by Sam Blake
Cathy had hardly got the words out when her mum interrupted. ‘Eat.’
It was a command delivered in exactly the way her mum had spoken to her when she was at school. Across the table she could see O’Rourke fighting a smile. Bastard.
‘I am.’ Cathy stuffed a piece of toast into her mouth, ‘See, eating . . .’
O’Rourke nursed his coffee. He looked like he’d had about as much sleep as she’d had. But he’d obviously been home to shower and had changed into a new crisp pale pink shirt. This one had delicate white stripes. He didn’t address anyone in particular when he spoke.
‘We’re collating the information that came in last night from the media release and starting call backs this morning.’
Niamh turned to Cathy, her voice calm, ‘Sarah Jane’s been missing since Sunday. It’s now Wednesday. There’s been no contact at all with any of her family or friends, and it’s totally out of character. Her room’s been broken into. Too many women have gone missing over the past few years for us to sit back and wait to see if she turns up.’ She paused, ‘We’re making this official.’
Hearing Niamh say Sarah Jane’s name made Cathy suddenly want to cry. For about thirty seconds. Then she just wanted to hit someone. She chewed hard for a minute, struggling to stay focused, and not to let the anger building inside her spill over. Maybe she was just exhausted, but Sarah Jane needed her to stay in control. She worked well when she was mad – she won medals when she was mad – and right now she needed to take in all the available information so she could process it. She swallowed as Niamh spoke again. ‘I know it’s not news, but we’re treating this as an abduction.’
She was right. Cathy knew Niamh was right. She’d known it from the moment she’d gone inside Sarah Jane’s room and seen all the mess. Sarah Jane just wouldn’t have vanished off the face of the earth without saying anything. Not voluntarily. And she wouldn’t have smashed her room up first.
‘Why on earth would someone want to abduct Sarah Jane?’ Cathy’s mum peered over her glasses, a tea towel in her hand, her tone innocent. When Cathy had called her to ask if she’d seen Sarah Jane, a tiny part of her had been praying Sarah Jane was having a bad day and had gone to have a cup of tea with her. It had happened before; Theresa seemed to be the go-to person for most of her children’s friends to confide in. Perhaps it was because she never judged. She was one of the world’s positive thinkers, could find the good in any situation. Almost.
There was an uncomfortable pause as everyone at the table – Niamh, Aidan, O’Rourke and Cathy’s dad – turned to look at her mum. Holy, holy feck.
Cathy knew the answer, could see from their stony faces exactly what they were thinking. The vast majority of assaults and abductions were sexually motivated. It had to considered fairly high up on the list of possibilities, couldn’t be ruled out. Sarah Jane wasn’t exactly invisible in a crowd.
Before anyone said it, Cathy cut in, ‘Why turn over her room? And take her computer? Surely it’s more likely to be related to that than a random attack?’ Cathy could hear the impatience in her own voice.
Niamh studied her empty plate, the knife lying precisely across the centre, ‘We have to look at every possibility. She’s come into contact with someone who has taken her away from her family and friends, who may mean her harm – for whatever reason. You know the stats. Six women have gone missing in the Dublin mountains alone.’
Niamh was right. Of course she was, that’s why she was so good at her job she’d made it through the ranks to the top in an organisation that was only twenty-five per cent female. ‘If that’s a possibility, we have to review all those cases, and any serious assaults in and around the south city and Shankill.’ Cathy could hear her lecturer’s voice echoing in her head as she spoke, ‘Offenders usually work in familiar territory. If there are any similarities, it’s highly likely that the assailant knows the area where she lives, where she was last seen. They might not live there – maybe they work there. The key is that they feel comfortable in that area.’ She paused, ‘That’s only about half a million people we have to worry about.’
Her mum put a fresh pot of coffee gently onto the long pine table, the aroma already filling the kitchen, and pulled out a chair, sitting down between Cathy’s dad and Aidan, giving Cathy her full attention. ‘Is someone who is going to commit an assault really going to be the same type of person who is going to abduct? That’s a steep level of escalation.’
Cathy would have smiled if her cheeks hadn’t been colouring. For someone who had left school at sixteen, her mum had more qualifications than all of them put together, had been studying at night since before Aidan was born, was the powerhouse behind Team Connolly. Even so, this wasn’t the type of thing you discussed with your parents. But this wasn’t about her. This was about Sarah Jane.
Cathy considered her words, ‘Sex offenders don’t start at abduction. They work up to it. Some of them begin as peeping toms, but then that gets boring, doesn’t give them the thrill. They have to step it up a bit, stealing women’s underwear off their washing lines, trying to get into their houses, graduating to serious sexual assaults.’ Cathy paused, shifting in her seat uncomfortably, ‘The next step is rape, and/or abduction. They don’t all get there – some of them get caught before that, but it’s a classic pattern.’ Theresa opened her mouth to speak, but Cathy hadn’t finished, ‘There’s been a load of studies done on serial offenders in the US. One suggests that the average number of a rapist’s victims is seven, another one says eleven; in each case the violence escalates.’ Cathy’s mum was nodding. O’Rourke’s eyes met Cathy’s – serious, no agenda, his voice gravelly, ‘We’ll see who’s known in the area – complaints and convictions – and we’ll find out where they were on Sunday evening.’ It was a procedure Cathy knew, but she needed to hear him say it.
It took a moment for Cathy to pull her eyes away from his as she said, ‘Abduction takes planning. Whoever did this was organised, had to be. Sarah Jane’s really fit – she beats the feck out of me, for goodness’ sake. Even if she was really sick, like Billy Roberts was saying, she’s not going to be tricked into going anywhere unless she trusts whoever she was with, and she’d put up some fight if someone tried to grab her off the street.’
‘Previous assaults and convictions will be a starting point. We’re working through all the staff in The Rookery too.’ O’Rourke eyed her over the rim of his cup.
‘Wasn’t there a strong suspect in the missing women cases – could he be involved?’ Theresa leaned forward, looking at Niamh at the head of the table.
‘He was convicted of a serious assault and kidnapping, did ten years, but he’s out of the jurisdiction now. We have to rely on other forces for information. We can only watch him while he’s here.’ Niamh sounded worried, ‘But we have to be open to all possibilities.’
Cathy’s mind whirred. The women who had vanished in Wicklow and Kildare had haunted her as she’d recovered from her injuries after the bomb. Unable to get back to boxing straight away, she’d needed to get her fitness back, as well as find space in her head to deal with it all, so she had started running. Perhaps she’d been running away from everything that had happened, she wasn’t sure, but the mountains had been the perfect place. Empty and silent, with only sheep for company, long tracks criss-crossed the hills, took her around the edges of silent lakes, and as she’d pounded the peaty ground she’d half expected to stumble over a body, to see the white of bone shining against the heather.
‘We really need to know who Sarah Jane has come into contact with in the last few weeks.’
‘Thirsty’s got her phone log now, so we can go through it.’ Cathy couldn’t read O’Rourke’s expression as he spoke – he was keeping his face deliberately blank.
Jesus, what had happened to her? She could be lying half dead somewhere in a bog up in the mountains right now . . .
Cathy took a slow breath, trying to still her heart. Sarah Jane needed them to be methodical now, to be prof
essional. She needed them to find the strands, the threads that would lead back to her. Panicking wouldn’t help anyone.
‘This isn’t a random thing, though – someone went to the trouble of taking her computer. They had her address.’ It was the one thing they were absolutely sure of, and in her gut Cathy was certain they needed to work from there outwards.
Her mum leaned forward to check the milk jug, ‘Perhaps it was someone she met online, on one of those dating sites, someone who was worried the computer would link him to her?’
Cathy sighed, thinking back to her last college essay. ‘Maybe. Maybe someone was stalking her online, had befriended her.’ She paused. It was a real possibility. ‘The type of offender who does that is going to be very careful, a planner. And that type of person is not necessarily going to be acting out of character immediately after the event, or beforehand for that matter. They will be a habitual liar, could easily be a psychopath who finds it easy to kill.’ Cathy stopped abruptly as she realised what she’d said.
Theresa reached across the table for Cathy’s arm, squeezing it hard. Cathy’s blurry eyes fixed on her mother’s engagement ring, a cabochon ruby set in a nest of diamonds. Her dad had sold his first car to buy it. ‘It could be nothing like that. You know what Sarah Jane’s like. She’s very highly strung, and she’s always getting lost. Maybe she just needed some time out.’
Cathy threw her mum a glance. Really?
‘Is there anyone you can think of that Sarah Jane’s mentioned recently? Someone new on her radar? A JDLR, someone who gave her the creeps?’ O’Rourke had asked her the same question at least a hundred times over the previous days. Cathy shook her head, running her hand across her eyes.
Cathy’s mum cut in, ‘JDLR?’
O’Rourke clarified, ‘Just doesn’t look right. Cop’s rule of thumb.’
17
Cathy drew in a sharp breath, dizzy for a moment as reality collided with everything whirling inside her head. This whole situation was utterly surreal.
Blocking out the voices of the others sitting around her parents’ kitchen table – O’Rourke crunching manpower numbers with Niamh, Aidan explaining the stages of a missing persons investigation to her mum and dad, Cathy picked up her coffee. The cup was almost empty but she needed to do something with her hands as the thoughts collided, her stomach churning.
‘Sick with worry’ just about nailed it. She always felt hyped up and anxious before a fight, but this was different, she felt like something was creeping up on her like a shadow that made half of her want to curl up into a ball in a dark place and cry, and made the other half of her want to get her gloves on and to draw blood.
How could someone just disappear? How could her friend just disappear? After everything that happened to her in remote parts of the world, after living in New York when she was younger – spending her school holidays there, for goodness’ sake – she came to Dublin, one of the safest cities in the world, and this thing happens.
Cathy’s sigh was ragged. But she didn’t have time to let the dark part of her get stupid and miserable. Cathy looked around the table, searching for something positive. And there it was: if Sarah Jane had had the power to pick the team to help find her, Cathy knew she would have chosen these guys. People who knew her, who had a personal reason for wanting her found.
Then something else struck her, like Sarah Jane was whispering in her ear, like she was bringing Cathy back, centring her, and she could hear Sarah Jane’s laughter like a breath of wind stirring the tall pines beyond the French windows at the end of the garden. None of the various scenarios in which Cathy had imagined herself having breakfast with O’Rourke had included her parents being at the table.
Cathy sighed, the flicker of a smile warming her. O’Rourke was leaning over to talk to Aidan now, his voice hushed, his blue eyes earnest.
Oh heck.
Cathy tuned out – over O’Rourke’s shoulder she could see it was beginning to get light outside, a bird lifting from the leafless branches of the old apple tree standing like a wizened crone in the middle of the lawn. The bright lights inside the kitchen made the garden look darker than it really was. Cathy strained to see out. If she just glanced at the French windows, all she could see was her own reflection, the scene at the kitchen table; but if she concentrated, if she looked really hard, she could see the garden, could see the apple tree. She shut her eyes for a second. If she concentrated hard enough, would she be able to see Sarah Jane, see where she was right now?
Abduction cases vied for attention in her mind: Jaycee Lee Dugard, Josef Fritzl. Jesus – she just prayed whoever had Sarah Jane, whatever the reason was, was keeping her alive; prayed that they could get to her in time. Before she went mad. Before the bastard killed her.
The odds might be against it, but Cathy knew that Sarah Jane would know she’d come for her. And she’d bring the might of the entire Garda Síochána when she did – all Sarah Jane had to do was to hang on, to stay alive long enough for Cathy to find her.
If Sarah Jane had been abducted, whether it was sexually motivated or not, she was a witness the perpetrator couldn’t afford to let go. From burglary to abduction, they’d taken a lot of risk, which had to mean that whatever this was about, the stakes were higher.
O’Rourke interrupted Cathy’s thoughts, sliding his chair back, the sound explosive on the terracotta floor tiles. He stood up, ‘We’re going to expand the team. I’ve got Paul Dobbyn in as bookman – he’s good, he’ll keep track of all the interviews and reports. We’ll draw the rest of the team from Shankill and Cabo. And we’ve got J.P. in buckshee.’ Cathy almost smiled. O’Rourke co-opting J.P. temporarily to the detective unit from uniform for the duration of the investigation was a good decision. J.P. knew Sarah Jane almost as well as she did. Leaning on the back of his chair, O’Rourke continued, ‘I think the planning has to be key here. Sarah Jane’s bright, she wouldn’t be taken in by a stranger.’
Cathy’s mum stood up to refill the coffee pot, and Cathy became conscious of the sound of the percolator as it started to bubble frantically behind them. Cathy held her cup out, the smell of the coffee kick-starting her brain. Adrenaline had her wide awake now, but she knew she’d need caffeine to last the day.
‘I think we need to focus on who would take her computer – and why. Your mum could be right, it could be an online dating thing. Was Sarah Jane hooked up to any of those sites, was she writing a story on one of them? Maybe that’s what her dad meant when he said it was a stupid thing for a student to do?’ O’Rourke’s face creased in a frown, ‘If we could get hold of him, it would be a major step forward. CNN are doing their best, but it might take a while.’
They all knew Syria was a war zone.
Cathy shifted in her chair, ‘If it was someone she met online there’s no way an abduction is going to be his first offence. Like I was saying, a sexual predator’s behaviour escalates to something like this, and planning is all part of that.’ Cathy reached for the sugar, heaping the spoon high, and took a sip of her coffee, her college assignments flicking through her memory. Cathy pulled at her chain, running the scratched silver dog-tag pendant along it. ‘Sarah Jane must have a connection to whoever has taken her, or how would they even know where she lived, about what she might be working on? This didn’t happen by accident – we’ve got that on our side.’
‘We’ll talk to everyone she knows,’ O’Rourke said.
‘There has to be some link, something we’re missing.’ She paused, ‘That fact alone gives us way more to go on than a lot of cases, we just have to work out what it is.’
‘We need to hit the road, get this thing moving.’ O’Rourke shouldered on his coat and started to head for the door. ‘We’ve a full day ahead of us.’
18
The interior of the shop was warm, the soft lighting making it cosy, bright spot lights highlighting opulent ‘buy me’ displays. Cathy pushed off her hood as she closed the door behind her, shutting out the dull greyness of the afternoon.
She’d wanted to get here sooner, but O’Rourke had said the boy was at school and his mum had insisted his routine couldn’t be altered when she’d called the station this morning. Cathy had looked quizzically at O’Rourke – then he’d said that the boy had Asperger’s syndrome and it had all made sense. And it wasn’t like Cathy hadn’t had plenty to do, reviewing the house to house statements, watching and rewatching the CCTV they had, but she’d been itching to get here all day.
J.P. arrived separately, and as she’d waited for him to park Cathy tapped her fingers on her steering wheel, unable to keep still. From what O’Rourke had said, it sounded like eight-year-old Jacob might have some valuable information on Sarah Jane’s movements before she got into the cab on Sunday evening.
Now they were both here, Cathy looked around her, wondering if anyone was minding the shop. There didn’t seem to be anyone here. She glanced at J.P. and thrust her hands in her pockets, trying to stifle her excitement – she needed to keep a lid on it. It was like any lead, it was more likely to blow out than turn into something worthwhile.
The clothes crowding the rails in the shop were gorgeous, well out of the range of her pay packet, she was sure. Even the pot crammed with pens beside the cash till looked like it would cost her a month’s salary. Before she could speculate more, an attractive woman appeared from somewhere at the back of the shop, high cheekbones accentuated by her hair pulled off her face and twisted in a knot behind her head. She was elegantly dressed in tailored black trousers and a black silk blouse, the sleeves rolled up to reveal an armful of gold bracelets. She looked like she found looking good easy, like it was second nature.
‘Can I help you or would you like to look around?’
Cathy pulled her warrant card out of her jacket pocket, ‘Gardaí. A Rebecca Ryan contacted us about a missing persons inquiry? I’m Garda Cathy Connolly. This is my colleague, Garda Morgan.’
The woman’s switch from a shop owner chatting to a potential customer to a worried mum was seamless, the strain suddenly showing. ‘Thanks so much for coming. I hope I haven’t wasted your time. He definitely saw the girl on TV, but he’s had such a bad day at school, I’m not sure how much he’ll be able to tell you.’ She paused, shaking her head, ‘He told someone in the playground he’d seen the girl on the news, that he had to talk to the Gardaí. They didn’t believe him.’ She held out her hands in a helpless gesture, ‘I was afraid this might happen. He doesn’t lie, you see, it’s just something that makes no sense to him, he can’t understand why people would suggest he might.’