The Drowned (4 page)

‘I can tell you where they
haven’t
gone,’ said Kyna. ‘And that’s to Heaven.’

*

A little over an hour later, Mary Buckley and Shelagh O’Reilly came into the station to see her. Katie invited them to sit down on the couches by her office window and asked Moirin to fetch them two cups of tea.

‘Is there any news at all?’ asked Mary. ‘I can’t believe that nobody’s seen them for nearly three days now. Like, you know, big strapping lads like that, they don’t just vanish into thin air.’

Shelagh looked desperately stressed, clutching her handbag as tightly as if she were riding pillion on the back of a motorcycle. ‘We was thinking of calling in the missing persons search people. You know, those fellers who go up and down the river in them little boats, looking for people what might have drownded.’

‘We didn’t know if you’d object to us doing it, like,’ said Mary. ‘We know that you’re doing everything you can to find them and we don’t want you think that we don’t appreciate it.’

‘I’ve no objection at all,’ said Katie. ‘Maybe you’re calling them a little sooner than most people do, and we’ve no evidence at all that your sons might have drowned, but if it reassures you to have them looking – then, by all means. They do wonderful work and we always keep in very close touch with them.’

By the ‘missing persons search people’, Shelagh meant the volunteer group Cork City Missing Persons Search and Recovery (CCMPSAR) – twelve men who provided a compassionate service to the families of people who had gone missing. When they were first contacted by worried relatives they would put out appeals on social media before they initiated a search, but in this case Katie had already arranged for that to be done. Now the CCMPSAR would launch their two inflatable boats and cruise up and down the river Lee with a sonar scanner, looking for unusual shapes under the water. In a single year they would expect to find at least five bodies, often more. The River Lee was the last resort for the drunk, the depressed, and the desperate.

‘I’ll have a word with Superintendent Pearse, who’s in charge of the uniformed officers,’ said Katie. ‘He’ll have one of his sergeants get in contact with the missing persons unit. We don’t want them searching unnecessarily, because they’re all volunteers and all their expenses come out of donations, or out of their own pockets.’

‘I know that,’ said Shelagh. ‘They found my uncle Tommy when he went missing three years ago. He had the panchromatic cancer and he couldn’t stand the pain any longer. When they found him he was going around and around in Tivoli Harbour. They knew it was him straightaway because he never wore socks.’

‘I promise you we’ll let you know as soon as we have any news at all,’ said Katie. ‘No – don’t rush. Finish your tea. I’m going to go and see Superintendent Pearse. Moirin will show you out.’

‘I hope we’ve done the right thing,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t know – asking them fellers to go looking for my Tadgh in the river – it’s almost like admitting that he’s dead already.’

‘Don’t think like that,’ Katie told her. ‘You’d be surprised how many missing people turn up alive and well and totally mystified why anybody should have missed them.’

*

Kyna came in and said, ‘I have Ruarí Barrett downstairs in the interview room. He gave me no bother at all this time when I asked him to come in for questioning. Even opened the door for me when we got here.’

‘I’m not sure if that’s a good sign or not,’ said Katie. ‘Suspects are usually cooperative because they have their story all sewn up in advance. You’re more likely to get the truth if you have to beat it out of them.’

‘Oh, you know me,’ said Kyna. ‘I can be very persuasive.’

She can, too
, thought Katie. She had seen Kyna coax some extraordinary confessions out of suspects who had come into the station clearly determined to give nothing away. She picked up the folder of photographs of the missing boys and then she and Kyna walked together along the corridor to the lifts. She felt like holding hands, but this was the station and she resisted it.

Ruarí was sitting at the table in the interview room chatting to the young garda who was watching him. He was a broad-shouldered, athletic-looking young man, with a ginger crew-cut and eyebrows and eyelashes so white that they were almost invisible. He had a broad face, with a snub nose, and the palest of pale blue eyes. He was wearing a red Cork GAA training jacket and jeans, and white Common Project runners that Katie estimated had cost at least €250.

He stood up when Katie and Kyna came in and held out his hand, but Katie ignored it and said, ‘You’re grand altogether, Ruarí. Please sit down.’

He sat down, smiling and casually crossing his legs, while Katie and Kyna sat down facing him, and Kyna switched on the voice recorder.

‘Has Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán made it clear to you why we’ve brought you in for questioning?’ asked Katie.

‘She has, yeah. Something to do with our party night last week.’

‘Party? Is that what you call it?’

‘There was music and drink and girls. I’d call that a party, yes, for sure.’

‘And there was sex?’

‘I’m not denying it. That happens at parties sometimes. Well, most of the time, at most parties. Sex.’

‘Did
everybody
have sex that night?’

Ruarí shrugged and said, ‘All of us went away satisfied, like, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I do know what you mean. What was the ratio of boys to girls?’

‘The girls were gagging for it. That was why we went to Davcon Court in the first place. Those beours would have laid down in a bed of nettles, I tell you.’

‘How many girls were there?’

‘What difference does it make? They were begging us for it.’

‘How many girls were there?’

Ruarí uncrossed his legs, leaned forward a little and cleared his throat. ‘Two. Aileen and Niamh.’

‘Aileen... she was, like, your steady girlfriend?’ asked Kyna.

‘Yeah. Well, sort of.’

‘Is she
still
your steady girlfriend?’

‘Why? What did she tell you?’

‘I’m asking the questions, Ruarí. Is she still your steady girlfriend?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘Because of what happened at this so-called party?’

‘Girls can be like that,’ said Ruarí. ‘Come on, you know that as well as I do. Before they have it they’re begging for it but after you’ve given it to them they start crying rape.’

‘How many boys were there?’

Ruarí smirked and counted on his fingers. ‘Me and Dermot and James and some other fellers we met at Havana Brown’s.’

‘How many other fellers?’ asked Katie.

‘Well, five altogether.’

‘So that makes eight. Eight boys and two girls. And you all went away satisfied?’

‘It’s that Niamh, isn’t it? She was loving it, I swear to God. She was loving every minute of it. Screaming the place down, she was. Good thing that Davcon Court has the concrete walls.’

‘These five fellers you met at Havana Brown’s,’ said Kyna. ‘Had you met them before?’

Ruarí sensed a trap in this question. What if Kyna had already interviewed one or all of them and they had admitted that they had already known Ruarí and his two student friends before the night of the party?

‘Yeah. We’d bumped into them two or three times.’

‘And on those other occasions when you bumped into them, did you have similar parties then?’

Ruarí’s pale blue eyes blinked, although he kept looking at Kyna directly. Katie guessed what he was doing. He had probably heard that liars always look up and off to the right because they’re supposed to be checking the creative lobe of their brain for an answer. But she knew from experience that was a myth. What was really giving Ruarí away was his hesitations and his exaggerated hand gestures and his strenuous efforts to appear nonchalant, even when a muscle in his cheek was twitching to indicate that he was grinding his teeth.

‘So what have they told you?’ he asked. It was becoming obvious to Katie that he hadn’t seen any of the appeals for the missing boys on the television or in the newspapers. He had probably been too busy catching up on his studies for his MEngSc.

‘It doesn’t matter what they told us,’ said Kyna. ‘We want to hear
your
version.’

‘We did have parties, yeah,’ said Ruarí. ‘Three altogether. Two at Davcon Court and one at Abbeyville.’

‘The same kind of parties? With girls?’

‘They haven’t complained, have they? I mean, like, none of them’s come to you and said we mistreated them or nothing? Not before Niamh. And like I say, Niamh was really up for it, whatever she’s been telling you now.’

‘The girls at your other three parties, where did they come from? Were they students, too?’

‘The girls at two of them were. The other one we picked up at Rearden’s.’

‘Am I hearing you right?’ said Kyna. ‘You had one of your parties with just one girl? Eight of you?’

Ruarí smirked again and threw up his hands and said, ‘She loved it. Every minute of it. When we were all finished she wanted more. Inexhaustible, that’s what she was. We treated her good, though. We even paid for her taxi home afterwards.’

Katie said, ‘These other five lads, do you know where they came from?’

Ruarí was plainly relieved to change the subject. ‘Mayfield, they said.’

‘Do you know their names?’

‘No. Never asked. I’m shite at remembering names anyway.’

‘After that last party, did any of these lads give you the idea that they might all be going off somewhere together? Taking a few days’ holliers, maybe?’

‘No,’ said Ruarí, and now he was growing uneasy.

Katie opened up the manila folder she had brought down with her, and passed it over so that Ruarí could see the photographs in it.

‘Are these your five party friends?’ she asked him.

Ruarí bent forward and looked at the photographs closely. ‘They are, yeah,’ he said. Then, ‘What? How did you—?’

‘You obviously haven’t been watching the news,’ said Katie. ‘These five lads have been missing without trace for the past three days. We thought you might have some idea where they are.’

‘Why should I? We only met up now and again. What do you mean, they’re missing? What, like –
all
of them?’

Katie took back the folder and stood up. ‘That’s it for now, Ruarí. However, I have to advise you that I will be wanting to interview you again, as well as your friends, and that you shouldn’t think of leaving Cork until my inquiry is completed.’

‘I can go?’ said Ruarí.

‘Why, do you want me to arrest you here and now? Because I can, and I will if necessary.’

Ruarí stood up and left the interview room as quickly as a frightened rabbit. After he had gone, Kyna said, ‘You could have arrested him, just on the strength of what Niamh told me.’

‘Yes, I could have,’ said Katie. ‘But there were eight of them and I want all eight of them to be punished, one way or another. I’m quite prepared to wait until I have all of them standing in front of me.’

*

‘I should have been a croupier,’ said Detective Dooley as he and Detective Scanlan walked to the Port of Cork marina in the first light of dawn. ‘They have to work late, croupiers, but at least they can have a good long lie-in every morning.’

‘Maybe you should change jobs,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I can just see you with a green eyeshade and a fancy waistcoat, spinning a roulette wheel.’

When they reached the quayside they found that four members of the Cork missing persons unit were already there, preparing their rigid-hulled inflatable boat. Three of them were dressed in black dry-suits with red life jackets, while the fourth was wearing a black diver’s suit. The orange boat was tied up beside the dock, dipping and bobbing in the water, while one of the unit was testing the outboard motor and another was checking the Humminbird sonar scanner.

It wasn’t raining, but the sky was unrelentingly grey, and the river was grey, too.

One of the unit came forward to meet them, a stocky middle-aged man with a black woolly hat and gappy teeth.

‘John Brogan,’ he said. ‘I’ll be doing the piloting this morning.’

He beckoned the man in the diver’s suit and said, ‘This is Fergus O’Farrell, he’s our latest volunteer. Ex-Navy.’

Fergus lifted a hand in greeting, although he didn’t smile. He looked about mid-fifties, too, with bristling grey eyebrows and a furrowed forehead and a turned-down mouth, like a pugnacious bull terrier. Having his face squashed by his tight rubber wetsuit didn’t improve his appearance.

‘It was Fergus who brought up that couple that drowned off Blackrock last month,’ said John. ‘Fierce tricky dive that was, because they were all tangled up in netting and rubbish. But sad, too, because they were still holding on to each other, like lovers.’

Fergus checked his watch and said, ‘I doubt I’ll be doing any diving the day, though. Even if we detect any anomalies on the river bottom, we’ll have to analyse them overnight first. But, you know, you never know.’

‘Do you have any more information on where those five lads were last seen?’ asked John Brogan. ‘That would be pure helpful. People always think that bodies in the Lee float off with the tide, but we usually find them almost exactly where they first went in. There’s almost no current at all at the lower levels, like.’

‘If they did go into the river, they’ll still be on the bottom so,’ added Fergus. ‘The water’s too cold for them to have started fermenting yet. In warm water they come floating up in three or four days and they’re so full of gas you wouldn’t be able to sink them again for love nor money. But in these temperatures it could take weeks for them to inflate.’

‘The last time that any of them were seen was at Havana Brown’s, at about one o’clock in the morning on Wednesday,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Even then, we only have firm identification that the twins were there, not the rest of them, although they probably were. After that, who knows where they went? I’m sorry. We don’t know how five young lads could have disappeared without anybody noticing them, but they have.’

‘Okay,’ said John. ‘We’ll just have to pootle up and down and see what we can see. I have to tell you, though, it could take weeks, or even longer. My own father’s body was found at Marina Point but it took three and a half months.’