He glanced around once at me, gauging the space between us, his expression one of sheer terror. He was about ten feet from the wall, his pace increasing as he prepared to vault the boundary, when McCready blindsided him, appearing from around the side of the last vehicle, rugby-tackling him to the ground.
The boy struggled for an instant but McCready soon subdued him and by the time I reached them, the boy lay face down, his arm twisted behind his back.
‘Peter?’
He turned his head to me, grit stuck to the side of his face as he began to sob.
Behind me I heard the others arriving. Caroline Williams pushed her way through them, her face alight with expectation. She ran to the boy lying on the ground, dropped to her knees before him, and gripped his chin in her hand, raising his head slightly as if to examine it. Her expression darkened.
‘Adam!’ she snapped. ‘Adam.’
Her shoulders began to shudder as she lifted her fists and began to hit the boy around the head, cursing him for not being her son.
The boy continued to cry, his face a smear of tears and dirt.
‘I’m sorry. Please don’t tell my da,’ he pleaded.
Adam Heaney sat in the tent with Cahir Murphy now, his rucksack lying forlornly on the grass outside, where Guard Dillon had discarded it.
‘Please don’t tell my daddy,’ Heaney repeated for perhaps the fourth time since we’d caught him.
‘What the hell did you run for?’ I asked him, angry that he had wasted our time, that he had caused me to hurt my shoulder again, and that he had dashed Caroline’s hopes.
‘I told my da I was staying with Peter,’ he explained. ‘He’d have a fit if he knew I was . . . here.’
He glanced at Murphy quickly before finishing the sentence. Murphy scowled. Clearly, Heaney’s father shared Caroline’s view of Cahir Murphy.
‘So, was anyone else here or just the three of you?’
Murphy laughed without humour. ‘No, that’s the lot.’
Heaney shuddered involuntarily, then tugged his jacket tight around him.
‘What happened to Peter tonight, Adam?’ I asked, squatting down level with the boy.
Again he glanced at Murphy. ‘He got up to go to the toilet. We never saw him after that.’
He tried to hold eye contact, but could not.
‘Was he drunk – don’t look at him, Adam,’ I said. ‘Look at me.’
The boy’s gaze shifted sharply from Murphy to me, but fell around my chin.
‘No. He might have had a can or two. That’s all. Nothing happened.’
‘Told you,’ Murphy said behind me.
I stood outside the tent with Caroline and Joe McCready. Caroline had settled herself a little now, though her eyes were raw with crying.
‘They’re lying about something,’ I said. ‘The problem is Heaney’s so scared of his dad finding out he’s here, we’re not going to get anything out of him.’
‘His dad is a bit of a thug,’ Caroline commented.
I nodded to McCready. ‘Take them home. Let their parents deal with them whatever way they want. Once that’s out of the way, bring them in again, separately, and make them go into detail. Look for anything out of place.’
McCready nodded earnestly. Dillon, by contrast, yawned loudly into his fist then squinted against the early morning sun cresting the headland to the east.
By noon, the search party had moved from the headland to a wider sweep of the beach and currently was combing the edges of the grass-covered sand dunes to the north. Search teams had also been dispatched to the fields running away from the beach, among which whitewashed holiday cottages caught the watery rays of late winter sunlight.
Caroline was part of one such team, making its way through the thick meadow grass of a field bordered by a drainage ditch that ran alongside the main road. She wore jeans and a heavy jumper several sizes too big for her, which I suspected one of the men had given her. Her hair was tied back from her face, her eyes puffy with tears or lack of sleep, or both.
I joined her team and walked alongside her, scanning both the ground in front of me and the ditch to my right.
‘You holding up OK?’
She shook her head. ‘I keep hoping he is going to phone me. I’ve called his mobile all day but it kept ringing out. An hour ago it stopped ringing and went straight to the answering service. Do you think maybe he turned it off?’
She glanced at me and I could see in her expression both the hurt that her son might choose not to answer her call, and the hope that he had been able to make such a choice at all.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe his battery died.’
She nodded her head vigorously. ‘Maybe,’ she said.
We walked in silence for a moment, before Caroline spoke again.
‘We . . . we argued before he left,’ she said. ‘He wanted to go camping and I’d said no. His friends were going surfing, he said, and he wanted to go with them.’
Murphy had told McCready a different story; he had claimed they were there for his birthday. And there had been no sign of surfboards in the tent.
‘I refused and he said he was going anyway. I couldn’t stop him.’ She looked at me a little plaintively. ‘He was right. There was nothing I could do. I . . .’ She began to speak, then seemed to choke on her words.
‘What, Caroline?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘He was right,’ she repeated. ‘Do you think he’s doing this to punish me?’ she asked, suddenly.
‘Peter’s a good fella, Caroline. We’ll find him.’
‘He changed, Ben. As he got older – he changed.’
‘They all change,’ I said. ‘Penny’s looking to go to discos, for God’s sake,’ I added with a laugh.
‘No. Peter’s become very angry; judging me. He blamed me for his father leaving. His moods were all over the place for a while there, he wasn’t sleeping, he was tying himself up in knots. The doctor actually put him on medication for depression, though he only took it off and on. He kept casting up the fact that I chased his father away from him. I think it was easier for him to blame me than to accept that Simon hadn’t wanted to see him.’
‘You had no choice there, Caroline. You had to do it for Peter’s sake as much as your own.’
‘He doesn’t remember that. He said it was my fault.’
‘Kids say things, Caroline.’
‘I should call his father,’ she said, decisively. ‘He deserves to know.’
‘Whatever you think is best,’ I said.
Simon Williams, Caroline’s estranged husband, had beaten her frequently. Only the intervention of our old boss, Superintendent Costello, had convinced Simon to leave Caroline and Lifford.
‘Maybe Peter will think better of me if he knows I called his father.’ She looked up into my face hopefully, as if the act of contacting Simon Williams might in some way precipitate the return of her son.
‘Maybe,’ I said. We walked in silence for a few more minutes, scanning the ground around us.
Then she spoke again. ‘I told him not to come back,’ she said, matter-of-factly. It took me a moment to realize that she was talking about Peter again rather than Simon. ‘That was the last thing I said to him: “If you go camping, don’t bother coming back.”’
‘We all say things, Caroline.’
‘I told him not to come back, Ben. That’s what I’m being punished for.’ She stopped walking and looked directly at me. ‘What if I deserve it?’
As the sky darkened we headed back to the hotel where the manager had offered tea and sandwiches to all involved in the search. The hotel itself was quiet, operating with a skeleton staff throughout the winter to cater for the handful of tourists and surfers who visited the beach this early in the season.
Caroline and I were standing at the table of food, when Joe McCready approached us. Removing his cap, he nodded to Caroline. ‘Ma’am,’ he said. Then he turned to me. ‘I spoke to the boys again, sir. After their parents arrived.’
I glanced at Caroline, who was listening intently. ‘Grab yourself something to eat, Joe.’
We took a seat by the bay window facing out on the shoreline. During our conversation I could see Caroline’s attention shift if she saw some movement along the beach. On several occasions she stood and stared out of the window, squinting into the middle distance every time a figure moved along the beach.
‘Anything of any use, Joe?’ I asked.
‘The same story as before, sir. They claim they came here for Murphy’s birthday party.’
Caroline turned from the window. ‘Peter told me they were going surfing,’ she stated.
McCready looked at his notebook of notes, then looked up at her blankly. ‘Neither of them mentioned that,’ he said.
‘What else?’ I asked.
‘Murphy admitted they’d had a can or two each. When I told them I’d found fourteen he denied it. Said they’d not had as much as that.’ He glanced at Caroline again. ‘He said that Peter had drunk the most. He’d been angry about something . . .’ He glanced again at Caroline, then at me.
‘Go on,’ I urged him.
‘He and his mother had had a row, he claimed.’ I noticed that Caroline did not turn round at that point, but maintained her silent vigil at the window.
‘Heaney continued to deny he’d been drinking at all. Though I . . .’ Again he glanced at Caroline, coughed, then continued, ‘I told them both that when we find Peter, we’ll find out the truth anyway.’
I could understand the delicacy of what he had said. If Peter turned up alive, he could tell us himself. If not, toxicology results would reveal traces of any alcohol taken prior to death.
‘Did he mention running away from home?’ Caroline asked, turning her body towards us but remaining where she was, her back against the window, her arms folded across her chest.
‘None of them said that as such, ma’am,’ McCready said.
‘Caroline,’ she corrected him, before returning her gaze to the shoreline.
I left for home at around seven thirty that evening, once the twilight had deepened to night. The road to Lifford takes you through Barnesmore Gap, between Croaghconnelagh and Croaghonagh. On either side of the road, you are enclosed by the sheer climb of the mountainsides, their ridges marked with angular dark-brown boulders, jutting through the soil, their sides flanked with sparse forests of fir trees. The thin black shadows of the trees were elongated by a heavy moon that clung close to the mountaintop.
Just as I was passing through the lowest point of the valley, where the river snakes along the base of the mountain to the left of the road, my mobile rang. It was Caroline.
The proximity of the mountains affected my reception and her message was broken. Yet there was no denying the changed tone of her voice. Between the static and the breaks in reception, I was able to decipher that she had received word from Peter.
I stopped in Ballybofey once I’d made it through the Gap, and phoned her from the car park outside Jackson’s Hotel.
‘He’s OK!’ she said, her voice buzzing with elation, as soon as I answered the phone. ‘He’s in Dublin.’
‘That’s fantastic news, Caroline. I’m delighted for you. What did he say?’
‘He . . . I didn’t talk to him. He sent a text message. He’s in Dublin.’
‘He didn’t say why he’d gone?’
‘No – that’s it. He’s in Dublin somewhere. Not to worry about him.’
‘That’s good news, Caroline.’
‘I’m heading down to Dublin, now, Ben. I just wanted to let you know. I . . . Thanks for your help.’
‘Not at all, Caroline,’ I said. ‘It was good to see you, despite the circumstances. I’ll contact someone in Dublin – get a bulletin out to the uniforms.’
‘Simon is meeting me there,’ Caroline said. ‘Look, I’ll be in touch,’ she said. ‘Thanks again.’ Then the line went dead.
As I drove back towards Lifford, I was a little ashamed to realize that my relief at Peter turning up alive was tempered by the knowledge that I would now be unlikely to see Caroline Williams again.
As I passed through Castlefinn on the way back to Lifford, I noticed a number of squad cars parked along the main roadway. An unusually large number of people were walking along the pavements, spilling onto the road as they made their way towards the entrance to Rolston Court, a cul-de-sac of thirty or so small council houses. Several of them had banners and placards. Pulling in, I approached a group of squad cars and was more than a little surprised to see my superintendent, Harry Patterson, standing with some of the men.
‘Where were you?’ he said.
I explained that I had spent the day in Rossnowlagh with Williams looking for her son.
‘How is she?’
‘Better now,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Anti-drugs demo.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘Someone told them that Lorcan Hutton operates out of one of the houses up in Rolston Court. They’re going to protest outside his house.’
‘Why?’
‘That fucker on the local radio named him at lunchtime as a suspect in the killing of Kielty. This Rising crew held a meeting about it this afternoon and arranged this.’