In the Forest (17 page)

That night a strange thing happens. Cassandra lay, waiting for sleep, knowing that she would not sleep, her mind in splinters thinking of the machine she spoke into and the guard that met her in a different station who also seemed indifferent to her plight. She is thinking of the moment when she will have to break it to her distraught mother and father, picturing their faces, their disbelief, their shock.

When she hears footsteps in the garden she’s not surprised, it is as if she has been waiting for this nameless person to come and take her too. Naked, she pulls the quilt up to her chin, with only her eyes listening, hearing the knocking on the door that is quite timid. The caller has not struck the knocker, merely tapped tentatively on the wooden panel. She waits for a voice, a command.

She is in the kitchen now, the light from the hall shedding only a faint beam so that to the person outside, the kitchen is a sphere of dark. The telephone is over by the fireplace, the green light of the answer machine like a little bead. She believes that she will be shot as she crosses to it. The knocking grows more persistent but is still gentle as if the person on the other side is pleading with her to have trust in it. She kneels by the side of the door and in a strangled voice asks, ‘Who is it?’

‘Can you open the door.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Declan.’

‘Declan who?’

‘I’m a friend of Eily’s ... I was doing the roof for her . . . you met me.’ As she opens the door she sees a young man, his gaunt face terrified and a cigarette about to drop off from the corner of his lips.

‘We think that the Kinderschreck might have taken them.’

‘The who?’

‘A local ... a wild man . . . he’s only out of jail a few weeks . . . since he got back home he’s created mayhem, stole cars, beat up a pensioner . . . took a gun . . .’ ‘Why do you think he would have taken Eily and Maddie?’

‘If I tell you, will you promise that you won’t say it was me? A man saw them around noon last Friday . . . the day they went missing ... his wife let it out in the shop . . . the man is demented ever since, he’s too afraid to go to the guards in case the Kinderschreck comes back to kill them.’

‘Who is the man that saw them?’

‘His name is Rafferty . . . they live a mile outside the village ... on the right hand side ... a lovely flower garden.’

‘And he saw Eily driving with this wild man?’

‘Don’t say I told you.’

‘Why not. Why not Declan ... we must all band together.’

‘It’s my mother . . . I’m out all day working and she’s afraid he will come and take revenge . . . you see he’s sworn to paint the town red . . .’

She feels cold, forewarned, knowing that the suspendedness of the last three days is a mere prelude to something terrible. She knows. Yet she still thinks of them as alive, Eily’s spirit would have spoken to her, sent her a sign of some sort, some premonition as she lay in the coiled darkness anticipating footsteps on the gravel under her window.

‘We’ll have to get the guards to track down this wild man,’ she says.

‘We’ll have to storm heaven and earth,’ he says sheepishly.

He did not leave, he vanished, like a fish darting down into the depths of a river and she stood and watched the sky a tapestry of stars and she could hear seagulls crying, the lonely, icy, almost human shrieks of seagulls who had come sixty or seventy miles in from the sea. And why.

They stand as one on Mrs Rafferty’s cement path, appealing to her in her doorway. There is Cassandra, Delia, Hildegard and Kim. It is evening as they have had to wait until Delia finished school, Delia round and strong and complacent, a link between the local people and the outsiders. The garden is a shower of colour, tiny blue flowers faint as drizzle, big white daisies and devil’s pokers a flame red, with red bonneted gnomes in the flowerbeds, like bucolic guardians. The pebbledash of the house a mosaic of ornamental shells and wedges of deep blue glass holding lakelets of blue light. Mrs Rafferty is vague, uncomprehending, her eyes averted, insisting that she does not know a thing, cannot understand why they have come. All of a sudden she seems animated, says by far the best place for their enquiries are shops, post offices, bars and restaurants. She even recalls the name Celine, the proprietor of a new international bar who would be familiar with the comings and goings of travelling folk.

‘Eily Ryan is not a traveller . . . she moved here,’ Kim says.

‘Is that so?’ Mrs Rafferty says vaguely.

‘Your husband saw someone in her car,’ Cassandra says.

‘I’m not my husband.’

‘I’m her sister . . . I’m desperate . . . my mother and father are desperate . . . put yourself in our position . . . help us.’

‘I can’t,’ Mrs Rafferty says, retreating backwards into the house and almost colliding with her husband who has obviously been listening. He salutes them with a stricken look as if their arrival bespeaks doom for him. He speaks rapidly as if in a witness box, speaking a prepared statement: ‘I saw her drive past here at approximately twelve noon last Friday. There was a man in the back aged about twenty with dark brown hair and he had on a green jacket’ and pointing to the wellingtons Hildegard is wearing he deems them the same green as the man’s jacket, an army green, yes, army green.

‘Can you name him,’ Delia asks, sympathetic.

‘No ... all I can tell ye is the registration of the car . . . it’s the same as my pick up truck. TZY.’

‘Was it O’Kane?’ Cassandra asks.

‘I couldn’t answer that.’

‘But you know him, Mick,’ Delia says.

‘Many people know him . . . you know him yourself . . . he’s a pest.’

‘I taught him for a short while,’ she says. She has taught his own children also and somehow she feels that he is better disposed towards her.

‘I’ve told you all I know,’ he says and puts his hand out to shake hers in conciliation.

‘It was my idea to come to you,’ she says, her big brown saucer eyes gazing into his, begging him.

‘Unease quickly spreads,’ he says in a droning voice like a man talking in his sleep.

‘Which direction did the car go, Mick?’ she asks.

‘Maybe Portumna ... or maybe up there,’ he says pointing to the swathe of evergreens.

They drove to the forest then, a place of unyielding solitude, vast, quiet and they got out of the car and stared into a hinterland of green, trees stacked close together, the trapped wind like the sob of a sea, stared at it and then at the charred tree stumps on the other side, and throwing up her hands Cassandra asks, ‘Where do we begin . . . where do we begin to search?’

‘We begin by getting the goodwill of the guards . . .

the local people, the foresters, people who know these woods, know them backwards,’ Delia says.

They stood in silence, reluctant to leave, each thinking it some kind of dishonour to go.

As they drive back down the road they see Mrs Rafferty away from her own gate with a cardboard box over her head. She gestures for them to slow down and in a galloping voice says, ‘My husband is seventy per cent sure it was the man you named.’

‘Seventy per cent,’ Delia says.

‘That’s how he worded it to me . . . it’s on his conscience,’ she says, her sloe eyes darting in every direction.

‘Will he go to the guards?’

‘I’m trying to get him to go but he’s afraid . . . we’re all in fear of our lives,’ she says and from deep inside her comes a strange racking cough like a death rattle.

Kim debates aloud to herself whether she should or should not tell them something that only she knows.

‘For God’s sake, Kim.’

‘A year ago last September I was off down near Eily’s place, picking blackberries and O’Kane came on me in that sneaky way of his and he made me go across to the house ... he said it was his headquarters and that it would be up for sale soon, but if anyone else bid for it he would shoot them.’

‘There we have it,’ Hildegard says and blesses herself.

‘Can we speak to you in confidence?’ Delia says to the tall guard on the other side of the counter.

He knows that they have come concerning the missing people and he is already resistant.

‘Go ahead,’ he says but he makes no attempt to bring them into the back room marked Private. That he is impatient is evidenced by his clicking the barrel of a biro, rearranging sheets of paper while pretending to listen.

‘We want a search in Cloosh Wood,’ Cassandra says.

‘Cloosh Wood . . . you’re talking of over a thousand acres ... it takes forty minutes alone to drive there and drive back . . . we’ve only four officers in our entire unit.’

‘It’s got to be done,’ she says.

‘Why there?’

‘It’s O’Kane’s area,’ Kim says.

‘O’Kane fever . . . why has everyone got that scoundrel on the brain. We’re not treating this case as an abduction . . . they are simply a mother and a son who have taken off somewhere.’

‘He was seen in her car last Friday,’ Delia says very quietly.

‘That doesn’t mean anything . . . he’s always thumbing lifts.’

‘But he’s dangerous.’

‘He only does Mickey Mouse crimes.’

‘Burning Mrs Slattery’s car isn’t a Mickey Mouse crime . . . kicking a pensioner unconscious isn’t a Mickey Mouse crime.’

‘Who saw him in her car . . . some visionary?’ he asks testily.

‘No, a farmer outside the village . . . Mick Rafferty . . . but he’s being cautious about it ... his wife broke it to us.’

‘Well that might be a link,’ he says, pausing, reaching now for a pad to jot down the farmer’s name and address and cursing locals twice O’Kane’s size for giving him bed and breakfast instead of turning him in.

‘Would he be armed?’ Kim asks.

‘Not a firearm . . . maybe an axe or a knife.’

‘If he has her, what might he do to her?’

‘Not that much . . . he’s a loner, he’d use her to get him from A to B and then he’d vanish . . . women are not his thing,’ he says, a little abashed at the necessity to broach such a thing.

‘That’s not true,’ Kim says abruptly.

‘Why so?’

‘I was in a caravan site two years back and he spent some time there ... we used to all sit outside at a picnic table in the summer evenings and one evening he said a thing I would rather not have heard.’

‘About women?’

‘About women and what he would like to do to them,’ she says and lowers her head with shame.

‘Would you come out with us and talk to this Rafferty man . . . it’s serious,’ Delia says.

‘I’ll go out later on ... I’ll have to refer to someone higher up to get the OK and then I’ll go out and take a statement from him.’

‘That’s my sister,’ Cassandra says holding up a photograph of Eily, thinking it will melt him, enlist him, those huge trusting eyes, the face pale and moulded under the brim of a straw hat.

‘Good-looking woman,’ he says.

‘We’d like it in the local newspaper.’

‘You’ll pay dear for that unless you have an in with an editor or a sub-editor.’

‘What about television?’

‘She’d have to be missing for at least a week for that crowd to cotton on.’

‘Guard Tighe,’ Delia says putting her hands flat on the counter, her ample body softly feminine, her pleading eyes, staring directly into his, not letting him slip from her - ‘You see, Eily moved into a house that O’Kane thought was his.’

‘His lair,’ he says soberly.

‘His fox’s lair,’ she counters.

‘And finds Mrs Fox at home.’

‘And Baby Fox,’ Delia says, her voice tapering out. His voice ceased, but his thinking quickened and his thin, sallow face was a map of tiny creases.

At first glance Aileen could tell there was something wrong with him, she sensed it the minute he came in, soaking wet, his hair plastered down, his eyes caved in and black as soot. It was back and forth, back and forth, from the kitchen window to the side window, from the back door to the hall door, on edge, listening for the slightest sound, kicking the cupboards open in case there was someone inside them. He wanted clean underpants and wanted them fast. They sparred over that. She said he was not in an English hotel now, meaning an English jail and that his granny was not a laundry girl.

‘Where is my granny . . . this is her house not yours.’ ‘I come every Tuesday to give her a hand.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s down the fields dosing a sick calf ... a woman of her age doing things men should be doing. Where have you been?’

‘In the woods.’

‘What were you doing in the woods?’

‘You’d love to know, wouldn’t you?’

‘I can see you’re in one of your hate moods.’

‘Hand me the fecking underpants,’ he shouts as she roots in a clothes basket and hauls out different garments, socks, pillow slips, rags. He takes off his jeans and wrings the wet out of them onto the floor, jumping at the sound of a passing car and rushing into the back hall shouting at her to lock the fecking doors and keep the pigs out. When he draws the striped underpants on over his dirty white ones she asks him if he is stone mad and tries to pull them, saying that if anything happened to him, like he had an accident, people would think he was kinky. He laughed at that and drew them up above his waist and for a split second she saw the prankster of his youth in him. When she lifted his anorak to dry it before the fire she nearly dropped it on account of its being so heavy.