In the Forest (20 page)

He did not hear the footsteps, simply saw his wife standing above him in a dither.

‘There’s a priest gone missing now.’

‘Where?’

‘Over in Eyre Court ... a young priest . . . Father John Fitzgerald.’

‘Who told you this?’

‘He didn’t show up for mass ... he was supposed to
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rehearse the little children soon to take their Holy Communion . . . and when he didn’t show, his housekeeper went across and got suspicious because the eleven duck eggs and a sponge cake she’d given him weren’t in his fridge ... so she alerted the parish priest and he called in the guards.’

‘Who told you this?’

‘A young guard from there come over to liaise with the guards here.’

‘I should have been briefed first.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘The rumour is that Father John knew Eily Ryan . . . that they were lovers . . . he was seen going into an empty house in Tipperary with a red haired woman . . . that they had planned their disappearance . . . and maybe now they’re in Berlin or Paris or Amsterdam’ and as she is saying it he sees the excitement mounting in her, that strange, giddy, prurient, unwifely grin and tells her to go out and bring in that skittish guard, bring him in to account for himself.

He opened the drawer again and took out the diary, innocent seeming with its flowered paper cover, in contrast with the warblings within. He resolved that in due course he would burn it. He felt he would be doing the right thing by burning it. Woman’s filth, Eve, taken from the rib of Adam, to wreak unchastity upon the world.

An auction room has been converted into an incident room for the search parties to foregather. They have come with sticks and food and water and dogs, the dogs mostly setters, yelping and whining to be let loose, to be let into the woods. To one side of the room a little
classroom has been set up, crayons and copy books and boxes of puzzles, as Vanessa, a student, has been appointed to mind young children while their mothers join in the search. All around, the wardrobes, sofas, mirrors, hall stands and ornaments add to the surreal feeling as people mill around impatient to get moving. They are annoyed with the guards, yet Bobby, the American woman, is the only one to vent her fury. She has been the bane of the sergeant’s life since she first set foot in the county. First it was to complain of the pollution from the factory, then it was an objection to a new street light as not being in keeping with the quaint mode of the others and now it is why he hadn’t got his act together sooner. She stands close up to him, wagging her index finger to smite him.

‘We’re getting our act together . . . well over a hundred guards are being recruited in . . . army infantry, helicopter back up, house to house enquiry, underwater unit, sniffer dogs . . . what more do you want?’

‘Three and a half days since Eily went missing . . . twenty-four hours since you learnt that O’Kane was seen at close range in the back of her car . . .’

‘I have heard she looked very relaxed when she was seen with him in her car.’

‘Bullshit . . . she was scared to death but she was simply not a priority for you.’

‘We treat every case with the same degree of importance.’

‘But you did nothing.’

‘Look, we have no evidence of any abduction . . . none... ’

‘So where do you think she is ... by a hotel pool? And where do you think he is?’

‘Bobby . . . I run this show, not you.'

‘One ofyour officers told her sister that next thing we would be asking to name her Housewife of the Year.’ ‘That does not reflect gardai policy.’

‘Only when the priest went missing did you sit u
p . . . ’

‘As I said on the local radio and I will say it again, any case that involves boundaries makes things more complicated . . . gardai in one station or another having to liaise with their colleagues.’

‘So where is O’Kane?’ she asks.

‘There are two or three woods that he frequents . . . he’s in one of them.’

‘Get him,’ she says with a vengeance.

He turns away from her and defers to Joseph, one of the foresters, who has his back to the crowd and is bent over a series of maps, marking out particularly dense areas with a red pen.

‘Why did you call off our search yesterday?’ Vera asks him, a little nervous and a little piqued.

‘Because you were all going criss-cross up there ... it was useless, you were getting nowhere ... no organisation, no strategy . . . today we have a strategy and Joseph is best suited to mastermind it ... he knows those woods, he planted those trees, he patrols there’ and turning to Joseph he asks him to brief them.

Joseph is a little shy and coughs a few times and begins: ‘What we do is this ... we form lines about one foot apart . . . ten to a line . . . now the person in front of his or her line takes the lead and goes into the forest and after about fifty yards shouts
all clear
• . • the second person picks that up and follows and repeats the coda and so on to the third and fourth and fifth . . .’ ‘Might she have jewellery on?’ someone asks.

‘That’s a good point,’ the sergeant says and asks those who knew her to recall things they’d seen her wear. Vera remembers a leather thong with a wooden pendant and Madge starts to speak but succumbing to emotion, keeps saying, ‘I’m a blatherer ... I know I’m a blatherer . . . but I am her friend.’

‘Are we talking a doomsday scenario here?’ Declan, a little drunk, asks as he staggers to where maps of the forestries are spread out on a desk.

‘No .. . bad as he is, O’Kane would not kill,’ a young guard says and turns to the sergeant for confirmation who is already counting and herding them into groups of ten. At that moment a stranger rushes into the room in a thrall of excitement, waving a sheet of paper and carrying a rowan branch as if it is a wand. He is tall and sallow, with a long white robe under his raincoat and his hair tied in a pony tail.

‘She is there,’ he says pointing to a star on a drawing which he has made, a perfect depiction of a country area with green colouring for the forest, brown for the humped bridges and an outline of an empty house with creeper hanging from the eaves.

‘Where is there?’ Vera calls out.

‘I am not familiar with the place names . . . I’ve never been to these parts ... I was guided here.’

‘It’s been in every paper ... a woman and a child and a priest are missing . . . it’s on every radio station,’ he is told.

‘I don’t listen to radios ... I listen to my dreams ... I meditated and the answer came to me.’

‘What answer?’

‘A woman in a swathe of woodland who is prevented from screaming.’

‘Who are you?’ the sergeant asks, irritated by his arrogance, his sandals, his John the Baptist robe.

‘I am a link in the chain ... a bond of connection between the missing woman and yourselves,’ he says unruffled and goes out with the same smiling rapture as when he came in, propelled by some inner calling.

It’s like we are looking for a wolfman who leaves his traces and then vanishes. The question now is, will we ever catch him? Has he powers beyond the natural? That is what is being said. The truth is, we’re all feeding on our fears, men and women both, retreating into blindness like into a dark cave. When Liam Purcell and myself came on an empty cigarette carton and banana skins, on the cow walk, our antennae were out.

We stopped first at Glebe House, which has not been occupied for years. There was a good, newish caravan cushion on the floor. It was brown corduroy with leather buttons. Liam said it was not there two days ago when he looked in that window. He has cattle up that way and fodders them morning and night so he notices anything unusual. On the side of the track into the wood there was a lady’s black sweater and I picked it up with a stick and put it in the back of the car to bring to the guards. Then two hundred feet into the forest we came on the remains of a lunch - an empty biscuit packet and a tin that had sardines. I also picked them up for evidence. Further on I found a blue torch with a red battery submerged in a pool of water. When I switched it on the light was weak. Nearby was a fertiliser bag. Things.

My wife, her friend Josie and myself visited our cousin Mary Kate down at the shore as she feels in real danger down there because Eily Ryan lived in that very same apartment for a short while. The whole conversation hinged on the disappearance of Eily and her child and a priest and the possible connection with O’Kane.

‘I wonder will he come for me,’ Mary Kate said looking towards the window.

‘Don’t say that ... in God’s name don’t say that,’ my wife said.

‘I know he will,’ Mary Kate said and went up the stairs for the umpteenth time to look to see if her child was safe.

We sat there smoking, drinking cup after cup of coffee, turning on the wireless at news time, expecting some bulletin. At one point I just sensed that O’Kane was nearby. I don’t know how or why I felt it but I just knew. I opened the window in her living room and heard movement to the right and told them to shush.

‘Is he there?’ Mary Kate asked.

‘There’s someone there,’ I said and I called out and we switched on the outside light and we went out with sticks, the four of us shouting, but he had disappeared. We stayed an hour longer to give Mary Kate courage but finally we had to leave because of work in the morning.

When we passed Tuohey’s milk parlour, their security light was on and I said I found that odd as it was worked by sensor and no vehicle had passed up or down the road while we were in Mary Kate’s.

‘That’s not normal,’ I said.

‘Nothing is normal now,’ my wife said and Josie and she huddled together in the back, screaming, as if they were going to be shot.

At Houlihan’s pier we saw a blue flame, about twenty foot high off the ground and I thought at first it was a lifebuoy on fire and I wanted to swing to the right and investigate but the women wouldn’t let me, they said, ‘Drive on drive on.’ They kept insisting then that it was a crowd of drunks who had lit a fire on the harbour and that it would be awful to call the guards at that hour of night.

Deep down we believe he has been sent by God, as punishment upon us.

‘Cripes ... a dancing girl,’ Frank says as he slows down the car to look.

‘A mermaid,’ Paddy says as they stare at the ball of lit blue that seems to be above the water, skimming it.

‘It’s a gas explosion on that houseboat ... we better call the fire brigade,’ Frank says, a little less skittishly.

‘I’m one of the fire brigade,’ Paddy says and splutters. They are both half drunk and they are enthralled by it. It is well after midnight and each had promised the other that they would leave the pub after the next drink and on and on it went, Frank’s uncle looking at his watch and begging them to bring him home to his bed.

‘We better get out and investigate.’

‘We had not ... we better be going back to Lawler’s Pub and ring the brigade . . . the funny thing is it wasn’t there five minutes ago when we were driving down . . .’

‘That’s the thing with fire . . . it’s a phenomenon,’ Paddy says, his tongue tripping on the big word.

On their way back to the village they come on Charlie who is carrying a pregnant sheep into his yard and they shout out to him about a boat being on fire and how they’re going up to Lawler’s to ring.

‘Ring from here . . . it’s faster,’ he calls back.

While they are waiting for the fire brigade to arrive, the three men decide to go back and getting there, walking in a closed knot, trampling their lit-up shadows, they find a car halfway in over the pier as if someone has tried to push it but failed. They are drawn to it, closer and closer, like men seeing fire for the first time, the lick of the flames dancing across their faces, their hands blackened by going too close to it and already they guess the worst.

‘It’s O’Kane’s style,’ Paddy says and as they gape at it the sharp and brittle crack and clatter of a gunshot is heard and a bullet lands somewhere in the ornamental bushes around the ruin of an old house.

‘He’s around . . .’

‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

They waited in Charlie’s house until the guards came and when they returned, the fire had almost ceased, the car, a black shell with nothing to show of itself, no windows, no seats, no number plates, just a cavity in which rosary beads dangled inside from a charred dashboard.

The fire engine arrived soon after, but without its siren on and the firemen jumped out, still half asleep but fully togged, ready to do their gallant work and a little crestfallen at finding they had come as the last puttery flames were ebbing, dying out. They walked around it saying the same commiserating things and the fire engine itself, its silent bells, its roped ladder and its coils of hosing looked like a big toy, faintly ridiculous in that scene of dread.

One of the guards found a registration branded into the glass of the rear window and they took turns to peer at it with a torch, then with the naked eye, to read the letters and the numbers, with collars of soot around them. With infinitesimal care he removed the soot with some sticky tape and the other men watched in a strained, admiring raptness. They deliberated, then each man called out the lettering and the numbering as he believed it to be and their guesses matched.