Page 104 of 56 Days
Her profile is set to private, but the lack of a profile picture suggests there wouldn’t be much useful information there anyway. Whoever she is, shereallywanted someone to do something about Oliver St Ledger’s supposed return to Dublin, even though, a few anonymous Facebook posts aside, she seemingly wasn’t prepared to do much about it herself.
KB Studios.
When Ciara googles this, she finds a website for a firm of architects based on Upper Baggot Street, Dublin 4—and then on their Meet Our Team page, a brief bio for an Oliver Kennedy—with no headshot.
OLIVER KENNEDY
BSc (Hons) Arch Tech
Oliver graduated from Newcastle University with a 1.1 BSc (Hons) in Architectural Technology in 2013 and joined us in 2020 from MPQ Engineering in London. He brings with him a passion for sustainable design, a flair for innovation, and a wealth of experience in projects large and small.
Ciara’s blood runs cold. Intellectually, she knows none of this adds up to much. There’s a guy named Oliver who could be the same age as Oliver St Ledger, and he used to work in the same city Richard St Ledger visited a few months ago—so what?
Butinstinctively...
She just has a feeling that this is him.
TheOliver.
Ciara glances at the other window she has open on her screen, the one that shows she has seventeen unopened emails and only a couple of hours left in the workday to resolve whatever crises they contain.
That’s what she should be doing, because this is ridiculous. What does she think it’s going to achieve, this onlinewild-goosechase? She’s letting her imagination run away with her. She’s distracting herself from the reality of the situation, which is that her mother is dying and soon it’ll just be Siobhán and her, and no “truth” is going to change that.
This isn’t him.
But if itwere, how might she confirm that?
Another emailpingsinto her inbox.
Ciara glances at the time stamp. It’s five minutes to the hour.
She’ll give herself those five minutes, she thinks, just five minutes more, and then she’ll stop.
She goes back to Facebook to search forOliver Kennedy, but the profiles she finds don’t look like they’re for the same person. The scant few details she has—Newcastle, London, Dublin—don’t match up. She goes back to Instagram on her phone and does the same thing, also to no avail.
Then she has an idea. She brings back up Richard St Ledger’s Instagram and starts scrolling through the list of people he’s following.
There’s no Oliver Kennedy, but thereareKennedys.
Several of them, in fact.
She picks one at random—Maurice—and scans his pictures, stopping at a picture of Sydney Harbour from back in November. It has no caption or hashtag, but there is one comment.
K Meara:Lucky you! Holiday?
Maurice Kennedy:Visiting family!
Family.
Adrenaline starts to fizz in Ciara’s veins.
She opens Richard’s Instagram on her computer screen, scrolls back to November, and starts systematically comparing the two accounts. She has no idea what Maurice looks like, but going by his social media skills and his amateur, unfiltered photographs, she’s guessing he’s an older man. No one like that appears in Richard’s photos, and Maurice doesn’t post pictures of people at all, only badly framed landscapes and random objects sitting in low light.
The best she can hope to find is a commonality, something that shows both men were in the same place at the same time.
And she does.
On November seventh, last year, Maurice Kennedy posted a picture of a line of vintage cars with a wide, sandy beach and cloudy skies visible in the background.
