Page 102 of 56 Days
She keeps scrolling down, careful not to double tap any of the photos—if this is the right Richard, then he’d knowhername for sure—until she comes to one taken much closer to home. It’s of Richard with his back against awaist-highglass railing, his head turned away from the lens as he looks out over the bird’s-eyeview of London behind him. The location tag says, “Sky Garden,” which Ciara knows sits atop the skyscraper known as the Walkie Talkie.
The photographer’s legs are reflected in the glass and Ciara stares at them for several seconds, wondering if she’s looking at Oliver St Ledger’s chino shorts, muscular calves, and white Vans. But then she touches a finger to the image and finds the legs tagged as@balfeyboi91.
She follows it to the corresponding account: Ken Balfe, whose bio is also sporting an Irish flag.
KenBalfe.
Ciara puts down the phone and goes back to her computer, opening up Facebook. She’s already logged in. She typesKen Balfeinto the search bar—and finds the corresponding profile easily.
There’s no evidence that he’s been active on the site recently; the top post on his page is from nearly a year ago. But the “About” section has lots of useful information, most notably that he went to secondary school at St. Columba’s Community in Naas, Co. Kildare.
She silently thanks him for filling it in.
The primary schools in the area were segregated by gender, but the secondary was mixed. St. Columba’s is where Siobhán went for a couple of years, and where Ciara had been supposed to go until they’d left the area a month after her father’s death, when their mother announced she just couldn’t stand to be there, suffocating in memories, for a single moment more. So it’s entirely plausible that Ken Balfe and Richard St Ledger have been friends since school, sincebeforeeverything happened.
Which would mean that Ken would know about Oliver.
Whichmightmean he’d know where he is now.
But what good is this information to her? What’s she supposed to do with it? Send him a message asking if he would kindly provide contact information for his friend’s younger brother, the convicted child murderer?
She couldn’t do that any more than she could send Richard St Ledger a message on Instagram and ask him a version of the same thing.
How do you find someone who doesn’t want to befound?
But that’s not really the right question, Ciara thinks now. What she should really be asking herself is,How do you find a child who was convicted of murder now that he’s a grown man and his name is protected by law?
Ciara only knows of one case where young children were convicted of murder; it had happened in England before she was born. Those boys were now men who lived under assumed identities, guaranteed lifelong anonymity—because their names were made public, they had to shed them immediately after the trial.
As she scans the case summary on Wikipedia, looking for any details that may help her in her search, she studiously ignores the shards of horror that jump out at her like glinting knife blades.
...blown his cover several times by sharing his true identity...
...in possession of child abuse images...
...returned to prison...
Maybe this is a mistake.
Maybe she shouldn’t be looking for Oliver St Ledger.
What if she finds him, and somehow gets him to talk, and what he says only makes everythingworse?
Ciara takes the half of the British pair who hasn’t reoffended and puts his original name into Facebook’s search box, just to see what comes up. There’s a handful of profiles withexact-namematches, but of course none of them can be him. She feels a pang of sympathy for those men and wonders why on earth they don’t go by nicknames or something. She scrolls down the page until she sees that a group has been returned in the results.
Justice, Not Protection! has almost eight thousand members.
Ciara feels compelled to turn around and make sure no one is standing silently behind her, looking over her shoulder. She’s in a small,open-planoffice, but the only other occupied desk right now is on the far side of the room. She should be safe.
She moves the mouse, clicks.
Ciara only needs a few seconds on Justice, Not Protection! to ascertain what it is—or more specifically, who it’s for: keyboard vigilantes. The aim of the game, it seems, is to expose the protected identities of convicted criminals who the group, playing both judge and jury, has decided should be exposed.
Each post is, supposedly, a tip, and there are hundreds of them. They seem to follow a standardized format: a bad photo of someone either blurred by the movement of the camera or taken from too far away to capture any detail, paired with a caption that makes claims like,this isso-and-so(1st degree murder, Preston, 2004) in the Waitrose on Chatham Wayandmy wife and I madeso-and-soat Cinema World, Belfast, last night—100% himand he knew I was looking but I just stared him down,authored by people hiding behind blank profile pics and gobbledegook usernames. Underneath each one is a trail of dozens of comments, most of which seem to be either fantasists outlining what injuries they’d inflict on the criminal given the chance or fullypaid-upmembers of the Outrage Brigade spoutingill-informednonsense about the law of the land.
It’s a cesspool and Ciara feels ill just looking at it. Plus it seems very muchUK-centricand so unlikely to be of any use to her.
But at the top of the page is an empty box and an invitation toSearch thisgroup.
