Page 36 of The Trap by Catherine
Chris was on the couch, watching the opening titles of the evening news. Theproperevening news, the one with actual, serious journalists, that aired on the kind of channel that wouldn’t let the likes of Jack Keane make the tea.
“I just thought there might be an update,” Chris said. “I can turn it off if you want?”
“No,” she said. “Leave it on.” She sat down on the couch beside him as he turned the volume up. “Let’s see what they’re saying.”
She almost addedand what’s been made publicbut she swallowed the words back just in time. She hadn’t told Chris anything about today. Not about what Jack Keane had told her, or what had happened at the meeting. As far as he knew, since she’d left the house this morning she’d been at the cafe, listening to music and cleaning. He’d called her phone around six to check where she was, and she didn’t have the energy to tell him the truth, then or now.
Lena Paczkowski was the top story.
The male anchor in the studio spoke directly to the camera. “Gardaí investigating the disappearances of three women from the east of the country are tonight searching a new area in the Wicklow Mountains, having received what they describe as significant new information. A spokesperson said no further details would be provided for operational reasons, but Garda sources quoted in tomorrow’sIrish Timessuggest that detectives have spoken to a possible survivor of an abduction, who told them she’d been in a location where other women were also being held.”
“The news is out, then,” Chris said.
Someof it is, Lucy corrected silently.
The screen cut to a shot of rolling fields, while a voiceover by a different man said pretty much the same thing, only with some added color. “As the sun sets this evening on the Great Sugarloaf, this car park is, like always, a hive of activity—but on this warm summer’s night, there isn’t a hillwalker in sight. Instead, dozens of specialist Garda search teams assemble to receive their instructions, ready to search this terrain for any trace of Jennifer Gold, Tana Meehan or Nicola O’Sullivan...”
“She hates being called Nicola,” Lucy muttered.
It was enough of an insult that the media didn’t talk about her sister as much as they should, but then, when they did, they didn’t call her by her name.
On screen, footage of chains of neon flak-jackets moving across scrubland was replaced by a woman in her fifties walking under some trees on what was clearly the grounds of the RTÉ television studios in Donnybrook. She was coiffed and glossed and wearing a pressed linen shirt in a shade of hot pink that reminded Lucy of bubblegum and Barbies, and she was managing to look like she’d naturally been captured out for a stroll instead of asked to walk from point A to point B while a camera filmed her for some “candid’ shots.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Lucy said.
The voiceover returned. “Margaret Gold’s daughter, Jennifer, had just turned seventeen when she went missing only yards from their home in Kilternan, County Dublin, one sunny afternoon last December. Soon after, Operation Tide was established to investigate possible connections between Jennifer’s disappearance and those of two other women. But this evening, her mother, Margaret, is calling on authorities to do more.”
Lucy couldn’t actually believe this.
When Chris turned and looked at her, she realized she’d said that out loud.
“What’s the problem?” he said. “Isn’t she always giving interviews?”
Margaret was standing still now, facing the camera and holding a large, framed photograph of her daughter dressed for her Debs ball: a strapless black gown, tacky corsage, unimaginative up-do. Her skin was perfect and her hair was shiny and her teeth were straight and white. There was no TikTok-thick make-up, fillers, or fake tan on display here. Jennifer was a natural beauty who looked like she was somehow lit up from within.
“Well, yeah,” Lucy said. “That’s just it.”
The sunshine Margaret was walking around in outside the news studio looked low enough to be late afternoon and, at the cafe, she’d said she was on her way to Donnybrook, where the studios were.
That bitch, Lucy said silently, then felt bad for thinking it.
“Any attention on any of them is good,” Chris said. “We just have to think of it that way.”
But Lucy wasn’t sure that was true.
“I just want to know where my daughter is,” Margaret was saying on screen, clutching the photo frame tightly. Her fingernails, Lucy noticed, looked as if they’d been professionally done. She hadn’t noticed that at the cafe. “I just want my Jenny home.”
“I’m surprised to see the Debs photo,” Chris said. “She doesn’t use that much.”
They were more used to seeing Jennifer in her school uniform, being presented with a certificate she’d been awarded by the Department of Education for six years of unbroken attendance, meaning she’d never missed asingleday of secondary school. Or Jennifer holding her Leaving Cert results, a photo which had been taken by a press photographer because she was one of only seven students in her year to achieve top marks across the board, and in which her Pioneer pin was also clearly visible. Or Jennifer in athletic shorts and a tank top, her long hair in a ponytail frozen in mid-swish, looking flushed and happy and wearing a medal around her neck.
Either Margaret had no photos of her daughter without some tangible evidence of her exceptional achievement in her hands, or she was out to prove a point with every choice: out of the three, Jennifer was by far the biggest loss. When Lucy had been choosing Nicki’s official “missing” photo, she’d only considered what she’d been told: that it needed to look as close as possible to what Nicki had looked like the last time she’d seen her. The only shot of Nicki’s newly purpled hair was a blurry selfie she’d sent Lucy via WhatsApp, so she’d gone with that.
What shedidn’tconsider was that that photo would be everything that anyone else knew about her sister: who she was, what she was like. From this single image of one moment, people would extrapolate an entire life. And that photo made Nicki look like a woman who colored outside the lines, who didn’t abide by society’s rules, and who might well just decide one day to walk away from it all.
Even the poor quality of the image, the low pixel count, the fact that it blurred whenever it was blown up for an online article or a newspaper page—it suggested an irreality. It helped promote the idea that Nicki just wasn’t as vibrant and substantial andaliveas Jennifer had been and, therefore, not as important.
On screen, the news bulletin moved on to flooding in Pakistan.
