Page 88 of The Trap by Catherine
“I spent a summer working in the Algarve,” she said then. “As a holiday rep. One of the guys there—he worked in the local Irish bar—he’d been here, the summer before. That was, like, four years ago now, so I didn’t know whether or not it was still here, or exactly where it was, but he had said if I was ever looking for it, I could just ask around in town and they’d know where to send me. You’re not allowed to put anything about it online, you see. While you’re here or after, if you leave. Bastian doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want glampers and Airbnbers and people who only want to live off the land long enough to make a fuckingreelabout it.”
“Right,” Denise said. “So you...?”
“I met some people. That night. After I left the Duke. A gang of Dutch students, traveling around Ireland for a couple of weeks. Just, like, randomly. On Grafton Street. They asked me to take a picture of them, and we got talking, and they said come for a drink, and they seemed so cool... My friends had been... well, pissing me off, frankly. I crashed on their couch that night, in the place they’d rented in Temple Bar. They’d rented a car and were heading south with it, and I just, you know, asked if I could tag along.”
“Was this the following day?”
Nicki chewed on her lip for a moment, as if weighing up whether to answer yet another of Denise’s questions or tell her where she could stick it.
“I spent, like, five nights with them,” she said then. “Got as far as Cork. And then with what cash I had left I got a bus to Bandon, and then another one to Dunmanway, and there I walked into a cafe on the square and asked if they’d heard of this place. The guy behind the counter took me back outside and said, “Bastian, she’s looking for you.” He was right there, across the road, on a market stall. We got talking and I convinced him to bring me back here with him.”
Denise and Angela exchanged a glance. That was probably why the CCTV had lost her: because in the middle of a crowded street, she’d slipped into a group of other women. Their rental car explained why Nicki had never been picked up on cameras at bus or train stations, and their being visitors here on holiday explained why they’d never reported having met her. The people who might have seen her on the buses she took to West Cork would only have had a slim chance of seeing anything in the news about her being a missing person, because, like all other low-risk adults who disappear, she’d only got a couple of virtual column inches to begin with.
“And you like it here?” Denise asked.
“It’s fine,” Nicki said.
But you’ve stayed here all this time, Angela thought.
“But you’ve stayed here all this time,” Denise said.
“Yeah, well.” Another shrug. “I liked it more in the beginning. When there weren’t as many bloodyrules.”
“Is there internet here? Do people have phones?”
“That’s one of them,” Nicki said. “That we don’t bring noise from out there in here.” She paused. “That’s one of the rules Ilike, actually.”
“But when you leave here,” Denise pushed. “For the farmers’ markets and what have you. You never see newspapers or—?”
“I’ve never left here.”
“Never?”
Nicki shook her head. “Not once.”
“In more than a year?”
“I haven’t been off the property since the day I arrived.”
“How come?”
Nicki threw up her hands, exasperated. “Because I came here to getawayfrom everything out there, OK?”
The man who had called the Garda Confidential Line to say that he knew where Nicki O’Sullivan was hadn’t left a name or any contact details, but hehadsaid that she had no idea what had been playing out in the headlines since Jennifer Gold disappeared and Operation Tide commenced.
Which seemed impossible, and also convenient.
But maybe itwastrue.
“Why did you feel like you couldn’t let Lucy know where you were?” Denise asked. “Or even just that you were OK? At any point, in all this time?”
Angela noted the careful phrasing of the question. What Denise was really asking, of course, was:How on earth could you let your sister, your only blood relative, think that you were lying dead in a ditch somewhere when you were actually here, in the beautiful West Cork countryside, living the good life, enjoying unprecedented peace?
Nicki frowned, genuinely confused. “But why wouldn’t I be OK?”
“Well,” Denise started, “it’s just that—”
“Look, I know what you’re thinking: that I’m a selfish bitch.” Nicki said this to Angela, who immediately tried to rearrange her face to that of someone who was definitelynotthinking that. “But I’m an adult. And you don’t know my life. And I have every right to do whatever I want with it. Nothing I ever did, or was ever going to do, was going to make my sister happy. Because she doesn’t want to be happy. She wants to be sensible. And responsible. And boring. And she wants me to be all those things too because... Well, honestly, I think she sees my life and the things I’ve done and the places I’ve been and she’s jealous. She wishes she could be like me, but she can’t, so she doesn’t want me to be like me either. All that’s happened here is that one day, I got some sense and I stopped trying to please her. And Chris. And everyone else. I came here because I can’t live out there, with them, and all their expectations and their little comments and their potent, never-ending, bottomless fucking disappointment in me, which, incredibly, all stems from the simple fact thatIdon’t want whattheywant.”
