Page 23 of The Trap by Catherine
“So, Mrs. Long—” Denise started.
“Maisie,” she corrected. “Please.”
She’d taken a seat on the armchair directly opposite, her back ramrod straight, her expression tense.
“Maisie. As I said, we’re conducting a review into Kerry’s case—into all outstanding missing person reports from the last five years. I want to be very clear that that’s all we’re doing. Unfortunately, we have no new information to share.” While Denise was saying this, she had pulled a notebook from her bag, and was now poised with a pen hovering over a fresh page of it. “What we’d like to do, if you don’t mind, is just hear the circumstances of her disappearance, from you, in your own words. So we can be sure that the report contains all the detail and information that it possibly can, and that that information is correct. Would that be OK?”
Maisie said, “Yes, fine,” but her body language and facial expression didn’t appear to agree.
“Why don’t we start with when you last saw her?”
“It was when she left for work that morning,” Maisie began. She was wringing her hands together in her lap, her knuckles white. “Kerry worked in Wexford town, in an estate agent’s. She used to get a lift in with one of our neighbors who worked nearby, but she’d have to get the bus home. The nearest stop was about a mile down the road, so she’d walk the rest of the way—or ring me for a lift if the weather was bad. She was always home by six, but that night she never arrived, and we couldn’t get in contact with her and she never contacted us.”
Denise scribbled something in her notebook.
“What did you do before you called the Gardaí?” she asked. “Did you try friends, her office, other family members?”
Maisie nodded. “Everyone I could think of. I rang Wendy—that’s our neighbor that she’d get the lift with—and she said she’d dropped her that morning like always. The office was closed by then but her boss was in the phone book, so I rang him at home. He said she’d been at work all day. He’d gone home before she did, but he gave me the number of one of the other girls and she confirmed that Kerry had left at her usual time and walked in the direction of the bus stop. Like always.”
“Did they actually see her reach the bus stop, or...?”
“No, it was a ways away from the office. But she went left out the door, as per usual. I asked how the form had been, and she said Kerry had seemed great, that they were chatting and laughing all day. We rang a couple of girls around here who she’d meet up with from time to time, but no one had seen her. So then we rang—well, my husband rang—the local station, just to get some advice, really. They said she’s probably just decided to head out on the town and to call them again if she hadn’t shown up by the morning. And, well...” Maisie paused. “She didn’t, so we did. But even then there wasn’t much, you know,action. We just filed a report and they called us a few times, and that was it.”
Denise scribbled down something else. Angela tried discreetly to read what it was but her handwriting looked like the output of a malfunctioning EKG machine.
“Mrs. Long,” Denise said then. “Maisie. Why did you ask Kerry’s colleague about what sort of form she’d been in? Had she been...?” Her voice trailed off and she let the implication dangle in the air between them.
“Well, Kerry had had...” Maisie shifted her weight. “She’d had some struggles. Over the years. Mostly when she was a teenager. We had some issues with her eating for a while, and then there was... the, ah”—she absently traced a finger across her inner arm— “hurting herself, and we had to admit her for that... Three months, she was in that time. She had to resit the Leaving Cert over it, because she was in hospital for all of her exams. But then she started seeing this new therapist, and she had new medication, and she really improved. She hadn’t had any issues for, I don’t know, a couple of years.” She paused. “Hasn’t had.”
“There was an article online,” Denise said. “An appeal for information. Generally those occur at the behest of the family, so at some stage you must have...?”
“That was her brother’s idea. Michael.”
The golden boy in all the photos, Angela presumed.
“Does he live here too?” Denise asked.
“No, he’s in Melbourne.”
“Is he older or younger?”
“Older by eighteen months.”
“Was he in Melbourne when Kerry disappeared?”
“He’s been there for nearly ten years. He flew home, of course, when he heard, but after a few weeks... He has a very big job, you see. An important job. Lots of responsibility. He couldn’t stay, and we told him there was really no point.”
“Did the appeal generate any helpful information, can you remember?”
Maisie said, “No.” She had started playing with a little silver locket she had on a chain around her neck, threading it from side to side. “The thing is, my husband, he’s a very private person. Doesn’t like everyone knowing our business, you know? And he didn’t want to cause a fuss. So we sort of said, look, if she wanted to run off, let her.”
“Had Kerry ever left like that before?”
“No, but she’d threatened to. I mean, back when she was... God, fifteen? Sixteen? Teenage tantrums.She didn’t mean it, I don’t think, it was just in the heat of the moment. They didn’t get on, you see. Her and her father. Too similar.” Her face changed then, and she let go of her chain to put her hands in her lap. “She wanted to move to Dublin, but he thought that would be a waste of money—the rent. They were at loggerheads over it.”
“Did Kerry drive?”
That question had come out of Angela’s mouth, and she was just as surprised as Denise to hear it.
