Page 32 of The Trap by Catherine
“It’s a special task force,” she began, “set up to investigate the three missing women cases from the last two years—”
“Which are?” Denise interrupted.
Unlike the PCT, this was a test Angela actually had a chance at passing. But she had to be careful to separate the cold, hard facts from the office whispers and overheard phone conversations that had added details she most certainly wasn’t supposed to know.
“Chronologically,” Angela started. “Tana Meehan was the first.She was, ah... twenty-nine.” She hoped—although Denise didn’t correct her, so she must have been. “Disappeared in December 2020, last seen at a bus stop in Kildare town. She’d just got off a train from Dublin. She and her ex-husband, Roland Kearns, were legally separated at the time. He’s been questioned but never charged.” Angela figured she probably shouldn’t say,And everyone thinks he killed her in a jealous rage because he thought she was having an affair with a friend she had visited that night in Dublin, and as Kearns issucha creep and a complete narcissist whocannotseem to keep his mouth closed around the press, it’s very easy to believe.“Her phone was found the following day, on the road close to the bus stop, by a member of the public. And she had the bad luck to go missing the day before Covid canceled Christmas, so her disappearance barely made the news.”
“Twodays before,” Denise corrected. “She was last seen on December nineteenth. The government announced new restrictions on December twenty-first, and that’s all anyone cared about from then on. And, according to Kearns, she was pregnant.”
“Really?” Angela did her best Surprised Face, even though that fact was common knowledge around the water coolers of Harcourt Square. The metaphorical ones; they didn’t actually have water coolers in the building. “How far along?”
“You tell me.” Denise raised an eyebrow at Angela as she plucked her Coke out of the cup holder between the seats and sucked noisily on the straw. “For your sake, I hope you don’t play poker.”
Angela blushed. “I heard ten weeks.”
“That’s what Kearns told us, yeah. And that it was his. They’d reconciled, he said. Conveniently. But we don’t have any evidence of a pregnancy. Tana spent some time in a friend’s apartment near Spencer Dock on the night she disappeared—we ruled him out—and he said she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, which of course doesn’t mean much in itself. But she hadn’t visited her GP either. She had, however, told at least two other friends that Kearns had been abusive throughout their relationship. Psychologicallyandphysically.”
“That doesn’t make him a m—” Angela started.
“It makes him a lot more fucking likely to be a murderer than a man whohasn’tpummeled his wife in the face with his fists,” Denise said, her voice rising slightly. “You know, it drives me absolutely fucking nuts when people say that. As if a man who’s violent, not only atall, but to the woman he supposedly loves the most, is our baseline for normality, and a man who does it until his victim dies is some other species entirely. They’re one and the same, for fuck’s sake. The only difference is one of them got angrier than the other.”
Angela looked down at her grease-stained cardboard box of limp salad leaves and resolved never to say such a thing again.
“Anyway,” Denise said. “After Tana was...?”
“Nicola O’Sullivan,” Angela finished, more tentative now, lest she say something else that would make Denise’s nostrils flare. “Ah, Nicki. Twenty-five when she disappeared in June 2021. Living with her sister in Dundrum. Last seen leaving the Duke pub on Duke Street late on a Saturday night.”
“Technically she was last seen on CCTV walking toward Grafton Street,” Denise said, “but OK. She’d been in the pub with friends, drinking enough to make her at least a little drunk. She didn’t tell any of them she was leaving, and when she did, she turned right out of the pub instead of left—when left would’ve brought her to a Luas stop within seconds, and the Luas would’ve brought her all the way home.”
“And they found her phone the next day, in a laneway near the pub.”
“Yes,” Denise said, nodding. “Her sister did. After she went into the pub to ask the staff if they’d seen where she’d gone.”
“Was she meeting someone, maybe?”
“There was nothing on her phone to indicate that, and the CCTV lost her in the late-night crowds on Grafton Street, and none of the surrounding streets picked her up again. We got a few reports of sightings of her at various places down the east coast, but none of them ever panned out.” Denise sighed. “What else do you know about her?”
There was a beat of silence while Angela tried to think of something.
“That’s it, really,” she said. “Unless you count the fact that Nicki O’Sullivan’s disappearance didn’t really make the news until Jennifer Gold went missing that Christmas, and Operation Tide put them and Tana Meehan together.”
“And what do you know about Jennifer Gold?” Denise asked.
“Presumably snatched just yards from her home on the Enniskerry Road in broad daylight last December, while walking her dog. She’d just turned seventeen. Her phone was found thrown into a bush. She’d been WhatsApping with a friend who’d seen aJennifer is typingmessage but then nothing more.” Angela paused. “I think the dog was called Walter.”
Denise looked at her with such disappointment that Angela colored.
“Do you think it matters what the dog is called?”
Angela shook her head. “But you asked what I knew—”
“So we have our three missing women,” Denise said, cutting her off. “Tana Meehan, Nicki O’Sullivan, and Jennifer Gold. Disappeared in December, June, and then December again. From Kildare town, Dublin city center, and the Enniskerry Road, around ten p.m., around midnight, and in broad daylight just after three. When Jennifer disappears, the three cases are linked and Operation Tide is established. But what links them? Evidentially?”
“The phones,” Angela said. “All three of their phones were found thrown on the ground near to where they were last seen or, in the case of Jennifer Gold, presumed snatched, bundled into a car or something.”
Denise took another noisy sip of her Coke, then pointed the straw at Angela.
“And you think that alone is sufficient? Do you think the phones are enough tangible evidence to say these three disappearances are definitely related to each other andunrelated to all others?”
