Page 52 of The Trap by Catherine
The silence was broken by the sound of a phone ringing: Denise’s.
“Shit,” she said, looking from the screen to Don. “It’s Hall.”
“You’rehis first call? Why?”
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good, can it?”
“You didn’t...?” Don paused, nodded at the screen. “Youdidn’t do this, did you?”
“What? Leak to Jack Keane? Seriously?”
“I meant Lucy O’Sullivan. You’re her FLO, aren’t you?”
“OfcourseI didn’t,” Denise snapped. “Why would I tell her any of that? She must have got it from him, and I don’t know who the fuckhegot it from.”
Don held up his hands in surrender. Denise threw him a furious look and then hurried out of the room, presumably to answer Hall’s call.
A cheery ad for car insurance was on the TV now.
Angela let its idiotic jingle fill the room for a few bars before turning to Don and starting to ask, “What the—?”
“Lena Paczkowski died in the ambulance,” he said. He pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, facing the TV. “She never even made it to the hospital. They were keeping it quiet in the hope the guy—if thereisa guy—would get nervous and, I don’t know, come back to the spot where he’d dumped the bodies to make sure they were still hidden or whatever. But he didn’t. Or else, they’re not buried anywhere near the Wicklow Mountains and the girl ended up there for some other reason. Or there are no bodies. The point is, the Tide lads did a piss-poor job of keeping their secret a secret, and now it seems like”—Don pointed a finger at the screen—“the families found it out from the media.”
“Shit,” Angela said. She sat down too, exhaled.
“Shit indeed.”
“You seem pretty calm about this.”
“Well, this isn’t us, is it?” Don said with a shrug. “It’s Tide. This is one of those times when I thank my lucky stars our main responsibility is filing things. Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
“But we’re the Missing Persons Unit. Didn’t we at least rent them the tent?”
He pointed at the screen. “They’re back.”
Angela turned toward the TV in time to catch the end of the news program’s titles and then a one-shot of the blonde anchor sitting on the couch.
“Welcome back,” she said smoothly, “to our special report this evening into Operation Tide, the investigation into the missing women. We’ll be looking at the rest of today’s headlines later in the program, but for now we’re going to continue our conversation with Lucy O’Sullivan, whose sister, Nicola, known as Nicki to her family and friends, has been missing since June of last year.” She pivoted in her seat just as the feed changed to a two-shot, showing both women still sitting opposite each other in the studio. “I’d like to switch gears a little, Lucy, if I may. What is it like, not knowing what happened to your sister?”
“Hell,” she answered immediately. For a moment it seemed like she might leave it there, but then she continued. “The last time I saw Nicki was on CCTV footage that showed her leaving the Duke on Duke Street on Saturday the twelfth of June 2021, and walking out of shot toward Grafton Street. Every second of those images, every frame, is burned into my brain. And there isn’t a moment of the day when I’m not wondering what happened next”—her voice caught here—“and wondering why we don’t have the answer. You try not to, but it’s impossible to stop yourself from filling in the blanks, even if we don’t actually know anything. I don’t know if whatever happened happened there, or elsewhere. Did she get on a bus, or was she pulled into a car, or did someone push her into the river?”
Tears were dripping on to Lucy’s cheeks now and the anchor had the sense to steer the conversation in another direction.
“This is the first national television interview you’ve given since Nicki disappeared,” she said softly. “What do you want people to know about your sister? What was she like?”
Lucy wiped at her cheeks and then took a deep breath.
“I’ve been dreading that question,” she said.
The anchor blinked, as if taken aback.
“Nicki was funny,” Lucy started. “And curious. And carefree. We had so much fun when we were children—on Saturday mornings, we’d make a sort of tent out of our bunk beds, and our mother would bring breakfast to us, and we’d all sit and have a picnic...” Lucy smiled briefly at the memory. “And I don’t know what I would’ve done without her when our mother died. Even though she was the younger one, she took care of me in many ways.”
The anchor nodded sympathetically, relaxing again now that she’d got the answer she was expecting.
“But she was also selfish,” Lucy continued. “And she could be mean. She hurt the feelings of the people who cared about her, and she didn’t even notice she was doing it. She was self-involved. She was always the most important person in her universe. She lacked direction, and she could be lazy, and she wasn’t bothered about things like getting a job or keeping a job or how she would afford a roof over her head and all those, you know,responsibilities, because she was too busy living in the now, and living with me, and taking advantage of the fact that when our mother died, she left the house to us. Chris, her boyfriend, would tell you that when it came to deciding things—big things, like where to live, and small things, like what to watch—she would never compromise. Her way was the only way. And on the night she disappeared, her friends said she’d snapped at them over something minor and then just left, wandering off by herself, while drunk and wearing a short skirt and—”
The anchor glanced at someone off-screen, nodded almost imperceptibly.
