Page 61 of The Trap by Catherine
Out of the car, all Angela could see beyond the house was endless rolling fields—and, distant on the horizon, a glow in the dusk that marked the location of Kildare town.
The front door opened and a woman stepped out. She was blonde, twenty-something, and dressed in a bright-blue T-shirt and skinny jeans. She was holding a cup of something in her hand. She must have heard Angela drive in.
“Ah, hi,” Angela said, waving. “Caroline, by any chance?”
The other woman’s eyes went to Angela’s car, and narrowed.
“Whatever you’re selling,” she said. “I’m not interested.”
“Oh no, I’m not—”
“Get off my property.”
Angela turned and looked at the car too, and realized what had happened.
Back at the MPU, when Denise had learned what Lucy O’Sullivan had done, she’d grabbed her car keys and run. She hadn’t stopped to say where she was going, but Don had said he bet he knew: to find Lucy, to make sure she was somewhere safe and then to park herself there, watching her, for the night. Protection on Denise’s own time, as he’d put it. He’d told Angela that she should head home.
Deflated, she’d gathered her things and headed for the Luas. But when a tram arrived, she let it pass her by. If Denise was going to spend all night making sure Lucy was OK and tomorrow morning getting a bollocking from Superintendent Hall, she wasn’t going to have a chance to call Caroline about the charity-shop appeal, now, was she?
But Angela could. It was reallyallshe could do, now, to help. And she felt like she had to dosomething. She wanted to, even if she knew that Denise would tell her off for this, for coming out here before she’d had a chance to call Caroline like she’d said.
But it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
So she’d gone back up to the office, told Don she’d forgotten her water bottle—and she had, but that morning, at home—and retrieved the piece of paper on which she’d written Caroline’s details. Dialing the number only resulted in a strange tone; she must have written it down wrong. But the address was less than an hour’s drive away.
According to her GoCar app, there was a vehicle available just around the corner, which Angela promptly booked and went to collect. It was a car-sharing service, effectively car rental by the hour, and all the vehicles were covered in the company’s white-and-green livery. Caroline must have seen that and assumed, understandably, that Angela was here in some company’s car, cold-calling in an attempt to flog their wares.
“No, no,” she said now. “I’m from the Missing Persons Unit. My name is Angela Fitzgerald. I’m not Gardaí, I’m a civilian—and I don’t own a car, so I rented that one, to drive here. And here...” She fished her ID out of a pocket and handed it to Caroline, who was still looking unconvinced. “That’s me. You can call Harcourt Square and confirm if you like; I don’t mind waiting. But there’s something I’d really like to chat to you about, if you have a minute. Detective Denise Pope sent me.”
At that, Caroline’s face, finally, softened into something more pleasant than open hostility.
“Denise sent you?” she asked.
“Yes. She couldn’t come herself. There’s, well...”
Where to even start, Angela wondered. But of course Caroline had seen the interview too.
“She’ll be trying to track down Lucy, I expect.” She handed Angela back her ID and nodded at something over her shoulder. “Shall we sit by the fire pit?”
“Ah...” She turned to look. In a corner of the scruffy garden, there was a little stone pit with two plastic Adirondack chairs arranged around it, and no fire in its center. Angela might not have been a guard, and she might never have visited someone’s home on the job she’d had until now, but still, this struck her as an odd suggestion to make. “Actually, if you don’t mind, I’ve some documents to show you. We’re going to need some light.”
“We have our phones,” Caroline said brightly.
“Ah... Yes. We do have our phones. But we might need a printer too.”
“I don’t have a printer, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.”
Angela was starting to feel an itch she couldn’t scratch.
Caroline clearly didn’t want her to come inside. But then, Angela pictured her own place: the unmade bed, the dirty dishes in the sink, the smears of various lotions and potions all over the bathroom. And she and her housematesdidthink that people who had the gall to call to other people’s homes unannounced deserved to be charged with war crimes, so...
Maybe that’s all it was.
Or maybe this was the end of Angela’s little extra-curricular adventure, and from tomorrow she’d be back at her desk in the MPU, trying to bring herself to eat her limp carrot batons, and maybe she was so desperate for something to keep her tethered to this case that she was imagining things.
“Actually,” Caroline said. “You know something? I didn’t realize how dark it had got.” She turned back to the house. “Come on in. You’ll have to excuse the mess... We’re going to be knocking the place down, you see, so we haven’t really done anything with it since we moved in. Waiting for planning permission. You know how it goes.”
