Page 94 of The Trap by Catherine
If she’d been spotted there a couple of times already, she was sure to go back.
And better yet, that was nowhere near the Pink House.
He hadn’t been planning a return to Base Camp. He hadn’t been there since. Yeah,OK, he’d boarded a couple of creaky flights to Kathmandu and got himself a hostel room, fair enough. And once he’d started to trek out of it in the general direction of Everest, but not because he was going to make a summit attempt. His climbing days were behind him. He’d hung up his crampons, put away his ropes.
Things were different now.
There was a baby on the way.
Although this, tonight, was the baby’s fault, actually. Technically. Amy had moved into a separate room because she was more comfortable with a bed to herself, and she’d chosen the one in the attic conversion because her sleep was so precarious, she needed to be as far away from potential disturbances as she could possibly get. Up there, she couldn’t hear him if he stayed up later than her, or got up out of bed to use the loo, or snuck out in the middle of the night to look for this idiot woman with the new baby seat out of the boot and in the back seat a little earlier than planned.
Nicki O’Sullivan looks different to the photo they printed in the papers, but it’s definitely her. She says something about a bus and shows him her supposedly dead phone, and he’s happy to play along. He sees her clock the baby seat in the back, the mess on the floor in the front. He pretends to look for a charger, says he came out without his phone too. And then he suggests that he give her a lift to a garage not far down the road, one of the twenty-four-hour ones, and, after barely a moment’s hesitation, she gets in the car.
Just like her sister.
Stupidity must run in the family.
Not like Kerry Long, his first, whose skull he’d smashed the night of Niamh’s birthday party. Whose bloody bra had been found in a charity shop, for fuck’s sake. He had worried a little about the fact that it had been insideAmy’shandbag, before remembering that, first, she’d have emptied everything out of it before donating it and, second, fingerprints don’t mean shit unless you’ve a set to match them against.Unless his wife was secretly some kind of criminal mastermind, he very much doubted her prints were on file and he knew his weren’t. They didn’t have DNA either, so the bloody bra was just as moot.
Jennifer Gold had been the easiest.The best mannered. The most helpful. By far the stupidest.He’d opened the passenger door and Jennifer hadsat in the carto look at what he was claiming was a map to his friend’s house. Getting the dog’s lead out of her hand before he drove off had been the only challenge there, really. It was just a shame she turned out to be so young.
Lena Paczkowski had been an absolute pain in his arse until she helpfully ran into the path of an oncoming car and solved that problem for him.
And Lucy O’Sullivan had come willingly, but shouldn’t have.
There were no others, and he’s stopped now. Stopped taking themandstopped visiting the Pink House.
But that doesn’t mean he can’t have a little fun.
He presses the button that locks all the doors simultaneously and, out of the corner of his eye, watches as the loudclickmakes her flinch.
“So,” he says then. “Was it a good night, at least?”
* * *
Denise had been surprised to hear from Chris Noonan after all this time, and after everything that had happened.
In the wake of Lucy O’Sullivan’s disappearance—and the reappearance of her sister, his former girlfriend—he’d been extremely vocal in his criticism of the Gardaí, complaining about their failures to everyone from the Minister for Justice to the ringmasters of misery who hosted phone-in radio shows around the country. When Denise saw his name come up on her phone, she’d presumed he was calling to complain to her too.
And she’d let him.
After all, he had a point.
She hadn’t seen him in person since she’d arrived on his doorstep three weeks after Lucy’s disappearance with a healthy, suntanned Nicki in tow, promoting his waking nightmare to a living hell. She was no longer his FLO or anyone else’s. Someone new had been assigned that job, and she’d heard that when they’d gone round to the house to introduce themselves, he’d told them to fuck off and then slammed the door in their face.
But no, Chris was calling her for another reason.
He was worried that Nicki O’Sullivan was doing something even more dangerous than her sister had, which was saying something, and he was hoping that Denise could help save her from herself. That’s why she’s sitting in her car, parked on the main street—the only street—of some tiny speck of a village somewhere in the Wicklow Mountains, watching Nicki get out of what was her sister’s car.
And ditch her jacket.
Swap her trainers for strappy heels.
Lock up the car, tuck the keys into her cleavage, and walk off into the night, stumbling a little, hands swinging loose by her sides, looking like the twilight hours between the Night Before and the Morning After.
But it’s all an act.
The girl is stone-cold sober. She wasn’t out on the town this evening; Denise has followed her here from her home. And if Nicki had been driving even a little like she’s walking, Denise would have arrested her long before now.
