Liz Nugent - Lying in Wait

I had information too that I had not shared with my parents; it would have hurt them too much. Earlier, before the press conference, O’Toole had taken me aside. He put his arm around my shoulder in a way that was supposed to be comforting, but I felt like gagging from the smell of his overpowering aftershave.

‘Karen,’ he said, ‘if there’s anything I can do, you know? I hate to see you suffering, like.’

‘Don’t you have any leads on where she went? Any clue as to what might have happened to her?’

‘Afraid not, but we’ve tracked down her pimp. He thinks she was seeing fellas on her own for the last few months. She wasn’t on the streets like she’d been before, but she seemed to have money for heroin. Sometimes, you know, a girl is better off with a pimp because he’ll offer her some protection.’

‘And did you arrest him?’

O’Toole seemed perplexed. ‘For what?’

‘For being a pimp! Isn’t it illegal?’

He actually laughed at me. ‘Now, don’t be getting upset, a pretty girl like you. Pimps are useful to us in other ways.’

I was livid. ‘I bet they are.’

He released me from his grip then. ‘I’m on your side, you know. I wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you, if I were you.’

I was shocked by how threatening he was. I needed to play along with him or he wasn’t going to help us.

‘I’m sorry, it’s just that… I’m worried… we’re close, me and Annie.’

‘I suppose it hurts that she kept secrets from you.’ He rifled through his desk and pulled up a copybook, like an old school jotter. ‘We found this with the syringes under the mattress. It’s not of any use to us, but maybe you’d like to keep it?’

I reached out to take it from him, but he held it aloft. ‘What do you say?’

‘Thank you, Detective Sergeant.’ I smiled sweetly.

‘ Declan .’

‘Declan.’

‘She’s not great at writing, is she? Did she go to school at all?’

I tried not to glare at him.

‘There’s some large cash amounts listed in there. We don’t know what they refer to. If you can shed any light on them, let us know? Prostitutes would never make that amount. The going rate averages at ten pounds for full sex,’ he said. He suggested that she must have been providing ‘very special services’ for the amounts listed in the notebook. It took me a few moments to understand what he was getting at. I thought of my sister, who I had shared a room with throughout my childhood. I was still trying to take in the fact that she might be a prostitute. He insisted that the addresses and phone numbers had all been checked and led to nothing.

He wrote his own phone number on a piece of paper. ‘Ring me any time. Any time you want to talk.’

‘About Annie?’

‘About anything.’

I recognized Annie’s scrawl at once. It was a diary of some sort. Her handwriting and spelling were terrible. But it was so… Annie, and when I read the contents, I felt sick. Sick about reading her personal stuff, but heartbroken for what she’d written. The first entry was a letter, dated shortly after she came home from St Joseph’s four years earlier.

Dear Marnie

I bet theve givin you a new name but youll allways be Marnie to me couse of that film. she was gorgues in that film and I think youll be gorgues like her wen you grow up. Your the mort buetifull thing I ever seen. I hope your new family are treeting you good. They wouldent tell me were you was going and I dint want to leave you but they said that Id be looked up their for ever if I didt sign the papers I wish I could have stayed and bawrt you home with me but my Da wouldn have it. He said i was a discrase to the famly. I dont want to be a discrase to you. I will come looking for you some day soone. I wish i new wher you are because I really miss holding you in my arms and cuddeling you. My sister asked me about you but i cant say anything becuse i am the bad one who left you behinnd and now I wish Id stayed and they hadnt sent you away. I am sorry with all my haert and i promise ill find you.

There was a lock of soft, downy, almost yellow hair stuck to the page with Sellotape.

As well as writing, there were things like cinema tickets pasted to the pages like a scrapbook, and random phone numbers, cash amounts and badly spelled hotel addresses. Some recent entries were listed with a ‘J’ on one side of the page and ‘£300’ on the other. I could make no more sense of it than O’Toole.

After the reporters printed our interview, information came flooding in. Annie had been spotted in five different pubs and two restaurants in Dublin, working in a café in Galway, a hotel in Greystones, an office in Belfast. Countless possible sightings. Detective Mooney kept us updated, but even he admitted that they didn’t have the resources to follow up on every single call. Not properly. Me and Dessie chased up a lot of them ourselves. We took the bus and went to hotels and pubs and shops with her photo, but it was infuriating. It seemed like some of the people who had ‘spotted’ Annie just wanted to be part of the excitement of a missing person’s case. Their stories didn’t hold up, or they were contradicted by their friends. Often they were just people with problems of their own that wanted some attention. Each new lead excited us for a time, but none of them checked out.

A week after our press interview, the muckraking began. New headlines appeared: ‘Missing Annie’s Heroin Addiction’ and ‘Annie Doyle’s Secret Teen Pregnancy’. There were vague references to gentlemen callers, and anyone with a brain could see what they meant.

Da and Ma were distraught. Da and I went straight to see O’Toole. ‘How did they know? You said you wouldn’t tell them any of that private stuff!’

O’Toole played the shocked innocent. ‘We’re launching a full investigation into how those details were leaked, Gerry. I can assure you, we’re just as upset as you are.’

Detective Mooney, I could tell, was furious. His eyes blazed at O’Toole. I knew it was O’Toole who had done the leaking. After the press conference, I saw him and some of the reporters laughing and joking together. He posed for photographs with them. I was sure he would not hesitate to provide any dirty details they wanted. Maybe he told them to hold off for a week, so that the articles couldn’t be connected to him.

To me, the tone of these reports seemed to imply that Annie deserved whatever she got, and if she was dead in a ditch, she had nobody to blame but herself. Even Dessie was upset by all the coverage. ‘It’s as if she doesn’t matter,’ he said.

Within three weeks, everything stopped. No leads, no investigation. Gradually, the name Annie Doyle disappeared from the headlines. I guess nobody cared enough to really investigate the vanishing of someone like Annie. If she had been a posh rich girl without a ‘troubled’ history, they would not have given up so quickly.

I couldn’t stop thinking of that first entry in Annie’s copybook. It had been written four years earlier, but the pain in that letter was obvious. What if she had travelled to St Joseph’s in Cork to find out where her baby had gone? What if something happened to her in Cork?

I rang O’Toole.

‘Did you ask St Joseph’s?’

‘What?’ He didn’t appear to know what I was talking about.

‘St Joseph’s in Cork, where Annie was forced to give up her baby.’

‘Oh yeah, I did, yeah.’

‘And what did they say?’

‘They didn’t have any information that would be helpful.’

‘But did they say she had been there? Had she gone down to find out where the baby was?’

‘Karen, a beautiful girl like you, all this worry is doing you no good. You have to leave this investigation to us. We’re doing everything we can.’