God knows where this child is too, and I wish God would tell me. I wish I could sleep and dream of where he is and wake and go and lead him by his little hand back into his mother’s arms.
I’ve been on the search party every day. The forensics lads put us into a line and tell us to link arms and take slow steps, looking down, looking left and right. Each person has his own arc, but they should overlap. We’ve covered every bit of ground in twenty square miles. But he was taken in a car. He could be anywhere. Now I’m told stay put in the village, the village needs an operational hub. A pure public relations stunt is all that is. Young Sean Shanahan is little Dylan’s father. It was the end of the first day before anyone knew that. Everyone thought that girl was a blow-in, no one knew she had such a solid link to the place. Not that it’d make any odds or anything. Young Shanahan is tearing around the place like a madman. He roared in the window of the squad car at Philly that we were only a pack of wasters. Philly said the tears had tracks made down his face the very same as scars made by a knife. The child’s mother was with him, pulling him back by the arm and telling him calm down. She’s a tough yoke, that lady. Réaltín, her name is. That’s a lovely name. I’d have given my daughter a name like that if we’d had one, if the universe hadn’t to have its symmetry. Her father is a grand man as well, he’s as pale as a ghost going around, but he’s been going non-stop since the first hour. He’s being pragmatic and realistic and hopeful, just the way you have to try and get people to be in these situations. That’s what the Civil Defence boys say anyway. He was an accountant I think. He’s not losing it the way young Shanahan is. Young Shanahan now would want to catch a hold of himself.
It doesn’t seem right to even be in a bed these days, not to mind sleeping. Since midsummer things are gone pure haywire. I wouldn’t have said Bobby Mahon killed his father any more than the man in the moon. But he rang me that day and asked me in a soft, flat voice to come down to the house and when I got there he was standing in the kitchen, looking down at his father in a puddle of blood with a piece of timber in his hand that was wet with red. When I asked him was it he did it, he told me he didn’t know. He didn’t know, you know. He didn’t say another word, only sat inside in the interview room inside in Henry Street as pale as a ghost and as silent as the grave. And the whole place has it he was doing a line behind his wife’s back with the mother of the girl whose child is gone missing. I said to Mary it’s the very same as something you’d see happening in one of them programmes on the television. Mary says I’m raving through my arse saying young Mahon didn’t do away with his father. I can see her point of view. But I know in my heart and soul he didn’t do it. I wish I knew how I knew, and then I might be able to figure out what really happened. I wish Bobby would snap out of this waking coma he’s after falling into and start talking properly. Josie Burke put up his bail. Josie might get sense out of him.
YOUNG TIMMY HANRAHAN walked in here not long after the mad roaring biddy. He looked at me out of his mouth for at least a half a minute while a tide of red rose in his face. He scratched himself a couple of times before he spoke. Finally, he said he heard a lad saying awful quare things on a mobile phone the day before at the very back of the search-party meeting where he thought he couldn’t be heard and he was on about going to jail for twenty years and he asked the person on the other end to know had he been watching the fucking telly and did he realize how many was looking for clues about the child and what have you and isn’t that fierce funny auld talk, Timmy wanted to know.
Timmy described the boy he’d heard talking on the phone and I felt a kind of a burning in the pit of my stomach. There’s one twitchy-looking little fucker does be around every day, mooching around the edge of the tape and trying to talk to the forensics boys. He was in a few of the parties that went in around the forestry over around Pallas where a car was seen like the one described by the children that were looking out the window that day. I might be clutching at straws now, but I have another strong feeling, the very same as I have the feeling about Bobby Mahon not having killed his father. I have a feeling that that twitchy prick and the Montessori teacher are kind of, I don’t know even how to put it — the same, sort of, like they’re the same type of a fella, kind of brainy and a bit odd and outside of things, even when they’re in the middle of goings on. Who ever heard of a young lad doing that job, anyway? Your lady that owns the crèche says she had him checked out and all before he started, but there’s no record on the PULSE of any check being done. She’s a quare hawk, that one; you wouldn’t know what to make of her. She’s finished in the childminding business anyway, that’s for sure.
But that Montessori teacher is awful suspicious if you ask me. I can’t understand why the crowd inside in Henry Street aren’t making more of that. He says he let the young fella out the door two steps ahead of him and the car was waiting near the door and the lad climbed into the back seat and even as the car drove off his only thought was that it was very rude of Dylan’s dad to just take him without saying anything, then in the next second he thought maybe it was a snatch by a father refused access, and in the third second he realized all hell was going to break loose and he was after fucking up rightly. And he can’t properly explain why it was only little Dylan going out the door to the play area at that second — why wasn’t there a swarm of kids going out the door together the way there always is at playtime? Why was Dylan so far ahead? I don’t know, I don’t know, it all happened so fast, Philly says he keeps saying, and putting his fat fingers over his face and snotting and crying like a child.
That boy of the Hanrahans isn’t half as thick as people make out. And better again, people don’t edit themselves around him, thinking him to be an out and out God-help-us. That’s how he picked up on that boy’s words. The likes of Timmy do be invisible. I’ll have to start putting these feelings into words properly soon. Philly will have a right laugh at me. Good man Jim, he’ll say, come on so and we’ll jump at the word of a halfwit and a feeling in your gut. He’ll tell me get back into my box the very same way he told me the time years ago when the rapid response lads were called out to that lad of the Cunliffes and he above in the farmhouse waving his shotgun at the neighbours. I’d have handled that the finest. He’d have done a few months wrapped up in a nice warm blanket above in Dundrum.
Them armed response lads blew that poor boy to Kingdom Come the very minute he set foot outside his front door. I’d have gotten that gun off of him no bother. That was nearly ten years ago and there was hardly a peep around here since. Madness must come around in ten-year cycles. That time, there was two shootings and a fatal car crash in the space of two months. Now we have another murder and a snatched child; well, a child from here snatched, and you can sense the potential for more. It’s in the air, in the way people are moving around each other with grim faces and shining eyes, either all frantic activity or standing in tight groups, talking quietly and looking at the ground. This must be how things were the time of the war against the British, when a crowd outside of Mass would suddenly explode into a flying column, guns appearing from under overcoats, killers appearing from inside of ordinary people. They were good killings, though — the Tans burned churches and creameries, interfered with women and shot little children. That was a time when killing was for good, for God and country. That time is long gone. But aren’t we still the same people?