‘The day after tomorrow, Steve, we are going to embark on the most epic journey of our lives. We are going to sail across the world to New Zealand. Our new home.’ I could remember New Zealand on our globe. Two long islands that looked like they might have fallen off the bottom of Australia. I knew that it was home to the kiwi bird and the All Blacks rugby team, that it had mountains and glaciers, and that the climate was not too different to Ireland’s. I also knew that the population of New Zealand was roughly the same as Ireland, even though it was three times the size. There would be plenty of room for us there.
‘Won’t it take an awfully long time?’
‘I expect it will, but you have no idea how expensive these passports were and how difficult they were to get. I had to consort with some rough men, but I got them in the end. Air travel is too risky and I don’t think it would be safe for you, with all that recirculated air from other passengers. We’ll have to buy a house and a car when we get there.’ His excitement was infectious. ‘Look, I got you a few presents.’
He had bought me a pair of gloves and a hat with ear flaps that almost covered my whole head to keep me safe from accidentally touching another person. He presented me with three brand-new books. The Flora and Fauna of New Zealand, New Zealand: The History and Culture of a Great Nation and New Zealand’s Heroes.
‘Are we not Irish any more?’
‘No, Steve, we are Kiwi natives, born and bred, members of the British Commonwealth. I have relatives in Ireland and went there on holiday after I left school. That’s where I met and married your mother. I stayed there and qualified as a dentist. You were born when we went back to New Zealand a year later. Your mother died of cancer last Christmas, and we brought her home for the funeral in her family plot. Right now, we are going back home. That is our story. We are changing history, my boy.’ There was glee in his voice.
‘And another thing, the guards have found Denise and her brat. There’s a search warrant out for me. They’re looking here in England for an Irishman travelling alone but it’s only in the Irish newspapers so far. They haven’t picked up the story here yet. Your stupid mother seems to have forgotten about you. They don’t appear to know you exist and, by the time they do, we’ll be on the other side of the world.’
29
Sally
In March 2019, I finally got news from New Zealand. Detective Inspector Baskin from Dublin was in charge of the case, but he sent Detective Inspector Andrea Howard to my house with the information. She told me the New Zealand police could find no lead on Conor Geary. I wondered why it had taken so long, over a year.
‘There were lots of leads in the beginning, when the photograph was circulated. They all had to be checked out and eliminated, and they all proved false. There were some leads which looked promising. A known paedophile Irish immigrant, but he’s two decades too young and so was ruled out. A dentist who had spent years in Ireland and had lived not far from where a young girl was abducted in New Zealand in 1983. But he was a Kiwi citizen and died decades ago. And he had a son, older than you. Another dead end. And, finally, a dentist who was accused of molesting a young patient twenty years ago, but the woman in question has turned out to be a very unreliable witness. She has accused many men over the years, some of whom weren’t even alive at the time of the alleged incidents. There were lots of other names thrown into the hat. People often think they’re helping, when they are actually obstructing the investigation.’
‘This is all useless information,’ I said.
‘Yes, well, I just wanted to keep you updated. Whoever it is may have posted the box in New Zealand but could have just been visiting. It wasn’t much to go on.’
‘Are you going to continue searching? Are they? In New Zealand?’
‘Well, like I say, we have explored every avenue.’
I was dissatisfied with this outcome. It turns out that no news was not good news, like they say. No news was no news.
‘I don’t know who sent you that bear, Sally, but it’s possible that it’s a different bear, some idiot trying to mess with your head. There are all kinds of weirdos out there. It was reported in the newspapers at the time of your mother’s abduction that she had a teddy bear with her.’
‘It was my bear.’ I was angry.
‘If you say so.’
‘I don’t tell lies.’
I knew it was. I was absolutely sure, but I tried my breathing exercises and seeing it from Howard’s point of view. I could understand her reticence, but I’d been waiting for over a year now and she had nothing.
Again, she asked me if there was anything I remembered from the period of my captivity. By this time, I knew why I remembered nothing at all. My dad’s files had included lists of all the medication I had been given, both in the psychiatric unit with my mother and in the year or two after my adoption. Angela said that the dosages were highly irregular, that I must have been in a near-zombified state for the first year at least until I was eventually weaned off the drugs. I don’t remember being given tablets. Perhaps they had been mixed in with my food. How dare Dad do that to me.
The next time I got to see Tina, I was seething. As usual, she helped me to rationalize my feelings. I wasn’t wrong to be angry. It was a perfectly normal response. But she made me look at things from Dad’s point of view. If I had come across a child who had lived through a horrific situation, would I not try to take those memories from her? I heard Tina out, but I worried that maybe those buried feelings could emerge one day, that I wouldn’t be able to control them. Most days, I could put it all to the back of my mind, but that churning anger was becoming more and more fiery, particularly since Detective Inspector Howard’s visit. Tina wondered if I felt threatened by the news, if I was worried that somehow Conor Geary would come back for me, but that wasn’t what scared me. It was wondering what he might have done afterwards. Do paedophiles stop being paedophiles if they’re not caught? I was not afraid of him, but I hated that he knew where I was. ‘S’ was out there somewhere.
‘Sending Toby was his way of letting me know that he still thought of me, that he was still in control.’
I hated him. I told Tina that I would like to kill him. He had committed a horrific crime and got away with it. What was to stop him doing it again and turning up in Ireland?
‘After the visit from DI Howard, I went outside the back door and smashed a vase in the yard. I’ve never done anything like that before. My anger scared me.’
Tina told me to focus on my breathing exercises and asked me if I was continuing my yoga practice at home.
I told her I’d decided to sell the house. It was even more urgent now, because I didn’t feel safe there alone. She asked if a sophisticated alarm system would make me feel safe. I knew that it was impossible to hide in a small village, but I was also too scared to move to a bigger unknown place; even Roscommon town was too big and noisy for me. ‘He will be able to find me, if he comes back here.’
‘I don’t think he has much interest in adult women, Sally. He’s eighty-four now? He must be frail. I doubt that you would be in physical danger from him. And we still don’t know for sure that he sent you the bear, though it seems likely. Is there anything else that worries you about him?’