Finglas, Dublin

 

He stood at the entrance to the Garda station and took a deep breath. Four steps upwards would change everything. He didn’t have to go through with this but there was no point in delaying. The truth would come out eventually. The November chill brought neither comfort nor incentive for him to stay outside, and the continuous rain of the past week was the final spur that forced him to take his first step.

An automatic sliding door served its function and blasted a wave of warm air in his face as he entered the hallway. A desk faced him, housing a Garda, remonstrating with a youth in a tracksuit.

“I don’t care if your mother and sister and great Aunty Nora are pregnant as well. I’m not signing it without full identification!” The Guard noticed the newcomer at the door.

“Look man...I have to get stuff for the baby yeh? I don’ want this hassle, know wha’r I mean? I need me dole and I need...” The youth flailed an arm back into the direction of a girl who was sitting on a chair to the right of the doorway.

David Corcoran hadn’t moved since entering the station. He glanced at the girl who was heavily pregnant. She sat slumped in the chair with her legs spread. Her grey tracksuit bottoms sagging precariously below her navel. She looked at Corcoran with a scowling lip which said, ‘what are you looking at?’ He looked away, eager not to get embroiled in any altercation, and walked to the left-hand side of the doorway and sat down on an orange plastic chair. There were leaflets on a table in front of him and he took one on family law, in order to look disinterested.

The youth’s argument, after what David presumed had started well before he had entered, finished abruptly with a venomous snarl. Grabbing the form, he turned towards the exit.

“Fucking joke is all it is.” He tried to mask his agitation with long lazy strides. Just as the door slid back, he mouthed, “’mon” in the direction of the girl, without looking at her and carried on out to the street. The girl wangled her way into an upright position like a caterpillar wriggling from its cocoon and grimacing, she blew out a puff of air. She fixed her tracksuit, steadied herself and began to follow her partner. As she waited for the door to slide back, she looked at Corcoran.

“Prick,” she said and walked out.

An elderly woman who had been sitting next to her ‘tut tutted’ and shook her head in David’s direction before making her way to the desk.

There was nobody else in the waiting area. David tapped his foot, as if in the dentist’s waiting room. For once he wished he was, and unlike the elderly lady, this was not the simple task of a passport renewal form. He could hear muffled voices and laughter, presumably from the garda’s colleagues. The smell from a microwaved dinner, cooked a minute too long, permeated into the reception area.

“You’re welcome, madam,” the Guard reciprocated, smiling to the elderly lady, pleased that this last customer was a ray of light as opposed to her predecessor. As she packed her correspondence into her handbag, the Guard nodded in David’s direction as he patiently waited for her to vacate the area.

“Bye-bye now.”

“Good bye Madam, and say a prayer for me in Lourdes!” The Guard smiled as she ambled to the doorway. The sliding door whooshed back again, and a blast of wind gushed through as she fixed her headscarf.

“Oh, it’s very wild out now,” she said, turning to the Guard.

David fidgeted in his seat, ‘Just fucking go will you’, he muttered to himself, willing the woman to leave.

“Another few days of it too I believe,” the Guard replied, both hands now out wide on the desk, in command of his position. He was in his fifties, heavy-set with grey wavy hair and sideburns. ‘Trapped in the seventies’ David thought as he waited to be signalled forward.

“Now sir.” The Guard motioned his hand and head in synchronicity, as if calling traffic on at the junction outside.

David jumped, despite his eyes never having left the desk. He placed the leaflet neatly back on the pile, stood up, and made his way across the hallway.

The strobe lighting bore down heavily on him and he winced as he approached the Guard. The Guard used these two or three seconds to gauge the demeanour of his next client.

David stood at the desk, attempted to place his hands on top, before quickly retracting them.

“Em, my name is David Corcoran. I live in Glasnevin...just down there by the Botanical Gardens. Em...I need to speak to someone about a delicate…situation...Would that be yourself?”

The Guard looked at him curiously and re-positioned himself, upright, not in a lounging fashion like these new young fellas just out of the trainee college in Templemore.

“Well, Mr. Corcoran, do you want to give me some indication as to what this is about? And I can see if I can deal with it here before referring you to someone else...if needs be of course.” He opened his palms in David’s direction. The body language training paying off as he offered the olive branch of trust.

Corcoran looked over his shoulder as if fifty people had secretly entered the station behind him and were hell bent on hearing what he had to say.

The door slid open again and David looked back nervously. There was no one there. A black cat scurried by, paused looked inside and carried on its way.

David turned back to face the Guard. There was a lingering pause, and the Guard, also in silence, nodded, for David to proceed.

“It’s eh..my wife, Roisin..Roisin Corcoran...em, she’s gone missing.”

The Guard placed his hands back into the formal position on the desk and looked on inquisitively.

Throwing his head to one side and his eyes downwards, he asked, “Now when you say missing sir, what do you mean exactly?”

“Well, I came home from work and she would…my wife would…normally be there...I mean, she should have been there and she wasn’t. I waited an hour or so, thinking she had skipped out to the supermarket but there was nothing...she didn’t come back. I rang her mobile and texted her but just got her voicemail and no reply. One hour led to two and then nothing else. I became frantic as the evening got darker and I knew something must be wrong.”

There was a momentary silence. The laughter from the back had stopped. The whirring of the air conditioning was the only sound.

“I see. So, there was no row or anything this morning?

“No... Nothing like that.”

“No family emergency...her mother may have taken ill?”

“No.”

The Guard reached for his log-book and flicked it open to find the next available page. He smiled gently as he sifted back and forth with a dampened fingertip.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Corcoran...these things usually sort themselves out. Modern living. We all need a bit of space from the mortgage and the broken washing machine.” He chuckled as he looked at the serious face before him.

Peering down at the book again and picking up his pen, he asked. “Now then, what date are we saying your wife went missing?”

“The twenty-ninth.”

The Guard pursed his lips into an ‘O’ shape and looked up at David.

“I don’t think so... you must have the date wrong.” He turned to a calendar hanging on the wall behind him and tapped it with his biro. “Sure, today is the twenty-ninth. There we are, Tuesday, November twenty-ninth.”

David shuffled nervously on his feet.

“No, it was the twenty-ninth...of October. Last month.”