The Searcher(36)

“He get turned down for a job? Mention a girl he met? Stay out later’n usual? We’re looking for anything out of his routine.”

The kid thinks. “He was a bit off that week, maybe. Narky, like. The day he went, he was grand, but. Mam said, ‘You’re very cheerful,’ and he said, ‘No point sitting around sulking, sure, I haven’t got time for that.’ That’s all.”

“Huh,” Cal says. An escape plan would cheer a guy up, all right. “So let’s talk about the twenty-first. Start at the beginning. You got up.”

“Didn’t see Bren then. He was in bed. I went to school. Got home and he was watching the telly. I went in to him. After a while he went out.”

“What time?”

“Five, maybe. ’Cause when Mam called us for tea he said nah, he was going out, and then he went.”

“What kind of ride he have? Car, motorbike, bike?”

“Nothing. Mam’s got a car, but he didn’t take it. He doesn’t have a motorbike. He was just walking.”

“He tell you where he was going?”

“Nah. I thought he was meeting the lads. He was checking his watch like he had to be somewhere.”

Or he could have had a bus to catch. The buses to Dublin and Sligo both pass on the main road, just a couple of miles away, and while they don’t officially stop, Noreen has assured Cal that most of the drivers are good-natured about being waved down. Cal writes down Bus timetables 4–8 p.m. Tues.

“You guys talk about anything, while you watched TV?”

“My birthday. Bren said he’d get me a decent bike; I’ve only his old one and it’s pure shite, the chain keeps jamming. And just the program on the telly. One of them singing shows, don’t remember what one.”

“How’d he seem? Good mood? Bad mood?”

“Fidgety, like. He was talking the whole time, slagging off the people singing. Sitting on different bits of the sofa. Poking me if I didn’t answer him.”

“That normal for him?”

Trey twitches one shoulder. “Sorta. He’s always up and down like a fiddler’s elbow, my mam usedta say. Only not like that.”

“How was that day different?”

The kid pulls at a frayed place in the knee of his jeans, trawling through his mind for the right words. Cal swallows the urge to tell him to knock it off.

“Bren,” Trey says in the end, “he’s a messer, mostly. He’d always be making me laugh. Making everyone laugh, but . . . we had jokes, like. Just us. He liked making me laugh.”

Cal gets a little bit of a glimpse of what Brendan leaving meant to Trey. The kid doesn’t look like he’s laughed since.

“But that day he wasn’t looking for laughs,” he says.

“Yeah. Not even once. He was the same kind of fidgety like during the exams.” Trey shoots Cal a sudden sharp frown. “That doesn’t mean he was planning on—”

“Focus,” Cal says. “How was he dressed? Like he was heading into town? What?”

Trey thinks. “Just normal. Jeans and a hoodie. Not like for going out in town, like not a good shirt or nothing.”

“He take a coat?”

“Bomber jacket, just. It wasn’t raining.”

“He say anything about when he was aiming to get back? ‘Keep me some dinner,’ ‘Don’t wait up,’ anything like that?”

“Dunno.” Trey’s face is tightening again. “Can’t remember. I tried.”

Cal says, “And he didn’t come back.”

“Yeah.” The kid’s shoulders have hunched up inside his parka, like he’s cold. “Not that night, or when I got back from school next day.”

“He ever do that before?”

“Yeah. Stayed with one of his mates.”

“So that’s what you figured he was doing.”

“At first. Yeah.” Trey looks pinched and curled in on himself, the look street kids get, flooded with more of life than they can absorb. “I wasn’t even worried.”

“When’d you get worried?”

“Day after that. Just starting to. My mam rang him, only his phone rang out. Day after, she rang round asking people was he there. Only no one’d seen him. Not even the night he went out. They said, anyway.”

“She didn’t call the police?”

“I said to.” The flash of pure fury in Trey’s eyes takes Cal by surprise. “She said he just went off, same as my da. Cops won’t do anything about that.”

“OK,” Cal says. He writes a 1 next to Sheila Reddy’s name, and circles it.

“I did go looking for him,” Trey says abruptly. “All along the roads, and up the mountain. For days, I went. In case he caught his foot in a hole and broke his leg, or something.”

For a moment Cal sees it, the kid bent into the wind, tramping between great slopes of heather and moor grass, boulders patched with moss and lichen. He says, “Any reason why he’d be up the mountain?”

“He usedta go there sometimes. Just to be on his own.”

Those aren’t the Rockies out there, but Cal knows they’re plenty big enough and bad enough to take a man if he makes a mistake with them. He says, “You go through his stuff?”