'He didn't see anything, but there's a fellow here who did.'
The fellow was sitting at the bar with a pint of Beamish in front of him and a whiskey chaser. He was small and red in the face, and the top of his head was curiously flat, as if you could have balanced a cup and saucer on it. He wore the jacket that had once belonged to a bronze-colored suit and the trousers that had once belonged to a dull blue suit.
'What's your name?' Katie asked him.
'Ricky Looney. Like my father before me. He was Ricky Looney, too.'
The fire was crackling in the hearth and all of the drinkers in The Angler's Rest were staring at Katie in shameless, unwavering curiosity. 'Well, Ricky, my name's Katie Maguire.' She produced the photograph of Fiona Kelly and held it up in front of his face. 'Detective Garda O'Sullivan tells me that you saw this girl.'
'I did so.'
'Can you remember what day that was?'
'Not exactly, but it was the day that Cork lost the junior hurling to Killarney.'
'Thursday,' put in Patrick.
'That's right. You're right. That would be the day before Friday.'
'Were you sitting in here when you saw her?' asked Katie.
'I was, yeah.'
'So where was she?'
'She was across the road there, like. There was this blue pickup, like, and she climbed out of it and crossed the road there, like. And I was watching her thumbing for a lift, you know.'
'And did she get a lift?'
'Oh, yes. Only a minute or two, and this big black car pulls up and in she gets, and that's it, like, she's gone.'
'Do you know what make of car it was?'
'Mercedes, I'd say. With one headlight only.'
'You didn't see the registration plate?'
He shook his head. 'It was all covered up with mud at the back. Like he'd been driving it through a field.'
She put out a call for every black or dark-colored Mercedes to be pulled over and the drivers asked to account for their movements on Thursday last week.
Dermot O'Driscoll rang her back and he wasn't at all happy. 'We have a lorry strike blocking the Jack Lynch Tunnel tomorrow. If you stop every dark-colored Mercedes as well, it's going to be chaos.'
'I'm on my way to Blarney, sir. I'll talk to you later.'
'Katie-I want you back by five. I've arranged another news conference.'
'I'm sure you can handle that, sir. You know just as much as I do.'
'Katie-'
'Sorry, sir. You're breaking up.'
Katie and Patrick O'Sullivan arrived in the village of Blarney and parked outside the castle. Blarney was a tourist trap, a small village with a supermarket, two big pubs that catered to thousands of foreign visitors in the summer, and souvenir shops selling Guinness T-shirts, leprechaun key rings, and Waterford crystal goblets at ?100 each. This afternoon, however, Blarney was almost deserted, with only one coach in the car park.
Katie went to the castle ticket office and produced the photograph of Fiona Kelly. The woman in the pay booth said, 'No, love, I'm sorry?and even if she was here, I wouldn't recognize her. They're all just faces, you know, one face after another.'
They walked through the grounds toward the castle itself. A giggling party of Japanese tourists were having their photographs taken on one of the wooden bridges, with the river beneath them sparkling with hundreds of pennies, where visitors had thrown them for luck.
After they had passed the Japanese, however, the lawns and the pathways were peaceful and chilly, with only the cawing of crows and the slowly sinking sunlight. They climbed the steps that led to the foot of the dark fifteenth-century tower, but when they reached the entrance, Katie said, 'That's it, Patrick. You can go up to the top on your own. You won't catch me climbing four hundred steps, even in the name of duty.'
She stayed by the souvenir shop until Patrick reappeared, sweaty and out of breath, in spite of the chill. 'You took your time,' she chided him.
'I talked to the photographers,' he panted. 'They don't recall any girl like that kissing the Blarney Stone, not in the past two or three weeks. But they're going to give me copies of every picture they've taken since Wednesday last. Like they said themselves, you can't imagine an American girl coming here on her own and not having her picture taken, so that she could send it to her parents back home.'
'All right, Patrick. Good work. Make sure they send you those pictures ASAP. But my feeling is that she never got here.'
'The dark Mercedes?'
'More than likely. It's only six kilometers from The Angler's Rest to the middle of Blarney-don't tell me that
