Disappeared Read Online Free PDF

tidying the living room, folding away clothes, removing unwashed cups and plates, piling newspapers and CDs into a rack.
    He felt a twinge of jealousy that she had devoted time to rearranging the objects of the room rather than waiting for him or continuing their phone conversation. Rather than say a proper good-bye, she had left him this tidy room filled with her perfume and an eerie silence. The memory of her voice rasped against the edges of his hangover. Perhaps he ought to have ignored the call from the police station, stayed among the clutter, and waited for her to appear.
    Daly had phoned Anna many times during the first months of their separation, when she was living with her parents in Glasgow. He had been tormented by the thought she was seeing another man. “There’s no one else to blame for this but ourselves,” she kept telling him. But he had struggled to believe her, convinced by his detective’s logic that an unknown culprit had destroyed their romance. In many ways, it had been an irrational response, based on self-delusion and paranoia.
    During the first months, he kept expecting the arrival of divorce papers, but none came. He put their house in Glasgow up for rent and applied for a transfer to Northern Ireland. He had hoped for a post in Belfast, but to his surprise was sent to Armagh, where he had grown up. At the time, it had made sense to move into his father’s abandoned cottage.
    In another phone conversation, he asked her what she wanted from him. She replied he had to prove that he had a world outside his detective’s life. Living in Glasgow, amid the churn of promotion and paperwork, he came to the grim realization that the request was impossible to grant. She might as well have asked him to prove the existence of a fourth dimension. Now he suspected he might be capable of fracturing time itself, without hesitation, to preserve what he had found with her.
    He went into the kitchen and opened something from a tin. He was too tired to read the label, but it smelled like something Anna would have fed her cat. After a few mouthfuls he got up, leaving a fork sticking in the tin, and dragged himself off to bed.

4
    T he nameless voice at the other end of the phone spoke briefly before replacing the receiver. Father Aidan Fee listened to the blunt facts stripped of any semblance of tragedy and slowly put down the phone. It was five a.m. and he was sitting in his cold study. He had served in a border parish as a curate during the Troubles, and knew what the messenger was referring to. He understood the authority in the caller’s voice, even though the message was inconclusive, and might even have been an elaborate prank. It was very sad and, more than sad, disturbing. He walked over to his desk and wrote down the message. It was his priestly duty to follow the instructions, though it was a responsibility they had never prepared him for in the seminary.
    In a tree on Coney Island the body has been left for you.
    It sounded like a clue in a gruesome game of treasure hunt, he thought. By the time he had dressed, washed, and collected his prayer book and oils, it was dawn. He opened the front door and walked outside. The morning smelled of damp moss. A few specks of rain fell from the low clouds that dragged across the sky. Clouds move with such a silent, enviable sense of purpose, he thought.
    A cataract had left the priest almost blind in one eye. It meant he was no longer fit to drive and had to rely instead on one of his parishioners for lifts. On this occasion, however, he decided to spare his regular driver the ordeal. Praying to Saint Christopher, he drove his ten-year-old Renault out onto country roads crusted with potholes, toward the ring of town lands known as the Munchies.
    In all, he had administered last rites to six murdered men. The phone calls had directed him to where their bodies lay in deep ditches or lonely forests, binder twine tied around their hands and fertilizer bags placed over