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its own crew of angels, but after what she had witnessed in her time in the Garda she knew for certain that there were no angels, and that the clouds were nothing but ghost ships sailing to nowhere.
    Kyna came and stood close beside her. She lifted her hand as if to touch her shoulder, but then lowered it again. At work they were detective superintendent and detective sergeant, not friends.
    ‘From what Niamh told me, this wasn’t the first time that Ruarí and these five other lads had got together for the same purpose,’ she said. ‘While they were raping her, she kind of blanked herself out, like, but she caught one or two snatches of conversation between them and it sounded like they were making comparisons with other girls they’d assaulted. Like, “At least these two have decent diddies, unlike that last one.”’
    Katie said, ‘Bring that Ruarí in here for questioning. Arrest him if he refuses. And make sure the other girl knows that she has nothing to fear from him at all – what’s her name, Aileen. Tell her that he’ll only have to scowl at her and we’ll charge him with threatening behaviour.’
    ‘It’ll be my pleasure,’ Kyna told her.
    Katie turned around. ‘Even if it turns out that these five lads who joined him for that gang-rape are the same lads who have disappeared, that still doesn’t explain where they’ve gone.’
    ‘I can tell you where they haven’t gone,’ said Kyna. ‘And that’s to Heaven.’
    *
    A little over an hour later, Mary Buckley and Shelagh O’Reilly came into the station to see her. Katie invited them to sit down on the couches by her office window and asked Moirin to fetch them two cups of tea.
    ‘Is there any news at all?’ asked Mary. ‘I can’t believe that nobody’s seen them for nearly three days now. Like, you know, big strapping lads like that, they don’t just vanish into thin air.’
    Shelagh looked desperately stressed, clutching her handbag as tightly as if she were riding pillion on the back of a motorcycle. ‘We was thinking of calling in the missing persons search people. You know, those fellers who go up and down the river in them little boats, looking for people what might have drownded.’
    ‘We didn’t know if you’d object to us doing it, like,’ said Mary. ‘We know that you’re doing everything you can to find them and we don’t want you think that we don’t appreciate it.’
    ‘I’ve no objection at all,’ said Katie. ‘Maybe you’re calling them a little sooner than most people do, and we’ve no evidence at all that your sons might have drowned, but if it reassures you to have them looking – then, by all means. They do wonderful work and we always keep in very close touch with them.’
    By the ‘missing persons search people’, Shelagh meant the volunteer group Cork City Missing Persons Search and Recovery (CCMPSAR) – twelve men who provided a compassionate service to the families of people who had gone missing. When they were first contacted by worried relatives they would put out appeals on social media before they initiated a search, but in this case Katie had already arranged for that to be done. Now the CCMPSAR would launch their two inflatable boats and cruise up and down the river Lee with a sonar scanner, looking for unusual shapes under the water. In a single year they would expect to find at least five bodies, often more. The River Lee was the last resort for the drunk, the depressed, and the desperate.
    ‘I’ll have a word with Superintendent Pearse, who’s in charge of the uniformed officers,’ said Katie. ‘He’ll have one of his sergeants get in contact with the missing persons unit. We don’t want them searching unnecessarily, because they’re all volunteers and all their expenses come out of donations, or out of their own pockets.’
    ‘I know that,’ said Shelagh. ‘They found my uncle Tommy when he went missing three years ago. He had the panchromatic cancer and he couldn’t stand the