The city breathes through cracks in the pavement.
Power lines hum like old men arguing. A man is
found in a derelict tenement, throat slit, a
silver ring clutched in his fist. The garda
assigned to the case has seen too many bodies in
too many alleys. She knows the silence of a
place where nothing grows but resentment.
The dead man was a returned emigrant. His flat
is lined with photos of a girl who vanished in
’89. The garda finds her name scrawled in ink on
the back of a newspaper clipping — Eileen
O’Connor. The same name appears on a list of
missing persons from the 1980s, a time when the
church held more power than the government.
She visits the local pub, where the regulars
speak in hushed tones about the man’s last days.
He was seen arguing with a woman in the street,
a woman with a scar across her cheek. The garda
tracks her to a flat above a bakery. The woman
denies knowing him. She says he was chasing
ghosts.
The garda digs into the man’s past. He had a
brother who died in the Troubles, a brother
whose death was never properly investigated. The
garda finds a letter hidden beneath floorboards,
written in a shaky hand: “I didn’t kill him. I
only wanted her to remember.”
She follows the trail to a graveyard on the edge
of the city. The man’s brother is buried under a
headstone that reads “Beloved Son”, but the date
is wrong. The garda checks the records. The
brother died in 1987, but the grave was dug in
1992. Someone moved the body.
She returns to the pub and asks about the woman
with the scar. The barman mutters something
about a love triangle — the man, the woman, and
a priest who once served in the same parish. The
garda presses for details. The barman says the
priest left after the woman’s sister disappeared.
The garda finds the priest in a small chapel on
the outskirts. He admits to seeing the man and
the woman together, but he says the woman was
not the lover. She was the sister. The man had
been trying to find her.
The garda returns to the tenement. She finds a
journal hidden in the wall. The entries are
dated 1989. The last one reads: “They took her.
I couldn’t stop them. I’ll never forgive myself.
”
She pieces it together. The woman with the scar
is the sister. The priest is the one who failed
to protect her. The man was trying to atone. The
garda stands in the empty room, the weight of
the city pressing down. She leaves the journal
behind. Some stories are too heavy to carry.
The city still breathes through cracks in the
pavement. Power lines hum like old men arguing.
The garda walks away, the ring still clutched in
her pocket.
