Disappeared Read Online Free

least the weather had been dry, he thought. He hoped the rivers would hold this winter. Only six months earlier, a rainstorm had flooded the lough shore countryside and stranded him at his father’s wake. The Blackwater River had burst its banks and swamped the lane to the cottage. The parish church, which lay half a mile away, was cut off completely, rising out of the water on a little island of green.
    It was a long wake, even by Irish standards. Through the tiny windows of an upstairs bedroom, the mourners watched the low sky soak up the gloom. When it stopped raining, a strange quietness fell across everything. It wasn’t until the following morning when the sun burst through the clouds that the waters receded.
    The relief felt by the trapped mourners was palpable as the hearse took off down a lane lined with glinting green holly. Daly accompanied his relatives and former neighbors in the snaking cortege. The wet road in front of the hearse shone like the brightest place on earth. Someone cracked a joke about his father’s old car, which had floated out of the yard and ended up in a ruined haystack. Daly remembered how his dad used to rev the guts out of its engine before setting off every morning to Mass.
    He forced his feet into a pair of Wellington boots and climbed into his car. At four a.m., the winter darkness beyond the windscreen was all-embracing, a dead-end in the night. He drove along the lough shore until he reached the Bannfoot and then turned left for the motorway. He glanced in his rearview mirror. Not a car in sight. At the roundabout, he turned the heating down and tried to find a weather report on the radio. A husky-voiced DJ was speaking in Irish and playing tracks of Motown music from the 1960s. Fugitive memories of dancing at parish discos scurried along the fringes of his consciousness.
    He rolled the window down a fraction to clear his head, and headed west. The old man must have wandered off and fallen into a ditch, he thought. It was probably a journey he had made countless times in the past—an easy scramble over the familiar folds of his fields during daylight, and in full control of his faculties.
    He passed a carload of youths. A boy leaned out of the passenger window and made obscene signals at the detective. He was obviously drunk. Daly overtook the car and tried to focus on the task at hand. It would be a small search party, unless they were able to call upon neighbors. He had organized many search parties during his twenty-year career and knew it was common for the missing person’s body to be pulled out of a river or lake several days into the search. He hoped they weren’t too late, or that at least the protective cloak of senility had prevented the old man from experiencing too much terror.
    Daly was surprised by the farmhouse’s remote location. If his relatives had lived there, he would have moved them at the first sign of illness into a neighboring village. His headlights lit up a grass-covered lane that didn’t look as though it had been used too often. A foot-and-mouth sign saying essential visitors only flashed its warning at them. He drove on; the last outbreak had happened more than three years previously.

3
    D aly swept his car into a yard at the back of the farmhouse. An attempt had been made to cordon off the small fields, but the restless winds and the trampling of hungry animals had opened up gaps in the fencing. In places, the ground had turned into a muddy quagmire.
    It wasn’t difficult to read the signs of infirmity in the untidiness of the yard filled with rusting machinery, the embrace of brambles and weeds throughout the garden, and the fields half lost to thickets of blackthorn. Paint was peeling from the walls and a few tiles had fallen from the roof. It was the same loss of interest and descent into chaos that marked his father’s cottage. The lough-shore countryside was full of decomposing houses like these, tucked away amid the gloom of thorn and elder