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Back Before You Were Gone
Chapters (58)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-one
  24. Twenty-two
  25. Twenty-three
  26. Twenty-four
  27. Twenty-five
  28. Twenty-six
  29. Twenty-seven
  30. Twenty-eight
  31. Twenty-nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-one
  34. Thirty-two
  35. Thirty-three
  36. Thirty-four
  37. Thirty-five
  38. Thirty-six
  39. Thirty-seven
  40. Thirty-eight
  41. Thirty-nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-one
  44. Forty-two
  45. Forty-three
  46. Forty-four
  47. Forty-five
  48. Forty-six
  49. Forty-seven
  50. Forty-eight
  51. Forty-nine
  52. Fifty
  53. Fifty-one
  54. Acknowledgements
  55. An Eastbourne Murder Mystery
  56. Canelo Crime
  57. About the Author
  58. Also by Sheila Bugler

Zooming in on the photos, Dee could see that Emer’s mother was a striking woman. She remembered Emer saying she took after her mother’s side of the family, but looking at this photo Dee couldn’t see the resemblance. Instead, she was struck by how much Ursula O’Brien resembled the woman Emer thought could be Kitty. No wonder poor Emer thought that, Dee reflected, looking at the photo of Ursula O’Brien, taken with her husband at some society event in Dublin.

When she’d finished reading about Robert and Ursula, Dee looked at what Emer had written about Lucy Ryan’s family. According to Emer, Lucy’s parents never recovered from what happened to them. The family had owned a hotel in Ballincarraig, but they’d sold this and moved to a different town in the years following Lucy’s disappearance. During the initial Guards investigation, Lucy’s father had been repeatedly questioned about his daughter. Emer said the family had no choice, in the end, but to leave town.

Niall had nothing to do with what happened to Lucy, Emer had written. But there were so many rumours, so much gossip, the family couldn’t cope. They sold the hotel and moved away. It was so sad.

Dee knew that parents were often the main suspects in cases like this. If Lucy’s parents really didn’t have anything to do with their daughter’s disappearance, she imagined the endless suspicion and scrutiny would be unbearable. Reading up on the case now, she could see how the press had become more balanced over time. She couldn’t find anything in the later stories that implied the parents were involved in their daughter’s disappearance. Unlike the earlier stories, printed in the weeks following Lucy’s disappearance, where almost every article Dee read implied Niall Ryan had killed his daughter and disposed of her body.

A journalist called Shay Flaherty had written extensively about Lucy’s disappearance. Unlike everyone else, Flaherty had professed Niall Ryan’s innocence from the start. From what Dee had found online, Shay Flaherty was also the only journalist who’d put forward a theory that there might be a link between Lucy’s disappearance and what happened to Kitty.

Back in 1997, when Lucy Ryan disappeared, Shay Flaherty was a journalist on a local newspaper called the Connacht Tribune. But when Dee looked him up on the internet, she saw he was now working for one of the country’s national newspapers, the Irish Times. His contact details were on the paper’s website. Dee sent him an email, introducing herself and asking if he might be willing to answer some questions she had about Lucy Ryan and Kitty Doran.