Nora had gone to bed around half past ten, the rest of the family a little after eleven—Rosie and her da had to be up for work in the morning. The two girls shared one back bedroom, their parents had the other; no pullout sofas for the Dalys, thanks very much. Nora remembered the rustle of Rosie changing into her pajamas and the whisper of “Night” as she slid into bed, and then nothing. She hadn’t heard Rosie get out of bed again, hadn’t heard her get dressed, hadn’t heard her slip out of the room or out of the flat. “I slept like the dead, back then,” she said, defensively, like she had taken a lot of flak about this along the way. “I was a teenager, you know what they’re like . . .” In the morning, when Mrs. Daly went to wake the girls, Rosie was gone.

At first they didn’t worry, any more than my family were worrying across the road—I got the sense Mr. Daly had been a bit snotty about inconsiderate modern youth, but that was all. It was Dublin in the eighties, it was safe as houses; they thought she had headed out early to do something, maybe meet the girls for some mysterious girl reason. Then, around the time Rosie was missing breakfast, the Shaughnessy boys and Barry Hearne had shown up with the note.

It was unclear what the three of them had been doing in Number 16 bright and early on a cold Monday morning, but I would have bet on either hash or porn—there were a couple of precious magazines doing the rounds, smuggled in by someone’s cousin who had been over to England the year before. Either way, that was when all hell had broken loose. The Dalys’ account was a little less vivid than Kevin’s—his eyes slid sideways to catch mine, once or twice, while they were giving us their version—but the general outline was the same.

I nodded at the case. “Where was that kept?”

“The girls’ room,” Mrs. Daly said, into her knuckles. “Rosie had it to hold her spare clothes and her old toys and all—we didn’t have the fitted wardrobes then, sure, no one did—”

“Think back. Do any of you remember the last time you saw it?”

No one did. Nora said, “It could have been months before. She kept it under her bed; I’d only see it when she brought it out to get something.”

“What about the things inside it, can you remember when you last saw Rosie using any of that stuff? Playing those tapes, wearing any of those clothes?”