‘No, absolutely not. The fella was a quiet man. Mary Ellen liked the party animals. And here’s something else her mother and sister won’t have told you. We checked the fella’s house and everything. Nobody believed he’d done anything, but we had to be seen to be acting. A few days later I went up and searched the place. Absolutely nothing – no sign there’d ever been a woman in the house. He couldn’t get over the smear, though. He moved away a few months later.’

‘And do you know where he went?’

Doyle shook his head. ‘He said he had relatives in England. He’d moved here originally because he’d had some stressful job up in Dublin, at a bank I think – and he had a minor heart attack. It was a wake-up call for his health. He packed it in, bought a taxi licence and moved down here for the peace. When it all kicked off – well, it wasn’t exactly the calm life he was looking for.

‘So, you see, we had several witnesses who saw Mary Ellen get into the taxi. The man himself, with no previous record – yes, I checked – drove her to her home and went straight back to the village. Where the hell could she have gone missing? The only thing I can assume is what I thought at the time: Mary Ellen went home pissed, told the clan she was leaving and why, and was gone the next morning. Okay, we know something happened to her now, but she could have been anywhere when she was taken. I should have logged her with Missing Persons earlier. I accept that. But I checked the family’s story and there was no cause for concern. I only put her on the register the following month because they wouldn’t let up.’

Laura sat forward.

‘Sergeant, we believe the man who killed Mary Ellen had a hunting ground. His victims are all from the southern region. Cork, Kerry, Waterford. This is a tourist village. He may have been passing through when he grabbed her. Maybe that taxi driver wasn’t telling the truth or maybe Mary Ellen went back out again that night. Either way, there’s nothing to indicate – so far anyway – that she was seen after March 17th, 2008, so when the family say she went missing, we have to presume she went missing. The thing is, we believe this man kept his victims for a period before he killed them. Do you understand what that means? Mary Ellen was probably alive that whole month when you didn’t issue a national alert through the Missing Persons Bureau.’

Doyle baulked, his face a picture of panic.

‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I mean, how could I have? How could any of us?’ He looked accusingly from one to the other of the detectives, as though they had been complicit in his dereliction of duty.