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"Crowe's natural habitat seems to be hot water"

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Crowe slewed his car down the estuary road. The recent downpour had turned it into an unforgiving quagmire. Each tap of the brake might tip him into the sea. He kept the driver's side window down keeping one eye on the uneven edge of the bank. It was high tide and the waves lapped the verge. The estuary looked deep and dangerous with an undercurrent thrumming below the surface.

The response to Crowe’s Data Subject Request had been in his work inbox for weeks. A sedentary couple of days at the kitchen table trawling the footage of Enda Cleary’s route, viewing, reviewing and stopping frame-by-frame had yielded a result. There was no sound and the image quality was grainy, but the jacket was recognisable. It was Hanafin. He had alighted at the stop near the mobile home. The one that had exploded. Crowe had sent his screengrab of Hanafin on to Nesbitt. He had sent a reminder email request to Busàras’ Lost and Found Department. It was a long shot.

Hope springs eternal, he thought. 

There was no sign of Hanafin’s demise apart from a fragment of fluttering Garda tape. Crowe unravelled it from the gorse it was caught on and pocketed it. Looking out to sea, a dark smear of cloud hung around Inishcarrig like a harbinger. The air smelled of rain and sea spray, magnifying the distant lighthouse several miles out. A shore breeze tugged at his clothes. 

It was cold. Crowe pulled on a thick woollen hat, work gloves and his wellingtons. He unpacked the heavy torch he had purchased at the local hardware store. Switching it on, the torch pierced the low afternoon light with an incisive burst of pure white. His phone was still in HQ, and he found it slightly liberating. 

Gabriel was right, no-one should be that contactable.

Crowe shrugged on his thick reflective Garda coat and trudged to the yew tree where Hanafin had been found. A naked raw oval stood out on the trunk where forensics had cut the branch off with its grisly load. He pushed past it into the dense copse of hazel trees, panning the torch across the patina of knotted roots and wild flowers.

A verdant wave of rotting leaves caused him to gag. It smelled like centuries of detritus and bark had lain undiscovered, carpeting the earth below it in tightly-packed strata. It also created a jarring flashback to the greenhouse, causing him to fight the rising bile it induced. Waiting for the wave to pass, he took a short breath in through his teeth and focussed. 

He didn’t believe for one minute the media-savvy Hanafin hadn’t had his phone with him. Or some other device. But then Crowe also believed Hanafin must have had a walking stick. This hadn’t shown up and without the rope, Crowe had absolutely nothing to build his suspicions on. The stick would be bigger than a phone and possibly harder to dispose of by Hanafin’s assailant or assailants. Dodging prickling branches that whipped into his face, Crowe stepped gingerly avoiding potential trips. He was grateful for the boot's protection, though his knees and thighs were jabbed and snagged without mercy. He was making slow headway. If anything, the closely knit hazel trees seemed to get thicker, and less forgiving. They made a roof of blackness that even the torches' powerful beam struggled to illuminate. 

Then Crowe paused. He opened his mouth slightly to improve his hearing that had returned to some level of normal. A crack of wood. A snap. Something heavy, and definitely not four-legged. Crowe held his breath for a beat longer. He panned the beam around, bringing the gnarled bark of the trees into sharp focus. For a split second the light found an outline, the shape of a person. A shape now rushing away in the opposite direction to the beam.  

But it was so brief, he couldn’t rule out just seeing things. He exhaled. 

Leaning forward he swept the torchlight left to right, starting at the toe of his boots and panning out with every sweep. After three or so minutes of this he was about to call it quits when the beam reflected off something shiny. 

Something metallic.