Fanore

SETTING - The small staff room to the left of Reception and Concierge in the totally renovated and refurbished ‘McNamara’s Quality Lodge & Eatery’. Now boasting twenty-five rooms, all ‘en-suite’ and an ‘A la Carte Restaurant’. Open all year round, or so reads the sign but time will tell. There are three seats around a small coffee table and two filing cabinets fill the two opposing corners. The young receptionist outside periodically glances to her right to see through the small sliding glass panel that separates her from the strange events in the staff room. She is clearly nervous.

SOUND - A much younger girl is also nervous but sits silently behind the coffee table. Her darting green eyes betray a frightened animal level of alertness and she makes intermittent eye contact with the receptionist next door, which only adds to the general unease. There is an empty chair next to the teenaged girl but in the third seat, a dark young man is sipping coffee. He is highly agitated and his hand is unsteady. His cup rattles noisily on the saucer when he finally replaces it, like dejavu.

LIGHT - It’s getting on towards evening and although it’s high summer, the wind can be heard rising and falling outside the single external window into the car park. The overcast cloud layer is dropping quite quickly.

ACTION - Garda Burke and Garda Brennan have just arrived and are shown into the staff room by Aisling Ryan.

“I thought it might be better to keep them here because we have some guests in the lounge.” Says Aisling. The black blazer of her duty manager’s business uniform is unbuttoned and her white crisply starched blouse is not so crisp. A handful of it has been pulled out of the waist of her figure hugging skirt. Her shiny patent leather shoes are covered in splashes of drying mud. “I had to help her catch him.” She says by way of explanation, nodding towards the girl with a shock of long red hair that only accentuates her luminous green eyes. Eyes that look strangely familiar.

“Who is she?” Asks Burke, looking to Garda Brennan for any sign that he might know the young girl in her long shabby looking dress that’s seen better days. It’s that or she’s been roughed up though, she doesn’t seem to be that kind of agitated.

Brennan is just out of the academy and should know most of the younger women as well as their sisters, but he shakes his head and adopts the look of a much older man as he asks authoritatively. “How old are you Miss?”

“Shioga Kelly. Seventeen.” Offers Shioga quietly, answering both questions at once and the police officers visibly relax when she speaks with such a pronounced Clare brogue.

“And where are your shoes Miss Kelly?” Asks Burke raising his voice as the young man interrupts by almost shouting in an obviously American accent. “So you’ve aged a year since I met you less than an hour ago. Well, that’s a neat trick.”

Shioga ignores Ethan but opens her eyes wide at the police officer’s question. “Up there.” She says pointing north and about twenty degrees above the horizontal, while successfully sounding like someone only half her apparent age.

“Were you guys having some kind of a retro party up there?” Asks Burke gesturing at her general appearance and his long hair with sideburns, like they were recreating the hippy era or something.

“With drink or maybe some smoke or something stronger?” Brennan is backing up his colleague’s interrogation precisely as he was taught. His notebook already drawn, which prompts Burke to belatedly reach for his.

“A midsummer celebration.” Says Shioga shyly and laughing a little. “But I don’t know anything about drinking. I didn’t have time to get my shoes because I needed to catch Brian Og when he just took off to come down here.” She paused.

“The rest of them are still up there. Playacting I suppose.” She continues and then laughs her little girl laugh again.

“Playacting?” Asks Burke.

“That was no acting.” Ethan is bewildered and angry and seems to just then have realised that two uniformed police officers have been summoned to help him. “You guys might need your side arms because there has to be at least twenty of them up there?” He stands up, eager to show them where Mona was abducted from the Old Green Road. “They kidnapped Mona.” He adds earnestly, like they somehow missed that vital piece of information.

“What’s this about a stolen car?” Asks Burke looking a little bewildered himself.

“Can’t we look for the car after we get Mona?” Ethan is showing his anger now and Brennan steps up beside his colleague wondering how drugged the tourist could be with his talk of side arms.

“Answer him.” Says Brennan.

“It’s a sky blue Ford 16-E and all I know is that it has one ‘Z’ on the plate with maybe four or five digits but don’t worry. Mr Avis owns it and I’m still paying for it until we file a stolen auto report. So can we get back to the abduction?”

“Hello Seamus.” An older lady with a soft gentle voice speaks through the half opened door, stooping as she does so and indirectly asking permission to enter.

Aisling’s mother continues. “Aisling called me to say this man was asking to see me.” She looks sympathetically towards Ethan.

“Deirdre McNamara?” Ethan is astounded.

“Eh, not really. That will be Ryan actually. Do I know you?” Deirdre’s expression shows a surprise equal to Ethan’s, but without his total shock.

“You’re Saoirse’s Deirdre.” Then he remembered her map and dug a piece of folded paper out of his back pocket, tearing a corner off as he did. “You gave us this.”

There follows a moment of the most intense silence.

“Oh my god. You disappeared more than forty years ago.” Aisling pulled the last seat over and behind her mother, who began to visibly tremble.

“They said you must have fallen off a ferry.” She looked him up and down again and then at her own map. Then she cried. “It is you, but you are still you … the same age, clothes, everything.”

It was only then that Deirdre noticed Sioga, who wilted under her prolonged examination. To get some relief, Sioga reached out and took Ethan’s hand but exposed the engagement ring on her finger as she did so.

“Oh Dear God. What did you do with your beautiful dark lady?” Deirdre Ryan nee McNamara was on her feet and started to back out of the room, horrified, confused and perplexed in rotating, fluctuating measures.

“That’s her.” Ethan was pointing through to reception at a large display panel on the wall beside the receptionist. “That’s Mona.”

Burke had to bend down slightly to see what he was looking at. “That particular lady was royalty and she’s been dead about four thousand years.” He said, in quiet disbelief. “Though if your friend looks anything like her you are one lucky man. But didn’t you say Mona was dark Mrs. Ryan?” He followed up quickly. “How dark exactly?”

Deirdre Ryan didn’t have to look at the advertisement displayed in reception. The Munster Queen, ceremoniously laid out in her tomb at Poulanegh had her image digitally recreated from the latest DNA software and there was no way she could be as dark as she remembered Mona to be, especially with that Afro hair?

“As far as I can remember, your wife was dark enough to have African hair and there could be no-one like that in Clare four thousand years before Shannon Airport was built?” Deirdre Ryan kept her gaze fixed on Ethan but when he offered no reply, she continued with the official narrative. “What you’re looking at there is the previously unknown Queen of Munster, when men were supposed to have ruled everywhere else. It says so on the boulder that kept the grave robbers out of her tomb all these years, though the Ogham script is worn in places.”

“They say she was taller than most of the men back then, probably something like an Amazon Woman I suppose.” Burke interjected, thinking how proud of her everyone in Ireland was. They would no doubt discover a lot more in due course but for now, Tourists and Academics were already falling over themselves to get close to her. The new Poulanegh Centre would be worthy of her when finished. The Munster Queen was nothing short of a miracle for Clare.

“No.” Ethan wailed. Caught between the urgency of finding Mona now and explaining why her image was wrongly represented. “They would have expected straight hair, so that’s what they gave her and they couldn’t expect an African mouth, so they gave her those mean looking lips. But if you change those and nothing else, it’s Mona. Mona is tall and a world ranking athlete.” Ethan looked forlornly at Deirdre Ryan and covered his face with his hands asking. “Javelin.” His hollow eyes bubbled up. “Was? How is that?” He asked weakly.

Aisling’s mother leaned over to look at the picture on the reception wall. The Munster Queen certainly had the same strong features, but it had to be coincidence. “Be a dear Aisling love and bring me the complete brochure.” Deirdre patted her daughter’s hand as she moved towards the sliding panel to speak to the anxious young woman in reception. She then handed the glossy brochure to her mother, who immediately turned to page three.

“It’s written in Ogham, but they would have spelled out the old Gaelic word for Munster regardless of what alphabet they had back then. That’s why they called her Ban Ri na Mumhan. See? Here it is on the stone, even though the smaller word is smudged and worn.” Said Deirdre Ryan looking more and more puzzled.

“However.” She continued slowly. “If that word is not smudged or worn, but missing, then the Ogham translation could read ‘Bean Ri Muna’, ‘Queen Mona’.”

Burke had wasted enough time on curious small talk and chose to do his talking through his shoulder radio. That particular action seemed to present more of a puzzle to Ethan than the seriousness of the inferred accusation or the impossibility that Mona was royalty, dead, buried, and lost in time.

“Charlie November. Sarge. Sergeant Rourke.”

“Rourke. Go.”

“It’s getting a bit weird here Sarge, but I think we have to cover ourselves with some immediate ‘Search and Rescue’ cover for a possibly abducted slash missing female, details are sketchy because I suspect there might be some drugs involved but they will follow. Do you copy?”

The reply was instant. “There’d better be a missing woman Burke or I’ll have your arse in a sling for the cost of a helicopter and overtime that will come down to me. Stand-by.”

Burke nodded to Brennan who seemed only too keen to write everything down. They had to be on something, but how come Mrs. Ryan was backing them up? It was just too much. He headed for the car park where he could think and maybe where not everyone in Fanore would be party to this insane discussion. He didn’t have to wait very long.

“Charlie November. Burke, Burke.”

“Yes Sarge.”

“As it happens, the Shannon based Sikorsky is just about inbound from the Aran Islands any moment now and they’ll do a few sweeps before the weather closes. Give me some co-ordinates or directions to pass on to them and for God’s sake, who the eff are we supposed to be looking for?”

Burke was caught for his reply, considering that the most likely candidate was already in Poulanegh and was in fact the Queen of effing Munster, who is slash was apparently, a lost African Amazon woman.” He thought better of that choice but he had to come up with something. An apparently very presentable woman could not expect a garden party from a gang who would kidnap her. Drugs or no drugs, he had to move.

“She might still be on the high ground of Murrough between Fanore and Ballyvaughan. There could be a group of up to twenty who may have abducted the lone female. The size of the group should make it impossible for them all to hide. I’m bringing one male suspect slash possible accomplice slash druggie back to the lock-up for questioning but it smells rotten. It’s been at least an hour since he said it all happened and we might need some additional help. More details as they surface. Over.”

“Mother of sweet Jesus. Copied. Get me a name and then bring the bastard in yourself so I can have a word or two before the wigs arrive. Send Brennan up the hill on foot now with any volunteers you can muster. Over.”

“One small thing Sarge. There’s a girl, says she’s seventeen but not too sure about that. She’s from somewhere around here but she seems to be a bit out of it. Says her name is Sioga Kelly but no ID. Aisling’s mother seems to know your man though. Over.”

“Is the girl any way dodgy? Over.”

“No Sarge. She’s one of ours. Just confused or on something I reckon. Over.”

“All right then. If the girl gets any way awkward, then drag her in with himself and take Brennan with you for some extra muscle, god help us.”

There was no “Over”, and Burke was confused by the silence. “Sir?”

“Brennan is not exactly Conor McGregor, is he? Anyway, I’m getting some lads to start south from here. Otherwise, keep the girl there and get someone to babysit her … but make sure it’s someone she doesn’t know. Anyone will do. I’ll get the quack to check her out. Over.”

Barely a second passed.

“NOW BURKE. NOW. Out.”

“Asshole.” As soon as Seamus said that, he wondered if his finger had really held the transmit button down, but when there was no reply he felt he could breathe again.

“You better be in that car and smellin’ burning rubber just about now Burke. Over.”

“SIR”. Shit. How could he know for sure if he’d just done that?

The radio came alive again but only for two seconds. It was just the carrier frequency with no talk. Then Burke got just a millisecond of Sergeant Rourke’s mobile phone ring tone before it went dead?

“SHIT.”