Tiago Duarte Dias

Maureen was about to get up to order a beer at the bar, when a young and attractive lady said she’d like to ask her a question, when she returned from getting her drink. Outside the window, she could see rain hitting the cobblestone street, on a morose Wednesday evening in Frankfurt. She had arrived late on a Tuesday, and was booked to give the main talk two days later, at yet another international conference, packed with law officers, detectives, lawyers, criminologists and judges from all over the world. Travelling to different countries was exciting at first, but now, every city felt, smelt and looked the same. The whole of Europe had become merely variations of the same airport.

Even before, she had retired from the police force, seven years ago, she was already regarded by her colleagues as an extraordinary case-solver, even if some of her detractors would paint her - to some extent rightfully so - as conflict-driven, stubborn and narcissistic. Her skills were recognized by all, even if a significant number of her colleagues over the years would go to some lengths to avoid working with her. In the last months before her retirement, Maureen felt an uncontrollable urge to write. And she wrote feverishly. Her twins had moved from home, and soon afterwards, her then wife, Carla, divorced her. Alone in a house with too many memories and empty rooms that subtly, and then obviously, evoked her loneliness, Maureen extended her presence into a world that she already started to miss through her keyboard. Through her writing, she was free to romanticize, in a somehow painless and aseptic way, her experiences as a cop. As her children and wife moved on with their lives, Maureen continued to live, in a sort of imaginary past; mourning what had never truly been, and yet was about to end... 

For Maureen, writing was the only way to silence the screaming sounds of her own mind and the loneliness and the boredom it evoked. The sound of her fingertips on her keyboard was the only way to attain peace. She wrote novels based on real life events, and wrote police and detective guides based on her own flourishing imagination. She finished her first novel, called ‘Two Blind Crows’, merely three months after Carla said she had met someone else, and just two weeks before she got her golden watch. Six months after, it was published. Less than a year after, it had become a best seller, with its first translations to Spanish, French, German and coming in the space of merely fifteen months after Maureen had received her printed copy. As ‘Two Blind Crows’ began to gather a wide audience, she had already finished the sequel, and a guide to police officers called ‘Thinking Like a Crook’, which blended pop psychology, untested hypotheses gathered from anecdotal evidences, and a veneer of self-help. Unsurprisingly, it found an avid readership not only in police departments, but also with ambitious Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors. Maureen also dared to write poetry, which she, however, showed to no one. This was one of the two only aspects of her life, in which she had an accurate estimation of herself. 

As a writer, Maureen built a career that seamlessly streamed from her previous one. Her twenty-five years as a detective had defined her more than any of the roles she had played, and it would define this new stage as well. Maureen was a cop. Maureen is a cop. Maureen will always be a cop. Her books were a swiftly way to cheat time and allow her to keep her badge, at least in feeling. 

Her literary career quickly blossomed, and with it, a new social life. Speaking invitations, book signings, TV-appearances, podcasts, interviews. It all came and flooded her literary agent’s email inbox. Along also came the exclusive, petit committee, the social mingles with influential editors, and other established writers, state ministers, heads of police departments, together with an overwhelming number of incredibly wealthy fans. In the public aspect of her career, Maureen excelled. Everyone who had heard her speak saw a very articulate, charismatic, charming, witty and fun woman, behind old-fashioned glasses, short hair and a bespoke suit. 

The more exclusive side of if, however, took some time getting used to. Meeting people who made more money in a week then she had, throughout her entire career as a police officer, would always leave her with a taste of bitterness, envy and despise. While meeting those wealthy benefactors, she prone to mean and sarcastic comments, which she felt were rather well deserved. For the most part, the wealthy accepted her meanness as some sort of social capital income tax, and indulged her in what they described amongst themselves as a lack of tact and finesse. After some months, she grew tired and resigned of this persona, and she learned how to masquerade those feelings. At times she could even be rather competent in doing so. 

Meeting the people who excelled in their field – the actors, the writers, the politician - made her feel inadequate and uncultured. She, who never really cared or understood art, constantly met people who had opinions on contemporary painters she had never heard of before. She, whose only political engagement was voting, was made to meet politicians and politically appointed officers. She, who hated the bureaucratic parts of her job, would be made to meet those people who thrived in it, in order to hide their lack of investigate instinct. She, who was never the best student in college and who never really felt at home in academic environment, met several professors from all different types of fields. She, who by her own estimation, was a great judge of character, could never truly comprehend those people and had a very defensive attitude towards them. She, who had never thought of herself as beautiful, would regularly meet B- and C-celebrities, who were almost always cold and aloof and on more than one occasion, an A-lister, who were surprisingly approachable.

In her eyes, all of them were always judging and analysing every single aspect of her personhood. In this, she was half correct, as they always judged her, whilst not taking too long to categorize her as an exotic daughter of the working class; one who was gifted with a fascinating charisma, that they simultaneously admired and despised. In the end, however, she made peace with herself, by realizing that, by her own estimation, she was the most interesting person in the room. This was the second aspect of her life of which she had an accurate perception.  

In sum, and as a James Joyce scholar once put it:

“Maureen is certainly, a unique person for one to make acquaintance with”, after Maureen had told her, unable to conceal her enthusiasm, that she had read all of Agatha Christie’s oeuvre and ranked Poirot’s inventor as the best writer she’d read. 

Fully aware of her quirkiness and honesty, together with an occasional faux-pas, she became the person she always thought she’d have the potential to be. In spite of Maureen often describing herself as a simple, working-class, and middle-aged lesbian, she did enjoy the fancy dinners, the fancy hotels, the Instagram posts with movie and music stars. Having a signed copy of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A’, and a picture with the man himself, was almost as good as the ever-changing number of twenty-thirty something women she bedded in different cities all over the world. All of those engagements had an oneiric feeling to a woman who had begun to write, just because she was feeling overwhelmed by the silence of cumulative years of regret. 

Maureen came back to her seat as the conversation had quieted down on the table, she occupied together with six fellow detectives or former-detectives or wannabe detectives. The pub was rather empty, with the exception of the local, usual drunks, which by now, after decades, had ingrained themselves with the mish-mash of kitsch which made up the decoration. Alongside a couple on a Tinder date, they were the only costumers that night. 

“Well, young lady, what was it that you wanted to ask me”, Maureen asked.

Shyly, the young and ambitious Swedish officer, in her first year after graduating from police academy, asked, with a melodic accent: 

“Is there a case that you’ve not written about, but would be willing to share with us. Perhaps one, that even you couldn’t solve?”

 Sigrid was her name. She had shoulder-length light blond hair, sharp blue eyes, a well-formed figure and, above all, a smile that could betray a multitude of intentions, if only one would pay attention. Sigrid. A beautiful woman. And whose beauty Maureen had noticed from the moment they had first met. A woman who also had desired Maureen since she gave her lecture, and who sat close to her, their knees slightly touching. In the end of the night, Maureen and Sigrid, who were both staying in the same hotel, would end up in the same room. For opposite, yet complementary reasons, they desired one another. Longed for each other, and the idea they had made of each other. Sigrid after many years of avidly consuming her books. Maureen after merely minutes of consuming her youthful presence. 

Maureen studied her face carefully and then looked at her glass of beer: half full, yellow, bubbling, slightly cold. She slowly raised her eye, and they met with the Swede, albeit briefly. Then she looked at everyone else at the table, then beyond them, beyond the bar, beyond the cold evening in Germany… 

Maureen looked back to her small town in Pennsylvania, a place that in many ways no longer exists, at least not how she remembered it. Sigrid and the others, however had not, even, for a brief second looked away from Maureen. Blinking would be wasting.

“Alright, miss”, she said briefly, now fully looking at Sigrid’s blue eyes, “there’s one case that I haven’t gotten around to write about it, and it’s one that I cannot for the whole world forget”, and then after taking another sip, she continued.

“It was a windy morning in April. My shift had just begun and then a woman came and claimed that she had not seen seventeen-year-old daughter since the previous day, when they had breakfast together. She had gone to work at 7:30 a.m. and came back from a double shift at around 10 p.m. She looked into her daughter’s bedroom and she was not there. She laid down on her sofa and waited for her daughter to show up. She fell asleep while watching T.V, and woke up at 5:30 a.m. and still no sign of her, whatsoever. She then looks into her daughter’s bedroom, and is quite positive that it looks the same as it looked the previous day, excluding, thus, the possibility of her coming and leaving home between 10 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. 

“Her name was Theresa Lloyd, and she was a single mother of two children – Christine and Steve – and whose husband had died mere months before during the war on Iraq. The second one, I mean. As he had not been in the service for too long, the pension she got was not enough to pay for the house loans, meaning that she had to take as many shifts as she could in order to stay afoot. She worked as a waitress, as a cashier, as a bartender, as a house cleaner. Whatever was needed, the woman was willing to do, with a stoic resilience that was much appreciated and even admired by her several employers. You know, that sort of admiration that only small business owners, those slightly above the working class, can have for those who earn less than they do, while working as much. Personally, I did not know her that well, but I knew of her. It is a small place.”

“After her husband died, Carla and I were one of the many from the community who donated anonymously in order to help the widow and her children. I mean, I know how it feels to be in a tough spot. After I met Carla, now my ex-wife, my first husband left, while the twins were one and half years old. The piece of shit just took off, just like that”, she said and snapped her finger, and spite of it all, did not say it bitterly. That part of her life she had recounted so many times by now. 

Then she continued: 

“Anyhow, he left out of a sudden, when he got tired of being a married man. Men are always leaving, whether to kill or be killed, to fuck or to be fucked, to leave again or to be left afterwards. Men are attracted to moving, while, we women, we have to fix, set things in order, find the order, invent an order, console, find the solution to all the problems that remain, and, oh boy, they do remain…”

“At the precinct, I saw a woman in panic, holding tight to her baby son, with red, swollen eyes who could not control their tears. Sitting by the table, there were both she and I and my partner, Frank, a quiet man, definitely not sharpest tool in the shed, and I’ve met my share of stupid police officers… Anyways, Frank was counting the days to his retirement since he had entered the force. Therese then told Frank and I all that I just told you guys. She answered negatively to all the standard questions in our enquiry, such as if her daughter was dating someone, if she suffered from depression, if was she using drugs, etc. And the she broke down and started to sob compulsively and scream like a desperate pray. She kept repeating that her daughter was taken. For us to do something. She begged and begged…”

“I tried to interject once and suggest that perhaps there could be another explanation. She was fucking defiant. Nothing could move her out of that idea. And then she mentioned something that made me entertain the possibility of a kidnap.”

“She mentioned a strange man in the woods. A mysterious fellow, dressed in a black suit and that according to her, had been spying their house for a week or so. She just knew it. He wasn’t none of their neighbours; she hadn’t seen before around town. She said that he lurked around the trail that goes near her lot. She had seen him for the first when she picked her daughter up from a friend across town, last month. He was driving a dark car that looked expansive.”

“Ma’am, when was the last time you saw him”, I asked her.

“She said it was two days ago. The night before he took my little girl, I remember her screaming.”

“I ask her how many times she had seen him and she said definitely more than half a dozen, maybe ten or more. I told her that a sketch artist would come in the afternoon and that it would be of great help if she could describe him as well as she possibly could. I asked her about that car and she just said something stylish, like from the seventies but pristine looking. She remembered the Ford logo.”

“I informed all the precincts in the area about a missing young woman, and told her the sketch artist would arrive at around 4pm. Then I asked her to email me a picture of her daughter. She reached for her pocket and handed me a picture while saying that she came prepared for this. I took the picture and said “we will get your daughter back”. 

Deep within her, however, Maureen was not so sure that she would ever find the girl, just like many other girls who had disappeared before her. There’s evil in this world and there is nothing you and I or all well-intentioned people in this world can do about it. There are occasions, more often than we realize, that this evilness, this sheer cruelty, this pain-for-pain’s-sake triumphs and we never hear its celebratory shouts, for this evilness never stops toiling, it never stops moving forward whilst threading lightly, and that is what she thought then and that’s what she would re-think, oftentimes alone in airplane lounges or between binge-watching The Office. And that was what she thought while recounting this case. Evil not always loses.

“We sent alarms to neighbouring police stations, but the description we had of the man was too weak and the detail of the car too broad. On the same day, I went to the trail and searched the area where Therese had seen the man. I found an empty bag of M&M’s near where the man supposedly spied on the house, or at least where Therese thought he had stood the day before. This was a long shot, but I did not have the heart to tell her. Obviously, the yellow wrapping could have landed there for multiple reasons that had nothing to do with anything. Many people took the same trail, many of them are pigs who loiter. I don’t know, the wind could have brought it there from many miles away. I kept my mouth shut and hoped Therese would grasp the obvious, because she did not have the heart to tell her. I bagged the chocolate wrapping and sent it to be analysed, anyway. The results yielded no usable fingerprints or DNA.”

“I am preaching to the choir here, but you guys know how it is, and how things get lost under the weight of other things, not necessarily more important, but easier to solve. Therese kept calling the precinct I’d reassure her that we were doing all we could to find her daughter. At first, people at precinct showed some sympathy and then, they started to lose their patience her...” 

At this moment Maureen took another long sip of her beer and continued: 

“At some point, one of the officers threatened to file her for harassment. Therese broke down and cried and more or less mumbled, between her tears, that she was sorry and all she wanted was her daughter back. She never called again after that.” 

“Six months later, when the case had been mostly forgotten, the city had moved on. Apart from the missing person posters that Therese religiously continued to nail to public places”. Sigrid at that moment, caught with the story, wondered if Therese nailed those posters, not only with the hope that they would help her find her daughter, but instead they would make her neighbours not forget her sorrow. Predictably enough, they did just that, at least most of them. Maureen continued:

“…a man who lived some ten miles away from Therese, almost at a different county, called to inform that had seen someone matching the description and also a black car that could have been the one. Frank and I went to check it, more so for Therese’s sake than for a belief that something would come out of it. Missing persons cases hardly ever are solved that way, as my experience and empirical evidence shows. In any case, it was a slow Tuesday morning, with nothing much happening, so I think, why the hell not? My nonchalant partner did not take much to convince and with a grunt followed by silence, he signalled right and drove.” 

Maureen always valued the sense of relief on doing all she could do, even when she was sure that it would yield no practical results. For Maureen, it always felt better to just do something, vven if the odds near zero; it is still larger than zero. In most people, this thought-process manifested itself through superstition. In Maureen, it was her sheer disquietude, a trait which would come to define much of her life.  

“The road ended near a lot, with some scattered out trailer parks. The squalor was obvious, the opioid pandemic had really hit those people badly. I remember some unemployed moron blasting some type of heavy metal, as an old lady screamed obscenities at her grandchildren. It smelt, pardon my French, like shit also, because someone had busted a pipe the day before.” 

“We knocked at the man’s place, and he pointed towards a small road down south. At the road’s end, we’d find a trail leading to an old cabin. He had seen the man and the car at the end of the road, while he was hunting. He said that he had neither seen the man nor the car before. He also said that the man’s choice of outfit really stood out. It was a fancy suit, he said, and for the looks of it, it was a quite expensive one. He claimed he did not have the time to pay much attention to this man, as he went further into the woods in pursuit of some game. Hours later, when he came by again, with a deer on his back, the man had been gone. He said he had spotted some smoke coming from the old cabin, but didn’t bother checking. It was not his business. Two days later, he came across one of the flyers, and that was when he decided to call.”

“We took to the trail, but in the middle of the path, Frank said his knee was hurting. He told me to just go ahead and check it, before he would get there. It wouldn’t be anything. Impatient and barely disguising my disapproval towards his laziness, I stepped up my speed, and after some minutes I could not see him any longer. He must’ve sat down for a smoke or something, that fat old fuck…”

“It was, perhaps after one minute or two minutes, that I spotted, some yards from me, you guys say meters, right, anyways, I saw a yellow M&M wrapper surrounded by some fallen leaves. That was it, I was sure, then I ran towards it...”

She was silent. All eyes were on her. She drank the last of her beer without rushing.

“Then, well, it all turned to black. I wish I could remember the pain that preceded me fainting, but the moment between what caused me to pass out and the act of passing out was just too brief. I woke up some time after that. I estimate, roughly, that was unconscious for fifteen to twenty minutes or so. I came to my senses and the first thing I saw was Frank screaming my name at my face. His bad breath and the high-pitched sound of his voice made me come back quite quickly. However, everything was still spinning and my head ached like it never had before. Frank feverishly asked me what had happened and I told him I had spotted what looked like a M&M wrapping there. I told him I tried to spring to it, but then I tripped and fell on the mud. Frank went to the spot, and told her to sit down and wait until everything stopped spinning. It didn’t for a long while. I puked. Frank wanted to come back to help me and I told him to keep looking for the wrapper, instead. He asked me what had happened. I said only:”

“I don’t know…”

“Close to me, there was a tree branch, hard and heavy. I didn’t and still don’t know if I had been hit in the head with a tree branch or any other object, if I had tripped and hit my head on the ground, or if a tree branch happened to fall precisely on my head. If it had been someone who had hit me, he could’ve used another object. The fact that I had fainted, that I had lost my senses, was all I knew. Frank asked for backup and four officers came and interviewed me. They searched the old cabin. Some people had used it as a toilet, but no evidence of it being a hideout, or that someone had been there as recent as today was found. They also looked for the M&M wrapper in the woods and found nothing. I wanted a more thorough search, but my department could not justify it. I wonder if I should’ve lied that I was hit in the head by someone. I regret not doing so, because the possibility existed.

“And this guilt I will carry to my grave”, she said, as Maureen eyed and laid her hand on Sigrid’s knee under the table, picking up a sudden and shy smile from the young officer. Then she continued: 

“The case that I cannot forget is a case I have not solved. Hell, it’s not even a case, if you ask me, it is just some suspicions. My boss saw no reason to further look into it. He was certain that I had slipped and hit my head or something. After two or three years, Therese left the county and her old house remains abandoned. I never saw her or her remaining child again. She passed away two years ago. Her son moved to California to work in the Silicon Valley. Things turned out alright for him. This I know because I sometimes would stalk their Facebook pages. I never could bring myself to add her, however. Every April 10th she would post a text and a picture commemorating the disappearance of her daughter. And yes, I think about them more often than I would like to admit…”

After a couple of beers, she and Sigrid would share a cab ride back to the hotel, and they would go into the Maureen’s room. In between the alcohol, Sigrid’s perfume, their colliding desires, the white sheets, the sober decoration of a Ibis hotel, the delightful accent of the Swede, the sound of the wheels of a suitcase rolling down the hall, at the very moment when Therese’s head would be in between Sigrid’s thighs, in a miscellany of smells, tastes and noises, Maureen would briefly think of Christine, of Steve, but mostly of Therese and the pain she endured of not knowing, of neverknowing, never discovering, always-in-the-dark, tortured-by-the-dark, oh the darkness and its loneliness, its emptiness, its glacialness, its doubtness, its neverness... The thought, however, would last just some seconds, and Maureen would turn all its attention to the task at hand and how to best fulfil it. Ja, ja, fortsätt, sluta inte and the memory of Therese, that had gone somewhere else, would perhaps come back at the hotel lobby, while she was checking out, or perhaps at the airport or perhaps some weeks later at a farmer’s market... 

Christine was, and would be, until Maureen’s death (and even with her dementia), a patient and a polite ghost. She never took too much of Maureen’s time, and never overstayed her welcome, however, as a ghost, and as patient and polite as she could be, she refused to be forgotten.