56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

78 Days Ago

How do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?

Having exhausted the search bar of every social media network, news site, and internet search engine she can think of, all to no avail, Ciara resorts to typing this very question into Google.

How do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?

A list appears at the top of the first page of results, a preview of an article that’s been linked below.

1. Full name, nicknames, family names.

2. Date/city/state of birth.

3. Hometown/last known/current city/state.

4. High school and/or college names.

It’s clearly aimed at people who are looking to find Americans who don’t want to be found and who have access to things like census information and government databases.

And so, for her, it’s absolutely useless.

Ciara goes to close down the window—she’s at her desk at work, the club sandwich she had with Siobhán sitting heavy in her stomach—but then she sees the next two items on the list and stops.

5. Former and recent employers.

6. Friends and family members.

Friends and family members.

Oliver had had an older brother, didn’t he? He’d have been Siobhán’s age . . . But what was his name?

Ciara drums her fingers on the desk, trying to remember.

Oliver and . . . Oliver and . . . Oliver and . . .

Richard.

Richard St Ledger. She types this name and “Ireland” into the Google search bar and hits Enter.

The top result is an Instagram account.

Ciara checks the coast is clear before picking her phone up from the desk and opening the app. It’ll be easier to navigate there than on a computer screen.

She starts scrolling through his posts.

She only has the faintest memory of what Oliver looked like, let alone his brother, so she can’t tell just by looking at him if this is the right one.

This Richard St Ledger is living in Australia, with his wife and two small kids. He seems to spend a lot of time at the beach and standing in front of mirrors at the gym. But there’s a recent photo of a thirty-first birthday cake (right age) and an Irish flag in his bio (so he’s Irish), and the only time she’s ever encountered a St Ledger was seventeen years ago, so it could be him.

She wonders why he didn’t change his name, but then why would he? He didn’t do anything and his brother’s name is protected by law.

Still . . .

She keeps scrolling down, careful not to double tap any of the photos—if this is the right Richard, then he’d know her name for sure—until she comes to one taken much closer to home. It’s of Richard with his back against a waist-high glass railing, his head turned away from the lens as he looks out over the bird’s-eye view of London behind him. The location tag says, “Sky Garden,” which Ciara knows sits atop the skyscraper known as the Walkie Talkie.

The photographer’s legs are reflected in the glass and Ciara stares at them for several seconds, wondering if she’s looking at Oliver St Ledger’s chino shorts, muscular calves, and white Vans. But then she touches a finger to the image and finds the legs tagged as @balfeyboi91.

She follows it to the corresponding account: Ken Balfe, whose bio is also sporting an Irish flag.

Ken Balfe.

Ciara puts down the phone and goes back to her computer, opening up Facebook. She’s already logged in. She types Ken Balfe into the search bar—and finds the corresponding profile easily.

There’s no evidence that he’s been active on the site recently; the top post on his page is from nearly a year ago. But the “About” section has lots of useful information, most notably that he went to secondary school at St. Columba’s Community in Naas, Co. Kildare.

She silently thanks him for filling it in.

The primary schools in the area were segregated by gender, but the secondary was mixed. St. Columba’s is where Siobhán went for a couple of years, and where Ciara had been supposed to go until they’d left the area a month after her father’s death, when their mother announced she just couldn’t stand to be there, suffocating in memories, for a single moment more. So it’s entirely plausible that Ken Balfe and Richard St Ledger have been friends since school, since before everything happened.

Which would mean that Ken would know about Oliver.

Which might mean he’d know where he is now.

But what good is this information to her? What’s she supposed to do with it? Send him a message asking if he would kindly provide contact information for his friend’s younger brother, the convicted child murderer?

She couldn’t do that any more than she could send Richard St Ledger a message on Instagram and ask him a version of the same thing.

How do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?

But that’s not really the right question, Ciara thinks now. What she should really be asking herself is, How do you find a child who was convicted of murder now that he’s a grown man and his name is protected by law?

Ciara only knows of one case where young children were convicted of murder; it had happened in England before she was born. Those boys were now men who lived under assumed identities, guaranteed lifelong anonymity—because their names were made public, they had to shed them immediately after the trial.

As she scans the case summary on Wikipedia, looking for any details that may help her in her search, she studiously ignores the shards of horror that jump out at her like glinting knife blades.

. . . blown his cover several times by sharing his true identity . . .

. . . in possession of child abuse images . . .

. . . returned to prison . . .

Maybe this is a mistake.

Maybe she shouldn’t be looking for Oliver St Ledger.

What if she finds him, and somehow gets him to talk, and what he says only makes everything worse?

Ciara takes the half of the British pair who hasn’t reoffended and puts his original name into Facebook’s search box, just to see what comes up. There’s a handful of profiles with exact-name matches, but of course none of them can be him. She feels a pang of sympathy for those men and wonders why on earth they don’t go by nicknames or something. She scrolls down the page until she sees that a group has been returned in the results.

Justice, Not Protection! has almost eight thousand members.

Ciara feels compelled to turn around and make sure no one is standing silently behind her, looking over her shoulder. She’s in a small, open-plan office, but the only other occupied desk right now is on the far side of the room. She should be safe.

She moves the mouse, clicks.

Ciara only needs a few seconds on Justice, Not Protection! to ascertain what it is—or more specifically, who it’s for: keyboard vigilantes. The aim of the game, it seems, is to expose the protected identities of convicted criminals who the group, playing both judge and jury, has decided should be exposed.

Each post is, supposedly, a tip, and there are hundreds of them. They seem to follow a standardized format: a bad photo of someone either blurred by the movement of the camera or taken from too far away to capture any detail, paired with a caption that makes claims like, this is so-and-so (1st degree murder, Preston, 2004) in the Waitrose on Chatham Way and my wife and I made so-and-so at Cinema World, Belfast, last night—100% himand he knew I was looking but I just stared him down, authored by people hiding behind blank profile pics and gobbledegook usernames. Underneath each one is a trail of dozens of comments, most of which seem to be either fantasists outlining what injuries they’d inflict on the criminal given the chance or fully paid-up members of the Outrage Brigade spouting ill-informed nonsense about the law of the land.

It’s a cesspool and Ciara feels ill just looking at it. Plus it seems very much UK-centric and so unlikely to be of any use to her.

But at the top of the page is an empty box and an invitation to Search this group.

She types in Oliver St Ledger and hits Enter, holds her breath—

There’s a match.