56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

78 Days Ago

FYI Oliver (Ollie) St Ledger back in Ireland—KB StudiosDublin.

A “Jane Smith” with no profile picture posted that in Justice, Not Protection! one week ago.

The comments on it are either advising her to repost it following the established format or expressing confusion because no one knows who Oliver St Ledger is. A few members ask for the victim’s name or other details so they can identify the case, but “Jane” never returns to answer their questions. When Ciara searches within the group, she can’t find any other posts from this user.

On a hunch, she searches for Oliver (Ollie) St Ledger Dublin across all of Facebook, but filters the results so that they’re confined to mentions in groups. It turns out that “Jane Smith” posted the exact same thing in at least eight other places, including a victims’ rights organization and a group obsessed with Irish true crime.

Her profile is set to private, but the lack of a profile picture suggests there wouldn’t be much useful information there anyway. Whoever she is, she really wanted someone to do something about Oliver St Ledger’s supposed return to Dublin, even though, a few anonymous Facebook posts aside, she seemingly wasn’t prepared to do much about it herself.

KB Studios.

When Ciara googles this, she finds a website for a firm of architects based on Upper Baggot Street, Dublin 4—and then on their Meet Our Team page, a brief bio for an Oliver Kennedy—with no headshot.

OLIVER KENNEDY

BSc (Hons) Arch Tech

Oliver graduated from Newcastle University with a 1.1 BSc (Hons) in Architectural Technology in 2013 and joined us in 2020 from MPQ Engineering in London. He brings with him a passion for sustainable design, a flair for innovation, and a wealth of experience in projects large and small.

Ciara’s blood runs cold. Intellectually, she knows none of this adds up to much. There’s a guy named Oliver who could be the same age as Oliver St Ledger, and he used to work in the same city Richard St Ledger visited a few months ago—so what?

But instinctively . . .

She just has a feeling that this is him.

TheOliver.

Ciara glances at the other window she has open on her screen, the one that shows she has seventeen unopened emails and only a couple of hours left in the workday to resolve whatever crises they contain.

That’s what she should be doing, because this is ridiculous. What does she think it’s going to achieve, this online wild-goose chase? She’s letting her imagination run away with her. She’s distracting herself from the reality of the situation, which is that her mother is dying and soon it’ll just be Siobhán and her, and no “truth” is going to change that.

This isn’t him.

But if it were, how might she confirm that?

Another email pings into her inbox.

Ciara glances at the time stamp. It’s five minutes to the hour.

She’ll give herself those five minutes, she thinks, just five minutes more, and then she’ll stop.

She goes back to Facebook to search for Oliver Kennedy, but the profiles she finds don’t look like they’re for the same person. The scant few details she has—Newcastle, London, Dublin—don’t match up. She goes back to Instagram on her phone and does the same thing, also to no avail.

Then she has an idea. She brings back up Richard St Ledger’s Instagram and starts scrolling through the list of people he’s following.

There’s no Oliver Kennedy, but there are Kennedys.

Several of them, in fact.

She picks one at random—Maurice—and scans his pictures, stopping at a picture of Sydney Harbour from back in November. It has no caption or hashtag, but there is one comment.

K Meara: Lucky you! Holiday?

Maurice Kennedy: Visiting family!

Family.

Adrenaline starts to fizz in Ciara’s veins.

She opens Richard’s Instagram on her computer screen, scrolls back to November, and starts systematically comparing the two accounts. She has no idea what Maurice looks like, but going by his social media skills and his amateur, unfiltered photographs, she’s guessing he’s an older man. No one like that appears in Richard’s photos, and Maurice doesn’t post pictures of people at all, only badly framed landscapes and random objects sitting in low light.

The best she can hope to find is a commonality, something that shows both men were in the same place at the same time.

And she does.

On November seventh, last year, Maurice Kennedy posted a picture of a line of vintage cars with a wide, sandy beach and cloudy skies visible in the background.

On November eighth, Richard St Ledger posted a picture of himself posing next to one of those cars.

Richard was the family Maurice was visiting. The St Ledgers are related to the Kennedys. Kennedy could even be Oliver St Ledger’s mother’s maiden name, which would make him choosing it as his new name entirely plausible.

Ciara goes back to the bio on KB Studios and stares at the text until it blurs.

This could actually be him. The only person left who really knows what happened on that day in 2003.

The person who could, potentially, provide her with the answers she seeks.

But how is she supposed to ask him her questions?