As second-date suggestions go, walking Trevor Deely’s route through Dublin was an unusual one.
It was daytime. Cold, dry, and bright.
Before we started, she told me she had a feeling that somewhere on the walk, something had happened. She said it simply and left it there.
Later, on Haddington Road, I stopped and said that I did not think he had walked beyond that point.
She looked at me and said that this was where she had felt it too.
That was the thing I remembered.
Not because it proved anything. It did not. But because sometimes a place refuses the story made for it. You can hear an official version from a distance and it sounds tidy enough. Then you stand on the ground itself and it starts to thin in your hands.
The canal idea always struck me as obvious tripe. Too neat. Too convenient. Trevor’s last confirmed sighting was on Haddington Road, walking toward the Beggars Bush area, and Garda appeals have long focused on the unidentified man seen near his office and again shortly after him on CCTV.
It was interesting too to learn that it was the weekend Bill Clinton was in Dublin. Accounts of the case say roads and security arrangements were altered, bins and skips were emptied, and manhole covers were checked before any meaningful search for discarded evidence could happen. That does not prove anything in itself. But it adds another layer of strangeness to a case that already resists easy explanation.
And then there was the setting itself. Trevor worked in investment banking, only a few years before one of the greatest financial crashes in modern history. That too may mean nothing. But when a young banker disappears into a city still flush with late-boom confidence, and the last ground on which he feels real is a short stretch of road in Dublin 4, the imagination does not need much encouragement.
What stayed with me was simpler than theory.
Two people walking through Dublin in the cold sun, and both feeling, at the same point, that the official map had gone thin.
That is rare.
Not proof.
Just recognition.
Sometimes that is enough.