MAGGIES DREAM - Escape from Ireland

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In the country, things like this did not happen. It seems important not to show my fear. So I keep walking, keep putting one foot in front of the other. If I turn and run, he could catch up with me in seconds and there would be something so exposing, so final about running. It would uncover to us both what this situation is; it would bring things to a head. The only option seems to be to carry on, to pretend that this is perfectly normal.

I cannot meet his gaze, I cannot look at him directly, not quite, but I am aware of narrow-set eyes, a considerable height, fists gripping his rucksack straps. I am past him, I am walking away, the path is open before me. He has, I note, chosen for his ambush the apex of the hike: I have climbed and climbed, and it is at this point that I will start to descend the mountain, to my guesthouse, to my evening shift, to work, to life.

I am careful to use strides that are confident, purposeful, but not frightened. Perhaps, I think, I am free, perhaps I have misread the situation. I do know, though, that he is right behind me.

I can hear the tread of his boots, the swishing movement of his trouser fabric — some kind of breathable, all-weather affair. And here he is again, falling into step beside me. He walks closely, intimately, his arm at my shoulder, the way a friend might, the way I walked home from school with classmates. There is something peculiar about his diction, I realise, as we tread the path together. His words halt mid-syllable; his Rs are soft, his Ts over-enunciated, his tone flat, almost expressionless.

This man might be like our old neighbour: Perhaps I should be kind, as my mother was. A day or so later, I walk into the police station in the nearby town. I wait in line with people reporting lost wallets, stray dogs, scraped cars. The policeman at the desk listens, head cocked to the side. Did he do or say anything improper? The man looks me up and down.

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I look like what I am: I hate this man with his thick eyebrows, his beery paunch, his impatient, stubby fingers. How should I have articulated to this policeman that I could sense the urge for violence radiating off the man, like heat off a stone? I have been over and over that moment at the desk in the police station, asking myself, was there anything I could have done differently, anything I might have said that would have changed what happened next? I could have said: I want to see your supervisor.

I would do this now, aged 45, but then? Please find him before he does. I could have said that I have an instinct for the onset of violence, and when the man put the binoculars strap around my neck, even though he was saying something about wanting to show me a flock of eider ducks, I knew what came next.

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I could smell it. I could almost see it there, thickening and glittering in the air between us. This man was going to hurt me. He meant to inflict harm, rain it down on my head, and there was nothing I could do about it. I decided I must play along with the birdwatching game. I knew that this was my only hope. I glanced through the binoculars for the length of a single heartbeat. Oh, I said, eider ducks, goodness, and I ducked down and away, out of the circle of that strap.

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He came after me, of course he did, with that length of black leather, intending to lasso me again, but by this time I was facing him, I was smiling at him, gabbling about eider ducks and how interesting they were, did eiderdowns used to be made of them, is that where the name came from, were they filled with eider duck feathers? Tell me more, tell me everything you know about ducks, about birds, about birdwatching, goodness, how knowledgeable you are, you must go birdwatching a lot. There will be people waiting for me.

Two weeks later, a police car drives up the winding track to the guesthouse and two people get out.

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I know straight away what they are doing here, so even before I hear someone calling my name, I am walking down the stairs to meet them. These two are nothing like the policeman at the station. They are in suits, their demeanours serious, focused. They proffer badges and documents to my boss, Vincent, with faces that are still with practised, skilled neutrality.

They want to talk to me in private, so Vincent shows them into an unoccupied room. He comes in with us because he is a good man and I am only a few years older than his own children. I sit on a bed I made that morning, and the policeman sits at an ornamental wicker table where some guests like to take morning tea; the policewoman seats herself next to me on the bed. Vincent hovers in the background, muttering mistrustfully. The police are interested, the woman tells me, in a man I encountered recently on a walk. Would I be able to tell them exactly what happened?

I start at the beginning, describing how I passed him early on the hike, how he headed off in the opposite direction, then somehow appeared ahead of me. Their eyes never leave my face: I have their absolute attention. When I get to the part about the binoculars strap, they stop nodding. They stare at me, both of them, their eyes unblinking. It is a strange, congested moment. Would I be willing, she asks as she hands me a folder, to take a look at some photographs and let them know if I see him there?

At this point, my boss interrupts. The policewoman is putting up her hand to silence him, just as I am placing my index finger on a photograph. The woman notes something again in her book. The man thanks me; he takes the folder. They exchange an unreadable glance but say nothing. With his binoculars strap. From across the room, Vincent swears softly. Then he walks over and gives me his handkerchief. The girl who died was She was from New Zealand and was backpacking around Europe with her boyfriend.

He was unwell that day, so had stayed at their hostel while she went off on a hike, alone. She was raped, strangled, then buried in a shallow pit.

Her body was discovered three days later, not far from the path where I had been walking. I only know all this because I read about it in the local newspaper the following week: She had light-coloured hair, held back in a band, a freckled face, a wide, guileless smile. I am aware of her life, which was cut off, curtailed, snipped short, whereas mine, for whatever reason, was allowed to run on. I never knew if they caught him, if he was convicted, sentenced, imprisoned. I had the distinct feeling, during the interview, that those detectives were on to him, that they had him, that they just needed my corroboration.

Maybe the DNA samples were incontrovertible. Maybe there were other witnesses, other victims, other near-misses, who gave evidence in court: I was never asked and was too green or, I suspect, too shocked to pursue the matter, to call the police and say, what happened, did you catch him, has he been put away? I left the area not long afterwards, so can never be certain. All this happened long before a time of ubiquitous and instantly available news.

I can find no sign, no trace of this crime on the internet, despite numerous searches. For a long time, I dreamed about the man on the path. The book's main character, though, is closely based on the life and times of Barney's "daughter" Maggie - the author's mother, whose prompting led Margaret Williams to write the book as well as a sequel to Maggie's Dream that's in the works.

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It'll be good for people to know what it was like back in Irish history,'" Margaret Williams said of her mother, who died in Maggie McGonagle was born in at the "workhouse" - the homeless shelter -in a small town in County Donegal in Ireland's northwest. The story is set in the period from , the year of the infamous Easter Rising, to , covering the period of Maggie's life from ages six to As portrayed on the book jacket, "Because of her father's need to help his country become independent, his long absences and stresses these place on Margaret, his wife, and the rest of the family, Maggie loses her identity and freedom, only to become an indentured servant.

Margaret Williams, who has lived in Squamish for the past 18 years, said she spent a lot of time researching the historical side of the novel to ensure its accuracy. The social side is the poverty and how people dealt with that, and the historical side is the fight for independence," she said. Maggie's Dream is self-published through an online service called CreateSpace - "I haven't tried the regular publishers because they're only interested if you have a name already," the author said.

Margaret Williams said she's grateful to her editor, Ann Westlake, for her advice and guidance and to her husband David for his support.

Home Lifestyles David Burke dburke squamishchief. Margaret Fernandez-Williams shows off a copy of her book Maggie's Dream, which she calls a social-historical novel set during the time of the Irish war of independence. Copyright Squamish Chief. Email this article to a Friend.

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