The Lost (13 page)

She forced herself to ask the question of Guy. ‘Did you tell her parents? That she was pregnant?’

‘Yes. I visited the father this morning. With the mother, I thought – I wasn’t sure she could handle it.’

‘And did
he
?’

Guy seemed surprised at her vehemence. ‘It was a shock, as you’d imagine. I’m not sure he took it in either.’

‘Hmm.’

‘What made you think she had a boyfriend, Paula?’ He held her eyes for a second, looking away again. Was this how it was going to be now?

She spoke as neutrally as she could, in the wake of this revelation. ‘Cathy had glitter nail polish on – I noticed that at the scene, and it’s photographed here. I’m fairly sure that’s not allowed at St Bridget’s. And this underwear in the report – that’s not typical school stuff.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Maybe she
went to meet someone. It says they didn’t find her shoes?’

‘No. The diver found nothing, and they weren’t at the scene either.’

‘I wonder which ones she had on.’

‘Shoes.’ Gerard looked at Paula with barely concealed contempt. ‘You want to ask about
shoes
.’

Paula tried not to react. ‘The school is strict about footwear – so if she had nice ones on, high heels maybe, it’s a good sign again that she was planning to see someone after school.’

Gerard sneered, ‘Or maybe she liked the colour. Where’d they
go
, that’s the important thing.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘I mean, did he take the shoes as some kind of trophy, or—’

‘You’re trying to say there’s a ritualistic element?’ She glared at him. ‘There’s no evidence of that. And she wasn’t sexually assaulted, which is very significant.’

Guy held up his hands. ‘I should stress there’s no assumptions here. We don’t know who killed Cathy, or why. It could even have been an accident, and then the killer panicked, hid her body. We don’t know anything yet, except what we don’t know.’

Paula and Gerard subsided, him scowling again, her keeping a carefully blank expression. Guy said nothing for a moment. ‘Right. What about mobile records, Avril? Did you check out the number Paula got from Cathy’s friend?’

The younger woman
blinked for a second, then snapped into business. ‘It looks as if Cathy did have a phone after all, though the parents said she hadn’t. It hasn’t been found, and wherever it is, it’s either switched off or disabled. The last triangulated point was on her way home.’ She tapped the town map they had spread out in front of them, Cathy’s usual route home inked in red. ‘Earlier on the Friday she rang the same number a few times. The last call she made was to that again, no answer. There’s no record of this number and it’s now also disabled.’

Guy nodded. ‘OK. So that’s about all that’s useful. Can you do anything with it, Paula?’ When he spoke to her his voice betrayed nothing; only the fact he couldn’t look at her showed how he felt.

She tried to focus, be equally cold and professional. ‘Maybe. They mention fibres in the wound – did they say what they were?’

‘It’s with the lab. Cotton, probably.’

‘So maybe someone tried to stop the bleeding. Maybe it
was
an accident.’

‘Perhaps. Let’s wait and see. They’ll send the other results when they come. The tarpaulin is also with Forensics, and the ropes it was tied with. It wasn’t weighted.’

‘Amateur,’ Bob muttered. An inexperienced killer wouldn’t always realise that, filled with decomposition gases, dead bodies tended to float.

‘Possibly. These are all the leads we have. They can get DNA from the foetus, of course, but unless the father’s on the database it won’t be much use at first.’ He spoke tonelessly; Guy wasn’t spending much time on ‘team building’ this morning. ‘That’s all then. We’re under a lot of pressure as you know, not just on this current case, but on Majella’s too. We need to get officers on the streets – sweeping fields, divers in the rest of the canal and any lakes nearby, door-to-doors . . .’

‘What’s the progress on those?’

‘They’re busy with Cathy’s neighbours,’ said Gerard. ‘There’s an old lady on one side, so maybe she saw something. Single fella on the other, he was out at work, he says.’

‘OK. Did you get the CCTV from last Friday?’

‘Some. A few businesses aren’t keen to hand it over.’

‘Well, remind
them who’s asking, and if needs be, pull up some dirt on them. They probably won’t have any older footage, but get them to look back three weeks as well, to when Majella went.’

‘Will do. Sir, did – did they say how it’ll work, with us here and Serious Crime at the station?’ Gerard, as a detective attached to the main Ballyterrin station, was going to be uncomfortably torn in this case. You can’t ride two horses with one arse, as Paula’s father used to say.

Guy winced. ‘We’re still wrangling over it. Corry being out’s putting a real strain on things, so the Super wants us to carry on some of the work. I’m saying we’re not a murder team and we’ve still got forty years of unsolved cases to go through. I think we’ll end up with a bit of both in the end. Try to get the footage, anyway. We want to know did anyone see Cathy leaving school, how far did she get down that road – was she taken somewhere else before she was killed?’

‘What about Majella? Are we doing anything else?’ Paula spoke up.

Avril agreed. ‘People’ll be asking, after your man and his carry-on at the press day. There was a piece in the
Irish Times
yesterday. Will Majella end up dead too, they were saying.’

Guy was frowning at the mention of Aidan O’Hara. ‘We still don’t know if there’s any connection. We will, of course, be carrying on the search, along with the station officers. There will be posters, maybe another TV appeal, and more interviews of people living on the traveller site. Let’s get those local volunteers back on the case, dragging the canal and so on. We’ll have to be seen to take action, but I’d really prefer we didn’t entertain the notion of an associated case at this point.’

‘People’ll only worry,’ said Bob. ‘No sense, when we don’t know they’re linked, is there.’

Paula didn’t
say that people were probably already worried, seeing as a dead teenager had just been pulled out of the canal, and another one had been missing for nearly a month. ‘And what about the older cases?’ she asked Guy. ‘You mentioned them at the conference. Why?’

He looked at her. ‘People need to understand why this unit is involved, and see that we’re earning our keep.’

‘You don’t think we should tell the families, the Reillys and the Dunnes? It’s not very fair on them. They’ll be wondering which cases you mean – whether you have new information on their daughter, maybe, or their sister . . .’ She stopped. Everyone was watching them.

Guy drummed his fingers on the table. ‘I take your point, Paula, but it’s too early to tell them. It may be nothing, after all. That’s what I want you on – reviewing the cases for any similarities.’

She tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Did you find the name of the third girl back then – the one who killed herself?’

He didn’t even need to check this time. ‘Annie Miller, that was her name. We also need to go through the files of the Gardaí – where’s Fiacra, by the way?’ No one knew. Guy tutted. ‘He should be here by now. I’ll call him.’

But as Guy took out his phone, the glass door buzzed and a dishevelled Fiacra Quinn almost fell in, weighed down by the stack of something in his arms.

‘Fiacra, what—?’

‘Sorry, boss, sorry.’ He pushed into the room and dumped his burden on the table, looking round at them. ‘Sorry I’m late and all, but have any of yous seen the paper this morning?’

For the next ten minutes, eyes were glued to the paper and lips were moving, as the team digested what Aidan had written in the hot-off-the-press
Ballyterrin Gazette
.

‘The gurrier,’ Bob kept growling, as he leafed through the pages. ‘The wee gurrier.’

For once
Paula concurred with him. It was all there – a big smiling photo of Majella Ward on the front page, captioned
Why aren’t they looking for this girl?
He’d interviewed Majella’s father, who’d given a long tirade against the ‘institutional racism’ of the unit. There was a smaller photo of Guy, looking like a shifty politician in his smart wool coat –
Why English ‘consultant’ got fired from London force.
Inside, Aidan had gone after Bob –
washed-up RUC man linked to bullying of Catholic officers
– and the team itself –
failed unit costs thousands a day to run
. He’d also used the Editorial to thunder about ‘taxpayers” money wasted on paper-pushing cross-border projects’, pointing out that the unit had so far only opened cases of supposed IRA victims: was there a sectarian bias at work? He even slyly blamed them for Cathy:
Team bungled for a week while girl lay dead
. Page after page of it. Speculation about what ‘old cases’ Guy could have meant when he spoke to the press.
Is there a serial killer in our midst?
The rest of the team hadn’t been named – typical Aidan, only going after management – but Paula had featured as
forensic psychologist brought in from London at taxpayers’ expense
.

She lowered the paper. ‘Well, those car rallies don’t seem too bad now, I must say.’

Guy seemed to come back to himself. She’d watched him read, betraying nothing – just a tightening round his mouth. ‘This is unfortunate, but it’s just one opinion.’

‘A lot of people read this now,’ said Avril despairingly. ‘What’s he got against us?’

‘He’s a gobshite,’ growled Gerard. ‘Er – sorry, Sergeant.’

But Bob didn’t seem to mind this time. He was shaking his head, sucking his teeth. ‘They’ll be going mad, the press lads.’

The Northern Ireland Police were so concerned about public opinion they’d even started a new force to escape the past. They weren’t going to like this.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Guy firmly. ‘We have to get to work. Fiacra, there’s a briefing for you to check with the Gardaí. Paula, I’d love to see your findings, when you’re ready.’

In other
words,
get on with it
. Paula watched as he strode into his office, a copy of the paper under his arm. The blinds went down.

Gerard swore again as Bob also barrelled out of the room. Avril gave him an offended look. ‘Sorry, sorry. But he’s a wee fecker, this O’Hara fella.’ Avril tutted, but did not disagree.

Fiacra spoke. ‘Isn’t he the one whose da was the Editor before, aye?’

They all thought for a moment about what had happened to John O’Hara.

‘It’s no excuse,’ Avril declared. ‘He’s no right to say all this.’

Fiacra scratched his head, his open smiling face downcast. ‘It’s bad craic, this. Well, I’m away to Dundalk. Catch yous later.’ He went out, inserting white headphones into his ears from the pocket of his suit.

Paula quickly re-read the bit about Guy.
Inspector Brooking was formerly working on London counter-terrorism, in the wake of the 7/7 bombings. But he was removed from this post in 2008 after two men died in dawn raids by his team. The police Complaints Commission ruled that ‘unacceptable force’ had been used by Brooking’s officers. Don’t we deserve better than a washed-up English bobby on the beat?

She knocked softly on his door. After a while, he said, ‘Come in.’ He was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, the paper in front of him. She saw how hard he’d been holding it together in front of the team; he looked awful.

‘Are you all right, Inspector?’

He frowned at the use of his title. ‘You don’t have to call me that.’

She sat down. ‘Just ignore it. Aidan’s, he’s – well, he has issues. Especially with the police.’

‘You’re close then. The two of you.’

‘I wouldn’t
say that. His parents were friends with mine.’ The moment she said it, she could have kicked herself. What was she thinking, bringing up her family? Hastily she added, ‘Aidan’s dad was killed in the Troubles. The IRA shot him in his office, and Aidan was there at the time. It’s sort of messed him up a bit.’

Guy rubbed his eyes. ‘Everyone has something, don’t they?’

‘That’s what happens in a war.’

He looked up. ‘It isn’t true, you know. What he wrote.’

‘I didn’t think it was.’

‘Well – I mean, some of it is technically true. The men did die; it seemed like one of them had explosives, so an officer fired some shots and . . . well, it turned out he hadn’t. It was awful, of course, but an accident. Everyone was so jumpy then. Mistakes happened. But that’s not why I left. He got that wrong.’

She watched him. ‘Why did you?’

Guy shuddered, pressing
his palms over his face. ‘I left because my son was killed.’

Chapter Thirteen

For a while she said nothing, listening to him breathe hard, as if he might cry. ‘Is that your son?’ He followed her gaze to the photo on the desk.

‘That’s him. Jamie.’

‘How did he—’

‘After the terrorism job, they moved me onto gangs. I was a sort of czar, as they call it in the media. I wanted out of anti-terror anyway. To be honest, I thought we were doing more harm than good. Repeating all the mistakes made here.’ He gestured out the window. ‘And also – a lot of people had died in terrorist attacks, yes – but where we lived, in East London, a child was being stabbed nearly every day. Every bloody day you’d wake up and find some other skinny kid lying dead in the gutter.’

Like the early nineties in Northern Ireland, when you listened to every bulletin tensed, waiting to hear who else was killed. Her mother gone too during that time, lost through the cracks somehow.

‘We did well for a while – knife armistices, education in schools, helping girls get out. You know what they do to the girls?’

She knew; she’d worked on gang cases at Missing Persons. ‘They rape them.’

‘The boys
take turns,’ said Guy. ‘Girls younger than Katie. Initiation, they call it.’

She waited.

‘I think it was getting to them, the gang leaders. So they found out where I lived, which was easy enough. I’d made a big deal of living locally, being part of the community. They drove round one Sunday. Quiet day, sunny. Jamie was playing football in the garden. I’d fallen asleep in front of the TV. Tess – she’d gone to work. She’s a midwife, and someone was having a breech birth or something.’ He paused. ‘Katie heard the shots. She was in her room doing homework. She woke me, and then – and then we found him, and I did CPR, but . . .’ His face convulsed. ‘I think they only meant to shoot at the house, just to scare me. But it got him right here.’ He touched a hand to the breast of his suit, over the heart. His eyes were fixed on the photograph of Jamie, gap-toothed, smiling. ‘It’s one of the reasons I took this job. I thought maybe, if I was lucky, I’d never have to see a dead child again. If everything’s already happened, if it’s in the past, then it can’t hurt. That’s what I thought, anyway.’