The Lost (33 page)

Where she couldn’t offend anyone, he meant. Because they were all most likely dead. ‘Will you reopen them, then? The other ones I found, where they’d mentioned a church group?’

‘If you can get together a dossier, I’ll pass it on to the Gardaí.’

It felt like a
sop. ‘Fine. I’ll just get my things.’

Paula went to her desk and defiantly swept the entire contents into a large bin bag she found in the kitchen. They couldn’t stop her taking her notes, anyway. On her way out, the bulging bag in her arms, she encountered resistance.

‘Jesus!’

‘Sorry.’ She lowered the bag to see Gerard Monaghan’s chest level with her nose. ‘It’s you. Great.’

‘What’s up with you?’ He frowned at her. ‘Are you not going the wrong way?’

‘Apparently not. Ask him.’ She jerked her head at Guy’s office, where the occupant was staring fixedly at his computer screen.

‘Eh?’

‘I’m being “moved to lighter duties”, or whatever the bullshit jargon is.’ She didn’t even care about swearing any more. ‘That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? They think I’m a liability too.’

His brow creased. ‘That’s daft. You’ve been right the whole time.’

‘Well.’ She hoped Gerard Monaghan wasn’t going to start being nice. Then she really would scream. Or even worse, cry. ‘Much use it was to me.’

‘Listen,’ he hissed out of the side of his mouth. ‘This is shite. I’ll keep you posted, OK? Keep your phone on.’

‘All right.’ Her lip was quivering. ‘Do me a favour, will you? Say something mean? Just for a minute.’

‘Eh?’ Total confusion now. ‘You’re mad, you are.’

‘That’ll do. Bye, Gerard.’

The traffic was minimal at that hour. A few minutes later she was knocking on her father’s door, no hands free to find her key. When PJ hobbled out on his crutches and saw her there with her arms full of bin bag, he raised his eyebrows. ‘Back already?’

Paula burst
into tears.

‘Lord save us,’ PJ muttered. ‘You better come in and get a drop of tea.’

Chapter Twenty-Nine

For the rest of the
day Paula decided to join her father in Retiredsville. She observed PJ’s habits carefully. He rose at six – far too early. She heard his radio going from the early hours, still obsessed with keeping up with the news. This, she knew, was a habit born from years of late-night awakenings and blood-red dawns, coughing and stamping feet in the cold, as yet another body was found. After so long in the RUC, every day that he woke up and someone wasn’t dead was a victory for PJ. Every political gaffe story and cat-up-tree novelty item was proof they now lived in a sane society, where murder wasn’t a way of life. So PJ arose with the dawn, or before it in winter, and drank his first cup of tea of many with an ear out for death and destruction, as Ballyterrin’s dark rooftops took shape in the cold morning light. Since falling from the ladder, he’d taken to making the tea the night before, and supping it from an old Thermos top.

Then he would spend an hour in bed, reviewing matters. What matters these were, Paula had to employ some light snooping to find out. Her father had carried notebooks ever since she could remember – the policeman’s tool. She remembered fumbling downstairs as a child, in search of water, and finding him still awake with the TV down low, his feet in white sports socks propped up on the ‘pouf’, as he stared fixedly at the ruled pages of these small black books. On peeking into his room, Paula had seen hundreds of them in a neat stack by the bed. Was he reviewing all his old work, the forgotten cases?

She didn’t like to go any
further in. The room was exactly as her mother had left it. Chipboard wardrobe with the flecked mirror reflecting Paula’s face in the doorway, patterned seventies carpet underfoot, net curtains on the windows. Margaret Maguire had often moaned about the house’s décor, and Paula wondered now would the two-up two-down have been transformed had her mother not vanished that day. Cream carpet, underfloor heating. Yet another question that would never be answered. Another gap.

After his morning review, PJ would get up with much clattering and coughing; usually at this time Paula was still burying her head under her pillow and trying to sleep. He would stump into the small lime-tiled bathroom, lodging his crutch in the bidet while he somehow washed and shaved, his bad leg jutting out like a broken branch. Then he’d shuffle into the bedroom and dress in his tracksuit bottoms and walking fleece, before attempting a manoeuvre close to scaling the north face of Everest in order to get downstairs, where he would hobble between the kitchen and TV all day.

What did he do? She watched him on her first day of enforced leave. Gardening leave, it was sometimes called. Given that the barren patch outside their back door had been dug up by the police in 1993 and left to die, Margaret Maguire’s roses shrivelled and black, actual gardening wasn’t on the cards. So Paula spread the contents of her purloined bin bag all over the kitchen table. PJ, who had the kettle on and was making toast, lifted an eyebrow.

‘I stole the case-notes, Daddy.’

‘So I see.’ He carried on rinsing out the teapot, his crutch rammed under one elbow.

She looked over the notes. Aidan’s print-outs, his scrawly writing all over them. Pictures of Cathy, of Louise. Transcripts of interviews with Majella Ward, Ed Lazarus, and Maddy Goldberg. Her own notes on conversations with the Carr children and parents, Majella Ward’s family,
and Cathy Carr’s so-called friends. The autopsy report on Cathy, and the inquest into Louise’s death, ferreted out by Saoirse. Aidan’s articles on the unit, and the most recent exposé of Eamonn Carr’s links to the Mission. Maeve Cooley’s blog. A lot of paper had come from the past few weeks. Felt like a lifetime.

PJ cleared his throat again, hands following the familiar ritual. Warm pot, discard. Two tea bags. Fill pot. Set on hob at mark two. Assemble cups, milk always in first, because that was how Margaret Maguire had insisted.

‘Dad?’

‘Aye?’

‘Will you help me?’

PJ gave her a wry look as he waited the requisite three minutes for the tea to stew. ‘Thought you’d never ask.’

‘This is an awful tangle, pet.’

‘I know.’

‘You’d want to be organising your case-notes better.’

‘I know.’

‘Tidy desk, tidy mind—’

‘
Dad
! Can you see anything?’

He’d been reading over her papers for the best part of an hour, while she paced the small brown kitchen, gulping down tar-strength tea. ‘So this neighbour, this Crawford fella – I know the one, works in the bank – he says he ran her up the road, but she wanted out at the bottom of their street?’

‘Yes. I know he sounds guilty as sin, but it checked out; some busybody saw Cathy get out like he said, and besides, he’s an alibi.’ She didn’t feel up to discussing gay escorts with her father just then.

PJ’s brow was furrowed. ‘Where could she have got to, from one end of the street to the other?’

‘Exactly. There was some suggestion
that she got in another car, but we couldn’t find anything. No one saw, apparently.’

‘Well, Paula. It seems to me the main question is: did the poor wee lassie get to her house or not?’

Paula was staring at him.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Is that not it?’

She spoke slowly. ‘I asked her little sisters. They said . . .’ What had they said? She hadn’t really taken in her conversation with Niamh and Ciara. They were so small she couldn’t imagine they had anything to add, and their sense of time wasn’t concrete enough to know what ‘last Friday’ meant. ‘The second wee one. She said something like, “Mammy shouted at Cathy in the kitchen. Then she told us to wait in the family room.”’

‘Family room.’ PJ snorted at this Americanism but Paula talked over him.

‘Cathy had no shoes on when they found her. They take their shoes off before they go inside, the Carr kids. And that house had been painted recently – I remember noticing the smell, when . . . and that knife they found, the one that caused the riot, it had cat’s blood on it.’

PJ coughed. ‘Had the Carrs a cat?’

‘They did when we first visited,’ she said slowly. ‘But when I went back, the cat was missing.’ The poster Ciara had been making. LOST CATT.

PJ coughed again, moving his bad leg to get the blood flowing. ‘There you go. There’s life in your old dad yet, pet.’

Sitting in the house all night was excruciating, like being back at school again, during that terrible blank winter after Margaret Maguire had gone, and Paula and her father had sat rigidly night after night, in front of TV shows they couldn’t take in,
ER
and
X-files
and
Frasier
, as if afraid that the moment they decided to go out would
be the day she’d come back.
Hello, I’m here, did you not miss me?

After several days of this, sitting at home, sifting through the papers with increasing desperation, one night there was a ring at the bell. Paula and her dad looked at each other, confused. No one ever called round to the Maguires’ door. PJ was starting to creak up, so Paula said, ‘Sit down, Daddy. I’ll get it.’

On the doorstep, huddling against the rain in a red ski jacket, was Saoirse. For a moment Paula just looked at her in astonishment.

Saoirse jiggled her arms around herself. ‘Well, are you not going to ask me in? I’m fecking freezing.’

In the kitchen, Paula continued to watch her friend in silence as PJ offered tea, chatted happily. ‘It’s great to see you, love. The doctoring’s all going well?’

‘Not too bad. I wouldn’t mind getting out of the shift work if I could. You know yourself, Mr Maguire, it’s not great when you’ve a family.’

‘You’re right there, pet. And how is the fella himself – Dave, is it?’

‘Oh, he’s grand.’

Paula stood up. ‘Dad, would you give us a minute, please?’

After PJ had stumped out, a curious look on his face, Paula went to the hob and wordlessly poured Saoirse’s tea from the pot. ‘It’s weird – you coming to the door. It’s almost like no time’s gone by.’

Saoirse was sitting at the table, small hands red, still in her coat. She sniffed with cold. ‘I thought that the other night, too, you and Aidan being there.’

‘It’s not like that.’ Time
had
gone by, and there was no turning back the clock.

‘He’s never had a girlfriend – least not that I know,’ Saoirse said. ‘That girl in Dublin – it was a one-time thing.’ Paula’s hand tightened on the teapot. ‘I think he
was just in a bad way at the time. I don’t think he meant to do it.’

Paula said nothing, stirring her tea very slowly, and after a moment Saoirse changed the subject. ‘That’s not why I came, anyway. I found you something.’

‘Oh yeah?’

Saoirse put down her mug and felt in the pocket of her over-large jacket. It was so big Paula wondered if it was in fact Dave’s. That made her obscurely sad, for some reason, thinking what it would be like to be wrapped all around in someone else’s love.

‘I managed to dig this up,’ Saoirse said. ‘Don’t tell anyone. Like I said, I know the family’s GP, and the mother’s been in a bad way. She had this hidden away the whole time, hoping they’d not rule it suicide, so maybe the poor kid wouldn’t go to Hell or whatever she believes. Tragic really.’

Saoirse slid a sheet of photocopied paper across the table. It had clearly been duplicated from something held in a poly-pocket – Paula could see the ghostly holes of the perforations. A scrap of paper had been held inside it, lined, as if torn from a notebook. On it was some writing in a curly, childish hand. She squinted at it.
Tell Ed I love him. I’m sorry. I just love him so much.
The last underlined three times, until the pen had torn the paper.

She looked up at her friend, glasses steamed up and drops of rain in her dark hair. ‘Is this . . .?’

‘Yeah. Louise McCourt’s suicide note.’

So she had it now, the proof that Louise had been one of Ed’s victims, that she had stepped up onto that car hood herself and ended her own life. But there was nothing to say he had killed Cathy. Everyone seemed to have an alibi, as if the girl had walked down her own street and simply vanished, yards from safety.

After Saoirse’s visit, Paula
was no further on than she’d been, still tormented by the idea that everything she knew wasn’t enough. Then, on the local news that night, among the ribbon-cuttings and political scandals, there it was. Paula was half-asleep on the sofa, her phone never far from her elbow. She jiggled and poked at the keys in a way that made her ashamed of herself. Sitting around waiting to see if a man would get in touch. Christ, she wasn’t eighteen. So why did everything feel disturbingly familiar? She was beyond furious to once again be waiting for Aidan to ring. He’d said they would talk, hadn’t he? So why hadn’t he called?

‘. . .
and in Ballyterrin, a local businessman has hit out against allegations in the local paper
. . .’

‘Turn it up!’ She bolted forward, the TV being too old for a remote, and pressed the button for sound, sinking to her knees in front of the screen, and ignoring PJ’s look of surprise.

On the screen were both of them. To see them together made her breathless for a second, with all she knew, all she suspected.

Eamonn Carr was being interviewed outside the Mission building, its pebble-dashed walls in the background. Beside him stood Ed Lazarus, smug in a spotless white smock. Eamonn looked awful – grey and worn, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. He was speaking. ‘I’d like to say that the Mission has the full backing of myself and my family. Our daughter Cathy got a tremendous amount from the time she spent there. We totally refute the allegations made in the local press that they had anything to do with her loss. Indeed, we find it quite worrying that the police would focus on an organisation that’s doing such good for our town. Someone out there killed our daughter, and we urge the police to continue looking for him, instead of wasting their time harassing the young people here. Thank you.’

The voiceover continued,
‘
The local paper has since been shut down due to a dispute over finance
.’