The Lost (34 page)

There he was, bloody Aidan O’Hara, at the press conference where he’d made such a fuss. Look at him, the bastard, pencil behind his ear, shirt untucked, face unshaven. Why hadn’t he rung her?

‘
The
Ballyterrin Gazette
is operated by Aidan O’Hara, son of former Editor John O’Hara, who was shot dead by paramilitaries at the paper’s office in 1986
.’ There were the library pictures that cropped up from time to time, the grainy eighties footage of blown-out glass, a security tape across the door of the building, an ambulance outside. A scene repeated a thousand times across Northern Ireland.

‘
Locals have been vocal in opposition to the closure, and are now raising a collection to keep the paper going for its next issue
.’

The shots were of Ballyterrin now, a bucket being shaken at a street corner – the sign reading
Save the Gazette
. The pert local reporter was asking one man in a beige anorak why he had just thrown in a pound. ‘Well, it’s important now, isn’t it.’

‘Do you read the
Gazette
, sir?’ The reporter moved the large microphone from her mouth to his.

‘Oh aye, never miss it. For the death notices, you know. And there does be good articles from time to time.’ Paula nearly laughed at that.

‘
And that’s the news, now the weather with Kirsty
. . .’

She looked up. PJ was getting painfully to his feet. ‘Dad?’

‘I’ve to ring Pat. Not right, her seeing that on her own, is it, John’s blood on the steps.’

Paula was ashamed she hadn’t thought of that. ‘No. You’re right.’ Because Aidan wouldn’t be much comfort; he probably hadn’t even seen the news from whatever den of iniquity he’d holed up in. He likely had no idea the people of his hometown were doing
their best to save his rubbish rag of a paper, since it meant so much to him.

As PJ hobbled into the hall, her phone beeped and Paula leaped a mile in the air. She was glad her father was out of the room, but he still heard. ‘Who’s that texting at this hour?’

‘It’s not that late, Dad. Anyway, it’s work.’ Her heart slowed as she realised it wasn’t Aidan. Of course it wasn’t, the bastard.

It
was
work; Gerard, in fact, true to his word. He texted all in one efficient, punctuation-free message:
nothing to report no news cant get any more on mission g
. She sighed and pocketed the phone. ‘I’m going up to bed, Dad. See if I can make any headway in the morning.’

‘All right. Don’t read too late.’

As if she was twelve. ‘I won’t. Night, Dad.’

Paula’s mind raced all night as she tried to sleep in her narrow single bed. The cat. She remembered seeing the home-made poster the little girls had been drawing. A fat ginger scribble and the words
LOST CATT
. The force had dismissed the knife find as a prank, some sick person messing with animals, but what if . . . Really, she needed to talk to Aidan. He was the only person who could help her draw her thoughts into some kind of order. It was inconvenient, then, that she wasn’t speaking to him.

As she thought about it, a wave of anger swamped her so that she had to sit up in bed. How dare he do
that
with her, after all these years, and then not get in touch! It was – it was juvenile, that’s what it was. Although of course she wasn’t getting in touch with him either.

The orange street light slanted in through glass streaked dark with rain. What time was it? Three, four? She’d barely shut her eyes, tossing and turning, her mind churning up impossible plans. There had to be a way to investigate Carr, even though he’d shut down the paper and got her thrown off the case. This was a man who thought he could do anything, that no
one would ever challenge him.

She thought of what Theresa had said.
Mammy’d skin her if she went with fellas.
What if Cathy had told her parents her secret – told them she was pregnant? How would that fit in with the Carrs and their perfect life?

She thought about Cathy. If you were fifteen, and you’d just found out you were pregnant, who would you turn to? How could you tell your parents what had happened, when your father led the local council, and your mother was Angela Carr? Angela who said going out with boys was ‘dirty’. Angela who never let her daughter out. Angela who’d been so pale and terrified the last time Paula had seen her, at the house.

Mammy
. . .

Paula snapped on her Anglepoise lamp, hoping PJ would actually have relaxed his constant vigilance and gone to sleep. The thing she wanted was somewhere in the vast pile of papers she’d lugged back from the office, she was sure of it. But where?

Shuffling into her old dressing-gown and fluffy slippers – it was always cold in the house – she eased open the door and made it down the stairs by the light from the street, feeling her way along the flocked wallpaper. In the kitchen it was brighter, next door’s security lights flickering on in the wind and rain. She shuffled through the papers, which PJ had arranged into a tidier system more to his own liking. It was something Aidan had given her, she was sure of it, in that great dossier of doom. Financial records, blog print-outs. Cathy’s school reports – how on earth had he got hold of those? She didn’t even want to know. Family pictures, paper snippets . . . There!

She saw the name she wanted, and then suddenly light exploded onto her eyes. ‘Christ! You blinded me.’

PJ was standing in the door, leaning
heavily on his crutch. Coming out of the cut-off leg of his tracksuit bottoms, the cast was snow-white. She realised how stupid she looked, kneeling on the cold lino tiles in her pyjamas, squinting in the half-dark at bits of scrappy paper.

‘Sorry, Dad. I didn’t want to wake you.’

He came in. ‘You’re a grown woman, Paula. You can put the light on if you need to.’

She blushed. ‘Sorry.’

‘Whatever would you be at down there?’

‘I just had an idea.’ She turned back to the papers, frustrated as it slipped out of her grasp again, the thought she’d had. ‘I remembered something I’d seen.’

‘Did you find it?’ He was putting the kettle on, as if on auto-pilot.

‘I’m not sure. I’ll take it back up to bed, sorry.’

In the bedroom she knelt in the pool of light from the Anglepoise. It was so late it was early, but she had to keep searching through it all until her hands closed on a crinkly piece of old newsprint.
Bingo
.

The piece of paper that had driven Paula out of her bed to the cold kitchen was a clipping from the
Ballyterrin Gazette
in its former heyday, when it had actually served up hard news, rather than the car rallies and dog shows Paula liked to make fun of. Twenty-five years ago, in fact. The year before John O’Hara had been shot in front of his young son, dying to protect his right to tell the truth, whether anyone wanted it or not.

Scandal of Case M
, it read.

For years in the North we have followed events South of the border, often priding ourselves on our moral superiority. Many cases have come to light in recent years that seem to prove this. Abuse scandals. Cover-ups by the Catholic Church. Pregnant women banned from leaving the country for an abortion by a government more concerned with bowing the knee to men in cassocks than protecting the vulnerable. Many will have been raped, or told that giving birth was likely to kill them, and yet there is no choice at all. We may well have felt smug. That could never happen here, in the more enlightened North. Yet abortion is just as illegal in the North, despite being part of the United Kingdom and subject to the laws and principles of that domain. Unless, of course, you happen to be young and female. And in Ballyterrin we’ve just witnessed one of the worst miscarriages of justice this country has ever seen.

When social worker Ann Cleary made a regular visit to one of her cases, she had no idea what would greet her that day. The family had been on her books since their mother died six months before. Although they lived on the notorious Shorelands estate, it appeared the father had been coping well, and the only child, a girl of twelve, had taken over the care of the house. But when Ann Cleary arrived at the door that day, there was no answer. She could hear loud sounds of choking from upstairs. Becoming alarmed, she managed to gain access to the property, and dashing to the bathroom found the twelve year old on the floor, bleeding from multiple cuts to her arms. She called an ambulance and the girl was rushed to hospital. Too inexperienced to know where to cut, her life had not been in danger. But the ordeal wasn’t over, as it was discovered that the girl, barely more than a child herself, was several months’ pregnant. A tragic story.

Yet due to this country’s draconian abortion laws, alienated from the rest of the UK by our moral rectitude, the story didn’t end there. According to the girl’s father, his daughter had been ‘out of control’ since her mother’s death, and sleeping with many boys in the neighbourhood. Not only will this child now be forced to give birth to her baby, she will also be sent to the notorious Ballyterrin Safe Harbour home where she will work off her ‘debt’. When her baby is born it will be shipped off with hundreds of others to wealthy childless couples in America, who pay through the nose for this vile cargo of Irish blood. Ballyterrin has failed this girl, and it continues to fail hundreds like her, who would rightly think that no one in this whole town cares if they live or die.

Paula blinked on finishing the article. She’d never realised that John O’Hara had been such a stern prose-writer – she’d only been six when he died. A child. And that other child, the brutalised twelve year old, what had become of her? What was her real name?

There was a paperclip on the cutting, as if something had fallen off in transit. She scrabbled through the papers until she found it. Yes, this had been it. It was only one sheet – a court listing. The case title was
R vs McGreavy, A
. What did the A stand for?

Something was in Paula’s corner vision, poking her in the shoulder. Something she remembered, recently, someone saying,
I’m twenty-five
. . . But it was too late, and she was too tired. Perhaps in the morning she’d swallow her pride and call Aidan herself, find out if he knew any more than this.

Paula alternately dozed and tossed for a few hours, before the black outside the window began to lift somewhat, and she heard PJ’s familiar cough next door. Must be six, then. Early. But there was another sound . . . She sat bolt upright in bed, as if a tap of cold dread had suddenly been turned on inside her. The phone was ringing, a sharp fractured sound. Phones
at this hour, it was always bad news. News to make the heart turn over and the blood still. Next door, through the thin walls, she heard her father wake too. He had a receiver in his room, because of his leg, and almost agonisingly slowly she heard him pick it up. ‘Ballyterrin 94362.’

A long silence. Paula felt as if her legs had frozen.

Then, a very slow shuffle. He was coming to her door. Oh God. In a minute, he was going to say something bad – someone else dead, something awful. The door squeaked open and PJ stood there in his pyjamas.

‘Dad?’

‘You better get up, pet.’

Chapter Thirty

It was like her dreams,
or her nightmares. The house, artificially lit. Every window bright with light. Like Christmas, but for the worst of reasons. Like the day seventeen years ago, when she’d come home and her life had changed forever. For a moment, Paula couldn’t get out of the car. Then she swallowed hard, and parked it outside Guy’s house.

Bob Hamilton was in the kitchen, the receiver of the phone held to his ear. ‘Aye, I’ll hold.’ He shook his head at her, grim-faced.

‘When did he realise?’ she asked quietly.

‘He wakes up early most days. Doesn’t sleep.’

‘And her things? Did she take any things with her?’

‘They’re up there checking.’ Bob’s round face was as sombre as she’d ever seen it. ‘I’m telling you, Miss Maguire, things is in a bad way. When we found wee Majella safe and sound, seemed like that was that, just an isolated incident, but now . . .’

She didn’t need him to spell it out. Now all those fears were back again. What if she’d been wrong all along about Cathy? What if there
was
a serial killer at large after all?

‘Can I go up?’ she asked. ‘I know I’m not meant to be here, but—’

Bob Hamilton gave her a long look. ‘Inspector Brooking said you was off the case.’

‘Come on, Bo— Sergeant. Maybe I can help. I know I’ve not been – well, I know you don’t agree with some of what I did, but if I could do something, should I not try?
Please
.’

He stood back to let
her past. ‘Miss Maguire, if you can do anything to find the wee girl safe, I think we’d all be grateful.’

The house was full of officers
in the dark green uniform of the PSNI, clumping on the stairs and talking into radios. Upstairs all the lights were blazing against the gloom of dawn, as Helen Corry stood taking notes, looking distinctly cross. Paula saw Gerard Monaghan flipping open notebooks on the desk, maths textbooks, a lever-arch file.

Standing over them, dictating orders, was Guy himself. He caught Paula’s eye and paused for just a moment before carrying on: ‘Make sure they search the train stations and buses. She knows how to get to Dublin, I’m sure.’

Corry was saying, ‘We’ll do it. Honestly, Inspector, we do this stuff as standard.’

Gerard asked, ‘Sir? Is any of her stuff gone?’

Guy glanced round the room, and for the first time Paula saw he was barely holding it together. His eyes were wild. ‘I think so . . . where’s her schoolbag? Do you see a schoolbag?’ They all looked, as if catching the whiff of crazy in his voice. He clutched his head. ‘I’m not thinking straight.’

‘Guy,’ she said quietly.

‘We need to talk to her schoolfriends – let’s get an officer over to, oh, what’s her name – Siobhan? Is that her friend?’