The Lost (39 page)
The bailiffs had probably been right to ignore the old supply closet set into the back wall of the office. It held an array of filing cabinets, cleaning apparatus, a detritus of old books and tapes the paper had been sent to review. Paula sneezed at the dust.
Aidan poked a mop with his foot. ‘Not much here, is there.’
‘Wait. What’s that?’ She plunged into the dark depths of the cupboard and came up with a long flat piece of wood, several inches across and curved at the end, sanded smooth. ‘This’ll do.’ She swung the stick back and forward.
Aidan just stared at her. ‘Have you totally lost it? A camogie stick? What in the name of God are you planning to do with a camogie stick?’
She laughed. ‘Aidan, did you never see me play?’
‘Oh, right enough, I was forgetting. Wasn’t there that girl who—’
‘Eh, I still say she broke her own nose. You’re meant to
hit
the ball, you know?’
‘Fair enough.’ He looked at her, suddenly serious. ‘You take care. Else PJ’ll have my guts for garters – that’s if he doesn’t want to skin me already after the other night.’
Paula’s stomach dipped alarmingly
at this reference to their under-the-desk antics, but she made herself look away, focus on the task in hand. ‘All right. You watch things here, and I’ll go to the house. Aidan?’ He turned on his way out. ‘You be careful too.’
A brief smile. ‘Maguire, I never knew you cared.’ And he was gone.
Paula was soon cursing herself.
Why hadn’t she insisted on taking her own car earlier? The Volvo, ugly but reliable, was parked up in front of Guy’s house, several cul-de-sacs over from the Carrs’. She’d have to walk. Ballyterrin was a small town, but it still took her a good twenty minutes to get up the hill. She was the only one going the other way, as hordes of teens headed to the concert, and parents led smaller children in costumes to see the fireworks show.
Paula, childless and zipped up in a black jacket and trousers, drew curious looks, as parents shepherded their offspring away from her. Not to mention for the camogie stick she had tucked under her arm, trying to be discreet. She didn’t blame them. Among all this mock-evil, devils and witches and ghosts, something real and terrifying was abroad. Someone had cut Cathy Carr’s throat and put her in the dark waters of the canal – that much they knew, though the rest of the crossword puzzle was full of blanks. But Paula was beginning to have more of an idea who it was. At least, she thought so.
The Carrs’ ranch-style house looked deserted in the gloom. Evening was closing in fast around Paula, damp mist pressing on her skin like little ghost hands. The penumbra of a street light illuminated the lawn, jets of rain shooting down into the light. Paula huddled deeper into her jacket, shiveringly aware that Ed Lazarus was still out there somewhere. The windows were all dark, curtains open. Was anyone even there?
Remembering her earlier visit,
and Eamonn Carr’s threats about trespassing, she slipped in the front gate, careful not to jangle it on its lock, and moved round to the pebble-dashed walls of the house.
The rain fell harder as she passed the kitchen, peering in at the clean surfaces and silenced kitchen appliances. A bowl of fruit stood on the table in the dark. On the outside, everything was normal here. But there was no sign of life, of any kind.
Paula reached the glass-panelled kitchen door and put her hand on the knob, heart pounding. It would be locked, surely. There was no one here.
The door clicked open and swung into the dark kitchen. Shouldering her camogie stick and gulping hard, she eased in. The house was silent but for the hum of the fridge. It felt warm, safe. The white cupboards and tiles were scrubbed clean. Paula thought of the mess a neck-wound made. Surely Cathy couldn’t have died in here. She started to breathe quickly, realising suddenly where she was and what she was doing. This was madness. She leaned the stick against the sink, careful not to make a noise as she crept forward to the archway that led into the hall, and the family room opposite where they’d interviewed Eamonn and Angela that day, when Angela had been so strange and withdrawn. Was that why? Was the woman too terrified to speak up, terrified because she knew exactly who had killed her daughter?
‘Angela?’ Paula’s voice was very small in the dark. She cleared her throat. ‘Angela?’
A voice behind her. A man’s. ‘I’m afraid not, Paula.’ Then the stick was flying at the side of her head.
It’s surprisingly hard to knock someone out cold. Paula knew this from a case she’d worked on once, a rapist who’d attacked his victims with a hammer. Even with severe head trauma, many had been able to remember
facts about their captor. And so it was for her when Eamonn Carr hit her over the head with the camogie stick. There was a blinding flash to the side of her head, and she must have fallen, feeling for a moment weightless. She didn’t know if she passed out exactly, but several seconds exploded into darkness. Then she was looking up at his shoes, her head near the underside of the sink. She heard her own breathing, hard in her ear. ‘H – how . . .’
‘You shouldn’t be talking. You might be hurt.’ He was down on his hunkers looking at her with what could have been concern. He still wore the suit she’d seen him in on stage, tie askew.
‘Hu—’ She couldn’t get enough air in her lungs.
‘You’re wondering how I got here, is that it? I saw your wee boyfriend, the paper fella, sneaking about at the show. No sign of you, so I put two and two together and thought you might be trespassing in my house again.’
She was trying to turn her body, force some air into her, breathe, get her eyes to work. Above her head the cupboard was a slice of white through her vision.
‘And here you are. I thought I got you taken off the case. You’re a bit of a liability, Miss Maguire.’
‘Wh-where . . .’
‘You’re wondering where Angela is. You think I’m keeping her here, is that it? Well, you might be very smart, but you don’t have a notion what’s going on.’ Eamonn Carr stood up with a sigh, and set down the stick he’d been holding. ‘I don’t know why you had to keep poking your nose in. A man has a right to protect his family. It’s private, what goes on in a family.’
Not if you’ve killed your daughter
. But she couldn’t form the words.
‘Now.’ He looked down at her again and shook his head. ‘What are we going to do
with you? I suppose your fella knows where you’re off to.’
She tried to indicate with her head that Aidan would be in like the SWAT team to save her any minute now.
‘We’ll have to take care of you, then, won’t we.’
Take care of her? Paula tried to get her body to understand the urgency of this, that she really had to try to get up, but her gaze was caught by something that marred the white underside of the cupboard. A splash of something red and dried, as if someone had wiped the place clean and missed that one spot. Blood.
‘Come on, come on, stop messing. Sit down.’
Had she blanked out for a moment? Paula had a memory of something dark over her head, and of being pulled up off the floor. Now she blinked around her – the smell of wood and damp was all about. Overhead a bare bulb snapped on: they were in Eamonn Carr’s shed. She was sitting on an upright chair, and when she tried to move her arms she couldn’t. She was tied on with rope.
Eamonn was bent over a workbench, and in some corner of her brain she realised she should be afraid. He turned, and she saw his face under the dim light. Dark shadows carved out lines of grief. In his hand he had a cloth pad, and as he came towards her he held it out in front of him. His other hand caught at her head, pulling up strands of her hair.
She made an inarticulate noise in her throat, trying to find her voice. ‘No – no!’
‘Hold still, woman, would you.’ Irritated, he dabbed with the pad at the cut on her head, the blood slowly seeping down her face. ‘Need to clean up that head of yours, it’s in a bad way.’
Since she couldn’t move her arms, and he was gripping her hair, Paula let him do it, struggling a little
from time to time in token protest.
After he’d finished he sat down heavily on the workbench, staring at her. ‘You never should have come here. You don’t learn, do you?’
It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it, but she glared back at him, finally finding her voice. ‘You better let me go, Eamonn. You’re going to be in a whole world of trouble for this. I’m with the police force—’
‘It’s your own fault. You never should have let it get to this point.’
‘Think about it, Eamonn. You could lose everything. Your business, the kids . . . Angela.’
He brought his hand down on the bench with a smack. ‘Don’t you dare talk about her!’
Paula jumped, jerking the rope painfully against her wrists. A moment ticked by. Paula wondered about the neighbours – if she could find the breath to scream, would anyone hear? Ken Crawford, with his sad little secret, or the deaf old lady on the other side?
‘Where is she, Eamonn?’ Her voice was coming in pants. ‘Where’s Angela? Are you keeping her somewhere?’
Eamonn’s reaction was strange. He laughed for a moment, dripping with bitterness. ‘Christ. That’d make sense, I suppose.’
‘Did it come as a shock to you?’ she risked. ‘When you found out about her?’
He said nothing for a moment.
‘You didn’t know – was that it? You didn’t know who she was. But other people did, in the town. And you must have suspected there was something in her background.’
Eamonn looked into space for a while before starting to talk. ‘You know, Miss Maguire, when I finally found out the truth, I was sort of happy. Can you believe that? It made sense, all those years . . . I’d even heard about the
case – I’d have been coming eighteen then. You’re too young to remember, of course?’
But he looked at her anyway, as if expecting an answer.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I heard about it, though.’
‘Course you did. The whole bloody country heard about it. I mean, wouldn’t
you
change your name, if everyone knew that about you? Jesus, it explained so much – the way she was with me, always shying away, why she’d never talk of her past, her family . . .’ He tailed off, staring at the wedding ring on his hand.
Paula leaned closer. The light in the room seemed worn out, the yellow frazzle struggling against the October gloom. ‘You weren’t angry, then?’
‘How could I be? It wasn’t her fault, she was only wee . . .’ His voice cracked and he swallowed. ‘I suppose I was sad. Yes, sad – you know, that she didn’t tell me before, about the wean. That way, maybe we could have . . .’ He fell into silence, looking at the ring again, as it glinted in the dull light.
Paula cleared her throat. ‘You decided you had to protect Angela, no matter what, was that it?’
‘Yes.’
‘No matter who found out.’ He was nodding slowly. She paused. ‘Eamonn. Tell me when you realised Cathy knew.’
Something flared in his eyes and died. ‘I suppose you know about all those papers she had.’
‘Yes.’ There was no point in lying now. ‘Her friends had them. It was the girls who told Cathy – at school, that last day.’ Paula tested the ropes on her wrist – no give. The fibres ate into her skin. She leaned forward as much as she could. ‘Eamonn, is that why Cathy came to see you, the day she disappeared?’ She didn’t want to say ‘died’. Not yet. She had to play this carefully.
Again his eyes
darkened. ‘Well, miss, I see you know everything. Or you think you do, anyway.’
‘No, not everything.’ The rest she was guessing. But she was getting surer.
‘I bet you have it all worked out. Yes, Cathy came down to the office, ran out of school early, crying her wee eyes out. She showed me all this stuff she’s found out about her mother, these news reports – way before she was born, even. Someone at the Mission knew, she said. Somebody had found out.’
Did Eamonn know about Maddy too? ‘You know who it was?’
‘No. Maybe that fella Ed, he might know. He came to me after Cathy went missing – he knew I’d seen her last. Seems she was trying to ring him, over and over. Only he didn’t want to see her. He’d some other wee girl lined up by then.’ Eamonn’s voice broke, bitter. ‘He ruined her, my Cathy. He broke her. Said he’d tell everyone what he knew, if I – if I didn’t support him. He didn’t want to go down for it.’
So that explained why Eamonn had supported the Mission. It was as simple and nasty as blackmail. ‘And Cathy went to you when she couldn’t find Ed?’
‘Aye, she was half-hysterical already. I tried to calm her down . . . She ran off anyhow, before I could stop her. That must have been when ould Ken lifted her. But it turned out he’d an alibi.’
Paula gulped. ‘What happened to her schoolbag? I always wondered.’
Eamonn leaned across his workbench and pushed aside a tarpaulin, the same type that had been wrapped round Cathy. Underneath was a black shoulder-bag with button-badges on it. A yellow smiley face seemed to smirk at Paula and her vision swam, but she carried on as if they were having a normal conversation.
‘And her shoes – you hid them, her normal
school shoes?’ He nodded. She said. ‘But she was wearing different ones that day. Heels. They’re still in the rack out there. You missed that.’
He frowned, then shook his head. ‘Hardly matters now, does it.’
‘And then the knife – the blood . . . did you do it?’
Eamonn put his head in his hands. A strangled laugh. ‘The poor weans! That bloody ould cat of theirs. Well, you saw through that and all.’
She held her breath. ‘Eamonn, the reason you did all this – supported Ed when it turned out he knew something, and killed the cat – it was because . . . Cathy died here, didn’t she?’
He said nothing. She couldn’t see his face. ‘Eamonn? I saw the blood in the kitchen. Cathy went home, didn’t she, after she’d been in your office, and she’d threatened to confront Angela; she had all the evidence . . . and you – you had to protect your wife, didn’t you, even if your own daughter . . .’ Paula was watching him very closely.
Eamonn’s mouth was open but she never got to hear what he was going to say, because at that point they heard a splintering at the door, and Aidan’s voice shouting, ‘Maguire! Are you in there?’