The Lost (42 page)

Angela
sneered, ‘For the love of God, girl, I’m not your mother. You’ve a mother in America, who loved you and clothed you and fed you all these years.’

‘And you – you wanted to rip me out of you, throw me in a bucket of blood. You’re sick, you know that? You stabbed your own kid – my sister! – and you wanted to kill me before I was even born.’

Angela was looking down at the gun. ‘You’ll never understand what I went through. The stage I got to – all I wanted to do was die, and take you with me.’

‘I was innocent!’

‘There’s no such thing, Madeleine. That’s what they called you, is it? The fallen woman. That’s a feckin’ joke.’

Maddy lunged at her mother, the knife in her trembling hand. Angela still held the gun, lolling lightly between her fingers. She didn’t flinch as the girl brought the blade to her neck, blubbering out her words.

‘You make me sick! What kind of woman wants to murder her baby? Then when she’s grown, and she only wants to know her mom, so bad she travels thousands of miles to see her, you send her away again! I tried so hard to meet you – I made friends with Cathy, even got to know her damn teacher at school, everything – all for you! Just so I could get to you! And God, it made me want to puke sometimes, the way Cathy talked: we’re moving to a new house in the country, we’re all so happy, me and my mom and dad and all the little kiddies . . . She even told me where this place was. That Friday, that was my chance. She rang me. She was in tears – Ed blew her off, of course, it’s what he does. So I said I’d pick her up, take her home, talk to you for her. I was hoping you’d be pleased to see me. But you hadn’t even thought about me. All you cared about was your other kids. Your
real
kids. You told me to get out in case they saw!’ Maddy jerked the blade away. ‘And then when I ran off – you killed her! Your own goddamn kid!’

So Maddy had been
to the house on the day Cathy died. That explained why she hadn’t been at the Mission meeting. Paula knelt on the concrete floor, breathing slowly.

Angela said, ‘I told you, I’m no mother of yours. You were lucky I didn’t strangle you at birth.’

‘Angie,’ Eamonn was moaning. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say she found you?’

Angela ignored her husband, focused on her first-born daughter. ‘Girl, you’ve your whole life to live. You’re twenty-five. Aye, I know your age to the minute. As if I could forget when they cut you out of me. I was only a child.’

‘That’s no excuse! It wasn’t my fault you were messing around with boys so young! I mean, what kind of slut were you? Twelve! And you never put his name down on the birth certificate, so I can’t even find who my father is. All these years, I just wanted a kind dad, someone who’d teach me, look after me – what Cathy always had. She had everything! I was the one you gave away, like a piece of garbage.’ Maddy was crying hard now.

Angela’s voice was cold. ‘A father. Aye, that’s what a father’s meant to do, all right.’

‘So why wouldn’t you tell me, when I came that day? I just want to know who my dad is! It’s like – it’s like a piece of me’s been missing all my life!’ Gesturing with the knife against her tie-dye top, the girl pleaded.

‘He’s dead.’

‘So you do know who he was? Who—’

‘He’s dead, and when they let me out for his funeral, I spat on his grave. You want to know what a father is? To me, a father’s someone who came into my bed every day from when my ma passed away. Sticking his big hands in my knickers. Shoving himself in me. At me day and night, and then when he gets me in trouble, he looks the police in the eye and he says, “Officers, my daughter’s a liar, she’s been going round with boys, now will you take her away and lock her up.”’

Everyone in the room held their
breath, except for Eamonn, who continued to cry.

Maddy’s sobs came fast and uncontrollable. ‘No, it’s not true! I don’t believe it. You’re just twisted, you want to make me hate myself more, oh God!’

‘Take it or leave it, girl, it doesn’t change the truth. Your da was my da. Happens all the time, especially in Ireland. You’d want to have seen how many girls in that home were there because of their das, or their uncles, or their brothers – their grandas, even.’ Angela laughed harshly. ‘And once they had us locked up, you know what they did to us there, the priests and the do-gooders who ran those places? They took our babies, and got their blood money for them, and they beat us, and they broke us even more.’ She looked at her daughter. ‘So maybe you’ll see why I never wanted to birth you into that.’

Maddy was weeping.

‘And maybe I was right, girl. You’ve not had a very happy life, by the looks of it.’

Gently hoisting the gun under one arm, she put out her other and took the girl’s hand. Maddy flinched as Angela rolled up her sleeve, revealing the painful legacy of scars.

‘You cut yourself. Aye, I tried to do the same. Much good it did me. Wouldn’t it have been better for us all, you and me and him there, and even my Cathy, if that busybody social worker had let me be? Just let me die there, and you with me, in that bathroom?’

Then it was all happening. Maddy made an inarticulate noise deep in her throat, and lunged at her mother. Outside, a distant boom went off, and the room was filled for a second with a brilliant green light. It was followed a second later by another bang, closer, louder, and a flash in the gloom. The gun. When darkness fell again there was a sound of screaming. A woman screaming.

‘Angie! Oh Christ, Angie. Oh no, pet, why did you
do it, why?’ Eamonn was crawling to his wife, who had collapsed on the floor, gurgling blood. He pushed aside the girl, who was shrieking, weeping. The knife fell from her hand, unused. In Angela Carr’s hand the gun was still smoking, her eyes opened wide and unseeing at the fireworks, as blood trickled dark from the hole she’d blown in the bottom of her jaw.

Epilogue

One month later

Ballyterrin, November

Paula winced as she put up her hand
to knock on Guy’s door. Though she’d been discharged from hospital after one night, treated for mild shock and some bruising, her shoulders still ached and the chafing marks on her wrists were visible, if faded. She could still sometimes feel a cold spot on her neck, where the muzzle of the gun had pressed.

Guy was, as usual, frowning down at the pile of paper on his desk. The aftermath of the Cathy Carr/Majella Ward investigation had caused, in the words of Fiacra Quinn, an almighty pile of steaming cowshite.

‘There you are.’

‘Here I am.’

‘You’d better come in.’

She sat down gingerly on the edge of the hard plastic chair. Her time off had been spent recuperating, PJ fussing round her with cups of tea and Pat’s buns, the two of them conspiring to keep her from the phone and never out of the house on her own. Eventually Paula had feigned needing tampons while Pat was at her Zumba class, knowing PJ wouldn’t offer to go to the chemist for this particular errand. Since she didn’t actually need tampons, she’d used the brief alone-time to slip into the office. It was quiet, nobody there but Guy, computers turned off. No one knew quite what was happening, and in the meantime the others had gone back to their own stations.

‘You’re OK, then?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine. My arm’s a bit stiff, but nothing lasting.’ She didn’t mention
the nightmares. Not a few mornings she’d found herself flung awake, clutched by memories.

His face was grim. ‘You were very lucky.’

‘I know.’

‘And how’s O’Hara?’

‘OK, I hear. He’s meant to do physio on the arm, but I reckon he won’t get much beyond lifting pints to his mouth.’ Pat had been in her element with Aidan back under her roof. Eamonn’s bullet had only grazed his arm, and he too would recover well. He and Paula had avoided each other since that night, as if afraid to rupture the fragile peace of recovery. But she’d have to face him sometime.

Guy said, ‘I suppose things could have been a lot worse.’

That was true. After a short autopsy, the body of Angela Carr, formerly Angela McGreavy, was released to her husband for a private funeral. Eamonn had stood down from the council and it was rumoured his businesses would be up for sale soon too. The four surviving children were being cared for by his mother in her smart new bungalow.

The newspapers had a field day, of course: the lurid details of the McGreavy case dug up, the mother who had killed her own daughter, and the girl who hadn’t been believed when she said her own father had fathered her child. There were renewed calls to compensate the victims of the Safe Harbour homes in Ireland, and to change the law to allow adoptees to find their birth parents. The Mission had also been quietly shut down, although the lovely Maeve Cooley said it was only a matter of time before it came back in another guise. Ed Lazarus, though banned from working with children, had in the end not been charged with any crimes, since it couldn’t be proved he’d forced any of the girls to have sex with him. There was also much thundering in the press about cults and why weren’t schools doing more to protect our children, blah blah.

Meanwhile, in the South, an
investigation had been opened into the missing girls on Paula’s list – minus Rachel Reilly, who had run away from her family, pregnant, and was laid to rest in Birmingham, where her son Ed had recently returned. Paula wasn’t sure if he’d contacted the Reilly family at all before he went, but at least they now knew what fate had befallen their sister. A week before, the PSNI had taken in ground-penetrating radar to the site of the old Safe Harbour home, which had also held the Ballyterrin branch of God’s Shepherd back in 1985, and later the Mission. Buried under fresh concrete by the back door, they’d uncovered the skeleton of what looked to be a woman in her late teens. Tests were still going on, but it seemed likely this would be prove to be the last resting-place of Alice Dunne, Alice with the beautiful smile who’d gone out one night and never come home. The girl, whoever she was, also appeared to have been several months’ pregnant when she died.

The inquiry would rumble on for some time, Paula was sure, and it wasn’t at all guaranteed they’d be able to extradite Ron Almeira, even if they could prove Alice’s death matched the dates he’d been in Ireland. When the body was found, the unit had been overwhelmed with calls from all over Ireland, families whose daughters had gone to God’s Shepherd groups in the seventies and eighties. Many had never been reported missing, thought to have run off, moved to England, or simply lost touch. Now it seemed some would have met a darker fate. There was still a long way to go before the deaths of Angela and Cathy Carr, not to mention Louise McCourt and all the rest, would have any lasting legacy.

‘So.’ Paula waited to hear her
fate. ‘You met with the Chief Constable.’

‘Yes.’ Guy spoke heavily. ‘Well, as you can imagine there was fall-out. The Majella case, it caused a lot of problems. But on the other hand, since she wasn’t really missing, it wasn’t our fault. And we did find her – thanks to the rapport you built with her sister.’

Paula inclined her head, accepting the compliment. It didn’t seem to matter much in the wake of what had happened. One found, one more lost. ‘And Cathy?’ It still hurt to think of the girl they could never have saved, choked by weeds in the bottom of the dark water. Killed by her own desperate mother, another child no one had helped.

‘Again, she was never lost either.’ He grimaced bleakly. ‘Some Missing Persons Unit we turned out to be. In both cases, it was the family who did it.’

‘That’s usually the way, sadly.’

‘I know. I quoted them your research. Depressing reading, but on the other hand it makes the public feel safer, if the most likely person to kill their kids is themselves. Strange, but true.’

‘Oh. I see. So—’

‘So I presented it all to the authorities, that at least we’d solved the cases, and the ones we didn’t even know were cases, and we’d put an end to the Mission’s work. That chap you found from the anti-cult group, Paddy Boyle, he holds a lot of sway down South. And the families of all those other missing girls, they’ve been vocal too. At least we hopefully did what we set out to do – found some answers, after all this time. It looks as if quite a few cases could be solved, in the end.’

She frowned at him suspiciously. ‘All this is sounding quite positive.’

‘I know.’ Guy looked up and she saw how torn he was. ‘Paula – they’ve commissioned us for another two years. Not just that – they want us to officially co-ordinate and advise on all new high-risk cases North and South of the border. It’s unprecedented.’

‘Oh, but—’

‘And I don’t know how to feel about
it. I mean, Katie running off to London, it showed me how unhappy she was. I’d let my family basically fall apart under my nose.’

Katie had been traced the day after Angela’s death to a women’s refuge in West London, where her mother Tess had moved after putting the family’s house on the market.

‘How is she now?’

He shrugged. ‘She’s as well as can be expected.’

‘Will she be coming home?’ It was a loaded question, Paula knew. What was going to happen now, to confused Katie, bereaved Tess, and her foundering marriage to Guy? Could they recover from what had happened? Paula had a flash of regret thinking of her night with him – ill-advised, pointless, going nowhere. She’d not even be able to comfort him now.

‘I just don’t know. We have to talk, Tess and I. There’s a lot to go over.’ So he didn’t know yet if he’d take the job in Ballyterrin. It had held nothing but sorrow for him, so she could understand why he’d leave. He looked at her. ‘And you? There’s a job here, if you want it. Corry wants you for her team too.’

‘Well. I took the job on secondment, as you know – and my dad’s better now.’

‘But London – do you have much to go back to?’

Paula said nothing to that, thinking of her sparse flat overlooking the sluggish river, long evenings in front of DVDs with just her case-notes, the pull of the tide outside her flat. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided.’

‘Right. Listen, Paula . . .’ He paused. ‘There’s something else. I wondered for a long time should I tell you this. I mean, you’ve had such a rough time of it.’