The Lost (9 page)

Bob Hamilton was directing operations, a blue anorak pulled up round his red face. ‘Evening, Inspector. Miss.’

‘When was she found?’

‘Round an hour back. These two clowns were smoking drugs on the towpath, saw something in the water, they said.’ He jerked his head to where two teenage boys in tracksuits sat in a police car, looking dazed. They’d probably get away with a caution, but what they’d found in the canal might put them off drugs for life.

‘Where is it – she?’

‘The SOCOs are in now. The wee tent.’ Hamilton hesitated. ‘It’s not what you’d want to see, Miss – Paula.’

She raised her chin, although her stomach was already churning. ‘I need to. I need to know how.’ Because she was going to find whoever had done this. She had to.

He led them further along the old towpath, to where Forensics had set up their white tent against the gale. ‘The boys pulled her out. I think they thought maybe she was still . . . well, they got a wee bit of a shock, anyway.’

A disturbed crime
scene caused many headaches, and she heard Guy sigh, but this soon faded at the sight of a small figure marching towards them, clipboard in hand. The person drew closer, pulling off a protective white cap and mask to reveal a short woman with glasses, dark hair held back in a metal clip. Her eyes moved over Paula with no sign of recognition and she thrust the clipboard at Guy. ‘You need to sign this.’

Paula stepped back, heart hammering. Guy blinked. ‘Sorry, I don’t think we’ve—’

The woman removed her gloves with a snap. ‘I’m the on-call FMO. Saoirse McLoughlin. Will you sign it so I can get out of here?’

Guy scribbled on the paper, which was rapidly growing soggy in the drizzle. ‘So what are we looking at? Is it a drowning, do you think?’

Dr McLoughlin wrinkled her small nose. ‘You’ll need to wait for the autopsy. If you’re lucky, they’ll do it over the weekend.’

‘There’s no way to speed it up?’

The doctor eyed him. ‘You’re the one who’s over from London? Yes, well, we’ve a different system here. Bodies all get sent to Belfast. They’ll do it as fast as they can.’

Paula cleared her throat and spoke. ‘That’s new, is it?’

The doctor stared at her for a moment. Guy paused and said, ‘Sorry, this is Ms Maguire – Dr Maguire, our forensic psychologist consultant. She’s from here, in fact.’

‘Is she, indeed.’ The eyes were dark. Paula looked away first.

Guy was still pushing. ‘You couldn’t possibly let me have some early thoughts? If we even knew probable cause of death—’

The woman’s small
face twisted. ‘Have a look for yourself, Inspector. It’ll be fairly obvious. Anyway, the coroner’s been notified and she’ll likely be moved to the mortuary later. You’ll want to get the family in for an ID.’

She held out her hand and Guy hesitated for a second, perhaps thinking of what she’d been touching, before shaking it. ‘Thank you, Doctor. I’m sorry for getting you out in this rain.’

She sighed. ‘I wish to God I could have done something for her. Goodnight, Inspector.’ She turned to go, hunched against the rain in her black jacket, without a backward glance.

Bob Hamilton took the cue and crossed the muddy ground to the area marked off by yellow police tape. He spoke to one of the officers inside, who stood up, pulling aside the tent flap with a gloved hand.

Guy got there first. Paula saw his reaction, and for a second she didn’t want to look, but then it was too late.

Don’t cry don’t cry.
It was like being punched in the stomach, every time. You couldn’t control the reaction – the nausea, then the tears in your nose – but you could learn to hide it. She thought Guy Brooking was doing the same, as he stared down. Of course, his daughter was the same age.

He spoke. ‘She was found like this?’

The white-masked SOCO (identifiable as male only by his voice), said, ‘We’re not sure, sir. The plastic’s come off a bit – but that could have been when the boys pulled her out.’

The body had been wrapped in green tarpaulin, tucked around with cords like you might use to fix bikes to a roof-rack. In the water they had begun to swell and loosen, so the head now emerged from the plastic, the feet poking out in their woollen knee socks. Underneath, you could see the maroon school uniform, drowned and sodden. The face and hands were white, bloated with water, awful. But from the dark hair and the small pierced ears, the body was just about recognisable as Cathy Carr.

The unit worked
all night, summoned from home. Gerard came racing in, still in his Gaelic football jersey, coated in either sweat or rain or both. Avril drove up in her tidy little Corsa, her face pale above her black polo-neck. Paula was wearing her mother’s dress under her coat, and kept forgetting, wondering why everyone was staring at her. A while later, Fiacra arrived from Dundalk in his rusting Toyota. Glancing at each other in silence, the team gathered their papers and laptops and decamped to the main station on the other side of town, where the case would now officially be launched as a murder enquiry.

The station was a brand-new monolith of bullet-proof glass, erected with PFI money and in another effort to bulldoze the past. Everything smelled new and unboxed, like the inside of a fresh pair of trainers. It was strange that night, full of buzzing phones and unfamiliar officers in rolled-up sleeves, constantly walking in and out with bits of paper in their hands. In a country so long inured to death, to horror, it was frightening how safe you could feel. The terrorists had never targeted children, not deliberately. The streets had always felt safe to walk in – but now this. A fifteen-year-old girl snatched on her way home from school, killed, dumped in the dark waters of the canal, until the twisting weeds and shopping trolleys had yielded her body back again.

Guy and Bob Hamilton had been closeted in a briefing with station detectives, grim faces behind tinted glass. No one else was quite sure where to put themselves, except Gerard, who as lead officer on the missing person’s case had already pinned a large map of Ballyterrin to the wall. Cathy’s way from school to home would have taken her through town, past the old mill where she’d been found. Paula watched Gerard across the room instructing uniformed officers.

‘Let’s get CCTV from every business she’d have passed.’ He pointed on the map. ‘There’s a garage on that corner, chip shop, car showroom – and get door-to-doors on all the residents. We can also run licence recognition on any cars passing through.’

Avril was struggling
to find somewhere to put her laptop, settling finally for the end of a long open-plan desk, where she had to perch on a stool looking less than pleased. Paula wasn’t sure what to do. Her work wasn’t in the awful blurred aftermath of a crime, it was in clear-headed analysis, piecing together reports, trying to get a picture of what had been going on inside Cathy’s head, what steps had led her to that dark canal, and who might have put her there. She made notes on what she’d seen – the careful wrapping of the body, the knots in the ropes, the glitter polish still visible on Cathy’s muddy hand – but her thoughts wouldn’t settle, as swirling with sediment as that dark water itself.

At some point, everyone in the room seemed to stiffen; voices came in from the desk.
The family were here
. Everyone seemed to know it. Through the glass you could see a dark-haired man, shouting at the desk officer: ‘. . . tell us nothing! Where the bloody hell is she? Where is the wean?’ He had a look of Eamonn Carr about him – one of the brothers? – and then the man himself came into view. By contrast, Cathy’s father was pale and composed.

‘Come on, Jarlath, they’re doing their best.’

The door to the conference room snapped open and Guy strode out, buttoning his suit. He shot Paula a quick look as he passed; his face was set in sharp angles. She knew where he was going – to the mortuary at the hospital above town, where Cathy was waiting in a body bag. Taking the family to identify the body was the worst, the absolute worst, worse than crime scenes or arrests or autopsies. It was the moment you saw the final bit of hope drain away like blood down a sink.

The remaining team worked
frantically, as if activity could stop them thinking of the dead child. Around midnight Paula went into the ladies’ to breathe for a minute, and heard loud sobbing. Since there was currently only one other woman in the place, she called, ‘Avril?’

Avril came out, flushing the toilet. Her eyes were red. Defensively, she said, ‘She was so young. It’s tragic.’

‘I know.’ Paula leaned against the hand-dryer as Avril splashed her face with water.

She looked at Paula in the mirror. ‘You’ve done this lots, have you? I just did traffic analysis before. How come you don’t cry?’

Paula thought of all the bodies she’d seen, starting with the ones back in her teens, the ones they’d made her look at because they didn’t entirely trust her father. She shrugged. ‘Sometimes I think I’ve no tears left.’ As she went out, she knew the younger woman was staring after her with narrowed eyes, but she didn’t care. She was sick of trying to explain how it was. How she’d learned there were worse things than finding a body.

Not finding one, for a start.

Finally, around midnight, Guy came back to the station, walking stiffly as if his back hurt. He went to Avril, Paula, and Fiacra, who were huddling together on one end of a desk, hardly daring to make eye-contact with the regular station officers.

‘Let’s call it a day, everyone,’ he said. ‘The autopsy will tell us more. There’s nothing we can do tonight.’

Gratefully, Avril went, sniffling as she shut down her computer. Gerard hovered, still holding a magic marker, shirtsleeves rolled up. ‘They’ll get onto those checks first thing?’

‘I’ll make
sure of it.’ Guy spoke to him gently. ‘You go home too, Gerard.’ Bob said he’d better get home to the wife – he looked exhausted – and Fiacra said goodnight pleasantly, though more quietly than usual. Their first murder had left no one untouched.

Paula packed up her shoulder bag more slowly, allowing the others to get to their cars, and then she and Guy walked down the carpeted corridor to the reception. Outside, the cool air hit them with a kiss of rain, and she risked looking at him. ‘How was it? With the identification?’

He just shook his head. ‘Hardest part of the job by far. God, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. That poor kid. I went back to the house after – to pay my respects, you know. The brothers and sisters were all sobbing, though I don’t think the little ones really understood why.’

‘And the parents?’

‘The mother’s in some kind of shock, I think. The father’s functioning, making tea and so on. Like we saw. But people’s grief is different. He seemed to feel it very keenly that we can’t release her body for the funeral.’

‘Yes. More than two days is a lot, here. I suppose we need the rituals.’

He said nothing for a moment, clutching his keys in the dark of the car park, the security lights glowing orange on his face. ‘I phoned Katie to tell her,’ he said. ‘She was upset. Said all the girls at the sleepover were in tears. It’s made the news already.’

Paula recalled girls at school crying over what had happened to her, even though they hadn’t really known her, or her mother. ‘Are you picking her up?’

‘She’s in her pyjamas. May as well let her spend the night, I won’t be much use to her.’ Guy looked Paula full in the face. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m cut out for this job any more. That poor kid. Same age as Katie. Christ.’

She nodded, brushing
stray hairs from her face. There was nothing to say.

‘I’m sorry about our drink,’ he said.

‘Not your fault.’

‘I can offer you a gin and tonic of my own making, instead?’

‘You mean – at your house?’

‘Unless you need to get back.’

She looked at her boots. ‘Well – no. I’m a bit too wired to sleep.’

‘All right.’ He held the car door open, his manner casual – nothing wrong with colleagues sharing a drink after a hard night. But the more he acted this way, the more nervous she got.

Guy’s house was close to the Carrs’; a large spacious home on the hill – doctors, lawyers for his neighbours. ‘I’m renting it from a solicitor,’ he said, opening the front door. ‘People are defaulting all over the place in the recession. Luckily for us, crime doesn’t go away.’

‘No, but the budget does.’ She laid her coat over an armchair, upholstered in deep purple. This room didn’t seem a man’s taste at all; all floral prints and bowls of pot-pourri.

Guy winced at her last remark. ‘You’re right. Christ, and we’ve lost one already. The papers’ll have a field day.’

‘She was already dead.’ Paula shook her head. ‘We couldn’t have helped Cathy. She was long gone, probably by the time you even started looking.’

‘I suppose.’ He sighed again – heavily.

‘So, that gin?’

‘Right.’ He gathered himself. When he came back in from the kitchen, he had forced on cheerfulness like a comedy hat. ‘Well, this was meant to be your welcome drink. What can we toast?’

It seemed wrong with
Cathy stiff and cold in the mortuary. Paula took the smeary glass. No ice or lemon, but it was alcoholic. ‘To catching the bastards.’ Somehow she didn’t think he’d mind the swearing at this point.

‘The bastards,’ echoed Guy, and swigged the pure liquid.

Later, Paula woke up with her cheek on scratchy fabric – a cushion. She must have fallen asleep. Guy was sitting on the floor, leaning against the sofa she lay on. He nodded along to the CD he’d put on – Pink Floyd. Before her time. Aidan’s favourite, too. ‘What time’s it?’

He started. ‘Oh – about three.’

‘Bollocks,’ she muttered. Her mother’s lovely dress was creased. ‘I’d better – oh.’ She tried to sit up and sank down again. ‘Why am I so tired? We only had, what, three drinks?’

He looked exhausted too, head falling back. ‘Shock. First time you see the body, it gets me every time. God, it was bad. And who was that stroppy doctor with the weird name –
Seer-sha
?’

‘Saoirse. It’s Irish for “freedom”.’ Paula swilled round the remnants of her drink.

‘I can never pronounce them.’ He pulled himself together, with effort. ‘You’d better stay here, Paula.’