The Killing House

by Claire McGowan

  ‘I know. You used the GPR here, though, right?’

  He hesitated. ‘Yes. It did show disturbed ground. But it doesn’t always mean there’s a burial site. Like I say, people forget, or they call to assuage their conscience but they don’t give the right info, or they ring to make mischief. We get a lot of crank calls, if you can believe it.’

  She nodded again. She was trying to keep her emotions in check as best she could, view it as another case to crack. She’d told her father the night before, while Pat put Maggie to bed, in measured tones with the TV muted behind them, men hitting each other with hurling bats. PJ had taken it in, in that quiet way of his, like rain soaking into the ground. ‘They’ll be digging, then?’

  ‘Yeah. They have to at least look. But Daddy . . .’ She’d tailed off, not sure what she wanted to say. ‘I don’t feel she’s there. You know? I just don’t.’ Her father, she knew, had long ago decided her mother was dead. Had made the choice to move on and marry Pat, aim for some happiness in his life. It was a big leap for them. Paula had heard Pat crying in the bathroom later in the night.

  ‘You don’t feel she’s gone.’ He stared at the silent TV.

  ‘I – I don’t know. I never did.’ Would she know, if her mother was dead? Would she feel it? She’d no idea.

  ‘Pet, I don’t know either. All that stuff people say about having a feeling, I used to hear it a lot on the force. I just feel he’s alive, officer. When I knew rightly the son was lying dead in our morgue. It’s not something we can know until we know. Maybe this’ll be it. The way we find out.’

  ‘Or maybe we never will.’

  ‘Aye. I had to face that too.’ He’d squinted at her. ‘I’m not sure you have, pet.’

  She fell silent. It was true, she hadn’t. She’d been turning over stones for years now, even hiring Davey Corcoran to ferret out the truth, urging him down dead end after dead end. Was she ready for it, if it came?

  Another skiff of rain started her back to the present, the cold day, the noise of the diggers, the wet slap of soil. She hunched her shoulders. ‘It’s awful weather, I better go in.’

  ‘I’ll stay. I like to supervise.’ Tozier squared his shoulders into the wind.

  ‘Listen,’ said Paula grudgingly. ‘Thank you. For looking for her. It means – well, I don’t think I realised what it would mean. So, thank you.’

  He shrugged. ‘We have to pay a high price for it, sometimes. To get them back. I ask myself every day is it worth it, and so far, I always come up with yes. But if you come up with a different answer, I get that.’

  Paula still didn’t know what she thought. She trudged off, her boots squelching in the mud. The house was shuttered up, the brand-new windows still with their stickers on. She felt sorry for the poor couple who’d bought the place. When she’d sold her own house a few months back, she wasn’t sure how much the estate agent had told the buyers. Her mother hadn’t died in there, of course. Just disappeared from the kitchen. But maybe now it wouldn’t be the last place she’d been seen. Maybe this was, this raw stretch of land, flat and green. She found she’d come to the first pit under what had been the barn, its sides neatly squared off like a grave waiting for a corpse. It was empty, of course, marked with police tape, the bottom filled up with brown water, but she stood and peered into it. Trying to imagine how that girl had been placed in there, with her grave goods about her, the cheap little pendant, her arms folded over her chest. A relative of the Wallaces, but no one prepared to say who. It must have been Aisling, surely. Who else? Her mind went round in circles. If it was her, why had Mairead not admitted as much, let them bury her? Who are you? The earth gave nothing back, only the increasing patter as the rain fell into it, swallowed back up by the pit.

  Margaret

  ‘What’s this?’ The girl’s nails were uncut, sharp as claws. She snatched at Margaret’s neck, scraping the skin there. She’d taken to coming in most days now, and Margaret had learned to dread the fumbling with the lock on the door, knowing what it meant.

  She tried to keep her voice reasonable, but fear had dirtied it beyond pretence. ‘It’s a necklace. My daughter’s. She’s about your age. I . . . I took it with me when they came for me.’

  The girl turned her nose up at that. She appeared untouched by emotion, only curiosity and a certain interested cruelty. Margaret wondered was something wrong with her. She never seemed to be at school, for a start. She wondered if Paula was back – had she taken time off when her mother went missing? Would they be searching for her, out beating hedgerows and dredging ponds? Why hadn’t they found her yet? It wouldn’t be hard to make the link – they were clearly some kind of IRA squad, these lads. Someone must know their names. They weren’t even trying to hide her that well. So why had no one come? Had Bob kept his bargain too well, and sent them on a wild goose chase? She’d thought she might be able to run, just for a while, till everything died down, and she didn’t want the police looking at her too closely. She’d been so stupid. And now here she was.

  It was surreal, thinking of them all going on with their lives, Paula going to school and PJ to work – with the police! – and Edward with all the resources he had access to, soldiers and spies and manpower. Yet he had not come for her. Sometimes when she drifted off she dreamed about Paula sitting in the kitchen, her red head bent over her homework. She dreamed she made it back to her door, that same house door she’d opened thousands of times, the paint peeling, the roses in the garden. I’m back. I got away! And Paula turned slowly to look at her, her face pale and distant. Who are you?

  She knew what this dream was telling her. There was no going back, even if someone did come for her. She’d made the choice between her family and the new child she was carrying. Could she bear to see PJ again, and have him look at her differently – not just a tout but a whore, a cheat? Like someone off the soap operas she used to watch during the day when Paula started school, alone in the living room, wondering if her husband would make it back alive that day or not.

  Her head jerked up. She had passed out for a few moments. It was happening more and more. The girl was leaning over her, her thick dark hair falling into Margaret’s face. She smelled like baby shampoo and cows, an incongruous combination that somehow made Margaret very frightened. For the last two years Paula had smelled of body spray and complicated potions from the Body Shop, all synthetic fruit and flowers. Who was this strange teenager? She had her hand clasped on the pendant round Margaret’s neck, the cheap silver dolphin leaping in mid-air. ‘I’m taking this. I want it.’

  Margaret remembered buying it, in the small gift shop on that island. Only months ago, only in the summer, but how very far they’d come since then. Paula still twelve, right on the edge of being a teenager, young enough to plunge into the sea with no self-consciousness about her swelling chest or long, pale limbs. PJ marginally relaxed for once, the lines from his face gone, not checking under the car every day for bombs before getting in. She’d known even then she would have to face things soon – she wasn’t stupid; she knew the signs that she was pregnant – but not yet. A few minutes more before it had to be shattered. It was PJ who had chosen the pendant. He wasn’t a man who noticed such fripperies, but on that holiday, far enough away from daily bombs and shooting, he’d pointed to the kiosk near the ferry stop. ‘She likes that kind of thing, doesn’t she?’

  Paula was out of earshot, mooning over a display of mood rings. ‘Developing a taste for jewellery?’ She hadn’t teased PJ for a long time. The lightness that had once been between them had dwindled a bit more every year, dampened down by fear, and the way the long nights waiting for a phone call had soured into anger. Why did he put her through this? Could he not find another job, or move away, leave this bloody town? It was this, in the end, that had pushed her to Edward. She couldn’t stand to love PJ and have him killed, like his friend John O’Hara. Easier to run, burn the marriage down herself. But the baby. S
he’d never meant for that to happen. Did she even know Edward? Why hadn’t he come for her?

  ‘For her birthday.’ PJ had been embarrassed, the silver necklace held in his big RUC man’s hand.

  ‘She’ll love it. I’ll distract her and you pay.’

  The necklace had been sitting on the kitchen counter when Margaret heard the car outside, and she’d snatched it up, wanting something of her daughter’s. She wondered if Paula would miss it. Probably she wouldn’t notice right away. She was careless with her things, like all teenagers, leaving her PE bag on the bus, her purse in the corner shop.

  Now the girl was pulling on it, so the chain dug into the back of Margaret’s neck. She winced. She told herself it did not matter if she lost it. It was only a bauble, not even worth a fiver, and Paula had just left it lying around. She wasn’t allowed jewellery at school and it was chokers that were all the rage now. But all the same it hurt, seeing it grasped carelessly in this girl’s dirty hand. Thinking of PJ, ashamed to buy something like that, but wanting to please his daughter. He was a good man. If it wasn’t for this war, the endless bloody violence, they could have been happy. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Emer! Fuck’s sake, get out of here.’ A man’s voice. A boy, really. It was the brother, she thought – he must be, he was so like the handsome man. In her head she was trying to keep track of them all. Paddy, the leader. Sean, older, harder somehow, who gave her strange looks like he might want to help, but then never did. Fintan, the dogsbody, who just fetched and carried, hardly meeting Margaret’s eyes. This boy, Paddy’s brother, she thought, was younger. Nineteen or twenty maybe, his cheeks still boyish with bumfluff and acne. He’d be handsome too in a few years. He’d only been in the barn once, dragged in by his brother. He didn’t like what they were up to, clearly. But he didn’t stop it.

  The girl had dropped the pendant, and it fell back lightly against Margaret’s chest, the sweat of the girl’s fingers still on it. The brother pushed her out the door, protesting, and Margaret realised she didn’t have the strength to appeal to him for help. As the days went on, she was giving up. He turned into the light, his face in shadow. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. Then he closed the door again and she heard the padlock click into place.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The phone was ringing. Paula blundered about the bed, groping for a table that wasn’t there. Of course, she wasn’t in the rented London flat, with the Ikea furniture and orange glow all night long from streetlights. She was in Pat’s guest room – which had once been Aidan’s room. She found her phone in the covers and silenced it. Maggie stirred restlessly on the other side of the bed. ‘Maguire.’

  ‘Dr Maguire?’ The voice was shouting over some background noise – the clank of machinery, the roar of the wind. ‘It’s Declan Tozier.’

  Her stomach turned over. The house was so quiet compared to the noise coming down the phone. She spoke softly. ‘Have you found something?’

  ‘We’ve uncovered some bones. I thought you might like to know – normally I wouldn’t tell the family until we were sure, but—’

  ‘Can I come there?’ She was already out of bed, whispering, trying to find her jeans and hoody in the dark without disturbing the sleeping child. ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘DI Corry said there was no point trying to stop you. It might not be her, you know.’ But he didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘I’ll be there soon.’ She cut the call, stooping to fumble some clean socks out of her case. She paused for a moment to smooth the hair off Maggie’s hot face. Was this it? Was this the moment they’d waited twenty years for, when they’d finally know what had happened? Her mind was trying to mould around it. If it was her mother, and they found evidence she’d been pregnant – could she keep that from her father? It wasn’t his child – she couldn’t let him find that out. It wasn’t fair on her mother, who had no one to speak for her. Maybe she’d had her reasons. Paula knew that the cold facts of a case never explained what had gone on in a person’s heart, the steps that had led them there, to the point of no return. Like her, with her fatherless child and the man in London who saw her every day and had no idea Maggie was his. Not so very different from her mother, after all.

  She wondered for a second about waking her father, telling him they’d found something. But she wasn’t sure she could bear to. And maybe it was nothing. Sean Conlon had told Bob he’d helped her mother escape. But then he’d also told Paula he’d never taken her mother in the first place, said it to her face when she’d gone to see him, heavily pregnant and desperate. He was a liar, he could not be trusted in life or in death. And the pendant, the stupid dolphin pendant. Her mother had maybe been at this farm. Died there, perhaps. But the face of the psychic. Your mother’s alive. A stupid piece of hope to cling to. Seeing shapes in the shadows – the man Edward living with a woman in London, after her mother had vanished. So what? It was probably his wife. He’d probably run as fast as he could from the mistake he’d made, the local woman he’d used as a source and then got pregnant. He was dead now anyway. It was all so tenuous, whispers in the wind. She was so tired of not knowing. Maybe tonight would be the end of that.

  She left the door open, knowing Maggie would run to Granny and Granddad if she woke up. She settled the child gate across the stairs and went down, scrawling a quick note on the back of the Ballyterrin Gazette that sat on the table. Aidan’s paper, once. Then she pulled on her coat, found her car keys, and slipped out of the dark, sleeping house into the night.

  The farmyard was bright as day from the lights they’d rigged up, the blue flash of emergency vehicles washing gently across the scene, making everything look like it was at the bottom of the sea. Paula pulled her coat tight round her as she struggled over the boggy ground, marked with tyre tracks now. Huddles of people in high-vis clothing. She spotted Declan Tozier in his bright jacket and a hard hat, and noticed how he approached her, shielding her with his body from the new pit they’d opened up, over near the fence of the property.

  ‘What’s going on? Why have you stopped digging?’

  ‘Dr Maguire . . . maybe we can talk in the car. It’s cold.’

  She pushed past him, stumbling over to it. A pit of light, swallowed in the dark. In the bottom, clagged in soil, some white things like branches. Bones. These were the bones. She looked for the tell-tale human signs, the long femurs and the shape of the skull. She blinked. The bones were too small for an adult, surely. ‘What is this?’

  Tozier caught up to her, panting a little. ‘I was trying to tell you. There’s been a burial here all right, but it’s not human.’

  Something in her gave way, and she registered it was relief. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it looks like the intel was solid as to the burial place – remarkably so, in fact – but the grave has – well, we think it’s a sheep in it.’ He sounded almost embarrassed. ‘I’m so sorry to drag you out here. I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

  Paula realised how cold she was now the adrenaline had worn off, the wind cutting right through to her sleep-warm skin. ‘No, it’s OK. Don’t be sorry. I needed to see. So . . . it’s not her?’

  ‘We can keep looking, but there’s no evidence of anything else buried nearby. It looks as if they dug a grave then buried an animal instead. Why someone would do that, I have no idea.’

  ‘So you’re going to stop?’

  ‘We can look a bit more widely, but then . . . I’m sorry. Yes.’

  She looked away, feeling the sting of it harder than the wind.

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I’ll send everyone home for the night. You should get some rest too.’

  He trudged off, and Paula stood again and stared into the pit, the heap of animal bones in it. No sign of her mother, a ghost again after all these years, like someone you can only ever glimpse out of the corner of your eye. She murmured, ‘You were here, weren’t you?
I can feel it. Where are you now? Where are you?’

  For answer, there was nothing but the moaning of the wind over the mountains, lost and lonely and cold as ice.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Walking into the office the next day was hard. The little looks of sympathy pricking on her skin. She didn’t want that. The hurdle had been got over – it wasn’t her mother buried there – and all she knew was she was relieved. All those years of telling herself she just wanted answers, even if her mother was dead. Turned out she was pretty good at lying to herself.

  She sat down at her borrowed desk, looking with distaste at the dull reports she was typing. If only she had some insight that might help. Find Mairead. Find her mother. Anything. On impulse she fired off an email to Guy in London. How’s it going there?

  He came straight back, and she hated the little lurch her stomach still made. Quiet without you. How’s the case?

  Messy. Actually maybe you could help with something. Can you find out anything about a murder ten years ago in London – Ciaran Wallace was convicted of it? Thanks.

  She clicked out and stood up, knowing that sitting emailing Guy all day was a sure-fire disaster waiting to happen.

  Gerard was hunched over his desk, eating a pasty from a paper bag, filling the air with the smell of beef and onion.

  ‘Any news?’ she asked him.

  He shook his head, spraying crumbs. ‘Search teams are out, alerts are out, all that jazz. No sign of Mairead or her brother yet. And I got nothing from the mother, except a feed of cake from the carers in the home.’

  She sighed. That meant nothing for her to do. And if she couldn’t justify her presence there, she’d have to go home.

  ‘What are you working on?’ She perched against his cubicle, remembering Maeve’s tip-off. ‘Heard you had a murder recently?’