Blood Tide (Paula Maguire 5)

by Claire McGowan

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘Yeah well, you can get over that, I’m sure. You were always good at letting your head make the choices. Buggered off at eighteen, you can bugger off again now too. Be sensible.’

  Paula swallowed. ‘That isn’t fair and you know it. We were kids, you’d dumped me. Now we’re . . . We were almost . . .’ She was afraid if she said any more she would cry.

  ‘Almost, but no cigar. I mean it, Maguire. Think about what you’re doing.’

  ‘And what about Maggie? I have to choose for her too.’

  He almost laughed. ‘Aye, and what’s here for her – a da who’s not even her da, locked away with murderers and men who’d kill you as soon as look at you?’

  ‘You’re her dad. You know that.’

  ‘She won’t remember me. Few more years, she’ll be grand. Find her another dad. Maybe even her real one. He down there with you, was he? Brooking? Very cosy.’

  Paula took a deep breath. She wouldn’t lose her temper, not when she hadn’t seen him for months and there was so much to say. She didn’t rise to the bait. In the bed, Pat’s chest lifted and fell, while she lay comatose. ‘Did she see you like this? Mags?’

  Aidan shook his head. ‘No. Got your da to take her out. Didn’t want to confuse her. She’ll be glad to have you back, though.’

  Paula took a step forward. ‘This doesn’t have to be it. We don’t have to just give up – there’s a chance, a way we can all be . . .’

  He gave a twisted smile. ‘Even if I was still a gambling man, it’d be too big a bet for me, Maguire. And I’m done saying prayers. Only did that the once since I was a wean and look how it all turned out.’

  ‘When was that?’ She tried to keep her voice calm, keep him talking. Terribly afraid that he would go and she’d not see him again for months, maybe years.

  He made that gesture again, the fingers groping for a cigarette, a crutch that wasn’t there. ‘When you were having her. Mags. Prayed you’d both be OK, and promised I’d not ask for anything from you ever again, if you’d only be OK.’ He smiled, and she saw one of his teeth was loose and bloody. ‘Made a mess of that one, didn’t I? Always wanted too much.’

  She tried not to look at his mouth. Jesus Christ. ‘You know Bob Hamilton? Dad’s old partner? Well, he told me – Sean Conlon had enemies. People who said they’d get him, as soon as he was out of jail.’

  ‘Aye, well, there’s no need to get him now, is there?’

  ‘But you see – maybe someone else came that night. Maybe he was still breathing when you left him and maybe . . .’ She tailed off. ‘GBH, maybe, and you’d have done your time by now. Mitigating circumstances . . . Aidan, you could come home.’

  ‘Home? There is no home. Only lies that I told you. You know that. You should put the place up for sale.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t lies. There’s more to family than just . . . blood.’

  ‘Aye, but blood is a lot, isn’t it, Maguire? Blood is a lot. You’d give anything to have your mammy back. Even her bones. Wouldn’t you? It calls to something inside you. I have it with my da, and with . . .’ He bowed his head to Pat, squeezing her limp hand. ‘Blood is a lot,’ he said again. ‘That man, he’s Maggie’s father. They both need to know that.’ She hesitated and he widened his bloodshot eyes. ‘You still didn’t tell him? Christ, Maguire.’

  ‘I don’t know how! I let him think that it was you, for two years, and that was a lie, so how can I tell him? I lied to him. All thanks to you.’

  ‘You can tell him because you have to. God almighty.’

  ‘I’m not ready. Not yet.’ Meaning she wasn’t ready to give up. On Aidan, on their family, on that life together that she’d allowed herself to hope for. Hope that still clung by a terrible shred of flesh, like a tooth in a bloody jaw.

  Aidan regarded her out of his good eye. ‘Still married, is he?’

  How dare he. How fucking dare he, after all this. ‘Look, you stubborn dick,’ she said, as quietly as she could, for fear of disturbing Pat. ‘Forget Guy Brooking. Forget you and me and that whole mess. Do this for Mags, if no one else. There’s a chance it wasn’t you who killed Conlon, an actually pretty bloody good chance, so why won’t you take it? Why?’

  ‘Who’s gonna prove it? You’re relying on Provos to come forward, terribly sorry, officer, but you got the wrong man, it was us did it, not that poor nice journalist who only beat ten shades of hell out of Conlon. It was us came along and finished the job, only nobody saw and there’s not a shred of evidence, even if we were feeling nice enough to own up. How in the hell would I ever prove it? They’ve got me, Maguire. I told Hamilton as much myself.’

  She frowned. ‘What do you mean? When did you see him?’

  Aidan sighed. ‘He came to visit me. Said the same – maybe he could help, maybe he knew someone, blah blah. As if it would make any difference.’

  Bob had gone to see Aidan? Why would he do that? ‘There was other DNA on the . . . on Conlon.’

  ‘Aye, and you know as well as I do half the punters in Flanagan’s use that car park as a toilet. Course there’d be other DNA. All manner of it. And there’s also my footprints on the man’s chest and my knuckles in a state and my T-shirt with his blood all over it.’

  He said it so calmly, the facts of the case against him, that it made her flinch. But she had to try all the same. ‘But if Bob says he can help . . .’

  He snorted. ‘Bob. Sideshow Bob, is that what you used to call him? You’d leave it up to him? That man couldn’t find his arse with both hands. Couldn’t find a trace of your ma, could he, back in the day? What makes you think he could find some Provo that doesn’t want to be found?’

  Paula flinched. Aidan was lashing out, looking to hurt and knowing just the way to do it. ‘I’ve got a PI working on it. Trying to find someone that might confess. Why won’t you try?’

  ‘Maguire. I could easily have killed Conlon, even if by some miracle I didn’t. So I’ll take my punishment for that, and it’s no more than I deserve. Everything good I ever had I ruined. You too. You and the wean. All my fault.’

  ‘But . . .’ But Maggie, she wanted to say. But me. Me and you, and the life we had. Instead she said: ‘Just tell me why. When there’s at least a chance.’

  He looked up, his green eyes haunted and restless. ‘Because, Maguire. I said I only prayed the one time. I won’t stake any more on it – hope. Look where it’s got us up till now. Look what I did to you, because of hoping, and to that wee girl. So no, there’s no point. I’ll do my time, and then I’ll get on with what life I have left, and you’ll do the same. For her.’

  Paula’s fists clenched. Damn him. Damn him for winning her back once, and keeping her here in this godforsaken town, and then leaving her here alone. Damn him for the fact she kept on choosing him, stubbornly refusing to go no matter how many other doors opened for her. Refusing to go out through them, while there was even the slightest chance she would get Aidan back. Even in five years. Even in ten. Damn him to hell. ‘You can’t stop me trying,’ she hissed, and turned on her heel and went out.

  She paced the corridor, too angry to go back in, too scared to leave in case something happened to Pat. What a mess. What an unholy shit-storm they’d made of their lives. He was right, though. She had to tell Guy about Maggie. She had to go to Guy and tell him and face the consequences. He’d be on his way back to London now, likely. She’d hoped to tell him that night, but fate had intervened. And there would always be a reason not to, a way to be a coward over and over.

  Her phone was ringing. Guy, calling to say goodbye? She fished it out, earning a black look from a passing nurse, and looked at the number. ‘Davey,’ she said wearily, answering. ‘Sorry, I can’t really talk now, there’s kind of a family emergency going on . . .’

  He ignored her, his twenty-a-day rasping coming down the line. ‘Go
t some news for you.’

  Her heart began to race. There was a smug, victorious tone in his voice. ‘Did you – you found something?’ Oh God. She couldn’t bear it, not on top of everything else, the answers she’d sought for so long. Her mother dead, maybe, while Pat lay hovering on the brink. Paula looked down the corridor, to where her father dandled Maggie by the hand, dancing along the corridor, a man of over sixty doing the steps to a Taylor Swift song. Whatever Davey had found out might be about to destroy them all. ‘What?’ she whispered.

  ‘Your man Edward. The Army Intel fella. I found him. Or at least, a last address. He retired out to London, in 1993.’

  ‘What month?’ She tried to sound calm. Her mother had gone missing at the end of October that year. Almost Halloween, smoke and sulphur in the air.

  Davey said, ‘November. Stopped working, gave up his commission, pretty much went to ground, changed his surname. But I’ve found an address.’

  She could hardly form the words. ‘And did you . . . have you gone there?’

  ‘Not yet. Wanted to check with you, like.’ Because if he went, and this Edward was still there, and there was someone else with him . . .

  Paula began to tremble, so hard she almost dropped the phone. From down the hall, she heard the sound of Maggie laughing – so high and clear it was almost like a scream.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Back in her house. Maggie asleep upstairs. Back in the place her mother had last been seen, pacing around the kitchen. Open the fridge, empty now of Aidan’s beer. Open the cupboard with the whiskey bottle, which she had checked so often while she lived with him, without asking herself why she felt the need to do this, why she didn’t trust the man she was going to marry. She thought for a moment about taking a swig, then closed the door again.

  The medical report on Fiona Watts was in her inbox, and she flipped through it absently on her laptop. Slightly heightened levels of lead . . . consistent with exposure to contaminants . . . So even Fiona, with her packaged food and bottled water, had not escaped the madness that was seeping out of the very ground on Bone Island. Paula remembered her own sense of dislocation, as if nothing was properly real, the blood-red sea sloshing around her feet. Guy disappearing over the side of the boat. She hoped the exposure was not enough to affect Fiona’s baby, that she’d fought so hard to protect. Sometime, when everything had settled – if it ever could – she would like to see Fiona again, the woman who’d kept her going in that cold cabin. She would go back to England, Paula imagined, once she was discharged from hospital in Kerry. Back to her old life, or what was left of it. Trying to make a life with the centre of it hollowed out. Paula knew what that was like. And as for the rest of the sorry mess that was Bone Island – she didn’t know what would happen. Rory would be prosecuted, undoubtedly, for the murder of Matt and kidnapping herself and Fiona. Seamas too, maybe. The company would have to pay compensation for what they’d done, poisoning a whole island, trying to bury the truth. And Maeve’s paper would no doubt follow up the story. Paula should have been there, sorting it out. Instead she’d dropped everything and run to Aidan. Like she did every time. Never learning, never making a better choice.

  She scrolled on, not really seeing the words. Presence of HCG . . . recommend monitoring of lead levels and chelation where appropriate . . .

  HCG. It stirred a memory in her somewhere, but she was too tired to retrieve it.

  Paula sat at the table, staring at the sink and the fridge. The countertop beside it – the units and doors now new and replaced – that was where her mother had placed the note she’d written, maybe sitting in this same spot. The note explaining to Paula that she had to leave, but not why. Explaining that she had to go away, and she knew Paula would not understand, but maybe she would one day. So if her mother had been having an affair with that man, Edward, and if she’d gone off with him, and he was still alive and living in London – was there a chance she had got away? Could be living still? In London, where Paula had spent so many years herself? What if she’d passed her on the street one day, or stepped off a train as her mother stepped on? Would she have felt a shiver, maybe, as if a ghost had walked past?

  And Paula felt hope, that terrible thing, flutter inside her like a flame you thought you’d snuffed out long ago. It hurt more than despair. Despair was like reaching the bottom. A comfort in it, your feet on solid ground. Hope was drowning, floundering in the sea, still trying to cling to life, kicking and flailing even when there was no point. Once again she pictured her mother on the shore of Bone Island, red hair flying in the wind, her green dress moulded around her body, for a moment swelling . . .

  Paula froze. How strange was the human mind, the way it could know something for weeks, maybe even years, maybe decades, and only reveal itself fully in one moment of blinding clarity. Of course. Fucking hell, of course. It all slotted into place. Her mother off work sick the day before she disappeared. A doctor’s appointment.

  Her bag. Where was her bag? It had been retrieved from the ruins of the pub, charred but not destroyed, and she’d dumped it in the hallway on her return. It stank of smoke and salt air, taking her back there, the floor heating up under her feet and groping for Guy’s hand in the dark. Paula scrabbled through the papers Davey had given her, her mother’s medical records, a little damp and sooty but still readable. There was a word she recognised. A chemical name. One she’d also just seen on Fiona Watts’s medical summary. She groped for the phone. Luckily, Saoirse was a good enough friend not to need social niceties, and she was used to Paula calling up with random medical questions.

  Her friend sounded sleepy. ‘Well, what’s the craic? You OK?’

  ‘Seersh, what’s human chorionic gonadotropin?’ She thought she knew, but wanted to hear it, in the hope that the vague ideas fractured in her head might come together.

  Saoirse yawned. ‘HCG? Can be a sign of some cancers, tumours and that.’

  ‘Cancer?’ Her mind was churning, mashing, crashing like waves.

  ‘Sometimes. But that’s not what it usually means. Do you not remember from when you had Maggie?’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘It’s what pregnancy tests check for. A hormone.’

  Paula was thinking hard. Seeing her mother on the shore there, her summer dress blown around her by the breeze. The shape of her body. You didn’t look at your parents when you were twelve, not properly. And PJ had been working so much that year – the ceasefires had broken down in 1993, and it was back to daily killings for a while, and he’d been out all the time dealing with one murder or another. Even the morning Margaret disappeared, he was out before light on a case. So it was possible. August, their last holiday, was only two months before her mother had gone. A lifetime from the hot summer days to the cold autumn morning when they’d somehow lost her. But not so long in the scheme of things. Maybe long enough to make a decision, or realise a decision had been forced on you, by your own inaction. Paula knew that. After all, she’d done exactly the same.

  Saoirse yawned again. ‘So . . . you’re not going to tell me what this is about? You’re not . . .’

  ‘Christ, no. Course not. A case.’

  ‘Right. Always a case with you.’ There were murmurs in the background, Dave waking up, no doubt. The two of them in the sleepy cocoon of night, like Paula and Aidan had been, so briefly. ‘It’s only Paula,’ Saoirse was saying.

  ‘Sorry, I’ll let you get back to sleep. Thanks, Glocko.’ The line went dead and Paula was left alone with the facts, cold and sharp. She remembered it well – she’d hidden her own pregnancy for months, not telling anyone, as she tried to work out what you were supposed to do when you weren’t sure who the father was. She’d even puked on Guy’s shoes one day in work. And still no one had figured it out. So could you hide something like that? In a house with your husband and daughter? Your husband who was crushed almost senseless by
the death he saw every day. Your daughter who was just thirteen and wrapped up in her world of watching X-Files and wondering if Aidan O’Hara, son of her mum’s best friend, would ever talk to her again now they were growing up.

  She was pacing in the kitchen, the familiar anger back. Why had her mother left so many questions? Hadn’t she known what her daughter was like, PJ Maguire’s daughter, who didn’t know how to live with an unanswered question, who always had to know everything no matter the cost? The only thing she’d not found out the answer to was Maggie’s parentage, and only then because she must have known, deep down, that the answer was not what she and Aidan pretended it was.

  Angrily, in silence, she asked her questions now. In her head her mother was always the age she’d been when she’d gone. Beautiful, still turning men’s heads. But Paula realised she would now be much older, if she was alive. What would she look like? Where could she have been all these years, if she’d gone off of her own accord? To hide a baby, maybe. But why?

  Now, in the silence of the house, she once again tore her hair out with unanswered questions. They cropped up like the Hydra every time she found something. This time it was a new one. Oh God, Mum, what did you do?

  She took out her phone again and fumbled a message to Saoirse. Sorry to wake you and Dave. I need to go to London tomorrow – any chance you could watch Maggie for one more night?

  Fiona

  Through the glass of the lighthouse bulb, I could see the sky. A white and featureless dome, like the top of the skull when you peel the skin away for surgery. Rory was gasping on top of me like a landed fish. ‘Oh God, Fi. Oh God. We shouldn’t have – oh Jesus, Mary and St Joseph.’ They really do love calling on the saints, the Irish. I hoped he wasn’t going to start with the Catholic guilt thing again.

  I got out from under him, looking for my clothes. Trying to sort out my feelings and parcel them into little boxes. I don’t know if Rory ever really believed me about Matt. Even the cut on my hand didn’t totally convince him. I think he was suspicious, but also he wanted me, so he went along with it. I could see the way his eyes always came back to rest on my hips or breasts. Not so flattering, really – aside from Lucy Cole at the primary school and that crazy researcher from the plant, the one who’s so blatantly in love with Matt I can practically feel the death-rays she sends my way, I’m the only woman under forty here who isn’t married or raddled. And Lucy is the kind of person who irons her knickers – I know; I’ve given her a smear test. However, Rory’s interest was currently all I had, and like a woman dying of thirst, I’d take what I could get. But like so many men, the ones who paraded through my sheets in the days before Matt, as soon as he’d finished, Rory was already thinking about how to archive the whole encounter. ‘What’ll we do? Matt’s my friend. Oh God.’