The Lost Child: A Gripping Detective Thriller with a Heart-Stopping Twist

by Patricia Gibney

  The study had multiple screens hanging on the wall. Wide screens. Flat screens. Two computer desktops and laptops. Wires were neatly pinned and secured along the walls. A set of headphones hung on a hook and the leather chair was situated in front of a desk full of technology.

  With her finger still gloved, she hit the return button on one of the laptops. A screen burst into life.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, exhaling a long breath. What the hell was Cian O’Shea involved in?

  Eighty-Five

  Kirby and Lynch were going over the information they’d received from the land registry when Boyd’s computer pinged with an email.

  ‘Have a look at that, Lynch. Might be important.’

  Lynch went over and tapped Boyd’s keyboard. Kirby joined her.

  ‘Health service records?’ he said.

  ‘The list of St Declan’s patients. This is a wild goose chase.’

  ‘Open it up,’ Kirby said.

  ‘You do it. I’m not a snoop.’

  ‘Ah, for Christ’s sake.’ Kirby jabbed a thick finger on the email, opening it up. ‘Screenshots of handwritten originals. I’ll print them off and let Boyd chase his own goose when he returns.’

  He ambled back to his desk.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘all this land was owned by Stan and Kitty Belfield in 1970.’

  ‘Who owned it before them?’

  ‘What matters is who owned it afterwards. I don’t know why or how, but by 1976, this portion here, consisting of two hundred and sixty acres, was in Tessa Ball’s name. This piece here, where Marian lived, twenty acres, was also in Ball’s name. The Belfields retained ownership of the manor house and the land banking down towards the lake. With me so far?’

  Lynch nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Over the last couple of years, the two hundred and sixty acres of farmland, including the cottage, was transferred over to Mick O’Dowd. He was just a farm tenant before that. Why the transfer? And the land at Carnmore containing two houses was transferred to Marian Russell. Nothing remained in Tessa’s name except her apartment. She wasn’t dying or anything, was she?’

  ‘Nothing showed up at the post-mortem.’

  ‘So the question is, what prompted a wealthy former solicitor to divest herself of her wealth?’ Kirby said.

  ‘Does it even matter?’

  ‘This might all have to do with land ownership, not drugs.’

  ‘Money,’ Lynch said, ‘the root of all evil.’

  ‘We need to run this by the boss,’ Kirby said. ‘They’re taking their time getting back.’

  ‘Who’s taking their time?’ McMahon asked, entering the office with a swish of his shoulders.

  ‘Shit,’ Lynch said.

  Eighty-Six

  Dressed in a white forensic suit, Cian O’Shea cut a morose figure in his sterile cell. Lottie left him to ponder the walls and walked up towards the office with Boyd.

  ‘Bastard, saying nothing until he gets his solicitor.’ Boyd thumped his hand against the wall with every step he took ascending the stairs.

  ‘We can nail him for the Moroney murders once SOCOs lift something from the washed clothes.’

  ‘If what Annabelle said about the blood is correct, then they will.’

  ‘And his DNA should be in Moroney’s house. But why did he do it?’ Lottie headed for the car pool yard. ‘I’d kill for a cigarette. We deserve a break.’

  Huddled in the rear doorway, Boyd lit the cigarettes.

  Lottie dragged heartily and stared up at the misty sky. ‘Will it ever end?’

  ‘The rain?’

  ‘Boyd, will you give me a hug. Just a quick one. In the face of all this insanity, I want to feel a little bit human.’ She turned to him, and he dipped his head and kissed her cheek before wrapping his arms about her.

  ‘You are the most human person I know,’ he said into her hair.

  ‘The world is so full of monsters, I fear for my family. I panic when I think of what we’ll find next.’ She drew away from his embrace, took another drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out. ‘And then I wonder if my father had any involvement with Carrie King’s incarceration in St Declan’s.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘Maybe he was a monster too.’ She glanced up at the clouds as they burst with a thunderous downpour. ‘If he was into something illegal, maybe he didn’t like what he had become.’

  ‘You think that’s why he killed himself?’

  ‘If he did in fact kill himself.’

  Boyd threw down his cigarette. ‘You may never know, and you have enough to concern yourself with right now.’ He gave her one final squeeze. ‘Let’s go back inside before we drown.’

  ‘We’ll get nowhere until O’Shea’s solicitor arrives. But first I want to speak with Natasha Kelly. Will you be a star and pull the car up to the door?’

  * * *

  They passed Marian Russell’s house on the way. It stood ghostlike; a spectre in the rain.

  ‘Where can Arthur Russell be hiding out?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘We’ve interviewed all his known friends. Searched everywhere. He hasn’t left the country. We’ll find him.’

  ‘I don’t think he killed his own daughter. When we spoke with him, he seemed to genuinely love her.’

  ‘You never know what can drive people to murder. Look at Cian O’Shea,’ Boyd said.

  ‘What was his motive for killing the Moroneys? That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘We don’t know that he killed anyone.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Do you think he murdered the others too?’

  ‘I don’t know, Boyd. I honestly don’t know what to think. But we really need to find Mick O’Dowd as well as Arthur.’

  He parked outside the Kellys’. ‘No car.’

  ‘They might be at the shops,’ Lottie said. The house looked as empty as Marian Russell’s. She rang the bell, hammered on the door until her knuckles turned red.

  ‘No one home,’ Boyd said.

  ‘Check the rear.’ Lottie took off at a run and Boyd followed.

  ‘Definitely no one here,’ she said after a minute. ‘I thought they’d decided to stay. So where are they? I need to find out why Emma phoned Natasha.’

  ‘Calm down. They’ll be back.’

  ‘I’ve a bad feeling about this.’

  ‘You’ve a bad feeling about everything.’

  ‘Check their car registration number and radio traffic to watch for them. Shit, there isn’t even a neighbour to ask when they were last seen.’

  ‘Will you quit panicking? They’re not gone far.’

  ‘And how do you deduce that?’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake.’

  Lottie watched as Boyd stomped back to the car. He leaned in and grabbed the radio. Looking around the house once again, she noted the lie of the land and wondered if Kirby had received any additional information about the land. Next on her list.

  From the car, Boyd shouted, ‘McGlynn wants us at O’Shea’s house.’

  Eighty-Seven

  ‘We’ve sent the clothes for analysis,’ McGlynn said, leading the way up the stairs.

  ‘They were washed. Will you get anything from them?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Fingers crossed we will.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were the superstitious type.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Parker, you don’t know anything about me.’

  ‘True,’ Lottie said as they reached Cian’s study. ‘So, what did you want to show us?’

  ‘This here is Gary. He’s a technical genius.’

  Lottie nodded at the young man. He was suited up, as she was, but she assumed he was young. Not too many technical geniuses in her age group. ‘What did you find, Gary?’

  ‘This is some set-up,’ he said, and she could hear the admiration in his voice. ‘There’s a whole games development suite here. I could sift through it all day long.’

  ‘Gary,’ McGlynn said. ‘Tell the detectives w
hat you discovered.’

  The technician reluctantly walked away from his prize. ‘This is an impressive CCTV system. Remotely linked. And from what I can see, it’s mainly via mobile phone network.’

  ‘So he was spying on people via their phones?’

  ‘And computer webcams.’ He tapped a keyboard with his gloved fingers.

  The screen Lottie had accidentally accessed earlier popped open. Annabelle’s surgery. She looked back at Boyd.

  ‘This is what I told you about.’

  ‘So the bastard was spying on her,’ Boyd said.

  Gary clicked a mouse and another screen sprang life.

  ‘Looks very modern,’ Lottie said.

  ‘It’s an office. But have a look at the reflection on the glass wall behind the desk.’

  Leaning over, Lottie squinted at the image. ‘A skyscraper?’

  ‘I think this office is in Manhattan.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Boyd said. ‘Was he spying on someone in New York?’

  ‘Can you access the address of the building?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘The image is a still, not live. I tried accessing the code, but no luck.’

  Tiredness and frustration seeped into her bones; she just wanted Gary to get to the point.

  ‘And brace yourself for this one.’ The technician clicked a third screen open.

  ‘What the…?’ Lottie gaped open-mouthed. ‘That’s my son’s room.’ She stared incredulously. ‘How…?’

  ‘He hacked into his computer with a game download.’

  ‘But why was he spying on Sean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was the only way he could access your home.’

  ‘Why would Cian O’Shea be spying on me and my family?’

  ‘And for how long?’ Boyd said.

  ‘I’ll let you know more once I get stuck in.’

  She could only see his eyes, but Lottie knew the young man was itching to get started on Cian O’Shea’s project. Whatever the hell that was.

  ‘And all that is live feed?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s in real time.’

  ‘Copies? Recordings? Tapes or anything?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘O’Shea has some serious questions to answer.’

  McGlynn handed Lottie a file. ‘This was in the cabinet. Know anything about it?’

  Lottie stared at the copy Jane Dore had made of her father’s post-mortem file. With all Cian’s expertise, she supposed it was a simple task for him to hack into the state computer systems and put a flag on the file. But why did he need to do that, and then steal the hard copy?

  Feeling the confinement of the room and the heat from the equipment, Lottie turned and rushed out. It suddenly felt way too small. And she felt even smaller.

  Eighty-Eight

  Lottie wanted to go home. Instead she sent a technician to her house to check out Sean’s computer equipment and to search for further intrusions. Exhaustion caused her knees to creak, but Kirby wanted everyone in the incident room. He’d pinned maps up on one of the incident boards.

  She tried to hide a yawn with the back of her hand. ‘Explain.’

  ‘For some reason, in 1976 all this land was transferred from Kitty and Stan Belfield to Tessa Ball. Then two years ago, Tessa transferred the farmland, including the cottage, to O’Dowd, and six months ago, the land containing the Russell and Kelly houses to Marian.’ Kirby smiled triumphantly.

  ‘So?’ Lottie said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted answers, not more questions.’

  ‘This might explain part of it.’ Lynch pinned two sheets of paper on the board alongside the maps. ‘Birth certificates.’

  Lottie rose from her chair and stood beside Lynch.

  ‘Tessa was born Teresa O’Dowd.’ She glanced at the other certificate, noted the parents’ names. ‘She was Mick O’Dowd’s sister.’

  ‘Maybe that explains why she signed the land over to him,’ Lynch said.

  ‘Answers one question,’ Kirby said.

  ‘But why did she only do it two years ago? What happened in her life then to force her hand?’

  ‘The only thing I can come up with is that the cottage was rented out around then. So it might have been the start of their involvement with the drug lord.’

  ‘Jerome Quinn?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Was she trying to distance herself by formally signing the land to O’Dowd?’

  ‘How does Cian O’Shea fit in?’ Boyd said.

  ‘This gets more complicated by the minute.’ Lottie paced in small circles. ‘We need to find O’Dowd. He’s the only one who can tell us about Tessa.’

  She thought of her search of O’Dowd’s house and the book she’d found under the sink cupboard, with its inscription inside.

  ‘Carrie King,’ she said. ‘Did you come across any connection to her?’

  ‘No, don’t think so,’ Kirby said.

  ‘No,’ Lynch said.

  ‘Let me get this straight.’ Lottie sat down and drummed her knuckles against her forehead. ‘The Belfields owned all that land. Stan was in partnership with Tessa Ball. Something occurred in the early to mid seventies to warrant him signing a large part of his fortune over to Tessa. What?’

  Boyd said. ‘What do you know about this Carrie King?’

  ‘She was supposedly into drugs and alcohol. Had a number of children taken from her and was eventually locked up in St Declan’s. Kitty Belfield said Tessa was heavily involved in the circumstances surrounding Carrie King’s incarcerations. She even suggested to me that Mick O’Dowd could have fathered at least one of Carrie’s children, and she remarked how alike Marian was to O’Dowd. But if Tessa and Mick were brother and sister, perhaps that’s the reason for the resemblance.’

  ‘Or, as you first thought, O’Dowd fathered Marian with Carrie King and Tessa cobbled together a birth certificate and raised her as her own.’

  ‘Let’s go with that for a minute,’ Lottie said. ‘It still doesn’t explain all that land transfer. What hold could Tessa have had over the Belfields?’

  ‘Maybe they had no children of their own and saw Tessa as an heir,’ Lynch said.

  ‘Kirby, check it out,’ Lottie said. ‘Boyd, we’re going to have a go at Cian O’Shea.’

  Eighty-Nine

  She wasted a full hour with Cian O’Shea and his solicitor. She’d be hearing ‘no comment’ in her sleep for a year.

  ‘The bastard,’ she said, entering Cathal Moroney’s house.

  ‘He’s afraid, though,’ Boyd said.

  ‘He should be very afraid. By the time I finish with him he—’

  ‘Lottie, there’s nothing you can do. Let’s find the evidence.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What do you hope to discover?’

  ‘I have no idea, but if it was Cian O’Shea who broke in and murdered the Moroneys, you can be sure it wasn’t something on a computer he was looking for. It had to be the file Moroney told me about.’ She headed straight for the study.

  ‘So it is drug-related.’

  ‘If I knew that, O’Shea would be in front of a judge this minute. As it is, we still have to look. This place is a mess.’

  On her knees, Lottie carefully stacked pages. Once she had a good sheaf, she handed them to Boyd. ‘Make yourself useful.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘These were all in the drawers and filing cabinet. So at one time they were in some sort of order. You’re good at that.’

  ‘But I don’t even know what they relate to.’ Boyd took the papers and sat on a chair by the desk.

  ‘Use your head.’

  ‘Is there anything in particular you want me to highlight for you?’

  ‘Something that caused a murderer to break in and kill Cathal and Lauren Moroney, while one of their terrified children hid upstairs.’

  ‘Murder might not have been the intention.’

  ‘Probably not. If he’d found what he was after, I think he’d have been in
and out without being discovered. Just sort the papers and I’ll go through them.’

  Should she tell Boyd about her conversation with Moroney? But surely his murder had nothing to do with what his father had wanted to print back in the seventies. Had it? No. It was something Moroney himself had uncovered about the drugs ring. Had to be. And if the killer hadn’t had enough time or couldn’t wrangle it out of him, then that information was still here. Somewhere.

  * * *

  ‘It’s all stuff he’s already reported on,’ Boyd said three hours later as he surveyed his handiwork. Lottie was still on her knees, wading through the morass of paper.

  ‘It’s here somewhere and I’m going to find it.’

  ‘You don’t even know what you’re looking for. Let’s call it a night and we can get back to it tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Lottie threw her hands in the air. ‘We have case files as high as the body count. Something links them all together. Moroney was on to it.’ Sitting back on the floor, she caught sight of the clock on the wall. ‘God! Is that the time?’ She jumped up, scattering paper and files in her haste.

  ‘Hey! I just sorted those. And yes, it’s 12.03, madam inspector. Just after the witching hour.’

  ‘I should’ve been home hours ago.’ She edged out past Boyd to the living room. Catching sight of the box of toys, she faltered. Thank God the children had not been harmed physically, though they would suffer psychological damage. And she knew how bad that could be. Picking up her jacket, she felt her phone vibrate in the pocket. She checked it. Chloe.

  ‘Hi, hon. I’m sorry, I got held up at work. All okay?’

  ‘Mom, you’d better come home. Now.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’