A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4)

by Claire McGowan

  Gerard had followed them through the kitchen doorway, and his face creased as he saw the pictures. ‘What’s that?’

  Paula opened another cupboard. ‘Thinspiration. Pro-anorexia stuff.’

  ‘That’s a thing?’

  ‘Be glad you’re male, Monaghan,’ said Corry, poking through a cutlery drawer.

  Gerard squinted. ‘So does she do this every day, take photos? Bit up herself, is she?’

  ‘It’s an eating disorder thing,’ said Paula. ‘She needs validation from people online to reassure herself she’s thin.’

  ‘Load of rubbish.’

  ‘Look at this.’ Paula indicated a headless picture of Alice in a bikini, her hipbones lifting the fabric like buttresses. ‘I’d say her self-esteem isn’t the best. She’d be at risk of drug use, self-harm – and suicide, sadly. And I bet if we have a look we’ll also find a bad boyfriend in the mix.’ Paula’s fingertip hovered over the picture, not touching.

  Corry shook her head. ‘Give me a nice gangland killing any day. Clean and simple.’

  Gerard said, ‘Like that one last month where the fella’s kneecaps were shot out all over the kitchen floor?’

  ‘At least that made sense. He didn’t do it to himself, did he?’

  Paula was still looking at Alice’s ribcage. She was gaunt, like an animal starving to death. She’d have hated how she looked, most likely. Probably explained the baggy clothes. But she’d chosen to cover her fridge with pictures of her near-naked body. Maybe so she’d punish herself if she allowed one morsel of food past her mouth. ‘Mortification of the flesh,’ she muttered.

  ‘Eh?’ Gerard was on his phone again, perhaps hoping for an assignment to something more clear-cut.

  ‘That was what Saint Blannad did, wasn’t it? She fasted for a year in captivity, supposedly, and was rewarded with divine visions. And Alice here is obsessed with the relic by all accounts, she’s spent the year studying it, she’s even moved out here – and she’s starving herself.’

  ‘A girl with anorexia at a shrine for the hungry,’ said Corry. ‘That’s strange.’

  ‘This is beyond me, Maguire,’ said Gerard irritably. ‘Women and food. Just eat if you’re hungry, then don’t if you’re too fat. Easy.’

  ‘I hope you don’t talk to your girlfriend like that,’ Corry scolded him.

  ‘She’s all right. She can eat what she wants, she’s a fast metabolism. She says she never diets.’

  ‘How long is it now you’re together?’

  ‘Year and a half.’

  Corry did her trademark eye-roll. ‘God love you, Monaghan, you’ve got a lot to learn.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Nothing. Let’s talk to her friends, see if we can get the name of a boyfriend, if there is one.’

  ‘There’ll be one. There always is.’ Paula peered at the photos, the dismembered body parts. The angles seemed impossible – a stomach curving in on itself, legs that didn’t meet in the middle. She looked down at herself, the roll she’d never quite shifted from her middle after Maggie’s birth. How thin could you get, before you’d actually disappear?

  ‘I better tell Willis,’ said Corry, shutting the kitchen door. ‘This is adding up to suicide, right?’

  ‘But the blood in the church, and the relic missing? The photo of Yvonne?’

  ‘I know. Which is why I’ve asked Willis to make it high-risk. Then we can put all the resources we have on it.’

  ‘Will he give it to Serious Crime?’ said Gerard, sounding wary. He preferred the more straightforward cases, scumbags to be hauled in and banged up. Simple.

  Corry shook her head. ‘I want to hang onto it. He’s enough on his plate and she’s only missing for now.’

  Until they found a body, that was. Paula looked around the cottage. ‘Is that it? Two and a bit rooms?’

  ‘There’s a wee garden outside.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  Corry shrugged and led her out of the side door to an overgrown back lawn. At the bottom was a shed. It would have been the outside loo at one point. Paula tramped down, the dying weeds crunching underfoot. There was no sound but the birds in the trees, and far away, the noise of a farm vehicle droning over the land. The door had not one but two padlocks on it. New and shiny.

  ‘This is weird. Nothing else is in such good nick.’ The door itself was old and rotten.

  ‘I’ll ask the search team to get a warrant.’ Corry beckoned to Gerard. ‘See if you can get in there, Monaghan, OK?’

  ‘Can we not get a DC on it?’ He lowered his BlackBerry. Now he’d made DS, Gerard was at pains to stay ahead of the pack.

  ‘I’m sure you can sort it. Let’s get back to the station and sort our paperwork, and then we better go to Oakdale. I think this lot are more concerned about the relic than they are about poor Alice.’

  Paula wondered was Corry saying ‘poor’ because Alice was gone, or because she’d clearly been an unhappy, suffering girl. As they left the cottage she saw Corry pull the front door shut on its old-fashioned latch. ‘It wasn’t locked?’

  ‘No. She left it open, Garrett says. It didn’t have a lock.’

  ‘Trusting.’

  ‘Well, it’s in the middle of nowhere. Who’d be coming round here?’

  But Alice was gone all the same.

  Chapter Five

  On the screen were two pictures. In one, a woman was dying in a famine in Sudan. Flies crawled on her face, made ageless by starvation. In the other, another woman was almost as thin, the skin stretched over the bones of her face. Only difference: she was smiling. On a website that gave tips on how to lose weight, hide your eating habits from friends and family. How to cheat at weigh-ins. How to never eat in public. How to die, slowly and willingly.

  Paula sighed and clicked out of her research, feeling the weight of the internet press on her. The Famine. The hunger strikes. Anorexia. It was all too much to process. There were already some news stories online about Alice disappearing, and the phones in the station had been ringing since their return from the church. She turned again to the picture of Alice which Corry had put on the incident room board – frail, lost. Where are you? Paula couldn’t help but feel that the signs – the empty kitchen, the blood in the church – were all crumbs someone had left, if only she could follow them.

  Gerard appeared at her desk, a ham sandwich in his hand – if he didn’t eat every fifteen minutes he would slip into a coma, apparently. ‘Corry wants you,’ he mumbled, chewing.

  Behind him was a young policewoman in uniform. Paula smiled at her. ‘Well, Constable Wright. Not arresting me, I hope.’

  Avril blushed. ‘Ah, stop it. It’s bad enough I have to wear this. I just hope I make CID quickly.’ The black police uniform, slacks and a stab vest, wasn’t Avril’s usual pastel attire, but her face was flushed and pretty as always when Gerard Monaghan was nearby.

  The two were very careful to be discreet at work. Gerard, at twenty-nine and already a DS, was her senior. Avril had been an intelligence analyst for the missing persons unit before getting a taste for policing. Paula wondered how it was working out for them. Gerard’s Republican family and Avril’s parents – her father a Presbyterian minister – had so far refused to meet. Avril would also not countenance living with a man she wasn’t married to.

  Gerard shoved the last of his sandwich in his mouth, chewing exaggeratedly to make Avril laugh. She shook her head. ‘You’re awful. Sorry, Paula.’

  Paula thought they were doing OK. Gerard’s big lug of a face was also trying hard not to laugh. ‘Isn’t she a sight in that get-up?’ he said to Paula. ‘I keep expecting her to Taser me.’

  ‘Ah, give over.’ Avril slapped him lightly on the arm. ‘I better head on, Paula, but I’m dying to hear all about the wedding. What’s your dress like?’

  Paula grimaced. ‘Um . . . I haven’t got one yet.’

  ‘Oh! But is it not . . . eh, a bit late?’

  ‘When’s it again?’ said Gerard, through lumps of ham.

&n
bsp; ‘The seventeenth.’ Avril shook her head at him. ‘Honestly. I’ve told you a million times.’

  Paula got up. ‘I know, I don’t have much time. Soon. I’ll do it soon. I’ll see you anyway. Better find out what Corry wants.’

  ‘Your man Garrett might be weird, but he was right – this is the third relic theft since last year. In Dublin they lost a preserved heart out of a church, and another place had the jawbone of Saint Brigid nicked, if you could credit it. People were seen hanging about the church both times – seemed like a professional job.’

  Paula said, ‘What do they want them for? Some kind of ritual?’

  Corry laughed. ‘Nothing so voodoo. They probably just want to sell the gold casings. The recession, you see.’ Saint Blannad’s finger appeared to be a white half-moon of bone. In the pictures it rested in a gold, velvet-lined reliquary, which had been locked in the glass case in the church. ‘So that’s one angle,’ continued Corry. ‘Burglary gone wrong. Also, as you suspected, Alice was anorexic. Listen to this: in her teens she was in a private clinic for two years, and she dropped out of her first university in England because of it. Explains why she’s twenty-two and only an undergrad.’

  ‘What are her parents like?’

  ‘Well, you know about her da. This is the mother. Rebecca Morgan.’ Corry held up a picture from a newspaper. A woman hurrying from court, with short blond hair and a grey suit. The kind who got manicures, and went to the hairdresser’s once a week. ‘That was taken when there was that hoo-ha, the affair allegations about our esteemed Lord Morgan – when he was made a life peer, remember? They sued the paper that broke the story. Rebecca swore blind he was at her side on the nights he was supposedly with those girls. Paper had to give them half a million.’

  ‘How old would Alice have been then?’

  ‘Let’s see, 2005 – about fourteen. Anyway, the Morgans have been at a conference in Dubai, so they’re travelling over.’

  ‘Anything else I need to know?

  ‘Well, the blood in the church – it’s same type as Alice’s.’

  Part of her had been hoping it was animal blood, or even a Halloween prop or something, not evidence that a living girl had been done some terrible harm. ‘Did they get into the shed at her cottage?’

  ‘God, the shed. What a palaver that was. It’s a listed building or something. Anyway, look what was in it.’

  Corry pulled up a picture on her phone and Paula leaned in to see. ‘Is that . . . food?’

  ‘Yup. Alice’s little secret.’ Even on the small screen, it looked as if the shed was packed out. Boxes of biscuits, multipacks of crisps, jars of peanut butter, sugary cereals, and bags and bags of sweets. ‘It looks like my kids’ dream meal,’ said Corry, putting the phone away.

  ‘So what, she was bulimic?’

  ‘Looks that way. We’re trying to get her medical records but she hadn’t registered with a GP since she left the college. And they aren’t exactly cooperative over at Oakdale. You’ll see.’

  ‘Do we know much about the rest of her life, her friends and so on?’

  ‘We’re going to the university in a minute. I say we – that means you’re coming too, so don’t get comfortable.’

  ‘Any boyfriends?’ Paula had been hoping for an obvious suspect, a jealous lover, a rejected friend, someone with an ‘arrest me’ sign on their forehead. She had so much on with the wedding and Maggie, it was entirely the wrong time for a girl to go missing. Because Paula knew herself, and she would never be able to let it go until Alice was found.

  ‘There’s a fella she was seeing, according to the college secretary. Bit of a gossip – best kind of witness, for our purposes. I don’t know if they even have boyfriends these days, it’s all Tinder and hooking up and what have you. So come on, get your things.’

  ‘Have we time for a bite to eat first?’ Paula hadn’t got around to buying lunch – all that research into starvation had put her right off – and she and Aidan never had anything in the house to make a packed one. She wondered if that would magically get better once they were married. If they’d be like proper grown-ups.

  Corry shook her head. ‘You should have brought something. Will I make you a packed lunch when I do Rosie’s, is that what you want?’

  ‘That’d be good actually.’

  ‘Come on. You can get a sandwich on the way.’

  Alice

  I’m throwing up. I hate this normally, I can’t stand it, choking my throat, panic in my chest – what if I can’t breathe? – but it’s all they’ve left to me. All the poison they’ve fed me, I can feel it coming out, leaving me clean. I’m hugging the toilet, the lovely ceramic curves of it cold under my arms. I rest my head against the seat. It smells of piss and bleach but I know I’m safe here. The floor is checked in black and white. Eight tiles each way. I count as I vomit, trying to stay in control.

  Into the toilet I am puking my guts. I heave and heave, feeling the body take over, the terrifying power of it. Out. Out. Getting rid of it. Everything they’ve forced down me over the past weeks. I can beat them. I can puke it all out. It’s all gone, in stringy ropes of bile. The smell is so disgusting it makes me want to cry. I imagine it leaching out of me, off my stomach and hips and thighs. They won’t have won. I won’t swallow this poison. In this place, everything is so controlled. They weigh you, they watch you bleed, they calculate every ounce of you. Well, this is my revenge.

  Down the corridor I hear the alarm start to scream, and the sound of running feet. They will find me. There’s nowhere to hide. But I’ve still escaped, for now, because I am purged and clean and new. I lie down on the floor and wait for them to come, and as they wrench the door open I put my head on the tiles and start to cry.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Do they know we’re coming?’

  ‘They should do.’ Corry was looking grumpy as they stood in the reception of the college. ‘There was meant to be someone here to meet us. We’ve an appointment with the principal.’

  Oakdale College, a small private university, was still fixed up like the stately home it had been – apple-green carpets muffling the stairs, clocks ticking quietly in the corners. And the calm of the place – despite the students gathering books and preparing for lunch, passing Corry and Paula with curious looks.

  ‘No one seems to know Alice is gone,’ Paula said, as the lobby, once the hallway of the house, filled and emptied, filled and emptied, busy with chattering students, the girls dressed for the hot weather in tiny shorts and vests, the boys loud-voiced. High sounds of laughter clashing round the wooden walls of the place.

  ‘They know. Honestly, you’d think they didn’t even care one of their students is missing. Come on, I’m not waiting.’

  The library at Oakdale stopped Paula in her tracks. Polished wooden shelves of old books, and above on a high mezzanine, lines and lines of them running into shadowed corners. Students worked at the desks, the buttery summer light reflecting off glasses and Macbooks. Though they were all over eighteen, the place felt more like Paula’s old convent school. Jam-packed with hormones and tears, everything constantly on the brink. Everything full of meaning. Where you sat, who you had lunch with, how you wore your clothes, how you carried your bags. ‘Why haven’t they gone on summer break?’ There seemed to be as many students around as you’d expect mid-term.

  ‘They’re allowed to stay all year round. It’s like an extension of boarding school for a lot of them – often they’ve no homes to go to, if Mummy and Daddy are overseas or it’s too much hassle to have them. So they carry on with research projects. That’s what Alice was doing with the relic.’

  A woman in a short-sleeved shirt and polyester trousers approached. She looked cross. ‘Yes?’

  Corry showed her ID and the list of names she’d got from the secretary. ‘We’re looking for these students. Any of them in here?’

  ‘Dermot Healy’s in Mathematics,’ the librarian stage-whispered. ‘But you can’t speak to him here. You’ll disturb the stu
dents.’

  ‘Where then?’ Corry was speaking at her normal volume.

  ‘Well, there’s my room, but—’

  ‘Good.’ She tapped the edge of her ID card on the librarian’s desk. ‘Would you send him in to us, please? It’s urgent.’

  Even the office was nice, a small room with wooden cabinets. Corry crossed to the kitchen area and flicked on the kettle. She saw Paula looking. ‘It’s the least they can do. One of their students is missing, for God’s sake, and they’re acting like we’re here from Ofsted or something.’

  It took a few minutes for Dermot to be summoned from the depths of the library – or perhaps he wasn’t keen on helping either. By the time there was a reluctant knock on the door, both Corry and Paula had cups of tea. Corry had shamelessly nicked some Earl Grey from what looked like a private stash. ‘Come in.’

  The boy in the doorway – you couldn’t really call him a man – had horn-rimmed glasses and the fair, rosy skin of a chorister. His brown hair, ungelled, fell in curtains round a child-like face. Paula clocked the crimson college hoody – she’d noticed others in the library. She remembered boys like him from her own university, sometimes emerging in groups from labs and libraries, blinking in the light.

  Despite her impatience, Corry’s voice was kind. ‘Hello, Dermot. I’m DS Corry from the Ballyterrin PSNI, this is Dr Maguire. We need to ask you a few questions about Alice Morgan.’

  ‘Did you find something?’ He stepped into the room, rubbing the back of his head. Afterwards, Paula would think it was a strange thing to say.

  Corry didn’t seem to notice. ‘No, she’s still missing. I’m afraid we’re a bit worried about her.’

  He looked puzzled but reacted slowly, his features somehow flat, as if under glass. Paula found she was looking to see if his pupils were dilated. ‘Oh. Where do you think she is?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know, Dermot. She’s missing, as I said. We were hoping you might know something.’