A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4)

by Claire McGowan

  ‘The fella who owns the land,’ said PJ, as if running through a database in his head.

  ‘Anderson Garrett? Yes, he’s odd. I think he had an alibi, though, did he not?’

  ‘He was a strange one.’ PJ tapped the paper for emphasis. ‘He’d an alibi, though, right enough – he was in his work in town all day. He couldn’t have got back to the church.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘See the date? Well, one of the IRA head honchos was killed that day. Shot in his house, here in Ballyterrin. Whole town was shut down from lunchtime on, riots, petrol bombs, you name it. I was in uniform, couldn’t get home to see if you were even OK. You were only wee, and—’ He’d come dangerously close to mentioning her mother there.

  ‘Garrett’s alibi held then?’

  ‘Aye. We checked with the other solicitor he worked with – guy called Andrew Philips, if I remember right. He backed it up – Garrett was there all day, he said, nine to seven. It’s the Garrett family’s firm, see, though I don’t know if Anderson ever did a stroke of work in it. Doesn’t need to work now, mind. Oakdale College bought the family land not long after Yvonne went missing, paid them a fortune, so he hardly needs to.’

  ‘This Andrew Philips – is he still about?’

  PJ shook his head. ‘Died in 2003, I heard. Heart attack – seemed a nervy kind of fella.’

  ‘So there’s no one who can prove it?’

  ‘Garrett’s ma backed it up as well, he’d been out all day. And Yvonne was safe at home until well after two. Garrett never made it back till near midnight, he said – roadblocks. Yvonne’s ma had already reported her gone by then. So that was that.’

  ‘That was that.’ Paula made a note anyway. Andrew Philips. All these names from the past, shut away in dull brown folders for over thirty-two years. Suddenly coming to the light, like things crawling away when you lifted up a stone. She wondered if Alice had heard. Did she know another girl had gone missing, and that her boss had been the chief suspect?

  Alice

  When they come into the room, Charlotte turns off. I don’t know how she does it. It’s like flicking a switch, no light in her eyes. Charlotte is past the point of wanting to escape. It’s a battle now, them against her. They sweep in, the man and the woman. He’s in his white coat, brisk bad-Daddy air about him. I start to shake on the couch – I can’t help it. She’s all starched up, hair pulled back, steady at his elbow. Yes. No. Three bags full. It makes me sick.

  Alice, he says. To the woman, not me. She snaps my wrist, moving me to the scales. Huge things, like for cows at market. She’s rough and I stub my bare toes but I don’t make a sound. I know Charlotte will notice, and approve. I step up on the horrible wobbly things and he’s so close. I can smell the old-man breath under his aftershave. I think he drinks. He looks me over like a dog at the vet, calling out things to her, which she writes down. I refuse to hear the numbers. I refuse to hear how fat they’ve made me. He feels down my arms for hair growth, and in my mouth for the gum recession that would mean I’ve been puking up. His hands move over my ribs and down. He stops at my legs. I close my eyes.

  Alice. You’re bleeding.

  I act stupid. Oh?

  Yes. I feel his gloved hands on my thigh, moving up the line of the blood that has come down. I close my eyes, bite my lip so hard it must be bleeding too. Alice, have your periods started again?

  I don’t know. I never have any.

  I’d be surprised if menstruation recommenced at this bodyweight. To the woman again. Not me. I catch Charlotte’s eye and there’s a glimpse of her back again. We’re winning. We beat them. But of course, no, we’re not. We will never win. He pulls my knickers aside and puts his finger inside me, right up inside. In me. I nearly scream. I thought it didn’t look like menstrual blood. For reference, girls, that’s much darker and thicker. I doubt either of you have seen much of it.

  Charlotte is suddenly alive. You stupid fucker! You’ve never had a period, you never will! Stop telling us what it’s like!

  He smiles at the woman. Would you please restrain Miss Yu? And be careful, because I think we’ll find some cutting implement about her person.

  They go at her like she’s an animal, and the energy is back, the strength. She’s cornered. The woman reaches for her wrist to put her in restraints, and I know it’s the hand with the razor in it, and I almost pass out – go, go, do it, Charlotte. And she does. A flick of her hand and the woman is howling, and there’s blood pattering to the floor. Big red drops of it. Hey, guess what, we all bleed the same.

  He’s on it, of course – the drawer, the needle, Charlotte’s eyes closing – but it’s enough. It’s enough to see the rage in his eyes, and hear the woman sobbing, as if her face was anything nice to start with. Do stop crying, he says. He looks at me as if he’d like to sedate me too, but I’m meek as a lamb. From somewhere in my deep self, dry as a bare riverbed, I find some tears. She cut me, sir, she made me.

  I know it’s what Charlotte would want. It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s the words in your head that count. And mine are saying I’m going to get away from you, no matter what it takes.

  Chapter Ten

  Being stuck was a common feature in families of the long-missing. Instead of moving to a new place with new memories, people often refused to leave, waiting fruitlessly in case one day the lost person came walking in the door. Hello, did you miss me? Paula knew it well – as an RUC officer her father should have moved around every few years, for safety’s sake, but they’d stayed in the last place Margaret had been seen. Yvonne O’Neill was another one of the lost. She’d gone out one summer’s day to help at the church that had stood on her doorstep all her life. The height of a warm day, where it begins to collapse, exhausted, under its own heat. A haze rising up from the ground. Tarmac melting on the road. It was quicker to go the back way to the church, but that would mean passing the Garretts’ house. So she went by the main road. In a yellow dress, carrying white roses from her mother’s garden, wrapped in the day’s newspaper. Planning to leave them at the shrine. Walking up the dusty path, the yew trees silent overhead. The flowers were found in the church, arranged in vases, but the newspaper had never turned up, and neither had Yvonne.

  And now Paula and Corry were calling on her mother, stirring up memories again. Dolores O’Neill was over eighty, but still lived alone in the farmhouse. The surrounding land had been sold off over the years, and the livestock too, but still she would not go, waiting for her missing child. You could even see the church from the kitchen window, a few hundred yards down the road and up the stone path. No distance at all. But far enough to get lost in.

  ‘This is great, Mrs O’Neill. You didn’t need to go to such trouble,’ said Paula.

  She’d made a full farmhouse lunch for them, sliced ham, brown bread, hard-boiled eggs from her own chickens, two types of cake, a big pot of tea. She stood at the sink in her slippers and housecoat, apparently not planning on eating herself. A walking stick leaned against the door, and Paula noticed the kettle was wrapped around with insulation – she knew Mrs O’Neill had MS. ‘No trouble. It’s a long time since anyone came asking about our Yvonne. In them days it was all big strapping men from the police.’

  Paula heaped her plate with ham and cheese, then narrowed her eyes at slim Helen Corry, who sighed and took some sliced egg.

  Mrs O’Neill was fiddling with the tea towel. ‘I don’t know what you’d find after all these years. Could there be some DNA or any of that?’ She spent a lot of time watching CSI, she’d told them.

  ‘Possibly. But the search was thorough back then, from what we can see.’ Corry ate some ham. ‘The reason we called to see you is actually the Alice Morgan case.’

  ‘Aye. She come to the door a while back, asking for some water. The cottage pump was playing up, she said. I had a shock. You’ve seen Yvonne, her pictures?’ She indicated a school photo on the wall, of a slight, fair girl who could have been a younger Alice. ‘Short wee thing, with this
great big jumper on her, even though the sun’s splitting the stones.’

  Corry nodded. ‘There is a resemblance. You’re saying she came to see you?’

  ‘We talked the odd time. She’d come in to say hello if she was walking past the place. I’d give her a good tea like this.’

  Corry paused with a slice of buttered bread in her hand. ‘I’m sorry – you’re saying Alice ate when she was here?’

  ‘Oh aye, every pick. She’s a good appetite for such a wee girl. Must have one of them fast metabolisms.’

  Paula looked at Corry. Strange. ‘And what did you talk about?’ she asked.

  ‘This and that. She asked me about Yvonne and I told her – you know, it’s a long time since someone wanted to hear, and I like to talk about her. All my ones and our Mary, that’s Yvonne’s sister, they’re sick of it, I think. No news in over thirty years. They’ve just given up. But wee Alice, she’d ask me a lot of things. Did Yvonne ever go in for fasting – of course, I said, we all fasted back then, on holy days of obligation. So lax now. You know what Lough Derg is?’

  Paula nodded, and Corry looked blank. ‘I’ll explain later,’ Paula said to her. ‘Yvonne went there?’

  ‘Aye. Trying to make up for what she did, giving up her vocation. I told her God wouldn’t blame her for leaving the convent – married love is sacred too. But she said when David died – you know he was killed in a car crash, God rest him – that was her being punished.’

  Paula knew the police had speculated about suicide back then – but then where was her body? In some boggy ditch or crevasse?

  Mrs O’Neill said, ‘Alice asked about the hunger strikes as well. And did I think it was connected, to Yvonne? Because of all those riots in town that day. I said not at all. If the Provos or the UVF shot her to make a point, they’d have left her body, wouldn’t they?’ She said it matter-of-factly, and it was close to Paula’s own thoughts on why the IRA probably hadn’t taken her mother, despite everything. They generally wanted people to know what they’d done. But you never could be sure. Terrorists were not a reliable source, after all.

  ‘What did you think, Mrs O’Neill?’ Corry cut a slice of cheese.

  She sipped from a china cup of tea. ‘I always remember it. She went out after lunch, and I said bye. She wanted to lay some flowers in church for the strikers – you know, they were dying. It was an awful time. Then next thing I looked up and saw it was near four, and her not back. And I thought – that’s strange. And you start to worry, just a wee bit. You tell yourself it’ll be grand, she’ll walk in the door any minute. Then she still doesn’t come. I went down to the church, she wasn’t there. I even went over to the Garretts’, though I was far from welcome there. Wanted me to sell a bit of our land, see. On and on at me they were. Course they got it in the end, once Yvonne went. Anyway, the son’s car was outside, but nobody answered. So I came back.’ She took a sip. ‘At first I hoped she’d run off – maybe she’d go and be a nun somewhere else, where nobody knew her. I’d see her in Spain . . . Seville, maybe. We went there once, when she was wee, for Holy Week. All the white hoods and the chanting. She’d have liked that, she loved all the incense and singing in church. It was why she went down there, to Saint Blannad. She loved that place – said the land was sacred. She didn’t like the idea of selling up to the university, wouldn’t let me do it.’ Sip. ‘But now I think someone took her and killed her.’ Another sip. ‘I just hope it was fast.’

  Corry was speaking gently. ‘And Alice – Mrs O’Neill, did it occur to you they might be connected, the two cases?’

  ‘No.’ She looked confused. ‘Alice ran off, did she not? That’s what her friend told me.’

  Corry stopped. Set down the piece of bread in her hand, slow and measured. ‘What friend?’

  ‘The young fella. The boy who called in yesterday. Wanted to know if she’d told me she was going. I said no, but he said she did it all the time, she’d come back.’

  Paula and Corry exchanged a look. And then Corry explained about the blood in the church, and watched as the woman’s face changed, and she shakily set down her cup.

  ‘Mother of God. Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph. That poor wean.’

  Corry was on her feet. ‘Sit down there, Mrs O’Neill.’ She pulled a chair for her. ‘I’m sorry we’ve given you a shock.’

  It wasn’t right, Paula thought, pouring out more tea and stirring in sugar. The woman should have her daughter there. Things should be in their proper place. None of this was right.

  ‘Blood,’ Yvonne’s mother said, when she could speak. ‘Do you think someone hurt her, wee Alice? In the same place . . . Mother of God.’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Corry. ‘It’s true Alice does have a history of running away, but because of the blood, we’re treating it suspiciously. And the relic’s gone too, of course.’

  ‘And you think my Yvonne . . . it’s the same person? Who would it be? There’s nobody round here; we know every man, woman and child on the land.’

  ‘We don’t know. But we’re looking into it. We just wanted to keep you updated.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, distracted. ‘Aye, aye, look into it, please.’

  ‘Mrs O’Neill?’ Corry clicked open her phone. ‘If you’re feeling all right in a minute, would you look at this picture for me and tell me if it’s the boy who came?’

  She hunted for her glasses, found them on her head, then peered at it. ‘Oh – I don’t think so, no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I think he had darker hair.’

  Corry gave Paula a look, then scrolled through. ‘How about this one?’

  More peering. She gripped the phone, holding it away from her. ‘Oh – I think that’s him, yes. He had glasses. Well-spoken.’

  Paula leaned over to see the picture. Dermot Healy.

  Corry put the phone away ‘And – I’m sorry, this is the last question, I promise. Could you tell us if you think you’re missing a photo of Yvonne? One where she’s at her graduation?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know . . . Wait there a minute.’ She left the room shakily, leaning on her stick, and they heard her open the door of the living room. For a moment there was silence. Then she came back. In her old hands she was holding a picture frame. Empty. ‘I don’t understand it. The picture’s always been in there, but I don’t be in that room much these days.’

  ‘Mrs O’Neill . . . I think we’ve found the picture.’ And Corry explained, as delicately as she could, about finding the picture in the pool of blood. By the end of it, Yvonne’s mother was weeping. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Corry. ‘Believe me, we’re going to do everything we can to find out what happened. I know they tried in 1981, but this new information—’

  ‘I always knew she was dead,’ said her mother hoarsely. ‘They said maybe she’d run off, gone with some fella . . . but she never would have. I always had this feeling, in my bones, that she was nearby. If only I could just get her, put her to rest.’

  ‘Like I said, we’ll do everything we can to—’

  ‘Please.’ She tried to steady herself. ‘Please. I know it’s been more than thirty years. But please, I just want to know where she is, before I die. I just want to put her to rest.’

  ‘I promise we’ll try everything,’ said Corry. And Paula knew that she meant it.

  ‘But it doesn’t make sense.’ They were walking to the car, Corry stepping over mud in her good heeled sandals. ‘These kids are barely twenty. I’m surprised they would even know about Yvonne’s case.’

  Paula was struggling with it too. ‘So why did Dermot come to see Mrs O’Neill? He must have gone after we spoke to him.’

  ‘Well, maybe Alice told her something important and he wanted to know what it was. Or maybe he wanted us to think there’s a connection to Yvonne – get him off the hook, since he wasn’t even born in 1981.’ Corry sighed. ‘God knows. But I’d certainly like to know what he was doing out here yesterday. Let’s get back to the station.’

  Chapter Eleven
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  ‘Was Alice Taken By Pagan Cult?’ Corry read aloud. She leafed through the paper. ‘I’m not seeing the part where it says, “No, don’t be daft, of course she wasn’t.”’ She lowered it and glared at Paula. ‘Top-notch investigative reporting there from your fella.’

  Paula made a noise of annoyance, trying to indicate that while Aidan might indeed be ‘her fella’, she had no control over what he chose to print in the Ballyterrin Gazette.

  The wider media had picked up on Alice’s disappearance – Affair Lord’s Daughter Vanishes and so on – but it was the loss of the relic that seemed to rouse the town. Aidan’s paper led with Bring Her Back to Us – and the ‘her’ in the headline meant Saint Blannad, not Alice. It turned out it was a quote from a distraught pensioner, who credited the relic with helping him win the pools.

  ‘Saint Blannad,’ Corry muttered, tossing the paper aside. ‘Feeds the hungry, magics up pool wins for those behind on their fag consumption. Oh bollocks, look who’s coming.’

  A brief flurry of desk-straightening went through the office; Willis Campbell was on patrol. He stopped by Paula and Corry’s desks. ‘Ladies. Any updates?’

  ‘We don’t have any strong leads,’ said Corry in the measured voice she used for him. ‘We know that one of Alice’s college friends was in the vicinity of the church yesterday.’

  ‘That’s all you’ve got?’

  ‘Everyone seems to think she went of her own accord,’ said Paula, earning herself another dark look.

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Just that. No one even seems to be worried about her. It’s like they almost . . . expected her to be missing.’ She looked to Corry, who nodded. That was the thing which wasn’t there. Shock. Surprise. That ‘it can’t be happening to us’ slap in the face people felt whenever crime entered their lives.