There was a creak on the stairs. She took her hand out, and left the jacket where it was.
Later, when they were in bed, and Aidan had fallen asleep on his back, Paula pulled his T-shirt on over her head and wandered round the house, alone, as she’d done in that year of her dad moving out, before Aidan. While she was waiting for Maggie to arrive. The night was hot, and the town restless with sirens – ambulance, police? Lives fracturing into pieces, somewhere out there. Paula eased open the door to Maggie’s room – the one she’d slept in herself as a child – and watched the little girl asleep in the bed with its Peppa Pig duvet, hands clutched into fists. Paula’s old desk was still in the room, now covered in stickers and cuddly toys, and in the bottom drawer of it, the sum of all the misery Paula hoped Maggie would never know.
In the glow of the street light, Paula eased open the drawer and looked in. A dull manila file with her mother’s name on it. A stack of documents and interviews, read almost into flitters by Paula as she’d combed it for a bit of information, something, anything that might give answers. She’d found none. But it was still there. And she would not, could not, throw it away.
Guy. Guy maybe coming back. And just before the wedding. It was all wrong. Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he too wanted to keep the door locked on the past, stay in London with his wife and his new job. Maybe it would be all right.
Maggie turned over in bed, making a small noise in her dreams, trusting and limp. Paula shut the drawer, as quietly as she could, and watched her daughter sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
‘This is stupid. I was worried about her. She’s my friend, of course I’d try to find her.’
Corry gave Dermot Healy a long look. ‘You weren’t too worried about her the other day.’
He scrubbed angrily at his hair. The light from the classroom window showed up the smears on his glasses and dark rings under his eyes. ‘When you first came, I didn’t know about the . . . you know.’ His voice cracked.
‘The blood?’ Corry supplied.
‘Yes. But when I found out, I got worried, OK? I knew she sometimes talked to the old woman at the farmhouse, so I called in.’
‘Did you know that the woman’s daughter also went missing from the church, in 1981?’
He paused for a second. ‘Alice told me. She thought it was interesting.’
‘Interesting. Not scary?’
‘Well, no. It was ages ago. She thought the church was . . . kind of a special place.’
Corry gave Paula a look and tried again. ‘So you’re saying you went over to Mrs O’Neill’s house to see if she knew anything about Alice. Did you go to Alice’s cottage?’
A slight pause. ‘Um, no.’
‘Have you ever been there, Dermot?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so? You aren’t sure if you’ve ever been there or not?’
‘Not that I can remember, no.’ He was sounding more sure now.
‘And how did you get down there the other day? It’s a couple of miles, isn’t it?’
‘Bike.’ He was barely opening his mouth to speak, arms wedged in the pocket of his hoody, which must have been in need of a good wash. Paula could hear, outside somewhere, a brief scream of laughter, which for a moment sounded like the other kind. The heat of the room lay heavy on her, frying through the glass windows. Madeleine Hooker had actually set Paula and Corry up with a base in the college this time. The room they were in was wood-panelled, with modern AV equipment skilfully inserted. Like everything else in Oakdale, it was beautiful.
Corry was saying, ‘So what you’re telling me is, if I take your fingerprints, Dermot, and compare them to ones we got in Alice’s cottage, there’ll be no match.’
He thought about it. ‘It depends if it’s something else there that I touched, doesn’t it? Doesn’t necessarily prove I was there.’ He was smart. That made things harder. Paula could almost feel the effort he was putting into staying alert – and why was he doing that, if he knew nothing about Alice? What was he trying to hide?
Corry’s tone changed. ‘Tell me about Peter and Katy.’
He blinked. ‘What about them?’
‘Would either of them have a reason to fall out with Alice?’
Dermot slumped in his chair. From the corridor came laughing, confident student voices. The sound of people who’d never had anything go wrong for them. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I know Katy and Al didn’t get on that well as room-mates, so maybe, something . . . And Peter, well, he is what he is.’
‘And what’s that?’
Dermot shrugged. ‘He rows. He plays rugby. He drinks beer.’
‘Does he do anything else?’
‘Girls,’ he said flatly.
‘Alice?’
Dermot pressed his lips together. ‘I don’t know. How would I know?’
Corry looked at her watch. ‘Well, maybe he’ll tell us himself. Come in!’
As she called, the door opened tentatively. Through it, with several feet of space between them, came a wary-looking Katy and Peter, who immediately said, ‘Do I have to be here for this? I’ve got practice.’
Corry motioned for them to sit down. Dermot was staring at his lap. ‘Yes, Peter, we need to speak to all three of you.’
Katy sat down beside Dermot, so they were facing Corry and Paula across the table like an interview panel. Paula preferred to watch from the sidelines usually – it gave her a better view of the things people were trying to hide. Peter remained standing. ‘But why? We already told you what we know.’
‘Well, you’ll need to tell us again.’ Corry glared at him. ‘Sit down.’
He did. Katy immediately took his hand and placed them both, entwined, on the table. ‘Of course we want to help,’ she said. ‘We’re worried about Alice. We think she might have hurt herself.’
Dermot looked up sharply and down again. Corry said, ‘Hurt herself how?’
‘Well, she tried to kill herself before. When she was in rehab. Did you know that?’
Corry looked at Paula. ‘Did she tell you that, Katy?’ Alice’s parents hadn’t mentioned it.
‘Yes. She took pills. She told me – we were really close, like I said.’
‘But not so much after she moved out?’
Katy opened her mouth and shut it. She glanced sideways at Dermot. He blinked and looked up, cleared his throat. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘If something’s happened to Alice – and I think it’s too early to say that it has – she’ll have done it herself. That’s the angle you need to take.’
‘What makes you say that, Dermot?’ Corry asked carefully. ‘Did she have a reason to hurt herself?’
He shrugged again. ‘Like Katy said, she’s done it before. And she’s been a bit weird the last few months.’
‘Weird how?’
‘She moved out to the cottage,’ said Katy, still clutching at Peter’s hand. ‘And before that she sort of . . . cut herself off from us. Didn’t she?’
Peter licked his lips. ‘Um, yeah, I guess so. We didn’t see much of her and I noticed in the buttery she wasn’t—’ He made an incoherent eating gesture. ‘You know, she was having trouble again.’
‘Her anorexia was kicking in again?’ said Paula.
The three exchanged looks. ‘Yes,’ said Katy confidently. ‘I was worried about her.’
‘Have you any idea why she cut herself off?’
Another short silence. ‘No,’ said Dermot. ‘We had no idea.’
Paula muttered something about the blind – a shaft of sun was hitting the wood of the table, filling the room with buttery light. She got up and went to the window, hovering there to watch the three as Corry questioned them. She noticed that Katy’s other hand, the one not clutching Peter’s, was on the side of Dermot’s chair. Almost as if she was poking him. Peter’s other hand was clenched tight by his side.
Corry was saying, ‘So where’s she gone then, if she went off by herself? We’ve found no trace of her.’
/> Dermot jerked his head irritably. ‘Down the rabbit hole. I don’t know. That’s kind of the point, that no one would know.’
Corry again. ‘So, to be clear, you all think that Alice isn’t missing at all.’
He made an odd gesture. Somewhere between a laugh and a shrug of despair. ‘We didn’t say that. I guess it depends if you think being lost is the same as no one knowing where you are.’
‘These kids,’ sighed Corry. Across the playing fields from the car, tall figures stood against the sun. Paula wondered if one of them was Peter Franks. Thinking about his hands, how strong they were. How small Alice was in her selfies.
She asked, ‘What did you think to that thing Dermot said about Peter? And girls?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t understand any of them. Why aren’t they upset? They were supposedly the best of friends, those four. And now she’s missing and there’s hardly a flicker of emotion between them. The only one that’s shown any feeling about it is Dermot, and he looks—’
‘Exhausted,’ finished Paula. ‘At the end of his rope.’
‘Right.’
‘Down the rabbit hole, Dermot said,’ Paula remembered. ‘That’s from Alice in Wonderland, right?’
‘I only know the Disney film. Our Rosie used to love it. You reckon he said it on purpose? He knows something else?’
‘I don’t know. It could just be a coincidence.’ Paula thought of the illustrations in her old copy of the book, the frail, fair child, staring at the cake, longing to eat it but disgusted at the same time. What it must have been like inside Alice’s head, every day. She wondered how to bring up her next point. ‘Uh – you said Peter Franks had no criminal record?’
‘None. His old school were very cagey about why they kicked him out, said he went of his own accord, but it must be something.’
‘Well – I might have some . . . information about him. Allegations only, of course.’
Corry narrowed her eyes. ‘Am I right in thinking you got it off a certain journalist you know?’
‘Maybe. Maybe indeed.’ Aidan was, as she’d said, very good at digging the dirt. His journalist friend Maeve worked in Dublin and knew all about the school Peter Franks had gone to, St Murtagh’s. A boarding school on the outskirts of Dublin, for boys whose parents had more money than time. ‘Anyway, Peter was apparently expelled just before his Leaving Cert.’
‘And did your super-secret source say why?’
‘There was an incident. A party in the school grounds – some girls from the local town were smuggled in.’
‘And?’
‘And one of them said she was raped, by Peter Franks and two other boys, taking turns.’
Corry’s mouth twisted. ‘Let me guess, no conviction?’
‘It was all hushed up. No need to ruin the boy’s futures, one mistake, etcetera, etcetera. But my, eh, source did hear there were drugs involved, Rohypnol or something similar.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know.’
Corry looked back at the college, lit by the afternoon sun as they turned onto the main road. ‘So we’ve got him with a rape allegation; Dermot . . . well, God only knows what’s up with him; Katy self-harming – I saw her wrists; Alice with her anorexia, and her history of vanishing acts. She tried to kill herself, Katy says. We need to look into that. What a messed-up wee foursome they were. Question is – what happened to make them into three? And why do the others not care?’
‘Do you reckon Willis would let us take a trip to Dublin?’ asked Paula casually.
Equally casually, Corry said, ‘Well, he did say we should throw everything we had at this. He’s got the Morgans breathing down his neck, and the press can’t get enough of it.’
It was the weekend, when she’d promised Aidan she’d help him with the final wedding admin. But Alice Morgan was still missing, and it was hard to care about flowers and dresses until she was found. ‘Exactly. We should follow every lead.’
Chapter Fourteen
‘I’m surprised she wanted to speak to us,’ said Corry.
‘Maeve can be very persuasive. She says rape victims get silenced, and it’s like another crime being done to them.’
They were driving through one of Dublin’s poorer streets, houses like weary faces, boarded-up windows and gardens full of rubbish. ‘Make sure you lock the car,’ Paula advised. Corry drove a sensible Fiat, and for a moment Paula thought of him – cars his one weakness in an otherwise straight-down-the-line personality. His BMW had been sold when he’d moved back to London. She wondered who was driving it now.
On the radio the news played. ‘And police in Ballyterrin are searching for the missing daughter of Home Office Minister Lord Morgan. Alice Morgan was last seen—’ Paula reached over and turned it off. Corry glanced up, but said nothing. They both knew they needed to find something, and soon.
The door of the small semi was opened by a young woman in a tracksuit and Uggs. She had straightened hair and polished nails, chipped off at the tips.
‘Colette?’
‘Yeah.’ Her eyes wary.
‘I’m Paula, Maeve’s friend? This is DS Corry. Are you OK for us to ask you a few questions?’
Colette raised a finger to her mouth and nibbled the top, as if thinking it over. Then she moved back and they followed her in. A TV blared in the living room. Colette shut the door on the rest of the house, which was filled with voices and running feet. She perched on the edge of the sofa. Paula indicated the TV, which showed a morning talk show. ‘I’m sorry. Would you mind?’
Colette used the remote to mute it, though the picture continued to distract Paula. ‘Maeve said a girl went missing.’
‘Yes. A student at Oakdale College. And she’d been going out with one of the boys you—’
‘Which one?’
‘Peter Franks.’
Colette leaned forward and took a cigarette from a packet on the table, flicking a light over it. Paula breathed through her nose.
Corry said, ‘There’s no evidence he’s involved, but we do know he has a history of violence.’
‘Not proved.’ She pulled a stray piece of tobacco from her lip.
‘No, but are you able to tell us what happened?’
‘The Guards said nothing happened.’
‘I know. But Maeve believed you, didn’t she?’
Colette’s face, her eyebrows plucked into expressions of permanent disapproval, didn’t shift. She was eighteen, Paula knew, but looked older, defeated somehow, her eyes already dull. ‘Well, like I said in my report. I knew a group of lads from the school. We’d meet down the shopping centre and muck about. They asked would I come round to the gates one evening and they’d sneak me in.’
‘And you wanted to?’
‘I wanted to see inside. We never got to, you know. And they were nice fellas. Smart. Cute, like. Talked like your ones off telly. They’d chat to you instead of just . . . grunting. So me and my mate Carly went. I got some whiskey out of my da’s cupboard. And then. Well, we drank. But I got really drunk really fast. Like that wasn’t normal, I’d been drinking since I was twelve, I can hold my booze. Carly said she was going but one of them had his arm round me and I liked him. I thought maybe he’d get off with me. I don’t know after that, I was really off my face. I don’t remember, except their faces, like coming at me out of a fog, and I couldn’t move, and the smell – sweaty boys and aftershave. Then I woke up. Must have been hours later. They’d gone and I was lying on the ground, all by myself. I was boking my ring up. My jeans and pants were off – I found them a wee bit away. I was all – I was sticky, and I’d been bleeding.’
A moment of silence. ‘What did you do?’ asked Corry.
‘I ran off home before I got caught. I had to squeeze through the fence, like, and it hurt – everything was sort of burning. I got into the house and had a bath. My ma shouted at me for wasting the hot water. Then I went to school.’
‘When did you go to the Guards?’
‘Mammy caught m
e scrubbing myself in the bath about a week later, and I told her the whole thing. I couldn’t stop bleeding, you see, and she knew it wasn’t the right time for that.’
Corry’s voice, which could strike fear into the hearts of the most hardened policemen, was very gentle. ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you, Colette. Can you tell me about the Guards?’
‘There was no evidence – too late. And I’d been drinking with the boys. And – it wasn’t exactly my first time. Someone from the college came and talked to Ma and Da, said they could even prosecute me for being in there if I didn’t drop it. Trespassing. Ma said I had to be more careful. Da called me a wee slut.’ She shrugged. ‘So. Nothing happened.’
‘Your report would be on file?’
‘I guess so. Don’t think they really believed me. I kept crying, and they only had men officers.’ She glanced coolly at Paula, taking a drag on her cigarette.
Paula said, ‘Thank you for talking to us. I know it must be hard. Do you remember anything else, anything at all?’
She exhaled slowly. ‘Laughing. I remember hearing it, even though I was out of it. Someone just laughing on and on, while I was lying there.’
‘Thank you,’ said Corry, writing it down.
The door opened and a young girl in a tracksuit burst in, carrying a squalling tow-haired toddler. ‘Ma says you’ve to take him.’
Colette pulled the child onto her lap, nursing him, soothing him with small noises. He wasn’t much older than Maggie, three maybe, with a helmet of fair hair. ‘Mammmmy, who’s these people?’ he said, sucking his thumb.
‘Just visitors. Shush now, be a good boy.’ She glanced up at them. ‘I called him Tiernan. It was – I wanted to go to England. But we couldn’t afford the boat or that. So. I just had to. You know how it is.’
Paula’s head swam. ‘Colette – do you mean . . .’
‘Maeve didn’t tell you? I was pregnant after it. We found out after the Guards dropped the case. I had to stop school and all, but he’s – well, he’s mine now. And it’s not his fault, poor wean.’ She continued to nurse the little boy to her, the child of her rapist, one of her rapists, and Paula found herself thinking back to the gleam of the fair hair on Peter Franks’ head.
A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4) Page 9
