A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4)

by Claire McGowan

  Guy said, ‘Bob has kindly agreed to run us through the Yvonne O’Neill case.’ Calling him Bob now, not Sergeant Hamilton. Guy, however, was just as much in control as ever, his suit jacket over the back of a chair, hands braced on it. Paula tried not to look, and did anyway. He still wore his wedding ring. Of course he did, he was still married. Stupid. Only difference was she had a ring on her finger too now. An anchor to cling to. ‘Bob, would you?’ Guy handed over to him.

  Paula and Corry took their seats, picking up Guy’s trademark stapled documents. Bob cleared his throat uncomfortably, as a picture of Yvonne appeared on the screen. ‘It was a long time ago, but we’d only one real suspect. Anderson Garrett.’

  ‘The neighbour.’ Guy was already on top of the case. ‘But he had an alibi?’

  ‘Has one for both cases,’ said Corry. ‘At work in town the day Yvonne went, and with his mother when Alice vanished. The hospital confirmed it. Anyway, that volunteer was with him when they got into the church and found the blood.’

  ‘Still, it’s too much of a link to ignore,’ Guy said. ‘We should re-check all the details of his alibi. DS Monaghan – well done on the promotion, by the way – you could get a DC to do that.’

  ‘Will do. And thank you, sir.’ Gerard gave a best-in-class smile and Paula did a mini eye-roll. Guy and his charm again.

  ‘There was no one else in Yvonne’s case?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ Bob shook his head. ‘We thought maybe some itinerant fella. Could have pulled her into a car. Same person as the Wicklow disappearances, maybe, if you know about those . . . but it was so far out of the way.’

  ‘You discounted a sectarian motive?’

  ‘We considered it, aye. Given what else was going on. But there wasn’t a body.’

  Guy examined the file. ‘Yvonne was last seen going up the path to the church.’

  ‘Right,’ said Corry. ‘She’d definitely been in the church, because the flowers were there.’

  ‘And Alice – last seen in there, blood on the steps, picture of Yvonne left – did we find out where that came from?’

  We. Who was this we? Paula and Corry exchanged a quick look. ‘It was taken from Yvonne’s mother’s house,’ supplied Corry.

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘We don’t know. Maybe Dermot Healy. He’s been there too.’

  Guy frowned down at the papers. ‘The date being the same . . . that’s strange.’

  ‘Thirty-two years later. Lúnasa – that’s an old Celtic fire feast. A time of sacrifice.’

  ‘Are the press onto that angle?’

  ‘No. They’re mostly interested in the relic and Alice’s father.’

  Guy said, ‘That’s probably good. Case like this, you get a lot of crackpots. Is there anything there, something about the relic? Cults, Satanists . . . burglary even?’

  ‘I’d say burglary,’ said Corry. ‘But where’s Alice’s body? And why’s Yvonne’s picture there?’

  ‘Right. So our main possibilities.’ Guy sketched on a whiteboard. ‘Robbery gone wrong; abduction by person or persons unknown, possibly the same who took Yvonne in 1981; or—’

  ‘She ran away,’ said Corry. ‘Which is what everyone, even her parents, is telling us. No one is a bit worried about that girl.’

  ‘And what do you think, DS Corry, did she run away?’

  ‘Why the blood? Why the photo? Why nothing on her bank account or phone?’ Corry shook her head. ‘And where’s the bloody relic?’

  ‘I was also interested in her social media usage,’ said Guy, glancing at his watch and then the door. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I asked the tech team to check her posts again, and try to trace her phone signal.’

  ‘Tech team? Do you mean Trevor the teenager?’ asked Corry.

  ‘Well, yes. He’s a bit older than that, isn’t he?’

  ‘He looks about fifteen,’ she said. ‘Well, did he spot anything? We didn’t find her phone. No sign of it.’

  ‘Here he is now.’

  In the door, holding a laptop aloft, lanyard swinging, came Trevor. He was a cheerful youth of twenty-four, given to zany T-shirts and technobabble about the latest computer games. Paula always wanted to sit him down with a milky drink and tell him to have a rest. ‘Well, well, how’re yous?’ He dispensed hellos to the team.

  ‘Find something?’ asked Guy.

  ‘Well, wait till you hear. Your woman – Alice is her name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Her phone’s just been switched on. Picked up a signal.’

  ‘Where is it?’ demanded Corry. ‘Don’t explain it, just tell me.’ Paula was on her feet, thinking – if they could find her, if she was safe after all . . .

  ‘Donegal,’ said Trevor. ‘Over the border. You guys should get down there now.’

  WhatsApp conversation

  Dermot: OMG. Guys go online right now

  Katy: What?

  Katy: Shit

  Katy: The phone. SHIT

  Peter: Someone’s messin about maybe. Stole it.

  Katy: Did one of you?

  Peter: Uh no fuck’s sake what are you saying

  Dermot: Don’t be stupid. Think what’s the most likely thing.

  Peter: Guys this is freaking me out. Maybe the police will find stuff on it. Why’s it been turned on now?

  Dermot: Stop it. You’re not helping. Just calm the fuck down and wait to see what happens. They don’t even have the phone they just tracked a signal from it

  Katy: SHIT I can’t believe this

  Dermot: Look calm down it doesn’t mean anything

  Peter: Err how can you say that it might be her

  Katy: This is so weird. I mean maybe we should just tell them what happened. She could be trying to send a message.

  Dermot: Don’t be a retard. If she’s dead she can’t send a message can she.

  Peter: Fuck sake Dermot they could be reading this

  Dermot: They’re not. They don’t even know how, they’re stuck in the dark ages.

  Katy: Err what do you mean D?

  Dermot: You told the police she’d hurt herself. Make your mind up.

  Katy: Oh well I don’t know do I. I just think maybe we should tell them the truth

  Dermot: We’re not telling them anything. But both of you have to calm down. I can’t do this by myself

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘Look who it is!’

  A familiar face greeted Paula as she got to the shore of Lough Derg, a dark oval of water on the border with Donegal. An invisible line on a map, but a different country all the same. Older now, a little less hair, a little more poise, Fiacra Quinn wasn’t the angel-faced boy he’d been, but all the same she was so pleased to see him she gave him a big hug before remembering where she was. ‘It’s good to see you. It’s been ages.’

  When the MPRU disbanded, Fiacra, nursing unrequited love for Avril and guilt at his role in Gerard being shot, had gone back to work in the Southern police force. Cross-border cooperation was back to being intermittent and suspicious, the progress made by the unit all swept away.

  Corry was watching them. ‘If we can hold back on the emotional reunions for now; this isn’t Surprise Surprise.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Fiacra, who was only twenty-seven.

  ‘Never mind. God, I feel old sometimes.’

  Paula kept sneaking glances at her, surprised to see Helen Corry wearing combats with zips along the side. She looked like a blonde Lara Croft.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said, seeing the look. ‘Reject from a nineties girl band. But we need to get into ditches, ponds, go digging. It’ll be mucky.’

  Digging – because while they said they were looking for Alice alive, they were also prepared to find her body, maybe lying in some grubbed-up shallow grave like the carcass of an animal. Her phone being switched on, that gave some hope – but for now, not quite enough.

  Corry was questioning Fiacra. ‘So the phone signal came from near here. Have you had any sightings?’

>   Fiacra’s easy-going manner had also changed over time. He was more efficient, less affable. ‘I went over to the island to ask that lot, though they weren’t keen to let me in. One of the pilgrims thought they might have seen a girl on the lake shore, two days ago. They didn’t report it before because they’ve no news over there, see, and phones are banned. They didn’t know anyone was missing.’

  Paula was nodding. Corry looked baffled. ‘And for the non-Catholics?’

  Fiacra explained, pointing over to the huddle of buildings on the lake’s small island. ‘Lough Derg. It’s like a retreat. You stay on the island, and you fast and pray, and there’s no contact with the outside world.’ He indicated some small skiffs, lapping in the waves on the shore. ‘Look, you have to go over on a boat. And guess what, on the day the girl was spotted, one of them had come loose. It was out floating in the middle of the lake.’

  Paula looked at the pitch-black lake. Imagined being down there in that, the choking weeds, the silent waters closing over your head. Lough Derg – the name came from the Irish for lake of the red eye. Red like the blood in the church. Same place Yvonne had gone, atoning for her imagined sins.

  ‘Fasting,’ repeated Corry.

  ‘That’s right. The idea is they don’t eat while they’re there, and they walk round in bare feet and stuff. You can have black tea but that’s it.’

  ‘Weird.’

  But Paula knew what she was thinking. It might seem like paradise to Alice, already starving herself and living in a damp cottage. ‘Will they talk to us?’ she asked Fiacra.

  ‘They’ve not been so far. It’s all religious types. Practically had to recite my catechism to get in. I showed them Alice’s photo and they said she’d not been over. But if that was her on the shore—’

  He didn’t need to say it. They all knew. Corry took a few steps, the rough sand of the beach crunching under her boots. ‘How did she get all the way here, if she came of her own accord? She didn’t have a car, did she?’

  ‘Not that we know of,’ said Paula. ‘She might have stolen one, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll get them to check for any stolen vehicles.’ Corry keyed in some notes on her BlackBerry. ‘I want a word with those people over there. An island retreat – it’d be the perfect place if you wanted to disappear. Especially if no one’s been watching the news, you could hide in plain sight.’

  ‘Should we—’ Fiacra gestured awkwardly to the lake, as still as an eye full of unshed tears. Paula thought of the expense of a dive team, trawling in zero visibility, how long it would take. Especially if there was still a chance of finding her alive.

  ‘I can’t on a random sighting,’ said Corry. ‘Too expensive.’

  ‘This isn’t exactly random now, is it?’ said Fiacra. When he’d first joined the MPRU, he’d been too scared to look Helen Corry in the face. But she’d gone down and he’d gone up, and here they were meeting in the middle. ‘And look – there’s this.’

  He was on his hunkers now, lifting aside some bracken with gloved hands. There in the mud of the shore, tracks were still visible, where the plants had sheltered them from the overnight rain. Tyre prints. Corry bent and looked. ‘All right. Let’s get these looked at. Have you a gait analyst over here, in case there’s footprints?’

  Paula remembered the joke circulating the incident room after Corry’s demotion, that she’d been brought down by Gaitgate – after her lover Dr Lorcan Finney, a forensics expert, had faked the results of footwear analysis. Three people had died as a result. It wasn’t much of a joke.

  She looked over to the island, glinting in the afternoon sun. The lake was impenetrable. Like Alice’s life. Was she in there? Had she stolen a boat, floated out there to the deep iris of the lake, then let herself go? Would you take a long breath before you did that, or try to let it all go, sink as easily and quickly as a stone? Or maybe someone had thrown her in. Maybe she’d fought and screamed for life.

  ‘Let’s do a fingertip search,’ Corry was saying, standing up. ‘All this area. Did you say you have volunteers? We’ll need all hands on deck. If Alice was here, she might still be – or maybe she wasn’t by herself.’

  Fiacra said, ‘They’re already here. Should someone go to the island again, though? They might prefer to talk to your lot.’

  ‘I was going to send Dr Maguire.’

  Paula didn’t mind. Getting a poke around the island would be right up her street – and she was good at hearing the things people wouldn’t say. ‘How will I get over?’ Her eye was caught by a tall, straight figure coming across the shore to them. Guy Brooking, in a blue polo shirt and jeans. He spotted Fiacra and shook his hand enthusiastically.

  ‘So, it’s Detective Sergeant Garda now, is it? Well done, that’s excellent.’

  ‘All thanks to your teaching, sir.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true. You wanted me, DS Corry?’ The new title sounded odd in his mouth, but he didn’t let it show. It seemed wrong that Corry and Fiacra were now the same rank.

  ‘Yes, I wondered if you were free to visit the island with Dr Maguire here. There’s been a possible sighting of Alice from one of the guests.’

  Paula glared at Corry, who met her gaze with a bland smile.

  ‘Of course.’ Guy seemed unperturbed by the request. ‘Shall we, Paula?’

  ‘Our Fiacra’s all grown up, isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh don’t,’ she said, leaning against the side of the boat, a slight breeze lifting her hair and cooling her damp skin. ‘I feel about a hundred already.’

  ‘Not at all, you haven’t aged a day.’

  She wished he would stop being so nice to everyone. The small boat was skimming them over the lake, and Paula was trying to remember what she’d learned at school about pilgrimages to Lough Derg. Fasting for three days, walking around the island in bare feet, praying. What would Guy make of it, fresh from grappling with inner-London gang warfare?

  ‘It’s nice to be back,’ he said again, breathing in the fresh air of the lake. The shifting clouds overhead changed it from black to blue and back to brown again. ‘I forgot how peaceful it was.’

  ‘Don’t be fooled by a bit of sun. You know what good weather causes.’

  ‘Sunburn? I’ve seen plenty of that so far. Do people here not know about SPF?’

  ‘No, we find it hard to believe the sun could ever be hot enough to burn us. Anyway, I was talking about our annual riot season. Stick around long enough and you’ll see.’ She spoke lightly, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to go back right away or not. She couldn’t deny it was good to be working with him again.

  Guy stretched. He was wearing sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes, which was a small blessing. ‘Let’s see what this lot have to say.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘I can’t take you onto the main island. People come here for rest and reflection, it would disturb them too much to have questions.’

  ‘Of course.’ Paula was glad, despite the difficulties, that she’d come with Guy rather than Corry, who could be abrasive and impatient with religious people. The manager, a man called Callum Manus, spoke in soft tones. They were in the visitors’ centre, which was open to the public. Beyond that was the rest of the island, tranquil and green. Squinting out the window, Paula could see people walking far off, small dots in the afternoon sun.

  ‘So is there anything you can tell us?’ Guy was asking. ‘You haven’t seen Ms Morgan?’

  Callum Manus had looked at Alice’s picture for several moments, with a creased brow. He had a pale, bloodless face. ‘I don’t recognise her, no. But sometimes people come here for a reason. They may not want anyone to know where they are.’

  ‘We understand that, but Alice’s parents are very worried about her.’ It was what you always said, but in this case Paula wasn’t sure it was true. ‘If we could be sure no harm had come to her—’

  ‘I don’t recognise her, as I said.’ He passed the picture back. ‘As I told the Garda who was over, a boat was
found floating in the lake two days back. And one of our American guests thought he’d seen someone on the shore around that time. Wearing a red jumper, he thought. It was too far away to see anything else.’

  Red like an Oakdale hoody, maybe. Guy said, ‘Is he still here, the witness?’

  ‘No. Gone back to the States.’

  ‘Can we have his details?’

  Manus hesitated. ‘I’ll contact him and ask. We have to respect people’s privacy here, you see. We don’t always know why they come to us.’

  Guy glanced at Paula. She asked, ‘Mr Manus, I know this is a place for people to retreat to . . . and I feel it would have been very appealing to Alice. You fast here?’

  ‘Guests fast for three days. Most find it a very spiritual experience. There are no phones here, no news, no distractions. It cuts through everything.’ He spoke simply, and she believed him.

  ‘So – I’m sorry to ask again, but are you absolutely sure she didn’t come here? Do you check people’s ID when they book in?’

  ‘No, why would we?’ He looked puzzled. ‘I don’t recognise the picture. But we give people their privacy. I wouldn’t have looked too closely at everyone. But she’s very . . . striking. I think I’d remember.’

  With her frail bones showing through the skin, Alice would have stood out all right. Paula nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll be praying for her. That she’s found.’

  ‘By us, you mean?’

  He looked at her. ‘By you, or by herself. There are other ways to be lost than just not knowing where you are.’

  It was similar to something Dermot had said. Paula couldn’t argue with that, so she and Guy took their leave.

  ‘All these people came to help with the search?’

  Corry spoke in low tones. ‘People want to find her – and the relic too, it unsettles them that it’s gone.’ The village hall, co-opted into headquarters to search the area round the lake, echoed with voices, feet tripping off the parquet floor. It smelled of village plays, and music competitions, and meetings of the parish council. If they closed their eyes it could have been a pleasant gathering. Paula looked round at the variety of people – some in Oakdale hoodies and jeans, as well as older people from the area, farmers, off-duty police. Kemal the CSI was there, looking pale and attentive. Presumably in case they did find something. Alice’s father was circulating, shaking people by the hand, thanking them. Paula saw he and several others wore a T-shirt with Alice’s face on it – her cheekbones standing out sharp as knives. There was, however, no sign of Alice’s supposed best friends – Peter, Katy, or Dermot.