Little Girl Lost

by Brian McGilloway

  Lucy moved closer till she was almost touching the child, could feel the chill of her skin, the crystalline tracks of tears that had frozen on her cheeks.

  ‘Come with me, sweetheart,’ she said again, holding out her hand, palm open, in front of the child.

  ‘Take my hand and come with me,’ she repeated.

  The child did not move, though involuntary shudders seemed to rack her body, the muscles of her neck taut beneath the skin.

  At least she could be reasonably certain that she was not Kate McLaughlin. Kate was sixteen, this girl looked closer to eight or nine.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Lucy asked again.

  The child unclamped her mouth as if to speak but seemed unable to form words.

  ‘I’m Lucy,’ she said again, inching closer to the girl, moving her hand ever nearer, until finally the tips of her fingers made contact with the girl’s frozen arm.

  The child initially reacted sharply to the contact, then seemed to relax. She looked at Lucy, then her eyes rolled backwards and she slumped onto the cushion of snow at her feet. Looking down at her, lying prostrate on the ground, Lucy could see clearly for the first time the image on the girl’s pyjama top: a teddy bear, clasping a large blood-red heart, beneath which was written the name ‘Alice’.

  Lucy glanced around her, looking for support. The milkman stood frozen behind the tree where he watched her, open-mouthed. Then she began to shout for Travers.

  The flickering of torches between the bare trunks of the trees signalled the arrival of the other officers. Chief Superintendent Travers led a group of uniformed constables, pounding his way through the snow seemingly with no regard for preserving the child’s prints. When he reached Lucy, he found her crouching in the snow beside a child. Lucy had taken off her coat and wrapped it around the young girl, who was now shuddering convulsively. He shone the torch towards her, not wanting it to glare fully on her face but eager to check her identity.

  He scrutinized the features, the dark hair.

  ‘Has she spoken?’

  Lucy shook her head, placed an arm around the girl’s shoulders, felt the dull tremors running through the body.

  Travers lifted his radio, clicked through to the station.

  ‘It’s not her,’ he said with a hint of disappointment. ‘It’s not Kate McLaughlin.’

  Lucy, without knowing why, found herself hugging the child even tighter because of this, laid her cheek against the child’s forehead, wrapped her fingers in the heat of her own hands.

  CHAPTER 4

  Lucy sat outside the hospital ward where Alice was being examined, listening to the noises of the place, registering their familiarity as she waited for the emergency social worker to arrive. Over the past month since her arrival back in Derry she’d been in and out of this place with her father more often than she cared to remember. He’d fallen getting out of the bath one day and hurt his arm. Then he’d tripped on the stairs. Each incident had required an overnight stay for him and also for Lucy who would keep vigil by his bed.

  She tried to shut out the noises, but couldn’t; the clattering of instruments, the squeak of the trolley wheels as beds were pushed to and fro across the ward, the soft squelch of the porters’ shoes, the echo of their distant voices. And above them all, the intermittent screaming of the girl she had found.

  When she had woken, she had clung to Lucy as they’d made their way out of the woods to the ambulance. She wouldn’t let anyone else touch her so that, eventually, Lucy had to carry her out through the trees. Only when she had wrapped her arms around Lucy’s neck, could see her face, did she allow some of the other officers to help hold her weight. The touch of her arms against Lucy’s neck had been chilling. She had not spoken, had not held eye contact with anyone.

  Because of this, Travers had suggested that Lucy travel in the ambulance with her. Not that she’d minded. The grip of the child was almost feral. As word had filtered through that this was not Kate McLaughlin after all, some of the other officers seemed to lose interest. Travers had said he’d contact McLaughlin’s father. Lucy was to stay with the girl until Social Services took over, then get back to the station; Travers wanted to speak to the CID team working on Kate McLaughlin’s abduction.

  In the ambulance, Alice had begun to moan, shifting uneasily beneath the blanket that the crew had draped around her after removing Lucy’s coat. Then as they’d neared the hospital, the moans had changed in pitch to an inarticulate keening. Now though, they had shifted again: the child screeched in agony, each yell bullying the rest of the ward into silence. Several patients from the rooms further along had wandered dazed into the corridor, squinted under the fluorescent glare, looking for the source of such agonized cries.

  Finally, sure that something was wrong, Lucy stood up and pushed her way into the room. The child was hunched in the corner, her knees drawn up in much the same way as when Lucy discovered her. A foil blanket had been wrapped around her and she was trying to remove it, apparently not realizing that she could not because she was sitting on the edges.

  The paediatrician was giving orders to one of the nurses who was rattling through the items in the drawers of the pharmacological trolley.

  ‘Why’s she screaming like that?’ Lucy asked.

  The doctor, a harried-looking Indian woman, glanced at her, gauging her right to ask such a question.

  ‘She’s warming up,’ she explained. ‘As her body heats, the blood returns to the extremities again. When she was so cold, her body didn’t feel its pain. She’s feeling delayed pain now.’

  ‘Is there nothing you can give her?’

  The woman nodded towards the nurse who was holding a hypodermic needle aloft, pressing it into a small vial of liquid, and drawing the medicine into the barrel of the syringe. She handed it to the doctor, who nodded to Lucy and the nurse that they should hold the girl still.

  Lucy approached Alice from her left-hand side, feeling guilty as the girl stared up at her, her gaze strangely empty, her eyes never quite connecting with her own. She reached around the child’s shoulders, as if to hug her tight. For a moment, Alice seemed to relax, as if trusting the affection of Lucy’s movement. Then she saw the doctor approaching, the needle in her hand, and she began to writhe, her feet flailing, her arms, barely more than skin and bone, jerking against Lucy’s chest. She twisted her head towards Lucy, her eyes wide and bulging.

  Lucy wanted to look away, to glance at the floor, but could not. She held her stare now, watching as the eyes widened, then seemed to deaden, the lids, suddenly heavy, began to droop, the wriggling of her limbs settled, and she began to slip onto the floor. Holding her fast around the shoulders, Lucy let the child lean against her.

  The doctor brushed her hair back from her face, wiped her brow with the sleeve of her white coat, as if she had been the one engaged in the physical exertion.

  ‘Lift her onto the bed,’ she said.

  Between them Lucy and the nurse managed to manoeuvre the child from the floor onto the bed. Her face twitched even as she slept, her eyes shifting beneath the thin veils of their lids. Her skin was still chilled to the touch, though her mouth had begun to regain some of its colour.

  The doctor approached the bed, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. She checked the girl’s head first, combing the hair back against the roots to see if there were scalp injuries. Then she gently followed the lines of her neck, and across her shoulders. She checked her arms and hands next, then feet and legs, before raising the pyjama top and checking her trunk.

  ‘Good and bad news, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said when she’d finished her examination. ‘The child hasn’t suffered any serious physical injury from being outside in the snow.’

  ‘And the bad news?’

  The doctor peeled off her gloves as she spoke. ‘She’s suffering quite severe hypothermia. We’ll need to keep her in for a few days. Have you found her parents?’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘I’d hoped to ask her how to contact them.’

/>   The doctor frowned slightly. ‘The sedative we gave her will last a few hours now. She might not be any use to you until later this morning.’

  A Scene of Crime Officer arrived on the ward about half an hour later. Because of the involvement of a child and the possibility of abuse, Alice was considered a ‘crime scene’ and would be subject to the same investigation with the paediatrician in attendance.

  Then the duty social worker blundered into the room, a wheezing corpulent woman who announced herself as Sylvia. She dropped a large handbag on the ground near the door and moved over to look at the girl, angling her head slightly to stare at the child face on.

  Finally, a little deflated, she shuffled over to Lucy.

  ‘I thought it might have been her. You know.’

  Lucy nodded her head. ‘It’s not.’

  ‘How is she?’ Sylvia asked.

  ‘They’ve sedated her. She was screaming in agony.’

  Sylvia nodded her head absent-mindedly. ‘I’ll not be working on this one. Robbie’s starting his rotation at nine. I’m only holding on until he comes.’

  ‘I see,’ Lucy said. She was about to leave when she realized that she’d no car with her, having come in the ambulance. She’d need to catch a lift back to the station with the Scene of Crime Officer when he had finished.

  Sylvia grunted softly to herself, lifted her bag, then went to sit in one of the armchairs near the bed. She took out a tabloid newspaper and settled herself to read.

  The SOCO worked quietly on the girl, only occasionally sharing murmured comments with the paediatrician.

  ‘God love that poor family,’ Sylvia commented. Lucy looked across at the picture of Kate McLaughlin on the cover of the paper.

  ‘God love this girl’s family too,’ she found herself saying, aware that it sounded a little petulant.

  ‘But Kate’s still lost. At least this girl’s been found,’ Sylvia explained, rattling the paper as she turned the page.

  Lucy watched the young girl shift fitfully through her sedation. She lay alone, no parents or friends, no name, no voice, no dignity even, as the SOCO and doctor began to remove her clothing.

  ‘She doesn’t seem very found to me,’ Lucy muttered.

  CHAPTER 5

  She waited for the SOCO, Tony Clarke, who worked for around twenty minutes with Alice, alongside the doctor. He was a heavyset man, in his mid-thirties, Lucy guessed. When he had finished he seemed more than happy to give Lucy a lift back to the station.

  ‘I’ve not seen you before,’ he commented as they walked out to the car park. ‘Newbie?’

  ‘I’ve been here a month,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry,’ Clarke said, reading something into her comment she had not intended. ‘It’s a big place; you don’t get to know everyone straight away.’

  Lucy felt she should say something, but wasn’t sure where to start. ‘How’s the girl?’ she asked instead.

  ‘No obvious signs of abuse,’ Clarke said. ‘I’ve brought her clothes for examination, but I reckon she was sleepwalking or something. By the time you get to the station her parents will have phoned to report her missing.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Lucy said.

  Suddenly, she felt her legs go from beneath her as she skidded on the compacted ice frozen beneath the most recent fall of snow. She reached out to steady herself, or to break her fall, but Clarke grabbed her before she hit the ground. He held her arm in one hand, his other arm wrapped around her trunk. She straightened up and adjusted her coat, thanking him for catching her.

  He linked his arm through hers until they made it to his car, then opened the door for her to get in while she struggled to decide if she should be annoyed with him or not.

  They drove down through the Waterside and across the Craigavon Bridge. Glancing upriver, she could make out the outlines of the houses in Prehen, just visible through the haze of falling snow. Cracked sheets of ice were forming around the outer edges of the river. At the far end of the bridge there was a bronze sculpture of two men, hands outstretched towards each other, representatives of the two sides of the town, and the two communities who lived there. Some local wag had dressed the pair with football scarves and hats, though had been careful to ensure the tribal rivalries remained, for one wore the colours of Celtic and the other the blue of Rangers.

  After going along the Foyle Embankment they went to Strand Road where the CID suite was located. Various members of the CID team had already gathered in the Incident Room by the time Lucy got there. Travers stood at the head of the room. He had changed since she saw him in the woods for he now wore a navy-blue suit with a fresh white shirt and red tie. He stood in front of a large cork noticeboard, which was covered with maps, information sheets and diagrams, among which was pinned the same picture of Kate McLaughlin that Lucy had seen in the paper. Another female detective sergeant on the team, Tara, acknowledged her arrival with a slight tip of her head. A few others glanced at her quickly, then dismissed her from their attentions.

  Travers paused for a moment to allow her time to sit, then continued.

  ‘We’ve managed to piece together the events of Friday night a little more fully now. We know that Kate was at the cinema with her friends until ten thirty. Her father had arranged to collect her at a friend’s house – Elaine Grant. As best we can tell, Kate received a text message she assumed to be from her father telling her he would collect her from Victoria Market car park which is four hundred yards from the cinema.’ He pointed out the locations on a map on the board.

  ‘Wouldn’t she know her father’s phone number?’ a Uniform beside Lucy asked.

  One of the senior CID team twisted round in his seat to see who had asked the question.

  ‘Sorry,’ Travers said, raising his hand. ‘I should have mentioned that her father’s phone went missing on Friday afternoon.’

  It was a well-organized pick-up, Lucy thought. Well planned and clearly targeted. One difficulty was that there had, as yet, been no ransom demand. The police had been treating it as a missing persons case until one of the papers got wind of it and, realizing the girl’s father was Michael McLaughlin, ran the story as a kidnapping.

  McLaughlin was one of Derry’s wealthiest businessmen. During the late eighties he had built a reputation through smart investment, buying huge swathes of property in the depths of the last recession, then selling it when the market recovered. His greatest success story had also been, until now, his costliest. He had bought a run-down market building on the docks, at the corner of which was an old sailors’ bar. He had planned to convert the entire waterfront, years before anyone else considered developing the dilapidated docklands. However, during one of the more sustained periods of violence in the city during the Troubles, the bar had been destroyed in an explosion targeting a passing British Army convoy. McLaughlin’s wife, Carol, had been trapped inside and died in the blast. McLaughlin still owned the prime land, though he had never developed it.

  ‘In the absence of any ransom demand,’ Travers began, ‘we continue to play down suggestions that this is a kidnapping. Unofficially that continues to be our belief and should inform our investigations. Now might be a good time to start asking around on the streets, especially your more reliable CIs. I’ve requested Police 44 to do a fly-over the town once the snow lessens sufficiently. The City Centre Initiative has provided us with relevant CCTV footage of Kate leaving the cinema. I want a team to work through it. Footage from the car park where she went missing is unuseable, apparently; both the camera and the lamps above the car park were smashed in the hours before the abduction. We’re going to do a reconstruction of Kate’s last movements this evening along Strand Road. I’ll want everyone out to take statements.’

  The comment was greeted with a collective groan; the only thing worse than taking statements from well-meaning members of the public was having to do it in such inclement weather.

  ‘I know,’ Travers said, smiling lightly and raising his hands again in placation. ‘The ACC has a
greed overtime for all working the case.’

  This, at least, reduced the groaning, even if it didn’t suppress it entirely.

  ‘Your team leaders have been briefed on what I want each of you to focus on for today; we meet back here at 1600 for an update. DS Black, I’d like to see you in my office.’

  One or two of the men, as they passed, feigned anxiety, believing that Lucy would have to explain her lateness at the briefing.

  Tara placed her hand on Lucy’s arm as she passed and whispered, ‘Good luck. Don’t let him lock the door.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Lucy watched Travers’s lupine gait as he padded up the corridor towards her. His shirtsleeves were rolled up revealing sinewy forearms marked with blue smudges of tattoos from his time in the forces. His face too was thin and taut, his eyes deep set, the thick greying brows shadowing his eyes. He ran his hand through his hair as he approached, shifted the pace of his step.

  ‘How’s the girl?’

  ‘Alice. She’s sedated, sir,’ Lucy said, standing at his approach.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, pushing open his office door, holding it for Lucy so she had to pass by him to get in.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, passing her to get to his side of the desk, touching her shoulder gently to guide her to a seat as he did so.

  He placed himself opposite her, joined his hands together on the desk, smiled enough to expose his teeth. Her glance took in his frame, the thinness of his arms, the tight musculature. The tattoos were clear now – a blurred blue anchor, a small red rose with a name, indistinct, beneath it.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked, gesturing towards a small table to his left on which sat a tray with a flask of coffee and cups and saucers.

  ‘No, thank you, sir,’ Lucy said.

  ‘It’s been quite a first month for you,’ Travers began.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, her clasped hands resting on her lap.

  His eyes looked at her mouth as she spoke, then drifted to her neckline.

  ‘You’ve found things different here from Lisburn, I dare say.’