Little Girl Lost

by Brian McGilloway

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘According to my Ian,’ Margaret said, lifting another jam-ring from the plate on her desk and dunking it in her cup.

  Alice was lying staring at the ceiling when Lucy went to her. She watched her approach and turned her head slightly as Lucy sat on the chair beside her bed.

  ‘How are we tonight?’ Lucy said, taking off her coat and bunching it up into a cushion that she placed behind her head, then sat back in the chair.

  Alice stared at her, her big eyes blinking several times.

  ‘Was anyone in with you today?’ Lucy asked.

  The girl continued to watch her, her eyes following the words on Lucy’s lips.

  ‘Can you hear me, Alice?’

  Lucy expected no response, so was shocked into sitting forward when Alice’s head seemed to nod almost imperceptibly.

  ‘Did you just nod?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Alice? Did you just nod at me?’ she asked again.

  The child continued to stare, her head unmoving.

  ‘Do you want me to read to you?’ Lucy asked, picking up the book of fairy tales from the bedside cabinet, not taking her eyes off Alice.

  Lucy opened the book to the next story. Perhaps she had imagined that nod.

  ‘How about Hansel and Gretel?’

  CHAPTER 22

  When Lucy awoke, her muscles ached with stiffness. She was slouched in the seat beside Alice with her feet up level with the bed. Someone had placed a blanket over her while she slept. Stretching her neck, she noticed that Alice lay facing her, moaning gently in her sleep. Her arms were wrapped around one of Lucy’s legs, her cheek pillowed by the softness of a thigh muscle.

  Lucy tried to move without disturbing her too much, using her hand to cushion the girl’s head while she moved her leg. Alice half opened her eyes and glanced at Lucy. The briefest smile ghosted her lips, then disappeared. The child closed her eyes again and her breathing evened as she went back to sleep.

  Lucy gathered her stuff and headed into the bathroom to wash. She checked on her father, then went for breakfast in the staff canteen. By the time she made it upstairs again Robbie was already in. Lucy glanced at her watch: 8.15 a.m.

  He evidently caught the gesture. ‘You’re not the only one who works out of hours occasionally,’ he said smiling.

  Lucy returned his smirk.

  ‘So, you stayed here again last night, did you?’

  Before Lucy had a chance to reply he continued, ‘Do you not have a life outside of the police? You’re never tempted to go out for dinner or a drink?’

  Lucy smiled. ‘Rarely,’ she said. ‘I look after my father.’

  ‘You need to make time for yourself too. Spend a night at home. Alice isn’t going anywhere.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she said, feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘I was wondering if you’d do me a favour,’ she said, keen to change the topic of conversation.

  Robbie arched an eyebrow. ‘Personal or professional?’

  ‘I’m looking to locate a girl who was in care in the early nineties. Her name’s Janet.’

  ‘Janet what?’ Robbie asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lucy said. ‘I know she was called Janet. She was in care in Derry in 1993. She’d have been in her teens.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘What’s the connection with Alice?’

  Lucy stumbled over her answer. ‘She’s … it’s connected to something else I’m investigating.’

  ‘Personal or professional?’

  ‘Will you do it?’

  ‘Personal or professional?’ he persisted, folding his arms.

  ‘Personal,’ Lucy said.

  He held up one placatory hand. ‘I’ll do my very best. I can’t promise anything though.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Lucy said. ‘I appreciate it.’

  She had only managed to pour herself a cup of coffee and was making her way into her office when her mobile rang.

  ‘Tony Clarke here, Lucy.’

  Lucy mumbled a greeting, trying to clamp the phone between her shoulder and cheek as she carried a coffee mug in one hand and lifted a bunch of Post-It notes with the other.

  ‘You need to come over here.’

  Before Lucy had a chance to answer, Clarke hung up.

  Clarke was the only one in the lab when she went up to him. She was a little annoyed both at him calling her Lucy and then hanging up the phone. Still, his excitement was so obvious when she went in that she could not remain angry for long.

  ‘I wanted to give you heads up,’ Clarke said.

  Lucy went across to the computer where he stood. He tapped a few keys, then stepped back to allow Lucy to see the screen. On it was displayed a graph of some sort.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ she asked.

  ‘I put through the stuff from Alice as part of the Kate McLaughlin caseload,’ Clarke said. ‘It meant it got fast-tracked, otherwise you’d have been waiting weeks.’

  ‘OK,’ Lucy said, still unsure where he was going.

  ‘This is an analysis of the blood we found on Alice’s clothes,’ Clarke said, unnecessarily tracing the direction of the graph on the screen with the tip of his finger.

  ‘Anything of interest?’ Lucy asked, assuming this to be the case as he had called her up to the lab. She understood that lab technicians liked to build up their work, to almost mystify the job in case they were not being fully appreciated. Clarke was no exception.

  ‘It belongs to a family member,’ Clarke said. ‘A parent specifically.’

  ‘That’s useful, Tony,’ Lucy said. ‘Thank you.’

  She began to move away from him when Clarke placed a hand on her arm. His face was flushed in the light from the VDU.

  ‘That’s not the important bit. I also got the hairs I took from her typed; the root material contains DNA.’

  Lucy nodded.

  ‘They’re Kate McLaughlin’s,’ Clarke said quickly, nodding encouragingly for Lucy to react.

  ‘What?’

  His nodding grew more vigorous. ‘The hairs belong to Kate McLaughlin.’

  ‘Are you sure? They might have mixed up samples if you sent this stuff in with the McLaughlin case work?’

  Clarke shook his head. ‘The chain of evidence is completely intact. They are definitely the samples from Alice; I found three.’

  ‘Have you told Travers yet?’

  Clarke shook his head more slowly now. ‘I thought you should know first. It’s your case.’

  CHAPTER 23

  ‘You’re sure about this?’ Travers said.

  Lucy glanced at Tom Fleming; she’d asked him to come along for support. As her senior officer, it made sense that she should report first to him. Fleming nodded. ‘The Forensics people confirmed it.’

  ‘And the girl hasn’t spoken yet?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Lucy said.

  ‘But she has been in contact with Kate McLaughlin.’

  ‘Or at the very least they’ve been in the same place,’ Lucy agreed.

  ‘You need to get her to talk,’ he said, assuming his spot perched at the edge of his desk.

  ‘The hospital psychiatrist is trying, sir, but she’s not had much luck.’

  ‘You seem determined to stay part of this case, DS Black,’ Travers said. ‘Even the evidence is conspiring to keep you here.’

  ‘Might it be a serial abductor, sir?’ Fleming said, keen to keep Travers on focus.

  Travers glanced at him, then stood and moved behind his desk. ‘It’s a bit early to say something like that.’

  ‘If two girls have gone missing and we suspect they’ve been in contact, sir,’ Fleming continued.

  ‘As I say, Tom, it’s a little premature to make comments like that. We don’t even know for a fact that they have been in direct contact.’

  ‘It might explain the lack of a ransom demand,’ Fleming reasoned.
<
br />   ‘At the minute, all we have is that your case met my case. If the girl won’t talk, we need to look at some other way of finding where their paths crossed.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We trace back your girl’s steps. If we move backwards, we should eventually reach a point where they had contact.’

  ‘The woods?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Indeed,’ Travers replied. ‘You can take us to where you found her and we’ll work back from there.’

  An hour later, three search teams assembled in the Everglades Hotel car park. Most were part of the uniformed Response team. Lucy was accompanied by Fleming. They all stood about, waiting for Travers to arrive and begin proceedings. When he arrived, he was dressed for the search; he had borrowed a blue bodysuit from the Tactical Support team. He stood in the car park with a map of the woods, dividing up sectors between each team of four. They were to enter the woods where Lucy had been on the night Alice was found, then to fan out, moving through the woods in a line, checking the undergrowth for evidence that Kate may have passed through. They were not, however, conducting a forensic search at the moment; the priority was locating Kate McLaughlin. He had chosen the word carefully: ‘finding’ offered some hope she might be alive, whereas, realistically, if she had spent the past few nights in the woods without cover, the chances of her surviving were negligible. The teams began moving slowly through the trees, aware that there was not, perhaps, the same urgency in this search as in others they had conducted.

  Fleming and Lucy walked side by side, chatting as they moved.

  ‘How do you feel about being back home?’

  Lucy considered the question. ‘I’m not sure if it is home.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me you grew up in Derry? I thought you might be glad to be back.’

  Lucy shook her head lightly. ‘I love the city, but … my only memory of this place is being put out of our house by our own neighbours. I’m not so sure the place has changed.’

  Fleming laughed mirthlessly. ‘Places can’t change,’ he said. ‘Only the people who live in them. You might be surprised.’

  Lucy glanced over at him and smiled lightly.

  Half an hour into the search, the team came to the lip of a quarry near the centre of the woods. The upper edge was overgrown with bushes, proliferating in the one spot where trees had been unable to find roothold in the rocky ground. Lucy remembered the quarry as a child, remembered scrabbling down the sheer rock face to search in the marshland of the quarry basin for newts and tadpoles. The basin, almost fifty feet beneath them, was overgrown now, some of the trees so tall their upper branches reached almost halfway up the rock.

  Fleming stepped back from the edge and leaned his upper body to get a better look.

  ‘I used to slide down there,’ Lucy observed, glancing over at the drop. It was only now, as an adult, that she felt any fear in so doing. She felt a retrospective tightening in her stomach at what could have happened to her twenty years ago.

  ‘Nowadays you’d be calling Social Services on someone who let their kid do that.’

  Travers had stopped and was standing poring over the map, four of the Tactical Support Unit holding it at each corner while he followed with his finger the paths they had taken. Finally he called the teams to gather around.

  ‘We’ll skirt round the top of the quarry first, keeping to our lines. The bottom entrance to the quarry looks more accessible. We’ll meet at the opposite point from here, at the bottom, then move down into the basin of the quarry itself. Possibly the girl came to the edge and, in the dark, didn’t see where she was going. Best if we prepare for the worst, people.’

  Fleming and Lucy moved off east of their position with a number of the TSU officers while Travers and the rest moved off to the west. The pathway, running parallel with the edge of the quarry, sloped downwards, the gradient deceptively steep beneath the thin coat of snow on the rock edge.

  Lucy and Fleming followed a path veering to the left. The path dropped sharply for twenty yards, then levelled out. To their right, only a few feet above them, they could see an alcove cut into the rock.

  ‘I didn’t even know this place existed,’ Fleming observed.

  ‘The stone here was used for the old American naval base at Lisahally docks after the Second World War,’ Lucy said, picking her way through the rocks that were now jutting through the snow.

  ‘That’s fascinating,’ Fleming remarked drily. ‘And how did you learn that little snippet?’

  ‘My dad brought me here sometimes when I was a child,’ she said.

  Her foot skidded on the edge of one of the rocks and she staggered. Fleming gripped her hand in his and held her steady until she found her footing.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, brushing her hair from her face. The TSU officers alongside them continued on their way, chatting quietly to themselves.

  The path began to slope again more sharply until they had come about halfway down. Above them, the rock face rose for about thirty feet. Below them the floor of the quarry basin was thick with snow. As they glanced over, a large brown rat scampered between two bushes, pausing for a moment to raise its snout in the air and sniff the scent off the winter wind.

  Lucy shivered involuntarily and moved onwards. Across the way they could see that Travers, who had taken the gentler path down, had already rounded the quarry and was headed towards them along the bottom edge.

  Glancing over to her left, she spotted the corrugated metal sheeting of an old shed, set back in the trees. As they came further down the path, the front section of the hut became visible, the door ajar, its bottom edge lodged against a rock.

  Fleming nudged Lucy. ‘What’s that?’

  They went towards the hut. The building was around eight feet high.

  ‘Hello,’ Fleming called out, entering the hut itself, Lucy following behind. Along the left-hand wall were a number of old kitchen cabinets and a small metal sink. Two opened cans of tinned fruit lay discarded on the worktop. Against the opposite wall was a mouldy old camp bed. A back section of the hut was curtained off. From where they stood, they could see the shape of something lying on the floor just behind the curtain.

  ‘Hello,’ Fleming repeated, treading forwards carefully. He reached out and pulled aside the faded material. A crumpled form lay on the floor and Lucy could see blood spots on it. She released her breath only when Fleming stepped to one side and she realized it was an old sheet, bundled up and lying in front of a small metal toilet bolted into the back wall.

  To the right of the toilet bowl, on the floor, lay an old penknife, the blade broken. A hole about two feet in diameter had been sawn into the rusting metal of the back wall, as if someone had tried to cut their way out.

  Fleming, pulling on his gloves, began to open the cabinets, one by one. The first held old tins of food, similar in age and style to the two empty cans lying on the counter. The next cabinet contained a handful of old tools. The lower shelf held circular lengths of copper wiring and a number of small lengths of copper piping. The next held several glass jars, the bottom quarter of each filled with small nails. A large torch battery lay on its side on the upper shelf, the contacts coated in white powder.

  Fleming bent down and opened the cabinets below the sink. Most were empty save for a large plastic container of clear liquid in one and an empty fertilizer bag in the other.

  ‘You know what this looks like?’ Fleming said, closing the final cabinet door. He did not get a chance to finish his sentence though, for Travers had entered the hut, his team having made it around the quarry.

  ‘What have you found?’ he asked, puffing out his cheeks to catch his breath after the exertion of the walk down.

  ‘It’s hard to tell, sir,’ Fleming said.

  Lucy moved to the back of the shed, taking in the broken knife, the sawn metal of the wall where a flap had been cut and pushed out. She saw a small gold item lying on the floor by the toilet and bent to pick it up.

  ‘Look at this, sir,’ she
said.

  Travers approached, holding out his hand. Lucy laid the object on the flat of his palm – a small golden charm shaped like a penguin.

  ‘Kate McLaughlin’s?’ Lucy asked. ‘From the same bracelet as the locket found in Billy Quinn’s car, maybe.’

  ‘We need to get a SOCO up here, pronto,’ Travers said, ushering them outside, taking out his phone.

  CHAPTER 24

  When Tony Clarke finally lumbered down the incline to work on the scene, the search teams continued moving up through the woods. The air grew increasingly chilled as the morning wore on. Even by noon, the watery winter sun still hung low in the sky, barely managing to raise itself above the treetops.

  Finally the path they followed brought them to the edge of the trees, not at the top of the woods, but to the east. The path became more pronounced, where walkers, bringing their dogs into the edge of the woodland for a brief walk, had worn the snow smooth.

  They came out of the trees at a small gate. Lucy realized with a start that they were standing at the end of her road.

  ‘I live just up there a bit,’ she said to Fleming, pointing towards the house.

  ‘You think you’d have us all back for a cuppa then,’ he commented.

  ‘I would have if you’d bought biscuits,’ Lucy joked. Just then her mobile rang. She looked at the display: Strand Road station.

  The desk sergeant who spoke when she answered explained curtly that he had been taking calls for her all morning. One man in particular was keen to speak with her: Charles Graham, manager of Clarendon Shirts. He said he knew who Alice was; her mother worked for him.

  Clarendon Shirts operated out of an industrial estate on the Buncrana Road, the back windows of the offices facing across the road at the low red-brick buildings of the local school. Lucy could see a number of the pupils, black shapes against the snow, slip-sliding through a lunchtime soccer game in the playing fields before afternoon class began.

  Charles Graham sat opposite her, his hands before him, his pudgy fingers entwined.