Little Girl Lost

by Brian McGilloway

  ‘Billy?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Quinn,’ Melanie said. ‘The two of them worked together in a bookies before Peter was sent down.’

  Lucy nodded, glanced quickly at Fleming.

  ‘So you left Alice with Peter?’ he encouraged her to continue.

  She nodded. ‘I’ve no family over here. He wasn’t best pleased either after crying about never seeing her, said it wasn’t the best time. I figured he’d got himself a woman and didn’t want a child hanging around the house.’

  ‘What’s your husband’s address, Mrs Kent?’

  ‘126B Woodside Road,’ she said.

  ‘That backs onto Prehen woods,’ Fleming said to Lucy.

  Melanie said, ‘That’s right; the woods run right up to the back of Peter’s garden.’ Then she added, delicately, ‘Has Peter … hurt her?’

  ‘No, ma’am, she’s fine. She was a little cold, so the hospital have kept her in for a few days.’

  ‘Did she not tell you she was staying with her father?’ Melanie asked, laughing forcedly.

  ‘She’s barely spoken since we found her, ma’am. Hopefully now you’re back she’ll be able to tell us how she ended up in the woods.’

  ‘Her bloody father was probably too busy at other things to even notice,’ Melanie said. ‘It’ll be the last time she stays with him.’

  Lucy considered that, if, as Tony Clarke claimed, the blood on Alice proved to belong to her father, this statement might be more accurate than the woman intended.

  ‘You must think I’m a terrible mother,’ Melanie said, glancing up at Lucy anxiously.

  ‘Not at all, ma’am,’ Fleming said in response. ‘Shall we get you to the hospital?’

  They sent Melanie Kent to the hospital in a squad car. After she left, Lucy called the duty social worker. The nasal twang of the woman who answered was familiar.

  ‘Sylvia?’

  ‘Yes?’ The word was drawn out, non-committal.

  ‘DS Lucy Black here. We’ve located Alice’s mother and she’s on her way to the hospital now with some of our officers. I thought someone should be there.’

  ‘I’ll be right up,’ Sylvia said; then added brightly, ‘I’ll call Robbie and have him come up too.’

  Before Lucy had a chance to respond, Sylvia hung up.

  CHAPTER 31

  Woodside Road, known locally as the Strabane Old Road, ran along the hill above the town, a few miles above Prehen. From this height, Lucy and Fleming could see right along the Foyle valley, could make out the flickering lights of the smaller villages and settlements between Derry and Donegal. There were no street lights along the road and the moon bathed the fields on both sides in lilac.

  The only houses along the road were old farmhouses, dotted sporadically along the way between Derry and New Buildings. At times they drove a mile between buildings. Fleming called the station to run an owner check on the address Melanie Kent had given them. The database had not listed any address for Peter Kent.

  ‘It belongs to someone called J.P. McCauley,’ Fleming said. ‘Kent must be renting.’

  A few moments later, on the left-hand side of the road, they found the address. The black mass of Prehen woods loomed above the rear of the property. They drew up at the front gate, parking on the road.

  Lights shone from the back of the house. Fleming approached the front door and knocked three times, then stood back and waited. Lucy stood behind him a step, watching around them, aware of the absolute silence. No one answered. Fleming repeated the knock and waited a moment again.

  ‘We’ll try the back,’ he said.

  The house was probably late-nineteenth century with the brickwork rough, the pointing uneven. The windows were still old, wooden sash affairs, the guttering the original metal, rusted and gapped in places.

  The snow in the driveway and around the rear of the house lay untouched. It looked as though no one had left the house in a few days.

  To the side of the house they came upon the wooden doors of a coal chute lying open. Lucy shone her torch through the doorway; a step dropped down into a basement. In the weak light of her torch she could make out a room full of lumber, old kitchen units, half-used paint pots. Just at the edge of her torchlight, she discerned the metal frame of a camp bed, a thin white mattress on the top.

  Past the opening, squatted a small concrete block, about four foot square. A flimsy metal chimney stood on the roof of it.

  ‘Heating boiler,’ Fleming said.

  The boiler whined without the subsequent whoosh of the fuel igniting that one would expect.

  ‘Sounds like he’s run out of oil,’ Lucy said.

  ‘And hasn’t realized it,’ Fleming added.

  They skirted around the perimeter of the house. Finally, at the rear, they found a pair of French doors ajar. Through the fabric of curtains pulled across the doorway shone the lights of the room beyond.

  Fleming drew his gun and knocked once on the glass of the open door.

  ‘Police,’ he called.

  Lucy drew her own weapon. She moved towards the door and took the edge of the curtain in her hand. Then, gently, she drew it back.

  The first thing she saw, on the white tiled floor of the kitchen beyond, was a small, perfectly formed footprint, made in blood. A few pictures hung on the wall. Nothing else.

  Drawing the curtain further back, they could see more of the prints, leading round the corner of what was an L-shaped room.

  Lucy stepped into the house. It was as cold inside as out. Glancing back, to hold the curtain open for Fleming, she noticed a number of bloated bluebottles clinging to the fabric. She moved further into the kitchen, avoiding stepping on the prints on the floor. Even before she had rounded the corner she knew what to expect. The flies, the smell, the bloody prints. Peter Kent was dead.

  Lucy wasn’t prepared for the manner of his death, though. Kent was slumped in a chair, his legs splayed, his head hanging limply downwards. A thick rope crisscrossed his chest and was wrapped around the back of the chair, preventing him from slipping to the floor. His chest was encrusted with dried brown blood, his stomach distended and bulging at the gaps between the buttons of his shirt. More blood had congealed into a gelatinous skin on the floor around his chair. A blood-soaked cloth hung from his mouth where he must have been gagged.

  One of his shoes had been removed and lay discarded against the far wall. The sock was balled in on itself and lay at the edge of the pool of blood. Kent’s foot had clearly been beaten before he died; the skin was discoloured with bruising. The two outermost toes hung at an angle from the rest of the foot. The arch of his foot was marked with round livid red circles.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Fleming said, drawing level with Lucy. ‘I’ll call it in.’

  As he took out his phone, Lucy edged around the pool of blood. Moving behind the body she found, in the sink, a hammer.

  While they waited for back-up, Lucy and Fleming moved through the house, checking the rooms in case anyone else remained in the house. Lucy noticed as she climbed to the first floor that the step on the turn of the stairs offered a clear view of Kent’s body in the kitchen, framed by the doorway.

  Upstairs they found a small room where, presumably, Alice had been staying while with her father. A small inflatable airbed was pushed against one corner. A duvet was thrown back to one side. A nest of clothes lay on the floor. Beside the dresser a small pink case lay opened. A doll sat on top of the dresser. The decor of the room, though, was sparse and plain. Alice may have stayed in this room, but the room was not hers. Certainly that would square with Melanie Kent’s comment that Peter had not been expecting Alice.

  A second room was obviously Kent’s own bedroom; the third was empty of all furniture.

  ‘Fairly sparse existence,’ Fleming said.

  Lucy stood looking at the bare room.

  ‘Strange that he didn’t put the third bed up here,’ she said.

  ‘What bed?’

  ‘There’s a bed set up in the basement,�
�� Lucy said, then realized the significance of it.

  They found the stairs to the basement leading down from a utility room to the side of the house. The door of the basement lay open. A new, heavy sliding bolt had been fitted to the outside of the door. Looking at the lock, Lucy was reminded of Mary Quigg’s bedroom.

  Inside the basement they used Lucy’s torch to help locate the light switch. A fluorescent tube light sparked into life, then began flickering erratically. From the elliptical flashing of the light they could see the camp bed Lucy had spotted from outside. The mattress was covered in a sheet though it had bunched up on one side.

  Strips of gaffer tape hung off the top of the bed frame. Each strip had been cut evenly. On the floor near the bed, a Stanley knife lay, bits of tape still stuck to the blade.

  Lucy stepped over to the bed. Something small glinted in the light of her torch, sitting in the hollow of the pillow. She stopped and lifted it, placing it in the palm of her hand to examine it: a small golden teddy-bear charm.

  ‘Looks like we’ve found where Kate McLaughlin was being held.’

  Lucy glanced around the room. Through the open door of the coal chute in the far wall she heard the distant crying of sirens.

  ‘The question remains,’ Fleming continued, ‘where is she now?’

  CHAPTER 32

  Tony Clarke shuffled up the driveway, lugging a case of equipment with him. The interior of the house had become too busy; SOCOs had set up arc lights in both the kitchen and the basement. Around Peter Kent’s body, heavy-bodied flies flitted blue-green through the light’s beam.

  Lucy had come outside for a moment, to escape both the bustle and the smell in the house. Fleming stood beside her, his hands in his pockets.

  ‘I’m going to have to start paying you commission,’ Clarke said to Lucy as he drew abreast of them.

  Lucy smiled. ‘Good evening, Officer Clarke.’

  ‘And a good evening to you too, DS Black. Always a pleasure.’

  He glanced at Fleming and nodded lightly. ‘Inspector,’ he said.

  ‘Any luck in the shed this afternoon?’ Fleming asked, dispensing with the small talk.

  ‘We found quite a lot, sir,’ Clarke said, placing the case he carried gently by his feet. ‘We know Kate was in there.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  Clarke nodded. ‘I found hairs too. Plus, of course, the charm you found.’

  Lucy nodded. ‘There’s one here too. It’s as though she’s leaving them for us like a trail.’ Absurdly, Lucy recalled reading Hansel and Gretel to Alice, the trail of breadcrumbs leading through the woodland, the picture of the two girls in the wood Alice had drawn afterwards.

  ‘We also found her prints all over the empty food cans in the shed in the quarry,’ Clarke said.

  ‘So she fed herself.’

  ‘And tried to escape, I think.’

  ‘How?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘There was a hole cut in the back wall. We found a knife lying beside it with her prints. We also found traces of blood on the edges of the metal where it had been cut.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Fleming asked.

  ‘It’s not my job to suggest, Inspector,’ Clarke said. ‘But if pushed, I’d say she was locked in the shed and couldn’t get out. She tried cutting her way out, using the knife to cut through the metal sheeting of the wall. She pushed out the flap of metal she had cut, then put her hands under the edge to push it further out, cutting herself in the process. When she’s found she’ll have cuts on her hands.’

  ‘Any indications of who put her in there?’

  ‘The clasp at the front of the shed had too many prints on it to be useful. However, I did find a couple of prints on the padlock belonging to your friend.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Alice,’ Clarke said. ‘She’d probably locked the shed.’

  ‘Is that where she met Kate?’

  ‘Alice brought her there,’ Lucy said suddenly. ‘She drew a picture for the shrink in the hospital of two girls walking hand in hand through the woods. Maybe Alice brought her to safety, then locked the shed.’

  ‘Surely she’d have come back for her,’ Fleming said.

  ‘Maybe she tried,’ Lucy said. ‘Maybe that’s why she went back into the woods when I found her.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Fleming said sceptically.

  Clarke shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know about any of that. It gets better though. The pieces of piping, jars, fertilizer? A bomb-making factory.’

  ‘I suspected as much when I saw it,’ Fleming said.

  Clarke nodded. ‘I lifted traces of Semtex off the worktop; old stuff but still traces there. It was part of the batch the Provos brought into the North in the early nineties.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Lucy said. ‘We know Kent was a bomb-maker for the Provos. Something like that hidden in the woods would be perfect for it.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Clarke added. ‘The batch was used in particular in one bombing in Derry.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The Strand Inn on the docks. The bomb that killed McLaughlin’s wife.’

  While the SOCO unit worked through the house, Lucy headed back to the hospital with Tom Fleming. Travers suggested that they inform Melanie Kent of the death of her ex-husband before meeting at Strand Road for a CID briefing the following morning at 7.30 a.m.

  Melanie Kent was in the office of the duty social worker when they arrived. Social Services were concerned about the circumstances surrounding the discovery of Alice in the woods and would not agree to Melanie being given custody of Alice again until they were satisfied that she had not been negligent in her care of the child.

  Lucy and Fleming sat in the cafe while they waited for the interview to conclude.

  ‘You have to feel sorry for the youngster,’ Fleming said. ‘Not even about the whole thing with seeing her father dead and that. But before that; her mother pissing about with a married man, her father doing time, her being shifted from pillar to post. It’s no wonder the child doesn’t want to speak. Maybe she knows that no one would listen anyway.’

  Lucy looked at him quizzically.

  ‘How many neglected kids are there looking for help and we don’t give it? Take that wee girl from the other day, Mary Quigg. What hope does she have?’

  Fleming nodded once, as if satisfied with his comment, then motioned towards where Robbie McManus stood at the door to his office, beckoning them over.

  ‘We need to see Mrs Kent,’ Fleming said. ‘Her husband’s been found.’

  Robbie raised his eyebrows expectantly, though quickly gleaned from Lucy’s expression that it was not good news.

  ‘You’d best come in now.’

  Melanie Kent was seated at the far side of the desk. Sylvia sat opposite her, a cup of coffee in front of her. A third, empty seat, beside Sylvia’s was, presumably, where Robbie had been sitting.

  Melanie stood when Lucy and Fleming came in.

  ‘Did you find the bastard?’ she snapped. ‘It’s his fault I’m in this bloody mess.’

  Fleming glanced at Lucy, then spoke. ‘We have some bad news, Mrs Kent.’ There was no need for him to elaborate, for the woman was stopped short just as she seemed ready to launch into a further tirade.

  ‘What hap— where is he?’

  ‘We found him in his house, Mrs Kent,’ Fleming said.

  Lucy moved across to the woman and placed her hand on Kent’s arm. She may have been separated from Peter Kent, but news of his death had still hit her.

  ‘Might be best to sit, Mrs Kent,’ Lucy said.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘We’ll be launching a murder inquiry, Mrs Kent,’ Fleming said, clasping his hands in front of him.

  Melanie Kent’s expression crumpled momentarily, her tears coming quickly. She spluttered as she turned and sat, while Lucy squatted beside her, her arm around the woman’s shoulders.

  ‘We might not … but I still … you know,’ the woman tried to explain as she wiped at her tears
with the sleeve of her coat.

  ‘We understand,’ Fleming said.

  Lucy found herself wondering if her own mother might feel the same way if she had heard similar news. Her mother had asked about her father when they spoke, though she had assumed it was out of politeness, out of a sense of what was expected. But then, her mother had never done what was expected of her, had seemed determined to ignore proprieties. In so doing she had broken the glass ceiling. And it was not all that she had broken.

  ‘Perhaps you could be doing with a few moments alone,’ Fleming said.

  Lucy felt torn between the discomfort she always felt in delivering such news to a relative, and her desire to offer the woman some consolation, to remain beside her when she needed someone. In the end, Melanie Kent made the decision for her. She nodded her head and turned away from her, seeking to be left alone.

  Fleming suggested that they both go home for a few hours’ sleep before the 7.30 briefing. The thought of going back to the empty house in Prehen did not appeal to her though, so Lucy said she would stay in the hospital, and perhaps visit her father. Fleming glanced at the clock in the foyer of the hospital, just edging towards 1.30 a.m.

  ‘Try to get some rest, Lucy,’ he said, before leaving.

  Despite saying she would visit her father, Lucy found herself on the children’s ward again.

  Alice was lying awake in the bed when Lucy came in and rewarded her arrival with the gift of her smile.

  ‘Hi, Alice,’ Lucy said, but the child did not speak.

  ‘Your mummy’s downstairs,’ Lucy explained. ‘She’ll be up soon, I expect.’

  Alice yawned lightly, emitting a tiny squeak at the height of her stretch. She laid her hands back on the bedclothes and watched Lucy expectantly.

  ‘I wish you would talk to us, Alice,’ Lucy said, aware now of all that had forced the child into choosing not to speak. After all, what could she say? How could she vocalize what she must have seen? She was a child after all, Lucy reminded herself. An adult would have difficulty coming to terms with what she had witnessed.

  She sat on the bed beside Alice and laid her hand on the girl’s head. Her hair was shiny and smooth, her scalp warm to the touch.