The Dead Ground

by Claire McGowan

  You’re thinking of your own child, safe at home, please God safe at home, born red and wriggling as a new pup. ‘Can she have any more?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ The doctor – Dr Alison Bates, her badge says, not a local name, and the accent not local either, she must be English – says, ‘There was too much bleeding, so I had to perform a hysterectomy. But she’ll live.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  The doctor hesitates. ‘I’ve told her, though she’s very woozy. She – well, we had to restrain her. She was very distressed. We gave her sedation.’

  For a moment the doctor flops down in the seat beside you. A small woman, dark-haired. She seems to have given way.

  ‘She’s alive.’ You can’t take it in, and for a moment you wonder if it would be better the other way, an end to it, be with the child and the husband again, if you believe in that kind of thing, and these days you just aren’t sure if you do.

  ‘Yes.’ The doctor rubs her face, her nails short and dirtied with blood. ‘Yes.’

  But it doesn’t feel like success, to you who have both fought to save her. Then the doctor’s beeper begins to sound, and she springs up, muttering a curse, and dashes off down the corridor, where a flurry of activity has begun. On the tiled floor, her feet make a rapid rhythmic pattering, and she is gone.

  Not knowing what else to do, you head home, every inch of you tired and stiff, sticky with the woman’s blood and the barnyard smell of the kitchen. You keep picturing the baby, its mottled purple skin, something not fit for the eyes of the world, like a bird fallen from a nest. Untimely ripped – the quote comes to you, something you’ve seen on your daughter’s homework. She’s doing Macbeth for her English, that’s it. Untimely ripped.

  You park your Volvo in the street and see with surprise the curtains in the house aren’t drawn. It’s six p.m., long dark, winter-dark, and Margaret hates to have them open, worried about people ‘looking in on you’. You open the door with your key. Your daughter sits at the table in her maroon school uniform, chewing on a pen in that absent teenage way, homework spread around. Her red hair is untidy and you notice she hasn’t put on the radio or TV, not like her. ‘Where’s your mum?’

  The kitchen is cold, no dinner cooking in the oven. ‘Paula?’

  Your daughter raises her eyes to yours, and for the second time that day you feel your stomach fail. ‘She wasn’t here,’ Paula says, her voice slipping into the panic she’s obviously been holding back since she came home. ‘I thought you’d know. I thought you’d know where she was.’

  Your heart, you think irrationally. Focus on the heart. It’s thumping in your chest like the feet of the doctor running down the corridor. One two one two. Running for a life.

  Chapter One

  Ballyterrin, 2010

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Sorry! God, I’m sorry.’ Paula put her head down on the conference-room table, under which she had just vomited all over the feet of her superior officers. Bob Hamilton, the senior sergeant, and Guy Brooking, the Detective Inspector, had leapt up in alarm as she leaned forward, convulsing, right in the middle of a case presentation.

  ‘It’s OK, Paula,’ said Guy awkwardly, moving his expensive brogues away from the stain on the threadbare grey carpet. ‘Are you all right?’

  She could feel beads of sweat along her forehead. ‘Uh – I don’t know. I must have eaten something bad.’

  ‘Why don’t you go and clean up – we need to leave in five minutes, anyway.’

  ‘OK.’ She dragged herself out of the conference room, stomach roiling, and behind her she heard Bob Hamilton’s plaintive tones: ‘She’s after boking on my shoes, so she is.’

  She fled to the Ladies, hanging over the sink for a while until it stopped, then running cool water over her face and rinsing the sour taste from her mouth, shaking. She’d thrown up every morning now for the past month, but this was the first time it had happened at work, and the first time anyone else had seen. She was fairly sure her father, who she lived with, had noticed – the ex-policeman missed very little – but so far he was choosing not to say anything.

  Paula raised the edge of her thick grey jumper and examined her stomach in the mirror of the Ladies. Still flat. But not for much longer, unless she made a decision and bloody soon. She started counting backwards in her head. If only she could be sure which time. Or which man, for that matter.

  The door opened and she smoothed the jumper down quickly.

  ‘Paula, are you OK?’ Avril Wright, the intelligence analyst, was the only other woman on their small team at the MPRU, or Missing Persons Response Unit, an obscure team set up in the Northern Irish town to consult on cases north and south of the border. They were supposed to look at old cases with a view to reopening any with new evidence, and also make sure the investigation was properly coordinated when a new person went missing. Which sadly was what had happened today. ‘The boss sent me to check on you.’

  Avril as usual looked fresh out of the box, in a crisp blue blouse and pencil skirt. Paula felt oozy and rumpled. ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘You don’t want to go home?’

  ‘No, no, not when there’s a big case like this.’

  Avril’s pretty face grew sombre. ‘I don’t know who would do such a thing. A wee baby!’

  Paula looked at her own pallid face in the mirror. She did know. That was the worst part of her job as a forensic psychologist, working out exactly who would do the most horrific crimes, and why. Entering into their minds, understanding. People said that understanding everything meant forgiving everything. She’d never known if that was true. ‘Come on.’ She pushed back lank strands of her hair. ‘We’re not going to find him like this, are we?’

  Coming out, she saw Guy through the glass of the conference room, down on his hands and knees in his good grey suit. He was dabbing at the patch of bile with a wad of kitchen roll, his fair hair falling over his forehead with the effort. Formerly a big deal in the London Met, he’d come over to Northern Ireland several months before to run the unit and made more of a noise than anyone had expected, even recruiting Paula from her own London job back to her dreaded home town. She’d been supposed to stay for one case only, but that had reached its traumatic conclusion weeks before, and now it was a month to Christmas and she was still here. Her hand once more crept to her stomach. She had to tell him. Shit, she couldn’t. Not today. Not when a case this big had just come in.

  ‘You coming to the hospital?’ Gerard Monaghan, one of the detectives from the local PSNI station who was seconded to the unit, was holding her coat. ‘This bloody snow’s made the traffic murder. Fiacra’s digging the cars out.’ Fiacra Quinn was the final member of their team, a young Detective Garda from Dundalk, who’d been brought in to act as liaison to the South.

  Focus, for God’s sake, Maguire. ‘Coming.’

  Paula had long believed that nothing good ever happened in Ballyterrin General Hospital. It was where they’d taken the two bodies they’d found in the nineties, women who for a while they’d thought could have been her missing mother. One washed up on a beach in Wexford, one unearthed in a drain during building works. Twice Paula had made the journey up from school in her maroon uniform, to meet her father at the morgue. It hadn’t been worth it either time, the trip in some teacher’s car, hands clasped between trembling knees. No trace of Margaret Maguire had ever surfaced and she was stilled in Paula’s memory forever as she’d been on the last day, tidying the kitchen in her wool dressing gown as Paula had slunk out to school, bleary-eyed, crunching cereal. She’d been thirteen, just. She’d barely even said goodbye to her mother – why would she, when every day in life Margaret had been there in the same spot when she came home, a pot of tea on the stove?

  The hospital was also the place Paula had been taken, aged eighteen, when she’d swallowed the contents of the medicine cabinet and ha
d her stomach pumped. And that was Aidan’s fault too, wasn’t it? No. No, Maguire. However angry she got at him she knew she couldn’t blame that on anyone but herself.

  ‘Where are we going?’ They’d parked the car in the icy, grit-scattered car park, and she was now trying to keep up with Guy as he barged through the double doors and onto a second-floor ward of the hospital. Too late she realised where it was – Christ, how stupid was she. Maternity. Of all the places to be today.

  The entire area had been cordoned off, and uniformed PSNI officers stood about. An early December snowfall had hit the town that morning, and had been causing chaos even before all this. Trails of greyish snow melted up and down the packed corridors, full of confused women in nightclothes, angry men, flustered nurses. Tinsel decorations hung from the walls but there was no sense of festive cheer. Weak and queasy, Paula trotted after Guy in her black suede boots, already stained with damp sludge. When he got like this, there was no keeping up with him. He approached the cordon flashing his badge. ‘Detective Inspector Guy Brooking, MPRU. Let us past, please.’

  No, nothing good ever happened in Ballyterrin General Hospital, and the fact that it was from here the baby had been stolen, well, that didn’t surprise Paula at all.

  In front of the private maternity room, a woman in a grey trouser-suit and red heels was talking to Gerard Monaghan. It was no surprise he’d got there first, as Guy scrupulously obeyed the town speed limits, and Gerard, like all locals, looked on them as a good wee joke. He looked up uneasily as Guy arrived. This woman was his other boss, DCI Helen Corry, head of Serious Crime for the area. Gerard’s work as liaison to the Unit left him uncomfortably torn between the two and their constantly simmering feud.

  Guy said, ‘What have we got?’

  Helen Corry saw them but carried on and finished her sentence. ‘. . . And get the CCTV quick as you can. We need to see if the child’s still in the building. Threaten them if you have to.’ Only then did she turn to the new arrivals. ‘Inspector Brooking, Dr Maguire. We have nothing. I have an abducted newborn, by the looks of it.’

  Guy was pressing his lips together, a sure sign of contained fury. ‘Why weren’t we called in sooner?’

  Helen Corry smoothed back a blond hair. Her nails were painted the same red as her shoes. ‘They called the police, quite naturally, so we came.’

  ‘We’re first point of contact on all missing per—’

  ‘You’re here now, Inspector, aren’t you? And as we’ll be supplying all the manpower, or personpower, for this case, I’m guessing you want to keep us on board.’

  Paula, no stranger to professional pissing contests herself, raised her eyebrows at Gerard, who shook his head helplessly. Between the two, he was on balance probably more scared of Corry.

  The woman herself was now saying, ‘As I understand it, your role is to coordinate and ensure a swift response to new missing persons cases. So what actions would your coordination create in this instance?’

  ‘Well, I’d seal the area—’

  ‘Done, as you saw – though you seem to have breached it.’

  ‘—I’d prevent all staff and patients from leaving—’

  ‘Also done, though we can’t hold them forever. So it might be good if you let me get on and interview them.’

  Guy spoke in a rush. ‘—interview any eyewitnesses, get CCTV and artist’s impressions, and ask my psychology consult to assess the MO.’

  Finally Helen Corry gave Paula one of her trademark unreadable expressions. ‘Good job you brought her, then. I’m fine with Dr Maguire being involved.’

  ‘I didn’t ask if you were,’ Guy muttered, but only after Corry had moved out of earshot to berate the uniformed officers at the cordon.

  Gerard sighed, his wide shoulders sagging. ‘It’s true what she said, sir. She’s ordered it all already, what you’d have done. She’s even got them checking the databases in case it’s happened before anywhere. Not much for us to do.’

  Guy turned to Paula. ‘We’ve got one thing she hasn’t. Ready to talk to the parents?’

  Damian and Kasia Pachek had loved Ireland, he explained during the interview. They loved the green mountains, the pubs, the wisecracking stoicism of the people. So much so that when Kasia became pregnant, they’d decided to have their baby in Ballyterrin, instead of going home to Krakow as their families had wanted. The hospital room had cards on the nightstand, a big bunch of flowers still in crinkly plastic, a blue teddy inside the cot which until two hours before had held their newborn son, Alek.

  Now Kasia lay on the bed, dressed in short pink pyjamas, a drip in her pale hand. She kept up a steady and monotonous weeping, the kind of sound you quickly stopped noticing. Her husband sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair, staring in front of him, mashing a paper coffee cup between his fingers. They were a young couple, Paula guessed. Mid-twenties, no more. Damian worked as a technician in a commercial lab outside town, and Kasia was a yoga instructor. Guy had already established as much from Gerard.

  ‘I lost him,’ said Damian Pachek again. His wife said something in Polish, swallowed in tears, and he lowered his head into his hands, eyes screwed up.

  Guy looked to Paula, who stepped in. ‘Mr Pachek. I know this is hard, but there’s every chance we will find Alek, and soon. Now I’m sorry we have to do this so soon, when you’re in shock, but time is really important in a case like this, before you forget any of it. I’ll take you through a special interview to help you remember all the details you can.’

  The man nodded, eyes still fixed on something invisible in the middle distance. His whole body was shaking. Paula took a deep breath and sat down in another plastic chair, Guy still leaning against the wall. The weight of it all settled round her, the responsibility to find and bring home this child whose first toy lay abandoned in his crib.

  ‘Damian.’ She said his name quietly, and he focussed on her. ‘I’m very sorry this has happened, but it isn’t your fault. It could have been anyone.’

  On the bed, Kasia moaned and choked out a few words of Polish. Damian passed a hand over his face. ‘She says I should have watched – I should not have taken my eyes from him.’

  Paula glanced at the woman, who was burying her face in the pillow, shoulders quietly heaving. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said again. ‘Whoever came and took Alek, it’s their fault, you understand? They’re the one responsible. So I need you to tell me everything, every detail you remember, to help us find them.’

  Tears were now pooling on his face. ‘Kasy was sleeping. She was so tired – I’m tired too but I was awake, I was excited.’

  Paula nodded.

  ‘I was looking at him, at – at Alek, and I was happy, I was thinking I had to make a phone call, tell my mother she is babcia now.’ His voice caught. ‘Then a nurse came and she said she has to take Alek for tests. Kasia was sleeping, so I – I went – ’ Words seemed to fail him and he gestured with one hand down the corridor. ‘I go out to phone, so I do not wake her, Kasia . . .’

  ‘The nurse,’ Paula prompted. ‘It was a woman, you said?’

  ‘Yes. She had the outfit, sort of blue colour.’ He waved a hand near his torso. ‘Like they wear.’ His English, perfect at the start, seemed to be breaking down under stress.

  ‘Damian. I need you to remember. Slow down and just let it come – every detail.’

  The young man had his head in his hands. ‘She came in the door. Her feet are so quiet – I nearly don’t hear her until she was there. She said – I forget – “Time for baby’s tests now.” And she started wheeling the, the cot. I didn’t have time to think, OK, this is strange, you know.’

  ‘Her voice,’ Paula asked, ‘did she have an accent?’

  He shook his head. ‘From here, I think. Like you. Not like him.’ He pointed to Guy, who was pure Home Counties English. ‘She was tall, I think. Black hair,
blue outfit like a nurse.’

  She had an idea. ‘Was it an actual nurse’s uniform, or maybe someone trying to look like a nurse?’

  He thought about it. ‘Maybe. I don’t look. I – I don’t know.’

  Paula understood. Overwhelmed with new parenthood and lack of sleep, you didn’t question the authority of a medical professional. Even if they weren’t a real one. ‘So when you went to phone, what happened then?’

  ‘I went, but something made me look back, and I see the thing, this—’ He pointed helplessly.

  ‘The cot?’

  ‘Yes – I saw it in the corridor, kind of spinning. She wasn’t there, and Alek, she lifted him out – oh God.’ He started to shake hard. ‘I could have run after her, but I didn’t know, I think it’s OK.’

  ‘What happened next, Damian?’

  ‘I – I called, and everyone at home is so happy, crying happy, saying when will we bring him there.’ He shuddered, somewhere between laughter and tears. ‘Then I came back, he’s gone but I didn’t worry. I waited maybe half an hour, then I went to the nurse station and they said – that’s all. I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ She went to touch his arm, earning a watchful look from Guy, and pulled back.

  He took over. ‘Mr Pachek. We’ll do our best to find your son. Every member of staff here will be questioned, and we’ll be going through the CCTV as soon as we can.’

  ‘Who would do this?’ Fingers stretched over his face like a mask, he looked to them for answers. ‘Who would take someone’s baby like this?’ They had none.

  ‘We’ll send an officer over to be with you the whole time, keep you updated.’ With those crumbs of comfort, they rose to go.

  Guy walked quickly down the corridor, buttoning his suit jacket. ‘First thoughts?’

  Paula tried to keep pace. ‘I’ve read about this kind of case. Usually it’s a woman, as he said. Someone who’s recently lost a baby or desperately wants one. They most likely won’t want to harm Alek, but the danger with a newborn is that the abductor can’t feed it, or look after it properly. There may not be much time.’