The Dead Ground

by Claire McGowan

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Guy. ‘Would we be able to have a quick look round the house, please?’

  Caroline looked as if she might say no, but Shane was already on his feet. Everything in the house was new, stylish, the kitchen painfully clean but with red-marked bills pinned to the fridge with magnets in the shape of fruit – bananas, apples. The bathroom, conversely, was sticky with soap and grime, a child’s plastic bath floating in several inches of dirty water, yellow ducks with innocent smiling beaks. This was where Darcy should have been, or safe in her nursery, which was upholstered in various shades of pink. Over her empty crib hung a mobile of floating fairies. It was too sad to look at it and Paula went back to the kitchen as soon as she could.

  After saying goodbye and giving assurances that everything possible would be done, Guy and Paula went out into the car and shut the door against the cold. There was no sign of Corry, but the front lawn was already churned up by officers and techs, blinding lights shining out from the police vans that blocked the small cul-de-sac. Paula imagined Caroline Williams staring at them through the mullioned windows.

  ‘Christ. What a thing to cope with,’ Guy said, clearing the windscreen with a chamois leather sponge. A fresh light coating of snow had started to drift down. ‘She was in such a state.’

  ‘I’d say she had a touch of post-natal depression, the mother. Trauma, even.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not just fear? Her baby’s gone.’

  Paula shook her head. ‘Something wasn’t right before. I saw her nails, and the bills – the way she talked to him, even. They’ve spent a lot of money on that place, but I’d say they maybe can’t afford it any more.’

  ‘So?’ Guy waited for her point.

  ‘So if somebody reached out to her, she might have opened up to them. Maybe said she was struggling. This abductor may have a misplaced sense that they’re helping the families. She can care for the child and they can’t, that sort of thing.’

  Guy wasn’t convinced. ‘But the Pacheks? They were desperate for that baby. They even went to Croft for help, you said. And it wasn’t as if Kasia even got the time to be with her child, let alone struggle with caring for it.’

  This was true. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Nothing about this seems to fit. Every time I put it in a box something plops back out.’

  ‘I know. I’ll send Gerard round to this baby group. Those things can be mini-fiefdoms. I remember from when Tess was—’ He broke off and she sighed.

  ‘You can say her name, you know.’

  He started the car as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘Anyway, it’s as good a lead as we’ve got.’

  ‘That’s just it, though.’ Paula chewed on her own fingernail, as if aping the gesture from the woman in the house. ‘We’ve got nothing but leads. More leads than a bloody overstocked pet shop, and not a single suspect.’

  He didn’t respond. Paula resumed her gnawing. As they moved past the police vans to the end of the cul-de-sac, Guy said, ‘At least we can pinpoint the time of disappearance quite accurately, if we check the phone records for the Williams’s house. That will help with alibis.’

  ‘We don’t have anyone to get an alibi from.’

  ‘No.’ They thought for a while more in tense silence. As the uniformed officers at the end of the road waved them out, a small band of journalists were already waiting, clamouring for answers. Another child missing. She could only imagine the media interest. She wondered was Aidan there among them, as the lights of the car swept over the crowd. The thought occurred: he would know what to do. If only she were speaking to him.

  ‘I – Paula.’ Guy stopped. ‘About earlier. I never meant for things to happen this way, you know.’

  She looked out the window at the icy night. ‘No. I don’t think anyone ever does.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘There you are, Maguire.’

  Gerard was passing, arms swinging with purpose, as he liked to be. The unit was already busy when Paula pushed open its doors on Monday morning. She was slightly late after another boking incident, but she doubted Guy would say anything after the bollocking she’d given him on Friday. The unit had worked all weekend, investigating all possible leads on the Williams and Bates cases. Paula had spent it reading everything she could about infant abduction, but was still no nearer to any answers as to who might have taken either child.

  Aidan’s paper, the Ballyterrin Gazette, came out on a Monday, and she’d tried her best not to read it over breakfast, but failed. Rather than praise the unit and PSNI for finding Alek Pachek, it was plastered with pictures of Darcy Williams, her sobbing parents, her pink-and-white face and huge blue eyes. FIND MY BABY was the headline. Since Alek had gone, the mood in town was fearful. There were reports of crèches closing down, parents taking holiday from work to avoid leaving their babies alone. The PSNI hotline was overwhelmed with sightings of anyone remotely shifty seen in a ten-metre radius of a newborn. There was also a full-page investigation of Magdalena Croft, hinting that she’d extorted money from her clients. Having just recovered after one libel claim nearly bankrupted the paper, Aidan was sailing close to the wind again. Bloody eejit. She hoped Guy hadn’t seen it, or he’d be in a tetchy mood all day.

  ‘What’s going on?’ She saw Gerard had his coat on, as if about to go out. ‘Is it Darcy?’ Maybe they’d found her safe.

  ‘No. You didn’t hear? Someone found a body, up by the Knockcree pass. By the standing stones.’

  ‘A baby?’ She stopped short.

  ‘Nah, a woman.’

  She started taking her coat off, then put it back on in case they had to go out. ‘Is it Dr Bates?’

  ‘We don’t know. Just a woman, they said.’

  ‘Who found her, a dog walker?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Maybe they should criminalise that, make our lives easier. They seem to find everyone.’ She was babbling. She was nervous, she realised.

  Gerard gave her an exasperated look. ‘Are you coming out – did the boss say you could?’

  ‘I’m sure he will,’ she said firmly. ‘If I can see the body it helps me understand what happened.’

  Gerard frowned. ‘It’ll be Corry’s call, will it not? It’s Serious Crime now, if it’s a murder.’

  She hadn’t thought of that. But then Guy came out, winding a grey scarf round his neck. ‘Right, Gerard, we’re going to the scene. She’s asked for you too, Paula, if you’re ready. You heard there’s a body in the snow?’

  ‘Yeah. Corry asked for me?’

  ‘Yes. Any idea why?’

  ‘No. I am ready though, definitely.’

  A fresh snow had fallen overnight, overlaying the sludge with a crisp white icing. ‘That’ll screw up the analysis,’ Gerard complained. He’d commandeered the front seat of Guy’s car, his footballer’s thighs spread out, so that Paula had to cram into the back like a kid.

  Paula leaned forward, trying to chip in. ‘Do we know how long she’s been there?’

  Gerard knew. ‘The guy says he takes the dog out every day – some hill farmer, doesn’t mind the snow. He didn’t see anything until this morning.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll tell us,’ said Guy firmly. He disliked speculation in advance of the facts. He also disliked music in the car on the way to crime scenes, whereas Fiacra would play gangsta rap and Gerard usually had something by the kind of group that still wore bandanas. So they drove in silence out of town, up to the hills round Ballyterrin. An old mill town, it huddled grey and brown in the scoop of wet, green hills, currently frosted white with snow. The ground was dead and cold after so many weeks frozen.

  The crime scene could only be reached by a narrow dirt track, now treacherously icy. They saw a police van trying to make it up, wheels spinning in the snow. Guy slowed his car beside it. ‘Can we go closer?’

  ‘If you c
an make it,’ shouted the bald driver over the noise of tyres. ‘A few of the lads just walked it. It’s bad all right.’

  Guy’s BMW made it halfway up before starting to slip, wheels spinning. ‘Wow!’ Paula braced herself and then had the alarming realisation that in that split second of panic, her hands had flown straight to her stomach. The car came to rest, one tyre off the track, and Guy killed the engine. ‘We better just walk the rest.’ His eyes found hers in the mirror. ‘OK?’

  ‘Fine.’ She’d put on stout boots that morning, with gripping soles. Thinking about the ice, about what would happen if she slipped. Even PJ had expressed his approval.

  ‘Come on, then.’ The rest of the way was about fifty metres up, but hazardous and slow-going due to holes ankle-deep, patches of melt-water under other footprints frozen into ice. Guy disappeared up to the knee of his expensive suit and withdrew it, cursing. At the top was Knockcree stone circle. The kind of priceless Neolithic site the Irish were always tripping over and trying to build great big bungalows on top of. Several of the stones in the ring were graffitied, and a litter of beer cans stained the snow around them.

  ‘It’s a genuine stone circle?’ Guy was shaking sludge off his shoes.

  Paula and Gerard looked at each other blankly. Knockcree had always just been there. She shrugged. ‘We did it at school. Some kind of early religious site? Like Newgrange, I think.’

  ‘It’s amazing to find it here, in the middle of nowhere.’ He peered round at the shapes of stones in the dull light, then his gaze stopped. In the middle of the stones and the ring of police tape, a white-suited CSI was bent over something splayed and stiff. The body. Subtly the three of them shifted, shoulders braced, jaws squaring. This was it – the moment before you saw the puzzle you’d been set, when you asked yourself if you’d be able to look at it without losing your composure or the contents of your stomach.

  ‘Inspector.’ Helen Corry materialised before them. No one was quite sure of the protocol here – when a missing person became a murder victim, there was supposed to be a sort of handover between the teams. But she was there, clearly in charge again, this time in a cream wool coat that despite its obvious impracticality – you’d never be done dry-cleaning it – struck a glamorous note against the fallen snow.

  ‘Chief Inspector,’ said Guy back, equally cool. ‘Is it her?’

  Corry flicked snow from her blond hair. ‘It seems to be. She looks like her picture – the face is untouched. Firstly, Inspector, we have to keep the press out of this. Her background, this place—’ She gestured to the lichened stones, weathered but immovable, older than millennia. ‘Can you imagine it? A body found at an old druid site?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ No one wanted to even think the word ‘satanic’. Once you did you’d be drowning in cult theories and ritual sacrifice, and the truth would vanish down the rabbit hole, whisking its little white tail.

  ‘So we’ll say a body was found in the Ballyterrin hills. No specifics, though it’ll leak out anyway, I’m sure.’

  ‘Where are we with the scene?’ Once again Guy was trying, and failing, to gain control.

  ‘FMO’s on their way, if they can make it up.’

  Paula wondered would it be Saoirse, who was on the rota of doctors who attended and certified deaths. Without Saoirse she’d never have been at the clinic that day, never realised Dr Bates was missing so soon.

  Corry was still talking. ‘One CSI’s in now – he walked up the hill with his kit, God love him. They’ve got tyre trails in the snow over that way.’ She pointed to the opposite side of the circle, where two officers were unfurling crime scene tape. ‘They’ll be doing a fingertip search once we get more people up, so don’t walk over there unless you’ve a suit and slippers on.’ It was hard to imagine Corry in the ignominy of the white paper onesies the CSIs used.

  Guy was impatient; they knew all this, as Corry was very well aware. ‘If it’s her, we need to arrange for next of kin to come in.’

  ‘Of course. There’s a daughter, I hear. Dr Maguire?’

  Paula jumped slightly; she’d been thinking about pregnant Heather Campbell. ‘You wanted me?’

  ‘I’d like your thoughts on this setting, if you have some.’

  ‘She died here?’

  ‘Kemal says so. There’s blood all over the scene.’

  ‘Weapon?’ asked Guy.

  ‘The blade’s in her hand, so we can’t rule out suicide.’

  ‘Oh?’ Guy hadn’t been expecting that. ‘How?’

  ‘That’s what I want Dr Maguire’s opinion on. She’s had her stomach slashed, right across.’ Helen Corry made a cutting motion against her coat, below where the navel would be. ‘Hardly the obvious way to do it, or the quickest. And how would she get up here in all this snow, when her car’s down by the market where we found it?’

  ‘So maybe not suicide.’ Guy looked perplexed and wrong-footed – not his favourite things to be, Paula knew. ‘What kind of blade was it?’

  ‘That’s the other strange thing. It seems to be a surgical scalpel. Not everyone could even get hold of one of those.’

  Paula realised her teeth were chattering. ‘Can I take a quick look at the scene?’

  Guy looked at her. ‘God, you’re freezing! Do you need to go back to the car?’

  ‘N-no. I’d like to see it, please.’ She appreciated their trust in letting her come to the site and didn’t want special treatment, but it was so cold, a damp chill that seemed to roll off those old stones like a malevolent breath. Even the light was eerie, blue-tinged like the lips of someone dying. They crunched over a few steps to the crime scene tape, where a tall, slim man was removing plastic gloves. He pulled down his white hood to reveal huge dark eyes, rimmed as if with kohl.

  ‘Dr Maguire, Inspector Brooking, this is Kemal, our crime scene genius.’ Corry doing the introducing once again.

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ His hand was frozen when Paula removed her own purple wool glove to shake it, and he was shivering under the white suit. ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you very much until we get the van up, but she died here, I would say. There is a lot of blood.’

  ‘When?’ Guy was trying to see past him into the circle. The silence of snow was all about.

  ‘I would guess last night. A large slashing wound to her stomach, as you’ve no doubt heard.’ His accent was carefully stripped, modulated. Paula thought he was maybe Egyptian. ‘It isn’t a fast way to go.’

  ‘And was she eviscerated?’ Guy asked. They hid their horror behind neat clinical phrases, a snick of surgical scissors.

  ‘Not exactly. It was lower, with no sign of disembowelment. More like a Caesarean section. She will most likely have died of hypothermia before the blood loss took effect.’

  ‘I see.’ Guy glanced at Paula. ‘Can we look?’

  ‘Of course. I haven’t moved her.’

  Paula had to plant her boots firmly on the snow to prepare for what she was about to see. Just a broken body. Nobody there any more. Nothing to hurt, or be hurt by.

  The body which was almost certainly Dr Alison Bates lay in the middle of the stone circle, the snow further out white and pristine except for a single track of churned footprints cordoned off by the police for access. Flakes had also fallen on her overnight, a drift like flowers over her hair and legs, obscuring the worst of the damage. Around her the snow was rust-coloured, red-brown, and her arms were clasped over her stomach, which seemed an odd shape – almost caved in. The snow was darker there, and Paula saw something gleaming beside her in the odd low light. The scalpel, presumably. Her legs were bent out, as if she’d been kneeling when the knife took her. ‘Any thoughts on whether it was suicide?’ Paula wiped snow from her eyes and looked at the CSI.

  ‘Well. From the angle, it’s indeed possible she did it herself. But there are marks around her wrists, I think.’r />
  ‘Ligatures?’

  ‘Perhaps. The pathologist will tell you more.’

  Paula took a deep breath, and Guy noticed. ‘Enough?’

  ‘Yes. Can I go to the car?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll send Gerard to walk you down while I finish with Corry.’ He signalled to Gerard, who’d been chatting to a uniformed officer near the brow of the hill. ‘Take Paula down, will you? She’s freezing.’

  ‘I’m fine!’ she protested, though she wasn’t. The last thing she needed was Guy treating her differently. ‘I’ve seen enough, that’s all.’

  ‘Bet we’ll get taken off it now,’ Gerard was grumbling, as they slipped and skidded down to the car. ‘It’s a swizz. As soon as the cases get interesting we lose them to Serious Crime. Wish I wasn’t seconded sometimes. She even has her claws in you now.’

  ‘I’m sure she doesn’t.’ Paula focussed on putting one step in front of the other, ignoring the image of that pale dead face, eyes filled up unseeing with fresh snow. There was no real expression in death, but the doctor had looked terrified all the same. What a place to meet your end, desolate and silent but for the softness of falling snow.

  ‘She does, she wants you to ring her and all. Arrange a meeting. I reckon she’s after poaching you.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Gerard. The other day she compared what I do to faith healing.’

  ‘Aye, but she’s a canny one. She’d get you in for the PR alone.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop – shit!’ A patch of ground turned suddenly treacherous, and she grabbed Gerard’s arm as she fell. Luckily it was there, solid as the boom of a sailing boat under his blue ski jacket.

  ‘You OK? Here, you look like you’re about to boke. Thought you’d seen a load of bodies?’

  ‘I have!’ Despite the cold, sweat prickled under her wool hat. ‘I just slipped.’

  She righted herself as Guy came sliding down, prancing nimbly in his Gucci shoes.

  ‘Maguire can’t handle the gory bits,’ said Gerard in an I’m-telling-teacher voice.