The Dead Ground

by Claire McGowan

  Aidan was still staring at Paula.

  ‘I saw your mum,’ she heard herself say. ‘She said you were OK.’

  ‘I am OK.’

  ‘Oh, good. That’s good.’ Silence.

  Maeve was either oblivious or choosing to barrel right through the acute tension in the room. ‘Right. I’ve no milk and it’s a mess in here, so I’m taking Paula out for a breakfast bap and a chat. Are you coming, William Randolph Hearst?’

  ‘No,’ said Aidan grumpily, rubbing hands through his tousled hair. ‘I’ve work to do.’

  Maeve rolled her eyes at Paula. ‘Ah, the top-secret investigative work. Fair enough. You could load the dishwasher, if the mood takes you, before you win your Pulitzer.’

  Aidan just turned and went back into the room. ‘Grumpy arse,’ sighed Maeve. ‘Right, I’ll put my jeans on and we’ll go, will we?’

  ‘Everything OK with you?’ Maeve lifted the all-day breakfast bap to her mouth and took a huge bacon-filled bite.

  ‘Fine,’ lied Paula. She’d asked for a cup of tea, which came with sachets of creamer that floated unappetisingly to the surface. They were in a café a few streets away, with metal tables and loud music playing, Christmas lights flashing like a warning sign. Directly across the street, in a pointed coincidence, was a large anti-abortion billboard showing a traumatised-looking woman. She ignored it. ‘Aidan’s OK then.’ She itched to ask what he was doing in Maeve’s bedroom, but she wouldn’t let herself.

  Maeve was chewing. ‘Oh yeah. You know him. Narky as feck when he’s not drinking.’ He wasn’t on the booze, then. That was one thing. ‘You didn’t know he was here, I take it.’

  Paula shrugged. ‘We haven’t been talking much.’

  Maeve clearly didn’t want to get involved. ‘Ah well, he’s a difficult one.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Paula stirred the manky tea and forced herself to change the subject. ‘Anyway, thanks for seeing me so quickly. I want to know about Magdalena Croft, the faith healer. She’s been up with us for years but she started out here. We think she might be involved with these cases we’re working on, but we can’t get at her since we’ve actually been using her as an expert.’

  Maeve licked her fingers and rummaged in her bag for a messy pile of papers. ‘So. A gift of a story, that is. I spoke to my colleague at Religion and he’d a lot to say on the subject. Six whiskeys’ worth, in fact, the tight fecker. So, this Magdalena first surfaces in Dublin in the early eighties. Claims to be having visions and offers healing out of some weird church on the Northside, run by this mental priest.’

  ‘Father Brendan?’

  ‘That’s him. Joe, that’s my colleague, he tried to do a piece on her once and she slapped an injunction on him. You didn’t really get that out of mad religious women in the eighties, so shall we say he’s followed her career with interest since. So she spends a few years here, collecting up money and followers. There’s thousands of people will swear blind she cured their ingrown toenails or what have you.’

  ‘That’s what we came up with too.’

  ‘Next there was the big mansion on the border, and she’s raising money to build her own church in her back field, and the psychic visions she has, and the healing – people would take their disabled kids, I don’t know, thinking she can rearrange DNA or something. Madness. But she’d nothing when Joe first knew her – she used to take the bus to the church and she hadn’t 2d to her name. Then a few years later she’s in a mansion in Ballyterrin and driving a Beemer. I think that’s a bit dodgy, myself.’

  ‘Dodgy, but hardly unusual, sadly.’

  ‘You’re telling me. So she made her money off her followers. People were giving cash for building the church – ten, thirty grand a go she’d ask for, her and Father Brendan. He got put out of his chaplaincy because of it, so now he just follows her round like a puppy dog. They take collections out of her house, too – people go to her when they’re dying, and she’s hovering over their relations saying what a shame, now get your chequebook out and make a donation for the Virgin Mary.’

  ‘She has this board,’ Paula said, tracing patterns in the spilled creamer. ‘All these babies she’s supposedly helped people have.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Cheaper than IVF, I guess.’

  ‘But the thing is – I mean, there must be something in it. People believe she helps them. People do get pregnant. Even my DCI asked her to work on a missing persons case for us. So what is it she does?’

  ‘Hope,’ said Maeve succinctly. ‘She gives them hope, and then sometimes people do get better or they do fall pregnant, and they think it’s her. People trust her. She has a gift all right, but it’s not being psychic. She can read people like a book, that woman.’

  ‘You’ve met her?’

  Maeve hesitated – which was so out of character it made Paula raise her eyebrows. ‘Not exactly. I went to one of those rallies she does at her house. I thought it’d be a laugh, like that Derren Brown or something. Thought I could get a story out of it – why are the Guards using this fraud to help them, and so on.’

  ‘I know. We’re doing it now, too. But it wasn’t a laugh?’

  ‘No. She – well, she channels people. The dead, you know. It’s one of her things. Load of bollocks, of course. But the thing was – she sort of channelled for me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My dad,’ said Maeve briefly. ‘He died when I was ten. Cancer.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t be. That’s why I was pals with Aidan, I guess – he understands.’

  A stab of jealousy, quickly suppressed. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She – well, it was horrible to be honest. She said he’d been sick, and he’d died, and she knew all that and then she—’ Maeve frowned. ‘She said, you and your daddy had the same birthday, didn’t you? And we did, it’s true. March the third. But it was so weird. I still can’t figure out how she could have known that. She has something, you see. I don’t believe in being psychic, it’s bollocks, so she’s working it out some other way, but she has it. She looked right into me somehow and I felt – I felt violated.’

  Paula remembered the woman’s quick, strong hand on her stomach. ‘She’s a very powerful presence. People seem drawn to that.’

  ‘That’s what Joe said. He’s drawn himself, though he hates her. He was the one found out she was helping the Gardai. The thing is, she does really seem to help. Have you looked into it?’

  ‘A bit. There were six cases or so, was that it?’

  ‘I think so. She helped them find four missing children, and the bodies of two others who’d had accidents and the bodies not found.’

  ‘What had happened to the other four?’

  ‘Same as usual. Their dads had snatched them in custody cases. Gone overseas, a few times. I think one of them had just wandered off into woodland in Wexford. Croft said she’d be there, and she was, three days later, alive. Joe has a real bee in his bonnet. It drives him mad that she actually seems to get results.’

  That was good. No one so useful as the person with the bee in their bonnet. ‘Did he find out anything about her life before all this?’

  ‘There was the husband no one ever saw – Joe dug up that they were living apart, while she pretended to be in a good Christian marriage.’ Maeve did air quotes. ‘David Croft died a few years back, I think. Natural causes, but she never had much use for him except his cash. He was one of her first devotees. Joe showed me photos – she was gorgeous back in the day, was Magdalena.’

  ‘That’s not her real name, is it? We traced a Mary Conaghan, like I said on the phone, and we think it could be her.’

  ‘It sounds made up, doesn’t it? No one’s called Magdalena; I mean, it’s not first-century Judea. Anyway, I did a search under the name you gave me and I actually did find a Ma
ry Conaghan living in Dublin at that time.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Paula set down her tea.

  Maeve smiled. ‘Guess what she did before? She was only a fecking nurse.’

  ‘No! Really?’

  ‘Yup.’ Maeve dug around in her bag for a pen and clicked it, then scribbled on Paula’s napkin. ‘That’s the details of the hospital where she started as a student nurse: 1982, St John of God’s.’

  ‘Wow, thank you.’ Magdalena Croft had a nursing background. She could just imagine Guy’s reaction when she told him that. ‘I’ll check it out while I’m here.’

  ‘What else do you know?’ asked Maeve, clearly as hungry for the story as Paula was, if for different reasons.

  ‘Well.’ Paula looked round at the dingy little café before she spoke. Silly – who would be listening or even care? ‘We traced a Mary Conaghan to Donegal and we think she was involved in a child abduction case as a young girl. Her cousin went missing as a baby, then was found again – similar to our Alek Pachek case. I think she came to Dublin not long after that.’

  ‘I’ll ask Joe, but he never mentioned anything. He said she was an orphan, no family at all.’

  ‘I think she was hiding,’ Paula said, turning it over in her mind. ‘I think she was running away, when she came here.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From who, maybe. I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I have.’

  Maeve scribbled something else. ‘OK. Leave it with me. Tell me this, Paula – is Aidan on this story too?’

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t talked at all.’ Another stab. He’d have helped so much, if only they were actually speaking. ‘I don’t know what he’s up to.’

  Maeve did a small eye-roll; it was uncannily similar to the one Saoirse always did when Paula tried to talk to her about Aidan. You two again. ‘OK. You don’t want to come back to the flat then?’

  ‘I won’t, thanks.’ She wasn’t going to ask how long he was staying. ‘Thank you for your help.’

  ‘No bother. I love all this.’ Maeve stood up, all ripped jeans and tangled hair, and Paula thought – wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t Aidan want to be with Maeve, so cool and gorgeous and uncomplicated, rather than someone who shouted at him and kept secrets from him and knew all his own painful ones, all of the dark inside of him? If only she could get over the raging anger that flooded her veins, she might not even blame him at all.

  The hospital where Mary Conaghan had her first nursing job was grim, diseased green paintwork on the outside and the chill of old stone emanating out. At four p.m. on a winter Thursday, it was as far from warmth and comfort as you could imagine. Paula had an appointment to see Donald O’Driscoll, who rejoiced in the role of Personnel Director, and had worked in the same small office since 1982, when he’d hired Mary Conaghan for a trainee nursing post in the maternity unit.

  Paula took the lift, feet clattering along cold stone corridors with depressing brown doors and metal signs, until she found the right one. Mr O’Driscoll was a corpulent man in his late fifties, wearing a pinstripe suit that looked as if he’d bought it back in 1982. He even had red braces. On his desk sat a picture of an equally fat woman and two plump children, plus a dog that was also in need of a few good walks.

  She shook his hand. ‘Mr O’Driscoll, thanks for seeing me. I said on the phone I work with the police in the North. You might have heard about our missing baby cases, and what’s happened since. Well, we think we’ve turned up something you might be able to help us with.’

  He looked wary. ‘If it’s a legal matter, I’ll have to contact our lawyers before I say anything.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not like that. May I?’ She sat on the hard plastic chair by his desk. It was a cheerless office, enlivened only by a stale coffee fug and a row of leather-bound legal books. All the objects on his desk had pharmaceutical branding. ‘Let me explain. I’m looking for any records of one of your nurses – could you tell me anything more about her? She was from Donegal, I believe. Her name came up in connection with our investigation.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ He was looking more worried still.

  ‘Could you just look at this for me and see if you recognise her?’ She laid out the photo from Magdalena Croft’s first newspaper article. She’d been twenty-five then, so it was just a few years after she’d got the nursing job, when she’d first started her healing work in Dublin.

  ‘No,’ said Donald, shaking his head and looking relieved. ‘I don’t recognise her at all.’

  Oh. Paula tried again. ‘You’re sure? Mary Conaghan was her name before that. She changed it later, when she got married.’

  ‘Oh, but this isn’t Mary!’

  ‘What?’ Paula stared at the man.

  ‘I remember Mary well. I interviewed her for the post. And that isn’t her. She wasn’t so dark, for a start.’

  ‘But—’ Paula struggled to understand. ‘We have a trail that shows Mary Conaghan changed her name to Magdalena, then married a man named Croft – we found the marriage certificate. Her name is still legally Mary, in fact.’

  Donald O’Driscoll pursed his plump mouth. ‘Well, I don’t know what to say. I’ve never seen that woman in my life.’

  ‘You’re positive?’

  He peered again at the picture. ‘I suppose there is some superficial resemblance, but it’s not her. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Oh . . . Do you have a photo on file of your Mary?’

  ‘We will do, I imagine, for ID badges. But that file will be buried in a basement somewhere, if she hasn’t worked for us in years.’

  ‘Can you find it?’

  He gave an administrator’s sigh. ‘There would be significant Data Protection hoops to jump through, Dr Maguire, but I’ll try. Leave your fax number and other details.’

  Paula wasn’t even sure they had a fax machine at the unit. ‘I will. So – this Mary Conaghan who worked here. We’re very interested in talking to her in connection with our missing baby case. I understand she worked on Neonatal while she was here – is there anything you could tell me about that? No complaints, no problems with the children, anything like that?’ She saw his expression. ‘I understand you might need to check the files, and that some of this might be confidential, but you’d really be helping us out. As you may have seen, another child went missing this week. That makes three in total, and two still not found. Someone is taking babies, and we have to pursue every lead we can.’

  He gave her a searching look. ‘Do you have police ID, Dr Maguire?’ He said the ‘Doctor’ as if she were a little girl playing dress-up. She found a card in her bag and slid it over; he made a big point of scrutinising it. ‘Well. We’re always keen to assist the police, of course. I assume this is in connection with the Roberts baby case?’

  Paula arranged her face carefully; she knew nothing about that. ‘Can you tell me anything about it? What was the year again – 1983?’ A wild guess.

  ‘’Eighty-four.’ He pursed his lips again. ‘Very bad publicity. But you see in those days, Dr Maguire, we’d no idea people would do such a thing. Not in Ireland. So we had no security on the wards. The hospital wasn’t found to be negligent in any way, if that’s what you—’

  ‘No, I’m sure you did everything you could. The child went missing from the Maternity Unit, is that right?’ She was guessing, free-wheeling off his reactions. Was that the same as what Magdalena Croft did, casting the runes of people’s faces?

  ‘Yes. We’d never had anything like that before. I must admit it brought it all back, when I heard about your case on the news. Ours was also taken from the Maternity Ward, right out of its crib.’

  ‘Right. Alek Pachek disappeared from hospital too, but then was returned a few days later, safe. That’s the oddest aspect of the case.’

  He frowned. ‘But the Roberts child was returned too, of course. Left on the door
step here two days later, in a shoebox.’

  She gave up pretending to know. ‘And was it—?’

  ‘Dead.’

  Paula flinched. ‘Oh. Do you know how?’

  ‘Exposure. Whoever left her back, they hadn’t wrapped her up enough for November, and she died before anyone found her. The family were devastated.’

  ‘It was a girl? What was her name?’ There was no real need for Paula to know this, except that she had to. She wondered if the man would remember.

  He hesitated just for a second, as if trying to recall. ‘Orla, I believe. Orla Roberts.’

  Paula rallied herself. ‘And was there any connection to Mary Conaghan?’

  ‘She worked on the ward at the time. But you know, a lot of other people did too. We all knew Mary could never have done such a thing – but there was some nonsense about a child going missing when she was younger. Anyway they let her go, thank God. No evidence.’

  Paula thought fast. ‘Mr O’Driscoll . . . I don’t suppose they took any fingerprints at the time, did they?’

  ‘I believe so, yes. I remember we all thought it was a disgrace. Of course Mary’s prints would have been there; she worked in the place!’

  Paula tried to stay calm. ‘The fingerprints – if you have those on file it would be very helpful to us.’

  ‘The Gardai may still have them, I suppose. You’d have to ask them.’

  ‘Just one more thing. This might seem like a slightly odd question. Did you like Mary? You thought she was a nice person? Did the patients like her, that sort of thing?’

  He answered right away. ‘That’s why I remember her so well. Mary was the loveliest person you could imagine. We got more praise for her than any other nurse I’ve hired. We all backed her a hundred per cent – she’d never have hurt a child. And that’s definitely not her in your picture.’

  ‘OK,’ said Paula, dissatisfied but not sure where she could go with this. ‘Thank you for your help.’

  ‘So how do you explain that? He was adamant.’

  Guy was on the other end of the phone as Paula went back to her car, parked in a multi-storey on Lower Baggot Street. ‘I can’t. Either your contact was lying, or we’ve missed a step and it was the wrong Mary Conaghan after all. It’s not that unusual a name, is it?’ He sounded worried.