The Missing Ones: An absolutely gripping thriller with a jaw-dropping twist (Detective Lottie Parker Book 1)

by Patricia Gibney

  ‘What the hell?’ Boyd said, stopping abruptly.

  Lottie looked at him. He’d walked into a decorator’s ladder and notched a cut on his forehead. She laughed.

  Boyd cursed his way out the door. ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, but she couldn’t stop laughing.

  Ten

  Lottie smiled to herself before she opened her front door. A bundle of Sean’s hurleys stood in the corner of the porch and the holly wreath was caked in frozen snow, blown there by the wind. The wooden plaque on the wall beside the bell read ‘Penny Lane’. Adam had christened the house. Each of the four bedrooms, named after the Beatles. It seemed cute at the time. Now it was plain sad.

  She lived in one of thirty semi-detached houses, midway along a mature, horse-shoe shaped estate. It was near enough to the greyhound stadium to hear the cheers every Tuesday and Thursday evening. But she never ventured the couple of hundred metres down the road to the track. Adam had taken the children a couple of times but they weren’t enamoured by the skinny dogs and their fat handlers. Tonight the area was quiet. No racing until the ground was back in shape. Good, thought Lottie; she needed the peace and quiet.

  Silence greeted her as she hung up her jacket, the rap music consigned to Sean’s virtual world. Having worked eighteen hours, Lottie’s body creaked but her mind was wound up.

  In the kitchen, a plate with two slices of pizza was left out for her. Chloe had written a note, ‘We DO love you.’

  She popped the pizza into the microwave and poured a glass of water. She loved her children, but usually didn’t have the time to tell them. She saw so little of Katie. The nineteen year old commuted daily to college in Dublin. But even throughout the holidays, she was never around. She’d been the apple of her daddy’s eye and had been so moody since Adam died. Lottie didn’t know how to handle her.

  Having devoured the soggy food, she climbed the stairs to her ‘John Lennon’ bedroom. Chloe and Sean were in bed. She closed their doors and glanced into Katie’s room. Empty. She would have to talk to that girl. Tomorrow. Maybe.

  Katie Parker lay back in her boyfriend’s arms.

  His hair tickled her nose. She tried not to sneeze and stifled a giggle. He appeared not to notice as he inhaled deeply from the spliff clutched between his long thin fingers. When he’d filled his lungs, he passed it over. She shouldn’t take it but she desperately wanted to impress Jason. At nineteen, she should have more sense. Her mother would have a fit if she could see her. Tough shit, Mam; always pontificating about the dangers of drink and drugs; maybe her mother should practise what she preached.

  Katie brought the rolled taper to her lips, inhaled its acrid odour before sucking deeply. She had expected a lightness in her head, but never had she experienced this thrill.

  ‘This is so cool,’ she said.

  ‘Take it easy.’ Jason rose on to his elbow. ‘I don’t want you puking all over me.’

  She squinted up at the ceiling and saw little stars painted there. She assumed they were painted, otherwise she was hallucinating.

  ‘Do you have stars painted on your ceiling?’

  ‘Yes. A throwback to my Harry Potter days.’

  ‘I love Harry Potter,’ Katie said. ‘All that mystical stuff. I used to wish I could magic myself into a different world. More so, after my dad died.’

  Jason laughed. She glanced sideways at him. He was gorgeous, with his designer jeans and Abercrombie hoodies. She was so lucky. Today, when he had asked her to his home, she’d nearly died. Her house would fit into his sitting room. She was glad his parents were not around, because genuinely she would not have known whether to bow or genuflect. As for his room, it was fantastic. The size of hers, Chloe’s and Sean’s all scrunched into one.

  First year of college was a bore, but he’d picked her from all the other girls. She was floating.

  ‘Here, give me some, you greedy thing,’ he said.

  She handed over the spliff and though his arm was hard beneath her head she could feel some of the softness of the pillow. She closed her eyes. Definitely floating.

  Yeah, if her mam could see her, she would have a grade A fit.

  ‘I better go home. It’s after midnight,’ she said, trying to sit up.

  ‘Are you Cinderella, or what?’ Jason laughed. ‘Will I turn into a pumpkin if I don’t get you home?’

  ‘Be serious.’ She sat up and felt around for her jacket.

  ‘All right, spoilsport, I’ll take you home,’ he said.

  Katie kissed him on the lips. Now she had wings.

  Sean Parker watched from his bedroom window as his sister and her boyfriend curled into each other on the snowy driveway. He witnessed them kissing under the road light and saw the smile on Katie’s face. When had he last seen his gloomy sister so happy?

  He couldn’t remember.

  Lottie eased her body into bed. She reached over her hand and felt the Argos book there, weighing down the duvet, her trick to keep the bedclothes tight on Adam’s side. She had tried the phone book once. But it wasn’t as good as the Argos book.

  She lay awake thinking of Susan Sullivan and James Brown, trying to understand what they could possibly have been involved in to warrant their deaths.

  Once she heard Katie turn her key in the door, she immediately fell asleep.

  Eleven

  The man rubbed his skin in hard even strokes.

  He had done what he had to do. Secrets had to be protected. He had to be protected. Others had to be protected too, though they didn’t know it.

  He lathered his body, attempting to scrub out the scent of death. Slowly and methodically he worked. From the roots of his hair to his neatly cut toenails. He stepped out of the shower and towelled his skin in precise sweeps.

  Fully dried, he strolled naked to his bedroom, lay down on the white sheets and stared at the ceiling for the rest of the night.

  1974

  She knew what he was doing was wrong but she was too afraid to tell anyone. He had a secret place where he took her most days after school. During the school holidays, he made her call to him at least once a week and sometimes he came to her house.

  Her mammy was thrilled to have a priest coming to visit. She would take down the good china and serve him tea and biscuits. When her mammy was making the tea in the scullery, he would grab her hand and thrust it down there. She felt sick when he made her do that. It was nearly worse than the other things he made her do.

  Once, they were almost caught when her mammy came back to see if he would like brown bread instead of biscuits. He turned toward the front window quickly, saying he was watching his car in case young hooligans scratched it.

  She did not see him for a month after that and thought it was the end but it was in fact the beginning of the nightmare in earnest. He told her mammy he had a job for her in the evenings in the priest’s house, sweeping and dusting, and he would give her a few bob pocket money. Her mammy was delighted.

  The little girl knew then, the horror would be daily.

  Sometimes she drank her daddy’s whiskey which she found in the cabinet under the television. It burned her throat but after a few minutes it warmed her insides and dimmed the reality around her. She was eating too much. Her mammy was giving out to her all the time about her weight. She wanted to tell her mammy to ‘fuck off’, because she had heard one of the girls in school saying it and knew it was a bad word. Sometimes the priest said bad words too when he was inside her. She hated him. She was sore and bleeding. She didn’t like any of it. And she knew it was too late to stop it. Who would believe her?

  The girls in school were calling her fatty. Fatty this and fatty that. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she did not recognise the person staring back at her. She looked like Mr Kinder next door with his beer belly sticking out through the buttons on his smelly shirt.

  Sometimes she cried herself to sleep. Mostly she just hated herself and what she had become. What he had made her become. She vow
ed that some day she would make him pay. She did not know when or how, but one day his time would come and she would be ready. He had shown her no mercy, only contempt. She would be the same.

  ‘What goes around comes around,’ she told her reflection in the mirror.

  DAY TWO

  31st December 2014

  Twelve

  Lottie’s car miraculously started on the second turn of the key. Someone up there must love me, she told the dark, early morning sky. She needed a clear head, so she drove the long way to work.

  Driving round by the Ardvale Road, she swung left at the roundabout, passing the once bustling tobacco factory with its smokeless chimneys. She remembered the pungent smell which used to hang in the air before the plant downsized to a distribution depot. She missed that whiff; it seemed to give definition to where she lived. It was gone now, like so much else.

  Stopped at the traffic lights on the Dublin Bridge, she took in the panoramic view of her snow-covered town below, nestled in a valley between two marshy midland lakes, dominated by the twin-spired cathedral to the right and the single spire of the Protestant Church on the left. Cushioned between both stood a four-storey, planning deformity apartment block, out of keeping with its low-rise surroundings.

  Historically, Ragmullin was a fortress town but now its idle army barracks was a breeding ground for vandalism and rumoured to be in line to become a centre for refugees and asylum seekers. It was constructed on the highest point of the town, up beyond the canal and railway. The eleventh-century monks who’d settled here would be proud that some streets still bore names in homage to these hooded men. There wasn’t much else to be proud of, Lottie thought.

  Before the traffic lights changed, she scanned the horizon once again, her eyes focussing on the spires standing tall in their tree-lined surroundings. Her hands turned white as she clutched the steering wheel. She thought of the church’s dominance over the lives of the townspeople in the past and the effect its long-frocked men had bestowed on her own family. The cast iron bell, snared in one spire, clanged out the sixth hour of the morning and resonated through the rolled-up windows of her car. There was no escaping it. Church and State. Two thorns in the history of Ragmullin and in her own history.

  Lottie took a few deep breaths and the shattered glass of the traffic light flashed to a cracked green. She stamped down the accelerator and the car skidded, almost stealing a strip of paint from the red Micra in front of her, the only other car around. She drove over the bridge and down the icy pot-holed, deserted street with shop windows dark and shaded. She wondered how many secrets lay hidden behind them, what mysteries waited to be uncovered and if in time there would be anyone left in Ragmullin to even bother trying to unearth them.

  Thirty men and women were crowded into the small incident room.

  Some sat on rickety chairs while others stood shoulder to shoulder, chatting loudly, body odours mingling with diverse perfumes, aftershaves and burned coffee. Lottie looked for somewhere to sit and, not finding anywhere vacant, leaned against the wall at the back of the room. She watched Corrigan fiddling with a handful of pages, standing in front of the assembled detectives. She should be up there.

  Boyd caught her eye and smiled. She grinned back. His smile could do that to her sometimes, just when she intended to scowl. Looking as neat as ever, dressed in a grey suit, his only concession to the weather was a navy sweater over his shirt. Perhaps this could be a ‘be nice to Boyd day’. Maybe? Maybe not.

  She gulped her black coffee, jolting energy into her tired mind. Corrigan nodded to her and she hurried to the front of the room before he changed his mind. She faced the team. Kirby’s eyes were red-rimmed, probably from a bout of whiskey drinking. Maria Lynch was bright and bubbly. Was she ever any other way? Boyd dropped his smile and donned his serious face. The team were on edge to get started. So was she.

  ‘Right,’ said Superintendent Corrigan, silencing the room. ‘Detective Inspector Parker will bring us up to date.’

  The faces before her were full of expectation. Her team were good. They had confidence in themselves and in her. She had to deliver. And she would.

  She placed her mug on the desk and, pulling down the cuffs of her long-sleeved T-shirt, a habit she couldn’t break, she briefed the waiting detectives on the events of the previous day and night, and delegated tasks.

  When she was finished, chairs scuffed along the floor as a heave of bodies shuffled and stretched. The noise increased from a hum to a loud chatter.

  ‘All hands on deck,’ Corrigan shouted above the din.

  Lottie could have sworn she heard Boyd mutter under his breath, ‘Aye, aye Captain.’ She shoved him out of the room in front of her, grabbed her jacket and took a walk over to the cathedral. She had a witness to interview.

  Father Joe Burke was waiting for her at the gate. The sky was still moody and dark, and Lottie craved the end of winter.

  Tumbling snow obscured the cathedral, now a cordoned-off crime scene. A few early morning onlookers were braving the weather to pause, bless themselves and leave flowers. The two gardaí standing in front of the crime scene tape stamped their feet. They looked frozen. Lottie felt the same.

  Lottie shook hands with Father Joe through thick gloves.

  ‘Come on up to the house for a cup of tea,’ he said warmly.

  ‘That’d be great,’ said Lottie, glancing at the priest’s bright blue ski-jacket. He had a fur hat pulled down over his ears. ‘You look like something out of the KGB,’ she said, smiling.

  He led her round the side of the cathedral, to the house.

  It was warm inside the house. Old iron radiators gurgled airlocks into the silence. Tall, dark mahogany cabinets cast shadows up the walls of the tiled hallway through which Father Burke led Lottie.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ he enquired, opening the door to a room with décor similar to the hall.

  ‘Tea, please.’ She needed to expunge the taste left in her mouth from the office coffee.

  The priest spoke to a small nun who had appeared behind them. She shuffled off with a sigh, to boil a kettle somewhere in the depths of the house.

  ‘So, Inspector Parker, what can I do for you?’ he asked, sitting into a claw-footed armchair.

  ‘I want information, Father Burke,’ said Lottie, removing her jacket and taking a seat opposite him.

  ‘Call me Joe. We don’t need formality, do we?’

  ‘Okay. Then please call me Lottie.’

  She knew she shouldn’t allow this familiarity. He was a suspect. Second on the scene, after Mrs Gavin, and he’d been in the cathedral at the time of the murder. Except, sometimes informality helped people drop their guard.

  ‘I notice you have CCTV cameras inside and outside the cathedral. I need access to the discs.’

  ‘Of course, but I don’t think they’ll be of any use to you. The external cameras haven’t worked since the drastic fall in temperatures before Christmas and the internal ones are trained on the confessionals.’

  ‘Why so?’ asked Lottie, inwardly cursing a potential dead end.

  ‘Bishop Connor organised it, so we priests can see who is about to enter. In case we get attacked.’

  ‘Bit ironic, isn’t it?’ She looked up as the nun reappeared with crockery rattling on a silver tray.

  ‘And the web cam wasn’t working either. It usually gives a live feed from the altar via the parish website. With the holidays, we couldn’t get anyone to come fix it.’

  Another piece of useless information, Lottie thought.

  Taking the tray to the table, Father Joe thanked the nun. She disappeared without answer. He poured the tea and Lottie poured the milk. They both sipped from delicate china cups.

  ‘I need to ask you a few questions about yesterday,’ Lottie said, hurriedly shrugging herself into work mode.

  ‘Is this a formal interview? Do I need my solicitor present?’ he asked.

  She was taken aback but noticed he was smiling.

  ‘I don’t thi
nk a solicitor is necessary at this stage of the investigation, Father . . . em . . . Joe,’ she stumbled over her words. ‘I’m trying to establish a few facts.’

  ‘Go ahead. I’m all yours.’

  Lottie felt her cheeks redden. Was he flirting with her? Surely not.

  He said, ‘I did ten o’clock Mass, cleared the altar, locked the chalices and Holy Communion into the tabernacle. The cathedral was empty by then. Normally a few people stay on to pray, but I think the cold weather won out over religion. The sacristan finished up around ten forty-five and he went home. I came over here for a cuppa, then went back to the sacristy after about an hour, to write up next Sunday’s sermon. Mrs Gavin arrived shortly after that and began her cleaning routine. I’d just said the Angelus when I heard her scream, so it must have been after twelve noon.’ The priest paused as if praying.

  ‘What did you do then?’ Lottie asked. She made a mental note for someone to interview the sacristan. Probably another useless exercise, seeing as he had left before the murder.

  ‘I rushed out to see what the commotion was about and ran straight into Mrs Gavin. Poor woman, she was hysterical. She grabbed me by the hand and dragged me down to the front pew. I saw the body . . . the woman . . . slumped there. I leaned over and listened for a breath but I could tell she was dead. I said an act of contrition and blessed her. Then I called the emergency services and brought Mrs Gavin up to the altar where we sat until the gardaí arrived.’

  His face was pale against the black of his sweater.

  ‘Did you touch anything around the victim? In fact, did you touch her?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not. I thought of feeling for a pulse but I knew by looking at her she was dead.’

  ‘Even so, you’ll have to call over to the station to provide a sample for DNA analysis.’ She added, ‘To rule you in or out of our investigations.’