All the Lost Girls

by Bilinda P Sheehan

  I caught up with Dorian as he was finishing up in the makeshift shallow grave. A collection of sample pots lay out on a large plastic tarpaulin spread out on the ground. Staring into the hole, I watched Dorian’s boots churn up the orange mud. The soil was waterlogged and each time he raised a boot, the ground protested loudly as though it didn’t want to let him go.

  “You wanted to ask me something?” His voice was contemplative as he scooped up one of the pots and stared in at the orange soil within.

  “Is there anything you can give me, anything you can tell me about the bodies?”

  “All three are female,” he said without the least hint of humour. “I won’t know cause of death until I can carry out an examination of the bodies.”

  “And the third,” I asked, “she was—” I broke off, hoping the right words would pop into my head. It felt so wrong to describe the state of the remains as being a mess but it was the only word that came to mind. What I’d seen of her, had been a jumbled mess and I needed to know if we were looking at experimentation on the killer’s behalf or if the disturbance of the primary burial site had caused the skeleton to break up.

  Dorian set the container he’d been examining aside and stared up at me. “From the brief examination of the bones,” he said. “There does appear to have been some dismemberment involved before the decomposition of the soft tissue.”

  “Jesus…” I breathed the word out, scrubbing my hand over my face as I turned away and stared into the darkness of the tree line. “Can you tell if the marks occurred after or… before she died?”

  “It’s not uncommon,” he said. “It’s more unusual to find the bodies intact, particularly in a case like this.”

  “Really?” I turned on him, the rage I felt finally bubbling to the surface. “You talk about them as though they’re not even human.”

  Dorian looked up at me, a mixture of confusion and pity in his eyes.

  “This is my job, Detective, making it personal won’t make me any better at it. Truthfully, it will only compromise my ability to work through the information.”

  He was right and I was being unfair, laying my own thoughts and feelings at his door instead of dealing with them myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, turning away. “Let me know when you’ve got something.”

  He called after me but I ignored him and instead headed back down the path away from the crime scene. I’d seen more than enough for one night. I just needed to trust that Dorian would do his job and do it well. But if I was honest that wasn’t what I was struggling to believe.

  Could I do this? Could I take the strands of this case and weave them together in time to find whoever was responsible, before another girl was lost?

  38

  We set the operations room in one of the larger offices in the Garda Station. Two of the walls were covered in large whiteboards, the third dominated by a corkboard capable of taking all of our case material and then some.

  Sitting in the black swivel chair I’d managed to beg from the main office, I stared at the six photographs Ronan had placed on the board. We’d only managed to find one other girl that fit our parameters; Anne Marie Shields. Just like the other girls, she had gone missing while making her way home after a night out with friends, in December 2005.

  The smiling faces of the missing women stared accusingly out at me, taunting me, daring me to find them and the one responsible for their disappearances.

  “There has to be more to this,” I said, leaning forward so that my elbows rested on my knees. Cupping my chin in the palm of my hand, I squeezed my eyes shut, my brain instantly conjuring an image of the girl in the woods.

  “Well we know he’s active again,” Ronan said grimly.

  “These can’t be his first attacks,” I said. “Someone like this doesn’t graduate straight to murder, especially not like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no forensics and how much do you want to bet, Dorian won’t find any forensics on this body too?”

  Ronan’s corrugated brow, betrayed none of the emotions I knew lurked beneath the surface as he surveyed the images before us.

  “So what, you think there are others we don’t know about?”

  “At the very least I think we should be looking at reports of rapes before Clara McCarthy went missing.”

  “Sorry I’m late.” Claire appeared in the doorway, face flushed from exertion.

  Glancing down at my watch, I nodded disapprovingly for her to join us. “The briefing began ten minutes ago,” I said. “if you don’t wish to work with us on this then you can—”

  “The Sergeant needed me to run some paperwork over to Cahir,” she said, her words rushing together. “He said it couldn’t wait.”

  Pursing my lips, I said nothing else. I knew she wasn’t lying. The sergeant didn’t approve of me or my investigation. It only made sense that he would use the officers I’d been assigned for his own purposes. Of course, treating Claire like she was nothing more than a glorified errand boy smacked a little too much of the usual chauvinistic bullshit I’d grown accustomed to in the force.

  “You’ve been assigned to this investigative force,” I said. “In future if he has an errand he desperately needs doing, tell him you’re off limits and if he’s got a problem with it, he can come and find me.”

  Two spots of colour appeared on Claire’s cheeks and she ducked her head before I could try and read her thoughts.

  With a sigh, I stared down at the sheaf of papers clutched in my hands.

  “Claire, any chance you can do a little digging into reported rapes in the area before Clara McCarthy’s disappearance in October 1996?”

  She nodded and scribbled furiously in the notepad she’d pulled out. “Anything else? What about petty offences?”

  “Such as?”

  “You know the sort; trespassing where there was an element of being a peeping tom or nicking personal items.”

  I thought about it for a moment. It wasn’t a bad idea.

  “You can check it out but I’ve got a feeling any of the crimes he’d have committed in that arena would have been done when he was a juvenile and those records are always sealed.”

  She nodded and chewed the tip of her Bic pen thoughtfully.

  “Ronan, I want you to contact the families, see if we can’t get them back in here to have another chat. We don’t need more statements but I think the chance to ask our own questions on the matter might be helpful…”

  “Some of the families have moved away,” he said. “And some of the parents have passed…”

  “Is there anyone, a sister or brother… aunt or uncle even?”

  He gave me a grim smile. “I’ll find someone,” he said.

  “I’ve been going through the old interviews in the Clara McCarthy case,” I said. “Alice mentioned something interesting over Clara’s boyfriend but when I checked the files you’d given me, I couldn’t find his interview transcripts or tapes?”

  For a moment Ronan looked surprised but he recovered quickly. “I’ll have another look in the file room,” he said. “Maybe they were mislabeled.”

  “I’m going to talk to her friends,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else. “At least the ones who gave the main statements. See if anything has changed in the years since.”

  “You really think the McCarthy case is the key to cracking this, don’t you?” There was no accusation in Ronan’s voice, just genuine curiosity.

  “It was the beginning,” I said. “Not to mention the fact that the killer seems to be communicating with us.”

  “How is he communicating?” Claire asked. She’d been so quiet, I’d practically forgotten she was in the room.

  “The necklace,” I said jerking my chin in the direction of the board where we’d hung the crime scene images. The photograph of the now cleaned up necklace sat there, larger than life, the scrawled message a reminder that the killer was so much cleverer than we were. He’d sent us on a wi
ld-goose chase by dressing Evie in Clara’s clothes, made fools of us. It spoke to an emotional intelligence and awareness not usually present in killers who were so vicious in their methods of execution.

  Some might consider the word execution a poor choice to describe a killer of this nature. They weren’t executions in the typical sense. This was no gang retaliation and it certainly wasn’t committed as a weapon deployed in active warfare. But in a way they were executions nonetheless. It had been an attempt to annihilate the person he’d captured. Destroy and erase the lively beautiful women he had chosen as his victims. Assassinate their characters and their spirits.

  He’d gone silent for thirteen years but he was back and I knew he wouldn’t stop, not until he was caught or killed.

  Whichever came first.

  “How do you know that was meant for us?” Claire asked, catching me off guard.

  Dragging my head up from the papers I’d been studying, I stared at her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It feels personal,” she said carefully, as though suddenly afraid she was about to say something wrong and would find herself on the wrong end of my sharp tongue. “Too personal for it to be meant for us lot?”

  I stared up at the image of the necklace once more and the message scrawled across the back.

  “Who in the world am I?”

  She was right. How had I not seen it before? The message was far too personal. I’d studied the case files of other killers who had communicated with the detectives involved but in all those situations the messages had been far more general. Nothing as specific as this. Nothing as personal as a question that wasn’t really a question scrawled across the back of a locket. A gift between sisters.

  “Any ideas about whom it might have been meant for?” It was a general question, meant for either of the officers present.

  Claire sank in on herself, her shoulders rounding defensively. “Sorry,” she said, her voice leaden. “I didn’t mean to make a stupid suggestion it just occurred to me and—”

  “It wasn’t stupid,” I said. “Not at all in fact, quite the opposite. And my question was genuine. Who was the intended recipient of the message? Who would know what this meant?” I gestured to the board and the image we were all focused on.

  “Evie’s boyfriend?” Ronan suggested helpfully, “maybe her mother?”

  “Maybe it has no connection to Evie at all,” Claire said, emboldened by my encouragement. “It’s written on Clara’s locket.”

  “Is there any indication that Clara and Evie knew one another? The girls were taken very close together, just weeks between disappearances and there’s no denying they both look quite a bit alike.”

  Ronan shook his head. “From everything I’ve looked at, there doesn’t appear to be any connection between the two girls,” he said.

  I blew out a sigh and stared at the pictures. “That doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. All we can do for now though is keep looking for the piece we’re missing.”

  Ronan and Claire scribbled furiously, the scratching of their pens on paper the only noise that broke the silence.

  “I went through the statement Alice made when Clara first went missing. In it she mentions a white panel van. But when I went back through the files I couldn’t find any information the officers at the time dug up on locals in the area who might have had vehicles matching that description.”

  “That’s an easy one,” Ronan said. “They didn’t look into it. I tried to find that information myself before you got in on this and there’s nothing to find.”

  “Why would they have ignored something like that?”

  He shrugged. “Honestly, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Could it have anything to do with the other missing files?”

  “It might. I’ll have to see what I can dig up.”

  “Right, keep me informed,” I said, climbing wearily to my feet.

  “Where are you off to?” Ronan asked, his head coming up so that his eyes met mine.

  “I’m going to talk to the Sergeant Mills,” I said, steeling my resolve. “Try to convince him to reassign the officers who were working on Joanna’s missing person’s case, to our murder enquiry.”

  “And if he turns you down, we’ll have another case and still no more help,” Ronan added the wry remark without any hint of the usual smile that clung to his lips.

  “I’ve got to try.” I felt my shoulders shrug an act of belying the nervousness I felt.

  I held back the words that hovered on the tip of my tongue. An explanation. How part of me felt like I owed it to the girls to find more resources for their case. They deserved to be found, deserved to be brought home and reunited with their families. We had failed Joanna by not catching this bastard sooner. I didn’t want another girl to suffer at the hands of this maniac because I hadn’t tried a little harder to swallow my pride and ask for help when we needed it.

  That wasn’t something I could live with.

  39

  After a quick checkup from the ER doctor and a refusal to stay overnight for observation, I found myself back outside the hospital.

  Aunt Imelda’s car was idling next to the curb. I’d called her as soon as I knew I was free to go. She hadn’t said much on the phone.

  While I couldn’t see her expression in the dark interior of the car as I crossed the road, I could already imagine the frosty reception I was about to get.

  Pulling the car door open, I slipped into the warmth and prepared to get an ear bashing. Instead, she pulled away from the curb without a word.

  The tension inside me ratcheted up with every moment that passed.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?”

  “Why bother?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the road ahead. “It’s not as though it’s going to stick inside that head of yours.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She sighed. “I know things aren’t easy for you right now, but...”

  “But I need to think of my parents,” I said, cutting her off before she could say the words aloud.

  “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

  It was my turn to sigh. Turning in my seat, I stared out through the fogged window, my finger creeping up to write the name ‘Clara,’ on the glass.

  “It’s not a bad thing,” I said. “But it’s all I’ve listened to since she left. ‘Think of your parents suffering...’ What people seem to forget is that I lost her too.”

  “I know you did,” she said. “You two were always close.”

  “I was with her when she was taken,” I said. “I heard her screaming. She’s gone because I couldn’t hold onto her hand.”

  The words caught in the back of my throat, wrapping themselves around the rapidly forming lump there.

  “No one is blaming you.”

  “I’m blaming me,” I said vehemently, drawing a sideways glance from my aunt. “And after today I know my mother certainly does.”

  “She doesn’t, not really. She’s just upset.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “You don’t need to make excuses for her. I’ve always known she blamed me. It’s because I came home without Clara. She might even think I let her get taken to save myself.”

  Imelda shot me a shocked look. “That’s not true, Alice. You were a child. You were never to blame.”

  I turned back to the window. I’d lived with this guilt longer even than I’d lived with my sister. What would she be like now, if that night had been different? Would we still be close? I’d gone over a million questions about her in my mind since that fateful night.

  “I should have gone back for her,” I said. “I knew she was vulnerable, slower, because of the baby. But I didn’t go back...”

  “You were trying to survive, Alice,” Imelda said, in her usual no nonsense voice. The same one she used on her fifth class students in the primary school. “Don’t ever apologise for that. If you hadn’t then your parents would have lost both their daughters.”r />
  “I think Mam would have preferred that,” I said. “I think she would know how to deal with that grief better. This way—“ I shrugged, glad to find the shot they’d given me in the hospital was still keeping the pain at bay. “She doesn’t know how to love me anymore because I remind her of what she lost.”

  “She still loves you.” I could hear just how unconvinced even Imelda sounded about the whole thing.

  “I got over it a long time ago,” I said softly. Watching as the letters of Clara’s name glistened in the half-light.

  Imelda said nothing else as she drove me home and for that I was grateful. In this life you had to take small mercies where you found them. And the silence she granted me gave me time to think.

  What if Clara really was up in those woods? Maybe not in the newest grave but somewhere up there. Alone.

  The urge to go up there once more was strong. Not that it would do me much good. I’d just end up stumbling around blindly. Probably end up getting lost on the Galtee’s and have to get rescued. That would really help the situation.

  My phone buzzed and I drew it out of my pocket, staring down at the message.

  “I hope you’re all right? -D.”

  I started to type back a response and paused.

  What was I supposed to say to him? Chances were, he thought I was some sort of lunatic. Not that I could blame him for thinking that, the way I’d run at the Guard was definitely suggestive of someone with a few screws loose. But the need to know if my sister was up there had washed over me and I hadn’t been able to help myself.

  This whole case had opened so many wounds I’d one thought closed for good.

  I shoved the phone back into my pocket as Imelda parked the car in front of the dark house.

  “I was worried the place might be crowded with people,” I said. “Like it was earlier.”

  Imelda shook her head. “No. A few people called after the Gardaí came this morning but I told them to put the word out not to call. I think you all just need some time to wrap your heads around everything that’s going on.” She pressed her face into her hands. “I’m not even sure I’ve begun to process this whole mess myself. Part of me just wants it all to be over.”