The Dead Ground (13 page)

‘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.’

‘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.

‘Well, I didn’t see you going up to look,’ she fired back.

Guy ignored their spat. ‘Can you handle it, Paula? You looked rather faint. I don’t want you coming out if it’s too much.’

‘I’m fine! It’s just
cold
.’

‘I hope it is fine. Because DCI Corry’s taking over this case now, but she wants you on it too.’

There were always mixed emotions at the start of an inquiry. A certain pulse of energy as you pieced the clues together. It was sad, but it was also your job, and you wanted to be good at it. So sometimes a feeling of near excitement could kick in. But this was always tempered when it came to telling the family.

Around three p.m., pushing past the band of journalists who’d gathered outside already, shivering in the snow – no sign of Aidan – Gerard arrived in the PSNI Reception with a pale and waddling Heather Campbell. She would fill in some forms and then be taken to the mortuary to identify her mother’s body. Heather was apparently listed as official next of kin.

‘Is that wise?’ Paula said to Guy, watching the woman through the glass walls. ‘Could the partner not have done it?’

‘Ms Cole can’t face it, it seems. And Heather insisted. I think she wants to punish herself, you know.’

‘Mm.’ Paula did know. If it happened now, if they found something that could possibly be her own mother’s remains, she would go, no matter how awful it was. To be there. To bear witness, in a way, with her own eyes.

‘Don’t worry, she’ll only have to see the face.’ And that had been unscathed. The same features, just stiff and waxy, as she’d imagined herself so many times. Except that’s not how it would be, would it? Paula’s mother had likely died seventeen years ago, if she was indeed dead at all. She’d be nothing like herself. It was pointless to keep imagining those well-loved features, frozen in time. She had to stop.

Chapter Fourteen

Later, in the storm’s eye between phone records and press calls and door-to-doors and tyre-track analysis and the body being moved to Belfast for a post-mortem, Paula tried to put what she’d seen and heard into some kind of pattern. Often, she felt her job was like turning over a piece of embroidery, feeling along the stitches of the thing that had been left. The dumping in the stone circle, that had a certain flair to it, a dark theatricality. From what the CSI said, Dr Bates had probably been marched there, bound at the wrists, then forced to kneel in the snow, and – what? You wouldn’t get someone to kneel if you were going to slash their stomach. The height, the angle, it was all wrong. It was a classic paramilitary execution pose – walked to some lonely place, then the shot to the head. But she hadn’t been shot. Had she been made to do the slashing herself? It was a horribly fitting end for an abortionist, who many in Ballyterrin would consider to be a cold-blooded murderer of innocents, and one who’d had the gall to charge for her crimes. The more Paula thought about it, the more the staging reminded her of another tableau recently left for them. Baby Alek, waving his hands and legs in the wooden manger.

‘I want us to consider the possibility the cases are linked,’ she announced. ‘The baby abductions and Dr Bates, I mean.’

Around the conference room table came the silence she’d expected from the team, the faint tut from Gerard, who didn’t approve of wild theories. Helen Corry, who’d reluctantly agreed to have the meeting at the cramped MPRU offices, put her chin in one hand. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know yet, really. But she was slashed low down, you said. Not the stomach, but where the uterus would be. It’s very odd, and not an efficient way to kill someone. Plus, she was maybe forced to do it herself.’

‘Ritual suicide?’ Fiacra perked up. ‘That there Japanese thing – hara-kiri?’

‘There could be something in that – I don’t know. I know it’s a tenuous link, but the odds on two random abductions in this town are very low.’ Paula struggled to marshal her thoughts. ‘I just think it’s all connected somehow – babies, abortions . . . you know. They gave Alek back, then took Darcy. What if the doctor was involved too?’

The DCI gave Paula an appraising look that made her heart sink. ‘You don’t think it’s much more likely she’s been targeted by extremists? You’re maybe not aware of it, Dr Maguire, but over the past few years the pro-life movement in Ireland has become very radicalised. They fire-bombed a pregnancy advisory service in Dublin last year. Go into town any Saturday and you’ll find them on the streets, with their flyers and their stalls. That’s why I leaned towards the idea it was someone posing as a patient, if we could find her laptop with the records. The woman offered abortion referrals. It’s hard to explain how angry that makes people here.’

‘I know that.’ Of course she knew; she might have been away twelve years but she did grow up in the province. ‘I can’t explain what I think, really. It’s just that the mode of death is very unusual.’

Guy looked to be thinking hard. ‘As a theory it just about holds up, I suppose, and I agree the odds of two abductors are very slim, but what link could there be? Does it give us any fresh leads we can pursue?’

‘No.’ That was the frustrating thing. ‘But I would continue the lines of inquiry we have open – the hospital staff, and the death threats to the doctor. Cross-referencing might throw up something that gives a breakthrough.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt to look for any links, I suppose.’ Helen Corry was watching her. She hadn’t taken any notes throughout the briefing. ‘You still think it’s a woman? Dr Bates was strong and healthy. Not easy to overpower her.’

‘It’s always women in these types of abduction cases – unless they have a man as an accomplice, to help them get a baby away.’

‘What a world,’ muttered Bob, who’d been in the RUC for forty years, but still considered Ballyterrin the last bastion against a rising global tide of sin.

‘So we could be looking at a couple?’ Fiacra’s question made everyone groan. Conspiracies were deadly to solve, even harder to prove.

Paula shook her head. ‘Like I say, I really don’t know. It’s just an idea.’

Corry was looking sceptical. ‘I’m far from convinced by random hunches, Dr Maguire, but I’m open to trying this approach, since we have basically nothing else.’

Paula subsided, chewing her lip. She desperately wanted to bring something to Corry and Guy, impress them, but all her insights had deserted her, like looking at a crossword upside down. ‘Did we find out anything about the Williams family?’

Gerard answered briefly. ‘They’d money troubles. The phone call from the bank checks out – apparently they’re this close to losing the house.’ He rubbed his fingers together. ‘So she probably did leave the wean alone to answer it.’

This had been Paula’s theory, but something still didn’t feel right. ‘OK. So if someone approached Caroline, seemed friendly, she might have admitted she couldn’t cope.’

Guy placed his hands on the table. ‘Where have we got to on the death threats to Dr Bates? DCI Corry, you’ll want to get your team on this, but we did some preliminary inquiries into who might have wanted to harm her.’

‘And?’

‘Easier to say who didn’t,’ piped up Fiacra, and then coloured. ‘Ma’am.’

‘Go on,’ Guy encouraged him.

‘Avril and me went over the threats the doctor received – well, there’s a load of them. She’d been denounced by everyone from the Catholic Archbishop to the Presbyterian Chief Moderator.’

‘Also by Magdalena Croft,’ Guy added. ‘Your expert, DCI Corry. She spoke against Dr Bates at one of her rallies.’

Corry didn’t react. Fiacra glanced at Avril, who took over seamlessly.

‘But most of the threatening phone calls came from the one number, which I’ve managed to trace. It’s registered to a Mrs Melissa Dunne, who lives near the border. She runs a pro-life group called Life4All. The “for” is like the number four, though.’

‘Is she North or South?’ asked Corry. The question you always asked on a border. The border itself was nothing – only a line on a map, no longer anything physical to show for it. All the same, you could stand as close to it as you liked, but you were still on one side or the other.

‘South. That’s why Fiacra was helping. We also have her prints on file – she got arrested a few times at demos, so she did. We could run them against the letters to Dr Bates, see if we can get any prints off them.’

‘Why wasn’t this done at the time?’ Guy was frowning. Everyone looked down.

Helen Corry answered. ‘Unfortunately the death threat is something of a staple of Northern Ireland life, Inspector. Ask any of our local councillors. If she’d been sent bullets in the post, or got followed home, we’d have been more worried. It happens.’

‘Well, can we run the prints like Avril suggests? We should get this Dunne in for questioning, I think.’

‘Of course.’ Corry still wasn’t even making notes. Paula wondered what it would take to really rattle her. ‘What about the Pachek and Williams cases – you said you were looking into the files?’

Avril answered again. ‘We ran all the child abduction cases for the past ten years, north and south of the border. There weren’t many and they’ve all been resolved.’

‘We could go back further,’ Gerard suggested. ‘She’s, what, in her late forties by the look of the tape. Could have been younger when she first did it.’

Avril’s fingers were poised over her laptop. ‘So, what, twenty years?’

Paula was thinking about it. ‘Typically this kind of behaviour is triggered by a woman losing their own child, or not being able to conceive. There are some cases of younger women doing it but usually not. I’d say twenty years back would do it. Check all unsolved abductions – even if the child was returned safe, like Alek – and anything involving women.’ Once again she felt Helen Corry appraising her, nodding as if pleased. ‘I can’t add much to my profile of the abductor, I’m afraid. There is some professional literature on it, which suggests they are often overweight, for some reason, or otherwise lack control over some area of their appearance. Sometimes they actually believe they are pregnant – this is a condition called pseudocyesis. False pregnancy, it means. They can even have all the symptoms – weight gain, no periods. But then when there’s no baby at the end of it, they find one somewhere else.’