The Dead Ground (18 page)

Again the snap, as if the brain was resetting itself. In the lined face, the woman’s eyes settled again on Paula. ‘Margaret. Where did you go?’

Paula drove home with extreme care, twitching at every turn of the wheels on ice. Outside the snow had started again, delicate wisps on the breeze, beautiful and soft. But if it went on long enough, deadly.

What did it mean, then? She’d said the words out loud, telling her unknowing grandmother, maybe because it was somehow the nearest she could get to her mother. It was pathetic really. She’d done without a mother all these years, through the blood and heartbreak of adolescence, the unformed anxiety of her twenties. She shouldn’t need one now just because she’d accidentally got herself pregnant.

She’d left her grandmother after a short while of smiling and nodding, patting the old papery hand. It was clear Kathleen Sheeran existed somewhere fluid in time, where it could be simultaneously present and distant past. Paula was driving back to town against the flow of evening traffic, brake lights like jewels in the falling snow and dark. She realised she didn’t want to go home, despite the weather. Not yet. She couldn’t face her father’s scrutiny and that file sitting on her desk, so many horrors behind its dun-coloured cover. She needed someone to talk to, someone to help make sense of this case. She couldn’t go to Guy – he’d be at home with Tess and their daughter Katie, curtains drawn warm against the night. The thought of it knifed her in the guts. There was only one other person she could possibly go to. Almost before she’d realised it, Paula had turned her car towards the office of the Ballyterrin Gazette. Magdalena Croft’s voice was in her head.
You’ve less time than you think.

She pulled up in the side street. The lights were off. No one home – most days Aidan was the only member of staff in the once-bustling building. So where else would he be, at seven p.m. on a week night? She was almost afraid to find out the answer.

From the paper offices it was only a short drive to Flanagan’s, the old-man’s pub Aidan had started drinking in at sixteen, and now frequented when he was on his periodic bouts of whiskey and self-destruction. As she feared, there was his red Clio parked up in one of the pub’s three spaces. She gripped the steering wheel. So he was drinking again. Well, she’d had enough of hauling him back from the bottom of a bottle. Let him crawl out by himself this time.

She was about to drive off when the pub door opened, spilling out noise and warmth into the frozen night. Paula caught a glimpse of the dark-lit interior, a TV screen showing some kind of sport, a green background, and there was Aidan lighting a cigarette, wearing just a T-shirt on the icy night.

She was tempted to leave anyway, though he’d seen her, but she opened the door instead and they approached each other warily across the car park. She crossed her arms against the cold. ‘Thought I’d find you here.’

Aidan dragged on his cigarette. ‘You know me too well, Maguire. Haven’t seen you much of late.’

‘Been working. A missing baby and a pregnant woman, and a murder too; we’re busy. Haven’t see you about either – too busy trying to undermine us?’

He ignored her. His cigarette glowed in the dark, and the smell took her back, to the summer they’d been teenagers and in love.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she said. ‘These cases. I’m stumped.’

‘You want my help?’

‘Yeah. Don’t tell me you’ve not done some digging.’

‘I might have a few ideas.’ He ground the butt under his Adidas trainers. ‘Will we go back to the office?’

The office, dusty and empty, had been the scene of their ill-advised encounter two months before, which had quite likely led to Paula’s current predicament. She looked down, hands in the pocket of her coat. ‘Not now. I have to tell you something as well.’

‘Oh yes?’ He was wary.

‘Guy – DI Brooking – he gave me my mother’s file last month. There might be new information about her.’

‘Really? I thought they never found anything.’

‘They didn’t. But there’s a prisoner, ex-IRA – he said he might tell something, if he got let out early. He hasn’t talked yet but I might – I might go and see him. He said maybe he knew her name. Mum’s.’

‘Who is it?’

She said nothing.

‘Who is it, Maguire? Someone local?’ She didn’t want to tell him. He knew anyway. ‘It’s Conlon, isn’t it? Jesus Christ. You’re going to talk to the man who shot my da right in front of my eyes?’

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ she said weakly.

‘Course we fucking know. I was there, Paula.’

He never called her Paula. ‘It’s my mother, Aidan! He might know something. I have to at least try.’

‘And why are you telling me?’ She hesitated. ‘Fuck off. You want me to
help
you?’

She nodded slowly. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? ‘I need you. I can’t do this without you.’

Aidan put his head in his hands, making an odd sound. It took her a few moments to realise he was laughing. ‘You’re something else. You sleep with me, then you ignore me for weeks while you prance about with fucking Brooking, and now you want me to help you free the terrorist who murdered my dad?’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Save it. You and me go back a long way.’ His eyes were very dark. ‘There’s a lot I’d do for you. But you ask too much sometimes. You ask too much, Paula.’

He turned and went back into the pub, and not knowing what else to do, Paula left.

When she turned her key in the lock at home she realised someone was there. The good teapot was out on the table and a plate with biscuits arranged on it – bourbons, custard creams. From the living room came voices, her father’s deep rumble, and someone else. A woman, her face turned away. Paula pushed the door. The woman had once been a redhead, you could tell – the exact shade of the plait coiling over Paula’s own shoulder. ‘Dad?’ Her voice stuck in her throat.

Light was falling from the lamp, pale and indistinct, and for a moment she couldn’t see the woman’s face. She wasn’t tall, around five-five, her body compact under a North Face raincoat, hair short and greying. ‘There you are, Paula. I knew you’d look exactly like that. Do you remember me?’

She did. She did. Her hands steadied on the wooden lintel of the door.
Not her
, no, not her, but close. ‘Auntie Phil?’

‘That’s me. Philomena.’ Her mother’s sister moved towards Paula, assessing critically. ‘I knew it had to be you. At the home they said one of Mammy’s granddaughters visited. Well, I knew it couldn’t be our Cassie because she’s in court weekdays – she’s a lawyer – and it can’t be Mairead since she’s off travelling in Australia. There’s only one other granddaughter, you know; it was all boys otherwise. And I knew you were back. I saw Pat O’Hara in town when I was doing my Christmas shopping.’

Paula stood speechless during this stream of information. Her father shifted to his feet. ‘You went to see your granny then?’

‘Yeah. It’s been too long.’

‘I’d have brought you, if you wanted to go.’ He manoeuvred past Paula, gently holding her elbow. ‘Will you take more tea, Philomena?’

‘No thanks, PJ. I’ll be on my way, with all this snow.’

‘Shocking, isn’t it? You’d think they’d get the gritters out.’

‘Well, what I heard was, PJ, the council have let all the stocks run down and now there’s no more to get, so we’ll have to sit it out. They’ve to order some in from China or someplace like that.’

‘Awful. I can hardly step out the door, with this leg.’

‘I’m sure, God love you.’

There was no indication that the two hadn’t spoken for nearly twenty years. Did they know? Had someone passed on that Paula had openly declared her pregnancy, and her intention to start looking for her mother again? There was no sign they were interested in anything other than biscuits, and the perfidy of the local council.

When Philomena went, making a big show of thanks, and goodbye, and come out to the house sometime, sure Cassie would love to see you, Paula stared at her father. ‘What was all that about?’

‘She called by. She must have been in town to get her shopping.’ He began putting the biscuits back into an old Quality Street tin.

‘Called by? Dad, she hasn’t been here in, like, seventeen years.’

He shrugged. ‘Aye, well, we both said some things. ’Twas a bad old time. But it’s water under the bridge.’

‘Did they—’ She paused. ‘You know when they – because you were suspended from work, did Mum’s family think it was you who maybe – that you had something to do with it?’

He said nothing for a moment. ‘It’s what you do. If a woman can’t be found, you always have to look at the husband.’

‘But you’d an alibi. You were working on a case that day. Weren’t you?’ She hoped it wasn’t obvious she’d been rereading the file very recently.

He closed the biscuit tin. ‘I was. But they’d only you to say she was here in the morning, pet. You see? And you were just a wean.’

‘Oh.’ That silenced her. How much of a lynchpin she’d been in the case, the last person to see her mother alive and well in her proper place. ‘What did she want, Auntie Phil?’

‘I think she wanted to bury the hatchet. I’m glad, to be honest. It was wrong of me to cut you off from them. You need your family. I won’t be around forever.’

‘Dad!’

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ He moved towards the living room, gathering his tea and paper. ‘Maybe if you were married or something, pet. But I worry about you. You can’t be alone in this ould world. You need people round you.’ He stumped past her again, the limp making him seem older than his sixty years. She wondered if he was right. In London being alone had seemed like a luxury, an escape, something to be hoarded. It was only in Ballyterrin that it seemed like a disease.

Chapter Twenty

‘Paula? You busy?’

Paula looked up, confused. She was at her desk, the cursor blinking on a blank Word document, and she had the sliding sense that time had rushed past her. ‘Um, no, just researching, why?’

It was Fiacra who’d spoken to her, coming in with a sprinkle of snow on the shoulders of his trendy reflective jacket. ‘Boss wants you to go to the station, he’s up there.’

‘What’s it about?’ Paula rubbed her face, trying to hide her confusion; she was just so tired, day and night.

‘Computer techs found something, he said. He wants you.’ Fiacra was settling down at his desk with a jam doughnut, flipping his tie aside and turning up his iPod.

Avril gave a little tut from her own neat desk. ‘Not Kanye again,
please
.’

‘Who’d you want? Jay-Z?’ Fiacra thumbed through the display.

‘I don’t mind him so much, I suppose. If Beyoncé likes him he must be OK.’

Paula left them to it and went out to her car, huddling into her coat for the short walk across the parking area, riven with icy winds.

She’d spent the morning updating her profile of the abductor, though it was difficult. You had to imagine that shadowy figure they’d seen taking Alek Pachek, tall and dark in the nurse’s uniform, doing all these other crimes too. Leaving the baby in the church and slipping out again unnoticed, onto a busy rush-hour street in town. Abducting Dr Bates, a strong and determined woman, keeping her for days, then forcing her to march in the snow and cut her own stomach open with a scalpel. Lurking on the path behind the Williams house, unseen by any neighbour or passer-by, waiting for the mother’s back to turn for a moment, then seizing the child and making off with her.

It was hard to believe the same person could have done all those things, have the patience to wait, the strength to overpower. Sighing, Paula had discovered herself clicking through the archives to check which cases Magdalena Croft had worked on in the South. All children, all missing. Little faces and little lost bodies. All found, though some sadly when it was already too late. But could she possibly know, when all the police and experts hadn’t a clue? How could she trace a four-year-old to a windswept beach where his body lay hidden in a cave by the sea? She remembered the woman’s words.
I’m not required to understand.
When things were so far beyond what you could take in, it wasn’t so surprising people made their own answers. Miracles. Visions. Psychic powers.

She pulled into the PSNI car park showing the pass she’d been grudgingly allowed, now she was working on the Bates murder case too. Guy must have found something important to call her up there.

Trevor the computer tech had to all appearances just recently finished primary school. He had pink cheeks and wore a suit his mum must have bought for him. Paula remembered the heady days when she’d always been the youngest on every team, fresh from her post-doc at Greenwich University. Not any more.

‘So he’s accessed Dr Bates’s files?’

‘They were stored online, apparently, and he’s managed to access them finally.’

Guy and Paula were outside the interview room where Trevor had been working on Dr Bates’s system with Erin, the doctor’s unhelpful receptionist. She was a lot more helpful now, letting out bursts of laughter that could be heard down the corridor. Through the room’s window they could be seen looking at something on Trevor’s laptop – what appeared to be a video of a dog on a surfboard.

‘Kids,’ muttered Guy. When he went into the room Trevor quickly minimised the window on his computer.

‘Inspector Brooking. Hello.’

‘Hello.’ Guy shut the door. ‘Hard at work, are we?’

‘Yeah. Erin’s been very useful. She’s the only other one who ever went on the system, see, so we had to get her in.’

Erin smiled to herself, playing with the ends of her long black hair.

‘How are you, Erin?’ asked Paula. She hoped the girl wouldn’t reveal exactly why Paula had been at the clinic that day. Her lie about checking out a lead was flimsy in the extreme.

Erin looked martyred. ‘I’m all right. We had her funeral the other day, Dr Bates. Humanist, but it was really nice. Sad. Poor Missus Cole.’

‘What have we got?’ asked Guy, impatient.

‘Well!’ Trevor beamed. ‘It’s a tough system, sir. Designed so not many could crack it. I mean, I could, but it took me a while.’