The Dead Ground (2 page)

‘She’s pregnant. Seven months, the sister said.’

Focus
.

A few swift kicks and the weak door splinters. ‘Jesus!’

Bob flinches at your blasphemy but then turns pale himself. The constable is retching in a flower bed. You clamp your nose shut. The smell is what you’d imagine after three days. Blood, and piss, and something worse, a terrible meaty smell that seems to reach out and envelop you.

‘Mrs Rourke?’ You step into the carpeted hallway, lined with pictures of a family. Wedding shots. Happy smiles. ‘Hello?’ You move into the living room, see how it’s disordered, chairs thrown round the place, a boot kicked through the TV. The kitchen is small, off the living room, behind a bubbled glass door. You can see something on the other side of it, a dark shape. The smell is coming from there.

You stop, the three of you, Bob and you and the poor wee constable who’s all of twenty. Kevin, that’s his name. First month on the job. You stop and then you realise it’s going to be you who opens that door and sees what is on the other side. You start to walk.

At first it looks like a mangled mess of flesh. Your feet catch in the tacky slick of blood which has stretched over the lino. The room feels like it has no oxygen at all, so cold you can see your breath on the foetid air. You bend down to the body, or what is left of it. ‘Mrs Rourke?’

She’s dead. She must be, all that blood – her face has been beaten to meat, red and pulpy, her clothes soaked black with it. And her stomach, is that – no, Jesus, it’s even worse. The tangle of skin and blood on her stomach, that’s her baby.

The baby is purple, its tiny eyes shut. It’s still attached to her by the blue umbilical cord. It lies on her ruined stomach as if exhausted. On one of the woman’s hands the nails are encrusted with blood, and you see she’s been trying to claw through her own skin. The other hand is stretched above her head, handcuffed to the handle of a drawer. You see what has happened. She’s been beaten, then locked in this kitchen for three days. In that time her baby has come, and there was no one, no one at all to help. A knife lies beside her, bloodied, and you see what she has done, trying to free the child from the prison of her own body. A little girl. You want to put the poor wee thing under your jacket.

‘Kevin!’ You’re shouting for the constable. ‘Don’t come in here, son, don’t look! Get Mick – call an ambulance. There’s a dead female and an infant, stillborn . . .’

You hear a noise and turn back. A bubble of spit forms in the woman’s cracked lips. ‘Mrs Rourke? Christ, I think she’s—’

‘No . . . No . . .’ The free hand reaches towards the baby. ‘No dead, no . . .’

‘I’m sorry. She’s gone, love. She’s gone.’

The woman tenses for a second, then slumps back in the pool of her own mess. The limp hand slips from her child’s blood-slick head, and you scrabble on her damp neck for a pulse. Nothing. Nothing. In your own chest your heart goes pounding on, reminding you you’re still alive, and that this bloodied kitchen with the melamine cupboards will be with you till the day you lie down and die yourself.

You were sure the woman would die. How could she not? She’d been in that freezing kitchen for days, bleeding out across the patterned lino; the dehydration alone should have killed her. Then she’d be joining the poor scrap she’d given birth to. But you’ve been waiting in the hospital for hours now and no one has come with the death forms for you to sign. You wonder if Margaret’s right, if something in you has hardened and died too.

Bob’s gone to the station to start the investigation. Much good it’ll do them. They’ll not be able to pin it on any particular group of thugs. No one will have seen anything, and in the houses you go to they’ll hear your Catholic name and look at you as if to say: traitor. Scab. Legitimate target. They were lucky to even find the husband’s body, and God knows things are bad when you feel lucky to have a half-headless corpse on your hands instead of another name to add to the lost. You know exactly how it was for Brian Rourke. His pregnant wife beaten, house wrecked, blindfold over his head and out to the car. The sound of his own breath. Drive to some lonely spot. A march in the dark, kneeling in the dirt, then a shot to the back of the head. And she was likely dead too now, the whole family gone in one night.

But as you sit twisting your hat, watching the clock inch round, a doctor comes out. Everyone in the waiting room looks up with dull hope, but she comes to you. A woman in blue scrubs, tired and creased. There are bloody handprints on her white coat – her own, or someone else’s?

‘DC Maguire.’ She rubs her eyes behind her glasses. ‘I’m afraid the child is dead, as you thought. I think she was stillborn – they beat the mother, and that must have brought the labour on.’ You nod, expecting to hear, ‘
And we did everything for the mother, but 
. . .’

‘She won’t be able to answer questions for a while, but when she wakes up you can try an ID. She must have seen them, even if they wore balaclavas.’

‘She’s
alive
?’

The doctor nods wearily. ‘I don’t know how, but yes. We think the child was born yesterday. She must have realised it was in trouble, from the beating, and tried to – well, she tried to give herself a Caesarean, it seems. It might have worked, too, if you’d got there sooner. I think she has medical training. It was crude, but in the right place.’

You’re thinking of your own child, safe at home, please God safe at home, born red and wriggling as a new pup. ‘Can she have any more?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ The doctor – Dr Alison Bates, her badge says, not a local name, and the accent not local either, she must be English – says, ‘There was too much bleeding, so I had to perform a hysterectomy. But she’ll live.’

‘Does she know?’

The doctor hesitates. ‘I’ve told her, though she’s very woozy. She – well, we had to restrain her. She was very distressed. We gave her sedation.’

For a moment the doctor flops down in the seat beside you. A small woman, dark-haired. She seems to have given way.

‘She’s alive.’ You can’t take it in, and for a moment you wonder if it would be better the other way, an end to it, be with the child and the husband again, if you believe in that kind of thing, and these days you just aren’t sure if you do.

‘Yes.’ The doctor rubs her face, her nails short and dirtied with blood. ‘Yes.’

But it doesn’t feel like success, to you who have both fought to save her. Then the doctor’s beeper begins to sound, and she springs up, muttering a curse, and dashes off down the corridor, where a flurry of activity has begun. On the tiled floor, her feet make a rapid rhythmic pattering, and she is gone.

Not knowing what else to do, you head home, every inch of you tired and stiff, sticky with the woman’s blood and the barnyard smell of the kitchen. You keep picturing the baby, its mottled purple skin, something not fit for the eyes of the world, like a bird fallen from a nest.
Untimely ripped
– the quote comes to you, something you’ve seen on your daughter’s homework. She’s doing
Macbeth
for her English, that’s it. Untimely ripped.

You park your Volvo in the street and see with surprise the curtains in the house aren’t drawn. It’s six p.m., long dark, winter-dark, and Margaret hates to have them open, worried about people ‘looking in on you’. You open the door with your key. Your daughter sits at the table in her maroon school uniform, chewing on a pen in that absent teenage way, homework spread around. Her red hair is untidy and you notice she hasn’t put on the radio or TV, not like her. ‘Where’s your mum?’

The kitchen is cold, no dinner cooking in the oven. ‘Paula?’

Your daughter raises her eyes to yours, and for the second time that day you feel your stomach fail. ‘She wasn’t here,’ Paula says, her voice slipping into the panic she’s obviously been holding back since she came home. ‘I thought you’d know. I thought you’d know where she was.’

Your heart, you think irrationally. Focus on the heart. It’s thumping in your chest like the feet of the doctor running down the corridor. One two one two. Running for a life.

Chapter One

Ballyterrin, 2010

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Sorry! God, I’m sorry.’ Paula put her head down on the conference-room table, under which she had just vomited all over the feet of her superior officers. Bob Hamilton, the senior sergeant, and Guy Brooking, the Detective Inspector, had leapt up in alarm as she leaned forward, convulsing, right in the middle of a case presentation.

‘It’s OK, Paula,’ said Guy awkwardly, moving his expensive brogues away from the stain on the threadbare grey carpet. ‘Are you all right?’

She could feel beads of sweat along her forehead. ‘Uh – I don’t know. I must have eaten something bad.’

‘Why don’t you go and clean up – we need to leave in five minutes, anyway.’

‘OK.’ She dragged herself out of the conference room, stomach roiling, and behind her she heard Bob Hamilton’s plaintive tones: ‘She’s after boking on my shoes, so she is.’

She fled to the Ladies, hanging over the sink for a while until it stopped, then running cool water over her face and rinsing the sour taste from her mouth, shaking. She’d thrown up every morning now for the past month, but this was the first time it had happened at work, and the first time anyone else had seen. She was fairly sure her father, who she lived with, had noticed – the ex-policeman missed very little – but so far he was choosing not to say anything.

Paula raised the edge of her thick grey jumper and examined her stomach in the mirror of the Ladies. Still flat. But not for much longer, unless she made a decision and bloody soon. She started counting backwards in her head. If only she could be sure which time. Or which man, for that matter.

The door opened and she smoothed the jumper down quickly.

‘Paula, are you OK?’ Avril Wright, the intelligence analyst, was the only other woman on their small team at the MPRU, or Missing Persons Response Unit, an obscure team set up in the Northern Irish town to consult on cases north and south of the border. They were supposed to look at old cases with a view to reopening any with new evidence, and also make sure the investigation was properly coordinated when a new person went missing. Which sadly was what had happened today. ‘The boss sent me to check on you.’

Avril as usual looked fresh out of the box, in a crisp blue blouse and pencil skirt. Paula felt oozy and rumpled. ‘I’m OK.’

‘You don’t want to go home?’

‘No, no, not when there’s a big case like this.’

Avril’s pretty face grew sombre. ‘I don’t know who would do such a thing. A wee baby!’

Paula looked at her own pallid face in the mirror. She did know. That was the worst part of her job as a forensic psychologist, working out exactly who would do the most horrific crimes, and why. Entering into their minds, understanding. People said that understanding everything meant forgiving everything. She’d never known if that was true. ‘Come on.’ She pushed back lank strands of her hair. ‘We’re not going to find him like this, are we?’

Coming out, she saw Guy through the glass of the conference room, down on his hands and knees in his good grey suit. He was dabbing at the patch of bile with a wad of kitchen roll, his fair hair falling over his forehead with the effort. Formerly a big deal in the London Met, he’d come over to Northern Ireland several months before to run the unit and made more of a noise than anyone had expected, even recruiting Paula from her own London job back to her dreaded home town. She’d been supposed to stay for one case only, but that had reached its traumatic conclusion weeks before, and now it was a month to Christmas and she was still here. Her hand once more crept to her stomach. She had to tell him. Shit, she couldn’t. Not today. Not when a case this big had just come in.

‘You coming to the hospital?’ Gerard Monaghan, one of the detectives from the local PSNI station who was seconded to the unit, was holding her coat. ‘This bloody snow’s made the traffic murder. Fiacra’s digging the cars out.’ Fiacra Quinn was the final member of their team, a young Detective Garda from Dundalk, who’d been brought in to act as liaison to the South.

Focus, for God’s sake, Maguire.
‘Coming.’

Paula had long believed that nothing good ever happened in Ballyterrin General Hospital. It was where they’d taken the two bodies they’d found in the nineties, women who for a while they’d thought could have been her missing mother. One washed up on a beach in Wexford, one unearthed in a drain during building works. Twice Paula had made the journey up from school in her maroon uniform, to meet her father at the morgue. It hadn’t been worth it either time, the trip in some teacher’s car, hands clasped between trembling knees. No trace of Margaret Maguire had ever surfaced and she was stilled in Paula’s memory forever as she’d been on the last day, tidying the kitchen in her wool dressing gown as Paula had slunk out to school, bleary-eyed, crunching cereal. She’d been thirteen, just. She’d barely even said goodbye to her mother – why would she, when every day in life Margaret had been there in the same spot when she came home, a pot of tea on the stove?

The hospital was also the place Paula had been taken, aged eighteen, when she’d swallowed the contents of the medicine cabinet and had her stomach pumped. And that was Aidan’s fault too, wasn’t it? No.
No, Maguire.
However angry she got at him she knew she couldn’t blame that on anyone but herself.

‘Where are we going?’ They’d parked the car in the icy, grit-scattered car park, and she was now trying to keep up with Guy as he barged through the double doors and onto a second-floor ward of the hospital. Too late she realised where it was – Christ, how stupid was she. Maternity. Of all the places to be today.

The entire area had been cordoned off, and uniformed PSNI officers stood about. An early December snowfall had hit the town that morning, and had been causing chaos even before all this. Trails of greyish snow melted up and down the packed corridors, full of confused women in nightclothes, angry men, flustered nurses. Tinsel decorations hung from the walls but there was no sense of festive cheer. Weak and queasy, Paula trotted after Guy in her black suede boots, already stained with damp sludge. When he got like this, there was no keeping up with him. He approached the cordon flashing his badge. ‘Detective Inspector Guy Brooking, MPRU. Let us past, please.’