The Dead Ground (20 page)

‘And do we have this software?’ Corry fixed Avril with a glare. She cringed.

‘Er – no, ma’am. I put in a requisition, but it’s expensive.’

‘Send it to me. Will it work?’

The girl blanched as heads swivelled towards her. ‘Y-yes. I mean, it should.’

‘Do it, then. Now can we get on and question our witnesses, please?’ She looked round the room at the mostly male faces staring back. ‘Who here has a kid?’ There was a surprised silence, then a few hands went up. Corry pointed to them. ‘Right, one of you can come in with me. I’m not having some ham-fisted batterer interview Dunne. You’d be lynched.’ She sighed at the blank looks. ‘Remind me to hire some women next time. That’s all.’ Corry looked at her watch as she dismissed them. ‘Dr Maguire, can you stay behind?’

Oh no, what now? Paula tried to catch Avril’s eye to apologise for putting her on the spot, but she was gone in the sea of hulking policemen.

When she was alone with Corry she started babbling, ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt; it was just I wondered if maybe I’d sent everyone down the wrong road, and—’

‘Paula, none of us have a bloody clue what’s going on in this case.’ Corry reset the clip that was holding back her blond hair. ‘We’re stumbling in the dark, and that’s the honest truth. So whatever insights you have, for God’s sake, share them, OK? That’s your job. There’s no point in having you if you don’t add anything.’

‘Um, OK. Sorry.’

‘Now come and observe this interview. I’ve no idea if she’s our woman or not, but at least we know she most likely sent those threatening letters, and that’s something we can charge her with. Right now that’s as good as we’re going to get, I think.’ She barrelled out, Paula tripping in her wake, always wrong-footed.

Today Melissa Dunne had dressed herself in what looked like a pyjama top covered in teddies, and a voluminous skirt over mud-encrusted wellies. The hairband and the Rose West glasses were still in place. Her hands were folded primly on the table. On the way down Paula had seen Michael Dunne, the husband, in another interview room, more smartly turned out in an old tweed suit. His lips were moving and he seemed to be praying as he waited for Gerard to interview him. He was an accountant, Paula knew, hence the big house and cars. A short, bald man, he was half the size of his wife. One of Corry’s DCs, a nervous-looking lad with a pronounced Adam’s apple, stood watch over Melissa.

‘What do you reckon?’ Corry asked Paula, as they looked through the glass. ‘You’ve spoken to her. What will she do?’

‘She’s smart,’ Paula said. ‘She’ll seem very stupid, though. I think it’s her thing, to make you so frustrated you can’t put up with her any more. And she knows the law. Has she asked for a lawyer?’

‘She declined, I believe.’

‘Right. She’ll probably try to twist that round somehow. The main thing about her is she’s absolutely convinced she’s right and acting in God’s stead. So she isn’t a bit sad that Dr Bates is dead, even if she had nothing to do with it. She sees it as no different from the torments of Hell, where in her opinion the doctor most likely is now. You see? She feels no compassion.’

‘You’re saying she’s a sociopath?’

‘Possibly.’ Paula thought about the neglect of those kids she’d seen, shivering, noses crusty. ‘She’s an obsessive, for sure.’

‘OK. What’s your gut feeling, Paula? I mean off the record. Forget all your research and your personality types. Could she have done this?’

Paula looked at the plump, blank-faced woman on the other side of the glass. Who’d rather save unborn groups of cells than care for her own living children. Who’d threatened to burn Dr Bates alive. ‘No,’ she said, finally. ‘She’s too controlled. That thing with Dr Bates – it was done from rage, not self-righteousness. Someone hated her. And Melissa has children, lots of them, so I can’t see her stealing one, I really can’t.’

Corry said nothing for a moment, then placed her hand on the interview room door. ‘Thank you, Doctor. Do observe, please.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

‘We’re getting nothing from her,’ said Corry, several hours later. Tight-lipped, she was expressing her dissatisfaction by very deliberately poking holes with her polished nails in the sides of the polystyrene coffee cup she held. They were gathered in her office – Paula, Guy, Corry. An air of inescapable weariness lay over them all. Guy had his shirtsleeves rolled up as the overhead grilles pumped out stale, burnt air. The reinforced window gave out on the car park, dark already at three-thirty p.m., snow pale and scurrying beneath orange security lights.

‘It’s not her,’ he said, but the fight was all gone out of him.

‘We can hold her another ten hours,’ said Corry stubbornly. ‘I’m not letting her go.’

‘Was there anything on her computer?’ Paula asked. It had been sent up to Trevor for analysis.

Corry shook her head slowly. ‘No. No, there’s nothing. No evidence she accessed Dr Bates’s files. There’s never anything in this damn case. But she knows something.’

‘How can you tell?’ asked Guy, rubbing his hands over his face.

‘You can see the look on her smug wee face.’
Poke poke poke
went the nails. The sound made Paula feel sick. She was so tired the orange lights cast shadows on her eyes. She wanted to say something, but had no words.

The phone on Corry’s desk shrilled, making them all jump. Corry answered. ‘What? Oh for the love of God. Who arranged that? Jesus.’ She slammed the phone down and moved over to the TV that sat on top of her filing cabinet, beside a dying plant. ‘They’ve been on the bloody afternoon news.’ She started stabbing through the channels.

‘Who?’ asked Guy.

‘Jim Campbell. Caroline Williams. I’d like to know who put them up to this. I knew we should have let them have a bloody press conference.’

She’d found the right channel. Jim Campbell was speaking outside a country bungalow, a people carrier parked in the drive. Beside him, thin and pale in a parka coat, was Caroline Williams, her bleached hair lank. She didn’t speak.

Jim was surrounded by reporters and talking to the cameras. In his early thirties, he was a tall, good-looking man with sandy hair, dressed only in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms despite the snow. His eyes were red-rimmed and his voice shook in and out of clarity. ‘My wife has now been missing for three days. She is eight months pregnant with our first child. I’m begging anyone that might know something, please, please call the police. Please help me find Heather.’ His voice cracked. ‘I just want her back safe. It’s nearly Christmas. Please give her back if you know something, anything.’

A reporter from the local news shoved a microphone in his face. ‘Mr Campbell, what’s your view on the police response to Heather’s disappearance?’

He paused. ‘I’ll just say this. If you’re going to come to my house and suggest to me my wife might have gone off willingly and not told me, and her hardly able to move with the baby, well, you don’t have the first idea what she’s like. I wouldn’t trust them to find a lost dog, to be frank with you.’

‘Do you feel the establishment of a specialist missing persons’ unit in the town has helped at all?’

‘It hasn’t helped Heather,’ he said bitterly. ‘I honestly don’t know what they’re doing down there. My wife is missing and so is Caroline here’s baby.’

The cameras trained on Caroline. Jim nodded to her, as if telling her to speak. On the screen came the caption:
Families of missing unite to challenge police.

Caroline’s voice shook. ‘My baby is gone.’

‘Mrs Williams, do you think the police have done everything they can to find your daughter?’

She seemed to freeze. ‘I—’ She recovered a little. ‘Please. I need to go inside now. Please help find her. Thank you.’

The piece ended and went back to the reporter in the studio, heavily made-up. Corry switched it off with a vicious swipe. Suddenly she was looking at Paula. ‘Tell me. How do I break her?’

‘Um – Melissa?’

‘No, the Queen of England. Of course Melissa.’

‘Well . . . let me . . . Emmm. I think she gets off on feeling superior, like I said. Like she pretends to be stupid, laughing at us the whole time. So . . . maybe we pretend to be stupider. See if she draws herself out.’

‘I tried that.’

‘Well – no offence, ma’am, but maybe you’re not the best at pretending to be . . . slow. You know?’ She waited to see how Corry took this. Could go either way.

But Corry was nodding. ‘OK. So you’re saying we need some big, thick, country constable who can soft-soap her, oh Melissa you’re so smart, tell us how you got away with it, blah blah.’

‘Essentially, yes.’

‘So, who?’ The nails drummed on the desk.

Paula and Guy looked at each other and she felt that surge, the joy of knowing someone was thinking exactly the same thing. ‘Can we do it?’ she asked him.

Guy said, ‘I don’t know. I’d say so, since he’s officially on secondment.’

‘Who in God’s name are you talking about?’ Corry was irritated. ‘I don’t speak code.’

Paula answered. ‘Um – we were thinking of Garda Quinn.’ We. The loveliest word in the English language. She didn’t trust herself to look at Guy.

‘You want me to let an Irish Guard interview my witness?’

‘Mrs Dunne does live over the border,’ Guy pointed out.

‘And can Garda Quinn put on a convincing bogtrotter act?’ Corry thought about it. ‘Never mind, I’ve answered my own question. OK. Get him in.’ She went to the door and shouted out. ‘Monaghan?’

Gerard must have been hovering; he poked his head in. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Tell Dunne we’re taking a short break. We need a different approach to this.’

‘Em . . . her solicitor’s arrived.’

‘What? I thought she didn’t want one.’

‘Aye, she’s changed her mind, looks like. Will you let her see him?’

‘Who is it?’

‘Eh . . . Colin McCready.’

‘For feck’s
sake
.’ Corry swore and clacked out, her heels echoing. Paula and Guy exchanged a quick look, which for a second made her entire body ache.

‘That was a good idea about Fiacra,’ he said politely. He’d thought it too, she knew. He was just being kind, letting her have the credit. He was always so kind.

‘We should go,’ she said. ‘We’re running out of time.’ And she recognised the name of Dunne’s solicitor. She’d been reading it in her mother’s file just the other night.

There’d been a time, after it had happened, when Paula had realised her father couldn’t look at her any more. One morning, struggling to get ready for school with no clean uniform or ironed shirts, she’d gone into the kitchen, where he sat in his dressing gown drinking tea. This was before the police came to dig up the garden, before he’d lost his job and hurt his leg and everything had changed forever. When the hope they had was still full, not waned to a sliver like it was now after seventeen years.

Paula’s hair had always been long, and her mother had liked to wash it for her over the bath, brushing it out into a fiery shine. Without this help, it was tangled in knots by the end of the first week gone. ‘Daddy, will you help me?’ She’d handed him the brush, and for a moment he’d raised it, one hand on her head like a blessing. He’d stood there like that, the brush in his other hand. Then he trembled and the brush fell on the ground, and her father had quietly left the room.

That look, the one she’d seen on her father’s face, was the same one her mother’s former boss gave her when Paula opened the door of the station tea-room to find him there, leafing through a file of notes. A small man, red-faced and balding.

He started. ‘Is it—?’

‘It’s Paula Maguire,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I’m Margaret’s girl. Paula. Do you remember me? I work here now.’

He stumbled up with the air of a sleepwalker, holding out his hand. ‘Of course, wee Paula. God, you’re awful like her.’

She tried to smile, shaking. ‘Everyone says that. Mr McCready—’

‘Oh, call me Colin, love.’ He was still staring. ‘Is there a problem with Mrs Dunne’s case? I haven’t been let in to see her yet.’

‘No, it’s not about the case. I just wanted to say hello. I remembered your name.’ She paused. ‘To be honest, I’d been thinking of coming to see you anyway.’

‘Oh?’ He looked puzzled.

‘Let me explain.’ She wasn’t sure she could. ‘I’ve been away for a long time, and now I’m back working here, it’s made me think about things. About my mother. I sort of feel I need to understand what happened to her.’

‘Closure, isn’t that what they call it?’ He fiddled with his papers. ‘You want some kind of closure?’

‘Something like that. I’m sorry – is there anything you could tell me? Maybe you don’t remember.’

He made an odd grimace. ‘Sure I remember everything about it. She wasn’t in work that day, you know. She’d been off sick.’ He scratched the top of his head. A balding man even in 1993, he now looked old, and tired, and portly. No wedding ring on his stubby finger, she noticed. There was a sad little model Santa Claus on the filing cabinet behind him, the whole room dingy and tea-stained.

‘Did she seem strange before she went – did you notice anything weird?’

He shook his head, and the small hiccup of hope she’d felt quickly subsided again.
Stupid
. He didn’t know anything either. ‘Nothing, pet. She was grand, just like always.’

‘Colin . . .’ She leaned forward. ‘In the file, there was some suggestion that her disappearance might have been to do with the work you did.’

‘The Republican POWs, you mean?’ POWs, he called them. Terrorists, others would say. In Northern Ireland, words had real and fatal consequences.

‘Yes. Were you involved with any cases like that?’

He rearranged his tie, which was red and had dogs on it. ‘I was the solicitor for a few local boys accused of paramilitary involvement, yes.’

‘And she worked on those cases?’

He frowned. ‘The police back in the day – they tried to say maybe she took some documents, some statements relating to the clients, confidential things like that – and she showed them to people.’

‘What people?’

He spoke reluctantly, lowering his voice in that way you learned to do when you’d lived in Northern Ireland through the worst of the Troubles. ‘Special Branch. You remember the Army barracks outside town – they’d intelligence officers based there, who’d have given their right arms to see some of the documents we had. But I knew she’d never have done that. She was a professional woman. I trusted her.’