The Dead Ground (4 page)

‘I can’t believe it happened here.’ Saoirse was shaking her head. ‘It’s so busy today – how could they have got out with him?’

‘I don’t know. We think they just walked straight out. I mean— Oh.’ Paula stopped.

‘You OK?’ Saoirse was up, doctor face on. ‘You’ve gone green.’

‘Yeah, I just—’ Oh God, it was happening again. She gestured blindly. ‘Have you a bin, quick?’

Saoirse snatched her small metal bin, and Paula threw up in it, a neat gob of bile landing on top of a tissue. No food in her left to come up.

Saoirse was watching her strangely. ‘Are you sick?’

‘I’m OK.’ Paula wiped her mouth with shaking hands.

‘Has this happened before?’

‘A few times.’

‘Since everything?’

Saoirse knew Paula had been having trouble getting over that night the previous month. She’d called in several times while Paula was recovering from the shock and bruises she’d sustained. Bringing chocolates, cheer, kindness. Saoirse did all these things properly, in her quiet way. Her mammy had reared her right.

Saoirse was still watching, and Paula could feel it spurting up in her. Not vomit this time, but the urge to tell. ‘I saw Aidan,’ she said. ‘Upstairs. Just there now. I ran away.’

‘Not
again
. What’s with you two now?’

‘Nothing! We just – we had words.’ In fact the lack of words was the problem. ‘We’ve not really spoken since – you know, everything.’ Everything meaning that night in the lonely farmhouse, fireworks outside, gunshots inside. She pushed the memories away.

‘Why not? I thought he was helping you with that case.’

‘He was. But something happened with us just before, and we never really talked about it.’

‘You slept together?’

Paula was embarrassed; how stupid. They were thirty, not twelve. ‘Little bit.’

Saoirse sat down on her desk, hands in her pockets. ‘So?’

‘So, I’ve been boking my ring up ever since.’

The shift in her friend’s expression was very subtle. You’d have to know her very well to notice the tightening round her mouth. ‘I see. Well, that’s great news.’

‘Is it?’

‘Is it not?’ Saoirse frowned. ‘I know you and Aidan have your differences, but there must be something there, if you keep going back. You were eighteen when all this started and it’s still going on.’

‘You’re right. There is
something
. I just don’t know what. Thing is – I’m not actually sure he’s the father. There was someone else. Round the same time. Ah—’ she indicated a vague upwards direction. ‘The, ah, the Inspector.’

‘Brooking! Jesus, but he’s
old
!’

‘He’s forty!’

‘He’s married!’

‘Separated!’ Though actually she wasn’t even sure if that was true now. They’d been getting a divorce, she’d thought, at the time, but since then she’d had a run-in with Guy’s wife Tess, who was very definitely not happy about the fact Paula had slept with him.

‘Right.’ Saoirse tapped her small foot on the floor. ‘You know, you
can
actually buy condoms in Ireland these days.’

‘I know! Christ, sometimes they break, OK?’ Not that she’d even used one with Aidan, carried away with lust and fear and sadness. God, she was an eejit.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. What can I do?’

‘Keep it. Don’t keep it. Choices are pretty limited.’

Paula recoiled slightly, but then leaned into the blow. What had she expected, coming to her Catholic friend, who’d been trying for five years to have what Paula had stumbled upon after a few stupid nights? ‘If I didn’t want to . . . what can I do? I’m sorry. I don’t know who else to ask.’

Saoirse sighed and opened her desk drawer. ‘This is the best place to go.’ She passed over a green-coloured leaflet. ‘They’ll be able to tell you what the options are.’

Ballyterrin Women’s Centre
, Paula read.
Choices for women. Dr Alison Bates, owner/operator.
A picture of a severe-looking woman, grey hair pulled back, white coat on. ‘But – it’s illegal here.’

‘Duh. She doesn’t do them here, obviously, but she’ll refer you to England. She’s English herself, actually. Been over here for years. Drives both sides mad, you can imagine. The hard-line Taigs and Presbyterians – you see them both on the pavement most days outside the clinic, blocking the way.’

Paula could feel the shiny paper between her fingers. ‘I don’t know if I – I don’t know what I want.’
Abortion
. She couldn’t even say the word.

Saoirse moved her mouse to bring her computer to life. She seemed to feel the need to do things, offer solutions, be a doctor and not Paula’s friend. ‘I can make you an appointment. Do you want me to make you an antenatal appointment too? That way you’ll have options.’

Options. Choices. That was what everyone said. So why did she feel she’d no choice at all, like walking down a corridor with only one locked door?

‘Um, no. Not yet.’

‘But you need to—’

‘I can’t, Seersh. Not yet.’ She put the paper carefully into the pocket of her wool coat. She felt unbearably ashamed. ‘I appreciate it, though. I mean, especially with—’

Saoirse stood up abruptly. ‘How far along are you? I mean, at a guess.’

‘About two months, I think.’ In fact she knew exactly. It was either eight weeks or it was six, depending on the man.

‘Hmm. Decide soon, will you? Either way it’s only going to get worse.’

When Paula got back from the hospital she felt exhausted, bone-tired and cold. The CCTV had apparently been viewed, and revealed that the abductor had left the building immediately after the incident, so when the exits were opened she thought she might as well go home and actually follow Guy’s instructions for once. Her father was in the kitchen, putting the kettle on, a Tupperware container of iced biscuits open on the counter.

‘Pat make those?’ Paula’s depleted stomach growled.

‘Aye,’ said PJ Maguire, hobbling on his crutches. An old injury had left his leg stiff, and he’d broken it badly again some months before, the plaster just off. ‘You never went out in suede boots in that snow, did you?’

Paula rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah. So?’

‘You’ll catch your death. You were down at the hospital, I take it.’

Paula dropped her coat on the stairs and lifted two biscuits. She’d long since accepted that her father, who’d been in the RUC for thirty years, knew everything that went on in the town. ‘It was on the news, was it?’

He swallowed his tea. ‘Aye, God love them. It’s a terrible thing.’

‘This kind of case, you’ve seen it before in Ireland?’ She accepted the thick brown mug of tea he offered and dipped a biscuit into it.

‘Once or twice.’ He stumped over to the table. ‘If it’s like this, a wee baby gone, it’s usually a woman. They only want to love the wee one, but sad thing is, sometimes it dies since they’ve no idea what they’re doing. You need to find him soon.’

‘They want a profile already,’ Paula sighed, pushing back her red hair, where snowflakes had settled in the short journey from the car to the door. It was going to lie overnight, she thought. ‘It’s all very well they ask for one, but then if it’s in any way out they eat you for breakfast.’

‘Profiles,’ PJ scoffed. ‘Common sense is what it is.’

Paula didn’t say this meant a lot of her job would be pointless. She crunched a biscuit. ‘These are nice. Thanks to Pat I’ve put on about a stone since I’ve been here.’ Immediately she wished she hadn’t drawn attention to it. If anything she’d lost weight, with all the fun puking she’d been doing.

‘She was asking after you today. You should call in with her.’

‘Hmm.’ Paula loved Pat O’Hara dearly – her mother’s best friend, she’d known the woman all her life. But Pat was also Aidan’s mother, and that was something Paula just couldn’t cope with right now.

‘I—’ She was going to say something else about the case, ask her dad’s opinion, when she felt the biscuits make an unwelcome reappearance. Christ, not again. ‘I – just – hang on.’ Hands over her mouth, she bolted up the stairs and retched on her knees before the toilet. When the nausea released its grip, she leaned her head against the porcelain of the nasty lime-green bath.

‘You OK, pet?’ PJ was calling up the stairs, worried.

‘Yes.’ Her voice sounded weak and weedy. ‘I just – I had something bad for lunch.’ How many people was she going to say this to today?

She felt his silence all the way up the stairs. PJ wasn’t a man you could easily lie to. ‘Well, come down and I’ll make you a hot water bottle.’

Paula closed her eyes, thinking of Guy Brooking, so tall and straight-backed in his grey suit, striding down corridors, handing out orders. Of Aidan O’Hara, in his ripped jeans and Springsteen T-shirt, pen behind his ear, chasing stories. Wishing she’d never set eyes on the pair of them.

Chapter Three

‘Morning, everyone. Briefing packs.’

As the staff of the MPRU trooped into the office early the next day, kicking dirty snow off their shoes and unwinding scarves from cold necks, it was no surprise to see Guy there already, shirtsleeves up, briefing sheets printed out and neatly stapled in a pile on the conference room table. Since his lapse at the end of October, when his own teenage daughter had run away from home and been thought kidnapped, Guy had seemed keen to reassert his authority and race through the backlog of missing persons’ cases the team had been tasked with clearing. It had been a month of long days, going through files, chasing up old leads, interviewing slightly stunned families of the long-missing, jumping on any new case that came up, even though they were mostly schoolkids who’d fought with their parents and were back after a night. Nothing high-profile until the missing baby, and sometimes Paula wondered were they doing more harm than good. If they couldn’t find these people, why stir up the past, like poking a stick into a murky pond?

Sitting down, she noticed a dark stain on the carpet, and tried not to meet anyone’s eyes. Please God she’d manage to hold onto the contents of her stomach today. The others were settling into their seats, Avril ready with her laptop, Fiacra fiddling with his iPod, Gerard drumming his fingers on the table in impatience, while Bob Hamilton blew his nose on a cotton hankie. Their small team had been in place only a few months, but faced a daily barrage of funding issues, local hostility, and competition from the regular police force, the PSNI, a sort of slick reanimation of the old RUC.

Guy had put up a picture of the lost person on the projector, as was his habit. It focussed the team on what really mattered. ‘This is the only photo so far taken of Alek Pachek,’ he said briskly. ‘The father took it on his mobile minutes after the child was born.’ In the blurry shot, the baby’s eyes were shut, mouth open in a wail. He was clasped in someone’s arms – his mother’s, probably. Paula recognised the pink fabric of her pyjamas. ‘Can you give us an update on the PSNI’s actions, Sergeant Hamilton?’

It always took Bob Hamilton just a moment too long to have the facts to hand. An old-school officer of the former RUC, he was supposed to take over the unit as a putting-out-to-pasture role when Guy eventually went back to London. Whenever that might be. ‘Eh . . . right. After the incident, the hospital was sealed and searched, so it was. The child and his abductor had clearly left the vicinity, so it was subsequently reopened. The cameras in the lobby showed the attacker exiting the area into the car park. So far nothing has been reported from traffic cameras and no one on the ward saw anything happen. Miss Wright has the footage, I believe.’ You’d never know from his dry delivery that Avril was in fact his niece. She caught Paula’s eye and smiled fleetingly. Typical Bob.

Guy waited; that was it from Bob, apparently, so he took charge again. ‘Now it seems Serious Crime have jumped the gun on this one already, but I want our full resources put to use anyway – Avril, let’s look in the files for any similar cases. Chances are they might have done this sort of thing before.’ Avril nodded her blond head, typing fast at her laptop.

‘Look for attempted abductions too,’ Paula put in. ‘Often they need to work up to something like this. Practice, almost.’

Guy switched off the projector. ‘I’m afraid it looks as if we’ll be playing catch-up on this case to up the hill, but let’s do what we can.’ ‘Up the hill’ was their shorthand for the PSNI station across town, Corry’s domain. Paula understood Guy’s annoyance. The unit’s funding was never secure, and they had to prove there was a need for an all-Ireland body to coordinate cases, someone to move quickly to search, to seek, and hopefully to find. If Helen Corry was bogarting all the new cases, that wouldn’t happen.

Avril Wright raised a timid hand. ‘Do you want to see the CCTV, sir? I got it from the hospital.’ She spun her laptop. They were looking at black-and-white footage of the Maternity corridor. ‘That’s the Pacheks’ room.’ On screen, a tall woman in a nurse’s uniform approached the room confidently. For a moment she paused at the door, then opened it and went in. A minute later she exited, wheeling the baby in a cot. The father had held the door open for his son’s kidnapper. Then the woman vanished down the corridor. Her face was turned away from the camera the whole time.

‘Now this.’ Avril clicked again. ‘This was a shot of the waiting area on the second floor. That’s just outside the ward. Look in the corner there.’

At first it was difficult to see, but the same figure was now rooting behind a chair. Then she quickly slipped the baby out of his cot and into what looked like a black shoulder bag. Like a caught fish. No one seemed to notice. In a corner, a man argued with the receptionist.

‘She put him in a
bag
?’ Paula stared at the screen.

‘Yeah. Now look here.’ The front doors of the hospital sliding back. The woman hurrying out, bag held close to her body. Avril froze the screen. ‘We lose her after that. Basically she was out in about two minutes. She went down the stairs, not the lift. She didn’t park in the car park or anything. She took him and was gone before anyone knew it.’

‘She’d have had a car though,’ said Fiacra thoughtfully. ‘Babies are heavy enough to carry, like. And there’s snow on the ground.’