A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4) (6 page)

Chapter Nine

‘This is the one you want?’ The wee lad who ran the storage facility was about eighteen, in a green polo shirt that bit into the painful acne on his neck.

‘Yeah.’ Coughing on the dust, Paula stepped into the unit. ‘Thanks, I’ll be grand here.’

He went, his feet clanging on the cold stone floors. Down below, he was playing the local radio station, Radio Ballyterrin, with important breaking news such as a herd of cattle getting loose on the road, and a suspicious package being blown up by Bomb Disposal. Northern Ireland was that kind of mixed-up place.

Paula had been given permission to access the archives earlier that evening, by an unnaturally helpful Willis Campbell. He’d said, ‘It’s hard to credit it. This other case happened on the same day, thirty years back?’

‘Thirty-two. I need to get the file out of storage, check a few things.’

He’d waved her on. ‘Yes, yes, do what you must. Oh, Dr Maguire?’

‘Yes.’ She’d paused, hating herself for adding: ‘Sir.’

‘I hear you get good results. I also hear you think the rules don’t apply to you.’ She said nothing. ‘I’d like to see more of the former, less of the latter, please. Then we’ll get along just fine, won’t we?’

‘I’m sure we will.’ She paused again, thinking –
Oh, Guy
. ‘Sir.’

‘Lovely.’ Then he’d added, as if remembering something he’d seen in a management manual: ‘You’re doing a good job, Dr Maguire. Carry on.’

But she wasn’t, she thought now, seeing the piles of archive boxes, labelled in what looked like Avril’s neat handwriting.
Women 30–45.
Yvonne would be in the box marked
Women
18–29.
A safe one, where Paula wasn’t likely to accidentally find her mother’s file. Of course, she had a copy of it in the desk at home. She hadn’t opened it in two years, but all the same it was there, while life went on around it. A nasty little secret on the underside of everything.

No, she wasn’t doing a good job. Alice had already been lost a day, and that meant the window for finding a missing person was closing. And with Alice’s background, suicide was the most likely thing. But why no body? Had she gone off somewhere alone to die, like an animal? And what of the strange coincidence about Yvonne? Paula found the right box, labelled
1970–90
(thank God for Avril; policing’s gain was admin’s loss), and pulled it out, grunting with the effort.

Paula read the file sitting on a squashy pile of boxes, by the dim light of the unit’s bare bulb. Soon she forgot about the cheerless surroundings, and the chill of the concrete walls. She was back in 1981, the year of her birth, and feeling it again – the first time in so long – the rush, the need to find and bring home the lost. Yvonne O’Neill, she noted, did indeed have a look of Alice Morgan. The fiancé who’d died had been the only man in her life, according to the RUC. No boyfriends, not even many friends, just her teaching job, among the same nuns who’d once been her family, and the invalid mother she’d gone back to every night. Yvonne had helped out with Girl Guides, visited sick neighbours. A good girl, you’d say. Paula looked at the old grainy photo of Yvonne, smiling, her hair falling in pale waves. Someone else had been cropped out of it – an engagement photo, maybe. There was a funeral order of service in the file too, the front reading
David Alan Magee, 1 May 1981
. A picture on that of a young man in a denim shirt, also smiling. Paula fitted the two together, the edges making one photo, David’s arm slotting in place around Yvonne’s shoulder. So it wasn’t long after her fiancé’s death, the disappearance. Him dead. Her gone.

She ran a finger over the signature on one report in the file –
Patrick Maguire.
Her father. He’d remember this case – like her, he never let go of the ones he couldn’t find. She took the file and locked up the cold little room. Full of names. The ones they would maybe never find.

Paula couldn’t get used to her dad living at Pat’s. She’d been going to this house all her life, since her mother had taken her as a child, whispering admonishments to keep quiet and be good. Then as a teenager, the odd time for parties or Christmas visits, keeping an eye out for Aidan, who hadn’t uttered a word to her at all between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. When suddenly they’d been going out and she’d been round here all the time to sneak into his room, burrowing her hands under his school shirt, gulping in the smell of him as if he was the air she breathed.

She was remembering all this as Pat came to the door, slowly, visible through the panes of coloured glass. ‘Ah pet, there you are. She’s asleep. Will I wake her?’

‘Ah no, I wanted a word with Dad anyway. Leave her be a while.’ Pat was looking tired, Paula thought. Dark circles under her eyes, a stiffness in her shoulders. She hoped it wasn’t from running around after two-year-old Maggie all day, who was currently into everything she shouldn’t be. PJ helped, but his old leg injury meant he couldn’t do the running, stop Maggie from slipping out an open door or feeding her sandwich into the video player or her fingers into the electric socket (really, it was exhausting).

‘He’s in the lounge. I’ll make you some tea – I haven’t baked, but I’m sure you’re not eating biscuits anyway, with the big day so soon!’

Paula was, in fact, still eating all the biscuits she could get her hands on – the lack of a functioning kitchen didn’t lend itself to healthy eating – but she let it go. PJ was in front of the horse racing, his leg propped up on a pouffe, the
Irish Times
crossword open in front of him with his glasses folded on it. Somewhere between now and Paula leaving for university – her eighteen, him mid-forties – her father had aged. ‘Well, pet.’ He took the glasses off and rearranged some cushions for her to sit down. ‘Where’s Lady Muck?’

‘Having her nap. I’ll leave her for a while yet. Wanted a word with you.’

‘Aye?’ PJ always looked wary at such things. When he’d told her he was marrying Pat, three years ago, and Paula had told him in return about Maggie coming, they’d had a lot of awkward conversations that veered closer to the emotions than PJ, being an Irish man, would have liked.

‘A work thing. An old case that’s come up again.’

‘Oh, right so.’ Relief. Work was safe in a way the topics of her mother and her child were not.

‘Did you work on Yvonne O’Neill’s disappearance? Remember that?’

It took PJ a moment. ‘Oh aye, the wee blonde girl. God, that was a bad summer. We were up to our eyes in riots and shootings. The hunger strikes, you know.’ He turned his eyes on her, suddenly alert. ‘What’ve you found? Did we miss something?’

‘No, no. It’s just she went missing from the same place Alice Morgan did. You know, this new case.’

PJ nodded. ‘Aye, I never thought. Crocknashee church. Strange old place. But that was thirty-odd years back. You’re thinking there’s a connection?’

‘No idea.’ Paula sank back in Pat’s squashy armchair. Once, in here, in 1999, when Pat had gone into the kitchen to make tea, she and Aidan had pressed themselves into the carpet, kissing with a blind fury. She blinked, trying not to let the memory show on her face. Even the ornaments and pictures were the same – the photo of Aidan’s father, John, holding the boy on his knee. 1983. Three years before he’d been gunned down in his office, in front of Aidan. Pat and John’s wedding picture, all seventies hair flicks and sideburns, had been tactfully taken down, replaced by one of Pat and PJ on their own wedding day two years back. Paula in a bridesmaid’s dress on one side, hugely pregnant, and Aidan on the other, ignoring her. And of course there were photos of Maggie on every possible surface. Maybe the only grandchild Pat would ever have, even if she wasn’t exactly . . . ‘So was there anyone?’ she asked her father. ‘You know, someone you suspected?’

PJ was thinking. ‘I was working with Hamilton then. We were still partners. You could always try him.’

Paula nodded. She hadn’t seen Bob Hamilton much since he’d retired two years ago, something she’d mistakenly had a hand in precipitating. She could have gone to visit, of course, but it was always there, the vague panicked feeling that Bob, who’d also been lead investigator on her mother’s case, knew more than he’d ever told her about it. And that whatever he knew, it was something that would shatter Paula and her father, bury the shoots of happiness they’d found for themselves in the rubble.

‘The fella who owns the land,’ said PJ, as if running through a database in his head.

‘Anderson Garrett? Yes, he’s odd. I think he had an alibi, though, did he not?’

‘He was a strange one.’ PJ tapped the paper for emphasis. ‘He’d an alibi, though, right enough – he was in his work in town all day. He couldn’t have got back to the church.’

‘Why not?’

‘See the date? Well, one of the IRA head honchos was killed that day. Shot in his house, here in Ballyterrin. Whole town was shut down from lunchtime on, riots, petrol bombs, you name it. I was in uniform, couldn’t get home to see if you were even OK. You were only wee, and—’ He’d come dangerously close to mentioning her mother there.

‘Garrett’s alibi held then?’

‘Aye. We checked with the other solicitor he worked with – guy called Andrew Philips, if I remember right. He backed it up – Garrett was there all day, he said, nine to seven. It’s the Garrett family’s firm, see, though I don’t know if Anderson ever did a stroke of work in it. Doesn’t need to work now, mind. Oakdale College bought the family land not long after Yvonne went missing, paid them a fortune, so he hardly needs to.’

‘This Andrew Philips – is he still about?’

PJ shook his head. ‘Died in 2003, I heard. Heart attack – seemed a nervy kind of fella.’

‘So there’s no one who can prove it?’

‘Garrett’s ma backed it up as well, he’d been out all day. And Yvonne was safe at home until well after two. Garrett never made it back till near midnight, he said – roadblocks. Yvonne’s ma had already reported her gone by then. So that was that.’

‘That was that.’ Paula made a note anyway. Andrew Philips. All these names from the past, shut away in dull brown folders for over thirty-two years. Suddenly coming to the light, like things crawling away when you lifted up a stone. She wondered if Alice had heard. Did she know another girl had gone missing, and that her boss had been the chief suspect?

Alice

When they come into the room, Charlotte turns off. I don’t know how she does it. It’s like flicking a switch, no light in her eyes. Charlotte is past the point of wanting to escape. It’s a battle now, them against her. They sweep in, the man and the woman. He’s in his white coat, brisk bad-Daddy air about him. I start to shake on the couch – I can’t help it. She’s all starched up, hair pulled back, steady at his elbow.
Yes. No. Three bags full.
It makes me sick.

Alice
, he says. To the woman, not me. She snaps my wrist, moving me to the scales. Huge things, like for cows at market. She’s rough and I stub my bare toes but I don’t make a sound. I know Charlotte will notice, and approve. I step up on the horrible wobbly things and he’s so close. I can smell the old-man breath under his aftershave. I think he drinks. He looks me over like a dog at the vet, calling out things to her, which she writes down. I refuse to hear the numbers. I refuse to hear how fat they’ve made me. He feels down my arms for hair growth, and in my mouth for the gum recession that would mean I’ve been puking up. His hands move over my ribs and down. He stops at my legs. I close my eyes.

Alice. You’re bleeding.

I act stupid.
Oh?

Yes.
I feel his gloved hands on my thigh, moving up the line of the blood that has come down. I close my eyes, bite my lip so hard it must be bleeding too.
Alice, have your periods started again?

I don’t know. I never have any.

I’d be surprised if menstruation recommenced at this bodyweight
. To the woman again. Not me. I catch Charlotte’s eye and there’s a glimpse of her back again. We’re winning. We beat them. But of course, no, we’re not. We will never win. He pulls my knickers aside and puts his finger inside me, right up inside. In me. I nearly scream.
I thought it didn’t look like menstrual blood. For reference, girls, that’s much darker and thicker. I doubt either of you have seen much of it.

Charlotte is suddenly alive.
You stupid fucker! You’ve never had a period, you never will! Stop telling us what it’s like!

He smiles at the woman.
Would you please restrain Miss Yu? And be careful, because I think we’ll find some cutting implement about her person.

They go at her like she’s an animal, and the energy is back, the strength. She’s cornered. The woman reaches for her wrist to put her in restraints, and I know it’s the hand with the razor in it, and I almost pass out –
go, go, do it, Charlotte.
And she does. A flick of her hand and the woman is howling, and there’s blood pattering to the floor. Big red drops of it. Hey, guess what, we all bleed the same.

He’s on it, of course – the drawer, the needle, Charlotte’s eyes closing – but it’s enough. It’s enough to see the rage in his eyes, and hear the woman sobbing, as if her face was anything nice to start with.
Do stop crying
, he says. He looks at me as if he’d like to sedate me too, but I’m meek as a lamb. From somewhere in my deep self, dry as a bare riverbed, I find some tears.
She cut me, sir, she made me.

I know it’s what Charlotte would want. It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s the words in your head that count. And mine are saying
I’m going to get away from you, no matter what it takes.

Chapter Ten

Being stuck was a common feature in families of the long-missing. Instead of moving to a new place with new memories, people often refused to leave, waiting fruitlessly in case one day the lost person came walking in the door.
Hello, did you miss me?
Paula knew it well – as an RUC officer her father should have moved around every few years, for safety’s sake, but they’d stayed in the last place Margaret had been seen. Yvonne O’Neill was another one of the lost. She’d gone out one summer’s day to help at the church that had stood on her doorstep all her life. The height of a warm day, where it begins to collapse, exhausted, under its own heat. A haze rising up from the ground. Tarmac melting on the road. It was quicker to go the back way to the church, but that would mean passing the Garretts’ house. So she went by the main road. In a yellow dress, carrying white roses from her mother’s garden, wrapped in the day’s newspaper. Planning to leave them at the shrine. Walking up the dusty path, the yew trees silent overhead. The flowers were found in the church, arranged in vases, but the newspaper had never turned up, and neither had Yvonne.

And now Paula and Corry were calling on her mother, stirring up memories again. Dolores O’Neill was over eighty, but still lived alone in the farmhouse. The surrounding land had been sold off over the years, and the livestock too, but still she would not go, waiting for her missing child. You could even see the church from the kitchen window, a few hundred yards down the road and up the stone path. No distance at all. But far enough to get lost in.

‘This is great, Mrs O’Neill. You didn’t need to go to such trouble,’ said Paula.

She’d made a full farmhouse lunch for them, sliced ham, brown bread, hard-boiled eggs from her own chickens, two types of cake, a big pot of tea. She stood at the sink in her slippers and housecoat, apparently not planning on eating herself. A walking stick leaned against the door, and Paula noticed the kettle was wrapped around with insulation – she knew Mrs O’Neill had MS. ‘No trouble. It’s a long time since anyone came asking about our Yvonne. In them days it was all big strapping men from the police.’

Paula heaped her plate with ham and cheese, then narrowed her eyes at slim Helen Corry, who sighed and took some sliced egg.

Mrs O’Neill was fiddling with the tea towel. ‘I don’t know what you’d find after all these years. Could there be some DNA or any of that?’ She spent a lot of time watching
CSI
, she’d told them.

‘Possibly. But the search was thorough back then, from what we can see.’ Corry ate some ham. ‘The reason we called to see you is actually the Alice Morgan case.’

‘Aye. She come to the door a while back, asking for some water. The cottage pump was playing up, she said. I had a shock. You’ve seen Yvonne, her pictures?’ She indicated a school photo on the wall, of a slight, fair girl who could have been a younger Alice. ‘Short wee thing, with this great big jumper on her, even though the sun’s splitting the stones.’

Corry nodded. ‘There is a resemblance. You’re saying she came to see you?’

‘We talked the odd time. She’d come in to say hello if she was walking past the place. I’d give her a good tea like this.’

Corry paused with a slice of buttered bread in her hand. ‘I’m sorry – you’re saying Alice ate when she was here?’

‘Oh aye, every pick. She’s a good appetite for such a wee girl. Must have one of them fast metabolisms.’

Paula looked at Corry. Strange. ‘And what did you talk about?’ she asked.

‘This and that. She asked me about Yvonne and I told her – you know, it’s a long time since someone wanted to hear, and I like to talk about her. All my ones and our Mary, that’s Yvonne’s sister, they’re sick of it, I think. No news in over thirty years. They’ve just given up. But wee Alice, she’d ask me a lot of things. Did Yvonne ever go in for fasting – of course, I said, we all fasted back then, on holy days of obligation. So lax now. You know what Lough Derg is?’

Paula nodded, and Corry looked blank. ‘I’ll explain later,’ Paula said to her. ‘Yvonne went there?’

‘Aye. Trying to make up for what she did, giving up her vocation. I told her God wouldn’t blame her for leaving the convent – married love is sacred too. But she said when David died – you know he was killed in a car crash, God rest him – that was her being punished.’

Paula knew the police had speculated about suicide back then – but then where was her body? In some boggy ditch or crevasse?

Mrs O’Neill said, ‘Alice asked about the hunger strikes as well. And did I think it was connected, to Yvonne? Because of all those riots in town that day. I said not at all. If the Provos or the UVF shot her to make a point, they’d have left her body, wouldn’t they?’ She said it matter-of-factly, and it was close to Paula’s own thoughts on why the IRA probably hadn’t taken her mother, despite everything. They generally wanted people to know what they’d done. But you never could be sure. Terrorists were not a reliable source, after all.

‘What did you think, Mrs O’Neill?’ Corry cut a slice of cheese.

She sipped from a china cup of tea. ‘I always remember it. She went out after lunch, and I said bye. She wanted to lay some flowers in church for the strikers – you know, they were dying. It was an awful time. Then next thing I looked up and saw it was near four, and her not back. And I thought – that’s strange. And you start to worry, just a wee bit. You tell yourself it’ll be grand, she’ll walk in the door any minute. Then she still doesn’t come. I went down to the church, she wasn’t there. I even went over to the Garretts’, though I was far from welcome there. Wanted me to sell a bit of our land, see. On and on at me they were. Course they got it in the end, once Yvonne went. Anyway, the son’s car was outside, but nobody answered. So I came back.’ She took a sip. ‘At first I hoped she’d run off – maybe she’d go and be a nun somewhere else, where nobody knew her. I’d see her in Spain . . . Seville, maybe. We went there once, when she was wee, for Holy Week. All the white hoods and the chanting. She’d have liked that, she loved all the incense and singing in church. It was why she went down there, to Saint Blannad. She loved that place – said the land was sacred. She didn’t like the idea of selling up to the university, wouldn’t let me do it.’ Sip. ‘But now I think someone took her and killed her.’ Another sip. ‘I just hope it was fast.’

Corry was speaking gently. ‘And Alice – Mrs O’Neill, did it occur to you they might be connected, the two cases?’

‘No.’ She looked confused. ‘Alice ran off, did she not? That’s what her friend told me.’

Corry stopped. Set down the piece of bread in her hand, slow and measured. ‘What friend?’

‘The young fella. The boy who called in yesterday. Wanted to know if she’d told me she was going. I said no, but he said she did it all the time, she’d come back.’

Paula and Corry exchanged a look. And then Corry explained about the blood in the church, and watched as the woman’s face changed, and she shakily set down her cup.

‘Mother of God. Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph. That poor wean.’

Corry was on her feet. ‘Sit down there, Mrs O’Neill.’ She pulled a chair for her. ‘I’m sorry we’ve given you a shock.’

It wasn’t right, Paula thought, pouring out more tea and stirring in sugar. The woman should have her daughter there. Things should be in their proper place. None of this was right.

‘Blood,’ Yvonne’s mother said, when she could speak. ‘Do you think someone hurt her, wee Alice? In the same place . . . Mother of God.’

‘We don’t know,’ said Corry. ‘It’s true Alice does have a history of running away, but because of the blood, we’re treating it suspiciously. And the relic’s gone too, of course.’

‘And you think my Yvonne . . . it’s the same person? Who would it be? There’s nobody round here; we know every man, woman and child on the land.’

‘We don’t know. But we’re looking into it. We just wanted to keep you updated.’

‘Aye,’ she said, distracted. ‘Aye, aye, look into it, please.’

‘Mrs O’Neill?’ Corry clicked open her phone. ‘If you’re feeling all right in a minute, would you look at this picture for me and tell me if it’s the boy who came?’

She hunted for her glasses, found them on her head, then peered at it. ‘Oh – I don’t think so, no.’

‘No?’

‘I think he had darker hair.’

Corry gave Paula a look, then scrolled through. ‘How about this one?’

More peering. She gripped the phone, holding it away from her. ‘Oh – I think that’s him, yes. He had glasses. Well-spoken.’

Paula leaned over to see the picture. Dermot Healy.

Corry put the phone away ‘And – I’m sorry, this is the last question, I promise. Could you tell us if you think you’re missing a photo of Yvonne? One where she’s at her graduation?’

‘Well, I don’t know . . . Wait there a minute.’ She left the room shakily, leaning on her stick, and they heard her open the door of the living room. For a moment there was silence. Then she came back. In her old hands she was holding a picture frame. Empty. ‘I don’t understand it. The picture’s always been in there, but I don’t be in that room much these days.’

‘Mrs O’Neill . . . I think we’ve found the picture.’ And Corry explained, as delicately as she could, about finding the picture in the pool of blood. By the end of it, Yvonne’s mother was weeping. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Corry. ‘Believe me, we’re going to do everything we can to find out what happened. I know they tried in 1981, but this new information—’

‘I always knew she was dead,’ said her mother hoarsely. ‘They said maybe she’d run off, gone with some fella . . . but she never would have. I always had this feeling, in my bones, that she was nearby. If only I could just get her, put her to rest.’

‘Like I said, we’ll do everything we can to—’

‘Please.’ She tried to steady herself. ‘Please. I know it’s been more than thirty years. But please, I just want to know where she is, before I die. I just want to put her to rest.’

‘I promise we’ll try everything,’ said Corry. And Paula knew that she meant it.

‘But it doesn’t make sense.’ They were walking to the car, Corry stepping over mud in her good heeled sandals. ‘These kids are barely twenty. I’m surprised they would even know about Yvonne’s case.’

Paula was struggling with it too. ‘So why did Dermot come to see Mrs O’Neill? He must have gone after we spoke to him.’

‘Well, maybe Alice told her something important and he wanted to know what it was. Or maybe he wanted us to think there’s a connection to Yvonne – get him off the hook, since he wasn’t even born in 1981.’ Corry sighed. ‘God knows. But I’d certainly like to know what he was doing out here yesterday. Let’s get back to the station.’