‘We do need to prove the blood came from Carly, so I can put all my resources onto this. Otherwise, you see, we just have a teenage girl going off on her own with no sign of a struggle, and as my colleague here will tell you we get about ten of those a day.’
‘But she doesn’t know anyone,’ Mairead said again. ‘I shouldn’t have brought her here. Why did I bring her? Oh God.’
Paula said, ‘In most cases we find them again, safe and sound, girls her age. She knew whoever this was and let them in, drank tea with them. That’s a good sign.’ In some ways it was, ruling out random abduction, but Paula also knew what the stats said: a girl Carly’s age was much more likely to be injured or killed by someone she knew, someone she’d willingly opened the door to. She’d seen it a thousand times.
Mairead was nodding reluctantly. ‘OK. If it’ll find her.’
‘Thank you,’ Corry said. ‘I’ll arrange for someone to come and do it now.’
Mairead’s hands were full of shredded tissue. ‘There’s something else. Her age . . . she’s not nineteen, like I said. She’s twenty. That’s why I left, you see.’
‘You were pregnant?’ Corry asked. ‘You ran away because of that?’
She nodded. So Mairead had been carrying Carly when she left Northern Ireland. That explained a lot – why she’d run when she did, why her mother wouldn’t have had her back. But why had she lied, made them think Carly was conceived in Liverpool? ‘I knew Mammy wouldn’t let me keep her, see.’ It was easy to forget, in this new permissive Northern Ireland which had held the first same-sex wedding in the UK, that even in the nineties this was routine, unplanned pregnancies being adopted away, tidied up. Mairead’s mammy had been an unforgiving woman; that was obvious even now. ‘So yes, I ran away.’ Her voice was defiant. ‘I couldn’t give my baby up. I just couldn’t.’
‘I see. Who’s Carly’s father, then? Not Mr Jones, I take it?’ If he even existed.
Mairead just shook her head. She wasn’t going to answer that. Maybe she didn’t know. ‘There’s no da. Just me and her. And we’re fine that way.’
‘I’m sure you are. Just get in the way, don’t they, men?’ Corry gave her a woman-to-woman smile, but it wasn’t returned. Mairead had shut down again, as if a veil had drawn over her. ‘Mairead . . . it’s good you’ve told us this. If there’s anything else you haven’t been honest about, we need to know. The blood tells us Carly likely didn’t want to leave, even if she let the person in willingly. They may have hurt her.’
‘You said it wasn’t much! Why would there be blood? Oh God, if he . . .’ She stopped. Corry and Paula exchanged a lightning-quick glance.
Corry spoke in measured tones. ‘Mairead. If you have any idea who Carly is with, you need to tell us. We can get DNA off the second cup, maybe. We’ll be able to prove they were there, whoever it is.’
‘I . . .’
‘Mairead. Come on now. We know you made several phone calls to the South the other day. We know you’re not telling us everything.’
Mairead’s face crumpled like her tissue. ‘She asked me all the time about the family. She’s no da, so . . . I think she wanted more than just me. To find her da maybe, too. Her real da.’ She saw the look they gave her. ‘You guessed it. I did marry a fella called Jones, but he was a waster, met him in a bar one night. Just wanted to give Carly another name, not Wallace. He’s nothing to her, she’s never even met him.’
‘So she went looking for more.’
‘Yeah. A family. Maybe she contacted one of them.’
‘Your sister?’ asked Paula. Perhaps this was why Mairead was so sure the dead girl was not Aisling. If they’d been in contact, that proved she was alive.
But she shook her head. ‘No. Not her.’
Corry said, ‘You called your brother Ciaran the other day too.’ Her tone was neutral, non-judgemental. Mairead must have her reasons for not telling them the full story.
‘I . . . Yes. First time we’ve talked in twenty years. He doesn’t know a thing. Didn’t think he would. He’s stuck inside that place. Swore to me he didn’t know how . . . the bodies . . . how they ended up in the ground. Said he’d gone by then himself.’
Corry nodded. ‘He can’t have taken Carly. So you mean it was . . . ?’
‘Yes.’ She seemed to spit the name up into her mouth. ‘Paddy. My brother Patrick. I was ringing around, you see, anyone I could think of that used to know him. Nobody knows a thing. But I think – I think maybe he came for her. I think he has Carly.’
‘Mummy, you know Auntie Seer-sha’s going to have a baby?’ Maggie began conversationally.
‘Yes, pet.’ Back to this topic. She wondered was Saoirse telling people openly. Paula would have expected her to keep it a secret. They were driving back from Saoirse’s house, where she’d been looking after Maggie again while Paula worked late, helping with the search for Carly. You could ask people for favours like that when you lived in Ballyterrin, the town you’d grown up in. Not in London.
Maggie went on. ‘Can I play with the baby?’
‘I’m sure you can, when it’s bigger, but it won’t be here for a while, you know.’ And please God, if there was a God, it would come.
‘Oh.’ Maggie stared out the window for a moment, chewing thoughtfully on the end of her red ponytail. ‘Mummy? Can you get a baby too? I want one.’
Paula almost drove off the road. Not this again. ‘Sorry, pet, we can’t have one right now.’
‘Because you need a daddy for that.’ Maggie sounded sage, and sad.
Paula decided now was not the time to explain you didn’t always need a daddy, strictly speaking. ‘That’s right.’
‘And our daddy is away in the bad place.’
Her hands gripped tight on the steering wheel. Except for that once in London, Maggie hadn’t mentioned her ‘daddy’ – Aidan – for months now. Had Pat and PJ been talking in front of her? ‘Does Auntie Saoirse have nice toys at her house?’ She changed the subject.
That seemed to prompt another worry. ‘Mummy, will the baby play with my My Little Pony castle? Because it’s mine, Mummy.’
‘I think the baby will be too wee for that.’
‘Why can’t we move it to our house?’
Because their current house was a rented flat in London, overlooking the grey lap of the Thames. Home, though it didn’t feel like it. Although she was doing her best to get Maggie away from Ballyterrin and her terrible legacy, being back here just felt right somehow, as if London was a whimsical holiday they’d been on for too long.
‘Why, Mummy?’ she insisted.
‘Just because,’ said Paula, taking refuge in that classic phrase of the harassed parent. ‘Come on, we’re here now.’ She’d pulled up outside Pat’s house, now her father’s too. Where Aidan had grown up. Would she ever get away from all these tangles?
She’d extricated Maggie from her car seat and helped her down when she saw the figure standing in the shadows by the gate. A man, watching them.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Mr Bob!’ Maggie ran towards him, her sharp eyes making out what Paula hadn’t been able to at first – it was Bob Hamilton standing there in the gloom.
‘Oof! Hello, wee pet, how are you?’
‘Mr Bob’ was what she’d taken to calling him, given that Uncle Bob felt wrong and Mr Hamilton wasn’t something she could pronounce. ‘Mr Bob, please can we go to your house and have a biscuit?’
‘Maggie!’ Scandalised, Paula tugged her back. ‘Sorry, Bob. Do you want to come in?’
‘Oh no. I just needed a wee word with you.’
Paula patted Maggie gently towards the door. ‘Run on in to Granny and Granddad, pet. Tell them Mummy’s on the phone.’
‘But you’re not on the phone.’ Maggie narrowed her eyes at this obvious lie.
‘No, but I will be in a minute. You’ll see Mr B
ob at the wedding, won’t you?’ Bob was Avril’s uncle, a fact that still seemed wildly improbable to Paula after so many years of knowing them both. She sensed Bob did not want to come in and say hello to her father, his former partner a hundred years ago, or to Pat, whose husband he’d found shot dead back in 1986. Too many connections in this town, pulling you down.
Maggie trotted off, casting dark backward looks that managed to convey her disapproval at this subterfuge. ‘She’s a lovely wee thing.’ Bob was bundled up in an old-man’s beige anorak, despite the mildness of the evening.
‘Is something the matter?’
‘I saw the news. You’re looking for Paddy Wallace?’
An alert had gone out after Mairead’s confession about her brother, although Paula had misgivings about showing their hand so soon. If he had taken Carly, a man like that, he would have a plan. ‘Yeah. It’s complicated. His niece has gone missing and her mother thinks she might have been in touch with him. He’s been on the run for years, I gather.’
‘We never caught up to him, and then everything ended and I suppose no one could be bothered to look any more.’
‘Do you know much about him?’
He hesitated. ‘Paula . . . it’s murky waters, you know. A man like Wallace was of his time. Ruthless. All he cared about was his so-called free Ireland and he didn’t care who he murdered to get there. Peace process or no peace process, he won’t have changed his mind about that.’
‘You knew him, then?’
‘Just by reputation. And I heard the name again recently.’
‘How?’
Bob sighed, and felt in the pocket of his jacket. Paula switched on her phone light to look at what he held out, which was a white envelope with some names scrawled on the back. Paddy Wallace. Prontias Ryan. Mark O’Hanlon.
She looked up at him quickly. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s . . . a list.’
‘I can see that. Where did you get it?’
Another silence. The words forced out, reluctantly. ‘I got that off Sean Conlon, the day he died.’
Paula stared at him. Bob had spoken to Sean Conlon on the same day he’d been kicked to death in a car park? The day Aidan had come home with bruised hands and blood on his T-shirt? She couldn’t make this information fit into her head. ‘What?’
‘Conlon was just out of prison, remember. He’d a lot of enemies. You remember I told you he was the chief suspect for shooting that fella Dunne.’
Paula nodded. Another Paddy, Paddy Dunne, a man who’d been high up in the IRA until he’d been shot in the eighties. Many thought it was done by his own side, to stop him using his influence to call off the hunger strikes of 1981. Someone had gone to his home and killed him in his doorway, all those years ago. Maybe Sean Conlon, who would have been just a young man then. ‘I remember.’
‘Well. Conlon, he’d heard his days were numbered and he wanted my help. Those are the names of people he thought might be after him.’
Paula stared down at the paper in her hands, thinking it should be in an evidence bag or something. The man’s writing had been awkward and square, as if unused to letters. The person who’d written this had maybe abducted her mother, murdered Aidan’s father. In his turn been murdered, possibly by Aidan. Ballyterrin – a circle of pain. Her mind tried to sift through this. ‘Wait. He came to you for help?’ Under what circumstances would a terrorist like Conlon have had anything in common with Bob, a straight-down-the-line RUC man and a member of the Orange Order to boot? They were as far apart as it was possible to be in this country.
Bob didn’t answer. Paula felt the weight of it between them, all the things he didn’t want her to know. She sighed. ‘Bob. I think it’s time to tell me what went on, don’t you? Because you know things, and I know things, and I imagine we’re both in the same boat here – the missing pieces driving us mad. So let me tell you what I know.’ Standing in the puddle of orange light from the streetlamp, she recited the facts she’d painfully dredged up over the past four years. ‘Mum was passing information to Army Intelligence. She was approached by someone after a soldier died in her arms at a checkpoint. She was disgusted by the whole thing – the Troubles, John O’Hara dying, everyone always dying. Right?’
She could hardly see Bob’s face, or his barely perceptible nod. She went on. ‘This man – Edward somebody – she was in love with him too. Or something, at least. And she got pregnant.’ It was hard, saying these words to Bob, exposing her mother’s secrets. But she was so tired of carrying them around by herself.
Bob flinched. She watched him. Not enough surprise there. ‘But you knew that already?’
His voice was rusty. ‘She came to me, like I said. For help.’
Even so, it was hard to believe her mother would have chosen Bob to confide in, her husband’s former partner. Why him? ‘So, she was definitely planning to leave?’
‘She knew they were after her. And if she told your daddy what was going on, then he’d have known everything, wouldn’t he? About the . . . other fella.’
Paula let that sink in. The confirmation of what she’d suspected, of what had to be the truth. The baby her mother was expecting back then – it was not her father’s. It was this other man’s. Proof of an affair, of what Margaret had been doing. Enough to make her run.
It felt so wrong, discussing her parents’ intimate lives with Bob, Sideshow Bob as Aidan always called him, here outside her dad’s house. But she had to plough on. ‘So she planned to – what? Run away with him, this man? For ever?’
‘She thought it was all nearly over. There was a ceasefire the year after, if you remember. I think she thought if she just got away for a while, if you and your daddy knew nothing, you’d be safe and then it’d be over and she could explain.’
‘She left a note. I didn’t find it for years, but there was one. In the kitchen of our old house.’
‘I went there that day,’ said Bob, almost in a whisper. Staring at his feet. ‘When the call came in from your neighbour, saying men had been at the door. But she was gone already. Nobody there. I must have missed the note; I was panicking, see, had to get out of there. You must have come in yourself not long after, from school. And for years I never knew nothing. I swear. She’d asked me if I would lead the case when she went, and not look too close into where she was, if you know what I mean. Not say anything to PJ. That’s why I hid the neighbour’s report. But I never knew was I doing the right thing. Did she get away safe, or did they come for her after all? I didn’t know should we be trying to find her or not, was she in danger, had something gone wrong?’
Paula didn’t know either. She imagined how it had been for Bob, racked all these years by the secret her mother had left with him. It was too much to ask of someone, she thought. It wasn’t fair.
He went on. ‘And then when we never heard a word from her again, I thought I must have been wrong to do it that way. But I could hardly say, oh by the way, here’s a wee report I forgot to file, now could I? That was all I knew for years, pet. I promise you.’
‘But now . . . ?’
He sighed again. ‘Are you sure you want to hear all this, Paula?’
‘I’m sure.’ She had decided long ago. That was her nature, to pursue the truth until it destroyed everything she held dear, burning it up like a white-hot flame.
‘Like I said, Sean Conlon came to see me the day he died.’
Her heart lurched up in her mouth, throwing her back to that day. Her stupid hen do. Aidan in the house when she hadn’t expected him back so early, blood on the sink in the bathroom. ‘Why you?’
‘Way back in the day, I did him a favour. So he owed me one. And when your mammy told me they were after her, I tried to call that favour in. Because he’d have known, if anyone was going to lift her. He was tied up in it all. You see?’
Her mind boggled at the idea of Bob and Sean Conlon in some
kind of conspiracy. ‘And what did he say?’
‘Just that we were quits now. He wouldn’t tell me anything else, what happened to her, if he helped her or not. After she went, he avoided me, and he’d never tell me if he knew anything. Then he went inside himself and I thought I’d never know. Next thing he’s out of prison and on my driveway, wanting a wee favour of his own.’
‘Which was?’
‘Getting him away from the fellas that were going to kill him. He wanted a deal. Out of the country in exchange for telling me what he knew. But there wasn’t time.’
She nodded; the rest of that story she was only too aware of. What she hadn’t known before was why Bob seemed to have insider information. And now she did. Because of what her mother had done, trying to bargain for her life. ‘He didn’t say anything about what happened to her, back then? When he came to you last year?’
Another hesitation. The habit of keeping secrets, long ingrained. She could see him struggle. ‘Never knew whether to believe him or not. He was a liar and a murderer, not to speak ill of the dead. But he did say . . . he said they’d come for her all right, that day. In 1993. They took her away in the car, to a farm on the border. They held her there for a few days – interrogation. Figuring out what to do with her. You know, a woman with a family, and the ceasefire coming any day then – they could have let her live. Or hidden the body. There was talk of that, even.’
Paula’s heart was drowning out her thoughts. At last, at last, to know the final steps of her mother. And what farm – did this mean the pendant on the dead girl really was hers? ‘So what happened?’
‘The way Conlon told it, he helped her get away. Let her go, and she ran off over the fields, and he never saw her again. He thought Army Intelligence got her out. He told her if she surfaced again – if he even got wind she’d contacted anyone back home – he’d come after her, and you and your daddy too. See, if those boys knew he’d let her go, they’d have executed Sean instead as a traitor.’
The Killing House Page 10