A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4)

by Claire McGowan

  Paula swallowed, her mouth suddenly full of saliva. ‘Dr Allardyce . . . do they sometimes fight you, when you’re trying to feed them?’

  His expression didn’t shift. ‘Hardly surprising if they do. It’s not always easy, saving someone from killing themselves. You need to think of them as drug addicts, or mental health patients. Sometimes we have to take extreme actions to help them.’

  Paula stood up; she couldn’t listen to much more of this. ‘Is there a ladies I could use?’

  He glanced at her for a second. ‘Maria will show you. Maria!’

  ‘Oh no, it’s fine, honestly, I’ll find it.’ She fled, trying to outpace Maria in her high heels.

  Once she was out of sight of the canteen, Paula went into the ladies and shut a cubicle door behind her. No lock. She held her foot against it, trying to process what she’d seen. She felt dog-tired. She’d had an early start to the airport, and Maggie had clung to her, crying, unable to understand that Mummy would be back the same night.

  She took out her phone in the cubicle and thumbed through it. A message from Aidan saying Maggie was fine and he’d leave Paula some dinner, as long as she was happy to eat fish fingers because ‘the bloody builders still haven’t fixed the hob’. This was what having a partner meant – no need to come home alone, to an empty bed and fridge. Someone to pick up the slack. Someone waiting for you, watching for you. Maybe she’d get used to it after all.

  She was about to go out when she heard a door bang and the gulp of sobs. There was the noise of a phone ringing. ‘Mum?’ A girl’s voice, hurried, cracked with tears. ‘Mum, I have to be quick, I’m not meant to have this . . . Mum, please, please come and get me. Please, I hate it, you don’t know what they do to us . . . please let me come home.’ She began to cry. Paula wondered if she should go out – but would it make it worse, knowing you’d been overheard? Before she could do anything the door banged again and heavy feet came in. A man’s voice. Paula braced herself against her cubicle door. They let men into the ladies here?

  ‘Stephanie?’ said the voice. ‘I know you’re in here. You know you aren’t allowed unsupervised bathroom visits.’

  Stephanie shouted back. ‘For Christ’s sake, leave me alone! I just want some privacy!’

  ‘We know you’ve got the phone, Steph. You’ll have to give us that. We’ll be searching your room. Just come out or we’ll put you in the cuffs.’

  ‘No! I’m not going anywhere near you, I hate you!’

  Another bang. The sound of the girl crying, then almost screaming. ‘Let me go! Let me go!’

  Stunned and frozen, Paula peered out the crack in the door. A huge man in a nurse’s uniform, tattoos on his burly arms, was dragging a bird-like little girl, her arms behind her in a restraint hold. She wore a flimsy hospital gown that gaped at the back, and she wasn’t much bigger than a child of eight. The phone she’d been holding fell from her hand and cracked open on the tiled floor. The man kicked it as he went past, crushing the screen. They went out into the corridor and were gone.

  Paula stayed there for a few seconds. They put the girls in restraints? They manhandled them?

  When she went downstairs again, Allardyce and Kevin were waiting for her in the lobby. The director’s blue eyes seemed to search her. ‘Maria lost you there.’

  ‘Oh, I just didn’t want to keep her,’ Paula said, hoping she sounded casual.

  ‘I hope you got what you came for.’ He smiled at her, and she tried to smile back, and failed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘So that’s the Yews,’ said Kevin, reversing out the gate.

  ‘How well do you know Dr Allardyce?’

  ‘Dave? Not that well. We did our training together, back in the year of dot, that’s all.’

  ‘Is there any controversy about his approach there?’

  ‘Oh, of course. There’s always controversy in this area of work. It’d be strange if there wasn’t.’

  Paula thought of the girl she’d heard sobbing. Please, please, let me come home. Something about it just didn’t seem right, and she was glad when they reached the airport and home was almost in sight.

  ‘OK now. You’ve got your boarding pass?’ Kevin leaned out the car door.

  ‘Yes, yes, I have everything. Thanks for the lift.’

  ‘And you’ll keep in touch this time? Bring the wee girl over to visit, maybe?’

  ‘Yeah,’ lied Paula. ‘We’ll definitely have to do that. You better go, look, the traffic warden’s coming. Bye!’

  A vague sense of dissatisfaction tugged at her as she carted her case through security, depositing phone and toiletries in the container, slipping off her shoes. It must be because she was in London. She needed to turn her back on the place again, and return to where her life was now. Kiss Aidan, and see Maggie if she made good time, smell the top of the kid’s curly head and feel chubby arms round her neck.

  She took out her boarding pass and passport and joined the straggling queue to get on. Then her heart did the same leap it had been doing all day. Ridiculous. Of course the flight was full of men in suits. One with fair hair wasn’t unusual at all. She looked again, waiting for the dip, the slowing pulse that followed when her heart realised it wasn’t him. It didn’t come. She stared, puzzled, at the tall man feeling in his jacket, taking out his passport. It actually was him. It was Guy Brooking, on the Aer Lingus flight to Belfast.

  For a moment she wondered if she could dodge him – get on the plane behind him, keep her head down. But that was daft. He’d only be going to Northern Ireland for one reason, and that was to consult on their case. So she waited for his gaze to swing round, and saw his visible double-take. She put on an awkward smile. He was coming towards her, moving back in the queue.

  ‘Paula? God, hello. How are you?’

  ‘Fine!’ She thought he was thinking about kissing her cheek, so she stepped back, gesturing wildly. ‘How are you? I mean, I’m over to do some digging on our current case. Alice Morgan.’

  ‘Right, right. I’ve been called in to consult.’

  ‘Yes, they said you might . . .’

  ‘Right. Shall we . . .’

  Side by side they shuffled onto the plane. She was silently hoping there might be only single seats left, but the plane was quiet. She’d have to sit beside him. He hefted her bag into the locker for her – he was always so damn polite – and let her sit at the window. ‘So! It’s good to see you. Been a while.’

  ‘Yeah. How’s everything?’

  ‘Oh, OK. I’m enjoying being back on gangs, I guess. I feel I can make a difference. But I suppose I still think about missper – it sort of gets to you, doesn’t it?’

  She knew just what he meant. For her, murder was sad and frightening and could make her furious, but it was an answered question. What really made the pulse beat in her blood was finding the ones who were only lost – the ones you could still help, maybe, and bring home. Like Alice Morgan. ‘And – the family?’ She could hardly get the words out.

  ‘All right. Katie’s going to Bath University in a few months. I can hardly believe it. How’s Maggie?’ He asked the question lightly. As if the last time he’d seen her he hadn’t still thought he might be Maggie’s father. She’d never told him he wasn’t. But she’d never told him she still wasn’t sure, either.

  ‘Oh, she’s great. Getting big, talking.’ She would have shown him a picture if he’d asked, but he didn’t, and the moment slid away.

  ‘Does she have the red hair then?’ Another light question.

  ‘Yes, God love her, she’ll be as red as me, I think.’ In the following silence, Paula tried not to think about what she knew of genetics, of recessive traits, and red hair and fair hair and dark.

  Guy shifted in his seat and said with a different tone: ‘Tell me about this case, then.’

  She sagged with relief. The lost – this was solid ground to her and Guy. They’d always worked well together, their emotional tangles aside. She told him what she knew – missing girl, blo
od, no body, suspiciously non-upset friends, disappearance of another girl years before, the unproven rape allegation against Peter. Guy’s frown deepened as she spoke. ‘And the relic is gone too?’

  ‘Yep. I think the church trust are more upset about that than about Alice.’

  He pointed to the forensics on his briefing sheets. ‘And the blood. This protein here – I’ve seen this before. It’s found in uterine lining. I worked this one case where a woman’s blood was on a man’s jeans, and he tried to say she’d had a nose bleed. She said he’d raped her while she was menstruating. They tested it and found this protein, and he confessed.’

  She shook her head. ‘But that doesn’t make sense. Alice hadn’t had periods for years, she was severely anorexic.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, OK. What about this shed you mentioned?’

  ‘The food? Also strange. I’ve just been told Alice was anorexic, strictly not bulimic. She had a horror of vomiting, even.’

  ‘But this is classic binge food.’ Guy tapped the paper again. ‘I wonder.’ He spoke slowly, over the whoosh of the airplane as it cut through the clouds. ‘I wonder if she’d started eating again. Gained weight, got her periods back.’

  After a minute’s thought, Paula shook her head again. ‘No one said she looked any different. And there were her selfies – Alice posted a picture of herself on Facebook every day. It’s a thinspo thing – she’d pose in her bra or a crop top so that people could say how thin she was. She kept putting those up every day, even on the day she went. She was skinny, dangerously so.’ How she missed this, bouncing ideas off him, knowing he wanted the answers as much as she did. With Aidan she was always aware that he wanted something else, to find the story, to tell the truth no matter who it hurt.

  He made a face. ‘Facebook. I hate the thing. Those kids put their life up there, and they don’t see how it can be used against them.’ Paula knew a lot of the work he did was focused on getting girls out of gangs, saving them from a lifetime of exploitation masquerading as love.

  The intercom clicked on, and the pilot announced their descent. Guy leaned forward to put the papers in his bag under the seat, and his hand brushed hers. She saw him notice her engagement ring, and held her breath. He paused for a second, then pulled back. ‘Sorry.’

  He didn’t know she was engaged. Why would he? He was gone, out of her life. Or at least he had been. She stared ahead, her own hands gripping the chair arms, and they spent the rest of the flight in silence. But as they hit tarmac, and he undid his belt, she felt a deep sense that things were back to how they should be – she was hunting for a lost girl, and Guy was at her side, helping her look.

  WhatsApp conversation

  Katy: Ola whatsapp buddies

  Dermot: Hi

  Peter: Is this a good idea? Can they not tap into it and stuff L

  Dermot: No it’s secure. I checked. We need a way to keep our stories straight

  Katy: I’m kind of freakin out with the police in and stuff. Do u think they’ll find out what happened

  Dermot: If they do we’ll all go to jail. That’s why we need to get this straight.

  Peter: LL

  Katy: What will we do? Maybe if we tell them about it

  Peter: No way we need to throw them off the sent. Don’t know why you said I was with you that nite Katy . . . can they not check stuff like that

  Dermot: It’s scent duh. But yeah Katy don’t just say stuff like that. Stick to what we agreed OK?

  Peter: L

  Katy: Um well I just was trying to help

  Dermot: We can’t tell them anything. Guys this is serious – I need to finish my degree this time or I’m screwed. This is my last chance.

  Katy: Im just really freakin out

  Peter: Chill dude. They don’t know nothing

  Dermot: It’ll be OK if we keep our stories right

  Katy: I was thinkin we should do something like start a campaign to find her? That’s what people do you know like a Find Alice thing on Twitter?

  Dermot: It’s too risky. We have to just keep our heads down. The police know something is up and they will be watching us. I think just don’t do anything for now. They have no proof.

  Peter: Shit man L

  Dermot: Just don’t lose it. Either of you.

  Chapter Twenty

  Aidan was in bed when she got in. Going up the stairs, tired and sweaty, she saw him through the door, turning over in bed. She eased open Maggie’s door, creeping over to the child. Maggie was sucking her thumb, her other hand clamped tight on the one-eyed elephant that had been a gift from Pat (the other eye had been lost in a terrifying yet ultimately non-dangerous swallowing incident). When Paula had lived in London, when she’d been that person, Maggie had not existed. Home now was this small border town, superstitious, backwards. This drab terraced house with the same God-awful lime bathroom and Formica cupboards. This little girl, knocked out in sleep so deep she didn’t stir when Paula brushed the curls from her face. Looking at the curve of the child’s forehead, holding her breath. She wished the builders had finished already, so this place could be sold. There seemed to be a moment approaching where she could move on with her life, marry Aidan, put the past behind her. But if it didn’t happen soon, she was afraid she was going to miss it.

  She cleaned her teeth and washed her greasy face, then undressed in the dark beside Aidan, fitting her legs around him. She’d grown used to having his body there, after a lifetime of sleeping alone. She breathed in, but there was no reek of tobacco, just his skin, the smell of him. He stirred, reaching for her arm and pulling it round him, dropping a kiss on her wrist. ‘Well. How are things in the big smoke?’

  ‘Oh, you know. I didn’t really go to the big smoky part.’

  ‘Find out much?’

  ‘Mm. Maybe.’

  He yawned. ‘’Kay. Get some sleep. I’ll get up with Mags, you can lie on.’

  He was good to her. He’d be a good husband, for the most part, even if he did sneak a fag now and again. She could tell from Aidan’s breathing he’d gone to sleep, so she lay in the dark and thought about how and when she’d tell him Guy Brooking was back.

  The next morning was like going back in time two years. When Paula entered the station, there was a crowd of people around the meeting table, and she knew just who they’d be talking to. Sure enough, Guy was in the middle, chatting to Gerard and a uniformed Avril. More surprising was the sight of Bob Hamilton, in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, though he’d been retired two years.

  ‘All the old band back together, eh?’ Corry had come up behind her.

  ‘Not all,’ said Paula, as lightly as she could. She felt sure everyone would be watching, see how she greeted him. They’d tried to be discreet about the situation but Ballyterrin wasn’t the kind of place you could keep secrets, especially not in a team of six. She turned her engagement ring on her finger, hard and cool. She hadn’t told Aidan, in the bustle of getting Maggie out that morning. She should have. She’d tell him tonight.

  ‘Boss is back,’ said Gerard, giving her a thumbs-up.

  ‘Yes, I know. Are we reviewing the case?’

  ‘I’ve pulled some slides together.’ Guy indicated the laptop on the table. Of course he had. Guy was a great one for PowerPoints. Corry nudged Paula; Willis Campbell was coming across the office towards them, buttoning the jacket of his suit – he and Guy were about to have a menswear-off.

  Campbell’s irritated gaze took them all in, alighting first on Paula. ‘Dr Maguire. Any reason you were wasting time on a trip to London, when there’s so much to do here?’

  Paula tried to speak calmly. ‘Well, sir, we wanted to learn more about Alice’s teenage years – she made a suicide attempt when she was fifteen. I was trying to put together a profile, see if she might have done it again.’

  ‘That could have been done by mainland officers – especially with DI Brooking on his way over to us.’

  ‘We weren’t actually made aware of that,’ said Corry neutrally. ‘Whi
ch was a shame. I mean, it would have been useful to know.’

  ‘Well, I’m here now,’ said Guy easily, standing up and extending a hand to Willis. ‘DCI Campbell, is it? Nice to meet you.’

  Willis shook it, eyeing Guy. ‘Good of you to come.’

  ‘Not at all, always lovely to be back in Ballyterrin.’

  Willis, a Belfastman to the core, looked as if he seriously doubted this. ‘Well, you’re up to speed on the case?’

  ‘DI Brooking has kindly agreed to undertake a seven-day review,’ said Corry, again in a neutral tone. ‘Constable Wright. We don’t need you for this, thanks.’

  Avril went. ‘Bye, DCI Brooking, glad to see you back.’

  ‘And you. The uniform suits you!’

  Damn him and damn his easy charm. Paula thought of Aidan, and the mound of his dirty socks that was amassing behind the bedroom door. She didn’t see why she should pick them up, and Aidan apparently had selective blindness for that part of the floor. And loss of smell. The stand-off was now reaching day five and she knew she’d crack soon.

  She turned to Bob as Willis Campbell told Guy a few facts about the case he most likely already knew. ‘How are you? Linda and Ian well?’

  ‘Oh aye.’ He looked out of place in the station, seeming a little bemused by the lights and noise of ringing phones. ‘How’s the wee one?’

  ‘Oh, she’s a dote.’ She should take Maggie to visit, she realised. Try to make up for the mistakes of the past, even if they weren’t all hers, even if she didn’t know what some of them were.

  ‘Well, shall we get started?’ Guy looked round at them.

  Willis seemed wrong-footed by Guy’s particular blast of efficient charm. ‘All right then. I’ll leave you to it. I hope you can come up with some ideas for us, DI Brooking; so far we have basically nothing. Alice’s father is not particularly happy with our efforts, and no doubt you’ve seen it’s all over the news.’ He went to his office, eyes darting left and right over the unnaturally quiet and neat incident room.