The Dead Ground

by Claire McGowan

  Copyright © 2014 Claire McGowan

  The right of Claire McGowan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain 2014 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 4722 0438 7

  Cover photograph © Shutterstock (Aliftin, Dudarev Mikhail, Kompaniets Taras and Ensuper). Author photograph © Alan Harbord

  Epub conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Claire McGowan

  About the Book

  Also By

  Praise

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About Claire McGowan

  Author Photograph © Alan Harbord

  Claire McGowan grew up in a small village in Northern Ireland. After a degree in English and French from Oxford University, and time spent living in China and France, she moved to London and works in the charity sector and also teaches creative writing. THE DEAD GROUND is her third novel and the second in the Paula Maguire series.

  About the Book

  A stolen baby. A murdered woman. A decades-old atrocity. Something connects them all . . .

  A month before Christmas, and Ballyterrin on the Irish border lies under a thick pall of snow. When a newborn baby goes missing from hospital, it’s all too close to home for forensic psychologist Paula Maguire, who’s wrestling with the hardest decision of her life.

  Then a woman is found in a stone circle with her stomach cut open and it’s clear a brutal killer is on the loose.

  As another child is taken and a pregnant woman goes missing, Paula is caught up in the hunt for a killer no one can trace, who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

  The Dead Ground will leave you gasping for breath as Paula discovers every decision she makes really is a matter of life and death . . .

  By Claire McGowan and available from Headline

  The Fall

  The Lost

  The Dead Ground

  Praise

  Praise for The Lost:

  ‘This thriller is fresh and accessible without ever compromising on grit or suspense’ Erin Kelly, author of The Poison Tree

  ‘A brilliant portrait of a fractured society and a mystery full of heart stopping twists. Compelling, clever and entertaining’ Jane Casey, author of The Burning

  ‘A keeps-you-guessing mystery’ Alex Marwood, author of The Missing Girls

  ‘A gripping yarn you will be unable to put down’ Sun

  ‘A clever and pacey thriller’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘McGowan’s style is pacey and direct, and the twists come thick and fast’ Declan Burke, Irish Times

  ‘Engaging and gripping’ Northern Echo

  ‘Taut plotting and assured writing . . . a highly satisfying thriller’ Good Housekeeping

  ‘Claire McGowan is a writer at the top of her game’ www.lisareadsbooks.blogspot.co.uk

  ‘An exciting, enthralling and tense read’ www.thelittlereaderlibrary.blogspot.co.uk

  Praise for The Fall:

  ‘There is nothing not to like . . . a compelling and flawless thriller’ S. J. Bolton

  ‘A cool and twisted debut’ Daily Mirror

  ‘She knows how to tell a cracking story. She will go far’ Daily Mail

  ‘Chills you to the bone’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘The characters are finely drawn, and it’s concern for them, rather than for whodunnit, that provides the page-turning impetus in this promising debut’ Guardian

  ‘A brilliant crime novel . . . worthy of its label – “gripping”’ Company Magazine

  ‘Hugely impressive. The crime will keep you reading, but it’s the characters you’ll remember’ Irish Examiner

  ‘It’s a clever, beautifully detailed exploration of the fragility of daily life . . . The genius of this story is that it could happen to any of us, and that’s why it hits so hard’ Elizabeth Haynes

  ‘A writer of great talent’ Michael Ridpath

  ‘Immediate, engaging and relevant, The Fall hits the ground running and doesn’t stop. I read it in one breathless sitting’ Erin Kelly

  ‘Highly original and compelling’ Mark Edwards

  ‘Sharp, honest and emotionally gripping’ Tom Harper

  ‘Stunning. Beautifully written, totally convincing and full of character. Really, really good’ Steve Mosby

  ‘An amazing first book’ www.promotingcrime.blogspot.co.uk

  ‘Intelligent and absorbing . . . Highly commendable’ www.milorambles.com

  For Stav Sherez, il miglior fabbro

  Prologue

  Ballyterrin, Northern Ireland 1993

  It starts with the smallest thing: the beat of your heart. When everything around you is horror, you focus on that. The pulse. The life. You focus and get on with it.

  It shouldn’t be like this. The phone call fills you with dread and you don’t know why. You’ve been a police officer since 1972, all the way through the hardest years of the Troubles. You’ve seen things beyond your worst dreams. A child blown up in a chip shop, the money for tea still clasped in their severed hand on the floor. A shooting in a pub, all broken glass and brain matter and country m
usic still playing on the jukebox. A woman burned in a firebomb, her skin hanging off her like a shawl. Yes, you’ve seen plenty, more than you thought you could ever live with. You did live, though. It’s either that or die. But now this one, this one is filling you with sick fear.

  The call comes in the early hours of the morning, as the worst ones always do. After so many years you’re awake at once, silencing it even before you realise, trying not to wake Margaret. But then she never stirs. Her back is an immovable wall beside you. Then you’re up and stumbling into your trousers in a dawn as dark as pitch. You pause for a moment outside your daughter’s door, her teenage breathing thick and deep. Please God, she’ll sleep right through this and never hear a word. So as not to wake your women, you put on your boots at the bottom of the stairs, dry toast clamped in your mouth. You swallow your tea too fast and burn your mouth; all day you’ll be tonguing at that one raw spot on your lip.

  Movement at the top of the stairs. Margaret, her face pale in the cloud of her red hair. Her voice is tired. ‘What is it this time?’

  You can’t tell her. God help you. Can’t say there’s a man just been found in a bog in Louth, small-time crook, back of his head shot out, and you have to go now to some farm and tell this news to his wife. You can’t tell her. It’s Margaret’s worst nightmare, the same happening to you, never coming home again. She’s been on at you for years to give the job up, do something else. But what else is there? What else is there to do? ‘Early start,’ you mumble. ‘See you later, love.’

  She stands for a moment, as if she might say something, and then she turns her face away. It is the last thing you see, floating over the railings like a white oval. Later, when all the rest of her has faded entirely, you will try and catch at it, her face in the morning gloom that day, her voice cracked and dry, and how she turns away, once and for good, into the dark.

  You drive through empty streets, a winter mist already rising off the roads, your breath like steam. It’s October, dark now until eight a.m. The road down to the farm is black, rising red in the east. Red sky in the morning, Shepherd’s warning. That’s what your daughter will say when she wakes up for school in an hour. Even the animals seem asleep, faint movement somewhere in dark fields soaked with dew. Parked on the front drive, Bob Hamilton’s already there, a nervous new constable in tow.

  There’s Bob, out of the car, stamping feet and billowing breath in the cold. Sergeant Bob he is now, and never let you forget it. Of course he’s been promoted. Of course the loyal Orangeman Bob has been promoted over you, awkward Catholic that you are. There’s never been any doubt. There’s no reason you should mind at all.

  Across the yard, leaning on a battered Ford, is Mick Quinn, the Guard who woke you this morning with the news. He’s parked far away, as if there’s an invisible battle line, and is cupping a fag in the icy morning air. The Guard works over the border in the South, where the husband’s body has washed up, but your territory merges, it bleeds into each other, and these early-morning calls are more common than either of you would like to think.

  Mick is a tall fair fella with an easy smile, but this morning he’s pale as milk. ‘PJ.’

  ‘Mick. You going in?’

  ‘Not our turf, son. You tear away.’

  You are technically in the North here, so it’s your ball game, but you wish all the same the Irishman could be at your back, instead of bloody Sideshow Bob, red-faced and dour, not to mention the wet-behind-the-ears constable, who looks ready to boke into his cap. You trudge back over to them.

  ‘Did you knock?’

  Bob shakes his head. ‘No answer.’

  ‘Is she not home?’

  ‘No, it’s . . .’ Bob hesitates. ‘Her sister’s been ringing her. She rang us too, apparently, to say the phone wasn’t being answered. Wanted us to come out here.’

  Christ. ‘When?’

  Reluctant. ‘Three days back.’

  ‘She’s been here three days on her own? What did they do to her?’ You know the husband has been taken by the IRA. It has all the hallmarks. He’ll have been informing, or invading their turf on drugs or guns, or maybe nothing at all, maybe he just crossed the wrong person. Happens all the time. But the woman. They must have done something very bad, for her not to answer the phone in three days.

  Your heart starts to pound. Focus, focus. ‘We have to go in.’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’ Christ, spit it out, Bob. There’s a woman behind those dark windows and whatever’s been done to her it means she can’t so much as pick up a phone to her sister. And they’ve known for three days, three whole days before the husband’s body surfaced in the wet bog, and no one has done a thing.

  ‘She’s pregnant. Seven months, the sister said.’

  Focus.

  A few swift kicks and the weak door splinters. ‘Jesus!’

  Bob flinches at your blasphemy but then turns pale himself. The constable is retching in a flower bed. You clamp your nose shut. The smell is what you’d imagine after three days. Blood, and piss, and something worse, a terrible meaty smell that seems to reach out and envelop you.

  ‘Mrs Rourke?’ You step into the carpeted hallway, lined with pictures of a family. Wedding shots. Happy smiles. ‘Hello?’ You move into the living room, see how it’s disordered, chairs thrown round the place, a boot kicked through the TV. The kitchen is small, off the living room, behind a bubbled glass door. You can see something on the other side of it, a dark shape. The smell is coming from there.

  You stop, the three of you, Bob and you and the poor wee constable who’s all of twenty. Kevin, that’s his name. First month on the job. You stop and then you realise it’s going to be you who opens that door and sees what is on the other side. You start to walk.

  At first it looks like a mangled mess of flesh. Your feet catch in the tacky slick of blood which has stretched over the lino. The room feels like it has no oxygen at all, so cold you can see your breath on the foetid air. You bend down to the body, or what is left of it. ‘Mrs Rourke?’

  She’s dead. She must be, all that blood – her face has been beaten to meat, red and pulpy, her clothes soaked black with it. And her stomach, is that – no, Jesus, it’s even worse. The tangle of skin and blood on her stomach, that’s her baby.

  The baby is purple, its tiny eyes shut. It’s still attached to her by the blue umbilical cord. It lies on her ruined stomach as if exhausted. On one of the woman’s hands the nails are encrusted with blood, and you see she’s been trying to claw through her own skin. The other hand is stretched above her head, handcuffed to the handle of a drawer. You see what has happened. She’s been beaten, then locked in this kitchen for three days. In that time her baby has come, and there was no one, no one at all to help. A knife lies beside her, bloodied, and you see what she has done, trying to free the child from the prison of her own body. A little girl. You want to put the poor wee thing under your jacket.

  ‘Kevin!’ You’re shouting for the constable. ‘Don’t come in here, son, don’t look! Get Mick – call an ambulance. There’s a dead female and an infant, stillborn . . .’

  You hear a noise and turn back. A bubble of spit forms in the woman’s cracked lips. ‘Mrs Rourke? Christ, I think she’s—’

  ‘No . . . No . . .’ The free hand reaches towards the baby. ‘No dead, no . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry. She’s gone, love. She’s gone.’

  The woman tenses for a second, then slumps back in the pool of her own mess. The limp hand slips from her child’s blood-slick head, and you scrabble on her damp neck for a pulse. Nothing. Nothing. In your own chest your heart goes pounding on, reminding you you’re still alive, and that this bloodied kitchen with the melamine cupboards will be with you till the day you lie down and die yourself.

  You were sure the woman would die. How could she not? She’d been in
that freezing kitchen for days, bleeding out across the patterned lino; the dehydration alone should have killed her. Then she’d be joining the poor scrap she’d given birth to. But you’ve been waiting in the hospital for hours now and no one has come with the death forms for you to sign. You wonder if Margaret’s right, if something in you has hardened and died too.

  Bob’s gone to the station to start the investigation. Much good it’ll do them. They’ll not be able to pin it on any particular group of thugs. No one will have seen anything, and in the houses you go to they’ll hear your Catholic name and look at you as if to say: traitor. Scab. Legitimate target. They were lucky to even find the husband’s body, and God knows things are bad when you feel lucky to have a half-headless corpse on your hands instead of another name to add to the lost. You know exactly how it was for Brian Rourke. His pregnant wife beaten, house wrecked, blindfold over his head and out to the car. The sound of his own breath. Drive to some lonely spot. A march in the dark, kneeling in the dirt, then a shot to the back of the head. And she was likely dead too now, the whole family gone in one night.

  But as you sit twisting your hat, watching the clock inch round, a doctor comes out. Everyone in the waiting room looks up with dull hope, but she comes to you. A woman in blue scrubs, tired and creased. There are bloody handprints on her white coat – her own, or someone else’s?

  ‘DC Maguire.’ She rubs her eyes behind her glasses. ‘I’m afraid the child is dead, as you thought. I think she was stillborn – they beat the mother, and that must have brought the labour on.’ You nod, expecting to hear, ‘And we did everything for the mother, but . . .’

  ‘She won’t be able to answer questions for a while, but when she wakes up you can try an ID. She must have seen them, even if they wore balaclavas.’

  ‘She’s alive?’

  The doctor nods wearily. ‘I don’t know how, but yes. We think the child was born yesterday. She must have realised it was in trouble, from the beating, and tried to – well, she tried to give herself a Caesarean, it seems. It might have worked, too, if you’d got there sooner. I think she has medical training. It was crude, but in the right place.’