The Missing Ones: An absolutely gripping thriller with a jaw-dropping twist (Detective Lottie Parker Book 1)

by Patricia Gibney

  The kitchen displayed the remnants of a teenage cook-in. Empty Pot Noodles, sticky forks on the table and an open, half-full bottle of Coca-Cola. More than likely there since they had their breakfast – at lunchtime. Boots, shoes and trainers were thrown inside the back door. Unopened Christmas cards stacked on the table and the few she had opened were wilting with condensation in the kitchen window. The tree was in the sitting room, out of her sight. She hadn’t wanted to put it up. Sean had insisted and now he’d have the job of dismantling the raggedy assemblage of tinsel and balls. Tough.

  Lottie was glad all the false décor would soon be consigned to the attic. She hated – no, despised – Christmas since Adam died. Over three years ago. Christmas was family time but now her family was decimated.

  But still, she had great memories of the good Christmases. Adam and herself trying to construct a toy kitchen at three in the morning after demolishing a bottle of Baileys. Or waiting for him to come off duty from the army barracks on Christmas morning, Adam sneaking in before the children woke up and she ticking off a list to make sure nothing was left in her mother’s attic. One time they’d left an Action Man there and Adam had to rush over and rouse her mother at two a.m. He’d called Lottie a coward. She smiled now at that memory. Adam wasn’t afraid of her mother. Lottie wasn’t either, but her mother had enough ammunition for rows without Lottie arming her with more. That’s what she’d told Adam anyway. She sometimes thought that he had loved her mother more than she did. His parents had died within a year of each other when he was just eighteen, so maybe he’d appreciated all that Rose did for Lottie and the children. But Lottie knew there was an old guilt lurking in Rose’s actions and, no matter how hard she tried, she could never rid herself of that feeling. Every interaction she’d had with her mother since Adam died had resulted in a disagreement. Harsh words, old accusations and banging doors. Because of their last altercation, Lottie hadn’t seen her mother in months – though she knew Rose called to see the children when she wasn’t around.

  She tried her best for the children but it was hard keeping her heart in it. It wasn’t in a lot of things. When Adam had died a part of her had died with him. Cliché or not, it was the truth. If it were not for their children . . . well, she had the three of them. Life goes on. There were other long absences in her life to cope with also – the mystery of her father’s death and consequent saga surrounding her brother. She’d played the blame game all her life but her grief for Adam overshadowed the decaying memory of the others. For now.

  Sean sauntered into the kitchen tipping a ball on the end of a hurley stick. The boy loved hurling, one of the most vigorous national sports, though she worried about how dangerous it was for her son. At thirteen and a half years old he was already as tall as Adam had been. His unruly fair hair masked long eyelashes. Lottie loved her son so much, sometimes it made her want to cry. With Adam gone, she had to protect him, protect all of them, and the weight of that responsibility was sometimes an unbearable burden.

  ‘What’s for dinner, Mam?’ Sean asked, pocketing the ball.

  ‘Jesus, Sean, I’m only in the door. It’s seven o’clock. For once in your lives couldn’t one of you have cooked dinner?’ Her love quickly turned to frustration.

  ‘I was studying.’

  ‘You were not. You didn’t even open your bag, never mind a book.’

  ‘But we’re still on holidays,’ said her sulky son.

  Lottie had forgotten, just for a minute. They’d been off school for the last week and would be for another long few days. What did they do all day? No, strike that, she really didn’t want to know.

  Unsuspecting Chloe walked into the kitchen.

  ‘Hi, Mother, what’s for dinner?’

  Chloe always called her ‘Mother’. Adam had called her ‘Mother’ in front of their children. She supposed her daughter was trying to keep him alive with these little things.

  Sean escaped back up the stairs, thumping his hurley on each step. The rap music restarted, louder this time.

  Chloe was dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a tiny strap top straining over her expanding (at last! according to Chloe) chest. Did she not realise it was sub-zero outside? Her long, bottle-dyed, blonde hair, scrunched on top of her head, was held in place with a butterfly bobbin. Her bright blue eyes were an exact replica of her father’s. The eyes Lottie had fallen in love with lived on, immortalised in her beautiful daughter. The ‘middle child’, Chloe often threw at her when she felt the other two were being favoured.

  ‘You’re sixteen years of age, Chloe. You’re doing Home Economics in school. Would it never enter your head to put on some dinner?’

  ‘No, why should I? You’d come home and say I was doing it all wrong.’

  Point taken.

  ‘Where’s Katie?’

  ‘Out. As usual.’ Chloe opened a cupboard, looking for anything edible.

  Lottie went to the fridge. No wine. Shit. She didn’t drink any more; at least not as much as she used to, she reminded herself. Times like these, she missed alcohol most. It helped relieve the stress of the day. She didn’t even smoke any more. Well, maybe sometimes, when she had a drink. God, but she was a contradiction. She should’ve taken a few Xanax from Susan Sullivan’s medicine cabinet. But she would never do that. She didn’t think she would anyway. She kept a small supply in her bedside locker and had an emergency pill Sellotaped to the bottom of her drawer in the office. Just in case, she told herself. And the stash was fast disappearing.

  ‘Put the kettle on, hon, I’ve had a bitch of a day,’ Lottie said.

  Chloe crunched a biscuit in her mouth and flicked the switch. The kettle hissed. Empty.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Lottie said.

  Chloe was gone, the door swinging shut behind her.

  After pouring water into the kettle, Lottie snapped on the electric fire and sat into her chair, reclining it as far as it would go. Snuggled up in her jacket, she closed her eyes and eased the buzzing in her brain by breathing deeply.

  Nine

  ‘James Brown is dead.’

  ‘What?’ Lottie said into her phone.

  Sitting with the electric fire blazing heat at her feet, she glanced at the kitchen clock. Eight thirty. She’d been asleep for over an hour; it was only the phone that had awakened her.

  ‘James Brown is dead,’ said Boyd. ‘You better get back to the station. Corrigan is dancing a jig. Sky News is reported to be on the way.’

  ‘Give me a good old-fashioned traveller feud any day,’ Lottie said.

  ‘You’ll need a lift,’ Boyd said. ‘It’s been snowing non-stop for the last few hours.’

  ‘I’ll walk. It’ll wake me up.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  She ended the call, searched for her jacket, discovered she was still wearing it and shouted up the stairs, ‘Chloe, Sean, I’ve to go back to work.’

  No reply.

  ‘You’ll have to cook dinner yourselves.’

  A chorus greeted her. ‘Ah Mam!’

  ‘Leave money for a takeaway,’ shouted Chloe.

  She did. Sucker.

  Superintendent Corrigan was pounding up and down the corridor, ducking under ladders, swearing ‘feck’, head beetroot red, his permanent, stressed-out colour. He turned around. Lottie came to a halt.

  ‘Where were you? You should’ve been here,’ he said.

  ‘Sir, I did a twelve-hour shift. I was at home.’

  Corrigan turned around and stomped off to his office. Boyd and Lynch stood, jackets on, waiting. Kirby was nowhere in sight.

  ‘What are you two looking at?’ Lottie asked. She had fire in her belly but quelled it. ‘Fill me in.’

  ‘A call came in half an hour ago,’ Maria Lynch said, curling her hair on top of her head before pulling on a knitted hat. ‘James Brown was found hanging from a tree at his home. Reports from uniforms suggest it’s a suicide.’

  ‘Suicide my arse,’ Lottie said. ‘The same day his colleague is murdered? God almight
y, when was the last time we had a murder, let alone two?’

  Memory man Boyd said, ‘Three years ago, when Jimmy Coyne killed Timmy Coyne in a family feud. You nailed him.’

  ‘It was a rhetorical question,’ Lottie said. ‘Where’s Larry Kirby?’

  She glanced around. The incident room throbbed with activity. Maps of the town coloured the bare walls, reports were building up in trays and detectives were busy on the phones.

  Buttoning up his jacket, Boyd said, ‘No doubt Kirby’s hanging out in a pub with his actress girlfriend.’

  ‘Are you jealous, Boyd?’ Lottie asked.

  Lynch said, ‘I’ll go start up the car, it’s probably frozen solid.’ She escaped.

  ‘You look like shit,’ Boyd said.

  Lottie said, ‘And I love you too. Come on.’

  Six kilometres outside Ragmullin, the forest road was lit up with the flashing blue lights of two squad cars. The roads were almost impassable and snow continued to fall heavier than it had since Christmas Eve, bulky flakes freezing as they fell.

  An ambulance and fire engine, wheels chained, blocked the narrow laneway leading to Brown’s cottage. Fire engine? Lottie shook her head. Lynch just shrugged.

  Boyd abandoned the car and they walked the rest of the way along tracks made by the other vehicles. Their legs sank to their knees as they trudged through the depths of snow.

  A gaunt, pale-faced man sat in a squad car with two uniform gardaí outside the inner crime scene tapes. Lottie was pleased with these precautions. A suspected suicide could easily be something else.

  ‘Derek Harte,’ Garda Gillian O’Donoghue said, pointing to the man in the car. ‘He found the deceased. He’s in a very distressed state.’

  ‘Talk to him, Lynch. Find out exactly who he is and why he’s here. If this is something other than suicide, he’s our number one suspect,’ Lottie said.

  ‘There’s a briefcase on the ground beside the deceased’s car,’ O’Donoghue said.

  ‘SOCOs can check it out when they arrive, then get it to the station.’ Lottie headed into the courtyard, Boyd beside her.

  A spotlight blazed eerie shadows toward a tree. She averted her eyes for a moment to concentrate on a paramedic standing against a snow-camouflaged car.

  ‘You didn’t cut him down?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I could see he was dead and the man who found him was muttering about the victim knowing your woman murdered in the cathedral, so I thought I better call you guys. Just in case, like.’

  ‘I suppose you watch CSI?’ Lottie said. The man’s face flushed. ‘You don’t have to answer that,’ she added.

  ‘I got the fire crew to put up the spotlight. Pitch black out here in the sticks.’

  ‘Why the fire engine?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue,’ the paramedic said. ‘Can I smoke?’

  ‘No,’ Lottie and Boyd said together.

  Turning away from the paramedic, Lottie looked up at the suspended body of James Brown highlighted by the temporary light.

  ‘I had a feeling Brown wasn’t being totally honest with me today. If I’d pressed him, I possibly could have discovered something that might have saved his life.’

  ‘Maybe he murdered Sullivan and afterwards, full of remorse, hung himself,’ Boyd said.

  ‘He murdered Sullivan? Will you look at him? A skinny, five foot nothing. He couldn’t kill a cold.’

  ‘In a fit of angry passion?’ ventured Boyd.

  Lottie glared. ‘You talk pure shite sometimes.’

  Brown’s body swayed slightly in the snowy breeze. His head hung sideways, twisted toward her. Eyes open wide. Staring into nothingness. Lottie turned away from the body and slogged through the snow.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Boyd asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Maybe I have,’ she said.

  She stopped and looked around the scene. A chair, lying on its side, partly submerged by the avalanche of snow; briefcase on the ground beside the car and another car parked behind it. Then she noticed a key in the front door. Garda O’Donoghue was writing down whatever the paramedic had to say. Everyone had tramped through the site. Lottie doubted SOCOs would find anything useful.

  ‘Any suicide note?’ Lottie asked.

  O’Donoghue shrugged. ‘I scouted round when I got here. Didn’t see anything outside, though if there is a note it’s buried and saturated. Jesus, I’ve never seen so much snow in all my life.’

  ‘Did the Harte guy go inside?’ Lottie asked, pointing to the key.

  ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ O’Donoghue said.

  Lynch popped up at Lottie’s shoulder.

  ‘Harte says he is a friend of Brown and drove over to see him when he heard about Susan Sullivan’s death.’

  ‘How did he know about Susan?’

  ‘Brown phoned him. When he arrived he saw the body straight away and called emergency. He was here, staring up at Brown, when our first car arrived. Didn’t go near the house. So he says anyway.’ Lynch swept away the clumps of snow, causing the ink to run on her notebook. ‘He’s genuinely in an awful state. Will I get a car to take him home or do you want to interview him tonight?’

  ‘I’m too tired to formulate proper questions. We’ll bring him in for questioning in the morning,’ Lottie said. She spied an alarm box on the wall over the door. ‘Ask him if he knows the alarm code.’

  ‘Do you want me to call in the morning, too?’ asked the paramedic, a smile burning to his ears.

  ‘Garda O’Donoghue has your statement,’ Lottie said. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ he said. ‘I found this stuck in the snow by the door.’

  Lottie looked at the man’s gloved hand holding a small green flashlight.

  ‘You picked it up?’

  ‘I sure did,’ he said. His eyes widened. ‘Oh, sorry. Maybe I should’ve left it there?’

  ‘Maybe you should have.’ Lottie slipped the flashlight into a plastic evidence bag and snapped it shut. ‘Was it on or off?’

  ‘I switched it off. To save the battery.’

  She felt like thumping him and turned away before she did.

  ‘Shithead,’ Boyd said under his breath as the paramedic retreated.

  ‘Boyd, one of these days someone, besides me, is going to hear you and you’ll get a broken nose. Get the SOCOs out here.’

  Her phone buzzed. Corrigan.

  ‘The boss wants to see us in fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘Has that man seen the weather?’

  Back in town, standing outside the station, Boyd lit a cigarette. The snow eased slightly and frosty night air hijacked the smoke. Lottie wished she could have a drag, but it would be one too many. She never stopped at one of anything. Addictive personality disorder, her mother was fond of telling her. Thanks Mam.

  Stepping in to the warm reception area, she checked her phone. No messages. No missed calls. She rang home. Chloe answered.

  ‘Hi, Mother. You coming home soon?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Lottie said. ‘I’m going into a meeting with my superintendent. Don’t know how long I’ll be.’ She rejected a pang of guilt. What could she do? She had to work and this meant unpredictable hours.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll mind the house,’ Chloe said.

  ‘Is Katie home yet?’ Lottie was worried about her eldest child.

  ‘I think she’s in her room.’

  ‘Check to make sure.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘And tell Sean to turn off his PlayStation.’

  ‘Of course. Chat later.’ Chloe hung up.

  They’d be in bed when she got home. Well able to look after themselves. They would do okay. She hoped. She wasn’t so sure about herself.

  Brushing snow off his shoulders, Boyd joined her.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The superintendent awaits and we are late.’

  ‘You took your time.’

  Corrigan marched up and down his office, like a regimental sergeant.

 
‘Was it suicide or what?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Never mind anyway, it’s suicide for now. One murder is enough for one day. Whatever it is, we’ll get to the bottom of it. I don’t want a hot-shot team from Dublin taking over, so you better get your act together. Step up the door-to-door enquiries. There’s people to be interviewed, phones to be manned, press releases, media briefings.’

  You’re in your element, Lottie thought.

  ‘I don’t think James Brown killed himself,’ she ventured.

  Corrigan snorted. ‘And how do you arrive at that conclusion?’

  ‘I think . . . it feels too convenient, you know.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Enlighten me.’

  Lottie chewed her lip. How could she translate a gut feeling? Corrigan was career-minded and did things by the book. His favourite mantra regarding investigations was ‘my way or no way’. Lottie had another way . . . her way. In any case, he didn’t wait for her to answer.

  ‘Inspector Parker, what you think is irrelevant. Look at the evidence, the circumstances. He was hanging from a feckin’ tree in the middle of the feckin’ countryside in a feckin’ blizzard. Something fishy was going on in the council, I can smell it here. He probably killed Susan Sullivan over some work thing, found the guilt too much, so . . . he swung a rope over a tree and killed himself. Now let’s plan our action.’

  Lottie withheld her words and the three of them outlined the team tasks. She was too exhausted to argue with Corrigan.

  When they had everything sorted as best they could, Corrigan repeated, ‘I don’t want Dublin sending down hot-shots. We can handle this. I want the Susan Sullivan murder solved, pronto.’

  ‘But sir,’ Boyd interjected, ‘if it turns out we have two murders, won’t we need the outside help?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Boyd! I’ve said what I’ve said. End of the matter. As of now we have one suspicious death and a suspected suicide.’

  Corrigan’s eyes slanted, defying them to argue. Lottie returned his gaze and pulled on her jacket.

  ‘Get a few hours’ sleep. Be back here at six a.m. sharp,’ he said.

  They left the superintendent’s office and walked down the corridor.