The Stolen Girls

by Patricia Gibney

  Lottie sighed. So much for her quiet first day.

  * * *

  Kirby was sitting at his desk shuffling through a bundle of interview transcripts from the apartment residents, one foot resting on top of a stack of files with his sandal beside it.

  ‘I was looking for you,’ Lottie said, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘You found me.’ He quickly slid his toes into the sandal. ‘I was about to bring this lot into the incident room.’

  ‘Does the pub on the corner of the street where the body was found have CCTV?’

  ‘Take a guess, boss.’

  ‘Doesn’t work?’

  ‘Correct.’ Kirby scratched his wiry mop of hair. ‘Why go to the bother of installing all that equipment and then not maintain it? It’s beyond me.’

  ‘And none at the apartments either?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What about the town CCTV at that location?’ she asked hopefully. ‘Anything there?’

  ‘Cutbacks? Budgets? I don’t know, but half the cameras don’t work. They’re only on the main streets anyway.’

  ‘Great.’ Lottie tried not to let her disappointment show, but it was a setback.

  She spent the afternoon reading every report her detectives had highlighted for her. Boyd sat doing the same while intermittently organising pens in a straight line on his desk. But there were no clues as to who the girl might be or who had murdered and buried her beneath the streets of Ragmullin.

  At 4.15 p.m., Lottie’s phone rang. Jane Dore, the pathologist. Lottie listened carefully before disconnecting the call. ‘Jane has the preliminary report ready.’

  ‘No flies on her,’ Boyd said.

  ‘Your choice of words amazes me at times.’ Lottie shook her head, grabbed her bag. ‘I’m going to Tullamore.’

  ‘Do you need me to—’

  ‘No, I don’t need you to come with me. I know how to drive. Keep sifting through that lot. I want to know the name of the victim.’

  ‘I can’t magic it out of thin air.’

  ‘Just find out who she was.’

  ‘Yes, boss. Why do you have to go all the way over there? Can she not email the report?’

  ‘Can you not do your own work and I’ll do mine?

  Lottie swung her bag over her shoulder and hurried out of the office before she lost her temper with him. Heading to the car, she hoped the damn air con worked. Chance would be a fine thing.

  NINE

  ‘What did you say?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Gunshot,’ the pathologist repeated.

  ‘No way.’ Lottie shook her head in dismay.

  ‘It’s all preliminary at the moment,’ Jane Dore said, curt and professional as always.

  ‘Preliminary will do for now,’ Lottie said.

  A forty-kilometre drive to Tullamore and she had sweltered through every one of them. At least in the Dead House it was cold. And round here it was like a million miles away from the scenery she’d viewed along the road. Green trees, luscious in their growth, grass verges blossoming with buttercups and one of the many midland lakes glittering in the distance under the heady sun. That was before she hit the motorway of speeding vehicles and diesel fumes rising in the air. Now she would welcome that oily smell to help dispel the odour shrouding the Dead House.

  They sat on chrome stools at a bench. The victim lay beneath a sheet on a steel table behind them.

  ‘Entry through her back. No exit wound. X-rays show a bullet lodged in a rib. I’ll send it to the lab and the ballistics people can examine it.’

  ‘She was shot. Shit,’ said Lottie. ‘I can’t remember when we last had a shooting in Ragmullin.’

  ‘And I found what looks like a bite mark on the back of her neck. I’ve swabbed the area for saliva and taken impressions. I’ll send the images to you.’

  ‘Will you be able to get DNA from the swab?’

  ‘Not sure. It was very clean. Wait and see.’

  ‘Any sexual assault?’

  ‘Evidence of vaginal tearing. So it’s probable but not conclusive.’

  ‘Anything from her clothes?’

  ‘Nothing. I believe she was undressed before she was shot. The wound presents as very clean. It may have been washed.’

  ‘The bullet hole? He washed it after he shot her?’

  ‘It’s clean. Someone washed it. I’ve also taken scrapings from beneath her nails. They might yield results. But don’t depend on it.’

  ‘Why did he undress her, shoot her, wash the wound and then dress her again?’ Lottie shook her head. What was she dealing with?

  ‘Maybe he’s a CSI freak.’

  ‘Who is she, Jane?’

  ‘That’s your job, Lottie. All I can tell you is that she was aged between sixteen and twenty and was pregnant at the time of her death. Allowing for the intense heat we’ve been experiencing and the rate of decomposition, I’d estimate she was murdered two days ago, three max.’

  Lottie thought of Petrovci’s statement. They’d initially dug the trench three days ago. Had this girl been buried after that and been lying under the street since then?

  ‘So she wasn’t killed where we found her?’

  ‘Lividity on the body suggests she was moved after death. The area where she was found would not allow the killer the freedom to undress her, shoot her, et cetera. She was definitely killed elsewhere. There’s something else too.’ Jane jumped down from her stool, steered Lottie to the autopsy table and pulled the sheet from the body. ‘See this scar?’ She pointed to an arc circling the victim’s left hip, from her abdomen around her back.

  ‘I see it,’ Lottie said, keeping her eyes away from the gaping vacuum where the pathologist had removed the foetus.

  ‘The suturing is very neat,’ Jane said.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She’d had a kidney surgically removed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Perhaps she donated it to a family member? I don’t know.’

  ‘Was the surgery recent?’

  ‘I’ll have a better idea when I do more tests. At the moment, I’d estimate surgery was no more than a year ago. That’s all I can say until I go in again.’

  ‘And the pregnancy?’ Lottie asked. ‘How far along was she when she died? Can we get DNA from the foetus?’ She wondered if she was dealing with a reluctant father brandishing a gun, or a crime of misspent passion. Her gut told her it was something completely different. She trusted her gut. Most of the time.

  Jane glided over to a second table. Lottie followed. Taking a deep breath, she braced herself. She wasn’t squeamish and didn’t mind looking at bodies. But an unborn baby? This was different.

  ‘Here’s her baby. It was about eighteen weeks’ gestation at time of death. A girl.’

  Jane slowly drew back the sheet. Lottie gasped at the sight of the smallest baby she’d ever seen, curled on one side on the cold steel. She gulped back tears; composed herself. Glancing sideways, she noticed Jane hastily wiping her eyes. In the short time she had known Jane Dore, the pathologist had hardly ever registered any emotion.

  ‘I’ve carried out a lot of autopsies in my time, but this… this is monstrous…’ Jane’s voice trailed off in the raw Dead House air.

  ‘Sometimes I think there’s nothing left to surprise me,’ Lottie said, ‘but there’s always one more horror awaiting discovery.’ She turned away, picked up the reports and stuffed them in her bag.

  ‘Find whoever did this,’ Jane said, her voice soft and flat.

  Lottie didn’t answer. But there was a new determination in her step as she left Jane in the Dead House and headed back to Ragmullin. As she drove, all she could see was the tiny baby with its miniature webbed thumb secured in its little mouth. She didn’t think she would ever be able to dislodge that image from her memory.

  * * *

  Dropping the pathologist’s preliminary report on Boyd’s desk, Lottie thought he looked as haggard as she felt.

  ‘We’ve canvassed the entire area, the pub,
the apartments, everywhere. No one saw anything,’ he said.

  ‘Typical Ragmullin.’

  She sat at her desk, recalling the case from late December that had crawled into January. A town where no one saw anything, very few said anything and those who did never told the whole truth.

  ‘So what’d Jane have to say?’ Boyd picked up the reports.

  ‘The victim was definitely shot.’

  ‘What? Shot? This is bad, Lottie.’

  ‘I know.’ Gun crime was low to non-existent in Ragmullin. Not like in the cities, she thought, where gangland crime was usually conducted at the end of a pistol. ‘She was definitely pregnant when she died.’

  ‘Bollocks!’

  ‘And – wait for this – at some stage she’d had a kidney surgically removed.’

  ‘God. I hope it was by consent.’

  ‘Hard to know at the moment. Jane has to complete the post-mortem yet.’

  ‘Pregnant, shot and a kidney gone. That girl has been through some horrors,’ Boyd said, scratching his head, looking lost. Lottie knew the feeling.

  ‘The victim was undressed before she was shot, then the wound was washed and she was re-dressed.’

  ‘Why would someone do that? It’s mad.’

  ‘Insane. Anyone fitting her description on the missing persons list?’ Lottie enquired, masking a yawn. Her first day had been much more hectic than she could have imagined.

  ‘Nothing to match our girl. But if she was over eighteen, I doubt she’d be on it yet anyway.’

  ‘She’s been dead two days, maybe three. Eighteen weeks pregnant. Someone, somewhere, is missing her. The father of her child, for instance.’

  ‘Maybe she told no one. The pregnancy could be the result of a one-night stand.’

  ‘Or she could be in a relationship with a married man and something went wrong and he shot her.’

  ‘We could release the post-mortem photograph.’

  ‘You saw her face. We can’t put decomposing flesh into the public domain.’ She grabbed the pathologist’s report from Boyd and scanned through it. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘It was just an idea,’ he said.

  ‘A stupid one.’

  She knew he wanted to retort, but the seriousness of what they were discussing didn’t warrant it. She said, ‘Jane notes here that based on the girl’s bone structure, she could be Eastern European, possibly of Balkan origin.’

  ‘How could she make that call?’

  ‘She studied anthropology.’

  ‘So was the victim here illegally?’ Boyd said. ‘It’d make our job all the harder to identify her.’

  ‘She could be a refugee or asylum seeker,’ Lottie said. ‘They’re documented.’

  She recalled a local outcry a few years ago when the Department of Justice leased out the defunct army barracks. It had been converted into a direct provision centre for asylum seekers. A storm in a teacup, her mother had said. It had all died down.

  ‘It’s worth checking,’ Boyd said.

  ‘Put it on tomorrow’s to-do list.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And we need to interview Petrovci again. First, though, I’ve to conduct a team meeting before everyone escapes for the night.’

  TEN

  It was after eight o’clock when she eventually arrived home from work. Silence greeted her. Her mother, Rose Fitzpatrick, who’d been looking after the kids, was long gone. Lottie thought how they were all doing a good job of avoiding each other recently.

  ‘Anyone here?’ she shouted up the stairs.

  No reply.

  Entering the kitchen, she groaned. The sink was piled high with glasses and plates. Back to what was normal before her sabbatical from the force. But at least her family had been fed. At one time Rose would have left the house sparkling clean. Lottie wondered what she’d done to cause the change.

  ‘Does anyone know how to wash a mug in this house?’

  No answer. Talking to herself. Again.

  Everywhere was unusually quiet. In a fit of panic, she raced up the stairs and ploughed into her son’s room.

  ‘What’s up?’ Sean asked, removing headphones. He quickly tapped his computer and the screen faded to a photograph of a sunny beach.

  ‘I’m home,’ Lottie said, feeling relief flood her cheeks.

  ‘So?’

  ‘How was school?’

  ‘Boring as usual.’ The boy replaced his headphones and waited for her to leave.

  Pulling the door behind her, wondering if she should have checked what he was up to on the computer, she poked her head round Katie’s door. Her elder daughter appeared to be asleep. Leaving her, Lottie glanced into Chloe’s room. Chloe was sitting at her small desk, buds in her ears and a stack of school books in front of her. Lottie waved a hand in front of her.

  Without raising her head, Chloe said, ‘I’m studying.’

  Leaving her alone, Lottie returned downstairs to see if there was anything left in the cupboards worth cooking. Nothing.

  Slumping into the comfort of the kitchen armchair, she noticed the paint peeling above the cooker. The house needed redecorating. She lowered her eyes to avoid the sight of grease gathered in small black dots along the wall just below the ceiling. The day had drained the energy from her body. Maybe a sleep would energise her enough to clean up the mess. She closed her eyes.

  * * *

  Chloe locked her bedroom door, wrapped up her ear buds, put away her books and took her noise-reduction headphones from the wardrobe. With the window open, she let the night breeze flutter over her body as she tapped the Spotify app on her phone.

  After she’d run from the canal, she’d spent most of the day in the library, listening to music, staring out of the window. At 4.30 p.m., she had strolled home, knowing her granny would have left by then.

  A knot of anxiety gripped her chest and she tried to catch her breath. She wanted to tell her mother how she felt. How this fear of helplessness threatened to overwhelm every thought she had. But any time she tried to say something, the words wouldn’t form. And there was no talking to Lottie now that she was back at work. As for Katie, God only knew what was going on in her mind since Jason had been murdered. She’d refused to go back to college and spent her days moaning.

  Looking over the fresh cut on her upper arm, Chloe wondered what her mother would do if she found out about that. The panic rose in her throat and she tried to control her breathing. In. Out. In. Out. She needed the blade. Yes, the physical pain might ease the thoughts swamping her brain.

  A message alert flashed up on her phone screen. She tapped it. A new post on #cutforlife. She opened it up and engaged on the forum, breathing a sigh of relief. She wouldn’t need to use the blade tonight.

  A deserted street at midnight was probably not the most sensible place for a jog, especially with a killer about, but after waking up in the armchair, Lottie needed air and exercise to clear her head and help her sleep that night.

  Deliberate, methodical steps, counted in her head. Her iPhone was equipped with a step counter, but she couldn’t be bothered setting it up. Anyway, she’d heard it chewed up battery life. With the phone nestling in her bra, she slowed her pace as she made her way uphill by the county council offices. Her breath came in sharp gasps. Unfit, she thought, even though she’d been jogging daily while off work.

  Taking a right at the top of the street, she suddenly stopped. Froze. Drawing in a breath, she turned around. Her body trembled as her heart palpitated. No one. Slowly she started jogging again. Imagining things, she thought.

  Monday nights were quiet in Ragmullin. No stragglers heading from the pubs to nightclubs; even the taxi rank outside Danny’s Bar was desolately tranquil as a lone driver leaned against his cab, smoking a cigarette.

  Unable to cast off the feeling of being followed, she decided against short-cutting through the town park and headed up by Friars Street instead, where the duo of ancient monks cast in bronze appeared watchful with their solid eyes.

&nb
sp; The jog wasn’t working in terms of clearing her head. Images of the girl’s body decomposing beneath the street and the tiny baby on the stainless-steel table in the Dead House refused to wane.

  Glancing to her left, towards Bridge Street, she noticed the crime-scene tapes hanging limply, blocking off the road. She walked across the deserted street to stand outside the tape.

  At the corner, the SOCOs’ tent flapped, forlorn in its solitude. A uniformed garda stood beside a squad car parked at the gated entrance to the apartments. He saluted her. Lottie acknowledged him with a nod, hands on hips, getting her breath back.

  ‘Quiet night?’ she asked.

  He shrugged: What do you think?

  She knew it was necessary to guard the site until everything was checked. Anyone could interfere with it. The killer might even return, though she supposed he was more than likely far away from Ragmullin at this stage. At least she hoped he wasn’t hanging around town, ready to strike again. But wherever and whoever he was, she would catch him. The image of the unborn baby girl flashed anger into her heart. No one was getting away with this murder.

  There it was again. She swung around, sure that someone had been at her shoulder.

  ‘Did you see anyone just there?’ she asked the garda.

  ‘No, Inspector, I did not.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  Deciding she’d had enough of the murky night air, she ran by the unlit community college and headed for home. The thought of a cool shower and bed stimulated her tired limbs.

  It was getting bad when she started to imagine things.

  ELEVEN

  The room was too small for so many. Two bunk beds, a locker and a wardrobe with no doors. Floorboards worn and bare, cracked paint, and cobwebs claiming the dusty corners of the ceiling.

  Two girls slept soundly in the beds opposite Mimoza Barbatovci, their soft snores breaking the silence. They had stepped out of their clothes, dropping them on the narrow floor space in the middle of the room, and crawled naked beneath thin sheets, falling asleep immediately.

  The unlit light bulb swayed above Mimoza’s head. Night-time didn’t come as quickly here as in her homeland. The evenings dragged through a slow dusk. Even then the dark never fully succeeded in pulling down the night.