A short while later, the men had finished loading the body – Matt’s body – into Rory’s jeep, Paula hanging back, sensing that her help would not be welcome. Rory shut the door, and Paula put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Aye. Well. Always knew it would end this way.’
‘We might still find her safe.’
He didn’t answer, and she knew there wasn’t much chance. Had it really been an accident after all? ‘Are you going to take him away?’ Meaning the body. There was no chance of getting a pathologist over, and he’d already been moved once, so it made little difference.
‘Aye. We’ll take him to the pub, I suppose. There’s a cold store that locks.’
‘OK. Maybe I’ll take DI Brooking to see the shed, then, before it gets too dark.’
‘The shed? Oh aye. If you like. It’s walkable from here.’
‘We’ll catch you back at the pub?’
‘Yeah. Sure.’
She motioned to Guy, and as they trudged over the beach away from the body, she felt some strange kind of relief at putting distance between them and the dead man. And Rory too, of course.
She was relieved when the dark shadow of the little boatshed appeared ahead of her out of the swirling sea fog. The short walk had already left her numb with cold, her eyes and teeth full of sand grit. But she’d be able to show Guy the writing on the walls, and he’d explain it to her, and it would all become less terrifying and more understandable. He always had that ability. She willed herself on, trudging over the wet sand, pushing aside the ineffectual police tape. There was a strong smell of rot on the beach, and she could see at the water’s edge the body of the seal still lay there. The waves lapped around its poor dead flippers and she wondered if the sea would come high enough to carry him back out, into the dark depths.
‘Come on!’ she shouted. Guy hurried after her, bumping against her in the doorway as she fumbled with her phone light. ‘Matt used to work in here, his laptop’s there and the samples he was collecting and . . .’
‘Where?’
She swung the beam. The desk in the corner was empty, a square of dust where the laptop had been. She turned. The sample box was also gone. ‘They’ve taken it! Fuck! I knew it.’
‘You think the company did this?’
‘They must have. But the wall, look . . .’
That was still there, the crazy red writing. Whoever had stolen Matt’s things hadn’t had time to clean it off. Guy stood, his own torch shining on, taking it in silently. Paula stood behind him, hearing the shriek of the wind and sea, feeling the cold breath that seemed to come out of the damp wooden walls. After a moment Guy said, ‘Come on. There’s nothing for us here. Let’s find shelter for the night.’
Fiona
‘Holy God.’ Rory took my hand in his, staring at the cut that ran down the fleshy part of my thumb. It looked worse in the daylight, the edges of it barely knit, crusted in drying blood. ‘He did this? Matt did this to you?’
We were in my surgery, my safe place, cosy against the howling winds outside. I’d put up a sad little Christmas tree in the waiting area, not that I or anyone else was feeling very seasonal. I pulled my hand back, ashamed. ‘He didn’t mean to. He just – I don’t know, Rory. He isn’t right.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s . . . he’s not himself.’ I tried again to explain. ‘You saw Niamh. And Andrea. The way they just – that isn’t normal. And Matt . . .’ I was getting frustrated. I couldn’t explain, couldn’t make him see that Matt was not Matt any more, in the same way Niamh was not herself when she blinded her friend and Andrea was not herself when she put her baby in with the dogs. ‘Something’s wrong,’ I tried again. ‘Something is wrong here.’
‘Fi . . . if he’s hurting you, you should do something, you know.’
‘He isn’t hurting me. Well, he is, but not in the way you mean. Not yet, anyway.’ Because it was hurting me every day to live with him, with the ghost of a man I’d loved. Who didn’t sleep, who roamed the house staring out of binoculars from the lighthouse desk, who brought home a box of dead things and wouldn’t tell me why, who couldn’t eat and ached all over and woke up screaming in the night. ‘I don’t want that,’ I tried again. ‘I just need your help.’
He answered so quickly. He was sitting where my patients usually sat, where I put them in blood pressure cuffs or felt their necks or listened to their chests. Where I gave them answers, except now I had none myself. He was still holding my hand in his, light and delicate, as if it might break. ‘I’ll do anything I can to help, Fi. Anything. You just have to ask.’
And that was when I knew what I had to do. Because when you are scared, so scared you can hardly breathe without it hurting, it makes sense to figure out who you can run to for help.
‘Anything?’ I said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The fire crackled, spewing out soft hunks of turf that fizzed and died on the hearth. Bits of bog, long-dead things bedded down for centuries, turned into something new. Paula watched it in silence, her glass of whiskey untouched on the table before her. She clearly wasn’t leaving now, not when they’d found a body. She’d already called Saoirse to make her excuses. Maggie was fine, and Mummy was instructed to ‘stay away longer’ so she could keep playing with her ‘Auntie Seer-sha house toys’. It was nice to be missed, Paula reflected wryly.
Guy too was staring into the depths of the fire, as if looking for answers, over the remains of the ham sandwiches Colm had scraped up for them. He’d looked up as she came back. ‘How’s Maggie?’
She couldn’t help but wince as he said her child’s name. ‘Um. She’s fine. Grand without me, it seems.’ And you’re her dad, guess what?
‘I know the feeling. Katie’s at Bath University now. Settled in well, making friends, not a drop of homesickness.’
Paula waited for him to mention Tess, his wife. Their marriage had been fractured by the murder of their son years before, and she was never quite sure if they’d make it. But they hadn’t officially split up, as far as she knew. Always a grey area. He didn’t mention her. She decided to change the subject. ‘So we’ve found Matt, anyway.’
‘Yes. Poor man. And Fiona?’
Paula shook her head slowly. ‘Rory said they’d take a boat round the island in the morning, look in all the little sea caves. But if she went into the water too, the tide could have taken her anywhere now.’ And with her all their hope of answers.
Guy knew her pretty well, even though they hadn’t worked together properly for years. ‘You don’t like him, do you? McElhone?’
‘I don’t trust him. He had something weird in his car – medical records, for the woman who tried to kill her baby. Missing from Fiona’s office.’
‘Evidence he forgot to log in, maybe.’
‘Hmm. You really think that?’
‘I don’t know the man. But you’re right – we should be careful who we talk to out here. From now on, we only trust each other with evidence. Assuming we can hang on to any.’
‘What did they say about getting a pathologist?’ They’d taken their turns on the payphone, its scratchy connection coming and going as the wind grew.
‘They won’t send anyone over until the storm dies down. Too dangerous.’
‘Even in a helicopter?’
‘Especially in a helicopter. Those things crash all the time.’
She nodded. And there was no chance of getting back until at least the next day. So it was just her, and him, and a dead body, and an entire island of people who were probably lying to them. ‘Is there something we can do?’ she said after a while. ‘I wish we’d bagged up those bloody samples while we had the chance. Can’t believe they’re gone.’ A doubt was growing in her mind. When Rory had left her at Rainbow’s, she’d thought he was going to secure the si
te. Maybe Andrea Sharkey’s medical records weren’t the only things he’d stolen. But however much she turned it over in her mind, she couldn’t think of any reason Rory would do that. He already knew she’d seen it all. And when she’d told him they were gone, he’d sworn convincingly, his fists balling. She didn’t think he was that good an actor.
‘You were just following protocol. All we can do for now is sit tight and keep an eye on the body. Try to preserve at least some shred of evidence.’ Matt’s body was in the bottle store not ten feet from where they sat. ‘What did you make of it?’
She tried to recall what she’d seen. ‘There was bruising on his head – a wound on the temple.’ She touched a finger to her own. ‘I was thinking maybe he fell into the water.’
‘Or someone pushed him. They need to check his lungs – if there’s no water in them, he was dead when he went in. We could also look for obvious rock fall round the island, but with this storm we’d never be able to make sure.’
She nodded again. It was sobering how quickly all your usual weapons – forensics, a back-up team, even police tape – could be put beyond use. On the island, they might as well be investigating a death in the 1950s. No mobiles, a handful of barely working phone connections. She wondered if, living out here, you’d feel beyond the law. If you’d have to make your own. ‘So I guess we’re stuck out here.’
‘For now.’
‘Yeah.’ It felt wrong somehow. Even though she knew Maggie was fine, and Aidan was miles away and didn’t want to see her anyway, it didn’t seem right to be out here with Guy, after everything that lay between them. The secrets shared and secrets held back. The things she wasn’t telling him.
‘You asked earlier why I’m here,’ Guy began.
‘You were in Dublin, you said.’
‘Yes, and I was keen to see you, of course . . .’
Her stomach lurched.
‘But there’s more, Paula. The reason the Met sent me over – well, she wasn’t unknown to them. Fiona Watts.’
‘She had a file?’
‘Sort of. About a year ago, Fiona was working in a clinic in East London. Big immigrant community, predominantly Muslim. She had a patient whose parents wanted to take her overseas, to the Sudan. Fiona suspected something was going to happen to the girl there. Female genital mutilation, most likely. Then a forced marriage. But just before they were due to go, the girl disappeared.’
‘And – they thought Fiona had something to do with it?’
‘Not at first. I was called in, because of my work with the task force, and my background in the MPRU. They thought maybe there was some gang involvement, even radicalisation. I didn’t think so. She was a very ambitious girl – Anika, that was her name – even wanted to be a doctor herself. I didn’t think she’d risk her studies like that.’
It was the kind of case Paula would have loved to work on. Getting into the mind of a teenage girl, working through her complex network of pressures and motivations, the things that were pushing and pulling her to disappear. ‘How come I didn’t hear about this on the news, if she went missing?’
He shrugged. ‘She wasn’t a white middle-class teenager, that’s why.’
Paula gritted her teeth. She’d forgotten how things were in London, how the disappearance of a child could be front-page news for decades, or forgotten in seconds, depending on who that child and their parents were. ‘And what happened?’
‘Well, we found her. She’d made it to a refuge and was hiding out there. The thing was, she said Fiona had given her the details. Even picked her up from school and dropped her off there. So that caused all manner of trouble – the practice had a policy of not interfering in such things. They’re obliged to report FGM, but only after the fact. So Fiona was fired. For a while the local force even thought about charging her with kidnap, I believe. Hence the file. I believe there was a lot of harassment afterwards, from the local community. Stones thrown, bike tyres slashed, that sort of thing. Even an arson attempt. Fiona and Matt lost their house, had to move, go back to renting. So when they disappeared, the Met thought there might be a link to that case.’
‘So, you came.’
‘I came. But now I don’t think so. It’s something to do with this place, isn’t it?’
‘And what happened to the girl? Anika?’
‘She was only fourteen, so they had to send her home to her parents, and the council didn’t want to intervene.’
‘So she was taken away?’
‘Yes. I believe so.’
Silence for a moment. Then the howl of the wind. Paula knew, in her bones, that should she ever meet Fiona Watts – if she was even alive – she would recognise the woman as her kin. She couldn’t promise she wouldn’t have done exactly the same, in that situation.
Guy said, ‘I thought you should know what kind of person she was. She wouldn’t have sat back and done nothing, if she saw what was going on here.’
‘Not that we actually know what’s going on.’
‘Well. No.’
‘What can we do, then?’ she asked.
‘Only one thing left.’ Guy ran a hand over his eyes – he must be exhausted. ‘We’ll have to interview them.’
‘Who?’
He shrugged his shoulders, hands wide to indicate the island. ‘Everyone.’
Outside, the wind still battered the windows of the pub. It was dark already, as if the light had just struggled and died against the might of the coming storm. Colm came in from the back room and dumped more peat briquettes on the fire, making it snap and hiss. Paula stared at the warm glow of it, squinting at the tension headache which had coiled up in her temples.
Colm squatted back from the fire and pushed himself up. He looked knackered. ‘Getting a bit sick of all this. It’s been a bit weird out here since I came back.’
‘Back?’ said Paula, still thinking about Matt Andrews’s dead eyes filling up with rain.
‘Aye, I was in Dublin, studying at Trinity. Came back for Christmas was all.’
It was now mid-February, though; surely term would have started again. ‘You didn’t go back to college? How come?’
He shrugged. ‘Wanted to stay, so I took a deferral. Ma seemed a bit . . . off. Like she called me Fintan a fair few times, and that’s my brother in Australia. And she was always getting angry. My ma’s the softest woman alive, never a bad word to say about anyone, but – she’d changed. On Boxing Day I saw her – well, a wee mouse came out of the kitchen, and she just – she killed it with the poker. All its blood and brains on the carpet, and she just kept hitting it, like . . .’ He glanced at the bar, where earlier Rory had battered the fisherman.
‘And there’s been more? Andrea Sharkey, is that part of it? Jimmy Reilly? Niamh?’
‘Jimmy Reilly killed that man in cold blood. Right in here. It went all over me.’ Colm looked around, as if seeing the arc of the blood across the room. Now Paula looked too, there were still faint stains on the yellow paint of the walls. Blood was hard to shift. ‘And Andrea – well, they tried to say the doc missed it, post-natal something or other, I don’t know. But Fiona didn’t seem like the type to miss things, if you see what I mean.’
‘Thorough?’
‘Aye. God, she asked a million questions when I took my mammy in.’
‘So what’s going on?’ Colm stared at the fire, and Paula felt it acutely, her status as outsider. She repeated, ‘What’s going on, Colm? If we need help, we can get it.’ Her voice wavered, and she clawed at her head as the pain throbbed.
Colm rubbed his face. ‘There’s something wrong,’ he said, almost embarrassed. ‘There’s something sending people crazy. That’s what I think. I don’t know what it is.’
She almost laughed at the clichéd phrase – sending people crazy, indeed – but she looked at Colm and he wasn’t smiling. ‘You m
ean with Jimmy Reilly, and Andrea and Niamh, and maybe Matt too? Something was wrong with him?’
‘Aye, maybe. I didn’t know him now, only to have a wee chat with when he came in. But the last while . . . he wasn’t in much. He missed trad night on Sunday and all. Loved trad night, so he did.’
Paula looked at Colm. ‘You went to the lighthouse that day, when Sergeant McElhone broke the door down? You were there?’
‘Aye. Coastguard said the light was off in the light-house, and Dr Watts wasn’t in her surgery, so Rory went to have a look. But it was locked so he came here and me and Seamas went. Seamas – Mr Fairlinn, that is, who owns this place.’
‘And? What did you find?’
He shrugged. ‘It was like Rory told you. Locked, but the top bulb all wrecked like. We thought they’d maybe fallen off.’
‘But you think something’s going on here? Like what?’ Guy leaned forward.
Colm shook his head, pushing himself wearily to stand. ‘I dunno. Something. Anyway. Need to close up now, folks, go and mind my mammy.’ He felt in the pocket of his loose jeans. ‘Here. Top of the stairs.’ He set down two keys, one on a green plastic fob and one on a red. The handwritten label on one read 1, and the other 2. The sum total of the pub’s available rooms. Paula had a memory – another trip to somewhere wild and cold, she and Guy having to share a room, and eventually, a bed. The feel of him beside her, solid and reassuring. It was eight months since a man had shared her bed, but she still woke up groping for Aidan, trying to pull his arm around her in the half-light of morning. Losing him again and again, every day.
Guy took the green one, and she lifted the red. No discussion about it. ‘Tomorrow then,’ he said. ‘We’ll start talking to everyone.’
Colm was pulling on his rain jacket. ‘Lock the door behind me, OK?’
‘Right.’ Guy stifled a yawn. ‘We could do with your help in the morning, if you don’t mind.’
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