A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4) (11 page)

Alice

2013

Nothing good ever lasts. I know that. I’ve known it since I was seven years old and being put into boarding school by parents who blamed me for their marriage falling apart. And who had chosen to save the marriage, and lose me. But still – for a while, the four of us, here, it was good. I knew there were things under the surface. I knew Peter wanted to fuck me, and was getting more and more pissed off I hadn’t let him. I knew Dermot maybe wanted to as well, or maybe just thought he should, and that he wanted Peter to like him maybe more than anything else. I knew that Katy wanted Peter, because he was popular, and that she wanted something from me, something darker. To have me, or more likely, to be me. But despite all that, it was so special to start with. I remember the first night most of all.

It was just before Christmas, so the boathouse was freezing, even when we dragged the little space heater down there. I’d told Katy to meet me there, and hinted it would be an amazing party. I’d told Dermot, who I knew from waiting to meet the stupid therapist, I’d be there too. I made it sound like I’d be on my own. I knew he would think that was the kind of thing he should do. I knew that if I pushed him, he’d probably do anything I asked. Whether he wanted to or not.

Peter was trickier. I knew he’d come, but he might be angry when he saw it wasn’t just me. He was already pissed off. The night before, when we’d kissed on his bed, he had pulled away and started looking for something, a condom, I guess. I said did he mind if we didn’t.
Why
, he said.
Do you not like it?

I couldn’t explain that I didn’t even know. So I said I had my period. A little joke to myself, that one. And when Katy and Dermot and I were at the boathouse, and I’d introduced them, and Katy was forcing him to bond with her – sensing a fellow runt in the litter – Peter appeared over the hill. He was carrying a bottle of vodka and I smelled him before I saw him. Smoke, and booze, and aftershave, and something else. The smell of the alpha male. He stopped. He’d given me the key earlier, I guess thinking I’d be sexing myself up for him down there.
Um . . . what’s this?

I went up to him, stroked his arm. The way I learned from Rebecca. All men are the same, really.
It’s cool, isn’t it? They’re good people
, I said under my breath.
And Dermot – he can get stuff. You know?

Dermot’s ability to ‘get stuff’ made him OK to Peter. He even shook his hand. I saw him look at Katy and dismiss her, but maybe even enjoy her being there, the ego boost.

There were other times too. Katy lying on my bed, laughing at
Pitch Perfect
. Dermot passing me notes in the library, little jokes. Peter smiling at me across the bar, everyone turning to see who he was looking at. It was good. It’s hard to believe it now, when things are so royally fucked up, but for a while, it was really good. It was the only time since Charlotte died that I actually felt I had friends.

I should have known. If you let people in, it only makes it easier for them to hurt you. I guess that’s why I’m writing it down, to try to understand what went so wrong. I haven’t done that since I was in the clinic. Things aren’t as bad as then. I have to remember that. I have to try and eat, and not go mad again, because whatever happens I can’t go back there. I’d rather die. And when I say that, unlike Katy, I actually mean it.

Chapter Eighteen

Paula asked to see the rest of the building, and after the briefest of hesitations, Allardyce lifted his desk phone and muttered some words into it. Maria was waiting for them outside, all smiles and heels. Could she offer them a drink or other refreshment? Perhaps they’d like to see the canteen with its nutrition programme?

Kevin said equably that he’d love a coffee, so they clattered down the stairs to a large barn–like room tacked onto the back of the house. It had views of the trees, and was done up like a hotel buffet, with cutlery trays, condiments in baskets. Except for the nurses on each till point.

‘The guests have to get used to eating in public,’ said Allardyce. ‘It’s one of the biggest issues for anorexics. The alimentary act, chewing and swallowing, it disgusts them, so they often eat in secret. We have a terrible mice problem here from food in the rooms. So they have to show the nurses they made good choices – no diet foods, just nutritious items. We do more than fatten them up – we try to change their behaviour.’

Most of the people in the room were female, and in their teens. The odd boy or older man was dotted around, looking shell-shocked. The girls chattered, but with a certain nervous energy. A flock of birds, pecking at their food.

‘What happens if they still refuse to eat?’ asked Paula. ‘Would you hospitalise them?’

‘If we have to. We have the facilities on site. Under-eighteens can legally be given nutrition, on a drip or orally.’

‘You mean you force-feed them?’

‘If you want to call it that. It’s saving them from a slow suicide, we think. Have you seen someone die of starvation, Dr Maguire?’ He was speaking neither loudly or quietly. ‘Everything shuts down. The eyes film over. The hearing goes. Their skin starts to crack open, even on the softest sheets. Their organs fail, one by one – the body eats itself to try to stay alive. Aside from breathing, eating is our most basic process. Unfortunately we live in a society which doesn’t understand that. People think you can stuff yourself with fat and sugar and are surprised to be obese – or at the opposite end, they think you can put in nothing at all for days and the engine will not grind to a halt.’ His eyes fell on one girl, who wore three layers of sweatshirts and a woolly hat, despite the warmth of the sun coming in the large windows. She was painstakingly putting milk into her coffee, drop by drop, her lips moving as she counted. Allardyce went on, ‘When you’re starving, the body starts to shut down non-essential systems. For girls, their periods usually stop. They may come back, if feeding is resumed. Or they may not. And the brain – no point in being able to think when you’re dying. So bear that in mind, when you’re trying to understand Alice. People with anorexia are mentally ill – you can’t trust them to make the right decisions. Their brains are dying, and it’s sending them mad.’

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, blood, 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.