A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4) (8 page)

Chapter Twelve

Aidan was in the living room when she got back, late. As he was the paper’s editor – and it more or less ran on shoestring and paperclips – he worked from home a lot, looking after Maggie.

‘Well,’ she said, putting down her bag.

Aidan was engrossed in a DVD of
Breaking Bad
and barely looked up. ‘Well, Maguire.’

‘Is she down?’

‘Not without a fight. I had to hang a blanket over the curtains before she’d believe me that it’s night-time. But it’s not
dark
, Daddy, she says.’

Paula smiled, feeling the twinge of unease she always got when the word was used. It had been a risk, letting Maggie call Aidan Daddy. She didn’t know who’d started it – Pat, maybe. And it seemed too churlish to correct a toddler about the man who put her to bed most days, and so they’d left it, and now it was two years on, and Aidan was Maggie’s father. Except that now Guy might be coming back.

She pushed the thought away and sat on the arm of the sofa, pressing up close to Aidan. He wore khaki shorts and a T-shirt, black hair flopping over his forehead, just like any dad in the town. His hand left the remote and crept round her waist, eyes not moving from the screen. It rested, strong and warm, on her hip, and she sank into the certainty of it. Ink on his knuckles, a smear of newsprint. This was her place. This would be her husband, soon.

He said, ‘So, I was thinking this weekend we should visit the hotel. Get a sense of final numbers, confirm the menu and that.’

‘Um . . . might be tricky. I’ve got this big case on, the Morgan girl.’

‘You always have a big case, Maguire.’

‘I know. But this one . . . it’s strange.’

‘What’s happening with it?’ he asked casually.

‘Ah, here we go, pumping for the story?’ She elbowed him.

‘Can I not ask my fiancée about her day?’

‘Urgh. I hate that word.’

‘It’s what you are, Maguire. At least for a few more weeks.’

Paula felt a nasty little lurch. God, the wedding was so soon, and he was right, there was still loads to do. ‘I know. No, there’s no sign of Alice Morgan. Though I see according to you she’s been kidnapped by tree-worshipping Satanists.’

He shrugged. ‘Weird stuff sells papers. And we could be doing with the money, pay for this wedding.’

‘I’m more concerned about Oakdale. It’s a strange old place up at that college. What do you know about it?’

He pressed Mute on the DVD. ‘Did a piece on it a while back. There’s some dodgy American cash behind it, but otherwise it’s just a sort of rehab with qualifications for washed-up rich kids. Hardly surprising one of them would go missing.’

‘If I gave you a few names, do you reckon you could do what you do best?’

‘And what’s that?’ He squinted at her.

‘Dig the dirt, of course.’

‘Maguire, I’m insulted. Who is it?’

‘Some of Alice Morgan’s uni friends. They’re just not quite ringing true.’

‘Rich kids with a dodgy past? That’s my kind of thing.’ His hand stroked her ribcage through her shirt. ‘But here, I resent the implication that’s the only thing I’m good at. What about other things?’

Paula pretended to consider it. ‘Hm – can’t think of any right now.’

‘Do I need to jog your memory?’

Paula leaned over and paused the DVD. On screen, a bullet left a gun and never arrived. Frozen in mid-air, before the damage was done. That was a missing person, a bullet in flight, never hitting the target. After a while, you started to long for the impact. To finally feel the wound that had been done to you, at last, so many years ago. She stood up. ‘Come on, then. Jog it.’

Aidan stood up too, and caught her face in his hands, and kissed her hard. Her hands went to his hair, so thick and dark. He tasted of mint, and of himself, and . . . She pulled away. He tasted like he usually did – that was the problem.

‘What?’ he frowned.

‘You’ve been smoking again.’

‘I have not!’

‘Aidan. I can taste it on you.’

‘I go in a lot of smoky places – that’s where the stories are, you know.’

‘Don’t lie to me. It’s just insulting.’

‘I’m no liar, Maguire. I might be many things but I’ve never lied to you.’

But he had kept things from her. She put her hands on her hips. ‘Aidan.’

He spoke cajolingly, hands around her waist. ‘Look. OK, the odd time, I still have a smoke. It helps put people at their ease is all. Some of these ould fellas, they don’t trust a man who won’t take a smoke or a drink. And I’m not on the latter, as you well know.’

Did she know? She glared at him. ‘Are you still buying your own?’

‘No. I just cadge the odd one.’

‘I don’t want Maggie anywhere near it. I don’t even want her smelling it on you, OK?’

‘Catch yourself on, Maguire. I’ve grown up a wee bit now I’m a dad.’

There was a tiny pause between them, which went on for a second more than was bearable, and Paula wondered if it would always be there, that pocket of making-do, of not-mentioning.

There was a squawk from upstairs, right on cue. ‘Daaaaady!’

‘The woman herself,’ Aidan said. ‘I’ll go.’ He dropped a careless kiss on Paula’s hand as he went out, the kind of gesture between people with love to spare, to throw away. She saw his jacket over the chair, carelessly tossed as usual, no thought to tidying up after himself. She didn’t know what made her do it. She crossed the room, telling herself she’d hang it up, but then she was slipping her hand into the pocket, feeling the cold silver of the Zippo lighter which had been his father’s, and breathing the spicy smell of his rolling tobacco, the onion-skin rustle of his Rizlas.

There was a creak on the stairs. She took her hand out, and left the jacket where it was.

Later, when they were in bed, and Aidan had fallen asleep on his back, Paula pulled his T-shirt on over her head and wandered round the house, alone, as she’d done in that year of her dad moving out, before Aidan. While she was waiting for Maggie to arrive. The night was hot, and the town restless with sirens – ambulance, police? Lives fracturing into pieces, somewhere out there. Paula eased open the door to Maggie’s room – the one she’d slept in herself as a child – and watched the little girl asleep in the bed with its Peppa Pig duvet, hands clutched into fists. Paula’s old desk was still in the room, now covered in stickers and cuddly toys, and in the bottom drawer of it, the sum of all the misery Paula hoped Maggie would never know.

In the glow of the street light, Paula eased open the drawer and looked in. A dull manila file with her mother’s name on it. A stack of documents and interviews, read almost into flitters by Paula as she’d combed it for a bit of information, something, anything that might give answers. She’d found none. But it was still there. And she would not, could not, throw it away.

Guy. Guy maybe coming back. And just before the wedding. It was all wrong. Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he too wanted to keep the door locked on the past, stay in London with his wife and his new job. Maybe it would be all right.

Maggie turned over in bed, making a small noise in her dreams, trusting and limp. Paula shut the drawer, as quietly as she could, and watched her daughter sleep.

Chapter Thirteen

‘This is stupid. I was worried about her. She’s my friend, of course I’d try to find her.’

Corry gave Dermot Healy a long look. ‘You weren’t too worried about her the other day.’

He scrubbed angrily at his hair. The light from the classroom window showed up the smears on his glasses and dark rings under his eyes. ‘When you first came, I didn’t know about the . . . you know.’ His voice cracked.

‘The blood?’ Corry supplied.

‘Yes. But when I found out, I got worried, OK? I knew she sometimes talked to the old woman at the farmhouse, so I called in.’

‘Did you know that the woman’s daughter also went missing from the church, in 1981?’

He paused for a second. ‘Alice told me. She thought it was interesting.’

‘Interesting. Not scary?’

‘Well, no. It was ages ago. She thought the church was . . . kind of a special place.’

Corry gave Paula a look and tried again. ‘So you’re saying you went over to Mrs O’Neill’s house to see if she knew anything about Alice. Did you go to Alice’s cottage?’

A slight pause. ‘Um, no.’

‘Have you ever been there, Dermot?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think so? You aren’t sure if you’ve ever been there or not?’

‘Not that I can remember, no.’ He was sounding more sure now.

‘And how did you get down there the other day? It’s a couple of miles, isn’t it?’

‘Bike.’ He was barely opening his mouth to speak, arms wedged in the pocket of his hoody, which must have been in need of a good wash. Paula could hear, outside somewhere, a brief scream of laughter, which for a moment sounded like the other kind. The heat of the room lay heavy on her, frying through the glass windows. Madeleine Hooker had actually set Paula and Corry up with a base in the college this time. The room they were in was wood-panelled, with modern AV equipment skilfully inserted. Like everything else in Oakdale, it was beautiful.

Corry was saying, ‘So what you’re telling me is, if I take your fingerprints, Dermot, and compare them to ones we got in Alice’s cottage, there’ll be no match.’

He thought about it. ‘It depends if it’s something else there that I touched, doesn’t it? Doesn’t necessarily prove I was there.’ He was smart. That made things harder. Paula could almost feel the effort he was putting into staying alert – and why was he doing that, if he knew nothing about Alice? What was he trying to hide?

Corry’s tone changed. ‘Tell me about Peter and Katy.’

He blinked. ‘What about them?’

‘Would either of them have a reason to fall out with Alice?’

Dermot slumped in his chair. From the corridor came laughing, confident student voices. The sound of people who’d never had anything go wrong for them. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I know Katy and Al didn’t get on that well as room-mates, so maybe, something . . . And Peter, well, he is what he is.’

‘And what’s that?’

Dermot shrugged. ‘He rows. He plays rugby. He drinks beer.’

‘Does he do anything else?’

‘Girls,’ he said flatly.

‘Alice?’

Dermot pressed his lips together. ‘I don’t know. How would I know?’

Corry looked at her watch. ‘Well, maybe he’ll tell us himself. Come in!’

As she called, the door opened tentatively. Through it, with several feet of space between them, came a wary-looking Katy and Peter, who immediately said, ‘Do I have to be here for this? I’ve got practice.’

Corry motioned for them to sit down. Dermot was staring at his lap. ‘Yes, Peter, we need to speak to all three of you.’

Katy sat down beside Dermot, so they were facing Corry and Paula across the table like an interview panel. Paula preferred to watch from the sidelines usually – it gave her a better view of the things people were trying to hide. Peter remained standing. ‘But why? We already told you what we know.’

‘Well, you’ll need to tell us again.’ Corry glared at him. ‘Sit down.’

He did. Katy immediately took his hand and placed them both, entwined, on the table. ‘Of course we want to help,’ she said. ‘We’re worried about Alice. We think she might have hurt herself.’

Dermot looked up sharply and down again. Corry said, ‘Hurt herself how?’

‘Well, she tried to kill herself before. When she was in rehab. Did you know that?’

Corry looked at Paula. ‘Did she tell you that, Katy?’ Alice’s parents hadn’t mentioned it.

‘Yes. She took pills. She told me – we were really close, like I said.’

‘But not so much after she moved out?’

Katy opened her mouth and shut it. She glanced sideways at Dermot. He blinked and looked up, cleared his throat. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘If something’s happened to Alice – and I think it’s too early to say that it has – she’ll have done it herself. That’s the angle you need to take.’

‘What makes you say that, Dermot?’ Corry asked carefully. ‘Did she have a reason to hurt herself?’

He shrugged again. ‘Like Katy said, she’s done it before. And she’s been a bit weird the last few months.’

‘Weird how?’

‘She moved out to the cottage,’ said Katy, still clutching at Peter’s hand. ‘And before that she sort of . . . cut herself off from us. Didn’t she?’

Peter licked his lips. ‘Um, yeah, I guess so. We didn’t see much of her and I noticed in the buttery she wasn’t—’ He made an incoherent eating gesture. ‘You know, she was having trouble again.’

‘Her anorexia was kicking in again?’ said Paula.

The three exchanged looks. ‘Yes,’ said Katy confidently. ‘I was worried about her.’

‘Have you any idea why she cut herself off?’

Another short silence. ‘No,’ said Dermot. ‘We had no idea.’

Paula muttered something about the blind – a shaft of sun was hitting the wood of the table, filling the room with buttery light. She got up and went to the window, hovering there to watch the three as Corry questioned them. She noticed that Katy’s other hand, the one not clutching Peter’s, was on the side of Dermot’s chair. Almost as if she was poking him. Peter’s other hand was clenched tight by his side.

Corry was saying, ‘So where’s she gone then, if she went off by herself? We’ve found no trace of her.’

Dermot jerked his head irritably. ‘Down the rabbit hole. I don’t know. That’s kind of the point, that no one would know.’

Corry again. ‘So, to be clear, you all think that Alice isn’t missing at all.’

He made an odd gesture. Somewhere between a laugh and a shrug of despair. ‘We didn’t say
that
. I guess it depends if you think being lost is the same as no one knowing where you are.’

‘These kids,’ sighed Corry. Across the playing fields from the car, tall figures stood against the sun. Paula wondered if one of them was Peter Franks. Thinking about his hands, how strong they were. How small Alice was in her selfies.

She asked, ‘What did you think to that thing Dermot said about Peter? And girls?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand any of them. Why aren’t they upset? They were supposedly the best of friends, those four. And now she’s missing and there’s hardly a flicker of emotion between them. The only one that’s shown any feeling about it is Dermot, and he looks—’

‘Exhausted,’ finished Paula. ‘At the end of his rope.’

‘Right.’

‘Down the rabbit hole, Dermot said,’ Paula remembered. ‘That’s from
Alice in Wonderland
, right?’

‘I only know the Disney film. Our Rosie used to love it. You reckon he said it on purpose? He knows something else?’

‘I don’t know. It could just be a coincidence.’ Paula thought of the illustrations in her old copy of the book, the frail, fair child, staring at the cake, longing to eat it but disgusted at the same time. What it must have been like inside Alice’s head, every day. She wondered how to bring up her next point. ‘Uh – you said Peter Franks had no criminal record?’

‘None. His old school were very cagey about why they kicked him out, said he went of his own accord, but it must be something.’

‘Well – I might have some . . . information about him. Allegations only, of course.’

Corry narrowed her eyes. ‘Am I right in thinking you got it off a certain journalist you know?’

‘Maybe. Maybe indeed.’ Aidan was, as she’d said, very good at digging the dirt. His journalist friend Maeve worked in Dublin and knew all about the school Peter Franks had gone to, St Murtagh’s. A boarding school on the outskirts of Dublin, for boys whose parents had more money than time. ‘Anyway, Peter was apparently expelled just before his Leaving Cert.’

‘And did your super-secret source say why?’

‘There was an incident. A party in the school grounds – some girls from the local town were smuggled in.’

‘And?’

‘And one of them said she was raped, by Peter Franks and two other boys, taking turns.’

Corry’s mouth twisted. ‘Let me guess, no conviction?’

‘It was all hushed up. No need to ruin the boy’s futures, one mistake, etcetera, etcetera. But my, eh, source did hear there were drugs involved, Rohypnol or something similar.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I know.’

Corry looked back at the college, lit by the afternoon sun as they turned onto the main road. ‘So we’ve got him with a rape allegation; Dermot . . . well, God only knows what’s up with him; Katy self-harming – I saw her wrists; Alice with her anorexia, and her history of vanishing acts. She tried to kill herself, Katy says. We need to look into that. What a messed-up wee foursome they were. Question is – what happened to make them into three? And why do the others not care?’

‘Do you reckon Willis would let us take a trip to Dublin?’ asked Paula casually.

Equally casually, Corry said, ‘Well, he did say we should throw everything we had at this. He’s got the Morgans breathing down his neck, and the press can’t get enough of it.’

It was the weekend, when she’d promised Aidan she’d help him with the final wedding admin. But Alice Morgan was still missing, and it was hard to care about flowers and dresses until she was found. ‘Exactly. We should follow every lead.’