The Dead Ground (25 page)

Guy was ready but had not yet opened the door. Outside it was hard to see much in the whirling snow, the path lit blue with police strobes. There was an impression of activity further up, dark shapes moving. ‘It’s the same, isn’t it? An out of the way place, a sacred place – like an offering.’

Paula didn’t want to think about it. ‘What will they do?’

‘Get up there. We got a tip-off a car was seen going up – it matched the description of Heather’s. That was about an hour back.’

‘So the abductor could still be up there?’

The killer, was what she really should have said. After Alison Bates had been ripped open and left to die, this wasn’t just a harmless baby-hungry nut.

‘Yes. We’re working on the assumption that Heather is still alive. Otherwise – well, we wouldn’t be out in this.’ He scrubbed a patch in the misted-up windows and looked at her. ‘You have to stay here, Paula. You understand?’

‘But I need to see it!’

‘It’s far too dangerous, you must realise that. Wait until the scene is secured.’

‘But—’

‘Paula. After last month . . . 
please
.’

She nodded reluctantly. She’d almost got herself killed, and Aidan too, going to the wrong house on her own at Halloween. But the truth was, this time part of her didn’t even want to leave the warm interior of the car. This time she was actually afraid. She who’d faced down sociopaths, killers, rapists. She was scared. ‘I’ll stay. But please, will you let me know what happens?’

‘Of course. I won’t even go myself. There’s a Tactical Support Unit heading up. We have to treat the situation as potentially dangerous. Keep the doors locked.’

He got out, letting in a blast of ice that soaked the seat, and vanished into the gloom of the trees. Suddenly alone, all she could hear was the wind. High above the path the Mass rock loomed, a cairn of stones with a cross on top, casting shadows in the snow. Paula remembered it from a school trip. Underneath was an alcove where worshippers could hide if soldiers came. She imagined how the wind would sound up there, nudging and moaning at each small rock, worrying its way into every weak spot.

Inches from the car windows, the trees whipped to and fro, scratching at the glass with each ferocious burst of wind. With the engine off, she could see her breath. She kept scrubbing at the windows. Nothing but the trees and dark and deathly blue light over everything. She waited, powerless, for struggle, shots, fire in the dark. Nothing. They’d be at the cairn by now, surely.

Paula couldn’t stand it a second longer. She wrenched open the door in the wind, the cold taking her breath away after the warm car. Pulling her hood tight against her face, she battled up the path in the wind. The nearest police van was perhaps five metres away.

It was so fast she didn’t know if she’d seen it or not. A flash in the dark, something white and quick, an impression of eyes watching, the crack of branches. Paula found she was crashing through the trees. ‘Hello? Is someone there?’ The wind snatched her voice.

She stopped. She was several metres into the forest, her own breath sounding in her ears, snow crunching underfoot. A stony chill radiated up from the earth. Branches scratched her cheek. ‘Hello?’

Paula had a moment of pure terror – just a few seconds, but enough to paralyse her – and then she sensed movement behind, on the path. A powerful light came on, filling the forest with dazzle. Paula shielded her eyes, and then felt her arm yanked. She almost screamed. Behind her was a breathless Gerard, ears sticking out under a woolly hat. ‘What the hell are you doing here? The car was lying open!’

She couldn’t speak. The wind howled round them.

Gerard shouted, ‘He says you’ve to come now.’

‘Hurry up, Maguire!’

‘It’s icy!’ The path was blanketed in new snow, white and perfect, dissolving to slush under her boots. She slipped and slid.

‘Don’t be daft, it’s not even frozen yet. Come on.’ Gerard took her arm in exasperation. He was radiating heat beneath his plastic jacket.

‘They found her?’ They were shouting over the gale.

‘Aye. She’s alive, barely. If they can get her to hospital she might have a chance, but—’ His face twisted. ‘He wants you to see it.’

She took deep breaths. ‘Was it – like before?’

‘Aye.’

‘She was cut?’

‘Yeah. The stomach.’

Paula was shaking. Snow stung her lips, her eyelids. ‘Gerard – what happened to the baby? Please tell me.’ Because she didn’t think she could handle it, not now, a baby cold and dead in the snow.

Gerard pulled her on over branches and tree roots. ‘The baby’s gone, Maguire.’

‘You mean—’

‘Someone cut it out of Heather, then left her up there. Half her blood’s probably soaked into their car, whoever it was. But the baby’s gone.’

At the top end of the path, through the snow, she could see an ambulance, the source of the blinding light. Being loaded into it, strapped to a stretcher, the white face and dark hair of Heather Campbell. Alison Bates’s daughter, sliced apart in the same way. The paramedics were trying to shield her face from falling snow, so she must be still alive. Paula looked at her stomach but it was covered with blankets. Her eyelids fluttered and her blue lips moved, as if she had something to say, something important, but the words were lost in the wind. Then they were shutting the doors and reversing out.

‘Did someone call her husband?’ Paula’s voice sounded strange inside the hood of her raincoat, louder and reverberating.

‘He’ll be at the hospital.’ Gerard signalled to Guy, who was conferring with Corry near an open police Land Rover. ‘I got her, boss.’

‘Thanks. You saw that?’ he asked Paula, cupping his mouth against the wind. ‘She was under the Mass Rock, they said, unconscious, laid out. It’s horrific.’ Snow was drifting onto his notebook; he brushed it off impatiently. ‘The baby’s been taken out and Heather was left to bleed to death. Same cuts as her mother – small, but deep, slashing across her stomach.’

‘The baby’s not up there?’ Paula’s hair whipped in her eyes.

‘We don’t think so.’

‘But they’ll look? Will they look?’

‘Of course they’ll—’

‘Please!’ She was shouting over the rising wind. ‘Please look hard – it won’t survive, not in this snow!’

‘
Dr Maguire
. Calm down. We’ll look for the baby,’ said Corry, looking at her, and Paula realised someone had guessed her secret.

Snow melts. Seasons change. But some things are forever – the stilling of a beating heart, the snuffing of a human life. That was forever. And that moment came too soon for Heather Campbell. The ambulance carrying her raced into town on treacherous roads, lights striping blue across the drifts as snow fell silently over the town, over the grey streets and huddled houses and the lives inside.

As they unloaded her into A & E, and doctors rushed forward to lay hands on her body, Heather’s heart stopped, leached almost entirely dry of the blood that had kept it squeezing in and gasping out for the twenty-eight years since her own mother had birthed her into the world. Scrabbling around on her bloodied stretcher, doctors tried defibrillation, then CPR, and then a desperate open heart massage, until one stilled the other’s pumping arms with a shake of the head, and on the blood- and slush-covered floor of the hospital, they felt Heather’s pulse stutter and calm, until the smallest thing of all, the beat of her heart, was gone entirely.

Chapter Twenty-Six

She was dead.

Dry-eyed, Paula took the news like a blow, lowering her head into her hands as they sat in the waiting room of the hospital. If she were honest, she hadn’t liked Heather Campbell that much on their brief meeting, but that made it harder. No one deserved this. To be lost, and then found, but in this way. And besides, Heather had been pregnant, scared and pregnant, with no mother to help her. They were the same under the skin, all blood and veins and terror. Except now Heather was dead.

‘We did everything we could.’ Saoirse was the one who’d come to tell them. She looked exhausted. There was blood on her white coat and her face was pale as bone.

Corry was leaning against the wall in her long cream coat, turned beige by the sickly yellow lighting. ‘If they’d got her here sooner?’

Saoirse shook her head. ‘Even if the ambulance had made it to the hospital sooner, she was already gone. The helicopter couldn’t take off in that weather. It was so cold, and she’d lost so much blood. Nothing could be done.’

Paula looked round at them, Fiacra and Avril pale as frightened children, with their near-identical blond heads. Bob accepting it, yet another death on his shoulders. So many he’d seen. So many taken. The whole team was there, gathered in the hospital to see if they’d managed to find one of the lost. And they had, but too late.

Gerard swore softly, then pushed back his chair and went out, banging the door. Guy let him go, shaking his head briefly as Bob stirred. ‘Leave him.’

Saoirse rubbed her face. ‘Anyway, I thought you’d want to know. My colleague is in telling the husband. Can someone sign the paperwork?’ Corry straightened herself and went to the door. Saoirse followed her out with a sideways glance at Paula, who still hadn’t moved. The news seemed to have paralysed her.

Guy let the door shut after Saoirse and looked round at them. ‘We’ve lost Heather. But her baby is still missing – she may be alive.’

‘She?’ Paula’s throat was dry.

‘Yes. They knew it was a girl. They were going to call her Lucy. So we can still find her, bring her home to her father.’

No one else seemed to believe it. ‘Could she really be alive, sir?’ said Fiacra wearily. ‘The depth of the snow out there . . .’

‘The doctors think she could be. We don’t know if Heather was even killed at the cairn – there was a lot of blood, but perhaps not enough. If it was done indoors, if the baby were kept warm and fed, and they knew to clamp off her umbilical cord and so on, she could be OK.’

‘It’s true,’ said Paula, wearily. ‘I’ve read about cases like this.’

‘It’s happened before?’ Guy looked horrified.

‘It’s called foetal abduction. They kill the mother, cut the child out. The baby was quite often alive after birth. They found them too, a lot of the time. These women often aren’t careful. They want everyone to think it’s their own child, so they’ll take it out, display it. These aren’t hardened criminals, just desperate people.’

‘Women?’ said Avril, very pale.

‘Yes. It’s nearly always women.’

‘Right. So it’s very possible we will find Lucy.’ Guy was doing his best to sound efficient. ‘Now we need to look at the traffic data again. Heather’s car was found halfway up the track to the Mass rock. Here’s the odd thing – there is no blood in the car, though she was quite probably injured before being taken there. It’s almost like they wanted us to find the car, and know she was there, but she can’t have been transported in it.’

‘How did they get her up there then?’

Guy acknowledged Fiacra’s bewildered question. ‘That’s what we need to find out. We’re working on the assumption that it’s the same person who killed Heather’s mother. The MO is exactly the same. So they must have access to some kind of off-road vehicle, a Jeep or a van or something – though in this case we don’t know why Heather’s car was also left there, or how they got her up there and escaped. Heather hadn’t been there long when we found her. She’d have been dead otherwise.’

She was dead anyway. Worse, sometimes, to think you might have saved them, if only you’d been faster, a minute here, a second there, however long it took to keep their heart beating. Timing. It could break you in two. Paula tried to think. ‘So maybe there were two of them – a husband, perhaps, helping?’

‘Maybe.’ Guy ran his hands over his face. ‘We must have barely missed them, too. She’d only just been dumped there.’

‘The killer could have still been there?’ Paula recalled the dark of the trees, the breathless silence of the snow.

‘Yes,’ said Guy briefly. ‘They may well have been. So that’s possibly three linked cases now – Darcy Williams, the doctor, and Heather, plus her child, who’s still missing. We’re leading on that case, while Corry’s team launch the murder inquiry.’

‘What can we do, sir?’ Fiacra’s voice was wavering. He was watching Avril, who was fighting back tears.

Guy said, ‘It looks as if someone has a grudge against the family. I want to talk to Heather’s father, and her husband if he’s up to it, and I want TV and radio appeals to find the baby. Posters, ads, the lot. I want you on screen, Paula, interviewed on the psychology of this person. Explain what signs to look for, what people should report.’

She nodded, trying to see it as work, not a pregnant woman ripped apart, dumped like meat.

Guy went on. ‘I want rock-solid alibis for all those pro-life nuts of Dunne’s. I want to know do any of them have Jeeps. I want everyone in this town looking for Lucy and Darcy. And I want an explanation from that bloody psychic woman.’

Bob stiffened at the curse. ‘Will DCI Corry authorise an arrest?’

‘I don’t know. But I think she knows something, and I’d bet it’s not through visions of the Virgin Mary, either.’ He swept his eyes round the team. ‘This case – it’s getting out of hand. Let’s bring it back. Let’s find that child and bring her home safe.’

Paula had been thinking and thinking about what Magdalena Croft had said when they’d gone to see her, and what it was she’d found jarring, and now eventually she got it –
God willing she’ll be found
, the woman had said.
And her wee baby too
.

Separately. As if she’d already known Heather and her child would be so violently torn apart. She got to her feet. ‘I’ll meet you back at the unit.’

Paula found Saoirse in her office, the door shut but not locked. She was sitting at her desk with her head in her hands. Paula closed the door behind her. ‘Hey.’

Saoirse didn’t turn. ‘The baby.’

Paula moved closer. ‘We’ll find her.’

‘She won’t survive it. It’s . . . look.’ Saoirse gestured painfully to the window, where outside the blinds the snow continued to fall.