The Dead Ground (41 page)

Epilogue

White.

Silence.

At first there was so much pain she thought she couldn’t be dead. Wasn’t there meant to be peace in death? She imagined people – her mother, standing in the corner of a hospital room, hair still red but her face older, smiling, and she failed to get to her, but someone was holding her down. Then her father, but sitting down for some reason, and Guy, and Aidan, and Saoirse – so many people she cried to be alone, burying her face in the pillow. The pain was a rack she twisted on, a ribbon of agony round her middle. The world coming back grey and noisy, bumping over ruts, and then.

White.

Silence.

Things were happening around her, or maybe she was remembering, or dreaming. How did you tell? There was a rush of noise, footsteps and doors banging, shouts, and then one sound she couldn’t escape – the high scream of a woman, going on and on until it got into the marrow of your bones. Hands were lifting her, and the air seemed to hurt her skin, and she cried. There was a screeching of sirens, then more white light, impossibly bright.

Silence.

This must be how death was. It was what she’d imagined when she tried to taste it as a teenager, the peace, just to lie down and forget your own name. For a while, she did. For a while she just floated, in the peace and the white and the stillness. For a while, Paula was quite happy to be dead.

Then she woke up.

It came back slowly, so blinding she couldn’t open her eyes. Her mouth was sore, as if her teeth had been knocked out of place. Her limbs were heavy, molten, and when she could see there was a pressure cuff on one finger and a catheter going into her arm. Below the waist was foreign – she couldn’t feel what was what going on down there, but it rustled when she stirred, and it felt like it wasn’t even a part of her.

‘Paula? Paula?’ Her father was there, in fact. She hadn’t dreamed that. And he was sitting down, or more strictly, in a wheelchair, one arm bandaged painfully in front.

She swallowed. There seemed to be sand in her throat. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Am
I
OK?’ PJ was gripping her hand in his one good one.

‘Yeah.’

He sighed. ‘You’d me worried sick, and you’re asking am I OK. I’m grand now you’ve opened your eyes.’

She blinked round the room. ‘Daddy . . . What happened? I thought I was dead.’ Flowers, cards, a blur of pastel.

‘You nearly were.’ He shifted so he could reach the bed, patting the arm with the pulse monitor on it. ‘They found you. One of your colleagues went to the house.’

‘Gerard came. I heard him. But he didn’t see me. I tried to call.’

‘He knew something was up when the sister answered the door. He’d seen her at the hospital – she’d even been interviewed a few times – and he didn’t buy her excuse, so they came back with a Tactical Support team. They saw the van outside, you know. It must have been bought illegally because it never came up on any of their searches of hospital staff. Anyway, she was in the room with you and she was about to – well – do you remember what happened?’

‘She cut me.’ It was easy to say it, somehow. The certainty of a blade slicing flesh. That had happened.

‘Yes. Well, she got the skin and muscle, and she’d nicked the – eh, your womb, pet – but not the artery. So they found you in time.’

‘Oh.’ She licked her dry lips and rustled again, tentatively. ‘I didn’t know . . . She was there all the time, and I never even realised. Is she—?’

‘You don’t remember what happened?’

‘No – it’s all sort of like a dream. I remember someone screaming.’ She shivered under the blankets.

‘She cut herself. Bernice. When they came in for you. Tried to slash her wrists, but they got her. She’s in a different hospital. The sister’s in custody. She admitted the whole business. She thinks they were in the right, you know. Doesn’t see a thing wrong with it. Anyway they found the wee Campbell baby safe. I thought you’d want to know that. She’ll be grand.’

Paula moved, cautiously, trying to work out what was going on below her waist. ‘Am I stitched?’

‘You’ve staples in, but they’ll be out in a week or so.’

‘Dad, I . . . am I . . .’

He took her hand. ‘Paula, you’re still expecting. If you want to be. The baby’s grand. She really is.’

She
. Paula put her hand under the sheets, and felt the gauze dressing on her stomach, and underneath a line of staples holding her flesh together. Pain flared and she drew in her breath in a hiss.

‘They said it’d be a challenge, since your skin’ll stretch a fair bit more, but you’ve time, and they’ll do their best.’

She was taking this in. ‘I’m having a baby.’

‘Looks that way, pet.’

A baby. That iron grip of life, the one she’d told to hold on no matter what. It had.

‘I’ll have to tell them,’ she said, panicking suddenly and trying to sit up. ‘Guy and Aidan. I’ll have to tell them I don’t know whose it is.’

‘Never mind those eejits,’ PJ said. His hand was rough and warm. ‘They’ve both been in pestering me day and night.’

‘Aidan too? Aidan came here?’ For a moment she wasn’t sure which was more painful. Assuming he wouldn’t care if she was dying, or thinking that maybe he did care, but just not enough. Never enough.

‘Of course he came. He’s not bad through and through. Though God knows how he’d take to being a father. Pay no heed to them now. I’ll mind you, and Pat too. We’ll get you well and the baby will come and we’ll sort it all out later.’

‘Dad. Magdalena – Mary, I mean. She said something to me, just before her sister – before she cut me.’

‘Don’t think about that now. It’s over. They’ve been caught, and they’ll not be hurting anyone else again.’

‘No – she said she saw Mum. She told me Mum’s still alive.’

He stopped patting her hand. ‘And how would she know a thing like that?’

‘She sees things. Visions.’

‘And you believe her?’

‘No. I don’t know. But, Dad, I’ve been looking. I’ve been looking at Mum’s file. I’ve been talking to people.’

‘I know you have. I’ve eyes in my head.’

‘But I want you to be with Pat. You have to be with Pat.’

‘Pet, you know that means I have to say your mother’s dead. There’s no other way.’

‘I know. But I have to keep looking, too. Even so. You understand that?’ She was pleading.

PJ sighed. ‘It seems like a lot of heartbreak for no reason. But you do what you have to, and I’ll do what I have to. I can’t let Patricia down now. She’s a good woman, the best. You’ll have to tell her, you know. About the wean. That she might be Aidan’s.’

She
. There it was again. No longer an it, a situation, a problem, but an irrevocable person on her way to them. Paula looked at the screen of the monitor, which was attached by a cord to her stomach. Not her heart, she realised, but the baby’s. Proof it was still there, and fighting, under those layers of skin and muscle so nearly laid bare. The pulse of it juddering, stuttering into life. It was the smallest thing. But it was everything, too.

Paula put out her hand. ‘Dad. Help me sit up, will you? I’ve got things to do.’

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank everyone at Headline, Hachette Ireland, and my overseas publishers for their support and belief in my books, especially Ali Hope.

Thanks to the staff at Johnson and Alcock, Blake Friedmann and AM Heath literary agencies, especially Oli Munson.

Thanks to my Twitter friends for help with many random research questions (eg What is the biggest town in Donegal? How quickly do you die from scalpel wounds?) especially Maitiú Ó Coimín who helped with the Irish (any remaining mistakes are down to me, or as I’m going to claim, ‘regional differences’).

Thanks to all my fantastic friends and family, who helped get me through this year. Especially thanks to Sarah Day and Angela Clarke for a riotous writing trip to Russia, in which not much actual writing got done. Thanks to Elizabeth Haynes for organising a great writing retreat in which quite a lot did.

Thanks to Oliver for reading early drafts of the book. Thanks to Jake Kerridge once again for support, helpful comments, and burgers, and to Stav Sherez for his invaluable help, without which the book would be much weaker.

Finally thanks to Iain, for coming along at exactly the right time.

To anyone who reviewed my previous books or contacted me to say they liked them – thank you so much, it means the world that you take the time to do this.

If you’ve enjoyed this book, I’d love to hear from you. Visit my website at http://clairemcgowan.net, or find me wasting time on twitter, where I am @inkstainsclaire.