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

Chapter Five

On the screen were two pictures. In one, a woman was dying in a famine in Sudan. Flies crawled on her face, made ageless by starvation. In the other, another woman was almost as thin, the skin stretched over the bones of her face. Only difference: she was smiling. On a website that gave tips on how to lose weight, hide your eating habits from friends and family. How to cheat at weigh-ins. How to never eat in public. How to die, slowly and willingly.

Paula sighed and clicked out of her research, feeling the weight of the internet press on her. The Famine. The hunger strikes. Anorexia. It was all too much to process. There were already some news stories online about Alice disappearing, and the phones in the station had been ringing since their return from the church. She turned again to the picture of Alice which Corry had put on the incident room board – frail, lost.
Where are you?
Paula couldn’t help but feel that the signs – the empty kitchen, the blood in the church – were all crumbs someone had left, if only she could follow them.

Gerard appeared at her desk, a ham sandwich in his hand – if he didn’t eat every fifteen minutes he would slip into a coma, apparently. ‘Corry wants you,’ he mumbled, chewing.

Behind him was a young policewoman in uniform. Paula smiled at her. ‘Well, Constable Wright. Not arresting me, I hope.’

Avril blushed. ‘Ah, stop it. It’s bad enough I have to wear this. I just hope I make CID quickly.’ The black police uniform, slacks and a stab vest, wasn’t Avril’s usual pastel attire, but her face was flushed and pretty as always when Gerard Monaghan was nearby.

The two were very careful to be discreet at work. Gerard, at twenty-nine and already a DS, was her senior. Avril had been an intelligence analyst for the missing persons unit before getting a taste for policing. Paula wondered how it was working out for them. Gerard’s Republican family and Avril’s parents – her father a Presbyterian minister – had so far refused to meet. Avril would also not countenance living with a man she wasn’t married to.

Gerard shoved the last of his sandwich in his mouth, chewing exaggeratedly to make Avril laugh. She shook her head. ‘You’re awful. Sorry, Paula.’

Paula thought they were doing OK. Gerard’s big lug of a face was also trying hard not to laugh. ‘Isn’t she a sight in that get-up?’ he said to Paula. ‘I keep expecting her to Taser me.’

‘Ah, give over.’ Avril slapped him lightly on the arm. ‘I better head on, Paula, but I’m dying to hear all about the wedding. What’s your dress like?’

Paula grimaced. ‘Um . . . I haven’t got one yet.’

‘Oh! But is it not . . . eh, a bit late?’

‘When’s it again?’ said Gerard, through lumps of ham.

‘The seventeenth.’ Avril shook her head at him. ‘Honestly. I’ve told you a million times.’

Paula got up. ‘I know, I don’t have much time. Soon. I’ll do it soon. I’ll see you anyway. Better find out what Corry wants.’

‘Your man Garrett might be weird, but he was right – this is the third relic theft since last year. In Dublin they lost a preserved heart out of a church, and another place had the jawbone of Saint Brigid nicked, if you could credit it. People were seen hanging about the church both times – seemed like a professional job.’

Paula said, ‘What do they want them for? Some kind of ritual?’

Corry laughed. ‘Nothing so voodoo. They probably just want to sell the gold casings. The recession, you see.’ Saint Blannad’s finger appeared to be a white half-moon of bone. In the pictures it rested in a gold, velvet-lined reliquary, which had been locked in the glass case in the church. ‘So that’s one angle,’ continued Corry. ‘Burglary gone wrong. Also, as you suspected, Alice was anorexic. Listen to this: in her teens she was in a private clinic for two years, and she dropped out of her first university in England because of it. Explains why she’s twenty-two and only an undergrad.’

‘What are her parents like?’

‘Well, you know about her da. This is the mother. Rebecca Morgan.’ Corry held up a picture from a newspaper. A woman hurrying from court, with short blond hair and a grey suit. The kind who got manicures, and went to the hairdresser’s once a week. ‘That was taken when there was that hoo-ha, the affair allegations about our esteemed Lord Morgan – when he was made a life peer, remember? They sued the paper that broke the story. Rebecca swore blind he was at her side on the nights he was supposedly with those girls. Paper had to give them half a million.’

‘How old would Alice have been then?’

‘Let’s see, 2005 – about fourteen. Anyway, the Morgans have been at a conference in Dubai, so they’re travelling over.’

‘Anything else I need to know?

‘Well, the blood in the church – it’s same type as Alice’s.’

Part of her had been hoping it was animal blood, or even a Halloween prop or something, not evidence that a living girl had been done some terrible harm. ‘Did they get into the shed at her cottage?’

‘God, the shed. What a palaver that was. It’s a listed building or something. Anyway, look what was in it.’

Corry pulled up a picture on her phone and Paula leaned in to see. ‘Is that . . . food?’

‘Yup. Alice’s little secret.’ Even on the small screen, it looked as if the shed was packed out. Boxes of biscuits, multipacks of crisps, jars of peanut butter, sugary cereals, and bags and bags of sweets. ‘It looks like my kids’ dream meal,’ said Corry, putting the phone away.

‘So what, she was bulimic?’

‘Looks that way. We’re trying to get her medical records but she hadn’t registered with a GP since she left the college. And they aren’t exactly cooperative over at Oakdale. You’ll see.’

‘Do we know much about the rest of her life, her friends and so on?’

‘We’re going to the university in a minute. I say we – that means you’re coming too, so don’t get comfortable.’

‘Any boyfriends?’ Paula had been hoping for an obvious suspect, a jealous lover, a rejected friend, someone with an ‘arrest me’ sign on their forehead. She had so much on with the wedding and Maggie, it was entirely the wrong time for a girl to go missing. Because Paula knew herself, and she would never be able to let it go until Alice was found.

‘There’s a fella she was seeing, according to the college secretary. Bit of a gossip – best kind of witness, for our purposes. I don’t know if they even have boyfriends these days, it’s all Tinder and hooking up and what have you. So come on, get your things.’

‘Have we time for a bite to eat first?’ Paula hadn’t got around to buying lunch – all that research into starvation had put her right off – and she and Aidan never had anything in the house to make a packed one. She wondered if that would magically get better once they were married. If they’d be like proper grown-ups.

Corry shook her head. ‘You should have brought something. Will I make you a packed lunch when I do Rosie’s, is that what you want?’

‘That’d be good actually.’

‘Come on. You can get a sandwich on the way.’

Alice

I’m throwing up. I hate this normally, I can’t stand it, choking my throat, panic in my chest –
what if I can’t breathe
? – but it’s all they’ve left to me. All the poison they’ve fed me, I can feel it coming out, leaving me clean. I’m hugging the toilet, the lovely ceramic curves of it cold under my arms. I rest my head against the seat. It smells of piss and bleach but I know I’m safe here. The floor is checked in black and white. Eight tiles each way. I count as I vomit, trying to stay in control.

Into the toilet I am puking my guts. I heave and heave, feeling the body take over, the terrifying power of it. Out. Out. Getting rid of it. Everything they’ve forced down me over the past weeks. I can beat them. I can puke it all out. It’s all gone, in stringy ropes of bile. The smell is so disgusting it makes me want to cry. I imagine it leaching out of me, off my stomach and hips and thighs. They won’t have won. I won’t swallow this poison. In this place, everything is so controlled. They weigh you, they watch you bleed, they calculate every ounce of you. Well, this is my revenge.

Down the corridor I hear the alarm start to scream, and the sound of running feet. They will find me. There’s nowhere to hide. But I’ve still escaped, for now, because I am purged and clean and new. I lie down on the floor and wait for them to come, and as they wrench the door open I put my head on the tiles and start to cry.

Chapter Six

‘Do they know we’re coming?’

‘They should do.’ Corry was looking grumpy as they stood in the reception of the college. ‘There was meant to be someone here to meet us. We’ve an appointment with the principal.’

Oakdale College, a small private university, was still fixed up like the stately home it had been – apple-green carpets muffling the stairs, clocks ticking quietly in the corners. And the calm of the place – despite the students gathering books and preparing for lunch, passing Corry and Paula with curious looks.

‘No one seems to know Alice is gone,’ Paula said, as the lobby, once the hallway of the house, filled and emptied, filled and emptied, busy with chattering students, the girls dressed for the hot weather in tiny shorts and vests, the boys loud-voiced. High sounds of laughter clashing round the wooden walls of the place.

‘They know. Honestly, you’d think they didn’t even care one of their students is missing. Come on, I’m not waiting.’

The library at Oakdale stopped Paula in her tracks. Polished wooden shelves of old books, and above on a high mezzanine, lines and lines of them running into shadowed corners. Students worked at the desks, the buttery summer light reflecting off glasses and Macbooks. Though they were all over eighteen, the place felt more like Paula’s old convent school. Jam-packed with hormones and tears, everything constantly on the brink. Everything full of meaning. Where you sat, who you had lunch with, how you wore your clothes, how you carried your bags. ‘Why haven’t they gone on summer break?’ There seemed to be as many students around as you’d expect mid-term.

‘They’re allowed to stay all year round. It’s like an extension of boarding school for a lot of them – often they’ve no homes to go to, if Mummy and Daddy are overseas or it’s too much hassle to have them. So they carry on with research projects. That’s what Alice was doing with the relic.’

A woman in a short-sleeved shirt and polyester trousers approached. She looked cross. ‘Yes?’

Corry showed her ID and the list of names she’d got from the secretary. ‘We’re looking for these students. Any of them in here?’

‘Dermot Healy’s in Mathematics,’ the librarian stage-whispered. ‘But you can’t speak to him here. You’ll disturb the students.’

‘Where then?’ Corry was speaking at her normal volume.

‘Well, there’s my room, but—’

‘Good.’ She tapped the edge of her ID card on the librarian’s desk. ‘Would you send him in to us, please? It’s urgent.’

Even the office was nice, a small room with wooden cabinets. Corry crossed to the kitchen area and flicked on the kettle. She saw Paula looking. ‘It’s the least they can do. One of their students is missing, for God’s sake, and they’re acting like we’re here from Ofsted or something.’

It took a few minutes for Dermot to be summoned from the depths of the library – or perhaps he wasn’t keen on helping either. By the time there was a reluctant knock on the door, both Corry and Paula had cups of tea. Corry had shamelessly nicked some Earl Grey from what looked like a private stash. ‘Come in.’

The boy in the doorway – you couldn’t really call him a man – had horn-rimmed glasses and the fair, rosy skin of a chorister. His brown hair, ungelled, fell in curtains round a child-like face. Paula clocked the crimson college hoody – she’d noticed others in the library. She remembered boys like him from her own university, sometimes emerging in groups from labs and libraries, blinking in the light.

Despite her impatience, Corry’s voice was kind. ‘Hello, Dermot. I’m DS Corry from the Ballyterrin PSNI, this is Dr Maguire. We need to ask you a few questions about Alice Morgan.’

‘Did you find something?’ He stepped into the room, rubbing the back of his head. Afterwards, Paula would think it was a strange thing to say.

Corry didn’t seem to notice. ‘No, she’s still missing. I’m afraid we’re a bit worried about her.’

He looked puzzled but reacted slowly, his features somehow flat, as if under glass. Paula found she was looking to see if his pupils were dilated. ‘Oh. Where do you think she is?’

‘Well, we don’t know, Dermot. She’s missing, as I said. We were hoping you might know something.’

‘Where do you think she could be?’ It was Paula’s standard question when people went missing, one that often yielded surprising results.

‘We thought she’d just gone off again,’ he said. Offhand.

‘Again?’ Corry flashed her gaze to Paula, steely.
Let him talk.

‘Well – sometimes Alice wanted, like, headspace. You know. She said that’s why she was moving out of campus. So she could work on her summer project.’

‘You said
again
. Do you mean she’s gone missing before?’

Dermot rubbed his head. ‘Uh – she told me once she used to run away a lot. At school and that. So we thought maybe . . . she went off.’

Paula asked, ‘What about Facebook? When did she last post?’

‘Um . . .’ He took out a phone and scrolled through it. ‘She liked something Katy – that’s Alice’s room-mate, or she was before – put up about friendship. Katy’s always posting these crap statuses, oh I’ve had such a bad day, blah blah, just had the worst time ever. Just to make the other girls go
are you OK, babe
? and all that. She’s so pass-aggy. That was yesterday.’

‘Tell me about you,’ said Corry, changing tack. ‘What are you studying?’

‘Applied Maths.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘It’s complicated. I don’t think it’s worth explaining.’

‘And you’ve known Alice a while?’

‘We met in freshers’ week. There’s a small class here so it’s easy to meet people.’

Corry said, ‘I gather you dropped out of Trinity before this.’

He looked irritated. ‘I didn’t drop out. I get anxiety. It wasn’t that bad. My parents over-reacted, made me transfer here.’

Paula asked, ‘And when did you last see Alice, Dermot? I mean actually see her yourself.’

He screwed up his eyes. ‘Um . . . I’m not sure. Not that long ago, I guess. A few weeks, maybe.’

‘And she seemed OK?’

‘Well, yeah. Same as normal really. Honestly, she’s probably just gone off for a bit of space.’

Corry regarded him steadily, and Paula could almost hear her thought as if she’d said it:
he’s lying
. ‘So you aren’t worried about her, then?’

‘Well . . .’ For the first time Dermot paused. ‘I mean, of course I’m worried. She’s my friend.’ He straightened up. ‘Anyway, is it not early for you to be here? I thought you normally waited like twenty-four hours to do anything about missing people.’

‘We don’t wait if we have reasons to be concerned.’ Corry stared him down. ‘Do you think we do?’

‘I don’t know. Like I said, she needs space sometimes.’

Corry held his gaze for a few more seconds, before nodding. ‘Well, if you hear anything that might help, please get in touch.’

‘We’re friends. Best friends. She didn’t have any other girl friends here. She got on better with the boys mostly.’

Katy Butcher was a large girl, with thick-framed glasses that matched the nondescript brown colour of her hair. Katy was sitting hunched over, cross-legged on one of the single beds in the room she’d shared with Alice, also wearing a college hoody, despite the warmth of the day. Sad, low music played; Paula thought it was maybe Snow Patrol.

Corry leaned against a dresser. ‘Would you give the music a rest, Katy?’ The room was small for two girls, one single bed under the window and another in the corner, stripped and unused. Katy’s posters – Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe; all the dead girls – crept over half the wall, then stopped, in an invisible line of demarcation.

Katy put out a hand to turn off the iPod dock, and Paula saw it, underneath the thick black wristband the girl wore: a network of broad raised scars, crossing Katy’s arm, right where the skin was thinnest and the veins showed through.

‘How long have you known Alice, Katy?’ asked Corry.

‘Oh?’ She had a habit of opening her eyes up wide under her glasses like a child. ‘I guess since we got here? A year? They said we’d be roomies, which was like the best thing ever, cos we got to be best friends. She told me everything.’ Katy bit her lip. ‘Do you think she’s OK?’

Corry said, ‘What do you think, Katy?’

Katy paused. ‘Alice . . . sometimes she needed, like, space. Headspace, you know. So maybe she went to . . . you know, get a break.’

Corry said nothing to that. The silence in the room felt like an extra person, especially unfamiliar since a girl like Katy had likely never known a moment without snap-chatting or WhatsApping or something. As if to underline this, her phone vibrated. Paula noticed it was an old, beat-up one, of the type only her own father insisted on still using. Katy glanced at it and stuck it into the pocket of her hoody. Paula felt Corry tense; she’d be wanting to tell the girl to put the phone away and listen. To break the silence, Katy spoke falteringly. ‘You know, she moved out there on her own. So. We thought she just wanted to be alone.’

‘But Katy – we found signs of a struggle in the church. And a quantity of blood, too, I’m sorry to say.’

Katy sat up straighter. ‘How much?’

Corry glanced at Paula. ‘Well. Some.’

‘Maybe she cut herself or something?’ Katy fiddled with the band on her own wrist. ‘Did you find anything else? Like anything that makes you think, you know, she’s been – hurt or something?’

‘We don’t know yet, Katy.’

She slumped back down again. ‘Right. So she could have gone off.’

‘All the same, we’re worried. Also, the relic is gone. Saint Blannad’s finger-bone.’

To Paula’s surprise, the girl sighed. ‘Not that again. We were all totally sick of hearing about it. After she had that lecture on relics she just went on and on about it. Wasn’t it amazing and wasn’t it so cool we had one right near here and—’

‘You said we,’ Corry interrupted. ‘Who’s we?’

‘Oh, the gang of us. Like me and Dermot and Peter.’

Corry looked at her list of people to interview. ‘Peter Franks, Alice’s boyfriend?’

Katy sat up again. ‘Er, they’re not together.’

‘We were told by the college that—’

‘It’s wrong. They kissed but like ages ago, only once or twice. He said she was too needy.’

‘So he’s not her boyfriend.’

‘No,’ she said, and her sullen mouth curved into a smile, despite what they’d told her about the blood in the church, despite her missing room-mate. ‘He’s mine. He was with me last night. He spent the night here.’

Paula looked at Corry quickly, but she hadn’t blinked. She was good. ‘Right. What about this other boy? Dermot Healy?’

‘Oh, he’s like my brother. You know, we’re totally close. You could tell him anything, that’s what Alice always said.’

‘But you weren’t romantically involved with him, either of you?’

‘God, no. It’s like he’s gay.’

‘But he’s not?’

‘He says he isn’t. Me and Al thought he was.’ Her mouth lifted again in that glassy smile. ‘I think he’s just kind of in denial?’

Paula asked, ‘What did you think when Alice moved out of college?’

‘I was worried. It’s so weird out there, and I was worried she might – you know.’ She made a vague gesture. ‘The anorexia, like, I mean. That it was back.’

‘You knew Alice had been ill with it?’ said Corry.

‘Er, no
had
been. She never really stopped. You’ve seen her pictures, she was so skinny. And she like, hadn’t had a period since she was fifteen or something.’

‘Is that right?’

Katy nodded knowledgeably. ‘That’s what it does to you. When she was here, though, like, we’ve got a nurse on site, we’ve all got personal counsellors. They meet us once a month to see if we need pills or whatever.’

‘Did you see her much after she moved?’ asked Paula.

‘Not so much. I’d see her in class or the buttery. Or we’d FB or G-chat, you know. But it was like . . .’ She sighed. ‘It was like I’d lost her. You know, we were really best friends. Before.’

‘When did you last actually see Alice then? I mean in person?’

She thought about it. ‘God, I don’t know. I think I saw her across the library last week and waved. She didn’t see me but we G-chatted after.’

‘And how did she look?’ asked Corry.

‘Eh, same as usual? She was wearing this big, baggy jumper and had a hat on, even though it’s been boiling. I didn’t really – but I should have realised maybe that was a sign.’

‘What?’

‘When you get really bad with anorexia, you sometimes wear massive clothes, cos you think you’re big. It’s like body dysmorphia or something?’

Paula nodded. ‘Right. That’s useful to know, thank you.’

Corry said, ‘So you can’t tell us why she liked the relic? It seemed to almost . . . obsess her?’

‘Oh yeah. It did. She told me she was interested in what it could do.’

‘What do you mean, do?’

At this, Katy looked up, her face smooth as a child’s. ‘The powers that it had. You see, she was looking for a miracle.’