The Lost (20 page)

‘Its only one, more like.’

‘Maybe. Well, according to my source, Eamonn Carr never totally finished with his first girlfriend. She’s a beautician in town.’

‘No way! Where?’

‘You know that place down on Flood Street?’

She nodded. To Dye For. In this context, the name made her shudder.

‘Supposedly he goes there all the time, tells the missus he’s at the Town Hall.’

‘Jesus.’ Angela Carr, bereft of her first-born, cheated on. That poor woman.

‘You need any waxing done, Maguire?’

‘
What?
’

‘The beauticians.’ He gave her an innocent look. ‘I was thinking we’d pay the fancy woman a visit.’

‘Maybe. You know what else is on Flood Street, don’t you?’

‘I do.’ The Mission, where Cathy and Louise and Majella had all gone, stood across the street from the HQ of Eamonn’s girlfriend.

‘And what did Ballyterrin’s finest mind discover about
that
?’

‘Enough to make your red hair stand on end, Maguire. You heard of an outfit called ESCAPE?’

‘No.’
She didn’t appreciate the reference to her hair colour.

‘Have a look when you can. It’s an anti-cult outfit in the South. Did you know there’s over two hundred suspected cults in Ireland? Everyone from the Mormons to mad Druid types. I printed you out this.’ He fished out a thick wodge of paper from his back seat, under a layer of boxes from the Abrakebabra takeaway. There was a coffee ring on the front.

‘What is this?’ She took it gingerly.

‘All the dirt on the Mission. Some bedtime reading.’ He caught her eye just for a moment, then turned his key in the ignition. As he did it, she heard the clink of his wrist.

‘Still wearing it then.’

As the engine turned over he cleared his throat, looking at the watch she’d given him for his nineteenth birthday. And then thrown at him, several months later. The watch had been fine, but them . . . not so much.

‘It works, doesn’t it,’ he said gruffly. ‘We better go or PJ’ll skin me alive.’

PJ was still up when Paula opened the front door,
The Late Late Show
on quietly in the background. ‘That was young Aidan’s car, was it?’

‘Yeah.’ She hung up her coat. ‘Saoirse invited him. I didn’t know.’

‘And how’s wee Saoirse?’

Paula decided not to mention Dave’s crying. ‘Grand, I think. Her husband’s nice.’

‘Aye, so Pat says.’

‘Was she here today, Pat?’ In the kitchen Paula could see clean dishes and a Tupperware box of buns.

‘She does be in most days.’ PJ kept his eyes fixed on the screen.

Paula felt a wash of guilt. She’d come back to look after him – hadn’t she? – but what could she do? He was so stubborn, and she was racing round town like an eejit trying to connect the dots on a puzzle that made no sense.

‘Is
there nothing I can do to help, Daddy?’

‘You could make a wee cup of tea before bed. Load of old rubbish, this.’ He stumped up to switch off the TV, purchased in the days before remotes, and she put her arm out to help, then drew it back. Tea she could do. She’d make the best damn cup of tea in Ireland.

‘These are nice.’ They sat at the kitchen table with mugs of tea and Pat’s caramel shortbread.

‘She’s a dab hand with the baking, is Patricia.’

‘It’s good of her to help you.’

‘Aye, she’s a good woman. She’d give you the shirt off her back.’

‘And John was the same, wasn’t he? I don’t remember him all that well.’

‘A great man. Brave as can be.’

‘Wonder where they got Aidan from,’ she laughed. Why was she bringing him up?

PJ gulped his tea and eyed her. ‘As you know, Paula, I’d have been the first to tell you what a useless eejit Aidan was—’

‘And you were.’

‘I was indeed. But that’s a long time back. You never know, he might surprise you.’

‘Hmm.’

PJ looked at her over the top of the
Irish News
. ‘Make us another pot there, like a good girl.’

Paula decided not to take up Aidan’s suggestion of bedtime reading. She had enough horrors filling her head – a dead child, murky weeds twisting in her hair, another girl hanging by her neck in her father’s garage. And Majella, where was she? Despite repeated searches and posters and appeals, they were no closer to knowing.

She
thought again of Cathy’s autopsy report. It was always the way in cases. The body had its own mute tale to tell. Forensics and the pathologists would produce the clues, and she would try to write the story. Who had this person been? Who could do something like that – stab a child in the neck and put her in the canal? The question was usually rhetorical, as if the asker was afraid to know the answer. But Paula actually had to. Someone had done it, because there was the body, an immovable fact.

Think, Maguire.
She liked to draw diagrams before she wrote her reports, to tease out all the facts before setting them down in black and white. Switching on the Anglepoise lamp, still adorned with the ghosts of stickers from
Just Seventeen
magazines, she felt in the drawers for a pen, taking out a dried-up biro. And there was the hardbacked notebook – her diary. It was almost a physical shock to see it. Why had this one not been burned with the others, in the metal bin in the back garden, the summer before she left? When PJ came home that day he’d just stared at the heap of charred paper. Said nothing, while Paula wept and rocked herself.

This had survived because she’d still been using it when everything happened. Only the first third was filled. She read the first line:
I don’t think I can live without him.

Paula tore the page out, crumpling it in her fist. She flipped hastily through to the blank sheets and wrote
Cathy
in the middle, scrawling a circle round the girl. Then she drew a line and wrote
Family
. Eamonn, strict behind the doors of the perfect home. Fingers in all kinds of juicy pies, including trying to buy up the land where the travellers squatted. The wife, almost catatonic with shock. Was it grief, or had he crushed the life out of her?

Paula went to chew the pen, then stopped herself, thinking of ten-year-old saliva. Next she wrote
Friends
. That bland group of teens, skinny, skirts rolled up, eyes cast down. What did they know? The teacher said Cathy had been crying in school, marks slipping. What was going on in her head?

She
wrote
Mission
. They said they hadn’t seen Cathy – a lie? If so, how could she prove it? Cathy had gone every Friday evening, or so her parents thought. But that Friday she hadn’t, had never made it home from school. Where had she gone after her friend saw her walking out of the school gate? Picked up by Ken from the centre of town, then – possibly – picked up by someone else on the road. A silver car that may or may not have existed. All the leads seemed to curve back on themselves.

Paula drew two more lines, one for Louise, who’d gone to the Mission and also died. Had she left a suicide note? Then Majella Ward. She’d gone there, her sister said. Had she secrets too – a boyfriend, maybe? Paula drew a dotted line and wrote
Katie Brooking
. This was one other girl who had definitely been to the Mission. What did Katie know?

Rachel. Alice.
She wrote their names and stared at them. In 1985, both girls had left their homes and never come back, slipping down between the cracks of the known, becoming
the lost.
The ones you knew had to be somewhere, maybe standing right behind you, glimpsed from the corner of an eye, a faint breath felt on your neck. The ones you could never quite get hold of. Were the police even on the right track? There’d been no leads at all in those cases, nothing to link them to the present day or even to each other, except that all the girls had gone from the Ballyterrin area and none of them had left any trace. Runaways, you usually found them fast, washed up quickly by the shallow tides of crime and poverty, hunger, and cold. But here there’d been nothing. Nothing at all. And Annie Miller, hanging in the woods, that blank spot in the investigation – had she been involved, or was her death nothing more than unfortunate timing?

Paula
stared at the page for a long time. There was Cathy and there was Majella. At first sight, two girls were gone. What did it make you think? A serial-killer, some kind of monster preying on young girls. But Cathy was dead, so why hadn’t they found Majella? The only link between them was the line that led to the word Mission. Paula hesitated, then drew one from Eamonn Carr to Majella. He wanted to clear the land she lived on. Had they ever met?

Through the floor Paula heard her father cough and turn over, uncomfortable in his sleep. So much for minding him, he hardly let her do a thing. She sighed and put the light out, hoping for no more dreams of the dead.

Chapter Nineteen

Aidan’s
handwriting was no better than it had been at seven, when he used to scribble on her Ladybird books while their parents played Old Maid downstairs. Back in the office after a weekend of uneasy thoughts, Paula squinted at what he’d scrawled on the stack of print-outs. What did it say?
Who owns them?
What did that even mean?

What he’d given her was mostly dry and technical, the kind of humanless prose she hadn’t the mind to trawl through. The gist of it seemed to be that the Mission was part of a big American church group, who also owned radio stations, a children’s publisher, and a chain of something called
Tiny Seeds
. Aidan had scribbled across this –
anti-abortion
. She Googled, once her computer had whirred to life, and found the website. The pictures showed worried-looking women and girls, babies with crumpled rose-petal faces. There was also a tab saying
For Prospective Parents
. It was a private adoption agency. She clicked on the section marked
Fees
.
Our babies are unique and priceless. If you would like to make your family complete, please contact us to discuss our compensation schedule.
Compensation? Of course, the adoption laws were a lot looser in America.

Aidan had drawn a heavy arrow round to the next page, a print-out of a story from the
Irish Times
. He’d scribbled:
this crowd sold all their buildings off to the American lot.

Calls for a Tribunal into Safe Harbour scandal
, Paula read. Heart racing at the familiar name, she scanned the page rapidly.

Between 1920 and as late as 1995, thousands of Irish girls and women were being robbed of their children. While their mothers were incarcerated in Safe Harbour homes, where abuse was rife, the babies were taken, given new names, and shipped off to new lives in America. Often no records were kept, and Irish law still has no provision to let adoptees find out their birth identity. ‘Baby flights’ to the US were common, taking dozens of infants at a time to be placed through right-wing adoption agencies.

But what made Safe Harbour so much more shocking was that its perpetrators – nuns and priests sworn to serve God – were charging adoptive families as much as £30,000 per child. This blood money went straight to the coffers of US pro-life groups and the Catholic Church. Meanwhile the inmates of the homes, brutalised and forced to work off the ‘debts’ incurred by their stay, have never received justice for this gross human rights violation.

Paula exhaled slowly. It wasn’t the huge shock it should have been. It was well known in Ireland that the homes for wayward girls had been harsh institutions, and that babies born there had been given up for adoption, often whether the mother wanted it or not. And where was all that money going? She looked at the name of the journalist – Maeve Cooley. The same name cropped up on Aidan’s next printout, this one a blog post.
Fears Over Mission.
Aidan had underlined the word ‘Mission’ three times. The article was from the year before.

The anti-cult group ESCAPE has voiced concerns over a new evangelical Church targeting Ireland. The US-based ‘Mission’ has opened in five English towns, and is now eyeing Ballyterrin for its first Northern Irish base. Experts fear it is linked to the controversial God’s Shepherd Church which flourished in Ireland in the 70s and 80s.

‘They are one and the same as far as I’m concerned,’ said Paddy Boyle, head of relatives’ group ESCAPE, which helps those at risk from cults. ‘The same people run it. The same things go on. The Mission is God’s Shepherd with a different name.’

The 1980s. An American church group in Ireland, maybe during the year Alice Dunne and Rachel Reilly had gone missing and Annie Miller had taken her own life. Paula started to read faster, a pulse beating in her stomach.

Underneath, Aidan had written:
website targeted by lawyers for the Mission and blog taken down a week later. I know Maeve from DCU and she sent it to me.

So, one of his journalism buddies. Paula tried not to let it colour her judgement of Maeve Cooley, who seemed more on the ball than most. Clever. She was probably pretty too. Paula stared at the byline photo from the
Irish Times
article. Yes, definitely pretty, even in black and white an inch square. On impulse, Paula typed in the email address on the bottom of the article and fired off a few lines.
I am working on a case which may involve the Mission
. . .
I am a friend of Aidan O’Hara . . .

Was that what she was to him, a friend? Never mind. Her phone rang. She tore her eyes away from the pile of papers. A church group, maybe run by the same people as the Mission, in Ireland in the eighties! God, she hated to admit it, but Aidan had done her proud. As she stood up to take the phone call, she quickly typed another line and pressed ‘send’ on her email.
Could you by any chance put me in touch with this Paddy Boyle?