The Silent Dead (Paula Maguire 3) (2 page)

Prologue

I’m dead.

I don’t mind. I want to be dead. Nothing could be worse than staying alive, not like this. But all the same I’m running away.

I can feel the blood between my toes, my feet slipping on the roots and branches. They’ve taken my clothes from me. You’re dead, they say. No one will miss you. You’re evil. The world is better off without you.

And I know they’re right, but I’m running anyway.

I know they will catch me – I’m lost, no idea where I’m going, and after what they’ve done I can hardly stand, but I’m running. In the dark the forest is full of eyes, and branches claw my face like scratching hands. Overhead, the moon is as white as a face with the flesh stripped back.

My own warm blood is splashing on my skin. My heart is bursting in my chest. You have no heart, they told me. You are dead inside. You are scum. Yes, yes, it’s all true, but, but, but. I can hear them nearby in the trees. The high voice of the wee girl. Saying my name. I know they’ll find me, panting and stumbling, but I can’t stop. I am so afraid. I’ve never been afraid like this.

The noise stops. The moon lights up the path ahead, empty, and I run, and as I run I’m thinking one thing:
my baby. Oh my baby.

Chapter One

Ballyterrin, Northern Ireland,
April 2011

‘We are gathered here today to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony.’

Paula’s lilies were wilting already. She shifted on her swollen feet. The bulk of her belly meant the only way she could comfortably stand was with one hip jutted out, leaning on it, and she didn’t think such an insolent pose would cut it before the altar. She’d already seen the priest’s eye travelling over her stomach and then pointedly not looking at it. Catholics – they were good at pretending things that did exist didn’t. And vice versa.

She stared straight ahead, her legs buckling under the cool satin of her dress, glad that its length hid her puffy ankles and enormous underwear.
What am I doing here?
The church smelled of incense, and cold stone, and the slightly rotting sweetness of the flowers.

Across from her, Aidan was also staring rigidly ahead. He was tricked out in a new grey suit, clasping his hands in front of his groin in that position men adopted during moments of gravitas or penalty kick-offs. She wondered if, like her, he was having to stop himself mouthing the too-familiar words of the Mass
. Lord have mercy (Lord have mercy) Christ have mercy (Christ have mercy) Lord have mercy (Lord have mercy).
The phrases found a treacherous echo in her bones. She heard Aidan cough, once, in the still, heavy air of the church. On that warm spring day, it was full of the ghosts of candles, and dust, and long unopened hymn books.
What are we doing here?
She wanted to catch his eye, but was afraid to.

‘Do you have the rings?’ Aidan stepped forward and deposited them on the Bible, two hoops of gold, one large, one tiny. Then he moved back into position, eyes downcast.

‘Repeat after me,’ said the priest. The bride and groom arranged themselves in suitable positions. ‘Patrick Joseph Maguire, will you take Patricia Ann O’Hara to be your lawful wedded wife, for richer for poorer, for better for worse, in sickness and in health, to have and to hold from this day forth, forsaking all others, as long as you both shall live?’

Paula’s father – PJ – spoke in a rusty voice. ‘I will.’ His bad leg was stiff but he stood up straight in a new black suit bought for the occasion. Paula suspected he was hating it all, but he’d have done anything for the woman standing next to him in an ivory suit from Debenhams, several nests’ worth of dyed feathers attached to her head.

Aidan’s mother, Pat O’Hara, said her vows quick and earnest: ‘I will.’

They would. They were both so sure. How could you be sure? Paula stole a glance at Aidan – what was he now, her stepbrother? – and saw his dark eyes were wreathed in shadows, his hair tinged with grey over the ears. She’d never noticed that before. He saw her watching, and both of them looked away, her belly as big and unavoidable as the lies between them.
Oh Aidan, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Then it was done, and Pat and PJ were wed, and they trooped down the aisle like a bride and groom in their twenties. Aidan grasped Paula’s arm without meeting her eyes, escorting her out, because that was what you did. His hand was cool on her hot, fat skin. Everything about her was squeezed. The ridiculous lilac bridesmaid dress, strained over newly discovered breasts, was like a cocoon she might burst from at any moment. Aidan could barely look at her. She didn’t blame him.

They were out now, and posing for photos taken by one of Pat’s friends, who couldn’t work the camera, and Pat was all smiles and tears, kissing Paula with her five layers of lipstick. She’d had her colours done for the wedding, plunging into manicures and spa days and shopping trips like a first-time bride. Paula had tried to play along, because she loved Pat, but it was hard to be excited about a wedding when its very occurrence hinged on the fact that your mother, missing for seventeen years, had been declared legally dead. And maybe she was dead – dead as Pat’s husband, who’d been shot by the IRA in 1986. But maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t.

Maybe
. When you got married you did not say ‘maybe’. You said ‘I will’, you put your feet on the good, solid stone of certainty. ‘Maybe’ was like shifting sand. She wished so much there was something, anything she could be sure of. Whether her mother was alive or dead, for a start.

It was warm outside, and the sunlight played around the old church, which was painted in crumbly lemon-yellow. Paula had made her First Communion here, and they’d also chosen it for her mother’s memorial service back in the nineties – no funeral, of course; nothing to bury. Now Pat’s friends had gathered to throw confetti, twittering women in their Sunday best suits, lilacs and yellows and blues covering crêpey arms, hats pressed out of boxes and set atop tight-curled hair. Many greeted Paula –
hello, pet
– some kissing her cheek, though she barely recognised them. She knew they’d be looking at her vast pregnant belly and bare left hand, and speculating about her and Aidan and what might be going on there. He’d been her boyfriend when she was eighteen and he was nineteen – was he the father of the wean? Honestly, she’d have told them if she knew.

Suddenly it was too much, all of them there, and the kiss of the sun on gravestones, and the sight of a small plaque in the vestibule bearing the name
Margaret Maguire. In loving memory.

‘Maguire?’ It was Aidan, speaking his first words to her all day. In months, in fact, since she’d told him about the baby. She realised she was sagging gently down to the steps, like a deflating balloon. ‘You all right?’

‘It’s just the heat – the sun . . .’ It wasn’t especially warm – it never was in Ireland, of course – but her body seemed to produce its own waves of heat now.

‘Sit down.’ Aidan led her inside to the incense-scented dark. She slipped off her tight lilac shoes and the stone floor was cool under her feet.

‘Thanks. I’m OK.’

Aidan sat beside her in a pew, leaning forward so his tie flopped between his knees. ‘Weird day.’

‘It is that.’

He looked at her, and the old ache came back. ‘Are you feeling well? I mean in general.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m like a beached whale. Still, won’t be long now.’

Aidan said, ‘We need to talk. I know that. I’ve been meaning to see you.’

‘I’ve been here.’

‘I just couldn’t . . . you know, after you told me it was either me or him. Christ, it was such a shock. It was like you’d done it on purpose almost. To punish me.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. I got pregnant and I’m the size of a cow just so I could make you feel bad. You’re totally right.’

He made a noise of annoyance. ‘I know, OK? It was just a lot to take in. And him – you see him every day, like, you must be close.’

She tried to explain. ‘He’s my boss. He – well, it’s complicated too. It’s not as if we’re—’ With spectacular bad timing, that was when her phone went, trilling in the depths of the (also lilac) clutch bag Pat had forced on her. ‘Oh, sorry. I better get this.’ It echoed in the silent church. She pressed the green button. ‘Hello?’

‘Paula?’

Her heart sank at his voice. She could see Aidan had recognised the name which flashed up; he was once again scowling intently ahead.

‘What’s up?’

‘I know you have the wedding today, and I wouldn’t bother you if I could help it, but—’

‘Something’s happened?’

‘There’s a body. I thought you’d be annoyed if I didn’t tell you.’

‘Is it one of them?’

‘We think so, but—’

‘Where?’

‘Creggan Forest. But listen, Paula, don’t—’

‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

‘No, Paula, that’s not what I—’

She ended the call. The menu of Poached Salmon, Roast Beef with Julienne Vegetables, and Summer Fruits Pavlova would have to wait, and after the day she’d had she was almost weepingly grateful for the certainty of human flesh, a crime scene to analyse, a case to solve.

Aidan spoke bitterly, still not looking at her. ‘You’re going then.’

‘I have to. It’s one of the Mayday Five, we think.’

She offered it as a small sop – Aidan, editor of the local paper, knew the significance of the case more than anyone. But he didn’t budge. ‘If you think that’s more important than today.’

‘I don’t. I’ll be an hour, tops – anyway, they’ll be snapping photos for ages yet.’ He wouldn’t move to let her out, so she clambered awkwardly over him. ‘
Aidan
.’

‘Oh, it’s OK. Go to him. Don’t mind me.’

She bit down the enraged retort that he’d ignored her for the best part of four months. ‘Where’s your car?’ she demanded.

‘You’re not really going to feck off during a wedding?’ But he sighed and slapped the keys into her hand, on a football key ring Paula knew had to have been a present from Pat. Unless someone was getting done on corruption charges, Aidan had zero interest in sport.

‘See you later. Look, I’m sorry – try to understand?’

‘You’ve made your choice,’ he muttered. She pretended not to hear. Then she ran down the aisle in her bare feet, shoes in one hand, bag and wilted flowers in the other, her lilac dress rustling around the folds of her unwieldy body.

Soon she was heading out of town, on her way to a small village in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains. Stone houses, Lego-green fields, the sea opaque with light. As she drove she felt her shoulders, crunched up all the way through the ceremony, gradually relax.

Her father was married. To Aidan’s mother. Even when he’d told her about it months back – told her he planned to have her mother finally declared dead so he could marry Pat – it somehow hadn’t sunk in until now, seeing them before the altar. Everyone else was moving on, and after seventeen years you couldn’t blame them. So why could Paula not give up? Why did she have her mother’s case file in her desk at home, full of questions and blind alleys and no answers at all, after all this time?

The car park near the forest was full of police cars and vans. Paula was beginning to realise her bridesmaid’s dress was not the most practical of garments for a crime scene. No matter. She wasn’t going to miss this.

She parked and staggered up to the police cordon on the path leading into the forest. DC Gerard Monaghan, an ambitious Catholic recruit in his twenties, was on his mobile nearby, and burst out laughing when he saw her. ‘Jesus, Maguire. Are you lost on your way to a formal?’

She was panting already, slick with sweat under the man-made fibres. ‘You found something.’

‘A walker phoned in a body in the trees. Some local uniform was first on scene.’

‘And how did we get in on it, if he’s dead?’ They were walking, so she tried to tuck up the hem of her dress.

‘Well, Corry and Brooking are on bestest terms right now.’

‘Hmm.’ Paula wasn’t sure how she felt about this rapprochement between DCI Helen Corry, head of Serious Crime at the regular PSNI in the area, and DI Guy Brooking, their boss at the missing persons unit, seconded in from London. At first the two had thoroughly trampled on each other’s toes, but lately Corry had been nice as pie about sharing jurisdiction. Paula wasn’t sure why.

But none of that mattered right now. ‘Is it definitely one of the Five? Which one?’

‘I doubt they can tell.’ He was leading her to the cordon and nodding to the uniformed officer at the tape. ‘Here’s Cinderella, late for the ball.’ She glared at him and he laughed. ‘She’s with us, pal. Dr Maguire, forensic psychologist.’

The officer eyed her sweaty face and bulging belly, but let them pass.

‘Why can’t they tell?’ Paula asked, as they trotted up the forest path. Dappled sunlight fell on them, and a warm pine scent filled the air. She knew that Gerard, six foot four in his socks, was shortening his stride for her, but even so she felt dizzy with the effort. Around them was the silence of the forest, small clicks of insects and leaves rustling.

‘You’ll see,’ said Gerard. ‘It’s a grim one. You don’t have to be here, you know.’

‘I do. I can’t get a sense of it otherwise.’

‘All right.’ Gerard gave an on-your-head-be-it eye roll and directed her down a small side path. She lifted her skirt to step over roots, her flimsy shoes already in flitters. This was stupid. This was, in a competitive field, one of the more stupid things she’d ever done.

Trees parted to reveal a small gap in the woods, and a cluster of CSIs and detectives surrounding something she couldn’t quite see. Corry and Brooking had their heads together, looking at a piece of paper.

‘Look who turned up,’ said Gerard cheerfully.

Helen Corry was the type of woman who, whatever they had on, you looked at it and realised –
that’s exactly what I should have worn
. Her short-sleeved white shirt and grey trousers were cool and fresh. She wore gloves, and a stern expression. ‘So I see. Being seven months’ pregnant can’t detain you from crime scenes, Dr Maguire?’

‘Or being at your father’s wedding?’ added Guy.

Paula sighed. They were awful united, much worse than any of their disagreements. It was like being looked after by an extra set of cool, young parents. ‘Who is it?’

Corry peeled off her gloves. ‘We think it’s Mickey Doyle. Hard to tell from the face, but we’ll know soon enough.’

‘So they didn’t leave the country then, the five of them? Do we think they were kidnapped?’

‘Should you really be here, Paula?’ Ignoring her question, Guy moved towards her. He too looked cool in a blue shirt and red tie, his fair hair brushed back from a stiffly controlled face. ‘I mean, the baby—’

‘The baby’s fine.’ She pushed forward, irritated. ‘Let me see him.’

Then she did.

Hanging victims all had a look in common. Eyes popping, tongue protruding, face red and livid. That would be why they couldn’t identify him yet. Also common was the loosening of the bowels, which Paula could now smell on the fresh pine breeze. She’d seen it lots of times, so it was strange and very bad timing that this particular victim should cause her to black out suddenly, the forest floor swimming up to meet her.