Blood Tide Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Claire McGowan

  The right of Claire McGowan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2017

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Ebook conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 2819 2

  Cover photograph © Westend61/Getty Images; woman © Astrakan Images/Alamy; stormy sky © eugenesergeev/Adobe Stock; lights and textures © jehsomwang/Shutterstock and HorenkO/Shutterstock

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  50 Victoria Embankment

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  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Also By Claire McGowan

  Praise

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Claire McGowan grew up in a small village in Northern Ireland and now lives in London, where she runs an MA in creative writing at City University. BLOOD TIDE is Claire’s sixth novel, and the fifth in the highly-acclaimed Paula Maguire series. She also writes women’s fiction as Eva Woods.

  About the Book

  Called in to investigate the disappearance of a young couple during a violent storm, Paula Maguire, forensic psychologist, has mixed feelings about going back to Bone Island. Her last family holiday as a child was spent on its beautiful, remote beaches and returning brings back haunting memories of her long-lost mother.

  It soon becomes clear that outsiders aren’t welcome on the island, and with no choice but to investigate the local community, Paula soon suspects foul play, realising that the islanders are hiding secrets from her, and each other.

  With another storm fast approaching, Paula is faced with a choice. Leave alive or risk being trapped with a killer on an inescapable island, as the blood tide rushes in . . .

  By Claire McGowan and available from Headline

  Paula Maguire series

  The Lost

  The Dead Ground

  The Silent Dead

  A Savage Hunger

  Blood Tide

  Controlled Explosions (a digital short story)

  Standalone

  The Fall

  Praise

  Praise for the Paula Maguire series:

  ‘Fast paced and engaging’ Evening Echo

  ‘Enthralling . . . evoked wonderfully’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘A gripping and gory read . . . shows McGowan to be a thriller writer of exceptional talent’ Irish Independent

  ‘Fresh and accessible without ever compromising on grit or suspense’ Erin Kelly

  ‘A brilliant portrait of a fractured society and a mystery full of heart stopping twists. Compelling, clever and entertaining’ Jane Casey

  ‘A keeps-you-guessing mystery’ Alex Marwood

  ‘A gripping yarn you will be unable to put down’ Sun

  ‘McGowan’s style is pacey and direct, and the twists come thick and fast’ Declan Burke, Irish Times

  ‘Engaging and gripping’ Northern Echo

  ‘Taut plotting and assured writing . . . a highly satisfying thriller’ Good Housekeeping

  Praise for The Fall:

  ‘There is nothing not to like . . . a compelling and flawless thriller’ S.J. Bolton

  ‘She knows how to tell a cracking story. She will go far’ Daily Mail

  ‘Chills you to the bone’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Hugely impressive. The crime will keep you reading, but it’s the characters you’ll remember’ Irish Examiner

  ‘Highly original and compelling’ Mark Edwards

  ‘Sharp, honest and emotionally gripping’ Tom Harper

  ‘Stunning. Beautifully written, totally convincing and full of character. Really, really good’ Steve Mosby

  To Jillian

  Prologue

  Margaret

  Ballyterrin, Northern Ireland, 1993

  Dear Paula. By the time you read this, you’ll see that I am gone . . .

  No. It was all wrong.

  She threw down the pen, angry, and it rolled away over the sheet of paper and clattered onto the kitchen floor. It was no good. How could she explain? She couldn’t. Was she really going to do this? It didn’t seem real.

  She glanced uneasily at the clock: 3.17 p.m., getting dark already. He should have rung by now. He’d promised to ring, tell her what to do, say when he was coming to take her somewhere safe. Because mad as it seemed, her kitchen, with its old seventies units and tiled floor, was not safe any more.

  3.18 p.m. Her hands clenched, thinking of Paula, of PJ. At least they’d be safe, if she was gone. She could come back, surely, once it all died down. It was nearly over again, they all said it, the peace process creeping ahead, back one step, forward two, back again. She just had to finish this letter, try to explain it, why she had to run now, today. Explain she might still look exactly like Margaret Maguire, mother of Paula, daughter of Kathleen, wife of PJ, but she wasn’t. She was someone else now. The things she had done. The lies

  she had told. But no, she couldn’t explain any of that. Not if she had a week to write the letter.

  3.19 p.m. Outside, the cough of a car engine in the street. The gun-crack snap of a door. Her han
ds began to shake. Not Edward, surely – he never parked near, in case they traced the car. Not PJ, he’d been called out on some case before dawn, something so bad he hadn’t even told her what it was. Voices outside. Men. Two or three. Her heart rose up in her throat, and she scrabbled on the floor for the pen, scratching down the last few lines in the seconds she had left. Trying to find the words to explain what could not be explained. Failing.

  3.20 p.m. Footsteps, coming to her door. They were here. It was too late.

  Chapter One

  Ballyterrin, Northern Ireland,

  February 2014

  ‘Mummy. Mummy! A bad man’s at the window!’

  Danger. Up. Run. Paula was on her feet before she knew it, heart hammering as she surfaced from sleep and realised where she was. In the doorway stood a small figure in My Little Pony pyjamas. Paula’s heart slowed. ‘There’s no bad man, pet. It’s just the big wind outside. It makes the trees scratch at the window, see.’

  ‘Don’t like it.’ Maggie, almost three now, had started sucking her thumb again, something Paula herself didn’t much like. The child’s breath was hitching in her chest; her top rucked up to show her little rounded tummy.

  Paula patted the side of her bed – cold and empty for nearly eight months now. ‘It’s just the wind. Come on, get in with Mummy here.’

  Maggie climbed up, so light the bed might as well have been empty still. Paula pushed the damp red curls off the child’s face, as her tears subsided into hiccups. ‘There now. You’re OK. There’s no bad men. Just the wind.’

  ‘Daddy’ll get the bad men,’ Maggie mumbled, from the edge of sleep. Paula said nothing, as she felt the child uncurl and sag beside her, and outside the wind howled and worried at the house like a boat tossed on the ocean. How could she explain to Maggie that it wasn’t true – that she’d lied to her? Of course there were bad men, lots of them, and Aidan – ‘Daddy’, as she called him – wasn’t around to get them because he was one himself.

  The child was asleep now, her chest rising and falling. Paula got carefully out of bed and went into Maggie’s room, which had been her own for eighteen years, and then again for a year when she’d moved back in with her dad in her home town of Ballyterrin. Twelve years in London, only to find herself here, back to the beginning as if in some crazy real-life version of Snakes and Ladders. Her old desk was stacked with Maggie’s soft toys, and the glassy eyes watched Paula as she knelt down and opened the bottom drawer. No need to hide it really. Maggie couldn’t read and Aidan was gone, and PJ and Pat were unlikely to go snooping. But just in case, she’d filled the drawer with some little vests of Maggie’s. It felt wrong, somehow, those innocent clowns and ducks so near to the horrors at the bottom of it.

  Paula reached under the vests and took out the folder. Plain manila, a little worn. On the front, a name – Margaret Maguire. The same name as her child. She and Aidan had talked about what to call her, whether to add O’Hara or not, but then the wedding had never taken place and it seemed now Maggie’s name would not change. Sometimes, on nights like this, she’d lie awake and wonder if it was for the best. It would have been a lie, after all.

  Paula knew the contents by heart. The handwritten reports, the interviews, the picture of her mother on a beach. She’d taken that herself, playing at photographer. Margaret’s red hair whipping in the wind, laughing against the gale and rain that constituted an Irish summer day. The August bank holiday, 1993. Two months after that picture was taken, in October, Paula had come home from school to find her mother gone, the house cold and dark. And there had been no sign, no trace of her for a further twenty years. No body. No answers.

  Until the previous summer, tidying up after builders had finally redone her kitchen, Paula had found her mother’s note. An innocuous scrap of lined A4 – torn, she was fairly sure, from her own school notebook – but it had changed everything. And now, six months later, she had still told no one. How could she? Her father PJ had remarried, finally declared her mother dead. And she might be, Paula had to remind herself. Even if her mother had gone of her own accord, as the note suggested, she’d gone for a reason, and it didn’t mean whoever was hunting her hadn’t found her soon after. Either way, Pat was PJ’s wife now. And Aidan was Pat’s son, and anyway Paula couldn’t talk to him at all at the moment, because he was gone. Saoirse, Paula’s best friend, was busy trying and failing to get pregnant, and she and Pat saw each other all the time. It was too much of a burden to place on anyone. There was only one other person who knew the whole story, knew the weight of it. And he was gone too. She touched the note lightly, mouthing its short lines by heart.

  Dear Paula. By the time you read, this you’ll see that I am gone. You won’t understand why, pet, and I can’t explain, but I have to go now. There are bad people after me and I need to keep you safe. I’m so sorry, pet. If you hear things about me, please try to understand I was doing it for you. Someone had to try and stop the killing.

  I love you. If I had any other choice I would take it, but I just can’t stand it any more.

  Look after your daddy, pet, and be good.

  Mummy

  Look after your daddy, and be good. Well, she hadn’t done either of those things. She’d run away to London as soon as she could, and now here she was, a single mother with a fatherless toddler. Who of course had a father – but one she couldn’t know about. Who thought her father was a different man, currently sitting in a jail cell several miles down the road.

  Paula stood and looked out the window over town, the lights winking against the dark of the surrounding mountains. Some nights she convinced herself she could see the beam from the prison, a bald white laser over a hulk of concrete, but she wasn’t sure it was even true. He was there – somewhere out there, anyway – and it was eight months since he’d let her visit, or anyone bring Maggie to see him, and Paula was alone, swimming hard against a current that kept dragging her back, back into the dark.

  She pushed the folder angrily away, and rubbed at her tired eyes. What a mess. What a bloody mess she’d made of everything.

  Fiona

  Looking back, it all began to go wrong on the day Jimmy Reilly cut Manus Grady’s throat. Or maybe it was sooner, maybe it had been growing and metastasising long before that, the way a wave will rise to the shore in a gentle green curve before suddenly cresting, battering you down, raking you over the stony bottom. But even if it had, I only realised how wrong things were going, how badly something on the island was awry, when Jimmy walked into Dunorlan’s pub with that old knife in his hand. It was one you’d use to gut fish, the Guards said later. Rusty, bent, but still sharp enough to kill a man.

  Manus and Jimmy had bad blood, of course, everyone knew that. Most people on the island had bad blood with someone or other. In Jimmy and Manus’s case it was that Manus had sold some land Jimmy thought rightly belonged to him. It had been sold, like most of the spare land on the island, for what I hear was more than enough to keep even Manus in whiskey. This was several years ago, when the company first came over. It was old news. Not something that should have ended with Manus on the spit-and-sawdust floor of that beer-soaked pub, gasping and spasming like a slashed fish on the deck of a boat. But it did.

  It was a clear day in January, rinsed out and shining from the usual rain squalls. Before I came to the island, I didn’t realise there were as many types of rain as there are days in the year. Patchy rain. Drizzle. Thick showers. Freezing rain that soaks through any layers of clothes you care to put on. Jimmy had encountered Manus in the village Spar around eleven. (I heard all this from Bridget who works at the post office counter and was in to see me about a persistent cough. Never underestimate what you can find out when you have a government post and a letter steamer.) Jimmy asked Manus had he filled in some forms from Jimmy’s solicitor. Looking for compensation or some such. Manus said something along the lines of, don’t be bothering my head with
that old shite now, I am off for a pint. And words were exchanged about the moral character of their respective mothers, before they were kicked out by Oona who owns the shop, much to Bridget’s chagrin.

  Then Manus set off across the harbour to Dunorlan’s, skidding on wet seaweed thrown up by the overnight storm. Shaking, no doubt, from his morning whiskey. He’d been in to see me already about early-stage liver fat, and I’d told him he had to stop or he’d die, but there is no reasoning with an Irish alcoholic – and Jimmy walked the twenty minutes back to his farm, and found the knife in a drawer in the kitchen (or so Bridget said). Even though most people on the island buy their fish ready-gutted in the Spar these days, they also never throw anything away. Jimmy took time to sharpen the knife, then walked back to the pub. Several people claimed to have seen him with the knife in his hand, but thought nothing of it. He might have been going to mend a fence, or cut wood. He entered the pub and approached Manus, who was on his usual bar stool, watching a hurling match on the TV. Meath versus Tipperary, I believe. Jimmy said something like, are you going to fill in those fecking forms or not. Manus repeated his earlier comment, with some added swearing. At that, Jimmy lifted the knife and caught at Manus’s head like he was shearing a sheep, and drew the blade along the man’s neck. The bar and the TV and the packets of Scampi Fries and the barman, young Colm Meehan – nice lad, brought his mammy in to me last week – were instantly sprayed with Manus’s blood. Although at that point it was probably mostly whiskey.

  People said afterwards, enjoying the drama of it all – oh, if only you’d been there, doctor, you could have done something for him. And maybe I could, if I’d pressed my fingers right to where the blood gulps out, quick and hot, if I’d stopped him up like an old leaking boat, but as it was, everyone stood gawping and Manus was quickly dead. Colm, who is that rare thing, a fast-thinking islander, took Jimmy and locked him in the bottle store, where he sat quite docile among the crates of Harp and boxes of Tayto crisps until Rory came to fetch him to the mainland. And that was it.