The Killing House Read online

  Guy went, leaving a cloud of citrus behind him, and Paula wrenched the office window open, letting in the stale summer air of London, the hoots of traffic far below. It was hard to breathe here. The air didn’t seem to make it down between the high buildings. Not like at home, the cold pure wind blowing off the wet mountains. On impulse she got her phone from her bag and dialled a number. A man with a slack Belfast accent answered, coughing the words. ‘Davey . . . hem, hem . . . Corcoran.’

  ‘Davey, hi. Paula here.’

  ‘Oh.’ She knew what that ‘oh’ meant. She’d been badgering him non-stop, ever since the private eye had found out her mother might have fled to London in the nineties. It was a very slim ‘might’ – the man who’d been her mother’s contact in Army Intelligence, and also probably her lover, had moved there in November 1993, just weeks after her mother went missing. Given up his post running informants, retired from sight. Maybe he’d got her mother out too. Maybe she’d been safe in England all this time. ‘I’ve nothing more for you. Sorry, love.’

  She bristled at the ‘love’. ‘What about the house in Hampstead?’ The last known address for this ‘Edward’, if that was even his name, had been there.

  ‘Neighbour said he moved on not long after. Dunno where to.’

  The neighbour had also said there was a child. That the man, her mother’s possible lover, had lived there with a woman, and a baby. It was all so slight. It barely held up. Paula sighed. ‘Thanks, Davey. If you find anything . . .’

  ‘Aye, aye, I’ll let you know.’ He was staying in a Premier Inn near Heathrow while he did his digging, she knew, and she wondered how much all this would end up costing her. It didn’t matter. She had to find out, no matter what. Had to keep moving forward, doing something instead of nothing. Hiring a PI. Moving back to London herself. Destroying the fragile peace her family had found.

  She spun in her seat again. What was wrong with her? She had a great job, back in the city she’d loved for years, before a brief secondment to her home town had stretched into three years and an unexpected baby. She was working with Guy, who understood her and inspired her more than any colleague she’d ever had, she was away from Ballyterrin with its sadness and secrets tearing her apart like wet cardboard. She should be happy. Instead she was . . . restless. Maybe it was the blast of summer heat that had swept into the city, pushing groups of office workers out onto the pavements every evening, pints in hand, sweat patches under the arms of their shirts. It was too clammy to sleep in Paula’s little flat, and she didn’t have many friends left here now, so there she was, stuck in limbo while the rest of the city seemed to open in the heat like an exotic flower.

  A ring from the desk phone disturbed her, and she answered in her best work voice. ‘Dr Paula Maguire, MP Task Force.’

  A familiar voice said, ‘Would Dr Maguire have a wee minute for an old colleague?’ The Northern Irish accent was a cold breath across the sea, fresh and bracing.

  ‘Helen! Always got time for you. How’s everyone in Ballyterrin?’

  ‘Grand, grand. You’ll be back for the wedding of the year, I take it?’

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it.’ Her former colleagues Avril and Gerard were getting married the following week, so a trip back to Ballyterrin was inevitable. She wondered if Guy was going too. He’d had an invite, she knew, but had been non-committal about whether he was actually attending, and she’d been avoiding asking him. She avoided discussion of Ballyterrin with him wherever possible, hoping to pretend that the time they’d worked together there, and its explosive consequences, could simply be forgotten. Turn their backs on it and move forward. Which was stupid. If anyone knew that you couldn’t turn your back on the past, it was Paula.

  ‘How’d you like to do a wee consult for us while you’re here?’

  Paula felt a watch-tick of interest in her stomach. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, you know how normally in missing persons we’ve got someone we can’t find and we’re looking for them, or more accurately, their body?’

  ‘Yeah.’ That was the sad truth – any longer than a few hours gone and there was rarely a happy ending to the story.

  ‘Well, this is different. We’ve got a body and we don’t know who it is.’

  ‘You’ve got a body?’

  ‘Sure do. Two, in fact.’

  ‘Two bodies?’ Ballyterrin had seen more murders over the years than you’d expect in such a small town – its troubled history and location on the Irish border made sure of that – but two at once was excessive.

  She heard Corry settle down, imagined her perched on the edge of a desk, the sound of the incident room around her. The local accents, the smell of Cup a Soup from the kitchen. For a moment she felt something strange – homesickness, maybe. Which was weird when she’d run from her home as fast as she could, as soon as she was old enough.

  ‘So there’s this old farmhouse way out the Killeany Road,’ Corry went on. ‘Red Road, they call it. Abandoned since the nineties. You know the place?’

  She missed that, the way people gave directions back home. Out the road, turn left at the big tree, go on till you pass the boulder. ‘Think so.’ It was called Red Road because the richness of the soil gave a coppery tinge to the ground.

  ‘Well, it’s been sold to some grand-designs eejits and they’re digging the whole place up, and what do they turn up but a nasty surprise under the barn floor.’

  Paula hitched the phone under her ear. ‘Who were the previous owners?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing. The family, they were bollocks-deep in the IRA. One of the brothers is in jail here in Ballyterrin, the other’s been on the run for years.’

  Suddenly, it hit her, and she understood why Corry was using her special gentle voice. Shit. SHIT. ‘Oh. The bodies, are they . . .’

  ‘One’s female.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s not her, Paula. I mean, we don’t have the forensics yet – but this girl is much younger. Black hair. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ She was glad she was sitting down. Of course it had happened before, several times over the years. An unidentified female body would surface in a bog or drain or yes, the foundations of a house, and Paula and her father would troop up to the morgue and take a look. The first time she’d been thirteen, dragged out of a Maths lesson in her school uniform, and she’d thrown up into a bin right there in the sterile white corridor. ‘Is Dad . . . ?’

  ‘We’ll inform him, of course. But it’s highly unlikely to be her, Paula.’

  ‘I know.’ The lift-drop in her stomach told her she’d allowed herself to hope, after promising herself she wouldn’t give in to it again. Over here in London, ostensibly for the job, when she knew very well it was for the one in eight million chance of one day passing her mother on the street. Not that they could even be certain she was here. She might have never left Ireland. She might easily be dead and buried beneath the ground of this farmhouse, or some other forgotten patch of soil. ‘So what’s happening now?’

  ‘We’ll speak to the family who used to own it, the Wallaces, if we can track them down. Then search the missper databases.’

  ‘So where do I come in?’

  ‘Once the forensics have been done – and it won’t be her, I really believe it – I’d like you to work on the case. What do you say? Find a name for a body, rather than a body for a name?’

  ‘I’m working here.’

  ‘I know, but you’ll be back for the wedding anyway. I’d just like you to take a look. There’s a few strange things about the way they’re buried.’

  Paula breathed out hard through her nose. It was impossible to say no to DI Helen Corry. ‘Um . . .’

  ‘Paula, pet, just save both our time. You know you want a peek. Get an earlier flight and give me a hand for a while. It’s the least Brooking can do, since he’s after stealing you away from me.’

 
‘OK, OK. I do have some holiday saved up.’

  ‘Brilliant. And Maggie’ll love to see her grandparents. I saw Pat the other day in Dunnes. How is she these days?’

  ‘She’s not too bad.’ The guilt at leaving was always there, even though Pat was not actually Maggie’s grandmother, and even though Paula had already left at eighteen and only intended to go back for a few months the last time. There was also Aidan, of course, rotting in his prison cell. He wouldn’t let her visit, or contact him, but it still felt like a betrayal to be over the water, far away from him. At least when they were in the same country she felt close to him, somehow. She’d look out her window over the dark town, trying to pick out the lights of the prison where he was. ‘I better go,’ she said to Corry. ‘Work to do here. I’ll come, though.’

  ‘How’s the work there, something exciting?’

  ‘Um. Sure. Send me the details once you get them.’ She was talking as if she already knew it wasn’t her mother under that barn – and it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t – but she felt the anxiety claw at her all the same. Two dead bodies. She imagined it – the digger turning over the cold ground, the noise and churn of it, and suddenly the glimpse of white bone and rotted flesh, the nasty secret the house had been hiding all this time. It would hit the news soon, surely. Grisly mysteries always did. She’d better call her dad. Even if it wasn’t her mother – and it wasn’t, surely it wasn’t – the idea of a long-dead woman was never fun, and it was sure to stir up unwanted memories for him too, squirming with beetles as they were brought reluctantly to light.

  ‘Look, Mummy, a bird!’

  ‘That’s right, pet.’

  ‘Look, Mummy, a dog!’

  ‘That’s right,’ Paula said distractedly. They were heading for the bus stop, Maggie trotting beside her pointing out everything she saw. As she’d spent the first three years of her life in a small Irish town, London was endlessly fascinating to her, even the crammed red buses and the tiny one-and-a-half-bed flat they were renting on the Isle of Dogs. Paula’s skin felt coated in dust and sweat. In her head she was turning over the case. She’d have to start prepping Maggie that they were going back home for a visit but not staying. Yes, they’d be seeing Granny and Grandpa and Auntie Saoirse. And hopefully Maggie wouldn’t remember or ask about anyone else.

  ‘Look Mummy, Daddy!’

  Paula’s heart stopped. They were boarding the bus now, struggling on through crowds of people with bags and pushchairs and walking sticks, and Maggie was pointing out the window. The bus was drawing off. She squeezed through to the side and looked out, stupidly, heart pounding. A hipster man slouched at the bus stop, tapping at his phone. Scruffy dark beard, band T-shirt. Not Aidan, of course. Stupid. Aidan was in prison. ‘It’s not Daddy, pet. Just another man.’

  It was the first time Maggie had mentioned Daddy since they’d left Ireland. She’d hoped the child might have forgotten. It was possible, wasn’t it, to forget the people you knew when you were two? No matter how much you’d loved them or they’d loved you? And there was Guy, asking so casually after Maggie, unaware that she was, in fact, his daughter. Paula had resolved to tell him so many times, and still hadn’t. They worked together so well. He respected her. He was back with his wife and she was pregnant. Paula knew she would not tell him. Not any time soon.

  She pulled Maggie onto her knee as the bus juddered off. ‘Look, a doggie! See his waggy tail!’

  Oh God. Why did she ever think she could get away? Ballyterrin would never leave her. It was cold dark ground pulling her down, crushing her arms and legs, closing up her eyes. She would have to go back.

  Chapter Two

  Rain. There was a saying in Ballyterrin, that if the cows in the fields were lying down it was about to rain. If they were standing up, it was already raining. Amazing how she’d managed to forget that already, in the heat of a London summer. Paula stood now and lifted her face up to it, that soft Irish rain that misted you all over, soaking you to the skin. Her hands were shoved in the pocket of the North Face jacket she’d hastily bought on the way from the airport. Beside her Helen Corry was turned out in a navy trench coat, slick and tailored, and a minion in uniform and a DayGlo jacket was holding a brolly over her head. They were staring into the dark pit that had once been a barn floor. It had been half-demolished when the builders made the discovery, and the remaining ceiling and walls stood crumbling in the rain, their insides exposed. Some twisted metal bars stuck up from the churned ground; places where animals had been tethered, she imagined.

  ‘So this was it?’

  ‘Aye. The couple’s builders were breaking ground when they turned them up. Making an “annexe”, whatever that is. Two bodies.’ Corry gestured with an elegant hand. ‘The man is older – mid-twenties, maybe. They were buried at the same time, we think, based on soil disturbance. He was in a classic execution pose. Arms bound behind him, knees folded, gunshot to the head. Thirty quid in cash shoved in his jeans pocket, no other identifying documents. The clothes, and the cash in the man’s pocket – it all suggests they were put down there around the early nineties.’

  ‘And the female . . .’ Even though it wasn’t her mother the resonance was there, and Paula felt desperately sad for the girl, whoever she was, buried in this heavy earth.

  ‘Pathologist thinks she was somewhere between twelve and eighteen. She’d never had a child or been pregnant. That’s how we knew for sure. That it wasn’t your mother.’

  Margaret Maguire had obviously had a child. And what Corry didn’t know was she’d also been pregnant when she’d gone missing. Paula still didn’t know what to do with that nugget of information, which she’d been turning over like a stone in her pocket for months now. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Black hair. She was in her nightie, with a sweatshirt on top, socks but no underwear – and a pendant. It’s quite distinctive. And she had her arms crossed over her chest, like this.’ Corry demonstrated; her minion moved the umbrella, panicked lest a drop would fall on the boss’s shiny fair head. ‘I’ve not seen something like that before. The way she was placed.’

  ‘The man. That suggests we’re looking at an IRA killing.’

  ‘Most likely. It’s how they executed informers. But the girl . . . We don’t know. They hardly ever killed women. And they never arranged people like that. It shows . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Respect,’ said Paula, who was thinking of Egyptian burials, young princesses laid out with such care. ‘Not an execution, then. Her at least.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it. We think she was strangled – the bones in her neck are snapped.’

  Paula looked up from the dark pit. The farmhouse stood on the other side of the field; the couple who’d bought the place were halfway through renovating it, with big glass walls and grey slate tiles. She could see the wife in the window, a toddler held in her arms. Poor woman. She could just imagine how she’d feel with Maggie running round near a pit like this, that held such grisly discoveries. ‘Reckon they know anything?’ She nodded to the house.

  ‘Nah. They only bought the place a few months back. Must have thought they were after getting a lovely bargain. No, it’s the Wallace family we need to look at. And if you know anything about that shower, they’re not the type who like to be looked at. Not the type at all.’

  Later, in the dry of the station, Paula walked in slightly abashed, casting awkward smiles at her former colleagues. Back already. It was even more awkward when DCI Willis Campbell, the head of Serious Crime and never her biggest fan, clocked her. ‘Dr Maguire! Over so soon?’

  ‘Just a consult.’

  ‘I thought your specialty was finding the missing. Nobody’s missing here.’

  Corry shepherded her past. ‘We’ve bodies and no names for them. I thought Dr Maguire’s experience would be useful.’

  His handsome face twisted. Paula wondered, not for the first time, did he highlight h
is hair. ‘And I suppose we’ll be inundated with press. That Commission lot have already been on the phone nosing around. Make sure we get the credit for finding the bodies, OK?’

  The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains had been set up as part of the peace process, to try and find the bodies of long-missing people the IRA had killed and buried back in the darkest days of the Troubles. They had clout. And money. And they weren’t without controversy, because if a body was found as a result of information they received, no one could be prosecuted for it. But these bodies had been dug up accidentally, so Paula wasn’t sure why they would be involved. And the girl, that was not an IRA killing, unless something had gone very wrong.

  ‘It was the builders found them,’ Corry muttered, but Campbell was already gone, striding across the room to upbraid some other unfortunate member of staff. ‘Right, so, we need to go through all those missing persons’ files you had back at the unit. They’re still in storage. See if a man or a girl was reported missing at any point back then.’

  Paula was already mentally scanning her memory of outstanding cases, which had been part of their remit in the now-axed Missing Persons’ Unit she’d come back to work in three years ago. A young woman in her teens, missing for perhaps twenty years. ‘You said the girl was strangled?’ She closed the door of Corry’s office behind her, noting the new photos pinned to the wall. Corry’s teenage children, growing up at what seemed an impossible rate. Life going on.

  Corry shoved over a picture. Paula saw the white flash of bone against the rich soil – crime scene pictures. ‘Pathologist reckons so. There isn’t much left of her, as you can see.’

  Strangling was often the method of killing in intimate murders. Family, loved ones. You held them close as you squeezed the life from them. Paula looked at the pictures of the girl’s clothes. Sad, skimpy things, partly rotted and clogged with soil. A cheap towelling nightshirt with a cartoon dog on the front, an Adidas sweatshirt with white stripes on the arms, photographed on a shiny steel surface in the morgue. ‘What shoes had she on?’