The Killing House Read online

  ‘Shoes?’ Corry frowned, leafing through her pictures. ‘Don’t think we found any of those. She was just in socks.’

  ‘So, she’d not have got far walking without shoes. And the farm is pretty out of the way.’

  Corry was nodding along. ‘Right, so someone took her out there in a car.’

  ‘Or she lived there to start with. She was in her nightclothes, obviously. Getting ready for bed. Or asleep already. What do we know about the Wallace family?’

  ‘We’ve a file on them a foot thick. Vocal Republicans. One of the sons, Ciaran Wallace, is serving a life sentence here in town. The other, Paddy Wallace, disappeared sometime in the nineties, never been heard of since. He was the head of an IRA punishment squad back then, fanatical about tracking down informers – any whiff of betrayal and he’d kill you as soon as look at you. A dangerous man.’

  ‘So the body under the barn could be him?’

  Corry shook her head. ‘We discounted that. Too short – he’s a big fella, Paddy Wallace. We think he’s on the run – you’ve been following all the hoo-ha with the on-the-runs?’

  ‘Sort of.’ She tried to keep up with the news from home, but had forgotten the chasm of perspective that opened up when you stepped on a plane and crossed the narrow sea, the way so much of local politics took on the character of a storm in a very small teacup. She thought the scandal was something to do with IRA suspects, still on the run for various crimes in the past, being secretly told by the British Government in the late nineties that they would never be tried. A part of the peace process that had been kept under wraps. The scandal over it had caused a major court case to collapse back in February. ‘The Wallaces. Was there a sister, or a daughter?’ she asked.

  ‘We can’t be sure, based on what’s in the files. We need to find someone who knew them. Apart from Ciaran, they all seem to be scattered – that’s why the farm came up for sale. Old Mrs Wallace is in a nursing home and the place had to go to pay for her care. I suppose it makes sense none of the family wanted to claim it, if they knew what was under the barn.’

  ‘A family tree would be really helpful. I’ll ask Dad, he’ll probably remember them.’ Paula’s father had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the criminals he’d pursued as an RUC officer, especially those he’d never been able to nail. Most of them would have seen Catholic PJ as a traitor to his own side, a legitimate target, deserving of a bomb under his car or a bullet in the head. As a child she’d always been scared that he wouldn’t come home one day. She’d never thought to worry about her mother, who was always just there in the kitchen when she came in from school. Stupid. If she’d known she would have asked so many questions. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been left hanging for twenty years, nothing answered, nothing explained. ‘You mentioned a pendant?’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes. Here, I have it.’ Corry took a plastic bag from her locked drawer and held it up to the light. ‘Needs to be logged in to evidence. Look, there’s strands of her hair caught in it. Must have hurt.’

  Paula’s blood stopped. Corry frowned. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I . . . Can I see?’ She took the bag, her fingers clammy against it, and held it up to the light. A thin chain, cheap and mass-produced, and on the end a silver dolphin leaping through the air. Black hairs caught in the clasp. The kind of thing a teenage girl would wear. Had worn.

  Corry was watching her. ‘Mean anything to you?’

  ‘Oh – no. It’s just, everyone had those in the nineties, didn’t they?’ She realised she was clenching the wrapped pendant in her fist, and it was digging in. She put it down on Corry’s desk, rubbing at the indentations on her palm. ‘So if we can find out who this girl is, who they both are – someone must know why they’re there. Who put them there.’

  Corry nodded. ‘Right. Are you fit to work on this? By rights I shouldn’t ask you – the possible connection to your mother . . .’

  Paula just raised an eyebrow.

  Corry sighed. ‘Fine, yes, I know, if none of us worked on cases we had a connection to we’d never get a stroke done in this town. And with Wright and Monaghan off choosing wedding chair covers or what have you, I need your help. I was hoping the pendant would be more of a lead, but maybe you’re right. I’m sure there were loads like that in the nineties. My Rosie has one like it now, sure.’

  ‘Right.’ And Paula, she’d had one too, hadn’t she? Exactly like this, a dolphin on a cheap chain. When had she lost it? She couldn’t remember. Had she seen hers since 1993, after her mother went? Was it possible this was her actual pendant, something real, a clue, a breadcrumb in the trail she’d been blindly following?

  And if by some chance it was . . . did it mean her mother had been at that farm, the place where two dead bodies had just surfaced?

  Chapter Three

  Tonight she wasn’t staying at her old house, the one she’d been born in and which her mother had gone missing from. It had been sold when she left town, so she was at Pat and her father’s place. The house Aidan had grown up in. All the same she made a small detour down her old street, the narrow terraced houses and parked cars leaving little room for two vehicles to pass. She loitered outside for a moment. The new people had painted the door and window frames green, and spruced up the untidy gravel at the front of the house, which she and Aidan had let choke with weeds in the two years they’d lived there. She wondered had they sorted the back garden too, the one that had never recovered from the police digging it up in 1993, in a vain search for her mother’s body.

  A curtain twitched in an upstairs room, Maggie’s old room, and before that Paula’s. A hand pulling them over, so she caught a glimpse of a child in a bed, cosy in the glow of a lamp. Paula pressed her foot down on the pedal and pulled away.

  Pat’s house would never feel like home. Something about the washing powder she used, or the smell of lemon cleaning products that permeated the place. Paula and Maggie were sleeping in what had been Aidan’s room as a teenager, and even though it had been redecorated in neutral cream and blue stripes, there was a ghost of teenage boy about the place, as if the football posters were still there under the wallpaper, and piles of sweaty football kit lingered in the corners. She’d only been in there once as a teenager, when Pat was out – they weren’t supposed to go in each other’s rooms, even though they were eighteen and seventeen at the time. Catholic Northern Ireland had different rules.

  She ran her hand gently over the new wallpaper, feeling the silkiness. Papering over the past. Maggie was already asleep, splayed out like a starfish in the middle of the bed, small palms turned up. Paula eased her over and climbed in. From downstairs came the sound of her father settling the house down for the night, locking doors, turning off plug sockets, checking windows. Habits learned from many years in the RUC. She wriggled, trying to get comfortable. Being back here was so strange. A guest in her father’s house, while he was downstairs with Pat. Stepmother, mother-in-law, who knew what to call her. The only mother she’d known for twenty years.

  Restless, Paula kicked back the covers. She’d never sleep like this. It was too hot, and the lights of cars kept moving over her window, and whatever Pat washed the sheets in made her skin itch. After a while she got up and padded downstairs in her pyjamas, noticing a faint blue light from the living room. ‘Hiya, Dad.’ His bad leg kept him up a lot, and it wasn’t unusual for him to be awake till the early hours as well. On the TV some shiny young politician was being interviewed, articulate and moderate, the kind that gave Paula hope for the future. No one she’d heard of, but the surname, Dunne, stuck in her head for some reason. A past case, maybe. Everyone in Ballyterrin was connected, roots beneath the surface.

  ‘There you are,’ said PJ observationally. ‘The wee one down?’

  ‘Like a light. She doesn’t take after me.’ Stupid, to say that, and remind him that Maggie’s biological father was an English police officer who didn’t even know that’s
what he was. Who thought the little girl’s father was Aidan, whose involvement was only to have slept with Paula once.

  She sat down, yawning. In the old days, it had been just her and her father in the house, often meeting in the kitchen when insomnia drove them both from bed, and she’d pick his brains about her cases. ‘So, I’m working on this Red Road thing.’

  ‘Oh aye. The Provos by the sounds of it. Some daft young fella who got himself mixed up with them, like as not.’

  ‘The farmhouse belonged to the Wallace family. You remember them?’

  PJ paused for a second, combing his memory banks. ‘Paddy and, what was the younger fella called?’

  ‘Ciaran.’

  ‘Aye, that was it. We never managed to pin anything on them back then, though Paddy Wallace for one was up to his eyes in it. You know what they used to call him? The Ghost. Cos he never left a trace at any of his crime scenes. Not a print, not a hair, and him always nowhere to be found when we wanted to question him. Still haven’t caught up to him. He’s that good.’

  ‘What about the brother?’

  ‘Aye, well, we lifted him a few times but he walked. Always denied all involvement, but they got him on something all the same in the end.’ A grim satisfaction in PJ’s voice, and she wondered not for the first time how it must feel as a former policeman, to see the men you knew had done murder walking around free in your home town. Knowing they’d shot or blown up your colleagues. Even those who had gone to prison were out already under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. The doors opened and murderers set loose.

  ‘Yeah, in 2003.’ Ciaran Wallace had been convicted of a murder in London that year, she’d learned, some former Army officer. He’d been brought back to Ballyterrin to serve his time, so they knew where he was, at least.

  ‘It’s not one of the Wallace brothers then, your dead fella?’

  ‘We don’t think so, no. Someone else.’

  ‘There’s a lot of families’ll be watching the news with interest,’ PJ said. ‘Waiting all this time to hear what happened to their son. Hope it brings them some comfort.’

  That probably explained why the Commission were calling. They wanted to check if it was anyone from their list of the Disappeared. A trawl through the missing persons’ archives, now thankfully digitised, had revealed no promising links. There were missing teenage girls, of course – there always were – but none exactly matching the description of the one in the morgue. None that had not turned up again, as happened in ninety-nine per cent of cases. This girl had been one of the one per cent that stayed stubbornly missing, a sentence with no full stop, a question with no answer. Those were the cases that Paula could not let go. So why had no one reported her gone? ‘The girl too. We don’t know who she is. Had the Wallaces any sisters?’

  ‘Don’t know, pet. If they had we never arrested them.’

  She kept looking carefully ahead at the TV, which was showing some kind of late-night news programme. Politicians arguing about on-the-runs or whatever the issue of the week was. ‘What did you think when they – when the bodies were dug up? The female?’

  A short silence. ‘They knew it wasn’t her, so they did. Too young, poor wee girl.’ Paula’s father had given up on finding his wife. She’d known that when he remarried. He’d not have done that if he thought there was the slightest chance Margaret was still alive, and neither would Pat, staunch Catholic that she was. So what happened if Paula found what she was looking for, and her mother was still alive? What would that do to PJ and Pat and this life they’d made?

  ‘Daddy . . . did you always think they got her? The Provos?’ This was dangerous territory. They didn’t talk much about her mother, groping past the high walls they’d put around her disappearance. You had to, just to survive.

  He paused. ‘I hoped they didn’t. But she was . . . well. People said she was up to something. Getting names from her work, passing them on to some Army Intelligence fella.’

  ‘Did you believe it?’

  ‘No. But she was gone. And we never found her, so . . .’ He shrugged. Paula understood. Her mother had either been taken by someone or she’d gone of her own accord, leaving them both and never sending back a word to say she was all right. And which was worse?

  Paula looked around her at the framed photos on the walls. Pat and PJ’s wedding, a pregnant Paula avoiding a stony-faced Aidan, before they’d worked things out between them. Maggie at every age from baby to now. Friends, relatives. PJ had built this, left behind the past and grabbed the happiness in front of him, even if it meant raising eyebrows, which for a stoical Catholic man in his sixties was no mean feat. Why couldn’t Paula do the same?

  Tell him, her mind urged. Tell him about the note in the kitchen. Tell him you’ve got a private detective searching for her in London. Tell him she might have been there, still be there even now. But how could she shatter all this, this comfortable over-warm house, Maggie’s grandparents, their happiness, settled so late in the day? She couldn’t. Not when she knew nothing for sure. She stirred herself. ‘I’ll make us some tea, Daddy. Are there any biscuits?’

  Margaret

  It started with the sound of a chair scraping over the floor. He was back. Her breath quickened like a dog’s, the fear coursing through her veins and the sack over her head already damp with sweat. She hated that. They hadn’t even hurt her yet, so why was she so scared?

  ‘Margaret. Good morning.’

  The sack was lifted off, gently this time, and he was sitting in front of her with his blue eyes and charming smile. A face you could trust. He reminded her of Edward in a way, which was a terrible thing to think. Somehow you wanted to tell him things. And she had told Edward many things, secret things that could get a lot of people in trouble, and he’d promised he’d look after her, but she’d been here for how long – a day? two days? – and he hadn’t come for her. So what did that mean?

  ‘Now, where did we get to?’ Pleasant. As if it was an interview.

  ‘I took the documents.’ Edward had told her there was no point lying. Men like this could spot it a mile off, and anyway they’d have proof. The best way to save yourself was admit you’d done wrong and tell them nothing else. You were insignificant, a tiny cog in the wheel. You didn’t know who you reported to.

  ‘You copied the files of the Republican prisoners your boss represented.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why would you do a thing like that, Margaret?’

  ‘I . . . I wanted to stop it. All the dying. I have a wee girl, she was scared all the time, crying. And my friend John . . .’

  ‘John O’Hara, oh yes. I remember.’

  She sucked in breath. They’d shot him, gentle, clever John, murdered him in his office and left him with his blood leaking out over the floor and his son, only seven, hiding under the desk in mute horror. It was the thought of wee Aidan that had spurred her on to do what she did. Imagining that same look on Paula’s face. It was years ago now. Had this man been involved? He looked too young, only in his twenties surely. And here she was helpless in front of him.

  ‘So you wanted to stop it. And you thought the best way to do that was to hand over information about your own side – men fighting for our freedom?’

  She said nothing. They weren’t freedom fighters, they were killers. She and PJ had always been united on that. And he, a Catholic RUC officer, had been a dead man walking since the moment he put the uniform on when he was eighteen. His own family had never spoken to him again. Had she made it worse for him? Please God they’d only go after her.

  ‘Tell me, Margaret – who did you give the documents to? The ones you stole from your work.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ah, come on now.’

  ‘I didn’t know his name. A man. English.’

  ‘This man?’ He flicked a picture up between his fingers, like a magician with
a card. She was so shocked to see Edward’s photo here in this place, that for a moment she couldn’t even hide it. It had been taken without him knowing – he was opening his car boot. They knew what his car looked like. Did they know where to find him? She was cold, suddenly, her skin goose-bumped. ‘Edward, aye? That’s his name? Your Brit boyfriend. Does your husband know, Margaret?’

  Margaret closed her eyes. How stupid she’d been, to think she could outwit these men. ‘Please don’t hurt him.’ Her voice sounded dry. It was a long time since they’d given her any water. The slats of the chair bit into her back and arms; she knew her skin would start to break soon.

  ‘Who? Your husband or your boyfriend? The peeler or the Brit spy? You can really pick ’em, Margaret, can’t you?’

  ‘Please. My daughter. Please don’t hurt her, she’s only thirteen and—’ A horrific scene came to her mind, Paula orphaned at thirteen if they went after PJ too. She’d have to live with her auntie Philomena and they didn’t get on at all. Her cousin Cassie would drive Paula mad with her make-up and her ballet lessons. Maybe Pat instead. Pat O’Hara would look after her family, she knew it, cook for them, mind them. Thank God for Pat.

  She almost laughed. Here she was, a killer sitting opposite, and she was already making plans for Paula’s dinner. As if there was anything she could do now.

  ‘We won’t touch your wee girl, who do you think we are? But we’re fighting a war here, Margaret, and you’re handing over the names of our soldiers. Now, do you think that’s fair? You leaping into bed with the same fella that’s spying on your countrymen, having our men shot dead in the street? What kind of woman does a thing like that?’