Blood Tide

by Claire McGowan

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Female Sleuths; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

A missing couple. A lurking killer. A perfect storm. Forensic psychologist Paula Maguire returns to solve a dark and dangerous case on a small Irish island in the taut and terrifying BLOOD TIDE, the fifth novel in Claire McGowan's acclaimed series. The perfect read for fans of Joy Ellis and Karin Slaughter. 'A brilliantly executed thriller with a haunting and atmospheric setting. Spine tingling' - Sunday Mirror 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... What readers are saying about Blood Tide : 'A very clever plot with many shocking moments. The island setting added to the atmosphere as did the ongoing storm. What a terrific book' 'I caught myself holding my breath as I followed the characters avidly. This is definitely the series that keeps on giving and keeps getting better ' 'A masterfully plotted and executed novel. The pace never lets up, with new developments in every chapter. An excellent read'

Release date: March 23, 2017

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 260

Sample

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.

In statistics, two points are just two points. They signify nothing. But three points, that’s a line. That’s a pattern. And after the incident with Manus and Jimmy, I began to think about the thing at the primary school, and that awful business with the Sharkey baby, and I started to draw some lines. I wonder now, after the blood in the sea and the boat and the box full of dead things, whether I could have stopped it all that day. Pressed my fingers to it like I might have pressed them into Manus’s gaping neck. Or whether things were already too far gone by then. I don’t know, but I’ve written it all down anyway, at the very least so I can try to understand myself. To see what exactly it was I did wrong. For what it’s worth, I, Dr Fiona Watts, date the happenings on Bone Island from the date of Manus Grady’s death – 5th January 2014 – but if you look back, no doubt you will find that this was only the moment when the building wave began to crest.



Chapter Two

‘Well, pet. That was a powerful gale last night. Are you all right?’ Paula’s stepmother Pat opened the front door, dressed in yoga pants and a lemon sweatshirt. The previous year she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, and Paula tried not to take it for granted that Pat would be there every morning, up and about, well as could be expected. But she was. Even her hair had grown back after the chemo, soft as a baby’s.

‘We’re fine. No harm done.’ At least the house had just been renovated when everything went wrong. At least she didn’t have to worry about bits of it falling off in the storm – even if it had been done in the hope of selling the place, moving to a new house that wasn’t full of memories.

‘Graaaaaanny!’ Maggie ran over and Pat scooped her up, struggling gamely.

‘Oof. There’s my wee pet!’

‘A bad man was at my window.’

Paula met Pat’s eyes over Maggie’s red curls. She shrugged. ‘Nightmares. Where’s Dad?’

‘Still upstairs. The ould wind makes his leg play up.’

‘I’ll leave him be, then. Saoirse’s getting her from nursery today, yes?’

‘Aye. I’ve my follow-up appointment.’

‘I know. Tell me how it goes, yeah?’ It was always a worry, that they’d find something else on the scans. Paula didn’t know what she’d do without Pat’s presence in her life – her own surrogate mother, and the only grandma Maggie had. So how could she ever tell her father about the note without destroying the two of them?

Maggie’s head drooped against Pat’s shoulder, which wasn’t like her. Usually at this hour of the morning she’d be running round full of beans, while Paula would trail after her, hollow-eyed with insomnia. Pat jiggled her. ‘What’s the matter, pet?’

Paula stroked Maggie’s foot in its little furry boot. ‘She was up in the night crying.’

‘Scared of the wind? Poor wean.’

Yes, the wind, and imagined horrors Paula knew came from the real, terrible things this family had been through. Too many to bear, she sometimes thought. And yet they did bear it, somehow. She looked at Pat – her stepmother, almost mother-in-law, and many other things besides. She’d be going to see Aidan today after her scan; Paula was sure of it. But she could never bring herself to ask outright how he was, this man who had so nearly been her husband. And so for yet another day, she didn’t mention him, or the note, or any of the other stones that sat in her heart, weighing it down.

‘It’s a shambles, so it is. Half me gutters came down in the night.’

‘Bloody sea wall’s in bits, too – council are shite at maintaining it.’

As Paula made her way to her desk in Ballyterrin police station, all talk was of the storm. Not one for chit-chat or office friendships, she steered clear, hoping for a quiet morning of emails and reports. She hadn’t slept again after re-reading the file, lying awake with her head full of questions and worries.

‘You didn’t get blown away, then?’ A fair-haired woman appeared, coffee cups in both hands, the seams in her grey trousers sharp as the folds of an envelope. DI Helen Corry, head of the local Missing Persons unit, had been Paula’s boss before a spectacular career plummet. Her punishment – for not realising that the man she was sleeping with had hacked her emails, derailing a murder case – had been harsh, slamming her back through the ranks she’d fought so hard to climb. But if Paula knew Corry at all, the other woman wasn’t going to stay down for long.

‘Maggie was a bit upset by the wind, is all.’

‘Poor wean.’ She handed over a coffee. ‘Here you go, you’ll need one when you hear what I’ve got for you.’

‘Do I have to? I’m propping my eyes open here.’

‘You’ll like it, I promise, or your money back.’

Paula sipped the hot liquid, feeling it hit her bloodstream. She hadn’t even drunk coffee before Maggie was born, existing only on tea like a true Irish person, but these days she couldn’t seem to remember what it was like to not be exhausted all the time. ‘Go on then, tell me.’

‘Feel like a trip down south?’ said Corry casually.

Paula arched an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, sure. Perfect time for a getaway, seeing as half the Atlantic coast’s busy falling into the sea.’

‘I’ve got a juicy one, though. You know you love a good missing persons’. We’ve had a request for you to consult.’ Corry was pushing her buttons, and Paula knew it, but she’d still bite.

She sat down, as Corry leaned against the dividing wall of her cubicle. ‘So?’

‘So, there’s this English couple living out on some godforsaken rock in the Atlantic. Bone Island. You know it?’

The name sent a ripple in her stomach like a stone falling into a well. Bone Island. The last stop, the last lighthouse in Europe, before the cold gulf of the Atlantic. The end of the known world, for a long time. It was narrow and thin like a bone, but the name didn’t come from the shape, rather from the Irish word for ‘white’. She turned to switch on her computer, trying to keep her voice light. Corry was nearly impossible to lie to. ‘Off the coast of Kerry, yeah?’

‘That’s right. Only a wee place, a few miles off the coast. Couple of hundred people. Lovely beaches. Anyway, these two are renting the old lighthouse out there. She’s the island doctor, didn’t turn up for her surgery yesterday. Fiona Watts. The fella’s Matthew Andrews, Matt. When the local Garda went out there to check on them the lighthouse was all locked up, no sign of them.’

‘Did they go away or something?’

Corry shook her head, a faint gleam in her grey eyes. ‘Locked from the inside, Maguire. But empty. The Garda broke the door down.’

‘Empty. How?’

Corry shrugged. ‘Yours to find out, if you want. I’ve cleared it with Willis. Inter-force cooperation is all back in style again. Next thing you know someone will suggest setting up a cross-border unit.’

Paula didn’t smile. It was still a sore point that the cross-border missing persons unit – the MPRU – she’d come home to work at had been scrapped after a year. Leaving her in limbo, back in her home town, tied down once again by all the bonds of family and friends she’d managed to sever at eighteen. ‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Your mate’s the one who asked for you. Quinn.’

‘Fiacra? Is he in Kerry these days?’ Detective Garda Sergeant Fiacra Quinn, once a fresh-faced recruit to their unit, was rising fast through the ranks of the Irish police, moving around the country on a fast-track scheme, different departments, different cases. Hungry for it, the way Paula used to be.

‘He must be. You’d go over to the island with him, if you want.’

Paula began to consider it. She’d maybe go for a jaunt if Fiacra was there, catch up, have a look. But there were other things to think about. ‘How long would it take?’

‘Day or two. Just check it out, see if there’s anything untoward. The local fella thinks they’ve gone into the sea, but that locked door is a bit off. Can someone mind Maggie for you?’

‘I suppose Saoirse would keep her, and maybe Dad and Pat . . .’

‘Right. You said she was doing grand after the last chemo?’

Why did Paula ever tell Corry anything? The woman forgot nothing, stored it up to use when she needed a favour. ‘She’s not too bad.’ But the illness was not Pat’s only problem, of course.

‘Grand. Will I tell them you’ll come, then? They’ve only one Garda there, and I think he’s a bit out of his depth.’

‘I’ll have to see. This weather’s not the best – what if I get stuck out there?’

Corry gave her a look. ‘Not you as well. Met Éireann says the storm’ll pass by over the Atlantic. Fly down tomorrow, get a boat out there to the island and just have a look. Your wee pal Quinn will meet you at the airport.’

‘All right, fine. But can someone else finish that O’Donnell report? I’m about to put myself to sleep with it.’

‘Fine, fine. Wright!’

The young blonde detective came over when called, her own black suit pressed and neat. ‘Yes, ma’am? Hiya, Paula – sorry, Dr Maguire.’

Corry said, ‘Can you help Maguire here finish her homework?’

‘If you like, ma’am. But the switchboards are going crazy. There’s a woman on the line thinks she heard, or so she says, “a loud bang, like a bomb going off”.’ Avril made air-quotes.

Paula frowned. ‘A bomb?’ Although the Troubles were officially over, a handful of diehards refused to accept that, and it wasn’t entirely beyond the bounds of possibility.

Corry snorted. ‘Honestly. It’s the wind taking their guttering off. You’d think these people hadn’t lived through an actual war. Send some uniform down and give them a bollocking about wasting police time, then you finish off this report. I’m sending Maguire over the border.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Avril turned, and Paula saw the flash of the ring she’d worn about her neck since she got engaged at Christmas. Paula’s own engagement ring sat in a drawer at home, stuffed away with all the rest of the things she wasn’t thinking about right now. She flexed her fingers over her keyboard. Now was not a good time for those thoughts. ‘Let me just check with Pat and Saoirse,’ she said. ‘As long as it’s only one night. Two tops.’

‘I promise.’ Corry understood. After all, she and Paula were both single parents now. She looked at her watch. ‘Right, time for my daily tête-à-tête with Willis, better get my garlic and crucifix.’ There was no love lost between Corry and DCI Willis Campbell, the Head of Serious Crime, a fussy stickler of a man who lived for the TV cameras. ‘God save us, here he comes.’

DCI Campbell was striding across the office, throwing vicious looks at any members of staff eating cereal or rapidly minimising computer windows or still going on about the bloody storm. ‘If we could have some work around here, thank you, everyone. Ah, DI Corry, time for a little chat?’

‘Just briefing Dr Maguire here on the Bone Island case. I’ve said you’ve kindly agreed to let her consult.’

Again the name stabbed at her. Bone Island. So many years since she’d heard it. The sound of it made her limbs cramp, remembering the grip of icy water around her. Waving back at a white sand beach, so far away.

‘Hmm. I suppose you can go, if all your work’s finished here?’ It looked good for the force if she was working on high-profile cases, but Campbell was not Paula’s biggest fan.

‘Of course, sir,’ she lied. ‘Intriguing case.’

He tutted. ‘They’ll be in the sea, as any eejit could tell you, but just because they’re English the Guards have to make a fuss. The press over there have got hold of it already. I’ll be in my office if you need me. Monaghan! Can you join us, please?’

He clicked his fingers, and a tall young detective stood up from his desk, buttoning an expensive-looking grey suit. Gerard Monaghan, another former colleague of Paula’s from the missing persons’ unit, and also Avril’s fiancé, was fast becoming Campbell’s right-hand man. ‘Do you think Willis took him shopping?’ Corry whispered to Paula. ‘He loves himself in that get-up, doesn’t he?’

Paula stifled a laugh as she saw Gerard brush imaginary lint from his shoulder. Passing Avril, he gave her a small wink. Corry made a noise in her throat. ‘God save me from men in suits, Maguire. Come back soon from Bogtrotter land, OK?’

As she went, Paula turned back to her computer, gratefully clicking out of a deadly dull report on a missing person from a month ago – the woman had clearly done a runner from her abusive husband, and well done to her – and googled Bone Island. Her mind was already whirring. A lighthouse locked from the inside? Had the couple fallen into the sea? Been pushed? She was itching to take a look, find the clues that had surely been left. But she couldn’t just go haring off any more. She had to make sure Maggie was OK.

On the screen, pictures came up of bleached-white sand, deep green water, rocky cliffs. It could have been the Maldives or somewhere. But all the same Paula couldn’t help but feel it coiling in her stomach. Bone Island. She knew it, yes, of course she did. She’d gone there years ago, for a day trip, on her last ever holiday with her parents. The famous white sand of Bone Island was the backdrop to that picture where her mother stood, laughing into the wind, her red hair whipped about her. The very last picture ever taken of her.

Fiona

The first time I saw Matt, it was underwater. We were on a diving trip off Sharm el-Sheikh – a place it turned out we both hated for its plastic tourism and armed guards, but loved for the reefs that still darted and teemed, oblivious to all that. I’d been dragged on an over-thirties singles tour by my friend Karen. Karen was a lawyer then, doing something with trusts, and she was desperate, I mean desperate, to find a man. She was thirty-five, I was thirty-three, and uneasily starting to realise that maybe it wouldn’t happen for me either. Maybe singles holidays and book clubs and pottery weekends . . .