The Dead Ground

by Claire McGowan

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

Synopsis

A stolen baby. A murdered woman. A decades-old atrocity. Something connects them all...

A month before Christmas, and Ballyterrin on the Irish border lies under a thick pall of snow. When a newborn baby goes missing from hospital, it's all too close to home for forensic psychologist Paula Maguire, who's wrestling with the hardest decision of her life.

Then a woman is found in a stone circle with her stomach cut open and it's clear a brutal killer is on the loose.

As another child is taken and a pregnant woman goes missing, Paula is caught up in the hunt for a killer no one can trace, who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

The Dead Ground will leave you gasping for breath as Paula discovers every decision she makes really is a matter of life and death...

(P)2014 Headline Digital

Release date: April 10, 2014

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 402

Sample

Praise

Praise for The Lost:

‘This thriller is fresh and accessible without ever compromising on grit or suspense’ Erin Kelly, author of The Poison Tree

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

‘A keeps-you-guessing mystery’ Alex Marwood, author of The Missing Girls

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

‘A clever and pacey thriller’ Sunday Mirror

‘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

‘Claire McGowan is a writer at the top of her game’ www.lisareadsbooks.blogspot.co.uk

‘An exciting, enthralling and tense read’ www.thelittlereaderlibrary.blogspot.co.uk

Praise for The Fall:

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

‘A cool and twisted debut’ Daily Mirror

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

‘Chills you to the bone’ Daily Telegraph

‘The characters are finely drawn, and it’s concern for them, rather than for whodunnit, that provides the page-turning impetus in this promising debut’ Guardian

‘A brilliant crime novel . . . worthy of its label – “gripping”’ Company Magazine

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

‘It’s a clever, beautifully detailed exploration of the fragility of daily life . . . The genius of this story is that it could happen to any of us, and that’s why it hits so hard’ Elizabeth Haynes

‘A writer of great talent’ Michael Ridpath

‘Immediate, engaging and relevant, The Fall hits the ground running and doesn’t stop. I read it in one breathless sitting’ Erin Kelly

‘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

‘An amazing first book’ www.promotingcrime.blogspot.co.uk

‘Intelligent and absorbing . . . Highly commendable’ www.milorambles.com



Prologue

Ballyterrin, Northern Ireland 1993

It starts with the smallest thing: the beat of your heart. When everything around you is horror, you focus on that. The pulse. The life. You focus and get on with it.

It shouldn’t be like this. The phone call fills you with dread and you don’t know why. You’ve been a police officer since 1972, all the way through the hardest years of the Troubles. You’ve seen things beyond your worst dreams. A child blown up in a chip shop, the money for tea still clasped in their severed hand on the floor. A shooting in a pub, all broken glass and brain matter and country music still playing on the jukebox. A woman burned in a firebomb, her skin hanging off her like a shawl. Yes, you’ve seen plenty, more than you thought you could ever live with. You did live, though. It’s either that or die. But now this one, this one is filling you with sick fear.

The call comes in the early hours of the morning, as the worst ones always do. After so many years you’re awake at once, silencing it even before you realise, trying not to wake Margaret. But then she never stirs. Her back is an immovable wall beside you. Then you’re up and stumbling into your trousers in a dawn as dark as pitch. You pause for a moment outside your daughter’s door, her teenage breathing thick and deep. Please God, she’ll sleep right through this and never hear a word. So as not to wake your women, you put on your boots at the bottom of the stairs, dry toast clamped in your mouth. You swallow your tea too fast and burn your mouth; all day you’ll be tonguing at that one raw spot on your lip.

Movement at the top of the stairs. Margaret, her face pale in the cloud of her red hair. Her voice is tired. ‘What is it this time?’

You can’t tell her. God help you. Can’t say there’s a man just been found in a bog in Louth, small-time crook, back of his head shot out, and you have to go now to some farm and tell this news to his wife. You can’t tell her. It’s Margaret’s worst nightmare, the same happening to you, never coming home again. She’s been on at you for years to give the job up, do something else. But what else is there? What else is there to do? ‘Early start,’ you mumble. ‘See you later, love.’

She stands for a moment, as if she might say something, and then she turns her face away. It is the last thing you see, floating over the railings like a white oval. Later, when all the rest of her has faded entirely, you will try and catch at it, her face in the morning gloom that day, her voice cracked and dry, and how she turns away, once and for good, into the dark.

You drive through empty streets, a winter mist already rising off the roads, your breath like steam. It’s October, dark now until eight a.m. The road down to the farm is black, rising red in the east. Red sky in the morning, Shepherd’s warning. That’s what your daughter will say when she wakes up for school in an hour. Even the animals seem asleep, faint movement somewhere in dark fields soaked with dew. Parked on the front drive, Bob Hamilton’s already there, a nervous new constable in tow.

There’s Bob, out of the car, stamping feet and billowing breath in the cold. Sergeant Bob he is now, and never let you forget it. Of course he’s been promoted. Of course the loyal Orangeman Bob has been promoted over you, awkward Catholic that you are. There’s never been any doubt. There’s no reason you should mind at all.

Across the yard, leaning on a battered Ford, is Mick Quinn, the Guard who woke you this morning with the news. He’s parked far away, as if there’s an invisible battle line, and is cupping a fag in the icy morning air. The Guard works over the border in the South, where the husband’s body has washed up, but your territory merges, it bleeds into each other, and these early-morning calls are more common than either of you would like to think.

Mick is a tall fair fella with an easy smile, but this morning he’s pale as milk. ‘PJ.’

‘Mick. You going in?’

‘Not our turf, son. You tear away.’

You are technically in the North here, so it’s your ball game, but you wish all the same the Irishman could be at your back, instead of bloody Sideshow Bob, red-faced and dour, not to mention the wet-behind-the-ears constable, who looks ready to boke into his cap. You trudge back over to them.

‘Did you knock?’

Bob shakes his head. ‘No answer.’

‘Is she not home?’

‘No, it’s . . .’ Bob hesitates. ‘Her sister’s been ringing her. She rang us too, apparently, to say the phone wasn’t being answered. Wanted us to come out here.’

Christ. ‘When?’

Reluctant. ‘Three days back.’

‘She’s been here three days on her own? What did they do to her?’ You know the husband has been taken by the IRA. It has all the hallmarks. He’ll have been informing, or invading their turf on drugs or guns, or maybe nothing at all, maybe he just crossed the wrong person. Happens all the time. But the woman. They must have done something very bad, for her not to answer the phone in three days.

Your heart starts to pound. Focus, focus. ‘We have to go in.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’ Christ, spit it out, Bob. There’s a woman behind those dark windows and whatever’s been done to her it means she can’t so much as pick up a phone to her sister. And they’ve known for three days, three whole days before the husband’s body surfaced in the wet bog, and no one has done a thing.

‘She’s pregnant. Seven months, the sister said.’

Focus.

A few swift kicks and the weak door splinters. ‘Jesus!’

Bob flinches at your blasphemy but then turns pale himself. The constable is retching in a flower bed. You clamp your nose shut. The smell is what you’d imagine after three days. Blood, and piss, and something worse, a terrible meaty smell that seems to reach out and envelop you.

‘Mrs Rourke?’ You step into the carpeted hallway, lined with pictures of a family. Wedding shots. Happy smiles. ‘Hello?’ You move into the living room, see how it’s disordered, chairs thrown round the place, a boot kicked through the TV. The kitchen is small, off the living room, behind a bubbled glass door. You can see something on the other side of it, a dark shape. The smell is coming from there.

You stop, the three of you, Bob and you and the poor wee constable who’s all of twenty. Kevin, that’s his name. First month on the job. You stop and then you realise it’s going to be you who opens that door and sees what is on the other side. You start to walk.

At first it looks like a mangled mess of flesh. Your feet catch in the tacky slick of blood which has stretched over the lino. The room feels like it has no oxygen at all, so cold you can see your breath on the foetid air. You bend down to the body, or what is left of it. ‘Mrs Rourke?’

She’s dead. She must be, all that blood – her face has been beaten to meat, red and pulpy, her clothes soaked black with it. And her stomach, is that – no, Jesus, it’s even worse. The tangle of skin and blood on her stomach, that’s her baby.

The baby is purple, its tiny eyes shut. It’s still attached to her by the blue umbilical cord. It lies on her ruined stomach as if exhausted. On one of the woman’s hands the nails are encrusted with blood, and you see she’s been trying to claw through her own skin. The other hand is stretched above her head, handcuffed to the handle of a drawer. You see what has happened. She’s been beaten, then locked in this kitchen for three days. In that time her baby has come, and there was no one, no one at all to help. A knife lies beside her, bloodied, and you see what she has done, trying to free the child from the prison of her own body. A little girl. You want to put the poor wee thing under your jacket.

‘Kevin!’ You’re shouting for the constable. ‘Don’t come in here, son, don’t look! Get Mick – call an ambulance. There’s a dead female and an infant, stillborn . . .’

You hear a noise and turn back. A bubble of spit forms in the woman’s cracked lips. ‘Mrs Rourke? Christ, I think she’s—’

‘No . . . No . . .’ The free hand reaches towards the baby. ‘No dead, no . . .’

‘I’m sorry. She’s gone, love. She’s gone.’

The woman tenses for a second, then slumps back in the pool of her own mess. The limp hand slips from her child’s blood-slick head, and you scrabble on her damp neck for a pulse. Nothing. Nothing. In your own chest your heart goes pounding on, reminding you you’re still alive, and that this bloodied kitchen with the melamine cupboards will be with you till the day you lie down and die yourself.

You were sure the woman would die. How could she not? She’d been in that freezing kitchen for days, bleeding out across the patterned lino; the dehydration alone should have killed her. Then she’d be joining the poor scrap she’d given birth to. But you’ve been waiting in the hospital for hours now and no one has come with the death forms for you to sign. You wonder if Margaret’s right, if something in you has hardened and died too.

Bob’s gone to the station to start the investigation. Much good it’ll do them. They’ll not be able to pin it on any particular group of thugs. No one will have seen anything, and in the houses you go to they’ll hear your Catholic name and look at you as if to say: traitor. Scab. Legitimate target. They were lucky to even find the husband’s body, and God knows things are bad when you feel lucky to have a half-headless corpse on your hands instead of another name to add to the lost. You know exactly how it was for Brian Rourke. His pregnant wife beaten, house wrecked, blindfold over his head and out to the car. The sound of his own breath. Drive to some lonely spot. A march in the dark, kneeling in the dirt, then a shot to the back of the head. And she was likely dead too now, the whole family gone in one night.

But as you sit twisting your hat, watching the clock inch round, a doctor comes out. Everyone in the waiting room looks up with dull hope, but she comes to you. A woman in blue scrubs, tired and creased. There are bloody handprints on her white coat – her own, or someone else’s?

‘DC Maguire.’ She rubs her eyes behind her glasses. ‘I’m afraid the child is dead, as you thought. I think she was stillborn – they beat the mother, and that must have brought the labour on.’ You nod, expecting to hear, ‘And we did everything for the mother, but . . .’

‘She won’t be able to answer questions for a while, but when she wakes up you can try an ID. She must have seen them, even if they wore balaclavas.’

‘She’s alive?’

The doctor nods wearily. ‘I don’t know how, but yes. We think the child was born yesterday. She must have realised it was in trouble, from the beating, and tried to – well, she tried to give herself a Caesarean, it seems. It might have worked, too, if you’d got there sooner. I think she has medical training. It was crude, but in the right place.’

You’re thinking of your own child, safe at home, please God safe at home, born red and wriggling as a new pup. ‘Can she have any more?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ The doctor – Dr Alison Bates, her badge says, not a local name, and the accent not local either, she must be English – says, ‘There was too much bleeding, so I had to perform a hysterectomy. But she’ll live.’

‘Does she know?’

The doctor hesitates. ‘I’ve told her, though she’s very woozy. She – well, we had to restrain her. She was very distressed. We gave her sedation.’

For a moment the doctor flops down in the seat beside you. A small woman, dark-haired. She seems to have given way.

‘She’s alive.’ You can’t take it in, and for a moment you wonder if it would be better the other way, an end to it, be with the child and the husband again, if you believe in that kind of thing, and these days you just aren’t sure if you do.

‘Yes.’ The doctor rubs her face, her nails short and dirtied with blood. ‘Yes.’

But it doesn’t feel like success, to you who have both fought to save her. Then the doctor’s beeper begins to sound, and she springs up, muttering a curse, and dashes off down the corridor, where a flurry of activity has begun. On the tiled floor, her feet make a rapid rhythmic pattering, and she is gone.

Not knowing what else to do, you head home, every inch of you tired and stiff, sticky with the woman’s blood and the barnyard smell of the kitchen. You keep picturing the baby, its mottled purple skin, something not fit for the eyes of the world, like a bird fallen from a nest. Untimely ripped – the quote comes to you, something you’ve seen on your daughter’s homework. She’s doing Macbeth for her English, that’s it. Untimely ripped.

You park your Volvo in the street and see with surprise the curtains in the house aren’t drawn. It’s six p.m., long dark, winter-dark, and Margaret hates to have them open, worried about people ‘looking in on you’. You open the door with your key. Your daughter sits at the table in her maroon school uniform, chewing on a pen in that absent teenage way, homework spread around. Her red hair is untidy and you notice she hasn’t put on the radio or TV, not like her. ‘Where’s your mum?’

The kitchen is cold, no dinner cooking in the oven. ‘Paula?’

Your daughter raises her eyes to yours, and for the second time that day you feel your stomach fail. ‘She wasn’t here,’ Paula says, her voice slipping into the panic she’s obviously been holding back since she came home. ‘I thought you’d know. I thought you’d know where she was.’

Your heart, you think irrationally. Focus on the heart. It’s thumping in your chest like the feet of the doctor running down the corridor. One two one two. Running for a life.



Chapter One

Ballyterrin, 2010

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Sorry! God, I’m sorry.’ Paula put her head down on the conference-room table, under which she had just vomited all over the feet of her superior officers. Bob Hamilton, the senior sergeant, and Guy Brooking, the Detective Inspector, had leapt up in alarm as she leaned forward, convulsing, right in the middle of a case presentation.

‘It’s OK, Paula,’ said Guy awkwardly, moving his expensive brogues away from the stain on the threadbare grey carpet. ‘Are you all right?’

She could feel beads of sweat along her forehead. ‘Uh – I don’t know. I must have eaten something bad.’

‘Why don’t you go and clean up – we need to leave in five minutes, anyway.’

‘OK.’ She dragged herself out of the conference room, stomach roiling, and behind her she heard Bob Hamilton’s plaintive tones: ‘She’s after boking on my shoes, so she is.’

She fled to the Ladies, hanging over the sink for a while until it stopped, then running cool water over her face and rinsing the sour taste from her mouth, shaking. She’d thrown up every morning now for the past month, but this was the first time it had happened at work, and the first time anyone else had seen. She was fairly sure her father, who she lived with, had noticed – the ex-policeman missed very little – but so far he was choosing not to say anything.

Paula raised the edge of her thick grey jumper and examined her stomach in the mirror of the Ladies. Still flat. But not for much longer, unless she made a decision and bloody soon. She started counting backwards in her head. If only she could be sure which time. Or which man, for that matter.

The door opened and she smoothed the jumper down quickly.

‘Paula, are you OK?’ Avril Wright, the intelligence analyst, was the only other woman on their small team at the MPRU, or Missing Persons Response Unit, an obscure team set up in the Northern Irish town to consult on cases north and south of the border. They were supposed to look at old cases with a view to reopening any with new evidence, and also make sure the investigation was properly coordinated when a new person went missing. Which sadly was what had happened today. ‘The boss sent me to check on you.’

Avril as usual looked fresh out of the box, in a crisp blue blouse and pencil skirt. Paula felt oozy and rumpled. ‘I’m OK.’

‘You don’t want to go home?’

‘No, no, not when there’s a big case like this.’

Avril’s pretty face grew sombre. ‘I don’t know who would do such a thing. A wee baby!’

Paula looked at her own pallid face in the mirror. She did know. That was the worst part of her job as a forensic psychologist, working out exactly who would do the most horrific crimes, and why. Entering into their minds, understanding. People said that understanding everything meant forgiving everything. She’d never known if that was true. ‘Come on.’ She pushed back lank strands of her hair. ‘We’re not going to find him like this, are we?’

Coming out, she saw Guy through the glass of the conference room, down on his hands and knees in his good grey suit. He was dabbing at the patch of bile with a wad of kitchen roll, his fair hair falling over his forehead with the effort. Formerly a big deal in the London Met, he’d come over to Northern Ireland several months before to run the unit and made more of a noise than anyone had expected, even recruiting Paula from her own London job back to her dreaded home town. She’d been supposed to stay for one case only, but that had reached its traumatic conclusion weeks before, and now it was a month to Christmas and she was still here. Her hand once more crept to her stomach. She had to tell him. Shit, she couldn’t. Not today. Not when a case this big had just come in.

‘You coming to the hospital?’ Gerard Monaghan, one of the detectives from the local PSNI station who was seconded to the unit, was holding her coat. ‘This bloody snow’s made the traffic murder. Fiacra’s digging the cars out.’ Fiacra Quinn was the final member of their team, a young Detective Garda from Dundalk, who’d been brought in to act as liaison to the South.

Focus, for God’s sake, Maguire. ‘Coming.’

Paula had long believed that nothing good ever happened in Ballyterrin General Hospital. It was where they’d taken the two bodies they’d found in the nineties, women who for a while they’d thought could have been her missing mother. One washed up on a beach in Wexford, one unearthed in a drain during building works. Twice Paula had made the journey up from school in her maroon uniform, to meet her father at the morgue. It hadn’t been worth it either time, the trip in some teacher’s car, hands clasped between trembling knees. No trace of Margaret Maguire had ever surfaced and she was stilled in Paula’s memory forever as she’d been on the last day, tidying the kitchen in her wool dressing gown as Paula had slunk out to school, bleary-eyed, crunching cereal. She’d been thirteen, just. She’d barely even said goodbye to her mother – why would she, when every day in life Margaret had been there in the same spot when she came home, a pot of tea on the stove?

The hospital was also the place Paula had been taken, aged eighteen, when she’d swallowed the contents of the medicine cabinet and had her stomach pumped. And that was Aidan’s fault too, wasn’t it? No. No, Maguire. However angry she got at him she knew she couldn’t blame that on anyone but herself.

‘Where are we going?’ They’d parked the car in the icy, grit-scattered car park, and she was now trying to keep up with Guy as he barged through the double doors and onto a second-floor ward of the hospital. Too late she realised where it was – Christ, how stupid was she. Maternity. Of all the places to be today.

The entire area had been cordoned off, and uniformed PSNI officers stood about. An early December snowfall had hit the town that morning, and had been causing chaos even before all this. Trails of greyish snow melted up and down the packed corridors, full of confused women in nightclothes, angry men, flustered nurses. Tinsel decorations hung from the walls but there was no sense of festive cheer. Weak and queasy, Paula trotted after Guy in her black suede boots, already stained with damp sludge. When he got like this, there was no keeping up with him. He approached the cordon flashing his badge. ‘Detective Inspector Guy Brooking, MPRU. Let us past, please.’

No, nothing good ever happened in Ballyterrin General Hospital, and the fact that it was from here the baby had been stolen, well, that didn’t surprise Paula at all.

In front of the private maternity room, a woman in a grey trouser-suit and red heels was talking to Gerard Monaghan. It was no surprise he’d got there first, as Guy scrupulously obeyed the town speed limits, and Gerard, like all locals, looked on them as a good wee joke. He looked up uneasily as Guy arrived. This woman was his other boss, DCI Helen Corry, head of Serious Crime for the area. Gerard’s work as liaison to the Unit left him uncomfortably torn between the two and their constantly simmering feud.

Guy said, ‘What have we got?’

Helen Corry saw them but carried on and finished her sentence. ‘. . . And get the CCTV quick as you can. We need to see if the child’s still in the building. Threaten them if you have to.’ Only then did she turn to the new arrivals. ‘Inspector Brooking, Dr Maguire. We have nothing. I have an abducted newborn, by the looks of it.’

Guy was pressing his lips together, a sure sign of contained fury. ‘Why weren’t we called in sooner?’

Helen Corry smoothed back a blond hair. Her nails were painted the same red as her shoes. ‘They called the police, quite naturally, so we came.’

‘We’re first point of contact on all missing per—’

‘You’re here now, Inspector, aren’t you? And as we’ll be supplying all the manpower, or personpower, for this case, I’m guessing you want to keep us on board.’

Paula, no stranger to professional pissing contests herself, raised her eyebrows at Gerard, who shook his head helplessly. Between the two, he was on balance probably more scared of Corry.

The woman herself was now saying, ‘As I understand it, your role is to coordinate and ensure a swift response to new missing persons cases. So what actions would your coordination create in this instance?’

‘Well, I’d seal the area—’

‘Done, as you saw – though you seem to have breached it.’

‘—I’d prevent all staff and patients from leaving—’

‘Also done, though we can’t hold them forever. So it might be good if you let me get on and interview them.’

Guy spoke in a rush. ‘—interview any eyewitnesses, get CCTV and artist’s impressions, and ask my psychology consult to assess the MO.’

Finally Helen Corry gave Paula one of her trademark unreadable expressions. ‘Good job you brought her, then. I’m fine with Dr Maguire being involved.’

‘I didn’t ask if you were,’ Guy muttered, but only after Corry had moved out of earshot to berate the uniformed officers at the cordon.

Gerard sighed, his wide shoulders sagging. ‘It’s true what she said, sir. She’s ordered it all already, what you’d have done. She’s even got them checking the databases in case it’s happened before anywhere. Not much for us to do.’

Guy turned to Paula. ‘We’ve got one thing she hasn’t. Ready to talk to the parents?’

Damian and Kasia Pachek had loved Ireland, he explained during the interview. They loved the green mountains, the pubs, the wisecracking stoicism of the people. So much so that when Kasia became pregnant, they’d decided to have their baby in Ballyterrin, instead of going home to Krakow as their families had wanted. The hospital room had cards on the nightstand, a big bunch of flowers still in crinkly plastic, a blue teddy inside the cot which until two hours before had held their newborn son, Alek.

Now Kasia lay on the bed, dressed in short pink pyjamas, a drip in her pale hand. She kept up a steady and monotonous weeping, the kind of sound you quickly stopped noticing. Her husband sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair, staring in front of him, mashing a paper coffee cup between his fingers. They were a young couple, Paula guessed. Mid-twenties, no more. Damian worked as a technician in a commercial lab outside town, and Kasia was a yoga instructor. Guy had already established as much from Gerard.

‘I lost him,’ said Damian Pachek again. His wife said something in Polish, swallowed in tears, and he lowered his head into his hands, eyes screwed up.

Guy looked to Paula, who stepped in. ‘Mr Pachek. I know this is hard, but there’s every chance we will find Alek, and soon. Now I’m sorry we have to do this so soon, when you’re in shock, but time is really important in a case like this, before you forget any of it. I’ll take you through a special interview to help you remember all the details you can.’

The man nodded, eyes still fixed on something invisible in the middle distance. His whole body was shaking. Paula took a deep breath and sat down in another plastic chair, Guy still leaning against the wall. The weight of it all settled round her, the responsibility to find and bring home this child whose first toy lay abandoned in his crib.

‘Damian.’ She said his name quietly, and he focussed on her. ‘I’m very sorry this has happened, but it isn’t your fault. It could have been anyone.’

On the bed, Kasia moaned and choked out a few words of Polish. Damian passed a hand over his face. ‘She says I should have watched – I should not have taken my eyes from him.’

Paula glanced at the woman, who was burying her face in the pillow, shoulders quietly heaving. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said again. ‘Whoever came and took Alek, it’s their fault, you understand? They’re the one responsible. So I need you to tell me everything, every detail you remember, to help us find them.’

Tears were now pooling on his face. ‘Kasy was sleeping. She was so tired – I’m tired too but I was awake, I was excited.’

Paula nodded.

‘I was looking at him, at – at Alek, and I was happy, I was thinking I had to make a phone call, tell my mother she is babcia now.’ His voice caught. ‘Then a nurse came and she said she has to take Alek for tests. Kasia was sleeping, so I – I went – ’ Words seemed to fail him and he gestured with one hand down the corridor. ‘I go out to phone, so I do not wake her, Kasia . . .’

‘The nurse,’ Paula prompted. ‘It was a woman, you said?’

‘Yes. She had the outfit, sort of blue colour.’ He waved a hand near his torso. ‘Like they wear.’ His English, perfect at the start, seemed to be breaking down under stress.

‘Damian. I need you to remember. Slow down and just let it come – every detail.’

The young man had his head in his hands. ‘She came in the door. Her feet are so quiet – I nearly don’t hear her until she was there. She said – I forget – “Time for baby’s tests now.” And she started wheeling the, the cot. I didn’t have time to think, OK, this is strange, you know.’

‘Her voice,’ Paula asked, ‘did she have an accent?’

He shook his head. ‘From here, I think. Like you. Not like him.’ He poi