The Killing House

by Claire McGowan

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

Synopsis

When a puzzling missing persons case opens up in her hometown, forensic psychologist Paula Maguire can't help but return once more.

Renovations at an abandoned farm have uncovered two bodies: a man known to be an IRA member missing since the nineties, and a young girl whose identity remains a mystery.

As Paula attempts to discover who the girl is and why no one is looking for her, an anonymous tip-off claims that her own long-lost mother is also buried on the farm.

When another girl is kidnapped, Paula must find the person responsible before more lives are destroyed. But there are explosive secrets still to surface. And even Paula can't predict that the investigation will strike at the heart of all she holds dear.

Release date: April 5, 2018

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 246

Sample

Margaret

1993

They’d told her, back when she’d first started doing their dirty work, how it was likely to happen. There’d be a knock at the door, hard and demanding, and when you opened it there’d be a bag over your head. That was for two reasons – to stop you seeing them, and to stop them seeing you. So you’d be less human, somehow. Not an ordinary woman in her kitchen, a mother with a daughter due home from school any minute, but a tout, a traitor.

Then you’d feel rough hands on you, pushing you into a car. They wouldn’t speak to you. They wouldn’t have to: you’d know who they were. And you’d know there was no point in arguing or fighting, because they had no say in what happened to you next. They were just the delivery men.

Then the car would drive for a while, and if you could see the light under the rough sacking you’d be able to tell you were heading to the country, from the low green shade to the darkening air and the sound of cows and birds, and then the car would bump over a rough track and a cattle grid or two and it would stop. You’d be dragged out, in the same rough way, and you’d be marched and sat down on a hard chair and your hands would be tied with rope, and you’d know from the noises and smells you were in some kind of farmhouse, way out in the country, where no one could hear what they did to you next. And that was when they’d take off the bag and then you would really start to panic because you’d know that if they showed you their faces it was all over for you. You’d pray they had a balaclava on. A balaclava meant there was a chance.

So far, it had all gone exactly as they’d told her, except that they’d left the bag on for a long time after she’d been pushed into the chair, while she’d watched their feet in heavy boots move about and listened to their low voices rumble. Snatches of words here and there were all she’d caught. What – fecking woman – Paddy. The floor of this place was bare earth, cold and dirty. It made everything echo. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine today had been different. That she hadn’t found the word in the dirt on her car two days back – TOUT – and she hadn’t stayed in the kitchen writing that note to her daughter, and they hadn’t come for her, she’d made it away in time. That Edward had got her away like he’d promised. Or that she could just turn things back to how they were before. Then she’d have been there when Paula came in, standing at the sink asking the usual questions about school, doling out the usual warnings not to eat too many biscuits, not to forget her homework. And later, when PJ trailed back in, stamped with exhaustion from whatever terrible things he’d seen today, she’d maybe have pulled herself together enough to smile and act normal. Her hands might have shaken when she drained the potatoes and she might have switched over from the news to something American with fake recorded laughter, and she might have lain awake beside him until the weary winter dawn crept in, but he wouldn’t have noticed a change in her. Because it had been going on for years now.

It had been so small at first. She’d glance at confidential papers she was copying in the law office where she worked, the one where they defended so many Republicans. Maybe make another copy and slide it into her handbag; sure no one would notice, and what harm would it do? Slip the copy to Edward, the names and addresses of suspects, people to keep an eye on. They were bad men, even if they were her own side. Murderers. She told herself these small acts – a name here, a nod there – might lead to a better future, where her daughter could grow up safe. Her husband not get killed on the job. When she lay awake at night she saw wee Aidan’s face, at the hospital after they’d shot his father right in front of him. The blankness. Like he’d never be right again. She hadn’t wanted that for Paula, her father dead, her childhood gone, but how was this any better? Her mother taken and bundled up in a car with a sack over her head?

She began to tremble, from cold and shock. Thinking of her daughter, who would by now have come home and found the house empty and dark, the curtains open. Who’d have read the note left on the worktop. Called the police maybe, called her father. Maybe they were looking for her already. Maybe they were almost here to save her. Of course, even if they did, everything would change – they’d have to run and hide and change their names and leave the country and she’d have to tell PJ what she’d been up to. All of it. Her arms contracted; she’d gone to touch her stomach automatically, but her hands were tied behind her. She was so vulnerable. These men were used to dragging in young fellas, hard and rangy, not middle-aged mothers taken from their kitchens. Maybe they’d go easy on her. She tried to remember had they ever killed women. A few times. Not many. And surely not one who was—

There were footsteps coming towards her, and a hand on her head, tugging on strands of her hair as the bag came off. She stifled a cry, blinking in the cold light. It was all so stupid. Tied to a chair, of all things. They’d been watching too many gangster films. Someone stood in front of her, blotting out the light from the bare bulb so she couldn’t see their face. A man, of course. A big man, tattoos on his hands, a bomber jacket. Smell of tobacco and bubble gum. Paula always wanted to buy it with her pocket money but Margaret wouldn’t let her, said it looked vulgar to be chewing like a cow. As if that mattered now.

‘Margaret,’ the man said. Surprisingly musical. The accent from over the border. ‘I hope they didn’t hurt you.’

She shook her head, wrong-footed. Maybe this was going to be OK? ‘My daughter . . .’ She could feel the cold of it around her neck, Paula’s cheap little necklace that she’d grabbed off the kitchen counter as they took her. It was all she’d had time for, and for once she was glad her untidy daughter always left everything lying in a trail behind her.

‘No one’s going to touch your daughter, come on now. We don’t hurt weans in this organisation.’

She could have asked did they hurt women but she knew the answer: if they really deserved it, then yes. And she deserved it, no doubt about that.

He pulled up a stool and moved closer, and she could see his face now her eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He was a good-looking man. A full head of black hair, fine soft lips like a woman, sharp blue eyes. Not what she’d expected; a thug maybe, with a broken nose and shaved head.

That was when Margaret realised she could see his face, and that meant he wasn’t wearing a balaclava, and that meant she was in much, much more trouble than she’d even been afraid of. That meant she probably wasn’t going to make it out of this alive.

Chapter One

London, 2014

Eight million, five hundred and thirty-nine thousand. That was the number of people in the city she was staring down at from her tenth-floor window, give or take a few thousand. So many people she couldn’t even absorb it, the sheer number. Among those millions, what were the chances she could find one in particular? Was her mother here – had she been here in London all along? Not dead for twenty years in an unmarked grave, but alive and walking the same city streets her daughter had crossed a hundred times?

Paula spun her wheely chair away from the distracting view and back to her desk. She was typing unenthusiastically at a document about procedures in missing persons’ cases, which was making her both bored and disgruntled. None of these procedures had been followed when her mother went missing from their kitchen on a cold October afternoon in 1993. A report from a neighbour about seeing masked men approach the house hadn’t even made it into the file. Basic searches hadn’t been done. Her medical records had disappeared. It was days before they’d even dusted the place for prints, and Paula and her father were still living in the house and present at the scene when they’d finally searched it. They’d just given up on her, despite the fact her husband was a police officer. Paula was doing her best not to imagine what might have happened if they’d done things properly, because she knew that was the surest route to crazy, but it was hard.

A knock at the door made her look up. ‘Oh, hi.’

‘How’s the report coming?’ said DI Guy Brooking.

She wrinkled her nose. The Missing Persons’ unit had official oversight of all the missper cases in the London area. Surely Guy could find her something more interesting to work on. ‘It’s a bit dry. Have you anything good for me?’

He shook his head. ‘Not since those girls got on the plane to Syria. We had to hand it over to Interpol. And the one from this morning turned up at her boyfriend’s house.’

The missing girl who’d been logged in earlier that day was fifteen. ‘And how old’s he?’

Guy winced. ‘Thirty-seven. So maybe we can charge him with something there.’

Paula sighed. It was good, of course, when a missing girl was found safe, but she needed something juicier. She’d taken the job with her old boss’s new team knowing it would be largely research-based, looking at strategies to prevent teenage girls from being radicalised or groomed, joining gangs, being sucked into abusive relationships. She was sure they were doing important work, but still. A bit of mystery would pep her day right up. She wasn’t asking for much. Just something where the girl hadn’t had a fight with her parents and run off with an unsuitable older man. Because ninety-eight times out of a hundred, that was what had happened.

Guy came in and perched on her desk, the smell of his citrus aftershave filling the room. His sleeves were rolled up and his skin lightly tanned from the week of warm weather they’d had. You actually got summer in London – sometimes, anyway. Back home in Ireland it was ten degrees and raining, despite being June. Paula still checked the weather every day, even though she officially lived here now.

She moved her chair away a little. It was never safe to be too close to Guy, despite the gallons of water under the bridge between them. His aftershave triggered all sorts of complicated sensations in her, and she couldn’t have that. There was too much at stake – her job, her daughter. Aidan. But she wasn’t thinking about him. ‘How’s Maggie settling in?’ Guy asked, performing his annoying trick of reading her thoughts. ‘It must be strange, moving to London from Ballyterrin.’

‘Oh, she’s fine. Kids are adaptable, I suppose. And the day care’s great – I can pop down and see her in my lunch break.’ She did feel bad about taking Maggie away from her grandparents. Paula’s father had remarried, and his wife Pat was technically Paula’s stepmother, but almost also her mother-in-law. Pat’s son, Aidan, who Maggie thought was her father, was currently in prison back in Northern Ireland. Part of Paula knew that by taking Maggie away, she was giving her daughter the chance to forget. She was only three. Maybe she wouldn’t even remember those two years when she’d had a father. Not that he was actually her father.

She wasn’t thinking about that either. ‘How’s Tess?’ she offered in return, with forced brightness. After a wobbly year or two, Guy and his wife were trying to make another go of it. She was pregnant. A Band-Aid baby, as they called it. Paula was happy for them, of course she was.

‘She’s fine. You know what it’s like, the final stretches. And this heat doesn’t help.’

She nodded. She knew more than he realised. She pushed her chair a little further away from him and that distracting waft of lemon. ‘Sure.’

Guy got up, his chat and check-in done, time to move on to another staff member who needed a pep talk. He was such a good boss. It was annoying. ‘Good. Well, if anything interesting comes in you’ll be the first person I call. Promise.’

‘Thanks.’ She forced a smile. It was good, working with him. The environment was supportive – it always was around Guy – and she could make a difference here, and work on a range of cases that weren’t all steeped in the horrors of the Troubles. That didn’t remind her every day of her mother. But still. She was bored.

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. . .