A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4) (10 page)

Chapter Sixteen

‘So I think a purple cravat would go lovely with the wedding theme, what about that?’ Hearing voices as she opened the door, Paula stopped in the hallway of her house to listen.

‘What’s a cravat?’ Aidan sounded scared.

‘Ach, you know, a sort of tie.’

‘Can I not just wear an actual tie?’

There was a noise of derision. ‘If you want it to just be like some
normal day
 . . .’

Paula went in to rescue him. ‘Hiya.’

Dr Saoirse McLoughlin, Paula’s bridesmaid, oldest friend, and godmother to Maggie, was sitting at the table, her godchild on her knee. ‘Well, there’s the bride!’

‘A bride with no dress,’ said Aidan.

‘Er, you’re not supposed to know about the dress. Hi, pet.’ Paula ruffled Maggie’s hair.

‘Mummy, Aunty See-sha’s here!’

‘Yes, I can see that.’

Aidan said, ‘Well then, I’ll take Miss Maggie up for a wee-wee, and you two can talk about it in secret. I know you love all that.’

She glared at him as he went, scooping Maggie into his arms, shooting her a small wink.

‘He’s right, you know,’ Saoirse started to say, then blinked as Paula suddenly asked: ‘What do you know about anorexia?’

‘Er, not a massive amount. I did a rotation once in psych, but it wouldn’t present to Casualty much.’ Saoirse was an A&E registrar, focusing on what she called the ‘blood and guts’ of medicine.

‘Well, would you know, or could you find out, if someone was starving, say, and they suddenly started eating again – what would that do to them?’

‘You mean would they put on a lot of weight fast?’

‘I was thinking more of bulimia, if they developed that too.’

‘Well, bulimia can easily be fatal. Puts a massive strain on the heart, which is usually damaged already with anorexia.’

‘So someone could die?’

‘Yeah, they could. If you’re starving, even eating normally can kill you. It’s called re-feeding syndrome. People had it after the war. Why?’

Paula shook her head. ‘Sorry, bit caught up with this case.’

‘I can see. You haven’t even mentioned the wedding. Anyone would think it wasn’t in, hello – two weeks’ time!’

Paula shrugged off the brief burst of panic. ‘Oh, you know me – I’m not good at that girly stuff. Is your own dress ready?’

‘Oh yes, it’s all taken in.’ Paula remembered that when they first chose it – ages ago, because that one was for Saoirse and therefore not as terrifying as her own – they’d picked one with an empire line, because of the chance Saoirse might be pregnant by the time it was worn. And two rounds of IVF later, she wasn’t.

Her friend was looking at her. ‘Pat says you still haven’t picked one.’

‘You’ve been talking to Pat?’

‘I saw her the other day in the hospital.’

This reminded Paula of two things – one, that Saoirse and Pat were basically organising this wedding for her, and two, that she hadn’t been anywhere in sight on her friend’s own big day. She’d been twenty-five, doing her best to stay away from the town that held so many painful memories, but still. Still still still. God, she could be a right bitch at times. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’d not have been able to do this without you.’

‘You’d not have wanted to do it.’

‘No, but – it’ll be nice.’

‘It’ll be lovely,’ said Saoirse. ‘You’ll see. I could have become a wedding planner after mine. Dave said he’d break down and cry if he ever heard the words “your special day” again.’

Paula nodded. ‘And Pat’s been to about a thousand weddings. She knows everyone in town, and I mean
everyone
.’

‘Is she OK then?’

‘I think so, why?’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing. Just wondered why she was in the hospital. She seemed a wee bit off, not her usual self.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe she was up visiting someone. She does that a lot.’

‘OK. I better go anyway, I have a shift tonight. Here, read this.’ Saoirse got up, foisting a bridal magazine on Paula. The woman on the cover had teeth whiter than her veil and looked as if every thought in her head had been replaced by confetti. The cover read:
Your special day – new trends in table wear. 101 things to do with your hair. The great cake debate – three-tier or cupcakes?

‘
Do I have to?’

‘Yes,’ said Saoirse firmly. ‘You have to order your dress. You won’t get anything decent now anyway, you need at least ten weeks. I ordered mine a year in advance.’

Yes, thought Paula, because you know what you want and that you won’t change your mind, and you and Dave have basically been together from the second you met and you’ve never had a moment’s doubt about him. ‘You’re too good to me, you know,’ she said awkwardly. They were not the hugging kind of friends. ‘I don’t know why you put up with me.’

‘Remember that time your dad hurt his leg?’

‘When were we seventeen? Yeah, why?’

‘Remember you came to stay for a while after, when he was in hospital? Well, Mammy took me aside, and she said, you mind that wee girl, Saoirse. She’s had a hard time of it, and you’ve your mammy and daddy and your brothers and sisters and everything. I said you’d be welcome to our Niamh, but she was right. She’s still right, always is.’

Paula didn’t know what to say to that, memories crowding her, that summer of violence and heat, her mind made up to leave town for good, even if it meant losing Aidan and her best friend in the world. ‘Are you saying I’m some kind of charity case? Thanks, Glocko. If Mammy McLoughlin said put your head in the oven would you do it?’

‘Anyone would,’ said Saoirse. ‘Have you met my mammy? She’d have put the fear of God on Osama Bin Laden, so she would.’

‘Don’t think he had a lot of fear of God, not as such.’

‘True. Right, I’m away, these sunburn cases won’t lecture themselves. Eejits. Bit of sun and they’re out frying themselves in chip oil.’ She gave Paula a rough pat on the shoulder. ‘Come on, Maguire, time to bride it up. Offer it up to Jesus.’

Which was another of Mammy McLoughlin’s sayings.

Ringing. Her phone was ringing. It was Monday morning, and Paula squeezed her eyes open, groping on the bedside table for her phone. Aidan was in the shower already, singing an off-key version of ‘Born to Run’. Next door there was some ominous creaking from Maggie’s room. She snatched up the phone. Corry. ‘Hello?’

‘You up? I’ve already had Willis on me this morning wanting an update.’

She rubbed her eyes: 7.45 a.m. Willis must be under serious pressure. ‘Well, we’re doing all we can.’

‘He doesn’t think so. Anyway, I’ve another angle.’

‘What’s that?’ said Paula warily, recognising the voice Corry used when she needed you to do something you definitely wouldn’t enjoy.

‘I’ve a few contacts in the East Sussex police. Apparently Katy was right – Alice tried to kill herself while she was at the clinic there. So if she was suffering with anorexia again now, maybe she did hurt herself after all.’

‘Uh-huh . . .’ She was waiting for the favour.

‘What do you say, fancy a quick jaunt to your old neck of the woods? See what you can find out?’

‘Aw, come on. I can’t leave Maggie.’

‘Go and come back in a day. Seriously. I want you to go, talk to them as a colleague. See if they think she might have tried it again.’

Part Two

‘This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping they would call after her . . .’

Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Ballyterrin, Northern Ireland,
July 1981

The streets were full of dead men. It was all you could see now. The bones under the skin. What they’d look like if the flesh fell from their bodies, if their eyes were sunk and milky, if their breath stopped in their chests, something begun and not ended. Did you always die breathing out? you wondered. Maybe you’d find out, before too long.

Ballyterrin. A crappy wee town on the border, all housing estates and fields and a stinking canal, but it was home. All the same you were jumpy as a snake driving through it. A hot day, tarmac melting on the roads. The streets pressed full of traffic, peelers on every corner in their green uniforms and hats, guns cocked. Rifle green, they called the colour. The colour of injustice. You’d been brought up to hate the RUC. If someone robbed your car or your house you’d ask the Provos to sort it out. Not the peelers, never the peelers in a million years, it would be betraying your kin and country. So how come now, as you drove carefully through the town in your crappy borrowed Jetta, all you wanted was to pull over to one of the cops and tell them everything?
Please, arrest me. Don’t make me do this.

As luck would have it, today was your day to escape the random checkpoints. Every time you crossed the border or drove round Belfast, yes, it was out of the car and have it searched, spread your legs sir with the gun trained on you, just a routine search sir it’s our prerogative. So many other times. Even when you’d your wee niece in the car with you, six years old, crying as the soldiers with the big guns had a good rummage through your boot. They didn’t care. Children were no defence, old people, you name it. To the Brit Army you were just scum, all of you. So how come this day, and you a twenty-year-old man driving alone, with a shifty look and a gun under the passenger seat, they wave you on through, not a bother on you? Sod’s law.

This town was ready to explode. You could see it in people’s eyes as they walked the hot streets, even women with prams, even wee kids. People gathered on corners, waiting for news, looking at the Army and peelers out of the corners of their eyes, sun glinting black off guns. They’d had enough. Six men had starved to death already. If – when – the next one went, there’d be all bloody hell to pay. And you, wee skitter of a fella, only a foot soldier in this war, driving someone else’s car, their God-awful Country and Western tape on the cassette player, you were the one who was going to make sure it happened, inexorable as the grim reaper. You were the one standing beside this petrol-soaked shitstorm bonfire of a country, and you were about to strike the match.

Chapter Seventeen

London,
August 2013

Below the Aer Lingus jet, London sprawled out, its outskirts beige, ugly and careless. But all the same Paula heaved a nostalgic sigh at the sight of it. This had been her place – somewhere to go when she’d left behind the hardened certainties of Ballyterrin, where everyone knew her and what had happened to her family. Where it wasn’t possible to change. In London, she was no one. Irish Paula, at uni. No close friends, just people she’d see now and again for a drink, send Facebook messages. Colleagues that she’d share work with. She’d learned the hard way that when people got close, they could be taken away. She felt a tinge of something at the thought of Aidan – he was back home with Maggie, sorting out the growing tangle of wedding admin. Wedmin, Saoirse had called it, and Paula had nearly boked. That was all really happening, in two weeks. Old Paula could never come back again – there were rivers that could not be crossed a second time.

As the signs came on for descent, she closed her eyes and thought about what she’d do when she got there. There was no need to actually go into London on this trip. The clinic where Alice had lived for two years was in East Sussex, not too far from Gatwick. But she felt all the same the city’s gravity. And somewhere down below, among all the millions of people, was Guy Brooking. Guy, and also his wife, and his daughter, and so she hadn’t, and wouldn’t, try to find him.

Bustling out at Gatwick with her wheelie case, trailing jackets and WH Smith bags, she almost missed the sign with her name on it. It was misspelled,
Paula McGuire
, and she looked up, then did a double-take. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I couldn’t resist the mistake. I knew it’d catch your eye.’ Dr Kevin Neary, one of her old university tutors. Kevin was one of the most eminent criminal psychologists in the country, and as a doctoral student Paula had naturally gravitated to him. He was also from Ballymena, his Ulster accent modulated by years in England and a London wife and kids. He had a neat grey beard and pens in his shirt pocket, a tie pin.

She eyed him. ‘Putting me to shame as usual, Kevin. I was going to freshen up before I got there.’

‘Ah, you’re grand. It’s not a formal place we’re going to.’

‘You’re taking me?’ She’d asked him to help her set up the meeting, but not expected he’d have time to come as well.

He ushered her towards the car park. ‘Let’s say calls were made. The girl’s father is some bigwig, yes? I don’t think the clinic wanted too much scrutiny on it.’

‘Oh right. So you’re here to keep tabs on me, is that the lie of the land?’

He laughed, stopping by the ticket machines. ‘That’s what they think. I’ve met you, of course, so I know better men than me have tried and failed. Now, how do you work this yoke?’

‘I bet you don’t say yoke to the English.’

‘No, and it’s a shame. A very useful word.’

After much perplexed stabbing of buttons – Kevin was a brilliant man, but one who referred to ‘email numbers’ and couldn’t work his own phone – they were leaving the airport and merging onto the M25. Gatwick was barely in London, Paula thought, as they soon cut off into country lanes, trees arching together so densely that Kevin had to put the car lights on. She needn’t have worried. She wasn’t going to run into anyone out here. She knew it was ridiculous, but she was jumpy every time she saw a fair-haired man out the window, or someone in a suit. Just for a half-second between breaths, but enough to spin her off her axis.

He looked at her from the corner of his eye. ‘And I hear congratulations are in order? Doubly so.’

‘Well – I had a baby, yes. Maggie’s her name.’

‘I’ll insist on pictures when we stop. Sandra says you’ve to email her one, I don’t have a notion how that works. And – do I hear wedding bells? Our wee Paula Maguire?’

She squinted out the window. ‘You know how it is back home – people still talk if you’re not married. And with the kid – anyway, the wedding’s in two weeks.’ Less than that now. Christ.

‘Lovely.’ It was a narrative that made sense – she’d had a child with her boyfriend, her childhood sweetheart, and now they’d get married and probably have more. Except, of course, it might not be true.

‘So what’s the place like?’ She changed the subject.

‘It’s like the Priory. Private rehab for kids with issues. So we’ve got the self-harmers, the drug users, and of course the eating disorders. They have a quite radical approach that you can’t get on the NHS – supposedly they can dry out a drug addict in a month.’

‘And anorexia?’

‘Well.’ He turned the car at a set of red-brick gateposts, almost invisible in the trees. ‘Let’s just say they hardly ever die. Not all clinics can say the same. So it works. In a way.’

‘In a way?’

Kevin’s face, placid and kind, gave nothing away. It was what made him so good at his job. ‘You’ll see. Come on.’

The place was like a country hotel, the kind stressed-out London couples would go to for minibreaks to try to revive their wilting relationships. They walked across crunching gravel and Paula noticed the bars on the lower windows. This was not a hotel – the people inside weren’t allowed to leave.

Kevin spoke into the videophone entrance for a while, negotiating entry, and Paula looked around. It was silent, eerily so. Only the rustle of leaves and the odd cry of a bird. She wondered how Alice had felt, cut off here.

Adding to the feel of a top hotel, they were met by ‘Guest Liaison Manager’ Maria Holt. Paula gathered her job was to look after the paying customers, i.e. the parents who put their children in here. She drifted off during the woman’s long spiel about the centre, as they were led down a wood-panelled corridor, Maria tapping in high heels. She had on subtle make-up, but a lot of it, and a blouse and pencil skirt. ‘Our success rates are consistently high, because we’re able to take a more aggressive approach to fighting addiction and mental disorders. Conventional therapies focus on controlling the problem, not the causes.’

They passed doors, a TV lounge with several teenagers in it, vacant, eyes glued to the screen. They wore loose grey clothes, like prison inmates. ‘There are no closed doors at the Yews,’ Maria said, seeing Paula look. ‘It’s our most fundamental policy.’

The centre director was ready for them in his office, which overlooked the thick trees at the back of the building. More yews, like the ones in Crocknashee churchyard. ‘Kevin! Good to see you.’ A firm handshake and a clasp of the shoulder for him. Paula was scrutinised by sharp blue eyes. ‘Hello, I’m David Allardyce. Dr Maguire, is it?’

She tried not to wince as he pummelled her hand. ‘Hello, yes.’

Allardyce was a short man, coming up to her eyes, and had sandy greying hair and a rugby player’s nose. Beneath the Paul Smith shirt and trousers was a strong body. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Kevin here used to sing your praises.’

‘My best grad student,’ said Kevin.

‘I doubt that.’ Paula brushed off the compliment.

‘Well,’ said Kevin. ‘I’ve had ones who are more patient with funding applications, maybe.’

‘What can I help you with?’ said Allardyce. ‘I heard you were on the criminal end of things – not thinking of going therapeutic?’

‘Not really,’ said Paula, thinking she couldn’t imagine anything worse. ‘It’s about a former patient of yours – an Alice Morgan. She was studying in Ireland and she’s gone missing.’

His expression didn’t change. ‘Oh yes. I think I remember. But we don’t call them patients here, they’re guests.’

‘OK. Obviously, with Alice’s history, our first thought wasn’t forced disappearance. So I wanted to pick your brains really, see if you can help me put together a profile.’

‘Sure, sure. Sit down.’ He indicated the chairs opposite his desk, which Paula thought were by some famous Swedish designer. ‘Let me get the file.’

She sat down, looking out at the cool oasis of trees outside the window. The place was peaceful, almost soporific.

‘Now.’ Allardyce had found a manila file in his oak cabinet. ‘Alice. She was with us for two years – a long stretch. Usually we pride ourselves on having a cure within three months.’

‘Can you ever really cure anorexia?’

‘Good question.’ He beamed a smile at her. ‘We consider them cured if they gain two stone or more and are eating normally again. Obviously, a relapse is always a risk. Was Alice’s eating still disordered?’

‘We think so. Here’s the last picture that was taken of her – the day she went missing.’ Paula took out her phone to show him Alice’s last selfie.

He pursed his lips. ‘Hm, yes. Not quite life-threatening, but still very underweight.’

She put the phone away. ‘Can I ask, Dr Allardyce, would you have expected Alice to have periods? Her room-mate at university said she didn’t.’

‘At that bodyweight, I’d doubt it, I have to say.’

‘We also found evidence in her home of bingeing.’

‘Bulimia?’ He frowned. ‘But that wasn’t her way at all. She had a real horror of vomiting – with her it was all about purity. She had something of an obsession with medieval saints, the ones who allegedly didn’t eat for years, left perfect corpses. You’d be Catholic, I assume, Dr Maguire?’

She glanced at Kevin, who shrugged slightly. It was an unusual question to hear in England. ‘I was raised Catholic, yes.’

‘Then you’ll know about the incorruptibles. The saints with preserved bodies – they didn’t rot after death, supposedly. Alice wanted to be like this.’

‘You mean like. . . holy relics?’

‘Yes, something like that. Things that don’t decompose, that stay unchanged.’

‘But don’t bulimia and anorexia often co-present?’ asked Paula. It wasn’t really her area.

‘Yes, of course. But Alice – I’d be surprised. Very surprised.’

‘OK. Thank you. I need to ask—’ She hesitated, glancing at Kevin, who looked peacefully out of the window. This was all down to her. ‘We’ve heard Alice attempted suicide while she was here.’

He fixed her with a stare, and for a moment the polite veneer was gone. ‘Who told you that?’

She faced him. Right on your side, Corry had said. ‘We have a source in the police.’

Allardyce placed his hands on his desk. ‘Well, yes, she did. A real pity. We take every precaution here – you’ll see there are codes on all the drug stores, and we watch them all the time – but accidents happen. Unfortunately Alice was able to stockpile some meds from another girl, who should have been taking them. The other girl died. Heart failure, at nineteen. Such a waste.’

‘And Alice’s parents don’t know this? They didn’t mention it.’

He uncapped his pen. ‘Dr Maguire . . . do you have children?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she bridled.

‘Just a question.’

‘I have a little girl.’

‘Well, maybe you can imagine then. Imagine the pain for a parent, of watching this child you brought into the world, and all they want to do is starve themselves to death. To disappear. You’d do anything, wouldn’t you, to make them eat? So Alice’s parents already blamed themselves. We didn’t want to worry them more. That’s all.’