The Lost Child: A Gripping Detective Thriller with a Heart-Stopping Twist Read online

  The Lost Child

  A Gripping Detective Thriller with a Heart-Stopping Twist

  Patricia Gibney

  Kathleen and William Ward,

  my parents,

  for your love, support and encouragement.

  Contents

  The Seventies

  Day One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  The Mid Seventies

  Day Two

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  The Mid Seventies

  Day Three

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  The Late Seventies

  Day Four

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  The Eighties

  Day Five

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  The Late Eighties

  Day Six

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  The Late Eighties

  Day Seven

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  The Nineties

  Two Weeks Later

  Chapter 101

  30th October 2015

  Epilogue

  Hear More From Patricia

  Also by Patricia Gibney

  A Letter from Patricia

  The Missing Ones

  The Stolen Girls

  Acknowledgements

  The Seventies

  The Child

  ‘You have to be quiet. Please. Don’t cry again.’

  ‘But… but she hurt me. I want to go back to our other mummy.’

  ‘Shh. Shh. I do too. But if we’re good, this mummy won’t hurt us. You have to be really, really good.’

  More crying. ‘Too hard to be good. I’m so hungry. Hic… hic.’

  ‘Don’t get hiccups. Don’t. You make her so mad.’

  I wrap my arms around my twin’s small, thin body and stare into the blackness. It is too dark in here. When the mummy woman turned off the hall light, even the little crack at the lock was filled with blackness. I lean into the folds of the vacuum cleaner bag, try to make a pillow for my head, but it is too lumpy, my body too bony. Pins and needles prickle my arm where my twin’s head rests.

  I am too cramped to move. The weight of my twin lying on me would be very light for the big people, I think, but it feels like a monster to me.

  A spider lowers itself from a web, down on to my nose, and I scream. My twin slips from my grasp. A head cracks loudly against the wall. We are both screaming now.

  In the confined space of the hall cupboard, our screams are loud and shrill. Neither of us knows why the other is howling. Neither of us can stop the other crying. Neither of us knows when the horror will end.

  And then… the sound of the lock opening.

  * * *

  Carrie King puts her hands over her ears. Will they ever shut up? Sobbing, crying, screaming. Little brats. After all she has done for them. Given up her drugs. Stopped drinking. Become someone she isn’t. For them. To get them back. She had to do it, especially after the others were taken from her. Fought so hard for them.

  ‘Shut up!’

  She uncorks the whiskey bottle and fills a glass. Two gulps later, she feels the warmth seep into her veins. That’s better. But she still hears them. Another gulp.

  ‘Enough!’ She runs from the kitchen. Bangs on the door of the cupboard in the hallway.

  ‘I said, shut up! If I hear one more word, I’ll kill the two of you,’ she screams.

  Leaning against the white chipboard, her chest rising and heaving from the effort, she listens above the thumping of her heart. Still crying, but softer now. Whimpers.

  ‘Thank God,’ she sighs. ‘Peace at last.’

  She drags herself back to the kitchen, dirt and crumbs sticking to her bare feet. Standing at the clogged sink, peering out through the smeared window, she pops an acid pill, but she really needs a smoke. Pulling the small bag of weed from her skirt pocket, she rolls a joint and takes two hits from the spliff in quick succession.

  Her legs weaken at her knees. She can see two windows, or is that three? The bread bin hops along the bench and the sweeping brush is begging for a dance partner.

  She laughs, and lights a candle. This is seriously good shit, or is it the acid? Turning, she grabs the whiskey bottle and drinks from its neck. It doesn’t taste so sharp now. She opens the book lying by her hand, before closing it again. She can’t remember when she last read, but this looked good. She liked the little pictures. Now, though, it is mocking her.

  The racket from the hallway has ceased and she hears the angels singing. Up there, lying in white fluffy clouds on her ceiling. They look kind of cute. Not like the twin bastards that have cost her so much of her life. At least she got them back. Away from their foster mother. That was a laugh. That woman had no idea how to raise children.

  ‘Hello, little angel friends,’ she chirps at the ceiling, her voice an octave higher than normal. ‘Have you come to shut the brats up?’

  That’s when she hears screams. Scrunching her face in confusion, she stares blindly around the kitchen. The angels have fled.

  Carrie King takes another slug of whiskey, following it with a drag on her joint, and grabs hold of the woode
n spoon. As she flees the kitchen, she doesn’t notice she has knocked over the candle and the bottle.

  ‘I’ll give you two something to cry about. So help me God, I will.’

  Day One

  Early October 2015

  One

  The evening was the best time to study. A glass of wine by her hand, phone in the dock spewing soft music, blinds pulled down halfway, the fields beyond the house in darkness. Light reflected off the glass and she could see all around her. Alone with her books. In her own home. Safe.

  Marian Russell had to admit that social studies wasn’t her course of choice, but she loved the genealogy module. Everything else was too highbrow for her stupid brain. She was stupid. Arthur had kept telling her that, so now she almost believed it. But she knew it wasn’t really true.

  Smiling to herself, she popped two pills into her mouth, swallowed them with her wine and lit a cigarette. Since she’d secured the barring order against her husband, she was beginning to take hold of her life again. A twenty-five-hour-a-week contract in the supermarket helped, and she had the family car. The bastard had lost his licence, so he hadn’t put up much of a fight over it. She’d succeeded in getting her mother to sign the house over to her before ensconcing her in a flat. Out from under her feet. And she had her studies. And her wine. And her pills.

  The front door opened and slammed shut.

  ‘Emma, is that you?’ Marian shouted over her shoulder. She needed to have a sit-down with her daughter. At seventeen, Emma was beginning to take liberties with her curfew. She checked the time. Not yet nine o’clock.

  Marian sipped her wine. ‘Where did you go?’

  Silence. No matter how much trouble she got into, Emma always stood her ground. A trait inherited from her father? No, Marian knew where she got it from.

  Standing up, she turned to the door. The glass fell from her hand.

  ‘You!’

  Two

  Carnmore was a quiet area, situated on the outskirts of Ragmullin. The main road had once run through it, but after the ring road had been constructed, it was cut off and mainly accessed by residents, or used as a rat run by those aware of its existence. Almost five hundred metres separated the two houses built there and only every third street lamp remained lit. On a night like this, with rain thundering down to earth, it was a bleak and desolate place. Trees shook their wet branches free of their remaining leaves and the ground was sludgy and black.

  The crime-scene tape was already in place when Detective Inspector Lottie Parker and Detective Sergeant Mark Boyd arrived. Two squad cars blocked the house from the view of any curious onlookers. But the area was quiet, except for garda activity.

  Lottie looked over at Boyd. He shook his head. At over six feet tall, he was lean and well toned. His hair, once black, now shaded with grey, was cut close around his ears, which stuck out slightly.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s get out of this rain. I hate calls late at night.’

  ‘And I hate domestics,’ Boyd said, turning up the collar of his coat.

  ‘Could be a home invasion. A burglary gone wrong.’

  ‘Could be anything at this stage, but Marian Russell’s had a barring order against her husband, Arthur, for the last twelve months,’ Boyd said, reading from a page dripping with rainwater. ‘An order he has flouted on two occasions.’

  ‘Still doesn’t mean it was him. We have to assess the scene first.’

  She pulled her black puffa jacket tight to her throat. She hoped this winter wasn’t going to be as bad as the last one. October could be a lovely time, but currently there was a storm warning, status orange, and forecasters intimated it could change to red at a moment’s notice. Being surrounded by lakes, Ragmullin was susceptible to flooding, and Lottie had had enough of the rain over the last two weeks.

  After a cursory look at a car in the drive, she approached the house. The door was open. A uniformed garda barred the entrance. When he recognised her, he nodded.

  ‘Good evening, Inspector. It’s not a pretty sight.’

  ‘I’ve seen so much carnage in the last year, I doubt anything will shock me.’ Lottie pulled a pair of protective gloves from her pocket, blew into them and tried to ease them over her damp hands. From her bag she removed disposable overshoes.

  ‘How did he get in?’ Boyd said.

  ‘Door isn’t forced, so he might have had a key,’ Lottie said. ‘And we don’t know it’s a “he” yet.’

  ‘Arthur Russell was on a barring order; he shouldn’t have had a key.’

  ‘Boyd… will you give me a chance?’

  Bending down, Lottie inspected a trail of bloody footprints leading along the hallway to where she was standing. ‘Blood tramped the whole way out.’

  ‘Both ways.’ Boyd pointed to the imprints.

  ‘Did the assailant come back to the door to check something, or to let someone else in?’

  ‘SOCOs can take impressions. Mind where you walk.’

  Lottie glared at Boyd as she stepped carefully along the narrow hall. It led to a compact old-style kitchen, though it appeared to be a relatively new extension. Without entering further, she shivered at the sight in front of her. She welcomed the sense of Boyd standing close behind her. It made her feel human in the face of such inhumanity.

  ‘It was some fight,’ he said.

  A wooden table was turned upside down. Two chairs had been flung against it, and one had three legs broken off. Books and papers were scattered across the floor, along with a phone and a laptop, screens broken, smashed as if someone had stomped on them. Every movable object appeared to have been swept from the counter tops. A combination of sauces and soups dripped down the cupboard doors, and a tap was running water freely into the sink.

  Drawing her eyes from the chaos, which evidenced a violent struggle, Lottie studied the corpse. The body lay face down in a small pool of blood. Short brown hair was matted to the head where a gaping wound of blood, bone and brain was clearly visible. The right leg stuck out to one side at an impossible angle, as did the left arm. The skirt was torn and a red blouse was ripped up the back.

  ‘Bruises visible on her spine,’ Boyd said.

  ‘Badly beaten,’ Lottie whispered. ‘Is that vomit?’ She looked down at a splurge of liquid two inches from her feet.

  ‘Marian Russell’s daughter was—’ Boyd began.

  ‘No. She couldn’t get in. She’d forgotten her front door key and didn’t have the one to the back door. She yelled for her mother through the letter box. Ran round the back. After heading back up the road to her friend’s house, she called the emergency services. So the report says.’

  ‘If she didn’t go inside, then one of ours spilled his guts,’ Boyd said.

  ‘No need to be so explicit. I can see it.’ Lottie went to run her fingers through her hair but the gloves snagged. ‘Where’s the daughter now?’

  ‘Emma? With a neighbour.’

  ‘Poor girl. Having to see this.’

  ‘But she didn’t see—’

  ‘The report says she looked through the back door window, Boyd. Saw enough to never have a decent night’s sleep for the rest of her life.’

  ‘How do you sleep? I mean, with all you witness in the job. I know I pound it out on my bike, but how do you cope?’

  ‘Now’s not the time for this conversation.’ Lottie didn’t like Boyd’s probing questions. He knew enough about her already.

  Stepping into the kitchen, she realised they were compromising a scene already contaminated by the first responders. ‘Are the scene-of-crime officers on the way?’

  ‘Five minutes or so,’ Boyd said.

  ‘While we’re waiting, let’s try and figure out what happened here.’

  ‘The husband broke in—’

  ‘Jesus, Boyd! Will you stop? We don’t know it was the husband.’

  ‘Of course it’s him.’

  ‘Okay, for a second, say I agree. The big question is why. What drove him to it? He’s been barred from the
family home for twelve months and now he goes mad. Why tonight?’ Lottie sucked on her lip, thinking. Something wasn’t right with the scene before her. But she couldn’t put her finger on it. Not yet, anyway. ‘Has Arthur Russell been located?’

  ‘No sign of him. Checkpoints are in place. Traffic units have the car registration. Our records show he’s banned from driving, but the car isn’t here so we can assume he took it. We’ll find him,’ Boyd said.