Little Bones: A totally addictive crime thriller
Little Bones
A totally addictive crime thriller
Patricia Gibney
Books by Patricia Gibney
The Detective Lottie Parker series
1. The Missing Ones
2. The Stolen Girls
3. The Lost Child
4. No Safe Place
5. Tell Nobody
6. Final Betrayal
7. Broken Souls
8. Buried Angels
9. Silent Voices
10. Little Bones
Available in Audio
The Detective Lottie Parker series
1. The Missing Ones (Available in the UK and the US)
2. The Stolen Girls (Available in the UK and the US)
3. The Lost Child (Available in the UK and the US)
4. No Safe Place (Available in the UK and the US)
5. Tell Nobody (Available in the UK and the US)
6. Final Betrayal (Available in the UK and the US)
7. Broken Souls (Available in the UK and the US)
8. Buried Angels (Available in the UK and the US)
9. Silent Voices (Available in the UK and the US)
Contents
Prologue
Two and a half years later
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
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
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Thirty years ago
Tuesday
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
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
Six months previously
Chapter 60
Thirty years ago
Wednesday
Chapter 61
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
Epilogue
Patricia’s Email Sign-Up
Books by Patricia Gibney
A Letter from Patricia
The Missing Ones
The Stolen Girls
The Lost Child
No Safe Place
Tell Nobody
Final Betrayal
Broken Souls
Buried Angels
Silent Voices
Acknowledgements
For Liam Gibney
Prologue
She had to save her children. That was what mothers did. They saved their children.
When he was smashing his fist into her stomach, her only thought was her babies upstairs. And if she had to save them, she must extricate herself from the murderous relationship. But how? And was it already too late?
‘Please, that’s enough,’ she whimpered, struggling up onto her knees. ‘Please, stop.’
Something caused him to pause. Her helplessness? No. Weakness in others spurred him on.
Up until now, she had taken the beating in silence. She stared up into his flint-like grey eyes and frowned at the blood dripping from the small cut high in his hairline where she had struck him with the tip of the knife. The cut wasn’t deep. Pity, but it had been enough to cause his explosion of rage. She had no idea where the knife had landed when he’d squeezed her wrist and unfurled her fingers, forcing her to release it.
He wiped the trickle of blood away before drawing back his arm to land another slap on her face. She cowered, desperately trying to defend herself. Any one of these thumps could be the blow to leave her debilitated, or the one to kill her. Who would protect her children then?
‘Please …’ She sheltered her head in cupped hands, hoping her fingers, rather than her head, would take the pressure from his fist.
‘And who is going to make me? You? Not a chance in hell. You think I don’t know what you were doing behind my back? I know! I bloody well know every fucking thing about you, and I told you before, you talk to no one. No one. You are mine!’
He grabbed her by the collar of her white blouse – stained black from the grime on his fists – and hauled her to her feet. She found herself staring at a chest full of curled hair, and unwillingly inhaled his disturbing scent of rage.
‘I’m sorry. Truly sorry. Let’s sit and talk it out,’ she whispered, terrified by his insane lies.
‘Let’s sit and talk it out,’ he mimicked, pushing her away, squeezing his hands into tightly scrunched-up balls, hiding the long fingers she thought she had loved. That had been her first mistake.
There never had been any love. Only torture and pain. She’d deluded herself with romantic notions to conceal the torturous hell in which she lived. She now recognised that he was consumed by psychopathic jealousy and a yearning for power, and she was nothing in his presence. A mouse in a trap. Clamped for ever. No escape. She sobbed, but quickly covered up her cries, fully aware that any display of weakness only provoked further violence.
Leaning against the cupboard for support, she scrabbled around for something, anything, to use as a weapon. But her hands fell to her sides when he stepped into her space and headbutted her.
She didn’t fall over. She didn’t cry out. She couldn’t wake the children. Then she wondered how they were sleeping through the noise.
‘You think I’m stupid?’ he sneered. ‘Skiving off to the shops without my say-so. Talking to all and sundry. I’m not bloody stupid. I know you must have slept with some dirty bollix. I have eyes everywhere. Everywhere, do you hear me? I know that bastard child is not mine. She doesn’t even look like me. You betrayed me.’ Sweat trickled from his temples. ‘Never wanted a daughter anyhow.’
He turned and landed a punch to her stomach. She sank to her knees. As she fell, he thumped her ribs. ‘I won’t have to listen to her screeching any longer. Job done.’
She bit her lip so hard, blood trickled down her chin.
‘What? What … what have you done to my baby?’
He laughed, loud and mocking. She realised in that instant that she would never escape him. No matter how long it took, he would eventually kill her.
He stopped laughing and sneered. ‘She’s go
ne to fluffy cloud land in the sky, where I won’t have to listen to her squawking and squealing ever again. She wasn’t even mine. Bitch.’
She dragged herself upright, knees wobbling and hips shuddering with pins and needles. A pit of fear opened up in her chest and she had nothing to douse the flames as they ignited with anger and rage and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. A streak of madness had invaded her brain. Had she truly lost her mind?
She shoved him then, with the full force of her shoulder, dodging his flailing arm, and flew out the door and up the stairs. Into her three-year-old daughter’s room. Rushed to the cot where the child still slept. The pillow from her own bed was in there. On top of her little girl. Whipping it off, she stared into the milky-white face, eyes closed, the tiny butterfly lips stretched in an unnatural grimace. She reached out and touched her daughter’s forehead.
Cold. Oh God, so cold. Her hand flew backwards as if it had been plunged into ice.
‘No, no, no, no …’
Then she saw the blood. So much blood for one so small.
She ran to her fifteen-month-old son’s room. She found him lying on top of his Spider-Man duvet, one foot and one arm hanging through the bars of his cot, the way he always slept, starfish-like. She gulped, then held her breath. Pain coursed through every bone and sinew, and her muscles cramped in terror. She waited. She counted.
In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.
Relief flooded her veins and she sank to her knees. Her son was breathing. She ran her hand over his forehead and felt the warmth of his skin. She nudged his limbs back into the cot and draped the light duvet around him. He turned over, his breathing steady, dreamless.
What was she to do?
He was still downstairs, pacing the kitchen. She heard the soft thump of his feet on the floor, where a few moments earlier she had thought he was about to kill her. He was still going to kill her.
Her baby girl was dead.
‘Oh my God!’ She clamped a hand to her mouth, ran to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. Blood and water spewed, swirling in the bowl. She returned to her son’s room, her mind a riot of confusion.
She had to stop him. But how? He had taken her phone. She had no friends. She didn’t know any neighbours. She’d never had a real family. She was alone. With her children. No, that was wrong. With her son, now that her little girl was dead. Her little girl was dead! Maybe she was safer in the arms of the angels, she thought, before vomiting bile on the carpeted floor by her son’s cot.
Sobbing, she wiped her mouth, fought the rising trauma and grief and flew back to the bathroom. There, she searched the cupboard under the washbasin. Bleach? Could she throw it in his eyes? Would it kill him? She had no idea, but she took the bottle anyway. Opening the mirrored door above the sink, she eyed the toothpaste and brushes. No make-up or pills. He never allowed them. Then her eye fell on his razor. The old-style cut-throat he preferred to use. Dancing with danger, she thought, as she took the blade in her hand. It would have to do.
Beating down her nausea, and with every creaking muscle and bone in her body screaming in pain, she slowly descended the stairs.
He was in the kitchen, on his knees, his face a mask of serenity. The red mist of anger, of insanity, had lifted, like it always did after his rages. She had to use this lucid time to convince him to let her go. She paused in the hallway and prayed she could at least save her son.
She would hold the death of their daughter over him with the cut-throat in her hand. It was the only way to escape.
He could not believe what he was hearing. He’d come to the Mireann Stone to cleanse his spirit, here on the side of the sacred hill. Mother Earth. The centre of the country. He held his finger to his lips to silence any sound that might come out.
The tramp of footsteps. Coming towards him.
He squinted through the darkness to see two people walking up the hillside, a light like a sabre guiding them. One of them carried something wrapped in a blanket.
A pink hue skirted the horizon as the morning struggled to overcome the night. He’d spent hours on the hill, part of the ritual he’d hoped would fill him with renewal. He had too much trauma in his soul, too many secrets to hide. He needed release from the anguish that clouded like a shadow all around him.
He leaned back against the stone, making himself as small as possible while still being able to see them.
‘We have to bury her.’ A woman’s voice. High-pitched. Like loud shrieking whispers.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We can’t leave her exposed to the elements. We have to put her somewhere. A bit deeper. So the animals won’t … Oh God, I can’t do this.’
‘This was your idea, not mine. Do you think I can dig this dry earth with my bare hands?’
‘She’s so tiny, and the ground isn’t that hard. We can dig a little. There’s a load of rocks around. We can cover her with them too.’
It took them over an hour, and the cold light of morning was casting its rays on the mound under the tree when at last they made their way back down the hill.
He couldn’t believe what he had witnessed, or the voices he’d heard. Voices he knew all too well. He did not want to believe any of it. But he would never forget it.
Abandoning his ritual and all thoughts of cleansing his spirit, he made his way home, consumed with more darkness than when he’d arrived.
It was the second day of November, and the souls of the dead were all around him.
Two and a half years later
Monday
1
When Anita Boland’s daughter, Isabel, rang her shortly after the nine o’clock TV news, whispering down the phone, asking her mother to mind the baby at nine the following morning, Anita was annoyed. It was just like Isabel to ask at the last minute. No thought that her mother might have a life, might have something else to be doing – not that she did have anything to be doing, but all the same, it rankled.
It was 8.57 the next morning when Anita reached the bungalow at Cloughton, eight kilometres from Ragmullin.
Without locking the car – no one locked anything out here in the countryside – she made her way to the back door, relishing the silence all around. She breathed in the air to fill herself with the freshness of nature, but the stench of slurry rose from the fields and caught in her throat. So much for country living; she preferred town life.
Opening the door, she immediately felt unnerved, for no good reason.
She stepped inside.
The air splintered with the high-pitched cry of a child. The wail was ancillary to the sound of silence. Anita knew her daughter was a terrible fusser and rarely let the child cry. Usually Isabel was all a-flutter through the house – television blaring, washing machine humming or hoover knocking against skirting boards – when she had an appointment in Ragmullin.
‘Isabel?’ Anita walked through the utility room.
No answer, save for the baby’s hysterical cries.
An icicle of fear skated down Anita’s spine. Her heart beat so wildly she thought it might break free from her chest. With her hand instinctively clutching her throat, she entered the kitchen, and froze.
Drawers hung from their moorings. The cupboard doors were open, a few pieces of crockery smashed here and there on the floor. The clothes horse lay askew against the wall and one chair was on its side.
‘Isabel?’ She called her daughter’s name again, her voice a fearful whisper.
Was there an intruder in the house? She had to get to her granddaughter. Where the hell was Isabel? Anita tiptoed through the kitchen towards the bedroom from where she’d heard the baby’s cries.
She had stepped into the room before her eyes registered someone lying on the floor. The overriding smell was metallic, mixed with the foul odour of the baby’s unchanged nappy.
‘Isabel, sweetheart.’ Her lips trembled as she took a tentative step towards the figure lying face down.
Isabel’s short hair was mat
ted with blood. Her pyjamas were torn, the cotton sliced and bloody. Anita raised her eyes to see baby Holly lying on her back in the cot, feet kicking frantically, her empty bottle on the floor. The child turned her head and her screams ceased, as if she’d recognised her grandmother through the wooden bars.
As she knelt beside her daughter’s body, Anita’s nursing training kicked in. She knew Isabel was dead. Still she laid a finger on her daughter’s cold neck and checked for a pulse. There was nothing.
‘Dear God in heaven,’ she cried. Someone had brutally assaulted her Isabel. What if the assailant was still in the house?
The baby! She had to get little Holly out of here.
She traipsed through the blood – there was no other way to get to the cot – and lifted the baby girl, feeling the weight of the soiled nappy and the dampness on the Babygro. She clutched the child to her chest, and with a final heartbreaking glance at her beautiful daughter lying slaughtered on the floor, she ran from the room.