Read Online The Lost by Claire McGowan - Free Book Online

thing is they’re not, that both girls ran away. But in a town this size, two random cases – well, it’s not very common.’ There was a sort of shift round the table; no one wanted to think what it meant if they weren’t random. ‘Given that the only link we’ve found between the girls is this Mission, I’d recommend starting enquiries there.’
    ‘OK,’ Guy said, again betraying nothing. ‘You say two cases – you won’t have had time to look into the 1985 ones?’
    ‘Not much, yet. Were there any similarities with what I’ve outlined?’
    ‘Some. It’s tenuous – Bob’s going to bring us up to speed.’ He nodded to his deputy.
    Bob Hamilton stood up, buttoning the jacket of his straining suit, and started clicking through a PowerPoint to get past the slides they’d had the first day. White-haired, solid, Paula could practically see the Orange sash round his chest. Be nice, she chided herself as the screen warmed into colour. Just because he was probably an Orangeman didn’t mean he wasn’t also perfectly pleasant.
    Bob spoke to Guy – conspicuously not to Paula. ‘Alice Dunne and Rachel Reilly both went missing round about the end of summer, 1985. Alice lived just over the border, so her case was handled by the Gar-da Síoch-án-a .’ He pronounced the words carefully, with a small glance at Fiacra Quinn. ‘Rachel lived outside town, on a farm. She went for a night out to the disco – never got home.’
    Paula was making notes. ‘And she was seventeen?’
    ‘Aye. And Alice, she was nineteen. Away at university in Dublin.’
    ‘Hmm.’ That was a big difference, psychologically. A fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, and a university student. ‘I’ll need to look at all the case details. How did Alice disappear?’
    Bob clicked again, getting stuck on the same screen. ‘Er – can’t get this yoke to work.’
    Guy said, ‘She went out for the evening to see friends. They found her car by the side of the road, abandoned.’ Paula thought she could hear a hint of irritation in his voice. Just the tiniest hint, like a ripple on water, but nevertheless there.
    ‘And they never found anything?’
    ‘Nothing. No trace of either girl, no leads. It doesn’t give us much to work with. There were also some . . . er . . . cross-community tensions in both cases.’
    Paula looked at him enquiringly. ‘You mean because Rachel was a Catholic, with the RUC? And Alice—’
    ‘Alice wasProtestant, living in Éire,’ Guy finished. Nothing marked him out as an outsider more than the fact he called it ‘Éire’.
    ‘Sergeant?’ Paula put her question to Bob Hamilton. ‘You know that map of cases we had the other day – can you cluster it according to demographic criteria?’
    He looked surprised. ‘Religion, you mean?’
    ‘Not really. I was thinking more of age.’
    ‘Oh aye.’ But he looked helplessly at the machine until Paula jumped up.
    ‘Mind if I . . .? OK.’ She fiddled with it for a moment, pressing buttons on the Excel sheet until a bar chart was generated. ‘So, this is the data from around Ballyterrin, see? We have just four teenage girls missing over the past ten years, and all found again quite quickly. So two in a month – that’s big spike. And it’s happened twice now. That’s doubly unusual.’
    Gerard Monaghanwas sceptical. ‘But surely girls go missing all the time – it’s the most common group, you said.’
    ‘That’s right. But for this area,’ she pointed to the screen, where red dots represented each case, ‘it’s a lot, you know?’ Risking more cold looks, she took a deep breath and said, ‘Any chance we can get the same data on suicides?’
    ‘Lord help us,’ muttered Hamilton, and Paula saw the girl, Avril Wright, look horrified.
    ‘Er, why?’ Guy asked quietly.
    ‘Well, there was a suspicious death over the summer, another girl from Cathy’s school called Louise McCourt. Louise also went to the Mission, it seems. So if we can find out more on