Little Girl Lost Page 5

  The garden to the house was flat and bare in the snow. Rusted handlebars of a discarded bike poked through the hedge. A small bird exploded out into the clear air with a burst of its wings, scattering the snow that had settled on the outer leaves.

  Fleming thumped on the door with a gloved fist, stepped back off the step, slipping slightly as he did so. Lucy gripped his elbow, helped to steady him, smelt the staleness of damp off his jacket.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, coughing to cover his embarrassment. The lock on the front door shunted open and the door swung back. A tall man, probably in his early thirties, stood in the doorway. He wore black denim jeans and a black T-shirt with the name of a rock band emblazoned on the chest.

  ‘What?’ he snapped angrily.

  ‘Mr Quigg?’ Lucy asked.

  The man glanced in her direction and scoffed, then turned and walked back up the hall, away from them, leaving the door ajar.

  Fleming looked at Lucy, eyebrows raised, then stepped across the threshold as she followed.

  The room to the left was the living area of the house. It was small and stuffy, the air heady with the smell of gas being given off from the gas heater blazing in the corner. An ironing board was set up against the opposite wall, on which was piled wrinkled laundry. At the tip of the board sat a child’s school exercise book, held open by a pencil.

  The man who had come to the door flopped into an old armchair in front of the TV, twisting out a cigarette in the ashtray that balanced on the armrest. He grunted as he shifted in the seat, using his foot to move to one side an open beer can that had been sitting in front of the chair.

  Beside him, on an equally threadbare sofa, a woman lay snoring heavily. She wore her nightdress, though was lying in such a way that the garment was pulled up around her legs. Lucy glanced at her, resisting the urge to pull the hem of the nightdress back down over her legs, threaded with varicose veins, the outer thigh yellowed and purple with bruises.

  ‘Are you Mr Quigg?’ Fleming repeated.

  The man stared up at him a little stupidly. ‘She’s Quigg,’ he said, nodding towards the prone figure on the sofa, then twisting his head sharply to flick his hair from his face.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Her partner.’

  ‘What’s your name, sir?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Cunningham. Alan Cunningham.’

  ‘We’re looking for Mary Quigg, Mr Cunningham. Is she here?’

  The man squinted at her, his eyes almost disappearing into red-rimmed slits.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We’ve found a missing child who fits her description.’

  ‘Mary’s not missing,’ Cunningham said. ‘She’s upstairs.’

  ‘Can I go up to her?’ Lucy asked.

  Cunningham shrugged, turning his attention once more to the chat show on TV. ‘Do what you like,’ he said.

  Fleming remained in the living room while Lucy made her way up the stairs. Somewhere, higher up in the house, a baby started crying.

  ‘Hello? Mary?’

  Lucy took the corner at the top of the stairs, glancing into the bathroom which lay empty. Cardboard tubes were littered on the floor. Dirty nappies were piled in a wastebin beside the toilet bowl, the smell of faeces strong enough to make Lucy recoil, and move away from the door out into the hallway.

  She heard something behind her and turned. It sounded like tapping at the door facing her. As she approached it, Lucy realized that a small shiny brass bolt had been newly fitted to the top of the door, effectively locking the occupant of the room inside.

  She slid back the bolt and pushed the door open. A small child stood in the doorway. From her appearance, Lucy could understand why the principal had thought of her; the child was thin-framed, her hair, brown and lank, hanging over her shoulders, her bony arms jutting at angles from her side, her nightdress so long it reached her ankles.

  ‘I need to pee,’ she said, pushing past Lucy and making her way to the toilet, as if a stranger standing in her doorway was not an unusual event.

  Lucy stepped into the room and was immediately hit both by the smell of a dirty nappy and the shrill keening of the baby in the cot against the far wall. She went to the child and lifted it. The baby bunched its fists against its face, scrunched its features in preparation for another cry. Lucy could feel her hand wet at the child’s bottom where the urine had soaked through the sodden nappy.

  Laying the reluctant child back in the cot, Lucy noticed that the area around the clasp of the white vest was dark with stains. Pulling on a pair of blue latex gloves, she began to change the child, removing the old nappy before realizing that she didn’t have a clean one in exchange.

  Holding the wriggling child in place with one hand, she began hunting under the cot in the hope that she might find something.

  ‘I have them,’ a reedy voice said. Lucy turned to see Mary Quigg standing in the doorway again. ‘I keep them in the cupboard. I only have one left. I wanted to make it last,’ the girl said simply, the plaintive nature of her voice more a trick of her accent than an expression of regret.

  ‘Can you get it for me, please?’

  The child went to the cupboard at the end of the room and opened it. A few desultory pieces of clothing hung limply from hangers. A single nappy lay on the floor and Mary Quigg reached in and took it out, before bringing it to Lucy.

  ‘I need wipes too,’ Lucy said.

  The girl squinted up at her. ‘I haven’t got any,’ she said.

  Leaving the child with the girl, Lucy ran back across to the bathroom. A grubby towel hung over the radiator and she lifted it and held it beneath the running tap. Wringing out the excess water, she returned to the room and began gently to wipe around the baby boy’s bottom – for she could see now that he was a boy. The soft skin of his buttocks was red and blistering in places.

  ‘You’ll need Sudocrem,’ Mary said. ‘But we don’t have any.’

  ‘We’ll do without, eh?’ Lucy said as she worked. ‘Are you Mary?’

  Mary Quigg nodded silently as she watched Lucy, as if committing what she was doing to memory. ‘And he’s Joe,’ she added.

  ‘Do you look after him?’

  Mary nodded her head, her small teeth worrying her bottom lip.

  ‘Only when Mummy’s friend stays over. Most of the time Mummy looks after us. When her friend comes, she gets too tired.’

  ‘How often does that happen?’ Lucy asked, trying to make the question sound conversational.

  ‘A few days a week,’ Mary said.

  Lucy glanced at the girl, but her attention was focused on Lucy changing her brother’s nappy. Lucy realized with a pang that the child wasn’t watching her to see how it was done; she was watching to make sure Lucy was doing it right. Indeed when, having never had to change a nappy before, Lucy struggled with the tape tabs, Mary reached her thin arms through the bars of the cot to help her.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ Lucy asked.

  Mary Quigg looked at her blankly, her head a little to one side, her bright eyes glinting momentarily. ‘I stay here in case Mummy needs me.’

  As she fitted the baby’s vest back on, having wiped at the stains with a clean edge of the wet towel as best she could, she thought of something.

  ‘Why would your mummy need you, when her friend is here?’ she asked.

  Mary’s voice lowered to barely a whisper. ‘Sometimes he shouts at her,’ she confided. ‘Sometimes he leaves her crying.’

  ‘Does he ever make you cry?’ Lucy asked, keeping her voice even.

  ‘He hurts my mummy,’ Mary repeated. ‘In bed. I went in one night so they had to put a lock on my door. In case I got hurt too.’

  ‘Does he hit you or your mummy?’ Lucy asked, but the girl had thought of something else.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ she stated. ‘I like you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mary. I like you too,’ Lucy said, hefting the baby up against her chest, his head resting on her shoulder.

  �
��I think Joe likes you as well,’ Mary Quigg added with a smile.

  By the time they made it downstairs, Mary’s mother had woken and was sitting on the edge of the sofa, a cigarette in one hand, her other tugging at the hem of her nightdress to cover the bruises on her legs.

  Lucy was surprised, and a little disappointed, when the baby she was holding – upon seeing his mother – began struggling and reached out his two arms for her to take him.

  Handing him down to her, Lucy added: ‘I changed his nappy.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to,’ the woman said, shifting the baby from her left-hand side to her right.

  Riled, Lucy opened her mouth to speak, but Tom Fleming interrupted. ‘As I was explaining to Ms Quigg and her partner, we’re following up on a missing child. Mary is obviously all right, so we’ll be on our way. I’d like a word with you, Ms Quigg, before we go.’

  Fleming led the woman out to the hall leaving Lucy standing in the middle of the room. She assumed he’d felt the woman might be more amenable to whatever he had to say without Lucy being there, but she couldn’t help being annoyed at being excluded. Cunningham, meanwhile, had turned his attention from the TV screen to her and was openly looking her up and down. He realized she was watching him and smiled good-naturedly.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘Mary needs to be at school,’ Lucy said to Cunningham.

  ‘I tell her mother that,’ Cunningham said. ‘I’d be glad to have her out of the way for a bit – a bit of privacy, you know, but her mother keeps her off.’

  ‘I’ll have to contact Social Services and arrange for someone to visit you here,’ Lucy continued, hoping for a reaction.

  ‘You do what you have to do, love,’ Cunningham said.

  Mary herself was standing on the threshold of the living room, clearly trying to listen to both conversations at once.

  Lucy bent down a little towards her. ‘If you need anything, you contact me,’ Lucy said, handing the girl her card. ‘Any time. Just ask for Lucy.’

  The girl took the offered card and clasped it in her hand.

  ‘Any time, Mary,’ Lucy repeated, as Fleming gestured to her from the hallway that it was time to leave.

  ‘What a shithole,’ Lucy said as they made their way down the path towards the car.

  ‘There’s no point antagonizing people, though,’ Fleming said. ‘If we ever have to go back there, you’ll want that woman on your side.’

  ‘We shouldn’t leave those children in there.’

  Fleming shook his head. ‘Old Alan won’t hang around long. Still, we’ll refer it to Social Services, have them pay a visit.’

  Lucy was about to speak when something exploded off the roof of their car with a dull thud. A second bang, this time on the window.

  Looking across the street, the gang of youths they had seen earlier had grown significantly. Fifteen or twenty now stood in the shadows of the houses, faces obscured. Buckets in front of them seemed to be filled with snowballs. As a third exploded near her, before skittering across the pavement and exploding off the wall and exposing a rock inside it, Lucy realized that the gang had compacted the snow into ice around stones.

  One rose in an arc above them, then dropped at an angle towards Fleming. He ducked out of the way with only partial success and the missile cracked him on the left cheek, causing him to fall to the ground. A cheer rose from the youths and more snowballs began flying towards them. Lucy struggled to keep her own balance as she pulled Fleming towards the shelter of the car. A lump of ice exploded against the bonnet, splintering into her face as she bent towards Fleming. Another cheer.

  Looking back at Quigg’s house, Lucy saw Cunningham silhouetted in the window, the curtains pulled back enough for him to see out. He stood, his hands in his pockets and Lucy could discern, even without seeing his features, his head as he laughed soundlessly before turning and speaking to someone in the room.

  Finally the barrage ended, and Lucy, glancing over the top of the car, could see the youths scrambling in the gardens of the houses, scooping up more snow to restock. Using the lull to their advantage, she and Fleming bundled into the car and drove off, their departure marked with the occasional dull thud of rocks exploding off the reinforced glass of the rear windscreen.

  CHAPTER 11

  The wound on Fleming’s face was being attended to. They’d cut straight back to the station before finishing for the day. Lucy had suggested taking him to the hospital but the cut, while still bleeding profusely, was superficial. Three paper stitches should hold it, the first aider advised him.

  Lucy had headed back up to the office to call Robbie, recalling that he finished at 5.30 p.m.

  ‘I was waiting to hear from you,’ he said when she called.

  ‘I was out on a call,’ Lucy said, feeling a little riled that she should have to explain herself. ‘A school principal suggested a possible ID for Alice.’

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘None,’ Lucy said, shaking her head despite the fact she was on the phone. ‘Though the girl we went out to needs help too.’

  ‘I’ll get the details from you later and pass it up the chain,’ he said, clearly eager to get home. ‘There’s been no word back on the alerts I sent. No one has reported a child missing who fits Alice’s description.’

  ‘Has she spoken yet?’

  ‘No. Nor has she eaten. They’re talking about fitting a drip tomorrow if she doesn’t eat.’

  ‘The press releases should throw something up soon, hopefully,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Mmm,’ Robbie replied, non-committally.

  She had to take a taxi back to Prehen so she could collect her car. It took her a while to get the car started and even then it skidded and slid as she made her way up the hill into Prehen again.

  She knew as soon as she pulled up outside the house that something was wrong. Despite the encroaching gloom, the house lay in darkness, the front door yawning open. Using the fence running the length of the sloping driveway for support, she made her way up to the house. When she went in, she noticed her father’s coat still hung at the end of the banister, as usual.

  ‘Sarah? Dad?’

  No response.

  She heard a clicking noise in the kitchen, then the humming of the central heating boiler firing up.

  The living room was to the rear of the house and she checked there first. A mug of tea sat on the small coffee table next to his chair, the antimacassar from the back of the seat lying on the floor. A box lay open on the carpet. Lucy recognized it as one of the two dozen or more that lined the wall of the spare room she was using for her bedroom. Her father had, several weeks earlier, begun sorting through his old notebooks, so as to free up room for Lucy. Instead of dumping the notebooks, though, he was reorganizing them according to some system he had devised. She had watched him doing so over a series of nights, bending to the task with a compulsive intensity that frightened her, his pursuit of order depressing in its futility.

  Stepping over the opened box, she saw a small folded scrap of paper on the mantelpiece, the spidery font of her father’s handwriting instantly recognizable.

  ‘Gone to the shop. Back soon.’

  Lucy shouted again for her father, despite already feeling the inexorable dread that he had gone out, in the snow, without his coat, to look for a shop that had closed fifteen years earlier.

  Even if his footprints were not clear in the snow, she’d have known where to check. For years, when she was a child, there had been a small corner shop at the top of Sunningdale Drive. Her father would go every day for his paper and a bag of buns. He would carry her on his shoulders. They would always stop at the house on the corner; they had a fountain in the centre of their garden but the six foot wall around its perimeter meant that none of the kids ever saw it, except, Lucy believed, her, atop her father’s shoulders, her chin resting on the coarseness of his scalp, the smell of his tobacco clinging to her clothes for the rest of the day. At night, sometimes, in her bed, she’d lift her
dress from the bundle of discarded clothes at the foot of her bed and try once again to inhale his smell.

  There was little point taking a car now; the roads were so bad that she’d be quicker on foot. Besides, to access the street with the shop, her father would have gone along an alleyway that lay between two houses on Knoxhill.

  In fact, it was there that she found him, standing staring up at the swirls of snow falling through the halo of a street light. He raised his fists ineffectually against the flakes, shouted indistinctly. His shoulders were slumped, his frame thinner than she remembered, accentuated by the fact that his damp shirt clung to his chest and the softness of his belly.

  ‘Dad?’ Lucy ran to him, slipping as she did so, righting herself and continuing.

  Her father turned to look at her, his eyes red, the tears shining on his face beneath the street lamps. His nose, reddened through his years of drinking following his divorce, looked scarlet and swollen under the glare of the lamp.

  ‘Janet,’ he called. ‘I’m sorry, Janet.’ He began to blub, bringing his fists up to his face, his shoulders shuddering with his tears.

  ‘Janet, love. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Dad,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s me. Lucy.’

  ‘Lucy?’ Her father’s expression hardened.

  ‘Come home, Dad,’ she said, moving towards him, her hand outstretched.

  ‘I’ve to go to the shop,’ her father said, raising his own hand in a placatory manner, out of her reach.

  ‘The shop’s closed, Dad.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’