The Lost Child (Detective Lottie Parker #3)(103)

‘Boyd?’

He turned to face Kirby huffing towards him, a fat cigar clenched between his teeth. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I think she saw someone suspicious and followed them. Up there.’ Boyd pointed upwards.

‘Jaysus, she could’ve gone in any direction after that,’ Kirby said, stuffing the cigar into his jacket pocket.

‘Take these’ Boyd handed over Lottie’s belongings. ‘I’m going to have a look.’

‘After that, I think you need to come to the station. I have new info you need to look at.’

Catching onto a bush, Boyd vaulted a small fence and began climbing up the embankment. Once on the railway tracks, he looked all around. The rooftops of Ragmullin lay like some Old Master’s monochrome sketch, faded with time, contorted with their secretive history and drowning in a deluge of murders. He crossed the tracks and checked the other side. A steep hill of grass and shrubs. At the bottom, a short pathway led to the main road. The reeds and grass were dampened down. From the weather? Or had someone slid down there in the night? Wishing he had on a pair of hiking boots rather than his leather loafers, he made a slippery descent. At the bottom, he determined that the reeds were damaged from more than the rain. To his left, the path led to the main road.

He gazed up the way he had come and concluded he’d have to take the long way round. As he walked, he kept his eyes to the ground. But anything that might have indicated that Lottie had taken this route had been obliterated.

He had no idea where she was.





Ninety-Three





The sound of water trickling down the inside of a copper drainpipe woke Lottie up.

‘Ohhh,’ she groaned. ‘My head.’

Dragging her body to a sitting position, she found her limbs were free from restraints. A thin sliver of light gleamed through a crack between a door and its jamb in front of her, up high. Where the hell was she?

Her hand, pricked with thorns, flew to her forehead, her fingers touching dried blood. The back of her skull felt like it had been hit with a steel bat. Running her hands down her body, checking, she was sure she had no major injuries. The knife had not been used on her. And she was still clothed in her filthy shirt and jeans. Her feet were bare and her ankle swollen. Unbound. Why? Must be somewhere her captor believed she could not escape from. We’ll see about that, she thought, parking her pain, steeling her body with resolve. No way was she going to die in this musty black hole.

In the sliver of light, she determined that the walls and floor were naked stone. She turned round on to her hands and knees, and crawled. There was a wooden table with sturdy legs. Could they be used as a weapon? She tried. They wouldn’t budge. No chairs. At the far wall – cupboards. No doors. Shelves. Cans and containers. Dipping her finger into one, she touched hard clay.

She took out the can and peered inside. A small green shoot struggled for life in the dry piece of earth. Ten cans, in five cupboards. Then an old washing machine. A twin tub, with its rubber hose sticking out. Not perfect, but it would do. Past the washer, a wooden staircase with open slats. She gazed upwards at the door at the top. High and foreboding. Was she alone in the cellar of some old house? She tried to recall if O’Dowd’s farmhouse had a cellar, but her mind was blank.

Up the stairs, as quietly as she could manage, each step causing her to wince with her throbbing ankle. Tried the round brass handle. Of course it was locked. Sitting on the top step, she peered down into the cavern to which she’d been brought in the dead of night.

There had been two of them. It had taken two people to possibly haul her into a car and drive her here. They must have knocked her out with the blow to her head. She remembered no more. Who had stolen the file, then assaulted and abducted her? At the back of her mind, she thought she had known at the time. That didn’t matter now. All that mattered was getting home to…

Dear God. Her children. Clamping a hand to her mouth, preventing a cry escaping, Lottie felt tears brim, then flow. They’d better not touch my kids, she thought, or so help me, I’ll kill them myself. She needed a plan. This was not the time to dissolve into a bubbling wreck.

Dismissing the pain in her body, she made her way on her buttocks back down the steps, crawled to the cupboard and set to work.





Ninety-Four





Back at the station, Boyd checked in with Superintendent Corrigan, who had activated a district-wide search for Lottie. He left Corrigan on the phone to McMahon, who was at the hospital trying to extract further information from the recovering Lorcan Brady.

Pulling off his suit jacket, Boyd said, ‘So, Kirby, what’s this information you have?’

‘Number one, you need to check those printouts on your desk. They came in via your email yesterday. I got Lynch to print them off but forgot to tell you.’

‘I’ll have a look in a minute. What’s number two?’

‘After we got Tessa and Mick’s birth certificates, the boss told me to find out if the Belfields had any kids.’

‘Go on.’

Kirby chewed on the end of his e-cig, twirling it from one side of his mouth to the other as he searched his desk. ‘I got the Belfields’ marriage cert. Guess what Kitty’s name was before she married Stan Belfield?’

‘O’Dowd?’