The Lost Child (Detective Lottie Parker #3)(51)

She raised her hands to the ceiling. ‘Do you want me to grovel? I shouldn’t have suspected you’d do such a thing. I’d just come out of Corrigan’s office and you were the first person I bumped into, so I took it out on you. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ But she had suspected him. A flush crept up her face. Shit. She knew Boyd could read her. ‘Do you accept my apology?’

‘I’ll think about it.’ He pushed himself away from the wall and stood up straight. ‘Lottie, I didn’t go behind your back. I don’t know who did, but you need to watch your step, because someone is waiting for you to make a mistake.’

Lottie thought of Maria Lynch. Was it payback for making her stand in for the FLO? She looked up. Boyd was standing in front of her. He was smiling.

Thank God, she thought.

‘Come on. We’ve work to do,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Hey! That’s my line.’





Forty-Four





The wind refused to let up or calm down, and the scabby collie dog looked cold and hungry sitting on the porch when Lottie and Boyd pulled into Lorcan Brady’s driveway. Everywhere was dank and black. Branches on the trees surrounding the house dipped and swirled, cracking against the roof tiles.

‘It’s awful weather for October,’ Lottie remarked.

‘Doesn’t matter what month it is, it’s like bloody winter.’

‘Lighten up, will you. You’re making me depressed.’

‘That poor dog looks like he should be in the dog pound,’ Boyd said.

‘They’d put him down.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You’re a cruel—’

‘Don’t say it,’ Boyd said.

They got out of the car. The dog raised its head but didn’t move.

‘Maybe you could bring him home. Little Louis would love a dog.’

‘Will you stop?’

Lottie opened the front door with the key they’d recovered from the remnants of Lorcan Brady’s burned jeans. A pile of mail shifted as she shoved the door inwards. With gloved hands she picked it up and scanned through it.

‘Junk,’ she said, and dropped the pile on the table in the hall. It was already overflowing with rubbish.

‘Smells a bit rank in here,’ Boyd said, sniffing the air.

‘Damp,’ Lottie said. She walked into the room to her left. A sitting room at one time, it now looked like it had evolved into some kind of a den.

‘Easy to tell his mother isn’t around any more,’ Boyd said.

‘Poor woman. Maybe she’s better off.’ They’d discovered that Lorcan’s mum had died two years previously from cancer. There was no record of a father.

A small table with crooked legs stood in the centre of the room, cluttered with empty beer cans and a candle melted to its wick.

‘Yuck,’ Lottie said, looking through the detritus on the table. Crisp bags, chip bags, two half-eaten burgers. The carpet was littered with crumbs and dirt. The fireplace was piled high with fast-food wrappers, and a pizza box containing a few crusts lay on the floor. Shelves in the corner were stacked with beer cans rather than books. The arms of the chairs had served as ashtrays, with burns tracked along them.

‘No sign of drug paraphernalia,’ Boyd said.

‘As if it would be left out on view,’ Lottie said.

‘Everything else is.’

She examined one of the shelves. ‘Boyd, do you see a fish tank anywhere?’

‘No. Maybe in the kitchen. Why?’

‘Look at all that fish food.’ She counted twenty-seven containers.

‘Let’s have a look in the kitchen.’

The door was open and Lottie was about to step in but stopped. She put out a hand, preventing Boyd from entering.

‘I think we’ve found where Marian Russell was held,’ she said.

Boyd peered over her shoulder. ‘Jesus! It’s like something out of The Walking Dead.’

‘Contact SOCOs. I’m going to have a quick look upstairs.’

‘Don’t you think we should wait?’

‘You can. I need to know what type of lunatics we’re dealing with.’

Boyd pointed into the kitchen. ‘And that doesn’t tell you?’

Lottie hardly heard what he said. She was already at the top of the stairs. The landing floor was constructed of old wood, and above her head, a light bulb was screwed into a makeshift electrical fitting attached to a cross-beam. There was no ceiling. All the studding appeared to have been stripped away. Electrical cables ran along the beams. The light switch was missing screws and hung at an angle from the wall. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom.

Entering the nearest room, Lottie deduced it had been Lorcan’s mother’s. Untouched since the day she died, most likely. Mounds of dust had collected on the gold satin bedspread. A yellow-ochre hue sliced the room in two, escaping from the space between the closed curtains. She shut the door and entered the second room.

The smell hit her. Rancid dirty clothes. She held a gloved hand to her mouth. Used condoms were strewn across the bare wooden floor, lying among dust and discarded beer cans. A jumbled mound of filthy sheets was scrunched up on top of the mattress, and the velour headboard was covered with cigarette burns. A chest of drawers stood under the window, and Lottie braced herself for the trek across the floor, expecting at any minute for vermin to scuttle out from beneath the bed.