The Lost Child (Detective Lottie Parker #3)(56)

‘Speaking of property,’ she said, ‘how come you never mentioned you owned the cottage?’

He eyed her up and down, his mouth hardening into a grimace. ‘You never asked.’

‘You should have said.’ Lottie ran her hand through her hair. He was succeeding in giving her the feeling of lice crawling around her scalp, taking hold of the roots of her hair. ‘If you own it, surely you know who rented it?’

‘I told you that already. I don’t know.’

‘I think you’re being very economical with the truth, Mr O’Dowd.’

‘And I think that if you’re not careful, you might end up jamming your service weapon to your own forehead.’

Gulping down a spurt of bile, Lottie lifted her hand and slapped him as hard as she could across his face. His proximity to her didn’t allow her to put any strength behind the blow, but it gave her a smidgen of satisfaction.

O’Dowd laughed, a grating-on-glass sound. ‘Assault along with trespassing. I think I have you sewn up nice and neatly now, Inspector.’

Boyd grabbed Lottie away from the farmer’s towering body. ‘We’re leaving.’

‘I’ll be lodging a complaint against you, Inspector. And don’t come back here unless you have a warrant.’

Lottie planted her feet so Boyd couldn’t pull her further away.

‘Tell us about the b—’ she began.

‘Lottie!’ Boyd forcibly seized her elbow and steered her towards the car. ‘Now isn’t the time. Okay?’

All fight left her body and she slumped onto the seat when Boyd opened the door. She looked out through the windscreen at O’Dowd. He rubbed a hand over his mouth and down the stubble of his chin. With his other hand he pinched the bridge of his nose and sneezed out a long snot before summoning phlegm from this throat. A globule of mucus landed on the hood of the car.

As Boyd reversed out of the yard, Lottie opened the door, leaned out and shouted, ‘You’re an ignoramus! You old fucker!’

The brakes screeched. She felt Boyd haul her back in before he leaned over and shut the door with a bang and sped from the farm.



* * *



From the first-floor window, Emma watched Mick O’Dowd fuming in his own yard. Should she have come down and opened the door when the detectives had knocked? But he’d told her to stay put. Plus his rabid dog was chained up at the bottom of the stairs, inside the front door. Definitely not going down there, she thought.

When she heard him below in the kitchen, she shrank further against the wall and pulled the old blanket up to her chin. The roughness of the wool grated against her cheek and she wanted to scream. Why hadn’t she done that when the guards were here? She didn’t know who she could trust. But she’d been told to trust O’Dowd, hadn’t she?

‘Girleen, I’ll put a few spuds in the pot and have a bite of dinner for you in a short while. That okay?’ His shout came up the stairs.

Emma nodded.

‘Are you up there?’

She heard the dog bark and a foot stamp on the bottom step.

‘Yes, yes. That’s grand, but I’m not hungry,’ she yelled back.

‘You have to eat, missy. Food for the body is food for the soul.’

She heard him laughing his sharp, clinking laugh on his way back down the stairs.

He hadn’t touched her. Not a finger had he laid on her, but she was now more scared of him than the others she’d originally been frightened of.

‘I’ve a bit of written work to do here, if you care to give me a hand while the dinner is cooking?’ She heard his voice echo up through the kitchen ceiling to her room.

‘In a minute, maybe,’ she said, and stuck her fist in her mouth to stop herself from screaming.

Was there anyone she could trust?





Forty-Eight





Lottie didn’t utter a word on the short drive back to the station. Her temper simmered just below the surface of her indignation.

As Boyd swung the car onto Main Street, she said, ‘He could’ve chopped her up and fed her to the cows or his dog. You saw that scythe and that… that rotor machine thing. Jesus, Boyd, we need that warrant.’

‘Calm down.’

‘You’re telling me to calm down? After that… that excuse for a man threatened me?’ She struggled to spin her words together in a coherent sentence.

‘You were out of order. You shouldn’t have hit him and he was within his rights to tell us to get off his property.’

Arms folded tightly, chin buried to her chest, Lottie smouldered.

‘If you keep that up,’ Boyd said, ‘there’ll be smoke coming out of your ears.’

‘We need to get a full description of the bicycle from Natasha.’ Lottie fumbled in her bag for her phone, then stopped. ‘Better still, drive over to the Kellys’ house. I’ll talk to her myself.’

‘We have a description back at the station,’ he said. ‘And you have to delegate. It’s impossible to do everything yourself.’

‘Go to Kelly’s. I need to talk to Natasha,’ she said abruptly.

He swung the car around the roundabout and headed in the direction of Carnmore.

Lottie seethed for the rest of the short journey. She thought of her own children and how she’d felt when Sean, and then Chloe, had gone missing. There really wasn’t anyone left to miss Emma, except her dad, and he could be a murderer. She took out her phone and called home. Just to hear they were all okay, that was all, she told herself.