The Lost Child (Detective Lottie Parker #3)(68)

‘And Sean and Katie? Are they okay?’

‘Mum, you need to ask them, not me.’

Lottie gave Chloe one last squeeze and watched her beautiful, intelligent daughter walk tall into the sitting room.

Yes, she really must talk with Sean and Katie.

But first she needed to sleep.





Sixty-One





Alexis sat at the head of the long table, where she could see her seated guests. They lined the length of it, eight on each side. Sixteen of the most influential people in New York’s computer gaming industry. The place that had been set at the end of the table, facing her, remained empty. As it had done for the last few weeks.

But her child would return. Once things were sorted.

It was an important time. A busy time. She needed to ensure she sorted out the mess in Ragmullin. A mess that was now threatening the world she had spent her life building up. A mess that she had fled from forty years ago, hoping she was leaving it all behind forever. She should have known that the death of an inconsequential garda sergeant in 1975 would one day resurrect itself; that skeletons would fall out of closets and come knocking on her door. Bones had been resurrected, and it was then her worries began in earnest.

Not that his death had much to do with her. No. It was what had happened the year before it that caused her intense worry. But after the discovery of the boy’s bones last January, Alexis knew it was the one thing that could unhinge the old woman to reveal what she might or might not have suspected for years. And Alexis needed to be in control of all possibilities. Plans had been put in place. But as it turned out, she’d been blindsided. No matter what happened now, she had to make sure her child never found out.

As laughter mingled with the rise and fall of the chatter around the table, Alexis tuned it out and devised the next steps she must take.

This time the past would stay buried.

She could not risk losing the child.

Once was enough for that to happen.

She would make damn sure it would not happen again.





The Eighties





The Child





That’s what they call me. The Child.

Do they not know I have a name? I did have one once. So long ago, I don’t even remember it.

Doesn’t matter now. I can be who or what I want to be.

I’m working on the farm now. A farm? Ha, that’s a laugh. I even laugh when I say it. It’s just a patch of ground within the high walls surrounding the asylum. Yes, I can call it an asylum now. Because that is what it is. This is where I have been abandoned. I’ll most likely die within these walls.

But today I am outside.

Johnny Joe shows me how to sow herbs. Herbs that heal, he says. Pity he didn’t use them on himself. The mad old man with his crooked brown fingers and his smoke-ridden cough.

I don’t think about my mother much any more. The voices have stopped calling her name. Maybe she is dead. Or maybe someone released her. Why didn’t they release me? Has everyone forgotten that I’m here? I asked a nurse one day when I’d be going home. She laughed and mussed up my hair.

‘You’re never going home.’

‘Why not?’

‘Your home was burned to the ground, you mad child.’

‘I’m not mad. Not like the others. I just want to get out.’

‘The only way you can get out of here, child, is when whoever signed you in comes back for you and signs you out.’

‘Why haven’t they come back?’

‘I think they’ve forgotten you exist.’

And she walked away from me.

I think of that conversation as I place another seed into the gnarled old hands of Johnny Joe. I watch his fingers curl over the little source of life before he drops it on the dry earth. I spread the clay over the seed with my fingers and dip them into the pot for another one. We repeat this process six hundred and sixty-five times before I start to cry.

He looks up at me, the whites of his eyes yellow. He grabs my hand and raises it to his lips. I think he’s going to bite my fingers off. But no, he gently kisses the tips of them.

‘No crying in here, child. The time for crying is done. The devil is all around us. Crying won’t keep him away. He is in your very soul. Now back to work.’

I hand him the final seed.

‘Six hundred and sixty-six.’





Day Five





Sixty-Two





The morning awoke with a sepia sky, the clouds low and watery. The storm died with the night but it left a trail of destruction in its wake.

Lottie was in the station before any of the others. No sign of McMahon, either. She flicked through the news on her phone app.

Farming land in the midlands had flooded; rivers had burst their banks and overflowed. There was a special report from Ragmullin. Cathal Moroney, with his flashy white teeth. The lower end of the town was now sinking in the waters of the river. The greyhound stadium was a mini lake; all racing cancelled for the foreseeable future. One picture showed mucky brown water streaming from the front of Carey’s electrical shop; a plastic-covered washing machine bobbing just inside the door. The council had a Boil Water notice in place as Lough Cullion, the drinking water supply, had been contaminated with run-off from surrounding farms.