Page 100 of The Altar Girls

‘You’ll have to be assessed and referred. Are you agreeable to that?’

‘I didn’t do anything wr—’

‘Stop it!’ Lottie’s voice echoed in the sterile cell.

‘Okay, okay. I did do wrong. But I did not kill my daughter. I loved her and I miss her. You have to believe me.’

‘I do.’ And in that moment, Lottie realised that she did believe the woman. ‘I believe that you loved her, at least.’

‘But not about other things?’

‘I need to ask you a few questions.’

‘Is Bethany really okay?’

‘Physically, yes.’

‘Okay. I should have a solicitor present, but go ahead and ask your questions.’

‘You didn’t notice Naomi was missing. That tells me she often didn’t come home from school. Where did she go those times? And I won’t accept that you didn’t know.’

‘I didn’t want to say it before because I knew it would look wrong. But it was innocent.’ Ruth kept her head down, her face shielded by a swathe of hair.

‘Where did she go?’

‘She was friends with that boy. He’s a good boy. He’s in her choir group. She sometimes went to his house after school to play computer games. His mother was always out at work, that’s why I didn’t tell you. That’s where I thought she was on Monday. At her friend Alfie’s house.’

Shit, Lottie thought. That put Alfie firmly in the frame for murder. ‘We found her body. Your little girl was dead. Why didn’t you tell us then?’

‘Because it made me look like a bad mother.’ Tears broke free from Ruth’s eyes and she sobbed into her hands. ‘I let my child go play with an older boy. I should have cared more.’

Lottie wasn’t about to judge the woman – she was in no position to throw the first stone – but she couldn’t help thinking Ruth could have saved her a lot of fruitless hours and kept Bethany from having to suffer the trauma of being taken and left in a smelly public toilet. Alfie was missing, and Lottie wondered if the boy was in trouble or had caused the trouble.

* * *

Sinead decided that rather than following the inspector, she would go home first. She was in such a hurry to get to her house that she didn’t even phone Carol to check if all was okay. Julian Bradley had unhinged something inside her and all she could think about was walking in her front door and hugging Annie.

Blinded by a fresh shower of snow beating against the windscreen, she tried to concentrate on the road. The street lights were casting eerie amber shadows on the vertical drift from the sky, and she took a corner ridiculously fast at the Dublin bridge. She realised too late that she’d gone through the red light and a car travelling out of town skimmed the rear passenger door.

She felt powerless to stop her car careening out of control.

She put her foot on the brake, knowing it was the wrong thing to do on ice but doing it anyhow. The skid jerked her body and the seat belt tightened across her chest. Twisting the steering wheel manically, she tried to halt an impact with the bridge.

The smash of steel against concrete was louder than anything she’d ever heard. She realised she was momentarily deaf before her head banged against the steering wheel and everything went black.

62

The accident investigation in Ballina was being run by the local garda traffic division with assistance from crash scene investigators. Boyd reached Ballina station in one hour fifteen minutes. He’d had a few hairy moments as he sped along the road, but he arrived in one piece, parked the car on double yellows and ran up the salted steps.

Detective John Duncan met him in an airless office. He was no more than thirty years old, small and squat, his hair too long and his face too tired. He recounted what they had learned so far, which wasn’t more than a car in the river and a dead woman.

‘Was she dead before the crash?’

‘What do you mean?’

Boyd’s mind was in overdrive. Jackie associated with criminals here and in Spain and it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that she had been murdered.

‘Simple question,’ he answered brusquely. ‘Did she die in the crash or was she already dead?’