Page 2 of The Altar Girls

The woman shook her head, grey curls swishing droplets around the freezing air. She tugged her open coat across her chest with a white-knuckled hand, and with her other hand pointed behind the church. Her eyes were wide, like footballs, he thought. Silly old cow.

‘What’s wrong, Mrs Coyne? Did you lose something? Want me to take a look for you? I can, you know, but the weather’s so bad…’ His voice trailed off as the elderly lady shoved by him. On feet that seemed even steadier than his own, she almost ran through the churchyard and disappeared into the blizzard.

Shaking his head, Alfie made to follow her. His own feet were slipping now, and he wished he’d worn his Timberlands. Something about the old lady’s eyes had spooked him. Mam said Mrs Coyne used to work in the church office before she became the choir chaperone. Her mind isn’t what it used to be, she said. But why was she out in a snowstorm?

He glanced back to where the woman had pointed. Curiosity was part of his gene set. The other kids called his mother a nosy parker. That was after the time she told their neighbour, Mrs Walsh, that her husband was down in Cafferty’s with a young one half his age. Alfie smiled because he thought it was funny the way Mrs Walsh had shouted at his mother, but then he frowned. It wasn’t a nice thing, was it, what his mam had done?

Still, his curiosity was piqued, and he followed Mrs Coyne’s footprints, which were fading fast in the falling snow.

It was dark behind the cathedral, with only the light from the sacristy stained-glass window casting rainbow shadows on the white snow.

Then Alfie saw what had scared Mrs Coyne. At first he was fascinated by the sight, but then he thought he should scream. It somehow clogged in his throat, though, and only a low, puppy-like bark came out of his mouth. His exhaled breath coloured the air in the light from the sacristy window as he heard footsteps come around the corner behind him.

Then he did scream.

4

It wasn’t an ideal way to spend a bitterly cold night. Approaching eight p.m. and the office radiators were on the blink again. Frost glistened on the inside of the window. Detective Inspector Lottie Parker tightened her son’s Liverpool FC scarf around her neck and blew on her corpse-like fingers.

‘When you think of the fortune spent on renovating the building,’ she said, ‘they could have extended their purse strings to upgrading the heating system.’

‘This always happens with extreme weather,’ Detective Larry Kirby replied. ‘Put your coat on. It’ll keep you warm.’

She noticed Kirby was bundled up in a large padded jacket.

‘It’d be no use to me when I have to go outside,’ she said, recalling one of her mother’s many quotes of old. Back before Rose developed dementia. There were still some good days, but those were dwindling. Rose regularly inhabited a world Lottie could not understand. It broke her heart to even think about her mother and her twenty-year-old daughter, Chloe, who had agreed to live with her. Short-term only, Chloe regularly reminded Lottie.

The ongoing saga with her mother was one of the reasons Lottie buried herself in work. There was another reason why she was still in the office on this cold night. An eight-year-old girl, Willow Devine, had been reported missing earlier that day. She glanced at the child’s photograph. Head thrown back in laughter, two front teeth missing, her long blonde hair windswept. Damn.

‘Did McKeown catch anything on the CCTV footage from the school?’ Though he was a thorn in everyone’s side, Lottie depended on Detective Sam McKeown for that type of work. Even so, she’d tried to get him assigned back to Athlone, but so far Superintendent Deborah Farrell had resisted. She had yet to uncover why the super stood up for McKeown.

‘Not a thing yet. The school principal issued a text message to all the parents around eight this morning telling them they would not be opening up, but Willow’s mother says she didn’t see it until she got home after she’d dropped her daughter at the school lane. That was around eight forty. By the time she saw the text and returned to the school, it was close to nine, she says, and there was no sign of Willow.’

‘I can’t understand how she didn’t twig that no one else was around before abandoning her child at the gate.’

‘Bit harsh there, boss. Willow’s three-year-old sister, Harper, was acting up in the car at the time, and she was distracted.’

‘That’s what she says.’

Lottie leaned back in the chair, stretched her arms out and yawned, swallowing air filled with the stale aroma of McDonald’s chicken nuggets. Was there ever an hour in the day when Kirby wasn’t eating?

It had been a fruitless day of dead ends. The little girl seemed to have disappeared into thin air. In a blizzard.

She almost fell off the chair as she stretched again and it moved. She realised it was on wheels and that she was sitting at Boyd’s desk. He’d taken a few days off. Again. Still concentrating his dwindling energy on the search for his eight-year-old son. Sergio had been snatched away by Boyd’s ex-wife, Jackie, over three months ago. No credible sighting of either of them since. She knew it was eating him up from the inside out.

‘Boss?’ Kirby chewed on something she would class as inedible. ‘Go home.’

‘Why don’t you go home?’ The long day injected ill temper into her tone. ‘I’m sure Amy doesn’t like you being out all day and night.’

‘I had to drop her back to the rehabilitation hospital in Dun Laoghaire yesterday evening.’

‘Oh, has she had a setback?’ In August, Kirby’s new girlfriend had suffered horrific injuries at the hands of a deranged killer, resulting in a badly broken leg. Lottie didn’t have the guts to ask about the mental torment the young woman must be enduring.

Kirby sighed, wiped his greasy hands on his trousers, then nervously patted his shirt pocket for the cigar he kept there. ‘The leg is causing her so much pain. The cold weather made it worse. It’s got to the stage where all the progress she’s made is in danger of being reversed. They’re keeping her for a week to see what can be done.’

‘That’s tough.’

He smiled sadly. ‘It could be a whole lot worse.’ He tapped his pocket again, leaving a streak on the pink cotton. ‘Will I go talk to Willow’s mother?’

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