Long after a body had been buried, those scents carried on telling tales. It made perfect sense to Alvin that Paco and his handler had been called in. Scientists were working on a machine that would be even more sensitive than the dogs, but that was a long way off yet. There were only a handful of cadaver dogs in the whole country; he supposed Paco was based closest to hand. Given the discovery of so many human remains, it would have been negligent not to examine the rest of the convent grounds just in case there were even more.
He thought about going over to say hello, but decided it wouldn’t be welcome while dog and handler were working. But he’d move a little closer and watch them for a while. He was intrigued to see the dog quartering the area, nose to the ground then rising to sniff the air, then back to snuffle at the grass and the earth.
Alvin had been watching for less than fifteen minutes when Paco’s behaviour altered suddenly. The dog’s hindquarters dropped to the ground and he began to growl. Four deep barks, then a pause. Four more barks, and Rivera was at his side, feeding him treats from a pouch on her belt. Alvin broke into a run and reached her as she was radioing through to the incident room.
‘The dog’s found something,’ he heard her say. ‘Round the side by the vegetable patch. I need a team here now.’
26
Children who have experienced extreme trauma in childhood often find it difficult to produce appropriate responses to trauma in later life. Sometimes they can’t cry. Often they are unable to articulate what they’re feeling and fear the consequences if they were to speak. It’s one of the reasons why victims of child sex abuse struggle with coming forward afterwards. They come to believe that the sky will fall if they speak the unspeakable.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
Every interview had a tipping point. On one side, triumph. On the other, car crash. Paula had always had an instinct for that moment. Carol Jordan had spotted her talent for drawing witnesses and suspects into revelations they hadn’t intended to make, and over the years, Paula had seized every opportunity to take courses to refine her skills. Elinor had once observed that when it came to the secrets we keep, she had no defences against her partner, but they both knew that was a tease. Somehow, when it came to worming information out of Elinor, and now Torin, Paula never quite succeeded as well as her track record at work might have suggested. Even the best have blind spots.
When it came to the battle of wills in the interview room, however, she felt confident that she could usually find a way to the truth. It was partly an empathetic understanding of what people needed to hear and partly her ability to make even the most defensive and suspicious individual believe she felt sympathy for them. There were occasions when she wished she could scrub the inside of her head after someone had divulged the dark perversions at the root of their lives. But she consoled herself that she was helping to clean the streets.
So she met Louise Brand’s frightened blinking with an even gaze. ‘You’ve been carrying this inside for a long time, Louise. It’s time to share the weight. I know you want to break your silence, and this is a safe place for you to do that. Nobody here is judging you. What do you mean when you say Sister Mary Patrick didn’t always know when to stop?’
Louise picked ferociously at the skin round her thumb. A jagged line of blood oozed out. ‘It was just what some girls said. You know what teenage girls are like. They pick up on something and nothing and spin a whole story out of it.’
‘It’s preyed on your mind all these years, though. There must have been something about what they said that made you think there was truth in it?’
Louise sighed, her eyes pleading. ‘Look, I don’t have any evidence. There were . . . incidents. This girl in my family group – they called us family groups, which was just laughable because so many of the girls came from dysfunctional families and now they’d been shunted into a so-called family that was every bit as fucked-up as what they’d left behind. Anyway, this girl in my family group, Jaya her name was, she got caught stealing food from the kitchen – which was fucked-up in itself because the food was so shit. But we were always on starvation rations, always hungry, so Jaya stole some bread rolls from the kitchen, only she got caught.’ She ran out of momentum and stopped.
Paula waited, then prompted her gently, ‘What happened to Jaya?’
‘Thou shalt not steal. Seventh Commandment. The nuns were shit hot on the Ten Commandments. It’s a pity the bible didn’t think of including, “Thou shalt not batter the living daylights out of the children in your care.”’ Bitter anger was creeping into Louise’s voice now. ‘One of the nuns hit her so hard with a rolling pin she broke her arm.’
Medical records, Paula thought. There had to be medical records. ‘Did they take Jaya to hospital?’
Louise made a scornful noise. ‘Did they buggery! A couple of the nuns were trained nurses, they dealt with everything in-house. Except a couple of times. One girl had a burst appendix, she’d been complaining of stomach pains for days but they paid no bloody attention. Another one – I don’t know exactly what happened but she was asthmatic and she got a bad chest
