At last Carol had no more tears. She slumped against Melissa, exhausted. ‘I’m sorry,’ she croaked.
‘No need for that. I promise, you will not sink this low again. You’re here, and that’s because this process is working. You trust me, don’t you?’
Carol thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘I think so, yes.’
‘Now you have to extend that trust to yourself.’ Melissa gave her a last hug then helped her to her feet. ‘I have another patient right now,’ she said. ‘Before you drive anywhere, I want you to rest and to do a full set of your exercises. We have a room upstairs where you can lie down and sleep for a while.’
Carol followed her out through reception, where a middle-aged man slouched in a chair, glowering. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment, Pete,’ Melissa said, leading the way upstairs to a tiny room furnished with a day bed and a side table. ‘Stay here as long as you need,’ she said. ‘But before you leave, promise me you’ll do your exercises.’
Meek as a child now, Carol nodded. ‘Thank you.’ She sat down as suddenly as if her legs had given way. ‘I thought I’d never find sleep again when I came here in the middle of the night. I think I was mistaken.’
Melissa gave her most reassuring smile. ‘Be kind to yourself, Carol. You deserve kindness.’ And she left Carol, refusing to allow herself a moment’s doubt that her patient would indeed find her way back to a version of herself with much less pain.
52
Most of the earliest texts on offender profiling insisted on dividing serial offenders into ‘organised’ and ‘disorganised’. It was a binary that failed to stand up to any degree of close scrutiny. Serial offenders generally exhibit behaviour that falls into both of these areas of distinction.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
Paula navigated Shannon Airport on automatic pilot, following the same signs as everyone else, clearing passport control effortlessly. ‘Make the most of it before Brexit fucks everything up,’ the young woman beside her in the line muttered. Paula emerged in the arrivals hall to be confronted by a man in a bottle green suit with shoulders like a prop forward and a shock of bright ginger hair waving a sign that read DI MCINTYRE, as if Diana were her first name.
‘I’m McIntyre,’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming to pick me up.’
He beamed at her and extended a hand that completely enveloped hers. ‘Detective Sergeant Fintan McInerny,’ he announced in a voice that needed no PA system. ‘I’m a regional detective based in Galway. At your service, ma’am.’
Paula winced. Like Carol Jordan, she hated the formal address. It made her feel like an irrelevant old lady. ‘Skip the ma’am,’ she said. ‘Paula will do.’
He looked pained. ‘My boss is a bit of a stickler. He wouldn’t like that.’
Paula cracked a smile. ‘Just go with “inspector” then, Sergeant.’
He grinned back at her. ‘I’ve got the car right outside.’ He reached for her overnight backpack. ‘Can I take that?’
She let him. Feminism was all very well, but there was no need to suffer for it. Sergeants were called ‘bagmen’ for good reason. And McInerny looked as if he could tote her bag with his pinkie.
He was true to his word. Immediately outside the terminal a shiny four-by-four, elegant as a rhino, sat on double yellow lines with a uniformed garda standing next to it. He nodded to McInerny and walked away. They were out of the airport and on to the M18 motorway in a matter of minutes. There was no dawdling in McInerny’s driving; he overtook like a fly half dodging a full back, coming right up on the car in front before swerving dramatically into the outside lane. Paula, who hadn’t been in the West of Ireland since a very damp camping trip in her early twenties, was pleasantly surprised not to be dawdling along one of the country roads she’d travelled then.
As if reading her mind, he said, ‘Have you visited here before?’
‘So long ago it feels like a past life experience. A lot of Guinness, a lot of live music and a lot of rain is what I mostly remember.’
‘Nothing much has changed except the roads have got better and so’s our economy. It’s a shame it’s raining now, this is a grand drive when you can see it.’
‘Maybe it’ll clear up.’
‘I think it’s set in for the day. But you’re not here to see the view, are ye? Nuns, is it?’
‘Just the one. She used to be the Mother Superior of a convent in Bradesden, just outside Bradfield.’
‘I went to Bradfield once. My cousin married a lad from there. To be honest, I don’t remember much about it. The reception was in an Irish club and it was more Irish than anywhere I’ve ever been in my life, if you take my meaning? So this nun, you think she’d been abusing the children in her care?’
‘It looks that way. It’s hard to track down the former residents. They were in care for the kind of reasons that don’t tend to lead to stable regular lives. But what we have so far is one key witness statement about girls being beaten and psychologically tortured.’ Paula stared out of the window. ‘And around forty skeletons buried under the front lawn.’
McInerny whistled. ‘That’s not something that happens by accident.’
‘The trouble is it’s hard to prove abuse. There’s no physical evidence of cause of death. And we’ve got the convent priest basically shrugging and saying, “children die”.’
‘And despite all the terrible things that have been coming out about what nuns and priests have been doing with the children and young people in their care over the years, there are still plenty of people who absolutely refuse to believe it. My nana, she’s one. She thinks it’s all a pack of lies from people
