Read A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4) for Free Online

hungry,’ said Corry. ‘That’s strange.’
    ‘This is beyond me, Maguire,’ said Gerard irritably. ‘Women and food. Just eat if you’re hungry, then don’t if you’re too fat. Easy.’
    ‘I hope you don’t talk to your girlfriend like that,’ Corry scolded him.
    ‘She’s all right. She can eat what she wants, she’s a fast metabolism. She says she never diets.’
    ‘How long is it now you’re together?’
    ‘Year and a half.’
    Corry did her trademark eye-roll. ‘God love you, Monaghan, you’ve got a lot to learn.’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘Nothing. Let’s talk to her friends, see if we can get the name of a boyfriend, if there is one.’
    ‘There’ll be one. There always is.’ Paula peered at the photos, the dismembered body parts. The angles seemed impossible – a stomach curving in on itself, legs that didn’t meet in the middle. She looked down at herself, the roll she’d never quite shifted from her middle after Maggie’s birth. How thin could you get, before you’d actually disappear?
    ‘I better tell Willis,’ said Corry, shutting the kitchen door. ‘This is adding up to suicide, right?’
    ‘But the blood in the church, and the relic missing? The photo of Yvonne?’
    ‘I know. Which is why I’ve asked Willis to make it high-risk. Then we can put all the resources we have on it.’
    ‘Will he give it to Serious Crime?’ said Gerard, sounding wary. He preferred the more straightforward cases, scumbags to be hauled in and banged up. Simple.
    Corry shook her head. ‘I want to hang onto it. He’s enough on his plate and she’s only missing for now.’
    Until they found a body, that was. Paula looked around the cottage. ‘Is that it? Two and a bit rooms?’
    ‘There’s a wee garden outside.’
    ‘Can I see?’
    Corry shrugged and led her out of the side door to an overgrown back lawn. At the bottom was a shed. It would have been the outside loo at one point. Paula tramped down, the dying weeds crunching underfoot. There was no sound but the birds in the trees, and far away, the noise of a farm vehicle droning over the land. The door had not one but two padlocks on it. New and shiny.
    ‘This is weird. Nothing else is in such good nick.’ The door itself was old and rotten.
    ‘I’ll ask the search team to get a warrant.’ Corry beckoned to Gerard. ‘See if you can get in there, Monaghan, OK?’
    ‘Can we not get a DC on it?’ He lowered his BlackBerry. Now he’d made DS, Gerard was at pains to stay ahead of the pack.
    ‘I’m sure you can sort it. Let’s get back to the station and sort our paperwork, and then we better go to Oakdale. I think this lot are more concerned about the relic than they are about poor Alice.’
    Paula wondered was Corry saying ‘poor’ because Alice was gone, or because she’d clearly been an unhappy, suffering girl. As they left the cottage she saw Corry pull the front door shut on its old-fashioned latch. ‘It wasn’t locked?’
    ‘No. She left it open, Garrett says. It didn’t have a lock.’
    ‘Trusting.’
    ‘Well, it’s in the middle of nowhere. Who’d be coming round here?’
    But Alice was gone all the same.

Chapter Five
     
    On the screen were two pictures. In one, a woman was dying in a famine in Sudan. Flies crawled on her face, made ageless by starvation. In the other, another woman was almost as thin, the skin stretched over the bones of her face. Only difference: she was smiling. On a website that gave tips on how to lose weight, hide your eating habits from friends and family. How to cheat at weigh-ins. How to never eat in public. How to die, slowly and willingly.
    Paula sighed and clicked out of her research, feeling the weight of the internet press on her. The Famine. The hunger strikes. Anorexia. It was all too much to process. There were already some news stories online about Alice disappearing, and the phones in the station had been ringing since their return from the church. She turned again to the picture of Alice which