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

again. Up, over, down, around. Of all the things that were lost, the relic seemed to be the only one he cared about.

Alice
    Today’s one of the days we aren’t allowed up. We wake up, we go to sleep, and in between we have to just lie here, looking at the ceiling. If you make a fuss, if you turn over in bed too much, then you get the bands.
    That makes them sound nicer than they are. Cuffs is what they are. Restraints. They’re made of a kind of Velcro that’s soft, but impossible to break. You don’t want to be in them, so you lie really still, but he’s always watching. Even a flicker of an eye, or breathing too deeply, or moving to scratch an itch, and he notices. Then you can cry and scream and beg and promise all you want, but it’s the cuffs. The woman helps him. We think she’s in love with him. She stinks of cheap perfume and sweat, and when he’s here her eyes follow him round the room. I can smell her breath as she straps me in. She doesn’t care if she hurts me.
    Please , I say. Please. I’ll be good.
    I might as well have said nothing. She doesn’t even look at me. Now my arms are pulled up over my head, my chewed fingers hanging over the cold metal bedhead. If I’m very bad, if I move or complain, it will be the ankle cuffs too. So I shut up. I stare at the ceiling and the brown stain where water has dripped through. It looks polluted. Ruined. It’s all I’m allowed to look at for the next ten hours, until it gets dark and we just look into the blackness with dry open eyes.
    Down the room, someone starts to scream. I can’t see who; my shoulders have seized up. The man and the woman rush to shut her up. I’ve already lost all feeling in my hands. It’s been ten minutes. There’s eleven hours and fifty more minutes to go.

Chapter Four
     
    ‘So Alice didn’t live on campus?’ They were walking down the hill at the back of the church, Corry’s heels getting stuck in the parched grass.
    ‘She did till about six weeks ago.’
    It seemed an odd place for a twenty-two year old. Your nearest neighbours would be the skeletons in the graveyard, and the yews around the church rustled and chattered, almost like they were whispering. Alice Morgan clearly didn’t scare easily.
    The lintel of the cottage was so low that Paula, at five foot ten, had to stoop to go in. Gerard Monaghan was loitering at the door, stabbing at his BlackBerry. Corry eyed him. ‘For the love of God, Monaghan, would you put your tie on right. Your neck’s not that thick.’
    They were technically the same rank now, which neither of them could get their heads around, but Gerard hadn’t lost the habit of deferring to her. He twitched his tie. ‘Nothing here. I’ve had a wee look in already.’
    ‘Well, let’s see anyway.’
    The cottage was just a living room with an open grate, in it a small pile of ashes; a modern kitchen, cold and ugly, and a sliver of bathroom with terrible seventies fittings. It reminded Paula of a bad B & B in the west of Ireland, the kind of place her parents used to take her on their holidays. Before everything. Alice seemed to have spent most of her time in the bed, which was dragged up to the fireplace in the living room, and heaped with books and paper. Baggy tracksuits and jumpers, even in the relative warmth of July. Paula glanced at one of the books. ‘The Paleo diet?’
    Corry rolled her eyes. ‘My Rosie came home the other day talking about that. She’s fourteen years old, for God’s sake. Here, don’t touch anything.’
    She took some gloves from her jacket. Paula snapped them on, examining the books more carefully. They were on two main themes – Irish history, or dieting. ‘Alice wasn’t overweight, was she?’
    ‘Hardly. Her description has her at five foot two and seven stone.’
    ‘Eating disorder?’
    ‘Most wee girls seem to have one now.’ Corry moved into the kitchen as Paula’s eye was caught by another book. Hunger in Ireland : From saints and visions to the famine