I tread carefully. I can’t afford to scare him off. ‘Suspicions about what?’
He moves out of the light and flicks away his cigarette. He lowers his voice as if he’s about to tell me a secret. ‘Those girls all had one thing in common. The Suzi Lake Centre.’
Excitement makes me lean closer. ‘You put a photo of the centre in one of your briefings from late ’94 alongside an article that was censored—’
‘Bastards,’ Patrick rasps. The spooked expression is back in his eyes again.
‘What was the Suzi Lake Centre?’
A bony finger taps away on his thin thigh as he answers. ‘It was a private organisation that claimed to educate and give opportunities to young women. It ran all kinds of courses to empower the young ladies. “Empower” my big toe.’
‘You think there was something sinister going on?’
Patrick jams into my space with such speed I nearly lose my seat on my perch. His eyes are large and wild. ‘What you’ve got to remember, girl, is that some of those so-called community organisations were as dodgy as a sinner in heaven. Bragging and claiming to be doing good deeds while behind closed doors they were a cesspit of rotten decay.’ His nose sniffs the air. ‘Places of destruction and death.’
Death. My heart thuds with dread. ‘Did you have evidence that the Suzi Lake Centre was harming the women it was meant to be helping?’
He shuffles back, mouth drooping with displeasure. ‘What I’m telling you is this: the families all had the same stories to tell. Their young women went off to the Suzi Lake Centre and then were never seen again.’
Then I remember what The Walsh Briefing stated: They were all last seen at CENSORED.
My brows pull down. ‘When the women disappeared surely their families must have asked at the centre—’
‘’Course they did, girlie,’ he snaps emphatically. ‘Sheryl’s brother and a friend of Amina’s gran went down there. The Suzi Lake Centre denied knowing anything. Said they never saw the women on the days they disappeared.’
I think for a moment while Patrick mauls another cigarette. ‘How are you so sure that the centre wasn’t telling the truth?’
Patrick turns to me with feverishly bright eyes, smoke hovering over his face. ‘The families asked me to go down there and get answers on their behalf. Now, if they’ve got nothing to hide why was the manager rude to me? Why did he tell me to sling my hook and naff off?’ A finger wags at me. ‘Why else would they run me off if they didn’t have something to hide. Eh?’
Sadly, I can well understand why they would run Patrick Walsh off and it will have had nothing to do with his investigative skills.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ he resumes, ‘because I was getting close to the truth.’
‘Which was?’ New hope sparks inside me.
Patrick wheezes loudly as he pulls in a ragged punch of smoke. ‘At first I thought the manager was the link man.’
‘Link man?’
‘You know. With them.’ He points to the sky.
What? Did I just miss something he said? I stare at him with miscomprehension. Then I get it. Ah! Them! Aliens and UFOs.
He launches in. ‘Usually, I’d say it was aliens.’ Patrick is dead serious. ‘But the MO in this case is all wrong for your usual extra-terrestrial extraction.’
My back teeth grind together. I wish he’d leave the aliens where they belong – in another galaxy. Inside, my conviction wilts. Am I wasting my time here?
But he’s my only lead. ‘If it wasn’t the aliens’ – did I really just say that? – ‘what happened to Hope, Amina, Sheryl and Veronica?’
He shakes his head, the tips of his shaggy hair flicking in the night. ‘I don’t know what happened to those women, but it was something horrible. And that centre was at the heart of it.’
Dejection presses down on me because the reality is that Patrick Walsh has no evidence that anything bad went on at the Suzi Lake Centre. And, honestly, I’m trying to square this with what I found out about Suzi Lake online. No one had a bad word to say about her, in fact she was portrayed as some type of superwoman. A very wealthy person who decided to spend her life helping others. Then again, what are the chances of all of the missing women being connected to a centre that bears her name?
So I ask, ‘If you’ve still got the centre manager’s details maybe I can pay him a visit?’
‘You can pay him a visit, all right,’ Patrick scoffs. Hope grows again. ‘He’s in the ground, girl. Buried six feet under with all the other rats for ten years now.’