The Silent Dead (Paula Maguire 3) (12 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Extreme grief had a look about it. It was like being very tired or very hungover. Your movements slowed down, your eyes heavy and blinking, as if the world had gone into slow motion. It was a look common to the families of the Mayday dead.

On arriving at Ann Ward’s house, Paula was surprised to find the place full of people. Then she remembered – it was Easter Monday, which had almost entirely passed her by. The door was opened by a middle-aged man holding a toddler on his shoulders, chocolate smeared round its face. ‘You must be the police. I’m Sean Ward, come in.’

Paula was trying to place everyone as they were led through to a kitchen/living room full of adults and children, who all stared at her bump. Sean was the other son – the one who wasn’t the father of the baby who’d been killed. Both the child and his grandfather had been called Patrick Ward.

Ann was there, a child of about three sleeping half in her arms, half on the sofa. The child was sucking her thumb while the house around her rang with shouts and screams and the low-level hubbub of chatter. Open Easter eggs were much in evidence. A crowd of young women were in the kitchen doing things with cling film-wrapped dishes. ‘Would you take something to eat?’ said one to Paula and Guy as they were led in.

‘No thank you.’

‘Clear over there,’ said Ann to a boy of ten or so who was engrossed in an iPad game. ‘Turn that ould thing off and let the lady sit down. Go out and play.’

He went, grumbling, and Paula sat down on the sofa beside the other, sleeping child, who stirred, fidgeting. Guy perched on a stool. Ann wore the same boot-faced expression as always. ‘So you’ve questions to ask, do you.’

‘Yes, but is this a bad time? We don’t want to interrupt the party.’

Ann seemed surprised. ‘There’s no party. This is Patrick’s family, and it’s only right they’re here to see what you have to say.’

‘All right.’ Guy looked about him – people were carrying on their conversations, and a seemingly endless conveyor belt of children ran in and out from the garden where a trampoline was drawing shrieks and howls. ‘Should I just—’

‘Mary!’ Ann shouted. A pale, very young-looking woman detached from the gaggle in the kitchen and came over, leaning on the arm of the sofa. ‘This is my daughter-in-law,’ Ann said. ‘She’s the mother of wee Patrick.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Guy. The woman didn’t react.

‘Wee Patrick’s daddy is in the garden,’ Ann went on. ‘He won’t talk to you. Patrick Senior and myself, we’d two boys and three girls. All these –’ she indicated the house and the hordes of people in it – ‘these are our family. Every single person here lost a father or grandfather that day, and a nephew or a cousin or a child.’ Mary Ward dropped her head but said nothing.

‘We understand that,’ Guy began.

She fixed him with a glare. ‘Do you? Then I have to wonder why you’d come round here trying to help the people who took our hearts and smashed them.’

‘We have to ask all the families,’ said Guy. ‘We just want to rule people out, then we can leave you alone.’

‘And it’s alibis you’re wanting, is it?’ She made the word sound ridiculous. ‘Well, I do mornings at Victim Support in town and I’d have been in the office that day. You can check with them. Same with all my family. We’ve all jobs, all hard-working people. I’m sure you can follow that up easily enough.’

‘Thanks,’ said Guy, making notes. Paula was sure it was just to give him something to do. ‘And I understand you’ve been secretary of the group since it began?’

‘I used to be a school secretary,’ she said, ‘so I know what’s what. I do the minutes and make sure we follow the law, and keep track of the bank accounts and compensation and all that. Some people weren’t too good at filling in the forms, you see.’

The child on Ann’s lap stirred again, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. ‘Who’s these people, Granny?’

‘Never you mind. Go to your mammy.’ She passed the little girl over to Mary with surprising strength, and Mary walked the child off to the garden, still without a word.

Ann saw Paula watching. ‘That one was born two years after we lost wee Pat. He was their first, God love them. He’d have been five now.’ It was too easy to imagine another child running around. ‘It was me made Mary leave him that day,’ Ann went on. ‘We were in town getting a wedding dress for my daughter Eileen, that’s her there in the pink top, and Mary came with us for the outing. She was bridesmaid. I said leave the wean with his granddad, he’ll only cry in the shop. So big Pat took him for a stroll in the pram. Up to the High Street.’ She paused. ‘They were right beside the bin when it exploded. We never even found a trace of wee Pat. Only one wee bootee – it was blue, it had cars on it. So we knew it was his.’ She pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘Well. I’ll do what I can to help, I’m sure. What is it you’ll be wanting?’

Guy couldn’t seem to speak for a moment. ‘Minutes of all the meetings, please. Anything you have. Activities of the compensation scheme, and ideally alibis we can check for all your family.’

Ann gave him a steely gaze. ‘Do you have family, Inspector?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded. Her eyes passed over Paula’s bump without comment. Paula drew her hands tightly around it, protective. ‘Well,’ said Ann. ‘I hope you’ll remember what some people lost that day. Not all the families are doing that well. Remember that.’

She got up, and so did they, taking their cue to go. Another child ran in, this one a girl with ginger hair. ‘Granny, Granny, Bobby fell off the swing!’

‘And is he all right?’

‘Aye, he’s laughing.’

‘Well, that’s OK then.’ She began walking, hands on the child’s back, batting her outside. She reached into a desk by the door and took out a pile of exercise books – A4, red covers, lined inside. She handed them to Guy, who made a show of putting them in his briefcase. ‘I haven’t had a chance to type them all up, but I’ve neat handwriting so you should be grand. Is that all you’re needing for now?’

Paula glanced at them very quickly – not the same hand as the notes in the mouths; Ann’s writing was spiky and neat. But the notebooks looked identical to the one found in the caves. She felt she had to say something more. ‘How long were you married, Ann? You and Patrick Senior?’

Ann stood in the doorway, screened in sunlight, her family moving around her like the parts of a clock. ‘We’re still married,’ she said. ‘They couldn’t take that away from us, at least. Anyway, I’d best be getting on now. Goodbye, Inspector, Miss Maguire.’

And she went out into the sun, shouting was Bobby OK and didn’t she say that trampoline would only end in tears?

At the end of the week they’d heard countless statements of unendurable loss, recounted in matter-of-fact tones by the flesh and blood relatives of the dead. Mothers who’d seen their babies blown up. Parents bereft of children. Husbands and wives living on without the other half of themselves. Every time Paula closed her eyes she saw them: the stoic widowers of Rita and Colette; the extended family of Penny Garston, the oldest victim, who’d been killed while out buying a Christening card for her newest grandchild; Arthur Jones, grandfather of ten-year-old Daniel, who couldn’t stop the tears trickling down his face at the mention of the dead child. It was overwhelming. Anna Kennedy, shakily defiant, explaining what a good man her husband Tom had been, all three of them sitting there thinking about how he’d been found burned alive, still holding the hand of Lisa McShane in the car park behind the petrol station.

At the home of Siofra Connolly’s family, her mother and father and grown-up brother and sister described how every year they were visited from Tours by the family of Siofra’s French penfriend Monique, who’d died alongside her on the day of the bombing. Monique had been spending a fortnight with them and as it was her last day, Siofra’s brother Liam had taken the girls into town to see some of the traditional Irish culture in the form of the Orange parade. The girls had died side by side in the newsagent’s, blown right through the window and into the street. Monique had still been holding the can of Fanta she was about to pay for.

‘They should have been strung up,’ her brother Liam muttered, pounding one fist into another. A builder, he was the young man in the paint-stained clothes Paula had seen at the meeting. He’d echoed Dominic Martin’s words; was that a coincidence?

‘Were you hurt yourself, Liam?’

He stared at her. He was no more than twenty-five, she was sure, but his blue-grey eyes looked ancient. There was a small fleck of red paint in his stubble. ‘I’d gone down the street to buy some cans. Told the girls I’d meet them after – ’cept I never did. Our Siofra died and I was just one street away. Only had cuts and bruises myself, and she was . . . well, they said she went quick. I just hope that’s true.’

‘I’ll always blame myself,’ said Siofra’s mother, in the matter-of-fact tone all the families seemed to use for their loss. ‘If that wee French girl hadn’t come here she’d be safe and well in France. She’d be twenty-one now, same as Siofra. Maybe they’d have stayed friends. Anyway, her family doesn’t blame us, they said. Lovely people, they are. Come over every year to lay a wreath at the site.’

Before they left, Siofra’s sister Aine displayed her two-year-old son and said how much she wished Siofra had met him. ‘She’d have been a great auntie, she loved kids.’

The message was clear: we’re good people, we’re the victims here. You need to leave us alone with our grief.

Paula and Guy went to his car, both stiff and weary. He scrolled through his BlackBerry as they walked, made a noise of annoyance. ‘Christ.’

‘What is it?’

‘Dominic Martin – he’s reported his van stolen. Just when I’d persuaded Corry to search it.’

‘For God’s sake. He couldn’t have known, could he?’

‘I don’t see how. And we’ve found out nothing useful this week. A total waste of time.’ Guy dropped the phone into his pocket, frustrated. ‘I’ll drop you home,’ he said, exhaustion sounding in his voice. ‘Take the rest of the day off, will you? Get some rest. It’s been a tough week.’

She buckled herself in. ‘It has that. What are you going to do?’

‘Oh, another meeting.’

‘With the Chief Constable?’

‘In Belfast, yes.’

She watched him closely. He didn’t look at her, staring out at the road. She opened her mouth to ask him what was going on, then shut it again. Maybe sometimes it was better not to know.

Paula was in her thirties, and weeks off giving birth, but standing in Mrs Flynn’s porch made her feel seven again, sent round by her mother with an apple tart or flapjack or something to take to ‘the ould busybody’, as Margaret had called her. She’d finally given in to guilt and called on her neighbour, at the end of the long, fruitless week talking to the relatives. Her mind turned over and over with a screensaver of faces: victims, the helpless dead, the grieving left behind. They were no closer to finding Catherine Ni Chonnaill or the others, and all she’d done was cause more grief to people who’d already suffered the worst. At least she could visit her neighbour, do a small act of kindness. She knew it wouldn’t make her feel any better, though.

It took a long time for the door to be answered. She could see Mrs Flynn through the glass of the door, fumbling with the chain. ‘Ye-es?’ The large eyes blinked behind glasses.

‘How are you, Mrs Flynn? Dad asked me to drop in on you. Eh . . . it’s Paula.’ She was never sure if people would remember her or not, she’d been so young when she left.

‘Wee Paula?’

‘That’s me.’ She was a good foot taller than the shrunken old woman, but no matter.

The chain had come off now, so she interpreted this as an invitation to go in and followed Mrs Flynn into the front room. The house was laid out just like theirs, except this one was stifling from the gas fire and smelled like a chemist. She insisted on making a cup of tea, which took ages, leaving Paula in the living room staring round at the family pictures, the Mass cards, the cheap glass figurines. Was this how her father would have been, had she not come back to Ballyterrin? Sitting alone, with only pictures of a child across the water, the ticking clock, waiting for someone who was never coming home?

‘Here you go.’

‘Thanks, lovely.’ The milk was on the turn, bits floating in the tea. Paula made a mental note to buy her some groceries and drop them off. ‘How’s Mark and Kelly?’

‘Oh, they’re well.’ She reeled off a list of their achievements – Mark was an accountant; Kelly had married a lawyer and they had three children, all doing well at some London private school. Paula remembered now she had never much liked Mrs Flynn, a fussy woman who’d never stopped blowing even then about her Mark and her Kelly. She remembered one time, kissing Aidan in his car outside on the street, only to see Mrs Flynn’s pale face peering out of the upstairs window. The memory gave her a lurch.

‘So you’re back then?’

Paula tuned in to the wavery narrative. ‘Oh yes, I’ve been back a while now.’

‘And you’re married? Your daddy never said.’ She nodded to the bump.

‘Eh – yes.’ It was easier than explaining.

‘English fella, is he?’

‘That’s right.’ Luckily Mrs Flynn still preferred to talk rather than listen, and didn’t ask what the imaginary husband was called. Joe, she’d decided, or Jim. A straightforward kind of guy. Probably wore jumpers.

‘And they never found your mammy after all that time.’

Paula froze. People did this sometimes, casually mentioning it, as if determined to show it didn’t faze them. Otherwise they didn’t mention it at all. She wasn’t sure which she disliked more. ‘Um – no, they never did.’

‘The peelers never came back to see me either. I thought they would.’

She frowned. ‘You mean – you didn’t give a statement?’

‘Of course I did, pet, sure I saw the whole thing, the men knocking on the door. They’re just wee boys playing soldiers, I wasn’t afraid.’

The tick of the clock seemed very loud, the spaces between it just the same as always, even though time had somehow slowed. ‘Mrs Flynn – I’m sorry, but we were always told none of the neighbours saw anything. Your statement wasn’t in the file.’