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

‘I told you.’ Guy had caught her before she fell. ‘Look, you’re not up to this. Sit down.’ He marched her to a tree stump. ‘I’ll get you some water.’

Paula acquiesced, breathing and blinking hard. His expression, she realised, was exactly the same one Aidan had adopted towards her, stoical and distant, with just a touch of resentment. Perfectly timed to remind her that, while the pregnancy had granted her a temporary reprieve, as soon as this baby was out, all three of them were going to have to find out which of the two men was the father.

Kira

When she woke up, she was covered in blood again. In that second when you’re still mostly asleep, when you’re sure everything you’ve dreamed is true – like when you look in a mirror and can’t recognise your own face – she could only see the blood all over her arms and feel it warm on her skin, going into her mouth even, metallic and hot.

Rose’s blood.

She put on the little light beside her bed. She’d tried to sleep with it on after what happened, but Mammy said she was too big for it, and always came in to turn it off. Mammy and her slept at different times now, as if they couldn’t both be awake at once. She imagined that even now, as she staggered up, heart hammering, Mammy’s eyes would be closing in front of the TV. She’d find her there when she got up for school, the bottle of vodka slumped so low it would be spilling on the carpet.

In the light she could see herself in the mirror. No blood. She’d just been crying in her sleep again, big, spurty tears that drenched her pyjamas. And her arms, it wasn’t blood on them, of course, it was the scars. She was glad about the scars, even though people made comments behind her back –
oh, poor wean, she was the one, you know the sister, blah blah.
She was glad of the scars because it showed she survived.

On her dresser was the photo of Rose and her. Rose was hugging her tight in it, the two of them on a sea wall down on the coast. After that they’d had salty chips and ice creams with flakes in, two each, because Rose said sure why not?

Today was the day. Today it was finally going to happen. She knew she wouldn’t sleep again, so instead she sat cross-legged on the carpet in the dark and wondered when it would start.

Chapter Two

‘Come on, everyone, shake a leg!’ It was Monday morning and the small team that made up the Missing Persons Response Unit was filing reluctantly into the conference room, cups of coffee in hand, suppressing yawns. It had been a long weekend – it had been a long week, in fact, ever since the disappearances.

Guy waited until they were settled. His deputy, Detective Sergeant Bob Hamilton, ex of the RUC, still of the Orange Order, was blowing his nose loudly on a cotton hankie, the others reluctantly shuffling papers and slumping in seats. Guy frowned. ‘Where’s Avril?’ He looked at Fiacra Quinn, a young Detective Garda from over the border who was their liaison with the South.

‘How would I know? Got her nose in some wedding magazine again, no doubt.’

‘Would you fetch her? We need to start.’

‘Monaghan can go,’ said Fiacra grouchily.

Gerard, sleeves rolled up and tie askew, gave a sort of grunt. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘Sorry, sorry!’ Finally in came Avril Wright, flustered and dropping papers, revealing the magazine she was carrying in among her briefing notes. A woman in lace and silk smiled out, radiant, and Avril hid it, blushing. The young and pretty intelligence analyst, who did her very best to overcome the disadvantage of being Bob’s niece, was getting married in the summer and had gone from being efficiency itself to an airhead with her nose never out of bridal magazines. Between her and Pat, Paula never wanted to hear the words ‘three-tier red velvet cake’ ever again. She herself was the sixth team member, though the bump of the baby was so huge it could probably count as a seventh for health and safety purposes. As Avril sat down, both Gerard and Fiacra shifted slightly in their seats, Fiacra to watch her, Gerard to pointedly ignore. Several months before, Paula had caught Gerard and Avril in some kind of strange, intense moment in the corridor. She’d never got to the bottom of it, and didn’t want to.

It was no accident that this joint team was situated in Ballyterrin, biggest border town in the North, a crossroads of smuggling, terrorist activity and general shiftiness. No-man’s-land, they called it. The team was supposed to coordinate missing persons’ cases north and south of the border, make sure the right people were looking for the lost, see that no one fell down between the imaginary lines of the border. But sometimes, as with the case in front of them, it was difficult to understand why anyone would want to look for those who were gone.

Guy gripped the back of his chair and launched into it. ‘Mickey Doyle.’

A small sigh went round the room. Relief, maybe, or something else.

‘Definitely?’ Gerard.

‘He had his driving licence in his pocket.’

‘Did he hang himself?’ asked Fiacra, who hadn’t been at the scene.

‘He died by hanging in Creggan Forest Park, yes. But whether it was suicide or he was forced we don’t know yet. The car park has CCTV, which shows a white van driving up into the forest around two a.m. last night. It left again half an hour later, and Doyle certainly wasn’t driving it. No number plate visible, but it’s a start. There’s also this.’ Guy switched on the projector, illuminating something on screen. ‘The autopsy hasn’t been done yet, but the FMO found this in Doyle’s mouth.’

On screen was a scrap of lined paper, and written on it in big, shaky capitals were the words: COLLATERAL DAMAGE. ‘Does anyone recognise that wording?’ asked Guy.

‘It was in their statement,’ said Avril, with her forensic recall of documents. ‘Ireland First. They made a statement after the bomb saying it wasn’t them, but even if it was, some loss was always inevitable in a war, something like that. Collateral damage, they said.’

Bob Hamilton was shaking his head. ‘Terrible thing. Terrible, terrible thing.’ Paula knew he’d been working on the day it happened, back in 2006. So had Helen Corry, for that matter. Everything about this case was too close to home.

But the idea of Bob working on it, or any case, made doubts worm in her mind again. She tried to focus.

Guy was nodding. ‘So this seems to rule out suicide, and also the idea that the Five skipped the country together.’

‘It was kidnap then,’ said Paula. ‘I thought it must be. I knew Catherine Ni Chonnaill wouldn’t have left her children like that.’

Finally, Guy looked at her, in that sideways manner he’d developed, as if holding up his fingers to block out her bump. ‘I agree. But who took them? With the memorial service coming up too, I don’t like the timing.’

Gerard leaned back in his seat. ‘I guess Jarlath Kenny’d want them out of the way. Talk is he’s going to run for Westminster.’

Paula saw Bob’s face contract at the mention of the name. The fact that Kenny, Ballyterrin’s Republican mayor, was a former member of the IRA did not sit well with her either, even though you weren’t supposed to mention these things in this post-conflict, all-friends-here Ireland.

‘What about other dissident Republicans, sir?’ asked Fiacra.

Guy said, ‘You know what they’re like. One mad man and a dog, some of them. No one’s claimed responsibility.’

They all considered it for a while. After the ceasefires and Good Friday Agreement of 1998, when Paula had been taking her A-levels, the Republican movement in Northern Ireland had fractured into several smaller groups, intent on keeping up the fight which the IRA had stopped. The peace of those past years had wobbled several times – defused bombs, shootings of police officers, the odd riot or two – but had held, so far held, thank God, and they did every day, whichever God you believed in or even none. It was over. They weren’t going back.

But for the people whose pictures Guy now showed on screen, the past was still alive, and pumping hot as fresh blood.

Guy switched the projector off, weariness sounding in his voice. ‘Corry’s team are treating Doyle’s death as murder. Our priority is to find the other four, and fast. It seems likely they’ve been taken together. So the question we now have to ask is, if Republicans aren’t behind this, who else would want them dead?’

And the answer, Paula thought, and the particular problem with this case, was who
wouldn’t
?

Paula managed to escape to her desk after the briefing without being alone with Guy – her main objective at work these days – and for what felt like the thousandth time since the Mayday Five had gone missing a week before, she read the case notes.

Nearly eight months since she’d come home to Ballyterrin, determined to consult on just one case then leave, but ending up pregnant, trapped, tied down by silken threads of family, friends, obligations. Love. It was hard to believe that for years she’d managed an almost nun-like life in a Docklands flat in London, working on missing persons with a big inner-city unit. That was where she’d been when the Mayday bomb exploded in a small village outside Ballyterrin – on 1st May 2006 – and she’d sat disbelieving before the TV all day as the death toll went up. Some man had been there with her, some transient bank holiday boyfriend – Adam? Alan? – and he’d been bewildered at her shock and horror. ‘Did you know someone there?’

She’d been unable to speak, explain how it was. That you grew up holding your breath while shaky ceasefires lasted a year, eighteen months, then exploded into shootings and bombs, that you hardly dared hope 1998 could be the end, but it was, after the stinging final horror of the Omagh bomb, biggest death toll ever in the Troubles, and still it held, five years, six years, eight years, and you’d let your breath out and it was going to be OK, almost.

Then it wasn’t. Another bomb in a small town, a vague warning, going off too soon. Sixteen dead. Babies blown up in the street, teenagers, old people. Paula had never met any of them but she knew their faces, she felt it like a slap from someone you had come to trust, and she went to bed that night crying angry tears, the blundering boyfriend sent home.
We thought it was over. You told us it was over.
And determined:
I’m never going home to that. Never.

And here she was.

The facts of the case. Mickey Doyle, now deceased, had gone missing a week before, on 1st April. On that same day they had received word of a further four missing people – Callum Brady, Ronan Lynch, Martin Flaherty, and one woman, Catherine Ni Chonnaill. Ni Chonnaill had texted her mother to pick up her children, as she’d be late home from work. Except she’d never turned up. Lynch had similarly not arrived at his job. Brady’s flat had been in disarray, furniture knocked over as if he’d left in a hurry, a half-eaten breakfast of microwave burger sitting on his fold-up kitchen table.

All five were part of a small Republican splinter group calling itself Ireland First, dedicated to continuing the armed struggle and disrupting the peace process. They were best known as the defendants in the Mayday bomb case, the trial which had collapsed the year before without a conviction, although everyone in the area considered them guilty as sin.

She looked at their faces again. There was Doyle, now dead, a father and husband, a small, rat-raced man with a cigarette hanging from his mouth in the surveillance photo they had of him. He’d been a binman. Lynch was handsome in a seedy way, tall and fair, and worked in a warehouse. Brady was overweight, unemployed, a pale wreck of a man captured outside a betting shop. Martin Flaherty was the leader – tall, greying, fiftysomething. An ordinary-looking man in glasses and a good wool coat.

Then there was the woman. Even in the blurred police shots she was beautiful, her fair hair pooling down her back as she strapped a child into a car. The child’s face was not visible, but Paula touched the photograph reflexively. Whatever she’d done, Catherine Ni Chonnaill’s loss would be felt.

Who would want them dead? Guy had asked. God, who would want them alive? They’d most likely made, armed and planted a massive bomb on a busy high street, then driven away. Their target was an Orange Order parade due later that day, but the bomb had gone off early, when the streets were crowded with families. They’d blown up sixteen innocent people, maimed many more. They were going about their lives unpunished. A memorial to the bomb victims was to be unveiled on the fifth anniversary in a few weeks’ time, and that was supposed to be the end of it. But the Five were gone, and now one was dead, and there were still no leads.

She looked down at the faces of the Five again. Ordinary people. That was the worst bit.

‘Hello.’ When she finally left the office that day, Guy was at her car, wiping spring pollen off the windscreen. ‘I was just—’

‘Thanks.’ She got her key out but didn’t move towards the car.

‘So I’ll see you tomorrow?’

‘I suppose. Do you really think it’s a good idea?’

‘They have the most obvious motive, so yes, we’ll need to get their alibis. Hopefully we can at least rule them out.’

They had arranged that Paula and Guy would visit the Chair of the Mayday Victims Support Group, to update him on the investigation and explain that they’d have to interview the families of the dead. Paula was already dreading it. She fiddled with the key. ‘How’s Tess?’ She tried to ask the question innocently, like a concerned colleague, but there was no way to innocently ask a man about his wife when you’d slept with him.

A guarded look came over Guy’s face. ‘She’s all right.’

‘Doing OK now she’s home?’

‘Yes, Katie and I are looking after her.’

‘That’s good.’ A family, that’s what they were. However much it hurt, she made herself press into the point of it. Guy had a teenage daughter, and a wife who’d suffered something of a breakdown before Christmas. After the murder of their young son in London, the Brookings had come to Ballyterrin to try a new life, and Tess had done her best to get pregnant again, with no success. They’d split up for a while, which Paula constantly reminded herself of when the guilt got too much, but now Tess was back. That meant Paula had no idea where she and Guy stood.

Guy was still hovering there. The evenings were growing lighter, the pearly twilights of an Irish summer not far away. ‘How are you feeling?’

Was he asking as a boss or as a prospective father? When she’d finally told him it was either him or Aidan, Guy had wanted her to sign a statement that would go to the Chief Constable. He’d been ready to resign, take the flak for sleeping with a junior colleague, but Paula had refused. Helen Corry, who knew the full story, was also keeping quiet. As long as people did their jobs she didn’t really care whose bed they went home to. Since then Paula and Guy had lumbered on in daily working contact, trying to ignore the situation as it visibly swelled between them. She shrugged. ‘Fine. Well, I’m enormous, but otherwise OK.’

‘How was the wedding in the end?’

‘All right. I made it back for the meal.’

‘O’Hara was there, I suppose.’

‘Of course. His mother being the bride and all.’

‘Sure.’ He stood awkwardly. ‘How is he?’

‘Aidan? You’re asking the wrong person. We haven’t been chatting much.’
Like you and me
, she wanted to say. The hardest thing about the pregnancy – aside from not fitting into any of her clothes and being sick ten times a day – was how it had damaged her relationship with Guy. Once it had been so perfect, a calibrated professional curiosity, so in tune that they could conduct interviews without even having to say a word to each other. Aidan, sure, things had never been right between them, not since he’d dumped her when she was eighteen. But being Paula, she’d slept with Guy, unable to leave it at a productive attraction. And Guy had backed off – since he was still married, after a fashion – and she’d slept with Aidan on a stupid sad impulse, and now she was carrying around the fruit of these mistakes like a balloon up her jumper. Even for a lapsed Catholic, it seemed an overly harsh punishment.

Extract from
The Blood Price: The Mayday
Bombing and its Aftermath
, by Maeve Cooley
(Tairise Press, 2011)

When you look at them, the faces of the Mayday Five seem to radiate evil. Is it because you know what they’ve done, or can something human in you sense that here are ruthless killers, delighted to murder in the name of long-dead politics? But the worst of it is they are human too. Catherine Ni Chonnaill is the daughter of former IRA Commander Danny Connell, and after he was shot by the UVF in 2004 she was pictured on TV weeping angry tears for him, collapsing behind his coffin while heavily pregnant with her first child. Four of the Five – Doyle, Lynch, Flaherty, and Ni Chonnaill – have been married and have children. Ni Chonnaill’s are still at primary school, a boy and a girl she had with Lynch before they split, and there’s also a young baby by an unknown father.