Gerard rubbed his eyes. She noticed another new suit, the influence of Willis Campbell, no doubt, who was a great man for a cufflink. ‘Two murders. One a few weeks back, one got rubbed out the other day.’
‘Rubbed out?’ Paula raised her eyebrows. ‘You been at Scarface again, Monaghan?’
‘Ah, leave me be. You try planning a wedding that’s up there with the peace process and also dealing with dead bodies and missing women, then take the piss.’
She had planned a wedding while working a case, of course, right up to the wire, but she let him have that one. ‘Who is it this time?’
‘Some thug by the name of Prontias Ryan. Low-level drug-dealer, general crim.’
Paula was suddenly paying attention. The bell was ringing again. Where had she heard the name? She frowned, trying to remember.
‘You OK?’ Gerard looked up from stabbing at his computer keyboard. ‘Yesterday, that must have been . . . shite, like.’
She smiled faintly at his attempts to empathise. ‘It was only a sheep.’
‘No, but still, you thought it could’ve been . . .’
‘It wasn’t. I’m OK. It’s just so frustrating, not being able to investigate the Red Road case properly. I feel like my hands are tied behind my back.’
‘Tell me about it. Bastards are gonna go free, again. Makes me wonder why we bother, sometimes. I’m knocking my pan in trying to catch these fellas and half the time they won’t even go down for it.’
‘How was he killed, this Ryan?’ She was looking for distraction, another case less close to home, something that didn’t begin and end in red, clinging soil.
‘Usual – knocked about a bit, then a bullet behind the ear. That’s interesting though, maybe.’ He chucked her a piece of paper.
She scanned it. ‘He’d money thrown on top of him?’
‘Yeah, thirty quid. Why’d they do something like that? Seems a waste.’
‘Fintan McCabe . . . didn’t he have the same amount in his pocket?’
Gerard squinted. ‘It’s just money though. Why, you think it means something?’
‘It was something the IRA used to do to . . . informers.’ Touts. ‘Thirty pieces of silver, that kind of thing. Telling everyone what they’d done, that they were traitors.’ Sometimes they would make tapes of people too, tortured into confessing, and send them to the victims’ families. Then the family would not only have a dead loved one, they’d also be shamed and shunned, knowing one of their own had betrayed their side. She’d been spared all that at least. Nothing from her mother – no body, no tape, no phone call admitting responsibility. A note she hadn’t found for twenty years. And now this tip-off, and a grave she wasn’t in. ‘Was he ex-IRA, do we know?’
‘I reckon so. Sure most of the lowlifes in town were wrapped up in it, back then.’
‘Well then. Is that worth looking into?’
‘Suppose.’ Gerard took the paper back with a sigh and plopped it onto a large pile on his inbox. ‘Christ, you’d think we’d be done with these by now.’ Under it, Paula spotted something that looked like a scrawled wedding to-do list. Cousin Sarah vegetarian?? Will eat FISH?? Auntie S not to sing in church. She was glad that wasn’t her again, however much she missed Aidan.
She said, ‘It’ll never be done so long as there’s lunatics about. Like Paddy Wallace for one. On the run for twenty years, long after everyone else stopped giving a damn. Kind of sad in a way.’
‘Just kinda wish we’d get some normal murders now and again. You know, crimes of passion. Housewife rearing up and stabbing her ould fella. A bit of mystery, you know? These ones are so predictable.’
‘Er, you’re forgetting that the interesting ones always seem to end up with someone putting a gun to my head, or your guts leaking out over my good jumper. Or Avril drugged and kidnapped.’
He glowered protectively across the room at his intended, who was patiently taking down notes from a caller who seemed convinced the Pope was hiding in their shed. ‘Aye, well, maybe you’re right. Suppose we’ve not got the time right now for an interesting one, not with these bodies and Mairead missing.’
There was something interesting in this case for Paula, though, who had suddenly remembered where she’d seen the name Prontias Ryan before. She eyed the sheets Gerard had spread haphazardly over his desk. His idol Willis Campbell would have something to say about that, and the greasy pastry bag littering crumbs among the pages. ‘The first murder, his name was Mark O’Hanlon?’
‘Aye. How’d you know that?’
‘And was it similar to this one? He was ex-IRA too, right?’
Gerard narrowed his eyes, trying to remember. ‘Aye. And he was shot in the head in his flat, right enough.’
‘At the door?’ That was often the IRA MO. Knock on the door, shoot, be gone in seconds, leave your victim dying in the hallway.
‘In the lounge, I think. Why?’
‘Sorry, Gerard, bear with me. Was there cash on him too?’
A long pause from Gerard, puzzling it out. ‘There’s a connection? What’ve you got, Maguire?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Mind if I borrow this file for a minute?’ she said casually.
He waved permission. ‘Just put it back when you’re done. Need to clear all this before we’re off on honeymoon.’
‘I’d start with the pastry,’ Paula advised. ‘Otherwise they’ll have to call in pest control while you’re off sunning yourself on the beach.’
Back at her desk, she leafed through the pages, noting greasy thumbprints here and there. Ryan had been in his fifties, overweight and unwell, living alone in a squalid council house. ‘Rambo’ had been his nickname in his IRA days, and it seemed a sad joke now, looking at the pictures of his bloated pale body, tattoos on sagging flesh.
O’Hanlon was similar, separated from his wife and living on benefits, out of condition and dicing with Type 2 diabetes. He’d also been active in the IRA back then. A few weeks back he’d been found dead after neighbours complained about the smell. Paula scanned the report on the system. Defensive injuries. Evidence of restraints, wounds to his hands and face, money tossed onto the body. These really were the cases no one cared about, shoved to the bottom of the pile. The last casualties in a war that had ended in 1998. Bad men, men who’d done terrible things and walked free, or had their sentences cut as part of the Agreement. No one would mourn them too much. But she’d seen the names Mark O’Hanlon and Prontias Ryan before – on the list Sean Conlon had given to Bob before he died. Just coincidence, maybe. These men had lived and died by violence, and it was hardly unusual to find a murdered ex-IRA member even these days. But they’d been on Conlon’s list . . . and they were dead, and so was Conlon. Aidan was in prison for killing him. So Aidan had been in prison when these two men were rubbed out, as Gerard put it. Too much coincidence, Conlon, O’Hanlon and Ryan killed by different people within a year of each other?
She called over to Gerard. ‘When was this guy Ryan killed, do we know?’
He scratched his head, consulting the smeary whiteboard on which they wrote unsolved cases. ‘Pathologist reckoned a week or so ago. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just an idea.’ But her heart was beating faster. Three names on Bob’s list. Two recently killed, one on the run having kidnapped his sister. And the writer of the list dead as well. Maybe that would qualify as interesting enough for even Gerard’s tastes. ‘Monaghan.’ She put on her most winning smile.
‘What do you want now?’ he said suspiciously.
‘Oh, just a wee favour. What are the chances I could visit this crime scene?’
Chapter Twenty-Four
‘This is it.’ Gerard lifted the police tape to let her through and into the council house. The estate it was in was notorious for Republican crime, and they’d parked the car a good distance away to avoid coming back to four slashed tyres or worse. A
ll the same Paula could feel eyes on her as they walked to the house, peering from behind darkened windows and out of every shadow. Prontias Ryan had lived alone in a drab little one-bed, weeds poking up from the gravel in his front yard. There was no chance of getting into O’Hanlon’s place; it was long since cleared out and tidied away. ‘Forensics are done now, so we don’t have to suit up.’
Going in she noticed the smell at once – damp and fried food, overlaid by a sharper, more insistent reek of death, and the metallic note of blood. She wrinkled her nose. ‘You said he was here a while before they found him?’
‘A day or two. No family, not many friends, that’s what happens.’ Gerard tucked his tie into his shirt to stop it swinging. ‘We found him here.’ He pointed to the floor by the TV, where a large dark patch on the orange carpet indicated the body had lain there. A mixture of body fluids and blood. Paula breathed through her mouth, looking about her. It was a sad and squalid place, no pictures on the bare magnolia walls, the carpet frayed and now destroyed entirely, the furniture sagging and stained from various takeaways. A stack of dirty cartons could be seen in the kitchen. ‘Did you find anything interesting?’
‘Nah. We get these every so often, that shower bumping each other off. Old scores, you know. This one was a wee bit weird, though.’
‘Weird how?’ She examined the small collection of knock-off DVDs on top of his TV – horror, porn, martial arts.
‘Well, in a feud like that, what they’d do is ring your bell then shoot you and run off, like you said. Have a driver waiting. But that’s not what happened here.’ Gerard pointed to the stain. ‘He’d those cable tie things on his ankles and wrists. Cuts all over his arms and chests. Finger missing, even.’
‘What?’
‘Chopped off with a bolt cutter or something.’ Gerard said this with a certain relish. ‘Nasty.’
‘Why would someone do that? Torture?’
‘Wanted to know something, s’pose. Or revenge. Or both. Then there was the money lying on his chest too – thirty quid in notes. You said that was an informer thing?’
‘Yeah. Thirty pieces of silver. And the other case, O’Hanlon, it was the same?’
‘Aye. I’d have made the link,’ he said defensively. ‘I hadn’t had a chance to look at it properly.’
‘I know. You didn’t lift any prints from either scene?’
‘Nope. Not a thing we can use. Whoever did this knew their stuff.’
And perhaps they were good enough at evading the police to have earned the nickname ‘The Ghost’. If he’d been tortured for information, what had Prontias Ryan told his killer before he died, in agony, his last sight this nasty, smelly room that reeked of loneliness? She was glad to have Gerard there, his hands shoved in his pockets and his big red country face. It was a horrible place, full of death and suffering and the waste of a pointless life. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Thanks for letting me see.’
‘Amazing.’ Paula cocked her head at the ceiling. ‘She goes down like a lamb for Pat. Back home it’s an hour of baths and stories and drinks of water and Mummy can I act out bits of Frozen for you.’
‘Aye, Pat has the touch all right.’ Her father was in his usual spot in front of the TV, while Pat was upstairs putting Maggie to bed. Paula had murmured protests, then gratefully accepted the break, telling herself Pat probably liked it. She didn’t see Maggie enough. And they’d be gone again soon, back to the place she’d just described as home. Her father hadn’t commented on that, but she knew he would have noticed. Instead he said, ‘So they’re still digging. At the farm.’
She stiffened, caught off guard. ‘I think not for much longer. Unless someone else comes forward.’ But why would they? Why would anyone care about a woman who’d gone missing twenty years before? ‘Dad – you know we’ve another missing person now. Paddy Wallace’s sister – he took her.’
‘Saw it on the news. God love her.’
‘He must have help, to hide like this. Anything you can tell me about him, his old mates, his associates?’
‘Well, there was a gang of them in town in the late eighties and nineties. Lots of young fellas dabbled in the Provos, but we always knew who the main command were. Or whatever they called themselves. Playing soldiers. There was . . . Conlon.’
She nodded. That name was painful in this house ever since Aidan had gone down for his murder. ‘He was older, in his thirties. But Wallace was in charge, all the same. There was thon one you’ve just found, Fintan McCabe. I know his Mammy’s been on the TV weeping and wailing, her innocent wee boy, wouldn’t have known a thing about the Provos, but he was up to his neck in it. You know, I always thought it was the two of them did for poor John. Him and Conlon.’ He glanced up at the picture on top of the piano, John O’Hara with his hand on Aidan’s shoulder, Aidan dressed in a white suit for his Communion. Under happier circumstances she might have nudged and slagged him for that, the pious expression on his face, hands raised in prayer. But John O’Hara had been murdered only months after the picture was taken, and Aidan, that innocent boy, was sitting in prison.
‘You couldn’t get them on it?’
‘We tried. Well, I wasn’t allowed to work the case. Hamilton was the lead.’ His voice flattened out. Still no love lost there, and Paula hadn’t been able to tell him Bob had been working behind the scenes all this time to protect them from the truth.
Whatever that was.
‘And Wallace?’
‘We knew they were the punishment squad. Brought people in and tortured them for info, knee-capped them, went after so-called informers. Interrogation, they called it. When your mammy . . .’ His voice failed. It was still hard to talk about. ‘When she went, I wanted to bring Wallace in for it. If they had her, they’d have been interrogating her. Taken her somewhere for questioning. Then they’d shoot her, like as not. Dump the body. It was so close to the other ceasefire, though – I always wondered did they maybe just hide her. So as not to rock the boat, you know? But nobody heeded me and I could hardly go after him myself.’
‘You thought they took her, then. Wallace and that lot.’
He shrugged. From upstairs, Paula could hear Pat’s soothing voice, reading a bedtime story. Safe, cosy, everything she wanted for Maggie. ‘I don’t know. Why wouldn’t she have told me, if she was in trouble? I could have helped. For God’s sake, I was in the RUC. If anyone could have helped, I could.’
Paula thought she might know why – the answer hidden in her mother’s medical records, which Davey Corcoran had unearthed for her. Her mother had been pregnant when she disappeared. The baby not PJ’s. So. There were those facts, facts which were as heavy and leaden as bullets, and so far she hadn’t quite been able to fit them into the empty slots in her mind. But she was getting there. ‘And did they even interview him, Wallace?’
‘Hamilton said they did, but I was never sure. He blocked me at every turn. Even came to our place and dug the garden up. Suspended me and all.’
She remembered that. Her father, who’d never been home throughout most of her childhood, suddenly at home all day in his dressing gown. Another frightening shift in the bedrock of her world, always so solid before. ‘Maybe there was a reason,’ she ventured.
Her father’s face hardened. ‘Hamilton and myself, we never saw eye to eye, not really. But there was a time we worked well together. Partners. I respected the man, in his way. But then it’s my own wife gone and he’s cutting me out, barring me from the incident room, sending me home, refusing to tell me if they’d even any leads. I could have helped! Nobody knew the local Provos like me back then. They were out for my blood, so of course I knew them well. But he wouldn’t even talk to me. God only knows what that was about.’
Paula knew now, but she could hardly explain that Bob had been deflecting attention as best he could, hoping her mother had managed to escape, praying that an investigation that didn’t look too hard might
give her the chance to get away. ‘Daddy, you know Bob . . . I think he’s a good man.’
‘Aye, I thought so too one time.’
‘I know it was hard. I know he did some things that were . . . strange. But I think we can’t understand why. I think he did the best he could at the time.’ She held her breath – she couldn’t say more in case her father suspected what she knew. But equally she couldn’t bear for Bob to take the blame when none of it had been his fault. When he’d only ever tried to spare them, her and her father, from whatever it was her mother had done that meant she had to flee.
PJ looked at her sharply. ‘Thought you were no big fan of his. It was you nudged him over to retirement.’
She felt ashamed of that now, the fuss she’d kicked up when she found out he’d suppressed the report from the neighbour. Not knowing it was all done for a reason. ‘I know, but . . . he cared for you. He speaks very highly of you still. He’s just . . . he has his own code.’ A code that she now knew had involved protecting her mother at all costs, including her darkest secrets. She changed the subject back. ‘So. Wallace. He might have been the one who . . . came for her.’
‘He’d have known something about it at least. And he’d recognise your name, pet, I’m sure of it. So tread carefully, aye?’ He wasn’t asking her to come off the case – he knew she could never do that – but he was reminding her that here in Ballyterrin, everything was personal. Everyone knew you. And that was maybe the best thing and worst thing about the place, both at the same time.
‘OK,’ Paula lied. Her father had never thought of his own safety all those years in the RUC, but she’d pretend to listen, all the same.
After a long moment he said, ‘You know, it was maybe Wallace rang in that tip. About your mother. The farm.’
‘I know.’ A tip that wasn’t correct. ‘What happens, Dad?’ she said, looking at the TV and not him. ‘If they ever do find something. Did you ever think about it?’ He must have. There’d been the other three bodies, dead women surfacing in bogs and drains and building sites, bodies he’d had to go and look at. None of them her mother.
The Killing House Page 16