The Killing House

by Claire McGowan

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Paula. ‘I don’t think she’s very lucid.’

  ‘Oh, she knows who I am all right. It’s what I thought she’d say. She always put her bloody united Ireland ahead of us. Well, it didn’t happen, Mammy, did it? What was the point of all that?’

  No reaction. Aisling turned away. ‘I just had one question. All this happened because the farm was sold, yeah? And they found . . . what we’d buried? How come it happened now?’

  ‘As I understand it, your mother’s fees here were being paid privately, but that stopped a few months ago. Since the farm was still in her name, it was put up for sale by the council to pay for her care. They couldn’t trace any of you, except for Ciaran, of course.’

  ‘I suppose that makes sense. But who was paying the fees before that? I wasn’t, and Ciaran wasn’t. I doubt Mairead had the money. Was it Paddy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He’d been her favourite, so it made sense if it was.

  ‘It must have been. So. Don’t you think it’s a bit strange, this all happening now? The payments stop, the bodies are found? What account was it being paid from, do you know?’

  ‘Er . . . I’ll have to check.’ Surely they would have looked into that, even with the Commission stalling the investigation. But Aisling had a point. Why had the payments stopped now, just when Paddy was back and picking off members of his squad one by one? Was it just a coincidence, or had someone actually wanted those bodies found?

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Dunne. Paula was sure she’d heard that name before somewhere. Back at the office, a quick search reminded her: Patrick Dunne, a leader in the IRA in the eighties, who’d wanted to end the hunger strikes early. He’d been shot in his home in the middle of them, in 1981, sparking off riots in Ballyterrin. People thought he’d been killed by a faction from his own side, who felt that letting the hunger strikes go on for longer would build support for their cause, help get Sinn Fein politicians elected. And it had. The man had been shot in front of his young son, who must be the Tom Dunne Ciaran had mentioned. If he’d been four then, he wasn’t much older than Paula. Thirty-six or so now. She wondered if she could ferret out an address for him.

  She went over to Corry’s office and knocked gently on the door. The office seemed quiet, with Avril and Gerard off on a beach in the Caribbean. She heard a murmur inside, and turned the handle without thinking.

  Nothing really happened. It was all perfectly above board, Corry and Tozier in there, leaning over some papers on her desk. There was no reason Paula should have noticed a thing, except that she knew Helen Corry pretty well by now, and caught the way she straightened her spine, edged away from him. ‘Sorry,’ said Paula. ‘I just wanted a quick word.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Corry, a fraction too quickly. ‘Declan was just updating me on the Red Road search.’

  ‘We’ll be wrapping it up tomorrow,’ he said, rolling the papers up again. ‘Unless we find anything. We feel it’s unlikely at this point, though.’

  Paula had given up all thoughts of finding remains at the site. Her mind was fixed on something else – the image of her mother getting away, running across those desolate fields around the Wallace farm. ‘I’m sorry your time was wasted.’

  ‘Not at all. It’s our job. I’ll leave you to it.’

  He went out, and Paula turned innocently to Corry. ‘You know, I take it back. He’s not so bad, is he? A bit officious, but maybe he has to be.’

  ‘It’s not easy for them, following the law. But it’s necessary.’ Corry scowled at her, defensive. ‘What? I can’t talk to a colleague in my office?’

  ‘I didn’t say a thing.’

  ‘He’s asked me for a drink,’ Corry said quickly. ‘After this, of course.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I slagged him off so much, Paula. To everyone.’

  ‘He doesn’t know that, does he? Are you going to go?’

  Corry stared at the door Tozier had just left through. Out in the main office, he could be seen putting on his sensible North Face coat. ‘I’m forty-five and I have two teenage weans, Maguire. It’s hardly young love. But as you say, he’s not so bad, no. Anyway. Do you have a good reason for coming in here and interrupting me?’

  ‘I do,’ said Paula. ‘But you’re not going to like it.’

  Paula waited outside the house until she saw the car pull off, and then she stepped out of hers and walked up the neat garden path. Past the fishing gnomes again. Were there more of them this time? Perhaps they were multiplying. She knew Bob would be in. He was always in, and especially when Linda popped out to the library he’d make sure to be. He was like her father, their horizons shrinking to four walls, pottering about doing small repairs, making tea and washing up the cup, watching daytime TV. It was hard to believe they’d been hardened RUC officers, both of them, with networks of contacts among dodgy low lifes, with dark secrets and evil men out for their blood. At least her father had moved out of his old house now.

  Corry had of course flat out refused to help her find Dunne’s address, sending her away with another scolding about doing her own investigations. She’d not told Corry about the writing on the car, knowing she wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the case if she was thought to be in danger. But Paula couldn’t stop. This was her chance to get Aidan out of prison and finally find out what had happened to her mother, she was sure of it. It was all connected, as Bob had said.

  She waved through the glass of the door, convinced that Bob’s heart must sink every time he heard her coming. More hard questions, more awkward discoveries, more painful secrets grubbed up from their graves. ‘Me again . . . sorry.’

  He stood back to let her in. ‘I’m just making tea.’

  She followed him into the kitchen, which was still dominated by Ian’s big wheelchair and other equipment. She wondered why they hadn’t got rid of it all yet, when their son was gone. Maybe it was too hard. There was still a faint hospital smell to the place. ‘Sorry to barge in again, Bob. I need a bit of advice really.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘You mentioned the name Patrick Dunne to me a few times. Remember?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Got shot during the hunger strikes.’

  That was a lifetime ago – the year after Paula was born. ‘Ciaran Wallace said I should ask about a Tom Dunne. I know Patrick Dunne’s long dead now, but there was a son, wasn’t there, that saw him get shot?’ She’d remembered the detail because the child had been four, Maggie’s age near enough, and the thought of it stuck in her throat.

  Bob reached for the local newspaper, which was sitting on the dining table with his reading glasses on top. The Ballyterrin Gazette, under new management since Aidan was in prison. Funny, she never bought it now. Too painful. He leafed through and pushed the paper over the table to her. She scanned it quickly – an interview with a local councillor who was hoping to be elected as an MLA. A rising star, they said. The same one she’d seen on TV that time. His name: Tom Dunne. A good-looking man, late thirties maybe. The right age. ‘That’s the son?’

  ‘Aye. He doesn’t try to hide who his da was – sure half the town had relatives in the IRA or UVF or what have you.’

  Paula looked again. He was clean-cut, well dressed, the new face of Republican politics for Northern Ireland. ‘I might go to see him,’ she said, waiting for Bob to talk her out of it. But he didn’t, just tidying the newspaper away. Maybe he wanted answers as much as she did.

  ‘Davey called earlier,’ he said casually. ‘Said you’d been leaving him messages.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Her heart beat a little faster. When he hadn’t called back she’d assumed he had nothing to tell her.

  ‘After your man Edward was killed, the lease on his flat was given up. That’s all he knows.’

  Her mother, suddenly finding herself stranded in London, her lifeline blown up. Had she grieved for him? She must have d
one. Had she loved him, or had they been thrown together by the need to survive, to avoid their hunters? Except if Paddy Wallace thought Margaret Maguire was dead, no one would have been hunting her. Dead along with the child she carried. The hairs on Paula’s neck stood up every time she thought of it. It felt like a film, a story happening to other people, not her ordinary suburban mother.

  ‘Be careful,’ Bob said, in his tired way, as he walked her to the door. She nodded, but in truth she had forgotten what that even meant by now. She was so far past being careful. It was way too late for that.

  Margaret

  1998

  ‘What was that?’

  She was awake in the dark, back arched like a cat. Something outside. Bins clattering. Feet.

  Beside her, Edward was awake at once too. Long years of army training meant he could sleep anytime and start out of the deepest dreams to be fully alert. ‘I’ll check.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  At least once a week it happened, noises waking her in the night. Ghosts in her dreams. The red bucket. The hand on her head. The smell of her own skin burning.

  Edward was at the window, looking out, in his striped pyjamas. He said nothing for a while.

  ‘Is someone there?’ Usually it was foxes getting into the bins.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is there . . .’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Get down from the window then!’ The fear was always there. Gun shots in the night. Bombs under the car. They’d been in this flat in Hampstead for six months now, a good long run. She’d got used to the place, the walk to the grocery shop. She nodded to people in the dry-cleaner’s. She’d even been to church a few times, trying to pray again, wanting to forget that feeling she’d had in the barn, of sending her cries up to God and being ignored. Her heart sank now, already picturing taking the boxes down, packing up, moving somewhere else again. Another rented flat with damp and stained lino. Sometimes she would remember her house, her own house with the roses in the garden, and it felt like another life. It was another life. These days she wasn’t even Margaret, she was Peggy. Edward’s wife, in name at least. Not before God, since she was already married. But that was another person. She could only survive by never thinking of PJ back in their house, or Paula. Peggy had never known those people. Peggy was married to Edward, and if things between them were still stiff and formal sometimes, if she knew he kept secrets, if both of them sometimes woke up at night screaming, well, they were alive. It was something, at least, to be alive, to have a warm body in the bed beside her. So Peggy was cultivating an English accent, and learning to talk about the weather instead of politics. Learning not to turn around when anyone mentioned Ireland. She would never see Ireland again.

  Edward sat down hard on the bed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s too risky.’

  She sighed. ‘It was a good run.’

  In the dark, they were both silent. They’d lived together as man and wife for five years now, thrown together after the sketchiest of meetings. She hadn’t even known his surname then. Sometimes, in the dark bleak truths of these nights, he still felt like a stranger. One she’d given up her life for. ‘I’ll check on her.’

  She lumbered into the other bedroom, the small one. Just a single bed and a nightlight. She’d done her best not to transmit her fears to the child, but it was impossible. ‘Is it bad men?’ came a small voice.

  ‘No, pet. It’s the foxes. The bad foxes.’

  The little girl looked sceptical. She had her toy cat, Sebastian, clutched tight in one hand, his missing eye reminding Margaret – Peggy – of other things, things she would like to forget. This, too, was something. On that terrible night on the ferry, Margaret had been convinced she was losing the child. When they reached Liverpool she’d been rushed to hospital, where she’d lain on a narrow bed with overhead lights blazing, feeling the blood run out of her. Sure she would lose it, and Edward would leave her, and she’d be alone in this strange country, running for her life. But it hadn’t happened this way. She had been allowed to keep her child, like some kind of gift. Forgiveness, maybe.

  Peggy smoothed the hair off the child’s face. She was like her father, everyone said – the square little face, the determined jaw – but Peggy only saw in her the other daughter, the one who thought she was dead. Her little girl looked so like Paula, and it haunted Peggy every day.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The house wasn’t what she’d expected. She’d been thinking of somewhere like Prontias Ryan’s place maybe, squalid and sad, with dirt ingrained in the fraying carpet and ready meal cartons stacking up in the kitchen, but of course a man like Tom Dunne wouldn’t live there. Instead, this was a large detached house on an expensive street outside Ballyterrin, with a people carrier parked in the drive. Tom Dunne had money, it seemed – and a family.

  In the end, she’d simply gone around Corry and found Tom Dunne with surprising ease. A quick Google told her he worked at a law firm in town, and that he was even in the phone book. A man without much to hide, then. All the same he would hardly welcome some strange woman turning up at his door, but she had to risk it. She put on her best professional smile and walked up their long driveway to the door, which had a sturdy wooden frame and panels of stained glass in it. A little brass plaque proclaimed Home Sweet Home. The door was opened by a woman in jeans and a striped top, highlighted blond hair in a ponytail. A small child of about two hung onto her ankles. ‘Yes?’ She was distracted, the child catching her attention.

  ‘I was wondering if Tom was in. I’m doing some work for the PSNI on historic cases.’ She flashed her ID. It was out of date now, and she’d get in trouble for using it, but she didn’t even work there any more; they could hardly fire her.

  It was the start of the summer holidays, so she’d banked on him being home, and sure enough she saw Tom Dunne coming out of the living room, cup of tea in hand. She explained who she was, rushing it, sure he’d know she was lying. Although, technically, it wasn’t a lie. She was indeed looking into some historic cases. He was a tall man, open-faced, dressed in the same kind of things Aidan used to wear about the house, jeans and a polo shirt. Dad clothes. There were at least two other children in the house, judging by the noise. Outside one could be heard loudly demanding why they couldn’t go on the trampoline even though there was rain pooled on it. ‘But it’s summer, Mummy. The trampoline is for summer.’

  Tom Dunne ushered her into the relative peace of the living room. ‘You want to talk about my father, is that it?’

  ‘Yes – if you wouldn’t mind having a few words with me? Really we’re just trying to establish some links to a few new cases we have.’

  He motioned to her to sit down. ‘I’m not sure how I can help, but you can ask, certainly. No one was ever caught for my father’s murder, as you probably know.’

  ‘It must have been terrible. You were there, I understand.’

  ‘I can’t remember much. But I saw it happen, that’s true. There was blood on the wallpaper in the hallway. We had to redo it.’ He spoke calmly, like someone who had long grown used to their own sorrow. ‘I just wish I’d been old enough to identify the gunman. There was just one, I’m sure of that. I saw him drive up, but I couldn’t tell them what he looked like or what make of car or anything. My mother was out the back, hanging up the washing. When she came in Dad was already dead.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ She felt the urge to tell him her own terrible story of the Troubles, but resisted. Ciaran had given her this man’s name for a reason. The lovely house and family didn’t mean he wasn’t involved. ‘Mr Dunne, last week a man called Prontias Ryan was killed in town. Nicknamed “Rambo”. Does that mean anything to you?’

  He took a gulp from his cup, then realised it was empty. ‘I should have offered you a drink. Aine’ll kill me, forgetting my manners.’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you. Have you heard that name b
efore? Or Mark O’Hanlon?’

  ‘Well, of course.’ He set the cup down slowly, as if he was thinking about his answer. ‘My father was in the IRA. I’ve never disputed that. Different times. But he was moving towards peace – he wanted to end the hunger strikes. Someone ordered his murder to keep him quiet, I’m sure of it. That man, Ryan, he was involved. O’Hanlon too. Gave the orders.’

  ‘Sean Conlon as well?’ she tested.

  He bowed his head in a brief agreement. ‘Conlon was the prime suspect as the gunman. He went to prison, at least, though not for killing my father.’

  Paula sat forward. ‘That’s what we’re looking into. We think there’s a link between those deaths and another case we have. I came to ask if you know anything about that, anything at all. If someone could have ordered the killings as revenge, for example. Former associates of your father’s, maybe.’

  He looked surprised. ‘I’m not involved in any of that, Dr Maguire.’

  ‘Oh no, I wasn’t suggesting that at all. We’ve just hit a bit of a wall, and I’m looking for anyone I can interview, really. A name, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just saw it on the news, like everyone else. I’ve tried to distance myself from it. You see your father killed as a wee boy and it makes violence a bit less appealing, if you know what I mean. I don’t know any names.’

  ‘Paddy Wallace?’ she tried. ‘That mean anything to you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not someone my father knew, I don’t think?’

  ‘No. Younger. Him and Conlon were on a punishment squad together.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He was already standing up, opening the door. She felt disappointed; another dead end.

  Out in the hall, a girl of about eight had her hands on her hips. ‘Daddy, it’s not fair, Siofra took my biscuit.’

  ‘Did she now? Well, we can’t have that.’ He was already being subsumed back into family life, the large, noisy family she’d always wanted as a child herself. No chance of that unless she could get Aidan out, and this man didn’t know anything, it seemed.