The Silent Dead (Paula Maguire 3)

by McGowan, Claire

‘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.’

  ‘Well I don’t know, I told them what I saw. Two men at the door, looking for her, that same day she went.’

  ‘Do you know – did she let them in?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, pet. I went to ring the police, and when I come back they’d gone, so I thought she was at work like normal.’

  ‘You don’t remember what time this was? I know it’s years ago.’

  ‘Oh aye, it was lunchtime. I’d the news on. I turned it down to see could I hear anything.’

  ‘You’re saying you rang the police to tell them men were at my mother’s door? On the day she disappeared?’

  ‘That’s right. I thought they might be burglars.’

  ‘And no one came to see you, follow it up?’

  ‘Of course they did, I gave a full statement. I’m not afraid to help the police, even the ould RUC back then. They weren’t all bad.’

  ‘You don’t remember who interviewed you?’ asked Paula, even though she was sure, deep in her bones, that she already knew the answer to this.

  ‘That Orangeman.’ Mrs Flynn lowered her voice. ‘You could see he’d never been in a Catholic home in his life, kept staring at my Sacred Heart pictures. Something Hamilton, that was him.’

  Bob Hamilton. Bob Hamilton had interviewed their neighbour about her mother’s disappearance. So why wasn’t the transcript in the copy of the file in Paula’s desk next door? ‘Can you tell me, Mrs Flynn, do you know anything else?’

  ‘That was all. And you never found her, after all this time?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Duh.

  ‘I always thought she’d come back. I thought she’d gone off to get away from them men that was looking her.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Why did you think that, Mrs Flynn?’

  Her eyes had wandered to the road again, where a van was passing with a rattle and suck of air. ‘Isn’t it awful, the speed they go flying down there? The council should put in those bumps. You’ll want to watch that when your wee one comes. Is it a boy or a girl?’

  ‘Girl.’ She didn’t often tell people this, superstitious, but Mrs Flynn maybe hadn’t long for the world. ‘But, listen, Mrs Flynn. Did you see her leave? Mrs Flynn?—’

  ‘A girl, that’s lovely. Will you bring her in to see me, pet, when she’s here?’

  As if the baby were on a long journey to them, perhaps by ocean liner. ‘I will, of course.’ She tried one last time. ‘Mrs Flynn, is there anything more you could tell me, please – about the men, or my mother? Did you ever see . . . ?’ But Paula realised she was afraid to ask the question forming in her mind. ‘Never mind. Thank you for the tea.’ As she took her leave, she wondered why her mother had disliked Mrs Flynn so. Interfering, nosy old busybody, she’d once called her . . . why? What exactly had she been nosy about?

  A familiar burst of anger went up in her, like a spurt of lava. Why had her mother left them with so many questions, never to be answered? Couldn’t she have sensed somehow she’d not be back, and left a list of answers, everything from where she kept the key to the meter box to why she’d been off work the day before she vanished?

  Paula went into her own house, standing again in the kitchen where her mother had last been. Every surface was scrubbed and clean, but the smell was ingrained – damp, and hope left to slowly fester. She had to find out where that transcript had gone.

  A memory rose up like a ghost, making her chest compress – the psychic she’d encountered before Christmas, Magdalena Croft. Your mother is alive. She’s alive, and across water.

  She remembered what her father had told her, when they’d last talked about it months ago – they’d arrested him because there was only Paula’s word her mother had been there in the morning. PJ had an alibi for the day of the disappearance, had been out on a case, but there was only a thirteen-year-old girl, stunned with grief, to say her mother had been there to make her breakfast. Yet this report from Mrs Flynn, it could have been proof her mother was in during the day – proof that someone had come and taken her.

  Paula hadn’t known any of this. She’d closed the door that morning and never seen her mother again. That was how it often was. You didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. And you’d think, knowing what Paula did, this would make her hang on fast to the people she loved, whisper words that could be the last, every time, but it didn’t. Sitting in the cold, dark kitchen, she found herself thinking of Aidan. It always returned, like a bad case of the flu, when she was at her lowest ebb.

  Paula couldn’t settle that night. She couldn’t eat the dispiriting healthy mess of vegetables and noodles she’d cooked for herself, couldn’t concentrate on TV or Maeve’s book or even the case files. The house was so large by herself. In London sometimes she’d go out if she got like this, pull on trainers and run through the silent residential streets of Docklands, past sleeping tower blocks and lights drowned in the river. Here someone was bound to notice if she went out at three a.m. and phone up her dad, wondering had she lost the run of herself altogether? She couldn’t go out anyway with her massive bump. She sighed, tapping her fingers in a light rhythm on her belly. She’d not be alone much longer.

  She was in the woods.r />
  It could have been the same ones where they’d found Mickey Doyle’s body, his skin turned purple. These woods also smelled like death, but old and wormy.

  She was looking for something. She was tripping over roots, her breathing hard in her ears, her heart punching in the drum of her ears. She was very, very afraid. Somewhere in the woods a baby was crying, heart-rending. She had to get to that sound but it seemed to be all around her as she stumbled. The cries went on and on and on, dragging at her, pulling her flesh from her bones. Then she was on her knees in the dirt, smelling soil and something rotting, and she was digging her fingers into it and snapping her nails. Overhead a bone-white moon came out from the clouds, and then she saw it reflected in the ground – the gleam of a skull, and around it a shawl of red hair.

  Paula was awake now, and it wasn’t real, it was a dream. Her mother was not in the ground, alone in the woods. No one knew where she was. Her baby wasn’t lost and crying, she was still inside, she was safe, under the tight drum of skin.

  She sat up, panting. It was early, the sky outside cut with icy blue. Now she could hear the phone ringing downstairs – she’d stopped sleeping with her mobile since the baby – and waited drowsily for her dad to pick it up, then remembered he was gone. She hauled herself down the stairs one at a time, gripping the banister. ‘Hello?’ The hall was cold and the microwave clock read 4.48 a.m. Work? No, PJ. ‘Dad, are you OK?’

  ‘Aye. Were you sleeping?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Look at your wee phone there, pet. Something’s happened. Work didn’t ring you?’

  ‘No. How do you know?’

  ‘Sure I can’t sleep in this place, and Pat has that News Twenty-Four yoke.’

  She could picture him downstairs in the dark, his bad leg on a cushion, cup of tea beside him. It swam through her head – Dad, did you know Mrs Flynn made a police statement? Did you know Bob Hamilton had it all this time? She couldn’t ask him. ‘OK. I need to hang up, though.’

  She opened her browser and waited for the slow 3G connection to kick in. Northern Ireland news was reporting a body found in the hills outside of town. One of the Five? No pictures yet. She dialled the number for the MPRU, expecting the answerphone, but instead it was picked up by Gerard. ‘What’s going on?’ she said, startled.