The Silent Dead (Paula Maguire 3)

by McGowan, Claire

  A man was looking at her. He had on overalls and his face was oily. ‘Help you, love?’

  She knew she was a weird sight, in her school uniform. ‘I’m looking Jamesie.’

  ‘James-eee!’ The man went back in, and he made some comment about starting young and the other men laughed. Kira tried not to understand. When Jamesie came out he was wiping his hands and not smiling. ‘Kira.’

  She stood there in her uniform. Now she was there she didn’t know what she was going to say. ‘Let’s go in the tearoom,’ he said. What this meant was a really small hut like a mobile classroom at school. Jamesie sat behind a desk that was cluttered with papers and magazines about cars. A calendar on the wall was still at February and had a girl on it in a bikini, licking her lips. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked her after a while.

  Kira just looked at him. ‘It’s the memorial. In May. Five years.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Will you go?’

  ‘I—’ he did an awkward thing with his shoulders. ‘If I can. Sometimes I can’t – think about her.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’ He just shook his head, like it was annoying.

  Kira was pleased. She hated being asked that too. It was like asking someone would they miss their arm or their leg or something. ‘You know the group,’ she said, and saw his face change.

  ‘I can’t be involved in that. I just can’t.’

  ‘Now the trial didn’t work, we’re thinking of doing something.’

  ‘What can be done?’

  She didn’t answer. This was the tricky part, explaining. Without it sounding too awful. ‘They’re evil. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. We – some of us anyway, we think it’s time they were punished for it.’

  ‘Well, we just have to hope God punishes them.’

  Kira sighed to herself. That was the problem. How could you rely on God to sort things, when he’d allowed Rose to be killed, and the bad people not to be in prison? She could see Jamesie wouldn’t help. He was one of the ones who’d given into it, let it fill them up and sink them, like when you drown. Not like the ones still fighting, and struggling, and shouting. Like Dominic. Like Ann. Like her.

  She stood up. It was a good thing having a reputation as being ‘a wee bit turned’ – you didn’t have to bother with all that how are you grand thanks is the family well drop us a wee line sometime, like grown-ups did. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Kira,’ he said. ‘Sometimes would you – would you come for a bite with me or something?’

  She was astonished. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d like to just talk about her. Like she was. Not all this court case and that.’

  She nodded. ‘What’s your number?’

  He told her and she put it in her phone. She put it under ‘Jackie’ just in case Mammy snooped. She remembered when she’d first met Jamesie, Rose taking her to the hotel that time – Don’t tell Mammy you saw him now. It’s our secret.

  Who is he? She’d never met or heard of Jamesie until that day, but she could tell he hadn’t just met Rose.

  He’s an old friend. From way back. Mammy never did like him. You know how she is – so, not a word.

  Jamesie was OK-looking, a bit chunky, his chin raw with shaving and reeking of Lynx. He was really nervous for some reason. Rose had started a weird chat about school and after about twenty minutes they’d gone. Kira didn’t even get a chance to drink her Coke.

  They’d had a lot of secrets, her and Rose. This was just one of them. When someone died and you had a secret with them, you still couldn’t tell anyone, and you couldn’t talk to them about it any more either. It was like having a secret with yourself. It was the loneliest feeling Kira knew.

  ‘I’ll text you,’ said Jamesie, now.

  ‘Don’t use your name,’ said Kira. ‘People read stuff.’ She realised she knew more than him, more than most adults, about what was really happening. And somehow that was a very lonely feeling too.

  Chapter Sixteen

  How incongruous it was when you found a body on a beautiful morning. April was continuing mild and fair, and the hedgerows were beginning to fill with fuchsia and montbretia, a riot of pink and orange. Paula drove the Volvo out of town, snaked in early-morning school-run traffic. She was heading for the Drumantee Hills, a barren mountainous region that ringed Ballyterrin. Though there were no longer any checkpoints or Army patrols or any border at all, she had crossed it all the same – this body had been found in the South. And that brought a whole different set of problems. Her mind raced as she tapped the steering wheel, impatient for the car to move on. A third body. That meant someone was probably holding the other two, who could still be alive.

  In contrast to the peaceful woods where Mickey Doyle had fetched up dead, hanging, the latest site was bare and flat, no tree for miles around to break the scrub of heather and gorse. She passed several TV vans, reporters doing live broadcasts in the morning breeze, and reached a cordon on the country road, manned by a Garda she didn’t recognise, and hoked her ID out of her bag. ‘I’m the forensic psychologist.’ Always nervous saying it; many officers were suspicious of civilians at crime scenes. She was waved through and parked up, realising once again how difficult it was to get about when you were heavily pregnant. She didn’t recognise anyone – even the techs were unfamiliar here. Finally she spotted Guy, but the brief burst of relief gave way to anxiety – if he saw she was struggling, he might send her home. She lumbered over to him. ‘Can I see the vehicle?’ She held up her hands. ‘I know, I know, but it’s an easy site, and there’s clearly something ritualistic going on here. I need to see it.’

  Guy hesitated. ‘Paula, it’s a really bad one.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘They only got the fire out a few hours ago, so he’s still in there. It’s been soaked in petrol and set alight. He didn’t try to get out, which suggests he was drugged, like the others.’

  ‘He wasn’t dead first?’

  ‘No. Pathologist says there are scorch marks in his throat.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I need to see anyway. How long’s it been here?’

  ‘There were reports of a fire in the early hours of the morning – it’s an isolated spot but anyone driving on the lower road would have seen it.’ They were walking now. Paula could see the van, a burnt-out wreck, which seemed to have once been white. There was a fire engine drawn up in the car park, and fire fighters mingled with the usual swarm of people at a murder scene. As they rounded the small hill she covered her mouth reflexively – the air stank of charred flesh and petrol. They said that was how Crossanure had smelled for weeks after the bombing.

  ‘Not nice,’ said Guy, seeing her face. ‘Anyway, they’re still cutting him out, so you can see if you need to.’ There was a high squeal as someone wearing a mask wielded a sparking torch on the van. They halted some distance back. The sun was warm, a soft breeze twitching Paula’s hair. She pulled strands from her eyes. ‘Is there a note with this one too?’

  ‘We think so. They’re trying to get the door open and extract it.’

  ‘I take it there’s no sign of the others?’

  ‘No. We may have to take helicopters up to the hills with infrared cameras. It can’t be that easy to hide two people in a small town.’

  Two more bodies to come. Paula struggled with the enormity of it. ‘We need to find them.’

  ‘I agree. We can’t have everyone with a grudge doing this.’ He waved a hand to take in the devastation, the blackened shrubs, the smell of roasted flesh in the air.

  ‘The van’s white.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Martin’s van,’ she began. ‘That was odd timing.’

  ‘It was.’ Guy’s mouth was twisted. ‘I don’t know, Paula, this case . . .’ A shout went up from the brow of the hill, and the noise of sawing ceased. ‘They must have found something,’ Guy said. ‘Come on, you can meet the Detective Garda.’

  This turned out to be a florid fiftyish man with white hair, who
clapped Paula’s hand with a firmness that made her wince. ‘Garda Joe Hanlon,’ said Guy. ‘This is Dr Maguire, our forensic psychology consult. What can you tell us?’

  ‘You asked us to look in his mouth? They just took something out with tweezers.’ Hanlon held up a see-through bag. ‘You can just about read it there, have a wee look.’

  The paper was charred and brown, but the writing on it was the same looping script as on the notes found in Mickey Doyle’s mouth and Ronan Lynch’s severed throat – this one said FRIENDLY FIRE.

  ‘It’s not random, if you ask me,’ said the Garda. ‘I’ve seen my fair share of Provo knock-offs – more than my share, if I’m honest. They used to like dumping the bodies over the border here, make a headache for the RUC to clean up. But nothing like this. Quick deaths. This fella – he was roasted to death, and he was alive to feel it.’

  Paula was squinting at the van. ‘Were you able to recover the number plate, Garda Hanlon?’ The one spotted near the crime scenes had had its plate covered up.

  ‘Yes. Do you want it?’ He wrote some numbers on his notebook and passed the sheet to Paula, flapping in the wind. She turned to Guy but he’d already made the leap and was tapping on his BlackBerry.

  ‘Is it?’

  He just nodded. ‘Garda, I think you’ll find this vehicle is registered in the North, to a Dominic Martin.’

  The man looked surprised. ‘I take it you were expecting it to turn up.’

  ‘We were. Just not so . . . audaciously.’

  Paula just shook her head. As they walked back to her car, she asked, ‘You didn’t send Fiacra to liaise with the Gardaí.’

  ‘No. Between you and me, he’s not been coping all that well since his sister was attacked. I’m trying to keep him on lighter duties. I’ve sent him to Dundalk to do some paperwork.’

  ‘That seems wise.’ She was careful not to allude to the reason Fiacra had blown up at her. ‘I think I’ll do the same, back at the unit.’

  ‘Good idea. I’ll see you there.’ How courteous they were being. As if the previous night’s shouting and crying had never happened. But always there was the pressing bump of her child, reminding them that some mistakes just couldn’t be ignored.

  Extract from The Blood Price: The Mayday

  Bombing and its Aftermath, by Maeve Cooley

  (Tairise Press, 2011)

  It was never fully resolved which of the Mayday bombers had played which role. The police put forward a version of events, which was rejected by the courts. But was it far from the truth, or different only in a few small brushstrokes?

  Ni Chonnaill was likely chosen to act as a courier. The year before the bomb she had been convicted of ferrying explosives in the pram of her first child, who is now seven. She is believed to have sourced and shipped parts for the bomb from her father’s network of supporters in Donegal and south of the border – detonators and wire from the bomb were traced back to well-known suppliers.

  Lynch was the explosives expert – the two were a couple at the time, and had worked together to make and plant several devices, such as the one found beneath the car of PSNI reservist Sam Roper in 2003 (Lynch was arrested for this but once again had to be let go due to a lack of witness cooperation). It seems likely Lynch built the bomb which devastated Crossanure.

  Doyle and Brady were logistics men, low down the pecking order. Brady had his IQ tested while in prison in the eighties and was borderline learning-disabled. He and Doyle probably took the bomb into Crossanure that day. Doyle’s job as a refuse operative gave him access to the bin which would later that day be on the route of the planned Orange march. The two were caught on CCTV driving Doyle’s work van into Crossanure several hours before the bomb went off.

  Flaherty was the ringleader. That was never in any doubt. He had been high up the ranks of the IRA South Armagh battalion, but split from them in anger at what he saw as capitulation to the peace process. The mobile phone which was intended to detonate the bomb had once been registered to Flaherty, then reported missing the previous year.

  And why did the Five escape justice, in the face of such compelling evidence? The pressure on security forces north and south of the border was immense after the bomb – arrests had to happen quickly. This meant corners were cut, PACE infringed in several cases, confessions extracted with perhaps too much force. Evidence was not correctly stored. There was human error. A margin of uncertainty. The need of our justice system to play by rules the terrorists ignore. Witnesses too afraid to speak out. Sheer bad luck. No one knows exactly why, but by naming them here I hope to counteract this gross miscarriage of justice and allow the families some fraction of the restitution they so desperately need.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Paula had been back at the unit for some time when she heard the voices. She was at her desk puzzling over the three deaths – the hanging, the beheading, the burning. What was the connection? One swinging from a tree, his purple face throttled, his bowels slack. The note in his mouth, COLLATERAL DAMAGE. The same phrase used about the bomb. The second, his head lopped off, eyes open in surprise. His note saying UNFORESEEN ESCALATION. The third, the burning man. Dying in Dominic Martin’s van and the note preserved inside his mouth, the lips pulled back into a horrible grin by the shrinking of burned skin. FRIENDLY FIRE. A sick joke. Paula could never forget the smell, of scorched petrol and cooking flesh, a sweet, almost barbecue-like reek. They’d got to him before he was completely unrecognisable, his sandy hair burned off and his skin blackened, but in spots under his clothes still milky pale. He’d been wearing a plastic leather jacket, which had burned and stuck to his flesh in clumps.

  She sighed and set down the gruesome pictures, wondering if they’d made any progress arresting Dominic Martin. Corry seemed determined to sit on it, whatever evidence they found. She had at least agreed to an expert taking handwriting samples from the families, now they had three notes to go on. Lorcan Finney’s lab would be working on that task too. Meanwhile, the MPRU had failed utterly to find any sign of the missing, only their mutilated bodies.

  ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come—’

  ‘I want to see Avril.’ Paula looked up from her desk to see what the sudden commotion was. They didn’t have a reception desk at the unit – couldn’t stretch to it, and people weren’t meant to walk in anyway, so they took turns to answer the glass door when it buzzed. Now a short man in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt was squaring up to six-foot-four Gerard. ‘Are you him?’

  ‘Excuse me, sir—’

  ‘Monaghan, is that your name?’

  Avril was standing up. ‘Alan! What’s gotten into you? Why are you here?’

  Her fiancé. Paula recognised him now from the picture on Avril’s desk. Unprepossessing, with a bad haircut, he was shaking like a dog in the rain. ‘I know what you did. You and him.’ He pointed to Gerard. ‘Do your bosses know? I said you shouldn’t be working in this place, it’s a den of sin.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Gerard was looking baffled.

  Avril’s voice shook. ‘I’m sorry, everyone. I don’t know what he— Alan, what is this about?’

  ‘Do they all know?’ demanded Alan. ‘Look at you, parading around here like a tart. Well, I want you to quit.’

  Paula wondered what stretch of the imagination could accuse Avril’s knee-length skirt of being ‘tarty’. She stood up but stayed at her desk, cradling her bump.

  Avril was pleading with him. ‘Don’t be silly, Alan. Can you just go home and we’ll talk about this later, sensibly?’

  ‘I can’t wait. You tell me if it’s true or not.’ He turned his pointing finger on her.

  ‘Is what true? I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘You and this Monaghan fella. Have you betrayed me, Avril?’

  ‘No,’ she said, but there was the smallest pause, and everyone heard it. ‘I haven’t done anything,’ she said. ‘Gerard is a colleague.’

  ‘You kissed him. I know you did. At Christmas.’

&n
bsp; The scene Paula had witnessed. She’d seen no actual kiss, but what had looked like the aftermath of one all right.

  Gerard had been rendered uncharacteristically silent but now he tried to speak. ‘Look. Alan—’

  ‘Don’t you dare say my name! You’re no better than her. Both of you, fornicators.’ He glared at Avril. ‘And with a Fenian, of all people. That’s the best you can do?’

  Paula and Avril were in the Ladies, safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be disturbed, given that no other women worked in the unit. Avril was sitting on an upturned toilet seat, pressing her eyes with the wads of paper towels Paula was passing to her. Her breathing was uneven. ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to tell me.’ She busied herself taking out more towels, the weight of her belly pushing into the sink. Behind her in the mirror she could see Avril, red-faced and weeping and apparently determined to share.

  ‘Me and Gerard – you know how things get a bit crazy here. All work, and people are dying and you can maybe save them if you just work hard enough, except you can never work hard enough?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I just did traffic analysis before. I never knew it would be this way.’

  Paula said nothing. The last thing she wanted was to get involved in someone else’s love life.

  ‘You’re close to DI Brooking.’

  ‘Hmm-mm. Well, we’re colleagues.’

  ‘More than that. Your baby . . .’

  Paula didn’t know how do to this locker-room girly intimacy. ‘Look, Avril. I’m not sure who this baby’s father is. That’s . . . inconvenient, but I still have to get on with my job. And so do you.’

  Avril gave a blubbery breath. ‘I can’t believe he came here. Someone’s been talking to him.’ She caught Paula’s eyes in the mirror. ‘You saw – at Christmas.’