The Silent Dead

by Claire McGowan

  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.

  Yet these five people conspired one bright summer day to blow up sixteen men, women, children, and babies, with a bomb so massive it destroyed a whole street, tore the heads right off some victims, and produced so much blood it fell down on the High Street like a red rain for a full ten minutes after the blast.

  What can we say in the face of such horror? What the Five have said amounts to – we were not involved, and even if we were involved, we didn’t intend to kill civilians, and anyway, some must always die in the war for freedom. We know the story. As I will show in this book, the guilt of the Five is indisputable, yet a series of legal and policing errors mean they have not been brought to justice. For the families of the sixteen people who died that sunny spring day, and the dozens maimed, blinded and paralysed in the blast, the end of the road has been reached.

  If you ever ask yourself the price of peace, then this is it – to go out in your home town and see the man who murdered your child filling his car with petrol, whistling a Republican tune, free and alive and getting off scot-free. Ask yourself – is that a price you’d be willing to live with?

  Chapter Three

  Paula returned to an empty house that night. The idea was that now Pat and PJ were married, he would move into her bigger and nicer house across town, where the bathroom could more easily be adapted to his bad leg. Injured in an accident years before, he’d been badly wounded again just before Christmas, when a killer had broken in looking for Paula. Since then the locks had been replaced by shiny new bolts, but still she didn’t feel safe until she’d checked all the doors and windows every night.

  Having completed the rounds, she stood in the kitchen. Under her loose maternity top, her hand found the scar on her abdomen, where an insane woman had tried to cut her baby out. But the baby was still in there, safe for now. A girl. Paula hadn’t wanted to know, but the woman’s sister, who claimed to be psychic, had told her, and now she knew it was hard not to picture th
e child. Would she have red hair? Paula sighed. Seeing Guy every day, his features were too easy to picture, the fair hair swept back, the rigid bones of his face. She remembered what the psychic, Magdalena Croft, had told her, seeing her with Guy: oh, he’s the one, is he? It wasn’t true. The woman didn’t have visions, it wasn’t possible. She was a fraudster, a liar, and she deserved the prison sentence she was now serving. But was she right? And then there was Aidan, of course, dark, angry, whose face she saw every time she shut her eyes.

  Paula touched her stomach and spoke aloud in the silence. ‘It’s OK. We don’t need either of them. We’ll have each other.’

  It was strange she should feel lonely here. She’d loved living alone in London, shutting the door and keeping out friends, lovers, would-be boyfriends. Waking to the river’s shifting colours, running along it at night with her breath in her ears and the pounding of her own feet the only sounds. Sitting in her window seat watching the lights of boats go past, perfectly happy in her own company, working on missing persons for a big station in Rotherhithe. Work had mattered, and nothing else.

  Then she’d come home, and got stuck here. And this house was haunted. There in the kitchen, that was where her mother had stood the last day, rinsing off breakfast dishes. Paula, then just thirteen, had eaten her porridge without looking up, school uniform on and eyes bleary. When the police asked about it later, when she’d been home for hours and no one had come and she had to give in to her rising panic, she’d not even been able to remember what her mother was wearing.

  Her mind turned, restless, to the doubts that lurked at the back of it. Several months ago Guy had handed her the file of her mother’s case. A jailed IRA member had suggested he knew something of the case, and might even talk if he could get early release. And then there was Magdalena, whispering more of her poison: your mother’s still alive. She’s alive, and over water.

  Bob Hamilton had been the lead officer on her mother’s case, back in 1993. Paula remembered him coming to the door, her father’s former partner, there to arrest him for the possible murder of his wife. Of course PJ had been released, but his job had never been easy again, and he’d been let go for good in 1998 after the Good Friday Agreement. Bob Hamilton had been the one to deliver the news. Forced to work with him, Paula had asked him to reopen the case, but he wouldn’t talk to her about it. She’d spoken to everyone who might know something, anything – her mother’s old boss, Pat, Bob himself. She’d learned nothing concrete, but still the doubts would not go away. Had they done everything they could? Was the psychic right, had she really seen something? What if? The what if, it could drive you mad if you let it.

  Restless, Paula checked her phone – nothing. Nothing from Aidan, nothing from Guy. Nothing from Saoirse, her best friend – or she had been before Paula left town anyway, who knew now – who’d been strange with her since the pregnancy. There was no one else. Her London life, her friends there, her colleagues, it had all been washed away in the move across the water.

  She shivered and tugged her dressing gown round her bump. ‘You OK in there? This is where we’re meant to live when you come out. What do you think?’ She looked round at the brown seventies cupboards and patterned lino of the kitchen. ‘I know, not the best, is it? We’re getting it fixed up. Hardwood floors and that.’ Her dad was going to pay. The idea was Paula and the baby could live here ‘for as long as you want, pet’, and then it could be sold. Which was until when? Could she go back to London as originally planned, with a tiny, helpless baby, pick up her life of dark bars and late nights and always the escape of her empty flat? Could she stay here and live in her parents’ sad terraced house, a single mother in her thirties?

  She wandered into the living room, itching with doubt and boredom. She picked up the local paper, but that only reminded her of Aidan, its editor, and anyway it featured a large profile of the Republican mayor Jarlath Kenny and the success he’d made of attracting investment to the town – something of a puff piece for Aidan, but no doubt he’d printed it for reasons of his own. Jarlath Kenny didn’t even try to hide his IRA past, as if everything that happened before 1998 had been wiped out by the Good Friday Agreement and no questions asked. Now he was launching a Westminster bid – the local seat was going to be vacant when the current moderate MP retired in September and he was widely seen as a shoo-in. It was strange that Kenny, once as much of a terrorist as the Mayday Five, was running the town, while the Five had disappeared. It was entirely plausible that the local Republican movement had dealt with them, bent as they were on derailing all the progress made since 1998 and stirring up awkward memories of the not-so-long-ago time when many politicians had themselves been no stranger to the detonator or the Armalite. And then there was the Mayday Victims Group, vocal, angry. Denied any justice since the trial had collapsed the year before.

  But Paula didn’t want to think about that. Hopefully they would all have alibis. Hopefully the visit to the Chair would be just a formality.

  She was actually glad when the phone rang and it was PJ checking up on her.

  ‘Make sure you don’t let that water heater overboil. It does be awful temperamental.’

  ‘It’s fine, Dad. Are you all right? How’s your leg?’

  ‘Ah, not too bad. Have you put the heating on? You don’t want to catch a chill with the baby.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Don’t go out now and leave your straighteners on or anything like that. I put a new battery in the smoke alarm, but you never know. Oh, and the bins go out on a Tuesday.’

  ‘Dad! I’m not a kid!’

  ‘I know, I know. Listen, would you ever call in on Mrs Flynn next door if you’ve time?’

  ‘I’m so busy, Dad, I—’

  ‘Just for a minute, see she’s OK. Now I’m not over the fence she’s got no one. Her weans all went to England and sure they never make it back to see her.’

  Had Paula chosen, she could have read books between the gaps in her father’s words. ‘OK. I’ll call in when I get a minute.’ Though the Lord only knew when that might be.

  ‘And you’re OK up there on your own, you’re not getting into bad thoughts or anything?’

  Paula thought again of all the years she’d lived alone in London, barely seeing her father for months on end, just stilted phone calls straining across the water. But this house was haunted – for him, too. ‘I’m fine.’ She could almost have said it, said, Dad, I know you think she’s dead, but I’m just not sure, and I have to keep on looking, whatever it means. Whoever it hurts. ‘Honestly, I’m just going to go to bed. We’re so busy at work.’

  ‘Oh yes, with the fella in the woods. Can’t say I have too much sympathy for him. Well, goodnight, pet. You’re sure you’re OK?’

  After assuring her father she was fine, she was thirty and had lived alone for many years, and hadn’t fallen down the stairs or electrocuted herself on the toaster, Paula took herself to bed to read a book published a month before, to much controversy, about the Mayday bomb. In it the author, a Dublin journalist, had publicly named the five people believed to be behind the blast, who due to various legal and jurisdictional blunders had never been convicted. Having followed the story with interest, Paula knew that Ireland First were in the process of suing the author and publishers, a small independent press – until the Five had vanished. And now Mickey Doyle had turned up in the forest with a rope around his neck.

  Lying on her bed in the dark house, she tried not to see his mottled face. The book’s journalist author, Maeve Cooley, was a rising star in the South, loved for her cynical style as much as for her blonde beauty. She was also a good friend of Aidan’s, often helping him on stories, and by extension a sort-of friend of Paula. Except that the last time Paula had seen Maeve, Aidan had been in her bedroom in Dublin, wearing just a T-shirt and boxers. They were old friends. Could have been nothing. But she wouldn’t ask, same as he wouldn’t ask her if he was the father of her child, and this was the game they were playing, had been play
ing for twelve years, until they were so good it was hard to say if either had won or both had lost.

  The cover was adorned with a picture of Maeve, soulful, lovely, clever. Damn her, she was funny too. You couldn’t not like her and Paula had done her best. She began to read.

  Extract from The Blood Price: The Mayday

  Bombing and its Aftermath, by Maeve Cooley

  (Tairise Press, 2011)

  No one got up that morning with any premonitions. Those who say they did are wrong, and worse, they do an injustice to the dead. For who would have gone into Crossanure that day if any pall or shadow hung over the bright sun, who would have strapped babies into buggies, taken elderly parents for a day out?

  On a farm outside town, John Lenehan was up tending to his cows. He’d later send his son Danny into town, to buy animal feed and change some money for Danny’s upcoming holiday to Majorca – his first ever with friends. He’d got his passport the day before. All over town people got ready. They were there buying a Communion dress, getting a car serviced, picking up new glasses, changing library books. Hundreds of people were in Crossanure that day. A funfair had set up in the park, spilling out popcorn smells and disco music. The Orange parade was due at two p.m., the first of marching season. It was Monday 1st May 2006, a bank holiday. By the end of the day sixteen people would be dead and hundreds wounded, the still-beating heart of the small town ripped right out. In this book I will try to make some of their voices heard, through speaking to those injured and those left behind to grieve.

  This is what happened. But no, that isn’t the right wording. It didn’t just happen. This is what someone did. And in this book I will go on to name them, in the hope that they may one day face the truth of the murders they committed.