The Silent Dead

by Claire McGowan

  ‘It must be more than one killer,’ said Paula uneasily. There were three chairs behind the table. ‘Surely one person couldn’t have got them all here, set all this up.’

  Finney nodded. ‘I’d agree with that too.’ I wasn’t asking you, she thought tetchily.

  There was movement at the opening to the cave. A young constable in uniform approached, stepping gingerly on the wet rocks, calling out to Corry. ‘Ma’am, they’ve found something in the woods. It was caught in the trees. Also, there’s some journalists at the cordon. Word must have got out.’

  Paula tried not to show that she’d immediately thought of Aidan. He was world-class at working out the lie of the land in Ballyterrin.

  ‘Send them off,’ snapped Corry. ‘No one can see this. We have to keep it quiet as long as we can.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said the constable nervously, licking his cracked lips.

  ‘Show me what they found.’ Corry made a gesture with her hand. A CSI in a blue suit and mask appeared, handing something to her in a clear bag. She peered at it in the dim light at the cave’s entrance, then reached impatiently into the pocket of her jacket and flicked on a small torch. Paula saw what it was, and her heart dipped with a quick dart of nausea and fear. ‘Hair,’ said Corry, looking at it. ‘Blonde hair.’

  ‘Is it hers?’ Paula swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. ‘Is it Ni Chonnaill’s?’

  ‘Looks like it. So she was held here, along with the others. Only question is,’ said Corry, glancing around, ‘who was sitting in judgement on them?’

  ‘Paula! Look at you!’

  ‘I know, I’m huge.’

  ‘Not at all, you’re glowing. Come here.’ Saoirse’s husband Dave was always so nice. He clasped Paula in a bear hug so tight a small gasp escaped her.

  ‘That’s good, I’ll be in labour in no time with more of that.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. What can I get you? No drink, I suppose.’

  ‘Sadly, no. I’ll just take a juice or something. Is – eh, is Aidan coming?’

  Dave always seemed oblivious of the issues between Paula and Aidan, though he couldn’t possibly be. ‘He’ll be down later,’ he said. ‘Working late, it’s deadline day.’

  Of course. She used to know things like that, in the brief hiatus when they were friends, or something, again.

  Saoirse came into the living room, wiping her hands on an apron. She looked flushed and happy. Paula noticed because on seeing her, her friend’s face instantly fell. She tried to hide it. ‘Paula! Glad you could come. Might be the last time for a while, eh?’

  ‘It might indeed.’ She sank into the squashy grey sofa Dave indicated. ‘I can’t imagine another two months of this. I’m seriously about to pop.’

  Saoirse’s expression didn’t change much, but Paula was reminded of a long-ago conversation, before she knew she was pregnant, and Saoirse was discussing her fertility issues: ‘What I can’t stand is women complaining about their kids, or being pregnant. They don’t know how bloody lucky they are.’

  ‘Anyway – how are you both?’ she said.

  ‘Well, I start stims next week. Then we wait for the egg harvesting.’

  Paula couldn’t help but twitch. ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘All being well we could be pregnant by May,’ said Dave. Paula looked at Saoirse, knowing it wasn’t like her to be this positive. Luckily the bell went. Paula braced herself – was it, was it – yes. She heard Aidan’s voice. Her heart turned upside down.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Dave, setting down his bottle of Peroni.

  Saoirse was watching, her eyebrows raised. ‘I did say he’d be here.’

  ‘No, I know. I wanted to see him. It’s OK.’

  Saoirse rose to kiss Aidan as he came in. He said to her, ‘Well, missus. You’re looking grand. When are you gonna ditch this fella here and run off with me?’

  Saoirse laughed. ‘He could break you in two, pet.’

  ‘I know. Why do you think I’m pals with him?’ He spotted Paula and the laugh was gone from his face. ‘Hiya.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yep. Just . . . getting by.’ She waved her glass of juice feebly and resolved to go home after the main course.

  When they were sitting down to the meal of Heston Blumenthal roast chicken, made by Dave, Saoirse brought up the case. ‘So you’re still looking for the Mayday lot? It’s been all over the news. Two of them are dead now?’

  Paula set down a chicken bone. ‘Yeah. We’re still looking for the rest.’

  ‘I was working that day.’ Saoirse was also not drinking, which made for a sober, quiet gathering. Aidan had three beers and stopped, as if making the point that his drinking was under control. When things were bad it was whisky he went for, or more specifically, cheap supermarket bourbon, chasing oblivion at the bottom of a bottle.

  ‘In the hospital?’ They’d fallen out of touch back then, Paula and Saoirse. She’d never known her friend was in the thick of the bomb, while she watched it on TV in the safety of her London flat.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It must have been awful.’

  Saoirse toyed with her food. ‘We got word something had happened, and then they started coming in. I’ve never seen anything like it – we just weren’t equipped. Hundreds and hundreds. People were driving up and dropping out of the back of cars, just sliding out, there was so much blood. It was on my shoes, all the way up my legs even. And I just knew there were people I could – but there wasn’t time. There wasn’t time to get to everyone. I saw this wee girl – she’d been brought in on a stretcher, but she wasn’t – God, she wasn’t even whole, they should have seen she was dead but I suppose in the confusion – I always remember her. Only a baby, really.’

  They’d all fallen silent.

  Saoirse gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Sorry. I forget not everyone spends their days up to the eyeballs in blood and guts.’

  Dave cleared his throat. ‘It was a terrible thing.’

  Saoirse said, ‘I’ve been thinking a lot since then about why things happen. I mean, why did those people die and others didn’t? They were good people.’

  ‘There’s no reason to it,’ said Aidan, fiddling with the label on his last beer. ‘Things just happen.’

  ‘I mean, look at me. I tried to do everything right. Got married, worked hard – I help people all day long. And I have no baby while other people my age are on their third.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Aidan said again. ‘But life isn’t fair. All of us at this table know that. I was there that day too. I was stringing for one of the nationals back then and they sent me. Bonus to the first person to get a picture, they said. I got behind the cordons and I saw . . . I saw some of it. People laid out, like. They wrote numbers on their heads, some of them, to try to keep track. With a marker, like.’ He tore the label off his bottle. ‘Course, some of them didn’t actually have heads.’

  Dave caught Paula’s eye over the table, and she saw his expression at the turn this conversation had taken. ‘Well,’ she said firmly. ‘It was very sad. But I’m sure you both helped people a lot that day.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Saoirse said quietly. ‘There were so many people I couldn’t get to.’

  ‘I wasn’t even trying to help,’ said Aidan. ‘Just to get shots of them dying.’

  ‘Well now,’ said Dave vaguely. ‘We all do the best we can, and we can’t do more.’

  Paula stared down at her empty plate as silence fell again. ‘I should make a move,’ Aidan said, as if reading her mind.

  ‘Me too,’ she said, with relief.

  Saoirse snapped out of the reverie she’d fallen into. ‘You’ll be over the limit, Aidan, you should leave your car here.’ He opened his mouth to protest. ‘Paula will leave you back.’

  She glared at Saoirse, who stared pointedly back, and realised she did need to talk to Aidan alone after all.

  Neither spoke during the short drive to his flat in town, but she was aware of e
very breath he took, every shift of his legs and creak of his leather jacket. He filled the car with a scent of tobacco and mint and something else that she could have picked out in a crowd as being the smell of him. ‘This is me.’

  She pulled up, wondering what the flat was like inside. If he had his vinyl, his guitars, his books, cups of half-drunk coffee everywhere. How could someone mean so much to you when you’d never even been to their home?

  He took his seat belt off, hesitated. ‘It was good to see you tonight.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘I said so, didn’t I?’

  ‘Aidan. I’m sorry. You said I wasn’t even sorry, back in January. Well I am. I didn’t plan any of this.’

  ‘I know. But it’s happening, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. But maybe after . . .’ He waited, and she realised she didn’t know how to finish that sentence. She rubbed her eyes. ‘This case is a real killer, you know.’

  ‘Have you any leads?’ He held up his hands. ‘No no, just making chat, not digging for a story.’

  ‘Gerard thinks it’s the local Provos. Getting rid of the embarrassing country cousins so they can put on suits and go to Westminster. We keep hearing that Kenny and Flaherty used to be friends, but he denies it.’

  Aidan rubbed his chin. ‘Aye, Maeve put that in her book. The publishers didn’t want her to, but she insisted.’

  Paula found that, at the mention of the journalist’s name, she was clenching her fists, imagining him once again in Maeve’s bedroom, half-naked. ‘What’s happening with that?’ She tried to keep her voice neutral.

  ‘Ireland First were trying to sue her, last I heard. I guess not any more, now.’

  ‘That must have been tough for her.’

  ‘Not at all. She did it on purpose.’

  ‘On purpose?’

  ‘Aye. If there was a libel trial it would all be heard in court again, wouldn’t it? It was one way to get something for the families, she thought.’

  Which was a bloody selfless thing to do. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Anyway, do I sense you don’t think Kenny actually did the kidnaps?’

  ‘There’s a lot that doesn’t fit. And . . .’ She couldn’t tell him about the notes in the mouths, the photos on the cave wall. ‘There are signs that link it to Mayday.’

  ‘Revenge?’

  ‘I think so. Some kind of . . . restitution, maybe. I went to the relatives’ group and there was definitely something up with them.’

  Aidan rubbed his chin, and it almost killed her how much she missed this, asking him for advice. ‘You’d want to be careful. The families went through so much they’re near canonised round here. You wouldn’t want to accuse them of being mixed up in it.’

  ‘I’m not. I just . . .’

  ‘You just have doubts.’

  She smiled weakly. ‘When do I not?’

  ‘OK.’ A silence welled between them, full of unsaid things. She gripped the steering wheel. She didn’t even know what she’d say if she could speak. After a moment, Aidan opened the door. ‘I’ll see you around then. Is Saoirse OK, do you think?’

  ‘You’d know as well as me.’

  He thought a bit. ‘She’ll have to be, I suppose. There’s no remedy for it.’

  ‘No, but I don’t think it helps seeing me like this.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Thought you said it was.’ She smiled at him weakly to show she was joking and he half-smiled, half-grimaced back.

  ‘Well, let’s not go there, as they say. Night, Maguire.’

  His old name for her. It was something, anyway.

  Extract from The Blood Price: The Mayday

  Bombing and its Aftermath, by Maeve Cooley

  (Tairise Press, 2011)

  Interview with DCI Helen Corry, Ballyterrin PSNI

  I was thirty-seven when the bomb went off. I don’t know why I feel that’s relevant, except that my life was cut in two by it. I can’t describe it any other way.

  I’d been doing OK before that. My husband wasn’t failing me. Not yet. We had money. The recession hadn’t hit. My kids were seven and nine. Still sweet, energetic wee things who didn’t hate me for working all hours. I had an au pair. I’d been made a DS already, despite missing a year for each child.

  I was leading the team on 1st May 2006. Crossanure is a small town outside Ballyterrin. I’m sure you know that, but perhaps your readers won’t. More of a village really. There was an Orange parade later on that day, so we were monitoring it from the control room, with officers on the street. I remember it was sunny, and I was in a bad mood at missing the bank holiday. My husband was annoyed and kept phoning to ask things like where were the barbecue tongs and did we have any suncream.

  Sorry. You don’t need to know that.

  The call came in at 11.03 a.m. I remember because I could see the red lights on the clock blinking on the control desk. It was a constable out on the beat, Raymond Sheeran. Eh . . . He came on the line then said nothing.

  Constable? I said. I was pressing down the button on my phone, irritated.

  I think something happened.

  You’ll need to clarify, Constable. We’re a bit busy for ‘something’.

  There’s a car, he says. This lad was in his early twenties, no more. No bombs for a good twenty years, remember. There’s a car in the middle of the High Street. It’s kind of parked weirdly.

  Weirdly how?

  Eh . . . sort of abandoned like. In the road. I could hear the hesitation in his voice. He didn’t want to say it. We didn’t want to think it. Have any threats been called in?

  No, of course— but then I saw a flicker of something in the dispatcher’s eye. Hold on, Constable. I glared at the dispatcher. She was sitting right beside me. What? Tell me.

  That’s right. Susan Markey was her name. Yes she was . . . let go after the incident. But I’m afraid that’s a confidential matter.

  It came in earlier, ma’am, she said hesitantly. I wasn’t sure it was anything but . . . it’s in those papers.

  You put it on my desk? Jesus, Susan. You always put any threats right into my hands.

  It sounded liked kids. She was trembling. There wasn’t a code word. They didn’t say a car, anyway, they didn’t say anything really. They weren’t making any sense and half of it was in Irish. They said something about the High Street, about continuing the struggle . . .

  Give me it. I read the whole transcript of the call, gulping it with my eyes. She was right – it was mostly gibberish, but all the same my blood was running cold. I shouted, Order an evacuation. Everyone out of that end of the street. I diverted all my officers and ordered Constable Sheeran to lead the operation.

  Ten minutes later the bomb went off. Not in that car but in a bin outside the Methodist church. On the route of the Orange Order parade, but several hours early, and exactly where I’d been sending all those people. The car was just an unfortunate coincidence. Constable Sheeran died. I heard him screaming through his phone. He’d been assisting an elderly woman, who hadn’t a scratch on her. It happens that way in a bomb. It moves through like the hand of God, knocking down the young, leaving the old, taking the well, missing the sick. There is no order. Afterwards it was concluded that grouping everyone at that end of the street most likely led to the very high loss of life. We’d walked them to their deaths.

  My supervisor shot himself a month after the inquest. That’s right. In the mouth, with his service rifle. Me, I got divorced. But I don’t blame myself. The only people to blame are those who made the bomb, who placed the bomb, who phoned in a vague and misleading warning. No one else should have been punished for it.

  I think we’ll have to leave it there, if you’ll excuse me. Thank you.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Nice place.’

  ‘As long you’re not a Protestant, a Catholic they don’t agree with, or English.’

  ‘We’re screwed then.’

  The pub was exactly the kind of one Paula would normally ha
ve crossed the street to avoid. It was called the Starry Plough, and was infamous as the scene of the shooting of Derek ‘Funster’ McCourt, one of the town’s most notorious drug dealers. He’d been gunned down there in 1997 in a small misunderstanding over a missing consignment of ecstasy tablets. Paula was sitting opposite it in Guy’s BMW, and her mind was currently failing to take in the idea of Guy Brooking, all English vowels and handmade suits, going inside the pub’s wired-up windows and faded paintwork. ‘You really think this will be all right?’

  ‘They’ve agreed to see us.’

  ‘But – don’t they know you were with the Met?’

  ‘They agreed to speak to me, and they know I’m neither Catholic nor Protestant. I’m told a priest will mediate.’

  ‘You know what they used to do to the English over here?’

  ‘Paula. It was all years ago. I understand perfectly if you feel apprehensive – I did say you should perhaps stay—’

  ‘I’ll be fine! I’m Catholic.’

  ‘A Catholic working for the police.’

  ‘Hmph. OK. Let’s both go then.’

  ‘I suppose you won’t listen if I suggest it’s not the best place for you.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘And if I mention the baby, you’ll get cross?’

  ‘I’m very well aware of the baby, sir. It’s hard not to be when it’s sitting on my bladder.’

  He almost smiled. ‘All right. Let’s take it nice and easy.’

  She walked across the road with her belly held awkwardly in front of her, like a ship’s prow. He hovered at her elbow, not quite taking it. The place smelled like all Irish pubs, as if every stick of wood in the place had been marinated in Guinness for forty years. It was so dark it took a while for Paula’s eyes to adjust. There was one man behind the bar wiping glasses, a radio softly giving out Irish. There were two other men at a corner table, one in a dog collar. The other, she knew, was Jarlath Kenny, IRA commander of the area in the nineties – allegedly, of course – and now mayor of the town, possibly soon to be MP. He was dressed in a polo shirt and tracksuit bottoms rather than the Armani suits he was known for, and drinking water from a pint glass.