The Dead Ground

by Claire McGowan

  At home, she switched on her laptop and plugged in the internet dongle, surfing easyJet and Ryanair fares to London. Was it possible? Could she say she needed a weekend away, business to attend to in London, a friend’s birthday? Go and get it sorted, then restart her life, drink wine and walk without fear over ice, eat cheese and prawns and go on rollercoasters, sleep around, never look back? She sighed and logged out, powering down the computer without a decision made, just as paralysed as ever.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When Paula was little – very little, before John O’Hara had been shot and the place became heavy with sadness – she’d loved going to Pat’s house. Hand in hand with her mother, shopping in bags, breaking the walk back from town with a cup of tea at Pat’s. Paula would have Um Bongo or Robinson’s Barley Water, and choose a biscuit from the large Tupperware box where Pat kept treats.

  Pat had always just been there. Paula remembered that endless night, dark by four p.m., when her father had come in and she’d realised the thing she’d been ignoring for hours was no longer standing behind her tapping her on the shoulder. It was right in front of her eyes – her mother wasn’t there. That was when she’d let go of the fears she’d been holding down, and like a bunch of balloons they’d gone soaring and never come back. Pat had come that night and sat on Paula’s bed until she slept some. She remembered all this now as she sat, many years older but feeling no wiser, at Pat’s kitchen table listening to the kettle boil. She’d called in on her lunch break, needing to keep things moving somehow now she’d spoken to her mother’s boss. And maybe, though she wouldn’t have admitted it to herself, hoping she might run into Aidan and get past their most recent falling-out.

  ‘Now!’ Pat came in, having changed out of her aerobics clothes into slacks and a long pink cardigan. She settled her glasses on her nose. ‘Sorry about that, pet. If I’d known you were dropping in I’d have baked.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ Pat was rooting in her larder, amid the same warm spicy smell Paula remembered. Safety and comfort and sugar all wrapped up. Christmas lights and holly over every window. ‘I just thought I’d call in, see how you were. How’s Aidan?’ she said brightly, patting the elephant in the room.

  Pat had found some flapjacks and was arranging them on a little plate along with several Kit Kats. She always did this, even if it was just two of them, even though Pat herself never ate anything, always on a diet. ‘He’s grand. Awful busy, I’ve hardly seen hide nor hair of him. Have you?’

  ‘Eh – no. I’ve been busy too. Work’s crazy.’

  ‘Of course, you’ll be working on those cases.’ Pat always spoke of Paula’s job in deferential code. ‘God, it’s awful, isn’t it? That poor girl who’s missing, and the wee baby out there somewhere. I’m glad you and my fella are all grown up, Paula. When you were wee, your mammy and me, we’d leave you both in the garden in your prams, no bother. We always felt safe, even with the bombs and what have you.’

  Paula leaned on her elbows. ‘That was what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘Mm?’ Pat was stirring, tinkling teaspoons, pouring milk.

  ‘Mum. About her.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pat spilled the tea on the table as she set it down. ‘Wait, now, I’ll get a cloth.’

  Paula wrapped her hands round the warm mug as Pat fussed. ‘I just think it’s time. I need to know what happened.’

  Pat sat down, fiddling with the cloth and running her hands over it distractedly. ‘Pet, you know what happened. As much as any of us does, that is.’

  ‘Do I? Dad won’t tell me anything. He won’t talk about her.’

  ‘He can’t, love.’

  ‘I know. But I can’t not. I was only thirteen, Pat, I can hardly remember. I can’t even picture her most of the time.’

  ‘But what good does it do to talk about it, pet? There’s nothing more to know.’

  ‘I know – I just want to talk about her. I – I miss her.’ The words fell into the kitchen, warm and safe and smelling of biscuits, the tick of the clock Paula had given Pat for Christmas when she was seven. It was in the shape of a cat, its tail the pendulum.

  ‘I know you miss her.’ Pat was looking upset, even more so than Paula had expected. ‘Did your daddy say something, is that where this comes from?’

  ‘No! He won’t talk about it at all. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I just wondered why now.’

  ‘I suppose being back, being older – I might want my own kids someday. What’ll I tell them about her?’ The lie passed over her lips, glib and sweet as sugar.

  ‘All right.’ Pat’s hands shook as she split a Kit Kat, running a nail down the silver foil. Paula wondered if she even knew she was eating it. ‘Well, it was my John and your daddy were friends, you know. From as soon as your daddy got posted to the town. And when he met your mum, he brought her here for her dinner.’

  ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘Of course I liked her, pet—’

  ‘I mean really. Did you know her?’

  Pat had flecks of chocolate on her lips. ‘I don’t know if I did, pet. We got to be friends – they married fast, your daddy and her, and John was your daddy’s best man, so we saw her a lot. Then I’d Aidan, and you arrived, so we’d push our prams together, and I’d lend her baby things and that.’

  ‘Pat—’ Paula hesitated. ‘I spoke to Mum’s boss. Do you remember him? The lawyer?’

  ‘Oh yes, what was his name again?’

  ‘Colin. Colin McCready.’

  ‘And did he know anything?’ Pat looked at Paula, glasses on a string, eyes tired and anxious.

  ‘No,’ Paula admitted. ‘Well. He said there’d been talk about Mum, about the Army barracks in town. She’d stolen some papers out of work, given them to the security forces, that sort of thing. I don’t believe it. I mean, how would she even have met someone like that? She never went anywhere except work and home.’

  Pat swilled the last dregs of tea round her cup. ‘There were rumours at the time, but you’re not to believe it, love. It’s just bad stories, because of your daddy’s job. Your mammy wasn’t political. She said the whole shower were as bad as each other.’

  ‘So she wasn’t unhappy or anything like that?’ Paula was aware of what she was really asking, behind these simple words. Was she killed? Did someone come and take her?

  ‘Well.’ A slight hesitation.

  Paula seized on it. ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t know about the soldier, do you?’

  ‘No.’ Paula sat up straight. ‘What was this?’

  ‘It was a few years before we lost her.’ That was how Pat said it – simply, we lost her, as if she were a purse dropped out of a handbag. ‘Your mammy was driving home from work, and there was a checkpoint – you might not remember, but things were bad again round those times. Anyway, your mammy’s stopped, and when it’s her turn the soldier’s checking her licence and doesn’t someone take a shot at him. A sniper. Got him right— well, God love him, he had no chance. I don’t like them over here with their guns and their helicopters, but he was only a young lad. She said she could see he’d cut himself shaving that morning.’

  ‘He died?’

  ‘He died in her arms. She tried to help him – she’d this nice silk scarf she used to wear, and she used it to bandage him, but there was so much blood, and the wee lad screaming and dying in her lap. There was nothing she could do.’

  ‘Why did no one tell me this?’ She’d been what age, eight or nine? Was it possible it had gone over her head?

  Pat jumped up and started piling the cups into the sink, running water on them. ‘They didn’t want to scare you. You used to have a lot of nightmares – you’d wake up crying about guns and bombs. It was a few years after John, you know. You were hit awful hard by that, wee tiny thing that you were.’

  Paula sh
ivered. If her mother had been known to help soldiers, people would have heard about it. And then there was the terrorist Sean Conlon, sitting in jail, claiming to know things. But no, she couldn’t talk to Pat about the man who’d most likely killed her husband. ‘Thank you. I just needed to talk about her. No one ever lets me.’

  ‘I know, pet.’ Pat was washing up the cups with a little plastic brush, whisking imaginary crumbs from the table. ‘Will you tell your daddy I said hello?’

  Paula put on her coat, flipping her hair out over the collar. ‘Of course, but will you not be calling up to see him?’ Usually Pat was at the house every day.

  ‘Ah, love, I’ll leave him in peace.’ She focussed on the cups. ‘I’ll tell Aidan you were looking for him.’

  Though she hadn’t been, Paula thought, going out to her car. And she wouldn’t, no matter how desperate she was to know where he was.

  The snow was coming down soft and relentless as Paula pulled into the office car park around three p.m. She sat for a moment with the engine off and watched it, before getting out and crossing the icy ground like an old woman. She stood outside the door watching the lights through the window, trying to draw her thoughts into some kind of order, but they were swirling like the snow, Pat and her mother and Aidan and Guy, and all the missing and the lost she would never be able to find.

  She drew in a breath of frozen air and was about to go in, when movement in the dark end of the car park made her start, slip. She reached for the breezeblock wall, heart thudding. ‘You scared me!’

  ‘Sorry.’ Aidan had materialised out of the gloom, as if her thoughts had conjured him up. He wore only a thin leather jacket against the snow. His nose was red, eyes black in his pale face.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘In the station.’

  ‘I can see that. Why in the station?’

  ‘I was talking to Sergeant Hamilton, if you must know. I had some things to ask him.’

  ‘Oh.’ For a moment she was flooded with such terrible disappointment she was sure it showed in her face. He hadn’t come to see her. It was only to get a story. The silence of the past months was no accident. He’d slept with her and then moved on, and she hadn’t, indeed she was probably carrying the weight of the consequences in her belly right now. She pulled herself together. ‘What about?’

  Snowflakes melted on his face; he brushed them off his mouth. ‘Did you honestly think you could just tell me about Conlon and I’d do nothing? Orangeman that he is, I can at least trust Hamilton to tell me the truth about what’s going on.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know that. I just have to know. You can’t expect me not to try, Aidan.’

  ‘And you can’t expect me to help, Paula.’

  He almost never said her first name, and it knocked the legs from under her, as always. ‘Why would I even trust you to help?’ Her anger startled them both. ‘It’s not like you’ve talked to me all month.’

  Aidan’s face hardened. ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘You’ve been in Flanagan’s every night God sends.’ He looked away. She went on. ‘It’s just, Christ, could you not have come to see me, or rung, or – after we – Oh God, Aidan. I don’t know what to say.’ Anger was making her inarticulate.

  He still said nothing. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why would you do that to me? Twelve years I waited for it, for us to be together, and now this?’

  ‘This is why.’ His voice was very low. ‘You’re angry. We’re fighting again. You’re expecting me to explain myself to you.’

  ‘Are you drinking again?’ she demanded.

  He stepped away. ‘You’re not my mother, Maguire. And you’re not my girlfriend any more. Not since we were eighteen.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Well, you’re not. You’ve made it very clear you’ll do what you want without thinking of me, so I’m going to do the same.’

  She was so enraged she couldn’t speak for a moment. ‘Some things don’t change, do they? Fuck me, forget me. Nice work, Aidan.’

  He looked up, and she saw his face, and she felt cold tears prick the corners of her eyes. She might have said something then, anything to fill the chasm opening up between them, but then the door opened, spilling light and voices.

  ‘Paula?’ Guy had a plastic cup in his hand. ‘I saw your car turn in, but then you didn’t appear – I was worried.’ He glanced at Aidan. ‘Should I leave you to it?’

  Aidan was still looking at Paula. ‘I was going.’ He nodded. ‘Good to see you, Inspector.’

  ‘And you.’ As much warmth between them as two icebergs. Aidan turned away into the dark, shoulders hunched against the cold, hands in pockets.

  Guy blinked away snow. ‘It’s really coming down. You shouldn’t be out in it.’

  ‘No. OK.’ She made herself go in, though not looking back at Aidan was as difficult as not breathing. Inside was warm and noisy. ‘What’s happening?’ She unbuttoned her coat.

  ‘Avril’s had a bit of good news – she got engaged last night.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ They were in the corridor by Guy’s office.

  ‘Yes, I think her boyfriend’s a church pastor. Alan, is that it?’

  ‘Think so. What’s that?’ She indicated the cup.

  ‘I got us some fizz. It’s nice to celebrate good news, I think. Everything’s been so difficult of late.’

  ‘Sure.’ She looked up at him and he paused at the corner before the main office, awkward.

  ‘Are we all right?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I wish you’d told me about Tess being back.’

  ‘I wanted to. I’m sorry. It’s – well, I can’t really talk about it. It’s harder than you know. I’m very, very sorry.’

  Could she really be angry, with all she wasn’t telling him? ‘All right. I’ll try to get over it.’ There was more to say and they both knew it, but it seemed impossible to broach. ‘Is it – is it going OK?’

  Guy clammed up. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now.’

  ‘No. OK. Well, let’s go in.’ She turned into the light, smile pasted on ready to congratulate Avril, and left behind the stricken look on his face.

  Avril’s face was flushed as she took tiny sips from her plastic cup. She wasn’t much of a drinker, Paula knew. She wore wide grey trousers and a pink cardigan, her fair hair plaited like an angel’s halo. One finger rather self-consciously bore a medium-sized solitaire diamond. Pretty. Unimaginative. Paula, feeling frumpy in her jeans and thick grey jumper, did what was expected of her as a slightly older woman who wasn’t engaged or married herself: she gushed. ‘Oh, it’s beautiful! Congratulations.’

  ‘Generous,’ commented Helen Corry, who was there for some reason, power-dressed in a purple suit and boots. ‘He must be fond of you, your fella.’

  Avril blushed, turning the ring, which was too big for her finger. ‘It was last night, after church group. I didn’t see it coming.’

  Corry swigged her champagne, or whatever it was that Guy had bought in the corner shop. ‘We have to say that round the fellas, but I think we always have an idea.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Avril said, somewhat anxious. ‘Really, I didn’t.’

  Corry smiled. ‘I’d have been a shite detective if I didn’t figure out mine was up to something. He had the ring in his sock drawer. Dozy bastard.’

  Paula, who’d never been proposed to, said nothing, regarding the fizzy gold liquid in her cup. Why was everyone suddenly pressing booze on her? ‘Have you set a date?’ She was racking her brain for girl-talk clichés. Overhead, the office Christmas decorations, put up by Avril, swung in the current of warm air trickling from the ceiling vent. Tinsel and glitter, sad and cheap in the fluorescent lights, reminding you the year was nearly wrung out and everything you’d meant to do was now too late.


  All the men in the room, unit staff plus a few of the PSNI officers she knew by sight, had clustered around Gerard’s desk in the corner, and were loudly discussing football. Gerard was deep in chat with one of the other DCs, his tie over one shoulder and a cup gripped in his large first, while Fiacra was perching on his own desk, swilling his drink round in an absent-minded way. Paula wondered about what his sister had said. If Fiacra had a wee notion of Avril, this would be hard for him. Bob, who was of course Avril’s uncle, had been hovering near the edge of the men, but now detached himself and went over to Guy. He didn’t drink at all – ran the local abstinence group, in fact – and had no fizzy wine in his hand. Guy met Paula’s eyes with a sad, twisting smile. She wished so much she could down the contents of her plastic cup, try to forget all the thoughts crowding in on her.

  A while later, things were winding down. Corry, who had sunk a fair bit of the first bottle and produced another, more expensive one from her Mulberry handbag, had engaged Avril in a long discussion about marriage and what concessions she must and must not make. ‘Do not wash his socks. Do not pick his socks up off the floor . . .’ Avril listened, nodding like a sort of dejected dog and taking larger gulps of her drink.

  Feeling uninvolved, and trying to hide her own sudden teetotalism, Paula drifted over to Fiacra. ‘All right?’

  He blinked. ‘Me? Oh aye.’

  ‘How’s your sister?’

  ‘Ah, she’s grand. She was pleased to meet you the other day. They’re always on at me to talk about work.’

  ‘You’ve a big family, have you?’

  ‘Mammy and four sisters. Da’s dead.’ Fiacra took a swallow of drink, simply stating a fact of life. ‘He was a Guard too, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know that. Was he – did something happen at work?’

  ‘No. Well, kinda. Heart attack, years back.’

  It was a common ailment, carrying off many of those who’d survived the Troubles and their onslaught of bombs, bullets, and fire, only to keel over from delayed stress and fear. ‘I wonder did he know my dad,’ Paula said, putting down her untouched cup. ‘PJ Maguire. He was RUC.’