‘I shouldn’t get involved,’ the man began, moving closer to the hedge and, thereby, inviting us to do likewise. He glanced at Callan’s house as if afraid that Callan might somehow be listening, even though he was the one who had told us it was empty.
‘There was a young fella here last night. He and James got into a row about something. We could hear it through the wall.’ He wrinkled his nose in disdain. ‘The walls between the houses are very thin,’ he added.
‘What were they rowing about?’
‘They’re not that thin. I could hear raised voices and that, but God knows what it was about.’
I sensed there was something the man wasn’t telling us, something significant that he was holding back for a finale.
‘But did you recognize the person with whom Mr Callan was rowing?’
As the neighbour glanced around again for listeners, Hendry and I leaned further forward. ‘I don’t know his name,’ the neighbour said, ‘but I did see him again. He was on TV last night, being interviewed about that dig going on over on the island.’
‘He was here last night?’ Hendry asked. ‘At what time?’
‘Around eightish, it must have been. The wife was watching her soaps and I had to get her to turn them down to hear.’ He blushed slightly. ‘I mean up, to hear them better over the shouting.’
‘What time did he leave?’ I asked.
‘Maybe five, ten minutes later. He arrived in a taxi, but he walked back down the road again afterwards.’
‘You’re sure about this?’
The man nodded.
‘You’ve been very helpful,’ Hendry said. ‘We might have to send someone out to take a statement from you. We’ll just check around the back.’
The man stared quizzically at Hendry, clearly wondering why the need for a statement. By the time he’d see the lunch-time news, he’d work out why.
As we moved around the side of the house, Hendry checked each window in turn. ‘Looks like there’s no one around, right enough,’ he commented.
We’d reached the rear of the property. Callan’s garden was separated from the river by one small field. From his back fence, we could see across to Islandmore, past the metal girders jutting out of the river, to where the burnt-out remains of the Commission’s diggers stood.
‘Maybe the sight of the digging spooked him,’ I suggested. ‘If he was involved in Cleary’s disappearance, it would be difficult to stand and watch from his back window while the body’s being exhumed.’
‘Either that or he followed Cleary’s son after he left, shot him well away from his own house and he’s gone on the run. Either way, he’s guilty about something.’
Chapter Twelve
Mary Collins opened the door almost before I had rung the bell, and I suspected that she had been watching our arrival. Indeed, with the dig going on for her missing partner, I suspected she had simply been waiting for news. I did not imagine that she could have expected the news we were bringing.
‘Inspector Devlin,’ she said to me, then smiled at Jim Hendry. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘This is PSNI Detective Inspector Jim Hendry,’ I said. ‘Can we come in, Mrs Collins?’ She smiled anxiously when I spoke.
‘Have you found him? Have you found Declan yet?’
‘We’re not here about Declan, I’m afraid, Mrs Collins. We’d best go inside.’
Her smile faltered. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’
‘We have some bad news, Mrs Collins,’ Hendry said, his cap clamped tightly under his right arm. ‘We’re here about Sean.’
‘Sean’s not here; he . . .’ she glanced backwards into the house, as if Sean was waiting inside. Then she turned again, her face drawn, the terror of the situation only beginning to hit her. She covered her mouth with her hand, shook her head. ‘You’re not . . . you . . . Has he been hurt? Where is he?’
‘We’d best go inside,’ I repeated.
She turned from us, moving up the hallway. Suddenly she lurched to one side, her legs collapsing under her. I only managed to grip her under her arms to prevent her falling. Hendry shifted quickly in beside me and, together, we hoisted her to her feet and brought her into the living room. We lay her on the sofa, all the time speaking to her, encouraging her to come round. Her skin was pale, her face clammy with sweat.
‘I’ll get an ambulance,’ Hendry said, taking out his phone.
Mrs Collins began to revive, moaning softly. I could see her eyelids flutter quickly, could see the shifting of her eyes beneath the thin film of their lids.
‘Give it a moment,’ I said. ‘She’s coming round.’
After a few minutes, she had recovered sufficiently that she could sit up, though we insisted that she keep her legs up on the sofa. Hendry fetched her a glass of water.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know what . . .’ her voice faltered into a mumble.
‘Would you like us to contact someone for you, Mrs Collins?’
‘My husband,’ she said. ‘My husband is out golfing. His number is on my mobile, on the . . . thing.’ She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the corner where a coffee table stood, the mobile phone atop it.
‘What happened to Sean?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were here about Declan. I thought you’d found him. But not Sean. Where is he?’
I glanced at Hendry. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Collins. Sean’s been found over in Strabane. He’s dead.’
Her husband arrived twenty minutes later; a short, wheezy man, his eyes wide and guileless, his face flushed from his morning exertions on the golf course. He sat on the sofa next to his wife and held her while she spoke, shaking his head and staring with the vacant expression of one who has become observer rather than participant in his own family’s story.
‘Sean never knew Declan,’ Mrs Collins said. She clenched her sodden tissue as tightly in one hand as she gripped her husband’s hand in the other. ‘I always regretted he never knew him. Not that he needed a father,’ she added, nudging lightly against her husband, having remembered that he was sitting next to her. ‘Sam always did right by Sean.’
She smiled briefly at her husband, then continued. ‘I was expecting when Declan went missing. Seven months gone. When he went, I thought he’d run out on me; taken cold feet.’
‘Did he give any indication that he was likely to do so?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘He was decent. Not the brightest, maybe, but decent. He was worried about providing for us; those were his words. He was an orderly in the old St Canice’s. It didn’t pay very well; he was panicking a bit about how he’d afford to look after me and a baby.’
Hendry raised an enquiring eyebrow.
‘St Canice’s was a mother-and-baby home,’ I explained.
‘He was hoping for better,’ she went on. ‘Then he just vanished.’
‘Disappeared,’ her husband added, then blushed at having interrupted.
‘Sean never asked about his daddy until he went to school. I told him he had gone away. I couldn’t say he’d died, for he’d have asked to see his grave and, well, there was none. Then I met Sam and decided to marry. I gave Sean the choice of using his daddy’s name or Sam’s and he stayed with Cleary.’
She glanced at her husband and added quickly, ‘Not that he didn’t love Sam. He was younger and, you know, wanted to stay loyal or something to his father.’
‘I understand,’ I said. Collins rubbed his wife’s hand soothingly as she spoke.
‘Do you know where he was last night?’ Hendry asked. ‘Sean?’
Mrs Collins stared at him blankly for a moment, the shift from past to present taking a little time to register with her.
‘He went out to see someone,’ she said. ‘He’d become fired up about his daddy’s body being looked for. He’d always known he was dead, but when the dig started, it made it more . . . real for him. I think it was the first time he thought of it as having actually happened.’
‘Do you think he was trying to find
out what happened to his father?’
She shrugged. ‘After we met the people from the Commission and passed on the map, they told us about the call they’d got. Sean got so angry.’
‘Because of his father?’ I said.
‘Kind of. More about the fact that they wouldn’t investigate it. They told us their job was to recover the body, not to find who killed him.’
‘Sean couldn’t quite accept it,’ Mr Collins said. ‘He resented the fact that he never had a chance to meet his father. That and the fact that someone might get away with murder.’
‘I told him, enough stuff has happened, enough bad stuff and suffering and pain, that it would do no good. What does it matter now if they lift some poor young fella, doing as he was told thirty years ago? It’ll not bring Declan back. He’s gone, life changed, moved on without him,’ Mary Collins said.
‘Disappeared,’ Mr Collins said.
‘Has Declan any family living?’
Mrs Collins shook her head. ‘Both his parents were dead when I met him. He’d no other family. Just Sean. Only Sean.’ With that, her sobbing began again. She bowed her head, her husband angling his against hers, embracing her tightly, his arm around her shoulder as he whispered in her ear the perennial mistruth that everything would be okay.
Chapter Thirteen
I dropped Hendry back across to the North. As he got out of the car he mentioned that they would be running a reconstruction of Cleary’s final movements on Beechmount Avenue the following evening, if I wanted to come across.
The clouds were gathering overhead as I crossed the border into the Republic again. I noticed more of the posters advertising the rally on the 2nd of November hanging from the lamp-posts, tattered from the high winds of early October. As I slowed to read one, I spotted the entrance to Finnside Nursing Home behind the Community Hospital just to my left. Patterson had told me I couldn’t investigate the death of the island child. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I swung right and stopped at the Off Sales, then cut across the road into Finnside.
It had been some time since I was last there, but once inside the door I recalled immediately the familiar smell of disinfectant and urine, which the owner had attempted to mask with incense sticks and votive candles, their collective scents and smoke drifting ceiling-wards as if in offering.
I stopped at the office to the left of the foyer, where the owner, Mrs McGowan, was sitting in discussion with one of the staff. The decor had changed little since last I had been there; the carpet was still wine red, the walls painted neutral shades of magnolia and yellow and hung with prints of Constable landscapes. I also recalled with some sadness that, during my last visits here, I had encountered a young woman named Yvonne Coyle who, it transpired, had been responsible for the deaths of several people and had ended up dead herself inside the ruins of the Borderlands dance hall a little further along the road from here.
Mrs McGowan came out to see me, closing the door behind her, leaving the staff member sitting in her office.
‘I’m here to see John Reddin,’ I said, after we had exchanged pleasantries.
‘He’ll be up in the lounge,’ Mrs McGowan said. ‘We’ve a band playing on a Sunday afternoon; Mr Reddin never misses it.’
I followed the corridor along the direction she had pointed. It was a relatively large lounge, over-furnished with mismatched easy chairs, most high backed, and several bookcases of large-print books and tattered paperbacks. At the far end, in front of a large TV, two musicians were setting up to perform; one was connecting leads to the back of a keyboard while the other was busying himself with tuning his guitar.
There were already almost a dozen of the home’s occupants sitting in the room, connected by their seeming isolation. A nurse was moving amongst them with a tray of small plastic tubs containing a variety of medicines. With each person she carefully selected the tub, watched as they took the tablets, then marked it off on a sheet of paper sitting on the tray, before moving on to the next person.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Mr Reddin.’
She stared at me appraisingly. ‘You’re not a relative,’ she said.
‘I’m a Garda inspector. I was hoping to speak with him for a moment.’
‘That’s him across there,’ she said, nodding towards the far corner. A man sat upright in an arm chair. He was heavy bodied, his face jowly and ruddy, his hair thick, its whiteness slightly yellowed like wild-sheep fleece. He tapped on the arm of the chair as if in anticipation of the rhythm of the music he was waiting to hear.
‘Mr Reddin,’ I said, moving across to him. ‘I’m Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin. I was wondering if I could speak to you.’
He looked up at me. One of his eyes was clouded in the centre, as if thick with cataracts.
‘Come closer,’ he said.
I squatted down to his level, near the seat. ‘I’m Inspector Benedict Devlin. Chief Super Costello suggested I speak to you.’ I handed him a brown bag containing a bottle of whiskey, as Costello had suggested.
‘Old Elvis isn’t Chief Super anymore,’ Reddin said, wagging his finger at me. He slipped the bottle from my grip with his other hand and hid it down the gap between his leg and the arm of the chair. ‘Once a smuggler,’ he commented, winking conspiratorially. I had assumed that his presence in the home was due to mental degeneration, but it seemed I was wrong.
‘So what can I help the Garda with?’
‘Tra na Cnamha.’
He nodded, his good eye rolling to the side, as if he were trying to recall the place.
‘Declan Cleary.’
‘You knew he was there?’ I said.
‘I heard on the TV today,’ he said. ‘What can I help you with?’
‘The person who passed on the information about Cleary’s body being on the island referred to Tra na Cnamha. Costello said the only people who knew that name would have been smugglers and net men. There aren’t that many of either left. He thought I should speak to you.’
‘The old smugglers have all gone – all the stuff across the border now is organized criminals’ doing. Not like us; what we did was harmless. Foodstuffs and that.’
I decided not to get involved in arguments about so-called victimless crimes.
‘You started young in them days,’ he said, laughing lightly. ‘Me mother took me across to Strabane when I was just a wee’un. She’d be over to buy sugar; you could bring a two-pound bag back with you, but not tobacco. The shops in Strabane used to hide a couple of ounces of shag inside the sugar bags. And my mother used to tie her stocking to the inside of me belt, running down inside me legs. You’d get them filled with flour and sugar and that; or butter, flattened and pressed against your thighs when you walked. The customs must have known, the shuffling of all the kids across the bridge like they was desperate not to wet themselves. Now it’s drugs and oil and that. It’s not the same.’
‘Who would still be around from the early-seventies?’ I asked.
‘Smugglers?’ Reddin said. ‘Not many. There were only three or four of us running the border by that stage anyway; the Fisheries men confiscated all the boats. Then when they shot that young fella Callan under the bridge, well that stopped everyone. Being caught bringing across a few cows was one thing; being shot for a Provo was something else.’
He leaned past me and winked sharply at someone. ‘All right, Maisie,’ he said. ‘I’ll be looking a waltz later, whatever time the boyos get started.’ He smiled wolfishly.
I turned to the recipient of his request. Opposite us sat a small, frail woman, her skin fine, her hands small and neat where they folded on her lap. She raised one slender hand and shooed away the comment. Despite that, her face was bright and keen, her smile at the comment radiant.
‘She’s a lovely old girl,’ Reddin said. ‘Poor woman, no one ever visits her. I’m here five years, I’ve never once seen any of her family come near the place; even at Christmas. They just let her vanish.’
&n
bsp; ‘How about you?’ I asked. ‘Do you like it here?’
‘It’s all right,’ Reddin said. ‘My eyesight kept going, and I couldn’t gauge things anymore. I’d be pouring tea and not know I’d missed the cup till I’d scorched me feet with the boiling water.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.
Reddin shrugged. ‘There’s worse things happen to people. The band will be starting soon, son, so you may finish your questions.’
I nodded. ‘I appreciate your speaking to me. Can you think of anyone from that time; net men or smugglers who would still be about?’
Reddin’s clear eye swivelled toward me. ‘I thought anything that went to the Disappeared crew couldn’t be investigated.’
‘It can’t,’ I said. ‘They found a child on the island. That’s what I’m more interested in.’
Reddin nodded. ‘The place was coming down with them; wee limbo babies.’
‘This one is different. From the late-seventies probably. We think it was murdered.’
Reddin squinted slightly, as if trying to focus on something.
‘The bridges were down by then. Whoever took that child onto the island needed a boat. Net men and smugglers would be the most likely to provide transit across,’ I explained. ‘They would know who brought the baby across. It was buried in another part of the island from the rest of the cillin.’
‘The same goes for Cleary, too, if you find him on that place – someone would have had to bring him across, too. Someone could get into trouble for that,’ Reddin said shrewdly.
‘No one can be prosecuted in either case. To be honest, I just want to know what happened to the child. I want to find out her name. So she doesn’t just disappear.’
Reddin considered the response. ‘In terms of smugglers, the only ones I knew of left were Pete Cuthins and Alex Herron. The net men were different. Their numbers have been dropping constantly; the Fisheries stopped them as well. Bloody stupid, too. You can have a thousand people with rods fishing above the Lifford bridge, but the net men fishing for a living beyond the bridge is having their licences cut every year. There would only be three left I can think of: Tony Hennessy, Finbar Buckley and Seamus O’Hara.’
Brian McGilloway - The Nameless Dead (Inspector Devlin #5) Page 5