Who Took Eden Mulligan?

by Sharon Dempsey

  Rose had made herself familiar with The Stormont House Agreement, which outlined a mechanism for dealing with the past, part of which was the establishment of the Historical Enquiries Unit. Their mandate was to progress investigations into outstanding Troubles-related deaths. Part of the problem lay in the fact that Eden Mulligan’s body had never been recovered. They had no definite proof that she had been killed. No body, no witnesses, no evidence. No real case.

  Unsolved murders are never officially closed. Sometimes you hit a dead end and all investigative power and effort dries up. The next big case comes along and all interest and manpower is directed towards it. Well, she would have to go back to the beginning, gather sufficient information about Eden Mulligan, create a character profile and assess the family relationships. All of Eden’s relationships would need to come under scrutiny, along with her daily routines. To complicate matters, it would be necessary to manage any expectations the family might have. Rose couldn’t promise them anything, but she would need their input and cooperation. She would begin by getting up to speed with the contents of the files and doing a proper review of the actions taken at the time of the initial investigation.

  Rose was about to create a sequencing timeline on her computer when Danny appeared at the door. She looked at his hands, wrapped around a copper-coloured plant pot with an ugly, twisted green thing within.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked, screwing up her face.

  ‘A cactus. Call it an office warming present. Anything to liven this place up a bit. We’re only one step up from working in an underground concrete bunker. You do realise that, don’t you? I need to be seen upstairs, keep an eye on the team, so you’ll have this place all to yourself at times.’ He handed the plant over to her.

  ‘It’s a bit scary looking. Are you sure it’s not dead?’

  ‘No, it’s not dead. I bought it this morning from a man in St George’s market, who assured me it’s a fine specimen of its type. I figured even you can’t kill something used to barren, inhospitable landscapes.’

  ‘Cheers. That’s a great endorsement of my nurturing skills.’ She laughed, looking at the wonky, spiked plant.

  ‘I had to do something to make this cupboard a bit more homely for you. I’ve seen homeless people spending their night in better spaces than this. It can’t be good for the psyche. Tell Sweaty Balls McCausland to find us something better, or you’ll go off on the sick, owing to mental anguish.’

  ‘Wind your neck in. I’m fine. Once I start reading this lot I’m lost to the world. I really don’t care what the office is like. In fact, if you must know, I like the quiet down here. No listening to office gossip and snarky comments, or Malachy Magee belching into his fist after his second sausage roll. Down here it’s just me, Iona Gardener and Eden Mulligan. Nothing else matters.’

  CHAPTER 15

  After Danny left to meet with Magee, Rose resumed her sequencing document. She wanted to have a sense of what Belfast was like around the time Eden Mulligan had vanished. What were the big stories people were talking about? From memory, life really was all bombings and shootings. She turned to her computer and typed in ‘Northern Ireland 1986’ and then clicked on the Conflict Archive site to find information and source material.

  It was all pretty bleak. A society living from one attack to the next, checked by a police service represented largely by only one side of the community it served. The dry statistics detailing bombings and shootings began to feel meaningless after the third page. It wasn’t Rose’s usual habit to go trawling the internet for blogs concerned with real-life crime stories, but in this instance, she thought it might be worth having a look to see what information there was beyond official reviews of the case, or monotonous news reports.

  The first few links she opened were rehashings of the newspaper articles that had been written at the time. The website of the Families for Justice campaign had a few links and it was one of these that led her to a blog site set up to extrapolate what had happened to Eden Mulligan.

  The Disappearance of Eden Mulligan:

  What We Know to be True

  By Joel Ellis

  Eden Mulligan was born in Portadown to a ‘mixed faith’ family – her mother was Catholic and her father was Protestant. The family lived without intimidation in a Catholic enclave. When Eden was seventeen she met Geordie Mulligan and moved to Belfast when they married two years later. The young married couple chose to live in the Markets area of Belfast, which was close to the city centre.

  At one time, the area had fifteen markets, the oldest being St George’s Market, which still operates today. The Markets is one of Belfast’s oldest communities. Despite being virtually part of the city centre, it still remains a residential area. In the early nineteenth century, houses were built in the Lower and Upper markets, to provide housing for labourers and working people in the area near the River Lagan. The wealthier merchants and commercial classes lived in the Georgian terraces of the Upper Markets.

  This is by the by. The Markets area that Eden made her home in was at that time a close-knit community of mainly Catholic families. By 1986, the year Eden disappeared, she was a young mother of thirty-three with five children to care for. Her husband, Geordie, was often living in London or Liverpool, working on building sites.

  The first investigation into Eden’s disappearance did not happen until six months after she was reported missing. Unlike other cases of a similar nature, neither the IRA nor the UVF ever accepted responsibility for Eden’s disappearance. This led to speculation that Eden could have left her family of her own volition and that she could be still alive, as a body was never discovered.

  The Mulligan children found themselves separated. Cormac, thirteen years old, and Eileen, aged eleven, were sent to a children’s home in Downpatrick. Paddy and Lizzie, eight-year-old twins, were adopted by a married couple who had no children of their own. Six-year-old Eamonn was passed around a succession of foster homes before landing in a convent home for troubled children.

  In 2007, the Police Ombudsman acknowledged that a formal investigation of Eden’s disappearance was never carried out. Instead, the RUC had conducted a minor review of the case and had lost valuable opportunities to investigate properly. The Ombudsman concluded that there had been no evidence that Eden Mulligan had acted as a police informer, an assertion that the press had made in the years following her disappearance.

  Rose clicked onto a different site that made reference to the Unknowns, two secret cells within the IRA tasked with abducting, killing and secretly burying the bodies of so-called informers. The victims were often transported to the Republic of Ireland, where they would be tortured and killed. Their bodies were then buried in remote parts, never to be found.

  Rose finished reading and clicked on the link to the pages of accompanying photographs taken during the seventies and eighties – grainy black and white stills of British soldiers patrolling the streets. One showed a squaddie down on one knee, looking through the view finder of a rifle, while a mother and her small son walked by, apparently unconcerned.

  Rose was aware that MI5, the Security Service, was also involved in Northern Ireland during this time, carrying out surveillance and running its own network of agents and informers within republican and loyalist paramilitary organisations. She wondered what they would have known about Eden Mulligan’s case. Would it have been on their radar at all?

  She continued reading the screen, clicking from one site to another and scribbling down the odd note. If Eden had simply vanished of her own free will, the chances were that she would have turned up on the system before now. Staying off the grid is hard to do without specialist assistance.

  And though no body had been recovered, that didn’t mean that she hadn’t been murdered.

  Scrolling through other links, Rose came across an interesting extract from a book called The Innocents Left Behind:

  There have been many casualties of the war on both sides, but sometimes the ones who are forgot
ten are the most vulnerable of our society. This was the case of Eden Mulligan’s family. Five motherless children left to fend for themselves. Eden disappeared one July evening, never to be seen again. Her children, now grown up, some with children of their own, have never given up hope that one day they will know the truth. Know who took their mother, what they did to her and their reasons why.

  Rose had a sense that whatever had happened to Eden, it hadn’t been without intrigue and wrongdoing. It was time to seek out her children.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was late afternoon by the time Danny and Rose headed to meet Eden Mulligan’s oldest son, Cormac. Danny knocked on the door of Cormac Mulligan’s flat and waited while he heard a shuffle of footsteps. The door opened and revealed a man who had an air of having been beaten down by life. He looked older than his forty-five years. His skin had a washed-out pallor, which told of too much drink and too many fags, and his hair had receded so far back that it made him look exposed and constantly surprised.

  Danny flashed his ID. ‘Cormac, we talked on the phone? This is Dr Rose Lainey. She’s working with me.’

  ‘Aye, so what are you doing here? I told you I’d nothing to say to you.’ His voice was hoarse, as if he’d been smoking for as long as he could talk. He smelt of smoke too. Acrid and bitter.

  ‘I’ve some questions about your mother’s case that I felt it would be better to discuss in person. Can we come in?’

  He didn’t budge from the door and ignored the request. ‘I’ve been through this all before. It didn’t get me anywhere then, so why should I expect this time to be different?’ His tone wasn’t belligerent, just uninterested.

  Danny shrugged. ‘I can tell you, I’m different. I’m not following an agenda. My job is to look at the case afresh, see if we can identify new lines of inquiry. Dr Lainey here will be able to provide insights that we haven’t had before.’

  ‘They sent an English copper last time. Told us he would be able to assess the case without prejudice. Fuck, should have told Alanis Morissette to put that in her song. They didn’t even mean it as a joke.’ He sounded desolate, as if all the hope and fight had been kicked out of him long ago.

  Danny nodded. ‘I know you’ve been messed about before. The Historical Enquiries Team promised more than it could deliver and they shouldn’t have done that. My job is to open the case, look at the documentation, talk to a few people, and see where it takes me. If we find a fresh lead, we follow it up. Where’s the harm in that?’

  He laughed, sardonic and sad. ‘The harm lies in how it screws me and my family up. Every. Frigging. Time.’ He stood back and allowed them to enter the hallway, but didn’t invite them any farther into the flat.

  Rose offered her hand, but he ignored it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cormac. I know it can’t be easy, but surely it is better to try to get some sort of justice than to simply assume we are about to trample all over your life. Maybe this time it will be different,’ she said.

  Cormac took a packet of Benson and Hedges from his tracksuit pocket and lit a cigarette with an orange disposable lighter before taking a long, slow draw on it. ‘You know they are waiting for us to all die out. Once my generation is cold in the ground there will be no one to keep the memories alive. No one to pass on the information that we’ve had to dig up for ourselves. When we die, any chance of justice dies with us.’

  ‘Then take a chance. Work with us,’ Danny urged.

  Cormac looked at them, his eyes cold.

  ‘Fuck away off and crawl back under whatever rock you came from.’

  Rose grimaced. ‘Look, you don’t need me to tell you that the disappearance of a loved one is one of the most traumatic and distressing things to live with. It’s the uncertainty of it that eats away at you. It must have been hard growing up without your parents.’ Her voice was soft and her tone measured.

  ‘You’ve no bloody idea.’

  ‘The relationship between a mother and a child is the deepest and most important one we have.’

  Cormac shook his head, as if dismissing her words.

  ‘You must have struggled. Every birthday, every Christmas, every new school year without your mother there to make it all right.’

  His shoulders dropped ever so slightly.

  Danny moved forward. ‘Let us help, Cormac. Explain to us what happened. You don’t know what we could uncover this time round.’

  Cormac took another deep drag on his cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke, not caring to tilt his head away from Danny. ‘We don’t talk to cops. Not anymore.’

  CHAPTER 17

  Rose watched as Joel Ellis – the author of the article she’d found on Eden’s disappearance – crossed the road like he was avoiding sniper fire. He dived in and out of the traffic, raising his hand by way of a thank-you, as he ran to reach the café and get out of the midday sun. It was another baking hot day. She climbed out of her car and followed into French Village. The aroma of good coffee seemed overpowering in the heat. She longed for something cool and refreshing.

  ‘Any more of this and they’ll be cancelling their package holidays. Sure, they always say there’s no place like Ireland, with the perfunctory “if you get the weather”. Of course you get the bloody weather. Rain is weather too, isn’t it? Buck eejits the lot of them.’ Rose listened as he made conversation with the blue-haired waitress with pale skin. The combination of the beginnings of a gingery beard and round, thin-rimmed glasses spelt out hipster. She could imagine Danny calling him a wank-stain, or something equally derisive.

  She let him settle himself into a chair and watched as he reached for the menu before she approached him.

  ‘Joel Ellis?’

  ‘Who’s asking?’ he said warily.

  ‘Dr Rose Lainey. Can I join you?’

  ‘Free world.’

  Rose took the chair opposite him and lifted a menu from the table.

  ‘What do you recommend?’

  ‘Pasta and prawns, or their sandwiches are pretty good. Are you buying?’

  The waitress approached and took his order. ‘I’ll have the pasta with prawns and a glass of still water.’

  Rose ordered a sandwich and gave the menu back to the waitress.

  ‘Botanic Avenue is the place to be on a day like this,’ he said.

  They watched as two lads by the window sat appraising the body of an attractive blonde girl, in an off the shoulder top, as she walked by.

  ‘Would you look at them. The wee girls are running around in all sorts of skimpy sundresses without a care in the world and wee shites like them are drooling with their tongues hanging out. Fellas trying to look cool while catching a crafty glimpse of a bare leg. Jesus, you’d think they’d never seen a half-dressed woman before,’ Joel said, shaking his head, half laughing.

  Rose had the impression that Joel seemed to find most people annoying. She knew he was a law graduate, now working for Families for Justice, providing advocacy for families affected by the Troubles.

  ‘You never returned my calls,’ Rose said.

  He opened his phone and scrolled through the messages, opening the one from Rose telling him she was interested in the Mulligan case. ‘Ahh, I’m busy, you know how it is. Thought I’d follow it up when I was back at the office. I have to tell you though, any interest in the Mulligan story is worth shite all. That case needs someone with a time machine. The lies, the lost witness statements, and the deliberate tampering with evidence has meant that any time we tried to get to grips with it, we reached a dead end.’

  Their food arrived and Joel began eating as he continued.

  ‘The press like to throw petrol on the dying embers of the Mulligan case every now and then. For them, it’s an interesting narrative, providing a different take on the Troubles. When they were bored by the tit-for-tat shootings and car bombs, Eden Mulligan’s disappearance – and what happened to her children after – proved to be a more salacious and sorrowful story in a time when violence was normalised and routine.’ He to
ok a long drink of water.

  Rose finished chewing her bite of beef and caramelised onion sandwich before speaking. ‘So, you felt that the case was messed up to begin with. That there wasn’t a thorough investigation carried out?’

  ‘You could say that.’ He looked at her, as if deciding whether she could be trusted.

  ‘I still stay in touch with one of Eden’s children – Eamonn Mulligan. I check in every now and then to see how he is doing. It’s the least I can do after all he’d been promised.’

  ‘Promised?’

  ‘Let’s just say, I was bright eyed and naive, straight out of Queen’s with a law degree, thinking I could take on all the wrongs of the world and make them right. Well, I fucked that up spectacularly and Eamonn Mulligan nearly paid for it with his life.’ He set his fork down.

  ‘Eamonn trusted me and I let him down.’

  CHAPTER 18

  The first rule of any new murder case is to phone the wife and tell her you won’t be home in time for dinner. DI Desmond Henderson told Danny that on his first day on the job. He was fresh out of Garnerville, having just finished his student officer training programme, and all raring to go to get the bad guys.

  ‘Keep the wee wife in the picture, but don’t bring the job home, lad,’ Henderson had told him. Not that he had to worry about that now that Amy had gone. There was no wife waiting at home. She had watched him, glassy-eyed and silent, as he’d packed, throwing anything he could place his hands on, into his gym bag. He could work all the hours the case demanded without worrying about her. He’d no one to answer to but the job itself.

  It was a small mercy on a depressingly gorgeous day. The weather had been brutally good and it only compounded his feeling of being wound up. What use was a sunny day to him when he had corpses to worry about, and no one to share a glass of cooled wine with on the patio come seven o’clock?