BENEATH LOST GROUND

by G. D. Higgins

  “Yes.” He grimaced as the lie came out, partly from disgust, partly playing up the pain in his ankle.

  “What happened to you?”

  I got in a scrap with a drug dealer who’s dead now and being blamed for a double murder he may not have committed. “I fell whilst hanging a picture of my daughter.”

  “At this godforsaken hour of the night?”

  “Ah, no. It happened earlier, but I couldn’t get asleep with the pain, so I decided to come in and have it checked out.”

  Her contempt was etched in her jaded pale face. “Well, take a seat over there then. I’ll have the duty doctor take a look at it soon, but you won’t be able to have an x-ray tonight. The radiologist isn’t in till the morning.”

  “That’s fine. If the doctor thinks I need one, I’ll wait around until then.”

  She threw her eyes to the heavens and reached her arm out, handing him a clipboard. “Go over there and fill this out. I’ll let you know when the doctor is ready to have a look.”

  Luckily for Brophy, the waiting area was next to the hall that led down to the wards. He should be able to make a break for it when she wasn’t looking. He took a seat towards the far end of the fixed plastic chairs, drawing an over-exaggerated tut from the nurse. He began filling out the form, forgetting to put in a false name in the process. A couple of minutes in, he figured the nurse had all but forgotten about him, so he made a break for it. Within seconds, he was on the lift heading for the third floor.

  He was relieved not to find Mrs Scully sitting outside the ICU. In fact, the floor felt almost deserted. An orange splash of light shot out from the small counter at the far end of the corridor. He assumed a duty nurse was there and would do her rounds regularly and again cursed himself for deciding to go there. But that thought was soon eradicated by the notion that this might be the last chance ever to put the case of Mel Fanning to rest.

  Light-footed and pressed close to the wall, he made his way halfway down and stopped outside Scully’s room. Focusing his vision amongst the medical equipment and lights, he saw Scully lying flat on his back, his breathing assisted by an oxygen mask. He thought he could make out his head slightly swaying over and back, his eyes blinking and his lips moving under the fogged-up mask. Brophy put it off to his lack of sleep and detoxing the alcohol that was leaving his system. He checked to see if the coast was clear, then opened the door gingerly and stepped inside. Scully looked a sorry sight, stocky and fit at nineteen when Mel Fanning went missing; he now cut a sorry shape of an addict on the cusp of his body saying ‘no more; time to check out.’

  Conscious of startling him and setting off all kinds of alarms and buzzers, he edged in slowly from the foot of the bed. First thing he noticed was that Scully’s eyes were, in fact open, but instead of focusing on anything, in particular, they rolled around his head like shiny ball-bearings in mercury ponds. His heartbeat was forty-six, his breathing slow and laboured.

  Brophy moved around the side of the bed and felt an unexpected shot of sadness at seeing the young man like that, robbed of his youth by a decision that cost the well-being of so many lives. A quick thought of how any one of Brophy’s bad decisions could have turned him into something like what was laid out before him, made him grateful for the empathy he always felt was his lifeline out of the void. He spent years with a spiteful hatred of Scully and his friends. Clearly guilty of something during the investigation that lasted over a year, he failed at boring through the solidarity of the bond between the three young men. The kind of bond he felt for some of his teammates over the years.

  “Cunt!” came out in a barely perceptible whisper.

  “Maurice, you’re awake?”

  His right hand flapped up towards his oxygen mask, but he missed the mark, and it flopped down onto his skeletal midriff. Brophy was worried the catheter in his hand would get ripped out painfully, so he decided to help take off the mask. He reached out and pulled it down gently, leaving it resting on his neck. Scully finally formed a readable expression as he did so, and that was deep-seated disdain. He stared like that at Brophy for a long while, not attempting to speak again.

  Brophy took the cue. “Maurice, I wanted to apologise for messing up the investigation into Mel’s disappearance.” Scully exhaled loudly through his nose. “I know now, I went about it the wrong way. I should have given you and Rob more assurances that if you cooperated and weren’t the ones who killed her, you’d be treated more leniently. But truth be told, I let anger take hold and was determined to take down the three of you for what happened.”

  Scully tried to cackle at that, but it came out as a high-pitched wheeze instead.

  “I know you feared, and still do, what Foylan can do to your mother, but the fact is, the damage is already done. Everyone associated with Mel’s disappearance has been going around like the living dead for the last ten years. Mel’s mother. Your mother. Rob. He arranged to meet me just before he took his own life but couldn’t bring himself to do it in the end. But he wanted the truth-”

  “Shut up, please. Just shut the hell up,” said Scully, gaining a bit more composure now. “You have no idea what this did to people around here. I’ve been looked at like some kind of crazed psychopath in this town ever since she went and fucked things up.” He gasped for breath after forcing out the words. “I’m gonna die soon, I know it. My mother will be all alone.”

  Brophy said nothing for a while. “She’ll be protected, you know? They won’t dare do a thing to her while I’m still around. The local guards want this ended as much as anyone, and they’ve assured me your mother would be looked out for.”

  “This has already destroyed her. There’s no going back.”

  “But if you’re the one to give everyone closure on this, I’m sure she’d be freed of so much of the mental hardship brought on by it.”

  Tears streamed down his sunken face. “I hated her, you know?”

  “Who? Mel?”

  “It was I who brought her into our group. We had a bit of a thing for a while. Only I wanted it to be more serious. She gave me the flick without a thought in the world and set her eyes on Brendan. He rubbed my nose in it good and proper for a while too. Fucking arsehole.”

  “What happened that night, Maurice?”

  He closed his eyes for a few beats. When he opened them, he looked out the glass wall and then glanced at the buzzer for calling the nurse to come and assist him. Brophy feared he’d blown his final chance to find out what happened to Mel Fanning. Scully began to reach for the buzzer but stopped a hand short of it. His face folded into a tortured grimace. He brought his hand back onto his stomach.

  “It was just a normal Friday night. We were in Brendan’s house, off our heads, having a laugh. His parents were in Greece, I think. After a while, the two of them headed off into one of the rooms as they always did. But this time it was different.”

  Brophy tensed up, shrouded in disbelief. He was finally hearing what occurred on that faithful night. “Why was it different? What happened?”

  “We were all peaking on ecstasy, and they just started roaring at each other. I was so out of it; it was hard to pick up on what they were saying exactly. But I kept hearing them say ‘pregnant’ and something about ‘keeping it.’ I don’t know how long it went on, but it seemed like forever. Me and Rob heard doors slamming, or that’s what we thought it was. It went quiet for a while, then we heard this wailing sound. I thought it was Mel crying, and I guess I still felt something for her cause I got the hump and headed straight for the room. Rob was right behind me. I walked into the downstairs bedroom and found Brendan sitting on the bed with his back to us. It was him that was wailing. I was shocked. I’d never seen him come close to crying before. Through the haze of the high, it took a few moments to see what was in the far corner of the room. First, I saw the blood on the door frame. I looked down, and there she was, in a heap on the floor, blood all over her.”

  “Was she dead?”

  “I puked, and I think may
be I collapsed and blacked out for a moment too. We were so off our heads and then seeing that. After a while, Rob went over and leaned down to check her. ‘She’s gonna be okay, lads. But she’s barely conscious. We have to get her to a hospital,’ he said. But Brendan freaked out. Started saying we had to get rid of her, or we’d all be fucked and our families with us. We pleaded with him, but he was always the dominant one. We didn’t have a chance.”

  “Where did you take her?”

  “The train track near the bridge. We used to play in a field beside the tracks when we were young. There’s a yew tree, no grass around the base, so we dug a hole there. We spent hours digging whilst she was in Brendan’s car boot. When the hole was finally ready, we went to get her.” Scully broke down in explosive sobs and started to shout. “Jesus Christ, she was still alive. She was still alive, and we shoved her into that hole and filled it in.”

  As his last words came out in a tortured yell, the duty nurse burst in the door.

  “Excuse me. What on Earth do you think you’re doing in here?” She was young and terrified looking.

  “Nothing. I was just about to leave. Don’t worry,” Brophy said, shuffling in his back pocket for his wallet. He pulled out his warrant card. “I’m a detective.” He looked back down at Scully. “Thank you, Maurice. I promise nothing ill will come of your mother.”

  Brophy walked out of the room, leaving the nurse to tend to the devastated patient.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Brophy sprinted out of the hospital, the desk nurses shrieking appeals not registering in his racing mind. Passing the main door, he came down hard on his injured ankle and let out a loud groan but didn’t slow down a bit. Fifteen minutes later, he was bearing down fast on winding country roads outside Thomastown.

  He fumbled with the GPS on his phone to get the exact location of the bridge and found he was only two kilometres away. The sun was readying its rise to the east behind him and his heart pounded rapidly. He couldn’t believe his luck, after all the sleepless nights, the declining eagerness for the job, all because of his failures in this case. Now, he had what he’d become resigned to believing he would never know — the location of Mel Fanning’s body.

  A crushing thought took hold of him as the old arched stone bridge came into view; what if Scully was lying again? He’d changed his story so frequently in the past. Why should now be any different?

  The bridge was on a sharp bend in the road, and he saw no place to park on the near side, so went through. He almost crashed when something sprung into view on the far side, a sprawling yew tree with manifold branches rising high, then curving down towards the dark earth beneath. He found a spot to park fifty metres up the road and ran back, half in awe, half terrified of the ancient tree.

  He scrambled down an overgrown grassy ditch and landed in a stream of cool water at the end. Initially annoyed, the coldness was a brief respite from the throbbing in his ankle. Scaling the other side of the ditch, he grabbed a bunch of nettles, and as soon as he took his hand away, it began to sting and itch, in equal measure.

  There was a stone wall on top of the bank, the style laid down hundreds of years ago in most parts, that had withstood the elements without budging. He stepped over the wall with great care, not wanting to displace a single rock, the remnants of a childhood superstition that said you’d have years of bad luck if you did so, surfacing from his subconscious. Finding himself in a clearance that circled the mesmerising tree, he could easily imagine the appeal of hanging out there with friends as a kid.

  The outwardly growing thick branches offered good climbing, a place to sit and shelter from the rain that was sure to come. But its boyhood attraction soon turned to a sinister place of heartache and grief. The sun peered over the hills behind the yew tree casting an eerie predawn display of shadows lined with sharp golden edges. The branches began to reach further towards the ground, and for a moment, he felt like he was locked in a dark cell. To regain composure, he took a slow walk around the perimeter of the clearing. He estimated the entire area to be about a quarter of an acre. It could potentially take many hours to excavate and find the remains if they were, in fact, there. But he didn’t care how long it would take. He would dig it up by hand if he had to. He wouldn’t rest until he knew for sure it was or wasn’t the final resting place of Mel Fanning.

  The first call he made was to the local station in Thomastown. He explained who he was and the situation with Maurice Scully and was reassured to find the desk sergeant took him seriously from the start.

  A squad car with two gardaí joined him ten minutes later. They tried to explain that they couldn’t organise a crew to come out and dig until working hours, at nine o’clock. Brophy wasn’t having any of it. Just shy of six o’clock, he insisted they get someone there with a digger within an hour, no matter who they had to wake up. By now Brophy looked a wily sight, wild bloodshot eyes and a glint that said he was ready to pop at any moment. The older of the two officers, a stout man in his forties, started calling around to people he knew in the town.

  Forty-five minutes later, a flatbed truck pulled up with a mini-excavator on top. They had to drive a few hundred metres further up the road to gain entrance by the gate of the field. By then, six more officers had arrived, including Sergeant Ryan.

  “I see you got him to fess up,” said Ryan. He came across as nervous as Brophy felt.

  Little was said between the small crowd assembled in the time it took to offload the yellow and black baby digger. Knowing McCall was an early riser, always getting in a run before work, he called her and explained the situation. She was ecstatic and cautious towards him at the same time. The reaction confused him, and she told him she’d get there as quickly as possible.

  The digging started in earnest after a small argument about where to start first. They all agreed it would likely be on the far side to the road, the boys not wanting to be spotted committing such a heinous crime by passersby, even though it would be difficult to get a good view in. That left them with about a fifth of the entire area.

  The burly local construction worker, O’Meara, who had brought the excavator, outlined a section a metre wide from the base of the tree to the edge of the grass, ten metres away. He started by loosening the topsoil along the area. A group of four officers, now dressed in white overalls, sifted through the loose earth with trowels and small rakes, a laborious task but necessary to see if there were any bone fragments or clothing before going any deeper and possibly damaging any evidence.

  By the time McCall arrived at seven-thirty, they had gone five feet deep in that section and had decided to mark another one, closer to the bridge this time, an area that may have offered even more privacy in the dark of the night.

  “Brophy, you look awful. What happened?” she said on approaching him after hopping over the stone wall like a nimble child.

  “I’ve had a strange night, Christine. Something happened that made me want to have one more stab at Maurice Scully.”

  “And he talked?”

  “Yes. He’s probably not going to make it. This was truly the last chance to find her.”

  “Did he say what happened?”

  “They were having a session in Foylan’s house that night, as we already knew. Scully and Dalton heard Foylan and Mel arguing in the bedroom. They heard something about her being pregnant and about going to England to have it fixed.”

  “Fucking bastard! Killed her because he got her pregnant.”

  “It looks like it. They went into the bedroom and found her head had been smashed in. But she was still alive. They knew this place, so brought her here to bury her. That’s all he gave me.”

  “Well done, Brophy.” She took out a cigarette and lit it up, her hands shaking with rage. “Poor thing. What must she have gone through?” Brophy snatched the smoke from her and took a long drag. “Keep it. I’ll light another one.”

  They looked on pensively, lost in the remorseful silence that pervaded the now brightly lit, dew-dampene
d field. The heat showed no signs of abating, if not even hotter than the previous few days.

  What seemed like an age past until they were about six feet down on the second section. A few metres back from the tree, and one of the officers spotting the bucket as it dug into the soil, let out a ferocious shout. “Stop!”

  Everyone rushed over to the spot. Two of them had jumped into the trench and were dragging the loosened earth away with their hands. It quickly became clear what they had seen. A foot-long section of black refuse liner was bulging out from the ground. All hands on deck, it took only a matter of minutes before the full length of the discovery was visible.

  “Okay. Clear away, lads,” said Ryan. “Time to call in the forensics team.” He looked up from the trench at Brophy. “Detective, would you like to do a house call with me?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The interview room in Thomastown Garda station was a small stuffy, windowless room. The sweat cascaded down Brophy’s back, his ankle throbbed a dull darting pain, and his eyes were forcing themselves closed despite his incessant attempts to ward off sleep. But all hardships aside, he sat there enthralled to finally get a chance at pinning the murder squarely on the one he never doubted had carried it out.

  After the body was hoisted out from its grave of the last twelve years, it was taken to Kilkenny General for a full postmortem. Neither Brophy nor the entire crew of the local station had any doubts about who was wrapped in the black plastic coffin. During the investigation, they were blocked from doing a full forensics sweep of Foylan’s parents’ house. Insufficient evidence was the reason given, the photograph of the four friends together in the house that night not deemed concrete enough to prove she was last seen with them. He cursed the memory but was brought back to the moment by the local detective sergeant, Reid, entering the room and taking his place beside Brophy, facing the door.

  “They’re just about done booking him in. He’ll be here any second now,” said Reid, a man in his mid-thirties going prematurely grey, but with a youthful face.