The Silent Dead (Paula Maguire 3) (26 page)

Pat was turned away, filling the kettle at the sink. Paula saw her eyes reflected in her glasses. ‘That’s – that’s what I always thought. But who knows for sure?’

‘So she’s probably – gone.’

‘I don’t know, pet. I never did. But . . .’

‘But you married Dad. And that’s why. You think she’s dead.’ Suddenly it was all so clear. There was no way Pat would have done that, married PJ, if she thought there was any chance at all his wife was still alive. Pat, the good Catholic, who’d deny herself any happiness if she thought it was the right thing to do. Standing in the kitchen, looking at the pink cake, smelling the sugar-pink roses, it hit Paula like the world was slowing down and stopped. Pat and her father thought her mother was dead, long dead. They’d thought so for a long time. There was no one but Paula who still had the hope to look.

She pulled herself together. ‘Listen, I need to go out for an hour or so. Would you look after Maggie for me? I’ll feed her first, so she shouldn’t be any trouble.’

‘Of course, pet.’

‘And don’t tell Dad where I’ve gone,’ said Paula. ‘If you don’t mind, I mean. Tell him I just went to get nappies or something. He doesn’t need to know any of this.’ Pat thought about it for a minute, and then nodded. Paula thought she looked relieved.

She rescued Maggie from grasping arms and took her upstairs, relaxing as she breathed in the smell of the baby’s head. In the bedroom were Dave and Saoirse. Saoirse was sitting on the bed with Dave bending over her.

Paula blundered in the doorway. ‘Oh God, sorry.’

‘Sorry, Pat said we could come up. It’ll only be a minute.’

As Paula watched, unable to look away, Dave lifted Saoirse’s wool jumper and rubbed at the soft white skin of her stomach with cotton wool. Then with surprising force he stabbed her in it with the needle. Paula flinched. Saoirse didn’t move. The syringe of drugs flowed into her with several breaths and it was done.

‘You do that every day?’

‘Every day, sometimes twice.’

‘God.’

‘No choice,’ said Saoirse grimly, then forced on a smile. ‘Not if we want one of our own. There’s wee Maggie. How are you, sweetheart?’

Paula’s hands tightened on Maggie’s little body, so much more skin than mass, almost missing her even though she was in her arms. She thought that her body would never forget having the child within it. But she had to leave her now, because there was something that needed to be done.

Kira

Kira was trying to spell the words out. They’d asked her to write the notes, she thought probably so she wouldn’t see what was going on down the back of the cave.

U-N-F-O-R . . .

She focused on the page in front of her, the sheets of the exercise book a bit damp from the cave and the sweat off her hands. She tried to keep writing and not look.

She could hear it, though. A noise like in a butcher’s shop, a sort of horrible crunching, and a smell coming on the damp cold air of the cave. At least it was dark, and with the torches you could pretend you hadn’t seen anything in the shadows. They’d said he wouldn’t feel a thing. They’d given him an injection. The others were out too, slumped in their chairs with the ropes pulled tight. Except for the first, who was already gone. This one would be gone soon too when they’d finished. And then, she supposed, the others.

She hadn’t really imagined it getting to this point. She hadn’t known what they would do once they had them. But she should have. Oh, she should have and it was all her fault.

She just had to concentrate on the writing. E-S-C-A-L. She realised that her hands were shaking so much she could hardly move them over the page.

Afterwards, no one was sure how the woman got away. It seemed like Dominic hadn’t tied her up as tight as the others, maybe he felt sorry for her or something. Anyway they were all busy trying to deal with the man over in the corner, and the noises he was making. She was busy pressing her pen into the paper, writing the note for him, then suddenly there was a movement and the woman was out of her seat. She lurched forward, then fell over on her knees on the dusty cave floor, making a little noise like she was hurt. Then before anyone could stop her she was out the front and into the woods.

That was the worst night. The idea that she might get away, tell people what had happened – no one could look each other in the eyes, as if they were only just realising how it seemed – the people tied up, the man in the corner who had stopped shouting, and she didn’t want to look over into the darkness and see why. They spread out into the woods to find her. Calling her name. Kira realised when she was deep in the dark trees she wasn’t even afraid. That the woman was probably afraid of her. Things had changed that much.

In the end it was easy to find her, she made so much noise in the bushes, and the crying, wheezing sound of her voice. She was caught onto some trees by her hair and couldn’t get free. They took her back. They tied her up again. The main man had woken up by then, sitting tied onto his chair, and the woman was shouting
Martin Martin help me don’t let them do it
, and also
My baby, oh my baby.
Nobody listened. Kira caught the man’s eye for a second, and she had to look away or she thought she might fall down herself.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Conlon was in his cell, a space about three metres across, with small dirty windows. He was sitting on his single bed, writing in a notebook. Paula couldn’t speak for a moment – she didn’t want to call his name, not Sean, like a friend might say, not Conlon like calling a dog. ‘Hello,’ she said. He looked up, freezing slowly with the pencil in his hand. She could see the reactions were still there, the stillness of a warrior. She was glad of the door between them. It had been easy enough to get in, with her PSNI credentials and Corry’s previous introduction. Of course, she wasn’t supposed to be here at all. No matter. She didn’t care any more.

‘Dr Maguire,’ he said cordially. ‘Back again.’

‘Yes.’ Her voice wavered.

‘Did you have your baby?’ His eyes were moving over her, framed in the hatch of the doorway. ‘Looks like you did. Boy or girl?’

She was trembling. Her hands holding the latch were slippery with sweat. ‘I don’t want anything from you. I’m just going to ask you one thing. Then I’ll go. If you do know anything about those other missing people, maybe you’d see your way to telling someone. Even if you think it’s too late to make a difference – well, take it from me, it would. To have them back. Bury the bones. That’s all people want.’

‘Easy to say,’ he said idly. ‘People always want more. Dr Maguire, have you ever heard that thing people say, the past is another country?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I believe that. Soon as you start poking too far into who did what back then, it’ll all come crawling out. People always want more. My sorry wouldn’t be enough for them.’

‘We don’t want sorry,’ she burst out. ‘We just want to know what happened to our goddamned families.’

‘Dr Maguire, if I knew where your mammy was, I’d tell you.’ He spread his arms. ‘I’ve not much to lose and lots to gain. I don’t know if she’s even dead. And that’s the truth.’

‘But there was an order given. To take her for interrogation.’

His face was impassive. ‘There may have been.’

‘I know some people went to the house. They were there that day. I know it. Two men. Maybe you were one – it doesn’t really matter now, as you said. But I know they went.’

‘Well well, you’ve been playing detective.’

‘Was she there? Did they take her?’

He said nothing.

‘Look. Just say yes or no. You don’t know what it would mean to me. Did they take her?’ Paula remembered the haste of the last morning she’d seen her mother, the snatched plate, the last hug. The sense of a clock ticking, though she hadn’t realised it at the time.

Sean Conlon said, ‘I don’t know. All I can say is I don’t know if anything was done to your mother.’

‘And would you have known, if it was?’

‘Aye, probably. Can’t say for sure. Now that’s all I know, miss.’

‘I—’ She wanted to say thank you, but couldn’t. ‘That’s what I needed to know.’

‘I don’t know anything else. There were orders, and you went and did things, and that was all. It’s hard to remember sometimes.’

Paula stepped back from the door, holding the flap. ‘Well, you’ll have a lot more time to remember now, Mr Conlon. I’m afraid that in light of your inaccurate information I won’t be recommending you for early release.’ She dropped it back and walked off, her steps echoing, but she could feel his eyes on her back all the way through the concrete and stone that kept him in.

‘You can do this. How hard can it be?’

Paula looked down at the baby wriggling on the changing mat. She had no idea what time it was, three a.m. possibly. She thought she had slept for a while but couldn’t be sure – the hours seemed to blend into each other. She’d changed Maggie’s nappy again, maybe for the tenth time since coming back from the prison. She’d fed her. But the baby was still crying, a desperate, choking wail as if her tiny heart was breaking.

She scooped her up, feeling the little pulse fluttering like a trapped bird. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart. What’s the matter?’ She walked her to the window, where the sky was lightening over the shrouded rooftops of Ballyterrin. ‘Look, it’s night-time still. We should be asleep. Sleeping!’

Maggie continued her ragged cries. Paula walked her between the kitchen and the living room, keeping up a monologue as she went. ‘Look, there’s a picture of Granddad. That’s Granny with him. Other Granny. She isn’t here any more. We don’t know where she is. And that’s your toy that Granny Pat gave you.’ Which just reminded her there was still no word or visit from Aidan, and resentment boiled up in her stomach like acid. ‘Well, this is it, Maggie.’ She showed the baby the living room, the seventies-style velvet couch, the cabinet of glass and silver knick-knacks, the silent TV coated in a layer of dust. She’d switched it off after the news channels rolled with endless updates on the Mayday case and the missing mayor. ‘I’m sorry it isn’t much. Maybe you’d rather go to London, what do you think? They have big red buses there. And nightclubs and bars and stuff. But you’re maybe a wee bit young for that.’ She sat down on the sofa, allowing herself to think briefly of her London life – transient men, long drinks in dark bars, running at night along the river, the city’s slowly pumping heart. That was all gone now. Now she had this instead – her parents’ sad old house, a town where everyone knew her name and her story, and this little baby, tangling angry fists in Paula’s hair and jumper. ‘What is it, love? Do you want more food?’ She tried latching the baby on, but Maggie turned crossly away. She wasn’t hungry. She wasn’t wet. Maybe she was just really, really annoyed. Paula would sort of understand that.

‘I’m sorry!’ Paula started walking her again. The kitchen, the living room, the hall. The kitchen, the living room, the hall. Still the crying didn’t stop. Her jumper was soon soaked in baby snot and tears, and she caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror – whey-faced, grubby, her hair in knots. ‘Is that why you’re sad, Mags? Because Mummy looks so awful?’

Mummy. That was her now. It was hard to believe. She was still pacing semi-dementedly when the doorbell rang. It was five a.m., who could that be? She rushed into the hall, hoping for deliverance of some kind. On the doorstep was Helen Corry, turned out despite the early hour in a swanky trench coat and trouser suit.

Corry winced at the wailing. ‘What are you doing to her?’

Paula wiped the sweaty hair out of her eyes. ‘I really don’t know. She’s been crying for hours, I think I’ve gone deaf in one ear.’

‘Give her here.’ Corry stepped into the hall, taking the baby and cradling her over one arm in a rocking movement. Maggie’s cries swelled like a passing siren and then subsided into sad hiccups.

‘How did you do that?’

‘Years of being up with crying weans, then called out to crime scenes at six a.m.’

Paula collapsed back on the sofa. ‘I’m not sure I can do this on my own.’

‘Course you can. I’d a husband and he was next to useless. Never heard them crying, apparently, even when I took them into the bed and held them beside his ear.’

‘How did you know to come?’

‘I’d a feeling you might be up.’ Corry looked at her kindly. ‘It’s tough the first few months.’

‘
Months
?’

‘Yes. But you’ll get through it. Anyway – I’m here with something that’ll cheer you up.’

‘What’s that, a full-time nanny?’ Either that or Aidan’s head on a plate.

‘Gerard’s got some anonymous tip-off about what happened to Kenny. You realise I mean cheer you up in that ghoulish sort of way you like.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Word is there’s been some kind of power shift in the local IRA leadership and someone wants to talk.’

Paula’s mind was racing, trying to put the pieces together, but then she sighed. ‘I’m not supposed to be working. What’s the point in telling me?’

‘I know you’re not, but how would you like a few hours in the office? If I know you, it’s doing your head in that you didn’t get to clear your desk.’ She nursed the now-sleeping baby. ‘I’ll mind this wee one while you nip out.’

‘Are you sure it’s OK?’

‘Call it one of those Keeping in Touch days or something. We have to stick together, us working mothers,’ said Corry, with a heavy tang of irony. Paula could have hugged her.

Gerard was in the car park as she pulled up. He was zipped up against the morning chill in a waterproof jacket. ‘You’re here, Maguire?’

‘Just pretend I’m not. What’s going on?’

‘Dunno. Apparently someone knows what happened to Kenny and they’re prepared to talk.’

‘Where are you off to now? You’re not going to see them on your own?’

‘Er, no, I’m not daft. I want to talk to my boys some more. I’ve an idea about something I want to check.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t want to say as I might be wrong. But it would explain a lot about why we’ve not been able to get any solid evidence.’

Paula looked at him suspiciously. ‘Where are you going?’

‘There’s a pub on the Knockvarragh estate where I sometimes meet them,’ he said, naming the dodgiest Republican enclave in the town.

‘You better not take the jeep then,’ said Paula.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ He paused. ‘How’s your, eh, baby and all that?’

‘Baby and all that is fine. Good luck with your terrorists.’

‘Republican soldiers, they prefer.’ Gerard went, beeping open the Skoda; no doubt he imagined he was in some Ballyterrin-set version of
The Wire
. ‘Catch you later.’

In the office, all was quiet. It was too early for Avril or Fiacra to be in, and Bob was still on suspension anyway.

Paula sat at her desk but didn’t turn her computer on. Her mind was full to bursting. First there was the four dead terrorists and the other missing two. Was it possible the leak was somewhere in their small team, so close-knit until recently? Then there was everything she’d found out about her mother. Sean Conlon said he didn’t know if they’d taken her mother or not, but they’d certainly planned to. Did that mean she was dead after all? Mrs Flynn had known something. She’d put it in her statement, and Bob had suppressed it, not to cover himself as she’d imagined, but to spare her and her father. What was the piece of knowledge it contained, that lost slip of paper? Paula sat on, and found she was thinking of the man. The man in the hat. The one her mother had been talking to at the back door that day. Something told her that to find out about him would be the trailing thread that unravelled the whole rotten fabric of the past.

Sighing, she looked around her at the empty office, dust hanging in a shaft of morning light. So many files, new cases, old cases, the long-lost and the recently gone. The unit had been set up to try to find these people, bring home the ones who’d been missing for years, either alive or dead, and look for the ones who’d just disappeared before they too became lost for good. But had they done it? Four of the Mayday Five were dead and the unit hadn’t managed to find anything. For the first time Paula found herself wondering what was the point of it all. Why hadn’t she stayed in London, with her safe, controlled life there, where every case wasn’t as close to her as her own pumping blood?

She sighed again. Reaching for her desk phone, she dialled a number and waited for the sound of his voice, rich and full. She said, ‘Hello. This is Paula Maguire here.’

‘Dr Maguire, back to work so soon?’ Lorcan Finney sounded guarded.

‘Not really. Just sorting out a few things. Sorry, have I caught you at a bad time? I know it’s early.’ She could hear the sounds of traffic behind him.

‘It’s fine. Just out for my morning run.’

‘Right. I was wondering, did you run that writing sample?’

‘Oh yes, the one you officially didn’t give me. I did, but there was no match with the notes.’

‘Really?’

‘No.’

She’d been so sure. ‘Well, OK, thank you anyway.’

‘How’s your wee one?’

‘Oh, she’s grand, yes.’ She wasn’t comfortable talking about this with him. ‘So there’s no more news from forensics?’

‘Nothing. The note from Ni Chonnaill’s mouth said LEGITIMATE TARGET, as you know. That’s a pretty standard phrase, so I don’t think we’ll get much from it.’

‘Same paper and everything again? Same writing?’

‘Same.’

She sighed. ‘Well. I’m not supposed to be working anyway. Thanks for looking at it.’

‘Take care, Dr Maguire.’

She was pottering about collecting case files, enjoying the silence of the office with the morning sun slanting in, when the main phone began to ring. She picked it up. ‘MPRU?’

‘Paula! Is anyone there with you?’ Fiacra was on the line, shouting. Fear in his voice.

‘No, it’s just me. What’s wrong?’

‘Call the hospital. Now. Tell them we’re coming. Then get outside, I’m coming to pick you up.’

‘Why? What’s wrong?’ She was reaching for her mobile.

‘Gerard’s been shot. His meeting, it was a set-up. We need to go and get him. I’m almost there.’

‘Oh . . . OK.’ Paula rang the hospital, giving the details as quickly as she could. Her hands shook as she put her coat on, went outside. She found herself locking up the door.
For God’s sake, Maguire, leave it.
Fiacra’s Fiesta was already screeching into the car park, engine chugging.

Fiacra wound the window down. ‘Get in!’

Paula had barely shut the door when Fiacra sped off, throwing her against the dashboard. She leant awkwardly on the tape deck. ‘Christ! Where are we going?’

‘To the estate. He was on his way to the pub. Someone took a shot at him.’ Fiacra was cutting up the morning traffic.

‘How do you know?’

‘I was on the phone with him. Heard it all happen. He knew it was bad.’ The estate was only minutes away and Fiacra rounded into it, turning the wheel wildly. ‘He said he was running down the alley by the pub . . . shit.’

There, slumped on the tarmac in a weed-grown alley between two council homes, was a familiar body. Gerard’s eyes were shut and he wasn’t moving, except for the blood seeping out from under him. As they drew up there was a screech of tyres, and a white van accelerated out of a side road, from which every resident seemed to have vanished.