The Killing House

by Claire McGowan

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Thanks for coming in again, Mairead.’ Corry’s soothing tone was back, her irritation with Tozier from the previous day all packed away. ‘So it’s looking like we have an ID for the other body we found and I just wanted to update you. We think it’s someone called Fintan McCabe. He’s been missing since the nineties and was thought to be involved with the IRA.’ There was a clearer picture of him on the table in the Family Room, supplied by his mother. An average-looking short young man, twenty-five years old, in a sweatshirt and jeans, with a nineties curtains haircut.

  Mairead was frowning. ‘Fintan?’

  ‘That’s right. Maybe you’ve heard of him? He wasn’t officially Disappeared – the IRA never claimed him – but that’s what his family always thought, that he got killed by them. His mother’s fairly certain it’s him.’ Paula imagined how that would feel, to finally get some answers, even if it meant your loved one was dead. The Commission must see that all the time. At least someone was looking for the victims on their list, refusing to forget them. No one was looking for her mother except her.

  ‘But . . . they were friends. Paddy and Fintan. They were always around our house, mucking about. Ciaran too. They were all about the same age.’ She was biting her lip again, as if picturing them back then, those murderous young men.

  ‘I see. So you’re surprised he would be found dead at your farm?’

  ‘Aye. Well, you see, it was where they took . . .’

  ‘Informers,’ Corry supplied. Paula kept silent.

  ‘Aye. People they thought were up to something. Fintan helped Paddy collect them.’

  It sounded so benign. Collect them. Kidnapping them at gunpoint more like, a sack over their head and bundled into a car. She shivered. The aircon was up much too high in this place. It was Ireland, for God’s sake, how hot could it get?

  Corry said, ‘Fintan was shot in the head from the back. I’m sorry, this must be upsetting if you knew him.’

  Mairead was staring at the diagrams of the bodies Corry showed her, the way the two had been packed into that space, Fintan jumbled up like an old rag doll, the girl laid so gently down. ‘No, no, it’s just . . . that’s how they did it. The informers. They had a sort of code. They’d tie their hands, make them walk a few steps.’ Her eyes were faraway, as if she was watching it happen again. ‘Then they’d get them to kneel. Facing away. They’d put the gun, you know, to the ear.’ She raised her finger to her own head.

  ‘You’ve seen this happen.’ Corry was gentle, but it wasn’t a question.

  Mairead nodded. Her hands were pushed up into the sleeves of her baggy jumper, far too big for her. ‘But Fintan . . . he was one of them. Paddy trusted him. I can’t think why he’d have been shot. You know, he was Paddy’s friend.’

  ‘Mairead . . . tell me what it was like, living there. Before you left. You were twenty-six when you went?’

  ‘Aye. I lived at home before that all my life. Daddy died when I was twelve. The Army shot him on patrol, thought he was someone else. He was sitting in his tractor and they just shot him. So it was just us and Mammy, and she went . . . she really turned against the government. Wanted us all to join the fight, even me and Aisling. But I never had any interest in that. Paddy, though . . .’ She trailed off. ‘I don’t know how to explain it to you. Living there, on the farm, it was like . . . an army camp. There were people tramping through it day and night, fellas in balaclavas, guns under the beds . . . and I was expected to cook and clean, wait on them hand and foot. It was no life, always expecting soldiers to come and kick the door in any minute, or someone to get shot. And the farm, it was dying. The boys had stopped looking after the animals, so they got sick. They just let it go to rack and ruin.’

  ‘So you left earlier this same year Fintan went missing, is that correct – 1993?’

  ‘Aye. It was bad again here. I just needed to get away.’

  ‘And you had no contact with your family since.’

  ‘None. They wouldn’t have had me back. And they’re all gone now, aren’t they? All of them.’ She spoke sadly, but there was an undercurrent of something else there, which Paula couldn’t quite identify.

  ‘So when you left there was Ciaran and Paddy at home?’

  ‘Aye. And our Aisling.’ She sounded impatient. ‘I told you this.’

  ‘I know. Just let me get this straight, Mairead. When you left, all your siblings and your mother were still at home, and Fintan McCabe was a regular visitor.’

  ‘Practically lived there.’ Something else in her voice again, a jagged edge sticking out. Paula couldn’t read her at all.

  ‘And now we have two dead bodies, and your brother Paddy and sister are missing. Correct?’

  ‘Suppose. If you say so.’

  ‘But you maintain the female body is not your sister.’

  ‘I don’t think so. She wouldn’t dress like that.’ Present tense. It was often a good indicator that someone knew a person was dead, if they used a different tense when talking about them.

  Corry went in for the kill, asking it so casually it was barely a question. ‘If we had a DNA sample from you, we could know for sure.’

  Mairead jerked in surprise. ‘From me?’

  ‘Yes. Just for comparison. It’s only a little swab, it—’

  ‘I don’t want to. I don’t have to, do I?’

  Corry blinked. ‘Well, of course not, but it would really help us to know if your sister is still alive or not. You know, so we can put all this to rest.’

  Mairead kept staring at the open file, the picture of the smiling boy. Likely chosen to make him look innocent and happy, not the gun-toting terrorist he had been. So much black and white back then. So many shades of grey. ‘I don’t know anything. I’ve told you everything. Can I go now? I need to be with my daughter.’

  The nursing home looked like they always did. Drab, squat, mobility equipment on the steps and vans parked outside. It was the same one Paula’s grandmother had been in. She’d died there without ever knowing what happened to her daughter Margaret. They weren’t a demonstrative family, on either side – Paula barely knew her paternal family, who hadn’t taken it well when their son joined the RUC – and she’d never really known how her mother’s lot felt about the disappearance either. Had they suspected Margaret was up to something? Everyone had heard the rumours. Tout. Or had they picked up that there was another reason for her to run? Paula’s Auntie Philomena, a confirmed busybody who never stopped talking, was unlikely to know anything. She wasn’t the kind you’d trust with your secrets.

  ‘Did Mairead not want to come with us?’ said Paula, as they got out of the car.

  ‘They had a row, back then. I think it’s too painful for her,’ said Corry. ‘Sad, isn’t it? Raising four weans and not a one of them to visit her. Makes me wonder if my Connor and Rosie’ll bugger off and leave me in my old age.’

  ‘The Wallaces had their reasons, maybe,’ said Paula, who had also buggered off and left her grieving father. It was deeply frowned upon in Northern Ireland, but sometimes you had to run to save yourself, as if from a burning building. ‘The mother was quite harsh, by the sounds of it.’

  ‘They thought you had to be strict in those days, or your weans would run wild. You’re too young to remember.’

  And she’d had no mother, of course, to chide her about boys and decorum. No one to spot how hard she was falling for damaged Aidan O’Hara, and the harm it was going to do her. Was still doing her. ‘Let’s go in.’

  Inside, the familiar fug of disinfectant and boiled food. The carers wore pink uniforms, and the TV blared out the lunchtime news. ‘Fidelma Wallace, please,’ said Corry to a girl who was scurrying past with a tray of cups.

  The girl blinked. ‘Fidelma, is it? She doesn’t get many visitors, now.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s why we want to talk to her. Where is she?
’

  They were directed to a tiny, hunched woman in the corner of the room, her spine compressed on itself. The shocking thing was she wasn’t that old. Paddy, her eldest, wasn’t even fifty, and Fidelma was close to seventy. But bent over, grey and wizened, she could have been ninety. Paula wondered was that the effect of losing touch with all four of her children.

  Corry pulled out a stool, pausing to brush it off before she sat down in her good Louise Kennedy trousers. ‘Mrs Wallace, hello. I’m DI Helen Corry, this is my colleague Dr Paula Maguire. Do you know why we’re here?’

  Her eyes didn’t move from the spot they’d been fixed on, somewhere north of the TV screen, on the blank cream wall. Corry ploughed on. ‘Maybe you saw it on the news, but the people who bought your farm when you had to sell it, they dug up the barn. And they found bodies there.’

  Paula watched but there wasn’t a flicker. Had she known? Could you live somewhere all your life and not know you were walking around on top of bones?

  ‘There’s one male body, who we believe we’ve identified as an associate of your son. There’s also the body of a young girl, aged somewhere between twelve and eighteen, and that’s why we’re here, Fidelma. We know you had two daughters and we’ve located Mairead.’ If they might have expected a reaction to the name of her estranged daughter, there was none. ‘I need to ask you if you know where Aisling is. Her whereabouts.’

  Nothing. Paula met Corry’s eyes – could the old woman even take in what they were telling her? That they were saying her daughter might be dead? Corry leaned in. ‘Mrs Wallace? Fidelma? When did you last see your daughter?’

  Now Paula could hear a low noise, like a dog growling. It was coming from Fidelma Wallace’s throat. ‘Ungrateful shower,’ she muttered. So she could understand. She was saying something else. Paula leaned in, catching the stifling smell of old food and decay. ‘Traitors.’

  Corry went on. ‘You understand what I’m saying, Fidelma? I need your help to work out if it’s Aisling there. You realise I’m saying she might be dead?’

  ‘Good riddance.’ The old woman’s voice creaked. Paula blinked. Had she really said that? Even unflappable Corry looked taken aback. ‘Good bloody riddance. Not a one of them worth a damn except my Paddy. Traitors.’

  Corry kept going, as if this was all normal. ‘Well, that’s another thing we wanted to know. Paddy hasn’t been seen for years and we believe he’s on the run. We’d like to talk to him, off the record, about what he knows. We just want to identify the girl. Is there anything you can tell us about where he might be?’

  ‘It’s what she deserved. What she deserved.’

  ‘Who, Mrs Wallace? Are you talking about Aisling?’ Corry leaned forward.

  ‘Ungrateful shower,’ she muttered again. Then she sank back in her chair. Paula’s heart sank too.

  ‘I don’t think she’s going to tell us any more,’ she said quietly to Corry. ‘Come on, we should go.’ The place was beginning to press down on her, the idea of ending up here all alone, no husband, her child gone to live her own life.

  Corry stood up reluctantly. ‘She knows something, I’m sure.’

  ‘Maybe she can’t remember.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t? Why is it, Maguire, that no one in this family seems to give a damn about the rest? Neither Ciaran or Mairead wants to give a simple DNA sample to help us find out if that’s their sister dead in the morgue. What kind of things would you have to go through to end up like that?’

  And what kind of mother would you have to be not to care when someone came and told you one of your daughters was likely dead? ‘What else can we do?’

  ‘We’ll have to keep looking. If we find Aisling Wallace alive, that’ll be our answer, I suppose.’

  And the girl in the ground. Buried without a name or grave. Paula understood now the work of the Commission. How, even when you’d lost everything that mattered, there were still things that could be taken away from you. At least they might be able to find out who this girl was, and give her a proper resting place. She thought of what Mrs Wallace had said – it’s what she deserved – and wondered again about Aisling Wallace in that picture, so young, so innocent. And no one could say where she was.

  Chapter Eleven

  Press conferences. Paula had been to so many over the years, hiding in the crowd if she could, sometimes reluctantly dragged on stage to blink in the lights and try not to show on her face what she and everyone else was thinking – how small the chances were of finding the missing person alive. As a psychologist she could run the odds in her sleep, calculate the risk factors. An older man, with alcohol or drug problems, no family? Likely wandered off, maybe dead, certainly unmourned. A three-year-old child gone from a holiday beach? If there were no parental abduction factors at play, then they were dead. Drowned or snatched, gone for good even as their parents sat in front of the cameras and begged for the child’s return. Perhaps even dead at their hands – statistically, that was the most likely thing. A teenage girl, gone missing on her way to school? Was there a boyfriend? Mental health problems, eating disorders? Was suicide a factor? If she hadn’t run away she was dead too. Dead, dead, and still they had to go through the motions of looking for them. It had begun to weary her, after so many years.

  But this was different. Now they had bodies and no answers as to why they were there. The man, that was easy. Fintan McCabe. His mother had been interviewed on the news earlier, a stooped woman with white hair who’d wept silently. ‘He was only a wean,’ she kept saying. ‘Only a wean.’ But this wean, this victim – he could have been one of the men who took her mother. And he’d ended up dead in that pit, while her mother was who knew where. Could she really mourn his loss, search for his killer?

  No, it was the girl she was thinking of, even as she sat in the crowd with her face carefully composed while Corry talked about bringing Fintan’s killers to justice. He’d lived by the gun and died by it too, as Gerard said. Occupational hazard. But the girl, to be buried in that pit without a name or grave marker – it wasn’t right. It stirred Paula, the need to track and find.

  ‘Yes.’ Corry pointed at a reporter in the crowd. Paula recognised the middle-aged woman as Aidan’s replacement at the Ballyterrin Gazette. He’d have been all over a case like this, asking if the police were holding back information because the Commission were involved. He was violently opposed to the Commission anyway, but Paula, who had no body and no grave where she could go to visit her mother, could privately see the point of it. Not that she’d say as much to her police colleagues.

  The reporter was asking something about Tozier’s presence. He’d insisted on sitting on the panel to field questions, his pale-blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves and the light reflecting off his glasses. He looked like he should be working at NASA.

  ‘The remains found do not fall under the remit of the Commission,’ said Corry crisply. ‘They were not found as a result of any information received. However, we’re working with the Commission in an advisory capacity, to minimise potential upset to the families of the long-missing.’

  Tozier nodded, as if he’d authorised her to say that. He leaned too close to his mic. ‘If anyone has any further information about the remains found, they can contact the confidential tip-line we’ve set up. Anything they have to say will be treated in full confidence.’

  Another thing Aidan hated. Provos getting fits of conscience, or more likely looking for a quiet life after years on the run, offering up titbits of information in exchange for letting it all be swept under a giant carpet of forgetting. He could not forget that men just like Fintan McCabe had killed his father, and he could not forgive.

  She pulled her attention back to the room. No sense in thinking about Aidan. He was gone, time was unspooling without him, and this was her job now. Find out who that dead girl was, and lay her to rest. Someone else had asked a question about her.

  Corry s
aid, ‘At the moment we don’t have an ID for this young woman, and we’d ask anyone with information to come forward, so she can be identified. We have here a digital reconstruction of what she’d have looked like at the time.’ Paula sat up; she hadn’t seen this yet. A picture was flashed onto the screen, a mock-up of the face over the skull. She’d been pretty, even with her features set in the strange Picasso-like shapes the computer programmes threw up. Surely someone, somewhere, must miss this young girl. ‘We think she was aged between twelve and eighteen, though it’s hard to be sure. When found she was wearing nightclothes and a jumper – I think we have an image of those now.’

  Paula ducked her head as the picture came up, those soil-stained clothes, the pendant that gave her an uncomfortable jolt every time. Again, the questions. Could it be hers? What was it doing there if so?

  Another reporter raised his hand, some kid in his first suit, reminding her again of Aidan, that scrappiness, the arrogance. ‘DI Corry. Are you saying there won’t be any prosecutions as a result of these finds? Even the girl, if she’s found with Disappeared victims? Isn’t that how the legislation reads?’

  Tozier opened his mouth but Corry cut right over him. ‘I’m not saying that at all, Matt. It’s Matt, yes? As far as I’m concerned this is a murder scene, with two dead bodies in it, and we’ll be using every resource we have to bring the killers to justice, no matter who they were or how long ago it was. That’s how the law reads, to my mind. Thank you. No more questions.’

  She pushed back her chair and was gone. Tozier was media-trained but not well enough to hide the annoyance that crossed his face.