The Silent Dead

by Claire McGowan

  ‘I saw nothing,’ said Paula hurriedly. ‘Just you talking. Anyway, I’m not the type to tell tales.’

  ‘I know who it was anyway,’ said Avril, shredding the tissues. ‘At least I think I do.’

  ‘But nothing happened?’

  ‘Well – no.’

  ‘So, it’ll be fine. I’m sure Alan will come round. That’s if you want him to. You want the big white wedding and all that?’

  ‘Well, what else is there?’

  And to that Paula had no answer but her own swollen belly and fatherless child. ‘We should go out,’ she said, turning off the tap. ‘It’ll be OK. I’ve cried in work at least ten times since I started.’

  ‘Men never do,’ said Avril gloomily, dabbing her face. ‘It’s really unfair.’

  ‘They do other daft things, though. Come on.’

  As they went out, Fiacra was coming in the front door, his leather satchel across his chest. ‘What’s going on?’ he said, unnaturally innocent. ‘Someone’s smashed a pane in the door here, look.’

  ‘Alan came,’ said Avril, very shaky.

  ‘Your fiancé? What did he want?’

  Avril went up to him. ‘I know why you did it. I understand, OK? And you should have just talked to me. This is . . . beneath you.’

  ‘No idea what you’re on about.’

  ‘I know it was you. Because I didn’t tell anyone else. Because you’re meant to be my friend!’

  ‘Friend.’ His face changed. ‘Maybe I didn’t want to be your fecking friend. How come I get that, and Monaghan gets all the good bits?’

  ‘You are a . . . bastard.’ Paula had never heard Avril swear before.

  Fiacra gestured to Paula. ‘Don’t know why you’re so chummy with her. She’s just got your uncle suspended.’

  ‘What?’ said Paula and Avril together. Avril stared at her. ‘Paula, is that true?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. I had some queries about an old case he worked on, but . . .’

  ‘An old case.’ Fiacra sneered. ‘Your ma’s case, is what you mean. Because you think you can do whatever you want, isn’t that right, Maguire?’ He glared back at Avril. ‘You and her are just the same. You think the rules are for other people.’

  Avril balled her fists as if she’d like to hit Fiacra, then shot back into the Ladies, sobbing.

  Paula regarded Fiacra. ‘What happened to you? You used to be so nice.’

  ‘Nice,’ he said bitterly. ‘When did that ever help a person?’ He barged into the main office.

  It was a silly question she’d asked him. Paula knew exactly what had happened to him. Someone had tried to kill his pregnant sister – the same person who’d attacked Paula herself – and the girl had nearly died, and she’d lost her baby. But still. They all had issues.

  ‘What’s going on now?’ Guy was coming in the door too, looking exhausted.

  ‘Oh, just tempers fraying.’ Paula would keep Avril’s secrets. Call it female solidarity, or the community of liars, or whatever.

  ‘We’ve got work to do. Three murders and we’ve achieved absolutely nothing towards finding the others. We can’t afford to fall apart.’

  ‘I think it’s too late for that,’ said Paula wearily. ‘Did you hear what Fiacra said, about DS Hamilton? Is it true, he’s been suspended?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Because that wasn’t what I meant! I didn’t want to get him in trouble, I just wanted answers! I just need to know what happened.’

  Guy turned away, rubbing his chin, which was already sprouting stubble after the early start. ‘I can’t talk to you about that, Paula.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No. I’m sorry, but you ought to know by now – the things you do have consequences. Now, please get everyone into the meeting room.’

  ‘Right,’ said Guy. ‘I hope everyone’s clear on why we’re here.’

  ‘This is stupid.’ Fiacra was slumped low in his seat like a sulky schoolboy, as was Gerard, as far away as possible from each other given that the room was barely three metres wide. It wasn’t the best timing for a team meeting, Paula agreed. She could barely sit for ten minutes without having to pee, and Avril had so much make-up round her eyes she looked like a sunburnt panda.

  ‘We have to work as a team. We are under huge amounts of scrutiny, as you know, and so far we have no results to show. Three of the Mayday Five are dead and we’re no closer to finding the other two. Basically, we have nothing. Now, Jarlath Kenny will be officiating at the memorial service for the bombing at the weekend, in his capacity as mayor. This will bring up all manner of security issues. Kenny won’t want any trouble from the dissident lot, so it’s possible he will kill the remaining two members of the Five, if indeed he’s involved in their kidnap.’

  No one said anything.

  ‘We work as a team,’ Guy repeated. ‘We’re supposed to be above petty tensions – a cross border team, working in harmony. We have to set an example.’

  Paula wanted to say that this wasn’t really about sectarianism, just good old-fashioned jealousy, but she also sat in silence. Trying not to look at Bob’s empty seat.

  ‘So no more in-fighting,’ said Guy, ploughing on. ‘Leave your private lives at home, please.’

  Fiacra shook his head, almost but not quite muttering something. Paula kept her eyes fixed on the desk, hands linked over her bump. The living proof that Guy and she hadn’t managed to follow his own advice.

  The moment stretched out, Fiacra, Gerard, and Avril all sitting in silence, either tearful or mutinous, until Paula spoke up. ‘Will Corry’s team be involved in policing the memorial service?’

  ‘Not directly. The risk is so high they’ll probably have the TSG there. But I feel we should attend, pay our respects. Most of the families will be there, except for a few who baulk at sharing the stage with a convicted terrorist.’ A very old-fashioned attitude nowadays. You were just supposed to put it behind you.

  ‘What will happen at it?’ she asked.

  He seemed grateful someone was talking. ‘There’ll be an unveiling service, and a journalist will read a poem – she wrote a book about it. Maeve Cooley – isn’t she your friend, in fact?’

  Yes, she was – or at least she had been before Paula had revealed Aidan might or might not be the father of the child currently doing flip-flops inside her. Now she clearly wasn’t enough of a friend to even tell Paula she was coming to town.

  Fiacra spoke up suddenly, his arms still folded. ‘What about Bob? Will he be there?’

  Guy shuffled his papers and stacked them neatly. ‘Sergeant Hamilton is taking some time off while we look into an older case he worked on. Some allegations have been made and we need to investigate them.’

  ‘But he’s not done anything wrong, sir, so—’

  Guy looked straight at Paula. ‘I’d rather not discuss that at the moment. With any of you. Thanks.’

  Kira

  Kira didn’t want to go to the memorial service. She refused to get dressed. ‘You’re a bad girl,’ Mammy said. She was in the living room, already dressed in her suit with the pink roses, but drinking out of a glass that Kira knew had vodka in. She’d spilled some so it looked like the roses had dew on.

  ‘Yes, Mammy.’

  ‘The wrong one died. It should have been you. Not my Rose.’

  ‘OK, Mammy.’

  ‘Nobody even wanted you. A mistake is what you were.’

  She was still in the T-shirt she wore to bed. It was one of Rose’s and it said Rage Against the Machine on it. That was a band. It made Mammy angry – Kira had taken it from under Rose’s pillow after that day and kept it.

  ‘That dirty old thing,’ said Mammy. ‘Take it off or I’ll tan your hide for you.’

  ‘No, Mammy,’ she said. She hid it when she was at school in case Mammy chucked it out.

  Mammy threw the glass. It missed but some sprayed on the T-shirt. Kira felt it spatter onto her skin, warm from sitting out, and it was so nearly like that day she had to breathe i
n hard so she didn’t scream. Behind Mammy, she could see Rose looking sad. Now, since it all started, she sometimes couldn’t see her at all. It was getting harder and harder to hear her voice.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said. To Rose, not to Mammy, though Mammy answered.

  ‘You’ll do as you’re told.’

  Go, Rose said. It will be OK. I’ll look after you.

  I’m scared, she said, just inside her head.

  You should go, Kiki. I’ll be there.

  ‘OK. I’ll go.’ She said that out loud but Mammy had switched herself off again. Kira went to get some towels and wiped up the drink. The carpet was ruined anyway from drink and fags. She rinsed out the towel and got washed, then put on her nicest dress, a black one with a yellow belt, and on her feet trainers. She didn’t want sore feet, and anyway, why couldn’t you wear those kinds of shoes with a dress? Clothes were clothes, weren’t they?

  The trouble with the anniversary was you couldn’t stop thinking about that day. Oh, this was when Rose and me watched Ant and Dec on TV and ate Coco Pops. This was when we drove in the car, and Rose turned the radio up high, and we sang along to that Rihanna song. Then less than an hour later Rose was dying all over the pavement and Kira had her blood running into her mouth.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked weird. She was weird. There was no getting around it. You dance to your own tune, pet, Rose used to say. Their pictures were out in the corridor, Rose in her party dress and Daddy in his suit. She couldn’t even really remember him; he’d died when she was wee. He always looked cross in the pictures, never smiling. She’d asked Rose once what he was like. They’d been in Rose’s room. She’d liked to play the CD deck and poke about in the jewellery and hairslides. One time, she’d opened Rose’s bottom drawer and found a bottle of vodka there under the pants. The family had been ‘dry’ before Rose died, which meant you didn’t drink. Daddy had been a ‘strict ould bugger’, Rose said one time. Then she looked sad. God forgive me. At least he never kicked me out onto the street. She’d have done that in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

  Why would she do that? Kira had asked. Why would Mammy want to kick Rose out?

  Never mind, she’d said. Let’s have a drink of Coke and some Skipps.

  ‘Bye,’ she whispered to Daddy. Rose she knew was coming with them. She could see it in her smile in the picture.

  ‘Show some respect,’ Mammy muttered, pulling at her suit jacket. ‘We have to honour Rose’s memory.’

  As if she didn’t. As if she ever stopped.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Paula had a bad feeling about the service. It was the idea of crowds, after all she’d been reading about crushing and trampling, the panic on the day of the bomb.

  She couldn’t get used to the contours of her body being so changed and stretched. Like trying to put a glass on a table when you were drunk and missing, smashing it. She got dressed in her childhood bedroom, bumping into the shabby old furniture. She could of course have moved into her parents’ room – PJ had gone and it wasn’t too likely Margaret was coming back to sleep in it – but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, so she stayed, ridiculously pregnant, in her single bed. Dressed in a shapeless black shift she’d bought in Dunnes, she shoved her feet into wide flats, broken down at the back, and bundled her hair up. She went into her parents’ room to check her reflection in the house’s only long mirror. All was still. Her mother’s perfume bottles – Anaïs Anaïs, Chanel – sat on the dresser, a thin coating of dust over all. The venetian blinds let in the light in slats, dust floating in mid-air. The bed was stripped and neat. Paula held her breath and shut the door behind her.

  Parking restrictions were in force for the service, so once she neared Crossanure she had to leave the car along the road. Already people were moving towards the main street in groups, families, couples, children. She was the only one alone, lumbering along, her own counterweight. Soon she was tired and needing to pee. She thought quite seriously about turning back. Standing in the heat for hours with a full bladder wasn’t all that appealing. But she remembered Amber Martin, and Rose Woods, and Patrick Ward both Junior and Senior, and all who’d come into that town on a normal bank holiday, just like her, but never made it home again. She kept walking.

  Despite growing up nearby, Paula had never actually been to Crossanure before, and so she saw in her mind the present day, five years on, superimposed with ghostly images of how it had looked after the bomb. The petrol station was still boarded up. It had never sold – haunted perhaps by the people who’d died there: Tom Kennedy and Lisa McShane in a car parked by the air station, Rose Woods on the forecourt as she was passing, the worker from Nigeria who was manning the pumps. The other people burned and maimed. High Street itself had been rebuilt, but it was too easy to picture the rubble, hear the screams on the bit of shaking camera footage someone had taken that day. The people they were searching for had most likely planted that bomb, hefted the bag into the bin, primed it and walked away to safety, while mothers and children were being herded to their deaths. They must have looked them in the face, knowing some of them would die. You couldn’t put a bomb on a street full of children and call it collateral damage. And yet Paula was trying to find them, bring them home. Because that was all she knew how to do – find the lost. Whatever they’d done.

  The streets of the small town were full of people. She didn’t want to go further. Her body was resisting, pulling her back, but she forced her legs on to the heart of town, the square where the bomb had gone off in a litter bin. The crowd was several hundred strong, spilling all the way out of the square and down the street. She saw Guy and other police officers on a raised platform with folding seats. The families were on the other side. She recognised several faces: Ann Ward and John Lenehan, seated with his stick in front of him. He nodded to her, his differences with the group clearly put aside for this occasion. Despite the hot day, his skin was as pale as paper. The police and journalists were to the right. Corry had picked a black suit with a pencil skirt, neat and sober. The men wore black ties. Paula wondered did you own one as a matter of course, when you had to go to dozens of funerals. The crowd was ringed by officers in high-vis jackets, though there was no need. A more sombre and well-behaved gathering would have been hard to find. Somewhere in the low murmur a baby cried, but otherwise the crowd was quiet, almost weary. Paula thought she understood. More than a decade after the Good Friday Agreement, you wouldn’t think you’d still need to attend peace rallies.

  Guy helped her up onto the low platform, avoiding her eyes. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine. I needed to be here.’

  Helen Corry looked tense – Paula knew she’d been closer to the bomb than most, as officer in charge of the control room that day. Her manicured hands were folded tightly in her lap.

  At the lectern, Jarlath Kenny. Mayor of the town, who’d likely shot a few Protestants and police officers in his time. Was he the one behind this case; did he know where the remaining terrorists were being kept? The memorial itself was shrouded in a black curtain, casting a shadow over the crowd in the sunlit square. Already people were sweating and loosening ties. Paula wondered how long it would last, as she took her seat. She was scanning the opposite side for Kira. No sign. Then she saw two figures being hustled through the crowd by officers – Kira and the mother. She’d studied that file until she felt she knew them all, each sorrowful face, each line of loss that was etched onto them. The Woods family took their seats. None of the others looked at them.

  The ceremony began at 10.30 a.m. There would be a minute’s silence at 11.17 a.m., when the bomb had gone off. First there was a priest and a minister. Paula had never heard of either of them and assumed they’d been chosen to give the correct religious balance. There was also a black man in a colourful outfit who delivered a blessing in a language no one seemed to understand. This would be for the Nigerian. She assumed the African woman in the headdress was his sister, over from London. She hoped eve
ryone had someone there for them. Even Niall McShane had come, sitting on the very back row with his folding chair pushed back, as if he might bolt. There was a young girl with him, around twelve or so, whose face was already swollen with crying. He held her hand tight. The sound of monotonous weeping had started up as soon as the blessings began. Paula realised it was Mrs Woods who’d begun it, her mouth open and slack. Perhaps she was drunk again. Her remaining child ignored her, looking stoically ahead.

  The blessings had finished. She shifted in the hard chair. She was by now dying to pee and a trickle of sweat was working its way down the back of her thigh. She hoped to God she didn’t go into labour right now. That would be inconvenient, but the baby had no idea she’d been brought to this ceremony of death, swimming around in the cushioned warmth inside. Guy was trying to catch her eye. She ignored him, licking the sweat from her top lip. She was very aware of Corry nearby, Avril and Gerard in the row behind. Bob, presumably, was not allowed to be there in an official capacity. Fiacra hadn’t turned up. That would be a very black mark. She heard feet on the metal staircase to her left – someone was coming up it. Maeve. Her fair hair was loose, shiny, and she wore a black trouser suit with red Converse underneath, a flash of colour among the sombre mourning outfits. She didn’t look at Paula.

  Jarlath Kenny was saying, ‘I’d now like to ask Miss Maeve Cooley to read the dedication. Miss Cooley has worked extensively with the families, and they’ve asked her to represent them here.’ Maeve smiled at him blankly as he gave her the microphone. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. Paula remembered the allegations in Maeve’s book, that there was pretty much nothing to choose between Kenny and the man who’d orchestrated this bomb. So why was one on the podium and the other disappeared?

  Maeve arranged some pieces of paper on the lectern, cool and in control. Her voice with its soft Dublin accent was steady. She was reading a poem. It began, ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there, I do not sleep.’ A sob came from the side of the families. Paula looked and saw most of them were crying. Several of the men stared ahead, white-faced. Dominic Martin held Lily Sloane’s hand as she wept. Looking over he met Paula’s eyes and she felt a stab of pain. She stared at the ground while Maeve read, squinting her eyes to try not to let any tears fall out. This wasn’t her loss to cry over. In the crowd there was a low noise of sniffing. People held each other’s hands and leaned together. She felt movement beside her – Guy was reaching for her hand. She let him take it, though she was lathered in sweat. His pulse was racing.