The Silent Dead (Paula Maguire 3) (25 page)

There was the sound of shouting as the prisoners were taken down to be let out.
Murdering scum! They should be strung up! It isn’t right. It isn’t right.

The person shouting those words was Dominic Martin. He was restrained by bailiffs, and the dock was opened and the prisoners stepped out, blinking as if they couldn’t quite believe it themselves. None of them looked at each other.

Doing my interviews for this book, I spoke to the solicitor for Ni Chonnaill, Grainne Devine. She was defensive, giving me a string of legal arguments about due process and right to trial. In the end I stopped asking why she defended people like the Mayday bombers, and simply asked how it made her feel. Standing up there with the eyes of the families boring into her. She thought about this for a moment. She is a young woman, stylish, assured. She said,
I feel like I’m doing my job. I feel like I’m lucky to live in a country where we have the right to be presumed innocent, no matter what the evidence looks like, and you can’t really understand what that means until you’ve defended someone who looks guilty as sin.
She said,
If I were ever to be on trial, on the other side of the dock, I’d want to know someone was defending me.

When she put it like that, I couldn’t argue.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

‘You’ve a visitor, so you have,’ said the nurse. It was the young one, who wore a pink uniform and thick glasses and was very rough with her pillow-plumping technique.

‘Who?’ After five days in hospital, Paula was getting fed up with visitors being sprung on her. She much preferred it the other way, arriving at people’s doors to question them.

The nurse tittered. ‘A fella. Dead handsome.’

Aidan, she assumed. Girls always went silly around his air of tortured abstraction. Finally, the bastard. She was already planning out how to be – aloof, making it clear his behaviour was as usual not acceptable, and yet there was a quickening in her pulse at the idea of seeing him. But as she pulled herself up to sitting, she saw someone totally unexpected approach across the ward. Dominic Martin. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved navy shirt buttoned tight. He had a few days’ stubble growing. ‘Eh – hi.’ She’d last seen him on the other side of the interview room glass.

‘Hello, Dr Maguire.’ He was carrying a Pampers box. ‘I’m sorry to land in on you. I rang the office and they said you’d had your baby – a little girl. This is her?’

‘Er – yeah.’ It was clearly Maggie beside Paula’s bed in her cot. She’d insisted on white Babygros only, though Pat, knowing unfortunately that a girl was expected, had already bought up the entire stock of frilly pink clothes in the Ballyterrin area.

‘What’s her name?’ Dominic was looking at the baby.

‘Maggie.’ She wanted to say –
I named her for my mother. She’s gone. She’s probably dead.
She wanted somehow to make a connection in their loss, but couldn’t. He stood alone, and she was here with her brand-new child.

He seemed to realise he needed to explain his presence. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I had a lot of toys in the house for a baby girl. Some of them never got opened – they were birthday presents.’ Of course, Amber had died just days shy of her second birthday. ‘I wondered if you’d – I mean they’ll just go to waste otherwise.’

Paula understood. In this box he had packed up his dead daughter’s toys to give to Maggie.

‘Maybe you’d think – but she never got these ones, there wasn’t time, and I’d like them to get played with. You know.’

She had to say something. ‘That’s really kind of you. How nice.’

He placed the box on the bed and she looked into it. Pink plastic, a rag doll, colourful picture books. ‘She’d be too wee for them now,’ he said. ‘But later . . .’

Paula took a deep breath. ‘Would you sit down, Dominic? I’m going spare here. I’d be glad of the company.’

He sat on the edge of the plastic chair. ‘They’ve kept you in a while then.’

‘Just a few days, they said. She was a bit early, and I had a caesarean.’ She felt embarrassed talking about this with him. A suspect, however much she tried to avoid it. It was hard to believe he wasn’t one of the men the Walshes had described. The nervous one, driving the white van. Paula looked at him. He was a good-looking man, and this bringing the toys was a heart-rending act of small kindness. Could she really see him arranging the murder of five people? They had no idea how extensive the leak was – did that explain why they’d not been able to pin any evidence on him?

‘It’s boring, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I was in myself after . . . everything. Amazing how boring it all was. Waiting for your tea to come, hoping they’d put something decent on the telly.’

‘I didn’t know you were injured too.’

‘Just my back.’ He touched it. ‘Burns and cuts. I lay on top of her when it happened. When the roof of the bank came down. But the shock waves, they said – well, she was too wee to stand it.’

Of course, she remembered now. He’d covered Amber with his body, trying to shield her, but they’d both been buried in the rubble when the bank collapsed. Paula realised she should say something but couldn’t find the words. Her mind was as exhausted as her body.

He changed the subject. ‘I had another visit from your boss. The English fella. Asking me all about the mayor and did I know where he is. He is your boss, is he?’

‘Yes. DI Brooking.’

‘We’re happy to help, as long as he’s sensitive to people’s loss. I know it might not seem like much, if you’re over from England, but to us it was – devastating.’

‘His son died.’ She said it before realising she probably shouldn’t have. But she hated the way some locals looked at Guy, the fair-haired Englishman with the military bearing, coming over there telling them to sort out their differences. They didn’t know what he’d been through.

Dominic’s face was still. ‘I didn’t know. How old?’

‘Ten. He got killed. In London.’ Jamie Brooking had been shot because of his father’s job in anti-gang work, but she shouldn’t say that.

Dominic nodded slowly. ‘I’m sorry for his loss. Can’t be easy to work on cases like this, then. Trying to find murderers who killed wee kids.’

She could have said,
It’s a job to him. He doesn’t know how to break the rules even if he wanted to.
She could have said,
He really believes in it, a fair trial and acquittal and innocent until proven guilty. He really believes we have a duty to look for everyone who’s lost, no matter what they did.
Instead she said, ‘Thank you for the toys. It was very thoughtful.’

‘I hope you get some use out of them. Amber didn’t.’

There was a silence that was painfully full of unsaid things and suspicion and apologies and he stood to go, putting his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His forearms were tanned and strong from working outside. Why had he come – to make a point, to get them to back off? To show he was a decent man, whatever she suspected him of? She wanted to ask how Lily was, but baulked at it.

‘His son,’ said Dominic, turning back. ‘When did he die?’

‘Early last year. Before he came here.’ And precipitating his family into crisis, his daughter lost and his wife deranged, and Paula making it all worse by having this child.

‘If he’d ever like a chat – you could tell him I’d be happy to. I mean, I learned a few things about it. Coping. I’ve had longer.’

‘That’s—’ Words escaped her. ‘That’s very kind. Thank you.’ She looked at him for a moment, so handsome, so sad.
Could you really have done this? Are you the killer I’m hunting?

‘I’ll be off then. Hope you feel better.’

He went, drawing glances from the women in the ward. Paula looked at the bright plastic toys, one with a scrap of wrapping paper still on it, and then at her own sleeping daughter, new-minted. She knew there was nothing she wanted to do less than give Maggie a dead child’s toys to play with – but also that when Maggie was old enough, that was exactly what she would do.

Paula was eventually allowed out of hospital five days later, minus a lot of weight, plus one baby and thirty-five stitches. Her father picked her up, and she did her best to smile and act normally and not think about what she’d learned from Guy. Was it really possible her mother had been unfaithful? And had her father known, had he any idea?

‘Er, what’s this?’ As they drew up to the doorway of the house, she could see pink balloons on the gate. ‘Dad?’

PJ was opening his car door. ‘It’s Pat – she wanted to do a wee thing to welcome the baby.’

‘Dad!’

‘I’m sorry, love. There’s a few people round.’

For God’s sake. The last thing she wanted to do was smile and chat to people, when she was still struggling to walk.

Pat was delighted to see her. ‘There you are, both of you! Welcome home, pet!’ She cooed at Maggie in her sling.

Paula was holding the baby in front of her like a human shield. ‘You didn’t have to do all this, Pat.’

‘Oh, it’s no trouble. Just a few friends and family.’

This translated to around twenty people – Paula’s aunt Philomena being one, the image of Paula’s mother but with the ferreting-out skills of a bloodhound, and her cousin Cassie, now a lawyer and correctly engaged to a man she wasn’t yet living with like you were supposed to, and Saoirse and Dave, loaded up with presents that Paula felt uncomfortably were meant to replace the joy her friend couldn’t feel for her, Avril in a pretty pink dress, finger still bare, plus assorted mates of Pat’s, who all wanted to devour baby Maggie. She was passed from arm to arm, luckily staying asleep, her face a crumpled rose petal. Thankfully, Mrs Flynn from next door was not there. Paula couldn’t have coped with that. There was pink everywhere – pink bunting, pink cupcakes (or ‘wee buns’, as Paula’s father insisted on calling them), pink wrapping paper, pink rosé wine, pink flowers. It was like an explosion in a patriarchal factory. Aside from the baby, all the talk, hushed in corners, was about the case and the four dead people turning up one by one. The case they still hadn’t solved.

While Maggie was being cuddled by Cassie and Auntie Phil – ‘Who’s a lovely girl? Ah look, she has the family red hair and all’ – Paula followed Pat out to the kitchen, where she was putting flowers (pink) in a vase.

‘You’ll be glad to be home, love.’

She’d have been gladder if said home were not filled with people, but said nothing about that. ‘Yeah. Listen, Pat – I need to ask you something. About Mum.’

Pat’s face changed. ‘I’ll close the door over there.’ She did, the noise of the party receding.

‘The thing I always think about you is, you’ve always helped me when I needed it.’ Paula spoke looking out of the window; it was easier that way. ‘I’m going to ask you something, and I promise it will never get back to Dad, or to Aidan. I know things have been awkward because of Maggie—’ She could hear Pat start to make some protest, something no doubt about Maggie being the best and sweetest baby in the world, and she steamrollered on. ‘Sorry. I need to get through this. I’ve heard a few things now about Mum, and I think you’d have known best what she was up to that autumn she disappeared. And I’d like to ask, was there a man? Was she seeing someone?’

Pat spoke carefully, arranging the flowers. ‘What do you mean, seeing?’

‘At first I thought it was something to do with her work, maybe she was informing, like they said, passing on confidential files. But now I wonder – was she seeing him as well? Like an affair?’ It almost killed her to say these words to Pat, the noise of the party next door, people gurgling at the baby, who mercifully stayed quiet.

‘I don’t know anything for sure.’ Pat’s voice was very small. ‘But one day when I called round, there was a man there, yes. I don’t mean – not like that. She was in the kitchen with him. I went to the back door, like I normally did – she wanted to borrow a cookbook I had, to make a cake for your birthday.’

That placed it as September then, around a month before the disappearance. Paula remembered the cake well, two records on a turntable, shaped in liquorice laces. She’d thought it was pretty cool, and it was a good thing she did because it was the last birthday cake she’d ever had. The following year PJ had mentioned something about it, and she’d said she was too old at fourteen, even though she didn’t think this at all, just to save him having to think of one more thing.

‘Anyway, your man was there clearing up his papers. He’d a briefcase with him. She was all flustered, I remember, but he was the calmest thing you’ve ever seen. She never told me who he was, and that wasn’t like her, she was always polite, you know. He shook my hand. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Pat O’Hara. I’d better be off, Mrs Maguire,” he said to her. “Lovely to meet you, Mrs O’Hara.”
I didn’t realise until after he’d never said who he was, and she just started talking about your party and how you wanted a sleepover and what did I think about that.’

Paula’s head was bowed. How little she’d known, consumed by teenage worries, such as would she be allowed to stay up to watch
The X-files
that week and would a boy ever talk to her. Even Aidan had totally ignored her back then, for all their mothers were best friends. Actually, he was still ignoring her now – no sign of him at the party, of course.

Pat was biting her lip. ‘The thing is, pet – I didn’t mean to snoop, honest I didn’t, but I saw his papers when he put them away, and there was an Army crest on them. And the way he walked, and shook my hand all firm like – I think he was one of them. I worried about it after. That I’d shaken his hand. Whether someone might find out. It was daft, but that’s how things were then.’

‘He was English.’

‘Aye, I think so.’

‘Did he have a hat? A sort of old-fashioned one?’

She could see Pat frown in the reflection of the window. ‘I think he did, now you mention it.’

The same man she’d seen at the door the day before it happened. When, crucially, Paula had come home to find her mother in her dressing gown at four p.m.

‘OK,’ she said heavily. ‘I won’t ask you any more. Thanks.’

Pat was twisting her wedding ring – the one she’d so recently had from PJ. She’d moved the one from John, Aidan’s father, to her right hand. ‘I keep thinking I’d know,’ she said distractedly. From the next room came the noise of the party, chatting, laughing, cooing over Maggie. Paula was like a tuning fork waiting for the smallest cry.

‘Know what?’

‘If I did the right thing. Marrying again. It took me a long, long time. But PJ needs someone to mind him, with that ould leg, and it just – I was selfish, I suppose.’

Paula leaned away from the counter. ‘You’re allowed to be happy, the two of you.’

‘But I see how you are, running round trying to find her, and you and my fella don’t even talk any more, and I think what if it was meant to be you two wed? What if we took your happiness, us old ones? Just being selfish, looking for a second go.’

Paula sighed. ‘It’s nothing to do with that. Honest it isn’t. Aidan and I always had our differences. This is nothing to do with you and Dad. I’m happy for you. I just needed to try and find out. I can’t explain it. I need to know I did everything I could to find her. Her bones, even. Pat – they were after her, weren’t they? They knew there was a man she was . . .’ She groped for the right word, a minefield of meaning – ‘talking to. They came for her, didn’t they? The IRA.’