The Nameless Dead (12 page)

‘I’m not fussed on the bonfire, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘There can be trouble there.’

‘I’m not a baby,’ Penny complained, then snapped as Shane stuck out his tongue triumphantly. ‘Shane’s sticking his tongue out at me,’ she whined, undermining
her previous statement.

‘Don’t stick your tongue out at people,’ Debbie warned from the hall, where she was fixing her make-up.

Penny smirked at Shane. ‘Can I, Mum?’ she called. ‘I’ll be careful. All the girls are going.’

‘I saw your friend, Claire, over in Strabane last night,’ I said. ‘She’s keeping bad company. Stephen Burke?’

‘Oh, him,’ she said. ‘He just tags along sometimes. He’s a weirdo.’

‘I’m surprised Claire’s allowed over there on a school night.’

‘You didn’t say anything to her, did you?’ Penny asked, appalled.

Before I could answer, Debbie stuck her head around the door frame. ‘What do you think? Let her across for an hour or two, just.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ Penny said, smiling, before I even had a chance to respond.

‘That’s not fair.’ Shane let his spoon clatter to the floor as he stomped away from the table.

‘We’ll go to Derry first,’ I said. ‘That way everyone will be happy.’

If the compromise placated him, he didn’t show it.

I was glad to get into the relative quiet of the station, and used the early start to follow up on what had happened in Christine Cashell’s home. I’d taken the
details of the monitor from Christine’s machine the previous night and a quick Internet search provided me with a helpline number for the manufacturer.

‘Hello. Thank you for calling; how can I help you?’ The voice was English, upbeat.

It seemed too convoluted to explain the details of my enquiry, so instead I simply said, ‘Yes. We have a problem with the monitor. We can hear a baby crying in it.’

There was silence on the other end, as the girl perhaps wondered if this was a prank call.

‘Is that not what a baby monitor is meant to do, sir?’ She managed to sound cheery, though a little suspicious.

‘Of course. Yes, I’m sorry. I mean, we can hear someone else’s baby in the monitor.’

‘I see. And you’re sure it’s not your own baby, sir?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘I see,’ she repeated. ‘The most likely cause, then, is that one of your neighbours is using a monitor set at the same frequency as yours. That means that you might overhear
their baby crying from time to time. And, of course, they’ll overhear yours.’

‘That explains it,’ I said. ‘Just as a matter of interest, how close by would they need to be for the monitor to pick it up.’

‘Is it clear?’

‘Fairly.’

‘It would need to be close, then; a neighbouring house. No further than maybe a few hundred yards.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ she asked, her voice lilting.

‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

I explained this to Christine Cashell an hour later while her partner sat in the chair opposite, a little sullen and more than a little hung-over. He scraped at the stubble
along his jawline as he spoke.

‘So someone else around here is using a baby monitor like ours, Chrissie. See?’

She stared at him. If I had expected the revelation to bring her some comfort or relief I was to be disappointed.

‘No one on our estate has a baby that young,’ she said. ‘No one else here has babies.’

‘There must be some around here, Christine,’ I said. ‘The estate has a lot of young families in it; there’s bound to be at least one baby in the estate.’

‘But I be talking to the mothers in the shops and waiting at school; they’d have told me.’

I prevented myself from pointing out that they may not have done so, precisely because she had recently lost her own child. Still, the woman from the monitor company had said the house concerned
would be a neighbouring property, and I doubted if Christine would have missed a pregnancy among one of her immediate neighbours.

‘What about the woman whose house you were at last night? Would she have a child?’

Dunne shrugged. ‘A lot of people live in and out of those unfinished houses. We don’t know who half of them are. The one she’s in was the show house for the estate, so
it’s probably well finished inside. Better than ours anyhow.’

‘But the rest are incomplete?’

He nodded.

‘Why would they choose to live in an unfinished house?’

Dunne rolled his eyes. ‘They don’t actually live there; they’re using the address for benefits.’

For a number of years, the benefits system in the Republic had been markedly more generous than the system in the North. As a result, less scrupulous Northerners had ‘moved’, on
paper, into properties in the south to exploit the fact that they could claim both in the North and in the Republic. Their child benefit would be paid in the North, while the south would top up the
difference to bring it to Republic levels. That particular golden egg had cracked with the collapse of the economy and the subsequent bailout, though many of the registered addresses remained on
the books. One impact of the scam was the disintegration of estates near the border where houses might be registered to a number of families without any of them actually living in them.

‘So you don’t know her name?’

Dunne shook his head. Christine looked at me and shook hers, too, once.

‘I can always ask.’

‘So what if she has a baby?’ Dunne said. ‘She’s not breaking the law.’

‘If she has one, we heard it being hit quite a smack last night. If she realizes that others can hear her, she might rein in her temper a little,’ I explained, more for
Christine’s benefit than Dunne’s.

The house was unoccupied when I went across. I rang the bell a few times, then moved around to the side of the house and peered in the window. Inside was nicely finished; the
ceilings were bordered with moulding and a small chandelier hung in the living room. The furniture in the room was perhaps a little large for the space, but even from where I stood it looked like
good quality.

I moved around the rear of the house. The garden was no more than a plot of clay which the builder had not even prepared for seeding. Despite this, a few hardier tufts of grass and weeds had
struggled through the lumps of hard-fill littering the ground. I glanced over the low fence bordering the garden at the outline of Islandmore in the distance, rising out of the river. In the
stillness of the morning I became aware of the constant running of a motor and realized that the dig had resumed. Millar had said they would be back to dig further around the site of Cleary’s
burial, in case they had missed anything. I could not see the dig itself for it was on the opposite side of the island.

I moved back up towards the house, picking my way through the piles of clay. Standing up on tiptoe to see in through the window of the kitchen I missed the figure coming around the corner of the
house.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

I turned to face a tall, forbidding woman, her features sharp, her hair tied back from her face. She looked in her late fifties. She carried two carrier bags emblazoned with the logo of the
local supermarket.

I realized that she would not have known that I was a guard, as I was in plain-clothes rather than my uniform.

‘I’m Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin,’ I said. ‘I believe you had an incident last night with one of your neighbours. I’m just following up.’

‘The lunatic across the way? What about it? I told the young fella out last night I didn’t want to do anything about it.’

‘Miss Cashell’s not mad. She lost a child recently and is having some difficulty in coming to terms with it.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Christine Cashell. She lost her baby.’

The woman stared down at the shopping she held, her manner softening. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know who she was.’

I was unsure how knowing who she was made a difference, but I was mollified by the woman’s apparent understanding.

‘She believes she can hear a baby crying in a neighbouring house. None of her other neighbours have children and she was wondering if it was coming from here; your child or grandchild
maybe?’

‘I don’t have any children,’ she answered sharply. ‘She didn’t hear anything coming from my house.’

‘This is your house, Miss . . .?’

‘Clark. Sheila Clark. I’m renting here for a few months; my own house is being repaired.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘But you haven’t had a child in your house that Miss Cashell might have heard?’

‘Despite being the one attacked last night, I get the feeling I’m being interrogated here,’ Shelia Clark replied.

‘I’m sorry it seems that way, Miss Clark. I’m just following up on things. I’ll let you get on with your shopping. Would you like a hand in?’

‘I can manage fine, thank you,’ she replied tersely.

I went back round the side of the house to my car, waving across to where Christine Cashell stood nervously at her window.

As I sat in the car I noted the registration number on Clark’s car. She may have claimed that she did not have a child in the house, but I had seen a box of baby milk through the
translucent plastic of her shopping bag.

I looked for Joe McCready when I got to the station, but Burgess told me he’d called to say that he’d be late; his wife had a scan.

‘I need you to do me a favour,’ I said.

Burgess stared at me, not replying lest it encourage me to continue with my request. I did so anyway.

‘I need to know who owns the houses in Islandview.’

‘Every house?’

‘Not the individual owners; I mean who owns the estate now.’

‘Why?’

I shrugged. ‘Someone is selling drugs out of one of the houses there; I want to know who’s giving them the okay to use the property.’

He seemed to consider this for a moment, before finally nodding. ‘I’ll get on to it,’ he said.

Joe McCready did not make it into the station until after ten-thirty.

‘How did it go?’ I asked as I poured us both a coffee in the station kitchen.

‘Great. It’s really great. Everything is okay, the heart was beating okay, the baby was moving, everything was . . . it was all good.’

He inhaled deeply and held the breath a moment, then let it slowly out, slumping his shoulders as he did so.

‘You need to relax about it, Joe,’ I said. ‘It will all be fine. The hospital has never lost a father yet during a labour.’

Joe attempted a smile. ‘It’s not that. I’m . . . I’m nervous about being in there, during the birth. About watching Ellen in pain and not being able to do anything. What
if I’m useless?’

‘You will be,’ I said. ‘Your job is to take the flak from the midwives for leaving your own wife in this condition in the first place. You just have to stand there and take
it.’

He smiled more warmly as I handed him his cup.

‘We, on the other hand, have a taxi to track down today,’ I began, then explained all that had transpired the day before.

Two coffees and seven phone calls later we located the taxi driver Burke had mentioned. The penultimate company I was planning to call knew who he was and gave me his home address in
Castlefinn.

Jeff Bryant fairly much fitted Burke’s description, despite the young boy being drunk when he saw him. Bryant stood just over 5'5" in his house slippers, his head smooth,
his skin sallow. He wore thick glasses that magnified his already widened eyes and blinked constantly as we spoke to him.

He remembered Cleary when I showed him a picture. He had dropped him off in Strabane.

‘You didn’t think to contact us about it earlier?’

He blinked furiously, glancing from me to Joe McCready, who was circling his car.

‘I didn’t think it was important, like,’ he said. He spoke with a Belfast accent, his vowels short and abrupt.

‘This is a nice car,’ McCready said.

‘Thanks,’ Bryant said, his blinking increasing.

‘Your taxi plates are for a different registration, though,’ McCready added.

‘What?’

‘The taxi licence on your car is for a different vehicle.’

Bryant laughed forcedly for a second. ‘I changed car and never got round to changing it. I’ll do it today.’

McCready took out his phone. ‘I can do it for you,’ he said. ‘The number on your licence is your old car, is that right?’

Bryant licked his lips, running his hand across his smooth head.

‘They might have a bit of difficulty tracing it. I can do it later.’

‘It’s no problem,’ McCready continued. ‘It’s ringing now.’

‘Wait, wait.’ Bryant held up his hand in placation. McCready made a show of shutting his phone again.

‘A mate of mine passed on his plates to me when he packed up the taxiing. I never got round to changing the number.’

‘Which is why you didn’t contact us, is that right?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘I’ve not done anything wrong. I just didn’t want the hassle.’

‘We’re looking into a murder. You may have been one of the last people to have spoken to the victim. You understand that?’

‘I didn’t speak to him,’ Bryant added sullenly. ‘He didn’t say anything to me when I picked him up. He was on the phone, talking about something or other. He told
me to take him to Beechmount Avenue in Strabane and that was it.’

Bryant cocked his head, his eyes half-closed as he struggled to remember something. ‘No, that’s not right,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘He wanted to go to
Doherty’s bar on the Derry Road, then changed his mind halfway through. It was like he was arranging to meet someone on the phone. He asked to be dropped opposite the old factory. That was
it.’

‘You didn’t see anyone hanging around when you dropped him off?’

‘Actually, there were a group of kids across the way, sitting around a fire or something, in the factory grounds.’

‘We know. We’ve spoken with them.’

Bryant bristled slightly. ‘Then you know I drove off and left him there.’

‘No one suggested otherwise,’ I said. ‘I’m more interested in the start of the journey. Where did you pick Cleary up from?’