The Nameless Dead (21 page)

‘I’m sure that’s not the case, Mrs Hughes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps your son was too good for this world.’

‘Have you children, Mr Devlin?’

‘Two, ma’am.’

‘Mmmm,’ she said, as if agreeing with something I had not said. ‘Thank you for letting me know.’

She hung up before I could respond.

A low mist hung over the fields around our home as I left for work the following morning, the tops of the trees bordering our property cresting the mist’s upper
edges.

I checked in at the station, half-expecting to have heard something from Patterson regarding the questioning of Callan, but there were no messages. I signed out a squad car and headed across to
Islandmore after 10 a.m. to attend the blessing of the
cillin
.

When I arrived the only person at the site was Lennie Millar. He was standing in the field where Cleary had been recovered. A number of mounds of earth, spoil from the various holes the team had
excavated, spotted the site, some piled almost six feet high.

‘Good to see you, Inspector,’ Millar said when I parked and got out.

‘Ben, please. How’re things?’

‘Fine,’ he said, refusing my offer of a cigarette with a shake of his head. ‘The post-mortem on Declan Cleary is done. He died of two gunshot wounds to the skull. Now
we’re just waiting for final DNA confirmation that the remains were his.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be glad to be done here.’

He glanced around him. ‘It’s not a bad spot. If I had to be buried somewhere, this would do better than most graveyards I’ve seen.’

‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

‘I know.’ He smiled. ‘We’re finished now. I didn’t want the diggers running here today, with the blessing and that going on, but they’ll be out on Monday to
push all the spoil back into the excavated holes, and that’ll be that.’ He paused before continuing. ‘The State Pathologist has been in touch looking to carry out further tests on
the children found here.’

I nodded.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he said.

‘The children all suffered with the same syndrome,’ I said. ‘Yet it’s rare. It seems a little odd to have such a high incidence of localized cases.’

Millar grunted. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve been deepening your knowledge of Goldenhar.’

‘There’s nothing stopping me finding out about the syndrome, after all.’

Millar appraised me warily. ‘You do know that I would like these deaths investigated as much as you would, don’t you?’

I nodded, though obviously with not enough enthusiasm.

‘I’m not happy to think that someone killed a child and dumped her on that island any more than you are. But my role is to recover the bodies of the Disappeared. That is all I can
do, whether I like it or not. I’ve put pressure on our own people to allow this through so that it can be investigated. I’m going to give the go-ahead for the tests on the infants
anyway, regardless of what they say, but I have to warn you, the issue here, Inspector, is whether you could ever prosecute anyone for the killing. The wording of the act which created our
commission has never been tested.’

‘I understand that,’ I said.

‘Then why do I feel judged?’

‘I’m not judging you,’ I said. ‘I just find it impossible not to investigate something like this. I can’t think that someone got away with killing a child. I know
your position means you are restricted in what you can do.’

‘I think what would be more galling would be to discover who did this, get them to court and for them to walk. No one would have answered for the killings and instead it would be public
knowledge that the guards were bending the rules of the Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains. No one benefits from that outcome – neither you, me, nor the children we
found.’

Our conversation was cut short by the arrival of Father Brennan.

‘Men,’ he called, as he locked the car. ‘Just the three of us, is it?’

‘For now, Father,’ Millar called. ‘They’ll be more here. It’s a good thing you’re doing today. People will come.’

As Millar moved to step away from me I put my hand on his arm and offered my free hand. ‘I’m sorry if you feel I’ve judged you. I understand your position.’

‘And I yours,’ Millar replied, shaking my hand. ‘More than you think.’

Behind us we heard the slamming of car doors as the first of the congregation began to arrive for the ceremony. The bridge which had been erected for the Cleary dig had been left in place to
allow the traffic onto the island. What would happen afterwards was not so clear, whether the island would become isolated once more or, having been received into the community’s collective
conscience, remain connected again to the mainland, no longer in limbo.

Brennan stood at the edge of the shoreline in his vestments. He held in one hand his prayer book. The other clasped a small silver rod for distributing holy water, while one of
the local women stood beside him, holding the small container that held the water.

I watched the crowd while he went through the ceremony. Over a hundred people had come onto the island, almost exclusively middle-aged men and women. Many wept silently as Father Brennan spoke,
their expressions a mixture of mourning and relief that their pain was finally acknowledged. A few of the women clasped small toys, aged teddy bears or dolls, talismans that had sustained them
through decades of being told that their children were lost not only in this life but in the next.

At the back of the crowd, holding a small blue bear in her hands, her face glistening with tears, I saw Mrs Hughes. Her husband was not with her. However, beyond her, across the shore on the
Republic side, I saw someone else I recognized. Christine Cashell stood at the edge of the water, at the outer boundary of Islandview Estate. Andrew Dunne stood with her, his arms around her as she
watched, following the prayers which must have echoed across to her.

When she saw me, she raised her hand in silent salute.

Jimmy Callan was sitting on the bed in his cell when I came in, reading a paper which one of the guards must have given him. He looked drawn, his face silvered with stubble,
his eyes bleary. Patterson himself had interviewed him through the night, attempting without success to get him to confess to Seamus O’Hara’s killing. He was now being held pending
proceedings by the PSNI to have him brought across to the North.

He watched me come into the cell without comment, then turned his attention again to the paper.

‘They want you across in the North in connection with Cleary.’

‘The father or the son?’

‘The son.’

‘I’d nothing to do with it.’

‘What about the father’s killing?’

He shook his head. ‘I’d nothing to do with that, either.’

‘That being the case, you’ve nothing to fear in going across.’

Callan snorted dismissively, though did not raise his head.

‘I was thinking, though. We have to hold you until the North gets all their extradition stuff in gear.’

‘Which they won’t. Even with a European arrest warrant, you can’t hand me over if they only want to hold me as part of an investigation. They’d need to charge me. And
they’ve got fuck all.’

‘That’s very impressive, Mr Callan. You should move into a career in law.’

‘It’s not my first time in this situation. So what else have you got?’

‘You could go across voluntarily and hand yourself in for questioning. If you’re clear, they’ll have to let you out again.’

‘And I’d do this because . . .?’ he said, looking up at me now.

‘Today is your son’s anniversary,’ I said. ‘Despite your better efforts, here you are in a jail cell again. We’ll have to hold you until bail is set. You’ll
not be out today. Unless you agree to head across.’

Callan did not speak but his jaw flexed instinctively, as if he were chewing on a piece of gristle.

‘I know the inspector in charge of the Sean Cleary investigation. I could take you across to the PSNI, hand you over to them. In the graveyard. After you’ve had a chance to pay your
respects.’

‘What if they decide to lift me before I’ve had a chance to get to the grave?’

‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘I guarantee it.’

Callan lowered his gaze, staring into the middle distance as he considered the offer. He glanced at the paper on the bed once more, then folded it shut.

‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

‘If this goes to shit, I’m holding you personally responsible,’ Patterson said. ‘You shouldn’t have offered that without checking with
me.’

‘Have we anything to connect him to O’Hara?’

Patterson accepted the point with a slight shake of the head.

‘He’s sitting in there, our responsibility. Hand him over to the North and let him be their problem.’

‘What’s the angle?’ Patterson asked. ‘There’s always an angle with you.’

I could not admit that, having spent the morning in the company of so many grieving parents – men and women who had waited years to publicly express their loss – I had felt sorry for
Callan. Though his son’s death had seemingly been the starting point for all else that had happened, we had nothing to connect him to the killing of Seamus O’Hara. In truth, Callan
looked beaten now; a man who had given his life to a cause, only to find himself left behind.

McCready and I sat up front while Callan sat cuffed in the back of the squad car. By the time I had contacted Hendry and made the arrangements, it was approaching 3 p.m. The
PSNI would lift Callan at 3.30, allowing him fifteen minutes at his son’s grave. I had no doubt they would be in the graveyard long before that, in case he tried to run, but Hendry had agreed
to allow him time at the grave without interruption. As we left the station, I warned McCready to avoid Lifford Bridge, where the anniversary commemoration would be ongoing, and instead head
further on to Clady and cross at the bridge there.

As we drove, though, McCready’s wife called him on his mobile. While he spoke to her on the Bluetooth receiver he had clipped to the sun visor, I turned and checked on Callan. It was only
as I turned my attention back to the road we were taking that I realized McCready had driven through the roundabout and had joined the queue of traffic waiting to get across Lifford Bridge, which
was temporarily closed while the Memorial Service for Callan was conducted.

‘Reverse and we’ll head back through Clady and cross over there,’ I said to McCready, but too late. The traffic behind us had already backed up, the car immediately to our rear
parked almost against our bumper, hemming us in. A single car in front separated us from the crowd that had gathered on the bridge.

‘Lie down on the seat,’ I said to Callan, removing my jacket and passing it to him. ‘Cover yourself with that.’ The last thing we needed was for any of the protestors to
see Dominic Callan’s father handcuffed in a garda car fifty yards from the crowd.

Paul Black, one of the gardai who were policing the demonstration on our side of the bridge, came across to us.

‘Can you head to the back of the queue and get people to back up?’ I said to Black. ‘We need to get out of here sharpish.’

Black looked uncertainly at the bundle on the back seat. ‘I’ll see what I can do, sir,’ he said, and set off up the road, looking for a gap in the traffic wide enough to allow
all the cars behind us to reverse enough for us to manoeuvre out.

While we waited, we could hear the voice of the speaker on the bridge reverberate through the PA system which had been set up. Those who listened numbered less than fifty, but they had taken up
positions in the centre of the road on the bridge, each holding placards bearing pictures of the dead man. Some were obviously relatives or friends, their faces puffy with weeping. Others, though,
stood erect, their expressions defiant. A handful closest to us wore military paraphernalia, their hoods pulled up, their eyes covered by darkened glasses. They stood to attention, their hands
clasped behind their backs. Despite their attempts to disguise their features, it was clear that some of them were barely out of their teens; certainly not old enough to have been alive when
Dominic Callan was shot.

Even through the windows of the car we could hear the dull resonance of the speaker’s voice. ‘Dominic sacrificed his life for the cause. How would he feel now, seeing the blatant
betrayal of that cause, of what his death achieved. Our politicians have failed us, have failed the cause. They call us traitors, yet they are the ones who have become agents of British justice.
Dominic Callan’s death has been belittled by their actions, his sacrifice invalidated by their capitulation to the continued presence of foreign soldiers on our streets.’

The group standing closest to us cheered, raising their placards in the air. I was struck by the simmering aggression of the group, palpable even where we sat. Several of the younger men who had
seen the garda car turned and directed their shouting towards us. I glanced over my shoulder and realized that Jimmy Callan had sat up to watch the crowd.

Simultaneously one of the older protesters must have spotted Callan. He nudged the man next to him and pointed towards us.

‘Get down,’ McCready snapped at Callan, but it was too late. A small faction of the protestors was beginning to move towards us. I glanced in the rear-view mirror, in the hope that
Black had created room enough for us to manoeuvre out, but the cars behind us had not shifted.

‘Get moving,’ I snapped at McCready.

He attempted to reverse but the car immediately behind us was too close. Before I could stop him, he pressed the horn, which served only to attract the attention of the group standing on the
bridge fifty yards from us. Several more joined the protestors approaching us.

In the middle-distance to our rear, reflected in the interior mirror, I saw Paul Black instructing one vehicle at a time to begin backing up to create space for us to move, but nowhere near
quickly enough.

The lead figure of the group had reached us by now and was staring in over our shoulders where Callan lay still across the back seat. He hammered on the bonnet of the car.