The Nameless Dead (4 page)

I grunted agreement as I got changed. ‘Did Shane say anything to you today about Penny?’

She shook her head. ‘What about her?’

‘Not about her, about him. I think he’s feeling jealous of the attention she’s getting. He said he was glad the baby hadn’t been born because it would have shifted him
even further down the pecking-order.’

‘That’s a nasty thing to say.’

‘He’s a kid, Debs. Nasty is a given. Maybe we should try doing a little more with him.’

‘He’s being spoilt, Ben,’ Debbie said. ‘Penny almost died. We got her back again – there’s nothing wrong in us being happy about that. He’s being
selfish. We can’t encourage it.’

I stood at the back door and lit a smoke while I waited for Frank to go out to the toilet before locking him in for the night. He slept in the kitchen now, the old shed where
he had slept being too draughty for an animal his age. He struggled slowly down off the lawn onto the path, his thick body seemingly too heavy for his short legs. He was old for a Bassett hound
and, in recent years, had slowed considerably. I suspected that the coming winter would be among his last.

I was just putting out my cigarette when my phone rang.

‘Devlin,’ I said.

‘Inspector, this is Laurence Forbes.’

It took me a moment to place the name. Forbes had been a DJ on a local radio station, but had graduated into TV news a few months previous.

‘Mr Forbes, what can I do for you?’

‘I wondered if you wanted to make a statement,’ he said. ‘About the child.’

‘What child?’

‘You found a baby on the island today, I believe,’ Forbes said. I wondered how he had heard. The Commission would not have announced the find until cause of death was
established.

‘Who told you about that?’ I asked.

‘Sean Cleary,’ Forbes said. ‘He gave us an interview on the 6 o’clock news about the injustice in the hunt for his father. You’ll be able to catch my piece repeated
on the bedtime bulletin, if you’re quick.’

‘I don’t have a statement,’ I said. ‘That information was not for public announcement,’ I added, hoping to appeal to Forbes’s sense of basic decency.

‘It’s a little late for that,’ Forbes said. ‘Switch on the telly and you’ll hear about it. Are you sure you won’t give a comment?’

‘Quite,’ I said, hanging up.

The TV in the kitchen was turned on, though muted. It took me a moment to find the relevant channel. I recognized Sean Cleary instantly.

‘I’m not happy, no,’ he was saying.

‘Why?’ Forbes asked, the camera focusing on him for the duration of each question. He was in his forties though carried the affectations of men twenty years his junior; his hair was
highlighted blond, his skin a permanent glow of bottle-induced tan.

‘My father died before I was born. I was never given the chance to meet him, to speak to him. No one ever told my mother or me what happened him, or why they took him from us. We
didn’t even know for sure that he was dead. We’ve been living in a state of . . .’

‘Limbo?’ Forbes suggested.

‘Aye,’ Cleary said. ‘That’s just what it has been. Now the men who did that, who took my father from me, think they can just wash their hands of it.’

‘You’ve had thirty-five years of wondering about your father, isn’t that right?’

Forbes angled his head sympathetically, even as he stoked Cleary’s anger.

‘We still don’t know for sure why my father was killed. I don’t believe that my father was a tout. So, I want whoever reported his burial-spot to the Commission to meet me; I
want them to tell me why my father had to die. People know where I live.’

Forbes nodded. ‘You need the closure, isn’t that right?’

The word closure itself was enough to make me switch off the set. I wondered how Millar would feel about Cleary’s interview. While not criticising the Commission, he was clearly angry at
the legislation that allowed his father’s killers to escape justice.

As I reflected once more on the nameless child that had rested on the island for so many years, I could begin to understand his ire.

‘The infant was newborn; the remains date probably around thirty to thirty-five years. There are signs on the skull of an assisted delivery, probably using forceps. The
craniofacial abnormalities are consistent with Goldenhar syndrome, which would have also brought various associated difficulties.’

Lennie Millar paused reading from the post-mortem report. Superintendent Harry Patterson, who had been doodling on the file pad in front of him on his desk, looked up. It was clear he resented
being brought in to the station on a Sunday, but Lennie Millar had insisted that the dig would continue and had requested we meet him to discuss the pathologist’s preliminary findings from
the previous evening. Millar had been waiting outside the station when I came back from early Mass, keen to get started on the day’s dig.

‘What is Goldenhar syndrome?’

‘It results in all kinds of birth defects, basically. Facial deformity, hearing problems, cleft palate, missing eyes at times. It also can cause spinal problems; vertebrae fusing together,
that kind of thing. It would not, however, necessarily lead to death.’

‘So, what killed him?’

‘Her. The child was a girl. She was throttled.’

Patterson began tapping the top of the pen he held against the pad. ‘So, she was murdered.’

Millar glanced down at the report, though the answer was clear.

‘Yes. I need to speak with our own lawyers to see where we go from here. At the moment, my inclination is that you can’t investigate this. The legislation is very clear: “Any
evidence obtained, directly or indirectly, shall not be admissible in any criminal proceedings.”’

‘This isn’t evidence. It’s a child,’ I said.

‘“Any human remains or other item found resulting from a dig shall not be subjected to forensic examination or testing.” I didn’t make these rules, Inspector, I’m
simply telling you what they are.’

‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘But we can’t just ignore the killing of a child.’

‘A disabled child,’ Patterson said.

‘I’m not sure I would term the infant as disabled,’ Millar said.

‘You said it was deformed,’ he said. ‘To a young mother, looking at a baby like that, she’d probably think it disabled.’ For a moment I thought he was supporting
me, until he stood up from his seat and moved across to the window.

‘This child was born disabled. Someone either didn’t want it or couldn’t cope with it. Thirty odd years ago. What good is going to come from raking over that now? We
can’t prosecute anyone anyway, isn’t that right?’ He gestured towards Millar as he spoke.

‘You’d need to check, but I’d be surprised if the Director of Public Prosecutions would proceed with any case considering the wording in the legislation. Wording that has never
been tested in court.’

‘Just because the child was disabled doesn’t make it any less valuable than anyone else,’ I said.

‘I’m not suggesting that,’ said Patterson. ‘But what do you want to find, Ben? Some wee girl who couldn’t cope? Saw that face and panicked and did something
unimaginable? Will it mean anything to haul that up now? Christ, the person who did this could be dead.’

‘It’s not about who did it, Harry,’ I said. ‘It’s about the child. She deserves something. A name, at least.’

‘The best we can do for her is have her buried somewhere proper. Or inter her in that
cillin
you found, with the rest of those youngsters.’

‘I’m not saying I agree with not following this through,’ Millar said softly. ‘I’m frustrated, too. But I’m telling you the law as it stands. I have to think
about the Commission; the amnesty against prosecution is necessary if our sources are to keep helping us locate these individuals.’

Millar was cut short by the shrill ringing of his phone. He excused himself and moved outside to take the call.

‘So you leave it alone now,’ Patterson said to me. ‘Let them get Cleary off that island and things might settle. We’ve this bloody rally on the bridge on the 2nd, too. If
you ask me, they should stop pissing around with Parades Commission up in the North deciding on this, that and the other, and just ban the whole bloody lot of them. That’s the problem with
the North – there’s a bloody commission for everything.’

Millar walked back into the room, having caught the final few words of Patterson’s comment. ‘Well,
this
commission has a problem. Someone has gone onto the island and burned
out our diggers.’

News of the attack travelled quickly. Less than half an hour after Millar and I reached the island, a blue car trundled across the temporary bridge the Commission team had
erected and pulled to a stop next to our cars. I recognized Laurence Forbes immediately.

‘It’s the press,’ I told Millar. ‘The guy who interviewed Cleary last night. Do you want me to chase them?’

‘We’ll maybe use it to our advantage,’ Millar said, and headed up the embankment onto the roadway where Forbes and his cameraman stood.

Standing downwind from them, over the course of the next few minutes I could catch snippets of Millar’s responses to Forbes’s questioning.

‘. . . attack is ridiculous. We have no interest in prosecutions. We can’t prosecute. Any information given to us is entirely confidential. No one has anything to fear from our dig;
it’s about recovering the remains of Mr Cleary and allowing his family the opportunity to grieve, to have a proper Christian burial, to have a grave to visit.’

‘To bring closure?’ Forbes added, obviously so pleased with having thought of the word that he decided to use it again.

‘Quite,’ Millar replied. ‘Our only concern is to bring the Disappeared home again. There is no other agenda. So the destruction of these diggers is simply an act of wanton
vandalism. People have nothing to fear from what we are doing.’

‘So how do you respond to the complaints Declan Cleary’s own son has made regarding the process?’

‘I understand Mr Cleary’s sense of frustration,’ Millar said. ‘We are, however, bound by the legislation. Our role is recovery of bodies and nothing else. So while I
empathize with Mr Cleary, we are simply doing what, by law, we must do. I hope that, if we do recover his father, that might bring him some sense of comfort.’

‘And any comment on the reports of the child’s remains found here . . .?’

I saw the cameraman angle away from Millar, focusing just past his right-hand shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw, in the near corner of the field running below us away from the road, the two
burnt-out diggers.

They had been relatively small machines, more useful for targeted digging than for mass earth removal. The remaining chunks of glass where the windscreen had been were yellowed and hung from the
rubber stripping which had once sealed the window to the frame. The interior cabin had melted out of shape, the black plastic of the dash now hardened blobs on the outer body of the machine where
it had dripped from the opened doorway. Blackened springs and pieces of charred sponge cushioning, trapped in the once molten plastic, were all that remained of the driver’s seat.

‘Bit of a tit, that one,’ Millar said, walking over to me as he nodded back towards Forbes, who was standing with his cameraman, recording a top and tail to the interview. Forbes was
being directed to stand in such a way that the diggers would be visible behind him.

‘Has anything like this happened before on a dig?’ I said, nodding across to the remains of the diggers.

Millar shook his head. ‘There’s never been any animosity to what we do; in fact we’ve got to the point where we hardly need to have police about on site. People leave us
alone.’

‘Why this time? Did his interview with Cleary cause it?’

Millar glanced across at Forbes. ‘Possibly. Maybe it drew attention to the fact we were here; some kids might have decided to do some damage. It just sets us back a day. Everywhere will be
closed today. We’ll have to hire in two diggers from Strabane tomorrow, and two new ditching buckets.’

Presumably he could tell from my expression that I didn’t understand, for he continued, ‘We can’t use buckets with teeth on them when we dig, for obvious reasons. Ditching
buckets are flat edged; they scrape off around five inches of surface clay at a time. The ones we had fitted to our diggers may not fit the new machines.’

I nodded as I offered him a cigarette. ‘Whereabouts was the
cillin
found again?’

‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

We took the 4x4 across the length of the island, the drive taking a few minutes on the potholed pathways which served as roads. The field in which the
cillin
lay was at the extreme tip of
the island, a promontory stretching into the Foyle. As I stood I silently understood the impulse which had driven the bereaved to select this spot as the final resting place of their loved one. The
sun had broken through a bank of clouds to the east, as if to shine directly on the spot, its brightness caught on the river’s surface and shattered into many pieces. The river’s
current here, where its streams merged, having been diverted around the island, was slow and lazy, the reflected sunlight winking against the light breeze. The banks of the river on both sides were
low-lying, running down to mudflats along the river’s edge. The fields beyond were flat and grown to meadow. A single hawthorn tree stood in the centre of the field on the Republic side.

‘The border runs right through this spot,’ Millar said after a moment. ‘It runs up the centre of the river, then cuts diagonally across the island here, presumably along the
line of the old railway. It really is neither here nor there.’

‘Limbo,’ I agreed.

The peace was broken by my mobile ringing. I found myself apologizing to Millar before answering it. I glanced at the screen and noted that I had missed a call already, the signal strength on
the screen a single faltering bar.

‘Ben? Jim Hendry here.’ Hendry was a DI in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, across in Strabane.

‘Jim. How’re things?’