The Nameless Dead (6 page)

Hendry pulled into the driveway of Callan’s and, as I knocked on the door, I saw him shift across to the front window and look in, leaning against the glass, using his hand to reduce the
glare.

I knocked a second time, but there was no response.

‘Let me try,’ Hendry said, coming over to me. ‘It might not be locked.’

He began to fumble in his pocket for a bunch of keys, rattling at the handle as he did so.

‘Can I help you?’

When we looked across to the source of the shout, we saw the occupant of the big house next to Callan’s standing at the wall which separated the two properties.

‘We’re looking for James Callan,’ I called.

‘What’s he doing with those keys?’ he shouted, nodding towards Hendry. The man was stout, grey haired, in his sixties, I guessed, but his eyesight was sharp. ‘I’ll
call the police.’

‘I am the police,’ Hendry called back, pocketing the keys and leaving the doorway.

The man snorted disdainfully. ‘Figures,’ he muttered.

‘We’re looking for James Callan,’ Hendry said again. ‘Have you seen him?’

‘He’s not in,’ the man replied.

‘We’ve established that,’ Hendry said. ‘Have you seen him recently? Do you know where he is?’

‘He left this morning,’ the man said.

‘Did he say where he was going?’

The man shook his head. ‘He’d a bag packed, though, so I’d say he’ll not be back for a bit. He asked me to put his bin out at the weekend and keep an eye on the house for
him.’

‘How did he seem?’

The man frowned bewilderedly.

‘Was he relaxed, like he was going on holiday? Anxious? Panicked?’

The neighbour considered my question for a moment. ‘He seemed a bit flustered. Like he didn’t want to hang around too long. He left me money to pay the milkman for him and
wouldn’t wait for me to give him the change. The incident last night can’t have helped.’

Hendry and I stopped and turned towards the man. ‘What incident?’

‘I shouldn’t get involved,’ the man began, moving closer to the hedge and, thereby, inviting us to do likewise. He glanced at Callan’s house as if afraid that Callan
might somehow be listening, even though he was the one who had told us it was empty.

‘There was a young fella here last night. He and James got into a row about something. We could hear it through the wall.’ He wrinkled his nose in disdain. ‘The walls between
the houses are very thin,’ he added.

‘What were they rowing about?’

‘They’re not that thin. I could hear raised voices and that, but God knows what it was about.’

I sensed there was something the man wasn’t telling us, something significant that he was holding back for a finale.

‘But did you recognize the person with whom Mr Callan was rowing?’

As the neighbour glanced around again for listeners, Hendry and I leaned further forward. ‘I don’t know his name,’ the neighbour said, ‘but I did see him again. He was on
TV last night, being interviewed about that dig going on over on the island.’

‘He was here last night?’ Hendry asked. ‘At what time?’

‘Around eightish, it must have been. The wife was watching her soaps and I had to get her to turn them down to hear.’ He blushed slightly. ‘I mean up, to hear them better over
the shouting.’

‘What time did he leave?’ I asked.

‘Maybe five, ten minutes later. He arrived in a taxi, but he walked back down the road again afterwards.’

‘You’re sure about this?’

The man nodded.

‘You’ve been very helpful,’ Hendry said. ‘We might have to send someone out to take a statement from you. We’ll just check around the back.’

The man stared quizzically at Hendry, clearly wondering why the need for a statement. By the time he’d see the lunch-time news, he’d work out why.

As we moved around the side of the house, Hendry checked each window in turn. ‘Looks like there’s no one around, right enough,’ he commented.

We’d reached the rear of the property. Callan’s garden was separated from the river by one small field. From his back fence, we could see across to Islandmore, past the metal girders
jutting out of the river, to where the burnt-out remains of the Commission’s diggers stood.

‘Maybe the sight of the digging spooked him,’ I suggested. ‘If he was involved in Cleary’s disappearance, it would be difficult to stand and watch from his back window
while the body’s being exhumed.’

‘Either that or he followed Cleary’s son after he left, shot him well away from his own house and he’s gone on the run. Either way, he’s guilty about
something.’

Mary Collins opened the door almost before I had rung the bell, and I suspected that she had been watching our arrival. Indeed, with the dig going on for her missing partner, I
suspected she had simply been waiting for news. I did not imagine that she could have expected the news we were bringing.

‘Inspector Devlin,’ she said to me, then smiled at Jim Hendry. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘This is PSNI Detective Inspector Jim Hendry,’ I said. ‘Can we come in, Mrs Collins?’ She smiled anxiously when I spoke.

‘Have you found him? Have you found Declan yet?’

‘We’re not here about Declan, I’m afraid, Mrs Collins. We’d best go inside.’

Her smile faltered. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’

‘We have some bad news, Mrs Collins,’ Hendry said, his cap clamped tightly under his right arm. ‘We’re here about Sean.’

‘Sean’s not here; he . . .’ she glanced backwards into the house, as if Sean was waiting inside. Then she turned again, her face drawn, the terror of the situation only
beginning to hit her. She covered her mouth with her hand, shook her head. ‘You’re not . . . you . . . Has he been hurt? Where is he?’

‘We’d best go inside,’ I repeated.

She turned from us, moving up the hallway. Suddenly she lurched to one side, her legs collapsing under her. I only managed to grip her under her arms to prevent her falling. Hendry shifted
quickly in beside me and, together, we hoisted her to her feet and brought her into the living room. We lay her on the sofa, all the time speaking to her, encouraging her to come round. Her skin
was pale, her face clammy with sweat.

‘I’ll get an ambulance,’ Hendry said, taking out his phone.

Mrs Collins began to revive, moaning softly. I could see her eyelids flutter quickly, could see the shifting of her eyes beneath the thin film of their lids.

‘Give it a moment,’ I said. ‘She’s coming round.’

After a few minutes, she had recovered sufficiently that she could sit up, though we insisted that she keep her legs up on the sofa. Hendry fetched her a glass of water.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know what . . .’ her voice faltered into a mumble.

‘Would you like us to contact someone for you, Mrs Collins?’

‘My husband,’ she said. ‘My husband is out golfing. His number is on my mobile, on the . . . thing.’ She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the corner where a
coffee table stood, the mobile phone atop it.

‘What happened to Sean?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were here about Declan. I thought you’d found him. But not Sean. Where is he?’

I glanced at Hendry. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Collins. Sean’s been found over in Strabane. He’s dead.’

Her husband arrived twenty minutes later; a short, wheezy man, his eyes wide and guileless, his face flushed from his morning exertions on the golf course. He sat on the sofa
next to his wife and held her while she spoke, shaking his head and staring with the vacant expression of one who has become observer rather than participant in his own family’s story.

‘Sean never knew Declan,’ Mrs Collins said. She clenched her sodden tissue as tightly in one hand as she gripped her husband’s hand in the other. ‘I always regretted he
never knew him. Not that he needed a father,’ she added, nudging lightly against her husband, having remembered that he was sitting next to her. ‘Sam always did right by
Sean.’

She smiled briefly at her husband, then continued. ‘I was expecting when Declan went missing. Seven months gone. When he went, I thought he’d run out on me; taken cold
feet.’

‘Did he give any indication that he was likely to do so?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘He was decent. Not the brightest, maybe, but decent. He was worried about providing for us; those were his words. He was an orderly in the old St Canice’s. It
didn’t pay very well; he was panicking a bit about how he’d afford to look after me and a baby.’

Hendry raised an enquiring eyebrow.

‘St Canice’s was a mother-and-baby home,’ I explained.

‘He was hoping for better,’ she went on. ‘Then he just vanished.’

‘Disappeared,’ her husband added, then blushed at having interrupted.

‘Sean never asked about his daddy until he went to school. I told him he had gone away. I couldn’t say he’d died, for he’d have asked to see his grave and, well, there
was none. Then I met Sam and decided to marry. I gave Sean the choice of using his daddy’s name or Sam’s and he stayed with Cleary.’

She glanced at her husband and added quickly, ‘Not that he didn’t love Sam. He was younger and, you know, wanted to stay loyal or something to his father.’

‘I understand,’ I said. Collins rubbed his wife’s hand soothingly as she spoke.

‘Do you know where he was last night?’ Hendry asked. ‘Sean?’

Mrs Collins stared at him blankly for a moment, the shift from past to present taking a little time to register with her.

‘He went out to see someone,’ she said. ‘He’d become fired up about his daddy’s body being looked for. He’d always known he was dead, but when the dig
started, it made it more . . . real for him. I think it was the first time he thought of it as having actually happened.’

‘Do you think he was trying to find out what happened to his father?’

She shrugged. ‘After we met the people from the Commission and passed on the map, they told us about the call they’d got. Sean got so angry.’

‘Because of his father?’ I said.

‘Kind of. More about the fact that they wouldn’t investigate it. They told us their job was to recover the body, not to find who killed him.’

‘Sean couldn’t quite accept it,’ Mr Collins said. ‘He resented the fact that he never had a chance to meet his father. That and the fact that someone might get away with
murder.’

‘I told him, enough stuff has happened, enough bad stuff and suffering and pain, that it would do no good. What does it matter now if they lift some poor young fella, doing as he was told
thirty years ago? It’ll not bring Declan back. He’s gone, life changed, moved on without him,’ Mary Collins said.

‘Disappeared,’ Mr Collins said.

‘Has Declan any family living?’

Mrs Collins shook her head. ‘Both his parents were dead when I met him. He’d no other family. Just Sean. Only Sean.’ With that, her sobbing began again. She bowed her head, her
husband angling his against hers, embracing her tightly, his arm around her shoulder as he whispered in her ear the perennial mistruth that everything would be okay.

I dropped Hendry back across to the North. As he got out of the car he mentioned that they would be running a reconstruction of Cleary’s final movements on Beechmount
Avenue the following evening, if I wanted to come across.

The clouds were gathering overhead as I crossed the border into the Republic again. I noticed more of the posters advertising the rally on the 2nd of November hanging from the lamp-posts,
tattered from the high winds of early October. As I slowed to read one, I spotted the entrance to Finnside Nursing Home behind the Community Hospital just to my left. Patterson had told me I
couldn’t investigate the death of the island child. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I swung right and stopped at the Off Sales, then cut across the road
into Finnside.

It had been some time since I was last there, but once inside the door I recalled immediately the familiar smell of disinfectant and urine, which the owner had attempted to mask with incense
sticks and votive candles, their collective scents and smoke drifting ceiling-wards as if in offering.

I stopped at the office to the left of the foyer, where the owner, Mrs McGowan, was sitting in discussion with one of the staff. The decor had changed little since last I had been there; the
carpet was still wine red, the walls painted neutral shades of magnolia and yellow and hung with prints of Constable landscapes. I also recalled with some sadness that, during my last visits here,
I had encountered a young woman named Yvonne Coyle who, it transpired, had been responsible for the deaths of several people and had ended up dead herself inside the ruins of the Borderlands dance
hall a little further along the road from here.

Mrs McGowan came out to see me, closing the door behind her, leaving the staff member sitting in her office.

‘I’m here to see John Reddin,’ I said, after we had exchanged pleasantries.

‘He’ll be up in the lounge,’ Mrs McGowan said. ‘We’ve a band playing on a Sunday afternoon; Mr Reddin never misses it.’

I followed the corridor along the direction she had pointed. It was a relatively large lounge, over-furnished with mismatched easy chairs, most high backed, and several bookcases of large-print
books and tattered paperbacks. At the far end, in front of a large TV, two musicians were setting up to perform; one was connecting leads to the back of a keyboard while the other was busying
himself with tuning his guitar.

There were already almost a dozen of the home’s occupants sitting in the room, connected by their seeming isolation. A nurse was moving amongst them with a tray of small plastic tubs
containing a variety of medicines. With each person she carefully selected the tub, watched as they took the tablets, then marked it off on a sheet of paper sitting on the tray, before moving on to
the next person.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Mr Reddin.’

She stared at me appraisingly. ‘You’re not a relative,’ she said.

‘I’m a Garda inspector. I was hoping to speak with him for a moment.’

‘That’s him across there,’ she said, nodding towards the far corner. A man sat upright in an arm chair. He was heavy bodied, his face jowly and ruddy, his hair thick, its
whiteness slightly yellowed like wild-sheep fleece. He tapped on the arm of the chair as if in anticipation of the rhythm of the music he was waiting to hear.