Authors: Brian McGilloway
‘We have another spot by the looks of it,’ Millar said. ‘For Cleary.’
‘Will you start digging today?’
He glanced above him where the sky was darkening.
‘It’s a little late to start. We’ll see the family and tell them we’re planning on resuming work in the morning.’
Declan Cleary had been missing since the 3rd of November 1976, when his girlfriend, Mary Harte, had contacted the RUC in Strabane to report that her partner had gone out to the
shop the previous night for cigarettes and had yet to return home.
The officer who had visited Harte noted in his report that she was seven months pregnant at the time and that she and Cleary had been dating for no more than a year. With no other reason to
attribute to Cleary’s failure to return home, his conclusion was that the man had taken cold feet and run out. He had assured Mary Harte of this and suggested that her boyfriend would
probably return within the next day or two.
When, days later, Mary Harte arrived at the RUC station in tears, demanding to see the same officer, he offered her tea and sympathy, suggested that Cleary had decided that the impending birth
of his child was too much to bear. He was unlikely to have done anything rash – he had left no note, had not displayed any of the usual signs of those contemplating suicide. They would keep
an eye on his bank accounts but, with little to his name by way of savings and with no other family alive but for his unborn child, she would have to accept that he had simply left.
Rumours soon began to circulate, though, that he had been targeted by the local Provos as an informer who had given information to the police about IRA activities. As a result, in 1999, when the
Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains was founded by the British and Irish governments, Cleary’s name appeared among the ranks of the Disappeared. The
Commission’s task was to gather information about the Disappeared, with a view to the recovery of their remains. Their role, in all cases, was not to investigate the killings or establish
motives for them, but simply to recover the bodies and provide those left behind with an opportunity to bury their dead. No prosecutions would arise from any evidence recovered; bodies would
undergo a post-mortem to establish cause of death, but no forensic analysis would occur, nor would notes be passed to the police in whichever jurisdiction the body was recovered. In almost all
instances, the bodies had been abandoned in the Republic.
In mid-May of this year, the Commission had received an anonymous tip-off that Cleary was buried in the local area. It was not until the start of October, when Cleary’s old girlfriend,
Mary Harte, and her son were anonymously sent an Ordnance Survey map of the area, with the island marked and Cleary’s name written beneath it, that the team visited the island and began
running tests. Whatever they had found, it had convinced them as to the reliability of the tip-offs, for they contacted us the following day and requested support from An Garda. As the only
detective inspector in the area, I was duly appointed their liaison.
Mary Harte answered the door to us when we called at her home in St Jude’s Court in Lifford. She had married some years after Declan Cleary’s disappearance; her
husband, Sam Collins, had been a teacher in the local primary school before retiring. Indeed, he had taught my daughter Penny when she was younger. As a consequence, I had always known Mary Harte
by her married name and it was with this that I addressed her.
The woman must have been in her late fifties now; her skin was firm and bright, her permed hair still brown.
‘Come in,’ she said, holding open the door.
She led us into her living room where her son, Sean, waited on the sofa. He was in his mid-thirties, born eight weeks after his father had disappeared. He sat forward, on the edge of the sofa,
his back erect, his hands resting lightly on his knees, which bobbed up and down. He looked up at us as we came in, as if unsure whether to stand, then seemed to decide against it. His hands
twisted around each other.
‘Is there any news?’ Mary Collins asked, standing in front of the fireplace with her hands behind her back, as if to warm them at the fire that smouldered there.
Millar nodded. ‘We’d no luck, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘We’ll start on a new site on the island tomorrow.’
‘I thought you said you were sure you had the right spot for today,’ Sean Cleary muttered, glancing across at Millar, though not quite looking directly at him.
‘We thought we had. We’ve walked the island and the archaeologists have identified a number of probable sites, based on surface analysis, changes in vegetation, that sort of thing.
We just have to work through each until we find him.’
‘Changes in vegetation?’ Sean asked.
‘Any digging, of graves or that, would clear the surface vegetation. As it grows back, it will always be at a different level from the vegetation around it. It’s a subtle change; not
proof in itself but enough for us to carry out geophysical testing.’
‘What’s that?’ Mrs Collins shifted slightly, as if the backs of her legs were getting scorched. Eventually she moved across to an empty seat in front of the window.
‘Resistivity testing, mainly. And magnetometry. Soil displays resistance to electrical current being passed through it. You’d expect all the soil in any one geographical area to have
around the same resistance readings. Where a grave has been dug and the spoil returned back into the hole dug, it never goes back in exactly as it came out – the mixing of top soil and deeper
soil changes the overall composition and therefore the resistance reading.’
‘So you still don’t know if Declan is definitely there then?’
‘I can’t say definitely. There is something there. We had a search-dog out again today and he picked up something around one of the sites we’d identified.’
‘You said that yesterday, too,’ Sean interrupted, looking between his mother and Millar, as if looking for her agreement.
‘There have been other issues with the island and the location we’ve picked.’
‘What issues?’
‘We found a child’s body in the site we dug today. That had to be excavated and processed.’
‘Is it another one of the limbo babies?’ Mary Collins asked, her face creased in sympathy.
‘We don’t know. It’s not part of the original
cillin
, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t buried there for much the same reasons. The find was very close to
where we believe Declan to be lying. I imagine there may be some scant consolation in knowing that Declan has not been lying alone these past years,’ Millar added.
Mrs Collins smiled sadly, her eyes glistening. I marvelled at her composure, having waited thirty-five years to learn what had happened to her partner, to have come this close.
‘What happens when he’s found?’ Sean said. ‘What will
you
do then?’ He nodded at me when he spoke.
It was Millar who answered, though. ‘When your father is recovered, we’ll have to send his body for formal identification. That may take some weeks. We’ll also want to conduct
a postmortem to establish cause of death. Then he’ll be returned to you for Requiem Mass and interment.’
‘But what about your lot? Will you be looking for who killed him?’
I looked quickly to Millar before I answered. ‘I’m afraid not, Sean. That’s not how it works.’
Millar nodded. ‘The Commission’s role is to bring about the recovery of the Disappeared. We have no powers to gather evidence or attempt to prosecute those responsible for the death
of the body we recover. Nor can anything we uncover be used in court. We will not be passing on any information to Inspector Devlin here. This is a recovery operation only. The legislation is very
clear on that.’
‘That’s balls,’ Sean Cleary said suddenly, shifting forward in his seat and standing. ‘So whoever killed my father can just sit back and watch on TV while he’s dug
up.’
‘I understand your frustration, Mr Cleary,’ Millar said. ‘But that is the law. If it’s any consolation to you, it was probably one of the people responsible for your
father’s death who contacted us in the first place. That that individual felt compelled to tell us where your father rested would suggest that it has weighed on his or her conscience these
past years.’
‘Except you were contacted in May and you waited until now to look for him.’
I could sense Millar swallowing back whatever he wanted to say. I imagined that, in his role, he would come across all forms of response to the work he was doing.
‘The information we were given in May was that the body was located near Tra na Cnamha. No one we spoke to recognized the name.’ He stumbled over the pronunciation of the name,
pronouncing both the ‘n’ and the ‘m’.
‘It’s pronounced
Crawaa
. Tra na Cnamha means the Beach of Bones,’ I translated. ‘But I’ve never heard the name being used for Islandmore.’
‘In the eighteenth century, locals called the island Innis na Cnamha. We found it on an old Donegal fishing map in the Linenhall Library in Belfast. It was the name, Isle of Bones, that
alerted us to the probability that there might be a
cillin
on the site,’ he explained, again speaking to Mary Collins.
She nodded. Sean glanced across at her quizzically.
‘We’d only got that name when you told us about the map you were sent. We’ve worked as quickly as we can. And, again, if the same person sent you the map as contacted us, it
suggests that he or she is feeling incredibly guilty about what happened. Thirty-five years on.’
‘And that’s the best we can expect? That whoever did it feels a bit guilty? My heart bleeds.’
‘That’s enough, Sean,’ Mary Collins said. ‘These men are doing their best. They’ll bring Declan home. That’s all I want now.’
‘It’s not what I want,’ Sean Cleary said, his voice breaking slightly. He was a big man when he stood, just under six foot, though, I suspected, edging near sixteen stone.
Despite being in his mid-thirties, though, his voice and manner were a teenager’s. ‘That’s not justice. It’s not good enough.’
‘It’s all we can do.’
‘Well, it’s not good enough for me,’ he snapped, standing and leaving the room.
Mary Collins stood with that, extending her hand to Millar.
‘I apologize for Sean. You’re doing very good work, Mr Millar,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how important it is. Thank you.’
‘We’ll work as fast as we can,’ Millar assured her.
She nodded, though the increasing glinting in her eyes suggested she could not trust herself to speak further without tears.
‘When will the post-mortem be held on the baby?’ I asked, when we got back into the car. ‘I’ll want to get things moving.’
Millar stared across at me, his seat belt still gripped in his hand.
‘You can’t investigate it, Inspector.’
‘But if the PM shows the child was murdered—’
‘Even if,’ Millar interrupted. ‘The same rules apply as I mentioned to the son in there. Any evidence uncovered in a dig for the Disappeared can’t be used to prosecute a
case, nor can it be investigated or forensically tested. Those are the rules.’
‘But the baby isn’t part of the Declan Cleary killing.’
‘That’s not the point. It was uncovered as part of our dig; it can’t be investigated.’
‘Someone killed a baby. The rules need to be bent a little.’
‘No. We rely on people coming to us with information precisely because they know they can do so without fear of prosecution. Considering the proximity of the sites, and the depth the
infant was buried at, theoretically there’s the possibility of a connection between the two. If it became known that we were allowing investigations into old killings, our sources would dry
up. We’d recover nobody.’
‘But this is different.’
He clicked the seatbelt into place. ‘You can’t investigate the baby, Inspector. That’s the law.’
By the time I got home, Debbie had dinner ready. Following the accident which had injured our daughter, Penny, a year previous, I’d tried to spend more time at home,
stopping off at meal times to see the kids. If I was running late, Debs would hold off on dinner until I was home.
As we sat in the living room after dinner, I mentioned the find we had made on the island and Millar’s warning that I could not follow it up.
‘The forensics guy they had with them thinks it was a newborn,’ I concluded.
‘That’s horrible,’ Debbie said. She was sitting on the sofa, watching the news. Penny lay sprawled beside her, her head on Debbie’s lap, while she played a game on her
iPod. As Debbie spoke, she ruffled the soft spikes of Penny’s hair. She’d had to shave it several times for surgery and it had only now begun to grow out again. In solidarity with her,
Debbie had cut her own hair in a gamine style that accentuated how similar the two of them were. ‘Was it . . . natural?’
‘We don’t know yet. They thought there were signs of something. The face was badly deformed, so the child might never have had a chance.’
The comment silenced her for a moment, and I suspected I knew what she was thinking. Finally she said, ‘Even if it was natural causes, imagine not being able to bury your child properly,
having to hide them on an island. A miscarriage was hard enough to go through, never mind going full term then having to do that.’
Penny propped herself up on her elbows and twisted to look up at Debbie. Despite having had her earphones on, she must have overheard our conversation, for she asked, ‘Did you have a
miscarriage?’
Debbie glanced at me before answering and, even then, spoke as softly as possible. Penny was 15 now but Shane was only approaching 10.
‘He’s doing his homework in the kitchen,’ I explained, keeping an eye on the hallway in case he should approach.
‘When we were first married, we had problems having a baby. It took five years before you arrived. In fact, we bought Frank thinking we couldn’t have a baby.’
At the mention of his name, Frank, our Bassett hound, lifted his head slightly off the hearth rug, his heavy wattles of skin drooping beneath his throat. He yawned widely then, satisfied that he
was not being directly addressed, lowered his head again to his paws.