Authors: Brian McGilloway
Patterson considered it.
‘Plus, if I’m right, there’s an infant in a house somewhere at the minute with no one looking after it. That’s not something that’s going to end well unless we find
it soon.’
He shrugged reluctant agreement. ‘So what do you want to do?’
‘The estates we searched looking for her. I’m betting that the child is in one of the completed houses, the show houses. If we start with the ones nearest where she was picked up and
work our way out . . .’
I worked through the list of Martin’s estates which Burgess had compiled earlier. Black had picked up Sheila Clark on the Derry road to Letterkenny, though that didn’t necessarily
mean she was heading to Letterkenny itself; she could have just as easily been going to Lifford, taking a left at the roundabout where she ended up crashing. In that region, from Lifford to
Letterkenny, there were four possible estates.
I sent one squad car to check the smaller of the three; an estate of fifteen houses at Drumbarnet off the Derry road. The second estate was at Drumleene, not far from Lifford itself. The third
estate was Islandview, though I suspected that Clark would have been unlikely to return there. And I knew that Christine Cashell would have alerted me if Clark had been in the area, particularly
with a child. The final estate was one I wanted to check myself, at Drumoghill, the site of St Canice’s Mother-and-Baby Home.
The estate lay about a mile off the main road to Letterkenny, a cul-de-sac located in the middle of farmland, bordered on one side by two large metal feed barns. The fields
behind the estate were meadow land and heavy-bodied cattle were grazing near the back fences of the rear houses.
It was much better-finished than Islandview. All the external work on the houses was completed, though a few remained unpainted. The roads had had one layer of tar at some stage, though it had
weathered badly and was potholed near the kerbstones, which sat too high above the road surface. As I drove I had to steer around the raised ironwork of man-hole covers and gratings.
Sure enough, as I made my way through the estate, I saw a billboard announcing the reduction in prices of the final few remaining homes. The poster was badly weathered, but it did announce the
presence of a show house.
I parked up and called at the first occupied house. The man who answered was in his thirties, a little heavy built, with a crying child in his arms.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for the show house.’
He stared at me, then pointedly looked at the child crying in his arms, which had, I suspected, been asleep until I rang the doorbell.
‘It’s eleven o’clock at night,’ he said.
‘We’ve reports of a break-in,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for bothering you so late. And for waking your child. I have two of my own, so I know what it’s
like.’
The comment mollified him. ‘It’s across there,’ he said, pointing over to a large house on the corner, the upper windows illuminated by the landing light.
Thanking him, I headed across the street. The house was unoccupied, the doors locked. I moved around the outer windows on the ground floor, hoping that I might see something inside. The
furnishing was markedly similar to that in the house in Islandview, as was the decor. There was, however, no sign of an infant.
I was considering trying to break in when a woman hailed me from a house next door to the one I had originally called at.
‘She’s gone out,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The one living in there. She went out a few hours ago.’
‘Sheila Clark?’
The woman bridled a little. ‘Is that her name?’ she asked disdainfully.
‘Did you notice if she had a child with her, Mrs . . .?’
‘Keeney,’ the woman said. ‘No, not tonight. She normally does, but she went out by herself tonight.’
‘Normally does what?’
‘Have a child with her. She left this evening about eight. Another car arrived before nine, with a couple in it. They sat for almost an hour, then left again.’
‘You’re very observant, Mrs Keeney,’ I said.
She turned and pointed to a small blue Neighbourhood Watch sticker on her front window.
‘We’ve had problems with undesirables in the area – youngsters hanging around the unfinished houses. We all keep a close eye on the houses in the area.’
‘That’s what we like to hear, ma’am,’ I said. ‘What can you tell me about this house?’
‘Just as I said. A couple arrived in a Northern car and sat for an hour. They left and shortly afterwards someone else arrived and took the child with her.’
‘Her? But not Sheila Clark?’ I knew it could not have been Clark; she had been in the hospital since the accident.
‘No. I didn’t see her car, I’m afraid. But I saw her coming out of the house with the child. She must have parked down the street a little; my fence restricts my
view.’
‘I see,’ I said. I imagined Mrs Kenney spent a lot of time watching the neighbourhood and not always for altruistic reasons. ‘Has anyone been back since?’
She shook her head. ‘Only you.’
‘I’ll take a look around and see if anything looks . . . untoward.’
I crossed the street and rang the doorbell, though, as I expected, there was no answer. I moved around to the rear of the house and tried the back door. It was locked. Jim Hendry would have made
short work of picking the lock; unfortunately, it was not a skill I had developed. Instead I lifted a rock from the flowerbed to my left and cracked it smartly against the small pane of glass in
the door. It shattered, falling in onto the tiled floor of the utility room. Reaching in, I unlocked the door and stepped inside.
‘Garda,’ I shouted, entering the utility room, which contained a set of kitchen units and appliances. Like the house in Islandview, the interior decor was expensive and showed little
sign of use. Ahead of me, in the kitchen, I could see a mug sitting on the worktop beside a kettle; it was lukewarm when I touched it. An empty milk carton sat next to them. Perhaps Clark had left
the house to get milk.
I moved into the living room and flicked on the light.
‘Hello,’ I shouted again.
I moved through the house quickly, checking the ground-floor rooms first, though they were all empty. I took the stairs two at a time and began checking the rooms above. The first was a
bathroom. The second was the main bedroom. A shape lay slumped on the floor at the foot of the bed. Turning on the light, I realized it was an overnight bag, half-packed and misshapen.
The next room, as with the one in Islandview, contained a cot, the blankets bunched up at its foot, the mattress still bearing the imprint of the child that had slept on it.
Having confirmed that the other rooms were empty and that the child had indeed been taken from the house, I went back into the first bedroom and opened the overnight bag. It contained a
selection of pale-blue baby suits and vests. A medical record book lay beneath them; I recognized the orange cover, having had one for each of our own children, in which to record each
developmental assessment, each vaccination or hospital visit. I opened the book and flicked through it. The child to which it referred had already received his first set of injections. Inside the
plastic flap at the back of the book, a document had been folded and placed for safe keeping. I removed it.
Unfolding it, I could see it was a birth certificate. It took me a second to locate the name of the child listed on the page, but as I did, I felt sick. The name of the child was Michael
Cashell.
Christine was named as the mother, the father was marked simply as ‘Unknown’. The birth had been registered by Sheila Clark.
Six hours after her crash, Sheila Clark sat in the interview room in Lifford, her solicitor beside her. She’d been examined in hospital and, following stitching to the
bridge of her nose, had been released into our custody. The skin beneath her eyes had already begun to darken with the bruises that would develop as a result of her nose injury. The effect of this,
coupled with her tousled demeanour, had left her with a wild appearance at odds with the measured, clipped tone of her speech.
Harry Patterson sat next to me as I introduced each of the people in the room for the benefit of the twin recorders set up to tape the interview.
Having confirmed her name, I explained to Clark why she had been brought in to the station.
‘Where’s the child?’
‘What child?’
‘I know you had a child in the house on Islandview.’
‘And this is a reason for questioning because . . .?’ her solicitor asked.
I ignored him and continued. ‘Your neighbour heard a child there. I heard a child there. You claimed you didn’t have one, yet you had baby milk the day I met you. I found a baby
monitor in the house.’
‘Am I missing something?’ her brief said. ‘What has any of this got to do with the guards?’
‘Are you offering children for illegal adoption?’
She raised her chin slightly. ‘No,’ she said.
‘So if I told you that we have spoken to someone who claims to have paid you for a child, you would deny this?’
She nodded, though she did not speak, perhaps trying to work out who might have told us this.
‘Do you deny that you were using the identities of infants who had died for children you were offering for adoption?’
Again a nod. I said as much into the microphone of the recorder.
‘Why do you have this?’ I asked, passing the birth certificate for Michael Cashell across the desk.
She glanced down at it, but did not lift it. Her shoulders sagged, though she fought to remain composed.
‘That belongs to a child I was watching for a friend.’
I smiled. ‘We both know that’s not true. You should recall that I know Miss Cashell. I know her infant died. Why have you registered the birth?’
‘I help out with administrative work in the hospital,’ she said.
‘Why have you this certificate?’
‘I must have lifted it by mistake.’
Her brief sat forward. ‘I believe Miss Clark has explained this issue.’
‘Where is the child that was in the house at Drumaghill now?’
‘My friend collected him. He’s perfectly safe with his mother and father.’
I reached into my coat pocket and, flattening out the picture from St Canice’s, laid it on the table.
‘Do you recognize these people?’
The shift in focus seemed to disconcert her, for she looked worriedly to the man beside her, as if to ask whether the new topic was one we had a right to raise.
‘What’s the relevance of this now?’ he asked.
I ignored the question and addressed Clark. ‘Do you recognize the people in it?’
Clark nodded, even as she remained silent.
‘That’s you, obviously. And that’s Seamus O’Hara. And Declan Cleary. And Dominic Callan. They’re all dead now. And, of course, the Martins.’
‘If you knew who they are, why did you ask?’ she said, her tongue dabbing at her lips as if she was thirsty.
‘We’ve found seven children on Islandmore,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ her solicitor said. ‘Just to be clear on this, are we talking about a child in a house, seven children on an island, or a photograph from thirty years ago?’
‘They’re all connected, though, aren’t they Miss Clark?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘I was helping a friend look after their child. You have no right to harass me like this.’
‘Why are you doing this? The adoptions. I know that you were paid 5,000 punts by a woman named Hughes in 1976 for a child who was given the identity of one who had died.’
‘I arranged adoptions during that period,’ she said. ‘I don’t deny that. Do you know how many people want to offer children a home but can’t get onto adoption
lists?’
‘So you bypass the paperwork?’
‘Occasionally, the bureaucracy, yes,’ she corrected me.
‘And make a packet on the side.’
She laughed forcedly. ‘I made nothing on it. The costs cover bringing the child into the country.’
‘And the birth certificates? You register the births of stillborn infants?’
‘The poor souls who died; I use their names to let other children live. Organ donors do it all the time. It’s only a name.’
‘It’s more than that,’ I said. ‘It’s the child’s identity, the only connection grieving parents have with the child they’ve lost.’
‘Grief is the inevitable cost of having loved.’
‘What?’ I said incredulously.
‘I’ve done nothing but help children find parents who would otherwise not have had any.’
‘And that’s all you did in St Canice’s?’
‘Those girls didn’t want the children they had; we found other parents for them.’
‘And what of the children on Islandmore?’
She swallowed back whatever she was going to say and considered her response.
‘It was not our fault that the Church prevented those poor souls from being buried in holy ground.’
‘There is a
cillin
on that island,’ the solicitor said. ‘It’s been on the news this week.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘That’s very useful, thank you.’
‘I mourned for every child that died in that home,’ Clark said. ‘I still do.’
‘Even the ones you killed?’ I added.
She flushed with anger. ‘I never hurt a child.’
‘Apart from the seven who were born with parts of their faces missing.’
She shifted sharply back in her seat. ‘Those children were born that way. That was God’s will.’
‘That was vitamin A, actually,’ I said. ‘We know that the children have high doses of retinoids in their bones. Was Alan Martin using a skin drug on the girls in that home? An
acne drug?’
‘The Martins donated a lot of medicines to the home for free; medicines, nappies, things we wouldn’t have had otherwise. They are good people. Those girls received care that the
state would never have given; their own families had thrown most of them out.’
‘He was testing an acne drug, wasn’t he?’
‘I don’t recall that,’ Clark said. ‘You’d need to ask him yourself.’
‘When those children started being born with abnormalities it wasn’t long before you or he realized that it might be connected to the drugs their mothers had been given. I think you
got rid of those children, buried them on the
cillin
, and brought in other children to use their identities so that the paper-trail continued and no one would know. I believe you continue
with the illegal adoptions still.’