The Nameless Dead by Brian McGilloway Page B

same logic applied to whoever had dispensed with Cleary’s body on the
island, too.
    The ferryman, Seamus O’Hara, who lived on Coneyburrow Road on the way to Ballybofey, was not at home when we called, his house standing in darkness, the curtains still drawn. Tony
Hennessey had died the year previous, so that eliminated him. Likewise Finbar Buckley, who’d died almost a decade earlier, despite Reddin’s belief he was still alive.
    Pete Cuthins was away for a few days staying with his family in Sligo, his neighbour told us when we called at his house on Gallows Lane. Alex Herron could not be contacted. We called at his
home in Carrigans, but the house was empty. I made a note to call again; an empty milk bottle sat on the step, suggesting he had not gone far.
    The dig was well progressed by the time I got back to Islandmore. I spotted Lennie Millar directing the group of men standing in the shallow hole the digger had scraped away.
The machine remained at the edge of the hole.
    Millar waved as I stepped down into the field.
    ‘How’s it going?’
    ‘Slowly,’ he said, taking the cigarette I offered him. ‘We’re taking it a few inches at a time at this stage; we think the body is just below us now.’
    ‘Are you sure it’s there?’
    Millar dragged deeply on the cigarette, then flipped the butt away. ‘I’d say so. We think there’s a boulder over it, maybe to keep it buried, stop wild animals digging it
up.’
    ‘The same as the baby,’ I observed.
    ‘Indeed.’
    ‘Lennie!’ One of the men in the hole was clambering out, shouting to Millar. ‘We’ve hit the stone.’
    I followed Millar across to the hole. Around four feet down, four men stood. One of them had exposed the edge of a slab of rock, perhaps three feet long.
    ‘Try prizing it out with the shovels,’ Millar said, dropping down into the hole beside the men.
    They lifted their spades and wedged them down the side of the rock, wriggling the blades in an attempt to jemmy their tips beneath it, allowing them to lift it upwards. Despite their best
efforts, though, the rock remained steadfast in its place.
    ‘Try the tip of the digger spade,’ Millar called to the digger driver. ‘Gently now.’
    The large bucket rose up above us, the arm extending until it had cleared the rock. The driver lowered the bucket again, angling it so that the front edge scraped back along the floor of the
hole. He drew it back inch by inch until it snagged on the edge of the rock. Once or twice he angled the bucket back and forth until he felt he had achieved a good hold, then he began to withdraw
the arm.
    The edge of the bucket caught a moment on the corner of the rock, then began to scrape up, breaking loose the strata of the rock’s edge.
    ‘Again,’ Millar called. ‘A little deeper.’
    The driver lifted the bucket clear, then repeated the process. This time, the bucket found better purchase and, as he drew the arm back, the rock began to rise out of the earth onto its edge.
Eventually, the stone was raised high enough that it tumbled to one side, exposing a cavity beneath it.
    Declan Cleary’s raggedy-clothed skeleton rested beneath, curled foetally, much as his son had been when we found him only a day earlier.

Chapter Seventeen
    The team worked for several further hours, digging around the body. Earth had compacted around the legs and the right arm, so they began digging it back, gently, working always
to preserve the dignity of the dead man’s remains.
    Millar had suggested quite early in the process that we should inform next of kin. I drove to Coneyburrow Road and collected Mary Collins and her husband and brought them to the site.
Sean’s body had not yet been returned to them for burial, and I could tell that, until her son was brought home to her, she would exist in her own personal limbo. She spoke little in the car,
her hand at her mouth, her eyes vacant, focused on some point in the middle distance. I imagined such a time must have