The Nameless Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.’

Chapter Eight
    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