The Dead Ground by Claire McGowan
In the Northern Irish borderlands, police forces from North and South work together with the Missing Persons Response Unit, the MPRU, on past and present cases. Undecided about a critical decision she must make, forensic psychologist Paula Maguire can’t decide whether she’s thinking too much or too little. When in mid-winter her unit must search frantically for missing babies and pregnant women, Paula is forced to face her past.
Educated at the University of Greenwich, Paula had a good job in her field in London. Persuaded to return to her home town on a temporary basis, she finds she can’t get away again. Here in Northern Ireland, “where we don’t like to let go of things,” her own history has got its claws in her and won’t let go.
Beyond tribal loyalties, she knows people are “all the same under the skin.” She’s also self-aware enough to see in herself “the same raw ore of sectarianism” she loathes in others. She knows she’s not alone in her feelings of discomfort about the other “side” — including her Protestant boss Bob Hamilton. He still marches in Orange parades, and his suit is “ironed into the same lines as his old RUC uniform.” The Troubles are said to be over, but in this “post-conflict society,” Paula sees strands of fear, suspicion and bias “in everyone, however much you liked your Protestant neighbours and colleagues, however tolerant you liked to think yourself…shopping at the House of Fraser and eating sushi.”
All through the book, we catch glimpses of how her troubled past hems Paula in. There are the routine expressions of fear and weariness in the eyes of citizens facing police, and there’s the fact that the new Police Service of Northern Ireland still runs informants, some the same people who assisted them during the Troubles. We get another hint of the past through Paula’s memory of her parents and another couple. While the two RUC officers forge a friendship in their dangerous pursuit of justice, their wives base their solidarity on having to “stay at home and worry about phone calls, balaclavas, shots ringing out.” That was back in the Troubles. But today there’s still evidence the community has been inured to walking around fueled by adrenalin. When the town’s water supply fails in mid-winter, their attitude is “strangely buoyant,” and they display a happy “kind of crisis spirit.”
Paula’s boss chivvies the team to get results on the missing babies, reminding them the town is now supposed to be safe. “It’s post-conflict. You can walk down the street without some maniac in a balaclava shooting you down or mowing down your children in their buggies.” The town may indeed be safer. Still, too many of the Guards have died young. Heart attack is still “a common ailment, carrying off those who’d survived the Troubles and their onslaught of bombs, bullets, and fire, only to keel over from delayed stress and fear.” To Paula, today’s younger PSNI officers are mostly huge country men “who could birth a lamb or dig a septic tank just as easy as subdue a suspect.” Probably just as well.
The MPRU operates in the old station of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, where the slogan painted on the walls used to read RUC: 98% Protestant, 100% Unionist. Paula’s father was one of the 2%, and some said his wife’s disappearance was punishment, “a debt to be repaid.” An ex-IRA prisoner, jailed for crimes carried out after the Easter Accord, has intimated he recalls something about Paula’s mother. But he won’t talk until he gets assurances of an early release in exchange for information. Moreover, he warns police he will not be held accountable for what, as an IRA operative, he considers “legitimate acts of war.”
Now, in an echo of the violent transgressions of the Troubles, someone is stealing babies and drugging and attacking pregnant women. One murder victim is found to have been forced to kneel in a classic execution pose used by paramilitaries. Like a ritual sacrifice, the body has been placed within an ancient druidic stone circle. Another dead person is discovered at the “old Mass Rock,” where Catholics secretly went to pray after their faith was banned by Cromwell. Paula tells Guy, the officer from London, that every year an Easter Mass is still held in commemoration there. The makeshift outdoor church is complete with “an alcove where worshippers could hide if soldiers came.”
When a pro-choice doctor is targeted with more than placards, threatening phone calls, and a brick through her window, the police must be careful how they handle public opinion and the media. In a country where most people oppose abortion, “it’s one of the few issues on which hardliners on both sides might agree.”
After Paula’s job obliges her to give a TV interview describing the psychological profile of women who steal babies, she leaves the office early, fearing her comments might spark protests. Bitterly, she reflects that you can “never underestimate the capacity of a Northern Ireland audience to get outraged.” Fortunately, the host of the show trims her interview before airing it, censoring out anything a bristly watcher might take umbrage at.
In this tale, we meet charlatans, convincing liars. Traumatized by their own pasts, they practice deceit to try to force other people into more “God-fearing” ways. In their misguided belief that they are in the right, they prey on people as vulnerable as they themselves once were. As Paula is sharply aware, it’s also true that when you want to protect yourself and people you care about, sometimes lies can be “so much simpler than the truth.”
The Dead Ground and The Barren Ground are literal translations of the Irish name for a remote area of Donegal where Paula and her boss go in search of answers. And indeed, on that barren and rocky coastline, the westernmost point of Europe, they do meet a couple of people who fill in background that helps the team solve the case.