In Search of the Missing Page 20

  When we resumed, we found a river littered with an accumulation of much of the onshore destruction, some of which had lodged deep under the quay walls. A body could quite easily have become trapped there, hidden beneath the rubble and prevented from rising to the surface. This time, Zak indicated a hundred yards further down than before. The area indicated initially was not yet searched as the divers were still concentrating on another section of the river.

  A mist had descended over the Lee, making conditions cold, damp and miserable. It was rough going up towards Patrick’s Bridge, and the boat was rocky. We were bobbing around in the tide, swaying from side to side, with only two feet to spare going in under the bridges. We had to lie flat to get below them. At 4 p.m. it rained. Searchers had come out in force that day, and the river was dotted with students from UCC combing the river in kayaks. We stopped and asked them if they had seen anything. Their boats were ideal for the search as kayaks can go anywhere, unlike other boats of limited scope. As we neared Christy Ring Bridge, we turned back because there were too many boats on the water. Unknown to us, family members of the second missing man were standing on the bridge; when they saw us turning around, they became upset, and later the gardaí asked us why we hadn’t continued on to Christy Ring Bridge.

  The second missing person was a thirty-one-year-old Clareman who had been living in Cork city. He was seen leaving the Crane Lane Bar at about 2.30 a.m. after he had watched the Ireland-versus-France World Cup qualifier with friends. The last sighting of him had been at Christy Ring Bridge, where the eyewitness had seen him fall in and watched him being swept away. Newspaper reports said that a scarf and jacket believed to be his were found on Friday 20 November on Horgan’s Quay.

  The search for the two young men went on, with garda divers, Naval Service divers, Mallow River Rescue Team, Missing Persons Association and volunteers all taking part. Friends and families of the missing men continued to come out in force, with many of them keeping a constant lookout by walking up and down the river bank.

  On the following Tuesday, I took a day off work. A guy from the Shandon Boat Club took us out. He was very good on the water as he picked up straight away on how dogs work. That day, we trawled all the way up to Christy Ring Bridge without meeting anyone else on the water. We combed up and down the river for six hours. Again, Zak indicated close to the same spot as before, but the divers still hadn’t got round to searching there as they wanted to complete another area first and their team was small in number. Water search is slow, intensive work. Divers work in darkness and can only feel their way through the water.

  After a twelve-day search operation, one of the searchers spotted a body in the river at a point under Kennedy Quay, the area where Lucy had indicated on the very first night of our search for the young student and a hundred yards upriver from where Zak had been indicating. Navy divers came and recovered the body, which was later identified as that of the missing student.

  The second young man was still missing, and the trawl through the waters carried on. The Lee Rowing Club continued to provide a base for the search, which was co-ordinated by a friend of the young man. My sister Celine knew the missing man well, and said he was a lovely guy. One day, while we were searching, his family came over to us. His parents took a little consolation from the fact that the dogs were out looking for him because they said he had grown up with a dog in his bed all his life. His sister asked me, ‘Will ye keep going?’ The family of a missing person should never feel that nobody cares. We never forgot about him. Even if some of our members were only out walking their dogs along the quay, they always kept a close eye on the water.

  It’s easy for us to empathise with the families of the miss-ing. We always remind ourselves that it could be one of us or one of our own tomorrow. Nobody knows. As it happened, only months after the search in the Lee, a member of our own club was confronted with a terrible tragedy when she had to search with her dog for her mother, who had gone missing in the Waterford area.

  We never found the body of the thirty-one-year-old Clareman. He had fallen into the Lee at the centre of the channel, unlike the young student, who had fallen in at the south channel, which is narrower and more likely to trap a body under the quay walls.

  The Passing

  My father’s illness was like a magnet, drawing all our family to his bedside at St Patrick’s, a hospital situated high on the hills above Cork city, between St Patrick’s Hill and St Luke’s. All of my brothers and sisters came in their turn, putting their lives on hold to be with him, recalling happier times, telling him snippets of news, trying to take his mind away from his sickness, doing little things for him, like propping up his pillows or topping up his water.

  As he had been a silent man all of his life, we knew he wouldn’t be making any demands, not even if he needed something. It wasn’t in his nature. And so we kept asking, ‘Is there anything I can get you, Dad?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ he’d always reply, but still we kept asking. Then, about a month before he died, he said to me, ‘I’d love a half-glass of Guinness.’ I rushed off to a pub in St Luke’s, excited to be able to grant him his wish. I told the barman my story and came back with the stout. The barman must have had a heart of gold because every single day from that day on, without anyone ever asking, he came across to the hospital with a half-glass of Guinness for my father. In all these years, I never did get round to thanking him.

  Another day, when my sister leaned over and asked him, ‘Is there anything you need, Dad?’ he whispered in her ear, ‘I’d love a kiss from my daughters.’

  My father had grown up in Ballymacandrick as part of a warm, country family, in a home where affection was openly shown with hugs and kisses galore. But ours was a different home. My mother was at the helm and she suppressed any physical demonstrations of fondness. Once, when one of my sisters was very young, she happened to sit on my father’s lap. My mother came along and walloped her. None of the girls dared go near my father again. But everything has it roots – the present is always chained to the past. And when my mother in her old age finally told me the reason behind her demeanour, I understood. As a child, she had been abused by a priest. Being exploited in this manner had left its mark on her.

  The mother we knew was hard, with no time at all for tenderness. In our home she reigned supreme, ran the house with an iron fist, and flaked the daylights out of us if she saw fit. The abuse she endured had a ripple effect and we all paid the price, with the girls in our family always getting the brunt of her anger, more so than the boys. Since we were children we had always known she had a terrible grudge against priests in general, but now we knew why. But it baffled us as to how she allowed my brother John to join the priesthood. He had been earmarked for the mission at primary school – at about the age of ten – when the priests from the Divine Word Missionaries came to the school, recruiting. By the age of fourteen he was signed up and went off to study at a college in Wales. My mother had to sign a document giving him over to the order, body and soul. We were horrified when she called us together and told us he was no longer part of our family. We did not see him for a few years after that, not until he returned as a grown man, accepting of all that the priesthood had taught him, but still one of us.

  I missed him all those years. We’d shared a bedroom with our other two brothers, and the two of us were always debating religion, looking for the flaws in the sermons we’d heard at Mass while sitting at the priests’ feet as altar boys. But his departure at such a young age never seemed to bother my mother; she had let him go without any show of emotion or loss. But she mellowed in her final years, and once said to me, ‘Wasn’t I very hard on ye when ye were young?’

  She took great delight in the arrival of our son Jack, always rejoicing at the sight of him, and saying, ‘At last I can hold him in my arms and listen to him talk to me in his own babbling way!’

  When neighbours speak of my mother, they remember her in glowing terms. They recall her beautiful handw
riting – you could call it a kind of calligraphy – and the fact that she wrote in ink with an old-fashioned nib. She knew how to put a letter together, and, like her mother before her, was the village scribe for anyone who wanted to apply for a job or write a letter to a politician. The villagers appear to have no recollection of her as the matriarchal disciplinarian we knew.

  All of my four sisters were moved by my father’s touching request for a kiss, and saddened at the wasted childhood years in which they would have loved to shower him with affection, to sit on his lap, snuggle up to him, hold on tight, feel safe in his arms, and kiss his kind, bristly, unshaven, handsome face. My sisters came to the hospital and kissed him fondly on the forehead. It may have been contrived in how it came about, but he got his final wish and felt the warmth of their embrace.

  When I came back one weekend from a training session in Wicklow, I went straight to the hospital to see my father, who was now in his final hours. A nun was sitting at his bedside with rosary beads in her hands, reciting the rosary aloud, the telltale sign that the end was near. My father was under huge pressure, gasping for breath every thirty seconds. I totally lost it when I saw him suffering. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I roared at the nun. ‘Why don’t you just put the poor man out of his misery?’ That’s what I would have done if I could. That’s what he would have wanted me to do and what I’d want anyone to do for me. What good were prayers to my father when what he needed was an end to his pain? I thought of Bob, my collie-mix: when he was thirteen and no longer capable of long runs, his life became miserable, totally unbearable. He started to whine and cry, day and night. I’d given him a good life, I had to stop his suffering, and so I put him to sleep. While it was upsetting and traumatic, I felt no guilt because he was no longer in pain or distressed. My father wouldn’t let a fly suffer. He was a gentle, quiet man all his life. He cared for his dogs and put them to sleep when he knew they were suffering and could not be cured. Now he was struggling with no such relief to be had, fighting to stay on this side of the fence while at the same time trying to climb over. But it was too high. He was in between, and I stood there pulling my hair out, helpless.

  When he finally went and left only his sweet memory behind, I saw him patiently carving wood to make a horse and jockey, reading his newspaper as he sat in the shed with the dogs at his feet, and calling to me with a smile in his soft, country voice, ‘Mikey! Watch what happens next. Gerard’s after whistling.’

  Shadows of a Searcher

  Some things in life never change, and the woodland around my native Knockraha has always held a certain charm for me, ever since I roamed there as a child with Jessie tagging along at my side. I return there often with the dogs when I want to be alone and far away from the world and all its woes. It’s a magical, musical place, a remote haven for birds, badgers, foxes and rabbits. When I stand in the middle of its steep, V-shaped valleys, I find myself shrinking in size, looking around in wonder at the majesty of its ancient, lofty trees and the richness of its rust-coloured foliage.

  I stroll with the dogs by its river and listen to the rippling stream as it gushes down the hills from the fields above and glistens in the autumn sun. A low wall runs along the side of the stream, keeping it on course, coaxing it into the waiting river, waving it off on its merry way. I ramble on, pausing with the dogs at an intersection in the river. It was here bombs were made in my grandmother’s time. The location was ideal as water was needed for the mixture, and the explosives could be made far away from prying eyes.

  The woods are steeped in history. A linen mill was built along the river, to which a public roadway ran from our house. It was also used as a Mass path for the people coming from the Butlerstown area, at the other side of the woods, to the church in Knockraha. I move on down with the dogs and into the glen. As I come close to the Fairy Rock, I stall. A sense of eeriness envelops me because as children we were always warned to stay far away from it. Beside the Fairy Rock, I spot the small opening leading to a cave. My father took me in there once, and we crawled along for a few yards, but it was dark and eerie, so I backed out of it quickly.

  The woods always take me back in time, reconnect me to my past and remind me of my roots. I can almost smell those red, rosy apples stored in a timber box in the Caseys’ hallway and taste the sugar-coated bread fingers prepared for me by the postmistress, Mrs Long. I can see Mick Mackey’s paper model aeroplanes as they twirled on the ceiling and feel the tree trunks beneath my feet as I jumped along with Jessie, from one to the other, to cross the river. I can hear Nana’s voice the day she told me Jessie had gone away. I catch sight of my mother as she cycled home from the farms, and sense the excitement as I stood beside my father to watch the ferret hunt out the rabbits from the warren.

  More so than any other place on earth, the woods around Knockraha awaken in me an appreciation of life, a life I could so easily have lost in a moment of madness at a time when I thought I was indestructible. When I trained in search and rescue, I used to go out with the dogs in hail, rain or snow. I climbed Carrauntoohil in the worst possible conditions, when even experienced members of the mountain-rescue team wouldn’t venture out – they were too wise and practical. I got the greatest buzz from having to literally crawl across Beenkeragh Ridge on my hands and knees because the winds were so strong it wasn’t possible to stand up. I used to attach my dogs to me to make sure they weren’t blown off the mountain.

  Once, when a German tourist went missing on Mount Brandon, I threw caution to the wind and went against all I had been taught in training. At 8 a.m. on that Sunday, Don and I stood at the foot of Mount Brandon with the dogs, Ben and Dex, gearing ourselves up to join the other members of the Kerry Mountain Rescue Team in the search for the missing German tourist – an elderly, experienced mountain climber who knew Mount Brandon well and climbed it every day as part of his holiday routine. Everyone was allocated their search areas, and the decision was taken that Don and I should work separately. Dex and I were combing the Brandon Point area when Dex began to make his way down a very steep, vertical, grassy slope overlooking water. He started to indicate deep down into the cliff face with great conviction. As he worked his way downhill along the grassy edges, he barked so forcefully that he convinced me he was giving a very definite indication. What could I do? The area was treacherous. I was on my own with no back-up. If I went down to investigate, would I be able to climb back up? Should I radio the others for help or risk breaking the searchers’ golden rule of always putting your own safety first? The indication was so strong, I couldn’t resist going against all I had been taught about keeping yourself safe when searching alone. I felt compelled to take action, and acted on impulse.

  I knew I would have to rely heavily on my ice axe – a multipurpose mountaineering tool used for climbing or going down dangerous ground, such as steep, slippery areas covered in snow and ice. The axe can also be used as a means of self-arrest in a downward fall. A rope can be tied around the shaft to create an anchor when the axe is buried pick down. As well as the ice axe, I had slings made from webbing; these could be looped to the ice axe to make an anchor if I needed to hang onto a support structure. I drove the axe as deep as I could into the ground, and tied myself onto it with my sling. Very slowly, I began my descent. I clung on tight to clumps of grass, stepped down a little, then took out the axe and drove it back in again. Repeating this process, I gradually eased my way downwards.

  When I had gone down about fifty feet, I heard voices. I could see the bow of a small boat nestled in neatly under the cliffs about four hundred feet below me. Then, just as the boat began to move out from under the overhang, I saw two fishermen. Dex’s indication was spot on. But these men had nothing to do with the search; we had not found the missing German. As I tried to climb my way back up, I discovered I was stuck. I realised then the serious risk I had taken, and knew I should never have gone down there. I had neglected to put my own safety above all else. Now the cliffs below looked even more threateni
ng.

  It’s always safer to work in pairs. Don and I had been split up. We had been given separate areas to search in the belief that we would not do anything stupid. Trust had been placed in us. But I had pushed out the boundaries too far. I had acted impulsively. Now I was paying the price. I could have contacted the guys for help on the walkie-talkie, but pride was at stake here. I couldn’t admit my own stupidity.

  Which was the safest path to climb? There was only one way to find out. I sent Dex back up the slope, and watched carefully the trail he took all the way upwards, noting the point at which he jumped up onto a tiny ledge. As he reached the top and was on the verge of disappearing from sight, I called him back down. I needed to check if he would use the same path on his return. He came down taking exactly the same route as he had taken on the way up. I sent him back up a second time, just to be sure. Then I was satisfied that the path he had taken was my best hope of climbing safely to the top.

  Now I was relying fully on the ice axe to help me climb safely up the steep, slippery slope with its small ledges of grass and rock. My heart was in my mouth with fear. One slip, one wobble, and I was gone. I concentrated with all my might and tried to blank out the image of the four-hundred-foot drop below me. I dug in my axe as hard as I could, lifted each foot carefully, and slotted it in as securely as possible. I took my time, made no move without first locating a shelf for my fingers and feet. I was taking no chances here – none. It was a matter of climbing step by step, taking each and every one at a snail’s pace. There was no other way. It seemed like a lifetime, but I got there in the end, and made it safely to the top through sheer perseverance.