mother.’ Adams excelled at this type of dissimulation. He would assume no personal responsibility himself. After all, he had never been in the IRA. ‘These killings happened twenty-five years ago, when the war here was at its height,’ Adams told one newspaper. ‘During war, horrible things are done.’
At one of his initial meetings with the McConvilles, Adams made it clear that he had what was, in effect, an alibi. ‘Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared,’ he said. This was not true. He had been released from Long Kesh in June 1972, in order to fly to London for the peace talks. Jean was abducted in December, and Adams was not locked up again until the following July. (‘That shouldn’t be taken out of context,’ Adams said later. ‘I got confused about the dates.’)
To Brendan Hughes, it was appalling that Adams would go to Jean McConville’s children and pledge to get to the bottom of what had happened to their mother, as though it were some great mystery to him. ‘He went to this family’s house and promised an investigation into the woman’s disappearance,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College sessions. ‘The man that gave the fucking order for that woman to be executed! Now tell me the morality in that.’ Only a ‘Machiavellian monster’ could do such a thing, Hughes concluded.
It was beginning to appear that the search for the bodies would take longer than expected. ‘The IRA were able to deliver a body on Friday in a coffin,’ Helen’s husband, Seamus, said after the discovery of Eamon Molloy. ‘They should get down here and do the same for us.’ But while a few of the graves had been easy to locate, others were proving more elusive. The graves were unmarked precisely so that they would blend in with the surroundings. People had grown old, memories had faded. Also, the topography had changed. Someone might recall a particular location with reference to a barn, but the barn had been torn down decades earlier. What had been a row of delicate saplings in the 1970s might be a grove of sturdy trees today. ‘The IRA leadership approached this issue in good faith,’ the Provos declared in a statement, sounding a bit defensive. Their efforts had been hampered, they said, by the passage of time.
The McConvilles found some solace in other families whose loved ones had disappeared. Several of the families would convene at a ‘cross-community’ trauma centre called Wave, which became a source of support for the relatives of the disappeared. Some had been through indescribable anguish. After Kevin McKee disappeared, his mother, Maria, went slightly mad. Some nights, she would rouse her other children from bed and bundle them into their coats, insisting that they head out into the city on fruitless searches. She would accost neighbours, pounding on their front doors, shouting, ‘Where’s my son? What have you done with Kevin?’ Other nights, she would prepare a plate of food and tell her children, ‘Put that in the hot press to keep it warm for Kevin,’ as if he had just stepped out to run an errand.
After a gun was discovered on a police raid of the McKee house, Maria ended up being arrested and spending several months at Armagh jail, where she happened to overlap with the Price sisters. She allowed Dolours Price to do her hair, unaware that this was the woman who had driven her son across the border to be shot. When Eamon Molloy’s body was recovered, Maria McKee attended the funeral and experienced the blissful delusion that she was burying her own son. But they still had not found Kevin when she died. Maria’s extended family kept the memory of him alive by naming children Kevin. Sons. Cousins. Nephews. Whenever a baby boy was born, it seemed, they’d call him Kevin.
The Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs, and the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland is occasionally subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters sometimes churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies, which in some cases date back to before the Bronze Age, often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death. These victims, cast out of their communities and buried, have surfaced vividly intact, from their hair to their leathery skin. At the height of the Troubles, during the 1970s, Seamus Heaney became fixated on ‘bog people’ after encountering