Free The Nameless Dead by Brian McGilloway

baby, there’s no crying, there’s nothing. She lost the baby, now she’s lost her fucking mind.’
    ‘Why is she listening to the baby monitor, if you don’t have a baby?’
    ‘Because she’s nuts,’ Dunne stated, as if talking to a child. ‘She bought it before the baby came. I came in one night and she’s sitting with it on. In case Michael
cries; I’m up and down those fucking stairs every ten minutes checking on an empty room for her.’
    He stared at me plaintively, a thin column of ash dangling from the end of his cigarette. It dropped onto the floor, shattering lightly on the linoleum.
    ‘I never signed up for all this . . . shit, you know,’ he said, his anger spent now. ‘I just wanted to do right by her.’
    He slumped heavily onto the seat by the table, propped up his head on his hand, his elbow resting on his knee. He took one drag from the cigarette, then stubbed it out on the saucer he was using
as an ashtray.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
    ‘Everyone’s sorry,’ he replied bitterly. ‘Doctors, nurses, priests, everyone’s sorry.’
    I stood a moment before excusing myself to go back in to Christine who, no doubt, had heard the entire exchange.
    ‘I didn’t mean none of that,’ Dunne said behind me. ‘Sorry I took it out on you.’
    I nodded, then moved back into the living room as Christine wiped her eyes free of tears. Joe McCready looked little better and I realized that, for a man worried about his pregnant wife, this
call-out might not have been the best for assuaging his fears.
    ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Christine,’ I said. ‘I truly am.’
    She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, sniffed loudly. A final tear trickled down her cheek and she wiped it away, too.
    ‘I’m not mad,’ she said. ‘I did hear crying. Someone hurt that baby. You believe me, don’t you?’
    She looked from Joe to me and back, willing us to believe her.
    ‘Of course,’ I said.
    But she must have read something different in my eyes, for she turned from me.
    ‘I’m sorry I bothered you,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d care.’
    Dunne stood at the doorway with us. The darkness had thickened, but the street lights along the pavement outside offered no light, being little more than decapitated poles with
occasional wires hanging loose from the top of them.
    ‘This place doesn’t help,’ he said, raising his chin slightly as he gestured towards the estate beyond.
    I could understand his concern. Island View, where they lived, was one of a number of ghost estates along the border; housing developments begun just before the property bubble burst and never
completed. The skeletal outlines of the houses standing around us were not the only unfinished element of the estate; the road was potholed and weedy, the pavements loosely comprising hard-fill but
no tarmac.
    The houses were in varying states of completeness. Island View was begun during the final yelps of the Celtic Tiger by a speculator who convinced the banks to loan him enough to build eighty
houses. The money had run out halfway through, the contractors folded, the developer long since fled to the North, where he had claimed bankruptcy to avoid having to pay any of the men who had
worked on the houses. It was just as well; the development had been built on the expectation of the continued influx of immigrant workers to bolster an Irish workforce wealthy enough to be choosy
about the employment they would seek. The death of the Tiger had seen the workers leave again, and the jobs no one would take became the jobs everyone wanted but no one could get anymore.
    Only thirty of the houses had ever been fully finished; they sat along the first street of the estate, near the road, completed early to attract potential buyers to set deposits on the houses
further back, out of view, squatting spectrally in the dark. In addition to the €400,000 each of the thirty buyers had paid for their homes, there were unforeseeable additional