A shoe was found. It was dark with a flat sole, like a slipper. There was a sleeveless sweater, some kind of scarf or wrap of nylon, a pair of tights, panties, a blouse. There was no trace of a skirt or trousers, which left unresolved the question of exactly what Jean McConville had been wearing that night, three decades earlier.
Michael and his siblings had discussed this occasionally through the intervening years. Some said she had been wearing slacks, as she often did in the evenings. Michael was sure it was a skirt. He remembers clinging to his mother's legs in a vain attempt to stop her leaving. He recalls the feel of the tights against his skin. For sure, it was tights with a skirt, not trousers. She was eventually prised from his grasp. He had watched her going out the door, turning back so that he could see the terror in her eyes, that look preserved for him as his final and enduring memory of his mother.
Then there were the bones, all 'higgly-piggly' in the sand, as Superintendent Pat Magee of the Dundalk garda described them. Not laid out like a regular skeleton, but pushed about and disordered, one or two of the bones protruding above the surface, along with some of the cloth.
That was what the man had seen the night before while walking on the beach at dusk. The man asked Magee to preserve his anonymity - perhaps regrettable in a case so full of secrecy, an additional secret bound to give rise to some suspicion about the circumstances in which the body had been found. What was he doing there, that mystery man? Had he really stumbled across the remains by chance? Was he, perhaps, connected to the IRA?
Magee was still protecting the man's identity when we met some weeks later. But the report was in front of him, so it was possible to clear up some of the uncertainties of the find. Even so, many questions remained, not least among them the thought of what Jean McConville had gone through before she was killed. The possibilities returned to torment Michael after the discovery of the body. He had made himself ill thinking about it, he said. He had barely managed four hours' sleep in 10 days and, unable to eat, had dropped a stone and a half in weight, so he had, as he put it.
Michael was just turned 42, married, three children, a steady job as a tiler, a decent, modest home in the small town of Crumlin, 20 minutes' drive west of Belfast. In many respects he was leading a regular life, but not all his siblings had been so lucky. It had affected each of them in different ways, but, for all of them, the fact that their mother had been abducted and 'put down a hole' by the IRA was a shared, inescapable burden. Jean had disappeared. Jean was the Disappeared, and until her sudden and surprising reappearance in late August last year, the family could only guess at what had happened to her or where she was.
According to Supt Magee, the man who found Jean's body was around 50 years old and familiar with Shelling Hill beach, a remote stretch of sand near Carlingford, just south of the border in County Louth. His own mother was buried in a churchyard nearby and he would go there sometimes and walk. It was a popular spot in summer but was totally undeveloped for tourists and, outside the season, retained a bleak beauty.
Two of his three children were with him in the late afternoon of August 26, 2003, and he had rambled slightly away from them across the stony beach towards the grass banks at the rear of the beach, some 50 metres from the end of the roughly made road where cars could park. He had seen the protrusion of cloth and bone and had immediately thought of Jean McConville.
The garda had dug for Jean's body on the next beach, Templetown, just around the headland, in 1999, and again in the summer of 2000, after the IRA said that was where they had buried her. The progress of the digs had been followed closely throughout Ireland. Jean had become a famous IRA victim: an unexpected turn of celebrity, alongside, say, Lord Mountbatten or Ross McWhirter.
The man tugged at the cloth but, not seeing anything obviously human, walked away, according to Magee, saying: 'Ah, Jeez, it's only an animal.' He thought about it overnight, and was still thinking about it the next morning. He called Magee, who had been in charge of the earlier digs at Templetown, at 12.45pm on August 27. Magee and a detective sergeant went straight away to meet the man, who showed them what he had found.
Magee smoothed the sand away, thinking it would be an animal carcass, as had been the case with the discovery of bones during the digs at Templetown. Eventually, however, he became sure the remains were human and were bound to be those of Jean McConville. He was thrilled. The failure of the earlier digs had disappointed the garda, who had known how much Jean's now grown-up children needed the return of her body. Magee knew how the family was still being torn apart. Jean's legacy was the sadness she had known in her life, and, thanks to the IRA, she could not keep from passing this on to her children.
There had been 10 children living but only seven of them at home with Jean McConville on December 7, 1972. The oldest girl, Anne, had been in full-time hospital care for a year or two, suffering from a severe form of tuberous sclerosis, a genetic disorder that had caused mental impairment and violent behaviour. The oldest boy, Robert, had been interned by the British that March. That he was Catholic and had just turned 17 seems to have been the reason for his internment.
Helen, the next eldest daughter, had been at the chip shop when the Provos came calling. Jean's last words to her were a warning not to go stopping for a sneaky ciggie. By the time she got back, Jean had gone. In later years, Helen, with her husband, Seamus McKendry, went on to lead the campaign that pressed the IRA to admit its role in the disappearance of the Disappeared. Helen often spoke about Jean's disappearance, but she had not actually been there when it happened. Over the years, through no fault of Helen's, the voices of her siblings had largely gone unheard. Helen thought Jean was in the bath, or just about to get in, when there was a knock at the door, but according to Michael, Jean was sitting on the sofa surrounded by her younger children - Suzanne, Tucker, Michael himself and the twins, Billy and Jim. Archie had been in the kitchen and, Michael thinks, Aggie was playing on the stairs, and it was she who opened the door and let them in.
