Trespass

by Anthony J. Quinn

  Not much happened along the lough shore during winter, and the detective’s behaviour and his dispiriting domestic life had kept preying on Nora’s mind. Somehow, the urgency of his gait and the emptiness of the landscape made his restlessness loom larger in her imagination. What was he trying to do every morning? It was perplexing and the last thing she expected of a professional police detective in the circumstances. Even on mornings when the wind blew in gales and the rain lashed the trees, the detective’s figure appeared on the brow of the hill, waiting under the thorn trees, before taking off on his clumsy pilgrimage of his fields.

  Watching him that morning, as he took shelter from the wind, she decided that she would have to speak to him. It was time she confronted him about his erratic behaviour. She tightened her shawl about her head and struck off from her front door. She thought she had worked out why Daly was so unsettled, why he wandered the fields every dawn with the air of a man looking for something he did not know how to find. She was determined that she would give him the benefit of her opinion, which was that there was only one way for a person to settle gently into middle age, and it did not involve living on your own surrounded by the shadows of the past.

  It wasn’t right to interfere, but it made her sad that Daly lived such a lonely life, and that there were no children for miles around, just old farmers and their wives floating along in their solitary routines like weeds trailing in a stagnant pond. She could not help thinking about Daly as a boy, and the other lough-shore children. She wanted to see their bright faces again, hear their laughter, and tell them stories about the past and the great characters that once sailed and fished the lough. Perhaps she was projecting her own acute longing for the children who would never exist, but whose voices she kept hearing in her imagination. In her view, Daly was of just the right age to start a family. He should free himself from the downward pull of the past, the weight of his father’s tragedy, his sadness and silence, and the guilt over his mother’s death, the murder he could never avenge. What was the point in being a detective if you could not tie up the loose ends of a decades-old crime and get on with your life?

  It was an invigorating, bad-tempered morning, the roar of the lough sinking deep into the thorny hollows and dips in the lane. Nora was almost out of breath when she came alongside the trees beneath which the detective had been sheltering. She was caught off guard when she saw him standing only a few feet away, immobile and tense, his mouth open, his eyes luminous in the glimmering dawn, eyes that just blinked and blinked without registering her presence. A buffet of apprehension hit her. Perhaps she was getting old and fretting too much over this reclusive man who still had many good years ahead to decide what to do with his life. She should mind her own business and not bother him with her opinions.

  Nevertheless, she tried to catch his attention by shouting a harmless remark about the weather. The detective did not appear to hear her over the roar of the wind. His hands were clenched by his sides, his tendons contracting, his eyes squinting as leaves and broken twigs blew around him. He seemed to be listening intently to the trees, which shifted in the wind with a rising chorus of injured, squeaking noises. What had so fixated his attention that he seemed oblivious to the weather and human company? She watched as his fists tightened and untightened, and his eyes swivelled back and forth, as if searching for some stimulus to release the tension in his body. For a few moments, she shared his lonely refuge, this space of cold air beneath the churning trees. Part of her wanted to reach out and console him, even though it violated the rules of respect for a neighbour’s grief. It seemed to her that the man beside her was not a detective, but a troubled only child who had yet to lead the life that had been promised him.

  However, she was afraid of provoking him into an outburst. There was something dangerous and vulnerable about the look in his eyes, like that of a starving carnivore hunching over its fresh kill. She waited for the right moment to say something. The morning sun peeked out from behind the rain clouds and the sky became a tumult of orange and red. Slowly he became aware of her presence. His eyes turned to take her in, flashing a look of dreadful surprise, and then, to her dismay, he bowed his shoulders and took off at a run back to the house.

  She hurried after him, shouting, ‘You can’t go on like this, Celcius Daly. You need a normal home, with someone to love. It’s time you took a chance in your life.’ However, the wind was too strong for her voice to carry. She tried to keep up with him, but he turned along the line of a high hedge and disappeared between the trees. She lingered for a while, saddened to find no further sign of him. The wind grew wilder, and the lough-shore waves filled the horizon with their queasy greyness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Samuel Reid opened the door that stormy night, he was surprised to find not a gypsy, but a tall, well-dressed man in his late thirties. The rain was whipping relentlessly at his face and raincoat, seeping its way along his shirt-neck and tie, and into his cuffs, which looked relatively dry, although his trouser bottoms were sodden and heavy. It seemed to Reid that he had not walked too far. The man’s coat filled with a blast of wind, and he gave Reid a look of desperation.

  ‘Sorry for calling at this time of the night,’ he explained in a southern English accent. ‘My car’s broken down and I can’t get a signal on the phone.’

  He pointed back at the swirl of darkness, the toiling trees, and the puddle-strewn lane disappearing into the mesh of border roads. His face winced in the cold and rain. He looked lost. He clutched a mobile phone with a younger man’s reliance on expensive gadgets. However, there was something in his eyes that unnerved Reid. A lingering grievance, as though Reid were to blame for his motoring misfortune. What was a strange Englishman doing travelling such remote roads at this time of night?

  ‘I only need to make a phone call. It’ll take less than a minute. My car’s at the bottom of the road.’

  The rain intensified, the puddles boiling under the weather’s fury.

  ‘You’d better come in.’

  Reid led him to the phone, a reassuring relic from the past, with its circular dial and metallic black receiver. Then he slipped into the front room and watched the stranger through a tiny secret window in the wall. He hesitated, transfixed by the sight of the visitor slowly replacing the receiver and opening the drawers of the telephone desk. He watched him root through the contents, examining old letters and notebooks.

  He stepped back into the hall. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked.

  The stranger stood upright, caught in the act.

  ‘You haven’t come here looking for help,’ Reid said aggressively. ‘What are you up to?’

  The Englishman raised his hands in the air, in an attempt to reassure his host. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘My car didn’t break down, but I do need your help. I’m a journalist researching a story. I’m trying to trace a woman who went missing from these parts many years ago. She was a traveller.’

  An old instinct kicked in. ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about. You should leave now. Before I call the police.’

  The journalist’s hands dropped. ‘Her name was Mary O’Sullivan. I need to find out what happened to her.’

  Reid cleared his throat. ‘What makes you think I can help?’

  ‘I’m finding it hard to locate anyone who can remember her at all. I heard she worked for a while on the farms around here. Does the name ring a bell?’

  For a bad moment, Reid felt the chill of his dream travel along his spine. The journalist now looked oddly familiar, as though his face was something presented not out of the rainy night but from the darkness of his subconscious. ‘Nobody along this part of the border is interested in a gypsy story from the past.’

  ‘Trust me, a lot of people soon will be.’

  Reid raised the back of his hand to cover his mouth, which was thick with spittle and dread. It was an involuntary movement, and he tried to conceal it from the journalist. He extended his hand to steady himself agai
nst the doorframe. ‘Have you any identification?’

  The journalist fished out his wallet and handed Reid a press card. He studied it carefully. Why had this Englishman come after all these years, intruding upon his company at this time of the night, annoying him with the dark deeds of the past? ‘Don’t you have more up-to-date stories to write?’

  ‘I’ve spent months tracing the geography of this woman’s short life. Her story deserves to be told.’

  ‘But this country is full of missing people. Every twist in the road, every thorn tree has its secrets. Who cares about a forgotten gypsy from all those years ago? Maybe she got into trouble and had to emigrate. The past is the past, and shouldn’t be interfered with.’

  ‘I heard she was suspected of being an IRA informer. A gang of men raped and murdered her before hiding her body.’

  ‘Where did you dig that rubbish up? None of that was in any of the newspapers. What sort of journalist are you?’

  ‘A journalist with some influential contacts.’ His eyes glinted with satisfaction. ‘They told me that her last job was at this very farm. Your brother was a friend of the police officers who investigated her disappearance.’

  ‘She worked here for a few months, and then she left.’ Reid focused on a spot somewhere behind the journalist’s head in an attempt to remain composed. ‘That’s the way with gypsies. They come and they go; no one knows their business.’

  Outside, the sound of the storm grew wilder. The light in the hall flickered, and in the shadows, it looked as though the journalist was grinning, but from the grave tone of his voice, he was not. ‘If you know something about what happened to her then the law demands you should bring it to the police.’

  ‘Whose law are we talking about? The law that allows gypsies to pitch up next to my land and run amok? You want a story then go down to that camp at the bottom of the lane and watch what happens at night. I’ve seen shocking things with my own eyes. Smuggling alcohol and god knows what else across the border.’

  ‘I want the names of the men who abducted her.’

  ‘I can’t help you any more. It’s time you left.’

  ‘Before you kick me out there’s something I want you to look at.’ The journalist removed a folder from his jacket. Reid noted that his fingernails were dirty. What grubby secrets of the past had the Englishman been digging up? He stood his ground, but accepted the folder. He had lost the momentum of his anger. For a moment, the hall was quiet, and the two of them stood motionless, neither of them speaking.

  ‘This was so long ago,’ said Reid, looking up from the documents.

  The journalist leaned closer. ‘You seem bothered. Perhaps you should look at them sitting down?’

  Reid grunted with irritation. He did not need to sit down. He did not want to be detained by the past. He glanced at the journalist and saw it again, a dangerous light glittering in his eyes. Why were people of his profession always meddling, always asking dangerous questions? They did not seem to anticipate or care about what might come to light, or imagine the events that might be set in motion when a question was answered truthfully. They were like mischievous children, pinpricking the dark deeds of the past, as though they were harmless balloons to play with.

  ‘A lot of things happened along the border that are none of your bloody English business,’ said Reid. Nevertheless, he opened the folder and went through its contents.

  The first photograph he saw was of a group of men in uniform, including his brother Alistair. They were wearing the same soldier’s uniform that hung in his wardrobe. He stared at the faces of the brave young men, cousins and brothers, who had bonded together to protect their border farms from IRA gunmen, to keep their country from slipping into chaos, only to find themselves betrayed at the last when the Ministry of Defence disbanded the regiment and refused to give part-time soldiers a proper pension or redundancy payment. All those nights they had spent lying in cold ditches, operating checkpoints on lonely roads, reading passages from the bible and singing psalms to keep up their courage. All those days cleaning their guns in the back yards of their farms and tending to their livestock in between mounting dangerous foot patrols under the gaze of IRA snipers and praying at the funerals of their colleagues,

  Another photograph slipped from the folder. He recognized the young traveller woman immediately. Perhaps he really did need to sit down. The trusting expression on her face looked so familiar to him, as did her dark eyes and the centre parting of her lank hair. She was wearing lipstick, which struck him as odd. He did not remember her wearing make-up. He wondered who had taken the photograph. Somehow, the lipstick made her look more vulnerable, more open to danger. He stared at her eyes. What were they communicating to the photographer? A shared secret? Some moment to remember? Then he noticed the full roundness of her belly. In another photo, she was beside the sea, this time with a young baby in her arms. There was a date below the photograph: 4 April 1976. This would have been about a month before her disappearance.

  There were old newspaper reports in the folder, much less pleasing to the eye. They were grubby and accusing, cut-outs from the Irish News dating back to the late 1970s. His eyes strained in the gloom to read the newsprint. They described the search for the missing traveller Mary O’Sullivan on both sides of the border, the futile police investigation, and then, later, protests by travellers claiming that not enough was being done by the authorities to find her.

  Reid trembled inside. The photographs changed everything about what he thought he knew. A birth and a disappearance. The young woman and her baby. A journey over and another just beginning. This journalist with his quest for the truth was well informed. There was no doubt about that. He felt a surge into the maw of the past, the secrets that lay beneath what he remembered, the details of the young woman’s pregnancy, her disappearance and the mystery of her baby. He was confronted by a truth that his own family had protected him from during his secluded life on this lonely farm.

  ‘You’re not looking at the pictures,’ said the journalist. ‘You’re thinking of something else.’

  Why are you searching for her? Reid wanted to ask the journalist. Is it to find out the facts or seek some form of atonement, a confession, or perhaps something darker – retribution or revenge? The questions hung in the air, demanding answers.

  The journalist watched him more closely. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened to the baby?’

  ‘I don’t want to know anything.’

  ‘Why? If it were me, I’d be desperate to know.’

  ‘I don’t like thinking about the past. For one thing, it reminds me of how old I am. For another I’d rather sleep tonight in peace.’

  He opened the door in a gesture that signalled it was time for the journalist to leave.

  ‘What do you mean, sleep in peace?’ asked the journalist. ‘If there was a secret I didn’t know I would want to discover it. Not knowing would keep me awake at night. Especially if it were a secret that others had kept hidden.’

  Reid pushed the folder back into his hands, but the journalist refused to take it. ‘Is that all you have to show me?’

  The journalist stared at him silently.

  ‘Have you anything else to say?’ asked Reid. ‘What else do you want from me?’

  ‘Did you rape her?’

  Reid’s heart began to pound. ‘I never touched her.’

  ‘Then help me solve the cover-up of her murder.’ His eyes were unmoving, black and glittering.

  ‘Help you? What sort of cover-up are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t look at me with that stupid expression on your face.’ The journalist’s tone was no longer polite. ‘I want to know: will you help me find her killers?’

  ‘What if I can’t help you at this stage of my life?’ Reid’s voice rang out in the narrow hallway. ‘Would that be so terrible? Think about it. She disappeared a long time ago, and memories grow weaker by the day. What difference would it make to her if no one remembered? Give us a few more
years and everyone who knew her will be dead.’

  ‘It would make a difference to me.’ The journalist’s face was full of darkness.

  ‘Then go to the police,’ said Reid. ‘If you’ve new evidence show it to them and ask them to open the case again.’

  ‘I’ve wasted enough time talking to them. They tell me there’s neither the funding nor the political will to open up these old cases.’

  Reid was quiet. His visitor was less a reporter, more a ghost that had floated up from the underworld to haunt him with bad news. He did not need these questions. A surge of defiance welled within him.

  ‘I’m no telltale. I won’t go blabbing about the past.’

  He flicked on the outside security light and angrily ushered the journalist out of the door. The rain had stopped and the yard was empty. However, close to the farm gate, he spied a dirty-white traveller van, its headlights flicking on.

  The reporter turned back briefly before walking towards the van. His eyes were filled with the dregs of contempt. ‘Now that we’ve found you, Mr Reid, be prepared to suffer.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The most uninhibited man in Armagh courthouse was the judge, from whom Inspector Celcius Daly detected a faint whiff of alcohol as he marched past him from his side chamber. One of his shirt collars protruded at an odd angle and his cheeks glowed red, his puffy eyes barely acknowledging the assembled ranks of solicitors as he perched himself at his leather seat, like a jockey getting ready for the starting gun. His state of inebriation appeared to have little detrimental effect on his performance, however, and he was soon making improbable headway though the list of uninsured motorists, drink drivers, and petty drug dealers, having memorized many of the details of that morning’s cases. The row of clerks and prosecuting solicitors worked at a feverish pace beneath him, prodding each other with files and pecking away at keyboards, struggling to keep up with his delivery as the stacks of papers beside them grew into towers.