Samuel dropped the folder of photographs and newspaper clippings on the seat beside him. ‘The reporter gave me these.’
The politician did not move. The dog put its head to one side and began rubbing the back of its head against his hand, cajoling him to keep petting.
‘What paper did he say he worked for?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘What leads does he have?’
‘He knows about the Strong Ulster Foundation.’
His brother sighed heavily. He glanced at his brother up and down as though he were an object he was contemplating for the first time in years.
‘Perhaps now is the time for you to come forward and tell the authorities what you know’, said Samuel. ‘You’ve friends in the right places; they’ll look after you.’
‘I can never do that.’
His brother leaned back in his chair and began to explain why his past had to remain a secret. To Samuel’s ears, it sounded like a story rehearsed for the benefit of reporters. He already knew most of the facts, but Alistair recounted them anyway. The Strong Ulster Foundation had been a maverick unit of soldiers, operating without official sanction, who’d resolved to take on the IRA at their own game. Sometimes they strayed over the line in terms of their reaction to IRA atrocities. Alistair had only ever been a junior member of the gang, barely involved in their operations. He didn’t want to describe their misdemeanours, or the laws they might have broken. His involvement ceased, when, during the early eighties, a local political party invited him to stand as an MP. After a successful election campaign, he retired from the army. The unit dissolved soon afterwards and its members swore to keep silent about their past. Ever since, he had been at pains to avoid bumping into them.
‘Where are they now?’
‘Some of the members were already alcoholics, a few found God and took up preaching on street corners. Most of them managed to keep their heads together and lead normal lives. They’re married now with grown-up children. They do as their wives tell them. Their days of roaming the border with guns are over.’ He looked closely at his brother. ‘I thought those times were dead and buried. Long forgotten. What does this journalist want to know?’
‘Everything that happened to Mary O’Sullivan.’
‘Military Intelligence believed she was informing for the IRA. She worked on border farms and set up young men for their deaths. She had connections with the wrong sort of people. When she turned up at our house, I contacted my friends and they took her away for questioning, and that was the last I saw of her. Is that enough for you?’
‘It is for me. But not for this reporter. Perhaps you should talk to him.’
‘What you are suggesting is too dangerous. Someone must be in contact with the reporter, drip-feeding him information. Have you considered that he might want to blackmail me over these secrets or discredit me? If word gets out about my connection with the foundation my career will be ruined.’
In the sharp aftermath of silence that followed, Samuel imagined that his brother was making a series of haunted, moaning noises, but then he realized that it was the sound of the wind wailing down the chimney, and that his brother was mute.
‘You should have told me what happened to O’Sullivan from the start. Perhaps I would have understood.’
‘Promise me not to speak about her to anyone. Or mention my name in connection with the events of the past. None of us is at fault over what happened to her. The problems of that time are at fault. All this is buried in the past and we must learn to forget.’
‘I’ve kept quiet all these years.’
‘And because of that I am indebted to you.’ Alistair spoke through a clenched jaw and mouth, his face taut and soldierly-looking, like a drill sergeant at dawn. ‘Do I have your word?’
Samuel reached forward and crammed some turf into the fire. ‘Yes. You have my word.’
‘Then we will speak no more about it.’ Alistair relaxed visibly. The two men said nothing for a while, witnesses to the deal that had been struck.
‘What about the reporter?’
‘Make it clear to him that you know nothing. Eventually, he’ll stop annoying you.’
‘You’re wrong. His search for the truth has just begun. He and the travellers will be back. They won’t stop tormenting me. They’ve already burnt down one of my sheds. The next time, it’ll be me.’
‘Are you afraid of them, Sammy?’
‘The only one I fear is God.’
Alistair sighed. ‘Give me the reporter’s details and I’ll make sure he won’t bother you again.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Alistair started stroking the dog again, but he did not reply. Reid looked up at the mirror over the fireplace so he could get a clearer view of his brother. He saw that the politician was perfectly composed now, his face detached and serene in the flickering light of the fire. The dog shivered and snuggled closer to him. Reid knew that the other questions he was burning to ask would never be answered. In particular, the ones about the woman’s baby. By contrast, when he looked at his own reflection, he saw a face full of darkness, the eyes obscured, as though someone had placed a blindfold over them.
Perhaps lies and deception are inevitable, he thought, part of living, and the past a terrain full of ambiguities and shadows. Only a child would expect always to hear the truth. How many evenings had they spent talking about other people, nephews, cousins, strangers, but never about themselves? And now when the evidence lay between them, he still could not find the conviction to ask the question: What dark deeds have you done, brother?
Alistair leaned back in his chair, and allowed his body to go slack, but his eyes were alert. The two of them stared at the fire, which flickered with reminiscences, none of them pleasant. Turf smoke hung in the air, carrying burnt hints of gruesome bogs and petrified oak. Samuel sat down in an armchair and drifted off to sleep. When he awoke, the embers had sunk to ashes, and his brother had gone.
Before going to bed, he went into his brother’s old room and lifted his soldier’s uniform from the musty wardrobe. He stared at it for a long while. He imagined that the sins of the past might be as evident as the brass buttons on its collar. He touched the beret, the epaulettes, the loyal things that had once ruled his brother’s life, searching for some form of reassurance transmittable through the cloth, a tactile escape from the guilty silence left in his brother’s wake.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shortly before the noon recess at Armagh courthouse, there came, into the stupefied hush of the waiting room, a noise that sounded like a woman wailing. Daly, who had been taking a break from the court proceedings, got up and stared over the railing into the lobby below. The cry of distress had not come from a defendant or a stricken relative, but from one of the smartly dressed female solicitors. A commotion grew as the woman, who seemed to be in a desperate hurry, pushed through the wall of defendants and their relatives. When Daly hurried down the stairs to investigate, he was surprised to see that the solicitor was Rebecca Hewson.
Somehow, she had lost her professional grip; her face and hair were in disarray, and one of her high heels had broken. She let out another wail that had an explosive effect on the crowd, making everyone turn and stare in her direction. Daly watched her anguished face as she steered through the bodies. She was breathing with difficulty, bumping into people, hobbling mechanically, her eyes scanning the faces she met. She drew close to Daly and when her eyes locked on to his, a look of relief passed across her features. She called out his name and swerved towards him. He stood still, trying not to flinch, a sharp and secret dread welling within him. The fact that she had singled him out from the crowd made him feel exposed and somehow implicated in her distress. Now that she was almost upon him, he could see that tears were bursting from her eyes, and her hair was soaking wet. He felt his temples throb. He had stored up a great lake of professional solitude, and now that reservoir was about to be broken. His deliverance was just beginning.
‘My son is missing.’
He glanced at the court security staff, the uniformed officers in the building and thought: Why me, again? Was he the only one capable of helping a mother in distress?
‘Please, you have to do something.’
‘When did you last see him?’
She moved closer to him. The habits of silence and loneliness he had acquired since his divorce made the proximity of her stricken face and the intensity of her eyes overwhelming. He was struck by the look of terror that dwelt there. Compared to the shoplifting mother from the day before hers was a wretched and primitive display of vulnerability.
‘About an hour ago,’ she said. Her voice snagged and then started again. ‘I left him in the car.’ She pointed at the glare of light from the lobby. ‘I just popped in to give a file to a colleague and for a quick chat. When I went back to the car park he was gone.’
In spite of her agitation, she had the confidence to keep staring at him, demanding a promise that he might not be able to keep.
‘Please, you must find him. He’s ten years old.’
He began asking questions. He brought his entire attention to her answers. It was the first time in weeks he had listened so carefully to another person. Behind the half-choked words, he detected a sinewy note of control in her voice. It was clear that her usual self-command had been overwhelmed by a rising tide of panic. He groped for some words of reassurance, but was unable to think of anything that might resolve her anxiety.
It was time for action, he decided. He arranged for announcements to be made in all the courtrooms. He organized the security staff to search the building from top to bottom. All the toilets were checked and the public galleries, too. Then the court proceedings were halted. However, no one had seen a ten-year-old boy matching Rebecca’s description.
As he led her out to the car park, he marshalled the police officers in the lobby of the court. ‘Check for eyewitnesses in the court grounds and nearby houses. Someone must have seen the boy.’
So distracted was the solicitor that it took her a while to locate her vehicle, and when she found it, she could not move. She stood with the key in her hand, flicking the door locks on and off, a lost look in her eyes. She seemed unable to accept that the empty car was hers. The car’s sidelights flashed. She looked at the car and then at the key in her hand. There was a mental gap she could not overcome, a rift in her field of vision. She pointed the key at the car and walked around it, as though it were someone else’s vehicle, someone else’s fate to have a child disappear in broad daylight.
‘Where was he sitting?’ asked Daly sharply.
‘In the back.’
Daly moved her aside, noticing that there were no signs of forced entry to the vehicle. He opened all the doors and then the boot. He shut the doors and circled the car, once, twice, and then again. There was no trace of the child or evidence that he had been abducted. However, he still did not have sufficient grounds for launching a full-scale police search for the boy. The greatest likelihood was that he would soon turn up, safe and well. Nevertheless, he stepped back, thinking of the possible evidence he might have contaminated. He tried to determine a space around the car that he might use without destroying more clues.
‘He must have followed you into court. How long were you gone?’
‘Barely five minutes,’ she replied, but Daly suspected it might have been considerably longer. ‘The security staff at the door said they haven’t seen him. I’ve already run up and down the road. I thought he might have got bored waiting for me, and wandered off.’
‘Has he ever taken off without telling you before?’
‘No. Something has definitely happened to him.’ She stared into Daly’s eyes. She was finding it difficult now to maintain the intensity of her gaze. ‘I want you to call in help. Block off all the roads. Just do something.’
Daly nodded. ‘But first there are things we must try here.’ He asked her if anything had been taken from her car. When she checked and said no, he got her to go through the sequence of events in case he had missed something. ‘Was there any sign of anything out of the ordinary in the car park?’
‘Not really.’
The only things he had to work on were the boy’s absence and his mother’s fear. But didn’t mothers fear for their children most of the time?
Catching the questioning expression in his eyes, she said she knew how it looked. She had been negligent leaving her son alone in the car, but she had only slipped away for a few minutes. She had been sure he would be safe and that nothing bad would happen to him in broad daylight. Daly reassured her that the boy had simply wandered off. He began planning a course of action based on this assumption.
‘Where would he most likely go, into the court grounds or along the road to the shops?’
Without hesitation, she pointed to a thick laurel hedge and shuddered. ‘He’s always playing in the trees.’
Leaves gently stirred in the wind, revealing a deeper darkness within. Daly organized the search party so that no one would overlap, and took the lead himself, exploring the margins of the court grounds. Soon he was trampling through the hedge, following the sound of rustling leaves. Within a few minutes, he could hear a child shouting and the sound of brisk footsteps.
Through a sudden hole in the leaves, he saw flickering movement, the sight of what looked to be a child’s legs running for dear life. He raised an arm to fend off the bushes and pushed on, twigs and branches snapping and buckling under the force of his intrusion, but the shapes remained indistinct, dissolving into the green gloom of the hedge. A heavy branch pinned him back, and he had to squeeze beneath it. More sounds trickled through the air, a child shouting and crying. Was the boy trapped somewhere? he wondered. He listened carefully, but the cries grew garbled and faint, broken up by the wind and the groaning branches. He plunged deeper into the cover. For a while, all he could hear was the sound of his shoes squelching in the mud, and then the wind gusted and a noise rose into the air that sounded oddly like laughter. He heard other children’s voices, much closer now. In spite of the dense undergrowth, he pushed and charged in a straight line towards the source of the sounds. The voices came again, this time farther to his left. The wind picked up, the shifting branches moaning together, and the voices were blown back. He crawled through a tunnel of trembling leaves, and eventually broke free, blinking into a cold draught of sunlight.
The light sharpened around the outlines of a young woman and a dark-skinned boy. Their eyes opened wide as Daly dragged himself completely free of the hedge. He froze, breathing hard. He saw the flash of more colours, like bunting in the wind, a carefree crowd of children rushing with curiosity to see what the commotion was about. The clawing branches had released him, breathless and sweating, into a school playground. The children circled him, laughing and screaming, making him the centre of their game. Then a bell sounded, summoning the children back to their classes, leaving behind several worried-looking adults. Daly remembered that a primary school lay next to the courthouse, and began to feel he had made a mistake. He introduced himself to the adults.
‘Have you seen a missing boy?’ he asked. ‘His name is Jack Hewson.’ He gave a description but no one had seen the child. He had made a mistake, he realized. He stood there like a dejected dog, and then he vanished back into the hedge without a further word.
By the time he returned to the car park, the place had begun to resemble the scene of an abduction. A van had pulled up and police officers were clambering out with search dogs. Daly heard their cries of encouragement as they guided their dogs to Hewson’s car and directed them to sniff the seat in the back. The handlers shouted more encouragement and the dogs began to whine around a nearby empty parking bay that bore an oil stain from the vehicle that had been sitting there. They refused to budge despite the efforts of their handlers. The trail had ended, it seemed.
The police and security staff ceased their se
arching in the court grounds. They approached Hewson, and then at a certain point halted. They waited and glanced at her with an impending sense of doom, while she stood, watching the whining dogs, rooted to the spot beside her car. Even her colleagues had stopped trying to reassure her. She had given up retracing her steps and ransacking her mind for the last memory of her son. She no longer had the heart for any form of conversation. Her face was immobile with fear, as if she was falling into a hollow car park that grew emptier and quieter by the minute.
Daly needed to see the car park exactly as it was the moment she had left the boy in the car, what vehicles were parked in the location that had attracted the sniffer dogs, and who was coming and going at the time. He checked with the security staff but, unfortunately, the court’s CCTV cameras had been trained on the building itself and the entrance doors, and they had seen nothing suspicious throughout the morning.
In the car park, Rebecca’s husband had appeared. He embraced her, almost in an aggressive manner, as if testing her to refuse his gesture. She submitted to his attention and they spoke together quietly. Then he broke away and began to pace restlessly about the place, not speaking to anyone. He was more composed than his wife, seemingly deep in thought. Daly watched him with interest. His dark hair was bushy, thrust upward, and his pale, freckled skin gave him a very Irish look, but he spoke with a pronounced southern English accent. Daly walked over and introduced himself. There was something tough and optimistic about the way Hewson shook Daly’s hand and began firing questions at him, which contrasted sharply with his wife’s frightened vulnerability. He told Daly that his name was Harry, and that he was a journalist. He knew that suspected child abductions usually turned out to have simple and innocent explanations. Nevertheless, he wanted Daly to employ the full resources at his disposal to find their son as quickly as possible.
Then Hewson turned his attention back to his wife. Daly listened to their conversation. Some old annoyance seemed to have resurfaced between them. Rebecca’s pretty mouth was fixed in a frown, her eyes enlarged with something other than fear.
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