Daly asked if Jack had any medical conditions such as asthma that they could include in their alert to the media.
‘No, he’s a very healthy boy.’
Daly returned to the incident involving the traveller children in their back garden. ‘Tell me more about the boys. Did they threaten Jack or you, or behave suspiciously in any way?’
‘Nothing happened, Inspector,’ said Harry. ‘If anything had, we would have told you by now.’
‘What about Jack? Did he speak about it afterwards?’
‘Yes, but again it was nothing important. They just asked him for old toys—’
‘I remember now,’ interrupted Rebecca. ‘They asked me questions about Jack. They wanted to know what age he was and where he went to school.’
‘Travellers always ask questions,’ said Harry dismissively. ‘It’s in their nature.’
Daly watched the husband intently. The fact that fathers could be more rational in their emotional attachment to their children was written in the natural order of things. After all, they did not have to undergo the trials of pregnancy and childbirth; however, there was something rehearsed and focused about Harry Hewson that unsettled Daly. The way he repeated the same words, the slowness of his speech, the formal respect he showed Daly and his self-restraint. By contrast, Rebecca started involuntarily every time a phone rang or a door clicked open in the corridor.
Daly had a tendency to want to understand people who showed perfect composure in such stressful circumstances. He wanted to replay in his mind the husband’s movements and everything he said more closely so that he might detect even a whisper of panic, but throughout the interview Harry’s voice remained almost grotesquely calm. Daly tried to put himself in the journalist’s shoes. He lingered over the relationship he might have with his son. Did he take him to football matches or help him with his homework and read him bedtime stories? Perhaps the boy was too old for that. Daly wouldn’t know. He didn’t have a son. He knew nothing about children of Jack’s age – or any age for that matter – and the thought depressed him.
‘These people were asking questions about our son,’ said Rebecca to her husband. ‘They were watching our house, which means they were watching you, too.’
There was a slight movement from Harry, an almost imperceptible hunching of his shoulders.
‘Hold on a moment,’ said Rebecca. Her expression grew darker and more solemn. ‘This happened before. When we were on holiday in Donegal last summer. I almost forgot to mention it. How could I have forgotten that?’ She looked at Harry with a faint shudder. ‘That day we visited the monastery at Rossnowlagh. You left for a walk on the beach, while Jack and I did the Stations of the Cross. He disappeared that day, too. One minute I was caught up in prayers with a group of nuns, the next he was nowhere to be seen. I was frantic for about an hour. I couldn’t believe that he had just vanished in broad daylight.’
Harry rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t, Rebecca. You’re twisting a story out of a couple of random events. There’s no connection between what happened back then and what’s happening now. You’re fabricating a plot to give the detective something to go on. We should just let him get on with his job.’
‘How can you be sure it’s not connected?’ replied Rebecca. ‘You always sound as if you know everything.’
‘All I’m saying is you’re straying into areas that don’t concern the detective.’
Daly interrupted the exchange. He could not leave her story hanging in the air. ‘Let me be the judge of whether it’s relevant or not. Tell me what happened at the monastery.’
‘I searched the grounds, retracing my steps, and then I saw her, an old woman holding Jack’s hand, leading him down a side path to the car park, as though she were making a getaway. I ran after them and grabbed Jack from her. I was shaking with anger.’
‘What was she doing with your son?’ asked Daly.
‘I didn’t stop to ask. A priest was walking nearby and I ran towards him. I could hear her calling after us but I didn’t dare look back.’
‘What did Jack say?’
‘He said she was a traveller. He’d wandered off and met her on a path. She’d wanted to know was he lost and where were his parents.’
‘Which are perfectly reasonable questions to ask,’ interposed Harry.
‘You seem to know a lot about travellers,’ said Daly.
‘I’ve had dealings with them. In the course of my work.’
‘Your work?’ A note of scorn entered Rebecca’s voice. Daly had not expected her to intervene in such a manner, but Harry seemed nonplussed.
‘Why did it take you so long to come to me?’ she asked him. The tone of her voice made his tardiness seem like a gross betrayal.
‘I came as soon as I could.’ Harry looked at Daly warily, unwilling to involve him in what seemed a domestic matter. ‘I already told you, I missed your messages.’
For Rebecca, however, Daly’s presence seemed of less importance.
‘You should have come sooner. None of your colleagues knew what you were up to. They hadn’t seen you for ages.’ Her voice teetered on the edge of a dangerous darkness. Harry’s discomfort increased.
‘I’ve been busy. I’ll explain everything later.’
‘Why are you telling me this roundabout story? Why don’t you just tell me the truth?’
Harry’s eyes grew small and intense. ‘I already told you. I dropped everything and came as soon as I could.’
Daly watched the two of them continue their argument in curt tones, trying to keep it civilized, but everything about their strained eyes and voices suggested that their relationship was derailing. Daly had seen it countless times before: the stress of a child’s disappearance or death breeding a void between its parents; the solitude of guilt and grief turning both partners into human shards, fragments that would never again constitute a functioning whole.
Eventually Rebecca fell silent. Daly and the journalist listened to her unsteady breathing. Her shoulders trembled slightly as she tried to control her emotions. She seemed to realize that it was the wrong time and place to have an argument, in the police station’s atmosphere of forensic surveillance, with a detective as piggy-in-the-middle. She repeated the same reproachful sentence, but in a smaller voice. ‘You should have come sooner.’
Daly decided he ought to send the couple home. The interview had reached an impasse, and he realized that the couple now craved to be on their own. They needed privacy to vent their fears and whatever marital tension was bubbling under the surface. He needed them to isolate whatever resentments they held against each other so that they would not infect the investigation.
Before they left, he showed them some still photographs from the hotel CCTV. ‘These are the boys who took Jack from the hotel. Do you recognize them?’
They shook their heads.
‘I want you to think carefully about these photographs. I want you to try to remember where you might have seen these teenagers before. Perhaps they have been watching you for some time and were waiting for this opportunity. Perhaps they befriended your son and encouraged him to run away. Talk about it and think it over. We need to work out what part Jack played in his disappearance.’
They stared at him blankly. They had crossed into the no man’s land of conjecture and fleeting hope. Already they were forming a more troubling picture of their son, a vulnerable child tricked into joining a gang of runaway travellers in a camper van, a feral teenager stationed at the wheel, all of them outlaws on a road trip, fleeing the messed-up world of grown-ups.
‘In the meantime, if you can think of any reason why these people might be interested in your son, let me know.’
Daly frowned after the couple left the station. He was still troubled by the fact that Harry Hewson’s behaviour had seemed too poised and controlled. He had the nagging feeling that he had been holding something back. But why would a father desperate to find his son not tell the police the truth? He kept his suspicions to himself for the
time being and organized two teams of uniformed officers to check all the traveller encampments, legal and illegal, on this side of the border for any information about the McGinns. He also made contact with the Gardai in Monaghan to launch a similar operation in the Republic. He asked Detective O’Neill to interview Jack’s teachers and his friends at school first thing in the morning. He wanted her to gather as much information as possible on the boy and his state of mind.
He drove home, his thoughts teeming with the events of the day. Only when the road orientated itself towards Lough Neagh’s dark mass of water did his mind begin to clear. Beyond him lay the unscathed heart of his country and one of its great wild spaces, its waves reflecting a silver mesh of moon and quivering starlight. He stopped the car and stared for a while at the expanse, mesmerized by the countless threads of reflected light rising and sinking with the ghostly slowness of the waves, which ran all the way, it seemed, to the humped silhouette of his little cottage. Even in the dark, the nearness of the lough never failed to calm his thoughts. Was it because this impassable barrier of water forced the end of all his travelling, depriving him of his restlessness?
Starting the engine again for the final stretch home, he began to think about the connections between the Hewsons and the travellers. It was a textbook procedure in criminal investigations. Explore the links, even if it meant casting suspicion on an entirely innocent party. He was struck by Harry Hewson’s knowledge of traveller ways, and his admission that he had worked on news stories about their tussles with law and order. The thought struck him: what if the Hewsons’ marital tensions were deeper than they seemed even to his discerning eye? What if they were in the throes of separation and custody issues had risen to the fore? The prospect of divorce changed children into powerful tools of menace and punishment. Humiliation and fear of loneliness might make a father act desperately. Desperate enough to stage a mock abduction?
Harry had seemed stubbornly calm all day. Had it been a protective response to Rebecca’s panic or a symptom of his secret control over the events? Ordinarily, would a father not be frantic also, demanding more of the police, less satisfied with how the search operation was progressing?
Daly climbed out of his car and made his way towards the dimly lit front door of his cottage. It struck him that suspecting the husband in this way made him feel happier about himself. The image of Rebecca’s stricken face flashed into his mind, her eyes lifting towards him, eyelashes quivering, her lips pale with worry. He remembered the soft grip of her hands in the courthouse, the way they sought out his fingers with the fervent instinct of a child. Was she the loveless victim of a plot hatched by her husband, or were his suspicions little more than the fanciful imaginings of a middle-aged man, the narcissism of a lonely detective who believed that she had singled him out to rescue her from a doomed marriage?
As he slipped his key into the latch, the black hen flapped towards him from her secret perch, as though to welcome his return home, but at the last moment, she faltered, fluttering her wings frantically and rising up on to the roof, far beyond his grasping hands. He looked up and saw that a few tiles had slipped from their places, and were now lodged precariously at the edge of the guttering. The hen hopped across the roof and nestled into one of the gaps. He called and called her, but despite his desperate coaxing, she refused to budge. Even when he pulled out a ladder and climbed on to the roof, she scrambled away from him, finding more and more inaccessible perches along the eaves. He could see that the roof was in bad shape and needed extensive repairing. He cursed to himself, thinking of the cost, and gave up on the hen. She had become his nightly trial, the antidote to his lonely narcissism.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘You should see a doctor,’ Detective O’Neill chided Daly as he prepared to chair the first meeting of the search team at nine o’clock the next morning. ‘At least get something to take the swelling down.’
Daly did not mind that his face was bruised and swollen. Somehow, it completed him. He dredged up a smile that revealed more of his cut lip and made him wince. ‘Serves us right for wandering into a traveller wedding without proper back-up.’
O’Neill smiled at him in sympathy. ‘Take you off court duty and within a few hours you end up with a face like a busted slipper.’
‘Sinclair will think I went crazy with my new-found freedom.’
Daly began the meeting by summing up what they knew so far about the boy’s disappearance. However, the face of Detective Irwin looming at the door window soon broke his train of thought. The Special Branch detective seemed to take an insolent pleasure in watching the proceedings. In spite of Daly’s seniority, Irwin had invaded his investigations without qualms, asking probing questions that were just shy of being insubordinate, happier, it seemed, to do battle over the political ramifications of Daly’s work rather than indulge in some proper detective work of his own. His face drifted by the window, his eyes fastening on to Daly’s, vigilant and gleaming with anticipation. Daly stared back at him, wearing his bruises like badges of honour. He had sloughed off his old skin, and abandoned for good the confines of the courtroom and the pleas of shoplifting mothers. No one in Special Branch could accuse him of hiding from real police work any longer.
As the meeting went on, Irwin’s lingering presence at the door and the impudence of his staring eyes made Daly’s skin prickle. These days, the new police headquarters building echoed with the footsteps of numerous Special Branch officers in the mould of Irwin. So habitual and discreet were they in their wanderings through the corridors and incident rooms that they seemed like watchful ghosts when compared to their harried counterparts in CID. While other departments such as Community Liaison and the traffic branch faced drastic cuts to their workforces, there seemed to be more recruits to the Special Branch team by the day. Daly had taught himself to ignore their presence, and told his junior officers the most helpful thing to do was to pretend they were not there, to pass them by as though they belonged to a different world.
So many competing interests were juxtaposed in this gleaming new building: the policing of the past and the policing of the present, one overshadowing the other. Even the simplest run-of-the-mill investigations into a car crash or a missing boy might turn out to have sinister implications for the stability of the peace process or the career of a former paramilitary now protected within the political framework of the new Northern Ireland government. Daly had grown used over the past few years to Irwin being his tail, going wherever he went, staying where he stayed. He dreaded to think what the successes of his detective work might look like through the eyes of this cold but attentive shadow, who had forged a career out of doing little more than watching and waiting for other officers to step over invisible political lines.
Although Daly had slept poorly and was tired, the events of the previous day painfully cramming his head, the thought of Irwin prowling around the edges of the investigation had the effect of energizing him. He was determined to prove that he was fit for the job. He was the lead detective, and that meant being the driving force in the search for the boy, even though the mêlée at the hotel had blunted and sapped the collective spirit of the team. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since Rebecca had summoned his help, and so far they had secured very little in terms of tangible leads.
‘Are we sure there was an element of coercion in his disappearance?’ Susie Brooke, the anti-racism officer, asked him. ‘For the sake of the travelling community, we need to work out as quickly as possible what actually happened to this boy. This is a closed society we’re dealing with, where privacy is paramount. Unfortunately, travellers fear the consequences of talking openly to the police.’
Irwin’s fish-like eyes bulged at the window in the door. Daly was all too familiar with the complacent smirk on his lips.
‘Of course,’ he replied, trying to concentrate on the priorities of the investigation. ‘We don’t want the media conjecturing the worst possible scenario and stirring up paranoia towards every t
raveller encampment in the country.’
‘What do you mean by the worst possible scenario?’ asked Brooke.
Nobody spoke. The rest of the officers, trained in the rules of political correctness, did not voice the fear that consumed their thoughts; instead, they semaphored it in a mixture of glances and throat clearances.
Daly answered for them. ‘That the travellers are involved in organized child trafficking.’
‘But Jack Hewson appears to have been free to play and mix with the travellers at the hotel. That doesn’t suggest to me that child traffickers are at work.’
‘That’s true,’ said Daly. ‘O’Sullivan’s effort at helping us in the hotel also goes some way to lessening that suspicion.’
Daly glanced up at the door and saw that the irksome shape of Irwin had passed from view. Taking advantage of the pause, Sergeant Tom McKenna began summarizing what he had gleaned from questioning O’Sullivan and his son.
‘I’ll make it brief,’ said McKenna. ‘O’Sullivan has no idea where Jack was taken to. He can’t give us any leads. Nor does he know anything about the McGinns or where they might be right now. It strikes me that he’s clamming up to protect his relatives.’
‘Were you able to tell when he was holding something back?’ asked Daly.
‘How would I notice that?’
‘You said you thought he was clamming up.’
‘How could I tell what he doesn’t want me to know?’ McKenna flashed Daly a look of surprise.
Daly made an effort to suppress his annoyance. He doubted if McKenna had listened properly to O’Sullivan’s answers, or probed his silences. What the junior officer saw and heard was probably based on the stereotypes he held of travellers, rather than the flesh-and-blood man before him, the rasp of his voice, the flicker of his eyes, and the movement of his hands.
‘Did you ask him if he knew Rebecca or Harry Hewson?’ asked Daly.
‘O’Sullivan was incomprehensible for most of the interview,’ said McKenna, shrugging his shoulders. ‘With his thick accent and fast talking, he just kept dodging every question I asked.’
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