CHAPTER FIFTEEN
For the next twenty-four hours, Daly and his officers interrogated and watched O’Sullivan and his son in the custody cell, but they discovered little of anything. The two slept, ate, answered the questions that were fired at them, paced up and down in their cell, and seemed not to notice the growing desperation in the officers’ eyes.
‘We didn’t do anything to the boy,’ said O’Sullivan. ‘It’s not our fault he sneaked into the back of the van. You can’t do anything to us, so let us go.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ said Daly.
‘We’ve done nothing wrong,’ O’Sullivan yelled as the door of the room slammed shut.
Daly paced up and down outside the interview room, thinking of a fresh angle of inquiry. At the very least, the father and son were key witnesses, and Daly was worried that through his own incompetence he might let them slip through his grasp.
‘We’re running out of time,’ said O’Neill, joining him in the corridor.
‘You’re right. I wish we could hold them for longer.’
Back inside the room, Daly asked them for more information about the McGinns.
‘We’ve already told you everything we know. It’s time you let us go.’
O’Neill stared at Daly as if to say O’Sullivan had a point.
Eventually, the two were released and warned to stay within the police jurisdiction, but not before Daly had organized a pair of officers and an unmarked car to tail them and report on anything suspicious.
Based on his misgivings about Harry Hewson, Daly decided to launch a more low-profile and personal line of inquiry, one that he wished to keep quiet because it was based on little more than his intuition. He ordered a criminal background check on the husband and a full driving licence check. He also rang round a few of his contacts in the local newspapers, but surprisingly none of them knew of Hewson or his work as a journalist. He asked the reporters to do some digging round and see what they could come up with to shed light on Hewson’s professional and personal life.
Meanwhile, Detective O’Neill had interviewed Jack’s school friends and teachers. She told Daly that their stories tallied on one main detail: Jack had been having problems over bullying in the playground. On several occasions, he had come to blows with a gang of boys in an older class. His teachers had linked the bullying to a decline in his schoolwork and the fact that he kept missing classes on Wednesdays, which was the day he had disappeared.
‘According to one of his friends, Jack was convinced this gang of boys had it in for him and wanted to attack him outside the school gates,’ said O’Neill.
This was something the Hewsons had not seemed to know about their son, or had at least not reported it to Daly. He was sure that Rebecca would have mentioned it if she had been aware of her son’s fears. Perhaps there were other things that Jack had kept hidden from them; worrying things that – magnified in the mind of a ten-year-old – might have prompted his flight.
To his annoyance, Daly saw that Inspector Fealty of Special Branch had left him a string of messages, requesting regular updates and a transcript of any interviews with suspects and eyewitnesses. Daly immediately fired back an email stating that Fealty would have to fill out an official request form for each separate transcript, clearly indicating the precise details of the information he wished to see. He sighed. The landscape of the investigation was steepening forbiddingly. Now that Special Branch were poking their nose in, Daly felt the prospect of any simple solution to the case dwindle considerably. He feared he was sliding towards another acrimonious battle with political forces within the higher command of the police service.
He left the headquarters and headed for the border. Where else could he shake off the shadows that oppressed him than amid the labyrinth of introverted roads criss-crossing Northern Ireland and the Republic? Ever since his Troubles’ childhood, Daly had the sense that these neglected border roads were transient rather than fixed, capricious and unknowable, likely to disappear into a bottomless bog or end mid-air over a bomb crater rather than lead one to a desired destination. They were the secret paths of paramilitaries and smugglers: men and women who hid from the law, who sought safe passage from the police and soldiers, while the surrounding farms and divided parishes sank into decline and abandonment. The undertow of the past was strong in this part of the country, and Daly was on the alert, checking his rear-view window constantly for suspicious vehicles.
Thankfully, there was little rain, mist, or fog and he was able to find his way along the crooked roads using his instinct and vigilance, driving until he reached the site where the McGinns had been encamped before they fled with the boy. Daly had checked the police records. An elderly farmer named Samuel Reid had made several complaints about the encampment, but as the travellers had not broken any laws, the police had been unwilling to move them on. Reid, who lived in the nearby farmhouse, had accused the travellers of poking about the farm and prying into his private life. Daly was intrigued by the complaints and the similarities with Rebecca Hewson’s account of the travellers in her back garden.
He pulled his car on to the muddy verge and got out. He inspected the huddle of small fields and meaningless lanes, the cramped pine forest and marshy hollow that surrounded the campsite. It was a bleak and difficult threshold to nowhere in particular. Why had the travellers chosen to pitch in this godforsaken place? Gypsies did not follow maps or GPS systems. They used older, more intuitive ways to navigate the country, but it was difficult for Daly to come up with a logical reason why the clan would have bought this particular field with plans to turn it into a permanent halting site.
He got out and walked around the abandoned field. Beyond the gate, the churned-up mud was knee-deep in places. He half expected to discover evidence of a drunken, slovenly encampment, but apart from the tyre tracks, there was barely a sign the travellers had been there. A few flecks of litter were visible in the corners of the hedges. At the sites of the campfires, someone had spread fresh sods of turf. He hung around the fringes of the field, examining the hedges for rubbish that might yield a clue to the McGinns’ whereabouts, but he found nothing at all. Crows muttered at him, dropping out of sight over the windblown shapes of hawthorn and willow. Bubbles glistened in the bottom of the ditches where the marsh water had broken loose. All he saw was a fetid cauldron of rotting vegetation.
A small blue van braked suddenly on seeing Daly. The driver rolled down his window and beckoned to the detective. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
Daly did not like the look on his face, the way his eyes barely blinked, and the aggressive frown on his lips. ‘I’m checking this field.’
‘You the police?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, when are you going to start catching the real criminals in this country?’
‘Who are you talking about?’ Daly wondered why he was answering his questions at all.
‘It’s them gypsies, always misbehaving, always making a nuisance of themselves. Turn your back for a second and they come crawling out of the night to set up camp on your doorstep, and all the time the government pays them just for living. You need to round up the whole bloody lot and send them back over the border.’
‘We can’t arrest anyone until they’ve broken the law.’
The driver glowered at Daly. ‘Of course they’re doing something wrong. They’re invading our land. This is our country, not a bloody holiday camp.’
‘Did the travellers commit any crime while they were here?’
The man chuckled to himself ‘Go up to the farmhouse and ask the man there. He’ll tell you how they harassed the life out of his brother, the farmer who owned that hedge you were poking at.’
‘Why can’t the farmer speak for himself?’
‘Because he died in a horrible accident. His burial is tomorrow. Go up quickly and you’ll catch the brother. He’s a very important person these days but he has a story to tell you.’ He started up his engine. ‘Must get
on, now,’ he shouted, as though Daly had been hindering him from his busy afternoon routine.
Daly drove up the lane towards a sky of silvery dark clouds marching along the brow of the hill. The blackthorns had blossomed and the silhouetted hedges seemed to carry their own trails of light, running up to the farmhouse like a series of simmering fuses, but the two-storey house itself was dark and dreary, reflections of the sky stifled within its small windows, and no signs of life about the place at all. Daly pulled into the back yard and parked behind a spotless black BMW. He stepped into mud curdled with straw and horse manure.
From one of the ramshackle outhouses there rose the grunting and slurping of hungry pigs, their stench fouling the air. He found it hard to pick out a safe passage to the back door. In fact, everything about the dead man’s farm was depressing and low key, apart from the figure of Alistair Reid, the famous Unionist politician, who looked surprised when Daly introduced himself at the door.
Daly had been taken aback himself when the door swung back to reveal Reid’s formidable features, his grey-black hair streaked back from his forehead, his eyes luminous and daunting. Daly was a simple detective based in a rural district, while Reid belonged to the most powerful political circles in the country, jetting off on regular trips to Dublin, London and Washington to bolster Northern Ireland’s peace process and seek support for the region’s ailing economy. Daly could not help feel a little insecure in his presence.
Adjusting quickly to the detective’s arrival, Reid ushered him into the living room with an air of warmth, as if they had known each other for years. He introduced Daly to his press assistant, a woman in expensive-looking clothes sitting in a corner, and on the opposite side of the room, Reid’s dead brother, who was laid out in a dark suit in a coffin, looking like a shrunken, more depressed version of the politician, his waxen features frozen in an expression of sadness, sunspots streaking his face and gnarled hands like mud-stained teardrops.
Newspapers lay spread on a low coffee table with a tray of tea, a funeral order of service pushed to one side. Socially, it felt awkward for Daly, interviewing the politician with his brother in the corner, and his unease increased. The room seemed to shrink to the size of a closet.
‘It’s terrible but at a time like this I can’t resist checking the headlines,’ Reid confided in Daly as he lifted the papers. ‘I’m sure you can understand how strong an addiction it can be.’
Even slumped on a sofa, Reid managed to retain an air of condescending authority. The defects of his face – the crooked nose, the darkened bags under his eyes, and the heavy jowls – reinforced the sense of power he emanated. His was a face destined to be thrust into the public domain, to be admired and hated for his flaws.
‘An addiction?’ said Daly.
‘Politics. Public opinion. I don’t read newspapers for relaxation or their literary merit.’
Reid tidied away the papers and poured Daly some tea. In the silence, the ticking of the clock seemed muted. On the mantelpiece, a set of silver-framed pictures depicting smiling relatives had been displayed with the same loyalty and care as the bible and photograph of the Queen in the china cabinet. Someone had opened the window, but it did little to disperse the fusty smell of age that seeped from the tired-looking furniture.
Alistair Reid looked pale, the way grieving brothers were meant to look. But in his hooded eyes, Daly saw something else: the mind of a politician calculating everything, assessing the tragedy that had been dealt him, working out how to play his cards to the maximum personal benefit. He let out a sigh that was a mixture of impatience and grief, and glanced at his press officer. She was sitting stiffly by the door in a vigilant manner that left Daly thinking she might be just as attentive if Reid were dabbling in a little gardening, advising him what gloves to wear and what weeds to pull.
‘I kept telling him to be more careful.’ Reid shook his head. ‘Believe me, Inspector, the sight of a police car calling at my house is not unusual, but when one woke me up yesterday morning, I had the sinking feeling that something had happened to Sammy.’
‘Why was that?’
‘My brother was feeling very troubled lately. His judgement was not what it should have been. I don’t think he was sleeping that well.’
‘And somehow you expected him to have an accident?’
For an instant, a wild haunted look stared out of Reid’s eyes, and then it was gone.
‘Why exactly have you come here, Inspector?’ he asked. ‘The police told me this morning that they would not be investigating Samuel’s death, beyond the usual coroner’s report.’
‘There’s another investigation I’m working upon. I believe your brother might have been of assistance had he been alive still.’
Reid’s nose twitched as if he had scented something unpleasant. ‘Special Branch have also been in touch with me. They wanted to go over the security ramifications of Sammy’s death. They’re not unduly concerned.’
‘Who were you speaking to?’
‘A detective called Irwin. He seemed busy. At least, busier than you, that is.’
‘Special Branch are always busy,’ said Daly. Whenever Irwin popped up one step ahead of him, he wondered what it was he was not meant to see or hear.
‘Your brother made several phone calls to the police over the past month complaining about a nearby traveller camp. He was fearful for his life. Why would that have been?’
‘I wish I knew.’ Reid’s eyes watched Daly, compact and still.
‘He never revealed why the travellers were targeting him or what personal questions they were asking him?’
‘Paranoia is not my speciality, Inspector. Don’t involve me in whatever it is you’re speculating.’
‘But you are involved, Mr Reid. The dead man was your brother.’
The troubled look passed across Reid’s features again. ‘To tell you the truth, Inspector, Sammy had become a stranger to me these past few weeks.’
‘Was he ill?’
‘Not ill, just haunted.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Possessed by those travellers, I might say. Instead of just bloody ignoring the camp and waiting for the authorities to get rid of them, he grew obsessed with their presence. All these years, he was used to just his own company, you see. The travellers had camped so close to his farm. He thought their idleness was proof they were plotting against him, that something terrible was going to happen.’
‘What do you mean plotting against him?’
Reid shrugged. ‘He was protective of the land. It was embedded in him, a part of his blood. He feared they had come to prise him away from his fields.’
‘When did you last talk?’
‘A few nights ago.’
‘How did he seem?’
‘Confused. Full of dark fears.’
‘What type of fears?’
Reid let out a pensive sigh. ‘I don’t know. I pretended to understand him, showed him sympathy, but his rambling got worse.’ He leaned back in the sofa and stared hard at Daly. ‘I want you to understand something, Inspector, something that’s important to good Protestant farmers like Sammy.’ He pointed to the green screen of an ancient-looking television in the corner. ‘My brother lived in the past. He never changed anything in the house. Not even that TV. Now he’s gone the house will be a burden to me.’ He let the words hang in the air. ‘Sammy will be happier if I just let the place fall apart. Like so many Protestant farms in this part of the country.’
‘Why not sell up, give it to someone who’ll look after it?’
Reid grimaced. He looked at Daly with an expression that combined sadness and embitterment. ‘Protestants are leaving this part of the border all of the time. Not just the young and the very old, but entire families, without ever putting their homes up for sale. They’d rather they rot back into the ground than sell up.’
Daly looked confused. The property market along the border was an arcane and mysterious world, but surely there were buyers somewhere. ‘House prices are on the up ag
ain,’ he said. ‘And land is always highly sought after. Why wouldn’t they make some quick money out of their inheritance?’
‘The Troubles may be over, Inspector, but what we have now is a hidden war, with farms like this one the new front line. Republicans are buying up land all the time, flush with money from fuel and cigarette smuggling.’ Reid sighed. ‘Soon they’ll own all the farms on both sides of the border. They won’t stop until they drive the Protestant people off the face of this country.’
The wind swirled under the door, making it creak on its hinges. It whispered through cracks and crevices in the farmhouse, unsettling the fine dust that covered the dark furniture and the ashes that lay in the cold hearth. Daly wondered if Sammy’s ghost was planning to linger about the place, eager to oversee the slow decline of the house, rather than let it fall into the wrong hands. He stared through the window at the sombre hinterland of the border, full of shadows and bedraggled-looking trees, the darkness of the hedges and slanting fields thickening into a mist that seemed to rise into the air like a poisonous vapour, with nothing stirring in it, only the solitary shape of a crow rising and then sinking back into the thorns.
‘If I put this place up for sale, my bidders will be former paramilitaries, IRA godfathers, retired gunmen,’ said Reid. ‘It’s a matter of survival, Inspector. My people are being threatened with extinction.’ He stared out of the window as though the landscape were a property balance sheet with terrifying black columns rising against him. The door rattled in its frame, incapable of holding back the wind and the ghosts of a generation of Protestants.
He glanced back at Daly, to check if he was following the story. For a persuasive politician who had held the attention of crowds, Reid seemed weak on eye contact when it came to one-to-one communication. He rose to his feet and beckoned Daly to follow him.
Trespass Page 14
