Trespass

by Anthony J. Quinn

  Daly was about to take off after her when his mobile phone buzzed into life. It was Commander Sinclair.

  ‘Daly? You never showed for your appointment.’ Sinclair’s voice was agitated.

  Daly did not reply. He was trying to catch his breath.

  ‘I’ve gone to a lot of bother, getting you back on this case and organizing a psychologist. Like it or not, you have to talk to her.’

  Daly felt a weight return to his shoulders.

  ‘You have another appointment for tomorrow morning. I want you to be there, without fail, understand?’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘Why? Has something come up? You sound out of breath.’

  ‘No. Nothing has come up. I’ve just been running.’

  ‘Let’s be clear about this, Daly. No amount of running is going to help you resolve your problems. You have things to get off your chest and it’s time you started telling your story.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Rain had fallen on the travellers as they followed the hunched figure of the old woman through the forest, a drifting veil of drizzle reducing the path to a tangled trail of mud and slime. Jack had looked up through the breaks in the cloud for a glimpse of the sun but the murky glow overhead failed to thicken to a shine. The faces of the traveller men had been indistinct, too, averted from his anxious eyes, as they passed a bottle of whiskey around and spoke in whispers.

  For about an hour, they picked their way over the slippery terrain of rocks and overgrown roots, the children stepping lightly, bouncing from rock to rock, while Jack plodded behind, pushed on by the traveller men. They wandered along the side of a fern-covered valley riddled with side streams that ran into a river glittering bleakly below. They passed under a pair of vast hollies bedecked with red berries. The old woman leaned her weight against the trees, sometimes running her hand along their bark, as though she were greeting old friends.

  Eventually, they reached a dim and featureless cavern in the side of the hill. When his eyes adjusted to the greater gloom, Jack saw they had reached some sort of shrine to the Virgin Mary. He doubted that anyone had prayed there for a long time. The grotto did not feel like a holy refuge. The pale and peeling statue of Mary encased in its rocky crevice resembled a larval creature that had never taken wing. Below the statue, the stunted thorn trees appeared to be in bloom, but on closer examination, he saw that the skeletal branches were adorned with pieces of string and glistening fabric, prayer tokens left behind by superstitious visitors.

  The old woman crept towards a pool of water, next to which an altar had been fashioned from a piece of smooth black rock. Someone had placed a crude-looking crucifix, a bunch of whitethorn blossoms in a vase ringed by stumpy candles, and in the centre a faded photograph of a girl in a glass frame. The old woman took out a cloth and began cleaning the items. The others watched her work with her rag, wiping and polishing, engrossed, as if nothing else mattered. When she was done cleaning, she bowed her head and began murmuring a prayer.

  Someone pushed Jack. He had not minded being shoved along the path because in the greyness, he had felt virtually invisible, but now, standing in the centre of the circle of watching eyes, he felt exposed and frightened. A bitter wind blew through the trees, whirling bits of old leaves and sticking them to the gypsies’ pale faces.

  A girl whispered in his ear: ‘When she calls, you must bless yourself and walk three times around the well.’

  A religious hush descended on the crowd, and then he heard the old woman say his name.

  ‘Go to her,’ said the girl.

  He clambered towards the old woman. The sound of water dripping and gurgling through countless crevices in the rocks made speech unnecessary. It was hard even to hear the wind in the trees. He blessed himself and walked around the pool three times. The old woman pursed her lips and nodded her head to show her appreciation at his devoutness, and then she beckoned him closer.

  She stared at him with a toothless grimace. Her face was cut with so many creases that her blue eyes seemed to stare out of the wrinkled map of all the paths she had travelled. She smiled, as though she had been waiting a long time for him, and then she dipped her hand in the murky water of the pool and scattered the drops over him.

  He remembered now where he had seen her before: on the holiday in Donegal, the traveller who had blessed him at the monastery.

  She leaned so close to him he could feel the weight of her sadness. The sound of someone weeping seemed to seep through the cracks in the rocks.

  ‘I come and pray here as often as I can,’ she said. ‘I’m the only one who visits this shrine now. I pull away the weeds, wipe the photograph, and bring new flowers. I still mourn her. All I have is this wet lump of rock where I pray for the return of her body. Take a look at the photograph, son. Do you recognize who she is?’

  He blinked and looked at the photograph and then back at the old woman. ‘No.’

  Above them, the statue of the Virgin watched them with her gutted eyes.

  ‘This poor girl is what connects us. Her name was Mary O’Sullivan. My eldest daughter.’

  He glanced again at the photograph. A big black beetle with a shiny back scuttled over the altar. ‘I’ve never heard of her.’

  The gurgling of the rivulets deepened like a hidden river rising beneath the rocks.

  The old woman’s face floated closer to him. ‘Look closely. The picture was taken a year before your father was born. She was his mother.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She was murdered by a gang of bad men.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who?’ she repeated back to him, her blue eyes clouding with fear. ‘The same men who will kill you when they discover you have the gift.’

  ‘What gift are you talking about?’

  ‘The gift of bad blood.’

  She rubbed her index finger and thumb together in a gesture which the boy recognized as signifying money. The men watching them began to snigger. He could hear the dregs of greed in their throats. He refused to look at her face, or the photograph of the girl. He wanted to run into the forest along the dangerous path to the river, anywhere but beside this sinister old woman, whose voluminous skirts threatened to spread out and encircle him, dragging him into the dark depths of the past.

  ‘If my life is in danger, why can’t I go home? Why can’t I go back to my parents?’

  ‘Keeping you here is not my idea. It’s not the traveller way.’

  ‘Then help me get home.’

  ‘We have a path to take first.’ Her voice began to grumble. ‘It wasn’t us who started this journey. The men who murdered your grandmother and hid her body. They’re the reason why you can’t leave us now.’

  He forced himself to look at the photograph. His eyes wavered. He felt nervous, awed by the story the old woman began to relate. She told him he had run away too soon, but his predicament was more than just a matter of bad timing. His life was now in danger and so was his father’s. A flurry of shadows fell over her face, or was it more shrivelled leaves picked up by the wind?

  ‘We travellers count for nothing in this society. Which is why we must stick together,’ she said, lowering her eyes to the altar.

  Seeing that the old woman had finished, the travellers bowed their heads without a word and filed out of the grotto. A rough hand pushed Jack along the track. He began to recognize the road they were guiding him towards. It was one of the gypsy ways his father had often talked about. He had promised Jack they would travel it together some day, but now the terrain was unravelling, full of deep recesses and shadows, warped out of all recognition by greed and the desire for revenge.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  On Tuesday morning, back at police headquarters, there was an email waiting for Daly about the police check he had ordered on Hewson’s background. He had been due to see the police psychologist but the appointment had completely slipped his mind, such was the unusual nature of the email. For some reason, he did not h
ave the proper authorization to access the file. He stared at the security clearance code that was required. He had no idea what it meant or who could grant it. The new computerized archive was still an alien landscape to him. He had learned to stitch a route together, navigating his way eventually to the desired information without getting too mired in the system, but in this instance, he had stumbled upon an invisible border. There were various official and unofficial ways he could respond to the obstacle, but the only one Daly was interested in involved finding out the truth as quickly as possible.

  He checked the access history for Hewson’s file, and saw that it had last been opened on 22 August from Dungannon police station. He searched back through the duty rosters to see who had been in charge of calls that day. Cross-referencing the date and the name of the inspector, he came across a brief describing a road collision, which had taken place early that morning, involving a thirty-nine-year-old male, who had been subsequently arrested on suspicion of drink-driving.

  A little more digging and he found the inspector’s original report. The suspect had been described as a journalist, but any other reference to him had been redacted from the transcript. At the bottom of the report was a note from Special Branch recommending that the prosecution for drink-driving be dropped because it risked compromising the security of an operative.

  A prickle of apprehension ran down Daly’s spine. The file suggested that Hewson had been recruited as an informant of some sort. The implication of this could hardly be more serious. Hewson had been holding back a lot more than even his wife realized. He had more than one dangerous secret. Was that the reason why he had disappeared? Because he feared the police investigation into the boy’s abduction might expose discrepancies within his professional life, and threaten his covert role with Special Branch, or worse, his life?

  Hewson must have weighed up the dangers and somehow decided that there was no point in revealing everything to Daly, and that he had to go it alone. If so, it was a heavy price to pay. Hewson was an informer but a father, too, which was why he must have made the drastic decision to disappear with his camper van and its secrets. He had become a fugitive, following in the footsteps of his son, at the risk of destroying his family and his career as a Special Branch spy.

  Since he was rooting around in the police archives, Daly decided to do a trawl for the missing traveller woman Mary O’Sullivan, who had been the target of the intruders’ search at O’Sullivan’s mansion. He traced the name back to a case that detectives had closed in the late 1970s. According to the records, O’Sullivan had been twenty-one years old when she was first reported missing in the spring of 1976. She was registered as the mother of a six-month-old baby, which had been found by social workers, unkempt and hungry, in her abandoned caravan.

  The police investigation had thrown up an unpleasant secret within Mary’s family. Since Mary was unmarried and had no partner, the neglected baby became the charge of court while social workers organized its adoption. A copy of the baby’s birth certificate was located and on its examination, social workers made the appalling discovery that Mary’s own father, a man called Patrick Thomas John O’Sullivan, had been registered as the baby’s father.

  The charge of incest had caused a stir within the travelling community, which had leaked into the press, sparking condemnation from Church authorities and politicians. Mary’s father had taken off from the family’s permanent halting site, disappearing over the border before he could be brought to court. Daly noted that while only one detective had investigated Mary’s disappearance, a number of teams had tried to track down Patrick O’Sullivan. They had mounted surveillance operations of traveller encampments along the border, which had led to the arrests of several young traveller men for smuggling small amounts of fuel and alcohol. Anonymous callers had given the police tip-offs over Mary’s disappearance, claiming she had been murdered and her body hidden after the IRA coerced her into informing on the movements of police officers and soldiers living along the border. Daly noted that whereas the tip-offs had been duly recorded, the detective in charge of her disappearance did not appear to have followed them up in any meaningful way.

  Members of the travelling community had also contacted police, claiming they had seen in dreams the location of Mary’s body, usually the bottom of a disused well or a bog pool, but these visions had been treated as absurd and irrelevant. Police made contact with Gardai in the South in an attempt to trace the father, but their efforts were without success, and the incest charges were eventually dropped, along with the investigation into Mary’s disappearance. Daly perused the files and could find no further mention of Mary O’Sullivan, or her baby.

  He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his eyes. He thought of the Hewson family and the possible connections they might have with the travellers. He did not know for sure if father and son were still alive, or hiding in some traveller caravan on the other side of the border. Perhaps they had run off to a hideaway in Spain. His thoughts kept returning to Rebecca and her downcast eyes. There had been something so alluring about the look she had flashed him in the courthouse. He tried going through all the material his team had gathered on the boy’s disappearance, as if he could make the memory of her sadness disappear, but his search lacked conviction. He knew he was conning himself. He stared at the flickering computer screen for several minutes. Feeling thirsty, he got himself a glass of water, which he sipped slowly. He reached into his coat pocket and fiddled with his car keys. He went back through the archive materials he had photocopied about Mary O’Sullivan, as if he might find the origins of Rebecca’s dejection in those bleak historical details. When he had finished, he pushed his chair back and grabbed his coat.

  There was something much bigger and more sinister behind the disappearance of Harry Hewson and his son, and the most direct source of information he had available was Rebecca herself. A lost mother, removed from her only son. He could see now why she intrigued him so deeply. Following her was a way of probing the original wound of his childhood. Her beauty was just the bait, the erotic charge that lured him back to the loss of his mother and the confusion of his boyhood grief.

  Rebecca’s car was parked on the drive, yet when he rang her phone there was no answer. He watched the house from a discreet distance. After some minutes, he saw her hurry out and climb into her car. He followed her vehicle into the nearby town of Dungannon, and tracked its movements through the narrow, hilly streets. She seemed lost and wasted half an hour driving round in circles. Once parked, she moved from café to café, unable to settle, wandering through the streets, staring at shop windows, taking off in hurried little spurts.

  He kept watching the surroundings, searching for any sign of a shadow, a traveller in disguise, or a white van, but there was no sign of any contact. She appeared completely alone. At one point, as he followed her through the town’s central square, he thought he heard someone call her name. He was not sure where the voice came from. He steered through a crowd of shoppers, jostling his way to get closer, but she floated away from him without any sign of recognition.

  He trailed her through the public park at the bottom of the town. Not once did she look back or stop for anyone. He began to suspect that she knew he was following her and that her meandering route was a ruse, a way to distract his attention. Perhaps this was all an act for the benefit of the police, and this version of her that he was pursuing was a fake, a woman pretending to be distracted by grief and fear, with no substance of her own, while the real Rebecca Hewson plotted her next move in the darkness.

  He waited for her outside a shop, standing in full view as she stepped out, but either she was lost in her thoughts or ignored him on purpose. Determined now, he made his approach, walking up to her and calling out her name.

  She stopped and looked at him in confusion, and then gave a half-smile in recognition, which gradually tensed into a frown. ‘Have you been following me?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Am I in danger
?’

  ‘I’m trying to work out the answer to that question myself.’ He examined her face. ‘How are you managing?’

  ‘As well as can be expected.’

  ‘Anything come to light that might be of interest to the police?’

  ‘Nothing worth mentioning.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘No. What about you? Have you anything to tell me?’

  ‘Not at the minute. Every piece of information is important to a police investigation like this, which is why you have to tell me all that you know.’

  She studied him with a nervous glance. ‘How long have you been following me?’

  ‘Since yesterday.’ He paused, watching the anxiety increase in her face. ‘I was at Maghery church when you met the traveller woman.’

  Immediately, she went on the defensive. ‘Am I a criminal? What have I done to deserve this level of attention?’

  ‘Perhaps you should begin by telling me what happened in the church.’

  ‘Why are you focusing your investigation on me? Do you think I have something to do with my son’s disappearance?’

  ‘I need to know why you secretly arranged to talk to the woman.’

  ‘I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about it. She called me on the phone. She warned me not to talk to the police. It was stupid and impulsive of me, but I wanted to go and confront them. I wanted to know why they had taken Jack.’

  ‘We could have organized covert surveillance, advised you what questions to ask and recorded everything.’