Trespass

by Anthony J. Quinn

  He drifted off to sleep with a smile of contentment, imagining that he lay huddled in the bunk of a caravan parked in the darkest, most secluded corner of an impenetrable forest.

  *

  Jack Hewson and his companions spent the day hiding in the back of a fleet of caravans towed by vans, criss-crossing the border, separating into smaller and smaller groups, as though trying to shake off an invisible pursuer. A teenage traveller showed him the crossing points in the landscape. Not so long ago, during the Troubles, long stretches of the border had been impassable. Rolls of rusting barbed wire still lay at the sides of the road, ensnaring blocks of concrete and iron fenders. In other places, Jack could see where craters had been blown in the middle of the road, and later filled in with gravel and rubble. The land all around had been emptied of people.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ he told the youth.

  ‘What are you frightened of?’

  ‘The road. I’m frightened of losing my way.’

  The more they travelled, the more the road unravelled, as though they were trapped on an endless circuit. He had the suspicion that time itself was unravelling. He no longer had any idea what day of the week it was. The wind blew and the caravan rattled on open stretches of the road. He could feel the side panels shifting in the turbulence.

  ‘I miss my family.’

  ‘Don’t think about them.’

  ‘I want to go back.’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘My father will be looking for me. He won’t stop until he finds me.’

  ‘We have a story to piece together. Remember?’

  ‘Keep your stupid story.’

  At one point in the journey, the teenager shifted his focus to the back window of the caravan. A car was gaining on them. They stared through the net curtains as the strange vehicle drew closer, the face of the driver seeming to bulge against the windscreen, so intent was he on narrowing the distance. Jack recognized the car from the filling station they had stopped at for supplies.

  ‘We’ve company.’ The youth spoke into a mobile phone to the driver towing the caravan. ‘Might be the police.’

  The sound of the tyres deepened, the road turning smooth as it swept into the northern end of a long valley lined with pine trees. They pulled sharply on to a gravel track that climbed into the forest. The car came rocketing behind them, gaining all the time, but the traveller did not seem unduly worried by the threat it posed.

  ‘In another minute, we’ll be over the border,’ said the teenager. ‘If he’s the police, he’ll have to turn back.’

  The youth drew a calm satisfaction from the chase, watching with interest and approval the manoeuvres of the stranger’s car over the potholed track. They crossed a small river, and then the jolting shadow of the car disappeared.

  ‘The police are everywhere,’ said the traveller. ‘That’s why we have to keep moving.’

  When they turned back on to the road, he leaned over to reassure Jack. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘The road is empty again. It’s just a road, nothing to fear.’

  That night, their encampment felt wilder and more dangerous. The constant moving left the boy unsettled. He could not believe how much time had passed since he had last seen his mother, and wished he could at least whisper goodnight to her. The incessant travelling made the road seem a vacant and lonely place, the journey in the back of the caravan so tedious that it might have easily been a journey of stillness, the only thing moving the thoughts in his head and the blood pumping anxiously in his veins.

  Out of the darkness, more vans and caravans joined the camp. He heard a lot of whispering. The new arrivals were twitchy and jabbering in voices so fast he barely understood the words. A teenage girl undressed him in the caravan and made him wash in a basin of hot water with some soap. She seemed to take a sulky pleasure in watching him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Call me whatever you like.’

  The metal bangles on her wrists jangled as she poured more water into the basin.

  Later, around the campfire, the conversation of the travellers grew rough and aggressive. Jack listened to their monotonous stories about past grievances and mad schemes for the future. They talked about the great wealth that awaited them at the end of the road and bickered over how they would spend it. All they had to do was draw their enemies out of their hiding places.

  One of the men sidled up to Jack in the darkness, his breath reeking of alcohol. He ruffled the boy’s hair and whispered in a voice deformed with drunken affection, ‘We’re your new family now, Jack. Make sure you stay close.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is of no importance.’

  ‘But I need to know who you are.’

  ‘I’m your protector. That’s all you need to know. I will watch over you tonight. In the morning, you will have to disappear again. You might not see me for days, but I will be there in the background, watching over you.’

  ‘What if I run away? I’m not your prisoner.’

  ‘I’m meeting your father very soon. He has an important message for you. Don’t you want to know what it is?’

  He felt a stab of relief that the travellers had mentioned his dad. ‘Why can’t I wait here for him? Why must I keep travelling?’

  ‘There are things none of us know at this stage. Knowledge comes at an expense. The way of the road is to find out step by step, a little at a time.’ The traveller grew pensive. ‘A long time ago, my sister was killed by some bad men. Ever since, I’ve been travelling this road constantly. I’ve had to make myself invisible in my own country, all the time waiting for her killers to reveal themselves.’

  ‘But you can’t make me invisible, too. I don’t want to go back on the road.’

  He sighed. ‘We travellers know that what divides us is bad. The border, hedges, walls, property boundaries. They are all bad. But the road is good. The road flows and joins people. Life should flow like the road. This is why you must keep travelling with us.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A ringing sound mounted in Daly’s ears. He awoke in the early-morning darkness, waiting for the thud of a hangover headache, but none came. I haven’t been drinking, he thought, it’s the phone. He groped his way to the hall.

  ‘We’ve found Hewson, Inspector,’ said the caller.

  ‘The father or the son?’ He knocked over a half-filled cup of cold tea and cursed quietly.

  ‘The father.’

  ‘Alive or dead?’

  ‘Quite definitely dead.’

  Daly felt dread curdle his stomach and wished it were whiskey. He listened to the scant details of the discovery and took down the directions.

  The road to the border lay cloaked in mist. Shapes loomed ahead of him, barely visible in the headlights of his car, trees and desolate farmhouses swimming by and disappearing in the darkness. Eventually, he pulled up on to an unpaved road that was not marked on the map; his car rocked and swayed as though the ground beneath were battling the churn of a hidden sea. He found a solid-looking patch of earth next to the other police vehicles and eased the car to a halt.

  Clambering out in the early-morning light, he found himself tramping upon bogland. Peat and water sloshed beneath his feet under a thin skin of grass and heather. He looked up, hearing disembodied voices chatting ahead. A silvery plume rose from the eastern rim of the bog. Not another swathe of fog but the breaking of day. The sun forced its way through, dispelling the freezing mist, pulling its white shroud back from the crime scene, unfolding the black shapes of trees and the still figures of the police officers, ushering them closer to Daly as he orientated himself towards the single tragic note in the landscape, the murdered body of Harry Hewson.

  The reporter and his camper van had turned up along a lane that looked to be on the point of disappearance, ribboning into the vast tract of bogland straddling Tyrone’s border with the Republic. The authorities, north and south, will never make these crooked ways straight, nor bridge the bog’s
yawning trenches, thought Daly. This was the wilderness that shaped the theatre of border life, the decades of smuggling, the illegal dumping of rubbish and the secret burial of informers during the Troubles. A dangerous habitat for an outsider like Hewson, whose body now lay floating in a bog pool, his opened eyes looking oddly alert yet exhausted.

  Blood from the wound in his forehead had seeped thick as oil through the black water, which had sucked up the lower half of his pyjama-clad body and left his bare feet, creased with grime along the soles, bobbing up like flotsam. The face looked rough and stubborn, the eyes squinting balefully at the clearing sky. The jaw needed a shave, the stubble bristling in the frost. As the rising sun warmed the skin, rivulets of water streamed down from his frozen eyelashes and collected in the corners of his mouth.

  The last remnants of frost clung to his dark hair. Now that the thaw was taking hold, his death seemed less complete, his body softer and more relaxed-looking. The features of his face grew slack as though he was returning to the sleep his killer had disturbed. Daly prised open his hands and checked for evidence but they were both empty. His fingertips met the corpse’s, their coldness greedy for his warmth.

  ‘A passing farmer noticed the van hadn’t moved in a few days,’ one of the officers told Daly. ‘He went to investigate and found the body. It had been lying here for a while.’

  He watched Daly. ‘Looks like he was dragged from his bed and executed. What do you think?’

  Daly did not know what to think. His eyes lingered over the body, but his mind was consumed with worry for Jack Hewson. Were the same people who had done this now in charge of the boy? For a while, he paced restlessly around the police cordon. Someone should inform Rebecca, he thought, before the press gets wind of the killing. He lifted out his mobile phone and noticed his hand was shaking. He rang O’Neill and relayed the barest details of the murder scene. He asked her to send a family liaison officer to the wife’s house to break the bad news and reassure her that as yet there was no evidence her son had been harmed.

  The scene-of-crime officers walked past him, men and women who had the scientific equipment and ability to read the landscape of a murder, but who would never detect the dark shadows that disturbed Daly. A camera began flashing, over-exposing Hewson’s grizzled face, blasting the scene with light, simplifying everything, laying bare the final indignity of Hewson’s death and his loneliness.

  Daly tried to assemble the sequence of events. Had the reporter been killed as a direct result of the boy’s disappearance, or could it be the other way round? Perhaps they were both the consequence of another set of events entirely. Sometimes a detective had to work back to front. Moreover, where did Samuel Reid’s death fit into the pattern? If that was murder, too, then the killer had accomplished it with cruel perfection, but why the need to make it look like an accident and not the reporter’s?

  In an attempt to preserve the crime scene, officers set up a winch, and hoisted Hewson’s body out of the water. A squelching sound filled the air. Daly wandered off to check the camper van for clues. The track leading to where the reporter had driven his vehicle resembled the wake of a boat amid the sea of heather. It stretched south to the border, reminding Daly that there were hidden ways running through this landscape, connecting secrets and people, ways that petered out into wilderness, into danger and death.

  His attention sharpened as soon as he entered the van. Surveying the ransacked interior, he felt he was at last on the trail of Hewson, if not the murderer. He let his gaze wander over the creased map stuck to the wall. He searched the cluttered bedroom and cupboards for Hewson’s briefcase of research papers but found no trace of it. Nor was there any evidence that his son had been living with him in the camper van. He picked up a heavy photo album from the dining table and began leafing through it. It was a collection of traveller encampments, photographs from different decades of cleared spaces within forests or bogland. The old black-and-white pictures were filled with caravans, while the more recently taken photographs were empty of human traces. He flicked through pictures of men and women standing huddled together with sullen faces that looked as though they had been repeatedly rebuffed, abused and threatened. At their feet sat half-naked children. There was an air of oppression about the scenes. Beyond the caravans lay the dark siege of the ever-present forest. What had connected Hewson to these wild halting sites?

  What intrigued Daly the most was not the photographs, or the map on the wall, which was a standard Ordnance Survey publication of the border counties of Ireland, but the lines that Hewson had drawn upon it in red ink, zigzagging the border, traversing bogland, forest and rivers, sometimes following the routes of roads, sometimes abandoning them. Now and again, the red lines were crossed out or corrected, and in places, there were gaps marked out in dotted lines. He had a sense that these lines could tell a story if only he could decipher their meaning. Given that they crossed the border in the most remote of places, perhaps they had something to do with concealment and escape.

  At regular points along the route, Hewson had placed a series of pins. Daly noticed that some had ripped the map and were slightly discoloured, suggesting that they had been stuck there a long time ago. He noticed the distance between the pins was about thirty miles. There was a handwritten key at the bottom of the map linking the pins to a series of numbers. Daly went back to the album and noticed that the pictures were numbered and appeared to correspond to the locations of the pins on the map. Had Hewson been tracking old halting sites or secret border crossings? What connection did the reporter have with these wild places?

  The travellers had meandered along these roads for centuries, seeking out their ancient resting places miles from human settlement. What had prompted Hewson, a journalist from England, to follow in their footsteps? His work as a reporter had expanded into helping Special Branch, but what else had he been involved in? A journalist, an informer and a father. A middle-class life full of connections and commitments, which had been uprooted so violently on this road into the unknown.

  At least that was how it looked to the casual observer. Daly suspected that Hewson’s marriage had been at the point of collapse, but had that been enough to propel him into this dangerous terrain, driving a camper van with a map full of traveller secrets? He wanted to spend some time alone with Hewson, not the water-soaked corpse but the inanimate map and photographs, in the hope that he might be able to chart Hewson’s inner terrain, the secrets he had carried in his heart.

  A breeze wafted through the van and rustled the map. It was as if the dead man were whispering at him, drawing him closer to a hidden landscape. These roads that were not roads. Riddles on a map. A sequence of pins joined by zigzagging lines. A death trap.

  He stepped outside and shifted his attention to the terrain surrounding the body, moving in ever-widening circles. Behind a hump of rotting turf, he retrieved a briefcase half-submerged in a pool of peaty water. It was soaked through, filled with what looked to be the blackened dregs of the bog. He dipped his hand in and examined them with his fingers. Wet ashes. Someone, probably the murderer, had burnt the contents of the briefcase. These ashes sticking to his fingers were all that was left of the documents that had probably cost Hewson his life.

  He climbed into his car. The ashes still streaked his fingers. He tried to wipe them with a hanky, but he only succeeded in blackening the rest of his hands. He drove to headquarters, a detective with his hands smeared in ashes, the only material proof he had of the treachery that had ended the journalist’s life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Police Ombudsman’s Office was a shiny new construction with a glass front tipped by the architects at a slightly oblique angle to the rest of the offices in the row, reflecting a sky full of clouds slipping off the building’s edge. It gave the impression of an office aslant from the rest of Belfast city’s huddled skyline, as if only it were new and clean and worthy of this early spring weather, and the envy of the passing pedestrians hunched up against
the cold.

  Daly had not been mistaken when he thought he recognized the number of the female caller so keen to speak to Harry Hewson. He had rung the ombudsman’s phone line himself several times over the past year, not out of professional need, but on a more personal basis. After discovering that his former colleagues were implicated in his mother’s killing, Daly had contacted the office and lodged the details of the murder triangle out of a desire for justice and the truth.

  Now he wondered if Harry Hewson had gone to the office with a similar purpose? Perhaps the journalist had asked the ombudsman to launch an historical investigation into an unsolved crime against the travellers, one that his research had uncovered. As Daly stepped through the building’s glass doors, he felt his heartbeat quicken. If his suspicions were correct, the answers he needed were simple and straightforward. What were the precise details of the unsolved crime, and how might it be linked to Hewson’s murder and his son’s disappearance? He suspected more than ever that the whole business of Jack’s abduction was connected to something much bigger than his mother could ever imagine, and now he hoped to find the information that would make everything clear.