The receptionist was not sure what to do when Daly introduced himself and got the office manager, who recognized Daly without having to check his identification. She ushered him through to the ombudsman’s office immediately. Daly got the impression that the front desk rarely had to deal with a police inspector turning up for an appointment.
The ombudsman, Caroline Black, a retired judge, was seated at her desk, surrounded by towering files of unsolved murders, complaints against the police and historical inquiries dating back to the start of the Troubles, files that might never see the light of day, but which loomed more oppressively than the clouds against the window. Daly had read that the office dealt with more than six hundred complaints a week. Some related to the recent conduct of officers, but most belonged to investigations that ran between 1968 and 1998. He wondered grimly how deep the file on his mother was buried within the stacks of unsolved crimes.
She rose from her seat when Daly entered and shook his hand warmly. ‘Good to see you again, Inspector Daly. I had a meeting scheduled for this morning, but when I heard you were coming, I immediately postponed it. Take a seat.’
The lively wrinkles around her eyes gave the impression of an energetic but serene mind.
‘The story of your mother’s murder is really a shocking one,’ she said before he could speak. Her eyes shone brightly, as though he were bringing her a gift rather than a contentious investigation and a burden for the resources of her office. The mention of his mother’s case unsettled Daly. He frowned and interrupted her.
‘That’s not the reason I need to speak to you.’
She faltered. Like a doctor who had misdiagnosed the patient.
‘Your office has been ringing a home number belonging to a journalist called Harry Hewson.’
She was silent. She shifted in her chair. She looked as if she now wished she had not cancelled the scheduled meeting.
‘I suspect that Mr Hewson was working undercover for Special Branch,’ said Daly. ‘But that he was also carrying out his own investigation into secrets from the past.’
‘Was?’
‘He was found murdered yesterday morning. I need to find out if he had talked to you about an historical crime or a justice campaign.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t give you any details about what he might or might not have said to me. Everyone who comes here is entitled to confidentiality. You of all people should know that.’
‘Of course I do,’ said Daly, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. ‘But I’m a detective in a murder investigation. If it’s necessary I will get a warrant and go through every file you have connected to Harry Hewson.’
She sighed. ‘What secrets do you believe he was trying to uncover?’
Daly thought of the unsolved crime he had in mind, the scant details of Mary O’Sullivan’s disappearance. ‘It’s not a line of investigation at this stage. Mostly a leap in the dark.’
‘If, as you suggest, Mr Hewson had been working for Special Branch, why didn’t he go to the police with his suspicions, rather than wait for my office to process them?’
‘That’s the missing piece in the puzzle. Either he had already spoken to someone or he was too nervous to bring it to police attention.’
‘Why would he have been afraid?’ The nets of wrinkles around her eyes tightened.
‘Perhaps he suspected the police of a cover-up, which is why you should tell me about your meetings with him.’
She leaned back in her seat, disconcerted by the intensity of Daly’s demands. A few moments passed, and then she coolly began telling him what he needed to find out.
‘Very well, Inspector, here’s what I know, or at least what I think I know. Harry visited me a few times with a file about a missing traveller girl called Mary O’Sullivan. He claimed that she was at the centre of a crime that had never been properly investigated.’
Daly felt a surge of confidence; he was on the right track, after all.
‘Right from the start, he struck me as different from the usual complainants.’
‘How?’
‘Brisker. More arrogant. There was a professional air about him. He carried his research in a briefcase but only opened it long enough to show me a few pages. At first, I thought he was demented because they were blank. But then, on the other sides, I got a glimpse of some photographs and a birth certificate. He was afraid of the documents getting stolen or damaged. I asked him to leave copies with us, but he was paranoid that they might fall into the wrong hands.’
‘What information did he have?’
In spite of her smile, she reminded him of a headmistress. The nets of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes gave her an astute, scrutinizing look.
‘He had no suspects, no witnesses, and no motive. He kept turning up in the foyer with his bundle of files, which amounted to little more than newspaper speculation and the claims of uneducated travellers. He was obsessed with the story.’
Daly nodded. He knew the type very well. Hewson had been one of Northern Ireland’s tribe of answer-seekers, individuals who lived in a form of limbo, spending their days in the waiting rooms of their solicitors’ offices or the archives of libraries, going through old newspapers. They formed queues as grim as those lining up to see a back-street faith healer, clutching their files, their assortment of photographs, their half-pieced-together accounts of murder plots. They wanted the truth, but the political establishment cared little about their quests. In his darkest moments, Daly suspected that it was the justice department and the ombudsman’s job to keep stringing them along, keep promising them the truth, all the time inventing more excuses for the delays, sidestepping them with legal jargon and excuses about budget pressures, in the hope that one by one they would give up their campaigns or die.
‘But you must have thought there was something to his claims. Otherwise why try to contact him?’
‘I wanted to encourage him to do more research. With more work, he might have had a case worth pursuing.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘Call it instinct.’
‘Still, I don’t understand why you went to the lengths of ringing him on several occasions in the past week. Do you follow up every complainant’s case with such urgency? There is something here you are not sharing with me.’
‘What do you know about Harry’s history?’ she asked him, her eyes shining, it seemed to Daly, with the superior knowledge of a secret.
‘It’s been difficult discovering anything,’ he replied. ‘He had an income, but apparently he had not worked as a journalist for some time. He may or may not have been an informant for Special Branch, but any police files relating to him have been classified as top secret. Nor had he any relatives who might have shed light on his behaviour or his past.’
‘It’s not surprising you find him such a mystery. In Harry’s case the simplest fact of his identity, the seed of who he was, had been kept hidden from him all his life.’
‘How?’
‘Tragically, his birth was recorded as a terrible crime, one hushed up by the authorities.’ She paused as Daly waited expectantly. ‘Harry was the son of travellers. The O’Sullivan clan to be precise.’
She moved to a filing cabinet and, after some searching, removed a document that turned out to be a birth certificate.
‘This belongs to Mr Hewson,’ she said, handing it to him. ‘His mother is recorded as Mary O’Sullivan and his father as Patrick Thomas John O’Sullivan. A traveller, who was also Mary’s father. This was one of the crimes he wanted me to investigate. The crime of incest.’
Daly looked at her in surprise. ‘I read that there was some sort of investigation by the police and social workers but it never led to charges.’
‘Precisely,’ she replied. ‘At first I was reluctant to look again at the investigation and the conclusion of the social workers. It was a deeply unpleasant family matter. But Harry persuaded me that it might have some bearing on what happened to his mother.’
; Daly thought about the photographs in O’Sullivan’s mansion: the dirty-faced children standing in the doors of caravans, the bundled-up possessions, the straggling line of their convoys; a race of strangers in society’s midst. He tried to place Harry Hewson among them, and immediately his image of the journalist underwent a transformation. Hewson’s lustreless dark hair, his tendency to disappear for days on end, his restlessness, his reluctance to blame the travellers for the boy’s abduction: it all made sense now. Of course he was a traveller. Daly took a deep breath. He felt as though he had been crawling through forest undergrowth for days and had finally reached a clearing, a place where he could stand up and take his bearings. The mystery of Harry Hewson was beginning to clear. He was no longer a shadowy journalist, operating at the boundaries of his profession. He was the son of a missing woman who might possibly have been murdered, obstinately and courageously trying to bring his mother’s killers into the light, in spite of hostile forces. As the son of a murdered woman himself, Daly understood the journalist’s reckless behaviour. Sometimes the shadows of the past were more important than living people, even loved ones.
Caroline Black explained to Daly why the social workers had dropped their investigation. After many interviews, and taking into account social and cultural differences within the traveller society, they had concluded that Mary’s family, confronted by the bureaucratic challenge of filling in the birth certificate of a child whose father was unknown, had decided to enter the name of Mary’s father as the baby’s dad. Not because it was the truth, but because they feared Mary would be viewed as a delinquent and her illegitimate child taken into care by the authorities. In fact, within the travelling community, it was not unusual for the children of unmarried women to have their grandmother or grandfather recorded as one of the parents. The cover-ups were partially an attempt to protect the mothers and the children, and partially a means to outwit the authorities of the state, making lies of their written records.
The case of Mary O’Sullivan was one instance when the practice had terrible consequences. Caroline suspected that the charge of incest brought by the police was used as a means to dissuade the travellers from demanding further investigations into Mary’s disappearance. With parts of the family having to disappear over the border to evade police questions, the official search for her whereabouts soon collapsed. The baby, without a mother, was handed over by social workers to adoption services in England, where the authorities thought it stood a better chance of growing up and succeeding in life without the disadvantages of its past at its doorstep.
Caroline told Daly other things. Among the most important facts was that Mary’s brother was none other than Thomas O’Sullivan. It seemed likely that the traveller had been aware all along of the link with Harry Hewson, and that he might have an idea about what happened to the journalist. Daly also accumulated a general sense of the O’Sullivan family. It was a poignant impression, a family who had botched Harry’s birth certificate in an act of protection and love for their daughter and her infant.
‘Harry’s wife, his deceased parents, his employers and even his police contacts knew nothing of his origins,’ she said. ‘They were his secret. But many people carry secrets like his. Northern Ireland is a country full of secrets, its clandestine paramilitaries, its covert agents and informers, not to mention its carefully concealed network of business interests. The more I stay in this post, the more I realize there is no end to the secrets of this country.’
‘Do you have any idea who Hewson planned to meet in the past week or so?’
‘No idea at all.’
Daly thought for a moment. ‘How do you think I might go about retracing his steps?’
‘That is beyond me, too.’ There was something approaching exasperation in her voice. She glanced at her watch.
‘What about now that he has been murdered? Will you be launching an official inquiry into Mary O’Sullivan’s disappearance?’
‘Quite possibly.’
Daly nodded. Getting himself killed meant that Harry Hewson now had an audience. He was no longer an insignificant protagonist, but a murder victim, one who had successfully moved beyond the waiting rooms full of shadowy complainants. Now he understood the essence of Hewson’s restlessness, how reconstructing the secrets of his mother’s disappearance and his birth had sidelined everything else: his family, his work, even his awareness of approaching danger. He imagined the journalist hunched over the steering wheel of his camper van, traversing the old killing ground of the border roads. Last winter, Daly had been in a similar demented frame of mind, unpicking the clues of his mother’s murder through the labyrinth of the border parishes. He frowned. For several moments, his mind felt overwhelmed by her memory, the lilt of her soft Tyrone accent, her blue nurse’s shoes lying on her bedroom floor.
Caroline watched him closely.
‘This is a difficult subject for me to investigate,’ he said. ‘I thought that when I found out why my mother was murdered that I would be released from…’ He struggled to find the right word. ‘That it would ease my guilt, this… torment inside.’
‘Torment?’
Was that really the right word? he wondered. He had not planned on opening up in this way, and he regretted the emotional intensity of his phrasing.
‘Not torment. I mean this preoccupation. This fixation on something that happened almost forty years ago. I keep circling the day of her death, trying to see it from a different vantage point, to find out if anything else has been kept hidden from me. Now I’m worried that what I remember from that dark portion of my childhood is just a dream. There are so many twists to the story, so many reverses that it no longer feels real.’
‘It seems to me that your memory is perfectly clear,’ said Caroline. ‘The truth is a terrible murder disrupted your childhood. You will always be the carrier of unresolved questions. That is why you have come here seeking my help.’
She smiled with her calm blue eyes. Her intelligent poise resembled a form of legal authority, but it was sympathy and kindness she was displaying towards him, he realized. What was she offering? Dangling before him the possibility that she might be able to answer those irresolvable questions, that with the powerful legality of her office, she might be able to administer a satisfactory ending to the story of his mother’s murder?
‘Be careful of ignoring your own grief and anger in your quest to solve this case, Celcius,’ she warned. ‘There is a dangerous emotional component at work here. Until you find a clear connection between the disappearance of Mary O’Sullivan and Harry’s murder, your reason for digging up the past is based on little more than conjecture.’
‘There has to be a connection,’ replied Daly. ‘There must be a link between the two. And Jack’s abduction, as well.’
She pushed back her seat, smiling as she led him out of the office. ‘All you have to do is work out how.’
‘I believe I already have,’ said Daly. ‘Or at least Jack Hewson’s part of the story.’
She paused at the door and looked at him expectantly.
‘I have to assume that there is a logical reason for the boy’s disappearance,’ he said. ‘Even travellers and smugglers do things for a reason. These are not irrational, impulsive people we are dealing with. However, the normal motives of greed and exploitation don’t seem to be operating here. This isn’t a traveller crime we’re dealing with.’ He glanced at her. ‘It’s a crime hidden in the past. A crime committed by settled people with a lot more to lose.’
Her brow creased with furrows as she tried to follow Daly’s reasoning.
‘And if greed is operating at its heart, then it’s not the greed of travellers, but another group of people entirely. A group that intimidated Samuel Reid and orchestrated his death. A group whose carefully laid plans for the future are threatened by Jack Hewson’s very existence.’
As Daly left the building, he took a final glance at the sleek glass exterior. The blankness of the reflected sky felt like a subtle a
rchitectural point he had missed earlier. The front of the building symbolized nothing and everything. Perhaps the emptiness of an ever-changing sky was the only symbol his divided country could take in the aftermath of the Troubles, he thought. It had accumulated too many competing symbols over the war-torn centuries to be at peace with itself for many years to come.
As he climbed into his car, the weariness that had weighed so heavily on him all winter began to lift. Someone had pushed Samuel Reid to his death and executed Harry Hewson with a bullet in his head, but there was something incomplete about the pattern of deaths. The killer had not finished and would strike again, Daly was convinced of that. He felt the tension inside him swell, dispelling all traces of his melancholy as he drove back to police headquarters.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dogs roamed the fringes of the gypsy camp, nosing through the overflowing rubbish bags, sniffing in sombre fashion at the new vans that had arrived, and skulking away from the drunken men who came to relieve themselves in the darkness. They jumped up with their filthy paws to greet Jack, but he whispered at them to be quiet as he scanned the circle of caravans and the fire still burning at the centre. The men had run out of beer and sent a couple of the teenage boys to drive to the nearest off-licence. Knowing that they would not be back for at least an hour, Jack had decided to make his escape.
When he was sure no one was watching him, he slipped into the surrounding trees. Immediately, the branches stirred with birds flapping and squawking from their roosting positions. The entire forest shivered with eerie life. Startled, he glanced back at the encampment. In spite of the disturbance, none of the travellers seemed to have noticed that he had taken flight. He ran into the forest, the noise of the birds swelling all around him like a hurrying wind, the movement of their wings meshing the forest floor with moonlit shadows. A blackbird clattered into the higher branches, scolding him at full throttle.
He dipped his head and ran harder. The sky opened above him, and he found himself on a track leading down to the main road. Traces of the crescent moon guided him along the rutted path. When he made it on to the road, the first thing he saw was a car parked at a lay-by. He recognized it as the same vehicle that had been following them. The one the travellers said belonged to the police.
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