‘You’re safe now, son.’
‘Are you taking me to the police?’ His eyes were dark with fear and hope. Rebecca’s eyes had looked at him like that.
‘No, I’m taking you to your mother.’
‘What about my daddy?’ In spite of the proximity of the fire, the boy shivered.
‘I’m sorry he won’t be there for you, but your mummy will.’
He took off his coat and wrapped it around the boy. He was about to lead him back through the forest to the road when a branch cracked underfoot and a figure appeared from the trees. The person waved a hand in greeting at Daly. It was Detective Barclay, looking composed and wary as he wandered along the edges of the fire’s ring of light.
‘Where’s Irwin?’ asked Daly.
‘He couldn’t come, so I decided to tail you instead.’ Barclay spoke in a low voice, scanning the shadows around Daly. ‘Surprised?’
‘No.’
Daly thought it strange that Barclay had decided to follow him, but he had no time to question the detective’s judgement. ‘O’Sullivan has made off through the trees, along with the rest of his gang,’ he said. ‘If you get some reinforcements we’ll stand a chance of apprehending them.’
Barclay appeared slow to respond. ‘First let the boy come with me, Daly. I’ve already phoned his mum and she’s keen to get him home.’
Jack stared at Barclay, his eyes full of suspicion. He seemed frozen to the spot and was breathing heavily.
‘Is something wrong?’ Daly asked the boy. He steered him by the shoulders towards Barclay, but the boy’s body had stiffened and he refused to budge. ‘Come on, Jack.’
Barclay waited just beyond the ring of light, watching them both but saying nothing. Somehow, the burden of negotiating with the boy had fallen to Daly.
‘We haven’t got all day,’ said Daly. ‘This is Detective Barclay, a colleague of mine. He has a car that will take you back to your mother.’
However, the boy kept glowering at Barclay, refusing to leave Daly’s side.
‘You have to trust me, Jack,’ said Barclay. ‘This time I’ll make sure you get home.’
‘What do you mean, this time?’ asked Daly.
Neither Barclay nor the boy responded. They stared at each other, the silence intensifying between them.
‘What’s wrong?’ Daly asked Jack. Clutching him closer, he felt something fluttering against the boy’s chest, like a tiny bird trying to escape. He realized that it was the boy’s heart beating wildly.
‘What do you think, son?’ said Barclay, his tone changing. ‘Do you want the story to end here in this filthy fucking camp? That would be a very sad story, wouldn’t it?’ His eyes caught Daly’s and glinted.
The silence grew so dense that Daly’s ears began to ring. He stared at Barclay in alarm as he produced a gun from his jacket.
‘It’s a pity Sammy Reid never got to meet you, Jack,’ said Barclay. ‘He would have been curious to meet his grandson. To see the same stubborn streak repeated in his heir. But, unfortunately, your father led you into this no man’s land.’ He pointed the gun at the detective. ‘The game’s up, Daly. You and the boy have reached the end of your journey.’
Daly hunkered a little further into the shadows.
‘What do you intend doing with the gun?’ he asked. The blood pounded in his temples as he tried to keep a measure of composure in his voice. The realization that Barclay had double-crossed him left him sickened, darkening further his vision of justice and order. It was a vision soiled already by the murder of his mother and the years of police cover-up. He did not need to hear a confession from Barclay. He knew already. The detective had murdered Samuel Reid and Harry Hewson, and was now intent on killing the boy and eradicating the final bloodline link to Mary O’Sullivan and Samuel Reid. As he had suspected, this was also the reason an attempt had been made to remove the farmer’s body from his grave, to destroy the DNA evidence of paternity.
‘It depends on who you’ve been talking to,’ said Barclay.
Daly tried to buy himself more time. ‘You’ve kept your role in this scheme secret from me. I applaud you on that. The day of Jack’s disappearance, you were watching the travellers and organized the search of O’Sullivan’s mansion. You were carefully erasing all traces of Mary O’Sullivan and her story. The last thing you expected was the appearance of her grandson on the scene. All of a sudden, her story threatened to engulf all the carefully laid plans of the Strong Ulster Foundation.’
‘What do you know about the foundation?’ Barclay lowered his gun slightly, his voice sounding slightly agitated. Daly hoped that he might distract the detective long enough to grab the boy and dive into the shadows beyond the fire’s circle of light.
‘What sort of question is that?’
‘You’re killing me, Daly.’
‘Killing you?’
‘You and your stupid questions.’ Barclay raised the gun again.
‘What about Alistair Reid? What does this mean for him, knowing that you murdered his brother?’
Barclay shrugged his shoulders. ‘It means that his reputation remains intact and you’ve turned out to be little more than a foolish amateur. While your friend O’Sullivan is either a complete coward or a scatterbrain.’
‘Does Reid know what you did to Hewson?’ Daly took another step to the side. All he needed was a little more time, and a few feet further from the light of the fire. Then he and the boy might find an escape route through the trees.
‘Hewson was dangerous. Asking too many questions of his Special Branch handlers. He had to be stopped. He manipulated the gypsies, too, feeding them snippets of information, while all the time he was busy digging up the past. He even used his own son in his attempt to blackmail his way to the truth.’
Barclay aimed the gun at Daly and stepped closer. Daly tensed and waited, holding his breath. Barclay was still too far away for him to throw himself upon the weapon.
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Kill you first, and then the boy.’
‘You’ll never get away with this.’
‘Of course I will. No one knows where we are. Not even you. For all you know we could be on the other side of the border. I’ll arrange this to look like you botched the boy’s rescue and got shot by the travellers. Then I’ll round up a suitable number of O’Sullivans and charge them with murdering the boy. No one will think to question my word over theirs.’
Daly heard the faintest of noises from the forest. He shifted a little, and saw a rifle glinting in the moonlight behind Barclay. A figure stepped out of the trees as stealthily as a shadow. Daly ignored the person and concentrated all his attention on Barclay.
‘You still have time to surrender,’ he shouted. ‘Give me the weapon now before it’s too late.’
Barclay stared at Daly with a look of annoyance. ‘Why are you shouting?’ He took aim with his gun, but before he could squeeze the trigger, Daly saw a flash from the rifle, the face of the gunman lighting up in the glare like a stage demon’s, and then a shot rang out. Barclay’s face turned to a sheet of ice.
Daly launched himself towards the detective, who stumbled forwards with the impact of the bullet. Barclay pointed his gun at Daly’s lumbering frame and fired. Daly closed his eyes and tumbled to the ground, thinking that he was about to die. When he realized the bullet had not struck him, he looked up and saw Barclay still staggering, as though battling a shift in his centre of gravity. Another shot sounded and this time a rose of blood erupted on Barclay’s forehead. He collapsed against a tree trunk, his eyes bulging in surprise, his lips moving slightly as if he were a murmuring a final prayer to himself, the hand holding the weapon trembling to the ground.
The broad-shouldered figure holding the rifle drew closer to Barclay’s dying body. He lowered the weapon. It was O’Sullivan, grim-faced, his eyes scorching the shadows, until a big grin broke across his face at the sight of Daly and the boy. He wore the look of a conjurer that had pulled off somet
hing quite special.
‘How long were you watching us?’ asked Daly.
‘From the start. I didn’t step in until I heard enough to confirm my suspicions. Your colleague was the man I’ve been hunting for forty years.’
‘I’m glad you acted when you did.’
‘This beast was one of the men who killed my sister.’
‘And I and the boy were the bait set to trap him?’
O’Sullivan nodded. ‘I’ve made my living along the border, Inspector. You can’t do that without meeting killers. Men who murdered for politics and men who murdered for money. But I’d never been able to trace the men responsible for Mary’s death. All I ever found was a wall of silence.
‘Then Harry came along, the nephew I thought I had lost. I realized I had a means to draw them out from their hiding places. This fear that they would lose their property empire to an illegitimate son. I wanted to take them out of circulation once and for all.’
Daly could see how the disappearance of Jack Hewson had appealed to a special traveller tradition – the business of going on the run to draw evil from its source.
‘I didn’t realize he would murder again so ruthlessly.’ The anger in O’Sullivan’s voice was replaced with sorrow. ‘Poor Harry paid for the truth with his life.’ He spat at Barclay’s body. ‘His mistake was to think we were motivated by greed. That we were holding on to Jack to get his rightful inheritance. We had no interest in the foundation’s empty buildings, its contested fields. What use had we for the money?’
Daly felt his impression of O’Sullivan changing. He had thought his openness, his child-like appetite for life rested on his desire to accrue as much wealth as possible. He’d been wrong. It rested on something deeper: revenge and the desire to hold together the fragmented pieces of his family.
O’Sullivan spoke again. ‘In a few minutes this place will be crawling with police, and then the journalists will come, sniffing over the story, falling on top of each other, asking questions, but by then I’ll be long gone.’ He took another spit at Barclay’s body. ‘My family has wandered the road for hundreds of years, Inspector. Our freedom is limitless, and so are our resources. What would we be doing with a string of abandoned farmhouses and their muddy fields?’
The dead man’s eyes stared up in O’Sullivan’s direction, but looked right through him. As though the traveller, the living, calculating survivor of their contest were now the unreal one in the light of the dwindling fire, as though O’Sullivan were little more than a ghost, fading into the cold atmosphere of the night. The traveller grunted a goodbye to Daly and then he turned to the boy.
‘I have to go now, Jack.’
‘I don’t want to travel any more. I want to stay with the detective.’
‘You can stay for the rest of your life.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Daly sat in his car and watched the fleet of mechanical diggers tearing with military precision at the stony terrain of the quarry. The site had become a dangerous frontier in the landscape, cordoned off by police tape, and patrolled by officers and excavation experts, with a few journalists and photographers watching the unfolding drama. In the passenger seat beside Daly was a plane ticket to a foreign country and the holiday he had been long overdue. However, his mind was elsewhere.
Alistair Reid had revealed the location of the quarry after Daly arrested him over the disappearance of Mary O’Sullivan. Investigators were busy unravelling the complex financial documents relating to the Strong Ulster Foundation, and interviewing the other members of the organization. The media were all over the story, hoping to get live footage of the missing woman’s remains being lifted into the air by one of the digger’s claws. It was part of the modern obsession, thought Daly. If it was not filmed or photographed, it did not happen. History was no longer what existed in books or the human memory but what flashed up on a computer or mobile phone screen.
One of the reporters spotted him and walked towards his car, his press credentials and a mobile phone in his hand. Daly started the engine. A photographer aimed her camera at him and took a few shots. Then she lowered her camera and watched him drive off.
He travelled a few miles and then pulled on to the side of the road. He was tired and thought of catching up on some sleep. After that night in the forest with O’Sullivan, he had handed over the investigation to a team of officers flown over from London. He still had more interviews to do with the Metropolitan detectives, outlining what he knew of O’Sullivan’s possible whereabouts, but he doubted if they would find the traveller any time soon. The investigation into Barclay’s death would continue for weeks, if not months, but it would not deter the charges brought against Alistair Reid.
In the meantime, his domestic circumstances had grown more precarious. The builders had forced him out of his dilapidated cottage and into a small caravan, which he had parked up at different locations on the farm, trying to find a berth that suited him. They told him it would take several weeks to do the necessary repairs to the roof, which was why he had booked the holiday in the sun.
He stared through the windscreen at the border landscape. The round hills loomed black and foreboding. The remnants of a British Army watchtower were still visible, a shard on the horizon. Daly wondered if he would ever lose the prickle of anticipation that signalled he was about to enter disputed territory. He rolled down the window and listened to the sound of birdcalls and flowing water, trees and boggy fields suffused with a sense of peace. He would have got out for a walk, but a sudden rainstorm kept him confined to the car. The horizon darkened as the rain drummed on the roof, the windscreen wriggling with the distorted shapes of trees. The horizon changed again as the sun broke through.
A strange feeling preoccupied Daly. He sat in silence. He did not know what had overcome him, but he felt as though the landscape still held secrets. What was it about the little road, dwindling through bogland and forest, now brightly shimmering in the aftermath of the downpour, that felt so alien? As though when the rain had stopped he had somehow crossed an invisible border, and was already in the country he had booked a flight for? He felt far away from everything. This was the true foreign country, he realized. Not the country on the other side of the border, nor the one he was due to fly to, but this landscape that was his own, so familiar from his childhood, but made strange by the hundreds of reconciliations, the countless little acts of truth-telling, the search for disappeared bodies like Mary O’Sullivan’s, the unravelling of cover-ups and secret betrayals.
This was the foreign country that he and his fellow citizens were coming to after a long journey, to rebuild lives darkened by the Troubles. The notion gave him a strange lift. That he and his neighbours might finally find refuge here, like asylum-seekers in the landscape they had always carried inside themselves.
He switched on the engine and drove back the way he had come. The border was not just a powerful physical presence. It stretched like their own lives, zigzagging through an interweave of darkness and light, birth and death, grief and happiness. He was glad that he was no longer an internal exile, a prisoner of his country’s painful history, that he could physically reach the landscape that nurtured him, and to which he had a profound and lasting attachment. This was his final consolation.
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ANTHONY QUINN was born in Northern Ireland’s County Tyrone and majored in English at Queen’s University, Belfast. After university, he worked a number of odd jobs – social worker, organic gardener, yoga teacher – before finding work as a journalist and author. His first novel, Disappeared, was published by Head of Zeus in 2014.
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Anthony J. Quinn, 2016
The moral right of Anthony J. Quinn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781784971274
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