Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  ‘I’ve an interest in practical jokes.’ Irwin smirked. He kicked the door of the car, sending a shower of glass fragments to the ground. ‘Given the state of the Catholic Church these days, who knows what sort of pervert we’re dealing with?’

  Irwin’s discourtesy to the dead man indicated a presumption about his past that Daly felt was unprofessional, if not a little bigoted.

  When Daly did not speak, Irwin looked up at him.

  ‘No offence, Celcius,’ he said, the easy smile never leaving his face. ‘But the Catholic Church looks more like a rogues’ gallery these days.’

  Religious honour was indeed at stake, and Daly feared the priest was going to let him down badly.

  ‘Find anything unusual?’ asked Daly.

  ‘No evidence of criminal activity – if that’s what you mean?’

  ‘Anything else seem out of place?’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ Irwin’s phone might have blacked out but judging by the watchful look on his face, his inner receptors were still showing vital signs.

  ‘I’ve no idea. What about the bundle of rosary beads? What does that say?’

  ‘Does it have to say anything?’

  ‘Holding on to it was probably the priest’s last act before he crashed the car. His final communication with the world. Otherwise, why bother?’

  ‘The priest was the victim of a dangerous prank. His guilty conscience made him ignore the police warning. What clues could he tell us even if he did leave a message?’

  Irwin was right. It shouldn’t have mattered, but Daly was intrigued by the beads and medals. It triggered a dim memory from his youth, from a more innocent time.

  ‘I think I’ve seen bundles like that somewhere before. All twisted up and left to rust in the rain.’

  He stared at the corpse for several more moments. He was convinced that the priest had not planned to end his journey this way. That the trick of the traffic cones had come as a surprise. That the path he found himself on had been ordained not by God or even chance but by darker forces.

  When he turned back to Irwin, the detective had located another phone and was stabbing in a number with his thumbs. A busy signal made him mutter under his breath. He glanced at Daly with an impatient look.

  ‘Waiting for a call?’ asked Daly.

  Irwin put away the phone and asserted himself.

  ‘I’ll be heading off now, Daly. Time to leave this place to the scene-of-crime officers.’

  ‘Before you leave, tell me: what are the ramifications of this man’s death for Special Branch?’

  ‘Ramifications? It’s not political or intelligence-related, if that’s what you mean?’

  ‘But the crash site is unusual.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You’re here for a start, and that puzzles me. I find it hard to believe that you came here in the middle of the night out of curiosity. And I find it strange that you keep trying to make contact with someone on your phone as though you have an important message to relay. What do you think? Am I being overly suspicious?’

  ‘My presence or absence here should be of no concern to you.’

  Daly stepped closer to him.

  ‘This is more than a road accident,’ he persisted. ‘You haven’t come here just to look at a practical joke that went wrong. You came here to search for something or do something. You can’t expect me to write up the usual accident report and file it away without addressing these concerns.’

  Irwin clambered up the slope and stood at the top looking down at Daly and the crashed car. His expression was a blank.

  ‘Write up the accident report how you like, Daly. That is your job. Write it up with all your opinions and suspicions. Remember to include all your paranoid thoughts. Wait and see, you’ll end up a laughing stock with your fellow officers.’

  Daly hurried up the slope after him.

  ‘Is that it? You’re offering me no proper explanation as to why you’re here?’

  ‘I’m a Special Branch detective. I have the right to come and go as I please at crime scenes within this jurisdiction. I have exercised that right. I am also entitled to my silence. If you have any other questions, I suggest you raise them with Inspector Fealty.’

  When Irwin had left, Daly began to feel a little chastened by the outburst. Perhaps the younger detective was right and he was being paranoid. Perhaps the accident was nothing more than a freakish curiosity, and by tomorrow morning the cold light of day would reduce it to its correct proportions. All he had to do was write a concise report describing the various lines of investigation into who had rearranged the traffic cones, and omit any mention of the Special Branch detective’s presence at the scene. After a few days, his suspicions would lose any significance whatsoever.

  He hunched over the crashed car, thinking quietly. It looked unstable, balanced on the edge of time as well as space. He laid a hand on its metal and felt the warmth leave his skin. It might slip further down the slope at any moment, he realized. He got up and retreated to the unfinished road.

  He noted the absence of any skid marks on the tarmac or the grass verge. The priest had not even touched his brakes, driving off the road in a perfectly straight line, like an arrow into the dark. He took one final look at the car below. What was it about the scene that left him simultaneously fascinated and repelled?

  ‘The border runs very close,’ said the young police officer, joining him on the verge. ‘It’s just on the other side of the river.’ His tone suggested that the border was something vagrant and dangerous, spinning by in the darkness. ‘Funny how bad things always seem to happen on this side of it.’

  2

  Daly decided that nothing encapsulated the edgy desolation of border country better than the empty filling stations sidelined by the new motorway. On his way home, the petrol warning light had flashed up on his dashboard, and he had been grateful to find one that was still open.

  He sat in the car after the elderly attendant insisted on dispensing the petrol himself. Rust wept from the signs, and the coiled fuel hoses trembled with the vibrations of lorries thundering by on the nearby motorway. Everything seemed to speak of impending ruin: the outbuildings permanently shuttered, the battered fuel stands looking all at sea on the forecourt muddled with diesel stains, the frail attendant glaring at him through the side mirror. As well as the new road, the vagaries of price differences and currency exchanges between the North and South had gradually decimated the passing trade on this side of the border.

  ‘How’s business?’ asked Daly, by way of conversation.

  ‘Are you fucking joking?’ was the reply.

  After paying, Daly asked was there a Mass-rock or holy well in the vicinity. The priest’s bundle of old rosary beads had given him the idea that he might have come from such a place.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  He seemed immediately on guard. Daly could hardly tell him the truth, which was that he wanted to probe the life of a dead priest.

  ‘When I was young I was brought to a holy place near here,’ he said. ‘There was some sort of religious procession. I’d like to see the place again.’

  ‘That used to happen years ago at a little glen on the other side of the mountain.’ He gave Daly directions. They were convoluted and involved skirting a stony hill and looking out for a hole in the hedge through which a path led into the glen. The lines on his face deepened. ‘Mind, with all the rain you’ll have to crawl through muck to get there.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  The attendant’s face twisted further.

  ‘The farmers there don’t like people trespassing.’

  ‘I thought it was a holy place.’

  ‘Holy?’ The attendant grimaced. ‘It was until they murdered the little girl there.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Your people,’ said the attendant. He hawked up phlegm with the sound of a shovel scraping, and spat on the ground. ‘I have a job to do here,’ he added.

  Dal
y drove off, staring at the attendant’s contorted face in the rear-view mirror as the man mumbled something. The detective’s window was still down and he could just about hear the words: ‘You should keep your fucking police nose out of that place.’

  Daly drove off, wondering how he had leaked the fact that he was a policeman. Deciding that it was too late to visit the glen, he made a mental note of the directions and headed for home. He switched on the radio, but the closeness of the border hills meant there was no signal. He felt uneasy until he found his way back on to the motorway. After an hour, he reached the exit for the final trek home. It was past midnight and he was tired.

  He reminded himself to be on the lookout for potholes, as his headlights picked out the familiar countryside. By the time he reached the shores of Lough Neagh, a ground mist had covered the sunken fields, making his neighbours’ cottages look remote, embedded in the past, as if they were melting back into bottomless darkness.

  He pulled up at his own cottage and switched off the headlights. He let the engine idle to keep the heater working. He wasn’t ready to go to bed. He waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to whatever light was in the night sky. A full moon appeared from behind a cloud. He stared at his smallholding of fields, which was part-islanded by the shore of the lough, and felt a twinge of guilt at its air of ruin: the jutting trees, the front garden gone to weeds, the hummocky fields lapsing back to their natural state, sprouting thorns and swathes of gruesome-looking nettles and thistles.

  However, in the night sky there was order and peace. The constellation of the Plough had swung into its familiar winter alignment over the cottage roof, and the moon was in the south, lighting up the little road on its way to the lough. He switched off the engine and sighed. This was as close as he got to a feeling of peace these days.

  Over the past seven years, he had reconciled himself to living within the cottage’s warren of damp rooms. The untended farm was his protective barrier of solitude, its wildness obscuring his neighbours’ cottages. His fondness for the old house had set him in direct opposition to the social trend of building bigger, brighter homes with almost unpayable mortgages. Not that there was anything wrong with trying to move up in the world; it was just the pace of change and the size of the debt that he had found objectionable. His ex-wife and colleagues had repeatedly encouraged him to move into town, to a new development of turnkey houses, with all the modern comforts, but he had resisted their advice. Somehow, the unruliness of the surrounding fields always settled his mind and helped him sleep better. After all, where else could he dare to lead such a simple domestic life than in his father’s dishevelled cottage; where else could his mind, saturated with the grisly impressions of detective work, be wrung through such an apparatus of emptiness and silence?

  When he entered the front porch, he spied the glossy feathers of his black hen roosting on the windowsill. He smiled to himself. He was ignorant about fowl keeping but had taken an interest in the hen’s welfare after the foxes had slunk out of the thickets one brutal moonless night and destroyed the rest of the flock. To his shame, he had forgotten to close and bolt the coop door before going to bed. Ever since, the black hen had kept close to Daly’s heels, always trying to follow him indoors, head dipping and wings flapping against her sides in her anxious hurrying. There was something tenacious in her attachment to him. She had stopped laying eggs since the fox attack, and was economically worthless, but Daly found in her constant presence something old-maidenly and reassuring.

  Now she had fallen into this nightly habit of roosting on the windowsill, and waiting for him to carry her back to the coop, which he always made sure to bolt firmly. He lifted her into the air, holding her as lightly as he could. She was compact and still, her plump body tensing slightly at his touch. He followed the worn path to the coop, thinking that it was a little like putting a baby to bed. He felt glad that her comforting presence had entered his life. In the vacancy of the neglected farm, it was the only intimate ritual he had left with another living thing.

  He stood for a few minutes in the moonlight, holding her close to his chest. A lough breeze fanned his face. He stared at the dimly lit landscape. In this arena, he was a spectator, nothing more. The sprawling bog, the lapping lough, the stars and moon slowly revolving in the sky knew nothing about his thoughts and cares. True country living began with such moments of strangeness and quiet, he thought.

  He carried the hen to the coop and nudged her into its darkness. She was reluctant to leave him. He gave her a little push and bolted the door. He wondered was he finally attaining the simple communion with nature that his father had always enjoyed? The goal was possible, as long as he kept the complications out of his life, the thoughts of work and worries about the future. But did this mean becoming more like his father? The thought would once have terrified him, but now with the approach of middle age he began to think that the old man might not make such a bad role model after all.

  He made his way back to the porch. His thoughts drifted to the crash scene, the police cordon and the flashing lights. His fingers jittered with the keys as a flood of darker memories welled within him. A restless impulse took hold of him again. He turned back into the night, striding off through the overgrown garden and into the adjoining bogland. It wasn’t the perfect time or weather for a ramble across such treacherous terrain, but in the moonlight he was just about able to follow the wriggling geography of grassy lumps and bog trenches, an interweave of life and death that had to be negotiated carefully, even in broad daylight. The lough wind flexed itself along a ridge of thorn trees: an easterly streaming bundle of spines that whined against the starlit sky. He paused for breath, watching in the distance the silvery waves sidling along the shore. Then he turned to view his father’s cottage, nestling within a dell of ash and elder trees. Gradually, the peacefulness of the scene diluted the adrenalin flooding his veins.

  It was the last time he would look at the cottage with innocent eyes, before its secrets and the revolting curse of its past darkened his vision and revealed the real reason why he had never been able to sell up and leave its gloomy confines – there was more truth to be discovered in a crumbling old house than a brand-new one.

  3

  Awakening earlier than usual the next morning, Daly trailed through the darkened rooms of his cottage, and pottered about in the kitchen. The whistle of the boiling kettle helped anchor his thoughts. This was his favourite time of the day; his small cottage never felt more expansive than in the half-light of a winter morning, its cramped furniture and sharp corners seeming to melt away into the darkness. By the time he had showered and dressed in a shirt and tie, his porridge had come to the boil on the gas hob. He stood at the window with a steaming bowl in his hand, a vantage point that pitted the domestic against the elemental: the tiny window frame, a slow-working dawn, the bogland leading down to the lough, and flocks of migrating whooper swans – deep silences that were just beyond his reach, but which touched him profoundly.

  He washed his bowl and put it away, feeling soothed and refreshed.

  By the time he drove to the new police headquarters, it was almost 9 a.m. He got himself a cup of coffee in the canteen and walked through the almost-empty corridors. From the flat atmosphere of the place, Daly surmised that most of the uniformed officers were out on patrol or on a training course.

  For several months, Daly had stayed away from the sprawling new headquarters, preferring his old office at Derrylee station, with its reassuring smell of damp plaster and old paper files. The new building daunted him, as did the lines of fresh police recruits milling through its corridors, labouring towards the bright future of policing in Northern Ireland.

  In the aftermath of the ceasefire, the government had decided that what the country needed to transcend all the bitter history of the Troubles was this grandiose new base, coupled with the closure of most of the fortified border police stations. It was a commanding state-of-the-art building with a gym, student accommodation, and e
ven a diving pool to train the scuba unit. Society was struggling to deal with the violence of its past and the economic woes of the present, so the thinking went, and what the country needed was a new building for a new police force, a totally professional and trustworthy police force, bringing peace and order to a society splintered by forty years of violence.

  Consequently, the police service had spent over seventy million pounds on the building, which overlooked Lough Neagh like a gleaming new ark, built to rescue a people and its law keepers from a troubled history. Unfortunately, the dream was not entirely an innocent one. For many former police officers, it carried an ugly little secret: not everyone was worthy of rescue. A swathe of senior detectives and uniformed officers had been encouraged to take early retirement, or pensioned off on the sick, to make way for the new recruits, well-groomed university-educated men and women, who had been born at the tail-end of the Troubles.

  Gone were the grizzled, red-faced policemen of Daly’s youth, who looked as though they could handle themselves in any bar-room brawl. Gone were the cabals formed in smoke-filled incident rooms; gone, too, was the latent sectarianism, the bigotry. As a Catholic detective, Daly had once been in the minority, but thanks to positive discrimination, the numbers of his co-religionists had swelled, and Catholic graduates flocked to this shiny new building in the deep sticks of Tyrone. This was why he had put off his move for as long as he could. He was reluctant to seal himself away in a building that might become an expensive monument to doomed expectations.

  Once in his office, he checked the internal email system for any updates on Father Walsh’s crash. A little bit of background had emerged. Walsh had been a resident of the Franciscan Abbey in Belfast, and was holidaying at the Clary Lodge Hotel close to Armagh City. He had been due to a meet a friend there at about 8 p.m. but had never appeared. Instead, he had headed for the border in a thirty-mile detour.