Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  What did Walsh’s red pin change? Everything. It suggested that his mother had been the intended target of a murder gang, one of dozens marked within the triangle, her death not an accident but a cold-blooded assassination. He felt a sense of outrage. Walsh had obtained a confidential police report showing that the gun used to kill her had been a Spanish-made Star pistol, the same weapon used in several of the other attacks marked out on his map. It was impossible not to agree with Walsh’s line of investigation. When a weapon was used in a similar type of attack, in a similar area and at around the same time, it suggested the attackers were at least linked, if not the same people. But why the cover-up and why his mother? She was a God-fearing Catholic, completely innocent, unconnected to any political party or paramilitary organization. Why concoct a story that she had died in the crossfire between an IRA gang and a police unit, when it should have been clear that her death was linked to a sequence of sectarian murders?

  Daly tried to sort through the legal papers and newspaper reports that Walsh had accumulated on his desk. According to Walsh’s research, the Star pistol bore the serial number 59488. It had been the personal-protection firearm issued to a man called Ivor McClintock. He had been charged in 1983 with membership of a Loyalist paramilitary organization. Daly read further, eager to find out why McClintock had been issued with the weapon in the first place, but he struggled to concentrate on the facts. His eyes kept flicking back to the map, to the red pin and his mother’s name, the memory of her shoes on the bedroom floor.

  To restore some order to his teeming thoughts he took out his mobile phone, fiddled with it, pointed it at the map and took several photographs, zooming in so he could capture all the details. His eyes were steely and blank, staring at the image on the phone’s video screen. It was the latest model, thinner and more expensive than the last. He disliked its heft; somehow its lightness disappointed him. He belonged to the generation for whom solidity and weight were allied with dependability, and the phone’s slimness made it seem an unreliable wedge between him and brutal reality.

  When he put the phone away, the chaos began to flow. He had a vision of the map and its criss-crossing lines shifting together, the dozens of deaths entangled, as if they were leaves and thorns whipped up in a wind. They surged towards him, helter-skelter, the names and locations flashing before his eyes. What had happened to their grieving families, all those disrupted lives, and what about his own? What had happened to him after that memory of his mother’s blue shoes lying on the floor and his father rummaging through the drawers? He found it impossible to take the image forward and remember what happened next.

  He stepped back and sat on Walsh’s bed. His mind shot back to another memory, before his mother’s death. He was standing with his schoolbag surveying his tidy bedroom as though it were a zone of anger and humiliation. His mother had found a secret list he’d been hiding in his room, and destroyed it. The memory left him stumbling out of the priest’s room, down the long corridor. The abbot saw him as he made to leave the building.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked. He must have seen the look on Daly’s face.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said the detective. However, everything was wrong.

  He drove out of the monastery grounds and stopped at the first bridge straddling the new motorway. His mind was not yet willing to accept what his eyes had perceived. He needed to investigate Walsh’s findings further and verify the facts listed on the map. He tried to plan a course of action while staring at the streaming traffic. For a while, he thought about passing the case over to Irwin, and allowing Special Branch to get their teeth into it. I don’t have to get involved in this, he told himself. I will not be pulled into the mire of the past. However, something about Irwin’s presence at the car crash warned him that he could not leave it to Special Branch to deliver justice and the truth. He had the nagging feeling that Irwin had been shielding some sort of secret. The younger detective wasn’t in the business of straightforward law and order, especially when it came to handling unsolved crimes in the past.

  He got out of the car and looked at the dual carriageway spreading before him, the lorries speeding by in their hollow thunder. He stared at the verge of sodden grass directly below, the stew of litter and overgrown weeds raked by the wind of passing vehicles. The murk of the evening made him feel like a stranger. He climbed back into his car and switched on the engine.

  His pain was so solitary that there was no relief to be granted by watching other people’s lives. This was not his road, he thought. He could see the truth now. If your past harboured a dark secret, you could travel nowhere peacefully, because home would always exert its dark gravity no matter where you went. Home for him would always be a gloomy cottage enmeshed by thorn trees and winding lanes, brooding over a lough of restless water.

  6

  The journalist was waiting for Daniel Hegarty in the corridor outside the hotel toilets. A glint of ruthlessness shone in her eyes. The spy began to think that she was not as attractive as he had first thought. With a stab of awareness, he saw she was hiding an ugly secret. Her prettiness was as hollow as her story, which he had been eager to believe in, as an antidote to his rising impatience. Something had happened to the priest; he could see that now in her cold face, the clenched teeth behind her smile, and the defiant tilt of her chin. She scrutinized his briefcase, and for a moment he feared he had betrayed his secret by allowing her to guess its emptiness. A man bringing an empty briefcase to such an important meeting was not to be trusted. However, she turned and led him up the stairs and along a windowless corridor, her dark hair bouncing on her tense shoulders.

  When they reached the hotel room, he lifted up his briefcase as if to take out the documents. He slipped his hand in, felt the gun and waited as she knocked on the door. He stared at the back of her head, her motionless neck. He admired her calm. She knew what she was doing, leading him into this dark little trap. She glanced back at him, her face expressionless, and then down at his briefcase, as if she were weighing it all in her mind, balancing the briefcase and its contents with his life, her blue eyes unblinking, as if both were worth nothing. He let the case hang a little lower.

  She walked into the room and he edged in behind her. A disco had started on the floor below and the heavy music reverberated in the room.

  The old man sitting on the bed had been flicking through a travel magazine. Hegarty entered the room, and the man looked up, his eyes glittering with a dangerous light.

  ‘Hello, Daniel,’ he said. He sounded happy to have company.

  ‘Where’s Walsh?’ asked Hegarty.

  ‘He couldn’t make it. What’s in your briefcase?’

  ‘It’s empty. You can see for yourself.’

  Hegarty tossed the briefcase towards him. It splayed open in mid-air. The man grabbed at it, when he should have recoiled backwards for cover. Quick and deft, Hegarty pointed the gun. The weapon flared twice, the bullets striking the man in the neck and the top of his chest. The briefcase clasped shut and fell on his body.

  Hegarty walked stiffly towards him. The dying man’s eyes fastened on him with an intensity that suggested they had once known each other, the muscles of his jaw convulsing while blood poured from a wound in his neck. His throat lengthened and grew rigid, as though he were trying desperately to say something.

  ‘I thought you had retired,’ said Hegarty, finally recognizing him. He was one of the shadows who’d been watching him for years. A man who had assassinated many innocent victims.

  ‘Yes,’ hissed the man through a mouth frothing with blood, but his eyes were already clouding with forgetfulness. His body fell to the side.

  Hegarty delivered a final bullet to his head, and turned his attention to the journalist, whose entire body had frozen to the spot.

  ‘This will do wonders for my writer’s block,’ she said hysterically, her eyes signalling some strange sort of relief. And then she laughed, but it was a silent laugh, more a ghost of a laugh. Her reaction
made him pause for thought. By the time he raised the gun to shoot she had slipped out of the room and into the corridor. He followed her and fired. Her run faltered and she glanced back at him with a pained look. To his surprise, she started running again, this time limping heavily. The bullet must have grazed her leg. He was about to raise the gun and take aim again, when a family with young children emerged from a room into the corridor.

  He ducked back into the room. In the mirror, he caught a glimpse of his face spattered with blood. By the time he had washed and re-emerged, the woman had gone.

  A mess of blood filled the bed. He checked the dead man’s body, careful not to get any more blood on himself. The black wedge of a gun jutted from an underarm holster. He searched the room for any evidence that might link him to the killing. Already there was too much blood on the carpet. He was careful where he walked, what he touched. For the first time that day, he felt relaxed, transposed into another more vital existence. He picked up his briefcase and left the room. He was no longer contemplating his own death.

  7

  After leaving the abbey, Daly felt too troubled to return home. He decided to phone ahead to the hotel Walsh had been staying in and arrange a search of the deceased’s room. As he drove back into border country he tried to think of a series of events that would have led to his mother becoming a target for Loyalist paramilitaries. He arrived at the hotel without having made any progress.

  Clary Lodge Hotel was situated at the bottom of a black mountain, half-hidden behind an enclosure of laurel and rhododendron bushes. It had once been the mansion of a grandly delusive English landlord, who’d wanted to turn the emptiness of the surrounding bogland into a visual spectacle. When Daly pulled up in his car, he thought that in winter few landscapes could have presented a gloomier prospect to travellers.

  However, the hotel seemed busy with the aftermath of what must have been a wedding party, parked cars festooned in white ribbon, young children colliding with each other, and groups of well-dressed men and women standing at the doors, grabbing a smoke between drinks. They steered clear of Daly as he approached, as if they knew exactly what he was, a portent from the outside world, a carrier of bad news.

  The receptionist at the front desk was not facing the entrance; he was turned towards a computer screen and speaking into a telephone. Daylight flickered against the wall. From the corner of his eye, Daly caught the silhouettes of children bolting past the windows. The front doors banged open and shut. A man appeared out of the shadows, kneading his forehead. After several minutes, Daly cleared his throat to get the receptionist’s attention.

  ‘My name is Inspector Celcius Daly,’ he said.

  The receptionist turned to regard him, placing a hand over the receiver.

  ‘They warned me you were coming.’

  ‘I need to search a room. It was booked by a priest called Walsh.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait a moment.’ A frown shadowed the receptionist’s face. He continued talking on the phone. The coolness of his manner irritated Daly.

  ‘Father Walsh died last night in unusual circumstances,’ he said, leaning over the counter in anger. ‘I can arrange for the details of the hotel to be circulated to the media as a key to the mystery of his death. You’ll have the press here taking pictures and interviewing guests within the hour. If that’s what you prefer?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ He looked aghast. ‘That’s not the type of publicity we want.’ He replaced the phone. ‘I was wondering why Father Walsh seemed to be hiding from everyone.’

  ‘Who’s everyone?’

  ‘There was a woman and a man enquiring about him. He missed some sort of meeting. What was your name again?’

  ‘Inspector Daly. When did you last see him?’

  ‘Yesterday morning at breakfast time.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘Fine. Like any other guest at that time of the morning.’

  ‘What room had he booked?’

  ‘Follow me and I’ll show you.’ He led Daly up a wide staircase to the second floor. ‘His room has the best views of the nearby mountain,’ he said.

  A fine prospect for a dead man’s last day, thought Daly. A drove of children had converged upon the top of the staircase. They pointed down at Daly and the receptionist as though they were figures of fun. It must have been difficult finding something worth giggling at in such dismal surroundings.

  The receptionist swiped the door lock with a card.

  ‘That’s odd,’ he said, pushing open the door. ‘It’s unlocked.’

  They walked into a darkened room. Daly sensed something throbbing within, a swarming presence. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he made out a tired-looking carpet patterned with dark congealments. For a long moment, they listened to themselves breathe. Whatever it was that Daly had expected to find, it was not this. Someone had turned the room into a pit of red. He turned on the lights and saw that it was blood staining the walls and the blankets on the bed. Only the light shade dangling from the centre of the ceiling had escaped the spattering.

  Outstretched by the bed lay the body of a man, the source of all the blood. Daly walked with small steps, careful not to disturb any evidence. He approached the bed and saw that the bloodletting had been arterial and catastrophic. He stared at the body, an elderly man with sunken features, the blankets around him swamped in blood. Methodically, he scanned the bedclothes and floor for anything the murderer might have dropped. He glanced at the victim; his mouth contorted in a grimace and his head tipped forward, blue shadows forming around his drained features. The window hung slightly open. Laughter and squeals of children playing on the lawns rose against the curtains. A car pulling away spat on the gravel drive.

  Inside the room, the eddies of silence deepened. The dead man’s blood had dripped from the corners of the duvet and pooled on the carpet. Daly felt a slight weakness in his knees. The silence was broken by the sound of a mother and her two young children walking along the corridor, the happy babble of girls’ voices ringing clear as a bell. The mother flashed Daly an inquisitive look as she passed the doorway, and then, glimpsing the room, her attention swiftly withdrew. Daly turned and saw the receptionist bent in two, retching into the tiny sink.

  Daly returned to his search. He found a driving licence lying half under the bed. He could make out part of the surname without touching it. ‘McClintock’, it appeared to read. On the bedside locker sat a copy of the bible and the priest’s breviary. Father Walsh’s presence lurked in the room like a ghost with gruesome secrets.

  Daly told the receptionist the name of the dead man.

  ‘Was he a guest?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll have to check the register. He might have come for the wedding.’

  Daly grimaced at the idea of questioning the bridal party. He hoped for their sakes that the bride and groom had already escaped on their honeymoon.

  The receptionist had left the sink and was watching him from the door, his face inclined in an attitude of enquiry, as though he believed Daly had already worked out what had caused the violent events that had unfolded in the room.

  What had he worked out? Very little. He tried to gather information, make some sense of the grisly scene. The pathologist’s report would pinpoint the time of the victim’s death and reveal if it had occurred before or after Walsh’s car crash. With the help of the scene-of-crime officers he would analyse the body and the room, place them in some sort of stable context, but for now, his detective skill of selecting relevant details was overwhelmed by the proximity of so much blood, the rawness and violence of it all. He heard the sound of a lift opening echo along the corridor.

  He was standing in a hotel room about ten miles from the Irish border, submerged in a reddish haze.

  The receptionist tried to slip away.

  ‘Strictly speaking, my shift ended about ten minutes ago,’ he said hoarsely.

  Daly glanced at his watch.

  ‘You can stay a little longer. I should
have clocked off an hour ago.’

  8

  Back at headquarters the following morning, Daly and Detective Irwin walked up a flight of stairs and down another long corridor. The polished floor gave way to carpet, and a hush descended. Special Branch Inspector Ian Fealty greeted them with a frozen smile and led them into his office, which was spacious, but filled with a heavy, cold light, the walls bare of anything that might soothe a troubled mind. Behind Fealty, a set of windows gave bleak views of the lough shore’s flooded hinterland. Rain drummed lightly against the glass, adding to the sombre mood in the room.

  Daly worked out he was in a north-facing wing on the third floor, a section he’d never visited before. The architecture of the building seemed to have the ability to sprout a new wing or two, then mysteriously disappear, and on more than one occasion he had found himself lost amid its avenues of corridors. He surveyed the room and the views from the window, thinking that this was the little summit the Special Branch chief had managed to clamber up, his new lair from which he could overlook all the entanglements of the past.

  Fealty seemed at home in his new surroundings. He dipped his head and indicated Daly a seat, while Irwin stood to the side. Daly was surprised to see Donaldson standing there, too, his eyes fixed on him, unblinking and severe, like the portrait of a family ancestor.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked Fealty.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘This will not take much of your time, Inspector,’ said Fealty. ‘Irwin has explained to me your interest in Father Walsh’s death. On this occasion, let me be very clear about how this investigation will proceed. Fortunately for you, it is very straightforward. With McClintock’s death, the case has reached a new level. Any further discoveries or leads are a matter for Special Branch and the intelligence services. Your intervention has been invaluable and we convey our thanks to you. Of course, you will undertake not to disclose any of the information you have discovered to anyone else.’