Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  He closed the video file and returned to contemplating the last of the evening light shining through the windows. Diluted through the screen of raindrops, it cast a vague luminosity on the walls, and on the white paper on his desk. It was the type of light that could be more oppressive than any darkness. He brooded over the file, waiting for the light to fade completely. He tried to think of another course of action that would resolve his difficulties, but he drew a blank. He flicked on his desk lamp, picked up his telephone and summoned Irwin and Donaldson.

  ‘The man we are looking for is called Daniel Hegarty,’ Fealty told the pair when they returned. ‘He used to be a spy.’

  ‘What sort of spy?’ asked Irwin.

  ‘An informer within the ranks of the IRA,’ replied Donaldson.

  ‘We know there’s a full file on him held by the Ministry of Defence, but it’s highly classified.’ Fealty drummed his hands on the desk. ‘It will take months to obtain it.’

  ‘Fortunately, the RUC held files on all the MOD’s informers,’ said Donaldson. ‘At least the ones we knew about.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t share intelligence?’ said Irwin.

  ‘Not a chance. We were fierce rivals.’

  ‘The information we hold on Hegarty is scant.’ Fealty handed Irwin the file. ‘We know that he was recruited in 1974 by a Major George Hannon, and that he has been implicated in several murders.’

  Irwin flicked through the information.

  ‘In the circumstances, it’s highly regrettable to have involved Daly,’ remarked Donaldson.

  ‘But then again, he is involved.’ Fealty bared his teeth in what might have been a smile but looked more like a grimace. ‘His mother’s death is unfinished business for him.’

  ‘I’m concerned, too,’ said Irwin. ‘He’s out of control. He’ll take risks other detectives would avoid.’

  ‘Your judgement is correct,’ said Fealty. ‘In fact, I can’t think of anyone better suited to serve our purposes.’

  ‘Which are what?’

  ‘To have someone act as human bait and draw Hegarty out of his hiding place. Let Daly chase his mother’s ghost in border country. He’ll go in deeper than any other police officer would care to.’

  ‘I thought you wanted the investigation brushed aside as quickly as possible,’ said Irwin. ‘Rather than stir up the past.’

  ‘We are in a more delicate position than we first thought,’ said Fealty. ‘I’d rather the investigation end now but that’s no longer my major problem.’

  Donaldson’s thinking was more organized than Irwin’s.

  ‘You’re getting pressure from above. They don’t want the investigation to end here.’

  ‘In a few more days, they might come round to our way of thinking. But first, we have to find Hegarty. Or rather we have to guide Daly towards him.’

  ‘Give Daly a fugitive to chase and he’ll go for it,’ said Donaldson. ‘Remember that tight spot he got into with the Croatian prostitute?’

  A smirk crept across Irwin’s face.

  ‘I think Daly will find Hegarty much too fascinating to ignore. The shame of his betrayals. His secret life as a spy.’

  Donaldson nodded.

  ‘He tends to fall under the spell of people like Hegarty, outlaws who live in the shadows.’

  Fealty agreed. Daly approached dangerous runaways as though he were a thwarted social worker, using them so soak up his own loneliness and loss. Fealty showed them the footage from the hotel.

  ‘What’s Hegarty carrying in the briefcase?’ asked Irwin.

  ‘From what we understand, he has a number of confidential intelligence files. Information that was destined for Walsh, which risked compromising the security of former agents. We presume that Hegarty had been feeding Walsh information about the weapons used in his so-called murder triangle and the gunmen’s links to the RUC.’

  ‘Do we know his next move? What will he do with the files now that Walsh is dead?’

  ‘We have no idea.’

  ‘The MOD must be shitting bricks.’

  ‘We all are.’

  ‘But our only worry is Hegarty, at least for now.’ Fealty paused and eyed up the Special Branch detective. ‘Listen, Irwin, I want you to find out the full history of Hegarty’s involvement with paramilitaries, starting with when he was first recruited by the British Army, and ending today. I want a complete list of his betrayals and double-dealings. We’ll have to move fast against him. Establish him as someone not to be trusted. Someone tainted by the darkest shadows of the Troubles.’

  ‘What if we can’t find anything?’ asked Irwin.

  ‘Then we’ll have to invent a past for him.’ Fealty thought of the journalist Pryce. ‘One with enough links to the truth to make the story credible to our friends in the media.’

  *

  After they had left the room, Fealty worked his way through the footage one more time. As he followed the flickering images, he remembered a point that had occurred to him during the meeting with Donaldson and Irwin. He zoomed in on the briefcase Hegarty was carrying. It was hard to make out its shape, a crooked little shadow. He worked backwards through the footage. His mind felt bright and alert. The tension in his body increased.

  At one point, he saw that Hegarty was holding the briefcase slightly higher than usual, as though it had grown lighter. In the next scene, it had dropped again, but the informer’s arm looked rigid, forced. He realized that he had observed an important change, one that Hegarty had tried to disguise. At some time during the morning, he must have emptied the briefcase of its contents. Perhaps he had suspected he was falling into a trap and had jettisoned the secret documents as a safety precaution. But where had he hidden them?

  He ran through the entire morning in the hotel. He saw that apart from Pryce, Hegarty had not approached anyone else. He had not even conversed with the waiting staff or bartenders. Several times, he stared at a member of the wedding party, as if building up the courage to break his isolation, but at the last moment he always turned away.

  Fealty scrutinized the footage again: Hegarty sitting shadowed in his seat while the wedding crowd flowed around him. The informer always seemed to occupy the edge of the frame, gravitating towards something beyond the scope of the camera. Fealty managed to narrow the mystery of the briefcase to the half-hour or so before the informer met Pryce. Hegarty had briefly placed the briefcase on the windowsill next to his seat. He sat motionless with his back to the window. There was no one beside him but he seemed to be talking to someone. Why had he left the case on the sill? Was it some sort of signal?

  Fealty leaned forward, slowed the video frame by frame, and spotted the key to the puzzle. A small pale hand appeared through the window, slipped into the briefcase and removed something. Hegarty had stopped talking. His shoulders were slumped. He reached round and removed the briefcase from the sill. His face appeared soothed. He waited for a moment, and then got up and walked away.

  Fealty scrolled through the footage captured outside the hotel. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to see. It was difficult to match the sequence of events outside the hotel to that within, but he persevered. He focused on the footage of a group of boys playing with a ball on the hotel’s front lawn. They ran in and out of the frame. He mulled over the scene. At one point, the game was interrupted for about a minute when the ball rolled close to a wall beneath a half-opened window.

  A small boy with ginger hair ran to collect the ball but froze before the window. He stood there for almost a full minute. Several times, he wavered and looked back at his playing companions. The other children remained at a distance, like an audience watching an unfolding drama. The boy stepped closer to the window. He nodded his head and adjusted his stance. His hand reached through the open window and removed a yellow folder. Then he ran back to the other boys. Fealty allowed himself a small grin of satisfaction. He had spotted the informer’s trick. The point at which he had transformed a passing child into a courier, a secret messenger.
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  After another hour of scrutinizing the footage, Fealty worked out the room number the boy had been staying in with his family. He noted it down and rang the hotel. After he had finished speaking to the receptionist, he put down the phone and rocked back and forth in his chair for a while. He had made a breakthrough, and no longer felt the helpless tension that had haunted him since the afternoon and clouded his thinking. The way forward was quite simple. Hegarty had broken the rules of engagement and now so would he.

  10

  Daly descended into border country again, switching from the motorway to the side roads. He wasn’t really driving; the narrow twisting roads were dragging him along. He sat hunched over the steering wheel, the engine humming and whining with the strain of shifting gears.

  The meeting with Special Branch had made him more determined to uncover the truth behind Walsh’s death and the murder of McClintock. Why were Special Branch so keen to take over the case? It seemed to Daly that Walsh’s rooting around in the past must have thrown up something unpleasant and potentially devastating for someone still alive and in a position of power within the security forces. It was the only rational explanation. Those terrible events in the 1970s must be linked to something that was happening right now.

  He pulled up at a crossroads close to where Walsh had crashed his car. It was quiet, almost dusk. He hadn’t a clue which road to take. He watched the cows in the fields returning to their byres. A dark anonymous-looking house sat nearby. It was a public house, as obscure as they made them in South Armagh, the beer kegs piled at the side of the building the only evidence of its true function.

  It seemed a logical place to ask for directions to the holy glen that the petrol attendant had described to him on the night of Walsh’s crash. Inside, he encountered the old-fashioned layout of a country bar and lounge, more like a front room and back scullery, the kind of bar that was all obstacles and tight corners, an unforgiving place for a lost stranger. The faint smell of urine and bleach lingered in the air, and a sweeter odour, that of poteen, illicit booze, the stuff of which truly great hangovers are made. He bruised his shin against a low table and cursed.

  Laden bottles clinked from a room within. Eventually a middle-aged barman appeared from the blackness at the end of the bar. For a moment, it felt liberating to be an anonymous passer-by asking directions to a site of ancient pilgrimage. It was so far removed from his normal work as a police detective. However, the resistance from the bartender surprised him.

  ‘Why have you come here?’ the barman replied with undisguised coldness.

  The question confused him and he took a moment to answer. A few old men sitting in a snug glared at him. They gave each other a knowing look. Daly noticed a picture of the Virgin Mary and a set of rosary beads dangling beside the whiskey optics. He knew that it would be to his advantage to play the religious card rather than disclose the fact he was a police detective. It was the most expedient tactic he could think of.

  ‘My father used to bring me to the glen as a child. But I’ve forgotten where it is.’ His voice lowered. ‘I’ve a special intention to pray for.’

  The barman had a round face with beefy jowls. He looked the type of person that would usually be easy to get on with. He frowned.

  ‘Are you a reporter?’

  ‘No. Not at all,’ said Daly, smiling in an attempt to lessen the mystery.

  Yet he had failed to allay the barman’s suspicions. Daly could sense he thought he was a fraud or something worse.

  ‘There are men and women who drive up there after dark and flash their headlights at each other.’ The barman regarded Daly warily. ‘Their cars come down from the motorway. Are you one of them?’

  As a police officer, Daly was all too aware of cases where couples sought out wild beauty spots for sexual adventures with like-minded people. Maybe the glen is plagued with people seeking sexual thrills and he thinks I’m one of them, he thought with an inner smile.

  ‘No. As I said, I have a special intention to pray for.’

  The bartender seemed unconvinced.

  ‘The path to the well is covered in mud at this time of year.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Hardly any ceremonies take place there now. Ever since the cops shot little Tara Grimes.’ He looked sharply at Daly, his hostility increasing.

  Daly nodded. He remembered the details of the case. The girl had been playing with a stick in a roadside hedgerow when a police patrol shot her believing she was a gunman preparing an ambush. The barman placed his heavy hands on the other side of the bar. They looked used to wielding larger, blunter objects than beer taps and glasses. Daly was glad he was not here in an official capacity. More locals drifted in behind him, waiting to place their orders. Their impatience was more compelling than anything Daly could say or do.

  ‘It’s a mile further up the back road,’ said the barman eventually. ‘There’s a little lay-by on the left-hand side and opposite is a hole in the blackthorn hedge. That’s the entrance – blink and you’ll miss it. Just follow the steps down.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’ll be dark soon. I wouldn’t hang around there if I were you.’

  *

  Daly parked the car in the lay-by. He opened the door and heard the panicky flight of unseen birds. He stood at the gap in the hedge. It was a bleak threshold. He spotted a lacy bra hanging from a bush, and wondered what sort of people made love amid cramped thorns and shadows. His feet sank in mud lined with the tracks of cars. Several centuries ago, persecuted Catholics filed to lonely glens like this to hear Mass in secret and to drink from the holy wells. Now their descendants came stumbling in the dark, clumsy as bullocks. It felt like a final unravelling of a God-fearing society, a trampling of sex and secrecy, the careless tyre tracks, the beer cans and cigarette stubs embedded in the mud. He felt a sharp need to push through the thorns and seek out somewhere more remote and wild, where there was no longer any evidence of human intrusion.

  In the months after the separation from Anna, his wife of ten years, Daly had taken to visiting the glens and holy wells around Tyrone. He had returned to the sites of childhood pilgrimages in the hope they might sharpen his faith and help him through that difficult time. No doubt he was searching for some sort of refuge or key to enlightenment up and down the wild glens that riddled the border countryside. As if it was as easy as entering the right landscape to return to childhood and resurrect the memories of faith and moral certainty.

  He had not been receptive enough, or perhaps he had lacked the mental detachment from his day-to-day problems, or the correct blend of the two, for he had found nothing. Just the same black pools of spring water, the same thorny twigs stirring against a dark sky, the same rain-soaked petitions hanging from the trees. No burning bushes or oracles. Not so much treasure chests of spirituality as spoil heaps of frustrated prayers.

  This particular glen was no different. Daly stared into the depths of the reputedly miraculous pool but all he saw was an unnerving stillness, a darkness distilled moment by moment from the surrounding rocks. Along the sides of the well, he found evidence of recent prayer: a collection of burnt-out candles, snippets of paper, rusting rosary beads and holy medals tied to the thorns, as well as fresh boot-marks in the squelchy terrain.

  It was the practice of the devout to hang a religious ornament or a piece of string to the overhanging tree as part of their pilgrimage, hence the collection of ornaments dangling from the twigs. They were the clue that led Daly to believe Walsh had been coming from a holy well on the night of the crash. He had deduced that the priest had visited the well and removed a bunch of the tangled artefacts because he was looking for a key too. Something to resolve his predicament, or reduce the burden of the past.

  Daly examined the offerings hanging from the tree as though they were evidence to be analysed and dissected. Visitors had left behind their written petitions, some of them in plastic envelopes. He gazed at the handwriting, the mishmash of prayer, scripture a
nd heartfelt pleas. He could almost hear their words whispering in his ear. Every twig held a burden; more than the tree’s spiny branches could bear, it seemed to him. He stepped back, overwhelmed, the tree writhing over him like a black sinuous altar.

  Out of instinct, he mouthed a few Hail Marys. It was not his most convinced praying, but nor was it simply a lonely detective speaking to himself. It was something else entirely different. A spell to bring evil out of its hiding place. Perhaps that was why people still flocked to half-pagan sites like the holy well, he thought, whispering prayers that were more like magical incantations, seeking deliverance from darkness. As a detective, it was his job to track down the murderous forces that lurked within the minds of ordinary people, the urge to kill and destroy. He was engaged in the human war against evil. He didn’t need to invoke prayers. He would discover his own way to lay siege to the people responsible for Walsh’s death and drive them from their hiding places.

  He approached the tree again. He reached up with his hand and felt amid the crevices of its branches. He groped with his fingers until he found the object he was looking for. Something thin and metallic. Not a holy offering, more a profane stowaway. A mobile phone. Its screen glowed as soon as he touched its keys. He smiled at it. He lifted it into the air, and walked around with it, holding it as high as he could, trying to get a signal but failing. He walked back up to his car. He took out his own phone; hunted out the number the abbot had given him, and called it. The other one buzzed into life.

  It made sense as soon as Daly had worked out that Walsh had come from the glen. He had hidden the phone in a safe place – and where was safer to a Catholic priest than a holy well? No one in Special Branch with all their years of expertise would have understood that as well as he did. It was a question of geography. Holy glens were always secret places, more like tunnels through the labyrinth of hills surrounding the border. Their remoteness and steep hillsides made them impervious to mobile phone technology. Walsh had hidden the phone in the closest place he could find to an inaccessible dimension.