But why? The priest must have felt hunted or followed in some way, and fearing that the phone contained incriminating information, had ditched it. Daly searched in the phone’s files but they were all empty. He scrolled through the call history. There were numerous missed calls from the same number on the night of Walsh’s death and the following morning. The caller’s name had been saved under Hegarty. Out of curiosity, he rang the number. He counted ten rings and then it went to a recorded message. He hung up and tried another number saved under the name Jacqueline. To his surprise, a woman’s voice answered almost immediately.
‘Who is this?’ Her voice seemed to contract as she spoke.
He answered without thinking.
‘It’s me.’
There was silence on the phone.
‘Aloysius?’
‘Yes.’
Again a silence, as if the woman wasn’t breathing.
‘Where can we meet?’ asked Daly.
He regretted the carelessness of the question, but she replied immediately, ‘Where are you now?’
He didn’t answer.
The signal faded a little. She was travelling somewhere.
‘I’ll be outside the hotel in twenty minutes.’ She spoke carefully, as if spelling out a set of instructions to a child. ‘I’ll see you at the far end of the car park.’
‘OK,’ he said and hung up.
11
There was only one hotel the woman could have meant. Half an hour later, Daly swung his vehicle into the grounds of Clary Lodge. He drove to the end of the car park, his headlamps lighting up a blue car. A woman stood next to it, dressed in a dark suit, skirt and red-heeled shoes.
She was immediately hostile when Daly approached her with Walsh’s phone.
‘You’re not Father Walsh.’
‘He couldn’t come. I’m here in his place.’
‘It wasn’t him on the phone.’ Her voice was edged with grief. ‘It was you. Aloysius is dead.’
Daly nodded a little sheepishly.
‘Who are you?’
‘Inspector Celcius Daly. I’m investigating his death.’
She relaxed visibly and looked at him with curiosity.
‘We should chat in the hotel bar.’
She turned and walked away. Daly stared at her back, which was stiff and strained-looking. The click-clack of her heels sounded out of beat, the muscles of her bare calves tightening with each step. He realized that she was limping slightly. He followed her up to the hotel entrance, staring at her red heels and deft calves.
Inside the hotel, she nudged beside him as they sat down, her figure composed and neat in her skirt and suit. She swiftly ordered two coffees and smiled at him. He realized that whereas he had explained his connection to Father Walsh, she had not introduced herself at all.
‘Coffee is the last thing I need right now,’ she said. ‘I’ve barely slept. I’ve gone through all the usual police contacts to find out what theories you guys are working on but I’m having no success at all. I don’t even know if my life is in danger or not. Should I have a protection officer assigned to me, do you think, Inspector?’
She stared at his uncertain gaze.
‘Forgive me for not introducing myself,’ she said. ‘My name is Jacqueline Pryce.’ She extended a slim, pointed hand that to Daly felt as neat as a digging tool. ‘I’m a journalist.’
‘Which newspaper do you work for?’
‘The one that pays the most,’ she said with a smile.
She passed him an NUJ card, which he examined. However, it didn’t contain the information he wanted, which was how this sleek, pretty journalist had got her life entangled with the unhappy business of Walsh’s death.
‘Ever since the night of Aloysius’s crash I’ve had this feeling that I’m being watched. I keep thinking I’m being followed while driving. Tell me, Inspector, are Special Branch watching me?’
‘Why would Special Branch want to do that?’
‘It was something that Aloysius said to me before he died. That I should keep looking over my shoulders to check for shadows.’
‘What made him say that?’
‘Because he believed we were getting too close to the truth. That we had wandered into forbidden territory.’
‘What you mean by the truth?’
She told him about Father Walsh’s theory of a murder triangle – that a large number of apparently random sectarian killings in Tyrone and Armagh were all connected. He had needed someone to help write up his research into some sort of a book, thus he had given her copies of all his maps and findings. At first, they had seemed rambling and chaotic, she explained, but she kept dipping in and out of them over the space of several months.
‘What intrigued me most were his claims about collusion between Loyalists and police officers,’ she said. ‘I spent a couple of weeks in the newspaper archives, reading as many reports as I could on those murders. I contacted the national archive of government papers and followed his lines of inquiry. Eventually my research began to bear fruit, and I came away with the feeling that Aloysius was correct.’
‘How?’
‘That there was a pattern. A web of connections between the killings. And something else: it struck me as odd that this gang was able to go undetected for so long. The killings should have rung alarm bells all the way to the top of government. However, nothing was done. The murderous cycle continued month after month. Even when some of the gang members were charged and convicted, they received only the lightest possible sentences.’
Daly decided not to press her on what she meant by the web of connections. He wasn’t interested in hearing that kind of detail, at least not yet.
She leaned a little closer to him.
‘Now tell me, Inspector, am I being followed? I need to know.’
‘I wouldn’t know, to tell you the truth. They might be following me as well.’
It was her turn to express surprise.
‘Why would they do that?’
There was something exquisite and finely honed about her curiosity. Her eyes flashed at him. Daly’s mouth felt dry but he decided to plunge right in.
‘My interest in Walsh’s murder triangle is more personal than you think.’
Daly was surprised at how easy it was to talk to this strange woman. She had access to brutal facts about his mother’s death, and this made him more wary and respectful than he had been of any other journalist, or woman for that matter. She might reveal things about his mother that he had never known. Journalism was a fickle business, with rapid deadlines and a superficial attachment to the truth, but something in her manner struck him as oddly trustworthy.
‘One of the pins on his map had my mother’s name next to it.’
‘She was one of the victims?’
‘That’s correct.’
She stared at him and waited.
‘And you were...’ She paused to scrutinize his face. ‘...surprised to see her name there?’
He paused.
‘Yes.’
Amid her concern, he detected a trace of satisfaction – excitement, almost. She was eager to get inside his feelings.
He stumbled on with his story.
‘I was only a boy, nine years old, at the time. They told me a different version of events. That she died during crossfire in an IRA attack on a police unit.’
Her interest doubled.
‘Who were “they”?’
‘The police at the time. My father, too.’ He hesitated. ‘I was a lonely child, unworldly in many ways. I never thought he kept anything from me. Now I’m confused.’
She leaned forward again, gazing at him intently. He reminded himself that he barely knew her. He viewed her slender face, the outline of her lips, and below, her exposed neck leading to the top of her chest. Was this a form of encouragement, he wondered, a token of her appreciation that he was opening up? Daly was unsure, but he could tell she was a subtle interrogator, and observant, too. She knew he was intensely aware of
the proximity of her body.
‘I would like to have it sorted out,’ he told her. ‘The truth, I mean.’
He wondered how much of the story he had invented himself based on the meagre details relayed to him. Perhaps that was the nature of childhood memories, a hazy narrative created by immature minds to deal with loss and pain.
‘Somehow, I always believed in the back of my mind that the explanation of her death was inadequate.’ His voice cracked slightly.
She appeared to bask in his discomfort, the inner conflict between his reticence and his need to spill the truth. He grew shy, worried that an excess of grief might leap from his heart and overwhelm him. However, she had a journalist’s knack of showing no discomfort or surprise at the most intimate of revelations.
‘What do you remember of that time?’
‘I remember countless checkpoints. Soldiers and policemen searching my father’s car.’ He stared at his hands. ‘I never saw the scene itself. You know, the place where she was killed. But somehow I remember it clearly. I wasn’t an eyewitness, but I’ve invented all the details in my imagination. Do you know what I mean?’ He stared at her. ‘I wasn’t there that morning but I can recall it as though I was. Am I making sense?’
‘Yes.’
‘And now that I’ve learned the story was a lie, and I try to remember what actually happened that morning, where I was and what I was doing, there’s nothing there any more. Just a blank.’
He glanced at her. She was deeply engaged with what he was saying. Motionless, she waited for him to continue, but he had nothing more to say. With a neat shuffle, she moved her body closer to his.
‘Father Walsh was committed to the truth,’ she said, examining his face for a reaction. ‘To exposing cover-ups and lies and filling in the blanks that remained amid all the grief. His search was leading him to some shocking conclusions.’
‘Like what?’
‘That the murders weren’t political assassinations. None of the victims were in any way involved in politics, let alone the IRA. Including, I presume, your mother.’
Such was the arbitrary nature of sectarian murder, thought Daly.
‘It’s clear they were killed because they were Catholics,’ he said. ‘Surely, that’s all there was to it.’
‘Aloysius believed there was another reason.’ She leaned closer and almost touched his hand.
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘Aloysius believed there was logic behind the apparent randomness of the attacks. The geographical pattern and the dates. For a start, the majority of the murders happened on the first Monday of the month.’
Daly shook his head. He was in no mood to follow her reasoning.
‘What are you suggesting? That my mother was deliberately targeted for some reason other than her religion?’
‘Yes.’
‘But there was no sense behind the killings. They were the work of psychopathic gunmen and you know it.’
‘Think about it for a moment. The gang must have studied their targets, followed their movements. They didn’t just pile into a car and drive off looking for a Catholic to murder. They were specific.’
She made the suggestion as gently as possible, but she might as well have been probing a painful wound with a razor. He tried to seal himself off from the source of grief so that he might understand the outrageous thing she was suggesting.
‘Why are you taking sectarianism out of the frame? What other motive could there have been?’
She held back from going any further.
‘That’s the puzzle. Poor Aloysius spent years trying to solve it.’
She ordered another set of coffees.
‘Where did your mother work?’
‘She was a nurse at the local hospital.’
‘Did she have any Protestant friends?’
‘What are you implying? That a colleague marked her down as a target?’
‘We’ll have to dig up staff lists for the wards she worked on. Find out if anyone had links with the paramilitaries or the police.’
She kept questioning him as he sipped the coffee, trying to pin down his memories of that dark year. However, they were slipping from his grasp. All he had left was the image of his mother’s blue shoes on the bedroom floor and his father rummaging through the drawers.
‘I’ve already told you how flawed my memory is,’ he said. ‘There’s no point asking any more questions.’
Suddenly he felt tired. He reminded himself that Pryce was a journalist, not a therapist or confidante. She was interested only in proving controversial conspiracy theories and stirring up the past. Perhaps the theory was nothing more than a journalist’s ploy to gain the greatest possible publicity for her book.
He was completely sure of one thing, however. A stray event had robbed him of his mother, the wanton behaviour of a gang of lunatics who did not know what they were doing from one moment to the next. That was what gave terrorists their edge, after all. Murder on a whim, their target constantly changing.
‘Are you a practising Catholic, Inspector?’ she asked.
He glanced at her, and then looked at his empty cup of coffee. He wanted desperately to walk away from this impetuous woman and her oddly intimate manner. He did not believe that the obsessive research of a lonely priest could dispel the murkiness of the past. The truth had disappeared more than thirty years ago down a labyrinth of twisted country lanes along with his mother’s incognito killers. It was gone forever, he told himself. Like his mother’s body. What was the point in following it into the labyrinth?
‘I asked are you a practising Catholic?’
‘Sorry, I was distracted.’ Had he imagined a judgemental tone in her voice? ‘What do you mean?’ He felt challenged and a little disorientated by the question.
‘I mean, if you were, it might be a form of consolation that the man who shed light on your mother’s death was a priest.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. In the sense that his research was a way of sanctifying evil.’ She spoke with a measure of reverence.
‘I don’t think anyone can sanctify evil. Not even the holiest of priests.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’
Daly said nothing. He considered there might be a measure of truth in what she had said – in that the priest’s meticulous charting of the murder triangle had exalted the deaths of its victims. Walsh had wanted to make the secret of their murder so large and all-encompassing it could no longer be buried in the past.
She leaned in closer.
‘I think we recognize something in each other, Inspector. Sometimes fate brings people together.’
He blinked.
‘You will find out what happened to Father Walsh. I can see that in your eyes.’
‘What do you see?’
‘A mother’s only son who wants to know as much as I do about what happened that night. Why and how Walsh died. That’s the reason you rang me in the first place.’
It jarred him a little that she knew he was an only son. How had she discovered that piece of information?
She removed her mobile phone.
‘If you give me your mobile number I’ll ring you if anything fresh comes up.’
He felt uncomfortable with where she was leading him. She was drawing him down a road into the past, but not the past he knew. It was a sinister place, stranger than any wilderness. He should walk away right now, he thought. He should just leave, and turn away from this road; yet knowing this, and still resenting the intimate draw of her voice and her smile, he acquiesced and gave her his mobile number.
She stood up, smoothed her skirt and held out her hand for him to shake. It felt slender and pointed. He was reminded again of a cold little digging tool.
12
When night fell, Daly was so tired he almost forgot to carry the black hen to its coop. The urgent peck-peck of its beak against the glass woke him as he drifted into sleep. He got dressed and lifted her from the porch window. H
e stumbled alarmingly in the darkness, holding the hen close to his chest. A fox barked a few fields away. He could feel her trembling. The track to the coop had never seemed so uneven and overgrown, and he was glad to slip the hen into its hay-filled darkness. He could almost have fallen into that cosy little hiding place, too.
He crawled into bed and fell into a fitful sleep. Episodes from his childhood percolated through his mind, memories of his father mumbling to himself, his mother’s shoes, the two of them standing together in one of the back fields staring at the ground. His subconscious was trying to isolate clues from the things his father had done and said, dragging him up out of sleep to remember. A pattern in the fields. His father digging energetically. Something inexplicable, hovering at the edge of his awareness. What had the old man buried there? He forced himself back down into sleep, hoping that by morning time he might begin to understand.
He dreamed that he saw the back of his mother walking slowly down a dark lane. She was wandering in a maze of little roads, partially dazed. She turned to smile at him absent-mindedly, beckoning him to follow, but something warned him that her journey was botched, that they would never discover the roads that would lead her back home.
Afterwards, he lay awake thinking that the lough-shore terrain of entangled lanes might be the landscape of the past itself. He needed instructions on how to untangle this inner geography for he felt as dazed as his mother had looked in his dream. He needed more clues than those provided by Walsh’s murder map. It did not bode well, beginning this journey into the past feeling so confused, but he had no other choice.
In another dream, he imagined that his cottage had grown a set of spindly legs and was strutting about the fields. Every time he stepped close to the front door, the building became agitated, whirling and spinning in the air with a mind of its own. The more he watched the cottage, the more it resembled an old hen looking for a place to roost. Finally, it settled in one of the back fields of the farm.
Yet when Daly went looking for the cottage, it had disappeared without a trace. In its place stood his father with a spade gripped in his hands. It was raining heavily and the earth around the old man was disturbed.
Silence Page 9
