Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  She gave it straight back to him.

  ‘I can’t look at it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I have a baby to feed.’

  She looked at him with a hint of sympathy. What kind of image did he present? A courageous investigator following clues into the past, or a grieving son, hopelessly lost with only an outdated map for guidance? Her face clouded, gathering itself to tell him something important.

  ‘Maps don’t always lead you to your destination. Sometimes they just take you further away.’

  *

  Daly drove home slowly, chewing over what Ciara had told him. His father had mentioned in his letter something about the depths of evil their neighbours had sunk to in the weeks leading up to his mother’s murder. The comment chimed with Walsh’s line about mean little jealousies. He was tempted to go back to Walsh’s room in the monastery and read the notes on each murder. However, it was getting late in the day, and he needed time to think.

  He had the nagging feeling he had overlooked something important. Until now, he had assumed that Walsh’s talk of conspiracies involved the intelligence services and perhaps the judiciary. But what if these weren’t the principal characters? What if the conspiracies involved a different circle of people entirely? One more connected with the local landscape? This was where he should begin again, he thought. He would have to go through all the connections of the murder map from a different perspective.

  The simplest way to give symmetry to chaos was to hold a mirror to it. The details of Ciara’s family tragedy had aligned with fragments of his own: the ruined cottage, the harassment at checkpoints, the time of the week and the hint at neighbourly disputes. When he recalled the stories of the other murders he saw that the same details were mirrored, doubled, trebled. It was no wonder that Walsh had worked on the cases for years.

  On an emotional level, he felt an odd sense of peace, satisfaction even, to know that invisible seams joined their family tragedies to his. On an intellectual level, he realized that Walsh was correct to have searched for patterns. He should be focusing on the most innocent-seeming details that the murders had in common; the more they were repeated, the more they took on meaning and importance.

  For the first time in ages, he felt a sense of achievement. Back in his cottage, he stood for a long time at the scullery window watching the lights of houses winking in the blackness, and in the distance, on the other side of the lough, the string of towns lit up against the dark motion of the waves. He went straight to bed, hoping to hold on to his small glow of contentment.

  *

  In the middle of the night, a frenzied cry warning of murder stirred him in his dreams. He turned and twisted his blankets. The shriek sounded again. Semi-conscious, he sensed the terror of something that could not speak expressed in that blood-curdling cry.

  For a moment, his brain could not make any sense of what was going on, but then he heard the cry again. An anguished squawk from the darkness outside. He woke up fully, realizing the sound wasn’t human. He remembered with awful clarity that he had forgotten to lock up the black hen, and that it was a moonless night. Killing time for predators like foxes.

  He jumped up, grabbed a torch and pulled on an old coat. It had been a while since he’d been tempted out for a nocturnal walk, and he was clumsy stumbling his way through the door and out into the overgrown garden. He knocked his shin against a low wall and cursed. He searched for the hen at her usual roost on the windowsill and then in the coop, but there was no sign of her. He made a circuit of the cottage. Scanning with his torch, he found a trail of black feathers leading into one of the thorn thickets.

  The thought that a fox had made off with the hen made him feel sad and angry, but a part of him also felt relieved of a troublesome burden. He followed the feathers. After a few minutes, he heard a faint jumble of cluck-cluck noises emerging from the thicket. The hen was more resourceful than he had believed. The beam of his torch caught her bolting deeper into the thicket, but then she froze. She crouched close to the ground, still gripped by fear. Apart from the missing feathers, she appeared unhurt. He eased himself through the thorns on his haunches, groping with his hands until he encircled her tattered wings and then her trembling body. He dragged her out and hoisted her back to the cottage, talking softly to her all the time.

  Fearing that she might not survive the cold night, he settled her into a box packed with hay and placed it next to the dying fire in the scullery. He waited until her agitation ceased and her attention turned inwards. Soon she settled into sleep.

  He was unable to get back to sleep himself, and got up once more to sit by the embers of the fire. He sighed. He wondered whether he was wasting his life, living day by day with the silence of the cottage, his only company this black hen dodging from shadow to shadow in his tracks. They were both castaways, he realized, marooned in the past. He saw a little of his futile detective’s life in the hen and her mannerisms, in the way she spent her waking life stooped over the ground, pecking at odd bits here and there, a life of scratching and vigilance, while the unseen predators circled perpetually in the darkness.

  Pryce wanted a hero for her book, but he wasn’t what she was looking for. He wasn’t even a hero of waiting and procrastination. He had exhausted all his resources already. He closed his eyes and willed a voice to speak, a voice of reassurance and wisdom, advising him of the right course of action to take, his mother or father’s voice, or his own voice from his childhood, any voice at all, but none were forthcoming.

  19

  Early-morning mist rolled in from the lough and gathered around the cottage, low-lying, serpentine, clinging in weird whorls to the tops of the thorn thickets. Daly stood at the scullery window watching it blanket his fields. The blackthorns seemed to collect the mist, giving it shape and menace. Dense and white, it advanced towards his lookout until all he could see was his reflection staring back at him with a look of haunted bafflement.

  The phone rang in the hall. It took a while for him to register the fact. He did not want to talk to anyone. Still, he hurried out and answered it.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hello, Celcius.’ The woman’s voice was warm, intimate. ‘You left without a proper goodbye.’ It was the journalist, Pryce.

  He said nothing.

  ‘Listen, I have to see you. We must meet up and talk things through.’

  ‘Talk what through?’

  ‘Aloysius’s murder map. Your mother. The connections.’

  He looked out at the thickening mist. The deepest of silences filled the air.

  ‘I’m busy this morning.’

  She gave a little laugh.

  ‘Ever since we met I’ve been turning this story over and over in my head, but every time I sit down to write it I get bogged down and give up. Not a single word written. You’ve cursed me with writer’s block.’

  Blaming him for her procrastination seemed absurd and petty, even for a journalist, thought Daly.

  ‘Perhaps it’s no longer your story to tell.’

  ‘Which is why I need to see you. I could come out to your cottage, or you could choose somewhere else to meet.’

  ‘I told you I’m busy.’

  Her voice grew softer, more winning.

  ‘I really need to talk to you.’

  Daly sighed again.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Major Hannon,’ she said. ‘He’s willing to meet us this morning.’

  ‘What’s the address?’

  Daly wrote down the details. He understood why she needed him so badly. Who else would be desperate enough to follow her signposts?

  ‘We should travel up together,’ she suggested.

  He had to hand it to her. She was stubborn and resourceful – the most dangerous type of journalist, brazen as long as she still had the scent of a story in her nostrils.

  ‘This is a police investigation. I don’t want you in the way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t need to explain my decisions to you
. For a start, you don’t know the type of people we’re dealing with.’

  ‘I don’t know?’

  ‘Correct. You don’t even begin to know. And let me remind you that in normal societies, police investigate crimes and journalists report them.’

  ‘But I have a duty to this story and to Father Walsh, not to mention my career. I can’t give it up now. I’d never be able to live with myself otherwise.’

  ‘You might not have much of a career left – or a life, for that matter – if you keep interfering,’ warned Daly and hung up.

  *

  An hour later, the sun was splitting through the mist and drenching Daly’s car in light as he pulled up the gravelled drive leading to Major Hannon’s home. He got out and stared at the impressive three-storey Victorian building with that slightly mesmerized feeling one gets when arriving in a warmer, more colourful country. He felt as though he had ascended through a fog of worry, sleeplessness and moral uncertainty to alight on this golden gravel. He climbed the steps to a pair of oak doors, with the uncomfortable sensation that he was dragging his tangled story behind, like a monstrous tail from the past.

  Hannon was large, square-headed, dressed in a cashmere cardigan, polo neck and cream slacks. He looked as though he had just dropped off his golf clubs at the putting green. He was fat for a former military man, and it was more than retirement weight, Daly noticed.

  On greeting the detective, Hannon swung his bulk to the back of his heels and forward again, his teeing-up position. The expectant look on his face turned a little desolate when he realized Daly was on his own.

  ‘Ms Pryce said you wanted to talk to me,’ he said, shaking hands. His voice was abrupt with a hint of tension in it. ‘Where is she?’

  He looked Daly up and down carefully. The detective guessed that not too far below Hannon’s overweight golfer’s persona there still lurked a razor-sharp intelligence agent.

  ‘Ms Pryce is a journalist. I want to keep our conversation between us and no one else.’

  ‘Very well,’ replied the major. ‘You’d better come in.’

  He led Daly into a conservatory with potted orange trees and a tiled floor scrubbed to the bright polish of a military barracks. From a drawer, Hannon removed an old-fashioned voice recorder, and placed it on the table between them. He smiled.

  ‘How may I help your investigation?’

  ‘What investigation?’ asked Daly, wondering how well the major had prepared himself for the visit.

  ‘I mean this – a police detective coming all the way from the sticks in Tyrone to interview me and rake over my past.’ He stared at Daly as though he had dragged himself from a wild thorny corner of another country.

  ‘This is not an official investigation. More a casual inquiry. I was interested in meeting you after I came across your name in some old files. I want to ask you a few questions about a number of murders that took place in the 1970s.’ Daly cleared his throat. ‘One of the victims was my mother. A completely innocent woman who was killed at a police checkpoint.’

  It occurred to Daly that Walsh’s research had made his mother’s death public property. He felt an odd sense of vulnerability bringing up its details like this.

  ‘If you want to ask questions then clearly you are conducting an investigation,’ replied the major. ‘What sort of questions?’

  Daly sensed a note of contempt enter Hannon’s regard for him. It prickled his anger.

  ‘According to the records, you were a senior intelligence agent operating out of Armagh military barracks at the time of the murders.’

  ‘Which records are you talking about?’ Hannon’s face and voice grew cold.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s confidential.’

  ‘Then I’m assuming they were dug up by your journalist friend.’

  ‘With the help of another source. A very reliable one.’

  Hannon snorted.

  ‘What sources are reliable these days? What do you know about your informant’s real priorities and prejudices? Everyone is playing some sort of political game in this country.’

  ‘I’m a detective. My job is to collar criminals, not play politics. Besides, I can assure you that this source was completely disinterested in anything but the truth.’

  The major’s face sharpened.

  ‘Was? Sounds like your source is deceased.’ He sighed and leaned his bulk back into the seat. ‘Dear God, I can see why you’re convinced; the only completely disinterested source is a dead one.’ He regarded Daly for several moments. ‘Very well, I will answer your questions. I’m retired now, and I’ve received no instruction from MI5 as to what I can or cannot say about that particular time of the Troubles. But first, you have to tell me precisely what you want to know.’

  ‘Who murdered my mother? And who orchestrated the cover-up?’

  ‘What makes you believe I can answer those questions?’

  Daly told him what he knew of his mother’s death, and the connections he had gleaned from Walsh’s murder map.

  Hannon shrugged pompously.

  ‘I find it strange your mother was murdered by that particular gang of Loyalists and rogue police officers if she was, as you claim, completely innocent. Did she have any political connections or involvement with the IRA?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘But you were a child at the time. It’s not inconceivable that your mother’s political leanings were unknown to you.’

  ‘Neither of my parents was political in any way.’

  ‘What about her relatives? Any black sheep in the family? A brother on the run, perhaps?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A completely innocent Catholic, then?’ The major looked thoughtful.

  Daly pushed the memory of his car registration collection to the back of his mind.

  ‘But that wasn’t the Loyalists’ style, you see,’ said the major. ‘Unless they had some sort of personal score to settle with your family. Why else would they target her completely at random?’

  Daly felt a bitter black taste rise in his mouth.

  ‘What do you mean? A personal score?’

  ‘A neighbourly dispute. A business deal gone wrong. Remember, Inspector, these men were weak, mentally unhinged. They obsessed over things in the past, grudges, enmities, a perceived slight.’

  The indifference with which he shrugged off the motivation for the murder increased the bitter taste in Daly’s mouth.

  ‘This was 1979,’ continued the major. ‘The entire country was slipping into chaos. If I tried to explain it, you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Very well, then.’ He sighed and leaned forward with the air of a man eager to talk, anxious not to conceal anything about the past. ‘Before the Troubles started, sectarianism and bigotry were barely noticeable to people of my class and background. It was simply how the country got by.’ He sighed. ‘But then the Civil Rights marches and the IRA bombing campaign came along, and that pathology became something much nastier, a convulsion, which along with the IRA’s barbaric terror tactics shook the country to its core. Many ordinary people were caught up in it – including a bunch of very misguided police officers and soldiers, over whom their commanders had no final control or authority. Remember, the IRA were rampant and the entire situation seemed out of control. Bloodlust and revenge can travel at lightning speed through the ranks of the very best of officers, men and women who had to bury their colleagues in the morning and return to duty in the afternoon.’

  ‘And when these officers or security agents committed murder a blind eye was turned?’

  ‘Of course not. However, in the atmosphere then, when it felt as though everything was falling apart, those of us in command and our contacts in the judiciary and media had a duty not to undermine public confidence in the security forces. In those days, secrecy wasn’t a dirty word, it meant discretion. It was thought that some things were better kept away from public scrutiny.’

  ‘So the conspiracy theories are t
rue. There was a committee in regular contact at the highest levels of society.’

  ‘No. But we knew who our friends were. Those in positions of authority who understood our predicament.’

  ‘And with their help you kept the truth about the murder triangle secret.’

  ‘Yes. A secret that was a bulwark to the policing of a society hovering on the brink of violence. Remember, we were only trying to do what was best for this country in the long run.’ He leaned back again. ‘Being loyal to one’s country and to law and order is not a criminal offence. Despite what people think nowadays.’ He smiled at Daly. ‘But of course, you’ve heard all this before. This is nothing new.’

  It was and it wasn’t. Not to this critical extent. Not to the nihilistic point where the very people paid to uphold law and order were being protected as they propelled the country towards civil war.

  ‘There is another theory,’ said Daly. ‘That there was an orchestrated campaign within intelligence circles to murder innocent Catholics.’

  ‘Why would anyone devise such a plan?’

  ‘Because it was the only way to detach the IRA from its bedrock of support. A cohort within the intelligence services wanted to prove that the IRA could not protect the wider Catholic community. The objective required a robust sectarian murder campaign. In a warped way, the more innocent the Catholic victim the better. Hence my mother’s murder.’ Daly stared intensely at the major, but Hannon gave nothing away. ‘There must have been an order given at the highest levels of government or within the military. The pattern of murders, the cover-ups within the police force, the judiciary and the media. Something sinister is begging to be discovered.’

  ‘Then discover it.’ The major’s voice had turned cold again.

  ‘I don’t have to. One man already has. A priest. He spent years struggling to find the connections. He wrote thousands of words about the similarities between these murders. He was on a mission to expose the entire rotten system until he died in mysterious circumstances close to the Irish border. His name was Father Aloysius Walsh.’

  Hannon did not react to the mention of the name. He seemed to be expecting it. He rose, unlocked a drawer in his desk, and pulled out a slender file.