‘I don’t have any information on your Father Walsh,’ he said. ‘But I do have this on his assistant, Jacqueline Pryce. I’d assumed she was accompanying you here today, so I took the liberty of preparing myself with a little background reading. This is a copy of an MI5 file that was dispatched to me by courier this morning. It concerns your little reporter friend and her involvement with Walsh. She must be flattered to have warranted the attention.’
He sat down and opened the file.
‘How well do you know her?’ he asked Daly.
‘I’ve only just met her.’
‘Did she mention that she’s married to a former IRA man, Eddie McKenna, a Republican dissident who doesn’t subscribe to the peace process? Gives her persona a little more edge, doesn’t it?’ He stared at Daly. ‘I have some background here about her employment record, and the people she has been talking to in the past few months.’
‘Background?’ relied Daly. ‘What about this for background? Walsh was researching an incident that took place in Palestine in 1947. The murder of a Jewish youth by a Major George Hannon. Why don’t you tell me what you know about this man who shares your name?’
Hannon stared at Daly, seemingly fascinated by the detective’s digression.
‘I’ve examined the military records,’ said Daly. ‘He was your father.’
‘You’re correct. But that was seventy years ago, when he worked for the Palestine police service. You know that he returned from his stint there a hero. He was awarded several medals for bravery. For his service in Oman, too. If you like, I can let you see them.’
Daly did not respond.
‘But I fail to see what relevance his military record has to your investigation. My father had no involvement with the modern-day Troubles. What you should be concentrating on is the foreground.’
‘But he passed something else on to you as well as his medals. A strategy, a controversial military theory on countering insurgency in a native population. Walsh tracked its use in Palestine, Oman and Uganda. It was his legacy to you.’
‘I see where you’re going now, Inspector.’ Hannon sat upright. ‘If you’re suggesting that I or my father had anything to do with Walsh’s murder triangle then you will have my lawyers to answer to.’
‘I’ll pass your concerns on to Special Branch. They’ll have to look into this, like everything else in the case.’
At the mention of Special Branch, Hannon visibly relaxed.
‘Make sure to keep them properly informed. They might save you from a serious lapse of judgement.’
Daly got up to leave. ‘One more thing before I go. Walsh was due to meet a man called Hegarty at the hotel the night he died. Do you know anything about him?
Hannon grimaced.
‘He’s a murderer, by anyone’s definition.’
He went on to explain that Hegarty was a highly placed mole within the IRA working for British Intelligence.
‘I recruited him many years ago when he was a young man. Unfortunately, since the peace process he has gone to great lengths trying to smear his former employers. He has stirred up a storm of rumour and conjecture that will tarnish the security forces for years. From what I understand, Walsh swallowed his lies and came back for more. Be warned, Inspector, Hegarty is ruthless enough to kill anyone in his path. For the last forty years he has operated in a vacuum without any political or judicial controls.’
‘He was also a British Intelligence agent,’ said Daly. ‘On this occasion, you’re not showing much loyalty to an old comrade.’
‘I’m only telling you this because I believe he’s one of the most dangerous men I’ve ever met. To make matters worse, his life is under threat in a way it never was before. Republicans know there was a mole in their midst. They won’t stop till they hunt him out.’
Hannon walked Daly to the door.
‘Do you know his whereabouts?’ he asked Daly.
‘I have no idea.’
‘Now is the time for him to leave Northern Ireland. I’ve argued with him over the years, begged him to emigrate to the US or Australia. But he’s hell-bent on stirring up trouble. You must warn him.’
‘As I said, I don’t know where he is.’
‘But you have some means of contacting him?’
‘No,’ lied Daly.
‘Well, if by some chance Hegarty gets in touch with you, I want you to contact your colleagues in Special Branch, immediately. Your life may be in great danger.’
Daly said goodbye to him at the door. Hannon handed him a copy of the MI5 file on Pryce.
‘I wish you luck in your search for your mother’s killers,’ said Hannon. ‘However, I fear that you will discover only traces of the truth, brutal bits of information here and there, a few obscure connections, but the whole story will remained invisible, fragmented. Especially if you have people like Pryce and Hegarty as your guides.’
‘My eyes are wide open, believe me, and my suspicions on the highest alert,’ said Daly and left.
Driving back to Tyrone, Daly imagined that a dark-coloured car was keeping pace behind him on the motorway. Was he being followed? It was difficult to tell on such a busy road. He cut off on to the minor roads around Lough Neagh. It was easier to single out a tail on this empty maze of lanes that he knew like the back of his hands. He glanced in his rear mirror and saw the car swing into view. For several miles, the car kept its distance as Daly traversed crossroads and junctions, until he came across a police checkpoint in the middle of nowhere. He slowed right down when the checkpoint was a hundred yards away. He could see the group of police officers standing in the middle of the road with their guns, waiting for his car to approach. They seemed to be doing nothing but guarding the emptiness of the road behind. Two of them were wearing blue overalls. Why the overalls? Was it to keep the forensics clean? A sweat broke out on Daly’s forehead thinking of what the officers might be planning. The snub noses of their guns were pointed at the ground but their eyes stared hard at his car, noting the registration. He reversed the vehicle at speed and turned off on to a narrow road. He hit the pedal hard, and drove straight to police headquarters. If a speed camera had caught him on those twisting by-roads, plunging by derelict-looking farms on one side and flooded fields on the other, he would without question have lost his licence.
Fealty appeared to be waiting for him as soon as he entered headquarters.
‘We’ve had complaints, Daly, about your little visits.’ The Special Branch inspector radiated barely controlled anger.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can’t go knocking on doors and barging right in like the old days. Especially at the home of a high-ranking former intelligence agent.’
‘How do you propose I should conduct my investigation?’
‘By sharing information and strategies with your colleagues. We work in an open-plan environment these days. You can’t keep skulking and hiding in back offices or your car, and operating like a maverick.’
‘I have questions that need answered. I need to find out what happened all those years ago, and uncover the links between Walsh’s death and the murder of McClintock in the hotel room.’
There was a shift in Fealty’s voice, a deepening of his anger.
‘Remember you’re a detective in the new police service of Northern Ireland. You shouldn’t let what happened in the past cloud your better judgement.’
‘Happened in the past,’ replied Daly. ‘You make it sound as though what happened to my mother is over and done with, but it’s not. It’s not the past, at all. It’s my front line. It’s where my detective career was headed on the day I began. I’ve no choice in the matter. I can no more ignore what happened all those years ago than climb out of my own skin.’
‘How can you be sure there are any links between what happened to your mother and Walsh’s death?’
‘What is there to be uncertain of?’
‘Why would anyone want to kill Walsh and make it look like an accident?’
&n
bsp; ‘That’s the crux of the puzzle. Who would want to kill an elderly priest? And who would want to shoot another man in his hotel bedroom? I can only assume that Walsh uncovered something that became too dangerous.’
‘And you suspect the major of involvement. What leads do you have?’
‘Right now, I’ve none, except that his name was mentioned in Walsh’s research.’
‘Who else have you spoken to?’
‘A woman called Ciara O’Brien. She’s a niece of one of the murder triangle victims.’
Fealty sighed.
‘It’s been more than thirty years since those murders took place. What could be so dangerous about that time that threatens a man’s life now? Haven’t you noticed, for Christ’s sake? We have a peace process; the paramilitaries have ended their bloody campaigns. No one wants to rock the boat. What ghosts can emerge into the light now?’
‘What do you know of a former spy called Daniel Hegarty?’
Fealty’s face darkened.
‘He was an informer within the IRA. Unfortunately, he wants to keep the war going. We believe he was trying to manipulate Walsh into believing there was a grand conspiracy. He has gone to great lengths to smear Special Branch and his former employers.’ Fealty paused briefly before continuing. ‘You should know that we’re launching a full-scale manhunt for Mr Hegarty. We believe he killed McClintock.’ He looked sharply at Daly. ‘Do you have any leads on Hegarty? What about Walsh’s mobile phone? Any sign yet?’
‘No,’ lied Daly. ‘I’ll let you know when I have something worth pursuing.’
Daly noticed that his evasions were disturbing Fealty, who stepped up close to his face. The Special Branch inspector wanted to push his point across as firmly as he could.
‘Listen to me, Daly. Father Walsh spun a web of rumour and suspicion for himself. He went looking for evidence to confirm his fears and prejudices, and he found it among disgruntled informers, alcoholic ex-police officers, journalists with an eye on the big scoop.’ Fealty’s thin lips carried an ugly sense of threat. ‘They fed him with what he wanted to hear – in the end, his conspiracy theories entangled him like a snug little web. He wove it for his ageing mind, wrapping himself in thicker and thicker strands of darkness. That night he crashed his car, something at the checkpoint spooked him. It was not the fault of the police officers, who were just trying to do their job, as officers have always done in this country. Walsh misconstrued something he saw, or saw something that was not there. It was a bad habit he had developed. In the end it killed him.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind the next time a police checkpoint tries to stop me.’
Fealty did not react to Daly’s comment. He nodded and made his way back up the stairs. Daly only stayed long enough in the building to check if any police patrols had radioed in the details of his car and his evasion of a checkpoint. The fact that there were no such reports heightened his suspicion that something sinister had been arranged on that lonely lough-shore road.
He made his way back to the entrance. He suddenly felt oppressed by the building and its sprawling size. He’d had enough of open-plan offices and long corridors. Part of him wanted to return to his old detective’s life and his former shell, the fortified police station at Derrylee. He scuttled out of the doors. He missed the old smoke-filled incident rooms, the sectarian banter and the chat about drinking expeditions, trifling things compared to all this high-powered talk of a new police force for a new Northern Ireland. He wanted to hear the voices of those old RUC officers, sit down at the same table with them, look into their eyes and laugh at their grim jokes, even if he did not share their religion or political beliefs, and would always be regarded as an outsider. However, that was akin to talking and laughing with a circle of ghosts, among whom his mother’s murderers might lurk. He could never partake of that world now. He could see those old RUC officers in his mind’s eye, getting up and quietly vanishing.
He turned his back on the building, and drove off in his car, but there it was again, floating in his rear-view mirror, jutting into his consciousness, urging him to hit the pedal hard. His wheels bit gravel at the verge of the road, and the car skidded. The building swung back into his windscreen again, and he cursed. He started up his car and shifted straight from first to third, the engine whining with the strain.
Someone had chosen that his mother should die, and the fault lay at least partially with former RUC officers. But who else had known about it? Who else had helped orchestrate and cover up the incident? The questions demanded answers. We live in a world compacted from our past and unsolved crimes cannot be hidden forever. He began to suspect that Special Branch were fabricating one lie after another, burdening his mother’s murder with secrets and darkness in the hope that it might plunge from view forever. That was the monstrous logic of military intelligence, the gargoyle-like behaviour of men like Fealty and Hannon.
Daly retired to the scullery fire that evening. He pulled up an old armchair with a sigh. For the first time that day, he felt his mind and body relax. Within the burning turf and the shadows cast by its flames, he had finally established a terrain under his personal control, where he could patrol his thoughts and keep an eye on his innermost anxieties. He opened a bottle of whiskey and sipped his way through several glasses, all the time watching the flames rise steadily. When he had done with the whiskey, he got out a pen and paper and wrote a letter, offering his resignation from the police force. He read it through a little while later. Perhaps it was the whiskey’s fault, but the letter contained feelings so dark and embittered that he immediately tore it up and cast the scraps into the fire.
Though his mind still felt dark, in the midst of his dejection he experienced a moment of odd euphoria, a flicker of anger and professional pride that persuaded him not to resign. Nothing he could do would erase the actions of the police officers in the past, but he might still summon enough courage to fix things for the future.
20
Saturday morning, and Daly awoke with a fresh mind. He took a quick shower to rinse away the previous night’s mood of morbid self-inspection. It was hard to keep holding on to loss and anger, especially when you needed to get out of bed in the morning. Keen to enjoy what was usually the most pleasant part of his day, he dressed and stepped outside without having breakfast. The sight of the farm foundering in the interplay of mist and dawn light was enough to keep him from regretting the discoveries he had made over the past week.
Shunning the enigmas of the landscape, the humped banks of soil and overgrown weeds, he strayed on to his father’s old vegetable patch. He kicked aside the nettles and managed to locate the almost effaced drills where the vegetables he had planted last year now lay rotten with frost. He grabbed his father’s lean spade and began digging as if he might tell the earth the depth of his troubles. The black hen came scuttling out and hurried after each fresh spadeful, picking out the worms and grubs.
The scrape of the spade hitting stones resounded comfortingly in the morning air. He worked himself into a sweat. At first, the clumps of root-entangled earth felt too heavy to lift, but then he struck a softer patch. He dug on, not looking up for an hour, fashioning a set of drills in the way he had seen his father do every spring of his childhood, head bent low, as if he were talking all the time to the spade. The ground had never been levelled or ploughed by a tractor and was full of quirky humps and dips, minutely adjusted by his father’s annual digging bouts.
With the hen for company, he lost himself in the work. The mist hung level in the air above and behind him, robing the terrain in pale threads. He felt a quiet satisfaction that he was in some small way contributing to the levelling of the farm’s patchwork of fields, which had been compacted and heaped by his forebears into this lopsided landscape. In short, he almost felt his old self again. It might be far from the normal demeanour of a well-adjusted, middle-aged man, but he was determined to hold on to the feeling at all costs.
He took a break, leaning on the spade, and surveyed
the rest of the farm. If only he could take the sharp edge of the spade to the past, he thought, but that landscape had been twisted out of symmetry by far greater forces.
Back in his cottage, he was about to breakfast on a bowl of porridge when he heard a car pull up rapidly outside. He opened the front door to see the journalist Pryce waving from her car.
‘Good morning,’ she called, rolling down the window.
He returned the greeting without moving from his threshold.
‘I was passing near and thought I’d drop by. I need to ask you a few questions.’
‘Not if they’re for your book.’ He tried to smile politely but failed.
She switched off the engine.
‘I thought it was country hospitality to always offer visitors a cup of tea.’
‘The place is a mess at the moment. We can talk out here.’
She tried to examine his face closely but couldn’t.
‘I’m sorry. This is one writing assignment I can’t shirk from. You must know how compelling a preoccupation it can be.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘As a detective yourself. You search for clues and suspects. I search for words and characters. But our compulsions are the same.’
He flinched at the comparison.
‘The truth is, I’ve become obsessed by your story, Celcius. My instinct tells me you’d make a compelling character for readers. It would be professional malpractice for me to ignore that.’
She looked at him with a smile that showed both pleasure and apprehension at her revelation. Daly felt himself blush slightly. Her use of his first name made him uneasy. Her smile darkened, grew more purposeful. She was aware of his discomfort.
‘I’m too stubborn and introverted to be compelling.’
‘A stubborn character often makes the reader stubborn, too. Gives them the determination to keep turning the pages of the story.’
‘Whose story are we talking about?’
‘Our story. You and me pulling away the layers of fear and denial from your past.’
Silence Page 16
