Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  He nodded slightly. She understood the overarching narrative of his life.

  ‘What do you want to ask me?’

  ‘The questions come later. First, I have to jog your memory with a few clues.’

  ‘What sort of clues?’ He felt his suspicions return.

  ‘Addresses. The first is number sixteen Derrycush Road. Jump in and I’ll take you there.’

  He was about to open the passenger door and climb in when she stopped him. Her face looked suddenly vulnerable.

  ‘Do you have your service weapon with you?’

  Her question surprised him.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just have a feeling I’m being followed by someone. I don’t know who they are.’

  Daly thought of the car shadowing him the previous day and the checkpoint on the empty road. He went back to the house and retrieved the gun. He climbed into her car, knowing he had allowed her a small victory, that they were one step closer to becoming accomplices.

  ‘I’ve a question I need to ask you,’ he said when she had settled into driving.

  ‘Fire ahead.’

  ‘How’s your husband Eddie McKenna doing?’

  She barely flinched. He found it difficult to read the look on her face.

  ‘Who told you that name?’

  ‘Major Hannon. He has a copy of a British Intelligence report on you.’

  A little of her prim, professional air drained away.

  ‘What else did he tell you?’

  ‘What else should I know?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve a Republican husband. That’s all there is to it. Eddie did some time in prison for IRA membership. When he came out he set up a campaign group for ex-prisoners’ rights. I interviewed him for a couple of stories and eventually he invited me out for a drink.’

  ‘I take it that saying no would also have been tantamount to professional malpractice.’

  This time she did flinch.

  ‘You know you remind me of him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Another man stuck in the past.’

  She pushed the car into a higher gear and drove fearlessly along roads that were little more than boreens, tapping the brakes only slightly as she swerved around blind corners. Potholes jolted the front wheels. A thorn branch slapped Daly’s side of the windscreen.

  ‘At least slow down,’ he complained.

  A crossroads loomed ahead and she braked hard. Daly lurched forward, held back by his seatbelt, and cursed. Pryce, however, was unperturbed, driving on in the same careless manner.

  The low hills, the roads that were all corners and crossroads, the hedges bearing in on them, the water swilling over the rims of blocked ditches and flooding dips in the road, made it impossible for Daly to lean back and stare through the windscreen in silence. He found himself longing for straighter roads, for the smooth tar of the dual carriageway. The car toiled through the gears. Their eyes kept meeting as, several times, she had to extricate the vehicle from a muddy lane that was in the final phase before obliteration.

  He took out Walsh’s murder map and examined it in a bid to distract himself from her driving. He tried to penetrate the cramped townlands, the interlocking parishes of grief and death. From memory, he pinpointed the locations of at least half a dozen IRA murders. For some reason, they were more easily recalled than the Loyalist attacks – Catholic guilt, perhaps, for the sins committed in his name.

  ‘Let me reassure you about one thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a political axe to grind, in spite of my husband’s background and what Major Hannon might think. I need to finish this book for financial reasons. Every journalist I know in this bloody country is broke. We’re all mortgaged to the hilt and our bank accounts are empty.’

  ‘I hope for your sake that your book never gets published,’ he said, putting away the map. ‘Otherwise some victims’ relatives might come to regard you as worse than the murderers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the way you consume people’s stories. Their tragedies. Like a cannibal of lost souls.’

  She changed gears roughly and drove on in silence. At one point, the gleam of open blue water caught his eye, and, glancing over her shoulder, he saw the white gable of his cottage, half-submerged in the bumpy fields, but then he realized that was geographically impossible, even in such a labyrinth of wriggling roads. His gable walls faced east and west, and this one faced south. He turned back to the windscreen, his empty stomach heaving with the sense of dislocation and Pryce’s reckless driving.

  ‘I doubt you’ll ever finish the book anyway,’ he told her. ‘There are too many blanks in the story.’

  ‘You needn’t worry. We’re going to fill in several this afternoon.’

  They drove along a long, lonely road that ran between a river and bogland. Daly glanced behind and saw a sleek black Audi following them. It wasn’t the type of car you’d normally see on empty by-roads. Its presence made Daly feel uneasy. It stayed close behind them in a manner that seemed deliberate and ominous, just like his tail the previous day. He glanced behind again and memorized the number plate. Old habits die hard, he thought. He rehearsed the numbers in his mind. As a child, the practice had helped prevent his mind from wandering into unsettling territories. He glanced behind again and saw that the car had disappeared.

  At intervals, the bogland gave way to plantations of pine trees and small, untidy-looking farms that had never shaken off the look of the bog, more cottages that had been abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin.

  ‘It must be hard work, living in that cottage of yours,’ said Pryce at one point.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean living cheek by jowl with the past. All those childhood memories mixed up with the present. Why not move to a new house in a nearby town?’

  He’d often asked the question himself in the gloom of a winter night, rolling in an old blanket, listening to the cold wind rising from the lough. He thought of the twisted little garden and the hummocky fields that looked as though they were slouching closer to his bedroom window with the inexorable creep of the past, and his mind darkened.

  ‘You must feel a duty to your forebears,’ said Pryce, testing his silence. ‘Why else are you still living there? Moping about that old cottage while the rest of the world moves on.’

  He sighed.

  ‘After my marriage broke up and my father died I grew tired of playing musical chairs with my life. I just wanted to stay put. The cottage is not that bad a place for a single man, despite the cold and the damp. It has its...’ He struggled to think of the correct word. Not comforts. ‘Refinements.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I have a weakness for turf fires and the bottle of whiskey in the old press. Then there are the views of the lough. Some mornings when the water’s at its highest I look out and imagine I’m in a little boat.’

  She smiled. Was it because she thought she was gaining ground with him?

  ‘But it must be lonely. Staring out at the same view, those same walls closing you in every evening.’

  ‘I have my lodgers for company.’

  She looked at him sharply.

  ‘Every night I can hear the blackbirds crawling into the roof-space. And I have a homely hen living in the porch.’

  She concentrated on driving. After a few miles, she pulled up at a lane leading to a rundown house.

  ‘Recognize this place?’ she asked.

  Daly nodded his head in silence; 16 Derrycush Road: a ruined house that had once belonged to a young couple called the Corrigans. The ruin had been a familiar landmark in his childhood. He remembered asking his father why no one lived there, and had been told a tragic story of a newly married couple who had died in a fire, and whose ghosts still haunted the burnt-out remains.

  ‘Why are we stopping here?’

  ‘Because it’s crucial to your story.’

  ‘Why is it crucial?’

  ‘Father Walsh’s murder
triangle is saturated with secret stories like that of the Corrigans and your mother. That was his predicament. He kept finding stories that could not be told until other stories were told first.’

  They both got out and approached the house. Daly opened a gate that was creaking in the wind.

  ‘I want to help you tell your story, if I can, but you have to be open with me. Do you understand? We can’t let the facts of what happened to families like yours and the Corrigans fall back into the darkness.’

  ‘What has my story got to do with what happened here?’

  He was surprised by what she told him. According to Walsh’s research, the Corrigans had married in the early summer of 1979. They had been painting their new house on the day after their honeymoon, when a Loyalist bomb, hidden in the hot press, had detonated, killing them both instantly.

  ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ he replied. ‘I heard another story. One that has nothing to do with the Troubles.’ He recounted what his father had told him, and in the telling of it, he realized how simplistic it sounded, stripped of any sense of evil or blame. A poignant isolated tragedy, constructed for a child’s ears. The truth caught up with him, and he found himself resenting Pryce. Again, she had him in her power. She had the capacity for rousing in him conflicting emotions: this aversion for the truth combined with a stronger desire to hear how evil had ploughed its course through his childhood.

  They approached the house and circled it. A blackbird bolted through a window. They stepped through what had once been the front door. At first, they could barely see where they were going in the gloom. He almost tripped over several pieces of furniture: an armchair crumbling with fungus, an upended cradle. At head level, electrical flexes and cracked light bulbs dangled in tortured silence. The rest of the house had been stripped bare, or perhaps had never been furnished or fitted out in the first place. A small ash tree had sprouted in a damp corner, a prisoner rooted in rubble, and a colony of slugs gathered where rainwater oozed from a hole in the ceiling. Now that he examined the roof closely, he could make out the path of the bomb where it had ripped through the ceiling and roof, shattering wood and tiles, buckling a steel girder.

  ‘Now can you see?’ said Pryce.

  Her exaggerated patience felt like a form of mockery. In the half-light, he saw that she was smirking slightly. She had calculated his punishment correctly.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘When you’re a child you believe what your parents tell you.’

  After a few moments of silence, they walked back to the car.

  ‘You grew up with blinkers on, Celcius,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘You didn’t see what was really happening. You didn’t understand a thing.’

  Daly got into the car and stared straight ahead, perplexed.

  ‘Of course, your family weren’t the only ones to ignore what was going on. It’s human nature not to acknowledge evil in case it spreads and comes closer to home.’

  ‘I don’t need to defend my family to you. You didn’t live through those times.’

  ‘Correct. But you did. It’s your responsibility to find out the truth. If you buckle and hide from it, you will never be able to live with yourself. You have a duty to your past, to your own self-respect.’

  She was right, he conceded. He couldn’t ignore the past any longer. He had his own journey to undertake. It was useless to keep closing his eyes, or turning his back. If their road trip proved anything, it was that the past was all around, in every direction, stretching all the way to the horizon. It was time to go back to his cottage on that morning in 1979. It was time to dig up the cottage’s secrets, the precious family bones.

  ‘You had a nice life, Celcius,’ she said. ‘A detective in the police service of Northern Ireland. With the Troubles over, life was safe, peaceful, prosperous. Then one day a priest is killed in a car crash, and bang! The past hits you. Suddenly you find out your mother was murdered. Life is not so nice and peaceful any more.’

  Again, Daly detected more than a hint of mockery in her voice. Had his life ever felt safe and peaceful? he wondered. Certainly, there had been an absence of trouble, but that did not equate with feeling safe. His father’s story about an accidental bullet had been a lie, but it had filled what would have otherwise been an all-devouring hole in his childhood. Pryce was correct. The idea of a random bullet had been so much easier to live with than puzzling over an evil motive. How much easier it was to forget a stray incident in the mix, beyond the concepts of good and evil, blame and retribution.

  ‘Take me home,’ he said.

  ‘Wait. I’ve one more address to show you.’

  The land changed from bogland to pasture and places where things grew. It improved so much that soon they were driving through leafless orchards. The farmhouses were clearly inhabited, comfortably off in appearance; the hedges well maintained, the whitethorn blossoming in neat, rectangular shapes. There was a sense of order at every level, from the rows of apple trees to the mown grass and mud-free farmyards.

  The sun found a gap in the overcast sky and reached across the low-lying apple trees, their arched branches resembling sinews bracing for a calamity that had already happened. Daly and Pryce got stuck behind a tractor, bumping along the narrow roads. He had time to take in sharply defined details in the sunlight, an Orange Order Hall bristling with antennae and flags, and the first tentative apple blossoms of the year, so bright they seemed to sway over the trees.

  ‘I haven’t been down these roads in years,’ he remarked.

  ‘Tell me something more about your mother, Celcius.’

  It was a test of his powers of recall to remember anything but the image of her that existed in photographs. All he could conjure up was the blurred oval of her face at the kitchen window, her back as he followed her about the house, and her blue nurse’s uniforms neatly ironed. She drove a red Hillman. He remembered long hours in the evening, standing by the front window, waiting for her car to turn the corner and arrive home. But was that before or after her death? Had he kept vigil expecting her to come back, once, briefly, to say goodbye?

  ‘There’s not much to tell you,’ he said. ‘She led an ordinary life.’

  ‘Was she the typical Irish mother? I want to picture her in my mind.’

  ‘Why do you want to picture her?’

  ‘No reason, really.’

  ‘I don’t want my mother to be a character in your book. Not now or ever. The subject is closed. Please don’t mention her again.’

  Pryce slowed her driving, hesitated at crossroads, and drove back down the same roads. She was lost. She pulled over and asked directions from a farmer, mentioning the name Agnew. Daly felt cold perspiration form on his forehead. Instinctively, he reached for his gun and felt its reassuring heft. A minute later, they pulled up at the front door of a two-storey farmhouse. An elderly woman watched them from an upstairs window, and then disappeared. She reappeared at a downstairs window and continued watching them, a fearful look on her face.

  They stepped out of the car. The sunlight intensified, casting long groping shadows through the nearby apple trees, which swayed in the breeze. Daly felt tension enter his body, a tension so intense his shoulders shivered. He remembered the name Agnew. It was the name of the last surviving police officer at the checkpoint that had stopped his mother.

  ‘Is this whose house I think it is?’ he asked

  She nodded and watched him carefully. Again, his hand reached into his jacket pocket and felt the gun nestling there. He wondered if they should turn back and arrange the visit for another day, when he was better prepared, but they had come too far already.

  He heard footsteps approach the door, a halting tread, the sound of infirmity or age, followed by the clicks of keys turning, locks unlatched. His tension grew. The thought of confronting one of his mother’s killers made him want to shut his eyes. Another part of him felt aroused by the thought of the gun in his pocket and the opportunity for revenge that now presented itself. If I were some
other person, he thought.

  He saw the handle turn. The door creaked open and an old man appeared. His gaze was hard and unwelcoming.

  Pryce spoke first, her voice sounding uncharacteristically uncertain.

  ‘We’re looking for Kenneth Agnew. We’d like to talk to him.’

  The old man’s eyes looked them both up and down. He frowned, faltered for a moment.

  ‘You’re too late,’ he said.

  Pryce showed no change in her demeanour. She leaned closer to the doorframe. Daly noticed that she had planted one foot across the threshold. She exuded determination to find out more, yet at the same time there was sympathy in her voice.

  ‘What happened?’

  The old man spoke bluntly.

  ‘Kenneth was my brother. He hanged himself at the bottom of the orchard a week ago. We buried him on Sunday.’

  The tension evaporated from Daly’s body, replaced in that instant by a larger feeling, of calmness – satisfaction, even. From her purse, Pryce took one of her calling cards and handed it to him.

  ‘Have you come far?’ asked the old man.

  ‘No,’ replied Daly.

  The man’s eyes flitted suspiciously over Daly, as though he were the odd man out.

  ‘Where do you live? Do I know you?’

  The farmyard stood still. The question hung in the air.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where I live. We came to talk to your brother.’

  The old man examined Pryce’s card.

  ‘You’re that journalist.’ He stared at her with new interest. ‘Kenneth said he talked to you a while back.’

  ‘That’s correct. I was hoping he might have helped me with a book I’m writing. About the Troubles.’

  He handed her the card back but she refused to take it.

  ‘They’re my contact details,’ she said. ‘They’re for you to keep. When you feel more like talking.’

  He waved the card in the air.

  ‘I don’t know why you want to talk to me. I don’t even know why you came here. There are things that belong to the past and should never see the light of day.’

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Agnew,’ said Pryce.