Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  ‘Why should you feel guilty if you had no involvement in it?’

  Donaldson nodded.

  ‘I feel guilty because I was preoccupied with maintaining the good reputation of the police force, when I should have shown courage and an instinct for justice. In those days, loyalty to one’s profession was not regarded as a virtue or a defect. It was a basic premise.’ He was now staring meaningfully at Daly. ‘I wanted to tell you this. I lied earlier when I said I happened to be passing by. I came here specifically to see you.’

  Daly felt tired of his unwanted visitors, their shadows, their complications. He wished their stories were tidier, easier to comprehend and file away. He longed for open space, the clean sound of the wind swelling from the lough, rather than the stillness of this cramped cottage with too many traps and bodies to bump into.

  ‘I want to tell you that you have my backing for an official investigation into what happened during these murders,’ said Donaldson. ‘In my early career I did not speak out as much as I should have done. Loyalty held me back. And the shame that my officers could be capable of harbouring such hatred. If we can’t speak of those times now, when shall we ever?’ He stood up as if to go. ‘You will be hearing from Special Branch soon.’

  ‘I want a press conference to announce the inquiry,’ said Daly. ‘The maximum publicity possible. I don’t want the investigation hidden away and quietly forgotten about. And I want the promise of cooperation from serving and retired police officers.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Before you go, I want to show you something.’

  Daly unfolded the notes he had been gathering of his mother’s murder and the links to the other murders in Walsh’s triangle. He laid them out before Donaldson, whose eyes flicked over the connections and cross-references.

  ‘So many links,’ he said. ‘Most of them sketchy, to say the least.’

  ‘The dates intrigue me. They must be connected by some sort of calculation.’

  Donaldson’s jaw clenched.

  ‘You understand I’m not obliged to discuss the matter until the inquiry is fully under way.’

  ‘The gang picked their victims for whatever reason and watched them. They waited. And then on the first Monday of every month they struck. There’s a strange logic at work there.’

  Up to now, Donaldson’s words had a rehearsed air. Suddenly, he seemed unprepared and didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I fear there are many things about the gang’s modus operandi we will probably never know,’ he said.

  His evasion stimulated the interrogator in Daly.

  ‘Why was it always the first Monday and not the third or fourth? Or a Tuesday, for that matter?’

  ‘Maybe it was the only time they were off duty together. I can’t recall their rosters. Maybe the dates are irrelevant. They murdered when they could get away with it. That’s all there was to it.’

  ‘There’s something else I find odd. The geographical spread of the murders. They all took place within the Armagh Council boundaries except for three. My mother’s murder, the Corrigans’ and the Hacketts’, who all lived in the Dungannon Council area. However, I’ve done some research. The council boundaries were changed in 1984. Before that date, this part of the lough shore fell into the Armagh Council jurisdiction. What do you think that means?’

  ‘Perhaps Walsh should have spread his map further. After all, there were just as many people murdered in neighbouring districts.’

  ‘But not by this particular gang.’

  Donaldson looked properly rattled now.

  ‘You’re trying to make these random connections deliver evidence that doesn’t exist.’ He stared at Daly with a desperate look in his eyes. ‘I came here to get things off my chest and you make an interrogation out of it.’ He sounded aggrieved.

  ‘There is something else we’re missing about these murders,’ pressed Daly. ‘What does it mean that so many of the victims were living in dank cottages, and that after their murders their families remained trapped in ruined old houses?’

  ‘You’re serious?’ Donaldson glared at Daly. ‘If there’s a meaning to that, surely it’s too deep for a police investigation to plumb.’

  ‘But what do you think it means? What secret lies in their refusal to move into new houses?’

  ‘If people want to live in decrepit homes, then so be it.’ He glanced about the small kitchen. ‘If you want an answer take a look at this cottage of yours, Daly, rotting into the ground. The only reason you prolonged your stay is because secretly you want to follow its example. You want to disappear back into the past. Melt away into darkness. You and your...’ He hesitated to say the word.

  ‘Co-religionists?’ suggested Daly.

  ‘Whatever. I have to go now, Daly.’

  Donaldson strode out of the kitchen and into the night. He looked right and left, anywhere but straight ahead at the fields slouching in the moonlight. He knew more than he was saying; Daly was convinced of that. It wasn’t a case that he didn’t know or found Daly’s questions unreasonable. He turned back to Daly before climbing into his car.

  ‘Remember, Daly, the truth comes at a cost. It will not make your life simpler or easier. It will complicate your way of seeing the world and it won’t bring your mother back to life. It won’t even bring you back to life, out of this sad old shell of a cottage.’

  Daly stood for a while at the door and watched Donaldson’s car disappear. The idea of an official inquiry daunted him. The unravelling of the snarl of clues around his mother’s death might have been invigorating in the initial stages, but with an official inquiry he would be at the centre of an investigation he no longer controlled. He would be its prisoner. The more he probed, the more the labyrinth would unroll its twisting paths into the past, a vista he had ignored his entire adult life.

  Hegarty emerged from the bedroom and followed the detective back into the fire. The spy seemed reanimated, freed from the tenacious hold of his ghosts.

  ‘An official police inquiry with the backing of an ex- RUC chief?’ Hegarty’s eyes glinted as he watched the detective. ‘Why, you’re all set now. The truth will finally out.’ He had obviously overheard every word of the conversation with Donaldson.

  Daly pulled closer to the fire, scraping his chair against the floor.

  ‘I told you before. I don’t know whether I have the appetite for the truth or not. Part of me would rather live with questions rather than answers.’

  ‘Then you are just as guilty of the cover-up as any of your senior officers.’

  Daly stared at the fire. He spoke in a low voice.

  ‘I don’t want my mother’s name plastered all over the newspapers and the internet. I don’t want her grave vandalized by Loyalists. I don’t want her story to end up on YouTube. I want her to rest in peace. If that makes me complicit in a cover-up then so be it.’

  ‘But there is something very flawed with this notion of peace you have for your mother.’ Hegarty’s voice intensified. ‘If it is secured by lies and denial then in my view it is not real peace. That is just my way of looking at things. You obviously have a different way. In your mind, the end justifies the means. Isn’t that what the politicians maintain as well? Isn’t that the principle this harmonious new society of ours is built upon?’

  The spy leaned closer to the fire, crouching forward, his knees almost bundled up to his chin, while Daly leaned back into the shadows. Hegarty turned his face to check for the detective’s presence, not to seek his agreement or concession but to reassure himself that his words weren’t disappearing into a void.

  ‘No,’ said Daly from the darkness. ‘That is not my guiding principle at all. My principle is to adopt the passive path. Because any other path leads to pain. To anger and the danger of more bloodshed.’

  ‘But what about the truth? Shouldn’t that be the moral code of any peaceful society? Rather than allowing lies and half-truths to flourish? It is your duty, Daly, and the police’s, to root out the truth.’
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br />   ‘Perhaps what we need in this country is not the truth,’ replied Daly. ‘What we really want is a fabrication. A made-up truth, one that we can all live with. Until we get that, everything else must be suspended, the rule of law, common sense, dealing with the past, even forgiveness.’

  Hegarty stared at Daly. He lowered his voice to a whisper and craned over the fire.

  ‘You and I are beyond that now, Inspector. We’ve crossed into unknown terrain.’

  Daly didn’t move in the flickering shadows. He felt a pang of jealousy. It would have been foolish to describe Hegarty as an authority on the past, but with his access to secrets darker than Daly could imagine, the spy had developed an insight that was probably only a finger’s breadth from the real truth.

  ‘The past surrounds us,’ said Hegarty. ‘Try as we may, we will never disperse its murk, only illuminate it.’

  A set of sparks charged up the chimney and distracted them into a prolonged silence.

  ‘The murder triangle is part of your past, too,’ said Hegarty softly. ‘You’ve done nothing all of your adult life but secretly seek it, and now that you have the truth within reach, and it’s too late to walk away, you realize that it will destroy you, and everything around you: your career as a detective, your life in this cottage, your peace of mind.

  ‘You should have foreseen this. You should have ignored the past, the tantalizing clues within Walsh’s research. You shouldn’t have rung my number. You should have thrown it away instead.’

  Hegarty was right. Daly’s personal life was in turmoil. He had lost faith in the police force, which had been the focal point of his life, the source of meaning to his existence, or at least the one source that had an illusion of meaning. What he had discovered was the worst thing possible for a policeman to discover: that the organization he had pledged his working life to had hidden his mother’s murderers. He had begun to fear that his true vocation wasn’t detective work. He wasn’t a true detective. It was simply that detective work had been the only tool he’d had at hand to challenge the darkness.

  Daly had only a vague recollection of the remainder of the evening. Hegarty’s words made him feel uncomfortable, but he felt unable or unwilling to stop their flow. He grew steadily drunk, while Hegarty talked on, without pausing, wetting his dry lips, determined to tell his story, even though his voice began to croak. It was hard to have the last word with a man who had whispered brutal secrets for thousands of nights.

  27

  The next morning Daly awoke with a sense of dread. He showered, dressed and while he was making a pot of tea, his phone rang. Hegarty had yet to emerge from his room, but Daly could hear him moving about, so he took the call in the porch.

  He tried to make his voice sound as though he wasn’t the ghost of the competent detective he had once been. It was Irwin. He told Daly there was to be a press conference at headquarters and his attendance was required. Fealty was due to make an important announcement about the investigation into Walsh’s death and the secret links that existed between Special Branch and the paramilitaries.

  ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ said Daly.

  *

  About half an hour later, Irwin met him as he entered the building.

  ‘You’re late,’ said the younger detective.

  ‘I wanted to shave for the cameras,’ replied Daly.

  Irwin said nothing, just ushered him through to one of the conference rooms.

  ‘The meeting’s about to begin. We’ll have to slip in at the back.’ He opened the doors. ‘By the way, Daly,’ he whispered. ‘There’s been a complication. A shift in the investigation.’

  ‘What shift?’

  ‘We now know that Walsh had entangled himself with some very sinister elements.’

  The two walked into a room filled with noisy journalists.

  ‘This media frenzy is all down to you, Daly,’ hissed Irwin. ‘I hope you’re happy with the can of worms you’ve opened.’

  They stood at the back of the room. At the front, next to a projector screen, sat Inspector Fealty. He appeared comfortable in the full glare of the media. His uniform looked impossibly neat and trim, as though it had been ironed a thousand times that morning. He was flanked by two officers from the press department, but there was no doubt as to who was in charge of the show. There was a professionalism and precision about Fealty’s persona that had been absent in the old police force. Once upon a time police commanders had been dour, stolid figures, reliable but completely lacking in media skills. The peace process and its political climate had changed all that. The media had developed an appetite for castigating the old institutions, stripping them of any trace of their former prestige. They would have crucified police chiefs like Donaldson, who regarded it as an emblem of his professionalism that he had never issued statements to the press. Fealty belonged to the front ranks of a new breed of officer that had emerged from the anonymous grey corridors of the old police stations into the smart arena of public relations.

  Daly heard a nearby reporter whisper, ‘I hear Special Branch are going to lift the lid on collusion.’

  He felt a sense of gratification – victory, even. He glanced over at Irwin and wondered why he was smirking.

  Fealty leaned towards the gallery of journalists and photographers and began speaking.

  ‘The extraordinary thing about what I am going to reveal to you today on this issue of the links between the police force and the paramilitaries is that the details exist nowhere in the official record.’

  Daly sensed a shiver of excitement pass through the room. The journalists were electrified by the prospect of Fealty’s revelations.

  ‘In many respects they were lost amid the fog of war,’ continued Fealty. ‘However, that doesn’t mean that the police force and the paramilitary organizations cannot be held accountable for what happened in the past.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘At a point in the mid-1970s the intelligence services came to the grim conclusion that the only way to beat the IRA’s terror machine was to plant a mole at the heart of its operations. The simplest way to destroy the IRA’s chain of command and crack its morale was to have a number of highly placed informers reporting on the running of the organization. Today I am going to reveal the identity of one of those men.’

  Daly edged closer to the back of the room. What sort of trap had Fealty fixed for him? When was he going to start talking about collusion between Loyalists and the police? He looked up at the screen behind Fealty and his heart missed several beats when he saw Hegarty’s face appear.

  ‘His codename was Lethal Ally,’ said Fealty, pointing to the screen. ‘But his real name is Daniel Hegarty.’

  Voice recorders were thrust towards Fealty and cameras flashed.

  ‘Ideally it would have been preferable to keep the issue of Special Branch’s links with the IRA out of the glare of the media. However, we are a new police force, operating in a new form of society, one where full disclosure is the norm. I regret to say that Mr Hegarty is no longer under our control. He is beyond the scope of law and order.’

  It took a moment or two for what Fealty was talking about to take full effect on Daly. A quiver of dread ran through his stomach, but he decided not to let himself be intimidated by Fealty’s subtle ploy. He stood as still as a statue, listening carefully to the journalists’ questions and Fealty’s concise replies.

  ‘Help us with the chronology, Inspector,’ said a journalist at the front. ‘When precisely did Mr Hegarty’s career as an intelligence agent begin? Who contacted whom?’

  ‘Hegarty was recruited in the winter of 1974. He was first contacted by the Force Surveillance Unit.’

  The cameras flashed again. Fealty’s face shone. He seemed wonderfully sharp and alert, sure of himself, playing this game of cat and mouse with the truth, laying down a trail for the journalists that would divert them from Daly and his claims of collusion between the police and Loyalists, overshadowed now by these more shocking revelations about the police force’
s links to the IRA. The entire performance might have been scripted, analysed and researched within the highest levels of the intelligence services. In the eyes of the media, Daly’s association with Hegarty would make him damaged goods, a police detective relying on the evidence of an informer and murderer.

  Daly could see the look of surprise – astonishment, even – in the journalists’ faces. Fealty was revealing a conspiracy so profound that they found it hard to believe. What sort of man could operate at the heart of the IRA for forty years and carry off such a lonely deception? The strategic impossibility of it. The emotional discipline. Already, Daly could hear the overtones of mobile phones ringing; editors ringing their journalists back to check the improbable facts; seasoned journalists purring with delight. This revelation of a top informer within the IRA would release a flood of speculation and headlines from the media, a swarm of claims and denials from politicians, with enough riddles and lingering questions to keep countless journalists occupied for months on end.

  ‘Why now, Inspector? Why release this man’s identity?’

  ‘We are concerned for the safety of the public.’

  ‘After forty years of supporting this agent’s activities as a terrorist isn’t it a little late to be concerned about the safety of the public?’

  ‘We have specific concerns at the moment.’

  ‘Has Hegarty made threats?’

  ‘We are searching for him with the highest degree of urgency. A manhunt is already in progress.’

  Fealty adjusted his position in his seat. He seemed to be looking towards the back of the room, straight at Daly. A coded glance, like an invitation to speak, his eyes cold and gloating. Irwin looked over at Daly and studied his reaction. A silence fell in the room, an uncomfortable silence in which Daly felt himself sharply etched and exposed. Had Fealty conjured up this media circus entirely to deter his investigation? He closed his eyes and thought of a question to pose, but all he could see was the searing outline of the murder triangle, replete with arrows, connections, dates and names.