Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  31

  Daly stood in the middle of the road, watching Pryce’s car disappear around a bend in the road. He stared at the darkness around him. It seemed innocent of surveillance. Where were Special Branch? he wondered. He began to walk back the way they had come.

  A vehicle engine coughed in the darkness and a set of headlights lit up the trees in front of him. From a hidden lay-by, a car eased on to the road and pulled alongside Daly.

  The dark driver’s window slid down, revealing Inspector Fealty’s face.

  ‘Need a lift, Daly?’

  Daly climbed in. He heard Fealty click on the central locking, and then engage the slick gears.

  ‘For God’s sake, what’s going on, Celcius? What were you and Pryce doing, driving all the way down here?’

  ‘She wanted to take me for a spin.’

  ‘You’ll have to give me more information than that.’

  ‘I’d rather not say anything more.’

  ‘What exactly is your relationship with Pryce? You know her husband is a dissident Republican.’

  ‘She’s a frustrated writer trying to finish her book on the murder triangle. She’s been manipulating victims, pushing them physically around, cannibalizing their words and feelings. When she discovered I wasn’t another puppet she ran off into the darkness.’

  ‘Are you OK? You don’t sound yourself.’

  Was he himself? Daly was no longer sure. He tried to push away the feelings of guilt and lethargy that had been plaguing him.

  ‘I’ve had a long day,’ he said. ‘I need a chance to reflect on things. Perhaps a leave of absence for a few days.’

  Fealty nodded.

  ‘You should take some sick leave. I don’t think you realize how concerned we are for you. We’ve been keeping an eye on you – for your own good, of course. We knew you were in a tight spot. After the press conference this morning we didn’t want to let you out of our sight.’

  ‘Did you notice anything to heighten your concern?’

  Fealty paused for a long time.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then, that’s good news, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Fealty’s blank expression told Daly that Hegarty must have made his escape from the cottage as planned. Daly looked through his side window as the darkness of border country gave way to the lit-up motorway. He and Fealty had the two lanes to themselves. And the entire night ahead of them. They could travel anywhere they wanted.

  ‘Why did you help Hegarty?’ asked Fealty.

  Daly thought about the question. An answer might have been because he needed Hegarty’s help. A deeper one would have been because they were both outsiders and vulnerable. Neither he nor Fealty spoke, both waiting for the other to break the silence. Fealty shifted his narrow frame behind the wheel. He glanced at Daly with a bitter smile.

  ‘You should have turned him in. He’s not worth sacrificing your career. Or your integrity.’

  ‘Is that what you think I’ve done? Sacrificed my integrity?’

  ‘Yes. You might believe that you have operated professionally in this investigation, but your detective work has an emotional component. It is grief and anger disguised.’

  Daly stared grimly ahead. Hegarty had gone, leaving him with more questions than answers. It hadn’t been the most constructive of relationships. What he longed for, the truth, whatever it was, had not come. He was still waiting for the breakthrough, the final revelation. He had a hunch that the clues still lay enclosed within the walls of his cottage, or tucked under the fields that were his inheritance.

  ‘Take me home,’ he said.

  Fealty drove on without saying anything. They passed the turn-off that would take them back to the lough shore.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘There’s been an unexpected development.’ Fealty’s voice was grave.

  The Special Branch inspector drove him up a side road that eventually led to Donaldson’s house.

  ‘Why are we here?’ asked Daly. ‘Why are there so many police outside?’

  ‘Donaldson, God rest his soul, is dead.’

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘No. It looks like a tragic accident. Another one.’

  32

  Fealty explained how, early that morning, Donaldson had taken his wife from the nursing home in which she was a patient. He had left her at the pier in her wheelchair and taken his boat out on to the lough. Staff at the marina had raised the alarm that evening, when they found her wrapped in his overcoat, sitting close to the pier, with no sign of Donaldson or his boat.

  ‘What did his wife say?’ asked Daly.

  ‘She can’t speak or communicate in any way.’

  Daly remembered that since her stroke she had been unable to take care of herself.

  ‘Does she know what happened?’

  ‘I doubt she ever will,’ murmured Fealty. ‘Maybe it’s the best for her. The Lough Neagh rescue service found his body a couple of hours ago. The initial reports say there was no evidence of foul play.’

  ‘The lough can be a very dangerous place at this time of year.’ Daly looked at Fealty. ‘You look worried.’

  ‘I am.’ Fealty’s tone grew confiding. ‘I’m afraid I’m suffering from your complaint.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A heightened degree of suspicion.’

  ‘As police detectives we work in an arena of suspicion.’

  ‘I may be mistaken but I believe the poor bastard was driven to kill himself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He’d complained to me that Pryce was harassing him with details of his past. Pestering him into telling his story.’

  Daly’s face darkened at the mention of her name. He felt a rush of blood to his head.

  ‘What are you suggesting? That she had something incriminating on him?’

  ‘I hope not. God forgive me for my suspicions if they prove wrong. But Donaldson had been behaving like a man with a guilty conscience. He said that Pryce was trying to blackmail him.’

  So Pryce had shepherded another man to his death. It was as easy as making sheep hop over a stile. She had asked for his story, demanded it, and he had given her his life instead. What sort of exchange was that? Had the woman no heart at all?

  ‘In what way had she been blackmailing him?’

  Fealty shrugged.

  ‘He didn’t tell me. But it appears that the RUC did not always have the leadership it deserved.’

  ‘What leadership did it deserve?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘I spoke to Donaldson in person last night. He called round to my cottage. He seemed agitated.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything about his fears?’ Fealty’s curiosity sharpened. ‘Have you any idea what Pryce had on him? What drove him to such a desperate act?’

  In a flash, Daly knew why Fealty had brought him here. It wasn’t to help the investigation into Donaldson’s death. It was to discover how much he knew of his former commander’s secrets.

  ‘I’m not sure what he was trying to tell me.’

  ‘You’re not sure? How?’ Fealty stared at Daly, waiting for a response. His eyes looked alarmed. By contrast, calm had settled over Daly, which seemed to make Fealty more apprehensive.

  ‘Donaldson promised me that he would help launch an inquiry into the murders. He said that he had devoted too much time to covering up the past.’

  ‘A pity he’ll never have the opportunity to fulfil his promise.’

  Daly nodded. It seemed that Donaldson had changed his mind, buying his own silence in the most drastic way possible. But who or what had he been trying to protect? His own reputation or that of someone else? Someone with a more direct role in the killings? Someone to whom Donaldson still felt a loyalty in spite of the passing of so many years?

  Daly followed Fealty into the house. He trod carefully through the rooms. It was clear from the police presence and the hum of activity that Special Branch were giving his sudde
n death more priority than that of Walsh, or Agnew or McClintock, for that matter. Even Irwin had rolled up his sleeves and was rooting through a set of drawers. The officers carried with them forensic bags but they were empty of anything that might prove useful to the investigation.

  ‘You’re not going to get very far here,’ said Daly. ‘You should be looking for what is missing. The secrets he took to the bottom of the lough.’

  He slipped into the study, and inspected the ornaments and framed photographs in the glass cabinets. Donaldson’s florid face stared back from one of the pictures. He was dressed in the full regalia of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Most human beings were different things to different people, thought Daly, but with Donaldson what you saw was what you inevitably got – a tedious, slightly pompous police chief. There were other photos of him. Donaldson as a raw recruit, wiry and tall, and then later, rising up through the ranks, more dignified-looking with a large moustache, decorations on his uniform and a look in his eyes that suggested he had witnessed dark days. In the latest pictures, he looked at his most exalted and proud, grey-haired, moustache bristling, his eyes heavy and appraising.

  Daly wandered through more rooms. He checked for ashes in the hearth, but the grate was empty. He watched the officers sort through drawers and cupboards. He searched down the backs of the sofas and seats. He had no idea what he was looking for, and he found nothing at all. He paused, sinking back into one of the seats. Something was missing from the house, his instinct told him. The air of gloominess was down to more than Donaldson’s tragic death. Something else had been wiped from the house with a dreadful finality.

  He caught sight of Fealty in the corridor, staring intently back. The Special Branch inspector was not much of a man for getting physically involved in a search. However, there was nothing passive or relaxed-looking about his eyes, which were full of restrained energy, looking at Daly as though he were the dark corner that most needed searching.

  It occurred to Daly that, in spite of the intensity of the search, Fealty was just killing time, wondering what to do with him next. He was killing his own time, Daly realized, when he should be following his hunches.

  He continued rummaging through shelves and drawers, searching for the information that Donaldson was trying to deny him. The more he saw its absence, the more determined he became. He worked with a sullen tenacity that attracted the smirking attention of Irwin. Several times, Daly returned to Donaldson’s study. He sat down at his desk and checked if anything had been sellotaped to the back of the drawers. He stared blankly at the empty walls, sensing the actions of a very troubled but thorough mind.

  No doubt Donaldson had been rigorous in his efforts to hide anything incriminating, but, in the end, Daly got lucky. Lifting a book out of a dusty box in the bottom of a cupboard, he found the lead he was looking for. It was an old volume on local planning laws. It had been well thumbed by someone in the past. He was about to put it back when something slipped out of its pages and fell at his feet. It was a black-and-white photograph of a young woman leaning against a car. He glanced around. No one had noticed his find. He examined the picture. The girl was posing in a summer dress, her hand raised to her brow, her eyes screwed up against the sunlight. It could almost have been his mother, but her hair was too light, and there was something tainted and tense about her smile that made it somehow less natural than his mother’s. He couldn’t make out her eyes, which were shaded completely by her hand. Behind her stood the shape of a large farmhouse, and beyond, just visible, a row of apple trees.

  The car dated the picture. It was a dark-coloured Hillman Hunter. He stared at the registration number. AIB 726. A shadow fell across his heart. A memory of the gloom and suspense he had felt collecting licence numbers as a boy. The car number looked familiar. He felt certain that it had been one of those listed in the documents he had found hidden in the family bible. He examined the woman again. He saw the stiffness in her slender frame, the hand raised in defence against the light, like a ghost begging not to be given away. He scanned the car looking for evidence of more ghosts. He felt certain that there were other presences just out of the camera’s field of view.

  At last, he had found a mental foothold. He thought about everything he knew of the murders and the possible role that the woman might have played. He wondered if he was mistaken in his assumptions. Perhaps he was misinterpreting Donaldson’s state of mind. However, he couldn’t think of any other possible reason to explain the former commander’s behaviour. He was going to have to follow the lead. He slipped the photograph into a pocket.

  In the corridor, he nodded at Fealty.

  ‘Seen enough?’ asked the Special Branch detective.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  Fealty hesitated for a moment. Then he nodded and said goodnight.

  Daly walked out and asked one of the younger officers patrolling the grounds to drop him home. He needed to find the woman in the photograph, a woman who had left no trace of herself. Father Walsh had been exhaustive in his research, and so had Pryce, but neither of them, with their ability at ferreting out secrets, had found a single piece of information relating to the woman. Nothing that revealed her role in the killings, nothing that verified her existence, not even her name.

  33

  The front door of Daly’s cottage lay slightly ajar and all the lights were on. He approached with caution, straining to listen, but he was unable to make out any sounds from within. He stepped inside with a sense of despondency. He stood in the hallway and glanced into the rooms. There was no sign of Hegarty anywhere, and the place was a mess. Clothes and books lay strewn across the floor, drawers hung open, their contents disordered. His house had been ransacked, its dark corners searched through, and the perpetrators had not even bothered to cover up their tracks.

  It had been years since the army had conducted their last search of the cottage. He remembered their loaded guns grazing the narrow walls, their heavy boots echoing through the warren of rooms. He also recalled the entangled feelings of guilt and fear he had experienced as a boy, as though he had been found out. As though he had been the wrongdoer. Now it had happened again. More than three decades later. This time without any warning or fanfare. He wondered how the cottage had stood up to the poking and probing after all these years. Had the searchers found anything incriminating, rummaging through the rooms? Had they noticed how unclear the dividing line was between the past and the present? That the ghosts of the dead occupied more rooms than the living?

  Considering that a wanted man had taken shelter here, it was fortunate they hadn’t taken sledgehammers to the walls and ripped up the floorboards. He inspected the insides of his drawers and cupboards. It was impossible to tell what they had rifled through, and what they might have removed. He thought of phoning Irwin, and asking him outright, but perhaps that would break some professional code. It wasn’t the type of question you asked your Special Branch colleague.

  The fire had gone out in the scullery. He lit it and waited. He prowled through the rooms again and took a tour outside the cottage. The only trace of the spy’s presence was a thin smell of sweat from the room he had slept in. Daly sat alone with the fire and the sound of the black hen pecking at the window.

  When he was sure that Hegarty wasn’t going to return he opened all the windows wide and the doors as well. It wasn’t just the spy’s smell, it was the dusty stench of the past that filled his nostrils, the bitter aroma of old furniture, the empty rooms and the corners full of cobwebs and dust. The wind blew in, driving out the stale air and memories. He stared through a window at the impenetrable hedges, the circle of moonlit fields, the swelling grass, the shadows of the past creeping forwards with a ghostly presence. He felt impatient and tense, breathing in the lough air through greedy nostrils.

  Midges and moths drew in towards the light of the fire, their shadows creating a flickering show on the low ceiling. Spiders emerged from their nooks and crevices, their swags of dead insects wafting in the br
eeze. Last year’s leaves gusted in through the front door and out through the back. The fire roared and crackled with the fresh ventilation.

  Was it the joy of liberation he suddenly felt? The sense that the cottage itself was breathing and stirring with life? A bat twirled in through a window and out through another. He wished that his relationship with the cottage were just as transient. But human beings were different from animals and the creatures of the night, more like ghosts than living things, filled with memories and the darkness of the past. He couldn’t leave the cottage now because to do so would mean dishonouring what haunted him, including the ghost of his nine-year-old self, the introverted little boy already acquainted with death and loss. If he avoided him, he might as well avoid life altogether. Perhaps Pryce was right in the end. Remembering ghosts, bringing them into the light, was a dangerous but necessary thing.

  The wind blew through the cottage with greater force. The eaves in the roof creaked and shifted, as though the cottage were a boat finally on the move again, a rising storm shifting it from its moorings. Daly thought of the young woman in the picture and the car registration number. He went through all the stories and names in his head: his mother, Angela Daly, Father Aloysius Walsh, Ivor McClintock, Kenneth Agnew and now Ian Donaldson. Their fragmented stories overlapped like a restless sea of waves. He hunkered in the light of the fire, like the captain of a vessel decked out with billowing sails, plotting its course through the darkness.

  34

  The wind was still blowing fiercely the next morning. It hustled Daly out of sleep, blurring his dreams, rattling his opened bedroom window, flaring the curtains, filling the room with raw light. He got dressed in a hurry, feeling full of energy, even though a glance in the mirror revealed a face lined with fatigue and anxiety. He skipped breakfast and grabbed a mouthful of hot tea. He took the photograph of the young woman with him. Finding her represented the one clear path he had left.

  Outside, the thorn trees swayed under the force of the wind, as if ready to leap into space, loose twigs and old leaves whipped into a panic. For the first time that year, he noticed a light green glimmering in the hedgerows. Overhead, birds were on the wing, prospecting for nesting sites. He sighed. Most of February had passed by without him noticing that the first signs of spring were afoot. He hoped that the woman and her story were still within reach, otherwise winter would have passed with the truth still no closer.