Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  ‘Normally you have to apply in writing,’ he explained.

  Daly could barely conceal his impatience.

  ‘This is related to an urgent police investigation.’

  The clerk grumbled and led Daly down a set of stairs to a basement archive. Daly could sense his reluctance. Was he a stickler for protocol or just being lazy?

  ‘What period are you looking for?’

  ‘All the files related to 1979.’

  ‘What is it you want to know about that year in particular?’

  ‘I already know everything I need to know about that year.’

  ‘You’ve come all the way here just to check something you already know?’

  ‘Correct.’

  The clerk shook his head and opened the door to the archive.

  ‘You’ll find all the planning decisions passed in the late seventies at the back.’ He withdrew and went up the stairs. Daly walked between the aisles of boxes and folders. Darkness closed around him. He stood for a while without flicking on the lights. Then he found the switch and pulled up a chair.

  Unlike many retiring police officers, Dorothy Donaldson had not cleared out her old files on the day she left her post as secretary to the chief planning officer. And unlike the remaining files in the police archive, none of hers had pages missing or redacted passages. After all, how could council staff have known they might contain such incriminating evidence?

  An alertness came over Daly as he flicked through the pages of one dusty file after another. The amount of information he now had at his fingertips was a welcome relief compared to the evasion of Donaldson and the reticence of his wife. He spent an hour whittling his way through documents, reading the details of council meetings and the legal intricacies of planning committee decisions. As secretary, Dorothy had been responsible for recording the minutes of all the planning department meetings. Gradually the floor around him became covered in stacks of files.

  There was a four-month period at the end of 1978 when her name disappeared from the list at the bottom of the minutes. Perhaps she had suffered some sort of mishap or illness. He began to wonder if he had been wrong in his assumption, but then her name reappeared at the start of 1979.

  Several times, he stopped at the sound of approaching footsteps. He got up and looked down the empty aisles. The metal shelves rattled.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called out, but no one answered. A ghost, he thought, and returned to the files.

  One by one, he examined the planning permission letters from that year. He lifted down a creased black folder with the word ‘April’ written across it. He sifted through the letters until he found what he was looking for. The file had his father’s name on it and their address with a case number. He looked through the documents.

  They included the architectural plans for a new bungalow and a site in the corner of the field behind the existing cottage. There were letters from Roads Service, the Water Board and the Building Control Department. More maps of the farm outlined where the water and electricity supply lines would go, the septic tank and a new access point on to the road. And then the planning procedure itself. Minor officials scratching along in their meticulous way, listing the number of objections to the planning proposal, fifteen in total from their neighbours, and some small alterations to the building to comply with fire safety regulations. A few paragraphs on the relevant planning law and then the decision stamped in bold red letters. APPROVED.

  He looked up at the date of the decision, two weeks before his mother’s death and then the line at the bottom: ‘Decision to be ratified at the next monthly meeting of Armagh District Council, 2 April.’ The date of his mother’s death. The meeting had been scheduled for 7.30 p.m. After ratification, the council would send letters to the successful applicants informing them of the approvals.

  So this was it. A single signature granting his mother and father planning permission for a new bungalow. Had that been enough to seal his mother’s fate? He shook his head. He found more letters granting planning permission for other families of the murder triangle. All of them bearing the same red-inked word APPROVED, and the dates of the murders coinciding with that of the council meeting that ratified the decisions. How strange to see that word repeated again and again, and taste the high hopes it should have heralded. However, by the time the letters had landed on their appointed doorsteps, the dreams they promised were over and consigned forever to dark nettle-infested corners of fields.

  The letters helped fill out the blanks in Walsh’s murder map, moving it towards a state of greater coherence. A new pattern showed through the mesh of country lanes, not a complete one, for the map would never be finished. But it was as though it had been swilled in a bath of photographer’s ink, allowing ghostly images to emerge, the bright new homes that had never materialized, the bereft families trapped in their cottages.

  He could see how the murder gang had operated within the boundaries of the old Armagh District Council, following its triangular shape, driving up remote lanes with their loaded SMGs, to the farms and cottages of upwardly mobile families, young couples dreaming of a better future, planning new houses for their children, houses with proper foundations and insulated walls, tiled roofs and central heating, houses that would not sink back into the damp earth.

  The fact that the murders had taken place on the first Monday of the month no longer seemed like a macabre joke by the killers. It was a conscious effort to communicate something to the victim’s families, to keep an entire community alert and fearful. His mother would have been alive at the time the decision was passed, but dead by the time the letter arrived on their doorstep. Apart from the chief planning officer, Dorothy Donaldson would have been the only person with prior knowledge of the planning approvals. It must have been she who divulged the dreams of these families to the murder gang, passing on their addresses in that short band of time before the decisions were made public knowledge. In the warped logic of the gang, it must have seemed that families like the Dalys were advancing themselves dangerously, encroaching on their Protestant neighbours, stirring up the mean little jealousies Father Walsh had written about, raising the old spectre of the native Irish rising up from bog and mountain to cast aside the colonial invaders.

  Daly sat gazing at the stack of files. For some reason he felt reluctant to leave. Eventually, he lumbered to his feet. He felt weary. It had been a busy day of revelations. His father had been exposed as a man of secrets, but also a man of flesh and feeling, the father of a son who still had to make his way in a dark world full of unpleasant surprises, a boy who innocently collected car registration numbers without realizing they might have made him the carrier of a plague, the shadowy violence that visited home after home in the murder triangle. He realized how thankful he should feel towards the old man, for holding his silence and allowing him to grow up untainted by anger and bitterness. He was grateful for that at least. He removed half a dozen of the letters from the file, folded them up and placed them in his jacket pocket. He reassured himself that he had found the most probable reason why the gang had targeted his mother, but somehow he still felt marked by guilt and uncertainty.

  The receptionist at the front desk smiled at him sympathetically.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Inspector?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thanks.’ His tongue had almost dried in his mouth. ‘I should be on my way.’

  He drove straight to the nearest post office and dropped the letters in an envelope. He sealed it and wrote an address on the back: ‘Jacqueline Pryce, c/o The Belfast Mail’. He gave no details about the sender or any explanation about the contents. He posted the letter and drove home, back to the edge of the hidden world. There was still enough light in the day to do one last thing.

  37

  It was almost dark when he drove down the winding road that led to the mouth of the Blackwater River. He got out and walked along the banks. No one was about. The water had darkened to the colour of the blackthorn thickets. He
wanted to make sure that Hegarty had made good his escape, and headed straight for the secret berth of the fisherman’s boat.

  He was surprised to see its dark hull just visible beneath a clump of willow and alder branches. It hadn’t moved from its hiding place. He felt nervous, and looked all around him, his mind alert for signs of danger. The only sign that the spy had been to the boat was a letter Daly found underneath the seat boards. It was addressed to him.

  Dear Celcius,

  I have decided not to take you up on your kind offer of a few days’ vacation on Coney Island. This tale of the murder triangle is yours, not mine, and I’ve interrupted it long enough, so I will slip away quietly rather than be a further hindrance to you.

  You are an intelligent man, and I’m sure you will work out a way to save the truth from darkness, from your father’s silence and the death of all those who took their secrets to the grave. Afterwards, you will decide the best thing to do with the story, whether it should be made public or passed on to a higher authority to investigate. I hope that I have been of some assistance to you in your search for the truth.

  I know it is not easy to dredge the past, but you must not give up. Remember, too many stories are never told or are lost along the way. Who knows how many stories are hidden in people’s hearts? One thing I am certain of is that their time will not pass, in spite of all the silence and cover-ups, since there is always someone who knows something, and the truth, no matter how twisted or incomplete, has the strength to filter through the tightest of defences.

  For my part, I can no longer keep secret my forty-year career of lies and betrayals. I have decided to write my own story. When I am finished, I will send it to you and you can decide if it is part of the tale you want to tell.

  Rest assured, by the time our stories are told, the Northern Ireland we grew up in will be finished. Whatever this country was during our childhoods, it is already disappearing. The paramilitaries terrorizing families with their Semtex and Armalites, and the garrison towns with their fortified police stations and army bases. It is all ending. Those violent men who murdered and bombed, and the shadowy figures who orchestrated the cover-ups, their day is almost over.

  Carefully, Daly folded the letter and placed it in an inside pocket. Deep in thought, he walked along the bank and then back again. He should have foreseen Hegarty would disappear like this. The old spy was a maverick, a man of contradictions, and unlikely to follow a path that had been charted by anyone else, let alone a police detective. Daly stood there for a while, unable to force himself into thinking or acting like a detective. He was still the bewildered son of a murder victim, rather than an investigator solving a three-decade-long mystery on a contentious political stage.

  The wind picked up and the water around the boat grew restless. He stared at the distorted reflections. He caught glimpses of sky, the broken outline of the boat and his silhouette, shifting in the ripples like the elements of a teasing puzzle. Hegarty had made the most of his hospitality and left, deceiving everyone, disappearing back into his informer’s world of shadows and fragments, another mystery to lurk in the margins of border country. He hoped that the spy would not try to make contact with him again. Already, he had allowed himself to be influenced too much by Hegarty’s thinking. The spy belonged to that group of men more interested in chaos than symmetry, intent on complicating their untidy pasts, their cover-ups and betrayals, sowing confusion and intrigue rather than understanding and closure.

  He thought of his father and his life-long refusal to speak the truth. That had been a cover-up, too. It occurred to Daly that the real reason he had undertaken the investigation was not to solve the riddle of his mother’s death, but to understand the mystery of his father’s silence. He had resisted concluding the investigation because that meant no longer hiding in his father’s reticence, his absent frown, his discreet way of trying to make tragedy disappear, which had been his gifts to his only child, gifts that proved more troublesome than countless family arguments and interrogations.

  However, he had listened to that silence long enough. Hegarty was right. If he was going to match his father’s strength of character he would have to start speaking about the past. He would have to carry the truth to a bright place, and somehow carry himself there, too.

  He looked all around him. He felt conspicuous and exposed standing at the riverside. He pulled the collar of his jacket around his neck and walked back to his car. Before climbing in, he listened to the noise of the wind stirring the new buds in the willow and alder trees. The evening sky seemed very pale after the darkness of winter. Something else occurred to him. An image floated before him without any direction from his consciousness. For a moment, everything seemed clarified in his mind’s eye. He saw his mother’s face, bright and happy, sinking back into the spring growth. He wanted desperately to hold on to that image, to hear her voice once again. What a blessing that would be, but she was slowly sinking out of sight, flowers and budding leaves growing in a network of lines that enlaced her face, blossom upon blossom overlapping until all that remained were the watchfulness of her eyes and her smile. This was the final symmetry, he thought, the nearness of the dead amid the continuing signs of life.

  ~

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  About Anthony J. Quinn

  About the Inspector Celcius Daly Series

  An invitation from the publisher

  About Silence

  A bizarre road accident claims the life of an elderly priest and propels Celcius Daly into an investigation that will reveal the truth about his mother’s death thirty years ago.

  Father Aloysius Walsh spent the last years of his life painstakingly collecting evidence of murder, mass murder – a year-long killing spree of unparalleled savagery that blighted Ireland’s borderlands at the end of the 1970s. Pinned to his bedroom wall, a macabre map charts the grim territory of death: victims, weapons, wounds, dates – and somehow, amid the forest of pins and notes, he had discerned a pattern…

  So why did the Father Walsh deliberately drive through a cordon of policemen and off the road to his death? Why, when Inspector Celcius Daly arrives at the scene, does he find Special Branch already there? And why is his mother’s name on the priest’s map?

  The past poisons the present and Daly’s life will never be the same again.

  Reviews

  ‘A tough yet lyrical novel.’

  The Sunday Times

  ‘Unquestionably one of the crime novels of the year, written in peerless prose, with a delicate plot… This is a novel to be read slowly and to be savoured sip by sip, as its spider ‘s web slowly but surely snares you in its grip.’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Beautifully written... unflinchingly lays bare Northern Ireland’s society as it tries to come to terms with its violent past. Outstanding.’

  Irish Independent

  ‘The Troubles of Northern Ireland are not over. This message is so disturbingly, convincingly and elegantly conveyed in Anthony J. Quinn’s first novel... Beautifully haunting.’

  The Times

  ‘One of the best books of the year.’

  The Strand Magazine

  ‘Quinn enriches Disappeared with Irish history and he does an excellent job of ratcheting up the tension.’

  The Rap Sheet

  ‘Betrayal, Pathos, Compassion, Brutality... Beautifully written.’

  Ken Bruen

  About Anthony J. Quinn

  ANTHONY QUINN was born in Northern Ireland’s County Tyrone and majored in English at Queen’s University, Belfast. After university, he worked a number of odd jobs – social worker, organic gardener, yoga teacher – before finding work as a journalist and author. His first novel, Disappeared, was published by Head of Zeus in 2014.

  Visit www.anthonyquinnwriter.com

  About the Inspector Celcius Daly Series

  1 – Disappeared

  Disappeared introduces Celcius Daly, a Belfast Police Inspector laden with fla
wed judgment and misplaced loyalties. One of 2012’s top ten crime novels.

  A retired Special Branch Detective succumbing to early-stage dementia disappears from his remote home in rural Northern Ireland. An ex-intelligence officer is tortured to death. But why was his obituary printed in the local paper before his death? A son seeks his father’s long-lost body and vengeance against those who murdered him. A stone-cold killer stalks the outskirts of Belfast. But at whose behest is he hunting his targets? And why?

  All are connected by a single strand spun out of the past... but as Inspector Celcius Daly knows, the past is never dead… it’s not even past.

  Disappeared is available here.

  2 – Border Angels

  A charred corpse and a set of footprints in the snow lead Celcius Daly into the twilight world of people trafficking.

  Inspector Celcius Daly is hunting for a missing woman, Lena Novak, who mysteriously disappeared one winter’s night along the Irish border, leaving in her wake the corpses of two men.

  Daly finds himself hooked together with a prostitute and a hit man in a life-or-death chase. His investigation leads them deep into border country, a wild terrain of disappearing lanes and blown-up bridges, abandoned ghost-estates and thick forests – the ultimate refuge for anyone who does not want to be found.

  Border Angels is available here.

  3 – Silence

  Father Aloysius Walsh spent the last years of his life painstakingly collecting evidence of murder, mass murder – a year-long killing spree of unparalleled savagery that blighted Ireland’s borderlands at the end of the 1970s. Pinned to his bedroom wall, a macabre map charts the grim territory of death: victims, weapons, wounds, dates – and somehow, amid the forest of pins and notes, he had discerned a pattern…