Disappeared

by Anthony Quinn

  In the yard, he bumped into Officers Harland and Robertson, who had been checking the fields around the house.

  “Nothing to report so far, sir,” said Harland.

  “Phone the neighbors and let them know that David Hughes is missing,” said Daly. “Ask if they’ve seen or heard anything. And get them to check their outhouses. It’s a cold night. If he’s out there, he’s bound to seek shelter somewhere.”

  Daly thought that if they didn’t find him in the next hour, he would have to bring in tracker dogs and a helicopter to sweep the countryside. Using his torch, he examined the thorn hedge bordering the back garden. His alert eye discovered a gap in the thick branches where the wind blew through unconstrained. He spotted where the branches had been neatly sawn off, the pattern of rings still clear. The gap gave an interrupted line of sight to the cottage’s kitchen door.

  When he returned to the farmhouse, Eliza Hughes’s silhouette was framed in the kitchen window, unmoving. Daly felt spurred to a greater urgency and strode off with his flashlight across the undulating farmland, his feet slipping and sliding into icy mud holes. The moon came out, and its light streaming through the trees was so blue and cold Daly could almost taste it in the air.

  His ankle twisted in a hidden ditch, propelling him face first into a blackthorn hedge. He ducked to avoid a jagged branch, and for a second he caught the glint of something in the light of his torch. A pattern of frozen water drops fell from the higher branches and something white briefly hung in front of him before disappearing. He listened intently to a fluttering sound in the swaying trees. Something was caught among the branches. Whatever it was, there was no hint of the old man or his presumed captors. He felt like a dog hunting a scent that had grown cold.

  He heaved himself further into the thicket of thorns, and grunted in surprise when he uncovered a secret hollow. What looked like a pair of clown’s hands, yellow and enlarged, waved at him. He leaned back in shock, fumbling for his torch. In the beam of its light, he saw that someone had propped a pair of Marigold gloves on a set of twigs. For the first time since arriving at the farmhouse, he felt unnerved. Collecting his wits, he examined the rest of the hedge, finding further objects suspended from branches—an alarm clock, an old battery, bags of nails and wire. His torch scanned the ground and lit up a row of faintly discernible mounds. He knelt down and propped his flashlight against a stone. He wondered, Could they really be what he thought they were? Then he saw the crude crosses at the top of each mound with lettering etched in them. A set of names and dates had been inscribed: oliver jordan d. 1989, brian and alice mckearney d. 1984, patrick o’dowd, d. 1985.

  The mounds were small, more like a child’s attempt at a play cemetery than a proper memorial. He dug at each of them with his bare hands, unearthing nothing but rotting leaves and mud. He felt a curtain shift momentarily, revealing the sinister tableau of a troubled mind. Looking up he saw old newspaper cuttings spiked on thorns, like prayers to a pagan god. Most were shredded by the wind and wet through. He pulled one down. It was an old clipping of a news report about an unexploded bomb. Another clipping described an explosion that had killed a six-year-old girl and a nun.

  A surge of adrenaline rushed in his veins. He felt as though he’d accidentally pressed the Up button and ascended the lift shaft into the deranged galley of Hughes’s mind. One thing he was sure of, the old man’s thoughts had wandered farther than the simple circuit of his fields and orchards.

  Back at the farmhouse, he handed Eliza the Marigold gloves.

  “I take it these are yours. They were part of some kind of memorial garden in the hedge, complete with makeshift crosses and graves.”

  She sat down heavily. “Oh dear, David and his demented games.”

  A look of exasperation filled her eyes. “Inspector Daly, dementia has turned my brother’s mind into an amusement park with its own ghost train. It’s not just a case of forgetting things and getting lost. The illness makes him perform these bizarre rituals, like hanging up old bits of newspaper in the hedges. He keeps talking about the past, and says he can see ghosts. In the last few weeks, he’s started to make crosses out of anything he can get his hands on. Ribbon, sticks, flowers, rope. I try to tidy them up before visitors arrive, but I can’t keep track of all his movements. Then there’s the messages he writes. Horrible things I can’t describe. Filled with curses and threats.”

  Daly decided to push no further. The woman was clearly in a nightmarish predicament. The sole witness to the twilight of her brother’s disorganized mind. He rubbed his eyes and got up to go.

  “We’ll do our best to find your brother, Ms. Hughes,” he promised. Eliza watched him go in silence, gathering her cardigan around her shoulders.

  Outside it was still dark and the branches of the thorn trees pawed in the wind. He could see the tracks of light that signaled his officers’ searches in fields sloping down to the hidden shore. In a few hours, it would be dawn. If they didn’t find Hughes soon, he might die of hypothermia. God only knew what was running through the old man’s mind.

  The mobile in Daly’s pocket rang as he walked back to his car. He hit Answer, not recognizing the number.

  “Where’s your black suit, Celcius?” asked a familiar voice.

  “Anna,” he said, dropping into the driver’s seat in surprise. “Where are you?”

  “In your house. I found the spare key under a cracked paving stone. I’ve searched your wardrobe and a chest of drawers.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “My sister’s father-in-law died on Thursday, and the funeral is in Dublin this morning. I wanted you to come with me, but it’s too late now. I couldn’t find your mourning suit anywhere.”

  “It’s at the dry-cleaners.”

  “I’ve been thinking of you, Celcius. I wanted you to know that. I have to go now.”

  “I’m working on a case. Can’t you wait an hour?”

  The tenderness in her voice was replaced by a familiar heaviness. “No. I have to leave right now. My sister is waiting for me. You’re always working on a case.”

  “Wait. Can you do me one favor?”

  “What?” She sighed.

  Daly pressed the phone closer to his ear, desperate to prolong the conversation. His breathing grew panicky and dry, as though he were trapped in a cavity of thinning air.

  “Can you get me a lottery ticket?” he said just before she disconnected the call. “I have a feeling these might be our lucky numbers—49, 11, 21, 7. You can pick the last two yourself.”

  There was a pause as she scribbled them down.

  When she spoke, the tenderness had returned to her voice. “Is this the new romantic Daly?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The numbers—they’re our first date backwards. Seven p.m. on November 12, 1994. I didn’t think you remembered.” She paused. “I’ll call you if they come up. Bye, Celcius.”

  •

  When Daly returned to his father’s cottage, he was greeted by a dawn burdened with the premonition of rain and a hangover. The sun found a gap in the clouds and streaked across the low-lying bog land and hedgerows. He almost felt his way to the front door, taking in razor-sharp details, the bright stone walls, a windowpane burning with the morning light, the whiskey glass sitting in the shadow of the porch, pale with frost.

  He sensed her presence within the house immediately. She had spent time tidying the living room, folding away clothes, removing unwashed cups and plates, piling newspapers and CDs into a rack.

  He felt a twinge of jealousy that she had devoted time to rearranging the objects of the room rather than waiting for him or continuing their phone conversation. Rather than say a proper good-bye, she had left him this tidy room filled with her perfume and an eerie silence. The memory of her voice rasped against the edges of his hangover. Perhaps he ought to have ignored the call from the police station, stayed among the clutter, and waited for her to appear.

  Daly had phoned Anna
many times during the first months of their separation, when she was living with her parents in Glasgow. He had been tormented by the thought she was seeing another man. “There’s no one else to blame for this but ourselves,” she kept telling him. But he had struggled to believe her, convinced by his detective’s logic that an unknown culprit had destroyed their romance. In many ways, it had been an irrational response, based on self-delusion and paranoia.

  During the first months, he kept expecting the arrival of divorce papers, but none came. He put their house in Glasgow up for rent and applied for a transfer to Northern Ireland. He had hoped for a post in Belfast, but to his surprise was sent to Armagh, where he had grown up. At the time, it had made sense to move into his father’s abandoned cottage.

  In another phone conversation, he asked her what she wanted from him. She replied he had to prove that he had a world outside his detective’s life. Living in Glasgow, amid the churn of promotion and paperwork, he came to the grim realization that the request was impossible to grant. She might as well have asked him to prove the existence of a fourth dimension. Now he suspected he might be capable of fracturing time itself, without hesitation, to preserve what he had found with her.

  He went into the kitchen and opened something from a tin. He was too tired to read the label, but it smelled like something Anna would have fed her cat. After a few mouthfuls he got up, leaving a fork sticking in the tin, and dragged himself off to bed.

  4

  The nameless voice at the other end of the phone spoke briefly before replacing the receiver. Father Aidan Fee listened to the blunt facts stripped of any semblance of tragedy and slowly put down the phone. It was five a.m. and he was sitting in his cold study. He had served in a border parish as a curate during the Troubles, and knew what the messenger was referring to. He understood the authority in the caller’s voice, even though the message was inconclusive, and might even have been an elaborate prank. It was very sad and, more than sad, disturbing. He walked over to his desk and wrote down the message. It was his priestly duty to follow the instructions, though it was a responsibility they had never prepared him for in the seminary.

  In a tree on Coney Island the body has been left for you.

  It sounded like a clue in a gruesome game of treasure hunt, he thought. By the time he had dressed, washed, and collected his prayer book and oils, it was dawn. He opened the front door and walked outside. The morning smelled of damp moss. A few specks of rain fell from the low clouds that dragged across the sky. Clouds move with such a silent, enviable sense of purpose, he thought.

  A cataract had left the priest almost blind in one eye. It meant he was no longer fit to drive and had to rely instead on one of his parishioners for lifts. On this occasion, however, he decided to spare his regular driver the ordeal. Praying to Saint Christopher, he drove his ten-year-old Renault out onto country roads crusted with potholes, toward the ring of town lands known as the Munchies.

  In all, he had administered last rites to six murdered men. The phone calls had directed him to where their bodies lay in deep ditches or lonely forests, binder twine tied around their hands and fertilizer bags placed over their heads. The men had been branded informers, very much an endangered tribe during the Troubles.

  During the bad years, he had imagined his parish not so much a sanctuary for a God-fearing flock but as a no-man’s-land between two armies, an arena for IRA ambushes and British Army patrols. The normal standards of right and wrong did not apply to his parishioners, only what was necessary or unnecessary for survival.

  He drove through a forest of dense birches and came out at the town land of Derryinver with its expansive view of Lough Neagh. He swung the old car through a series of bends that the locals claimed would knock the devil out of a heretic, and, with gears grinding, passed by Maghery Church. The vague outlines of the Sperrin Mountains were visible in the distance, capped with snow. He sped along as the road rolled through a landscape that was a sniper’s puzzle of thick thorn hedges and slanting fields.

  It was fitting that this would be one of his last missions before retirement. The entire forty-eight years of his vocation had been a sad trajectory through the purgatories of this accursed province. Perhaps when he looked back from his deathbed, he might come to realize that the Troubles had saved his ministry, especially toward the end, the confessed crimes of his parishioners winding around his soul like a nest of snakes. It had been easy to distinguish good from evil, and prevent, or at least delay, his own slide into spiritual indolence.

  Pulling into Maghery Park the car skidded slightly on an untreated patch of ice. A fisherman, pulling in his boat at the nearby pier, looked up and waved at him. Disguising his unease, Father Fee got out and asked after the man’s mother, who had been seriously ill.

  It had been a long, dark winter with too many heavy skies. However, at the lough shore, the sheen of light filled his eyes, making his cataract weep. The bright swell of water lapped against the fisherman’s boat, casting arcs of light over his shadowy form.

  The priest asked the fisherman to ferry him across to Coney Island. Then he sank heavily onto the wooden seat, knocking the holy oils and water bottle in his pocket. He was glad the sun was shining as they rowed out. The light momentarily dispelled any dreaded thoughts of what was to come. For a while, it was enough to watch the fisherman as he rowed, and with whom he felt solidarity. Fishers of men, fishers of lost souls, he thought to himself. He exchanged a few words about the weather, determined not to make the mistake of communicating the reason for his trip, or the anxiety he felt.

  He was used to finding the bodies of informers left discreetly in half-sheltered places, clogged with weeds and briars, the corpse facedown and hidden from view. It had been difficult to locate the monstrosity in those humdrum scenes, his eyes eased by the sight of blossoming flowers and birds flashing through the hedgerows. When he stepped onto the island, he quickly found that this occasion was different. The person who had dumped the corpse had a showman’s talent for the macabre. The corpse was propped grotesquely in the hollow of a tree, the head and shoulders slumped with a look of haggard exhaustion in the grizzled face. Immediately he recognized the body as one of his elderly parishioners, and a regular Mass-goer at that. He had not seen him for weeks, which had been unusual.

  The priest shook his head sadly. Another piece of human flotsam washed up from the great shipwreck of violence they called the Troubles. Although the bombings had stopped more than a decade ago, it was still an unpleasantly recurring fact that his priestly life was hemmed in by sectarianism and murder.

  Often, when he looked down from the altar at his small congregation, Father Fee thought of his parishioners’ fears and hopes, their homes and families, the little crosses they carried on their backs and in their hearts. Since the cease-fire, many paramilitaries had gone to ground along the lough shore—entire families of them, in fact. Some of them forged new careers in politics, others took to alcohol, and a few found God. The religious ones were the men whose minds were mangled by what they had seen and done. Through the sacrament of confession he extended God’s forgiveness to them, and in doing so, in their unstable state, he became someone to whom they had to prove themselves constantly. They were his lost flock of sheep, turning up faithfully at all the weekday Masses, giving large donations to the collections, even offering to send him on holidays to Rome and the Holy Land. At funerals, they placed their rough hands on his shoulder and whispered, “Well done, Father.”

  During the Stations of the Cross, he could see them gathered behind his shoulder, reflected in the glass-covered paintings of Christ’s ordeal on Calvary.

  His cataract smarted as he watched them from the altar.

  He saw the cold-eyed blackmailer sitting behind the mother with a young child, and in the back pews, beside the elderly couple with all their sons in America, the murderer who had no heart.

  Their terrible crimes echoed constantly in his mind.

  And then there had been Jos
eph Devine.

  Father Fee had been drawn by something like tenderness to his pensive face, tilted upward to the statue of the crucifix. An old man struggling with his conscience. All his effort narrowed down to a final battle with the voices in his head.

  His mind went back to Devine’s last confession. It had been an unusual exchange between a confessor and a penitent. Devine had begun by describing his inability to feel joy at the christening of a friend’s granddaughter.

  “I didn’t feel anything, Father,” he had whispered. “It was an effort just to smile. I couldn’t even bring myself to hold the baby in my arms.”

  Father Fee had paused, unable to supply a comforting response. Although they were separated by the metal grille, Devine’s face felt very close. On his breath, he smelled the stale whiff of alcohol.

  “Is what I am afraid of true?” Devine asked him.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “That I’ll never be at peace with myself.”

  The question worried Father Fee. He rubbed his bad eye before answering.

  “Why wouldn’t you be at peace? God is full of forgiveness. All you have to do is make a full confession in the presence of the Lord.”

  “I do that every month, Father.”

  Father Fee paused again.

  “You’re not telling me the truth,” he chided. “You haven’t come here today to talk about a christening. There’s something else troubling you. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps you are too ashamed to say. I don’t know. The only one who knows is you. And God.”

  He waited for the words to sink in.

  “Nothing else troubles my conscience, Father,” replied Devine, a note of defiance creeping into his voice.