Disappeared

by Anthony Quinn

  “Lung cancer is a horrible disease. I’ve never seen anyone die of it myself, but I hear the sufferer finally drowns in a froth of blood and phlegm.”

  O’Hare raised a voluminous handkerchief from his pocket and placed it over his mouth. For a moment, he and the detective stared at the ticking time bomb. A look of frustration burned within the solicitor’s eyes before his charming equilibrium restored itself.

  “Very well, Inspector. Thank you for your assistance. I would like to be notified when the contents of the fire are examined. Those files are still the property of the firm.”

  When O’Hare had left, Daly returned to the fire. The solicitor’s instinct for survival had proved a solid enough foundation on which to base a minor deception, he thought to himself as he sifted through the ashes and retrieved the file. One misled solicitor would hardly upset the scales of justice.

  7

  Oliver Jordan. The name still meant nothing to Celcius Daly, but it was the only one he could decipher as he scanned the scorched legal notes. It was written several times in a pedantic hand so minute as to be practically illegible, added almost as a footnote to what appeared to be police custody notes. It was the same name inscribed on one of the crosses in Hughes’s makeshift cemetery. The only other detail that jumped out at him was the date of the notes, taken between August and November 1989.

  He decided the file would have to wait for a more detailed examination. It was early afternoon, and he was late for a meeting with a local politician. He placed the papers into an evidence bag along with Devine’s pager and tossed them onto his passenger seat. He told Irwin he was leaving and drove back to the station.

  He had yet to drink his first coffee of the day, and he craved its cerebral buzz. Concerned that he might nod off to sleep, he rolled the window down a chink. The drip-drop of birdsong from the tree-lined shore threaded into the car. The forest was alive with the bubbling sounds of blackbirds and thrushes.

  Daly was on his way to meet Owen Sweeney, a Republican politician. He had known Owen as a boy, given him lifts to school on the back of his bike while he did his morning paper round, in fact, but their paths had diverged many years ago. Sweeney had rung him in a fury over the helicopter search for David Hughes. The helicopter was equipped with a PA loud-hailer system. At one point, on Sunday afternoon, it had hovered over a crowd returning from a GAA match, requesting them to assist in the search for the missing man. A panic had ensued because the football fans thought a dangerous maniac was on the loose. Sweeney claimed the helicopter pilot had targeted the fans on purpose, to harass them on their way home.

  The press will have a field day on this one, he had warned Daly. The detective imagined the headline: ALZHEIMER’S PATIENT IN PAJAMAS AND SLIPPERS TERRORIZES GANG OF FOOTBALL FANS. Daly loathed the melodrama and political blackmail that accompanied community liaison work in post-cease-fire Northern Ireland.

  At a bridge, he passed a mud-spattered transit van, which appeared to have broken down. He slowed and observed the driver—a skinny, pasty-faced youth standing at the side of the vehicle with a mobile phone pressed to his ear.

  The van had a flat tire, and even though he was in a hurry, Daly braked and pulled up with his warning lights flashing. He had a feeling that something else was wrong.

  As soon as the youth saw Daly, he sprinted off, disappearing up a lane overgrown with brambles and bushes. The back door of the abandoned van lay open. Approaching it, Daly sniffed the heady, acrid bouquet of diesel. He peered inside at its illicit cargo: a double row of fuel containers, half covered in oily blankets. He had happened upon a botched fuel smuggling run.

  Daly had been involved in a few deadly games of high-speed cat-and-mouse with such vehicles as they flashed down the M1 motorway and disappeared up country lanes. The drivers were always young men who ten years ago would have happily toiled on a tractor all day in a muddy field. Now they could earn thousands of pounds for the dash from the border to the ferries at Larne, or to loyalist paramilitary gangs in Belfast. Smuggling, as old as the border itself, was breaking a range of political boundaries. Agricultural diesel, originally from the Irish Republic, was smuggled across the border by former IRA men, treated in secret sheds, and then driven to loyalist heartlands in the city. For sworn enemies pounds had become more important than politics or the pope. There was no religion on a ten-pound note, after all.

  But it wasn’t just illegal. It was highly dangerous. The back of a van was an unsafe place to store thousands of liters of combustible fuel. Daly felt the bonnet of the vehicle to see if it was still warm. The engine was cold. As a makeshift fuel tanker, the van was a ticking bomb.

  His eyes caught the flash of the youth’s tracksuit, slowing down as he found cover amid the shrubbery. Afterward Daly realized this was the point when he should have let the youth escape and radio in for help. He had a van full of evidence, and an important meeting to get to. Instead, he took off in pursuit. Not out of fearlessness but because the person who was running away from him was still only a flash of tracksuit, a shadow flying away, a page torn from a book he had yet to read.

  About a hundred yards up the lane the youth stopped, apparently convinced the middle-aged passerby would not give chase. When Daly saw him at the end of a tunnel of leaves, his face was as expressionless as a sheet of ice. The only thing that moved was the vapor of his breath trailing into the shadows. Then the boy darted off again, his gait quicker, more fluid, his body weaving around sprawling shrubs, jumping over crumbling walls, disappearing into whorls of leafy shadow. Daly lumbered behind, crashing through the outstretched branches.

  The lane ran roughly parallel to the main road and a gleaming line of new bungalows. It burrowed through overarching thorn trees and alders, twisting by the oddly angled walls of dilapidated cottages and outhouses. Nobody knocked down buildings in this part of the country. They just built bigger ones, deposing the previous generation’s homes to overgrown lanes such as these. The Armagh countryside was becoming a maze of dark, forgotten little lanes, as dark and crooked as the past.

  The shrubbery thickened, reducing Daly’s visibility to a few yards. He stood still, listening to the rain ping on leaves and the branches swaying in the wind. Up ahead he saw a patch of the youth’s shiny tracksuit hanging motionlessly as though snagged on a branch. Had he stopped to let the detective catch sight of him again? Daly felt an equal measure of fear and curiosity as he approached. He wondered whether the youth felt the same. After all, they were two of the most primitive emotions, shared by all species, even criminals and policemen.

  He shouted out, “I’m a police officer. I want you to come back with me to the van.”

  Through the undergrowth, he caught a better view of the youth’s face. Thin and white, with a wet fringe of hair. The apparition of a truant schoolboy. His face looked empty of fear, empty of curiosity. In the Republican strongholds of Armagh, they taught children from an early age not to show any emotion to enforcers of the law. Daly could sense the boy was not ready to cooperate with him. Fuel smugglers were like border Republicanism itself. Self-reliant and cunning, but too easily seduced by the powerful forces of money and politics.

  Any hope Daly might have had for a successful arrest was ended by the metallic rip of a quad bike blasting along the lane toward them. The youth gave Daly a cheeky wave before hopping onto the back of the bike. Then the driver fishtailed the machine and accelerated toward Daly. A wooden stick appeared in the passenger’s hand and hung low as the bike careened past. Daly felt a blow to his knees and fell to the ground as if shot.

  “Up the hoods!” shouted the boy with the stick raised in the air. The length of wood disappeared from view, along with the bike, but Daly had seen enough to recognize it was a hurley stick. It ought to have been a comfort that the youth was into Gaelic sport rather than guns or knives. Although the stick might not be classified as an offensive weapon, the young man had wielded it with the precision of a marksman.

  By the time Daly made it back to t
he broken-down van, it was raining heavily. He was soaked through and hobbling. He examined the back of the vehicle as a lorry passed, its headlights sweeping over him. In the flood of light, he saw that the containers were empty. Slowly he closed the doors. Why had the boy run off when there was no contraband to incriminate him? He got his answer when he saw the smashed glass of his own passenger window. He looked for the bag containing the legal files and the pager but it was gone. The wet black hull of another lorry thundered by, wipers lashing in the heavy downpour. Daly felt its cold wind pass through him as if he weren’t there.

  It was getting dark. Too late to ring Sweeney and apologize for missing the appointment. The day was almost over and two important pieces of evidence had been stolen from him in what appeared to have been a planned ambush. He had accomplished more as a boy on his morning paper round.

  8

  Daly worried that, as the winter drew on, he and the office walls were beginning to share the same coloring—a dull matte gray. He suspected neither his face nor the walls flattered each other very much. The light of the frosty morning came in through the windows of the police station but did little to relieve the gloom inside or out.

  His last holiday had been a weekend break to Paris in spring. It was also the last time he and Anna had gotten drunk together. The last time they had enjoyed each other’s company. Pity all he remembered now was the expensively priced champagne and wine, and a view of the Eiffel Tower drowning in the rain-spattered window of a taxi. He supposed it had been romance of a sort.

  He surreptitiously eased his shoes off under the table. Leaning back in his chair, he thought of Devine working in a busy solicitor’s office, sitting bent and sun-starved, surrounded by legal papers, day in, day out, for more than forty years. An office that probably looked very like Daly’s own room. Four walls filled with a grayness that fought its way into every living cell of the body. Had Devine ever wondered if he was missing out on life? If so, his killers had robbed him of any chance of making up for lost time.

  The murder barely made sense to Daly. It contradicted the dull order of the legal profession and threw Devine’s whole life out of focus. Perhaps there had been something in the half-burnt files that provided a link to his horrific death. If so, why had it taken so long to come to light?

  Solicitors, like priests and doctors, were bound by an oath of confidentiality. It dawned on Daly that Devine had been privy to a horde of secrets. Maybe in his retirement, an act of recollection had floated up some detail from an old case. He had been unable to speak out at the time, but things had changed when he left the firm. Secrets had that effect as the years passed, mused Daly; they rose up with a force that could capsize lives.

  After a while, he slipped on his shoes and got to his feet. It was too soon to draw conclusions but he felt he was on the right track. He went out to the coffee room where Irwin and Harland were trying to persuade a female officer to share her bag of crisps.

  A look, smooth as steel, slid across Irwin’s charming face when he saw Daly. He got up and made four cups of black coffee. Everyone at the station was used to taking it that way, since the milk in the fridge was usually well past its sell-by date.

  “I’m not disturbing you?” asked Daly, glancing at the retreating figure of the young female officer. Deep down, he wondered if he were alive at all.

  “No. And so what even if you were?” replied Irwin.

  The detective told Daly he’d been unable to get through to Father Aidan Fee. “The day after he found Devine’s body he left on some sort of a retreat,” he said. “Apparently, he’ll be gone for several weeks.”

  “What’s a retreat?” asked Harland.

  “They’re like second honeymoons for Catholic clergymen,” explained Irwin, winking at Daly. “Reinvigorates them when they get bored with the pope and all that Roman diktat. The priests go off somewhere nice and peaceful to spend a little quality time with God.”

  Daly smiled thinly. “What’s that funny smell, like pears?” he asked.

  “Perfume,” replied Irwin. “Not mine, I might add.”

  “Of course.”

  Irwin handed him a mug of black coffee and yawned.

  Daly sipped at the mug and eyed the younger detective over the rim.

  “Anything come through on the broken-down van?” asked Irwin.

  “It was stolen from a house at Mullenakill yesterday afternoon. The owner said two masked men broke into the house and demanded the keys.”

  “You think they knew what was in your car?”

  Daly shrugged. “Too early to say. If it was an ambush, they were quick off the mark.”

  “Maybe it was just a coincidence.”

  Daly’s raised eyebrow suggested he was a man who did not believe in coincidences.

  They moved on to discussing Devine’s career at the solicitors’, and what links it might have with his murder.

  “You still think a former client murdered Devine?” asked Irwin.

  “Not necessarily. But we need access to all the cases he was involved in to rule out the possibility. All we can do at this stage is scrape away the layers of paint to find what’s hidden beneath.”

  Irwin put down his coffee. “It won’t be easy extracting that kind of information from O’Hare’s firm.”

  Daly almost missed the question mark left hanging by the comment.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t remember the senior partner, Brian Cavanagh? He died of a heart attack a few years ago. But back in the ’80s, he was a self-styled human-rights lawyer with an interesting client list. Let’s just say he wasn’t the type to spend his spare time rehearsing the Queen’s Oath.”

  An image went off in Daly’s mind like a flashgun. A shiny-eyed, shrewd firebrand of a solicitor reading an angry statement outside a courthouse. A series of high-profile cases involving IRA men had brought Brian Cavanagh media notoriety. To his critics, the solicitor’s interest in human rights extended only as far as the Republican prisoners he represented.

  In fact, within the security forces, there were unfounded rumors that he provided a constant stream of messages between prisoners and the IRA leadership. As a Catholic, Daly tended to believe the unofficial version: that Cavanagh, like many solicitors working for Republican clients, wasn’t politically motivated, his only interest was getting at the truth. Either way, the missing file began to take on a more menacing significance.

  “There’s something Mr. O’Hare’s not letting us in on,” said Daly.

  “He seemed preoccupied at Devine’s cottage.”

  “Any connection between Devine’s death and his firm will arouse a lot of public interest. We’ll let him sweat it out for now. See if the press comes up with anything interesting.”

  “By the way, Butler has sent a preliminary report on the forensics. He left you this.”

  He handed Daly a brief handwritten note that began with Butler’s characteristically sardonic humor: Cleaning up is always the hardest thing to do after a party. However, Devine’s murderers were professionals. So far we haven’t found a scrap of DNA that doesn’t belong to the victim.

  Five minutes later Daly was sitting in his car, the engine running.

  The case had to be linked to terrorism and Northern Ireland’s bloody past. He had suspected it the moment he saw the body on the island. The lack of a prime suspect in Devine’s life helped confirm his instinct. He released the clutch, and soon he was driving by the empty orchards on the road out of town, wondering what grim forces the legal clerk had entangled himself in.

  A fine drizzle began to fall, and in the grayness, the low, arching branches of the apple trees took on the solemnity of a great funeral procession. This part of the Armagh countryside had earned itself the nickname of the Murder Triangle during the height of the Troubles, a series of tit-for-tat killings devastating both the Protestant and Catholic communities. The roads he was driving through had to be some of the most ghost-run in the country.

  He pul
led the car to a stop at a narrow crossroads. A ribbonlike stream of water twisted and turned its way down the road from the summit of a hill. He was of two minds. When another car drew up behind him and flashed its headlights, he decided to follow the lead that had first caught his attention inside Devine’s cottage.

  It took him half an hour to find his way back to the farmhouse where David Hughes had gone missing. In daylight, the farmyard looked more desolate. The wind sniffed at a fence of broken wire. Rainwater filled a line of empty post holes, and an ancient tractor with a rusted seat stood in a lane of mud. The farm seemed to have sunken into a forlorn state of waiting.

  However, in the garden, a full washing line flapped in the cold breeze, suggesting that Eliza Hughes was not the type of woman to neglect her household routine. This time the door was locked with a series of bolts. Eliza spoke to him first from behind a pane of frosted glass. Her eyes were wide with fear when she pulled open the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like opening the door to strangers.”

  “We’ve no news of your brother, yet,” said Daly hurriedly. “I just have a few questions to ask you, that’s all. It won’t take much of your time.”

  She put away a scrubbing brush and bucket, and led Daly down a corridor lined with miniature gilt picture frames of hunting scenes. They stepped into a kitchen where a dishwasher and washing machine were busy twins of suds and noise. An oppressive cleanliness reigned throughout, in spite of the emotional upheaval the woman had endured.

  “I used to tell David every day that everything was fine because I didn’t want him to worry,” said Eliza, her words sounding dull and hopeless. “Now I have to keep telling myself the same. Things aren’t fine, though. I’m falling to pieces behind a wall that I built brick by brick around David and myself.”

  Daly felt a note of sympathy with her sense of abandonment. In a way, it mirrored his predicament with Anna: not knowing the whereabouts or motivation of a loved one.