Disappeared

by Anthony Quinn

  10

  Daly drove slowly along the dilapidated terrace of council homes looking for the right house number. His car slid unnoticed through a street full of children, boys running and jumping after a football, a row of girls shouting from the edge of the pavement, their sharp, disdainful cries ringing in the winter air. Broken toys cluttered the tiny front lawns. Even the grass looked made of plastic.

  Daly got the impression of cramped houses so overburdened with children that childhood itself had been shoved outside into the gardens and onto the street. This was what passed for parenthood these days, he thought, children driven to the edge, to make room and time for all-night parties and days spent watching chat shows on wide-screen TVs. The only thing that broke the air of deprivation was a sleek black BMW parked at the bottom of the street.

  He was looking for the house of Oliver Jordan’s widow, Tessa. A search through old police files revealed that Jordan had been an informer shot by Republicans in 1989. He was one of a number of IRA men killed at the time over fears that different cells of the organization had been infiltrated by moles. Six months before his abduction, Jordan had been arrested by police after his fingerprints were found on an IRA bomb that failed to detonate.

  The street had one of the highest crime rates in Armagh, and during the Troubles was nicknamed the Ponderosa. After the cease-fire, the name somehow stuck, and well-meaning officials still came out with clipboards looking for directions to a cowboy ranch in the Wild West. When he got out of the car, the children disappeared like rabbits down a warren. A watchful silence surrounded him. It was wariness and silence that distinguished Republican estates after the cease-fire. Not petrol bombs or riots, but silence.

  An attractive-looking woman in her late thirties answered the door at Number 14. Her face was jagged but fresh, with a smattering of youthful freckles but also the ache of loss ripening in her eyes.

  “If you’re the police, you’re bloody quick. My son called you only five minutes ago.”

  She stepped back into the shadows. Daly wasn’t sure if she was angry or relieved. In the hallway he smelled the acrid whiff of smoke and caught sight of a child with dark, empty eyes, her face like a doll’s that had been left out too long in the rain. He followed the flowing figure of the woman through the back door to a concrete yard at the back, where a burnt-out wheelie bin lay on its side, still smoldering. The smell of petrol colored the air.

  “This is what I woke up to this morning,” said the woman, grim-faced. The winter pallor of her skin made her look like an overanimated ghost. “Last weekend they broke the living-room window and set light to the letterbox. I’m a child minder. How can you look after other people’s kids with that sort of intimidation going on?”

  Daly listened to the details of the attack, following the glint of her green eyes and the bounce of her dark hair against her neck before introducing himself. He held out his hand, but she refused to shake it.

  “Mrs. Jordan, the reason I’m here is to ask you some questions about your husband and his disappearance.”

  “What’s that got to do with the burnt bin?”

  Her anger flashed like a spark about to ignite the petrol-laden air.

  “We have reason to believe Oliver’s death may be connected to a recent murder. This new case might throw light on who abducted your husband.”

  “I already know who killed Oliver. It was his so-called comrades in the IRA. But they’ll never be brought to justice. Not by the likes of you, anyway.”

  Under the staircase, he thought he saw another child lurking in a shadow. Silence and shadows, he thought, the legacy of the Troubles. He followed her into a room that was even darker than the hall. For a moment, the shadows reminded him of a childhood game in which he and his friends would dare one another to crawl into an old river tunnel.

  Tessa Jordan self-consciously pulled the curtains back a little. He saw that the room was decorated with photographs of a dead man. There were shots of Oliver Jordan at school as a teenager playing Gaelic football on a Sunday afternoon, and on his wedding day with his sad-eyed bride. As a reminder that Mrs. Jordan was a devout Catholic, a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus also kept watch from the wall. Out of childhood habit, Daly flinched from the all-knowing, all-seeing gaze.

  “I know this is hard for you, but I wanted you to know before you read about it in the papers,” he said. “There might be more stories printed about Oliver’s abduction.”

  She barely reacted. Daly realized they were on territory that had been trespassed a thousand times by the press.

  “So you’re a detective from our new police service, the PSNI,” she said, measuring him up. “Let’s see your identification.”

  Daly obliged and waited as she studied his card.

  “New badge, new name, same old police force, though.” She sniffed skeptically, as though the story of Northern Ireland’s new inclusive police force was a transparent fiction.

  She leaned back, crossing her legs, taking a deeper measure of Daly. The detective felt her eyes searching him out, a sense of danger resonating in the air, as though they were two people considering a secret tryst.

  “Oliver’s murder left me the single mother of a very young child,” she told him, her voice weak but cold. “I hardly had any time to grieve. All I want now is his body returned for a proper burial.”

  She regarded Daly for a second. “Don’t worry; I’m not going to cry. I never did. I was the heroic wife of an IRA man. But when I heard what they were saying about Oliver, that he had been an informer, it was as if I had been stabbed. I didn’t think I’d be able to take it, the accusation that he was a traitor.”

  Daly relaxed a little as she kept talking, feeling like an intruder who had temporarily broken through enemy lines.

  “But eventually the pain sharpens you, and you begin to see things clearly. You have no idea how dull real life is until you feel that sort of anger boil inside you. We found out from our solicitor that Special Branch knew who was responsible for Oliver’s abduction not long after it happened, but no charges were ever brought. When we asked to see the police reports of the investigation, they told us they’d been lost. The authorities have behaved dishonestly. They have lied to us and misled us at every turn. What made the IRA kidnappers so special that the police had to protect their identities?”

  “Perhaps it’s time for a new investigation,” said Daly. “New clues have a habit of turning up, and witnesses can be jolted into remembering vital clues even years later.”

  “What hope is there of solving the case now, seventeen years after the event?” Her voice was more despairing than angry. “Since the cease-fire, we’ve been campaigning to have a public inquiry into Oliver’s abduction, but the British government keeps refusing. I’m quite used to it by now, this burning sense of rage rising from within. The anger isn’t just bearable, it’s electrifying. We Catholics must be hardwired to feel injustice, don’t you think, Inspector Daly?”

  Inwardly, he had to agree. He recalled the thrill of anger he had felt as a new recruit in Glasgow dealing with sectarianism, especially when it was meted out by colleagues. On one occasion, a senior detective had forgotten he was still in the room and remarked to his officers: “That’s the trouble with Fenians, you can never trust them.” Daly had watched the muscles on the inspector’s face tighten with anger and humiliation when he realized his mistake. He had felt his own blood thicken with anger. Of course, the comment was the tiniest of slights compared to the ordeal Tessa Jordan had described.

  “Sometimes personal injustice shapes us and brings out our better qualities,” he suggested.

  She snorted. “For months after Oliver’s disappearance, I used to sit up in the middle of the night with the baby in my arms and listen to the wind. The baby might be crying at the top of its lungs but all I heard was the wind howling over the roof. It was so loud I used to think it was boiling up from inside me.”

  She paused again, and the silence felt so empty that Daly
struggled to find words to fill it. “They say anger is the first stage in the grieving process.”

  “What are you trying to do, Inspector Daly?” she asked. “Turn this into a counseling session? Is that how you get your probes into people?”

  When Daly failed to respond, she talked on. “I’m just like any another woman trying to get on with raising her family. Oliver’s mother spent her whole life campaigning to prove he wasn’t an informer. It was a vicious lie that hurt her deeply. She raised her son in the fear of God, to be obedient and respectful. And that’s the way Oliver was. The campaign to have his body returned wore her out. Now she’s in a nursing home. It’s only right I take up the fight. Branding Oliver an informer has blighted my own son’s life. All I want is the truth and for his body to be returned. I don’t care about punishment or justice, just the truth.”

  Daly admired the simplicity of her request. For a moment, he sensed surrender in her eyes, a serenity in her soul. The living room was like a shrine to Oliver Jordan, but if a transcendence had occurred it was in his widow. Tessa Jordan was a very different woman from the sad-eyed girl of the wedding photograph. It was not just age that had changed her. She had tasted the powerful emotions of grief and anger, and they had transformed her, filling every vein in her body and brimming up in her shining green eyes. Her fight for justice was like a slow-burning martyrdom. He found himself wondering if there had been a lover in her life in the intervening years. Somehow, he suspected that loneliness had never driven her into another man’s arms. He cleared his throat. The time for making silences in their conversation was over. Time for more pushing, less listening.

  “I have some questions to ask.”

  “Fire away.”

  “I understand your husband was on remand for bomb-making charges. Who represented him?”

  “O’Hare solicitors.”

  “I mean who specifically?”

  “Malachy O’Hare himself. He sent me a condolence card when Oliver disappeared.”

  “Why did the IRA believe your husband was an informer?”

  “There was a bomb left on Thomas Street. It was meant for an army foot patrol, but someone had removed the battery from the detonator. Oliver was the last person to have handled it so the suspicion fell on him. His fingerprints were all over the device. He was arrested but then released without charge. That signed his death warrant. When the IRA found out, they claimed he had cut a deal with Special Branch.”

  “And you believe he didn’t?”

  She stared at Daly. “Why are you here, Inspector?”

  “Because evidence relating to your husband’s disappearance was found at the house of a murdered man.”

  “Are you talking about Joseph Devine? The man they found on the island?”

  “You knew him?”

  “I had a visit from him a few weeks ago. Dermot, my son, answered the door. When I saw Devine, he was looking at Dermot as though he’d seen a ghost. He was hardly able to speak. I felt sorry for him, took him in, and made him a cup of tea. He wanted to talk about the evidence we had gathered on Oliver’s murder and the search for his grave. He was doing some sort of research project on the disappeared. He claimed he’d narrowed the search for their bodies. But I didn’t trust him. There was something secretive about him. It made me uncomfortable, and I couldn’t understand what he was getting out of it.” Her eyes narrowed. “Did the IRA kill him too?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to determine.”

  “He probably had it coming to him.”

  Her harshness surprised him. “Why do you think that?”

  “He shouldn’t have been intruding on other people’s grief. When you try that, things blow up in your face.…”

  Before she could continue, a teenage boy barged into the room. When he saw Daly, he stopped dead in his tracks and fumbled with something in his coat pocket, a look of fear filling his face. Daly watched him maneuver closer to his mother, his hand still grappling with the object in his pocket. The detective had levered himself to a half-standing position when the boy finally pulled out a purse and handed it to his mother.

  Daly swallowed and lowered himself back into the armchair. He studied the boy’s face, struck by the resemblance to his dead father. It was as if time had gone into reverse and a ragged, more youthful version of Oliver Jordan had untied his hands, removed the tape from his eyes and made his way back from the shadowy wood, where a gun had just shattered the dawn silence.

  “This is my son, Dermot,” said Tessa. “I was pregnant with him when they took Oliver. He never saw his dad.”

  Daly introduced himself. The fear discharged itself from the boy’s face, but something about his awkward stance and the effort that showed as he forced himself to meet Daly’s gaze piqued the detective’s curiosity.

  The boy’s body arched away from Daly as he backed out of the room. Perhaps his odd behavior was due to the invisible shadow cast by the father labeled an informer, thought Daly, the sense of shame the boy had carried into the world from the moment of his birth, as contaminating as original sin.

  Daly was beginning to suspect that Devine had been murdered because of his investigations into the past. Somehow his death was linked to the abduction of Oliver Jordan and a possible cover-up by Special Branch. Daly wondered to himself why the police had botched the original investigation if the victim was a suspected mole. Surely if Jordan had been an informer, the police would have been keen to find out how their man was discovered and who had killed him. He began to think that Tessa Jordan might be right, that whatever her husband had been guilty of, it was not spying for the security forces. He felt wary, interested. He was following the tracks left by Joseph Devine, but the two of them were circling above a deeper mystery, one shrouded in a darkness to which his eyes had still to adjust.

  He had no more questions to ask Tessa Jordan. Before he left, he promised to keep her up to date with any developments in the case.

  “What about the burnt-out bin?” she asked.

  “I’ll send an arson team ’round to examine it, see if any clues were left behind. I’ll also put a patrol car on the street to keep watch. It might deter any further attacks.”

  This time at the door, Tessa Jordan shook hands with him. Daly glanced up the staircase, but the shadowy children had gone. The street was still quiet when he got into his car. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the teenage boy standing on the doorstep with his mother. Together, they looked like two survivors just crawled out from the crater of a bomb.

  11

  Chief Inspector Ivan Donaldson pointed to the reinforced security gates at Derrylee Police and chewed vigorously at his thick mustache. A black panic still hung around the watchtower and gates, even though it had been a decade since a mortar bomb last rattled the cups and saucers in the police canteen.

  “Those gates survived countless bomb attacks, but now they’re to fall before the gaze of architects and planners,” he complained. “Do you know the local rag has branded this station the ugliest building in Northern Ireland?”

  Daly noticed that Donaldson’s mustache chewing was a little noisier than usual and that the chief appeared perturbed.

  “Looks like we’re under attack from the forces of good taste, sir,” said Daly, staring at the scorch marks and dents that covered the metal gates. For years they had acted as a magnet for grenades, rockets, and all sorts of homemade incendiary devices. Now as part of the demilitarization process, they were to be pulled down and sent to the scrap heap.

  Earlier, Daly had walked into his office to find the chief poring over his notes into Devine’s murder. The detective had felt an instinctive uneasiness, a reflex he could no more control than that resulting from a struck knee.

  At Donaldson’s suggestion, they made their way across the car park toward his large gold Audi.

  The chief inspector clicked his keys and checked beneath the car. Inside, he started the engine and switched on the heater.

  “Sometimes I wonder
if we’re any safer than we were during the Troubles,” he remarked.

  Daly stared at the windscreen and waited for Donaldson to continue. The leather seat was comfortable, and he began to turn over images in his mind from his interview with Tessa Jordan. The car was a good place for a briefing. It allowed them both the opportunity to avoid eye contact. The engine ticked idly, and for a moment Daly thought the chief’s voice might prove to be a pleasing soundtrack as he drifted toward the gates of sleep. Then the tone of Donaldson’s voice changed abruptly.

  “There’s one thing I want to make clear, Inspector,” he said. “Special Branch isn’t involved in the investigation into Devine’s murder. But they have been advising me on the bigger picture. It’s important you should be discreet.”

  “About what?”

  “Talking to anyone about what the case throws up. Full stop.” His voice had stiffened.

  Daly shifted his body toward the passenger door.

  “Especially about any link to the abduction of Oliver Jordan,” the chief continued. “In their opinion, that avenue would complicate things.”

  Donaldson turned to look at Daly. His face was blank, but his concentration was like that of a gambler at a roulette table, waiting for the spinning ball to find its slot.

  A long silence filled the car.

  “I think Devine’s death complicated things in the first place, sir,” replied Daly.

  Donaldson was undeterred. He returned to gazing out the windscreen. “For your information, Special Branch has told me they think it unlikely Republican paramilitaries were involved in Devine’s murder. Too frenzied an attack, and the body was left at the scene of the murder. Typically, the IRA did their killing across the border and dumped the body in the North. Separates the forensics and complicates the investigation.”

  “That’s very helpful of Special Branch. But I hear they haven’t been as forthcoming with theories about Jordan’s abduction.” Daly’s voice did not have to adopt a belligerent edge; the air was already awash with it. “What’s the official line they gave his widow, Tessa? That he disappeared off the face of the earth on his way to work one morning?”