From the back of the crowd, an anonymous voice spoke up.
“Sweeney was an extortionist and a blackmailer all right. And he bankrupted anyone who had the courage to cross him. He might have been a great Catholic, but he would have shot you as soon as look at you.”
An old man pushed his chair forward in response. Butter dripped down his chin, but he appeared oblivious to it. His rasping voice trembled in his throat.
“What Brendan Sweeney did to my family was a crime,” he declared.
“Tommy was our only son, and he was nineteen. He was never any trouble. He was somebody we could rely on and trust, and he lived for cars. That was his whole life. I never thought he would die pleading for mercy. Brendan Sweeney ordered his execution. Tommy was blamed for causing a car crash that left the daughter of an IRA man badly injured.
“The men who killed Tommy all wore boiler suits and surgical gloves. It was a planned operation, and they broke every bone in his body. Afterwards Sweeney said no one was allowed to speak to the police about what had happened. He said he would take full responsibility for the murder.
“That man was nothing but a coldhearted butcher. Most people if they had to put down a cat or a dog would walk away with some feeling. I wanted to know if he ever felt remorse. Now I’m at his wake. I used to dream about this day, but all I feel is sadness.”
The old man’s voice rolled about in his throat, and tears streamed down his face.
“In this part of the world life is cheap; you won’t find it cheaper anywhere else. Sweeney was a monster. It would take years to list all the terror that bastard waged upon his own people.”
In the tense silence that followed, a young woman stood up, placed a coat over the old man’s shoulders and wiped his chin. “Let’s go home, Granddad,” she whispered. “Don’t cry on his account. It’s too late for that.”
Egged on by the old man’s grief something broke loose among the mourners, a pull of emotion that passed from person to person like an electrical current, bringing a woman to her feet, her chin stuck out defiantly.
“My nephew was kneecapped by Sweeney’s gang for getting into a fight at a pub with a bunch of IRA men. That mistake ruined his life. His mother had just bought him a new pair of football boots. They lifted him from the football ground and took the laces from the boots and tied him up. He’s never kicked a football since.”
She sat down quickly and immediately a man took her place with another story. It was clear Sweeney had a split personality, wronging as many people as he had helped.
The mourners began quarrelling. One side claimed Sweeney had been a generous patron of the parish and a good Republican, the other that he had terrorized his neighbors and turned the parish into his personal fiefdom. Daly got up. He quietly slipped from the room into the kitchen, and out through the back door.
The rain that had been falling all day had lightened, but the drizzle still enshrouded the view from the back door. The mountain behind Sweeney’s house was obscured but a nearby gully and its rumbling water could clearly be heard. Sweeney must have woken to its perpetual roar every day of his life. Perhaps that was where the old man got his edge, Daly thought, that intimidating sense of violence, as he rolled from house to house along the gentler slopes of the valley below.
The latch of the back door clicked shut as someone else left the house. The IRA man slowly moved into view, inspecting the space around him, discreet but without making an effort to be quiet. His steel-tipped boots echoed on the cobbled yard. Too late, Daly realized he had walked into a trap.
“Why are you here?” he asked, squaring up to Daly.
“Brendan was a neighbor of my father’s.”
“No, I mean what are you doing here?”
He prodded Daly in the shoulder.
“I’m a police detective and I wish you’d stop doing that,” said Daly.
“You’re not a detective here. You can be a mourner come to pay his respects but not a policeman. You can’t come here and poke your nose into a dead man’s life.”
“I understand,” said Daly, trying to hold the terseness in his voice. He did not want to signal surrender, only a growing awareness of how complicated the situation was. He glanced tentatively toward the kitchen door, but it was shut. Dusk was advancing, and even though the IRA man had removed his beret and sunglasses, his face was difficult to see in the fading light. He poked Daly again in the shoulder and began circling him, jabbing him here and there as though inspecting what sort of stuffing he was made from.
Before the detective could brace himself against an attack, a cigarette flared in the darkness. Someone stepped out of the shadows and beckoned the paramilitary to return to the house. The new arrival had a peaked cap, and the collars of his coat were drawn up. Dressed to draw the minimum of attention to himself. He pushed his face forward for inspection and Daly recognized the tufty beard and shining eyes of Owen Sweeney.
“Sorry about that,” said the politician, glancing at the retreating back of the paramilitary. “They’re like gun dogs quivering with excitement at the scent of prey. You’re lucky, you know. The next time you saw your face could have been in a mirror on a hospital ward.”
A grimace creased Sweeney’s face and he gestured toward the house. “Typical Irish wake, eh? My father’s not even buried and they’re tearing his reputation to shreds. It’s disgusting.”
He rocked back on his heels, drew heavily on his cigarette, and allowed himself a rueful grin. “All the same, Dad could be a sick old bastard when he wanted to be.”
There was an air of potent self-assurance about Sweeney in the shadowy light. Daly had seen that smug confidence before in senior Republicans, former paramilitaries who had done time in prison and were now celebrated politicians in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Men who believed they held the balance of power, sure that the dealt cards favored them.
Together the two men watched the signal light of a helicopter flash in the murky sky.
“How could the British ever defeat us?” said Sweeney, softly, almost wistfully. “We were stubborn and showed them we meant business.”
He turned and concentrated his gaze on Daly.
“Glad you could make it, by the way, Inspector. Dad would have been pleased to have a policeman praying over his body.”
He tossed away the cigarette. “Also, I’ve something I want to show you.”
Sweeney’s self-satisfaction slowed his voice into an intoxicated drawl.
“But that can wait. You know, at the time of the cease-fire we weren’t losing the battle. British soldiers had to walk backwards on the streets of every town in Armagh and Tyrone. And you don’t do that if you’re winning the war.”
He licked his lips as though the words had left a sweetness behind he desperately wanted to savor. From his pocket, he took another cigarette and lit it.
More smoking and silence.
When Sweeney spoke again his voice was still low but less intimate.
“Let’s get down to business. Tell me what you make of Devine’s murder. I hear it was quite a crime scene.”
“Officially it’s too early to say. Unofficially, I’m working hard on the angle that Republicans were involved,” said Daly.
“I wouldn’t get too excited about that avenue of investigation.”
“Why not? There’s enough about Devine’s past and the way in which he was killed to justify such an inquiry.”
“Republicans had nothing to do with his murder. An incident like that would have far-reaching political consequences. The whole peace process might unravel. Anyway, we had no intelligence that Devine was an informer. He wasn’t even on the radar. If you’re interested in finding his killers, you’ll have to spread your net a little wider. Devine had in his possession sensitive information which could have done damage to a lot of people.”
“You sound well informed, better than Special Branch themselves.”
“Who? Donaldson and his cronies?” said Sweeney derisively. “They coul
dn’t investigate the whereabouts of their boots.”
He crushed the cigarette, and his face grew animated.
“Since the cease-fire we Republicans and the intelligence organizations have been working by a set of unwritten rules. One of them is that we keep an eye on each other. Trust is in very short supply. We strike a balance, look after our own security, and everyone gets on with promoting peace.”
Sweeney turned his big-boned face at Daly, all trace of enjoyment gone from his features.
“Unhappily, you were assigned Devine’s murder, and ever since you’ve been trespassing on everyone’s territory. It’s time to stop taking an interest in Republicans, Daly. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the ranks and your investigation is stirring up all sorts of conspiracy theories.”
“I’ll suspect anyone I want,” replied Daly.
Sweeney looked at him fiercely and then a twinkle of mirth flashed again in his eyes. From the inside of his jacket, he produced a sheaf of papers.
“You know Devine was kneecapped in his youth. He’d been pestering some girl and the order was put out to give him a little tickle on the knee. I fired the bullet. Looks like I should have aimed it higher.”
He rolled the papers into a baton and smacked them into the fat of his palm.
“These are the legal files you retrieved from Devine’s house. They make interesting background reading. Nobody wants a bloodbath unless it’s really necessary. Devine wasn’t murdered out of blind fury or revenge. He was killed because it was necessary. And the orders must have come from very high up.”
“Who are you talking about? The intelligence services?”
“Who knows? But don’t expect any help from them. Their brief is to ensure the investigation goes ’round in circles until people like you get tired of pursuing it. Devine has no family, so the expectation is there’ll be no campaigning relatives to keep his case in the spotlight.”
He handed Daly the papers.
“Want to know something you’ll never see written down in any report or file? One of your lot tried to recruit me once. A Special Branch officer nicknamed the Searcher.”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“His name was David Hughes, the man who’s leading you a merry dance at the minute. I remember him as a self-righteous prat with a strong sense of duty and no mercy. But I hear dementia has made him much more pleasant to get on with.”
It was turning out to be an evening of the strangest questions and confessions, thought Daly.
He glanced at the papers. “What about the pager?”
“The pager?” asked Sweeney. “I had to return it to its rightful owners.”
“Who are they?”
“Your friends in Special Branch,” he answered with a laugh. “Property of the British Security Services. They’re very precious about things like that. I didn’t want to get a bill and an angry letter from them.”
22
Reconstructing the past was proving a tougher task than the visitor had imagined. At times David Hughes couldn’t remember the identity of his companion, let alone what had brought them together. Moreover, as each day went by the net of their investigation seemed to expand, taking in a wider circle of informers. Now he was back to talking about ducks again. The old man’s illness made it feel as though they were trying to walk over deep black water. Time was running out.
“I’ve had enough. Stop talking about those bloody duck decoys.” The visitor lost his temper.
Hughes looked at him from the corner of his eye, as though he wanted to say something but was restraining himself.
“What is it?”
Hughes sighed. “If only I could escape.”
“From here?”
“No. From my conscience. Now that the truth is close, I wish I could escape.”
“And you think that hiding from the truth will bring you freedom?”
“You wouldn’t understand. My conscience has got very big, too big for the old wreck of my mind. It keeps challenging me to a fight.” He began to shake his head as though a fly were annoying him.
“Do you believe in God?” asked the visitor.
Hughes was silent. He scratched his head vigorously.
“If I believed in God, I’d also have to believe in the devil, and hell, too, and that would cause a whole lot more complications than my muddled mind can deal with.” He looked at the visitor. “What age are you?”
When the visitor told him, the old man laughed.
“And you believe in God and angels and that we all have souls and good intentions?”
The visitor felt ridiculed.
“You’ve led too pure a life to realize that man is a brute,” said Hughes. “Give him a gun and any kind of uniform, and he’ll trample all over you.”
“If you don’t believe in God, then why listen to your conscience?”
“My conscience is my major flaw. It’ll kill me quicker than any illness.”
The visitor got up and stood at the window. The darkness outside was thick and foreboding. He felt a sudden squeeze of panic in his guts thinking of what Hughes had said. We are like two blind mice scurrying on the pantry floor, he thought to himself.
He was unable to rest so he put on Hughes’s old overcoat and sat up, waiting for the moon to rise. The pockets were full of duck feathers. He seized a thought that had been floating around the edge of his consciousness. Devine’s last message had made an unusual reference to flight. He didn’t know why the description had stayed with him, but then he saw the connection.
He went over to the bed and roused the old man. They were about to make a late-night trip, and for the first time they were going to be accomplices to a crime.
23
Now that he had worked out the meaning of Devine’s last message, the visitor’s mind was as clear and simple as that of a poker player with a winning hand. What a moment of inspiration it had been, coming out of the blue when his search for the truth had seemed so dark and complicated. Now, as he drove the borrowed jeep along the overgrown lane, he felt freed from any shadow or notion of fear.
Hughes sat beside him with his vacant hunter’s face, impermeable to weather or words. He kept looking straight ahead as if searching for an indication of rain or inclement weather. During that first meeting in the room of comfortable armchairs, the old man had let slip his nickname, the Searcher. It was apt. Even though illness had dulled his personality, his gaze still burned with a stubborn intensity.
The visitor did not say anything. He just followed Hughes’s directions. A person had to know when it was right to stay silent. It was no longer possible to have a full conversation with the old man anyway. His illness interfered too much with the organization of his mind. He had to be patient, and ensure they made the most of their new lead.
They drove on as a cold rain snuffed out the dusk. They wanted to avoid the police patrols that might be watching their intended destination, so they followed forgotten lanes that were no longer marked on maps. The jeep sloshed through the downpour. They slipped unnoticed through a small forest. A screen of thorn trees swung back, revealing the cottage and the light from the back porch throwing into jagged relief a circle of unkempt garden.
“Where are we?” asked Hughes. They had been silent so long the old man had forgotten their mission. He looked about him as though he might be on one of those artificial outings designed to break the boredom of the long winter evenings.
The driver sighed. “The truth is always near, within your reach.”
After a minute of silence, he tried another tack.
“To catch two birds with the one stone. What does that mean?”
“I know that. It’s simple. This is usually what people try to do. Because they want to catch too many birds, they find it difficult to stay focused. They end up not catching any birds at all.”
The driver waited, counting his breaths, keeping his impatience in check. During his bouts of confusion, the two of them clung to a few wisps of shared c
onversation. Swapping proverbs and playing word games had become a vital form of sustenance to their friendship.
“The man with two birds,” said the driver. “This is his house.”
“Of course, I remember now.” Hughes looked around him as though he was just coming to consciousness from a long nap. “Switch off the headlights. Keep the engine running. This will take just a minute.”
The old man walked furtively toward the back door. The visitor leaned back and thought of Joseph Devine, a man he had never met but who had fundamentally changed the course of his life. Devine had held more than one bird in his hand. He had been the center of a secret organization of spies and informers. But in the end he had made a mistake. And that had cost him his life. He knew that any mistakes made by him or Hughes would be punished in a similar way, such was the dangerousness of their operation.
Eventually the old man reappeared, creeping out of the house. The driver flashed his headlights. Hughes stood in the dim gleam of the porch light and took his bearings. A look of confusion darkened his face. Over his shoulder was a bulky bag. The driver held his breath. The old man put down the bag and walked toward the front of the house, his posture changing abruptly from skulking to leisurely. The driver felt the blood drain from his body. He flicked the headlights twice, and then again. He was convinced the detective in charge of the case would have posted a patrol car at the front of the house.
The rain spattered the windscreen, obstructing his view. He rolled down the window and, straining his ears, heard only the washing sounds of the lough. He felt a moment of terror in the darkness. A tremor of the mind as disabling as Hughes’s fits of confusion. The heavy trees and the brooding cottage all converged upon him, shutting out any means of escape.
Something moved at the other side of the house, a prowling silhouette. Hughes had returned. He held out his hand as though he had just discovered it was raining. The headlights lit up his grizzled face. He was dripping wet. Ducking back toward the porch, he threw the bag over his shoulder and hurried back to the jeep. In one swoop, he opened up the back door and heaved the load inside.
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