‘This isn’t the road, Jack,’ said the traveller with a smile.
‘I don’t think I’m ready for the road,’ he replied.
‘Not ready for the road? Of course you are,’ said the traveller patiently. ‘Think of all the adventure that’s ahead of us. No more school and no more rules. We’re going to follow the road until our shoes fall to tatters.’
‘I’m worried where it will take me. I want to go home now.’
‘Don’t worry, Jack. The road always takes you home, no matter how long you spend travelling it.’
There was a mysterious purposefulness about the young traveller, which eased Jack’s worries about being so far from his parents. He shuddered with a thrill of dread, remembering what the youth had promised him the night before.
The youth stroked the back of his head. ‘I think it’s time we headed back, Jack. Cousins and uncles have travelled from all corners of the country to meet you. We’ve a little surprise planned for you. A ceremony will take place later today and you’re our special guest.’
Jack nodded his head. He did not know what the ceremony was, but he knew that his real life was starting now, his life without his mother and father. They turned back together and kept walking until they reached the camp. The others had risen and wisps of smoke curled from a campfire. A naked toddler sat on a caravan step, crying inconsolably, his sobs shaking his plump little body. No one was paying him any attention. The child’s wail rose, piercing the air, and then subsided.
Jack found himself a place at the fire. His sleeping companions from the caravan sat down beside him, wedging him in so tightly he could barely move. More children joined them. He stayed alert and quiet within the growing horde, hoping that his fear would recede. A gang of men circled the boys, sombre-faced and powerful. More men arrived, casting furtive glances at Jack. He caught their stares and glanced away. Everywhere he turned, he was blocked. What did the men know about him that he did not know himself? What was the secret that he held but did not know how to deliver to this strange race of people?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The housing estate had its own eyes, dozens of them, hostile and reflective, gazing skywards as Daly drove by slowly, the windows of brand-new homes built too close for his comfort, walling him in as he searched for number 38, the residence of the Hewsons. The moment he awoke that morning, he had decided he needed to speak to the couple as soon as possible. Not that he had any good news to relay about their missing son, but the question marks over Reid’s death had given him a shiver of anxiety for the couple’s safety. He felt a strong need to check that they were coping with the emotional strain, and that they were generally safe and well.
It was a new estate, constructed during the boom, when builders packed houses on to cramped sites to meet the insatiable demand for property. Slender threads of front lawn were the only green spaces, unravelling into a wilderness of rubble and stagnant marsh at the bottom of the estate. Many of the houses looked unoccupied, homes with no insides, thought Daly as the reflection of his car ghosted along their windows. His experience of living in his father’s run-down cottage had taught him that inherited houses were animate things, capable of cursing or blessing their occupants. The spirit of the past never faded away in an old house, rather it mustered in its nooks and crannies, ready to pour forth at unexpected moments. By comparison, these new homes were sturdy and bright and packed with mod cons, free of the ghosts of the past. However, Daly seriously doubted if he would ever settle happily in one of them.
There did not seem to be anyone at number 38. After ringing the bell and knocking on the door, Daly took out his mobile phone and tapped in their landline number, which rang and rang. He tried Rebecca’s mobile and, after a few ring tones, someone answered but did not speak. Daly said hello. There was a moment of silence, followed by a sigh and then the clearing of a throat. The line went dead. Daly rang again but this time the phone went straight to an answer message. He tried Harry’s mobile but all he got was the sound of static. His sense of anxiety increased.
He rang the landline again, and this time it was engaged. Convinced that at least one of the couple was at home, he rang the doorbell repeatedly and shouted their names through the letterbox.
Eventually, Rebecca came to the door, looking thinner and frailer than at their previous meeting. She had guessed from the look on his face that he had no positive news to bring. Her eyes appeared set behind glass, wary as she led Daly wordlessly through a hallway and into a comfortable living room, suffused with the light of discreetly placed lamps.
‘I take it you still haven’t found him, Inspector,’ she said.
‘Not yet,’ he replied. She gestured for him to take a seat by the window.
‘Then have you come with news about my husband?’ Her voice hinted at bitterness and loneliness.
Her question stumped him. ‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘He’s decided to run out on me,’ she said flatly. ‘I’ve been ringing his phone all morning but there’s no answer. He packed his stuff in a camper van and left as soon as we came home from the police station.’
‘Why would he leave you at this time?’
She almost laughed. ‘My guess is that he’s hiding somewhere along the border. He often takes himself off there.’
‘Did he say when he’d be back?’
‘No.’
‘That sounds very odd, given what has happened.’
‘Odd if you don’t know Harry. He gets agitated from time to time and has to be on his own.’
‘What about his personal documents, did he take them with him? Passport, driving licence, that sort of thing.’
‘Yes.’
‘His mobile phone and any other devices?’
‘Gone, too.’
Rebecca sounded genuinely confused by the abruptness of her husband’s departure. How well did she really know him? he wondered. What was parenthood but a man and a woman lit up by the flickering light of the children between them? Take the children away, and sometimes all that remained were two strangers staring at each other across a void.
‘I’ve contacted his editor at the Irish News. He said Harry had been made redundant about a year ago, and since then he’d done some freelance work but nothing in the past six months. I rang every other newspaper I thought he worked for but none of them had heard of him, never mind employed him.’
‘He’d kept this secret from you?’
‘I only suspected something was wrong after Jack was taken.’ There was a bitter edge to her voice. ‘Whatever he’s been doing all these months, it wasn’t journalism. I challenged him after we came home from the station, but he just kept on packing.’
Daly nodded and struggled to think of something sympathetic to say. ‘How many of us question what our partner says about their job? It’s the last thing we expect to be lied to about.’
‘Harry always took his profession so seriously. I thought he was committed to the truth.’
But not to his nearest and dearest, thought Daly. ‘What did he do for money?’
‘He always seemed to have enough. He mentioned something about an advance from a publisher for a book he was researching.’ She flashed a fierce look at Daly, a woman wronged. ‘I don’t know what to think now – perhaps even that was a lie. What does it all mean, Inspector?’
‘It means perhaps you shouldn’t judge him so harshly because he couldn’t tell you he’d lost his job.’
Her eyes glanced away from Daly’s stare, her mind elsewhere. ‘Before he left, he told me something. He thought he knew the people behind Jack’s abduction.’
‘How might he have known them?’
‘Through work.’
‘But he didn’t work. His career as a journalist was over.’
‘He told me that his work might have been the reason why Jack disappeared.’
‘Then he must have meant that he was responsible, personally. Did he tell you how?’
‘This book he was working on.
It was about the history of the travellers during the Troubles.’
Daly raised an eyebrow. ‘What sort of history?’
‘How they suffered during the conflict. Intimidated and abused by both sides, with no one to protect their rights or ensure they had access to justice.’
Daly considered the possibility that Hewson had been unravelling a dangerous secret within the travelling community. If it was true, the abduction might make sense as a scare tactic, a warning for him to desist from his research. At the very least, it backed him into a corner.
‘He told me he’d spent the last month interviewing travellers and studying library archives of the Troubles. I asked him what was so important that it made him ignore his family and his proper job, but all he said was that he was on to something important.’
‘Did he give any hint as to how dangerous it was?’
‘His job was about asking awkward questions, he always told me. Sometimes he offended powerful people.’
‘Did you ever see this book he was working on?’
‘He said he was writing a first draft, but when I asked to see it he couldn’t produce a single page. He explained that he’d yet to commit it to paper. However, he’d written it in his head, and any day now he was going to type it all up. I saw files of newspaper cuttings, maps of the border, and journals, but he hadn’t written a word of what they all meant.’ She made his writerly failure seem like a further act of betrayal. ‘When I went looking for his papers yesterday, they were gone.’
‘What about his computer?’
‘He used a laptop which he kept locked in his camper van. He’d been living out of it for the past month.’
‘Perhaps this story he was working on was so dangerous he had to hide it.’
‘Hide it? From who?’ She frowned at Daly.
‘From his family. From you.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘To protect you and your son from the truth.’
‘But why dig up something so dangerous in the first place?’
Her voice, the emotion in it, penetrated his professional defences. With her dark hair and green eyes, he realized how much she resembled his mother. Hers was a younger and more alluring face than the one he remembered from his childhood, but still the resemblance was there. Not just in her looks but in the way she carried herself and sat at the edge of her seat, her composure, her obstinate wariness, the signs of worry that appeared at the corners of her mouth. He hadn’t noticed it before, or had blanked it out, but now the similarity was manifest in the intimate setting of her living room. The resemblance impeded him, distracting him from the questions he needed to ask. The sound of her anxious breathing seemed to fill the room. He could sense her inner turmoil, but the signal that drowned out everything else was the memory of another woman.
Rebecca sighed and gazed at him with a look of curiosity. There was his mother’s face again, or a more intense version of it, oppressing him through the proximity of another woman’s sadness. A tide of emotions flowed within him. What loss did he want to bury in this young woman’s searching eyes, and in the warm darkness of her hair? He was afraid to look away from her face in case the huge gallery of his memories welled up and filled the rest of the room.
With a shudder of annoyance, he pulled himself together. Rebecca had told him that her husband was researching something dangerous, but what? A powerful truth that had activated dormant forces, old monsters from the Troubles. Her son abducted and now her husband disappears. What did that chain of events signify? The common denominator was the travellers. What was it about the past that Hewson could not discuss with his wife? Why, in the first place, had he kept up the pretence that he was still employed as a journalist?
‘What about his family?’ he asked. ‘Have they been in touch?’
‘There is no family.’ She sat erect and tense in her chair.
‘Everyone has a family.’
‘Harry was an only child. Both his parents are dead. He never mentioned other relatives.’
‘Has anyone else tried to get in touch with him? A friend or colleague?’
She shrugged her shoulders in a way that seemed to suggest every question he might ask was futile, that Harry Hewson’s entire life had been an impenetrable fiction.
‘Someone called Caroline rang a few times,’ she said eventually.
‘Did she say what she wanted?’
Rebecca hesitated. ‘She mentioned something about an old police investigation concerning a missing traveller girl, and that Harry hadn’t answered her calls. I really didn’t want to ask her for more details.’
‘Why?’
‘She sounded concerned about him. I was afraid of catching my husband in another lie.’
She had given Daly an opening for a more delicate question.
‘How were things between the two of you?’
Hewson’s disappearance fitted one of Daly’s theories. If a separation was imminent between the couple, then the husband might have arranged the abduction and had now joined their son. When Rebecca did not speak, he probed gently: ‘It’s usual for a couple undergoing trauma to experience relationship difficulties.’
‘It’s usual’, she said in a cold voice, ‘for a husband to tell his wife the truth. He told me so many lies and half-truths I’m not sure where the reality begins.’
‘Do you think something has happened to him?’
‘I’m not sure. So much of his life was kept secret.’
‘Yes.’
She seemed to realize that her husband might have been plotting something in the weeks prior to Jack’s disappearance. ‘Do you believe he might have been behind Jack going missing?’ She tried to blink away fear.
‘There is no evidence to support that theory,’ said Daly. Nevertheless, he was glad she had brought up the possibility.
‘But not much to discount it either?’ she said.
Daly nodded. The question was what sort of plot determined that the boy should disappear first, and in such unusual circumstances?
Rebecca looked about her with an expression of eerie panic, as though the interview with Daly had displaced her from her familiar surroundings. A burst of sunlight came through the living-room window, sharpening the look of anxiety on her face. He stared at her blankly. He opened his mouth to say something but closed it again, not because he was unsure what to say, but because the ray of light had changed her face into another woman’s. He must be mad, he thought. Perhaps he was suffering from some sort of premature senility. The way the memory of his mother’s face seemed to resurface in bits and pieces, the flash of her eyes, the wave of her hair, but as soon as he homed in on the similarities, the image disintegrated.
It struck him how much he had tried to remember as little as possible of his mother’s face, avoiding any thought or conversation that might trigger a recollection, as if that would accelerate the oblivion to which he had consigned many of the murder victims he had encountered in his career as a detective. Ever since he had unravelled the complicated circumstances of her death, he had fought to keep her free-floating face from entering his consciousness. In spite of all his precautions, Rebecca’s face had sought him out on the afternoon of her son’s disappearance. He should have closed his eyes and ears to her, ignored her imploring request, kept himself hooded and hidden in the depths of the courthouse.
‘Are you all right?’
Rebecca’s voice sounded far away.
‘Yes.’ Had she noticed the depth of his distraction?
‘Is there something you can’t tell me?’
‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘You look as if your mind is elsewhere. You must tell me what you know.’
He sighed. ‘I know very little about your husband, but I intend to find out more. To tell you the truth, I am concerned for your safety. First your child disappears and now your husband. You are the only one left that is connected to them. Is there anyone you can stay with, family or friends?’
She mov
ed her shoulders, gesturing resignation. ‘This is my home, our home. I can’t leave it now.’ She expressed it without emotion, an incontrovertible fact.
Daly had one final question to ask her before he left. ‘That day in the court, when your son was taken, why did you come to me?’
She looked at him in surprise, as though the answer was obvious. ‘Because you were there.’
‘But why pick me out of all the police officers and security staff? And the previous time, when you needed someone to look after the shoplifter’s baby. Why me that day?’
‘Because you have a caring face. Because your eyes looked at me, clear and straight.’
Daly got up to leave. Her answer had been too personal and she seemed to regret saying it. At the door, he said, ‘If your husband returns or you manage to make contact with him, let me know immediately.’
She nodded, her eyes lingering upon his with something like reproach. He had failed to rescue her; instead, he had brought her a new terror neither of them could explain.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was a dream-like morning in a strange place full of smoke and flames. The barefooted boy beside Jack tested the hot embers of the fire with his grubby toes and then wriggled them in the ashes like worms. The other children were half-asleep, docile and resting their heads against each other, unconcerned by the increasing tension in the air. Slowly, the gypsy men gathered around the fire in a circle of makeshift seats, upturned buckets with planks across them, wooden crates, half-crippled chairs, even a rusted birdcage. So dignified were their attitudes and postures, they might have been lowering themselves on to marble plinths. Some of them had fashioned crosses from rough pieces of wood and rushes, and erected them near the fire. The effect was sinister, suggesting that the huddled throng belonged to a lost corner of a superstitious religion.
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