Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  ‘You’ve come to tell me how poor Aloysius died?’ said the abbot.

  It wasn’t the only reason, but Daly followed his lead and began summarizing the details of the car crash. Graves stared at him with a gaze that lacked focus. When Daly finished his account, he told the abbot he had some important questions to ask.

  ‘Questions? What sort of questions?’

  ‘What exactly were Father Walsh’s priestly duties, and how long had he been living here?’

  The abbot stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘A priest is a priest. I would think the job description is fairly well known. Like every other member of the religious orders, he performed a daily Mass, held confessions. He was always diligent in his religious observances.’

  Daly wanted to ask was he a good priest, but his sense of deference prevented him. However, he was unable to suppress any longer the question that most consumed his thoughts.

  ‘Yet before he crashed, he broke through a police roadblock and almost knocked over an officer. What made him do that?’

  The abbot shrugged and looked perplexed.

  ‘How should I know what was going through his mind?’

  ‘I’m interested in hearing your opinion.’

  ‘Are you indeed?’ Graves held his tongue for a moment but then seemed to relent. ‘Well, if you think it’s relevant to the investigation. All I can say is that Aloysius was certainly not the type to ignore a police checkpoint. As far as I know, he never broke a motoring law in his life. Didn’t even have a parking ticket to his name. And if he had committed some misdemeanour, he would have owned up and accepted his punishment. He certainly wouldn’t have tried to evade the police.’

  ‘You’re suggesting he wasn’t acting under his free will when he drove through the police cordon?’

  Again, Graves looked a little confused.

  ‘Oh no, I can’t comment on his state of mind. I’ve told you that already.’

  ‘We’re trying to trace his mobile phone. Do you have his number?’

  The abbot’s eyes shrank to pinpoint glints.

  ‘Why are you interested in finding his phone? Is Father Walsh under suspicion of committing some crime?’

  ‘Not that we’re aware of.’

  ‘Then I’m relieved.’ The abbot relayed the number from a leather address book. ‘Well,’ he added, rising from his seat. ‘Thank you for your visit but you must excuse me, I have things to do.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said Daly. ‘I’d like to ask you some more questions.’

  The abbot sighed and sat down heavily. He removed a pair of glasses from a case and put them on. He stared closely at Daly, blinking.

  ‘Tell me, Inspector, why exactly have you come?’

  ‘I’m trying to piece together Father Walsh’s final days.’

  The abbot scrutinized him through his glasses, as if for the first time registering the true nature of his visit.

  ‘You must understand that I cannot reveal any details of his private life.’

  ‘Of course you can – you were his superior. Unless you’re trying to spare the order some sort of embarrassment?’

  ‘Inspector Daly, my work here is usually very simple. There are half a dozen priests and monks, and they live right under my eyes. We are one of the best-run religious communities in the country. It is because we have a philosophy of not seeking contact with the secular world. Unfortunately, Father Walsh found it impossible to adhere to that precept.’

  The abbot took off his glasses and put them back in the case. His shoulders slumped slightly and he lowered the tone of his voice, as though from now on he was going to tell Daly a different type of story.

  ‘Do you remember much about the late 1970s, Inspector? You were probably only a boy then.’

  Daly flinched. Of course he remembered. When he peered into that portion of his childhood, he saw the darkness surrounding the death of his mother. She had been killed in crossfire between IRA gunmen and police officers at a checkpoint. The experience had marked him deeply, leaving him haunted throughout his adult life with the dread of losing another loved one, the fear cramping him in his relationships as effectively as a prisoner’s shackles.

  ‘For the past year, Aloysius had been spending very little time in the monastery. He wandered a lot. Restless is how I would describe his behaviour.’ He stared at Daly with a look that resembled fear. ‘He was always talking about the past. Frankly it was becoming an unhealthy obsession.’

  ‘We all have memories we treasure,’ said Daly. ‘They are our refuge in times of trouble or uncertainty.’

  ‘I’m not talking about his childhood past. I’m talking about the historical past. Aloysius was trying to verify the dates and locations of certain events during the Troubles. They were the kind of memories no one treasures. He was gathering up the details of unsolved murders in Tyrone and Armagh during one particularly dark year and charting them on a map. It was the most macabre piece of cartography I ever saw. He was trying to prove the murders were part of a conspiracy involving some very powerful institutions.’ The abbot shrugged. ‘How can you discover something that happened in a cloud of secrecy and fear all those years ago? The truth about those terrible killings is locked away in people’s hearts. He must have known there would be so little left to find now, a few hazy memories, the dregs of evil filtered through failing minds.’

  Daly’s curiosity was strongly aroused. Maps were a way of taking on an unknown landscape, seizing it and making it one’s own through detailed observations and connections. But why would an elderly priest want to chart such grim territory?

  The abbot spotted the glint of interest in his eyes.

  ‘If you feel you must, you have permission to visit his room and examine his maps. The door’s unlocked. I’m sure to Father Walsh the room had its own order, and he knew where everything lay, but to the rest of us it was an abysmal mess.’

  The curtains were drawn in the cell-like space of Walsh’s room. Daly pulled them aside to reveal an elderly scholar’s room, stacks of paper everywhere, folders of newspaper clippings, legal notebooks, and old-fashioned cassette tapes. The priest had glued several sheets of paper on to the largest wall in order to accommodate a sprawling map of the border areas of Tyrone and Armagh. Across the top, he’d written in block capitals ‘THE TRIANGLE OF DEATH’. From a distance, the map resembled a medieval cartographer’s life’s work, overgrown by a forest of names, dates and arrows, and pockmarked by red pins. On closer inspection, Daly was able to make out the macabre details: the pins representing the locations of murders, mostly perpetrated by Loyalist paramilitaries within a triangle of about thirty townlands and parishes.

  Daly scanned the map and pages of handwritten notes. Father Walsh had been a curate in a number of border parishes during the 1970s, and the memories of tending to grief-stricken families had stayed with him. He knew he had witnessed a pivotal point in Irish history. After moving to the monastery in the early 1990s he had begun carefully writing down what he’d seen and heard, corroborating the details with eyewitnesses, and then later with disgruntled former police officers and ex-informers.

  To Daly’s eyes, there was an amateurish air to the research – the efforts of an ordinary man to record history rather than a professional historian or a well-connected journalist. The notes were strewn everywhere, bringing back memories of twisting lanes, checkpoints in the dark, the blood-spattered porches of isolated farms, and men with hoods roaming the darkness of border country. The names and dates flickered by without offering him any clues. He was confronted by a feeling of helplessness. Father Walsh’s investigations focused on the year 1979. A year of unparalleled savagery. In total, 121 sectarian murders. It was also the year his mother had been killed, and he felt an instinctive recoil. The priest had spent his final days slowly dissecting the events of a brutal year and staring into its bloody blackness. Somehow, he had discerned a pattern. Daly could see that much. He had listed the same names and weapons repeatedly, the movements of a param
ilitary gang linked to some of the murders, their vehicles, a Luger 47 and the surnames Mitchell, Browne, Agnew and McClintock. Each murder was somehow rooted in the details of the others.

  Daly was so absorbed by the map he didn’t hear the abbot approaching. Suddenly Graves was there in the room standing alongside him. He looked more diminutive than when he had been sitting at his desk, and his face had grown paler. He waved at the map in a disheartened way.

  ‘How did it get so bad?’ His voice was that of a tired confessor contemplating an overwhelming abundance of sin. ‘I remember the start of the seventies and the civil rights marches, the campaigns for better housing and fair employment. It all seemed to herald a new dawn for Northern Ireland.’ The words tumbled from the abbot’s lips. ‘How did we end up with murder gangs and medieval justice, vigilantes pursuing revenge with guns and bombs? Where were the warning signs that we were harbouring such murderers in our midst?’ He stared up at Daly, as if expecting him to shed light on the puzzle.

  ‘What drew Walsh to this particular set of murders?’ asked Daly.

  ‘Evil.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was a different sort of priest to the one you’re familiar with. He believed not in miracles and goodness but in the power of evil. Most of us have a blind spot in that regard. We are sane and solid and we place our trust in society and the power of law and order. But Father Walsh didn’t accept the conclusions of others, and there was a danger in that. He wanted the details of these murders cleared up. He wanted everyone he believed guilty held to account.’

  ‘And who was everyone?’

  ‘The murderers, the intelligence services, the men who pulled the strings in the background, the politicians. Even the police and the judiciary.’

  Daly raised an eyebrow.

  ‘And did you believe his murder conspiracy theories?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m a monk and everything I believe in is shut up inside a golden box on an altar. I tried to ignore the facts of evil he was at such pains to reveal. Many of his fellow priests thought he was a crank, out of step with the politics of peace and moving on.’

  The abbot made to leave. He bowed politely but Daly could see the unease working its way though his mind.

  ‘There was one other thing,’ he said. ‘It struck me as odd that he had taken to wearing a watch. It added to the sense that he was in a hurry. In all the years he’d been here, I’d never seen him wearing one before.’

  The abbot waited for a response from Daly but there was none. The detective was thinking about the priest speeding off from the checkpoint. He had certainly seemed in a hurry on the night of his death. He was reminded of his meeting with Donaldson and his new watch. Another old man anxious about time. Did the former RUC commander also have a ticking deadline?

  ‘You see, the days here are structured, and the church bells are always ringing out the hour. I couldn’t understand why he was always glancing at this new watch of his.’

  Daly tried to analyse the detail as simply as possible. What did it mean for an old man, living in an institution like an abbey, to start wearing a watch? He needed to measure time. Not the time inside the abbey, which appeared to stand still, but time in the outside world. It signalled a new relationship with life outside the abbey walls, the possibility that he was synchronizing his life to some other beat, another person or a series of events.

  ‘Did he have any unexpected visitors? Someone you hadn’t seen before?’

  The abbot drummed his fingers on the table.

  ‘Yes.’ He hesitated. ‘There was a woman. A journalist. Her name was Jacqueline Pryce.’

  ‘Why did she want to see him?’

  ‘She was helping him piece together the details of the murder map. I believe she was going to write a book about it.’

  The revelation troubled Daly. Walsh’s research looked disordered and unfinished, but the idea that a journalist was writing a book on it suggested a measure of order and completeness. Journalists were in the business of making a name for themselves, especially when they undertook to write books about the Troubles, and they seldom stopped until they were published, no matter the consequences. Walsh’s research was beginning to look less and less like the secret obsession of a harmless old priest.

  ‘Do you know her?’ asked the abbot.

  ‘I’ve never heard of her.’ Daly made a mental note of the name. ‘Something about this map must have whetted her interest.’

  The abbot had decided he’d said enough. He nodded and left Daly to peruse the room on his own.

  The detective stood for a while, contemplating the priest’s handiwork. A wall full of secrets in a silent room in a silent monastery. He blinked at the map. He could see that it had been in a constant state of flux. Walsh had rearranged the intricate facts of each murder, drawing new connections between them. Daly scanned over the details. The names of the weapons, the size and number of the bullets fired, the description of the strike marks, the entry points on the victims’ bodies, the getaway cars, and the statements of eyewitnesses, some of whom reported seeing police checkpoints near the murders. The priest had also compiled the names of men charged with minor roles in the killings, some of whom were listed as ex-police officers. Daly stood so still he almost didn’t breathe. He began to understand why Irwin and Special Branch might be so interested in Walsh and his crashed car.

  He stepped back, trying to absorb the web of facts and conjecture in its entirety. To his tired mind, the map seemed to be alive, wriggling with the details of evil. He stared at the northeast corner of it more closely. Blinked again. The jarring detail did not fade. He stared at the red pin placed at a corner of Lough Neagh, directly over the location of his cottage. The name beside it was Angela Daly; his mother’s. His face was motionless. His hands hung limply by his side. He saw her blue nurse’s shoes lying on her bedroom floor. He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the map again.

  Was it his imagination or did the network of roads seem to coil under and through each other like serpents? He leaned closer, looking deeper and harder in an effort to fix the details in his mind. He was unwilling to phrase what floated through his mind at that moment, but the dark question that struggled towards expression was in the nature of: What was his mother’s name doing in the company of so many people he had never heard of, in the context of such cold-blooded murder? He asked himself more questions: How had Walsh decided that his mother was another victim of the Loyalist gang, and, if it was true, what had she done to bring herself to their murderous attention?

  ‘Mum.’ He half mouthed, half whispered the word. The dryness of his voice disturbed him, and the hollowness of the childish monosyllable he had not uttered in a long time. He stepped back towards the door, thinking he had to call his father, tell him what he’d seen, but then he realized his father was dead. He was forty-three years old, divorced, childless, and his first instinct had been to call on his deceased dad for support. How ill-starred his life had been.

  ‘Mother,’ he said to himself again. ‘Who would have thought your death and my work would cross all these years later?’

  He had few clear memories of his childhood but he remembered the details of that spring evening in 1979, the police detective standing directly in front of his father, almost whispering in his ear, relaying how his mother had died in the crossfire between an anti-terrorist police unit and an IRA gang. His father’s face was deathly white and his eyes were staring directly at Celcius, who listened to every word. The quietness of their voices made everything seem far away, as if he did not belong to the tragedy that was unfolding, as if it was a play or some sort of lie that was being told for his benefit.

  ‘She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ said the detective softly.

  He remembered how the veins had stood out on his father’s forehead, thin and shiny like nylon string, and his eyes had bulged. He couldn’t see the detective’s face, his back was to him, standing so still he might have been a spectato
r at the event. His father’s eyes were fixed on Daly, but he didn’t seem to see him any more. His father said in a thick voice, ‘She wasn’t.’

  The detective didn’t move.

  ‘What do you mean, she wasn’t?’

  ‘She wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ his father said, still staring at Celcius. ‘She was in the right place at the right time. She was coming home from her work. She was driving down the same road she took every evening.’

  After a lengthy pause, the detective said, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr Daly.’ He glanced over his shoulder at Celcius before leaving the room.

  His next memory was of his parents’ darkened bedroom, his mother’s blue nurse’s shoes lying on the floor and his father’s shadowy figure, clumsy and fumbling, rummaging through the drawers of her cupboards. He remembered his father’s determination, mumbling to himself as he searched through her things. He kept lifting out and rereading old letters. Daly had never seen him look so agitated.

  In the weeks after her funeral, Daly’s father had been haunted by the nagging suspicion that the police detectives were failing her, that there was unfinished business to the investigation. Both the IRA gang and the police unit had melted mysteriously away. No charges were ever brought against the person who had fired the weapon, or the IRA men responsible for the attack.

  Daly’s father was given barely half an hour’s notice by the police when the inquest was called. He had managed to get to the courthouse in Portadown just in time, but had been forced to sit at the back of the room, unable to fully hear the proceedings. All he heard was the coroner’s conclusion: that his wife’s death had been a tragic accident, one of many that blighted those years.

  Time had reduced the pain for Daly and his father. If not healing the loss, then permitting them to forget it gently, growing scar tissue around those months, sealing them off. Gradually, they’d been able to reconcile themselves to the coroner’s findings, and the lack of any charges or arrests.