Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  ‘You’re going to get drenched,’ said Daly.

  ‘I’m on guard,’ replied his father.

  ‘What are you guarding?’

  Daly’s father gestured at the blackness of the upturned soil.

  ‘The secrets of the past.’

  At his father’s words, the earth began to boil like tar, lumpy and full of craters. It piled up behind his the old man in the shape of a rising wave.

  ‘What secrets are you and the cottage hiding from me?’ Daly demanded.

  But before his father could reply, the earth heaved into a steep slope, and swept over his thin frame. Daly looked up just before the wave slammed into him, and woke up with a start.

  *

  The next morning, he made his way gingerly through the rooms of the cottage. He hunkered down at the breakfast table and ate some lumpy porridge. It was ironic, but he had never felt so stranded, so far away from home. He recalled his strange dreams and tried to interpret their imagery. He wondered what message his unconscious was trying to communicate to him.

  He peered through the small kitchen window, and for the first time in his life contemplated the humps and folds in the field behind the cottage. Had they always been there, or was his memory correct in believing they dated from around the time of his mother’s death? From what he could remember his father had abandoned grazing that particular field and never tried to farm it in any way.

  He forced his feet into an old pair of Wellington boots and scrambled over a little iron gate. At first the folds of the field felt familiar, the hiding places of his childhood, but the terrain soon changed. He spent half an hour trailing through hummocky grass and peering into thickets of blackthorn; his trouser bottoms grew soaking wet. His thoughts kept wandering off into his solitude, his mind a blank. He had no inkling as to what he was searching for. He kept returning to one corner of the field, more bramble than grass, with an odd conjunction of raised banks and old stones peeping through the weeds. However, the undergrowth of briars and nettles had welded itself together, blocking any further investigation. Badly scratched by thorns and stung by nettles, he stepped back and tried to survey the scene. Nothing about the field and its contours seemed logical. Why had his father left it all those years ago, squeezing his hungry cattle into the marshier, outlying fields of the farm?

  He stared at the raised banks. He realized that they were too long and high to have been the result of even his father’s most Herculean digging. Something mechanical had been at work here, piling the earth and stones into these irregular mounds. However, he had no recollection of ever seeing diggers working in the field. Perhaps his father had attempted to clear the field of its stones and bushes to make it more arable. Perhaps the abandonment of the project had more to do with grief or infirmity, or the descent into old age, than anything mysterious or sinister.

  A cold chill rose from the insides of his boots. A misty rain filled the air, shrouding everything with a nullifying greyness. He was wasting his time here, he realized. He had been mistaken in believing the humps and folds of that strangely uneven field might reveal the secrets of the past. He left the puzzle behind and returned to the warmth of the kitchen.

  From the mantelpiece in the living room, he took down a framed photograph of his father in his later years. He scrutinized the familiar face. It surprised him to realize he had only ever glanced at the picture in a superficial way. He had always thought the photographer had caught his father’s charming, slightly downturned smile and the warmth of his eyes, but now, examining the smile at the corners of the eyes, he thought he saw something strange and subdued, a sadness, perhaps even a trace of bitterness. Another detail that disturbed him was the clock on the shelf behind his father. It still sat in the same sun-faded position against the scullery wall, showing the same time as it did in the photograph: a quarter past eleven. He had thought the clock had stopped working some time after his father’s death, but from the evidence of the picture it had stopped years previously and never been fixed.

  Gripping the picture, Daly had the sensation that he was teetering at the edge of a void, and that he might fall without a place to land. He replaced the picture on the mantelpiece. Now that Walsh’s map had questioned the past, he feared that all his memories in the years following his mother’s death had been nothing more than an illusion created to hide a dark secret.

  *

  That night, Daly sat by the turf fire with his nightly glass of whiskey and the radio on, but he was unable to relax. As a detective, he was perpetually searching for clues, uncovering secrets, solving mysteries and bringing them to public attention, but what did it matter whether one secret more or one secret less was exposed? Hadn’t enough secrets been revealed already? Did his country need so much examination of its past? Could any society bear so much truth-telling? And moreover, whose truth was it anyway? He could only investigate and interrogate his own truth, his own experience of the Troubles, which in the grand scale of things was as small and insignificant as the grains of sand churning in a boundless desert storm. Perhaps he should unravel the mystery of his mother’s death but keep the findings to himself, like a writer penning a book that he never intends to publish. He would discover the secret and then become part of it himself.

  He stared at the flames but all he could see was a tangled mass of memories floating before his eyes. He got up from his armchair and walked around the cottage, turning at every sound: the creaking of the floorboards; the shifting of the glass panes as the wind picked up. He needed someone to talk to but could think of no one to phone. He tried to do some housework, put away the dishes, empty the laundry basket and sort out the rubbish, but anxiety gradually consumed him. He knocked back another whiskey, too soon after the first. He raised his hand to the flickering light of the fire and stared at his outstretched fingers and their shadows, almost disbelieving they were his own. This was more than loneliness, he realized; this was something more primitive and unsettling. His ears were crammed with a ringing silence. He felt a sudden need to verify his existence by saying something, but he was more afraid of the silence that would follow his words.

  He folded his hands. The thought of praying to God crossed his mind, but what deeper void would his half-remembered prayers plumb? he wondered. He needed a point of focus, a guide, something to hold in his hands and anchor him to reality. He went out to the porch windowsill and lifted the black hen that was roosting there. He cradled her in his hands and took her inside to the fire. He stuffed the turf box with loose bits of paper and let the hen nest there. He sat in his armchair for a long while, listening to her ruffle her feathers and cluck as she settled to sleep. By the time the last glowing ember had gone out and the ashes were turning cold, he had fallen asleep.

  13

  Daly didn’t speak to anyone the next morning at police headquarters. He had the strange feeling that he was out of kilter with the rest of his colleagues, ahead even of himself, thinking thoughts and planning actions that did not correspond to any rational or familiar model of detective work. Why had he gone to the hotel with Pryce and why had he told her so much about his past? Was she an escape route through the invisible barricades he felt were hemming in his normal detective’s life?

  A younger female colleague told him he looked worn out and chided him for his late nights. She brought him a coffee and a bun, but the gesture failed to lift his mood or give him any satisfaction. He was frustrated to see that there were no significant updates on the crash-scene investigation. He flicked through the reports, pausing at the photographs of Walsh’s awkwardly positioned body. What he knew about the dead priest’s research hinted at a deeper set of facts beyond the surface layer: the police checkpoint in the dark, the rearranged traffic cones, the collision of metal and wood, the braid of religious effects in a dying man’s grip.

  His mother’s death had been covered up, so why not Walsh’s, too? He remembered the smugness of Irwin’s expression as he stood over the corpse. Once you began to suspect a polic
e conspiracy, all the details eventually collapsed into a jumble of paranoia and doubt.

  He dug deeper into the paperwork, the careful ordering of the facts surrounding a man’s last moments, trying to define the shape of what lay beyond them. He tried to reason with his suspicions and accept Irwin’s clear-cut explanation. However, it was impossible to halt the march of his black doubts. He worked backwards through the sequence of events from the moment of collision to the point where Walsh had pulled up at the checkpoint. He was surrounded by fragments rather than a coherent whole: the winking light of the policeman’s torch, the blue overalls of his colleagues, the snub noses of their guns, Walsh’s frightened response, the lure of the traffic cones and the vortex ahead. What lay concealed beneath the report that might link Walsh’s death with his mother’s and the other murder triangle victims?

  He fetched himself another cup of coffee and went back to his desk. He flicked through his emails and was surprised to see several from the Human Resources Department outlining how much time he was entitled to take off for bereavements. How odd, he thought. He hadn’t lost anyone since his father had died four years previously. Were they referring to his mother’s murder? He wondered what garbled message had come through from his police chiefs.

  The truth was he had too much to do, too many pressing questions to answer before he could even consider taking some time off work. He needed more information to illuminate the past, the deaths in Walsh’s murder triangle. It was time he investigated the links that Walsh had claimed existed, and the best place to do that was in the new archive building, where he hoped to find details of all the police investigations from the 1970s.

  It was his first time visiting the archive section, and what he found there angered him. The officer in charge of the files told him he needed written permission from Special Branch for any historical enquiries.

  ‘This isn’t historical,’ replied Daly. ‘It’s related to a live investigation.’

  The officer avoided eye contact. Was it his imagination or did he detect a slight horror mingled with something like a look of pity in his response to Daly’s request? Perhaps he had heard the story of Daly’s mother from colleagues, and wanted no part in his futile search for the truth, the inverted paranoia of a middle-aged detective investigating his own police force.

  ‘Very well, then.’ He removed a set of keys and led Daly down a back stairwell.

  He was expecting a state-of-the-art filing and retrieval system, something suited to the new headquarters’ grand ambitions, a luminous sanctuary of carefully ordered files, and so was unprepared for the sight that greeted him in the basement rooms. The first thing he noticed was a musty, mildewed smell at odds with the clean, well-ventilated air in the rest of the building. And then the eerie silence. He had the feeling he was entering a world he had ignored his entire adult life. A forgotten world full of shadows. He followed the archive officer into an underground hall filled with aisles of metal shelving that were loaded with untidy stacks of boxes, files spilling haphazardly. He picked up a folder at random. It was an investigation into an illicit alcohol distillery, dated March 1951. The one underneath was about a hit-and-run accident in Dungannon from 1986.

  The officer waved a hand at a far corner in the room.

  ‘The ones you’re looking for might be over there. That’s where all the old files from Armagh went.’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Daly. ‘Surely there must be some way of locating the files I want.’

  ‘Not until the IT people come and digitize them. They were neatly ordered in the old police stations, but the removal company just dumped them here on top of each other.’

  ‘But this is total chaos. How are we meant to find anything?’

  The officer shrugged.

  ‘There are files here dating from the 1930s. Even if you sort through them all, there’s no guarantee you’ll find what you want. Many of them went missing or were never returned by the case detectives when they retired.’

  Could the past stay hidden forever? Daly wondered. In a place like this, it might.

  ‘This will have to be fixed,’ he said. ‘There should be a complete and ordered archive of every investigation going back to the beginning of the Troubles.’

  ‘To do that we’d have to hunt through every attic and garage in the country. This is the past we’re talking about. It was a different era of policing altogether. What sort of order do you expect to find in those dark days? The IRA were rampant, blowing up police stations and murdering officers. How do you impose order on mayhem like that?’ He handed Daly the keys. ‘Drop them back in the office when you’re finished,’ he said brusquely. ‘If you’re planning on staying late, you can hold on to them until the morning.’

  Daly began working where the officer had suggested. He was furious at the state of the place. Many of the files weren’t even typed, which made his search even more difficult. Some of them had the air of discarded schoolbooks, filled with untidy writing. A sense of desperation descended. He searched for several hours like a blind person shuffling on a ledge, with nothing to guide or give him bearings but his hands sorting inch by inch through the dusty boxes. He lost confidence in his method. He needed someone like Donaldson with him, to help light the way.

  After a while, he began moving at random through the shelves, opening boxes and appraising their contents. Somewhere, lost amid the shelves, the details of his mother’s murder might lie. He moved between countless boxes, placing his hands briefly upon them, as though he might feel the living past squirm within. He carried on for another hour, but failed to locate any of the files linked to Walsh’s murder triangle.

  At one point, he caught an echo of someone calling his name. He passed back through the aisles of shelves, listening to the near silence. He could hear the faint sounds of footsteps on the floor above, and voices echoing down the stairwell. He felt as though he’d found the dark and hollow core at the heart of the building. He heard the voice call his name again, a woman’s voice, sharp and urgent, but somehow muffled.

  He wanted to shout back – I’m here – but when he looked up the stairwell no one was there. Layers of echoes drifted down, different voices talking, but he couldn’t make out any of the words. The voice calling his name had sounded like a summons from the past. He shivered. He was aware that he was surrounded by the records of thousands of crimes, many of them trifling, but a sizable number involving violent and cruel acts. The building was too new to be haunted by the ghosts of the dead and wronged, he thought. Was it his imagination or could he still hear the voice, repeating his name, only plaintive now? The closer he moved towards it, the more it seemed to recede. Perhaps he was overtired and simply hearing things.

  He came across a small door that he hadn’t seen before. The muffled voice seemed to be emanating from the other side. He hesitated and then opened the door. To his surprise, he walked into an even larger room that was completely empty. A row of ground-level windows filtered light across the floor. The voice stopped calling his name. The emptiness and scale of the room disturbed Daly, the freshly painted walls, and the smooth concrete of the floor. So overwrought were his thoughts that he imagined a black sea of shadows surging towards him from the opposite side of the room. He could see it so clearly, soundless, looming higher and higher, occupying his entire vision, spilling towards him like an inky-black waterfall. The depths of the darkness made him instinctively raise his hands and close his eyes, but when he opened them, the room was empty again.

  14

  It wasn’t until much later in the day that elements of the puzzle began to fall into place for Celcius Daly. A pattern emerged from the chaos of the past. However, the discovery gave him no sense of reassurance or satisfaction. It occurred unexpectedly, in the one place he thought he was safe from the shadows of the Troubles.

  He returned to his cottage late that evening, upset that he had made no significant progress in the case, despite his best attempts. He was convinced that the investig
ation into Walsh’s crash should start back in the early months of 1979. That was the key, he thought, the time when both his mother and Walsh were alive. However, the day was almost over, and there was nothing more he could do. He sank into an armchair, exhausted.

  In his mind, he tried to step back from all the facts of the case, like a soldier retreating in no man’s land, but a sense of restlessness remained. What he needed was a sanctuary for his thoughts. He got out an old portable radio and searched for something classical, a melody to heal the sense of brokenness that haunted him. He tuned into one of Schubert’s string quintets. He closed his eyes and nodded his head to the music. For a few minutes, he drifted off. He woke up with a start, his mind clear and alert. It occurred to him that there was still something he could do, a task that he should have completed a long time ago.

  He grabbed the radio and hauled himself up a plank stepladder into the attic. It was time he sorted through his father’s old chest of drawers and the rest of his boxes. Since his death, Daly had refused to go into the dusty corners of the cottage and rummage through his father’s things because of his aversion to nostalgia, but his attitude had grown less sentimental, more curious. Perhaps he might even find a happier glimpse of his childhood, from the time before his mother’s death, something to sustain him amid all these revelations of the past.

  The drawers of the chest were stiff and unyielding. They were loyal accomplices to his father’s secrets, resisting his attempts to open them. He inserted his hand under the bottom drawer and, finding the cavity behind it, forced it open with a grunt. He worked his way through the other drawers in the same manner until he found what he was looking for. An object wrapped in a piece of white muslin. Carefully, he unwound the fabric until he was holding it in his hands. The precious family bible. It had a dead weight, as though its pages contained years of layered sadness.