He carried the bible down the steps and placed it on the kitchen table. He stared at it for a while. He opened the cover and detected the faint scent of lilies and funeral flowers that had lingered from his father’s wake. The bible had sat next to the coffin for three days, accompanied by a candle, a crucifix and a bottle of holy water. Daly remembered the nocturnal rosaries and the paralysing wait for dawn, slipping outside to smoke in the dark of the porch, the slow ordeal of wringing out one’s grief in the company of neighbours and his father’s friends, while glancing surreptitiously at the kitchen clock and wondering had all the timepieces in the house come to a standstill. In all that time, he had not once opened the bible, refusing to seek consolation in any of its passages.
He flicked through the first pages. In the fading light from the cottage window, they had a luminous quality. The first leaf contained a family history of the Dalys, starting in the mid 1800s and ending with the date of his mother’s death: 2 April 1979. It occurred to him that he should have added his father’s death to the list. He sighed. He was only just beginning to realize that a substantial part of his father had died with his mother. The old man had been restless and depressed during the later years of his life.
Looking back, he understood that time had stopped for his father on the day of his mother’s killing. Only a premature death could do that: bring the clocks to a perfect standstill. It was the sacrifice the living felt they should make for those who go before their ordained time.
His father had so cautiously closed the door on his mother’s death that Daly had not dared open it. He remembered the uneasy feeling that descended upon the cottage on her anniversary, his father’s silences, his agitation, his starting and abandoning of odd jobs around the farm, digging drills in the vegetable patch and then raking them over, rounding the cattle into a new pasture and then chasing them back, sitting by the turf fire chewing his fingernails or going through old bills and burning them one by one, all the time giving the impression that he was struggling with something secret and tormenting.
Daly felt a pang of sadness mingled with admiration. By comparison, his grief seemed limited and simple. God only knew what had been going through his father’s head at the time. His greatest wish now was to hear his father speak his mind about his mother’s death.
He turned another leaf in the bible and found an A4-sized envelope with his name written on it in his father’s spidery handwriting. He handled it as carefully as a wafer of ice. Inside were several documents, a letter addressed to him, a map of the lough shore, some legal correspondence and a newspaper clipping. Daly opened the letter and read its contents.
Dear Celcius,
I have penned this letter and hidden it within the family bible not knowing if you will ever read it. Perhaps it will only come to light years after my death, when our country will have undergone many changes, and the secrets I write of will seem irrelevant and harmless. However, that is a risk I am willing to take because I want this outpouring of suspicions to reach you not in an unguarded or accidental moment, but at a time of reflection and solitude, when you are perhaps searching for an expression of the truth, when you might feel susceptible to this summons from the past.
Most of all, I hope that you are still a detective, or at least that your skills of detection remain sharp enough to help you read between the lines and discern the truth that awaits you.
For the past thirty years, I have been reluctant to awaken you to the true story of your mother’s life and death. I have found it impossible to speak about the depths of evil our neighbours sank to in the weeks leading up to her murder, but now, I owe it to you, after allowing you to live through your teenage years and adulthood without guessing what I suspected to be the truth. I even accepted your choice of profession without ever hinting at my suspicions.
My dearest son, your mother’s death was a crime, not an accident. A gang of Loyalists with connections to serving police officers murdered her in cold blood. I stress that she did not choose to be the victim. She was the innocent party. Her murderers chose her, or rather us, and I believe the gang had been targeting us in the months prior to the attack.
I must warn you that the ghosts of her murderers still haunt the police force to which you belong. They should be driven out and not allowed to take it over as their sanctuary. I want you to read the documents I have enclosed with this letter, and use them to solve the mystery of why we were targeted. I want you to clear the confusion that surrounds her murder. For too long, I have kept the trail of evidence a private matter, my business and no one else’s. After my death, I want you to make the details public, and hold her killers to account. I stress that I do not want vengeance. If that were the case, I would have told you everything when you were a young man, but that is not how I believe justice should work.
I also want you to know that I never meekly accepted her murder. I kept it secret because I wanted a safe passage for you into the future. I did not want the plague of sectarianism and bloodlust to visit my house and take away my only son, as it has done in so many houses up and down the country.
I hope you will forgive me for trying to reduce the darkness and guilt in your life.
Yours forever with love and affection,
Patrick Joseph Daly
Daly held on to the letter as though it were a handrail along a precipice. He read it again, this time more carefully. What did his father mean by guilt? He examined the map and the solicitor’s letters. He tried to clear a path through the wealth of detail, and patch the story together while ignoring the void that loomed below him.
He worked out that about six months before his mother’s death, the British Army had raided their cottage and found the registration numbers of several security force personnel in a child’s scrapbook. His father had been arrested and released on suspicion of collecting information for the IRA. The charges had been dropped after the intervention of a local politician and the parish priest. The correspondence included a photocopy of a scrapbook page with lists of car registration numbers with several circled in black ink. Daly stared at them in dazed perplexity. He recognized the handwriting; it was his own.
His head swam with confusion. The chasm opened by Walsh’s murder map now emptied into a greater chasm, one void flowing into a much darker void. For several moments, he stood frozen to the spot. One summer in his childhood, he had taken to writing down car registration numbers. It had begun on a washed-out holiday in Donegal, listening to the steady beat of rain hammering on the caravan roof. Out of boredom, he had written down sets of car numbers on a piece of paper. For some reason, he’d continued the hobby when he returned home, where it became an introvert’s obsession.
He remembered the blue and green scrapbook pages and how they absorbed the numbers he had written down. News of the latest sectarian murder would send him scurrying up a tree with his scrapbook. From his vantage point, he recorded the number plate of every car that passed the cottage. Vigilance, surveillance, thinking in lists – these were the ways he controlled his childhood fears. He liked having the numbers for the record, to build up his collection. It was a form of acquisition. He even gathered numbers in his sleep. Strange cars driven by shadowy men floated through his dreams giving themselves away in a stream of random numbers.
However, he hadn’t grasped the pathology hidden within the lists. It was simply a childhood pastime, albeit one that felt out of control. When he didn’t have his scrapbook to hand, he found himself memorizing number plates. It became his automatic response when he spotted a strange car. Every vehicle was worth watching, especially on the crooked roads around their lough-shore home. The number plates were like announcements, premonitions he could not ignore, secret messages that had to be recorded and studied later. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, he’d flick through the scrapbook, underlining the recurring numbers, searching for sequences. He found he could lose himself in the lists, turning the pages one by one until he fell asleep.
Staring at th
ose numbers and letters, now a middle-aged man, he felt a surge of sadness. In a way, the hobby was the essence of a childhood overshadowed by the Troubles. Innocence hemmed in by murder and fear. More memories came to him. The rapt way his father stood when a car loitered at the end of their lane, his tall figure motionless by the curtains, transfixed by the shimmer of idling metal through the thorn hedge. Strange cars parked on the roads around the farm always held his father spellbound. He slowed down while passing them, craning his neck to make eye contact with the driver, who would normally avert his or her gaze. ‘There’s activity,’ he’d remark to Daly’s mother. But the nature of the activity was always unknown. Daly could feel it, however, an unremitting suspicion hanging in the air, motorists passing each other in coded moments of silence and salute, vehicles brushing the thorn hedges, tyres sinking into the muddy verges.
As a child, he hadn’t fully understood the context, the frame of reference. People were fighting in a war, a shadowy underground war, and strange cars usually presaged murder or a bombing. He’d kept the scrapbook under his pillow. For a year, the numbers meant everything to him. So he was devastated one day when he returned home from school to find the book missing. He’d searched everywhere, under his bed, in his cupboards, in the drawers of his bedside locker, only stopping when he saw the silhouette of his mother standing at the bedroom door, arms crossed around her waist.
She’d explained to him that soldiers had searched the house that morning after he left for school. They’d found the scrapbook and taken it away as evidence. She’d given him a hug, her shoulders shivering slightly. He’d wanted to complain bitterly, but something about her stillness made him hesitate. He remembered her whispering the words: ‘Don’t blame yourself; it’s not your fault.’ At the time, he hadn’t understood what she meant but now he felt such grief that his boyhood pastime had brought stress and fear into their lives. What else had he done in his life that had such appalling consequences? Nothing approached it. If he’d played outdoors more and neglected his scrapbook, would his mother still be alive?
Next, he read the newspaper clipping. It was a notice placed in the Portadown News by his father, dated 17 February 1979. In it, his father claimed soldiers at a checkpoint had warned him that his details had been added to a Loyalist hit list, and that his life was in danger. Daly grimaced. Placing such notices in newspapers had been common practice among Catholics harassed by the security forces. According to the solicitor’s letters, the Daly family had been repeatedly stopped and searched at police and army checkpoints, and after the raid on their home, one of the soldiers had accidentally dropped a map that pinpointed their address.
He turned to the map. Even though it was a photocopy of the original, he could see that it was incredibly detailed. Every house, field and road was carefully noted, right down to the featureless hummocks and thorny hollows that filled the small fields around the lough shore, as well as the dozens of unidentifiable ruins. He assumed it was a copy of the military map dropped during the raid. The Daly cottage was highlighted with a red circle and the letter P written beside it. Did the P stand for Provisional IRA? he wondered, his hands shaking slightly.
He collected himself and sat down on an old chest. Intervals of darkness opened between one thought and the next. He stared into the void and asked himself the question: Had his harmless hobby led indirectly to his mother’s murder? Certainly, it looked less and less like a random killing. It wasn’t casual or accidental, but part of a premeditated plan. It hadn’t mattered that the car number plates had been collected by an innocent child. They were enough to satisfy the pattern, enough for the murderers to fit together the elements of the design and conclude that his parents were working for the IRA. Now he understood that in all those years after his mother’s death his father’s silence had been built around protecting him from the guilt of precipitating her murder.
He needed a way out of this guilt and fear. He doubted if he was strong enough to survive the emotional damage this revelation might cause, especially if it lingered unproven in the back of his mind. He wanted the truth now. He feared and yearned for the truth. The letter and documents had opened a trapdoor which could never be closed.
He poured himself a large whiskey and sat in the kitchen. He could still hear the radio playing faintly in the attic. He made out a familiar song from another era that somehow sounded slower and more enigmatic emanating from the darkness of the roof space. Daly rubbed his forehead and tried to reconfigure the events of his childhood.
Long after midnight, musical notes and memories pulsed within that room, throbbing with serene disregard for the listener below.
15
The next day, Daly arrived punctually at work. He picked his way through the incident rooms, past his colleagues sitting and chatting at computer screens. The new recruits all seemed so extroverted and well informed. No one seemed to sense the inner trauma dominating his thoughts. He skulked within his own office, and managed not to talk to anyone for hours on end. He felt a primitive need to avoid the company of his fellow police officers.
In a moment of painful lucidity, he worried that his career as a detective was no more than a fraud and that any future involvement in a major investigation might unmask him as the dull, hesitant, clumsy human being he had always felt he was. He ignored any messages that came through from Special Branch. Fealty wanted to meet him and discuss the investigation into Walsh’s death, but Daly kept avoiding him. He no longer cared what his fellow officers and commanders thought of him. This rebellious streak was in part a longing to put an end to the farce of his career.
He read whatever police investigations and reports relating to IRA and Loyalist gunmen he could find, but was unable to glean anything that might shed light on his mother’s death. His thinking seemed paralysed. Everything in his head was disconnected from everything else: his memories of his mother, her nurse’s shoes lying on the bedroom floor, the manner of her death at a checkpoint, his father’s grief, their solitary years in the cottage, as if a magnet inside him had had its polarity reversed, repelling and scattering into chaos the fragments of reality he had been holding on to. He had devoted his entire adult life to catching criminals, and now he feared that the greatest criminals might be the people he had worked alongside.
After a while, when he forced himself to go to the canteen for a coffee and a scone, he spied the lanky figure of the policeman who’d stopped Walsh at the checkpoint. Daly saw him walk down a staircase, deep in conversation with Donaldson. He bounded down the corridor and stairs, but could see no sign of the pair. None of the staff he met knew where they had gone. He searched the offices along the corridor and then all the ones on the floor below. Each door he opened was the wrong one, and he withdrew in doubt and bewilderment. He felt lost in a labyrinth of white corridors and empty stairwells, unsure of his way back.
He bumped into Irwin.
‘You’re looking for Donaldson,’ he said, pointing a warning finger at him.
‘How do you know?’
‘I can see it in your face.’
‘Did Donaldson send you?’
‘No.’
Irwin walked away.
‘You’ll not track him down that easily. He’s back to his old tricks, busy finding places to hide.’ Irwin’s voice echoed along the corridor.
‘Hide from what?’
‘The past. Don’t you know? It’s the new front line.’
Daly left and clambered into his car. The headquarters hung at the edge of his vision. He looked across and saw that a team of builders were busy working on a new block of offices. His gall rose at the never-ending construction work. More corridors for people like Donaldson to pad with their unfathomable secrets. It was almost comic, the way the offices sprang up and multiplied like white cells. It was the architecture of evasion and containment. The builders were going to be busier than ever keeping pace with the unravelling of the past.
He sat in the car for a while as it felt the safest place
to be. On a whim, he hunted out Father Walsh’s mobile phone from the glove compartment. He dialled the number that had tried to contact Walsh on the night he died; the one saved under the name Hegarty. It rang and went to a pre-recorded message. Daly asked for the owner of the phone to contact him urgently.
He stretched back in his seat and stared through the windscreen. He watched the sky. He listened to the sounds of cars parking and driving away, footsteps drawing near and then fading. In his mind, he turned over the facts of the investigation that he could categorize, but his thoughts kept clouding over. He tried to analyse this sense of confusion that had overtaken him.
The historical nature of the investigation made it very different from his usual workload. He was beginning to understand that in this case there was no order or structure, only fragmented effort and a lack of direction. He feared that he might never make any progress that could be measured, nor was there the slightest possibility that all his questions could ever be answered.
He pictured Walsh’s murder map in his imagination. Drawing it had been the priest’s way of organizing the mess, making a network out of the string of seemingly random murders, a web of connections. Daly could see how the map had given Walsh’s obsession with the past a sense of purpose and direction. It was an introvert’s consolation, like his secret collection of car number plates, but he saw the inherent flaw in the map, how it might give the illusion that the killing frenzy had a secret design, a controlling intelligence.
Yet in spite of his uncertainty, a strange sense of excitement coursed through his veins as he sped away from the police HQ. On the motorway, he felt much freer than usual, almost out of control, attuned to signals from a more primitive, emotional part of his brain, which pulled him away from the professional habit of carefully deliberated decisions, balanced judgements and impartiality, making it all the more likely that he was going to botch the investigation in spectacular fashion.
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