‘Bad things were covered up.’ Hegarty’s face looked up at the sun, revealing his hawk-like profile. ‘When that happens, there will always be someone searching for the truth.’
Hannon was unmoved by the veiled threat. He wanted nothing more than to continue his path through the fading sunlight and trees, and for the spy to be gone with his battered-looking briefcase.
‘There’s a detective working on Walsh’s accident,’ said Hegarty. ‘He’s interested in his research.’
‘We’ve had police investigations before.’ Hannon smiled. ‘They never get very far.’
‘This one seems more keen than usual. I’ve spoken to him on the phone. He must have got my number from Walsh’s records.’
‘Why don’t you help him? Maybe he’ll find the answers you are seeking.’
Hegarty grimaced.
‘If he finds out who I am, he’ll arrest me for murdering the man in the hotel. And then I’ll spend the rest of my days in jail. If the paramilitaries don’t get to me first.’
‘Then you really are in a fix.’
‘You concentrate on digging up what you can on the journalist,’ said Hegarty. ‘I’ll look after the detective. We’ll report back to each other next week.’
‘Very well.’
Hegarty got up and limped off. ‘You’d better not let me down,’ was his final warning.
The sun had disappeared, replaced by something else – the sharp empty feel of winter. Hannon remained on the bench long after Hegarty had left. The advance of darkness was unflagging – the gathering shadows, the dark birds roosting in their nests high in the trees – like the weight of the past bearing down upon the present. Hannon absorbed it all with a precious sense of lingering life and hope.
Men like Hegarty were a species in peril, he thought; eventually their butchered bodies ended up face down in the dark little ditches of border country. He felt genuinely sad at the thought of what lay ahead for the spy. And more than sad, angry. Hegarty had been one of his most useful recruits, and his betrayals had played an important role in convincing the IRA to abandon its terror campaign. He wished the spy had retired to a quiet corner of the country, become a man of modest means and sober habits, like himself, rather than scuffling about in the dirt of his own grave.
Yet there was a sneaking euphoria to be experienced in darkness and death, especially when one man’s demise meant another would live and breathe more easily. He stared at the unmoving trees, smiling at the notion that he was a spectre himself in the fading sunlight. Today and yesterday, the present and the past: really, there was no chance of ever separating the two. This feeling of vengeance more than compensated for the loss of his pleasant afternoon walk and the warmth of the spring sunlight on his face.
He sat stiffly in the corner of his bench like an actor waiting for his moment to return to the stage. In the fading light, the rest of the park turned into a desert of empty paths and shadows.
18
A flash-in-the-pan rainstorm kept Daly confined to his car outside an abandoned cottage, the roof hammering with raindrops, the windscreen wriggling with the distorted shapes of trees. He switched off the engine. The silence within the car felt equal to the silence emanating from the cottage. He rolled down his window, and listened as the ditches deepened their gurgling. He drove off again, bumping cautiously along potholed roads and then even more cautiously over rush-grown lanes.
The detective was driving through border country, following Walsh’s dated map. It was the best guide he had to tracing the homes of the murder triangle victims, to untangling the network of minor roads the killers had once used. It struck him that this journey through the back roads was like travelling into that strangest of places – the past. The idea of summarizing what had happened along these roads daunted him; there were so many personal tragedies on both sides of the community, the murders of so many innocent Protestants and Catholics left unsolved, so much rumour and suspicion, that only bewilderment and fear remained.
The task ahead strengthened his feeling of not knowing which way to turn, this sense of not having a single clear thought in his head. He knew that his mother had been murdered and that her killers had escaped justice, swallowed up in the murkiness of the past. In his mind, he tried to juggle her murder with the other twenty-odd cases marked on Walsh’s murder map.
As he drove, derelict cottages emerged from lanes like ghosts of his own cottage. He stared at each one; they were his obsession now. Something to take the place of his introvert’s collection of vehicle registration numbers. Every thorn hedge seemed to hide another potential murder site; every ditch brimmed with murky mysteries, the hummocky little fields like rucked-up carpet hiding swept-away secrets. He got out, strolled around the wild margins of their plots, gawking at the extent of ruin. The similarities with his father’s farm held him spellbound. They belonged to the same kingdom of slippage and neglect.
He drove down roads he had forgotten existed, trying to discriminate in his head between the different murders, sifting through the array of facts accumulated by the priest. He wanted to limit the cases to a significant few, the ones that had most in common with his mother’s.
He played with the possibility that a serial killer had been at work, operating on a psychopathic level, killing innocent people because the justice system and the media were so overwhelmed with the deaths of so many Catholics and Protestants that they ignored his handiwork, his bloody trail of evidence.
He delved further into Walsh’s map, going deeper into border country. There was no going back now, he told himself. The evening grew darker, the roads and thorn thickets and low hills became indistinguishable. He remained transfixed, hunched over his steering wheel, the car headlights groping the blackness.
He pulled up a muddy lane, and located another ruinous old house dimly visible through the trees, another fractured mirror revealing fragments of his past. He switched off the engine and got out. He could hear something moving through the trees. It was not the wind moving, but something darker, the unsettling nearness of the past. He stood for several moments, fused with the twilight, conscious only of the pale gable wall of the cottage, its outline slowly disappearing as night drew in. I’m in danger of disappearing into this darkness, he told himself.
He took out his flashlight and flicked the beam over the house. Straggling gorse thickets overran what had probably been a well-tended garden in the 1970s. To the side, he traced the same mounded heaps of earth overgrown with rank grass and briars that lay so mysteriously in a corner of his father’s farm, the same sense of a half-buried pattern that eluded any interpretation.
He inspected the dark of the ruined interior and shivered. He saw what looked like an old boot with no sole lying in a damp corner. A shudder from the past doubled the cottage’s dereliction. On 25 January 1979, 24-year-old Gregory O’Brien had been shot dead by a Loyalist paramilitary gang in the cottage’s hallway. Daly suspected that no amount of renovation work could have remedied the disfiguring slippage induced by that evil act.
He fumbled in his pockets for his car key. He had seen enough. It was time he went home to the familiar folds of his father’s fields. Perhaps the journalist or Hegarty would contact him, and they could unravel the mystery together. He turned back to his car and a light flicked through the trees. Warm, inviting light. He decided to walk towards it. He saw a silhouette framed in the window of a house. It was a young woman, staring in his direction. She looked peaceful, disturbingly peaceful through the restless trees, as though she belonged to a dream or some other dimension.
He drew closer to the light and came across a tarmac lane. He saw that a neat lawn had been bulldozed from the humped terrain, and a new bungalow built on the levelled site. He knocked on the door, and the young woman answered.
He introduced himself and said he was looking for the relatives of Gregory O’Brien.
The woman’s face was motionless. She stared at him as if waiting for more.
‘Why have yo
u come now?’ she said.
‘A man died recently in mysterious circumstances. He was searching for new evidence relating to Gregory’s murder.’
‘No one told us you were coming.’
‘I know. I won’t trouble you for long.’
She held out her hand.
‘My name is Ciara O’Brien. Gregory was my uncle.’
She reacted calmly to his appearance on her doorstep. She did not seem hostile, dismayed or badly interrupted to have her uncle’s murder brought up by a strange detective calling unannounced at her door.
‘He’s a police detective,’ she explained to the man who had appeared from an inner room. ‘An Inspector Daly.’
The man had a slight beard, and was carrying a young child in his arms. He looked closely at Daly and then at the woman, as if trying to decide if the intrusion was going to be painful or bothersome.
‘Your name doesn’t ring a bell,’ he said, a trace of scepticism in his voice. ‘You weren’t involved in any of the previous investigations.’
‘That’s correct. This is a new line of inquiry. Evidence has emerged that Gregory may have been murdered by serving police officers.’
His explanation did not appear to perturb them. If anything, it seemed to satisfy them.
‘You must be talking about Father Walsh’s murder map,’ said Ciara.
‘You knew him?’
‘He visited us about a fortnight ago and gave us a copy of the map. He told us he was close to solving a mystery about the murders. He had questions to ask us.’
‘What sort of questions?’
She took the baby from the man and placed it in a cot. The man returned to a back room. She sat at the edge of the seat, legs intertwined, pale knees jutting. She was wearing a loose woollen sweater that had been tugged awry, probably by her baby, giving her an air of frayed nerves and distress, yet when she spoke her voice was calm.
‘Father Walsh asked lots of questions. About my uncle’s life, his occupation, his friends. He wanted to know all about the harassment Gregory had suffered at police checkpoints in the weeks leading up to the shooting. He kept asking about neighbourly disputes, resentments, that sort of thing. He said that greed and envy were useful traits to exploit. He believed that the intelligence services had exploited local grievances, what he called mean little jealousies between Catholics and Protestants.’
‘What was he suggesting? That neighbours scheming against each other could lead to murder?’
‘You know what neighbours are like in these parishes. Always ready to help out in a crisis but secretly plotting each other’s downfall.’
Daly looked doubtful. He stared through the window, wondering where was the root of it all, why innocent families had to suffer so much. If there was a web of connections between the murders, why did it entangle so many blameless individuals?
The window framed a stark vista. A thicket of thorns and Gregory’s ruined cottage. The wind picked up, agitating the trees, multiplying the shadows and patterns that fell across the cracked walls of the old house. He felt as though he was getting closer to something difficult to understand. Mean little jealousies. What had Walsh been referring to?
‘Tell me, Inspector, why are the police so anxious to find out what Father Walsh asked?’ Her voice was firm. ‘It shouldn’t be any of your business. You shouldn’t give a damn about his murder map, but you clearly do.’
Her eyes rapidly surveyed him as he held his silence.
‘Why weren’t we informed in advance of this investigation?’ she demanded. ‘Why have you turned up out of the blue at this time of the evening?’ Her indignation mounted. ‘Is this visit part of an official investigation into my uncle’s murder?’
Her blunt questions silenced him. He passed his hand over his forehead, rubbed his stubble and looked out through the window. He caught sight of his reflection and saw something beggarly and vulnerable in the way he sat on the sofa with his shoulders hunched. He realized he had given himself away. He looked more like a lonely obsessive than a professional detective working on an important investigation.
‘There is no new official investigation into your uncle’s murder,’ he said.
‘Then why should I answer your questions?’ There was a ring of triumph in her voice, but she was incensed now. ‘What interest do you have in Gregory’s death? Are you here to cover up the past, to keep a lid on things? Are you working on your own or for someone else?’
‘I haven’t come here to be interrogated like this,’ said Daly. A part of him was drawn to the intensity of her fury, the energy of her questions. She adjusted her position, twisting her legs tighter. Her body grew taut, ready for attack. ‘I’m here as a detective,’ he explained. ‘Searching for the truth. Nothing else.’
‘But you’re not telling me the truth. Your motives for coming here are more personal than what you’re letting on.’
Daly levered forward, uncertain as to whether he should simply leave or reveal his secret. He had spent the afternoon scuttling from the shell of one empty house to another, like some introverted, raw-skinned creature seeking protection from the elements. She had sensed this need in him. In her eyes, his motives must have appeared suspicious – sinister, even.
‘I’m trying to connect your uncle’s murder to that of a woman called Angela Daly.’ His heart beat faster at the mention of her name. ‘She was killed on the second of April 1979.’ He swallowed. ‘She was my mother.’
Immediately, her anger flickered off, like a blown light bulb. Her face grew weary, strained by her show of emotion, Daly’s reluctant admission and the fact that a bond now existed between them.
‘And what connections have you discovered?’
‘Nothing groundbreaking.’
She looked relieved.
‘I know that they were killed by the same weapon and on the first Monday of the month. I also know...’
She raised her hand. ‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘Aren’t you interested in hearing the connections?’
‘What I am is exhausted, Inspector. I want to get on with my life, look after my baby, go to bed and get some sleep. The same things you look as though you need.’
The glint of young motherhood shone in her eyes. Daly found it slightly intimidating.
‘You sound more angry than exhausted,’ he said.
She didn’t reply.
Outside, the trees shifted, one behind another, realigning their branches. A line of sight opened, letting him see the darkness of the ruined cottage, and then the view disappeared. He felt a sudden longing for symmetry.
‘Inspector?’
He started at the closeness of her voice. His thoughts had been miles away.
‘Have you ever considered what good digging up the past will do?’ she asked. ‘All this searching for connections and conspiracies. How will it really help either of our families? Or anyone, for that matter? This baby of mine, do you think it will make any difference to his life, knowing exactly why his grand-uncle was murdered?’
Daly’s face was a blank. His reference to Walsh’s research had felt clumsy and rushed, and, in a way, he was grateful that she had stopped him in his tracks. He raised his eyes to the view of the cottage. He could not stop his thoughts from hovering with the trees, joining their dark consciousness as they churned in the wind. Their restless movement made the woman and her baby seem eerily calm and stable. Was he the only one of the victims’ relatives in thrall to the past’s restless shadows and silences? he wondered.
‘Father Walsh died in a road accident a few days ago,’ said Daly. ‘Ordinarily that means his research would have died with him. However, he had a journalist working with him. She wants to publish a book on his findings. She’s convinced the story should be told.’
‘A journalist?’ She laughed harshly. ‘That’s presumptuous of her. Why does she want to tell the story?’
‘For the same reason that Walsh wanted to. Because she is obsessed with the idea of a murder tria
ngle. Because it’s a mystery that has never been properly explained. Isn’t that the sort of story that needs to be told?’
The note of scorn persisted in her voice.
‘Anyone can tell a story like that. The bookshops in this country are groaning with the weight of those sort of books. But not everyone can keep silent. The art of staying quiet is an underestimated talent.’ She watched him closely. ‘Tell me, what did your father tell you about your mother’s death?’
‘Nothing. Apart from a few vague lies that I took to be the truth.’
‘Isn’t that a better sort of a story to tell? One that protects you from the painful truth?’
Perhaps she was right, thought Daly; the only stories worth telling were the ones that hid secrets right to the final words. Weren’t the best fairy tales labyrinths for the unpalatable truth? He remembered his father’s bedside presence when he was a boy, helping him settle into sleep. He felt a pang of loss for his fatherly attention, his watchful eyes, his sustaining silence.
‘Perhaps your father was right to hide the truth from you. He didn’t want it to ruin your life.’
‘But the truth doesn’t ruin lives.’ He could have said more, but he stopped himself.
‘But it doesn’t make us any happier. If I found out tomorrow that I had an incurable disease, how would that make my life any better?’ She stared at him and shrugged. ‘Perhaps I should know better than to argue with you about your father’s motives.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘About what you said, earlier, it is true. I am exhausted. With all this talking about my uncle’s death. We should keep our mouths shut more often. We used to be good at doing that in this country.’
He took out a copy of Walsh’s murder map.
‘Before I go, I want you to have a copy of this. I want you to study it carefully.’
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