Silence

by Anthony J. Quinn

  The woman he intended to visit was now elderly and infirm, but there would be no trace of compassion shown by him. No allowance made for old age, no politeness beyond that of an interrogator interviewing a suspect, sifting for secrets. He stuck the gearstick straight into third and the engine laboured as he pulled on to the road. His destination, a nursing home, was about ten miles further along the lough shore; however, it took about twenty minutes to drive there, traversing the bumpy roads, driving past slanting fields, braking hard at the corners and hidden crossroads.

  In the clear light of morning, he thought again about Donaldson’s death on the lough. Even though Pryce had been plaguing the former commander with her research into the past, it did not necessarily mean that his death was a direct consequence of her meddling. It might have been the conclusion of another set of events entirely, perhaps one that involved his domestic affairs. He thought about the empty feel to Donaldson’s house, the sense that it was guarding a secret in his past.

  The large three-storeyed nursing home overlooking the lough had once been a popular hotel in the time before cheap flights and overseas holidays, and a look of disuse had overtaken its façade. A flock of rooks was busy building nests in its high chimneys. Their rasping caws sounded half strangled and aggressive. This was the true accent of the lough-shore hinterland, thought Daly as he climbed out of his car, the kind of incomprehensible roar you once heard in the old fishermen’s pubs. He nodded at an elderly man who had been pushed out in his wheelchair for a smoke, his head drooping like his cigarette. Inside, he found the nurse in charge and introduced himself. He explained that he wanted to talk to Dorothy Donaldson, the wife of his former commander.

  ‘You’re the first of her husband’s colleagues to visit,’ she remarked. She studied him for a moment. ‘Were you a good friend of his?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pity. She hasn’t anyone left to visit her since her brother passed away and now her husband too.’

  ‘What happened to her brother?’

  She thought for a moment before answering.

  ‘A suicide. About a fortnight ago. He hanged himself in the family orchard.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Kenneth Agnew. He used to visit her all the time.’

  He had thought he might have been seeing connections where none existed, but now he knew his hunch was correct. Donaldson had been protecting his wife and her link with the killers all along, and had tried to take the secret with him to the bottom of the lough. Daly felt the sense of apprehension he had been carrying around since Walsh’s death intensify into deep dread. He followed the nurse down a silent corridor. He could imagine the advantages a nursing home might provide for someone hiding from the past.

  ‘What’s wrong with Mrs Donaldson?’ asked Daly. ‘I heard she had some sort of stroke.’

  ‘Physically, there is nothing wrong with her at all. Her doctor says she has a form of hysteria. A silent hysteria. She hasn’t spoken a word in six months. Shows no interest in anything and eats very little. She became a complete stranger to her husband overnight. He was at his wits’ end before the doctor found a room here for her.’

  ‘How does she keep up her silence?’

  ‘I suppose she keeps her head in the clouds. Everyone gets a little like that with old age.’

  Daly waited at her room door while the nurse entered. He heard her say loudly, ‘There’s an Inspector Celcius Daly here to see you.’ There was a pause and then the nurse reappeared. ‘Go on in, I’ll be in the nurse’s office if you need anything.’

  The moment Daly crossed the threshold his sense of dread drained away. He smelled a strong odour of lavender almost overpowered by bleach and antiseptic. Propped with pillows in an armchair by the window, Dorothy Donaldson regarded him with a blank doll-like stare. She didn’t have the haggard or ill appearance he’d been expecting. Her grey hair was finely brushed, her skin so pale it was almost transparent and curiously unwrinkled. A shadow-dweller, thought Daly, a ghost hiding from the light. She looked as though she had been pretty in her youth, but there was an emptiness now in her facial expression. Her sitting pose was elegant, but lifeless. Her hands clutched an old-looking teddy bear, as though it was the one toy she’d ever had. She didn’t register his presence in any way; her only movement was the barely perceptible rise and fall of her chest.

  Space was short in the room. Heavy furniture had been transported from her home, along with a complement of fringed lampshades, ornaments and framed photographs, which covered the dark surfaces of the furniture. Most of the pictures were of Dorothy, charting her journey through her wedded life. He saw that she was always wearing sunglasses, or her eyes were half-closed against the light, a hand raised to shade her face. The photographs were what had been missing from Donaldson’s house, their absence making the place feel strangely empty for a married couple’s home.

  There was nowhere to sit, apart from her bed, so Daly stood in front of her. Through the window, he could see a small boat disappear into the dinge of a drizzly day on Lough Neagh.

  He introduced himself slowly and carefully.

  ‘I’m investigating a number of murders that took place in 1979 within the Armagh district,’ he said. ‘Including that of my mother. I have some questions I need to ask you.’

  He detected a carefully veiled wariness in her eyes. He could tell she had understood what he had said. The corners of her mouth were dragged down by what at first he took to be sadness but now looked more like determination.

  Why have you come here? her eyes seemed to ask.

  ‘Angela Daly. Do you remember that name? From Maghery.’

  A physical tremor appeared in her face. Was it the result of illness or a physical reaction to his question? Her mouth tightened into a puncture hole.

  ‘She was shot dead by your brother Kenneth.’

  Her chin lifted in defiance.

  Daly mentioned the other victims of the murder triangle.

  ‘I’ve been trying to find out what the common denominator was. What made these innocent people the targets of your brother’s gang? Who supplied their details? And why?’

  She turned away slightly and gazed through the window, at the watery murk of the lough. Then she rolled her eyes back at him.

  ‘Their homes were important, weren’t they? Their rundown cottages. Their dreams for a better future.’

  For a moment, her hands clutched the teddy bear tighter. Daly noticed it and her hands went still.

  ‘Someone in the background provided the gang with names and addresses.’ He let the words settle for several seconds. ‘Who do you suppose could have done something like that? If you don’t tell me what you know, I’ll find out for myself.’

  Leave me alone, her eyes seemed to say. Get on with your life. Her frail fingers squeezed the teddy bear’s arms.

  ‘You can’t dupe me with your act,’ he said. He could hear the bitterness creep into his voice. Her silence felt like a provocation, an affront to justice. He saw that she had been preparing for this interrogation for years, building up her jaw muscles’ strength to gag the tongue. The obstinate staring of her eyes. The silence that was like the din of a bell filling the room.

  However, he was determined to break down her defences.

  ‘I’m going to keep visiting you every day until you tell me what you know. I’m going to wait every day by your side until you tell me the truth.’

  Her hands clawed at her teddy bear but her face gave nothing away.

  ‘Your brother hangs himself. Then Ivor McClintock is shot dead. And now your husband drowns on the lough. Something is begging to be revealed.’

  She cleared her throat with a little growl at the mention of her husband, but no words came out. She was locked into her muteness, he realized, as committed as a long-distance runner. A final marathon of unwavering silence. He could see that she probably had it in her to succeed. The toughness lying behind those pale eyes. The resolute line of her lips, the steadines
s in her thin frame. She had said all she was going to say months ago. He could ask her questions all day and night, attempt to coax some utterance from her, uncover exactly what role she had played in the murders, but his efforts would be in vain. He had to hand it to her. As an experiment in hiding the truth it had worked so far. Retiring to this nursing home in silence. Waiting for entropy, for the truth to wither up and die. Wasn’t that the irrevocable course of all things? From dust to dust, ashes to ashes; from that bright spring morning in 1979, his mother heading off to work, to this, an old woman dying in a corner of a nursing home.

  ‘This story of yours is not going away, despite your silence,’ he said.

  He could almost read the unspoken words on her lips. I’m dead already. What does it matter?

  He began moving around the room, examining the photographs, tantalized by the sense that he was missing something in them. Why had Donaldson been so careful to remove all trace of them from his house? Her eyes swivelled and focused on him with suspicion. He could sense her annoyance as he touched the pictures, turning them towards the light of the window. Perhaps he might be able to provoke an outburst. However, the closest she gave to an outcry was the lurch of her head as she followed his movements, and a rapid series of eye blinks.

  One of the pictures appeared to be of her retirement day from the council. He studied it closely. Smiling officials presenting her with an award for long service. He saw the details of the department she worked in, her job title. A shadow fell over his heart, and with it a moment of insight. The haze that dimmed his vision of his father’s humped fields and cottage lifted with an appalling clarity. He knew that he was looking at the truth, the same truth that had been hidden for years by the other ruinous cottages in the murder triangle.

  He glanced back at the sight of Dorothy Donaldson staring at him and the photograph. Perhaps he wouldn’t need to hear from her own lips the account of her role in the murders, after all. The secret lay much closer to home.

  ‘Inspector Daly?’ A voice disturbed him from his reverie. ‘Are you OK?’ It was the nurse.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, turning, but that wasn’t the truth either. ‘I’m just leaving.’

  He looked at the old woman one more time. The words came to him like a revelation. She is trying to kill herself with silence. It’s the perfect way out for her. Relentless silence. Losing contact with the world bit by bit.

  ‘Have you worked out why she won’t speak?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘Yes.’ They left the room together and walked down the corridor. ‘Because she’s afraid of the world discovering who she really was. She’s simply holding out, waiting for death to complete her silence.’

  35

  Daly left the nursing home with more questions than answers. However, the most important one was the puzzle that had been haunting him since he first encountered Father Walsh’s murder map. Why had someone directed that bloodthirsty gang to his mother? The question was like a box he’d been carrying around for years without knowing it. The box did not belong to any police investigation. It was his box, the burden of his family’s past.

  There was a small pier at the bottom of a footpath leading from the nursing home car park. He took a walk down to the lough shore. He was far away from cars and people now, the only sound that of the water lapping against the wooden jetty. The lough was full of light and waves but the land lay dark. He could see further along the shore where cattle had trodden the margins of the fields into quagmires. In places, clumps of earth lay crumbling in the water. In an attempt to slow the erosion, farmers had placed boulders and thick sleepers on the banks, but their efforts had merely channelled the water around the obstacles. More entropy, he thought. It was impossible to avoid or resist it. All around him, a shamed landscape slowly sinking into a restless lough.

  The shore was almost a mirror to the society he had grown up in during the 1970s. Everything on the verge of capsizing into chaos. Two tribal communities on perpetual guard against anything that might threaten them, where stability, the status quo, was more important than anything else. A fragile society spinning around itself a protective web of denial, lies and cover-ups in a bid to keep from slipping over the edge.

  In the distance, he spotted the outline of Coney Island. He thought of Hegarty and wondered if the old spy had found a sanctuary there. Last night, he had violated the most fundamental rule of police work in helping him escape the police checkpoint. In hindsight, he felt it was a mistake, one prompted by his shaken confidence in his police colleagues, but a professional error all the same.

  What other mistakes had he made? he wondered. For a moment, he questioned his judgement about Dorothy Donaldson, but then he became convinced that he was right. She was the key link between the rogue police officers and their victims. He had to concentrate on finding the vital evidence that would prove this link before it disappeared forever. If he was correct, that evidence lay in two places: his father’s back garden, and in a file somewhere in the council archives.

  After a while, he walked up to the car and drove back through the labyrinth of lough-shore roads. As soon as he reached home, he ran from the car and into the back garden without bothering to change his clothes or shoes. He grabbed an old spade and ploughed into the nettle-infested banks at the bottom of the field. He cleared the weeds and began digging into the ground, as though his spade might hit upon the hard corners of the truth. Eventually his foot juddered as the spade struck something unyielding. He exposed the pale glint of concrete. He counted out about twenty paces, the average length of a bungalow, and began digging again. About a foot below the surface, his spade rang against another slab.

  He found a sledgehammer in the shed and pounded the concrete, but it refused to break. It was at least a foot thick. He cleared more soil and watched the slab widen for several feet. He stopped, stood back, trembling with exhaustion. He attacked the northwest corner of the field and uncovered another concrete slab. Again, this one refused to break under the pounding of his sledgehammer.

  He gave up and followed a path through the grass back to his car. Without thinking, he threw the spade into the back of the vehicle and set off. After several miles of driving, he parked his car outside the cottage of another of the murder triangle victims. He avoided the ruined house and hurried into the back garden.

  The humps in the grass were his pointer. He tried to follow a straight line but the weeds were so thick and entangling that he lost his sense of direction. He thought of contacting a relative of the murdered man for guidance but then he realized the secrets of the rough ground had probably died with him. He picked a corner and began digging through the nettles and thistles. His knees almost buckled with the effort of clearing the invasive roots, gouging at them with the blade of his spade. He grabbed hold of them with his bare hands and loosened their hold. He went back to attacking the ground with his spade, only taking a breath when he hit a hard surface. He scraped away the soil and found concrete. He grunted with satisfaction. He counted out about twenty paces running south, just as he had done in his father’s back field and began digging again.

  It wasn’t long before he encountered more concrete. He stood there motionless, staring at the patterns in the grass. He broke into a trot, criss-crossing the field in apparently aimless lines. In his mind’s eye, he was able to draw a diagram connecting the spots where he had struck concrete. He had uncovered the concrete foundations of a bungalow that had never been built. Sweating but determined, he ran back to his car and sped off. A neighbour saw him leave and watched him with a puzzled stare.

  He drove deeper into the townlands of Walsh’s murder triangle. He stopped at the farms of several more victims. There was no one to stop or question him as he paced through the rough fields with his spade, trying to uncover the ungraspable outlines of the forgotten past. He groped around in the black earth of border country for the rest of the afternoon, striking concrete slabs at some of the farms, and finding nothing at the others but mud an
d a chaos of weeds.

  Part of him wanted to drive to all the locations pinpointed on Walsh’s map and dig up their humped fields, but he was too tired to complete that Herculean task. At about the tenth farm, he realized he had dug up and seen enough. He leaned his back against an old tree trunk. The afternoon grew cold, and his sweat made his clothes feel damp and chilly. He sank down on to the mossy grass, breathing heavily. He stared at the landscape of broken cottages, outhouses, craggy gables and gardens full of weed-covered banks where diggers had once piled the soil for the foundations of homes that had never been completed. For the first time he could clearly follow the fault line, the dislocation in a generation’s dreams for the future, and the rotten inheritance they had left behind.

  36

  The schools had just opened their gates and Armagh town was full of running children and teenagers, faces babbling into mobile phones, figures with headsets sauntering in front of traffic. Daly drove cautiously through the busy streets, which were tinged with early spring sunshine. It was impossible to think that the terrible spectres of the past could touch this forward-looking town. Whereas the lough drew the haunted, the betrayed and the broken to its thorny shore, this part of the province had managed the trick of escaping the stranglehold of the past. An avenue of budding cherry trees led Daly towards a clean new building dappled with the light of a happier future. He had arrived at the headquarters of Armagh District Council.

  When he asked to see the old planning files, the clerk at the desk frowned.