Then on November 12, he started to write at length again.
They wheeled an old woman in beside me today in the sitting room. Her eyes were directed past me towards the window, and they had a dull look. Her hair was a spool of downy grey and the features of her face were lined with a throng of wrinkles. A young man came in and asked her could she hear him. He was persistent but well mannered, but the old woman seemed asleep.
When the old woman eventually spoke, her voice was faint.
“I know why you’ve come here,” she whispered. “You’re dredging the past for ghosts. Go home and forget about where they buried him.”
For a moment, I thought the old woman was doting but something in the boy’s expression made me wonder: “Buried who?”
I looked at him closely, and then the sweat began to form on my forehead, and I felt my neck begin to itch. His face looked oddly familiar. A coughing fit overcame me, and when I looked up again, the boy had disappeared, and the old woman was asleep again.
November 13
In the afternoon, I awoke in the sitting room. The sun hadn’t come out all day. I had lost my watch, and felt disorientated. This illness hangs over me like a curse. There was light from the tall windows moving the shadows about, and from their position, I tried to work out the time. The old woman was sitting beside me in an armchair with dirt-encrusted wheels. I had heard the nurses call her Mrs Jordan. By now, I had guessed she was Oliver Jordan’s mother. The coincidence was too horrible to bear.
“You’re caught,” she said suddenly, turning her head slightly towards me. “You’ve come to a dead end. First you made the mistake of getting ill, and then coming here where you’re boxed in by other dying people towards your own coffin. Get out while you still can.”
The words of her final command trembled in her mouth. She was breathing heavily. Her eyes were barely open, and I was unsure if she was addressing me.
I must have fallen asleep because my next memory is of seeing a cold cup of tea and a buttered scone sitting on the armrest of my chair. There were crumbs on the old woman’s chest and her eyes were open and fixed on the opposite wall. It was an empty wall, and during the long afternoons, it acted like a blank screen, shimmering with the images of the past. A tangle of memories floated to the surface. I saw the headlights of a car swimming through a foggy night, a body bundled out of the boot, torches winking across a wild bog, and a man’s bare feet dragged through the mud.
The old woman shifted in her seat.
“I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Oliver,” she said. “The last time I saw him he was sleeping.” She pointed at the wall opposite. “Sleeping in that bed there. The same bed he used to sleep in when he was a boy.”
I thought of offering some form of sympathy, but could see no consolation in that, not after all these years.
“I didn’t sleep for days,” she added. Her face screwed tight against the memory.
My mind started filling with more images from that dreadful night. It was almost impossible to speak. I worried about how I was going to frame what I wanted to say.
At last I spoke. “I may be the only one left who saw your son’s body being buried that night.”
A nurse pushed a medicine trolley past the door, and a bed alarm echoed down a distant corridor.
“I’m the only one left,” I repeated.
The old woman’s eyes were shut. Her mouth had folded upon itself as if the words had chewed her up. If she was breathing, there was no sign of it. She was gathering her strength for what was coming next. She stooped forward and gripped her hands on the armrests of the chair as though she might fall to the floor. A cup of cold tea fell across the carpet. She released a long breath, and then she turned her dim eyes towards me.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Why have you come here?”
Her arm reached out towards me, as though an electrical current had taken hold of it. I recoiled. Afraid that some shock of grief or sorrow might suddenly leap from her wrinkled skin.
“I worked for Special Branch,” I began to explain. “We were monitoring the movements of Republicans. I watched them that night dig a pit and bury your son’s body. I wasn’t able to intervene because it would have endangered the operation. It was too late for your son, anyway. He was dead.”
The old woman sank back into her seat, and shut her eyes. For a long time, there was not a sound in the room. We were like two people isolated on an island of grief. I watched the sky darkening to twilight. Night was approaching. Her grandson would be making his way through the gloom, on his way to the nursing home, seeking his answers.
“I always believed that one day news would reach me,” said the old woman. “That I would find out where Oliver was buried.” She paused, caught her breath, and turned towards me.
I told her that my memory was failing, and that I could no longer recall the exact location of the grave.
“But you must remember,” she said. “You must. Let him be given a Christian burial. So I can finally rest.” Emotion gulped in her throat.
“I will do my best,” I replied. There was no one left who could help her. I sank back into my chair, surrendering myself to the task. I was going to have to return to the gap in the thorn hedge, and step back into the black wind where only ghosts wandered.
“Let me talk to your grandson,” I told her. “Let me see what I can do.”
The next entry was a few days later. In the meantime, Daly surmised, Hughes had introduced himself to Dermot Jordan and passed on the few details he could remember. After that, the entries described Hughes’s regular conversations with the boy. Then on November 19:
My last day in the nursing home. I sat waiting for the ambulance to take me home when Dermot appeared. It was our final meeting.
“Are you going already?” he asked, a note of disappointment in his voice.
I felt the same. Our friendship was ending. Or rather, our usefulness to each other was waning. It was ridiculous to believe we could build on the conversations we had shared during my short stay in the nursing home. I could see the boy was reaching the same conclusion. After all, I was an old man with a rapidly fading memory, who hadn’t been able to answer his most pressing questions.
He accompanied me on a short walk through the nursing home grounds. It was a cold winter evening. Not a trace of wind in the air. Soon a frost would form on the neatly mown lawn and the conifer trees.
“I must find out where they buried Dad’s body,” he said.
“I’ve forgotten. That’s the simple truth. My memory is going. Anyway, I was never the type to look back and revisit old scenes. I must have blotted out the details of the entire incident.”
The ambulance pulled up.
“You have to tell me if you remember anything more,” he urged.
“Of course. You have my address.”
I got into the back of the ambulance. It drove me slowly through the darkness of the lough shore, with no siren lights or wailing noise, through a wind swathed with snowflakes, dissolving into the blackness like the trapped faces of ghosts.
The notes after Hughes’s departure from the nursing home became more disjointed and confused. There appeared to be a marked deterioration in his condition. His handwriting became hard to make out, and he switched to writing in pencil. In one entry, he noted that the ghosts had left him feeling apprehensive but determined. The next few pages were roughly torn out. Thereafter there was only a sentence or two in each entry. Daly could feel a chill seeping from the barely legible words. At one point, Hughes wrote that he was afraid of dying, and that only the thought of seeing the duck flocks fly over in spring kept him going. There was little further mention of his investigation or of the location of Oliver Jordan’s grave. Each day seemed to have become a grim survival against an unknown fear.
34
Irwin stood smoking by an unmarked car in a lane opposite the entrance gates to the monastery. From there he had the best view of both approach roads and was invisible
until the last moment to passing motorists. Officers had positioned themselves on the grounds of the monastery and in the rooms next to 204.
Irwin could have swamped the surrounding roads with checkpoints, but he wanted to bring the boy into custody himself. He was looking forward to quizzing him about his relationship with Daly. As for Hughes, who cared about a senile old man? Alzheimer’s was a death sentence anyway.
The lane led to a few sagging outhouses with rusted tin roofs and stone walls that had lost their mortar. A black dog bounded out and began sniffing at his feet.
“Get lost!” he shouted, kicking out at the animal.
“Don’t mind him.” A young man appeared from one of the outhouses, carrying a feeding bucket. “He’ll not bite.”
The boy started calling to the herd of cows in the adjoining field. Irwin stood still, wondering how he was going to explain his presence. No point in lying, he decided. The boy might have seen something that might be of use. Better to tell him the truth and enlist his cooperation.
“Is that your car?” asked the boy with a simple grin. “It looks fast.” There was a lopsided look of simplicity to his face.
Clearly the result of inbreeding among farming folk, thought Irwin.
“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “You should see it accelerate when I hit the motorway.”
The boy regarded him with such a look of innocence that Irwin began to wonder whether he was seriously retarded.
“I haven’t seen you here before,” said the boy. His brow knitted in puzzlement as though trying to count something in his head. “You’re not from the school, are you? If you are, I’m not going back.” His face was strained with anxiety, and he shied away from the detective.
“No. I’m not from school,” explained Irwin. “I am trying to catch someone though.”
A flash of cunning appeared in the boy’s face. “Is that why you’ve a fast car?”
“Yes,” said Irwin. “You’re a quick learner.”
Again that happy, ill-made expression of stupidity appeared on the boy’s features, his face like a wrongly shaped bowl rejected by a potter.
“I’m looking for a boy about your age and an old man. They’ve been staying at the monastery for the past few weeks.” Irwin showed him a photograph of Hughes.
A mouthful of delighted laughter shot out from the boy. “I think I’ve seen them. I live in the house back there with my da. He lets me feed the cows in the evening. I’ve seen them leave the monastery in a jeep.”
“I’ll let you go for a ride in the car if you can tell me more,” offered Irwin.
“Da talked to the old fellow a few times,” said the boy, thinking hard.
A voice yelled from farther up the lane. A high-pitched, demanding voice, contorted by illness or old age.
“Let me feed the cows first,” said the boy, a flicker of worry appearing in his face. “Then we’ll go up and talk to Da.”
Irwin nodded.
The boy swung his leg with practiced ease over a gate and marched up the field, calling all the time to the cattle. Very soon, he had disappeared over the brow of the hill, the herd of cows lumbering behind him.
Irwin waited. He smoked a cigarette, and another. Then he returned to his car and sat in silence.
One by one, the cows returned over the hill and jostled against the gate as if they were still hungry. They stared at Irwin with their stupid faces. There was no sign of the boy. The detective sat forward with a new attentiveness. The cows pushed harder against the gate, hooves stamping, eyeballs swiveling. Hungry animals getting hungrier. Irwin went over the boy’s actions in his mind. It occurred to him that the bucket had probably been empty. The boy had duped the animals into following him over the hill. They weren’t the only ones who had been fooled, he was beginning to suspect.
He got out of the car and walked up to the outhouses. There was no sign of a house beyond, or the boy’s father, only a muddy lay-by with a fresh set of tire tracks. Irwin followed them, his stomach churning with unease. They led back down onto the main road. He stood and stared across the fields, hoping to see the figure of the boy return. After a few more minutes, he returned to his car and phoned the station. An officer sent an image of Dermot Jordan to his phone. When it came through, Irwin turned to the baffled herd of cows and performed a passable imitation of a man shooting himself in the head. One of the animals responded with a despairing “Moo.”
When Daly arrived, Irwin was still wrestling with embarrassment at letting Dermot Jordan slip through his fingers. Daly’s request for the precise details of their conversation had the younger detective writhing on a mental skewer. He watched with interest as the hostility in Irwin’s face drained away completely, replaced by a squirming look of failure, which broke through his hardened features like a hooked fish pulled from the depths.
“How could you let it happen?” asked Daly.
Irwin recounted the incident methodically to Daly, like a new recruit doing what he was taught to do. “I swear he looked simple. I thought he was just a farmer’s son sent out to feed the cattle.”
“Simple? That’s the last word I’d use to describe Dermot Jordan. What kind of vehicle did they drive off in?”
“I didn’t see a car. I already told you.”
Daly shook his head. “Jumping to assumptions is an extremely unreliable trait in a policeman. Just because the boy was carrying a bucket, it didn’t automatically make him a farmer’s son. It didn’t mean you could abandon all your suspicions.” He realized he was shouting. He turned his back on Irwin and groaned to himself.
A female officer was standing guard by the outhouses. She looked at Daly as if he might be in pain.
Daly tried not to let his antagonism show.
“I think I saw a pair of eyes in there,” she told him, pointing into the darkness of the outhouse.
“Perhaps it was an animal,” he suggested.
“What if it was a rat?”
Daly took out a torch and directed its light into the byre.
A half-spilled sack lay in a corner. Motionless eyes glinted in the light of the torch. He walked in and discovered a heap of duck decoys. Some of them were damaged, split into pieces. He shouted for Irwin to join him.
“This is where the paths cross,” said Daly. “These decoys are the point of connection between Hughes, Devine, and Dermot Jordan. We don’t yet know their significance, but I suspect Hughes and Jordan stole them from Devine’s cottage.”
Irwin ruffled his hair.
“I want you to find out why they were stolen,” added Daly.
35
Pulling into the station, Daly saw Fealty get out of his car and hurry into the building ahead of him. Daly sensed he was going to have another confrontation with the Special Branch inspector. Since their conversation about Dermot’s past, they’d had no further contact, but in his mind, Daly felt he was engaged in an ongoing war with Fealty.
However, he was surprised when the inspector met him in the corridor and invited him for a coffee. Daly thanked him but declined. Staring at Fealty’s pinched, jaded face, Daly wondered if it had been proper to thank him. To be grateful placed him in the position of a subordinate.
Fealty did not seem to have heard Daly’s refusal. Instead, his bleak eyes stared through Daly, as if to some point of doom behind. He drew close to the detective and began talking about how important it was to find Hughes and Dermot Jordan. He asked Daly some routine questions about the search, but the detective got the impression he knew the answers already. Fealty’s earlier arrogance had disappeared completely. He seemed deflated, unsure of his next move. His haircut looked too short for his narrow face.
When Daly had finished, Fealty looked at him and waited for something more, his eyes two hungry black dots.
“What fresh leads have you?” he asked sharply.
“If I had any, you would have heard already.”
Fealty looked offended. He seemed to be expecting a measure of sympathy and cooperation from Da
ly.
“You know, Inspector, this country has undergone a fundamental change in the last few years,” said Fealty. “There’s a whole generation of people like David Hughes, who have lost their way. You don’t need to have dementia to feel unsure of what’s going on in this country. Or question what was the point of risking your life as a policeman. The Troubles went on too long, but there’s a prevailing feeling they ended too easily. You were lucky you got away to Scotland. Your perspective is not so distorted by history. That’s why I think you bring something useful to this investigation.”
Daly raised an eyebrow. “My father sent me to live with an aunt in Glasgow after my mother was killed. She was shot in crossfire during an SAS ambush on a band of IRA men. I was fifteen at the time. It left me grief-stricken. As angry as a teenager can be. My father was afraid the loss would politicize me and propel me into Republicanism. But I never escaped. Even in Scotland. It was more like my history was stolen.”
Fealty nodded stiffly. “That kind of tragedy is hard to comprehend. It can put tremendous pressures on the mind.”
“What about David Hughes’s mind, and Joseph Devine’s? What kind of pressure was put on them?”
“That’s Special Branch business. As you know, David was a spymaster, the main point of contact for informers like Devine. He retired after the cease-fire. Like many people, he thought that was it. War over. Safe to hunt ducks and tend to his farm to the end of his days.”
“Let me guess, Special Branch thought differently.”
“We had to take precautions. There were too many loose ends left hanging. We recruited his sister to keep an eye on him, report on his state of mind, that sort of thing. It was our insurance policy. We thought we had nothing to worry about, until six months ago, when the Alzheimer’s came to light.”
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