Special Branch Inspector Ian Fealty had followed the directions set out in the postcard. They had wanted him to come alone to the isolated headland. Neither was he supposed to be carrying a weapon. They had told him they wanted to talk, to share information. They wanted to discuss different courses of action before deciding what to do with Hughes. Other than that, he had no idea what to expect.
If they were looking for privacy, they had chosen the right location. It was late afternoon, and already the mist was beginning to swill in from the lough, sprawling over the rocks and tangled branches of the storm beach. He remembered that he was supposed to look as though he was out on a stroll. He picked his way over the debris of winter gales and threw a few stones into the water. The honking of a flock of geese out on the water sounded muted, ghostly. He was far from help. Somewhere out there, the kidnappers were probably watching him.
Special Branch had been in a stir since Hughes’s disappearance. They had discussed what needed to be done for days and nights. But no one could reach agreement, except that they all agreed they were possibly facing a doomsday scenario. It was only when the strange postcard arrived out of the blue that they were able to put a plan into action. The details of which were passed onto the special committee, which had given the green light and assigned him his current mission.
Fealty tried to reduce the rising tension by doing deep-breathing exercises. However, they didn’t work. His instinct was to turn back and wait for a further message from the kidnappers. Let them sweat a little, he thought. He consoled himself by feeling the dead weight of the Browning in his pocket. The kidnappers had promised to bring Hughes along to the meeting as proof the old man was still alive. They would not be expecting a Special Branch operative to endanger his life.
Unfortunately for Hughes, the committee had decided that drastic action had to be taken if Special Branch were to prevent its whole network of spies and informers from collapsing.
The mist thickened and grew oppressive. Fealty reached out with his gun and pointed it at the fragments of dark rock and trees revealed fleetingly. He did not like his situation. Visibility was down to an arm’s length. People made mistakes when they could not see clearly. They misread what they did see, or saw what was not there. He had only studied photographs of Hughes, never having met the man. The committee had warned he might be deranged or suffering from some sort of memory loss. It struck him that the location suited the old man the most. He had lived all his life along the lough shore and would know the place like the veins and knuckles on the back of his hand.
Fealty tried to keep his bearings and checked his watch. If the mist remained much longer he would call off the meeting, pretend he had gotten lost and missed the rendezvous point. He was about to quit and head back into the forest when he heard the rattle of a boat drifting onto the stony shore. He stepped toward the sound. There was a heavy grinding noise as the boat ran aground.
“Is anyone there?” he shouted into the blanket of whiteness.
“Who is it?” sounded a man’s voice, deep and firm.
“The decoy has come,” said Fealty, using the agreed phrase.
“I’m waiting for you,” replied the voice.
“I need to see you. I’ve been sent to talk to David Hughes.”
“I’m here. Come right ahead.”
He pushed into the whiteness, unable to distinguish anything. A gust of wind dissolved some of the mist, and an old man’s face with an unkempt beard materialized into view. He was sitting at the prow of a boat. His hair and beard were wet through. Fealty was surprised. Hughes appeared to be by himself.
“Wouldn’t it be better if we went for a walk together?” he suggested.
“I don’t want to leave the boat. This is not a good place to be marooned. Too damn cold. If you could get hold of some whiskey, though, that would be a different matter.”
Fealty was momentarily confused. There was no sign of the kidnappers and the old man sounded off his rocker.
“It’s a hell of a place, I agree,” replied Fealty.
The mist swung back, leaving Fealty groping as the boat drifted away and disappeared. When the mist cleared again he found himself farther along the shore, the boat gone. Fealty decided he needed to feed Hughes a line, anything to rein him back out of the mist.
“You’ll catch a cold out in this weather,” he shouted.
“That only happens to townies like you,” came the reply. “I wash in cold water, every day. Even in winter.”
The boat was nearby. He could hear the slapping of oars in the water. He realized that Hughes must have someone with him.
“What information are you looking for?” shouted Fealty.
This time the voice was different, younger and edgier, more in control. “We need the names of the detectives who investigated Oliver Jordan’s disappearance.”
Fealty found himself staring into the blank face of the fog. The weather was making things impossible, and the question left him puzzled.
“What has Oliver Jordan got to do with you?” he asked.
“I’m the one asking you. You don’t need to ask me anything.” The voice grew faint.
Fealty shouted out a name.
“I’m not interested in him. He’s dead.”
Fealty shouted out several more, but wondered if they had heard him. He waded into the water, but the fog immediately closed around him. It was like trying to push your way clear of a slippery monster that lashed this way and that. The sound of the oars returned, farther up and then down the shore. The boat passed to his left and then to his right. Somehow, it was circling him, trying to make him lose his bearings. He stumbled back to the shore and climbed over the gnarled roots of an upended tree. The fog lifted again, and he felt disoriented, as though his sense of direction had been reversed. His destination had become his point of departure.
He wheeled around just in time to see the prow of the boat appear out of the mist, advancing toward him like a spear. The old man bore down upon him, his arm pointing out as if to signal a warning. For the first time Fealty saw the other person, a slack shape hunched in the back of the boat. As Fealty peered at him, the figure unwrapped a scarf from his face. It was the face of a man Fealty did not expect to see, not out here with Hughes. This fog is leaving me confused, he thought. A tangled mess of memories floated up before his eyes. The Searcher had produced so many potential recruits the authorities couldn’t vet them quickly enough. They had been forced to turn people away. So many different faces. But he was sure he had seen the man in the boat before. He began to suspect there were no kidnappers, and that Hughes was working with some kind of accomplice.
“Over there,” spat Hughes at Fealty, pointing into the trees. The Special Branch officer turned around. A feeling of unease gripped him. Who might be hiding among the trees? A bunch of armed men? It was the perfect location for an ambush. Then he saw, through a gap in the undergrowth, two black-crested birds. He relaxed and adjusted his position, but he was still startled when their wings broke into flight, shattering the silence.
“Crested terns,” explained Hughes. The old man was close, almost within touching distance. He examined Fealty intensely. “I need to see your ID.”
Fealty put his hand into his inside pocket and fumbled, unable to hide the fact that there was a gun there. He repositioned it with his damp hand and pulled out his police identification. As he handed it to Hughes, an oar swung up from the boat, knocking him into the water.
“We need the names of the other detectives,” said Hughes again.
“Why?” spluttered Fealty as he hauled himself out of the water.
“The answer to that should be as plain to Special Branch as the sash on an Orangeman,” said Hughes. “I need the names because there are loose ends from the past that need tied up.” His voice turned hoarse, savage. “You should fear growing old. When your time is near, you find yourself looking down into the whole of your soul as if you are on the peak of a mountain. You see everything, even the secrets hidden in the darkest corners. Your mistakes can’t be concealed forever.”
Fealty now realized the old man was deranged. He needed to play for time. He gave Hughes the names he wanted and dragged himself onto a rock, removing the gun at the same time. Ideally, he would have liked Hughes and his accomplice’s death to look like a hunting accident, but that might prove too tricky. Two clean shots were all he required.
The mist congealed again, swallowing up the boat and the two men. Fealty thought he could hear the splash of an oar nearby but couldn’t determine in which direction, or whether he had really heard it. All he could make out was the knocking of his heart in his chest.
“I have a message for you from headquarters,” he shouted. “You can have whatever you want. Resettlement. A new identity. The last thing they want is for you to be out wandering in this no-man’s-land.”
“I’m OK,” came Hughes’s voice, faintly, across the water. “Nobody knows where I’m staying. It’s the perfect place for me. I’m like a raindrop hiding in a waterfall.”
“There isn’t any perfect place for you anymore. Your photo has been plastered across the papers all week.”
“I’ve seen it. Even
I
didn’t recognize myself. It was just another photo of an elderly man with an illness. People just see old age and blot out the rest. It won’t help you find me.”
Fealty worried he was losing them. “We can give you security and money, anything you want.”
“Whatever you have for me in that jacket pocket I don’t want it. I’m finished with you all.” Hughes’s voice was almost beyond hearing.
“Don’t you want to know why Devine was killed?” Fealty waded out into the water. “He was in contact with us in the weeks before he was killed. He was a very frightened man.”
However, all the Special Branch officer saw was the dense black waters of the lough undulating beneath the fog’s anxious face.
O
n Monday morning, Daly went out of his way to pick up Dermot Jordan from the bottom of the lane at his aunt’s farmhouse. Daly watched the boy cringe and go rigid at the sight of his mother rushing toward him at the last minute with a lunchbox. Tessa Jordan hugged him and her eyes crinkled sadly on feeling the resistance in his body. She had splashed on some makeup, and she flashed a smear of a smile at Daly. Her red lips heightened the paleness of her skin.
Dermot climbed in with a shy, grateful nod to Daly. The detective pressed the accelerator and the boy closed his eyes, almost in thanks, and relaxed into the purring motion of the car.
“How are you bearing up, Dermot, living on a farm?”
“Apart from the constant smell of manure, it’s OK.”
After a while, he turned to Daly. “I found something. You might be interested in it if you’re opening the case into Dad’s abduction.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card.
“We can look at it when we get to the station,” said Daly.
For the rest of the journey, Dermot sat staring straight ahead. Daly kept glancing at him. He was turning the card repeatedly in his hands. Daly could feel his tension. He wondered what the boy had to show him.
When they entered the station there was a commotion of shouting and swearing at the front desk. An elderly man with clenched fists was being bundled toward the front door by two police officers.
“I’m a retired police officer, and I’m not drunk, if that’s what you think. Let me speak to someone before I get really angry.”
“Piss off,” said the desk sergeant, within earshot of Daly. “Before I arrest you for breaching the peace.”
Daly intervened and helped the old man regain his composure. He took out a battered RUC identity card, which Daly inspected closely.
“I really was a police officer, and I’m not drunk,” the old man told the detective. In spite of his protestations, his jaw appeared to be loose and his words were slurred.
The ID card showed that he had once been Constable Noel Bingham of the RUC. Daly examined a photo of a smartly dressed policeman with neat hair and a confident face. However, in the intervening years time had doodled all over Bingham’s features. A set of thick eyebrows now fluttered above a pair of eyes that were like two watery holes of darkness. Broken veins ran along the sides of his nose, and his mouth had soured and slipped closer to his chin, caved in with the weight of a lifetime’s worth of grievances.
“You understand we have to be careful,” said Daly, dismissing the two officers. He made Dermot sit down in the waiting room before returning to Bingham.
The retired policeman’s alcohol-heavy breath hung in the air.
“Now, what is the purpose of your visit?” demanded Daly.
He looked at Bingham’s face and tried his best to picture him as an RUC officer. He failed. It was like seeing one’s reflection in a distorting mirror at a fairground.
“I have some information on David Hughes,” said Bingham, peering around Daly. His cheekbones were gaunt peaks at either side of his haunted eyes. “Where’s McKinley and what’s-his-name, the fair-haired man from Ballymena? They used to be in charge of this place. Christ, I can’t even remember his name.”
“They were before my time,” said Daly. “Just tell me what you have on David Hughes.”
Bingham straightened up. “David was a first-class Special Branch officer. I was with him and O’Brien. We were undercover men. Our team still exists, somewhere in here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “There was Dodds and Ferguson, too. They were OK. What was Dodds’s partner called? He got caught in too many bombs. That was his trouble. Lost one limb after another. Adair. That was his name. You don’t lose many men, these days.”
“Are you telling me David Hughes was a former Special Branch police officer?” Daly wanted to grab his arms and shake him to attention.
Bingham regarded him with a sullen face. “That’s what I said. We used to think we were invincible. It was our destiny to serve this wee country and the queen. I never thought I would be manhandled in this very police station.”
“This is something I’ll have to check up on,” said Daly. The search for a missing man threw up many cranks with crackpot notions. As his eyes met Bingham’s, the old man winked and grinned. A string of credibility snapped in Daly’s mind.