“Your friends in Special Branch,” he answered with a laugh. “Property of the British Security Services. They’re very precious about things like that. I didn’t want to get a bill and an angry letter from them.”
R
econstructing the past was proving a tougher task than the visitor had imagined. At times David Hughes couldn’t remember the identity of his companion, let alone what had brought them together. Moreover, as each day went by the net of their investigation seemed to expand, taking in a wider circle of informers. Now he was back to talking about ducks again. The old man’s illness made it feel as though they were trying to walk over deep black water. Time was running out.
“I’ve had enough. Stop talking about those bloody duck decoys.” The visitor lost his temper.
Hughes looked at him from the corner of his eye, as though he wanted to say something but was restraining himself.
“What is it?”
Hughes sighed. “If only I could escape.”
“From here?”
“No. From my conscience. Now that the truth is close, I wish I could escape.”
“And you think that hiding from the truth will bring you freedom?”
“You wouldn’t understand. My conscience has got very big, too big for the old wreck of my mind. It keeps challenging me to a fight.” He began to shake his head as though a fly were annoying him.
“Do you believe in God?” asked the visitor.
Hughes was silent. He scratched his head vigorously.
“If I believed in God, I’d also have to believe in the devil, and hell, too, and that would cause a whole lot more complications than my muddled mind can deal with.” He looked at the visitor. “What age are you?”
When the visitor told him, the old man laughed.
“And you believe in God and angels and that we all have souls and good intentions?”
The visitor felt ridiculed.
“You’ve led too pure a life to realize that man is a brute,” said Hughes. “Give him a gun and any kind of uniform, and he’ll trample all over you.”
“If you don’t believe in God, then why listen to your conscience?”
“My conscience is my major flaw. It’ll kill me quicker than any illness.”
The visitor got up and stood at the window. The darkness outside was thick and foreboding. He felt a sudden squeeze of panic in his guts thinking of what Hughes had said. We are like two blind mice scurrying on the pantry floor, he thought to himself.
He was unable to rest so he put on Hughes’s old overcoat and sat up, waiting for the moon to rise. The pockets were full of duck feathers. He seized a thought that had been floating around the edge of his consciousness. Devine’s last message had made an unusual reference to flight. He didn’t know why the description had stayed with him, but then he saw the connection.
He went over to the bed and roused the old man. They were about to make a late-night trip, and for the first time they were going to be accomplices to a crime.
N
ow that he had worked out the meaning of Devine’s last message, the visitor’s mind was as clear and simple as that of a poker player with a winning hand. What a moment of inspiration it had been, coming out of the blue when his search for the truth had seemed so dark and complicated. Now, as he drove the borrowed jeep along the overgrown lane, he felt freed from any shadow or notion of fear.
Hughes sat beside him with his vacant hunter’s face, impermeable to weather or words. He kept looking straight ahead as if searching for an indication of rain or inclement weather. During that first meeting in the room of comfortable armchairs, the old man had let slip his nickname, the Searcher. It was apt. Even though illness had dulled his personality, his gaze still burned with a stubborn intensity.
The visitor did not say anything. He just followed Hughes’s directions. A person had to know when it was right to stay silent. It was no longer possible to have a full conversation with the old man anyway. His illness interfered too much with the organization of his mind. He had to be patient, and ensure they made the most of their new lead.
They drove on as a cold rain snuffed out the dusk. They wanted to avoid the police patrols that might be watching their intended destination, so they followed forgotten lanes that were no longer marked on maps. The jeep sloshed through the downpour. They slipped unnoticed through a small forest. A screen of thorn trees swung back, revealing the cottage and the light from the back porch throwing into jagged relief a circle of unkempt garden.
“Where are we?” asked Hughes. They had been silent so long the old man had forgotten their mission. He looked about him as though he might be on one of those artificial outings designed to break the boredom of the long winter evenings.
The driver sighed. “The truth is always near, within your reach.”
After a minute of silence, he tried another tack.
“To catch two birds with the one stone. What does that mean?”
“I know that. It’s simple. This is usually what people try to do. Because they want to catch too many birds, they find it difficult to stay focused. They end up not catching any birds at all.”
The driver waited, counting his breaths, keeping his impatience in check. During his bouts of confusion, the two of them clung to a few wisps of shared conversation. Swapping proverbs and playing word games had become a vital form of sustenance to their friendship.
“The man with two birds,” said the driver. “This is his house.”
“Of course, I remember now.” Hughes looked around him as though he was just coming to consciousness from a long nap. “Switch off the headlights. Keep the engine running. This will take just a minute.”
The old man walked furtively toward the back door. The visitor leaned back and thought of Joseph Devine, a man he had never met but who had fundamentally changed the course of his life. Devine had held more than one bird in his hand. He had been the center of a secret organization of spies and informers. But in the end he had made a mistake. And that had cost him his life. He knew that any mistakes made by him or Hughes would be punished in a similar way, such was the dangerousness of their operation.
Eventually the old man reappeared, creeping out of the house. The driver flashed his headlights. Hughes stood in the dim gleam of the porch light and took his bearings. A look of confusion darkened his face. Over his shoulder was a bulky bag. The driver held his breath. The old man put down the bag and walked toward the front of the house, his posture changing abruptly from skulking to leisurely. The driver felt the blood drain from his body. He flicked the headlights twice, and then again. He was convinced the detective in charge of the case would have posted a patrol car at the front of the house.
The rain spattered the windscreen, obstructing his view. He rolled down the window and, straining his ears, heard only the washing sounds of the lough. He felt a moment of terror in the darkness. A tremor of the mind as disabling as Hughes’s fits of confusion. The heavy trees and the brooding cottage all converged upon him, shutting out any means of escape.
Something moved at the other side of the house, a prowling silhouette. Hughes had returned. He held out his hand as though he had just discovered it was raining. The headlights lit up his grizzled face. He was dripping wet. Ducking back toward the porch, he threw the bag over his shoulder and hurried back to the jeep. In one swoop, he opened up the back door and heaved the load inside.
It landed on the floor with a heavy thump.
As the jeep slowly reversed, he glanced at the driver with a twinkle in his eye.
“Bet you never saw an old fool burgle a house before.”
“Not like that, anyway.”
“You’re an accomplice to robbery now.”
“If the police ever question me, I only gave you a lift.”
“That’s right. I could be carrying anything in that bag. A load of sticks or a bale of hay. Anything at all.”
The driver peeked into the sack and saw Devine’s collection of duck decoys glinting back at him. He grinned at Hughes.
W
hen Daly got back to his cottage there was a message for him on his answering machine. Constable O’Neill had asked him to phone her at the station.
“What’s happened?” asked Daly, expecting grim news.
“Nothing too serious,” she replied. “I thought you might like to know. Eliza Hughes rang earlier looking to speak to Inspector Irwin. No one else would do. When Irwin got the message, he left in a hurry. That’s all.”
“Did she say where she was calling from?”
“No.”
“Thanks. Keep in touch if you hear anything else.”
Eliza’s secret meeting with Irwin was suspicious enough to merit further investigation. Wishing he had eaten something at the wake, Daly got back into his car and drove to Washing Bay. He met her on the way, driving fast, an expression of alarm on her face. She did not appear to have noticed his car. He reversed in a lane and took off after her in a flurry of mud. As he drove in the twilight, the dark blues of the lough reasserted themselves, the pine forests lagging behind. She was following the lough shore, Daly realized, keeping off the main roads.
The idea that she might have something to hide was psychologically disturbing for Daly. She was Hughes’s long-suffering carer, an elderly woman who had devoted herself to her brother’s needs, not someone who organized furtive meetings with Special Branch.
As her brake lights gleamed ahead, something pressed upon a nerve in his subconscious. Her responses had struck him as odd on the night of Hughes’s disappearance. A stillness and silence when he asked about any enemies David might have had. Daly’s hunger was replaced by a gnawing unease.
Her car turned left, and after ten minutes of driving turned left again into a forest. There was only one possible destination, and that was Joseph Devine’s rundown cottage. Daly pulled his car into a passing place and waited for her lights to disappear through the trees. It was a calm moonlit night. In a field, he saw two hares running together. After a few minutes, he took off again, slowly following the road through the forest.
He parked in the shadow of a high plantation of fir trees a short distance from Devine’s cottage. The first thing that struck him as strange was the absence of a patrol car guarding the house. He rang through to the station on his mobile and discovered that Irwin had reassigned the officers to a burglary in Portadown.
The lights were on in Devine’s cottage, and the front door lay slightly open. The night was dark and cold, and the cottage still offered a residual sense of welcome that even the owner’s grim murder had not quite dispelled.
It had rained earlier and the thorn trees dripped heavily as Daly brushed beneath them. He wasn’t looking forward to several hours of cold, wet, stooping surveillance.
Eliza Hughes was briefly silhouetted in the doorway, her hair tied up in a bun, before she scuttled within. He saw her again framed in the front-room window, talking to someone. A few days ago, she had been Hughes’s stricken sister, a detached but recognizable figure. Now she was a woman of intrigue with a hidden life. The upturned collar of her coat and the formal arrangement of her hair made her look efficient, like a woman dressed to carry out a difficult assignment.
Daly watched her head turn to survey the room and then back to continue her conversation. He was amazed he had not noticed this side to her personality before. He felt an overpowering sense of curiosity and was about to walk up to the cottage when the figure of Irwin appeared in the window. Daly heard the detective shout suddenly. Eliza crouched with her arms raised protectively to her head as a horrible clacking sound echoed from inside the house. Irwin stood behind her, waving his arms wildly in the air.
It was no time for chivalry, but Daly did not want to see the woman hurt. He tensed his body and was about to run toward the house, when the motive behind their violent pantomime became apparent. There was a trapped bird in the room, its dark shape swinging between the walls like the shadow cast by an erratic candle flame. Its wings thrashed frantically against the windowpane as Irwin tried to help it escape. But the bird was too frightened. It fluttered its wings through his hair and swung its beak at his face. In the background, Eliza appeared with a broomstick and managed to shove the distressed creature out the opened window. Daly crept back into the hedge, half smiling to himself.
For the next twenty minutes, the two conducted what appeared to be a thorough search of the house, even stripping at the grim wallpaper. Daly watched, waiting for someone else to appear. Nothing made sense to him. He couldn’t imagine Irwin at the helm of a conspiracy with Eliza as an accomplice.
Eventually another figure appeared in the room. A tall, sleek, well-groomed man with a razor-blade smile. Daly wondered where he had been during the search. His presence in the room was like a sudden shift in gravity. It appeared to galvanize the efforts of Irwin and Eliza Hughes. They proceeded with more haste throughout the house, emptying shelves, pulling out boxes, upending furniture.
Watching the growing desperation of their search, Daly had a hunch that whatever they were looking for was already gone. The secret life of Joseph Devine was entangling more and more people. His mind flashed back to the black BMW that had followed him from Mitchell’s house, and the note pinned to his door. It was more than an attempt at intimidation. We can follow you and we don’t care if you see us, the note seemed to suggest. But behind it, he also sensed a growing agitation as his investigation dug deeper into Devine’s past and the connections with David Hughes became evident. Perhaps they were trying to distract him from something.
He walked back to his car. He had gained an advantage over Irwin, and he wanted to make sure he made the most of it.
It rained heavily throughout the night. The next morning, Daly’s car sped along the lough-shore roads on white wings of spray. His eyes took in the flooded scenery of the countryside, the huddled gables of outhouses, wet ribbons of water forming in the fields, and cattle sinking up to their knees, but his mind was elsewhere.