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.
I
rwin 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.
P
ulling 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 Daly.
“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.”
“You were worried he might divulge some dangerous secrets.”
“I won’t lie to you. He held damaging information about how Special Branch ran its operations. We asked his sister to monitor his conversations, check his movements, keep a lid on him generally.”
Daly thought, When people tell me they’re not going to lie, what follows seldom sounds very convincing.
“How about this for a theory? Special Branch were worried that Hughes might compromise a higher-placed informer in the IRA. A senior politician, for instance? Who else did you send to monitor him? You must have taken more precautions.”
“We had an arrangement with some former operatives. Some of them wanted to mount their own surveillance. Hughes was their worst nightmare come back to haunt them.”
“I take it one of them was Joseph Devine.”
Fealty nodded. “The irony was not lost on us. Devine was the perfect candidate for that kind of surveillance. He had similar interests as Hughes. For the last six months he had been spying on the man who once recruited him.”
“But there were others. More than Devine. I get the feeling you are supplying me with just enough information to satisfy my curiosity.”
“If there were, they are of no interest to your investigation.”
“Not if they were witnesses to a crime or know of Hughes’s whereabouts.”
“You keep trying to fit Devine’s murder with Hughes’s disappearance. As though the two are part of one jigsaw. You’re wrong. You’ll never make them fit together. They belong to two different puzzles.”
“According to his priest, Devine was cracking up. He believes Devine confessed his crimes to the relatives of one of his victims, and this led to his death.” Daly watched Fealty carefully for a flicker of interest, but the Special Branch man looked nonplussed.
“That didn’t give you the fright I thought it would.”
“Our main worry is finding David Hughes. Devine is dead. And dead men don’t talk. Until we find Hughes we’re prepared to turn a blind eye towards Devine’s killers, whoever they were.”
“What about the rule of law? Are you blind to that as well?”
Fealty had recovered his former vigor and stared resolutely at Daly. A slight frown was the only clue to his earlier anxiety.
“There’s only so much law and justice a society like this can take. People have to get used to those lofty concepts first.”
“Is that why Special Branch administers them in such miserly doses?”
“We’re all striving towards a more just state.”
“But what are we doing right now if it’s not just? Either we uphold the law to the letter, or we’re no better than the criminals and terrorists we’re meant to police.”
Somewhere a door opened. A bunch of trainee officers filed out of a room. The sound of their walking and talking filled the corridor. Daly waited for Fealty to reply, but he remained silent.
“That’s all for now,” he said after the young officers had trooped past.
“And there was me thinking we were making progress,” remarked Daly.
Fealty, walking away, turned back briefly. “That’s right. We were. But you’re not going to disentangle Hughes’s past in a single conversation. The same goes for Devine. Finding out the truth is a long and complex process. There are no shortcuts for policemen anymore.”
“What about Noel Bingham? Was he another loose end?”
“What about him? He was a drunk. Killed in a hit-and-run.”
“The driver made sure he got his man.”