“Inspector, you should know that people die in road accidents all the time. You’ve been spending too much time dabbling in the world of spies. Now you’re beginning to think like one. Forget your conspiracy theories. The hit-and-run was just the final twist in his tragic life. An inescapable twist.”
A
s Daly approached Joseph Devine’s cottage, a stray black dog lurched up to him as if it had a secret to divulge. It was almost twilight and a vibrating veil of midges hung in the air. Daly ruffled the dog’s itching neck. He opened the front door and paused for a second, staring into the gloom. If anyone had been there since his last visit, they had left no sign or trace. He stepped inside. The wind followed behind, sending a few dead leaves and scraps of paper scuttling across the dirty floor. He was instantly aware of the cold inside, and the smell of dust, and something sharper. Old ashes, old sweat, the smell of an elderly man and the inevitable damp that crept indoors during a lough-shore winter.
He picked up one of the scraps of paper. A torn piece of old newspaper. Nothing more. He looked through the cupboards and a wardrobe in the bedroom. Devine had been a man of rough comforts. In the drawers, he found a folded pile of linen, washed well beyond softness.
Daly sat down on a dirty leather chair as the dog prowled about outside. He felt the sides of the chair, looking for he knew not what. He found nothing at all, and paused, sinking back into the chair. Devine must have made contact with someone in the days before his death, an old enemy, a still-grieving relative, a former colleague….
The dog was whining and scratching at the door. The house had been searched several times but no one had found a safe or strongbox. This perplexed Daly. He thought that a suspicious man like Devine must have had a secure place to hide his most important belongings.
In a cardboard box, he came across several theology books. Perhaps there had been a religious dimension to Devine he had not noticed before. Daly thumbed through them, noting the passages Devine had underlined. The dead informer appeared to have read only the first few chapters of each book. There was plenty of evidence that he had been undergoing a spiritual crisis and frantically searching for answers, but it was a skittering, heedless search with only enough momentum to carry him through the first twenty pages or so of each book. He weighed the books in his hands. They represented the high-tide mark of a very private terror. The idea that Devine had undergone a spiritual crisis sparked Daly’s interest. He made a note of some of the quotations Devine had underlined. Later he would find Father Fee and ask him to explain them. Or perhaps he should simply forget about them. After all, they had more relevance to his own curiosity than to the murder investigation.
He still had religion on his mind when he walked out to where the dog was prowling. The wind had picked up, and he could hear the washing of waves at the dilapidated jetty where Devine had moored his boat. The dog set off in the direction of the lough, and Daly followed behind.
There is nothing worse than a long, drawn-out wait for something to happen, thought Daly. Whether it’s waiting for the results of some tests from a doctor or the executioner’s ax to fall. Daly supposed that retirement had become a private hell for Devine, a state of suspense that finally sweated him into informing on himself. It was thoughtful of Special Branch to assign him the task of monitoring Hughes. Like getting a prisoner to eavesdrop on the agony of a tortured inmate in the cell next door. Watching Hughes struggle with his guilty conscience, as Alzheimer’s systematically dismantled his personality, must have had a profoundly unsettling effect on Devine’s own state of mind.
The water surged against the jetty, creating a wash that left the tethered rowing boat heaving like a frightened animal. Past the slipway sat a small boathouse half-hidden in a thicket of alder and willow. The setting looked familiar. He recalled the photograph of the duck-hunting club and realized he was standing close to where the photo had been taken.
The door to the boathouse refused to budge. Daly kicked it with his boot, and it flew open. A bird flapped noisily in the bushes nearby. Daly hunched inside and looked around carefully. The interior of the shed looked smaller than he had expected. Disappointingly, it was empty. He was about to leave when something caught his attention. A small nut and bolt was attached to the back wall of the shed. He walked around to the outside of the shed, roughly measuring its dimensions. After checking and double-checking, he reckoned the length of the shed on the outside was about two feet longer than the inside.
He retrieved a wrench from the boot of his car and used it to remove the nut and bolt. A plywood section freed itself and slid up against the roof, revealing a hidden compartment. In a suitcase he found a pile of neatly folded clothes, an old RUC uniform, a set of blue overalls, a battery, an alarm clock, and bundles of old newspaper clippings like the ones he had found in the hedge at Hughes’s farm. The overall effect of the cache was extremely unsettling, as if his entire investigation had been based on an elaborate hoax.
He took out a pen and picked through the clues, trying to extract from them an inevitable order, a final arrangement. He wondered whether the objects were genuine items of evidence linked to the crimes outlined in the newspaper clippings.
From the pile of clothes, it looked as though Devine had dressed himself up as the ghosts that haunted Hughes at his farm. Had the informer spent the last few weeks of his life tormenting a confused old man? Daly shook his head. It seemed more sinister than a practical joke. However, Devine did not appear to have been the type of person given to practicing cruel japes. Later that night, reading over Hughes’s journals again Daly became convinced that Devine had dressed up in the uniforms for one purpose only—to extract information from Hughes.
Had Devine approached the old man in person, Special Branch would have been alerted immediately. But by dressing up as a ghost he had counted on the fact that no one would bother to investigate their meetings. Special Branch had already taken Hughes’s stories of ghostly intruders as proof he was beginning to lose his mind. It was the perfect setup for Devine to pry into the old man’s mind without fear of capture.
T
he black hedges around his father’s farm were heavy with the foaming branches of whitethorn blossom. Daly stared at them with a profoundly unsatisfactory sense of time hurrying by. It was March already. His eyes were distracted by the surges of brilliant white flowers lit up in the morning sun. The narrow fields around his father’s farm seemed to swell and shimmer, reconfigured into softer, more mystical dimensions.
Patience, he thought. It’s been a long winter. He drew a deep breath and looked down at the sink. His mind was heavy with thoughts of Dermot and Devine’s subterfuge. He looked back at the whitethorn-bounded fields, and a line from a Patrick Kavanagh poem floated into his mind. Something about not growing old unless he walked outside his whitethorn hedges. He hoped that within the vigorously flowering hedgerows there might be space for a tired mind to grow again.
He felt a tension in his shoulders as he drove up the lane to Tessa Jordan’s caravan. The worried clucking of a flock of hens greeted him as he stepped out of the car. The sweet stench of rotting manure hung heavily in the air.
Pots of herbs and flowers were arranged by the caravan door. A sign that her temporary living arrangement was gaining a more permanent footing. The farm looked deserted. He paused only long enough to check the caravan was empty too.
A car pulled up alongside his, and Tessa Jordan climbed out.
“I don’t know what gives you the right to walk around my sister’s property when there’s no one here!” she shouted. Her voice was indignant. “Aren’t you supposed to have a search warrant?”
“I was just about to leave,” explained Daly, feeling his temper flare.
“You haven’t answered my question. What are you doing here if you haven’t a search warrant?”
“I just want to find out where Dermot is.”
However, Tessa Jordan did not seem to hear him.
“How long have you been here? Are you spying on me?”
“I haven’t been spying on you. I just have some questions to ask, and then I’ll be on my way.”
“You’d better come in, then,” she said grudgingly.
Daly stood in the cramped caravan. “I was with Dermot when we found out why your husband was killed. I took him to Mitchell’s house. I feel a responsibility towards the boy, and I need your help. This is too serious.”
She sat down. Something inside her had collapsed.
“He seemed so contented recently,” she said. “I had almost stopped worrying about him. I never thought he would run away like this. It’s like his father’s disappearance all over again. This morning I stood at the sink and said the Rosary over and over again. It was all I could do to keep myself sane.”
Unwilling to test himself against her eyes, Daly studied her lips. There was a disturbingly tremulous jut to the lower one. He felt his defenses break.
“Nobody has kidnapped Dermot. He can still be rescued from danger.”
“I’ve heard policemen make those promises before. They’re worn out. I can’t lose Dermot as well.”
Daly heaved a patient sigh. He had not been trained as a family therapist. They had never told him he would be dragged so often into the internecine war of emotions families waged upon themselves. He longed for the simple life of catching bad guys and saving the good ones. Sometimes the questions he had to ask of relatives felt like minor acts of war.
“Is Dermot seeking some kind of revenge?”
Her eyes blazed at him. “For what the security forces and Republicans did to his father? If he was like that, you would have been the first to find out.”
“I need to know if he is capable of violence.”
“There’s violence in all of us.”
“Let me reframe the question. Would he break the law and harm another human being?”
“I don’t think he’s concerned with the law in this country. For that matter, neither am I.”
“But the law is concerned with your son.”
“Why? Dermot hasn’t committed a crime. The only crime I can see is the one committed against his father by people like you.”
He was losing her again. He felt her recede into the simplistic perspective of the past, the black-and-white world of the Troubles, with victims pitted against perpetrators and the security forces, and grieving widows embattled on all sides.
Daly tried to control the edge in his voice. “We need to find Dermot because he has some form of control over David Hughes. We suspect he was the man who handled the agents responsible for your husband’s death.” He paused before continuing. “We also need to assure ourselves that nothing bad has happened to Dermot.”
Tessa was quiet. The momentum of her anger had dissipated. A vagueness clouded her features. Her every move reflected an intense desire to not betray her son. Daly watched as her eyes fixed upon him.
“What do you want to know?” Her attempt at helpful compliance was unexpected.
“What vehicle is Dermot driving?”
“His uncle’s jeep. The registration is KBZ 1648.”
“Does he have any other relatives he might call on?”
“No.”
Daly stared hard at her. He had the impression that he was looking into a mirror that had once been transparent glass. There was no sign of the Tessa Jordan he had known, only an ugly sense of his plodding pursuit of the truth.
“When was the last time you saw Dermot?”
“Two mornings ago. He left very early. Before dawn.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No. I didn’t know he was leaving.” She sounded evasive. “My sister heard him leave.”
“He must have planned this through carefully. Let’s think about it. What is he hoping to achieve?”
“Perhaps he’s scared and in hiding.”
“Possibly. What did you think when he didn’t return?”
“No news is good news with Dermot.”
She was talking calmly, matter-of-factly, which he found the opposite of reassuring. The lack of concern in her voice, its lightness, after the earlier drama, posed too sharp a question for him to ignore. He looked about the caravan. It was clutter free, the shelves and cupboards tidy and ordered. Someone with a composed mind had been working hard.
“It would take months to tell you all the escapades Dermot has hatched over the years,” said Tessa. “Frankly they’re not months I would care to spend, even in your company.”
He nodded as she continued speaking, wary at her demeanor, sensing that somehow she knew her son was safe. A coolness flowed from her that suggested a mind at ease with itself.
“What I need to know is whether or not he’s planning to harm anyone,” he said abruptly.
There was silence. Nothing happened to her eyes. Nothing happened to her face.
“When he was a child he used to burn insects,” she said eventually. “Then he moved on to setting cats’ tails alight. He seemed to smell of smoke all the time. The psychologist said it was an avoidance mechanism. What he really wanted to hurt were the people responsible for his father’s disappearance.”
Daly surveyed the caravan again. “This place could go up like a matchbox.” There was an unpleasant frost to his voice. “Aren’t you frightened he might set you alight, because of his ‘avoidance mechanism’?”
Something in her fed on his coldness and rose up in defense of her only son.
“That’s a ridiculous and cruel thing to say. I can still tell you to leave. You haven’t a search warrant, and I’m not under arrest.”
“If you were really worried about where your son is, you wouldn’t even consider asking me to leave.”
“What are you trying to suggest?”
“That you know where Dermot is, or at least he’s been in contact with you recently.”
“I’ve told you all I know.” She rose imperiously. “Are you finished now?”
“No,” he replied. “You have to do one thing for me.”
She considered it for a moment. “What is it?”
“Dermot’s going to call you and ask if I’ve been here.”