Even though it was six months since he had separated from his wife, the loneliness he felt on awakening on nights like these still surprised him. The clock’s dim face was the only light in the room—3:50, it read. The bars had long closed and most revelers would have made their way home by now, he thought. A domestic row had ended badly or a drunken street brawl had spilled over into something more violent. Either way, he could expect a dawn of gastric terror. At least he had not slept long enough to feel the jagged impact of a hangover.
He climbed out of bed and listened to the receiver.
“Hello, what is it?”
“I hope I haven’t disturbed you, sir,” said the voice.
“No, not at all,” he replied with a sigh, staring again at the numbers he had scribbled down. For a brief second, he felt cheated. What had it cost him over the years to answer such calls in the night? He thought ruefully of his wife and their impending divorce, and it struck him that a happy marriage was worth more than several fortunes.
“Something unusual has come up.”
“Anyone dead?”
“No, no one at all. An old woman rang from Washing Bay. Someone broke into her home by forcing the back door.”
“A burglary?”
“No. Some clothes and medication were missing but that wasn’t why she was ringing.”
“She wants us to help her fill out the insurance form?” asked Daly, a note of irritation creeping into his voice. Why had the recruit bothered him with a botched burglary?
“She was on the verge of being hysterical. I tried to calm her down. She claimed the burglars kidnapped her elderly brother. A man called David Hughes.”
Daly paused. “What? Did they leave a ransom note?”
“She didn’t say. But she sounded terrified. Her brother is sick. He has Alzheimer’s. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Any chance he just wandered off while going to the toilet?” asked Daly with exasperation. Unfortunately, they didn’t teach police officers common sense at training college.
“She claimed he couldn’t have got out on his own.”
“OK. Tell your colleagues to wait for me outside the cottage. We’ll form a search party. Who knows? Maybe the old man has fallen asleep somewhere. Let’s hope he hasn’t gone too far.”
Daly pulled on some clothes. His mouth was dry and he felt the beginnings of a headache. He had overdone it with the whiskey, he realized as he searched for his rolled-up socks. A glance at the murky reflection in the window was all he wished to see of his appearance.
His father’s cottage sat on the southern shore of Lough Neagh. During the winter, the landscape resembled a mini-tundra, filled with migrating arctic geese. The moon had disappeared while he had slept, and he peered blankly through the small window.
The lough was at its darkest and fullest on these early February mornings. The fields and bog land that ran down to the shore were dark too, impossible to read without the guidance of hedges and lanes, and slashed with bog holes deep enough to sink a man right up to the waist. It was a patchwork of life and death that had to be negotiated carefully, even by the young and healthy. At least the weather had been dry, he thought. He hoped the rivers would hold this winter. Only six months earlier, a rainstorm had flooded the lough shore countryside and stranded him at his father’s wake. The Blackwater River had burst its banks and swamped the lane to the cottage. The parish church, which lay half a mile away, was cut off completely, rising out of the water on a little island of green.
It was a long wake, even by Irish standards. Through the tiny windows of an upstairs bedroom, the mourners watched the low sky soak up the gloom. When it stopped raining, a strange quietness fell across everything. It wasn’t until the following morning when the sun burst through the clouds that the waters receded.
The relief felt by the trapped mourners was palpable as the hearse took off down a lane lined with glinting green holly. Daly accompanied his relatives and former neighbors in the snaking cortege. The wet road in front of the hearse shone like the brightest place on earth. Someone cracked a joke about his father’s old car, which had floated out of the yard and ended up in a ruined haystack. Daly remembered how his dad used to rev the guts out of its engine before setting off every morning to Mass.
He forced his feet into a pair of Wellington boots and climbed into his car. At four a.m., the winter darkness beyond the windscreen was all-embracing, a dead-end in the night. He drove along the lough shore until he reached the Bannfoot and then turned left for the motorway. He glanced in his rearview mirror. Not a car in sight. At the roundabout, he turned the heating down and tried to find a weather report on the radio. A husky-voiced DJ was speaking in Irish and playing tracks of Motown music from the 1960s. Fugitive memories of dancing at parish discos scurried along the fringes of his consciousness.
He rolled the window down a fraction to clear his head, and headed west. The old man must have wandered off and fallen into a ditch, he thought. It was probably a journey he had made countless times in the past—an easy scramble over the familiar folds of his fields during daylight, and in full control of his faculties.
He passed a carload of youths. A boy leaned out of the passenger window and made obscene signals at the detective. He was obviously drunk. Daly overtook the car and tried to focus on the task at hand. It would be a small search party, unless they were able to call upon neighbors. He had organized many search parties during his twenty-year career and knew it was common for the missing person’s body to be pulled out of a river or lake several days into the search. He hoped they weren’t too late, or that at least the protective cloak of senility had prevented the old man from experiencing too much terror.
Daly was surprised by the farmhouse’s remote location. If his relatives had lived there, he would have moved them at the first sign of illness into a neighboring village. His headlights lit up a grass-covered lane that didn’t look as though it had been used too often. A foot-and-mouth sign saying essential visitors only flashed its warning at them. He drove on; the last outbreak had happened more than three years previously.
D
aly swept his car into a yard at the back of the farmhouse. An attempt had been made to cordon off the small fields, but the restless winds and the trampling of hungry animals had opened up gaps in the fencing. In places, the ground had turned into a muddy quagmire.
It wasn’t difficult to read the signs of infirmity in the untidiness of the yard filled with rusting machinery, the embrace of brambles and weeds throughout the garden, and the fields half lost to thickets of blackthorn. Paint was peeling from the walls and a few tiles had fallen from the roof. It was the same loss of interest and descent into chaos that marked his father’s cottage. The lough-shore countryside was full of decomposing houses like these, tucked away amid the gloom of thorn and elder hedges.
A mushroomy smell vied with the oversweet scent of rotten damsons as Daly climbed out of his car. He was confronted by a gaunt woman in her sixties, wearing a voluminous dressing robe. Even in the dark with the wind blowing Eliza Hughes’s gray hair across her face, the fear could still be seen shining in her eyes. At first Daly thought she might be deranged, but when she started speaking, her voice was sharp and clear.
“I’ve checked the outhouses and the fields. There’s no sign anywhere. It’s no use, he’s long gone.”
She brought Daly into the house and, flourishing a key, unlocked the door into the missing man’s bedroom. It reminded Daly more of an interrogation room than a bedroom, with its bare walls devoid of photos or decoration, the tiny window and the bright shadeless bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. In the center of the room was a bed with security bars and a pressure mat laid out on the floor. On a small dressing table, a candle had burned out with a pile of paper ashes stuffed around the wick. Something about the candle struck him as odd, but he could not quite place what it was.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I put David to bed at the usual time, raised the bars, and switched on the pressure mat. It should have triggered an alarm if he slid out.”
“And it was switched on?”
She nodded.
“Your brother is an ill man?” asked Daly surveying the room.
“He has dementia. Some days he doesn’t even remember where he is and confuses me with our mother. I’ve asked for more help but you know what social services are like. Anyway, David would never have coped with life in a nursing home.”
Daly checked the back door and saw that it had been splintered with a crowbar. It was reasonable to conclude that burglars had indeed entered the property. He took Eliza by the arm and sat her at the kitchen table.
“It appears that your house has been burgled, Miss Hughes. Have you checked your valuables?”
“There’s nothing of any worth here. All they took was his medication and clothing,” she replied.
“There is also the possibility that your brother woke up in a confused state and simply walked out after the burglars, whoever they were,” suggested Daly.
She got up and busied herself making tea. “They’ve taken him away. They’ve been watching us for weeks.”
“Who?”
“I have no idea. But there was a storm one night last week. A cow broke loose and went on the rampage, tearing up the back garden and knocking over pots. I chased it back up the field and phoned its owner.”
She handed Daly a weak cup of tea.
“While I was up there I found a hole had been cut in the hedge. There were cigarette stubs and footprints in the ground. Ever since then I’ve felt there was someone out in the dark who shouldn’t be there.”
“Do you have anything of value in the house?”
“Nothing beyond what’s sentimental. My brother spent his life going to church, tending his farm, and hunting ducks in the winter. He treated his fields as God’s allotment. Work was its own reward.”
Daly nodded but thought of all the bachelor farmers who had died leaving a small fortune squirreled away in their mattresses.
“If your brother was taken away against his will, surely he would have made some noise or struggle?”
She looked at him blankly. “Unless he was unconscious.”
“Can you think of anyone who might want to do something like this to an old man?”
“No. David kept on good terms with everyone. Before he took ill.”
Daly surveyed the sparse bedroom again. Old age had few comforts or pleasant surprises. Perhaps the old man was terrified of illness and death and had done a bunk. Daly thought of all the times he wouldn’t have minded dropping out of his own life, at least for a while.
He left Eliza in the kitchen and walked out into the darkness. In the low huddle of outhouses, the beam of his torch picked out rusty chunks of machinery, an overturned rowing boat and farming bric-a-brac. A basket of seed potatoes emptied itself of a colony of mice, and the sinister black eyes of what was probably a rat gleamed at him from the shadows. The smell of turpentine lingered in the air. He found nothing that would help in the search for the missing man.
In the yard, he bumped into Officers Harland and Robertson, who had been checking the fields around the house.
“Nothing to report so far, sir,” said Harland.
“Phone the neighbors and let them know that David Hughes is missing,” said Daly. “Ask if they’ve seen or heard anything. And get them to check their outhouses. It’s a cold night. If he’s out there, he’s bound to seek shelter somewhere.”
Daly thought that if they didn’t find him in the next hour, he would have to bring in tracker dogs and a helicopter to sweep the countryside. Using his torch, he examined the thorn hedge bordering the back garden. His alert eye discovered a gap in the thick branches where the wind blew through unconstrained. He spotted where the branches had been neatly sawn off, the pattern of rings still clear. The gap gave an interrupted line of sight to the cottage’s kitchen door.
When he returned to the farmhouse, Eliza Hughes’s silhouette was framed in the kitchen window, unmoving. Daly felt spurred to a greater urgency and strode off with his flashlight across the undulating farmland, his feet slipping and sliding into icy mud holes. The moon came out, and its light streaming through the trees was so blue and cold Daly could almost taste it in the air.
His ankle twisted in a hidden ditch, propelling him face first into a blackthorn hedge. He ducked to avoid a jagged branch, and for a second he caught the glint of something in the light of his torch. A pattern of frozen water drops fell from the higher branches and something white briefly hung in front of him before disappearing. He listened intently to a fluttering sound in the swaying trees. Something was caught among the branches. Whatever it was, there was no hint of the old man or his presumed captors. He felt like a dog hunting a scent that had grown cold.
He heaved himself further into the thicket of thorns, and grunted in surprise when he uncovered a secret hollow. What looked like a pair of clown’s hands, yellow and enlarged, waved at him. He leaned back in shock, fumbling for his torch. In the beam of its light, he saw that someone had propped a pair of Marigold gloves on a set of twigs. For the first time since arriving at the farmhouse, he felt unnerved. Collecting his wits, he examined the rest of the hedge, finding further objects suspended from branches—an alarm clock, an old battery, bags of nails and wire. His torch scanned the ground and lit up a row of faintly discernible mounds. He knelt down and propped his flashlight against a stone. He wondered, Could they really be what he thought they were? Then he saw the crude crosses at the top of each mound with lettering etched in them. A set of names and dates had been inscribed: oliver jordan d. 1989, brian and alice mckearney d. 1984, patrick o’dowd, d. 1985.
The mounds were small, more like a child’s attempt at a play cemetery than a proper memorial. He dug at each of them with his bare hands, unearthing nothing but rotting leaves and mud. He felt a curtain shift momentarily, revealing the sinister tableau of a troubled mind. Looking up he saw old newspaper cuttings spiked on thorns, like prayers to a pagan god. Most were shredded by the wind and wet through. He pulled one down. It was an old clipping of a news report about an unexploded bomb. Another clipping described an explosion that had killed a six-year-old girl and a nun.