Silence (13 page)

He stared at the flames but all he could see was a tangled mass of memories floating before his eyes. He got up from his armchair and walked around the cottage, turning at every sound: the creaking of the floorboards; the shifting of the glass panes as the wind picked up. He needed someone to talk to but could think of no one to phone. He tried to do some housework, put away the dishes, empty the laundry basket and sort out the rubbish, but anxiety gradually consumed him. He knocked back another whiskey, too soon after the first. He raised his hand to the flickering light of the fire and stared at his outstretched fingers and their shadows, almost disbelieving they were his own. This was more than loneliness, he realized; this was something more primitive and unsettling. His ears were crammed with a ringing silence. He felt a sudden need to verify his existence by saying something, but he was more afraid of the silence that would follow his words.

He folded his hands. The thought of praying to God crossed his mind, but what deeper void would his half-remembered prayers plumb? he wondered. He needed a point of focus, a guide, something to hold in his hands and anchor him to reality. He went out to the porch windowsill and lifted the black hen that was roosting there. He cradled her in his hands and took her inside to the fire. He stuffed the turf box with loose bits of paper and let the hen nest there. He sat in his armchair for a long while, listening to her ruffle her feathers and cluck as she settled to sleep. By the time the last glowing ember had gone out and the ashes were turning cold, he had fallen asleep.

Daly didn’t speak to anyone the next morning at police headquarters. He had the strange feeling that he was out of kilter with the rest of his colleagues, ahead even of himself, thinking thoughts and planning actions that did not correspond to any rational or familiar model of detective work. Why had he gone to the hotel with Pryce and why had he told her so much about his past? Was she an escape route through the invisible barricades he felt were hemming in his normal detective’s life?

A younger female colleague told him he looked worn out and chided him for his late nights. She brought him a coffee and a bun, but the gesture failed to lift his mood or give him any satisfaction. He was frustrated to see that there were no significant updates on the crash-scene investigation. He flicked through the reports, pausing at the photographs of Walsh’s awkwardly positioned body. What he knew about the dead priest’s research hinted at a deeper set of facts beyond the surface layer: the police checkpoint in the dark, the rearranged traffic cones, the collision of metal and wood, the braid of religious effects in a dying man’s grip.

His mother’s death had been covered up, so why not Walsh’s, too? He remembered the smugness of Irwin’s expression as he stood over the corpse. Once you began to suspect a police conspiracy, all the details eventually collapsed into a jumble of paranoia and doubt.

He dug deeper into the paperwork, the careful ordering of the facts surrounding a man’s last moments, trying to define the shape of what lay beyond them. He tried to reason with his suspicions and accept Irwin’s clear-cut explanation. However, it was impossible to halt the march of his black doubts. He worked backwards through the sequence of events from the moment of collision to the point where Walsh had pulled up at the checkpoint. He was surrounded by fragments rather than a coherent whole: the winking light of the policeman’s torch, the blue overalls of his colleagues, the snub noses of their guns, Walsh’s frightened response, the lure of the traffic cones and the vortex ahead. What lay concealed beneath the report that might link Walsh’s death with his mother’s and the other murder triangle victims?

He fetched himself another cup of coffee and went back to his desk. He flicked through his emails and was surprised to see several from the Human Resources Department outlining how much time he was entitled to take off for bereavements. How odd, he thought. He hadn’t lost anyone since his father had died four years previously. Were they referring to his mother’s murder? He wondered what garbled message had come through from his police chiefs.

The truth was he had too much to do, too many pressing questions to answer before he could even consider taking some time off work. He needed more information to illuminate the past, the deaths in Walsh’s murder triangle. It was time he investigated the links that Walsh had claimed existed, and the best place to do that was in the new archive building, where he hoped to find details of all the police investigations from the 1970s.

It was his first time visiting the archive section, and what he found there angered him. The officer in charge of the files told him he needed written permission from Special Branch for any historical enquiries.

‘This isn’t historical,’ replied Daly. ‘It’s related to a live investigation.’

The officer avoided eye contact. Was it his imagination or did he detect a slight horror mingled with something like a look of pity in his response to Daly’s request? Perhaps he had heard the story of Daly’s mother from colleagues, and wanted no part in his futile search for the truth, the inverted paranoia of a middle-aged detective investigating his own police force.

‘Very well, then.’ He removed a set of keys and led Daly down a back stairwell.

He was expecting a state-of-the-art filing and retrieval system, something suited to the new headquarters’ grand ambitions, a luminous sanctuary of carefully ordered files, and so was unprepared for the sight that greeted him in the basement rooms. The first thing he noticed was a musty, mildewed smell at odds with the clean, well-ventilated air in the rest of the building. And then the eerie silence. He had the feeling he was entering a world he had ignored his entire adult life. A forgotten world full of shadows. He followed the archive officer into an underground hall filled with aisles of metal shelving that were loaded with untidy stacks of boxes, files spilling haphazardly. He picked up a folder at random. It was an investigation into an illicit alcohol distillery, dated March 1951. The one underneath was about a hit-and-run accident in Dungannon from 1986.

The officer waved a hand at a far corner in the room.

‘The ones you’re looking for might be over there. That’s where all the old files from Armagh went.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ said Daly. ‘Surely there must be some way of locating the files I want.’

‘Not until the IT people come and digitize them. They were neatly ordered in the old police stations, but the removal company just dumped them here on top of each other.’

‘But this is total chaos. How are we meant to find anything?’

The officer shrugged.

‘There are files here dating from the 1930s. Even if you sort through them all, there’s no guarantee you’ll find what you want. Many of them went missing or were never returned by the case detectives when they retired.’

Could the past stay hidden forever? Daly wondered. In a place like this, it might.

‘This will have to be fixed,’ he said. ‘There should be a complete and ordered archive of every investigation going back to the beginning of the Troubles.’

‘To do that we’d have to hunt through every attic and garage in the country. This is the past we’re talking about. It was a different era of policing altogether. What sort of order do you expect to find in those dark days? The IRA were rampant, blowing up police stations and murdering officers. How do you impose order on mayhem like that?’ He handed Daly the keys. ‘Drop them back in the office when you’re finished,’ he said brusquely. ‘If you’re planning on staying late, you can hold on to them until the morning.’

Daly began working where the officer had suggested. He was furious at the state of the place. Many of the files weren’t even typed, which made his search even more difficult. Some of them had the air of discarded schoolbooks, filled with untidy writing. A sense of desperation descended. He searched for several hours like a blind person shuffling on a ledge, with nothing to guide or give him bearings but his hands sorting inch by inch through the dusty boxes. He lost confidence in his method. He needed someone like Donaldson with him, to help light the way.

After a while, he began moving at random through the shelves, opening boxes and appraising their contents. Somewhere, lost amid the shelves, the details of his mother’s murder might lie. He moved between countless boxes, placing his hands briefly upon them, as though he might feel the living past squirm within. He carried on for another hour, but failed to locate any of the files linked to Walsh’s murder triangle.

At one point, he caught an echo of someone calling his name. He passed back through the aisles of shelves, listening to the near silence. He could hear the faint sounds of footsteps on the floor above, and voices echoing down the stairwell. He felt as though he’d found the dark and hollow core at the heart of the building. He heard the voice call his name again, a woman’s voice, sharp and urgent, but somehow muffled.

He wanted to shout back –
I’m here
– but when he looked up the stairwell no one was there. Layers of echoes drifted down, different voices talking, but he couldn’t make out any of the words. The voice calling his name had sounded like a summons from the past. He shivered. He was aware that he was surrounded by the records of thousands of crimes, many of them trifling, but a sizable number involving violent and cruel acts. The building was too new to be haunted by the ghosts of the dead and wronged, he thought. Was it his imagination or could he still hear the voice, repeating his name, only plaintive now? The closer he moved towards it, the more it seemed to recede. Perhaps he was overtired and simply hearing things.

He came across a small door that he hadn’t seen before. The muffled voice seemed to be emanating from the other side. He hesitated and then opened the door. To his surprise, he walked into an even larger room that was completely empty. A row of ground-level windows filtered light across the floor. The voice stopped calling his name. The emptiness and scale of the room disturbed Daly, the freshly painted walls, and the smooth concrete of the floor. So overwrought were his thoughts that he imagined a black sea of shadows surging towards him from the opposite side of the room. He could see it so clearly, soundless, looming higher and higher, occupying his entire vision, spilling towards him like an inky-black waterfall. The depths of the darkness made him instinctively raise his hands and close his eyes, but when he opened them, the room was empty again.

It wasn’t until much later in the day that elements of the puzzle began to fall into place for Celcius Daly. A pattern emerged from the chaos of the past. However, the discovery gave him no sense of reassurance or satisfaction. It occurred unexpectedly, in the one place he thought he was safe from the shadows of the Troubles.

He returned to his cottage late that evening, upset that he had made no significant progress in the case, despite his best attempts. He was convinced that the investigation into Walsh’s crash should start back in the early months of 1979. That was the key, he thought, the time when both his mother and Walsh were alive. However, the day was almost over, and there was nothing more he could do. He sank into an armchair, exhausted.

In his mind, he tried to step back from all the facts of the case, like a soldier retreating in no man’s land, but a sense of restlessness remained. What he needed was a sanctuary for his thoughts. He got out an old portable radio and searched for something classical, a melody to heal the sense of brokenness that haunted him. He tuned into one of Schubert’s string quintets. He closed his eyes and nodded his head to the music. For a few minutes, he drifted off. He woke up with a start, his mind clear and alert. It occurred to him that there was still something he could do, a task that he should have completed a long time ago.

He grabbed the radio and hauled himself up a plank stepladder into the attic. It was time he sorted through his father’s old chest of drawers and the rest of his boxes. Since his death, Daly had refused to go into the dusty corners of the cottage and rummage through his father’s things because of his aversion to nostalgia, but his attitude had grown less sentimental, more curious. Perhaps he might even find a happier glimpse of his childhood, from the time before his mother’s death, something to sustain him amid all these revelations of the past.

The drawers of the chest were stiff and unyielding. They were loyal accomplices to his father’s secrets, resisting his attempts to open them. He inserted his hand under the bottom drawer and, finding the cavity behind it, forced it open with a grunt. He worked his way through the other drawers in the same manner until he found what he was looking for. An object wrapped in a piece of white muslin. Carefully, he unwound the fabric until he was holding it in his hands. The precious family bible. It had a dead weight, as though its pages contained years of layered sadness.

He carried the bible down the steps and placed it on the kitchen table. He stared at it for a while. He opened the cover and detected the faint scent of lilies and funeral flowers that had lingered from his father’s wake. The bible had sat next to the coffin for three days, accompanied by a candle, a crucifix and a bottle of holy water. Daly remembered the nocturnal rosaries and the paralysing wait for dawn, slipping outside to smoke in the dark of the porch, the slow ordeal of wringing out one’s grief in the company of neighbours and his father’s friends, while glancing surreptitiously at the kitchen clock and wondering had all the timepieces in the house come to a standstill. In all that time, he had not once opened the bible, refusing to seek consolation in any of its passages.

He flicked through the first pages. In the fading light from the cottage window, they had a luminous quality. The first leaf contained a family history of the Dalys, starting in the mid 1800s and ending with the date of his mother’s death: 2 April 1979. It occurred to him that he should have added his father’s death to the list. He sighed. He was only just beginning to realize that a substantial part of his father had died with his mother. The old man had been restless and depressed during the later years of his life.