Silence (15 page)

He bumped into Irwin.

‘You’re looking for Donaldson,’ he said, pointing a warning finger at him.

‘How do you know?’

‘I can see it in your face.’

‘Did Donaldson send you?’

‘No.’

Irwin walked away.

‘You’ll not track him down that easily. He’s back to his old tricks, busy finding places to hide.’ Irwin’s voice echoed along the corridor.

‘Hide from what?’

‘The past. Don’t you know? It’s the new front line.’

Daly left and clambered into his car. The headquarters hung at the edge of his vision. He looked across and saw that a team of builders were busy working on a new block of offices. His gall rose at the never-ending construction work. More corridors for people like Donaldson to pad with their unfathomable secrets. It was almost comic, the way the offices sprang up and multiplied like white cells. It was the architecture of evasion and containment. The builders were going to be busier than ever keeping pace with the unravelling of the past.

He sat in the car for a while as it felt the safest place to be. On a whim, he hunted out Father Walsh’s mobile phone from the glove compartment. He dialled the number that had tried to contact Walsh on the night he died; the one saved under the name Hegarty. It rang and went to a pre-recorded message. Daly asked for the owner of the phone to contact him urgently.

He stretched back in his seat and stared through the windscreen. He watched the sky. He listened to the sounds of cars parking and driving away, footsteps drawing near and then fading. In his mind, he turned over the facts of the investigation that he could categorize, but his thoughts kept clouding over. He tried to analyse this sense of confusion that had overtaken him.

The historical nature of the investigation made it very different from his usual workload. He was beginning to understand that in this case there was no order or structure, only fragmented effort and a lack of direction. He feared that he might never make any progress that could be measured, nor was there the slightest possibility that all his questions could ever be answered.

He pictured Walsh’s murder map in his imagination. Drawing it had been the priest’s way of organizing the mess, making a network out of the string of seemingly random murders, a web of connections. Daly could see how the map had given Walsh’s obsession with the past a sense of purpose and direction. It was an introvert’s consolation, like his secret collection of car number plates, but he saw the inherent flaw in the map, how it might give the illusion that the killing frenzy had a secret design, a controlling intelligence.

Yet in spite of his uncertainty, a strange sense of excitement coursed through his veins as he sped away from the police HQ. On the motorway, he felt much freer than usual, almost out of control, attuned to signals from a more primitive, emotional part of his brain, which pulled him away from the professional habit of carefully deliberated decisions, balanced judgements and impartiality, making it all the more likely that he was going to botch the investigation in spectacular fashion.

Therefore, when the priest’s phone rang into life, he braked the car and answered it immediately. The caller was Hegarty. Daly did not want to lose his balance completely. He was unbalanced already, reeling round in circles, without any possibility of advancing towards the truth, or retreating into blissful ignorance. His past had been shattered and he was spinning with it, as if chasing his reflection in a broken mirror while it spiralled into bottomless darkness.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Hegarty.

For a moment, Daly said nothing.

‘I’m a detective inspector. I’m investigating the death of Father Walsh.’

Hegarty did not respond.

‘I need to talk to you if you knew him, or were in contact with him before he died,’ continued Daly. ‘You’re not suspected of anything.’ He paused. ‘I just need information.’

Hegarty’s voice was barely a whisper, hoarse and irritated-sounding.

‘I don’t talk to policemen.’

Daly expected the line to go dead but the man hung on. He could sense a deep fatigue in his breathing, and something else – a wariness.

‘What leads do you have?’ murmured Hegarty.

Daly decided to tell him the truth.

‘At the moment, the investigation isn’t going anywhere.’

‘Where do you want it to go?’

‘I want to find out if Walsh’s death was orchestrated by someone in a position of power. I want to find out if his death was linked to his research into the murder triangle.’

‘Why are you interested in the murder triangle?’

Daly hesitated. Should he reveal the personal link? He had told so many; it hardly mattered that this stranger should hear it also. He lowered his voice and told him about his mother. Hegarty seemed encouraged by the revelation, and began to talk more freely.

‘Your hunch is correct,’ he said. ‘Father Walsh could not be stopped. That’s why they had to make him take a wrong turn. That’s why they had to kill him.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Your colleagues in Special Branch.’

‘Why would they want to kill him?’

‘Walsh was investigating thirty years of concealment and obstruction. He was tracking down the members of a secret gang who were involved in the murders of about twenty innocent Catholics, including your mother. He was making contact with all sorts of disgruntled former police officers and their informers. It was a slow process but he was finally getting there. That’s the pity. Another month or two and he would have nailed them.’

‘You believe he had enemies?’

‘Powerful ones.’

‘British Intelligence?’

‘Even further.’

‘Government?’

‘All the way up to the level of Minister of Defence. Under two different Parliaments.’

Daly felt a burst of adrenalin in his veins. A part of him wanted to believe Hegarty. In his gut, he suspected it was true. But something also warned him that it wasn’t. Paranoia and distrust had that effect on people; it confirmed every outlandish claim. Thirty years of murder and cover-up had reduced many people to a state of rapturous gullibility, keen to believe in any conspiracy theory floated by fantasists and political opportunists. There was nothing new about what Hegarty was saying; the same rumours and suspicions had been floating in the air since the 1980s. He needed elaboration and hard evidence.

‘How do you know this? What proof do you have?’

‘It’s all there in Walsh’s research. Someone needs to pursue the links now that the priest is dead. Before they are wiped away forever.’

‘What about you?’ asked Daly.

Hegarty wheezed with laughter.

‘I haven’t the flexibility to do anything right now. I want you to pursue them.’

Daly was quiet.

‘A thirty-year-old wrong that is single-handedly brought out into the open. Isn’t that better than solving a dozen new murders?’

Daly’s breathing stiffened.

‘Don’t try to contact me again,’ said Hegarty. ‘This is more conversation than I’ve had for weeks.’

When Hegarty hung up, Daly drove straight to Walsh’s monastery. He had no choice but to go into the mine- field alone.

Daly was surprised to see that almost all the parking spaces outside the monastery were taken. People milled around the entrance doors as he slipped inside. For a moment, he feared that a crowd of grieving families had stumbled upon Father Walsh’s research and were trampling all over his papers. He hastened past the abbot’s office. From the corridors rose the rumbling of many whispering voices, and another sound, low and heavy, that reminded him of weeping reverberating through the walls.

He bumped into a shy, awkward-looking boy in thick glasses, but didn’t have time to apologize. He hurried past open doors in sight of people praying in fervent groups. Some sort of religious retreat was in full swing, he realized, the participants churning out a steady stream of Hail Marys.

He knocked on Walsh’s door once, twice and then tried the handle. The door was still unlocked. The layout of the room with its stacks of files and map-covered walls looked almost identical to his recollection. Everything was intact and in its place. Sweaty and almost euphoric in his relief, he cleared a seat by the window, and began perusing the files. He leafed through them trying to get an overall sense of their contents. As a detective this should have been the first place he looked for clues, but the idea of digging for leads in this cluttered room, the place he had learned of his mother’s murder, had repelled him.

His mind filled with apprehension as he read Walsh’s list of victims. He had to read them several times to absorb the details. He wanted to know them so well he could recite them from heart.

The year 1979 began in horror and blood, the priest had written. Janice Whyte, a married Protestant civil servant, died from her injuries after the IRA detonated a bomb in a Portadown bar. The revenge attack two days later was savage, even by the standards at the time. A fake checkpoint manned by Loyalists on a border road shot dead a carload of young Catholic men returning from a football match. Three brothers and their cousin died instantly in the hail of gunfire. According to a legal document released to the victims’ families, police recovered thirty-seven spent 9mm bullet cases from the car with forty-one strike marks at the front and sides of their vehicle. Unaccountably, however, they failed to locate four spent bullet cases, which the family discovered after the forensics team returned the car to them.

The family had passed the bullet cases to Father Walsh, who had them analysed by a ballistics expert within the police force. He found that at least two guns had been used in the attack – a 9mm Parabellum-calibre Sterling SMG and a .455 Webley revolver, the same weapons used in the attack on Daly’s mother.

By February 1979, politicians and media commentators thought the violence couldn’t get any worse, but it did. A week later, a van of workmen heading home from constructing a new police station in Newry was stopped by an armed checkpoint. The gunmen ordered the two Catholics in the van to lie face down on the road. Their workmates, fearing that they were about to be shot by Loyalists, tried to protect their identities. However, the gunmen opened fire on the defenceless workers, firing more than one hundred bullets in less than a minute. A Republican paramilitary group claimed responsibility for the attack.

A few days later, the murderous cycle continued. Loyalists launched a gun attack on a bar in Armagh. Eyewitnesses reported seeing a gunman push his weapon through a small glass door in the inner door of the bar and open fire, killing six people inside. The gunman had a Mexican moustache and left the bloody scene laughing, according to a witness. It was also noted that his accomplices in the getaway car were wearing blue overalls.

Daly sighed. From his post at the window, he could hear the tolling of the nearby church bells marking out the quarters of the hour. He rubbed his weary eyes. For two more hours, he read on.

A plot gradually emerged from the research, a plot that he was part of, but had never known before. About twenty people lost their lives in attacks that Walsh attributed to a Loyalist gang, aided and abetted by state security forces. The killings had occurred against a backdrop of IRA bombings and shootings, but, according to the priest’s research, only a small handful of the victims were linked to Republican paramilitaries. He wrote:

‘The evidence is clear in Catholic graveyards across Armagh and Tyrone. The murdered were farmers, publicans, businessmen, young couples renovating derelict homes, trade unionists, tradesmen...’

Walsh had asked the simple question: Why? If the purpose of Loyalist collusion was to eliminate the threat of the IRA, why had the organization escaped virtually unscathed? He warned that the British government had taught a deadly lesson to the people of Northern Ireland, that power came out of the barrel of a gun, that the ballot box was powerless against force, and that the police and army can betray their trust.

Walsh had underlined one particular name in red several times. A Major George Hannon. The name jumped out because Walsh had mostly been unable to unearth the names of intelligence personnel, and was forced to refer to them with letters of the alphabet. Major Hannon was a hook, one of the few definite leads that Daly could follow. However, the more he read about Hannon the more he doubted his relevance to the murder triangle. For a start, he was too old to be implicated in the Troubles.

According to Walsh’s research, he was active in Palestine in the late 1940s and had been implicated in the disappearance and murder of a young Jewish boy. Daly read that Hannon had been a member of a special squad within the Palestine Police Force, at a time when the country was still under British mandate. Decorated for his bravery in World War II, Hannon had been chosen to lead the squad in a fight against the insurgents, which at that time were Zionist militants trying to expel British forces and set up an independent Jewish state.

Along with former Sandhurst graduates and SAS members, Hannon had operated covert patrols in Jewish-type clothing and driven Q-cars, civilian vehicles specifically engineered for intelligence gathering. He’d even used a laundry van to mask their activities when operating in a hostile area. The pattern rang a bell with Daly. It was the same undercover tactics the British Army had used in West Belfast in the early seventies.

Sometime in the late 1940s, Hannon had been forced to flee Palestine after his cover was blown. The civilian authorities discovered a hat of his at the place where the Jewish boy had been abducted. In addition, eyewitness reports described a tall, blond-haired man with a reddish complexion that matched Hannon’s description.

Walsh referenced the research of several Jewish military historians, who claimed that the squad had been set up to snatch suspects, provoke gunfights and sow the seeds of internecine strife. It was a tactic designed to inflame sectarian tensions with the local Arab population. Some historians also claimed that the squad deliberately mounted assassinations to add to the sense of confusion and bully the civilian population into acquiescence. Walsh’s theory was clear. Hannon had drawn a template of counter-insurgency operations that was developed in places like Aden and Kenya before being launched on the streets of Northern Ireland.