Silence (2 page)

Daniel felt as though he had been plunged into a more suffocating pool, immersed in the man’s warmth and charm, his aura of power, the sweetness of the tobacco smoke. He clasped his hand as it held the cigarette to his chest, trying to stop his arm from shaking. He felt the intensity of a pinpoint gaze, the man’s eyes adjusting to all his little movements, steady as the magnetic needle of a compass, centring in on the flaw, the tic he had managed to conceal from his riverside interrogators.

‘I’m not for sale.’ He raised the cigarette to his lips, fingers clenched tight. ‘All I need is this smoke.’

The voice sighed.

‘Everyone has a price, Daniel. That’s a fundamental truth.’

Water collected on the tips of thorns, glinting like tiny claws. The wind picked up and the thorns swiped at it.

‘Why are you interested in me?’

‘We’ve nobody on the ground in border country. We want you to work for us. You’ll be operating alongside people just like you. People who have lost family members. People who feel compelled to action, who want to stop terrorism in all its forms, all these senseless murders.’

‘“Stop terrorism in all its forms.” Is that your way of convincing me I won’t be a traitor?’ However, something tight swelled in Daniel’s throat – not fear, but a dark hope, the thought that he might have his revenge for his brother’s murder after all.

‘We’ll pay you well, look after your parents. You won’t have to worry about their security.’

The mention of money sparked his interest further. He knew he couldn’t go on living the way he had been, sleepless, jobless, practically penniless, relying on the small income his parents made from their farm. A twilight existence, dominated by fear and humiliation.

‘I sense you’re interested in my offer.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘That’s good, Daniel. We all have to do our bit. Get this country back to law and order.’

Daniel snorted.

‘Some law and order. Your policemen almost drowned me.’

‘They took the wrong approach entirely. I can see that now.’

‘No more fucking around with water, then?’

‘You have my word.’

‘And will you leave me alone?’

‘I can’t promise you that.’ The major smiled. ‘Go home and think about what I have said. I promise you that our training is first-class. We’ve been running this unit for decades in far more dangerous parts of the world. We’ll train you in man-to-man surveillance techniques and how to shake off paramilitary scrutiny of your movements. Remember, our war is directed at Loyalists as well as Republicans.’

He handed Daniel the rest of the packet of cigarettes.

‘A boom is on its way, Daniel. A boom in killing. Tons of illegal weapons are coming into the country. From South Africa, Libya, the Lebanon. The intelligence services are predicting a surge in violence.’

Daniel nodded. It was the solemn truth. He flicked open the packet of cigarettes. Inside was a calling card with a number and a contact name and next to it a wad of ten-pound notes. He looked up, but the major had gone.

*

He scrambled back to the road feeling tired and cold. His car was parked next to where the police officers had set up their checkpoint. He turned on the heater and the windscreen wipers. The empty road seemed more unreal than the thicket of thorns and the fast-flowing river. He started up the engine, and drove his usual route home. That was the thing about living in border country, he told himself, you had to acclimatize yourself to intimidation, develop a regular routine, get used to the uncertainty of living each day suspended between fear and suspicion, life and death, somehow surviving these impromptu checkpoints and interrogations.

He drove on, delving deeper into the maze of introverted little lanes that criss-crossed the border. He wasn’t ready to go home, not yet. The roads had the dull, soothing quality of loneliness, their broken white lines glimmering in the rain. Dripping trees slashed backward and forwards. He listened to the hiss of water sliding along the wipers, coiling from the tyres. He drove as if still caught in a whirling current, trees flickering by, the windscreen a river of ghostly reflections, the twisting lines of the border roads luring him deeper into their darkness.

He already felt like an outcast in this country. A condemned man. The landscape and weather hated him. The freezing rivers, the blinding rain, the tattered hole of the sky through which the sun infrequently shone, the roads that threatened to empty him every time he pressed his foot to the accelerator pedal. No wonder his neighbours and friends were leaving in their droves, those who weren’t dead or in prison, emigrating to England and America, never to return. They left in silence, without uttering a word or fighting with anyone. Many of them had been in the middle of building new homes, like his brother. Their half-finished houses dotted the countryside, building sites overgrown with briars and nettles, wastes of muddy puddles. He did not want to go to England or America but he did not want to be left behind either, amid their abandoned dreams.

He knew with certainty that in the weeks ahead, there would be more interrogations at checkpoints, more smiling men like Major Hannon, more pestering, more harassment and insinuation, more whispering about failure and revenge, and the dire consequences of his inaction. He began to think there must be some other way to leave behind these hills and their sprawling thickets of thorns, this warren of roads disappearing into tunnels in the dark.

The rain intensified. He switched off the wipers. It was cosy in the driver’s seat as he moved up through the gears. He peered through the web of raindrops densely crowding the windscreen. He came quickly upon a blind corner and pressed the accelerator pedal as hard as he could. The car skidded as he took the bend. He had the impression of blurred branches sailing close to the car, a few seconds of flight, and then the crunch of gravel as the wheels bit into the verge, and the car corrected itself.

He drove off again, foot pressed flat against the accelerator. He took the next corner at even greater speed. Again, the car teetered. The engine whined and the wheels locked into a spin. He was no longer in control, the speed of the car dragging him on. He shut his eyes, waiting for the brute force of the impact, but instead of noise, everything went silent. He felt the darkness beyond the thin shield of the windscreen erupt in upon him, and then an overwhelming force lifted him out of his seat. For a moment, fragments of broken glass and thorns rose with him. He felt so pure and free that he grinned with delight. He forgot about the cold business of the river and its trees dripping darkness and betrayal. He willed himself up towards the tranquillity of the night sky, up and up, but then he butted against the stubbornness of his flesh and blood. He felt himself dragged back to the crashed car and the lonely black mass of anger that was his heart.

When he came to, he lay slumped over the steering wheel. The car had slid down a gully and crashed into a tree. He gaped at the hole where a branch had smashed through the windscreen. Inside he felt disappointed. It was not as easy as he thought to escape border country. A few lights flashed on the dashboard but his head felt too light to understand their instructions. Perhaps they were warning signals. He swung open the door and staggered out. His thoughts felt mangled. He climbed back up the slope and sat hunched by the roadside, trying to quell his giddiness.

He set off, head bowed, unsure of which direction he was going, until a passing car slowed down. In the twilight, he could just make out the car registration – AIB 726. He recognized the young woman behind the wheel, a neighbour who had recently lost her brother in an IRA attack. Her name was Dorothy Agnew. He looked at her, wondering if she would recognize him. She smiled at him and instinctively he waved back. She held her chin up bravely, but her eyes were downcast, her smile still carrying the shadow of her grief. To his surprise, she stopped and gave him a lift home.

After she had dropped him off at his gate, he felt confused. He had been close to ending his life, but somehow her smile and act of kindness had filled his mind with new confidence, new conviction. In the course of their short conversation, he had told her about his brother’s murder at the hands of Loyalists and she had responded with sympathy and curiosity. They were both survivors from different sides of the community, they realized, falling through border country with their anger and grief. Why should either of them shoulder this darkness alone? His mind began to burn with the new plan he was formulating. The business with the major seemed more urgent now. He would give Hannon a phone call and outline his requirements. He was going to cross invisible boundaries into a new mental landscape, one where he would roam with killers and psychopaths. His thoughts grew luminous, purposeful, contemplating the dark path that lay ahead.

February 2013

Thoreau’s line – the question is not what you look at, but what you see – was a favourite of Inspector Celcius Daly’s, not just because it said something about detective work, but also because it described the way in which he and his fellow citizens were dealing with their country’s conflicted past. Daly lived between two views of the Troubles, the one he saw with his eyes wide open and the one he saw with his eyes firmly shut. He had trusted the former over the latter ever since childhood, but every now and again the unruly brew of his subconscious, imagination or his dreaming threw up a suppressed memory or an old secret that threatened to disrupt the carefully edited view.

It had not taken much to set him off that wintry night at the start of February. He was preparing to go to bed when the call came through. He listened to the details: a single-vehicle car crash, a line of misplaced traffic cones and a dead motorist. A freak accident, he thought, the result of too much speed, alcohol or the driver falling asleep at the wheel.

He drove through Maghery and headed towards Dungannon. Soon he was on the new motorway. He took a deep breath and eased the car into top gear. There was a full moon and the empty carriageway stretched westwards towards the border, a vaulted path of tar and concrete bridges shining in the moonlight.

For decades, the Irish and British governments had neglected the border roads, allowing them to fall into ruin, but ever since the ceasefire, they had been at pains to reverse the decline. Gone were the checkpoints, the military fortifications, the sabotaged roads and blown-up bridges. New carriageways were replacing the meandering roads that had once made even a short trip along the disputed frontier feel like a trek through a labyrinth.

Inexorably
, he thought,
the crooked little lanes of my troubled country are disappearing. Soon there will be none of them left. Soon there will be no more getting lost on by-roads, no more skulking in shadowy places; soon there will be nothing left but straight roads with no hiding places.

He flicked his headlights on to full beam and accelerated, the lamps scouring the darkness ahead. Perhaps this was the freedom everyone had been fighting for during the Troubles, he thought, the freedom to drive all night, free and fearless, on wide roads without ever coming to the end of one’s tether.

The motorway cut through a narrow valley, and Daly crossed a bridge. He glanced through his side window, and saw the old country below, felt its dark gravity, its mesh of forgotten roads, its interlocking parishes of grief and murder. He had spent the last seven years policing this part of Northern Ireland, and it was a relief to be carried on so many tonnes of concrete and steel above its shadows; everything below was crime and violence, age and death, loose bits of the past squirming their way through the darkness.

He had relaxed into a state approaching drowsiness when his car swayed a little, buffeted by crosswinds. The central reservation loomed closer. He was surprised to see how much his car had drifted across the lanes. He tapped his brakes and gripped the steering wheel. That was the problem with feeling afloat on such an elevated road, he thought: it made you forget your precariousness in this world.

The motorway cut deeper through the countryside as he approached the border, and the terrain grew rockier, bleaker. He slowed on reaching the final uncompleted section. Roadwork diversion signs redirected traffic on to side roads, but Daly ignored them. He held firm. Ahead, his headlights picked out the broad tract where diggers had been tearing a hole through the hills that formed the border with the Republic. His tyres rumbled over the uneven surface. He eased his car up the last hundred yards or so to where the tape of the police cordon fluttered amid the warning lights.

He stared through the windscreen, taking his measure of the scene. At first, all he could pick out beyond the signs and flickering lights were heaps of soil, denuded rock and digging machines, which, perched on the dark mounds of earth, seemed to float over the chaos. Then he saw the moving figures. Men and women in uniforms, walking about with flashlights.

He was back in border country.

‘What happened?’ Daly asked the young officer in charge of the crash site. It took him several moments to work out the sequence of events. The officer and his colleagues had arrived at the roadworks shortly before 10 p.m. to investigate a report of criminal damage to the diggers. They discovered that the vandals had also removed the diversion signs and rearranged the traffic cones into a lane that would have guided unsuspecting motorists straight over a precipice. Immediately, they had set up a cordon and checkpoint.

It was a dangerous prank, explained the officer, especially in the dark. He and his colleagues had been removing the cones when an elderly driver pulled up. For some inexplicable reason, he had ignored the police cordon and driven off at speed, almost knocking over one of the officers.

That was his first error, said the policeman. His second and fatal mistake had been to steer a path through the rearranged cones without once tapping his brakes.

‘The poor bastard went over the edge into a thicket of thorns thirty feet below,’ he added. ‘He seemed to drive off in some sort of panic.’