Silence (21 page)

He turned his back on the building, and drove off in his car, but there it was again, floating in his rear-view mirror, jutting into his consciousness, urging him to hit the pedal hard. His wheels bit gravel at the verge of the road, and the car skidded. The building swung back into his windscreen again, and he cursed. He started up his car and shifted straight from first to third, the engine whining with the strain.

Someone had chosen that his mother should die, and the fault lay at least partially with former RUC officers. But who else had known about it? Who else had helped orchestrate and cover up the incident? The questions demanded answers. We live in a world compacted from our past and unsolved crimes cannot be hidden forever. He began to suspect that Special Branch were fabricating one lie after another, burdening his mother’s murder with secrets and darkness in the hope that it might plunge from view forever. That was the monstrous logic of military intelligence, the gargoyle-like behaviour of men like Fealty and Hannon.

Daly retired to the scullery fire that evening. He pulled up an old armchair with a sigh. For the first time that day, he felt his mind and body relax. Within the burning turf and the shadows cast by its flames, he had finally established a terrain under his personal control, where he could patrol his thoughts and keep an eye on his innermost anxieties. He opened a bottle of whiskey and sipped his way through several glasses, all the time watching the flames rise steadily. When he had done with the whiskey, he got out a pen and paper and wrote a letter, offering his resignation from the police force. He read it through a little while later. Perhaps it was the whiskey’s fault, but the letter contained feelings so dark and embittered that he immediately tore it up and cast the scraps into the fire.

Though his mind still felt dark, in the midst of his dejection he experienced a moment of odd euphoria, a flicker of anger and professional pride that persuaded him not to resign. Nothing he could do would erase the actions of the police officers in the past, but he might still summon enough courage to fix things for the future.

Saturday morning, and Daly awoke with a fresh mind. He took a quick shower to rinse away the previous night’s mood of morbid self-inspection. It was hard to keep holding on to loss and anger, especially when you needed to get out of bed in the morning. Keen to enjoy what was usually the most pleasant part of his day, he dressed and stepped outside without having breakfast. The sight of the farm foundering in the interplay of mist and dawn light was enough to keep him from regretting the discoveries he had made over the past week.

Shunning the enigmas of the landscape, the humped banks of soil and overgrown weeds, he strayed on to his father’s old vegetable patch. He kicked aside the nettles and managed to locate the almost effaced drills where the vegetables he had planted last year now lay rotten with frost. He grabbed his father’s lean spade and began digging as if he might tell the earth the depth of his troubles. The black hen came scuttling out and hurried after each fresh spadeful, picking out the worms and grubs.

The scrape of the spade hitting stones resounded comfortingly in the morning air. He worked himself into a sweat. At first, the clumps of root-entangled earth felt too heavy to lift, but then he struck a softer patch. He dug on, not looking up for an hour, fashioning a set of drills in the way he had seen his father do every spring of his childhood, head bent low, as if he were talking all the time to the spade. The ground had never been levelled or ploughed by a tractor and was full of quirky humps and dips, minutely adjusted by his father’s annual digging bouts.

With the hen for company, he lost himself in the work. The mist hung level in the air above and behind him, robing the terrain in pale threads. He felt a quiet satisfaction that he was in some small way contributing to the levelling of the farm’s patchwork of fields, which had been compacted and heaped by his forebears into this lopsided landscape. In short, he almost felt his old self again. It might be far from the normal demeanour of a well-adjusted, middle-aged man, but he was determined to hold on to the feeling at all costs.

He took a break, leaning on the spade, and surveyed the rest of the farm. If only he could take the sharp edge of the spade to the past, he thought, but that landscape had been twisted out of symmetry by far greater forces.

Back in his cottage, he was about to breakfast on a bowl of porridge when he heard a car pull up rapidly outside. He opened the front door to see the journalist Pryce waving from her car.

‘Good morning,’ she called, rolling down the window.

He returned the greeting without moving from his threshold.

‘I was passing near and thought I’d drop by. I need to ask you a few questions.’

‘Not if they’re for your book.’ He tried to smile politely but failed.

She switched off the engine.

‘I thought it was country hospitality to always offer visitors a cup of tea.’

‘The place is a mess at the moment. We can talk out here.’

She tried to examine his face closely but couldn’t.

‘I’m sorry. This is one writing assignment I can’t shirk from. You must know how compelling a preoccupation it can be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘As a detective yourself. You search for clues and suspects. I search for words and characters. But our compulsions are the same.’

He flinched at the comparison.

‘The truth is, I’ve become obsessed by your story, Celcius. My instinct tells me you’d make a compelling character for readers. It would be professional malpractice for me to ignore that.’

She looked at him with a smile that showed both pleasure and apprehension at her revelation. Daly felt himself blush slightly. Her use of his first name made him uneasy. Her smile darkened, grew more purposeful. She was aware of his discomfort.

‘I’m too stubborn and introverted to be compelling.’

‘A stubborn character often makes the reader stubborn, too. Gives them the determination to keep turning the pages of the story.’

‘Whose story are we talking about?’

‘Our story. You and me pulling away the layers of fear and denial from your past.’

He nodded slightly. She understood the overarching narrative of his life.

‘What do you want to ask me?’

‘The questions come later. First, I have to jog your memory with a few clues.’

‘What sort of clues?’ He felt his suspicions return.

‘Addresses. The first is number sixteen Derrycush Road. Jump in and I’ll take you there.’

He was about to open the passenger door and climb in when she stopped him. Her face looked suddenly vulnerable.

‘Do you have your service weapon with you?’

Her question surprised him.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I don’t know. I just have a feeling I’m being followed by someone. I don’t know who they are.’

Daly thought of the car shadowing him the previous day and the checkpoint on the empty road. He went back to the house and retrieved the gun. He climbed into her car, knowing he had allowed her a small victory, that they were one step closer to becoming accomplices.

‘I’ve a question I need to ask you,’ he said when she had settled into driving.

‘Fire ahead.’

‘How’s your husband Eddie McKenna doing?’

She barely flinched. He found it difficult to read the look on her face.

‘Who told you that name?’

‘Major Hannon. He has a copy of a British Intelligence report on you.’

A little of her prim, professional air drained away.

‘What else did he tell you?’

‘What else should I know?’

‘Nothing. I’ve a Republican husband. That’s all there is to it. Eddie did some time in prison for IRA membership. When he came out he set up a campaign group for ex-prisoners’ rights. I interviewed him for a couple of stories and eventually he invited me out for a drink.’

‘I take it that saying no would also have been tantamount to professional malpractice.’

This time she did flinch.

‘You know you remind me of him.’

‘How?’

‘Another man stuck in the past.’

She pushed the car into a higher gear and drove fearlessly along roads that were little more than boreens, tapping the brakes only slightly as she swerved around blind corners. Potholes jolted the front wheels. A thorn branch slapped Daly’s side of the windscreen.

‘At least slow down,’ he complained.

A crossroads loomed ahead and she braked hard. Daly lurched forward, held back by his seatbelt, and cursed. Pryce, however, was unperturbed, driving on in the same careless manner.

The low hills, the roads that were all corners and crossroads, the hedges bearing in on them, the water swilling over the rims of blocked ditches and flooding dips in the road, made it impossible for Daly to lean back and stare through the windscreen in silence. He found himself longing for straighter roads, for the smooth tar of the dual carriageway. The car toiled through the gears. Their eyes kept meeting as, several times, she had to extricate the vehicle from a muddy lane that was in the final phase before obliteration.

He took out Walsh’s murder map and examined it in a bid to distract himself from her driving. He tried to penetrate the cramped townlands, the interlocking parishes of grief and death. From memory, he pinpointed the locations of at least half a dozen IRA murders. For some reason, they were more easily recalled than the Loyalist attacks – Catholic guilt, perhaps, for the sins committed in his name.

‘Let me reassure you about one thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a political axe to grind, in spite of my husband’s background and what Major Hannon might think. I need to finish this book for financial reasons. Every journalist I know in this bloody country is broke. We’re all mortgaged to the hilt and our bank accounts are empty.’

‘I hope for your sake that your book never gets published,’ he said, putting away the map. ‘Otherwise some victims’ relatives might come to regard you as worse than the murderers.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of the way you consume people’s stories. Their tragedies. Like a cannibal of lost souls.’

She changed gears roughly and drove on in silence. At one point, the gleam of open blue water caught his eye, and, glancing over her shoulder, he saw the white gable of his cottage, half-submerged in the bumpy fields, but then he realized that was geographically impossible, even in such a labyrinth of wriggling roads. His gable walls faced east and west, and this one faced south. He turned back to the windscreen, his empty stomach heaving with the sense of dislocation and Pryce’s reckless driving.

‘I doubt you’ll ever finish the book anyway,’ he told her. ‘There are too many blanks in the story.’

‘You needn’t worry. We’re going to fill in several this afternoon.’

They drove along a long, lonely road that ran between a river and bogland. Daly glanced behind and saw a sleek black Audi following them. It wasn’t the type of car you’d normally see on empty by-roads. Its presence made Daly feel uneasy. It stayed close behind them in a manner that seemed deliberate and ominous, just like his tail the previous day. He glanced behind again and memorized the number plate.
Old habits die hard
, he thought. He rehearsed the numbers in his mind. As a child, the practice had helped prevent his mind from wandering into unsettling territories. He glanced behind again and saw that the car had disappeared.

At intervals, the bogland gave way to plantations of pine trees and small, untidy-looking farms that had never shaken off the look of the bog, more cottages that had been abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin.

‘It must be hard work, living in that cottage of yours,’ said Pryce at one point.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean living cheek by jowl with the past. All those childhood memories mixed up with the present. Why not move to a new house in a nearby town?’

He’d often asked the question himself in the gloom of a winter night, rolling in an old blanket, listening to the cold wind rising from the lough. He thought of the twisted little garden and the hummocky fields that looked as though they were slouching closer to his bedroom window with the inexorable creep of the past, and his mind darkened.

‘You must feel a duty to your forebears,’ said Pryce, testing his silence. ‘Why else are you still living there? Moping about that old cottage while the rest of the world moves on.’

He sighed.

‘After my marriage broke up and my father died I grew tired of playing musical chairs with my life. I just wanted to stay put. The cottage is not that bad a place for a single man, despite the cold and the damp. It has its...’ He struggled to think of the correct word. Not comforts. ‘Refinements.’

‘Like what?’

‘I have a weakness for turf fires and the bottle of whiskey in the old press. Then there are the views of the lough. Some mornings when the water’s at its highest I look out and imagine I’m in a little boat.’

She smiled. Was it because she thought she was gaining ground with him?

‘But it must be lonely. Staring out at the same view, those same walls closing you in every evening.’

‘I have my lodgers for company.’

She looked at him sharply.

‘Every night I can hear the blackbirds crawling into the roof-space. And I have a homely hen living in the porch.’

She concentrated on driving. After a few miles, she pulled up at a lane leading to a rundown house.

‘Recognize this place?’ she asked.

Daly nodded his head in silence; 16 Derrycush Road: a ruined house that had once belonged to a young couple called the Corrigans. The ruin had been a familiar landmark in his childhood. He remembered asking his father why no one lived there, and had been told a tragic story of a newly married couple who had died in a fire, and whose ghosts still haunted the burnt-out remains.

‘Why are we stopping here?’

‘Because it’s crucial to your story.’

‘Why is it crucial?’

‘Father Walsh’s murder triangle is saturated with secret stories like that of the Corrigans and your mother. That was his predicament. He kept finding stories that could not be told until other stories were told first.’