Silence (27 page)

‘But what about the truth? Shouldn’t that be the moral code of any peaceful society? Rather than allowing lies and half-truths to flourish? It is your duty, Daly, and the police’s, to root out the truth.’

‘Perhaps what we need in this country is not the truth,’ replied Daly. ‘What we really want is a fabrication. A made-up truth, one that we can all live with. Until we get that, everything else must be suspended, the rule of law, common sense, dealing with the past, even forgiveness.’

Hegarty stared at Daly. He lowered his voice to a whisper and craned over the fire.

‘You and I are beyond that now, Inspector. We’ve crossed into unknown terrain.’

Daly didn’t move in the flickering shadows. He felt a pang of jealousy. It would have been foolish to describe Hegarty as an authority on the past, but with his access to secrets darker than Daly could imagine, the spy had developed an insight that was probably only a finger’s breadth from the real truth.

‘The past surrounds us,’ said Hegarty. ‘Try as we may, we will never disperse its murk, only illuminate it.’

A set of sparks charged up the chimney and distracted them into a prolonged silence.

‘The murder triangle is part of your past, too,’ said Hegarty softly. ‘You’ve done nothing all of your adult life but secretly seek it, and now that you have the truth within reach, and it’s too late to walk away, you realize that it will destroy you, and everything around you: your career as a detective, your life in this cottage, your peace of mind.

‘You should have foreseen this. You should have ignored the past, the tantalizing clues within Walsh’s research. You shouldn’t have rung my number. You should have thrown it away instead.’

Hegarty was right. Daly’s personal life was in turmoil. He had lost faith in the police force, which had been the focal point of his life, the source of meaning to his existence, or at least the one source that had an illusion of meaning. What he had discovered was the worst thing possible for a policeman to discover: that the organization he had pledged his working life to had hidden his mother’s murderers. He had begun to fear that his true vocation wasn’t detective work. He wasn’t a true detective. It was simply that detective work had been the only tool he’d had at hand to challenge the darkness.

Daly had only a vague recollection of the remainder of the evening. Hegarty’s words made him feel uncomfortable, but he felt unable or unwilling to stop their flow. He grew steadily drunk, while Hegarty talked on, without pausing, wetting his dry lips, determined to tell his story, even though his voice began to croak. It was hard to have the last word with a man who had whispered brutal secrets for thousands of nights.

The next morning Daly awoke with a sense of dread. He showered, dressed and while he was making a pot of tea, his phone rang. Hegarty had yet to emerge from his room, but Daly could hear him moving about, so he took the call in the porch.

He tried to make his voice sound as though he wasn’t the ghost of the competent detective he had once been. It was Irwin. He told Daly there was to be a press conference at headquarters and his attendance was required. Fealty was due to make an important announcement about the investigation into Walsh’s death and the secret links that existed between Special Branch and the paramilitaries.

‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ said Daly.

*

About half an hour later, Irwin met him as he entered the building.

‘You’re late,’ said the younger detective.

‘I wanted to shave for the cameras,’ replied Daly.

Irwin said nothing, just ushered him through to one of the conference rooms.

‘The meeting’s about to begin. We’ll have to slip in at the back.’ He opened the doors. ‘By the way, Daly,’ he whispered. ‘There’s been a complication. A shift in the investigation.’

‘What shift?’

‘We now know that Walsh had entangled himself with some very sinister elements.’

The two walked into a room filled with noisy journalists.

‘This media frenzy is all down to you, Daly,’ hissed Irwin. ‘I hope you’re happy with the can of worms you’ve opened.’

They stood at the back of the room. At the front, next to a projector screen, sat Inspector Fealty. He appeared comfortable in the full glare of the media. His uniform looked impossibly neat and trim, as though it had been ironed a thousand times that morning. He was flanked by two officers from the press department, but there was no doubt as to who was in charge of the show. There was a professionalism and precision about Fealty’s persona that had been absent in the old police force. Once upon a time police commanders had been dour, stolid figures, reliable but completely lacking in media skills. The peace process and its political climate had changed all that. The media had developed an appetite for castigating the old institutions, stripping them of any trace of their former prestige. They would have crucified police chiefs like Donaldson, who regarded it as an emblem of his professionalism that he had never issued statements to the press. Fealty belonged to the front ranks of a new breed of officer that had emerged from the anonymous grey corridors of the old police stations into the smart arena of public relations.

Daly heard a nearby reporter whisper, ‘I hear Special Branch are going to lift the lid on collusion.’

He felt a sense of gratification – victory, even. He glanced over at Irwin and wondered why he was smirking.

Fealty leaned towards the gallery of journalists and photographers and began speaking.

‘The extraordinary thing about what I am going to reveal to you today on this issue of the links between the police force and the paramilitaries is that the details exist nowhere in the official record.’

Daly sensed a shiver of excitement pass through the room. The journalists were electrified by the prospect of Fealty’s revelations.

‘In many respects they were lost amid the fog of war,’ continued Fealty. ‘However, that doesn’t mean that the police force and the paramilitary organizations cannot be held accountable for what happened in the past.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘At a point in the mid-1970s the intelligence services came to the grim conclusion that the only way to beat the IRA’s terror machine was to plant a mole at the heart of its operations. The simplest way to destroy the IRA’s chain of command and crack its morale was to have a number of highly placed informers reporting on the running of the organization. Today I am going to reveal the identity of one of those men.’

Daly edged closer to the back of the room. What sort of trap had Fealty fixed for him? When was he going to start talking about collusion between Loyalists and the police? He looked up at the screen behind Fealty and his heart missed several beats when he saw Hegarty’s face appear.

‘His codename was Lethal Ally,’ said Fealty, pointing to the screen. ‘But his real name is Daniel Hegarty.’

Voice recorders were thrust towards Fealty and cameras flashed.

‘Ideally it would have been preferable to keep the issue of Special Branch’s links with the IRA out of the glare of the media. However, we are a new police force, operating in a new form of society, one where full disclosure is the norm. I regret to say that Mr Hegarty is no longer under our control. He is beyond the scope of law and order.’

It took a moment or two for what Fealty was talking about to take full effect on Daly. A quiver of dread ran through his stomach, but he decided not to let himself be intimidated by Fealty’s subtle ploy. He stood as still as a statue, listening carefully to the journalists’ questions and Fealty’s concise replies.

‘Help us with the chronology, Inspector,’ said a journalist at the front. ‘When precisely did Mr Hegarty’s career as an intelligence agent begin? Who contacted whom?’

‘Hegarty was recruited in the winter of 1974. He was first contacted by the Force Surveillance Unit.’

The cameras flashed again. Fealty’s face shone. He seemed wonderfully sharp and alert, sure of himself, playing this game of cat and mouse with the truth, laying down a trail for the journalists that would divert them from Daly and his claims of collusion between the police and Loyalists, overshadowed now by these more shocking revelations about the police force’s links to the IRA. The entire performance might have been scripted, analysed and researched within the highest levels of the intelligence services. In the eyes of the media, Daly’s association with Hegarty would make him damaged goods, a police detective relying on the evidence of an informer and murderer.

Daly could see the look of surprise – astonishment, even – in the journalists’ faces. Fealty was revealing a conspiracy so profound that they found it hard to believe. What sort of man could operate at the heart of the IRA for forty years and carry off such a lonely deception? The strategic impossibility of it. The emotional discipline. Already, Daly could hear the overtones of mobile phones ringing; editors ringing their journalists back to check the improbable facts; seasoned journalists purring with delight. This revelation of a top informer within the IRA would release a flood of speculation and headlines from the media, a swarm of claims and denials from politicians, with enough riddles and lingering questions to keep countless journalists occupied for months on end.

‘Why now, Inspector? Why release this man’s identity?’

‘We are concerned for the safety of the public.’

‘After forty years of supporting this agent’s activities as a terrorist isn’t it a little late to be concerned about the safety of the public?’

‘We have specific concerns at the moment.’

‘Has Hegarty made threats?’

‘We are searching for him with the highest degree of urgency. A manhunt is already in progress.’

Fealty adjusted his position in his seat. He seemed to be looking towards the back of the room, straight at Daly. A coded glance, like an invitation to speak, his eyes cold and gloating. Irwin looked over at Daly and studied his reaction. A silence fell in the room, an uncomfortable silence in which Daly felt himself sharply etched and exposed. Had Fealty conjured up this media circus entirely to deter his investigation? He closed his eyes and thought of a question to pose, but all he could see was the searing outline of the murder triangle, replete with arrows, connections, dates and names.

Fealty resumed speaking from his prepared lines.

‘Right now, my detectives are investigating Hegarty’s role in the murder of Ivor McClintock at a hotel in South Armagh the week before last.’

The smartphones and voice recorders jabbed closer.

‘Are you saying that McClintock’s murder is connected with the intelligence services?’

‘I can’t comment on that.’

‘Do you feel responsible for any murders this man may have committed during the Troubles?’

‘No comment.’

Apart from the odd hesitation, Fealty handled the barrage in a brisk and efficient manner.

‘Did you use Hegarty to manipulate the IRA in terms of their political direction, or did he simply disclose its secrets?’

‘Hegarty gave us options, both in terms of military action and also broader political strategy. We were able to make things happen, and we knew when they would happen.’

Daly saw the politicians’ and media’s will for a collusion investigation deteriorate before his eyes. He was powerless to prevent its collapse. Fealty had hoodwinked him with this ploy to expose Hegarty, a spy whose secrets would tantalize the media and create waves of runaway speculation. The room seemed to grow more crowded, the mood urgent, a reflection of Daly’s state of mind, which boiled with frustration and anger. Secrets and deception lay all around. In every direction, he stumbled upon his own ignorance, each fresh revelation leaving him fumbling in greater darkness.

Daly’s breathing grew heavy and his shoulders slumped. He glanced up at Fealty, listening to the shouted questions of the journalists, waiting for the Special Branch inspector to deliver the final blow, to point the pack of journalists in his direction and utter the condemning words:
We have reason to believe that Inspector Celcius Daly knows Hegarty’s whereabouts.

But for some reason, the words never came. Perhaps Fealty had not exhausted him enough, he thought, perhaps he had yet to reach the fifteenth round, the point where he would no longer be fit to throw a single punch.

‘Are you saying that the intelligence services were able to pull the strings of the IRA, thanks to this lone agent?’

‘Correct,’ replied Fealty.

‘There must be more informers than this man. Who else do you have working for you?’

‘No comment.’

‘What murders did you know of in advance and were unwilling or unable to prevent?’

Fealty’s tone changed.

‘Spies like Hegarty operated in a grey zone, serving the public interest, but beyond the protection of the law. In many ways, the legal system has yet to catch up with their role during the conflict.’

Daly found it difficult to breathe. He wished the room wasn’t so crowded. He had been careless of his own reputation and safety, he could see that now. He wished that Hegarty had not returned his call, that he had crawled away into the deepest hole of border country and taken his secrets with him. The media pack had the spy firmly in their sights. They would not rest until they had hounded him into the light. Tomorrow all the newspapers would have Fealty’s revelations plastered over the front pages. They’d send out teams of journalists to pick over the traces of the spy’s life and flush him out from hiding. He was too precious a commodity to the media. He was like the Abominable Snowman or the last of a primitive race, a creature left over from a darker, more violent time. They would drag him blinking like an ancient coelacanth into the blinding glare of notoriety. They would not let him skulk in the shadows any longer.

‘Would it be fair to describe this manhunt as a setback to the peace process?’

‘You’ll have to ask the politicians and Mr Hegarty’s former comrades in the IRA that.’

‘What disciplinary procedures had Mr Hegarty been subject to in the past?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean what punishments or sanctions were imposed whenever he broke the law?’