Silence (7 page)

The abbot made to leave. He bowed politely but Daly could see the unease working its way though his mind.

‘There was one other thing,’ he said. ‘It struck me as odd that he had taken to wearing a watch. It added to the sense that he was in a hurry. In all the years he’d been here, I’d never seen him wearing one before.’

The abbot waited for a response from Daly but there was none. The detective was thinking about the priest speeding off from the checkpoint. He had certainly seemed in a hurry on the night of his death. He was reminded of his meeting with Donaldson and his new watch. Another old man anxious about time. Did the former RUC commander also have a ticking deadline?

‘You see, the days here are structured, and the church bells are always ringing out the hour. I couldn’t understand why he was always glancing at this new watch of his.’

Daly tried to analyse the detail as simply as possible. What did it mean for an old man, living in an institution like an abbey, to start wearing a watch? He needed to measure time. Not the time inside the abbey, which appeared to stand still, but time in the outside world. It signalled a new relationship with life outside the abbey walls, the possibility that he was synchronizing his life to some other beat, another person or a series of events.

‘Did he have any unexpected visitors? Someone you hadn’t seen before?’

The abbot drummed his fingers on the table.

‘Yes.’ He hesitated. ‘There was a woman. A journalist. Her name was Jacqueline Pryce.’

‘Why did she want to see him?’

‘She was helping him piece together the details of the murder map. I believe she was going to write a book about it.’

The revelation troubled Daly. Walsh’s research looked disordered and unfinished, but the idea that a journalist was writing a book on it suggested a measure of order and completeness. Journalists were in the business of making a name for themselves, especially when they undertook to write books about the Troubles, and they seldom stopped until they were published, no matter the consequences. Walsh’s research was beginning to look less and less like the secret obsession of a harmless old priest.

‘Do you know her?’ asked the abbot.

‘I’ve never heard of her.’ Daly made a mental note of the name. ‘Something about this map must have whetted her interest.’

The abbot had decided he’d said enough. He nodded and left Daly to peruse the room on his own.

The detective stood for a while, contemplating the priest’s handiwork. A wall full of secrets in a silent room in a silent monastery. He blinked at the map. He could see that it had been in a constant state of flux. Walsh had rearranged the intricate facts of each murder, drawing new connections between them. Daly scanned over the details. The names of the weapons, the size and number of the bullets fired, the description of the strike marks, the entry points on the victims’ bodies, the getaway cars, and the statements of eyewitnesses, some of whom reported seeing police checkpoints near the murders. The priest had also compiled the names of men charged with minor roles in the killings, some of whom were listed as ex-police officers. Daly stood so still he almost didn’t breathe. He began to understand why Irwin and Special Branch might be so interested in Walsh and his crashed car.

He stepped back, trying to absorb the web of facts and conjecture in its entirety. To his tired mind, the map seemed to be alive, wriggling with the details of evil. He stared at the northeast corner of it more closely. Blinked again. The jarring detail did not fade. He stared at the red pin placed at a corner of Lough Neagh, directly over the location of his cottage. The name beside it was Angela Daly; his mother’s. His face was motionless. His hands hung limply by his side. He saw her blue nurse’s shoes lying on her bedroom floor. He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the map again.

Was it his imagination or did the network of roads seem to coil under and through each other like serpents? He leaned closer, looking deeper and harder in an effort to fix the details in his mind. He was unwilling to phrase what floated through his mind at that moment, but the dark question that struggled towards expression was in the nature of: What was his mother’s name doing in the company of so many people he had never heard of, in the context of such cold-blooded murder? He asked himself more questions: How had Walsh decided that his mother was another victim of the Loyalist gang, and, if it was true, what had she done to bring herself to their murderous attention?

‘Mum.’ He half mouthed, half whispered the word. The dryness of his voice disturbed him, and the hollowness of the childish monosyllable he had not uttered in a long time. He stepped back towards the door, thinking he had to call his father, tell him what he’d seen, but then he realized his father was dead. He was forty-three years old, divorced, childless, and his first instinct had been to call on his deceased dad for support. How ill-starred his life had been.

‘Mother,’ he said to himself again. ‘Who would have thought your death and my work would cross all these years later?’

He had few clear memories of his childhood but he remembered the details of that spring evening in 1979, the police detective standing directly in front of his father, almost whispering in his ear, relaying how his mother had died in the crossfire between an anti-terrorist police unit and an IRA gang. His father’s face was deathly white and his eyes were staring directly at Celcius, who listened to every word. The quietness of their voices made everything seem far away, as if he did not belong to the tragedy that was unfolding, as if it was a play or some sort of lie that was being told for his benefit.

‘She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ said the detective softly.

He remembered how the veins had stood out on his father’s forehead, thin and shiny like nylon string, and his eyes had bulged. He couldn’t see the detective’s face, his back was to him, standing so still he might have been a spectator at the event. His father’s eyes were fixed on Daly, but he didn’t seem to see him any more. His father said in a thick voice, ‘She wasn’t.’

The detective didn’t move.

‘What do you mean, she wasn’t?’

‘She wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ his father said, still staring at Celcius. ‘She was in the right place at the right time. She was coming home from her work. She was driving down the same road she took every evening.’

After a lengthy pause, the detective said, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr Daly.’ He glanced over his shoulder at Celcius before leaving the room.

His next memory was of his parents’ darkened bedroom, his mother’s blue nurse’s shoes lying on the floor and his father’s shadowy figure, clumsy and fumbling, rummaging through the drawers of her cupboards. He remembered his father’s determination, mumbling to himself as he searched through her things. He kept lifting out and rereading old letters. Daly had never seen him look so agitated.

In the weeks after her funeral, Daly’s father had been haunted by the nagging suspicion that the police detectives were failing her, that there was unfinished business to the investigation. Both the IRA gang and the police unit had melted mysteriously away. No charges were ever brought against the person who had fired the weapon, or the IRA men responsible for the attack.

Daly’s father was given barely half an hour’s notice by the police when the inquest was called. He had managed to get to the courthouse in Portadown just in time, but had been forced to sit at the back of the room, unable to fully hear the proceedings. All he heard was the coroner’s conclusion: that his wife’s death had been a tragic accident, one of many that blighted those years.

Time had reduced the pain for Daly and his father. If not healing the loss, then permitting them to forget it gently, growing scar tissue around those months, sealing them off. Gradually, they’d been able to reconcile themselves to the coroner’s findings, and the lack of any charges or arrests.

What did Walsh’s red pin change? Everything. It suggested that his mother had been the intended target of a murder gang, one of dozens marked within the triangle, her death not an accident but a cold-blooded assassination. He felt a sense of outrage. Walsh had obtained a confidential police report showing that the gun used to kill her had been a Spanish-made Star pistol, the same weapon used in several of the other attacks marked out on his map. It was impossible not to agree with Walsh’s line of investigation. When a weapon was used in a similar type of attack, in a similar area and at around the same time, it suggested the attackers were at least linked, if not the same people. But why the cover-up and why his mother? She was a God-fearing Catholic, completely innocent, unconnected to any political party or paramilitary organization. Why concoct a story that she had died in the crossfire between an IRA gang and a police unit, when it should have been clear that her death was linked to a sequence of sectarian murders?

Daly tried to sort through the legal papers and newspaper reports that Walsh had accumulated on his desk. According to Walsh’s research, the Star pistol bore the serial number 59488. It had been the personal-protection firearm issued to a man called Ivor McClintock. He had been charged in 1983 with membership of a Loyalist paramilitary organization. Daly read further, eager to find out why McClintock had been issued with the weapon in the first place, but he struggled to concentrate on the facts. His eyes kept flicking back to the map, to the red pin and his mother’s name, the memory of her shoes on the bedroom floor.

To restore some order to his teeming thoughts he took out his mobile phone, fiddled with it, pointed it at the map and took several photographs, zooming in so he could capture all the details. His eyes were steely and blank, staring at the image on the phone’s video screen. It was the latest model, thinner and more expensive than the last. He disliked its heft; somehow its lightness disappointed him. He belonged to the generation for whom solidity and weight were allied with dependability, and the phone’s slimness made it seem an unreliable wedge between him and brutal reality.

When he put the phone away, the chaos began to flow. He had a vision of the map and its criss-crossing lines shifting together, the dozens of deaths entangled, as if they were leaves and thorns whipped up in a wind. They surged towards him, helter-skelter, the names and locations flashing before his eyes. What had happened to their grieving families, all those disrupted lives, and what about his own? What had happened to him after that memory of his mother’s blue shoes lying on the floor and his father rummaging through the drawers? He found it impossible to take the image forward and remember what happened next.

He stepped back and sat on Walsh’s bed. His mind shot back to another memory, before his mother’s death. He was standing with his schoolbag surveying his tidy bedroom as though it were a zone of anger and humiliation. His mother had found a secret list he’d been hiding in his room, and destroyed it. The memory left him stumbling out of the priest’s room, down the long corridor. The abbot saw him as he made to leave the building.

‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked. He must have seen the look on Daly’s face.

‘Nothing at all,’ said the detective. However, everything was wrong.

He drove out of the monastery grounds and stopped at the first bridge straddling the new motorway. His mind was not yet willing to accept what his eyes had perceived. He needed to investigate Walsh’s findings further and verify the facts listed on the map. He tried to plan a course of action while staring at the streaming traffic. For a while, he thought about passing the case over to Irwin, and allowing Special Branch to get their teeth into it.
I don’t have to get involved in this
, he told himself.
I will not be pulled into the mire of the past.
However, something about Irwin’s presence at the car crash warned him that he could not leave it to Special Branch to deliver justice and the truth. He had the nagging feeling that Irwin had been shielding some sort of secret. The younger detective wasn’t in the business of straightforward law and order, especially when it came to handling unsolved crimes in the past.

He got out of the car and looked at the dual carriageway spreading before him, the lorries speeding by in their hollow thunder. He stared at the verge of sodden grass directly below, the stew of litter and overgrown weeds raked by the wind of passing vehicles. The murk of the evening made him feel like a stranger. He climbed back into his car and switched on the engine.

His pain was so solitary that there was no relief to be granted by watching other people’s lives. This was not his road, he thought. He could see the truth now. If your past harboured a dark secret, you could travel nowhere peacefully, because home would always exert its dark gravity no matter where you went. Home for him would always be a gloomy cottage enmeshed by thorn trees and winding lanes, brooding over a lough of restless water.

The journalist was waiting for Daniel Hegarty in the corridor outside the hotel toilets. A glint of ruthlessness shone in her eyes. The spy began to think that she was not as attractive as he had first thought. With a stab of awareness, he saw she was hiding an ugly secret. Her prettiness was as hollow as her story, which he had been eager to believe in, as an antidote to his rising impatience. Something had happened to the priest; he could see that now in her cold face, the clenched teeth behind her smile, and the defiant tilt of her chin. She scrutinized his briefcase, and for a moment he feared he had betrayed his secret by allowing her to guess its emptiness. A man bringing an empty briefcase to such an important meeting was not to be trusted. However, she turned and led him up the stairs and along a windowless corridor, her dark hair bouncing on her tense shoulders.

When they reached the hotel room, he lifted up his briefcase as if to take out the documents. He slipped his hand in, felt the gun and waited as she knocked on the door. He stared at the back of her head, her motionless neck. He admired her calm. She knew what she was doing, leading him into this dark little trap. She glanced back at him, her face expressionless, and then down at his briefcase, as if she were weighing it all in her mind, balancing the briefcase and its contents with his life, her blue eyes unblinking, as if both were worth nothing. He let the case hang a little lower.