Silence (11 page)

‘It’s a mile further up the back road,’ said the barman eventually. ‘There’s a little lay-by on the left-hand side and opposite is a hole in the blackthorn hedge. That’s the entrance – blink and you’ll miss it. Just follow the steps down.’

‘Thanks.’

‘It’ll be dark soon. I wouldn’t hang around there if I were you.’

*

Daly parked the car in the lay-by. He opened the door and heard the panicky flight of unseen birds. He stood at the gap in the hedge. It was a bleak threshold. He spotted a lacy bra hanging from a bush, and wondered what sort of people made love amid cramped thorns and shadows. His feet sank in mud lined with the tracks of cars. Several centuries ago, persecuted Catholics filed to lonely glens like this to hear Mass in secret and to drink from the holy wells. Now their descendants came stumbling in the dark, clumsy as bullocks. It felt like a final unravelling of a God-fearing society, a trampling of sex and secrecy, the careless tyre tracks, the beer cans and cigarette stubs embedded in the mud. He felt a sharp need to push through the thorns and seek out somewhere more remote and wild, where there was no longer any evidence of human intrusion.

In the months after the separation from Anna, his wife of ten years, Daly had taken to visiting the glens and holy wells around Tyrone. He had returned to the sites of childhood pilgrimages in the hope they might sharpen his faith and help him through that difficult time. No doubt he was searching for some sort of refuge or key to enlightenment up and down the wild glens that riddled the border countryside. As if it was as easy as entering the right landscape to return to childhood and resurrect the memories of faith and moral certainty.

He had not been receptive enough, or perhaps he had lacked the mental detachment from his day-to-day problems, or the correct blend of the two, for he had found nothing. Just the same black pools of spring water, the same thorny twigs stirring against a dark sky, the same rain-soaked petitions hanging from the trees. No burning bushes or oracles. Not so much treasure chests of spirituality as spoil heaps of frustrated prayers.

This particular glen was no different. Daly stared into the depths of the reputedly miraculous pool but all he saw was an unnerving stillness, a darkness distilled moment by moment from the surrounding rocks. Along the sides of the well, he found evidence of recent prayer: a collection of burnt-out candles, snippets of paper, rusting rosary beads and holy medals tied to the thorns, as well as fresh boot-marks in the squelchy terrain.

It was the practice of the devout to hang a religious ornament or a piece of string to the overhanging tree as part of their pilgrimage, hence the collection of ornaments dangling from the twigs. They were the clue that led Daly to believe Walsh had been coming from a holy well on the night of the crash. He had deduced that the priest had visited the well and removed a bunch of the tangled artefacts because he was looking for a key too. Something to resolve his predicament, or reduce the burden of the past.

Daly examined the offerings hanging from the tree as though they were evidence to be analysed and dissected. Visitors had left behind their written petitions, some of them in plastic envelopes. He gazed at the handwriting, the mishmash of prayer, scripture and heartfelt pleas. He could almost hear their words whispering in his ear. Every twig held a burden; more than the tree’s spiny branches could bear, it seemed to him. He stepped back, overwhelmed, the tree writhing over him like a black sinuous altar.

Out of instinct, he mouthed a few Hail Marys. It was not his most convinced praying, but nor was it simply a lonely detective speaking to himself. It was something else entirely different. A spell to bring evil out of its hiding place. Perhaps that was why people still flocked to half-pagan sites like the holy well, he thought, whispering prayers that were more like magical incantations, seeking deliverance from darkness. As a detective, it was his job to track down the murderous forces that lurked within the minds of ordinary people, the urge to kill and destroy. He was engaged in the human war against evil. He didn’t need to invoke prayers. He would discover his own way to lay siege to the people responsible for Walsh’s death and drive them from their hiding places.

He approached the tree again. He reached up with his hand and felt amid the crevices of its branches. He groped with his fingers until he found the object he was looking for. Something thin and metallic. Not a holy offering, more a profane stowaway. A mobile phone. Its screen glowed as soon as he touched its keys. He smiled at it. He lifted it into the air, and walked around with it, holding it as high as he could, trying to get a signal but failing. He walked back up to his car. He took out his own phone; hunted out the number the abbot had given him, and called it. The other one buzzed into life.

It made sense as soon as Daly had worked out that Walsh had come from the glen. He had hidden the phone in a safe place – and where was safer to a Catholic priest than a holy well? No one in Special Branch with all their years of expertise would have understood that as well as he did. It was a question of geography. Holy glens were always secret places, more like tunnels through the labyrinth of hills surrounding the border. Their remoteness and steep hillsides made them impervious to mobile phone technology. Walsh had hidden the phone in the closest place he could find to an inaccessible dimension.

But why? The priest must have felt hunted or followed in some way, and fearing that the phone contained incriminating information, had ditched it. Daly searched in the phone’s files but they were all empty. He scrolled through the call history. There were numerous missed calls from the same number on the night of Walsh’s death and the following morning. The caller’s name had been saved under Hegarty. Out of curiosity, he rang the number. He counted ten rings and then it went to a recorded message. He hung up and tried another number saved under the name Jacqueline. To his surprise, a woman’s voice answered almost immediately.

‘Who is this?’ Her voice seemed to contract as she spoke.

He answered without thinking.

‘It’s me.’

There was silence on the phone.

‘Aloysius?’

‘Yes.’

Again a silence, as if the woman wasn’t breathing.

‘Where can we meet?’ asked Daly.

He regretted the carelessness of the question, but she replied immediately, ‘Where are you now?’

He didn’t answer.

The signal faded a little. She was travelling somewhere.

‘I’ll be outside the hotel in twenty minutes.’ She spoke carefully, as if spelling out a set of instructions to a child. ‘I’ll see you at the far end of the car park.’

‘OK,’ he said and hung up.

There was only one hotel the woman could have meant. Half an hour later, Daly swung his vehicle into the grounds of Clary Lodge. He drove to the end of the car park, his headlamps lighting up a blue car. A woman stood next to it, dressed in a dark suit, skirt and red-heeled shoes.

She was immediately hostile when Daly approached her with Walsh’s phone.

‘You’re not Father Walsh.’

‘He couldn’t come. I’m here in his place.’

‘It wasn’t him on the phone.’ Her voice was edged with grief. ‘It was you. Aloysius is dead.’

Daly nodded a little sheepishly.

‘Who are you?’

‘Inspector Celcius Daly. I’m investigating his death.’

She relaxed visibly and looked at him with curiosity.

‘We should chat in the hotel bar.’

She turned and walked away. Daly stared at her back, which was stiff and strained-looking. The click-clack of her heels sounded out of beat, the muscles of her bare calves tightening with each step. He realized that she was limping slightly. He followed her up to the hotel entrance, staring at her red heels and deft calves.

Inside the hotel, she nudged beside him as they sat down, her figure composed and neat in her skirt and suit. She swiftly ordered two coffees and smiled at him. He realized that whereas he had explained his connection to Father Walsh, she had not introduced herself at all.

‘Coffee is the last thing I need right now,’ she said. ‘I’ve barely slept. I’ve gone through all the usual police contacts to find out what theories you guys are working on but I’m having no success at all. I don’t even know if my life is in danger or not. Should I have a protection officer assigned to me, do you think, Inspector?’

She stared at his uncertain gaze.

‘Forgive me for not introducing myself,’ she said. ‘My name is Jacqueline Pryce.’ She extended a slim, pointed hand that to Daly felt as neat as a digging tool. ‘I’m a journalist.’

‘Which newspaper do you work for?’

‘The one that pays the most,’ she said with a smile.

She passed him an NUJ card, which he examined. However, it didn’t contain the information he wanted, which was how this sleek, pretty journalist had got her life entangled with the unhappy business of Walsh’s death.

‘Ever since the night of Aloysius’s crash I’ve had this feeling that I’m being watched. I keep thinking I’m being followed while driving. Tell me, Inspector, are Special Branch watching me?’

‘Why would Special Branch want to do that?’

‘It was something that Aloysius said to me before he died. That I should keep looking over my shoulders to check for shadows.’

‘What made him say that?’

‘Because he believed we were getting too close to the truth. That we had wandered into forbidden territory.’

‘What you mean by the truth?’

She told him about Father Walsh’s theory of a murder triangle – that a large number of apparently random sectarian killings in Tyrone and Armagh were all connected. He had needed someone to help write up his research into some sort of a book, thus he had given her copies of all his maps and findings. At first, they had seemed rambling and chaotic, she explained, but she kept dipping in and out of them over the space of several months.

‘What intrigued me most were his claims about collusion between Loyalists and police officers,’ she said. ‘I spent a couple of weeks in the newspaper archives, reading as many reports as I could on those murders. I contacted the national archive of government papers and followed his lines of inquiry. Eventually my research began to bear fruit, and I came away with the feeling that Aloysius was correct.’

‘How?’

‘That there was a pattern. A web of connections between the killings. And something else: it struck me as odd that this gang was able to go undetected for so long. The killings should have rung alarm bells all the way to the top of government. However, nothing was done. The murderous cycle continued month after month. Even when some of the gang members were charged and convicted, they received only the lightest possible sentences.’

Daly decided not to press her on what she meant by the web of connections. He wasn’t interested in hearing that kind of detail, at least not yet.

She leaned a little closer to him.

‘Now tell me, Inspector, am I being followed? I need to know.’

‘I wouldn’t know, to tell you the truth. They might be following me as well.’

It was her turn to express surprise.

‘Why would they do that?’

There was something exquisite and finely honed about her curiosity. Her eyes flashed at him. Daly’s mouth felt dry but he decided to plunge right in.

‘My interest in Walsh’s murder triangle is more personal than you think.’

Daly was surprised at how easy it was to talk to this strange woman. She had access to brutal facts about his mother’s death, and this made him more wary and respectful than he had been of any other journalist, or woman for that matter. She might reveal things about his mother that he had never known. Journalism was a fickle business, with rapid deadlines and a superficial attachment to the truth, but something in her manner struck him as oddly trustworthy.

‘One of the pins on his map had my mother’s name next to it.’

‘She was one of the victims?’

‘That’s correct.’

She stared at him and waited.

‘And you were...’ She paused to scrutinize his face. ‘...surprised to see her name there?’

He paused.

‘Yes.’

Amid her concern, he detected a trace of satisfaction – excitement, almost. She was eager to get inside his feelings.

He stumbled on with his story.

‘I was only a boy, nine years old, at the time. They told me a different version of events. That she died during crossfire in an IRA attack on a police unit.’

Her interest doubled.

‘Who were “they”?’

‘The police at the time. My father, too.’ He hesitated. ‘I was a lonely child, unworldly in many ways. I never thought he kept anything from me. Now I’m confused.’

She leaned forward again, gazing at him intently. He reminded himself that he barely knew her. He viewed her slender face, the outline of her lips, and below, her exposed neck leading to the top of her chest. Was this a form of encouragement, he wondered, a token of her appreciation that he was opening up? Daly was unsure, but he could tell she was a subtle interrogator, and observant, too. She knew he was intensely aware of the proximity of her body.

‘I would like to have it sorted out,’ he told her. ‘The truth, I mean.’

He wondered how much of the story he had invented himself based on the meagre details relayed to him. Perhaps that was the nature of childhood memories, a hazy narrative created by immature minds to deal with loss and pain.

‘Somehow, I always believed in the back of my mind that the explanation of her death was inadequate.’ His voice cracked slightly.

She appeared to bask in his discomfort, the inner conflict between his reticence and his need to spill the truth. He grew shy, worried that an excess of grief might leap from his heart and overwhelm him. However, she had a journalist’s knack of showing no discomfort or surprise at the most intimate of revelations.

‘What do you remember of that time?’

‘I remember countless checkpoints. Soldiers and policemen searching my father’s car.’ He stared at his hands. ‘I never saw the scene itself. You know, the place where she was killed. But somehow I remember it clearly. I wasn’t an eyewitness, but I’ve invented all the details in my imagination. Do you know what I mean?’ He stared at her. ‘I wasn’t there that morning but I can recall it as though I was. Am I making sense?’