Silence (12 page)

‘Yes.’

‘And now that I’ve learned the story was a lie, and I try to remember what actually happened that morning, where I was and what I was doing, there’s nothing there any more. Just a blank.’

He glanced at her. She was deeply engaged with what he was saying. Motionless, she waited for him to continue, but he had nothing more to say. With a neat shuffle, she moved her body closer to his.

‘Father Walsh was committed to the truth,’ she said, examining his face for a reaction. ‘To exposing cover-ups and lies and filling in the blanks that remained amid all the grief. His search was leading him to some shocking conclusions.’

‘Like what?’

‘That the murders weren’t political assassinations. None of the victims were in any way involved in politics, let alone the IRA. Including, I presume, your mother.’

Such was the arbitrary nature of sectarian murder, thought Daly.

‘It’s clear they were killed because they were Catholics,’ he said. ‘Surely, that’s all there was to it.’

‘Aloysius believed there was another reason.’ She leaned closer and almost touched his hand.

‘Where are you going with this?’

‘Aloysius believed there was logic behind the apparent randomness of the attacks. The geographical pattern and the dates. For a start, the majority of the murders happened on the first Monday of the month.’

Daly shook his head. He was in no mood to follow her reasoning.

‘What are you suggesting? That my mother was deliberately targeted for some reason other than her religion?’

‘Yes.’

‘But there was no sense behind the killings. They were the work of psychopathic gunmen and you know it.’

‘Think about it for a moment. The gang must have studied their targets, followed their movements. They didn’t just pile into a car and drive off looking for a Catholic to murder. They were specific.’

She made the suggestion as gently as possible, but she might as well have been probing a painful wound with a razor. He tried to seal himself off from the source of grief so that he might understand the outrageous thing she was suggesting.

‘Why are you taking sectarianism out of the frame? What other motive could there have been?’

She held back from going any further.

‘That’s the puzzle. Poor Aloysius spent years trying to solve it.’

She ordered another set of coffees.

‘Where did your mother work?’

‘She was a nurse at the local hospital.’

‘Did she have any Protestant friends?’

‘What are you implying? That a colleague marked her down as a target?’

‘We’ll have to dig up staff lists for the wards she worked on. Find out if anyone had links with the paramilitaries or the police.’

She kept questioning him as he sipped the coffee, trying to pin down his memories of that dark year. However, they were slipping from his grasp. All he had left was the image of his mother’s blue shoes on the bedroom floor and his father rummaging through the drawers.

‘I’ve already told you how flawed my memory is,’ he said. ‘There’s no point asking any more questions.’

Suddenly he felt tired. He reminded himself that Pryce was a journalist, not a therapist or confidante. She was interested only in proving controversial conspiracy theories and stirring up the past. Perhaps the theory was nothing more than a journalist’s ploy to gain the greatest possible publicity for her book.

He was completely sure of one thing, however. A stray event had robbed him of his mother, the wanton behaviour of a gang of lunatics who did not know what they were doing from one moment to the next. That was what gave terrorists their edge, after all. Murder on a whim, their target constantly changing.

‘Are you a practising Catholic, Inspector?’ she asked.

He glanced at her, and then looked at his empty cup of coffee. He wanted desperately to walk away from this impetuous woman and her oddly intimate manner. He did not believe that the obsessive research of a lonely priest could dispel the murkiness of the past. The truth had disappeared more than thirty years ago down a labyrinth of twisted country lanes along with his mother’s incognito killers. It was gone forever, he told himself. Like his mother’s body. What was the point in following it into the labyrinth?

‘I asked are you a practising Catholic?’

‘Sorry, I was distracted.’ Had he imagined a judgemental tone in her voice? ‘What do you mean?’ He felt challenged and a little disorientated by the question.

‘I mean, if you were, it might be a form of consolation that the man who shed light on your mother’s death was a priest.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. In the sense that his research was a way of sanctifying evil.’ She spoke with a measure of reverence.

‘I don’t think anyone can sanctify evil. Not even the holiest of priests.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’

Daly said nothing. He considered there might be a measure of truth in what she had said – in that the priest’s meticulous charting of the murder triangle had exalted the deaths of its victims. Walsh had wanted to make the secret of their murder so large and all-encompassing it could no longer be buried in the past.

She leaned in closer.

‘I think we recognize something in each other, Inspector. Sometimes fate brings people together.’

He blinked.

‘You will find out what happened to Father Walsh. I can see that in your eyes.’

‘What do you see?’

‘A mother’s only son who wants to know as much as I do about what happened that night. Why and how Walsh died. That’s the reason you rang me in the first place.’

It jarred him a little that she knew he was an only son. How had she discovered that piece of information?

She removed her mobile phone.

‘If you give me your mobile number I’ll ring you if anything fresh comes up.’

He felt uncomfortable with where she was leading him. She was drawing him down a road into the past, but not the past he knew. It was a sinister place, stranger than any wilderness. He should walk away right now, he thought. He should just leave, and turn away from this road; yet knowing this, and still resenting the intimate draw of her voice and her smile, he acquiesced and gave her his mobile number.

She stood up, smoothed her skirt and held out her hand for him to shake. It felt slender and pointed. He was reminded again of a cold little digging tool.

When night fell, Daly was so tired he almost forgot to carry the black hen to its coop. The urgent peck-peck of its beak against the glass woke him as he drifted into sleep. He got dressed and lifted her from the porch window. He stumbled alarmingly in the darkness, holding the hen close to his chest. A fox barked a few fields away. He could feel her trembling. The track to the coop had never seemed so uneven and overgrown, and he was glad to slip the hen into its hay-filled darkness. He could almost have fallen into that cosy little hiding place, too.

He crawled into bed and fell into a fitful sleep. Episodes from his childhood percolated through his mind, memories of his father mumbling to himself, his mother’s shoes, the two of them standing together in one of the back fields staring at the ground. His subconscious was trying to isolate clues from the things his father had done and said, dragging him up out of sleep to remember. A pattern in the fields. His father digging energetically. Something inexplicable, hovering at the edge of his awareness. What had the old man buried there? He forced himself back down into sleep, hoping that by morning time he might begin to understand.

He dreamed that he saw the back of his mother walking slowly down a dark lane. She was wandering in a maze of little roads, partially dazed. She turned to smile at him absent-mindedly, beckoning him to follow, but something warned him that her journey was botched, that they would never discover the roads that would lead her back home.

Afterwards, he lay awake thinking that the lough-shore terrain of entangled lanes might be the landscape of the past itself. He needed instructions on how to untangle this inner geography for he felt as dazed as his mother had looked in his dream. He needed more clues than those provided by Walsh’s murder map. It did not bode well, beginning this journey into the past feeling so confused, but he had no other choice.

In another dream, he imagined that his cottage had grown a set of spindly legs and was strutting about the fields. Every time he stepped close to the front door, the building became agitated, whirling and spinning in the air with a mind of its own. The more he watched the cottage, the more it resembled an old hen looking for a place to roost. Finally, it settled in one of the back fields of the farm.

Yet when Daly went looking for the cottage, it had disappeared without a trace. In its place stood his father with a spade gripped in his hands. It was raining heavily and the earth around the old man was disturbed.

‘You’re going to get drenched,’ said Daly.

‘I’m on guard,’ replied his father.

‘What are you guarding?’

Daly’s father gestured at the blackness of the upturned soil.

‘The secrets of the past.’

At his father’s words, the earth began to boil like tar, lumpy and full of craters. It piled up behind his the old man in the shape of a rising wave.

‘What secrets are you and the cottage hiding from me?’ Daly demanded.

But before his father could reply, the earth heaved into a steep slope, and swept over his thin frame. Daly looked up just before the wave slammed into him, and woke up with a start.

*

The next morning, he made his way gingerly through the rooms of the cottage. He hunkered down at the breakfast table and ate some lumpy porridge. It was ironic, but he had never felt so stranded, so far away from home. He recalled his strange dreams and tried to interpret their imagery. He wondered what message his unconscious was trying to communicate to him.

He peered through the small kitchen window, and for the first time in his life contemplated the humps and folds in the field behind the cottage. Had they always been there, or was his memory correct in believing they dated from around the time of his mother’s death? From what he could remember his father had abandoned grazing that particular field and never tried to farm it in any way.

He forced his feet into an old pair of Wellington boots and scrambled over a little iron gate. At first the folds of the field felt familiar, the hiding places of his childhood, but the terrain soon changed. He spent half an hour trailing through hummocky grass and peering into thickets of blackthorn; his trouser bottoms grew soaking wet. His thoughts kept wandering off into his solitude, his mind a blank. He had no inkling as to what he was searching for. He kept returning to one corner of the field, more bramble than grass, with an odd conjunction of raised banks and old stones peeping through the weeds. However, the undergrowth of briars and nettles had welded itself together, blocking any further investigation. Badly scratched by thorns and stung by nettles, he stepped back and tried to survey the scene. Nothing about the field and its contours seemed logical. Why had his father left it all those years ago, squeezing his hungry cattle into the marshier, outlying fields of the farm?

He stared at the raised banks. He realized that they were too long and high to have been the result of even his father’s most Herculean digging. Something mechanical had been at work here, piling the earth and stones into these irregular mounds. However, he had no recollection of ever seeing diggers working in the field. Perhaps his father had attempted to clear the field of its stones and bushes to make it more arable. Perhaps the abandonment of the project had more to do with grief or infirmity, or the descent into old age, than anything mysterious or sinister.

A cold chill rose from the insides of his boots. A misty rain filled the air, shrouding everything with a nullifying greyness. He was wasting his time here, he realized. He had been mistaken in believing the humps and folds of that strangely uneven field might reveal the secrets of the past. He left the puzzle behind and returned to the warmth of the kitchen.

From the mantelpiece in the living room, he took down a framed photograph of his father in his later years. He scrutinized the familiar face. It surprised him to realize he had only ever glanced at the picture in a superficial way. He had always thought the photographer had caught his father’s charming, slightly downturned smile and the warmth of his eyes, but now, examining the smile at the corners of the eyes, he thought he saw something strange and subdued, a sadness, perhaps even a trace of bitterness. Another detail that disturbed him was the clock on the shelf behind his father. It still sat in the same sun-faded position against the scullery wall, showing the same time as it did in the photograph: a quarter past eleven. He had thought the clock had stopped working some time after his father’s death, but from the evidence of the picture it had stopped years previously and never been fixed.

Gripping the picture, Daly had the sensation that he was teetering at the edge of a void, and that he might fall without a place to land. He replaced the picture on the mantelpiece. Now that Walsh’s map had questioned the past, he feared that all his memories in the years following his mother’s death had been nothing more than an illusion created to hide a dark secret.

*

That night, Daly sat by the turf fire with his nightly glass of whiskey and the radio on, but he was unable to relax. As a detective, he was perpetually searching for clues, uncovering secrets, solving mysteries and bringing them to public attention, but what did it matter whether one secret more or one secret less was exposed? Hadn’t enough secrets been revealed already? Did his country need so much examination of its past? Could any society bear so much truth-telling? And moreover, whose truth was it anyway? He could only investigate and interrogate his own truth, his own experience of the Troubles, which in the grand scale of things was as small and insignificant as the grains of sand churning in a boundless desert storm. Perhaps he should unravel the mystery of his mother’s death but keep the findings to himself, like a writer penning a book that he never intends to publish. He would discover the secret and then become part of it himself.