Silence (24 page)

Hegarty said nothing. The thought of Special Branch blowing his cover made him feel cold and sick. However, he was too deeply committed to this fugitive life to give it up that easily.
I must be tough-willed and not relent. I have only one plot, while they have many, but my plan to be free will in the end prevail over their countless conspiracies.

‘The last time we met, you talked about getting me out of the country. I want to avail myself of that opportunity now.’

The major grunted.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes I want to, or yes you’ll help me?’

‘Yes, it’s never too late to come to your senses,’ said the major after a hesitation. ‘I can arrange flights and a new passport, but we’ll have to work quickly.’ He paused. ‘Rest assured, in a few days, you’ll be out of this country and your only regret will be that it took you so long to give up the game.’

Hegarty felt a wave of comfort at the major’s promise.

‘You know I’m not cut out for this type of subterfuge any more,’ grumbled the major. ‘I should be tending to my garden and enjoying my retirement rather than getting pulled into your messy one-man war with Special Branch.’

‘I understand,’ said Hegarty. ‘Where do you intend to send me? Will Special Branch know?’

‘Do you have to ask so many questions and make things complicated? Just give us your location and I’ll have you picked up within hours.’

Hegarty hesitated. The brevity of the major’s replies made him feel uneasy, and who were the ‘us’ he referred to?

‘Refusing this offer is tantamount to signing your own death warrant,’ said the major.

Did he have no say in where he was going to be relocated? It was the way the intelligence services always worked, invisible people playing games with the lives of others. However, his discomfort overwhelmed his doubt. Other than Inspector Daly, there was no one else he could rely on. In spite of his distrust, he gave the major the details of where he was hiding.

‘We’ll pick you up in the morning. Sit tight until then, and don’t let anyone else know of our plans. Have you got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good luck, Hegarty.’

That night, the spy lay down on his sleeping bag and tried to nod off. However, it was impossible. He felt suspended between relief and dark suspicion. He listened to the occasional bleats and footfalls of the sheep, and almost drifted away, but then their sudden silence brought him back to alertness.

He switched on the light of his phone and saw that the entire flock had gathered around him, stifling the air with their rank breath. Their muddy faces and dugs tottered closer. They had stopped chewing the cud and their mouths were slack, their green saliva sickening his stomach. Their eyes gaped at him.

‘What is it?’ he asked the mute assembly. ‘What’s happened?’

What were they doing, crowding around him like a confused search party? Something must be worrying them, he concluded.

‘Is it me?’ he asked.

He stared at their silent black faces, and without thinking began to play a mental game, finding similarities between them and the faces of people he knew, former comrades in the IRA, and his handlers in Special Branch. He remembered men in cramped dark rooms, entrenched in conspiracy, eyes flashing in the dim light. He thought of the countless rooms he’d sat in, rooms with listening devices recording everything, rooms where he’d plotted murder and betrayal.

He stared at the sheep until his eyes began to throb. Here and there, he glimpsed the faces of dead comrades, murdered neighbours. They seemed to disappear as soon as he caught sight of them. He was filled with a desire to hear their voices, to look into their eyes and have a conversation with them. He prowled through the flock, moving from one animal to another, his mind filling with the paranoid thought that the ghosts of the past had gathered to warn him, telling him he could not go on living like this, that he had reached a dead end. The more he shouted at them, the more resistant the sheep were to moving. They seemed to know he was just a harmless old man, crazed with loneliness and fear. He clenched his jaw. What a pity he had lived to this stage of his life, searching for familiar company in the faces of beasts.

Suddenly something in the dark disturbed the sheep, and they began bleating. He forgot himself and began scolding them.

‘Look at your filthy faces. Look at the mess you’ve made,’ he muttered. ‘This is entirely your fault. The trouble I’m in. Stop crying. It’s too late for crying. Be silent and give me peace.’ He vented a torrent of resentment upon the sheep that swelled in ire the more they surrounded him meekly and refused to speak back. ‘I don’t want to see any of you again,’ he shouted, on his feet now.

He swung his arms and ran at them, but they darted out of his path and re-formed, bowing their heads and refusing to move, stubborn and oddly calm in the circumstances. He beat his fists in the air, frustrated and breathless.

He only stopped his tirade when a further chorus of warning bleats broke out from them. He watched as a few of the sheep turned to stare at the opened doorway and the moonless sky beyond as though it held an invisible threat. He listened carefully. At first, he could hear nothing but the wheeze and snort of the sheep’s breathing. Then a faint rumble, more like a tremor in the sky. Was it thunder? He was fully alert now. He could see through the doorway the silhouettes of the thorn trees against the starlit sky. They stirred in the wind, like a river of tossing shadows. The thunder returned, louder now. Up in the sky he spotted a light that was not a star. He pushed his way through the flock and saw the lights of a helicopter and its search-beam combing the glen below.

In frantic, awkward haste, he packed his bag and tried to slip away into the night, but the sheep blocked his escape. They grew panicked, bleating loudly, following his progress through the doorway. He stopped and stared at their startled eyeballs.

‘Come on, get a move on,’ he whispered. But they made no effort at flight. ‘You filthy beasts, move away or you’ll finish me right here.’

He waved his arms in the air and hissed, but if anything, the flock thickened around him, butting his legs.

The helicopter turned away from the glen and came thundering up the mountain. The searchlight swept towards the shepherd’s cottage, the air brimming with the roar of the blades. The sheep panicked in different ways, some fell sideways, or backwards, and then they picked themselves up and ran off.

He stumbled after them, keeping his body low. He looked behind. The field was dazzled with light, the blades of the helicopter drawing closer, smacking the air, beating out a threshed circle of grass. The searchlight picked out one or two of the outlying sheep. The helicopter was almost above him now. He plunged into the herd of sheep and ran with them, almost on all fours. They had grown used to his presence in the cottage and were not alarmed to have a human trotting within their ranks. The helicopter passed overhead and continued along the mountain.

For a blessed interval, Hegarty was a wolf among sheep, feeling sharp and alert, heading towards a dark forest. Their trampling hooves would erase any footprints or sign of occupation, his scent, the trail of evidence, anything that might link him to the cottage. The helicopter swept over them again, and the flock closed in around Hegarty, so near he could feel their agitated breathing on his face. It was hard to believe that he had been reduced to this half-wild state, seeking refuge among animals and thorns. His hands and knees grew cold, sinking into the boggy ground.

The helicopter hovered overhead and passed. He took off for the cover of the forest. Again, the sheep circled in behind his crouched figure. Swiftly, he forged into the flock’s lead position. He felt vigour in his legs that he had not felt in years, as if he were part of a mass escape in the good old days. They came across a river and toiled along its rocky course.

He savoured the sensation of the cold water. The sheep’s hooves plunged along the riverbed. His neck and back strained to keep as low as the rest of the flock. The closest beasts eyeballed him with side glances, anticipating his next move, his next turn of direction. All he had to do was nod his head and they understood, bursting into a chorus of energetic bleats. He found himself looking at them with companionable curiosity, their black tongues, the paleness of their eyes, their pointed hooves churning the muddy sides of the river. He was surprised at the sense of satisfaction he felt to have fallen into the company of these dumb creatures, the sense that he might count as something in their tribe. What mistakes had he made all his life, running on his own, he thought, a solitary fugitive, when he could have been hiding with a pack and enjoying this freedom, this sense of indifference to his individual fate? All his life he had been thwarted, he realized, cheated out of this sense of belonging.

The river grew deeper, the water rougher. The flock churned alongside him with grim resolve. He groped in the dark. Several times, he slipped and collided with the body of one of the animals. Each time he picked himself up and kept running, but then in a lapse of concentration his foot struck a submerged rock. He wavered, staggered and fell, knocking his head against an outcrop. He stood up again and felt dizzy. He stumbled for a few steps and then sprawled face first into the river. This time he lost consciousness. The sheep crowded around him, ramming their heads against his prone body, turning him over, and then they fell silent, unmoving, their hooves sinking into the watery quagmire. Somewhere, not too far away in the sky, the helicopter persisted with its tiny tumult.

Daly drove to the healing glen and cautiously searched around the holy well with his flashlight but could find no trace of Hegarty. He thought he saw something caught and struggling in the branches of the tree overhanging the well but when he shone his torch all he saw were ribbons of material and religious medals dangling from the branches. That evening, in the darkness of his cottage, he had decided that whatever fate had in store for him it was entangled with Hegarty’s destiny. They had in common a unity of suspicions, fears and hopes that was strong enough to suspend any sane or professional judgement. The intensity of Daly’s loneliness also propelled him towards this dangerous rendezvous, and fuelled the fantasy that the spy might help dissolve all the murk surrounding the past.

Daly drove back out on to the roads that surrounded the glen. He had no idea where he was going. There were no other vehicles about. He saw the searchlight of a helicopter in the distance and drove in its direction. He wasn’t even sure if he was on the right side of the border. It was a landscape of straggling forest, winding rivers and empty farms.

Abruptly he braked to a standstill. His headlights had picked out the shape of an old man, a wraith-like figure, at the side of the road. Daly stepped out into the night air. He thought he heard a moan but the throb of the helicopter and the roar of a nearby river drowned it out. The figure of a man stepped into the pool of light cast by the headlights, a figure that buckled as Daly hurried to support it. The man’s clothes were soaked through and moulded to his back. His eyes glowered like someone deranged and his face was streaked with mud.

‘Hegarty?’

‘Yes.’ The spy shivered with the cold.

Daly introduced himself.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ he asked the spy.

‘I had a little accident.’ Hegarty looked at Daly as though meeting like this was the most natural thing in the world.

‘A genuine accident, or did someone arrange for it to happen?’ Daly glanced uneasily at the blinking light of the helicopter in the sky, and thought of Walsh’s crashed car.

‘No,’ growled Hegarty. ‘Normally they don’t let their victims limp away.’ He leaned heavily on Daly, who felt the chill of a mountain river on the old man’s body.

‘We should bring you to a doctor.’

‘I’m fine. I can take care of myself.’

‘Where are the secret books?’

Hegarty groaned.

‘Special Branch got to them first. They booby-trapped them with a firebomb.’

‘Then we’d better get you out of here,’ said Daly, pushing him towards the car. ‘We’ll go back to my cottage and figure out what to do from there.’

Hegarty shook his head.

‘What about the others?’ he asked. He grabbed Daly’s sleeve and pointed back towards the trees.

‘What others?’

Daly heard a set of voices, all sounding alike, a few plaintive phrases, repeated over and over again, difficult to comprehend. The sounds grew louder, broke into a commotion, and then he observed a stream of shadowy lumps hurtling out of the trees, piling on to the road. He made out the woolly heads of sheep, and their trembling bodies. They stood and blocked the road, bleating noisily.

Daly helped Hegarty into the passenger seat and jumped in himself. The sheep churned around the car, as if they were trying to keep up with the spy, who lay back in his seat, eyes half-closed, his face set in a grimace. The sour smell of sheep filled the car.

‘What are they talking about, Daly?’ he asked. ‘What do they want of me?’

The detective did not respond. He assumed the spy had concussion and was confused, but right now he was more worried about the helicopter in the sky, and the possibility of checkpoints along the road. He eased the car through the flock. They jostled and pushed against the vehicle. Hegarty raised his hand to the side window in an attempted gesture of farewell. He strained against his seatbelt and tried to get to his feet.

‘Sit where you are,’ ordered Daly.

The spy obeyed immediately. The sharpness of Daly’s voice brought him to his senses. He looked at the detective.

‘I thought you weren’t going to come. What took you so long?’

‘I came as soon as I could.’

‘Did anyone follow you?’

‘No. I took the back roads.’

‘Are you sure?’

Daly hesitated.

‘We’d better get a move on,’ said Hegarty. ‘They’ll be here soon. Switch off your headlights; otherwise you’ll draw in the helicopter.’

This time Daly followed Hegarty’s instructions. It was pitch-dark and he drove at a snail’s pace. However, he soon found that if he unfocused his eyes he could see more in the dim starlight: the avenue of fir trees, the emptiness of the road, the tunnel of deeper darkness ahead. In his rear-view mirror, he saw flashes of light, the helicopter’s search-beam, a mile or so behind, sweeping through the forest.