Silence (26 page)

Daly caught sight of a beam of light illuminating the kitchen window. From a sideways position, he looked out and saw that a car had pulled up at the front gate. He remained motionless. The lights went out and a figure stepped out of the car. There was just enough moonlight for Daly to make out a tall, stiff figure and the blur of a face. The figure stood by the car, staring at Daly’s cottage, as if waiting for some sort of signal. It took Daly a few seconds to recognize his forlorn gaze, the upright bearing of his shoulders, the hesitation of his stance.

Christ, what’s Donaldson doing here?
he thought in dismay.
It can’t be a coincidence.
Who else could he want but Hegarty? He hurried back to the fire and warned the spy, who immediately stiffened at the news.

‘Who does he want? You or me?’ asked Hegarty.

The spy stood up and moved to the window, wanting to see Donaldson for himself. Daly was unnerved. He pulled the curtains and ushered Hegarty into the back bedroom. The old man crouched by the door and looked up, staring right through Daly, his eyes glinting with an unstable light. Daly closed the door and left him in darkness, hoping that in the panic, Hegarty’s ghosts had fully abandoned him.

Daly walked outside to where his former commander stood in the moonlight, silhouetted against the thorn trees, and in the distance another wild border, the shore of Lough Neagh, its waves jostling together in the moonlight. It seemed to be the detective’s fate these days to have unwelcome visitors flocking to his cottage.

There was a silence between the two men. Donaldson looked at Daly as though waiting for a welcome or a question, neither of which were forthcoming. Daly could see that Donaldson had come alone, but he sensed that this was not a simple friendly visit.

The former commander had not shaved for a few days and the stubble gave his face a drawn, shifty look. He walked over to Daly’s old Renault.

‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘The roads round here must be a real mud bath.’ He pointed to the rear bumper and licence plate, which were almost obscured by dirt. ‘If you’re not careful you’ll get bogged down in the quagmire.’ His voice was almost ironic. He smiled at Daly. It was a contracted smile. Even his voice sounded thin. There was another silence.

‘What brings you here?’ said Daly eventually.

‘The lough. At this time of my career, I’m considering my plan B.’

Neither of them said anything as a few bats twirled overhead.

‘Nothing to do with police work. I’ve spent the evening looking round for a retirement cottage. One that has a berth for my boat. With Dorothy a permanent resident in the nursing home, I need some sort of a distraction.’ Donaldson’s wife had taken sick a few months previously and had been unable to care for herself since.

His tone was apologetically cheerful, but the look in his eyes and his movements were wary.

‘Why would you want to retire here?’

‘To get in touch with the elements.’ He breathed deeply. ‘The wind and the water.’

Daly grimaced. The lough shore was already in danger of becoming a refuge for transient souls, outlaws and people with a past to hide. Somehow, the strangeness of that vast body of inland water made visitors feel they could suddenly become anonymous, and end their days puttering about in boats.

‘So why did you call by?’

Donaldson seemed more interested in the humped fields surrounding the cottage. Daly had never seen anyone looking at the farm in that way, as though the former commander had known the lie of the land a long time ago and was making an effort to recognize it. He seemed to be experiencing a tentative revelation. His eyes swivelled about, unwilling to absorb some dreadful fact he saw written in the uneven landscape. Daly followed his gaze, trying to decipher the secret. The dappled moonlit fields looked false, lit up with nocturnal contours, the mysterious places multiplying now that daylight had receded.

‘I was passing and I remembered how heated our last conversation had been. I wanted to get some things off my chest.’ His usual irritability and condescension were absent. ‘Can I come in?’

Daly hesitated.

‘If you’re busy, I can come back some other time. Perhaps you have a guest?’

‘No, not at all. Come in. I’ve been clearing the attic, so excuse the mess.’

Daly tried to control his apprehension. His nerves were all over the place. Steady, he told himself as he led Donaldson through into the kitchen. If Donaldson knew nothing of Hegarty’s presence, he didn’t want his discomfort to alert any suspicions. He thought of his ex-RUC chief in one room and Hegarty the informer skulking in another. It pained him deeply to have his privacy, so carefully constructed during months of loneliness, gatecrashed in this manner.

At the sink, he fussed over some cups and the kettle. He wondered if Donaldson could detect the whiff of whiskey on his breath. The place seemed darker and more cluttered now that he had two unwelcome guests. Donaldson paced up and down the flagstones, bumping into bits of furniture.

‘Sit down,’ ordered Daly and handed him a cup of tea.

‘Where’s your travelling companion?’

Daly flinched.

‘Who?’

‘Your journalist friend. I hear you and she have been travelling in circles. You should find a better guide, Celcius. One who really knows the way.’

‘I thought you said there was something you wanted to get off your chest.’

‘My chest?’ His voice stiffened and he avoided Daly’s eye. ‘I’m not sure if that is the case or not. They aren’t my secrets to confess, after all.’ He glanced at Daly. ‘Excuse me for talking in this roundabout way. I’ve come to tell you another side of the story.’

‘I’ve heard enough stories to last me a lifetime.’

‘Well, I would like to tell you this one, if you have the time to listen.’

How much time would it take to hear everyone’s story? wondered Daly. Days of non-stop confessing, weeks, months, perhaps even years.

‘You know,’ began Donaldson, ‘one of the laziest assumptions people make these days is that guilt and shame are morbid things to be avoided. Really, the opposite is true. Guilt should be embraced like a trusted friend. It is usually a warning that bad things are at hand. To avoid feelings of guilt is the worst form of cowardice imaginable. Even if the bad things were done by others.’ He looked at Daly again. ‘I’m speaking about the actions of men under my command, the men responsible for your mother’s murder.’

‘Why should you feel guilty if you had no involvement in it?’

Donaldson nodded.

‘I feel guilty because I was preoccupied with maintaining the good reputation of the police force, when I should have shown courage and an instinct for justice. In those days, loyalty to one’s profession was not regarded as a virtue or a defect. It was a basic premise.’ He was now staring meaningfully at Daly. ‘I wanted to tell you this. I lied earlier when I said I happened to be passing by. I came here specifically to see you.’

Daly felt tired of his unwanted visitors, their shadows, their complications. He wished their stories were tidier, easier to comprehend and file away. He longed for open space, the clean sound of the wind swelling from the lough, rather than the stillness of this cramped cottage with too many traps and bodies to bump into.

‘I want to tell you that you have my backing for an official investigation into what happened during these murders,’ said Donaldson. ‘In my early career I did not speak out as much as I should have done. Loyalty held me back. And the shame that my officers could be capable of harbouring such hatred. If we can’t speak of those times now, when shall we ever?’ He stood up as if to go. ‘You will be hearing from Special Branch soon.’

‘I want a press conference to announce the inquiry,’ said Daly. ‘The maximum publicity possible. I don’t want the investigation hidden away and quietly forgotten about. And I want the promise of cooperation from serving and retired police officers.’

‘Very well.’

‘Before you go, I want to show you something.’

Daly unfolded the notes he had been gathering of his mother’s murder and the links to the other murders in Walsh’s triangle. He laid them out before Donaldson, whose eyes flicked over the connections and cross-references.

‘So many links,’ he said. ‘Most of them sketchy, to say the least.’

‘The dates intrigue me. They must be connected by some sort of calculation.’

Donaldson’s jaw clenched.

‘You understand I’m not obliged to discuss the matter until the inquiry is fully under way.’

‘The gang picked their victims for whatever reason and watched them. They waited. And then on the first Monday of every month they struck. There’s a strange logic at work there.’

Up to now, Donaldson’s words had a rehearsed air. Suddenly, he seemed unprepared and didn’t know what to say.

‘I fear there are many things about the gang’s modus operandi we will probably never know,’ he said.

His evasion stimulated the interrogator in Daly.

‘Why was it always the first Monday and not the third or fourth? Or a Tuesday, for that matter?’

‘Maybe it was the only time they were off duty together. I can’t recall their rosters. Maybe the dates are irrelevant. They murdered when they could get away with it. That’s all there was to it.’

‘There’s something else I find odd. The geographical spread of the murders. They all took place within the Armagh Council boundaries except for three. My mother’s murder, the Corrigans’ and the Hacketts’, who all lived in the Dungannon Council area. However, I’ve done some research. The council boundaries were changed in 1984. Before that date, this part of the lough shore fell into the Armagh Council jurisdiction. What do you think that means?’

‘Perhaps Walsh should have spread his map further. After all, there were just as many people murdered in neighbouring districts.’

‘But not by this particular gang.’

Donaldson looked properly rattled now.

‘You’re trying to make these random connections deliver evidence that doesn’t exist.’ He stared at Daly with a desperate look in his eyes. ‘I came here to get things off my chest and you make an interrogation out of it.’ He sounded aggrieved.

‘There is something else we’re missing about these murders,’ pressed Daly. ‘What does it mean that so many of the victims were living in dank cottages, and that after their murders their families remained trapped in ruined old houses?’

‘You’re serious?’ Donaldson glared at Daly. ‘If there’s a meaning to that, surely it’s too deep for a police investigation to plumb.’

‘But what do you think it means? What secret lies in their refusal to move into new houses?’

‘If people want to live in decrepit homes, then so be it.’ He glanced about the small kitchen. ‘If you want an answer take a look at this cottage of yours, Daly, rotting into the ground. The only reason you prolonged your stay is because secretly you want to follow its example. You want to disappear back into the past. Melt away into darkness. You and your...’ He hesitated to say the word.

‘Co-religionists?’ suggested Daly.

‘Whatever. I have to go now, Daly.’

Donaldson strode out of the kitchen and into the night. He looked right and left, anywhere but straight ahead at the fields slouching in the moonlight. He knew more than he was saying; Daly was convinced of that. It wasn’t a case that he didn’t know or found Daly’s questions unreasonable. He turned back to Daly before climbing into his car.

‘Remember, Daly, the truth comes at a cost. It will not make your life simpler or easier. It will complicate your way of seeing the world and it won’t bring your mother back to life. It won’t even bring you back to life, out of this sad old shell of a cottage.’

Daly stood for a while at the door and watched Donaldson’s car disappear. The idea of an official inquiry daunted him. The unravelling of the snarl of clues around his mother’s death might have been invigorating in the initial stages, but with an official inquiry he would be at the centre of an investigation he no longer controlled. He would be its prisoner. The more he probed, the more the labyrinth would unroll its twisting paths into the past, a vista he had ignored his entire adult life.

Hegarty emerged from the bedroom and followed the detective back into the fire. The spy seemed reanimated, freed from the tenacious hold of his ghosts.

‘An official police inquiry with the backing of an ex- RUC chief?’ Hegarty’s eyes glinted as he watched the detective. ‘Why, you’re all set now. The truth will finally out.’ He had obviously overheard every word of the conversation with Donaldson.

Daly pulled closer to the fire, scraping his chair against the floor.

‘I told you before. I don’t know whether I have the appetite for the truth or not. Part of me would rather live with questions rather than answers.’

‘Then you are just as guilty of the cover-up as any of your senior officers.’

Daly stared at the fire. He spoke in a low voice.

‘I don’t want my mother’s name plastered all over the newspapers and the internet. I don’t want her grave vandalized by Loyalists. I don’t want her story to end up on YouTube. I want her to rest in peace. If that makes me complicit in a cover-up then so be it.’

‘But there is something very flawed with this notion of peace you have for your mother.’ Hegarty’s voice intensified. ‘If it is secured by lies and denial then in my view it is not real peace. That is just my way of looking at things. You obviously have a different way. In your mind, the end justifies the means. Isn’t that what the politicians maintain as well? Isn’t that the principle this harmonious new society of ours is built upon?’

The spy leaned closer to the fire, crouching forward, his knees almost bundled up to his chin, while Daly leaned back into the shadows. Hegarty turned his face to check for the detective’s presence, not to seek his agreement or concession but to reassure himself that his words weren’t disappearing into a void.

‘No,’ said Daly from the darkness. ‘That is not my guiding principle at all. My principle is to adopt the passive path. Because any other path leads to pain. To anger and the danger of more bloodshed.’