Silence (3 page)

Daly stared at the road swimming in a trickery of light and reflective signs. He saw the line of shining cones, and at their end the pool of darkness into which a car and a life had vanished. A fatal diversion masquerading as an escape route. Road accidents were usually a combination of bad luck and stupidity, but what had made the elderly man disdain the advice of law and order?

‘I wonder what frightened him so badly?’ he asked the officer, scrutinizing his young face.

‘I don’t know. A guilty conscience?’ The officer shrugged. ‘Did I mention he was a priest? A Roman Catholic priest. He was wearing a dog collar. According to our records, his name was Father Aloysius Walsh.’

Daly raised an eyebrow. The worst, the blackest reading of the driver’s actions was that he had a secret to hide and feared arrest. It was the simplest explanation for his behaviour, but Daly suspected that given the history of this part of the country, and the fact that the dead man had been a cleric, the truth might turn out to be a little more complicated.

Daly took the officer through his conversation with Walsh. Perhaps he had let slip a word that had agitated him. Doubtless a priest of his age had seen and witnessed a lot, especially during the Troubles. In addition, the media were hounding many elderly priests over their handling of clerical child-abuse cases. God only knew what was going through his mind when he saw the police cordon in the darkness.

The officer stitched together the sequence of events, and the words he had spoken, but Daly failed to detect any hint of menace in them.

‘I just warned him the road was blocked and a diversion in place,’ he said.

‘What were you doing while you spoke?’

‘Warming my hands. It was a cold night.’ There was something appealing about his honesty and the patience with which he answered Daly’s questions. ‘He gave me a strange look. As though he recognized me. But I’d never seen him before.’

‘And your colleagues. What were they doing?’

‘They were repositioning the traffic cones.’

Daly glanced at the men, who were dressed in blue overalls and standing by the side of the road, more like a huddle of suspects than investigating officers.

‘Why aren’t they in uniform?’ he asked.

‘We’d just come from an illegal fuel plant. They hadn’t time to change out of their protective gear.’

Daly nagged him with more questions. Was there a car following the priest? Did he seem anxious from the start or only after the officer started speaking? Was he in a hurry, anxious to be on his way? Did he seem a stranger to the area, unsure of his surroundings?

The officer answered the questions as best he could.

‘Are you going to check the car itself, sir?’ he asked helpfully.

Daly, however, was unwilling to let the subject drop.

‘Did you smell any alcohol on his breath? Any sign of drugs? Was his car the first you stopped? What about the vandals, any leads there?’

However, none of the policeman’s answers provided a satisfactory explanation for his priest’s actions. Daly could detect nothing that might have made Walsh feel pressured or threatened, frightened or worried, certainly not desperate enough to break a police cordon.

‘Perhaps he was depressed,’ suggested the officer.

‘Depressed people don’t behave that rashly,’ said Daly. ‘Their illness makes them averse to risk or spur-of-the-moment behaviour. If they commit suicide it’s usually planned meticulously.’

Daly bent under the cordon and walked towards the traffic cones. The flash of a camera lit up the scene. A police photographer stood to the side, attempting to capture the confusion with his lens. Daly frowned. He turned back to the group of officers in blue overalls. He thought he detected a look of wariness in their faces. He strode on. The warning lights thronged the sides of his vision, hemming him in. The police officers emitted their signals, too, their defensive stance, their eyes shadowed, another set of potential pitfalls to be ignored by motorists at their peril.

For a moment, Daly felt as though he was standing outside of time, in a zone without road markings or warning lights, a no man’s land, with only dim memories of the past to guide him. He felt a change in his body chemistry. His heart rate increased to a painfully fast tempo, and a line of sweat formed on his forehead. Teetering on the edge of panic, he glanced at his watch, more in an effort to ground himself than to check the time. The police officers stared at him, their faces watchful, curious. He saw himself through their eyes. A middle-aged detective, greying, haunted by the darkness of an unfinished road.

He was at a loss to explain why, but he suddenly found himself running along the route marked by the traffic cones. If he had been in his car, he might have accelerated just as the dead priest had done. But why? What had triggered this feeling of incipient doom? He was forty-three years old, and had spent almost half his life unravelling crime scenes more confused and gruesome than the one he now found himself in, but something about it troubled him deeply. His eyes swivelled as he ran, taking in the innocent-seeming details of the roadblock, the four policemen, three of them in overalls, the row of traffic cones pointing towards death. What was it about them that seemed to speak darkly of a mystery in his country’s troubled past? He felt as though he was hurrying towards something that no one had approached for decades. A lost secret. A crashed car at the edge of the Irish border and a dead body.

Daly saw the tyre markings cutting through the grass, and down below the glinting boot lid of the wrecked car, tilted at an unnatural angle. He fastened on to it with the intensity of someone who’d witnessed this before, in circumstances that had been both unexpected and emotionally overwhelming. Relief flooded through him when he made out the rest of the car in the beam of the flashlight – a silver Audi with long scrape marks along its sides – as if he had been anticipating another car, another body. The panic subsided completely by the time he had scrambled down the bank and peered in through the driver’s broken window. He saw pieces of broken glass on the leather upholstery, but no sign of the priest’s body. The force of the impact must have propelled him through the smashed windscreen.

He plunged further into the thicket, head bowed, arms fending off branches, and came across the body in a small clearing padded with moss and old leaves. Daly leaned closer with his torch, the thorns bristling around his face. The rain had webbed the dead man’s hair to his scalp, the pattern of slick strands resembling roads criss-crossing a map. Apart from scratches and grazes, there was very little sign of blood on his downturned face, which wore a tired expression, or on the rest of his body, sprawled and helpless-looking, his legs sticking out like crooked piping. He looked unhappy to have ended up like this, a grisly spectacle of motoring misdirection.

However, the most poignant element of the scene lay in the strange object the dead man gripped in his right hand. Daly narrowed the beam on to the stiffened fingers, which were wrapped around an untidy braid of children’s rosary beads and holy medals, strands of charms tied up with wisps of broken string. He stared at this twisted pigtail of religious effects and wondered what significance they had held for the dead priest. Did they represent a cry for spiritual assistance, or something more sinister? Some of the beads had rusted over, suggesting their original owners had long ago abandoned them. Did they hold the clue to the mental flux that had set the priest on his final journey?

The more Daly looked at the strange bundle, the more it spoke to him of something more personal: his own religion. Although he was an infrequent Mass-goer, the rituals and imagery of Catholicism were still firmly planted in his memory, lodged there like an entangled obstruction, resistant to all the turmoil he had undergone in the intervening years. He didn’t like to think of himself as a lapsed Catholic, rather that the course of his life had taken him to the margins of his faith. He still felt the soothing power of the Church’s symbols, the rosary beads and the miraculous medals, and he worried that if he removed them completely from his life, he might find himself pulled down a tapering funnel into a deeper darkness. Worse than that, he feared the horrors that might emerge from the depths of his subconscious if he were to clear away the obstruction.

He wondered what the priest had seen amid those dishevelled strings and beads. He knew enough of the human condition to understand that for a priest, the life of selfless dedication to God could prove a very troubled sea. Even the holiest of men might find themselves occasionally flung upon a strange shore, battered and lost.

A branch cracked nearby. Daly pulled himself away from the corpse. Perhaps the bundle meant nothing to the investigation. Perhaps it had more relevance to his own spiritual life, or lack of one. He made his way back to the crash site and saw the figure of a man in plain clothes standing to the side of the car.

At first, Daly could not see who it was, since he kept his head turned away. An unmoving shadow concentrating on something in the darkness. Daly shone his torch on to the back of his head and the man turned round. His eyes blinked in the light. It was Detective Derek Irwin from Special Branch.

‘Lost in thought?’ asked Daly, his voice sounding more annoyed than he intended.

‘No, just checking my messages.’ Irwin flashed his mobile phone. He ignored Daly and stared at the device, his thumb stroking the screen in an obstinate way, as though he were trying to get rid of an annoying wrinkle. Ever since he’d been recruited by Special Branch, Irwin had developed the unpleasant habit of hovering at the edge of Daly’s investigations, and behaving in wilful ignorance of correct police procedures. It constantly perplexed Daly how Irwin managed to maintain, let alone advance, his career in the special investigations unit.

‘Special Branch quiet these days?’ asked Daly.

‘Not really.’ As Irwin spoke his phone peep-peeped and died. He juggled the device and slid it back into his pocket.

‘Then why are you attending a road fatality? Did Fealty send you here?’ Fealty was Head of Special Branch, and a different animal entirely from Irwin, leaner and more professional with a razor-blade smile and an icy stare. Daly’s career had survived several run-ins with him.

‘I heard the call come through from switchboard.’ Irwin yawned. ‘I thought it might be worth a look.’

‘Hell of an evening to come out for just a look.’

Daly glanced grimly at the thorn trees, the river coiling below, and began to fear that there might be an element of design in the way the priest had met his end.

‘I’ve an interest in practical jokes.’ Irwin smirked. He kicked the door of the car, sending a shower of glass fragments to the ground. ‘Given the state of the Catholic Church these days, who knows what sort of pervert we’re dealing with?’

Irwin’s discourtesy to the dead man indicated a presumption about his past that Daly felt was unprofessional, if not a little bigoted.

When Daly did not speak, Irwin looked up at him.

‘No offence, Celcius,’ he said, the easy smile never leaving his face. ‘But the Catholic Church looks more like a rogues’ gallery these days.’

Religious honour was indeed at stake, and Daly feared the priest was going to let him down badly.

‘Find anything unusual?’ asked Daly.

‘No evidence of criminal activity – if that’s what you mean?’

‘Anything else seem out of place?’

‘What are you suggesting?’ Irwin’s phone might have blacked out but judging by the watchful look on his face, his inner receptors were still showing vital signs.

‘I’ve no idea. What about the bundle of rosary beads? What does that say?’

‘Does it have to say anything?’

‘Holding on to it was probably the priest’s last act before he crashed the car. His final communication with the world. Otherwise, why bother?’

‘The priest was the victim of a dangerous prank. His guilty conscience made him ignore the police warning. What clues could he tell us even if he did leave a message?’

Irwin was right. It shouldn’t have mattered, but Daly was intrigued by the beads and medals. It triggered a dim memory from his youth, from a more innocent time.

‘I think I’ve seen bundles like that somewhere before. All twisted up and left to rust in the rain.’

He stared at the corpse for several more moments. He was convinced that the priest had not planned to end his journey this way. That the trick of the traffic cones had come as a surprise. That the path he found himself on had been ordained not by God or even chance but by darker forces.

When he turned back to Irwin, the detective had located another phone and was stabbing in a number with his thumbs. A busy signal made him mutter under his breath. He glanced at Daly with an impatient look.

‘Waiting for a call?’ asked Daly.

Irwin put away the phone and asserted himself.

‘I’ll be heading off now, Daly. Time to leave this place to the scene-of-crime officers.’

‘Before you leave, tell me: what are the ramifications of this man’s death for Special Branch?’

‘Ramifications? It’s not political or intelligence-related, if that’s what you mean?’

‘But the crash site is unusual.’

‘In what way?’

‘You’re here for a start, and that puzzles me. I find it hard to believe that you came here in the middle of the night out of curiosity. And I find it strange that you keep trying to make contact with someone on your phone as though you have an important message to relay. What do you think? Am I being overly suspicious?’

‘My presence or absence here should be of no concern to you.’

Daly stepped closer to him.

‘This is more than a road accident,’ he persisted. ‘You haven’t come here just to look at a practical joke that went wrong. You came here to search for something or do something. You can’t expect me to write up the usual accident report and file it away without addressing these concerns.’

Irwin clambered up the slope and stood at the top looking down at Daly and the crashed car. His expression was a blank.

‘Write up the accident report how you like, Daly. That is your job. Write it up with all your opinions and suspicions. Remember to include all your paranoid thoughts. Wait and see, you’ll end up a laughing stock with your fellow officers.’