Silence (31 page)

The car dated the picture. It was a dark-coloured Hillman Hunter. He stared at the registration number. AIB 726. A shadow fell across his heart. A memory of the gloom and suspense he had felt collecting licence numbers as a boy. The car number looked familiar. He felt certain that it had been one of those listed in the documents he had found hidden in the family bible. He examined the woman again. He saw the stiffness in her slender frame, the hand raised in defence against the light, like a ghost begging not to be given away. He scanned the car looking for evidence of more ghosts. He felt certain that there were other presences just out of the camera’s field of view.

At last, he had found a mental foothold. He thought about everything he knew of the murders and the possible role that the woman might have played. He wondered if he was mistaken in his assumptions. Perhaps he was misinterpreting Donaldson’s state of mind. However, he couldn’t think of any other possible reason to explain the former commander’s behaviour. He was going to have to follow the lead. He slipped the photograph into a pocket.

In the corridor, he nodded at Fealty.

‘Seen enough?’ asked the Special Branch detective.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

Fealty hesitated for a moment. Then he nodded and said goodnight.

Daly walked out and asked one of the younger officers patrolling the grounds to drop him home. He needed to find the woman in the photograph, a woman who had left no trace of herself. Father Walsh had been exhaustive in his research, and so had Pryce, but neither of them, with their ability at ferreting out secrets, had found a single piece of information relating to the woman. Nothing that revealed her role in the killings, nothing that verified her existence, not even her name.

The front door of Daly’s cottage lay slightly ajar and all the lights were on. He approached with caution, straining to listen, but he was unable to make out any sounds from within. He stepped inside with a sense of despondency. He stood in the hallway and glanced into the rooms. There was no sign of Hegarty anywhere, and the place was a mess. Clothes and books lay strewn across the floor, drawers hung open, their contents disordered. His house had been ransacked, its dark corners searched through, and the perpetrators had not even bothered to cover up their tracks.

It had been years since the army had conducted their last search of the cottage. He remembered their loaded guns grazing the narrow walls, their heavy boots echoing through the warren of rooms. He also recalled the entangled feelings of guilt and fear he had experienced as a boy, as though he had been found out. As though he had been the wrongdoer. Now it had happened again. More than three decades later. This time without any warning or fanfare. He wondered how the cottage had stood up to the poking and probing after all these years. Had the searchers found anything incriminating, rummaging through the rooms? Had they noticed how unclear the dividing line was between the past and the present? That the ghosts of the dead occupied more rooms than the living?

Considering that a wanted man had taken shelter here, it was fortunate they hadn’t taken sledgehammers to the walls and ripped up the floorboards. He inspected the insides of his drawers and cupboards. It was impossible to tell what they had rifled through, and what they might have removed. He thought of phoning Irwin, and asking him outright, but perhaps that would break some professional code. It wasn’t the type of question you asked your Special Branch colleague.

The fire had gone out in the scullery. He lit it and waited. He prowled through the rooms again and took a tour outside the cottage. The only trace of the spy’s presence was a thin smell of sweat from the room he had slept in. Daly sat alone with the fire and the sound of the black hen pecking at the window.

When he was sure that Hegarty wasn’t going to return he opened all the windows wide and the doors as well. It wasn’t just the spy’s smell, it was the dusty stench of the past that filled his nostrils, the bitter aroma of old furniture, the empty rooms and the corners full of cobwebs and dust. The wind blew in, driving out the stale air and memories. He stared through a window at the impenetrable hedges, the circle of moonlit fields, the swelling grass, the shadows of the past creeping forwards with a ghostly presence. He felt impatient and tense, breathing in the lough air through greedy nostrils.

Midges and moths drew in towards the light of the fire, their shadows creating a flickering show on the low ceiling. Spiders emerged from their nooks and crevices, their swags of dead insects wafting in the breeze. Last year’s leaves gusted in through the front door and out through the back. The fire roared and crackled with the fresh ventilation.

Was it the joy of liberation he suddenly felt? The sense that the cottage itself was breathing and stirring with life? A bat twirled in through a window and out through another. He wished that his relationship with the cottage were just as transient. But human beings were different from animals and the creatures of the night, more like ghosts than living things, filled with memories and the darkness of the past. He couldn’t leave the cottage now because to do so would mean dishonouring what haunted him, including the ghost of his nine-year-old self, the introverted little boy already acquainted with death and loss. If he avoided him, he might as well avoid life altogether. Perhaps Pryce was right in the end. Remembering ghosts, bringing them into the light, was a dangerous but necessary thing.

The wind blew through the cottage with greater force. The eaves in the roof creaked and shifted, as though the cottage were a boat finally on the move again, a rising storm shifting it from its moorings. Daly thought of the young woman in the picture and the car registration number. He went through all the stories and names in his head: his mother, Angela Daly, Father Aloysius Walsh, Ivor McClintock, Kenneth Agnew and now Ian Donaldson. Their fragmented stories overlapped like a restless sea of waves. He hunkered in the light of the fire, like the captain of a vessel decked out with billowing sails, plotting its course through the darkness.

The wind was still blowing fiercely the next morning. It hustled Daly out of sleep, blurring his dreams, rattling his opened bedroom window, flaring the curtains, filling the room with raw light. He got dressed in a hurry, feeling full of energy, even though a glance in the mirror revealed a face lined with fatigue and anxiety. He skipped breakfast and grabbed a mouthful of hot tea. He took the photograph of the young woman with him. Finding her represented the one clear path he had left.

Outside, the thorn trees swayed under the force of the wind, as if ready to leap into space, loose twigs and old leaves whipped into a panic. For the first time that year, he noticed a light green glimmering in the hedgerows. Overhead, birds were on the wing, prospecting for nesting sites. He sighed. Most of February had passed by without him noticing that the first signs of spring were afoot. He hoped that the woman and her story were still within reach, otherwise winter would have passed with the truth still no closer.

The woman he intended to visit was now elderly and infirm, but there would be no trace of compassion shown by him. No allowance made for old age, no politeness beyond that of an interrogator interviewing a suspect, sifting for secrets. He stuck the gearstick straight into third and the engine laboured as he pulled on to the road. His destination, a nursing home, was about ten miles further along the lough shore; however, it took about twenty minutes to drive there, traversing the bumpy roads, driving past slanting fields, braking hard at the corners and hidden crossroads.

In the clear light of morning, he thought again about Donaldson’s death on the lough. Even though Pryce had been plaguing the former commander with her research into the past, it did not necessarily mean that his death was a direct consequence of her meddling. It might have been the conclusion of another set of events entirely, perhaps one that involved his domestic affairs. He thought about the empty feel to Donaldson’s house, the sense that it was guarding a secret in his past.

The large three-storeyed nursing home overlooking the lough had once been a popular hotel in the time before cheap flights and overseas holidays, and a look of disuse had overtaken its façade. A flock of rooks was busy building nests in its high chimneys. Their rasping caws sounded half strangled and aggressive. This was the true accent of the lough-shore hinterland, thought Daly as he climbed out of his car, the kind of incomprehensible roar you once heard in the old fishermen’s pubs. He nodded at an elderly man who had been pushed out in his wheelchair for a smoke, his head drooping like his cigarette. Inside, he found the nurse in charge and introduced himself. He explained that he wanted to talk to Dorothy Donaldson, the wife of his former commander.

‘You’re the first of her husband’s colleagues to visit,’ she remarked. She studied him for a moment. ‘Were you a good friend of his?’

‘No.’

‘A pity. She hasn’t anyone left to visit her since her brother passed away and now her husband too.’

‘What happened to her brother?’

She thought for a moment before answering.

‘A suicide. About a fortnight ago. He hanged himself in the family orchard.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Kenneth Agnew. He used to visit her all the time.’

He had thought he might have been seeing connections where none existed, but now he knew his hunch was correct. Donaldson had been protecting his wife and her link with the killers all along, and had tried to take the secret with him to the bottom of the lough. Daly felt the sense of apprehension he had been carrying around since Walsh’s death intensify into deep dread. He followed the nurse down a silent corridor. He could imagine the advantages a nursing home might provide for someone hiding from the past.

‘What’s wrong with Mrs Donaldson?’ asked Daly. ‘I heard she had some sort of stroke.’

‘Physically, there is nothing wrong with her at all. Her doctor says she has a form of hysteria. A silent hysteria. She hasn’t spoken a word in six months. Shows no interest in anything and eats very little. She became a complete stranger to her husband overnight. He was at his wits’ end before the doctor found a room here for her.’

‘How does she keep up her silence?’

‘I suppose she keeps her head in the clouds. Everyone gets a little like that with old age.’

Daly waited at her room door while the nurse entered. He heard her say loudly, ‘There’s an Inspector Celcius Daly here to see you.’ There was a pause and then the nurse reappeared. ‘Go on in, I’ll be in the nurse’s office if you need anything.’

The moment Daly crossed the threshold his sense of dread drained away. He smelled a strong odour of lavender almost overpowered by bleach and antiseptic. Propped with pillows in an armchair by the window, Dorothy Donaldson regarded him with a blank doll-like stare. She didn’t have the haggard or ill appearance he’d been expecting. Her grey hair was finely brushed, her skin so pale it was almost transparent and curiously unwrinkled. A shadow-dweller, thought Daly, a ghost hiding from the light. She looked as though she had been pretty in her youth, but there was an emptiness now in her facial expression. Her sitting pose was elegant, but lifeless. Her hands clutched an old-looking teddy bear, as though it was the one toy she’d ever had. She didn’t register his presence in any way; her only movement was the barely perceptible rise and fall of her chest.

Space was short in the room. Heavy furniture had been transported from her home, along with a complement of fringed lampshades, ornaments and framed photographs, which covered the dark surfaces of the furniture. Most of the pictures were of Dorothy, charting her journey through her wedded life. He saw that she was always wearing sunglasses, or her eyes were half-closed against the light, a hand raised to shade her face. The photographs were what had been missing from Donaldson’s house, their absence making the place feel strangely empty for a married couple’s home.

There was nowhere to sit, apart from her bed, so Daly stood in front of her. Through the window, he could see a small boat disappear into the dinge of a drizzly day on Lough Neagh.

He introduced himself slowly and carefully.

‘I’m investigating a number of murders that took place in 1979 within the Armagh district,’ he said. ‘Including that of my mother. I have some questions I need to ask you.’

He detected a carefully veiled wariness in her eyes. He could tell she had understood what he had said. The corners of her mouth were dragged down by what at first he took to be sadness but now looked more like determination.

Why have you come here?
her eyes seemed to ask.

‘Angela Daly. Do you remember that name? From Maghery.’

A physical tremor appeared in her face. Was it the result of illness or a physical reaction to his question? Her mouth tightened into a puncture hole.

‘She was shot dead by your brother Kenneth.’

Her chin lifted in defiance.

Daly mentioned the other victims of the murder triangle.

‘I’ve been trying to find out what the common denominator was. What made these innocent people the targets of your brother’s gang? Who supplied their details? And why?’

She turned away slightly and gazed through the window, at the watery murk of the lough. Then she rolled her eyes back at him.

‘Their homes were important, weren’t they? Their rundown cottages. Their dreams for a better future.’

For a moment, her hands clutched the teddy bear tighter. Daly noticed it and her hands went still.

‘Someone in the background provided the gang with names and addresses.’ He let the words settle for several seconds. ‘Who do you suppose could have done something like that? If you don’t tell me what you know, I’ll find out for myself.’

Leave me alone,
her eyes seemed to say.
Get on with your life.
Her frail fingers squeezed the teddy bear’s arms.

‘You can’t dupe me with your act,’ he said. He could hear the bitterness creep into his voice. Her silence felt like a provocation, an affront to justice. He saw that she had been preparing for this interrogation for years, building up her jaw muscles’ strength to gag the tongue. The obstinate staring of her eyes. The silence that was like the din of a bell filling the room.