Silence (6 page)

In truth, however, he knew there were no completely safe places for him any longer.

She leaned towards him.

‘Who are you hiding from?’

‘People who ask questions like that.’

She smiled. She offered to buy him a drink but he refused.

‘I’m glad you came over.’

‘Why?’ If her behaviour was meant to reassure him, it wasn’t working.

She shrugged and finished her drink. She glanced at her watch, and a stillness settled over her features. She was waiting for something to happen, thought Hegarty, but what exactly? A fear rose in him that he was not safe at all, and that he was trapped in a strange hotel with a dangerous woman. It had been a mistake, he realized, striking up the conversation in the first place.

Her phone rang and she answered it briefly. She slipped it back into her handbag with a smile.

‘Good news. Father Walsh has returned.’ She stared unblinkingly into his eyes. ‘He’s in his room right now. You can come up with me if you want.’

‘What was the reason for the delay?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘But surely he owes us some sort of explanation.’

‘No, he does not,’ she said curtly. Before he could protest, she stood up and waited for him to follow.

‘You must excuse me for a moment. I need to visit the bathroom.’ He grabbed his briefcase, its lightness reminding him of his vulnerability.

She flashed him a look of impatience.

‘You have to hurry.’

‘I’ve waited for him since last night. I’m sure he can hold on for a few more minutes.’

He limped into the toilets, locked himself in a cubicle and stared at the creases in his trousers and his shoes. He took out his phone and tried Walsh’s number. It went straight to a recorded message. Why didn’t he answer if he was ready to see him? His sense of anxiety increased. He removed his handgun from his jacket pocket and rubbed its cold metal along his sweating temples. He inspected the firing mechanism, and fingered the shiny litter of bullets. He lifted the safety catch and peered down the barrel as if it was a keyhole into a hushed, dark little hiding place. The mouth of the weapon exhaled the reassuring smell of metal and grease, the sweetness of death. He pressed the barrel to his forehead and caressed the trigger. His forehead dripped like a wet cloth and his hand shook slightly.

He had held the weapon this way countless times before, whenever he felt trapped. Somehow, the pressure of the gun against his temple always returned his self-control, easing his sense of empty panic. His heart flooded with an appalling pleasure, the contemplation of how much power and destruction the gun wielded, this little black idol nestled in his hand. His finger tightened on the trigger, but before he could pull it his craving to live returned, his will to keep on seeking revenge in a world full of violence and stupidity. His breathing relaxed but he still held the gun firmly to his forehead.

Someone shook the handle of the cubicle violently. Hegarty was rattled. Instinctively, he pressed the gun to the door lock. An elderly sounding man complained bitterly at the other side. He took out the silencer and screwed it on to the muzzle. The weapon felt forceful and whole. He slipped it into his briefcase, and unlocked the door.

The lane to the abbey looked old and seldom used, overshadowed by a tunnel of oak and beech trees. Daly half expected to encounter fences and closed gates but there was nothing to impede his approach to the weathered-looking entry doors. It took him a while to find the button for the bell. It was rusted and almost covered in ivy. When no one answered, he ignored the feeling of trespass, pushed open the door and walked inside.

The abbot, Father Graves, had been informed of his visit. Daly found him peeking out from a room full of leather-backed books.

‘Ah, there you are, Inspector,’ he said, slowly nodding, as though he had been searching for him. He set off at a brisk pace down a corridor, and Daly, succumbing to the childhood rules of obedience, fell into pace behind. They passed into a side room with a large desk and chairs, which must have been the abbot’s private office.

‘You’ve come to tell me how poor Aloysius died?’ said the abbot.

It wasn’t the only reason, but Daly followed his lead and began summarizing the details of the car crash. Graves stared at him with a gaze that lacked focus. When Daly finished his account, he told the abbot he had some important questions to ask.

‘Questions? What sort of questions?’

‘What exactly were Father Walsh’s priestly duties, and how long had he been living here?’

The abbot stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘A priest is a priest. I would think the job description is fairly well known. Like every other member of the religious orders, he performed a daily Mass, held confessions. He was always diligent in his religious observances.’

Daly wanted to ask was he a good priest, but his sense of deference prevented him. However, he was unable to suppress any longer the question that most consumed his thoughts.

‘Yet before he crashed, he broke through a police roadblock and almost knocked over an officer. What made him do that?’

The abbot shrugged and looked perplexed.

‘How should I know what was going through his mind?’

‘I’m interested in hearing your opinion.’

‘Are you indeed?’ Graves held his tongue for a moment but then seemed to relent. ‘Well, if you think it’s relevant to the investigation. All I can say is that Aloysius was certainly not the type to ignore a police checkpoint. As far as I know, he never broke a motoring law in his life. Didn’t even have a parking ticket to his name. And if he had committed some misdemeanour, he would have owned up and accepted his punishment. He certainly wouldn’t have tried to evade the police.’

‘You’re suggesting he wasn’t acting under his free will when he drove through the police cordon?’

Again, Graves looked a little confused.

‘Oh no, I can’t comment on his state of mind. I’ve told you that already.’

‘We’re trying to trace his mobile phone. Do you have his number?’

The abbot’s eyes shrank to pinpoint glints.

‘Why are you interested in finding his phone? Is Father Walsh under suspicion of committing some crime?’

‘Not that we’re aware of.’

‘Then I’m relieved.’ The abbot relayed the number from a leather address book. ‘Well,’ he added, rising from his seat. ‘Thank you for your visit but you must excuse me, I have things to do.’

‘Wait a moment,’ said Daly. ‘I’d like to ask you some more questions.’

The abbot sighed and sat down heavily. He removed a pair of glasses from a case and put them on. He stared closely at Daly, blinking.

‘Tell me, Inspector, why exactly have you come?’

‘I’m trying to piece together Father Walsh’s final days.’

The abbot scrutinized him through his glasses, as if for the first time registering the true nature of his visit.

‘You must understand that I cannot reveal any details of his private life.’

‘Of course you can – you were his superior. Unless you’re trying to spare the order some sort of embarrassment?’

‘Inspector Daly, my work here is usually very simple. There are half a dozen priests and monks, and they live right under my eyes. We are one of the best-run religious communities in the country. It is because we have a philosophy of not seeking contact with the secular world. Unfortunately, Father Walsh found it impossible to adhere to that precept.’

The abbot took off his glasses and put them back in the case. His shoulders slumped slightly and he lowered the tone of his voice, as though from now on he was going to tell Daly a different type of story.

‘Do you remember much about the late 1970s, Inspector? You were probably only a boy then.’

Daly flinched. Of course he remembered. When he peered into that portion of his childhood, he saw the darkness surrounding the death of his mother. She had been killed in crossfire between IRA gunmen and police officers at a checkpoint. The experience had marked him deeply, leaving him haunted throughout his adult life with the dread of losing another loved one, the fear cramping him in his relationships as effectively as a prisoner’s shackles.

‘For the past year, Aloysius had been spending very little time in the monastery. He wandered a lot. Restless is how I would describe his behaviour.’ He stared at Daly with a look that resembled fear. ‘He was always talking about the past. Frankly it was becoming an unhealthy obsession.’

‘We all have memories we treasure,’ said Daly. ‘They are our refuge in times of trouble or uncertainty.’

‘I’m not talking about his childhood past. I’m talking about the historical past. Aloysius was trying to verify the dates and locations of certain events during the Troubles. They were the kind of memories no one treasures. He was gathering up the details of unsolved murders in Tyrone and Armagh during one particularly dark year and charting them on a map. It was the most macabre piece of cartography I ever saw. He was trying to prove the murders were part of a conspiracy involving some very powerful institutions.’ The abbot shrugged. ‘How can you discover something that happened in a cloud of secrecy and fear all those years ago? The truth about those terrible killings is locked away in people’s hearts. He must have known there would be so little left to find now, a few hazy memories, the dregs of evil filtered through failing minds.’

Daly’s curiosity was strongly aroused. Maps were a way of taking on an unknown landscape, seizing it and making it one’s own through detailed observations and connections. But why would an elderly priest want to chart such grim territory?

The abbot spotted the glint of interest in his eyes.

‘If you feel you must, you have permission to visit his room and examine his maps. The door’s unlocked. I’m sure to Father Walsh the room had its own order, and he knew where everything lay, but to the rest of us it was an abysmal mess.’

The curtains were drawn in the cell-like space of Walsh’s room. Daly pulled them aside to reveal an elderly scholar’s room, stacks of paper everywhere, folders of newspaper clippings, legal notebooks, and old-fashioned cassette tapes. The priest had glued several sheets of paper on to the largest wall in order to accommodate a sprawling map of the border areas of Tyrone and Armagh. Across the top, he’d written in block capitals ‘THE TRIANGLE OF DEATH’. From a distance, the map resembled a medieval cartographer’s life’s work, overgrown by a forest of names, dates and arrows, and pockmarked by red pins. On closer inspection, Daly was able to make out the macabre details: the pins representing the locations of murders, mostly perpetrated by Loyalist paramilitaries within a triangle of about thirty townlands and parishes.

Daly scanned the map and pages of handwritten notes. Father Walsh had been a curate in a number of border parishes during the 1970s, and the memories of tending to grief-stricken families had stayed with him. He knew he had witnessed a pivotal point in Irish history. After moving to the monastery in the early 1990s he had begun carefully writing down what he’d seen and heard, corroborating the details with eyewitnesses, and then later with disgruntled former police officers and ex-informers.

To Daly’s eyes, there was an amateurish air to the research – the efforts of an ordinary man to record history rather than a professional historian or a well-connected journalist. The notes were strewn everywhere, bringing back memories of twisting lanes, checkpoints in the dark, the blood-spattered porches of isolated farms, and men with hoods roaming the darkness of border country. The names and dates flickered by without offering him any clues. He was confronted by a feeling of helplessness. Father Walsh’s investigations focused on the year 1979. A year of unparalleled savagery. In total, 121 sectarian murders. It was also the year his mother had been killed, and he felt an instinctive recoil. The priest had spent his final days slowly dissecting the events of a brutal year and staring into its bloody blackness. Somehow, he had discerned a pattern. Daly could see that much. He had listed the same names and weapons repeatedly, the movements of a paramilitary gang linked to some of the murders, their vehicles, a Luger 47 and the surnames Mitchell, Browne, Agnew and McClintock. Each murder was somehow rooted in the details of the others.

Daly was so absorbed by the map he didn’t hear the abbot approaching. Suddenly Graves was there in the room standing alongside him. He looked more diminutive than when he had been sitting at his desk, and his face had grown paler. He waved at the map in a disheartened way.

‘How did it get so bad?’ His voice was that of a tired confessor contemplating an overwhelming abundance of sin. ‘I remember the start of the seventies and the civil rights marches, the campaigns for better housing and fair employment. It all seemed to herald a new dawn for Northern Ireland.’ The words tumbled from the abbot’s lips. ‘How did we end up with murder gangs and medieval justice, vigilantes pursuing revenge with guns and bombs? Where were the warning signs that we were harbouring such murderers in our midst?’ He stared up at Daly, as if expecting him to shed light on the puzzle.

‘What drew Walsh to this particular set of murders?’ asked Daly.

‘Evil.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He was a different sort of priest to the one you’re familiar with. He believed not in miracles and goodness but in the power of evil. Most of us have a blind spot in that regard. We are sane and solid and we place our trust in society and the power of law and order. But Father Walsh didn’t accept the conclusions of others, and there was a danger in that. He wanted the details of these murders cleared up. He wanted everyone he believed guilty held to account.’

‘And who was everyone?’

‘The murderers, the intelligence services, the men who pulled the strings in the background, the politicians. Even the police and the judiciary.’

Daly raised an eyebrow.

‘And did you believe his murder conspiracy theories?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m a monk and everything I believe in is shut up inside a golden box on an altar. I tried to ignore the facts of evil he was at such pains to reveal. Many of his fellow priests thought he was a crank, out of step with the politics of peace and moving on.’