Disappeared (5 page)

“I do that every month, Father.”

Father Fee paused again.

“You’re not telling me the truth,” he chided. “You haven’t come here today to talk about a christening. There’s something else troubling you. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps you are too ashamed to say. I don’t know. The only one who knows is you. And God.”

He waited for the words to sink in.

“Nothing else troubles my conscience, Father,” replied Devine, a note of defiance creeping into his voice.

“Then why are you here?”

And then the words that Father Fee was expecting came. It was gratifying to discover that shame still had power. Of course, it depended on the community you sprung from, how important its opinion was to you. Informers in this part of the world were regarded as the lowest of the low. Father Fee had heard it said that if you raped your next-door neighbor it would soon be forgotten, but if your grandfather was an informer you would be an outcast all your life.

In the semidarkness of the booth, the priest felt Devine’s eyes fix on him.

“I thought I could leave my past deeds behind me, but the voices won’t go away. I was a spy for the British security forces. I did it for the money. Men were killed because of the information I supplied.”

Father Fee absorbed the revelation. He sighed in preparation for what was to come.

“How often did this happen?”

“Too often to remember.”

“And did you feel any remorse for your actions.”

“At the start, yes, I felt guilty. My conscience rebuked me. But after that, the sense of shame went. You see, the men I helped kill were violent and dangerous. None of them were innocent.”

A moment of tiredness overcame the priest. He felt as though he were trying to force his way out of a bad dream.

Devine waited patiently for the priest’s absolution, but instead Father Fee closed his eyes. His parishioners’ hunger for absolution felt like something bottomless he had to feed forever. The priest’s mouth was dry, and his head throbbed. He did not feel able to continue with the usual words of the sacrament. Light trickled under the door. He looked at his hands and was surprised to see they were shaking. Perhaps this ought to be my last confession, he thought. Tomorrow I will ring the diocesan secretary and ask to be allowed to retire.

At last he spoke. “Usually for penance, I would suggest prayer, but in your case, I will make an exception. You have come here seeking some form of redemption, but forgiveness is not that easy. Before I can absolve you from your sins, you have to make amends for what you did.”

He had then outlined the unusual task he had in mind for Devine’s penance.

“After you have done this, you may return to this booth and I will continue with the holy sacrament of confession,” he told him.

He blessed Devine and closed the metal grille. The confession was over. He could hear Devine splutter and struggle to say something like a puzzled child running out of questions to ask.

Afterward he felt a strange exhilaration. After years of dutiful obedience, of deferment to the will of God, he saw this digression from the rite of confession as a form of emancipation. He no longer had to make things better for men who had murdered or assisted in murder.

Standing over Devine’s dead body, the priest reasoned to himself that everything had happened as was destined. True, he had not envisaged that Devine would end up being murdered, but he saw the workings of some kind of mysterious, possibly even divine justice that enabled him to be the first to find his body. Now he could give Devine last rites and complete the act of confession.

The priest kneeled down and, gingerly placing his hand on the man’s forehead, uttered the words he had said so many times before.

“May God Almighty have mercy upon thee, forgive thee thy sins, and bring thee to everlasting life.”

The prayer took just a few seconds. Afterward he turned to rest his eyes on an ancient hydrangea shrub, covered in sodden masses of last year’s flowers. The branches were bowed with the weight, unable to cope with the abundance of dead blooms. He wondered why nature did not just allow the shrub to scatter its huge flowers when they faded, and lighten its load. He felt a great need for some sign of spring, a fresh snowdrop petal or a leaf bud unsticking itself, but the shrub was as useless to him as all the years of baggage inside his head.

His eye with the cataract filled with water, and then his good eye began to smart in sympathy with the bad eye. Devine’s body swam into vision like a thorn that could not be extracted.

T
he fisherman advised Celcius Daly to sit back and enjoy the view as they pulled away from the rickety jetty. The shoreline became wilder as they rowed out, clearing the inlet to head north into the great gap of water called Lough Neagh. Soon Daly could see the outline of Coney Island, and as the boat drew closer he made out the burnt stump of a large oak tree struck by lightning. A group of men and women, some wearing forensic suits, were foraging their way through twists of blackened wood. As the fisherman steered the boat past a bed of reeds, a tern flew at them with increasingly fretful pipings.

The sleek, sculpted fiberglass of the police launch, the only boat the force had in service, took up most of the tiny landing jetty. Daly managed to jump ashore without breaking a leg, glad to be reacquainted with surefootedness.

“As a rule, corpses don’t make any sound,” warned the pathologist, Ruari Butler, as he sauntered over to greet the detective. “But I’m afraid this one’s a little unusual in that regard.”

He took Daly on a tour of the murder scene with an exaggerated propriety, as though he were a guide at a National Trust property. Daly fumbled as he stepped over the tape, stumbling in the big man’s wake.

At first glance, everything looked aboveboard to Daly’s eyes. The body of a barefoot, elderly man sat propped within the scorched stump of a tree, his face untroubled, the mouth slightly open and the tongue sticking out, like a creature trying to escape the death of its host. The smell of rotting sloe berries flavored the air, and bluebottles droned above the corpse like a deep snore. No outward sign of evil, he remarked, the death a tragic accident that had happened to an old man who might have normally walked this way barefoot and rested in the hollow of a tree every morning.

But on closer inspection it was evident that parts of the corpse had been set alight, making it difficult to distinguish between human sinew and burnt wood. The victim’s blackened limbs, shriveled after the fire, were entwined with charred branches as though his body had twisted itself around the remains of a burnt deformed twin. An examination of the head revealed multiple bruises and patches of sticky blood. The back of the scalp was a mangled flap of gristle.

Around the corpse, hardworking, competent professionals waltzed about, snapping photographs, mopping hairs and microscopic pieces of evidence from the undergrowth, collecting and cataloguing a brutal segment of the past that they would eventually waltz off with to fill the shelves of a police laboratory.

Butler was talking to him, but Daly could barely follow the words as he took in the scene before him. Some detectives sucked up the details of gruesome murder like efficient vacuum cleaners, but Daly was not one of them. Butler noticed his discomfort. To help him regain his composure the pathologist turned to the view of the Tyrone shoreline and began listing the distant town lands, as if for his own amusement.

The tremor of squeamishness that passed through Daly’s gut was nothing to his sense of professional rivalry when it came to dealing with the macabre, and he felt a twinge of annoyance at Butler’s tactful distraction.

“How long has the body been here?” he asked, turning toward the pathologist’s composed profile.

“Fortunately, the victim has been found before serious decomposition could set in or the local wildlife have had their wicked way with him.”

“You’re telling me it could not have worked out better for him?” Daly’s voice was stony.

“To a degree. A wildlife preserve is not a good place for a murdered body.”

“Where is a good place?”

Butler stepped gingerly around the lumps of wood, unperturbed by either Daly or the corpse, his features concentrating on the process of thought and deduction. Death simplified things, like mathematics. Working out how it happened meant seeing things clearly and being objective; dropping the veils of sentimentality.

“At least he got a priest’s blessing,” remarked Daly.

“Kindly performed by a Father Aiden Fee from Maghery. Do you know him?”

“No, no. I’m not a regular Mass-goer. But I will look him up.”

“He says the dead man was Joseph Devine, a devout parishioner. Mr. Devine had no next of kin, apparently. The wallet in his jacket held a driving license and a few bank cards.”

The ripples of wash from a passing motorboat splashed urgently against the jetty. The two men watched the boat frisk the island’s rocky shoreline and then disappear from view.

“The victim was killed by brute force and a series of blows to his skull,” Butler continued. “His limbs were also set alight, possibly as a means of torture. The sap in the tree acted as a form of fuel. We’ll never be able to supply you with an exact time, but roughly speaking he’s been dead for no more than twenty-four hours.”

Butler prodded the victim’s chest with a pair of forceps. There was a wheeze and then a series of sounds caught in the corpse’s throat. A reedy, birdlike gurgle. It was one of the strangest noises Daly had ever heard. High-pitched, savage, inhuman.

He glanced at Butler with an almost pleading look. “What the hell was that?”

“You don’t recognize it?”

Butler pushed the corpse’s mouth ajar. He had already given the throat a meticulous examination. Using the pair of forceps, he whisked out a small metallic object with a practiced motion and held it up to Daly.

“A duck whistle. Wedged above the voice box.”

Some of the tension eased from the detective’s face.

“From the trauma in the area it looks as though it was forced in while the victim was still alive.”

“Gives a new meaning to croaking it.”

Butler ignored the remark. He paused for a moment, using a measure of his theatrical talent to regain the stage. “The way the body has been left in plain sight in such a dramatic fashion and the fact that a priest was informed of its location suggests the involvement of paramilitaries.”

“We’ve no evidence to substantiate that yet,” grunted Daly.

“Either way, the media will swarm all over this one.”

Daly shrugged. “Perhaps the attention will bring forth some leads.”

“Here’s one for you. His death meant a lot to his murderers.”

“How come?”

“Burnt and tortured and then beaten to death, a duck caller lodged in his throat. In my experience, not a common way for a victim to be dispatched. A bullet to the head is much simpler and more efficient.”

Daly grumbled. “So our prime suspects are a group of paramilitaries with macabre imaginations and an interest in duck hunting.”

Butler bared his teeth in a half grin. He went back to working on the corpse while Daly set off to explore the rest of the island, glad to escape the sight of that sinister tree stump. He ought to have remained and given the crime-scene technicians a hand, but he needed to clear his head. Besides, Butler was in charge and would ensure no stone was left unturned.

Back at the shoreline, he took a deep breath of the lough air and watched the cloud shadows shuffle across the water. Farther south, he could see the purple-gray gloom of the Mourne Mountains retreating into the horizon along with the disappearing winter light.

Coney Island was a wild, weird place, visited only by fishermen waiting out a storm or adventurous bird-watchers. It had been used as a place of refuge by the O’Neill chieftains during the Elizabethan wars, and was named after a witch who was supposed to have been a spy for the British queen. The story went that she had poisoned Red Hugh O’Neill while administering aid to a battle wound. A witch, a murderer, and a spy, thought Daly. Mrs. Coney made Mata Hari sound like a Girl Guide.

He followed the shoreline and began to plan the investigation, setting out the different stages. After examining the crime scene, they would start questioning people who lived or worked near the lough. They would try to work out how the dead man came to be on the island, how the killers got there and made their escape. Had anyone noticed anything strange? Any unusual boats or vehicles in the vicinity? The lough shore had two tightly knit communities, one of Protestants, the other of Catholics, both sides wrapped fiercely in a web of mutual suspicion. Anything odd within the visible rim of the horizon would have been noted by someone.

He reached a shingle beach of perfectly rounded boulders and, picking his way over them, idly wondered if he could manhandle a few of them into the fisherman’s boat. They would help decorate his father’s ruined garden. A seagull dove into the water and resurfaced with a wriggling eel. The lough was teeming with life, and murder, too, he thought. The civilized land across the lough might just be a figment of his imagination.

Northern Ireland was no longer a bad place, he reassured himself. Bad food, maybe, and some bad people, but the peace process was beginning to undo a lot of the harm of the past forty years.

The shingle beach gave way to a deep bed of reeds, and he shivered. The murder had been an unusually cruel one, and he feared the investigation might be long and difficult. The killers had taken risks, secure in the knowledge they would not be disturbed on this uninhabited island. Had they lured their victim here or arranged a rendezvous?

He noticed a track of broken reeds and freshly disturbed mud leading into the reed bed. As he approached, a flock of ducks clattered from their nesting positions. They were swift, elusive creatures, their bodies adapted for the quick getaway.

In the heart of the reed bed, he came across a bird hide. It was a lot less drafty and more sophisticated than the ones he remembered as a boy. Inside it, he found a pair of binoculars. Bird hides were really human hides, he thought, designed to conceal the idiotic behavior of ornithologists and duck hunters. The binoculars were surprisingly powerful, not the antiquated set he was expecting. Through them, he scanned the shoreline. He didn’t have a pad or a pencil to record the creatures in his sights, but then a spot of bird-watching wasn’t on his to-do list. His gaze rested on a rundown cottage, half hidden in the trees, the back door slightly ajar. Other than the dwelling there appeared to be no signs of human life along the shore.