Disappeared (8 page)

The shrubbery thickened, reducing Daly’s visibility to a few yards. He stood still, listening to the rain ping on leaves and the branches swaying in the wind. Up ahead he saw a patch of the youth’s shiny tracksuit hanging motionlessly as though snagged on a branch. Had he stopped to let the detective catch sight of him again? Daly felt an equal measure of fear and curiosity as he approached. He wondered whether the youth felt the same. After all, they were two of the most primitive emotions, shared by all species, even criminals and policemen.

He shouted out, “I’m a police officer. I want you to come back with me to the van.”

Through the undergrowth, he caught a better view of the youth’s face. Thin and white, with a wet fringe of hair. The apparition of a truant schoolboy. His face looked empty of fear, empty of curiosity. In the Republican strongholds of Armagh, they taught children from an early age not to show any emotion to enforcers of the law. Daly could sense the boy was not ready to cooperate with him. Fuel smugglers were like border Republicanism itself. Self-reliant and cunning, but too easily seduced by the powerful forces of money and politics.

Any hope Daly might have had for a successful arrest was ended by the metallic rip of a quad bike blasting along the lane toward them. The youth gave Daly a cheeky wave before hopping onto the back of the bike. Then the driver fishtailed the machine and accelerated toward Daly. A wooden stick appeared in the passenger’s hand and hung low as the bike careened past. Daly felt a blow to his knees and fell to the ground as if shot.

“Up the hoods!” shouted the boy with the stick raised in the air. The length of wood disappeared from view, along with the bike, but Daly had seen enough to recognize it was a hurley stick. It ought to have been a comfort that the youth was into Gaelic sport rather than guns or knives. Although the stick might not be classified as an offensive weapon, the young man had wielded it with the precision of a marksman.

By the time Daly made it back to the broken-down van, it was raining heavily. He was soaked through and hobbling. He examined the back of the vehicle as a lorry passed, its headlights sweeping over him. In the flood of light, he saw that the containers were empty. Slowly he closed the doors. Why had the boy run off when there was no contraband to incriminate him? He got his answer when he saw the smashed glass of his own passenger window. He looked for the bag containing the legal files and the pager but it was gone. The wet black hull of another lorry thundered by, wipers lashing in the heavy downpour. Daly felt its cold wind pass through him as if he weren’t there.

It was getting dark. Too late to ring Sweeney and apologize for missing the appointment. The day was almost over and two important pieces of evidence had been stolen from him in what appeared to have been a planned ambush. He had accomplished more as a boy on his morning paper round.

D
aly worried that, as the winter drew on, he and the office walls were beginning to share the same coloring—a dull matte gray. He suspected neither his face nor the walls flattered each other very much. The light of the frosty morning came in through the windows of the police station but did little to relieve the gloom inside or out.

His last holiday had been a weekend break to Paris in spring. It was also the last time he and Anna had gotten drunk together. The last time they had enjoyed each other’s company. Pity all he remembered now was the expensively priced champagne and wine, and a view of the Eiffel Tower drowning in the rain-spattered window of a taxi. He supposed it had been romance of a sort.

He surreptitiously eased his shoes off under the table. Leaning back in his chair, he thought of Devine working in a busy solicitor’s office, sitting bent and sun-starved, surrounded by legal papers, day in, day out, for more than forty years. An office that probably looked very like Daly’s own room. Four walls filled with a grayness that fought its way into every living cell of the body. Had Devine ever wondered if he was missing out on life? If so, his killers had robbed him of any chance of making up for lost time.

The murder barely made sense to Daly. It contradicted the dull order of the legal profession and threw Devine’s whole life out of focus. Perhaps there had been something in the half-burnt files that provided a link to his horrific death. If so, why had it taken so long to come to light?

Solicitors, like priests and doctors, were bound by an oath of confidentiality. It dawned on Daly that Devine had been privy to a horde of secrets. Maybe in his retirement, an act of recollection had floated up some detail from an old case. He had been unable to speak out at the time, but things had changed when he left the firm. Secrets had that effect as the years passed, mused Daly; they rose up with a force that could capsize lives.

After a while, he slipped on his shoes and got to his feet. It was too soon to draw conclusions but he felt he was on the right track. He went out to the coffee room where Irwin and Harland were trying to persuade a female officer to share her bag of crisps.

A look, smooth as steel, slid across Irwin’s charming face when he saw Daly. He got up and made four cups of black coffee. Everyone at the station was used to taking it that way, since the milk in the fridge was usually well past its sell-by date.

“I’m not disturbing you?” asked Daly, glancing at the retreating figure of the young female officer. Deep down, he wondered if he were alive at all.

“No. And so what even if you were?” replied Irwin.

The detective told Daly he’d been unable to get through to Father Aidan Fee. “The day after he found Devine’s body he left on some sort of a retreat,” he said. “Apparently, he’ll be gone for several weeks.”

“What’s a retreat?” asked Harland.

“They’re like second honeymoons for Catholic clergymen,” explained Irwin, winking at Daly. “Reinvigorates them when they get bored with the pope and all that Roman diktat. The priests go off somewhere nice and peaceful to spend a little quality time with God.”

Daly smiled thinly. “What’s that funny smell, like pears?” he asked.

“Perfume,” replied Irwin. “Not mine, I might add.”

“Of course.”

Irwin handed him a mug of black coffee and yawned.

Daly sipped at the mug and eyed the younger detective over the rim.

“Anything come through on the broken-down van?” asked Irwin.

“It was stolen from a house at Mullenakill yesterday afternoon. The owner said two masked men broke into the house and demanded the keys.”

“You think they knew what was in your car?”

Daly shrugged. “Too early to say. If it was an ambush, they were quick off the mark.”

“Maybe it was just a coincidence.”

Daly’s raised eyebrow suggested he was a man who did not believe in coincidences.

They moved on to discussing Devine’s career at the solicitors’, and what links it might have with his murder.

“You still think a former client murdered Devine?” asked Irwin.

“Not necessarily. But we need access to all the cases he was involved in to rule out the possibility. All we can do at this stage is scrape away the layers of paint to find what’s hidden beneath.”

Irwin put down his coffee. “It won’t be easy extracting that kind of information from O’Hare’s firm.”

Daly almost missed the question mark left hanging by the comment.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t remember the senior partner, Brian Cavanagh? He died of a heart attack a few years ago. But back in the ’80s, he was a self-styled human-rights lawyer with an interesting client list. Let’s just say he wasn’t the type to spend his spare time rehearsing the Queen’s Oath.”

An image went off in Daly’s mind like a flashgun. A shiny-eyed, shrewd firebrand of a solicitor reading an angry statement outside a courthouse. A series of high-profile cases involving IRA men had brought Brian Cavanagh media notoriety. To his critics, the solicitor’s interest in human rights extended only as far as the Republican prisoners he represented.

In fact, within the security forces, there were unfounded rumors that he provided a constant stream of messages between prisoners and the IRA leadership. As a Catholic, Daly tended to believe the unofficial version: that Cavanagh, like many solicitors working for Republican clients, wasn’t politically motivated, his only interest was getting at the truth. Either way, the missing file began to take on a more menacing significance.

“There’s something Mr. O’Hare’s not letting us in on,” said Daly.

“He seemed preoccupied at Devine’s cottage.”

“Any connection between Devine’s death and his firm will arouse a lot of public interest. We’ll let him sweat it out for now. See if the press comes up with anything interesting.”

“By the way, Butler has sent a preliminary report on the forensics. He left you this.”

He handed Daly a brief handwritten note that began with Butler’s characteristically sardonic humor:
Cleaning up is always the hardest thing to do after a party. However, Devine’s murderers were professionals. So far we haven’t found a scrap of DNA that doesn’t belong to the victim.

Five minutes later Daly was sitting in his car, the engine running.

The case had to be linked to terrorism and Northern Ireland’s bloody past. He had suspected it the moment he saw the body on the island. The lack of a prime suspect in Devine’s life helped confirm his instinct. He released the clutch, and soon he was driving by the empty orchards on the road out of town, wondering what grim forces the legal clerk had entangled himself in.

A fine drizzle began to fall, and in the grayness, the low, arching branches of the apple trees took on the solemnity of a great funeral procession. This part of the Armagh countryside had earned itself the nickname of the Murder Triangle during the height of the Troubles, a series of tit-for-tat killings devastating both the Protestant and Catholic communities. The roads he was driving through had to be some of the most ghost-run in the country.

He pulled the car to a stop at a narrow crossroads. A ribbonlike stream of water twisted and turned its way down the road from the summit of a hill. He was of two minds. When another car drew up behind him and flashed its headlights, he decided to follow the lead that had first caught his attention inside Devine’s cottage.

It took him half an hour to find his way back to the farmhouse where David Hughes had gone missing. In daylight, the farmyard looked more desolate. The wind sniffed at a fence of broken wire. Rainwater filled a line of empty post holes, and an ancient tractor with a rusted seat stood in a lane of mud. The farm seemed to have sunken into a forlorn state of waiting.

However, in the garden, a full washing line flapped in the cold breeze, suggesting that Eliza Hughes was not the type of woman to neglect her household routine. This time the door was locked with a series of bolts. Eliza spoke to him first from behind a pane of frosted glass. Her eyes were wide with fear when she pulled open the door.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like opening the door to strangers.”

“We’ve no news of your brother, yet,” said Daly hurriedly. “I just have a few questions to ask you, that’s all. It won’t take much of your time.”

She put away a scrubbing brush and bucket, and led Daly down a corridor lined with miniature gilt picture frames of hunting scenes. They stepped into a kitchen where a dishwasher and washing machine were busy twins of suds and noise. An oppressive cleanliness reigned throughout, in spite of the emotional upheaval the woman had endured.

“I used to tell David every day that everything was fine because I didn’t want him to worry,” said Eliza, her words sounding dull and hopeless. “Now I have to keep telling myself the same. Things aren’t fine, though. I’m falling to pieces behind a wall that I built brick by brick around David and myself.”

Daly felt a note of sympathy with her sense of abandonment. In a way, it mirrored his predicament with Anna: not knowing the whereabouts or motivation of a loved one.

He nodded and suggested she should accept any help that was available. Then he groaned inwardly at the clumsy way he was expressing himself.

“Are there any family members that can stay with you?”

Her breath caught as she said no.

Daly took out the photograph of the duck hunters and the lecture invite, and showed them to Eliza. Her fingers shook slightly as she looked at them.

“This was before David took ill. I thought he would have continued into healthy old age long after any of the others.”

She pondered the group of faces. “A dwindling band of brothers,” was all that she remarked.

“Do you recognize Joseph Devine?”

“Yes, I do. Bottom left.” Her face went blank. “I read in the paper he was found dead on Coney Island. Is that why you’ve come here?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I have to ask these questions whenever a murder has been committed.” Daly paused. “How well did David know Mr. Devine?”

There was an awkward silence. A crow began to scrabble on the roof, its caws echoing down the chimney. It was clear to Daly that he ought to have delayed visiting Ms. Hughes. He did not know how important the link was between her brother and the dead man. He wasn’t sure of what he was trying to uncover, and he had no way of providing the reassurance the woman so clearly craved.

However, Eliza’s answer was firm and unhesitating. “Apart from the odd meeting of the duck-hunters’ club they hadn’t seen each other in years. They weren’t really on speaking terms.”

“What about the other men in the photo?”

“I only know them by their first names, and even they might just be nicknames.”

Then without warning, she burst into tears.

Daly turned his back and filled a kettle. While he rummaged for cups, Eliza composed herself.

“Have you no theory at all about who took my brother?” she demanded.

“You’ve told me there was no evidence of any trouble in his life apart from his illness. You said that David lived an ordinary existence with simple, regular habits. Went to church on Sundays, tended to his orchard and garden, and went duck hunting in the winter. Is that all you’re giving me to work on?”