Silence (22 page)

They both got out and approached the house. Daly opened a gate that was creaking in the wind.

‘I want to help you tell your story, if I can, but you have to be open with me. Do you understand? We can’t let the facts of what happened to families like yours and the Corrigans fall back into the darkness.’

‘What has my story got to do with what happened here?’

He was surprised by what she told him. According to Walsh’s research, the Corrigans had married in the early summer of 1979. They had been painting their new house on the day after their honeymoon, when a Loyalist bomb, hidden in the hot press, had detonated, killing them both instantly.

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ he replied. ‘I heard another story. One that has nothing to do with the Troubles.’ He recounted what his father had told him, and in the telling of it, he realized how simplistic it sounded, stripped of any sense of evil or blame. A poignant isolated tragedy, constructed for a child’s ears. The truth caught up with him, and he found himself resenting Pryce. Again, she had him in her power. She had the capacity for rousing in him conflicting emotions: this aversion for the truth combined with a stronger desire to hear how evil had ploughed its course through his childhood.

They approached the house and circled it. A blackbird bolted through a window. They stepped through what had once been the front door. At first, they could barely see where they were going in the gloom. He almost tripped over several pieces of furniture: an armchair crumbling with fungus, an upended cradle. At head level, electrical flexes and cracked light bulbs dangled in tortured silence. The rest of the house had been stripped bare, or perhaps had never been furnished or fitted out in the first place. A small ash tree had sprouted in a damp corner, a prisoner rooted in rubble, and a colony of slugs gathered where rainwater oozed from a hole in the ceiling. Now that he examined the roof closely, he could make out the path of the bomb where it had ripped through the ceiling and roof, shattering wood and tiles, buckling a steel girder.

‘Now can you see?’ said Pryce.

Her exaggerated patience felt like a form of mockery. In the half-light, he saw that she was smirking slightly. She had calculated his punishment correctly.

He cleared his throat.

‘When you’re a child you believe what your parents tell you.’

After a few moments of silence, they walked back to the car.

‘You grew up with blinkers on, Celcius,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘You didn’t see what was really happening. You didn’t understand a thing.’

Daly got into the car and stared straight ahead, perplexed.

‘Of course, your family weren’t the only ones to ignore what was going on. It’s human nature not to acknowledge evil in case it spreads and comes closer to home.’

‘I don’t need to defend my family to you. You didn’t live through those times.’

‘Correct. But you
did
. It’s your responsibility to find out the truth. If you buckle and hide from it, you will never be able to live with yourself. You have a duty to your past, to your own self-respect.’

She was right, he conceded. He couldn’t ignore the past any longer. He had his own journey to undertake. It was useless to keep closing his eyes, or turning his back. If their road trip proved anything, it was that the past was all around, in every direction, stretching all the way to the horizon. It was time to go back to his cottage on that morning in 1979. It was time to dig up the cottage’s secrets, the precious family bones.

‘You had a nice life, Celcius,’ she said. ‘A detective in the police service of Northern Ireland. With the Troubles over, life was safe, peaceful, prosperous. Then one day a priest is killed in a car crash, and bang! The past hits you. Suddenly you find out your mother was murdered. Life is not so nice and peaceful any more.’

Again, Daly detected more than a hint of mockery in her voice. Had his life ever felt safe and peaceful? he wondered. Certainly, there had been an absence of trouble, but that did not equate with feeling safe. His father’s story about an accidental bullet had been a lie, but it had filled what would have otherwise been an all-devouring hole in his childhood. Pryce was correct. The idea of a random bullet had been so much easier to live with than puzzling over an evil motive. How much easier it was to forget a stray incident in the mix, beyond the concepts of good and evil, blame and retribution.

‘Take me home,’ he said.

‘Wait. I’ve one more address to show you.’

The land changed from bogland to pasture and places where things grew. It improved so much that soon they were driving through leafless orchards. The farmhouses were clearly inhabited, comfortably off in appearance; the hedges well maintained, the whitethorn blossoming in neat, rectangular shapes. There was a sense of order at every level, from the rows of apple trees to the mown grass and mud-free farmyards.

The sun found a gap in the overcast sky and reached across the low-lying apple trees, their arched branches resembling sinews bracing for a calamity that had already happened. Daly and Pryce got stuck behind a tractor, bumping along the narrow roads. He had time to take in sharply defined details in the sunlight, an Orange Order Hall bristling with antennae and flags, and the first tentative apple blossoms of the year, so bright they seemed to sway over the trees.

‘I haven’t been down these roads in years,’ he remarked.

‘Tell me something more about your mother, Celcius.’

It was a test of his powers of recall to remember anything but the image of her that existed in photographs. All he could conjure up was the blurred oval of her face at the kitchen window, her back as he followed her about the house, and her blue nurse’s uniforms neatly ironed. She drove a red Hillman. He remembered long hours in the evening, standing by the front window, waiting for her car to turn the corner and arrive home. But was that before or after her death? Had he kept vigil expecting her to come back, once, briefly, to say goodbye?

‘There’s not much to tell you,’ he said. ‘She led an ordinary life.’

‘Was she the typical Irish mother? I want to picture her in my mind.’

‘Why do you want to picture her?’

‘No reason, really.’

‘I don’t want my mother to be a character in your book. Not now or ever. The subject is closed. Please don’t mention her again.’

Pryce slowed her driving, hesitated at crossroads, and drove back down the same roads. She was lost. She pulled over and asked directions from a farmer, mentioning the name Agnew. Daly felt cold perspiration form on his forehead. Instinctively, he reached for his gun and felt its reassuring heft. A minute later, they pulled up at the front door of a two-storey farmhouse. An elderly woman watched them from an upstairs window, and then disappeared. She reappeared at a downstairs window and continued watching them, a fearful look on her face.

They stepped out of the car. The sunlight intensified, casting long groping shadows through the nearby apple trees, which swayed in the breeze. Daly felt tension enter his body, a tension so intense his shoulders shivered. He remembered the name Agnew. It was the name of the last surviving police officer at the checkpoint that had stopped his mother.

‘Is this whose house I think it is?’ he asked

She nodded and watched him carefully. Again, his hand reached into his jacket pocket and felt the gun nestling there. He wondered if they should turn back and arrange the visit for another day, when he was better prepared, but they had come too far already.

He heard footsteps approach the door, a halting tread, the sound of infirmity or age, followed by the clicks of keys turning, locks unlatched. His tension grew. The thought of confronting one of his mother’s killers made him want to shut his eyes. Another part of him felt aroused by the thought of the gun in his pocket and the opportunity for revenge that now presented itself.
If I were some other person
,
he thought.

He saw the handle turn. The door creaked open and an old man appeared. His gaze was hard and unwelcoming.

Pryce spoke first, her voice sounding uncharacteristically uncertain.

‘We’re looking for Kenneth Agnew. We’d like to talk to him.’

The old man’s eyes looked them both up and down. He frowned, faltered for a moment.

‘You’re too late,’ he said.

Pryce showed no change in her demeanour. She leaned closer to the doorframe. Daly noticed that she had planted one foot across the threshold. She exuded determination to find out more, yet at the same time there was sympathy in her voice.

‘What happened?’

The old man spoke bluntly.

‘Kenneth was my brother. He hanged himself at the bottom of the orchard a week ago. We buried him on Sunday.’

The tension evaporated from Daly’s body, replaced in that instant by a larger feeling, of calmness – satisfaction, even. From her purse, Pryce took one of her calling cards and handed it to him.

‘Have you come far?’ asked the old man.

‘No,’ replied Daly.

The man’s eyes flitted suspiciously over Daly, as though he were the odd man out.

‘Where do you live? Do I know you?’

The farmyard stood still. The question hung in the air.

‘It doesn’t matter where I live. We came to talk to your brother.’

The old man examined Pryce’s card.

‘You’re that journalist.’ He stared at her with new interest. ‘Kenneth said he talked to you a while back.’

‘That’s correct. I was hoping he might have helped me with a book I’m writing. About the Troubles.’

He handed her the card back but she refused to take it.

‘They’re my contact details,’ she said. ‘They’re for you to keep. When you feel more like talking.’

He waved the card in the air.

‘I don’t know why you want to talk to me. I don’t even know why you came here. There are things that belong to the past and should never see the light of day.’

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Agnew,’ said Pryce.

They went back to the car and drove off.

‘Agnew was the last surviving policeman from the Loyalist gang,’ said Pryce. ‘I interviewed him a while back. He was an alcoholic, and completely unrepentant about his past.’

If the comment was meant to jar Daly, it failed. Instead, he felt a sense of peace. The men responsible for his mother’s murder had suffered and were dead. Agnew had hanged himself in an empty orchard.
Does that mean I’ve won? That I can give up this search for the truth? That I am no longer bound by any obligation to pursue her killers?
At the very least, he had been released from the limbo between procrastination and revenge. The sense of relief made him look all around the landscape. The late-afternoon sun gave the rolling hills of apple orchards an air of peace. There was a shine upon everything that felt strange after the brooding greyness of the morning.

However, Pryce did not appear to share his mood. She ignored the signs at crossroads, unwilling to stop. She was riveted by something, her expression rigid, her eyes impervious to the shifts of light in the sky, the restfulness of the landscape.

‘Now we might never discover why they targeted your mother, or who set her up in the first place.’

Daly realized that Agnew’s suicide might have raised more questions than it had answered.

‘We might never know if these murders were willed at a higher level.’

Her eyes flicked across his face, hardened, and focused straight ahead on the road with a tunnelled gaze. Daly began to feel travel-sick. Perhaps it was more than physical nausea; it was the strain of locating himself repeatedly in the spider’s web of roads on Walsh’s map, jarred by the perspective of slanting fields and thorn hedges, and Pryce’s vicious regress into the past. Another empty cottage materialized before them: a gate hanging open in disrepair, the roof dipping in places and spiky weeds sprouting from the drainpipes. Someone had been digging in the overgrown garden, fashioning neat drills out of the black earth. He jolted with surprise when he realized she had taken him home.

That night, Daly found it hard to settle in the cottage. He paced back and forth over the floorboards. A biting wind blew in from the lough, and made the windows rattle. The frames had loosened over the winter and needed fixing. He walked outside to the turf shed and filled a basket with turf. He usually enjoyed puttering about the back yard but he felt cold and tired. He cleaned out the fireplace in the living room, the ashes enveloping him in their soft stink. He picked out pieces of crumbling mortar that had fallen down the chimney. The stack needed repairing and the roof needed new insulation. Everything about the cottage required something done, he grumbled. It was in mortal danger of becoming one of the ruined, forgotten cottages of Walsh’s murder map.

The thought of the mounting odd jobs vexed him. Why had he not sold up and moved into a brand-new house? Everywhere he looked in the cottage, he saw accusing fingers pointing at him, demanding his care and attention: the dilapidated furniture, the peeling walls. Would it not have been easier to run away, to seek the comforts of a modern apartment? But there were other fingers oppressing him. What else did he lack? What else had he left undone? Where was his thirst for revenge, the determination to have the people who orchestrated his mother’s death brought to justice? He gritted his teeth. He felt annoyed with his fate, the story of his mother’s murder and now this dire sequel, his search for the truth, and the unravelling of his career as a detective.

Perhaps Pryce was right. The story was his story, and he could not escape the tale, no matter how dark the telling grew.

That Sunday morning, Daly needed time and space to think. He did something he had not done in a long while. He drove to early-morning Mass at his parish chapel. All his life he had aspired to being a good and careful human being, and when he went to Mass he was usually reminded of how much he had failed, and that his life was little more than a tortuous journey through regret and shame. However, within that huddled Maghery congregation, it was a comfort to feel he was not the only one.

He made sure he was early for the service. He liked the silence of the altar before the priest appeared, a silence that the mind could truly baulk at. He walked up to the chapel doors, feeling like a creature that had hidden for too long in the darkest reaches of a hole, hoping that the shadows of history would pass it by. He blessed himself at the double doors, and closed them gently behind.