Disappeared Read online

  “This time I’ll make sure a car watches your sister’s house. Hopefully the arsonists won’t know where she lives.”

  He glanced into the rearview mirror again and saw she had fallen asleep. The boy sitting in the passenger seat beside him was still awake. Daly could feel an intense concentration from him.

  His imperative was to ensure their safety, but as for a larger strategy, he had none. He had no doubt that but for the boy’s watchfulness, the latest fire could have been fatal. From his car phone he put out an alert for the arsonists based upon the boy’s description.

  Then he turned the heater on and relaxed into his seat. The boy beside him sat like a ghost stranded from a bad dream.

  “Are you still at school, Dermot?” asked Daly.

  “I’m doing A-levels. One of them’s criminology.”

  Daly didn’t say anything. He could understand why the boy wanted to study crime. It probably helped create a mental distance from terror. Analyzing it was a way of preventing fear from paralyzing oneself.

  They drove several miles without exchanging a word.

  “Doing criminology was a mistake,” announced Dermot. “The more I read about the study of crime the more it seems a waste of time. My teacher talks about poverty and inequality, but really some people are so evil they’re beyond human understanding.”

  Daly nodded and tried to change the subject, but the boy appeared not to hear him.

  “Law and order are no comfort to people like my mum. I’ve watched her. Her life is a tightrope walk on a wire tied at one end to the police and people like you, and at the other to the IRA and the so-called protectors of Catholics. She doesn’t trust any of you.”

  “That can’t be healthy.”

  “Look at where we’re forced to live. It’s a hole. I can’t wait to get out. I wish they’d burn the whole place down. Even then my mother would still want to stay there.”

  “That’s where her roots are?”

  “No. She’s just set in her ways.”

  “Mothers can be like that.”

  The boy gave him directions that led them up a deep lane lined with ragged fuchsia bushes.

  Before they pulled up at the farmhouse, he turned to Daly. “Can you do me a favor?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’ve work experience to do as part of my criminology course. Just a day or two. I was wondering if I could follow you around?”

  Daly paused for a moment. He glanced at the sleeping form of Tessa in the backseat. Her face was a pale blur hidden behind her dark hair.

  “I can’t see it being a problem,” he said. “We’re meant to be an accessible police force these days. Headquarters is always encouraging us to let people see how professional we’ve become.”

  The car swung up to the front door of the farmhouse. Tessa’s sister was ready to greet them, framed against a neat porch filled with overwintering geraniums. She looked older and softer than Tessa.

  Daly got out to introduce himself, but the sister, who had stepped closer to the car to inspect them, backed away. He knew he didn’t look good. Judging from his reflection in the car window, he would have scared most people away.

  The woman looked relieved when Tessa climbed out of the car. She half-scolded, half-reassured her, and they embraced.

  “You won’t back out of your promise?” asked Dermot.

  “I never back out of anything.”

  Before going into the house, Tessa turned and walked back to Daly. Her hand stroked her hair back from her flushed cheeks. Her eyes, however, were level and calm.

  “You’re a good man,” she said. “Don’t waste your time investigating what happened tonight. The people who set my house alight were just drunk vandals. Tomorrow night, it’ll be someone else’s home.”

  Daly nodded. Either she could not understand that Oliver’s killers might also want her dead, or she wanted to protect them in some way. Perhaps her lack of suspicion was no bad thing. It might help scale down his sense of mistrust and paranoia. When he got into the car, he felt so exhausted he wanted to lie down and sleep. He drove straight home, his mind a blank.

  13

  When Daly walked into the main office in the police station, Irwin was already sitting there, yawning, and O’Neill was on the phone with an open magazine on her lap. She replaced the receiver and pulled a face. Harland, Robertson, and O’Brien were gathered around a computer screen. Judging from the tight grins on their faces, they weren’t writing crime reports.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Like shit.” Irwin spoke for the rest of the team. “Thank God I’m off duty at one.”

  Daly could feel a weariness in the room like a physical weight. Bouts of lethargy in difficult murder cases were not unusual. He hoped it was no more than a periodic fit and that his team would not miss an important clue or lead.

  For his part, he felt energized by the events of the night before. Among the many imperatives thrown up by the investigation was the safety of Tessa Jordan and her son. It had a power that seemed to him not just instinctive but also moral. He worried that it might establish itself as the major motivation in the case and weaken his decision-making.

  “Who was meant to be watching the Jordan house?” he demanded.

  “Harland and Robertson,” said Irwin. “They were called to a break-in at a petrol station. A digger was driven into the cash machine. Some idiot must have forgotten his PIN number.”

  Daly grunted.

  “Sightings of Hughes have started coming in,” said O’Neill. “Nothing of any worth, though. A woman called to say she saw him at Malaga airport last Friday. The day before he disappeared.”

  “Eliza Hughes also phoned,” said Irwin. “She wants you to call out to the cottage. It sounded urgent, but she wouldn’t say why.”

  Irwin and Daly pored over a preliminary report the fire service had drawn up on the blaze. Traces of fire accelerant had been found splashed in the living room. The smoke alarm wasn’t working, which was a serious oversight by Tessa Jordan considering the history of arson attacks.

  “What’s that smell?” asked Irwin.

  Daly shrugged and got up to leave.

  “It’s perfume. I can smell it from your jacket.” Irwin smirked. “You’ve been behaving strangely, Celcius. All those late nights and not a lot to show for it. How come you were out at the Jordan house after midnight?”

  Daly left the room before Irwin could ask one question too many.

  Outside he saw that it was going to be a fine day. He relished the trip back to the lough shore. A fine southwesterly breeze was blowing and he filled his lungs before getting into the car. Thirty minutes later, he caught sight of the blue wedge of Lough Neagh between rows of pine trees. The sky above the water was filled with slow-moving clouds carrying their freight of winter visitors, geese from Siberia, whooper swans from Canada.

  Hughes’s cottage held two surprises for him. When he arrived, the door opened before he could ring the bell. Eliza Hughes was wearing a pair of Marigold gloves and her sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. Her face looked tired and her eyes were wide. Daly had seen that look before in people whose loved ones had been missing for several days or more. They were the eyes of a woman whose gaze was beginning to fasten on the nightmare from which she was trying to awake. The nightmare that was rising like a flood of water around her feet. She blinked in the bright daylight and led Daly into the kitchen where she had been scrubbing pots in the sink.

  “Every time I see you I keep expecting David to be at your side.”

  Daly did not know what to say. Eliza’s gaze swung around the kitchen from object to object, as though the room were immersed in an element that made her distrust her eyes.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked. A pot was already brewing on the hob. Daly gingerly took a cup from her and began filling her in with the details of his visit to Ginger Gormley’s.

  However, before he could finish, she interrupted him.

  “Y
ou had better take a look at this.” She handed him a postcard. “It arrived this morning. It’s from my brother.”

  Daly stared at the card in surprise. The picture showed a hunter wading out into murky water to release a flock of duck decoys. The message on the back was written in an unsteady hand. It said:

  Dear Elira,

  I’ve gone for good. Please don’t think of following me. Don’t worry, my kind hosts are taking good care of all my needs. If only they would stop talking about God and salvation.

  Love, David

  P.S. If only that old bird would talk, imagine the stories it would tell.

  The message was more confusing than reassuring. Daly guessed it was the product of a mind sinking into senility. He glanced at Eliza and saw a hopeful smile creep across her face.

  “I’m sure it’s from him. He misspelled my name. ‘Elira.’ It was his pet name for me when we were growing up.”

  Daly examined the postmark. The card appeared to have been posted from Portadown.

  “At least we know he’s alive,” she added.

  “Do you have any idea where’s he at?”

  “No. I can only guess he’s with friends. Perhaps they don’t even know he’s ill.”

  “Do you think the postcard’s meant to be a clue? Is he trying to tell us what he’s up to or who he’s staying with?”

  “I don’t think he knows himself.”

  “We’ll keep an open mind. He may still be a danger to himself. Then again he might be out with friends shooting ducks as we speak and having a great time.”

  “It’s possible,” said Eliza, nodding. “He’d been looking forward to the hunting season, but I was too frightened to let him near a gun, even during his lucid periods.”

  The postcard lay on the table between them. A note from a mind on the edge of oblivion.

  “Patience,” said Daly eventually. “We’ll establish where he is sooner or later.”

  He asked permission to walk around the house. He wanted to get a sense of the type of person David Hughes was. Eliza agreed and went back to scrubbing her pots.

  Hughes’s bedroom looked barer than it had been on the night of his disappearance. The smell of fresh disinfectant hung in the air. The bed had been stripped of its blankets and sheets. All traces of the old man had been scrubbed away. He got the impression that for Eliza Hughes the greater part of looking after her brother involved an arduous amount of cleaning. Even in the depths of his illness, Hughes must have felt suppressed by her relentless routine. A scrubbing so fierce it threatened to wipe all trace of him from the face of the earth.

  It was only when Daly turned to leave the room that he remembered. Something else had been in the room that night. Something that had not been cleared away. For several moments he didn’t move, afraid the fragment of memory might slip away.

  The candle with ashes and paper piled around it. It had sat on the cabinet next to the bed. On the night of Hughes’s disappearance, it had struck him as odd. Now he knew why. It had been the one blot of untidiness in the room.

  When he asked Eliza about the ashes, she was uncertain at first.

  “David might have burnt some paper after he went to bed,” she suggested.

  “Did you see him with anything earlier?”

  She thought for a moment. “I remember he was reading the local newspaper, the Armagh News. It was when I brought him his cup of tea. He had his back to me and was poring over one of the pages. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he looked up at me as if he’d seen a ghost. Then he folded the newspaper sheet and put it in his pocket. It was the obituary page. I left him alone and we didn’t speak. That was the last time I looked into his eyes.”

  “Had you read the newspaper?”

  “No, but I had my own copy of it so I didn’t mind.”

  “Did you notice any change in him afterwards?”

  “He did seem a little preoccupied, but then I thought he was having one of his moods. He went to bed early and I called in at about ten p.m. When I went into the room to put on the pressure mat he was fast asleep, snoring away.”

  Daly was silent while Eliza’s eyes widened in alarm.

  “You think there was something in the obituary page that made him decide to run away?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to determine,” he replied. “David reads the newspaper and for some reason gets rid of it before anyone else can read it. Later that night, it appears he faked a burglary and then fled the house. Something in the newspaper might have alarmed him. Did he say anything that evening which seemed out of place?”

  Eliza blushed. “He didn’t say anything at all. But then he had days like that. I was his carer, but in many ways we had a distant relationship. It was ridiculous. Some weeks he refused to speak to me at all. I had no idea what was going on in his head, apart from the clues he left in his messages.”

  “Don’t worry. That sounds quite normal to me. I refused to speak to my father from the age of fifteen.”

  “David could be lucid at times. And he had always been very bright. The illness didn’t seem to affect his confidence. He believed he could manage anything he had done before. Just a bit slower. Which made it more difficult to care for him. To keep him safe.”

  “He needed your help about the house?”

  She laughed lightly. “David was beyond helping. He did his own thing. Whether it was right or wrong, he didn’t care.”

  Daly let the air clear for a moment.

  “I’ve asked you this before, but can you think of any reason David might have feared for his safety?”

  “I can’t imagine any.” She gazed down, off-center, then back up at Daly.

  There it was again, thought Daly. Something evasive and not quite straightforward. Why don’t I believe you?

  “Have you still got your copy of the Armagh News?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She retrieved the paper from a pile ready to go into the recycling bin.

  Daly spotted the death notice immediately. It was bordered in black, and unusually worded. However, that wasn’t the strangest thing about it. The obituary was for Joseph Devine, and the date at the top of the paper read February 19, the day before Devine was murdered. The final line read: His spirit that could never take flight in life, has finally taken wing. For further arrangements contact Bill.

  14

  Armagh News reporter Owen Murphy was a slight, fidgety young man with curly black hair. Daly remembered meeting him at the station’s weekly press briefings. The first time Murphy had attended one, Daly asked a senior journalist from a rival paper to vouch for the young reporter. Something about the nervousness of his smile and his casual clothes had sparked Daly’s suspicions.

  The newspaper shared a building with a Chinese restaurant and an Indian takeaway. Murphy took Daly and Irwin up a back staircase covered in greasy carpet. A primitive-looking vent from the Chinese restaurant dripped curry stains down the wall. The patch of carpet beneath had rotted away. Inside the newsroom, a sense of agitation filled the air. The rattle of journalists’ keyboards blended with the sounds of the busy kitchen across the corridor, food being chopped, pots boiling, and the clink of knives and forks.

  Fast food, fast journalism, thought Daly. Both working to deadlines, both serving up what the public desired, only to leave everyone with a queasy feeling afterward.

  “We need to know who placed Joseph Devine’s obituary in last week’s paper,” Daly told Murphy.

  “Simple,” replied the reporter. “A man came in and handed me the copy. He told me he was a brother of Devine’s. He paid the fee and we put it in the paper.”

  “Devine didn’t have a brother.”

  “So it was someone posing as his brother. It’s the first time I’ve heard of a bogus relative. We get lots of reports of bogus callers. But never a joker pretending to be the brother of a dead man. I had no reason to doubt him.”

  The journalist rifled through some files on his desk and booted up his computer. “What’s the big deal,
anyway?”

  “Policemen have an aversion to lies,” said Daly. “Perhaps it’s because everything we do ends up going before a judge and they loathe fiction in their courts. We need to find out who this person was and why he placed an obituary before Devine was killed.”

  “Before he was killed?” Murphy raised an eyebrow. He tested one of the cups of coffee sitting on the desk and looked thoughtful.

  “OK,” said the reporter. “It’s just dawned on me. Devine’s body was found on the Sunday. But we had the obituary in the Saturday edition.” He gulped down a mouthful of coffee. “I see your point now.”

  “We need a description of the man who claimed to be Devine’s brother,” said Irwin.

  The journalist held back. “What crime has he committed?”

  “That’s exactly the question going through my mind at the moment.”

  Murphy leaned back, weighing up what bargaining power he might have with the policeman.

  “Devine’s murder was very violent. What leads are you working on? Republicans, perhaps? Or do you think they’re subcontracting work these days?” His eyes gleamed at the prospect of a scoop.

  “This is a murder investigation,” warned Daly, “not fair game for a reporter sniffing out a story. Holding back information is obstruction. If you like, I can ask you to come down to the station where we can discuss this further.”

  Murphy flashed a quick smile and held up his hands. “No problem, Inspector. Always glad to help the local constabulary. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and all that. We’ve a good working relationship with you guys these days.” He paused for thought. “I didn’t really get a good look at him, unfortunately. Old. Early sixties, I’d say. Gray stubble. He looked like a tramp, to be honest, as though he hadn’t been taking care of himself.”

  Daly produced a photograph of the duck-hunting club.

  “Can you pick him out in this group?”

  Murphy barely paused. “Sure. That’s him right there.”