Disappeared Read online

  A distressed croak from the mallard woke him with a start. The sound filled him with concern, the quack resembling a death cry, a wet gouging sound throttled from the bird’s throat. He climbed out of the hide and waded toward the source of the quacking, but the sound had abruptly ceased, swallowed up in the darkness of the freezing night.

  Another distressed quack sounded in the undergrowth. This time in the clear air, he heard the crack in the call. A wrong note. A human note. The person imitating the call was an expert but his ears were no longer deceived.

  A movement snatched the focus of his eyes and he knew then that a path leading to death had opened up. The reeds moved and he sensed the shadows hasten toward him. Plunging through the marsh to the duck-hide, he caught sight of another shape looming before him. As he wheeled around, he heard a noise that sounded like laughter.

  The voice he had heard that morning on the phone spoke in the darkness. It had changed subtly, deformed after all these years with contempt or illness. He tried to pinpoint its location, a black orifice amid the silently moving shadows, directing them toward their prey.

  He had not realized his pursuers would be that many. Their number filled him with dread. What if they all wanted retribution, to have him divided up and subjected to their individual versions of hell? How many deaths could a man endure?

  He surrendered his last hope when a heavy object struck him across the face and his mouth filled with blood. Another strike sank his left eye into his skull like a nail.

  His remaining eye gaped around as the shadows tore at his clothing and rained down blow upon blow, stripping him to his bare skin. And then an executioner’s silence as they paused for breath. Holding his naked sides, he tried to roll away, his body doubling up with pain.

  “You murderous bastard,” said the familiar voice close to his blinking eye, a cold smile drawn across his lips like a visor.

  “I never killed Jordan, if that’s what you believe,” he pleaded.

  “But you were in cahoots with those who did,” the voice countered, thick with saliva, ready to gobble up the cold dish that was being served.

  “I just wanted to help his family. Make amends for what happened.”

  Too hurt to move he tried to beg for mercy.

  “I give up, I give up,” he whispered, more in the form of a promise to himself.

  But the shadows did not give up until it was almost dawn. Pounding and hacking at his body as if they had been fasting for years from violence to enjoy this feast.

  When they had finished their job and left the island, a flock of crows gathered around the victim. As the dawn’s stain seeped through the sky, the crows began their scolding, their cries obliterating the usual morning chorus, screaming and condemning the grisly sight before them. But there was no audience left to hear them. A thin rain began to fall, coming down like a curtain over the informer and the island that was a haven for waterfowl.

  2

  They had told the new police recruit a lot of his time would be spent in the company of drunken people. When he answered the urgent call on Saturday night, he was beginning to realize this was an absurd understatement. The officer had just finished his first tour of the pubs of Armagh City with a colleague. He was feeling irritable, unused to the clamor at closing time, the staggering drunks gaping through the windows of the patrol car, their exaggerated shouting and laughing penetrating the reinforced glass. He could not escape the observation that the throng of young people cavorting down the street was like a poisoned organism celebrating its own death throes.

  He had been revolted by the sight of bodily fluids ejected in alleyways and against walls—the bubbling mess of nighttime intoxication washing down the streets of the ecclesiastical city. Sitting in the passenger seat, he had felt like a diver trapped in an underwater cage, flinching at the grinning under-faces of sharks reeling by.

  “There’s nothing stopping them from partying now,” the older officer had remarked.

  Northern Ireland’s rural towns were no longer mute, inhibited little corners of sobriety and sectarianism. To his colleague, however, the liberated nighttime scenes were a strong endorsement of the curative powers of a little terror. Say what you like about the paramilitaries and trigger-happy troops, they knew how to keep the rabble in their place.

  In the quiet of the control room, the new recruit listened to the stricken caller and assumed it was a case of a drunken relative not arriving home. He suspected the caller herself might be intoxicated too. He almost had to hold the phone away from his ear to grasp what she was saying. He fumbled for a notepad. Behind the high-pitched words, he detected a sinewy note of control in the woman’s voice, as though her usual self-command had been overwhelmed by a wave of turmoil. The officer took the details and checked the whereabouts of the patrol car.

  Then he donned a bulletproof vest and stepped outside into the protective shadow of the watchtower, where he lit a cigarette. The female desk sergeant he would normally have chatted and flirted with at this hour was unfortunately off duty. Dealing with the boredom of the long wait till dawn was a professional technique the young officer had yet to master.

  He stubbed the cigarette out and came to a decision. Inspector Celcius Daly always reminded the night-shift officers to phone him if anything unusual occurred, especially at the weekend. By this, he meant to exclude the long tail of alcohol-related crimes. The request, usually delivered with Daly’s stray, fatigued eyes sweeping upward as if in prayer, had the effect of motivating the officer to handle alone whatever problems arose. On this occasion, however, the new recruit decided to press ahead and risk Daly’s irritation.

  Celcius Daly had sat up late drinking whiskey by a turf fire in his father’s cottage. The turf belonged to a moldy batch his father had cut the previous summer. The old man had probably handled each piece five times before bringing them home and still they were wet. The damp smoke had filled the room and triggered a coughing fit. Daly had wrapped himself in a duffel coat and made his way out to the open porch, where the air was sharp and clean but cold.

  He saw the moon rise and combine with the frost to form a silvery rime on the ridge of potato drills his eighty-two-year-old father had watched over until the week of his death. He refilled his glass and returned to stare at the broken ridges shining in the moonlight like the rib cage of a hungry beast. In his intoxicated state, he must have found the moonlit tableau diverting. It was well after three a.m. before he stumbled to bed.

  The phone jarred him from his sleep. His stomach leaped, and he cursed involuntarily. He had just slipped into a remarkable dream—a series of lottery balls swiveling into view, their numbers shining with the luminosity of a premonition. He had watched them drop into place: 49, 11, 21, 7…

  On awakening, the first thing he did was write the numbers down on the back of an old photo he found in the drawer of the bedside locker. Unfortunately, the phone had interrupted the winning sequence. He tried to guess the remaining two but the feeling of certainty dimmed. He rubbed his eyes, and the random numbers faded into that elemental pointlessness that permeates everything in the small hours of the night. He realized it was the middle of the night, and he was alone in bed.

  Even though it was six months since he had separated from his wife, the loneliness he felt on awakening on nights like these still surprised him. The clock’s dim face was the only light in the room—3:50, it read. The bars had long closed and most revelers would have made their way home by now, he thought. A domestic row had ended badly or a drunken street brawl had spilled over into something more violent. Either way, he could expect a dawn of gastric terror. At least he had not slept long enough to feel the jagged impact of a hangover.

  He climbed out of bed and listened to the receiver.

  “Hello, what is it?”

  “I hope I haven’t disturbed you, sir,” said the voice.

  “No, not at all,” he replied with a sigh, staring again at the numbers he had scribbled down. For a brief second, he felt
cheated. What had it cost him over the years to answer such calls in the night? He thought ruefully of his wife and their impending divorce, and it struck him that a happy marriage was worth more than several fortunes.

  “Something unusual has come up.”

  “Anyone dead?”

  “No, no one at all. An old woman rang from Washing Bay. Someone broke into her home by forcing the back door.”

  “A burglary?”

  “No. Some clothes and medication were missing but that wasn’t why she was ringing.”

  “She wants us to help her fill out the insurance form?” asked Daly, a note of irritation creeping into his voice. Why had the recruit bothered him with a botched burglary?

  “She was on the verge of being hysterical. I tried to calm her down. She claimed the burglars kidnapped her elderly brother. A man called David Hughes.”

  Daly paused. “What? Did they leave a ransom note?”

  “She didn’t say. But she sounded terrified. Her brother is sick. He has Alzheimer’s. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Any chance he just wandered off while going to the toilet?” asked Daly with exasperation. Unfortunately, they didn’t teach police officers common sense at training college.

  “She claimed he couldn’t have got out on his own.”

  “OK. Tell your colleagues to wait for me outside the cottage. We’ll form a search party. Who knows? Maybe the old man has fallen asleep somewhere. Let’s hope he hasn’t gone too far.”

  Daly pulled on some clothes. His mouth was dry and he felt the beginnings of a headache. He had overdone it with the whiskey, he realized as he searched for his rolled-up socks. A glance at the murky reflection in the window was all he wished to see of his appearance.

  His father’s cottage sat on the southern shore of Lough Neagh. During the winter, the landscape resembled a mini-tundra, filled with migrating arctic geese. The moon had disappeared while he had slept, and he peered blankly through the small window.

  The lough was at its darkest and fullest on these early February mornings. The fields and bog land that ran down to the shore were dark too, impossible to read without the guidance of hedges and lanes, and slashed with bog holes deep enough to sink a man right up to the waist. It was a patchwork of life and death that had to be negotiated carefully, even by the young and healthy. At least the weather had been dry, he thought. He hoped the rivers would hold this winter. Only six months earlier, a rainstorm had flooded the lough shore countryside and stranded him at his father’s wake. The Blackwater River had burst its banks and swamped the lane to the cottage. The parish church, which lay half a mile away, was cut off completely, rising out of the water on a little island of green.

  It was a long wake, even by Irish standards. Through the tiny windows of an upstairs bedroom, the mourners watched the low sky soak up the gloom. When it stopped raining, a strange quietness fell across everything. It wasn’t until the following morning when the sun burst through the clouds that the waters receded.

  The relief felt by the trapped mourners was palpable as the hearse took off down a lane lined with glinting green holly. Daly accompanied his relatives and former neighbors in the snaking cortege. The wet road in front of the hearse shone like the brightest place on earth. Someone cracked a joke about his father’s old car, which had floated out of the yard and ended up in a ruined haystack. Daly remembered how his dad used to rev the guts out of its engine before setting off every morning to Mass.

  He forced his feet into a pair of Wellington boots and climbed into his car. At four a.m., the winter darkness beyond the windscreen was all-embracing, a dead-end in the night. He drove along the lough shore until he reached the Bannfoot and then turned left for the motorway. He glanced in his rearview mirror. Not a car in sight. At the roundabout, he turned the heating down and tried to find a weather report on the radio. A husky-voiced DJ was speaking in Irish and playing tracks of Motown music from the 1960s. Fugitive memories of dancing at parish discos scurried along the fringes of his consciousness.

  He rolled the window down a fraction to clear his head, and headed west. The old man must have wandered off and fallen into a ditch, he thought. It was probably a journey he had made countless times in the past—an easy scramble over the familiar folds of his fields during daylight, and in full control of his faculties.

  He passed a carload of youths. A boy leaned out of the passenger window and made obscene signals at the detective. He was obviously drunk. Daly overtook the car and tried to focus on the task at hand. It would be a small search party, unless they were able to call upon neighbors. He had organized many search parties during his twenty-year career and knew it was common for the missing person’s body to be pulled out of a river or lake several days into the search. He hoped they weren’t too late, or that at least the protective cloak of senility had prevented the old man from experiencing too much terror.

  Daly was surprised by the farmhouse’s remote location. If his relatives had lived there, he would have moved them at the first sign of illness into a neighboring village. His headlights lit up a grass-covered lane that didn’t look as though it had been used too often. A foot-and-mouth sign saying essential visitors only flashed its warning at them. He drove on; the last outbreak had happened more than three years previously.

  3

  Daly swept his car into a yard at the back of the farmhouse. An attempt had been made to cordon off the small fields, but the restless winds and the trampling of hungry animals had opened up gaps in the fencing. In places, the ground had turned into a muddy quagmire.

  It wasn’t difficult to read the signs of infirmity in the untidiness of the yard filled with rusting machinery, the embrace of brambles and weeds throughout the garden, and the fields half lost to thickets of blackthorn. Paint was peeling from the walls and a few tiles had fallen from the roof. It was the same loss of interest and descent into chaos that marked his father’s cottage. The lough-shore countryside was full of decomposing houses like these, tucked away amid the gloom of thorn and elder hedges.

  A mushroomy smell vied with the oversweet scent of rotten damsons as Daly climbed out of his car. He was confronted by a gaunt woman in her sixties, wearing a voluminous dressing robe. Even in the dark with the wind blowing Eliza Hughes’s gray hair across her face, the fear could still be seen shining in her eyes. At first Daly thought she might be deranged, but when she started speaking, her voice was sharp and clear.

  “I’ve checked the outhouses and the fields. There’s no sign anywhere. It’s no use, he’s long gone.”

  She brought Daly into the house and, flourishing a key, unlocked the door into the missing man’s bedroom. It reminded Daly more of an interrogation room than a bedroom, with its bare walls devoid of photos or decoration, the tiny window and the bright shadeless bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. In the center of the room was a bed with security bars and a pressure mat laid out on the floor. On a small dressing table, a candle had burned out with a pile of paper ashes stuffed around the wick. Something about the candle struck him as odd, but he could not quite place what it was.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I put David to bed at the usual time, raised the bars, and switched on the pressure mat. It should have triggered an alarm if he slid out.”

  “And it was switched on?”

  She nodded.

  “Your brother is an ill man?” asked Daly surveying the room.

  “He has dementia. Some days he doesn’t even remember where he is and confuses me with our mother. I’ve asked for more help but you know what social services are like. Anyway, David would never have coped with life in a nursing home.”

  Daly checked the back door and saw that it had been splintered with a crowbar. It was reasonable to conclude that burglars had indeed entered the property. He took Eliza by the arm and sat her at the kitchen table.

  “It appears that your house has been burgled, Miss Hughes. Have you checked your valuables?”

&nb
sp; “There’s nothing of any worth here. All they took was his medication and clothing,” she replied.

  “There is also the possibility that your brother woke up in a confused state and simply walked out after the burglars, whoever they were,” suggested Daly.

  She got up and busied herself making tea. “They’ve taken him away. They’ve been watching us for weeks.”

  “Who?”

  “I have no idea. But there was a storm one night last week. A cow broke loose and went on the rampage, tearing up the back garden and knocking over pots. I chased it back up the field and phoned its owner.”

  She handed Daly a weak cup of tea.

  “While I was up there I found a hole had been cut in the hedge. There were cigarette stubs and footprints in the ground. Ever since then I’ve felt there was someone out in the dark who shouldn’t be there.”

  “Do you have anything of value in the house?”

  “Nothing beyond what’s sentimental. My brother spent his life going to church, tending his farm, and hunting ducks in the winter. He treated his fields as God’s allotment. Work was its own reward.”

  Daly nodded but thought of all the bachelor farmers who had died leaving a small fortune squirreled away in their mattresses.

  “If your brother was taken away against his will, surely he would have made some noise or struggle?”

  She looked at him blankly. “Unless he was unconscious.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might want to do something like this to an old man?”

  “No. David kept on good terms with everyone. Before he took ill.”

  Daly surveyed the sparse bedroom again. Old age had few comforts or pleasant surprises. Perhaps the old man was terrified of illness and death and had done a bunk. Daly thought of all the times he wouldn’t have minded dropping out of his own life, at least for a while.

  He left Eliza in the kitchen and walked out into the darkness. In the low huddle of outhouses, the beam of his torch picked out rusty chunks of machinery, an overturned rowing boat and farming bric-a-brac. A basket of seed potatoes emptied itself of a colony of mice, and the sinister black eyes of what was probably a rat gleamed at him from the shadows. The smell of turpentine lingered in the air. He found nothing that would help in the search for the missing man.