Disappeared Read online

  He watched Donaldson carefully for his reaction. His use of Mrs. Jordan’s first name would have indicated he had already met the woman.

  The chief had been well briefed. “As I understand it, a series of detectives from the branch were assigned to investigate the abduction, but, for one reason or another, they all left. One retired, another moved to a different division, one detective died, and the final one was seriously injured in a bomb explosion. By itself that’s not unusual. There has always been lots of turnover in Special Branch. However, somewhere along the transfers some important files went missing. The Jordan family maintained it was a cover-up, and the press have run with that angle. If they get a whiff of his case being investigated again, they’ll be all over us.”

  “I’ve a question for Special Branch. Don’t you think the Jordan family deserve more justice than they’ve been given?”

  Donaldson was overcome by a fit of coughing, the legacy of a career spent smoking two packs of Benson & Hedges a day. When the fit had settled, he placed his hand across his chest. A look of condescension strutted across his features.

  “Inspector Daly, you’re new to this police force, but I’m sure you’re a competent detective and well intentioned. I’ve been a police officer for more than forty years and I find it hard to renounce the things I have always believed in. One of the things I am certain about is that we won the war, and not the IRA. It was a violent time. I’m not denying that. You must understand that it was Special Branch’s ring of informers and spies that made the IRA realize the pointlessness of the armed struggle. Oliver Jordan was unlike the countless innocents on both sides who lost their lives. He was an IRA man. Never forget that.”

  “Is that meant to absolve Special Branch from any responsibility in bringing his killers to justice? What if Jordan’s killers also murdered Devine because he was about to expose them? If they turn up on my doorstep, am I meant to shelter them too and help them evade justice?”

  “They didn’t do it,” said Donaldson coldly. “All the suspects involved in Jordan’s murder are dead. If they did turn up on your doorstep, Inspector Daly, I’d be very worried indeed.”

  He started the car and indicated to Daly that it was time to leave. “My loyalty is to the peaceful society we created, Inspector. What we achieved wasn’t easy. There were many dark days when officers had to go out on the streets in the afternoon after burying a murdered colleague that morning. Sometimes the rules got lost in translation. It’s a regret, of course….” He trailed off. The tone of his voice, however, suggested something less than bottomless regret.

  “Stay in touch, Daly, and I’ll let you know if anything crops up from Special Branch. And remember, you’re in a very fortunate position. You only need worry about loyalty to your commanding officers.”

  Let me know what? wondered Daly. He doubted if Special Branch was going to help shine any light on the investigation. And what did he mean by loyalty to his commanding officers? Of course, as a policeman he had to obey commands. But wasn’t there a higher authority, another moral code to be obeyed? If a plot to protect a Special Branch spy lay at the heart of the investigation, he would expose it and make sure the scumbags involved in the cover-up would be brought to justice.

  His meeting with Donaldson had been uncomfortable, perplexing even, but oddly, he found himself looking forward to a future encounter with Special Branch. He wondered whether that revealed a capacity for masochism he never realized he had, a desire to pit himself against disproportionate forces when any reasonable person might just walk away.

  Perhaps Tessa Jordan had been right in a sense, and Irish Catholics were hardwired to react with rage to injustice, even when it might bring about their own downfall.

  12

  Five days had passed since Devine’s murder, and the brutal news had been splashed across the front pages of the national and local newspapers. The police meeting scheduled at nine a.m. was their first as a team during the investigation. Daly licked his lips and was surprised at their dryness. He could feel sweat forming on his forehead and wondered if he was coming down with something. He began to speak, hoping that the calm of experience would carry through in his voice, but for some reason it did not. He checked the faces of the other officers to see if they noted the anxiety in his hesitant opening. Irwin looked groggy, while Harland tried to stifle a yawn. O’Neill was busy tapping a pen against her teeth. Daly guessed that for some of his officers the meeting was like dozing in front of a TV screen. It didn’t matter if the sound was faulty, just as long as there was a picture to look at.

  “Let’s look at the search for David Hughes first,” he said before a tickle in his throat developed into a coughing fit.

  The fact that he had led murder investigations countless times before provided no assurance he could do it again. He knew he would have to face the depths of himself once again, and he worried that he had changed. Working long hours on tough cases in Glasgow had forced him to develop a hard-boiled emotional privacy when on the job that was like a bunker in no-man’s-land. Its defenses had been considerably weakened by his separation from Anna, and the last few months spent investigating vandalism and car crime in the rural backwaters of County Armagh.

  “I think our missing man is going to stay missing,” announced Irwin.

  He and Harland had traced the remaining members of the duck-hunting club, but there was no evidence any of them might be sheltering Hughes. They had also checked with hotels, bed and breakfasts, even nursing homes in the area.

  Daly suggested they issue another press release to enlist the public’s help in the search.

  “Is there not a good possibility the poor bugger is dead?” asked Constable Harland.

  “Somehow, I doubt it,” replied Daly. “I believe he’s staying with a friend of sorts. At least we can be fairly sure he hasn’t been kidnapped. Or being held against his will.”

  “If no offense has been committed and he left of his own free will, why are we getting involved? Is it our business if a man wants to take himself off and get his head showered for a while?”

  “The circumstances of his disappearance are still suspicious enough to warrant our interest,” said Daly. “Never mind the fact that a confused old man is at large, probably armed with an untrustworthy hunting gun.”

  They moved on to the murder enquiry.

  “We’re going to have to dig deeper into Devine’s life,” said Daly.

  The team decided to move on two fronts. Daly would make a start on reinvestigating the circumstances of Oliver Jordan’s abduction while Irwin and Harland would examine the cases Devine had worked on while employed by O’Hare solicitors.

  Before the meeting broke up, Daly handed Irwin the remnants of the newspaper clippings he had found in the hedge at Hughes’s cottage.

  “You should show these to Devine’s former colleagues. I believe they might have a connection with his past, and possibly his murder, too.”

  When he returned home, the scolding cluck of a flock of hens greeted him. They were a brood of leghorns, which his father had kept for company and the odd egg. He had forgotten to feed them that morning, and they sounded angry. They fluttered into the air as he walked up to the front door, their feathers wild and wet from the hedgerows. Black clouds had gathered in the sky and large drops of rain fell on his head. He paid no heed to the birds and plunged into the damp darkness of the cottage.

  The wheel of detective work had begun to bear him away from the confines of his father’s cottage, and he wondered if it was time to clear out the house, put the place up for sale, and free himself of its burden. The impatient cries of the fowl echoed with the voices inside him, equally plaintive and imperative—Oliver Jordan and Joseph Devine seeking deliverance from beyond their graves, and David Hughes, confused and frightened, gathered up in a net of secret memories.

  He made himself something to eat. Then he lit a turf fire, and sat down, idly flicking through a manual on chicken rearing he lifted from a pile of old farmi
ng journals.

  He woke with a start a few hours later. He found himself sitting slumped over the gray grate like a man waiting for his lover to turn up for dinner. The fire had gone out, and he could feel the thin threads of cold creeping through chinks in the window frames. The clock on the mantelpiece showed almost midnight. He knew from experience this was not the place or time to get drunk, and he resisted the temptation to switch on the radio to catch the late news bulletin. Newsreaders were too obsessed with crime, doling out the accounts of random violence to their audience like bedside stories. He craved a cigarette and wondered if he would sleep tonight.

  The ashes settled into the grate. Crows creaked from the chimney top. He detected a ghostly whisper in the air—the sound of his father reciting the intricate prayers that were his nightly routine. Even after six months, he still expected to see his father sitting beside him by the fire, wreathed in pipe smoke. Soon the ashes of the turf the old man had dug last spring would be swept up and scattered among the potato ridges. He shivered in the armchair. There was the past, and there was sleep, but in neither could his mind find rest.

  He put on his overcoat and picked up the car keys. In spite of the weight of tiredness tugging at him, he decided to return to the station and examine Devine’s files.

  Outside, the moon was shining. The feathery weight of the frost burdened the trees and crumpled the thick grass in the front garden. The sound of the lawn crunching underfoot was more tangible than the memories in his head. The soft wing-beat of a bird, probably an owl wheeling for prey, circled in the branches above. Living in Glasgow, night was a time to lock the doors and huddle inside, but out here, in the deep Armagh countryside, it was hard to imagine evil or peril simmering in the dark. Unless, of course, you listened to the honeyed voices of the newsreaders.

  The hens were roosting in their coop. Before he locked them up for the night, he threw them some chicken meal. They gawked and scratched about, looking dirty and down-at-heel, their clucking hoarse and timid. The countryside was full of foxes and the night air probably carried the whiff of danger. Daly hoped the coop was secure. He didn’t want to wake up some morning to a bloodbath.

  He got into the car and drove along the lough shore through Clonmakate and Maghery. A lone taxi sat by a forest plantation at the Birches, its engine ticking over. He crawled along country roads. The shapes of trees shining in the frost were like the nerves and arteries of a dissected corpse. On a whim he turned south at the motorway roundabout and made his way to Portadown and the house of Tessa Jordan.

  At Dalriada Terrace, he could see behind the curtained windows the ghostly blue margins of TV screens, but at number 14, the lights were yellow and orange. The Jordans must be the sole watchers of another channel, he thought. He got out and looked up and down the street. Bulky toys still lay abandoned in the front gardens. There was no sign of the patrol car he had requested. He felt a twinge of annoyance. A door opened somewhere, and a harsh voice greeted the arrival home of a drunk. The street felt like a dingy holiday resort inhabited by the inmates of a concentration camp.

  He was just about to get back into his car when he noticed the yellow and orange colors intensify in the Jordans’ front room. Then he heard a boom and the crash of glass breaking. He felt the heat before he saw the flames escape from the broken window. Very quickly, they engulfed the entire front of the house. He crouched against the garden fence, feeling a heavy blanket of heat roll over him. He tried to move but felt pinned down. The sounds of wood splintering and glass breaking erupted from within the building. He listened intently to the trapped sounds of the fire, hoping to detect a human shout or cry, but heard none.

  Fumbling for his phone, he tried to ring the fire brigade.

  It felt as though the heat had hurled his voice to the back of his throat. He struggled to give directions to the operator. Above the spitting sounds of the blaze, he could barely hear the woman’s voice.

  Fearing he had wasted too much time already, he ran toward the door. More by luck than brute strength, he managed to break it down, stumbling into the smoke-filled darkness of the hall. He hung back at first, like a timid bather, listening for any sounds that might lead him to Tessa and her son. The house seemed empty of human life. The flames had taken hold of the living room, the furniture, and the walls. A jagged light lit up the staircase. He shouted out Tessa’s name against the condensed roar of the fire, but got no reply. It was like confronting a trapped violence, the compacted heat forcing him backward.

  He took a running leap up the stairs. The flames had yet to reach the first floor, but the smoke was rising up the stairs in black plumes. He could hear a thick sigh as it spread along the landing floor.

  He burst into a bedroom, shouting, “Get up! Get up!” But the beds within were empty. He checked the smoke alarm on the landing ceiling and saw the battery had been ripped out. Holding his breath, he groped toward the main bedroom and rolled himself through the door.

  Someone was lying on the double bed. Daly shouted, but the body remained lifeless. He fumbled his way toward it. The body was a solid, unmoving mass. For a moment, he feared Tessa Jordan had suffocated in her sleep.

  Then he realized it was only a set of pillows. His head was pounding and he could barely breathe. The stairs behind him were no longer intact, so he took a chair and broke the windowpane. In the garden below, a woman and a boy, huddling together, stared up at him in surprise. They watched as he lowered himself onto the outside ledge, slipped on the crumbling plaster, and pitched backward toward the ground.

  His arm was in pain when he awoke. Tessa Jordan leaned over him.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Is that you, Inspector Daly?”

  He tried to turn to one side. “I’m the one meant to be rescuing you. What happened?”

  “A group of men dressed in black come to the front door with a can of petrol. Dermot raised the alarm. We had to leg it out of the house and hide in the garden.”

  Daly could make out the boy’s anxious face in the light of the fire.

  He sat up and gasped with the ache in his shoulder.

  “You’re injured,” said Tessa. “The ambulance will be here soon.”

  “I don’t need any help,” he said, picking himself up.

  “That’s the second time you’ve appeared as soon as I rang for help.”

  “Bloody telepathy.” He winced. “I’ll have to do something about that.”

  Within minutes, the lights of the ambulance and fire brigade were bathing the street in a reassuring blue. The fire roared with a sickening glee as the firefighters fought to control it.

  A paramedic rushed toward Daly, but he brushed him away.

  He walked on, and a group of firefighters surrounded him like members of an opposing football team.

  “I thought you were a detective, not a bloody firefighter,” said Martin O’Hanlon, the chief fire officer. He looked Daly up and down, taking in his scorched clothes.

  “I was answering a call nearby and saw the fire start,” said Daly vaguely.

  He wanted to ask O’Hanlon an important question. A detail inside the house had struck him as unusual, but the force of the fall had dislodged it from his memory.

  “The fire started in the living room,” Daly told him. “I could smell petrol. The family has been attacked before. We’ll have to put a patrol car down here every night.”

  “You won’t need to,” said O’Hanlon. “The house is ruined. They won’t be staying here for a while.”

  “Of course,” said Daly.

  “There’s no need for you to stay here. You look as if you should go home.”

  For a family burnt out of their home, the Jordans looked remarkably relaxed. Daly found them tucked in the shadow of the fire engine, sheltering from the cold. Tessa gave Daly a look as though she were personally responsible for his grim appearance.

  “How’s the investigation going?” she asked.

  “It’s n
ot going anywhere.”

  “Too busy trying to save people from fires, I suppose.” There was a hint of a smile on her pale face.

  She shivered slightly as he put his jacket around her shoulders. From his brief contact, she felt like a woman who had escaped the clutches of an icy river rather than a blazing fire.

  “No one ever makes progress,” she said. “That’s the nature of Oliver’s case. You’ll never hunt down clues that have vanished off the face of the earth. Just as you’ll never be able to charge people who are protected by the state. Every Catholic knows that.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  “We never had an armed struggle. The whole thing was a horrible game run by secret agents and psychopaths.”

  Even though his shoulder hurt and his clothes smelled of smoke, Daly tried to maintain a professional air.

  “What are you going to do tonight? Is there anywhere you can stay?”

  “My sister lives out in the country. We can stay in a caravan she has on the farm.”

  “I’ll give you a lift, if you like?”

  Under his jacket, she was wearing a dark green dressing robe. The fabric parted as she slipped into the backseat of the car. The pale skin of her thighs was dappled with the light of the emergency services. The movement of her legs ignited a subtler fire within him.

  Dermot got into the front of the car, his mouth set in a frown, his hands clenched in his lap.

  As he drove, Daly began to feel revitalized. Not exactly happy, but the blaze had fueled his sense of determination. He also felt he had earned the right to ask Tessa more questions about Oliver’s disappearance.

  “Has it ever occurred to you the arson attacks might be linked to your campaign to find Oliver’s body?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Why should I think that?”

  She stared into his rearview mirror with evident unease. He thought it was strange she should deny a link between the intimidation and her fight for justice. Surely she must suspect somebody out there had something to hide and might go to any lengths to avoid detection.