Disappeared (19 page)

Daly postponed the coffee he needed to jolt his brain into action, and drove out immediately to the scene. He found Irwin standing with the police photographer. The detective was nonchalantly chewing gum, evidently undisturbed by the sight that lay before him. In the field nearby, newborn lambs were bleating their woes and jumping about, as though their hooves were entangled in the roadside annihilation.

Irwin took in Daly’s disheveled state. “Inspector, what a pleasant surprise.”

“Really?” Daly blinked.

“Of course. Usually I’m taking orders from you. But not today. Special Branch is handling this case. It must be quiet down at Derrylee this morning for you to rush out here.”

“Why is Special Branch so interested in a hit-and-run?”

Irwin turned to the body on the road.

“Because he’s one of ours. An alcoholic. Retired, of course. The front bonnet of the vehicle must have come as a nasty surprise. He still had a cigarette butt in his mouth. Clenched between his teeth. A smoker to the end.”

The body of former Special Branch RUC officer Noel Bingham lay spread-eagled on the road like that of a wild animal caught in full flight. His head was set at a contradictory angle to the rest of his body, his bulging eyeballs twisting out of their sockets. His final moments might have been spent trying to outstare an approaching predator, thought Daly. A trail of blood, thin as a rat’s tail, stretched from the back of his head.

Daly looked closely and saw the cigarette butt wedged in the dead man’s mouth, the teeth locked like a trap against the cold of the morning.

“At least he avoided a hangover,” said Irwin, flashing a look back at Daly. “A passing taxi driver identified him. Apparently, he spent the evening getting drunk at the Four in Hand, his usual haunt. He was making his way home and trying to flag down a lift when someone forgot to stop. On another night he might have been lucky enough to stumble into a ditch and sleep it off.”

“Makes your report nice and neat then,” muttered Daly.

Irwin nodded. “No one’s touched the body yet. Forensics will compile a report and see if we can find any scraps of evidence that might identify the vehicle. We’ll give out a press release asking the public for eyewitnesses. Other than that, the case is more or less wrapped up.”

Daly surveyed the roadside for a moment, thinking how Irwin’s early arrival at the scene had affected the investigation. For a start, he would have wanted to cross-examine anybody who had seen Bingham along the road. He had a string of questions lined up like an ammunition belt. Surely someone had seen the vehicle that knocked him over. And if they hadn’t, that would tell him something too. Unfortunately, it was too late. Irwin had let them go without taking their contact details.

The forensic examiner arrived. It was not Butler but a locum called Carberry—a pale, plump man, with a shirt collar too tight for his neck, and a face that lacked confidence and authority. He introduced himself with a sweaty hand. In comparison to the nervous Carberry, Daly suddenly felt clearheaded, coordinated, invincible.

“How long are you going to take?” he asked a little brutally.

Carberry put down his case. “I can’t tell you right now. You must know that.”

Irwin smirked. Carberry looked from him to Daly and back again as if the two detectives were ganging up against him. For a moment, they had.

The examiner’s unease spread from his eyes like a stain. He nodded quickly and bent down to the body. His hands shook slightly as he lifted out his instruments. Irwin grew bored, stuck another stick of gum in his mouth, and strolled away.

As Daly waited, a dazed-looking farmer appeared in the field of sheep and lambs. He was carrying a bale of hay, his face a blank as he tried to fit the sight of the police officers, the white tape, and the dead body into his usual morning routine. Frozen breath hung above his mouth. Daly watched as a look of slow realization dawned on his ruddy features.

Carberry removed the dead man’s jacket, letting a wallet slip and splay its contents onto the road. Something caught Daly’s attention. He bent forward with an evidence bag and closed it around the item.

Carberry watched him out of the corner of his eye.

“An old RUC ID card,” he remarked, “they’ll be collectors’ items soon.”

Later, in the privacy of his office, Daly examined the card with a magnifying glass. The smudged mark at the top of the photo was indeed a bloody finger mark, as he had first thought. Unfortunately, it was smooth and featureless, most probably the imprint of a gloved hand. As such, it raised a series of questions. Why had someone with bloody gloves bothered to check the victim’s identity? It was hardly the natural reaction of a hit-and-run driver. A disappearing act was what interested them, rather than the name of their victim. Bingham’s accidental death suddenly took on a sinister possibility.

Daly realized he needed a chronology of Bingham’s last days, right from the morning he had given a lift to David Hughes to the moment he inhaled his last drag of nicotine. He wanted to know everyone the former RUC man had spoken to. If necessary he would take his photo and call at the Four in Hand and every other pub in the area.

He bumped into Irwin as he was leaving the building.

“Still not settled into your new headquarters?” asked Daly.

“Just wanted to see how the builders were getting on. You’re in the thick of a lot of rubble and dust here. Reminds me of a bomb site.” He grinned at Daly. “Just like the old days, eh?”

“I’d like to see the report on the hit-and-run before you send it to Donaldson.”

Color suddenly flared in Irwin’s cheeks. “Are you taking over this investigation, or are you just being nosy?”

“I talked to Noel Bingham two days ago about Hughes’s disappearance. Let’s just say his sudden death has aroused my curiosity.”

“That’s very vigilant of you.”

“Just doing my job,” said Daly with emphasis. “I want my own version of how he met his death.”

“Your suspicious mind at work again? Let me drop you a hint about how Bingham was killed. The fatal combination of too much alcohol, a dark roadside, and the internal combustion engine.”

When Irwin left, Daly felt the effect of their conversation buoy his mood. He spent the rest of the day trying to trace Bingham’s movements in the hours before his death. It seemed, however, that Bingham had been overlooked by all, ignored like the relic from the past he had become. Drinkers in the Four in Hand had other things preying on their minds, and Bingham had streamed through their midst like an invisible shadow. Until the front bumper of a vehicle speeding into the night gave him a one-way ticket to join his dead companions. By the end of the day, Daly was no closer to determining whether the hit-and-run had been deliberate.

As Daly approached his father’s cottage that evening, a row of double-parked cars blocked the road. He slammed on the brakes. Two marshals in fluorescent jackets were directing traffic in and out of Brendan Sweeney’s house, the father of the Republican politician Owen Sweeney. The old man had once been a friend of his father’s, and had been seriously ill for several months. Daly assumed that he had died and the crowds were mourners descending upon his wake. He reversed and made his way back around the lough shore. It was getting late, and he was hungry. Tattered rainclouds made the twilight sky look punctured with holes. He made slow progress in an anticlockwise direction, inching along narrow, barely remembered roads, reversing out of dead ends, losing a mudguard against an upended telephone post. He passed huddles of derelict cottages among stony knolls, and small fields that were little more than nests of nettles and briars. Spatters of rain gleamed on his windscreen with the last surge of evening light. Eventually the roads arranged themselves into a more familiar pattern and he found himself back at Sweeney’s lane, caught in the traffic, his wheels slithering in the mud. There was no question of getting home for several hours at least. The rain was falling heavily and the marshals had run for cover.

T
here were clean sheets on the bed in the room with pale green wall­paper­. A low window framed with lace curtains looked out into the heart of a rainstorm, its heavy clouds pulsing over a vague terrain­ of murky bog and thorny fields. Somehow, the single pane of glass kept the ramming wind and cavorting raindrops at bay. It was a neat, homely room, a room that Daly would have relaxed in with great comfort­ had it not been for the two men dressed in paramilitary uniforms­ standing to attention beside an open coffin.

Daly did not know if the IRA men, whose faces were hidden behind sunglasses and low black berets, knew he was a detective, but they saluted him as he entered the room like any other mourner come to pay his respects. Something about their leather-gloved hands and pistol-bearing holsters told him their presence was more than the usual military sideshow that accompanied the funerals of Republican sympathizers.

Equally serious was the group of old women sitting on the white-sheeted bed, reciting the rosary, their faces a set of masks too—wrinkled, absorbed, pious. Daly felt the room vibrate with their deep concentration.

The women made some space for him, moving by intuition, without breaking the stream of their prayers. Their fingers slaved over black, clicking rosary beads, stacking up the Hail Marys and Our Fathers. He sat among them and briefly closed his eyes, his mind letting the detail of their words blur and slip out of hearing, their voices a variation of the voices that had filled his childhood. As a boy, he had been enraptured by the fervent sounds of the rosary and in private moments lately, he found himself drawn nostalgically back like a recovering patient to the whiff of hospital anesthetic.

There was a pause in the prayers, and he looked up. Through the window, he saw several sheep trying to wriggle through a southward streaming hedge of blackthorn and crooked gorse. From the downstairs kitchen came the private murmur of conversation and more prayers.

The door opened and several mourners entered the room with bowed heads. A few greeted Daly, but the others ignored him. Their voices were low, preoccupied. Oddly, he had yet to detect the slow outpouring of grief that normally filled the air at an Irish wake. People passed one another in the corridor outside the room, their conversations hushed and inhibited.

As if possessing one throat, the old women started praying again, their devout voices trickling through another set of sorrowful mysteries. Daly felt one of the IRA men eyeball him and flex his muscles, inviting him to follow the ripple of his waist down to the heavy black pistol sitting in its holster. If this were a church, Daly thought, all the statues of the Virgin Mary would have fainted to the floor.

The IRA men performed a salute and moved to the side to allow the new batch of mourners a glimpse of the coffin. Daly’s eyes were drawn to the gnarled face of the dead man lying there, gaping out of a creamy white shroud. For a moment, he felt the room dissolve into a series of shifting masks, the anonymous faces of the IRA men merging with those of the old women, and the frozen features of the dead man. The click of the rosary beads combined with the snap of the paramilitaries’ heels as more mourners crowded into the room and pressed against the walls. Religion and violence all mixed up, like mixing drinks, thought Daly, dangerous and intoxicating.

Brendan Sweeney was survived by his son, but the feted politician was nowhere to be seen. Although Brendan had been a friend and neighbor of Daly’s father, the two men had not spoken to each other since Daly was a boy.

The old man looked smaller than he remembered. Irrationally, Daly had been expecting the corpse to look the same as the living man, but the vigorous, full-blooded farmer of his memories had shrunk, the features of his face contracting inward to a miniature waxwork of the man who would have given his life for a united Ireland.

“Time to leave,” said one of the IRA men, putting his hand roughly on Daly’s shoulder.

“I’m still saying my prayers,” said Daly, looking up in surprise.

“Save them for yourself.” The IRA man refused to move.

Daly sidled by and crept downstairs into the living room, which was filled with people chatting in small groups. He tried to plan an escape route to slink through the crowd, but the IRA man had followed him downstairs and was blocking the only exit. Instead, he sat down and stared at the empty TV screen—anything to avert his gaze from the curious glances he was attracting.

The woman next to him turned around and smiled, revealing a nicotine-stained set of teeth. His confidence returned and the feeling of crossing a dangerous frontier receded.

He had only been sitting a moment or two when the atmosphere in the room suddenly changed. Somehow, he had missed the word or glance that had interrupted the muttering conversation and brought the room to silence.

“Why is no one talking about Brendan?” asked a mourner who had taken center stage. People looked at one another balefully, as if appalled at their failure to rekindle the memory of the dead man.

The silence in the room grew heavier.

“What difference will it make? He’s past caring now,” the man added.

A man on the other side of Daly stood up and addressed the room.

“I’m a mechanic. I fixed Mr. Sweeney’s cars for years. He was very fond of German motors, Audis and BMWs.”

The mechanic had several teeth missing and such a strong country accent that some people in the room had trouble understanding him.

“A while back I was hit by a big legal claim. It was enough to put me out of business.”

He flashed a gap-toothed smile.

“I needed thirty thousand pounds but couldn’t get access to that sort of money anywhere. When I told Brendan about it, he said he would be happy to lend me the cash. Without hesitating, he wrote me a check for the entire amount.”

When the mechanic had finished, a woman stood up.

“I’m a neighbor of Brendan’s,” she said. “Without him, we would never have got planning permission. My husband wanted to build a house beside his mother who was sick. She had a large farm to run. Even though we owned the land, we weren’t allowed to build there.