Disappeared (32 page)

“Joseph Devine and then Owen Sweeney, both dead. What’s bad is that I pushed Devine when he didn’t want to carry on. He begged me to let him go. He wanted a green card, and a new life in the US. But I kept jerking him into the air. Like a puppet. I kept him walking and talking the way I wanted. I told him he could never leave. His only way out was to tie a stone around his neck and throw himself into the lough.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said Dermot, appearing at Daly’s side.

“I can’t ignore what’s in my heart. Your friend here and the ghosts need to hear this. I went to your father’s memorial service all those years ago, and I watched your mother cry. Now I feel her weeping inside me. It’s as if she’s wringing out my soul.”

He caught Dermot by the arm. “Tell the ghost I didn’t mean to do all those things. They were just orders I was obeying.”

“Tell who?”

“The ghost that’s come to sniff out its killers.”

“There are no ghosts,” said Daly. “It was Devine impersonating dead people all along.”

Hughes’s eyes grew terrified. “Devine? Has he come back too?”

The old man looked at Daly. “Do you know what’s going on? What secrets are you hiding?”

There was a soft cough in the darkness behind them, like a cork popping out of a bottle.

Then the flare of a match as someone lit a cigarette.

“Excuse me, but I couldn’t stay quiet for much longer,” said Grimes, striding toward them, the cigarette blazing and the steel muzzle of a gun gleaming in his outstretched hand. “Though I have been very discreet up until now.”

He studied Dermot’s frightened face. “I respect your resourcefulness, but it’s the end of the road for you now, young man. You’ve run out of options.”

Daly tried to appraise the situation as quickly as possible.

“Whoever it is you’re trying to protect, they’re safe,” he said. “No one’s interested in unraveling Hughes’s network of spies. The boy just wanted to find out where his dad’s body was buried. There’s no reason to do away with any of us. Nothing to be gained, a lot to lose.”

Grimes appeared to listen. He blinked at Daly. He looked down at the old man for a while, weighing up his silence and confusion, the loneliness that was plain to see in his gaunt features.

“I’m taking on board what you’re saying,” he replied. “But you see, I’ve been made an offer. An opportunity to make some really big money. Plus I’ve a gilt-edged reputation as a reliable hit man. Letting you lot go would do it serious harm. Now, tell me why should I risk that?”

Daly searched for an answer and found it. The answer was he shouldn’t. Of course not. All three of them were expendable. All three of them were tarnished in some respect, and discredited. The teenage arsonist, the senile spy handler who talked to ghosts, and the police detective with the flawed judgment and misplaced loyalties. Had he only known it, Dermot had done Grimes and whoever was paying him a favor by entangling Daly in the trap. There’d be no one left to question the circumstances of their deaths. No one else in the police force pointed in the right direction. It was an overwhelmingly persuasive argument from Grimes’s viewpoint.

“How well do you know the people you’re working for?” asked Daly. “Can you trust them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you really think you’re going to be able to grab your money, take off, and disappear? Have you not thought of what arrangements they might have made behind your back?”

“You’re trying to distract me from my mission. Maybe even buy yourself some more time. It’s to be expected. I’d do the same in your circumstances.”

Daly persisted, hoping to press home his advantage. “You’re doing all their dirty work for them. What’s to stop them from eliminating you, too? Look at it from their perspective. It’s the only way to ensure the truth will never come out.”

“I’m getting tired of this silly conversation,” said Grimes, a forced smile playing on his lips. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve made my own contingency plans. I treat all my employers with the utmost suspicion.”

“I hope you’re relying on something more than their goodwill. Just think about it. Three unexplained murders are going to raise a lot of questions. People will want a scapegoat, someone to blame.”

“I can give you some reassurance that won’t happen. Unfortunately, it might not be to your liking.” He paused to take another drag of the cigarette and fill his lungs with pleasure. “This gun I’m holding is a Glock 19. There’s nothing special about it. It’s as good a killing device as any other gun. Except that it’s registered in the name of David Hughes. For his personal protection.”

Daly went cold.

“I’m keeping to my agreement. I’ve told you that already. Do you still have any reason to doubt that?” He smiled at Daly, coaxing him to join in his good humor. It looked like checkmate.

Daly realized he had just one remaining chance to save the three of them. And he needed to take it while he still had strength.

Grimes lined the three of them up and made them walk down toward the lough. They gave little resistance as he started tying them up, first Hughes and then Dermot. Grimes had no reason to be impatient. He took his time, making sure the knots were strong. It was a misconception that fear made people unpredictable, he thought. On the contrary, it was like a numbing drug. Fear made its victims very boring.

Finally, it was Daly’s turn. Grimes pushed him to his knees and leaned over him with the rope. Daly raised his hands upward and then at the last moment let them drop.

“Lift them up!” barked Grimes.

Daly leaned back into a squatting position and raised his hands slightly, luring Grimes closer.

“Sit up.”

Grimes paused but Daly refused to budge. Cursing, he swung his boot at the detective’s ribs. Daly dodged the blow and waited until the arc of Grimes’s kick flew into thin air, then rammed his body into the hit man’s standing knee. Grimes saw it coming and tried to cling on to Daly’s propelled body, but his leg buckled from underneath. The hand carrying the rope fumbled in the darkness for a grip before he fell back with a heavy thud.

Daly wondered if he should take another swing at Grimes, for good measure, but he feared his physical strength might not be enough. Instead, he flew forward. Keeping his head low, he scurried for cover. Soon he was running into the darkness of a hedge, a hail of thorns pricking his face and hands.

He scrambled along the roots of the hedge, feeling as though he had spent the entire month in the shadow of thorn trees. Running up and down, doing little more than beating the hard winter ground harder. Grimes’s flashlight tracked back and forth behind him.

“If you don’t come back, I’ll shoot the boy,” warned Grimes.

Daly lost time pausing to get his whereabouts, searching for the gap in the hedge that had been sawn down months ago. The hole through which the ghosts and Hughes’s dark wind had blown all winter. A crashing sound alerted him to Grimes’s approaching presence. He flung himself deeper into the hedge, fearing each moment was going to be his last. He crawled along the muddy track of a ditch. Even if he managed to escape, Grimes would undoubtedly go back and shoot the old man and the boy. Running away was pointless. Instead, he had to find another way out, one that would include the rescue of his companions. The moon came out and an owl hooted nearby. He was close to the gap in the hedge and its uninterrupted view of the cottage’s back door. Somewhere in the wizened branches above him lurked the hidden eye that had tracked Hughes’s movements through the winter.

He fumbled through the earth and wet leaves until he found it—a heavy metal object buried like a log in the hedge bank. He pulled at it and a cable sprang out of the earth. He had located the battery pack and lead for the surveillance camera that he’d guessed had been concealed somewhere in the branches above. The device had probably been operating for months, Daly reasoned. It had been monitored by Special Branch, who alerted Devine via the pager whenever Hughes had wandered from the house.

It was easy to disconnect the lead from the battery pack. He watched as a warning light flashed silently on the pack. Eyes on target no longer.

The wind picked up, sending the branches slashing sideways. The scent of the ditch’s leafy dregs rose from the disturbed earth, filling Daly’s nostrils. A pang of doubt and anxiety overcame him. Perhaps all he had done was ensure that his final moments at the hands of a bloody assassin would never be recorded. He turned and walked back toward the torchlight with his hands raised in the air.

When Grimes had tied Daly securely, he dragged him back to where the old man and the boy were kneeling. Only Hughes struggled now, twisting and turning his body in an attempt to loosen the ropes, knocking shoulders with Dermot, grumbling in desperation. His confusion no longer seemed irrational or berserk, but necessary in a blind, stubborn way. Perhaps it was this refusal to give in that had helped him stagger through the unwinding events of the past few weeks. The boy was kneeling beside Hughes, his head bent, like the prow of a boat cleaving through the wake of madness stirred up by the old man. It seemed to take all his effort not to fall forward.

Daly felt as though he did not quite belong to this final scene. The old man and the boy might be father and son, their huddled silhouettes merging together in the moonlight. Daly knelt on his own, waiting for the darkness to be punctured by the rip of gunfire.

“It was you that murdered Devine,” said Daly, still playing for time.

“Please,” said Grimes. “Murder is not a kind enough word. I eliminated an individual who betrayed countless victims and thought he had evaded all his enemies.”

“He left a message behind. In a newspaper obituary.”

“And what good did that do him?”

The patience of Grimes’s wait, the mildness of his movements as he took the final drags of his cigarette seemed unbearable to Daly. The way in which Grimes was dragging out their execution was the mark of a man who took pleasure in never hurrying.

Hughes’s breath rose and fell like the bellow of a bull about to die: sharp, and hoarse, and then sharp again. The old man had given up his struggle. He was exhausted.

But when the shots went off, they sounded farther away and higher up than Daly expected. From behind them, there was the sound of a rotten branch being kicked. He turned around and saw Grimes’s body fall to the ground, his spine crumpled by a series of high-caliber bullets. Daly crouched against the ground and closed his eyes.

When he looked up again, he saw two soldiers with night-vision goggles breathing heavily and staring at him, semiautomatic guns nestled in their arms. Another two soldiers were helping Hughes and Dermot to their feet.

One of them introduced himself to Daly as Captain Shane Kerr, the head of an SAS unit that had been dug in at an abandoned cottage nearby. Their mission had been to pick up Hughes if he ever returned to the house. They had been monitoring the camera and its view of the cottage when the alarm went off, alerting them to the fact that someone had tampered with the equipment.

“What took you so long?” asked Daly angrily. Even though it was cold, his clothes, covered in mud and leaves, were soaked in sweat.

“We didn’t want a general slaughter on our hands. You should be grateful we got close enough to hit our target. Before he hit his.”

Twenty minutes later Inspector Fealty arrived, along with an ambulance.

“I was beginning to think we would never find our assassin,” he said, inspecting Grimes’s body.

The Special Branch man’s face was gravely pale and weary. He lifted his eyes toward the thorn trees, where the surveillance camera was hidden.

“If you’ve damaged the camera, Daly, we’ll be sending you a hefty bill.”

“Don’t worry. I just switched off the power. I assume it was recording all the time. Even on the night Hughes disappeared.”

Fealty nodded solemnly. “That’s correct. Think of it as our baby monitor. Special Branch always likes to know exactly what’s going on.”

“So you knew the old man had escaped, even before the police arrived.”

“Even better. We helped him get away. Ripped the back door open and frightened him out of his wits.”

Daly gave him a look of surprise.

“It was a calculated risk we took. The old man could have wandered off at any point. At Special Branch, we don’t like losing control of a situation. The decision was made that Hughes needed inpatient care. He was a liability in that cottage. So we planned his escape. It was the only way we could convince Eliza her brother was no longer safe in her care. We figured that separating them for a night or two would have shocked her into agreement.”

“But Hughes managed to shake you off. Noel Bingham was hardly up to the task of keeping track of him.”

Fealty looked pained. “In spite of his drink problem Bingham was loyal. A man to be trusted. But he let Hughes slip through his fingers. Also, we hadn’t counted on the old man befriending Dermot Jordan.”

“You’ve made my police team look like fools,” said Daly bitterly. “You should have disclosed the truth to us at the start.”

“You’ve nothing to regret. Hughes has turned up, along with Devine’s killer. The case is successfully closed.”

“We’ve still Noel Bingham’s murder to investigate.”

“Like I told you earlier. Bingham’s death was a nasty accident. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s your problem, Daly, you think too much.”

“Unlike you desk men at Special Branch.”

“That’s right,” said Fealty with a sudden smile. Success and adrenaline had made him overconfident. “Thinking too much can be bloody dangerous.”

“So who hired Grimes to kill Devine?”

Fealty shrugged his shoulders. “Dissident Republicans? Who knows. The success of our operation was measured according to whether or not we found the man who killed Devine. The media needs the identity of a killer, and so does the public. The rest is speculation. That’s the official line, anyway.”

“What are you afraid of? Upsetting the people who ordered Devine’s death?” Daly suspected that someone in a powerful position was being protected.

“Don’t try and complicate things, Inspector,” warned Fealty.