Disappeared (16 page)

Bingham glanced with contempt toward the desk sergeant. His voice turned loud and patriotic, an Orange Order–schooled voice, carrying the booming tone of Lambeg drums. “That’s the problem these days; too many Fenians in the force.” He paused, struggling to shape his next thought. “I’d like to see them lying in a ditch manning a border checkpoint in the bad old days. And for fifty quid a week, too. These young officers are so smug. Look at them. Does it ever cross their minds that police officers once had to pay the ultimate price for this country? For Christ’s sake, they don’t even take the Queen’s Oath anymore.”

Daly checked his patience. Bingham was a wall he had to batter against because he still suspected there was something there, something that might be of importance to the investigation.

“Have you seen David Hughes recently?”

“I picked him up on Saturday morning on the Derryinver Road.” Bingham stuck out his chin defensively. “He was walking towards the motorway. He was like someone who had escaped from a nursing home. I didn’t ask him where he was going. I just made sure he got in. I told him I’d give him a ride back to his house, where Eliza would make him a good cup of tea. He seemed confused and frightened.”

“Did he tell you where he was heading?”

“I should have found that out.” Bingham sounded repentant. “He told me he wanted to buy a bus ticket, but he didn’t have enough money. I figured he just wanted to get to Armagh or Dungannon.”

“You could be right,” said Daly.

“Maybe.” Bingham’s head swung around in a wary arc. He seemed worried that someone might be listening. “David was frightened. I think I told you that.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“I don’t think he knew himself. I could hardly get a word out of him. Not like the David I knew. But then he had Alzheimer’s, didn’t he?”

Silence was an option he would have chosen himself, thought Daly, if he was stuck in a car with Bingham. He had stopped thinking of Hughes as a man with an illness. Not many Alzheimer’s patients were able to leave behind their network of support and survive on their own for several days.

“What happened when he got into the car?”

“I pulled into a garage and told him to wait while I phoned Eliza. I waited and waited, but no one answered. When I got back to the car, David was gone. I drove up and down the road but there was no sign of him. I thought someone else must have given him a lift.”

Bingham’s sunken black eyes fastened onto Daly’s. He looked weakened, frail, as though the effort of recounting the story had drained him.

“Why did it take you so long to contact us?”

Bingham’s tongue moved heavily in his mouth. He licked his lips and his eyes flicked away. He was not quite drunk enough to be completely confessional.

“I don’t read the papers. Seeing David like that was a hard blow. I never thought he would get so ill. In the end he was only trying to escape the past like the rest of us.” He glanced at Daly and then looked away. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do this past week. Fight my own battles.”

His eyes locked onto Daly’s again. Then he waved his hand. “Ah, I’ve wasted enough of your time already. Good luck with your search. I’d like to offer you my services, but then I’m retired from a police force that no longer exists except in graveyards up and down the country.”

Daly wanted to fire a series of questions at him, but Bingham insisted on leaving.

He walked unsteadily out of the station, muttering to himself. His voice was almost inaudible. “All the old fool wanted to know was where the bloody duck decoys were.”

Daly was still coming to terms with what Bingham had told him when Dermot appeared from the waiting room. He showed Daly the card he had been holding.

“When Joseph Devine called at our house he left behind his jacket,” explained Dermot. “My mother kept it, meaning to return it. But then we found out he had been killed. She thought it best to donate the jacket to St. Vincent de Paul. When she went through the pockets she found a card with a detective’s name and address on it. Kenneth Mitchell. She remembered he was one of the detectives at the early stages of the investigation into Dad’s abduction. She wanted to throw the card away, but I held on to it. I suppose I thought it would come in useful at some stage.”

“We’ll make a detective out of you yet,” said Daly, taking the card from him with a grin.

“I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

The card looked to be from an old-fashioned address system. It had Mitchell’s name, address, and even a telephone number. It also mentioned that the detective had been badly maimed in an IRA explosion. Scribbled on the back were the words
Senior Investigating Officer, Oliver Jordan abduction
.

“I wonder where Devine got it,” said Daly. He felt an increased momentum tug at the investigation, a sustaining pull that was leading him in the direction of Jordan’s abduction.

He looked at Dermot, square in the face. For the first time he saw beyond the withdrawn pose of the boy’s profile, the long black hair that hung in two protective wings, the awkward hunch of the head sinking into a set of narrow teenage shoulders. The boy’s hair half-hid a face that was as innocent-looking as a choirboy’s. However, his body was leaning forward with a dangerous intensity, and his eyes burned as though he were welding himself to Daly.

T
he days passed according to plan, and, bit by bit, a picture pieced itself together. David Hughes waited in the house where the wind was always moaning under the eaves. He could come and go as he pleased, but he chose to remain in the room that was as bare as a monk’s cell. He sat on the edge of his bed and recited his prayers, his lips moving slowly like a young child learning to read. Through the window, he watched the other inmates of the house, mostly elderly men and women, wander across the expansive lawns.

Afterward he walked over to the sink and ran himself a glass of cold water. The reflection in the small mirror surprised him. He saw the nose, lips, and beard of a grizzled old man. He looked more than his seventy-odd years. However, it reassured him to see the firmness of his chin had not been forgotten, or the falconlike glare of his gray eyes. His tight mouth and pursed lips still exuded determination.

His face had once struck terror in the hearts of weaker men, the informers he had groomed and slowly brought into the fold. Frightened men caught up in sectarian intrigues with no idea whom to trust. Even now, his flared nostrils and the corners of his mouth registered contempt at the thought of them.

His work for Special Branch had left him with an eternal look of scorn, he realized. He examined the features of his face in concern, as if a mask had grown there like skin and flesh. Would he ever be able to cast it off? The mask was a projection of his own spirit, the persona he had adopted to deal with all those years of terror. He would never be able to wipe away that look of cold contempt.

His hand shook slightly as he brushed back his hair. Over the last twelve months, his illness had tamed him. Infirmity, when it came, was not in the form he had expected. He had always believed he would succumb to a heart attack, or some abrupt physical catastrophe. Not Alzheimer’s disease. Not this long, drawn-out wait, with chaos slowly seeping around him like a poison gas. Even now, sitting in this room, waiting for his visitor, he did not fully understand what was happening.

His mind was like a house that had been repeatedly burgled by a memory thief. It was a brutal and chaotic crime. Some of the most personal objects were gone forever, drawers plundered, furniture upturned and broken, while other valuable items were left strangely intact.

The sparseness of his new accommodation was a comfort. It was reassuring to be surrounded by objects he could identify and understand. The bed and sink, and the mirror above. The bedside cabinet with a well-thumbed Bible, the brown leather file and a radio.

However, a flat, circular object suspended from the wall was causing him some confusion. He knew it had a connection with the arrival of his visitor, a clue lying waiting for him to decipher or calculate. The numbers one to twelve were organized in a circle, and he stared intently at them. He could not figure out why anyone would put numbers in a shape like that, making it so difficult to add or subtract them.

At least the visitor knew what he was doing. He nodded contentedly to himself. He had chosen the right man for the job. His recruitment skills were still sharp in spite of his illness. If it hadn’t been for the visitor, he would be a dead man now. He was sure of that.

Their first meeting had been a happy accident. Out of habit, the old man had not revealed his real name. The visitor might easily have been one of those shadowy men from the past, still bent on revenge. He might even have been a journalist, or a legal researcher, poking his nose where it didn’t belong. However, the visitor had been none of those.

He had told the old man the catastrophe that had befallen his family, a story that, to Hughes’s surprise, prompted tears. They had sat together afterward, sipping tea and watching the sun set over Lough Neagh. They arranged to meet again, and soon it became the norm for them to sit late into the evening, the visitor with a notebook and pen, the old man talking at length. The kind woman who brought them tea joked that he was having his biography written. You must be famous, she remarked.

He turned to the bedside cabinet and lifted the leather file. He opened it carefully and lifted out the thick bundle of handwritten notes and maps. Through the walls, he heard his neighbor begin to snore. He replaced the notes within the file, turned on the radio, and lay back on his bed. The visitor is like me, he thought. He likes everything clear-cut and well planned. If only his mind was as good as when he handled his circle of informers. This illness has betrayed me, he thought with bitterness. His impatience intensified, rose up, and enveloped the whole room—the dark walls, the sink and mirror, the strange object on the wall, and all the other accouterments of his carefully organized surroundings.

At the appointed time of four p.m., the visitor opened the door and entered the room. The old man had tried to resist sleep, fearing that his dreams would force their way out and fill the room like a fog. However, in the end he had succumbed, lying on his back, his arms loosely folded across his chest, a deep rasping breath dragging his rib cage up and down.

The visitor stood for a while in the middle of the room and listened carefully. A thin rain fell outside with occasional drops pecking the window.

The visitor said nothing and waited, not wishing to break the impression that the old man and all his secret knowledge lay within his power. He had gotten over the instinctive recoil he felt on first learning of the old man’s past, the shock at each spilled reminiscence that was like a jab in the guts.

As the old man had rambled on during their first meeting, the visitor realized he might know the answers to questions that had haunted him for years. He had almost given up hope of finding an explanation for the tragedy that had darkened his life. The Troubles were over, and the truth was being whitewashed by politicians. That was the horror of the cease-fire, that your perceptions could be so blurred you no longer recognized the terrorist. The threads of causality linking paramilitaries with their atrocities had been broken. Three decades of bombs and shootings now drifted away from the rational ordering of things like terrible acts of a vengeful God, with murderer after murderer floating free from their crimes. What was required to bring them together again was the simple act of recollection.

However, Alzheimer’s had clogged up the old man’s memories with obvious inaccuracies and meaningless references to his childhood. The story’s traces had been scattered by the illness. But now the visitor was determined to pick them up one by one.

The rain fell heavier against the windowpane, blurring the view, numbing the mood in the unlit room. Everything will go as planned, the visitor reassured himself. Before the old man’s memories poured irretrievably away, he would have his moment of revenge.

The sound of his own breathing rose, became hard and dry. Hughes sat up in bed suddenly, his eyes full of light and urgency.

“Where am I?” he asked.

He took in the figure of the visitor, and a look of recognition passed across his face.

“I was afraid.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought they had moved the beds around while I was sleeping.”

“The beds don’t move.” The visitor’s voice was reassuring. “They are here to stay. Just like you.”

He helped the old man to his feet and sat him at a table by the window. Hughes turned to him, his face sharpening.

“You smell like the IRA.”

“What do you mean?”

“I smell the whiff of diesel and sweat. The aroma of terror. You’ve been running from someone.”

The visitor ignored the comment, producing a set of photographs and more maps, and laying them on the table. The old man gazed up at him with a look of worry.

“You must tell me if they move the beds around. Otherwise, I’ll be completely lost. We’ll work out a warning sign. Promise me that.”

“I promise you.”

Carefully the visitor guided the old man’s attention back to the maps.

Sighing, he lifted them to the light. The features of his face hardened into a mask. He stifled a groan as he tried to make his brain function. A series of grotesque images flashed into his mind, a man hanging upside down in a cow shed, cigarette burns on the back of his hands, clumps of torn-out hair lying on the manure-decorated floor. Torture was part of Hughes’s business, and he had come across it many times in his career. The secret, he had instructed his men, was to find the victim’s weak point.

When he lifted his head up, the visitor’s eyes were hard. They were like fingers reaching into his mind.

“How did you get away?” the old man asked. “There were three IRA men there that night and they had you tied and gagged.”

“How do you know that? Were you there too?”

“I was in the vicinity,” the old man replied evasively, rubbing his hands as though washing himself of any responsibility. He spoke very slowly. “How did you manage to survive?”