Disappeared (26 page)

“We haven’t come here for the tour guide,” snapped Irwin.

The abbot’s face froze. He blinked. In a cold voice, he said, “I’m glad you don’t plan to stay with us, Inspector. The Benedictine motto is to treat all guests as you would treat Christ himself.”

Daly spoke. “We’re looking for a man called David Hughes. We have reason to believe he may be a guest here.”

He handed the abbot a photograph of Hughes.

“His life may be in danger. As might the lives of those he confides in.”

The abbot studied the photo for a moment.

“It’s an old one,” added Daly. “Mr. Hughes may have changed in the meantime, shaved his beard, or lost weight.”

“No, no, he hasn’t changed at all,” said the abbot. He raised his hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “How can such a harmless old man cause such drama?”

“An informer called Joseph Devine was murdered a fortnight ago. Mr. Hughes was his handler, his point of contact with the security forces.”

The abbot got up and began fussing over a heavy folder.

“I think you’ll find,” he said, addressing Daly, “that the gentleman you’re looking for is in Room 204.”

There was a heavy creak of leather as the abbot sat down wearily.

“He’s still registered as a guest here, but I haven’t seen him for a few days. His grandson used to come and take him out for trips.”

Dermot, thought Daly. It had to be him.

The cast-iron radiators hummed with heat, and Daly felt the sweat gather on his brow as he and Irwin hurried down the long corridor.

An old monk came hobbling toward them, walking with two sticks to help carry his weight. Though he looked to be in pain, his smile as they passed him was pronounced, unwavering.

The abbot had supplied them with a key, but the door was already ajar. Irwin gingerly pushed the door wide with his foot. He took a step into the room with the air of someone assuming control.

The bed had been made, and a chair sat neatly at a bare desk. The carpet was spotless. A pile of clothes lay folded in an opened suitcase. A fly buzzed against the windowpane, a black dot of anger in an otherwise empty room.

“For someone with Alzheimer’s, Hughes has a tidy streak.”

“More likely it belongs to the person helping him,” murmured Daly.

He walked over to the bedside cabinet and picked up a leather-bound notebook. It appeared to be a journal written by Hughes over the previous six months.

One of the first truths of detective work was that the unexplainable almost never happens. Even a vulnerable old man disappearing into thin air turns out to have a perfectly logical explanation. Daly could see that now. The monastery had been a perfect hiding place with its fixed routine and unwritten code of privacy. Guests were looked after without too many questions asked. The behavior of a confused old man might not appear so strikingly out of the ordinary. Most of the guests were probably fleeing some sort of pain or disturbance in their spirit. If one of them rambled a little, it might only be because he was trying to shake off some burden of guilt. And if a guest seemed unsure of himself, wasn’t it because, in a fundamental sense, everyone on a retreat feels lost or undermined or no longer certain of anything? And then there was Dermot, posing as Hughes’s grandson, able to wander in and out like a shadow as the guest ate, prayed, and sang hymns.

The boy was resourceful, Daly had to hand him that. He had established a refuge where he could patrol and keep an eye on Hughes, unbeknownst to anyone else.

“Now that the boy knows we’re on to him, he’ll turn himself in,” remarked Irwin.

“I don’t think our presence here is going to stop their mission.”

“They’re not on a mission,” snorted Irwin. “This whole thing is an elaborate schoolboy’s prank. He’s using the old man to get attention. Just like his arson attacks.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Dermot I know. He’s trying to extract information from Hughes. Dangerous information.”

“You’re thinking like a sane person.”

“I’m thinking full stop. That’s what we’re paid to do.”

“You can’t think sane with a disturbed teenager and a senile old man. Trust me on this.”

D
aly decided to hand over responsibility for the surveillance operation at the monastery to Irwin and Special Branch. It was not because he thought they could do a better job. It was because of something more personal—the thought that his involvement with the Jordan family had reflected badly on him as a detective. He worried that he had lost the necessary intensity of effort and concentration that should have alerted him earlier to the boy’s secret life. How could he penetrate the darkness surrounding a possible suspect when he felt he was walking in pitch-darkness himself?

He went back to the station. He planned to spend the next few hours going through the investigation, searching for any more mistakes, or leads he might have overlooked. Then he would start reading through the journal he had recovered from Hughes’s room.

It had been a long day, with many surprises, and it was barely afternoon. He postponed lunch and sat down at his office to read the journal. He quickly found himself absorbed by the old man’s words. Few things are as captivating as other people’s nightmares.

  
October 22

It has been a week since I last was able to pen my thoughts. I misplaced my diary and was worried sick Eliza had found it. Fortunately, I found it at the bottom of my suitcase. Things aren’t getting much better for me since the last time I wrote. The ghosts keep appearing on the appointed nights. They ask me questions about old cases, and often I cannot remember. Sometimes they’re gone by the time I get outside. Then they leave newspaper clippings of old cases hanging on thorns to haunt me. Last night I locked myself out of the house and Eliza­ got mad at having to let me in. She said I shouldn’t be out wandering in the dark, and took the front door key off me.

  
November 2

I awoke last night to the sound of heavy rain drumming the window. My calendar tells me the ghosts will appear again tonight, but Eliza has made me a prisoner in my own home. Earlier, she locked the bedroom door, and threatened me.

“I’ve got to sleep, David,” she told me. Her hands shook as she fitted the bars on my bed. “I’ll look in now and again, and if I see that you’ve tried to get out I’ll have to ring the police. You understand that, don’t you?”

When I awoke later I used up a whole hour just listening to make sure she was in her room. I heard her settle into bed, and waited for any further creaks. Then I moved to the bottom of the bed and squeezed past the sidebars. I pressed my ear against the key hole of the door. Not a sound. I took out a key I had hidden, and unlocked the door. The only noise I could hear was the blood rushing in my head.

The dark wind from the lough was blowing again, bringing with it the voices of ghosts. I could see through the whitethorn hedge a man wearing an old RUC uniform. The badge on his cap glinted in the moonlight. He was carrying a rope. He selected a branch and tied the rope to it. Before he placed his head in the noose, he turned towards me, keeping the features of his face hidden in the shadow of his cap. When I returned from the thorn hedge, my clothes were so wet I had to wring the water out of them.

Daly read on. In a series of rambling entries, Hughes described his conversations with the ghost of Oliver Jordan. He had recognized Jordan from the blue electrician’s boiler suit he was wearing, and the details he supplied about the unexploded bomb that had signed his death warrant. Then on November 5, Hughes noted in capital letters that he had been
INSTITUTIONALISED
. Daly assumed this referred to his arrival at the nursing home. There were no notes for the following week, except the comment that the other “inmates” seemed to be drugged or asleep.

Then on November 12, he started to write at length again.

They wheeled an old woman in beside me today in the sitting room. Her eyes were directed past me towards the window, and they had a dull look. Her hair was a spool of downy grey and the features of her face were lined with a throng of wrinkles. A young man came in and asked her could she hear him. He was persistent but well mannered, but the old woman seemed asleep.

When the old woman eventually spoke, her voice was faint.

“I know why you’ve come here,” she whispered. “You’re dredging the past for ghosts. Go home and forget about where they buried him.”

For a moment, I thought the old woman was doting but something in the boy’s expression made me wonder: “Buried who?”

I looked at him closely, and then the sweat began to form on my forehead, and I felt my neck begin to itch. His face looked oddly familiar. A coughing fit overcame me, and when I looked up again, the boy had disappeared, and the old woman was asleep again.

  
November 13

In the afternoon, I awoke in the sitting room. The sun hadn’t come out all day. I had lost my watch, and felt disorientated. This illness hangs over me like a curse. There was light from the tall windows moving the shadows about, and from their position, I tried to work out the time. The old woman was sitting beside me in an armchair with dirt-encrusted wheels. I had heard the nurses call her Mrs Jordan. By now, I had guessed she was Oliver Jordan’s mother. The coincidence was too horrible to bear.

“You’re caught,” she said suddenly, turning her head slightly towards me. “You’ve come to a dead end. First you made the mistake of getting ill, and then coming here where you’re boxed in by other dying people towards your own coffin. Get out while you still can.”

The words of her final command trembled in her mouth. She was breathing heavily. Her eyes were barely open, and I was unsure if she was addressing me.

I must have fallen asleep because my next memory is of seeing a cold cup of tea and a buttered scone sitting on the armrest of my chair. There were crumbs on the old woman’s chest and her eyes were open and fixed on the opposite wall. It was an empty wall, and during the long afternoons, it acted like a blank screen, shimmering with the images of the past. A tangle of memories floated to the surface. I saw the headlights of a car swimming through a foggy night, a body bundled out of the boot, torches winking across a wild bog, and a man’s bare feet dragged through the mud.

The old woman shifted in her seat.

“I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Oliver,” she said. “The last time I saw him he was sleeping.” She pointed at the wall opposite. “Sleeping in that bed there. The same bed he used to sleep in when he was a boy.”

I thought of offering some form of sympathy, but could see no consolation in that, not after all these years.

“I didn’t sleep for days,” she added. Her face screwed tight against the memory.

My mind started filling with more images from that dreadful night. It was almost impossible to speak. I worried about how I was going to frame what I wanted to say.

At last I spoke. “I may be the only one left who saw your son’s body being buried that night.”

A nurse pushed a medicine trolley past the door, and a bed alarm echoed down a distant corridor.

“I’m the only one left,” I repeated.

The old woman’s eyes were shut. Her mouth had folded upon itself as if the words had chewed her up. If she was breathing, there was no sign of it. She was gathering her strength for what was coming next. She stooped forward and gripped her hands on the armrests of the chair as though she might fall to the floor. A cup of cold tea fell across the carpet. She released a long breath, and then she turned her dim eyes towards me.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Why have you come here?”

Her arm reached out towards me, as though an electrical current had taken hold of it. I recoiled. Afraid that some shock of grief or sorrow might suddenly leap from her wrinkled skin.

“I worked for Special Branch,” I began to explain. “We were monitoring the movements of Republicans. I watched them that night dig a pit and bury your son’s body. I wasn’t able to intervene because it would have endangered the operation. It was too late for your son, anyway. He was dead.”

The old woman sank back into her seat, and shut her eyes. For a long time, there was not a sound in the room. We were like two people isolated on an island of grief. I watched the sky darkening to twilight. Night was approaching. Her grandson would be making his way through the gloom, on his way to the nursing home, seeking his answers.

“I always believed that one day news would reach me,” said the old woman. “That I would find out where Oliver was buried.” She paused, caught her breath, and turned towards me.

I told her that my memory was failing, and that I could no longer recall the exact location of the grave.

“But you must remember,” she said. “You must. Let him be given a Christian burial. So I can finally rest.” Emotion gulped in her throat.

“I will do my best,” I replied. There was no one left who could help her. I sank back into my chair, surrendering myself to the task. I was going to have to return to the gap in the thorn hedge, and step back into the black wind where only ghosts wandered.

“Let me talk to your grandson,” I told her. “Let me see what I can do.”

The next entry was a few days later. In the meantime, Daly surmised, Hughes had introduced himself to Dermot Jordan and passed on the few details he could remember. After that, the entries described Hughes’s regular conversations with the boy. Then on November 19:

My last day in the nursing home. I sat waiting for the ambulance to take me home when Dermot appeared. It was our final meeting.

“Are you going already?” he asked, a note of disappointment in his voice.

I felt the same. Our friendship was ending. Or rather, our usefulness to each other was waning. It was ridiculous to believe we could build on the conversations we had shared during my short stay in the nursing home. I could see the boy was reaching the same conclusion. After all, I was an old man with a rapidly fading memory, who hadn’t been able to answer his most pressing questions.

He accompanied me on a short walk through the nursing home grounds. It was a cold winter evening. Not a trace of wind in the air. Soon a frost would form on the neatly mown lawn and the conifer trees.

“I must find out where they buried Dad’s body,” he said.

“I’ve forgotten. That’s the simple truth. My memory is going. Anyway, I was never the type to look back and revisit old scenes. I must have blotted out the details of the entire incident.”

The ambulance pulled up.

“You have to tell me if you remember anything more,” he urged.

“Of course. You have my address.”

I got into the back of the ambulance. It drove me slowly through the darkness of the lough shore, with no siren lights or wailing noise, through a wind swathed with snowflakes, dissolving into the blackness like the trapped faces of ghosts.