Silence Read Free Page A

hands of Loyalists and she had responded with sympathy and curiosity. They were both survivors from different sides of the community, they realized, falling through border country with their anger and grief. Why should either of them shoulder this darkness alone? His mind began to burn with the new plan he was formulating. The business with the major seemed more urgent now. He would give Hannon a phone call and outline his requirements. He was going to cross invisible boundaries into a new mental landscape, one where he would roam with killers and psychopaths. His thoughts grew luminous, purposeful, contemplating the dark path that lay ahead.

1
    February 2013
    Thoreau’s line – the question is not what you look at, but what you see – was a favourite of Inspector Celcius Daly’s, not just because it said something about detective work, but also because it described the way in which he and his fellow citizens were dealing with their country’s conflicted past. Daly lived between two views of the Troubles, the one he saw with his eyes wide open and the one he saw with his eyes firmly shut. He had trusted the former over the latter ever since childhood, but every now and again the unruly brew of his subconscious, imagination or his dreaming threw up a suppressed memory or an old secret that threatened to disrupt the carefully edited view.
    It had not taken much to set him off that wintry night at the start of February. He was preparing to go to bed when the call came through. He listened to the details: a single-vehicle car crash, a line of misplaced traffic cones and a dead motorist. A freak accident, he thought, the result of too much speed, alcohol or the driver falling asleep at the wheel.
    He drove through Maghery and headed towards Dungannon. Soon he was on the new motorway. He took a deep breath and eased the car into top gear. There was a full moon and the empty carriageway stretched westwards towards the border, a vaulted path of tar and concrete bridges shining in the moonlight.
    For decades, the Irish and British governments had neglected the border roads, allowing them to fall into ruin, but ever since the ceasefire, they had been at pains to reverse the decline. Gone were the checkpoints, the military fortifications, the sabotaged roads and blown-up bridges. New carriageways were replacing the meandering roads that had once made even a short trip along the disputed frontier feel like a trek through a labyrinth.
    Inexorably , he thought, the crooked little lanes of my troubled country are disappearing. Soon there will be none of them left. Soon there will be no more getting lost on by-roads, no more skulking in shadowy places; soon there will be nothing left but straight roads with no hiding places.
    He flicked his headlights on to full beam and accelerated, the lamps scouring the darkness ahead. Perhaps this was the freedom everyone had been fighting for during the Troubles, he thought, the freedom to drive all night, free and fearless, on wide roads without ever coming to the end of one’s tether.
    The motorway cut through a narrow valley, and Daly crossed a bridge. He glanced through his side window, and saw the old country below, felt its dark gravity, its mesh of forgotten roads, its interlocking parishes of grief and murder. He had spent the last seven years policing this part of Northern Ireland, and it was a relief to be carried on so many tonnes of concrete and steel above its shadows; everything below was crime and violence, age and death, loose bits of the past squirming their way through the darkness.
    He had relaxed into a state approaching drowsiness when his car swayed a little, buffeted by crosswinds. The central reservation loomed closer. He was surprised to see how much his car had drifted across the lanes. He tapped his brakes and gripped the steering wheel. That was the problem with feeling afloat on such an elevated road, he thought: it made you forget your precariousness in this