Silence Read Free Page B

world.
    The motorway cut deeper through the countryside as he approached the border, and the terrain grew rockier, bleaker. He slowed on reaching the final uncompleted section. Roadwork diversion signs redirected traffic on to side roads, but Daly ignored them. He held firm. Ahead, his headlights picked out the broad tract where diggers had been tearing a hole through the hills that formed the border with the Republic. His tyres rumbled over the uneven surface. He eased his car up the last hundred yards or so to where the tape of the police cordon fluttered amid the warning lights.
    He stared through the windscreen, taking his measure of the scene. At first, all he could pick out beyond the signs and flickering lights were heaps of soil, denuded rock and digging machines, which, perched on the dark mounds of earth, seemed to float over the chaos. Then he saw the moving figures. Men and women in uniforms, walking about with flashlights.
    He was back in border country.
    ‘What happened?’ Daly asked the young officer in charge of the crash site. It took him several moments to work out the sequence of events. The officer and his colleagues had arrived at the roadworks shortly before 10 p.m. to investigate a report of criminal damage to the diggers. They discovered that the vandals had also removed the diversion signs and rearranged the traffic cones into a lane that would have guided unsuspecting motorists straight over a precipice. Immediately, they had set up a cordon and checkpoint.
    It was a dangerous prank, explained the officer, especially in the dark. He and his colleagues had been removing the cones when an elderly driver pulled up. For some inexplicable reason, he had ignored the police cordon and driven off at speed, almost knocking over one of the officers.
    That was his first error, said the policeman. His second and fatal mistake had been to steer a path through the rearranged cones without once tapping his brakes.
    ‘The poor bastard went over the edge into a thicket of thorns thirty feet below,’ he added. ‘He seemed to drive off in some sort of panic.’
    Daly stared at the road swimming in a trickery of light and reflective signs. He saw the line of shining cones, and at their end the pool of darkness into which a car and a life had vanished. A fatal diversion masquerading as an escape route. Road accidents were usually a combination of bad luck and stupidity, but what had made the elderly man disdain the advice of law and order?
    ‘I wonder what frightened him so badly?’ he asked the officer, scrutinizing his young face.
    ‘I don’t know. A guilty conscience?’ The officer shrugged. ‘Did I mention he was a priest? A Roman Catholic priest. He was wearing a dog collar. According to our records, his name was Father Aloysius Walsh.’
    Daly raised an eyebrow. The worst, the blackest reading of the driver’s actions was that he had a secret to hide and feared arrest. It was the simplest explanation for his behaviour, but Daly suspected that given the history of this part of the country, and the fact that the dead man had been a cleric, the truth might turn out to be a little more complicated.
    Daly took the officer through his conversation with Walsh. Perhaps he had let slip a word that had agitated him. Doubtless a priest of his age had seen and witnessed a lot, especially during the Troubles. In addition, the media were hounding many elderly priests over their handling of clerical child-abuse cases. God only knew what was going through his mind when he saw the police cordon in the darkness.
    The officer stitched together the sequence of events, and the words he had spoken, but Daly failed to detect any hint of menace in them.
    ‘I just warned him the road was blocked and a diversion in place,’ he said.
    ‘What were you doing while you spoke?’
    ‘Warming my hands. It was a cold night.’ There was something appealing about his honesty and the patience with which he answered Daly’s questions.