Disappeared by Anthony Quinn

until you feel that sort of anger boil inside you. We found out from our solicitor that Special Branch knew who was responsible for Oliver’s abduction not long after it happened, but no charges were ever brought. When we asked to see the police reports of the investigation, they told us they’d been lost. The authorities have behaved dishonestly. They have lied to us and misled us at every turn. What made the IRA kidnappers so special that the police had to protect their identities?”
    “Perhaps it’s time for a new investigation,” said Daly. “New clues have a habit of turning up, and witnesses can be jolted into remembering vital clues even years later.”
    “What hope is there of solving the case now, seventeen years after the event?” Her voice was more despairing than angry. “Since the cease-fire, we’ve been campaigning to have a public inquiry into Oliver’s abduction, but the British government keeps refusing. I’m quite used to it by now, this burning sense of rage rising from within. The anger isn’t just bearable, it’s electrifying. We Catholics must be hardwired to feel injustice, don’t you think, Inspector Daly?”
    Inwardly, he had to agree. He recalled the thrill of anger he had felt as a new recruit in Glasgow dealing with sectarianism, especially when it was meted out by colleagues. On one occasion, a senior detective had forgotten he was still in the room and remarked to his officers: “That’s the trouble with Fenians, you can never trust them.” Daly had watched the muscles on the inspector’s face tighten with anger and humiliation when he realized his mistake. He had felt his own blood thicken with anger. Of course, the comment was the tiniest of slights compared to the ordeal Tessa Jordan had described.
    “Sometimes personal injustice shapes us and brings out our better qualities,” he suggested.
    She snorted. “For months after Oliver’s disappearance, I used to sit up in the middle of the night with the baby in my arms and listen to the wind. The baby might be crying at the top of its lungs but all I heard was the wind howling over the roof. It was so loud I used to think it was boiling up from inside me.”
    She paused again, and the silence felt so empty that Daly struggled to find words to fill it. “They say anger is the first stage in the grieving process.”
    “What are you trying to do, Inspector Daly?” she asked. “Turn this into a counseling session? Is that how you get your probes into people?”
    When Daly failed to respond, she talked on. “I’m just like any another woman trying to get on with raising her family. Oliver’s mother spent her whole life campaigning to prove he wasn’t an informer. It was a vicious lie that hurt her deeply. She raised her son in the fear of God, to be obedient and respectful. And that’s the way Oliver was. The campaign to have his body returned wore her out. Now she’s in a nursing home. It’s only right I take up the fight. Branding Oliver an informer has blighted my own son’s life. All I want is the truth and for his body to be returned. I don’t care about punishment or justice, just the truth.”
    Daly admired the simplicity of her request. For a moment, he sensed surrender in her eyes, a serenity in her soul. The living room was like a shrine to Oliver Jordan, but if a transcendence had occurred it was in his widow. Tessa Jordan was a very different woman from the sad-eyed girl of the wedding photograph. It was not just age that had changed her. She had tasted the powerful emotions of grief and anger, and they had transformed her, filling every vein in her body and brimming up in her shining green eyes. Her fight for justice was like a slow-burning martyrdom. He found himself wondering if there had been a lover in her life in the intervening years. Somehow, he suspected that loneliness had never driven her into another man’s arms. He cleared his throat. The time for making silences in their conversation was