Disappeared by Anthony Quinn Page A

over. Time for more pushing, less listening.
    “I have some questions to ask.”
    “Fire away.”
    “I understand your husband was on remand for bomb-making charges. Who represented him?”
    “O’Hare solicitors.”
    “I mean who specifically?”
    “Malachy O’Hare himself. He sent me a condolence card when Oliver disappeared.”
    “Why did the IRA believe your husband was an informer?”
    “There was a bomb left on Thomas Street. It was meant for an army foot patrol, but someone had removed the battery from the detonator. Oliver was the last person to have handled it so the suspicion fell on him. His fingerprints were all over the device. He was arrested but then released without charge. That signed his death warrant. When the IRA found out, they claimed he had cut a deal with Special Branch.”
    “And you believe he didn’t?”
    She stared at Daly. “Why are you here, Inspector?”
    “Because evidence relating to your husband’s disappearance was found at the house of a murdered man.”
    “Are you talking about Joseph Devine? The man they found on the island?”
    “You knew him?”
    “I had a visit from him a few weeks ago. Dermot, my son, answered the door. When I saw Devine, he was looking at Dermot as though he’d seen a ghost. He was hardly able to speak. I felt sorry for him, took him in, and made him a cup of tea. He wanted to talk about the evidence we had gathered on Oliver’s murder and the search for his grave. He was doing some sort of research project on the disappeared. He claimed he’d narrowed the search for their bodies. But I didn’t trust him. There was something secretive about him. It made me uncomfortable, and I couldn’t understand what he was getting out of it.” Her eyes narrowed. “Did the IRA kill him too?”
    “That’s what we’re trying to determine.”
    “He probably had it coming to him.”
    Her harshness surprised him. “Why do you think that?”
    “He shouldn’t have been intruding on other people’s grief. When you try that, things blow up in your face.…”
    Before she could continue, a teenage boy barged into the room. When he saw Daly, he stopped dead in his tracks and fumbled with something in his coat pocket, a look of fear filling his face. Daly watched him maneuver closer to his mother, his hand still grappling with the object in his pocket. The detective had levered himself to a half-standing position when the boy finally pulled out a purse and handed it to his mother.
    Daly swallowed and lowered himself back into the armchair. He studied the boy’s face, struck by the resemblance to his dead father. It was as if time had gone into reverse and a ragged, more youthful version of Oliver Jordan had untied his hands, removed the tape from his eyes and made his way back from the shadowy wood, where a gun had just shattered the dawn silence.
    “This is my son, Dermot,” said Tessa. “I was pregnant with him when they took Oliver. He never saw his dad.”
    Daly introduced himself. The fear discharged itself from the boy’s face, but something about his awkward stance and the effort that showed as he forced himself to meet Daly’s gaze piqued the detective’s curiosity.
    The boy’s body arched away from Daly as he backed out of the room. Perhaps his odd behavior was due to the invisible shadow cast by the father labeled an informer, thought Daly, the sense of shame the boy had carried into the world from the moment of his birth, as contaminating as original sin.
    Daly was beginning to suspect that Devine had been murdered because of his investigations into the past. Somehow his death was linked to the abduction of Oliver Jordan and a possible cover-up by Special Branch. Daly wondered to himself why the police had botched the original investigation if the victim was a suspected mole. Surely if Jordan had been an informer, the police would have been keen to find out how their man was discovered and who had killed him. He began to think that Tessa Jordan