Free Disappeared by Anthony Quinn Page B

handed Daly a brief handwritten note that began with Butler’s characteristically sardonic humor: Cleaning up is always the hardest thing to do after a party. However, Devine’s murderers were professionals. So far we haven’t found a scrap of DNA that doesn’t belong to the victim.
    Five minutes later Daly was sitting in his car, the engine running.
    The case had to be linked to terrorism and Northern Ireland’s bloody past. He had suspected it the moment he saw the body on the island. The lack of a prime suspect in Devine’s life helped confirm his instinct. He released the clutch, and soon he was driving by the empty orchards on the road out of town, wondering what grim forces the legal clerk had entangled himself in.
    A fine drizzle began to fall, and in the grayness, the low, arching branches of the apple trees took on the solemnity of a great funeral procession. This part of the Armagh countryside had earned itself the nickname of the Murder Triangle during the height of the Troubles, a series of tit-for-tat killings devastating both the Protestant and Catholic communities. The roads he was driving through had to be some of the most ghost-run in the country.
    He pulled the car to a stop at a narrow crossroads. A ribbonlike stream of water twisted and turned its way down the road from the summit of a hill. He was of two minds. When another car drew up behind him and flashed its headlights, he decided to follow the lead that had first caught his attention inside Devine’s cottage.
    It took him half an hour to find his way back to the farmhouse where David Hughes had gone missing. In daylight, the farmyard looked more desolate. The wind sniffed at a fence of broken wire. Rainwater filled a line of empty post holes, and an ancient tractor with a rusted seat stood in a lane of mud. The farm seemed to have sunken into a forlorn state of waiting.
    However, in the garden, a full washing line flapped in the cold breeze, suggesting that Eliza Hughes was not the type of woman to neglect her household routine. This time the door was locked with a series of bolts. Eliza spoke to him first from behind a pane of frosted glass. Her eyes were wide with fear when she pulled open the door.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like opening the door to strangers.”
    “We’ve no news of your brother, yet,” said Daly hurriedly. “I just have a few questions to ask you, that’s all. It won’t take much of your time.”
    She put away a scrubbing brush and bucket, and led Daly down a corridor lined with miniature gilt picture frames of hunting scenes. They stepped into a kitchen where a dishwasher and washing machine were busy twins of suds and noise. An oppressive cleanliness reigned throughout, in spite of the emotional upheaval the woman had endured.
    “I used to tell David every day that everything was fine because I didn’t want him to worry,” said Eliza, her words sounding dull and hopeless. “Now I have to keep telling myself the same. Things aren’t fine, though. I’m falling to pieces behind a wall that I built brick by brick around David and myself.”
    Daly felt a note of sympathy with her sense of abandonment. In a way, it mirrored his predicament with Anna: not knowing the whereabouts or motivation of a loved one.
    He nodded and suggested she should accept any help that was available. Then he groaned inwardly at the clumsy way he was expressing himself.
    “Are there any family members that can stay with you?”
    Her breath caught as she said no.
    Daly took out the photograph of the duck hunters and the lecture invite, and showed them to Eliza. Her fingers shook slightly as she looked at them.
    “This was before David took ill. I thought he would have continued into healthy old age long after any of the others.”
    She pondered the group of faces. “A dwindling band of brothers,” was all that she remarked.
    “Do you recognize Joseph Devine?”
    “Yes, I do. Bottom left.” Her face went blank. “I