Free Silence by Anthony J. Quinn

dark little trap. She glanced back at him, her face expressionless, and then down at his briefcase, as if she were weighing it all in her mind, balancing the briefcase and its contents with his life, her blue eyes unblinking, as if both were worth nothing. He let the case hang a little lower.
    She walked into the room and he edged in behind her. A disco had started on the floor below and the heavy music reverberated in the room.
    The old man sitting on the bed had been flicking through a travel magazine. Hegarty entered the room, and the man looked up, his eyes glittering with a dangerous light.
    ‘Hello, Daniel,’ he said. He sounded happy to have company.
    ‘Where’s Walsh?’ asked Hegarty.
    ‘He couldn’t make it. What’s in your briefcase?’
    ‘It’s empty. You can see for yourself.’
    Hegarty tossed the briefcase towards him. It splayed open in mid-air. The man grabbed at it, when he should have recoiled backwards for cover. Quick and deft, Hegarty pointed the gun. The weapon flared twice, the bullets striking the man in the neck and the top of his chest. The briefcase clasped shut and fell on his body.
    Hegarty walked stiffly towards him. The dying man’s eyes fastened on him with an intensity that suggested they had once known each other, the muscles of his jaw convulsing while blood poured from a wound in his neck. His throat lengthened and grew rigid, as though he were trying desperately to say something.
    ‘I thought you had retired,’ said Hegarty, finally recognizing him. He was one of the shadows who’d been watching him for years. A man who had assassinated many innocent victims.
    ‘Yes,’ hissed the man through a mouth frothing with blood, but his eyes were already clouding with forgetfulness. His body fell to the side.
    Hegarty delivered a final bullet to his head, and turned his attention to the journalist, whose entire body had frozen to the spot.
    ‘This will do wonders for my writer’s block,’ she said hysterically, her eyes signalling some strange sort of relief. And then she laughed, but it was a silent laugh, more a ghost of a laugh. Her reaction made him pause for thought. By the time he raised the gun to shoot she had slipped out of the room and into the corridor. He followed her and fired. Her run faltered and she glanced back at him with a pained look. To his surprise, she started running again, this time limping heavily. The bullet must have grazed her leg. He was about to raise the gun and take aim again, when a family with young children emerged from a room into the corridor.
    He ducked back into the room. In the mirror, he caught a glimpse of his face spattered with blood. By the time he had washed and re-emerged, the woman had gone.
    A mess of blood filled the bed. He checked the dead man’s body, careful not to get any more blood on himself. The black wedge of a gun jutted from an underarm holster. He searched the room for any evidence that might link him to the killing. Already there was too much blood on the carpet. He was careful where he walked, what he touched. For the first time that day, he felt relaxed, transposed into another more vital existence. He picked up his briefcase and left the room. He was no longer contemplating his own death.

7
    After leaving the abbey, Daly felt too troubled to return home. He decided to phone ahead to the hotel Walsh had been staying in and arrange a search of the deceased’s room. As he drove back into border country he tried to think of a series of events that would have led to his mother becoming a target for Loyalist paramilitaries. He arrived at the hotel without having made any progress.
    Clary Lodge Hotel was situated at the bottom of a black mountain, half-hidden behind an enclosure of laurel and rhododendron bushes. It had once been the mansion of a grandly delusive English landlord, who’d wanted to turn the emptiness of the surrounding bogland into a visual spectacle. When Daly pulled up in his car, he thought that in