Disappeared Read Online Free Page B

rowing boat and farming bric-a-brac. A basket of seed potatoes emptied itself of a colony of mice, and the sinister black eyes of what was probably a rat gleamed at him from the shadows. The smell of turpentine lingered in the air. He found nothing that would help in the search for the missing man.
    In the yard, he bumped into Officers Harland and Robertson, who had been checking the fields around the house.
    “Nothing to report so far, sir,” said Harland.
    “Phone the neighbors and let them know that David Hughes is missing,” said Daly. “Ask if they’ve seen or heard anything. And get them to check their outhouses. It’s a cold night. If he’s out there, he’s bound to seek shelter somewhere.”
    Daly thought that if they didn’t find him in the next hour, he would have to bring in tracker dogs and a helicopter to sweep the countryside. Using his torch, he examined the thorn hedge bordering the back garden. His alert eye discovered a gap in the thick branches where the wind blew through unconstrained. He spotted where the branches had been neatly sawn off, the pattern of rings still clear. The gap gave an interrupted line of sight to the cottage’s kitchen door.
    When he returned to the farmhouse, Eliza Hughes’s silhouette was framed in the kitchen window, unmoving. Daly felt spurred to a greater urgency and strode off with his flashlight across the undulating farmland, his feet slipping and sliding into icy mud holes. The moon came out, and its light streaming through the trees was so blue and cold Daly could almost taste it in the air.
    His ankle twisted in a hidden ditch, propelling him face first into a blackthorn hedge. He ducked to avoid a jagged branch, and for a second he caught the glint of something in the light of his torch. A pattern of frozen water drops fell from the higher branches and something white briefly hung in front of him before disappearing. He listened intently to a fluttering sound in the swaying trees. Something was caught among the branches. Whatever it was, there was no hint of the old man or his presumed captors. He felt like a dog hunting a scent that had grown cold.
    He heaved himself further into the thicket of thorns, and grunted in surprise when he uncovered a secret hollow. What looked like a pair of clown’s hands, yellow and enlarged, waved at him. He leaned back in shock, fumbling for his torch. In the beam of its light, he saw that someone had propped a pair of Marigold gloves on a set of twigs. For the first time since arriving at the farmhouse, he felt unnerved. Collecting his wits, he examined the rest of the hedge, finding further objects suspended from branches—an alarm clock, an old battery, bags of nails and wire. His torch scanned the ground and lit up a row of faintly discernible­ mounds. He knelt down and propped his flashlight against a stone. He wondered, Could they really be what he thought they were? Then he saw the crude crosses at the top of each mound with letter­ing etched in them. A set of names and dates had been inscribed: oliver jordan d. 1989, brian and alice mckearney d. 1984, patrick o’dowd, d. 1985.
    The mounds were small, more like a child’s attempt at a play cemetery than a proper memorial. He dug at each of them with his bare hands, unearthing nothing but rotting leaves and mud. He felt a curtain shift momentarily, revealing the sinister tableau of a troubled mind. Looking up he saw old newspaper cuttings spiked on thorns, like prayers to a pagan god. Most were shredded by the wind and wet through. He pulled one down. It was an old clipping of a news report about an unexploded bomb. Another clipping described an explosion that had killed a six-year-old girl and a nun.
    A surge of adrenaline rushed in his veins. He felt as though he’d accidentally pressed the Up button and ascended the lift shaft into the deranged galley of Hughes’s mind. One thing he was sure of, the old man’s thoughts had wandered farther than the simple