Haunted Ground

1

With a sodden rasp, Brendan McGann’s turf spade sliced into the bank of earth below his feet. Had he known all that he’d turn up with the winter’s fuel, perhaps he would have stopped that moment, climbed up onto the bank, and filled his shed with the uniform sods of extruded turf that a person could order nowadays by the lorry-load.

But Brendan continued, loosening each sopping black brick with the square-bladed turf spade, tossing it over the bank, where it landed with a plump slap. He performed his task with a grace and facility that comes from repeating the same motion times without number. Though his father and grandfather and generations before had taken their turf from this same patch of bog, Brendan never thought of himself as carrying on an age-old tradition, any more than he considered the life cycles of all the ancient, primitive plants whose resting place he now disturbed. This annual chore was the only way he’d ever known to stave off the bitter cold that crept under his door each November.

Chilblains were the farthest thing from Brendan’s mind this unusually sun-drenched late-April morning. A steady westerly breeze swept over the bog, chasing high clouds across the watery blue of the sky, and teasing the moisture from the turf. Good drying today, his father would have said. Brendan worked in his shirtsleeves; his wool jacket, elbows permanently jointed from constant wearing, lay on the bank above his head. He paused, balancing his left arm on the handle of the upright slean, and, with one rolled-up sleeve, mopped the sweat from his forehead, pushing away the damp, dark hair that stuck there. The skin on his face and forearms was beginning to feel the first pleasant tightness of a sunburn. Hunger was strong upon him at the moment, but just beyond it was an equally hollow feeling of anxiety. This might be the last year he could cut turf on his own land without interference. The thought of it burned in the pit of his stomach. As he clambered up the bank to fetch the handkerchief from his coat pocket, he searched the horizon for a bicycle.

Forty yards away, his younger brother Fintan made a comic figure as he struggled against the weight of a turf-laden wheelbarrow. Fintan dumped his two dozen wet sods at the end of a long row, one of many that lent the surface of the bog the temporary texture of corduroy. For a good square mile around them, little huts of footed turf covered the landscape. Here and there on the neighbors’ allotments, large white plastic bags bulged with sods dried as hard as dung.

“Any sign of her yet?” Brendan shouted to his brother, who raised his shoulders in a shrug and kept at his work. The two men had been hard at it since nine, with only a short tea break midmorning. Their sister Una was to bring them sandwiches and tea, and pitch in with footing the turf. It was cumbersome, backbreaking work, turning the sods by hand so that they dried in the sun. It would be another month before this lot could be drawn home.

Tucking his handkerchief in his back pocket, Brendan descended once more into his gravelike void, noting with a small grimace of satisfaction the angled pattern his slean had made down the wall of the bank. He was reaching the good black turf now, more appreciated in these parts for its long-burning density than for the fact that it had remained in this place, undisturbed and undecayed, for perhaps eight thousand years.

He set to work again, trying to drown out the rumbling in his belly by concentrating on the sound and the rhythm of cutting. He was used to hard physical labor, but there was no doubt about it, something in the bog air put a fierce hunger on a man. What might the day’s lunch be? Chicken sandwiches, or egg, or perhaps a bit of salty red bacon on a slab of brown bread. Each stroke became a wolfish bite, a slug of hot sweet tea to wash it down. One more row, he thought, heaving each successive sod with more violence, just one more row—and then his blade stopped dead.

“Shite!”

Fintan’s head poked into view at the edge of the cutaway. “What’s the matter? Strike a bit of Noah’s ark down there?”

“Ah, no,” Brendan said. “Only a bit of horsehair.”

There were four things, their father always said, that could stop a man cutting turf. Brendan could hear the old man’s voice: Wig, water, blocks, and horsehair. Then he’d hold up four fingers in front of their faces. Meet any of them, boys, and it’s your Waterloo.

“Hand us down the spade, will yeh?”

Fintan obliged, then leaned on the handle of his fork to watch. Though these things typically turned out to be tree trunks and roots, other wonders turned up in bogs occasionally—rough beams of oak, ancient oxcarts, wheels of cheese or wooden tubs of butter. Stores buried for keeping in cool wetness and long since forgotten—objects caught and suspended outside of time by the watery, airless, preserving power of the bog.

Working deliberately, Brendan dug around the perimeter of the fibrous mat, probing for its edges, and scraping away loose bits of peat. He knelt on the spongy bank and pulled at the strands that began to emerge from the soaking turf. This was not horsehair; it was tangled and matted, all right, but it was too long, and far too fine to be the rooty material his father called horsehair. Brendan worked his broad fingers into the dense black peat he’d pried loose with the spade. Without warning, a block in his left hand gave way, and he cast it aside.

“Holy Christ,” Fintan whispered, and Brendan looked down. Almost touching his knee were the unmistakable and delicate curves of a human ear. It was stained a dark tobacco brown, and though the face was not visible, something in the line of the jaw, and the dripping tangle of fine hair above it, told him at once that this ear belonged to a woman. Brendan struggled to his feet, only dimly aware of the cold water that was seeping through the knees of his trousers and down into his wellingtons.

“Sorry, lads. You must be perished with the hunger.” Una’s breathless apology carried toward them on a bit of breeze. “But you should have seen me. I was literally up to my elbows…” Her voice trailed off when she saw the faces her brothers turned toward her. Brendan watched her stained fingers tighten their grip on the flask, and on the sandwiches she’d wrapped hastily in paper, as Una stepped to the edge of the bank beside Fintan and looked down at their awful discovery.

“Ah, Jaysus, poor creature” was all that she could say.

2

Cormac Maguire was in the shower when the call came. He let it ring, as he customarily did, until the answerphone came on. But hearing the excitement in Peadar Wynne’s voice, he hastily wrapped himself in a towel and sprinted down the stairs, hoping to catch Peadar before he rang off. Cormac stood just over six feet and, though he’d begun to feel a few creaks during the passage of his thirty-ninth year, still possessed a rower’s lean, muscular frame. His dark brown hair was cut short; intense dark eyes, a long, straight nose, and a square jaw defined his angular face. His pale olive complexion would soak up sun as he spent time in the field during the summer months. He had neglected to shave for the past couple of days, and now water dripped at irregular intervals from his chin to his bare chest.

Peadar—a technician in the archaeology department at University College Dublin, where Cormac was on the faculty—was a normally languid young man, whose concave frame and large hands invariably put Cormac in mind of a stick figure from an ancient cave painting. The cause of Peadar’s agitation was soon clear: some farmers cutting turf had discovered a body yesterday in a raised bog near Lough Derg in the southeast corner of County Galway, about two and a half hours west of Dublin.

Although hundreds of bog bodies had turned up in central Europe, mostly in Germany and Denmark, they were somewhat of a rarity in Ireland. Fewer than fifty such discoveries had been made in Irish bogs, and they offered an unparalleled opportunity to gaze directly into the past. Peat bogs not only preserved skin, hair, and vital organs, but even subtle facial expressions, and often revealed what a person who drew his dying breath twenty centuries ago had taken for his last meal on earth. Modern turf-cutting methods often damaged bog bodies. If this was a complete specimen, it would be the first in nearly twenty-five years, since the ancient remains of a woman had been discovered at Meenybraddan in Donegal. This body had been found by a man cutting turf by hand, so there was a good chance that it was intact.

With Peadar’s voice seeping into his ear, Cormac crossed to the desk to put on his glasses and culled from the flow of words the few that were pertinent to the matter at hand. “Has Drummond been there?” he asked. Malachy Drummond, the chief state pathologist, visited the scene of any suspicious death, to decide whether it should be classified as a police matter. Drummond had been to the site this morning, Peadar said, and upon examination of the remains had declared it a case for the archaeologists rather than the police. The National Museum had jurisdiction over all such bog remains, but as it happened, Peadar explained, their entire conservation staff had just left for a conference in Belgium and would be away for the next four days, so the museum’s keeper of conservation had phoned from Brussels to see whether Cormac would be available to do the excavation.

“He said he realized you were on leave, but that he’d consider it a personal favor.”

“Phone back, would you, Peadar, and tell him I’m on my way.”

Cormac paused to clear his throat before he broached the next subject. “I presume somebody’s informed Dr. Gavin.” Nora Gavin was a lecturer in anatomy at Trinity College Medical School, an American with a particular interest in bog bodies—and as it turned out, the one person Cormac felt disinclined to have working beside him, though he didn’t see how it could be avoided. It would be easier if he didn’t have to phone her himself.

“She’s already been notified. Says she’ll meet you there,” Peadar said.

Twenty minutes later, Cormac was on the road. What would they find at the bog? Given the natural preservatives in peat, it was difficult to tell at first how long someone had been buried in it—he remembered an account of English workmen uncovering the remains of a middle-aged female in a fen during the 1950s, spurring a tearful confession from a local man who told police he’d killed his wife and dumped her body in the marsh. Later—shortly after the remorseful husband hanged himself in his prison cell—the corpse in question turned out to be a woman who died sometime in the late Iron Age. The remains of the missing wife never turned up.

Cormac felt a growing excitement as he considered the possible significance of this new find. It had been ten years or so since he himself had been involved in an excavation of bog remains; he and a colleague had uncovered a fully articulated hand and arm at a bog road site in Offaly. He remembered studying the grooved and brown-stained fingernails, in particular. It was curious how arbitrary preservation in bog environments could be; sometimes bones were completely decalcified, but the skin, hair, and internal organs were intact. A well-preserved ancient body could often be found alongside completely skeletized remains in what one would quite naturally presume were the same conditions.

Cormac was dressed for the field, in jeans, a dark cotton pullover, and a bright blue anorak; he had tossed his waterproofs and wellingtons in the back of the jeep. As he drove through the confusion of suburban developments that had begun sprouting along the major roads out of the city, past the point where the built-up areas began to give way to the expansive pastures of prosperous farms and the tree-lined edges of stone-walled estates, he looked forward to escaping the din of Dublin. This journey would take him west across the great shallow basin of low bogland and pasture that formed the Midlands, and to the lip of the Shannon estuary, the place he always considered the most significant border on this little island. The larger world invariably imagined Ireland divided into north and south, but for him a greater division had always existed between east and west, especially between the lush, fertile planters’ dominion around Dublin that early English settlers had dubbed “the Pale” and the stony, wind-beaten west, where the last vestiges of Gaelic Ireland had long since been quite literally banished. You could still hear the echo of an ancient culture in the traditional music, of course, but it was also in the way people spoke, in their manner, in the very pace of their lives, which seemed to slow perceptibly the farther west he traveled. This drive always seemed to take him backward in time.

The trip would take at least two and a half hours, so Cormac fished with one hand in the glove box and brought out a tape of Jack Dolan, a flute player of the old puff-and-blow Leitrim style. Beside him on the passenger seat was his wooden flute case—East Galway was an area fairly saturated with flute players, and you never knew when a bit of music might turn up. Alongside the instrument case was Cormac’s site kit, which he carried in his father’s old medical bag. The small gilt “J.M.” on its worn leather surface reminded him that he was also heading back into his own past, to a place only an hour’s drive from where he had grown up, on the west coast of Clare. He should, he knew, make a trip to the church in Kilgarvan where his mother was buried. He berated himself for harboring such ambivalence about her. There was nothing to be done now, except to try to understand her better in death than he had in life. He’d visit her grave—if he had a chance.

Cormac disliked driving the motorways. When he wasn’t in a hurry, he savored crawling along the secondary routes. Today there was a reason for haste: once removed from its sterile environment, a bog body was susceptible to dehydration and rapid decomposition. The usual procedure was to excavate around and then cut away the entire section of turf containing the body, continuing to use the peat in its preservative capacity even after the remains reached the lab at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Conservation methods used on bog bodies so far—tanning, freeze-drying—had yet to prove successful over the long term. Bacteria and mold still set in too easily. The current approach was to pack remains in wet peat, then in several layers of black plastic sheeting, and keep them refrigerated indefinitely at 4 degrees Celsius. The National Museum recently had a room-sized unit built specially for the purpose. Not ideal, certainly, but the best current option.

Cormac began sorting out the details of the excavation. If one cubic meter of waterlogged peat weighed a ton, what type of crate would have to be built to contain two cubic meters? And how long would it take to excavate the whole area by hand? But beneath the ticking metronome of these conscious thoughts was a hidden melody, aroused by a chance connection to a human being whose life and death were about to intersect with his own. He wondered for the first time whether this new bog body was man or woman. It mattered little to his work whether the person was male or female, ancient or modern, but each individual found in the bog—and indeed any human remains—had a unique story to tell. The question was always how well you could decipher the story from what was left behind.

It’s easy to get caught up in the methodology, in all the highly technical aspects of what we do, his colleague and mentor Gabriel McCrossan had once told him. But that’s just our way of seeking knowledge, it’s not the essence of what we’re about. Keep in mind that our main concern is people—we learn about ourselves by studying those who have come before.

This would be his first trip into the field without Gabriel. Only three weeks ago, he had dropped by the office and found the old man dead at his desk. The fountain pen had tumbled from his right hand, and a large blot of ink had formed where it had last made contact with the paper. Cormac knew the old man would have shared his excitement about this new find.

Gabriel had always maintained that all scientific inquiry, whether it was undertaken through the lens of a microscope or the lens of a telescope, consisted of peering at the vast universe through one tiny peephole. He had often spoken of their archaeological work as seeing through a glass darkly, trying to reconstruct the past with sparse and imperfect evidence. Gabriel had relished the moments when something turned up. Another piece of the puzzle, my boy, he’d say, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Another little piece of the puzzle.

Cormac had just crossed over the Roscommon border at Athlone, noting the gradually shrinking proportions of the fields, the increasing narrowness of the roads, the first signs that he was well and truly in the West, when he remembered the potentially awkward situation that awaited him at the site. Gabriel had first introduced him to Nora Gavin. Although Nora was American, her parents were from Ireland, and she and the old man had some sort of prior connection; he’d been at university with her father or something. It was hard to tell how old she was; probably somewhere in her late thirties. From the way Gabriel had kept mentioning Nora, and insisting that Cormac must meet her, he also guessed that she was unattached. She seemed intelligent, and pleasant enough on the few occasions when they’d met, but nothing had come of Gabriel’s prodding. Then one evening about six months ago, he and Nora had both been among a small group of people invited to supper at Gabriel’s house, and the old man had pressed him into giving her a lift home. Cormac remembered how annoyed he’d felt, letting himself be maneuvered into a corner. Nora lived in one of those modern blocks of flats along the Grand Canal, not far from his own place. He’d hardly spoken a word to her on the drive, and hadn’t even waited to see whether she got inside safely. As he pulled away, he glanced into the rearview mirror to find her at the curbside looking after him. He hadn’t seen her since. Surely she’d been at Gabriel’s memorial, but his memory of that day was too clouded by grief to be trusted.

At Ballinasloe he turned off the main road and headed south toward Portumna, the town at the head of Lough Derg. To the west, the ground sloped gradually upward to the feathery pine forests that covered the Slieve Aughty Mountains; to the east lay what remained of the ancient body of water that once covered the whole center of Ireland. Farther down the lakeshore were the holiday resort towns of Mountshannon and Scarriff, but in this remote corner of Galway, there was only farmland and mountain overlooking small, hidden lakes and treeless stretches of bog. As he approached the lakeshore, he began to see homemade signs posted along the road. At first he thought they were To Let notices or adverts of some kind, but as he drew near the first one he read, “No Bog Licence”; a bit farther on was one that said, “No Bog Evictions”; and finally:

He wasn’t surprised to see such sentiments expressed along the roadside. There had long been controversy about Ireland’s use of peat, since it was an unrenewable resource. Irish bogs also provided a wildlife habitat unique in all of Europe, and there was increasing pressure from the EU to consider the environmental consequences of turf-cutting.

Cormac arrived at the site at a quarter past two. The sun was still fairly high overhead, barely veiled by a few wispy clouds. Here and there the bog’s heathery surface was scarred with deep black gashes. There were no ditches here, no fencing, no visible evidence of property boundaries on this raised blanket of turf. And yet he’d wager each of the locals knew precisely where his own turf allotment ended and his neighbor’s began. A random scattering of spiky, pale green furze bushes, not yet covered in bright saffron blossoms, stood close to the road. Beyond them, a patch of bog cotton shivered in the breeze. And beyond that, about fifty yards away, Cormac could see a small group of people, including Nora Gavin and a uniformed Garda officer. He felt something like dread as he stepped into his waterproof trousers, then carefully removed his shoes and plunged each stocking foot into a sturdy wellington. He stood for a moment at the roadside, squinting as he surveyed the horizon for some fixed point, a church steeple or radio tower, anything that would help him map out exactly where the body had been discovered; nothing appeared. A short distance down the road, the door of an ancient-looking Toyota opened, and a squarish man in a brown leather jacket emerged. A slight protrusion of the man’s midsection suggested a fondness for porter, and the sunlight glinted off his silvery-white hair. He seemed to have been waiting. Cormac lifted his jacket and site kit out of the passenger seat and extended his hand as the man drew near.

“Cormac Maguire. The National Museum asked me to oversee the excavation.”

“Ah, the archaeologist,” said the man, taking the hand Cormac proffered and giving it a firm squeeze. Now that Cormac was closer, he could see the man’s fresh pink countenance belied his hoary head; he was probably no more than forty-five.

“Detective Garrett Devaney,” the man said. “Dr. Gavin will be glad to see you. Said she had to wait for you to begin.” Devaney spoke out of the corner of his mouth, as if every word were an aside, and his pale blue eyes darted slantwise under their lids, giving him a perpetual look of wry amusement. Then the policeman tipped his head across the bog, and they turned to make their way to the gathering, treading carefully over the soggy ground, with Devaney leading the way and talking backward at Cormac. “You probably know most of it, local farmer cutting turf. According to him, nobody’s so much as opened a drain on that section for a hundred years or more. Malachy Drummond—you know Drummond, the pathologist?—apparently agreed. He was in and out of it in about ten minutes this morning.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s a detective still doing here, all the way from…”

“Loughrea.”

“…from Loughrea, if this isn’t reckoned to be one of your unsolved murders?”

“Ah well, we didn’t know that for certain, now did we? There was some notion it might be a woman gone missing from nearby. I’m just here to clear up any questions on that score. And I live just down the road.”

“Is there much disturbance around the body?”

“It’s fairly clean,” Devaney said. “Once he realized what he was onto, the lad with the spade set it down in a bit of a hurry.”

Nora Gavin approached as they drew nearer the cutaway. She was taller than Cormac remembered, and dressed as he was, in jeans and wellingtons, but no waterproofs. Her large blue eyes, dark hair, and milk-white skin exemplified the paradoxical features so common in Ireland. Occasionally some word or inflection would hint at her Irish origins, but for the most part, Nora’s accent betrayed the years she’d spent in the broad middle of America. Her hair was different, perhaps shorter than the last time they’d met, and drew Cormac’s attention to the graceful line of her neck, something he’d not noticed before. In his recent fit of self-recrimination for the way he’d behaved toward Nora, Cormac had quite forgotten how thoroughly attractive she was, and felt vast relief that the excitement of the occasion seemed to have removed any awkwardness about their last encounter.

“Cormac, it’s good to see you,” she said, reaching out to take his hand. “I’m realizing I must have driven the whole way like an absolute maniac, and I’m sorry to say I’ve been pestering these poor people with questions.”

“I apologize for keeping you waiting,” Cormac said. “Good to see you as well.” He turned to Devaney. “The man who found the body—is he here?”

“Brendan McGann,” Devaney said, indicating the stocky man of about thirty who stood a few feet from him, leaning on the handle of a two-grain fork. The shaggy curls that framed McGann’s face cast it into shadow. Apart from the reticent farmer, the mood of the group was expectant as Devaney introduced them. Declan Mullins, the young Garda officer, obviously fresh out of the academy at Templemore, had a slender neck and prominent ears, which lent him the air of an overgrown altar boy. The fair-haired woman in the denim jacket and Indian skirt, whom he guessed to be in her mid-twenties, was McGann’s sister, Una. Cormac was struck by her large dark eyes, and the way her broad mouth turned up slightly at the corners. But most unusual were her hands and fingernails, which were stained as though they’d been steeped in blackberry juice.

“All right if I have a look?” Cormac asked Brendan McGann, who said nothing, but put his lips together and tipped his head to signal assent. Cormac climbed carefully into the hole with his site bag, feeling the soggy turf spring like rubber under his weight. The cutaway was a space seven or eight feet in length, but narrower than a man’s arm span—large enough for one person to work comfortably enough, but extremely close quarters for two. One wall rose higher than the other, and its surface, which graduated from sepia to coal-black, bore the oblique impressions of a foot slean. The floor was uneven, and Cormac turned his attention to the area of loose peat where Brendan McGann had apparently been stopped in his work. He knelt and used his bare hands to scrape away the damp peat that had been replaced over the body. It was too risky to use a trowel in a bog excavation: a sharp metal edge could too easily damage waterlogged objects. His breath came faster as he caught the first glimpse of finely preserved hair and skin, but he was unprepared for the wave of pity that struck him at the sight of an ear, as small and fragile as that of a child. He looked up to see Nora Gavin crouched at the very edge of the cutaway, captivated by the grisly image that had just emerged from the peat.

“Are you ready?” Cormac asked. She nodded wordlessly, then climbed down into the cutaway beside him.

“First we have to determine the way the body is situated before we begin the complete excavation,” Cormac said. “The head appears to be turned at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to the cutaway floor here, which means the body could be articulated in any number of different ways.” He was aware that this was probably Nora’s first experience of a bog body in situ, so after carefully covering the head once more with wet peat, Cormac pulled paper and pencil from his bag and hastily drew a sketch to show her what they were about to do.

“So, here’s the head—right? The body could be fully extended or flexed, and it could also be angled downward, if it’s intact. We’ll mark out as much of a circle as we can, then dig small test pits, like this,” he said, making small circles on the diagram, “starting from the outside of the circle and moving inward. That way we can establish how large a block of peat will have to be removed. The pits should be about fifty centimeters apart, and twenty to thirty centimeters deep. We’ll have to dig with our bare hands; that way we can’t do any damage, and it’s important for sensing the texture of the surrounding material.” He unstrapped his wristwatch, glancing at it briefly before putting it into his pocket. “If only it weren’t so late in the day. We’ll have to work quickly.” He handed her his waterproof jacket. “You can kneel on this if you like. Any last thoughts before we get stuck in?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. Her eyes rested for an instant on his stubbly chin, and as she turned away, Cormac felt a faint flush of embarrassment; in the rush to get out here he hadn’t taken the time to shave. He lifted his sweater over his head and rolled up his sleeves. As he worked, plunging his bare arm into the dense, waterlogged peat, he considered that there was nothing in the world quite like the consistency of turf. If a bog wasn’t exactly liquid, it wasn’t quite solid either, but a curious mixture somewhere between the two. It was also extremely cold; with their sleeves and shirt fronts completely soaked through, both he and Nora had to stop every few minutes to warm their hands. After nearly twenty minutes thoroughly probing almost the entire arc of their circle, they had turned up nothing at all.

“Is it just me,” she asked, leaning back and rubbing off the tiny flecks of wet peat that stuck to her arms, “or is something missing here—like any sign of a body?”

“Let’s have another look at her,” Cormac said. With Nora watching over his shoulder, he removed a larger portion of the protective peat, to find the woman’s features obscured by her long red hair, which clung like seaweed on a victim of drowning. Bog tannins gave hair of every hue—even black hair—a reddish tinge, but it was still possible to tell the original color. Cormac carefully lifted the damp strands and laid them aside, then froze when he saw what lay beneath. The girl’s mouth was clamped tightly shut, her top teeth deeply embedded in the flesh of her lower lip. One eye stared wildly; the other was half closed. Her face seemed distorted with fear, a far cry from the images he’d seen of Iron Age bog men, whose unblemished bodies and tranquil expressions led to theories that they were either drugged, or willing victims of sacrifice. In its brief exposure to the air, the girl’s hair had already begun to dry, and a few strands began to play in the breeze that scooped down into the trench. Something about this tiny movement made it seem, for one surreal instant, that she was alive. Cormac felt Nora Gavin’s involuntary start beside him. “Shall I go on?” he asked. Nora’s head slowly turned until her eyes met his, and she nodded.

Cormac continued scraping away the soft black turf with his fingers, until what he had half suspected was confirmed. The girl’s neck ended abruptly, he estimated, between the third and fourth vertebrae. He sat back on his heels.

“My God,” Nora said. “She’s been decapitated.”

The girl was young, perhaps no more than twenty, and, if you removed the ghastly expression, had probably been quite beautiful, with a gracefully arched brow, high cheekbones, and a delicate chin. Beside his knee, Cormac could make out a ragged fringe of rough fabric, like torn burlap. Who was this girl, that she had come to such a harsh and desolate end? When he rose slowly to his feet again, he found the McGanns and the young policeman gazing at her solemnly, as he and Nora had, in silence.

The sound of voices came from the road. Detective Devaney was having words with a newcomer—a tall, fair-haired man dressed in jeans and heavy work boots. The man broke away from Devaney, and began to cross in long strides to the digging site. Devaney followed after, leaping sideways through the heather like a terrier. They could hear the policeman’s words: “…completely unrelated…Haven’t we promised to notify you if there’s any news at all?” The stranger ignored Devaney, and marched stone-faced through the scrub. When he reached the cutaway, the man was breathing heavily, though he still said nothing. His eyes met Cormac’s for an instant, but his gaze was distracted until it at last seized upon the terrible, upturned face of the red-haired girl. And at that moment, all purpose seemed to drain out of him. He fell to his knees and clapped a hand over his eyes, as if suddenly overcome by extreme exhaustion or relief. After a moment or two, Una McGann stepped to the stranger’s side and helped him to his feet.

“Hugh,” she said, looking into his face intently, “you know it isn’t Mina.” He nodded mutely, then straightened and let her walk with him away from the trench. Devaney’s eyes had never left the stranger’s face. Now the policeman raised a hand to the back of his neck and sighed. Cormac caught another slight movement with the corner of his eye, and glanced up to see Brendan McGann twisting the two-grain fork in his hands, his eyes trained on his sister’s back.

In the course of his work, Cormac had often felt like a detective, sorting through evidence and piecing together clues to unlock the secrets and the lives of those long dead. Here were two mysteries dropped in tandem right into his lap. What—if anything—had they to do with one another? He wished he could keep digging until he had discovered what word or thought or deed had brought the red-haired girl to this place. But archaeology was not that kind of science. Whatever small knowledge he could gain came in shards, in fragments, in frustrating, piecemeal fashion. Would they ever find out who she was, or why she died? He looked down into the dead girl’s once-beautiful face, and pledged that he would try.

3

Nora Gavin found it strange that no one had said a word when Una McGann and the stranger walked away from the site, but she had followed Cormac’s lead and fallen to work again. The initial shock of seeing the dead girl’s hair, so like Triona’s, had been unsettling enough. Nora knew she must not think about her sister, at least not while there was still work to be done. She forced herself to focus instead on Cormac’s instructions, and on what she must do once she got back to Dublin. She’d call and arrange for a technician to meet her at Collins Barracks tonight, so that this curious relic might be deposited in the refrigeration unit as soon as possible. Tomorrow she’d take the hair and tissue samples they needed for carbon dating and further chemical testing. She’d schedule a CT scan at one of the local hospitals immediately after the preliminary exam, if they could fit her in. Much of what they knew about bog specimens today was based on past blunders. The primary mistake had usually been in waiting too long before beginning examination and conservation, and the result was that the specimens had begun to decay. This girl might not be as important a find as the Meenybraddan woman back in 1978, but Nora wanted to make sure that they found out as much as they possibly could from her.

The crowd at the cutaway had thinned considerably by the time they finished the excavation: the farmer, Brendan McGann, had cleared off shortly after his sister left the scene, and the young Garda officer had eventually drifted back to his station in Dunbeg. Only Detective Devaney remained, standing by with arms crossed, looking down at his feet and occasionally toeing the earth like a hopeful suitor. The block of peat that she and Cormac removed, though not large, was extremely heavy. Cormac had rigged a sort of makeshift stretcher but it took two of them to lift the thing and convey it across the bog to the road, where they set it gently in the trunk of her car; Devaney followed after. As she arranged the items in the trunk to keep the plastic-wrapped bundle from sliding in transit, Nora wondered why the policeman had bothered hanging around so long. There was something tentative in his manner, as if he felt he really ought to return to work but couldn’t let go of some idea that was rattling around in his brain. Maybe he was waiting until the three of them were alone to tell them what was going on here. And if he didn’t bring it up, then she bloody well would.

“I’ll stay on and clear up around the site,” Cormac said to her. “You’d better be heading back.”

“So that’s it—you’re finished here?” Devaney asked.

“Well, we’ve searched the immediate area pretty thoroughly,” Cormac said, wiping his hands. “We can’t just go tearing up turf at random. Things shift around in bogs, Detective. It’s almost like an underground lake. Even if the girl’s body had been nearby at one time, there’s no telling where it’s got to by now.”

Devaney’s tone was studiously nonchalant. “I don’t suppose ground-probing radar would be any use?”

“No use at all on a bog,” Cormac said. “All the organic material is waterlogged. Doesn’t matter what it is—turf, tree stump, body—it all reads exactly the same. That’s what makes a bog the ideal place to hide a corpse. But I’m sure you know that, Detective.” Devaney frowned and rubbed his chin.

Did Cormac know something that she didn’t? “Would you mind filling us in?” she asked the policeman. “Who was that guy? And who’s Mina? It seems like I’m the only one here who doesn’t have the full story.”

Devaney considered them both for a moment before speaking. “His name is Osborne. Local gentry, I suppose you’d call him—lives at the big house on the lake beyond. His wife disappeared just over two years ago. Maybe he thought we’d found her.” Nora felt as though she’d been punched.

“The whole area was searched at the time of the disappearance—civil defense, underwater units, the lot—and none of the search teams came up with anything. Last year all the bog holes in East Galway got another going-over. We’ve put out numerous appeals, and there’s been a generous reward all along, but nobody’s come forward. Nobody knows a thing. It’s as if the ground just opened and swallowed her up.”

“Don’t you have any suspects?”

“We’ve no proof a crime was even committed,” Devaney said, the dismay audible in his voice.

“What about that guy, Osborne?”

“He was interviewed several times. No solid alibi for the time of the disappearance, but nobody could manage to find any material evidence that would crack his story. And without a body… Now the higher-ups want to lump his case in with a whole string of women gone missing over the last five years—in spite of the fact that it doesn’t fit.”

“Why not?” Cormac asked.

“Well, for one thing, none of the others involved a child. Osborne’s young son is missing as well.”

“Could Mina have had some reason to leave, Detective?” Nora heard herself asking. “People sometimes disappear on purpose.”

“If you’re running away, usually someone’s got a clue. Nobody’s seen Mina Osborne. And I mean no one. Not her family, not her closest friends. And we couldn’t find a reason that she might have left. According to all the world, the Osbornes had the perfect marriage. No one says a word to the contrary.”

“How do people know what really goes on?” Nora murmured. That’s what people had said about Peter and Triona as well, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. She felt queasy. First the red hair and now this; the coincidences were beginning to unnerve her.

“So what do you think happened to them, Detective?” Cormac asked.

“At this point I don’t think anything at all.”

“It seems to me if you’re hanging around asking questions about ground-probing radar, you might have some theories,” Cormac said.

“Oh, I have a few. But the trouble with theories is they don’t prove a fucking thing”—he cast an apologetic look at Nora—“if you’ll pardon the expression. And evidence-wise, everything has come up blank.” He paused. “But I know two things: As far as we know, Mina Osborne hasn’t made contact with anyone since her disappearance. And her husband’s been pushing to get turf-cutting in the area banned altogether. I have to ask myself why.”

“The man was devastated,” Cormac said. “We all saw him.”

“So we did” came Devaney’s terse reply.

Nora felt her throat constrict as she tried to understand what the policeman was saying: that Osborne’s show of grief could have been exactly that—a show. Her face felt frozen; she hoped it could mask her feelings. She felt a hand on her elbow.

“Nora—are you all right?” Cormac asked. His dark eyes scanned her face. “You look a bit pale.”

“I’m fine,” she said, pulling away. “I just need a drink; I’m a bit parched.” She went around to the driver’s side of the car to fetch her water bottle, and lifted it to take a long swallow, hoping that her hand wasn’t visibly shaking.

“I shouldn’t really be talking about any of this,” Devaney finally said. “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

“Thanks for explaining, Detective,” Cormac said. Nora could still feel his eyes on her. “We’d like to help, of course, but I’m not sure there’s anything we can do. Dr. Gavin’s got to be leaving straightaway for Dublin. I’ll stay and finish up here in the morning, but—”

“You’re doing what you have to do,” Devaney said, looking away. “So are we all.”

As she indicated her turn and pulled cautiously out onto the main road to Portumna, Nora allowed her thoughts to settle on the strange cargo she carried. It was difficult not to think of it; at every rough patch in the road, she could feel the weight of the waterlogged block of peat in the trunk of the car. Remembering the expression she had seen stamped on the young woman’s features, Nora felt a shiver. She told herself it was the damp. She hadn’t bothered to change before leaving the site, and now her jeans felt clammy against her skin, and the small bits of peat that still stuck to her arms were beginning to itch beneath her thick sweater. She reached forward to turn on the car’s heater.

If only there were some clue, some lead that would help them find out more about this red-haired girl. Unfortunately they had found no clothing of any kind, which was often useful in dating bog bodies. Nothing but that piece of burlap. Perhaps the absence of the body was a clue in itself. Was the girl’s head intended as a trophy of some kind, an offering to some terrible deity? She’d often read that the ancient Celts revered the head as the seat of the soul, and had decorated their shrines and holy places with the skulls and desiccated heads of their enemies. Several of the most well-preserved bog bodies in Europe were thought to be human sacrifices, because they’d undergone what Celtic scholars called a “triple death”—ritual garrotting, slitting of the throat, and finally drowning, their bodies weighted down with stones or branches—perhaps to appease a blood-thirsty pagan trinity. Was this red-haired girl among those chosen for such a role, in which the last stage of her triple death was beheading? Had she committed some unpardonable sin—adultery, perhaps, or murder—for which her community had wreaked its punishment and cast her into the bog? Or was she simply the victim of murder, carved up and disposed of in such a gruesome way?

Nora was not unaware of the reputation that she was beginning to earn for what some considered, even in the medical community, a rather macabre and sensational preoccupation. In addition to her duties as a parttime anatomy lecturer at Trinity, she was pursuing graduate level work of her own: a major research project studying the physical and chemical effects of bog burial. The irony was that this was her first experience of an actual bog body; all her research thus far had been carried out on mummified museum specimens, or on “paper bodies”—written records of remains that had been destroyed or reburied soon after their discovery.

Why should this unfortunate creature be any different from the dozens of other nameless souls who lost their way or were left purposely in such dangerous, deserted places? She remembered poring for hours over the gazetteer of Irish bog bodies that Gabriel McCrossan had been helping her to update, and being moved by its bare descriptions—devoid of identity, but imbued with unforgettable detail: a young child of indeterminate gender dressed in a pinafore, with boxwood comb, leather purse, and ball of thread still in its pocket; a man’s left foot with stocking and leather shoe intact; the partially preserved body of a young woman, and, nearby, the skeletal remains of an infant with a small buckled leather strap around its neck. Each of these had a story as well, but they were all lost now, and would never be discovered. The red-haired girl would no doubt end up as just another anonymous entry, the minutiae of her life erased by time. And yet Nora found herself unable to abandon the idea that even a single clue might point the way toward the red-haired girl’s identity. She tried to remember whether the girl had any kind of distinctive hairstyle—any kind of plait or knot that would help suggest a date. All at once her memory was overtaken by a sensation, the feeling of the wiry strands against her fingertips as she pulled the hairbrush through her younger sister’s luxuriant mane with quick, sure strokes, parting and twisting three strands into a single thick braid—Ouch, Nora, you’re pulling too hard, Triona’s plaintive cry echoed in her head, along with her own peevish reply: I am not pulling. If you’d ever stop squirming—

The edges of the road swam as tears welled up in her eyes, and Nora felt as if she would choke, but she pulled off the road and fought against the memory. The events of this day opened a fissure in the wall she had tried to build around her heart, and now she felt it crumble and give way, engulfing her once more in a fierce, pulverizing flood of grief.

She had told no one in Ireland about her sister’s brutal murder. Gabriel had come to know a few of the facts, but he didn’t know that the strongest suspect was Triona’s own husband, Peter Hallett. And Nora was certain that no one had told Gabriel how the desire to see her sister’s killer brought to justice had taken over and consumed her. That single, desperate need had pushed aside everything else: her job, her relationships, her whole life. She should have stayed and kept fighting, for Elizabeth’s sake; the child was only six when Triona died. A few months after the murder, when Peter found out Nora was helping the police to find evidence against him, he had abruptly cut her off from any contact with her niece. After three years of bitter frustration, Nora’s endurance had nearly been exhausted. She told herself she had not given up—that would never happen—but she had come to Ireland eighteen months ago to think and recover her strength.

But to come all this way and be faced with another red-haired victim, a missing wife, a husband who might have killed her—Nora knew that if she were in a slightly more paranoid frame of mind, she could believe that someone, something, was deliberately mocking her sorrow.

4

Nuala Devaney was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, fiddling with the clasp on her necklace when her husband stepped forward to help.

“I might be late,” she said to him over her shoulder. “It’s a couple over from Belgium, so I told them we might go out for a drink after they look at the house, you know, showing off the local.” Devaney settled the tiny clasp, then stepped back to gaze at his wife, admiring the way she looked in that particular pale green suit. He often felt that while approaching middle age had diminished him in many ways, it had only improved Nuala.

“Thanks, love. The kettle’s just boiled, and your supper’s in the cooker. Would you believe they’re looking at a place up in Tullymore? A ruin. None of them are the least bit interested in a new house; they all want the old falling-down cottages. Preferably thatched, if you don’t mind.” She paused and looked straight at him, as if trying to gauge whether he’d heard a word she’d said. “Are you all right, Gar?”

“Grand,” he said. “I’ve some paperwork to do.” He gestured toward the briefcase sitting at the other end of the kitchen table. “And then I’m headed down to the session.”

“Right,” she said with a wry half-smile, but evidently relieved that his plans were at least settled. “I’m off, then.” He watched out the kitchen window as she backed her sleek new silver sedan out of the narrow drive.

As he took the hot plate of food from the oven, Devaney told himself once again how glad he was that Nuala enjoyed her work. They were certainly better off financially since she had begun working, and he was proud that she was the best auctioneer in this part of the county. But it also pained him that she had no time for the music; he winced at her insistence that the children pursue things that would be—in her words—“more useful.” For all her acuteness in reading people on the verge of buying property, he sometimes felt that she could no longer read him—or maybe she didn’t want to. Music was all he had to pass on. He’d nothing at all of any value, except for the tunes and stories he’d collected in hours spent drinking cups of tea and pints of porter with thick-fingered old men in baggy-kneed trousers who never washed but once a week, if that. He thought of the hollow ruin of a thatched house Nuala was showing tonight, and the sheer quantity of culture that was wiped out whenever any one of the old players was laid to rest. How often had he traveled up the road when he was younger to have a few tunes with Christy Mahon, God rest him, a grizzled old fiddler who had the time—and above all the patience—to sit and go over the tricky part of a tune with him, making sure he got the notes and the ornamentation just right. Their musical companionship had to do with something neither of them could begin to put into words, and thankfully, they didn’t have to; the music did it for them. A wild, lonely melody could carry him back to a place beyond his own lifetime, when music and poetry had been kept alive in secret, carried on in defiance of death and despair. Through him, this music was his children’s connection to the joy and pain of a past all too easily forgotten or denied.

Devaney thought of his children. His firstborn, Orla, whose name meant “golden,” was fair-haired like her mother, poised and intelligent. At seventeen, Orla was already a champion debater; she’d make a fine president, he thought, then revised himself. Why settle for a figurehead job like president? Give her another few years and she’d make a better prime minister than some of the fucking magpies they had running the country today.

Padraig, whose dark looks reminded him of himself as a boy, was fifteen this year. He had only recently been transformed from a bright and talkative boy into a hollow-chested, silent teenager, whose entire life seemed to revolve around acquiring the latest computer game or piece of athletic gear. Devaney had felt himself diminish in his son’s eyes these last two years. It was inevitable, he supposed, remembering how his own father had suffered a similar reduction in stature. Padraig had once shown a bit of interest in the fiddle when he was younger, but he didn’t have the gra for it, the hunger and thirst for music that would have kept him going.

His younger daughter, Roisin, who had just turned eleven, was still a riddle. Dark-haired, thin of face, and serious beyond her years, Roisin still called him Daddy, as she had when she was small, and was the only one of the three who seemed to value his company at all anymore. Perhaps because she was the youngest, he felt his age most at her growing up.

Padraig was at football practice this evening, and Orla and Roisin were in their rooms doing schoolwork. Devaney found himself alone in the kitchen as the evening light waned, sipping on a lukewarm mug of tea. He’d always been restless, but the feeling had increased since he’d given up smoking eighteen months ago. This is a lovely new house, Nuala had said, please let’s not have it reeking of cigarettes. He’d complied, partly because he knew he ought to give them up anyway, and partly to keep the peace. But it was devilishly hard to quit, and he wished right now for the familiar sight of a fag in an ashtray beside him, and the feeling of smoke filling his lungs. He took another drink of tea instead, looking out his back window, imagining Dunbeg just a few miles down the lakeshore. Strange to think how much he knew about all the people in the town. Even though he worked out of the detective unit fifteen miles away in Loughrea, being any sort of a policeman in a small town was a bit like being a priest: receiving and keeping private confidences was part of the job, whether you invited them or not. It went both ways, of course. They all knew about him as well, or thought they did. They knew he’d seen his share of city policing, perhaps more than his share, in seven years on the murder squad in Cork. Many of them knew the recent transfer to Loughrea had not been his own idea.

But none of them would ever fully grasp the twist of fate that had brought him to this place. Devaney himself, despite all the thousands of times he’d relived every second of that pursuit gone fatally wrong, could never put his finger on it. Had it been a conscious decision or pure instinct that made him ultimately responsible for the deaths of two people? One was a suspect he’d been after for months, a twisted piece of work named Johnny Comerford, who had terrorized and battered to death an elderly couple in their own home. The other was a seven-year-old child named Julia Mangan, the daughter of Comerford’s sometime girlfriend. On his way home from the Anglesea station one evening, he’d seen Comerford leaving a pub along the quays, so he’d followed, not expecting the bastard to take off. The girl was so small he hadn’t even seen her in the car. Once outside of town, Comerford missed a turn at a T-junction and plowed head-on into a stone wall.

Although Devaney himself hadn’t been injured, he’d been placed on mandatory medical leave for the duration of the inquiry into the crash. He wasn’t charged, but when his medical leave was up he was told his choices were Loughrea or leaving the Guards altogether. He had taken the transfer—which was in essence a demotion—because he had not known what else to do. And in the weeks he’d spent on leave, the music had been his only solace, the only thing that could replace the memory that kept replaying in his head, of approaching Comerford’s silent, demolished car, and the sinking horror of finding that child’s shattered body in the passenger seat. Perhaps that’s why Nuala disliked hearing him play, he thought, if it brought back to her that terrible time, without knowing that in playing the same tunes, the same sequence of notes again and again, he found a kind of release, and that release—not his family and not his work—was the one thing that kept him from being slowly crushed to death by the weight of remorse.

As he drained the last of the tea from his mug and got up to set his dinner plate in the sink, Devaney realized that he’d been plagued the past couple of days by the turn of a reel that had been traveling through his head. He crossed and took out his fiddle from behind the pine dresser. It was in an old-fashioned case, not the new molded-plastic variety, but a wooden box, wide at one end and narrow at the other, the precise shape and size of a miniature coffin. He always thought of the instrument as Christy’s fiddle. The old man had handed it on when the arthritis had got into his fingers and he could no longer play. After applying rosin up and down the length of the bow, Devaney took up the fiddle and played easily through the first part of the troublesome tune, feeling his way around the contours of the notes, knowing that as he played each one, his fingers would remember their places the next time it came to him. He attacked the irksome phrase again and again, until he finally made it through the turn, the music spilling forth from his bow, flowing like the water of a stream that has finally found its way through a rocky crevice.

That was the way he had always worked through stubborn cases as well; it was always a matter of approach, of taking a run at the thing from various angles. There had to be some crack in the Osborne case, he was sure of it. And his conviction had been further cemented by the odd conversation he’d had with the superintendent this evening, just before leaving the office.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Devaney had only stuck his head in at Superintendent Boylan’s door after putting his jacket on; Boylan took a particular exception to detectives coming into his office in shirtsleeves. Despite the fact that he’d never had an original thought in his life, Brian Boylan possessed a rare instinct for the kind of political maneuvering that had got him where he was today. His office had been done up far beyond the basic standard issue for a superintendent of detectives. And with his smartly tailored suits and manicured nails, Boylan had always stood out among his colleagues; the man had the look of an actor, someone who took on whatever role others expected him to play. Devaney himself had seen too many shrewd, capable detectives passed over for promotion because they didn’t look the part the higher-ups had in mind for their modern police force, and some bollocks like Boylan did. Like it was some fucking film they were casting. Boylan had been handling Devaney cautiously to this point, no doubt worried that he might crack under pressure, so he’d been given only the most elementary cases, the most plodding detective work—essentially to keep him occupied, and everyone in the Loughrea station knew it.

“Ah yes, come in, please,” Boylan said, making no effort to rise or offer a chair, which felt like a transparent attempt to underscore their difference in rank. The superintendent made a show of marking his place in the massive interdepartmental report he was reading, then finally looked up and addressed Devaney with an air of preoccupation. “I wanted to let you know that you may have to make do without a partner for the time being. It’s in process, however, and I’ll let you know as soon as the paperwork is complete.” Devaney’s most recent partner had celebrated his retirement a fortnight ago. “Remind me again what you’re working on at the moment?”

“A break-in at Tynagh, and the rash of fires around Killimor.”

“Good, good,” Boylan said, nodding.

Devaney felt like a right eejit standing on the carpet. He thought: You should know, you’re the one making bloody sure I get all the scut work around here.

“I heard Hugh Osborne turned up at that business out at Drumcleggan today,” Boylan said. “I think you know that case has gone to the task force in Dublin.”

Devaney kept his face impassive. “Yes, sir, I had heard that.”

“They’ve got the resources, let them have a go. It’s out of our hands now.” Devaney remained silent. “How would it look if one of my officers seems to be questioning the decision to make that referral?” Here was the real sore point.

“It doesn’t fit the profile,” Devaney said. He recognized immediately that he’d made a mistake, but it was too late. “There’s the child, for a start—”

Boylan cut him off: “You’ll leave it alone.” The superintendent’s voice was even, but the color had drained from his face. “Do you understand?” His eyes locked on to Devaney’s, daring him to say something, anything, in defiance of a direct order.

“I understand,” Devaney said. He found it curious that Boylan’s eyes dropped first. “If that’s all, sir.”

“Yes, that was all.” Boylan swiveled his chair away abruptly, and turned to his place in the thick report once more.

Fuck Boylan anyway, Devaney had thought as he trudged back down the corridor. When he returned to the detective division office he saw the Osborne file at the corner of his desk. Someone might have seen the thing and mentioned it to the superintendent. He’d cast a glance around, and, on finding he was alone in the office, casually slid the bulky file into his bag.

Devaney stopped playing abruptly and set the fiddle back in its case. He remembered as he reached for the file his initial curiosity about the Osborne case when he’d first come to Dunbeg. One particularly slow afternoon, he’d gone through the drawer full of unsolved cases, and had been intrigued by this one. The file was nearly three inches thick, crammed with written reports, witness statements, photographs, and news clippings. It was exactly the kind of case that he knew from experience would get under his skin, gnawing at his conscience every day that it went unsolved.

The case had gone to Operation Trace because of growing speculation that a series of disappearances over the past five years might be related. There was talk of a serial killer. But a blind man could see that Mina Osborne stood out from the other victims. Every one of the women had disappeared while walking along quiet country roads. But all the rest were younger, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two; Mina Osborne was twenty-nine years old. And all of the younger women went missing within a forty-kilometer radius of Portlaoise; Mina Osborne was the only one well outside that circle. And finally, there was the little boy. None of the others had a child in tow. One of the younger girls had a baby, right enough, but the child was spending the night with the girl’s parents when she disappeared.

Devaney remembered the sudden urge he’d had that afternoon to drive a bulldozer into Drumcleggan Bog and dig up the whole fucking thing. If Osborne was responsible, his performance as the grieving husband out on the bog could have been deliberately staged to throw them off the scent. Devaney knew he’d have to work through this, step by step. If Mina Osborne and her child were already dead, there was no use rushing if he couldn’t build a case against the person—or persons—responsible. There had been a thorough investigation, but something was still missing, some element they hadn’t yet considered. The trouble was, you couldn’t tell which piece was missing until the thing was nearly put together.

He turned to the original missing person report. Here was something he had never noticed before. The signature at the bottom of the form was “Detective Sgt BF Boylan.” So Boylan had headed up this case. No wonder he wanted to get it off his desk and into the hands of the national task force. Beneath the first report was a photograph of Hugh, Mina, and Christopher Osborne—at some holiday or other, it looked like. Mina was sitting in a chair with the child on her lap; Osborne knelt by her side, holding one of his son’s hands in his own, his free hand gesturing toward the photographer. The little boy looked curious and excited, his face upturned toward his mother’s. Mina Osborne was a beautiful woman, Devaney thought. Her straight teeth seemed very white in contrast to her dusky skin, and she wore a colorful sari, dark crimson cloth woven at the edge with gold. Her look was one of contented amusement. He wondered who took the picture. The back of the photo was blank.

He turned back to the missing person report on Mina Osborne and read through the full description: height, weight, build, and smaller particulars like teeth, voice, accent, gait, and distinguishing marks; haunts and habits. There was a sketch of a distinctive hair clip that several people reported seeing her wearing just before the disappearance—a pair of metal filigree elephants.

What did they have? A disappearance. Murder, suicide, accident, kidnapping, flight—there was not enough to prove or disprove any one of several possibilities. But there were small things, not even clues, really, that pointed toward some possibilities and away from others; perhaps that was the place to begin.

There had evidently been some brief discussion of kidnapping, but there had never been a demand for ransom. Could Mina Osborne have fled, as Dr. Gavin had suggested, skipped the country without leaving a trail? If she had, the question was not only how, but why. Devaney made a note to check through the file for medical records on Mina and Christopher Osborne, to see if there was ever any suggestion of physical abuse. Provided all the family and friends they’d contacted were telling the truth, no one had heard from Mina Osborne since she went missing.

In the case of accident or suicide, you’d expect to find bodies. Certainly there were cases of people disappearing down bog holes. Mina Osborne hadn’t lived in the area long enough to know the safe shortcuts through the bog like the locals did. But hardly anyone traveled on foot through bogland anymore, not like in the old days, and nothing in the circumstances immediately suggested that possibility. Besides, Drumcleggan Bog was on the other side of her home from the village; there was no reason to be crossing it at all. No, if Mina Osborne was in the bog, it wasn’t her own doing. Murder was the likeliest scenario, and Hugh Osborne remained the likeliest suspect.

Osborne had phoned the Dunbeg Garda station at 10 P. M. one night in early October, just over two and a half years ago. His story was that he’d been away for three days, attending an academic conference at Oxford. He’d taken an early afternoon flight from Heathrow and driven up from Shannon Airport. When he got home around six that evening, he found his wife’s car in the old stable that served as their garage, but she and their son were nowhere to be found. According to another occupant of the house, a Lucy Osborne, Mina had left for Dunbeg with her son around one o’clock that afternoon. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for her to travel the short distance to the village on foot, with Christopher in a collapsible pushchair, so the car in the garage suggested nothing out of order. When there was still no sign of them at half-seven, Osborne reported that he’d begun searching the house and grounds, and that just after ten he had phoned the Gardai. But because Mina Osborne was a responsible adult, and because there was no evidence of foul play, the police could do nothing further until seventy-two hours had elapsed from the time she was last seen.

When the next day and the next passed without word, extra Guards were brought in to help mount a search. They began scouring the fields and roadsides between the house and the village, and combing the grounds at Bracklyn House on foot. Photos of the missing mother and child were dispatched to seaports, train stations, and air terminals all over the country. The police also began questioning people in town. Mina Osborne had first gone to the local Allied Irish Bank branch, where she had withdrawn two hundred pounds. Then she’d taken her son into Pilkington’s and bought him a new pair of red boots, which he had worn out of the shop. She was last seen leaving the village on the Drumcleggan road, presumably on her way home. Those who had seen her in the village described Mina’s mood as quieter than usual, even downcast. No one had ever found the pushchair. Heavy rain in the days following the disappearance had washed away any evidence of tracks. When the ground search turned up nothing by the fourth day, they searched the lakebed around the house and the village. The divers had come up empty-handed.

It was only then that the police had begun questioning Hugh Osborne more closely concerning his whereabouts on the actual day of the disappearance. He had indeed been traveling home from a conference, but his return flight from London had landed in Shannon at noon, a full six hours before he’d arrived home at Bracklyn. The drive from the airport couldn’t have taken more than two hours. The only explanation Osborne offered was that he’d been up late the night before, that he’d felt tired and pulled over along the road above Mountshannon and fallen asleep in the car. They’d found no one to confirm or refute his story. He’d been the primary suspect from that point on. If he were just making it up, surely he could do better than that. They had only the word of two other inhabitants of Bracklyn House, Lucy and Jeremy Osborne, to confirm that Hugh had indeed arrived home from Shannon at six. Now there was a strange setup, Devaney thought: Lucy Osborne was only the widow of some distant cousin, and yet she and her son had been living at Bracklyn for the past eight years. It was possible these two were lying, of course; why should they want to jeopardize their position by grassing up the person who fed them and put a roof over their heads?

Osborne apparently had no major assets other than the house and a few small parcels of land, and in fact was rather strapped for money at the time of his wife’s disappearance. Devaney paged through the file until he found the document he was looking for. According to a statement from Kevin Reidy, a representative from Hanover Life Assurance, from the time of his marriage Hugh Osborne had a substantial life insurance policy on his wife—750,000 euros—and the same amount on himself, each with the surviving spouse listed as beneficiary. Maybe that wasn’t an unusually large amount for someone like Osborne, though by anyone’s standards, it provided motive enough for murder. But what was the use of killing your wife for the insurance money if you couldn’t produce a body? No damning evidence of foul play that way, Devaney supposed, but no claim could be made either, until she was legally dead—seven years in the case of a disappearance.

All right, say you wanted to get rid of a body—or bodies, in this case—so that they’d never be found…Devaney’s thoughts ticked through the various methods of disposal. Whichever you selected, it was a challenge, and the choice often depended on whether the murder was a crime of passion or carefully planned. Burning and burial both took time. The search had concentrated on the outdoors, looking within a radius of ten to fifteen kilometers from Dunbeg, and mainly for any areas of disturbed earth that might indicate a shallow grave. The police had also searched open wells and bog holes. But what about the inside of Bracklyn House? When the focus narrowed in on Osborne, the place was gone over, but old fortresses like that were usually rotten with secret rooms and passages. Nuala had pressed him into a family trip to Portumna Castle last summer, and he remembered the tour guides showing off a hollow built into one of its walls where the family had hidden priests during penal times, when Catholicism was outlawed. Devaney made a note to check on any architectural drawings of Bracklyn House, past or present.

Maybe trying to come up with bodies wasn’t the best approach. In every murder investigation, you tried to get to know the victim. The more you knew, the easier it became to imagine why anyone would want her dead. Mina Osborne was an artist—a painter, he seemed to recall. It might be useful to take a look at her work.

Those years in Cork had taught him that there were plenty of incentives for killing—greed, jealousy, revenge, even love that had turned to bitter hatred. Maybe the investigation had failed to go deep enough into that shadowy realm of impulse and instinct. He remembered, as a young policeman, attending the postmortem of a young woman, an apparent suicide by poisoning. The pathologist had explained what he was about to do: We’ll go for the poison, and we’ll go for the womb, and I’ll wager we find our answer in the latter. And so they had: the girl was several months pregnant—by her married lover, as it eventually turned out.

Hugh Osborne had indeed appeared devastated out on the bog. Did that mean he couldn’t possibly be responsible for killing his wife? Nothing could be taken for granted, not even a father’s love for his own child. Devaney closed the file with a sigh, and remembered the expression on Hugh Osborne’s face when he saw that the person in the soaking turf was not his wife—a complicated mixture of dread, disappointment, and relief. But was the relief from realizing that the woman he loved might still be alive, or simply that her body had not been found? Whoever she was, that red-haired creature in the bog had managed to set something loose, like the genie from a bottle, and he was going to make fucking sure it didn’t get back in again.

5

Just past seven o’clock, Cormac was splashing at the tiny sink in his room above Lynch’s pub in Dunbeg. Devaney had helped him sort out lodging. The accommodation was basic: a single bed and no shower, but at a tenner a night, it would certainly do.

Cormac’s chin was now covered in white lather; as he removed it with short, deft strokes of the razor, he pictured the red-haired girl’s distorted countenance, and tried pressing his own teeth into the pliable flesh of his lower lip. His nostrils recalled the pleasantly rusty tang of the bog air, occasionally layered with the clean, soapy scent of Nora Gavin working closely beside him. They’d arranged to meet at Collins Barracks in Dublin tomorrow afternoon, and Cormac felt himself looking forward to the prospect. But for that one slight flinch down in the cutaway, Nora had remained perfectly composed throughout the excavation—he reminded himself that this was a woman used to working on cadavers, after all—but unless he was mistaken, she’d suddenly gone rigid when Devaney started telling them about the disappearance of Mina Osborne. Of all the things they had seen and heard today, why should that be so upsetting to Nora? Osborne’s anguish had seemed perfectly convincing, but he didn’t envy Devaney the task of sorting truth-tellers from dissemblers. How could you not become jaded, dealing with utterly convincing liars every day?

Cormac rubbed the last bits of lather from his ears and was absently checking his clean-shaven face in the mirror when he heard the sound of a creaking footfall in the hallway outside his door, then silence. A vague disquiet passed through him, then was gone. He swung the door open to find Una McGann with her hand raised, ready to knock.

“Oh, Jaysus Christ, you gave me a fright,” she said.

“Sorry, I thought you were Devaney again,” Cormac replied, crossing to the chair where he’d hung his fresh shirt, feeling suddenly naked and self-conscious in close quarters.

Una remained at the doorway, apparently not wanting to intrude into the small space, but also slightly wary of him, Cormac thought. She crossed her arms and looked at her feet. “I can imagine what he’s been telling you. But I really came to ask if you’d want to join us for supper. There’s nothing open here in the village this time of day, and I thought you could use a decent meal after all your work.”

“You’re very kind; that sounds great,” Cormac said, sitting on the edge of the bed to put on his shoes. “I won’t be a minute. Devaney mentioned there’s a good traditional session here on a Tuesday night.”

“It’s brilliant. My brother Fintan always goes along for it. Do you play, yourself?”

“Flute.” He indicated the instrument case that lay beside him on the bed. “What’s Fintan at?”

“The pipes. Ah, sure, Fintan’s pure stone mad for the music—always was.”

“I was hoping for another chance to speak to Brendan, too,” Cormac said, pulling his last shoelace tight. McGann had disappeared from the bog so quickly this afternoon that he hadn’t had a proper chance to bring up the subject of financial compensation. Artifacts found on Bord na Mona lands paid a fairly decent finder’s fee—mainly to keep the turf board workers honest—but there was no regular system of payment for objects that turned up on private property. Most people didn’t expect anything for discovery of human remains. But part of his job here was to find out whether that would be a problem—without actually asking the question, of course.

“He can be a bit rough, I know, but Brendan is really the decentest man you could meet,” Una said. “He’s just out of sorts because it’s another setback. It’s already the end of April, and he figures we should have finished footing the turf a fortnight ago.”

As they drove out of the village, Cormac began to feel he was getting his bearings about the place. Dunbeg was in the center of a small peninsula that jutted out into Lough Derg. He knew that around the curve of the small inlet north of the town was Bracklyn House, and beyond that another quarter mile down the shore lay the brown expanse of Drumcleggan Bog. The day’s fair weather had lasted into evening, and now there was a high, milky cast to the sunlight that played on the waves of Lough Derg, visible now and again through the overgrown hedgerows as they made their way up the high road out of the village.

Una was quiet for a moment, then asked: “You got the cailin rua safely off to Dublin, then?” The cailin rua, Cormac thought. It was a fitting name for her: the red girl. “Nobody said what’s going to happen to her.”

“Well, Dr. Gavin and the museum staff will see if they can estimate her age, and try to figure out how she died, I suppose. There’d be more to go on, obviously, if the body were also intact, but they can still gather quite a lot of information.” Una was silent, and he could feel her discomfort in the face of his enthusiasm.

“That’s not what you wanted to know, is it?”

“Actually, what I meant was what will happen to her in the end, after all that.”

“Well, at the moment the National Museum is keeping all its bog specimens in a special fridge,” Cormac answered, feeling as he said the words how callous it sounded.

“But what’s it in aid of? Maybe the poor girl deserves some peace.”

“If we can preserve bog remains, then we have a chance to answer questions in the future that we haven’t even conceived of yet. The examinations are carried out with the greatest respect.” Una didn’t seem satisfied by his answers, but said no more.

As they rounded a bend in the road, a forbidding tower house hove into view among the trees. The imposing stonework looked mostly intact, but its roof gaped open toward the sky and tufts of grass and wild phlox grew out of the chimney stones. Narrow windows were slashed into the sides of its gray stone bulk, which was half enshrouded in ivy. Though he’d been down this road earlier, Cormac had not seen it before.

“That’s O’Flaherty’s Tower,” Una said. “They were the big family around here once. It belongs to Bracklyn House now—to Hugh Osborne.”

As Cormac slowed the jeep to study the tower more closely, a large crow appeared out of one of the upper windows, spread its wings, and began to wheel around the ruin. A second bird joined it, then another, and another, in rapid succession until the topmost part was enveloped in a whirling mass of dark wings and a cacophony of croaking calls. The sight touched that place inside him, unrevealed to anyone, where he tucked away such otherworldly images and impressions, things connected somehow to myth and memory, to times and places that modern humankind could not completely understand.

Then, as unexpectedly as they had appeared, the noisy crowd of birds vanished, leaving a single dark shape dipping and soaring around the castle walls, the evening light glinting off its jet-black wings. A voice broke through beside him: “Are you all right?” Una asked. Cormac looked down and saw his hands on the steering wheel, feeling as if he’d just awakened from a dream. The jeep wasn’t moving. He’d come to a full stop in the middle of the road.

“People say the place is haunted,” Una continued, “and looking at you just now, I’m half tempted to believe it.”

“Sorry,” he said, pressing on the accelerator once more. Around a curve in the road, the dense forest around the tower gradually gave way to light undergrowth, and finally to the stone-walled grounds of the Osborne estate. “This is where Hugh Osborne lives?”

Una nodded. Through the imposing stone and wrought-iron gates Cormac could see a lawn and formal gardens, and Bracklyn House itself, a sturdy manor house of dark gray stone, its steep slate roof rimmed around with stepped gables and crenellations. It was modest, as Irish country houses went, and retained the rough-hewn look of the century in which it was built.

“Fine old place,” he said. A harmless remark, but one glance at Una told him that it had tipped the scale.

Her words came in a torrent: “I suppose Devaney explained to you how the police have tried over and over again to pin the blame on Hugh for what happened? Of course there’s no proof, because he didn’t do anything. Just a lot of malicious talk from spiteful people with nothing better to occupy their minds. Whatever happened to Mina and the child, I’m certain Hugh had nothing to do with it. Anyone could see how he adored his family. The last two years have been awful, on top of everything else to have the police sniffing around asking questions, and the whole town watching, and waiting—” She stopped and took a breath, but seemed determined not to shed any tears. “Sometimes I really hate this feckin’ place.”

Why did he imagine that Una McGann had more than once been in the position of defending Hugh Osborne? “I suppose you’ve known him a long time?” He watched her face and posture soften.

“Not long, actually. He’s quite a bit older, and he was always away at school when we were growing up. But I got to know him when I was taking some classes at the university in Galway—he teaches geography there. I’d be hitching up to school the odd time and he’d give me a lift.”

“What were you studying?”

“Studio arts,” Una said. “I never finished.” Her tone suggested there might be more to the story, but he gathered it was not something she felt comfortable talking about. “You’re very good, listening to me go on,” she said.

“Did you know his wife?”

“Not really. Just to say hello. We used to pass along the road. I don’t know how Hugh has kept going at all.”

Cormac hadn’t reached a point where he’d begun to think of himself as a confirmed bachelor, but he had never been married, never been a father. He searched the windows of Bracklyn House for signs of life as he tried to put himself in Hugh Osborne’s place. Una followed his gaze, then looked down at her hands, doubled into fists in her lap.

He wanted to ask Una what she thought might have happened to Mina Osborne, but thought better of it. As they pulled away from the gate, Cormac wondered whether Una’s ministrations to Osborne out on the bog were anything more than neighborly concern. He remembered the fork twisting uneasily in her brother’s hands as well.

They had driven less than a quarter mile when Una spoke up: “You can turn in at the next gate on your left.” Cormac did as she instructed, and the jeep thundered over a cattle grid and up a steep drive. The McGann house was all but invisible from the road, tucked up against the side of the hill, and surrounded on three sides by pale green fir trees that brushed against its eaves. Like many old farmhouses, it was broad-shouldered and compact, close to the ground, with small-paned windows. The exterior had been freshly whitewashed, and the front door and window frames recently painted with glossy black enamel. An old-fashioned dog rose grew to one side of the door, and every flower bed looked lovingly tended. An ancient black car was parked on one side of the tin-covered shed in the haggard. Everything about this place suggested a family farm of thirty, perhaps even forty years ago.

“Brendan’s the man with the spade and the paintbrush here,” Una said. “He loves this place as if it were his child. He was that upset when my father replaced the old thatched roof—he slept out in the shed for three days. When they wanted to build a new house, he was like a briar. Wouldn’t hear of it.”

Cormac understood. A man who still insisted on cutting his own turf by hand wouldn’t exactly be a man who thrived on change. Una pushed open the shiny black front door. The house was divided in two equal halves, with the main hallway down the center. She led him into the kitchen, clearly the heart of the house. A heavy pine table stood in the middle of the room, its oilcloth heaped with onion skins and carrot peelings, and a dresser full of blue willow delft china stood beside the sink. The old stone fireplace still dominated the room, but it was cold at the moment. What heat there was apparently came from the enormous cooker that stood to one side of the fireplace, and the smell wafting from the cast iron pot that sat on top of it reminded Cormac that he was ravenous.

“You’ll have tea? Of course you will,” Una answered for him. “Fintan must have finished up the stew before he went out. The lads pretend to be useless, but they’re well able to fend for themselves.” She checked the kettle, and began to fill it at the sink, giving Cormac a chance to look around the space.

A narrow stairway led up to a closed loft that hung over the far side of the room. Cormac wondered if the bedrooms here were like those in his grandmother’s house: he pictured the horrid flowered wallpaper in musty rooms of his childhood, furnished with swaybacked metal beds and pictures of the Sacred Heart. Beneath the loft stood a second cooker, this one covered with white enamel buckets. In shelving all around it were large glass canisters, all labeled in the same neat hand. They contained mysterious organic substances that looked like bark, roots, and other dried plant material. He recognized pale green lichens, coppery onion skins, and the fibrous rhizomes of wildflowers, but others were strange in name and appearance: “Madder root,” “Cochineal,” and “Hypernic.” Hanks of yarn, some dyed, some natural, bawn-colored wool, were stacked in binlike baskets on another set of shelves. The low ceiling, coupled with the strange-looking contents, gave this place the atmosphere of a medieval alchemist’s lair. In the back corner of the kitchen, beneath the stairs, stood a large loom, its complicated system of warp and weft temporarily at rest. Hanging on the wall beside it was a length of cloth, a textured landscape in earthy tones reminiscent of lichens and sphagnum moss, with flecks of purple fox-glove and butterwort. Cormac’s eye was drawn to the subtle variations in color; he could make out the incomplete arcs of two circles, almost like the long-buried footprints of a pair of ringforts.

“This your work?”

“Yes, such as it is,” Una said, sounding somewhat preoccupied. She swept around him, scooping up a pile of papers, a jumper, and a newspaper from the well-worn sofa whose back rested against the front window.

“Please, do sit down, and forgive the mess. I’ve become a bit blind to it, I’m afraid.” What she called mess was the comfortable, familiar flotsam of everyday life, and it gave the room a sense of warmth and animation he suddenly felt his own orderly house in Ranelagh sorely lacked.

“What is all that?” he asked, gesturing toward the area under the loft.

“I suppose you could call it my studio. It used to be all very tidy when I was just doing the weaving. But since I’ve begun making my own dyes, it’s taken over the whole bloody kitchen. I’m hoping to get a bigger space soon.”

Cormac heard a commotion at the back door, and a small girl about five years old burst through the door, her round face circled by a corona of fair ringlets. She wore denim overalls, yellow wellingtons, and a tweedy green jacket with large red buttons. The child’s bright eyes traveled to Una, then to Cormac, and she darted out the back door again as quickly as she’d come in.

“Fintan, will you come on?” they could hear her plead in an exasperated tone, as though he’d been holding her up all day. “We’ve got company for tea.”

A clean-shaven young man in a baggy sweater smiled and nodded as he stuck his head in through the door, and set down a basket that seemed to be laden with moss and mushrooms, then turned to pull off his boots outside. “Stew should be nearly ready,” he said to Una through the open door.

“Cormac Maguire, this is my brother, Fintan, and this,” Una said, as the child scurried around to her side, “is my daughter, Aoife.”

Conversation at the McGanns’ supper table reminded Cormac of the few times he’d gone home for a weekend with a classmate from school. At home there was only himself and his mother, and they never wanted for conversation, but in the circle of a larger family than his own, there was a kind of uncontrolled energy he found irresistible. The subject matter around this kitchen table was nothing lofty, and yet Cormac watched with fascination as words and laughter leapt and slid across the table. There was only one party noticeably silent: Brendan had barely acknowledged Cormac’s presence when he came in, and after answering a few questions, sat apart from the rest of them at the end of the long table. He chewed noisily, mopping the meaty juice of the stew with rough pieces torn from a heel of brown bread, and spoke not a word to anyone. Soon he pushed away from the table and retreated to the chair beside the fireplace, grinding tobacco between his rough palms and filling his pipe in a way that suggested years of habit. Indeed, everyone behaved as if this were a perfectly normal occurrence, and perhaps it was.

No one had mentioned Aoife’s father. Perhaps he was absent, as Cormac’s own father had been. After the meal, the little girl set out the spoils she’d collected—a broad white toadstool, acorns and chestnuts, soft patches of pale green moss, and, finally, a small sprig of white hawthorn flowers. Brendan’s face darkened.

“Aoife, take those outside. Right now—do you hear me? It’s bad luck bringing them into a house. And you,” he said, jabbing a finger at Fintan, “ought to know better.”

“Ah, Brendan, they’re lovely,” Aoife protested, as she playfully thrust the pale flowers into his face. He recoiled and stood, towering awkwardly over the little girl.

“Why must you always argue? Jaysus, you’re just like Una,” he said, the pitch of his voice rising. “Can you not just do as you’re told?” He wrenched the flowers from the child’s grasp and marched to the back door to fling them out into the darkness. Cormac remembered his grandmother’s horror when he’d brought a similar bouquet home as a small boy. His mother had tried to explain that it was just superstition. It was only years later he’d read that hawthorn was considered unlucky because its sweet, stale fragrance suggested the smell of death. What would a child know of that?

“Maybe I’d better be getting back,” Cormac said, remembering the music session in Dunbeg. He turned to Fintan. “I can give you a lift in, if you like.”

The pub was already fairly crowded when they arrived, and a handful of musicians had gathered just inside the door near the stone fireplace. A half dozen pints of porter, creamy tops measuring their levels, stood waiting on the short tables at the center of the group, while the air above their heads coursed with the swirling rhythm of a reel that Cormac recognized immediately as a splendid setting of “Rakish Paddy.” As Fintan stepped to the bar to order drinks, one of the fiddle players turned to look at them—it was Garrett Devaney. The policeman raised his eyebrows by way of greeting, all the while keeping his bow in motion and his chin lovingly pressed to the body of his fiddle.

When Fintan handed him his pint, Cormac sat down and began putting together his ebony flute, carefully wedging together the silver-rimmed seals of waxed string, lining up the finger holes, testing the sound and the feel of it against his lower lip. As he did so, he watched Fintan’s elaborate process of assembling and strapping on his uilleann pipes, one narrow leather belt buckled around his waist, the other around his right arm to work the small bellows. It had always seemed to Cormac a ritual akin to strapping on the phylacteries of some ancient religion.

As the pulsating rhythm of the tune ended, an old man with a bald head burst out laughing as he set down his flute and reached for his full pint. “Be the holy, that was a good one,” he said to the fellow beside him. “A real scorcher.” Fintan quickly introduced Cormac around the circle. The stocky man beside the chortling flute player sat leaning forward, listening intently. At first Cormac wondered what set this man apart from the others. No instrument, for a start, but as the fellow reached out and touched the table for his drink, Cormac realized that he was blind, though he moved like a person who hadn’t always been so.

“That’s Ned Raftery, my old schoolteacher,” said Fintan. “Great fuckin’ singer.”

Devaney broke in beside them with a sideways glance. “Glad you could join us.”

Cormac didn’t quite know what to make of the policeman. The wry look didn’t disguise the fact that Devaney’s eyes were everywhere, even here, among his friends and neighbors, sizing things up, cannily recording and filing everything away.

The pub door swung open, and Hugh Osborne entered. Conversation suspended for the briefest instant as his presence registered around the bar, then resumed at normal volume, but Osborne seemed completely unaware of the momentary stir he caused. As he surveyed the room, his gaze alighted on Cormac, hesitating slightly, as though he only half recognized the face. He moved to the bar, where he ordered a drink and stood alongside a young man whose dark, cropped head seemed barely suspended between the peaks of his shoulders. Osborne spoke a few words to the boy, who jerked his arm away awkwardly, though Cormac would almost swear he hadn’t been touched.

In contrast to the work clothes he’d been wearing at the site this afternoon, Osborne was dressed expensively, even elegantly now, in a black silk jacket and camel-colored slacks. But it wasn’t just the clothing; the man had a natural physical grace that was all the more noticeable because of his height. Fintan followed Cormac’s gaze.

“You get the story on him?” he asked confidentially. Cormac nodded, and Fintan continued: “I don’t know if he’s as guilty as everybody around here likes to make out. A lot of ’em are just fuckin’ delighted seeing the big man down in the mud. I think that’s a load of bollocks. But I wish Una would wise up all the same.”

“Maybe they’re just friends,” Cormac said.

Fintan looked at him. “Right,” he said, “maybe they are.”

A while later, on his way back from the gents’, Cormac passed by the end of the bar, near the young man to whom Osborne had spoken. The crowd hushed as one of the fiddles began to play “The Dear Irish Boy,” an old air whose haunting melody never failed to raise the hairs on the back of Cormac’s neck. He stopped for a moment to listen, feeling his chest and throat tighten at the desolation in the pleading notes. The boy at his side drew back and stared hollowly at Cormac for a long moment, then turned unsteadily, lifted a glass to his lips, and drank greedily, as if by draining the glass he could dive headfirst into oblivion. And so he could, Cormac thought. The young man rapped his glass once on the bar and Cormac heard the publican whisper furiously: “You’ve had enough, now. Clear off.” There was no response but another rap of the glass. “Go home, will yeh? Before you get us both in a rake of trouble.” The boy peered blackly at the barman, then lurched away and stumbled in slow motion through the crowd and out into the night. Hugh Osborne followed the boy, ducking his head as he pushed his way out the door. Cormac saw that he wasn’t the only one watching: Devaney was taking it all in as well.

6

It was morning. Cormac could hear the pub coming to life downstairs, the unloading of aluminum casks of beer, the clink and rattle of bottles in wooden crates, the puttering diesel roar of a lorry as it pulled away to the next delivery. He’d slept wretchedly, his rest disturbed by fearful, brackish dreams of being pursued by a shadowy assailant through a dark wood.

He turned over to try to sleep again, but a knock sounded at the door. “Mr. Maguire?” a raspy, adolescent voice inquired. “It’s nine o’clock. You asked to be called.”

“Bollocks,” Cormac muttered under his breath. Aloud he said, “Yes, all right. Thanks very much. Any chance of a cup of tea?” There was no reply except the sound of a large pair of trainers bounding down the narrow carpeted stairs. He’d better make a move if he was going to meet Nora in the lab at two.

There was tea—a full breakfast, in fact, waiting for him in the bar below. He’d just tucked into a mighty-looking fry of eggs, sausages, rashers, and tomatoes when the pub door opened. Una McGann entered, followed by Hugh Osborne, who appeared reluctant to be disturbing anyone’s breakfast.

“Please forgive the interruption,” Una said. “I’ve just had a brain wave.” The two men shook hands, then stood for a moment awkwardly.

“Won’t you join me?” Cormac asked. Behind the bar, he could hear Dermot Lynch, the publican, clattering together spoons and crockery.

Settling his large frame onto one of the small upholstered stools that stood like dwarves about his knees, Hugh Osborne first cast a glance at Una, then addressed Cormac: “I’m developing a parcel of land for a workshop that will demonstrate and sell traditional crafts.” Cormac realized at that moment that he’d never heard the man’s voice. It had a deep bass timbre, and an accent that was neither Irish nor wholly English, but somewhere between the two. Osborne leaned forward, and the dark circles under his eyes suggested that he’d not slept well the previous night either.

“We’ve enlisted a couple of other weavers, a metalsmith, and several potters,” he continued. “And of course, Una’s dyeworks is a central part of the plan.” Listening to him, Cormac got the sense that Hugh Osborne was a naturally diffident person. He remembered what it was like to live an eventful life in a small town, and felt a surge of compassion for the lanky figure who faced him across the table.

“It’s an ideal setting, really, given the history of the place….” Osborne’s voice trailed off.

“Sounds promising,” Cormac said, “although I’m not quite clear how it involves me.”

“Sorry, sorry, I should have explained that at the outset,” Osborne said, coloring slightly. “We’re due to be putting in electrical and gas lines in a few weeks’ time. And I’m sure you know that in order to get planning permission, we first have to make an archaeological survey of the site. We were all set to begin, and the consulting firm I originally hired to do the work pulled out. Conflict with another project that’s taking longer than anticipated. And every other licensed archaeologist I’ve contacted is fully booked. I realize you probably don’t normally do this sort of thing, but we’re behind schedule as it is. I’d pay the usual fees, of course. It might take a week or two. Rather a busman’s holiday, I suppose—but you could stay at the house while you work. Of course, I don’t know what your schedule looks like.”

“I’m actually on sabbatical this term,” Cormac said. “The thing is, I’m supposed to be finishing a book; the publishers are breathing down my neck.”

“I understand completely,” said Osborne.

“And I told Dr. Gavin I’d be back in Dublin this afternoon for the exam on that girl from the bog.” Cormac realized that he had been vaguely unsettled by Devaney’s suspicions. He looked across the table, where Una and Hugh studied his face in anticipation. “I don’t know what to say. Can I let you know?”

“By all means. Think it over.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be more definite just now.”

Osborne rose. “Quite all right. I do understand.” He offered no handshake this time. One flicker of the deep-set eyes was enough to let Cormac know he wasn’t the first to balk.

“Good-bye then,” Osborne said as he moved toward the door of the pub. “I’m sorry if we disturbed your breakfast.” Una McGann gave Cormac a bewildered look, and pressed a slip of paper in his hand. “Here’s the telephone number.”

“Tell him I’ll ring this afternoon,” Cormac said. The words sounded unconvincing even to himself.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, the head of the nameless red-haired girl lay, still embedded in peat, on an examining table in the conservation lab at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Perched on a stool at one end of the table, Cormac studied the strange bundle as he waited for Nora Gavin. The scent of wet turf filled the room, and diffused daylight streamed in from a single unshaded casement window that looked out onto the expansive stone-paved courtyard. Just over a century ago, when this building was still the largest army barracks in the British empire, Queen Victoria had made a visit here to inspect her troops. Something of the spartan, military ambience of those days remained in these chambers, despite the fact that two wings of the quad were now occupied by the National Museum.

Cormac could hear Nora speaking on the phone in the adjacent office. “That would be great. Okay, see you soon. Thank you so much.” She pushed open the door to the lab. “That was radiology up at Beaumont Hospital,” she said. “They can fit us in for a CT scan at six, so we’ll have to get a move on here.”

Nora reached into a drawer beneath the table for a pair of surgical gloves, pulling them on over the cuffs of her lab coat. As she performed this ordinary task, her professional demeanor seemed to snap into place as well, fitting her as smoothly as the thin layer of latex against her skin. She gingerly removed the black plastic, then began to remove the larger piece of sopping turf, and to arrange the matted strands of reddish hair. As the young woman’s features emerged in the merciless fluorescent glare of the lab, her expression was even more ghastly than it had seemed out against the earthy blackness of the bog, but Nora’s hands were steady, and as gentle as if her patient lived. Whatever had so visibly affected her yesterday seemed to have loosened its hold. Cormac wondered what sort of a life Nora Gavin had left behind her in the States, and in particular why she had pulled up stakes midcareer and moved to Dublin. He had a suspicion that Gabriel McCrossan had known more about her circumstances than he’d been willing to share.

“We’ll have to wait for Drummond to do the official postmortem, of course. He said he might be available tomorrow, provided things remain quiet.”

As she spoke, Nora was carefully removing bits of peat from the red-haired girl’s face, and applying a mist of deionized water from a spray bottle. Cormac suddenly realized that if he apologized for the way he’d behaved the night of Gabriel’s dinner party, she would have absolutely no idea what he was talking about. There was something about that realization, and about sitting here watching Nora Gavin at her work, that he found enormously enjoyable. As he drew closer to observe, Cormac saw that the red-haired girl’s skin, now washed clean of its protective peat, was soft and brown as tanned leather. He studied the lifelike curve of her upper lip, the faint covering of down on her cheek, and had to resist an urge to smooth her furrowed brow.

“Is she the first you’ve ever seen up close?” she asked. He nodded. “Me too. You can help if you like,” she said. “But you’ll have to wear these.” She handed him a pair of gloves from a drawer. “We have to keep her as clean as possible.” She crossed to the door and called into the next office, “I’m ready for a hand, Ray, whenever you are.” Raymond Flynn, the conservation technician, joined them. Cormac watched and occasionally lent a hand as Nora and Flynn measured the circumference of the girl’s cranium and the length of her damp red hair, taking photographs and carefully noting their measurements as they went along, pausing frequently for the spray bottle. When they were finished with that phase of the exam, Nora carried the girl’s head at arm’s length to the adjacent X-ray room, positioned it on a negative plate, then retreated outside and closed the chamber door while Flynn activated the machine.

“We might be able to hazard a few guesses about how old she is,” Nora said when they’d returned to the examining table. “It’s tough to determine age with any accuracy unless we can get a closer look at her molars. The jaw looks pretty pliable, but we’ll have to be extremely careful.” She used surgical tweezers and a pair of scissors to extract a small piece of skin and a lock of hair for chemical analysis, then a tiny sample of muscle tissue from the girl’s severed neck. She saw Cormac watching closely as she carefully removed a small section of an artery.

“Turns out cholesterol is the most reliable stuff for carbon-dating bog bodies; it’s insoluble in water, less likely to be contaminated by the surrounding material. Without the rest of the body, cause of death is probably going to be an educated guess. There don’t appear to be any ligature marks around the throat. I see several things that point toward decapitation as the cause.”

“Such as?”

“Well, come here for a second. Look at the wound.” Nora reached for the magnifying glass on the tray beside her. “It’s a very clean cut. Look at the way the blood vessels have been sliced through, not torn. Probably a single blow from a fairly sharp blade.” She gestured for him to take the glass, which he did with some trepidation. “You wouldn’t bother being quick about it if the person were unconscious or already dead. And what else could make a person bite down through her own lip like that? She was probably lucky, if that’s how it happened. At least it was over quickly. And look at this.” She pointed to what appeared to be a small abrasion on the girl’s chin. “See how the adipocere, that yellowish waxy material under the skin, is exposed here? Looks to me like a small section of the skin has been cut away. That could have been done with the same blow of the axe—or sword, or whatever kind of blade it was that severed her head.”

He must have looked puzzled. Nora leaned forward impulsively to demonstrate, holding her hands behind her back as if they were bound. She lowered her head to the level of the tabletop.

“Look, if I’m on the block, my natural reaction would be to contract, to become as small as possible.” He studied the back of Nora’s slender neck, the edge of dark hair that stood out against her pale skin, the small hollow between the tendons that supported her head. How easy it must seem, at first, to sever such a vulnerable connection. But how difficult it must prove, as well, considering the toughness of bone and sinew that must be cut through.

“Do you see how it would happen? If my chin is tucked tight, it comes in line with the blade.” She straightened again. “We can probably figure out all kinds of things about how she was killed. But the real question is why? This girl is hardly more than a child. The other thing I can’t get over is how incredibly well-preserved she is. The lab will check of course, but I can’t see any visible evidence of insect eggs or larvae. She must have gone into the bog very soon after her death—which means she was probably killed at or very near the bog.”

“You realize we’ve probably found out all we’re going to about this girl,” Cormac said. He wished there were more as well, but they had to be prepared for reality.

“Yes, I know. But I’m not ready to be perfectly rational about all this yet.”

Should he mention the offer he’d had from Osborne this morning? He could easily drop the whole thing, go on as he had been, finishing his book, preparing to go back to teaching in the fall. He could see his entire future so clearly down that course. Why did he feel that once he stepped from that comfort zone, he would never be able to return? Then again, what was the point of this or any convergence, if not to create new paths?

“Hugh Osborne asked if I’d be interested in coming back to do a small job for him—a general archaeological survey on a construction site.” A light seemed to spring from Nora’s dark blue eyes as she turned to him.

“Oh, Cormac—” she began, then stopped abruptly. “Please tell me you didn’t turn him down.”

“I said I’d have to think about it. It’s too much work for one person—”

“I could help. I’ve got Easter holidays the next two weeks.”

“I couldn’t ask you—”

“But you’re not asking, I’m volunteering. I want to do it. And going back there would give us a chance to find out more about this girl.”

“She could be a hundred or a thousand years old.”

“And in all that length of time, how many red-haired girls do you suppose have been executed in the vicinity of Drumcleggan Bog?” She touched his hand. “Look, I’m not trying to press you into doing something you really don’t want to do. But Cormac, look into her face and tell me you feel nothing, no obligation to find out what happened to her.”

Dropping his gaze to the dead girl’s face, he was again overcome by a familiar, unbidden swell of pity as he answered: “I can’t.”

Even as he spoke, however, Cormac felt the warmth and weight of Nora’s hand on his own, and suddenly realized that the strongest obligation he felt at this moment was not to the red-haired girl on the table, but to the living person who stood across from him, her eyes filled with fierce intelligence and compassion. Hers was the unknown story he felt compelled to explore. Above all, he had the strongest craving to hear her speak his name again.

7

It was nearly nine when Nora left the conservation lab. She navigated the narrow streets just north of Collins Barracks and pulled up near a pub in Stoneybatter called The Piper’s Chair. She had never been in the place, but knew its reputation, and that Cormac Maguire was a regular at its Wednesday night session. The pub itself was a nineteenth-century corner building of no great architectural interest, except that its burnished bar, worn tapestry snugs, and tall windows provided a reminder of dirty old working-class Dublin, and a stark contrast to the trendy, modern bistros that were popping up only a few streets away.

She knew about Cormac’s allegiance to this session through their mutual friend Robbie McSweeney—scholar of history, guitarist, and singer, though she wasn’t sure Robbie himself would put his occupations down in that order. Had he been born five hundred years ago, she thought, Robbie would surely have been in great demand as a harper in the houses of the aristocracy. According to what he’d told her, the same musicians had been coming to the Wednesday night session here for nearly ten years. She gathered there was a strong West Clare connection in this group, most of the players having come from there, or having parents or grandparents who came from that part of the country. The Piper’s Chair was a place tourists were unlikely to find just wandering in off the street, and the regulars liked it that way, because it meant there was little performance pressure and plenty of time for the craic and the chat.

Nora found Robbie sitting at the bar, polishing off a prawn cocktail with his first pint. He raised his eyebrows in greeting as he licked the last of the cocktail sauce off his left thumb.

“Hiya, Nora,” he said, pulling up a seat for her, and signaling the barman. “Will you have a drink?”

“No, thanks, Robbie. I’m just on my way home.”

“So what brings you here to grace our humble presence?”

“I’ve got something to show Cormac.”

“Oh, so it wasn’t music you were looking for, then?”

“Well, that too.” And to try to persuade Cormac to return to Dunbeg, she thought, if he still hadn’t made up his mind. She felt a twinge of guilt that she hadn’t come clean about her own motivations for returning to Galway, which perhaps had as much to do with Hugh Osborne’s missing wife as the red-haired girl.

“You’ll forgive me, Nora, but I have to ask—what’s all this about a head?” Robbie asked. “The academic world was abuzz today about you carrying around a severed head in a box.”

“I did no such thing. I took it straight to the lab.”

“God, you make me suddenly grateful I stuck with history,” Robbie said in mock disgust. “The worst thing I can dig up is a lurid eyewitness account, not an actual corpse.”

At that moment, Cormac came through the door, and Robbie tipped his head to make sure that his friend had noticed her presence as well. Nora could contain her news no longer: “Cormac, you’ll never guess what we found. There was something odd on one of the X rays. Right up against the molars on the left side of her jaw. It looks like a piece of metal. Hard to tell what, exactly. We’ll do an endoscopic exam in the morning.” She watched the furrow in his forehead deepen. Had he forgotten what he’d said in the lab this afternoon?

“So this head belongs to a she, then? Anyone we know?” Robbie said.

“Not a clue so far,” Cormac said. “Although Nora’s convinced me we ought to try and find out.”

“Well, especially now,” Nora said. “This piece of metal might be a clue. Robbie, what do you know about beheading?”

“A popular choice, I believe, ranking just after being hanged, drawn, and quartered in centuries past. Not a lot of women would have been beheaded, though. You’re sure it was an execution, not just a do-it-yourself murder?”

“That’s my best guess. It’s such a clean cut across the neck. You can see for yourself.” Nora pulled a folder of photographs from her bag and handed them to Robbie, who blanched slightly, but took the file. She was gratified to see his curiosity quickening when he laid eyes on the face of the red-haired girl.

“And no sign of a body?”

“None. Will you help us, Robbie? Find out about any women who might have been executed this way—and why.”

“What time period are we talking about?”

“That’s the trouble,” Nora said. “We don’t really know.”

“Probably only the last couple of thousand years,” Cormac said. Robbie looked back and forth, as if trying to decide which one was going to convince him.

“Sure, what the hell,” he said, handing the photos back to Nora. “It’s not like I’ve anything more interesting to be doing in the next few months.”

“Thanks, Robbie. You’re a dote.”

“Well, put it down to the fact that you’re just a bit more fetchin’ than he is.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “But whatever works.”

“We’d better get stuck in there if we’re going to, Robbie,” Cormac said. He turned to her. “Will you stay for a few tunes?”

She hesitated. “I was really only stopping by—”

“Ah, do, Nora,” Robbie said.

“At least let me get you a drink,” Cormac said. His serious dark eyes had a rather unnerving effect at this proximity, and just past his shoulder she could see Robbie silently urging: Go on.

“All right,” she said. “Thanks.”

8

Wading into the session, Cormac negotiated a spot for Nora to sit, on a bench near the window just beside Robbie, where she could be within the arc of the musicians’ circle. The evening’s repertoire consisted of reels, reels, and more reels, a pattern broken only occasionally by a jig or a horn-pipe. He was delighted that Nora had decided to stay for the music. As he played and felt a dozen pairs of feet thumping out the rhythm to the left and right of him, Cormac watched her body move slightly, almost involuntarily, to the same pulse. Toward the end of the evening, at a point where the tunes trailed off, and the musicians reached in unison for their pints, he saw Robbie look sideways at her.

“Would you ever give us a song, Dr. Gavin?”

Nora shrank back with a dismissive wave. “Ah no, I couldn’t. Play away there,” she said. Cormac hadn’t realized she was a singer. But reticence was the expected response to this first request; coaxing the shy singer was very much a part of the tradition. After a few more words of encouragement from Robbie and calls from the rest of the group, she finally yielded, took a quick drink of whiskey for courage, and leaned forward, clearing her throat and trying to find the right pitch. When she tipped her head up again, her eyes were closed.

Cormac was stunned by the dark, earthy voice that seemed to pour from Nora’s lips. Nervousness caused it to falter slightly, and he could see her eyes flicker under their lids, an intimacy that was almost too much to bear. He closed his eyes, and heard Nora’s uneasiness begin to subside as she relaxed. The song picked up strength and fervor like some powerful incantation, spinning a familiar, sad tale of faithless love and abandonment.

There was a brief silence when she finished, then a roar of approval from the gathered musicians, and even from some of the pub regulars who’d hissed one another into silence to hear the song. Cormac sat back in his chair and watched Nora open her eyes, looking as if she’d awakened from some dream to find a whole room full of people staring at her. She seemed astonished, and a little embarrassed, by all the admiring faces leaning in, the hands reaching in to touch her knee, her arm, her shoulder. She looked across at him, but he felt unable to move or speak.

“Time, please,” the bartender shouted over the din. “Drink up, ladies and gentlemen. Time, please.” There was the usual unwillingness to let the evening end so soon, as everyone seemed determined to remain talking and to stretch out the last pint. Finally the crowd began to disperse, and Cormac was able to make his way toward her through the noisy crush of pub patrons just outside the bar. “Nora, wait,” he said. “Let me walk you to your car.”

By day, Stoneybatter was a busy thoroughfare lined with dozens of small businesses. But at night, its shop faces were closed up tight with solid metal gates, which combined with blowing litter to give this part of the city center its nightly guise of a war zone. As they walked slowly down the nearly deserted street, Cormac fingered the wooden flute case he had tucked under his arm, and chanced a sideways glance at her. “That song was mighty, Nora.”

She smiled. “Thanks. I was a bit nervous.”

“Where did you ever learn to sing like that?”

“I don’t know. Listening to records, I guess.”

“You’re joking.”

“Where else? But did you ever get the feeling with a certain tune that it was something you’d been waiting to hear? I don’t know what it is about old songs. Maybe it’s their plainness, or that they’re so sad, and so true. And I love the way songs get handed on. It’s almost like they’re alive, in some way. I’m no good at explaining it. Anyway, here’s my car.” She unlocked it with a tiny remote, then opened the door and turned to face him. They both began to speak at once:

“I wanted to ask you—”

“If you’d still be interested—”

Cormac insisted that she speak first.

“I was going to ask if you’ve decided about going back to Dunbeg,” she said.

“That’s just what I was about to tell you. I am going back. I phoned Hugh Osborne this evening. I’ve a couple of things to do tomorrow morning, then I’m heading out there in the afternoon.”

“And did you find someone to help you?”

“I thought I had a volunteer. Unless you’ve changed your mind.”

“Oh no, not at all. I have to finish up in the lab tomorrow, but I could probably make it out there by about six.” She stopped thinking aloud and looked directly at him. “Thanks, Cormac.”

“Not at all. Thank you for the song.” A small gust of wind blew Nora’s hair across her eyes. Without thinking, he reached up to brush it away, then let his fingers rest against the soft curve of her cheek. He was startled when she twisted away from his touch.

“No,” she said. “Please don’t.”

“I’m sorry, Nora—”

“It’s not you, Cormac—please don’t think that. It’s just—it’s just that I’m a coward.” She finally looked at him again. “I hope you still want my help tomorrow.”

“Yes, of course I do.” She studied him thoughtfully for a moment longer, then climbed into her car and drove off down the empty street. Cormac began walking briskly back to his own car, realizing that he’d no reason at all to feel hopeful. It had been a most definite rebuff. But he had gotten to hear her say his name again—twice.