Haunted Ground

1

When Cormac awoke, it was daylight, and Nora dozed in the chair beside his hospital bed. He wanted to speak, to let her know he was awake, but his head felt huge and thick. She stirred, looked about for a second, as if she didn’t quite remember where she was, then pulled her chair up to the bedside and put her face close to his. The mark of the crow’s sharp claw had begun to heal, but there were fresh, raw scratches where brambles had cut her face, and he dimly began to recall what had taken place. It seemed so long ago now.

“Shall I call the nurse?” she asked. He tried to shake his head no, but couldn’t manage it. He winced instead, then licked his lips and tried them out.

“Never should have had those fifteen pints,” he mumbled. She took his hand and smiled, but her chin wavered slightly.

“Please don’t. This is all my fault,” she said.

“It’s not.” He tried again to move.

“Lie still, Cormac.” He liked the sound of her voice, the way she said his name. “The doctor said you have a mild concussion, and some nasty bruises—but no fractures, which is a miracle. The tree branches must have helped to break your fall. And you’re only slightly singed from the fire.” Cormac looked down at white gauze bandages on his left arm and hand.

“Jeremy?”

Nora looked down. “He’s badly hurt. Broken bones, some internal bleeding. A possible head injury—it’s too early to tell.”

“Has he said anything?”

“He’s been unconscious.”

Cormac closed his eyes to consider what he should do. He opened them again, and said, “Nora, could you find Devaney for me?” The strain of the last twelve hours showed in her eyes, and it seemed to Cormac that she finally understood his reluctance to be drawn into this story, as if he somehow knew from the beginning what would be asked of him. He sank back into a half-sleep, and in what seemed like only a few seconds, Nora was back with the policeman at her side.

“Hell of a night,” Devaney said. “You and the young lad are lucky to be here. Osborne likewise. You needed to see me?”

“I did,” said Cormac. His own voice sounded strange and far away in his ears. “Jeremy said something last night—at the time I hadn’t a clue what he meant, but I think I do now.”

Devaney’s voice was quieter than usual. “Go on.”

“He said, ‘They’re here. There’s a place underground.’” Cormac watched as the substance of the words struck his listeners. Neither apparently had any doubt as to whom Jeremy’s words referred.

“Oh God, Cormac,” Nora said, and sank into the chair beside his bed. Devaney’s eyes closed, and his lips were set in an expression of disappointment and finality.

Cormac felt exhausted, and had to close his eyes as well. But there was more. He tried to remember what it was, though his head was pounding like a bass drum. “I think he said something else as well. Something like: ‘She knows. She’d never tell.’”

Devaney’s voice was sharp. “Are you sure? ‘She knows? She’d never tell’?” Cormac could hear the words stick in the policeman’s throat.

2

By the time Devaney had phoned in the request for a full-scale crime scene detail to meet him at Bracklyn House, he was already playing out the next few days in his head: the cameras flashing, and tarps rigged to keep away rain, the barriers set to fend off the prying reporters who invariably descended. Before he left the hospital, it might also be prudent to check on Hugh and Jeremy Osborne, and put a couple of the local lads on duty outside their rooms. The boy’s words finally gave them something to go on, but still left open the question of responsibility.

What had prompted Hugh Osborne to try the ultimate escape? A suicide didn’t fit with any way Devaney had figured the case. If Osborne wasn’t guilty, maybe he just couldn’t go on any longer. And if he was, perhaps he saw things beginning to unravel. When Devaney stopped at the door, Osborne was turned on his side, facing away from the corridor. A thin cotton blanket was drawn up over his shoulders, but there were no restraints. Nothing to keep him from walking away—or to keep him from doing himself further harm, Devaney thought.

“He’s sleeping now,” whispered the young nurse who came up behind him. “Just as well. When he wakes up he’ll have a right bugger of a headache.”

“How’s he getting on?”

“Are you a friend?” The girl’s porcelain skin was lightly freckled, and her green eyes fixed him with a compassionate gaze. He looked away.

“Acquaintance.”

“Much improved this morning, but the doctor says they’re going to keep him another day or two for observation. Carbon monoxide can have some rather nasty effects, and they don’t want to let him go too soon.”

“I see—thanks,” Devaney said. He’d see what turned up at the tower before he had a chat with Hugh Osborne. Two young Garda officers approached, and Devaney took them aside.

“What are your names?”

“Molloy,” said the first young officer.

“O’Byrne, sir,” said the second.

“I want you to stay here as my eyes and ears. Molloy, you’ll stay with Hugh Osborne. Try to be as unobtrusive as possible.” When he saw the blank look on the young man’s face, he added: “Blend in. O’Byrne, you can come with me.”

Jeremy Osborne’s status was still critical. Devaney approached the room where the boy lay propped up in bed with his left leg and arm in casts, and his head swaddled in bandages. Jeremy’s face was distorted and discolored by bruises, and a breathing tube was taped to his open mouth. Beside him, his mother sat upright in a chair, as if by keeping straight, she could hold her son back from the brink of death by sheer force of will. Lucy Osborne’s whole body turned toward Devaney as he entered the room. Her dry eyes seemed to overflow with pain, but the rest of her face remained masklike, frozen into a stoic calm.

“I blame myself,” she said. “If he had stayed near me, I might have kept him safe.” Her eyes flickered to the Garda officer beyond the door. “What’s going on?”

“It’s just routine. Until we have the full story of what happened last night,” Devaney said. “I promise he won’t be in your way.”

As he drove to the tower, Devaney thought of Mina Osborne’s letters, and of the mother in India, waiting patiently for news. People knew that the person they loved was dead, but let themselves be deluded, buoyed up for a while on the notion that what their gut was telling them could be wrong.

Maguire’s second bit of information had given him pause. She’d never tell. Could mean she’d done it, or they’d done it together. But it could just as easily mean that the boy and his mother had stumbled across the evidence, and—for whatever reason—decided to keep quiet. He should have realized the boy knew something, should have pushed him more at the interview about the cars. But there wasn’t time now to worry about all the possibilities; he had to find out whether Jeremy Osborne was telling the truth.

As Devaney pulled up at the side of the road near the tower, the file on the passenger seat of his car slid forward, and some of its contents spilled out onto the floor. He reached over to gather up the sheaf of scattered papers. Among them was one of the photographs he had taken in the confessional at St. Columba’s. Devaney put the car in neutral, and took a moment to look closely at the picture. There were the carved letters, crudely made, but clearly legible: HE KNOWS WHERE THEY ARE. He had been very nearly convinced that Brendan McGann carved them, as a silent accusation against Hugh Osborne. But as he looked at the photograph once more, his eyes returned to the first mark—it wasn’t a letter at all, but an empty square, more deeply gouged than the rest. It could be a mistake, but whoever made the mark could also have changed his mind, and wanted to destroy what had originally been there. He tried to find any evidence that it had once been the letters. As in SHE KNOWS WHERE THEY ARE. Whoever carved those words wanted so desperately to tell someone, anyone, to relieve the burden of guilt, but couldn’t muster the resolve to do it out loud. Another idea struck him. Of course. Jeremy Osborne had to be Father Kinsella’s candle thief; Dr. Gavin had said the tower was full of candles. If Jeremy was the messenger, who was the subject of his message, and why had he changed it? Or could someone else have found the message and altered it to suit his own ends? Devaney remembered the praying figure of Brendan McGann in the side chapel of the church. One thing at a time, he told himself, and braced himself for what he was about to do.

It was late afternoon before the scene-of-crime officers arrived. The gray day had grown more overcast and a soft rain had begun to fall. There was a mechanical quality to the work entailed at a crime scene, what to Devaney always seemed a small amount of comforting routine in the face of horror. He stood in the woods near O’Flaherty’s Tower, surrounded by a drone of activity: scene-of-crime officers in their white suits, and policemen in yellow rain gear. The fire brigade had succeeded in dousing the flames last night, but the tower had been reduced to a blackened and empty shell, with a few stout timbers high up that had partially withstood the blaze. Even in the rain, small plumes of smoke still wafted from the rubble, a dangerous mixture of fallen stones and charred, splintered wood. In daylight it was readily apparent where the firemen had trampled through the thick undergrowth, and the bright green of the rain-slick leaves leapt out against the tower’s blackened bulk.

The boy had said, They’re here. However, if there was some sort of underground chamber in the tower, the entrance was well hidden, and Devaney wasn’t surprised that no one had discovered it during previous searches. Once they’d cleared the rubble from inside the tower, the dirt floor was solidly packed, and showed no evidence of having been dug up. Likewise, the team could find no areas of disturbed earth around the building’s perimeter. Why should it be easy? Devaney thought. Every way into this case had been a hard road; why should this, even though it seemed the final step, be any bloody different? He was feeling the raw, edgy effects of too many hours without sleep, but couldn’t force himself to leave. Even when the passage had not been located by nightfall, he stayed and watched the team press on under the glaring white of the floodlights. When daybreak came, they switched off the lights. The sky had cleared, but they still had found nothing.

At midmorning, a police vehicle pulled up on the roadside near the tower. Molloy, the young officer he had placed outside Hugh Osborne’s room, approached.

“It wasn’t my idea, sir. He insisted.”

“Who is it, Molloy?”

“Osborne, sir. Dr. Maguire and Dr. Gavin are with him.”

Devaney watched as the three passengers emerged from the car. The effects of his fall were evident in the careful way Maguire moved, but he was trying to put on a good front. Beside him, Osborne also moved slowly, not from any apparent physical injury, but like a man mesmerized. He looked only at the white-garbed officers as they went about their work. Dr. Gavin followed behind the two men; her dubious expression told Devaney what she thought of this impromptu expedition. He stepped in front of them.

“I’ll have to ask you not to go any farther just now,” Devaney said. Hugh Osborne just looked at him blankly.

“We’ll stay right here,” Maguire said, “if that’s acceptable.”

Devaney nodded, then pulled Dr. Gavin aside. “Are they all right?” he murmured, tipping his head in Osborne’s direction.

“Neither of them should really be up and about, but they wouldn’t stay in the hospital. Cormac insisted on telling Hugh what Jeremy said. I tried to convince him that it might not be a good idea. Hugh Osborne is still your chief suspect, isn’t he?”

“Unless we find evidence to the contrary. But we’re not making much headway here.”

Maguire approached and spoke in a low voice: “If I might offer an idea?”

“By all means.”

“Well, it looks like your team is assuming the underground place and its entrance to be somehow connected to the tower. But people tend to build on the same places over and over again. It may very well be a souterrain or underground chamber left over from some previous settlement or fortification that’s older than the tower. Have you got a piece of paper or something?” When he’d got it, he hastily sketched the tower, and marked the locations of the various earthworks.

“We’re here.” He pointed to the spot on his crude map where he and Devaney stood, about twenty yards from the tower. “Do you see the area of raised earth all around us here? That’s where I’d begin, within that circle. The entrance is bound to be pretty well concealed. It might save time to use that ground-probing radar you mentioned, if you have access to some equipment.”

Osborne refused to leave the scene; he hovered, sometimes sitting quite still, sometimes standing beside the yellow tape the scene-of-crime unit used to mark the perimeter, but his silent presence did not appear to disturb the officers as they went about their methodical work. It wasn’t until midafternoon, when they’d got the loan of radar equipment from a surveying firm in Ballinasloe, that the team was able to make any progress. The readings showed a solid slab about four feet below the surface, within the circle Maguire had shown them. They called in earth-moving equipment, a small backhoe that trampled the vegetation in its path like some prehistoric beast. Fortunately, the operator was an artist, a man who could control the heavy steel excavation bucket as though he were measuring tea for the pot rather than a half ton of soil. The sound of metal scraping on stone came from the trench, and a voice said, “He seems to have hit something here, sir.” Devaney peered into the pit. He could see several large, flat stones. One of them suddenly gave way and collapsed into the chamber below, taking with it loose soil from the surrounding banks.

“All right,” Devaney shouted. “Hold up. That’s enough.” He sent one of the young Guards to fetch Maguire.

“You’ve more experience than we have with uncovering this sort of structure,” he said when the archaeologist arrived. “I wonder if you’d mind advising us on how to proceed.”

3

Dressed in a regulation white suit and mindful of his bruised ribs, Cormac climbed carefully down into the chamber while Devaney and the rest of the team remained at the edge of the excavation. At the bottom of the ladder, he switched on his torch and peered into the darkness. The walls were exquisite dry-stone construction, battered to support the heavy lintels. At the end nearest the tower, a slab of sandstone had been cut into an archway to support the roof. As he admired the workmanship of the builders who had put these stones in place more than a thousand years earlier, Cormac suddenly realized what a terrible contradiction existed if the bodies of Mina and Christopher Osborne were indeed hidden here. Souterrains were common enough features of ancient ringforts, but in addition to their function as storage vaults, they often served another particular purpose—to protect a settlement’s most vulnerable inhabitants: its women and children. The entrance creeps were often built purposely small so that a grown man could not fit through.

Everything he could see was covered with a thin layer of dust. He could smell putrefaction. As he slowly let his beam track across the small room, Cormac could see nothing but gray shadows and shapes. Wait. He turned his light back to where it had just been, and stared at the pattern that began to emerge. The eye is quick to detect the stamp of human presence in the seeming chaos of the natural world. Beneath the dust, half buried in soil and rubble, he had perceived the diamond motif and raised cable of an Aran sweater. He focused his beam on that spot, and the shapes began to make sense to his eye and mind. He could see a body lying on its right side, back toward him. Near the figure’s left hip, his eye began to comprehend the meaning of another form. It was the sole of a child’s tiny wellington. He turned to the company standing above him, and didn’t have to say a word. They could read what he had seen in his face.

No one noticed that Hugh Osborne had moved gradually closer until he was standing among the crime-scene officers at the edge of the excavation. Before anyone could stop him, Osborne had jumped down into the souterrain and seized the torch from Cormac’s hand. Devaney held up a hand to signal his fellow officers to hold off for just a moment. Osborne fell to his knees at the entrance to the hidden chamber, and drew a deep breath. Then he looked inside, and what he saw made him release that breath; with it he seemed to release all the hope and fear and anticipation he had held in for so long, to let it all go with a faint sound that was halfway between a moan and a sigh. And when the nightmarish vision before him persisted, and did not fade away, he finally sank slowly downward, and the torch, still switched on, tumbled from his hand. No one spoke or moved until Osborne himself finally broke the silence.

“Thank you—thank you for finding them,” he said in a hoarse voice to the air before him. Then he rose somewhat unsteadily and looked vacantly around him, as if unsure of how to climb out of the chamber. “I’ll go now,” he said. “You know where to find me.” A couple of officers came forward to help him out of the souterrain, and Devaney signaled them to escort Osborne back to the house. Cormac climbed up the ladder, and sought Nora’s face in the crowd. She brushed away her tears as he approached.

4

Cormac had just set a mug of tea in front of Hugh Osborne when a rap sounded at the kitchen door. It was Una McGann. She must have heard the news in the village; it hadn’t taken long for the story to travel that far. Osborne didn’t rise to meet her, but instead lowered his head to the table and covered it with his hands, in a gesture of the most abject helplessness. When she placed a hand gently on Osborne’s shoulder, Cormac realized that Una was the first person to offer any expression of sympathy, and he felt ashamed. Then the door banged violently open.

“You fuckin’ bastard,” roared Brendan McGann, advancing toward Una and Hugh, his face blotchy with rage. “Your wife’s not yet in her grave and you’re back making a hoor of my sister. Get out of my way, Una. Get out of the way!” He seized his sister by the shoulders and pushed her roughly aside, then turned his attention to Hugh Osborne, who half stood, blinking in disbelief. Brendan McGann landed a fist to Osborne’s jaw that sent him sprawling backward onto the table, and the sugar bowl and mugs of tea smashing onto the stone floor. “Come on, you fuckin’ hoormonger, get up and fight.” Osborne was stunned, and staggered forward, but before Brendan could throw another punch, Cormac hooked Brendan’s arms from behind and pulled him away.

“Well,” Brendan shouted, “what have you got to say for yourself, Englishman? Eh, fuckin’ Sassenach?” Spittle trembled at the corners of his mouth.

Una rushed to steady Osborne, then whirled on her brother. “What right have you to come in here flinging accusations? You know nothing about what’s between us. Nothing. I found those things you had hidden away, Brendan, all the cuttings, Aoife’s birth cert, and the hair clip—Mina’s hair clip—and I said nothing. I couldn’t believe you would harm anyone, but I don’t know anymore, Brendan, I don’t know you.”

As he listened to her words, all the fight drained from Brendan McGann’s limbs, and Cormac gradually released his hold.

Brendan spoke quietly: “You think I—ah, Jaysus, Una, you actually believed that I could hurt a woman—and a child? I found it,” he continued, his voice breaking. “I found that clip in a fuckin’ jackdaw’s nest, Una, I swear it. And the other things, you can’t blame me for being suspicious, people see him giving you a lift every day along the road, and you turn up pregnant, what were we to think? We’re not stupid. And to top it, he goes off and gets married, and leaves you and Aoife to get along as best you can. It tears at me to see you working so hard, and him sitting up here in his big fuckin’ house, telling people what to do, not willing to fork over a few shillings for his own flesh and blood. He’s the one you want to mind, Una, not me.” His finger jabbed toward Osborne. “Ask him how his wife and son ended up dead. Ask him.”

Osborne still looked dazed as he wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. He seemed completely bewildered, but as he studied Brendan’s defiant expression, a light began to dawn. “You sent the hair clip. And that letter accusing me, to the private detective’s office in Galway. And you sent Mina a letter, too, didn’t you?” Brendan’s eyes shifted guiltily. “Didn’t you? Just before she disappeared. Lucy gave it to me the other night; she said she found it only a couple of days ago going through some of Mina’s books. When I phoned home that night from the conference—she seemed so distressed, but she wouldn’t tell me what was troubling her. It was that vicious, cowardly letter. You made her believe that I’d betrayed her, and I never had a chance—you sick bastard—” This time it was Osborne’s anger that boiled over, and he made a savage lunge for Brendan’s throat.

“Stop it, stop it!” Una screamed, using all the strength she possessed to get between them and push the two men apart. She turned to face her brother; she was trembling with outrage, and spoke only inches from his face. “Hugh is not Aoife’s father. Do you need to hear it again? Sometimes I wish to Christ he were, but he’s not. But he was the only person who befriended me when I got pregnant, the only person who noticed or cared that I was so miserable and confused. Just so you know, Aoife’s father was one of my teachers at university. I should have known better—and I went away, Brendan, only because I was ashamed to think what a fuck-wit I’d been. Hugh knew what people were saying about us all these years. He put up with all the looks and the whispers because I asked him not to say anything. Are you satisfied now, Brendan? Are you fuckin’ satisfied?”

“Why didn’t you come to us, Una? To Mammy and me? Why did you have to go to a stranger? We’d have looked after you, Una. We’d have helped you.” The hurt in her brother’s voice appeared unfeigned, but Una’s face was incredulous.

“You know it wouldn’t have happened that way, Brendan. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done. I know you went through an awful time with Mammy, and I am sorry I wasn’t there to help you. But I can’t regret having Aoife, I can’t. And I came back here in spite of all the small-mindedness and suspicion, because I wanted my daughter to have a home and a family, Brendan. You and Fintan are all that we have, God help us.”

Brendan’s hands moved feebly at his sides. “Una—”

“Your apologies are no use to anyone at this stage. Go home, Brendan. Will you just go home?”

He turned to leave, but stopped at the open door, and looked outside as he addressed his final words to Cormac. “I’ll pay for the cost of repairs to your cars. I got drunk. Lost the head.” That was the sum of Brendan’s confession. He pulled the door closed, and was gone.

Una knelt to pick up the pieces of shattered crockery that littered the floor. Now it was Hugh Osborne’s turn to comfort her. He stooped and took the pottery shards from her hands and set them on the table, then lifted Una to her feet and put his arm around her. Initially she resisted, but could not hold back a choking sob as he sat her down beside him on the bench beneath the windows. Cormac and Nora worked together without speaking to finish the task Una had begun, mopping up the milk and tea, sweeping up the spilled sugar, collecting broken bits of crockery and disposing of the debris in the bin. By the time they were finished, Una had pulled herself together; she and Hugh Osborne now sat side by side on the bench, linked only by hands clasped on the seat between them, each staring into the chasm of the past.

5

As he drove to the postmortem in Ballinasloe, Devaney remembered how his prediction about inquisitive reporters had come true the previous afternoon. The first was an ambitious young man from the Sunday World who had to be escorted from the scene to keep him from crossing the barriers they’d set up near the road; next came the RTE camera crew. At least Devaney was spared dealing with them. As the superintendent in charge of the investigation, Brian Boylan was only too eager to be quoted in the papers and on the television news. Of course Boylan had nothing to say, apart from confirming what everyone already knew, that human remains had indeed been discovered at this site, and that it remained to be determined whether there was a connection between the discovery and the Osborne case or any other unsolved disappearances. He also didn’t tell them that the police had found a collapsible pushchair, a pair of small blue shoes, and Mina Osborne’s handbag, or that a .22 rifle had also been recovered from the souterrain. As he’d watched his superintendent bask in the television lights, Devaney had imagined the modesty with which Boylan would eventually take credit for shepherding the investigation to this juncture.

Once in Ballinasloe, he drove around the back of the hospital to the mortuary. He’d always dreaded postmortems, and the familiar queasiness started even before he’d parked the car. He got directions to the autopsy room, and found Malachy Drummond just outside the door. Drummond was a thinnish man, balding and bespectacled, known by colleagues for his trademark dickie bows and his appetite for good food and drink. His face had become familiar to the general public from coverage of crime scenes on the television news, but Drummond took this exactly for what it was, a kind of spurious quasi-celebrity that had nothing whatever to do with his actual work. To his colleagues in the police, what Drummond did bordered on the repellent, but the man himself had earned their respect for a professional demeanor and methodical work habits tempered by consideration for the dead. He always referred to his charges as “the lady” or “the gentleman,” despite the often undignified circumstances of their deaths.

“Detective” was his laconic greeting to Devaney. “Sad business, this, a young mother and child. Very sad.” Devaney had enough experience of the man to know he actually meant it. “I have a few things I want to show you.” Drummond led the way into the autopsy room, where Devaney was relieved to see that the bodies had been covered.

“With dental records we were able to confirm the identity of the young lady—she is Mina Osborne, without a doubt. And the cause of death seems fairly clear.” Malachy Drummond picked up long tweezers from a metal tray, and held up for Devaney’s inspection a slightly misshapen rifle pellet. “I found this inside the braincase. But there was neither entrance or exit injury to the skull itself, which tells me a couple of things: one, that she was not shot at close range—which would rule out a self-inflicted wound—and two, that the bullet probably entered the body through soft tissue: the eye, for example, or perhaps the mouth. Difficult to tell with such an advanced state of decomposition.”

“And the child?” Devaney asked.

“With the remains almost completely skeletized, it’s hard to say. No apparent knife or bullet wounds, no blunt injury. The only evidence of trauma is a hairline skull fracture, but that doesn’t appear severe enough to have been the cause of death on its own. However, as I said yesterday, the position of the bodies certainly suggests that they were moved to the location where they were found. I’m ruling both as homicides.” Drummond must have heard the small sigh that escaped Devaney’s lips. He added, gently, “From the nature of his injury, I’d venture to say the little lad was probably unconscious, Detective, whatever ultimately happened to him.”

Devaney himself wasn’t sure why the information about Christopher Osborne triggered such an emotional response. He had worked on scores of murders, and had always been able to maintain his objectivity. Lack of sleep, it must be. He straightened. “Thanks, Malachy. I’ll look for your report.”

As he walked down the corridor from the mortuary to the main hospital building, Devaney tried to work out a scenario in which the different causes of death would make sense. He’d had no preconceptions about what might have happened; why did these facts, taken together, seem so strange? Even after the bodies were discovered, he had wondered about the possibility of a murder/suicide. Such things were not unheard of. But Malachy had found that Mina Osborne’s injuries were definitely not self-inflicted. They’d have to get a ballistics test to find out whether the gun found in the souterrain was the same one that fired the fatal bullet. So how did Jeremy know where the bodies were, unless he was somehow involved? The boy didn’t seem like the type to plan and commit two murders all on his own. Maybe he had witnessed something. Devaney’s head began to ache from the smell of antiseptic, and from the thoughts that kept tumbling against one another in his brain. Christ, he’d give anything for a cigarette.

He turned down the corridor that would take him past Jeremy Osborne’s room, where he pulled aside a passing nurse.

“Any news on the Osborne lad?”

“Sorry, there’s been no change.”

Through the large window, he could see that Lucy Osborne still kept her vigil. She hadn’t been home since Jeremy had been brought here, but sat silently beside her son. In all the times he’d been to check on the boy, Devaney had never seen her sleeping, and yet she somehow managed to maintain her usual fastidious appearance, despite having to wash in the public lavatory down the corridor. He had not divulged to anyone, even his own colleagues in the Gardai, where the break in the case had come from, but with the burgeoning media attention, there was no way Lucy Osborne could have missed hearing about the recovery of the bodies. No doubt she was trying to block it from her mind, concentrating fiercely on her son.

6

The day after the scene-of-crime officers had finished and packed off back to Dublin, all that remained was the flimsy barrier of yellow tape staked around the perimeter, wrapped around saplings in the now torn-up woodland at Bracklyn House. Cormac had come back out here looking for Nora; there was no sign of her in the house, and he wanted to let her know he was going to work on the excavation site. He stepped up to the edge of the souterrain, thinking that this secret place, this nest of concealment, had ultimately succeeded too well in its purpose.

Nora was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest and her back up against the wall of the souterrain. A torch lay just out of reach beside her on the clean-swept dirt floor. She didn’t look up. “I had to see it for myself,” she said.

Cormac eased himself down into the souterrain and sat down a couple of feet from her. Nora’s right hand held a jagged piece of stone, and for an instant she seemed unsure what to do with it. Instead of flinging it, as he had thought she might, she began to scrape at the dirt floor beside her, almost unaware of what she was doing.

“I’ve been sitting up there for days, watching all this, thinking about Mina Osborne,” she said. “I wonder if she even knew she was in danger.”

Cormac said nothing, only watched Nora’s hand scrub a shallow trough in the earth with the stone. She finally spoke: “The night she was killed, I thought my sister would be safe with me. I thought I’d finally succeeded in convincing her that the way Peter treated her wasn’t right. That she didn’t deserve it. Elizabeth was away for the weekend with my parents. Triona called to tell me she had packed a bag, everything was set, and she was finally walking out. She was going to be all right; she and Elizabeth were going to stay with me as long as they needed to. But do you know what else she told me just before she hung up the phone? That underneath it all, even though she couldn’t live like that anymore, that a part of her still loved him. I think she tried to tell Peter what she’d told me, and he finally snapped. Nobody can prove it, but I know, I know that’s what happened. He couldn’t keep her, so he made sure she would never be her own, separate person, or anything more than his pathetic victim, forever.”

The surface of the floor had begun to break apart beneath the steady scouring of the stone, but Nora didn’t seem to notice until her fingers brushed against a tuft of ragged cloth that stuck up from the loosened soil. As Cormac watched, she brushed away the soil to uncover a bundle of what looked like rough-textured woolen homespun. When she carefully lifted the top layer of frayed and moth-eaten fabric, a tiny, fragile-looking skull lay exposed on the surface of the soil, its empty sockets upturned toward the sky.

“Cormac,” she whispered. “This is a newborn baby.” He experienced a kind of slow-spreading horror at the realization that Mina and Christopher Osborne might not be the only victims entombed here, merely the most recent. “Help me,” she said, and began to scratch at the surface of the soil again with the rough edge of stone.

“We should get the Guards.”

She paused only briefly to scan his face. “I’m not stopping now.”

“At least let me get some tools. Please be careful, Nora. Let me show you what to do.” He hurriedly reached up to the bank above their heads and felt around for the handle of his site kit. He handed her a trowel, and used another himself to help clear away bits of soil and animal bones, until the infant was completely uncovered, and what was clearly recognizable as an adult’s elbow joint protruded from the earth beside it.

Within the space of a few minutes, they’d uncovered almost the entire right side of an adult human skeleton, curled around the bundle containing the remains of the child. They really ought to stop now; the standard protocol in the discovery of any human remains was to inform the Gardai immediately. But Cormac knew he’d have a job convincing Nora on that point. Besides, these bones were too old to be of any concern to the police, he was certain. At least a dozen skeletons like this turned up every year, as building foundations were excavated and pipelines and sewage schemes were launched; such discoveries had become almost routine in a place that had been so densely populated for so long.

“See how the surrounding material is full of bones and broken shells?” he said. “That probably means this area was used as a midden; people had to live in these places for extended periods if they were under siege, so they needed not only a stock of supplies, but also a place to get rid of rubbish. It seems like these two weren’t just left in the souterrain, but were actually buried here. Though I couldn’t tell you why.”

About two inches from the adult skeleton’s flexed knee joint, Cormac’s trowel suddenly came in contact with what appeared to be a small patch of metal just under the surface of the clay. He quickly scraped away the dirt and gravel to expose one side of an oblong metal container, about the size of a small bread box and rather ordinary-looking. With further digging, the box turned out to be a sort of coffer or strongbox, now heavily corroded from being buried in damp soil. It was decorated with nail heads and secured around with two heavy iron bands. When he finally had the whole thing excavated, Cormac could see the remnants of leather handles on either side that had rotted through, and the rusty padlock that secured the vaulted lid.

“Maybe something in here can give us an idea who they are,” he said.

Nora could perceive that Cormac was speaking, but his words didn’t register. She had seen hundreds of human skeletons in the course of her career, but each time, she couldn’t help being struck by the beauty and ingenuity of the form, the strength and flexibility in the triangular bones of the spine. She was studying the way the soil had infiltrated the child’s chest cavity, cradling the breastbone, ribs, and collarbone. She knew how difficult it was to tell whether an adult skeleton was male or female without precise measurements of the pelvic bones, though this one being found in the company of a newborn child increased the probability that it was female. Nora knelt over the mute remnants of what might be the second mother and child hidden in this dark place, and understood from the posture of the whitened bones lying before her, now exposed to the light, that again there had been no laying to rest here, no ceremony, but another hurried inhumation cloaked in secrecy. All at once she began to experience the same prickling sensation she had in the lab the day she was alone with the head of the cailin rua. “Cormac,” she said, “do you realize what we haven’t found?”

Nora worked feverishly to remove compacted soil until it was clear that no skull was attached to the end of the adult’s spinal column. She quickly counted the vertebrae, careful not to touch the bones themselves for fear of scratching or damaging them. A normal human spine should have seven cervical vertebrae; this individual was missing the first three.

“My God, Cormac, this could be our red-haired girl,” Nora said, then almost immediately reversed herself. “No—that would be just too fantastic.”

“Of course it would. But I don’t know why it should be. The girl Raftery told us about—Annie McCann—who was executed, she was from around this place somewhere. And what would have become of her body after the execution? You wouldn’t very well bury a convicted murderer in the churchyard with all the proper Christians.”

If by some remote chance this actually was the cailin rua, why would someone take the trouble to conceal her body in a souterrain—with the corpse of the infant she’d presumably murdered? Of course none of it made logical sense. Nora’s head ached, and her shoulders finally began to feel the crushing weight of the last few days’ events. She looked down at the child’s tiny skull, and tried to imagine what little effort it would take to stop the breath of such a helpless creature. It would be over in a few brief seconds. Is that how this child died, when its mother’s touch turned murderous? The infant’s empty orbits stared up at her, unanswering, and Nora felt suddenly cold, kneeling in the damp, shaded corner of the underground room.

7

Malachy Drummond had returned and confirmed Cormac’s assumption that the remains found in the souterrain had indeed been buried there for several centuries. Now he sat with Nora in the evidence room at the Loughrea Garda station. They were waiting for Niall Dawson from the National Museum, who was coming down to have a look at the strongbox and to take it and the skeletal remains with him back to Dublin.

“You’re very quiet this morning,” Cormac said.

“I’m just thinking about how thin the line is between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. And once it’s done, how everything changes.”

“We have nothing to be sorry about, Nora. If you and I had never come here, Mina and Christopher Osborne would still be missing. All we did was to help uncover what was already done.”

“I know, I know. I keep telling myself that. But the way I went about things here only ended up causing extra pain, to you, to everyone. It’s ironic that the whole point of coming back here was supposedly to find out more about the cailin rua, and we haven’t even managed to do that.”

“Hang on,” Cormac said. “We found that bit of a song. Raftery found the story of an execution that fits the dates. And we should know within a few days whether the skeleton from the souterrain belongs to our red-haired girl. That’s an incredible amount of information, Nora. What more could we possibly learn?”

Her eyes pierced him. “That she didn’t do it. That she didn’t murder her own child.” As Cormac studied Nora’s face, he knew that she was also thinking of Hugh Osborne. The awful uncertainty over the whereabouts of his family had been replaced with an even more dreadful probability—that one or more of the people they had come to know in these few days at Bracklyn might be involved in a double murder. The thought had been weighing upon him as well.

Devaney had remained tight-lipped about the postmortem results, but he and his fellow detectives had begun intensive interviews, particularly of Hugh and Lucy Osborne. They had put out additional public appeals for witnesses and information about the day of the disappearance, but as yet no one had been charged. Cormac couldn’t help thinking that nothing would be resolved as long as Jeremy remained unconscious, the words he’d spoken at the tower as much a mystery now as when he’d uttered them. They were all waiting for the moment when the boy would awaken—if he awakened at all.

A few minutes later, Cormac stood by with Nora and Devaney as Niall Dawson launched his examination of the strongbox from the souterrain. Dawson began by taking several photographs of the unopened coffer. He gently tried to work the ancient lock with a thin tool, teasing flakes of rust onto the table below. After a few seconds, the lock cracked apart and fell to pieces in his gloved hand.

“Probably wonderfully strong when they put it on,” Dawson said as he lifted the lid. “Hmm. Seeing what’s in here may help in dating the box quite precisely.” After taking a few photos of the undisturbed contents, he lifted out a slightly concave paten, and a chalice, both of which appeared to be made of pewter or some similar metal. The chalice was set around with uncut stones. The next object was a crucifix, about eight inches long, made of wood, with a crude metal Christ figure.

“See how the arms are very short? Makes it easier to hide up your sleeve, a handy trick if you’re saying a Mass somewhere you oughtn’t. These weren’t items to be caught with—unless of course you felt compelled to risk your neck. So that presents a dilemma: you shouldn’t really destroy them—that would be sacrilege—but you can’t risk anybody finding the bloody things either. So you bury them, and pray for times to change.”

At the bottom of the coffer was a book that looked badly damaged with age, its warped calfskin cover embossed with red and gold. Dawson’s gloved fingers opened the pages at random. It appeared to be a Latin Bible, with woodcut illustrations and initials. From the quick appraisal Dawson gave the book, Cormac surmised that he had apparently seen at least a few others like it.

“Italian imprint, published in 1588,” he said, opening the volume to its flyleaf. “That means the National Library will be at least wanting to take a look at it.” He turned to Devaney. “I’m not sure what you were looking for, Detective. These items have some historical interest, but they’re not all that rare. There’s nothing of great monetary value here, if that was a concern. The Bible is worth a thousand or two at most. You’d find objects of this sort in many local historical museums around the country.”

“I appreciate you coming all the way from Dublin on short notice,” Devaney said. “It’s good to be clear about what we have.”

“Not at all,” Dawson replied.

“Niall,” Nora said, “I wanted to ask if you’ve found out any more about the ring.”

“I’m afraid it’s out of my hands. The decorative arts department has possession of it; they might be able to tell you more.”

“Why would it go to them? I thought ‘decorative arts’ meant vases and furniture.”

“Well, the general rule,” Dawson explained with a wry grin, “is that if an artifact is found in bits it comes to Antiquities; if it’s intact, it goes to Decorative Arts. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

A young Garda officer stuck his head in the door. “Excuse me, Detective Devaney? O’Byrne’s just phoned from the hospital, sir. Jeremy Osborne has come around, and says he won’t speak to anyone but you.”

8

When Devaney arrived at the hospital, he could see a medical team hovering over Jeremy Osborne’s bed. O’Byrne, the young officer posted at the door, eagerly filled him in on what had happened: “I wasn’t in the room, sir, but I could hear everything that went on. His mother was in there with him, like she has been all along, and you could hear him rustling in the bed, like. ‘Jeremy,’ says she, ‘lie still. I’ll get the doctor.’ Well, I can’t leave me post, so I flag down a nurse and says to her, ‘Get the doctor, yer man’s awake inside in the room.’ I go in, and the next thing you know he’s screaming bloody murder, and telling me to get her out, get her out, he doesn’t want her here, and she’s trying to get him to whisht, and he just gets worse, roarin’ and shoutin’ and carryin’ on till the doctor arrives and sends us both out into the hallway until they get him settled down. Then the mother tries to go in, but he’s at it again, and the doctor tells her to stay out if she wants what’s best for the lad. That’s when I rang you.”

“Where’s the mother now?”

“Over there, sir,” O’Byrne said, indicating her with his eyes. Lucy Osborne sat upright in a chair in the corridor outside Jeremy’s room. Devaney thought he could finally detect the strain beginning to show in her face.

“Mrs. Osborne, I understand that your son wants to speak with me.”

“I should be in there with him,” she said, rising and moving toward the door. Devaney stepped into her path.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“You don’t understand. Even before the accident, he wasn’t well.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Osborne, but we’re allowed to question him alone if he’s over seventeen. I’ll have to ask you to wait here. Maybe one of the nurses would get you a cup of tea or something.” When he turned away, Devaney could feel her eyes drilling holes in his back.

The nurse was taking Jeremy Osborne’s pulse. He looked dreadful, his face still bruised and swollen under the bandages, but Devaney could see relief in the boy’s eyes as he dutifully kept the thermometer under his tongue. He and O’Byrne waited until the nurse left the room, then Devaney closed the door and drew a chair up on the far side of the bed. Through the window, he could see Lucy Osborne’s anxious face as she strained to catch every gesture, to comprehend what was being said behind the glass, and found himself praying fervently that he could play this thing right. It might be his only chance.

“Hello, Jeremy. This is Garda O’Byrne,” he said, indicating the uniformed officer. “I do have to caution you that you’re not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. Do you understand that, Jeremy?” There was no response. “I have to make sure you understand.”

Jeremy’s voice cracked as he answered: “I understand.”

“We uncovered the bodies of Mina and Christopher Osborne three days ago, in an underground passage near the tower house, just as you said.” He watched the boy’s face crumble. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, Jeremy?”

“Why did he have to stop me? Why couldn’t he just let me die?”

Devaney imagined that the boy was referring to Maguire, who had prevented him from leaping into the fire. “Maybe he saw someone worth salvaging.”

“You don’t understand. I killed them. I killed them both.” Jeremy Osborne looked at him, and Devaney could see the effort it had taken for the boy to speak those words aloud, and how much more it was going to take to finally give the full story. He waited, and Jeremy’s eyes closed once more. The silence grew until it filled the space. Finally, Jeremy began to speak again; Devaney had to lean forward to hear his faint whisper.

“I had my birthday the end of September. Mum gave me a hunting rifle, an old one that belonged to my granddad. She said she didn’t want me to be afraid of guns just because of—because of what happened to my father. I never even touched a gun before. She said to wait until someone showed me the proper way to use it, but I took it out anyway. I was only going to shoot at birds; ah Jesus, I never meant—” Jeremy’s face screwed up again, and Devaney simply waited once more, wishing this could be over.

“I went up to the tower. It was foggy, and when I heard something move, I fired.” It was clear he was reliving those endless seconds again, as he had every day, every night for almost three years. “I thought it was a bird.” The tears were spilling down Jeremy’s face now. His eyes focused not on Devaney, but a place somewhere on the ceiling of the hospital room, where the scene seemed to play itself out before him. Devaney could see it as well: mother and child arriving home from the village, the little boy, wearing his new red boots, climbing from the pushchair and leading his mother on a chase, or a game of hide-and-seek at the edge of the woods.

“I thought it was a bird. But it was Mina.” He recoiled at the memory. “I don’t know what she was doing there. Her eye was gone, it was all blood—” He reached up as if to touch her face before him, and his hand stopped in midair. “And then I saw she’d fallen on top of Chris. He wasn’t moving.”

“What did you do next?” Devaney asked.

It was a moment before Jeremy could respond. “I don’t remember, I just knew they were dead, and I had to cover them up,” he said, and even before he finished speaking, Devaney knew the last part was a lie. Everything the boy had said to this point had the ring of truth in it; why would he begin to lie now?

“Nobody knew about that underground passage, only me. I used to hide there. I dragged them inside, and closed up the entrance, covered it with stones. That’s why the police never found it.” Though he was nearly exhausted, the tears had stopped, and Jeremy’s voice had taken on a hard edge it hadn’t had before.

“Are you saying that you hid the bodies all on your own? That no one helped you?”

“No. There was no one else. Only me.”

“If it was an accident, Jeremy, why didn’t you come forward?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know—I was afraid.”

“What about the gun, Jeremy? What did you do with the gun? And the pushchair?”

The boy’s face suddenly betrayed confusion, and his breath began to catch in his throat. “I—I don’t remember. You’re trying to confuse me.” Devaney saw his chance and took it, not looking up to see whether Lucy Osborne was still watching.

“Listen, Jeremy, I have reason to believe that someone helped you, at least in the covering up. Why don’t you just tell me how it really happened?”

“I’ve told you. No one helped me. No one.” If anything, the boy looked even more abject and miserable than he had before he’d relieved himself of his awful burden. You think you’ve gotten rid of it, but it doesn’t go away, Devaney thought. It never goes away.

“Then tell me, Jeremy, why would you have said, ‘She’d never tell’?”

“I said that?” The boy looked horrified.

“You did. Maguire says you told him there was a place underground, then you said: ‘She knows. She’d never tell.’ You don’t remember that?”

“No. I never said that.”

“I see. Let’s go back to Christopher. The postmortem shows he had a hairline skull fracture, but the pathologist says that alone wouldn’t have been enough to kill him. How did Christopher die, Jeremy?” Devaney moved closer to the boy, spoke softly, close to his ear. Jeremy’s hands and feet began to move, and Devaney hated himself. He knew he must stage this as carefully as a performance, must persist in probing until he could sense the gnawing horror in the boy’s insides, and see it in his terrified eyes. “I’m thinking it probably wasn’t very difficult to smother him. He was small, and not very strong. Maybe he was unconscious, and never even struggled. What did you do? Did you just put your hand over his face? What did that feel like, Jeremy? What does it feel like to stop a helpless little child breathing until his heart stops? Until you know that he’s really and truly dead?”

Jeremy’s body was writhing weakly among his bedclothes, as he tried to resist the dreadful words, the even more terrible images they conjured up. “No, that’s not how it was. She fell—oh, Jesus, help me. Somebody help me—”

That was the moment at which Lucy Osborne, who had been watching through the window, could restrain herself no longer. She opened the door and came to stand beside Devaney’s chair.

“Get away from my son,” she warned in an icy voice. “I know what you’re trying to do. Leave him alone.” When Devaney stood to address her, she slapped him hard across the face. He took the blow, but seized her arm before she could strike him again. For such a slight woman, Lucy Osborne was phenomenally strong, and at first only her eyes gave away the fury she had managed for so long to contain. Then she began to laugh breathlessly, almost hysterically, and Devaney felt his stomach heave as he stood between overprotective mother and sheltered son, and only dimly began to realize that he’d had the whole thing backward all along. The relationship between parent and child had been distorted beyond all recognition, and it was Jeremy who’d been protecting his mother, not the other way around. Devaney suddenly knew that the scene as he’d played it out for Jeremy didn’t come close to the real atrocity that had taken place that day in the woods at Bracklyn House. As he stood facing Lucy Osborne, her wrist gripped tightly in his hand, he had to extinguish a savage desire to stop the laughter, to strike the woman to the ground and pummel her until he could make it stop. He looked into her eyes as he spoke the words of the official caution again, slowly and carefully, as a way to calm himself. Then he let go of her arm.

“What’s the matter, Detective?” she asked in a strangely mocking tone, as if she knew what had gone through his mind. “Hasn’t my son broken down to your satisfaction? Hasn’t he played his part well enough in your precious search for the truth? I’ll give you the truth.” She spat the word with a venomous contempt.

“No, please, no,” Jeremy pleaded, but there was no stopping Lucy Osborne now.

“I’m the one you want. My son didn’t know what he was doing; the shooting was a complete accident. He came into the house raving, ‘I’ve killed them, I’ve killed them.’ He kept saying it over and over again.”

“Please stop,” Jeremy implored once again.

She reached out for her son’s hand, and stroked it as she addressed him: “Hush now, don’t say any more. I have to tell them, darling, don’t you see, they’re going to take you away unless I do, and I can’t let them do that, I can’t.” Then she turned back to Devaney and began to speak slowly, deliberately, and seemingly without emotion: “All I could think at first was that our chance to get home again to England was ruined. I had been planning it for so long, working out the details, and now this would destroy everything. But then I began to see how it all might work. If we could manage just to stay calm and handle ourselves well. There wasn’t very much blood at all, not like Daniel. We didn’t have much time. Hugh might be back at any moment, so we had to find a place to hide them, just until I could think things through. Jeremy told me about his underground room. I had him run and get a spade from the shed, and then—” Her eyes stared into the past. “I was looking down at the child. He was quiet, but I could see a pulse, just there.” She raised her fingers to her own throat. “I had to make it stop, don’t you see? It was so small, so insignificant. And all I could think was that this boy was in the way, he was the one minor obstacle that now stood between Jeremy and the dream I’d always had for us. We had to get back to our home at Banfield. We’d made the mistake of losing it once before, you see, more than three hundred years ago, but we got it back then, and we could get it back again now. We were so close. I don’t suppose it means anything at all to you, but I wasn’t about to let five hundred years of my family history at Banfield come to a full stop just like that. I couldn’t be responsible for that. So all I could think was that this child must die—and after that it would be easy, so easy.”

Jeremy Osborne’s face was filled with revulsion, but his strength was gone and he could not pull his hand away from his mother’s grasp. Lucy continued, her voice now absolutely cool and deliberate: “And then I thought how fitting it was, in a way, because of all the people who had tried to take Jeremy away from me, it was this child, this filthy little kaffir, who’d most nearly succeeded. I said to him, ‘It’s really for the best, don’t you see? There’s nothing left for you here, you poor, motherless mongrel.’ What I did was an act of kindness.”

Devaney pictured the boy arriving back with the shovel, to find his mother’s hand covering Christopher’s face. “Is that how it happened, Jeremy?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” The boy’s face was twisted with anguish. Here was the real reason Jeremy had not come forward, though he had nearly died trying to keep that terrible truth within himself. It had been too late to do anything for Mina, but Jeremy had suffered torture for more than two harrowing years, thinking that he might have saved Christopher.

But Lucy wasn’t finished. “After that, there was only Hugh, and he was so bloody weak—like all the Osbornes. He let himself be convinced—under the circumstances—that the estate ought to go to Jeremy if anything happened to him. That’s what he told me Sunday evening, that he’d gone to London to change his will. He even believed that it was his own idea all along.”

Lucy Osborne’s eyes grew larger, and the words came faster and faster, spilling out in an unstoppable torrent: “I knew no one would question a suicide, the way he’d carried on. It was almost too easy, putting the sleeping tablets in his tea. I knew the real difficulty would be in getting him out to the car, but the garden cart worked very handsomely. But that meddling pair ruined everything. That wretched American, prying into every corner, using Jeremy to get at me. I tried to warn her off, get rid of her—I told her on the phone, leave it alone, they’re better off. The broken glass was far too subtle; she just swept it up. Finally, I put that horrible dead thing in her bed, but she still wouldn’t leave us alone. That’s why it had to escalate, why Hugh’s suicide had to happen that night, when they were supposed to be out for the evening. And if only—” The memory of this failure seemed to cause physical pain, and Lucy Osborne’s bony fingers clawed at the bedsheets like talons. Her eyes brimmed with hatred and disgust. “If only they’d arrived five minutes later, Jeremy and I would be shut of this godforsaken country and on our way home again. And none of you could have stopped us.”

Devaney had heard his share of confessions. He’d seen plenty of suspects finally crack under the pressure of questioning. But he had never witnessed anything quite like what had just taken place here.

Lucy’s face softened again as she turned to her son and took his hand. “This is not your fault, darling. You did so well for so long. I know it was difficult. Whatever happens to me, you mustn’t blame yourself.” With gritted teeth, Jeremy wrested his hand from his mother’s grip, and turned away from her, wracked with broken sobs. Devaney wasn’t sure the woman realized that her son had been lost to her quite some time ago.

“Lucy Osborne, I’m arresting you for the murder of Christopher Osborne, for the attempted murder of Hugh Osborne, and for concealing evidence in the death of Mina Osborne. It would be in your best interest to speak with your solicitor as soon as possible. You can phone from the station. Do you understand? Mrs. Osborne?”

Lucy ignored him, and reached out to stroke her son’s hair. “You haven’t been well, my love. Not well at all. You rest now, darling. I’ll be back soon.”

Not for about thirty years, Devaney thought. “I’d be obliged if you and Mullins would take Mrs. Osborne to the station,” he said to O’Byrne. “I’ll be there shortly—there’s something I have to do first.”

Devaney was crossing Drumcleggan Bog when he saw Hugh Osborne’s black Volvo heading toward him. He leaned on the horn; though Osborne had been driving fast, he managed to slow down and stop, then reversed until the two cars were side by side.

“I had a message about Jeremy. Is he all right? What did he say?”

Devaney looked into the man’s eyes and felt the words tearing at his throat as he tried to speak. Maybe it would be better if there were other people around. “Hadn’t we better go somewhere it’s easier to talk?”

“Tell me now, Detective. Please. There’s a place where you can pull off the road just ahead. I’ll turn around.”

Devaney nodded once, and drove off the road to the place Osborne had mentioned, a small peninsula of solid ground that jutted out into the bog. He looked through the wind-screen at the black voids of the random cut-aways and the little clumps of footed turf as the first drops of rain began to spit from the low, shifting blanket of clouds that moved in from the west. And he knew that Hugh Osborne had been telling the truth all along. That ridiculous story about stopping to rest along the road from Shannon was not fiction but cruel fact. It meant that Osborne would have to live the rest of his life knowing he’d been asleep only a few miles from home as his wife and son were killed. Devaney thought as he opened the car door and felt the freshness of the mist on his face how strange it was that this chapter of the story at least would reach its end here in the bog, almost exactly where it had begun. And it struck him that there was nowhere to hide in this place of banishment—neither tree nor stone nor bush as far as the eye could see, nothing to provide shelter from the wind, and from the rain when it came.

9

Alone in her room, Nora counted the time: it was nine days now after the tower fire, and just a week since the discovery of the souterrain. Cormac’s work at the priory was finished, and they would be leaving Bracklyn House after the funeral tomorrow. They were alone in the house at the moment; Hugh Osborne had looked exhausted this morning, but he’d insisted on driving on his own to collect his mother-in-law at Shannon, and they hadn’t been able to dissuade him.

She found Cormac in his room, packing for the journey. “I just spoke to Hickey, the garage man,” she said, sitting on the bed where he was arranging the items in his case. “My car’s good as new, but they couldn’t get all the parts for yours. Drivable, he says, but you’ll have to get the rear window replaced when you get back to Dublin.”

“I was actually thinking I might not go straight home,” Cormac said. He paused a moment before continuing. “I was thinking of heading up to Donegal for a few days.” He hesitated once more, but this time looked up at her. “You could come with me.”

This sudden fit of spontaneity took Nora completely by surprise. She studied his face for a moment before responding. “I have to get back to Dublin; I’ve already missed a week of classes as it is. You’re probably better off on your own, anyway. I imagine you and your father will find plenty to talk about. How’s your head, though? Are you sure you’re all right for driving?”

“I’ll be fine.” Cormac shoved his case aside and sat down beside her, then reached for her hand, and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist.

She tried to withdraw her hand. “I’m going to be kicking myself as it is, but you have to bloody well make sure of it, don’t you?”

“Nora, what’s bothering you?”

“I was so wrong about Hugh. I heard what I wanted to hear, and I came here ready to hang him. The worst part is that he’s been so forgiving.”

“It wasn’t just you; everyone suspected him. The police—”

“Everyone but you.”

“Maybe it seemed that way. On the inside, I’m afraid I wavered too.”

“I keep wondering what’s going to happen here, Cormac. Devaney said we might be called to testify, if the case actually goes to trial. I hope it doesn’t come to that. I wonder if Jeremy could survive going to prison. And if he isn’t charged, or gets a suspended sentence? Devaney said it’s a possibility because he was underage at the time. Where will he go?”

“Hugh told me he wants Jeremy to stay on here—if and when he’s released. He knows what happened wasn’t the boy’s fault.”

“It sounds very noble, but the whole idea is fraught with disaster. How could he not be reminded every single day of what Jeremy did? And how can Una McGann possibly go on living in the same house with her brother?” Nora said. “Fintan’s going off to seek his fortune in the States. For Aoife’s sake, how can she even think about staying there?”

“I know we’ve been through an ordeal with Hugh, and with Una these last few weeks,” he said. “But it’s not as if we even really know them. Maybe Hugh Osborne has more forgiveness in him than you or I could ever imagine. Maybe he needs Jeremy as much as the boy needs him. Maybe Una will decide to leave home. They’ll have to find their own ways through this, Nora. They will. But I don’t know that we can help them.”

She had imagined that finding answers should impart at least some small sense of satisfaction, and yet that feeling was absent. She knew that they would all carry on, as human beings had always carried on, as automatically as their hearts carried on beating, their lungs continued taking in and expelling breath. Sometimes without thinking or feeling, sometimes invaded by despair. Why then, after helping to unearth the truth of this place, did she feel so compelled to do more? What more was there? Maybe Cormac was right, maybe they had reached the end of doing.

“Come here to me,” he said, and whether it was the warmth of his arms, or the roughness of his face against hers, she did not know, only that she needed the solace he offered, and responded instinctively to his touch until they were tangled together on the high bed. All Nora could hear was their ragged breathing, and she felt herself falling, borne downward into a maelstrom, a potent confusion of feeling.

Downstairs, the single deep note of the doorbell sounded in the front hall. Nora pulled away and slid off the bed. “What the hell are we doing? What were we thinking? I’m sorry, Cormac.” As she left the room, she heard his carefully packed case go crashing to the floor.

10

Devaney stood outside the front door at Bracklyn House, bearing the brown paper envelope containing Mina Osborne’s letters. When Nora Gavin answered the door, he said, “I just dropped by to see Mrs. Gonsalves.”

“We’re expecting them any time. You can wait if you’d like.”

Devaney stepped inside, and caught Dr. Gavin eyeing his package. “Just some letters,” he said. “From Mina Osborne to her mother.”

“You’ve read them?”

“I have.”

“What was she like?”

Devaney considered for a moment, thinking of the Mina Osborne he’d come to know a little, remembering the intelligence, thoughtfulness, and compassion that radiated from her letters. He had wondered the same thing, and yet what was the point of such a question, since none of them, not even her mother or her husband, had really known, or would ever know? Mina Osborne had become a void, an absence in the lives of those she’d left behind. The paltry words that he might use to sum her up would be based only on a few lines of handwriting. He was aware that Dr. Gavin was watching him with a curious expression. “I’m afraid I can’t really say.”

Maguire seemed rather subdued when he joined them, and Devaney got the distinct sense that he’d interrupted something when he’d rung the doorbell.

“Detective,” Dr. Gavin said, “we’ve been wondering what’s going on, and maybe you could enlighten us. Cormac and I have read the papers and heard lots of things second-and third-hand about Lucy Osborne’s confession and the charges. We’d rather not be asking Hugh.”

“I’ll tell you what I can. According to what Jeremy told us, his mother had become obsessed about getting back her home place in England. She’d started writing rambling letters to her solicitor, and was scheming about ways to get it back. She evidently got it into her head some time ago that the Osbornes collectively owed her for the loss of her family home. Who knows if she would have done anything on her own, but when the shooting occurred, an opportunity presented itself, and the more she thought about it, the more she began to see eliminating this branch of the Osborne family as the main chance for herself and her son. With Mina and Christopher out of the way, she accomplished two things: she eliminated Hugh Osborne’s lawful heirs, and put her own son in their place. Hugh Osborne would be a rich man when he got the insurance, when his wife was declared legally dead. But once Hugh made Jeremy the beneficiary in his will, there was no reason to wait. All she had to do was to see that something happened to Hugh, and she and Jeremy would be secure. Osborne’s own policy might not have paid if he committed suicide, but Jeremy would still stand to inherit Bracklyn House, not to mention the life insurance on Mina Osborne.”

“How did it all start to unravel?” Dr. Gavin asked.

“Jeremy told us that he and his mother removed suitcases and clothing from the house to make it look as if Mina had simply run away. He was supposed to burn it all, but he hung on to a few items. Then a couple of months ago the cleaner, Mrs. Hernan, found one of Mina’s scarves under his mattress—and when Mrs. Hernan brought it to Lucy’s attention, she was sacked. Evidently Lucy forced Jeremy to burn the scarf—this time in front of her, to make sure it was done properly—and that’s when he felt he had to find a way to tell someone. He tried to keep away from his mother, ended up practically living out at the tower—he started stealing food, and all those candles he had were nicked from the church. Between the drink and camping in the tower like an outlaw, it’s not hard to see why Jeremy seemed to be the one who was going mad.”

“Do you know anything more about the charges, Detective?” Maguire asked.

“We got word today from the DPP—that’s the director of public prosecutions. Lucy Osborne is charged with one count of murder for the death of Christopher Osborne, and one of attempted murder against Hugh Osborne. If she’s judged competent to stand trial—and they cautioned that it’s a big ‘if,’ considering her current mental state—she could receive a life sentence on those charges alone. And she could get an additional sentence for concealing evidence. At this point, Jeremy’s up on a single charge of involuntary manslaughter for the death of Mina Osborne, but the DPP says he’ll most likely receive a suspended sentence, given the circumstances of the case, and his age at the time.”

“The thing I don’t understand is why Hugh didn’t say anything about Lucy giving him sleeping tablets,” Dr. Gavin said.

“He says he has no memory of anything that happened after he went down into the workshop—he can’t even recall Lucy bringing him tea.”

“Surely he must have figured out that he didn’t end up in that car by himself,” she said.

Devaney hesitated, remembering Hugh Osborne’s explanation when he’d brought up the same point himself during questioning. When you’ve thought as often as I have about what it would be like—to go out to the car, turn it on, and just go to sleep, he’d said, it’s somehow not at all surprising to find out that’s exactly what you did. If it weren’t for Lucy’s admission, Devaney thought, the man might still consider himself an unsuccessful suicide.

The sound of voices cut short their conversation as Hugh Osborne came in with Mrs. Gonsalves. Devaney heard the voice he’d come to know on the telephone, and wondered how the woman’s grace and dignity could seem completely undiminished by the length and grim purpose of her journey. He watched her dark eyes alight upon the package in his hands.

“You must be Detective Devaney,” she said.

“You know one another?” Osborne asked.

“We’ve spoken on the telephone,” said Mrs. Gonsalves, clasping Devaney’s outstretched hand. “Detective, I’m so grateful for all you’ve done on my daughter’s behalf. And my grandson—” Her voice faltered, but her eyes were steady. Devaney held out the precious brown package.

“Thank you for returning Mina’s letters,” said Mrs. Gonsalves as she received it. “I know you understand how I treasure them.”

Devaney begged off staying for tea. He had done his duty in bringing the package. Upon reaching home, he could hear a few faint, wobbly fiddle notes as he got out of the car. Roisin was in the kitchen, tentatively picking out a tune; he could barely recognize the first few bars of “Paidin O’Rafferty.” He watched through the kitchen window as Nuala came in, kissing the top of her daughter’s studiously inclined head as she passed.

“That’s starting to sound lovely, Roisin, keep at it. Remember what Daddy said, and don’t try to play too fast. I’ve got to go out—” Nuala stopped when he opened the door. Devaney felt frozen on the threshold, couldn’t force himself to speak or to step into the house. Roisin stopped playing, and Nuala came and stood in front of him.

“Are you all right, Gar? Why are you home in the middle of the afternoon?”

He wanted to tell his wife that for the first time in a long while he could see her so clearly, so entirely, every curve and eyelash and tiny line, as clearly as that first time they had slept and awakened together, but he found himself unable to speak.

“Garrett,” she said, “why won’t you come in?” Her touch was enough to break the spell. He stepped forward and sat down facing his daughter across the table. Nuala seated herself beside him.

“Listen, Daddy, I’ve nearly got it off,” Roisin said brightly, launching into a halting jig tempo once more, barely getting through the A part of the tune.

“Isn’t she coming along?” Nuala asked, still searching his countenance for some inkling of what was going on. He felt them standing on opposite sides of a threshold, if not of understanding itself, then at least a willingness to understand one another again. Nuala reached up and touched his face. “I’m going to call the office, and ask Sheila if she wouldn’t mind taking a couple of appointments for me. I won’t be a minute.”

When Devaney looked across the table at Roisin, he saw a reflection of his own bewildered countenance in the bottomless depths of his daughter’s eyes.

11

The funeral Mass for Mina and Christopher Osborne took place two days later at St. Columba’s in Dunbeg. Standing in the back of the church, Devaney watched a small clutch of reporters gather outside the gates, no doubt hoping to get a few shots of the grieving family, to be served up on the evening news with some of the more sensational facts of the case, all intoned with the usual air of affected solemnity. They’d have a good show; the whole village had turned out. Hugh Osborne was already in the front of the church with Mrs. Gonsalves. Devaney suddenly realized that in their conversations, he’d never even asked Mina’s mother her Christian name. He watched the mourners shuffle slowly past: Delia Hernan, Dolly Pilkington with her three eldest, Ned and Anna Raftery, all the women he’d dubbed charter members of the Father Kinsella fan club. Una McGann and her daughter sat among them, purposely removed from Osborne, Devaney noticed, and he could see the looks from all around her that measured the distance exactly. Una’s brothers were there as well, Fintan sitting upright beside her, and Brendan kneeling in one of the back pews with his head bowed, and a rosary knotted through his thick fingers.

Devaney was still standing inside the door, wishing in vain for a cigarette, when Brian Boylan approached. Boylan was all spit and polish today in one of his expensive suits, as if he’d come here to work the crowd—and so he had, Devaney thought cynically.

“Just wanted to say well done, Detective,” Boylan said in a confidential tone. “Very well done indeed. A sad case, but good to have everything resolved.”

“Sir” was Devaney’s curt reply. He didn’t feel he deserved even this brief congratulatory nod. Though he probably would have cracked it eventually, the fact of the matter was that the bloody thing had fallen right into his lap. When are you ever going to learn to ease up? asked the voice in his head. Whatever way the answers had come, the thing was finished.

A heavy rain lashed down all during the service, and by the time the Mass was over the television cameras had dispersed. The showers had all but stopped when the mourners reached the burial site, but the sun seemed to dodge in and out behind still-threatening dark clouds that occasionally let go a sporadic drizzle. Mother and child were interred in the same casket, in a corner of the ancient churchyard at Drumcleggan Priory, in an area slightly separated from the rest of the burials. The church had been full to the rafters, but here at the priory Hugh Osborne stood solemnly by the graveside, arm in arm with Mrs. Gonsalves, and the only others in attendance were Father Kinsella, Cormac Maguire and Nora Gavin, Una and Fintan McGann, Devaney himself, and the undertaker’s men.

After the rain, the air smelled of freshly turned clay, and it struck Devaney that there was nothing illusory about this burial: no carpet of artificial turf covered the mound of earth that had been dug by hand from the grave; the unpretentious wooden coffin was lowered into the ground on stout ropes by two laboring men in shirtsleeves. Seated on a folding chair at the graveside, Fintan McGann strapped on his pipes and, when the holy water had been sprinkled and the last prayers said, lowered his head and began to play an air—a lament whose simple, dignified melody contained the purest distillation of grief. After they all filed from the churchyard, Devaney turned to watch the workmen as they shoveled the wet clay into the grave, listening to the damp, rhythmic scrape of the spades, and the sound of the soil hitting the coffin with a hollow thud.

12

Back at Bracklyn House after the interment, Cormac noted how the noise level dipped for the slightest fraction of a second when Hugh and Mrs. Gonsalves entered the front hall, just as it had the night he saw Osborne ducking through the door at Lynch’s pub. The mood here was decidedly somber, and yet this usually silent house took on a different, almost unrecognizable demeanor when filled with the buzz of conversation. It was clearly the first time most of these people had seen the inside of Bracklyn House, and he could see their eyes gauging its proportions, and their frank astonishment at its general state of disrepair, the age and shabbiness of the furnishings. The doors to the formal sitting room were open wide, the chandeliers managed to glitter through their thin veil of dust, and the huge dining table and sideboard were laden with plates of homemade ham and salad sandwiches, dark fruitcake, and currant scones. The combination of homeliness and grandeur struck a discordant note.

Hugh led Mrs. Gonsalves to a chair beside the dining room windows. Una brought her a cup of tea, and tried to press some refreshment on Osborne as well, which he refused. Mourners began to file past. “Sorry for your trouble,” Cormac heard them murmur in low voices as they leaned down to Mrs. Gonsalves, or solemnly shook Hugh Osborne’s hand. How strange to see the modern-day citizens of Dunbeg, whose tenant ancestors no doubt spent lifetimes tugging their forelocks in the presence of the Osbornes, greeting the current owner of Bracklyn House as though he still exerted some sort of control over their lives.

As he moved about the rooms, Cormac wondered where Nora had got to, and saw her talking to Devaney in a corner of the library. Going about his work, Devaney always seemed so self-assured, but here he had the uneasy look of a man not used to socializing, at least in situations where there was neither pint nor fiddle in his hands. When Cormac approached, they were talking about the cailin rua.

“So you’re hoping the bones from the souterrain will come up a match?” Devaney asked.

“Malachy Drummond is helping us with it right now,” Nora said.

Cormac addressed Devaney: “We found some evidence that the red-haired girl from the bog might have actually been”—he lowered his voice, not wishing under the circumstances to broadcast such news to every soul within hearing—“executed for the murder of her newborn child. But Nora doesn’t believe it.”

“I realize we may never find anything conclusive,” Nora said. She looked through the open door into the dining room, where Hugh Osborne stood by the window, accepting condolences. “I just think we ought to get all the information we can.”

13

The morning after the funeral, Nora was packing her case when her mobile phone began to chirp. It was Malachy Drummond.

“I have some interesting news,” he said. “First, the skeletal remains of the adult from your souterrain were a conclusive match for the head found at Drumcleggan Bog. The vertebrae matched exactly, as did the blade marks on the bones. I’m as positive as a pathologist can be that they’re the same person.”

“I knew it,” Nora said under her breath, and at the same time, she felt slightly ill as she thought of the cailin rua putting a hand over her infant’s mouth and nose until it lay still. She didn’t know if the murdered child was a boy or a girl. There was no mention of its gender in the account Raftery had provided. “Thanks, Malachy, I appreciate you taking the time.”

“Hang on. That was only the first bit; there’s more. The museum has some sort of arrangement with one of our colleagues at Trinity. McDevitt’s his name, a chap from the genetics department. He’s working on a database of mitochondrial DNA. Anyway, he came to take a sample from your two specimens while I had them in the morgue, and we got to talking about his research.” Nora was listening, but her mind was already turning over the possibilities of what Drummond was about to reveal.

“It’s fascinating stuff. In addition to DNA, he’s also collecting surname information. Taken in conjunction, his data will eventually produce a map of genetic diversity in Ireland, as a first step in making inferences about population origins. I told him you might have evidence about this girl’s identity, and he said he might like to phone you about it when you get back. I gave him your office number; I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, that’s fine, Malachy.”

“So as we were working, I told him the whole story, how this young woman’s head had been found in a bog, and that you’d turned up evidence that she may have been executed for the murder of her child, very possibly the same infant who was found alongside her in the souterrain.” Drummond paused for breath. “I thought no more about it. But then McDevitt phoned me, just a few minutes ago, with some very curious results. The mtDNA sequences of these two individuals were completely different. There’s no possibility that they were mother and child. They’re not even distantly related. Isn’t that curious?”

Nora couldn’t answer, as her mind tried to take in the enormity of what she had just heard.

“Hello, Nora? Are you still there?”

“Malachy, you’re sure that’s what he said? Not related?”

“He said the evidence couldn’t be more distinct.”

“How is that possible?” She wasn’t really talking to Drummond, but trying to fix the contradictory information in her mind. “So if the child wasn’t hers, whose was it?”

Nora carried her case downstairs, where Cormac was waiting for her, and Hugh Osborne walked them out to the cars in the drive. Cormac’s jeep still bore a few scars from Brendan McGann’s attack; the rear window was temporarily repaired with clear plastic sheeting.

“I owe you both so much,” said Hugh Osborne. “I’ve spoken to Jeremy. He’s going to come back home here when he’s released. I know it may be difficult, but I can’t just abandon him. Mina would never have wanted that.”

“If there’s anything at all that I—that we can do—” Cormac said.

“I fear I’ve already asked far too much.”