Lake of Sorrows

PROLOGUE

It was the cold that roused him. The moment he plunged into the frigid water at the bottom of the bog hole, his eyes fluttered open, and his mind grasped the fact that he would certainly die here. He knew it was the reason he had been brought to this place, the reason he had been born. His body, however, seemed to require further persuasion. He shook his head, groggy, as though awakened from sleep. Was all this real, or only a vision of what was to come? He remembered running, a glancing blow, and before that—

For a moment he remained very still; then he struggled to right himself in the bog hole’s narrow fissure, pressing against the walls with his hands and elbows, treading slowly against the dark, pulpy liquid into which he’d already sunk to his hips. It was pulling him in, downward. Nothing would stop him now. He gasped for air, feeling the leather cord encircling his throat, all at once aware of a strange, spreading warmth upon his chest—blood, his own blood, sticky and metallic. But the primary sensation was cold, a deep, numbing chill combined with an utterly astonishing softness, whose deceitful purpose, he knew, was to draw him into its familiar, bosomy grasp and keep him here forever.

Above his head the midsummer evening remained fair and mild, and his eyes reflected the waning twilight still visible at the top of the bog hole, scarcely more than an arm’s length above his head. His muscular shoulders were those of a man who had herded cattle milked at daybreak and evening, who each spring broke the virgin soil with his plow, who sowed corn and reaped it with sharpened blade—a man ruled by circular, circadian rhythms of light and darkness. The slight hollows in his clean-shaven countenance bespoke hard labor and scant harvests.

He knew this place, this bog. It was a mysterious, holy place, home to spirits and strange mists, a place of transformation and danger. He had crossed it countless times, treading carefully among glittering blue and green damselflies while tracking a hare or a slow-moving grouse. He’d seen the same evening light in its pools of standing water that recalled a hero’s footprints or fragments of firmament fallen to earth. At their edges he had crouched, watching crimson masses of bloodworms as they transformed almost before his eyes and rose from the water to join quivering clouds of midges that hovered, faintly droning, above. He would never see them again, for he had entered a place from which there was no return.

Trapped by the weight of his own body, he could feel himself sinking with every passing second, could feel his hands moving uselessly against the seeping walls of the bog hole. Letting go an involuntary howl, he began to twist and claw furiously, reverting to the instinctive behavior of a trapped animal, baring his teeth and straining with every fiber, unable to reason or comprehend. But his feet were firmly mired in the slurrylike peat and would not come away. He was getting light-headed. His legs were numb, and as the frigid water seeped steadily higher, he began to tremble violently. Even as he felt the dread chill envelop him, he knew that his heart’s blood would soon begin to slow. He ceased struggling and kept still, feeling each breath flow in and out, each one shallower than the last. A memory brushed like spider silk across his consciousness—a luminous face, a woman’s voice soft against his ear. He had sunk to his shoulders; soon he would be swallowed up, devoured by the insatiable earth, the origin and end of life.

In the last few moments, it was only instinct that kept his chin above the surface, as each involuntary shudder drew him further downward. The water stung as it touched his wounds, and began to trickle into his ears, slowly shutting out all sound but his own beating heart. Soon only his face and hands lingered above the surface, but his eyes remained open, staring upward, so that the last image imprinted there was the dim, familiar outline of a head and shoulders, framed in the jagged opening above him by the dying light of evening. His savior, or his executioner? An instant later, living moss and damp peat showered down upon him from above, closing his eyes and filling his nostrils with the scent of sweet grass and heather as he abandoned all resistance and finally yielded to the bog’s chill embrace.

1

Seventy miles straight west of Dublin, at the northern perimeter of Loughnabrone Bog in the far western reaches of County Offaly, Nora Gavin had already formed a distinct image of the man she was supposed to rescue today. It was not a complete figure she imagined, for the man she was going to see had been cut in half—jaggedly severed by the sharp blade of an earth-moving machine. The image lodged in the back of her mind was of frayed and slightly shrunken sinews, ragged patches of skin tanned brown from centuries spent steeping in the bog’s cold, anaerobic tea. She knew she should feel grateful that even a portion of the body was intact; a few more seasons of turf cutting and he might have been completely scattered to the winds. It made her suddenly angry to think that an entire human being had been preserved for so long by the peat, only to be destroyed in the blink of an eye by the thoughtless actions of men and their machines. But the bleak reality was that she might never get the chance to examine an intact bog body, so she had to make the most of each fragmentary opportunity.

It was Monday, the seventeenth of June. The excavation season had begun only a week earlier, and the bog man had turned up the previous Friday. The business Nora would be engaged in today was just a recovery operation, to salvage the torso dug up by a Bord na Mona excavator. It remained to be seen whether the body’s lower half was still embedded in the bank beside the drain. That mystery would probably have to wait for the full excavation—something that would take several weeks to coordinate, since it involved a whole crew of wetlands archaeologists, forensic entomologists, environmental scientists who analyzed pollen and coleoptera and ash content, and experts on metal detection and film documentation. But since the bog man’s upper half had been removed from his peaty grave, the recovery was urgent. Without the proper conservation procedures, ordinary bacteria and mold would start their destructive march in a matter of hours.

Nora glanced down at the large-scale map she’d laid out on the passenger seat of the car. Driving into the West from Dublin, you couldn’t be blamed for missing County Offaly. The two major motorways managed to skirt it almost entirely. The county had a reputation as a backwater, perhaps befitting a place that was one-third bogland. The Loughnabrone workshop, her destination, showed as a cluster of industrial buildings on a dryland peninsula, a scrap of solid earth jutting out into the bog. Bord na Mona, also known as the Turf Board, was Ireland’s official peat-production industry, and had dozens of operations like this all over the midlands. The bog itself appeared on the map as a set of irregular blank areas between the River Brosna and the few hectares of arable land.

She was surrounded on all sides by bogland, and had evidently missed the turn for the workshop. It seemed too arduous to backtrack; the easiest way to navigate now might be to steer toward the looming pair of bell-shaped cooling towers at the nearby power station. That should put her within a quarter-mile of the workshop. The power station looked like the old nuclear plants at home, but chances were the electricity produced here had always been generated by burning peat. No smoke poured from the stacks now, but the towers remained still and silent landmarks in this strange landscape.

Scale was definitely the overpowering element here, where each furrow was fourteen meters across, and human beings were reduced to miniature among the gargantuan machines and the mile-long mountains of milled peat. Deep drains cut through the bog at right angles to the road. Ahead, Nora saw an enormous tractor with fat tires that kept it from sinking in the spongy peat. The extensions suspended from its cab on long cables looked like vast wings. Bearing down on her, with two front windows glinting in the sunlight, it took on the aspect of a monstrous mechanical dragonfly. Far in the distance, several similar strange contraptions in a staggered formation churned up huge clouds of brown peat dust. She drove on, toward the very center of the vast brown-black desert.

The sun was still low, but strong. Racing before her on the road she could see the car silhouetted in the golden morning light, a shape that contained her own weirdly elongated shadow. There was no one else on the road for miles. She opened the window and thrust her hand out into the wind, the way she sometimes had as a child, and felt her whole arm swimming, salmonlike, against the strong current of the cool morning air. She glanced over at the passenger seat and imagined her sister Triona as a child, red hair trailing down her back, her arm out the window as well. She grasped Triona’s hand, as she had done years before, and they flew along together for a few moments, reveling in their sisterly conspiracy of wickedness and giddy with the sensation of being at least partially airborne. Suddenly her mother’s voice echoed in her head: Ah, Nora, please don’t. You know she insists on copying everything you do. Triona’s bright face vanished, and Nora pulled her arm back into the car. There was little comfort in such memories. Triona was gone, and these fleeting images had become a precious, finite commodity.

Eventually, the road’s surface became so uneven that Nora had to slow to a crawl to keep her head from banging against the roof of the car. Bog roads provided only the illusion of solidity; they were merely thin ribbons of asphalt, light and flexible enough to float above the shifting, soggy earth beneath. At this level, right down on the surface of the bog, you could see an unnatural barrenness where the earth had been stripped, year after year, to prevent the spread of living vegetation. It was only in comparing this landscape to what she knew of ordinary boglands that she could understand what was missing here—the teeming proliferation that existed in a natural bog—and could grasp the fact that the dark drains stretching to the horizon and beyond were actually bleeding away the life-giving water.

She imagined what the bog must have seemed to ancient people—a strange liminal region, half water and half earth. To them it had been the center of the world, a holy place, a burial ground, a safe for stowing treasure, a region of the spirits. She tried to conjure up an image of what this spot might have been like thousands of years before, when giant oaks still towered overhead. She had seen their sodden, twisted stumps resurrected from peaty lakes, the trunks used up for ritual structures, or plank roads to traverse the most dangerous marshy places.

It was astonishing to her that bogs, despite their role as collective memory, were still being relinquished to feed the ever-growing hunger for electric power. Up until a hundred years ago, the bogs had been considered useless, mere wasteland. Then the men of science had gone to work on them, devising ever more efficient ways to harvest peat—only to find out, too late, that this was a misguided effort, and perhaps the wrong choice all along. Twenty years from now, the outdated power plants would be gone. This bog would be stripped right down to the marl subsoil, and would have to begin anew the slow reversion to its natural state, layer by layer, over the next five, or eight, or ten thousand years. Without even realizing it, the men of science and progress had given up a book of the past, whose pages contained an incredible record—of weather patterns, and human and animal and plant life over several millennia—all for jobs in a backwater wasteland, for a few paltry years’ worth of electricity.

Since prehistoric times bogs had served as sacrificial sites; it was strange to think that the bogs themselves had become the sacrifice. She thought back to the archaeology books she’d been reading steadily all winter. She had found a kind of fascination in the description of hoards recovered from watery places, including many of the artifacts she’d seen on display in the National Museum. Most had been discovered completely by accident. She had been stunned by the beauty and complexity of the ancient designs. Some of the objects were distinctly military: ornately patterned bronze swords and daggers, spearheads, serpentine trumpets like something from a fairy story. Others suggested domestic or ritual purposes: gold bracelets and collars, fantastic brooches and fibulae that mimicked bird or animal forms, mirrors with a multiplicity of abstract faces hidden in their graved decoration. The reason these objects had been deposited in lakes and bogs remained shrouded in mystery, the enduring secret of a people without written language.

And of course it was not only artifacts that had been found in bogs; nearly a hundred sets of human remains had turned up as well. Judging from the bare facts in the gazetteer of bog bodies she’d been updating, some people had simply gone astray and fallen into the deadly morass; the careful inhumations might have been ordinary burials, or suicides, or childbed deaths refused burial in hallowed ground. But there was still vigorous debate surrounding the assertion that some older bog bodies had been victims of human sacrifice. And this was not the only point of argument. The latest studies showed the difficulty of pinpointing radiocarbon dates, and experts debated whether bog men had colored themselves blue with copper or had absorbed the element from the surrounding peat, even whether they had been murdered, or had been the subjects of ill-fated rescues. Nothing was absolutely certain. When it came down to hard facts, all they really had were dots on a map, the points at which objects had been found.

Driving across the border into Offaly, she had been acutely aware that she was approaching the ancient region known as the Mide, the center. It was a place that had been ascribed all sorts of magical attributes, the powerful locus represented by the central axes of the crosses on Bronze Age sun discs, from a time when the world had been divided up into four quadrants, North, South, East, and West, and a shadowy central place, which, because it was not There, had to be Here. Where was her own Mide, her center, that point where all the pieces of her life met and intersected at one infinitesimal but infinitely powerful place?

She had tried very hard to avoid thinking about Cormac on the trip down here, but she felt her resolve weakening. It was just over a year since she’d made almost the same journey westward, to the place where their lives had been bound together by the untimely death of a beautiful red-haired girl whose head they’d recovered from the bog. She hadn’t meant to find someone like Cormac Maguire. She hadn’t meant to find anyone; she’d come to this place as an escape, a retreat from too much feeling. It hadn’t happened suddenly, but gradually, like a slow envelopment. There was no question that she had soaked up the warmth he offered like a person nearly perished from cold, but were those moments of intense happiness real, or only an illusion? It seemed as if the entire year had passed like a dream. With the coming of spring, she’d known that the dream couldn’t last; that certain knowledge was like a goad in her side, sharp and getting sharper with each passing day. She couldn’t wait to see him, but her eager anticipation was tempered by mounting anxiety.

She had no business fashioning a life for herself here. Her stay in Ireland was supposed to be temporary, a period of respite after her long struggle to find some semblance of justice for Triona’s terrible death. Sometimes she dreamt of her sister’s battered face, and woke up weeping and distracted. The dream would linger, encroaching on her waking mind, a heaviness remembered in body and spirit that sometimes took days to dissipate. Worse still were the dreams where Triona came back, whole and restored, as if she’d never been away. Though Nora knew these visions to be false even as her subconscious conjured them, upon waking from such a dream she still experienced new shock and sorrow.

She had picked up the phone two days ago, and heard the tremor in her mother’s voice: “He’s getting married again.” There had been no need to ask; Nora knew that she meant Peter Hallett—Triona’s husband, and her killer.

Remembering the conversation, Nora suddenly felt her stomach heave. Afraid she was about to be sick, she brought the car to a screeching halt and climbed out, leaving the car door open and the engine running. She walked back along the road the way she’d just come. If she forced herself to breathe slowly, she might be able to keep from hyperventilating. She sat down abruptly on the roadside and dropped her head between her knees, feeling the pulse pounding in her temples.

After a moment the steady noise of the wind began to calm her, and she felt the nausea subside. Suddenly buffeted by a strong gust from behind, she raised her head. The breeze encircled her, then picked up a scant handful of peat dust. The tiny whirlwind danced over the surface of the bog, spinning eastward into the low morning sun, and then dissipated, nothing more than a breath of air, briefly embodied and made visible.

She sat for a moment longer, listening to the strange music of the wind as it whistled through the furze bushes along the road, watching the bog cotton’s tiny white flags spell out a cryptic message in semaphore. Bits of organic debris danced overhead, caught in the updraft, and the strangely dry air contained something new, a mineral taste she could not readily name. When she stood up to return to the car, Nora understood instantly what had given the air its metallic flavor: an immense, rapidly moving wall of brown peat dust bore down on her from only about thirty yards away. She froze, momentarily stunned by the spectacle of the storm’s overwhelming magnitude, then made a headlong dash for the car, but it was already too late. The dust cloud engulfed her, along with the road and the vast expanse of bog on either side, closing her eyes, filling her nostrils and throat with stinging peat. Suddenly unable to gauge any distance, she ran blindly until her right knee banged hard into the car’s rear bumper. The glancing pain took her breath away. She didn’t dare open her lips to cry out, but limped around to the driver’s side and climbed in, closing the door against the dust that tried to follow her. After desperately trying to hold her breath out in the storm, she gasped for air and promptly burst into a coughing fit. Once the car door was closed, the dust could not penetrate the sealed windows, but a fair amount of peat had blown in through the open door, and now the tiny airborne particles began to settle, covering the seats and dashboard with fine dark-brown organic material. The outside world had disappeared, and Nora gripped the steering wheel, feeling like a cocooned caterpillar at the mercy of the wild elements. It was far too dangerous to try driving across a bog when visibility was so poor. There was little she could do except wait, and listen to the wind whistling under the car and around the radio antenna, furiously pummeling away at any object, animate or inanimate, that had the audacity to remain upright in its path. She rubbed her throbbing knee; she would have a lovely bruise tomorrow.

All at once, she made out a figure standing just ahead of the car. Although its general shape was human, the face was strange and horrible: huge exophthalmic eyes stood out above a flat black snout. She and the insectlike thing stared at each other for a surreal moment, then another heavy gust blew up, and it was gone. A second later, a solid thump sounded on the window just beside her ear, and she felt a rush of fear, until at last it began to dawn on her that the mutant creature was actually nothing more dreadful than a Bord na Mona worker in an old-fashioned gas mask. She could see that the man was trying to communicate, but his voice was hopelessly muffled by the mask and the wind. He pointed a gloved finger to her, then to himself, and then forward. He wanted her to follow him. The wind was beginning to diminish, and she could just make out the back end of a tractor about ten yards in front of the car. She realized in horror that she might have crushed her rescuer if she’d simply put the car in gear and started driving. She watched through gusty clouds of peat as he climbed up into the cab and turned the tractor around. When he drove forward, she followed.

It was impossible to tell how far they traveled; time and distance were distorted in the strange dark fog. Gradually the peat cloud began to thin away, the world began to reappear, and they were once again in the clear air. Nora watched the brown wall recede eastward, all the while keeping a close tail on the lumbering tractor until they reached the Bord na Mona sign at the entrance to Loughnabrone. Inside the grounds, the driver pulled up to a row of hangarlike metal sheds and climbed down from the cab; Nora caught up to him just as he was entering the large open door of a workshop, where several other men in grease-spotted blue boilersuits toiled over a huge earth-moving blade with acetylene torches.

“Excuse me,” she said, reaching out to touch the man’s arm in case he hadn’t heard her. The other workers looked up, their torches still blazing. The tractor driver turned to face her, and it was only then that the gas mask came off, revealing a youthful face with strong features and intensely blue eyes.

“Excuse me—I just wanted to say thanks.” She offered her hand. “Nora Gavin.”

He looked at her for a split second, then dropped his gaze, and Nora wondered whether it was her red eyes, her dirty face, or her obvious American accent—or a combination of all those things—that had this young man so mortified. He took her hand very briefly. “Charlie Brazil,” he finally said, pronouncing his surname the Irish way, with the emphasis on the first syllable. He colored deeply and glanced at the other men, who had stopped working when she approached.

“Well—thanks, Charlie. I’m grateful for your help.” She could feel the workmen’s eyes upon them, and understood that all poor Charlie Brazil wanted was to be shut of her as quickly as possible. “I’m afraid I have to ask another favor. Could you point me toward the manager’s office?”

“Over there,” he said, indicating a single-story pebble-dashed building about fifty yards away.

“Right,” she said. “Thanks again.” Heading toward the manager’s office, she heard a leering voice behind her inquire: “What’d you do for the lady, Charlie?” There was an unsettling chorus of sniggers, and Charlie Brazil’s deep voice muttered darkly: “Ah, feck off and leave me alone, why don’t you?”

2

There was no one at reception inside the manager’s office. Nora considered ringing Cormac to let him know she’d arrived safely, but decided against it. She wanted to put off talking to him as long as she could. Her emotions were too much in turmoil. A small sign on the nearest wall bore a single word, “Toilet,” and an arrow pointing to her left down a short hallway, so she ducked in to have a look in the mirror. It was a shock: her eyes were horribly bloodshot, and her insides felt rubbed raw. Bits of peat dust clung to her hair and eyebrows, and to the tear tracks that lined her cheeks. No wonder Charlie Brazil had looked at her so strangely. What a fine state for meeting the brass here. She brushed as much of the peat from her hair as she could, and splashed her eyes with cold water, which stung as much as the dust had. As she dried her face on the cloth towel, the door swung open, and Nora stood face-to-face with a vigorous, casually dressed man of about forty, whose expression betrayed astonishment and a certain amount of suspicion. Perhaps she hadn’t paid close attention to the sign and had accidentally wandered into the gents’ by mistake.

“Sorry if I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be,” she said. “I got caught in a windstorm out on the bog, and I was just trying to get a bit of the dust off before I found the manager.”

“You’ve found him,” the man said.

“You’re Owen Cadogan?”

“I am,” he replied. “And you are…”

“Nora Gavin. I’m here for the bog body excavation.” Surely he’d known she was coming down from Dublin. “I think you spoke with Niall Dawson at the National Museum—he said he’d explained all the arrangements.” A subtle change came over Cadogan’s demeanor; she thought it safe to surmise that the Dr. Gavin he’d expected was neither female nor American.

“Ah, right, Dr. Gavin. You’re early.” He ushered her down the hall toward his office. “We’re not expecting the museum crowd until later in the day. Anyway, sorry you were caught out there in the dust. Been dry as a desert here for two weeks, and that’s one of the rare hazards of fine weather.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it. But one of the workmen was kind enough to make sure I got here in one piece—Charlie Brazil?”

“Ah, yes,” Cadogan said, with a grimace that suggested she ought to consider giving Mr. Brazil a wide berth in future.

“I have to admit the gas mask had me rather taken aback at first.”

“Ah, he’s all right,” Cadogan said. “Bit of a quare hawk, Charlie is—an oddball.” He led her back through reception and into his tiny office, where he gestured for her to have a seat. The place reminded Nora of her auto mechanic’s office at home with its practical, no-frills atmosphere, its metal desk and uncomfortable vinyl chairs. “Afraid I’m fending for myself here at the moment,” Cadogan said. “The girl’s out sick today. Can I get you a cup of tea—or coffee, is it?”

Cadogan gave the impression that he was a very busy man: the quick gestures, the eyes that never settled in one place for too long. Whether consciously or not, he gave Nora the distinct impression that she was keeping him from duties much more important and necessary than her comfort. But breakfast had been three hours ago, and she realized that she was actually quite hungry. “Tea would be great.”

“Won’t be a minute.” He ducked out of the room, and Nora tried to put a finger on what she sensed about him. Brisk, businesslike, still stirred by ambition—but on the cusp of forty, when a lot of men began to feel themselves softening into middle age, and to wonder why it was that the responsible job and the family and the new house weren’t enough to keep them from feeling somehow anesthetized inside. A dangerous age.

She stood up to take a look at two large black-and-white charts hanging on the walls of the office. The first showed average rainfall at Loughnabrone over the past four decades, sometimes as much as a thousand millimeters a year. How was it even possible for the earth to soak up that much water? Alongside the rainfall chart was a bar graph showing annual peat production by the kiloton. She noted the inverse symmetry between the numbers, and the downward slope of the peat production stats for the past few years. Another poster on the wall had photographs of the various artifacts bog workers might encounter, and a series of exhortations:

Under Your Feet in This Very Bog

There could be hidden objects up to 10,000 years old.

Because of waterlogged conditions, the bog has preserved objects, such as wood, leather, textiles, and even human bodies!

Once unearthed, these ancient finds begin to decay instantly and if not cared for they will be lost forever.

Help us record our history by preserving these buried objects.

No doubt ignorance was the greatest enemy; if workers didn’t know what they should stop the machines for, they might just keep cutting. But theft had to be a major concern as well. It must be tempting, if you did find something of value, to keep it to yourself. That was human nature. Nora wondered idly how much the average bog worker made these days. Probably the same as most other factory workers—not a fortune, certainly, just enough to keep a man with a family from cutting the tether.

Her attention was drawn to a framed and yellowed newspaper cutting. It was dated August 1977, and showed two lean-faced, unsmiling men in boilersuits looking up from a drain. One of the workmen held up what looked like a corroded sword blade. The caption read:

Illaunafulla men Dominic and Danny Brazil with the large Iron Age hoard they discovered while working at Loughnabrone Bog last week. The men uncovered numerous axe-heads, several amber bead necklaces, a scabbard and sword hilt, and twelve bronze trumpets. After excavation is complete, the artefacts will be transported to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.

Brazil, like her rescuer. She wondered whether it was one of those unusual surnames, like Spain, that had something to do with where your ancestors had traveled. Or maybe it was simply an old Irish name, misspelled by the English. She’d have to ask Cormac. At the picture’s edge, almost entirely cut off, a third man leaned in above the Brazils, down on one knee at the edge of the drain. He was dressed, quite inappropriately for the bog, in a tweed jacket, collar, and tie. Three-quarters of his head had been cropped out of the frame.

“That was quite a find,” said Cadogan from behind her. “Colossal. Nothing like it before or since. There was even a rumor that they’d turned up some gold pieces as well, but that turned out to be a load of—nonsense.”

“Would these Brazils be any relation to Charlie?” Nora asked, accepting the mug of gray, watery-looking tea he proffered, and wishing she’d been prudent enough to refuse.

“His father and uncle,” Cadogan said, taking a seat behind the desk. “We’ve got Brazils galore here. A lot of the lads come from families who go back four or even five generations on the bog. All the turf used to be hand-cut, of course, but even when they brought the big machines in we’d have whole families footing the turf for the summer.”

“What happens to the peat you produce here?” Nora asked.

“Some of it goes to the briquette factory at Raheny, but most of what comes out of Loughnabrone is only suitable for use in the power plant.”

“That place with the two towers down the road?”

“Used to go there, until a few years ago. It’s closed down now. Obsolete. They’re going to demolish it in a few weeks’ time. No, all our production gets shipped up to the new station at Shannonbridge.” Cadogan looked at her as if he didn’t consider this a suitable topic of conversation for visitors, and abruptly changed the subject: “I was meaning to ask how you happened to be out in the storm. You weren’t traveling on foot, surely?”

“Oh, no,” Nora said, suddenly acutely aware that she wasn’t prepared to give an exact account of how she had happened to be out on the road. “I stopped the car and got out to watch a—I don’t even quite know what to call it, a small whirlwind. I’d never seen anything quite like it—”

Cadogan nodded, as if he understood. “The fairy wind.”

“Excuse me?” Nora thought she’d misheard.

“That small whirlwind you saw. The lads around here call it the fairy wind. They also say nothing good comes after—ah, it’s a load of auld rubbish, that kind of talk, but what can you do?”

“Well, in my case it was true. When I turned around, there was a huge dust cloud bearing down on me. I barely made it back to my car. Thank goodness Charlie Brazil came along when he did.”

Again Cadogan studied her with a skeptical eye, as if he didn’t quite believe the tale. Why did she keep feeling as though she was missing the joke here?

“If you’ll excuse me just a moment, I’ll get you fixed up here straightaway.” He reached for his mobile and dialed a number from memory, then turned away slightly, with a small smile and a glance back in Nora’s direction. He wanted to be rid of her, and soon. She was getting to be a nuisance.

“Ursula? It’s Owen. Dr. Gavin’s arrived in the office. Did you want to come round and fetch her—?” Cut off in midsentence, Cadogan listened for a moment, then colored and turned abruptly, as if the person on the other end of the connection had asked an embarrassing question. One hand flew up to the side of his face, an unconscious gesture of protection. “Look, I really can’t…Yes, she’s here with me now,” he said, glancing up. Nora went back to perusing the office walls again, and did her best to pretend she wasn’t listening. She stared at the newspaper cutting once more, at the nearly headless man in suit and wellingtons, noticing the interesting pin that anchored his tie—a sort of three-legged spiral. She’d arrived too early, and they didn’t know what to do with her. Well, if that was the case, she could find her own way to the site. It beat standing around here like an idiot while they argued. She tried to catch Cadogan’s eye. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” he said, “but if you—” Ursula evidently cut him off again. “All right then…Yes, right away.” Nora wondered idly whether it was a command or an acquiescence.

“That was Ursula Downes, the archaeologist heading up the bog road excavation on the site. She was first on the scene when the body was found.” Cadogan looked vaguely preoccupied, shuffling through some papers on his desk, perhaps only to avoid having to make eye contact. “Since you’re here, Ursula said she’d escort you out to the findspot, but she’s rather tied up at the moment—so she’s asked me to run you over there.” He tried to offer a smile, but could only manage a worried grimace.

“Do I really need an escort? I’m sure I could find my way there if you gave me directions—”

“The trouble is that we’re liable for your safety, and it’s really much better if either Ursula or I or someone from Bord na Mona is with you out on the bog. It can be a much more treacherous place than it may appear. If you’d like to bring your own car, I’m happy to lead you out to the site—that is, whenever you’re ready.”

Nora glanced down at the brown film of limescale floating atop her now-cold tea. “I’m ready now.”

As she followed Cadogan in her own car, watching him cut corners and shift gears a bit more forcefully than was warranted, Nora wondered what had passed between him and Ursula Downes. After speeding down the winding, tree-lined drive from the office, Cadogan turned onto the long, straight bog road. A set of narrow-gauge train tracks ran parallel to the road just below the ditch, and three rusting railcars sat idle upon them, with no engine in sight. Where the rails curved away from the road and out into the center of the bog, she could also see a jumble of extra track and several large bales of black plastic beside a high bank of turf someone had cut away by hand. A dirty wing chair faced the bank, as if someone had been sitting watching the cutter at work. It reminded her that in addition to its ancient use as a ritual depository, the bog had more recently taken on the role of communal rubbish heap. There was a pervasive air of abandonment here that surely didn’t sit well with someone like Owen Cadogan, who still saw himself as young and vigorous. There wasn’t much time to take in details; Cadogan’s gray Nissan fairly flew along ahead of her, and she struggled to keep up on the bumpy road.

As they came near the site, she could see figures working at cuttings along the drain faces. In the distance, a brilliant white marquee tent out on the bog billowed slightly in the wind, looking oddly medieval in this dark, barren place. That’s where the body was; it had to be. Cadogan finally braked abruptly when he came alongside a television news van and a couple of small rectangular trailers that seemed to have been dropped haphazardly by the side of the road. Between the sheds, a fair-haired woman was pacing and smoking a cigarette as she spoke on a mobile phone. She looked to be in her midthirties, and was dressed in standard work clothes for the bog: heavy-duty waterproof gear and industrial-strength rubber boots.

As they pulled onto the patch of gravel beside the first trailer, the woman closed her phone and approached Nora’s car. Ursula’s spiky fair hair and full lips were certainly arresting, but it was her large, luminous green eyes—set off by the delicate gold ring that pierced her left eyebrow—that added a not-so-subtle air of sensuality to her appearance. Whatever had passed between her and Owen Cadogan on the telephone had created a tension Nora could feel from several feet away, as Cadogan got out of his car and strode toward them, arms crossed over his chest in a posture that demanded acknowledgment. He opened his mouth to speak, but Ursula deliberately ignored him.

“You must be Dr. Gavin,” she said, and Nora was surprised to hear a voice that immediately betrayed working-class Dublin origins. “Ursula Downes. I’ve heard so much about you, I feel as if we’ve already met.” Heard so much from whom? Nora wanted to ask. As they shook hands, she felt the woman’s eyes sweep her up and down, and had the unmistakable impression that she was being judged. It wasn’t that Nora hadn’t experienced this sort of scrutiny before—she was a Yank, after all, and had grown accustomed to being inspected—but the sincerity in Ursula’s gaze had only to increase by the slightest margin before it crossed over into something much closer to condescension.

Ursula let go of Nora’s hand and finally turned to acknowledge Cadogan. “Owen.” The remarkable sea green eyes flickered across his face. “Mr. Cadogan usually pretends not to give a toss about what I’m up to out here, but he’s actually terribly, terribly interested.” Though these words were presumably addressed to Nora, Ursula’s eyes remained on Cadogan. “Thanks for escorting Dr. Gavin,” she said, glancing toward the television news vans. “I’ve been up to me oxters out here, trying to keep all the feckin’ reporters from tripping into the cuttings.”

Owen Cadogan’s simmering annoyance was visible in his eyes, and in the grim set of his lips. “Could I have a word, Ursula?” he asked. “If you’d excuse us just one minute, Dr. Gavin…”

“I’ll get my things,” Nora said. She went around to her trunk to collect the gear she’d need for the day, and to climb into her waterproofs. She tried not to listen as she stepped into the baggy rubberized trousers, but couldn’t help overhearing snatches of whispered conversation above the sound of the wind. “…treat me like your fucking errand boy,” Cadogan was saying to Ursula, his right hand in a close grip on her elbow. She shrugged him off.

After Cadogan climbed into his car and roared away, Ursula Downes approached again, showing no apparent concern about the taut conversation.

“I’m sorry if I caused any trouble,” Nora said. “I couldn’t get exact directions—”

“Not to worry,” Ursula said. “Owen’s just in a poxy mood today. He got some bad news recently.” She didn’t elaborate, but somehow Nora got the impression that the source of Cadogan’s dire bulletin had been none other than Ursula herself. “That was Niall Dawson on the mobile when you were arriving; he said they’re about halfway here and should be arriving in the next hour.”

Once again, Nora felt like a fifth wheel. “I’d love to have a look at what you’re doing until the others get here.”

“I suppose. Come along, then.” Ursula led the way across a low-lying area beside the ditch, walking along in the impression left by a giant tractor tire. “It’s still a bit soft in the low spots. Just put your feet down where I do.”

Nora followed, carefully treading the same path Ursula took, her legs unsteady in the soft peat. To their right stood a rectangular pool—no doubt the end of a drain—reflecting the deep blue sky and billowy clouds. Beside it sat a twisted stump of bog oak, whose striated, ash gray surface had the segmented, half-burned look of charcoal. No fire had burned it, Nora realized. The effect came from the foreign touch of parched air after centuries of immersion.

“The wind is brutal today, isn’t it?” she said, trying to make conversation.

Ursula turned back slightly, but kept walking. “I’ll warn you—after a whole day out here, it feels as if you’ve been scrubbed raw. The peat gets everywhere: in your eyes, in your hair, even in your pores. It’s almost impossible to get clean, and usually not worth the trouble.” Nora glanced down at Ursula’s hands, and saw black peat beneath the sculpted nails.

As they climbed the gentle rise of a slightly rounded field between two drains, Nora felt the familiar, not-quite-solid sensation underfoot. It was like walking on dry sponge. The first half-inch of peat had curled and cracked into irregular puzzle pieces, like the mud of a dry lakebed. It was clear that the peat in this area hadn’t been cut in several years. Green plants sprouted at random; she recognized grass and sedge plants, sheep’s sorrel and butterwort, and behind the clumps of rushes lay whitish pellets left by the hares who had used the rushes for cover.

“Your man’s away down here,” Ursula said. She pointed to the white tent, another hundred yards past the excavation site. A lone uniformed Garda officer sat on watch outside, his temporary seat an upturned white plastic bucket. The wind was still strong, and the blue-and-white crime-scene tape marking out the findspot trembled vigorously.

It was hard to imagine what this place must have been like thousands of years before. It must have taken a similar communal effort to make the roads that Ursula and the crew were digging up today, to cut down hundreds of trees, to fashion spikes, to weave hurdles from saplings. Whole villages must have turned out. If bogs had been sacred, then this area must have been a very holy place indeed. There were only sporadic patches of dry land, scattered like islands across the marshy center. What had it been then? A place of offering. Larder. Death trap. Quagmire. Healer of wounds. Nora tried to imagine the time when all this had been wild bogland, crisscrossed by floating roads, a fearsome place roaming with wild beasts and bandits. She played the picture in her head, of the last hundred centuries, from glaciers to forests and solitary meadows, lakes gradually filling in, building up until the peat was ten and fifteen meters deep, dead but undecayed, immune to corruption. Home to strange and primitive carnivorous plants, delicate orchids, clouds of midges.

When she looked up, Ursula was yards ahead of her, easily jumping the drain to the next bank. Nora’s palms began to sweat as she approached the drain, unsure if she could make it across. She saw Ursula turn to watch her, a subtle challenge in her expression. What had she done to earn this woman’s scorn? They’d barely met, and already Ursula seemed to dislike her. She gathered her courage and cleared the drain in one hopping step. Safe.

“Who actually found the body?” she asked.

“I did,” Ursula said. “We were clearing out this drain yesterday, getting ready to start another cutting here. I was directing Charlie Goggles, one of the Bord na Mona lads, who was driving the Hymac, trying to make sure he didn’t put the spoil where the cutting was supposed to be. After he dropped the first bucket, I saw something sticking up out of the peat. Thought it was an animal bone at first, but it wasn’t—it was the bog man’s thumb. Still attached to his hand, which was still attached to his arm, which was still attached to his torso. Poor Charlie Goggles. Nearly pissed himself when he saw it.”

“Charlie Goggles? You don’t mean Charlie Brazil?”

“Ah, you’ve met him. None other.”

When they reached the tent, Ursula ignored the Garda officer’s cautious gesture of greeting and ducked through the flap. Nora followed. The space inside was an oasis of diffuse light and sublime calm after their windy trek across the bog. Stepping inside felt like entering another realm, another dimension. As she looked around, Nora felt Ursula studying her once more, making sure that her anticipation reached full fruition before lifting a corner of the black plastic sheeting that had been staked to the ground over a mound of loose wet peat. Nora’s eyes searched the sodden heap until she saw a glistening, dark brown patch that she knew immediately was human skin. Like the previous bog remains she’d seen, it had an iridescent, slightly metallic cast.

“Do you think it would be all right if I—”

Ursula cut her off: “Do what you like. I’m not in charge of him; Niall Dawson has made that perfectly bloody clear.”

Nora was aware for the first time that she had blundered into a potentially hazardous competition. Archaeologists had their turf wars, the same as everyone else, and maybe it was just the fact that she was part of the museum team that had put Ursula in bad humor. Whatever the politics here, she had to remain neutral. The problems of the living were the least of her business.

She knelt down and realized that she was holding her breath. The peat was wet and crumbly, like very damp, fibrous cake. She removed several handfuls of the stuff and saw how the excavator’s gargantuan teeth had bisected the man at an angle just below his diaphragm, exposing muscle tissue and shrunken internal organs. The thought of such violence done to a fragile human being, even one centuries dead, suddenly made her feel queasy.

No one had mentioned how extraordinarily well-preserved this man was. His head, shoulders, and upper chest were almost miraculously intact. And if the Hymac had cut the body in half, there was a good chance that the rest of it was still under the bank below their feet. The man’s skin was a rich dark brown, the typical tanned-leather appearance of a bog body. Tufts of hair about half an inch long stood out from his head, dark, but with the unmistakable reddish tinge of bog water. In the lab, they’d be able to tell how recently it had been cut, and with what kind of blade. Nora’s eyes traveled the contours of his face again. She didn’t want to forget anything about this moment, about the picture before her. In the next two days, he would be photographed from every angle, and finally removed from this place where he had slept so long undisturbed. There was no evidence of clothing, but a braided leather armlet circled his left biceps, and a thin piece of twisted leather lay coiled behind his head. Nora reached into her jacket pocket for a magnifying glass. Through the thick lens, she traced the cord to a triple knot just below the right ear, and saw how the leather cut into the wasted flesh. She crawled around to get a better look at the throat and noticed one end of a deep gash just below the ligature. From the position of the cut, inside the body’s protected curve, she knew it could not have been made by an errant machine blade. By all appearances, someone had strangled this man and savagely cut his throat.

She raised her head and heard a hollow noise in her ears. That sound might have been the last thing he’d heard out on the bog as well: the gusting wind, or a faint whistle as it dragged through the sharp points of furze and heather. Or perhaps what he had heard were the few words whispered by his executioner just before the fatal blow. She wondered whether the armlet signified anything. Had he been a member of the society that killed him, a high-born leader, perhaps—or a prisoner, a hostage, an outcast? Had he gone willingly to his end, or been carried here bound and under protest? She imagined his killing carried out in darkness, some secret ritual witnessed only by the moon and stars, but maybe it hadn’t happened that way at all. Maybe the bloodletting had been part of some public display.

She was suddenly aware of Ursula Downes standing beside her. “Looks like someone wanted to make sure he was dead,” Ursula said. “Did you see the stakes? Look at his arms.”

Nora saw several thin wooden stakes about an inch in diameter that had been driven through the flesh of the man’s upper arms.

“I don’t suppose you ought to do anything more until Niall Dawson gets here,” Ursula said. She looked down at the bog man again and probed at his curled fist with the toe of her boot, a gesture that made Nora cringe. She wanted to shove Ursula away from the fragile body, out of the tent. But instead she slowly replaced the wet peat over the corpse and they stepped outside, back into the harsh sun and wind.

“Might take a couple of days to get him crated up,” Ursula said. “I assume you’ve got accommodation sorted.” The extraordinary green eyes shot her a stealthy look, and Nora suddenly felt foolish. Of course—everything was falling into place now; Ursula’s having heard so much about her, the sideways glances that said she was under close scrutiny. It should have come as no surprise at all that Ursula and Cormac were acquainted—Dawson too. They were probably all old friends, and she was the mug. She should have remembered that here in Ireland, the world of archaeology was a tiny sphere, and Cormac knew everyone in it. Clearly Ursula had been toying with her since the moment they’d met, but there was no reason to let on that she knew it. Nora struggled to put on her blankest expression. “Yes, I’m staying with a friend nearby.”

Ursula gave a mysterious smile, then looked across the bog toward her crew and sighed. “What the bloody hell are they up to now?” She checked her watch. “They’re not due a tea break for another hour.”

Nora followed Ursula’s gaze. The crew were all standing about one of the cuttings. With the wind, it was impossible to hear what anyone was saying, but their postures communicated a disagreement of some sort. One young woman broke away from the group and started running toward them. “Ursula!” she shouted, voice faint against the wind, and her hail was followed by a gesture, a single sweep of the arm that said “Come.” Nora followed as Ursula began to run.

When they reached the crew, Nora could see expressions of shock and dismay around the circle of fresh, windburned faces. A dark-haired girl crouched on the bank above the drain, her wellingtons covered in fresh muck to the midcalf.

“Jesus Christ, Rachel, why didn’t you say anything?” demanded one young man.

“What’s going on?” Ursula demanded. “And you—” she said to the television cameraman who had wandered over to see what was happening “—get the hell off this bank before I run you.” He raised his free hand in a gesture of submission and beat a hasty retreat back to his van. Ursula turned to the crew. “Now, somebody tell me quick what’s going on here.”

Several of them responded at once: “Rachel fell into the drain—”

“We had to pull her out—”

“I was concentrating on what I was doing,” the girl said. “I accidentally stepped off the end of the plank. I didn’t ask anyone to rescue me.”

Ursula’s tone was incredulous. “I can’t believe you’re all in such a state about having to pull someone out of a drain. For Christ’s sake—”

“It’s not that,” said the young woman who’d called them over. She stepped aside and pointed to the corner of the cutting. “We nearly stepped on him trying to get Rachel out.”

Looking toward the spot the girl had indicated, Nora could just discern the outline of a distorted face. She dropped to her knees beside the cutaway for a closer look, and it took a moment for the totality of the terrible image to sink in. The skin was dark brown and the features slightly flattened, the nose smashed to one side, but the eye sockets, skull vault, and jawline clearly marked it as human. One skeletal, clawlike hand was curled into a fist and raised above the head, as though he’d been submerged and was trying to come up for a breath of air.

Ursula heaved an exasperated sigh. “You must be coddin’ me. Two bloody Iron Age bog men in the space of a week.”

“I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions,” Nora said, looking up into the circle of anxious faces peering down at her. “This man seems to be wearing a wristwatch.”

3

Detective Liam Ward had just set the phone in its cradle when he noticed the fresh drops of blood staining his shirt front. The plaster he’d applied to the shaving cut on his throat had evidently come loose. He didn’t really have time for this; the phone call had been from the duty officer, ringing with news that another body, the second in as many weeks, had just turned up at Loughnabrone Bog. The first had been officially declared at least five hundred years old, but this one looked as though it might be modern. Whatever the circumstances, it wouldn’t do to have the detective in charge show up looking as if he’d just been in a brawl. He stripped off his shirt and went into the bathroom to clean the cut and apply another plaster. When he returned to his bedroom, the bloodstained garment lay crumpled on the bed. Like evidence from a crime scene, he thought, more mindful this time of the plaster as he buttoned his collar.

Lugh seemed restless. Perhaps it was something to do with the smell of blood. As Ward put the knot in his tie, he glimpsed the dog pacing down the hall and into the kitchen, setter’s plumelike tail on alert, nails beating an anxious tattoo on the tile floor. For some reason the sound reminded Ward of his mother. He remembered the noise of her high-heeled shoes on the same floor, as she tried in vain to convince him to leave this house on the day after his wife’s funeral. Of course he hadn’t left, but had stayed on, anchored by memories, by the stones in the garden. He knew his mother thought he’d been relieved of a great burden when Eithne died. Could it already be eleven years this summer since his wife had walked down the riverbank, her pockets laden with dozens of small stones from their own garden, never intending to come up for air? He could see the stones: black, gray, white, pink, their smooth and rounded shapes. He’d put them out only a week earlier, to help keep the weeds down around the roses. He pictured Eithne at the edge of the grass, down on her knees but long past any hope of prayer, selecting the stones one by one and slowly filling the pockets of her dark green raincoat. He could imagine her performing that simple act, but he could go no further. Her final moments were obscure and inaccessible to him. They’d returned the stones with her personal effects after the inquest. He couldn’t bring himself to put them back in the garden. It seemed wrong somehow, or perhaps just bad luck, so he’d flung them back into the river where they belonged.

He’d met Eithne at a spring wedding. One of his younger colleagues had taken the plunge. He remembered how the young sergeant and his friends had all slagged him as a perennial bachelor. Up to that point, he had never found anyone who had moved him enough—until the moment he’d glimpsed a wondrous creature playing a harp in the corner at the wedding dinner. He’d been struck at once by her sorrowful eyes, but above all by the dignity in her bearing, the graceful way she moved. She had seemed so regal, so self-contained, and he was a man who noticed such things.

He had been puzzled by the fact that he’d never seen this girl before, that he’d known nothing of her existence. He made a few discreet inquiries at the wedding party, and found she lived with her father and younger sister near Loughnabrone. She was considerably younger than he was—fourteen years—and astonished, embarrassed by his interest, her manner always somewhat diffident. He had not taken love easy, as the song implored, but uncharacteristically pursued her, wooed her, and eventually won her heart, although he sometimes wondered now whether she had finally consented to marriage more out of misplaced compassion than from genuine affection. At the time, it hadn’t mattered. He had never experienced anything like it, the hunger that seemed to occupy every cell of his body, a chemical fire that would not be calmed or cooled. His all-consuming need to be with her, to possess her, had seemed sufficient to carry them both. But of course it had not been sufficient.

He’d told no one that Eithne had been carrying their child when she’d walked into the river. It didn’t seem right to share a secret that had been revealed to him only through her death. She must have known about the child, and she had been so far sunk into confusion and despair that the prospect of a new life had not lifted that dark veil, but only made things worse. She had packed a bag before she’d walked down to the river that day, a single lucid gesture that had been calculated, he supposed, to save him the trouble of sorting through her things after she’d gone. He had opened the case and spilled the neatly folded skirts and blouses onto their bed, buried his face and wept into the silky underthings still suffused with her scent.

Lugh came through the bedroom door and stopped in front of him. The dog lifted his graying muzzle and sniffed the air, and Ward tried to reassure him with a friendly scratch. “It’s all right, auld son. Relax.” He felt great tenderness for his aging companion, who had arrived in this house as a tiny pup, a gift from his colleagues just after the first anniversary of Eithne’s death. They had been together a long time, he and Lugh, and he knew the dog wouldn’t last the year, if that. Lugh had come to the point in his existence where major systems had begun to break down, as they would for all creatures, Ward supposed, should they live so long. We are all vulnerable in that way, he thought—soft and imperfect, riddled with frailty. Long ago he’d forced himself to admit that he’d been drawn to Eithne Scully’s dangerous streak, as if she could make up for that part of him that was afraid to live intensely in the present. He’d been fascinated by the dark, chaotic side of her nature, capable of great passion and creativity, but also subject to fits of paranoia and an inconsolable desolation. He’d once thought that if he could only surround her with peace and constancy, she might be able to hold some fragment of it within her, but once again he had been wrong. A capacity for contentment was something they had never shared. Eithne was always restless, chafing at any and all expectations. When he’d first brought her to this house after they were married, she’d followed him around as if on a tour, then gone home to her father’s house for another fortnight before he’d convinced her to come back and live with him here.

In hindsight, of course, he felt he ought to have seen the signs earlier. At first, the changes had been gradual, imperceptible, mere hairline cracks. He’d taken to sorting through their lives, remembering gestures and looks, wondering about that certain blank expression that had said she didn’t know who he was or what she was doing here with him. Eventually she hadn’t been able to play the harp anymore; her hands would no longer do what she told them. He had arrived home one evening and found her sitting at her harp, with the instrument all unstrung, a web of golden wires across her lap. It wasn’t right, Liam, she’d said. I know I could play if only it were strung properly. The harp sat, still unstrung, in the corner of the sitting room.

One day she had told him she’d taken up walking. At first he’d been encouraged, hoping that a daily dose of physical activity might help lift her mood. But even that had taken a bad turn as time went on. Coming home, he’d sometimes overtake her on the roadside, walking with her head down, lips moving in some silent litany, weighed down with the burden of words and numbers that had begun to crowd her mind. Eventually she was counting exactly how many steps it took to get to every one of her regular stops around the town: the post office, the newsagent, the chemist. He found her pockets jammed with small items she’d taken: scarves, gloves, lipsticks—all things she didn’t use—which he would return discreetly. No one ever had the heart to confront her directly. Then she’d begun venturing farther afield. He remembered the terrible phone call from the Garda station in Ballingar, six miles away, where she’d turned up in the midst of a downpour, asleep at the foot of the Virgin in the grotto. She’d been completely disoriented when he came to fetch her, like a lost child. He still recalled her blank look when he’d tried asking what she had been doing wandering alone in the rain. She’d not ventured out for a few weeks after that episode, and he had thought she might be taking a turn for the better, not perceiving the nature of the disease that gripped her.

His colleagues had always treated her with deference and been discreet in their dealings with him, but it was a discretion born of pity rather than understanding. He knew what they said behind his back. “Poor auld Ward. You wouldn’t wish that mad wife of his on anyone.” She was slipping gradually into oblivion, and nothing he did could make things better. He lived each day in limbo, in dreadful anticipation. She shouldn’t have been left alone, and yet he knew she would have found some means to get away. There was no such thing as enough vigilance. And if he had allowed himself to admit it, a part of him wanted to let her go, to let her have what she so ardently wanted.

The final phone call had brought him to the river’s edge. Her body lay submerged in the clear water, and her long dark hair streamed away from her face, rippling in the current like the pale green weeds that trailed along beside her. The dress she wore under the raincoat billowed in the water. She had been so peaceful, so beautiful in death, suspended in her otherworldly, watery realm, that never-empty channel pouring itself endlessly into the sea. All at once he felt what she must have felt as the cold water closed over her—a relief that was almost like communion. But in his case, the feeling was brief and transitory. He remembered standing on the bridge as the ambulance men splashed into the shallow water to lift her out onto a stretcher, pale, cold, and heavy, once more subject to the earth’s dreadful gravity. Had he contributed to that gravity, become part of what she could no longer bear? He tried to tell himself that nothing he’d done or failed to do had made the final difference to her, but in the end, that was the saddest testament of all. He thought of her every day, was still tied to her, as he would be always, those river weeds firmly twined around his heart.

Ward looked into the bathroom mirror, settling the knot on his tie and checking the plaster on his throat one last time before leaving the house. He was curious about this new body at Loughnabrone. He’d been out there a few days earlier, along with Catherine Friel, the new assistant state pathologist, who had been making a determination on another set of remains. He was glad that she would again be attending. He’d worked with Malachy Drummond many times, and they got on well, but he had only met Dr. Friel the previous week. He’d felt an immediate lift at the warmth and the acute intelligence in her eyes, and the slight frown of concentration that had furrowed her forehead as she worked. He hadn’t felt anything similar in years—didn’t even know how to describe it, except as a sort of forward momentum of the spirit. He hesitated for a moment at the bedroom door, then crossed back to the chest of drawers, where he removed his plain gold wedding band. He held it in his fingers, feeling the warmth and the weight of it, and finally set it in the shallow tray on top of the bureau.

4

Cormac heard the wind, and looked up from his work to see the leaves on the chestnut trees outside tremble in the stiff breeze. He hoped Nora was getting on all right out at the bog; he remembered what a strong wind could do to all that loose peat. He had urged her to come out with him, the night before she was to begin work on the excavation, but she’d insisted on getting up early and making the trip alone this morning. She needed time to think, she’d said. He had detected a slight pulling away in her recently, a greater detachment in the way she looked at him, a new tinge of sadness in her eyes. There was definitely something going on, something he was not privy to, and the thought disturbed him.

They’d never gone away for a proper holiday, and this hardly qualified. When he’d discovered that Nora was coming down for the excavation on the latest bog find, he’d arranged for them to stay at the McCrossans’ cottage, which was only a short distance from the site. He was on deadline to finish an article, and the solitude afforded by this place would be ideal. But he had an ulterior motive as well, to try to clarify where he and Nora stood. He understood her reluctance to be drawn into anything serious. He’d tried not to read too much into her reticence. Maybe she had just had a lot of things to attend to before leaving Dublin. There was always work to do for classes, or her own academic work to catch up on at weekends. He sensed something terribly temporary about every aspect of Nora’s life—the job, the flat, even her studies—and from the way she’d been behaving lately, he’d almost begun to feel as if he might be one of those temporary arrangements. Everything might carry on just as it had been, on and on. The trouble was that he didn’t know whether that was quite enough.

He looked around the little house, where his old teacher and mentor Gabriel McCrossan had come every summer. Twenty years ago, Gabriel had started spending so much time out here, working on bog road excavations and living in somewhat shabby rented accommodations, that he and Evelyn must have thought it practical just to buy a house, so at least they could have more time together. The cottage was small and compact, and despite having been completely fitted out and modernized, still carried the atmosphere of age in its low ceilings, gray flag floor, and deep-set windows. The place was not distinguished in location. There was no breathtaking view, only wild bog and small hills, no doubt the remnants of ancient monuments long since plowed under. A bland place, most people might think, and yet some of Ireland’s greatest treasures still lay beneath these bogs. Gabriel had been the first to bring them to the nation’s attention. These treasures were not precious metal, but planks of rough, hand-hewn wood, the wordless annals of the Iron Age, and with them a fuller portrait of a whole society had begun to emerge.

Evelyn rarely used the house now, since Gabriel’s death. A month ago, she’d asked Cormac to dinner, and announced that she’d made a will leaving the house to him, and that he ought to consider it his own. She’d handed him a key, the same one he’d used to let himself in last night. He’d been so touched by her gesture that he hadn’t quite known what to say.

“Just say you’ll make good use of it,” she had advised. “I’d hate to see it empty and lonesome. Take Nora down for a few days.”

When this opportunity to stay in the cottage had presented itself so serendipitously, he’d quickly phoned Michael Scully, the old friend and neighbor who had always looked after the house for the McCrossans when they were in Dublin. Evelyn had warned him that Michael’s health was declining, though she hadn’t been specific. But he’d seemed happy to have them coming down for a few days, and had sent his daughter to remove the dustcovers, wash the windows, and sweep out the cobwebs and the cold ashes. She had still been in the house when Cormac arrived. When he’d stepped into the kitchen, Brona Scully—a slender, doe-eyed girl of about twenty—had retreated to the corner beside the dresser and stood frozen, like a hare convinced that immobility would render it invisible to predators. He’d tried speaking to her, but got no response; and when he came back from inspecting the rest of the house, the girl had vanished without making a sound. Cormac didn’t know her background well, only the story—perhaps just a rumor or local legend—that as a child she had witnessed her sister’s suicide. Whether or not the story was true, it was a fact that she had not spoken a word since that day.

Cormac could feel his friends’ presence strongly here: Evelyn in the colorful tapestry cushions and all the other things that made the house comfortable, Gabriel in the worn leather armchair by the fire, and both of them in the hundreds of books that lined the walls. He had been the anchor around which her energy swirled. To Cormac their union had always seemed a near-perfect balance: strong individuals married together to make a separate entity greater than either of them alone, a mystery unfathomable even to themselves. The deference they’d invariably shown each other used to calm him when he felt anxious. He remembered the way Gabriel sometimes used to catch Evelyn’s hand when she passed by. He had always felt embarrassed but also fascinated by the tenderness between them.

He sometimes imagined that he could feel the same way about Nora as Gabriel had about his wife. Evelyn had come here, to a place not known for its amenities, and made a home for herself and Gabriel, amid the bogs that were his life and his passion. Cormac knew he wasn’t Gabriel, that he could never be half the intellect, half the scholar, half the man Gabriel had been. He couldn’t ask Nora to come with him to this remote place. She had her own work as well, with a different center, a life that was not his life.

It wasn’t just that his work was here. He’d spent the past year trying to create a bridge with his long-absent father, now an old man retired from the world, living at his home place up in Donegal. It was not an inconsiderable thing for a man to know from whence he came. It was Nora who’d convinced him to keep trying, though the going had been rough at times.

It suddenly struck him that it was in this house that he had first heard her name. He’d been down for the weekend with the McCrossans, and Evelyn was already asleep. He and Gabriel had stayed up late, waxing philosophical over a few large whiskeys, and Gabriel was becoming more than usually sincere. Others might become uncoordinated, or belligerent from strong drink, but with Gabriel, utter sincerity was always the best indicator that he’d achieved a slight state of inebriation. He heard the old man’s voice: There’s someone I’d like you to meet. Nora Gavin is her name. I think you might get on. Cormac remembered protesting, as he usually did when any of his friends tried a hand at matchmaking. But Gabriel had persisted: She’s lovely, very intelligent, and she has a fierce good heart. And you need someone, Cormac, someone to get your arms around at night. Believe me, it makes all the difference.

And of course Gabriel had been dead on, as usual. Nora was all the things the old man had said, and more. The idea of sharing his life completely with anyone had never before circled the edges of Cormac’s consciousness. Now it hovered, light and capricious as a butterfly. In many ways, his daily life had not appreciably altered since they’d been together. He still rose each day at seven, and cycled to the university for morning classes three days a week. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he’d go down to the boat club and take his scull out for an early morning row down the Liffey. When the water was calm, it was the nearest thing to flying he’d ever experienced. He loved the dank smell of the riverbank, the dripping green moss and algae on the bridge pilings, and the image that always filled his mind as he rowed, of the river water merging with the seawater, brown and green. These things were all part of the life he’d made, layer by layer, over many years. And Nora was the mercurial salmon, that bright flash of silver he glimpsed only occasionally, swimming against the current in that steady stream. What would happen if he caught her?

He thought back to the last time they’d made love. She’d begun to weep, quietly but uncontrollably, and when he’d asked whether it was something he’d said or done that had upset her, she had only shaken her head. Her wordless sorrow had moved him to the point of tears as well, though he hadn’t shed them in years—not since his mother died, in fact. He hadn’t even been able to cry for the loss of Gabriel, his truest father in any real sense of that word. But he had felt so helpless, so completely defenseless against Nora’s tears. He’d wanted to gather her up like a small child, to tell her everything was all right, or would be all right, but he couldn’t do it. Because it wasn’t all right, and never would be, with that cleft in the world where Triona used to be, where Nora’s own life used to be. How often had she replayed that last conversation with her murdered sister, each time changing what she had said, so that circumstances would alter, the future would shift, and horror would recede into the realm of nightmare?

He wondered what she’d done to help build the case against her brother-in-law. He’d once found her poring over a file when he arrived at her flat, but she’d tucked it under a pile of papers, without letting him see what it was. Later, shifting the papers from the table, he’d scanned the heading: HALLETT, Catriona. Autopsy report. He sometimes tried to imagine how a family could be transformed by such a tragedy. He had often heard Nora on the telephone with one or both of her parents; it was easy to perceive her affection for them, and yet he detected a distance, a strain in the relationship—something in the tone of her voice, the duration of the pauses in the conversation. He imagined growing up in a close family, something that was as foreign to him as the place she was from. But when a thing is so horrifically broken, never to be put back together again, there must be all sorts of jagged edges.

Giving up on writing for the moment, Cormac put together his flute, hoping the distraction of playing a tune would get him thinking more about his article than about Nora. He felt the cool ebony against the underside of his lower lip, this once-living thing from the tropics now resident in a nearly treeless rainforest a world away. He felt the music pass through him, from somewhere unknown, out between his pursed lips and into his fingers, through the flute and into the air, the atmosphere he breathed and took into his lungs to make more music. So much of existence was like that: endlessly, thoughtlessly self-perpetuating cycles. His courtship of Nora—and he did think of it in that formal way—was part of another cycle of human life. He wondered where it would end, whether they would ever find enough common ground, but he remained hopeful. He had no choice.

He took another breath and began to play “The Dear Irish Boy,” the tune that had become, for him, the theme of the cailin rua, the red-haired girl who had brought them together last summer. The cailin rua had suffered a needless and cruel death, but her son had survived, and three hundred and fifty years later, through another tragedy, her descendants had learned her story. He played through the tune’s B part, feeling the cascade of high, keening notes pull like brambles at his soul. Slowly the theme resolved itself and flowed once more like a stream, with rippling, dark currents only occasionally audible under its surface.

He set down the flute and tried to go back to writing. The article he was wrestling with was a new look at Bronze Age and Iron Age gold from possible ritual deposits—and ritual deposits were always only possible because, as much as one wanted to believe in it, ritual intent was almost impossible to prove through archaeology alone. That whole period was fraught with riddles and mysteries to which they had only fragmentary answers. Why was it that the heaviest deposits of native gold were found in the rivers of Wicklow and Tyrone, and yet the most spectacular of the Bronze Age gold objects had been found all the way across the island in Clare? Why was there no direct evidence of beekeeping in the Iron Age, despite evidence that beeswax had most certainly been used for cire perdue metal casting? Why were gold objects so uncommon among grave goods—were they melted down, or passed on to the next wearer as a mark of office?

He studied the map showing the distribution of Bronze and Iron Age gold objects across Ireland. How many dots were missing because someone had stumbled on the gold and kept it, buried it again, or melted it down and sold it, and lived on the proceeds in comfort for the rest of his natural life? There were also hundreds of unknown and never-to-be-told stories of gold-fueled strife—thefts and confiscations and no doubt murders as well—all over bright yellow metal. He wondered how the ancients had perceived it, who worked in rusting iron and green corroding bronze. To cultures steeped in the ever-corrupting natural world, it must have seemed the only substance that did not decay, the sacred metal of the sun, of immortality.

A noise startled him—only a bird nesting in the eaves, but he realized how anxious he was, waiting for Nora’s arrival. He didn’t want a repeat of what had happened last night. Shortly after he’d arrived, he’d heard a rap on the door. He had answered it automatically, thinking the caller might be Brona Scully come back to see if he’d had any trouble with the boiler. He’d been caught off guard to find Ursula Downes on the doorstep. He thought back to the picture she’d presented. Ursula was slight and fair, and the hair cut tight around her ears gave her a rather self-consciously gamine look. The gold eyebrow ring was an addition since he’d last seen her, but somehow it was hardly surprising. It had been some time.

“I was just driving past, and saw the car,” she said. “Thought it might be Evelyn, but I’m happy to find that it’s you. Back on Loughnabrone Bog again. You’ll never believe it—I’m over at the old digs. The house has been fixed up, but once in a while I’ll open the door and expect to see you or one of the others standing in the queue for the toilet.”

“It was all about making the most of a rare opportunity, as I recall.”

They’d both spent several summers working out here with Gabriel nearly twenty years earlier, and seeing Ursula again brought it all back: the primitive student lodging, the aroma of wet wool jumpers drying by the fire, strong tea, cold rooms, warm beds. The very air in those days had seemed fraught with all kinds of physical hunger. From her expression, he had no doubt that Ursula remembered it too.

“Listen, Cormac, I was very sorry to hear about Gabriel,” she’d said, lowering her voice. “It must have been a complete shock. I’m sure we all thought he’d go on forever. I meant to phone you or Evelyn, but I’m no good at that sort of thing.” She had seemed alone at that moment, wary and vulnerable somehow, still standing outside on the doorstep.

“Would you like to come in for a drink or something?” he’d heard himself ask. Even as he extended the invitation, he hoped it wouldn’t be something that he would later regret.

“Maybe just a quick one. Thanks.” She stepped across the threshold and glanced around. “This place hasn’t changed much, has it?”

“What can I get you?” he asked, when she’d pulled up a chair at the kitchen table.

“Red wine?” She looked over at the half-dozen bottles waiting to be stowed in the kitchen cabinet. “Unless you’re saving it. Trying to impress someone.”

“Just experimenting.”

As Cormac opened a bottle and poured them each a glass, Ursula continued, “I find I’m not at all particular about wine. Cheap plonk is just as effective as the posh stuff, if you’re in the right mood. And I’m generally in the right mood.” She turned to face him and took the glass from his hand, her luminous green eyes as mischievous as ever. The lamp on the table beside her cast a warm gold glow that caught her skin tone and highlighted the angular shape of her face, the slight hollows in her cheeks. Only a few lines at the corners of her eyes marked the passage of time. “So what are you doing down here?”

“Working on an article for the Journal. Some new findings about Bronze and Iron Age gold work.”

“Really?” She started to peruse the books he’d strewn across the table in an attempt to get his materials organized. “You know, people always say there was gold in the Loughnabrone hoard, but the two brothers who uncovered it swore up and down they never found any.” She pulled a book from a stack on the table. “Any chance I could borrow this one? I promise to return it promptly whenever you need it back.” Checking the spine, Cormac saw it was one of the more obscure and detailed references on Iron Age metalwork.

He made a gesture of offering. “Be my guest.”

“Oh, I would in a minute,” she said, “but I believe you already have one.”

Still quick as ever, Ursula. He didn’t see any point in being coy. “I expect you’ll meet her tomorrow—Nora Gavin. She’s coming down to help with your bog man.” He tried changing the subject. “How’s your own work going these days?”

“Oh, you know. It’s a living. We’re finding bits of things, but it’s a bit of a mess at the moment, a real hodgepodge of odd stuff: platforms and short stretches of plank trackway, a couple of nice willow hurdles. We’ve come across some really interesting peat samples—you might be interested in taking a look. But the regional manager is a desperate whinger, giving me a lot of pointless grief about hurrying it up so he can get this area back on his precious production schedule. The bog man turning up hasn’t exactly made his day, although it’s improved my mood considerably.”

She looked at the open wine bottle, but apparently decided not to ask for another glass, for which he felt grateful. She leaned back in her chair and looked at him thoughtfully. “One of these years I’m going to give up fieldwork. Get myself one of those desk jobs. I’m sick to death of being out in all weather, of peat dust in my hair, and ten solid weeks of this—” She held up her hand, the fingers and nails black with ground-in peat. “Next year I’m going in for one of the consulting jobs, even if I have to switch firms. Those lucky sods barely get their feet wet once a year. It’s either that or pack it in altogether.” As she spoke, Cormac thought he perceived a change in Ursula. It had been a long time since they had met, and she no longer seemed to have that razor edge he had once so carefully tried to avoid.

She drained the last swallow of wine from her glass and stood up. “Time to push off home; I’ve an early start again tomorrow. Could I just run up to the loo before I go? I remember the way.”

Cormac switched on the light at the stairs for her. He’d always had an uneasy feeling about Ursula. From the time they’d first met, he had sensed danger in her presence, a moodiness and manic energy that was draining to be around. There was, he had to admit, an unabashed and frank carnality about her, something he’d once been close enough to know about firsthand. But it wasn’t that quality itself that he found worrisome; his reservations were about how she used it, as a weapon. Ursula had always possessed a very sophisticated—one could almost say scientific—understanding of sexual attraction in all its varying forms. He was still unsure whether “predatory” was the right word to describe exactly the way Ursula was, but she clearly got some sort of thrill from her ability to get another person’s pulse racing. Years ago he’d watched her in action, toying with fellow students, then colleagues at otherwise deadly dull faculty functions. She loved causing a stir, and seemed to draw energy directly from the amount of social discomfort she could engender during the space of a single evening, with a glance, or with fingertips that lingered just a fraction of a second too long. She excelled at pulling every eye after her, making them see she didn’t give a tinker’s curse what they thought of her. He always imagined tense arguments erupting in cars as everyone headed home. Ursula had not made these people unhappy, but she was a catalyst who could concentrate unhappiness and set it loose.

He had once tried to convince Ursula that it was only herself she was damaging with those antics, but she didn’t seem to care. He’d always sensed an edge of mistrust in her as well, of hurt or betrayal. Being in a room with her now filled him with unaccountable and overwhelming sadness. In all these years, had she ever found someone who was willing to risk everything, to get past all the defenses to reach her wounded soul?

She returned to the kitchen and breezed past him toward the door; he followed to open it for her. “Great to see you, Cormac,” she said, and leaned forward, apparently to offer a quick embrace. But when he moved to reciprocate, she reached up with both hands, turned his face down to hers, and kissed him full on the mouth. He felt her tongue dart between his lips for an instant, and he pulled back reflexively.

His startled reaction seemed to amuse her. “Ah, come on, now. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t.” Then she’d been out the door and into her car before he could say a word. He’d stood looking after the receding taillights, and when he’d reached up to wipe his mouth, his fingers had come away touched with plum-colored lipstick. He had rubbed his hands together, then scrubbed them against his trouser legs.

Feeling perplexed by the surge of emotion his memory of the scene had unleashed, Cormac climbed the stairs and looked at his clothes hung neatly in the wardrobe, his toothbrush and shaving things on the ledge above the sink in the adjacent bathroom. He sat at the edge of the armchair across from the bed, seized by a sudden gust of melancholy, similar to the feeling that had driven him from his own house to Nora’s flat almost precisely fourteen months ago. The prospect then had been a different sort of life from his ordinary, orderly existence, and the decision he’d made at that time had certainly lifted him to a new level. Had he reached a point where another decision was required, where what he and Nora had was no longer enough for him? He thought of her tears again and felt far away from her, closed off from all those interior passages in her soul that he had once imagined. What impulse was it that pressed for access there? And was he really willing to reciprocate? Was he prepared to make an offer—to lay himself bare, metaphorically speaking, and hand Nora a knife?

5

Death set all sorts of wheels in motion, especially when a body turned up where it ought not to have been. Within a few minutes, a quartet of brisk young Guards in two police cars had arrived on the scene and set to work. They herded everyone away from the cutting and marked out the crime scene—if crime scene it should turn out to be—with their familiar blue-and-white tape. The archaeology crew had been banished for the moment to their roadside hut, but on discovering that Nora was a physician, the policemen had asked her to stay behind, to certify for the record that the man in the cutting was in fact deceased, and did not require medical attention. It was a routine procedure, but seemed the ultimate redundancy in this case. The coroner’s crew had arrived a short while later; the uneven ground prevented them from erecting yet another tent over the cutting, but they did their best, rigging up some plastic sheeting to shield the body from prying eyes and cameras.

Nora was just about to inquire if they were finished with her when another vehicle stopped at the side of the road, and two people emerged. One was a tall man, well-dressed and serious—perhaps in his early fifties, she guessed, from the dark curly hair just going to salt-and-pepper gray. The dress shoes and immaculate raincoat looked out of place on the bog, but it was clear from the junior Guards’ attitude that this man was in charge. The woman with him was evidently his partner. At the site, he nodded briefly to his fellow officers, then addressed Nora. “Dr. Gavin? Detective Liam Ward, and this is Detective Maureen Brennan. Are you connected with this excavation?”

“Not exactly. I’m actually here to help recover the bog body that was found the other day. I just arrived early.” Nora glimpsed a plaster peeping out over the top of Ward’s shirt collar, marked with a dark drop of blood.

“There’s a whole van-load of people on their way from the National Museum as well. They should be arriving shortly.”

“There’s no way we could contact them, request that they delay the trip?”

“We could ring them, but they’re nearly here, and I’m afraid it wouldn’t be prudent to delay. The body they’re coming to recover is in a very fragile state, and getting it to the lab as quickly as possible is critical.”

Ward turned to Brennan. “Looks as if we’ll need a few extra uniforms on crowd control.” He motioned for Nora to accompany him to the cutting. “Is there anything you can tell me? Who was it found this body?”

“One of the archaeologists working here at the site. They called her Rachel, but I’m sorry, I don’t know her surname. I only arrived a short while ago myself.”

Ward consulted a list he’d been handed by one of the uniformed officers. “Briscoe, it says here. Rachel Briscoe.”

They’d reached the edge of the cutaway. The policeman seemed unfazed by the sight of the corded brown arm that stuck up out of the peat. “Ursula Downes and I were having a look at the other findspot when they called us over,” she said. “I think at first we both assumed this was another set of old remains, until we saw the watch.”

Ward’s eyebrows spiked. “A wristwatch?”

“Yes—I can show you, if I could just climb down into the drain for a second.” Ward nodded. Nora dug out a foothold in the drain face and stepped down onto the board that rested on the mucky floor. She had to hang on to the edge of the cutting and tread carefully to keep the plank from tipping. If she fell off, she’d be mired to her knees in a second.

Through her magnifying glass, she examined the dead man’s flexed hand, his long fingers with their well-formed oval fingernails, and noted the fibrous black peat embedded beneath the nails, which were slightly ragged, as though bitten off rather than clipped. The delicate flesh on the back of the hand was shrunken and slightly decayed from being near the exposed surface of the bog, but the palm appeared wonderfully intact, the fingertips wrinkled as if he had just lingered too long in the bath. With gloved fingers, Nora scraped the wet peat from around the watch, its wide metal strap buckled around a once-solid wrist now reduced to moldering flesh and exposed bone.

Ward crouched on the bank above the cutting for a closer look. “What else can you tell me?”

Nora peered through the glass at the disfigured face. The man was clean-shaven; his eyes were closed, but not sunken in the sockets. Reddish lashes rimmed the lids. It was impossible to tell his age; immersion in astringent bog water tended to make even youthful skin appear shrunken and wizened, and this man had already begun to take on a tanned-leather appearance. Though he couldn’t have been buried here more than a few decades, this body was not quite as well preserved as the older corpse. There was nothing odd in that; bog preservation happened by accident, depending on fortuitous water levels and chemicals mixed by capricious nature. Sometimes the acidic bog water preserved skin and internal organs but had the opposite effect on bone; Nora remembered reading about a bog man in Denmark whose entire skeleton had been completely decalcified, leaving behind only a flattened, human-shaped sack of leathery skin. What could she tell Ward? The dead man’s nostrils and open mouth were filled with peat. Perhaps it was only an impression, but to her he seemed to have been captured in the posture of dying, at the very moment when life’s frenetic energy ceased: dividing cells stopped in their tracks, coursing blood slowed to a halt, the brain’s constant storm of electrical impulses suddenly ceased.

Ward showed no adverse reaction to the gruesome sight before them, but a young uniformed Garda who came up beside him only looked at the body for a moment before turning away abruptly, and being violently sick all over his shiny black shoes. Nora saw the detective’s hand rest briefly on the younger man’s shoulder. It made her think that perhaps Ward had experienced similar distress when faced with his first corpse in the line of duty. Without a word, he signaled another uniformed officer to come look after their ailing colleague. Nora couldn’t help feeling a surge of compassion for the ashen-faced Guard as well. She had never been affected by the sight of death; it was physical insult to living creatures that provoked in her an extreme visceral reaction. The embarrassing truth was that she’d barely made it through her surgical rotation in med school.

“Here’s Dr. Friel,” Ward said, ducking under the blue-and-white police barrier, and Nora looked up to see a silver Mercedes pull up along the road. She’d heard the state pathologist, Malachy Drummond, speak of his new colleague, but had never yet had the opportunity to meet Catherine Friel, despite the fact that their offices were only a short distance apart at Trinity. The slim, silver-haired woman who emerged from the car carried herself with a fresh, energetic demeanor. To look at her, one would never have imagined that Dr. Friel traversed the country several times a week on the trail of deadly violence. It was a regrettable sign of the times that Malachy could no longer keep up with the caseload all on his own.

Nora studied Ward’s formal, deferential posture as he greeted Dr. Friel and escorted her to the excavation site. With his calm, soft-spoken manner, he seemed more like a family doctor than a cop. What had prompted him to join the Guards? What did he enjoy about a job that many viewed as nothing more than dredging up the unsavory details of other people’s lives? She’d often tried to fathom what it took to be a detective, a person obliged to look behind hedges and ditches and through the walls of houses, stripping away the veils of propriety and convention to find a world of strange and untidy reality.

When Ward introduced them, Catherine Friel said, “Nora Gavin. That name seems so familiar…” Her face brightened. “I remember what it was. Malachy showed me an article you wrote recently for one of the anatomy journals, about bog chemistry and soft-tissue preservation?” Nora nodded. “Fascinating stuff. I’m certainly glad now that I read it with such interest.” She turned to Ward. “It might be wise, as long as we have Dr. Gavin here, to make use of her expertise—if she’s willing, and you have no objection.”

“No objection at all from my end,” Ward replied. “Carry on.”

Nora felt her stomach begin to grumble; she hadn’t eaten since six that morning and it was getting on toward one o’clock. But this was not the time to be worrying about hunger pangs; they would pass.

Moments later, outfitted in a white paper suit, Nora was down in the cutting again, this time beside Dr. Friel, who asked for her observations so far. At this point, she didn’t have much to offer. “The position of the body, the presence of peat in the mouth and nose and under the fingernails—all of that could point to the possibility that this man just fell into a bog hole. But there’s one thing that seems really strange.” Nora reached for a handful of the black peat and rubbed it between her fingers. “Look at the texture of this stuff right around the body, how it breaks up into small clumps. It’s definitely backfill. So even if he did just stumble into a hole, it looks as if somebody might have gone to a lot of trouble to cover him up.”

“I knew there was a very good reason to keep you here,” said Dr. Friel. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

They very carefully removed the remaining peat from around the dead man’s neck and upper chest. “Odd that he’s not wearing a shirt,” said Dr. Friel. “How many people venture out onto the bog half-dressed, even in fine weather like this? And look here.” Nora leaned closer and saw a thin leather cord. Dr. Friel traced its length to just below the man’s left ear. “Could be a ligature,” she said.

“Yes, but wouldn’t it be tighter if it had been used as a garrote?”

“You’re probably right.” The pathologist’s fingers probed gently at the leathery flesh beneath the dead man’s chin. She lifted a small fold of skin, and Nora spied one end of a gash just under the jawline. “Doesn’t look terribly deep,” Dr. Friel said, “but it might have bled quite a lot—unless he was strangled first, and the throat wound was inflicted postmortem.”

Nora realized she wasn’t really listening; she was concentrating on the disjointed images that tumbled about in her consciousness: another length of cord, another knife wound, another dead man only a few hundred yards away. But this man was wearing a wristwatch. The two deaths couldn’t possibly be related; they were separated by a few centuries at least. She said: “The body that was discovered here a few days ago—”

“Yes, what about it?”

“Well, it appears that he was garroted, and his throat was slashed as well.”

“You think there’s some connection?”

“I don’t think it’s possible. It just seems a strange coincidence that two men would be killed the same way, in the same place, hundreds of years apart.”

Dr. Friel looked up at her. “What are you doing tomorrow morning, Dr. Gavin? I’m wondering if you’d like to attend the postmortem. Nine o’clock?” Before Nora could answer, the pathologist had turned her attention to the young Garda who stood above them. “Would you find Detective Ward for me? I want to let him know I’m listing the death as a homicide. And we can let the scene-of-crime officers begin their work, if they’re ready.”

Nora spied Ward up at the road, where the van carrying the National Museum delegation had just pulled up alongside the police cars. The detective was leaning in the window, no doubt explaining the situation.

She turned back to find Charlie Brazil standing behind her at the drain edge. He must have come walking across the bog, but the fact that no one had heard his approach was hardly surprising; four meters of peat soaked up sound like the ultimate underfelt. He was crouched beside the cutting, staring down at the dead man, his expression a complex blend of fascination and revulsion.

“Another one,” he said. “What happened to him?”

“We don’t know yet.” She saw Charlie notice the leather cord, and the watch. He knew this body wasn’t as old as the one he’d found. She could see the details pull him in, begin to work on him. He looked startled when she spoke. “Ursula said you were the one who uncovered the body the other day.” He nodded. “I’d like to hear your version of what happened.”

Charlie Brazil’s eyes shifted, and he looked at the group that was headed toward the cutting. “I’ve got to be going now,” he said. “I’m not supposed to be here.” Then he turned on his heel and trudged off.

Now that the museum contingent had arrived, it was time to leave the realm of police work and return to the inquiry on the first Loughnabrone bog man. Nora went to greet Niall Dawson, who was getting his people set up at the far cutting. They wouldn’t miss her for a few minutes; she excused herself and headed up to the hut for a long-delayed lavatory break and a bite to eat. She fetched her packed lunch from the car, and entered the Portakabin to find that the archaeologists had been sent home for the day. The place was deserted, and the floor was an inch deep in peat clods, as if a stampede of water buffaloes had just been through. As she bit into her green apple, Nora caught a flash of light on metal from a parked car outside and looked up to see Ursula Downes and Owen Cadogan engaged in conversation. The wind’s steady whine swallowed up their voices, so they moved like figures in a dumb show. Ursula slouched against her car, looking up only occasionally; Cadogan paced the ground in front of her, arguing a point perhaps, but without much apparent success. All at once he stopped and raised one hand to Ursula’s throat. It was impossible to discern at first whether the gesture was a caress or a threat, but when Ursula tried to move, he pinned her to the car with one quick motion. Nora felt a surge of adrenaline as she started from her seat. The only thing she could think to do was to slam her fist against the window. Cadogan lifted his head at the sound, and when he saw someone standing inside the hut, he dropped his hand and slowly backed away. Nora could hear the complaint of grinding gears as he drove off.

She left the hut and approached Ursula, who stood beside her car, one hand rubbing the place where Cadogan’s fingers had rested on her throat.

“Are you all right? I realize it’s none of my business—”

Ursula stopped her with a chilly glance. “You’re right; it’s absolutely none of your business.” Nora felt as though she’d been slapped. She could only watch as Ursula turned her back and walked away.

6

The cottage wasn’t difficult to find, with the directions Cormac had provided. The gate was open. As she pulled into the drive, Nora caught a whiff of turf smoke and saw a pale gray smudge rising from the chimney. Evelyn hadn’t used the place in months, and yet it looked well cared for. Someone was making sure that the flues were cleaned and that damp and mold had no chance to set in. The rough exterior walls were painted a dull yellow ochre, the trim rusty blood-red. She could see the tail end of Cormac’s jeep parked behind the house. It had been easy enough to put off thinking about their situation as the events of the day unfolded. Now she had no excuse—apart from being famished and thirsty, windburned and exhausted from all the fresh air out on the bog. What she really needed was a quiet evening without emotional upheaval. Nora gathered up all the resolve she could muster and opened the car door. As she lifted her case from the trunk, she checked the second-story window above; no movement, no indication that anyone was about. As she turned the corner, her bag brushed against the flowers in the window box, releasing a raft of dark crimson petals. She knocked three times.

The door swung open, and Cormac stood before her. He studied her for a moment, as if trying to decipher the day’s events from her appearance. She tried to imagine the sight that greeted him. She’d taken off her waterproofs, but her work clothes were still a muddy mess.

“Nora—what happened? Your eyes—”

“Oh—I got caught in a dust storm first thing this morning. I’d almost forgotten about that. It’s been an incredibly strange day. Another body turned up at the site, only it’s not as old as the other one. The police were there, and the state pathologist. They think it’s a murder.”

Cormac’s face clouded. “Jesus. And you were there when they found it?”

“Yes. I’m supposed to go along to the postmortem tomorrow morning too.”

Cormac’s eyes fixed her with a questioning look. He stepped forward to slide the bag from her shoulder, then reached out and brushed her face with the backs of his fingers, the way he had first touched her, outside the bar in Stoneybatter. The inner turmoil she had managed to keep at bay all afternoon seemed to rise to the surface in response to this simple, compassionate gesture. But her arms hung inert at her sides; she sank forward, exhausted, to rest her forehead against his chest.

“You must be knackered,” he said. “Why don’t you come upstairs straightaway and have a bath? Then you can tell me what happened.” He took her by the hand and led her up the narrow stairs, into a comfortable room with a low, sloping ceiling and a deep window that looked out into the treetops in the orchard. He set her bag on the broad double bed. Knowing what she had to do before she left this house, she felt something false in the prospect of sharing this bed with him tonight. It raised a pain in her stomach that wasn’t remotely related to a lack of food.

“Bathroom’s through that door,” he said. “There are clean towels in the press, and there might be some drops in the cabinet to help your eyes. I’m very glad you’re here, Nora.” He leaned down to kiss her, but for some reason she couldn’t respond; her whole body felt wooden. He could feel it too, and he began to back away.

She wanted to reach out for him, but instead she said, “I’ll be in a better mood to tell you everything after a nice long soak, I promise.”

“Take as much time as you like. I’ll fix us something to eat—is an omelette all right?” She nodded. He turned from the doorway, and Nora heard his quiet footsteps receding down the carpeted stairs. She started the water running in the bath. Maybe a little warmth would help melt away the stiffness in her limbs. She opened the nearest container from the row of bath salts on a shelf above the tub and threw a handful of powder under the tap, watching it bloom into a froth of soap bubbles. Returning to the bedroom, she stowed her case on the floor by the night table. She decided not to unpack; she wasn’t going to be here long, and there was certainly no point in hanging her work clothes in a wardrobe.

Nora quickly stripped off, leaving her dirty clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor for the moment, and eased herself into the steaming water. It was almost hotter than she could stand, but she slid down to immerse herself completely for a couple of seconds, closing her eyes and holding her breath. The heat was too much; she burst through the suds, gasping for air, her chest heaving with the first tightness of a sob. There was no relief, no respite from the grinding dissonance of her two impossible realities. She lay back in the tub and let the tears flow down her wet face onto her throat.

She remembered the first faltering steps that she and Cormac had made toward each other. Even as it happened, she hadn’t been at all sure it was a wise or prudent thing. She’d denied the voice in her head, the one that kept warning her not to go there. Sometimes she felt like the selkie, the seal woman who comes ashore in human form, knowing that she cannot stay, that she must eventually return to the sea. She’d been on such tenuous ground, and he’d been so solid, so substantial. And now she was going to deliberately tear herself from his side, where she had felt so safe. She didn’t know if she could take another keening, another period of mourning. Was there anything she could have done about the way things had unfolded between them? She was sure that Cormac had been as surprised as she by the rediscovery of desire, something she could only ever describe as a kind of wild, secret sweetness, like the fleeting taste of nectar on the tongue. It was far too late for any regrets. But every minute that went by sealed them together, and would make it that much more difficult when they had to part.

Two days earlier, when she had first received news about the Loughnabrone bog man, she’d dug around the high shelves in the bedroom closet for her waterproofs, unused since the previous summer. One of the shelf supports must have been weak; a box full of dog-eared files had upended, knocking her backward and sending a flurry of loose papers to the floor. She’d sat for a moment, dazed by the fall, looking around at the scattered documents. It was her own case file on Triona’s murder. She had read and reread every one of the papers in the file, scouring their neat typescript and scrawled ciphers for any pattern, any particle of information that might help the police prove who was responsible for her sister’s death. She had felt a stab of remorse, remembering that when she first arrived in Dublin, this box had held a place at the center of her kitchen table. It was the constant reminder of what she’d left behind, unfinished. It had eventually shifted to the floor to make room for Cormac at the table. A few months later, she’d moved this box to the bedroom, but she had no memory of putting it up on the shelf in the closet. Was that how far she’d pushed Triona out of her life?

Among the jumbled police reports, the autopsy findings and witness statements, she’d seen the corner of a color snapshot, and pulled it out. It was Triona in profile, caught in a rare moment of contemplation, looking out the window into a grove of trees. Nora had taken the picture on a trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior. She had studied the lovely, lost features for a long, long time, then set the picture aside and begun sorting through the drifts of paper.

It had taken her nearly four hours to get the files organized again. How many times had she read all these notes and police reports? But this time one statement seemed to leap from the page: “Because the body was moved, the location of the primary crime scene remains unknown.” The primary crime scene. The place that had witnessed an act of savagery. Places did not forget such things. But where was it? The police had searched the garage and basement of Peter and Triona’s house and found nothing; they’d searched Peter’s office and come up empty there as well. And all this had happened nearly five years ago; what chance was there that any trace evidence would be left after such a length of time? The phrase kept echoing in Nora’s consciousness: the primary crime scene remains unknown.

That night she’d awakened with Cormac sleeping beside her, knowing that she would have to leave him as soon as her work on the bog was over. She lay beside him, studying the outline of his face in the shadows, seized by desperate, overwhelming desire, but afraid to touch him. At last his eyes had slid open, and without a word he’d understood and answered. She knew that her fierce ardor that night had startled him; it had surprised her as well. But after they’d made love, she hadn’t been able to keep from weeping. He thought it was something he’d done, and she couldn’t find any words to explain.

The bathwater was beginning to cool. She lathered up one of the poufs that hung from the tap and began scrubbing at her face and forearms. Ursula had been right about the peat getting in your pores. Nora reached for a nailbrush to go after the black stuff under her fingernails, and remembered the peat under the dead man’s bitten-off nails. What did that tell them? That he had worked in a bog? Or that despite his wounds, he had still been alive when he went into it? Tomorrow they might be able to find the answer—along with any other secrets he’d been keeping under the peat. She tried to imagine falling into a bog hole—the cold, the wet, the damp-earth smell, what it must be like to feel completely enveloped, paralyzed. She had read about air hunger; in cases of suffocation, the instinctive reaction to being deprived of oxygen was usually fierce struggle. That might explain the peat under the nails as well.

Out of the bath, she began to feel more human again. She dressed and ruffled her hair in front of the mirror, then clipped her fingernails as short as possible. Looking for a place to deposit the clippings, she opened the cabinet below the sink. Resting at the bottom of the empty bin was a single tissue, stamped with a perfect parenthesis of dark mauve lipstick. It was an absolutely precise impression, down to the tiny grooves bearing a slightly heavier stain of pigment. It was fresh, and not a shade she’d ever seen Evelyn McCrossan wear. Nora set the wastebasket back, shutting out a chorus of half-whispered questions as she quickly closed the cabinet doors.

7

No one was in the kitchen when Charlie Brazil arrived home from work, but the radio droned faintly into the empty room. They always ate their dinner without him; it was better that way. He removed his jacket and shirt and went to the sink to rinse away the peat dust that clung to his face and the back of his neck. He still had the uneasy feeling that something else was going to happen before the sun set. He was no more superstitious than the next man, but everyone knew that strange occurrences came in threes. First there had been the peat storm—a rare event; they’d not had more than two days in a row of fine weather in the six years he’d worked at Loughnabrone, and the wind had to be just right. He couldn’t remember ever seeing such a storm, a wall of dust so vast it had blotted out earth and sky, even the light of the sun. He’d come across that woman and her car in the midst of it. He might have killed her, but he had stopped the tractor just in time. Surely that was a sign of something—but what?

Those gombeens in the workshop hadn’t let up on him all afternoon, slagging him about the way the Yank had looked at him, asking was it true that American women were all mad for it? He detested that kind of talk, and he had felt as though his head would split. It was the same every day; they always found some way, large or small, of having a go at him. He’d almost grown used to it. He certainly knew that they talked about him, and even what they said, that he wasn’t quite the full shilling. What they didn’t understand was that all of his quirks were defenses, conscious choices he’d made to keep them at a distance.

A short time after he’d returned to the workshop, someone else had arrived with news that the archaeologists doing the bog road excavation had found another body, and this one was beginning to look suspicious, judging by all the police cars and vans. It was hard to keep anyone from knowing the score when police cars were swarming the place, visible from miles away on the empty bog roads. Word had spread until the air felt thick with shocked whispers, everyone trying to imagine who the victim might be—that young one from the next parish, some said, or another ancient corpse. There were murmurs, mutterings, and he could feel them all looking at him, asking the questions with their eyes.

Charlie slipped into the fresh shirt his mother had left for him on the chair near the hallway. He removed his dinner from the oven, using a towel to protect his fingers from the hot plate, and set it in the place laid for him at the table. He knew his father’s illness would not let him live much longer. For a time they’d all tried to pretend that it wasn’t so, but what was the point of denying it now, with the tubes and oxygen tanks, the death rattle at the bottom of his watery cough? In the meantime, someone had to keep the place from falling asunder. It wasn’t a large farm, but there was still a load of work to do each day when he got home from the bog: feeding the calves, getting the hay in, not to mention keeping the house in good repair and the tractor running. He fell into bed exhausted every night and was up again at six in the morning for his shift on the bog. There was no end to it, ever. He deeply resented the position he was in, and still felt guilty for not doing more. He wolfed his food, eager to fill the gnawing void in his belly and be off. One boiled potato remained on his plate when his mother emerged from the sitting room, bearing a tray with his father’s half-eaten dinner; each day he ate a bit less than the day before. The treacly music coming from the radio suddenly cut out, replaced by a heavy drumbeat signaling the seriousness of what was to follow:

“And here’s the latest news from Radio Midlands. Gardai have launched an investigation into the death of a man whose well-preserved body was found in Loughnabrone Bog this afternoon. The body was found by archaeologists working at the site, and has not yet been identified. A postmortem examination will be carried out in the morning, and Gardai are looking into missing-persons cases from the area.”

The newsreader’s reassuring murmur continued, talking about shrinking dole queues and rural road construction grants, but Charlie’s attention was concentrated on his mother’s expression as she unloaded the tray full of dishes into the sink. She was someplace far away from him, away from his father, away from this place. He had studied her so often, tracing their similarities and differences: they had the same skin, pale and lightly freckled; the same cheekbones, nose, and hairline. There were times when she seemed to be illuminated from the inside, but there were also times like this, when she was unreachable, like something seen through a dark window that showed only his own reflection when he approached. Perhaps, like him, she had no idea how to gather up all those shape-shifting, unformed thoughts and begin to translate them into words. All at once he was back out on the bog, staring down at dark, wet peat cradling the dead man’s misshapen head.

“I saw it,” he said.

She turned to him as if she’d just awakened from a dream. “What?”

“That body in the bog. All black, it was—”

“For God’s sake, Charlie! I don’t want to hear that.”

“It’ll be on the television and in all the papers tomorrow. But they didn’t even mention the strangest bit. I was there. I saw it. He had a leather cord around his neck with three knots in it—and he was wearing a watch.” His mother’s hands stopped suddenly, and she stood staring down at them, immobile in the soapy water. She spoke only after a long pause.

“What sort of watch?”

“I don’t know—just an ordinary sort of wristwatch with a metal band. I couldn’t see very well and it was all corroded.”

Why had he told her about it? He’d developed a habit of telling his mother lies just to provoke a reaction. The story he’d just told her sounded like one of his more outrageous tales—except that it was all true. He hadn’t told her what had unsettled him most—that the leather circlet around the dead man’s neck was almost identical to the good luck charm he’d fashioned for himself from a length of cord.

Charlie stood and carried his plate to the sink. He knew his mother was watching him from the kitchen window as he left the house and walked toward the fencerow at the back of the haggard. He couldn’t help it; he had to get out of the house, to take the fresh summer air deep into his lungs. Sometimes he began to feel suffocated in those rooms, weighted down with the silence. He wanted to cast it all off, all the expectations they had of him, and especially the desperate, killing worry about what people might think. He crossed the field behind the house in long strides, making his way toward the whitethorn tree in the corner, where he’d slip through the fence and follow the path up across the next small hill to his apiary.

There was a lot of work to be done this evening, and it was already getting on for six o’clock. It wasn’t that he resented the work, exactly; he enjoyed the time he spent with the bees. But the farm work, though there was much less since they’d let most of the fields to neighbors when his father became ill, was still too much for one person alone. The constant grind was beginning to wear on him. If things stayed as they were, he’d end up just like his father, old before his time, and he wasn’t going to let that happen. He remembered how hard his father had labored when he was a child, and look what those years of work had brought the old man: decrepitude and early death, from breathing in all that black peat. Charlie could feel the same thing for himself, in the constant wind out on the bog. That was why he wore the mask. He knew they all laughed at him, but he didn’t care. They’d stop laughing when it hurt just to breathe.

He wondered what his mother had been thinking when he told her about the body. He knew she was intelligent; he caught the glimmer of it in her eyes, in the way she turned and looked at him when he asked her a question. But then the doors would shut again. She must once have had a desire for more than she had—endless days of labor beside a sullen ditcher driver of a husband who came home in the evening and had to put in another shift working the farm. She must have had dreams and ideas when she was young. What had happened? Charlie thought he knew the answer: his father, Dominic Brazil. Her family had never questioned the match. To them he was a good few acres, not bad to look at. What more could a girl in her position expect? He’d heard it often enough in their voices—what was life but a grim penance to be borne?

How his parents had come together in the first place had always been an unfathomable mystery to him. The only photograph he had of them was a blurry snapshot he’d found and now kept in the box under his bed: it showed his father looking defiant, even a little dangerous, as he leaned back against a wall, cigarette in his mouth, conscious of the camera. Teresa was leaning toward him, but half turned away, the side of her face a blur. Charlie thought he understood why she had turned away, even then. The one thing he’d always known was that Dominic Brazil loved his packet of fags and his pint of Guinness far more than he had ever loved any other human being. And yet she still washed his socks and made his bed, cooked his food, waited on him. And now hooked up a new oxygen tank when he needed it.

Charlie had spent a good deal of his childhood wondering what he’d done to earn his father’s animosity. It was never an anger that expressed itself in physical violence, but the looks he received had done as much damage as blows. He’d sometimes watched other fathers with their sons, and he knew that his face had been a portrait of naked envy when he saw a bout of mock sparring, or when the sight of a man’s hand on a son’s shoulder would squeeze his heart into a cinder. Such things didn’t hurt him the same way anymore, not really, but he wondered about them still.

He’d overheard his mother talking to her sister once, about his own difficult birth. From what he could understand, his entry into this world had very nearly killed his mother. “The doctor said I wasn’t to consider having any more children,” she’d said. He remembered wondering what that meant, whether it was anything to do with the fact that his parents kept separate rooms. From that point onward, the suspicion that he bore the dreadful responsibility for the rift between them had lurked in the nether regions of his consciousness. If he ever had a wife, he told himself, they would sleep and wake together. But what hope had he of ever finding someone? He’d always regarded girls as otherworldly creatures, as unapproachable as they were unattainable, on another plane of reality entirely from him, whose ears and face turned seven shades of crimson at the mere possibility of eye contact. He never thought of any specific woman when he gave in to temptation and touched himself, late at night, feeling the aching pleasure, the joy and shame at the moment of release. What hope, indeed?

He tried to remember how he’d come to the conclusion that his mother was at least as odd as he in some ways. Some of it had come from watching her work with the sheep. She always had soft hands, from the lanolin in the wool. He’d seen her work around the clock at lambing time, her shirt and trousers sticky with blood and afterbirth, and he knew she felt much more than she ever gave away. Once he’d watched her chasing a carrion crow away from a lamb, the firstborn of a pair of twins. As the ewe struggled giving birth to the second lamb, the bird had settled beside the firstborn and plucked out one of its eyes. He remembered his mother running at the crow with a strange, strangled cry in her throat, flapping her arms like a madwoman, and taking the wounded lamb into her arms. They hadn’t been able to save it.

When he was fourteen, he had found out by accident that his mother wasn’t at home some days. He’d mitched from school one day and sneaked back to the house, only to find that there wasn’t any need for stealth; his mother wasn’t even in the house. She’d returned about two hours later with no parcels, no evidence of where she’d been all morning. The following week he’d mitched again and followed her, ducking behind hedges, using all the skills he’d acquired playing spies. It had been a warm October day, and she’d taken the same path he was taking now, up through the pasture behind the house and along the lane that led to an old orchard. He’d gone there occasionally as a child, but eventually the bees had kept him away. He hadn’t set foot in the place for years. He’d watched his mother wade through the tall weeds toward a small stone house with grass sprouting from its rotting thatched roof. No one else was about. He crouched by the roadside and watched, breathless with secret knowledge, as she pushed open the old door. There was no one else inside. Through the windows he could see her moving slowly around the small room, occasionally reaching out to touch an object on the windowsill or hanging from the wall. After a few minutes, she sat down on the cot against the wall opposite the door. She drew her legs up to her chest and sat like that in the ruined house for a solitary hour, in silence.

He’d had to keep shifting his weight so that his legs wouldn’t go to sleep, and he breathed silently, conscious of every sound and movement that might draw her attention. As he crouched there, he heard a sound, a faraway droning; he didn’t quite realize what it was until a single honeybee dropped onto the sleeve of his jacket. He held perfectly still as the bee clumsily traversed his coat’s brown canvas hills and valleys. After about a minute it had given up and flown away, and he’d looked up to see his mother’s face in profile through the door of the ruined cottage. Suddenly he remembered the feeling that had spread across his chest at that moment, the slow realization that every creature on earth had a secret interior life. The idea had filled him, traveled like electricity out to the ends of his fingertips. It felt enormous. And far from feeling betrayed, he remembered thinking it quite fantastic that his mother could be alone with her thoughts, away from him and away from his father, totally separate from them. He’d sunk down in the weeds and sat watching. He didn’t know what this place was to her, and he decided at that moment that he didn’t want to know.

After another thirty minutes, she’d risen from the cot and left the orchard, retracing the same path she’d taken earlier. This time he’d followed her only as far as the back fence. When he came into the house twenty minutes later, he searched for any sign that she’d seen him. But she was calmly laying the table for their dinner as usual, without a word, with no outward sign that she’d been out of the house all afternoon. His guilt about spying on her was assuaged somewhat by his gladness that she had another life.

He’d decided not to follow her again, but a few days later he had trod the narrow path up to the orchard, to explore the place. What he’d discovered was an apiary, a circle of nine rotting wooden hives half hidden beneath the nettles and buachalans that had nearly taken over the grove. The first hive he’d uncovered was tipped over and encrusted with granulated honey. There was an enormous hole in the side of the box where bees were coming and going. The keeper had obviously abandoned them, but the bees had carried on, unmindful of human indifference. He’d tried to lean in and see into the hole, but when he lost his balance and tried to steady himself on the hive, a stream of angry bees started pouring out of the opening. He’d had to make a run for it, ducking under whitethorn branches until he was safely out of their path.

After that encounter, the notion of the bees had kept at him. He was plagued with curiosity about what went on inside the hive, and he wondered how people ever managed to extract honey if the bees were such ferocious defenders. On his third visit, he’d found a musty old book about beekeeping in the ruined house; he brought it home to read, making sure it was well hidden beneath his stash of maps and school papers. The book, with its descriptions of queens, workers, drones, nurse bees, and undertakers, of their orderly existence and mysterious chemical communications, only whetted his appetite for more. He haunted the libraries in Birr and Tullamore, returning from each visit with another beekeeping book secreted under his jacket, hands clammy with excitement over the new knowledge it might impart.

Once he had read every book he could lay his hands on, he’d sent away for a white beekeeping suit and veil. When he’d finally assembled the equipment he needed to set about putting the apiary to rights, his work had started in earnest. It could have occurred to him that his presence might be ruining his mother’s place of solitude, but he was too caught up, and reasoned that she could simply go there when he was at school. He’d begun very gradually, using a scythe to clear away the tall weeds, setting up the tumbledown hives and repairing the holes in their sides. In doing so, he’d found one or two boards bearing the unmistakable impression of a sledgehammer. In the dozen years he’d been working at it, he’d turned the apiary into a haven. He hoped his mother still went there. If she did, she never acknowledged this thing they shared, not even when he brought her the first jar of honey from the hives.

He’d used the ruined house as his supply shed, just as the previous beekeeper had done. One day last autumn he’d found a small leather-bound book just inside the shed door, as though it had been left there for him. It was a beekeeper’s journal, unsigned, anonymous. There was nothing about the keeper’s own life; he wrote only about the bees. The pages contained a dutiful record of his daily work, the season’s cascade of flowering plants, the weather, and the honey that was the distillation of it all. Tucked inside the book he’d found a whole handful of sketches by someone trained in technical drawing, as he himself had been. They were precise, detailed drawings of swords and daggers, mostly, but there were also strange Y-shaped objects, like old-fashioned hardware. Looking at them pleased him, and he had tacked them up in neat rows on the walls of his beekeeping shed. It was still a mystery where they had come from, and not one he was likely to solve.

This place was his sanctuary, away from the demands of the farm and the job, a place where he didn’t have to measure time. He was nearing the apiary, wading through tall grass and wildflowers, aware of their scent and of the faint buzz in the air. Bees had moods, the same as people; the temperature and the weather and the light all affected them in different ways. He had spent time studying the ways they moved, from a swarm’s quivering mass to the delicate, individual dances that spelled out the location of a clover patch somewhere close by. He’d studied the bees’ tiny bodies, marveling at the detail, the perfection of their transparent wings and striped raiment.

The feeling came over him again, the anticipation of a third strange event yet to happen today. There was something unfinished about two of anything. He wouldn’t feel right until it was settled. He could hear the bees’ steady, collective hum as he approached, the reassuring, almost lazy vibration of more than a hundred thousand insects, their legs laden with the gold dust of pollen to be transformed into their precious hoard of sweetness. Bees were not good fliers; sometimes, especially in cold weather, he could sense the effort it took for them to become airborne.

Charlie pushed through the tangle of thistles and blackberry brambles and tall grass that was beginning to invade his small apiary meadow from the edges. He trailed his hands over the fragrant bearded grasses and sweet globes of clover. The bees would be getting their fill. He loved this protected place above the lake, nestled below the hill’s crest, cut off from strong wind and heavy weather. He’d set his hives exactly where the old ones had stood, in an arc around the center of a small depression ringed by whitethorn bushes and apple trees. When the light was right, a person could mistake it for a stone circle, a holy place.

At times he was seized with a feeling that he really ought to keep this area in better trim, but the feeling vanished when he was here, amid all this profusion. The grass did not live in order to be cut down, but in spite of cutting. Its nature was to grow and go to seed and grow again. He felt the rebellion in his own soul swell sympathetically whenever he stood on this small patch of earth. The world was meant to be wild, unbridled. The place where he worked, Loughnabrone, was humankind’s attempt to put its own shape on nature, but humankind never really won that fight. Drains filled in, grasses and bog plants encroached; they would soon take over again, once the humans were all gone.

He looked down to find a single worker bee attached to his wrist, apparently attracted to a small smear of honey on his shirt cuff. He watched the insect circle the spot, intoxicated by the scent of it. He watched her tongue looping outward onto the cloth, feeling as small as she was, the air around him buzzing, vibrating with life, the very atmosphere thick with the smell of nectar and flowers, the sheer overwhelming abundance of the universe. This sudden awareness passed quickly, and he was once more in his own apiary, studying the single bee as she worked to get the nectar from his sleeve. When she was satisfied she lifted off, flying unsteadily, he thought, drunk on the taste of her own honey.

There was someone in the apiary. Charlie stopped to peer through the dense and crooked whitethorn branches, half expecting to see his mother. Instead he saw a pale, slight figure in the center of his hive circle, a young woman about his own age. She wore a kind of shift—he knew no other word for the garment—a simple dress in some sheer material that caught the sun, which made her seem illuminated around the edges. A makeshift crown woven of twigs, clover, poppies, and other common roadside weeds adorned her dark head. He stood transfixed, watching as she lifted her arms and stretched luxuriously, like an animal. A single bee alighted on her outstretched hand, and she brought it down to have a closer look. It didn’t sting her, as he had thought it might; she studied its trail across the back of her hand. Far from being frightened, she seemed curious.

She raised her thin arms level with her shoulders and turned slowly, raising her face to the sky. She seemed unaware of his presence; her eyes were closed, and he saw a cloud of bees gathering around her head, perhaps attracted to the flowers. He suppressed the urge to cry out, afraid he would startle the bees into doing her injury. But it was as if she anticipated, even invited the insects’ attention. He remained still as a statue, barely breathing as they landed on her in dozens. Her neck and shoulders were awash in a vibrating mass of busy, winged bee bodies. He imagined their strange strawlike tongues against her skin, perhaps tasting her for the queen substance, the chemical reassurance they needed to carry on. This was swarming behavior, he realized, the main thing all his efforts as a beekeeper went toward preventing, and yet he could not disturb such a wondrous apparition. She was some deity, a force of nature incarnate, and who was he to disturb her communion with her subjects? For it was as if she commanded them, and they sought her out, the irreplaceable touch and taste of her. And she, for her part, seemed transported, rapturous.

He had no idea how long they stood there. It might have been two minutes, it might have been ten; his sense of time was distorted by this unexpected vision. It was almost as if their beating wings were about to lift her from the ground. He felt his center go with them, the girl and the bees, borne upward on a wish. He could have sworn there was a space beneath her feet, a miraculous millimeter, thinner than a bee’s gossamer wing.

When the bees had taken their fill of her, it seemed, they departed as gradually as they’d come. She stood for a moment longer with her eyes shut, as if to retain the feeling of microscopic feet by the thousands upon her flesh. She shivered, clasped herself tightly, and heaved a sigh, the kind of wordless exhalation he imagined might escape from a woman whose lover has just left her. Then she dropped her arms to her sides and opened her eyes. Charlie was taken aback when he recognized the face, returned to earth from wherever she had been. It belonged to Brona Scully, the daughter of their nearest neighbor. Someone had cut off her long hair—that might have been the reason he hadn’t recognized her earlier. Brona was perhaps the only person in the locality who enjoyed more pity than he did. People said she wasn’t right in the head—but they said the same thing about him, he knew. Charlie wanted to be near her, to understand what she had just experienced. And with a kind of gentle, settling sadness, he knew he never would. He knew it in the same way he knew that this was the third strange occurrence, the thing he’d been waiting for all along.

8

The red wine swirled in her glass, and Ursula Downes studied the sediment as the eddying liquid slowed and came to rest. The bathwater was getting cold, and she was reaching the bottom of the bottle. She reached down and poured another splash; only a couple of inches remained. Her unsteady movement made the wine slosh in the glass, and several drops escaped and fell into the water. She watched as the inky red sank in ever-decreasing rings until it disappeared altogether. Her head felt heavy from the wine. She leaned back, letting the glass rest between her soapy breasts.

She remembered the look in Owen Cadogan’s eyes this afternoon. She probably shouldn’t have laughed, but he was so pathetic. He couldn’t fathom why she wouldn’t just pick up where they’d left off last summer, and resume those desperate bouts of coupling he’d no doubt begun to think of as their “affair.” She had to admit that she had enjoyed watching his expression whenever she’d proposed anything slightly more adventurous than he was used to. But what right had he to assume that she would just take up with him again? Their relationship—if you could even call it that—had been based on physical need, nothing more. It wasn’t as if they even really enjoyed each other’s company. In fact, after what she’d seen today, she’d have sworn he actually despised her, so what was he on about? Owen didn’t know what had changed for her. She had other prospects now, not just another permanently married man who liked having it off once in a while with someone younger and more imaginative than his wife.

And Owen wasn’t her only problem. Plenty of strange things had happened today, almost as strange as a second body with a leather cord around his neck. The crew were not settling into their work. Maybe it was just her imagination, but the pool of qualified archaeologists seemed to include a larger percentage of head cases every year. Rachel Briscoe was getting moodier and more unpredictable with each passing day. And what exactly had Charlie Brazil been up to, scrabbling through her site maps in the office this afternoon? She’d walked in and caught him out, and though he’d pretended to be curious about the excavation, there was more to it than that. He’d always been far too interested in their business. She’d seen him often enough, climbing the small hill behind her house, or out on the smaller bogs around Illaunafulla. Did he sleep out there, or was it some other attraction? Everyone around here thought him soft in the head, and Charlie Brazil was anything but. She’d find out what he was looking for.

Actually, meeting Nora Gavin had been quite interesting. Ursula had to admit that she’d experienced the tiniest buzz shaking the woman’s hand, remembering her brief encounter with Cormac Maguire the night before. She’d always found it impossible to resist needling people like Cormac. She wondered if he was ever sorry about the way he’d left things between them. She’d long ago given up being sorry for anything. There was no future in regret.

She set her wineglass on the floor, and began scrubbing at her nails with a brush, but gave up after a few seconds. It was no use; her nails would remain black until she left this place. She sometimes felt as though the peat was entering her very pores, filtering in through the microscopic cracks in her skin, filling her up with darkness. She was sick to death of bogs, weary of the people and the bleak rented house. Who would have believed it: two consecutive summers back in the same dreary squat from all those years ago? Somehow she thought her life would add up to something more by now. At least she’d insisted upon her own place—and why not, if Bord na Mona was paying? The crew’s communal way of life, the shared kitchen and toilet, depressed her unutterably, perhaps because she’d lived that way every summer for long enough. Maybe this time next year she’d be someplace where it didn’t rain ten months of the year. She relented for once and let herself imagine sun and heat, white sand, azure water. She knew she ought not to think about it too much. Bad luck.

She wetted her sponge and applied a few drops of body wash, working it into a frothy lather, then slid the rough sponge around the back of her neck and over her chest and shoulders. The image of that second dead body in the bog came back to her, the stillness of it, the spark long extinguished. And with the picture came the knowledge that staying here much longer meant extinguishing her own spark, letting it gutter out in perpetual rain. She wanted to see it burn brightly for as long as possible. She felt nothing but pity and contempt for those who would stifle their own vital energy, from fear of what might happen—or even worse, from some false sense of morality. She knew she was an amoral person, by any definition of the word. The idea of morality held very little meaning for her. If the universe itself was amoral, why should the creatures governed by the rules of that universe be any different? There was no morality in gravity, for instance; it just was. Nor was there any sense or judgment in the way atoms formed into elements. Who was to say that one collection of particles had any more intrinsic value than another mass of particles with one electron more or less? The very coldness of it excited her, the hard, physical substance of the world. The rest was sentimentality masquerading as morality.

She lathered the sponge again, and went back to washing, feeling suddenly aroused by its roughness on her soapy skin. Then the sponge passed over the top of a scar that stretched the length of her back. Various lovers had asked about it, a question that usually meant they felt entitled to intimate knowledge of her. Whenever that happened, she made sure not to see the person again. It was her only rule. She couldn’t bear inquisitiveness in a sexual partner; it seemed a singularly undesirable trait. Only one living person besides herself knew why she avoided dry cleaning shops and couldn’t abide the smell of perchloroethylene.

Long ago, when she was still a child, she’d sought out confession, trying to get rid of that dirty feeling she couldn’t seem to scrub away. The priest had instructed her to tell him everything. She had complied, choking when she had to describe what her stepfather had done. She had remained kneeling, innocently hoping for absolution, even as she heard the breathing on the other side of the curtain grow more labored. It had only dawned on her very gradually that the old priest was getting stirred up listening to her, imagining what was forbidden, taking twisted pleasure in her fear and shame. “My child,” he’d called her. The bastard. The sick fucking wanker. She’d walked out in the middle of her confession. She didn’t believe in goodness or morality anymore. It simply didn’t exist, and people who did believe in it were deluded. She wiped away the single tear that slid down her face, and with it wiped the scene from her memory.

Ursula took another swallow of wine and watched, fascinated at how the liquid clung to the side of the glass. It was true what she’d told Cormac—that she didn’t really give a damn about what vintage she was drinking, but maybe that would change. Desmond Quill said he would teach her about wine, and maybe she’d let him. She had to admit that Quill wasn’t at all her usual type. For one thing, he’d pursued her. When they had first met at that museum reception in the spring, she’d been struck by the hard glint in his eyes, the strength of his handshake. He’d kept staring at her through the crowd, and when they bumped into each other at the bar, he’d slipped one hand around her waist and steered her right out the door and into a waiting taxi. She hadn’t even asked where he was taking her, and when the taxi pulled up in front of a Georgian house, she had followed him inside and straight up the staircase to his bedroom. They had not spoken a word. The memory of that first encounter still excited her. She and Quill were very much two of a kind. He was probably at least thirty years older than she was, and he never seemed to have the desperate, guilty quality of the partners she usually chose. She felt transparent to him, in a way that she’d never felt with any other human being—as if he could see right through her, into her bones, into the darkest thoughts that occupied her existence. He had never asked about her scar, but he’d often traced the outline of the damaged skin as though it were the map of her soul.

Ursula’s reverie was suddenly punctured by a loud crash, then another, and another. Jagged fear sang through her veins. It sounded like someone breaking down the door. She leapt from the bath, leaving the water lapping and sloshing in her wake. Her fingers felt clumsy as she quickly turned the key in the lock. Then she covered her ears and sank down to the floor, trying to imagine what she would do if someone started to batter down the bathroom door. But no one came. The house had gone dead quiet.

Ursula had no idea how long she waited—ten minutes, perhaps fifteen. She heard no movement, no sounds of life from the other side of the door. She knew it might be a ploy to draw her out, but she couldn’t stay in there forever, and her mobile phone was out in the kitchen. She found a small pair of scissors to use as a weapon, then pulled on her bathrobe and silently turned the key. No figure loomed out of the shadows at her, no hand reached out to grasp her by the hair. The house was still. She almost thought she had imagined it all, until she turned the corner into the kitchen and saw the word scrawled on the glass in red paint: SLAG. Ursula looked down at the small scissors in her hand and felt as though she was going to be sick.

Returning to the bathroom, she saw that the nearly empty wine bottle had toppled over and was spilling onto the white tile floor. The dark pool shimmered in the electric light, its surface disturbed by drops that seemed to fall in slow motion from the bottle’s open mouth.