Lake of Sorrows

1

The postmortem on the second murdered man from Loughnabrone took place the following morning. The mortuary at the regional hospital in Tullamore, twelve miles northeast of Loughnabrone, was a drab, anonymous room with institutional tiled walls, anemic fluorescent lights, and two stainless-steel tables. Dr. Friel had gone into the next room to take a phone call, leaving Nora alone with the corpse, which lay partially covered by a plain white sheet on one of the tables, ready for their initial external examination. There had been no clothing to itemize and remove; upon taking the body from the bog, they’d found the deceased completely naked but for his leather cord and wristwatch.

Nora lifted the sheet and looked at the band still encircling the man’s wrist, its metal parts corroded green and black. She could just make out the word “Waterproof” on its peat-clogged face, a watchmaker’s assertion now disproved. The hands pointed to 9:55; faded red characters, TUE 20, showed through the window at three o’clock. Around his neck was the thin leather cord with its three knots, regularly spaced, about an inch apart. The Gardai would have trouble identifying the corpse, if this and the watch were all they had to go on. She considered his still outline, wondering who had waited in vain for him to arrive; who had held fear inside like a clenched fist, waiting for any news of him; who, perhaps, was waiting still.

The left arm that had stretched toward the top of the bog now extended above the man’s head, the partially skeletonized hand still bagged to preserve any forensic evidence. Dr. Friel would take scrapings from beneath the fingernails, to check for traces of skin or hair from another person—possible evidence of a struggle, if he hadn’t gone quietly to his death. But the acidic bog environment typically destroyed fragile nuclear DNA, so even if there was any tissue residue from a struggle, it probably wouldn’t provide concrete clues to a killer’s identity.

She circled the table to take a closer look at the man’s right hand through another polythene bag. This hand was much better preserved than the other, the palm and fingertips marvelously intact. Her primary impulse, on seeing this modern body, was to wonder whether she might be allowed to take a few small samples to analyze and compare to older specimens. But that would require the consent of the family, if the man’s identity was ever determined, and might require a delicate diplomatic approach. Maybe Dr. Friel would have some advice.

At the other end of the table, the sight of the dead man’s right foot was particularly arresting: brown skin stretched, tentlike, over a fan of bone and sinew. The flexed foot was delicately pointed as if caught in a dance step, from the toes, like five small dark stones in a row, to the wrinkled arch and rounded heel leading to the shapely ankle. Strange, Nora thought, that the glimpse of a bare foot should strike such an oddly intimate chord. But the feeling was not unfamiliar; she had experienced similar, fleeting flashes whenever she worked on a cadaver. Death allowed all kinds of intimacies never imagined in life. She wanted so much from this man, whose skin and bones and sinews had already begun to form answers to her questions. For as long as she could remember, the human body had been her subject, her instrument, her fascination. Most people misunderstood the pathologist’s motivation; it was not a preoccupation with death, but a profound curiosity about life. She had seen a Latin inscription in some mortuaries that captured the philosophy exactly: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. “This is the place where death delights to help the living.” There was a procedure to be followed, a routine that broke the experience of death away from emotion and grief, and pushed it instead into the realm of scientific observation. It relieved her mind, at least for a while, to believe the illusion that she was dealing only with flesh and bone, with the comforting clarity of science rather than the murky world of human relationships. But even scientific detachment didn’t last. Eventually every person on the autopsy table had to be recognized as someone who had lately had a life.

Catherine Friel pushed through the door, wearing a rubber apron over her lab coat and pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Let’s get started now, will we?” She pressed the button on her tiny tape recorder and began to describe the deceased in a calm, measured voice: “The body is that of a normally developed white male of slender build. Difficult to ascertain age because of the condition of the body.” She lifted first one arm, then the other, then each leg in turn. “There is no rigidity, and no visible lividity, but the body is quite dark brown in color from deposition in a bog. The left hand is desiccated and partially skeletonized. The exposed bone is somewhat decalcified, and adipocere seems firmly established throughout. The exposed skin is darkened from contact with peat, but remains remarkably elastic. Deceased is wearing a wristwatch with a metal band on the left forearm.” She gingerly removed the corroded watch and bagged it. “The deceased is clean-shaven and the hair on the scalp appears black and wavy. There’s a slightly reddish tint to all the body hair, which I think we can assume is from immersion in the bog.” She looked up at Nora, who nodded her concurrence. “There’s no visible evidence of congestion in the face, and the skin discoloration prevents observation of any possible cyanosis.” Dr. Friel set down the recorder and carefully lifted each closed eyelid, examining the surface of the eyes with a magnifying glass. “The irides appear blue, and the pupils are fixed and equal. There are no foreign bodies or contact lenses. There’s noticeable focal petechial hemorrhaging in both eyes.” The small blood spots were one of the typical signs of asphyxia or strangulation.

Dr. Friel concentrated on the man’s head and neck, marking off his external wounds with her measuring scalpel. “There’s an incised wound on the left lateral area of neck, four centimeters in length. We’ll have to do a dissection to describe the wound path and see whether it’s severed any major vessels. I don’t know if you can see this…” She handed Nora her magnifying glass. “There’s horizontal bruising just above the gash. A pretty definite ligature mark; see how it continues around the back of the neck? A rising peak in the back usually indicates a suspension point. That’s one way we can tell the difference between an actual hanging and a rearward strangulation.” She cut the leather cord from around the dead man’s neck, bagged and labeled it, then gently opened his mouth and pointed a small torch inside to peer at the teeth and gums, which were only slightly discolored and clotted with peat. “There’s some dental work. Gold crown on the first molar, lower right—and the first upper left bicuspid is missing. No visible injuries to the gums, cheeks, or lips. Looks like he got a mouthful of bog water at some point, though—we’ll be able to tell more about that after we have a look at the lungs and the airways.” She lifted and examined each arm in turn. “The hands and arms appear to have sustained a few defensive wounds. The right hand seems to be in fairly good shape; we might be able to get a decent set of prints.”

Nora looked up to see Detective Ward standing at the door, and after a moment Dr. Friel noticed him as well. “It’s all right, Liam, come in.” He joined them at the table. “I’m afraid cause of death isn’t going to be very straightforward,” Dr. Friel continued. “There’s a lot going on here, and it may take a bit of time to work it all out. I’m finished with his effects, if you wanted to take them. I was just about to ask Dr. Gavin if there was anything she could see, given her previous experience, that might give us a better idea about how long this man was in the bog.”

Nora felt slightly discomfited by such deference; the “previous experience” to which Dr. Friel referred consisted of exactly one nonpreserved specimen. Ward ventured a question. “What exactly causes the discoloration?”

“The bog environment triggers what’s known as a Maillard reaction.” Ward looked blank, so Nora tried to explain: “In simple terms, it’s a common protein-sugar reaction—the same chemical process that causes food to turn brown, actually. Some of the recent research using piglets has demonstrated pretty marked discoloration after a couple of years. So, in other words, I don’t know if we can tell very much from coloration alone.” She looked closely at the dead man’s shoulder through the magnifying glass. “It’ll be interesting when the larger incisions are made to see how deeply the color has penetrated the cutaneous and subcutaneous layers. The brown color doesn’t seem quite as rich or well-established as in the older remains I’ve seen, but I’ve not seen that many bog bodies—to be honest, no one has, and they’re all slightly different, depending on the particular environment.”

Nora paused, realizing that what she was about to say might be all wrong, that she might have to backtrack somewhere down the road. She took a deep breath, hoping she wouldn’t regret what she was about to say: “This man apparently went into the bog completely naked. He’s probably been strangled with a leather cord, and his throat has been slashed. If he hadn’t been wearing the wristwatch, we might quite naturally assume he was much older.”

“And why is that?” Ward seemed intrigued.

“Well, he has similarities to the other body from Loughnabrone, and to remains found in England, Germany, and Denmark, and other places as well. The finds over the past fifty years or so have all been pretty well documented. Some of them had similar types of wounds: they were hanged or strangled, their throats were cut, and they were buried or staked down in watery places. Some people have taken those things as proof that many of the bodies were victims of ritual sacrifice.”

Ward seemed troubled by this interpretation. “So what are you saying—you think this might have been some sort of ritual killing?”

“I don’t think it can be ruled out. When we find the same evidence on an older body, it’s always one of the possibilities. Any one of those wounds was probably enough to kill him, so why the excessive violence? If he were from the Iron Age, then the injuries would be consistent with what’s been found before. But if he’s clearly modern, then the mystery is why someone today would have used those three forms of violence in particular.”

“Why, indeed? Shall we see what this fella can tell us?” Dr. Friel said, reaching for the garden shears that lay on the stainless-steel tray near the dead man’s head. She didn’t seem to notice that Detective Ward was already beating a hasty retreat out the mortuary door.

2

As he drove the twenty-three miles back to his station in Birr, Ward was thinking about Dr. Gavin’s words. Ritual killings, or murders that looked like ritual killings, were rare, although probably not as rare as people might imagine. Some were committed by self-styled occultists, but murders carried out for other reasons were sometimes covered up by staging the scenes to look like ritual killings. He’d seen a few examples where the ritual aspect had turned out to be misleading.

The first challenge here would be to find out who the victim was. He pulled out his mobile and punched in a number. “Maureen, it’s Liam. Do me a favor, will you, and pull all the missing-person files? How many are there from the last twenty years, do you reckon?…Maybe we should go even further back…. Yes, sort those out if you would. I’m on my way. I’ll have a look at them when I get there. And I’ll tell you more about the PM when I get in.”

They’d be lucky if it was a local disappearance. If the victim happened to be from somewhere else, they’d have to search missing-person files from the whole country. It could take a long time just to establish identity, not even talking about evidence for a murder case. There was that date on the watch, but it only told the day of the week and the date. No indication of the year or month, unless…The watch had to know what month it was, in order to tell the date accurately. Maybe it had to be set by hand; but perhaps there was a mechanism inside the watch that calculated how many days were in each month. At the very least, they might be able to get a manufacture date for the watch and eliminate the years before it was made.

How strange was it that the victim was naked? He’d seen the body out in the bog; there was no suggestion that this had been a careful burial—just the opposite, in fact. So how had the victim come to be naked, and why—especially out on that broad expanse of milled peat? There was no evidence from the postmortem that he’d been bound—or was there? Victims of ritual killings were not usually cooperative, unless they were incapacitated in some way. Dr. Friel hadn’t mentioned any blows to the head, and they’d have to wait for toxicology results to see if there had been any drugs involved. But the peat under the nails might suggest he hadn’t been unconscious going into the bog. Ward was crossing a similar stretch now, along a straight bog road, the surface rutted and patched, crumbling away at the sides. He suddenly realized that he relished this moment in a case, when the whole thing lay before him, complicated as a Chinese box, waiting to be opened, to confound and mystify.

He parked outside the station and walked around to the front entrance, a tiny room with a window for the duty officer and a row of hideous molded-plastic chairs opposite. No one was at the window, but a woman sat in one of the chairs, waiting. She cast a brief, anxious look in Ward’s direction, then turned back to the empty window and sat a little straighter in her chair, arms crossed across her chest. Her handbag hung over one shoulder and two bulging carrier bags rested at her feet. She’d come in after doing her shopping for the day, after trying to decide whether to speak to the police. She wouldn’t stay long if no one came to her aid.

Crossing the waiting area to the inner door, Ward formed an impression instantly. The woman was perhaps his own age, he decided, fifty-ish, though she looked younger. He would have described her as handsome rather than delicately beautiful. She had dressed with care, and the clothing, though not in the latest fashion, was of good quality: a tailored trouser suit, a crisp white blouse, and just a touch of makeup. A farmer’s wife, Ward decided. Respectable. Her face showed concern, perhaps that she would be seen sitting in the reception area of the Garda station, but there was something deeper as well. In his years in the Guards, Ward had learned to read many different layers and grades of concern. There was the annoyance of parents come to fetch unruly offspring who had committed some relatively minor offense such as public drinking or joyriding; complainants about noisy neighbors often brought with them a nauseating air of moral sanctity. This woman’s face had none of that. The idea struck him that she was here to make a confession, but perhaps it was better not to jump to any conclusions. He turned to her. “Excuse me, have you been helped?”

She looked up, startled by his sudden attention. “No. No one’s been here. But I haven’t been waiting very long.”

Just then the duty officer returned from the inner room, pulling the door shut against the sound of laughter and the murmur of male voices. Upon seeing Ward in the outer room, he straightened and put on a serious face.

“I can help the lady now, sir,” he said. Ward noted a few crumbs of seedcake on the young man’s shirt front.

“That’s all right; I’ll look after her myself,” Ward said. He returned to the security door to press in his code, then ushered the woman down the hall and upstairs to the plain beige office he shared with Maureen Brennan. The space was spare and impersonal, but at least they had a view, overlooking the street in front of the station.

“May I get you a cup of tea?” he asked.

She seemed surprised at the offer. “No, thank you. What I need—” She looked down at her knees and couldn’t seem to find the words to continue. Perhaps she was unused to stating her needs so baldly, and to a stranger.

“Let me get you some tea,” he said. “I won’t be a moment.” He stepped into the corridor and closed the door, watching her through the glass as he crossed the hall to the galley kitchen to fetch the tea. He poured the steaming water over the bag in the large mug, not watching the tea as it steeped, but instead studying the woman in his office. She continued to look straight ahead, not even glancing around the room. This woman was completely focused on whatever it was she’d come to say. Again he thought of a confession, but pushed the idea aside.

Ward squeezed the darkness from the teabag, added milk and sugar, and headed back to his office. As he handed the woman the steaming mug, he noticed her hands. Where he had expected to see skin rough and reddened from farm work, he saw long, delicately tapered fingers, fresh and pink as a young girl’s. She began speaking before he could take out a report form, so he leaned back against his desk and listened.

She introduced herself as Teresa Brazil, then said, “I’ve come because I think the body they found at Loughnabrone yesterday might be someone I know—someone I knew, that is—my husband’s brother. Danny Brazil.” It came in a rush, as if she was afraid she’d stop before getting it all out. And having said what she had come to say, she fell silent and looked up at him, unsure what would happen next.

Ward considered for a moment; there’d been no details released, besides the fact that the deceased was a man. Why would she presume that it was someone she knew? He remembered the leathery corpse he’d just left in the mortuary and wondered whether this woman was just another case of wishful thinking. Whenever a body turned up, the relatives of missing persons came forward and prepared themselves for the worst, just in case. Somewhere way in the back of his head, the name Brazil seemed familiar; he’d met Teresa Brazil before, he was sure. The why of it might be a little longer in coming to him.

“We haven’t even put out an appeal for information yet. We were just preparing to look through all these old cases—” he indicated the stack of missing-person files Maureen had left on his desk “—to see whether we could come up with anyone matching his description.”

“You won’t find Danny Brazil there,” she said.

“And why’s that?”

“We all thought he’d gone away, emigrated to Australia. He talked about it often enough. That’s why they never reported him missing. He’d just gone, no long good-byes, just slipped away as he said he would.”

“When was the last time you saw him yourself?”

Her voice was barely audible: “Midsummer’s eve, twenty-six years ago.” Very precise date, Ward thought. Teresa Brazil seemed uncomfortable sitting in the chair before him, but she evidently felt compelled to be there, to tell what she knew.

“So you’re saying he never wrote, never came home, and no one thought that strange? No one from the family tried to find him?”

“What would have been the point, if he didn’t want to be found?” she murmured.

“I’m still not quite clear why you think the man we found is your brother-in-law.”

She looked up at him, suddenly back from wherever her distant thoughts had taken her. “There were some things found with him. My son was there; he told me. A knotted leather cord, a wristwatch with a metal band. I could describe the watch, if you like. It was a gift for his birthday that year.”

Ward reached into his jacket for the two evidence bags and set them without fanfare on the desk in front of her. The corroded watch had left dust against the clear polythene, and he watched as the object worked its magic of recognition in Teresa Brazil’s eyes. He followed her gaze to the narrow leather ligature, still stretched from being twisted tight around the young man’s throat.

“That cord—” she said.

“What about it?”

“He always wore it,” she said. “May I have a closer look?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s evidence in a murder investigation.”

“Murder?” She barely whispered the word, and the color drained from her face.

“I’m afraid so. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

“It is Danny,” she said. There was no doubt in her voice. “I don’t know anyone else who wore such a thing. It was for protection, he said. For luck.” She turned away, and Ward watched her try to gain control. When she turned back to him, her face was calm.

“Mrs. Brazil, please understand that I’m not questioning your word on the identification, but it might be best to have some sort of corroborating physical evidence. Did your brother-in-law have any identifying marks that might help us—any noticeable scars or birthmarks?”

“He had a scar just above his left eyebrow, from hurling. I don’t know about birthmarks.”

“And did he ever see a dentist, here in the town or elsewhere?”

“They used to see Dr. Morrison, just here beside the station. The old doctor died a few years ago, but his son is in it now.”

“If we’re able to establish a positive identification, we’d of course have some additional questions for you and your husband, and any other family members as well.” Teresa Brazil nodded and stood, and he escorted her to the top of the stairs. “Thank you for coming in. We’ll certainly be in touch, whatever happens. And here’s my card, in case you think of anything else.” She took the card without comment and tucked it into her handbag.

As she started down the staircase, Ward spoke again: “One more thing, Mrs. Brazil. I was wondering why your husband wouldn’t have come along himself.”

Her expression said she’d anticipated his question all along. “My husband has been in poor health. He rarely leaves the house.”

That ambiguous answer would have to suffice for now. Ward returned to his office window to observe Teresa Brazil as she left the station. What was it about her that was so familiar? He watched as she merged with a crowd of adolescent boys and girls, all limbs in their blue school uniforms. They didn’t move as she passed them by, just another housewife weighed down with her messages, hurrying home to cook the family dinner.

When she disappeared around the corner, Ward turned away and sat down at his desk, where he picked up the phone and started dialing Dr. Friel’s mobile number. While he waited for the connection, he spoke across the desk to his partner as she came in. “Maureen, do you know Morrison, the fella who has the dental surgery just beside us here? Looks like we’ll have to request records belonging to a former patient of his father’s. The name is Brazil. Danny Brazil.”

3

As Nora made her way back to the excavation site, the dead man in the mortuary kept pulling at the fringes of her consciousness. She had an uneasy feeling that she was getting caught up again, as she had with the mysterious red-haired girl whose head she and Cormac had unearthed last summer. But she couldn’t help imagining the murdered man as he had been in life, electricity humming through his nervous system, blood soaking oxygen from his lungs, all the thoughtless, automatic, repetitive cycles of physical existence brought to an abrupt and violent end. Why? Who was he, and why should he have been dispatched in a manner usually reserved for Iron Age victims? Had his death been deliberately planned to look like an ancient ritual killing—and if it had, who would have known enough about those practices to approximate such a thing? Maybe he had been a real sacrifice for some reason—the victim of mob violence for something he’d done, perhaps? It was difficult to imagine the sort of crime that might warrant a treble punishment. She pictured the naked victim, kneeling at the edge of a bog hole as the garrote tightened around his neck and a blade was drawn. Perhaps the blade was dull, and didn’t cut as deep as it should have. Maybe the victim struggled, or the swordsman’s aim was not true. Had he been drugged? Toxicology results and stomach content analysis could take weeks, but they might reveal how far the killer had gone in pursuit of authenticity, if it had been some sort of sacrificial ritual.

She arrived at the excavation site to find the small parking area jammed with Garda vehicles. The Technical Bureau van stood out above the cars, and a couple of television vans with satellite dishes had pulled up along the road as well. The place was turning into a circus, crawling with people. She had to park on the road about fifty yards from the hut. It looked as if the Guards had cordoned off access to the bog and were only letting people in if they were on a list. No sign of Ward. She wanted to tell him that the whole triple-death scenario he’d been so interested in this morning was probably not quite as concrete as she’d made it seem.

As she rounded the back of her car and got out her heavy boots and waterproofs, Nora saw Rachel Briscoe, the girl who’d found the new body, sitting cross-legged just inside the open door of the supply hut, on a large rectangular box like a shipping container that rested on blocks beside the shed where the archaeologists took their tea. A large pad of paper rested on her knees; she was drawing the worked ends of timbers that had been uncovered in the cuttings. It was all part of the excavation work, documenting each stroke of the ax; each gouge or facet was a direct line to the work of ancient hands.

Owen Cadogan’s Nissan pulled up behind Nora as she struggled into her waterproof trousers. Cadogan passed her by without speaking and strode purposefully toward the tea shed. When he was almost at the door, Ursula Downes emerged, evidently ready for a confrontation; as Cadogan moved to speak to her, she drew back and slapped him hard across the face. When he recoiled and began to protest, she pushed him away with both hands, turned on her heel, and left him standing with his arms hanging uselessly by his sides. A few yards beyond them, Rachel paused in her drawing and watched intently from the door of the hut, only turning her eyes back to her work when Cadogan stalked off, still rubbing his face. Maybe, Nora thought, she’d been wrong in her assumptions about Ursula and Cadogan. Maybe she’d completely misread what had happened yesterday. Cadogan obviously didn’t have the upper hand today. Maybe Ursula could handle him, and she had been butting in where she wasn’t wanted or needed.

As Cadogan returned to his car and sped off, the shed door opened again and Charlie Brazil emerged, checking to see if anyone was watching him. He began walking slowly toward the Garda checkpoint, skirting the crowd of reporters and sliding in at the front.

When she was suited up, Nora approached the barrier through a small but persistent crowd of journalists and showed her ID to the young policeman. “You should have me down on the list there—Gavin. Nora Gavin.”

The officer scanned down his clipboard and made a tick by her name. “Yeah, you’re all right, Dr. Gavin. Go ahead.” He waved her through, then held up his hands against the reporters who were clamoring for access and pressing up against him. Nora saw Charlie Brazil following a few yards behind her; he was let through the barrier as well. The crowd’s buzz receded as she walked deeper into the bog, conscious of Charlie Brazil’s presence only a few paces behind her. She could see Niall Dawson’s shaggy head among the group at the site, and felt somehow comforted to see his crew from the National Museum carrying on in spite of all the tumult.

Beside Dawson another figure moved slightly, and for a fraction of a second she thought it might be Cormac. In another heartbeat she realized it wasn’t him, but she wondered how she had known, so quickly and so absolutely. She also understood that the same thing would happen to her again and again, perhaps for the rest of her life, if she turned away from him now. In the years to come she’d see the back of a man’s head, a shoulder turning toward her, and his image would come to her like a ghost. Was it possible for the living to haunt their fellow creatures? For something as intangible as the mere memory of a gesture to slip into the subconscious unbidden and remain there until some firing synapse, some chemical key set it free? She had studied Cormac with her anatomist’s eye—how his bones were put together, how the layers of muscle and sinew lay upon those bones in a very particular way to create the face and form she loved. And she did love him. The knowledge filled her suddenly, like a great breath. She’d been fighting it, denying it out of guilt and fear, but now she felt overwhelmed by the certainty of the feeling. Strange how epiphanies arrived in between things, when they were least expected.

There was nothing to be done about it now. She hiked her bag up on her shoulder and tried to prepare herself to work.

The wind was cool today, and everyone wore jackets; great cloud towers billowing past periodically threw everything into high relief or heavy shadow. The white marquee still shielded the bog man; its sides puffed in and out with the strong wind—it was a wonder the thing hadn’t lifted off and blown away. Niall Dawson, directing the crew that was building the transport crate for the body, looked up as Nora reached him. “Welcome back. How did your postmortem go?”

“Very interesting. A bizarre coincidence—well, bizarre anyway; I suppose we’ll have to find out if it’s really a coincidence. It looks as if he was killed almost exactly like our man here—strangled with a ligature, throat slashed—”

“Really? And how long do you reckon he’d been in the bog?”

“That’s what’s odd. From the style of the watch he was wearing, I’m guessing probably twenty or thirty years at the outside. Maybe less.” Nora saw Charlie Brazil turn toward them. He might have heard what she’d said about the cause of death, and she realized that she probably shouldn’t have said anything—to Niall Dawson or to anyone. “You’ll keep all this under your hat, won’t you, Niall? It’s officially a murder investigation, and I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

“You know me, Nora—the soul of discretion. We’re just about to do the honors here, if you’re ready.” He held the tent flap as Nora ducked into the white marquee.

Inside, she paused for a moment to put on a pair of latex gloves. It was difficult to believe this was real. All the hours she’d spent digging through musty old files and museum records, trying to string together known facts into never-before-discovered patterns—all the hours she’d spent trying to imagine from quaint, antique descriptions the reality faced by earlier discoverers of ancient bog remains; and here was another whole trove of information, in the flesh.

The purpose of this partial excavation today was to photograph the bog man in situ before removing him to the National Museum conservation lab at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Because the body had already been removed from its original location, there was an extra urgency about getting the remains into the protected and controlled environment of the lab. Today they would expose the arrangement of the limbs, record the things that might change once the body was moved, just as police photograph a crime scene—as an aid to memory, capturing empirical evidence exactly as it lay. The crew had already taken the obligatory shots of the telltale body parts that emerged from the peat, with markers to show the scale. Now it was time to draw back the peaty blanket and to find the full, fascinating horror that lay beneath.

First Nora uncovered the crown of the bog man’s head, bare except for a matted carpet of skin and hair. She remembered reading an account of bog workers finding and tossing around something they jokingly called a “dinosaur egg,” only to find later that it was a badly decayed human head, a vessel that had once held memories, sensations, fears, the spark of an individual life. She uncovered a deeply furrowed brow, a left ear bent nearly in half, a left eye squeezed shut. She looked up at Dawson; he was uncovering the man’s right forearm, which was flung out away from the body, chasing the sodden peat from between the finger bones so that they would be distinct when photographed.

Nora was astonished to see the raised outlines of blood vessels beneath the skin of the dead man’s right temple, distinct though the pulse they had contained had been stilled centuries ago. His delicate, papery eyelids were likewise preserved, and there was a deep crease between his eyebrows, an expression of fierce concentration. He had a full lower lip, and a strong chin covered in fine stubble the color of fox fur.

It was difficult to make out many details when everything was the same shade of brown and the invading peat had filled every recess. They’d be able to see more once they had him in the lab. The cord that had been tied around his throat looked like leather, though Nora knew, from reading about previous bog discoveries, that it might be hard to determine definitively what sort of animal hide it was. The knots would have to be examined further by a forensic specialist, but they seemed fairly simple: a stopper knot at each end of the narrow cord, and a third knot linking the two ends. That was one difference between this victim and the newer bog body.

The withered skin on his throat had gathered in folds, but with the help of a pocket mirror she could see that the near edge of the cut was still sharp, and there was a distinct layer of adipocere at its lip. They’d have to examine the wound more carefully in the lab to determine whether it had been made by a piercing or slashing action; from that they might be able to discern whether the blow had been intended to kill the victim, or merely to spill his blood—an important distinction when studying possible ritual significance. It was tempting to imagine this excessive violence as part of a complex ritual, but it was also possible that the bog men who had been subjected to such apparent overkill were simply being punished multiply for multiple crimes.

When they’d finished exposing the front and sides of the body, the photographers came inside the tent to do their portion. Nora sat on the ground outside and closed her eyes, trying to imagine what this spot had looked like twenty centuries earlier. No doubt it had been covered in a thick blanket of bog, scattered with stands of birch trees and standing pools. What was it about wet places—rivers, lakes, and bogs—that prompted offerings? Perhaps ancient people saw in the water’s surface another world, a reflection of this world turned upside down, or a place inhabited by shades and spirits. She’d often listened to Cormac talk about how the Celts saw life and animus in everything, eyes peering out from the leaves of the forest, grinning faces disguised as abstract spirals and curved lines. The Romans had certainly portrayed the people who lived here as bloodthirsty savages—but didn’t every conquering culture paint that portrait of the people they tried to subdue?

Perhaps the whole community had gathered here to witness as the man inside the tent bled and died, or perhaps his death had been clandestine, a well-kept secret. Some bog bodies, from their undernourished state, were thought to be people of low status, while some were very well-fed. What had this man’s status been—outcast, scapegoat, fatted calf? Had he ventured out here to the bog willingly, understanding that he was to die, knowing that his blood was the necessary price for his people’s survival, or had they carried him, unconscious or drugged, against his will? The whole idea of sacrifice recurred in religion to this day, Nora thought; modern Christians still drank the blood and ate the flesh of their God, if only in symbolic form. And it wasn’t just Christians; nearly every culture, every human endeavor from sport to politics to the cult of celebrity, had a way of selecting scapegoats to receive punishment that would otherwise have been borne by all.

As she felt the eternal wind on her face and watched the sun still riding high across the southwestern sky, Nora felt as if she’d just discovered the key to a locked doorway into the distant past. She wasn’t sure whether it was disturbing or reassuring to open those doorways and find that human beings had not fundamentally changed at all in the intervening years. Perhaps they never would.

She checked her watch; nearly six o’clock. They’d soon be finished for the day and covering up the bog man in preparation for his journey to Dublin tomorrow. She climbed to her feet and started cleaning off her tools.

Niall Dawson came up behind her. “That’s the bog man finished. We’ll start searching the spoil tomorrow, if that’ll suit.” He meant the sopping heaps of loose peat that Charlie Brazil had been removing from the drain when he’d uncovered the body. They’d have to go through it all by hand, looking for any more clues to the Loughnabrone bog man’s fate. “Good for you to get your hands dirty, Nora. It’ll give your research much greater depth and credibility if you’ve participated in all these different aspects of an excavation. Who knows, you might even get a book out of it.” He smiled at her. “A few of us are heading over to Gough’s in Kilcormac later if you and Cormac would fancy coming along for a drink. They’ve a regular set dance night there on Tuesdays. I assume you know the Clare set, at least?”

“Are you joking? Of course I do.” She lapsed into a broad West Clare accent: “Didn’t I spend every summer at my granny’s below in Inagh? What else was there to do on a Sunday night?”

Dawson laughed. “Very good.”

Nora smiled back at him, and her own American voice returned. “Been a while, though; I’m probably very rusty. Thanks for the invitation, Niall. We might see you there.”

At the parking area, she spotted Charlie Brazil unloading several welded metal grids into the supply shed. He hadn’t had cause to employ his gas mask over the past couple of days, but it was still hanging around his neck, facing backward. In profile, he looked like a strange two-faced Janus. He set down the heavy grids, then gave one of the joints a proprietary check. “Did you make those?” Nora asked.

He seemed startled. “I did, yeah.”

“What are they?”

“Drawing frames. The archaeologists use them as grids when they’re drawing the cuttings.” His ears went bright crimson. “I’m allowed to make what they need here, as long as all my other work gets done.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about a newspaper cutting I saw in Owen Cadogan’s office when I first arrived. It had a picture of two men who made a big discovery here years ago. Their name was Brazil too. Owen Cadogan said they were relations of yours?”

He answered quietly: “My father and his brother.”

“How did they come across the hoard, do you know?” Charlie’s expression told her he’d heard this question before. “Sorry. You must get sick of people asking about them.”

“It’s never been any other way. I only get tired of people asking me where the gold is buried.”

“They don’t. Really?” At first she couldn’t tell if he was serious; another quick glance told her that it was true, but that he managed to keep a sense of humor about it. Charlie Brazil was a quare hawk, all right, just as Owen Cadogan had described him.

“Do your dad and uncle still work on the bog?” she asked.

Charlie’s defenses came up again, and quickly. “Why do you want to know?”

“It’s just that I might like to talk to them as part of my research.”

He looked away, then down at the ground. “My father took the pension last winter. Had to—his lungs are gone.” From the set of his jaw, she sensed some rift between father and son.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, is it?”

“And what about your uncle?”

“Never met him. He emigrated before I was born.” Charlie lifted two more drawing frames up into the high container door. “I’d like to have known him, though. I’ve been looking after his bees, and I have a few questions.” He spoke as though he was just a temporary caretaker—typical, Nora realized, of all the beekeepers she’d ever known.

“My grandfather used to keep bees,” she said, “down near the bog in Clare. He’d let me help him tend them sometimes. He never let me mark the queens, though; I always wanted to but he said it was too dangerous, too delicate.” Charlie looked over at her with a new appreciation. Nora thought he was probably one of those keepers so enmeshed in the bees’ world that he would be one of them, if only he could. She suddenly saw him veiled, hands sheathed in white gauntlets, sorting through the writhing insect mass, gently brushing aside the courtiers to capture the queen in her tiny cage, making the mark that set her apart as the necessary mother of replicants, a unique being in a universe of clones. Her grandfather had explained it to her: the queen was the anointed one, chosen at random—the first to hatch. Her first royal duty was to dispatch every one of her sisters, to the last. No sentiment, just a quick spike to the head.

“You must get heather honey, this close to the bog,” she said. “You don’t happen to have any left from last year’s run?” She felt a sudden craving for the taste—dark, almost musky, and never liquid. It was like end-of-summer fruit, sweetness teetering on the edge of decay, the last breath of summer, intensely distilled. “I’d love to see the apiary. I could just stop by—”

“No!” His vehemence seemed to surprise even himself. “There’s no need. I can bring you some.”

Perhaps the place was remote and hard to find. And an apiary could be dangerous to someone with no experience of bees. But the alarm in Charlie Brazil’s voice had seemed slightly out of proportion. Was there something at the apiary he didn’t want her to see?

4

“A set dance night?” Cormac’s eyebrows lifted as he repeated the phrase, and Nora understood it might not have been his first preference for something to do that evening. “You’re aware that Gough’s is reputed to be the dirtiest pub in all of Ireland?”

“Well, no, I wasn’t. But now I’ve got to see it. Come on, Niall Dawson is going down with a bunch of his people. He said you could join the session if you were afraid to dance.”

As they walked through the front door of Gough’s, Nora understood the designation, but thought it a bit exaggerated. True, the floor was plain concrete and could do with a good sweeping. But the bar’s reputation was probably due to its bohemian decor—no tidily upholstered tapestry benches and barstools here, but swaybacked antique settees in threadbare brocade, as if the owners made a habit of haunting country-house estate sales and snapping up the worn castoffs of a dwindling aristocracy. Above the bar, an antique pendulum clock advertised Golding’s Manures. Behind the front room and up a few steps lay a modern addition, a large open room with a fireplace and limestone walls lined with benches and tables. The stout pine dance floor was already filled with eight-person sets.

While they waited for drinks at the bar, Nora looked up at the fluttering streamers of green, white, and gold that made a bright pinwheel above the punters’ heads. The championship season was in full swing, and hopes were high this year for the Offaly hurlers. Hurling wasn’t a sport in this part of Offaly, Cormac had explained; it was closer to the local religion. And of all the sports Nora had ever halfheartedly followed, it was one of the most beautiful. It was an ancient game, played since the days of legend—the hero Cuchulain was supposed to have been a great hurler, though in his time the losing team was usually put to death after the match. There was something still very primal in watching lean young men racing down the field, scooping up the small leather ball with flat hurley sticks, balancing it while running at full speed, then batting it over the bar for a point—from a hundred meters out. Set dancing and everything else would be forgotten on Sunday afternoon during the match.

Drinks finally in hand, they headed toward the back room and spotted Niall Dawson and his group at the far side of the dance floor. The crowd was an interesting mix of older and younger people; the musicians sat in one corner near an upright piano, leaning hard into a set of reels, and four couples stood in squares, the ladies lacing their way surefootedly around the gentlemen with a brisk battering step. Then the couples faced one another, and danced around the square, stopping in each place with two emphatic stamps. When they reached home to their original places, the figure was over, and the dancers returned, flushed and perspiring, to their tables, while the musicians started up another set of tunes.

“This will be a Plain set,” shouted the organizer, an energetic white-haired man in shirtsleeves and a loose tie. “Who’s for a Plain set?”

Nora set her drink down on the table in front of Dawson, then took Cormac’s pint and flute case from him and pulled him out onto the floor. “Back in a minute, Niall.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Nora,” Cormac said, hanging back. “It’s been too many years.”

“Don’t fret,” she said. “I’ll pull you along.”

She placed Cormac’s right hand snug against her waist, lifted his left arm and let her hand rest lightly against it. The music began with two thumps on the piano, and they both fell naturally into the subtle toe-heel rhythm of the Clare set. They stepped in tandem, forward and back, then Cormac swung her into ballroom position and around the square. It was clear this wasn’t his first time on a dance floor.

“You’re a man of many surprises,” she said.

Cormac smiled and spoke quietly in her ear. “I gave it up when I started playing music, but it’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.”

When the dance ended, they headed back to Dawson, who was deep in conversation with the couple at the next table. He waved them over and introduced them to Joe and Margaret Scanlan, an elderly pair who’d been sitting out the set. Joe, silent and barrel-chested, was filling his pipe and barely nodded in greeting, but Margaret Scanlan leaned forward and shook hands, scanning their faces with bright eyes. Dawson said, “Would you ever enlighten these fine people with what you were just telling me, Mrs. Scanlan?”

“We got chatting,” Margaret said, “and when I found Mr. Dawson was working on the excavation over at Loughnabrone, I asked if he’d heard the latest on the murder victim. Everyone around here thinks it’s a fella from these parts, Danny Brazil.”

Dawson broke in: “The strange thing is, Brazil’s family—”

“Says he emigrated,” Nora said.

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“I was just talking to his nephew this afternoon.” Joe and Margaret Scanlan exchanged a significant look. “I was asking about Danny and his father finding the Loughnabrone hoard, and Charlie said people still ask him where the gold is buried.”

“Seems we’ve nothing to tell that you don’t already know,” Dawson said, feigning disappointment.

“No, it’s news to me that people think the body belongs to Danny Brazil. Mrs. Scanlan, why do people think it’s him?”

“Well, Joe’s niece Helen works at Dr. Morrison’s dental surgery right beside the Garda station in Birr. About half-ten yesterday morning she saw Teresa Brazil—that’s Charlie’s mother—going into the station and leaving again a few minutes later. And the Guards came ’round to the surgery that very same afternoon, asking for Danny Brazil’s records.”

Nora said, “I hate to seem skeptical, Mrs. Scanlan, but surely the man’s own family would know whether he emigrated or not. How could he be missing for twenty-five years and his family know nothing about it? That doesn’t make sense.”

Dawson said, “It all depends on the family.”

Margaret Scanlan leaned forward. “Indeed. And it makes great sense if you knew the Brazils. All a bit quare in the head, if you know what I mean—every last one of ’em.”

Cormac asked, “Any theories about why he might have been killed?”

“I think everyone assumes it’s something to do with the gold,” Mrs. Scanlan said. “It’s been a great source of speculation for years.”

Dawson broke in: “Everyone thought—maybe just assumed—that there was more to the Loughnabrone hoard, that the Brazils hadn’t turned quite everything over to the museum. I suppose it’s what people always think, even when it isn’t true. It’s nicer to think of treasure still being buried somewhere, accessible.”

Margaret Scanlan said, “But now Danny’s turned up dead, everyone’s looking for answers about the brother and the gold.”

“But there’s no actual evidence that the Brazils kept anything back from the hoard?” Nora asked.

“None that I’m aware of,” Dawson said. “We’ll probably never know for certain.”

“But it’s certainly not the first time that family have had their dealings with the police.” Margaret Scanlan took a sip of sherry and settled herself in to tell the story, while her husband sat back, sucking on his pipe and nodding. “About ten or twelve years ago there was an awful scandal, over terrible things that were done to several sheep and a kid goat—too horrible to mention. I don’t even like thinking about it. Everyone said it was Charlie Brazil that did it, but they couldn’t prove anything against him, so he was never up in court. Dreadful, it was. Shocking. And you know what they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

5

By the time Nora reached the bog on Wednesday morning, the Loughnabrone man was already packed into his crate, ready for his trip across the Bog of Allen to Dublin. She felt sorrow for some reason, seeing him leave this place where he had been cradled for so long. But she told herself she would see him again, get to know him through whatever intimate secrets his flesh and bone and marrow might divulge.

When the museum van drove out of sight, she turned to Dawson, who was remaining to oversee the next step in the excavation process. Over the next few weeks, a full-scale excavation of the site would look for any additional remains beneath the turf. But today they would begin the search, going through every scrap of spoil looking for bone fragments, skin, and any associated artifacts. They’d have to go through a ton and a half of wet peat with their bare hands, looking for objects as small as a single fingernail. The ridge of spoil had been marked out into sections, so that each person had a manageable amount, and any finds could be pinpointed on a drawing. Nora’s section was just beside Niall Dawson’s.

One of the bog man’s fingernails turned up after three-quarters of an hour, but it was slow, painstaking labor. Nora finished going through her fourth bucket of wet peat, and had just shifted to another position to keep from going numb, when something jabbed her, hard, just below the knee. She gasped and rolled to one side to find whatever it was that had made such a sudden impression. Straightening her leg, she found a sharp point stuck right through her trouser leg and a good quarter-inch into the flesh of her shin. She pulled it out.

Dawson was up on his knees, peering over her shoulder. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Looks like part of a clasp.” She rubbed the place where it had stabbed her and tried to remember when she’d last had a tetanus shot, then held the thing out to Dawson. He gave a low whistle, and she saw his eyes grow large. “What is it?”

“It’s a fibula. I’m sure you’ve seen them in the museum collection—Iron Age safety pins.”

Nora turned the thing over in her hand. Most of the ones she’d seen had been bronze, but the body of this pin—bright yellow metal, uncorrupted by damp—was unmistakably gold. It was exquisite: a stylized bird with furled claws, its eyes set on either side of a long beak that formed the arching bow. Even with Dawson looking right at her, the first impulse she felt was to fold this beautiful object into her palm and slip it into her pocket. It was almost like the urge she’d felt as a child, to hide when another person entered the room.

Watching Dawson mark the findspot and deposit the pin in a clear polythene bag marked with the excavation number, Nora felt a small part of herself resisting the very idea of collection, collation, enumeration. Her hand remembered the pin’s lovely heft. How easy it would have been to slip it into her pocket, and say not a word to anyone. She remembered the poster in Owen Cadogan’s office, requesting bog workers to report the things they found. An idea began to rattle around in her brain.

As they were going back to the shed at the tea break, Nora caught up with Dawson. “Niall, supposing I found something valuable out on the bog, and decided to keep it.”

Dawson seemed a little reluctant to engage on the subject. “If you were caught you’d be looking at a hefty fine, and probably jail time if it was deliberate poaching and not done just out of ignorance. The National Monuments Act is very specific and very strict.”

“What’s to keep me from coming out here with my trusty metal detector and looking for treasure?”

“You mean apart from it being illegal and unethical? Even archaeologists have to have a license when they’re using metal detectors on sites. The answer, unfortunately, is not much.”

“Supposing I wasn’t caught?”

Dawson threw her a look. “You’d be lucky. Illegal trade in antiquities is big business, but hard to keep secret for long. There was a pair of cousins prosecuted a few years ago. The Guards got a tip-off and nailed them with more than four hundred artifacts in their house—figured they’d probably made off with hundreds more before they got caught. Another woman down in Wexford went around wearing a thousand-year-old Viking brooch as a lapel pin for about three years before anyone realized it was a valuable artifact.”

“So how do you get people to resist temptation?”

“Well, with ordinary law-abiding citizens, fear of prosecution is a great motivator.”

“What about rewards and finders’ fees?”

“Oh, there’s that as well. Things found on private property are handled a bit differently from discoveries made on Bord na Mona lands. But according to the law, the finder’s fee is at the discretion of the state—more specifically, the museum’s director.”

“So that pin I just found—how much would it have been worth if I’d just dug it up perfectly legally in my back garden?”

“Are you asking about its value, or what the museum would actually pay?”

“What’s the difference?”

“The reward is usually just a percentage of the actual value. It can be a delicate negotiation, particularly if we know somebody’s got something we want, and we’re not sure who they are, what the object is, and whether they’ll ever turn it over.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“More than we like to admit.”

“So what’s your estimate?”

“I couldn’t really say, not without examining it further. I’m not just being coy, Nora; that’s the way it is. Depends on the object’s value, the archaeological and historical value, and the amount of rewards made for similar objects. And it all comes from the state treasury, so we’re usually talking a maximum in the thousands rather than the millions. Just to give you an example, when the Derrynaflan hoard turned up in Tipperary in 1990, the finder and the landowner received about twenty-five thousand pounds each—and that was for a whole hoard that included a silver chalice inlaid with gold.”

“But depending on what you found, it could be serious money.”

“Oh, aye, surely—if it was found legally, and reported as required. Why this burning curiosity all of a sudden? Tell me you haven’t been tainted by one touch of saint-seducing gold?”

“Not to worry, I’ve no plans to turn treasure hunter. Thanks, Niall.”

Someone else farther back in the group called for Dawson’s attention, and Ursula Downes maneuvered into his place beside Nora.

“How’s your accommodation working out, then?” she asked.

Something in the innocent way she’d posed the question made Nora suddenly wary. “Just fine,” she answered cautiously, curious about where Ursula might be heading.

“What do you think of the Crosses?”

“It’s a wonderful place.”

“You don’t find it a bit…I don’t know—cramped? When I used to stay there, I always found it a bit confining. Old houses are like that, I suppose. Some people like quaint. I always preferred something a bit more up-to-date, myself.” They’d reached the shed, and Ursula cast a frankly lubricious glance over at Charlie Brazil, who was building a new staircase for the supply shed out of broad planks, his shirt loose and unbuttoned in the afternoon heat. He was about ten yards away and couldn’t have heard Ursula’s remark, yet Nora felt her face unaccountably burning for his sake, or perhaps her own. Was it true, what Margaret Scanlan had said about him last night? She hadn’t even tried to imagine what “terrible things” had been done to those animals. What she really wondered was whether Charlie Brazil was a true misfit, or just one of those unfortunate people whose odd behavior naturally draws suspicion—a scapegoat.

The afternoon’s work was slow and hot. Like footing turf, Nora thought; you’re better off not looking up. At a quarter past three, she climbed to her feet and set out for the nearest lavatory, a portable toilet with no running water. It was swarming with bluebottles and the floor was caked with peat. She had just closed the door of the Port-a-loo when she heard noises outside under the vent to her left. The compartment suddenly rocked as a body was shoved up against it, and she heard a struggle, like two people wrestling. Male and female, from the silhouettes on the fiberglass walls. Was she a witness to violence or lovemaking? Even at this proximity, it was almost impossible to tell. Finally the tussling stopped, and Nora recognized the voice: Ursula Downes, out of breath. “Don’t worry, you won’t hurt me. That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it, Charlie? To tell the truth, I like it a bit rough. What about you?”

Charlie Brazil didn’t respond, but Nora could hear his ragged breathing. Through the louvered vent, she could see them outside on the ground, Ursula astride Charlie with her knees pinning his arms. He couldn’t move without shifting her off him by force.

Ursula leaned forward and extracted something from the front of Charlie’s shirt. “What’s this—some sort of good luck charm? It’s very like the one your uncle Danny was wearing when we found him. Only it didn’t turn out very lucky for him, did it now?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Charlie said. “What do you want from me?”

“Why do you think I want something, Charlie? Maybe I have something to give you. Did you ever think of it that way?”

“Whatever it is, I don’t want it.”

“Is that any way to talk? You haven’t even heard my offer. I’ve been up at your place, Charlie—the place where you have the bees. People have told me Danny used to keep bees there as well.”

“What about it?”

“Randy little devils, aren’t they, bees? I heard once that the drones put it to the queen while she’s flying, ride her in the air. Is that really true?”

“I don’t know. Let me go.” He struggled again, but she held him fast.

“I think you do know, Charlie. I think you know all about that and much more. I’ve been watching you, Charlie. I know what you’re hiding.”

He writhed beneath her, but she leaned forward into his face and whispered, “It’s not as if you’d get nothing in return. I wouldn’t tell anyone, for a start. And I’m very inventive, Charlie. You’ve no idea. I can be very sweet when I want to be, and I know you appreciate sweetness, Charlie. I can feel it. There’s just one thing I have to mention, and it’s that little girlfriend of yours, Helen Keller—”

Out of Charlie’s throat came a deep groan full of anguish, swelling into a roar as he heaved Ursula from his midsection and scrambled to his feet to make an escape. She couldn’t resist one parting shot: “When you do come and see me, Charlie, wait until after dark. You know how people talk.”

When he was gone, Ursula sat on the ground and began to laugh to herself, a dusky sound in which Nora thought she recognized a bright note of triumph. Eventually Ursula climbed to her feet, brushed off her clothing, and went back around the side of the shed. Nora kept still for a moment, trying to think. She felt somehow stained by having witnessed the scene. She couldn’t shake the sound of Ursula’s laughter from her head, and she felt it setting loose the darkness that sometimes welled up inside, washing through her. She felt as though it had the power to turn her blood a deeper shade of red, and it was something she could not just wish away.

A few minutes later, when she headed back to the parking area, Nora found a jar of dark golden heather honey sitting on the hood of her car. A solitary bee had found it as well, and was tracing a circle around the edge of the lid, trying to find a way in.

6

Owen Cadogan hated the train station—the cold tile floors, the huge ticking clock, all the lifeless gray cinders that lay beneath the tracks. Perhaps the aversion was left over from his childhood, when the whole family would go down to see his father off on his way back to work in England. All that false hope, the forced emotion, the tears…it was dreadful. The father had made it home every few months at first, then he’d come back only at Christmas, and eventually he’d stopped coming back altogether. He had to find work, he’d said, and England was where the work was, but they all wondered what else he had found over there. Owen knew he wasn’t in any position to judge, considering what he’d done with his own life, but that didn’t make his father any less guilty.

He stood in the ticket queue, looking back occasionally to where Pauline sat with the children on a wooden bench against the wall. They were going up to visit her mother in Mayo for a fortnight, something they did every summer without him. A holiday at the seaside did the children good, Pauline said. And she was probably right, because Pauline was always right. The worst thing wasn’t the fact that she was always right, but that she knew it. The woman’s awareness of her own superiority hung around her like a stifling cloud. He’d never understand women. First they laid traps for you with their soft voices, the way they smelled and felt under your hands, and once you were reeled in and caught it was too late; you were marched before the judge and informed of the way things were going to be. When she finally had the two children she’d always wanted, Pauline’s interest in him had abruptly terminated. Then she was off-limits, the door closed in his face whenever he came near her. She didn’t want to have to move to a separate bedroom, she’d said, for the sake of the children, but she would if he persisted.

So he played his role as provider—the wallet, the moneybox, the bank—he’d always played that part all right. It was just in every other area that he couldn’t seem to measure up. No one really understood his position, at home or at the job. He thought of all the workers who’d be losing their jobs at the end of this season. They couldn’t see into the future for themselves, didn’t even fucking try; they just put their heads down and went to work every day, hoping desperately that no one would force them to think too hard about the choices they had made. In many ways they were like overgrown children, and they expected to be taken care of like children for the rest of their lives. He was the one who had to tell them that things didn’t work that way anymore.

He glanced back again at his family. They were his family; why should he feel like such an outsider? He studied the dark hair falling down Deirdre’s back and wondered what his daughter thought of him. Children were very sensitive about these things. Did she see him for the failure of a man that he was? Stephen raised his eyes at the same moment, and Cadogan felt himself shrink under their gaze. The roundness of Stephen’s head and the set of his shoulders, that confidence of youth, suddenly made him feel like weeping. They knew all about him, it was clear. And they had always been their mother’s children, never his. He looked at his daughter’s hands clutching the small suitcase, her knuckles still dimpled with a babyish plumpness—touching, but already lost to him. If they never came back from Mayo they wouldn’t miss him a bit. He wished the train would come and take him away, once and for all, so that he would never have to look at them or think about them ever again. But just then the woman in front of him stepped away from the ticket window, and the clerk addressed him: “Where to, sir?”

“Three return tickets to Westport, one adult and two children.”

“The missus taking the little ones on holiday, is she?”

“Yes.”

“They’re a fine-looking family.”

“Yes.” Cadogan’s hackles rose as he watched the man’s eyes flit over toward his family once more; the gray eyes glittered, the pink tongue darted out to moisten cracked lips. But when the clerk handed over the three return tickets with nicotine-stained fingers, Cadogan saw the man for what he really was: a harmless old bastard stuck behind a ticket counter for forty years. What was wrong with him? He must be losing his mind, seeing the iniquities within himself manifest themselves in everyone around him. He felt queasy, and turned away without a word of thanks.

The children led the way out to the platform. The train wasn’t due for another couple of minutes, and his son went immediately to the tracks and peered into the distance for it.

“Will you get away from there, Stephen?” Pauline scolded. It was the very same tone of voice, Cadogan realized, that she often used with him as well.

“Stop fussing me, will you?” Cadogan recognized his own voice in the boy’s response. When Stephen was out of harm’s way, his wife turned to him, but kept her distance. “You know when we’ll be home. You’ll have to fend for yourself until then.” What did she think he was, a schoolboy? Why had it taken him so long to realize that this was the way she’d always treated him, like a stubborn child?

Finally, the train pulled into the station. No false hope, no forced emotion, no tears. Cadogan felt relief as he watched his family climb the steps into the carriage.

“I won’t wait, if you don’t mind. I’ll just be off.”

“Whatever you like,” Pauline said. “I’ll ring you from Mam’s. Behave yourself.” With that final admonishment, she turned to catch up with the children, who were already arguing over who would get to sit facing the front of the train.

Cadogan turned and threaded his way through the loose clumps of travelers disembarking and waiting to get on. Freedom stretched before him, fourteen days in which he would not follow his wife’s advice. He felt enormous relief at getting out from under his family for a few days, and wondered briefly what it might feel like to be shut of them altogether. He dared not think about that—at least not until he’d seen his plan through, until he’d found out what his worst side was capable of at the bottom of it all.

Once out of the station, he passed a self-imposed threshold and allowed himself to think about Ursula Downes. When he’d arrived at the excavation site today, she’d accused him of trying to frighten her the night before. He hadn’t responded, just listened to her fume and sputter on. He wasn’t going to dignify her accusations with any reply. Who did she think she was, coming out here with airs and graces, rejecting him, after what they’d got up to almost every day last summer? Why should he tell her anything? Let her fucking wonder, the bitch.

7

Two days after the new body had turned up at Loughnabrone, Liam Ward sat at his desk finishing the paperwork on a couple of recent cases. They’d just closed the inquiry on a local farmer who was making and selling his own quack cures for cattle, and were now waiting for a determination on the charges to be filed by the Director of Public Prosecutions. And just last week they’d cracked a stolen car case purely by accident; on their way out to interview the suspect, they’d found him trying to bury the car in the bog with a backhoe. Far from being sporadic, the detective work—even in a rural district like this—was usually small-scale, but relentless. This was the first homicide he and Maureen had faced in several years, and it was possible that the unusual circumstances of the case would mean they’d have some interference from above.

Maureen came through the door with a brown envelope. “Preliminary autopsy on the Loughnabrone case. It’s addressed to you.”

Ward studied the envelope. The address was in Catherine Friel’s regular, slightly feminine hand. Still no word on Danny Brazil’s dental records; it might take a few more days. He opened the envelope and slid the autopsy report onto his desk. There was a note attached:

Liam—

I hope this preliminary report will be of some use. It could be a couple of weeks before the toxicology and serology results come through, but please ring me if you have any questions. The findings are fairly conclusive, but let me know if you need clarification on any point. I’d like to help the investigation in whatever way I can.

—Catherine

Ward felt an unfamiliar catch just beneath his solar plexus as he set the card aside. He scanned the first few paragraphs, looking for the one phrase, the key that would help him unlock this puzzle.

Evidence of injuries:

1. Sharp force injury to the left side of the neck. This is a complex injury, a combination stabbing and cutting wound. The initial wound is present on the left side of the neck, over the sternocleidomastoid muscle, 6 cm below the left auditory canal. It is diagonally oriented, and after approximation of the edges, measures 2 cm in length. Subsequent autopsy shows that the wound path travels through the skin and subcutaneous tissue, without penetration or injury of a major artery or vein. This is a nonfatal sharp force injury.

2. Lateral contusion measuring 3 mm in width around the neck superior of the hyoid and traversing C4 at a 10-degree angle ascending anterior to posterior. There is a ligature crossover pattern 3 cm from posterior midline at C4, suggestive of a slightly off-center rearward ligature strangulation. This is a nonfatal injury.

3. Oblique and slightly curved laceration of the left posterior head, located 12 cm from the top of the head and 6 cm from the posterior midline. The laceration extends through the scalp and is associated with subgaleal hemorrhage. No skull fracture is present. This is a nonfatal injury.

4. Multiple incised wounds to scalp, face, neck, chest, and left hand (defense wounds).

5. Multiple abrasions on the upper extremities and hands (defense wounds).

6. Peat particles present in trachea and in both lungs.

7. Multiple small contusions on the calves, ankles, and heels.

From there, Dr. Friel embarked on a more detailed description of each wound. Ward read quickly through the details, then skipped over the internal examination to the final page, for the summary of the findings:

From the anatomic findings and pertinent history, primary cause of death is ascribed to drowning. However, from the character and number of lacerations, contusions, and defensive wounds, inflicted trauma is clearly the result of a homicidal assault.

Drowning. Strange that despite all the other injuries, he had ended up asphyxiating at the bottom of a bog hole. The defensive wounds said the man hadn’t gone willingly to his death. Cuts on his hands and forearms were evidence that he’d been conscious while being attacked with a knife. There had been a fierce fight.

Ward tried to put himself in the dead man’s place, to reconstruct the events in logical sequence. He opened the evidence box and removed the leather cord. Someone surprises the victim. He naturally tries to escape, so the attacker takes hold of this cord, twists and pulls him backward, to hold him, probably with the left hand. That’s one reason the ligature mark on the neck would be slightly off center. The attacker tries to reach around and slash the victim’s throat with the knife, but he’s still struggling, and the attacker doesn’t get a good strike; the wound is only superficial.

In the struggle, the victim twists around and falls. His head strikes something hard, giving him that curved laceration, and he’s knocked unconscious. He might even appear to be dead. At this point the attacker drags him across the bog and throws him down the bog hole. But the victim isn’t dead; he’s only unconscious. He regains consciousness in the hole, and struggles even then, sinking in the sloughy darkness, trying to dig his way out, until finally he sinks and the attacker fills in the bog hole with spoil.

Ward felt exhausted, just thinking about the scenario. But what were the weaknesses? There were always weaknesses. It was all a bit too much to believe—the garrote, the knife, the drowning. Unnecessary overkill. But had it been planned that way, or had it just happened? Unwilling victims had a way of upsetting people’s carefully drawn plans.

And there was still the puzzle of the missing clothing. If the victim had been fully dressed when he was attacked, why would the killer bother to strip the body? If you were simply trying to make identification difficult, why not take all the effects—the watch, the leather necklace? Dr. Gavin said that the bodies thought to be sacrificial victims were usually found naked.

There was another problem as well. The scenario he had just imagined assumed only one attacker, and there might have been more. A conspiracy? Stranger things had happened. In the famous Missing Postman case, several upstanding citizens had been involved in covering up an accidental death, transporting the body and concealing it down a well.

Now that they knew how the man had died, they would have to wait and see if he turned out to be this Brazil fellow. Once again, thinking the name, Ward felt unsettled. Ever since Teresa Brazil had sat here in his office yesterday morning, he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that he should know that name, but he couldn’t place it. Nothing recent—it was something old, unfinished.

He turned to the computer on the corner of his desk, typed “Brazil” into the system, and started scanning the dozen or so items that came up: joyriding, petty burglary, public drunkenness. No, none of those; the first names were wrong. Then he spotted it, and everything came back to him. The case had been one he’d handled himself, eight years earlier, with his old partner, Eugene Larkin. A postman making his rounds on the bog road between Kilcormac and Loughnabrone had discovered a lamb hanging by the neck from a scrub tree at the edge of the bog. Whoever had put the creature there had also cut its throat, and with the blood had drawn three circles in a sort of triangular formation on the ground below. It was just the sort of incident that fanned the flames of fear and intolerance in a small rural place. The killing had been discovered just after a full moon, and a sort of mass hysteria had taken hold of the community. The air was rife with rumors of clandestine rituals and blood cults. Perfectly innocent activities became suspect. When a second animal was found slaughtered after the next full moon, on the same stretch of road and in much the same condition, anonymous tips began pouring in. Ward had taken several of the calls himself, and could still hear the voices: Better look to that Brazil lad, Charlie. He’s a right quare one, he is—a desperate odd character. Not the full shilling, out walking on the bog at all hours. What’s he get up to out there? No good, I’ll promise you.

After the second incident, they’d decided to interview the boy, if only to eliminate him from the inquiry. Why the community had all settled on this boy in particular was a mystery. All that set Charlie Brazil apart from his fellows, apparently, was that he kept to himself, displayed a pointed lack of interest in football and hurling and girls, hadn’t been seen inside the church these last two years, and was seen walking in the bog at all hours of the day and night.

But after the official visit from the Guards, it seemed as though the suspicion and whispering only escalated. Emboldened by their neighbors, more voices began chiming in, a chorus of indictment. One person claimed her cousin’s daughter had seen the boy in nothing but his pelt, dancing around a bonfire. But whenever they had pressed further—for proof, any physical evidence, eyewitness statements placing Charlie Brazil in or near that part of the bog on the nights in question—the anonymous accusers had vanished like mist. They’d all heard about Charlie and his midnight rituals from a neighbor or someone in the pub. For some of them it was proof enough that the animals involved belonged to the boy’s mother; naturally she wouldn’t be interested in pressing charges against her own son.

The last and most violent incident had involved a kid goat. The third time they’d questioned Charlie Brazil with no result, Larkin had tried flashing a few photos from the scene. But the boy hadn’t looked at the pictures, nor at the men who were questioning him; he had maintained his composure, kept his eyes averted, and calmly continued answering their questions, with the photographs strewn on the table before him. Ward recalled that to Larkin, the boy’s lack of reaction had been proof enough of guilt. He himself hadn’t been so sure.

The Brazils were an odd family; that much was true. Ward had sensed a deep disconnect in the room with them—three individuals completely separate from one another, each consumed with maintaining that separation. He recalled the father’s dark expression, the way he’d hung back beside the door while the boy was being questioned, as though he wanted to be able to bolt at any moment. A powerful man, Dominic Brazil was, with hands like two spades. Ward had interviewed dozens of fathers like him, inexplicably silent men whose own fathers had been rigid and unforgiving, fearful of any weakness in their offspring. At least the mother had been concerned about what was happening to her son. Teresa Brazil, the woman who’d been in his office this morning, had looked at every grim photo that day so long ago without flinching. He was surprised that he hadn’t remembered her; she’d impressed him back then with her unwavering support for the boy. After looking through the pictures, she had turned and spoken slowly to him and Larkin, shaking her head. My son could not have done this. As though trying to convince herself, Ward had thought. As though willing it not to be so was enough. It was possible the boy had done it, of course. Anything was possible.

In the end, they hadn’t been able to find a single scrap of physical evidence tying Charlie Brazil to the incidents and consequently had never charged him. After the third and most grisly occurrence, the mutilations had stopped, and the case had eventually been shelved for lack of evidence. Ward hadn’t seen the lad since. He must be in his early twenties now, probably working for Bord na Mona as a ditcher driver like his father.

Ward remembered what he’d been going through himself at that time—it hadn’t been long after Eithne’s death—the night sweats, the fearful dreams of drowning, of watching her head slide beneath the water and being frozen with horror, unable to act. He’d probably been easier on the boy than he should have been. But there had been no compelling evidence. And inflicting needless suffering had never been one of the attractions of his job.

It was both curious and disturbing that the animal mutilations and the body from Loughnabrone seemed to involve similar ritualistic spilling of blood. But was that a connection or just a coincidence? What age was Charlie Brazil—about twenty-two, twenty-three? That meant he hadn’t even been born when Danny Brazil left home.

The key to the Loughnabrone case was how long the body had been in the bog. At this point Ward only had Teresa Brazil’s word for the date when Danny had disappeared from Loughnabrone. Maybe he’d never gone away. Or maybe he’d left for a while and come back, tried to get in contact with someone he shouldn’t have. Ward looked down at the list of known associates he’d been working on, people they might have to interview in the next few days: the Brazil family, of course; Danny’s coworkers at the workshop; his former mates on the hurling team, those erstwhile local heroes turned middle-aged butchers and electricians and publicans. He wondered whether Danny Brazil had been headed to Australia of his own free will, or whether he’d been banished there—and if so, by whom.

When he got back to the office, Liam Ward watched Maureen on the phone with her husband, cradling the receiver against her left ear, and wondered whether he’d ever again have the opportunity to hear a woman’s voice soften like that over the telephone. He thought about picking up his own phone and ringing Dr. Friel. Perhaps she was still in the area, and wouldn’t mind having dinner with him. That was all it would be: a meal and some conversation.

He flipped through the numbers in his diary, and was just about to dial her mobile when Dr. Friel herself appeared in front of his desk. She was wound up about something, but from all appearances, it looked like something good.

“Hello, Liam. I hope you don’t mind me just popping over like this, but we’ve got a positive ID on the second body from the bog. It is Danny Brazil, no question about it. I made the preliminary comparison, and the odontologist just confirmed it; he says there are too many matches in the dental work for it to be anyone else. I have both sets of X rays here if you want to have a look.”

Maureen overheard, and put down the phone to join them at the window. In the ghostly image against the pane, the dense teeth glowed white, the fillings and metal crowns a translucent gray.

“Can you see the missing bicuspid here on the left? And the gold crown is pretty unmistakable in both. A person’s teeth have very distinctive features, very individual facets and root systems.” Ward looked, and saw some of the similarities, and was glad there were experts whose obsession served the greater good.

“These are a bonus,” Dr. Friel said, pulling out a pair of X rays and holding them up to the light. “Turns out Danny Brazil was treated for a blow to the face during a hurling match—they tell me he played midfield for Offaly. These X rays were taken at the time of the injury and were in his file at the dental surgery.”

Ward looked more closely at the shadowy radiographs of Danny Brazil’s skull. On one he could see the leather cord still hanging loose around the throat. The soft tissue—the eyes, ears, and the tongue—were gone, the sockets round and staring. It was probably best not to imagine all that was inside us, Ward decided. Not to dwell on it at least. And yet she thought about it all the time, Catherine Friel did. It was her life, the same way his life was thinking about what went on inside people, perhaps in a somewhat less literal, less visceral way. But there were those who preferred not to think about either. He was acutely aware of her close beside him, of the hand that held the X ray up to the window. No wedding band.

“It was great of you to bring these by,” he said.

“I have to admit I had an ulterior motive.”

Maureen cleared her throat and excused herself with a look that said Ward had better be listening carefully. Was his attraction to Catherine Friel that obvious? They both watched Maureen go, then Dr. Friel turned back to him. “I was wondering whether you might join me for dinner. I’ve another case over in Athlone tomorrow, so I’m here for another day at least. I’d love to talk over this case a bit more—if you’re free.”

It was as if she knew what he’d been thinking since the first day they’d met out on the bog. Of course, he’d have to go and speak to Danny Brazil’s family before he did anything else. “I really should—”

“Perhaps another time.”

Ward could see that she was reading his hesitation as reluctance, and he wanted to dispel that notion. “No, it’s just that I should go and talk to the family right away this evening. What about tomorrow?” He felt sudden perspiration on his palms, but was relieved when she smiled.

“I’m staying at the Moors. It’s out the Banagher road—do you know it? There’s quite a nice restaurant in the hotel, if that would suit. Is eight o’clock too late?”

“I’ll see you there tomorrow at eight.”

As he drove out to the Brazils’ farm, the fact that he had a grim visit to pay to a bereaved family kept Ward from thinking about dinner with Dr. Friel the following night—and that, he reflected briefly, was probably just as well. He passed by the Scully house and felt a tug of guilt. Ward hadn’t been to see Michael for nearly a fortnight. He could stop by after talking to the Brazils—but something just beneath his breastbone told him he wouldn’t do it, not tonight, in any case. There would be enough of bereavement tonight. Perhaps tomorrow.

He pulled into the yard at the Brazils’ farm and wondered how significant it was that Teresa had come forward so early to identify the body. He decided to play it neutral and not mention that fact just yet. Better hold it in reserve to see if he needed it later.

One car stood in the yard. The place looked like a lot of the smaller farms in the area, barely able to justify the burden of work it took to maintain. Crowded into an old foundation beside the house, small green cabbages stood in three neat rows. Alongside them ran a dozen potato drills, a few rows of runner beans, and various other vegetables. Two sheds with horseshoe roofs stood at a right angle to the garden, one housing a load of turf, the other a small tractor; muddy hoof-prints, evidence of cattle, tracked across a corner of the yard. Washing flapped on the line, but Ward knew from experience that it was impossible to keep things clean out near the bog. Everything got covered in peat dust—the laundry, the tabletops, the people. Got inside them as well, muffled their speech, their thoughts.

The large single-pane window faced the back garden, and through it he could see Teresa Brazil expertly peeling potatoes with a small kitchen knife. He watched her sure, rapid motions as the long spiraling ribbon fell away and the glistening, naked potato slipped under the surface of the water in the saucepan. Then she looked up and saw him, and immediately understood the reason he’d come. She grasped the edge of the sink and bowed her head. She’d known it was Danny; that was why she’d come forward, after all, Ward told himself. But to have it confirmed, and so quickly, must still be a shock.

She came to the door, and waited until Ward had stepped several paces into the room before she turned to face him once more.

“It was Danny,” she said. The words were not a question.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. We just got a positive identification from the dental records. I’m very sorry.”

Teresa Brazil spoke in a low voice, glancing toward the door to the sitting room. “He doesn’t know I came to you. He doesn’t even know about the body. Couldn’t you just tell him that—I don’t know—that someone phoned anonymously?”

“If you wish,” Ward said. He would go along with that for the moment at least, to see how that simple omission colored things. After all, her husband would be a primary suspect in this case. Always look closest to home when investigating a murder; that was one of the rules.

Teresa Brazil finished wiping her hands. “Let me speak to him first. I’ll be right back.” She disappeared down the hallway, her footsteps silent on the carpeting.

Ward turned to take in the space behind him, a sort of combination kitchen and sitting room. Blue delft stood on display in a dresser against the wall, and two places were laid at the table. In addition to the potatoes Mrs. Brazil had been peeling, the makings of a substantial dinner sat ready beside the cooker. The room spoke of order and cleanliness, the kind of existence where you knew exactly what you were going to get for your dinner seven nights a week. The radio, tuned to the Midlands station, droned in the background. In the corner farthest from the kitchen area stood a trio of tall sea green oxygen tanks, their shiny cautionary labels warning against use near an open flame.

“You can go in to him now,” Mrs. Brazil said, and ushered Ward into the sitting room. Her husband sat stiffly in an overstuffed chair. One might almost have imagined that, apart from his barrel chest, the man was slowly disappearing into his clothes. A thin, clear tube snaked up to his face, which had the hollow eyes and bluish-gray complexion that accompanied afflicted lungs. Dominic Brazil was perhaps sixty, but looked older, blue veins standing out on the pale hands that emerged from his sleeves, his once-dark hair now a dull gray. Voices tinkled merrily from the television in the corner, but above its sound a faint hiss filled the room, like air escaping from a slow puncture, and Ward realized it came from the oxygen tank that stood beside Brazil’s chair. What was this before him but a man slowly drowning, dying a little more each day?

Teresa Brazil hovered at the door, apparently unsure whether she should stay or return to the kitchen, until Ward said, “I’d prefer you to stay, if that’s all right.” She sat down in a straight chair near the door.

Ward moved to sit down opposite Brazil on the sofa, feeling like an awkward suitor in his collar and tie. Brazil’s wheezy breath grew perceptibly faster, in through the nose, but out through pursed lips, and each exhalation seemed to take more effort than the last. “Mr. Brazil, my name is Liam Ward; I’m a detective.”

Brazil nodded, evidently not wanting to waste his breath in responding when every ounce of oxygen was precious. Ward continued: “I’m here to tell you that workers at Loughnabrone Bog discovered a body two days ago. I’m sorry to inform you that it’s been positively identified through dental records as the body of your brother, Danny.”

Brazil said nothing, but closed his eyes and concentrated fiercely upon each breath. Just as he seemed about to speak, the man pitched forward in a violent coughing fit—a ragged, tearing sound from somewhere deep within. His wife was beside him in a second, pulling his shoulders back, and Ward noticed once again her smooth, youthful hands. Her husband gripped her forearm, hard enough that Ward thought it must be hurting her; he could see the pain in her face, but she said nothing. At last Brazil sat back in the chair, exhausted, bright tears streaming down his face, but whether they had been brought on by the news of his brother’s death or by the coughing fit, Ward couldn’t be entirely sure.

“I’m also sorry to have to tell you that your brother’s death doesn’t appear to have been accidental. I’ll have to ask you a few questions. I can do that now, if you’re up to it. If not, I can come back later.”

“What do you want to know?” wheezed Dominic Brazil. “He left. Went off to Australia, we thought.” His voice was like a child’s wind-up toy running out of steam. His hand still rested on his wife’s forearm, but she slowly withdrew it, and rubbed the spot where he’d held her fast. Had that grip been just a reflex, a spasm, or some sort of communication?

“When was the last time you saw your brother, Mr. Brazil?”

He thought for a moment. “It was Midsummer’s eve, but the year—what was the year?”

His wife reminded him. “It’s twenty-six years ago tomorrow.”

“You say you thought he’d gone away. Did you ever hear from him after he left home?” Dominic Brazil shook his head fractionally.

“Did no one worry about him not staying in touch with the family?”

“He could be dreadful mulish.”

“Why did he want to leave?”

“Nothing for him here. He hated the bog like poison.”

“I understand he hurled for Offaly, but he was injured?”

Brazil nodded. “After that blow to the head, he couldn’t play anymore. He suffered from fierce headaches. That’s when he started talking about Australia.”

“How did he have enough money to get to Australia?”

“He had the reward.” Brazil’s look suggested that everyone knew about the reward.

Teresa jumped in: “For the hoard they found on the bog. There was a finder’s fee.”

“Do you mind if I ask how much?”

“Twenty thousand—pounds, it would have been at that time.”

Ward tried to imagine a couple of Bord na Mona lads with that kind of cash. “You split the money equally?”

“I bought him out, his share of this place. He had enough for Australia.”

“And no one thought it strange that he never wrote? No one tried to find him?”

“What would have been the point, if he didn’t want to be found?”

Ward was taken slightly aback; Teresa Brazil had said exactly the same thing in his office. “Who were his mates? Anybody from the workshop that you can recall?”

“Never paid much attention to any of them. He had a couple of mates on the hurling team, but when he quit playing, they fell out. All he really cared about here was those bees.”

“Bees?”

“He kept hives above on the hill. Used to spend hours up there.” Teresa Brazil rose abruptly and left the room.

“What about girls? Was Danny involved with anyone?” Brazil shook his head, saving breath.

“Had he had a dispute with anyone? Over something on the job, maybe? You said he had a falling out with some of the hurlers?”

Brazil shook his head again, but no words came. He launched into another violent coughing fit, and this time Teresa was not beside him to help until it passed. Ward felt helpless watching the man go through agony, and knew he’d gotten all he was going to get from Dominic Brazil today. He would come back when they’d had a chance to let the reality of the situation sink in. It was the same whenever you brought this dreadful news to a family—they could never imagine anyone with reason enough to kill. As if reason came into it at all. He waited as Brazil’s cough gradually subsided, then rose and said, “I’ll leave you now. I may have more questions in the next few days.” Dominic Brazil nodded again, ashen-faced.

Ward found Mrs. Brazil in the kitchen, back at her cookery, scraping the skin from a carrot with furious intensity.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Brazil. You wouldn’t by any chance have a photograph of Danny? It might help in our investigation.”

She looked at him blankly, as if she’d never seen him before, then seemed to snap out of her slight trance. “Of course. I’ll see if I can find one.” She left him and went back down the hall. Through the cracked-open door, Ward could see that she went into a bedroom, and he heard her digging around, probably in the bottom of a wardrobe. She returned with a battered cardboard suitcase. “If there’s anything at all, it would be in here.” She flipped the latches and exposed a jumble of color snapshots and antique portraits, a collection of family history, corseted women and mustached men in well-worn Sunday suits, a dead child in its pram. He looked over her shoulder as she dug up ancestors, the jumbled details of their triumphs and tragedies long forgotten.

“My husband’s family were never great for taking photos, and after Danny—” She stopped momentarily. “After Danny was gone, his mother threw the few pictures she had of him into the fire. No longer any son of hers, she said.” Teresa Brazil turned her face away, apparently disturbed by the vivid memory. Ward’s own mind formed the image of a vigorous young man in a fading color photo, suspended for a few seconds against the orange glow of a turf fire, then curling up and crumbling away into ashes.

She continued looking, and at the very bottom of the case she found a newspaper cutting. “This was in the Tribune when the lads found all that in the bog,” she said.

Ward looked at the grainy image, softening into yellow and blurry gray with age and damp. Yet Danny Brazil’s face was clearly visible, along with the sword he held in his hands, like an offering, while his brother looked up at the camera from behind. It was astonishing to think that one of the vital men in the photo was now the living cadaver who sat in the next room. And the other was the wizened brown flesh he’d last seen on the stainless-steel table in the mortuary. He tucked the cutting into his pocket, thanked Mrs. Brazil for her help, and took his leave.

Driving back to the station, Ward tried to put his finger on the feeling he’d got in the Brazil house. It was like walking the bog; you had to be very careful where you put a foot down, in case you’d sink in. Stick to the well-trodden paths, and you’d be all right, you’d survive the crossing. But how had Danny Brazil happened to stray from the path? How exactly had he put a foot wrong and ended up dead?

8

“We’ve got a standing invitation to have a drink over at Michael Scully’s house,” Cormac said, when they’d finished their evening meal. “We could go over tonight, if you’re up for it. Michael keeps a bottle of Tyrconnell single malt for special occasions, and apparently we qualify. He’s quite anxious to meet you.”

Nora knew that Michael Scully had been one of Gabriel McCrossan’s great friends; that was enough incentive. “I’m delighted to go along for a drink. But I can’t understand why he’d be anxious to meet me.”

“Gabriel told him about your research project. He probably wants to meet the mind behind it. Michael would be a good person for you to know. He’s retired from the Heritage Service a good few years now, but his interest always ran much deeper than the job required. If you’re interested in bogs, archaeology, antiquities, the history of this area, Michael Scully is your man. He’s devoted years to going through all the annals and old manuscripts, especially the ones that mention this part of the county. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard tell of hereditary historians, families whose job it was to remember the whole history of an area. He’s a bit like that. An amazing character, for the most part self-educated, very grounded in the old culture. There are so many people around here who have nothing of it left in them at all. He’s fluent in Irish, and reads Latin and Greek. An unappreciated treasure stuck out here in the middle of the bog.”

When they arrived at the Scully house, the first thing Nora noticed was that the property seemed to be overrun with poultry, including strangely tufted guinea fowl, matronly buff-colored hens, and many black-and-white barred pullets, all bright-eyed and alert to movement, randomly scrabbling at the ground for things to eat. The sole rooster, a scrappy bantam, strutted among them, flicking his fall of beautiful black and brown and purple tailfeathers and eyeing the human visitors suspiciously as they approached up the gravel drive.

The house was plain and large like many farmhouses of a certain age, the yard beside it a small green patch edged with gravel. As they passed by one of the windows, Nora thought she saw a curtain flutter, but it must have been her imagination; when she looked back the drapery was still. Someone had made sure the grass was kept in trim, but the house didn’t boast much in the way of plantings—or adornment of any kind, in fact, except for the heavy brass knocker on the door, which was painted a deep carnelian red. There was no movement visible inside.

Cormac rapped loudly with the knocker, then stood back. “Mind yourself,” he said under his breath. Nora turned to see a black-and-white sheepdog creeping up toward them on its belly around the back end of the car parked outside the door. “That’s a wicked dog,” Cormac said. “He’ll try to nip you. Stick close beside me.” The dog moved closer, as if his rolling, innocent eyes and obsequious posture put him above suspicion.

A human figure appeared behind the rippled glass of the front door, and the dog slunk away silently, much to Nora’s relief. The door swung open to reveal a man perhaps in his seventies, wiry and gray-haired, with brows that stuck out above his intense dark eyes like a pair of caterpillars. He was dressed rather formally, in wool flannel trousers, with a V-neck sweater over his shirt and tie, as if the routine of getting dressed each day provided a modicum of helpful structure. Scully moved with some difficulty, and his neatly pressed shirt collar seemed a few sizes too large for him, giving the impression that he was shrinking, slowly but steadily.

When Cormac introduced her, Michael Scully took Nora’s hand in his own with an inquisitive, approving look. “Ah, Nora—delighted to meet you. Gabriel spoke of you very fondly. Since his passing the one thing this old house has most sorely lacked is good conversation.” A look passed between Cormac and Scully that said there was something more in the remark, but she let it go.

They followed Scully into a large sitting room that could have been much the same in the nineteenth century. Heavy Victorian furniture claimed the floor, and framed family photos hung from a high picture rail on the flowery papered walls. A gramophone and a huge collection of 78s took up one entire wall. To the other side of the room stood a large table, completely drifted with books and papers, like the cluttered desk of many an academic Nora had known, a visual representation of the scholar’s crowded mind. And yet the underlying impression was not one of squalor, but of order and cleanliness, as if the absentminded chaos of one consciousness was underlaid by another that cared whether the floor was swept and the cobwebs dusted away. Someone—and clearly not the keeper of this disarranged archive—was at work to maintain cleanliness at least, if order was out of the question.

“I see you’re still hard at work,” Cormac said.

“Impossible to keep a rein on it,” Scully said. “Some people collect stamps, some collect tunes; I collect what Fionn MacCumhaill once called ‘the music of what happens.’ And since I’ve retired, people insist on giving me these things. They tell themselves it’s because I’m keen, but it’s also partly because they don’t want to deal with it themselves—all the boxes of old letters and newspaper cuttings in their granny’s wardrobe. Some of the things I get are really beyond redemption. In a climate like this, paper can turn to mildew in a few weeks’ time. It’s impossible to keep up with the rate of decay. But I can’t bear not to at least have a look through it all. You never know when something interesting may turn up.”

“Cormac was telling me you know a lot about this area,” Nora said.

“And not just paper history, either,” Cormac said. “Michael has walked every tumulus and fairy fort for fifty miles around. He can tell you what’s inscribed on every castle wall and standing stone, even take you to the spot where the ravens in legend sang over the grave of a king. A worthy heir to O’Donovan.”

“Ah, pure flattery and you know it,” Scully demurred. He turned to Nora. “It’s invariably this way when he’s craving my good whiskey. You’ll have a drop as well, won’t you?” He crossed to a carved cabinet beside the fireplace and, with much effort, searched for one particular bottle among a small collection. To Cormac he said, “I don’t have to remind you that O’Donovan never had much affection for this part of the country. What’s the verse he quoted from the Dinnseanchas? ‘Plain and bog, bog and wood, / Wood and bog, bog and plain!’”

Nora looked blankly from one to the other, hoping one of them would take pity on her and explain. “Dinnseanchas means ‘place-history,’” Cormac said. “It’s actually a series of fragments of the old oral history that were set down in manuscript form during the twelfth century. Sometimes it’s also called Seanchas Cnoc, the History of Hills.”

“And who’s O’Donovan?”

Michael Scully said, “John O’Donovan. One of the great Gaelic scholars of the nineteenth century. He and his brother-in-law, Eugene O’Curry, were employed by the Ordnance Survey during the 1830s. O’Donovan worked in the field, traversing the country, documenting ancient sites and checking contemporary maps against old manuscripts. He sent letters back to the Ordnance Survey office in Dublin almost daily, with a sort of running commentary on all he was finding along the way, and he always sowed in snips of poems and songs and quotations—the letters make tremendous reading. And the depth of his scholarship is absolutely frightening. But he should have known better than to cover this part of the country in the dead of winter. It spilled rain almost every single day, and he often complained about the damp rooms where he had to spend the night. Survey work did him in eventually, poor fellow. Dead of rheumatic fever before he ever saw sixty years of age.”

Scully finished pouring and handed them each a small tumbler of whiskey, which smelled sweet and smoky as a turf fire. Nora could imagine Michael and Gabriel and Cormac staying up too late over the last drop of this stuff. Scully lifted his glass. “As Gabriel always used to say, Go mbeirimid beo ag an am seo aris! May we all be alive this time next year.” The defiance in his voice was tinged with sadness as he repeated his old friend’s perennial toast. They drank to Gabriel in silence.

Scully finally roused himself from his brief reverie and moved to sit near the fireplace, gesturing to them to do the same. “I see you brought the flute,” he said to Cormac.

“I’ve a new tune for you, Michael. Something of local interest, a set dance Petrie collected somewhere near Kilcormac.”

“George Petrie, another of O’Donovan’s contemporaries,” Scully said in an aside to Nora. “He and O’Curry between them collected hundreds of tunes, and all kinds of information about the old music.”

Cormac sat on a stiff chair beside the fireplace and began putting together the flute as he spoke, deftly lining up the finger holes, wetting his lips in anticipation of playing this tune for Scully, and Nora realized that to come bearing a new tune was like bringing flowers or a naggin of whiskey—it was an offering. Cormac had been storing this up for some time, she could tell, and now the notes seemed to fall from the flute in slow motion, suggesting a dignified, almost courtly dance. As he listened, Michael Scully filled his pipe with tobacco and lit it, the smoke curling around his head and shoulders. From time to time, his features took on a worn, gray pallor, as though he was suffering great pain but did not wish to acknowledge it. Eventually the pain seemed to subside, and a look of satisfaction stole once more across his face as the tune’s main theme returned. The whiskey was good, and warming, and the windburn she’d gotten from a few days out on the bog made Nora’s face feel warm and flushed.

Cormac set down the flute when he finished the tune and took up his glass. “Petrie called that ‘The Hurling Boys.’ Said it was a most popular tune in the King’s County in the 1860s. It’s probably an old set dance piece, but it’s quite stately—almost like a walking march.”

“Yes, isn’t it? It would put you in mind of this one—” Scully broke off and began to lilt. He had to strain to reach the highest notes, but in the lower register his voice was rich and resonant. Nora had never learned how to lilt, and envied the ease with which some people made this sort of music. It was almost as if they heard it inside their heads all the time, like language. They were steeped in it, changed by it, down to the deepest recesses of their souls.

“I never played an instrument,” Scully said, looking at Nora, “and I’m sorry for it now. But the music’s here.” He pointed to a spot just below his breastbone. “Cormac tells me you’ve got music in you as well.”

“I don’t know about that. I just can’t help singing.”

“Will you give us a song now, Nora?” She saw in Cormac’s expression that her own presence was part of his gift to Michael Scully this evening. He sat apart from her, but it was as if she felt his hand at her back, pushing her forward like a child sent with flowers. She could not refuse. With a flutter in her stomach, she took a breath, and opened her mouth with no idea what song might emerge.

The last verse contained such pure aching sadness, and Nora felt its familiar pain as she sang the words about a bruised and broken heart:

“Lovely, Nora,” Michael Scully said. “Thank you.”

She opened her eyes, feeling cool tear tracks on her face. “I’m not sure where that came from.” It was true. She had known the song forever, but had never sung it particularly well. This evening something was different; maybe the good whiskey had helped. But underneath she knew it was more than that; she’d felt, while singing, almost as if she was being played like an instrument, as if she was a mere conduit for the unnamed young woman’s despairing cry. And now that the song was gone, she felt uncomfortable and self-conscious.

It was Cormac who came to her rescue. He looked at her, not at Scully, when he spoke. “Michael, didn’t you say you had something for Nora?”

“Ah, I do.” Scully climbed slowly to his feet and went to his desk, carefully extracting a slim leather-bound volume from one of the piles so that he didn’t set off an avalanche of papers. “I’ve been holding on to this for months, and it got buried underneath everything. But when Cormac phoned and said you were coming out, I did a little excavating.

“About a year ago, among one of the latest loads of old papers and photographs, I discovered a diary kept by a Miss Anne Bolton, companion to Mrs. William Haddington of Castlelyons. Miss Bolton began her record on the first of January, 1835.” He handed Nora the small book and directed her to the place on the page with one thin finger. His eyes beamed his pleasure in this moment of discovery. “Read what she says about the second of May.”

Nora read aloud:

“The weather being exceptionally fine this morning, and Mrs. Haddington being in rare excellent form, we decided to traverse the countryside to take the view. We climbed the gravel ridge that lies just beside the Castlelyons gatehouse, and proceeded to walk along its back, across the moorland that lies along the southwest boundary of the castle demesne. If the weather is good, and one is properly attired, the bog can be a very pleasant place to take the air, especially for persons interested in botany (as I am), and it is a rare excursion that does not raise at least a few hares and pheasants. However, we had not ventured but a few minutes on our course when we heard the alarm raised among some workmen who were toiling in the bog. It is the practice of the country people here to venture out into the bogs to cut ‘turf’ as they call it, which, once dried, can be burned in place of wood in their hearths. When Mrs. Haddington stopped to ask the cause of their consternation, they shewed her what they had found, a man buried and quite marvelously preserved in the peat.”

Nora’s stomach tightened with excitement. Nowhere in her previous research had she seen any reference to this body or this location. She was looking at a new paper body—the name given to bog remains that survived only in written accounts. She tore through the succeeding paragraphs in which the extremely observant Miss Bolton described the man’s glossy brown skin and the twisted withy made of sally rods around his throat, not to mention his shocking nakedness, from which the workmen had quite properly shielded her and Mrs. Haddington. She also described in detail the leather armband around the dead man’s upper arm, and the astonishing preservation of his face and feet. Of his disposition in the bog, Miss Bolton had written:

Mrs. Haddington has sent for the vicar, so that this unfortunate soul may be re-interred at the paupers’ cemetery outside the village. This discovery presents a most intriguing puzzle: how the peat and bog water could preserve both flesh and bone. Perhaps the cold may have some part in it, or perhaps there is some other reason. I have often heard the natives of this place tell that the bog water of this locality, and indeed the peat itself, is an excellent treatment for wounds and afflictions of the skin, and wonder if there is not something in it that may contribute to this most astounding suspension of decay.

Nora raised her eyes from the book, feeling an electric shock of recognition and a surge of affection for Miss Bolton. Only then did she realize she’d been reading silently since the first paragraph, ignoring the two men who were waiting expectantly for some more visible reaction.

“I’m sorry, it’s just—this is huge,” she said. “I’m fairly sure it’s a new paper body, one that nobody has in the records. To have this, and such a detailed description—what a gift.”

“It gives me great pleasure to share it with the one person best able to appreciate its true significance.”

“I wonder if I might borrow this book—just for a short while, I promise.”

“You may have it. I’ve read Miss Bolton right through to the end, and there are several other passages you might find interesting as well. She struck me as extremely curious and well-read. What do you think of her theory about the bog water?”

“Amazingly accurate. You don’t happen to have a map, so I could see the exact point she’s talking about?”

“I do. Cormac, you know where the maps are—in the cabinet there.” Scully was looking a bit drawn, and Nora knew they ought to go soon, but she felt an urgent need to find out how this new body fit in. Cormac brought out a flat map book, like his own, and opened it on the table before them.

“These are the maps O’Donovan was working on, originally drawn in 1838, and updated in 1914. Here’s Castlelyons demesne,” Scully said. “And here’s the gravel ridge Miss Bolton mentioned. It was left behind by the last glaciers, and the ancients called it the Eiscir Riada, ‘the Great Road.’ People used it for centuries as the main east-west highway across Ireland. There are a few breaks, but for the most part it was a useful roadway. It stood above the rest of the landscape, you see—especially useful in this ‘county of bogs and morasses,’ as O’Donovan once called it. If the ladies were walking toward the bog from the house, they must have been right about here when they encountered the workmen.”

Nora had seen the ruined shell of an eighteenth-century manor house near the crossroads she passed every day on the way to the excavation site. She tried to get her bearings from the map in front of her, looking for familiar names or features.

“Here’s where we are right now,” Cormac said, indicating a long, irregularly shaped land mass that seemed to be in the middle of a bog.

“So we’re actually on an island?”

“Yes; there was a bridge built across the bog a hundred and fifty years ago,” Scully said. “It looks like a peninsula now, but it was originally a dryland island. There were hundreds of islands like it, all across the bog. You often hear mention of such islands in the old place-names.”

“Where’s the excavation site?” Cormac pointed to an area only an inch away on the map, and the pieces began to fall into place. There was the place where the workshop was now, the tracts of bog that were all drained and measured on Nora’s own map.

“The Dowris hoard was found just over here,” Scully said. The Dowris treasure, one of the most famous Iron Age discoveries in Ireland, made up of hundreds of mysterious horns, crotals, and other votive objects, had been deposited in a bog about fifteen miles away.

“And where was the Loughnabrone hoard found?”

Scully’s thin finger pointed to the spot only about a quarter-mile distant.

Nora said, “So we have a couple of major Iron Age hoards and two possible sacrifices that follow the pattern of the triple death—all this from the same small spot.” She turned to Scully. “You haven’t by any chance heard that another body was found on Loughnabrone Bog the other day? Not ancient remains—much more recent.”

“No, but I miss a lot now that I can’t get into town as often as I used to. Have they identified the body?”

“Not officially, but everyone thinks it’s someone from around here—a guy named Danny Brazil, who supposedly emigrated twenty-five years ago and was never seen again. A strange name, isn’t it—Brazil? Is it Irish?”

“Yes,” Scully said, “from the Irish O Breasail. Historical sources say they were mainly found in Waterford, but there’s long been a pocket of Brazils in Offaly as well.”

“Did you happen to know Danny Brazil?” Nora asked.

“The family are our nearest neighbors. Danny used to keep bees over the hill here behind the house. Was it an accidental death, or—”

“The police don’t think so. They’re calling it a murder. I can’t really say any more than that.”

“Well, I’m stunned. Who would want to kill Danny Brazil? He was a hero, a champion in these parts, a splendid hurler. And his injury came at the worst possible time for the Offaly team. They were in with a chance that year, but when he dropped out—well, their chance dried up, vanished straightaway. An awful shame.”

“You don’t think his death had anything to do with that?” Nora asked.

“With dropping off the hurling team in the middle of the championship? Ah, no; he was very seriously hurt. I saw it happen myself, along with thousands of other people. No one thought he was feigning the injury—and why would he do a thing like that? He wanted them to win as desperately as we all did; they just couldn’t pull it off without him.”

Nora’s brain began to simmer with unanswered questions. From what was known about the few triple deaths, it seemed as though the victims had been killed during periods of great social stress, especially when food supplies were scarce. What if there were other kinds of social stress—adversity or bad luck—that some people still believed could only be lifted through blood sacrifice? She cast the thought aside. There had to be another, more logical reason that Danny Brazil had been killed in such a mysterious, ritualistic way.

Cormac had been silent for some time. Now he asked, “Michael, do you happen to remember reading anything in O’Donovan’s work, or in any of the older manuscripts, anything that mentions this area being known as a place of votive deposits or sacrifices?”

“Nothing that I can recall, not specifically. The medieval writers might not have known about such things, or might have chosen to suppress them if they did know. But it certainly fits with the ancient name of this place,” Scully said. “According to O’Donovan, the patch of ground we’re standing on is called Illaunafulla—’Island of Blood.’ O’Donovan had no explanation for it; he just noted that that was the name he’d found in the annals.”

Nora felt as though someone had run a cold finger down her spine. “And what about Loughnabrone?” she asked. “I meant to ask Cormac what it means. I know lough means ‘lake,’ but what’s the rest of it?”

“It’s quite a grand poetic name. Shares the same root as my daughter’s name—bron,” Michael Scully said. “Loughnabrone means ‘Lake of Sorrows.’”

9

It was Midsummer’s eve, the longest part of the year, and felt like it, Nora thought. Another eight hours on the bog today, and not even another fingernail. She looked with envy at Ursula’s team, who were making great progress with their bog road, and sighed. They were finishing up for the day, gathering up their tools, tossing trowels and kneepads into their buckets, spades and rakes into the wheelbarrows for the trek back to the trailer. Some of the crew were spreading black plastic tarps over the cuttings.

Nora packed up her own tools, wished her fellow crew members a good evening, and started back to her car, passing Ursula’s team on the way.

Rachel Briscoe seemed agitated as she searched through one of the buckets. “Where are they?” she demanded of the first person she saw, a young woman clearing away debris nearby.

“Where are who?” the other girl asked, irritated. “What are you on about?”

“My binoculars. I put them right on top of this bucket.”

“Look, Rachel, how should I know? I never went near them.”

Another of the archaeologists, a young man, approached Rachel from behind. “Here they are,” he said. “I was just having a look at some wildlife—”

“Give them to me,” Rachel said. She reached to take the field glasses from his hand, but he stepped aside and moved them just out of her reach, teasing. Rachel gave him a look of pure hatred and formed her words slowly: “I said, give them to me.”

“Off to do a little bird-watching again tonight, are you?”

Neither of them noticed Ursula striding toward them. “Oh, for God’s sake, grow up, will you?” Her voice cut through the air as she snatched the binoculars from the young man’s grasp. She held them out to Rachel, who stared at her for a long moment before taking them and stalking off without a word. Nora was close enough to read Rachel’s expression, and what she saw was a violent churning beneath the pale surface.

Nora had only been here a couple of days, but it was obvious to her that Rachel Briscoe stuck out among the archaeology crew. She thought it must be awkward for Rachel, effectively ostracized by her colleagues yet having to work and live and eat with them, day in and day out for weeks. No doubt this was like every other human endeavor; alliances and divisions were formed through no one person’s conscious effort, under nobody’s control. A group of people was something like a primitive organism, affected by mood and atmosphere and even weather, resistant to change, with each member playing a specific role. Leaders, followers, scourges, clowns—every group had them, and people slipped into their parts as easily as actors taking on familiar stock roles.

The boy had mocked Rachel for bird-watching, or was it for bird-watching at night? The bog was a great place for birders, Nora knew, but why should such an innocent interest provoke such an extreme reaction? Perhaps it wasn’t innocent; perhaps there was some subtext, some implication she was missing. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The Bord na Mona minivan pulled up beside the hut and the crew began to pile in for the ride home. Nora saw Rachel hang back, perhaps reluctant to face her tormentor. The minivan driver shouted, “Are you coming, then?” The girl shook her head, and the driver backed out of the gravel parking area and stepped on the gas. Rachel set out walking.

When she had packed up her things, Nora pulled the car alongside Rachel and let the window down.

“Can I give you a lift?”

The girl seemed annoyed that Nora was bothering her. She marched stoically onward. “I’ll walk. It’s only a couple of miles.”

“You shouldn’t really walk alone out here. Please, Rachel, I insist.” At the use of her name, the girl hesitated momentarily, and Nora thought she might run. But there was nowhere to go, only black bog for acres and acres to the horizon. She finally climbed in, hefting her heavy rucksack onto her lap. She sat quite still, and her beetlelike posture spoke volumes about defensiveness and mistrust. Nora wondered what was inside the bag, besides her precious binoculars.

Nora said, “The friend I’m staying with is part of the archaeology department at UCD—you didn’t happen to study there?”

“No,” Rachel said curtly. She obviously hadn’t accepted the lift because she was starved for conversation.

“You’ll have to tell me where I’m going. I’m not sure.” Rachel gave her the route, then was silent again. “Do you all share the same house?” A wordless nod. “What is there for people your age to do out here all summer? Sorry, I don’t mean to interrogate you; I’m just curious. Ten weeks out here must seem like an eternity—”

“I don’t know what the others do. I don’t spend time with them when we’re not working. They mostly go home at the weekends.” Implying that she didn’t. Rachel Briscoe seemed particularly young at that moment, vulnerable and alone. Nora didn’t know what else to say.

They turned near the McCrossans’ cottage, then navigated a few sharp turns on narrow little roads before arriving at an old two-story white farmhouse. The minivan was just leaving; Nora had to stop beside the gate to let it pass. When she pulled into the drive, Rachel opened the door and slid out quickly.

“Thanks for the lift, but I’ll be all right on my own from now on.” It was a final dismissal, as if Rachel had realized she shouldn’t have let anyone get this close. Why not? She shut the door and marched stolidly toward the house. Nora could hear thumping music already coming from its open windows, and felt again what it was like to be somehow apart from all those around you. She had some firsthand experience of not fitting in, but she had early on taken refuge in books and music, in the elegant, abstract beauty of the biological world. She had spent many hours in school peering through a lens at microscopic bacterial colonies, oblivious of the corresponding macroscopic social activity around her. Perhaps it had been just as well. Solitary bird-watching might be Rachel Briscoe’s escape. Making yourself an outcast was one way to avoid the pain of having it done to you.

It wasn’t until she pulled into the driveway behind the McCrossans’ cottage that she noticed a folded paper down beside the passenger seat. Unfolding it, she found a brief, polite form letter requesting the return of several books borrowed from the Pembroke Library in Ballsbridge, Dublin. It must have fallen from Rachel’s pocket as she climbed out of the car. Scanning it again, Nora noticed that the letter was addressed not to Rachel Briscoe, but to someone named Rachel Power. Was the girl using a false name here? Unless Power was the false name. Kids knew enough to use fake identities on the Internet; maybe they did it elsewhere as well. She might have a very good reason for going by two different names. Nora left the letter folded on the passenger seat—she could return it in the morning.

She must have seen Cormac’s yellow waterproof jacket and trousers hanging outside the back door before, but this evening something in the way the garments were draped over the peg made her do a double-take. With the wellingtons standing at attention below, they looked almost like a person pressed flat against the wall. Nora pushed at the yellow rubber and felt it collapse beneath her hand.

She heard music as she approached the door, so she opened it silently and stepped into the entryway to listen. It was not a recording, as she’d first thought, but Cormac playing the flute as she’d never heard him play—flat-out, ferociously, full of joy and pain and exultation, the attack of air, breathing the fullness of experience into the notes, so that life became music, and music became life, in all its frustrating, overwhelming glory. The movement from slow air to reel left percussive notes ringing in the air, and the reel’s whirling pagan flow felt unstoppable. She closed her eyes, leaned back against the wall, and let the music lift her in its vortex. She didn’t know the name of the tune, but she had heard him play it before, although never with this kind of intensity. There was something inspired in him today; he was on fire, stoked by the passion in the notes.

Finally the flow of music slowed, eddied, and died away. Nora pushed away from the wall and touched Cormac from behind, sliding her arms down his chest. He wasn’t surprised; on the contrary, he seemed to be expecting her, and turned toward her to accept the hungry, searching kiss she offered. He set the flute down on the table and guided her onto his lap as they continued tasting each other, drowning in sensation, as if this were the first and not the thousandth time their lips had met. A fragment of a song came into Nora’s mind, something about ivy twined around an oak. Which was need, and which was love? The question slipped away unanswered, replaced by a ferocious abandon, desire so strong she might have given up anything at that moment to see it fulfilled.

And then it shattered, dropping in shards and splinters around her feet. The change was so sudden and frightening that she jerked her head away and gasped, causing Cormac to catch her shoulders in alarm. She stood and staggered backward, marking the fear in his expression and knowing there was no way she could explain what had just happened.

She didn’t know if she could bear the way he looked at her. She made a bolt for the stairs and shut herself in the bathroom, running the bathwater to cover the sound of her tears. A long soak would wash them away, the tears, the deceit, and make her feel whole again; at least she hoped it would. But the look on his face, the shock and hurt as she backed away—she knew that was only a fraction of what he would feel when she told him she was leaving, and the prospect made her shoulders shake more violently with each shuddering sob.

She’d been in the bath twenty minutes when she heard a soft rap at the door. “Nora, are you all right? Please talk to me.”

“Come in.” The door opened a crack and she could see his worried face. “You can come all the way in.”

He crouched by the end of the tub where her head emerged from the bubbles. The house had been newly fitted out, but it still had an old claw-footed tub, wide and deep. She closed her eyes and felt his fingers brush against her cheek. He kissed her forehead, her burning eyes. She lay back and listened as he poured a drop of shampoo into his hands and began soaping her hair and scalp, massaging her pounding temples with slow, rhythmic strokes. She could feel her fear break up and wash away as he rinsed the soap from her hair. As she rose dripping from the water he wrapped her in a huge white towel, then carried her in his arms the short distance to the bedroom. And this time nothing shattered; there was only triumphal yielding, sweet blending.

10

Charlie Brazil waded through the tall grass at the edge of the apiary, his mouth dry and a twisting knot in his stomach. Strange things had been happening here the last few days. He felt eyes on him, heard whispers wherever he went, and rumors swirled through the air like ghosts. He’d come home this evening to find that detective, the same one from all those years ago, speaking to his parents. He’d listened, watching and waiting outside until the policeman got into his car and drove away. Apparently all the whispers had been true: the body from the bog was his father’s only brother, Danny Brazil. But when he’d gone into the house a few minutes later, neither of his parents had spoken a word about it.

But Danny Brazil wasn’t the reason for this clenched knot beneath his ribs—not exactly. How did Ursula know about what he’d got up here? She couldn’t know anything; she couldn’t. She was just having him on, playing him. But she must have been here—how else would she know about Brona? He felt the burning shame come over him once more, remembering how it had felt when Ursula sat straddling him, the edge in her voice when she’d talked about Brona. He’d wanted to throttle her, rip her for thinking that way; he couldn’t bear it. Raising a hand to wipe the bitter taste of hatred from his lips, he heard something and stopped abruptly, midstride.

His beekeeping shed had no door, and he could hear a noise from inside, a faint tearing sound. It was her again. He crouched by the window, peering through the weeds up into the loft at Brona Scully, once again illuminated in a shaft of late-evening sun. She sat on her feet, deeply immersed in ripping some piece of cloth to ribbons. Surely she knew that he came here every day; surely she saw that the bees were looked after? But today he was earlier than usual. Watching her behave as though she were completely alone gave him a kind of guilty thrill, the same thing he’d experienced following his mother up here all those years ago. The sun shone through the edges of her shift, and her thin, pale arms looked gilded.

All at once a dog began to bark in the distance, and Brona got to her feet and bolted down the stairs before he had a chance to hide himself. It was the very first time their eyes had met, and Charlie felt electrified by her gaze. She, too, seemed shocked, momentarily paralyzed at seeing him not an arm’s length away. As she came through the door, his arm shot out and snaked around her waist; for a brief, breathless moment he held her there, transfixed by the galvanizing jolt that passed through him as he felt her warmth through the thin cloth. The ground seemed to rise in a roiling wave beneath his feet when she let out a short gasp, the only sound he’d ever heard her make. Then she was gone, pushing past him before he could even react.

She was anxious, frightened—because of him? The idea upset him. He went back over the frozen moment in his mind: the terrified look in the girl’s eyes; her face streaked with tears, he realized now, bright tracks down her pale, lightly freckled cheeks. It wasn’t her eyes he’d stared at when they’d stood face to face, but her lips, moving noiselessly. He found himself wondering if she made any sound at all when she wept. He was seized with a fierce desire to hold her, help her in some way.

He hesitated, wondering whether he should follow her, not wanting to step from the place he’d first touched her, rooted to the spot as if under a spell, weakened by her gaze. Then the feeling passed; he turned slowly and sat on the steps up to the loft, turning over the scene in his mind, reliving the startling shock of touching her, going through in slow motion how he’d put out his hand, how his arm had circled her, briefly. He had only been trying to stop her so that he could see what was wrong, how he might help her—how could he communicate that? Most people said she was a deaf-mute, but others protested that she wasn’t deaf, only refusing to speak, stubborn, touched. He knew the truth; she understood every word you said to her. And there was no mistaking the looks she got, a mixture of pity and contempt. Charlie knew those looks because he’d received them himself—cultivated them, in fact. It was easier than trying to fit in, which was hopeless in any case.

She must have known that they would sooner or later meet on this threshold. What had she imagined happening then? He’d tried to keep from thinking of it, alone in his narrow bed at night, filled with yearning for which there was no relief. He couldn’t allow himself to think of touching her in that way, but sometimes he awakened drenched in sweat, the bedclothes sticky, and he felt ashamed of what his unconscious mind desired. He hung his head and tried to wipe that sensation from his memory, knowing it could never be erased—the feeling of her hipbone under his palm, the friction of the two fabrics rubbing together under the weight of his hand. It was automatic, he told himself, just a reflex. Anyone would have put out a hand to stop her.

Charlie climbed the ladder to the loft to see what she’d been at. He found a cardboard suitcase lying open, its contents jumbled about—a man’s suitcase, by the look of it. Definitely a man’s clothing. Where had she found it? Or perhaps she’d brought it with her. He’d been up here a few times and never found anything like that, but the loft was filled with boxes of nails gone to rust, old milk cans, spools of rotted baling twine. He knelt and lifted one of the shirts. Those were what Brona had been after. There were two completely torn up, the bodies and arms shredded to ribbons. What was she up to?

A pile of yellowed newspaper cuttings had been tossed aside; Charlie picked up the top one, gone soft with mildew and almost illegible. It was a smudgy photo of two hurlers struggling for control of a ball, one gripping the other’s shirt, feet and ankles covered in mud, teeth gritted fiercely as they concentrated on the ball. He quickly pawed through the other cuttings; they were all about the Loughnabrone hurling club and the Offaly team. Beneath the cuttings was a polythene bag containing a few old snapshots. Most of the images were stuck to one another, the photographic emulsion turned sticky with age and damp. A single picture had been facing the polythene and was still intact except for slight discoloration at the edges. He edged nearer a hole in the thatching so that he could have a look at it in the light. A young woman stared at the camera thoughtfully, skirt pulled over her drawn-up knees. Charlie recognized the setting: it was the downstairs of this house, in better repair in those days. The photo was slightly out of focus, but not so blurred that he couldn’t recognize the young woman as his mother.

A faint buzzing noise arose as he tried to make out the expression on the face in the photograph. Without warning, a large, sticky drop of golden honey fell from above, directly onto the photograph. He pulled it out of harm’s way—too late—then looked up and watched another drop stretch from the ceiling and fall in the same place, onto a growing mound of crystallizing sweetness on the floor. The bees had gotten into the roof and recognized the dark, enclosed space between the beams as suitable for a hive. They’d have to be shifted, and a bucket put under the drip until he had time to do it. The bees, not knowing it was their own store escaping, would bring the honey back, one drop at a time, only to lose it again.

He looked back at the photograph, thinking how young his mother looked, and wondering if he could somehow rinse away the sticky residue without ruining it. Had this place been her retreat even then? But the suitcase was a man’s, he was almost sure of it. Charlie felt something hovering in his consciousness, unnamed, unrealized, an idea that had yet to take shape. He tossed the picture aside. He’d have to think about it later. Right now he had to know if Ursula had been here. If she had—

He cursed himself again for his stupid mistake, letting Ursula catch him looking at her maps. He felt his palms go damp, remembering how she had circled around him and blocked the door, not letting him out until he was shaking and covered in sweat. And then yesterday afternoon she’d stopped him behind the supply trailer. At least he hadn’t told her anything. She couldn’t know.

He dropped to the place he used for hiding things, a hollowed-out space under one of the flagstones near the fire. He’d hidden a biscuit tin there, to make a safe place for the things he didn’t want robbed. He used the poker to pry the flagstone up, and found the tin just where it should be. He’d looked in it only a few days ago, and everything seemed to be there. His eyes traveled over the familiar shapes: two fingerlike silver ingots; fourteen bronze rings—he counted to make sure they were all there; six coins; four bracelets, ends flared like trumpets; and a dagger, its greenish sheath graved with sinuous scrolls. Everything was exactly where he’d left it, he was sure. He glanced around, checking the windows and the door to see how anyone might be able to look into this protected space.

He couldn’t leave the box here now; what if she’d found it and just decided not to take anything? But where could he hide it? She could be watching now, to see what he would do. He was caught again. He had no way to know for certain whether she had been there. Everything was in the box, but maybe she’d taken something else, left something for him.

He searched the walls and windows for any mark, anything out of place. Then he saw it: the blank space on the wall where he’d tacked up the other beekeeper’s drawings. He started pulling down the remaining sketches, ripping them in his fury, heedless of the thumbtacks flying everywhere and rolling dangerously underfoot.

11

The long golden twilight was beginning to wane outside the bedroom window. Lying tangled in the sheets with Cormac, watching him sleep, was a rare luxury. But Nora felt her blissful, dreamy state dissipate as her stomach’s emptiness made itself known. She’d have to get something to eat.

“Cormac, are you awake? I’m starving. Do you want anything?”

He opened his eyes and looked at her a long moment, and not as if he was thinking about food. Finally he said, “I’ll come with you.”

They were foraging in the kitchen when the bell sounded, and Nora turned to see Liam Ward’s angular profile framed in the diamond window of the front door. “It’s Ward, that detective I told you about.”

When she answered the door, Ward’s face wore a somewhat worried expression. “Sorry for intruding, Dr. Gavin. I was just at—I was passing by, and I had a few more questions for you about the postmortem, if you have a few minutes.”

“Of course. Come in.”

The policeman stepped into the tiny front hall and offered his hand to Cormac. “I don’t believe we’ve met. Liam Ward.”

“Cormac Maguire.”

“Won’t you sit down?” Nora asked, ushering him into the inner room. Ward eyed the two places set at the table and moved to one of the leather chairs near the fireplace. Nora sat down across from him, and Cormac perched on the arm of her chair.

“Any luck yet in identifying the body?” Nora asked. “Everyone’s been talking about it.”

“As a matter of fact, someone did come forward with information, and the positive ID came through yesterday. The victim was Danny Brazil. You probably heard some speculation about it. His family thought he’d emigrated to Australia twenty-five years ago. They say they didn’t expect to hear from him, and they never did.”

“How can I help you?”

“Well, you mentioned something yesterday at the postmortem, and it’s been with me ever since—this notion of ‘triple death.’ Can you tell me any more about it?”

Nora felt embarrassed. “I’m not sure I’m the one you should be asking. Cormac probably knows much more about it than I do.”

“There’s not much to know,” Cormac said, “but I can tell you what I’ve read. The whole idea of triple death stems from the fact that some bodies found in bogs seem to have sustained multiple mortal injuries. Up to this point, all the clearest examples have come from Britain and the Continent, but that could change as forensic methods improve. The man from Gallagh in Galway—he’s on exhibit at the National Museum—is from the Iron Age, and it’s quite possible that the twisted sally rods around his neck were some sort of noose or garrote. And from what Nora’s told me, the older body from Loughnabrone was strangled with a narrow cord, then had his throat cut, and was deliberately sunk in the bog. At first glance that certainly seems like overkill, since any one of the three would have been enough to dispatch him. But taken together, they might add up to a classic triple death.”

Ward pulled at his left ear. “So this triple death was a form of human sacrifice?”

“It’s one possibility,” Cormac said. “I’m not deliberately being difficult, but the Iron Age Celts operated in a completely oral culture; they never wrote anything down about their religious practices. Much of what we know about them was actually written by others, like the Romans, and a lot of that was based on hearsay rather than firsthand accounts. But something like the triple death probably did exist, according to the current scholarship.”

“What was its purpose?” Ward asked.

Cormac said, “There are Roman sources that say each of the three major Celtic deities who required human sacrifice had a preferred method: the thunder god Taranis was appeased by fire or heavy blows like thunderbolts. Then there was Esus, who preferred his sacrifices hanged from a tree and cut until they bled to death. Sacrifices to the war god Teutates were usually dispatched by drowning. Personally, I don’t think the Romans really had a firm grasp on barbarian religious practices. I think the reality was a bit more complicated than they imagined; after all, they considered other cultures inferior, barbaric. The Celts had numerous triple deities, one entity with three different aspects, sometimes three separate identities…when the early Christians were teaching about the trinity, the concept was already pretty old news in these parts. There’s a strong streak of triplism that remains in us, even today.”

Ward pulled at his lower lip and nodded slowly. “All those old pishrogues—making the sign of the cross three times.”

“Exactly,” Cormac said. “When it came to those ancient sacrifices, the three-in-one combination seemed to be all about augmenting power—both the power of the deity and of the person making the invocation. And a triple sacrifice, likewise, was intended to magnify and make an offering more powerful. To combine all three forms may have been a very powerful offering indeed, perhaps reserved for times of great crisis. And of course there were variations; sometimes the victim wasn’t bashed over the head, or his throat wasn’t cut. The hanging or strangling seemed to have been pretty consistent, as was disposition in the bog. Sometimes the victims were pinned down with wooden stakes.”

“The older body from last week was clearly staked down,” Nora said. “I didn’t see any stakes around Danny Brazil’s body, but it might be worth asking Rachel Briscoe if she remembers removing any sticks or branches from around the body—if someone is trying to make it look like a triple death, a small detail like that might be important.”

“So who were the usual victims?” Ward asked. “How were they chosen?”

“Some of the bodies show no battle scars or evidence of hard labor, so one camp says that sacrificial victims were probably not warriors, and may have been fairly highborn individuals, possibly even priests. Of course, they may also have been criminals, or outcasts, or hostages taken in war. The Romans said that the Celts preferred sacrificing criminals, but if there were none, they would resort to using innocent people. But they also said the sacrifices were invariably performed in the presence of holy men or priests.”

Nora said, “From what I’ve read, the victims were sometimes children, or people who were injured or malformed in some way—some had tubercular bones, some had extra fingers or toes. It’s possible that they were chosen as scapegoats for those reasons.”

“Or it may have been left to chance. Examination of some victims’ stomach contents showed that they’d recently ingested blackened grain kernels. There’s a theory that a burnt piece of bannock may have been used in a kind of deadly lottery. Several had apparently ingested grain contaminated with ergot, which can cause hallucinations and severe convulsions—so those victims might have been in some sort of altered state when they were killed. Archaeological evidence for any of these theories is very scant, especially here in Ireland, and what does exist is open to a number of different interpretations. In other words, no one really knows. Everything we’ve told you is built on a certain amount of speculation.”

“Finding an ancient body that fits this pattern of multiple injuries isn’t a complete shock,” Nora said. “A number of victims have turned up, all across northern Europe, with similar wounds; most of them date from the Iron Age—about two thousand years ago.”

Ward began to nod slowly. “But finding a modern victim with similar injuries only a hundred yards away…”

“Yes, that’s what’s really strange,” Nora said. “It’s a very odd coincidence, to say the least.”

Ward’s expression was thoughtful. “Or maybe it’s not just a coincidence. Is it possible that someone might have discovered the older body at some point and not reported it?”

Nora said, “Yes, I suppose. But if you’re asking whether anyone could tell whether something like that had happened, the answer is probably not. We can tell if an area is backfill, but not how many times it’s been disturbed.”

“But chances are the perpetrator in the more recent case would most likely be someone who’s at least acquainted with this whole idea of triple death.”

Cormac said, “If this Danny Brazil disappeared more than twenty-five years ago, remember that much less was known about bog remains in those days. A lot of the forensic information we have these days has only come to light since then.”

Ward pursed his lips in displeasure. “Well, thank you both for the information.” He rose and went slowly to the door; before opening it, he paused, pulled out a card, and handed it to Nora.

“I’d be obliged if you’d contact me if you think of anything else—just in case there are more similarities between your ancient man and our modern victim. Thank you again for your time.”

12

All the way to the Moors, Ward kept seeing Danny Brazil, stripped of his clothes, a prisoner in the bog. Whose prisoner? Had there been one captor, or a whole group? They would have to look for connections to other cases, anything that might resemble a kind of sacrifice: animal mutilations, victims or crime scenes marked with any significant symbols or patterns, victims treated in any ritual way. If it had been a group of people, they must have had a trigger. Something must have precipitated the death. Perhaps it was tied to the calendar, or something less regular. What was it Maguire had said? Times of great social stress. That would include famine, obviously, or danger from an invading force. What about power plants shutting down, a way of life dependent upon peat going the way of all things? He knew it took less than people imagined to push things over the edge.

Working from the date Danny Brazil was last seen, Maureen Brennan had checked the date on Brazil’s watch. Midsummer’s eve, the twentieth of June, had fallen on a Tuesday in 1978. The date hadn’t come around on a Tuesday again until 1989, then 1995, and then 2000; it was a very irregular pattern. That information, and the state of his teeth, told them that Danny Brazil had never left Offaly. He had gone into the bog at the same time he was last seen.

Ward knew he had to dig up yet another Danny Brazil—the one who had never really disappeared, who remained in memory, whose time on earth had left ripples when he sank into that bog hole. His job was to follow all those ripples and find out where they led.

Arriving at the hotel, he looked forward to seeing Catherine Friel’s face. His wife’s death had made him draw back into his tortoiseshell, closed off from the world of experience and risk. Catherine was pulling him out of that, ready to expose himself to hurt and danger. And it felt exhilarating, that primitive, mysterious chemical and biological phenomenon—an intense, unsettling feeling, rooted in the primeval senses of touch and smell. What was it that drew him to Eithne, to Catherine, to anyone?

As he walked across the gravel drive and glanced into the restaurant, lit only by candles and the setting sun, he imagined her sitting across from him at the table, glowing in the flickering candlelight, perceptive of his unspoken yearning and reflecting it back to him. How natural, then, that after they finished the meal and lingered deliberately over the last of the wine and coffee, they would climb the stairs together, she leading and he following, until they stood behind the closed door of her room…. The momentary dream was shattered as the flat-nosed grille of a gold Mercedes came to an abrupt stop only a few feet from his knees, and the driver let down the window to offer a few choice words of advice.

Ward didn’t raise his eyes to the sputtering driver, but tramped slowly toward the door with measured steps. When he got inside, he was surprised by a bar stripped down to stone walls and wooden floor, with modern leather furniture in the seductive colors of exotic spices. He caught sight of Catherine Friel’s silver hair; her back was to him, and as he approached, wondering whether he should touch her arm or call her name, she turned slightly and he saw that she was speaking on a mobile. He stopped his advance and stood a few yards away to afford her at least a small amount of privacy.

“I can’t stay on the phone now, John, I’ve got to go…. Yes, I’m having dinner with a colleague….No, no one you know, a detective. We’re going to talk over the case. He’s probably waiting for me now.” She turned to check the room and saw Ward. “There he is. I should be home tomorrow evening….Yes…. Good night now, love.”

As he heard the last phrase, Ward felt foolish for entertaining notions about Catherine Friel. Her interest was in the case, that was all. It had been so long since he’d even allowed himself to imagine such a closeness, and now he shut the notion down, psychologically boarded it up, so quickly that by the time they entered the dining room he’d nearly forgotten the vision he’d had of himself and Catherine Friel there in the candlelight, and in the darkness upstairs, just beyond the locked door.

13

“I suppose the police are always reluctant to declare any death a ritual killing,” Cormac said, digging into his second plate of pasta. “Given a choice, they’d probably prefer old-fashioned, understandable motives. And I’ll bet a good portion of ritual killings turn out to be ordinary garden-variety murders dressed up after the fact to try and put detectives off the scent.”

Nora chased the last couple of penne around her own nearly empty plate and took another sip of wine. “I wish there was more we could do to help. Think about it, Cormac—he was probably still alive when he went into the bog hole.”

“But what else can we tell Ward? We don’t know anything about the victim, the circumstances of the crime.”

“We don’t know anything about Danny Brazil, but we may know something about the circumstances.”

“What do you mean?”

“We know something about the other people found with the same kinds of injuries. It would just be interesting to compare Danny Brazil to other possible triple-death victims—to take a really close look and see what the similarities and differences are. I should ask Rachel Briscoe, the girl who found him, if she removed any wood from around the body. The crime-scene people may not have been looking for stakes or branches, but if he was staked down, that would fit with earlier finds.”

“How are we going to do all this research without the materials we’d need?”

She shot him a sheepish look. “All my research files are in the trunk of the car. I figured if you were getting some work done here, I might have a chance as well.”

Cormac leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together behind his head. “It’s likely that the police will come up with something sooner than we would. I mean, it is pretty coincidental that the victim turns out to be one of the two people who’d found a cache of treasure only a short time earlier. This story is probably all about money or love gone wrong, and we might just be chasing wild geese.”

“I know, but we still might find something useful. And anyway, it’s interesting. I was thinking—if the injuries were deliberate, what sort of person would have known so much at that time about triple death? Danny Brazil went missing in the late seventies. Most of the research comparing causes of death has been done in the last ten years or so. But certain people would have had access to that kind of information before it was widely known—”

“Certain people like archaeologists, you mean.”

“Maybe. Anyway, I can’t help thinking about all this. It’s a puzzle.” And it wasn’t the only one, either, she thought. There were the riddles of Owen-and-Ursula, Ursula-and-Charlie, and Rachel Briscoe/Rachel Power. Not to mention the difficult Cormac-and-Nora conundrum, which might not have any solution.

She got up to clear, trying to avoid Cormac’s eyes. He caught her wrist as she was about to remove the plate in front of him, took the cutlery from her other hand, and set it on the table.

“Leave it, Nora. I can do all that later.” He stood and slipped his hand into hers. “I know it’s been a long day, but are you up for a short expedition? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

“What is it?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, now, would it?” He stopped. “You’ll probably want to wear your wellingtons.”

She eyed him skeptically. “Do I really want a surprise that involves wellingtons?”

He nodded. She retrieved her boots from the car and put them on while leaning against the back bumper, and Cormac did likewise. Then he led her up over the gap in the stone wall, into the pasture that rose to a small hill at the back of the house. The grass was cropped close to the ground, and the handful of cattle grazing the field watched their progress with that typical bovine mixture of curiosity and detachment.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“You’ll see.” Cormac turned back to glance at her, but his close-lipped smile gave nothing away. The gentle slope had turned into a steep grade. “You can see Michael Scully’s house from here, off to our right,” Cormac said. “And the Brazils must be the next farm, way down at the other end of this ridge. The white house over there"—he indicated a plain but freshly painted bungalow just over the ridge—"is the Bord na Mona house where Ursula Downes is staying this summer.” At the mention of the name, Nora felt a twinge of discomfort, remembering the conversation she’d overheard yesterday afternoon. She didn’t ask Cormac how he happened to be in possession of that fact.

Breathing hard, they finally reached the top of the hill, a flat tabletop that afforded a view for miles around. It helped that the surrounding area was mostly bogland, stretching endlessly into the distance before them. About a quarter-mile to the northeast stood a pair of bottle-shaped cooling towers, the old Loughnabrone power plant due to be demolished soon. Far in the distance, Nora could see the red-and-white striped smokestack of the power station at Shannonbridge.

It was after ten o’clock, and the sun was setting under a bank of dark clouds, glowing golden and leaving the horizon bathed in oranges and pinks and purples. Despite its detrimental effect on the air quality, the peat dust in the atmosphere contributed to the beauty of the sunsets. There was always that tension in life, beauty walking hand in hand with danger.

“What do you suppose will happen here, when all the bogs are gone?” she asked Cormac.

“I don’t know. I try to remember that it’s in their nature to return. The moss can’t help growing.” That brainless proliferation, Nora thought; life asserting itself as it always did, and as it always would, please God.

“All right, you’ll have to close your eyes from here,” he said. “I promise I won’t let you stumble.”

Nora hesitated only a moment before closing her eyes and taking his hand. It was a strange sensation, walking through a field as though blindfolded. They were moving along the top of the hill, she thought, then down a gentle slope. She lurched dangerously a few times, but, as he’d promised, Cormac didn’t let her fall. At last he stopped and stood behind her, setting her shoulders between his hands. “Here we are.”

Nora opened her eyes. Directly before her stood a small whitethorn tree, covered in a colorful mishmash of ribbons and rags. Thick vines twisted up the trunk, and faded white blossoms peeped out from between the weathered scraps of fabric. Nora’s mouth opened in wonder, and she moved to examine the strange man-made foliage, overwhelmed by the wild assortment of fetishlike objects that had been tied to the branches: neckties, old gloves and socks, numerous rosaries, a scapular, several handkerchiefs, a hair ribbon, a frilly wedding garter, three hairbands, a holy medal of the Virgin, a hairnet, a knitted bag, several plastic bags with bits of cloth inside, a tiny stuffed bear, a Sacred Heart bookmark. Around the trunk hung a black patent-leather purse, as though the tree had grown up through its handles. It was impossible to believe that this was the work of one consciousness, one pair of hands. Despite the fact that it had been created from a jumble of mad-looking, cast-off junk, the little tree presented an aura of holiness. It was like a prayer of some kind.

She stood still beneath the branches, absorbing its weird energy, until Cormac came up behind her and slid his arms around her waist. She shivered slightly and leaned back into him, feeling the roughness of his face on her neck.

“Astonishing, isn’t it? I haven’t seen anything like this in years. My grandmother’s neighbor, Mrs. Meagher, used to save bits of things all year and tie them on the whitethorn bush outside her house on the first of May. I once made the mistake of asking why she did it, and she told me I’d no business being so bold. I don’t think she even knew. I suppose she’d been doing it her whole life and didn’t think it a good idea to stop. My grandmother said people used to do it as protection against the fairies. Anyway, I hope you like it—my offering to you.”

“I love it, Cormac.” She kissed him, and in the kiss was a fervent prayer that they might stay here, forever sheltered in this sacred place. She felt a breeze come up from the east, setting all the ribbons into an excited flutter, and had an unmistakable premonition that this deceptively calm evening held mischief or malice, or both. She shivered again, and Cormac held her more tightly.

“I saw Brona Scully up here the other day,” he said.

“Tell me about Brona, Cormac. I think I saw her watching us from upstairs when we went over to the Scullys’ house last night.” The girl’s sudden, erratic movement at the window came back to her. “Is she—is she all right?”

“Right in the head, you mean? Hard to say. As a child, she used to speak, but she suddenly went silent—about ten or twelve years ago, I think. I can’t remember exactly.”

Nora thought back to Ursula’s conversation with Charlie Brazil, and her callous reference to Helen Keller. That little girlfriend of yours, Ursula had said. Who could she have meant but a girl who didn’t speak? “Why would someone just stop speaking?”

“Most people seem to think it was brought on by some sort of trauma, but they’re just guessing, and of course she can’t—or won’t—say.”

“What sort of trauma?”

Cormac hesitated, then looked away. “Well, it was right around the time of her sister’s death. Some people think Brona may have watched as the sister drowned herself.”

“How awful.”

“Nobody knows if it’s true, Nora. It’s only supposition.”

She knew from experience how uncomfortable Cormac was in the realm of supposition, and she wasn’t surprised when he changed the subject. “See that gravel ridge over there?” He pointed to a grassy knoll where the earth rose to a point and its rocky underbelly spilled out below. “Probably a bit of the Eiscir Riada that Michael Scully mentioned—the Great Road. What’s left of it, anyway.” Nora had begun to see the landscape differently since being with Cormac. She wanted to see what he saw, to know what he knew about these places, to see under the skin of the landscape down to the bones.

“I’m glad you liked the surprise,” he said, when they were back home in bed. “I only wish I had such wonders for you every day.”

Nora was silent for a while, listening to Cormac’s steady heartbeat, mustering her courage. She would never be ready; she had to just open her mouth and speak.

“Cormac, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I don’t want to do it—I’ve been putting it off, but I can’t any longer. It’s not fair.” She stopped to gather strength, preparing herself for his justifiable anger. “I can’t stay here.” She held her breath.

He was silent, unmoving against her. She hadn’t wanted to blurt it out like that, with no warning, no preparation. What a coward she was, not able to look him in the eye.

But when he did respond, it was not in any of the myriad ways she had imagined. He only reached out and gathered her in closer until she could feel the warmth of his body all along the length of her own.

“I know,” he said. “I’ve always known you’d have to go home. We’ve both been avoiding the subject. I just hoped it might be later rather than sooner.”

She pulled away slightly and turned to look into his eyes, black pools in the encroaching darkness. “How did you know?”

“You’re not a person who gives up, Nora.” He ran one finger along the edge of her jaw and down her throat. “But neither am I.”

She searched his face for proof that he would not give up, even when she was thousands of miles away, tangled up once more in the threads of a dark web that kept spinning and would never allow an end to grief. No matter how much Cormac might reassure her, and no matter how much she might wish for it, no such proof existed.

“Don’t think about any of that right now,” he said. “Rest yourself.”

“But do you know why I have to go? I want you to understand. It’s not that I want to leave you, Cormac. I don’t. It’s not just for Triona’s sake, but for my niece, for my parents—”

“I know,” he said, pressing his lips close to her ear. “Shhh.” She felt his arm close around her, locking them together at least for tonight, and she felt safe, surrounded, quiet inside. Eventually she drifted off, worn out by the long day, the wine, and a surfeit of emotion. She slept profoundly, heavily, like a person drugged.

14

At half past eleven, Liam Ward sat washed in the golden glow of his desk lamp, going through his coins. He wasn’t a serious collector, not like the fanatical dealers with whom he’d corresponded from time to time. The coins in his collection were certainly old—mostly Roman-era English—but not all that rare; none of them could be considered extremely valuable. His was more an aesthetic appreciation; he enjoyed the artistry and symbolism of the form, liked feeling the weight of the coins in his hands, their surfaces worn smooth from touching the palms of generations before him. He liked to imagine their history, to envisage the multitude of debts each piece had paid.

They’d have to find out more about Danny Brazil’s part in discovering the Loughnabrone hoard. Everyone had heard the rumors that there had been more to the hoard, that the Brazils hadn’t turned everything over to the museum. Ward wondered whether Danny and his brother had shared everything equally. He had sensed some tension when Dominic Brazil spoke about the farm. It wouldn’t be the first time that property had caused bitterness between family members, the kind of bitterness that sometimes led to murder. If Dominic had paid the brother for his share of the farm, where had all that money gone when Danny Brazil went into the bog? But if money was the motive, why go to such trouble—why not just bash him over the head, dump the body, and be done with it? No, the method suggested there was more to the story than simple money-grubbing. There were all the signs of sacrifice, and something in that smelled to Ward of revenge, of humiliation.

Another possible—though much less likely—theory was that Danny Brazil was a fallen hero, a champion cut down in his prime. Dr. Gavin’s mention of damaged or deformed sacrificial victims had brought that into Ward’s head. He thought about how seriously some of them took the hurling around here. You’d have thought it was their lives on the line with the outcome of a match. And what was sport, underneath, but a kind of sanitized, ritualized violence? Danny Brazil’s injury had probably cost his teammates the championship, the coveted McCarthy Cup…. Ward had never been that much interested in sport himself, but he thought of the faces he’d occasionally seen as a child—red faces contorted with pain and anger as a match slipped away. What was sport but a thin veneer over the factional fighting it had replaced—ritualized violence, bloody entertainment?

Everywhere around them, in religion, in sport, in politics and entertainment, were daily reminders of how quickly one could go from being carried on the shoulders of a jubilant crowd—greeted with palm fronds, as it were—to being reviled, cast down, crucified and torn to pieces. The pattern was too recognizable not to be seen. Blood lust he understood—someone pushed too far over a tipping point. What he couldn’t fathom was the conspiracy that made it possible to carry out and cover up an atrocity. But history was full of figures able to disconnect, to carry out horrific acts and still pose as decent family men.

They’d have to get back to the Brazils, dig a little deeper. Ward had a sense that Teresa Brazil and her husband knew more than they’d told him, with the husband’s illness providing an excuse when he didn’t feel like talking. And tomorrow he and Maureen could also start on Danny Brazil’s old hurling teammates, to see if they could shed some light on the man. The farm, the family, the hurling, the workshop… where else could Danny Brazil have got in over his head? Some of the seemingly ritual murders carried out recently had turned out to be drug-related executions. But illegal drugs—at least on the scale that usually accompanied killings—had been practically unknown in this area twenty-six years ago.

There were plenty of leads to follow on this one—too many. And many layers had settled over this murder in the years since the deed had been done. Who knew what would come up when they started probing around under the surface? Ward closed his coin album, placed it carefully back in the desk drawer, and turned the key in the lock.

15

Owen Cadogan drove to the abandoned storage shed at the edge of the Loughnabrone works and parked his car among the trees. He wasn’t terribly worried about being seen. No one used the back road anymore since the pipe factory had closed down a few years ago. Thirty years earlier, when the bog was in full production, they’d built a factory adjacent to the workshop, to make cement drainpipes for siphoning the water off the peat. The factory had closed once all the drains were laid. Eventually it would all be gone, he thought, and himself with it.

He unlocked the storage shed with a key from the chain on which he kept his office and car keys. This was where he and Ursula had met last summer, hastily and on the sly. The taste of those illicit encounters lingered on the back of his tongue. She’d felt the same kind of excitement, he knew; now she claimed it was over, that she’d moved on, and didn’t need him or want him anymore. After he’d spent the whole bloody winter dreaming of her, anticipating the next time.

He’d even started fantasizing about leaving Pauline, only to find out that what they’d done had meant nothing to Ursula. He had seen it in her eyes when she’d arrived this summer. He’d been a temporary diversion to her, nothing more. Anger and jealousy welled up in his throat, choking him. Nothing was over until he said it was over. He’d make sure she understood that.

No one else had a key to this building. He surveyed the small, crowded room, trying to keep alive the memory of how he’d felt there, looking at Ursula’s glistening face, certain in the knowledge that he’d made her feel something. He’d enjoyed having her in this place, not at all like the comfortable marriage bed, but hard, rough, and dangerous. A person might get hurt here.

Moonlight filtered through the filthy glass of the window. He looked down and saw his own handprint on a bag of cement stacked in the corner of the shed, evidence of where, a few months earlier, he’d stood with his trousers around his ankles, gasping and straining against her. He’d never done with his wife the things he did with Ursula. The intensity of the release he felt with her actually frightened him, made him feel that he was somehow abnormal. But once tasted, it had spurred a hunger that nothing else would fill. And now she was demeaning him further by making him beg for it, by holding his need over him like a club.

He went over those first few moments again, as he had a thousand times before. He’d given Ursula a lift home after some official function over in Birr. The Carlton Arms Hotel. He remembered almost nothing about the journey now; it had been wiped out, obliterated by what had happened when they arrived at her place, what he’d come to think of as his final moments as an ordinary man. When he’d pulled the car up the drive of her rented house, she’d reached over without a word and unzipped his trousers. They’d both been half pissed, but not completely out of their heads, and he hadn’t said no. How different everything would be now if he had.

After that night, they’d met almost daily in this old supply shed. There had been a few other places as well: in the woods bordering the canal, and once—only once, and most spectacularly—right out in the middle of the bog, on the sweet, yielding surface of a fresh peat stockpile under a full moon. That time had been so intense he’d thought he was having a heart attack, or a stroke at the very least.

Trying to re-create the intensity of that night, he’d emptied a dozen or more bags of peat moss onto the floor. Over the peat he’d draped woolen blankets. He now gathered them up and took them to the door and shook each one vigorously, until no more dust emanated with each snap of the rough fabric. When he had arranged the blankets once more, he stepped back and surveyed the scene. It was like a nest, an animal’s lair. Perhaps that was why he’d never been able to recapture those few ecstatic moments out under the broad mantle of sky.

From behind a stack of cement bags, Cadogan coaxed a large metal toolbox. He flipped the latch to open the lid. No one had touched these things for a long time, the handcuffs, the velvet hood, the silk scarves. It was just games, he’d told himself, just elaborate playacting. Harmless, really. And it had all started innocently enough, when the necktie he’d taken off had become the rope in a playful tug-of-war. It was Ursula who’d suggested going further; he’d had to be talked into it. But the craving was within him now, had wormed its way into his mind like a sinister, corrupting force. He’d become an animal, a monster.

He took out the hood, felt the velvet fabric with his fingertips, and slipped it over his head, flushing with the memory of how Ursula had made use of it, teasing him to within an inch of his life. She might be finished with him, but he certainly wasn’t finished with her. He pulled the hood off and put it back in the toolbox, then went to the door and flicked the light switch. The shed was well illuminated in the daytime, but he had to make sure he would have light at night. He counted the steps it took to get from the door to the makeshift bed. He threaded a strong cord through the leather cuffs. She wouldn’t be able to wriggle free and evade him so easily here. He could talk to her all he liked. And he’d be gentle at first. But he’d make sure she felt his anger. She’d told him many times that she deserved to be hurt, and in this he was now more than willing to oblige.

Above the blankets was a shelf unit, through which was slung an assortment of hemp ropes and chains they’d rigged up to use with the cuffs. All very effective for his purposes. There was no danger the shelf would come down; he’d anchored it to the concrete wall himself, with six-inch bolts. He pulled one of the silk scarves from the toolbox, sliding it through his hands, pulling it taut. At first this had all been just a fantasy, but as he’d imagined it more and more, it had taken on a life of its own, and become a reality—or at least a possibility, and then a plan. She wouldn’t suspect; it was nothing they hadn’t tried before. He felt a frisson of excitement, thinking about the look that would come into her eyes when she realized that things were not going to go as they always had before, with her in charge.

Cadogan wound up the silk scarf and stuffed it into his pocket. Everything was ready. He walked slowly to the door, carefully going over all the details in his mind, then turned off the lights and locked the door behind him. No one would get into this place—or out of it—in a hurry.

The thought had crossed his mind a few times that perhaps she’d found someone else. If that was the case, he ought to warn the poor sod, before it was too late. It was too late for him, he knew—too late to go back to his former innocence. But what was done was done, and he’d never been one to wallow in misfortune. When something was finished, he forgot about it. He would forget about Ursula, too, as soon as he’d finished with her.

16

The fire was not difficult to start, given the recent dry weather. Charlie Brazil watched the flames leap higher as they consumed his broken frames, the bits of scutch he’d been saving for this night. The bullock he’d tied to the tree nearby lowed softly, alarmed by the fire’s scent. Charlie leaned over to pick up a cup from the ground, and reached into his pocket for a penknife. He approached the frightened animal, moving slowly and speaking softly to allay its fears.

“You’re all right, now. It’ll all be over soon. Just keep still.” The nervous bullock stamped its feet and eyed Charlie suspiciously as he inched nearer. He made a small but deep incision above the animal’s left foreleg, and held the cup to the wound to collect the blood that flowed from it. When the cup was half-full, he pulled it away; the blood continued, coursing in a small stream down the bullock’s leg. Charlie set his cup on the ground and reached into his pocket for a folded paper packet. He opened it and took out a flattened tangle of spider silk, and pressed it firmly against the wound. The bullock’s dark brown eyes shone in the moonlight.

He returned to the fire, feeling its heat against his face and chest and thighs. He dipped his first three fingers into the blood and sprinkled the warm liquid into the fire, repeating the motion three times. The droplets sizzled as they came in contact with the flames. He murmured the old charm:

Then he poured the remaining liquid into the blaze and heard it hiss and sputter. He sat, knees drawn up to his chest, imagining that he saw fires on other hilltops in the distance, waiting for the flames to die down. By what he did tonight, he was making sure that Ursula Downes could not harm him, or anyone else, ever again.

17

The thudding music from the next room was giving Rachel Briscoe another grinding headache. She checked the clock; not time yet. Better to wait until after twelve, when it was really and truly dark. She closed her eyes and lay still, trying to quiet the thoughts, the colors and shapes that moved in her head.

The beat of the music coaxed her memory back to the spring. She’d been lying in bed at university, her windows open for the first time in the year. She’d emerged from sleep in darkness, to a noise coming from outside and above her bedroom window, a deep guttural sound. An animal, she’d thought at first. Then the cries had started to come faster and faster. When she’d realized what they really were—human noises, not animal—she’d felt embarrassed, repelled, fascinated. It had lasted only a few seconds, then all was quiet. People said it was a beautiful thing—but how could it ever be beautiful, she wondered, all that thrashing and howling like beasts? Her stomach knotted, remembering the disgust she’d felt. It remained one of the profound mysteries, what made men and women want to do those things to one another. But the worst thing was pretending that it was driven by love.

At eight minutes past twelve, Rachel got to her feet and looked around the room, surveying all it contained: a bed, a chair, a desk; herself and her rucksack. Nothing to tell anyone anything about her—no books, no music, no pictures. Only a few articles of clothing, a small clock, and some toiletries, all of which fit into her rucksack. She had to leave this room each night prepared never to return. And yet, so far, she always had returned, unable to let this part of her life go as eventually she must.

As she pulled on her jacket, she felt the pendulous weight of the binoculars in one pocket, her torch in the other—her two touchstones in this whole strange affair. She felt safer with them bumping against her legs. She checked to make sure no one was in the hallway, then left her room, shutting the door behind her. She would have locked it, if only she’d had the key. She passed the sitting room, seeing that Trish and Sarah were completely absorbed in some insipid pop-music program. They didn’t give a toss what she did. It was the three lads who thought her strange, who couldn’t resist slagging her, and who were probably puzzled by her total lack of interest in them. They had no way of knowing that she was here for reasons completely different from their own.

She quietly lifted her waterproofs from the hook and left the house by the kitchen door, careful to lock up after herself. Once outside, she struck out along the narrow lane, staying close to the verge so that she could avoid the headlights of any oncoming car, but sure there would be none. This road was dead quiet at night. A short distance down the lane, she climbed up and over a large metal gate, sinking into the soft ground churned up by the cattle that congregated there each morning and evening. She followed the field’s bushy perimeter—a short, familiar walk over the hill, fifty yards this way, another thirty yards that way—until she came to the gap in the hedge. She ducked under, sure of her footing after treading the same path each night for the past couple of weeks.

Rachel began to feel the knot in her chest loosen as she approached her destination. She’d imagined it would be hard to live in secret. But she’d been shocked at how easy it was, how like second nature it had become for her to lie to people’s faces. Perhaps it was more difficult when you were spurred by baser motivations. She felt herself to be above all that; it was love that was driving her, after all. This nightly trek was her own act of devotion, her own private pilgrimage. She always made sure no one saw her go out. And she had always made it back to the house before morning. But the late nights were beginning to take their toll, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to maintain these sojourns forever. It had to come to an end, and soon. Perhaps tonight she’d have the courage to act. She tried to imagine what she would say, what Ursula would say, what they would both do, but she could not envision the scene. The future loomed empty ahead of her, beyond the point of confrontation, that precipice. She’d never pushed herself to a place like this before, and it was both frightening and exhilarating. She began to acknowledge that tiny flame inside her that relished the prospect that lay before her, the unknown, dangerous place she was about to tread.

Working with Ursula every day, watching her, studying her, was a chance she’d never even dared to imagine. She’d applied at the firm not even hoping for a spot on this dig, at least not right away. But it had fallen into place: first one of the archaeologists had got appendicitis just before work was to begin, and then her own application had been top of the heap when the position was to be filled. She couldn’t have planned it better had she schemed and plotted for years. That had to mean something.

Rachel reached her place outside Ursula’s house. She was sweating; her armpits and the small of her back felt clammy under her dark anorak. Taking the binoculars from her pocket, she let herself imagine briefly what her mother would say if only she could see her now. Rachel saw her mother’s face, pale and luminous, beautiful as she herself had never been, never would be now. She cut off the thought, before any hint of disappointment was visible in her mother’s face, before those lovely lips could utter her name.

The spot she’d come to was directly above and behind Ursula’s house. She had a perfect view into the kitchen and the bedroom, the one where Ursula slept. The bathroom window was pressed glass, a translucent pattern through which Ursula’s toweled head was sometimes visible after her nightly bath. Rachel knelt on the bed of leaves she’d arranged to make the spot more comfortable. She had been lucky in the weather. This summer had been incredibly dry so far; she’d only been rained on once—a minor miracle. She lifted the binoculars and focused on the kitchen table. An open bottle of red wine was there, as usual. No glass, though; she must have it with her. Rachel swung the binoculars from window to window, looking for Ursula’s form or any sign of movement. She might be in the bath. But she usually brought the bottle if she was going to have a long soak. Rachel focused in on the bottle on the kitchen table. It was newly opened; probably Ursula had just gone into the bedroom and would return to the kitchen soon. She decided to settle in. She had waited so long for this opportunity, and everything was going so well, just as she had planned; what need was there to rush? She could certainly bide her time for another few minutes.

She opened her rucksack and felt around until her fingers found the flat bundle she sought, wedged up against one side. She drew it out, and slowly unwrapped a long-bladed knife, admiring the way the metal glowed dully in the moonlight. Sitting hidden in the hedge, feeling the blood pulsing through her temples and her breath slowly flowing in and out, Rachel suddenly realized that she had never felt more alive.