Lake of Sorrows

1

When her alarm sounded at seven, Nora was first conscious of the fresh air coming in through the open window. She felt warm and comfortable in the bed, aware of Cormac’s weight beside her. She resisted getting up right away; instead she turned to face him, luxuriating in this temporary illusion of domesticity. It was quite usual for her to fall asleep before he did, and that, added to the fact that they hadn’t spent many nights together in the first place, meant she hadn’t had many opportunities to study him as he slept. It was lovely seeing him so relaxed and oblivious, since that wasn’t the usual picture she had of him. His hair was pushed into odd tufts where it rested against the pillow. She admired the natural embouchure of his lips that she found so pleasing, the slight concavity of the unshaven cheeks; her eyes lingered for a long while on the tiny whitened scar at the edge of his hairline. Her heart suddenly squeezed tight as a fist, thinking of all the stories she had not yet had a chance to know.

When she noticed a small smear of dried blood on the pillowcase, she suddenly remembered Detective Ward’s plaster-patched shaving cut a few days earlier. Pushing the covers aside, she examined Cormac’s neck and chest. No apparent wound. Then he stirred and turned over, and she saw three red lines on the side of his neck, fresh enough that they were still caked with a small amount of blood. She looked at her own fingernails, cut short. How could she have done that to him without knowing? But how else could he have acquired them? She tucked the duvet around him again. If she had hurt him, he had not complained.

Unwilling to wake him so early, she slid out of bed, slipped quickly into her jeans and work shirt, and carried her shoes downstairs. She moved around the kitchen, noting the dishes all washed and stacked neatly in the drainer. He’d been up again last night while she was asleep, tidying the kitchen, the books and papers on his work table. While she waited for the coffee to brew, she made some sandwiches to take out to the bog for lunch, and thought again about the night before: the fairy bush, her feeling that some mischief was afoot. Cormac hadn’t seemed at all surprised when she’d finally told him she was leaving. He said he had always known—just as she had. But knowing didn’t make it any easier.

When the coffee was ready, she poured it into her travel mug, added a drop of milk, and took it out to the car. Maybe it would be best to leave her files here today; that way Cormac could get started looking through them if he felt like it. She set the coffee in the car and went around to the trunk to unload her files. Lugging the heavy box into the house, she noticed that Cormac’s waterproofs, which had been hanging on the hook outside the back door, were no longer there. It seemed curious. Why would he have moved them since last night? She didn’t have time to puzzle over it at the moment. She was going to be late for her shift, sorting through drain spoil again today.

She knew her way to the bog by now, through the maze of crooked, unmarked lanes and hedge-choked byways. The distance was only a mile and a quarter, but the journey took at least fifteen minutes on these small roads. The power plant’s strange, enormous towers were always a marker in the landscape. Cormac had been coming here for years, and must know every knoll and back road. Last night, from the hilltop, he’d given her a glimpse into the life of the place, into all the human activity—large and small—that had scratched the surface here.

She was approaching the house that Cormac had pointed out as Ursula’s temporary home. Why did the woman make her so uneasy? Ursula’s face rose up in Nora’s memory, and for some reason she remembered the tissue in Cormac’s bathroom bin, the soft, sensual impression of a woman’s lips. She tried to banish the thought from her mind, but it clung like a cobweb to the edge of her consciousness.

It wasn’t until she was past Ursula’s house that Nora registered something odd about it. Checking to make sure that no one was behind her on the road, she slowly backed up to take a closer look. Her fleeting impression had been right; the front door was standing wide open, and what she presumed to be the sitting-room window was smashed.

Nora parked the car as far off the road as she could. She opened the trunk and reached for the tire iron, then slowly made her way up around the back of the house. The kitchen window was also broken, and the back door and shed door were wide open as well. Something was definitely not right here. Ursula should have been down on the bog already, and she wouldn’t have left all the doors open. The house was still.

Nora approached, tire iron in hand, checking for broken glass on the ground. A few clumps of moss bloomed on the concrete foundation, and a painted clay drainpipe emerged from the wall under the bathroom window, probably from the tub or shower. She heard the drip, drip, drip of the pipe before tracing it all the way to the drain at the bottom, and looking down she felt a sharp electric jolt of fear. The small pool below the drain was dark crimson with blood. There was no mistaking the color.

She entered by the back door. A wine bottle and two glasses, one empty and one half-full, stood on the kitchen table. A few drops of blood spattered the floor in front of the sink and one of the chairs near the table. Nora moved quietly down the hall to the bathroom, barely breathing, and she looked in through the open door, unprepared for the full horror that awaited her there.

Ursula’s wrists and ankles rested on the lip of the claw-footed tub, pale as porcelain. Her body was submerged beneath the water’s surface, and mounds of peat had been heaped all around the base of the tub. The stillness, the strange and terrible intimacy of the scene before her, was so surreal that it took a moment to register. Then the natural flood of confusion and horror broke loose, and a thousand jumbled thoughts began rushing through Nora’s head: she shouldn’t be in here, she should phone the police immediately, she should get out, call Cormac, run away and hide. What if someone was still in the house?

Listening closely for any noise, she fought her fear and edged closer to the bathtub. Her conscious mind understood that it was too late, but she checked for a pulse inside Ursula’s left ankle just to be sure, and found the pale skin cold to the touch. Nora withdrew her hand and cast her eyes around the bathroom. They would ask her to describe exactly what she had seen. Nothing was registering but the peat, the blood on the wall, and the pale, cold limbs emerging from the water. She forced herself to turn and look, to concentrate on the white tiles, the strange green walls, the purple bathrobe lying on the floor beside the tub, the single bare bulb that hung on a wire from the ceiling, the black peat under Ursula’s fingernails. Several candles on the windowsill had burned down and guttered out. Nora backed out of the bathroom slowly with the tire iron still in one hand, trying to hold the scene in her mind. The faucet dripped slowly, and nothing else moved, only the bright clear water steadily dripping into crimson, counting the seconds.

She had worked with death almost daily for years, but there was nothing between her and this death, no buffer, no intention on the part of the deceased to become the object of scrutiny, and somehow that made all the difference. Her presence here felt like an affront to dignity. She reached into her jacket pocket, fumbling for her mobile phone, and dialed 999 for emergency services. While the forefront of her mind calmly answered the operator’s questions, under the surface coursed a fearful, dark tumble of thoughts. Her memory replayed the angry gestures between Ursula and Owen Cadogan, his hand around her throat, her fists pushing him away. She remembered the confrontation, the threats Ursula had made to Charlie Brazil. But what was the pile of peat supposed to mean, unless—Nora’s stomach churned when she thought of the strange way Danny Brazil had met his death. She leaned over the tub again to look at the still corpse beneath the water, and this time she saw the thin leather strand that encircled Ursula’s throat, its dark line broken by three knots.

2

The house and yard were swarming with Guards. Soon they would be replaced by scene-of-crime officers going over the minutiae like white-clad ants, carrying bits of evidence away to their own anthill. Nora sat waiting to give her statement to Detective Ward, wishing that they would just let her go home. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed, to go to sleep and wake up again, start the whole day over, and find this nightmare vanished.

“Thank you for staying, Dr. Gavin. We’ll eventually need to get a detailed statement from you, but at this point it would be helpful if you could just tell me what happened this morning. What made you decide to stop and look in here?”

Nora’s mind went back to the moment she’d seen the open door. What synapse made a person do or not do something? What if she hadn’t seen the door standing open, or it had been open to a lesser angle? Would she have noticed, or flown past as she’d done all the previous days she’d been here? Had knowing this was Ursula’s house made her more observant? “I don’t know, really. I saw the door standing open, and I thought it was odd. I thought something might be wrong.”

“Did you know who was stopping here?”

“Yes, I knew that Ursula Downes was staying here for the excavation season.”

“How did you know?”

For some reason she felt a bit nonplussed. “Cormac Maguire told me last night.”

“And how did he know that this was Ms. Downes’s residence, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Why did she mind the question so much? “I’m not sure how he knew. He never mentioned their acquaintance specifically, but I believe they knew each other from years back. Archaeology is a small field. Everyone knows everyone.”

“I see,” Ward said, and Nora knew he was making a note to put Cormac on his interview list. “Why don’t you take me through what happened, from the time you saw the open door?” His brown eyes were not unkind, and she told herself that he had to be open to every possibility—even those that seemed extremely unlikely. Of course he had to look at Cormac. He’d probably have to interview everyone within a five-mile radius. She took a deep breath and plunged in, recounting all the details she could remember: the broken window, the drops of blood on the kitchen floor, the wine bottle on the table, her panicky journey down the corridor, and the jangling fear she had felt pushing the bathroom door open with the tire iron. She couldn’t seem to go on.

“I’ll let you go very soon,” Ward said, “but I have to ask you, Dr. Gavin, where you were last night. Perhaps you’d oblige me, and go back to the time I left the house after talking with you and Dr. Maguire.”

“We ate dinner after you left, then Cormac took me to the top of the hill behind the cottage. That was when he pointed out all the neighboring houses.”

“And then?”

“We came home and went to bed. ”

“What time would you say that was?”

“About ten forty-five, I suppose, maybe eleven.”

“So you were together the whole evening, and all night?” When Nora looked up at him, he tried to reassure her: “Absolutely routine questions; I don’t want to assume anything. I just need the facts.”

“Yes.” Nora thought of the clear evidence she’d seen this morning that Cormac had been awake and moving about the house.

“You didn’t wake up in the night? Didn’t go to the loo, or to get a glass of water?”

She wondered if Ward could see her hesitation. “No, I’d been working out on the bog all day, and I was exhausted. I didn’t wake until the alarm went off this morning.”

“How well did you know Ursula Downes, Dr. Gavin?”

“Not well at all. I only met her a couple of days ago, out on the bog. We hadn’t really spoken very much.”

“And what about Dr. Maguire? How well was he acquainted with Ursula Downes?”

“As I said, they may have worked together some time ago. I don’t really know.”

“I realize you’ve been here only a few days, but in that time, were you aware of anyone who may have wished her harm?”

Nora hesitated again. “I don’t know about wishing harm; I can only tell you about things I witnessed.”

“Go ahead,” Ward said, interested.

“Ursula didn’t seem to be on especially good terms with Owen Cadogan, the bog manager. I saw them talking on a couple of occasions, and neither was what you’d call a cordial conversation. At one point, Cadogan had his hand around Ursula’s throat. I couldn’t tell if he was threatening her or not, and when I asked whether everything was all right, she basically told me to back off and mind my own business. The next day, when Cadogan arrived at the site, Ursula tore into him. I don’t know why; I couldn’t hear what she was saying. And she hit him, a slap in the face. She seemed absolutely furious, but you’ll have to ask Cadogan why.”

“Anything else?”

Nora watched Ward noting all this in his book. If she was so willing to tell him everything she’d witnessed between Ursula and Owen Cadogan, why not mention the conversation she’d overheard between Ursula and Charlie Brazil?

“If that’s all—”

“It isn’t, actually.” She might regret this but it was too late now. “I also overheard a conversation a couple of days ago between Ursula and one of the Bord na Mona men, Charlie Brazil. She had—” It was going to sound ridiculous enough, without mentioning how Ursula had wrestled him to the ground. “She said that she’d been watching him, that she knew what he was hiding. And it seemed as though she was threatening to expose whatever it was if he didn’t do what she wanted.”

“And what was that?”

“She wasn’t really specific. She just said that he should come and see her, after dark.”

Ward took all this in impassively, making a few notes in his book. “Anything else?” Nora shook her head, wondering why it was that she had left out Ursula’s reference to Brona Scully. She told herself she couldn’t be positive, and for some reason she felt a fierce protectiveness toward a girl she’d never even met. “You can go home now if you wish, Dr. Gavin. If you wouldn’t mind coming down to the station this afternoon, we can finish taking a complete formal statement then. Thank you for your cooperation.”

As Ward made his way back to the house, Nora saw one of the Guards at the gate turn to address someone approaching from the road. The lanky stranger had blunt, handsome features—a slightly flattened nose, down-turned lips, and a square jaw—and his short steel gray hair was combed straight back over the crown of his head. He wore a long gray raincoat that reached below his knees, and carried a black attache case. Another detective? Not likely. He didn’t seem like a reporter—too mature and too well-dressed for this sort of assignment—and it was a bit early for that, in any case. She heard the young Garda say, “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t let you in without an okay from the boss.”

“Where’s Ursula?” the man in the raincoat asked. “Has something happened to her? Tell me what’s going on here.”

The officer looked at the attache case. “You her brief, sir?”

The man looked at the young Garda as if he’d never encountered a greater class of imbecile. “No, I am not her ‘brief.’ Is there someone in charge of you here? I insist that you let me speak to the officer in charge.”

Ward had evidently overheard and strode toward them. “Detective Liam Ward. I’m in charge of the scene. And you are—”

“Desmond Quill. I’m a friend of Ursula’s, and I demand to know exactly what’s going on here.”

“If you’d step this way, Mr. Quill.” Ward’s calm demeanor withstood the waves of anger directed toward him. The two men stopped a short distance away, and Nora watched Ward speaking very quietly to Quill. There was a brief silence, then Quill’s head tipped forward and the case he gripped in his left hand dropped abruptly to the ground. Ward reached out to steady him, but he pushed the policeman’s arm away, rubbing his brow with one hand as the other, the one that had held the attache case, slid up and down his side as if searching blindly for his raincoat pocket.

3

Nora drove in stunned silence back to the Crosses. She felt her right foot pushing too hard on the brake, as if she could stop time and back up to the previous evening when she had stood wrapped in the aura of that magical tree, when, for one brief shining instant, everything had seemed so right and possible.

When she pulled in beside the cottage, it seemed impossible that she should be reaching to open the car door, entering the house. All these mundane, thoughtless acts seemed somehow surreal after the bizarre and terrifying tableau she had just witnessed. And yet it was all real, all of it: Ursula’s blood on the wall was as real as the birds in the trees outside the windows, as real as Cormac sitting at his desk inside the cottage. He stood up as she came through the door.

“Nora, what are you doing home? Is everything all right?”

“I never made it to the bog. I only got as far as Ursula’s house. She’s dead, Cormac.”

Nora wasn’t sure what sort of reaction she expected. What should a person say when presented with such news? He took a step backward, a deep crease furrowing his forehead, and looked into her eyes, searching for a sign that she was telling the truth. When she nodded, his head dropped forward and words finally escaped within a long, slow exhalation. “Ah, no. No.”

“She’s been murdered.”

This brought Cormac fresh anguish. He lunged forward and seized her by the arms. “How do you know, Nora?”

As his fingers pressed into her arms, she found his reaction beginning to alarm her. She tried to wrest one arm out of his tightening grasp. “Because I found her body.”

All his urgency dissolved in an instant. He folded his arms tight around her and whispered through her hair. “Ah, Nora. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you all right?” He pulled back to look into her face, to see for himself.

“I’ll be all right. But what about you—are you all right, Cormac?”

He didn’t answer for a moment; he looked away, the muscles in his jaw tensing. He finally looked back at her, and she could feel the anxiety that radiated from his eyes. “Nora, there’s something you need to know right away. I was over at Ursula’s last night. I’m responsible.”

She received the force of that blunt statement as though she’d been struck in the face.

He realized his poor choice of words immediately. “No, no, I didn’t—I wasn’t even there very long. Maybe fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. She was fine when I left, Nora.” He shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. “But I am responsible, you see. She rang me up on the mobile after you’d gone to sleep, just after midnight. I was here in the kitchen, finishing the washing up. Ursula said she’d heard someone outside the house and asked me to come over. She wouldn’t phone the police or the emergency services. I didn’t know what else to do. She sounded a bit drunk, and she seemed genuinely frightened. I was just going to try to calm her down, get her to ring the Guards.

“I thought something was off as soon as I stepped inside the door. The kitchen window had been smashed. She was trying to clean it up, and she’d cut herself pretty badly in the process; it was a nasty gash, and I ended up with blood all over my clothes from helping her bind it up. When I came back from putting away the bandages, Ursula was calmly pouring two glasses of wine, as if nothing had happened. I asked her what the hell was going on, and she said something about how shockingly simple it was to mislead a decent man.” He colored deeply. “I thought she’d made it up—the prowler. I thought she’d broken the window herself.”

“So what happened?” Nora felt a hand tightening around her heart, the familiar signature of her old enemy, regret.

“When I told her that there was no way I was staying for a drink, I don’t know what happened—she just went off.” Cormac’s anguish and humiliation were evident from the red flush that burned in his ears. “I turned to leave, and she came at me from behind. All I wanted was to get the hell away from there. I tried to shake her off, but she got in a good swipe at me, enough to draw blood.” He put one hand to his injured throat. “All I know is that she was alive when I left, Nora. Halfway up the hill I looked back. I could see her standing there in the kitchen. She was holding up a wine glass and laughing at me.”

He leaned back into the wall and sagged against it for support. On the left side of his neck Nora could see the three distinct scratches, still raw-looking. All at once she remembered the smear on his pillow.

“You’ll have to go to the police right away.”

“Yes. Of course.”

An expectant silence hung in the air, and Nora could sense that she hadn’t heard everything he had to tell. “There’s something else. What is it, Cormac?”

He closed his eyes and drew another breath. “It’s bound to come out when I talk to the Guards, and I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else.” He looked straight into her eyes. “I should have told you before now, Nora, and I apologize for that. Ursula and I were very briefly—involved, a long time ago. We were both graduate students, working out here with Gabriel. It only lasted for a few weeks one summer. I broke it off when I realized that Ursula was not…” He searched for the right words. “…not as honorable a person as I had imagined.”

“And that was something you couldn’t figure out before sleeping with her?” His eyes flashed, and she gazed into the wound her words had opened, quick as a blade. “I’m sorry, Cormac, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

“Not entirely. I don’t know what made me go over there last night. When she stopped by on Sunday evening, I thought there was something different about her. She seemed calmer, more thoughtful. I thought perhaps she’d changed a little. Maybe she had, maybe she hadn’t; maybe it was all an act.”

She had been here. The lipstick-stained tissue in the bathroom bin—Ursula had left it there, deliberately planting seeds of doubt. Nora’s mind crashed back through all the sly looks she’d received the past few days; Ursula had been probing, checking to see whether those seeds had taken root.

“I should have stayed last night. Maybe Ursula would still be alive if I’d just taken the time to talk to her and calm her down.”

Cormac paused for a moment. “I wanted you to know what really happened before things get crazy. Because they will get crazy; I think we can count on that. But I didn’t hurt her, Nora. I would never—”

His dark eyes overflowed with remorse and supplication, and it seemed as though he was waiting for a response, for her to say something reassuring—Of course, of course you wouldn’t. But she was thinking: No one knows what he’s capable of until it’s done and he’s face-to-face with it. People snap, they do stupid things, they don’t think. Her throat felt thick; no words would come.

“Please say something, Nora.”

She was suddenly aware that she was pressing her fingernails into tightly clenched fists. She uncurled her hands, and tried to unclench her stomach as well. He reached out and gripped her wrist. “I know. I know it’s a crazy, stupid story. No one will believe me, and I don’t blame them. But I can only tell you what truly happened.”

She looked into the deep brown pools of his eyes, then down at the fingers encircling her forearm—the same fingers that had coaxed such wild, furious music from his flute, that had touched her and stroked her hair when she wept. “We’ll get all this sorted,” was all she said. But she could see the relief break over his face like a wave.

4

Ward stood for a moment in the light streaming through Ursula Downes’s missing kitchen window. It had been a huge window of plate glass, unshaded. Must have seemed like a lighted stage to someone looking in at night. He looked out the window at the rise of the back garden, saw the sagging wires on the clothesline vibrate in the wind. He checked the locks on the back door, one of those that latch without a key, and a separate dead-bolt. Both front and back doors had been left open. Neither one had been forced, which meant that Ursula Downes’s killer either had a key or was someone known to her, someone she would have let into the house. Or the killer could have just entered through the smashed window. Most of the glass had been cleared away; there was a broom in the corner and the bin was full of broken plate glass. He drew out one shard with gloved fingers, and noticed tiny droplets of what appeared to be red spray paint on the glass. “Can we have a closer look at this?” he asked the first crime-scene technician who passed by. “Reconstruct the glass and see if it’s graffiti or writing of some kind?”

The tech nodded and took the bin of broken glass. Ward turned his attention to the presses. Lots of tea and a few tins of beans and sardines, but the fridge was empty except for milk and several nearly empty take-away containers. Ursula Downes was not a cook, apparently.

In the sitting room, marks on the carpet looked as if someone had been moving the furniture recently—covering up a violent struggle, or looking for something? Ursula Downes had not left a large imprint on her temporary lodging; there weren’t many personal items in the sitting room. He had a suspicion that her flat in Dublin wouldn’t be that much homier than this. She didn’t seem the type to go in for soft cushions.

A rucksack sat on the floor next to the table. He picked it up and unzipped the front pocket, and found a single lipstick, a mobile phone, a diary. The precious details that would help him unlock her life and death were here, waiting to be winnowed. He bagged the rucksack as evidence—he’d take it with him and have a closer look at the station.

Suddenly a white-garbed officer appeared at his elbow. “Dr. Friel’s ready for you, sir.”

Ward took several slow, deep breaths before walking into the bathroom where the body was. The scene-of-crime officers had removed and bagged the peat to allow Dr. Friel better access to the body. Ursula Downes’s pale corpse was still partly submerged in the tub. The cloying smell of blood hung in the air. For him, the odor of death was usually worse than the sight of the body, but he wasn’t prepared for this one. A thin black thong cut into the flesh of her neck just below the chin, and below it gaped a dreadful wound.

“Not a very deep ligature,” said Dr. Friel, beside him. “Possibly not done to kill her, but to cut off airflow temporarily, or to control the bleeding. And there are three knots in the cord.”

“Just like Danny Brazil.” Ward mentally went through the list of people who would have known about the ligature on the previous victim. “What about the slashing?”

“Almost certainly a right-handed person, from the angle of the cut and the spatter.”

“So you believe she was alive when her throat was cut?”

“Yes; look at the pattern on the wall. Very definitely arterial bleeding.” Ward looked where Dr. Friel’s eyes pointed, at the deep rust-red plumes on the wall. He counted: one, two, three, four, five. How long had her heart carried on beating before she died? Whoever had done this hadn’t gotten away clean, he thought. He looked down at Ursula’s wrists and ankles, still resting on the bathtub’s gracefully rounded lip. “Any other visible injuries?”

“Just a gash inside the left hand here.” She pointed to an incised wound between the thumb and forefinger. “It’s a very recent cut, and the strange thing about it is that there are traces of cotton thread in the wound, as if it had been bound, but the bandage was removed. There may also be some skin and blood under the nails of her left hand. I won’t be able to tell for certain until we get to the PM. She may have been unconscious, just this side of asphyxiation, when her throat was cut.”

“And the knife found on the floor?”

“They’ll have to test it, of course, but I’d bet it’s not the murder weapon.”

“Why’s that?”

“The blade is serrated. According to everything I see, her throat was cut with a nonserrated blade.”

Ward took this in. “Anything else, anything—I don’t know—unusual?”

“Well, you’re looking for a dull blade. Not new—maybe an antique; a kind of metal that doesn’t hold a sharp edge for long.” Ward raised his eyebrows in query. “Not that difficult to determine. Dull knives make for rough wounds.”

“And how long has she been dead, would you say?”

“Based on general rigor and lividity in the limbs, I’d say roughly eight to twelve hours. But the fact that she’s been mostly submerged in cold water gives us a larger margin of error. I should have the PM finished by early evening, if you want to check back with me then. You have my mobile number?”

As he left the scene behind, Ward reflected that sometimes the only witness they had to a horrific crime like this was the victim herself. It was fortunate for him, he thought, how well a body remembers. He removed his gloves before leaving the house and placed them carefully in his raincoat pocket. Stepping out the back door, he heard a noise, like pouring water, and saw a crimson pool spreading out from the peat-clogged drain. He shouted to the officers standing beside the thing, but it was too late; their shoes had been surrounded.

“Detective Ward!” a voice rang out from a few yards away. “We’ve got something over here.” The uniformed Garda hoisted the stick he’d been using to probe at the thick grass and held aloft a pair of green binoculars. Ward strode over to take a closer look, putting his gloves back on and pulling an evidence bag out of his pocket.

The binoculars were compact and waterproof, with a cloth strap—the sort you might imagine hunters would use, he thought. Had someone been watching Ursula Downes last night, waiting for his chance to strike? “Good work, Moran.” Ward held up the polythene bag, and Moran let the binoculars slide into it. “Make sure you mark the spot and let the crime-scene boys document this area.” He was nearly back at the house when another voice called from about fifty yards away. “Detective? I’ve something else here, sir.” Ward turned on his heel and charged up the slope toward the sound of the officer’s voice, through a gap in the hedge that defined the boundary of the pasture.

“I was just putting my stick down at the base of the hedge when I saw the yellow color, sir. There was this huge stone on top, so I shifted it and found this.” Ward folded himself into a crouch to look at the spot where the Garda officer was pointing. Beside the large stone was a flattened waterproof jacket of heavy rubberized yellow canvas, like those worn by fishermen and by some of the archaeologists on the bog excavation. The jacket’s right sleeve was spattered with blood. Ward pulled out a pen and flipped over the tag just inside the neck to see the owner’s name written in block capitals: MAGUIRE.

He hadn’t even had time to formulate any ideas about this strange turn of events when the mobile in his pocket began to ring. The duty officer reported that a Dr. Maguire had just rung, and would be coming in at three to give a statement on the Ursula Downes case. Not before time, Ward thought, looking down again at the blood-spattered jacket. He quickly returned to the house and finished up with the crime-scene team. As he climbed into his car, he found himself running through the questions they’d ask Maguire in the interview room. It was an elaborate form of negotiation—not unlike diplomacy or even courtship, he’d often thought—with each side trying to find out how much the other knew, how much had already been given away. His fingers thrummed a steady rhythm on the steering wheel as he drove the short distance to the excavation site. He hoped questioning the archaeology team wouldn’t take too long. He couldn’t wait to hear what Maguire had to say.

5

Ward arrived at the excavation site at a quarter past eleven, and was greeted by the uniformed officer who stood to one side of the sturdy wooden steps leading up to the door of the tea hut. Maureen was already there, taking the team’s names and addresses down in her notebook. Five pairs of eyes followed Ward as he took a chair at the far end of the table, which was littered with boxes of teabags, biscuit packets, and several open milk containers. Someone had made a pot of tea, and several of them warmed their hands on mugs. Their faces were reddened from sun and wind. There was a reason they were all so young, Ward thought as he looked around the room at the apprehensive faces. The work was physically hard, temporary, grim, seasonal—a stepping-stone to other things, not an end in itself. Was he getting old, that they all looked so unformed to him, so unmarked by experience? The shed where they sat was a flimsy trailer; he could hear and feel the wind outside, trying to blow away the whole structure, this paltry affront to its power. Even if it didn’t blow them away, the wind always succeeded, eventually, in wearing down the people who worked here. Soon enough they would all be gone, replaced by others, and the constant wind would still be blowing over the face of the earth.

Ward was acutely aware that he had to treat even such an inexperienced group as potential suspects, until they could safely be eliminated. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about what’s happened,” he began.

“Nothing,” said a stocky lad with close-cropped sandy hair and large gray eyes. “We’ve heard nothing at all. We’ve been here working all morning, and all we know is that we were told to come in here and give our names.” Ward looked down through the list Brennan had handed him, and she pointed to a name: Tony Gardner.

“Then I’m sorry to have to tell you. Ursula Downes was found dead this morning, and it appears that she’s been murdered.”

He could feel the collective jolt as his words registered around the room. He watched their faces for a reaction, that familiar first denial, parrying reality’s brutal thrust, as if a simple “no” could reverse the facts. Such news was always too immense, too illogical, too impossible to accept. “I can’t tell you any more at the moment, except to say that we’ve been in contact with your employers, and they’re sending someone from the firm out here straightaway. I’m here to ask you a few questions about Ursula, and about your work here, to see if we can find a reason anyone might have had to wish her harm. What happened when she didn’t show up at the site this morning?”

Gardner replied for the group: “Nothing. I mean, we didn’t think anything of it, because she wasn’t meant to be here this morning. She was taking the day off, she said—a long weekend. I’m not sure if she was going home to Dublin or somewhere else. She didn’t tell us her plans.”

“So the last time you saw Ursula was—”

“Yesterday evening when we were finishing up here.” Maureen pointed to another name: Trish Walpole. She was an English girl in her early twenties, as Ward guessed most of them were. The natural color in her face had been heightened by the sun, and her fair hair was streaked and layered like straw from the constant wind. She played with a teaspoon as she spoke. “We all took the minibus back to the digs, and I presume Ursula went home as well. She had her own car.”

Beside Trish was a quiet young woman with long dark hair and frightened eyes, who sat on her hands and never looked up. Ward looked down through his list again: Sarah Cummins. This must be terrifying for some of them, perhaps their first time away from home.

“How well did you all know Ursula Downes?”

“Not all that well,” another of the young men replied. “Barry Sullivan,” he added, looking at Ward’s list. “Most of us were just hired on for the summer season. She had her own digs, didn’t really hang around with us. We only saw her out here on the job.”

“Given that limited interaction, were you aware of anyone who might have wished her harm?”

“Not really,” Sullivan said. “I mean, she had a few rows with Owen Cadogan, but I guess I thought they just didn’t get on. The managers have to put up with us, but most of them don’t really give a toss about what we’re doing here; I think they just see us holding up their bloody production schedules. The sooner they can get rid of us, the sooner they can get back to raping the landscape.”

“There’s no need to be melodramatic, Barry,” said Trish Walpole. “They’re really quite good to us here.”

“But Ms. Downes’s relationship with Cadogan was strictly professional, as far as you knew?”

“Yeah. As far as we knew,” Sullivan said. None of the others disagreed.

“And what about her relationship with Charlie Brazil?” Several of the crew shifted in their seats, and Ward could see damp clods falling off their heavy boots onto the layer of brownish peat that already covered the floor.

“She was always trying to get him to come out here—making up odd jobs for him to do,” said Trish Walpole. “She was very sweet to his face, but behind his back she called him Charlie Goggles. There was something strange going on between them. A couple of days ago I saw her come in here, and a few minutes later Charlie came out, looking like somebody had given him a right hiding.”

“You said Ursula had separate digs from your own. But all the rest of you lodge at the same place?”

“Yes, we have a house about a half-mile around the bend past Ursula’s place, on the Cloghan road,” said the last young man, Tom Galligan.

“Five of you in the house?”

Gardner said, “Six, actually. One of our crew is missing today—Rachel Briscoe.”

The girl who’d found Danny Brazil’s body. Ward remembered talking with her. She had answered his questions that day, but had barely made eye contact.

“I knocked on her door this morning, but there was no answer, so I stuck my head in. She was still asleep. Had the duvet pulled up over her head.”

“But you didn’t go in, didn’t speak to her?”

“By that time the minibus driver was already waiting, and we didn’t have time to hang around. She just overslept. It’s not the first time.” His tone suggested that Rachel was a constant thorn in their collective side.

Sarah Cummins said quietly, “I went in. The bed was arranged to make it look as if somebody was in it, but Rachel wasn’t there.”

A cascade of guilty looks traveled through the group. Sullivan said, “Look, we all knew she went out nearly every night. Thought we didn’t take any notice, I suppose. She was always back by morning.”

“Any idea where she was going?” Ward asked. “To meet someone, perhaps?”

Sarah Cummins bristled defensively. “We don’t know where she went. How could we?”

“I do,” Gardner said. “I was coming back from the pub one night, and I saw her on the hill right behind Ursula’s place.”

“Anyone else ever see her there?” Ward asked. The uncomfortable looks and a couple of nodding heads told him that they had, but like Sarah Cummins, they didn’t like to jump to conclusions. “Do you have any reason to believe she was somehow involved with Ursula?”

“More like obsessed,” Gardner said. “I’m sure she thought we didn’t notice, but you could see her staring at Ursula when she thought no one was around. Watching her like a cat when we were on tea break. It was weird.” Ward looked around at the other crew members. No one jumped in to agree, but none of them protested either.

Ward reached into his coat pocket and brought out the bag containing the binoculars found at the crime scene. “Have any of you seen these before?”

Sarah Cummins said quietly, “They’re Rachel’s. She always had them with her. She’d go berserk if anyone borrowed them, even for a second.”

When he’d finished questioning the archaeology crew, Ward excused them. He handed out his cards as they filed out of the office, and asked them to ring him personally if they remembered anything else, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Sarah Cummins lingered behind the others, and Ward waited until they were alone before he spoke. “Was there something else you wanted to tell me?”

“They’re all seeing what they wanted to see. There’s something bothering Rachel; she’s acting strangely, and I don’t think she’s been thinking straight since she arrived here. I know the signs.” Sarah pinched the ends of her coat sleeves as she spoke, balling her hands up in knots. “I walked in on her once in the bathroom at the house. I didn’t know she was in there; the door wasn’t locked. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, staring at a knife in the sink.” The girl swallowed hard. “I know what she was thinking about, what she was going to do.” She took a deep breath, and pushed up one of her sleeves, showing several whitened lines where the skin had once been cut. “It’s not about killing yourself, or even about the blood; it’s about the pain—about feeling something, anything. And about taking control again. I don’t do it anymore.”

“Do you think Rachel could have hurt anyone else?”

The girl’s anxious eyes held him. “I don’t know. I should have said something before now.”

“You can’t blame yourself for anything that’s happened. I mean that. It’s not your fault, Sarah. Have you got someone you can call—someone to talk to?”

The girl nodded and looked away. “My sister.”

“And will you promise me you’ll ring her today?” She looked back up at him and offered another wordless nod. How had this young woman come to bear the whole world upon her back? “I want to thank you for coming forward, Sarah. It took a lot of courage, and it might make the difference to this case. Will you ring me if you think of anything else—anything at all?” Sarah Cummins nodded again and left, tucking his card into her trouser pocket as she walked slowly back to her work. Unseen disturbances lurked everywhere, Ward thought. It was difficult enough to calm the situations that were out in the open. How could human beings hope to forestall the conflicts that raged within a soul turned on itself?

6

Owen Cadogan didn’t look pleased to see two detectives approaching his office, but he was evidently expecting them. He got his secretary—a soft-looking woman, perhaps in her early thirties—to bring in a pot of tea and three mugs on a tray. She glanced at the detectives with that combination of fascination and dismay common in people who find themselves unexpectedly on the periphery of a dreadful crime. When she left, pulling the door closed behind her, Ward jumped right in. “Mr. Cadogan, tell us about your relationship with Ursula Downes.”

Owen Cadogan fixed him with a stare, evidently annoyed at the assumption in the question. “There was no ‘relationship.’ She worked the bog last summer and came back again this year. She and her crew were under my charge here, so we were in fairly regular communication.”

“About what?”

“About the progress they were making, if she needed any supplies, or anything from the workshop—that sort of thing.” He went silent for a moment. “It’s hard to believe she’s—”

“You’re sure that was the extent of it?”

“Extent of what?”

“Of your relationship?”

“I’ve told you there was no ‘relationship’—”

“We have eyewitnesses who say that you had a couple of rather heated exchanges with Ursula a couple of days ago. What was that all about?”

Cadogan’s eyes shifted away. “It was to do with a personnel matter.”

Brennan took the ball. “And how confidential will it be when we have to go through all your employees’ files to find out?” Cadogan looked up into her eyes, on the verge of challenging her authority, Ward thought.

“This is a murder inquiry,” Brennan said curtly, and Cadogan backed down.

“Last summer Ursula got her hooks into one of the lads here in my workshop, and I saw how it turned out. It seemed that Ursula liked to try things sometimes, just to see if she could get away with them. I wasn’t going to let her do it again.”

“Or you’d do what? Seems to me taking her by the throat is a rather unprofessional way of making your point,” Brennan said.

“I’d tried talking to her already, several times, and she wasn’t getting the message.”

Wasn’t getting the message, Ward thought to himself. Here’s a man who doesn’t really like women. Doesn’t trust them, sees them as alien creatures. He listened closely as Brennan continued her questions.

“Sure she didn’t have her hooks into you?” Brennan asked.

“I’m married,” Cadogan said. “Besides, a woman like that—”

“A woman like what? What did she make him do, this young man she seduced? Did you think about that a lot, Mr. Cadogan? Did it upset you—make you feel jealous, perhaps?”

“No! I’m just trying to do my job here.”

“And who was this worker she was after, again?” Brennan asked. “This innocent lamb whose virtue you were defending? Presuming they’re both of legal age, why should it be anything to do with you?”

Cadogan considered his answer. “It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t trying to interfere, but the way she carried on disrupted morale, that was all. We were stuck with her out here for ten weeks, and I was just trying to keep the peace.”

Ward sat forward slowly, so as not to draw attention to himself, and watched Owen Cadogan’s lips form the words of his answer—the truth this time, or a lie? They had no proof that Cadogan had been involved with Ursula Downes. But somehow his story seemed false. If only there were some foolproof clue to mendacity. The trouble was, most liars were clever enough to mix in some truth with their lies, so it wasn’t whole cloth. You had to sort it out, check everything they said, not just the parts that seemed suspicious. There were many kinds of lies and many kinds of liars. There were embellishers, people who told things the way they remembered them, usually to their own advantage. Some people set themselves rules about lying, when it was all right and when not acceptable. There were those whose words were never false, but whose actions invariably were. The best liars, in Ward’s experience, were those who knew how to embroider, to stitch together truth and fiction into a seamless fabric. What sort of a liar was Owen Cadogan? As he mused, Ward found himself looking not at Cadogan, but at the secretary working in the next office, separated from them only by a partition that was half glass. He wondered how much she could hear. It was only a single pane, and Brennan’s voice was rather loud. The secretary seemed to be going about her work with a kind of forced concentration that led him to believe that she could hear it all. At this moment, she had her back turned and was typing furiously.

Ward rose and ventured out to her desk, closing the office door behind him. “I wonder if you could point me in the direction of a water tap?” The woman raised her head and pointed wordlessly to the galley kitchen across the hall. “I’m supposed to take this tablet an hour before my dinner,” Ward offered, by way of explanation, “and I nearly always forget. Thanks, Miss…”

“Flood. Aileen Flood.”

Ward ducked across the hall and downed his aspirin tablet with a sip of water, throwing back his head to make sure it went down properly. She regarded him curiously. Then he came back across the hall and observed that the sound from the inner office was indeed perfectly audible, as though there were no partition at all. “Thanks,” he said again, and rejoined Cadogan and Brennan, who hadn’t missed a beat.

“All right. All right. The lad’s name is Charlie Brazil. He got himself into an awful twist about her last summer. If you ask him, he’ll deny it. Some people say he’s not the full shilling, but he’s all right. A good lad—a bit odd, but a good worker. She’d no business messing with him.”

“Does your wife know about your talks with Ursula Downes?” Ward asked.

“Leave my wife out of this,” Cadogan said. His eyes narrowed as he looked across the desk at them.

“I’m afraid we can’t leave your wife out of this, Mr. Cadogan, because you’re on our list as a suspect, and we’re going to have to talk to her about where you were last night.”

Cadogan looked down with the dejected air of someone who was well and truly in it. “She took the children up to her mother’s place in Mayo. They go every summer for a fortnight. She left two days ago.”

“So no one can vouch for your whereabouts last night?”

Cadogan looked away, then back at Brennan. “No, I was home. Alone.”

“And no one saw you at the house, no one phoned you there? I’ll remind you, Mr. Cadogan, that we’re investigating a murder, and that you’re under very serious consideration as a suspect. Can anyone give evidence about where you were last night?”

“No.” Even as his lips formed the word, Cadogan’s eyes flicked over to the window, where his secretary was continuing the pretense of going about her work. But the woman’s stony facial expression, her overprecise movements, betrayed her intense agitation.

“Look, if someone can tell us where you were between one and four o’clock this morning, we’d be delighted to cross you off our list.”

Ward made a point of turning, ever so slightly, so that he was looking straight out at the anxious woman in the next office. But Cadogan wasn’t going to bite.

“There’s no one, I swear. I was alone all evening. All night.”

Brennan regarded Cadogan evenly, giving him a last chance to come clean, then glanced over at Ward. He closed his eyes to tell her he had no additional questions, so she stood, and said, “That’ll do for now. We’ll be in touch when we have any more questions, and of course you can always ring us if you remember anything further.”

Cadogan looked slightly surprised that they were finished with him so soon. He tried to mask it, placing his hands on the table and making a show of getting out of his chair. As they took their leave and headed down the corridor to the exit, Ward glanced back briefly, to see Owen Cadogan crouched by his secretary’s desk. It wasn’t his submissive posture, but the woman’s worried face that piqued Ward’s interest. He turned back to Maureen.

“We won’t have time today, but do you fancy calling in on Ms. Flood at home tomorrow?” he asked.

“Already in my diary,” Brennan said.

7

Charlie Brazil wasn’t hard to find. They entered the workshop’s open maw, where a man in a stained boilersuit was working on aligning the swamp treads on a huge tractor. They showed their IDs and asked for Brazil. “You’ll have to wear these,” the man said, tapping his own goggles, and ducking into the shop foreman’s office to pull down two pairs from the board inside. He handed them each a pair, then pointed with his thumb to the next repair bay, where a young man in safety glasses worked on a machine part with a grinder. Ward put his goggles on, noting the row of illustrated calendars at the back of the shop, featuring posing, pouting women whose breasts looked like they’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. The workshop seemed to be organized into different areas, according to type of repair and equipment needed. It was impossible not to be overwhelmed by the scale of the machines and the sharpness everywhere: dull blades being honed with grinders, shiny new blades waiting to be fitted on these huge tools for scraping the skin of the earth. He wondered if these men understood that every day they came to work they were destroying their own livelihood. Bogs were finite, not like his line of work, which relied upon wellsprings of anger and greed and stupidity that seemed to have no end.

As they approached, the fair young man at the grinder pressed metal to metal, and a rain of sparks fell near their feet.

“Charlie Brazil?” Ward shouted above the noise, holding up his ID. The young man nodded and turned off the grinder, and Ward noted the fingers black with grime. They had it from two sources that their victim had been interested in the lad. But what was his interest in her? “We were just having a chat with your boss, Mr. Brazil. He tells us you knew Ursula Downes.”

Brazil eyed them suspiciously through his safety goggles. “So did we all. She was here on the bog last year as well.” Ward stood facing the open door to the next repair bay and watched as the police presence seemed to reverberate around the building. He marveled at how such knowledge was passed, like a scent, a feeling in the air. Some of the workers strode by purposefully; a few stood and gawked from a distance like curious cattle. Every once in a while, a figure would drift by the open door, pretending to check the yard for the next job. It was clear they all knew why the police were there. When the third boilersuited figure came into view, Ward turned to Charlie Brazil and said, “Look, we can go somewhere else if you’d like.”

Charlie gave a kind of resigned grimace and shook his head. “I’m used to it.” Ward noted that Charlie was the only youngish man at the workshop; all the rest seemed to be middle-aged or older. He could imagine the slagging, the thinly veiled envy, the superiority of knowledge. Charlie Brazil had the same look Ward remembered from boys who had been picked on at school, for being too intelligent, too introverted, too quiet. They might as well have had signs hanging around their necks. He watched Charlie Brazil’s long fingers fiddle with the clamps that held the machine part. Did he know what Ursula Downes had called him behind his back?

“I didn’t know her all that well. They sent me over to put up some steps for her, just knock together a wooden staircase so they could get in and out of their supply shed—it was up fairly high off the ground. When she needed some drawing frames there the other day, she asked if I’d make them.”

“So you were often out at the excavation site.”

“Fairly often, yeah.”

“Did you look for opportunities to be out there, to help Ursula whenever you had the chance?”

“No. I only did what I was asked to do.”

“Was there any change in how you got on, between last summer and this one? Any difference in her that you noticed?”

“Not really. She liked to get people to do things for her. She was always asking me to help her out, and I did.”

“Why?”

Brazil didn’t answer immediately; he looked away and pulled at his lip. His voice dropped a notch or two in volume. “I suppose I felt sorry for her.”

“What?” Brennan’s voice was incredulous, and Ward flashed his eyes to tell her to tread lightly here.

“It seemed like she needed attention,” Brazil said. “I helped her when she asked me.”

“I see.” Brennan opened her mouth to ask another question, but this time Ward jumped in: “Did you ever see Ursula away from the job, Charlie?”

“No. Never.”

“Did you ever have a sexual relationship with Ursula Downes?” Ward asked.

“No!” The lad’s nostrils flared as he raised his head, and his chest heaved as if he couldn’t take in enough oxygen. “I never. I swear.”

Ward remembered the comment from one of the archaeologists. “What were you doing in the archaeologists’ shed a few days back?”

Charlie Brazil stared at them with a new wariness in his eyes. “I was looking at a map they’ve got in there, trying to see where the next cuttings were going in.”

“Ursula found you in there, didn’t she? Why was she upset or angry to find you there?”

“No, she wasn’t—”

“You left in quite a hurry,” Ward said. Charlie couldn’t understand how they knew all this. He was unsure of himself, and they kept the pressure on.

“When was the last time you saw Ursula?” Brennan asked.

“At the excavation site a couple of days ago, about five o’clock. They were finishing up for the day. I didn’t speak to her.”

“That’s not what we heard,” Ward said. “We have a statement from someone who overheard you talking with Ursula. She said she’d been watching you, didn’t she? She threatened to expose what you’d been hiding unless you did something for her. There’s a word for that sort of proposition; it’s called blackmail. What are you hiding, Charlie? And what did Ursula want from you in return?”

Charlie’s fingers gripped the metal cylinder more tightly, and his eyes hardened into steely blue stones. “Whoever told you all that was a liar. It never happened. Who was it told you that—Cadogan? He’s the one you ought to be asking about his relationship with Ursula Downes.”

“Are you saying you’ve seen them together?”

“If he denies it, ask him about the pipe shed on the back road to the old power station. I’ll say no more about it.”

“Where were you last night, Charlie?” Brennan asked.

He didn’t respond immediately, and his feet shifted nervously. He couldn’t look either one of them in the eye. “I had nothing to do with Ursula’s murder. I swear it.”

“Just tell us where you were. Start from the time you left work.”

Charlie finally looked up at Maureen. “I finished my shift at four and went home to get my dinner. After that, I fed and watered the cattle and mended a fence across the road where my mother keeps her sheep. One of the posts was a bit wobbly, so I had to see it was mended straightaway.”

“And what time did you finish all that?”

“About half-eight, I suppose. I don’t really know. I don’t wear a watch.”

“Well, what time did you get home?”

There was a brief silence. Charlie’s voice was low as he answered. “I didn’t.”

Ward saw Brennan glance over at him before she proceeded. “So where were you?”

“Up the hill behind the house. I had a big pile of dry scutch I’d been saving for a bonfire that night. It took a while to get the fire going well and I stayed beside it all night. I didn’t want it to burn out. I got home around half-six to do the foddering.”

“Where was this fire, exactly?”

“Top of the hill directly behind the house.”

“Did anyone else see it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t build it for anyone else. It was my own thing.”

“What was the occasion?” Ward asked.

Charlie’s eyes remained downcast. “Midsummer’s eve. It’s supposed to bring good luck, putting ashes from the fire over the cattle.”

Brennan said, “So you’re telling us you just sat and poked at a fire all night? All on your own?”

“That’s all.” Charlie colored deeply. Was it something that innocent and personal, Ward wondered, or was he concealing something darker? Whichever it was, the boy couldn’t seem to raise his eyes from the floor. It wasn’t just luck for the cattle he’d been after. There was something more, something he wasn’t saying.

“I don’t know if you remember, Charlie, but you and I have had dealings before,” Ward said. “The business about some animals killed out on the bog. It’s a good few years ago now. I talked to you a couple of times about that.”

The young man’s voice was low and adamant. “I remember. And what are they saying now? ‘It must have been Charlie Brazil, he knew her, and remember what he did to those poor creatures.’ They all think I’m half cracked, but I’m not, and you know it. I didn’t do those things back then, and I did not kill Ursula Downes. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

They had reached a stalemate. It would be useless to go on, at least for the moment.

“Can I get back to my work now?”

Ward nodded, and Charlie Brazil switched on the grinder, ignoring them as they made their way back out through the workshop.

8

When they reached the Garda station, Cormac hesitated for a moment before they went inside. He pulled his car keys out of his pocket and handed them to Nora.

“Just in case you need them,” he said. He might as well have said what he was really thinking: Just in case they arrest me. “You can wait here for a while if you like, but I’m betting it’ll take more than a few minutes. Maybe I should just ring you when they’re finished with me.”

She took the keys, letting her fingers rest lightly on his upturned palm; then he turned and walked through the door. “Cormac Maguire,” he said to the officer at the front desk. “Here to see Detective Ward. He’s expecting me.”

Just a few moments after Ward had taken Cormac away to an interview room, Detective Brennan stuck her head through the inner door. “Dr. Gavin? If you’d come with me, we can have you sign your statement upstairs.”

They passed through what appeared to be a squad room and turned into a stairwell at the building’s rear. Their feet clattered on the concrete stairs, making a hollow, metallic echo in the stuffy stairwell. More desks, more phones upstairs, then a nondescript room with a table and several chairs—an interview room. Cormac was probably just next door. Nora knew they would not have brought her here just to sign a statement; they weren’t finished with her yet, and it was this woman’s job to get something more out of her.

Brennan set a sheaf of typed papers on the table, just out of reach. “We have your earlier statement here ready for you to sign, Dr. Gavin, but we wanted to give you the opportunity to add to it, if you wish to do so.”

Nora studied Detective Brennan’s face: broad, with a generous mouth; thick hair cut in a style that said she was a woman who tolerated a minimum of fuss.

“I’m not sure what you’d like me to add.”

“You live in Dublin, but are staying out here for the moment at—” She checked the typed sheet. “—the Crosses, a house owned by Evelyn McCrossan, is that correct?”

“Yes. You know all this; it’s in my statement.”

“Just want to make sure there’s nothing you’ve inadvertently left out. Now, as I understand it, you’re assisting with the excavation at Loughnabrone, and the archaeologist in charge of that excavation was Ursula Downes.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that. Ursula was in charge of the bog road excavation, and in the course of that work, her team found the remains that the National Museum team was recovering over the past few days. I was consulting with the National Museum on that secondary excavation.”

“I see. And Ursula’s crew also found the body of Danny Brazil, who apparently was murdered at Loughnabrone Bog twenty-six years ago.”

“Yes.”

“All rather strange and coincidental, isn’t it? It’s also coincidental that your fellow houseguest up at the Crosses is an archaeologist and knew Ursula Downes—knew her quite well, according to our information. Working with her must have been a bit awkward.”

Nora said nothing, but she felt her hands tightening into fists under the table. Brennan, despite her pleasant appearance, was quite good at this.

“Whose idea was it for you and Cormac Maguire to spend time here?”

“I don’t remember, exactly. When the body turned up at Loughnabrone, the museum asked me to come down and consult on the recovery, and when I mentioned it to Cormac, he suggested that we stay at the Crosses.”

“You came out here together from Dublin? When?”

“No. Cormac drove out here on his own last Sunday, and I came out on Monday morning. I wanted to have my own car while I was here.”

“And why did you say he came along on the trip out here?”

“I didn’t. But he told me he was working on some writing and thought a few quiet days in the country might help his concentration.”

“I see. Or maybe he thought it would be interesting to put the two women he was seeing within reach of each other? Maybe the danger of that situation appealed to him. Surely he’d seen Ursula Downes being interviewed on television about the bog body. Surely he’d heard she was working on the site. Isn’t that why he came out here?”

He’d never said anything to her about Ursula before they’d made their plans. “No. I had to be here for the excavation, and he came along to write.”

“Did he mention anything to you about Ursula Downes visiting him at the Crosses on Sunday evening?” Brennan asked.

“Yes, he told me she stopped by just after he got in.”

“This was something he volunteered on his own when you arrived?”

“No, he told me this morning—” Only this morning, after he’d found out Ursula was dead. But what Detective Brennan was suggesting could not be true.

“Can you tell us where Dr. Maguire was last night?”

“He was with me.”

“All night?”

Nora hesitated slightly, trying to feel her way through this minefield, to tell the truth without damning Cormac. “We were together all evening. I fell asleep about eleven-thirty, and he was with me. When I woke up at seven this morning, he was there as well.”

“And in the intervening hours, from half-eleven to seven a.m.?”

“I told you, I was asleep.”

“You didn’t wake in the middle of the night?”

“No, I was very tired.” She felt the calm gray eyes survey every inch of her face. Brennan switched gears again.

“I suppose all archaeologists have their own gear that they bring to an excavation—do you know anything about that? I’d no idea they actually use bricklayers’ trowels; I suppose I thought it would be something more sophisticated than that. And everyone all done up in waterproofs. I suppose the weather doesn’t make all that much difference out on a bog. Wet above, wet below.”

“Yes. It’s very soggy work.” A whirlwind of images swirled in Nora’s brain: all the genderless figures out on the bog, Cormac’s waterproof jacket hanging on the hook above his wellingtons last night, and the empty peg she’d seen this morning, the arterial blood spray on the wall at Ursula’s house, and, though she tried to resist it, the image of an arm encased in a yellow rubber sleeve pulling a blade in a sharp motion across Ursula’s slender throat. She knew Detective Brennan was watching these visions pass in front of her eyes.

“Cormac kept his waterproofs outside the back door of the house. Anyone could have taken them.” She realized her misstep a second too late.

“Kept them outside the door? So you’re saying they’re not there now? When did you notice they were missing?”

“This morning as I left the house to go to the bog.”

“So just before you discovered Ursula Downes’s body?”

“Yes.”

“And when did you last notice Dr. Maguire’s waterproofs hanging in their usual place?”

“Yesterday evening, when we got home from a walk after dinner. He wore his wellingtons on the walk, and put them back under his waterproofs when we got home.”

“What time was that?”

“It was almost dark—about ten-thirty, I suppose.”

“So between approximately ten-thirty last night and half-seven this morning, Dr. Maguire’s waterproofs went missing.”

Nora had the sinking feeling that she was digging Cormac in even deeper, but she couldn’t lie without making things worse. She couldn’t hear the rest of Brennan’s words. The world had gone pear-shaped in front of her eyes. Was there anything Cormac had not told her about his visit to Ursula? Stay calm, urged the voice in her head. They’re doing this on purpose, to get at you. It’s all part of the interrogation technique, to get you to question Cormac’s word, tell them something you shouldn’t tell. But you’ve told the truth. Who had told them Cormac had been involved with Ursula? Had he told them himself, or was there some other evidence? Or maybe it was just speculation on their part. The police had to sort fact from fiction all the time, and they, like all humans, made mistakes, and jumped to conclusions, too eager to find connections where there were none.

“Put yourself in my position, Dr. Gavin,” Brennan was saying. “We have to follow all possible leads, and when we see a past relationship with a victim, physical evidence at the scene, and an eyewitness account, we have to look into it.”

Nora tried to focus, to slow her racing thoughts. “Of course you do,” she said. “I understand perfectly. But I hope you’re looking into all the other possible suspects as well.”

“Oh, we are. But did I happen to mention that Ursula put up quite a struggle, and that we found blood and skin under her fingernails? We ought to be able to match that with the person who strangled her and cut her throat. I’m encouraged by that news, but I’m afraid Ursula Downes is beyond encouragement.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Detective Brennan. I found her body, remember? I couldn’t be more aware of a victim’s plight. But Cormac Maguire is not the one you’re looking for. He’s not, and I’d stake my life on it.”

“Well, Dr. Gavin, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” She pushed the statement in front of Nora and offered a pen. “Just sign and date the statement, if you would. Then I can see you out.”

Emerging from the station, Nora felt as if the world had changed while she was inside. The faces of the people passing by looked harder, more sinister; the very light looked harsher and more unforgiving than it had less than an hour ago. She had two talismans, the car keys Cormac had handed her and her mobile phone. She checked the phone’s battery—still good, for another while at least. He’d said he would ring as soon as they were finished with him. Surely they wouldn’t—no, she couldn’t let herself imagine that they would keep him in custody. But if they tried, he might not kick up enough fuss about it, thinking that everything would come right somehow.

Gazing across the busy street, Nora saw another little whirlwind like the one she’d seen out on the bog, only smaller, more compact, and remembered Owen Cadogan’s words: The fairy wind. They say nothing good comes after. A strong gust suddenly pulled a spout of dust and leaves several feet up into the air, where it lost cohesion and fell apart, once more becoming just a harmless heap underfoot—the stuff we tread through day after day, she thought. And it’s the same with evil; it comes from nowhere, from the things and people around us every day, and recedes back into them. How else to explain lynch mobs, death squads, mankind’s cruel history of spontaneous, senseless slaughter? Ancient people everywhere had explanations for it: tricksters, evil spirits, ill winds; the eyes they saw everywhere, leering, grimacing, taking glee in the disruption of order. Nora found herself offering up a tiny, wordless prayer for Cormac’s safekeeping, and for her own.

Another thought struck her as she walked toward the jeep. They might just take a cheek swab or blood sample for typing and DNA analysis, and be finished with him within a few minutes. It would be silly to go home if that were the case. Nora crossed the street and pushed open the door of Coughlan’s Hotel, then the door under a sign with three carved wooden knots that read “Lounge Bar.” Inside was a rather old-fashioned blend of burnished wood and brass, tapestry-upholstered stools and benches. Nora ordered a cappuccino and sat at a table near the bar, stirring a sugar lump into the coffee hiding beneath the white foam.

Three knots. There had been three knots in the cords that strangled both Danny Brazil and Ursula Downes. Maybe that wasn’t the only connection. If only she could get her thoughts to order themselves. She needed a logical plan of action, not this chaotic jumble of half-drawn connections and questions.

She wondered whether the certainty she felt about Cormac’s innocence was the same certainty felt by people whose loved ones maintained their innocence when they really were guilty. Cormac might be guilty of other things—guilty of gallantry laced with stupidity in venturing over to Ursula’s house that night, without a single witness to support his story. Why hadn’t he brought her with him, if he’d only gone to assuage Ursula’s fears? Detective Brennan had done an excellent job of raising all the unanswered questions that had been lying dormant in her mind.

She looked across the bar and saw a half-familiar figure. The man from Ursula’s house this morning—Quill. When people said a man looked distinguished, they meant he looked like Desmond Quill, who had the sort of face that weathered nicely over time. He was probably over sixty, but broad-shouldered and trim, with well-defined, even features, a square jaw, and a full head of silver hair. Something in his upright posture suggested an elegant wading bird, a gray heron. Nora didn’t know the man, but as she approached, the set of his shoulders and the double whiskey in front of him filled her with a spreading ache.

“Mr. Quill?”

He didn’t turn; his eyes only flickered upward briefly, and did not rest on her face.

“You were at Ursula’s house this morning,” he said, his speech noticeably slowed by alcohol. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

She slid onto the bench across from him, and he didn’t object. “Nora Gavin. I’m so very sorry about Ursula. I heard you say that you were a friend—”

“They won’t let me go, you know. Not until their investigation proves that I’m not a cold-blooded killer. As if I—” He rubbed his temple as if massaging a vein that throbbed there, closed his eyes and breathed in deeply through his nose. Nora stared at his crinkled-tissue eyelids, the deep lines in his face that actually enhanced rather than detracted from its attractiveness. “I told them everything I know,” he said. “That she phoned me in Dublin last night, said someone had been bothering her. She didn’t say who it was, only that she was a bit anxious. I asked if she was in any physical danger, and she said—” He couldn’t go on for a moment. “She said she didn’t think it would go that far. I told her I’d be down first thing, to help her get things sorted out. I wasn’t going to let her stay in a place where she might be in danger. She promised to ring the police if anything else happened.” He looked up, his eyes searing into Nora’s face.

“I knew her only briefly. I wish—”

“What do you wish?”

“I wish there were something I could do.”

“Do you know who killed her?”

“No. I mean—I don’t know. You said someone was harassing her?”

“Yes, that’s what she told me. Ringing her at all hours, spraying paint on the windows. I offered to come out here last night, but she said no, nothing would happen, I should wait until the morning. And so I played my usual game of chess, and I lost.”

He lifted his eyes to meet hers, and she felt a sudden transfixion. Then he looked away, as if he’d felt it too. The amber whiskey before him looked thick and sweet, clinging to the clear glass as he lifted it and swallowed. Nora studied the way his Adam’s apple rose and fell above the crisply pressed white shirt. Quill had one of those faces that seemed almost not to have any pores, so fine and fresh was the skin. She looked at his necktie, pulled loose at the collar, but still secured with a very unusual pin: a bronze disc, into which an ancient design had been engraved, a triskelion, a graceful trio of spiraling curves.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the Guards,” Quill said. “I have a suspicion about who might have been threatening Ursula. She told me that she had a brief—and, by her account, wholly unsatisfactory—liaison with Owen Cadogan last summer. It was long over, at least on her part, but Cadogan was evidently having trouble letting go.” So the contempt she had seen in Ursula’s face, and the anger in Cadogan’s eyes, had been real, Nora thought. She had been witness to the unraveling of a relationship, with all the pain and bitterness that entailed.

Quill drew back slightly and studied her expression. “You think it strange that Ursula would tell me about her affairs.”

“No, not necessarily.”

“You do. That’s all right, too. She wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into with her. Thought that, if I knew the worst about her, I’d be warned off; but it didn’t work that way. She fascinated me, absorbed me. Why am I telling you all this?” He stared down at the whiskey, then up at her. “She wanted to tell me about her lovers. And I wanted to hear because she felt the need to tell me. No doubt some people, maybe even most people, would think that strange. I can’t say it’s not. I don’t defend or deny. It’s just a fact. It is. And I daresay there are stranger things in the world than the need to confess, to take someone into your confidence. Lets you feel, perhaps, slightly less alone.”

“Why you? Why did she choose you as her confessor?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve refrained from passing judgment. Isn’t that what love does?”

Nora thought it quite possible that she’d never had such a peculiar conversation with a complete stranger. Sometimes death had a way of cutting through polite social customs. And, in a way, she found Quill’s lack of embarrassment quite exhilarating. His fingers circled the glass in front of him. They were long and slender, almost out of proportion to the rest of him, and Nora felt as if she could see clearly, through the skin, how each finger’s knobby metacarpal fitted against its cuplike base.

“I didn’t really know Ursula,” she said. “I only met her a few times, out on the bog. But I found her this morning, and I suppose that makes me feel as if I should have made an effort to know her better.”

“What do you want to know? I wonder what it says about the human race that we’re so much more interested in the dead than in the living. While she lived, no one inquired after Ursula—what sort of a person she was, what moved her, excited her, allowed her to get out of bed each morning. Now that she’s dead, you’re just the latest in a series of people who’ve asked me that same question. I’m not trying to make you feel bad, Miss Gavin; it’s just curious to me. Being with Ursula was like getting a strong electric jolt. Everything she did crackled; there was no sitting things out, no passivity. Who would want to see that extinguished?”

Nora thought of the Ursula Downes she’d seen, provoking Owen Cadogan, mocking Charlie Brazil, and wondered whether Desmond Quill’s judgment had been clouded by his feelings. Then she remembered the ghastly sight that had greeted her only a few hours earlier and knew that, no matter what she’d done, Ursula Downes hadn’t deserved the death she had met today.

“We met only a few months ago,” Quill said. “An exhibition opening at the National Museum. We were strangers, passing at a reception. I know it seems ridiculous, but sometimes you experience a kind of sudden recognition, and that’s what I felt from the start. No illusions. Ursula was the only person with whom I ever felt that sort of kinship. The world saw us both in the same light, I suppose: cold, a little hard, perhaps. I prefer to think of it as being unsentimental. But there was ample reason for Ursula’s mistrust of the world. It’s a common reaction to betrayal. Think of it; the one person you depend on for protection, turning around and using that very vulnerability against you.” He stared into the nearly empty whiskey glass, his expression distant, remembering.

“I don’t think Ursula ever told anyone except me what her stepfather made of her. He used her mother’s illness as an excuse, started coming to her room when he’d closed up the dry-cleaning shop for the night. She was just a child, and there was no safe place to run. Eventually he stopped. She grew up, you see—became a young woman, not a child anymore, and so she no longer fit within the bounds of his twisted fixation. Ursula said that sometimes, after everything else, it still felt as though the worst cruelty was the way in which he finally rejected her. That she actually came to hate herself for growing up. Can you imagine such a monster? He left his mark on her. It wasn’t just the physical scars that remained forever.”

There was nothing Nora could do but listen. Of course all the tiny facets of Ursula she’d seen were not the whole picture. But what became of all the other undetectable, irreducible essences that made up any human being, when the person was no longer there? One of the most terrible things about murder was that it made for an unfair summing-up, a life abridged far too soon. She still wasn’t sure why Desmond Quill was telling her all this. Perhaps he hadn’t planned to do so; maybe the shock had been more than he realized. After all, it was only this morning that he had arrived at the house to find that Ursula Downes, his singular vision of the future, was dead.

“I suppose some people would look at Ursula and me and see an old man using a younger woman to regain the illusion of lasting life. I was laboring under no misconceptions, mind you. I’m not young—I’ll be sixty-seven in October—and I understood completely that Ursula had certain needs, certain desires that I might not be able to fulfill. I wouldn’t have stood in her way. She didn’t belong to me; it isn’t—wasn’t—that kind of possessive relationship. But in many ways we were uncommonly well-suited. If only she’d let me look after her, she wouldn’t have been out here again. But she could be terribly willful. Exasperating at times.” He took another swallow of whiskey, and Nora wondered how many he’d had before she arrived. He began shifting the change that sat beside his glass on the table, arranging the coins into triangles, then rows of three, like some elaborate game of noughts and crosses. She watched the elegant fingers moving slowly, surely, deliberately.

“You said you wished there was something you could do,” Quill said. “Maybe there is. You can tell me about her last few days here.” He seized Nora’s hand; she tried instinctively to pull it away, but he held her fast. “I need to find out what happened to her. I’ve got to know.” The muscles in his jaw went taut; then his head drooped toward his chest, and he let her go. “I’m sorry…. Do you know what she asked me, just before she rang off last night? She asked whether I thought three was a lucky or an unlucky number. What do you think she meant by that?”

Nora looked down at the coins on the table, neatly arranged in three rows of three. Just then her mobile began to chirp and vibrate against her hip. She couldn’t answer it, not now; she needed room to breathe and think. She had to get out of here, away from Desmond Quill with his deliberate hands and his disjointed grief and his sweet whiskey breath. She stood up suddenly and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to go now.” Desmond Quill stood as well, at least a head taller than she was, but unsteady on his feet.

When she reached the jeep, she sat in the driver’s seat, flipped open her phone, and retrieved the voice mail message. It was Cormac. “It looks like I’m going to be here another while. Why don’t you go home for now? I’ll ring you again when they’re finished with me.” A pause. “Talk to you later, Nora.” How strange that the device she held in her hand could contain all that was in those final words: disappointment, puzzlement, a plaintive sliver of hope.

9

The conversation with Desmond Quill had unsettled Nora, and she arrived back at the Crosses unsure what to do next. Climbing out of the car, she saw the empty peg where Cormac’s waterproofs had hung the previous night. Where were they now, and why had Detective Brennan been so full of questions about when she’d seen them last? The detectives must have thought they had something concrete; otherwise Brennan wouldn’t have wasted precious time asking pointed questions. Surely they didn’t think Cormac would be that thick—to wear his own protective gear while committing a murder, and then stash it near the crime scene? She thought of him in a windowless interview room, trying to explain what seemed inexplicable, even to himself—why he’d gone to Ursula’s house, how her blood had gotten all over his clothing. Things looked bad for Cormac unless they could come up with evidence placing someone else at the scene as well. And with a prime suspect who had conveniently presented himself on their doorstep—at her insistence, she recalled—would they even try?

After hearing Desmond Quill’s suspicions, Nora was more convinced than ever that Owen Cadogan had something to do with Ursula’s murder. But what was she going to do—phone up Cadogan’s wife and ask if he’d been home all night? Surely the police would do that much. Her statement on its own wouldn’t be enough, of course; they would need hard evidence. Quill said that someone had sprayed paint on Ursula’s windows; maybe there was some way Cadogan could be tied to the scene through that….She knew she was grasping at straws, jumping to conclusions too fast. Maybe Quill’s suspicions had made her too focused on Owen Cadogan.

If it wasn’t Cadogan—well, Cormac wasn’t the only person who might have traveled to Ursula’s house on foot. Michael Scully had told them that the Brazils were his closest neighbors, that Danny Brazil’s apiary was just over the hill behind the house. And Danny’s apiary was now in Charlie Brazil’s care. From the conversation she’d overheard between Ursula and Charlie, it seemed that Ursula had been for some reason keenly interested in the recovery of Danny Brazil’s body. Nora tried to remember exactly what Ursula had said—something about Danny’s triple-knotted cord not being such a good luck charm. Was that what Ursula had meant, asking Quill if he thought three was a lucky or an unlucky number? I’ve been watching you, she’d said to Charlie. I know what you’re hiding. But when Charlie had asked what she wanted from him, she’d said, Maybe I have something to give you. Her words had been a proposition, in more ways than one. Come and see me, she’d commanded. As if he’d have no choice but to obey.

Nora closed her eyes and went back to the previous night, trying to picture what they’d seen from the top of the small hill. From what she remembered, anyone up there could have seen down into Ursula’s kitchen. Cormac said he’d seen Brona Scully at the fairy tree; maybe she’d been up there last night. But that hopeful idea was immediately tamped down by reality. Even if she had been, even if she’d seen something, how was that supposed to do Cormac any good? The girl didn’t speak a word. One might as well try to coax testimony from a silent standing stone. If Brona had seen something…the more Nora thought about it, the more that possibility disturbed the edges of her consciousness. It wouldn’t hurt to find out what the girl could have seen from the fairy tree.

The scrappy whitethorn bush made an arresting sight even in the bright light of day. The setting was just as Nora had remembered: from the pasture atop the hill, a person could indeed see straight down into Ursula’s back garden. The empty kitchen window still yawned jaggedly, and crime-scene tape still marked out the perimeter of the house and garden. She tried to picture Ursula’s figure in the house—and Cormac coming up over this hill and down into Ursula’s yard. She didn’t like to think about what had followed, but she had to, if she was going to help Cormac. She stood in the spot where a witness might have stood only a few hours ago and imagined how events must have unfolded.

Cormac was not guilty of murder—he couldn’t be; but Brona Scully’s silence might be his undoing. How much would Brona have been able to see at night—presuming she even came here after dark? There was no sign of the girl, but Nora still felt ill at ease, wondering if there were eyes upon her. She had a distinct, unsettling feeling that someone was watching her from the tangled bushes at the edge of the field. She turned slowly back toward the fairy tree, searching the hedgerows for signs of life, but nothing stirred.

She heard the sound of breathing behind her, and whirled around to find a red bullock with a creamy-white face regarding her curiously from a few yards away. From what Michael Scully had told them, Nora guessed the cattle grazing in the surrounding pastures belonged to the Brazils. Charlie’s apiary was probably somewhere up here as well. She kept thinking of Ursula’s words: 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…. Was it blackmail, or another kind of threat that had lingered in her words? I’ve been watching you, Charlie. I know what you’re hiding. What if it was something in that forbidden knowledge that had gotten Ursula killed?

Nora had another vision of Cormac sitting in that dreary interview room, answering the same questions again and again, facing disbelieving expressions on the faces of the detectives across the table. Ursula’s blood was on his clothing, and she had left scratches on his neck. It was possible that unless Nora found some other path for them to follow, Cormac’s whole life might be forfeit for something he hadn’t done.

She checked her watch. Charlie Brazil wouldn’t be at the apiary just yet. At midsummer bees had to be tended quite closely and checked at least once a day, she knew, but Charlie probably worked until at least four o’clock on the bog. She wasn’t sure what direction to choose, until she saw several bees, heavily laden with golden pollen, rise up out of a wild rose hedge beside her and fly off unsteadily away from the Crosses and the way she’d come. She followed the cattle path and saw the circle of trees first, then the hives, set like standing stones around the open ground in its center. Off to one side was a house, with door and window frames gaping open to all weather. No one was about except for bees, buzzing in the midsummer plenty amid the globes of clover. She had no protective gear, but she didn’t feel nervous. The insects were consumed in their business, and not interested in her.

Walking into a house with no door didn’t seem as intrusive as breaking and entering, but Nora still felt strange, venturing into Charlie Brazil’s beekeeping shed. Two things drove her past the discomfort: the image of Cormac being interviewed as a suspect, and the lingering regret she always carried with her that she had not done more, had not pushed harder to find things out when her sister was still alive. She couldn’t afford to risk timidity anymore.

The door frame had once been painted green, and the whitewash had long ago crumbled from the walls with damp. She stepped across the threshold and saw a ragged curtain tacked to the window frame with nails. You could imagine a father and mother in their traditional places by the fire, and thin-faced barefoot children in pinafores. Was there no place in Ireland that wasn’t hip-deep in ghosts?

Charlie Brazil had stacked new frames along the walls. His bee suit, hat, and veil hung on a hook beside the doorway, and his smoker—a small can with a built-in bellows that keepers use to control their bees—sat ready on the window ledge with a box of matches beside it. Under one of the small windows sat a plain metal cot, blanket neatly tucked under the mattress. Someone stayed here—if not every night, then at least from time to time. A dozen or more small holes in the thick, crumbling quicklime of the wall at the bed’s foot said something had been tacked up there, and fairly recently, too. Nora got down on her knees to look under the cot, and saw something like a postcard lying facedown on the dirt floor next to the wall. Reaching one hand in, half afraid of what she would find, she felt the thick, smooth paper.

The image on the other side was not a photograph, as she’d half imagined, but a detailed pen-and-ink drawing, like those she’d seen in Cormac’s archaeology books, only this one was graying slightly with mildew. Its subject was a plate or shield, with decoration that was vaguely familiar; something about it said Iron Age. She let her fingers travel over the sinuous S-curves and scrolls, drawn on paper here as they had been engraved in the original metal. What was a drawing like this doing in Charlie Brazil’s beekeeping shed? She noted the pinhole in the paper, with a thumbtack still through it, and counted the pinholes in the wall; seventeen, regularly placed, as if more drawings like this had once hung there. Was this what Ursula had found?

Nora slipped the drawing into her jacket pocket and looked around the tiny room once more. She wondered what had become of the people who had lived here. The house seemed to have been abandoned more or less intact; the worm-eaten shelves built against the dividing wall were still stacked with cracked cups and saucers. Someone kept the bare floor swept fairly regularly, presumably with the broom that stood in the corner, and the wooden steps up into the loft had been mended recently; several nail heads shone against the weathered wood. She tested the first step, and, finding it sturdy enough, ventured up the short ladder into the attic. An open suitcase lay on the floor. She stooped to examine the contents scattered about: clothing that looked as if it had been torn to shreds, a jumbled pile of newspaper cuttings, and some old photos, faded with time and weather. The top photograph, sticky with honey, showed a young woman. From the clothing she wore, the picture seemed to have been taken some time ago. Nora closed the suitcase and looked for initials, a tag, anything that would tell her whose belongings these were; but the warped cardboard shell gave up no clue, just fell apart where the hinges were coming loose. She continued looking around the cramped attic room, strewn with old junk, rusted nails, and wire. Maybe Charlie was digging up artifacts like the disc in the drawing, and that was what Ursula had been on to. According to Niall Dawson, digging up antiquities without a license was a criminal offense—but would such a thing be worth killing for?

A noise came from below; someone was in the house. Nora felt a surge of adrenaline as she flattened herself along the floor. The smell of dust and damp filled her nostrils, and she prayed that she wouldn’t sneeze or choke and give herself away. There were wide cracks between the floorboards, and she could see into the room downstairs.

It was Charlie Brazil. But he made no move toward his suit and gloves. He was here for something else. Nora held her breath and watched as he knelt by the fireplace. With the poker he prised up a gray flagstone at one corner. He removed a flat tin box from the place beneath and set it on the floor beside him, then moved the stone back into place and scattered a few ashes over it. Nora tried to pull herself along the floor without making a noise, to get a better vantage point.

Charlie opened the box, lifted out a handful of drawings like the one Nora had tucked in her pocket, then checked through the other objects the box contained. She heard the sound of metal on metal, and saw ring money, bracelets, an ax-head, coins. Charlie reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a primitive dagger, and drew the blade from its sheath. The dull bronze glowed in his hands, and it was clear to Nora, even at a distance, that the knife was not a modern implement. A thrill of cold fear traveled through her. This could be the knife that had been used on Ursula Downes. If Ursula had found out about Charlie’s hoard of artifacts, what would she have done? Perhaps she’d wanted in on it. Charlie had said people asked him where the gold was buried, the things Dominic and Danny Brazil had supposedly kept from the Loughnabrone hoard. Nora tried to remember exactly what Ursula had said to Charlie that afternoon. I know what you’re hiding.

She felt something on her left ankle, down near the place where the roof met the floor. One of Charlie’s bees had found the space between her trouser leg and sock, and was crawling slowly up toward her knee. She couldn’t move for fear of making a noise, so she held her breath and willed the bloody insect to turn around and go back from whence it had come. She’d have to be very careful not to provoke it; she knew from experience that a stinging bee gives off a pheromone that encourages other bees to join in the attack. And she’d seen what kind of damage a swarm of angry honeybees could do. The alternative was giving herself away and getting out now—a prospect she did not relish, looking down on the knife that might have cut Ursula’s throat.

Charlie slipped the dagger back into its sheath, then placed it carefully in his pocket and slid the tin into a cloth sack he’d pulled from another pocket. He was shifting these things; maybe Ursula had found them, and he feared another discovery. The bee inched its way toward her left knee, and Nora had to fight the urge to smash it and run. If only Charlie would get out, so she could move, get away from here…He stood, looking around the room. Nora twitched involuntarily as she felt the bee move again, then froze as Charlie started to mount the staircase. He stopped with his head just inside the upstairs room, listening intently, and Nora hoped that her breathing wasn’t audible from where he stood, that he couldn’t feel the vibration as her heart wrenched violently against her ribs. She felt the bee sting, like a nettle’s hot-cold touch, until the pain blurred together into a single throbbing mass. She tried to still her mind, deaden her senses, breathe silently despite the awful fear that she would cry out.

After a few seconds, Charlie’s head disappeared, and he climbed back down the ladder and left the shed. Nora waited as long as she could, then peeled off her jeans, batting at the bee, though she knew it couldn’t sting her again. She scrambled to her feet, flailing her arms and legs to shake it off, and almost tripped down the ladder. She ran out of the house, up onto the pasture above the apiary, trying desperately to put distance between herself and the angry bees, waving her empty trousers behind her. Her left ankle already felt swollen and hot as her body’s natural histamine rushed to fight off the poison. She began to limp, and stopped at the pasture gate to catch her breath and put her trousers back on. The ankle had started to swell. Stepping into her jeans, she heard a noise in the bushes behind her, and turned to see Charlie Brazil, red with embarrassment at her state of undress.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

Nora’s mind raced through possible responses. Charlie had nothing in his hands now; he must have hidden the artifacts somewhere nearby. “I was just out for some air,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for the honey, if you were around. I’m afraid I strayed too close to the hives.” She lifted her trouser leg and showed off the swollen ankle. “Stupid of me. I should have known better.”

“Let me see that,” he said, dropping to one knee and cradling her ankle in his hands. His touch felt cool against her skin. “You’re not allergic to bee stings, are you? Do you need some help getting home?”

Nora remembered the dagger Charlie had removed from his pocket. “I’m sure I can make it on my own,” she said. “There’s no need—”

“You shouldn’t put your full weight on that ankle. Come on, I’ll walk you.” He was close enough that she could smell the tang of sweat his body gave off after a day’s work. It was possible that she’d completely misread Charlie Brazil from the start. He stood and was about to put one arm about her waist, but the thought suddenly struck her: What if he found the drawing in her pocket? She pulled away.

“No, really, I can make it on my own. I’m all right.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. “Why are you afraid of me?”

“I’m not. You’ve rescued me once already, that first day out on the bog. I just don’t think it’s necessary. You’ve things to do, I’m sure, and I’ll be fine on my own.” Her eyes brushed involuntarily across the knotted cord around his neck, then slid away, but he’d seen her hesitation.

“What is it—this?” Charlie lifted the cord between his fingers and looked at her accusingly. “Ursula was very interested in this too.”

He wasn’t prepared when Nora bolted, ducking under his arm and fleeing headlong down the path toward the Scullys’ house and the Crosses, as fast as she could run on her swelling ankle. Charlie probably could have caught her if he’d really wished to, but he let her go.

Nora’s hands were trembling when she finally made it into the cottage and bolted the door behind her. Her ankle throbbed, and she limped to the fridge to see if there was any ice. One tray—it would have to do for now. She dumped the cubes into a plastic bag and twisted it shut, holding it to her still swelling ankle.

At first she had been almost certain that Owen Cadogan had something to do with Ursula’s death. But after what she had seen just now, she couldn’t be sure that Charlie Brazil wasn’t involved as well. There were too many connections between Charlie and Ursula to rest on mere coincidence. She had nothing substantial enough to bring to the authorities, just a vague collection of hunches and suppositions. And yet she knew that all the things she’d seen had to add up somehow. Remembering why she had come here in the first place, to find out more about a man who had been either executed or sacrificed, Nora realized with a sinking feeling that she couldn’t possibly stop now; there was too much at stake. Owen Cadogan had called the superstitions surrounding the fairy wind a load of old rubbish but, thinking back to that day, Nora knew that nothing good had come after it.

10

Ward left the superintendent’s office and walked slowly back to his desk. They would have company on the Ursula Downes murder, as he had suspected. The unusual nature of the case, not to mention the whiff of ritual killing, had piqued the attention of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and they were sending down a contingent to assist the local detective force. To the Bureau, “assist” meant something slightly more than the term generally implied. It meant he and Maureen Brennan had only a few more hours to come up with results before the Dublin boys in the expensive suits rolled in to take over the case.

He came up behind Brennan, who was pinning up crime-scene photos and other pertinent scraps of information on the board behind her desk, lining up a neat column for each of their lines of inquiry. “They’ll be here Monday afternoon to set up their incident room.” Her lips pressed together in a subtle expression of annoyance. “I know, but we’ll have to just bear it.”

“What did the superintendent say about the search for Rachel Briscoe?”

“I told him we’ve got several men and some local volunteers out looking for her already, handing out photos, asking if anyone’s seen her, and that they’re having no luck at all. We’ll mount a coordinated search in the morning if there’s no word.”

“What are we calling her at this point—suspect or material witness?”

“She’s only wanted for questioning, but that could change. Some of her coworkers seem convinced that she was obsessed with Ursula Downes, possibly stalking her. From the binoculars—and the way her colleagues describe her attachment to them—it seems likely that Rachel was at the house last night.”

“What about that knife found at the scene?”

“It’s being processed, but Dr. Friel didn’t seem to think it was the murder weapon.”

“Why not?”

“The blade is serrated; from what she’s seen so far, Dr. Friel’s of the opinion that the knife that cut the victim’s throat had a straight edge. I still think Rachel Briscoe is probably the key to everything. If she didn’t kill Ursula Downes, there’s a chance she might have seen the person who did.”

It was still early in the investigation, Ward realized, but they were very short of information on the victim. The house where Ursula Downes had been staying was only temporary quarters, and it had yielded very little useful information about her; the testimony they’d been able to gather so far from people who’d had contact with her here was sketchy and incomplete. They needed a fuller picture of the victim in order to imagine the crime.

He reached for the rucksack he’d brought back from the scene, and started to go through the contents. Brennan listed and described each object on an inventory form as he extracted it from the bag. “Appointment diary—not much in it; I’ll have a look through that. Clipboard and paperwork—related to the excavation, looks like. Pens and pencils. Small purse with identification, driving license, business cards, fifty-seven euros and—” He counted out the change. “Forty-three cents. Mobile phone. Why don’t you have a look at the phone—check all the calls made and received in the past few days. By the way, what’s the word from Dublin—have they been in touch about the search of Ursula’s flat?”

“They’re sending a team over right now,” Maureen said, looking at her watch. “Anything else you need from them? What about Desmond Quill—hadn’t we better check his alibi as well? I mean, it’s unlikely that he drove out here, cut her throat, and then hung around to see who might discover the body, but we’ve still got to check him out.”

“Yes, see if they can send someone ’round to check Quill’s story for Thursday evening. He says he was playing his usual chess game that night, and was occupied with that until quite late. Dr. Friel puts time of death between midnight and four a.m., so if we can eliminate Quill, we can concentrate on a few of the others.”

“Ah, yes—the others.”

“Let’s go over the interview notes, see where we might have a few holes where we can start digging.”

Maureen reached for her notebook and flipped back a few pages to the start of the interviews on the case. “Nora Gavin says she saw Owen Cadogan making threatening gestures toward Ursula Downes on Monday afternoon last. Dr. Gavin also says that the following day, Ursula turned the tables, giving Cadogan a slap in the face and a right old tongue-lashing. A couple of very public quarrels with the victim in the days running up to the murder, and no alibi for that night.”

Ward remembered Cadogan’s tight-lipped secretary. “Unless perhaps Aileen Flood has a slightly different story than the one he gave us. Let’s wait and talk with her tomorrow. And don’t forget we also have Desmond Quill’s statement, saying Ursula was seeing Owen Cadogan last summer, and that he’d been harassing her since she arrived last week—ringing her mobile, leaving crude messages on her windows. There was something that looked like red spray paint on the broken window glass in the bin in Ursula’s kitchen. I sent it along to the lab; if it was one of those messages Quill described, they might be able to reconstruct it, tell us what it said. Her mobile also ought to tell us if Cadogan was the person ringing her up day and night.”

“His story about warning Ursula off Charlie Brazil sounds to me like a complete load of rubbish. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Ursula wasn’t somehow involved with Charlie Brazil.”

Ward considered that possibility. “We’ve got Dr. Gavin’s statement that she overheard Charlie speaking with Ursula Downes—she was blackmailing him, threatening to expose something he’d been hiding.”

“What do people normally want to keep hidden?” Brennan said. “Bastard children, buried treasure, family skeletons…Whatever it is, though, we’re going to have a job finding out, since he flatly denies that conversation ever took place. We should also check out that place he mentioned—the pipe shed on the road to the old power station.”

“What do you think of Charlie’s story about building a midsummer bonfire?”

“Ah, come on, Liam. Nobody does that anymore.”

Ward thought back to Charlie Brazil’s guarded expression when he’d talked to them about the bonfire. Brennan wasn’t often wrong, but he thought she was mistaken in this case. The attraction of fire was deep and instinctive, inexplicable, and there were certain areas, especially in the West, where people still made huge bonfires on special nights. Ward felt suddenly pierced by the memory of an incident that had happened more than thirty years ago, one of his first official tasks as a young Garda officer. He’d been asked to put the boot down on a Saint John’s Eve bonfire, at the request of a parish priest who had no time for such remnants of pagan foolishness. He had driven out to the spot thinking it was probably harmless enough, wondering what the hell he was doing there. Then he’d seen the huge fire. He had stood for a long time, watching as flames and embers reached skyward, through them seeing human faces, their reddened features exaggerated and transformed into surreal masks by the firelight.

The memory receded, and Ward said, “We’ll have to go up there and check the place where Charlie Brazil said he built his bonfire. It won’t tell us if he was there all night, but at least we’ll know if he was telling the truth about the fire. Did anything turn up in the files about other ritual murder cases?”

As if reading his thoughts about conflagration, Brennan said, “There was a body found burnt to a cinder in Wicklow last winter. At first there was speculation that it might be some sort of ritual thing, but they eventually found out it was a disagreement over drugs. The victim had a bullet in him, and the fellas who put it there tried to make the killing look like a sacrifice to throw investigators off.”

“That’s it? Nothing else?”

“Nothing local, at least nothing with a human victim. Just that case you mentioned to Charlie Brazil.” She took a file from a stack on her desk and tossed it over to him. Ward opened the file and perused the reports and photographs it contained, stopping at the pictures of the butchered kid goat suspended from a slender branch. He studied the detail shots of the narrow noose, the animal’s protruding tongue, the deep gash in its distended throat, the blackening entrails. Poor harmless creature. The ground beneath the kid’s hind legs was exactly as he remembered it from the scene: stained a deep rust red, with three circles drawn in blood. A hideous prank, or some demented notion of a sacred rite?

“Tell me more about that case,” Maureen said. “You said you worked on it?”

“I’d only been here about three years. There were three separate incidents, two lambs and a kid goat killed in some apparent ritual sacrifice. It was bad—you’ve seen the file. I had a suspicion at the time that Charlie Brazil was probably just a convenient scapegoat. Now I’m not so sure.”

“What about Maguire?” Brennan turned the pages of her notebook to their most recent interview. “He says Ursula Downes reported a prowler and asked him to come over and investigate, which he did. He says she’d cut herself on glass from the kitchen window, which was broken when he arrived, and he got blood on his clothing when he helped her bind up the wound.”

“There was a fairly deep cut on Ursula’s left hand. We should ask Dr. Friel to check for any fragments of glass in the wound.”

“Right, but Maguire also admits that it’s his skin under the victim’s fingernails. He claims she attacked him when he questioned her story about the prowler and refused to stay any longer. He says he put his bloodstained clothing into the washing machine when he arrived home. Claims he doesn’t know what happened to his waterproof gear. He did keep it outside the back door of the house where anyone might have taken it. And why would you wear your own kit if you’re planning to kill someone? Wouldn’t you get a nice disposable mac? But I suppose that sort of mistake makes sense if it was a crime of passion, spur-of-the-moment. You’ve done the deed; you’re covered in blood, and for some reason you can’t take the time to get rid of the evidence. So you plant the waterproofs somewhere and hope someone will buy the idea that you’re being stitched up.”

Ward remembered the plumes of blood on Ursula Downes’s bathroom wall. She had probably been unconscious but still alive when her throat was cut, a fact that didn’t square with Maureen’s spur-of-the-moment theory. And the tableau, all that peat heaped around the bathtub, also smacked of ritualistic obsession, not crime of passion. “But why bring the waterproofs in the first place? It wasn’t raining on Thursday evening. And what about motive? Maguire admits he was involved with Ursula Downes years ago, but it doesn’t seem to have been a terrible secret. Not worth killing for.”

“Maybe it’s something else. They’re both archaeologists; maybe it’s professional. She knows something about him that he doesn’t want other people to know—something to do with his academic work, his research; something that might compromise his career, his ambitions to be department chairman one day. We’ve got to at least check him out.”

“Agreed. Let’s add him to the list for the boys in Dublin, get some background on him.”

“It would be so nice and simple if it was Maguire.”

“Wouldn’t it, though? Somehow I doubt this case is going to untangle that easily. I keep going back to this thing with the three knots,” Ward said. “Both bodies found in the bog had knotted leather cords around their necks. One’s a couple of thousand years old, one’s more recent. But the cord was how the newer body was identified; Teresa Brazil said her brother-in-law Danny always wore a similar cord with three knots, some sort of good luck charm. And then, three days after Danny’s body turns up, somebody strangles Ursula Downes with the same sort of triple-knotted cord. Both also had their throats cut. One was found in a bog, one in a bathtub that had been heaped around with peat.”

“What’s the peat supposed to mean, do you think?”

“Dr. Gavin mentioned at Danny Brazil’s postmortem that his injuries were very like some she’d seen on ancient corpses from bogs—like the one that turned up here last Friday. She said it’s not certain, but some archaeologists think they might have been human sacrifices. The idea was niggling at me, so I called around yesterday evening to ask her a few more questions about it, and she referred my questions to Maguire. He seemed well up on ancient sacrificial rites, especially the triple death Dr. Gavin mentioned—it’s supposed to have included strangulation, throat-cutting, and drowning.”

“Unfortunately, a lot of people could have had all the pertinent details on the manner of Danny Brazil’s death.” Maureen started ticking off the witnesses on her fingers. “There’s Ursula Downes, for a start, all six people on her crew, and Nora Gavin. And Maguire obviously knew about it, if you talked to him. We know for a fact that Charlie Brazil told his mother about the triple knots, because that’s how she came to think it might be Danny. And that’s not even mentioning all the people that any one of those witnesses could have spoken to after that morning. You know how information travels here; I’m betting that half the county was well up on it by Tuesday afternoon.”

She was right, of course. Still, they would have a look at the two cords. It was at least a possible connection, and there might be others as well. Ward reached for the preliminary autopsy report on Danny Brazil, and turned to Dr. Friel’s description of the injuries: The initial wound is present on the left side of the neck, over the sternocleidomastoid muscle, 6 cm below the left auditory canal. There was something tentative about the injury, as if the assailant hadn’t quite maintained control of the situation, and the victim had struggled. They didn’t have the autopsy report yet, but it was clear from what he’d seen this morning that Ursula Downes’s throat had been cut from side to side, deeply enough to sever the main arteries. Danny Brazil had drowned. Even though the modus operandi seemed similar, the two attacks had had very different results. Were they looking at the same killer, or at someone who for some reason only wanted Ursula’s death to look like Danny Brazil’s?

“What else do we know about Danny Brazil?” Ward asked. “He was twenty-four years old when he was last seen in June 1978. He was unmarried, employed at Bord na Mona as a fitter, and helping his brother, Dominic, work the family farm. Played for the Offaly senior hurling team until he suffered a career-ending injury in 1977. That was also the summer he and Dominic found a significant stash of Iron Age artifacts out on the bog. Just before Danny disappeared, they’d each received ten thousand pounds in reward money.”

“Must have thought they’d won the Lotto,” Maureen said. “Especially at that time. Nobody had two shillings to rub together.”

She was right. The amount seemed almost paltry now, but ten thousand would have been a huge sum in those days. And there were the stories that the Brazils had held out, kept some of the best pieces from the Loughnabrone hoard. People took it for granted that the rumors were true. The brothers had mostly kept to themselves, and hadn’t gone out of their way to refute the common assumption. Ward had thought at the time that the suspicions of the older generation might have been a factor in the whispered accusations against Charlie, but those were things that you could never quite describe or quantify in a file. Some people said that finding the hoard had actually brought bad luck on the Brazils. The question remained: Was there some connection between Danny Brazil’s death and the murder of Ursula Downes, or did someone just want them to make a connection?

“I know it’s tempting to make a link with the older murder,” Maureen said, “but I think we’re looking for something much more recent. At this point I’m still leaning toward a jilted lover, which would lead us straight to Owen Cadogan or Cormac Maguire. They both have motive. Cadogan’s been rejected, and after his carry-on with Ursula the previous summer, that probably wouldn’t sit well. He’d probably feel entitled. Maguire told us his relationship with Ursula Downes was long over, but suppose it wasn’t. Suppose he goes over there hoping to cool things off, and she refuses—maybe threatens to tell his new girlfriend about them. He admits arguing with her; we’ve got traces of his skin under her fingernails, and her blood is all over his waterproofs, for God’s sake. Sometimes it is just that simple, Liam.”

No, it isn’t, Ward thought. Things were never that simple. Not just every crime, but every second of existence was fraught with complications, misunderstandings, lies, and cock-ups. Ninety-nine percent of their work was sorting through the chaff to find one solid clue. They could follow dozens of leads in this case, waste precious time pursuing every twisting road to its ultimately fruitless end. Their job over the next few days or weeks would be to try to find the connections between people, connections those people were often trying very hard to hide.

It seemed to Ward that he spent half his life immersed in a shadowy, fictional world, conceiving scenarios that may or may not have happened. Most people imagined detectives as people who dealt in facts, in hard evidence—and that was a vital part of what he did. Still, much of his life remained in the subjective tense. He breathed speculative air, and so, he realized increasingly, did everyone else around him.

11

Once the ice pack had reduced the throbbing in her ankle, Nora reached into her jacket pocket for the drawing she’d robbed from Charlie Brazil. She wasn’t even sure why she’d taken it, except that it seemed somehow significant. She tried to collect her thoughts, to impose some order on all the possibilities that tumbled about in her brain. What use could her feeble theories be against the powerful reality that two people were dead? Danny Brazil and Ursula Downes had been brutally murdered. There were similarities in the way they’d been killed, but she couldn’t shake the thought that something else connected them as well, something that no one had yet grasped. The line back to Danny Brazil went even further into the past, to the time when he and his brother had discovered the Loughnabrone hoard—and, according to the rumors, gold. But if this place was anything like the other places in Ireland where she’d spent time, folklore and legend were on a fairly equal footing with fact.

Just because Charlie Brazil might be involved, that didn’t mean Cadogan was innocent. They could both have been mixed up with Ursula, for similar or very different reasons. Maybe they had all three been in something together, and no one had yet figured it out. And the boyfriend, Desmond Quill…he seemed to have no illusions about Ursula’s character, despite the fact that he was in love with her. What had Ursula thought of Quill?

Nora looked down at the drawing, its edges curled and speckled with black. Struck with a sudden idea, she carried the sketch to Cormac’s work table and rummaged through the papers for his magnifying glass. The artist’s pen strokes leapt out at her through the thick lens. The detail was exquisite; the shield’s curved surface appeared as tiny dots that blended together to form a shadow. She turned the drawing over and saw a series of circles lightly sketched in pencil, and a scribbled inscription: Below a city of sisters, beside a lake of sorrows. That was the way it was here; double and even treble meanings hidden everywhere.

The door rattled against the jamb. Was Charlie Brazil coming after her? She slipped the drawing into the nearest book and kept very still, until she heard Cormac’s voice calling through the stout door: “Nora? Are you there? I haven’t got my key.”

She crossed quickly to the door to let him in, throwing her arms around him, pressing herself into his chest. He seemed a little surprised at her greeting, but not unhappily so. “I wasn’t gone all that long, was I?” he asked. “Everything’s fine. They just asked me a lot of questions.”

“And have they finished with you now?”

“For the moment, anyway.” He tried to give her an encouraging smile, but she sensed his worry.

“How did you get home?”

“The Guards gave me a lift. I tried ringing your mobile, but I couldn’t get through. Did you have it switched off?”

“No, I was waiting for you to call. I was out of the house for a bit; maybe the signal is weak out here in the middle of the bog.”

“You shouldn’t really be wandering around by yourself, Nora. It’s not safe, not after what’s happened. Where did you go?”

“First I tried to find Brona Scully. I thought if she’d been out at the tree, she might have seen you leaving Ursula’s house the other night. Then I went over to Charlie Brazil’s apiary. Something Ursula said to him the other day made me think about it.” She limped back to the work table where she’d hidden the drawing.

Cormac’s alarm was immediate. “Nora, what happened to your leg?” She could hear the anguish behind his words, the jangling fear that she might have gone somewhere she shouldn’t have, on his behalf.

“It’s just a bee sting. I’m fine. I’ve put ice on it, and the swelling’s already starting to go down. I found out some things about Charlie Brazil that I don’t think anyone knows. He’s got a stash of what I’m fairly sure are illegal artifacts hidden somewhere up near his apiary. It makes me wonder if Ursula’s death isn’t somehow tied to all that.” She decided not to mention that she’d actually met Charlie on the expedition, or Cormac might lose sight of what was most important here—finding some connections in this ever more vexing puzzle.

“How do you know all this?”

“I was just looking around in the shed where he stores his beekeeping supplies, and I saw where he’d hidden the other things under the floor. He doesn’t know I was there. I found this, too.” She flipped through the pages of the book where she’d hidden the stolen drawing. The pages opened to the place where the postcard-size drawing lay facedown, but when Nora turned the paper over, it was not the same picture as the one she’d slipped into the book. It showed some kind of intricately decorated circlet, though whether it was a bracelet or a necklace was difficult to tell from the scale. The thick paper had been pierced by a pin about a half-inch from the top, just like the drawing she had found in the shed.

A wave of nausea swept over her, and her fingers suddenly felt clammy and cold. Turning a few more pages, she found the shield sketch she’d put in the book and compared it to the new drawing. Both were clearly the work of the same artist.

Cormac was close behind her now, looking over her shoulder. “What are those, Nora? Where did you get them?”

Nora felt her breath catch in her throat as she wrestled with how to respond. The question seemed in earnest. How else could she answer him? She held up the shield drawing. “I found this one in Charlie Brazil’s beekeeping shed this evening. And this one"—she held up the sketch of the circlet—"I just found here in your book.”

He seemed to grasp the unspoken question even before she could think it. “It’s not mine, Nora. I’ve never seen it before, I swear.”

“How did it get here?”

“That’s the book I lent Ursula. I hadn’t even remembered it. When she stopped by the house the first night I was here, she wanted to know what I was working on. She started looking through the books I was unpacking, and asked if she could borrow that one for a day or two. There didn’t seem to be any harm in lending it to her. Last night I saw it just beside the door at Ursula’s, so I took it back. I put it on the kitchen table when I came in, never even thought to open it.”

Nora thought back to the morning, which seemed so long ago now, and remembered moving the book from the kitchen to Cormac’s work table. She examined the spine. The Exquisite Art: Masterpieces of Irish Metalwork. “Why would Ursula be so interested in this book?”

“I don’t know, Nora. It’s an academic treatise on artifacts and antiquities,” Cormac said. “Pretty dry reading, even for an archaeologist. She didn’t say why she needed it, and I didn’t ask.”

Ursula Downes hadn’t struck Nora as the kind of person who devoted herself to scholarship. There had to be some reason she had been interested in this particular book. Nora opened the thick pages at random, finding photographs and drawings, charts full of numbers that looked like location coordinates, maps documenting where certain types of artifacts—gold gorgets and hoards of bent and broken weapons—had been found. Cadogan’s words about the Brazils holding back some things from the hoard suddenly circled through her head. Had Ursula found out something she didn’t want anyone else to know? I know what you’re hiding…. The discovery of a previously unknown artifact would certainly put a new spin on the murder. And there were three knots in Ursula’s cord, just like in Danny Brazil’s.

“Can I have a look at it?” Cormac took the drawing and the book and started going through the illustrations, comparing the sketch in his hand against the book’s drawings and photographs. “This has a catalog of all the known gold artifacts recovered on Irish soil.”

“So what are you doing?” Nora asked over his shoulder.

He quickly flipped to a page showing a drawing, and held it open to show her. “The Broighter collar, a gold neck-ring from the first century B.C. The style of decoration—these intricate, curving designs—marks the piece as Irish-made. The drawing you found in here seems to be a collar similar to this one. The thing is, I don’t think anything exactly like the piece in your sketch has ever been found in Ireland—or maybe I should say, nothing like it has ever been reported. The Broighter collar is one of the few examples of La Tene metalwork found in Ireland, and one of the few gold artifacts from the Iron Age. You must have seen it at the National Museum. Look at the decoration on your drawing, those raised whorls and trumpet curves—see how similar they are to the Broighter details? It’s astonishing.”

“So if the collar in the drawing is real, and not just a figment of some artist’s imagination…”

“It would be an unbelievable find. Priceless. And whoever found it—presuming that they turned it over to the state, and that it was found legitimately and not through illegal means—would get a pretty whacking great reward. Once an artifact has been dug up, its provenance comes into question. It loses a lot of archaeological significance if we don’t know where it came from—but of course the monetary value always remains. I’m wondering now about the other drawing—whether it’s an actual object that exists, or as you said, just a figment of some artist’s imagination.”

Nora handed him the shield drawing, and they both began to search through the book of artifacts, comparing it to the objects pictured. The names of all the findspots started to blur in front of her eyes: Dowris, Ballinderry, Moylarg, Lagore, Loughan Island, Lisnacrogher…The organic forms snaked and twisted and curled across the pages, mirroring the natural world in abstract. Eyes and animal faces were everywhere. She imagined the metalworker hunched over his tools, making delicate herringbone patterns, birds whose beaks formed the heads of pins. She paged past a triskelion disc and felt a tug of familiarity; where had she seen that image before? The graceful spirals, everything counted in threes…She scoured her memory, but could not place the image. Never mind; it would come back sometime, probably when she wasn’t even trying to remember.

“Here it is,” Cormac said. “A shield boss, part of the Loughnabrone hoard.” Nora looked over his shoulder and saw a photograph that matched the drawing exactly. She thought of all the other drawings, probably at least ten or twelve of them, that Charlie Brazil had in his tin box.

“I have an idea,” she said. She ran to get her mobile, and scrolled through the memory until she found Niall Dawson’s home number. She heard his familiar voice over the background noise of children chasing one another, breathless with laughter. She could imagine them in the back garden of the Dawsons’ house in Sandymount, getting ready to take the food off the barbeque, and the sound of normal life suddenly made her feel like weeping.

“Niall, it’s Nora Gavin. I know it’s the weekend, and I’m calling to ask a favor. I’m wondering if there’s any way I can get a complete list of all the items found in the Loughnabrone hoard.” She waited for a moment, while the children’s voices carried on in the background. “I wouldn’t ask, Niall, except that I think it could be vitally important.”

“No, I’m happy to oblige, Nora. It’s just that I’m a little astonished, because you’re the second person in two days to ask for an itemized inventory of the Loughnabrone objects. I faxed the same list off to Ursula Downes yesterday evening.”