The Book of Killowen

1

Kevin Donegan grasped the twin joysticks and thrust the right one forward, feeling the fierce hydraulic power in the arm of his backhoe. He loved working the controls. Truth to tell, he often dreamed that he was not driving the machine but part of it, wielding not just one but two scoops like gigantic hands. He smiled, reveling in his rusty strength, iron fingers cutting through soft peat, huge arms knocking evildoers on their arses left and right, riding to the rescue of a bewitching blonde who couldn’t wait to show her undying gratitude. He was the mighty Diggerman, feared by all who dared oppose him. Invincible.

It was early enough that mist still covered the lowest parts of the bog, an eerie presence that muffled the sharp cries of birds, the unearthly keening of a hare. He’d been on this bloody job for two days, trying to get the drain cut, and it would likely take another three days before he could be on his way. Nobody had said what the peat would go for—not that he gave a rat’s. Not his job. Diggerman just dug the holes, cut the drains, and then moved on to the next job: trenching for gas lines, foundation excavation. Whatever. He was in at the start of the job, not to see it finished. Never saw much of anything finished. Better that way.

As he saw it, Diggerman wasn’t about putting down roots; his job was turning things up. It was pretty much the same in the romance department. He usually liked being the first to open a trench, and he much preferred girls who were a little nervous and inexperienced. In and out he was, just like Diggerman, and then gone like the wind.

Remembering the ever-so-pleasant bottle blonde and the happy ending of his recurring dream, Kevin thrust the joystick forward again, maneuvering the digger’s huge arm into position for another scoop of wet peat. He jammed the left lever forward to let the bucket drop. This time it landed with a loud clunk.

That was odd. Apart from the noise of the machine, cutting a drain was usually dead quiet. He lifted the bucket and set it down again. Clunk. Could be something dangerous—a drainpipe, maybe a gas line nobody had bothered to flag. Holy Jaysus.

Kevin jumped down from his seat and grabbed the spade he kept always at the ready in case of emergency. The teeth of the bucket had struck something hard, punctured it, from the look of things. He began to recognize painted sheet metal, a bit of chrome, and… was that a tail-light? It was. What kind of a fuckin’ bollocks would go and bury a car in the bog? That’s what it was, and no mistake. Not something you’d see every day. He started using the spade to clear away all the peat on top of the boot, which was badly creased by the blow from the heavy bucket. As soon as the weight was lifted, the boot popped open on its own, and Kevin’s mind groped to put a name on what lay before him.

He was staring down into the sunken, sightless eyes of a wizened, bluish-brown face. He felt an almost irresistible urge to scramble up the bank, but fought it, fascinated and repelled by the horror before him. At last he managed to assemble a coherent thought. A body. His eyes traveled along the limbs sprawled in the peat—a forefinger and thumb, a shod foot, a knob of bone protruding from a twisted joint. This was a man, all right, but the parts of him were mixed up, a foot where a hand should be. This wasn’t just any dead body—it was murder. He remembered grisly accounts he’d heard of people topped over drugs and sacks full of cash. Kevin suddenly felt the blood drain from his head, and he leaned on the spade handle to keep from swaying. But he could not look away.

The possibilities skittered around in his brain: he could run, he could check for a stash of drugs or money in the boot, he could ring the Guards, ring the boss. Which was it going to be? One thought pushed its way to the fore. The job had been very hush-hush from the start. The boss, Claffey, advised him not to mention to anyone where he’d be working the next few days. Had to be off the books, illegal somehow. He usually never gave a fuck about permits or planning permission—not his trouble, and besides, he badly needed the work. Claffey might tell him to get on with it or get out. Although Kevin had realized ages ago that he didn’t have many scruples, somehow ignoring a thing like this wouldn’t seem right.

He began to recall reports of a bog man uncovered over in Offaly awhile back. That poor bugger turned out to be a couple thousand years old. Who was to say this fella wasn’t as old as that?

Suddenly he saw himself on camera, being interviewed about this body. All the television crowd were bound to cover it. He could see the reports on RTÉ, UTV, TG4, maybe even Sky or the BBC—a bog man like this was big news, no matter how old he was. It began to dawn that people would be asking him about this moment for years to come. He’d be something of an instant celebrity, if he played it right. He imagined women gathering around him, female voices breathy with a mixture of curiosity and pity.

Kevin reached for his mobile to ring emergency services, hoping to Christ he’d get a signal way out here in the middle of the bog and relieved when the call finally went through. Conscious of an unwanted edge of excitement in his voice, he started explaining to the operator exactly what he’d been doing when he found the body. He knew emergency calls were recorded—the television people might even play a bit on the news reports. Had to make sure he sounded unflappable, in control.

The operator told him not to touch anything and assured him it would be no longer than twenty minutes before the Guards arrived on the scene.

Nothing for it now but to wait. He climbed back up into the digger to break out his lunch, three cello-wrapped sandwiches and a couple of boiled eggs he’d picked up at a petrol station this morning. Biting into one of the boiled eggs, he caught the empty eye sockets staring up at him from the car boot, the dead man’s mouth hanging open like the beak on a hungry fledgling. Suddenly he had no appetite.

As he thrust the half-eaten egg back into the carrier bag, the presence of malice overwhelmed him, a roundly sweeping paranoia, bringing with it all the nights he’d spent as a child listening to his grandparents sitting around the fire with the neighbors, as each in turn described the eerie happenings they’d witnessed or heard tell of.

At that exact moment, a dark cloud passed in front of the sun, casting the whole bog into shadow. Kevin reached down to roll up the cab window. Why take a chance? The scorching weather they’d been having these past couple of weeks was well known to bring on chills. He checked his mobile—only four minutes since he’d rung off with the emergency services. Kevin shoved the phone back in his pocket. And suddenly twenty minutes seemed like an awfully long fuckin’ time to wait.

2

Claire Finnerty set down her nearly full egg basket beside the massive oak and checked the path behind her to make sure she hadn’t been followed. She crouched beside the tree and, reaching deep into its woody hollow, drew out a battered tea tin. Settling into the natural seat provided by the old tree’s twisted roots, she opened the tin, pushing aside the small green booklet with the gold harp stamped on the front, and took out a box of matches, a packet of rolling papers, and small bag of cannabis. She fashioned a thin joint with practiced hand, lighting it with the last of the matches—she must remember to bring a fresh box tomorrow.

Drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, she leaned back and looked out through the trees to her private patch of ripening meadow. Not many people in this upland corner of Tipperary, an untraveled cul-de-sac that pushed its way north into the Offaly boglands. That was one reason she’d finally settled here. This ancient oak had grown up beside a crumbling wall and slab of limestone embedded in the earth, probably the last vestige of some monk’s retreat. She understood why he had built his shelter here: the field laid out beyond the trees was covered in blue pincushion plant, dark pink marjoram, sweet clover, and white sprays of cow parsley. Looming low and purple to the southeast lay the Slieve Bloom Mountains.

These few snatched moments in the mornings were her only real opportunity for solitude and privacy. While everyone else at Killowen was busy with chores, she could sit here for a few minutes and indulge in her one remaining vice—and try not to think about the troubles that pressed in upon her, more each day. Christ, how she detested being in charge.

Claire took another long toke and her limbs began to relax. She could actually feel her brain switch into a lower gear as the buzz kicked in. A thick cloud of guilt began to descend upon her, one of the unwelcome side effects of the pot. She ought not to be coming here.

On the other hand, if she were to give it up, she’d have to have a little chat with Enda McKeever. Claire had never thought of the boy as her dealer, though the police certainly would. To her, he was just the polite, enterprising lad who cycled up the lane once every fortnight to swap a small bag of homegrown cannabis for the three dozen eggs she left beside the gatepost. He was responsible for feeding his eight brothers and sisters, she was sure of it. Money was of no use to Enda; his mother was away with the fairies a good portion of the time, and that shiftless, ne’er-do-well father of his was on the way to drinking away every cent they’d ever had, and the farm as well, no doubt. What Enda’s brothers and sisters needed most of all was food, and the boy would rather starve than take anything that smacked of charity. So what would the family do for their breakfast if she suddenly decided to turn over a new leaf?

Besides, she needed these few moments of peace to get through the rest of the day. Always so much to be done. The eggs and the milking were just the first chores, then there were the herbs and vegetables to tend, tools to keep in good repair, meals to prepare, not to mention the cleaning and mowing and trimming, and all the paperwork that came with juggling visiting artists and their schedules. Even with a full complement of eight workers, they had a difficult time keeping it all under control.

She still couldn’t believe that there were seven other people now living at Killowen. How on earth had that happened? In some ways, she had been better off alone, those first years. There were days she missed it dreadfully, the silence, the weeks and months of soul-scouring solitude. Asking two human beings to live in close quarters without coming to blows was hard enough—but eight? And all eccentrics, to boot—everyone at Killowen was an oddball in some way, there was no denying it. She must have been out of her mind. Look at her, retreating to this private bolt-hole every day, thinking she might avoid dealing with the whole situation by coming out here and getting stoned—again. Pathetic, that’s what it was, really and truly. If she had any sense, she’d have left long ago, before the place had turned into something… unmanageable. But when was that point, exactly?

When she arrived here, the first imperative had been putting distance between herself and what had happened. That was the way she thought about it now. On that fateful day so long ago, she had just started walking away from the blood and the chaos, the sound of the sirens. And she had kept walking, thumbing a lift when she could, until by sheer chance she had arrived here. For the most part, she had succeeded in walling off her past. There was no reason to return. Claire took another drag and held the smoke inside her lungs. That familiar, comforting buzz was becoming a little harder to achieve, a bit more difficult to sustain every day. Claire leaned back, letting the weight of her body slump into the oak tree’s gnarled roots, remembering. She watched the smoke curling around her head, suddenly back again in the warmth of a pub’s wooden snug, the lofty words and ideas wafting as dense as the curling cigarette smoke in the air. The conversation, fueled by whiskey and porter, was no more than youthful railing against the status quo. Nothing was ever resolved—did anyone really expect resolution? Once in a great while, she allowed herself to miss the innocence and arrogance of those days, when action was still only hypothetical, and idle words had no consequence. Raising one hand in front of her, she studied the worn palm, the stretched skin and enlarged knuckles. Who’d have thought, after everything, that she’d end up as a farmer?

The place had been an absolute tip when she arrived, abandoned for years. The eighteenth-century granary, now the main house, had been a complete ruin, just four walls and gaping windows. The cottage roof was stoved in and the windows were broken, the frames peeling paint; every wall seemed invaded by damp and mold. There was no electricity, no plumbing to speak of. The sad death and even sadder life of the last bachelor-farmer occupant was evident in the mismatched jumble of crockery still on the table, the remains of a final dinner left to molder on the range. She had slept poorly that night, on the old farmer’s rough straw mattress. The following morning, she had staked her claim. Picking up a rusty sledge from the shed, she’d gutted the whole cottage in a single day, right down to bare stone. In the days and weeks after, she had cleared away cartloads of mildewed junk and found scraps of sheet metal that would do for temporary roofing. When at last the cottage was marginally livable, she had dug in beds for herbs and vegetables, built a chicken run out of scrap lumber and odd bits of fencing, started trading eggs for paint and lamp oil. It had taken her more than a year to make the place habitable, but after months of hard labor, the cottage walls were finished and fairly glowed with several coats of fresh whitewash. She often thought back to the texture of those early days, the bone-weariness that allowed her nights without dreams. Occasionally her precarious standing as a squatter had triggered a sleepless night, but eventually even that fear had worn away. What might happen was kept at bay by the here and now. And the combination of work and solitude had suited her then. There were times when she’d spoken to no one for weeks on end.

But the need for companionship must have been much more deep-seated than she realized and reared its head quite unexpectedly. She remembered the day in great detail. She’d been taking advantage of rare good weather, staking out beans in the garden, when a middle-aged couple on a walking tour stopped to ask where they might find lodging.

“We’ve no guesthouse nearby,” she’d told them, “but you’d be welcome to stay here. I won’t say the accommodation’s deluxe, but it is free—that is, if you’d be willing to lend a hand for a day or two.”

Her own words had taken her by surprise. But the offer, once made, could not be withdrawn. That couple—Martin and Tessa Gwynne—planned to stay on only a few days at Killowen. Eighteen years later, they were still here. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever got on without them. Martin, tall and slender, with elegant long hands, was an artist with the quill, something she found out only after he’d been at Killowen for more than two years. Tessa was nearly as tall as her husband, with a cascade of dark hair long since turned to white, and hands strong and sinewy from playing the harp. They were both like characters from the ancient sagas, out of place in the present. Martin, in particular, had made himself indispensable, with his esoteric understanding of compost toilets, wattle-and-daub construction, and drystone walls, all subjects about which Claire herself knew next to nothing. Even after all this time, she still knew precious little about Martin and Tessa, except that they were roughly fifteen years older than she was and had lived and traveled the world—London, Switzerland, Paris, North Africa. Claire knew virtually nothing about what had led them to those places, but if she had been forced to speculate, she might have guessed that they were on some sort of spiritual quest. That was quite all right—as long as they didn’t try to tell her about it. She had a low tolerance for that sort of thing.

For years, it had been just the three of them. Then, nearly a decade ago, Martin had proposed converting the ruined granary into an artists’ retreat, and everything else had progressed from there. It had never been Claire’s aim to create anything; to her way of thinking, Killowen had just happened as she was trying to survive. But they had built something here, bit by bit, as the years piled up, the tilling and planting, the circle of seasons, round and round.

Over time, a whole rootless menagerie of misfits had arrived on her doorstep like strays, all looking for something. Some never found what they were seeking and moved on; some stayed, perhaps content just to work in a garden after being chewed up and spat out by the world. At Killowen, they were fairly well insulated from all that. It wasn’t that they were purposely egalitarian, it just worked out that way. They all pitched in with the farmwork, according to their interests and abilities, shared cooking duties in turn, and had time to pursue their own creative inclinations. A French couple had come to stay last year, through a scheme that matched volunteers with small organic farms. Lucien and Sylvie had launched a cheese-making operation and now supplied local co-ops and farmers’ markets. Claire didn’t really understand what had drawn them to Killowen, but she needed the extra hands—and, she had to admit, the overall quality of the communal meals had vastly improved since the Francophone contingent had arrived.

She had purposely avoided asking questions of the residents, knowing all too well that any idle curiosity might be turned back upon her. No one at Killowen knew of her former life either. It was almost as if the past didn’t exist, as if in coming here everyone had acquired a fresh start.

None was more enigmatic than one of their latest arrivals. Eighteen months ago, Martin had discovered a stranger, apparently ill and wandering the bog on foot—with no identification and no sign of where he’d come from. It being the depths of winter, Martin really had no choice but to bring him back to Killowen before he froze to death. Claire closed her eyes, remembering her first glimpse of the man at the door of her cottage—wet and wild-eyed, ill clothed, chilled to the bone.

“Bring him inside, Martin,” she’d commanded. “Put him in my bed.” While Martin stoked the fire, she had wrapped the shivering stranger in blankets and watched over him for three days and three nights as he sweated and chattered and mumbled about fierce beasts and mysterious visions like Tom O’Bedlam. For three days and nights, she had studied his face against her pillow—dark hair and eyes, flawless pale skin that had somehow retained the high color of youth, though he was probably at least forty. He was in a bad way those first few days, sweating through the bedclothes several times a night. Claire felt her face burn, remembering the illicit ache she had experienced each time she lifted the drenched linens from his nakedness. After living alone for twenty-two years, it was the first time another prospect had entered her mind.

When the fever broke, the stranger in her bed seemed perfectly sane, but he claimed not to know his own name. She had been deeply skeptical at first, but as the days wore on, he seemed utterly sincere in his ignorance. In the end, they had to take him at his word, which also meant they had to christen him. Martin had suggested Diarmuid, after the most famous abbot of the now-ruined monastery near the bog where he was found, and Claire herself had added a surname, Lynch, after her maternal grandmother. And so Diarmuid Lynch he became. As his physical health returned, Diarmuid had moved from her cottage to his own room in the main guesthouse. She had taken to watching him secretly as he went about his work, trying to convince herself that she was concerned only for his well-being but knowing it was just cover for a vaguely unhealthy obsession. For his part, Diarmuid seemed to suffer no anxiety over his lost identity, no hint of curiosity about what he’d been doing on the bog. On the contrary—he’d fallen quite easily into life at the farm, helping Anthony tend the cattle and goats, taking up stone carving and carpentry as if born to that work, even though his soft hands hinted otherwise.

Still an air of mystery remained. She had once caught a glimpse of him lying prostrate in front of the altar stone at the ruined chapel down by the bog. He was speaking in a low voice, but she’d not been close enough to hear. She had not seen him there again.

And Diarmuid wasn’t the only mystery. Anonymous notes had begun arriving about four months ago. The first had been left outside her cottage door, a blank envelope with a handwritten message inside, block capitals in blue ink: I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Cheap writing paper, available from any newsagent. She had studied the handwriting, trying to divine who the anonymous accuser could be. Arriving at the stump the next morning, she’d been seized by paranoia, imagining that her tin was in a slightly different position from where she’d left it the previous day. And yet nothing was missing, the papers hidden there seemed undisturbed. Since there was no name on the envelopes, she even wondered whether the messages had been intended for her or for someone else. What did it really matter, in the end? The person she had been ceased to exist long ago.

A noise sounded on the path behind her. Claire snatched up the egg basket and leapt to her feet as a lanky figure, dark haired and bearded, plunged through the underbrush.

He pulled up short when he caught sight of her.

“What is it, Diarmuid? What’s wrong?”

“Claire.” He was out of breath from running, and bent forward, hands on knees. “The Guards are down at the bog. Three cars… I saw them on my way back from the lower pasture. It looks as though someone’s been digging there. I saw an excavator, a small JCB.”

Claire’s stomach dropped. “That bog is protected.”

“The coroner’s van is there as well. I think they’ve found a body.”

3

It was just gone half-eight on Thursday morning when Detective Stella Cusack arrived at Killowen Bog. The local coroner had already set up a wall of tarps to shield the body from view. A mechanical digger, arm poised in midair, sat a few yards from the wall, and she spotted a young man, presumably the driver, being interviewed by her partner, Fergal Molloy. The scene-of-crime squad had been waiting for her before they began photographing the body and collecting evidence. She pulled a white Tyvek coverall from the kit bag she kept in the boot of her car, shaking out the flaccid, papery limbs as she prepared to step into it.

When she was suited up, Stella stepped around the tarp wall and slid sideways down the plank into the partially cut drain. The vehicle was a gold Mercedes SL, with a Dublin number plate intact. The first two digits on the plate said the vehicle was two years old; they’d have only to run the number to suss the owner. That alone might tell them whether the dead body in the boot was a kidnapping gone wrong, a gangland murder, or a domestic dispute. Stella couldn’t immediately recall any high-profile cases still open, but Molloy would. He was good at that sort of thing, facts and details.

Even after hearing about a car in the bog, the sight of a huge machine submerged in peat was still surreal. As was the body itself. Stella peered down at the leathery face in the boot, letting her eyes and ears absorb details of the scene. This was her first up-close encounter with a bog man—though he looked to be fairly recent, not like one of the ancient corpses you might see in a museum. Perhaps most curious, no cloying smell of death hung in the air. All her nose detected was the usual clean, earthy scent of bog. No doubt it was a man, with all that gingery stubble covering his face. His mouth gaped open; along with the open eyes, the expression made it seem as if he’d been taken by surprise. She was struck by the awkwardness, the indignity of his pose, and for the first time began to notice that the hands and feet were not exactly where they ought to be, as if the body had been rearranged somehow. Stella’s rapidly downed breakfast of instant porridge rose in the back of her throat.

Fergal Molloy poked his head around the edge of the tarp. “Dr. Friel is here, Stella.”

Catherine Friel was the chief state pathologist. Her job entailed traveling all over the country to crime scenes involving suspicious deaths, conducting autopsies, and testifying about her findings in court. Stella had worked with her only twice before. There had been rumors that Dr. Friel had been seeing Liam Ward, one of Stella’s fellow detectives, but they’d somehow managed to keep the relationship pretty well under wraps.

“Thanks for getting here so quickly,” Stella said. “I hope the journey wasn’t long.”

Dr. Friel had lost her Guards driver to austerity cutbacks and now had to make her own way to crime scenes at every hour of the day and night. She offered a tiny smile. “Well, I happened to be stopping near Birr last night, so not the worst. Although some days it definitely feels as though I’m running on caffeine.” She had quickly suited up and was now stepping into white Tyvek booties. “What can you tell me?”

“Body was found by an excavator clearing a drain. In the boot of a car, apparently buried in an old cutaway. Looks to be dismembered—but you’ll see for yourself.”

They rounded the end of the tarp and Dr. Friel sidled down the plank. She got down on her knees, probing at the body with a gloved finger, peering closely at the disarranged limbs through a magnifying glass. After less than a minute, she turned to Stella. “I’m afraid you won’t find this man’s killer.”

Stella felt the first prickle of intrigue. “So he was murdered?”

“Well, I think it’s safe to say that he didn’t just fall in. I’m seeing what look like several sharp-force wounds to the torso. Of course I won’t be able to say for certain until the postmortem.”

“Why won’t we find his killer?”

“Because the one thing I can tell you with fair certainty is that this man died at least five hundred years ago.”

Stella stared at the pliable flesh before her. “But that’s not possible. He’s so—” She struggled to find the right word. “I don’t know how to say it—so fresh. How can you tell he’s been here for that long?”

“There are several clues, but first off, the color of the skin says he’s been in the peat for a good long time. Based on my experience with bog remains, I’d guess at least a few hundred years. And the bones are almost completely decalcified. When a body’s been in peat for a long time, everything—even the bones—becomes soft as wet pasteboard. Very easy to pull apart in that state.” She pointed to the toe of a shoe sticking up from the peat. “And, unless I’m very much mistaken, his footwear doesn’t appear to be the latest style.” Dr. Friel reached into her pocket and handed over a business card. “So you see, it’s not me you need, it’s someone from the National Museum.”

Stella glanced at the card: Niall Dawson, Keeper of Conservation, National Museum of Ireland.

“Best to ring straightaway,” Dr. Friel said. “They won’t want to lose any time. You might want to pack some extra peat around the body until Dawson can get a recovery team here.”

Stella thought she’d misheard. “Sorry?”

“It helps to preserve the body.” Dr. Friel stooped to collect a large handful of sopping peat from the cutaway floor, applying it gently to the corpse’s right arm. “Like this. You’ll want to make sure he’s completely covered. Niall Dawson will thank you for taking the trouble, believe me.” She eyed her watch. “Sorry, I’ve got to dash. Urgent case up in Westmeath.”

“Wait a minute. If this man is five hundred years old, how in God’s name did he get into the boot of a car?”

“No idea,” Dr. Friel said. “Perhaps that’s worth investigating.”

4

Cormac Maguire stood at his bedroom window, looking down into his back garden. Not just his garden or his room anymore. Nora Gavin had shared his bed for the last twelve months. It seemed impossible that so much time had passed.

When they’d returned to Dublin last fall, he had urged her to request a sabbatical, to allow herself a period of recovery after everything that had come to pass on that barren headland in Donegal. The Trinity medical school had granted her request, so she had spent the past year here in his house, reading, walking, digging in the garden. It was a necessary period of decompression, a slow readjustment after being so long submerged in grief. As he had anticipated, the guilt that had anchored her for five years proved difficult to cast off. In the past couple of months, however, he thought the weight seemed to be lifting, little by little—that was all he could say.

Be with me, he’d said to her at Port na Rón. Summoning his own words, and her unspoken response, never failed to fill him with a potent longing. He wanted nothing more than to be with her. But her mere physical presence wasn’t what he meant when he’d said those words: Be with me. Some part of her was still holding back, unwilling to allow him entrée to the very deepest, most hidden recesses within herself. Perhaps it was only that she had never dared imagine her life beyond a certain point—the point where she managed to bring her sister’s killer to justice.

He’d had his own period of adjustment since moving his father here last summer. The old man had suffered no permanent paralysis or lateral weakness from the stroke he’d suffered a year ago. He could dress and feed himself without difficulty, and for that they had reason to be thankful. But the brainstorm had left a different sort of damage: severe aphasia that showed no signs of abating. It was clear from the old man’s demeanor that he could understand them. He could also speak quite fluently, but only in strings of gibberish, as if all the words stored in his brain had suddenly become untethered. He seemed to harbor suspicion that everyone around him was deliberately obstreperous, or perhaps even a bit thick. Attempts at conversation frustrated and exhausted him. He’d recently begun regular twice-weekly sessions with a speech therapist—Cormac had heard the poor young woman from the next room, cheerfully trying to pull his father through the prescribed exercises: she would list the days of the week, the months of the year, try to coax answers to simple yes-or-no questions: Does glass break? Can fish fly?

Cormac crossed to his suitcase, lying open on the bed, waiting to accept the last few items he would need on this pilgrimage. For some reason he had fixed upon that designation for the trip he and Nora and his father were about to make. What else would you call a visit to a holy site, for the purpose of collecting relics?

The call about the body had come about forty minutes ago. Niall Dawson from the National Museum had rung to ask whether he and Nora would be part of the recovery team for a set of human remains that had just turned up in a remote Tipperary bog, beside the ruins of a medieval monastery.

Nora had come into the room just as he set down the phone. “Who was that?”

“Niall Dawson. A body’s been found in Tipperary, and he wanted to know if we could help with the recovery.”

“What did you say?”

“That I’d have to talk to you and ring him back.”

“You’d normally jump at a job like this. Why are you hedging? Do you think I’m not able to judge for myself whether I’m ready or not?”

“I didn’t say that. It’s just that this bog is way off down in Tipp somewhere. Who’s going to look after my father?”

“We’ve got that young woman from the agency coming, haven’t we?”

The old man’s regular caregiver, Mrs. Hanafin, had just left for two weeks at her son’s holiday home on Mallorca. He’d already arranged for a substitute caregiver from a local agency. Nora continued: “I’m not saying we should leave him alone with a new minder, but surely the agency won’t mind if we take your father and this new caretaker along with us. It’s only going to be a day or two, and it might be a good thing for him, getting out of the city.”

She was standing in front of him, her face only a few inches from his own. Her voice softened. “What is it? There’s something else, isn’t there? Tell me.”

“Niall didn’t have many details on the body, just that it was old… and it turned up in the boot of a car buried in the bog.”

He watched her features cloud over as she took in this new information.

She touched his face. “Oh, Cormac, I do love you for wanting to spare me. But you can’t do it forever. You have to stop trying.”

And so after a few hasty phone calls, it had been arranged: they would take part in the recovery, and Joseph and his temporary caretaker would travel with them to Tipperary. Dawson had arranged a place for them to stay.

In some ways, this trip would be déjà vu all over again. He and Nora had first come together over the corpse of a red-haired stranger, a tragic story sealed for centuries in a bog. They had managed to set her story free, but what would they discover about the current specimen?

The bell sounded in the front hall. Cormac opened the door to a pretty dark-haired woman whom he guessed to be in her midtwenties. She was casually dressed; a small rolling bag stood beside her feet.

“Ah, good, you’re all set. Come in, come in. We’ve been expecting you,” he said, extending his hand. “Cormac Maguire.”

“Eliana,” she said. “Eliana Guzmán. I was looking for Joseph Maguire?”

“Yes, my father,” Cormac said. “I’m sorry to spring travel plans on you with such little notice. Did the agency explain? We only just got the call and have to get down the country as soon as possible. You’re all right about leaving as soon as we have the car packed?”

He sensed a slight flicker of hesitation in her eyes, then it was gone. “Yes… where is it we are going?” she asked.

“I’m sorry. I did explain all this to the woman at the agency but it’s all been so rushed. We’re headed to Tipperary, it should only be for a day or two. The lodging is all sorted—we’re staying at some sort of artists’ retreat. You’ll have your own room, of course, and access to kitchen facilities, everything you’ll need to look after my father—although we won’t really have to fend for ourselves; it’s the sort of place where the cooking is done for us. Nora and I will be able to help you, when we’re not out at the site.”

“Tipperary?” she said. “I didn’t know there truly was such a place.”

“Oh, yes,” Cormac said. “And not even such a long way as you’ve probably supposed.” He checked his watch. “In fact, if we can manage to push off soon, we might even arrive in time for lunch.”

5

They had just crossed the Tipperary border outside Birr when Nora glanced down at the map. Better start paying attention; she was meant to be navigating this last bit of the journey to their lodgings. The drive had taken them out of Dublin, southwest along the M7, through Kildare and Laois, and now into the area known as Ely O’Carroll. She rode in back with Joseph nodding beside her; Cormac and Eliana sat in front, and she enjoyed listening to the buzz of their conversation without hearing exactly what was said. Now and again a word or phrase would float back to her—Cormac inquiring about Eliana’s home in Spain, she asking a few general questions about the daily routine. Nora was grateful to be left alone with her thoughts.

She let her gaze caress the back of Cormac’s head, admiring, as she so often did, the curve of his skull, how pleasingly it intersected with the angle of his jaw. Whenever he turned to speak she once again remembered the meandering path those same lips had traced across her bare skin only a few short hours ago.

That intimate portion of her life, in particular, didn’t seem quite true. She felt the unreality most acutely each morning when she awakened beside him. Would she ever learn to stop holding her breath, waiting for the next bad thing to happen? Lately she had begun to feel a gradual easing, another few degrees of difference each day, but would it ever be enough? After wandering so long in the underworld after her sister’s death, the past year had felt like trying to claw her way back into the realm of the living. She had yet to face the fight for her niece’s good opinion, a struggle that hadn’t yet begun. Elizabeth refused to see her, wouldn’t even speak her name. You couldn’t blame the child for clinging to her father’s memory, refusing to accept the part he had played in her mother’s death. Cormac kept saying that Elizabeth would come around, but it hadn’t happened yet. And Nora refused to press. How could you ask a twelve-year-old to see such things?

She glanced over at Joseph, nodding beside her. In some ways, he remained in a shadowy otherworld, bound by a tangled thicket of words without meaning. As she studied the delicate, translucent skin at his temples, the darting movement under his eyelids, she wished for even a fleeting glimpse of the images taking shape inside his head. Were a person’s dreams transformed when words slipped their meaning?

They had spent a lot of time together in the back garden these past few months—she on her knees in the dirt, Joseph basking in a chair—on the days when the sun god deigned to show his face. After her own father, she’d taken to cultivating roses and had found restoration in tending to growing things. Cormac’s father, too, seemed to find a sense of calm in being surrounded by virescent life. The back garden had become an oasis for the two of them.

In all the days they had spent together, she had yet to discern any sort of pattern in Joseph’s speech, or to crack the garbled code of his stroke-damaged brain. He could speak quite easily, and indeed often rambled on and on, but there seemed no logic to it—one day “fork” meant “tree”; the next day it meant another word entirely. That was the trouble—if there was a code, it was corrupt, the circuits faulty. Only his frustration level remained constant.

Once in a great while, he would have a small breakthrough. Two days ago, she’d been standing at the kitchen sink doing the washing up after supper, looking out into the garden and absently singing under her breath the words of an old song that she and Tríona used to sing to pass the time on long car journeys:

She heard a noise and turned to find Joseph standing behind her. He’d looked agitated, his collar askew, white hair sticking straight up from the side of his head.

“Can you do her angle?” he said, and opened his mouth. “Bowling over, to-to-to give it up. Get up the barking again.”

Did he want her to keep singing or to stop?

“The barking! Um, umma.” He took her by the hand and gestured to his mouth, to suggest something pouring out. “Do-do the hemming!”

She began to sing once more, slowly drawing out the words—“Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen”—and watching as his lips began to move, following along.

He joined in then, each word perfectly formed and clear: “We daren’t go a-hunting for fear of little men.”

She pressed on: “Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together.”

Joseph finished the line once more, on his own, in a scratchy but rather tuneful baritone: “Green jacket, red cap, and white owl’s feather!”

He let her hand drop and shook his head. “Ah, God, a shinna what’s gone,” he said. And then, with sudden vehemence, “Feckin’ gyroscope!”

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“You can say that again,” she’d offered.

“Feckin’ gyroscope,” he growled.

It had taken her a moment to realize that he had repeated himself—on purpose. He seemed to detect that some shift had occurred as well. His face began to screw up. She had thought at first that he might weep, but the sound that trickled from him was a barely audible chuckle, which grew into a chortle, and then to a full-throated guffaw, which Nora couldn’t help joining in—especially when she realized that it was the first time she had ever heard him laugh. When Cormac had entered the kitchen a few minutes later, he’d found them both propped against the cupboards, weak from laughter.

The stroke literature talked about how memorized words and phrases were sometimes unaffected by stroke damage, how they were apparently stored in a separate place in the brain. Joseph had once come out with a few phrases in Spanish, but since neither she nor Cormac spoke Spanish, they couldn’t tell whether he was making sense. So many mysteries left inside the human skull. She often imagined how much more difficult the current situation must be for Cormac than it was for her, since she had never met Joseph Maguire before his words had become disconnected. To Cormac, the contrast between this absurd, nattering old man and the larger-than-life figure his father had once been must be more than shocking.

A few words of conversation floated to her ears from the front seat.

“—and is this your first time in Ireland?” Cormac was asking Eliana.

“Yes. I wanted a bit more time speaking English before I begin my studies in September.”

Glancing at Joseph, Nora could perceive that his eyes were open, though his drooping posture still feigned sleep. There was probably more understanding than they knew.

“Where will you go to school?” Cormac asked.

“Trinity. I’m excited—such a historic place.”

Nora knew from teaching there about Trinity’s high admissions standards. This girl must be exceptional. She leaned forward to join the conversation. “What will you study?”

“English literature,” Eliana said, turning slightly to include her. The girl had an especially striking profile: delicately arched brows and dramatically sculpted cheekbones, a generous, bow-shaped mouth. Dark chestnut hair and deep brown eyes set off her complexion, which was a pale shade of ivory. Suitable pallor for a bookworm, Nora thought.

“I love the sound of English,” Eliana was saying. “I don’t know why, it seems sometimes quite…” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Plain? Is that the right way to say it? Unlike Spanish!” She laughed lightly, and the sound seemed to rouse Joseph from his false slumber. His eyes opened wider as he concentrated on the girl’s profile and seemed suddenly tuned in to the sound of her voice. All at once his eyes began to brim. His face was immobile as bright, shivering tears traced shining trails down his cheeks.

6

Cormac was looking forward to meeting Niall Dawson and tackling the job at hand. It had been well over a year since he’d been out in the field, the longest he’d ever gone without getting his hands dirty, and he missed it. They were on their way out to the site, after dropping his father and Eliana at the lodging Dawson had set up for them. Killowen was a working farm but also some kind of artists’ colony, and while not exactly posh, the place was immaculately clean and quite comfortable. And whatever they were cooking for lunch smelled fantastic. He felt a twinge of guilt, leaving the old man in a strange place with a caretaker he’d only just met, but realistically speaking, what other choice did they have? If they wanted to improve the bog man’s chance for survival for a few more centuries, there was little time to waste.

He looked over at Nora and reached for her hand. “Thanks for agreeing to this job. You could have said no.”

“Yes, well, in our line of work, it’s not like we can just wait around when a bog man turns up. Best to take the opportunity we get, isn’t it?”

As the car crested the top of the drive from Killowen, a swath of bogland hove into view just beyond a formidable wall of furze bushes. Cormac turned left out of the drive and then down a narrow, rutted laneway a short distance from the farm. Killowen Bog lay at the bottom of a hollow between rolling hills. Random fir trees and scrubby birches sprouted from its damp center. The blades of a wind farm spun lazily, silently on top of the next ridge. Cormac tried to imagine what the place must have looked like when the bog man sank to his death many centuries ago. This whole area east of the Shannon had once been wall-to-wall monasteries, little islands of learning in the midst of wild bog. As a kid, he’d loved reading about the illicit graffiti scribbled by Irish monks at the edges of their manuscripts. There was one in particular he remembered: “I am Cormach, son of Cosnamach, and there is some devil in this ink.” He had felt an immediate kinship with his namesake, imagining him young and perhaps a bit gawky, fed up with errant splodges as he struggled to make it through his copying. Remembering that tiny flare of fellow feeling, Cormac couldn’t suppress a smile.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“Nothing, just imagining what it must have been like here long ago.”

Cormac found himself a little unprepared for the carnival-like activity at the site. Upwards of twenty people were standing around, including Guards officers and a few local gawkers. A couple of television vans stood along the road, their camera crews off vying for interviews with the digger operator. There was even a van peddling fish and chips and burgers, no doubt hoping to cash in on feeding the pack of journalists. A small swarm, some journos and some locals, had gathered out at the edge of the drain. They were being kept well away from the body by uniformed Guards officers and crime scene tape, but they still craned to catch a glimpse past the white tarp wall erected by the coroner’s crew.

He slowed the car to a crawl, trying to get through the crowds. “Bloody hell. Niall’s not going to be happy.” At last a space opened at the side of the road and he pulled over and looked at Nora. “This is it. Look, I’d understand if you want to change your mind, especially with all this.”

Her eyes held his gaze, steady and calm. “No,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They collected their site kits and started out across the bog. A dark-haired woman stood beside Dawson—she must be the police. Dawson was about to speak when the woman stepped forward and introduced herself: “Detective Stella Cusack. Before you begin, I want to stress that the site is still technically a crime scene—that is, until we can figure out what the body’s doing here, or if the vehicle is connected to any crime. At the very least, we could be talking about disturbing human remains, but that’s still a chargeable offense.”

“We’re always careful to document everything as we go along,” Cormac said. “And of course we can defer to you or the crime scene investigators whenever you think it necessary.”

Stella Cusack seemed satisfied. “At this point we’re thinking the car may have been involved in a hit-and-run. Some amadán out for a joyride gets into a smashup, thinks he’ll just scuttle the evidence. Obviously didn’t reckon on a bog body turning up.”

“Anything else we ought to know?” Dawson asked.

“Well, Dr. Friel—the state pathologist—said she thought there might be evidence of sharp-force wounds. So it may be murder after all, but I think we’re safe filing it as a cold case.”

She led them past a group of people standing just beyond the police line near the tent. Dawson followed along and spoke under his breath, “Sorry about the mob scene. I’d love to know who went and blabbed to the press. We’ve tried a couple of times to get people to leave, but of course when the media got here, the landowner insisted on staying. That’s him at the end of the barrier—Vincent Claffey. Been a right bollocks, to be perfectly honest.”

“How long is all this going to take?” The shout came from the man Dawson had pointed out as they passed. “This is my property, and you’ve no right to keep me off it.”

Niall Dawson cringed. “You see what I mean.”

Cormac glanced over in the direction of the small crowd. The speaker was a wiry specimen, midforties, with shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbow, sideburns trimmed just a little longer than the current fashion, a broad midlands accent. Cormac watched Detective Cusack take a moment to steel herself before turning to face the man. “We’re only following the law, Mr. Claffey. As I’ve explained, we have to give the National Museum charge of the site until they’re finished.”

Claffey was not satisfied. “Fuckin’ government intrusion, that’s what it is. This is private property. And am I going to get any compensation for whatever you find here? Not fuckin’ likely. Not to mention that I’ve got to spend all day down here looking after my own interests, because I can be fuckin’ sure none of you lot will be doing it for me.” He’d gone red in the face and began stabbing a forefinger through the air. “I’m warning you, if there’s anything valuable turns up here, it’s mine by rights, d’ye hear me? I want it down in writing somewhere.”

Niall Dawson spoke, an unfamiliar edge of irritation in his voice: “We haven’t found anything of monetary value, Mr. Claffey. You’ll be the first to know if and when we do.”

Claffey narrowed his eyes at Niall Dawson. “You’d better be telling the truth. What about them two?” Claffey jerked his chin toward Cormac and Nora. “Who are they, more pigs at the public trough? If there’s something you’re not telling me…”

The teenage girl standing behind Claffey rolled her eyes. “Ah, for God’s sake, Da, can we just go?”

Claffey turned on her. “And leave this lot to say what they found or didn’t find? I’ll not have any of this bunch of cute hoors trying to smuggle away our good fortune, and that’s that. What are you doing here, anyway? Who’s minding the chipper? Get back there, yeh little slapper!” He pointed the way.

Deflated, the girl turned and trudged toward the van parked at the roadside. Claffey turned back to them, folded his arms across his chest, and planted his feet. “Well, what are ye all lookin’ at? Get on with it, why don’t ye?”

Detective Cusack pressed her lips together as if to keep from saying something she might regret. She turned her back on Claffey and continued leading them to the white tarps set around the drain.

“Before we begin,” Cormac said, “I wonder, could you point out whoever it was found the body? Just in case we have questions for him.”

Cusack nodded toward the boilersuited young man being interviewed by a television journalist about fifty yards away. “That’s him, the digger operator—Kevin Donegan. Not sure he’ll have time for you between media interviews, but you can ask.”

“He was cutting a drain here, is that right?” Cormac asked.

Cusack nodded. “I don’t know what Claffey’s up to, or whether it’s even legal, to tell you the truth. Right, I’ll leave you to it. I’m still trying to track down the car’s registration. You’ll keep me posted if anything important turns up?”

7

Nora followed behind Cormac as Niall Dawson led them around the tarp wall, where a partially cut drain ran straight up to the open boot of a car that had been completely submerged in the bog.

“Dr. Friel asked Cusack to pack extra peat around the body after she was here,” Dawson said. “Nobody’s disturbed anything since then.”

Nora knelt beside the drain as Cormac stepped down into it and began removing a few handfuls of peat. As he picked away at the soggy pile, the wrinkled sole of a foot began to materialize from the dark wetness. The skin appeared brown, with a faintly bluish cast. A bone jutted from the peat, and a litany of Latin words began humming through her head: caput humeri, tuberculum majoris, infraspinatus, teres minor. All part of the minutiae she had absorbed years ago, names for the various parts and surfaces belonging to the long bone of the upper arm. She recognized the humerus by its distinctive rounded cap, the pair of fan-like tuberosities. And she knew from the exposed surfaces that the bog man’s arm had been literally wrenched from the socket.

A faint, electric tracery of adrenaline flushed through her, something she didn’t generally experience in the presence of the dead. It was a reminder of the day she’d given up working with live patients, unnerved not only by surgery but even the act of piercing a vein to draw blood, the sight of a wound or scar. But they had been warned about the state of this body. What was it, then? Perhaps the fact that whoever had put the bog man in the boot had been in such a hurry that the remains of a fellow human had been nothing more to him than a nuisance.

“According to Donegan, the fella who found him, the legs and feet are at the left side, the head and torso toward the right side of the boot,” Dawson said. “At this point we’re not sure if he was dismembered before he went into the bog, or if he was pulled apart by the digger that buried the car. We know a digger was used from the backfill around the car. But whoever dug the hole wouldn’t have been best pleased to find a body—must have decided to chuck the bog man into the boot with his spoil.”

Nora stared down at the protruding bone, now seeing the folds of flesh and connective tissue that surrounded it. The usual procedure for remains found in situ was to remove the whole block of peat containing the body and return it intact to the lab at Collins Barracks for processing and examination. Since this body had already been disturbed, the usual protocol was out the window. Instead, they would have to extract the body parts right out here on the bog and go through the rest of the spoil in the car boot one handful at a time. They’d already been robbed of a whole range of important clues—the body’s position in the bog, composition of the original surrounding material, proximity to any artifacts that might have been nearby.

Niall Dawson said to Cormac, “I’ve got some boards and a roll of polythene in the back of the Rover. Give us a hand?”

Cormac climbed out of the hole and the two men ducked around the tarp again, leaving Nora alone with the body.

No matter how many times she encountered a human being preserved like this, it was impossible not to feel dumbstruck. She stepped down into the drain and sank slowly until her face was level with the bone, trying to let the minute details sink in. These moments of silent observation were not exactly prayerful in any traditional sense, and yet she felt something sacred in them, something reverential in the acknowledgment of a common thread of humanity. She tried to imagine the quicksilver thoughts, the fears and desires that had once coursed through these limbs, this heart, this brain. How had he ended up here, separated from the rest of his tribe, floating alone in the middle of a bog?

If they were fortunate, all that would come; his story would begin to emerge, little by little, as they dug into the peat. Nora pulled a camera from her bag and zoomed in on the shod foot and its cutwork shoe. Very like one discovered in a Westmeath bog fifty years ago—she’d seen it in reserve collection storage at the National Museum last year. She set the camera down and began removing peat from around the shoe, only to discover a second foot—this one bare—a few inches removed from the first. A few more handfuls and she could see that the ankle was fully flexed; a few inches below the furrowed arch, five toes lined up neatly, one tucked under the next, like peas in a pod.

Was it possible to read a part of this man’s life story in a thickening of his rounded heel, the flattening of his metatarsal arch? It was apparent that he had walked—a lot. His feet offered a record of the accumulated miles of a lifetime. Not at all like the sacrificial victims of the Iron Age, who were more often strapping young men who went to their graves untraveled and uncalloused. This man was different. His knobby toes and the sole of his foot bore proof of experience, of a long life, fully lived. She would be wise to linger over details like this now, while she had a chance. Once they’d removed the remainder of the peat, there wouldn’t be any time for leisurely study; they’d have to get him into the container and packed off to the fridge at Collins Barracks. In some ways, finding a body like this was like opening the pages of an ancient book, getting a direct glimpse into another time.

Nora climbed out of the trench and started snapping photographs of the drain where it met the buried car. A grave often told more about the person who dug it than the person buried there. She could see the toothmarks of a mechanical digger and places where the spoil had clearly been backfilled around the car. It occurred to her that whoever had buried this car might be here right now, watching the police and archaeologists at work, worrying about what they might find.

She climbed back into the cutaway and moved on to the area beside the bog man’s feet, carefully picking away the wet peat with gloved thumb and forefinger, reserving the spoil in case they had to go through it again. Bit by bit, the outline of a head and upper torso began to emerge.

If Killowen Man’s bare foot had made an impression, his distorted face, with its gaping mouth and unblinking eye sockets, formed an image that was utterly unforgettable. He had a high forehead; his cheeks had apparently been shaved a few days before he died, and the extra folds of skin about his neck seemed to confirm what she had guessed earlier about his rather advanced age. Tucked around his torso were folds of a thick woolen fabric, perhaps a cloak. There were the slits Dr. Friel had seen as possible stab wounds. Beneath the material she could trace the outline of a shoulder and flexed arm, following the curve of the elbow until she saw, nestled in the folds of the cloak, a curled fist, the right thumb and first two knuckles of the forefingers on his hand clearly visible. Reaching for her camera, Nora focused in on the thumbnail and pressed the shutter release, capturing the image. At least this portion of the body seemed intact. If they could manage to extract the head and torso without doing any further damage…

She snapped a few more pictures and glanced at the framed image on the camera’s small screen. One more shot. This time, as she zoomed in on the curled fist, something stood out from the glistening peat beside the bog man’s elbow. Another half-moon shape, almost like another thumbnail.

She peered into the boot and pushed aside the surrounding peat. This seemed like an awkward spot for his left hand. Then again, she reminded herself, if poor Killowen Man was indeed in pieces, there could be body parts crowded every which way in the boot. She could be looking at a toenail rather than a thumb.

Nora set aside the camera and her pulse quickened as she began scraping away the peat from around the second nail. She hadn’t been mistaken. Definitely a thumb, and then a whole hand. Another right hand.

Killowen Man was not alone.

8

Cormac hefted two sheets of plywood near the edge of the cutaway, wondering how much weight each would bear and calculating the full weight of a bog man with his swaddling of soggy peat. Might be better to take him in sections, if he was already divided that way. They had to be able to lift the bloody things. Nora was standing in the trench beside the half-buried car, camera resting in her left hand.

He set down his load a few paces from the cutaway. “How are you getting on?” he asked. When she didn’t respond right away, a spark of fear flared inside him. “Nora, is something wrong?”

She stepped aside without a word, and he looked into the boot. The bog man’s right fist lay curled against the peat. Beside it was a second hand, this one poking out of a sleeve that sported three knotted leather buttons at the cuff.

“Jesus.” He quickly jumped down into the trench to get a closer look. Nora handed him a magnifying glass, which he used to examine the sodden sleeve and the oblong signet ring that seemed to wink at them from the peat. The block capitals of a monogram were upside down but clearly visible: BKA.

When Nora spoke, her voice was calm. “You’d better fetch Cusack.”

They could hear Niall rounding the corner of the tarp wall. As soon as he saw their faces, Dawson grasped that something was wrong. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Complications,” Cormac said.

Dawson came to the lip of the cutaway and looked down into the boot. He swore softly. “We’ll have to get Cusack and her crew back in here. Do you want to go, or shall I?”

“I’ll go,” Cormac said.

So the car was a crime scene after all. They’d been here less than a full hour, and already he was starting to have a very bad feeling about this place. Once again he and Nora were unraveling connections between the living and the dead. Some of those connections were to be expected in their line of work. But some could be dangerous, particularly when people preferred that they remain buried.

He began to make his way across to the road, feeling the eyes of the bystanders upon him—and the landowner, Vincent Claffey, in particular. Why was Claffey giving out like that when they arrived, and what exactly did he imagine they would find here? He was obviously unfamiliar with the law on treasure trove. The government had claim on any artifact found on Irish soil, even on private property.

Cusack was still on her mobile as he approached. He could hear her end of the conversation: “Benedict. And the last name, is that with a C or K?” A pause. “Right. Kavanagh with a K it is. Thanks.” Cusack snapped her phone shut. “Well, we’ve got a registration on the car’s owner, but nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him for the last four months.”

“I think we found him,” Cormac said.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a second body in the boot. Clearly not as old as the—”

Cusack held up one hand. “Wait. Back up just a minute. Another body?”

“Looks like he’s been pushed into the back of the boot.”

Cusack paused for a moment, trying to get her mind around this new information. Her joyriding theory had suddenly vanished, replaced by something much darker. All the tumblers that had begun lining up in her brain would have to be recalibrated.

“We’ve stopped the recovery work, obviously,” Cormac said. “At least for the moment. But we can offer our assistance if you need it—”

Without a word, Cusack began marching over the bog once more. Cormac had to jog along beside her to keep up.

“Did I hear you say the owner of the car was Benedict Kavanagh?”

Cusack gave a sideways glance. “Why? Do you know him?”

“Not personally, but I remember thinking when he went missing that someone must have done him in.”

Cusack pulled up short. “Why would you think that?”

“You never watched his television program?”

She kept walking. “No.”

Fair enough, Cormac thought. Spending a Friday evening watching tweedy intellectuals lock horns in epistemological debate was not everyone’s idea of a good time.

“It was a chat show, but not like the usual—philosophy was Kavanagh’s hobbyhorse. He’d spend the first twenty minutes teasing out his guests’ ideas, grilling them about their latest book or whatever. You could feel him digging the ground out from under their feet. Then in the last few minutes, he’d prove his guests not just sadly mistaken but wrong on every possible level. He was brilliant. But I couldn’t help feeling there was something a little sadistic underneath it all. I’m amazed that anyone ever agreed to be on the program. I mean, surely they knew what was in store for them. Or they imagined themselves somehow able to fend him off, unlike the last poor sod.”

“So you think he may have been murdered by a disgruntled guest?”

“Well, perhaps not—that would be too bizarre. But I’ll admit it was my first thought when I heard the name.”

9

Stella Cusack wished that her instinct about this case had been wrong. But there was no mistaking the age of the second body; she stared at the three buttons on the tweed jacket, the gold signet ring a few inches from them. There was no mistaking the initials on the ring either: BKA. She spoke to Molloy. “Give Dr. Friel a quick ring, Fergal. We’ll need her back as soon as she can manage. The crime scene detail as well. And ring up central records in Harcourt Street, tell them we need everything they’ve got on this man.” She reached for her notebook and ripped out the page on which she’d written the name of the car’s owner. “Missing person case.”

She turned back to the archaeologists, who were standing above her at the edge of the cutaway. “I understood there was some urgency in getting your bog man out of here.”

Niall Dawson rubbed his chin. “There is. I was just going to say, we’ve got to extricate him sooner or later. So I was thinking, it’s probably better for all concerned if we just press on.”

Stella knew that the decision—and the consequences, should something go wrong—would be on her.

Dawson looked at her hopefully. “Dr. Gavin has been an official consultant to the state pathologist on bog remains, and Dr. Maguire has extensive crime scene experience, documenting mass grave sites in Bosnia. They’re both well up on the protocol for clandestine burials.”

Stella knew she had to make a decision. “All right, carry on, then. But I want all your photos and drawings. And I want scene-of-crime to go through everything you’re planning to take away.”

“Done,” Dawson said. “And we can see about keeping our bog man on ice at the local mortuary until you’re ready to release him.”

As she stepped around the edge of the tarp again, Stella found herself scanning the faces in the small crowd that still lined the perimeter of the site, thankful that at least she’d not chased them off. They were bound to guess that something was up when the state pathologist made a return appearance. The new body changed everything. Vincent Claffey claimed to own this parcel of bogland, but what exactly was he up to here? He’d hired Kevin Donegan to cut a drain, but there were no milling machines or baggers lined up to turn this bog into garden-grade peat moss or extruded turf. Whatever he was doing, it had to require planning permission, so had he filed the necessary paperwork, or was he trying to get away with something?

Would Claffey be giving out like this if he’d known about the car and the two bodies—if he’d actually put them there, for instance? Feigning ignorance could just be a way of pointing suspicion away from himself. Stella was familiar with Claffey’s form; he’d never been what you might call a hardened criminal, just a small-time schemer who always walked a fine line when it came to the law. Probably due up in court next month for not paying his television license. Claffey and his moneymaking schemes were the stuff of local legend. There was the time he tried offering stump removal with an ancient Massey Ferguson tractor. He ended up rupturing a gas line, barely escaping with his life. The tractor had been blown to smithereens. Or that December night a few years back when the Christmas turkeys he was rearing in a heated shed had all escaped and perished out in the frosty fields. It wasn’t just where did he get such hare-brained notions, but where on earth did he get the money? Somehow there was never a shortage for the next big project. Burying a car in the bog was exactly the sort of thing Vincent Claffey might do, but was it in him to cross over the line into something like murder? Still, it was possible to underestimate the man.

Then again, it might also be significant who was not standing around at the perimeter of the crime scene. This bog bordered on three farms: Claffey’s place, Anthony Beglan’s property, and Killowen, and yet neither Anthony nor Claire Finnerty had even ventured over to see what was going on. Might be wise to leg it over there soon.

Stella’s phone began to vibrate, then she heard that wretched Lady Gaga song her daughter Liadán had programmed in as her personal ringtone. Bloody teenagers. She fumbled for the phone, trying to shut off the embarrassing noise as quickly as possible.

As usual, Lia didn’t bother with a greeting. “I’m going to stay at Da’s tonight. He said we could get an early start on the weekend, if it’s all right with you. And before you ask, I’ve collected the mail, folded all the laundry, and finished the washing up.”

Jesus, Stella thought, did she really sound like that to Lia? Had the past twelve months of single motherhood turned her into a total nag and a killjoy?

“So, is it?” Lia prompted.

“Is it what?”

“Is it all right with you if I head over to Daddy’s tonight instead of waiting until tomorrow?” Lia spoke each word distinctly, as if her mother was suddenly deaf as well as clueless. Stella heard the note of exasperation and could imagine the eye rolling going on at the other end of the phone. She considered the alternatives. Lia would be seventeen next Tuesday week. She had begun to spend every other weekend with her father these past few months, though they hadn’t worked out any sort of formal arrangement. In fact, Barry hadn’t pressed for specific visitation—probably just as glad not to have his daughter around, especially as he was busy bedding women closer to his daughter’s age than his own. The very thought made Stella ill. But as it turned out, Barry had very little to say about his part in their daughter’s custody; Lia had latched on to the idea of weekends at her father’s place when she learned that she could get away with murder. He let her eat what she liked, never made a fuss about her staying up all hours. She understood that if she said yes, she was being overly permissive; if she said no, she was being too hard. Those were the choices; there was no middle ground.

She had dragged out the decision as long as possible. “Well, since you’ve got everything in hand, I suppose it’s all right. But you’ll be back by five on Sunday, as usual?” Stella heard the subtle note of pleading in her voice and hated it, hated herself for allowing it to creep in. She had no doubt that Lia heard it, too.

“Yes. See you Sunday. Thanks, Mam.”

A loud click told her Lia was already gone.

Stella snapped her phone shut. It wasn’t as if she’d be home all weekend anyway, not with another dead man in the boot of that bloody car.

Fergal Molloy approached. “I got on to the revenue crowd about the property records. This bog is split into three turbary allotments, one for each of the adjoining properties, as you might expect. One belongs to Anthony Beglan, one is part of the Killowen parcel, and the other is attached to Vincent Claffey’s land.”

“So Claffey is the legal owner, as he says?”

“Looks like it. But here’s the thing he didn’t mention. This bog was designated as Special Area of Conservation two years ago. Claffey and his neighbors are getting compensation for not cutting here—a thousand euros per annum, each. I suppose Claffey wanted to be having his cake and atin’ it, too, probably counted on nobody checking.” Molloy jerked his head in the direction of the car. “Is it really him in the boot, Benedict Kavanagh?”

“We’ll find out soon. What news from Dublin?”

“Harcourt Street are sending the file over. Looks like Kavanagh went missing four months ago. He taped his television program on a Thursday afternoon, as usual—that was April twenty-first. But he wasn’t officially reported missing until the first of May.”

“Who made the report?”

“His wife, Mairéad Broome. She’s a painter—pretty famous in her own right, evidently.”

Stella felt a pinprick of irritation and told herself Molloy didn’t realize he was being patronizing. It was just what people said.

“What about a photograph?”

“They’re sending pictures to both our mobiles. Should have them here in a tick.” Molloy looked sideways at her. “You ever watch his program? Kavanagh’s, I mean.”

Why was everyone asking that? “I suppose you did.”

“Once in a while. Bit out of my depth, really. But it was amazing what he got away with. I think half the people who watched didn’t give a fiddler’s fart about philosophy; they just liked seeing your man have a go. Fuckin’ deadly with words, he was.”

These minor details were revealing a side of Molloy that Stella had never glimpsed before. All she knew was that he’d been born and reared in this part of the country, and had been seconded to the Antiquities Task Force before landing in Birr last year. What else did he do in his spare time? From the way he dressed, she’d already guessed he wasn’t in a darts league with the local Guards contingent. Molloy had been her partner for only a few months, and these things took time. But it had been brought home to her only too recently that you could work with, even live with, someone for years and never get a glimpse into his inner life.

“Any idea who tipped the media?”

Molloy shrugged. “Well, Claffey brought the chipper. Ask him.”

“Did you notice there’s no one here from Killowen?”

“You sure they’ve heard about all this?”

“Not much goes on here that Claire Finnerty hasn’t got a bead on.” Stella had investigated a suspicious fire at Killowen about three years ago. Hooligans, most likely, not enough evidence to pursue anything. But the investigation led to a few interesting chats with Claire Finnerty. There was something that nagged at her about the woman; she couldn’t say exactly what it was—a certain guardedness, perhaps, that helped kick her detective’s instincts into overdrive. “I’ll have a word with Claffey. Why don’t you have another little chat with the digger operator, see if he has any more to tell us.”

“You mean like why he was digging a drain in a protected bog, for instance?”

People who didn’t actually do police work might imagine that detectives were trained to deal only in facts, but the bottom line was that a large part of the work was sorting fact from fiction—also from hearsay, misremembered details, outright lies, ingrained biases, and personal opinion. There was no such thing as “the facts.” She tried to keep all that in mind as she rambled over to Vincent Claffey.

She could see him feigning surprise. There was no real place to conduct interviews out here, so she’d have to steer him away from the other gawkers.

“What’s happening? What’s all this commotion about?” Claffey’s grating voice was even louder since he’d spied the archaeologists calling her back to the site.

“The team is just going about their work, Mr. Claffey, and had a question for me. No cause for concern. But I wonder if I could have a word?”

He eyed her suspiciously. “What about?”

They were finally far enough not to be overheard. Stella tried to fix Claffey with a steady gaze, but his shoulders twisted nervously.

“We checked the property records for this bog,” she said.

Claffey looked insulted. “Didn’t I tell you it’s mine? I can show you the papers.”

“That’s all in order. But Detective Molloy also happened to run a check on Special Areas of Conservation.”

Claffey looked sideways, caught. “Ah, well, now, there’s a slight difference of opinion on that,” he said. “That law is weak.”

Stella knew she had him. Cutting turf in a protected bog could bring a stiff fine. “What are you doing with the peat, Mr. Claffey?”

“Sure, what would I be doing with it? Only gettin’ me bit of turf mold for sowing potatoes—”

In the course of her work, Stella had driven past the Claffey place on numerous occasions and had never once seen a green leaf of any vegetable growing amid the rubbish and rusted-out machinery that filled his haggard. Vincent Claffey wouldn’t know a potato plant if he tripped over it. So what was he really up to, going for his bit of turf mold with a digger?

Her phone vibrated once—the photo of Kavanagh. She held up the screen to show Claffey the image.

“Do you happen to know this man? Ever seen him around here?” The photo triggered a subtle change in Claffey’s demeanor. Stella could see his thoughts zigzagging like a hare. He’d been his old cute, cunning self up to that point, and it was definitely the photo of Kavanagh that tipped him over. She said, “We’ve just found that the car in the bog belongs to him. Benedict Kavanagh. Ring any bells?”

“Kavanagh? No… no, can’t say that it does.”

“So you’ve never seen him before?” She held up the phone again. “Take another look.”

Claffey glanced once more at the image, shifted his weight. “No.”

“You’re sure?”

Barely a thrust of the chin this time, and he’d managed to suppress the glint of panic in his eyes. “Look, are you finished with me? I’m dyin’ for a slash.”

He had been dancing a jig along the tape for the past few minutes. “Just one more thing,” Stella said. “If you suddenly remember seeing Mr. Kavanagh anywhere, I want you to ring me.” She handed him a card. “My mobile’s on there.”

He took the card and pretended to study it before slipping it into his pocket. “Can I go now? I’m about to burst me fuckin’ bladder.”

She waved him off, and he legged it over behind the chipper and ducked around back. Stella made a mental note to stay away from the cod and chips—and almost anything else on offer from that van. No matter how hungry she got, she’d wait until Molloy could bring them some grub from the nearest Supra station. The girl in the chipper folded and refolded her gray rag, no doubt wishing she were somewhere else. What must it be like, having a man like Vincent Claffey for a father?

After a moment, Claffey emerged from behind the chipper, zipping his trousers as he returned to his position at the tape. Stella circled around until she stood beside the van, out of his line of vision. More than one way to skin a cat, as her mother used to say. She stepped up to the chipper window. “Hullo, Deirdre, isn’t it?”

“Yeh.”

Stella’s gaze lingered on Deirdre’s forearms, which sported a few yellow patches at the wrist, the telltale remains of bruises. Suddenly self-conscious, the girl pulled down the sleeves of her jumper and balled both hands into fists. No good even asking, Stella knew. She would have a ready story about knocking into something. Everybody knew about Claffey’s wife scarpering years ago, leaving the child behind. Everyone also knew how Vincent Claffey worked his daughter like a navvy, and even worse suspicions had cropped up when she’d fallen pregnant. But the way the system worked, you couldn’t bring a parent up on charges on the basis of whispers and nasty rumors. And to complicate matters, whenever the girl had been questioned, she defended the bugger.

“Your father says you’d been helping him out here on the bog.”

Deirdre frowned, unsure whether to believe her. “I only work in the chipper. That’s all.”

“But he told you what he’s doing here?”

“No, he didn’t. My da is into all sorts of stuff I know nothin’ about.”

Thus sparing you from prosecution, Stella thought. Very decent of him. She’d have to try a different tack. Glancing over the tired-looking menu board with its hash of mismatched letters, the spattered fryer and the bags of crisps on their clipboard, the cans of Sprite and Diet Coke stacked up against the back wall, she was caught in the undertow of memory. “I worked in a chipper once—I was about your age.” All right, so she was fishing, trying to soften the girl up, but it was the truth. “Hated that fryer with a passion—it seemed like I could never get the stink off me—but at least the job got me out of the house at weekends. You do meet all sorts, working in a chipper.”

The girl almost smiled. “Yeh, most of them stocious.”

Also true, Stella thought. She felt the tug of memory, of the late-night conversations she’d carried on with maggoty young fellas at one o’clock in the morning after the pubs closed. “I used to like market days,” she said. “People always seemed in a cheery mood when they were making a few bob.” Fishing again, hoping the girl wouldn’t notice.

“Yeh—” Deirdre started to say, when the startled noise of an infant came from somewhere near her feet. She stooped to pick up a baby from its carrier and rested him on her hip. She reached for a bottle of formula and slipped it into the baby’s mouth; he helped hold it in place. After his nap, the child appeared plump and rosy; he beamed at his mother. Deirdre’s eyes, too, lit at the sight of her child.

“I wonder, you wouldn’t remember if you ever saw this man anywhere around?”

She held up her phone with the photo of Benedict Kavanagh. Watching Deirdre Claffey’s eyes dart away, her expression flattening, Stella picked up another whiff of a scent. Hold up, said the voice in her head. Don’t pounce. Just let her talk.

“Dunno,” Deirdre said. She fiddled with the front of the baby’s jumper, switched him to her opposite hip. “Like you said, you meet all sorts.”

But not many you remember so well, Stella thought. And surely not many who ended up dead at the bottom of a bog hole.

10

It was nearly eleven by the time Nora returned to her room at Killowen. The National Museum team had worked into the night, lights rigged up inside the tent, which glowed out in the darkness of the bog like a giant luminaria. After they’d recovered as much of Killowen Man as they could from the boot, the coroner’s team had come in and removed the second body. Both sets of remains were now headed to the morgue at the regional hospital, where they’d each undergo a preliminary postmortem in the morning. Nora had elected not to go along, partly because she wanted to give Cormac a chance to catch up with his old friend Niall Dawson and partly because she was desperate for a bath after the day’s grubby work.

They’d not taken much time to get Cormac’s father settled in before heading out to the bog, so it was only now that she began paying attention to the surroundings at Killowen. A small sign marked COTTAGES pointed down a path to the right as she pulled Cormac’s jeep into the car park alongside the main house.

“House” was probably a misnomer, because the place still resembled the barn or granary it had once been: although two stories, the broad-beamed structure seemed to hug the ground, with vine-covered limestone walls and a slate roof. The entry was a graceful glassed-in room built out from the arch of an old doorway. A few lights glowed in the upper windows now, and Nora realized that she hadn’t met any of the residents except for Claire Finnerty, who’d greeted them when they arrived. It turned out that Killowen was no ordinary bed-and-breakfast guesthouse but an artists’ retreat. She crunched across pea gravel in the car park, wondering if she’d have to disturb someone to gain entrance this late, but the front door was unlocked. They mustn’t be too concerned with security way out here—or maybe it was a philosophical statement about the nature of property. Either way it was curious; the crime rate in the countryside was usually higher than one might want to admit.

The kitchen at the back of the house was dark but for tiny spotlights above the sink and a set of French doors that looked out onto an herb garden. Mealtime had come and gone, and she was positively ravenous. She opened the refrigerator to find a glass-covered cheese plate front and center with a note taped conspicuously to the bell. Niall, et al., Please help yourselves to anything you may like here. Fix yourselves an omelet if you like, or there’s salad on the shelf below. The cheese is our own, and there’s wine, bread, and butter on the table. The note was signed CF.

Nora nibbled some bread and cheese, to take the edge off. She might have something more, perhaps a glass of wine, with Cormac and Niall when they returned.

Making her way silently up the stairs, she knocked softly at Eliana’s door.

“Eliana? Are you awake?”

After a few scuffling noises, the door opened.

“Just checking to make sure—” Nora stopped speaking when she saw the girl’s face, slightly blotchy, the eyes red rimmed as if she’d been crying. “Is everything all right, Eliana? Are you alone here?” Nora’s eyes instinctively checked over the girl’s shoulder. There was no one else in the room, only a book overturned on the writing desk, a small volume bound in yellow leather.

“Yes, I’m all right. It’s just… a sad story.” She smiled. “Everything was fine today. We had an excellent dinner.”

“And you think Joseph was comfortable about being here—away from home, I mean?”

“Yes. But he seemed rather tired after the meal and went to bed about half past eight,” Eliana said, her voice steadier now.

“That’s not unusual; he sleeps quite a lot these days. Well, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Nora said. “I’ll let you get back to your story. See you in the morning.”

Inside her own room, Nora gathered up the items she’d need for a bath and left a note for Cormac: Gone in search of promised thermal suite. Join me if you like.

She headed down the stairs and turned toward the old stable block adjacent to the granary that had been converted into a kind of spa. The sleeping rooms at Killowen were all en suite, but Claire Finnerty had urged them to take advantage of the new whirlpool and steam room. Because they’d been expected down at the bog, they hadn’t taken the time upon their arrival to have a look.

As Nora turned down the corridor to the spa, an eerie noise came from the far end. It sounded almost like a moan. She stopped to listen. There it was again, a strange wavering contralto. Impossible to tell whether it was a human voice, or just the wind crossing a chimney pot, or a piece of furniture being dragged across a flag floor. Then it was gone.

She kept walking, looking at the frescoes on the walls: long watery ribbons of intertwined pigment, in subtle layered shades of blue green, echoing the variations in the limestone outer walls. The place was a retreat for artists, and someone had put in a lot of time, making Killowen itself into a work of art.

Everything was silent now. And no wonder: the walls upstairs and here in the stable block were at least three feet thick. She hadn’t heard anything through the rough-hewn doors upstairs as she passed—no conversation, not even snoring. Quiet as a cloister, this place. She finally came upon a door with a hanging wooden sign: BATH SUITE.

The sight that greeted her as she switched on the light was a spacious room painted a stormy-sea shade of green, the same as the hallway outside. The outside wall was set with frosted-glass windows at regular intervals, the inside wall devoted to four roomy shower stalls. Nora ranged around the room, exploring. She peered through a small window into the steam bath; behind a folding screen at the opposite end, she found a massage table and a large oval tub sunk into the floor, with steps spiraling down along the rim. Nearby shelves held stacks of folded towels, bath salts, and dried seaweed in large apothecary jars. Alongside the jars lay several long clear plastic tubes, cinched at each end with metal clasps. Nora picked one up. “Tir na nOg,” read the brand name in large letters on the label, “Authentic Irish Moor Peat.” She’d heard of spas where you could steep in a hot peat bath, or detoxify by smearing moor mud on various parts of your anatomy. The scientist in her naturally discounted most of the outrageous health claims, but peat did have some pretty remarkable chemical and biological qualities that weren’t completely understood. Maybe she ought to give it a go, although her main concern at this point was getting at the muck lodged under her nails.

She kicked off her shoes and felt a delicious warmth radiating from the stone floor. Turning on the taps, she began to fill the tub, thinking about what she’d seen so far of Killowen. Through the French doors in the kitchen, she had spied a large empty room in the adjoining wing that looked almost like a yoga studio. She’d still not seen any of the residents besides Claire Finnerty, but they must have staff. It would take a lot of effort to keep this place running. Especially if most of the food came from the farm. Claire had explained that residents and guests took meals together in the main kitchen; the rotating cooking detail and menus for the week were sketched out on a chalkboard on the wall. Communal living did seem to have some advantages. Nora supposed her own current arrangement with Cormac and his father had similar perks and pitfalls. But the homemade bread and cheese she’d just consumed let her imagine an idyllic existence here: What could be better than following the creative impulse, living on the bounty of the earth just outside the door? Of course there must be downsides: lack of privacy, for a start, which she understood firsthand. And there were always undercurrents of tension wherever human beings tried to work in concert. No doubt the rifts would become apparent the longer she stayed. But at least for tonight, it seemed easy enough to admire the beautiful façade.

When the bath was full, she stripped off her clothes and lowered herself into the water, snipping the end off one of the tubes of moor peat and squeezing it out onto her knees. This peat was the next thing to mud, but not remotely mineral—its texture was smooth and silky, its color the darkest chocolate. She rubbed the ooze between her palms until it finally dissolved, turning the steaming bathwater a dark brown. This was the same peat that preserved bog butter, wooden roads, all those ritual sacrifices. Ten thousand years, that’s how long it had lain in a suspended state in the bottom of a bog, and now it was being disturbed, for what? Beauty treatments whose effects were at best transitory. The impossible quest for youth. She thought of all the endangered bogs and suddenly began to feel guilty for enjoying the fruits of such exploitation.

As she closed her eyes, the vision of the two men in the car boot resurfaced—limbs at all angles, intertwined like two figures in a medieval knotwork design. The first corpse she’d already begun to refer to as Killowen Man, with his delicate hands and cutwork shoe, who, despite being dead, had also become a miraculous survivor in a way. She was eager to begin learning more about him tomorrow. Those cuts in his garments said he hadn’t simply fallen into a bog and drowned, but his remains were too recent to have been a ritual sacrifice. So maybe he was the victim of a crime of passion, a domestic dispute, or a robbery gone wrong? One thing was certain: people murdered one another centuries ago for the very same reasons they did today.

It was the other man, the one they believed to be Benedict Kavanagh, who was more unsettling, especially as he might have been pushed into that boot by a killer who was still nearby. Perhaps very near. Nora tried to shove that thought out of her mind, realizing that she hadn’t even thought to lock the door behind her.

As if on cue, she heard a small whoosh as the door to the thermal suite began to swing open. She sank down, keeping as still as possible and letting the peaty water lap against her chin. She held her breath.

“Nora?” The sound of Cormac’s voice loosed a small flood of relief. “Are you there?”

“Back here. And there’s definitely room for two, if you—”

“Say no more.” In a few seconds, he had peeled off his damp clothing and sunk down into the bath beside her. “Great stuff,” he said. “Somehow I had forgotten all about the grinding physical labor involved in fieldwork.”

Nora slid closer. “Well, then, a spa treatment is just what the doctor ordered.”

He leaned in, brushed his lips against hers. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Did you get something to eat? And did you check on your father?”

Cormac nodded. “Yes and yes. Sleeping peacefully.”

“And you got the two gents settled at the mortuary?”

“Ready and waiting for your ministrations in the morning. Anything strange here?”

Nora considered for a moment. “I’m not sure. I looked in on Eliana just before coming down here, and she seemed to be crying. She said it was the sad story she’d been reading, but I don’t know.”

“It’s possible that she’s just homesick. I got the feeling that she’s led a rather sheltered existence up to this point.” Cormac frowned. “And you know yourself what a confounding old goat my father can be, even at the best of times. We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t feel like we’re abandoning her here, expecting her to be alone with him all day long. I know it’s only temporary, but—”

The door swung open and they both started in surprise, though not as much as the astonished female who’d just walked in on them.

“Sorry!” she said. “I didn’t realize anyone was in here. We usually flip over the sign on the door.” A fellow American, Nora noted, thirtyish, with an uncomfortable smile and a pair of bright blue eyes that she was trying studiously to keep averted.

“No, we apologize,” Nora said. “We haven’t been here long enough to know the house rules. Just arrived today.”

The woman’s voice brightened. “Oh, you’re the archaeologists from the National Museum. Me, too. I mean, I’m an archaeologist—Shawn Kearney.” Then, suddenly realizing that she was still the only person in the room wearing a stitch, she put a hand to her eyes and blushed furiously. “Sorry! Not the best time to chat. I’ll just—sorry!” She flipped the sign on the door and was gone.

“Not quite how I imagined getting acquainted,” Nora said, when she and Cormac were alone again.

“Good to know about the sign, though,” he said. “We must employ it in future.”

Cormac’s forefinger traced an elaborate cipher along her collarbone. “You know, there was something else I noticed out on the bog today. I hate even to bring it up, but—” He seemed to be fighting with himself. “Well, it was strange. When Niall found out the car was registered to Benedict Kavanagh, he never said a word.”

“And why is that strange?”

“Because he knew Kavanagh. They were at university together. We were all there at the same time, Niall and Robbie McSweeney and I—and Benedict Kavanagh, though I didn’t know Kavanagh personally. He and Niall were best mates in their first year. I know it’s a long time ago, but still, you’d think Niall would have mentioned that he and Kavanagh were acquainted.”

“You said they were good mates, past tense. Was there some sort of falling-out?”

“You could say that. It only started coming back to me as we worked. The Philosophical Society had this tradition of sponsoring a head-to-head debate between their two most promising undergraduates. Philosophy became a spectator sport eight weeks into the fall term, because you were guaranteed a bloody good argument. I mean, rooting sections and everything. But that year, it was even more interesting, because the two chosen combatants happened to be best mates.”

Nora nodded. “Niall and Benedict Kavanagh. So what happened?”

“I can’t quite recall the topic of the debate, but it was impossible to forget the outcome. Poor Niall was left sputtering, while Kavanagh ran rings around him. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.”

“And you think Niall remembers, too?”

“I don’t see how he could forget. The way I heard it, the whole experience made him chuck philosophy. He very nearly dropped out of university altogether. It was only his good friends—Robbie and a few others—who saved him from going down the rabbit hole.”

“And you think he may have held a grudge against Kavanagh all these years?”

“That’s what’s strange. From the little I know, Niall never held Kavanagh responsible for his failure in that debate. He blamed himself for being ill prepared.”

Nora was thinking aloud. “So, if he didn’t hold anything against Kavanagh, why not mention the old connection to Cusack?”

“Exactly what I was wondering. It’s not like he could keep it from surfacing sooner or later. He and I have never spoken about Kavanagh. I don’t know if Niall’s even aware that I was at that debate. We didn’t meet until he switched to archaeology—”

A noise came from the direction of the doorway. Surely not the embarrassed intruder again, Nora thought. Cormac put a finger to his lips, and they both froze in place, waiting. Then the bathroom door closed with a loud click.

11

Stella arrived home well after midnight, greeted by an empty house. A sense of impending doom washed through her, thinking about the mortgage she could barely afford, all the other bills that had to be paid now out of one pay packet. Yet another reason for Lia to prefer her father’s place. He wasn’t exactly flush, given the current state of the economy, but at least he wasn’t trying to scrape by on a Garda detective’s salary. There had been a time not so long ago, Stella thought, when she felt strong, decisive, like she was actually capable of making her own choices. Now, more and more, the choices seemed unworkable, and she seemed to be sinking in a swamp of indecision.

She thought of the words Barry and Lia and her colleagues at the station in Birr would use to describe her: reliable, thorough, organized, responsible, competent, sensible, words that enclosed her like the bars of a prison cell. She was all those things, to be sure, but wasn’t there even a spark of something more, or had she become just another steady plodder? Whatever happened to that bracingly alive creature she had once been, the one who jumped into everything with both feet?

Looking in the mirror each morning, she could see how her hair, her eyes, had gone dull. Her eyesight was going; she had to squint to read anything. She felt the scratch of the safety pin hitching up her brassiere strap and glanced down at the hem of her sleeve, held together with a staple. Pathetic. She was barely holding it together most days—maybe no one had blamed Barry Cusack for walking out. What happened when you turned out to be a stranger, even to yourself?

Stella ripped off her rumpled suit with its stapled sleeve and flung it on the floor. She stripped off her blouse and bra and knickers, and dumped a whole drawer full of faded, worn-out underclothes onto the pile. Into the feckin’ rubbish bin with all of it—she was sick to death looking at it. It was only when she put her hand on the kitchen door handle to peg the pile of clothes outside that Stella realized she was stark naked. Retrieving one pair of knickers, she put on her favorite plush tracksuit and returned to the kitchen, where she poured herself a large glass of wine, and pushed everything from the table.

She pulled out the missing person file on Benedict Kavanagh. The photo inside was the same one she’d received on her phone: a vigorous face, perhaps forty years of age, with intense blue eyes, an aristocratic-looking nose and cheekbones, well-formed lips. He was clean shaven and beginning to gray at the temples. Dynamite on television, one would imagine. Stella tried to visualize this man cocking an eyebrow and delivering a verbal deathblow to his debating opponent.

She started making a list of the interviews they’d have to launch: Kavanagh’s wife and all known associates, anyone else who might have benefited from his death. Surely a serious scholar like Kavanagh would have professional rivals. He was also on television, which meant he could have been killed by an obsessed viewer who took exception to something he’d said or, as Maguire had mentioned, perhaps by one of the many guests he’d enjoyed humiliating. Then there were the locals: Vincent Claffey and his daughter, Claire Finnerty and her crowd. A long list.

But the wife was first priority—after all, who had more motive for killing a man than the one person who knew him most intimately? The next thought unsettled her. What if the person who knew a man most intimately wasn’t his wife? Happened all the time. And yet another motive for the spouse. Kavanagh’s wife had kept her own name—Mairéad Broome. Molloy’s “in her own right” comment pricked at her again. According to the file, at the time of her husband’s disappearance, Mairéad Broome had recently been elected to the Aosdána, the national artists’ association, and had just launched her first solo show. How was Benedict Kavanagh reacting to his wife’s increasing success? On that, the file was mum.

Stella reached for a fresh sheet of paper and began listing locations she ought to visit: the crime scene at the bog, Killowen, Claffey’s place; an arrow pointing eastward stood in for Kavanagh’s home in the city and the Dublin Academy for Advanced Scholarship, where he was a fellow. What did that mean, exactly? Did he teach, or was it mostly research? And what sort of research was involved in a field like philosophy? Stella had little exposure to the world of academia and found herself intrigued by people who could work up a froth splitting hairs over a single word. Then there was the whole political side of things, the usual hurts about who got passed over for chairmanships and committees, the pressures of publication, how the system turned a few academics into stars and the rest into pillocks. All of Stella’s firsthand knowledge of workplace politics came from her time in the Guards, but how different could it be, really? Human beings were essentially the same selfish, venal creatures no matter the sphere.

She flipped through the contents of the files: interviews with his wife, the producer of his television program, his colleagues at the academy, the neighbors. Everyone had a slightly different take, it seemed, so the portrait of Kavanagh ended up like one of those dotted paintings she’d seen once in a museum. Stand too close, and you couldn’t make out the image. Only by stepping back could you get any perspective. She forced herself to focus on Benedict Kavanagh’s habits, his routines. From what she was gathering, he’d had a rather light teaching schedule—one seminar, which met once a week on Monday afternoon. He wrote every morning between eight and eleven, and prepared for his television program after lunch. The show taped from four to six on Thursday afternoon.

Stella had an impression that the interviewees were holding back, not telling all they knew about Benedict Kavanagh. Words like “difficult” and “brilliant” seemed to recur with regularity, almost always in the same breath, as if you couldn’t be one without the other. He had gathered a chosen few around him, a coterie that his larger circle—behind his back, of course—had gleefully dubbed “the Children of a Lesser God.”

Benedict Kavanagh had grown up in Dalkey, the pampered only son of a prominent heart surgeon and his wife. Had a stellar career as a student, earned multiple degrees at University College Dublin, and slipped naturally into a cushy post at the Dublin Academy for Advanced Scholarship. What he did there apart from the single seminar was anyone’s guess, but he was paid a decent salary for it. Nothing out of place in his financial dealings. From the look of things, he traveled and lectured in Europe and America, on his particular area of expertise, listed as “Neoplatonist Philosophers of the Carolingian Court.” Someone had included the title of one of Kavanagh’s papers: “Eriugena’s Commentary on the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy.” Stella stared at the words on the page, struck by the notion that they were legible, neatly typed, and in English. They might as well have been Swahili or Cantonese for all they communicated to her. What prompted people to delve so deeply into a subject that their work was incomprehensible to the vast majority of the planet’s population? Perhaps this was a man who’d been raised to believe that he had no equals. That kind of thinking led to all kinds of dangerous situations, in her experience.

The details surrounding Kavanagh’s disappearance had been tracked four months ago, as far as possible: he’d taped his program as usual on a Thursday afternoon, and no one reported him missing until his wife phoned the Guards on the first of May. After the taping session, the trail had gone cold. His seminar was not scheduled to meet on the following Monday because it was a bank holiday weekend; there were no cashpoint withdrawals, no credit card receipts, nothing to pinpoint where he went or with whom. His car did have an eToll tag, but he’d evidently avoided the M7 motorway on his route to Killowen; there was no record of his tag activating the system. Was he deliberately trying to evade detection for some reason?

Stella found herself resenting the fact that this case would probably be handed over to Serious Crimes in Dublin, as if she and her colleagues weren’t capable of investigating a high-profile murder. But that was the way politics was played these days in the Garda Síochána—the big-city task forces wanted any case guaranteed to bring them a dose of media attention, which helped justify their existence in the minds of people in charge of budgets and bottom lines. But even if it came to that, they couldn’t stop her from doing her own inquiry. She kicked herself for not going to Dublin herself right away, this evening, to speak with Kavanagh’s wife.

Even though Benedict Kavanagh was a minor celebrity, and news of his disappearance had been all over television for a short time, no one had come forward to report seeing him after he’d finished the taping session. His wife had been out of town herself and only reported him missing ten days after he was last seen. News of his body turning up might now bring out someone who remembered clapping eyes on him, and then again, it might not. Serious Crimes would be working that angle anyway; using the media to flush out witnesses was their specialty, not hers. But she had tools of her own. She had seen the body out on the bog—those bulging eyes, the distended cheeks. This crime was not about money or abstract intellectual principle. Benedict Kavanagh’s death had been intensely personal for someone. The question for Stella was: For whom?