BOOK TWO

Truagh sin, a leabhair bhig bháin,

tiocfaidh an lá, is budh fíor,

déarfaidh neach os cionn do chláir:

“Ní mhaireann an lámh do sgríobh.”

This is sad! O little white book!

A day will come in truth,

when someone over your page will say,

“The hand that wrote it is no more.”

—Verse written by an Irish scribe in the margin of a medieval manuscript

1

The kitchen at Killowen was filled with morning light. Cormac found his father sitting at the table, and Eliana nowhere to be seen.

“Have you had your breakfast?” he asked, then noticed a scattering of crumbs on the table before them, an answer to his question. “Where’s Eliana?”

Joseph’s eyes flickered to the window. “Ticka boffing majuscule.” He shielded his face from the figures in the garden, where Cormac could see Eliana talking to Claire Finnerty.

“What is it? Something about Eliana?” Cormac was conscious of the girl’s dark head glinting in the bright sunlight outside.

Joseph seized his hand. “She’s the porpoise—no, no, these are bad wugs.”

“Is something wrong? Are you not happy with Eliana?”

The old man’s lips worked, hands fluttering in vague gestures above the table’s surface.

He’d been making progress over the past three or four months, even incorporating a bit of sign language into his speech therapy sessions. Most of the signs concerned everyday occupations—eating, getting dressed, all the tasks that came with trying to relearn the words for items a person might use in any ordinary day. They hadn’t progressed to the more difficult concepts.

Cormac remembered glancing into his rearview mirror yesterday, seeing his father’s eyes locked on Eliana. Was he ill at ease with this new caretaker? Cormac had tried making a study of his father’s various facial expressions over the past twelve months, but this latest agitation was something new, like nothing else he’d seen. So many possible shades of meaning in the touch of his hand—fear, urgency, panic.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” He watched the old man’s face crumple in frustration, feeling helpless and dull-witted, bereft of words himself. Words were a false currency in expressive aphasia, a translation machine gone seriously haywire.

Out in the garden, Claire Finnerty turned and led Eliana back into the kitchen. Joseph dropped Cormac’s hand and stared at the tabletop, unable—or unwilling—to make eye contact with any of them.

“Look what Claire has brought for our lunch today,” Eliana said. “I like the name I read in a book once—‘string beans.’ That’s quite funny, isn’t it?” She held up a perfect specimen in front of Joseph’s face. “Perhaps you would help me.” She gestured, showing how she was going to snap their tender necks.

Joseph didn’t look up; he made a noise halfway between grunt and sigh. Eliana looked at Cormac. “Have I said something wrong?”

Cormac shook his head. “No, Eliana, I’m sure he’d be glad to help.” Seeing the expression on his father’s face, like a man being led to the gallows, Cormac crouched beside him and spoke quietly: “I’ve got to go now—we’ll talk later, all right?” He took his father’s hand again, offered a reassuring squeeze. The old man pulled his hand away and stared out the window.

Cormac headed out to wait for Niall Dawson, wondering if he was missing something important because he was distracted by this work out at the bog. How ironic that he should be the one feeling guilty, this late in the game, when it was his father who had been missing for so much of his life.

While he waited, he rang Nora, who was on her way to the hospital in Birr.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. My father was trying to tell me something. Something about ticks, or porpoises. He didn’t want me to leave.” Cormac hesitated. “I suppose whatever it is, we can sort it out this afternoon. Eliana seemed in great spirits, by the way.” He remembered the gentle playfulness in the girl’s face as she offered his father the beans. “Whatever upset her last night seems to have passed.”

“I’ll be back from the hospital after the exam, so I’ll try talking to Joseph.”

He was silent for a brief second. “You’re so good with him, Nora—”

She cut him off. “Ah, now, remember our agreement.”

Early on in their odd household arrangement, they had agreed that there would be no silliness about things like indebtedness between them. They were all just doing what was necessary, what had to be done. And it was as if she had understood quite clearly from the beginning that she would be a kind of buffer between father and son, taking the role that Cormac’s mother had once filled, if only briefly. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the three of them—himself, Nora, and his father—holding hands in a line, like a group of children striking out into uncharted territory. The stroke had picked them up and landed them in a place where nothing was familiar, but Cormac knew it was the only place he wanted to live.

2

Stella rose before dawn on Friday and took the M7 into Dublin, enjoying the smooth comfort of the motorway but quite missing the drive through the winding old coach roads, the sight of the pubs where her father invariably stopped for refreshment on the way in and out of the city, following his true religion—sport, and championship hurling in particular. But time was money these days, and the gleaming white concrete motorways were a sign of the new religion.

She’d decided late last night to make this trip herself and not leave it to anyone else. This was her investigation, and Serious Crimes could get seriously stuffed if they hadn’t made it over to interview the victim’s spouse by now.

It was just gone half-eight when she pulled up in front of Benedict Kavanagh’s house in the city center. The Kavanagh/Broome residence was one of those Georgian monstrosities on North Great George’s Street. Artists and other creative types had snapped up these grand but crumbling houses for next to nothing back in the eighties, living with scaffolding for years until development made the street fashionable again. Stella stood before the door, painted a brilliant aquamarine under the fanlight, and rapped twice with the huge brass knocker shaped like a fist. Had to be a story behind that. There was a story behind most things, if you were paying attention.

When the door swung open, it revealed a barefoot and stylishly stubbly young gent in black jeans and an expensive cashmere jumper. “We’re not open.” He pointed to a brass plaque beside the door: TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS ONLY, BY APPOINTMENT.

“That’s all right,” Stella said, producing her ID. “I’m not here about art.”

The young man’s eyes narrowed as he comprehended the nature of her visit. He ushered her into the foyer, and she saw that the whole ground floor was done up as a gallery, with large paintings that nearly covered the walls. The cracked plaster behind them was real, impressions of centuries behind wallpaper, a fresco of evidence to a trained eye. Here and there a chair or a table with a vase of flowers that beautifully set off the paintings. What was it like to have such an eye? Stella wondered, thinking of her own drab sitting room with its insipid wallpaper and matching suite.

The young man left her alone while he went upstairs, giving her a chance to look around. The paintings in the front room were angry seascapes, thick-painted stormy skies and waves and weather, the paint applied with such passion that you could almost hear the surf. Not just grays and blues and greens, but also shades of yellow, brown, and purple. Stella went up close and studied the nearest canvas. How did a person work at close range like this and understand what effect the brushstrokes would have at a distance? There was mystery in it, how the eye perceived the parts and the whole. She glanced up the stairs and saw no sign of the young man returning. So she made a quick round of the ground floor, from the rooms in front, with their large casement windows that looked over the street, to the back rooms—a galley kitchen stocked with wineglasses, coffeemaker and tea urn, industrial dishwasher. The kitchen adjoined a tiny room that functioned as an office, with desk, file cabinets, and a glowing laptop. On the laptop screen was a spreadsheet with recent sales to museums. Stella had to stifle a curse as she glimpsed the number of zeros behind each figure. She slipped from the room and took up her previous position just as the young man appeared again at the top of the stairs.

“Mairéad says she’ll talk to you in the studio. I’m sorry I neglected to introduce myself—Graham Healy, I’m her assistant.”

Stella followed him up a graceful cascade of pale marble held in place with a wrought-iron railing. Orchestral music poured down from above, louder and louder as they traveled upward, past the living areas on the first floor, all the way up to a garret at the very top of the house, transformed by a bank of windows on the north wall into a painting studio. A whiff of mineral spirits assaulted the nostrils, and music blared loudly from speakers all around the room, filling the airy space with the throb of violins and cellos, the crash of cymbals and booming kettledrums. Mairéad Broome signaled the young man to turn down the music, and as he did so, Stella’s gaze traveled through an open doorway to a bedroom where the walls, sheets, and furniture were all stark white. Amid the rumpled luxury of bedclothes, she spied a few discarded garments—his and hers, from every appearance. Stella turned to give Kavanagh’s wife her full attention.

Mairéad Broome couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, but her hair was prematurely white. It was short and asymmetrical—an artistic statement. She had the fresh and slightly weathered complexion of someone who spent days out of doors—perhaps she painted at the seaside as well. When she turned to set down her paintbrush and rag, the dark brown eyes she fixed on Stella radiated curiosity and intelligence. “You’re here about my husband,” she said. A statement rather than a question. She’d been expecting a visit like this for some time.

Stella appreciated directness and decided that she ought to respond in kind. “Yes. A body has been found, and we have reason to believe it might be your husband.” She watched for an initial reaction. There was none. Mairéad Broome’s steady look never wavered, as if something she already knew had been confirmed. The young man began to speak, but she stopped him with a glance. “Where did you find the body?”

“A few kilometers from Birr.” Stella felt as if she ought to say more. “You may have heard news of an ancient body that turned up yesterday. Your husband was later found at the same location. His car was submerged in the bog.”

At this news, Mairéad Broome stood frozen, staring at Stella as if seeing through her. “I’m sorry, where?”

“Eight kilometers outside Birr, just over the Tipperary border.”

“I see. And my husband?”

“I’m afraid he was inside the car.”

A short pause, then, “How did he come to be driving in a bog?”

“We’re not sure he was driving. It doesn’t appear to have been an accident.”

“You’re saying my husband was murdered?”

“That’s what we believe, from the evidence so far.”

Mairéad Broome shook her head. “But how do you know it was murder?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t really share any details at this point.”

“Because I’m a suspect?”

“Until we know more, everyone’s a potential suspect.”

Mairéad Broome’s gaze followed Stella’s, through the bedroom door. “It’s easy to jump to conclusions, isn’t it, Detective? But people’s lives are complicated. They don’t fit into tidy categories. Surely that’s one thing you learn from police work.”

Stella moved to her next question. “I have to ask if there was anyone who would profit from your husband’s death.”

“Apart from myself, you mean? My husband had a pretty sizable family trust. Since there are no children, I suppose it would come to me. But I didn’t marry Benedict for his money. I didn’t give a damn about his bloody money.”

“What did you care about?”

“Difficult as it may be to believe—and not to mention as difficult as he tried to make it sometimes—I did love my husband.”

“You were married for how long?”

“Seventeen years.” She took in Stella’s curious look. “I’ll save you the trouble of doing the sums, Detective. I was fifteen when we met and eighteen when we married. Benedict Kavanagh was… well, he was unlike anyone else I’d ever known.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “Bastard.”

“How did you meet?” Stella asked.

“At my parents’ house. Benedict was a colleague of my father’s, a rising young star at the academy. He used to come to dinner about once a month. My father loved to sit around the table and talk philosophy, and of course Benedict was brilliant at it. No one better. I was young and easily dazzled. There was a minor scandal when we eloped. My parents were furious, but what could they do? Force an annulment? Not quite the thing for a couple of radical advocates of free will. I was so certain about what I wanted then. The path seemed so clear.”

“Not as clear since?”

She turned and looked at Stella directly for the first time. “Are you going to tell me you’ve never had any regrets, Detective? Anyone who makes that claim is a liar in my book.”

“Your husband was gone more than a week in April before you reported him missing.”

Mairéad Broome’s eyes flashed. “I was out of town. I didn’t know he’d gone missing until I returned home.”

“You still waited three days.”

“I explained all this to the police at the time. There had been a couple of… previous instances… where it turned out that he was simply caught up in his work. I didn’t like the idea of wasting police time if Benedict was just buried in old books—” She stopped short and turned away, apparently remembering where her husband’s body had turned up.

“Can you tell me about the last time you spoke to your husband?”

“It was just before I left for Cork. April fourteenth. It was my first solo exhibition.”

“So you never phoned him while you were away? And—you’ll forgive my curiosity—your husband couldn’t find time to attend your first solo exhibition?”

“We had our own work, Detective, our own schedules. Benedict was as busy as I was—busier, even—with his writing, and his work at the academy, and the television program. With my odd hours up here in the studio, there were some weeks we hardly saw one another.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know what your husband was working on at the time of his disappearance?”

Mairéad Broome sighed. “He often traveled to London, to the British Library, and to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, usually something to do with his old manuscripts. When he got back from his last trip to London, he did mention something about a breakthrough. He didn’t say much more, just that he’d found something that would turn the world of philosophy on its ear. I remember his exact words. He said, ‘This is going to rattle some bones.’ You could see that he relished the prospect—he loved lighting fires under people. It’s always been a mystery to me how a few words scribbled down a thousand years ago could be so earth-shattering today. But that was what my husband lived for.”

“Did he have any enemies?”

“Well, since you tell me that he’s been murdered, obviously at least one. There’s a long list of people who disliked him, Detective. It’s no secret that my husband was good at stirring things up. One of the things I admired about him, actually. He never shied away from controversy. On the contrary; he refused to let people hide behind comfortable hypocrisies, and if he made enemies, well, he looked upon that as their problem, really, not his.”

“I understand he had some rather lively debates with colleagues on his television program.”

“Just because he could run rings around those phony, full-of-themselves so-called intellectuals doesn’t mean they wanted to see him dead. It was a game to them—all that mock quarrelling and backstabbing. You can’t think any of them took it seriously. It’s their stock-in-trade, lobbing firebombs, insulting one another’s intelligence. They thrive on it.”

As she spoke these last words, her voice faded, and it seemed as if the floor had begun to fall away beneath her. Stella realized, almost too late, that Mairéad Broome’s legs were about to give way. Healy moved quickly to scoop a chair under her. He knelt on the floor beside her. “Let me bring you a glass of water, Mairéad—”

She snapped at him weakly, “I’m all right, Graham. For God’s sake, stop fussing.”

Stella waited as the young man ignored the instruction and fetched a glass of water anyway. She was glad she’d made the trip herself and not let Serious Crimes handle the interview. Was this genuine grief she was witnessing, or some version of relief, now that the wait for the missing husband was finally over? Impossible to tell. She said, “I’ll need to speak with you at greater length, to go over all the details of your husband’s disappearance. But there was another reason for my visit here today. I wonder if you’d be willing to come to the hospital in Birr to identify your husband’s body.”

Mairéad Broome looked up, as if startled to find Stella still there.

“I can drive you down to Birr, if you like,” Stella said.

This consideration of practical details seemed to bring Mairéad Broome back to herself. “No, I’ll come on my own. Graham will drive me.”

The young man leaned in. “We’ll need a few minutes to gather up some things. I’m assuming we’ll stay on for a day or two.”

“I think that would be wise,” Stella said. She turned to Mairéad Broome. “I wonder if I might have a look through your husband’s papers. I understand he kept an office here in the house.”

“Yes, Graham can show you.” Mairéad Broome stood and turned away.

Graham Healy led Stella downstairs to the study on the first floor. He pushed open the door to the book-lined room. “That wasn’t like Mairéad, what you saw up there. Must’ve been the shock.”

It was unclear what he meant. Was it the matter-of-fact way the wife discussed her husband’s death, or was it her collapse at the end that was so uncharacteristic? Stella studied the young man. Definitely an art student, she decided, unconvinced of his own talent but finding his true calling as the assistant, disciple, and younger lover of a famous artist. The whole situation had a slight whiff of scandal, but of course no one would have blinked if the genders had been reversed.

“What does a painter’s assistant do, exactly?” Stella asked.

“A bit of everything, really. I clean brushes, stretch canvases, order supplies, work on the inventory, and keep up all the gallery and collector contacts, the publicity and mailing list, maintain the website.”

“And how did you come to be working here?”

“Mairéad came to an exhibition at my school last year,” he said. “Favor for a friend, I think. Not that she isn’t interested in encouraging young artists—she is, of course—but she was under tremendous pressure, getting ready for her first big solo exhibition. I offered to help out, do whatever I could.”

“Because?”

“Because it was a great opportunity, and because Mairéad Broome is a great artist, the sort of artist I’ll never be.”

“So you left art school and came to work here full-time? Do you also live here?”

The young man’s eyes locked on hers, showing a hint of defiance, then flicked away. “That’s my room upstairs, next to the studio.”

“How well did you know Benedict Kavanagh?”

“Not well. I mostly stayed out of his way, but that wasn’t difficult. Like Mairéad told you, they had different schedules.”

“Would you say they led separate lives?”

“Listen, when Mairéad realized Benedict was missing, she was beyond distraught.”

“Pardon me if this sounds cold, but she does seem to have recovered somewhat. Perhaps with your help?”

“Think what you like, Detective. I’ve not done anything I’m ashamed of. I doubt whether Benedict Kavanagh could have said the same.”

Stella turned back to him. “Enlighten me, please. What do you mean?”

Healy was clearly uncomfortable, but he pressed on. “Well, you hear things—about how the rumors used to fly whenever a new intern turned up to work on his program—it was always the same. After a few months, he’d tire of them, and in would come someone new. Mairéad’s not stupid. She knew—everyone knew. The way that bastard treated her.” He glanced up at Stella. “As if she didn’t exist.”

“Do you mind telling me where you were yourself, the last two weeks of April?”

“I was wondering when you’d get around to that,” Healy said. “This is all in the file.”

“Indulge me,” Stella said.

“It was Mairéad’s first solo show in Cork. We went down to supervise the installation on the fourteenth. The show opened on the twentieth, and we were back in Dublin on the twenty-eighth.”

Stella feigned ignorance. “So you stayed on in Cork for a few days after the opening?”

Healy’s eyes flicked away, uneasy. “No, we took a sort of miniholiday after the frenzy of mounting the show.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Sorry?”

“Where did you go on this miniholiday?”

“Mairéad’s agent has a cottage in the Slieve Bloom Mountains, near Mountrath. We stopped there to decompress.”

“And you have someone who can vouch for you, I suppose?”

“We were alone. The owners were away, in Australia. That’s why we went.”

At least what Graham Healy was saying matched the statements he’d given in April, Stella thought. Still, not exactly what you’d call an airtight alibi. And all far from the motorways with camera systems.

Graham Healy looked at her intently. “I know what you imagine, Detective, but it’s not like that.”

“What is it like?”

“The marriage was over when I arrived on the scene. There’s nothing sordid—”

Stella cut him off. “Thank you, Mr. Healy. I’ll be fine here.”

He stood at the door for a moment, about to speak, then turned and left her alone in Kavanagh’s study.

The crime scene technicians would go over this room again, of course, but Stella always found it revealing to visit the place where the victim had lived or worked. She switched on the desk lamp. Stacks of paper formed lopsided battlements around the edge of the large desk, notes for some dry academic treatise, from the look of it. A pile of dog-eared novels and a nest of scribbled notes and drawings filled the center of the fortress. No sign of a laptop, no phone. A large tea stain showed where a spill had been rather ineffectively mopped up, and biscuit crumbs with attendant blots of grease dotted the papers. Were these Kavanagh’s leavings, or had someone else been using his desk in the meantime? The room didn’t strike her as a shrine, kept exactly as it had been left by its last occupant. Did the person who had sat here recently have firsthand knowledge that Benedict Kavanagh would never return? Stella studied the crumpled-up sketches on the desk. Perhaps Graham Healy had usurped Kavanagh’s place in his study as well as his bed.

3

Standing at the foot of a stainless-steel slab in the morgue, Nora gazed upon the bog man, released from his swaddling and roughly articulated upon the table, following the anatomist’s urge to understand everything in its proper place. She tried to take in the whole man, as she had taught her students to do in gross anatomy lab, the whole impression of the person laid out before them on the table. There was a lot more to be gleaned from a cadaver’s life and death than a collection of parts, and it was important for future physicians to understand as much about what went right for people as what went wrong. The fact that the patient had died probably ten centuries earlier was neither here nor there. For Nora, every encounter with a cadaver was an occasion, a chance to increase human knowledge and understanding.

The head, upper torso, and arms were still attached, but they had been separated from the legs just above the pelvis. The weakest parts tended to fall asunder first—which usually meant the unsupported spine in the lower back. The man’s head was only slightly misshapen from the weight of the peat, the features still readable. Eyes and mouth open, perhaps an expression of surprise at his grisly fate.

Wet bog-brown cloth clung to the torso and limbs, following their contours, apparently torn by the same rough force that had dismembered the fragile body. Because this man had not been found in his original place, a lot of information about how he had ended up there had been lost. Had he gone into the bog standing up, facedown, supine? All these details could speak about the circumstances. Had he gone in whole, or already in pieces? The answer to that was likely the former, judging from how the clothing was torn and the fact that he was obviously much later than naked Iron Age bog men who appeared to have suffered perimortem dismemberment as part of their ritual sacrifice. The other detail that stood out was the stretching and pulling of the muscle fibers, which suggested that the body had been intact until unearthed by someone or something with enough force to pull it apart.

Nora paused to check the spray bottle of deionized water she’d brought with her from Dublin. There could be no dillydallying; she’d have to take her photos and measurements and get Killowen Man’s remains back into the container as quickly as possible, to keep him from being exposed to the mold- and bacteria-laden air.

The morgue at the regional hospital was much more used to preparing the remains of elderly patients for removal by undertakers, not so much used to the state pathologist or the National Museum descending upon them en masse. She could see hospital staff occasionally peering through the small window in the autopsy room door.

Nora knew the full team back at the Barracks could probably determine lots of things: when and how his hair had been cut, how much work he’d done with his hands, perhaps even the menu of his last earthly meal, and with it, the time of year in which he’d died. It was a major break that he was wearing clothing; it could be analyzed by experts in fiber analysis, garment and footwear construction, and other arcana of the archaeological profession.

Her job today was to examine the body, take measurements, note her observations while the corpse was still fresh, so to speak. Try to hazard a few conjectures about which types of damage were perimortem and postmortem.

She began to take photographs, starting at the head and working her way down to the corpse’s pointed toes. Even after several years in Ireland, working on remains recovered from the peat, she remained in awe of a bog’s protective power. This man was clearly at least hundreds of years old, and yet a section of his limbs would show nerves, blood vessels, bone and marrow, the same as a person only recently dead.

Although it was digital, her camera shutter clicked and whirred just like the real thing. The thickened sole of the unshod foot again pulled at her imagination, as it had out on the bog. Part of his story was written there, she was certain. Calluses and fallen metatarsal arches spoke to a lifetime of wandering. The ankle showed signs of gout, suggesting a rich diet, and yet his cheeks were slightly sunken, a sign of deprivation. Was he an outcast or an exile?

She worked her way around to the other side of the body, snapping photographs of the right hand, whose thumb and first two fingers seemed stained darker brown along the distal interphalangeal joints. An anomaly of coloration from the bog, or something else? She circled again to examine the left hand, but it was clenched tight. Setting aside the camera, she began to probe at the clothing that twisted around the man’s torso, her eye drawn to the edge of a hole in his cloak. She gently moved aside the wet wool that shrouded his rib cage. There was not just one, as it turned out, but several holes of similar size, and definitely cut rather than torn through the cloth.

The door at the head of the table swung open, and Catherine Friel’s face brightened when she saw Nora. “Thought you’d have him back at the Barracks by now. Isn’t that the usual protocol?”

“Detective Cusack asked us to hold up here for a while, since evidence from her case could be intermixed with the older remains.”

“Wise choice,” Dr. Friel agreed. “I’m here for the PM on the other gentleman. Maybe you’d give me a hand? I’d be happy to reciprocate.”

After she had Killowen Man safely stowed in the cooler, Nora stood at the other mortuary table, taking in the details on the recent murder victim. In contrast to the ancient bog man, Benedict Kavanagh’s corpse was not only intact but surprisingly unmarked. Of course they were still waiting for final confirmation that this really was Kavanagh, but everything pointed that way. Nora couldn’t help thinking about what Cormac had said last night, that Benedict Kavanagh and Niall Dawson had been best friends at university. Why would he keep silent?

The mortuary technician had already cut the clothes off and removed the personal effects. Because Benedict Kavanagh’s body had just come out of the bog, the limbs were still quite pliable. The corpse now looked like a slightly shrunken effigy laid out on the slab.

A line from a Seamus Heaney poem, the reference to “a saint’s kept body,” circled through Nora’s brain. But by all accounts, this dead man was not a saint, and his face was not the calm visage usually associated with a holy man’s death mask; the eyelids were open, and the somewhat shriveled eyeballs still seemed to bulge slightly from the sockets. His jaw gaped open, the muscles of his cheeks stretched tight. As Dr. Friel turned to mark the autopsy diagram, Nora said, “There’s something inside his mouth.”

“Yes, I saw that,” Dr. Friel said, setting down her clipboard. “First priority, I think.” She worked two gloved fingers between the dead man’s teeth and eventually removed a slightly misshapen black object about the size and shape of a large marble.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“Not sure, but there’s more than one.” Catherine Friel’s fingers were still wedged between the dead man’s teeth. “At least two more.” She tightened her grip on the corpse’s chin and leaned down to get better leverage.

“Do you think it’s possible that he choked on them?” Nora asked.

“Well, they’d be about the right size to block the airway. We can put obstructive asphyxia on the list of possible causes.”

Nora pulled the magnifier down to examine each small black orb in turn as Dr. Friel removed it. “Looks like a puncture in this first one,” she said, moving on to the others. “A couple of the others, too. No, not a puncture. It’s more like a tiny drilled hole.” She had a nagging feeling that she’d seen something like this before, but she couldn’t say where.

“That’s it,” Catherine Friel said as she managed to extract the last of the strange objects. “Half a dozen whatever they are.”

“Definitely plant material,” Nora said. “Possibly a seed pod.”

“Take a look at this.” Catherine Friel was still holding the dead man’s jaw open. She pulled the lighted magnifier closer and suddenly the presence of the pods seemed to fade into the background. Despite the discoloration of the tissue inside the corpse’s mouth, Nora could make out a thin layer of epithelial cells, the lamina propria and papillae surrounding thick muscle. Benedict Kavanagh’s tongue had been split in half lengthwise, straight down the center.

4

Stella was about twelve miles from the hospital when she rang Molloy. “I’ve got Kavanagh’s wife on her way to identify the body. How’s Dr. Friel getting on with the autopsy?”

“Almost finished.”

Stella checked her watch. “Can you let her know we’ll be there shortly, see how much longer she’ll need? I’d rather not have to delay once we get there. Thanks, Fergal.”

As Stella drove, she kept glancing at the two figures reflected in her rearview mirror. Mairéad Broome’s car, a black BMW, was much more conservative than her husband’s gold Mercedes. As she checked the mirror again, she could see Kavanagh’s wife in profile, staring out the window and occasionally turning to speak. Stella tried to imagine the conversation going on in the other car.

The regional hospital in Birr was a former tuberculosis sanatorium, a grim complex of single-story pebble-dashed buildings painted pale yellow. As Stella knew from many visits in the course of her work, recent budget cutbacks meant fewer beds, which meant fewer staff, which meant overcrowded casualty departments, and more sick and injured people lying on trolleys in the corridors. You could be bloody sure all the politicians in charge of health services had private insurance and wouldn’t be caught dead in one of these places. Entering the hospital car park, she drove around to the back and led Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy through the back door. Whatever their conversation had been on the road, both were silent now.

“We do appreciate your help with identification,” Stella said. “If you’ll give me just a minute, I’ll just see whether they’re ready.”

Stella pushed through the door to the morgue. It wasn’t set up like some of the more modern hospital facilities, with a video camera or separate viewing room. You had to get close to death here. The body lay on a trolley, covered by a sheet. Catherine Friel stood at the sink, preparing to remove her gloves and apron, with Dr. Gavin beside her, still wearing protective gear as well, evidently after assisting with the postmortem. It struck Stella that she was in the presence of a pair of women who had chosen to look at the face of death every day.

Dr. Friel lifted her eyes as Molloy quietly entered the room and joined them at the trolley.

“I’ve brought Mr. Kavanagh’s wife to help with an ID,” Stella said. “Any news on the cause of death?”

“The only outward trauma is some swelling in the occipital region at the back of the skull, but I don’t believe it was severe enough to be fatal. No fracture, and the swelling would actually suggest that he was alive after it occurred. And we found these in his mouth” Dr. Friel brought out a tray containing what looked like six small black walnuts.

“You think he choked on them?”

“I’m not sure. There’s no evidence of petechial hemorrhage, but that’s often absent with obstructive asphyxia. There was one of these pretty far down in his throat. Let me show you something else.”

Dr. Friel pulled back the sheet and opened the dead man’s mouth.

Molloy couldn’t manage to stifle a reaction. “Jesus, what happened to his tongue?”

“Split along the median groove, with a fairly sharp blade. But the amount of blood present says it was most likely done postmortem.”

Stella was still trying to figure all this out. “So he was hit over the head, possibly asphyxiated with some of those… whatever they are… and then his tongue was cut? I’m not sure I follow.”

“Neither do I. I’m just showing you what the evidence so far suggests. I’ll have to let you work out the sequence.” Dr. Friel gently closed the corpse’s mouth and replaced the sheet. “In any case, we’re finished here, if you want to proceed with your identification.”

“Thanks.” Stella was poking at one of the black walnut-like things with a gloved finger. “No idea what these are, you said?”

“Dr. Gavin thought possibly some sort of seed, but we’ll let the lab sort it out. You can bring his wife in now, Detective.”

Stella stepped into the corridor to speak to Mairéad Broome and her assistant. “We’re ready for you now.”

Stella knew it was odd, but she always felt strangely energized watching the reaction in situations like this. Most identifications she’d handled were car accidents—there had been a couple of drownings as well—but murder was something entirely different. Mairéad Broome must have realized that she was going to be under scrutiny, which made her first reaction all the more surprising. When Dr. Friel folded back the sheet to reveal her husband’s face, Mairéad Broome didn’t back away or flinch. On the contrary, she stepped forward. It was as if she wanted to experience her husband’s appearance, with every detail burned into memory.

After a long moment, Mairéad Broome spoke: “This man is my husband.” She continued to stare at the corpse, and Stella noted with dismay that Kavanagh’s mouth was open, the two ends of his split tongue protruding slightly.

Mairéad Broome saw it also and twisted away with an anguished cry, “My God, what’s happened to him?” It was only when Graham Healy moved to place a hand on her shoulder that she darted forward to grasp the edge of the sheet, and with one swift motion, she ripped the cover away, exposing the body in all its gruesome nakedness—the shrunken-looking privates nestled in reddish pubic hair, the bare chest bisected by the roughly stitched Y of the autopsy incision. For a moment, Mairéad Broome stood quite still, staring at her dead husband. Dr. Friel and Dr. Gavin stooped in unison to collect the sheet from the floor and pull it back over the corpse.

Healy seized Mairéad Broome by the shoulders and spun her around. Her arms hung limply by her sides; she looked at him blankly, as if she could see his lips move but couldn’t hear what he was saying. After a few seconds, she took a deep breath, and her limbs began to flail. Healy tried to hold on, but she was a whirlwind. “Get off me! Get off!” she shouted, slapping at his chest and the hands that held her. Her eyes flashed with dangerous, pent-up fury. “Christ, Graham, can you not just leave me alone?”

Healy backed away, hands in the air. Mairéad Broome’s chest heaved, her head drooped forward, and she began to sob.

Graham Healy approached her again and spoke gently. “If we’re finished, Mairéad, let’s leave here.” He carefully slipped one arm about her waist, and this time she didn’t resist.

Stella said, “I’d like to speak with you both again before you leave.”

Healy’s eyes implored. “Give us just a minute?”

Stella nodded and hung back as he led Mairéad Broome into the corridor. She called Molloy over. “Fergal, hang on here and get the autopsy report from Dr. Friel. I’m going with those two.”

Stella crossed to the table where the bagged evidence lay. “Just going to borrow these for a bit. I’ll bring them right back.” She left the room and placed herself where she could see Healy and Broome down the corridor. She feigned making a call on her mobile, so that she could pace up and down while observing the scene. Healy’s ministrations were being rebuffed once more. Mairéad Broome broke away, planting herself on one of the hard benches along the wall, bent at the waist, arms wrapped around herself, head bowed. Her young man sat on his hands, his face grim.

How would it feel to have taken the great chance, killed for someone, only to find out that she still loved the bastard? How had Mairéad Broome put it, only a short while ago? I did love my husband. Past tense, Stella noted. As difficult as he tried to make it sometimes.

What had Benedict Kavanagh done to try his wife’s affections? It wasn’t hard to imagine. The possibilities were endless, actually. There was the old standby, apparently true in this case, getting off with other women—or even other men. Such things happened, and Healy hadn’t mentioned whether the interns on Kavanagh’s program were male or female. Not to mention all the countless ways he might have found to humiliate his wife, in public or in private, especially given her reaction to the body just now. What was Mairéad Broome looking for under that sheet?

Or was all her sudden anger directed at Benedict Kavanagh for getting himself killed and leaving her hanging all these months? Just because you didn’t love your husband any longer, that didn’t mean you stopped worrying about him. If Kavanagh had been getting a leg over, they’d know soon enough. How did these eejits not realize that they couldn’t keep their affairs completely secret?

Mairéad Broome had admitted that her marriage was in tatters when she spoke in that careful code about the pair of them being busy with their own work. Bollocks. She probably knew about her husband’s bits on the side, and if she did, what would have moved her to do something about it? She’d said she didn’t care about money, but as soon as someone made a claim like that, you were almost assured that the opposite was true. Stella made a mental note to check the terms of the family trust, whether it specified what would happen in the event of a divorce or a childless marriage. If leaving Benedict Kavanagh was out of the question, how long before the constant weight of indignity forced his wife’s hand? Time to start asking those questions. Stella pretended to ring off the mobile and made her way down to where Mairéad Broome sat.

“I’m all right now, Detective. It was just the shock.”

Stella said nothing but reached into her pocket for the bag containing the pods from the dead man’s mouth. She held them out to Mairéad Broome, who took the bag and peered at the blackened knobs through the polythene.

“Am I meant to know what these are? Because I don’t.”

Beside her, Graham Healy shook his head as well, blank. “Not a clue.”

“Are they something to do with my husband’s death?”

Stella wasn’t prepared to part with that information at the moment; instead she tucked the bag back into her pocket and decided on another approach. “When you reported your husband missing, you said you couldn’t think of any particular enemies he might have had, but you admitted that he sometimes rubbed people the wrong way—”

Graham Healy exploded: “He was a fucking bollocks!”

“Graham!”

“He ought to have kissed the ground you walked on, Mairéad, with all that you did, all you sacrificed for him and his brilliant fucking career. But no, he was far too busy poncing about on television, stirring the shit and dragging people down. That’s all he ever did—”

“Graham, stop it!”

“I’m only speaking the truth, Mairéad, and you know it.” He turned to Stella. “She should have walked out years ago. All the international recognition she’s been getting, it’s only happened since he’s been out of her life—”

“Graham, stop it, that’s enough!”

He threw up his hands and walked away. They’d clearly had this conversation before.

“I’ve already told you, Detective, my husband was not an easy man. He was impatient with people who weren’t as clever as he was, and that included me. But there were other sides to him, certain aspects that were so… well, so simple, in a way. Despite all his intellectual gifts, there were ways he was still a child, emotionally. It turned out that his philosophical high-wire act was just that—an act. All my husband’s theories about the nature of the divine, the existence of good and evil, all that bore no connection at all to the way he lived his life.”

“Are you trying to say that your husband was a hypocrite?”

“I’m saying that he delighted in the abstract and abhorred the specific, especially when it came to examination of his own behavior. So why don’t you just come out and ask me what you want to know, what everyone’s dying to know: whether I, or Graham, or Graham and I together killed my husband. The answer is no. And yes, for the record, Graham and I are lovers, and have been ever since the day he came to work for me—”

“Mairéad—”

She silenced him with a look. “Why waste any more of this woman’s time, Graham? I’m so tired of pretending. I can’t be bothered to keep up appearances. I really can’t. If this woman is a proper detective, she’ll know everything soon enough. How I was a child when I married Benedict, how he grew bored with me before I’d reached the ripe old age of twenty, and about all the years I’ve spent since then trying to regain any scrap of dignity and self-respect. And now he’s back from his grave, trying to take it all away from me again. Well, he’s not going to succeed. This time I’m going to beat Benedict Kavanagh at his own bloody game.”

“Why did you stay married, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Mairéad Broome looked at the floor. “Cowardice, I suppose. I’m not proud of it. I would have been alone, and my husband had money, he had status and connections. For most of the time we were married, I was just a struggling painter. In some ways, I think he enjoyed having me beside him, all part of the Benedict Kavanagh show. But the threat was always there, under the surface, that he could make my life miserable if I left him, and I had no doubt that he would.”

“And yet he tolerated your relationship with Mr. Healy, presuming he knew about it.”

“Oh, he knew. But it happened to serve his purposes—let him feel magnanimous, I suppose. And letting me have Graham meant he could do whatever he liked.”

“And what was it your husband liked?”

Mairéad Broome raised her weary eyes to Stella. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Detective. I couldn’t bring myself to find out. There are some things even a wife is better off not knowing.”

Stella felt the words like a knife. Denial was the default. In a world filled with all manner of bad behavior, why did society insist upon a façade of normality, tidy exteriors that masked the messes inside? How many women knew the truth about their husbands but refused to acknowledge it, because doing so would raise the possibility of more than one reality within themselves?

“Thank you for coming,” Stella said. “I’ll be in touch if I have any more questions. When will you be heading back to Dublin?”

“We’re going to stay on for a day or two,” Healy answered. “Mairéad has friends who run an artists’ retreat not far from here. A place called Killowen.”

5

Cormac rose from his crouch and stood by as Niall Dawson directed the workmen out on the bog. After hours of clearing peat, they’d finally removed enough weight that the buried car could be lifted. A flatbed lorry was in place, waiting to transport the vehicle to the crime lab in Dublin. Cormac watched as the car slowly ascended, pulled upward out of the muck by the arm of the huge digger. The mud-caked vehicle swayed briefly, still dripping, before the machine operator set it down gently on the back of the lorry.

In addition to himself and Niall and the removal workers, the scene-of-crime officers were still on-site, searching for any useful evidence in the apparent murder of Benedict Kavanagh. No one had yet advanced any theories about what Kavanagh was doing out here in the back of beyond, or who might have had reason to wish him dead. Nor had Niall Dawson said a word about his own acquaintance with Kavanagh. Strange.

While his crew covered the car in black polythene for its trip to Dublin, the head of the crime scene detail jumped down onto the boards that rimmed the excavation area, leaning forward to examine the impression of the vehicle’s underside, the depressions where the four tires had rested in the peat. “Looks like we’re through here, lads,” he said. “Let’s let the archaeologists have their site back again.” He took the hand Niall Dawson offered and heaved himself up out of the pit. “We’re heading back. Be sure to let us know if anything else turns up.”

Cormac had watched them go over the car, collecting anything that might have a bearing on the case, which meant everything they could find—even the older bog man was forensic evidence in the case they were investigating. The gap where the car had been was roughly four meters by six, a couple of meters deep. The surface was churned up in some places, flat in others where the vehicle’s undercarriage had been pulled away.

Cormac eased down one of the stout planks the crime scene crew had placed around the perimeter and his perception began to shift. Since everything in a bog tended to be the same color as peat, you had to keep an eye open for subtle differences in texture. Would they happen upon another item of clothing belonging to Killowen Man, any items he might have been carrying on his person when he went into the bog—his other shoe, or a walking stick, perhaps, or a sack of provisions? Or maybe they’d find evidence of an ancient road, the reason someone would be out here in the middle of a bog. His eye caught upon the fringe of a willow hurdle, a type of woven fencing laid over brushwood centuries ago to make a footpath through soft bog. It was about chest-high in the wall, and ragged, cut through by the digger but amazingly intact, the bark still on the osiers used to weave it. He shifted the planks, stepping from one to the next and pulling the other board to set in front of him. At the far end he found more evidence of a roadway, birch branches thick as a man’s arm, eaten up centuries ago by the encroaching moss.

Dawson came back from seeing the scene-of-crime officers on their way with the shrouded vehicle. “Down to us, now,” he said. “Let’s see what we can find.”

Gathering their tools, they began measuring and marking out a grid on the floor of the pit with stakes and string, as they would with any excavation. The surface of the peat was uneven, revealing the impression of a muffler and driveshaft, the axles of the car. Niall was down on his hunkers, taking photos and sketching the features of the surface in his allotted squares from the grid; Cormac did the same in the opposite corner. He leaned in to snap a photo of a shallow pool that had formed under the car’s chassis.

The site was deserted now. They worked in silence for twenty minutes, each caught up in his own thoughts. Cormac wondered about Dawson and Kavanagh again. How had Niall Dawson come to know about Killowen? He’d mentioned the farm as a place to kip when they’d discussed coming down to help with the recovery. Before they even knew about Benedict Kavanagh. A small detail, easy to overlook. Cormac knew what it was like to be suspected when you were innocent, but there were so many things about people that were impossible to fathom, even if you’d been friends for years. There was no explaining the way people behaved sometimes. Perhaps he should urge Dawson to come clean, to get the connection with Kavanagh off his chest.

“Look, Niall, I don’t know how to say this except straight out. You and Benedict Kavanagh were friends at university. I was there, too, remember? I watched him destroy you in that debate. So why didn’t you say anything to the police? When we found the car was his, even when we found the body?”

Dawson’s trowel stopped moving. “I haven’t seen Benedict Kavanagh for nearly thirty years, Cormac. Surely you don’t think—”

“No, of course not. I just can’t understand why you kept quiet.”

The trowel hung loose in Dawson’s hand. “Because it’s water under the bridge. I didn’t see a need to dredge any of it up again. I’m more than satisfied with my life now, you know that. In a way, I was grateful to Benedict, for opening my eyes.” He gestured to the plot they were excavating. “This is my life’s work. Getting trounced in that debate made it clear that I wasn’t cut out for the philosophical rough-and-tumble. Not in the same way Benedict was, certainly.”

“Maybe the rough-and-tumble got a bit too rough. The man was murdered, Niall.”

“Well, not by me. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I’m not trying to make a big deal of this. I just thought you might be better off mentioning your old connection to Kavanagh, before someone else does.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Dawson said. “I’ll have a word with Cusack.”

As he turned back to his own work, Cormac’s eye caught on a shape about an arm’s length in front of him. A flat strip, like a belt, with a loop projecting just slightly from the peat’s surface. “Niall, take a look at this.” Cormac’s bare fingers continued scraping at the peat, uncovering more of the leather strap.

“I see it,” Dawson said. “Keep going.”

The strap was long, and at last Cormac reached the place where it joined another piece of leather. The peat was very wet here, squelching as he worked his hand into the material. He could feel the thickness of the leather, swollen with water, and formed a picture of it in his mind as he worked. Generally rectangular, rounded at the corners, stitching on the inside. He turned to Dawson. “It looks like a satchel—do you see the flap in front? Do you suppose our bog man could have been carrying this?”

“And if there happened to be a book inside—” Dawson sounded short of breath with excitement. “You know, that’s been one of our leg-pulls for years. I phoned up Redmond in the conservation lab not three weeks ago and told him some poor sod had stumbled on an illuminated book in a bog. He always knows straightaway I’m taking the piss. What’s he going to say now?” Dawson used his fingers to lift the front flap and reached into the satchel’s open mouth. Almost immediately, his posture signaled disappointment. “Nothing there. It’s empty.”

Cormac began to have a strange feeling, the same sort of presentiment he occasionally got while working on a site, as if he could see down through all the layers of history and sense the connections between things that seemed completely unrelated. Perhaps it was only coincidence that Kavanagh’s body had come to rest here in the bog in the very spot where some ancient scribe lost his life, or perhaps there was more to it, something they had yet to discover.

Dawson glanced up at the clear sky. “It’s warm. Let’s get this covered up again, quick-like. Hand us that roll of cling film, will you?” Oxygen was the enemy here. They carefully replaced the wet peat over the satchel, then laid several sheets of film over the sodden mess. After dipping a roll of resin bandage in a nearby water-filled bog hole for a few seconds, Dawson began, with Cormac’s help, to stretch lengths of tape across the satchel to preserve its shape, careful to press out any air between the wet peat and the film.

Dawson was thinking aloud as he worked. “If only there had been a book. I mean, Jaysus, think of it. How many early medieval manuscripts have survived in Ireland—a dozen, give or take? If you think about it, there must have been hundreds. Every monk had his Psalter.”

Cormac had been pondering the same thing as they worked on the satchel. Now he said,

“Niall, don’t you think it strange that Benedict Kavanagh happened to be found here?”

Dawson looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Well, wasn’t that his specialty, early medieval philosophy?”

“What difference does that make?”

“I just find it odd that he should be buried here with someone who’s probably from the very same era that he studied. A rather amazing coincidence, don’t you think?”

6

On the way to Killowen, Stella checked her messages. Nothing from Lia since yesterday morning. Second-guessing was the worst sort of disease, an incurable affliction. Perhaps if she’d been stricter? Or more permissive? Which was it, and where was the magic balance point? Lia’s schoolwork was gone to hell last spring, lost in a different, brand-new immediacy—the scent of a boy’s neck, the electric torch of a warm hand inside a blouse. What dusty old book could compete with that biological imperative? She felt herself carried back on a memory, locked arm in arm with her classmates, all half pissed on stolen altar wine and possibility as they made their way home on a warm May evening after a snogging session in a nearby orchard with the lads from Saint Anselm’s, the boys’ college down the road. They’d been falling all over one another, laughing and singing at the top of their lungs:

I am eighteen years old today, Mama, and I’m longing to be wed.

So buy for me a young man, who will comfort me, she said.

You must buy for me a young man, who will be with me all night,

for I’m young and airy, light and crazy, and married I long to be.

She remembered what came after as well—being called on the rug before Sister Geraldine, the mother superior. Breaking the rules didn’t bring chastisement from Sister Geraldine but something even worse—a feeling that one had disappointed her. In some ways, that was punishment enough. Stella had often wondered about Sister Geraldine’s background, about what had made her choose the veil. What had drawn any of the nuns to that life, away from society, from the world of men? It wasn’t as if the choice had lifted them to a higher plane of existence, above the worldly fray; there were obvious frictions among the sisters at the convent—you could see it in the pursed lips, the clipped way they spoke to one another at times. But she had since come to realize that these were intelligent, educated women, scholars who were often deeply immersed in their own subjects—biology, mathematics, literature—and curious about the world. Stella found she had a much greater appreciation for them now that she was trying to raise a daughter with even a fraction of the nuns’ self-respect and self-possession. She’d not appreciated them at the time, just as Lia was having a difficult time understanding or appreciating her—that circular curse of youth and age.

Stella pulled into the yard at Killowen and parked opposite the farmhouse, beside Mairéad Broome’s black BMW. A few ducks and a gaggle of geese roamed around the driveway. The slate roof on the main building looked new. This was definitely a working farm, and yet there was simplicity and order, as well as a certain creative vibe to the place. As Stella climbed out of the car, the geese began to waddle in her direction. The gander darted forward, hissing a warning, and a voice came from the doorway: “Mind that fella, he’s the next thing to a guard dog.”

Stella turned to find Claire Finnerty standing in the entry. “I expect you’re here about the bog men,” Claire said. “Hard to keep a thing like that under wraps. Boot of a car, we heard.” Claire herself was dressed for work, in cargo pants, striped jumper, and fleece vest. Her thick dark hair was tied back in a no-nonsense plait, her feet firmly planted in a beat-up pair of wellingtons. “I’m the only one here at the minute, apart from a couple of guests.”

“I’m happy to begin with you,” Stella said.

“Come in, then.” Claire Finnerty led her into the house, through the large open sitting room and kitchen that formed the main portion of the ground floor. Thick oak beams spanned the width of the building, and the far wall was almost all glass—three sets of French doors that looked out over an herb garden in the back courtyard. The table was covered at the moment with small heaps of fresh-cut oregano, thyme, and rosemary that gave the kitchen a pungent aroma. Claire Finnerty returned to her task, bundling the herbs with elastic bands. “Have to keep at this,” she said. “We’ve a market in Banagher first thing tomorrow.”

“Her car’s outside, so no doubt you already know what I’m going to ask: How long have you known Mairéad Broome?” Stella asked.

“She’s been coming here about six or seven years. We offer a place to work with a minimum of interruption. That’s why we’re here.”

“How often does she come?”

“I’d say about twice a year, on average.”

“Regularly?”

“Not really; it depends on her exhibition schedule.”

“What about last spring?”

“I don’t remember the dates on every booking. I’d have to check—”

“Please do.”

Claire Finnerty rose deliberately and led Stella to a small cluttered office adjacent to the kitchen. It was a cozy and gloriously eccentric space, walls the color of cinnamon and carved wooden and woven grass masks hanging on nearly every inch of space that wasn’t occupied by bookcases. The shelves were packed with books this way and that, not in disorderly fashion but so that every possible inch was filled, no wasted space. Horticulture, spirituality, Irish history, art, architecture, teach-yourself titles on every conceivable topic, including worm propagation, organic farming, How to Grow Your Own Hemp. At the center of the desk, a small laptop gave off a cool blue light. “When were you looking for?” Claire Finnerty asked.

“The last two weeks of April, this year.”

Finnerty tapped on a few keys to bring up the booking calendar. “Oh, no, I thought we’d taken care of that.” She turned to Stella, all concern. “We had a computer virus that wiped out our scheduling program for the first five months of the year. I know that Mairéad was with us sometime in the spring, but I can’t remember whether it was February or March—but definitely not April.”

“How do you know?”

“We were getting in a new geothermal system, and with all the upheaval of construction, we decided it would be better not to have resident artists during that time.”

“Since you’re a friend of Mairéad Broome’s, you must also know that one of the dead men found in the bog yesterday was her husband.” Stella held up the photo on her mobile and watched Claire Finnerty’s eyes narrow. “Benedict Kavanagh. The car belonged to him.”

“Yes, Mairéad told me about Benedict when she arrived just now.”

“Did you ever meet Mr. Kavanagh?”

“No.” Stella wasn’t sure if she was taken aback more by the lack of apology or by the tiny note of challenge in Claire Finnerty’s voice.

“But you didn’t like him.”

“I really couldn’t offer an opinion. As I said, I never met the man.”

“And Ms. Broome never spoke about him?”

“Not really.”

“A man goes missing and ends up dead less than a quarter of a mile from here, the place where his wife came to work twice a year for the past six or seven years. You don’t find that rather odd?”

“It is strange. But I don’t have any idea what Benedict Kavanagh was doing here. If you don’t mind, I need to get on with my herbs.” Claire gestured toward the kitchen, and Stella followed her back to the table.

“What else can you tell me about last April?”

“You mean, can I remember anything incriminating about anyone here?”

Stella found herself rankling at the antagonistic edge in Claire Finnerty’s voice. “I just need to know what you recall,” she said. “Anything unusual. We’re trying to figure out, for instance, how Mr. Kavanagh’s car came to be buried in the bog, whether anyone would have had access to a mechanical digger during the last two weeks of April.”

Claire Finnerty offered a grudging glance. “I suppose I ought to just tell you now, because you’ll find out sooner or later. There was a digger here, for installing the geothermal system. The workmen had to excavate a portion of the hillside behind the house to bury the coils.” She gestured toward the courtyard, and Stella noted how the ground sloped away beyond the garden wall. “We had a company down from Boyle to do the work,” Claire continued. “GeoSys, they’re called. They brought in a JCB and a bulldozer.”

“And this gang from GeoSys, they’d just leave their equipment unattended when they’d knock off? Weren’t they afraid someone might pinch it?”

“They never said as much.”

“Did the workers stay here?”

“No, they preferred staying nearer the pubs in town.”

“Do you remember hearing anyone using the equipment after hours?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you know if anyone here has experience in heavy construction?”

“I don’t interrogate the people who come to work here, Detective. You’ll have to ask them yourself.”

“I will,” Stella said. “I assume everyone returns here to the main house at some point during the day?”

“They’ll be here for lunch in about an hour, when they’ve finished their chores, and then everyone’s free in the afternoon.”

“I’ll come back then.”

Claire Finnerty didn’t look up from her work but raised no objection.

Stella headed for the door but turned back just before crossing the threshold. “There was one more thing I wanted to ask. How much do you know about Vincent Claffey and his… activities?”

“As little as possible,” came the terse reply. “We’re not on great terms, if you want the truth.”

“But he is your closest neighbor. Which means you’d have more opportunity than anyone else to observe what goes on at his place. Any idea why he would be digging in a protected bog?”

“None whatsoever.”

Stella thought for a moment. “How deeply would you say his daughter is involved in any of his schemes?”

A flicker of anger seemed to travel through Claire Finnerty. “Deirdre Claffey is a child, Detective. She doesn’t know anything.”

Outside, Stella took the long way back to her car, skirting the perimeter of the haggard between the outbuildings to see what she could see. She darted between the goat barn and the cheese storehouse, keeping an eye out for that nasty gander. The whitewashed wall of the storehouse had scorch marks from the ground and hastily sprayed graffiti—a couple of rudely drawn human figures with exaggerated private parts. Rain had made streak marks in the soot. The fire must have been fairly recent. Why hadn’t Claire Finnerty bothered to report this, or tell her about it just now? Stella reached out to touch the scorch marks. This fire had been put out before any great damage was done, so perhaps they figured it wasn’t worth reporting. Or was there some other explanation?

7

Nora pulled on a new pair of nitrile gloves for the second forensic exam of the day, on Killowen Man. Catherine Friel was the primary point person, given her experience with bog remains and suspicious deaths. After Nora had removed as much peat as she could, Dr. Friel began the external exam, first noting the appearance of the body into her minirecorder.

“The deceased appears to be male, approximately sixty to sixty-five years of age. The body has been dismembered, more likely the result of disinterment by machines than by homicidal violence or postmortem mutilation.” Dr. Friel’s voice was calm; she was focused on her subject, as if she had long ago learned to concentrate not on the horror but on the physical form before her and what that physical form had to contribute to the story that was about to unfold. “The deceased appears to be wearing a woolen cloak, which will have to be removed eventually, but I want to make a note first of cuts in the outer garment that seem to align quite precisely with sharp-force wounds on the body.” She pointed to the gashes in the woolen fabric where it was wrapped around the truncated torso and then lifted the cloak to show the corresponding cuts in the dead man’s flesh. “If we measure the length of these wounds”—she nodded to Nora, who reached for the measuring tools—“it looks as if these cuts were made right through the cloak.” She pressed the dead man’s skin with a fingertip to flatten the surface. “See how the wound narrows at both ends? That shows the shape of the weapon. It looks as if he was stabbed with a double-edged blade, something like a dagger. And not just once but at least a half dozen times.”

Dr. Friel stepped back again and began to scan the rest of the body, and Nora observed the differences in the way they each approached the corpse: she immediately took in details that told of the man’s life; Catherine Friel seemed to zero in on what the body revealed about his death. A slight but fascinating divergence in perspective.

“Look here,” Dr. Friel said. She was examining the other side of the torso and pointed to a similar set of cuts in the cloth on the victim’s left side, underlaid once more with sharp-force wounds. “What do you think—two assailants, or one person with two knives?” She stepped back and mimed an attack with a short blade in each hand, thrusting up toward Nora’s rib cage. “Could have happened either way, but I’m betting on two assailants—see how there are many more cuts here, on the left side? Points to one attacker being a bit more… enthusiastic than the other. A symmetrical pattern is more likely if it’s only one person.”

Dr. Friel stepped back again, taking in the whole body once more. “Really quite amazing,” she said. “He’s so well preserved that we’ve got enough evidence for a real case. Suspicious death is suspicious death, even centuries later. Pity whoever did it is long gone.”

She pointed to several locations on the body with a gloved finger. “There are two distinct areas where the wounds appear to be clustered: there’s one grouping in the infraumbilical region, just below the navel; another in the epigastric region, which probably punctured the stomach. The different characteristics of the wounds in each area suggest that there was more than one assailant. That, plus the upward thrust of the blade, which is more usual for attacks than self-inflicted wounds, plus the holes through his garments that correspond with the wounds, all of that together suggests cause of death was exsanguination brought on by homicidal violence. That’s what I’d put in my autopsy report.”

“So he was stabbed, possibly by two assailants, and bled to death?”

“That’s certainly what it looks like. And from the lack of any decomposition, particularly around the wounds, I would also say that he must have gone straight into the bog after he was killed. What else can we tell about him, given the physical evidence?” Dr. Friel pointed to one of the bog man’s hands. “There’s a pronounced callus on the middle finger of his right hand. Also, the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand are stained darker than the rest of the body. Mishap with a leaky quill, perhaps?” Dr. Friel held up her own right hand, showing off her own discolored fingers. “Unfortunate incident over the crossword last night.”

“If it is ink, we should be able to tell from trace analysis.” Nora studied the bog man’s face, the open eyes and lightly stubbled cheeks, the gaping mouth. She wondered what, if anything, you could tell about a person from his expression at the moment of death. What were the words on his lips at the instant the knives plunged into his gut? And what did he believe would happen to his spirit when his life was so rudely extinguished? The expression was perhaps a function of death itself, the muscles relaxing into primary flaccidity. She thought of the words of the requiem: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

8

The sun had gone behind a bank of dark clouds when Stella pulled into the driveway at Vincent Claffey’s house. Just as she remembered: three junked cars and a rusty washing machine, a trio of unlicensed dogs with the run of the place, a broken baby swing and a pushchair, rolls of fencing. No clamp of turf, so he wasn’t likely burning the stuff here at the house. There was plenty of greenery, and every bit of it weeds—not a potato drill or a cabbage in sight. The chipper was parked alongside a shed in the haggard and gave off a greasy reek. What a place to rear a child, Stella thought, realizing that she was thinking of Deirdre Claffey and not the baby she’d seen balanced on the girl’s hip yesterday.

She ought to go straight to the door and knock, but the shed door had been left open, and investigative instinct overcame her. She might be able to find out what Claffey was up to with the peat if she could just happen to walk past an open door. She glanced at the house, and seeing no one, made her way to the shed just beyond the chipper.

Just as she reached the door, Deirdre Claffey’s voice rang out across the haggard. “What’dye want?”

Stella turned around. “Is your daddy here, Deirdre? I was hoping to speak to him.”

“He’ll be back soon.”

“Maybe I could wait for him? I just have a few follow-up questions.”

The girl said nothing but moved away from the door, which Stella took as an invitation. She stepped across the threshold into a dim room with blinds drawn, television blaring, and a dozen spuds peeled and ready for boiling on the stove. Stella’s suit, rumpled as it was, made her feel out of place amid the squalor, but with the father’s checkered history, she was probably not the first Guards officer or social worker Deirdre Claffey had ever met.

The baby lay on his back on a blanket in the middle of the tiny sitting room, staring up at her from the floor with those giant blue eyes. He shrieked when she made eye contact, delighted to have a playmate. Stella couldn’t help it—she picked up a set of plastic keys from the floor and rattled them in front of the child’s face. In contrast with nearly everything around him, the baby’s face and clothing, Stella noticed, were immaculately clean. Hard to know which stories to credit amid the local gossip. The child was loved—was that any sort of a clue?

“What’s his name?” Stella asked.

Deirdre’s voice, floating from the kitchen, sounded tired. “Cal.”

“Well, Cal, you’re a great little fella, aren’t you? What age are you, hmm?” She poked the baby playfully in the stomach, and he shrieked again. Was there any sound more irresistible?

“Don’t be getting him excited, now—he’s about to have his dinner,” Deirdre sounded exactly like someone’s nattering old granny. “He’ll be nine months next week.”

Stella felt her antennae picking up signals from all around the room: large stash of nappies in the corner, the brand-new clothing on the baby, and a new battery-powered swing to replace the knackered one out in the yard.

“Deirdre, do you remember the man I asked you about yesterday, Benedict Kavanagh?”

“I told you I didn’t know him.”

“But you also said you met all sorts, working the chipper van. I’m sorry to have to tell you this—Benedict Kavanagh is dead, Deirdre. That was his car in the bog. His body was in the boot.”

The baby began to cry, and Deirdre quickly plucked him up off the floor. “Shhh,” she whispered. “Whisht now, whisht.” She began to rock slowly and hummed a little tune until the child began to settle. Unclear, Stella thought, who was comforting whom.

“How well did you know Mr. Kavanagh?” Stella asked as gently as she could. No response. “When was the last time you saw him?”

The girl’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “I told you I didn’t know him.” She lifted the baby’s hand and stroked his dimpled fingers. The child began to suck his thumb and laid his head on her shoulder.

“Did your father know you were acquainted—”

“No!” Deirdre shot back, almost as if she was defending her father against some as-yet-unmade accusation.

Before Stella could form her next question, she heard a noise of tires skidding in gravel, and Vincent Claffey was through the door and only a few inches from her face.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doin’ here? You’d better not be talking to my girl—she’s underage, and you know it. Say nothin’, Deirdre, I’m warning you. She’s no right to be here asking questions.”

“Mr. Claffey—” Stella began, but her voice was drowned out.

“Did you get what you came for, then? Did you?” Claffey’s voice had risen in pitch, as if he was frightened of something. He turned to his daughter. “You, get to your room, and don’t come out ’til I say.” He moved to shove Deirdre, who was still holding the child, and Stella stepped forward to block him. Had she put the girl and her baby in danger by coming here?

“Mr. Claffey, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I came to speak to you. Deirdre and I were just chatting.” Claffey was not a big man; he was short and wiry but prone to explosive outbursts, as Stella knew from reading his form. He’d never been arrested for striking his daughter, but that didn’t mean it never happened. Surely he knew better than to lay a hand on a Guards detective.

Deirdre spoke up: “She was only waitin’ for you.”

Claffey eyed his daughter over Stella’s shoulder, jabbed his finger at her. “I said shut up, you! Not another word.”

Stella held her ground. She was taller than Vincent Claffey and confident that she could take him down, if it came to that. “I’m here as part of an official murder inquiry, Mr. Claffey. Of course, if you’d rather not talk here, we can go to the station in Birr. It’s up to you.”

After a tense moment, in which he seemed to consider his options, Claffey’s stance began to soften. But his eyes continued drilling into her, and Stella wondered again whether she’d totally bollixed up this case by coming here today.

“I expect by now you’ve heard that there was another body in the car,” she began. “I asked you about him yesterday, Benedict Kavanagh. And all the evidence at this stage points to murder. I just wanted to double-check and make sure you’d never seen him around.” Stella proffered the photo on her phone once more, but Claffey ignored it. “We’ve discovered that his wife was a regular visitor at Killowen—”

“Wasters,” Claffey muttered. “All their crunchy-granola load of fuckin’ bollocks. Can’t stand seeing anybody making a few bob.” Stella filed away this tidbit of information. She could just imagine the difference of opinion between the owner of a chipper van and his totally organic neighbors.

“So you never had any dealings with Kavanagh?”

“What do you mean, ‘dealings’? I hope you’re not accusing me—”

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything, Mr. Claffey, just trying to get a picture of the victim’s movements before he disappeared—where he went, who he might have spoken to. I’m just doing my job, trying to figure out what happened. And I wondered if you could help me.”

The tongue darted between his lips. “I’ve told you, I didn’t know the man.”

“What about his wife? Her name isn’t Kavanagh—it’s Mairéad Broome.”

Claffey’s eyes had gone cold. “Never heard of her.”

For a petty criminal, he was a pretty piss-poor liar. But the bruises on Deirdre’s wrists came back to her, and Stella knew she couldn’t push any further without the risk of putting the girl and her child in danger. She’d have to leave it for now. “Well, if you’re certain…”

The slight smirk that lit up Claffey’s face said he was pleased for having won—this round, anyway. He turned away and started rooting through a cardboard box that sat beside the door, pawing through its contents until he came up with a sturdy padlock.

He followed her out to the yard, and as Stella executed a slow three-point turn in the haggard, he made a show of slipping the lock through the hasp on the shed door and fastening it securely.

9

Low clouds had settled over Killowen by the time Nora returned to the farm. Her first task was locating Joseph, to try to find out what had been troubling him this morning—she’d promised Cormac. The front door of the main house was wide open, but no one answered when she called. The house felt peaceful, a diffuse light from the cloudy sky leaking in through the windows out onto the courtyard garden. The sitting room and kitchen were empty, so Nora stepped into the herb garden, refreshed by the pungent whiff of oregano. As she crossed to the other wing of the house, a small movement caught her eye. Stepping through the doorway, she called out, “Hello, anyone here?”

The stillness in the air refuted another living presence. Probably just her imagination. The interior walls of this corridor were plain whitewash, perfect for displaying the work no doubt donated by resident artists: there were woodcuts, flat metal sculptures, a few abstract seascapes, and a series of elaborate calligraphy pieces.

The first room she encountered seemed to be some sort of scriptorium: beside the windows stood a couple of tall desks, angled surfaces covered in large sheets of vellum. Shelves hanging on the back wall held rolled-up parchments and jars of brightly colored pigment; a long table between the writing desks held a mortar and pestle and several clamshells with brilliant colors crusted in their cupped surfaces. A basket of eggs stood on the center table as well, along with metal rulers, white cotton gloves with the index fingers cut off, a jar of long feathers and others holding tiny brushes and sharp knives. She ran a hand over the vellum on the nearest table, struck by the anatomical quality of the medium. You could still see blemishes, fly bites, spidery veins. She remembered reading stories, at the start of her training, about ancient medical books bound in human skin.

A few samples of the writer’s art hung framed upon the walls here in the studio as well. Unlike the precise, perfect character of most calligraphy she had seen, there was a certain extra degree of expression in these pieces, a primitive spirit that came out in the arrangement of shapes and colors. The staring animal forms that inhabited the pages seemed ready to blink. She turned to read the labels on the pigments: auripigmentum, verdigris, lapis, azurite, cinnabar, yellow ochre, purpura, malachite, red lake. Some of the names hinted at far-flung origins.

Nora began to feel self-conscious, wandering through someone’s private workroom, and was about to retreat when she was stopped by the sight of a large bowl of black marble-sized spheres. She picked one up to examine it more closely. Turning the thing over in her palm, she found a tiny hole drilled in one side.

“Can I help you?” The man’s voice came from the doorway, startling her and causing the pod to fly from her palm and roll under one of the writing desks. The speaker was a tall, lean man, perhaps in his early sixties, dressed in jeans and a plain black sweater. His hair was arranged in a thick fringe above his ears, ginger going to white, and behind the smile in his blue eyes was an inquisitive expression. Nora felt flustered, caught snooping where she probably ought not to have been. When the man spoke again, his voice held no accusation. “Would I be right in guessing you must be one of our guests from the National Museum?” The rolled r and rising inflection pegged the accent as Welsh.

“Yes, sorry, Nora Gavin.”

He took her hand. “I’m Martin, Martin Gwynne.”

“Is this your studio? I didn’t mean to blunder in here. Sorry if I’m intruding.”

“Ah, no, you’re all right.” Gwynne bent down to pick up the object she had dropped. He began to play with it as he spoke. “You’re interested in illumination, are you?”

“I teach anatomy, so I’m naturally interested in calfskin, but I’m also intrigued by all the exotic pigments.” She gestured toward the shelves.

“Ah, you’re thinking of lapis lazuli—the truest blue, brought all the way from Afghanistan in the Middle Ages. But there are local sources as well. Woad grows here, as an example. Irish monks also used ground-up shellfish, charcoal, red earth.” He reached for a jar containing a yellow powder. “This one, auripigmentum, is made from the gallbladders of eels.” He enjoyed Nora’s reaction.

“Do you still use all the old pigments?”

“Well, I’ve given up on a few of the more poisonous compounds. Orpiment, for example, a beautiful golden color, is actually arsenic trisulfide, not something into which I wish to be dipping my quill. And cinnabar—Chinese red—is mercuric sulfide. I’ve managed to find suitable substitutes for some. But somehow the modern pigments are never quite as vivid.”

“I’ve always wondered, how did the monks discover all those bizarre compounds?”

“That’s a good question. It must have been a process of experimentation, I suppose. Some knowledge carried through from even more ancient cultures. And every scriptorium had its Book of Secrets, where the monks would record their recipes. Knowledge was passed down, refined along the way, as with any branch of science or alchemy.”

Nora glanced toward the illuminations in progress she’d spied earlier. “Is this your own work? It’s beautiful.”

“You’re very kind. Yes, most of it is mine, but I’ve been working with an apprentice recently, so a few are hers.” He pointed to a couple of smaller works hanging beside the door and an unfinished piece on the nearest writing desk. “Anca’s still a bit hesitant about her design, but there is a certain boldness at the back of it. The power is in her, no doubt. She just has to learn to let it out.” Martin Gwynne frowned. “At a certain point, you can’t teach people anything further. They have to make their own mark.”

As they talked, Martin Gwynne was still playing with the pod he’d picked up from the floor and was now rolling through his fingers with the deft skill of a magician.

“What do you call that?” Nora asked. “I know I’ve seen them before, but I can’t—”

“This?” Gwynne said, stopping the little orb on the flat of his palm. “It’s an oak gall, sometimes called a gallnut.”

“Of course!” Nora felt the knowledge returning.

“We get all we need in the oak wood just beyond.”

“And what do you use them for, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“For ink, of course. Grind up a few of these, add iron shavings, wine, and gum arabic, cook it all down, and voilà!” He handed her the gall and picked up a stoppered bottle of dark liquid. “You get a very serviceable black-brown ink. It was the basic everyday stuff used all through the Middle Ages, right up to the nineteenth century. Not much in favor these days. Too caustic, you see, eats right through paper. A surface like parchment is able to withstand the bite of acid.”

And all perfectly harmless, Nora thought. Unless you’d just seen a handful of these gallnuts in the mouth of a corpse.

A voice came from the doorway. “Martin, love, do you happen to—” The woman who entered stopped short when she saw Nora. She was slender to the point of gauntness, probably in her midsixties, dressed in a hand-knit linen sweater and jeans. Her hooded eyes were dark pools that called to mind a wild creature constantly on the lookout. “So sorry, my dear, I didn’t realize you were occupied.” The accent was English, a cultivated drawl that suggested private school and money.

“My wife, Tessa, this is Dr. Gavin, one of our visitors from the National Museum,” Martin Gwynne explained and then turned to Nora. “I believe you came to help with our bog man, isn’t that right, Dr. Gavin?”

“Yes,” Nora said, and then hesitated. Was it possible that they hadn’t yet heard about the second corpse? Perhaps it was better not to divulge too much. She began to get the impression that she was holding up a private conversation and hastened to make her exit. “I stumbled in here looking for someone, so I’ll just keep hunting, if you’ll excuse me. Very nice to meet you both.”

She withdrew to the cloister walk outside the studio and stopped a short distance down the corridor to examine the gallnut still in her left hand. It looked exactly like the objects they’d found in Benedict Kavanagh’s throat, she was sure of it. She ought to share this new bit of information with Cusack, but she’d also promised to find Joseph. She tucked the gall into her pocket for the time being and set out for the kitchen.

As she crossed the courtyard, she could see Joseph and Eliana coming up from the bottom of the garden. They were accompanied by a tall, awkward-looking figure dressed all in brown, from the worn corduroys to his tweed jacket and cap—even his wellingtons were brown. He carried a couple of fishing rods and a basket.

“Nodding!” Joseph cried. “Noddy in the busker—in the biscuit.” He pointed to the creel, and the brown man opened it to show off their catch: a tangle of gray eels, still alive and wriggling in the bottom.

Eliana said, “We helped to catch them.” She gave a mock shudder. “So horrible, but very… em… tasty?”

“You actually eat them?” Nora asked, unable to take her eyes from the writhing mass in the basket. She glanced up to see the brown man’s chin jutting forward.

He shrugged and blinked rapidly a few times, then let out a series of small barks, looking mortified and blushing furiously all the while, until Eliana intervened, speaking under her breath: “Oh, yes, we eat anguilas many ways at home.” The fact that she was standing between two grown men who couldn’t manage to put two coherent words together didn’t seem to faze her in the least. “This is Anthony Beglan,” Eliana said, stumbling a bit over the foreign surname. “And this is Nora, Anthony. I think you will like her.”

Nora endeavored not to stare at Beglan but found herself fascinated by the tics that seemed to take him over whenever he tried to speak. All the signs—the rapid gestures, the facial tics, and vocalizations—pointed to Tourette’s. She had read a bit about it in the medical literature, of course, but never before had such an up close and personal encounter with the disorder.

Anthony tipped his head back, his jaws snapping together fiercely as his eyes searched her face for the familiar look of alarm he must have encountered daily.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Beglan,” Nora said. “Are you one of the… I don’t quite know what to call them… the residents here?”

The jaws snapped shut a few more times before he could manage a response. “No, I live just bug-bug-bug-beyond, but”—again the tics interrupted—“we share the work. I keep cuh-cuh-cac-cattle.”

“And what about these eels? Are they really going to be our dinner?” Nora smiled, and Anthony Beglan’s glower split into a reluctantly wolfish grin, a complete transformation. “Because if they are, I hope Eliana’s telling the truth.”

She glanced at Joseph, who was gazing intently at Eliana again. Whatever disturbance Cormac had seen this morning seemed to have dissipated. When the girl moved past him, he reached out and grasped her hand, in a gesture that neither surprised nor annoyed her, so it clearly was not the first time. Nora felt a small twinge of trepidation, remembering Joseph’s attraction to Cormac’s friend Roz Byrne last year before his stroke, and worried about where this new attachment to Eliana might lead. He’d still not managed to recognize Roz, and although she stopped by the house every few weeks to see how he was getting on, there had not yet been any flicker of recognition in his eyes. Each time Roz came for a visit, she went away bereaved yet again.

Eliana’s hand looked so small and pale tucked inside Joseph’s large fist. Was the attachment significant enough to mention to Cormac? The girl hadn’t been with them even two full days. Nora decided to let things be, at least for the moment.

“Anthony, are you coming?” The woman they’d awkwardly encountered in the bath last night emerged from the French doors. “I’ve got the pot ready for your catch.”

Anthony’s jaws snapped together a few more times before he could answer. “Be there stuh-stuh-straightaway. Just have to take cuh-cuh-care of these.” He lifted the creel slightly.

The woman waved and then retreated.

Nora lowered her voice. “Shawn, isn’t it? She said she was an archaeologist.”

Beglan nodded. “That’s right.”

“And what does she do now?”

“You ask a luh-luh-lot of questions,” Anthony Beglan said. He turned and strode away.

10

Nora stood in her room, looking over the available change of clothing. She always required a shower and change after a postmortem. Through the open window she could hear a smattering of electronic music, someone’s mobile phone. A man’s voice floated upward from the drive. “Christ,” he muttered, “what the fuck is it now?”

Glancing out the window, she could see it was the same rather scruffy young man who had been with Kavanagh’s wife at the hospital earlier. He was in the middle of retrieving two cases from the boot but had set them down after receiving a text message. He stared at his phone and spoke aloud to whoever had sent the text. “Not here, you bollocks. Are you mad?” He texted furiously, then sent off the message and picked up the cases again, heading toward the other end of the car park. His phone jingled again, a real ring this time, before he’d traveled to the other side of the car.

“What the hell are you doing?” Nora heard. “I told you I’d be in touch. No, no, that’s not going to happen. I explained to you how we were going to handle it—”

Just then a small motorbike carrying Vincent Claffey came puttering up the drive from the road. He stopped at the outer edge of the farmyard and trundled the bike off the drive and up against the nearest shed. Claffey had a mobile pressed to his ear all the while, and soon it became clear that he was the person on the other end of the call with the young man. They both hung up, and the younger man headed over to meet Vincent Claffey, glancing around in case they’d be seen. Nora watched from her invisible perch, fascinated. The young man pressed a brown envelope into Claffey’s hands. “You’ve got what you want now—and you know what we want.”

Claffey’s expression seemed to hold both amusement and triumph. He held up the envelope. “Oh, yes, I know what you want. But it’s a lot to ask of any man.” He slipped the envelope inside his jacket and patted it. “I’m afraid ye’ll have to give me a little more time to think it through. Don’t worry, I’ll be in touch.” When he reached the bike, he threw his leg over it, and sped away down the drive.

Alone again, the young man leaned forward and banged his head slowly against the wall of the shed. Then he returned to the car to pick up the cases and trudged down the path that led into the oak grove, disappearing from view.

Nora realized she’d been holding her breath. It was some sort of payoff, had to be. Blackmail? The thickness of the envelope suggested it was no small consideration. She finished changing and made her way outside once more. Mairéad Broome’s young man seemed awfully familiar with Vincent Claffey. They must have been here before. What did Claffey have on him? Maybe a bit more knowledge than anyone realized about Benedict Kavanagh’s disappearance?

She followed in his footsteps, passing the sign that pointed to the cottages. The broad macadam path cut through a gentle slope that was covered with green mounds, hundreds of moss-covered stones like an army of turtles marching through the oak grove. She spied three or four small dwellings farther down the path, glimpses of thatch and stone and whitewash through the leaves. Towering above the sparse undergrowth of saplings stood a few stout old trees and one giant in particular whose girth must have been twenty feet or more. Nora slowed her pace and circled the massive tree, resting her palm on ancient bark that had grown into folds upon itself, looking up into gnarled branches that stretched outward like enormous crooked arms that drooped gracefully toward the earth, practically begging to be climbed. Garish green moss grew straight up the trunk and clung to a snake-like root that slithered into leaf mold underfoot. How long had this ancient life been rooted here? What ravages of wind and weather, what natural and man-made firestorms had it withstood through all those centuries?

Nora leaned forward and peered up into the branches. She could, if she wished, step from one limb to another and vanish up into its leaves. Testing her balance, she set one foot gingerly on the lowest limb, then stepped quickly up the ladder of branches. Soon she was fifteen feet above the ground, lost amid the rustling foliage. Their thick leaves gave oak trees a particular sound, a deeper timbre than the music of sycamores or beech trees or firs. Nora glanced down and felt a little dizzy. What was she doing, acting like a child? And how on earth was she going to get down?

A growing murmur of voices came from back along the path. The slouchy young man walked beside Mairéad Broome. Her cottage must be along this path, but they seemed headed back to the main house, passing under the oak where Nora was hidden.

“I had to give him the money,” the young man was saying. “Coming here like that, in broad daylight? It’s not like I had a choice, Mairéad.”

Mairéad Broome stopped just under the tree, and Nora held her breath. How could they not hear her or at least sense her presence above them? She hung on tight, pressed against the oak’s mighty trunk.

“No, you did the right thing, Graham.”

“The trouble is, he’ll just keep asking for more, unless we do something.”

“What can we do? We’d all be in jeopardy if he says anything, and I won’t risk that.”

“But he’s using you, Mairéad.”

“I know he is. Just leave it be, please, Graham—”

He stopped her saying any more with a fervent kiss, pressing her back against the oak.

Nora nearly had to stifle a cry as a fat acorn dropped from a branch directly in front of her eyes, glancing like a stone off Graham’s unprotected head.

“Ow!” he yelped, jumping back. “Jesus!” One hand reached up to rub the spot where the acorn had made contact, but to Nora’s relief, he glanced up only briefly and didn’t see her. The acorn had provided sufficient disruption, however, and the pair moved on and were soon out of earshot.

Nora slowly let out her breath and started to climb down the same branches that had been her ladder on the way up. Reaching out to find a grip, she noticed a small branch bearing a spray of leaves and a marble-sized brown sphere. There was no hole in it, like those she’d seen in Martin Gwynne’s studio, but the thing was definitely not an acorn. Nora felt the lump in her pocket and looked around, spying other brown galls on the branches all around her. She hadn’t even noticed them on the way up. She plucked the false fruit from the tree, slipped it into her pocket, and climbed carefully to the ground.

It was difficult to imagine that anyone she’d met so far at Killowen could have been responsible for Benedict Kavanagh’s death, but the oak galls must be a significant clue. From what she’d seen in the morgue, Kavanagh’s death had been planned in some detail. And the anger felt personal. What could Kavanagh possibly have done to warrant such a dreadful vengeance? A little research might be in order.

She found Joseph and Eliana in the kitchen. “I’m back,” she said. “Thought it might be time to give Eliana a well-deserved break.”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

“Wouldn’t you like to take a walk or read a book, anything?”

Eliana finally nodded, eyes downcast. She headed for the door and turned as she crossed the threshold. “One hour?” It sounded as if she was being forced to stay away for an hour, rather than being granted her liberty.

“I’m sure you’ll find plenty to do,” Nora said. She turned back to Joseph. “You and I are going to do a bit of research. Stay right here—I’ll be back.”

Nora fetched her laptop from upstairs. She reached into her pocket for the oak galls she’d collected from the studio and the wood and showed them to Joseph. “Here’s what we’re looking for,” she said, setting them down on the table in front of him.

His eyes seemed to light up. “Bugallas,” he said. “Tinta, la tinta! Uncle!”

Nora wondered if he made as little sense in Spanish as he did in English.

“Uncle!” Joseph said again. He moved his right hand, miming the act of writing.

Nora looked at him. “Do you know what this is?” He nodded slowly, reaching out for the gall she held in front of him.

“Bugalla,” he said. He held up the second gall as well. “Dos bugallas-uh-uh-duh—roble.”

“You’ve seen something like this before?”

“Sí, sí, la medicina.”

Nora couldn’t quite believe her ears. “La medicina—for medicine, you mean?”

Eliana’s voice came from the doorway. She was back already. “And ‘la tinta’ is ink—or perhaps, em, what do you call this… for changing colors.” She gestured to her clothing.

“You mean dye?” Nora asked.

“Yes, dye, that’s it.”

“What about ‘bugalla’? Is that a real word?”

“I don’t know,” said Eliana. “I never heard it before.”

Nora swung her laptop around and found an online translation engine. She typed bugalla, set the boxes for Spanish to English, and pressed Translate.

The answer came in a flash: oak gall. Was it possible Joseph had come across these odd little things in Chile?

“Amargura,” Joseph murmured. He was looking now at Eliana. “Mi dolor. La cara de mi dolor.”

Nora observed them both. “I can see that you understand. He is speaking Spanish, right? Is it something about a friend?”

The girl shook her head. “No, no—he says amargura, em… ‘bitterness,’ and…” She hesitated.

“What is it, Eliana?” Nora asked. “What else did he say?”

“He said, ‘My sorrow. The face of my sorrow.’”

“What does that mean? Is it some sort of expression?”

“I don’t know.” The girl seemed bewildered and suddenly close to tears.

“Will you excuse us for just one second?” Nora asked Joseph. She took Eliana aside. “I’m so sorry about all this. We ought to have warned you. The stroke seems to have made Joseph’s emotions a bit more volatile. I know he’s not saying or doing things on purpose to upset you. I’m not sure where all these cryptic phrases are coming from, and I’m not sure he knows either. If you’re finding it too much, we can try to contact the agency and see if they can send someone else.”

“No! I’m not upset. Please, don’t send me away.”

“No one wants to send you away, Eliana. I know you’re trying your best. But if he upsets you, if you’re not comfortable, we can ask for someone with more experience—”

“Please don’t get someone else. I will try harder. Please!”

Nora looked into the girl’s dark eyes, and something clicked. There was one advantage Eliana had over someone with more rehab experience, and it had just been demonstrated before her eyes. “You know, I’m not sure whether Cormac mentioned that his father lived in Chile for many years. He’s only recently come back to Ireland. It’s possible that English feels strange to him, especially after the stroke. It’s hard to know. But if you can understand him, I don’t know, maybe you could try doing the flash cards in Spanish.”

Eliana’s face brightened immediately. “I could do that, yes, let me try!” She went off in search of the cards, and Nora returned to Joseph and her laptop in the kitchen. She typed “oak gall” into the search box. The first entry that appeared was from a very old medical text:

Galls or gallnuts are a kind of preternatural and accidental tumour, produced by the Punctures of Insects on the Oaks of several Species; but those of the oak only are used in medicine. We have two kinds, the Oriental and the European galls: the Oriental are brought from Aleppo, of the bigness of a large nutmeg, with tubercles on their surface, of a very firm and solid texture, and a disagreeable, acerb, and astringent taste. The European galls are of the same size, with perfectly smooth surfaces: they are light, often spongy, and cavernous within, and always of a lax texture. They have a less austere taste, and are of much less value than the first sort, both in manufactures and medicine. The general history of galls is this: an insect of the fly kind, for the safety of her young, wounds the branches of the trees, and in the hole deposits her egg: the lacerated vessels of the tree discharging their contents form a tumour or woody case about the hole, where the egg is thus defended from all injuries. This tumor also serves for the food of the tender maggot, produced from the egg of the fly, which, as soon as it is perfect, and in its winged state, gnaws its way out, as appears from the hole found in the gall; and where no hole is seen on its surface, the maggot, or its remains, are sure to be found within, on breaking it. [See also: Serpent’s Egg.]

Nora stared at the last two words, her memory flashing back to Benedict Kavanagh’s distorted face and bulging eyes. The name—serpent’s egg—offered yet another meaning, altogether unforeseen. Filled with bitterness, the gallnuts were the imagined spawn of serpents. How many of these were forced into Benedict Kavanagh’s mouth—a half dozen? All at once she could taste the bitterness, the rancor, and the resentment contained in each one.

She thought of Kavanagh destroying a youthful Niall Dawson in that debate so many years ago, saw again in slow motion the scene from this morning: Kavanagh’s wife pulling the sheet from her husband’s body, such a primal, visceral reaction. Nora shook her head, trying to erase the memory of the expression on Kavanagh’s face, the bulging eyes and distended cheeks. She looked down at the gall in her hand once more, a chilling message from a vengeful killer.

11

There were a few more signs of life when Stella returned to Killowen in the late afternoon. With their morning chores out of the way, the farm’s residents were now pursuing their own work. Stella heard the tap-tap-tap of a chisel on stone as she rounded the corner of a small shed across the yard from the main house. Inside, wearing a leather apron and holding a hammer and chisel, was a fortyish man, his jaw elongated by a dark beard, his large blue eyes framed by shaggy brows and a floppy fringe of hair. His hands moved deftly as he chased a groove along a round stone into which he was carving a spiral design. One knuckle bled a bit where he had scraped it.

Stella waited until he’d finished before she spoke. “Excuse me, I wonder if I could have a word?”

He turned, unstartled by her presence, and began to lay down his tools as soon as she produced her Guards ID. “I expected you’d turn up sooner or later,” he said. “Saw the cars out on the bog yesterday.”

“Just routine questions,” Stella admitted. “I’m talking to everyone at Killowen, Mr.—”

“Lynch,” he said. “Diarmuid Lynch. What can I tell you?”

“Well, we’ve received confirmation that the second body in the boot was this man, Benedict Kavanagh.” Stella held up the photo of Kavanagh. “He and the car went missing about four months ago. So, for a start, did you know him?”

“No,” came the terse reply. Lynch barely glanced at the picture and instead picked up a rag from the bench beside him and began to wipe the stone dust from his tools, moving slowly and deliberately, replacing each in turn.

“How long have you been here, at Killowen?”

“Eighteen months.”

“And before that?”

“Knocked about. I was living in Spain for a while.”

“Working?”

“At a vineyard for a time, then another farm. ‘General labor,’ I think they call it.”

“How did you come to this place?”

“When I came back after being in Spain, I didn’t really have a home to go to. My parents were dead, the farm sold. I’d no other family. So I did whatever work I could find. Spent a good bit of time sleeping rough. Just my good fortune to fall ill so near to this place. I have Martin Gwynne to thank, for finding me out on the bog. I was in pretty bad shape—pneumonia, they said. Martin brought me here, and they managed to nurse me back to health. I decided to stay on after that.”

“We’re trying to find out what Mairéad Broome’s husband, Benedict Kavanagh, might have been doing in this area at the time he was killed. Any thoughts?”

“I really couldn’t say. I never met the fella.”

“Can you tell me what sort of work you do here at the farm?”

“The same as everyone else: tilling, planting, cultivating, harvesting, the odd bit of construction—and my own work here, of course.” He gestured to the stone before him.

“You don’t happen to have experience operating heavy machinery?”

“We have a small loader that we use for moving stones like these and for building projects. I drive it sometimes, as do Martin and Claire and Anthony and Shawn. Never operated an excavator, if that’s what you wanted to know.” He calmly continued wiping his tools with a rag, checking their edges, replacing them on the bench.

“Do you remember anything unusual happening last April, anything at all out of the ordinary?”

“Well, we got the new heat in last April—had lashings of hot water for the first time. That was unusual. And that’s when Shawn Kearney—the archaeologist—came to stay with us, attending the excavation on the heating coils. She turned up a few interesting bits, as I recall. I really don’t remember much beyond that. Everything else was pretty normal.”

He finished with the tools and turned his gaze upon Stella once more. For some reason, she had a sudden urge to put his name through the system.

12

Martin Gwynne looked up at Stella Cusack as he worked the flaws in a sheet of parchment with a short, sharp knife, scraping away rough patches. “Ask away,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind if I keep working; this commission is due in a few days, and I’ve still a lot of work to do.” He set aside the knife and reached for a sheet of fine sandpaper, scouring in a circular motion.

Stella studied his hands at work, the fingers long and sensitive, the fingertips floating over the vellum’s pale surface. Gwynne saw her glance at the text he was working from, a formal commemoration of a wedding, no doubt suitable for framing. As if he’d been reading her thoughts, he said, “Yes, decidedly less elevated than transcribing the word of God, but the written word has lost some of its mystique in the modern world, I’m afraid. This is what pays the bills nowadays.”

“I’m here about a second body found in the boot of that car out on the bog.”

Gwynne didn’t look up, but the sheet of sandpaper in his hand stopped dead at the center of the vellum. After the briefest pause, it continued, making circles within circles.

Stella continued, “I’m trying to reconstruct the victim’s last known whereabouts, to find out what could have brought him to this part of the country.”

“And you think I might know what he was doing here?”

“You shared an interest in manuscripts, from what I understand. His name was Benedict Kavanagh. That name ring a bell?”

Martin Gwynne put down the sandpaper and ran his fingers across the calfskin again, like a blind man, feeling rather than looking, paying close attention to the sensations that passed through his fingertips. “I knew Kavanagh. We met once, long ago, at some conference or other. As you said, he studied old manuscripts, and he was sometimes known to consult with persons such as myself about some of the finer nuances of ink making or handwriting.”

A very carefully couched reply, Stella noted. “And did he happen to consult with a person such as yourself last April?”

“No, he didn’t. Now, as to whether he was on his way to see me, I couldn’t say. But we had no arrangement or appointment. He never came here to consult with me.”

Again, the way it was phrased, Kavanagh could have come to Killowen for some other reason than to consult Martin Gwynne. Was he being deliberately evasive?

“Had anyone mentioned him being in the area?”

“Not that I recall.” He began riffling through a jam jar full of white goose feathers, examining each shaft minutely before selecting the stoutest and cutting through it with his small, sharp knife, so that it was about ten inches in length, with a V-shape at the top. He got a firm grasp on one end of the V, and in a single swift motion stripped the lower barbs from the shaft. He repeated the motion on the other side, again leaving a few inches at the top of the quill.

“What do you recall about last April?”

Gwynne stopped to consider. “That’s the time for sowing leeks and onions. And Anthony—our neighbor, Anthony Beglan—was working on a new batch of calfskins for me. It might help if I just consult my diary.” He set down the half-made quill and crossed to the desk beside her. “I keep a note of deadlines and other important dates in here.” Quickly flipping back a few months, he found April and began looking down the entries. The small book was filled with a calligrapher’s careful hand, a rainbow of different-colored inks. He saw her taking in his handiwork. “If something is important enough to write down, it’s important enough to write properly. It’s a mark of respect for the person who will read what you’ve written.” Gwynne replied absently, repeating words he must have said a thousand times. “What sort of time frame are we talking about?”

“We only have a few details. Mr. Kavanagh taped his last television program on April twenty-first. We believe he might have come here shortly after.”

Martin Gwynne perused the entries in his book. “Well, we had the workmen in for the new heat, from April twentieth through the end of the month. No visiting artists during that time, with all the upheaval from the construction.” He paused to consult the diary once more. “What else? Ah, yes. I always prefer to work in daylight, but I had a commission due at the end of the month, quite a large piece, so I was working late. Burning a lot of midnight oil, as they say.”

“Are you the only person with a prior connection to Kavanagh?”

“I met him once, years ago, as I said. I’d hardly call that a connection.”

“To your knowledge, had any of the others here ever met Mr. Kavanagh?”

“Well, my wife would have met him at the same time I did, but I doubt she would remember. It’s twenty years ago.”

“And where was this?”

“At an academic conference in Toronto—a meeting of the Eriugena Society. A little-known group, medievalists and philosophers and paleographers. I believe Kavanagh was presenting a paper—I’m afraid I don’t remember the subject.”

“What was the name of the group?”

“The Eriugena Society.”

“Could you spell that for me?” She handed him her notebook.

“Medievalists, philosophers, and—sorry—what was the last group you mentioned?”

“Paleographers. Specialists in the study of ancient handwriting.”

“And what were you doing at the conference?”

“A colleague and I had just finished work on a late-ninth-century text, and the conference organizers thought it might be useful to have me give a talk about the process. I warned them that I wasn’t much at public speaking. How is all this relevant? I’ve really no idea what Kavanagh was doing here.”

“It’s possible that his visit to the area had something to do with his wife. I believe she’s stayed here a few times.”

Gwynne looked confused.

“Her name isn’t Kavanagh—it’s Broome. Mairéad Broome.”

A light dawned in his eyes. “Yes, of course, Mairéad. She’s often stayed with us.”

“And you’d no idea she was married to Benedict Kavanagh?”

“She never mentioned it. I suppose I thought—” He broke off suddenly, as if aware that he ought to be a bit more circumspect.

“What?” Stella asked. “That she was attached to her assistant, perhaps? Maybe I ought to mention that she’s here at Killowen now. She came down to identify her husband’s body. I believe she and Graham Healy will be staying on here for a few days.”

Gwynne looked slightly distracted. “Yes, better to be away from Dublin. The newspapers and the television can be merciless.”

Spoken like someone with firsthand experience, Stella thought. He looked up, and she understood that he would say no more today. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Gwynne. I wonder if you could point me to”—she consulted the handwritten list Claire Finnerty had made for her—“Lucien Picard.”

He stepped to the door and directed her across the far corner of the yard to a single-story whitewashed shed. “Ah, the French contingent. He’ll be in the cheese storehouse, and Sylvie with him. Never apart, those two.”

The rank scent of mold greeted Stella’s nostrils when she stepped through the door of the storehouse. “Lucien Picard?” A wiry, energetic-looking man in his midthirties looked up from his work as she entered. He was slicing through a thick wheel of cheese with an implement that looked like a knife with handles on both ends.

“C’est moi,” he said. “Sorry—that’s me. Try some of this? Six months aged.” He cut a thin wedge and popped it into her mouth before she could protest. “Very good, eh? To me, it is the best ever!”

Stella tasted the cheese on her tongue; it was perfectly tart and crumbly. She struggled to swallow. “Yes, very good, but I’m not here to… I have to ask you about Benedict Kavanagh.” She held up her identification. “The dead man found in the bog?”

His look of triumph vanished, replaced by seriousness. “Ah, yes, we heard about this. Do you need Sylvie as well? Sylvie!” A slightly younger woman emerged from the next room. Her short platinum hair was swathed in a turban-like pink headband, and beneath it strong features—large hazel eyes, a long, refined-looking nose, and generous lips—made a striking impression. Sylvie wore a blue peasant blouse and jeans, topped with a starched white chef’s apron. Resting on her shoulder was a four-foot plank that held two dozen or more petite creamy white cheeses.

“We have the police here, Sylvie, about the man in the bog—”

“Benedict Kavanagh,” Stella added.

“Yes, what about him? Is it true what they’re saying, that he was murdered?” Sylvie set her plank down on the counter and began loading her cheeses into a box. She avoided eye contact, concentrating instead on her task, her hands moving quickly, efficiently. Sylvie was careful to grasp each round of the soft cheese very gently so as not to damage it.

“Did either of you happen to know Kavanagh?” Stella asked. “Here’s a photograph, in case you might recognize him.”

Her cargo safely stowed at last, Sylvie looked up at the picture. “No. I’ve never seen this man. I’m sorry.”

“We think he disappeared sometime in late April, so I’m asking everyone at Killowen what they recall from that time. Anything out of the ordinary.”

Lucien and Sylvie regarded each other briefly, and Stella got the impression that they had already conferred about what they were going to say. Difficult to tell if she was reading the signals right; it was always slightly disconcerting when interview subjects spoke a language with its own nonverbal nuances.

“Out of the ordinary?” Picard made a wry face. “Difficult to say, because you see, there is no ‘ordinary’ here. Every day is different. That last part of April, we were making the chèvre, Sylvie, do you remember? The soft goat cheese, also crottin and pyramide.” He held up his hands to describe the shapes.

“We also had many, eh… Lucien, qu’est-ce que ‘chevrette’ en Anglais?

“ ‘She-goat,’ je crois.

“Many of our she-goats, they were having kids at the time. So much to do.”

“We didn’t sleep a lot,” Lucien added.

“Did you have any guests or artists in residence at that time?”

Lucien squinted, trying to recall. “A few, I suppose. I can’t remember. Claire would have their names, if you need them.”

“Do you happen to know the name Mairéad Broome?”

“Yes, the painter. She has been here a few times.”

“And was she one of the artists who were staying here at the end of April?”

“You know, she might have been. As I said, Claire would know for certain.”

“And you know that she was married to Benedict Kavanagh?”

“I didn’t know. Sylvie, did you know this?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Once again, Stella got the distinct impression that a certain amount of forethought had gone into the answers these two were providing. Why should anyone lie about knowing the identity of Mairéad Broome’s husband? The reactions of the people here to Benedict Kavanagh’s death were strange. Each knew less than the one before, as if they were in some sort of competition for who could display the blankest expression, who could know the least about the dead man. She still had three more people to interview: Tessa Gwynne, Shawn Kearney, and Anthony Beglan.

“Thank you. If you do think of anything else, please give me a ring?” She handed each of them a card, wishing she could double back and listen to the conversation that would be in progress a few minutes after she’d left. Of course it would help if she had a bloody word of French.

As she crossed the haggard, there was a clatter of stones that sounded like a wrecking ball had gone through the side of the house. Stella rounded the corner of the barn to find Diarmuid Lynch’s heavy loader driven by a lanky middle-aged man in a brown peaked cap. Beside the pile of stones the driver had just deposited on a patch of meadow stood a woman with short dark hair and vivid blue eyes. Stella glanced at her list. “Shawn Kearney?” she asked.

The woman raised her hand in reply, then removed her dusty leather gloves as her colleague parked the loader and shut off the engine. “Yes, I’m Shawn.”

The accent was American, Stella noted, as she held up her ID. “Detective Cusack. I’m here about the body found in the bog yesterday. You’re the nearest neighbors, so I’m talking to everyone at Killowen. Does the name Benedict Kavanagh mean anything to either of you?”

Shawn Kearney shrugged. “No, I don’t remember hearing that name. Do you, Anthony?”

“Cuh-cuh-can’t suh-say that I do,” he said. His right arm shot out forcefully, as if he was going to land a punch, but he struck at the air. Stella drew back involuntarily.

“It’s all right, Detective,” Kearney said. “It’s just a reflex.” As if to demonstrate, Beglan’s hand shot out twice more, uselessly punching the air before him, and he let out a series of high-pitched squeaks. Shawn Kearney stood by as if this conversation were the most normal thing in the world. Stella had to concentrate on her questions and tried to keep eye contact with both of them. “We’re looking at the last two weeks of April, asking everyone if they remember anything unusual from that time.”

“I was the on-site archaeologist as the new geothermal system was going in,” Kearney said.

“So you’d only just arrived?”

“That’s right. Never set foot on the place before the middle of last April. And now I can’t leave.” She raised her arms, as if astonished to find herself standing in a meadow next to a heap of stones. “Life is full of surprises.”

“You had no previous connection to Killowen before coming to work on the project?”

“No. I was at one of the big contract archaeology firms in Dublin.”

“You’re American,” Stella noted.

“Yes, I got my Irish citizenship after grad school—my gran was from Sligo. Ireland was a great place to find archaeology work—until the economy went to hell. I was lucky to be working when the job here came up, and when it finished, they let me go. With so much development on hold, there aren’t as many jobs. But I made out all right. I love it here.”

“What sorts of artifacts turn up in an excavation at a place like this?” Stella asked.

“There’s not much left aboveground in these early Christian settlements. We did find a stylus, a medieval writing tool. That’s how we met Niall Dawson—he came down to collect it.”

“When was Mr. Dawson here?”

“I put in the call to the National Museum right away, as soon as the stylus turned up. He was here the next day, the twenty-second of April. I showed him around a bit, but nothing else turned up, so he went back to Dublin.”

“What about you, Mr. Beglan?” Stella asked. “What do you recall from April?”

He opened his mouth to speak but instead began to yip like a small dog—once, twice, three times—and then said, “Nothing… strange.” His chin jutted forward and his jaws snapped shut, as if he were trying to recapture the words he’d just spoken into the air.

“Is the name Mairéad Broome familiar to either of you?”

“No, not really,” Kearney said. “But I’m fairly new here.”

“Picka-picka-painter,” Anthony Beglan sputtered. “Often cuh-cuh-comes here.”

“That’s right,” Stella said. “Benedict Kavanagh was her husband.”

Shawn Kearney’s eyes widened. “You think there’s some connection? That’s horrible.”

Stella eyed the loader Beglan had been driving. “Do you use a lot of heavy equipment around here?”

“Just that loader for stones, and the tractor,” Shawn Kearney replied. “Nothing heavier than that.”

“Never have need of a JCB?”

“No. Claire would usually hire out those sorts of jobs. Like when they brought in the digger for the new heating system.”

“Let me ask you, did anyone at Killowen have access to those diggers after hours, when the workmen had knocked off for the night?”

“Not that I recall,” Kearney said. “Besides, you’d have to know how to drive one—”

“I’ve operated a juh-juh-JCB,” Anthony Beglan said. “Not them ones, though. Huh-had their own, that crowd.”

“Where exactly were the new heating coils installed?”

“Just down this hill, Detective. Do you see that post in the ground, with the red flag attached? That’s where the coils went in.”

Stella turned back to the main house, trying to imagine the decibel level of a JCB and the distance from the house. “Did you ever see or hear anyone else using the machinery?”

“No,” said Shawn Kearney. Beglan shook his head.

“Well, thanks for your time.” She turned to leave, then pivoted on her heel. “I meant to ask, what are you doing with that load of stones?”

“Building a labyrinth,” Shawn Kearney replied. “A meditation path.”

The last person on Stella’s list, Tessa Gwynne, wasn’t difficult to track down. She was in the cottage that she shared with her husband, at the end of a path that wound through Killowen’s oak wood. The cottage was either authentically old or built to look that way, with small windows, rough whitewashed walls, and a rosebush, a vigorous climber that arched over the doorway.

All at once, a most exquisite ringing swelled from inside the house. Stella peered in through the open window and saw Tessa Gwynne on a low stool behind the door, playing a harp that looked as if it were strung with gold. Was that even possible, or was it just a trick of the light? Tessa Gwynne’s eyes were closed, and her whole body moved to the music, the harp in her intimate embrace. Stella stood, rooted, feeling her chest tighten as the melody grew in urgency. As the music grew from a thrum of low notes to a thrilling race up the scale, she leaned into the wall, overtaken by a wild grief that welled up from nowhere and kept spilling until there was no more, until the miraculous notes finally settled into plaintive dignity, the feeling receding and fading with the notes like lapping waves.

Stella felt exhausted. She tried to collect herself, remembering what she’d come for. She rapped on the door and found herself looking into a pair of dark, heavy-lidded eyes that regarded her over a pair of half-moon reading glasses. The woman’s collarbone stood out like a yoke beneath her flesh. “Mrs. Gwynne? Detective Stella Cusack. I’m investigating the murder of the man whose body was found in the bog yesterday.”

Tessa Gwynne seemed to shrink slightly. “Ah, yes, a terrible business.” She didn’t step away, and Stella had to drag her gaze from the hand that gripped the door—thick nails, uncannily powerful fingers. Strange how playing heaven’s instrument could give one a hellish harpy’s claws. “You’ve found out who he is, then? We hadn’t heard.”

“Benedict Kavanagh.” Mrs. Gwynne’s long white hair was done up in a coil at the back of her head, and the claw fluttered at the wisps of hair at the base of her neck. “So the name is familiar to you?”

“Yes, my husband and I met him once. It’s many years ago now. Although there is a more recent connection. His wife is a painter—she sometimes stays with us.”

“So you knew that Mairéad Broome was married to Benedict Kavanagh? How is it your husband wasn’t aware of that fact?”

Tessa Gwynne gave a tiny, exasperated smile. “Because my husband is—like most men—off in his own world, never quite paying attention to all that’s going on around him.” Her voice was mild, the accent English and decidedly upper-crust, but she looked slightly frazzled, and a touch too thin. The word “careworn” popped into Stella’s head—probably the word her mother would have used.

“So only you and Claire Finnerty knew that Mr. Kavanagh was related to one of your guests?”

“I can’t think how anyone else would have known, except from talking to Mairéad. Benedict Kavanagh was something of a celebrity because of his television program, but it’s unlikely that anyone else would have known who he was.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because we haven’t got a television at Killowen. Never have. This is a meant to be a place for contemplation, a retreat.”

“Then how did you happen to know about Mr. Kavanagh’s program, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Mairéad is my friend. She shared a few things with me about Benedict and his work.”

“Did you ever discuss the state of her marriage?”

Tessa Gwynne turned an even gaze upon her. “Are you married yourself, Detective?” Stella felt her face flush. “And do you speak to many people about the state of your marriage? I wonder. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. Only I wonder how much we can ever really know about other people’s lives.”

“But perhaps you were able to form some impression?”

“My impression was that Mairéad loved her husband.”

Stella paused for a moment. “She told me that she and Graham Healy were lovers and have been ever since he came to work for her.”

Tessa Gwynne’s spine straightened, and her voice betrayed a glint of ice. “Well, since Mairéad has been so forthcoming, I’m afraid my impressions can be of no use to you.”

“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Gwynne,” Stella said. “I won’t trouble you any further today.” She took her leave and returned to the path up to the main house, thinking about Tessa Gwynne’s spellbinding music—and about what sort of friend tries to protect someone who doesn’t want her protection.

13

It was a few minutes past five when Nora spotted Stella Cusack coming up the path from the oak wood at Killowen. She hurried out to the drive, glancing around and feeling just a tiny bit paranoid about being seen talking to the police.

Cusack stood beside her car. “Dr. Gavin.”

“Detective, do you remember those marble-like things we found in Benedict Kavanagh’s throat?” Nora handed over the two galls she’d collected this afternoon. “I did a bit of research, thought you might like to know what I found. They’re oak galls, gallnuts. And they have another name as well. In folk medicine and magic they’re called serpent’s eggs.”

Stella Cusack’s brow furrowed. “Where did you get these?”

“Martin Gwynne’s studio. He uses them to make iron gall ink,” Nora said. “That’s where this one came from.” She pointed to the slightly more dried-up of the pair. “But I also found some in the wood just beyond the cottages. That’s where Mr. Gwynne gets his supply. Apparently Anthony Beglan collects them.”

“I see. May I keep these?” Cusack glanced up at her. “Is something else bothering you, Dr. Gavin?”

“It’s just… I happened to overhear a bit of conversation this afternoon. I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation—”

“If you wouldn’t mind, Dr. Gavin, just tell me what it was that you heard and let me worry about explanations.”

“It was about two o’clock. I was upstairs changing, when I saw Mairéad Broome’s young man—”

“Graham Healy,” Cusack said.

“Yes, the fella at the mortuary with her this morning. I heard him take a call from Vincent Claffey.”

“How did you know it was Claffey?”

“Because the man himself pulled up on a motorbike a few seconds later, and they were still talking on their mobiles. They must not have realized that I was at the window. Graham Healy didn’t want Claffey here, that much was clear, didn’t want anyone seeing them together. They had evidently made some prior arrangement about how and when they were going to meet, and Claffey was upsetting the plan. They were arguing about it.”

“What else did you hear?”

“Well, it looked to be some sort of payoff. Healy handed over a fairly thick envelope, and he said to Claffey, ‘You’ve got what you want now—and you know what we want.’”

“And what was Claffey’s response?”

“He said he knew, but it was a lot to ask of any man, that he needed more time to think about it. He said he’d be in touch.”

“And then what happened?”

“Claffey got back on his motorbike and rode off.”

“Was there any indication that Mairéad Broome knew about this meeting?”

“Well, actually, I happened to hear her discussing it with Healy a few minutes later.” No need to mention the fact that she’d been up in a tree when that conversation took place. “Graham Healy said he had no choice but to hand over the money, since your man had the nerve to come to the farm in broad daylight. He seemed afraid of what Claffey might say unless they did something. Mairéad Broome seemed a bit more resigned—she said she knew Claffey was using them. But she didn’t want Graham to do anything; she told him just to let things be. Then they were out of earshot, and I couldn’t hear any more.”

Cusack thanked Nora, told her she had done the right thing in reporting what she had heard. Still, Nora felt a bit grubby. What if it was nothing? And what if the people she’d just blithely implicated were innocent of any crime?

As she entered the kitchen, a low murmur of conversation came from the corner where Claire Finnerty stood with the Gwynnes and another couple she hadn’t met.

“—but do we know how long she’s staying?” Martin Gwynne asked.

“I’m not sure,” Claire said. “She’s evidently helping the police with their inquiries—”

Spotting Nora, the group quickly broke apart. Claire returned to sawing through a crusty loaf and Tessa Gwynne began tossing a bowl of fresh greens. The new couple tended to something in the oven as Martin Gwynne began pouring the wine. Just another Friday evening at Killowen, evidently. One could hardly blame this crowd for their slightly somber mood, considering that a pair of murders had just turned up a quarter mile from their doorstep.

Claire Finnerty looked up. “Glad you could join us this evening, Dr. Gavin. Where are your compatriots?”

“Just back from the bog,” Nora said. “Getting cleaned up. They said not to wait.” In fact, Niall and Cormac were just returned from the hospital, after depositing the ancient leather satchel they’d discovered at the crime scene this afternoon—a detail they’d asked her not to share in company just yet. She turned to find the archaeologist, Shawn Kearney, coming through to the kitchen behind her, accompanied by a bushy-bearded man in his forties.

Claire Finnerty said, “I don’t think you know everyone.” She presented Nora to the new people, Lucien and Sylvie Picard, Diarmuid Lynch, and Shawn Kearney, who laughed and said, “That’s all right, Claire. Dr. Gavin and I have already met.”

“As have we,” Martin Gwynne said, with a gesture to include his wife as well. “In the studio this afternoon.”

Claire waved at the far end of the table. “And this is our neighbor, Deirdre Claffey.” Nora recognized the girl from the chipper van yesterday, now clapping the pudgy hands of the child she held on her lap.

The long table was laid out with hand-thrown stoneware, woven linen place mats and napkins, and candles, along with a heavenly smelling pan of something under bubbling red sauce. There was an impressive-looking cheese plate and three unlabeled bottles of red wine. Through the glimpses she’d gained these last couple of days, Nora was beginning to form an impression of life here at Killowen. It seemed both profoundly simple and elegantly sufficient—growing the bulk of your own food, using the rest of your time for creative pursuits. Here it seemed possible to imagine a proper sort of balance. Compared to this, the rat race of life in the city suddenly seemed seriously out of whack.

Anthony Beglan slipped in the garden door and removed his cap, the whiteness of his high forehead contrasting with the weathered cheeks. Difficult to tell his age—he looked to Nora like some of her grandfather’s mates, men who had worked farms in Clare for fifty years or more, never married, and had no one to whom they could bequeath the fruit of their labors. Was Anthony Beglan also the end of a line? He sidled into the room and stood next to Deirdre Claffey and her baby.

Claire looked around the room, gathering everyone in with her eyes. “Just so you’re all aware, we have another couple of visitors as of today. Mairéad Broome is in her usual cottage. It’s a dreadful time for her. I know you’ll all respect her privacy.”

“So it was her husband in the boot of that car?” Shawn Kearney sat at the table and popped a mushroom from the salad into her mouth. “That detective was asking everyone—”

“I think that’s a subject we’d better leave right there for the moment, Shawn,” Claire said, casting her eyes discreetly in the direction of Deirdre Claffey, who stopped playing and sat with her arms wrapped around the baby, much to his displeasure. He tried to squirm away, but Anthony Beglan began to mug and dance, lifting the cap in front of his face in a game of peekaboo. Nora wondered whether Deirdre Claffey was a regular guest here—or perhaps tonight was unusual?

Claire took a seat at one end of the long table and motioned Nora to take the opposite place. Martin Gwynne took the seat beside Nora. “I hope you like aubergines,” he said. “I must admit I never did, until Lucien and Sylvie applied a few secret herbs and tomato sauce. Try this.” He held a steaming forkful to Nora’s lips. She took the offering and tasted an explosion of flavor. Gwynne looked on expectantly. “What do you think?”

His wife said softly, “For heaven’s sake, love, let the poor girl enjoy her meal in peace.”

Nora had to admit that she had never been convinced about eggplant—until that moment. “Mmm,” she managed, groping for the appropriate word.

“Fantastic,” said Gwynne. “Isn’t it?”

“Ah, non, non,” said Lucien, waving off the compliment. “Pas du tout.”

Joseph and Eliana came through from the sitting room, and Joseph took the other chair beside Nora. “What’s a dingo?” He pointed at her plate. “Your eeking.”

“Eggplant,” Nora said. “It’s eggplant parmigiana.”

“Upland,” Joseph repeated. “Ugglamp—good.”

The food made its rounds of the table, and when Cormac and Niall Dawson finally arrived and took their places, the only sounds in the room were the clinks of serving spoons and the low murmur of voices.

“Shawn, you mentioned last night that you’re an archaeologist,” Nora said. “Are you doing excavation work here?”

“Not at the moment. But that’s the reason I came here last April. With the new heating system going in, my company got the contract for the archaeological survey, to see if anything might turn up in the excavation.”

“And what did you find?” Nora looked up to see a worried look on Niall Dawson’s face.

“Well, plenty of pits and postholes that fit with what we already knew about the site,” Shawn said. “From the name, Cill Eóghain, Owen’s Church, you know it’s a monastic settlement, and there’s even a brief mention in the Annals of the Four Masters. The postholes we found showed pretty typical early Christian wooden structures—although there is a beautiful tenth-century stone chapel over beside the orchard—”

Niall Dawson jumped in. “You know how surveys go, Nora—a lot of digging and not much to show for it.”

Shawn Kearney looked curiously at Dawson and continued. “We did find one really spectacular piece—a metal stylus, the sort used on wax tablets. And that’s how we met Niall—when he came down to take the stylus back to the museum.”

Nora felt the pull of several threads at once. “You’ll have to pardon my ignorance. What’s a wax tablet?”

“Notepad of the ancient world,” Shawn Kearney said. “Until the advent of cheap paper, they were the best—well, really, the only—temporary writing surface. Suppose you wanted to scribble something down—a poem, a shopping list, whatever. You’d take a flat wooden board and carve out a shallow reservoir, and into that you’d pour melted wax. Once it cooled, you could scratch down your thoughts in the wax. And when you didn’t need whatever you’d written any longer, you could just rub it out and start again. People used them right up to the nineteenth century in some places.”

Cormac added, “The fragments of writing that have turned up on tablets are amazing—Greek, Latin, Old Irish—sometimes they’ve even found the writer’s fingerprints in the wax.”

“And the stylus was the writing instrument?” Nora asked.

“That’s right,” Shawn said. “Most would have been made from wood, but there were metal versions, too, some quite elaborately wrought.”

Cormac asked, “Where did you find it, exactly?”

Shawn pointed out through the French doors. “Just down below the garden outside. We left a stake at the findspot.”

“This part of the country would have been fairly rotten with monasteries at that time,” Cormac said. “You’ve got Birr only a short distance from here, and Clonmacnoise and Sier Kieran. How did Killowen compare, do you think?”

Shawn Kearney shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t quite as important as any of those places, obviously, but there was an interesting mention in O’Donovan’s notes for this area.” She turned to Nora. “You know about John O’Donovan, the famous nineteenth-century antiquarian?”

Nora nodded, and Shawn continued. “Well, he made a note about a curious figure carved into the doorway of Killowen Chapel—”

Glancing at Niall Dawson, Nora thought she detected a shadow passing over his face.

“Yes,” he said. “That was a fascinating twist.”

Shawn Kearney continued, gesturing with a chunk of eggplant on the end of her fork. “—And he was able to tie it to the mention of a monastic settlement called Cill Eóghain in the Annals of the Four Masters. Usually with those sorts of carvings, you might see the monastery’s founding saint, or a bishop with his miter and crozier, but this one was different. I’ll take you over to see it tomorrow, if you like.”

“Yes, I would like,” Cormac replied. “Especially as Niall has neglected to tell me a single word about any of this. Did O’Donovan happen to mention any manuscripts associated with this place?”

Shawn Kearney turned to Gwynne. “Martin can probably answer that better than I can. He’s our resident manuscript expert.”

Gwynne cleared his throat before speaking. “Well, any early medieval scriptorium worth its salt would have been turning out Gospels and Psalters and sermons—”

Shawn Kearney interrupted, “But I believe the monks at Killowen may have been copying and translating works by Greek and Roman writers.”

“And what makes you think that?” Cormac asked.

Shawn Kearney offered a mysterious smile. “That’s what I’m going to show you tomorrow. I’d hate to ruin the surprise.”

The baby began to squawk at the end of the table, until Tessa Gwynne said, “Give him to me, Deirdre. I’ll mind him while you finish your dinner.” The girl handed over the child, who seemed glad to have a new playmate. Tessa began making faces and poking the baby’s belly to make him laugh. Nora glanced at Martin Gwynne and caught him observing his wife with what she could only describe as a mixture of compassion and consternation. What was their story?

“I enjoyed seeing your work today,” Nora said to Martin Gwynne. “Plenty to pass on to your apprentice. Tell me her name again—was it Áine? No, Anca.”

Gwynne suddenly looked acutely uncomfortable, and Claire Finnerty said, “Oh, yes, she was from Romania. We’ve had loads of international volunteers—WWOOFers, they’re called—after the group that matches us up, World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming. Most stay only a few weeks, but Anca was with us a long time—nearly nine months, I think. We were sorry to see her go. She left over a month ago now, wasn’t it, Diarmuid?”

“That’s right,” came the reply. Lynch’s shaggy head lifted as he turned his gaze toward Dawson. “Six weeks ago.”

Without warning, the kitchen door slammed open with a loud bang, frightening everyone, but especially the baby, who began to wail. Vincent Claffey stood in the doorway, fists at the ready and practically breathing fire. “What have I told you?” he shouted at Deirdre. “I told you to stay away from this place. Have nothing to do with those fuckin’ hippies, I said. So what are you doing over here again?”

He moved to Deirdre and seized her by the arm, but Claire Finnerty jumped up to intervene. “Leave her alone.”

Claffey looked daggers at Claire. “Shut your trap. You’re the cause of all this. She’s my daughter, and I’ll do with her what I fuckin’ like.” He pushed Claire out of the way. She fell against Diarmuid, who’d risen from the table as well. The baby’s cry turned into a terrified shriek, but Tessa Gwynne held on tight.

“Come on,” Claffey said. “We’re going. You, missus, give her the child,” he said to Tessa, shoving his daughter sideways.

Deirdre nearly stumbled as she went to collect the baby. “I’m all right,” she murmured to Tessa as she reached for the child and settled him on her hip.

“Will yeh shut up!” Claffey shouted, making the girl flinch. “This crowd don’t give a flying fuck about you, my girl.”

“And you do?” Claire Finnerty’s eyes blazed.

Claffey turned to her and smiled. “Don’t you go gettin’ any ideas, because I know your secrets, the lot of yez. Think you’re safe out here, far from prying eyes? But I know, I know.” He tapped his temple and leveled a warning gaze at each one of them, as each, in turn, looked away. In the eerie silence, he took hold of Deirdre’s free elbow and walked her straight out the door, not pausing to shut it after them.

Claire Finnerty was the first to speak. “Bastard!” She straightened up and separated herself from Diarmuid, trying to regain a little dignity, but her hands were shaking. “We’ve got to get Deirdre away from him.”

“Yes, but how?” Martin Gwynne’s voice betrayed a helpless frustration. Clearly this was not their first confrontation with Claffey. “If no one’s actually witnessed an instance of abusive behavior, and Deirdre refuses to talk about it…”

“I’m sorry, but wouldn’t you call what just happened here ‘abusive behavior’?”

A loud sob escaped from Tessa Gwynne. Her husband pushed his chair back and circled around to her. “Don’t fret now, love, we’ll find some way to help the child.” But Tessa would not be consoled. Martin Gwynne helped his wife to her feet and led her out the open door.

“Poor Tessa,” Shawn Kearney whispered. “She and Martin had a daughter who died, so it tears her apart to see Deirdre treated like that. She just can’t take it.”

Nora looked across the table, directing Cormac’s attention to his father. Joseph had Eliana by the hand and was squeezing hard. His grip was strong, as Nora knew from experience, and the poor girl looked stricken. Cormac reached out and placed his hand over his father’s. “Will you let go, please? You’re hurting her.” Joseph looked down at his own hand as if it belonged to someone else and slowly loosened his grip, his eyes imploring Eliana’s forgiveness.

Up and down the table, everyone stared glumly at their plates, poking at the formerly delicious-looking parmigiana with their forks.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Claire Finnerty said to Nora. “As you’ve probably gathered, we’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with the situation.”

Claffey’s dark threats cast a new meaning on the scene Nora had witnessed earlier in the day, the handover of the brown envelope by Mairéad Broome’s assistant. In addition to being a cruel father, Vincent Claffey might be a brazen blackmailer who’d just terrorized everyone in this room. Nora observed the faces around the table. What dangerous secrets could any of these people have to hide?

14

The dinner party was breaking up, the mood shattered by Vincent Claffey’s intrusion. Guests were politely banished to the sitting room at the front of the house while the Killowen residents cleared the table and started the washing up. Cormac had been hoping to have a few tunes with Niall Dawson after supper, but proposing a session after the strange scene they’d just witnessed didn’t seem right.

The sitting room at Killowen was more library than formal drawing room. Bookcases stretched from floor to ceiling—art books, Irish history, science and natural history, architecture, fiction by some of the country’s most respected writers, a small but choice selection of crime novels. Had some of these authors stayed here? Cormac tilted his head to read the spines as he circumambulated the room, feeling restless and unsettled, thinking about the abrupt way the meal had ended, Vincent Claffey’s eyes drilling everyone.

His father had stuck close to Eliana ever since Claffey had barged in. She’d found a box of dominoes and had enlisted Joseph’s help in setting up a game. There was such a… what would you call it? An ease between her and the old man, a camaraderie he himself had never shared with his father. Seeing it stirred up a few unexpected and unwelcome feelings. Added to that was a tiny but undeniable concern. The old man was acting as though he knew this girl, when they’d only just met. What if the attachment strayed over the line of what was appropriate? The thought had never before occurred to him, and now he couldn’t shake it. He kept checking on the little scene playing out in the corner, Eliana and his father, heads conspiratorially close as they overturned the ivory-colored tiles. She was so natural with the old man, no doubt blissfully unaware of the undercurrent of familial tension into which she’d stepped. Probably for the best. He turned away and caught the last bit of what Nora was saying to Niall Dawson. “—and the middle finger is quite discolored.”

“What’s this?” Cormac asked. “What am I missing?”

Nora turned around. “I was just telling Niall that Dr. Friel and I wondered whether Killowen Man might have been a scribe.”

“And what made you think that?” Dawson frowned.

“Proper-looking calluses, for a start, and what seemed to be ink stains, just here.” She held up her right hand, indicating the thumb and first two fingers. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And now with the satchel, from the same spot where the body turned up…”

“You’re wondering if Killowen Man might have been a resident of the monastery at Cill Eóghain?”

“Well, it’s possible, isn’t it? I haven’t even told you the most interesting detail we found in the postmortem,” Nora said. “I had a suspicion, but Dr. Friel was able to confirm. He was definitely murdered.”

Dawson sat forward in his chair. “How do you know?”

“Cuts through his garments, matching multiple stab wounds to the upper torso. Dr. Friel said both sets of wounds looked as if they were made by some sort of double-edged blade, like a dagger.”

Dawson’s eyes narrowed. “Both sets of wounds?”

“There were two groupings. Probably too early to say for certain, but it looks as if he might have been waylaid by two assailants. Viking raiders, maybe?”

Dawson seemed stunned, trying to take it all in. “We’ll have to see what else the evidence says. Oh, I meant to tell you, I got through to the textile expert. She’ll meet us in the mortuary at eight, if that’s not too early.”

“Not at all.” The mention of a phone call reminded Cormac that he’d left his mobile in the car. “Will you excuse me for a second? Be right back.”

Outside, the clouds had dissipated, and the sky was almost unnaturally clear. No need for a torch this evening. Cormac went to the jeep and found the phone on the front-seat floor where he’d dropped it. He was rounding the corner of the house, checking for missed calls, when he ran full on into Anthony Beglan. Beglan cursed as he dropped the plate of food and a full carton of cigarettes he was carrying.

“Sorry,” Cormac said, rubbing his jaw where it had made contact with Beglan’s fist. “I didn’t hear you coming. It’s Anthony, right? Don’t know where my mind was—”

Beglan’s jaws snapped together three times before he could answer. “ ’Twas an accident,” he said, the words rushing out in a torrent. “You’re all right.” He was trying to gather up the spilled food, but it was no use; everything was dirt and gravel. When he had the plate partially reassembled, he climbed to his feet and took off at a quick trot up over the field without another word.

Why was Beglan carrying that plate of food? He’d sat down to table and eaten along with the rest of them, so where was he carrying leftovers? Cormac thought he remembered Claire Finnerty saying that meals at Killowen were communal. He glanced down and saw something glinting in the gravel. A key. Beglan must have dropped it when he’d fumbled the plate. Cormac turned it over in his hand. He could feel its sharp edge—newly cut, not worn down from use. Perhaps Anthony hadn’t noticed that he’d dropped it.

Cormac set off, following the shortcut Beglan had taken, over the fields and then down a small lane. He followed the curving lane for about a hundred yards, the last fifty of which was bounded by high hedges. Tucked away and a bit overgrown, Beglan’s farm was definitely rough-and-ready. A foul odor permeated the air—no wonder Anthony seemed to spend most of his time at Killowen.

The first building Cormac came upon was an old house—a water-damaged two-story ruin, its gaping door and broken windows crisscrossed with lengths of baling twine, on which hung glinting bits of aluminum and discarded CDs. Evidently an attempt to keep swallows from roosting inside. The adjacent barn looked as if it had been converted into a dwelling; a power cable stretched between the two buildings, there were patterned curtains in the windows, and an old cast-iron pot sat beside the door. The window beside the kitchen door was open, and a pair of voices came from inside—one male, one female.

“Don’t worry, Anthony,” the woman said. The voice was heavily accented, Eastern European. “I’ll find something else to eat.”

“I haven’t anything to give you. Muh-muh-bollocks barged right into me,” Beglan explained. “Sorry, eeh-eeh-Anca. Got your cigarettes, though.”

The girl gave a mirthless laugh. “That’s good. Cigarettes are more important than food.”

Anca. The name Nora had mentioned at dinner. Martin Gwynne’s apprentice, the one Claire claimed had left Killowen more than a month ago. She was obviously still here, so why would Claire lie? If the girl was a foreign national, maybe her papers weren’t in order. That could get a bit dicey, with the police everywhere, digging into everything at the farm. Whatever the immigration rules were for Eastern Europe these days, they weren’t likely very strict. Dublin was still full to bursting with Romanians and Bulgarians and Poles, although some had legged it off home when the Irish economy soured.

He looked down at the key in his hand. Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t make himself known. Not his business, any of this. He edged up to the door and set the key gently on the threshold, moving away silently the same way he’d come. One of them was bound to find it there, and he’d have discharged his duty. He felt guilty for ruining the girl’s dinner. She’d go hungry, and all because he’d been fixed on the bloody phone and hadn’t looked where he was going.

He found Niall and Nora still in the sitting room. They had cracked open the bottle of twelve-year-old whiskey from the side table. Nora looked up, and Cormac tipped his head at the corner where Eliana and his father had been. “Gone to bed already?”

“Yes. Your father was tired, so I helped Eliana get him settled. You were gone a long time.”

“Oh, yes, found my phone right where I dropped it. But then I ran into Anthony Beglan—literally, ran smack into him in the car park. Completely destroyed the plate of parmigiana he was carrying home.”

“So that’s how you got tomato sauce on your face?” Nora’s eyes glinted as she directed him to his left eyebrow. “Just there.”

“What? Oh.” Cormac touched his own forehead and brought away a small splodge of red sauce. “I guess it must have—” He looked around for something to wipe his fingers and finally took the handkerchief Niall Dawson offered. “But that’s not the most curious thing.”

He told Nora and Niall what he’d overheard at Beglan’s place.

“So Anca’s not gone away at all,” Nora said. “I thought it was strange that she’d left half-finished work on the writing table in the studio. Martin Gwynne seemed to regret my mentioning her tonight at dinner, didn’t you think?”

Cormac agreed. “I thought Claire seemed miffed as well, to tell you the truth. So they don’t want us to know she’s here, but why not?”

“The girl’s probably illegal,” Dawson said. He shifted in his chair, looking almost as uncomfortable as Gwynne had been at the dinner table.

“I thought of that,” Cormac admitted. “But even if that is the case, they’re going to an awful lot of trouble to hide her, from us or from the police.”

Nora asked, “Did you ever meet the girl, Niall? She must have been here when you came last April.”

Cormac studied Dawson, watching his friend’s expression subtly change in response to Nora’s gentle probing.

“I don’t really remember,” Niall said. “I was only here briefly.”

Cormac thought back to the intimacy of the dinner table tonight. How could you forget the people you’d broken bread with at that table, even if it was a few months past? Nora seemed to register a touch of disbelief as well. “Come on, Niall, how could you not remember?”

“Well I don’t.”

Nora shot him a questioning glance, but Cormac signaled her with a tiny frown to drop it. Something was not right. He’d have to take up this subject with Niall when they were alone.

15

At nine o’clock on Friday night, Stella Cusack was at home watching the first of several digital videos she had requested from the RTÉ archives—Benedict Kavanagh’s chat show. The format featured an intellectual duel, each guest challenging the host over philosophical points that had about as much to do with any ordinary person’s life as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. After twenty minutes or so, all the blather about “being” and “nonbeing” made her head ache. No surprise at all that the debaters were men, who evidently had time to sit around and think deep thoughts while their wives were at home managing the house and the children and the cooking and every-feckin’-thing else.

Still, it wasn’t difficult to understand people’s attraction to Kavanagh. He had a kind of effortless grace, a full head of hair just unkempt enough so that you knew he wasn’t vain—at least not in that way. Kavanagh seemed to focus on his guests, to take in and process what they were saying. Each guest would fall under his spell, relaxing into easygoing, spirited conversation. Which made it all the more surprising when the smiling host suddenly went on the attack at the end of the program.

Stella began running the video again, fast-forwarding through the arguments, instead focusing on what interested her, which was Kavanagh’s body language and that of his guests. If gamblers had their tells, so did philosophers, apparently. At some point in each of the debates, Kavanagh would purse his lips and wait a few moments, then interrupt whoever was speaking and cut him off at the knees. She watched another three videos, fast-forwarding through the chat just to watch the body language, and it happened at the same time in each one. It was as though Kavanagh knew exactly when to stop the discussion and make his fatal thrust before the credits rolled. She studied the faces of the guests as their host cheerily signed off: fuming at their own impotence, trying to make nice for the sake of the audience, but ready to strangle the man as soon as they got off camera. Had anybody ever thrown a punch at the studio? Easy enough to find out. Stella thought back to her conversation with Mairéad Broome. Did Kavanagh resort to the same tactics in the inevitable marital disagreements? Barry Cusack, for all his faults, had never made her feel like murdering him because he could lap her in an argument. But if Benedict Kavanagh was capable of outmaneuvering his brainy professional colleagues, what might he have done in a spat with the wife? Not forgetting the live-in assistant who might have rushed to her aid.

Stella dialed Fergal Molloy. She could hear music in the background as he picked up and remembered that it was Friday night. He probably had some girl at his flat.

“Sorry to bother you, Fergal—”

“No, it’s fine.” The volume of the music dropped.

“I was going through the archives of Kavanagh’s television program and wondered if you’d found out any more about the land records.”

“Have you had dinner?”

“No, actually, I started in on these—”

“Because I could pop round, pick up a curry, and we could go over a few things. What’s your usual?”

Stella surprised herself with a quick response: “Saag chicken and garlic naan.”

When she hung up, Stella was taken aback at what had just transpired. They’d sometimes stayed late at the office, going over case notes, but Molloy had never volunteered to bring dinner before. Was she missing something? And was the house presentable enough to receive a guest? She jumped up to clear away the few pieces of dirty crockery that tended to pile up in the sink when she was home alone, and then turned to the files that were spread across the kitchen table. Finally, she checked the fridge and found some bottles of ale still there from a few months back. That was fine—Smithwick’s was rather good with Indian.

Just then the bell went, and she opened the door to find her partner laden with a file tucked under one arm and two carrier bags full of take-away containers. “Didn’t realize your flat was so near,” she said.

“All right, I confess, I was in the car when you rang. Going for curry on my own.”

She showed him to the kitchen and they began unloading the food. “And here’s me, thinking you’d have someplace to go on a Friday night, somewhere a bit more exciting than going over case notes.”

“And if I was looking forward to it?”

“Then you are officially a pathetic human being.” The spicy curry smelled wonderful. Stella licked a bit of sauce from her thumb and realized that she was ravenous.

Molloy pulled the last package from the bag. “And garlic naan, as requested.”

“Thanks, Fergal. You didn’t have to do this.”

He waved away her thanks. “Best option I had for the evening, by a long shot.”

She leveled him with a look. “You can leave off the slagging right now.”

His gaze was steady as her own. “I happen to be deadly serious.”

A small voice at the back of her head told Stella something had just happened, that she ought to be paying attention. But whatever it was, the moment was so small, and so subtle, that she couldn’t say what it was. She went to the fridge and brought out two bottles of ale.

Molloy sat down to his curry and began flipping through the pages of his notebook.

“Killowen, including the turbary rights to turf cutting in the adjacent bog, belonged to a Thomas Beglan, bachelor uncle of Anthony, until his death at age eighty in 1992. Thomas had no heirs but his nephew, so the whole parcel went to him. Anthony Beglan still owns the land, both his own family farm and Killowen.”

Stella’s interest piqued. But first things first. “Kavanagh’s wife and her assistant are top priority in this case. I found it curious that even though they’d stayed at the farm multiple times, everyone I spoke to this afternoon denied that Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy were at Killowen during the last two weeks of April. And no one seemed to know what Kavanagh might have been doing in the vicinity. But Dawson, the archaeologist from the National Museum, he was at Killowen for a couple of days in April, right around the time of Kavanagh’s disappearance. Odd that he never mentioned it.”

“Want me to check him out?”

“Not yet. Dr. Gavin was telling me about an interesting encounter she witnessed this afternoon: Graham Healy passing a fat brown envelope to Vincent Claffey in the car park at Killowen.”

“Did you get anything from Claffey?” Molloy asked.

“More from his daughter than the man himself, not surprisingly. When I spoke to Deirdre Claffey, she didn’t admit knowing Kavanagh, but she seemed quite upset that he was dead. It’s going to be difficult getting anything more out of her—the father doesn’t want her talking to us. But we’ll have to find a way to get to her again. And it looks as if Claffey’s hiding something in his shed. He made a show of locking it up as I was leaving, almost like a deliberate two fingers to the world. I wish I knew what the hell he’s playing at.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Stella clicked through the list of interviews in her head. “I keep going back to that car buried in the bog. It’s partially drained, so the surface is pretty solid—you can’t just push the car in. Someone used a digger. And that’s the thing: you can’t just pick up and drive a JCB—it’s not that easy. Whoever buried that car must have had some experience with an excavator. But everyone at Killowen seems to have things they’re not telling us. I found out that the calligrapher and his wife, Martin and Tessa Gwynne, both knew Kavanagh, or were at least acquainted. Met at a conference in Toronto twenty years ago, some group called the Eriugena Society. Let’s see if we can find out more about that. And maybe you could also get some background on Claire Finnerty and Diarmuid Lynch. He gave me a story about being a farmhand in Spain—I don’t know, it sounded dodgy. Obviously, it would be great if we could take a closer look at everyone, but we’ve got to prioritize. Unless we can make progress—and soon—Special Crimes will pull this one from us.”

“Let’s make some progress, then,” Molloy said. “I’ve been through the missing person file on Kavanagh, and there are a couple of things that don’t add up.”

“Such as?”

“Well, if he was out here in April for more than just a day trip, where’s his luggage? Presumably he’d bring a toothbrush, a change of underpants. But there was no case in the boot of the car, right? So if he did have an overnight bag, where is it?”

“Come to think of it, there wasn’t any laptop in his Dublin office either. But no one ever came forward with those things when his disappearance was in the news. Speaking of, did you put out that photo to the television people?”

“Just like you asked.”

“So maybe we’ll get something. Good work so far, Fergal.” She glanced at her watch and sprang to her feet. “God, will you look at the time? It’s nearly midnight.”

“We’re only getting started.”

“No, it’s time you were off home. I want your little gray cells firing on all cylinders in the morning.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He offered a small, crooked smile, and Stella felt once more that she’d just missed something. She pushed him toward the door. “I won’t be responsible for dark circles under your eyes. What would your mammy say?”

He stopped short and gave her a curious look. “It’s all right, Stella, I don’t live with my mammy anymore.”

16

Cormac stood at the kitchen window, gazing out at the herb garden in the moonlight. It was after three o’clock, and everyone else at Killowen seemed to be asleep. He’d come downstairs, unable to stop the thoughts circling in his head, mostly worries about Niall Dawson’s connection to a murder victim and his strange reaction to the mention of that Romanian girl.

And it wasn’t just thinking about Dawson that kept him from sleep. Every time he had closed his eyes tonight, he’d sunk immediately into shadowy dreams: standing at the edge of a bog, surrounded by faceless assassins and dagger blades glinting in the darkness. He’d jerked awake the last time with a strong taste of bitterness on his tongue and headed downstairs for a drink—something that might take away the lingering sharpness. He’d found a lone bottle of cider in the fridge and had gone outside into the courtyard to drink it, sitting in the shadows of the cloister-like walkway.

It would certainly have been his preference to let the police get on with their job and solve Benedict Kavanagh’s murder. He didn’t want to be mixed up in all this, now with Claffey threatening people, and worrying about whether Nora, or his father, or Eliana might be in danger. And yet there were bits of information to which he alone was privy that raised questions perhaps not best answered by the police. He’d have to find some opportunity to speak to Niall. Why was it so difficult to know what to do?

He finished the cider and set the bottle gently in the recycling bin in the kitchen corner. Climbing the stairs, he decided that perhaps he ought to poke his head in, make sure the old man was safe and comfortable.

Cormac paused as he grasped the handle on his father’s bedroom door, conscious of making noise in the still night. But the sturdy hinges seemed to be well oiled, and the heavy door opened silently. He let his eyes get used to the darkness, focusing on the old man flat on his back, the barrel of his chest rising and falling steadily, one arm flung out to the side. A pile of extra bedclothes on a chair next to the bed shifted, apparently on its own, and Cormac stared, trying to make sense of it. Again, the pile moved, and he squinted into the darkness. Was he seeing things? At last his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, and he could see a pale arm snaking out of the blankets, a small hand clasped in his father’s large one. The old man wasn’t alone.

Cormac crept into the darkened room and knelt by the chair. “Eliana,” he whispered, trying to rouse the girl without waking his father. “Eliana.”

She started, groggy with sleep. “What is it?”

Cormac said, “Listen to me, you shouldn’t be here. You ought to be in your own room.”

“He couldn’t sleep, so I came to sit with him,” Eliana explained. “No trouble, really—”

“But you can’t let him talk you into these things.”

By this time, the old man was awake. He sat up and reached for the girl’s hand again. “Have a projection!” the old man mumbled. His hair was a fright, standing on end all over his head. “He can projector. Projecture.” He tried to push Eliana back into her chair.

Nora’s groggy voice came from the doorway. “Cormac, do you need some help?”

“Eliana was sleeping here, in the chair.” Cormac could feel his blood pressure rising, not sure how to explain what he’d seen, what he feared. None of this was good. “My father won’t let her go back to her room.”

“Let me speak to him—you can see Eliana to her room.”

Cormac hesitated. “He’s my responsibility, Nora. I can’t let you—”

“Will you stop? Just go with Eliana. I’ll be fine here.”

Eliana pulled her blanket from the floor and led Cormac to her own room next door. She piled the fluffy duvet onto her bed and sat beside it.

Cormac pulled up a chair beside the bed. “First of all, I’m not angry with you. I want to make sure you understand that.” The girl nodded. “Can you tell me what happened tonight?”

Tears welled in Eliana’s eyes. “I try to make sure he is all right before I sleep,” she said. “And tonight, he didn’t want me to go, I don’t know why, so I brought this.” Her fingers played with the edge of the duvet. “I didn’t mind.”

How was he going to explain to her? “Now, listen, Eliana, I want you to tell me, honestly. My father hasn’t said or done anything that’s made you feel… well, uncomfortable?”

“No, he’s very kind.” Then she pulled back, her eyes widening, suddenly aware of what Cormac was asking. “No, no, nothing has happened, I swear! I would never… please, you must believe me.”

“I do believe you, Eliana. Calm yourself.”

* * *

Back in their own room, Cormac’s conversation with Nora turned on what had just transpired and how they ought to handle it. He said, “I don’t think we should send her back to Dublin.”

“No, I agree.”

“So if we can just stick things out here for the next day or two, that would be best.”

“Do you want to call the agency, request someone else?”

“No, let’s wait until we get home and take things from there. It’s not as if Eliana has done anything wrong—perhaps she’s not exercised the best judgment—it’s my father who’s been making unreasonable demands.”

Nora smoothed the worry lines from his forehead. “We’ll figure all this out. And remember that it’s only temporary. Mrs. Hanafin will be back in ten days.”

Ten days. And then everything would go back to normal—at least to the ordinary strangeness of their quotidian life.

A whisper came from the darkness. “I meant to ask, Cormac, what were you doing up in the middle of the night?”

“The usual. Couldn’t sleep,” he said. No need to mention his fears about Niall, the shadowy dreams. He pushed all that away. Let Stella Cusack worry about solving Kavanagh’s murder. Not his business, any of it.

Nora’s silence told him that she had slipped back into slumber. He lay still and concentrated on breathing until he heard the faint sound of a footfall out in the corridor. If his father was going to start wandering the halls at four o’clock in the morning… He threw off the duvet and went to the door, cracking it open. No sign of his father, or Eliana. The only movement was Niall Dawson’s door across the way, closing silently.

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