Ná luig, ná luig
fót fora taí:
gairit bía fair,
fota bía faí.
Do not swear, do not swear
by the ground on which you stand;
it’s a short time you’ll be upon it,
and a long time you’ll be under it.
As Cormac came down the stairs into the kitchen at Killowen the next morning, Niall Dawson was staring down into a cup of steaming coffee. He looked like hell—unshaven, dark rings under his eyes. But he glanced up as Cormac poured himself a cup of coffee.
“I’m sorry for taking everything out on you last night,” Dawson said. “It’s not your fault I’m in this mess—it’s all down to me. It’s probably good that I’m here, actually. It’ll give Gráinne time to think.”
“She loves you, Niall. You’ll work things out.”
Dawson nodded numbly. “Listen, before we head back to the site, I was thinking of nipping over to the hospital, to see if I could use one of the scopes and have a closer look at that wax tablet. Thought you might like to come along.”
Twenty minutes later, they were pulling into the parking lot at the hospital in Birr. The tablet had been kept with evidence from the Kavanagh murder, which included Killowen Man, his clothing, and other effects. Dawson brought the tablet to the adjacent pathology lab where they could examine it under a microscope.
“I’ve been thinking about the stylus Shawn found at Killowen last April,” he said, placing the tablet gently on the scope’s stage and adjusting the angles of the lamps. “I spent hours looking at that thing under the magnifier at the Barracks. One side of it had a small flattened spot—not clear how it happened exactly, but it gave the thing a particular fingerprint. And with a material as impressionable as wax, it just might be possible to prove an association between the stylus and this tablet. Each stylus has a signature, and if there’s any way of identifying its mark—if there’s a flattened area on one side that could be identified on a microscopic level, for example—we might be able to say with a high degree of certainty that the stylus Shawn found was used on this tablet.” He peered through the lens, moving the tablet carefully across the stage to inspect each line of text.
Dawson’s voice took on an excited edge. “You’re not going to believe this. Take a look.”
Cormac leaned in and looked through the lens.
“Do you see it?” Dawson was almost dancing. “I had hoped, certainly, but never… can you see it?”
Cormac could see a distinctive flattened impression, repeated wherever the writer had made a mark upon the wax.
“No other stylus could make exactly the same mark. This is enormous.”
Cormac understood how Niall was feeling. That sudden, visceral connection with the person who wrote those words on the tablet, or left his mark on metal, his fingerprint in clay. No one talked much about the emotional fallout of these discoveries, rare glimpses so deep into the past. Staring at shapes graved into the wax, he suddenly saw how letters began, as animal signs and drawings on cave walls. The words before him still carried the horns of the ox, the sinuous curve of the serpent.
Dawson began to pace in the narrow laboratory space. “I’m thinking Killowen Man must have been a rare specimen indeed, if he could read and write Greek. Must have been a scholar of some degree.” He was thinking aloud. “If we could get a better angle on the lighting, perhaps we could make out the words more clearly.” Cormac stepped back, and Dawson began adjusting the lamp to rake light across the surface of the wax. “Better be careful,” he muttered to himself. “Christ, that’s all I’d need right now, to melt this! Have you got the camera—”
The door swung open to reveal Stella Cusack, with Detective Molloy behind her.
“Mr. Dawson?” she said. And suddenly the tiny room seemed far too crowded. Niall looked up from the microscope, elation draining from his face.
“Niall Dawson, I’m here to arrest you for the murder of Vincent Claffey. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence—”
“What?” Dawson studied Cusack’s face as if there was some disconnect between it and the words issuing from her lips, and Molloy came around from behind, reaching for a pair of handcuffs from his belt.
“Wait a minute, this can’t be right,” Dawson said, pulling his arm from the junior detective’s grip.
Cormac turned to Stella Cusack. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t suppose you can vouch for Mr. Dawson’s whereabouts two nights ago, between the hours of one and five A.M.?”
“For Christ’s sake, Detective, we were all asleep,” Cormac said.
Niall still held his left wrist aloft, as though doing so could stave off the inevitable.
Molloy said, “If you would just come along, Mr. Dawson. It’s better for all of us if you don’t make a fuss.”
“I’ll make a fuss. I’ll make a fuckin’ stink if I like,” Dawson said. “Because I haven’t murdered anyone. You can’t possibly have any evidence.”
“What we have is an eyewitness who saw you kill Vincent Claffey,” Molloy said. “I’m afraid we’ve got to bring you in.”
“What eyewitness? That’s impossible. Somebody’s lying.”
Cusack replied, “If you’d just come with us, Mr. Dawson.”
Niall’s shoulders sagged as he turned to Cormac. “Please be careful. That tablet is—”
Cormac tried to reassure him. “I’ll make sure it’s safe.”
“Could you take a few photos first?” Dawson asked. “Document that mark. It’s very important. I didn’t do this, Cormac, you’ve got to believe me.”
“Do you want me to phone someone? Gráinne, or a lawyer? Anyone?”
“No, don’t call my wife,” Dawson said. “Not yet. And there’s no need for a lawyer. I’m sure this will all blow over—it’s a misunderstanding, has to be.” At last he brought down his other wrist and submitted to being handcuffed. “It’s all a dreadful mistake.” He sounded as though he was trying to convince himself, and not succeeding.
Cormac was left standing alone in the little laboratory, the microscope lens still focused on a string of words written a thousand years before.
Cormac sat at the lab bench, knowing he had to do something to help Niall, but what? Get past all the qualms he’d been feeling last night and actually do something, start digging. If Niall hadn’t killed Vincent Claffey—and Cormac believed he hadn’t—then someone else had, someone else who also had just as much in the way of motive. Claffey had threatened every person at that dinner table. He had something on all of them, it seemed.
Cormac switched off the lamp. He should finish up here at the hospital and get back to the farm, talk things over with Nora.
He told her about Niall’s arrest and about the shadows he had followed to the storehouse last night.
“Cusack said she had a witness to Vincent Claffey’s murder?” Nora asked.
“That’s what Detective Molloy said.”
“But who would say such a thing, if it wasn’t true?”
“Someone who wanted to deflect suspicion from himself, I’d imagine.”
“Surely Cusack gets that. Maybe she’s just playing with the real suspect, making him think the heat’s off. Let’s wait a minute now. We haven’t stopped to put together all the facts.”
“We can’t rule out the possibility of a conspiracy. Do you remember the way everyone at the table that night seemed to be in agreement about one thing—the need to protect Deirdre Claffey from her father?”
“There did seem to be a general consensus.”
“So maybe there was a similar pact about protecting Mairéad Broome from her husband.”
Nora rubbed her arms. “Not a very comforting thought. I suppose it’s a good thing we’re out here where no one can hear us.”
They were sitting on the ground in the middle of the open field above Killowen’s geothermal system, far from any possible eavesdropping. Joseph and Eliana were doing flash cards under the tree at the edge of the meadow, well out of earshot.
“Claffey might have discovered who murdered Kavanagh, and the killer might have taken his threats the other night seriously,” Cormac said. “The cloven tongues and oak galls found in the victims’ mouths—those are the details tying the two murders together. Who would have known enough about Kavanagh’s murder except the person who put those galls down his throat?”
“Or persons, if you’re sticking with your conspiracy theory. So what do we do next?”
“Keep our eyes open, try to find out more about Kavanagh’s connections here at Killowen. And anything to do with Claffey’s blackmail schemes, manuscript smuggling. There’s definitely something strange going on at that storehouse. Conspiracy or no, I get the distinct feeling that everyone here knows more than they’re telling.”
“What did you find out about the wax tablet?”
“Niall thinks the impressions in the wax came from the stylus that Shawn Kearney found. The point of the stylus has a unique imperfection that makes a distinctive mark.”
“You have photos?”
Cormac pulled a memory card from his pocket. “Did you want a look?”
“What would you think of printing off a few pictures and showing them to Martin Gwynne? He’s apparently worked with old manuscripts; maybe he could decipher the writing.”
“Isn’t he one of our suspects?”
“Of course he is, but at this point, who isn’t?”
Stella Cusack needed to speak to Anca Popescu once more. The girl claimed she had witnessed Vincent Claffey’s murder. Stella pulled into the drive at the safe house where she’d sent Anca and Deirdre Claffey and the baby, expecting to see the Guards officer she’d assigned to the door. No one there. The door was open, and she found the officer, Stephen Murray, tied to a chair in the kitchen. Stella felt no qualms about causing pain as she ripped the tape from his mouth. “Christ, Murray, what happened?”
“That little one, the Romanian, she’s a right devil. I turned my back for one second, and the next thing you know, I’m trussed up here like a Christmas turkey, and they’re away in me car. Sorry, Stella, I know she was your witness.”
“I’ll deal with you later. Which way did they go?”
Murray pointed with his head. “East on the Mill Road, I think. They can pick up the N52 from there. They didn’t say anything about where they were going, like. Been gone about twenty minutes or so.”
“What’s the number plate on the car?”
Murray rattled off a Tipperary registration, and Stella got on her radio and put out a bulletin for all available cars to check the numbers on all Garda vehicles within a sixty-kilometer radius. She returned to Murray, still strapped to the chair, and cut the tape from around his arms and torso. “You can do the rest yourself,” she said, handing him the knife. “Then get back to the station and write up a report. Don’t leave anything out.”
Stella trudged back to her car. She’d had some serious doubts about Anca’s story all along. Now she had a sinking feeling that it had only been a ploy to buy time. If Anca had been any way involved in Vincent Claffey’s death, she’d be deported straight back to Romania. The Immigration Ministry had no qualms about ejecting criminal offenders. The girl was running scared. She’d turn up; you could get only so far driving a Garda officer’s vehicle, especially with a baby. And petrol cost money. Stella suddenly realized that they’d never found the brown envelope that Claffey had received from Graham Healy. If Anca had taken it, she’d have enough to keep running for a while—but was it enough to leave the country? The way things were with the economy right now, you might easily find a fishing boat that would drop you on some faraway coastline for the right price. Stella couldn’t help thinking of the two girls, one the same age as Liadán, and the baby, and all the harm that had come to them already. She could only hope that they would be found again, and soon.
Her thoughts returned to Kavanagh’s references in his note to a mysterious manuscript and the curiously few degrees of separation between the body in the boot and the residents of Killowen. Vincent Claffey’s gob full of gallnuts—it seemed a deliberate clue, perhaps a little too deliberate. There must be a logical order to all the disparate pieces of information they’d collected so far. She just had to figure out how they all lined up.
Stella set out for the station. Dawson had started to tell her about the anonymous tip he’d received in April, about a mysterious ancient manuscript. Kavanagh’s handwritten notes flickered through her head: IOH returns to IRL, great work unfinished. What was the great work? Mairéad Broome said the initials IOH belonged to the object of her husband’s obsession, this ancient scholar Eriugena. This is going to rattle some bones, Kavanagh had told his wife.
When she arrived at the makeshift incident room, Stella began scribbling notes on the whiteboard:
IOH—great work unfinished
Treasure hunters operating near Killowen—manuscript?
Kavanagh here 18 mos earlier—notes on location of Faddan More
Healy/Broome paying Claffey off
Cregganroe?
She stood back and took in the whole picture. Like the debris field after an explosion, there were fragments and bits of things all scattered and mixed together.
“We need to know more about this Eriugena character,” she said to Molloy, who’d just come in. “What can you find out about him?”
Molloy opened his laptop and tapped a few keys. “Let’s see, John Scottus Eriugena.” He went through the history as Stella scribbled a few notes. “Early details are sketchy. Most people think he died around 877, probably in France. They’re not sure whether or not he was a cleric.”
“Anything there about his ‘great work’?”
Molloy peered at his screen. “His major work was a philosophical treatise, Periphyseon—On the Division of Nature. Here’s something interesting—the last line mentions ‘recent discoveries of manuscripts.’”
“How recent?”
Molloy scrolled down to the bottom of the page. “Ah, this was written in 1909.”
“No joy from Interpol?”
“Nothing yet.”
Stella spotted a fat interdepartmental courier envelope in the wire basket on a shelf behind Molloy’s head. “What’s that?”
“Case file on the Cregganroe bombing you requested. Arrived this morning.” He reached for the file and handed it over. Stella shoved it in her bag; she’d have a look at it later.
“What about Diarmuid Lynch? What do we know about him before he turned up at Killowen?”
“He’s no driving license, which is a bit odd in itself. Says he had a passport but lost it when he got back from Spain. So I checked. Forty-six passports issued to people with the name Diarmuid Lynch over the past twenty-five years. The thing is, Stella, it’s just you and me on this case. We don’t have the manpower to track all these people down.”
Martin Gwynne was in his studio bent over a sheet of parchment when Cormac and Nora arrived at his door. Nora waited until the quill lifted from the calfskin before speaking. “Mr. Gwynne?” She pulled Cormac into the room after her. “We wondered if you would mind having a look at some photographs.”
“What sort of photographs?” Gwynne said, apparently a little puzzled by the request.
Cormac spoke this time. “We had a textile expert here going through our bog man’s garments, and we found this tucked inside his cloak.” He laid the printed photographs of the tablet on the table.
Gwynne stared at the pictures, as if touching them might make the images evaporate. “My God, a wax tablet.” He proceeded to examine each photo in minute detail before turning to the next. “I’m sorry, where did you say this came from?”
“Killowen Man’s cloak,” Cormac said. “He must have been carrying it when he went into the bog.”
“When he was dumped into the bog,” Nora said. “After being stabbed to death.”
“Is that right?” Gwynne seemed distracted, focused completely on the tablet images and not on his visitors or what they were saying.
Nora said, “We were wondering if you could help us decipher the writing.”
Gwynne looked up, as if suddenly aware that he was not alone. Cormac noted a twinge of melancholy—or was it regret?—that seemed to cloud the man’s features.
“Yes, of course, I can try.” He cleared his throat and settled down to business, pulling his lighted magnifier closer, setting the pictures out in two short rows. He pored over each photo through the thick glass. “The language is Latin, as you probably recognized, with a few Greek words interspersed. The script is Irish majuscule, very like the Springmount tablets.” Gwynne reached for a sheet of paper and a pen. “Let’s see if we can work out what it says…” The nib of his pen began to move across the page, Latin words appearing in a fancy, ancient-looking hand:
Si enim libertas naturae rationabilis ad imaginem Dei conditae a deo data est, necessario omne quod ex ipsa libertate evenit, malum seu malitia recte dici non potest
Gwynne stopped writing and looked at the paper. “ ‘For if the freedom of a rational nature has been given by God, then necessarily all that from freedom comes—or has come to pass, evil or malice’—no, that’s not right—it’s ‘cannot rightly be called evil or malice.’”
Cormac’s eyes were on Gwynne’s handwriting as well. “Definitely not Psalms, then. Any thoughts on what it might be?”
Receiving no answer, he glanced at Gwynne to find his face completely blank, the pen tumbled from his hand, his eyes staring into the middle distance. The change in demeanor was so abrupt, and so extreme, that Cormac had to wonder whether something had gone wrong inside his brain. “Gwynne,” he said sharply. “Martin, are you all right?”
All at once the eyes seemed to regain focus. “Yes, yes, quite all right. No, it’s not Psalms, you’re right about that.” He peered through the magnifier once more. “No, it’s something else entirely, but I’m not sure what. I’d be happy to hold on to these photos and keep working on them, if you like. It might take some time—I’m afraid my Latin has grown a bit rusty.”
“Anything you can tell us would be helpful,” Cormac said.
When they were out of earshot of the studio, Nora turned to Cormac. “I don’t suppose you would have noticed, since that was your first time in Gwynne’s workshop, but he’s gotten rid of the oak galls. There was a huge bowl on one of the side tables last time I was in the studio, and now they’re gone. Listen, one of us ought to spell Eliana for a while—I’ll take the first shift. What are you going to do?”
The shadows he’d seen skulking about the storehouse last night lingered in Cormac’s brain. “There’s something I need to check out. I’ll catch up to you in a bit.”
When Nora had gone, he made sure he was alone, then crossed the yard to the storehouse. The van was still parked out front. He glanced about once more and shaded his eyes to see in through one of the storehouse’s tiny windows. No one. Might be worth a look inside. He was just about to head for the door when Tessa Gwynne emerged from the forest path. He slipped quickly around the corner, hoping she hadn’t seen him. Tessa came straight for the storehouse and ducked in through the small doorway. Under cover of a vine, Cormac peered inside to see her looking through the items on the shelves, about two dozen packages, all neatly wrapped in brown paper. She seemed to be searching for a particular parcel. When she found it, she brought it down and pasted a Killowen Farmhouse Cheese label on top, then placed it in the basket she carried over her arm.
Tessa Gwynne left the storehouse and crossed over to her husband’s studio. They both emerged a minute or two later, Martin climbing into the driver’s seat of the Killowen van.
Cormac could hear Nora’s voice inside his head: What a perfect way to smuggle stolen goods—inside a wheel of cheese. We should at least see where they’re taking it.
Cormac slipped behind the wheel of his jeep and headed down the driveway, careful to keep his distance.
Cormac checked his watch. Martin Gwynne was a careful driver, coming to a full stop at every crossroads, checking both ways before pulling out. Wherever the pair of them were headed, they didn’t seem in any hurry. The van cruised along a back road from the farm to the N52, followed that main road north for a bit, then turned onto a secondary road that led into the Slieve Bloom Mountains. At the twenty-six-kilometer mark, just past the village of Coolrain, they turned into the driveway of a big house with beautifully manicured grounds. Cormac hesitated at the gate, not wanting to make his presence known. He’d park outside and see if he could figure out what this place was. The sign at the gate said simply HAWTHORN HOUSE.
Driving on for a bit, he turned around and found a field gate and parked beside it. He tapped “Hawthorn House” into his phone and found that it was part of a network of residential rehabilitation centers for people with brain injuries. If the Gwynnes were smuggling a stolen manuscript hidden in a wheel of cheese, why bring it to a place like this?
Cormac drove onto the grounds. There was a small car park at the side of the main building, a rambling old gray limestone mansion. He left the car there and circled around to the front door. Perhaps he could see about a tour…
No one was at reception. Cormac waited, taking note of the surroundings. All the furnishings were new, none of the draperies yet faded by sunlight. Someone was spending a bit of dosh, keeping this place updated. It was private, which meant fees were probably steep. If the Gwynnes did have someone here, how on earth could they afford it? Their own modest living arrangements boasted no such luxury, and calligraphy, unless you were the warranted scribe of some royal family, wasn’t exactly a lucrative profession these days.
Cormac walked to a tall window that looked out over the back garden, a spectacular formal arrangement, with miniature boxwood hedges, rosebushes, and other colorful blooms. The edges of the beds were as sharp as if they’d been cut with a razor.
From the window, he could see the Gwynnes strolling through the side garden, coming upon a younger woman sitting at a table on the terrace, under the shade of an oak. They greeted her warmly, but she remained diffident, barely looking at them. Tessa Gwynne reached into the basket and brought out the brown paper package, unwrapping it carefully. She’d brought a knife and cut into it—nothing but a wheel of soft cheese.
He turned his attention to the younger woman. She was short and slight, dressed in a pair of pale green corduroys, a patterned blouse, and what looked like a hand-knitted cardigan; a long dark plait fell down her back. She sat up eagerly to the table now, looking for a taste of the cheese. Tessa Gwynne reached out to touch the younger woman’s hair, but she pulled away, shrugging off the attention. Tessa’s disappointment at the rebuff was visible, even at a distance. Who was this person? The touch implied some sort of close relationship, but he could have sworn he remembered someone at Killowen saying that the Gwynnes’ only child had died. Cormac felt ashamed, following these people like some sort of half-arsed private investigator, prying into their personal business.
Tessa Gwynne seemed to have recovered. She stood close to the younger woman, speaking softly. Cormac was so intrigued by the miniature drama unfolding in the distance that he didn’t hear the footsteps approaching behind him.
“Can I help you, sir?”
He turned to find a fresh-faced receptionist standing at his elbow. Her name badge read FIONA.
“Are you here for an appointment with Dr. Carnahan?” she asked brightly. “I can ring and let him know you’ve arrived.”
“Sorry, no,” Cormac said. “I just happened upon your website and thought I might have a look around. My father’s recovering from a stroke, you see, and we’ve got him at home just at the minute, but my wife and I, well… we’re looking for a place where he might receive more intensive therapy.” He’d just managed to spit out a plausible lie. “I suppose it’s not all stroke patients here.”
“Oh, no, we get the lot—car accidents, sport injuries, strokes, and falls.”
Cormac threw a glance over his shoulder. “Your garden is certainly stunning.”
“Isn’t it, though? Designed by the father of one of our residents,” the girl explained. She joined Cormac at the window. “There she is now, with the parents—Derryth. They’re here every Sunday, but she’s in that garden all the time. Hard to get her indoors, even when it’s raining. Anyway, the father’s some class of artist, I think. He made up the plans for the garden. Fantastic, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Cormac said. He didn’t say any more, hoping that Fiona would try to fill the silence. He didn’t have to wait long.
“Very sad, what happened to her, poor craythur.” The girl’s voice dropped to a whisper. “They say she tried to hang herself, over some boy. By the time they found her, she’d gone without oxygen for too long. She’s been here near on twenty years like that.” A shaking of the head suggested the extent of the damage done. “You’d never catch me trying to top myself over some man. Nothin’ but a shower of shites, the lot of ’em—well, present company excepted, I’m sure.” Fiona suddenly seemed embarrassed. “God, I’m an awful eejit. Shouldn’t have gone and opened my yap. I’ll just go and ring Dr. Carnahan for you, will I?”
When the girl turned and left the room, Cormac slipped out the front door and made his way to the car. He had what he’d come for, to see where Tessa Gwynne had taken her package. And he had something else: the knowledge that the Gwynnes’ daughter was not dead after all.
Pulling into the car park at Killowen, Cormac had a notion about how he might be able to find out more about the Gwynnes. He reached for his phone and punched in a number.
Robbie MacSweeney was Cormac’s oldest friend. He and Niall and Robbie had a regular session at the Cobblestone, which of a Wednesday night became an island of wild, wind-tossed West Clare music in the heart of Dublin. Perhaps he should tell Robbie about Niall being arrested—but Niall wasn’t ready for that information to reach Dublin quite yet.
“Robbie, I’m ringing to ask a favor.”
“Fire away.”
“Could you find out anything about a fella called Martin Gwynne? He’s something to do with handwriting or old manuscripts, I’m not quite sure.”
“Say no more. That’s G-W-Y-N-N?”
“And an e at the end,” Cormac said. “I think he’s Welsh—he worked at the British Library and may have been in academia at one time, if that helps.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why I’m on the lookout for this fella?”
Cormac hesitated. “I wish I could, Robbie. Just ask around and see what you can suss out, will you? Ring me back as soon as you have anything.”
A wise decision, ringing MacSweeney, the best researcher Cormac knew. If past experience was any guide, he would have something from Robbie within a couple of hours.
The house was quiet. Everyone must be outside. Cormac went straight to the sitting room, curious to see if there was any pattern to the books collected there. He crossed to the Irish history section and paid closer attention this time to the titles, all about the early Christian era into the Middle Ages, and a great preponderance of books about books, manuscripts, scribal arts. And a large-format book about artifacts, treasures of the National Museum—a treasure hunter’s sourcebook hiding in plain sight. He found an appendix at the back, a gazetteer of priceless objects, including exact GPS coordinates of each findspot. How exactly had Shawn Kearney happened upon that stylus?
But she had turned it in. Perhaps that was why Niall seemed to trust her.
He felt a presence behind him and turned to find Shawn Kearney herself standing in the doorway. He closed the book and slipped it back on the shelf.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“Is what true?”
“About Niall Dawson being arrested?”
Word traveled fast here. He didn’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of telling the truth. “I’m afraid so.”
“He didn’t harm anyone. He couldn’t.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Cormac said. “Niall’s one of my oldest friends.”
“Then you want to help him, too.”
“Is there something you know, Shawn? Something that could help Niall?”
She came closer and lowered her voice. “He told me this morning why he was here in April, investigating a ring of treasure hunters—”
“Shawn, have you ever heard of the Book of Killowen?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Nora found John O’Donovan’s notes online last night, with the reference to the shrine and to the book being burned. We thought that might have been a ruse.”
She glanced behind her, checking to see that they were alone. “I need to know exactly what’s on that wax tablet you found on the bog man.”
“How did you—”
“Martin told me. He showed me the photographs you left with him. Do you still have the originals?”
Cormac took the camera’s memory card from his pocket. “On here.”
“Let me have a look. Please.”
He handed over the card, and she plugged it into the laptop on the corner table. Her reaction was similar to Gwynne’s. What did they all know that he and Niall were missing? “Shawn, do you know what it says?”
She turned to him. “I should let Martin explain, he’s much better at translation than I am. How much do you know about the Book of Killowen?”
“Only that it’s mentioned in the Annals of the Four Masters, and there are stories about people coming to blows over it, and that neither the book nor the shrine has surfaced since the eighteenth century—a hundred years before O’Donovan wrote about it in his Ordnance Survey letters. He was basically reporting on rumors on something that might not even exist anymore. One of the Beglans was supposed to have burned the book because he was fed up with the controversy.”
Shawn Kearney threw him a skeptical glance.
Cormac took a step back. “Hang on, is the Book of Killowen still here? What about the shrine?”
“I can’t say any more.”
“Wait a minute. Does the book have anything to do with the death of Benedict Kavanagh or Vincent Claffey?”
“I don’t know. Please don’t ask me any more. Look, you’ve got to be careful. There are certain people here who would—” A sudden noise in the hall pulled her up short. “I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.” She opened the door and looked both ways, then slipped away.
Cormac’s memory snaked back to Anthony Beglan following the cattle, the foreign-sounding words flowing from him, and Martin Gwynne’s reaction to the Latin script on the tablet, the ancient writer’s thoughts about evil and malice.
Nora studied Joseph Maguire’s sleeping face, searching for traces of the family resemblance. She found hints in the cut of his jaw, the shape of the earlobes, the curve of his lower lip. Joseph had been subdued all day, after the bath incident last night. He shifted in his lounger, opening one eye only briefly to see that she was there. “Nero,” he said, one of his many names for her.
She checked her watch: nearly four. Eliana should be back soon. From where she sat, she could see the gap between the car park at the front of the main house and the path that headed off toward the cottages in the wood. Graham Healy pulled a black BMW into the car park’s end space and hefted a couple of large carrier bags—one filled with clinking bottles of wine—and what looked like a petrol container from the back of the car. He disappeared down the path. Strange that no one had seemed too concerned about Healy paying off Vincent Claffey. Why was that? Come to think of it, had anyone found a fat packet of cash when they searched Claffey’s farm? The Garda Síochána weren’t exactly immune to opportunity; there had been ample proof to the contrary. But somehow Stella Cusack didn’t strike her as the light-fingered type. So why was Graham Healy still walking around while Niall Dawson was sitting in jail? If stopping blackmail was the motive for Claffey’s murder, surely both men had at least an equal stake in that. Everything came back again to Benedict Kavanagh and what he was doing in the boot of that car.
Nora looked to the woodland path again, surprised to see Eliana emerging from the oak grove. The girl walked quickly, and Nora detected a disturbance.
“Is something bothering you?” she asked when Eliana joined them.
“No!” The girl’s eyes darted back to the edge of the wood.
“Eliana, please tell me. That man who just went down the path, did he say something?”
“No, he said nothing.” She paused. “He only stared at me.”
Nora looked through the woods where Healy had gone. “Perhaps it’s better to stay away from that path. There are plenty of other places to walk.”
Nora glanced back at Joseph. His eyes were open, and he’d apparently been listening in on their conversation. “Who’s stack-stack-staring?”
“It’s nothing at all,” she said. “Nothing for you to be concerned about.”
“Is it all right if I leave you two here for a bit?” Nora asked. A notion was taking shape, her curiosity catching on Graham Healy’s odd manner just now.
She’d have to double back around the orchard so that Joseph and Eliana wouldn’t see her go down the path. Easy enough, just head for the bog and turn right behind the goat barn and the cheese storehouse. Lucien and Sylvie must have rooms dug into the hill for aging their cheese; they sold their produce at the local markets, and there was no way all that could fit into the tiny storehouse. There must be caverns full of cheese in there.
She made sure no one was watching, then followed along the barn and ducked behind it. To her left was the road leading to Anthony Beglan’s farm and the bog, and straight ahead a narrow path led back up into the wood above the storehouse.
The light was different on this visit to the oak grove. The cloud cover was heavier, and the sky cast a yellow light that made the moss underfoot glow a most unnatural fluorescent green. A crack sounded ahead, and Nora slowed her pace. She was off the path entirely now, stepping over hummocks and boulders, the snake-like and moss-eaten roots of giant trees. She detected movement about a hundred yards ahead. Healy, it had to be. But what was he doing? She crept closer, moving only when his back was turned, until she was close enough to observe him. He’d heaped a large pile of dead branches in the center of a circle of fallen logs and was breaking branches over his knee and pitching more wood onto the pile. He bent over, and Nora spotted the petrol can at his feet.
Healy left the container at the edge of the woodpile, evidently not ready to start the fire just yet. Maybe they were waiting for cover of darkness, so that smoke from the fire wouldn’t be visible. This far from the house, you wouldn’t smell it or see the light through the trees. It wasn’t Midsummer, or Samhain or Imbolc, or any cusp of a changing season, so what was this fire for—a celebration, some sort of ceremony? Or perhaps the simplest reason of all: to burn something.
Stella Cusack had reached an impasse with her prisoner. Niall Dawson sat across the table with his head in his hands.
“I don’t know how many more times I can say it. I did not kill Vincent Claffey.”
“But you admit that he was blackmailing you. How much had you paid him?”
“I already told you—two thousand euros. It was all I could manage.”
“And he wanted more.”
“Yes, but I was going to work that out. I would never have killed anyone over something as…” Dawson shook his head and sighed.
Cusack kept silent, waiting for the weight of guilt to do its work.
“Look, I went home to Dublin yesterday, told my wife everything—about all the mistakes I’d made, about Anca, about paying off Vincent Claffey to keep him quiet. I should have told her everything ages ago. I wouldn’t be here now if I had.”
He looked as if that wasn’t all he had to say. Cusack waited.
“I was there, in Claffey’s shed, two nights ago. He was dead when I arrived, I swear. But he wasn’t up on the machine, the way we found him the next morning. He was on the floor, and there was a small pool of blood under his head. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, so I left him there. I ran. I’m not proud of it, but there was nothing to be done.”
“You could have rung emergency services.”
“And made myself a suspect right away?”
“So what were you doing there, in the middle of the night?”
“I needed to speak to Anca. Cormac said he’d heard her at Beglan’s, so I headed there first. But no one was about, so I headed over to Claffey’s—she obviously had some connection to the man. They might have been working together, or he might have been forcing her to do things, I don’t know.” He stopped and looked at Stella. “I never did find her.”
“There was no one at home at Beglan’s, at three o’clock in the morning?”
“No, but the door was open. I just needed to talk to Anca. But there was no one home.”
“Where was Anthony Beglan?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I never saw him, or Anca, or anyone except for Vincent Claffey, who was—”
“—already dead when you arrived. Did you bother to check for a pulse?”
“There was no need, Detective. It was obvious that he was dead.” Dawson let out a breath, reliving the moment of discovery.
“Anca Popescu says she was hiding in the shed. She says you and Claffey argued, that you pushed him, and that he fell backward, hit his head—”
“That’s not true! Anca might have done for Claffey herself, did you not think of that? She had as much in the way of motive as I had. And easy enough to pin the crime on me, stumbling over the body like some feckin’ gombeen—”
The phone on her hip began to play Lady Gaga, and Stella rose from the table. The tiny screen said, “Home,” and Stella remembered with a stab of regret that it was past five on Sunday. Lia was due back from her father’s now. She’d hoped they could have dinner together, maybe watch a film on television. Shit.
Stella took the call in the corridor. “I’m sorry, I’m right in the middle of an interview here, Lia.” She couldn’t say anything about the case, or the Serious Crimes Unit. All of that meant sweet F-A to a seventeen-year-old anyway. “Why don’t you have something to eat, just to tide you over until I get home? I can swing by and pick up a pizza on my way—”
Lia put her hand over the mouthpiece, and the muffled sounds seemed as if she was conferring with someone. “Lia, is someone there with you?”
After a brief pause, a familiar male voice came on the line. “It’s me, Stella. I can take her back to the flat if you’re tied up.”
“I’m not here all night, Barry, I just have to take care of a couple of things, and then I’ll be home. It’s not a problem.”
“Look, it would be easier, wouldn’t it, if I just take her out for dinner? You can let us know when you’re home.”
“Are you not busy with Allison this evening?” Stella cringed at the sound of her voice, the tone that managed to sound both chilly and pathetic.
There was the briefest pause before Barry said, “No, not tonight.”
Stella held the phone to her ear, trying to stay calm. “Could you put Lia back on?” When her daughter took the phone again, Stella said, “Your father says he’ll take you for a bite to eat. That might be best—I’m rather tied up here at the minute. But I’ll see you when I get home—”
“No you won’t. I’m going back to stay at Da’s.”
“I’ll only be a couple of hours—”
“That’s what you always say.” There was a curt beep as Lia rang off.
Stella gave the wall a vicious kick before joining her suspect once more.
“We had a look around your room at Killowen,” she said to Niall Dawson, “and we found these in your case.” She opened her hand and let a handful of gallnuts spill onto the table. Dawson stared at the incriminating evidence, then up at her.
“They’re not mine, I don’t know where they came from. Someone else must have put them there.”
“You do know what they are?”
“Of course I do. They’re oak galls.”
Stella set one of the gallnuts on the table directly before him. “Can you think of any reason why these might have been left as a calling card in two murders?”
“Two murders?”
“You’ve admitted you were at Killowen between the twenty-second and the twenty-fourth of April, when Benedict Kavanagh disappeared into the bog. Tell me something. If I start digging, will I find that you have a prior connection to Kavanagh as well?”
Dawson looked at her, jaded now, mistrustful. He reached out and carefully moved the single gallnut back to her side of the table. “Back to you, Detective. Someone’s trying to frame me. I suggest you find out who it is.”
Cormac stood at the top of the stairs, listening to the conversation around the dinner table below. A different, quieter sort of crowd tonight. Niall was missing, of course, but there were two new voices—Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy had evidently joined them. Why had they suddenly become sociable, after three days in isolation? Cormac started down the stairs, realizing that he was seeing everyone at Killowen in a new light since the visit to Hawthorn House and his conversation with Shawn Kearney this afternoon.
He’d been thinking of the stunning detail on the book shrines in the National Museum, with their elaborate metal covers studded with jewels, the intricate knotwork designs and large-eyed human figures that mirrored the high crosses. The Cumdach Eóghain, if it was like the book shrines he’d seen, would be priceless, something that might prompt a private collector to offer a huge sum. The tricky part was finding a person or an institution not so particular about provenance. Such buyers did exist; there was no doubt about that. But would the sale bring a fortune worth killing for? Two men were dead—perhaps therein lay the answer.
When the phone in his pocket vibrated, he stepped into the sitting room at the bottom of the stairs and closed the door behind him.
“You’ll owe me two bottles of whiskey when you hear this,” Mac-Sweeney said.
“Done. What did you find?”
“I rang up a friend at Cambridge, the one who invariably has all the gossip. Seems your man Gwynne is an expert on ancient manuscripts. He got his start at Cambridge, doing research under the famous paleographer T. A. Priest, the top man in medieval history there. When Gwynne left Cambridge, he went to work for the British Library.”
“Thanks, Robbie. I’m not sure how all this will help, but it’s good to know.”
“I’m not finished. The scuttlebutt is that Gwynne was let go from the British Library, more than twenty years since, when a rare manuscript in his charge went missing. He claimed innocence, of course, and I gather there wasn’t enough proof to prosecute. When are you going to tell me what this is all about?”
Cormac was trying to process all he’d just heard. “I’m sorry, Robbie, I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.”
“Hang on, I’m not done. This is all something to do with Benedict Kavanagh, isn’t it? We do get the news here, you know, everyone’s talking about him turning up in a bog out there.”
“I can’t really say anything. It’s an ongoing investigation.”
“The reason I ask is that after he was sacked from the library, your man Gwynne went back to work for his old tutor, Priest, and apparently they put together the definitive work on the handwriting of the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena. Everyone knows Eriugena was Benedict Kavanagh’s main subject.”
“Yes.”
“So all this about Gwynne is something to do with Kavanagh after all, isn’t it?”
“I am sorry, Robbie, but I still can’t tell you anything.”
“Don’t you at least want to know what the book was?”
“What book?”
“The one Gwynne was supposed to have pinched. It was a revised edition of Deeds of the English Bishops by William of Malmesbury.”
“Is that significant?”
“Well, William of Malmesbury was one of the preeminent sources of information about Eriugena, although most people took the stories as apocryphal. There’s a great one, though, about Eriugena having dinner with the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Bald, where the emperor posed him a question: ‘Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum?’—What separates a sot from a Scot? And your man shot back, ‘Mensa tantum’—Only a table. Cheeky wee bastard.”
Cormac couldn’t help smiling at his friend’s enjoyment of the legend. “Listen, Robbie, I can’t thank you enough.”
Everyone at the dining table was absorbed in passing plates and filling bowls. Paella and salad tonight, fresh greens fragrant with garlic and the tang of fresh blood orange. No one said a word about Niall’s absence, and Cormac could only assume that they knew what had happened. And that someone at this table might be willing to let an innocent man go down for a crime he hadn’t committed. A strange wave of apprehension surged over him. He ought to get Nora and his father and Eliana away from this place right now, tonight. But he couldn’t do it—he couldn’t abandon Niall.
It was almost as if Nora was reading his turbulent thoughts as she tried to make conversation. “Cormac and I have just been reading up on the history of Killowen. Easy to be overshadowed by the monasteries at Clonmacnoise and Birr, I suppose. Still, the monks at Killowen had their own thing, didn’t they?”
Martin Gwynne looked up from his salad. “What did you find about our monks?”
“Just that they were known for their work as scribes, apparently,” Nora said.
Martin Gwynne said, “Oh, indeed. They saw it as their sacred duty to copy every book they could get their hands on.”
Nora considered for a moment. “Do you mean they copied absolutely everything, word for word? Never changed or embellished anything?”
Gwynne smiled. “Well, there were mistakes, obviously. They were human. And they certainly added glosses and annotations in various editions. But you have to realize the significance of the ‘faithful copy’ to these men—and women, too; there’s plenty of evidence of female scribes, but that’s another discussion. The notion of a ‘faithful copy’ was absolutely central to the worldview of a scribe. You’ll find that even books that were badly damaged were copied out exactly, with blank spaces left where they were illegible.”
Nora pressed on. “You know, all those stories you hear about hedge schools, about ordinary Irish people reading old Latin and Greek texts, right up through the eighteenth and nineteenth century, are they really true?”
“Well, there was certainly a great tradition of scholarship in Ireland,” Gwynne said. “History and poetry and writing of all kinds have always held a vaunted place in Irish culture—Welsh culture, too, going way back. When Christianity came, and with it the great wave of written language, the Irish weren’t particularly interested in censoring content, even if the monks writing down the old stories thought they were a load of pagan rubbish.”
Cormac’s gaze wandered across the faces around the table. No particular reactions to what Gwynne was saying, but the man was apparently just getting started. Only Tessa Gwynne’s expression said she’d heard this all before.
Gwynne held his wineglass in front of him. “Imagine living in a time when the written word was so special—every book was an individual work of art, unlike any other in existence. Not like today, when all we have is mass-produced, so-called content, and—God help us—‘physical books.’ Imagine stumbling upon a unique collection of words and ideas and images so fantastic that it was worth spending months or even years of your life copying it out so that others would be able to share in and appreciate its splendor.”
Cormac decided it was time to show a little of his hand, despite Shawn’s earlier warning. “You know, I’ve always been intrigued by handwriting,” he said. “Such an intimate thing, really. It’s amazing how much of one’s personality comes out in the act of writing.”
Gwynne was enjoying himself now. “I couldn’t agree more—almost akin to the unique qualities of a human voice, or a fingerprint. For me, the act of writing has always been a kind of out-of-body experience. It starts with the spark here”—he pointed to his temple—“but then the head, the hand, the pen, and the ink all become one in the act of writing. Of course, all forms of creativity are a way of dipping one’s toes in the essence of the divine.”
Cormac glanced over at Anthony Beglan, whose head was bent over his plate. Sylvie poured herself another glass of wine. “What do you think of that, Lucien? The divine, Martin says.”
The Frenchman dismissed her question with a glance. “What do I know about the divine? I’m only a fromager. Although one thing I do know—a crottin is as close to heaven as a man can get.” He lofted a small plate of goat cheese for all to see.
Cormac couldn’t catch Shawn Kearney’s eye. The woman knew something, or at least had her suspicions. He was conscious of Nora watching him as well, no doubt wondering what he was at. He wasn’t quite sure of that himself.
Perhaps warmed by wine, Martin Gwynne began to wax on again about the scribal arts: “We tend to think of the monks’ copying as rote work, but it wasn’t. Each copy was distinct, a permutation, a way for the writer to put his own signature and stamp on the work, adding his own interpretation, his own embellishments and flourishes.”
“It’s the same in traditional music,” Cormac said. “The individual embellishments may be subtle, but they’re peculiarly individual.”
“Just so. You know, in the days of copying by hand, books were precious, even magical, but they were meant to be read and handled, studied, and above all, argued over! It was only much later that they were turned into artifacts of veneration, objectified like saints’ relics, used only on special occasions.”
“I suppose you’re talking about book shrines?” Cormac asked. He saw Shawn Kearney’s head jerk upward, and he could feel the tension around the table shift. “Nora and I were reading about a shrine associated with this place and the family that was supposed to have kept it—”
Claire Finnerty stood abruptly and said, “There’s blackberry crumble with cream for dessert. Who’d like some?”
As Martin Gwynne approached the front door an hour later, Cormac asked quietly, “I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to look over those photos?”
“I’m sorry, it’s been a rather busy day, busier than usual, even. I’ll have a go at them as soon as I get back to the cottage.”
Cormac said, “You might be interested in our other discovery this morning. Niall compared the marks on that wax tablet with the stylus found here last April, and he’s convinced that it was the writing instrument used on that tablet. He thinks he’ll be able to prove it without much doubt.”
“Takes your breath away, doesn’t it, what science is able to do these days? I meant to ask about Dawson—we did hear about his trouble. I think we’d all like to help, but no one is sure what to do. I was quite certain that Vincent Claffey had something to do with Benedict Kavanagh’s death. Now I suppose we’ll never know, will we?”
Tessa came up behind her husband, and for the first time, Cormac could see the way the blade of her jaw stretched her skin, sharp and insistent. Her eyes seemed to look out from a deep well.
“It’s time to go, my love,” Tessa said to her husband. He took her arm and tucked it in the crook of his own, and led her out across the gravel. Cormac recalled a gesture he’d seen that afternoon—Tessa Gwynne’s hand reaching out to touch her daughter’s hair.
It was after nine on Sunday evening when Stella arrived home. She changed into pajamas but kept her phone close by, just in case there was word on Anca and Deirdre and the child. Where could they have got to? She remembered the delight on the baby’s face when she’d dangled the plastic keys in front of him. Cal. Short for Calum? Where had Deirdre had come up with the name? She hadn’t thought to ask. Such a wonderful age, nine months. Not quite walking, but you could see all the wheels turning inside a baby’s head. She’d never forgotten what Lia was like at that age. It made her heart ache now, remembering how she had watched the words form on her daughter’s lips, the first time the spark of knowledge appeared in Lia’s eyes as she said mama.
She punched in Barry’s mobile number but hesitated before pressing the green button. What would she say? She wasn’t finished with this case, not by a long shot. She’d likely be working strange hours for days to come, so perhaps it was best if Lia stayed with her dad for the time being. When the school term started, they’d have to work out a more regular schedule, but until then…
She felt a punch to the gut, realizing just how many times she had left Barry and Lia to fend for themselves over the past seventeen years. How many times Barry had had to feed their daughter and put her to bed when she was off on some training course, or when she’d served on the Drugs Task Force. Spending more time with criminals than with her own family. She stared at the number on the tiny screen, then let her hand drop. There was nothing she could say right now that would bring her daughter home. Time to crack this case, then she could work on making things right with Lia.
Stella retrieved the Cregganroe bombing file from her bag, poured herself a glass of wine, and slid the file out onto the table. It was thick, gray with fingerprints, and stuffed with all the photographs and intelligence reports that led to the arrest of the bomb makers. CLOSED was stamped across it in large black letters. Another successful resolution.
She flipped through lists of all the physical evidence collected at the bomb makers’ worksite. There was a list of suspected and known associates. Not all the associates had names; sometimes physical descriptions or code names were all investigators had to go by. The file was filled with photos of shaggy young men, cigarettes dangling on their lips, on street corners and in pubs. Stella studied the faces in the photographs, taken by a hidden camera inside a pub. She remembered those days, the heady talk from the young intellectuals about freedom from tyranny, the corruptibility of governments looking out for one another against the will of the people, the whiff of socialism that had laced the struggles in the North. So much had changed, and so much had stayed exactly the same.
There were photos of the bomb makers’ hideout after it was uncovered, stuffed with detonators, plastic explosives, and Semtex. It was a wonder they hadn’t blown themselves up, as so many others had done before them. The investigators had managed to track down all but one of the group—the instigator, the head of the serpent, as it were. They’d given him a fitting code name, the Snake.
A rap at the door broke her concentration. Molloy was holding a striped carrier bag full of fish and chips. The smell made her mouth water and reminded her that she’d skipped dinner once again. She only wished she’d put on a robe before answering the door.
Molloy grinned. “Seeing as you’re working late again, I thought you might be hungry.”
“How do you know I’m working?”
He glanced at the contents of the file spread all over the table. “If you’re not, I’ll go straight home and reckon myself a very bad detective indeed. What are you at there?”
She led him to the table. “I don’t know.” She showed him the bag with the newspaper cutting. “I found this in Vincent Claffey’s shed. It’s about the Cregganroe bombing. Not sure what it has to do with the rest of the case, if anything, but thought I should check it out, at least. I’m just going through the file.” She held up the bottle. “Wine?”
It took them all of about ten minutes to demolish the fish and chips. Stella had vowed a thousand times to eat healthier but always knew she’d never be able to give up battered cod and salty vinegar-soaked chips. She’d had almost a full glass of wine before Molloy arrived, and he filled her glass again. He said, “The Cregganroe bombing—that’s awhile back now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, a bit before your time,” Stella said. “My first assignment out of Templemore—”
“Christ, Stella, not your first day on the job?”
“It was.” She didn’t have to say any more. A silence lapsed between them.
“Found the bastards, though, didn’t they?” Molloy finally asked.
“Oh, they did,” Stella said. “Four of them went down for it. But not the brains of the operation, or the girl who was supposed to have phoned in the warning, which nobody admitted receiving.” Stella held the cutting at arm’s length. “It does strike me as just a bit curious that this particular cutting should turn up in Vincent Claffey’s shed. He was making threats at Killowen the night he was killed, intimating that he knew all their secrets. What if this is one?”
“You think somebody at Killowen could have been mixed up in that bombing? It’s more than twenty years ago, Stella.”
“So anyone over the age of forty would be in the running.”
Molloy considered. “The Gwynnes, Claire Finnerty, Diarmuid Lynch, Anthony Beglan—everyone else would have been too young.”
“Yes, unless it’s an indirect connection, through a family member maybe? And just because Shawn Kearney is American doesn’t mean she’s off the hook. She said her gran was from Sligo.” Stella spied a speck of grease at the corner of Molloy’s mouth. “You’ve got something there,” she said, reaching over to wipe it off.
He caught her wrist and pulled her close. She felt his other hand against her back, through the thin pajama fabric. Her immediate reaction was to push back, but he leaned into her.
“Don’t fight, Stella. You’ve been pushing me away for days. You don’t even see it, do you?”
“What are you talking about?” She struggled harder, but he still had her wrist, and the other arm around her waist, so that she couldn’t move. He smelled good, a mixture of soap and chips and healthy sweat. This could not be happening. They worked together, for God’s sake. And not only that, he was far too young. “Fergal,” she said, a note of warning in her voice.
Suddenly he let go of her. “Ah, Christ, Stella, you must know—”
Before he could finish, she grabbed his collar with both hands and pulled him to her, this time tasting that errant dab of grease and salt on her tongue.
Cormac made sure that Nora was deeply asleep, then dressed and grabbed his torch and headed downstairs. It was time to check out the storehouse. Two a.m. The farm was in complete darkness as he slipped through shadows to the building that housed the cheese-making operation. The wind had picked up, and the leaves rustled in the steady breeze that blew inland from the bog.
Cormac thanked Providence or whomever that the van was still parked in front of the storehouse and could serve as cover for his intrusion. Cracking open the door, he slipped inside. Cormac was conscious of every noise and could hear his own heart as the moldy odor of aged cheese greeted his nostrils. This was madness, he knew, but he couldn’t stop. Something strange was going on in this place, and it must have something to do with both a missing ancient manuscript and the artifacts they’d just recovered from the bog. There were too many facts lining up to suggest otherwise.
He made his way through the workspace that was the front room, walls lined with shelving and all kinds of strainers and separators, metal and plastic molds. He picked up each wheel of cheese as he passed and tapped it, listening for the sound of a hollowed-out space, a void that could be used for smuggling. No luck. Every cheese large enough to hide anything sounded solid to the core. Beyond the workroom, a cave had been carved out of the limestone hill, the perfect spot for aging. The ceiling was supported with large oak timbers, and the cave seemed to go back about ten meters. The beam from his torch played over the walls, showing more cheeses waiting on wooden shelves, built in a way that increased air circulation. It was all about the flora, Lucien had explained at dinner the other night. Allowing the spores to work their magic in concert with other varieties of mold was the secret to great cheese. The shelves were stacked floor-to-ceiling with large wheels the size of car tires, and miniature gray-black pyramids, the last rolled in ashes as a contrast to the creamy white goat’s milk, undergoing a miraculous transformation inside.
“Cormac?” Nora’s whisper came from the workroom door. “What’s going on? What are you doing out here?”
“Nora, you shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”
“If it’s safe enough for you—”
He didn’t let her finish but pulled her deeper into the cave. “I saw two people sneaking out here the other night. I couldn’t see who they were or what they were up to, but I thought I’d probe around a bit, in case there’s something out here that could help Niall.”
“It seems unlikely. What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. Treasure, a manuscript, some evidence of what Kavanagh and Claffey were after.” He began to feel along the shelves, looking for a crack or a set of hinges, a hidden doorway, perhaps. All at once, his fingers found a break, the cool metal of a hidden hinge with a spring-loaded mechanism. Only the bottom half of the shelf came forward when he pulled on the latch. They’d have to crawl through.
On the other side was a small room, carved deeper into the hill behind the storehouse. The contents of the room took Cormac’s breath away. There were several books—old, leather-bound volumes on a worktable, along with a half dozen magnifiers.
The light of his torch fell upon an ancient book open to an illustration of a plant, its leaves and roots drawn on vellum with a delicate hand. Below the plant was some Latin script and a drawing of a man being administered a draught of liquid from a wooden tankard, his limbs writhing, eyes rolling in his head.
“Looks like a medical text,” Nora said, coming up behind him. “I’ve read about these, but I’ve never seen one. Doctors called them ‘leech books.’” She closed the book and turned it over, pointing her light to the title stamped into its leather spine. “Regimen Sanitatis,” she read. “These other titles are different kinds of books—geography, astronomy, a Bible.”
By this time, Cormac had spied a laptop computer on the far side of the table. “Nora, come look at this.” He pointed to the screen, which had come back to life listing a number of North American colleges and universities, private libraries, and museums, each with an abbreviation of several letters and numbers. “An inventory,” he said to Nora. “Someone is selling these books to the highest bidder.”
“But where have they come from?”
“You said you suspected that an ancient manuscript was somehow part of Benedict Kavanagh’s murder. If Kavanagh found out about this stash, if he was a potential customer—”
“Someone might have killed him to keep him from exposing this operation.”
Cormac nodded. “I think we know whose office this is, but let’s see if we can confirm it.” He started looking at the files on the computer desktop. Clicking on a folder marked “Photos,” he found hundreds of images of the French couple, Lucien and Sylvie—skiing in the Alps, dressed in gauzy tropical gear on a beach, along a wharf on some Mediterranean island. “Here they are.”
A sudden whoosh came from the opening into the storeroom, and a dozen tiny balls of fire rolled in at their feet as the hidden door slammed shut. There was no handle on the inside, no way to get out. Cormac knelt and pressed his shoulder against the false wall. It wouldn’t budge—they were trapped. He turned around to Nora, the question in her eyes answered by the sound of liquid being splashed about on the other side, then a match being struck. Through the cracks in the wallboards, they could see light and hear the roar of the fire before they smelled smoke.
Together they shouted, in unison, as loud as they could, “FIRE!”
The goats in the barn next door began to bleat, helping to sound the alarm. Smoke was beginning to seep into the small room, searing their eyes. Cormac thought he heard someone outside, but it was only the van. Whoever had started this fire was getting away. “HELP!” he shouted again. “FIRE!”
Nora crawled on the floor, chasing fireballs, trying to extinguish them. “Stay low!” she shouted.
He could hear noises outside, indistinct voices raised in alarm.
The wall was beginning to feel warm to the touch, the flames crackling louder and louder, fed by oxygen from the outside. Finally, they heard footsteps running into the storehouse. “Back here,” he shouted. “Behind the shelves. Hurry!”
A series of heavy blows sounded, smashing down the shelving and breaking through the false wall. Cormac grabbed Nora’s hand and dragged her. As they passed the table, she made a lunge for the stack of books, but he pulled harder. They hadn’t time to stop. They made it through the opening just as flames snaked up the table legs and began to consume the ancient volumes.
Diarmuid Lynch stood outside, surrounded by smoke, a sledgehammer in his hands. “Get out, quickly!” he shouted, and they clambered past him and out the storehouse door. “The fire’s spreading to the barn. We’ve got to save the animals. Open the pens and let them out—quickly!”
Although he could barely see, Cormac followed Diarmuid’s command, lifting the pins at each gate as he passed and chasing the goats through the opening. Nora worked the other side, driving frightened animals before her. The goats scrambled madly, tripping and falling over one another, spreading out as they reached the huge door and running madly in all directions. The humans outside stood openmouthed in their nightclothes: a wild-haired Claire Finnerty with a mobile in her hand, Martin and Tessa Gwynne, Shawn Kearney, his father and Eliana. Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy were on the path from their cottage, and Anthony Beglan came running up from the back meadow. The only two missing were Lucien and Sylvie. The white van was gone.
Claire Finnerty rushed up to them. “Are you all right?” she asked, as Diarmuid came up behind. “Was anyone else in there?”
Cormac shook his head. “Someone… locked Nora and me in the storehouse… and started the fire,” he said between gasps. He watched the expressions on the faces around him, the glances of disbelief and denial as they all realized who wasn’t among them.
The phone on Stella Cusack’s bedside table intruded into a dream about herself and Barry, the one she had nearly every night, where he’d brought her to the circus, and just as the lights came up on the ring, he said, “I’ll be right back,” and then disappeared into the crowd. Whatever it meant, Stella was sure she didn’t know, but it kept spinning in her subconscious, like bathwater circling a drain.
The clock read 2:38 A.M., and the voice on the phone was the duty officer, Hartigan. An emergency call had come in, a fire at Killowen Farm.
“Anyone hurt?” she asked, fearing the worst. If only she’d been paying more attention.
“A couple of minor cases of smoke inhalation, but somebody got to them fairly sharpish, so they’ll be all right, thank God. I already rang Molloy. He’s on his way over there now.”
Stella rang off and looked over at the other side of the bed. When had he left? She reached out and ran her hand over the sheets. Slightly cool to the touch.
It was a quarter past three when Stella pulled into Killowen’s car park. She found a crowd of emergency personnel milling about with Killowen residents and guests, and about sixty goats in a makeshift pen between the house and the damaged barn. The ambulance crews were still tending to Nora Gavin, Cormac Maguire, and Diarmuid Lynch. Molloy was herding the other residents into the farmhouse kitchen, preparing to take statements. He glanced at her with no glimmer of acknowledgment. Probably for the best. She should never have let him into the house last night.
Suiting up, Stella entered the fire scene, noting a stench of burned milk. She addressed herself to the local fire brigade’s chief arson investigator, Thomond Breen: “What have you got, Tom?”
“Come through,” he said. “One thing I can tell you is that it would have been one hell of a lot worse if someone hadn’t turned a hose on. From what I can tell so far, it looks as if an accelerant was splashed about here.” They were in some sort of storage room. Strands of melted cheese dripped from charred wooden shelving, and Stella noted the scorched petrol tin tossed to one side. Broken shelves at the back of the room showed the entrance to another space, also steaming and blackened. “Look here,” Breen said, stooping to pick up a small black object from the floor. “Looks like these were used as fire starters. Can you smell the petrol?”
He set the charred walnut-shaped thing in her outstretched hand. “Some are burned more than others. That one’s not too bad. Just what the hell are they, do you suppose?”
“Gallnuts,” Stella murmured.
She headed for the house and found most of the farm’s residents and current guests crowded into the kitchen with emergency service personnel. “We’ll need statements from everyone,” she said to Molloy. “I’d like to talk to them, if you don’t mind. I’ll take the sitting room, start with Dr. Gavin and Maguire, if you’d send them in. Give me about two minutes. Have we a call out for the two gone missing?”
“Just went out on the wire.”
“Bloody Interpol,” Stella said. “I’m guessing this all could have been avoided if they’d been on the ball.”
Molloy shot her a sheepish look and reached into his jacket. “I meant to show you these last night, Stella,” he said, then lowered his voice. “That’s why I came over, actually. Sorry I got distracted.” He handed over a couple of pages from the station fax machine, mug shots of two Swiss nationals wanted for theft of rare books from a library in St. Gallen. The names were different, of course, but it was definitely the supposedly French couple from Killowen.
She didn’t look directly at him. She could still feel the grip of his hands, the heat of him against her. “One more thing, Fergal. What were Maguire and Gavin doing out in that shed in the middle of the night, anyway?”
Molloy gave a shrug and the slight jerk of an eyebrow. “You’ll have to ask them.”
Often the best witness in an attempted murder was the intended victim. Stella’s advantage in this case was that she had two best witnesses, and not just ordinary witnesses, either, but scientists, trained observers of detail. Perhaps this whole case would be wrapped up tonight, if she was lucky. She went to the sitting room and waited for Dr. Gavin and Maguire.
“Have a seat,” she said when they joined her. “You were both very fortunate tonight.” That came out differently than she’d intended, more like an admonishment. “Can you tell me what you were doing in the storehouse tonight?”
Maguire sat forward in his seat. “I went there. I thought Nora was asleep, but she followed. I went because I’d seen suspicious activity there a couple of nights ago. It was two people, a man and a woman, but I couldn’t make out who they were, in the darkness. Tonight I went looking for any evidence that could help Niall Dawson—”
“Evidence?” Stella couldn’t help herself. She had almost forgotten about Dawson, still in custody down at the station.
Maguire said, “I had a notion that Benedict Kavanagh’s death, and maybe Claffey’s as well, had something to do with an ancient manuscript—”
Dr. Gavin jumped in: “And as it turned out, we did find evidence that Lucien and Sylvie were stealing old books. I’m sorry that the fire destroyed the evidence.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve got all we need to go after those two,” Stella said. “Tell me how you arrived at that conclusion, about Kavanagh’s death being connected to a rare manuscript.”
Maguire’s face was still marked with soot. “This place, Killowen, used to be a monastery. You know about the metal stylus that was found here last April?”
“Niall Dawson told me it was his excuse for being here then. My colleague’s just off a stint with the Antiquities Task Force last year—he was very interested in that find.”
“Well, a few more things have turned up since then,” Dr. Gavin said. “The bog man, for a start. And while we were going through his garments with the textile expert, we found a wax tablet tucked into the folds of his cloak.”
Maguire picked up the story. “Niall and I also found a leather satchel out on the bog, the kind the monks used to carry books a thousand years ago. It was empty. We started to think there might be a missing book, but it was all so vague. Then there were the gallnuts turning up everywhere—”
Stella sat forward. “Used to make ink.”
Dr. Gavin said, “That’s right. Then I happened upon some old accounts of a manuscript called the Book of Killowen—”
“And what sort of manuscript would that have been?”
Maguire was hedging his words. “Perhaps a special illuminated edition of the Gospels, like the Book of Kells or the Book of Durrow, perhaps something else. We don’t really know.” He looked at Nora. “It’s possible that several important books might have come from the monastery here. Tradition has it that the Book of Killowen was guarded by a family called O’Beglan, and that there was a cumdach, an elaborate book shrine, made for it sometime in the tenth century. But evidently possession of this particular manuscript was so contentious that one of the O’Beglans got fed up with the fighting between the priests and bishops, and claimed to have burned it in the twelfth century. Seven hundred years later, one of that Beglan’s descendants was supposed to have sold the shrine to a clockmaker, presumably to have it melted down.”
“But you didn’t believe these stories?”
Maguire shrugged. “I think such tales are a good way to throw people off the scent. Saying that you’ve burned or destroyed something may be the best way to keep it safe.”
“Wait, back up for a minute. Who were the keepers of this manuscript?”
“The O’Beglans. The family was connected with the monastery, going back centuries. They farmed the termon lands of the church here. It’s not out of the question. Lots of important manuscripts were for centuries in the possession of private families. A few still are.”
“So why, in your estimation, would Benedict Kavanagh have been killed over this manuscript?”
“We haven’t been able to work that out. Perhaps he was after the same artifacts as the treasure hunters, or maybe he was mixed up with them. A book like that would be worth a lot to the right collector. And even more if there’s a shrine with precious metals and stones. If you could just locate Lucien and Sylvie—or whatever their real names are—perhaps we could find out whether Kavanagh and the book were connected. Vincent Claffey could have learned about it as well and wanted his share to keep quiet.”
Stella took all this in. “So tell me again what you were doing out in the storehouse tonight?”
Maguire sighed. “Trying to find someone else with a motive for murdering Benedict Kavanagh. It occurred to me that a compartment carved out of a wheel of cheese would be an ideal way to smuggle valuable artifacts away from the farm.”
“And what gave you that idea?”
Maguire paused for a moment. “I happened to see Martin and Tessa Gwynne, earlier in the day, carrying a wrapped package to a place called Hawthorn House—it’s a private nursing home. Turns out their daughter has been a resident for almost twenty years. Someone told us the daughter had died, but it isn’t true. The girl apparently tried to commit suicide after being jilted by some man. I’m not sure if it’s anything to do with what has happened here, but you did ask how I got the notion.”
Dr. Gavin said, “I saw something earlier as well, Detective. I don’t know if it’s important, but I was out in back, and I saw Graham Healy park up here beside the house and head down the path to the cottages. Eliana was just coming back that way—”
“My father’s minder,” Maguire said. “He’s recovering from a stroke.”
Dr. Gavin continued, “Eliana looked upset as she was coming from the wood, so I asked her what had happened. She said that Healy had been glaring at her. I wanted to see for myself what he was up to, so I went around the back way to the grove, and I saw him preparing a bonfire.” She glanced up at Stella. “He’d set out a can of petrol.” She shook her head. “That’s all I know. But whoever lit the fire in the storehouse tonight used petrol as well, or some sort of accelerant. The thing I don’t understand is, if Lucien and Sylvie did this, if they killed Benedict Kavanagh and Vincent Claffey, was it all for money? Then the elaborate staging, with the gallnuts and everything, that was all just for show. You saw the bodies, Detective. What do you think?”
Inside that question was the same vague notion that had been bothering Stella for several days. From the beginning, the two murders seemed very personal. Something about this was not sitting right.
After seeing her witnesses out, Stella called Molloy. “Fergal, can you get Tom Breen to look for a bonfire site in the oak grove, see what he can find there in the way of evidence? And one more thing, did you ever find out whether Graham Healy had experience with heavy machinery?”
Molloy inclined his head slightly. “Sorry, Stella, meant to tell you about that last night as well. I checked with the art school, like you said. Healy was the head of the sculpture installation crew, operated a small JCB they used for digging foundations. You were dead right about that.”
The rest of the interviews were unproductive. No one else at Killowen admitted hearing a thing before the fire began. Stella paid particular attention to the accounts of Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy, but they claimed bonfires were a perfectly ordinary occurrence at Killowen, that they’d half a tin of petrol left after starting the fire.
So many things just weren’t adding up. If Kavanagh had been murdered by the Swiss couple, why would they stick around after his death? Wouldn’t it make more sense to disappear before the body was discovered and suspicion aroused?
But Maguire and Gavin’s theories about an old book being at the center of this case jibed with what they’d found in Kavanagh’s things from the B and B. Kavanagh could have been here looking for a valuable old manuscript, one that might raise a few eyebrows, give his academic notoriety a nicely timed kick in the hindquarters. What had he said to his wife? This is going to rattle some bones. It would have to be something sensational. But he had to make sure it was real. She could see the notes in his hand: IOH returns to IRL, great work unfinished.
Fergal Molloy appeared at the door. “Stella, we’ve got something you should see. Come out to the grove. Breen and his lads did find the remains of a bonfire.”
Out at the bonfire site, Stella got a whiff of woodsmoke with an edge of something acrid, like burned chemicals. She turned to Thomond Breen. “What news here?”
“No petrol container, but we did find a few interesting bits. Photos and papers, mostly, not completely burned. I’ll have them bagged up and delivered to you.”
Stella felt a twinge of excitement. Vincent Claffey had made a mistake, squeezed the wrong person. And something in this pile of ashes may have led to his death.
She was headed back to the house when she brushed past an old man sitting on a bench outside the door at Killowen. She felt a surge of annoyance, realizing that she hadn’t interviewed this man; Molloy hadn’t brought him in. “Are you all right there?”
“Nan-nanning a wordoo,” the old man said. His diction was perfect, but the words were incomprehensible. “I flang the cubbits snaring.” It finally dawned on her. This was Maguire’s father, the one who’d suffered a stroke. On the ground at his feet were large white cards with black lettering on one side, pictures on the other. Common household objects, as if he were a child again. In her experience, even children noticed far more than people realized.
The old man seized her hand, a pleading look in his eyes. “I sew the Free Staters,” he said. “You know, the Free Staters.” He kept pointing to an upstairs window and making the same gesture over and over, running his pinched-together right thumb and forefinger over his open left palm. Was it some sort of sign?
“Sorry, I don’t understand. Do you need pen and paper?”
“No, no.” He seemed impatient, urgent.
“Shall I get your son?”
“My sum?” He seemed worried, confused. “No, my author.”
“Maguire, the archaeologist, isn’t he your son?”
“Yes. Yes.” The old man let her go then and sank back onto the bench. No wonder Molloy had left him off the interview list. He had mentioned an author—could it have to do with a mysterious missing manuscript, or was he just talking rubbish? Impossible to tell. And yet behind his eyes, she sensed a kind of light, or intelligence. Or was it only the ghost of the person he had been?
Just then Graham Healy came through the front door of the house, followed by Molloy. Stella felt the old man grip her forearm. “Free Stater,” he whispered hoarsely.
She dropped down beside him, so that her face was on a level with his own. He started making the same gesture again, and this time she felt a jolt of recognition. He was lighting a match. She spoke quietly, making sure to keep her back to Healy and Molloy. “You saw that man start the fire last night, didn’t you, from the window upstairs?”
He nodded, and Stella continued. “Listen to me, was it the bonfire in the wood, or the fire up here, the one in the storehouse?”
The old man’s eyes darted unmistakably toward the storehouse. She had a witness. “You’re sure it’s the same man you saw? It was dark last night.”
He focused on her face with intense concentration and said slowly, “I—sawt—rum-rumaway.”
“All right. Thank you for telling me.”
As Stella straightened, she glanced up to find Graham Healy staring at them.