BOOK FIVE

Gaib do chuil insin charcair,

ni róis chluim na colcaid.

Truag insin amail bachal;

rot giuil ind shrathar dodcaid.

Take thy corner in the prison:

thou shalt have neither down nor pallet.

it is sad, o prince of crosiers,

the packsaddle of ill-luck has stuck to thee.

—Verse written in the margin by the Irish scribe who copied Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae (a Latin grammar) in the mid-ninth century

1

Tired as she was, Stella felt an extra adrenaline jolt as she entered the windowless interview room. Graham Healy sat at the table. She took a seat across from him. “Thank you for coming in, Mr. Healy. I just have a few more questions.” She consulted her notes, giving him a little extra time to stew before she began.

“We found evidence of a bonfire at Killowen last night, out in the wood.”

“That’s not against the law now, is it?”

“No, but destroying evidence in a murder investigation is. Burning down a building with people inside it is a crime.”

“I was asleep in my own bed when that fire started at the storehouse last night.”

“I have reason to believe otherwise. Let me ask, how far is it from the cottage where you stay to the storehouse? Only a couple of hundred yards, right? Easy enough to start the fire and then double back. You could make certain everyone saw you and Ms. Broome coming up the path when the alarm went up.”

“Why would I want to harm those people? I know nothing about them. We’d barely even met. I’d never seen them before dinner last night.”

Stella paused for a moment, then tried a different approach.

“All right, let’s go back to your relationship with Vincent Claffey.”

“There was no relationship.”

“But you did work together, isn’t that right? Preparing canvases, other sorts of… how did Ms. Broome put it? Oh, yes, ‘the more basic tasks.’ You’d have to instruct him, surely, explain just the way she wanted them, dimensions and so on, and arrange delivery if he worked on the canvases at his own place, all that sort of thing.”

Healy offered a grudging glance in her direction. “Yes.”

“So you did have an ongoing relationship with Mr. Claffey, if he took care of those sorts of tasks for you on a regular basis?”

“I suppose so.”

“What’s the going rate?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a simple question. How much did you pay Mr. Claffey for framing and stretching canvases?”

Healy looked at her for a long moment. “It was a bit more than the going rate; Mairéad was always too generous, especially with Claffey.”

“How much more? And do you figure that sort of work on an hourly basis, or is it usually piecework?”

“Hourly.” Graham Healy’s voice was barely audible. “He was paid forty euros an hour.”

“So he must have put in a lot of time on those canvases. Because the witness statement we have says it was a pretty fat brown envelope you handed over to Vincent Claffey on the day you arrived at Killowen.”

“He preferred twenty-euro notes, didn’t like fifties. He’d particularly asked to be paid in twenties that time. You can check with Mairéad if you don’t believe me.”

“So where are the canvases?”

“Sorry?”

“Come on, Mr. Healy. If Vincent Claffey spent so much time making bloody canvases, where are they? Is there a special shed at Killowen where you keep a store of materials? We didn’t find any materials at Claffey’s farm, so I assumed he’d been working at Killowen. But there don’t seem to be any supplies there either.”

Healy sat stone-faced.

“I have a different theory, Mr. Healy. Would you like to hear it?”

“I don’t suppose I can stop you.”

“I think Vincent Claffey spied you with Benedict Kavanagh out at Killowen Bog. I think he didn’t make anything of it until Kavanagh’s body turned up. That was when Claffey saw his big chance to make a bit of money—for keeping his mouth shut.”

“No.”

“But maybe he threatened to tell anyway. Or maybe he wanted more money, and you couldn’t see paying again and again, for years. So you had to get rid of him. Or maybe it was an accident. You went to talk to him, things got ugly, you pushed him, and he hit his head. Nothing to be done about it, so you make his death look like Kavanagh’s to distract us.”

Stella continued, “You knew the bog was protected, that no one was going to be cutting there for a long time. You have experience driving an excavator. The one thing I can’t figure with that whole scenario is how you got Kavanagh out to Killowen. But I have to hand it to you, whatever way you did it, it worked. Maybe it was you who sent him an anonymous message about an old manuscript, something to do with his old friend, Eriugena, the philosopher fella. Some earth-shattering new discovery that would definitely rattle some bones.”

“I really have no idea what you’re talking about, Detective. I never should have come here. You’re dead wrong—about all of this.”

“Am I?”

“I told you, Mairéad and I were staying at a friend’s place in the Slieve Bloom Mountains when Benedict disappeared. We were nowhere near Killowen. If you don’t believe me, ask Claire, ask Diarmuid Lynch—they’ll tell you.”

“They’re also friends of Mairéad’s. Maybe they were glad to see her get shut of that bastard of a husband, almost as glad as you were.”

“You’ve got it all wrong. Mairéad would never harm anyone. She was only trying to help—” Healy stopped abruptly.

Stella knew she’d just witnessed a slip. “Who exactly was she trying to help?”

Healy had reached his limit. “I’m done talking. If you’ve nothing to keep me here, I’d like to go.”

It could have happened just as she described to Healy, but there wasn’t a shred of evidence that could prove anything, and Healy knew it. Molloy was lounging against the wall outside the interview room when she opened the door. Healy didn’t make eye contact with either of them as he left.

“I hate to say it, Stella, but we’re going to have to charge Dawson or spring him. All we’ve got are those gallnuts from his room, which anyone could have planted, and a witness statement from Anca Popescu, who’s conveniently scarpered.”

Anca’s statement was looking more and more like a fable, Stella thought. She remembered Dawson’s words: Anca might have done for Claffey herself, did you not think of that? The girl had claimed that Dawson pushed Claffey, that the victim had struck his head. Those details had been borne out in the postmortem. But it could have been Anca herself on the other side of that altercation, and Niall Dawson could be telling the truth. They still didn’t know who’d mutilated Claffey’s corpse and wrapped him in plastic.

“Have we gone over the clothes Dawson was wearing that night? He admitted finding a corpse, for God’s sake. I can’t believe there’s not even a single speck of blood on his shoes. We’ve no physical evidence that can place him there?”

Molloy shook his head.

“Fine,” she said. “Let him go. Christ, this whole case has me round the bend.”

Stella could hear the clock ticking, could feel the hot breath of Serious Crimes on her neck. They were going to lose this case in the next day or two, she could feel it.

2

Cormac shook his head. “It’s no use, I don’t know what you’re saying.” He threw up his hands and turned away from his father, who sat on the bed, refusing to get up or dress himself. They’d let him sleep late after the excitement over the fire last night, and now he was adamant about not leaving his room.

“I sew the Free Stater. Tolder pleaseworum.” He kept repeating the same phrases, over and over again, about a Free Stater. There was a screw seriously loose today, and no mistake. “Will you just please put your clothes on?”

The old man shook his head. “No.”

“If you’re not going to get up, I’ll have to get someone to sit with you.”

“No—” He started to stand. “Does she havunn? The Free Stater?”

Cormac said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.” He knelt down in front of his father once more. “What is it? What are you trying to say?” He searched his father’s eyes, looking for clues.

Joseph shook his head and spoke slowly, distinctly. “I sew the Free Stater. I sew.” He held his fingers up, pointing to his own eyes. “Bollocks. But she… she knows I sew it.”

“Who knows?” Cormac asked. “Who the hell are you talking about?”

“Her! The worum.” He let his head drop into his hands. “You can’t hear me.”

“I’m trying. I’ll keep trying, if you will.”

“I’m an awful bosom.”

Cormac struggled to keep a straight face. “Well, an awful something, and no mistake.”

Joseph reached out to touch Cormac’s face, letting his fingertips brush the eyebrow that had been singed in the fire last night, the edge of the bandage that covered a small burn on his forehead. “My poor lad,” the old man said. “My sum.”

He helped his father to stand and brought his clothes from the bedside chair. “Time to put these on and face the day. Eliana is downstairs waiting for you.” The mention of the girl’s name drew an unexpected response.

“Can’t look. Spuh-puh-puncture of pass. Pass. Peas. Ah, I’m a fool of bad words.”

Cormac tried to hear what his father was saying. “Has Eliana upset you in some way?”

“No, no. She’s a goose to me.”

What must it be like, every day facing a barrage of meaningless words that hemmed him in, imprisoned his thoughts? She’s a goose to me. What could that possibly mean?

The old man was finally dressed. Cormac led the way downstairs, already exhausted before the day had begun. He made tea and buttered some brown bread for their breakfast, though it was nearly two in the afternoon. A strange morning after a strange night.

But both he and Nora had work to do today; he was back on the bog, and Nora had said she’d lend a hand. Bringing the old man out here, even for a few days, had been a mistake. What if he never regained his faculty of speech? Once in a while, some word would come swimming to the surface, stay anchored to its meaning for a few hours, and then recede again. Most days the image he carried was of the two of them, himself and his father, in a coracle, paddling furiously in a vast sea of alphabet soup.

3

By half-two in the afternoon, Stella Cusack felt her energy flagging. Between Molloy’s late-night visit and the fire, she’d slept only about two hours, and a heavy fatigue was beginning to settle upon her. But there was no question of taking any rest, not now when the case was in disarray. They had no leads, no suspects in custody. The whole thing was a bloody shambles. She’d been staring at the whiteboard for twenty minutes with no flash of insight.

Molloy set a cup of steaming tea on the table beside her.

“Just got a call back on Claire Finnerty,” he said. “Remember, you asked me to look into her background, like I did with Lynch? I checked public records for the birth date listed on her driving license. There was a Claire Finnerty born at the Mater Hospital in Dublin on the fourth of January 1968. I was able to track down the parents, Roger and Sheila Finnerty of Beaumont Road, Dublin. Just got off the phone with them, and get this—their daughter was eight weeks premature; she only lived two days.”

Stella said, “So who’s your one at Killowen calling herself Claire Finnerty? Any chance we’ve got her prints on file?”

Molloy shook his head. “Never any reason to collect them.”

“Except now we know she isn’t who she pretends to be.”

“Want me to talk to her?”

“No, I’ll go. What else have you got?”

“The arson investigators found a few fragments of the papers burned at that bonfire site. Thought you’d like to see them.” He lined up on the tabletop about half a dozen clear polythene bags, each holding a bit of partially charred paper. “Not much left, but…”

Stella took the magnifying glass from Molloy and peered at each one in turn. “No, but look—does that seem like a date from a newspaper article?”

Molloy peered at it. “Yeah, Irish Times, looks like the eighteenth of August 1991. We can check that. What about this?” He held up one of the other fragments. “That colored pattern looks almost like a bit of a passport.”

Stella turned the clear packet over. The numbers 463 stood out clearly at one corner. “Let’s start there, get a list of Irish passport numbers ending in four, six, three. See if anything leaps out.”

Molloy’s phone began to buzz. Stella couldn’t hear what the caller was saying, but it seemed to be good news. He pressed the phone to his shoulder. “They’ve found the girls and the baby. Up in a forestry preserve above Mountshannon. The car got stuck, but they’re all right. The local sergeant already called social services for Deirdre Claffey and the child.”

“Good! This time we’re going to keep closer tabs on Anca Popescu. I don’t think Murray will get over the trauma.”

“Tied up by that slip of a girl? He shouldn’t get over it.”

“Fergal, why don’t you head over to Mountshannon and bring Anca back here? I’ll get to work on these.”

Stella locked up the evidence, then stashed her notebook where she’d scribbled the newspaper date in her bag. The local library ought to have newspapers from that era, on microfilm or online. She left the station by the front door, traveling out John’s Place to the oval, and then turned right at Wilmer Road, the N52. The Birr library was in a nineteenth-century chapel built by the Sisters of Mercy. Stella stepped into the nave of the old church, now the main reading room. In the center stood a display case, lit from above. She felt herself drawn to the large book inside. The sign said it was a facsimile of the MacRegol Gospels, supposed to have been made at Saint Brendan’s monastery, Birr. Stella knew the place, now just a small ruined churchyard around the corner from the Guards station in Church Lane. She read:

The MacRegol Gospel Book is a manuscript copy of the Four Gospels, written and illuminated by an abbot of Birr about 800 AD. It consists of 169 vellum folios (leaves) about 345 mm high and 270 mm wide. The script used is a formal one called insular majuscule or insular half-uncial and it somewhat resembles one of the hands of the Book of Kells. A translation or gloss in Old English cursive script was inserted between the lines about a thousand years ago. Eight pages are illuminated in the style of the eighth or ninth century AD with pigments including red lead, verdigris, and orpiment probably bound with the white of an egg. About 1681 John Rushworth presented it to the Bodleian Library, where it was known as the Rushworth Gospels and presumed to be of Anglo-Saxon origin. But Charles O’Conor STD of the O’Conor Don family demonstrated by internal evidence in 1814 that the manuscript must have originated in Ireland. He pointed to the colophon on the final page of the manuscript, which read: “Macregol dipinxit hoc evangelium. Quicumque legerit et intellegerit istam narrationem orat pro Macreguil scriptori.” (Macregol coloured this gospel. Whoever reads and understands its narrative, let him pray for Macregol the scribe.)

Stella propped her elbows on the glass and gazed at the book. This was only a photographic copy, and yet she felt herself pulled in by the tiny spirals and twisted birds, the serpent that formed the border, the odd rectangular shapes of letters hidden in plain sight. And the colors—red the color of half-dried blood, gold, green, and black—and eyes, everywhere, creatures staring unblinking from every corner of the page.

“Very fine, isn’t it?” The librarian’s voice startled her. “The original is in Oxford, but it was made at the monastery right here in Birr.”

“Yes, I was just reading about it,” Stella said. “I suppose there were lots of books like this made in the monasteries around here.”

“Yes, but only a few survive. Which makes them all the more valuable.”

“I wonder, you wouldn’t happen to have heard of the Book of Killowen?”

“Ah, the lost book of Killowen and its shrine.”

“If the book was lost, how do you happen to know about it?”

“There are several accounts of it. Monks wrote down the stories of important books, who made them, who kept them, any controversy. They say the first copyright case in the world was over a manuscript illegally copied by Colmcille himself. We librarians are like a secret society, Detective. Even in the digital age, we make it our business to know about books.”

Stella was puzzled. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

“Not formally, but I’ve seen you about. Mary Anglim—I should explain. I know your daughter, Lia. She often comes to our writers’ workshops for young people. You must be pleased—she’s turning into an excellent writer.”

“Yes… yes, she is,” Stella said, although this was the first she’d heard of any literary aspirations. She’d never even seen her daughter with pen in hand. What on earth did Lia write about? And why had she kept this part of herself so well hidden?

“Must be frustrating,” Stella said. “Reading accounts of something like the Book of Killowen and never being able to see it. Especially if it was as spectacular as this. Where do you suppose MacRegol’s book was between the time it was made and the time it was presented to the library at Oxford?”

“Most likely in private hands, but there’s no way to know for certain. Were you just here to see the Gospels, or was there something else?”

Stella said, “No, I came to see if you have the Irish Times on microfilm. I’m looking for a specific date.”

“Anything before 1996 is searchable on the Irish Times website. Let’s have a look. What’s the date?”

“Let’s start with the eighteenth of August, 1991,” Stella said. Mary Anglim brought up a search screen on a library computer beside them and typed in the first date. Smudgy black-and-white images of newspaper pages came up on the screen.

“Thanks.” Stella got down to it, letting her eyes wander over the headlines, anything that might pop out as connected to Vincent Claffey and his black market in secrets. Follow-up reports on the freeing of the Birmingham Six and the IRA firing mortar bombs at 10 Downing Street a few months earlier. There were items about the brouhaha over the minister of defense being spotted at an IRA funeral, and preparations for the opening of the Dublin Writers Museum at Parnell Square. A small headline on page six stood out: “Gardaí still seek leads on missing woman.”

Stella made the article larger and began to read. “Gardaí investigating the disappearance last month of Co Dublin woman, Ms Tricia Woulfe (23), have not ruled out the possibility that the case could become a murder investigation. But Supt Gerald Murray from Harcourt Street, who is in charge of the investigation, said yesterday there was no evidence to suggest that the young woman has been murdered. Tricia Woulfe, from Greystones, Dublin, was last seen in the Cuffe Street area of the City at around 1 am on 13 August.”

That was the day before the Cregganroe bombing. Twenty-two years ago this month. A photograph accompanied the article, a blurry black-and-white image showing a young woman with short dark hair and a broad smile, her friends obviously cropped out of the frame.

Where was Tricia Woulfe now? Stella thought she had an idea.

4

Cormac looked up from his work at the excavation site to see a figure approaching through the small trees and clumps of sedge that dotted the surface of the bog.

“Nora,” he said. She stopped digging. Niall Dawson was about forty yards away. Cormac climbed up out of the cutaway and waited for his friend. “They cut you loose,” he said.

“Didn’t have enough to hold me. Never did. What a mess.”

Nora shaded her eyes as she looked up from the pit. “I’m so glad. Welcome back, Niall.”

“Tell me what you’re up to here,” Dawson said. “I’m in desperate need of distraction.”

Cormac jumped off the bank into the hole once more, while Niall peeled off his jacket and began to roll up his shirt cuffs. The three of them stood in the middle of the large rectangular void.

“We’ve finished going over the area where we found the satchel,” Cormac said. “So I thought we’d get going on a couple of test pits. I was just going to start breaking the surface in that area.” He indicated a plot that he’d finished marking off with stakes and twine. “Maybe you’d care to let off a little steam?”

Cormac handed his friend the pick, and Niall attacked the dense, spongy peat. Once the top layer was broken, they would use spades and trowels and eventually graduate to bare hands to sort through the increasingly sodden material below.

“I stopped by the farm—Claire told me about the fire,” Dawson said, breathing heavily as he slung the pick. “She said there were old books in that storehouse.”

Cormac said, “Yes. That nice French couple turned out to be Swiss art thieves on the run from Interpol.”

Dawson stopped his work. “Lucien and Sylvie? Claire didn’t mention that.”

“They were the only people missing after the fire,” Cormac said. “They must have seen us go into the storehouse and saw their chance to escape.”

“Yes, but why start a fire?” Dawson asked. “Why not just lock you in while they made their getaway? That level of violence, it doesn’t fit the profile of book thieves I’ve seen. They like money, or they like books, but very few resort to murder.”

“Unless they were involved in Kavanagh’s death.”

“Why stick around after he was killed? That doesn’t make sense either.”

“Unless they didn’t have what they’d come here to find. Niall, did you ever hear of a manuscript called the Book of Killowen? Shawn Kearney seemed to know about it,” Cormac said. “She seemed rather frightened, to tell you the truth.”

“I found a brief mention of it in John O’Donovan’s Ordnance Survey notes,” Nora added. “It was evidently a special book, but it was said to have been burned back in the twelfth century. O’Donovan also mentioned a fancy book shrine, but it may have been melted down after the book was destroyed. And the family that was reported to have done all this were called Beglan.”

Dawson stopped swinging the pick and leaned on the handle. “What else do you know?”

“The Beglans were successors to the founder of the monastery at Killowen. But it’s all so convoluted,” Cormac said. “I meant to tell you, Niall, we showed the photos of the wax tablet to Martin Gwynne. I thought it was rather curious that a medieval manuscript expert should be living here at Killowen, so I rang up Robbie and asked him to check into Gwynne’s background. Turns out he was sacked from the British Library over a stolen manuscript, twenty years ago. The thing is, the stolen book was a revised edition of Deeds of the English Bishops by William of Malmesbury—”

“I know the one,” Dawson said. “Gesta Pontificum Anglorum.”

“Then you know it has a connection to Kavanagh’s subject, Eriugena.”

“Yes, well, William of Malmesbury was probably just repeating all the juicy stories he’d heard. If I’m remembering right, he even had one about Eriugena being murdered, how his pupils were supposed to have stabbed him to death with their styli because he insisted that they think for themselves—a cautionary tale for all academics. Robbie must have explained that William of Malmesbury had a reputation for embellishment.”

“Well, he did mention the stories were considered apocryphal.”

Nora said, “Hey, guys, I’ve found something.”

She dropped her trowel and began to work with bare fingers while Cormac and Niall Dawson crowded around. A smooth brown ridge began to protrude. Cormac and Niall joined in the digging, working quickly, until they had uncovered a single leather corner and a ragged hash of soft brown material.

“Sweet holy Jaysus,” Dawson said. “I don’t believe this. It’s a book. It’s Killowen Man’s missing book.” He gingerly picked away more peat, and a few words of Latin script appeared under his fingertips, the vellum page shiny with wetness and miraculously still readable. Dawson sat back on his heels. “I really don’t believe this.”

Cormac tried to get his head around the shape, the book splayed open, the upper left corner folded over and the pages dog-eared, the center almost rotted away, a mass of letters floating free in wet peat, independent of their vellum matrix. “I think you’re right. It is a book, though it looks a bit more like—”

“Lasagna,” Nora said. “What the hell do we do now?”

“First, we get the camera.” As Dawson turned to dig into his bag, Cormac’s eyes began to pick out details: a yellow bar appeared, and then an almost circular letter D, with an S-curve clearly visible inside. “Look here, Niall, I think this is a capital, and a gold border.”

Nora leaned in to try to read the script as Niall peered through the camera lens, snapping away as quickly as he could. He said, “See that line of text, dead center? Can you read it? Looks to me like ‘in ualle lacrimarum.’

Cormac dredged up his decades-old knowledge of Latin. “Something about a vale of tears. Psalms, maybe?”

“There’s one way to find out,” Nora said, quickly typing the letters into her phone. “You’re right. Psalm 83, verse 7: ‘in ualle lacrimarum in loco quem posuit.’ ‘In the vale of tears, in the place which he has set.’ So our bog man was walking here, maybe reading his book of Psalms, and he’s attacked by a couple of assailants, they throw his body into the bog, and then his book, and his satchel after him.”

“So maybe he was robbed,” Niall said. “Remember what the textile consultant told us, that he ought to have been wearing a brooch, and we didn’t find any. Maybe it was as simple as that.”

But the words on Killowen Man’s wax tablet weren’t verses from Psalms, Cormac thought. They were something about freedom of rational thought, and malice and evil. He had often experienced this same sensation out on excavations, a feeling of hurtling down a tunnel through time. Now he felt himself spat out, centuries ago, on this same squelching bog, where the ancient man in the hospital cooler had once walked and perhaps written his last thoughts, and where he’d been brutally murdered. Cormac suddenly understood in a flash how everything they’d found was connected, down through the centuries, all the way from the Dark Ages directly to Benedict Kavanagh. He heard voices from a distance, then felt his thoughts zooming back into the present.

Niall had his face pressed to the wet peat and was using a flat probe to try and get a look between some of the other pages. “I can see another illuminated border.”

“We’ll have to get it out of there as quickly as we can,” Cormac said. “I’ve got some plywood in the back of the jeep. Would that do as a stabilizer for now?”

Niall nodded. “It’ll have to do.”

On the way to the hospital, Cormac’s thoughts came back to the present as he glanced over at Nora in the passenger seat. She was nodding off. Dawson’s eyes, too, were closed in the backseat. Cormac felt tremendous relief, looking at the white gauze wrapped around Nora’s forearm, that neither of them had been badly injured last night. They were lucky that Diarmuid Lynch had heard them. Surely the police would track down the book thieves, and the case would be wrapped up shortly. Still, it was chilling to know that someone at Killowen had wanted them dead.

5

Stella was on her way to Killowen when her mobile began to buzz. “Cusack here.”

“She’s dead, Stella. Anca Popescu is dead.”

“Fergal, what are you talking about? What’s happened?”

“I met the uniforms at Cappaghbaun, the place above Mountshannon where the girls got stuck on the forestry road. Social Services had charge of Deirdre Claffey and the baby, and I was carrying Anca back to Birr, like you said…” His voice broke. “You told me to keep close tabs on her this time, and I should have been watching—”

“Just tell me what happened, Fergal.”

“I brought her in the car with me. But I never locked the fuckin’ passenger door, Stella. I never thought—”

“What happened?”

“We were coming over the top of the mountain, and the next thing I know she’s got the door open and she’s trying to jump. I reached out for her, but I couldn’t hold on.”

Stella was imagining the scene as Molloy described it: a rough forestry road, fir trees, and a vicious drop. She felt a punch to the gut. Did the girl dread being sent back to Romania so much that she would risk losing her life rather than face that? “Are you with her now?”

“Yes. I had to climb down to her. I checked her pulse, but there’s nothing. She’s dead.” He sounded on the verge of tears.

Stella heard her own voice take on a steely edge. “Fergal, listen to me. Stay where you are and ring Emergency Services. Do it now.”

She heard a sharp exhalation. Finally he said, “Right. It’ll be all right. I’ll just tell them what happened.”

“Phone Emergency Services right now, Fergal. Don’t move her, don’t touch anything else. I’m on my way.”

Stella rang off, feeling numb. Anca Popescu was only nineteen, but she had probably experienced more horrors than any human being could be expected to endure. And all Stella could see now was that haunted expression in the girl’s eyes, the nervous, darting hands, the way she’d sucked that smoke from her cigarette, as if it were pure oxygen. That, and how Anca had turned her gaze into a silent plea as Stella had left the safe house the other day, as if she had somehow known it would be their last meeting. Why the hell had she sent Molloy? She ought to have gone with him, or picked the girl up herself, and none of this would have happened. She sat in the car, hands on the wheel but going nowhere, not sure what to do next.

Her phone buzzed again.

“Mam, it’s Lia.”

Stella didn’t say anything, afraid that if she opened her mouth to speak, she would begin to sob.

“I’m sorry about hanging up on you yesterday,” Lia said, her voice sounding less like the stroppy seventeen-year-old she’d been lately and more like the child she used to be. “It was rude. I only wanted… it just makes me crazy when you and Daddy are so unhappy. I don’t mean to mess things up.”

Stella forced herself to speak. “Oh, Lia, you haven’t messed anything up. What happened between your father and me, it’s not your fault, sweetheart. It’s nothing to do with you. Are you all right, staying with Daddy for another little while? It’ll only be a day or two more, I promise. I’ll ring you.”

“But you should talk to Daddy. He’s not—”

“I’ll speak to him, Lia, don’t worry.”

“Right, see you, Mam.”

“I love you, Lia. I’ll ring you back just as soon as I can.”

Stella started her ignition and felt the tears begin to flow.

* * *

Forty minutes later, she bumped along the road that crossed the top of the mountain at Cappaghbaun and found an ambulance, a Mountain Rescue van, and several Guards vehicles all parked in the middle of the road.

“Stella!” A voice came from beside the ambulance as she stepped from the car. It was her superintendent, Eamonn Brown, looking smart in his expensive suit. Not a bad copper, but too ambitious, always looking for the next opportunity to impress those above him, which tended not to impress the people below him.

“Eamonn, why are you here?”

“One of my officers involved in a fatal accident? It’s my job to be here.”

And to see how your investigation is coming along, was the unspoken subtext.

“Where’s Molloy?” Stella asked.

“The ambulance lads are checking him over.”

“Have they recovered the girl’s body yet?”

“A bit dodgy, that.” He waved her to the edge of the road to look down. “The Mountain Rescue team is rigging up some lines to make sure no one else takes a tumble. Then they’ll send a couple of people down and bring the body up on a gondola. Dreadful business. Molloy said he phoned and told you what happened?”

“Yes, that the girl jumped from the moving car.”

“I gather she was one of your witnesses on the Killowen case?”

“Yes, although I was beginning to have serious doubts about her story.”

“You’re saying you’ve no leads at all?”

“No, we’ve got substantial evidence for book theft but still not much to go on for either of the murders, unfortunately. I was hoping this girl might finally come clean when we got her back to the station.”

“Well, this is pretty damned inconvenient, then, isn’t it?”

She got the message: Brown wanted this case cleared up, and fast, before Serious Crimes ran roughshod over all of them, himself included.

The paramedics were just coming up the hill, pulled up by their mates along a couple of nylon cords. Anca Popescu’s body was already zipped into a black body bag. A light rain had begun to fall while they were down the slope, and now the valley below was beginning to disappear in the mist.

“Can I just see her face?” Stella asked the nearest paramedic.

He turned to look at her. “It’s not pleasant.”

Stella unzipped the bag. Anca’s face bore cuts and contusions; her lip was split, and there was a dreadful gash at the temple, lots of blood. She looked so young, even more like a little girl now that her wary eyes were closed. Where were this child’s parents? Stella wondered. And who would have to go and tell her people that she was dead?

6

The sun was just coming up behind the brow of the hill as Joseph Maguire climbed the rise that led to Anthony Beglan’s farm. He felt a little short of breath and paused to rest for a moment against one of the crumbling gateposts along the hedge-lined lane. In his mind was a picture of the eels he’d have for lunch today. He could see their shiny, slippery skins, the intricate and beautiful architecture of their tails.

He closed his eyes and breathed, letting the scent of cattle and grass fill his head, bringing back the animal smells of childhood, the strange gaze of beasts standing out in the rain along the road he walked to school. Everything took such an effort now, and time itself felt slippery as an eel. He was young, and then he was old again, in the blink of an eye.

He pushed off from the gatepost and passed by a field where a dozen pairs of large brown eyes looked up to greet him, ears with yellow tags flapped and twitched as he kept walking. He looked down and saw the bulge of a belly, two stout legs beneath him. Whose were they? Not those of a boy. Hard to keep things straight when his brain was so uncooperative.

A house stood at the end of the road, old and weather-beaten, paint peeling from the window and door frames. No one home. He could see no sign of life, no sounds, but he walked toward it, waiting for something. Glinting shards of light came from the building beside him, and he turned to see the sun broken into hundreds of pieces, bright circles, blinding him as he looked through a missing wall. All a dream, it had to be.

He felt the sharp jolt of the blow before the pain registered. It seemed like he waited for eternity after that, with that hollow roar in his ears as his knees buckled under him and he pitched forward into darkness.

* * *

Joseph felt himself drifting, floating in space. When he tried to move, he could not. Pain in his head. Cracking his eyes open, he saw and then felt the band, something around his chest. His hands were behind him, shoulders pulled back, a shooting pain up the shoulder. Where was this place? Was someone here? His head still lolled forward on his chest, but he could see a table before him, cracked oilcloth, a basin of water—and a shape made of green rushes. He was alone.

He began to move, trying to break free, but he was fixed, immobile. He twisted from side to side, and at last the chair moved, but only to topple over. He landed on his right cheekbone with such force that the pain knocked the breath from him, and he experienced a sudden flashback—the cold floor, the musty smell, the shooting pains through his limbs. Another interrogation? They could beat him all they liked—he knew nothing. The whole right side of his face felt numb. He was ready to pass out when the door opened and a pair of muddy black shoes walked slowly toward him. From his awkward angle on the floor, he could not see the wearer. The silent figure stood and looked at him, as if deciding what to do. He’d let his jaw go slack, feigning unconsciousness, knowing instinctively that it was the wisest course. When the boots turned and proceeded out the door once more, he tried to open his eyes wider but felt himself slipping into an unconsciousness that this time was not feigned.

7

“Sorry about the hour,” Catherine Friel said. “I’ve got to be up in Cavan by noon. You must know I wouldn’t have dragged you out of bed for no reason.”

Stella was gazing at the mortal body of Anca Popescu, looking in her nakedness on the table here this morning even more like a waif than she had appeared yesterday evening. Again Stella’s throat constricted, thinking of how alone this girl was, in death as in life. “What is it? What have you found?”

“Since I wasn’t at the scene, I don’t know a lot about the circumstances surrounding this girl’s death, but I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty that it was no accident. At first I thought perhaps it was the position of the body after the fall, a function of livor mortis. Then I found this.” She lifted Anca’s arm away from her body and revealed a mark on the skin, a pattern of discoloration.

“What is it?” Stella asked. “What am I looking at?”

“Do you see the outline just here?” Catherine Friel’s gloved finger traced the air above the shape. She pointed to a jagged line on one side, a rounded curve on the other.

Stella’s brain began to distinguish the significance of the outlines before her, just as Dr. Friel’s voice sounded in her ear: “It’s a footprint, Stella. This girl didn’t jump to her death. She was pushed.”

Stella stared at the mark, remembering Molloy’s distraught voice on the phone.

“Are you all right?” Catherine Friel’s voice had become a low, echoing noise, like a sound traveling down a long tunnel. Time slowed, and all Stella could feel was the touch of his hands upon her skin, his eyes locked on to her own. It wasn’t real, any of it—it had only been a distraction, to keep her from seeing what he was. She had to force herself to focus.

“You’re sure this happened at the time of her death? It couldn’t have happened earlier?”

“The marks would be much darker if the contusions had happened a day or two earlier and the blood had had a chance to settle in the surrounding tissue.”

An image came back—those fresh red marks on the girl’s arm in the interview room. Stella had let herself imagine that they were self-inflicted, but Molloy had just been with her. Was he threatening the girl? Had he forced her to point the finger at Niall Dawson for the murder of Vincent Claffey?

Of course Molloy knew Anca. Because she was mixed up with Vincent Claffey, and so was he. How could she have been so thick? Molloy and Claffey and the Swiss book thieves, and perhaps Anca as well—they were all in on it. That secondment to the Antiquities Task Force, and all those cracks Molloy kept making about treasure hunters trying to corrupt Guards—she’d heard only what was on the surface and not the truth that lurked below. They know we’re always skint. He needed money, and for that he’d let himself be pulled into a hole so deep… Stella looked down at Anca Popescu’s fragile, battered face. Was it money that had driven Molloy to treat another human being like this? She felt the floor shift beneath her, and held on to the table for support.

“Detective?” Catherine Friel’s voice was louder now. “Stella, are you all right?”

8

Cormac emerged from his room at Killowen at about half-seven in the morning to find Eliana in the hallway, still in her dressing gown. She raced to his side, eyes wide and slightly frantic. “You’re awake, thanks God!” she cried. “He is gone again. I looked in his room, and the bath. Your father is not here.”

Cormac put his two hands on her shoulders. “Calm yourself. He can’t have been gone long. Have you any idea where he might have headed? Had you made plans for today?”

“Anthony was going to bring us eel fishing again, but not until later.”

“He may be mixed up about the time. Let’s see if we can find him at Anthony’s. You get dressed, and I’ll wake Nora and tell her where we’re going.”

He was trying to maintain a calm demeanor for Eliana’s sake, but Cormac could feel fear rising in his throat. It was tempting to believe that two murders had been solved with the discovery of stolen books in the storehouse, but what if Lucien and Sylvie were only book thieves and not killers?

It took nearly ten minutes to cover the fields between Killowen and Beglan’s place. They went up over the field and along the perimeter of the orchard, then down the narrow lane that separated the two farms.

Cormac turned to Eliana. “Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s fine. Probably having a very interesting conversation with Anthony Beglan right now.” Eliana allowed the ghost of a smile to pull at the corners of her mouth.

They turned down the lane that led to Beglan’s drive. Anthony had been here. The gate was open, the cattle grid littered with fresh dung from the morning’s milking.

“Hullo!” Cormac shouted as they approached the sheds. “Anyone here?”

No answer from the ruined cottage or the house. The shed gave off an acrid, rotten smell, as before, and Cormac held his nose as he approached the door. Something was not right here—he could feel it. With Eliana behind him, he pushed open the first door. In the center of the room was a strangely shaped chopping block alongside a crude table holding several rounded blades, plus a dozen or more stretching frames, some with half-dried skins upon them. The light from the grimy window glowed through the rough but translucent skins, casting the room in an eerie yellowish light. Jesus.

“Stay here,” he whispered to Eliana. “Don’t come any farther.”

Cormac crossed to the next doorway and pulled it open to reveal two large bubbling vats of opaque liquid the color of heavy cream. A sopping, pale skin lay draped across an old oar that had been adapted for use as a stirring paddle. Cormac felt his blood freeze. He ran forward and seized the paddle, and began feeling around in the cauldron, unaware of the agitator stirring up the bottom. It clamped on to his oar and practically lifted him from the ground, the oar bending and nearly snapping with the weight of him, until he was able to let go. The machinery stopped, and he dislodged the oar and finished stirring each of the vats. Nothing.

Anthony had to be here, Cormac thought. He wouldn’t leave this machinery running if he weren’t, surely. Cormac heaved himself away from the vat and surveyed the room. There was no place to hide. At the center of the third room hung a chain studded with large hooks, where Beglan evidently hung the bodies of recently slaughtered animals. One calf hung suspended by its hind legs, blood staining the metal trough below. Still dripping. So where was Beglan? Cormac inched around the corner, expecting the worst, but found only a skinned calf’s head, pink and white musculature exposed like an anatomical drawing. His eyes scoured the walls, the floors, looking for clues. All he could see were a couple of stalls in the far corner. A closer look revealed a handprint in blood on the dirt floor and a few stray bits of straw that must have been carried in by the calves. Above the print dangled a long pair of tongs on a coil of electric cable. The line ran to a control panel on the far wall. A stunning device of some kind, no doubt used on the animals. A spark leapt from the tongs and landed harmlessly on the dirt floor, prompting Cormac to cross and shut off the power.

A low moan came from the corner stall. Cormac dug through the straw, uncovering a semiconscious Anthony Beglan.

He lifted Beglan’s head and began checking for broken bones, obvious wounds. All he found was an angry circular burn at one temple but no blood anywhere. An accident, or a foiled attack? He gripped Beglan’s face. “Anthony, can you hear me? Is my father here? Joseph Maguire, is he here?”

Beglan opened his lips and emitted another low moan. He couldn’t speak but seemed to be trying to cast his eyes in the direction of the house. “It’s all right now,” Cormac said. “You’re going to be all right.”

He shouted for Eliana, and when she came around the corner, he thrust his mobile into her hand. “Stay here with Anthony and make sure he’s warm. He may be in shock. Ring emergency services, nine-nine-nine, and do exactly what they tell you. Do you understand? I’ve got to find my father.”

Cormac burst out the door of the shed, heading toward the house. He entered by the back door, trying to remember what his father had said on the morning after the fire. Some nonsense about Free Staters. It wasn’t exactly what he was trying to say, but he just kept banging on about it, so it must have been important. Trying to wring the meaning from his mixed-up words was like trying to crack an ever-changing code. Sometimes the words came in spurts, sounds or meanings like the one he intended but not quite the thing he meant. Letters transposed, or dropped altogether. Free Staters. Perhaps someone else had understood.

The kitchen was in disarray, although whether from a struggle or just general neglect, it was difficult to discern. Crockery in the sink, peeling wallpaper, the table and chairs pushed from the center of the room. Cormac bent down on one knee to examine the kitchen floor. There was a small amount of blood, about an arm’s length from the table.

But for the dripping faucet, the house was eerily still until a strangled cry came from the far corner. Cormac flung himself forward and found his father bound to a toppled chair, eyes wild, his mouth stuffed with gallnuts. He was choking. Cormac scrabbled for the blackened marbles that blocked the old man’s airway, spilling a shower of galls onto the floor. But there were more—he had to keep going until he reached the very deepest one, lodged in the windpipe. He couldn’t reach it. Too far down. He ran to the sink and seized a carving knife, slicing through the tape and watching the old man go into a spasm. He was dying. Cormac lifted him from behind, and cinching his arms around his father’s middle, gave a mighty squeeze. It worked—the last gall shot out of Joseph’s mouth and pinged off a windowpane four feet away.

Cormac released his grip, letting his father slide to the floor. They were both still gasping. Stretched there, the two of them resembled a pair of knotwork figures, arms and legs at all angles. The old man’s eyes were open, and Cormac searched for any tiny glimmer of recognition, wondering if his father might have had another stroke. At the very least, the lack of oxygen couldn’t have done his overtaxed brain any favors. “Stay with me, Da. We’re not finished. Stay.”

Joseph’s hand reached out blindly, as though he couldn’t see who or what was before him. Cormac felt the old man’s palm, warm against his face.

“Sum,” Joseph said, his voice hoarse as a crow’s. “My sum.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to understand.” He smoothed the old man’s hair. “Who did this? Can you tell me who tried to harm you?”

The old man shook his head and croaked, “Free Stater.”

Cormac’s brain began searching for possibilities. It couldn’t have been Anthony Beglan—he was injured—and whoever had done this to his father must have just left. Probably still close enough to catch if he… no, he couldn’t leave the old man here.

Joseph’s breathing finally began to slow. He grasped Cormac’s shirtfront and pulled him down closer. “My author?” He started to reach for his breast pocket but couldn’t find whatever he was looking for. The old man began to plead: “She-she’s-my-author. My author.” More labored breathing. “You see?” Why was it always like this, two steps forward, one step back? Cormac felt lost once more, and frustration was rising in him again. “We’ll figure this out,” he said at last. “I’ll find some way to decipher it, I promise.”

The wail of an ambulance sounded, far away but fast approaching, and Cormac struggled to his knees. “Eliana’s managed to get through. She’s out in the shed with Anthony, I’m afraid he’s hurt.”

Joseph reached for him once more. “Stay. Stay.”

“Don’t worry,” Cormac said. “I’m going nowhere.”

9

Stella Cusack was flying down the N52 when she heard the keening of an ambulance and saw flashing lights overtake her on the narrow road. They turned off, headed for Killowen or Beglan’s place—there were no other options this way. She arrived in the yard at the Beglan farm a few seconds after the ambulance.

Eliana Guzmán was at the shed door. “Over here! A man is hurt!”

Cormac Maguire was coming out of the house with his father, the two of them staggering along like punters after a long night at the pub. “Help!” he shouted. “Someone help us.”

The ambulance crew split up, two in each direction. Stella headed for the Maguires.

“What’s happening here? Who’s hurt?”

“My father, and Anthony Beglan over in the shed. Someone tried to kill them. I don’t know who it was.” He held out his hand, revealing a half dozen gallnuts. “But someone tied my father up and stuffed these down his throat. If I hadn’t found him when I did…” He shook his head, trying not to imagine.

Stella said, “Did he keep repeating the same word to you?”

Maguire looked at her curiously. “How did you know that? Yes, he kept saying ‘Free Stater.’ Do you know what he meant?”

“I thought I had it figured out,” Stella said. “When I talked to him yesterday morning, he kept repeating that same word over and over, and I thought he was saying ‘fire starter.’ I believe he saw the person who lit the fire in the storehouse.”

“Jesus.”

“And that person saw him speaking to me—that’s why he was targeted. I’m so sorry. You didn’t happen to hear a car just now, before the ambulance arrived?”

“No, there was no car. Whoever did this must have left on foot.”

Molloy wouldn’t have tried to escape down the lane, Stella reasoned, since that was the way the police and ambulance would have to approach the farm. No, he’d head for the bog. Maybe he’d left his car there, out of sight of the farm.

As she set out toward the bog, Stella felt her soul begin to harden from the inside out. What on earth had possessed her? She felt ill, remembering how sorry she had felt for him, having to witness Anca Popescu’s terrible death, and realizing that he would have gotten away with it, too, if Catherine Friel hadn’t spotted his footprint on the girl’s body.

More sirens sounded in the lane; squad cars were on their way. What would she do if she found Molloy, if he tried to resist? She’d show him the same mercy he’d shown Anca Popescu.

The field in front of her started to slope downward, and a long row of furze bushes about a hundred yards away separated them now from the bog. Stella kept her eyes on the ground, letting her gaze sweep left and right, checking for bent grass, footprints, anything Molloy might have dropped along the way as he made his escape. About fifty yards from the hedgerow, she heard a low moan and glanced up, shocked to see a figure spread-eagled across the huge bank of furze. It was Molloy, hanging upside down, caught on the spiky thorns. He must have been running down the slope and somehow tripped and tumbled into the furze. When she reached the hedge, she saw that Molloy couldn’t move without two-inch barbs tearing into his flesh. “Help me, Stella,” he pleaded. “You’ve got to help me, please.”

She couldn’t move.

“For fuck’s sake, Stella!” he began to protest and then winced—every tiny movement caused a dozen fresh wounds. Blood was beginning to trickle from his face and hands. One barb had quite pierced his ear. It must have been extremely painful. Still, she didn’t move. She had to know.

“I know about the ‘accident’ on the mountain,” Stella said. She couldn’t bring herself to say his name. “You were in this all along, weren’t you? Right from the start. Even the assignment to the Antiquities Task Force, it was all just preparation. You deliberately kept those pictures from Interpol until you could warn your accomplices, and then you made it look as if they started the fire. But Maguire, the old man, saw you running away. You put those gallnuts in Dawson’s room, too, to cast suspicion on him.” She felt sick as the whole story came crashing in on her. Turning away from Molloy, she spied a group of uniformed officers at the top of the hill. They hadn’t seen her yet.

Molloy groaned as his weight pulled him into the thorns, and for the first time Stella noticed a cloth-wrapped bundle at the base of the furze bush. She inched closer, realizing that the canvas cloth was marked with bright drops of blood.

Reaching in, she brought the heavy bundle out and began to unwrap it, feeling a chill as she caught the first glimpse of intricate golden metalwork, the checkerboard patterns and knotwork designs, beautifully rounded letters cut into the border, and the glowing bloodred stone embedded in the cross at the center. She said, “This is it, the thing you were after? Tell me, was it worth all the people you had to destroy to get this? Kavanagh and Vincent Claffey, and Anca, that poor child—”

“Poor child?” Molloy tried to sneer through his grimace. “Who do you think helped Claffey blackmail everyone? Who do you think killed him?”

“And if she did, that’s supposed to justify what you’ve done, how you nearly killed two innocent human beings back there as well?” Stella pointed to Beglan’s farm. “At least you didn’t succeed this time. Jesus Christ, Fergal, why? You were a good cop.”

“I was a fuckin’ poor cop.” His voice was labored. “Look at your life, Stella. Can you blame me for wanting more? You can’t prove anything.”

Stella couldn’t bear any more. “Say you did it,” she demanded. “Say you killed Anca.”

“No. Just get me down.”

“Say you pushed Anca Popescu down the side of that mountain, or I swear to God I’ll call off the uniforms and leave you there to rot!” He would recant as soon as he was free, she had no doubt, but she needed to hear him admit his guilt. “Say it!”

“All right, all right! But you can’t put any of the rest of it on me, Stella. Claffey was dead when I got to him. I may have… rearranged the body, but I didn’t kill him. And I never laid a hand on Kavanagh, I swear. I knew nothing about him. You have to believe me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “I don’t have to believe anything you say ever again.”

She hailed the uniforms, and in a few seconds the officers were down the hill and stood gaping at the strange sight of a man hanging upside down in a thorn bush. Stella kept a hand raised to hold them off. Molloy’s eyes were focused not on her but on the crimson pool gathering on the ground below his head. “Christ, Stella, I’m bleeding to death here. You’ve got to help me, please!” The last word faded away into a whimper.

Stella moved deliberately, wrapping the golden shrine again in its canvas shroud. She looked into Molloy’s face, upside down, twisted in agony, and felt nothing but a cold, dead spot in the center of her chest as she recited the words of the caution and arrested her partner for the murder of Anca Popescu. When she had finished, Stella turned to the nearest uniform. “All right, call the paramedics and get him out of there. Don’t feel you have to rush.”

10

It was after three in the afternoon when Stella Cusack finished writing up her report on Molloy and all she knew about his involvement in the treasure-hunting ring and Anca Popescu’s death. He wasn’t badly hurt from the thorn bush but remained under arrest and under guard in hospital. How could she have been so blind and stupid? She desperately wanted to go home and have a shower, to wash off any particle of him that might remain upon her skin.

For some reason, she believed Molloy when he said he’d had nothing to do with Kavanagh’s death. No, for that piece of the puzzle, she’d reluctantly returned to her original theory, that Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy were somehow involved. There was the liar’s forked tongue for a start, not to mention the gallnuts and the burial in a protected bog, both elements they would know about from staying at Killowen. But Vincent Claffey couldn’t provide a witness statement about what he knew, and Anca Popescu’s lips were also closed forever. That left as her possible witness pool only the people at Killowen, all friends of Mairéad Broome, and one other person—Deirdre Claffey.

Stella thought back to the shock on Deirdre’s face when she’d seen Kavanagh’s photo. Flipping open her notebook, Stella found the number for Child Protection Services.

Fifteen minutes later, she was on her way to meet Noreen Kilpatrick, the specialist victim interviewer. The timing of the call was fortunate. The SVI was also on her way to interview Deirdre Claffey at one of their designated interview locations, a nondescript building in Limerick. Stella hadn’t undergone training to become an SVI, so she’d remain in the other room, but she would be able to watch Deirdre via camera and monitor system, and communicate with Kilpatrick through an earpiece.

The interview unfolded according to the prescribed protocols. Stella found herself only half listening, watching Deirdre Claffey’s body language as she answered questions about her family, the daily routines at home. Part of the process of the stripping away of ordinary, habitual behavior that trained interviewers used to get at the truth. The first speed bump was the girl’s mother. She’d left when Deirdre was only six.

“That must have been difficult,” Noreen Kilpatrick said. “Not having your mum around.”

“She didn’t love me,” Deirdre said. “If she loved me, she wouldn’t have gone away, would she?”

“What were things like for you, after your mum left?”

“All right,” Deirdre said. “My da and me, we managed. He never bothered me—that’s what you want to know, isn’t it? Well, he didn’t. I could see the way people looked at us, but it’s not true, any of it.” She began to cry. “My da loved me, he was looking out for me. Maybe he was rubbish at it, but at least he never ran away.”

The interviewer tried several different gambits, but Deirdre Claffey was steadfast and resolute in her denials. Stella had to admit she wasn’t surprised. A nasty rumor is a nasty rumor, as Deirdre herself had pointed out. But the girl was playing with a gold cross that hung on a slender chain around her neck. Stella hadn’t noticed it when she’d spoken to Deirdre before. She spoke into her tiny mike: “Can you ask her where she got that cross?”

“Did someone give you that necklace?” Kilpatrick asked.

Deirdre nodded. “Da gave me it. I had another one, a First Communion one from mum, but I lost it.”

Stella’s memory traveled back to the items in Kavanagh’s overnight case. The small gold cross with the engraved message, From Mum.

“Can you ask her about the child’s father?” Stella said quietly into her headpiece, and received a minute glance in response from inside the interview room.

“You were close to someone once, Deirdre,” Kilpatrick continued. “I’m talking about your child’s father. Where did you meet him? Does he know he has a son?”

The girl looked miserable. “I met him at our chapel. It’s not really ours, doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s out in a field beside the bog.”

“Was this chapel someplace you went often?”

Deirdre nodded.

Stella remembered with a pang her own desperate need for solitude at that age, and the field where she used to go, to lie down in the grass and feel the vast vault of heaven above her.

Deirdre continued, “One time I went there, and I met this man…”

“Can you tell me what happened, Deirdre? Just as much as you can remember.”

“He asked if I knew about the funny little picture of a man beside the doorway. And he showed me some letters. They weren’t ordinary letters—alpha and omega, he said they were called. The first and the last. I didn’t know what he meant.”

The girl’s voice had turned a bit dreamy as she remembered. “He was standing behind me, pointing to the letters, and then”—she closed her eyes, and her breathing changed as she remembered—“he said I had beautiful skin, and he put his fingers here.” She touched the side of her neck. “I remember he was shaking. And he asked if he could kiss me and I said yes. And then he asked if I would lie down in the grass with him, and I said yes to that, too. I wasn’t scared. I let him do everything. I wanted him to do it.”

“And that was the first time you met, at the chapel?”

Deirdre’s eyes were downcast. “The only time,” she whispered.

“And after that, Deirdre, how long was it before you realized that you’d fallen pregnant?” Kilpatrick asked gently.

“I just started feeling ill. I don’t really remember when it was.”

“Did you understand what was happening?”

“No. I didn’t know about any of that. Not until my da found out.”

“And what did your father say when he discovered you were going to have a child?”

Deirdre hesitated and looked up at the interviewer. Stella wanted to shake the girl and tell her: Your father is dead. There’s no need to protect him now.

“He was angry at first, but he never laid a hand on me, I swear. He just kept going on and on about this bein’ his ticket. His ticket. I don’t know what he was on about.”

“You didn’t understand what was happening?”

Deirdre brushed away a single tear. “Then I heard him on the phone.” Her voice was a whisper. “He said, ‘You’ll pay for your bastard, you tosser.’ He said he’d have money, and plenty of it, for me and the child—or he’d tell the whole world, anyone who’d listen.”

Kilpatrick cast a quick glance up at the camera, at Stella. “Deirdre, can you tell us his name, this man you met at the chapel?”

Deirdre’s fingers traced the edge of the table in front of her. “I don’t know his name. I never saw him again, until that lady from the Guards showed me his picture.”

“Kavanagh,” Stella breathed into her headset. “That’s the photo I showed her. Benedict Kavanagh.” But how would Claffey have known where to find Kavanagh? Unless he’d discovered who his daughter had met at the chapel from the camera he’d rigged up there, the same one he’d used to trap Niall Dawson. She’d just about written off Vincent Claffey as a suspect in Kavanagh’s murder, but this was further confirmation that he wasn’t involved. He’d have had no reason to bury that car in the bog if Kavanagh was about to become his cash cow for life. He must have been sore when the prospect of an easier life evaporated, and just when he was so close.

What would someone in Kavanagh’s position pay to keep an underage pregnant girl and her money-grubbing father well out of sight? Another possibility trickled into her brain: What if Kavanagh wasn’t at all put out by the news that he was going to be a father? What if he had embraced the possibility, welcomed it? He’d married Mairéad Broome when she was only eighteen, and she’d not given him any children. Perhaps this was his only chance to carry on the family line, and he was making plans to throw his wife over for this girl. Mairéad Broome claimed not to care about the Kavanagh family money, which might just mean that she did. Not to mention being shown up by some brainless poppet who’d only to open her legs once to get knocked up. A thing like that could push a person off the deep end.

11

The kitchen at Killowen filled slowly at dinnertime. There was no conversation, only people going about their mealtime preparations singly or in pairs. They’d all heard about Anca, and about Molloy. It would have been easier to stay apart, to take the blows of the latest discoveries in solitude, but there seemed to be a purpose in gathering around the table this evening above all others.

Cormac sat at one corner of the table, grating a lump of hard yellow cheese. At the opposite end, Nora cross-sectioned shallots into paper-thin slices for the salad. Martin and Tessa Gwynne were helping Shawn Kearney lay the table, while Claire and Diarmuid wrestled a trio of crisp herb-roasted chickens from the oven onto a serving platter. Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy joined the company, each bearing two bottles of wine.

Cormac pressed the block of parmigiano into the grater, watching short curls fall onto the plate below. His father and Eliana were still resting, worn out by the mayhem earlier in the day, and Anthony Beglan was spending the night in hospital. He’d received a nasty shock but was expected to make a full recovery. Niall Dawson slipped in from the sitting room and sat down across the table. He leaned forward and spoke under his breath. “Is it true, what I just heard—about Anca, and that detective, Molloy?”

“I’m afraid so,” Cormac said.

Dawson looked bereft. “I was going to try to talk to her, to apologize, something.” He stared at the table. Cormac didn’t know what to say.

After a moment, Dawson spoke again. “I’m going to see Cusack in the morning, to tell her I’m taking Killowen Man back to Dublin. She’s got what she needs from the site.”

Cormac glanced up to see Stella Cusack standing behind Niall. “Looks like you can tell her right now.”

“Apologies for the interruption,” Cusack said. “But I have a few more questions, particularly for you,” she continued, turning to Mairéad Broome. “When did you find out that your husband was the father of Deirdre Claffey’s child?”

Claire Finnerty reached out to her friend. “It’s all right, Mairéad.”

Mairéad Broome’s voice was quiet but strong. “Vincent Claffey informed me of that fact just after my husband went missing. It seems they’d had a… financial arrangement, but Mr. Claffey never had a chance to collect.”

“And that’s why Mr. Healy was paying him off when you arrived here?”

Mairéad Broome nodded. “I agreed to honor the arrangement he’d made with my husband, but I wanted to add one condition. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I don’t expect you to believe me, Detective.”

Graham Healy spoke. “What Mairéad wanted was to raise the child and to look after Deirdre as well, give her a better start in life. But Claffey was holding out for more money. He knew Mairéad would give anything to help the girl and her child.”

“It was the only way I could think to protect her, to get her away from that man. Deirdre will have to make her own decisions now, but Cal will eventually inherit the bulk of my husband’s estate, according to the terms of the family trust.”

“You all knew this,” Cusack said, issuing a challenge to the assembled Killowen residents.

“Mairéad has suffered enough,” Claire Finnerty said. “But you can’t accuse her of murder. For God’s sake, she loved Benedict. She’s still protecting him. Can you not see that?”

Mairéad Broome spoke quietly. “Please, Claire, that’s enough. We’ve been through it all, Detective. Graham and I were on the other side of the Slieve Bloom Mountains when my husband disappeared. I know we can’t prove that to your satisfaction, but it’s the truth.”

“And if I choose to believe you, then that means my investigation will have to focus elsewhere,” Cusack said. She looked in turn at each of the people around her. “Do you know what I’m beginning to think? That one of you deliberately brought Benedict Kavanagh here, knowing that it was the perfect opportunity to get rid of him, not only for your friend’s sake, but for your own. Or perhaps for all your sakes.”

The detective took a few more steps, walking behind Shawn Kearney, as she thought aloud. “I have my former colleague, Detective Molloy, to thank for some of what I’m about to tell you,” Cusack said. “Before the worm turned, he’d actually done some police work. You must have wondered where Vincent Claffey got all the material he used for blackmail. Molloy was supplying it. He used his position to dig into your backgrounds, your histories, and discovered that you were all running from something. He’d found out, for instance, that at least one of you is using an alias.” She stopped behind Claire Finnerty, who shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Cusack moved to the next person at the table, Diarmuid Lynch. “I even considered that Benedict Kavanagh’s death might have been carried out by more than one person. You all had reason to hate him—”

Lynch turned to face her. “Say whatever you’ve come to say, Detective.”

“All right.” Cusack continued on her circuit around the table. “We’ve had plenty of distractions, if you want to call them that. Book shrines and treasure hunters, ancient manuscripts, Vincent Claffey and his blackmail schemes. But it struck me just today that this whole case goes back to what sort of a man Benedict Kavanagh was. Intelligent, yes, but also arrogant, aggressive, blind to his faults, and more than willing to use other people in pursuit of his own aims.” Cusack stopped, fixing Martin Gwynne with a steady gaze. “But perhaps most telling was the evidence we found suggesting that Benedict Kavanagh was a serial seducer of young girls. Why did you insist on telling everyone that your daughter was dead, Mr. Gwynne? I can understand if the shame of attempted suicide was too much to bear—”

“No!” A jagged cry erupted from Tessa Gwynne. All eyes were on her as she leapt up from the table and tried to put herself between Stella Cusack and her husband. “No, it was never shame. I won’t have you saying that. And don’t look at him, don’t—Martin…”

Gwynne’s look pleaded with his wife. “Ah, Tess, you don’t know what you’re doing—”

“I know, my love. I do know.” She turned back to Cusack. “I think you have a daughter, Detective. You cannot know what you would do if someone… if someone brought such grievous harm to your child.”

Cusack said nothing.

Tessa Gwynne continued: “Our Derryth was such an open spirit, so gentle, so full of joy—”

“Until she met Benedict Kavanagh.”

“Until he destroyed her. She met him at that conference in Toronto where Martin spoke all those years ago. I’ve thought about it so much since then, all those philosophers wasting their breath arguing against the existence of evil when he was right there in their midst, that serpent, that villain—” She stumbled, but Cusack reached out to keep her upright. “Martin and I, we didn’t know what had happened. When we returned to England, she tried to stay in touch with him, this man to whom she’d given everything—everything—and he—” Her legs buckled and she fell against Cusack for support. “He tossed her aside, like so much rubbish. My beautiful, beautiful child. Only fifteen years old. And so she tried to kill herself, by swallowing these, a half dozen or more.” Tessa Gwynne brought a fistful of gallnuts from her pocket, her hand shaking. “She believed they were poisonous, you see, just kept shoving them down her throat until she couldn’t breathe anymore. It was too late when we found her, too late to reverse the damage. You see, don’t you, why I did what I had to do? I brought Benedict Kavanagh here. I didn’t know anything about Deirdre, or the baby. Mairéad, I swear, I meant to stop him sooner.”

“How did you manage to get Kavanagh down here to Killowen?” Cusack asked.

“It wasn’t difficult. I knew he wanted the book, you see, the fabled Book of Killowen. I knew he’d have done anything to get it. I heard Martin and Anthony talking about it and knew that Kavanagh wouldn’t be able to resist. So I rang and told him that what he was after was here, that it could be his for the right price. I told him to come and see the carving at the chapel, if he didn’t believe me.”

“The figure with the wax tablet,” Niall Dawson said. “The Greek letters. And the initials below, IOH—for Iohannes Scottus Eriugena.”

“And that was the first time Kavanagh came here, eighteen months ago?” Cusack asked.

“Yes. I’d whetted his appetite for the spoils but missed my chance to get him alone. He came, and saw the chapel, and then he escaped. I had to wait more than a year for another opportunity. I couldn’t fail this time. I rang again, asked him to meet me out on the bog, at night. I was to bring the book this time. He didn’t know me—who I was, what I was doing here. I showed him Martin’s copy of the old manuscript, and when he leaned into the boot for his case of money”—her muscles began to spasm, limbs jerking awkwardly—“I hit him,” she said, reliving the horror of it. “As hard as I could, and he crumpled, just like a marionette. I tied his hands and feet, and stopped his breath—one bitter serpent’s egg for every one my child had swallowed. After he was dead, I gave him a proper serpent’s tongue as well.” She fell to her knees, arms and shoulders writhing, her face a grimace.

Martin Gwynne dropped to his knees beside her. “Tessa, no!”

“What’s wrong with her?” Shawn Kearney asked. “Why is she shaking like that?”

Nora darted forward and seized Tessa’s wrist. “Mrs. Gwynne, have you taken something? You must tell us.”

Tessa Gwynne pushed her away. “Leave me alone. Let me talk.” She turned to Cusack again. “You wanted to know about the car, how I managed to bury it. My father was in construction. He taught me himself how to handle a JCB. Always said I was the neatest excavator he’d ever had.”

“And you came across the bog man when you were digging the cutout for Kavanagh’s car,” Cusack said.

Tessa Gwynne nodded, her lips curling back once more in a ghastly grin. “I had no choice, had to put him in the boot. No one would have found them, but for Vincent Claffey grubbing after money in moor peat.” Her breaths were coming shallower. “I’m not sorry he’s dead. As bad as the other, the way he used Anca, his own daughter.” Tessa Gwynne cried out as her body convulsed, her back arching uncontrollably.

Nora took her wrist again, this time checking for a pulse. “Mr. Gwynne, has your wife taken something?”

“I don’t know,” Gwynne replied helplessly.

Nora looked around at the circle of anxious faces. “Did she swallow anything in the last few minutes? Did anyone see?”

Martin Gwynne wept as he tried to still his wife’s body, now wracked with spasms. “I didn’t think… she takes so many tablets. My wife hasn’t been herself these last few months, she’s been ill. Oh, Tessa, my lovely Tess.”

His wife looked up at him, between spasms now, and raised a hand to his face. “I had hoped… all this would pass, and you would never know… but how could I let you or anyone else take the blame? You see that, don’t you, my love? Don’t forget—” Tessa Gwynne’s back arched once more, until it seemed as if her spine would snap. Her husband clasped her to his chest, but her eyes were staring, vacant now. Stella Cusack turned away, her head bowed.

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