by Erin Hart
She opened her rucksack and felt around until her fingers found the flat bundle she sought, wedged up against one side. She drew it out, and slowly unwrapped a long-bladed knife, admiring the way the metal glowed dully in the moonlight. Sitting hidden in the hedge, feeling the blood pulsing through her temples and her breath slowly flowing in and out, Rachel suddenly realized that she had never felt more alive.
Book Three
SPEAKING IN RIDDLES
They speak in riddles, hinting at things, leaving much to be understood.
—the Greek philosopher Poseidonius, writing about the Celts in the first century B.C.
1
When her alarm sounded at seven, Nora was first conscious of the fresh air coming in through the open window. She felt warm and comfortable in the bed, aware of Cormac’s weight beside her. She resisted getting up right away; instead she turned to face him, luxuriating in this temporary illusion of domesticity. It was quite usual for her to fall asleep before he did, and that, added to the fact that they hadn’t spent many nights together in the first place, meant she hadn’t had many opportunities to study him as he slept. It was lovely seeing him so relaxed and oblivious, since that wasn’t the usual picture she had of him. His hair was pushed into odd tufts where it rested against the pillow. She admired the natural embouchure of his lips that she found so pleasing, the slight concavity of the unshaven cheeks; her eyes lingered for a long while on the tiny whitened scar at the edge of his hairline. Her heart suddenly squeezed tight as a fist, thinking of all the stories she had not yet had a chance to know.
When she noticed a small smear of dried blood on the pillowcase, she suddenly remembered Detective Ward’s plaster-patched shaving cut a few days earlier. Pushing the covers aside, she examined Cormac’s neck and chest. No apparent wound. Then he stirred and turned over, and she saw three red lines on the side of his neck, fresh enough that they were still caked with a small amount of blood. She looked at her own fingernails, cut short. How could she have done that to him without knowing? But how else could he have acquired them? She tucked the duvet around him again. If she had hurt him, he had not complained.
Unwilling to wake him so early, she slid out of bed, slipped quickly into her jeans and work shirt, and carried her shoes downstairs. She moved around the kitchen, noting the dishes all washed and stacked neatly in the drainer. He’d been up again last night while she was asleep, tidying the kitchen, the books and papers on his work table. While she waited for the coffee to brew, she made some sandwiches to take out to the bog for lunch, and thought again about the night before: the fairy bush, her feeling that some mischief was afoot. Cormac hadn’t seemed at all surprised when she’d finally told him she was leaving. He said he had always known—just as she had. But knowing didn’t make it any easier.
When the coffee was ready, she poured it into her travel mug, added a drop of milk, and took it out to the car. Maybe it would be best to leave her files here today; that way Cormac could get started looking through them if he felt like it. She set the coffee in the car and went around to the trunk to unload her files. Lugging the heavy box into the house, she noticed that Cormac’s waterproofs, which had been hanging on the hook outside the back door, were no longer there. It seemed curious. Why would he have moved them since last night? She didn’t have time to puzzle over it at the moment. She was going to be late for her shift, sorting through drain spoil again today.
She knew her way to the bog by now, through the maze of crooked, unmarked lanes and hedge-choked byways. The distance was only a mile and a quarter, but the journey took at least fifteen minutes on these small roads. The power plant’s strange, enormous towers were always a marker in the landscape. Cormac had been coming here for years, and must know every knoll and back road. Last night, from the hilltop, he’d given her a glimpse into the life of the place, into all the human activity—large and small—that had scratched the surface here.
She was approaching the house that Cormac had pointed out as Ursula’s temporary home. Why did the woman make her so uneasy? Ursula’s face rose up in Nora’s memory, and for some reason she remembered the tissue in Cormac’s bathroom bin, the soft, sensual impression of a woman’s lips. She tried to banish the thought from her mind, but it clung like a cobweb to the edge of her consciousness.
It wasn’t until she was past Ursula’s house that Nora registered something odd about it. Checking to make sure that no one was behind her on the road, she slowly backed up to take a closer look. Her fleeting impression had been right; the front door was standing wide open, and what she presumed to be the sitting-room window was smashed.
Nora parked the car as far off the road as she could. She opened the trunk and reached for the tire iron, then slowly made her way up around the back of the house. The kitchen window was also broken, and the back door and shed door were wide open as well. Something was definitely not right here. Ursula should have been down on the bog already, and she wouldn’t have left all the doors open. The house was still.
Nora approached, tire iron in hand, checking for broken glass on the ground. A few clumps of moss bloomed on the concrete foundation, and a painted clay drainpipe emerged from the wall under the bathroom window, probably from the tub or shower. She heard the drip, drip, drip of the pipe before tracing it all the way to the drain at the bottom, and looking down she felt a sharp electric jolt of fear. The small pool below the drain was dark crimson with blood. There was no mistaking the color.
She entered by the back door. A wine bottle and two glasses, one empty and one half-full, stood on the kitchen table. A few drops of blood spattered the floor in front of the sink and one of the chairs near the table. Nora moved quietly down the hall to the bathroom, barely breathing, and she looked in through the open door, unprepared for the full horror that awaited her there.
Ursula’s wrists and ankles rested on the lip of the claw-footed tub, pale as porcelain. Her body was submerged beneath the water’s surface, and mounds of peat had been heaped all around the base of the tub. The stillness, the strange and terrible intimacy of the scene before her, was so surreal that it took a moment to register. Then the natural flood of confusion and horror broke loose, and a thousand jumbled thoughts began rushing through Nora’s head: she shouldn’t be in here, she should phone the police immediately, she should get out, call Cormac, run away and hide. What if someone was still in the house?
Listening closely for any noise, she fought her fear and edged closer to the bathtub. Her conscious mind understood that it was too late, but she checked for a pulse inside Ursula’s left ankle just to be sure, and found the pale skin cold to the touch. Nora withdrew her hand and cast her eyes around the bathroom. They would ask her to describe exactly what she had seen. Nothing was registering but the peat, the blood on the wall, and the pale, cold limbs emerging from the water. She forced herself to turn and look, to concentrate on the white tiles, the strange green walls, the purple bathrobe lying on the floor beside the tub, the single bare bulb that hung on a wire from the ceiling, the black peat under Ursula’s fingernails. Several candles on the windowsill had burned down and guttered out. Nora backed out of the bathroom slowly with the tire iron still in one hand, trying to hold the scene in her mind. The faucet dripped slowly, and nothing else moved, only the bright clear water steadily dripping into crimson, counting the seconds.
She had worked with death almost daily for years, but there was nothing between her and this death, no buffer, no intention on the part of the deceased to become the object of scrutiny, and somehow that made all the difference. Her presence here felt like an affront to dignity. She reached into her jacket pocket, fumbling for her mobile phone, and dialed 999 for emergency services. While the forefront of her mind calmly answered the operator’s questions, under the surface coursed a fearful, dark tumble of thoughts. Her memory replayed the angry gestures between Ursula and Owen Cadogan, his hand around her throat, her fists pushing him away. She remembered the confrontation, the threats Ursula
had made to Charlie Brazil. But what was the pile of peat supposed to mean, unless—Nora’s stomach churned when she thought of the strange way Danny Brazil had met his death. She leaned over the tub again to look at the still corpse beneath the water, and this time she saw the thin leather strand that encircled Ursula’s throat, its dark line broken by three knots.
2
The house and yard were swarming with Guards. Soon they would be replaced by scene-of-crime officers going over the minutiae like white-clad ants, carrying bits of evidence away to their own anthill. Nora sat waiting to give her statement to Detective Ward, wishing that they would just let her go home. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed, to go to sleep and wake up again, start the whole day over, and find this nightmare vanished.
“Thank you for staying, Dr. Gavin. We’ll eventually need to get a detailed statement from you, but at this point it would be helpful if you could just tell me what happened this morning. What made you decide to stop and look in here?”
Nora’s mind went back to the moment she’d seen the open door. What synapse made a person do or not do something? What if she hadn’t seen the door standing open, or it had been open to a lesser angle? Would she have noticed, or flown past as she’d done all the previous days she’d been here? Had knowing this was Ursula’s house made her more observant? “I don’t know, really. I saw the door standing open, and I thought it was odd. I thought something might be wrong.”
“Did you know who was stopping here?”
“Yes, I knew that Ursula Downes was staying here for the excavation season.”
“How did you know?”
For some reason she felt a bit nonplussed. “Cormac Maguire told me last night.”
“And how did he know that this was Ms. Downes’s residence, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Why did she mind the question so much? “I’m not sure how he knew. He never mentioned their acquaintance specifically, but I believe they knew each other from years back. Archaeology is a small field. Everyone knows everyone.”
“I see,” Ward said, and Nora knew he was making a note to put Cormac on his interview list. “Why don’t you take me through what happened, from the time you saw the open door?” His brown eyes were not unkind, and she told herself that he had to be open to every possibility—even those that seemed extremely unlikely. Of course he had to look at Cormac. He’d probably have to interview everyone within a five-mile radius. She took a deep breath and plunged in, recounting all the details she could remember: the broken window, the drops of blood on the kitchen floor, the wine bottle on the table, her panicky journey down the corridor, and the jangling fear she had felt pushing the bathroom door open with the tire iron. She couldn’t seem to go on.
“I’ll let you go very soon,” Ward said, “but I have to ask you, Dr. Gavin, where you were last night. Perhaps you’d oblige me, and go back to the time I left the house after talking with you and Dr. Maguire.”
“We ate dinner after you left, then Cormac took me to the top of the hill behind the cottage. That was when he pointed out all the neighboring houses.”
“And then?”
“We came home and went to bed. ”
“What time would you say that was?”
“About ten forty-five, I suppose, maybe eleven.”
“So you were together the whole evening, and all night?” When Nora looked up at him, he tried to reassure her: “Absolutely routine questions; I don’t want to assume anything. I just need the facts.”
“Yes.” Nora thought of the clear evidence she’d seen this morning that Cormac had been awake and moving about the house.
“You didn’t wake up in the night? Didn’t go to the loo, or to get a glass of water?”
She wondered if Ward could see her hesitation. “No, I’d been working out on the bog all day, and I was exhausted. I didn’t wake until the alarm went off this morning.”
“How well did you know Ursula Downes, Dr. Gavin?”
“Not well at all. I only met her a couple of days ago, out on the bog. We hadn’t really spoken very much.”
“And what about Dr. Maguire? How well was he acquainted with Ursula Downes?”
“As I said, they may have worked together some time ago. I don’t really know.”
“I realize you’ve been here only a few days, but in that time, were you aware of anyone who may have wished her harm?”
Nora hesitated again. “I don’t know about wishing harm; I can only tell you about things I witnessed.”
“Go ahead,” Ward said, interested.
“Ursula didn’t seem to be on especially good terms with Owen Cadogan, the bog manager. I saw them talking on a couple of occasions, and neither was what you’d call a cordial conversation. At one point, Cadogan had his hand around Ursula’s throat. I couldn’t tell if he was threatening her or not, and when I asked whether everything was all right, she basically told me to back off and mind my own business. The next day, when Cadogan arrived at the site, Ursula tore into him. I don’t know why; I couldn’t hear what she was saying. And she hit him, a slap in the face. She seemed absolutely furious, but you’ll have to ask Cadogan why.”
“Anything else?”
Nora watched Ward noting all this in his book. If she was so willing to tell him everything she’d witnessed between Ursula and Owen Cadogan, why not mention the conversation she’d overheard between Ursula and Charlie Brazil?
“If that’s all—”
“It isn’t, actually.” She might regret this but it was too late now. “I also overheard a conversation a couple of days ago between Ursula and one of the Bord na Mona men, Charlie Brazil. She had—” It was going to sound ridiculous enough, without mentioning how Ursula had wrestled him to the ground. “She said that she’d been watching him, that she knew what he was hiding. And it seemed as though she was threatening to expose whatever it was if he didn’t do what she wanted.”
“And what was that?”
“She wasn’t really specific. She just said that he should come and see her, after dark.”
Ward took all this in impassively, making a few notes in his book. “Anything else?” Nora shook her head, wondering why it was that she had left out Ursula’s reference to Brona Scully. She told herself she couldn’t be positive, and for some reason she felt a fierce protectiveness toward a girl she’d never even met. “You can go home now if you wish, Dr. Gavin. If you wouldn’t mind coming down to the station this afternoon, we can finish taking a complete formal statement then. Thank you for your cooperation.”
As Ward made his way back to the house, Nora saw one of the Guards at the gate turn to address someone approaching from the road. The lanky stranger had blunt, handsome features—a slightly flattened nose, down-turned lips, and a square jaw—and his short steel gray hair was combed straight back over the crown of his head. He wore a long gray raincoat that reached below his knees, and carried a black attache case. Another detective? Not likely. He didn’t seem like a reporter—too mature and too well-dressed for this sort of assignment—and it was a bit early for that, in any case. She heard the young Garda say, “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t let you in without an okay from the boss.”
“Where’s Ursula?” the man in the raincoat asked. “Has something happened to her? Tell me what’s going on here.”
The officer looked at the attache case. “You her brief, sir?”
The man looked at the young Garda as if he’d never encountered a greater class of imbecile. “No, I am not her ‘brief.’ Is there someone in charge of you here? I insist that you let me speak to the officer in charge.”
Ward had evidently overheard and strode toward them. “Detective Liam Ward. I’m in charge of the scene. And you are—”
“Desmond Quill. I’m a friend of Ursula’s, and I demand to know exactly what’s going on here.”
“If you’d step this way, Mr. Quill.” Ward’s calm demeanor withstood the waves of anger directed toward him. The two men stopped a short di
stance away, and Nora watched Ward speaking very quietly to Quill. There was a brief silence, then Quill’s head tipped forward and the case he gripped in his left hand dropped abruptly to the ground. Ward reached out to steady him, but he pushed the policeman’s arm away, rubbing his brow with one hand as the other, the one that had held the attache case, slid up and down his side as if searching blindly for his raincoat pocket.
3
Nora drove in stunned silence back to the Crosses. She felt her right foot pushing too hard on the brake, as if she could stop time and back up to the previous evening when she had stood wrapped in the aura of that magical tree, when, for one brief shining instant, everything had seemed so right and possible.
When she pulled in beside the cottage, it seemed impossible that she should be reaching to open the car door, entering the house. All these mundane, thoughtless acts seemed somehow surreal after the bizarre and terrifying tableau she had just witnessed. And yet it was all real, all of it: Ursula’s blood on the wall was as real as the birds in the trees outside the windows, as real as Cormac sitting at his desk inside the cottage. He stood up as she came through the door.
