by Erin Hart
“Nora, what are you doing home? Is everything all right?”
“I never made it to the bog. I only got as far as Ursula’s house. She’s dead, Cormac.”
Nora wasn’t sure what sort of reaction she expected. What should a person say when presented with such news? He took a step backward, a deep crease furrowing his forehead, and looked into her eyes, searching for a sign that she was telling the truth. When she nodded, his head dropped forward and words finally escaped within a long, slow exhalation. “Ah, no. No.”
“She’s been murdered.”
This brought Cormac fresh anguish. He lunged forward and seized her by the arms. “How do you know, Nora?”
As his fingers pressed into her arms, she found his reaction beginning to alarm her. She tried to wrest one arm out of his tightening grasp. “Because I found her body.”
All his urgency dissolved in an instant. He folded his arms tight around her and whispered through her hair. “Ah, Nora. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you all right?” He pulled back to look into her face, to see for himself.
“I’ll be all right. But what about you—are you all right, Cormac?”
He didn’t answer for a moment; he looked away, the muscles in his jaw tensing. He finally looked back at her, and she could feel the anxiety that radiated from his eyes. “Nora, there’s something you need to know right away. I was over at Ursula’s last night. I’m responsible.”
She received the force of that blunt statement as though she’d been struck in the face.
He realized his poor choice of words immediately. “No, no, I didn’t—I wasn’t even there very long. Maybe fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. She was fine when I left, Nora.” He shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. “But I am responsible, you see. She rang me up on the mobile after you’d gone to sleep, just after midnight. I was here in the kitchen, finishing the washing up. Ursula said she’d heard someone outside the house and asked me to come over. She wouldn’t phone the police or the emergency services. I didn’t know what else to do. She sounded a bit drunk, and she seemed genuinely frightened. I was just going to try to calm her down, get her to ring the Guards.
“I thought something was off as soon as I stepped inside the door. The kitchen window had been smashed. She was trying to clean it up, and she’d cut herself pretty badly in the process; it was a nasty gash, and I ended up with blood all over my clothes from helping her bind it up. When I came back from putting away the bandages, Ursula was calmly pouring two glasses of wine, as if nothing had happened. I asked her what the hell was going on, and she said something about how shockingly simple it was to mislead a decent man.” He colored deeply. “I thought she’d made it up—the prowler. I thought she’d broken the window herself.”
“So what happened?” Nora felt a hand tightening around her heart, the familiar signature of her old enemy, regret.
“When I told her that there was no way I was staying for a drink, I don’t know what happened—she just went off.” Cormac’s anguish and humiliation were evident from the red flush that burned in his ears. “I turned to leave, and she came at me from behind. All I wanted was to get the hell away from there. I tried to shake her off, but she got in a good swipe at me, enough to draw blood.” He put one hand to his injured throat. “All I know is that she was alive when I left, Nora. Halfway up the hill I looked back. I could see her standing there in the kitchen. She was holding up a wine glass and laughing at me.”
He leaned back into the wall and sagged against it for support. On the left side of his neck Nora could see the three distinct scratches, still raw-looking. All at once she remembered the smear on his pillow.
“You’ll have to go to the police right away.”
“Yes. Of course.”
An expectant silence hung in the air, and Nora could sense that she hadn’t heard everything he had to tell. “There’s something else. What is it, Cormac?”
He closed his eyes and drew another breath. “It’s bound to come out when I talk to the Guards, and I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else.” He looked straight into her eyes. “I should have told you before now, Nora, and I apologize for that. Ursula and I were very briefly—involved, a long time ago. We were both graduate students, working out here with Gabriel. It only lasted for a few weeks one summer. I broke it off when I realized that Ursula was not…” He searched for the right words. “…not as honorable a person as I had imagined.”
“And that was something you couldn’t figure out before sleeping with her?” His eyes flashed, and she gazed into the wound her words had opened, quick as a blade. “I’m sorry, Cormac, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
“Not entirely. I don’t know what made me go over there last night. When she stopped by on Sunday evening, I thought there was something different about her. She seemed calmer, more thoughtful. I thought perhaps she’d changed a little. Maybe she had, maybe she hadn’t; maybe it was all an act.”
She had been here. The lipstick-stained tissue in the bathroom bin—Ursula had left it there, deliberately planting seeds of doubt. Nora’s mind crashed back through all the sly looks she’d received the past few days; Ursula had been probing, checking to see whether those seeds had taken root.
“I should have stayed last night. Maybe Ursula would still be alive if I’d just taken the time to talk to her and calm her down.”
Cormac paused for a moment. “I wanted you to know what really happened before things get crazy. Because they will get crazy; I think we can count on that. But I didn’t hurt her, Nora. I would never—”
His dark eyes overflowed with remorse and supplication, and it seemed as though he was waiting for a response, for her to say something reassuring—Of course, of course you wouldn’t. But she was thinking: No one knows what he’s capable of until it’s done and he’s face-to-face with it. People snap, they do stupid things, they don’t think. Her throat felt thick; no words would come.
“Please say something, Nora.”
She was suddenly aware that she was pressing her fingernails into tightly clenched fists. She uncurled her hands, and tried to unclench her stomach as well. He reached out and gripped her wrist. “I know. I know it’s a crazy, stupid story. No one will believe me, and I don’t blame them. But I can only tell you what truly happened.”
She looked into the deep brown pools of his eyes, then down at the fingers encircling her forearm—the same fingers that had coaxed such wild, furious music from his flute, that had touched her and stroked her hair when she wept. “We’ll get all this sorted,” was all she said. But she could see the relief break over his face like a wave.
4
Ward stood for a moment in the light streaming through Ursula Downes’s missing kitchen window. It had been a huge window of plate glass, unshaded. Must have seemed like a lighted stage to someone looking in at night. He looked out the window at the rise of the back garden, saw the sagging wires on the clothesline vibrate in the wind. He checked the locks on the back door, one of those that latch without a key, and a separate dead-bolt. Both front and back doors had been left open. Neither one had been forced, which meant that Ursula Downes’s killer either had a key or was someone known to her, someone she would have let into the house. Or the killer could have just entered through the smashed window. Most of the glass had been cleared away; there was a broom in the corner and the bin was full of broken plate glass. He drew out one shard with gloved fingers, and noticed tiny droplets of what appeared to be red spray paint on the glass. “Can we have a closer look at this?” he asked the first crime-scene technician who passed by. “Reconstruct the glass and see if it’s graffiti or writing of some kind?”
The tech nodded and took the bin of broken glass. Ward turned his attention to the presses. Lots of tea and a few tins of beans and sardines, but the fridge was empty except for milk and several nearly empty take-away containers. Ursula Downes was not a cook, apparently.
In the sitting room, marks on the carpet look
ed as if someone had been moving the furniture recently—covering up a violent struggle, or looking for something? Ursula Downes had not left a large imprint on her temporary lodging; there weren’t many personal items in the sitting room. He had a suspicion that her flat in Dublin wouldn’t be that much homier than this. She didn’t seem the type to go in for soft cushions.
A rucksack sat on the floor next to the table. He picked it up and unzipped the front pocket, and found a single lipstick, a mobile phone, a diary. The precious details that would help him unlock her life and death were here, waiting to be winnowed. He bagged the rucksack as evidence—he’d take it with him and have a closer look at the station.
Suddenly a white-garbed officer appeared at his elbow. “Dr. Friel’s ready for you, sir.”
Ward took several slow, deep breaths before walking into the bathroom where the body was. The scene-of-crime officers had removed and bagged the peat to allow Dr. Friel better access to the body. Ursula Downes’s pale corpse was still partly submerged in the tub. The cloying smell of blood hung in the air. For him, the odor of death was usually worse than the sight of the body, but he wasn’t prepared for this one. A thin black thong cut into the flesh of her neck just below the chin, and below it gaped a dreadful wound.
“Not a very deep ligature,” said Dr. Friel, beside him. “Possibly not done to kill her, but to cut off airflow temporarily, or to control the bleeding. And there are three knots in the cord.”
“Just like Danny Brazil.” Ward mentally went through the list of people who would have known about the ligature on the previous victim. “What about the slashing?”
“Almost certainly a right-handed person, from the angle of the cut and the spatter.”
“So you believe she was alive when her throat was cut?”
“Yes; look at the pattern on the wall. Very definitely arterial bleeding.” Ward looked where Dr. Friel’s eyes pointed, at the deep rust-red plumes on the wall. He counted: one, two, three, four, five. How long had her heart carried on beating before she died? Whoever had done this hadn’t gotten away clean, he thought. He looked down at Ursula’s wrists and ankles, still resting on the bathtub’s gracefully rounded lip. “Any other visible injuries?”
“Just a gash inside the left hand here.” She pointed to an incised wound between the thumb and forefinger. “It’s a very recent cut, and the strange thing about it is that there are traces of cotton thread in the wound, as if it had been bound, but the bandage was removed. There may also be some skin and blood under the nails of her left hand. I won’t be able to tell for certain until we get to the PM. She may have been unconscious, just this side of asphyxiation, when her throat was cut.”
“And the knife found on the floor?”
“They’ll have to test it, of course, but I’d bet it’s not the murder weapon.”
“Why’s that?”
“The blade is serrated. According to everything I see, her throat was cut with a nonserrated blade.”
Ward took this in. “Anything else, anything—I don’t know—unusual?”
“Well, you’re looking for a dull blade. Not new—maybe an antique; a kind of metal that doesn’t hold a sharp edge for long.” Ward raised his eyebrows in query. “Not that difficult to determine. Dull knives make for rough wounds.”
“And how long has she been dead, would you say?”
“Based on general rigor and lividity in the limbs, I’d say roughly eight to twelve hours. But the fact that she’s been mostly submerged in cold water gives us a larger margin of error. I should have the PM finished by early evening, if you want to check back with me then. You have my mobile number?”
As he left the scene behind, Ward reflected that sometimes the only witness they had to a horrific crime like this was the victim herself. It was fortunate for him, he thought, how well a body remembers. He removed his gloves before leaving the house and placed them carefully in his raincoat pocket. Stepping out the back door, he heard a noise, like pouring water, and saw a crimson pool spreading out from the peat-clogged drain. He shouted to the officers standing beside the thing, but it was too late; their shoes had been surrounded.
“Detective Ward!” a voice rang out from a few yards away. “We’ve got something over here.” The uniformed Garda hoisted the stick he’d been using to probe at the thick grass and held aloft a pair of green binoculars. Ward strode over to take a closer look, putting his gloves back on and pulling an evidence bag out of his pocket.
The binoculars were compact and waterproof, with a cloth strap—the sort you might imagine hunters would use, he thought. Had someone been watching Ursula Downes last night, waiting for his chance to strike? “Good work, Moran.” Ward held up the polythene bag, and Moran let the binoculars slide into it. “Make sure you mark the spot and let the crime-scene boys document this area.” He was nearly back at the house when another voice called from about fifty yards away. “Detective? I’ve something else here, sir.” Ward turned on his heel and charged up the slope toward the sound of the officer’s voice, through a gap in the hedge that defined the boundary of the pasture.
“I was just putting my stick down at the base of the hedge when I saw the yellow color, sir. There was this huge stone on top, so I shifted it and found this.” Ward folded himself into a crouch to look at the spot where the Garda officer was pointing. Beside the large stone was a flattened waterproof jacket of heavy rubberized yellow canvas, like those worn by fishermen and by some of the archaeologists on the bog excavation. The jacket’s right sleeve was spattered with blood. Ward pulled out a pen and flipped over the tag just inside the neck to see the owner’s name written in block capitals: MAGUIRE.
He hadn’t even had time to formulate any ideas about this strange turn of events when the mobile in his pocket began to ring. The duty officer reported that a Dr. Maguire had just rung, and would be coming in at three to give a statement on the Ursula Downes case. Not before time, Ward thought, looking down again at the blood-spattered jacket. He quickly returned to the house and finished up with the crime-scene team. As he climbed into his car, he found himself running through the questions they’d ask Maguire in the interview room. It was an elaborate form of negotiation—not unlike diplomacy or even courtship, he’d often thought—with each side trying to find out how much the other knew, how much had already been given away. His fingers thrummed a steady rhythm on the steering wheel as he drove the short distance to the excavation site. He hoped questioning the archaeology team wouldn’t take too long. He couldn’t wait to hear what Maguire had to say.
5
Ward arrived at the excavation site at a quarter past eleven, and was greeted by the uniformed officer who stood to one side of the sturdy wooden steps leading up to the door of the tea hut. Maureen was already there, taking the team’s names and addresses down in her notebook. Five pairs of eyes followed Ward as he took a chair at the far end of the table, which was littered with boxes of teabags, biscuit packets, and several open milk containers. Someone had made a pot of tea, and several of them warmed their hands on mugs. Their faces were reddened from sun and wind. There was a reason they were all so young, Ward thought as he looked around the room at the apprehensive faces. The work was physically hard, temporary, grim, seasonal—a stepping-stone to other things, not an end in itself. Was he getting old, that they all looked so unformed to him, so unmarked by experience? The shed where they sat was a flimsy trailer; he could hear and feel the wind outside, trying to blow away the whole structure, this paltry affront to its power. Even if it didn’t blow them away, the wind always succeeded, eventually, in wearing down the people who worked here. Soon enough they would all be gone, replaced by others, and the constant wind would still be blowing over the face of the earth.
Ward was acutely aware that he had to treat even such an inexperienced group as potential suspects, until they could safely be eliminated. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about what’s happened,” he began.
“Nothing,” said a stocky
lad with close-cropped sandy hair and large gray eyes. “We’ve heard nothing at all. We’ve been here working all morning, and all we know is that we were told to come in here and give our names.” Ward looked down through the list Brennan had handed him, and she pointed to a name: Tony Gardner.
“Then I’m sorry to have to tell you. Ursula Downes was found dead this morning, and it appears that she’s been murdered.”
He could feel the collective jolt as his words registered around the room. He watched their faces for a reaction, that familiar first denial, parrying reality’s brutal thrust, as if a simple “no” could reverse the facts. Such news was always too immense, too illogical, too impossible to accept. “I can’t tell you any more at the moment, except to say that we’ve been in contact with your employers, and they’re sending someone from the firm out here straightaway. I’m here to ask you a few questions about Ursula, and about your work here, to see if we can find a reason anyone might have had to wish her harm. What happened when she didn’t show up at the site this morning?”
Gardner replied for the group: “Nothing. I mean, we didn’t think anything of it, because she wasn’t meant to be here this morning. She was taking the day off, she said—a long weekend. I’m not sure if she was going home to Dublin or somewhere else. She didn’t tell us her plans.”
“So the last time you saw Ursula was—”
“Yesterday evening when we were finishing up here.” Maureen pointed to another name: Trish Walpole. She was an English girl in her early twenties, as Ward guessed most of them were. The natural color in her face had been heightened by the sun, and her fair hair was streaked and layered like straw from the constant wind. She played with a teaspoon as she spoke. “We all took the minibus back to the digs, and I presume Ursula went home as well. She had her own car.”
Beside Trish was a quiet young woman with long dark hair and frightened eyes, who sat on her hands and never looked up. Ward looked down through his list again: Sarah Cummins. This must be terrifying for some of them, perhaps their first time away from home.
