by Erin Hart
“Tell me more about that case,” Maureen said. “You said you worked on it?”
“I’d only been here about three years. There were three separate incidents, two lambs and a kid goat killed in some apparent ritual sacrifice. It was bad—you’ve seen the file. I had a suspicion at the time that Charlie Brazil was probably just a convenient scapegoat. Now I’m not so sure.”
“What about Maguire?” Brennan turned the pages of her notebook to their most recent interview. “He says Ursula Downes reported a prowler and asked him to come over and investigate, which he did. He says she’d cut herself on glass from the kitchen window, which was broken when he arrived, and he got blood on his clothing when he helped her bind up the wound.”
“There was a fairly deep cut on Ursula’s left hand. We should ask Dr. Friel to check for any fragments of glass in the wound.”
“Right, but Maguire also admits that it’s his skin under the victim’s fingernails. He claims she attacked him when he questioned her story about the prowler and refused to stay any longer. He says he put his bloodstained clothing into the washing machine when he arrived home. Claims he doesn’t know what happened to his waterproof gear. He did keep it outside the back door of the house where anyone might have taken it. And why would you wear your own kit if you’re planning to kill someone? Wouldn’t you get a nice disposable mac? But I suppose that sort of mistake makes sense if it was a crime of passion, spur-of-the-moment. You’ve done the deed; you’re covered in blood, and for some reason you can’t take the time to get rid of the evidence. So you plant the waterproofs somewhere and hope someone will buy the idea that you’re being stitched up.”
Ward remembered the plumes of blood on Ursula Downes’s bathroom wall. She had probably been unconscious but still alive when her throat was cut, a fact that didn’t square with Maureen’s spur-of-the-moment theory. And the tableau, all that peat heaped around the bathtub, also smacked of ritualistic obsession, not crime of passion. “But why bring the waterproofs in the first place? It wasn’t raining on Thursday evening. And what about motive? Maguire admits he was involved with Ursula Downes years ago, but it doesn’t seem to have been a terrible secret. Not worth killing for.”
“Maybe it’s something else. They’re both archaeologists; maybe it’s professional. She knows something about him that he doesn’t want other people to know—something to do with his academic work, his research; something that might compromise his career, his ambitions to be department chairman one day. We’ve got to at least check him out.”
“Agreed. Let’s add him to the list for the boys in Dublin, get some background on him.”
“It would be so nice and simple if it was Maguire.”
“Wouldn’t it, though? Somehow I doubt this case is going to untangle that easily. I keep going back to this thing with the three knots,” Ward said. “Both bodies found in the bog had knotted leather cords around their necks. One’s a couple of thousand years old, one’s more recent. But the cord was how the newer body was identified; Teresa Brazil said her brother-in-law Danny always wore a similar cord with three knots, some sort of good luck charm. And then, three days after Danny’s body turns up, somebody strangles Ursula Downes with the same sort of triple-knotted cord. Both also had their throats cut. One was found in a bog, one in a bathtub that had been heaped around with peat.”
“What’s the peat supposed to mean, do you think?”
“Dr. Gavin mentioned at Danny Brazil’s postmortem that his injuries were very like some she’d seen on ancient corpses from bogs—like the one that turned up here last Friday. She said it’s not certain, but some archaeologists think they might have been human sacrifices. The idea was niggling at me, so I called around yesterday evening to ask her a few more questions about it, and she referred my questions to Maguire. He seemed well up on ancient sacrificial rites, especially the triple death Dr. Gavin mentioned—it’s supposed to have included strangulation, throat-cutting, and drowning.”
“Unfortunately, a lot of people could have had all the pertinent details on the manner of Danny Brazil’s death.” Maureen started ticking off the witnesses on her fingers. “There’s Ursula Downes, for a start, all six people on her crew, and Nora Gavin. And Maguire obviously knew about it, if you talked to him. We know for a fact that Charlie Brazil told his mother about the triple knots, because that’s how she came to think it might be Danny. And that’s not even mentioning all the people that any one of those witnesses could have spoken to after that morning. You know how information travels here; I’m betting that half the county was well up on it by Tuesday afternoon.”
She was right, of course. Still, they would have a look at the two cords. It was at least a possible connection, and there might be others as well. Ward reached for the preliminary autopsy report on Danny Brazil, and turned to Dr. Friel’s description of the injuries: The initial wound is present on the left side of the neck, over the sternocleidomastoid muscle, 6 cm below the left auditory canal. There was something tentative about the injury, as if the assailant hadn’t quite maintained control of the situation, and the victim had struggled. They didn’t have the autopsy report yet, but it was clear from what he’d seen this morning that Ursula Downes’s throat had been cut from side to side, deeply enough to sever the main arteries. Danny Brazil had drowned. Even though the modus operandi seemed similar, the two attacks had had very different results. Were they looking at the same killer, or at someone who for some reason only wanted Ursula’s death to look like Danny Brazil’s?
“What else do we know about Danny Brazil?” Ward asked. “He was twenty-four years old when he was last seen in June 1978. He was unmarried, employed at Bord na Mona as a fitter, and helping his brother, Dominic, work the family farm. Played for the Offaly senior hurling team until he suffered a career-ending injury in 1977. That was also the summer he and Dominic found a significant stash of Iron Age artifacts out on the bog. Just before Danny disappeared, they’d each received ten thousand pounds in reward money.”
“Must have thought they’d won the Lotto,” Maureen said. “Especially at that time. Nobody had two shillings to rub together.”
She was right. The amount seemed almost paltry now, but ten thousand would have been a huge sum in those days. And there were the stories that the Brazils had held out, kept some of the best pieces from the Loughnabrone hoard. People took it for granted that the rumors were true. The brothers had mostly kept to themselves, and hadn’t gone out of their way to refute the common assumption. Ward had thought at the time that the suspicions of the older generation might have been a factor in the whispered accusations against Charlie, but those were things that you could never quite describe or quantify in a file. Some people said that finding the hoard had actually brought bad luck on the Brazils. The question remained: Was there some connection between Danny Brazil’s death and the murder of Ursula Downes, or did someone just want them to make a connection?
“I know it’s tempting to make a link with the older murder,” Maureen said, “but I think we’re looking for something much more recent. At this point I’m still leaning toward a jilted lover, which would lead us straight to Owen Cadogan or Cormac Maguire. They both have motive. Cadogan’s been rejected, and after his carry-on with Ursula the previous summer, that probably wouldn’t sit well. He’d probably feel entitled. Maguire told us his relationship with Ursula Downes was long over, but suppose it wasn’t. Suppose he goes over there hoping to cool things off, and she refuses—maybe threatens to tell his new girlfriend about them. He admits arguing with her; we’ve got traces of his skin under her fingernails, and her blood is all over his waterproofs, for God’s sake. Sometimes it is just that simple, Liam.”
No, it isn’t, Ward thought. Things were never that simple. Not just every crime, but every second of existence was fraught with complications, misunderstandings, lies, and cock-ups. Ninety-nine percent of their work was sorting through the chaff to find one solid clue. They could follow dozens of leads in this case, wa
ste precious time pursuing every twisting road to its ultimately fruitless end. Their job over the next few days or weeks would be to try to find the connections between people, connections those people were often trying very hard to hide.
It seemed to Ward that he spent half his life immersed in a shadowy, fictional world, conceiving scenarios that may or may not have happened. Most people imagined detectives as people who dealt in facts, in hard evidence—and that was a vital part of what he did. Still, much of his life remained in the subjective tense. He breathed speculative air, and so, he realized increasingly, did everyone else around him.
11
Once the ice pack had reduced the throbbing in her ankle, Nora reached into her jacket pocket for the drawing she’d robbed from Charlie Brazil. She wasn’t even sure why she’d taken it, except that it seemed somehow significant. She tried to collect her thoughts, to impose some order on all the possibilities that tumbled about in her brain. What use could her feeble theories be against the powerful reality that two people were dead? Danny Brazil and Ursula Downes had been brutally murdered. There were similarities in the way they’d been killed, but she couldn’t shake the thought that something else connected them as well, something that no one had yet grasped. The line back to Danny Brazil went even further into the past, to the time when he and his brother had discovered the Loughnabrone hoard—and, according to the rumors, gold. But if this place was anything like the other places in Ireland where she’d spent time, folklore and legend were on a fairly equal footing with fact.
Just because Charlie Brazil might be involved, that didn’t mean Cadogan was innocent. They could both have been mixed up with Ursula, for similar or very different reasons. Maybe they had all three been in something together, and no one had yet figured it out. And the boyfriend, Desmond Quill…he seemed to have no illusions about Ursula’s character, despite the fact that he was in love with her. What had Ursula thought of Quill?
Nora looked down at the drawing, its edges curled and speckled with black. Struck with a sudden idea, she carried the sketch to Cormac’s work table and rummaged through the papers for his magnifying glass. The artist’s pen strokes leapt out at her through the thick lens. The detail was exquisite; the shield’s curved surface appeared as tiny dots that blended together to form a shadow. She turned the drawing over and saw a series of circles lightly sketched in pencil, and a scribbled inscription: Below a city of sisters, beside a lake of sorrows. That was the way it was here; double and even treble meanings hidden everywhere.
The door rattled against the jamb. Was Charlie Brazil coming after her? She slipped the drawing into the nearest book and kept very still, until she heard Cormac’s voice calling through the stout door: “Nora? Are you there? I haven’t got my key.”
She crossed quickly to the door to let him in, throwing her arms around him, pressing herself into his chest. He seemed a little surprised at her greeting, but not unhappily so. “I wasn’t gone all that long, was I?” he asked. “Everything’s fine. They just asked me a lot of questions.”
“And have they finished with you now?”
“For the moment, anyway.” He tried to give her an encouraging smile, but she sensed his worry.
“How did you get home?”
“The Guards gave me a lift. I tried ringing your mobile, but I couldn’t get through. Did you have it switched off?”
“No, I was waiting for you to call. I was out of the house for a bit; maybe the signal is weak out here in the middle of the bog.”
“You shouldn’t really be wandering around by yourself, Nora. It’s not safe, not after what’s happened. Where did you go?”
“First I tried to find Brona Scully. I thought if she’d been out at the tree, she might have seen you leaving Ursula’s house the other night. Then I went over to Charlie Brazil’s apiary. Something Ursula said to him the other day made me think about it.” She limped back to the work table where she’d hidden the drawing.
Cormac’s alarm was immediate. “Nora, what happened to your leg?” She could hear the anguish behind his words, the jangling fear that she might have gone somewhere she shouldn’t have, on his behalf.
“It’s just a bee sting. I’m fine. I’ve put ice on it, and the swelling’s already starting to go down. I found out some things about Charlie Brazil that I don’t think anyone knows. He’s got a stash of what I’m fairly sure are illegal artifacts hidden somewhere up near his apiary. It makes me wonder if Ursula’s death isn’t somehow tied to all that.” She decided not to mention that she’d actually met Charlie on the expedition, or Cormac might lose sight of what was most important here—finding some connections in this ever more vexing puzzle.
“How do you know all this?”
“I was just looking around in the shed where he stores his beekeeping supplies, and I saw where he’d hidden the other things under the floor. He doesn’t know I was there. I found this, too.” She flipped through the pages of the book where she’d hidden the stolen drawing. The pages opened to the place where the postcard-size drawing lay facedown, but when Nora turned the paper over, it was not the same picture as the one she’d slipped into the book. It showed some kind of intricately decorated circlet, though whether it was a bracelet or a necklace was difficult to tell from the scale. The thick paper had been pierced by a pin about a half-inch from the top, just like the drawing she had found in the shed.
A wave of nausea swept over her, and her fingers suddenly felt clammy and cold. Turning a few more pages, she found the shield sketch she’d put in the book and compared it to the new drawing. Both were clearly the work of the same artist.
Cormac was close behind her now, looking over her shoulder. “What are those, Nora? Where did you get them?”
Nora felt her breath catch in her throat as she wrestled with how to respond. The question seemed in earnest. How else could she answer him? She held up the shield drawing. “I found this one in Charlie Brazil’s beekeeping shed this evening. And this one"—she held up the sketch of the circlet—"I just found here in your book.”
He seemed to grasp the unspoken question even before she could think it. “It’s not mine, Nora. I’ve never seen it before, I swear.”
“How did it get here?”
“That’s the book I lent Ursula. I hadn’t even remembered it. When she stopped by the house the first night I was here, she wanted to know what I was working on. She started looking through the books I was unpacking, and asked if she could borrow that one for a day or two. There didn’t seem to be any harm in lending it to her. Last night I saw it just beside the door at Ursula’s, so I took it back. I put it on the kitchen table when I came in, never even thought to open it.”
Nora thought back to the morning, which seemed so long ago now, and remembered moving the book from the kitchen to Cormac’s work table. She examined the spine. The Exquisite Art: Masterpieces of Irish Metalwork. “Why would Ursula be so interested in this book?”
“I don’t know, Nora. It’s an academic treatise on artifacts and antiquities,” Cormac said. “Pretty dry reading, even for an archaeologist. She didn’t say why she needed it, and I didn’t ask.”
Ursula Downes hadn’t struck Nora as the kind of person who devoted herself to scholarship. There had to be some reason she had been interested in this particular book. Nora opened the thick pages at random, finding photographs and drawings, charts full of numbers that looked like location coordinates, maps documenting where certain types of artifacts—gold gorgets and hoards of bent and broken weapons—had been found. Cadogan’s words about the Brazils holding back some things from the hoard suddenly circled through her head. Had Ursula found out something she didn’t want anyone else to know? I know what you’re hiding…. The discovery of a previously unknown artifact would certainly put a new spin on the murder. And there were three knots in Ursula’s cord, just like in Danny Brazil’s.
“Can I have a look at it?” Cormac took the drawing and the book and started going through the illustrations,
comparing the sketch in his hand against the book’s drawings and photographs. “This has a catalog of all the known gold artifacts recovered on Irish soil.”
“So what are you doing?” Nora asked over his shoulder.
He quickly flipped to a page showing a drawing, and held it open to show her. “The Broighter collar, a gold neck-ring from the first century B.C. The style of decoration—these intricate, curving designs—marks the piece as Irish-made. The drawing you found in here seems to be a collar similar to this one. The thing is, I don’t think anything exactly like the piece in your sketch has ever been found in Ireland—or maybe I should say, nothing like it has ever been reported. The Broighter collar is one of the few examples of La Tene metalwork found in Ireland, and one of the few gold artifacts from the Iron Age. You must have seen it at the National Museum. Look at the decoration on your drawing, those raised whorls and trumpet curves—see how similar they are to the Broighter details? It’s astonishing.”
“So if the collar in the drawing is real, and not just a figment of some artist’s imagination…”
“It would be an unbelievable find. Priceless. And whoever found it—presuming that they turned it over to the state, and that it was found legitimately and not through illegal means—would get a pretty whacking great reward. Once an artifact has been dug up, its provenance comes into question. It loses a lot of archaeological significance if we don’t know where it came from—but of course the monetary value always remains. I’m wondering now about the other drawing—whether it’s an actual object that exists, or as you said, just a figment of some artist’s imagination.”
Nora handed him the shield drawing, and they both began to search through the book of artifacts, comparing it to the objects pictured. The names of all the findspots started to blur in front of her eyes: Dowris, Ballinderry, Moylarg, Lagore, Loughan Island, Lisnacrogher…The organic forms snaked and twisted and curled across the pages, mirroring the natural world in abstract. Eyes and animal faces were everywhere. She imagined the metalworker hunched over his tools, making delicate herringbone patterns, birds whose beaks formed the heads of pins. She paged past a triskelion disc and felt a tug of familiarity; where had she seen that image before? The graceful spirals, everything counted in threes…She scoured her memory, but could not place the image. Never mind; it would come back sometime, probably when she wasn’t even trying to remember.
