by Erin Hart
Nora felt the words acutely, knowing how difficult it had been for her to tell Cormac she was leaving. “But she doesn’t write, she doesn’t use any kind of sign language?”
“Not really,” Scully said. “It’s difficult to describe. She does make herself understood in our daily life. It must be a terribly lonely life for her, out here on the bog with me, but she doesn’t complain. She cooks and keeps the house, she helps me with my work, she reads. We used to look forward to Gabriel and Evelyn coming down every summer; it took away some of the loneliness for a while. I sometimes thought of leaving here, but I didn’t have a notion where else to go. Where on this earth can a person be spared from loneliness? And I understand it’s sometimes far worse when you’re surrounded by people. Here it may rain enough to drown fish; it may not be the most picturesque part of Ireland nor the most desirable—but it’s my place, this.”
As he was speaking, Nora felt the stab of longing for her other home, where snow buried broken cornstalks in the prairie winter, where the river bluffs glowed golden in the autumn light, and the glorious, towering sky dwarfed all that lay beneath it. There was a great flatness and openness that she missed dreadfully, even out here on the black bog, and she envied Michael Scully that feeling of belonging somewhere.
“I’ve decided that I’d prefer not to be in here, when the time comes,” Scully said. “I’d rather be in my own home, on my own patch. I know I’ve asked a lot of you already, but is there some way you could help me arrange that?”
“If you’re talking about hospice care, yes, I could give you the names of some people who would be able to help.”
They continued down the corridor, both carried in the constant flow of their own thoughts. Nora wondered what would happen to the hoard of knowledge Michael Scully had built up over a lifetime—more than a lifetime, if you considered all the people from whom he’d gleaned bits of history over the years. He had all those incredible files, of course; but reading them wasn’t the same thing as walking out with someone who could take you to the very spot where three ravens had sung over the grave of a king.
Down the long corridor a white-coated figure was approaching, a brisk, clean-shaven young man, probably a resident. Nora stopped the wheelchair when he reached them, and saw the nervous way the man gripped the chair’s arm and ducked his head to speak to Michael. “Mr. Scully, before you go in to your daughter, I wonder if we might have a word—in private.”
Scully said to Nora, “Dr. Conran has been minding Brona.” He turned back to the physician. “This is Dr. Gavin, who has been looking after me. If she doesn’t mind, I’d like to have her with me, whatever the news.”
“As you wish,” said Conran. “We can go into the office here.” He led them a few yards down the hallway into a small room where three cluttered desks were pushed into the corners. The young doctor began cautiously: “Yesterday, as you know, Brona seemed to be having quite a bit of pain in her lower back and legs, and this morning we decided we should check to see whether she might be suffering from a compression fracture. It’s routine, when scheduling a pelvic X ray, to perform several blood tests before exposing a woman of child-bearing age to even such a small amount of radiation. One of those routine blood tests is a pregnancy test.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I have to inform you that your daughter’s result on that test came back positive.”
“Are you saying Brona is pregnant?”
The doctor ran one hand over his chin. “Yes. I had the laboratory run the test a second time, to be sure it wasn’t a false positive. The thing is, Mr. Scully, when your daughter was brought into casualty, we didn’t do any sort of examination for sexual assault. No one asked for it—”
Nora’s mind raced over the details of that awful day. Was it possible that Brona had been hiding in the weeds at the apiary because she’d been attacked?
“Do you have some reason to believe my daughter was sexually assaulted?” Scully asked. “Something I didn’t know about? Was she injured in some way—”
The young resident was alarmed. “No, no, nothing like that. But, as I said, we didn’t examine her…”
Michael Scully was silent for a long moment. When he did speak, his voice sounded rough and tired, but not unkind.
“Thank you, Dr. Conran, for being forthright about all this. I do appreciate it. But I have two questions for you. First, I wonder why you would assume that Brona was the victim of an assault?”
“Well, she—I thought—” Nora watched the resident’s face and knew he was terrified that Michael Scully would be angry about an oversight that might get him, his colleagues, and the hospital into trouble. It was also clear that he thought Brona suffered from somewhat diminished mental capacity. Nora pitied the young doctor, but couldn’t fault him; hadn’t she assumed the very same thing?
Scully went on: “Second, if you have some news about her medical condition, I wonder why you’d convey that news to me and not to the patient herself. My daughter is twenty-two years of age, Dr. Conran. She’s not deaf, and her mental faculties are perfectly intact.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know—that is, I wasn’t sure. She’s been sedated, and—”
“I’ll go and speak to her. You can consider yourself absolved of that duty.”
The relief that broke across the resident’s face was almost unseemly. He had a bit of work to do on his bedside manner, Nora thought; but when he spoke, her irritation lifted somewhat. “I appreciate your honesty as well. I’m very sorry if I jumped to any wrong conclusions, Mr. Scully, and I apologize sincerely if I’ve offended you. I’ll remember our conversation before making any assumptions.” He offered his hand, and Michael Scully took it. “I’ll leave you now,” Conran said. “You can stay here in the office for a while if you like.”
When he had gone, Nora took her place behind the wheelchair and maneuvered Scully down the hall to Brona’s room again. When they were perhaps ten feet from the door, Michael put up his hand to stop the chair once more. Nora looked into the room to see what had made him pull up short; Brona was still asleep, but tossing in the bed, her hands clasping the bedclothes.
“I have a confession to make,” Scully said. “The night Brona was out until late—the night I rang you—it wasn’t the first time. She wasn’t at home at all the night Ursula Downes was killed. Something awakened me that night. It was a quarter past two, and I went to make sure she was all right. But she wasn’t in her room; she wasn’t anywhere in the house. She didn’t come home all night, and the next day her clothes smelled of wood smoke. When I heard about the murder, I should have said something, told Liam that Brona had been out that night, but I kept quiet. I was worried for her safety, and I thought the fewer people who knew she’d been out that night, the better off we would all be.”
Nora looked down at Scully and saw his shoulders lift in an involuntary sigh, saw the furrowed face, the bright tear trembling at the margin of his eye. “I thought I could protect her. But if I find that someone hurt her, and I kept quiet…”
At that moment, Brona’s eyes opened. She saw them outside the door, and gathered her father in with such a look of affectionate devotion that, standing beside him, Nora felt herself gathered in as well.
Then Brona looked straight into her, past all the fear and trepidation, and Nora felt her breath flowing in and out, felt herself transfixed by the girl’s eyes. Her look was a benediction, a blessing, a knowing acknowledgment of all they had shared. Then Brona’s eyes drifted shut again, and Nora felt as though she’d been released from some sort of thrall.
3
Liam Ward stood in front of his open cupboard, feeling uninspired by the tins of beans, the bottled curry sauce that met his gaze. He was standing there out of habit, talking to Lugh, who was doing his usual pointing routine at the sight of the dog food tins in the cupboard. This was a ritual they followed every night, and one that still delighted both of them, after all these years together.
“What will it be this evening—mut
ton stew, or steak and kidney pie?” Lugh raised his tail like a flag. “Steak and kidney pie it is. A wise choice.”
As he opened the tin and filled the dog’s dish, watching him lunge hungrily at the meat and gravy, Ward’s thoughts turned to the case again. He had difficulty letting go until he’d worked out the major knots, though there were always some that refused to disentangle, no matter how much time and patience were applied.
Charlie Brazil’s story about building the bonfire had checked out, but they had no indication of how long he’d stayed there. He’d also omitted one major detail; he had not been alone. Ward had conducted his own search of the scene, and had trod on something in the ashes. Beneath his foot was the bracelet he and Eithne had given Brona for her tenth birthday. It was made of several slender strands of gold metal, twisted into a kind of torc. As far as he knew, Brona always wore the thing, never took it off.
He had picked the bracelet up and slipped it into his pocket, guilt clawing at his conscience. He’d told himself he would not keep its existence hidden if it proved to be significant. But he had already tampered with possible evidence. He pulled the bracelet out of his pocket and stared at it for a few minutes, turning it in his fingers. Time to return it to Brona.
He thought of all the things, like this bracelet, that had something to do with the case but would never find their way into his report. There were too many connections, too many stories that the case did not require, though they were part and parcel of it. Things such as the box full of trophies in Ursula Downes’s flat, things she had evidently nicked from dozens of men. Each object was tagged and documented with a first name and a date, and sometimes there were as many as three or four dates within the space of a single week. What pathological need, what lack had Ursula Downes been trying to fill?
Rachel Briscoe had indeed been the daughter of Thomas Power, as Maguire had surmised. After her parents divorced, the girl had moved to England with her mother, and they’d taken the mother’s maiden name. All of this had been confirmed for them by Sarah Briscoe, who had arrived more than a week ago to claim her daughter’s body. She’d not been interested in what they’d found in Rachel’s flat in Dublin: notebooks filled with tiny, crabbed writing, meticulously documenting her surveillance of Ursula Downes in the weeks and months before the excavation.
They were almost impossible to read, the scribblings of an increasingly disordered mind, but the one thing Ward had taken away from it was that Rachel Briscoe was not a killer, despite what Desmond Quill had said—unless you counted suicide as self-murder. Because that had been the girl’s plan: to find Ursula Downes, to get close to her somehow, and finally to cut her own wrists before the woman who had poisoned her existence.
His own blood had gone cold as he read those words, perhaps written at the very moment the idea had taken shape in Rachel Briscoe’s mind. It had been a long and difficult night, but he had forced himself to continue reading, living through her writings the tormented existence of a young woman who truly wished to die, thinking of another suffering he had been unable to ease.
He looked down at Lugh, who was just finishing the last bit of gravy in his bowl, nudging it across the floor.
“Nice work, old son. Hunger is great sauce, isn’t it? I suppose you’ll be ready for your walk soon.” Lugh’s head lifted at the word “walk,” another of their evening rituals, so Ward fetched the lead and fastened it to the dog’s collar. Their customary path was out the road by the hurling pitch, to the crossroads, up the hill past the castle ruin, and back home again on the small road that ran along the Silver River. They both looked forward to it on an evening like this, when the long light stretched over the hills. But when Ward opened his front door, he found Catherine Friel standing on his doorstep.
“Hello, Liam,” she said, recovering quickly. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping in on you like this. Maureen Brennan told me where to find you.” She handed him an envelope. “I wanted to make sure you got my report as soon as possible, and—”
Lugh poked his nose out the door and nuzzled her free hand, looking for a scratch, and she stooped to stroke his soft ears and look down into his face. Ward had to admit he felt slightly unsettled. Why would Dr. Friel drive all the way out here just to deliver a report he’d have had in the morning anyway?
The dog moved in closer, appreciating the unexpected attention, and tried to lick their visitor, but she held him off. “He’s terribly affectionate. What’s his name?”
“Lugh.”
“Lovely name. God of light, victorious over darkness.” Her glance upward was quick, as if to gauge by Ward’s expression whether Lugh had managed to live up to his name. “My son has been lobbying hard for a dog for the past eighteen months. I’ve been telling him I don’t know. I’m away from home so much with this new job. But I suppose to him that’s as much an argument for having the dog as against it. I keep hoping he’ll give up and let it go, but he’s been very persistent.”
“What’s your son’s name?”
“Johnny—John, after his father. I keep forgetting that he wants to be called John nowadays.”
“What age is he?”
“Ten in October. Both his sisters are away at school, so he’s on his own a lot. I suppose it would be good for him to have a companion.”
“And what does his father say?”
A look of pure astonishment crossed her face, and she turned away slightly before answering. “I lost my husband, three years ago.”
“I’m sorry, Catherine—I didn’t know. I didn’t want to presume—” He looked down. “Not much of a detective, am I?”
She met his gaze with a wry smile that made his chest tighten alarmingly. “Nonsense. You’re a fine detective. You’ve had a lot to deal with these past few days.” She suddenly leaned down to give Lugh one last scratch behind the ears, evidently a gesture of farewell. “I really should go.”
Ward felt his chance slipping away. In a few seconds it might be gone forever, and he couldn’t let that happen. He heard himself say, “I had a wonderful time at dinner the other night.”
“I did too, Liam.”
Ward was remembering how much he had held back during dinner, how many times he’d struggled to keep his emotions reined in so that hope wouldn’t get the best of him. Now, faced with his first real opportunity, he was nearly paralyzed.
They both stood motionless in the open doorway, until she finally spoke again. “For a time after my husband died, I tried living my life backward. But I found that it doesn’t work. The only direction I can live is forward. It’s terrifying, but it’s the only option I can see.” She reached up and brushed her lips against his in a brief farewell, but let her face remain close to his, so that he felt the warmth radiating from her skin. He felt momentarily unable to breathe, to think. But when she began to pull away, he caught her arm with his left hand.
“Catherine—I don’t suppose I could prevail upon you to stay one more night, to have dinner with me again?” Something in her eyes lit the dry tinder of his soul, and he felt a slow flame, damped down and presumed dead for so long, suddenly flicker to life in his chest.
“You could, Liam,” she said. “You could indeed prevail.”
4
Charlie Brazil picked his way through the charred remains of the house in which he’d been reared, searching for familiar remnants, any bits of his former life that might be worth salvaging. But the destruction was complete; all he saw was singed upholstery, charred bits of chairs and wardrobes, broken glass and shattered concrete. The fire brigade said it had been a gas explosion. His mother had known exactly what she was doing. She’d turned the sheep loose herself to keep him away from the house and out of harm’s way. He’d been confused, but he now saw it as the proof that she had wanted him to live. He didn’t want to think about his father.
Where was his mother now? He tried to imagine her, contained within herself, casting a shadow that moved somewhere across the earth, and knew he’d never see her again. He w
asn’t quite sure what he felt. Maybe the anger, the worry would come later. For now, he was just relieved that she had not been in the house. He wanted her to live, too. He dug a toe into the debris, turned over the blackened radio that had rested on the kitchen shelf since his earliest memory.
Now he had a reason for the feeling he’d always had about this house—that there was something wrong here. His father had always talked about the house being unlucky, but Charlie was convinced, more than ever, that it wasn’t the house, nor the ground it was built upon. And yet there was something to the claim. Some negative force resided here. Never once did he remember his father turning in at night without checking the doors and windows, without shaking holy water over the doorjambs and the fireplace, warding off whatever might come in. It was as if he had expected an invasion. No doubt he had known of all sorts of dangers, of which Charlie and his mother had lived unaware.
After the rescue workers had taken his father’s body from the apiary, they had removed the body of the man they said had killed him, a man called Desmond Quill. The corpse was wearing a collar and tie, but the object that caught Charlie’s attention was the tie pin, a simple bronze disc with three whorls. He looked back at the dead man’s pale face and saw it younger, nearly twenty years younger, smiling out of the window of a car that had pulled up beside him on the road. The man had said he was a friend, that Charlie’s parents had been called away on a family emergency and had sent him to collect their son, to take him out for supper while they were away, and then bring him home. Charlie had been afraid to go against his father’s wishes, so he had agreed. He remembered being mistrustful at first, but the man had done exactly what he said he would. They’d gone to a posh restaurant somewhere in the Slieve Bloom mountains. He remembered the drive into the mountains with the sun still high. It had been early summer, and the bushes on either side of the road had blushed pink with blossoms. He remembered the greed that had overtaken him at the sight of the food brought to their table; he had eaten extravagantly: roast beef and gravy, and two desserts, and all the while the man across from him had watched, smiling and smoking and saying very little. After dinner, with the man’s warm hand resting uncomfortably on his neck, they had phoned his father from the restaurant lobby, and he’d had to speak on the phone. But before he’d had a chance to tell about his magnificent meal, the man had pulled the phone away and spoken into it: You know what I want. I think it’s a fair exchange, he’d said. I just wanted you to know how easy it was.
