by Erin Hart
“No use at all on a bog,” Cormac said. “All the organic material is waterlogged. Doesn’t matter what it is—turf, tree stump, body—it all reads exactly the same. That’s what makes a bog the ideal place to hide a corpse. But I’m sure you know that, Detective.” Devaney frowned and rubbed his chin.
Did Cormac know something that she didn’t? “Would you mind filling us in?” she asked the policeman. “Who was that guy? And who’s Mina? It seems like I’m the only one here who doesn’t have the full story.”
Devaney considered them both for a moment before speaking. “His name is Osborne. Local gentry, I suppose you’d call him—lives at the big house on the lake beyond. His wife disappeared just over two years ago. Maybe he thought we’d found her.” Nora felt as though she’d been punched.
“The whole area was searched at the time of the disappearance—civil defense, underwater units, the lot—and none of the search teams came up with anything. Last year all the bog holes in East Galway got another going-over. We’ve put out numerous appeals, and there’s been a generous reward all along, but nobody’s come forward. Nobody knows a thing. It’s as if the ground just opened and swallowed her up.”
“Don’t you have any suspects?”
“We’ve no proof a crime was even committed,” Devaney said, the dismay audible in his voice.
“What about that guy, Osborne?”
“He was interviewed several times. No solid alibi for the time of the disappearance, but nobody could manage to find any material evidence that would crack his story. And without a body… Now the higher-ups want to lump his case in with a whole string of women gone missing over the last five years—in spite of the fact that it doesn’t fit.”
“Why not?” Cormac asked.
“Well, for one thing, none of the others involved a child. Osborne’s young son is missing as well.”
“Could Mina have had some reason to leave, Detective?” Nora heard herself asking. “People sometimes disappear on purpose.”
“If you’re running away, usually someone’s got a clue. Nobody’s seen Mina Osborne. And I mean no one. Not her family, not her closest friends. And we couldn’t find a reason that she might have left. According to all the world, the Osbornes had the perfect marriage. No one says a word to the contrary.”
“How do people know what really goes on?” Nora murmured. That’s what people had said about Peter and Triona as well, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. She felt queasy. First the red hair and now this; the coincidences were beginning to unnerve her.
“So what do you think happened to them, Detective?” Cormac asked.
“At this point I don’t think anything at all.”
“It seems to me if you’re hanging around asking questions about ground-probing radar, you might have some theories,” Cormac said.
“Oh, I have a few. But the trouble with theories is they don’t prove a fucking thing”—he cast an apologetic look at Nora—“if you’ll pardon the expression. And evidence-wise, everything has come up blank.” He paused. “But I know two things: As far as we know, Mina Osborne hasn’t made contact with anyone since her disappearance. And her husband’s been pushing to get turf-cutting in the area banned altogether. I have to ask myself why.”
“The man was devastated,” Cormac said. “We all saw him.”
“So we did” came Devaney’s terse reply.
Nora felt her throat constrict as she tried to understand what the policeman was saying: that Osborne’s show of grief could have been exactly that—a show. Her face felt frozen; she hoped it could mask her feelings. She felt a hand on her elbow.
“Nora—are you all right?” Cormac asked. His dark eyes scanned her face. “You look a bit pale.”
“I’m fine,” she said, pulling away. “I just need a drink; I’m a bit parched.” She went around to the driver’s side of the car to fetch her water bottle, and lifted it to take a long swallow, hoping that her hand wasn’t visibly shaking.
“I shouldn’t really be talking about any of this,” Devaney finally said. “It’s an ongoing investigation.”
“Thanks for explaining, Detective,” Cormac said. Nora could still feel his eyes on her. “We’d like to help, of course, but I’m not sure there’s anything we can do. Dr. Gavin’s got to be leaving straightaway for Dublin. I’ll stay and finish up here in the morning, but—”
“You’re doing what you have to do,” Devaney said, looking away. “So are we all.”
As she indicated her turn and pulled cautiously out onto the main road to Portumna, Nora allowed her thoughts to settle on the strange cargo she carried. It was difficult not to think of it; at every rough patch in the road, she could feel the weight of the waterlogged block of peat in the trunk of the car. Remembering the expression she had seen stamped on the young woman’s features, Nora felt a shiver. She told herself it was the damp. She hadn’t bothered to change before leaving the site, and now her jeans felt clammy against her skin, and the small bits of peat that still stuck to her arms were beginning to itch beneath her thick sweater. She reached forward to turn on the car’s heater.
If only there were some clue, some lead that would help them find out more about this red-haired girl. Unfortunately they had found no clothing of any kind, which was often useful in dating bog bodies. Nothing but that piece of burlap. Perhaps the absence of the body was a clue in itself. Was the girl’s head intended as a trophy of some kind, an offering to some terrible deity? She’d often read that the ancient Celts revered the head as the seat of the soul, and had decorated their shrines and holy places with the skulls and desiccated heads of their enemies. Several of the most well-preserved bog bodies in Europe were thought to be human sacrifices, because they’d undergone what Celtic scholars called a “triple death”—ritual garrotting, slitting of the throat, and finally drowning, their bodies weighted down with stones or branches—perhaps to appease a blood-thirsty pagan trinity. Was this red-haired girl among those chosen for such a role, in which the last stage of her triple death was beheading? Had she committed some unpardonable sin—adultery, perhaps, or murder—for which her community had wreaked its punishment and cast her into the bog? Or was she simply the victim of murder, carved up and disposed of in such a gruesome way?
Nora was not unaware of the reputation that she was beginning to earn for what some considered, even in the medical community, a rather macabre and sensational preoccupation. In addition to her duties as a parttime anatomy lecturer at Trinity, she was pursuing graduate level work of her own: a major research project studying the physical and chemical effects of bog burial. The irony was that this was her first experience of an actual bog body; all her research thus far had been carried out on mummified museum specimens, or on “paper bodies”—written records of remains that had been destroyed or reburied soon after their discovery.
Why should this unfortunate creature be any different from the dozens of other nameless souls who lost their way or were left purposely in such dangerous, deserted places? She remembered poring for hours over the gazetteer of Irish bog bodies that Gabriel McCrossan had been helping her to update, and being moved by its bare descriptions—devoid of identity, but imbued with unforgettable detail: a young child of indeterminate gender dressed in a pinafore, with boxwood comb, leather purse, and ball of thread still in its pocket; a man’s left foot with stocking and leather shoe intact; the partially preserved body of a young woman, and, nearby, the skeletal remains of an infant with a small buckled leather strap around its neck. Each of these had a story as well, but they were all lost now, and would never be discovered. The red-haired girl would no doubt end up as just another anonymous entry, the minutiae of her life erased by time. And yet Nora found herself unable to abandon the idea that even a single clue might point the way toward the red-haired girl’s identity. She tried to remember whether the girl had any kind of distinctive hairstyle—any kind of plait or knot that would help suggest a date. All at once her memory was overtaken by a sensat
ion, the feeling of the wiry strands against her fingertips as she pulled the hairbrush through her younger sister’s luxuriant mane with quick, sure strokes, parting and twisting three strands into a single thick braid—Ouch, Nora, you’re pulling too hard, Triona’s plaintive cry echoed in her head, along with her own peevish reply: I am not pulling. If you’d ever stop squirming—
The edges of the road swam as tears welled up in her eyes, and Nora felt as if she would choke, but she pulled off the road and fought against the memory. The events of this day opened a fissure in the wall she had tried to build around her heart, and now she felt it crumble and give way, engulfing her once more in a fierce, pulverizing flood of grief.
She had told no one in Ireland about her sister’s brutal murder. Gabriel had come to know a few of the facts, but he didn’t know that the strongest suspect was Triona’s own husband, Peter Hallett. And Nora was certain that no one had told Gabriel how the desire to see her sister’s killer brought to justice had taken over and consumed her. That single, desperate need had pushed aside everything else: her job, her relationships, her whole life. She should have stayed and kept fighting, for Elizabeth’s sake; the child was only six when Triona died. A few months after the murder, when Peter found out Nora was helping the police to find evidence against him, he had abruptly cut her off from any contact with her niece. After three years of bitter frustration, Nora’s endurance had nearly been exhausted. She told herself she had not given up—that would never happen—but she had come to Ireland eighteen months ago to think and recover her strength.
But to come all this way and be faced with another red-haired victim, a missing wife, a husband who might have killed her—Nora knew that if she were in a slightly more paranoid frame of mind, she could believe that someone, something, was deliberately mocking her sorrow.
4
Nuala Devaney was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, fiddling with the clasp on her necklace when her husband stepped forward to help.
“I might be late,” she said to him over her shoulder. “It’s a couple over from Belgium, so I told them we might go out for a drink after they look at the house, you know, showing off the local.” Devaney settled the tiny clasp, then stepped back to gaze at his wife, admiring the way she looked in that particular pale green suit. He often felt that while approaching middle age had diminished him in many ways, it had only improved Nuala.
“Thanks, love. The kettle’s just boiled, and your supper’s in the cooker. Would you believe they’re looking at a place up in Tullymore? A ruin. None of them are the least bit interested in a new house; they all want the old falling-down cottages. Preferably thatched, if you don’t mind.” She paused and looked straight at him, as if trying to gauge whether he’d heard a word she’d said. “Are you all right, Gar?”
“Grand,” he said. “I’ve some paperwork to do.” He gestured toward the briefcase sitting at the other end of the kitchen table. “And then I’m headed down to the session.”
“Right,” she said with a wry half-smile, but evidently relieved that his plans were at least settled. “I’m off, then.” He watched out the kitchen window as she backed her sleek new silver sedan out of the narrow drive.
As he took the hot plate of food from the oven, Devaney told himself once again how glad he was that Nuala enjoyed her work. They were certainly better off financially since she had begun working, and he was proud that she was the best auctioneer in this part of the county. But it also pained him that she had no time for the music; he winced at her insistence that the children pursue things that would be—in her words—“more useful.” For all her acuteness in reading people on the verge of buying property, he sometimes felt that she could no longer read him—or maybe she didn’t want to. Music was all he had to pass on. He’d nothing at all of any value, except for the tunes and stories he’d collected in hours spent drinking cups of tea and pints of porter with thick-fingered old men in baggy-kneed trousers who never washed but once a week, if that. He thought of the hollow ruin of a thatched house Nuala was showing tonight, and the sheer quantity of culture that was wiped out whenever any one of the old players was laid to rest. How often had he traveled up the road when he was younger to have a few tunes with Christy Mahon, God rest him, a grizzled old fiddler who had the time—and above all the patience—to sit and go over the tricky part of a tune with him, making sure he got the notes and the ornamentation just right. Their musical companionship had to do with something neither of them could begin to put into words, and thankfully, they didn’t have to; the music did it for them. A wild, lonely melody could carry him back to a place beyond his own lifetime, when music and poetry had been kept alive in secret, carried on in defiance of death and despair. Through him, this music was his children’s connection to the joy and pain of a past all too easily forgotten or denied.
Devaney thought of his children. His firstborn, Orla, whose name meant “golden,” was fair-haired like her mother, poised and intelligent. At seventeen, Orla was already a champion debater; she’d make a fine president, he thought, then revised himself. Why settle for a figurehead job like president? Give her another few years and she’d make a better prime minister than some of the fucking magpies they had running the country today.
Padraig, whose dark looks reminded him of himself as a boy, was fifteen this year. He had only recently been transformed from a bright and talkative boy into a hollow-chested, silent teenager, whose entire life seemed to revolve around acquiring the latest computer game or piece of athletic gear. Devaney had felt himself diminish in his son’s eyes these last two years. It was inevitable, he supposed, remembering how his own father had suffered a similar reduction in stature. Padraig had once shown a bit of interest in the fiddle when he was younger, but he didn’t have the gra for it, the hunger and thirst for music that would have kept him going.
His younger daughter, Roisin, who had just turned eleven, was still a riddle. Dark-haired, thin of face, and serious beyond her years, Roisin still called him Daddy, as she had when she was small, and was the only one of the three who seemed to value his company at all anymore. Perhaps because she was the youngest, he felt his age most at her growing up.
Padraig was at football practice this evening, and Orla and Roisin were in their rooms doing schoolwork. Devaney found himself alone in the kitchen as the evening light waned, sipping on a lukewarm mug of tea. He’d always been restless, but the feeling had increased since he’d given up smoking eighteen months ago. This is a lovely new house, Nuala had said, please let’s not have it reeking of cigarettes. He’d complied, partly because he knew he ought to give them up anyway, and partly to keep the peace. But it was devilishly hard to quit, and he wished right now for the familiar sight of a fag in an ashtray beside him, and the feeling of smoke filling his lungs. He took another drink of tea instead, looking out his back window, imagining Dunbeg just a few miles down the lakeshore. Strange to think how much he knew about all the people in the town. Even though he worked out of the detective unit fifteen miles away in Loughrea, being any sort of a policeman in a small town was a bit like being a priest: receiving and keeping private confidences was part of the job, whether you invited them or not. It went both ways, of course. They all knew about him as well, or thought they did. They knew he’d seen his share of city policing, perhaps more than his share, in seven years on the murder squad in Cork. Many of them knew the recent transfer to Loughrea had not been his own idea.
But none of them would ever fully grasp the twist of fate that had brought him to this place. Devaney himself, despite all the thousands of times he’d relived every second of that pursuit gone fatally wrong, could never put his finger on it. Had it been a conscious decision or pure instinct that made him ultimately responsible for the deaths of two people? One was a suspect he’d been after for months, a twisted piece of work named Johnny Comerford, who had terrorized and battered to death an elderly couple in their own home. The other was a seven-year-old child named Julia Mangan, the dau
ghter of Comerford’s sometime girlfriend. On his way home from the Anglesea station one evening, he’d seen Comerford leaving a pub along the quays, so he’d followed, not expecting the bastard to take off. The girl was so small he hadn’t even seen her in the car. Once outside of town, Comerford missed a turn at a T-junction and plowed head-on into a stone wall.
Although Devaney himself hadn’t been injured, he’d been placed on mandatory medical leave for the duration of the inquiry into the crash. He wasn’t charged, but when his medical leave was up he was told his choices were Loughrea or leaving the Guards altogether. He had taken the transfer—which was in essence a demotion—because he had not known what else to do. And in the weeks he’d spent on leave, the music had been his only solace, the only thing that could replace the memory that kept replaying in his head, of approaching Comerford’s silent, demolished car, and the sinking horror of finding that child’s shattered body in the passenger seat. Perhaps that’s why Nuala disliked hearing him play, he thought, if it brought back to her that terrible time, without knowing that in playing the same tunes, the same sequence of notes again and again, he found a kind of release, and that release—not his family and not his work—was the one thing that kept him from being slowly crushed to death by the weight of remorse.
As he drained the last of the tea from his mug and got up to set his dinner plate in the sink, Devaney realized that he’d been plagued the past couple of days by the turn of a reel that had been traveling through his head. He crossed and took out his fiddle from behind the pine dresser. It was in an old-fashioned case, not the new molded-plastic variety, but a wooden box, wide at one end and narrow at the other, the precise shape and size of a miniature coffin. He always thought of the instrument as Christy’s fiddle. The old man had handed it on when the arthritis had got into his fingers and he could no longer play. After applying rosin up and down the length of the bow, Devaney took up the fiddle and played easily through the first part of the troublesome tune, feeling his way around the contours of the notes, knowing that as he played each one, his fingers would remember their places the next time it came to him. He attacked the irksome phrase again and again, until he finally made it through the turn, the music spilling forth from his bow, flowing like the water of a stream that has finally found its way through a rocky crevice.
