by Erin Hart
That was the way he had always worked through stubborn cases as well; it was always a matter of approach, of taking a run at the thing from various angles. There had to be some crack in the Osborne case, he was sure of it. And his conviction had been further cemented by the odd conversation he’d had with the superintendent this evening, just before leaving the office.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” Devaney had only stuck his head in at Superintendent Boylan’s door after putting his jacket on; Boylan took a particular exception to detectives coming into his office in shirtsleeves. Despite the fact that he’d never had an original thought in his life, Brian Boylan possessed a rare instinct for the kind of political maneuvering that had got him where he was today. His office had been done up far beyond the basic standard issue for a superintendent of detectives. And with his smartly tailored suits and manicured nails, Boylan had always stood out among his colleagues; the man had the look of an actor, someone who took on whatever role others expected him to play. Devaney himself had seen too many shrewd, capable detectives passed over for promotion because they didn’t look the part the higher-ups had in mind for their modern police force, and some bollocks like Boylan did. Like it was some fucking film they were casting. Boylan had been handling Devaney cautiously to this point, no doubt worried that he might crack under pressure, so he’d been given only the most elementary cases, the most plodding detective work—essentially to keep him occupied, and everyone in the Loughrea station knew it.
“Ah yes, come in, please,” Boylan said, making no effort to rise or offer a chair, which felt like a transparent attempt to underscore their difference in rank. The superintendent made a show of marking his place in the massive interdepartmental report he was reading, then finally looked up and addressed Devaney with an air of preoccupation. “I wanted to let you know that you may have to make do without a partner for the time being. It’s in process, however, and I’ll let you know as soon as the paperwork is complete.” Devaney’s most recent partner had celebrated his retirement a fortnight ago. “Remind me again what you’re working on at the moment?”
“A break-in at Tynagh, and the rash of fires around Killimor.”
“Good, good,” Boylan said, nodding.
Devaney felt like a right eejit standing on the carpet. He thought: You should know, you’re the one making bloody sure I get all the scut work around here.
“I heard Hugh Osborne turned up at that business out at Drumcleggan today,” Boylan said. “I think you know that case has gone to the task force in Dublin.”
Devaney kept his face impassive. “Yes, sir, I had heard that.”
“They’ve got the resources, let them have a go. It’s out of our hands now.” Devaney remained silent. “How would it look if one of my officers seems to be questioning the decision to make that referral?” Here was the real sore point.
“It doesn’t fit the profile,” Devaney said. He recognized immediately that he’d made a mistake, but it was too late. “There’s the child, for a start—”
Boylan cut him off: “You’ll leave it alone.” The superintendent’s voice was even, but the color had drained from his face. “Do you understand?” His eyes locked on to Devaney’s, daring him to say something, anything, in defiance of a direct order.
“I understand,” Devaney said. He found it curious that Boylan’s eyes dropped first. “If that’s all, sir.”
“Yes, that was all.” Boylan swiveled his chair away abruptly, and turned to his place in the thick report once more.
Fuck Boylan anyway, Devaney had thought as he trudged back down the corridor. When he returned to the detective division office he saw the Osborne file at the corner of his desk. Someone might have seen the thing and mentioned it to the superintendent. He’d cast a glance around, and, on finding he was alone in the office, casually slid the bulky file into his bag.
Devaney stopped playing abruptly and set the fiddle back in its case. He remembered as he reached for the file his initial curiosity about the Osborne case when he’d first come to Dunbeg. One particularly slow afternoon, he’d gone through the drawer full of unsolved cases, and had been intrigued by this one. The file was nearly three inches thick, crammed with written reports, witness statements, photographs, and news clippings. It was exactly the kind of case that he knew from experience would get under his skin, gnawing at his conscience every day that it went unsolved.
The case had gone to Operation Trace because of growing speculation that a series of disappearances over the past five years might be related. There was talk of a serial killer. But a blind man could see that Mina Osborne stood out from the other victims. Every one of the women had disappeared while walking along quiet country roads. But all the rest were younger, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two; Mina Osborne was twenty-nine years old. And all of the younger women went missing within a forty-kilometer radius of Portlaoise; Mina Osborne was the only one well outside that circle. And finally, there was the little boy. None of the others had a child in tow. One of the younger girls had a baby, right enough, but the child was spending the night with the girl’s parents when she disappeared.
Devaney remembered the sudden urge he’d had that afternoon to drive a bulldozer into Drumcleggan Bog and dig up the whole fucking thing. If Osborne was responsible, his performance as the grieving husband out on the bog could have been deliberately staged to throw them off the scent. Devaney knew he’d have to work through this, step by step. If Mina Osborne and her child were already dead, there was no use rushing if he couldn’t build a case against the person—or persons—responsible. There had been a thorough investigation, but something was still missing, some element they hadn’t yet considered. The trouble was, you couldn’t tell which piece was missing until the thing was nearly put together.
He turned to the original missing person report. Here was something he had never noticed before. The signature at the bottom of the form was “Detective Sgt BF Boylan.” So Boylan had headed up this case. No wonder he wanted to get it off his desk and into the hands of the national task force. Beneath the first report was a photograph of Hugh, Mina, and Christopher Osborne—at some holiday or other, it looked like. Mina was sitting in a chair with the child on her lap; Osborne knelt by her side, holding one of his son’s hands in his own, his free hand gesturing toward the photographer. The little boy looked curious and excited, his face upturned toward his mother’s. Mina Osborne was a beautiful woman, Devaney thought. Her straight teeth seemed very white in contrast to her dusky skin, and she wore a colorful sari, dark crimson cloth woven at the edge with gold. Her look was one of contented amusement. He wondered who took the picture. The back of the photo was blank.
He turned back to the missing person report on Mina Osborne and read through the full description: height, weight, build, and smaller particulars like teeth, voice, accent, gait, and distinguishing marks; haunts and habits. There was a sketch of a distinctive hair clip that several people reported seeing her wearing just before the disappearance—a pair of metal filigree elephants.
What did they have? A disappearance. Murder, suicide, accident, kidnapping, flight—there was not enough to prove or disprove any one of several possibilities. But there were small things, not even clues, really, that pointed toward some possibilities and away from others; perhaps that was the place to begin.
There had evidently been some brief discussion of kidnapping, but there had never been a demand for ransom. Could Mina Osborne have fled, as Dr. Gavin had suggested, skipped the country without leaving a trail? If she had, the question was not only how, but why. Devaney made a note to check through the file for medical records on Mina and Christopher Osborne, to see if there was ever any suggestion of physical abuse. Provided all the family and friends they’d contacted were telling the truth, no one had heard from Mina Osborne since she went missing.
In the case of accident or suicide, you’d expect to find bodies. Certainly there were cases of people disappearing down bog holes. Mina Os
borne hadn’t lived in the area long enough to know the safe shortcuts through the bog like the locals did. But hardly anyone traveled on foot through bogland anymore, not like in the old days, and nothing in the circumstances immediately suggested that possibility. Besides, Drumcleggan Bog was on the other side of her home from the village; there was no reason to be crossing it at all. No, if Mina Osborne was in the bog, it wasn’t her own doing. Murder was the likeliest scenario, and Hugh Osborne remained the likeliest suspect.
Osborne had phoned the Dunbeg Garda station at 10 P. M. one night in early October, just over two and a half years ago. His story was that he’d been away for three days, attending an academic conference at Oxford. He’d taken an early afternoon flight from Heathrow and driven up from Shannon Airport. When he got home around six that evening, he found his wife’s car in the old stable that served as their garage, but she and their son were nowhere to be found. According to another occupant of the house, a Lucy Osborne, Mina had left for Dunbeg with her son around one o’clock that afternoon. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for her to travel the short distance to the village on foot, with Christopher in a collapsible pushchair, so the car in the garage suggested nothing out of order. When there was still no sign of them at half-seven, Osborne reported that he’d begun searching the house and grounds, and that just after ten he had phoned the Gardai. But because Mina Osborne was a responsible adult, and because there was no evidence of foul play, the police could do nothing further until seventy-two hours had elapsed from the time she was last seen.
When the next day and the next passed without word, extra Guards were brought in to help mount a search. They began scouring the fields and roadsides between the house and the village, and combing the grounds at Bracklyn House on foot. Photos of the missing mother and child were dispatched to seaports, train stations, and air terminals all over the country. The police also began questioning people in town. Mina Osborne had first gone to the local Allied Irish Bank branch, where she had withdrawn two hundred pounds. Then she’d taken her son into Pilkington’s and bought him a new pair of red boots, which he had worn out of the shop. She was last seen leaving the village on the Drumcleggan road, presumably on her way home. Those who had seen her in the village described Mina’s mood as quieter than usual, even downcast. No one had ever found the pushchair. Heavy rain in the days following the disappearance had washed away any evidence of tracks. When the ground search turned up nothing by the fourth day, they searched the lakebed around the house and the village. The divers had come up empty-handed.
It was only then that the police had begun questioning Hugh Osborne more closely concerning his whereabouts on the actual day of the disappearance. He had indeed been traveling home from a conference, but his return flight from London had landed in Shannon at noon, a full six hours before he’d arrived home at Bracklyn. The drive from the airport couldn’t have taken more than two hours. The only explanation Osborne offered was that he’d been up late the night before, that he’d felt tired and pulled over along the road above Mountshannon and fallen asleep in the car. They’d found no one to confirm or refute his story. He’d been the primary suspect from that point on. If he were just making it up, surely he could do better than that. They had only the word of two other inhabitants of Bracklyn House, Lucy and Jeremy Osborne, to confirm that Hugh had indeed arrived home from Shannon at six. Now there was a strange setup, Devaney thought: Lucy Osborne was only the widow of some distant cousin, and yet she and her son had been living at Bracklyn for the past eight years. It was possible these two were lying, of course; why should they want to jeopardize their position by grassing up the person who fed them and put a roof over their heads?
Osborne apparently had no major assets other than the house and a few small parcels of land, and in fact was rather strapped for money at the time of his wife’s disappearance. Devaney paged through the file until he found the document he was looking for. According to a statement from Kevin Reidy, a representative from Hanover Life Assurance, from the time of his marriage Hugh Osborne had a substantial life insurance policy on his wife—750,000 euros—and the same amount on himself, each with the surviving spouse listed as beneficiary. Maybe that wasn’t an unusually large amount for someone like Osborne, though by anyone’s standards, it provided motive enough for murder. But what was the use of killing your wife for the insurance money if you couldn’t produce a body? No damning evidence of foul play that way, Devaney supposed, but no claim could be made either, until she was legally dead—seven years in the case of a disappearance.
All right, say you wanted to get rid of a body—or bodies, in this case—so that they’d never be found…Devaney’s thoughts ticked through the various methods of disposal. Whichever you selected, it was a challenge, and the choice often depended on whether the murder was a crime of passion or carefully planned. Burning and burial both took time. The search had concentrated on the outdoors, looking within a radius of ten to fifteen kilometers from Dunbeg, and mainly for any areas of disturbed earth that might indicate a shallow grave. The police had also searched open wells and bog holes. But what about the inside of Bracklyn House? When the focus narrowed in on Osborne, the place was gone over, but old fortresses like that were usually rotten with secret rooms and passages. Nuala had pressed him into a family trip to Portumna Castle last summer, and he remembered the tour guides showing off a hollow built into one of its walls where the family had hidden priests during penal times, when Catholicism was outlawed. Devaney made a note to check on any architectural drawings of Bracklyn House, past or present.
Maybe trying to come up with bodies wasn’t the best approach. In every murder investigation, you tried to get to know the victim. The more you knew, the easier it became to imagine why anyone would want her dead. Mina Osborne was an artist—a painter, he seemed to recall. It might be useful to take a look at her work.
Those years in Cork had taught him that there were plenty of incentives for killing—greed, jealousy, revenge, even love that had turned to bitter hatred. Maybe the investigation had failed to go deep enough into that shadowy realm of impulse and instinct. He remembered, as a young policeman, attending the postmortem of a young woman, an apparent suicide by poisoning. The pathologist had explained what he was about to do: We’ll go for the poison, and we’ll go for the womb, and I’ll wager we find our answer in the latter. And so they had: the girl was several months pregnant—by her married lover, as it eventually turned out.
Hugh Osborne had indeed appeared devastated out on the bog. Did that mean he couldn’t possibly be responsible for killing his wife? Nothing could be taken for granted, not even a father’s love for his own child. Devaney closed the file with a sigh, and remembered the expression on Hugh Osborne’s face when he saw that the person in the soaking turf was not his wife—a complicated mixture of dread, disappointment, and relief. But was the relief from realizing that the woman he loved might still be alive, or simply that her body had not been found? Whoever she was, that red-haired creature in the bog had managed to set something loose, like the genie from a bottle, and he was going to make fucking sure it didn’t get back in again.
5
Just past seven o’clock, Cormac was splashing at the tiny sink in his room above Lynch’s pub in Dunbeg. Devaney had helped him sort out lodging. The accommodation was basic: a single bed and no shower, but at a tenner a night, it would certainly do.
Cormac’s chin was now covered in white lather; as he removed it with short, deft strokes of the razor, he pictured the red-haired girl’s distorted countenance, and tried pressing his own teeth into the pliable flesh of his lower lip. His nostrils recalled the pleasantly rusty tang of the bog air, occasionally layered with the clean, soapy scent of Nora Gavin working closely beside him. They’d arranged to meet at Collins Barracks in Dublin tomorrow afternoon, and Cormac felt himself looking forward to the prospect. But for that one slight flinch down in the cutaway, Nora had remained perfectly composed throughout the excavation—he re
minded himself that this was a woman used to working on cadavers, after all—but unless he was mistaken, she’d suddenly gone rigid when Devaney started telling them about the disappearance of Mina Osborne. Of all the things they had seen and heard today, why should that be so upsetting to Nora? Osborne’s anguish had seemed perfectly convincing, but he didn’t envy Devaney the task of sorting truth-tellers from dissemblers. How could you not become jaded, dealing with utterly convincing liars every day?
Cormac rubbed the last bits of lather from his ears and was absently checking his clean-shaven face in the mirror when he heard the sound of a creaking footfall in the hallway outside his door, then silence. A vague disquiet passed through him, then was gone. He swung the door open to find Una McGann with her hand raised, ready to knock.
“Oh, Jaysus Christ, you gave me a fright,” she said.
“Sorry, I thought you were Devaney again,” Cormac replied, crossing to the chair where he’d hung his fresh shirt, feeling suddenly naked and self-conscious in close quarters.
Una remained at the doorway, apparently not wanting to intrude into the small space, but also slightly wary of him, Cormac thought. She crossed her arms and looked at her feet. “I can imagine what he’s been telling you. But I really came to ask if you’d want to join us for supper. There’s nothing open here in the village this time of day, and I thought you could use a decent meal after all your work.”
