Haunted Ground ng-1

by Erin Hart

  Maguire’s second bit of information had given him pause. She’d never tell. Could mean she’d done it, or they’d done it together. But it could just as easily mean that the boy and his mother had stumbled across the evidence, and—for whatever reason—decided to keep quiet. He should have realized the boy knew something, should have pushed him more at the interview about the cars. But there wasn’t time now to worry about all the possibilities; he had to find out whether Jeremy Osborne was telling the truth.

  As Devaney pulled up at the side of the road near the tower, the file on the passenger seat of his car slid forward, and some of its contents spilled out onto the floor. He reached over to gather up the sheaf of scattered papers. Among them was one of the photographs he had taken in the confessional at St. Columba’s. Devaney put the car in neutral, and took a moment to look closely at the picture. There were the carved letters, crudely made, but clearly legible: HE KNOWS WHERE THEY ARE. He had been very nearly convinced that Brendan McGann carved them, as a silent accusation against Hugh Osborne. But as he looked at the photograph once more, his eyes returned to the first mark—it wasn’t a letter at all, but an empty square, more deeply gouged than the rest. It could be a mistake, but whoever made the mark could also have changed his mind, and wanted to destroy what had originally been there. He tried to find any evidence that it had once been the letters. As in SHE KNOWS WHERE THEY ARE. Whoever carved those words wanted so desperately to tell someone, anyone, to relieve the burden of guilt, but couldn’t muster the resolve to do it out loud. Another idea struck him. Of course. Jeremy Osborne had to be Father Kinsella’s candle thief; Dr. Gavin had said the tower was full of candles. If Jeremy was the messenger, who was the subject of his message, and why had he changed it? Or could someone else have found the message and altered it to suit his own ends? Devaney remembered the praying figure of Brendan McGann in the side chapel of the church. One thing at a time, he told himself, and braced himself for what he was about to do.

  It was late afternoon before the scene-of-crime officers arrived. The gray day had grown more overcast and a soft rain had begun to fall. There was a mechanical quality to the work entailed at a crime scene, what to Devaney always seemed a small amount of comforting routine in the face of horror. He stood in the woods near O’Flaherty’s Tower, surrounded by a drone of activity: scene-of-crime officers in their white suits, and policemen in yellow rain gear. The fire brigade had succeeded in dousing the flames last night, but the tower had been reduced to a blackened and empty shell, with a few stout timbers high up that had partially withstood the blaze. Even in the rain, small plumes of smoke still wafted from the rubble, a dangerous mixture of fallen stones and charred, splintered wood. In daylight it was readily apparent where the firemen had trampled through the thick undergrowth, and the bright green of the rain-slick leaves leapt out against the tower’s blackened bulk.

  The boy had said, They’re here. However, if there was some sort of underground chamber in the tower, the entrance was well hidden, and Devaney wasn’t surprised that no one had discovered it during previous searches. Once they’d cleared the rubble from inside the tower, the dirt floor was solidly packed, and showed no evidence of having been dug up. Likewise, the team could find no areas of disturbed earth around the building’s perimeter. Why should it be easy? Devaney thought. Every way into this case had been a hard road; why should this, even though it seemed the final step, be any bloody different? He was feeling the raw, edgy effects of too many hours without sleep, but couldn’t force himself to leave. Even when the passage had not been located by nightfall, he stayed and watched the team press on under the glaring white of the floodlights. When daybreak came, they switched off the lights. The sky had cleared, but they still had found nothing.

  At midmorning, a police vehicle pulled up on the roadside near the tower. Molloy, the young officer he had placed outside Hugh Osborne’s room, approached.

  “It wasn’t my idea, sir. He insisted.”

  “Who is it, Molloy?”

  “Osborne, sir. Dr. Maguire and Dr. Gavin are with him.”

  Devaney watched as the three passengers emerged from the car. The effects of his fall were evident in the careful way Maguire moved, but he was trying to put on a good front. Beside him, Osborne also moved slowly, not from any apparent physical injury, but like a man mesmerized. He looked only at the white-garbed officers as they went about their work. Dr. Gavin followed behind the two men; her dubious expression told Devaney what she thought of this impromptu expedition. He stepped in front of them.

  “I’ll have to ask you not to go any farther just now,” Devaney said. Hugh Osborne just looked at him blankly.

  “We’ll stay right here,” Maguire said, “if that’s acceptable.”

  Devaney nodded, then pulled Dr. Gavin aside. “Are they all right?” he murmured, tipping his head in Osborne’s direction.

  “Neither of them should really be up and about, but they wouldn’t stay in the hospital. Cormac insisted on telling Hugh what Jeremy said. I tried to convince him that it might not be a good idea. Hugh Osborne is still your chief suspect, isn’t he?”

  “Unless we find evidence to the contrary. But we’re not making much headway here.”

  Maguire approached and spoke in a low voice: “If I might offer an idea?”

  “By all means.”

  “Well, it looks like your team is assuming the underground place and its entrance to be somehow connected to the tower. But people tend to build on the same places over and over again. It may very well be a souterrain or underground chamber left over from some previous settlement or fortification that’s older than the tower. Have you got a piece of paper or something?” When he’d got it, he hastily sketched the tower, and marked the locations of the various earthworks.

  “We’re here.” He pointed to the spot on his crude map where he and Devaney stood, about twenty yards from the tower. “Do you see the area of raised earth all around us here? That’s where I’d begin, within that circle. The entrance is bound to be pretty well concealed. It might save time to use that ground-probing radar you mentioned, if you have access to some equipment.”

  Osborne refused to leave the scene; he hovered, sometimes sitting quite still, sometimes standing beside the yellow tape the scene-of-crime unit used to mark the perimeter, but his silent presence did not appear to disturb the officers as they went about their methodical work. It wasn’t until midafternoon, when they’d got the loan of radar equipment from a surveying firm in Ballinasloe, that the team was able to make any progress. The readings showed a solid slab about four feet below the surface, within the circle Maguire had shown them. They called in earth-moving equipment, a small backhoe that trampled the vegetation in its path like some prehistoric beast. Fortunately, the operator was an artist, a man who could control the heavy steel excavation bucket as though he were measuring tea for the pot rather than a half ton of soil. The sound of metal scraping on stone came from the trench, and a voice said, “He seems to have hit something here, sir.” Devaney peered into the pit. He could see several large, flat stones. One of them suddenly gave way and collapsed into the chamber below, taking with it loose soil from the surrounding banks.

  “All right,” Devaney shouted. “Hold up. That’s enough.” He sent one of the young Guards to fetch Maguire.

  “You’ve more experience than we have with uncovering this sort of structure,” he said when the archaeologist arrived. “I wonder if you’d mind advising us on how to proceed.”

  3

  Dressed in a regulation white suit and mindful of his bruised ribs, Cormac climbed carefully down into the chamber while Devaney and the rest of the team remained at the edge of the excavation. At the bottom of the ladder, he switched on his torch and peered into the darkness. The walls were exquisite dry-stone construction, battered to support the heavy lintels. At the end nearest the tower, a slab of sandstone had been cut into an archway to support the roof. As he admired the workmanship of the builders who
had put these stones in place more than a thousand years earlier, Cormac suddenly realized what a terrible contradiction existed if the bodies of Mina and Christopher Osborne were indeed hidden here. Souterrains were common enough features of ancient ringforts, but in addition to their function as storage vaults, they often served another particular purpose—to protect a settlement’s most vulnerable inhabitants: its women and children. The entrance creeps were often built purposely small so that a grown man could not fit through.

  Everything he could see was covered with a thin layer of dust. He could smell putrefaction. As he slowly let his beam track across the small room, Cormac could see nothing but gray shadows and shapes. Wait. He turned his light back to where it had just been, and stared at the pattern that began to emerge. The eye is quick to detect the stamp of human presence in the seeming chaos of the natural world. Beneath the dust, half buried in soil and rubble, he had perceived the diamond motif and raised cable of an Aran sweater. He focused his beam on that spot, and the shapes began to make sense to his eye and mind. He could see a body lying on its right side, back toward him. Near the figure’s left hip, his eye began to comprehend the meaning of another form. It was the sole of a child’s tiny wellington. He turned to the company standing above him, and didn’t have to say a word. They could read what he had seen in his face.

  No one noticed that Hugh Osborne had moved gradually closer until he was standing among the crime-scene officers at the edge of the excavation. Before anyone could stop him, Osborne had jumped down into the souterrain and seized the torch from Cormac’s hand. Devaney held up a hand to signal his fellow officers to hold off for just a moment. Osborne fell to his knees at the entrance to the hidden chamber, and drew a deep breath. Then he looked inside, and what he saw made him release that breath; with it he seemed to release all the hope and fear and anticipation he had held in for so long, to let it all go with a faint sound that was halfway between a moan and a sigh. And when the nightmarish vision before him persisted, and did not fade away, he finally sank slowly downward, and the torch, still switched on, tumbled from his hand. No one spoke or moved until Osborne himself finally broke the silence.

  “Thank you—thank you for finding them,” he said in a hoarse voice to the air before him. Then he rose somewhat unsteadily and looked vacantly around him, as if unsure of how to climb out of the chamber. “I’ll go now,” he said. “You know where to find me.” A couple of officers came forward to help him out of the souterrain, and Devaney signaled them to escort Osborne back to the house. Cormac climbed up the ladder, and sought Nora’s face in the crowd. She brushed away her tears as he approached.

  4

  Cormac had just set a mug of tea in front of Hugh Osborne when a rap sounded at the kitchen door. It was Una McGann. She must have heard the news in the village; it hadn’t taken long for the story to travel that far. Osborne didn’t rise to meet her, but instead lowered his head to the table and covered it with his hands, in a gesture of the most abject helplessness. When she placed a hand gently on Osborne’s shoulder, Cormac realized that Una was the first person to offer any expression of sympathy, and he felt ashamed. Then the door banged violently open.

  “You fuckin’ bastard,” roared Brendan McGann, advancing toward Una and Hugh, his face blotchy with rage. “Your wife’s not yet in her grave and you’re back making a hoor of my sister. Get out of my way, Una. Get out of the way!” He seized his sister by the shoulders and pushed her roughly aside, then turned his attention to Hugh Osborne, who half stood, blinking in disbelief. Brendan McGann landed a fist to Osborne’s jaw that sent him sprawling backward onto the table, and the sugar bowl and mugs of tea smashing onto the stone floor. “Come on, you fuckin’ hoormonger, get up and fight.” Osborne was stunned, and staggered forward, but before Brendan could throw another punch, Cormac hooked Brendan’s arms from behind and pulled him away.

  “Well,” Brendan shouted, “what have you got to say for yourself, Englishman? Eh, fuckin’ Sassenach?” Spittle trembled at the corners of his mouth.

  Una rushed to steady Osborne, then whirled on her brother. “What right have you to come in here flinging accusations? You know nothing about what’s between us. Nothing. I found those things you had hidden away, Brendan, all the cuttings, Aoife’s birth cert, and the hair clip—Mina’s hair clip—and I said nothing. I couldn’t believe you would harm anyone, but I don’t know anymore, Brendan, I don’t know you.”

  As he listened to her words, all the fight drained from Brendan McGann’s limbs, and Cormac gradually released his hold.

  Brendan spoke quietly: “You think I—ah, Jaysus, Una, you actually believed that I could hurt a woman—and a child? I found it,” he continued, his voice breaking. “I found that clip in a fuckin’ jackdaw’s nest, Una, I swear it. And the other things, you can’t blame me for being suspicious, people see him giving you a lift every day along the road, and you turn up pregnant, what were we to think? We’re not stupid. And to top it, he goes off and gets married, and leaves you and Aoife to get along as best you can. It tears at me to see you working so hard, and him sitting up here in his big fuckin’ house, telling people what to do, not willing to fork over a few shillings for his own flesh and blood. He’s the one you want to mind, Una, not me.” His finger jabbed toward Osborne. “Ask him how his wife and son ended up dead. Ask him.”

  Osborne still looked dazed as he wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. He seemed completely bewildered, but as he studied Brendan’s defiant expression, a light began to dawn. “You sent the hair clip. And that letter accusing me, to the private detective’s office in Galway. And you sent Mina a letter, too, didn’t you?” Brendan’s eyes shifted guiltily. “Didn’t you? Just before she disappeared. Lucy gave it to me the other night; she said she found it only a couple of days ago going through some of Mina’s books. When I phoned home that night from the conference—she seemed so distressed, but she wouldn’t tell me what was troubling her. It was that vicious, cowardly letter. You made her believe that I’d betrayed her, and I never had a chance—you sick bastard—” This time it was Osborne’s anger that boiled over, and he made a savage lunge for Brendan’s throat.

  “Stop it, stop it!” Una screamed, using all the strength she possessed to get between them and push the two men apart. She turned to face her brother; she was trembling with outrage, and spoke only inches from his face. “Hugh is not Aoife’s father. Do you need to hear it again? Sometimes I wish to Christ he were, but he’s not. But he was the only person who befriended me when I got pregnant, the only person who noticed or cared that I was so miserable and confused. Just so you know, Aoife’s father was one of my teachers at university. I should have known better—and I went away, Brendan, only because I was ashamed to think what a fuck-wit I’d been. Hugh knew what people were saying about us all these years. He put up with all the looks and the whispers because I asked him not to say anything. Are you satisfied now, Brendan? Are you fuckin’ satisfied?”

  “Why didn’t you come to us, Una? To Mammy and me? Why did you have to go to a stranger? We’d have looked after you, Una. We’d have helped you.” The hurt in her brother’s voice appeared unfeigned, but Una’s face was incredulous.

  “You know it wouldn’t have happened that way, Brendan. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done. I know you went through an awful time with Mammy, and I am sorry I wasn’t there to help you. But I can’t regret having Aoife, I can’t. And I came back here in spite of all the small-mindedness and suspicion, because I wanted my daughter to have a home and a family, Brendan. You and Fintan are all that we have, God help us.”

  Brendan’s hands moved feebly at his sides. “Una—”

  “Your apologies are no use to anyone at this stage. Go home, Brendan. Will you just go home?”

  He turned to leave, but stopped at the open door, and looked outside as he addressed his final words to Cormac. “I’ll pay for the cost of repairs to your cars. I got drunk. Lost the head.” That was the sum of Brendan’s confes
sion. He pulled the door closed, and was gone.

  Una knelt to pick up the pieces of shattered crockery that littered the floor. Now it was Hugh Osborne’s turn to comfort her. He stooped and took the pottery shards from her hands and set them on the table, then lifted Una to her feet and put his arm around her. Initially she resisted, but could not hold back a choking sob as he sat her down beside him on the bench beneath the windows. Cormac and Nora worked together without speaking to finish the task Una had begun, mopping up the milk and tea, sweeping up the spilled sugar, collecting broken bits of crockery and disposing of the debris in the bin. By the time they were finished, Una had pulled herself together; she and Hugh Osborne now sat side by side on the bench, linked only by hands clasped on the seat between them, each staring into the chasm of the past.

  5

  As he drove to the postmortem in Ballinasloe, Devaney remembered how his prediction about inquisitive reporters had come true the previous afternoon. The first was an ambitious young man from the Sunday World who had to be escorted from the scene to keep him from crossing the barriers they’d set up near the road; next came the RTE camera crew. At least Devaney was spared dealing with them. As the superintendent in charge of the investigation, Brian Boylan was only too eager to be quoted in the papers and on the television news. Of course Boylan had nothing to say, apart from confirming what everyone already knew, that human remains had indeed been discovered at this site, and that it remained to be determined whether there was a connection between the discovery and the Osborne case or any other unsolved disappearances. He also didn’t tell them that the police had found a collapsible pushchair, a pair of small blue shoes, and Mina Osborne’s handbag, or that a .22 rifle had also been recovered from the souterrain. As he’d watched his superintendent bask in the television lights, Devaney had imagined the modesty with which Boylan would eventually take credit for shepherding the investigation to this juncture.