by Erin Hart
Once in Ballinasloe, he drove around the back of the hospital to the mortuary. He’d always dreaded postmortems, and the familiar queasiness started even before he’d parked the car. He got directions to the autopsy room, and found Malachy Drummond just outside the door. Drummond was a thinnish man, balding and bespectacled, known by colleagues for his trademark dickie bows and his appetite for good food and drink. His face had become familiar to the general public from coverage of crime scenes on the television news, but Drummond took this exactly for what it was, a kind of spurious quasi-celebrity that had nothing whatever to do with his actual work. To his colleagues in the police, what Drummond did bordered on the repellent, but the man himself had earned their respect for a professional demeanor and methodical work habits tempered by consideration for the dead. He always referred to his charges as “the lady” or “the gentleman,” despite the often undignified circumstances of their deaths.
“Detective” was his laconic greeting to Devaney. “Sad business, this, a young mother and child. Very sad.” Devaney had enough experience of the man to know he actually meant it. “I have a few things I want to show you.” Drummond led the way into the autopsy room, where Devaney was relieved to see that the bodies had been covered.
“With dental records we were able to confirm the identity of the young lady—she is Mina Osborne, without a doubt. And the cause of death seems fairly clear.” Malachy Drummond picked up long tweezers from a metal tray, and held up for Devaney’s inspection a slightly misshapen rifle pellet. “I found this inside the braincase. But there was neither entrance or exit injury to the skull itself, which tells me a couple of things: one, that she was not shot at close range—which would rule out a self-inflicted wound—and two, that the bullet probably entered the body through soft tissue: the eye, for example, or perhaps the mouth. Difficult to tell with such an advanced state of decomposition.”
“And the child?” Devaney asked.
“With the remains almost completely skeletized, it’s hard to say. No apparent knife or bullet wounds, no blunt injury. The only evidence of trauma is a hairline skull fracture, but that doesn’t appear severe enough to have been the cause of death on its own. However, as I said yesterday, the position of the bodies certainly suggests that they were moved to the location where they were found. I’m ruling both as homicides.” Drummond must have heard the small sigh that escaped Devaney’s lips. He added, gently, “From the nature of his injury, I’d venture to say the little lad was probably unconscious, Detective, whatever ultimately happened to him.”
Devaney himself wasn’t sure why the information about Christopher Osborne triggered such an emotional response. He had worked on scores of murders, and had always been able to maintain his objectivity. Lack of sleep, it must be. He straightened. “Thanks, Malachy. I’ll look for your report.”
As he walked down the corridor from the mortuary to the main hospital building, Devaney tried to work out a scenario in which the different causes of death would make sense. He’d had no preconceptions about what might have happened; why did these facts, taken together, seem so strange? Even after the bodies were discovered, he had wondered about the possibility of a murder/suicide. Such things were not unheard of. But Malachy had found that Mina Osborne’s injuries were definitely not self-inflicted. They’d have to get a ballistics test to find out whether the gun found in the souterrain was the same one that fired the fatal bullet. So how did Jeremy know where the bodies were, unless he was somehow involved? The boy didn’t seem like the type to plan and commit two murders all on his own. Maybe he had witnessed something. Devaney’s head began to ache from the smell of antiseptic, and from the thoughts that kept tumbling against one another in his brain. Christ, he’d give anything for a cigarette.
He turned down the corridor that would take him past Jeremy Osborne’s room, where he pulled aside a passing nurse.
“Any news on the Osborne lad?”
“Sorry, there’s been no change.”
Through the large window, he could see that Lucy Osborne still kept her vigil. She hadn’t been home since Jeremy had been brought here, but sat silently beside her son. In all the times he’d been to check on the boy, Devaney had never seen her sleeping, and yet she somehow managed to maintain her usual fastidious appearance, despite having to wash in the public lavatory down the corridor. He had not divulged to anyone, even his own colleagues in the Gardai, where the break in the case had come from, but with the burgeoning media attention, there was no way Lucy Osborne could have missed hearing about the recovery of the bodies. No doubt she was trying to block it from her mind, concentrating fiercely on her son.
6
The day after the scene-of-crime officers had finished and packed off back to Dublin, all that remained was the flimsy barrier of yellow tape staked around the perimeter, wrapped around saplings in the now torn-up woodland at Bracklyn House. Cormac had come back out here looking for Nora; there was no sign of her in the house, and he wanted to let her know he was going to work on the excavation site. He stepped up to the edge of the souterrain, thinking that this secret place, this nest of concealment, had ultimately succeeded too well in its purpose.
Nora was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest and her back up against the wall of the souterrain. A torch lay just out of reach beside her on the clean-swept dirt floor. She didn’t look up. “I had to see it for myself,” she said.
Cormac eased himself down into the souterrain and sat down a couple of feet from her. Nora’s right hand held a jagged piece of stone, and for an instant she seemed unsure what to do with it. Instead of flinging it, as he had thought she might, she began to scrape at the dirt floor beside her, almost unaware of what she was doing.
“I’ve been sitting up there for days, watching all this, thinking about Mina Osborne,” she said. “I wonder if she even knew she was in danger.”
Cormac said nothing, only watched Nora’s hand scrub a shallow trough in the earth with the stone. She finally spoke: “The night she was killed, I thought my sister would be safe with me. I thought I’d finally succeeded in convincing her that the way Peter treated her wasn’t right. That she didn’t deserve it. Elizabeth was away for the weekend with my parents. Triona called to tell me she had packed a bag, everything was set, and she was finally walking out. She was going to be all right; she and Elizabeth were going to stay with me as long as they needed to. But do you know what else she told me just before she hung up the phone? That underneath it all, even though she couldn’t live like that anymore, that a part of her still loved him. I think she tried to tell Peter what she’d told me, and he finally snapped. Nobody can prove it, but I know, I know that’s what happened. He couldn’t keep her, so he made sure she would never be her own, separate person, or anything more than his pathetic victim, forever.”
The surface of the floor had begun to break apart beneath the steady scouring of the stone, but Nora didn’t seem to notice until her fingers brushed against a tuft of ragged cloth that stuck up from the loosened soil. As Cormac watched, she brushed away the soil to uncover a bundle of what looked like rough-textured woolen homespun. When she carefully lifted the top layer of frayed and moth-eaten fabric, a tiny, fragile-looking skull lay exposed on the surface of the soil, its empty sockets upturned toward the sky.
“Cormac,” she whispered. “This is a newborn baby.” He experienced a kind of slow-spreading horror at the realization that Mina and Christopher Osborne might not be the only victims entombed here, merely the most recent. “Help me,” she said, and began to scratch at the surface of the soil again with the rough edge of stone.
“We should get the Guards.”
She paused only briefly to scan his face. “I’m not stopping now.”
“At least let me get some tools. Please be careful, Nora. Let me show you what to do.” He hurriedly reached up to the bank above their heads and felt around for the handle of his site kit. He handed her a trowel, and used another himself to help clear away bi
ts of soil and animal bones, until the infant was completely uncovered, and what was clearly recognizable as an adult’s elbow joint protruded from the earth beside it.
Within the space of a few minutes, they’d uncovered almost the entire right side of an adult human skeleton, curled around the bundle containing the remains of the child. They really ought to stop now; the standard protocol in the discovery of any human remains was to inform the Gardai immediately. But Cormac knew he’d have a job convincing Nora on that point. Besides, these bones were too old to be of any concern to the police, he was certain. At least a dozen skeletons like this turned up every year, as building foundations were excavated and pipelines and sewage schemes were launched; such discoveries had become almost routine in a place that had been so densely populated for so long.
“See how the surrounding material is full of bones and broken shells?” he said. “That probably means this area was used as a midden; people had to live in these places for extended periods if they were under siege, so they needed not only a stock of supplies, but also a place to get rid of rubbish. It seems like these two weren’t just left in the souterrain, but were actually buried here. Though I couldn’t tell you why.”
About two inches from the adult skeleton’s flexed knee joint, Cormac’s trowel suddenly came in contact with what appeared to be a small patch of metal just under the surface of the clay. He quickly scraped away the dirt and gravel to expose one side of an oblong metal container, about the size of a small bread box and rather ordinary-looking. With further digging, the box turned out to be a sort of coffer or strongbox, now heavily corroded from being buried in damp soil. It was decorated with nail heads and secured around with two heavy iron bands. When he finally had the whole thing excavated, Cormac could see the remnants of leather handles on either side that had rotted through, and the rusty padlock that secured the vaulted lid.
“Maybe something in here can give us an idea who they are,” he said.
Nora could perceive that Cormac was speaking, but his words didn’t register. She had seen hundreds of human skeletons in the course of her career, but each time, she couldn’t help being struck by the beauty and ingenuity of the form, the strength and flexibility in the triangular bones of the spine. She was studying the way the soil had infiltrated the child’s chest cavity, cradling the breastbone, ribs, and collarbone. She knew how difficult it was to tell whether an adult skeleton was male or female without precise measurements of the pelvic bones, though this one being found in the company of a newborn child increased the probability that it was female. Nora knelt over the mute remnants of what might be the second mother and child hidden in this dark place, and understood from the posture of the whitened bones lying before her, now exposed to the light, that again there had been no laying to rest here, no ceremony, but another hurried inhumation cloaked in secrecy. All at once she began to experience the same prickling sensation she had in the lab the day she was alone with the head of the cailin rua. “Cormac,” she said, “do you realize what we haven’t found?”
Nora worked feverishly to remove compacted soil until it was clear that no skull was attached to the end of the adult’s spinal column. She quickly counted the vertebrae, careful not to touch the bones themselves for fear of scratching or damaging them. A normal human spine should have seven cervical vertebrae; this individual was missing the first three.
“My God, Cormac, this could be our red-haired girl,” Nora said, then almost immediately reversed herself. “No—that would be just too fantastic.”
“Of course it would. But I don’t know why it should be. The girl Raftery told us about—Annie McCann—who was executed, she was from around this place somewhere. And what would have become of her body after the execution? You wouldn’t very well bury a convicted murderer in the churchyard with all the proper Christians.”
If by some remote chance this actually was the cailin rua, why would someone take the trouble to conceal her body in a souterrain—with the corpse of the infant she’d presumably murdered? Of course none of it made logical sense. Nora’s head ached, and her shoulders finally began to feel the crushing weight of the last few days’ events. She looked down at the child’s tiny skull, and tried to imagine what little effort it would take to stop the breath of such a helpless creature. It would be over in a few brief seconds. Is that how this child died, when its mother’s touch turned murderous? The infant’s empty orbits stared up at her, unanswering, and Nora felt suddenly cold, kneeling in the damp, shaded corner of the underground room.
7
Malachy Drummond had returned and confirmed Cormac’s assumption that the remains found in the souterrain had indeed been buried there for several centuries. Now he sat with Nora in the evidence room at the Loughrea Garda station. They were waiting for Niall Dawson from the National Museum, who was coming down to have a look at the strongbox and to take it and the skeletal remains with him back to Dublin.
“You’re very quiet this morning,” Cormac said.
“I’m just thinking about how thin the line is between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. And once it’s done, how everything changes.”
“We have nothing to be sorry about, Nora. If you and I had never come here, Mina and Christopher Osborne would still be missing. All we did was to help uncover what was already done.”
“I know, I know. I keep telling myself that. But the way I went about things here only ended up causing extra pain, to you, to everyone. It’s ironic that the whole point of coming back here was supposedly to find out more about the cailin rua, and we haven’t even managed to do that.”
“Hang on,” Cormac said. “We found that bit of a song. Raftery found the story of an execution that fits the dates. And we should know within a few days whether the skeleton from the souterrain belongs to our red-haired girl. That’s an incredible amount of information, Nora. What more could we possibly learn?”
Her eyes pierced him. “That she didn’t do it. That she didn’t murder her own child.” As Cormac studied Nora’s face, he knew that she was also thinking of Hugh Osborne. The awful uncertainty over the whereabouts of his family had been replaced with an even more dreadful probability—that one or more of the people they had come to know in these few days at Bracklyn might be involved in a double murder. The thought had been weighing upon him as well.
Devaney had remained tight-lipped about the postmortem results, but he and his fellow detectives had begun intensive interviews, particularly of Hugh and Lucy Osborne. They had put out additional public appeals for witnesses and information about the day of the disappearance, but as yet no one had been charged. Cormac couldn’t help thinking that nothing would be resolved as long as Jeremy remained unconscious, the words he’d spoken at the tower as much a mystery now as when he’d uttered them. They were all waiting for the moment when the boy would awaken—if he awakened at all.
A few minutes later, Cormac stood by with Nora and Devaney as Niall Dawson launched his examination of the strongbox from the souterrain. Dawson began by taking several photographs of the unopened coffer. He gently tried to work the ancient lock with a thin tool, teasing flakes of rust onto the table below. After a few seconds, the lock cracked apart and fell to pieces in his gloved hand.
“Probably wonderfully strong when they put it on,” Dawson said as he lifted the lid. “Hmm. Seeing what’s in here may help in dating the box quite precisely.” After taking a few photos of the undisturbed contents, he lifted out a slightly concave paten, and a chalice, both of which appeared to be made of pewter or some similar metal. The chalice was set around with uncut stones. The next object was a crucifix, about eight inches long, made of wood, with a crude metal Christ figure.
“See how the arms are very short? Makes it easier to hide up your sleeve, a handy trick if you’re saying a Mass somewhere you oughtn’t. These weren’t items to be caught with—unless of course you felt compelled to risk your neck. So that presents a dilemma: you shouldn’t really destroy them�
��that would be sacrilege—but you can’t risk anybody finding the bloody things either. So you bury them, and pray for times to change.”
At the bottom of the coffer was a book that looked badly damaged with age, its warped calfskin cover embossed with red and gold. Dawson’s gloved fingers opened the pages at random. It appeared to be a Latin Bible, with woodcut illustrations and initials. From the quick appraisal Dawson gave the book, Cormac surmised that he had apparently seen at least a few others like it.
“Italian imprint, published in 1588,” he said, opening the volume to its flyleaf. “That means the National Library will be at least wanting to take a look at it.” He turned to Devaney. “I’m not sure what you were looking for, Detective. These items have some historical interest, but they’re not all that rare. There’s nothing of great monetary value here, if that was a concern. The Bible is worth a thousand or two at most. You’d find objects of this sort in many local historical museums around the country.”
“I appreciate you coming all the way from Dublin on short notice,” Devaney said. “It’s good to be clear about what we have.”
“Not at all,” Dawson replied.
“Niall,” Nora said, “I wanted to ask if you’ve found out any more about the ring.”
“I’m afraid it’s out of my hands. The decorative arts department has possession of it; they might be able to tell you more.”
“Why would it go to them? I thought ‘decorative arts’ meant vases and furniture.”
“Well, the general rule,” Dawson explained with a wry grin, “is that if an artifact is found in bits it comes to Antiquities; if it’s intact, it goes to Decorative Arts. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
