“Kyla,” Thomas Ealey (“Call me Tom”) said. “Yes, Philip met her the summer of 1992. Not that he was especially interested in her at the time—she was only just fifteen. But his default is always charm, and he couldn’t keep from flirting with a pretty girl if his life depended on it. Being young as she was, probably Kyla took it more seriously than he did.”
“Why exactly was Mr. Grant in Wicklow that summer?” Sibéal had the bare-bones statement given by Philip to the local police at the time—two paragraphs that provided almost no useful information—and she wanted to see if the story he’d told matched what he’d told his friends at the time.
“He was there for a summer job,” Tom Ealey replied. “Mind, he took it more for the connections than the money. Lord Gallagher—the previous Lord Gallagher—was something of an investment genius and had all sorts of ties to all sorts of wealth around the world. Philip craved that kind of personal scene. He didn’t just want to make money, he wanted to make money with the right kinds of people.”
“So he was working for Lord Gallagher?”
Ealey stretched back in his seat, hands resting on his comfortably prosperous stomach. “Mostly, yes. Though I believe he also did some work for Lady Gallagher. I met her once when she came to Dublin to arrange matters for the summer. Her usual secretary was off having a baby that summer, and she asked Philip if he’d mind lending a hand from time to time—and of course Philip seized the chance. He might even have done so without her husband’s position. She was a…very warm person.”
Sibéal’s ears pricked up. “Too warm?”
He shook his head. “She wasn’t hitting on him, or hiring him to provide…other services. No matter what gossips might have said about her afterward. No, it was simply who she was. So overflowing with joy in her own world that she couldn’t help pulling others along with her. Lady Gallagher could look at you, as the cliché goes, and make you feel you were the only person in the world who mattered.”
Coming from someone whom had met her only once, it was a compelling description. “So Mr. Grant liked Lady Gallagher.”
“It was impossible not to. And yes, before you ask, I’m sure Philip had something of a schoolboy crush—whatever his age—but personally I thought it was good for him to have the tables turned for once. Let him pine after a woman who wouldn’t have him. Anyway, that’s why he went to Deeprath that summer. He was working for them.”
“Doing what, precisely?”
Tom shrugged. “You’d have to ask him.”
The police had asked, at the time, but in only the most cursory fashion. “Executive assistant,” Philip had replied. And no one had bothered to press for details. He’d been twenty-two that summer—plenty old enough to commit murder.
Sibéal thanked Thomas Ealey for his time and exited the office, only to stop short at the sight of Aidan Gallagher in the reception area.
“What are you doing here?” they asked in unison.
Aidan recovered first. “Never mind, I know what you’re doing here, Inspector. The same thing you were doing at Deeprath—trying to catch a killer.”
“And you?”
He didn’t blink for an alarmingly long time. “The same.”
It was as if he was daring her to warn him off, to caution him against interference. No need for that…yet.
“I shall probably come down to Deeprath again tomorrow to speak to your brother-in-law.” She did not ask permission.
“Lucky Philip.” With that, Aidan stalked past her to take the chair she had just vacated and, no doubt, to repeat many of the same questions.
Though he had her at this disadvantage: no matter how young he’d been, Aidan Gallagher had lived through that summer. No doubt he knew things she didn’t. Perhaps it would be worth making an ally of him. He was a fellow police officer, after all. It couldn’t hurt to try.
An optimistic point of view that had kept Sibéal in an unhappy marriage for far too long. She’d tried patience, she’d tried understanding, she’d tried ignoring…until one day she woke up and knew that was the day she was going to leave.
Whatever his faults, Josh had been cooperative about it all. Letting her have the flat, promptly paying child support, and no one could accuse him of being a neglectful father. He was such a good father, in fact, that his second child was born to his current paramour just four months after the day Sibéal asked for a divorce. Never more than a nominal Catholic, he’d blithely married again in a registrar’s office. To his credit, he’d managed to stay married to this wife, though Sibéal’s mother and grandmother considered both the divorce and remarriage religiously invalid. If ever she decided to marry again, Sibéal would have a battle on her hands.
As though on cue, her mobile rang with the doom-laden tune assigned to her mother’s number. Sibéal had long ago learned that avoiding calls only meant greater trouble later on, so she sighed deeply, forced a false note of patience into her voice, and said, “Hi, Mam. What’s up?”
There was never much of import, just a long litany of gossip about the neighbors and the village and the sorry state of the country and when was Sibéal going to move home so that her family could help take care of May like a proper family should.
She knew it so well she only had to listen with half her attention, inserting the appropriate phrases and encouraging sounds along the way.
“Your grandfather’s looking forward to seeing you both for his birthday.”
Which was next week. “Mam, I told you that with my promotion, I might not be able to manage it. I’ve got a case.”
“A dead case,” her mother answered with no sense of irony. “It’s not like anyone’s in a rush, are they? It’s just solving a puzzle, not stopping danger. And I can’t see that a puzzle matters more than your family.”
“Mam, I have to go. I’ll ring you later.” She hung up abruptly, the only way she could escape from those kinds of conversations.
What stung was that her mother wasn’t entirely wrong. She’d only been promoted because then they could stick her away in Serious Crimes Review where the work was mostly tedious and unappreciated. Whoever killed Cillian and Lily Gallagher had been quiet for more than two decades. It was the very definition of a cold case, with no one in imminent danger should she fail to solve it.
But she thought of Aidan Gallagher’s eyes—the only part of his expression he could not control—and the anguish in them of a child who deserved answers. A family had been destroyed all those years ago. And what was left of that family deserved to know who had done it, and why.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After pondering those mysterious notes found in Chase’s book, Carragh helped herself to the tower keys and made her way up the stairs to the very top. With at least some sunlight coming in through the arrow slits and the small door she wrested open, now was as good a time as any to photograph the wall of words. It was a pity all she had was her phone, but who carried a real camera these days unless they were a serious photographer? She tried to go about it systematically, dividing the walls into grids in her head, but no doubt she overlapped too often and probably missed some sections. By the time she was finished, she’d taken almost five hundred pictures. She would load them onto her laptop later and see if she could make sense of it all.
She spent another two hours working hard on the library catalogs and felt pleased with what she’d accomplished—six bays completed—until she looked at the fourteen bays remaining. Then she took the least-traveled route to her bedroom and successfully avoided contact with anyone. Mrs. Bell had left a cold meal for her on the desk and Carragh decided on a bath before anything else.
There was something decadent about these enormous old tubs, as though one should be surrounded by maids pouring fresh pails of steaming water—which would be an improvement on the temperature. The plumbing wasn’t as bad as at her grandmother’s house, but the size of the tub and open space of the bathroom meant it cooled quickly.
Afterward, Carragh ate cheese and bread and a
pples and ham while she uploaded the photos and studied them on her laptop. Try as she might, however, it was impossible to decipher more than a few words at a time. Zoom in too close, and everything went blurry. Zoom back out, and it was too small. She sat back, rubbing the bridge of her nose where strain had settled in a knot, listening to the wind that had picked up enough in the last hour to sound as though it were battering at the stone walls. Carragh knew she needed help with the photos. She had a friend who did graphic design in Dublin—perhaps if she emailed him the photos he could manipulate them into clarity, blow them up, then print them out? It would be easier to figure out if there was a narrative line if she could lay them all out at once.
There was a knock, and Nessa Gallagher entered without waiting for a reply.
Carragh scrambled to her feet, closing her laptop as she did so. It was like having one’s headmistress or tutor show up unexpectedly, and she began thinking how to justify the work she had done thus far.
But Nessa had not come to call her to account. “Have you spoken to Aidan at all tonight?”
She shook her head. “Not since he left for Dublin earlier.”
“I thought he might have been in touch with instructions.”
“No.”
Nessa was dressed more informally than Carragh had yet seen her, though informal was a relative term. She wore a dressing gown of cream-figured silk with dark red cherry blossoms trailing across the fabric. “Aidan used to be such an obedient child. Not like Kyla, she had an opinion on everything from the time she could walk. But Aidan has always understood and accepted his position and responsibilities. Now, I feel as though I do not know him at all.”
It was the first time Nessa had ever sounded old to Carragh, and it made her sympathetic. “I’m sure he does not mean to worry you.”
She realized that Nessa had moved her walking stick so she could lean on it with both hands. “Would you like to sit down?” Carragh moved forward to provide support or help her to a chair…
But Nessa seemed not to hear her. She gazed around the room, from toile drapes to heavy bed hangings to limestone fireplace surround. “This was my bedroom when I was a young woman. I’d stayed in the nursery wing, of course, until I went to school in France.”
“Where did you study?”
“A convent school outside Paris. I had to leave when the war came. I was thirteen when I came back, and insisted I was too old to return to the nursery. Papa let me choose whatever room I wanted. I’d always loved this one. And Fiona didn’t mind me having it.”
“Who was Fiona?” Carragh’s mind had too many Gallaghers in it to place them all.
“My brother’s wife. Eamon was from Papa’s first marriage—he was twenty-four when I was born. I was glad when my brother married Fiona. She would ride and hunt with me. Fiona was always quite kind, and the castle could be lonely.”
Considering that Deeprath could—and had—comfortably housed dozens upon dozens of servants, not to mention the much larger families of the past, Carragh was not surprised Nessa had been lonely. She was only surprised that she admitted it.
Cautiously, she probed. “You must also have been glad when Lily came to the castle. It seems she loved it here, as much as any Gallagher.”
“Lily.” The softer, mellower tone was gone. Nessa clearly had mixed feelings about Lily Gallagher.
Before Carragh could press the issue, the room was plunged into darkness without warning.
She gasped despite herself, then bit her lip and cautiously felt for the desk to her right and her industrial flashlight. She switched it on, to find that Nessa had unerringly made her way—in the dark and with her cane—to the fireplace mantel and the candles there. Without comment she lit them from matches set beside them.
“Well,” Nessa said, all her authority returned. “Your first Deeprath blackout. I hope you don’t find it too tiresome. It’s not stormy, just windy, so Bell should be able to find the trouble and get it sorted before too many hours. We don’t bother with the utilities company unless necessary.”
Then she visibly startled. “My goodness, what on earth have you done with that painting? Why would you take it down?”
Carragh moved the flashlight beam to where Nessa was staring: the painting of Jenny Gallagher propped against the pillows of her bed. She could not have missed that earlier in the evening. The thing was four feet tall! If that enormous picture had been there when she’d come in, she would most definitely have noticed it.
Nessa said frostily, “I appreciate your interest in our home, Miss Ryan, but unless you have an art history degree of which I am not aware, I would prefer that you admire our paintings from a distance. Do you need assistance to rehang it?”
“No,” she said slowly, too shivery with curiosity to be much embarrassed. “I can do it.”
“See that you do.”
Carragh offered to light Nessa to her room, and returned almost reluctantly. Would the painting have moved again? No. It continued to look at her from the bed. Whatever her promise to Nessa, she didn’t rehang it immediately. How could she? This was the second time it had been taken down, and that could not be accidental—never mind the fact that she’d just found it noted on the list Lily Gallagher had made years ago: 4: Bride painting. It seemed someone wanted her to look at it. She tried to ignore questions about whether that someone was alive or dead, propped her flashlight at an angle, and sat cross-legged on the bed staring at Jenny Gallagher and the Darkling Bride.
The portrait had been painted in 1880, Jenny’s wedding gift to her husband. Its outstanding feature, of course, was the subject and her reflected double. It tended to block out all else. But tonight Carragh deliberately avoided the painted women. Instead, she studied all that surrounded them.
The background appeared to be little more than generic woodland, though she’d seen enough of the Wicklow Mountains now to recognize the distinct shadings of brown and ochre earth beneath the pines. The longer she looked, the more details began to appear—like invisible ink turning brown beneath lemon juice.
Reflected in the pond behind the Bride’s shoulder was the outline of a Norman keep just like the one at Deeprath. At the base of the trees surrounding Jenny were woodland creatures—hares and foxes and sika deer. There were faces, as well, like gargoyles lurking in the trees, mischievous and cruel.
Carragh sighed in satisfaction when she found the most recognizable symbol—the wide, squat Sanctuary Cross from Glendalough. Not the entire rock on which it was carved, but just the outline of the cross itself, etched beneath the hem of Jenny’s dress. As though she were standing on it. She played the light at different angles until she got the best one, and leaned in so close her nose wasn’t more than six inches from the canvas. There was something else etched inside that cross. Two letters: EC.
A shudder went through her, like a rush of air beneath wings. Jenny Gallagher had chosen to make a deliberate statement with this painting: her sanctuary was Evan Chase.
So how had it all gone so disastrously wrong?
* * *
—
After a long day in Dublin and an uncomfortable train journey, Aidan’s ill temper was not helped by having to navigate the castle in darkness, illuminated only by a penlight. But he managed to find his bedroom without falling over anything…and then wished he hadn’t, since his great-aunt was sitting in the chair before his empty fireplace. The paired candelabra on the mantel gave off a light that licked her face eerily.
“I heard you return,” she informed him. “Has Bell found the issue with the power?”
He shook his head of excess rainwater and took off his wet coat. For once, Nessa did not complain about his manners. “It’s started to rain. I told him to leave it until first light. Were the girls frightened?”
“Kyla told them they could have a campout. They piled all their blankets and quilts on the floor and fell asleep in two minutes.”
He expected her to inquire about his trip to Dublin, but instead she asked, “A
re you quite sure Miss Ryan can be trusted?”
“What do you mean? You’re the one who hired her.”
“I didn’t know you would be leaving her so much to her own devices. She’s spending quite a lot of time alone in the library. Is that wise?”
“You think she’s going to pocket some of the books? More power to her. There’re more than anyone needs down there, even the National Library. Miss Ryan can take what she likes as far as I’m concerned.”
“And are you at all concerned about your family’s reputation?”
Aidan sighed. He pulled out the heavy oak desk chair so he could sit across from her. In the candlelight, Nessa’s face seemed to flicker between past and present, from the stern but fair guardian of his youth to the hollows and angles of old age. For the first time, he really grasped the fact that she was nearly ninety.
It led him to speak more gently. “How much more damage could be done? If there was anything incriminating in the library, the police would have taken it long ago. They didn’t—I have looked at the evidence lists. There is one missing journal of my mother’s. The police don’t have it, and unless it has been pulled to pieces and scattered page by page, it’s not in the library. If Carragh wants to look at dress pattern books from Great-grandmother Isabella or family letters from the 1700s, I have no objections to whatever she might learn.”
Nessa dipped her chin, her carefully shaped bob a flash of white in the shadows. “Things cannot go on like this, Aidan.”
“What things?”
“I know I have not been the maternal figure you would have liked over the years. I raised you the best I knew how, and made allowances for trauma. But you are thirty-two years old, and the last Gallagher male. However old-fashioned you find it, the name matters. You must marry and have a son.”
“And I suppose you would like to play matchmaker?”
Sarcasm never deterred Nessa. “Certainly, if you will permit me. Enough of our ancestors married for money that it need not be the deciding factor. And there are any number of blue-blooded girls anxious to increase their titles. Just because the English queen’s grandson married a commoner doesn’t mean you need follow suit.”
The Darkling Bride Page 12
