by Erin Hart
Stella pulled into the yard at Killowen and parked opposite the farmhouse, beside Mairéad Broome’s black BMW. A few ducks and a gaggle of geese roamed around the driveway. The slate roof on the main building looked new. This was definitely a working farm, and yet there was simplicity and order, as well as a certain creative vibe to the place. As Stella climbed out of the car, the geese began to waddle in her direction. The gander darted forward, hissing a warning, and a voice came from the doorway: “Mind that fella, he’s the next thing to a guard dog.”
Stella turned to find Claire Finnerty standing in the entry. “I expect you’re here about the bog men,” Claire said. “Hard to keep a thing like that under wraps. Boot of a car, we heard.” Claire herself was dressed for work, in cargo pants, striped jumper, and fleece vest. Her thick dark hair was tied back in a no-nonsense plait, her feet firmly planted in a beat-up pair of wellingtons. “I’m the only one here at the minute, apart from a couple of guests.”
“I’m happy to begin with you,” Stella said.
“Come in, then.” Claire Finnerty led her into the house, through the large open sitting room and kitchen that formed the main portion of the ground floor. Thick oak beams spanned the width of the building, and the far wall was almost all glass—three sets of French doors that looked out over an herb garden in the back courtyard. The table was covered at the moment with small heaps of fresh-cut oregano, thyme, and rosemary that gave the kitchen a pungent aroma. Claire Finnerty returned to her task, bundling the herbs with elastic bands. “Have to keep at this,” she said. “We’ve a market in Banagher first thing tomorrow.”
“Her car’s outside, so no doubt you already know what I’m going to ask: How long have you known Mairéad Broome?” Stella asked.
“She’s been coming here about six or seven years. We offer a place to work with a minimum of interruption. That’s why we’re here.”
“How often does she come?”
“I’d say about twice a year, on average.”
“Regularly?”
“Not really; it depends on her exhibition schedule.”
“What about last spring?”
“I don’t remember the dates on every booking. I’d have to check—”
“Please do.”
Claire Finnerty rose deliberately and led Stella to a small cluttered office adjacent to the kitchen. It was a cozy and gloriously eccentric space, walls the color of cinnamon and carved wooden and woven grass masks hanging on nearly every inch of space that wasn’t occupied by bookcases. The shelves were packed with books this way and that, not in disorderly fashion but so that every possible inch was filled, no wasted space. Horticulture, spirituality, Irish history, art, architecture, teach-yourself titles on every conceivable topic, including worm propagation, organic farming, How to Grow Your Own Hemp. At the center of the desk, a small laptop gave off a cool blue light. “When were you looking for?” Claire Finnerty asked.
“The last two weeks of April, this year.”
Finnerty tapped on a few keys to bring up the booking calendar. “Oh, no, I thought we’d taken care of that.” She turned to Stella, all concern. “We had a computer virus that wiped out our scheduling program for the first five months of the year. I know that Mairéad was with us sometime in the spring, but I can’t remember whether it was February or March—but definitely not April.”
“How do you know?”
“We were getting in a new geothermal system, and with all the upheaval of construction, we decided it would be better not to have resident artists during that time.”
“Since you’re a friend of Mairéad Broome’s, you must also know that one of the dead men found in the bog yesterday was her husband.” Stella held up the photo on her mobile and watched Claire Finnerty’s eyes narrow. “Benedict Kavanagh. The car belonged to him.”
“Yes, Mairéad told me about Benedict when she arrived just now.”
“Did you ever meet Mr. Kavanagh?”
“No.” Stella wasn’t sure if she was taken aback more by the lack of apology or by the tiny note of challenge in Claire Finnerty’s voice.
“But you didn’t like him.”
“I really couldn’t offer an opinion. As I said, I never met the man.”
“And Ms. Broome never spoke about him?”
“Not really.”
“A man goes missing and ends up dead less than a quarter of a mile from here, the place where his wife came to work twice a year for the past six or seven years. You don’t find that rather odd?”
“It is strange. But I don’t have any idea what Benedict Kavanagh was doing here. If you don’t mind, I need to get on with my herbs.” Claire gestured toward the kitchen, and Stella followed her back to the table.
“What else can you tell me about last April?”
“You mean, can I remember anything incriminating about anyone here?”
Stella found herself rankling at the antagonistic edge in Claire Finnerty’s voice. “I just need to know what you recall,” she said. “Anything unusual. We’re trying to figure out, for instance, how Mr. Kavanagh’s car came to be buried in the bog, whether anyone would have had access to a mechanical digger during the last two weeks of April.”
Claire Finnerty offered a grudging glance. “I suppose I ought to just tell you now, because you’ll find out sooner or later. There was a digger here, for installing the geothermal system. The workmen had to excavate a portion of the hillside behind the house to bury the coils.” She gestured toward the courtyard, and Stella noted how the ground sloped away beyond the garden wall. “We had a company down from Boyle to do the work,” Claire continued. “GeoSys, they’re called. They brought in a JCB and a bulldozer.”
“And this gang from GeoSys, they’d just leave their equipment unattended when they’d knock off? Weren’t they afraid someone might pinch it?”
“They never said as much.”
“Did the workers stay here?”
“No, they preferred staying nearer the pubs in town.”
“Do you remember hearing anyone using the equipment after hours?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you know if anyone here has experience in heavy construction?”
“I don’t interrogate the people who come to work here, Detective. You’ll have to ask them yourself.”
“I will,” Stella said. “I assume everyone returns here to the main house at some point during the day?”
“They’ll be here for lunch in about an hour, when they’ve finished their chores, and then everyone’s free in the afternoon.”
“I’ll come back then.”
Claire Finnerty didn’t look up from her work but raised no objection.
Stella headed for the door but turned back just before crossing the threshold. “There was one more thing I wanted to ask. How much do you know about Vincent Claffey and his… activities?”
“As little as possible,” came the terse reply. “We’re not on great terms, if you want the truth.”
“But he is your closest neighbor. Which means you’d have more opportunity than anyone else to observe what goes on at his place. Any idea why he would be digging in a protected bog?”
“None whatsoever.”
Stella thought for a moment. “How deeply would you say his daughter is involved in any of his schemes?”
A flicker of anger seemed to travel through Claire Finnerty. “Deirdre Claffey is a child, Detective. She doesn’t know anything.”
Outside, Stella took the long way back to her car, skirting the perimeter of the haggard between the outbuildings to see what she could see. She darted between the goat barn and the cheese storehouse, keeping an eye out for that nasty gander. The whitewashed wall of the storehouse had scorch marks from the ground and hastily sprayed graffiti—a couple of rudely drawn human figures with exaggerated private parts. Rain had made streak marks in the soot. The fire must have been fairly recent. Why hadn’t Claire Finnerty bothered to report this, or tell her about it just now? S
tella reached out to touch the scorch marks. This fire had been put out before any great damage was done, so perhaps they figured it wasn’t worth reporting. Or was there some other explanation?
7
Nora pulled on a new pair of nitrile gloves for the second forensic exam of the day, on Killowen Man. Catherine Friel was the primary point person, given her experience with bog remains and suspicious deaths. After Nora had removed as much peat as she could, Dr. Friel began the external exam, first noting the appearance of the body into her minirecorder.
“The deceased appears to be male, approximately sixty to sixty-five years of age. The body has been dismembered, more likely the result of disinterment by machines than by homicidal violence or postmortem mutilation.” Dr. Friel’s voice was calm; she was focused on her subject, as if she had long ago learned to concentrate not on the horror but on the physical form before her and what that physical form had to contribute to the story that was about to unfold. “The deceased appears to be wearing a woolen cloak, which will have to be removed eventually, but I want to make a note first of cuts in the outer garment that seem to align quite precisely with sharp-force wounds on the body.” She pointed to the gashes in the woolen fabric where it was wrapped around the truncated torso and then lifted the cloak to show the corresponding cuts in the dead man’s flesh. “If we measure the length of these wounds”—she nodded to Nora, who reached for the measuring tools—“it looks as if these cuts were made right through the cloak.” She pressed the dead man’s skin with a fingertip to flatten the surface. “See how the wound narrows at both ends? That shows the shape of the weapon. It looks as if he was stabbed with a double-edged blade, something like a dagger. And not just once but at least a half dozen times.”
Dr. Friel stepped back again and began to scan the rest of the body, and Nora observed the differences in the way they each approached the corpse: she immediately took in details that told of the man’s life; Catherine Friel seemed to zero in on what the body revealed about his death. A slight but fascinating divergence in perspective.
“Look here,” Dr. Friel said. She was examining the other side of the torso and pointed to a similar set of cuts in the cloth on the victim’s left side, underlaid once more with sharp-force wounds. “What do you think—two assailants, or one person with two knives?” She stepped back and mimed an attack with a short blade in each hand, thrusting up toward Nora’s rib cage. “Could have happened either way, but I’m betting on two assailants—see how there are many more cuts here, on the left side? Points to one attacker being a bit more… enthusiastic than the other. A symmetrical pattern is more likely if it’s only one person.”
Dr. Friel stepped back again, taking in the whole body once more. “Really quite amazing,” she said. “He’s so well preserved that we’ve got enough evidence for a real case. Suspicious death is suspicious death, even centuries later. Pity whoever did it is long gone.”
She pointed to several locations on the body with a gloved finger. “There are two distinct areas where the wounds appear to be clustered: there’s one grouping in the infraumbilical region, just below the navel; another in the epigastric region, which probably punctured the stomach. The different characteristics of the wounds in each area suggest that there was more than one assailant. That, plus the upward thrust of the blade, which is more usual for attacks than self-inflicted wounds, plus the holes through his garments that correspond with the wounds, all of that together suggests cause of death was exsanguination brought on by homicidal violence. That’s what I’d put in my autopsy report.”
“So he was stabbed, possibly by two assailants, and bled to death?”
“That’s certainly what it looks like. And from the lack of any decomposition, particularly around the wounds, I would also say that he must have gone straight into the bog after he was killed. What else can we tell about him, given the physical evidence?” Dr. Friel pointed to one of the bog man’s hands. “There’s a pronounced callus on the middle finger of his right hand. Also, the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand are stained darker than the rest of the body. Mishap with a leaky quill, perhaps?” Dr. Friel held up her own right hand, showing off her own discolored fingers. “Unfortunate incident over the crossword last night.”
“If it is ink, we should be able to tell from trace analysis.” Nora studied the bog man’s face, the open eyes and lightly stubbled cheeks, the gaping mouth. She wondered what, if anything, you could tell about a person from his expression at the moment of death. What were the words on his lips at the instant the knives plunged into his gut? And what did he believe would happen to his spirit when his life was so rudely extinguished? The expression was perhaps a function of death itself, the muscles relaxing into primary flaccidity. She thought of the words of the requiem: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
8
The sun had gone behind a bank of dark clouds when Stella pulled into the driveway at Vincent Claffey’s house. Just as she remembered: three junked cars and a rusty washing machine, a trio of unlicensed dogs with the run of the place, a broken baby swing and a pushchair, rolls of fencing. No clamp of turf, so he wasn’t likely burning the stuff here at the house. There was plenty of greenery, and every bit of it weeds—not a potato drill or a cabbage in sight. The chipper was parked alongside a shed in the haggard and gave off a greasy reek. What a place to rear a child, Stella thought, realizing that she was thinking of Deirdre Claffey and not the baby she’d seen balanced on the girl’s hip yesterday.
She ought to go straight to the door and knock, but the shed door had been left open, and investigative instinct overcame her. She might be able to find out what Claffey was up to with the peat if she could just happen to walk past an open door. She glanced at the house, and seeing no one, made her way to the shed just beyond the chipper.
Just as she reached the door, Deirdre Claffey’s voice rang out across the haggard. “What’dye want?”
Stella turned around. “Is your daddy here, Deirdre? I was hoping to speak to him.”
“He’ll be back soon.”
“Maybe I could wait for him? I just have a few follow-up questions.”
The girl said nothing but moved away from the door, which Stella took as an invitation. She stepped across the threshold into a dim room with blinds drawn, television blaring, and a dozen spuds peeled and ready for boiling on the stove. Stella’s suit, rumpled as it was, made her feel out of place amid the squalor, but with the father’s checkered history, she was probably not the first Guards officer or social worker Deirdre Claffey had ever met.
The baby lay on his back on a blanket in the middle of the tiny sitting room, staring up at her from the floor with those giant blue eyes. He shrieked when she made eye contact, delighted to have a playmate. Stella couldn’t help it—she picked up a set of plastic keys from the floor and rattled them in front of the child’s face. In contrast with nearly everything around him, the baby’s face and clothing, Stella noticed, were immaculately clean. Hard to know which stories to credit amid the local gossip. The child was loved—was that any sort of a clue?
“What’s his name?” Stella asked.
Deirdre’s voice, floating from the kitchen, sounded tired. “Cal.”
“Well, Cal, you’re a great little fella, aren’t you? What age are you, hmm?” She poked the baby playfully in the stomach, and he shrieked again. Was there any sound more irresistible?
“Don’t be getting him excited, now—he’s about to have his dinner,” Deirdre sounded exactly like someone’s nattering old granny. “He’ll be nine months next week.”
Stella felt her antennae picking up signals from all around the room: large stash of nappies in the corner, the brand-new clothing on the baby, and a new battery-powered swing to replace the knackered one out in the yard.
“Deirdre, do you remember the man I asked you about yesterday, Benedict Kavanagh?”
“I told you I didn’t know him.”
“But you also said you met al
l sorts, working the chipper van. I’m sorry to have to tell you this—Benedict Kavanagh is dead, Deirdre. That was his car in the bog. His body was in the boot.”
The baby began to cry, and Deirdre quickly plucked him up off the floor. “Shhh,” she whispered. “Whisht now, whisht.” She began to rock slowly and hummed a little tune until the child began to settle. Unclear, Stella thought, who was comforting whom.
“How well did you know Mr. Kavanagh?” Stella asked as gently as she could. No response. “When was the last time you saw him?”
The girl’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “I told you I didn’t know him.” She lifted the baby’s hand and stroked his dimpled fingers. The child began to suck his thumb and laid his head on her shoulder.
“Did your father know you were acquainted—”
“No!” Deirdre shot back, almost as if she was defending her father against some as-yet-unmade accusation.
Before Stella could form her next question, she heard a noise of tires skidding in gravel, and Vincent Claffey was through the door and only a few inches from her face.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doin’ here? You’d better not be talking to my girl—she’s underage, and you know it. Say nothin’, Deirdre, I’m warning you. She’s no right to be here asking questions.”
“Mr. Claffey—” Stella began, but her voice was drowned out.
“Did you get what you came for, then? Did you?” Claffey’s voice had risen in pitch, as if he was frightened of something. He turned to his daughter. “You, get to your room, and don’t come out ’til I say.” He moved to shove Deirdre, who was still holding the child, and Stella stepped forward to block him. Had she put the girl and her baby in danger by coming here?
“Mr. Claffey, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I came to speak to you. Deirdre and I were just chatting.” Claffey was not a big man; he was short and wiry but prone to explosive outbursts, as Stella knew from reading his form. He’d never been arrested for striking his daughter, but that didn’t mean it never happened. Surely he knew better than to lay a hand on a Guards detective.
