by Erin Hart
Claire threw her a suspicious look. “Yes.”
“I don’t blame you for trying to keep her name out of the investigation, telling us that she’d left. Shawn gave us the whole story this afternoon.”
Claire Finnerty swung around to face Nora full on. “Did she, now?”
“We found Anca’s cigarettes during the search. Shawn had to tell us. She said you were trying to protect the girl. I think that’s commendable.”
Claire offered no response.
“It’s hard to know what to do, sometimes, to protect people.” Nora knew she was in danger of overstepping, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Maybe last night wasn’t the first time you’d seen Deirdre’s father treat her that way. But I know what it’s like, not having any legal standing to intervene—”
“Please stop, just stop talking!” Claire Finnerty was grasping the edge of the sink. Her voice sounded strangled. After a long moment, she turned and fled the kitchen, leaving the water running over some salad greens.
Nora turned off the tap. She shouldn’t have pushed Claire so hard just to satisfy her own curiosity. And yet, recalling the shock and anger in the faces around the dinner table, she was sure that her memory wasn’t mistaken. It had been Claire Finnerty insisting that they find a way to get Deirdre Claffey away from her father. Someone had found a way, but perhaps it wasn’t what Claire had in mind.
Joseph and Eliana came ambling up to the kitchen through the courtyard garden. Both of them had witnessed the scene at dinner last night, but as far as Nora knew, they were still ignorant of Vincent Claffey’s death. Better if they were spared the details. The way Cormac’s father had clung to Eliana’s hand after Claffey’s outburst last night—you could read it as a protective gesture. Was that what was going on later on as well, when the girl was in his room? He didn’t want me to leave, she’d said. Was he afraid Vincent Claffey would come back to Killowen? Cormac had the same protective streak as his father, which could be maddening at times, but it was also oddly reassuring. And Cormac probably had no idea where he’d picked up that character trait.
“Time to wash up for supper,” Eliana was saying to Joseph, letting go of his arm. “Would you like to rest a minute here before we go upstairs?”
Nora saw Eliana check under the throw on the sofa and slip the yellow notebook out between the cushions and into her bag.
“I’ll take him to get washed up, Eliana, if you’d like a break before supper,” Nora said. She motioned Eliana a short distance away so that Joseph might not overhear their conversation.
“Did you have a good day?” Nora asked.
Eliana glanced at her briefly. “Yes, everything is fine today. We were studying these cards—what do you call them?”
“Flash cards.”
“Yes, the flash cards. He likes the pictures, but he gets eh… nervous?” She tried to find the proper way to express it.
“Flustered? Or perhaps you mean frustrated?”
“Yes, that’s it—frustrated. I try to tell him he will learn the words again. That it will take patience.”
“That’s true,” Nora said. She glanced over at Joseph, who seemed to be nodding off in his corner of the sofa. “I wanted to ask if there’s anything more that Cormac and I could be doing to help you.”
Eliana’s eyes flicked away nervously. “I hope I am doing the right things…”
“You’re doing great work, Eliana. He seems to enjoy the time spent with you.” Nora reached up to give the girl’s shoulder a squeeze. “I want to make sure you know that we’re here, both Cormac and myself, if you have questions about anything, or just want to talk.” Eliana nodded without looking up. “Now, a little time off.”
“I don’t need it.”
“I insist,” Nora said. “I can stay with Joseph, and you can do whatever you’d like to do.”
Eliana looked doubtful. “You’re certain?”
“Yes, go and enjoy yourself.”
Eliana rose slowly from her chair and headed for the stairs, not visibly cheered by the prospect of time to herself. This reluctance to leave Joseph was becoming a pattern. A worrisome pattern, if she were honest.
Nora turned back to find that Joseph had cracked one eye open. He’d been watching them the whole time, the sly old devil. “Narb a fisking torrit,” he said, drawing his hand over his face. “Her fox, it’s a looken peas. Peas.” He shook his head and with one hand seemed to bat the words away, a gesture that said he knew what was happening and was buggered if he could do anything about it. Here he was, back at the peas again. That was the way this thing seemed to work; he’d make steady forward progress and then would come a sort of verbal hiccup, and he’d drop back to where he’d been a week ago. Back with the vegetables.
“I think Eliana’s all right,” Nora said. “Probably just a bit homesick.”
He looked puzzled.
“Missing her family, you know.”
He looked at her with such a fixed stare that she wondered if he understood.
“Neary, shows a brick.” He put his palms together, then opened them like a book. Like an endless game of charades, Nora thought, and he can’t even tell us when we’ve guessed right. “A brick,” he said, and made the book gesture again.
“A book?” She exaggerated the O shape of her lips, trying to show him. “What is it about a book?”
“Hermakes a voil.” Here he scooped one hand, as if to say, Come here, and she moved closer. “No! A voil in it, a spog, a spogget.” Beads of sweat were beginning to form on his forehead, as if the effort of making oneself understood was hard physical work. She searched his face for hints, clues to the meanings he was going for, to no avail. He definitely had something to tell her, perhaps something important. That was the trouble—no way to know.
“Bollocks,” he muttered.
“Now that I understand,” Nora said. “And you’ll forgive me if I concur.”
11
Cormac looked up from his work in the cutaway. He was digging directly below the spot where they’d found the satchel, hoping there might be a few more clues buried in the peat. Killowen Man’s brooch was still unaccounted for, not to mention the contents of his satchel. The likeliest scenario was that both the books and the brooch were stolen by the assassins who had stuck their blades into Killowen Man’s belly.
It was nearly five; Niall had probably made it back to Dublin by now. Cormac tried mightily not to think about Gráinne Dawson’s reaction, not to feel in his own gut the punch his friend was about to deliver at home. He had never been married, so how could he possibly know what it was like? Surely a true marriage required a certain acceptance of all the shades of human complexity; to deny imperfection, or to allow a momentary weakness to undo years of connection seemed extraordinarily severe. And yet what would his reaction be if Nora came to him with a similar story to Niall’s, not a long-term affair but giving in to a brief flash of desire? He looked down at his feet, stuck into wellingtons that seemed to be melting into the wet peat, and realized that he was still standing on shifting ground. Was there nothing solid at the bottom of it all? After a full year together, he found himself still craving assurances that Nora, no matter how desperately he loved her, might never be able to provide.
He started packing up his tools. They hadn’t had any security out here since the crime scene detail left, and now he wondered if they should ask the Guards to post someone on site overnight. That’s when treasure hunters usually did their work, going over sites with their outlawed metal detectors.
Niall’s anonymous tipster had mentioned a manuscript. The real question was whether there was a manuscript, or whether the tipster only wanted to draw the National Museum’s attention to Killowen. The stylus was discovered a few days before Benedict Kavanagh went missing and just before Niall had received the tipster’s call. Considering Vincent Claffey’s obsession with rewards, could he have been the anonymous voice on the phone? Not likely that Shawn Kearney and the others at Killowen would have kept C
laffey posted on their excavation, given the frosty relations between them. Then again, Claffey seemed to have no problem spying on people. He should have asked Niall a few more questions: what sort of accent the caller had, the exact language he had used.
As Cormac stood in the cutaway, he heard someone moving through the scrubby birch saplings at the bog’s edge. A strong, low voice carried over the heather: “How, hi, hi, how!” Anthony Beglan carried a thin hazel rod as he drove his cattle home from the pasture beside the bog. Cormac could see only the top half of Beglan’s body and the tip of the hazel. He had to struggle to make out the language—not English, that was certain, nor Irish. Straining to hear, he climbed up out of the cutaway, trying to follow without being detected, safely screened behind the saplings at the edge of the road.
Every language had its own music, Cormac thought, tuning his ears to the sound. If it wasn’t English or Irish, what were the possibilities, logically speaking? The sound was almost like Italian, or perhaps Beglan had begun to learn a few words of Romanian from the girl he’d been hiding in his house.
When they reached his farm, Beglan penned the cattle and slipped the leather strap from the basket over his head. Cormac followed at a distance. The rank smell he’d noticed the other night was stronger now and seemed to be coming from the shed across the haggard, a low building with a corrugated fiberglass roof.
Beglan crossed to an open lean-to against the shed, where he took an eel from his basket. Cormac looked away as Beglan held a nail to the creature’s head, and he flinched as the first hammer blow drove the nail through its skull. Cormac looked up to see the eel’s tail flex once and then lie still. Beglan took a knife and scored around the creature’s neck, then used pliers to peel back its skin. Finally he slit the belly and gutted it, paying close attention to the entrails and carefully separating out one small portion, which he slipped into a cup on the nearby bench. The eel went into a bucket at his feet.
As he watched Anthony go about his work, Cormac wondered about the conversation he’d overheard here the other night between Beglan and Anca. Shawn Kearney said the Killowen residents were trying to protect the Romanian girl. So why had she run away with Deirdre Claffey? Why not flee to Killowen? If Niall had been set up by Vincent Claffey, the girl must have had something to do with arranging the incriminating photos of her and Niall, either as coconspirator or unwilling pawn. Either made her a possible player in Claffey’s death.
Cormac had no more time for rumination. Anthony Beglan was such a practiced hand that the half dozen eels in his creel were skinned and gutted in the space of about twelve minutes. He rinsed off his hands under the tap in the shed, reached for the bucket of eels and the small container from the workbench, and set off down the lane toward Killowen.
Anthony never slowed or turned around. As Cormac struggled to keep up, it occurred to him that the old spelling for Beglan would have been Ó Beigléighinn—beag for small, and léighinn from the word léigh—to read or to study—scholarship, in other words. Put it all together and the name meant “descendant of the little scholar.” In all the conversations about Cill Eóghain, they’d gone back and forth about what sorts of scholarship might have been carried on at the monastery here more than a thousand years ago. Was it possible that Beglan’s family had some connection to this place from that time? Centuries had passed, to be sure, but it was true in Ireland—as it was true everywhere, in fact—that artifacts, roads, structures, and even people sometimes did not stir from where they’d remained for generations. There was clearly some powerful force that connected human beings to their ancestral places.
Cormac watched Anthony Beglan fifty yards ahead of him. Here was a man far removed from the bookish pursuits of his presumed forebears. How ironic it would be if this descendant of the little scholar could himself neither read nor write.
Arriving at Killowen, Beglan went first to the kitchen, where he dropped the bucket of eels, then crossed to the north wing of the house, where Martin Gwynne kept his studio. Still in Beglan’s left hand was the small cup from his workbench, with whatever he had taken from the eels’ insides. He stuck his head through the door and spoke to Martin Gwynne. Cormac could hear a few words of the conversation:
“…like you asked,” Beglan said.
“Very good, Anthony, I appreciate you going to the trouble,” Gwynne replied.
“Nuh-no trouble, really,” Beglan said. “All for a guh-good cause. I’ll get some more gallnuts as well.”
Beglan left by the outside door of the studio, and Cormac tried to get close enough to peer in through the window.
Martin Gwynne fished something out of Beglan’s cup, a small bluish organ, and held it steady over a glass jar. He lanced the thing with a sharp scalpel, releasing a bright yellow liquid into the jar. Gwynne carefully repeated the same procedure five more times. What could it be? Best to ask the anatomist—surely Nora would know.
12
Stella Cusack decided to begin by interviewing Deirdre Claffey. The girl was in one of the two tiny, airless rooms they had for talking to suspects and witnesses. The uniforms had taken the baby away for the moment. Deirdre had appeared exhausted when they brought her in. The circles under her eyes were dark as bruises, and she obviously hadn’t slept.
Getting information from people wasn’t as difficult as everyone imagined. Most of them wanted to speak. Deirdre’s head was on the table when Stella entered and took a seat across from her.
“Before we begin, do you need anything, Deirdre, cup of tea, a biscuit, maybe a sandwich?”
The girl didn’t raise her head but rocked it side to side. “Where’s Cal?” came a small voice from the tabletop.
“He’s being looked after by a very nice bean garda just outside. He’s fine. They’re giving him a bit of dinner while you and I have our little talk.”
“They won’t give him peas, will they? He doesn’t like peas.”
Stella checked her watch. Where was that bloody child advocate? It was getting late, and whoever Social Services had assigned to the case was taking her own sweet time in getting here. But those were the rules. She’d just have to wait.
Molloy stuck his head in. “She’s here, Stella, the advocate.”
Five minutes later, Stella sat across the table from Deirdre Claffey, now with the child advocate by her side. “I just need you to tell me what happened last night, Deirdre, in your own words. Take your time. We’re not in a rush.”
The girl’s hands were tucked underneath her. She stared at the table and mumbled her story, about going to Killowen yesterday evening, her father bringing her home, going straight to bed, and being awakened in the middle of the night by her friend Anca. They’d stayed in the chapel until first light and then moved on. Anca seemed anxious about getting away.
“You don’t know why Anca wanted to run away?”
“No. I asked if she’d seen my da, and she started shouting at me.”
“And what did she say?”
“That we couldn’t go back.”
“Why did you go along with Anca?”
“I was afraid. She said my da was using us, me and Cal—what was she talking about?”
“Do you know why you’re here, Deirdre?” Stella asked as gently as she could.
“Something’s happened to my da,” the girl whispered. “I know it, something bad. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes, Deirdre. I’m afraid he is.”
Deirdre put her head on the table and wept. Impossible to know if it was genuine sorrow or relief. The advocate tried to comfort the girl but was pushed away.
As she waited, Stella pulled a gallnut from her pocket, one of the pair Dr. Gavin had given her. When Deirdre looked up again, she set the gall on the table between them. “Do you know what that is, Deirdre?”
“Is it a seed?”
“Not exactly,” Stella said. “It’s a gallnut, from an oak tree. Some people call them serpent’s eggs.”
“I used to see them in the wood, where I
played when I was little.”
Her wrist was exposed as she reached for the gall, and Stella winced at the sight of the fresh bruises—raw, distinct marks of an adult hand.
“Can you tell me how you got those bruises, Deirdre?”
The girl dropped the gallnut, and both hands went immediately back under the table. “Working the chipper,” she lied.
Stella tried again. “What about your lip—is that from the chipper as well?”
“Fuck you!”
Stella was unprepared for such vehemence. This girl’s father had been killed, possibly for abusing her, had quite likely made her pregnant, and here she was, still trying to defend him. The world really beggared belief.
Through the small window in the door, she saw Molloy out in the corridor. “Will you excuse me?” she said to the advocate. “I’ll be back.”
There was no sign of Molloy when she got outside. Stella took a deep breath and started to bang her head slowly against the wall. She felt a presence behind her and heard Molloy’s voice in her ear. “Hey, everything all right, Stella?”
She turned, surprised to see his look of concern. He leaned closer. “Anything I can do?” How had she never noticed his long lashes, those dark irises flecked with gold?
“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Just let me know when you’ve got Anca Popescu set up in the other interview room.”
“She’s there now,” Molloy said.
“What’s the word from Interpol? Anything?”
Molloy shrugged. “You know how things are on the Continent—they don’t work weekends. Did you want me to finish up with Deirdre?”
“No, let her stay put for a bit. I may want to talk to her again.”
Stella pushed through the door of the other small interview room. Anca Popescu sat at the table, smoking, hands toying nervously with a bit of cigarette wrapper. Stella noted some red marks on her wrist, the ankles twined together under the table. The girl’s eyes had the look of a cornered animal. Not the most trustworthy source of information, in Stella’s experience. Better to try to calm her first. Stella took a seat, moving deliberately. She had no file or notebook in front of her, no recording device. All conscious choices, to say this was just a conversation. She waited perhaps thirty seconds for Anca to glance up and offered a slight but reassuring smile.
