by Erin Hart
“You think somebody at Killowen could have been mixed up in that bombing? It’s more than twenty years ago, Stella.”
“So anyone over the age of forty would be in the running.”
Molloy considered. “The Gwynnes, Claire Finnerty, Diarmuid Lynch, Anthony Beglan—everyone else would have been too young.”
“Yes, unless it’s an indirect connection, through a family member maybe? And just because Shawn Kearney is American doesn’t mean she’s off the hook. She said her gran was from Sligo.” Stella spied a speck of grease at the corner of Molloy’s mouth. “You’ve got something there,” she said, reaching over to wipe it off.
He caught her wrist and pulled her close. She felt his other hand against her back, through the thin pajama fabric. Her immediate reaction was to push back, but he leaned into her.
“Don’t fight, Stella. You’ve been pushing me away for days. You don’t even see it, do you?”
“What are you talking about?” She struggled harder, but he still had her wrist, and the other arm around her waist, so that she couldn’t move. He smelled good, a mixture of soap and chips and healthy sweat. This could not be happening. They worked together, for God’s sake. And not only that, he was far too young. “Fergal,” she said, a note of warning in her voice.
Suddenly he let go of her. “Ah, Christ, Stella, you must know—”
Before he could finish, she grabbed his collar with both hands and pulled him to her, this time tasting that errant dab of grease and salt on her tongue.
11
Cormac made sure that Nora was deeply asleep, then dressed and grabbed his torch and headed downstairs. It was time to check out the storehouse. Two a.m. The farm was in complete darkness as he slipped through shadows to the building that housed the cheese-making operation. The wind had picked up, and the leaves rustled in the steady breeze that blew inland from the bog.
Cormac thanked Providence or whomever that the van was still parked in front of the storehouse and could serve as cover for his intrusion. Cracking open the door, he slipped inside. Cormac was conscious of every noise and could hear his own heart as the moldy odor of aged cheese greeted his nostrils. This was madness, he knew, but he couldn’t stop. Something strange was going on in this place, and it must have something to do with both a missing ancient manuscript and the artifacts they’d just recovered from the bog. There were too many facts lining up to suggest otherwise.
He made his way through the workspace that was the front room, walls lined with shelving and all kinds of strainers and separators, metal and plastic molds. He picked up each wheel of cheese as he passed and tapped it, listening for the sound of a hollowed-out space, a void that could be used for smuggling. No luck. Every cheese large enough to hide anything sounded solid to the core. Beyond the workroom, a cave had been carved out of the limestone hill, the perfect spot for aging. The ceiling was supported with large oak timbers, and the cave seemed to go back about ten meters. The beam from his torch played over the walls, showing more cheeses waiting on wooden shelves, built in a way that increased air circulation. It was all about the flora, Lucien had explained at dinner the other night. Allowing the spores to work their magic in concert with other varieties of mold was the secret to great cheese. The shelves were stacked floor-to-ceiling with large wheels the size of car tires, and miniature gray-black pyramids, the last rolled in ashes as a contrast to the creamy white goat’s milk, undergoing a miraculous transformation inside.
“Cormac?” Nora’s whisper came from the workroom door. “What’s going on? What are you doing out here?”
“Nora, you shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”
“If it’s safe enough for you—”
He didn’t let her finish but pulled her deeper into the cave. “I saw two people sneaking out here the other night. I couldn’t see who they were or what they were up to, but I thought I’d probe around a bit, in case there’s something out here that could help Niall.”
“It seems unlikely. What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. Treasure, a manuscript, some evidence of what Kavanagh and Claffey were after.” He began to feel along the shelves, looking for a crack or a set of hinges, a hidden doorway, perhaps. All at once, his fingers found a break, the cool metal of a hidden hinge with a spring-loaded mechanism. Only the bottom half of the shelf came forward when he pulled on the latch. They’d have to crawl through.
On the other side was a small room, carved deeper into the hill behind the storehouse. The contents of the room took Cormac’s breath away. There were several books—old, leather-bound volumes on a worktable, along with a half dozen magnifiers.
The light of his torch fell upon an ancient book open to an illustration of a plant, its leaves and roots drawn on vellum with a delicate hand. Below the plant was some Latin script and a drawing of a man being administered a draught of liquid from a wooden tankard, his limbs writhing, eyes rolling in his head.
“Looks like a medical text,” Nora said, coming up behind him. “I’ve read about these, but I’ve never seen one. Doctors called them ‘leech books.’” She closed the book and turned it over, pointing her light to the title stamped into its leather spine. “Regimen Sanitatis,” she read. “These other titles are different kinds of books—geography, astronomy, a Bible.”
By this time, Cormac had spied a laptop computer on the far side of the table. “Nora, come look at this.” He pointed to the screen, which had come back to life listing a number of North American colleges and universities, private libraries, and museums, each with an abbreviation of several letters and numbers. “An inventory,” he said to Nora. “Someone is selling these books to the highest bidder.”
“But where have they come from?”
“You said you suspected that an ancient manuscript was somehow part of Benedict Kavanagh’s murder. If Kavanagh found out about this stash, if he was a potential customer—”
“Someone might have killed him to keep him from exposing this operation.”
Cormac nodded. “I think we know whose office this is, but let’s see if we can confirm it.” He started looking at the files on the computer desktop. Clicking on a folder marked “Photos,” he found hundreds of images of the French couple, Lucien and Sylvie—skiing in the Alps, dressed in gauzy tropical gear on a beach, along a wharf on some Mediterranean island. “Here they are.”
A sudden whoosh came from the opening into the storeroom, and a dozen tiny balls of fire rolled in at their feet as the hidden door slammed shut. There was no handle on the inside, no way to get out. Cormac knelt and pressed his shoulder against the false wall. It wouldn’t budge—they were trapped. He turned around to Nora, the question in her eyes answered by the sound of liquid being splashed about on the other side, then a match being struck. Through the cracks in the wallboards, they could see light and hear the roar of the fire before they smelled smoke.
Together they shouted, in unison, as loud as they could, “FIRE!”
The goats in the barn next door began to bleat, helping to sound the alarm. Smoke was beginning to seep into the small room, searing their eyes. Cormac thought he heard someone outside, but it was only the van. Whoever had started this fire was getting away. “HELP!” he shouted again. “FIRE!”
Nora crawled on the floor, chasing fireballs, trying to extinguish them. “Stay low!” she shouted.
He could hear noises outside, indistinct voices raised in alarm.
The wall was beginning to feel warm to the touch, the flames crackling louder and louder, fed by oxygen from the outside. Finally, they heard footsteps running into the storehouse. “Back here,” he shouted. “Behind the shelves. Hurry!”
A series of heavy blows sounded, smashing down the shelving and breaking through the false wall. Cormac grabbed Nora’s hand and dragged her. As they passed the table, she made a lunge for the stack of books, but he pulled harder. They hadn’t time to stop. They made it through the opening just as flames snaked up the table legs and began to c
onsume the ancient volumes.
Diarmuid Lynch stood outside, surrounded by smoke, a sledgehammer in his hands. “Get out, quickly!” he shouted, and they clambered past him and out the storehouse door. “The fire’s spreading to the barn. We’ve got to save the animals. Open the pens and let them out—quickly!”
Although he could barely see, Cormac followed Diarmuid’s command, lifting the pins at each gate as he passed and chasing the goats through the opening. Nora worked the other side, driving frightened animals before her. The goats scrambled madly, tripping and falling over one another, spreading out as they reached the huge door and running madly in all directions. The humans outside stood openmouthed in their nightclothes: a wild-haired Claire Finnerty with a mobile in her hand, Martin and Tessa Gwynne, Shawn Kearney, his father and Eliana. Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy were on the path from their cottage, and Anthony Beglan came running up from the back meadow. The only two missing were Lucien and Sylvie. The white van was gone.
Claire Finnerty rushed up to them. “Are you all right?” she asked, as Diarmuid came up behind. “Was anyone else in there?”
Cormac shook his head. “Someone… locked Nora and me in the storehouse… and started the fire,” he said between gasps. He watched the expressions on the faces around him, the glances of disbelief and denial as they all realized who wasn’t among them.
12
The phone on Stella Cusack’s bedside table intruded into a dream about herself and Barry, the one she had nearly every night, where he’d brought her to the circus, and just as the lights came up on the ring, he said, “I’ll be right back,” and then disappeared into the crowd. Whatever it meant, Stella was sure she didn’t know, but it kept spinning in her subconscious, like bathwater circling a drain.
The clock read 2:38 A.M., and the voice on the phone was the duty officer, Hartigan. An emergency call had come in, a fire at Killowen Farm.
“Anyone hurt?” she asked, fearing the worst. If only she’d been paying more attention.
“A couple of minor cases of smoke inhalation, but somebody got to them fairly sharpish, so they’ll be all right, thank God. I already rang Molloy. He’s on his way over there now.”
Stella rang off and looked over at the other side of the bed. When had he left? She reached out and ran her hand over the sheets. Slightly cool to the touch.
It was a quarter past three when Stella pulled into Killowen’s car park. She found a crowd of emergency personnel milling about with Killowen residents and guests, and about sixty goats in a makeshift pen between the house and the damaged barn. The ambulance crews were still tending to Nora Gavin, Cormac Maguire, and Diarmuid Lynch. Molloy was herding the other residents into the farmhouse kitchen, preparing to take statements. He glanced at her with no glimmer of acknowledgment. Probably for the best. She should never have let him into the house last night.
Suiting up, Stella entered the fire scene, noting a stench of burned milk. She addressed herself to the local fire brigade’s chief arson investigator, Thomond Breen: “What have you got, Tom?”
“Come through,” he said. “One thing I can tell you is that it would have been one hell of a lot worse if someone hadn’t turned a hose on. From what I can tell so far, it looks as if an accelerant was splashed about here.” They were in some sort of storage room. Strands of melted cheese dripped from charred wooden shelving, and Stella noted the scorched petrol tin tossed to one side. Broken shelves at the back of the room showed the entrance to another space, also steaming and blackened. “Look here,” Breen said, stooping to pick up a small black object from the floor. “Looks like these were used as fire starters. Can you smell the petrol?”
He set the charred walnut-shaped thing in her outstretched hand. “Some are burned more than others. That one’s not too bad. Just what the hell are they, do you suppose?”
“Gallnuts,” Stella murmured.
She headed for the house and found most of the farm’s residents and current guests crowded into the kitchen with emergency service personnel. “We’ll need statements from everyone,” she said to Molloy. “I’d like to talk to them, if you don’t mind. I’ll take the sitting room, start with Dr. Gavin and Maguire, if you’d send them in. Give me about two minutes. Have we a call out for the two gone missing?”
“Just went out on the wire.”
“Bloody Interpol,” Stella said. “I’m guessing this all could have been avoided if they’d been on the ball.”
Molloy shot her a sheepish look and reached into his jacket. “I meant to show you these last night, Stella,” he said, then lowered his voice. “That’s why I came over, actually. Sorry I got distracted.” He handed over a couple of pages from the station fax machine, mug shots of two Swiss nationals wanted for theft of rare books from a library in St. Gallen. The names were different, of course, but it was definitely the supposedly French couple from Killowen.
She didn’t look directly at him. She could still feel the grip of his hands, the heat of him against her. “One more thing, Fergal. What were Maguire and Gavin doing out in that shed in the middle of the night, anyway?”
Molloy gave a shrug and the slight jerk of an eyebrow. “You’ll have to ask them.”
Often the best witness in an attempted murder was the intended victim. Stella’s advantage in this case was that she had two best witnesses, and not just ordinary witnesses, either, but scientists, trained observers of detail. Perhaps this whole case would be wrapped up tonight, if she was lucky. She went to the sitting room and waited for Dr. Gavin and Maguire.
“Have a seat,” she said when they joined her. “You were both very fortunate tonight.” That came out differently than she’d intended, more like an admonishment. “Can you tell me what you were doing in the storehouse tonight?”
Maguire sat forward in his seat. “I went there. I thought Nora was asleep, but she followed. I went because I’d seen suspicious activity there a couple of nights ago. It was two people, a man and a woman, but I couldn’t make out who they were, in the darkness. Tonight I went looking for any evidence that could help Niall Dawson—”
“Evidence?” Stella couldn’t help herself. She had almost forgotten about Dawson, still in custody down at the station.
Maguire said, “I had a notion that Benedict Kavanagh’s death, and maybe Claffey’s as well, had something to do with an ancient manuscript—”
Dr. Gavin jumped in: “And as it turned out, we did find evidence that Lucien and Sylvie were stealing old books. I’m sorry that the fire destroyed the evidence.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve got all we need to go after those two,” Stella said. “Tell me how you arrived at that conclusion, about Kavanagh’s death being connected to a rare manuscript.”
Maguire’s face was still marked with soot. “This place, Killowen, used to be a monastery. You know about the metal stylus that was found here last April?”
“Niall Dawson told me it was his excuse for being here then. My colleague’s just off a stint with the Antiquities Task Force last year—he was very interested in that find.”
“Well, a few more things have turned up since then,” Dr. Gavin said. “The bog man, for a start. And while we were going through his garments with the textile expert, we found a wax tablet tucked into the folds of his cloak.”
Maguire picked up the story. “Niall and I also found a leather satchel out on the bog, the kind the monks used to carry books a thousand years ago. It was empty. We started to think there might be a missing book, but it was all so vague. Then there were the gallnuts turning up everywhere—”
Stella sat forward. “Used to make ink.”
Dr. Gavin said, “That’s right. Then I happened upon some old accounts of a manuscript called the Book of Killowen—”
“And what sort of manuscript would that have been?”
Maguire was hedging his words. “Perhaps a special illuminated edition of the Gospels, like the Book of Kells or the Book of Durrow, perhaps something else. We don’t really know.”
He looked at Nora. “It’s possible that several important books might have come from the monastery here. Tradition has it that the Book of Killowen was guarded by a family called O’Beglan, and that there was a cumdach, an elaborate book shrine, made for it sometime in the tenth century. But evidently possession of this particular manuscript was so contentious that one of the O’Beglans got fed up with the fighting between the priests and bishops, and claimed to have burned it in the twelfth century. Seven hundred years later, one of that Beglan’s descendants was supposed to have sold the shrine to a clockmaker, presumably to have it melted down.”
“But you didn’t believe these stories?”
Maguire shrugged. “I think such tales are a good way to throw people off the scent. Saying that you’ve burned or destroyed something may be the best way to keep it safe.”
“Wait, back up for a minute. Who were the keepers of this manuscript?”
“The O’Beglans. The family was connected with the monastery, going back centuries. They farmed the termon lands of the church here. It’s not out of the question. Lots of important manuscripts were for centuries in the possession of private families. A few still are.”
“So why, in your estimation, would Benedict Kavanagh have been killed over this manuscript?”
“We haven’t been able to work that out. Perhaps he was after the same artifacts as the treasure hunters, or maybe he was mixed up with them. A book like that would be worth a lot to the right collector. And even more if there’s a shrine with precious metals and stones. If you could just locate Lucien and Sylvie—or whatever their real names are—perhaps we could find out whether Kavanagh and the book were connected. Vincent Claffey could have learned about it as well and wanted his share to keep quiet.”
Stella took all this in. “So tell me again what you were doing out in the storehouse tonight?”
Maguire sighed. “Trying to find someone else with a motive for murdering Benedict Kavanagh. It occurred to me that a compartment carved out of a wheel of cheese would be an ideal way to smuggle valuable artifacts away from the farm.”
