The Book of Killowen ng-4 Read online

  How would it feel to have taken the great chance, killed for someone, only to find out that she still loved the bastard? How had Mairéad Broome put it, only a short while ago? I did love my husband. Past tense, Stella noted. As difficult as he tried to make it sometimes.

  What had Benedict Kavanagh done to try his wife’s affections? It wasn’t hard to imagine. The possibilities were endless, actually. There was the old standby, apparently true in this case, getting off with other women—or even other men. Such things happened, and Healy hadn’t mentioned whether the interns on Kavanagh’s program were male or female. Not to mention all the countless ways he might have found to humiliate his wife, in public or in private, especially given her reaction to the body just now. What was Mairéad Broome looking for under that sheet?

  Or was all her sudden anger directed at Benedict Kavanagh for getting himself killed and leaving her hanging all these months? Just because you didn’t love your husband any longer, that didn’t mean you stopped worrying about him. If Kavanagh had been getting a leg over, they’d know soon enough. How did these eejits not realize that they couldn’t keep their affairs completely secret?

  Mairéad Broome had admitted that her marriage was in tatters when she spoke in that careful code about the pair of them being busy with their own work. Bollocks. She probably knew about her husband’s bits on the side, and if she did, what would have moved her to do something about it? She’d said she didn’t care about money, but as soon as someone made a claim like that, you were almost assured that the opposite was true. Stella made a mental note to check the terms of the family trust, whether it specified what would happen in the event of a divorce or a childless marriage. If leaving Benedict Kavanagh was out of the question, how long before the constant weight of indignity forced his wife’s hand? Time to start asking those questions. Stella pretended to ring off the mobile and made her way down to where Mairéad Broome sat.

  “I’m all right now, Detective. It was just the shock.”

  Stella said nothing but reached into her pocket for the bag containing the pods from the dead man’s mouth. She held them out to Mairéad Broome, who took the bag and peered at the blackened knobs through the polythene.

  “Am I meant to know what these are? Because I don’t.”

  Beside her, Graham Healy shook his head as well, blank. “Not a clue.”

  “Are they something to do with my husband’s death?”

  Stella wasn’t prepared to part with that information at the moment; instead she tucked the bag back into her pocket and decided on another approach. “When you reported your husband missing, you said you couldn’t think of any particular enemies he might have had, but you admitted that he sometimes rubbed people the wrong way—”

  Graham Healy exploded: “He was a fucking bollocks!”

  “Graham!”

  “He ought to have kissed the ground you walked on, Mairéad, with all that you did, all you sacrificed for him and his brilliant fucking career. But no, he was far too busy poncing about on television, stirring the shit and dragging people down. That’s all he ever did—”

  “Graham, stop it!”

  “I’m only speaking the truth, Mairéad, and you know it.” He turned to Stella. “She should have walked out years ago. All the international recognition she’s been getting, it’s only happened since he’s been out of her life—”

  “Graham, stop it, that’s enough!”

  He threw up his hands and walked away. They’d clearly had this conversation before.

  “I’ve already told you, Detective, my husband was not an easy man. He was impatient with people who weren’t as clever as he was, and that included me. But there were other sides to him, certain aspects that were so… well, so simple, in a way. Despite all his intellectual gifts, there were ways he was still a child, emotionally. It turned out that his philosophical high-wire act was just that—an act. All my husband’s theories about the nature of the divine, the existence of good and evil, all that bore no connection at all to the way he lived his life.”

  “Are you trying to say that your husband was a hypocrite?”

  “I’m saying that he delighted in the abstract and abhorred the specific, especially when it came to examination of his own behavior. So why don’t you just come out and ask me what you want to know, what everyone’s dying to know: whether I, or Graham, or Graham and I together killed my husband. The answer is no. And yes, for the record, Graham and I are lovers, and have been ever since the day he came to work for me—”

  “Mairéad—”

  She silenced him with a look. “Why waste any more of this woman’s time, Graham? I’m so tired of pretending. I can’t be bothered to keep up appearances. I really can’t. If this woman is a proper detective, she’ll know everything soon enough. How I was a child when I married Benedict, how he grew bored with me before I’d reached the ripe old age of twenty, and about all the years I’ve spent since then trying to regain any scrap of dignity and self-respect. And now he’s back from his grave, trying to take it all away from me again. Well, he’s not going to succeed. This time I’m going to beat Benedict Kavanagh at his own bloody game.”

  “Why did you stay married, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Mairéad Broome looked at the floor. “Cowardice, I suppose. I’m not proud of it. I would have been alone, and my husband had money, he had status and connections. For most of the time we were married, I was just a struggling painter. In some ways, I think he enjoyed having me beside him, all part of the Benedict Kavanagh show. But the threat was always there, under the surface, that he could make my life miserable if I left him, and I had no doubt that he would.”

  “And yet he tolerated your relationship with Mr. Healy, presuming he knew about it.”

  “Oh, he knew. But it happened to serve his purposes—let him feel magnanimous, I suppose. And letting me have Graham meant he could do whatever he liked.”

  “And what was it your husband liked?”

  Mairéad Broome raised her weary eyes to Stella. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Detective. I couldn’t bring myself to find out. There are some things even a wife is better off not knowing.”

  Stella felt the words like a knife. Denial was the default. In a world filled with all manner of bad behavior, why did society insist upon a façade of normality, tidy exteriors that masked the messes inside? How many women knew the truth about their husbands but refused to acknowledge it, because doing so would raise the possibility of more than one reality within themselves?

  “Thank you for coming,” Stella said. “I’ll be in touch if I have any more questions. When will you be heading back to Dublin?”

  “We’re going to stay on for a day or two,” Healy answered. “Mairéad has friends who run an artists’ retreat not far from here. A place called Killowen.”

  5

  Cormac rose from his crouch and stood by as Niall Dawson directed the workmen out on the bog. After hours of clearing peat, they’d finally removed enough weight that the buried car could be lifted. A flatbed lorry was in place, waiting to transport the vehicle to the crime lab in Dublin. Cormac watched as the car slowly ascended, pulled upward out of the muck by the arm of the huge digger. The mud-caked vehicle swayed briefly, still dripping, before the machine operator set it down gently on the back of the lorry.

  In addition to himself and Niall and the removal workers, the scene-of-crime officers were still on-site, searching for any useful evidence in the apparent murder of Benedict Kavanagh. No one had yet advanced any theories about what Kavanagh was doing out here in the back of beyond, or who might have had reason to wish him dead. Nor had Niall Dawson said a word about his own acquaintance with Kavanagh. Strange.

  While his crew covered the car in black polythene for its trip to Dublin, the head of the crime scene detail jumped down onto the boards that rimmed the excavation area, leaning forward to examine the impression of the vehicle’s underside, the depressions where the four tires had rested in the
peat. “Looks like we’re through here, lads,” he said. “Let’s let the archaeologists have their site back again.” He took the hand Niall Dawson offered and heaved himself up out of the pit. “We’re heading back. Be sure to let us know if anything else turns up.”

  Cormac had watched them go over the car, collecting anything that might have a bearing on the case, which meant everything they could find—even the older bog man was forensic evidence in the case they were investigating. The gap where the car had been was roughly four meters by six, a couple of meters deep. The surface was churned up in some places, flat in others where the vehicle’s undercarriage had been pulled away.

  Cormac eased down one of the stout planks the crime scene crew had placed around the perimeter and his perception began to shift. Since everything in a bog tended to be the same color as peat, you had to keep an eye open for subtle differences in texture. Would they happen upon another item of clothing belonging to Killowen Man, any items he might have been carrying on his person when he went into the bog—his other shoe, or a walking stick, perhaps, or a sack of provisions? Or maybe they’d find evidence of an ancient road, the reason someone would be out here in the middle of a bog. His eye caught upon the fringe of a willow hurdle, a type of woven fencing laid over brushwood centuries ago to make a footpath through soft bog. It was about chest-high in the wall, and ragged, cut through by the digger but amazingly intact, the bark still on the osiers used to weave it. He shifted the planks, stepping from one to the next and pulling the other board to set in front of him. At the far end he found more evidence of a roadway, birch branches thick as a man’s arm, eaten up centuries ago by the encroaching moss.

  Dawson came back from seeing the scene-of-crime officers on their way with the shrouded vehicle. “Down to us, now,” he said. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  Gathering their tools, they began measuring and marking out a grid on the floor of the pit with stakes and string, as they would with any excavation. The surface of the peat was uneven, revealing the impression of a muffler and driveshaft, the axles of the car. Niall was down on his hunkers, taking photos and sketching the features of the surface in his allotted squares from the grid; Cormac did the same in the opposite corner. He leaned in to snap a photo of a shallow pool that had formed under the car’s chassis.

  The site was deserted now. They worked in silence for twenty minutes, each caught up in his own thoughts. Cormac wondered about Dawson and Kavanagh again. How had Niall Dawson come to know about Killowen? He’d mentioned the farm as a place to kip when they’d discussed coming down to help with the recovery. Before they even knew about Benedict Kavanagh. A small detail, easy to overlook. Cormac knew what it was like to be suspected when you were innocent, but there were so many things about people that were impossible to fathom, even if you’d been friends for years. There was no explaining the way people behaved sometimes. Perhaps he should urge Dawson to come clean, to get the connection with Kavanagh off his chest.

  “Look, Niall, I don’t know how to say this except straight out. You and Benedict Kavanagh were friends at university. I was there, too, remember? I watched him destroy you in that debate. So why didn’t you say anything to the police? When we found the car was his, even when we found the body?”

  Dawson’s trowel stopped moving. “I haven’t seen Benedict Kavanagh for nearly thirty years, Cormac. Surely you don’t think—”

  “No, of course not. I just can’t understand why you kept quiet.”

  The trowel hung loose in Dawson’s hand. “Because it’s water under the bridge. I didn’t see a need to dredge any of it up again. I’m more than satisfied with my life now, you know that. In a way, I was grateful to Benedict, for opening my eyes.” He gestured to the plot they were excavating. “This is my life’s work. Getting trounced in that debate made it clear that I wasn’t cut out for the philosophical rough-and-tumble. Not in the same way Benedict was, certainly.”

  “Maybe the rough-and-tumble got a bit too rough. The man was murdered, Niall.”

  “Well, not by me. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “I’m not trying to make a big deal of this. I just thought you might be better off mentioning your old connection to Kavanagh, before someone else does.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Dawson said. “I’ll have a word with Cusack.”

  As he turned back to his own work, Cormac’s eye caught on a shape about an arm’s length in front of him. A flat strip, like a belt, with a loop projecting just slightly from the peat’s surface. “Niall, take a look at this.” Cormac’s bare fingers continued scraping at the peat, uncovering more of the leather strap.

  “I see it,” Dawson said. “Keep going.”

  The strap was long, and at last Cormac reached the place where it joined another piece of leather. The peat was very wet here, squelching as he worked his hand into the material. He could feel the thickness of the leather, swollen with water, and formed a picture of it in his mind as he worked. Generally rectangular, rounded at the corners, stitching on the inside. He turned to Dawson. “It looks like a satchel—do you see the flap in front? Do you suppose our bog man could have been carrying this?”

  “And if there happened to be a book inside—” Dawson sounded short of breath with excitement. “You know, that’s been one of our leg-pulls for years. I phoned up Redmond in the conservation lab not three weeks ago and told him some poor sod had stumbled on an illuminated book in a bog. He always knows straightaway I’m taking the piss. What’s he going to say now?” Dawson used his fingers to lift the front flap and reached into the satchel’s open mouth. Almost immediately, his posture signaled disappointment. “Nothing there. It’s empty.”

  Cormac began to have a strange feeling, the same sort of presentiment he occasionally got while working on a site, as if he could see down through all the layers of history and sense the connections between things that seemed completely unrelated. Perhaps it was only coincidence that Kavanagh’s body had come to rest here in the bog in the very spot where some ancient scribe lost his life, or perhaps there was more to it, something they had yet to discover.

  Dawson glanced up at the clear sky. “It’s warm. Let’s get this covered up again, quick-like. Hand us that roll of cling film, will you?” Oxygen was the enemy here. They carefully replaced the wet peat over the satchel, then laid several sheets of film over the sodden mess. After dipping a roll of resin bandage in a nearby water-filled bog hole for a few seconds, Dawson began, with Cormac’s help, to stretch lengths of tape across the satchel to preserve its shape, careful to press out any air between the wet peat and the film.

  Dawson was thinking aloud as he worked. “If only there had been a book. I mean, Jaysus, think of it. How many early medieval manuscripts have survived in Ireland—a dozen, give or take? If you think about it, there must have been hundreds. Every monk had his Psalter.”

  Cormac had been pondering the same thing as they worked on the satchel. Now he said,

  “Niall, don’t you think it strange that Benedict Kavanagh happened to be found here?”

  Dawson looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, wasn’t that his specialty, early medieval philosophy?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “I just find it odd that he should be buried here with someone who’s probably from the very same era that he studied. A rather amazing coincidence, don’t you think?”

  6

  On the way to Killowen, Stella checked her messages. Nothing from Lia since yesterday morning. Second-guessing was the worst sort of disease, an incurable affliction. Perhaps if she’d been stricter? Or more permissive? Which was it, and where was the magic balance point? Lia’s schoolwork was gone to hell last spring, lost in a different, brand-new immediacy—the scent of a boy’s neck, the electric torch of a warm hand inside a blouse. What dusty old book could compete with that biological imperative? She felt herself carried back on a memory, locked arm in arm with her classmates, all half pissed
on stolen altar wine and possibility as they made their way home on a warm May evening after a snogging session in a nearby orchard with the lads from Saint Anselm’s, the boys’ college down the road. They’d been falling all over one another, laughing and singing at the top of their lungs:

  I am eighteen years old today, Mama, and I’m longing to be wed.

  So buy for me a young man, who will comfort me, she said.

  You must buy for me a young man, who will be with me all night,

  for I’m young and airy, light and crazy, and married I long to be.

  She remembered what came after as well—being called on the rug before Sister Geraldine, the mother superior. Breaking the rules didn’t bring chastisement from Sister Geraldine but something even worse—a feeling that one had disappointed her. In some ways, that was punishment enough. Stella had often wondered about Sister Geraldine’s background, about what had made her choose the veil. What had drawn any of the nuns to that life, away from society, from the world of men? It wasn’t as if the choice had lifted them to a higher plane of existence, above the worldly fray; there were obvious frictions among the sisters at the convent—you could see it in the pursed lips, the clipped way they spoke to one another at times. But she had since come to realize that these were intelligent, educated women, scholars who were often deeply immersed in their own subjects—biology, mathematics, literature—and curious about the world. Stella found she had a much greater appreciation for them now that she was trying to raise a daughter with even a fraction of the nuns’ self-respect and self-possession. She’d not appreciated them at the time, just as Lia was having a difficult time understanding or appreciating her—that circular curse of youth and age.