The Book of Killowen ng-4 Page 3

  For years, it had been just the three of them. Then, nearly a decade ago, Martin had proposed converting the ruined granary into an artists’ retreat, and everything else had progressed from there. It had never been Claire’s aim to create anything; to her way of thinking, Killowen had just happened as she was trying to survive. But they had built something here, bit by bit, as the years piled up, the tilling and planting, the circle of seasons, round and round.

  Over time, a whole rootless menagerie of misfits had arrived on her doorstep like strays, all looking for something. Some never found what they were seeking and moved on; some stayed, perhaps content just to work in a garden after being chewed up and spat out by the world. At Killowen, they were fairly well insulated from all that. It wasn’t that they were purposely egalitarian, it just worked out that way. They all pitched in with the farmwork, according to their interests and abilities, shared cooking duties in turn, and had time to pursue their own creative inclinations. A French couple had come to stay last year, through a scheme that matched volunteers with small organic farms. Lucien and Sylvie had launched a cheese-making operation and now supplied local co-ops and farmers’ markets. Claire didn’t really understand what had drawn them to Killowen, but she needed the extra hands—and, she had to admit, the overall quality of the communal meals had vastly improved since the Francophone contingent had arrived.

  She had purposely avoided asking questions of the residents, knowing all too well that any idle curiosity might be turned back upon her. No one at Killowen knew of her former life either. It was almost as if the past didn’t exist, as if in coming here everyone had acquired a fresh start.

  None was more enigmatic than one of their latest arrivals. Eighteen months ago, Martin had discovered a stranger, apparently ill and wandering the bog on foot—with no identification and no sign of where he’d come from. It being the depths of winter, Martin really had no choice but to bring him back to Killowen before he froze to death. Claire closed her eyes, remembering her first glimpse of the man at the door of her cottage—wet and wild-eyed, ill clothed, chilled to the bone.

  “Bring him inside, Martin,” she’d commanded. “Put him in my bed.” While Martin stoked the fire, she had wrapped the shivering stranger in blankets and watched over him for three days and three nights as he sweated and chattered and mumbled about fierce beasts and mysterious visions like Tom O’Bedlam. For three days and nights, she had studied his face against her pillow—dark hair and eyes, flawless pale skin that had somehow retained the high color of youth, though he was probably at least forty. He was in a bad way those first few days, sweating through the bedclothes several times a night. Claire felt her face burn, remembering the illicit ache she had experienced each time she lifted the drenched linens from his nakedness. After living alone for twenty-two years, it was the first time another prospect had entered her mind.

  When the fever broke, the stranger in her bed seemed perfectly sane, but he claimed not to know his own name. She had been deeply skeptical at first, but as the days wore on, he seemed utterly sincere in his ignorance. In the end, they had to take him at his word, which also meant they had to christen him. Martin had suggested Diarmuid, after the most famous abbot of the now-ruined monastery near the bog where he was found, and Claire herself had added a surname, Lynch, after her maternal grandmother. And so Diarmuid Lynch he became. As his physical health returned, Diarmuid had moved from her cottage to his own room in the main guesthouse. She had taken to watching him secretly as he went about his work, trying to convince herself that she was concerned only for his well-being but knowing it was just cover for a vaguely unhealthy obsession. For his part, Diarmuid seemed to suffer no anxiety over his lost identity, no hint of curiosity about what he’d been doing on the bog. On the contrary—he’d fallen quite easily into life at the farm, helping Anthony tend the cattle and goats, taking up stone carving and carpentry as if born to that work, even though his soft hands hinted otherwise.

  Still an air of mystery remained. She had once caught a glimpse of him lying prostrate in front of the altar stone at the ruined chapel down by the bog. He was speaking in a low voice, but she’d not been close enough to hear. She had not seen him there again.

  And Diarmuid wasn’t the only mystery. Anonymous notes had begun arriving about four months ago. The first had been left outside her cottage door, a blank envelope with a handwritten message inside, block capitals in blue ink: I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Cheap writing paper, available from any newsagent. She had studied the handwriting, trying to divine who the anonymous accuser could be. Arriving at the stump the next morning, she’d been seized by paranoia, imagining that her tin was in a slightly different position from where she’d left it the previous day. And yet nothing was missing, the papers hidden there seemed undisturbed. Since there was no name on the envelopes, she even wondered whether the messages had been intended for her or for someone else. What did it really matter, in the end? The person she had been ceased to exist long ago.

  A noise sounded on the path behind her. Claire snatched up the egg basket and leapt to her feet as a lanky figure, dark haired and bearded, plunged through the underbrush.

  He pulled up short when he caught sight of her.

  “What is it, Diarmuid? What’s wrong?”

  “Claire.” He was out of breath from running, and bent forward, hands on knees. “The Guards are down at the bog. Three cars… I saw them on my way back from the lower pasture. It looks as though someone’s been digging there. I saw an excavator, a small JCB.”

  Claire’s stomach dropped. “That bog is protected.”

  “The coroner’s van is there as well. I think they’ve found a body.”

  3

  It was just gone half-eight on Thursday morning when Detective Stella Cusack arrived at Killowen Bog. The local coroner had already set up a wall of tarps to shield the body from view. A mechanical digger, arm poised in midair, sat a few yards from the wall, and she spotted a young man, presumably the driver, being interviewed by her partner, Fergal Molloy. The scene-of-crime squad had been waiting for her before they began photographing the body and collecting evidence. She pulled a white Tyvek coverall from the kit bag she kept in the boot of her car, shaking out the flaccid, papery limbs as she prepared to step into it.

  When she was suited up, Stella stepped around the tarp wall and slid sideways down the plank into the partially cut drain. The vehicle was a gold Mercedes SL, with a Dublin number plate intact. The first two digits on the plate said the vehicle was two years old; they’d have only to run the number to suss the owner. That alone might tell them whether the dead body in the boot was a kidnapping gone wrong, a gangland murder, or a domestic dispute. Stella couldn’t immediately recall any high-profile cases still open, but Molloy would. He was good at that sort of thing, facts and details.

  Even after hearing about a car in the bog, the sight of a huge machine submerged in peat was still surreal. As was the body itself. Stella peered down at the leathery face in the boot, letting her eyes and ears absorb details of the scene. This was her first up-close encounter with a bog man—though he looked to be fairly recent, not like one of the ancient corpses you might see in a museum. Perhaps most curious, no cloying smell of death hung in the air. All her nose detected was the usual clean, earthy scent of bog. No doubt it was a man, with all that gingery stubble covering his face. His mouth gaped open; along with the open eyes, the expression made it seem as if he’d been taken by surprise. She was struck by the awkwardness, the indignity of his pose, and for the first time began to notice that the hands and feet were not exactly where they ought to be, as if the body had been rearranged somehow. Stella’s rapidly downed breakfast of instant porridge rose in the back of her throat.

  Fergal Molloy poked his head around the edge of the tarp. “Dr. Friel is here, Stella.”

  Catherine Friel was the chief state pathologist. Her job entailed traveling all over the country to crime scenes involving suspicious deaths, conducting autopsies,
and testifying about her findings in court. Stella had worked with her only twice before. There had been rumors that Dr. Friel had been seeing Liam Ward, one of Stella’s fellow detectives, but they’d somehow managed to keep the relationship pretty well under wraps.

  “Thanks for getting here so quickly,” Stella said. “I hope the journey wasn’t long.”

  Dr. Friel had lost her Guards driver to austerity cutbacks and now had to make her own way to crime scenes at every hour of the day and night. She offered a tiny smile. “Well, I happened to be stopping near Birr last night, so not the worst. Although some days it definitely feels as though I’m running on caffeine.” She had quickly suited up and was now stepping into white Tyvek booties. “What can you tell me?”

  “Body was found by an excavator clearing a drain. In the boot of a car, apparently buried in an old cutaway. Looks to be dismembered—but you’ll see for yourself.”

  They rounded the end of the tarp and Dr. Friel sidled down the plank. She got down on her knees, probing at the body with a gloved finger, peering closely at the disarranged limbs through a magnifying glass. After less than a minute, she turned to Stella. “I’m afraid you won’t find this man’s killer.”

  Stella felt the first prickle of intrigue. “So he was murdered?”

  “Well, I think it’s safe to say that he didn’t just fall in. I’m seeing what look like several sharp-force wounds to the torso. Of course I won’t be able to say for certain until the postmortem.”

  “Why won’t we find his killer?”

  “Because the one thing I can tell you with fair certainty is that this man died at least five hundred years ago.”

  Stella stared at the pliable flesh before her. “But that’s not possible. He’s so—” She struggled to find the right word. “I don’t know how to say it—so fresh. How can you tell he’s been here for that long?”

  “There are several clues, but first off, the color of the skin says he’s been in the peat for a good long time. Based on my experience with bog remains, I’d guess at least a few hundred years. And the bones are almost completely decalcified. When a body’s been in peat for a long time, everything—even the bones—becomes soft as wet pasteboard. Very easy to pull apart in that state.” She pointed to the toe of a shoe sticking up from the peat. “And, unless I’m very much mistaken, his footwear doesn’t appear to be the latest style.” Dr. Friel reached into her pocket and handed over a business card. “So you see, it’s not me you need, it’s someone from the National Museum.”

  Stella glanced at the card: Niall Dawson, Keeper of Conservation, National Museum of Ireland.

  “Best to ring straightaway,” Dr. Friel said. “They won’t want to lose any time. You might want to pack some extra peat around the body until Dawson can get a recovery team here.”

  Stella thought she’d misheard. “Sorry?”

  “It helps to preserve the body.” Dr. Friel stooped to collect a large handful of sopping peat from the cutaway floor, applying it gently to the corpse’s right arm. “Like this. You’ll want to make sure he’s completely covered. Niall Dawson will thank you for taking the trouble, believe me.” She eyed her watch. “Sorry, I’ve got to dash. Urgent case up in Westmeath.”

  “Wait a minute. If this man is five hundred years old, how in God’s name did he get into the boot of a car?”

  “No idea,” Dr. Friel said. “Perhaps that’s worth investigating.”

  4

  Cormac Maguire stood at his bedroom window, looking down into his back garden. Not just his garden or his room anymore. Nora Gavin had shared his bed for the last twelve months. It seemed impossible that so much time had passed.

  When they’d returned to Dublin last fall, he had urged her to request a sabbatical, to allow herself a period of recovery after everything that had come to pass on that barren headland in Donegal. The Trinity medical school had granted her request, so she had spent the past year here in his house, reading, walking, digging in the garden. It was a necessary period of decompression, a slow readjustment after being so long submerged in grief. As he had anticipated, the guilt that had anchored her for five years proved difficult to cast off. In the past couple of months, however, he thought the weight seemed to be lifting, little by little—that was all he could say.

  Be with me, he’d said to her at Port na Rón. Summoning his own words, and her unspoken response, never failed to fill him with a potent longing. He wanted nothing more than to be with her. But her mere physical presence wasn’t what he meant when he’d said those words: Be with me. Some part of her was still holding back, unwilling to allow him entrée to the very deepest, most hidden recesses within herself. Perhaps it was only that she had never dared imagine her life beyond a certain point—the point where she managed to bring her sister’s killer to justice.

  He’d had his own period of adjustment since moving his father here last summer. The old man had suffered no permanent paralysis or lateral weakness from the stroke he’d suffered a year ago. He could dress and feed himself without difficulty, and for that they had reason to be thankful. But the brainstorm had left a different sort of damage: severe aphasia that showed no signs of abating. It was clear from the old man’s demeanor that he could understand them. He could also speak quite fluently, but only in strings of gibberish, as if all the words stored in his brain had suddenly become untethered. He seemed to harbor suspicion that everyone around him was deliberately obstreperous, or perhaps even a bit thick. Attempts at conversation frustrated and exhausted him. He’d recently begun regular twice-weekly sessions with a speech therapist—Cormac had heard the poor young woman from the next room, cheerfully trying to pull his father through the prescribed exercises: she would list the days of the week, the months of the year, try to coax answers to simple yes-or-no questions: Does glass break? Can fish fly?

  Cormac crossed to his suitcase, lying open on the bed, waiting to accept the last few items he would need on this pilgrimage. For some reason he had fixed upon that designation for the trip he and Nora and his father were about to make. What else would you call a visit to a holy site, for the purpose of collecting relics?

  The call about the body had come about forty minutes ago. Niall Dawson from the National Museum had rung to ask whether he and Nora would be part of the recovery team for a set of human remains that had just turned up in a remote Tipperary bog, beside the ruins of a medieval monastery.

  Nora had come into the room just as he set down the phone. “Who was that?”

  “Niall Dawson. A body’s been found in Tipperary, and he wanted to know if we could help with the recovery.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I’d have to talk to you and ring him back.”

  “You’d normally jump at a job like this. Why are you hedging? Do you think I’m not able to judge for myself whether I’m ready or not?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that this bog is way off down in Tipp somewhere. Who’s going to look after my father?”

  “We’ve got that young woman from the agency coming, haven’t we?”

  The old man’s regular caregiver, Mrs. Hanafin, had just left for two weeks at her son’s holiday home on Mallorca. He’d already arranged for a substitute caregiver from a local agency. Nora continued: “I’m not saying we should leave him alone with a new minder, but surely the agency won’t mind if we take your father and this new caretaker along with us. It’s only going to be a day or two, and it might be a good thing for him, getting out of the city.”

  She was standing in front of him, her face only a few inches from his own. Her voice softened. “What is it? There’s something else, isn’t there? Tell me.”

  “Niall didn’t have many details on the body, just that it was old… and it turned up in the boot of a car buried in the bog.”

  He watched her features cloud over as she took in this new information.

  She touched his face. “Oh, Cormac, I do love you for wanting to spare me. But you can’t do it forever.
You have to stop trying.”

  And so after a few hasty phone calls, it had been arranged: they would take part in the recovery, and Joseph and his temporary caretaker would travel with them to Tipperary. Dawson had arranged a place for them to stay.

  In some ways, this trip would be déjà vu all over again. He and Nora had first come together over the corpse of a red-haired stranger, a tragic story sealed for centuries in a bog. They had managed to set her story free, but what would they discover about the current specimen?

  The bell sounded in the front hall. Cormac opened the door to a pretty dark-haired woman whom he guessed to be in her midtwenties. She was casually dressed; a small rolling bag stood beside her feet.

  “Ah, good, you’re all set. Come in, come in. We’ve been expecting you,” he said, extending his hand. “Cormac Maguire.”

  “Eliana,” she said. “Eliana Guzmán. I was looking for Joseph Maguire?”

  “Yes, my father,” Cormac said. “I’m sorry to spring travel plans on you with such little notice. Did the agency explain? We only just got the call and have to get down the country as soon as possible. You’re all right about leaving as soon as we have the car packed?”

  He sensed a slight flicker of hesitation in her eyes, then it was gone. “Yes… where is it we are going?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry. I did explain all this to the woman at the agency but it’s all been so rushed. We’re headed to Tipperary, it should only be for a day or two. The lodging is all sorted—we’re staying at some sort of artists’ retreat. You’ll have your own room, of course, and access to kitchen facilities, everything you’ll need to look after my father—although we won’t really have to fend for ourselves; it’s the sort of place where the cooking is done for us. Nora and I will be able to help you, when we’re not out at the site.”