The Book of Killowen ng-4 Read online

  Out in the garden, Claire Finnerty turned and led Eliana back into the kitchen. Joseph dropped Cormac’s hand and stared at the tabletop, unable—or unwilling—to make eye contact with any of them.

  “Look what Claire has brought for our lunch today,” Eliana said. “I like the name I read in a book once—‘string beans.’ That’s quite funny, isn’t it?” She held up a perfect specimen in front of Joseph’s face. “Perhaps you would help me.” She gestured, showing how she was going to snap their tender necks.

  Joseph didn’t look up; he made a noise halfway between grunt and sigh. Eliana looked at Cormac. “Have I said something wrong?”

  Cormac shook his head. “No, Eliana, I’m sure he’d be glad to help.” Seeing the expression on his father’s face, like a man being led to the gallows, Cormac crouched beside him and spoke quietly: “I’ve got to go now—we’ll talk later, all right?” He took his father’s hand again, offered a reassuring squeeze. The old man pulled his hand away and stared out the window.

  Cormac headed out to wait for Niall Dawson, wondering if he was missing something important because he was distracted by this work out at the bog. How ironic that he should be the one feeling guilty, this late in the game, when it was his father who had been missing for so much of his life.

  While he waited, he rang Nora, who was on her way to the hospital in Birr.

  “Everything all right?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. My father was trying to tell me something. Something about ticks, or porpoises. He didn’t want me to leave.” Cormac hesitated. “I suppose whatever it is, we can sort it out this afternoon. Eliana seemed in great spirits, by the way.” He remembered the gentle playfulness in the girl’s face as she offered his father the beans. “Whatever upset her last night seems to have passed.”

  “I’ll be back from the hospital after the exam, so I’ll try talking to Joseph.”

  He was silent for a brief second. “You’re so good with him, Nora—”

  She cut him off. “Ah, now, remember our agreement.”

  Early on in their odd household arrangement, they had agreed that there would be no silliness about things like indebtedness between them. They were all just doing what was necessary, what had to be done. And it was as if she had understood quite clearly from the beginning that she would be a kind of buffer between father and son, taking the role that Cormac’s mother had once filled, if only briefly. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the three of them—himself, Nora, and his father—holding hands in a line, like a group of children striking out into uncharted territory. The stroke had picked them up and landed them in a place where nothing was familiar, but Cormac knew it was the only place he wanted to live.

  2

  Stella rose before dawn on Friday and took the M7 into Dublin, enjoying the smooth comfort of the motorway but quite missing the drive through the winding old coach roads, the sight of the pubs where her father invariably stopped for refreshment on the way in and out of the city, following his true religion—sport, and championship hurling in particular. But time was money these days, and the gleaming white concrete motorways were a sign of the new religion.

  She’d decided late last night to make this trip herself and not leave it to anyone else. This was her investigation, and Serious Crimes could get seriously stuffed if they hadn’t made it over to interview the victim’s spouse by now.

  It was just gone half-eight when she pulled up in front of Benedict Kavanagh’s house in the city center. The Kavanagh/Broome residence was one of those Georgian monstrosities on North Great George’s Street. Artists and other creative types had snapped up these grand but crumbling houses for next to nothing back in the eighties, living with scaffolding for years until development made the street fashionable again. Stella stood before the door, painted a brilliant aquamarine under the fanlight, and rapped twice with the huge brass knocker shaped like a fist. Had to be a story behind that. There was a story behind most things, if you were paying attention.

  When the door swung open, it revealed a barefoot and stylishly stubbly young gent in black jeans and an expensive cashmere jumper. “We’re not open.” He pointed to a brass plaque beside the door: TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS ONLY, BY APPOINTMENT.

  “That’s all right,” Stella said, producing her ID. “I’m not here about art.”

  The young man’s eyes narrowed as he comprehended the nature of her visit. He ushered her into the foyer, and she saw that the whole ground floor was done up as a gallery, with large paintings that nearly covered the walls. The cracked plaster behind them was real, impressions of centuries behind wallpaper, a fresco of evidence to a trained eye. Here and there a chair or a table with a vase of flowers that beautifully set off the paintings. What was it like to have such an eye? Stella wondered, thinking of her own drab sitting room with its insipid wallpaper and matching suite.

  The young man left her alone while he went upstairs, giving her a chance to look around. The paintings in the front room were angry seascapes, thick-painted stormy skies and waves and weather, the paint applied with such passion that you could almost hear the surf. Not just grays and blues and greens, but also shades of yellow, brown, and purple. Stella went up close and studied the nearest canvas. How did a person work at close range like this and understand what effect the brushstrokes would have at a distance? There was mystery in it, how the eye perceived the parts and the whole. She glanced up the stairs and saw no sign of the young man returning. So she made a quick round of the ground floor, from the rooms in front, with their large casement windows that looked over the street, to the back rooms—a galley kitchen stocked with wineglasses, coffeemaker and tea urn, industrial dishwasher. The kitchen adjoined a tiny room that functioned as an office, with desk, file cabinets, and a glowing laptop. On the laptop screen was a spreadsheet with recent sales to museums. Stella had to stifle a curse as she glimpsed the number of zeros behind each figure. She slipped from the room and took up her previous position just as the young man appeared again at the top of the stairs.

  “Mairéad says she’ll talk to you in the studio. I’m sorry I neglected to introduce myself—Graham Healy, I’m her assistant.”

  Stella followed him up a graceful cascade of pale marble held in place with a wrought-iron railing. Orchestral music poured down from above, louder and louder as they traveled upward, past the living areas on the first floor, all the way up to a garret at the very top of the house, transformed by a bank of windows on the north wall into a painting studio. A whiff of mineral spirits assaulted the nostrils, and music blared loudly from speakers all around the room, filling the airy space with the throb of violins and cellos, the crash of cymbals and booming kettledrums. Mairéad Broome signaled the young man to turn down the music, and as he did so, Stella’s gaze traveled through an open doorway to a bedroom where the walls, sheets, and furniture were all stark white. Amid the rumpled luxury of bedclothes, she spied a few discarded garments—his and hers, from every appearance. Stella turned to give Kavanagh’s wife her full attention.

  Mairéad Broome couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, but her hair was prematurely white. It was short and asymmetrical—an artistic statement. She had the fresh and slightly weathered complexion of someone who spent days out of doors—perhaps she painted at the seaside as well. When she turned to set down her paintbrush and rag, the dark brown eyes she fixed on Stella radiated curiosity and intelligence. “You’re here about my husband,” she said. A statement rather than a question. She’d been expecting a visit like this for some time.

  Stella appreciated directness and decided that she ought to respond in kind. “Yes. A body has been found, and we have reason to believe it might be your husband.” She watched for an initial reaction. There was none. Mairéad Broome’s steady look never wavered, as if something she already knew had been confirmed. The young man began to speak, but she stopped him with a glance. “Where did you find the body?”

  “A few kilometers from Birr.” Stella felt as if s
he ought to say more. “You may have heard news of an ancient body that turned up yesterday. Your husband was later found at the same location. His car was submerged in the bog.”

  At this news, Mairéad Broome stood frozen, staring at Stella as if seeing through her. “I’m sorry, where?”

  “Eight kilometers outside Birr, just over the Tipperary border.”

  “I see. And my husband?”

  “I’m afraid he was inside the car.”

  A short pause, then, “How did he come to be driving in a bog?”

  “We’re not sure he was driving. It doesn’t appear to have been an accident.”

  “You’re saying my husband was murdered?”

  “That’s what we believe, from the evidence so far.”

  Mairéad Broome shook her head. “But how do you know it was murder?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t really share any details at this point.”

  “Because I’m a suspect?”

  “Until we know more, everyone’s a potential suspect.”

  Mairéad Broome’s gaze followed Stella’s, through the bedroom door. “It’s easy to jump to conclusions, isn’t it, Detective? But people’s lives are complicated. They don’t fit into tidy categories. Surely that’s one thing you learn from police work.”

  Stella moved to her next question. “I have to ask if there was anyone who would profit from your husband’s death.”

  “Apart from myself, you mean? My husband had a pretty sizable family trust. Since there are no children, I suppose it would come to me. But I didn’t marry Benedict for his money. I didn’t give a damn about his bloody money.”

  “What did you care about?”

  “Difficult as it may be to believe—and not to mention as difficult as he tried to make it sometimes—I did love my husband.”

  “You were married for how long?”

  “Seventeen years.” She took in Stella’s curious look. “I’ll save you the trouble of doing the sums, Detective. I was fifteen when we met and eighteen when we married. Benedict Kavanagh was… well, he was unlike anyone else I’d ever known.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “Bastard.”

  “How did you meet?” Stella asked.

  “At my parents’ house. Benedict was a colleague of my father’s, a rising young star at the academy. He used to come to dinner about once a month. My father loved to sit around the table and talk philosophy, and of course Benedict was brilliant at it. No one better. I was young and easily dazzled. There was a minor scandal when we eloped. My parents were furious, but what could they do? Force an annulment? Not quite the thing for a couple of radical advocates of free will. I was so certain about what I wanted then. The path seemed so clear.”

  “Not as clear since?”

  She turned and looked at Stella directly for the first time. “Are you going to tell me you’ve never had any regrets, Detective? Anyone who makes that claim is a liar in my book.”

  “Your husband was gone more than a week in April before you reported him missing.”

  Mairéad Broome’s eyes flashed. “I was out of town. I didn’t know he’d gone missing until I returned home.”

  “You still waited three days.”

  “I explained all this to the police at the time. There had been a couple of… previous instances… where it turned out that he was simply caught up in his work. I didn’t like the idea of wasting police time if Benedict was just buried in old books—” She stopped short and turned away, apparently remembering where her husband’s body had turned up.

  “Can you tell me about the last time you spoke to your husband?”

  “It was just before I left for Cork. April fourteenth. It was my first solo exhibition.”

  “So you never phoned him while you were away? And—you’ll forgive my curiosity—your husband couldn’t find time to attend your first solo exhibition?”

  “We had our own work, Detective, our own schedules. Benedict was as busy as I was—busier, even—with his writing, and his work at the academy, and the television program. With my odd hours up here in the studio, there were some weeks we hardly saw one another.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know what your husband was working on at the time of his disappearance?”

  Mairéad Broome sighed. “He often traveled to London, to the British Library, and to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, usually something to do with his old manuscripts. When he got back from his last trip to London, he did mention something about a breakthrough. He didn’t say much more, just that he’d found something that would turn the world of philosophy on its ear. I remember his exact words. He said, ‘This is going to rattle some bones.’ You could see that he relished the prospect—he loved lighting fires under people. It’s always been a mystery to me how a few words scribbled down a thousand years ago could be so earth-shattering today. But that was what my husband lived for.”

  “Did he have any enemies?”

  “Well, since you tell me that he’s been murdered, obviously at least one. There’s a long list of people who disliked him, Detective. It’s no secret that my husband was good at stirring things up. One of the things I admired about him, actually. He never shied away from controversy. On the contrary; he refused to let people hide behind comfortable hypocrisies, and if he made enemies, well, he looked upon that as their problem, really, not his.”

  “I understand he had some rather lively debates with colleagues on his television program.”

  “Just because he could run rings around those phony, full-of-themselves so-called intellectuals doesn’t mean they wanted to see him dead. It was a game to them—all that mock quarrelling and backstabbing. You can’t think any of them took it seriously. It’s their stock-in-trade, lobbing firebombs, insulting one another’s intelligence. They thrive on it.”

  As she spoke these last words, her voice faded, and it seemed as if the floor had begun to fall away beneath her. Stella realized, almost too late, that Mairéad Broome’s legs were about to give way. Healy moved quickly to scoop a chair under her. He knelt on the floor beside her. “Let me bring you a glass of water, Mairéad—”

  She snapped at him weakly, “I’m all right, Graham. For God’s sake, stop fussing.”

  Stella waited as the young man ignored the instruction and fetched a glass of water anyway. She was glad she’d made the trip herself and not let Serious Crimes handle the interview. Was this genuine grief she was witnessing, or some version of relief, now that the wait for the missing husband was finally over? Impossible to tell. She said, “I’ll need to speak with you at greater length, to go over all the details of your husband’s disappearance. But there was another reason for my visit here today. I wonder if you’d be willing to come to the hospital in Birr to identify your husband’s body.”

  Mairéad Broome looked up, as if startled to find Stella still there.

  “I can drive you down to Birr, if you like,” Stella said.

  This consideration of practical details seemed to bring Mairéad Broome back to herself. “No, I’ll come on my own. Graham will drive me.”

  The young man leaned in. “We’ll need a few minutes to gather up some things. I’m assuming we’ll stay on for a day or two.”

  “I think that would be wise,” Stella said. She turned to Mairéad Broome. “I wonder if I might have a look through your husband’s papers. I understand he kept an office here in the house.”

  “Yes, Graham can show you.” Mairéad Broome stood and turned away.

  Graham Healy led Stella downstairs to the study on the first floor. He pushed open the door to the book-lined room. “That wasn’t like Mairéad, what you saw up there. Must’ve been the shock.”

  It was unclear what he meant. Was it the matter-of-fact way the wife discussed her husband’s death, or was it her collapse at the end that was so uncharacteristic? Stella studied the young man. Definitely an art student, she decided, unconvinced of his own talent but finding his true calling as the assistant, disciple, and younger lover of a famous artist
. The whole situation had a slight whiff of scandal, but of course no one would have blinked if the genders had been reversed.

  “What does a painter’s assistant do, exactly?” Stella asked.

  “A bit of everything, really. I clean brushes, stretch canvases, order supplies, work on the inventory, and keep up all the gallery and collector contacts, the publicity and mailing list, maintain the website.”

  “And how did you come to be working here?”

  “Mairéad came to an exhibition at my school last year,” he said. “Favor for a friend, I think. Not that she isn’t interested in encouraging young artists—she is, of course—but she was under tremendous pressure, getting ready for her first big solo exhibition. I offered to help out, do whatever I could.”

  “Because?”

  “Because it was a great opportunity, and because Mairéad Broome is a great artist, the sort of artist I’ll never be.”

  “So you left art school and came to work here full-time? Do you also live here?”

  The young man’s eyes locked on hers, showing a hint of defiance, then flicked away. “That’s my room upstairs, next to the studio.”

  “How well did you know Benedict Kavanagh?”

  “Not well. I mostly stayed out of his way, but that wasn’t difficult. Like Mairéad told you, they had different schedules.”

  “Would you say they led separate lives?”

  “Listen, when Mairéad realized Benedict was missing, she was beyond distraught.”

  “Pardon me if this sounds cold, but she does seem to have recovered somewhat. Perhaps with your help?”

  “Think what you like, Detective. I’ve not done anything I’m ashamed of. I doubt whether Benedict Kavanagh could have said the same.”

  Stella turned back to him. “Enlighten me, please. What do you mean?”

  Healy was clearly uncomfortable, but he pressed on. “Well, you hear things—about how the rumors used to fly whenever a new intern turned up to work on his program—it was always the same. After a few months, he’d tire of them, and in would come someone new. Mairéad’s not stupid. She knew—everyone knew. The way that bastard treated her.” He glanced up at Stella. “As if she didn’t exist.”