The Celtic Riddle

by Lyn Hamilton

  Rather fortuitously, or so I thought at the time, I caught sight of Breeta at a table of a small local eatery, and approached her, Vigs in his hatbox with me.

  “May I join you for a moment?” I asked her. A few seconds went by before she nodded her assent and I sat down across from her and ordered a coffee.

  Breeta went on eating, virtually ignoring me. She was obviously eating for two, a rather large platter of fish and chips in front of her, with bread on the side, and a large cola too.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened, Breeta,” I said. “Michael was a lovely young man. This has all been quite dreadful.” Breeta concentrated on working on the meal in front of her. It was not so much eating, come to think of it, as stuffing food in her mouth. She barely chewed it. I had the feeling that, whether she was conscious of it or not, she was stuffing herself with food to keep churning emotions, grief and anger, from rising up and pouring out of her.

  “Breeta,” I went on undeterred, although the sight of all that greasy food making its way so rapidly into her mouth was making me slightly nauseated. “I was wondering, I mean, I’m very worried about what has happened, and as selfish as this sounds, what it might mean to Alex. First John, and then Michael. I’m so afraid that being involved in this Will may be very dangerous for everyone named. I’m sure your father never thought that such awful things would happen...”

  “I hate him,” she said vehemently. “Hate him!”

  “But perhaps finding the treasure would put a stop to this,” I went on after a few seconds pause after this outburst. “We, Alex and I and some friends, have found a number of clues already. I have them back at the hotel. If you would just have a look at them, I’m sure you could help us. You know so much about Celtic history and...”

  “No!” she exclaimed. “Stop. Never. I will never forgive my father for this. My life... ruined.” She looked as if she would cry, but then stuffed some more chips in her mouth.

  “But Breeta, you need the money,” I protested. “Please...” I reached over to touch her hand. She wrenched it away.

  “Leave me alone,” she said getting up from her chair. “Go away. This is all your fault. Why did you have to come here?” She almost ran to the cashier and then out the door. Stung, I let her go. After a few minutes of feeling awful, I picked up Vigs and trundled him back to the Inn, where he was greeted with real enthusiasm by Sheila and Aidan’s three young children, and resignation on the part of Sheila herself. Then I headed for the bar, and ordered a drink: nothing wimpy like wine, this time—a single malt Irish on ice.

  It was depressing to think that Breeta blamed me for what happened. I told myself it was ridiculous to feel guilty about everything, but found it almost impossible not to wonder if I had, however unwittingly, done something that had set off a chain of events. But if this was the case, then I had to do something to fix it. The question was, what? It was not lost on me that not everyone shared my enthusiasm for finding the treasure, but I could not think of what else to do. While there were dire hints about Byrne’s past from time to time, the treasure remained the most logical place to start. I’d heard lots of tales about Byrne in the last few days, in this bar and around town. As Deirdre had said, he wasn’t the most popular person in town, but there seemed to be a grudging admiration for his business acumen. He kept to himself, it seemed, was not an habitué of the bars the way many in town were. And the place being what it was, he was still regarded by the locals as a newcomer, despite the fact he’d arrived in the Dingle a newly married man many years before. But there wasn’t a whiff of anything that would meet Deirdre’s criteria for a curse. The more I thought about it, the more Deirdre sounded like a superstitious and perhaps not well-educated woman, and the more plausible the treasure as the key to the question about why Michael was killed: a clue had been found clutched in his dead hand, after all. In the end, I promised myself that I’d keep my eyes and ears open for more on Byrne, but concentrate on the treasure, though it was clear we were going to have to find it without Breeta’s help.

  Even without her, we were not doing so badly on that score. The first clues had been the easiest to find, all right around Second Chance. There was Alex’s clue and Michael’s, and then the one about the beauty of the plant, the one found clutched, at least part of it, in Michael’s dead hand.

  I’d assumed that one would be found in his garden, probably in the toolshed. When I got there, however, I discovered someone had gone looking ahead of me. At least, I thought that the only possible conclusion, because I couldn’t believe that Michael, whom I’d watched meticulously tending his garden, would have left his domain in such a mess, with garden implements strewn everywhere, and broken pots and spilled soil in messy little heaps on the floor and worktable.

  I was afraid that clue was lost to us, but then Rob saved the day, although he didn’t know it. He’d stopped to admire a vase full of roses in the entranceway of the Inn with the words, “quite the most beautiful of flowers, don’t you think?” and I was off to Rose Cottage moments later. It was a bit of a trek because I was determined not to cross the Byrne property and went overland from the main road. It was worth the scratches from the wild berry bushes and the scrapes from the rocks: once I got there, the clue was quickly located, wedged behind the door frame.

  The next clues took us farther afield and had been quite a bit harder to find. The Dingle is a peninsula only about thirty miles long, and is often described as a finger that juts out into the sea, the farthest point west in Ireland. To me, though, the Dingle is not so much of a finger jutting out from a hand, but a primordial creature, mountains for its spine, its undulating torso slipping into the sea so that only the tip can be seen as the Blaskett Islands off shore, its head way down in the depths. In reality, it has four mountain areas, the Slieve Mish Mountains where the finger joins the hand, as it were, the Stradbally Mountains, Mount Brandon on the north side, and Mount Eagle to the southwest. In between are fabulously beautiful but isolated valleys, rocky gorges, and breathtaking vistas. Roads through the mountain passes rise up steep inclines, then drop precipitously to the coast, where there are dozens of little towns and hundreds of ancient sites. In other words, there were a lot of places to search.

  Nonetheless, we were making progress. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’d fanned out across the countryside with military precision or anything, but while Rob cooperated with the Irish police in the murder investigation—at least that’s what he called it—the rest of us, with a copy of the poem Alex had dug out of the local library, and Malachy and Kevin’s knowledge of the area, had set out to find the rest of the clues.

  Kevin, who turned out to be rather good at all this, figured out the hawk above the cliff. “Has to be Mount Eagle,” he said. “Hawk, bird of prey, eagle. Cliff, mountain. Not perfect, but where else could it be?” Mount Eagle turned out to be a rather big place, a mountain that ran down to the edge of the sea near Slea Head. Kevin lead our little ragtag bunch on a merry chase over the hilly terrain. We clambered over stone fences, dodging sheep and their poop and slogging through the mud, stopping whenever we came to the remains of some ancient structure. Dotted over the landscape were ruins of tiny stone beehive-shaped huts, where centuries ago people had not so much lived as taken shelter, “clocháns” Malachy called them. Many were just heaps of rubble, but others still stood as little masterpieces of engineering, carefully placed stones fitted together and angling up to a peak without benefit of mortar to form stone huts that had withstood centuries of weather, and various invasions.

  “Eamon Byrne liked old places,” Kevin said, as we looked about us, “so I think we should search them.” We checked as many of them as we could, dodging through the low stone doorways and scanning the interior walls for any sign of a clue. We found nothing, but Malachy wouldn’t give up. Eventually, we came upon the remains of an ancient stone fort right in the middle of a field. It was there, a tiny roll of paper wrapped in plastic and wedged between two stones. Malachy and Kevin were
ecstatic.

  Jennifer was an able assistant as well. She’d realized right away that ogham was read from right to left, or bottom to top, and saved us a lot of time. Who’d have thought that her thinking-outside-the-box class, and its rather irritating lessons on how to talk backwards, would have had such practical application?

  She found one of the clues by herself. From the vantage point of her sailing lessons out on the bay, she’d spied a CD store on shore called Music of the Sea. As soon as she’d hit dry land again, she’d climbed up a fire escape to get level with the sign, and found the clue taped to its underside.

  The clue at the Boar’s Head Arms disturbed me a little. Seven clues had been handed out, for Alex, Michael, Margaret, Eithne, Fionuala, and Breeta Byrne, as well as Padraig Gilhooly. The Boar’s Head clue was the eighth line of the poem. Either that meant that every line did not lead to a clue—and since we only had our own, we didn’t know—or that we were expected to figure out the clues were from Amairgen’s Song and look then for every line of the poem.

  Even before the Boar’s Head clue, we were still missing the stag of seven slaughters and the ray of the sun. It was difficult to know whether to keep looking for them, or to assume someone else had found them first. Other than the mess in the garden shed and our little set-to with Conail O’Connor, there had been no signs of anyone else looking for clues. Maybe Margaret Byrne had been quite sincere in saying the family wouldn’t be participating, and Conail was the only renegade. Somehow, I doubted it, though. They’d shown themselves to be quite ruthless, certainly where Alex’s inheritance of Rose Cottage was concerned, something else I still had to deal with. We should keep searching, I thought, looking about the bar. My eyes alighted on the painting over the fire, the scene which I found quite repulsive despite its quality, of a stag, its snout full of arrows, being set upon by a pack of hounds. Stag of seven slaughters, I breathed, counting the dogs. Seven, of course. Right under my nose.

  Picking up my drink, I ambled over to the hearth in what I hoped was a nonchalant way, then stood for a minute or two with my back to the fire, drink in hand, that most Irish of poses. As Aidan entertained the lads at the bar with one of his stories, and all eyes seemed fixed on him, I pulled up the lower comer of the painting and took a quick peek behind. The clue was there, or at least it had been. All that was left of it was a comer of the paper still secured by the tape which had held it to the back of the painting. I quickly pulled it away. I would check it against the paper on which the clues we’d already found had been written, but there was little doubt my question had been answered and that at least one other person was, despite all protestations to the contrary, looking for the treasure just as we were. The question was who, and just how dangerous were they?

  I went to the front desk to retrieve, from safekeeping, what we were calling the Master List, and added the Boar’s Head clue to it, then studied it for a while. I took a fresh piece of paper, drew a line down the middle, and marked one column Amairgen’s Song and the other Ogham clues, and looked at what we had.

  AMAIRGEN’S SONG

  I am the sea swell

  The furious wave

  The roar of the sea

  A stag of seven slaughters

  A hawk above the cliff

  A ray of the sun

  The beauty of a plant

  A boar enraged

  OGHAM CLUES

  May’s sunrise by Tailte’s Hill is seen

  A curse be on these stones

  Leinster’s Hag to Eriu’s Seat

  Aine’s Mount to Macha’s Stronghold

  Raise a cup to the stone

  Almu’s white to Maeve’s rath

  It was all rather baffling. The ogham clues didn’t seem to have anything in common with the lines of the poem, other than that the clues in the poem had led to their discovery. Was there supposed to be a direct relationship? I didn’t know. It seemed to me that it was possible that the first ogham clue referred to a real place. What of the rest? Almu’s white to Maeve’s rath sounded like a board game to me, White Queen or something to Red whatever. I assumed that Maeve wasn’t Garda Maeve Minogue, although I had absolutely no basis for thinking that. Maeve, I knew, had been an ancient Celtic queen.

  Three of the ogham clues had a something-to-something-else pattern, again perhaps directions, but the trouble was I didn’t know what, or where, any of these things were. Stones were big, that was certain. The clues irritated me: they were either coy or the product of someone who thought he knew a whole lot more than the rest of us. I felt I was being toyed with and by a dead man at that. But I did acknowledge, reluctantly, that had the circumstances been different, that is, had the family and the rest of us been working together amicably, this might have been fun. But whose fault was it they didn’t?

  A curse be on Eamon Byrne, I thought, rather un-charitably, which led me right back to what Deirdre had said and to the other hints about something bad in the past that no one would tell me. I understood their reticence. Really, why should they tell a total stranger, and one from far away, their worst secrets? This was the Dingle, after all, a wild and relatively remote place with its own ways. Even in Ireland, I suspected, it would be regarded as someplace different: the Gaeltacht, the Gaelic-speaking part of Ireland, a throwback in an all-too modem world. But it was frustrating nonetheless.

  I decided that maybe we really would have to come at this several different ways. Malachy, Kevin, and Jennifer could search for more clues. Alex I’d send on another research project, to the local library, or wherever, to begin to identify the names in the ogham clues. Myself, I thought I’d do a little poking around in Eamon Byrne’s past. After all, we had the time. We were stuck here for a while as the murder investigation marked its stately course. Currently, we were awaiting the possible exhumation of John Herlihy to check for poison in his system, an outcome I didn’t doubt for a minute.

  Rob, I thought, was perfectly happy to stay indefinitely. He’d managed to convince his superiors on the force back home to lend him to the local authorities for a while, a stroke of good fortune, according to Rob, as it meant he’d be paid while he was here. I rather thought he would consider it a stroke of good fortune for other reasons, but held my tongue. Jennifer was only too happy to be able to stay a little longer. While Rob had initially objected to her taking sailing lessons from Padraig Gilhooly, who he reasoned was part of a murder investigation, I’d persuaded him to lighten up a little, there being no evidence whatsoever to implicate Padraig. Several of Paddy’s chums had attested to his presence at their favorite watering hole the afternoon the Will was being read and the evening Michael had died. His landlady—he had a flat in town—claimed to have heard him come in shortly after closing time, not to leave again till morning. In any event, Jennifer loved her sailing lessons, was beginning to make some friends in town, and had really blossomed, not nearly the shy and rather immature person I’d arrived with. Alex was his normal calm self.

  The only problem for me was the shop, and I was starting to fret about it. Sarah didn’t seem terribly perturbed when I told her my return had been delayed, saying that Clive was being very helpful. This development I found disturbing. What exactly was Clive, the rat, up to, I wondered. I decided I’d go up to the room before the others came back so I could phone my friend, and Clive’s new partner, Moira, to assess the situation without having to admit I was worried. I hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, then turned back to put the Master List under lock and key once again at the front desk. I felt sort of silly doing this: carrying around my cash and credit cards, but locking up a piece of paper, but right from the start, I’d decided to be safe rather than sorry.

  A good thing it was too. I opened the door to Jennifer’s and my room, and my jaw dropped. If I needed confirmation that we weren’t the only ones in this treasure hunt, I had it. The place was a shambles. The room had been thoroughly searched. The mattresses had been lifted and pushed against a wall, the carpet tossed in a heap in a corner; the
drawers were all open and contents dumped; our suitcases had been lifted down from the shelf in the cupboard, opened and dropped as well. Even the bathroom had been searched. It looked as if every packet in my cosmetic bag had been opened.

  Conail again, I wondered, or worse yet, Breeta? As much as I didn’t like to think it, I had told her that very afternoon that we had several clues back at the Inn. At peak time in the bar, the residential part of the Inn was pretty much left untended. The front door of that part of the Inn was kept locked, but to someone who knew their way around the place, it would be easy enough to get in, through the kitchen, or the entrance off the bar. I’d given her plenty of time while I’d moped around the bar, licking my wounds after her accusations.

  Shocked, I just stood there staring at the mess. Eventually I became conscious of footsteps coming up the stairs and two familiar voices.

  “It’s my money,” Jennifer said. “You said so. You said I could do whatever I wanted with it.”

  “No daughter of mine,” Rob began as they rounded the comer and stopped dead at the open door. Jennifer gasped.

  Two thoughts came into my mind at that moment. One was that Rob was just being an old poop where Jennifer was concerned, and I was going to tell him so. The second was that it was time I saw a little more of Ireland.

  We stood silently in the doorway for a moment or two.

  “Ffuts ym gnihcuot mucs etah I,” Jennifer said at last.