by Erin Hart
Returning to the bathroom, she saw that the nearly empty wine bottle had toppled over and was spilling onto the white tile floor. The dark pool shimmered in the electric light, its surface disturbed by drops that seemed to fall in slow motion from the bottle’s open mouth.
Book Two
HUMAN CRIME AND BLOODSHED
What then, think you, is the honor, what the piety, of those who even think that the immortal gods can best be appeased by human crime and bloodshed?
—the Roman writer Marcus Tullius Cicero, writing about the Gauls in the first century B.C.
1
The postmortem on the second murdered man from Loughnabrone took place the following morning. The mortuary at the regional hospital in Tullamore, twelve miles northeast of Loughnabrone, was a drab, anonymous room with institutional tiled walls, anemic fluorescent lights, and two stainless-steel tables. Dr. Friel had gone into the next room to take a phone call, leaving Nora alone with the corpse, which lay partially covered by a plain white sheet on one of the tables, ready for their initial external examination. There had been no clothing to itemize and remove; upon taking the body from the bog, they’d found the deceased completely naked but for his leather cord and wristwatch.
Nora lifted the sheet and looked at the band still encircling the man’s wrist, its metal parts corroded green and black. She could just make out the word “Waterproof” on its peat-clogged face, a watchmaker’s assertion now disproved. The hands pointed to 9:55; faded red characters, TUE 20, showed through the window at three o’clock. Around his neck was the thin leather cord with its three knots, regularly spaced, about an inch apart. The Gardai would have trouble identifying the corpse, if this and the watch were all they had to go on. She considered his still outline, wondering who had waited in vain for him to arrive; who had held fear inside like a clenched fist, waiting for any news of him; who, perhaps, was waiting still.
The left arm that had stretched toward the top of the bog now extended above the man’s head, the partially skeletonized hand still bagged to preserve any forensic evidence. Dr. Friel would take scrapings from beneath the fingernails, to check for traces of skin or hair from another person—possible evidence of a struggle, if he hadn’t gone quietly to his death. But the acidic bog environment typically destroyed fragile nuclear DNA, so even if there was any tissue residue from a struggle, it probably wouldn’t provide concrete clues to a killer’s identity.
She circled the table to take a closer look at the man’s right hand through another polythene bag. This hand was much better preserved than the other, the palm and fingertips marvelously intact. Her primary impulse, on seeing this modern body, was to wonder whether she might be allowed to take a few small samples to analyze and compare to older specimens. But that would require the consent of the family, if the man’s identity was ever determined, and might require a delicate diplomatic approach. Maybe Dr. Friel would have some advice.
At the other end of the table, the sight of the dead man’s right foot was particularly arresting: brown skin stretched, tentlike, over a fan of bone and sinew. The flexed foot was delicately pointed as if caught in a dance step, from the toes, like five small dark stones in a row, to the wrinkled arch and rounded heel leading to the shapely ankle. Strange, Nora thought, that the glimpse of a bare foot should strike such an oddly intimate chord. But the feeling was not unfamiliar; she had experienced similar, fleeting flashes whenever she worked on a cadaver. Death allowed all kinds of intimacies never imagined in life. She wanted so much from this man, whose skin and bones and sinews had already begun to form answers to her questions. For as long as she could remember, the human body had been her subject, her instrument, her fascination. Most people misunderstood the pathologist’s motivation; it was not a preoccupation with death, but a profound curiosity about life. She had seen a Latin inscription in some mortuaries that captured the philosophy exactly: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. “This is the place where death delights to help the living.” There was a procedure to be followed, a routine that broke the experience of death away from emotion and grief, and pushed it instead into the realm of scientific observation. It relieved her mind, at least for a while, to believe the illusion that she was dealing only with flesh and bone, with the comforting clarity of science rather than the murky world of human relationships. But even scientific detachment didn’t last. Eventually every person on the autopsy table had to be recognized as someone who had lately had a life.
Catherine Friel pushed through the door, wearing a rubber apron over her lab coat and pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Let’s get started now, will we?” She pressed the button on her tiny tape recorder and began to describe the deceased in a calm, measured voice: “The body is that of a normally developed white male of slender build. Difficult to ascertain age because of the condition of the body.” She lifted first one arm, then the other, then each leg in turn. “There is no rigidity, and no visible lividity, but the body is quite dark brown in color from deposition in a bog. The left hand is desiccated and partially skeletonized. The exposed bone is somewhat decalcified, and adipocere seems firmly established throughout. The exposed skin is darkened from contact with peat, but remains remarkably elastic. Deceased is wearing a wristwatch with a metal band on the left forearm.” She gingerly removed the corroded watch and bagged it. “The deceased is clean-shaven and the hair on the scalp appears black and wavy. There’s a slightly reddish tint to all the body hair, which I think we can assume is from immersion in the bog.” She looked up at Nora, who nodded her concurrence. “There’s no visible evidence of congestion in the face, and the skin discoloration prevents observation of any possible cyanosis.” Dr. Friel set down the recorder and carefully lifted each closed eyelid, examining the surface of the eyes with a magnifying glass. “The irides appear blue, and the pupils are fixed and equal. There are no foreign bodies or contact lenses. There’s noticeable focal petechial hemorrhaging in both eyes.” The small blood spots were one of the typical signs of asphyxia or strangulation.
Dr. Friel concentrated on the man’s head and neck, marking off his external wounds with her measuring scalpel. “There’s an incised wound on the left lateral area of neck, four centimeters in length. We’ll have to do a dissection to describe the wound path and see whether it’s severed any major vessels. I don’t know if you can see this…” She handed Nora her magnifying glass. “There’s horizontal bruising just above the gash. A pretty definite ligature mark; see how it continues around the back of the neck? A rising peak in the back usually indicates a suspension point. That’s one way we can tell the difference between an actual hanging and a rearward strangulation.” She cut the leather cord from around the dead man’s neck, bagged and labeled it, then gently opened his mouth and pointed a small torch inside to peer at the teeth and gums, which were only slightly discolored and clotted with peat. “There’s some dental work. Gold crown on the first molar, lower right—and the first upper left bicuspid is missing. No visible injuries to the gums, cheeks, or lips. Looks like he got a mouthful of bog water at some point, though—we’ll be able to tell more about that after we have a look at the lungs and the airways.” She lifted and examined each arm in turn. “The hands and arms appear to have sustained a few defensive wounds. The right hand seems to be in fairly good shape; we might be able to get a decent set of prints.”
Nora looked up to see Detective Ward standing at the door, and after a moment Dr. Friel noticed him as well. “It’s all right, Liam, come in.” He joined them at the table. “I’m afraid cause of death isn’t going to be very straightforward,” Dr. Friel continued. “There’s a lot going on here, and it may take a bit of time to work it all out. I’m finished with his effects, if you wanted to take them. I was just about to ask Dr. Gavin if there was anything she could see, given her previous experience, that might give us a better idea about how long this man was in the bog.”
Nora felt slightly discomfited by such deference
; the “previous experience” to which Dr. Friel referred consisted of exactly one nonpreserved specimen. Ward ventured a question. “What exactly causes the discoloration?”
“The bog environment triggers what’s known as a Maillard reaction.” Ward looked blank, so Nora tried to explain: “In simple terms, it’s a common protein-sugar reaction—the same chemical process that causes food to turn brown, actually. Some of the recent research using piglets has demonstrated pretty marked discoloration after a couple of years. So, in other words, I don’t know if we can tell very much from coloration alone.” She looked closely at the dead man’s shoulder through the magnifying glass. “It’ll be interesting when the larger incisions are made to see how deeply the color has penetrated the cutaneous and subcutaneous layers. The brown color doesn’t seem quite as rich or well-established as in the older remains I’ve seen, but I’ve not seen that many bog bodies—to be honest, no one has, and they’re all slightly different, depending on the particular environment.”
Nora paused, realizing that what she was about to say might be all wrong, that she might have to backtrack somewhere down the road. She took a deep breath, hoping she wouldn’t regret what she was about to say: “This man apparently went into the bog completely naked. He’s probably been strangled with a leather cord, and his throat has been slashed. If he hadn’t been wearing the wristwatch, we might quite naturally assume he was much older.”
“And why is that?” Ward seemed intrigued.
“Well, he has similarities to the other body from Loughnabrone, and to remains found in England, Germany, and Denmark, and other places as well. The finds over the past fifty years or so have all been pretty well documented. Some of them had similar types of wounds: they were hanged or strangled, their throats were cut, and they were buried or staked down in watery places. Some people have taken those things as proof that many of the bodies were victims of ritual sacrifice.”
Ward seemed troubled by this interpretation. “So what are you saying—you think this might have been some sort of ritual killing?”
“I don’t think it can be ruled out. When we find the same evidence on an older body, it’s always one of the possibilities. Any one of those wounds was probably enough to kill him, so why the excessive violence? If he were from the Iron Age, then the injuries would be consistent with what’s been found before. But if he’s clearly modern, then the mystery is why someone today would have used those three forms of violence in particular.”
“Why, indeed? Shall we see what this fella can tell us?” Dr. Friel said, reaching for the garden shears that lay on the stainless-steel tray near the dead man’s head. She didn’t seem to notice that Detective Ward was already beating a hasty retreat out the mortuary door.
2
As he drove the twenty-three miles back to his station in Birr, Ward was thinking about Dr. Gavin’s words. Ritual killings, or murders that looked like ritual killings, were rare, although probably not as rare as people might imagine. Some were committed by self-styled occultists, but murders carried out for other reasons were sometimes covered up by staging the scenes to look like ritual killings. He’d seen a few examples where the ritual aspect had turned out to be misleading.
The first challenge here would be to find out who the victim was. He pulled out his mobile and punched in a number. “Maureen, it’s Liam. Do me a favor, will you, and pull all the missing-person files? How many are there from the last twenty years, do you reckon?…Maybe we should go even further back…. Yes, sort those out if you would. I’m on my way. I’ll have a look at them when I get there. And I’ll tell you more about the PM when I get in.”
They’d be lucky if it was a local disappearance. If the victim happened to be from somewhere else, they’d have to search missing-person files from the whole country. It could take a long time just to establish identity, not even talking about evidence for a murder case. There was that date on the watch, but it only told the day of the week and the date. No indication of the year or month, unless…The watch had to know what month it was, in order to tell the date accurately. Maybe it had to be set by hand; but perhaps there was a mechanism inside the watch that calculated how many days were in each month. At the very least, they might be able to get a manufacture date for the watch and eliminate the years before it was made.
How strange was it that the victim was naked? He’d seen the body out in the bog; there was no suggestion that this had been a careful burial—just the opposite, in fact. So how had the victim come to be naked, and why—especially out on that broad expanse of milled peat? There was no evidence from the postmortem that he’d been bound—or was there? Victims of ritual killings were not usually cooperative, unless they were incapacitated in some way. Dr. Friel hadn’t mentioned any blows to the head, and they’d have to wait for toxicology results to see if there had been any drugs involved. But the peat under the nails might suggest he hadn’t been unconscious going into the bog. Ward was crossing a similar stretch now, along a straight bog road, the surface rutted and patched, crumbling away at the sides. He suddenly realized that he relished this moment in a case, when the whole thing lay before him, complicated as a Chinese box, waiting to be opened, to confound and mystify.
He parked outside the station and walked around to the front entrance, a tiny room with a window for the duty officer and a row of hideous molded-plastic chairs opposite. No one was at the window, but a woman sat in one of the chairs, waiting. She cast a brief, anxious look in Ward’s direction, then turned back to the empty window and sat a little straighter in her chair, arms crossed across her chest. Her handbag hung over one shoulder and two bulging carrier bags rested at her feet. She’d come in after doing her shopping for the day, after trying to decide whether to speak to the police. She wouldn’t stay long if no one came to her aid.
Crossing the waiting area to the inner door, Ward formed an impression instantly. The woman was perhaps his own age, he decided, fifty-ish, though she looked younger. He would have described her as handsome rather than delicately beautiful. She had dressed with care, and the clothing, though not in the latest fashion, was of good quality: a tailored trouser suit, a crisp white blouse, and just a touch of makeup. A farmer’s wife, Ward decided. Respectable. Her face showed concern, perhaps that she would be seen sitting in the reception area of the Garda station, but there was something deeper as well. In his years in the Guards, Ward had learned to read many different layers and grades of concern. There was the annoyance of parents come to fetch unruly offspring who had committed some relatively minor offense such as public drinking or joyriding; complainants about noisy neighbors often brought with them a nauseating air of moral sanctity. This woman’s face had none of that. The idea struck him that she was here to make a confession, but perhaps it was better not to jump to any conclusions. He turned to her. “Excuse me, have you been helped?”
She looked up, startled by his sudden attention. “No. No one’s been here. But I haven’t been waiting very long.”
Just then the duty officer returned from the inner room, pulling the door shut against the sound of laughter and the murmur of male voices. Upon seeing Ward in the outer room, he straightened and put on a serious face.
“I can help the lady now, sir,” he said. Ward noted a few crumbs of seedcake on the young man’s shirt front.
“That’s all right; I’ll look after her myself,” Ward said. He returned to the security door to press in his code, then ushered the woman down the hall and upstairs to the plain beige office he shared with Maureen Brennan. The space was spare and impersonal, but at least they had a view, overlooking the street in front of the station.
“May I get you a cup of tea?” he asked.
She seemed surprised at the offer. “No, thank you. What I need—” She looked down at her knees and couldn’t seem to find the words to continue. Perhaps she was unused to stating her needs so baldly, and to a stranger.
“Let me get you some tea,” he said. “I won’t be a moment.” He
stepped into the corridor and closed the door, watching her through the glass as he crossed the hall to the galley kitchen to fetch the tea. He poured the steaming water over the bag in the large mug, not watching the tea as it steeped, but instead studying the woman in his office. She continued to look straight ahead, not even glancing around the room. This woman was completely focused on whatever it was she’d come to say. Again he thought of a confession, but pushed the idea aside.
Ward squeezed the darkness from the teabag, added milk and sugar, and headed back to his office. As he handed the woman the steaming mug, he noticed her hands. Where he had expected to see skin rough and reddened from farm work, he saw long, delicately tapered fingers, fresh and pink as a young girl’s. She began speaking before he could take out a report form, so he leaned back against his desk and listened.
She introduced herself as Teresa Brazil, then said, “I’ve come because I think the body they found at Loughnabrone yesterday might be someone I know—someone I knew, that is—my husband’s brother. Danny Brazil.” It came in a rush, as if she was afraid she’d stop before getting it all out. And having said what she had come to say, she fell silent and looked up at him, unsure what would happen next.
Ward considered for a moment; there’d been no details released, besides the fact that the deceased was a man. Why would she presume that it was someone she knew? He remembered the leathery corpse he’d just left in the mortuary and wondered whether this woman was just another case of wishful thinking. Whenever a body turned up, the relatives of missing persons came forward and prepared themselves for the worst, just in case. Somewhere way in the back of his head, the name Brazil seemed familiar; he’d met Teresa Brazil before, he was sure. The why of it might be a little longer in coming to him.