Lake of Sorrows ng-2

by Erin Hart

  “We haven’t even put out an appeal for information yet. We were just preparing to look through all these old cases—” he indicated the stack of missing-person files Maureen had left on his desk “—to see whether we could come up with anyone matching his description.”

  “You won’t find Danny Brazil there,” she said.

  “And why’s that?”

  “We all thought he’d gone away, emigrated to Australia. He talked about it often enough. That’s why they never reported him missing. He’d just gone, no long good-byes, just slipped away as he said he would.”

  “When was the last time you saw him yourself?”

  Her voice was barely audible: “Midsummer’s eve, twenty-six years ago.” Very precise date, Ward thought. Teresa Brazil seemed uncomfortable sitting in the chair before him, but she evidently felt compelled to be there, to tell what she knew.

  “So you’re saying he never wrote, never came home, and no one thought that strange? No one from the family tried to find him?”

  “What would have been the point, if he didn’t want to be found?” she murmured.

  “I’m still not quite clear why you think the man we found is your brother-in-law.”

  She looked up at him, suddenly back from wherever her distant thoughts had taken her. “There were some things found with him. My son was there; he told me. A knotted leather cord, a wristwatch with a metal band. I could describe the watch, if you like. It was a gift for his birthday that year.”

  Ward reached into his jacket for the two evidence bags and set them without fanfare on the desk in front of her. The corroded watch had left dust against the clear polythene, and he watched as the object worked its magic of recognition in Teresa Brazil’s eyes. He followed her gaze to the narrow leather ligature, still stretched from being twisted tight around the young man’s throat.

  “That cord—” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “He always wore it,” she said. “May I have a closer look?”

  “I’m afraid not. It’s evidence in a murder investigation.”

  “Murder?” She barely whispered the word, and the color drained from her face.

  “I’m afraid so. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

  “It is Danny,” she said. There was no doubt in her voice. “I don’t know anyone else who wore such a thing. It was for protection, he said. For luck.” She turned away, and Ward watched her try to gain control. When she turned back to him, her face was calm.

  “Mrs. Brazil, please understand that I’m not questioning your word on the identification, but it might be best to have some sort of corroborating physical evidence. Did your brother-in-law have any identifying marks that might help us—any noticeable scars or birthmarks?”

  “He had a scar just above his left eyebrow, from hurling. I don’t know about birthmarks.”

  “And did he ever see a dentist, here in the town or elsewhere?”

  “They used to see Dr. Morrison, just here beside the station. The old doctor died a few years ago, but his son is in it now.”

  “If we’re able to establish a positive identification, we’d of course have some additional questions for you and your husband, and any other family members as well.” Teresa Brazil nodded and stood, and he escorted her to the top of the stairs. “Thank you for coming in. We’ll certainly be in touch, whatever happens. And here’s my card, in case you think of anything else.” She took the card without comment and tucked it into her handbag.

  As she started down the staircase, Ward spoke again: “One more thing, Mrs. Brazil. I was wondering why your husband wouldn’t have come along himself.”

  Her expression said she’d anticipated his question all along. “My husband has been in poor health. He rarely leaves the house.”

  That ambiguous answer would have to suffice for now. Ward returned to his office window to observe Teresa Brazil as she left the station. What was it about her that was so familiar? He watched as she merged with a crowd of adolescent boys and girls, all limbs in their blue school uniforms. They didn’t move as she passed them by, just another housewife weighed down with her messages, hurrying home to cook the family dinner.

  When she disappeared around the corner, Ward turned away and sat down at his desk, where he picked up the phone and started dialing Dr. Friel’s mobile number. While he waited for the connection, he spoke across the desk to his partner as she came in. “Maureen, do you know Morrison, the fella who has the dental surgery just beside us here? Looks like we’ll have to request records belonging to a former patient of his father’s. The name is Brazil. Danny Brazil.”

  3

  As Nora made her way back to the excavation site, the dead man in the mortuary kept pulling at the fringes of her consciousness. She had an uneasy feeling that she was getting caught up again, as she had with the mysterious red-haired girl whose head she and Cormac had unearthed last summer. But she couldn’t help imagining the murdered man as he had been in life, electricity humming through his nervous system, blood soaking oxygen from his lungs, all the thoughtless, automatic, repetitive cycles of physical existence brought to an abrupt and violent end. Why? Who was he, and why should he have been dispatched in a manner usually reserved for Iron Age victims? Had his death been deliberately planned to look like an ancient ritual killing—and if it had, who would have known enough about those practices to approximate such a thing? Maybe he had been a real sacrifice for some reason—the victim of mob violence for something he’d done, perhaps? It was difficult to imagine the sort of crime that might warrant a treble punishment. She pictured the naked victim, kneeling at the edge of a bog hole as the garrote tightened around his neck and a blade was drawn. Perhaps the blade was dull, and didn’t cut as deep as it should have. Maybe the victim struggled, or the swordsman’s aim was not true. Had he been drugged? Toxicology results and stomach content analysis could take weeks, but they might reveal how far the killer had gone in pursuit of authenticity, if it had been some sort of sacrificial ritual.

  She arrived at the excavation site to find the small parking area jammed with Garda vehicles. The Technical Bureau van stood out above the cars, and a couple of television vans with satellite dishes had pulled up along the road as well. The place was turning into a circus, crawling with people. She had to park on the road about fifty yards from the hut. It looked as if the Guards had cordoned off access to the bog and were only letting people in if they were on a list. No sign of Ward. She wanted to tell him that the whole triple-death scenario he’d been so interested in this morning was probably not quite as concrete as she’d made it seem.

  As she rounded the back of her car and got out her heavy boots and waterproofs, Nora saw Rachel Briscoe, the girl who’d found the new body, sitting cross-legged just inside the open door of the supply hut, on a large rectangular box like a shipping container that rested on blocks beside the shed where the archaeologists took their tea. A large pad of paper rested on her knees; she was drawing the worked ends of timbers that had been uncovered in the cuttings. It was all part of the excavation work, documenting each stroke of the ax; each gouge or facet was a direct line to the work of ancient hands.

  Owen Cadogan’s Nissan pulled up behind Nora as she struggled into her waterproof trousers. Cadogan passed her by without speaking and strode purposefully toward the tea shed. When he was almost at the door, Ursula Downes emerged, evidently ready for a confrontation; as Cadogan moved to speak to her, she drew back and slapped him hard across the face. When he recoiled and began to protest, she pushed him away with both hands, turned on her heel, and left him standing with his arms hanging uselessly by his sides. A few yards beyond them, Rachel paused in her drawing and watched intently from the door of the hut, only turning her eyes back to her work when Cadogan stalked off, still rubbing his face. Maybe, Nora thought, she’d been wrong in her assumptions about Ursula and Cadogan. Maybe she’d completely misread what had happened yesterday. Cadogan obviously didn’t have the upper hand today.
Maybe Ursula could handle him, and she had been butting in where she wasn’t wanted or needed.

  As Cadogan returned to his car and sped off, the shed door opened again and Charlie Brazil emerged, checking to see if anyone was watching him. He began walking slowly toward the Garda checkpoint, skirting the crowd of reporters and sliding in at the front.

  When she was suited up, Nora approached the barrier through a small but persistent crowd of journalists and showed her ID to the young policeman. “You should have me down on the list there—Gavin. Nora Gavin.”

  The officer scanned down his clipboard and made a tick by her name. “Yeah, you’re all right, Dr. Gavin. Go ahead.” He waved her through, then held up his hands against the reporters who were clamoring for access and pressing up against him. Nora saw Charlie Brazil following a few yards behind her; he was let through the barrier as well. The crowd’s buzz receded as she walked deeper into the bog, conscious of Charlie Brazil’s presence only a few paces behind her. She could see Niall Dawson’s shaggy head among the group at the site, and felt somehow comforted to see his crew from the National Museum carrying on in spite of all the tumult.

  Beside Dawson another figure moved slightly, and for a fraction of a second she thought it might be Cormac. In another heartbeat she realized it wasn’t him, but she wondered how she had known, so quickly and so absolutely. She also understood that the same thing would happen to her again and again, perhaps for the rest of her life, if she turned away from him now. In the years to come she’d see the back of a man’s head, a shoulder turning toward her, and his image would come to her like a ghost. Was it possible for the living to haunt their fellow creatures? For something as intangible as the mere memory of a gesture to slip into the subconscious unbidden and remain there until some firing synapse, some chemical key set it free? She had studied Cormac with her anatomist’s eye—how his bones were put together, how the layers of muscle and sinew lay upon those bones in a very particular way to create the face and form she loved. And she did love him. The knowledge filled her suddenly, like a great breath. She’d been fighting it, denying it out of guilt and fear, but now she felt overwhelmed by the certainty of the feeling. Strange how epiphanies arrived in between things, when they were least expected.

  There was nothing to be done about it now. She hiked her bag up on her shoulder and tried to prepare herself to work.

  The wind was cool today, and everyone wore jackets; great cloud towers billowing past periodically threw everything into high relief or heavy shadow. The white marquee still shielded the bog man; its sides puffed in and out with the strong wind—it was a wonder the thing hadn’t lifted off and blown away. Niall Dawson, directing the crew that was building the transport crate for the body, looked up as Nora reached him. “Welcome back. How did your postmortem go?”

  “Very interesting. A bizarre coincidence—well, bizarre anyway; I suppose we’ll have to find out if it’s really a coincidence. It looks as if he was killed almost exactly like our man here—strangled with a ligature, throat slashed—”

  “Really? And how long do you reckon he’d been in the bog?”

  “That’s what’s odd. From the style of the watch he was wearing, I’m guessing probably twenty or thirty years at the outside. Maybe less.” Nora saw Charlie Brazil turn toward them. He might have heard what she’d said about the cause of death, and she realized that she probably shouldn’t have said anything—to Niall Dawson or to anyone. “You’ll keep all this under your hat, won’t you, Niall? It’s officially a murder investigation, and I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “You know me, Nora—the soul of discretion. We’re just about to do the honors here, if you’re ready.” He held the tent flap as Nora ducked into the white marquee.

  Inside, she paused for a moment to put on a pair of latex gloves. It was difficult to believe this was real. All the hours she’d spent digging through musty old files and museum records, trying to string together known facts into never-before-discovered patterns—all the hours she’d spent trying to imagine from quaint, antique descriptions the reality faced by earlier discoverers of ancient bog remains; and here was another whole trove of information, in the flesh.

  The purpose of this partial excavation today was to photograph the bog man in situ before removing him to the National Museum conservation lab at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Because the body had already been removed from its original location, there was an extra urgency about getting the remains into the protected and controlled environment of the lab. Today they would expose the arrangement of the limbs, record the things that might change once the body was moved, just as police photograph a crime scene—as an aid to memory, capturing empirical evidence exactly as it lay. The crew had already taken the obligatory shots of the telltale body parts that emerged from the peat, with markers to show the scale. Now it was time to draw back the peaty blanket and to find the full, fascinating horror that lay beneath.

  First Nora uncovered the crown of the bog man’s head, bare except for a matted carpet of skin and hair. She remembered reading an account of bog workers finding and tossing around something they jokingly called a “dinosaur egg,” only to find later that it was a badly decayed human head, a vessel that had once held memories, sensations, fears, the spark of an individual life. She uncovered a deeply furrowed brow, a left ear bent nearly in half, a left eye squeezed shut. She looked up at Dawson; he was uncovering the man’s right forearm, which was flung out away from the body, chasing the sodden peat from between the finger bones so that they would be distinct when photographed.

  Nora was astonished to see the raised outlines of blood vessels beneath the skin of the dead man’s right temple, distinct though the pulse they had contained had been stilled centuries ago. His delicate, papery eyelids were likewise preserved, and there was a deep crease between his eyebrows, an expression of fierce concentration. He had a full lower lip, and a strong chin covered in fine stubble the color of fox fur.

  It was difficult to make out many details when everything was the same shade of brown and the invading peat had filled every recess. They’d be able to see more once they had him in the lab. The cord that had been tied around his throat looked like leather, though Nora knew, from reading about previous bog discoveries, that it might be hard to determine definitively what sort of animal hide it was. The knots would have to be examined further by a forensic specialist, but they seemed fairly simple: a stopper knot at each end of the narrow cord, and a third knot linking the two ends. That was one difference between this victim and the newer bog body.

  The withered skin on his throat had gathered in folds, but with the help of a pocket mirror she could see that the near edge of the cut was still sharp, and there was a distinct layer of adipocere at its lip. They’d have to examine the wound more carefully in the lab to determine whether it had been made by a piercing or slashing action; from that they might be able to discern whether the blow had been intended to kill the victim, or merely to spill his blood—an important distinction when studying possible ritual significance. It was tempting to imagine this excessive violence as part of a complex ritual, but it was also possible that the bog men who had been subjected to such apparent overkill were simply being punished multiply for multiple crimes.

  When they’d finished exposing the front and sides of the body, the photographers came inside the tent to do their portion. Nora sat on the ground outside and closed her eyes, trying to imagine what this spot had looked like twenty centuries earlier. No doubt it had been covered in a thick blanket of bog, scattered with stands of birch trees and standing pools. What was it about wet places—rivers, lakes, and bogs—that prompted offerings? Perhaps ancient people saw in the water’s surface another world, a reflection of this world turned upside down, or a place inhabited by shades and spirits. She’d often listened to Cormac talk about how the Celts saw life and animus in everything, eyes peering out from the leaves of the forest, grinning faces disguised as abstract spirals and curved l
ines. The Romans had certainly portrayed the people who lived here as bloodthirsty savages—but didn’t every conquering culture paint that portrait of the people they tried to subdue?

  Perhaps the whole community had gathered here to witness as the man inside the tent bled and died, or perhaps his death had been clandestine, a well-kept secret. Some bog bodies, from their undernourished state, were thought to be people of low status, while some were very well-fed. What had this man’s status been—outcast, scapegoat, fatted calf? Had he ventured out here to the bog willingly, understanding that he was to die, knowing that his blood was the necessary price for his people’s survival, or had they carried him, unconscious or drugged, against his will? The whole idea of sacrifice recurred in religion to this day, Nora thought; modern Christians still drank the blood and ate the flesh of their God, if only in symbolic form. And it wasn’t just Christians; nearly every culture, every human endeavor from sport to politics to the cult of celebrity, had a way of selecting scapegoats to receive punishment that would otherwise have been borne by all.

  As she felt the eternal wind on her face and watched the sun still riding high across the southwestern sky, Nora felt as if she’d just discovered the key to a locked doorway into the distant past. She wasn’t sure whether it was disturbing or reassuring to open those doorways and find that human beings had not fundamentally changed at all in the intervening years. Perhaps they never would.

  She checked her watch; nearly six o’clock. They’d soon be finished for the day and covering up the bog man in preparation for his journey to Dublin tomorrow. She climbed to her feet and started cleaning off her tools.

  Niall Dawson came up behind her. “That’s the bog man finished. We’ll start searching the spoil tomorrow, if that’ll suit.” He meant the sopping heaps of loose peat that Charlie Brazil had been removing from the drain when he’d uncovered the body. They’d have to go through it all by hand, looking for any more clues to the Loughnabrone bog man’s fate. “Good for you to get your hands dirty, Nora. It’ll give your research much greater depth and credibility if you’ve participated in all these different aspects of an excavation. Who knows, you might even get a book out of it.” He smiled at her. “A few of us are heading over to Gough’s in Kilcormac later if you and Cormac would fancy coming along for a drink. They’ve a regular set dance night there on Tuesdays. I assume you know the Clare set, at least?”