Lake of Sorrows ng-2

by Erin Hart

  “How well did you all know Ursula Downes?”

  “Not all that well,” another of the young men replied. “Barry Sullivan,” he added, looking at Ward’s list. “Most of us were just hired on for the summer season. She had her own digs, didn’t really hang around with us. We only saw her out here on the job.”

  “Given that limited interaction, were you aware of anyone who might have wished her harm?”

  “Not really,” Sullivan said. “I mean, she had a few rows with Owen Cadogan, but I guess I thought they just didn’t get on. The managers have to put up with us, but most of them don’t really give a toss about what we’re doing here; I think they just see us holding up their bloody production schedules. The sooner they can get rid of us, the sooner they can get back to raping the landscape.”

  “There’s no need to be melodramatic, Barry,” said Trish Walpole. “They’re really quite good to us here.”

  “But Ms. Downes’s relationship with Cadogan was strictly professional, as far as you knew?”

  “Yeah. As far as we knew,” Sullivan said. None of the others disagreed.

  “And what about her relationship with Charlie Brazil?” Several of the crew shifted in their seats, and Ward could see damp clods falling off their heavy boots onto the layer of brownish peat that already covered the floor.

  “She was always trying to get him to come out here—making up odd jobs for him to do,” said Trish Walpole. “She was very sweet to his face, but behind his back she called him Charlie Goggles. There was something strange going on between them. A couple of days ago I saw her come in here, and a few minutes later Charlie came out, looking like somebody had given him a right hiding.”

  “You said Ursula had separate digs from your own. But all the rest of you lodge at the same place?”

  “Yes, we have a house about a half-mile around the bend past Ursula’s place, on the Cloghan road,” said the last young man, Tom Galligan.

  “Five of you in the house?”

  Gardner said, “Six, actually. One of our crew is missing today—Rachel Briscoe.”

  The girl who’d found Danny Brazil’s body. Ward remembered talking with her. She had answered his questions that day, but had barely made eye contact.

  “I knocked on her door this morning, but there was no answer, so I stuck my head in. She was still asleep. Had the duvet pulled up over her head.”

  “But you didn’t go in, didn’t speak to her?”

  “By that time the minibus driver was already waiting, and we didn’t have time to hang around. She just overslept. It’s not the first time.” His tone suggested that Rachel was a constant thorn in their collective side.

  Sarah Cummins said quietly, “I went in. The bed was arranged to make it look as if somebody was in it, but Rachel wasn’t there.”

  A cascade of guilty looks traveled through the group. Sullivan said, “Look, we all knew she went out nearly every night. Thought we didn’t take any notice, I suppose. She was always back by morning.”

  “Any idea where she was going?” Ward asked. “To meet someone, perhaps?”

  Sarah Cummins bristled defensively. “We don’t know where she went. How could we?”

  “I do,” Gardner said. “I was coming back from the pub one night, and I saw her on the hill right behind Ursula’s place.”

  “Anyone else ever see her there?” Ward asked. The uncomfortable looks and a couple of nodding heads told him that they had, but like Sarah Cummins, they didn’t like to jump to conclusions. “Do you have any reason to believe she was somehow involved with Ursula?”

  “More like obsessed,” Gardner said. “I’m sure she thought we didn’t notice, but you could see her staring at Ursula when she thought no one was around. Watching her like a cat when we were on tea break. It was weird.” Ward looked around at the other crew members. No one jumped in to agree, but none of them protested either.

  Ward reached into his coat pocket and brought out the bag containing the binoculars found at the crime scene. “Have any of you seen these before?”

  Sarah Cummins said quietly, “They’re Rachel’s. She always had them with her. She’d go berserk if anyone borrowed them, even for a second.”

  When he’d finished questioning the archaeology crew, Ward excused them. He handed out his cards as they filed out of the office, and asked them to ring him personally if they remembered anything else, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Sarah Cummins lingered behind the others, and Ward waited until they were alone before he spoke. “Was there something else you wanted to tell me?”

  “They’re all seeing what they wanted to see. There’s something bothering Rachel; she’s acting strangely, and I don’t think she’s been thinking straight since she arrived here. I know the signs.” Sarah pinched the ends of her coat sleeves as she spoke, balling her hands up in knots. “I walked in on her once in the bathroom at the house. I didn’t know she was in there; the door wasn’t locked. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, staring at a knife in the sink.” The girl swallowed hard. “I know what she was thinking about, what she was going to do.” She took a deep breath, and pushed up one of her sleeves, showing several whitened lines where the skin had once been cut. “It’s not about killing yourself, or even about the blood; it’s about the pain—about feeling something, anything. And about taking control again. I don’t do it anymore.”

  “Do you think Rachel could have hurt anyone else?”

  The girl’s anxious eyes held him. “I don’t know. I should have said something before now.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for anything that’s happened. I mean that. It’s not your fault, Sarah. Have you got someone you can call—someone to talk to?”

  The girl nodded and looked away. “My sister.”

  “And will you promise me you’ll ring her today?” She looked back up at him and offered another wordless nod. How had this young woman come to bear the whole world upon her back? “I want to thank you for coming forward, Sarah. It took a lot of courage, and it might make the difference to this case. Will you ring me if you think of anything else—anything at all?” Sarah Cummins nodded again and left, tucking his card into her trouser pocket as she walked slowly back to her work. Unseen disturbances lurked everywhere, Ward thought. It was difficult enough to calm the situations that were out in the open. How could human beings hope to forestall the conflicts that raged within a soul turned on itself?

  6

  Owen Cadogan didn’t look pleased to see two detectives approaching his office, but he was evidently expecting them. He got his secretary—a soft-looking woman, perhaps in her early thirties—to bring in a pot of tea and three mugs on a tray. She glanced at the detectives with that combination of fascination and dismay common in people who find themselves unexpectedly on the periphery of a dreadful crime. When she left, pulling the door closed behind her, Ward jumped right in. “Mr. Cadogan, tell us about your relationship with Ursula Downes.”

  Owen Cadogan fixed him with a stare, evidently annoyed at the assumption in the question. “There was no ‘relationship.’ She worked the bog last summer and came back again this year. She and her crew were under my charge here, so we were in fairly regular communication.”

  “About what?”

  “About the progress they were making, if she needed any supplies, or anything from the workshop—that sort of thing.” He went silent for a moment. “It’s hard to believe she’s—”

  “You’re sure that was the extent of it?”

  “Extent of what?”

  “Of your relationship?”

  “I’ve told you there was no ‘relationship’—”

  “We have eyewitnesses who say that you had a couple of rather heated exchanges with Ursula a couple of days ago. What was that all about?”

  Cadogan’s eyes shifted away. “It was to do with a personnel matter.”

  Brennan took the ball. “And how confidential will it be when we have to go through all your employees’ files to find out?”
Cadogan looked up into her eyes, on the verge of challenging her authority, Ward thought.

  “This is a murder inquiry,” Brennan said curtly, and Cadogan backed down.

  “Last summer Ursula got her hooks into one of the lads here in my workshop, and I saw how it turned out. It seemed that Ursula liked to try things sometimes, just to see if she could get away with them. I wasn’t going to let her do it again.”

  “Or you’d do what? Seems to me taking her by the throat is a rather unprofessional way of making your point,” Brennan said.

  “I’d tried talking to her already, several times, and she wasn’t getting the message.”

  Wasn’t getting the message, Ward thought to himself. Here’s a man who doesn’t really like women. Doesn’t trust them, sees them as alien creatures. He listened closely as Brennan continued her questions.

  “Sure she didn’t have her hooks into you?” Brennan asked.

  “I’m married,” Cadogan said. “Besides, a woman like that—”

  “A woman like what? What did she make him do, this young man she seduced? Did you think about that a lot, Mr. Cadogan? Did it upset you—make you feel jealous, perhaps?”

  “No! I’m just trying to do my job here.”

  “And who was this worker she was after, again?” Brennan asked. “This innocent lamb whose virtue you were defending? Presuming they’re both of legal age, why should it be anything to do with you?”

  Cadogan considered his answer. “It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t trying to interfere, but the way she carried on disrupted morale, that was all. We were stuck with her out here for ten weeks, and I was just trying to keep the peace.”

  Ward sat forward slowly, so as not to draw attention to himself, and watched Owen Cadogan’s lips form the words of his answer—the truth this time, or a lie? They had no proof that Cadogan had been involved with Ursula Downes. But somehow his story seemed false. If only there were some foolproof clue to mendacity. The trouble was, most liars were clever enough to mix in some truth with their lies, so it wasn’t whole cloth. You had to sort it out, check everything they said, not just the parts that seemed suspicious. There were many kinds of lies and many kinds of liars. There were embellishers, people who told things the way they remembered them, usually to their own advantage. Some people set themselves rules about lying, when it was all right and when not acceptable. There were those whose words were never false, but whose actions invariably were. The best liars, in Ward’s experience, were those who knew how to embroider, to stitch together truth and fiction into a seamless fabric. What sort of a liar was Owen Cadogan? As he mused, Ward found himself looking not at Cadogan, but at the secretary working in the next office, separated from them only by a partition that was half glass. He wondered how much she could hear. It was only a single pane, and Brennan’s voice was rather loud. The secretary seemed to be going about her work with a kind of forced concentration that led him to believe that she could hear it all. At this moment, she had her back turned and was typing furiously.

  Ward rose and ventured out to her desk, closing the office door behind him. “I wonder if you could point me in the direction of a water tap?” The woman raised her head and pointed wordlessly to the galley kitchen across the hall. “I’m supposed to take this tablet an hour before my dinner,” Ward offered, by way of explanation, “and I nearly always forget. Thanks, Miss…”

  “Flood. Aileen Flood.”

  Ward ducked across the hall and downed his aspirin tablet with a sip of water, throwing back his head to make sure it went down properly. She regarded him curiously. Then he came back across the hall and observed that the sound from the inner office was indeed perfectly audible, as though there were no partition at all. “Thanks,” he said again, and rejoined Cadogan and Brennan, who hadn’t missed a beat.

  “All right. All right. The lad’s name is Charlie Brazil. He got himself into an awful twist about her last summer. If you ask him, he’ll deny it. Some people say he’s not the full shilling, but he’s all right. A good lad—a bit odd, but a good worker. She’d no business messing with him.”

  “Does your wife know about your talks with Ursula Downes?” Ward asked.

  “Leave my wife out of this,” Cadogan said. His eyes narrowed as he looked across the desk at them.

  “I’m afraid we can’t leave your wife out of this, Mr. Cadogan, because you’re on our list as a suspect, and we’re going to have to talk to her about where you were last night.”

  Cadogan looked down with the dejected air of someone who was well and truly in it. “She took the children up to her mother’s place in Mayo. They go every summer for a fortnight. She left two days ago.”

  “So no one can vouch for your whereabouts last night?”

  Cadogan looked away, then back at Brennan. “No, I was home. Alone.”

  “And no one saw you at the house, no one phoned you there? I’ll remind you, Mr. Cadogan, that we’re investigating a murder, and that you’re under very serious consideration as a suspect. Can anyone give evidence about where you were last night?”

  “No.” Even as his lips formed the word, Cadogan’s eyes flicked over to the window, where his secretary was continuing the pretense of going about her work. But the woman’s stony facial expression, her overprecise movements, betrayed her intense agitation.

  “Look, if someone can tell us where you were between one and four o’clock this morning, we’d be delighted to cross you off our list.”

  Ward made a point of turning, ever so slightly, so that he was looking straight out at the anxious woman in the next office. But Cadogan wasn’t going to bite.

  “There’s no one, I swear. I was alone all evening. All night.”

  Brennan regarded Cadogan evenly, giving him a last chance to come clean, then glanced over at Ward. He closed his eyes to tell her he had no additional questions, so she stood, and said, “That’ll do for now. We’ll be in touch when we have any more questions, and of course you can always ring us if you remember anything further.”

  Cadogan looked slightly surprised that they were finished with him so soon. He tried to mask it, placing his hands on the table and making a show of getting out of his chair. As they took their leave and headed down the corridor to the exit, Ward glanced back briefly, to see Owen Cadogan crouched by his secretary’s desk. It wasn’t his submissive posture, but the woman’s worried face that piqued Ward’s interest. He turned back to Maureen.

  “We won’t have time today, but do you fancy calling in on Ms. Flood at home tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Already in my diary,” Brennan said.

  7

  Charlie Brazil wasn’t hard to find. They entered the workshop’s open maw, where a man in a stained boilersuit was working on aligning the swamp treads on a huge tractor. They showed their IDs and asked for Brazil. “You’ll have to wear these,” the man said, tapping his own goggles, and ducking into the shop foreman’s office to pull down two pairs from the board inside. He handed them each a pair, then pointed with his thumb to the next repair bay, where a young man in safety glasses worked on a machine part with a grinder. Ward put his goggles on, noting the row of illustrated calendars at the back of the shop, featuring posing, pouting women whose breasts looked like they’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. The workshop seemed to be organized into different areas, according to type of repair and equipment needed. It was impossible not to be overwhelmed by the scale of the machines and the sharpness everywhere: dull blades being honed with grinders, shiny new blades waiting to be fitted on these huge tools for scraping the skin of the earth. He wondered if these men understood that every day they came to work they were destroying their own livelihood. Bogs were finite, not like his line of work, which relied upon wellsprings of anger and greed and stupidity that seemed to have no end.

  As they approached, the fair young man at the grinder pressed metal to metal, and a rain of sparks fell near their feet.

  “Charlie Brazil?” Ward shouted above the noise, holdin
g up his ID. The young man nodded and turned off the grinder, and Ward noted the fingers black with grime. They had it from two sources that their victim had been interested in the lad. But what was his interest in her? “We were just having a chat with your boss, Mr. Brazil. He tells us you knew Ursula Downes.”

  Brazil eyed them suspiciously through his safety goggles. “So did we all. She was here on the bog last year as well.” Ward stood facing the open door to the next repair bay and watched as the police presence seemed to reverberate around the building. He marveled at how such knowledge was passed, like a scent, a feeling in the air. Some of the workers strode by purposefully; a few stood and gawked from a distance like curious cattle. Every once in a while, a figure would drift by the open door, pretending to check the yard for the next job. It was clear they all knew why the police were there. When the third boilersuited figure came into view, Ward turned to Charlie Brazil and said, “Look, we can go somewhere else if you’d like.”

  Charlie gave a kind of resigned grimace and shook his head. “I’m used to it.” Ward noted that Charlie was the only youngish man at the workshop; all the rest seemed to be middle-aged or older. He could imagine the slagging, the thinly veiled envy, the superiority of knowledge. Charlie Brazil had the same look Ward remembered from boys who had been picked on at school, for being too intelligent, too introverted, too quiet. They might as well have had signs hanging around their necks. He watched Charlie Brazil’s long fingers fiddle with the clamps that held the machine part. Did he know what Ursula Downes had called him behind his back?

  “I didn’t know her all that well. They sent me over to put up some steps for her, just knock together a wooden staircase so they could get in and out of their supply shed—it was up fairly high off the ground. When she needed some drawing frames there the other day, she asked if I’d make them.”