Lake of Sorrows ng-2

by Erin Hart

  “Mr. Quill?”

  He didn’t turn; his eyes only flickered upward briefly, and did not rest on her face.

  “You were at Ursula’s house this morning,” he said, his speech noticeably slowed by alcohol. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

  She slid onto the bench across from him, and he didn’t object. “Nora Gavin. I’m so very sorry about Ursula. I heard you say that you were a friend—”

  “They won’t let me go, you know. Not until their investigation proves that I’m not a cold-blooded killer. As if I—” He rubbed his temple as if massaging a vein that throbbed there, closed his eyes and breathed in deeply through his nose. Nora stared at his crinkled-tissue eyelids, the deep lines in his face that actually enhanced rather than detracted from its attractiveness. “I told them everything I know,” he said. “That she phoned me in Dublin last night, said someone had been bothering her. She didn’t say who it was, only that she was a bit anxious. I asked if she was in any physical danger, and she said—” He couldn’t go on for a moment. “She said she didn’t think it would go that far. I told her I’d be down first thing, to help her get things sorted out. I wasn’t going to let her stay in a place where she might be in danger. She promised to ring the police if anything else happened.” He looked up, his eyes searing into Nora’s face.

  “I knew her only briefly. I wish—”

  “What do you wish?”

  “I wish there were something I could do.”

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  “No. I mean—I don’t know. You said someone was harassing her?”

  “Yes, that’s what she told me. Ringing her at all hours, spraying paint on the windows. I offered to come out here last night, but she said no, nothing would happen, I should wait until the morning. And so I played my usual game of chess, and I lost.”

  He lifted his eyes to meet hers, and she felt a sudden transfixion. Then he looked away, as if he’d felt it too. The amber whiskey before him looked thick and sweet, clinging to the clear glass as he lifted it and swallowed. Nora studied the way his Adam’s apple rose and fell above the crisply pressed white shirt. Quill had one of those faces that seemed almost not to have any pores, so fine and fresh was the skin. She looked at his necktie, pulled loose at the collar, but still secured with a very unusual pin: a bronze disc, into which an ancient design had been engraved, a triskelion, a graceful trio of spiraling curves.

  “I’ll tell you the same thing I told the Guards,” Quill said. “I have a suspicion about who might have been threatening Ursula. She told me that she had a brief—and, by her account, wholly unsatisfactory—liaison with Owen Cadogan last summer. It was long over, at least on her part, but Cadogan was evidently having trouble letting go.” So the contempt she had seen in Ursula’s face, and the anger in Cadogan’s eyes, had been real, Nora thought. She had been witness to the unraveling of a relationship, with all the pain and bitterness that entailed.

  Quill drew back slightly and studied her expression. “You think it strange that Ursula would tell me about her affairs.”

  “No, not necessarily.”

  “You do. That’s all right, too. She wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into with her. Thought that, if I knew the worst about her, I’d be warned off; but it didn’t work that way. She fascinated me, absorbed me. Why am I telling you all this?” He stared down at the whiskey, then up at her. “She wanted to tell me about her lovers. And I wanted to hear because she felt the need to tell me. No doubt some people, maybe even most people, would think that strange. I can’t say it’s not. I don’t defend or deny. It’s just a fact. It is. And I daresay there are stranger things in the world than the need to confess, to take someone into your confidence. Lets you feel, perhaps, slightly less alone.”

  “Why you? Why did she choose you as her confessor?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve refrained from passing judgment. Isn’t that what love does?”

  Nora thought it quite possible that she’d never had such a peculiar conversation with a complete stranger. Sometimes death had a way of cutting through polite social customs. And, in a way, she found Quill’s lack of embarrassment quite exhilarating. His fingers circled the glass in front of him. They were long and slender, almost out of proportion to the rest of him, and Nora felt as if she could see clearly, through the skin, how each finger’s knobby metacarpal fitted against its cuplike base.

  “I didn’t really know Ursula,” she said. “I only met her a few times, out on the bog. But I found her this morning, and I suppose that makes me feel as if I should have made an effort to know her better.”

  “What do you want to know? I wonder what it says about the human race that we’re so much more interested in the dead than in the living. While she lived, no one inquired after Ursula—what sort of a person she was, what moved her, excited her, allowed her to get out of bed each morning. Now that she’s dead, you’re just the latest in a series of people who’ve asked me that same question. I’m not trying to make you feel bad, Miss Gavin; it’s just curious to me. Being with Ursula was like getting a strong electric jolt. Everything she did crackled; there was no sitting things out, no passivity. Who would want to see that extinguished?”

  Nora thought of the Ursula Downes she’d seen, provoking Owen Cadogan, mocking Charlie Brazil, and wondered whether Desmond Quill’s judgment had been clouded by his feelings. Then she remembered the ghastly sight that had greeted her only a few hours earlier and knew that, no matter what she’d done, Ursula Downes hadn’t deserved the death she had met today.

  “We met only a few months ago,” Quill said. “An exhibition opening at the National Museum. We were strangers, passing at a reception. I know it seems ridiculous, but sometimes you experience a kind of sudden recognition, and that’s what I felt from the start. No illusions. Ursula was the only person with whom I ever felt that sort of kinship. The world saw us both in the same light, I suppose: cold, a little hard, perhaps. I prefer to think of it as being unsentimental. But there was ample reason for Ursula’s mistrust of the world. It’s a common reaction to betrayal. Think of it; the one person you depend on for protection, turning around and using that very vulnerability against you.” He stared into the nearly empty whiskey glass, his expression distant, remembering.

  “I don’t think Ursula ever told anyone except me what her stepfather made of her. He used her mother’s illness as an excuse, started coming to her room when he’d closed up the dry-cleaning shop for the night. She was just a child, and there was no safe place to run. Eventually he stopped. She grew up, you see—became a young woman, not a child anymore, and so she no longer fit within the bounds of his twisted fixation. Ursula said that sometimes, after everything else, it still felt as though the worst cruelty was the way in which he finally rejected her. That she actually came to hate herself for growing up. Can you imagine such a monster? He left his mark on her. It wasn’t just the physical scars that remained forever.”

  There was nothing Nora could do but listen. Of course all the tiny facets of Ursula she’d seen were not the whole picture. But what became of all the other undetectable, irreducible essences that made up any human being, when the person was no longer there? One of the most terrible things about murder was that it made for an unfair summing-up, a life abridged far too soon. She still wasn’t sure why Desmond Quill was telling her all this. Perhaps he hadn’t planned to do so; maybe the shock had been more than he realized. After all, it was only this morning that he had arrived at the house to find that Ursula Downes, his singular vision of the future, was dead.

  “I suppose some people would look at Ursula and me and see an old man using a younger woman to regain the illusion of lasting life. I was laboring under no misconceptions, mind you. I’m not young—I’ll be sixty-seven in October—and I understood completely that Ursula had certain needs, certain desires that I might not be able to fulfill. I wouldn’t have stood in her way. She didn’t belong to me; it isn’t—wasn�
�t—that kind of possessive relationship. But in many ways we were uncommonly well-suited. If only she’d let me look after her, she wouldn’t have been out here again. But she could be terribly willful. Exasperating at times.” He took another swallow of whiskey, and Nora wondered how many he’d had before she arrived. He began shifting the change that sat beside his glass on the table, arranging the coins into triangles, then rows of three, like some elaborate game of noughts and crosses. She watched the elegant fingers moving slowly, surely, deliberately.

  “You said you wished there was something you could do,” Quill said. “Maybe there is. You can tell me about her last few days here.” He seized Nora’s hand; she tried instinctively to pull it away, but he held her fast. “I need to find out what happened to her. I’ve got to know.” The muscles in his jaw went taut; then his head drooped toward his chest, and he let her go. “I’m sorry…. Do you know what she asked me, just before she rang off last night? She asked whether I thought three was a lucky or an unlucky number. What do you think she meant by that?”

  Nora looked down at the coins on the table, neatly arranged in three rows of three. Just then her mobile began to chirp and vibrate against her hip. She couldn’t answer it, not now; she needed room to breathe and think. She had to get out of here, away from Desmond Quill with his deliberate hands and his disjointed grief and his sweet whiskey breath. She stood up suddenly and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to go now.” Desmond Quill stood as well, at least a head taller than she was, but unsteady on his feet.

  When she reached the jeep, she sat in the driver’s seat, flipped open her phone, and retrieved the voice mail message. It was Cormac. “It looks like I’m going to be here another while. Why don’t you go home for now? I’ll ring you again when they’re finished with me.” A pause. “Talk to you later, Nora.” How strange that the device she held in her hand could contain all that was in those final words: disappointment, puzzlement, a plaintive sliver of hope.

  9

  The conversation with Desmond Quill had unsettled Nora, and she arrived back at the Crosses unsure what to do next. Climbing out of the car, she saw the empty peg where Cormac’s waterproofs had hung the previous night. Where were they now, and why had Detective Brennan been so full of questions about when she’d seen them last? The detectives must have thought they had something concrete; otherwise Brennan wouldn’t have wasted precious time asking pointed questions. Surely they didn’t think Cormac would be that thick—to wear his own protective gear while committing a murder, and then stash it near the crime scene? She thought of him in a windowless interview room, trying to explain what seemed inexplicable, even to himself—why he’d gone to Ursula’s house, how her blood had gotten all over his clothing. Things looked bad for Cormac unless they could come up with evidence placing someone else at the scene as well. And with a prime suspect who had conveniently presented himself on their doorstep—at her insistence, she recalled—would they even try?

  After hearing Desmond Quill’s suspicions, Nora was more convinced than ever that Owen Cadogan had something to do with Ursula’s murder. But what was she going to do—phone up Cadogan’s wife and ask if he’d been home all night? Surely the police would do that much. Her statement on its own wouldn’t be enough, of course; they would need hard evidence. Quill said that someone had sprayed paint on Ursula’s windows; maybe there was some way Cadogan could be tied to the scene through that….She knew she was grasping at straws, jumping to conclusions too fast. Maybe Quill’s suspicions had made her too focused on Owen Cadogan.

  If it wasn’t Cadogan—well, Cormac wasn’t the only person who might have traveled to Ursula’s house on foot. Michael Scully had told them that the Brazils were his closest neighbors, that Danny Brazil’s apiary was just over the hill behind the house. And Danny’s apiary was now in Charlie Brazil’s care. From the conversation she’d overheard between Ursula and Charlie, it seemed that Ursula had been for some reason keenly interested in the recovery of Danny Brazil’s body. Nora tried to remember exactly what Ursula had said—something about Danny’s triple-knotted cord not being such a good luck charm. Was that what Ursula had meant, asking Quill if he thought three was a lucky or an unlucky number? I’ve been watching you, she’d said to Charlie. I know what you’re hiding. But when Charlie had asked what she wanted from him, she’d said, Maybe I have something to give you. Her words had been a proposition, in more ways than one. Come and see me, she’d commanded. As if he’d have no choice but to obey.

  Nora closed her eyes and went back to the previous night, trying to picture what they’d seen from the top of the small hill. From what she remembered, anyone up there could have seen down into Ursula’s kitchen. Cormac said he’d seen Brona Scully at the fairy tree; maybe she’d been up there last night. But that hopeful idea was immediately tamped down by reality. Even if she had been, even if she’d seen something, how was that supposed to do Cormac any good? The girl didn’t speak a word. One might as well try to coax testimony from a silent standing stone. If Brona had seen something…the more Nora thought about it, the more that possibility disturbed the edges of her consciousness. It wouldn’t hurt to find out what the girl could have seen from the fairy tree.

  The scrappy whitethorn bush made an arresting sight even in the bright light of day. The setting was just as Nora had remembered: from the pasture atop the hill, a person could indeed see straight down into Ursula’s back garden. The empty kitchen window still yawned jaggedly, and crime-scene tape still marked out the perimeter of the house and garden. She tried to picture Ursula’s figure in the house—and Cormac coming up over this hill and down into Ursula’s yard. She didn’t like to think about what had followed, but she had to, if she was going to help Cormac. She stood in the spot where a witness might have stood only a few hours ago and imagined how events must have unfolded.

  Cormac was not guilty of murder—he couldn’t be; but Brona Scully’s silence might be his undoing. How much would Brona have been able to see at night—presuming she even came here after dark? There was no sign of the girl, but Nora still felt ill at ease, wondering if there were eyes upon her. She had a distinct, unsettling feeling that someone was watching her from the tangled bushes at the edge of the field. She turned slowly back toward the fairy tree, searching the hedgerows for signs of life, but nothing stirred.

  She heard the sound of breathing behind her, and whirled around to find a red bullock with a creamy-white face regarding her curiously from a few yards away. From what Michael Scully had told them, Nora guessed the cattle grazing in the surrounding pastures belonged to the Brazils. Charlie’s apiary was probably somewhere up here as well. She kept thinking of Ursula’s words: I’ve been up at your place, Charlie—the place where you have the bees. People have told me Danny used to keep bees there as well…. Was it blackmail, or another kind of threat that had lingered in her words? I’ve been watching you, Charlie. I know what you’re hiding. What if it was something in that forbidden knowledge that had gotten Ursula killed?

  Nora had another vision of Cormac sitting in that dreary interview room, answering the same questions again and again, facing disbelieving expressions on the faces of the detectives across the table. Ursula’s blood was on his clothing, and she had left scratches on his neck. It was possible that unless Nora found some other path for them to follow, Cormac’s whole life might be forfeit for something he hadn’t done.

  She checked her watch. Charlie Brazil wouldn’t be at the apiary just yet. At midsummer bees had to be tended quite closely and checked at least once a day, she knew, but Charlie probably worked until at least four o’clock on the bog. She wasn’t sure what direction to choose, until she saw several bees, heavily laden with golden pollen, rise up out of a wild rose hedge beside her and fly off unsteadily away from the Crosses and the way she’d come. She followed the cattle path and saw the circle of trees first, then the hives, set like standing stones around the open ground in its center. Off to one side was a house, with door and window frame
s gaping open to all weather. No one was about except for bees, buzzing in the midsummer plenty amid the globes of clover. She had no protective gear, but she didn’t feel nervous. The insects were consumed in their business, and not interested in her.

  Walking into a house with no door didn’t seem as intrusive as breaking and entering, but Nora still felt strange, venturing into Charlie Brazil’s beekeeping shed. Two things drove her past the discomfort: the image of Cormac being interviewed as a suspect, and the lingering regret she always carried with her that she had not done more, had not pushed harder to find things out when her sister was still alive. She couldn’t afford to risk timidity anymore.

  The door frame had once been painted green, and the whitewash had long ago crumbled from the walls with damp. She stepped across the threshold and saw a ragged curtain tacked to the window frame with nails. You could imagine a father and mother in their traditional places by the fire, and thin-faced barefoot children in pinafores. Was there no place in Ireland that wasn’t hip-deep in ghosts?

  Charlie Brazil had stacked new frames along the walls. His bee suit, hat, and veil hung on a hook beside the doorway, and his smoker—a small can with a built-in bellows that keepers use to control their bees—sat ready on the window ledge with a box of matches beside it. Under one of the small windows sat a plain metal cot, blanket neatly tucked under the mattress. Someone stayed here—if not every night, then at least from time to time. A dozen or more small holes in the thick, crumbling quicklime of the wall at the bed’s foot said something had been tacked up there, and fairly recently, too. Nora got down on her knees to look under the cot, and saw something like a postcard lying facedown on the dirt floor next to the wall. Reaching one hand in, half afraid of what she would find, she felt the thick, smooth paper.