by Erin Hart
The image on the other side was not a photograph, as she’d half imagined, but a detailed pen-and-ink drawing, like those she’d seen in Cormac’s archaeology books, only this one was graying slightly with mildew. Its subject was a plate or shield, with decoration that was vaguely familiar; something about it said Iron Age. She let her fingers travel over the sinuous S-curves and scrolls, drawn on paper here as they had been engraved in the original metal. What was a drawing like this doing in Charlie Brazil’s beekeeping shed? She noted the pinhole in the paper, with a thumbtack still through it, and counted the pinholes in the wall; seventeen, regularly placed, as if more drawings like this had once hung there. Was this what Ursula had found?
Nora slipped the drawing into her jacket pocket and looked around the tiny room once more. She wondered what had become of the people who had lived here. The house seemed to have been abandoned more or less intact; the worm-eaten shelves built against the dividing wall were still stacked with cracked cups and saucers. Someone kept the bare floor swept fairly regularly, presumably with the broom that stood in the corner, and the wooden steps up into the loft had been mended recently; several nail heads shone against the weathered wood. She tested the first step, and, finding it sturdy enough, ventured up the short ladder into the attic. An open suitcase lay on the floor. She stooped to examine the contents scattered about: clothing that looked as if it had been torn to shreds, a jumbled pile of newspaper cuttings, and some old photos, faded with time and weather. The top photograph, sticky with honey, showed a young woman. From the clothing she wore, the picture seemed to have been taken some time ago. Nora closed the suitcase and looked for initials, a tag, anything that would tell her whose belongings these were; but the warped cardboard shell gave up no clue, just fell apart where the hinges were coming loose. She continued looking around the cramped attic room, strewn with old junk, rusted nails, and wire. Maybe Charlie was digging up artifacts like the disc in the drawing, and that was what Ursula had been on to. According to Niall Dawson, digging up antiquities without a license was a criminal offense—but would such a thing be worth killing for?
A noise came from below; someone was in the house. Nora felt a surge of adrenaline as she flattened herself along the floor. The smell of dust and damp filled her nostrils, and she prayed that she wouldn’t sneeze or choke and give herself away. There were wide cracks between the floorboards, and she could see into the room downstairs.
It was Charlie Brazil. But he made no move toward his suit and gloves. He was here for something else. Nora held her breath and watched as he knelt by the fireplace. With the poker he prised up a gray flagstone at one corner. He removed a flat tin box from the place beneath and set it on the floor beside him, then moved the stone back into place and scattered a few ashes over it. Nora tried to pull herself along the floor without making a noise, to get a better vantage point.
Charlie opened the box, lifted out a handful of drawings like the one Nora had tucked in her pocket, then checked through the other objects the box contained. She heard the sound of metal on metal, and saw ring money, bracelets, an ax-head, coins. Charlie reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a primitive dagger, and drew the blade from its sheath. The dull bronze glowed in his hands, and it was clear to Nora, even at a distance, that the knife was not a modern implement. A thrill of cold fear traveled through her. This could be the knife that had been used on Ursula Downes. If Ursula had found out about Charlie’s hoard of artifacts, what would she have done? Perhaps she’d wanted in on it. Charlie had said people asked him where the gold was buried, the things Dominic and Danny Brazil had supposedly kept from the Loughnabrone hoard. Nora tried to remember exactly what Ursula had said to Charlie that afternoon. I know what you’re hiding.
She felt something on her left ankle, down near the place where the roof met the floor. One of Charlie’s bees had found the space between her trouser leg and sock, and was crawling slowly up toward her knee. She couldn’t move for fear of making a noise, so she held her breath and willed the bloody insect to turn around and go back from whence it had come. She’d have to be very careful not to provoke it; she knew from experience that a stinging bee gives off a pheromone that encourages other bees to join in the attack. And she’d seen what kind of damage a swarm of angry honeybees could do. The alternative was giving herself away and getting out now—a prospect she did not relish, looking down on the knife that might have cut Ursula’s throat.
Charlie slipped the dagger back into its sheath, then placed it carefully in his pocket and slid the tin into a cloth sack he’d pulled from another pocket. He was shifting these things; maybe Ursula had found them, and he feared another discovery. The bee inched its way toward her left knee, and Nora had to fight the urge to smash it and run. If only Charlie would get out, so she could move, get away from here…He stood, looking around the room. Nora twitched involuntarily as she felt the bee move again, then froze as Charlie started to mount the staircase. He stopped with his head just inside the upstairs room, listening intently, and Nora hoped that her breathing wasn’t audible from where he stood, that he couldn’t feel the vibration as her heart wrenched violently against her ribs. She felt the bee sting, like a nettle’s hot-cold touch, until the pain blurred together into a single throbbing mass. She tried to still her mind, deaden her senses, breathe silently despite the awful fear that she would cry out.
After a few seconds, Charlie’s head disappeared, and he climbed back down the ladder and left the shed. Nora waited as long as she could, then peeled off her jeans, batting at the bee, though she knew it couldn’t sting her again. She scrambled to her feet, flailing her arms and legs to shake it off, and almost tripped down the ladder. She ran out of the house, up onto the pasture above the apiary, trying desperately to put distance between herself and the angry bees, waving her empty trousers behind her. Her left ankle already felt swollen and hot as her body’s natural histamine rushed to fight off the poison. She began to limp, and stopped at the pasture gate to catch her breath and put her trousers back on. The ankle had started to swell. Stepping into her jeans, she heard a noise in the bushes behind her, and turned to see Charlie Brazil, red with embarrassment at her state of undress.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Nora’s mind raced through possible responses. Charlie had nothing in his hands now; he must have hidden the artifacts somewhere nearby. “I was just out for some air,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for the honey, if you were around. I’m afraid I strayed too close to the hives.” She lifted her trouser leg and showed off the swollen ankle. “Stupid of me. I should have known better.”
“Let me see that,” he said, dropping to one knee and cradling her ankle in his hands. His touch felt cool against her skin. “You’re not allergic to bee stings, are you? Do you need some help getting home?”
Nora remembered the dagger Charlie had removed from his pocket. “I’m sure I can make it on my own,” she said. “There’s no need—”
“You shouldn’t put your full weight on that ankle. Come on, I’ll walk you.” He was close enough that she could smell the tang of sweat his body gave off after a day’s work. It was possible that she’d completely misread Charlie Brazil from the start. He stood and was about to put one arm about her waist, but the thought suddenly struck her: What if he found the drawing in her pocket? She pulled away.
“No, really, I can make it on my own. I’m all right.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Why are you afraid of me?”
“I’m not. You’ve rescued me once already, that first day out on the bog. I just don’t think it’s necessary. You’ve things to do, I’m sure, and I’ll be fine on my own.” Her eyes brushed involuntarily across the knotted cord around his neck, then slid away, but he’d seen her hesitation.
“What is it—this?” Charlie lifted the cord between his fingers and looked at her accusingly. “Ursula was very interested in this too.”
He wasn’t prepared when Nora b
olted, ducking under his arm and fleeing headlong down the path toward the Scullys’ house and the Crosses, as fast as she could run on her swelling ankle. Charlie probably could have caught her if he’d really wished to, but he let her go.
Nora’s hands were trembling when she finally made it into the cottage and bolted the door behind her. Her ankle throbbed, and she limped to the fridge to see if there was any ice. One tray—it would have to do for now. She dumped the cubes into a plastic bag and twisted it shut, holding it to her still swelling ankle.
At first she had been almost certain that Owen Cadogan had something to do with Ursula’s death. But after what she had seen just now, she couldn’t be sure that Charlie Brazil wasn’t involved as well. There were too many connections between Charlie and Ursula to rest on mere coincidence. She had nothing substantial enough to bring to the authorities, just a vague collection of hunches and suppositions. And yet she knew that all the things she’d seen had to add up somehow. Remembering why she had come here in the first place, to find out more about a man who had been either executed or sacrificed, Nora realized with a sinking feeling that she couldn’t possibly stop now; there was too much at stake. Owen Cadogan had called the superstitions surrounding the fairy wind a load of old rubbish but, thinking back to that day, Nora knew that nothing good had come after it.
10
Ward left the superintendent’s office and walked slowly back to his desk. They would have company on the Ursula Downes murder, as he had suspected. The unusual nature of the case, not to mention the whiff of ritual killing, had piqued the attention of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and they were sending down a contingent to assist the local detective force. To the Bureau, “assist” meant something slightly more than the term generally implied. It meant he and Maureen Brennan had only a few more hours to come up with results before the Dublin boys in the expensive suits rolled in to take over the case.
He came up behind Brennan, who was pinning up crime-scene photos and other pertinent scraps of information on the board behind her desk, lining up a neat column for each of their lines of inquiry. “They’ll be here Monday afternoon to set up their incident room.” Her lips pressed together in a subtle expression of annoyance. “I know, but we’ll have to just bear it.”
“What did the superintendent say about the search for Rachel Briscoe?”
“I told him we’ve got several men and some local volunteers out looking for her already, handing out photos, asking if anyone’s seen her, and that they’re having no luck at all. We’ll mount a coordinated search in the morning if there’s no word.”
“What are we calling her at this point—suspect or material witness?”
“She’s only wanted for questioning, but that could change. Some of her coworkers seem convinced that she was obsessed with Ursula Downes, possibly stalking her. From the binoculars—and the way her colleagues describe her attachment to them—it seems likely that Rachel was at the house last night.”
“What about that knife found at the scene?”
“It’s being processed, but Dr. Friel didn’t seem to think it was the murder weapon.”
“Why not?”
“The blade is serrated; from what she’s seen so far, Dr. Friel’s of the opinion that the knife that cut the victim’s throat had a straight edge. I still think Rachel Briscoe is probably the key to everything. If she didn’t kill Ursula Downes, there’s a chance she might have seen the person who did.”
It was still early in the investigation, Ward realized, but they were very short of information on the victim. The house where Ursula Downes had been staying was only temporary quarters, and it had yielded very little useful information about her; the testimony they’d been able to gather so far from people who’d had contact with her here was sketchy and incomplete. They needed a fuller picture of the victim in order to imagine the crime.
He reached for the rucksack he’d brought back from the scene, and started to go through the contents. Brennan listed and described each object on an inventory form as he extracted it from the bag. “Appointment diary—not much in it; I’ll have a look through that. Clipboard and paperwork—related to the excavation, looks like. Pens and pencils. Small purse with identification, driving license, business cards, fifty-seven euros and—” He counted out the change. “Forty-three cents. Mobile phone. Why don’t you have a look at the phone—check all the calls made and received in the past few days. By the way, what’s the word from Dublin—have they been in touch about the search of Ursula’s flat?”
“They’re sending a team over right now,” Maureen said, looking at her watch. “Anything else you need from them? What about Desmond Quill—hadn’t we better check his alibi as well? I mean, it’s unlikely that he drove out here, cut her throat, and then hung around to see who might discover the body, but we’ve still got to check him out.”
“Yes, see if they can send someone ’round to check Quill’s story for Thursday evening. He says he was playing his usual chess game that night, and was occupied with that until quite late. Dr. Friel puts time of death between midnight and four a.m., so if we can eliminate Quill, we can concentrate on a few of the others.”
“Ah, yes—the others.”
“Let’s go over the interview notes, see where we might have a few holes where we can start digging.”
Maureen reached for her notebook and flipped back a few pages to the start of the interviews on the case. “Nora Gavin says she saw Owen Cadogan making threatening gestures toward Ursula Downes on Monday afternoon last. Dr. Gavin also says that the following day, Ursula turned the tables, giving Cadogan a slap in the face and a right old tongue-lashing. A couple of very public quarrels with the victim in the days running up to the murder, and no alibi for that night.”
Ward remembered Cadogan’s tight-lipped secretary. “Unless perhaps Aileen Flood has a slightly different story than the one he gave us. Let’s wait and talk with her tomorrow. And don’t forget we also have Desmond Quill’s statement, saying Ursula was seeing Owen Cadogan last summer, and that he’d been harassing her since she arrived last week—ringing her mobile, leaving crude messages on her windows. There was something that looked like red spray paint on the broken window glass in the bin in Ursula’s kitchen. I sent it along to the lab; if it was one of those messages Quill described, they might be able to reconstruct it, tell us what it said. Her mobile also ought to tell us if Cadogan was the person ringing her up day and night.”
“His story about warning Ursula off Charlie Brazil sounds to me like a complete load of rubbish. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Ursula wasn’t somehow involved with Charlie Brazil.”
Ward considered that possibility. “We’ve got Dr. Gavin’s statement that she overheard Charlie speaking with Ursula Downes—she was blackmailing him, threatening to expose something he’d been hiding.”
“What do people normally want to keep hidden?” Brennan said. “Bastard children, buried treasure, family skeletons…Whatever it is, though, we’re going to have a job finding out, since he flatly denies that conversation ever took place. We should also check out that place he mentioned—the pipe shed on the road to the old power station.”
“What do you think of Charlie’s story about building a midsummer bonfire?”
“Ah, come on, Liam. Nobody does that anymore.”
Ward thought back to Charlie Brazil’s guarded expression when he’d talked to them about the bonfire. Brennan wasn’t often wrong, but he thought she was mistaken in this case. The attraction of fire was deep and instinctive, inexplicable, and there were certain areas, especially in the West, where people still made huge bonfires on special nights. Ward felt suddenly pierced by the memory of an incident that had happened more than thirty years ago, one of his first official tasks as a young Garda officer. He’d been asked to put the boot down on a Saint John’s Eve bonfire, at the request of a parish priest who had no time for such remnants of pagan foolishness. He had driven out to the spot thinking it was
probably harmless enough, wondering what the hell he was doing there. Then he’d seen the huge fire. He had stood for a long time, watching as flames and embers reached skyward, through them seeing human faces, their reddened features exaggerated and transformed into surreal masks by the firelight.
The memory receded, and Ward said, “We’ll have to go up there and check the place where Charlie Brazil said he built his bonfire. It won’t tell us if he was there all night, but at least we’ll know if he was telling the truth about the fire. Did anything turn up in the files about other ritual murder cases?”
As if reading his thoughts about conflagration, Brennan said, “There was a body found burnt to a cinder in Wicklow last winter. At first there was speculation that it might be some sort of ritual thing, but they eventually found out it was a disagreement over drugs. The victim had a bullet in him, and the fellas who put it there tried to make the killing look like a sacrifice to throw investigators off.”
“That’s it? Nothing else?”
“Nothing local, at least nothing with a human victim. Just that case you mentioned to Charlie Brazil.” She took a file from a stack on her desk and tossed it over to him. Ward opened the file and perused the reports and photographs it contained, stopping at the pictures of the butchered kid goat suspended from a slender branch. He studied the detail shots of the narrow noose, the animal’s protruding tongue, the deep gash in its distended throat, the blackening entrails. Poor harmless creature. The ground beneath the kid’s hind legs was exactly as he remembered it from the scene: stained a deep rust red, with three circles drawn in blood. A hideous prank, or some demented notion of a sacred rite?