Haunted Ground ng-1

by Erin Hart

  A young Garda officer stuck his head in the door. “Excuse me, Detective Devaney? O’Byrne’s just phoned from the hospital, sir. Jeremy Osborne has come around, and says he won’t speak to anyone but you.”

  8

  When Devaney arrived at the hospital, he could see a medical team hovering over Jeremy Osborne’s bed. O’Byrne, the young officer posted at the door, eagerly filled him in on what had happened: “I wasn’t in the room, sir, but I could hear everything that went on. His mother was in there with him, like she has been all along, and you could hear him rustling in the bed, like. ‘Jeremy,’ says she, ‘lie still. I’ll get the doctor.’ Well, I can’t leave me post, so I flag down a nurse and says to her, ‘Get the doctor, yer man’s awake inside in the room.’ I go in, and the next thing you know he’s screaming bloody murder, and telling me to get her out, get her out, he doesn’t want her here, and she’s trying to get him to whisht, and he just gets worse, roarin’ and shoutin’ and carryin’ on till the doctor arrives and sends us both out into the hallway until they get him settled down. Then the mother tries to go in, but he’s at it again, and the doctor tells her to stay out if she wants what’s best for the lad. That’s when I rang you.”

  “Where’s the mother now?”

  “Over there, sir,” O’Byrne said, indicating her with his eyes. Lucy Osborne sat upright in a chair in the corridor outside Jeremy’s room. Devaney thought he could finally detect the strain beginning to show in her face.

  “Mrs. Osborne, I understand that your son wants to speak with me.”

  “I should be in there with him,” she said, rising and moving toward the door. Devaney stepped into her path.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “You don’t understand. Even before the accident, he wasn’t well.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Osborne, but we’re allowed to question him alone if he’s over seventeen. I’ll have to ask you to wait here. Maybe one of the nurses would get you a cup of tea or something.” When he turned away, Devaney could feel her eyes drilling holes in his back.

  The nurse was taking Jeremy Osborne’s pulse. He looked dreadful, his face still bruised and swollen under the bandages, but Devaney could see relief in the boy’s eyes as he dutifully kept the thermometer under his tongue. He and O’Byrne waited until the nurse left the room, then Devaney closed the door and drew a chair up on the far side of the bed. Through the window, he could see Lucy Osborne’s anxious face as she strained to catch every gesture, to comprehend what was being said behind the glass, and found himself praying fervently that he could play this thing right. It might be his only chance.

  “Hello, Jeremy. This is Garda O’Byrne,” he said, indicating the uniformed officer. “I do have to caution you that you’re not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. Do you understand that, Jeremy?” There was no response. “I have to make sure you understand.”

  Jeremy’s voice cracked as he answered: “I understand.”

  “We uncovered the bodies of Mina and Christopher Osborne three days ago, in an underground passage near the tower house, just as you said.” He watched the boy’s face crumble. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, Jeremy?”

  “Why did he have to stop me? Why couldn’t he just let me die?”

  Devaney imagined that the boy was referring to Maguire, who had prevented him from leaping into the fire. “Maybe he saw someone worth salvaging.”

  “You don’t understand. I killed them. I killed them both.” Jeremy Osborne looked at him, and Devaney could see the effort it had taken for the boy to speak those words aloud, and how much more it was going to take to finally give the full story. He waited, and Jeremy’s eyes closed once more. The silence grew until it filled the space. Finally, Jeremy began to speak again; Devaney had to lean forward to hear his faint whisper.

  “I had my birthday the end of September. Mum gave me a hunting rifle, an old one that belonged to my granddad. She said she didn’t want me to be afraid of guns just because of—because of what happened to my father. I never even touched a gun before. She said to wait until someone showed me the proper way to use it, but I took it out anyway. I was only going to shoot at birds; ah Jesus, I never meant—” Jeremy’s face screwed up again, and Devaney simply waited once more, wishing this could be over.

  “I went up to the tower. It was foggy, and when I heard something move, I fired.” It was clear he was reliving those endless seconds again, as he had every day, every night for almost three years. “I thought it was a bird.” The tears were spilling down Jeremy’s face now. His eyes focused not on Devaney, but a place somewhere on the ceiling of the hospital room, where the scene seemed to play itself out before him. Devaney could see it as well: mother and child arriving home from the village, the little boy, wearing his new red boots, climbing from the pushchair and leading his mother on a chase, or a game of hide-and-seek at the edge of the woods.

  “I thought it was a bird. But it was Mina.” He recoiled at the memory. “I don’t know what she was doing there. Her eye was gone, it was all blood—” He reached up as if to touch her face before him, and his hand stopped in midair. “And then I saw she’d fallen on top of Chris. He wasn’t moving.”

  “What did you do next?” Devaney asked.

  It was a moment before Jeremy could respond. “I don’t remember, I just knew they were dead, and I had to cover them up,” he said, and even before he finished speaking, Devaney knew the last part was a lie. Everything the boy had said to this point had the ring of truth in it; why would he begin to lie now?

  “Nobody knew about that underground passage, only me. I used to hide there. I dragged them inside, and closed up the entrance, covered it with stones. That’s why the police never found it.” Though he was nearly exhausted, the tears had stopped, and Jeremy’s voice had taken on a hard edge it hadn’t had before.

  “Are you saying that you hid the bodies all on your own? That no one helped you?”

  “No. There was no one else. Only me.”

  “If it was an accident, Jeremy, why didn’t you come forward?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know—I was afraid.”

  “What about the gun, Jeremy? What did you do with the gun? And the pushchair?”

  The boy’s face suddenly betrayed confusion, and his breath began to catch in his throat. “I—I don’t remember. You’re trying to confuse me.” Devaney saw his chance and took it, not looking up to see whether Lucy Osborne was still watching.

  “Listen, Jeremy, I have reason to believe that someone helped you, at least in the covering up. Why don’t you just tell me how it really happened?”

  “I’ve told you. No one helped me. No one.” If anything, the boy looked even more abject and miserable than he had before he’d relieved himself of his awful burden. You think you’ve gotten rid of it, but it doesn’t go away, Devaney thought. It never goes away.

  “Then tell me, Jeremy, why would you have said, ‘She’d never tell’?”

  “I said that?” The boy looked horrified.

  “You did. Maguire says you told him there was a place underground, then you said: ‘She knows. She’d never tell.’ You don’t remember that?”

  “No. I never said that.”

  “I see. Let’s go back to Christopher. The postmortem shows he had a hairline skull fracture, but the pathologist says that alone wouldn’t have been enough to kill him. How did Christopher die, Jeremy?” Devaney moved closer to the boy, spoke softly, close to his ear. Jeremy’s hands and feet began to move, and Devaney hated himself. He knew he must stage this as carefully as a performance, must persist in probing until he could sense the gnawing horror in the boy’s insides, and see it in his terrified eyes. “I’m thinking it probably wasn’t very difficult to smother him. He was small, and not very strong. Maybe he was unconscious, and never even struggled. What did you do? Did you just put your hand over his face? What did that fe
el like, Jeremy? What does it feel like to stop a helpless little child breathing until his heart stops? Until you know that he’s really and truly dead?”

  Jeremy’s body was writhing weakly among his bedclothes, as he tried to resist the dreadful words, the even more terrible images they conjured up. “No, that’s not how it was. She fell—oh, Jesus, help me. Somebody help me—”

  That was the moment at which Lucy Osborne, who had been watching through the window, could restrain herself no longer. She opened the door and came to stand beside Devaney’s chair.

  “Get away from my son,” she warned in an icy voice. “I know what you’re trying to do. Leave him alone.” When Devaney stood to address her, she slapped him hard across the face. He took the blow, but seized her arm before she could strike him again. For such a slight woman, Lucy Osborne was phenomenally strong, and at first only her eyes gave away the fury she had managed for so long to contain. Then she began to laugh breathlessly, almost hysterically, and Devaney felt his stomach heave as he stood between overprotective mother and sheltered son, and only dimly began to realize that he’d had the whole thing backward all along. The relationship between parent and child had been distorted beyond all recognition, and it was Jeremy who’d been protecting his mother, not the other way around. Devaney suddenly knew that the scene as he’d played it out for Jeremy didn’t come close to the real atrocity that had taken place that day in the woods at Bracklyn House. As he stood facing Lucy Osborne, her wrist gripped tightly in his hand, he had to extinguish a savage desire to stop the laughter, to strike the woman to the ground and pummel her until he could make it stop. He looked into her eyes as he spoke the words of the official caution again, slowly and carefully, as a way to calm himself. Then he let go of her arm.

  “What’s the matter, Detective?” she asked in a strangely mocking tone, as if she knew what had gone through his mind. “Hasn’t my son broken down to your satisfaction? Hasn’t he played his part well enough in your precious search for the truth? I’ll give you the truth.” She spat the word with a venomous contempt.

  “No, please, no,” Jeremy pleaded, but there was no stopping Lucy Osborne now.

  “I’m the one you want. My son didn’t know what he was doing; the shooting was a complete accident. He came into the house raving, ‘I’ve killed them, I’ve killed them.’ He kept saying it over and over again.”

  “Please stop,” Jeremy implored once again.

  She reached out for her son’s hand, and stroked it as she addressed him: “Hush now, don’t say any more. I have to tell them, darling, don’t you see, they’re going to take you away unless I do, and I can’t let them do that, I can’t.” Then she turned back to Devaney and began to speak slowly, deliberately, and seemingly without emotion: “All I could think at first was that our chance to get home again to England was ruined. I had been planning it for so long, working out the details, and now this would destroy everything. But then I began to see how it all might work. If we could manage just to stay calm and handle ourselves well. There wasn’t very much blood at all, not like Daniel. We didn’t have much time. Hugh might be back at any moment, so we had to find a place to hide them, just until I could think things through. Jeremy told me about his underground room. I had him run and get a spade from the shed, and then—” Her eyes stared into the past. “I was looking down at the child. He was quiet, but I could see a pulse, just there.” She raised her fingers to her own throat. “I had to make it stop, don’t you see? It was so small, so insignificant. And all I could think was that this boy was in the way, he was the one minor obstacle that now stood between Jeremy and the dream I’d always had for us. We had to get back to our home at Banfield. We’d made the mistake of losing it once before, you see, more than three hundred years ago, but we got it back then, and we could get it back again now. We were so close. I don’t suppose it means anything at all to you, but I wasn’t about to let five hundred years of my family history at Banfield come to a full stop just like that. I couldn’t be responsible for that. So all I could think was that this child must die—and after that it would be easy, so easy.”

  Jeremy Osborne’s face was filled with revulsion, but his strength was gone and he could not pull his hand away from his mother’s grasp. Lucy continued, her voice now absolutely cool and deliberate: “And then I thought how fitting it was, in a way, because of all the people who had tried to take Jeremy away from me, it was this child, this filthy little kaffir, who’d most nearly succeeded. I said to him, ‘It’s really for the best, don’t you see? There’s nothing left for you here, you poor, motherless mongrel.’ What I did was an act of kindness.”

  Devaney pictured the boy arriving back with the shovel, to find his mother’s hand covering Christopher’s face. “Is that how it happened, Jeremy?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” The boy’s face was twisted with anguish. Here was the real reason Jeremy had not come forward, though he had nearly died trying to keep that terrible truth within himself. It had been too late to do anything for Mina, but Jeremy had suffered torture for more than two harrowing years, thinking that he might have saved Christopher.

  But Lucy wasn’t finished. “After that, there was only Hugh, and he was so bloody weak—like all the Osbornes. He let himself be convinced—under the circumstances—that the estate ought to go to Jeremy if anything happened to him. That’s what he told me Sunday evening, that he’d gone to London to change his will. He even believed that it was his own idea all along.”

  Lucy Osborne’s eyes grew larger, and the words came faster and faster, spilling out in an unstoppable torrent: “I knew no one would question a suicide, the way he’d carried on. It was almost too easy, putting the sleeping tablets in his tea. I knew the real difficulty would be in getting him out to the car, but the garden cart worked very handsomely. But that meddling pair ruined everything. That wretched American, prying into every corner, using Jeremy to get at me. I tried to warn her off, get rid of her—I told her on the phone, leave it alone, they’re better off. The broken glass was far too subtle; she just swept it up. Finally, I put that horrible dead thing in her bed, but she still wouldn’t leave us alone. That’s why it had to escalate, why Hugh’s suicide had to happen that night, when they were supposed to be out for the evening. And if only—” The memory of this failure seemed to cause physical pain, and Lucy Osborne’s bony fingers clawed at the bedsheets like talons. Her eyes brimmed with hatred and disgust. “If only they’d arrived five minutes later, Jeremy and I would be shut of this godforsaken country and on our way home again. And none of you could have stopped us.”

  Devaney had heard his share of confessions. He’d seen plenty of suspects finally crack under the pressure of questioning. But he had never witnessed anything quite like what had just taken place here.

  Lucy’s face softened again as she turned to her son and took his hand. “This is not your fault, darling. You did so well for so long. I know it was difficult. Whatever happens to me, you mustn’t blame yourself.” With gritted teeth, Jeremy wrested his hand from his mother’s grip, and turned away from her, wracked with broken sobs. Devaney wasn’t sure the woman realized that her son had been lost to her quite some time ago.

  “Lucy Osborne, I’m arresting you for the murder of Christopher Osborne, for the attempted murder of Hugh Osborne, and for concealing evidence in the death of Mina Osborne. It would be in your best interest to speak with your solicitor as soon as possible. You can phone from the station. Do you understand? Mrs. Osborne?”

  Lucy ignored him, and reached out to stroke her son’s hair. “You haven’t been well, my love. Not well at all. You rest now, darling. I’ll be back soon.”

  Not for about thirty years, Devaney thought. “I’d be obliged if you and Mullins would take Mrs. Osborne to the station,” he said to O’Byrne. “I’ll be there shortly—there’s something I have to do first.”

  Devaney was crossing Drumcleggan Bog when he saw Hugh Osborne’s black Volvo heading toward
him. He leaned on the horn; though Osborne had been driving fast, he managed to slow down and stop, then reversed until the two cars were side by side.

  “I had a message about Jeremy. Is he all right? What did he say?”

  Devaney looked into the man’s eyes and felt the words tearing at his throat as he tried to speak. Maybe it would be better if there were other people around. “Hadn’t we better go somewhere it’s easier to talk?”

  “Tell me now, Detective. Please. There’s a place where you can pull off the road just ahead. I’ll turn around.”

  Devaney nodded once, and drove off the road to the place Osborne had mentioned, a small peninsula of solid ground that jutted out into the bog. He looked through the wind-screen at the black voids of the random cut-aways and the little clumps of footed turf as the first drops of rain began to spit from the low, shifting blanket of clouds that moved in from the west. And he knew that Hugh Osborne had been telling the truth all along. That ridiculous story about stopping to rest along the road from Shannon was not fiction but cruel fact. It meant that Osborne would have to live the rest of his life knowing he’d been asleep only a few miles from home as his wife and son were killed. Devaney thought as he opened the car door and felt the freshness of the mist on his face how strange it was that this chapter of the story at least would reach its end here in the bog, almost exactly where it had begun. And it struck him that there was nowhere to hide in this place of banishment—neither tree nor stone nor bush as far as the eye could see, nothing to provide shelter from the wind, and from the rain when it came.

  9

  Alone in her room, Nora counted the time: it was nine days now after the tower fire, and just a week since the discovery of the souterrain. Cormac’s work at the priory was finished, and they would be leaving Bracklyn House after the funeral tomorrow. They were alone in the house at the moment; Hugh Osborne had looked exhausted this morning, but he’d insisted on driving on his own to collect his mother-in-law at Shannon, and they hadn’t been able to dissuade him.