The Darkling Bride
Page 25
Whether she could prove it would be another matter.
Philip answered the door, to her surprise. He looked a bit worse for wear, with the bloodshot eyes and tight expression of someone with a vicious hangover.
“You didn’t tell me you were returning to Deeprath when we spoke yesterday,” Sibéal said accusingly.
“You didn’t ask. What do you want?”
To talk to the castle… “I want to visit the library and the tower.”
“To look for clues? After all this time?”
She smiled politely and did not elaborate. Before Philip could make more snide comments, Nessa Gallagher appeared at the door. In the week since their first meeting, Nessa seemed to have aged several years, her iron will increasingly less visible beneath the paper-thin skin and cautious balance.
But her voice, at least, remained the same. “Inspector. I’m afraid you find us somewhat disarranged. You know how it is after hosting an event.”
As Sibéal had never been able to cram more than a dozen people into her little flat, she doubted it was quite the same. But at least it gave her a clue to Philip’s morning-after state. No doubt there had been plenty of alcohol involved.
“I won’t get in your way,” she promised. “I think I can even find the library on my own. And the tower opens up from there as well, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Nessa replied. “I believe it’s still locked. I’ll come with you and show you where the key is kept. Something happened here last night that I think you should know about.”
Intriguing. But Nessa said no more until Philip had been dismissed and the two of them reached the library itself. Nessa retrieved the key from a glass-fronted cabinet and showed Sibéal the inner doorway that opened into the base of the tower. “You will be careful, won’t you? The steps are centuries old and extremely worn and uneven. At least you’re not wearing heels,” she said, though she looked doubtful about Sibéal’s loafers.
“I’ll be careful. What did you want to tell me?”
“A serious act of vandalism occurred here yesterday. Some very valuable items were destroyed beyond repair.”
“Items connected to the past murders?”
“No.”
“Have you notified the local police?”
“My great-nephew does not wish the matter to be handled officially.”
Sibéal cocked her head. “Then what do you want from me?”
Nessa, she decided, only ever hesitated for effect. “I would like you to finish up this investigation as soon as possible so that our lives can return to normal and we can dispense with the services of outsiders. We should never have brought a stranger into our home.”
Even more intriguing—it seemed Nessa was not a fan of Carragh Ryan, either. Sibéal couldn’t think whom else she might mean. Though she knew she shouldn’t involve herself in this, Sibéal said, “Why don’t you write me a brief statement of what happened, and I’ll take a look at it and the property damage after I’m finished here.”
Nessa departed, leaving her alone in the library. There were stacks of books on the table, and several open registers, one of them very old-fashioned. She supposed the other notes, all in the same neat hand, had been compiled by Carragh. As she wandered through the bays she noted that some of them were clearly a work in progress, with gaps on shelves and some books stacked on the floor in a method she could not divine.
Sibéal stood with her back to the main door, soaking in the space of the former chapel. She was religious enough to feel a shiver of unease at the desecration of the space—if not by books, then by the violence committed here. Was that why the library atmosphere was so charged?
Stop it, she commanded herself. Don’t daydream. Don’t anticipate. Start with the facts and walk the crime. A concept her first partner had drilled into her.
Fact: Cillian Gallagher died from a blow to the head while standing near the library table.
Fact: whatever caused that blow had not been found in the library at the time.
Fact: the marble cross discovered with the “stolen” antiquities two miles away was stained with human blood and hair, and the pathologist had confirmed that it was in keeping with the description of the damage to Cillian Gallagher’s skull.
Fact: during the first police search of the grounds, Lily Gallagher’s body was found at the foot of the ancient Norman keep, with injuries consistent with a fall. Among those injuries, might there have been one inflicted by the same marble cross?
No, now she was moving out of the realm of facts.
Supposition, verging on fact: Lily Gallagher did not kill her husband, tramp two miles into the mountains to hide the marble cross and antiquities, and then return to Deeprath to commit suicide. The timeline alone would not support it, no matter how many people wanted her to reach that conclusion.
There were three ways to kill a person: accidentally, in a moment of temporary passion, or deliberately and “with malice aforethought.” The careful disposal of the offending weapon and stolen antiquities almost surely ruled out accident. That same logic ruled out a crime of passion—at least, not solely of passion. Cillian Gallagher might very well have been hit in the head without previous intent, but the careful cover-up that followed was both rational and cold-blooded.
Despite Sibéal’s normally pragmatic outlook, the walls of the library seemed to be pushing in at her, as though trying to help her see what they had seen on that tragic day.
Walk the crime. She stood at the table across from where Cillian Gallagher had fallen and imagined facing him. She knew from photographs that he had looked a good deal like Aidan, so she imagined a shockingly good-looking man about to turn fifty, tall and intimidating in presence, confronting someone with hostile intent. He would not have expected violence, surely, for he was a man of control and would expect to be able to handle whatever situation arose. Especially if it was someone he knew. And it was surely someone Cillian knew.
So…Cillian died without expecting it. And then? What had the killer done then?
The answer depended on whether Lily Gallagher had died before or after her husband. The timetables of people’s movements through the castle that day were unsatisfyingly vague and incomplete—not necessarily suspicious in itself, because most people don’t walk through their lives constructing alibis as they went just in case one was needed. In a place the size of Deeprath, it was no wonder that individuals dropped out of sight for long stretches of time.
But the timetable firmed up considerably from the moment Aidan had found his father’s corpse. Mrs. Bell’s call to the police was made at 4:15 P.M., the first officers on scene arrived at 4:37 and the coroner at five-ten.
Taking advantage of the enormous library table, Sibéal sat down and reviewed the timetable she’d constructed from the records.
3:00—Mr. Winthrop, the Rathdrum solicitor, leaves Deeprath Castle after a meeting with Cillian Gallagher and the steward, Robert Bell.
3:20—Mrs. Bell takes a tea tray to Nessa Gallagher in her bedroom.
3:25—Mrs. Bell takes tea to the library for Cillian Gallagher, who is expecting his wife to join him.
3:40—Mr. Bell and the gardener head into the woods to examine some trees that need cutting down.
4:00—Mrs. Bell sees Aidan Gallagher return from Glendalough; he asks her where he can find his father and heads in the direction of the library.
Fifteen minutes had elapsed before the boy’s screams brought the housekeeper running. What had Aidan been doing for that quarter hour? Sibéal wondered. Why had no one bothered to ask him that at the time?
By the time the police and emergency services arrived at Deeprath, every member of the household was present and accounted for—save only Lily. It had been then-constable O’Neill who had discovered her body at the bottom of the tower, fallen into a tussock of tall grass against the weathered stones.
So…between three-thirty and four-fifteen someone entered the library, hit Cillian Gallagher in the head, and removed
the cross and antiquities. All of that was straightforward enough. The oddity was Lily. Why hadn’t she died in the library? Why had she gone to the top of the tower? And when?
As Sibéal stood there, the library seemed to shiver in her sight, and she had the sudden certainty that she was seeing it as Lily had. Facing her husband, the antiquities scattered across the library table, Cillian’s expression changing from surprised to furious. She could see it all through Lily’s eyes…except for one thing. Just out of reach beside her, just beyond her sight, stood someone else. The killer.
She breathed deeply, knowing she was on shaky evidentiary ground, but certain all the same that Lily had been in this room when her husband died. And in trying to get away from his killer, she’d bolted up the stairs of the tower.
Sibéal now walked the crime with her feet as well as her thoughts. The door between the library and tower opened fairly easily with the key. It must have already been open that day, for someone running for her life could not have paused to unlock it.
She took care as she went up, for Nessa had not exaggerated the condition of the stairs. Sibéal hadn’t made a habit of visiting medieval ruins, and she found the boxed-in spiral staircase claustrophobic. The arrow slits let in pitifully little light—even less considering that clouds were boiling up, from what she could see through the narrow openings. Better hurry.
The Victorian sitting room floor was something of a shock, completely inconsistent with the empty floors below. There was something nightmarish about the space, from the damaged books to the rotting sofa. It took first place for weirdest room she’d ever seen.
And then she went up the last flight of stairs.
If the sitting room was macabre, the bedroom she emerged into was terrifying in a “mad wife in the attic,” Jane Eyre kind of way. It was like an old-fashioned asylum: plain iron bedstead, a small table, and straight-backed chair…and then there were the walls.
“Now that’s disturbing,” she said aloud, staring at the white walls covered in black writing. Who had been kept up here? And what had they written?
Not Lily, she reminded herself. Which means it’s not the crime I’m investigating. Wrenching her gaze away from the hypnotically horrifying walls, she went to the only door in the outer wall, a short, narrow door that even a medium-sized man would have to turn sideways to get through.
There had been a lock installed on this door, but it had been disabled at some point. Sibéal stepped gingerly through the doorway onto the open battlements. She made herself look down, and for a second she could swear she saw something at the tower’s base—an illusion of broken limbs and white fabric.
Shuddering, she stepped back as a streak of lightning and crash of thunder occurred almost simultaneously. Within seconds rain sheeted down so heavily that she might as well have been standing in a crow’s nest at sea.
“You’re not very subtle,” she complained to the skies above and the stone beneath. “I get it, you want me to stay. Fine. Now make it worth my while.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
May 1881
Evan spent the last four weeks of Jenny’s pregnancy watching her every move. She seemed to find his attention endearing—but when her father tried to do the same, she shied away sharply.
“This is not his baby,” she complained to Evan a week before her due date. “I wish we could go away for the birth.”
Jenny was wise enough to know why she could not, which Evan took as a sign that her illness was not really madness. If she were insane, she could not be this reasonable. He had toured lunatic asylums as research for his third novel. Of course, Bedlam was the most famous and by far the most disturbing. But he was a rigorous researcher and so had also visited several progressive asylums in Europe, as well as two privately run institutions in England. In every place, he’d seen men and women who were kept securely for their own good and safety as much as—if not more so—that of others.
And in none of those places had he found anyone half so reasonable and intelligent as Jenny.
She went into labor on a Tuesday evening when the Wicklow light had just begun to take on the glow of spring. All through the night she labored in their bedroom, with the ever faithful Dora Bell and a midwife to attend her and a medical man to oversee. Jenny did not like the doctor, but that mattered little to Michael Gallagher. The healthy birth of the next Gallagher generation must be assured by every means wealth and position could arrange.
Evan could have escaped overhearing any of her cries; his father-in-law shut himself up in the library at the opposite end of the castle. But he haunted the staircase and corridors near their room.
For that, he was rewarded by hearing his child’s first cry. It brought him to the threshold of the room, where he hovered until Dora came out a few minutes later with a bundle of sheets and towels. There was no small amount of blood.
“Is she all right?” he asked, panicky.
Jenny heard him, and called. “Evan.”
He ignored the doctor’s and midwife’s objections and went straight to where she rested against a pillow, face sheened with sweat. He pushed her hair back from her forehead. “Are you all right?”
But Jenny wasn’t interested in her own condition. “Did you hear him?”
“I did…wait. It’s a boy?”
The midwife answered, bringing with her a tightly wrapped bundle. “It’s a boy, right enough. And mad as sin at all the fuss.”
The woman didn’t trust either of them to hold the precious bundle, but allowed them time to marvel at his screwed-up face, his eyes and nose and mouth, every familiar human feature turned to brilliance by the fact that he was theirs.
Finally, as Jenny grew sleepy, Evan allowed himself to be pushed out. But not before his wife murmured, “My father will finally be happy.”
DIARY OF JENNY GALLAGHER
11 May 1881
Dora would not bring me my diary, so I begged the night maid instead. What can possibly be too strenuous about leaning against bed pillows and writing this on a lap desk? After being turned more or less inside out, this is positively restful.
We have named him James for Evan’s grandfather and Michael to please my father. I know all mothers are biased, but he is truly beautiful. He has my black hair and Evan’s strong nose so that he looks like he has been formed from the very landscape of our Wicklow Mountains. Dora says the hair will not last—that I myself was born blonde and then, after losing it all by the age of three months, it grew in black—but I’m sure my James will be beautiful whatever God has in store for him.
It is not often that I dwell on my mother, for she was ill for so long, and my life since her death has been so dominated by my spells and the tower room that she seems to belong to a part of life I hardly believe was once mine. But I feel that she has been with me all day, that it was she who held my James in her arms until the last moment when he was placed in mine. I pray that her love and care will keep my baby safe.
I told Evan that my father would be happy, but even I did not expect the tears in his eyes and the wonder in his expression when he first laid eyes on his grandson. For a moment I was shamed to think I have ever thought him overbearing. I know that what he does, he does for love of me.
Then he said, “The Gallagher line seems assured with this one—but another two or three will be even better.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Of course, Aidan knew someone nearby with a boat. He probably knew someone with a cannon and battering ram. John Quinn, it turned out, knew not only Aidan but his father and even his grandfather. The wiry old man lent them his truck and trailer to pull the boat with, keeping a wary eye on the sky and issuing a gruff warning.
“Storm coming in.”
“Not till after dark, they say,” was Aidan’s answer.
“Just don’t let yourself be distracted.” Quinn gave Carragh a suspicious look, as though she was a siren in disguise. “Going to be a bad one. You won’t want to be on the lake when it hits.”
As it was only ten o’clock in the morning, Carragh certainly hoped so. She didn’t mind being outdoors—her brothers had often dragged her hiking—but she was dubious about small boats on open expanses of water.
She watched Aidan maneuver the boat off the trailer. “You know what you’re doing, right?”
“Do you think Quinn would let me near his precious boat if I didn’t? He’s the one who taught me, no worries.”
Once Carragh let herself relax—and put on a life jacket—she quite enjoyed the beauty of the Upper Lake. No wonder St. Kevin and his followers had wanted to live here. Aside from the occasional car passing on the road above, they might have been in any century from the eighth to the eighteenth.
Aidan seemed to have the same thought. “When I was little, we would have had a lot more company on the lake. They closed it to tourist traffic some years ago.”
“So what happens if someone sees the boat?”
“I might get yelled at. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“You’re telling me that being a Gallagher gets you special treatment?”
“I’ll take what I can get.”
They tied up at the bottom of a projecting shelf of rock and Aidan helped her up the steps cut into it. This brought them to a shallow section of level land that looked as wild to her eyes as it must have fifteen hundred years ago. All that time, all those pilgrims, all those monks passing in their silent ranks of the dead…