by Erin Hart
The shed door was open. A whirr of machinery caught Cormac’s ear as he stepped from the car. He glanced over at Niall, trudging toward the door wearing a grim expression, clearly not relishing the prospect of the conversation before them.
There would be no negotiation. Vincent Claffey lay on the conveyor belt of a contraption that filled almost half of the small shed. The machine was whirring and clanking, jerking the man’s body from side to side. Cormac took a step closer. Claffey was completely encased in cling film, and his eyes were open and glassy. His mouth gaped open, and several dark round objects protruded from it. Gallnuts. I know your secrets, Claffey had said last night at dinner. Someone had clearly taken his words to heart.
From slightly behind him, Dawson managed a strangled whisper. “He’s dead, is he?”
“I’m afraid so,” Cormac said. He located a red emergency switch, at last putting a stop to the machine and its futile whine. Claffey’s head sagged, and Cormac had to resist the urge to support it. They really ought not touch anything. He placed two fingers gingerly on the man’s temple. No pulse, and through the plastic, the skin felt cold. He must have been dead for some time.
Cormac found himself counting the hours since four A.M., until a voice inside his head said, Stop. He glanced up at Dawson, who was staring at the corpse, unable to move. “We should ring Detective Cusack,” Cormac said. “Will you check and see if Deirdre Claffey is around? We don’t want her wandering in here.”
“No, no, of course not.” Dawson began backing slowly away from the body.
Cormac had dealt with plenty of corpses in the course of his work, but there was something uniquely unsettling about this one. Now his training kicked in. Something in him turned on automatically in situations like this, reading a site for what it could tell. Vincent Claffey’s apparent penchant for clutter continued inside this shed. The only really remarkable item was the machine, fairly new and astonishingly clean, compared to everything else. What was Claffey doing here? A cardboard carton on the ground beside him was half filled with plastic tubes, with labels that read: “Tir na nOg—Authentic Irish Moor Peat, 500 ml.”
He looked at the gallnuts again. Nora had told them about the handful she and Dr. Friel had found in Kavanagh’s mouth. They were clearly some sort of message, but in a language as yet undecoded. It was as if someone knew that he and Niall would be coming to visit Vincent Claffey today, and his body had been left for them to find.
He thought of Niall Dawson’s old connection to Benedict Kavanagh and wondered about all the unknown threads that bound together the people he and Nora had met at Killowen. And how many more connections would Cusack begin to uncover, once she started to dig?
“The girl’s not here.” Dawson spoke from the shed door. “I’ve looked everywhere. No sign of the child either.”
4
Stella Cusack was on her way to Killowen on the N52 when her phone rang. It was Cormac Maguire. Her stomach sank as she received the news of Vincent Claffey’s murder. “There’s something else as well, Detective,” Maguire said. “We can’t find Deirdre Claffey or her baby.”
When she hung up, her first impulse was to ring Lia, just to hear the sound of her daughter’s voice. It was almost noon on Saturday. Where would Lia be now? She pictured her daughter with a small knot of friends, wandering aimlessly through piped-in music and shiny window displays at the Bridge Centre in Tullamore. When Lia answered, Stella could hear the echoing background noise and knew she’d guessed correctly.
“You don’t need to be checking up on me, Mam. Everything’s fine. Everything’s wonderful.”
Tears welled up as Stella rang off. Everything wasn’t wonderful. She couldn’t help thinking of Deirdre Claffey. If something had happened to that girl, or her child… Lia had no idea how fragile life was, how everything could be fine one minute and gone in the next second.
Still sitting in her car at the side of the road, she rang Molloy, then Dr. Friel, her third call to the state pathologist in as many days.
“It’s getting to be a regrettable habit for both of us, isn’t it, driving the N52?” Catherine Friel said. “I do hope this will be my last trip down that road.”
Arriving at the Claffey farm, Stella slipped immediately into crime scene mode, wading through the uncut grass that brushed against her legs. The shed she’d wanted to get inside for the past two days was wide open, and Maguire was standing to one side of the door with Niall Dawson.
Stella found Claffey’s body cocooned in cling film, his mouth open and stuffed with gallnuts, exactly like Benedict Kavanagh. A grubby plastic tub at one end of the machine held a glistening mass of wet black peat, the wonder substance Vincent Claffey was apparently packaging for sale. She should have known what he was up to in that protected bog. Pulling moor peat out of the ground, slapping on a label, and selling it for a hundred euros a liter—so obvious now. It was almost like free money. Claffey wouldn’t have been able to resist.
Stella returned to the door to speak to the two men. “Tell me what happened.”
Maguire began. “We found a few more artifacts from the bog site, so Niall and I came here to talk to Mr. Claffey about a possible reward. As the landowner, he’d be due some compensation. He was dead when we got here.”
“What exactly did you notice when you arrived?” she asked.
Again, it was Maguire who spoke. “We heard a sort of clanking noise from the shed—”
“That’s when we came in and found him,” Dawson managed to add. He still looked shell-shocked. “The machine was still going.”
“You haven’t touched anything?”
“No,” Maguire replied. “Well, apart from switching off the machine, seeing whether he was still alive.”
Dawson said, “I must have touched the door handle when I went to look for Deirdre.”
“I’ll need statements from both of you. Have either of you seen Deirdre Claffey in the past twenty-four hours?”
“She was at Killowen last night; she and the baby were with us for dinner,” Maguire said. “But her father came and collected her—”
“Dragged her off, you mean,” Dawson said. “It was a bit of a scene.”
“What time was that?” Stella asked. “And what happened, exactly? Tell me as much as you can remember.”
Maguire told her. “Must have been about half-seven, maybe closer to eight. Vincent Claffey called everyone at Killowen ‘fuckin’ hippies.’ Said he knew our secrets. He looked at every one of us, Niall, didn’t he? If I’d any secrets, I’d have the wind put up my back by that look, and no mistake.”
“What happened after they left?” Stella asked.
“Claire seemed to imply that it wasn’t the first time Claffey had come after Deirdre, that they had to figure out some way to get the girl away from her father,” Dawson said.
Maguire added, “Someone—Martin Gwynne, I think—mentioned having no evidence of abuse.”
“Nothing but the evidence of our own eyes,” Dawson murmured. “He was pretty rough on the girl. And he shoved Claire Finnerty at one point, as well.”
“But no one rang the police?”
Dawson shook his head. “Not as far as we know.”
“And no one said any more about the incident?”
Maguire glanced at Dawson. “We wouldn’t know. It was all guests out of the kitchen after that, so we didn’t hear any more discussion.”
Stella was processing all that she’d heard so far. Claffey could have been killed by someone wishing to protect his daughter, or someone with a secret so great he or she couldn’t afford to risk exposure. “Tell me who, exactly, was at the dinner table.”
“Claire Finnerty and the Gwynnes, Diarmuid—I’m sorry, I don’t know his second name,” Maguire said. “Shawn Kearney, the archaeologist, Anthony Beglan—”
“The French couple,” Dawson added. “Lucien and Sylvie.”
“My father and his minder, Dr. Gavin, and Niall and myself.”
No mention of Mair
éad Broome or Graham Healy. Perhaps Vincent Claffey had seen something he wasn’t meant to see, perhaps someone, or even more than one person, coming back from the bog where they’d buried Kavanagh. Stella had to admit, she still liked the widow and her young man for Kavanagh’s murder, maybe this one as well. She walked closer to Vincent Claffey, his head dangling at an awkward angle. “Can you describe for me how you found the body?”
“The machine was going,” Maguire said. “Back and forth, like it was stuck, and he was on the conveyer belt, just like you see. I found the emergency switch and turned it off, then checked for a pulse, but it was no use, he was long gone. I sent Niall to look for Deirdre and phoned you as soon as he returned.”
She said, “If you would stick around until my partner gets here, he’ll take your statements. You can wait outside if you like.”
Alone inside the shed, Stella reached for her torch. The place was filthy, which made the one clear spot on the floor under the hayloft stairs particularly noticeable. The torch beam showed a rectangle on the floor, devoid of dirt or peat, with a footprint about the size of a small chest. At a crime scene, sometimes what was missing ended up being just as important as what remained.
Stella crouched and peered under the stairs, shining her tiny light all around the cramped space. In the farthest corner, tucked in under the steps, she could see the corner of a yellowed cutting from an old newspaper. She got down on her hands and knees and reached for the paper. The cutting was torn in half, but she could tell from what was left what it was about: a bombing in a small border town called Cregganroe. A car packed with Semtex had peeled shop fronts from buildings in the high street. The blast that had gone off without warning. She was familiar with the story.
On her very first day as a lowly bean garda, she had been assigned to evidence collection at the bombing scene. Nobody really covered those sorts of situations in training courses. And how could they? How on earth could anyone prepare trainee officers for the horrors they might encounter? After an hour searching the scene, relieved to find nothing, she’d been heading for the stairs when her gaze fell upon a small bright stone on the roof’s pebbled surface. Round and shiny, a shade larger than the others. And then she’d realized it wasn’t a stone at all but a lone detached eyeball, staring up at her.
The bomb makers had been found out and put away—too late, after their handiwork had killed seven people. During their trial, the bombers swore that a warning had been phoned in to Special Branch, in plenty of time to evacuate the area. They charged the authorities with letting the bomb go off—an act of calculated, cynical murder to harden the hearts of the people against the cause. The charge wasn’t all that uncommon in the bad old days of the Troubles. Stella knew which of the two scenarios she believed but had never admitted it aloud. Garda detectives weren’t supposed to have political views.
What was Vincent Claffey doing with this old newspaper cutting? She thought of the threats he’d uttered just last night. Perhaps Claffey was making someone at Killowen pay for what he knew, or thought he knew. She saw the faces of the people she’d interviewed yesterday, imagining each of them in this shed with Claffey. Who among them would have been physically capable of lifting the dead weight of a body onto the machine? Hatred was a powerful thing; it could give an attacker an almost inhuman physical power. Or perhaps the deed had been carried out by more than one person. She searched for signs of a struggle and found a small pool of blood near the outside wall. Perhaps Vincent Claffey never suspected that he was being attacked until it was too late. Blackmail, if that was Claffey’s game, was like playing with a serpent: in order to profit, you had to get close enough to risk a deadly bite.
5
Nora had just arrived back from the hospital and was standing in the kitchen at Killowen with Joseph and Eliana when Shawn Kearney came through the door. Her usually animated expression was gone. She pulled Nora aside and spoke under her breath.
“Vincent Claffey’s been found murdered,” she said.
“But that’s not possible. Niall and Cormac just went to see him.”
Shawn’s grim expression told her everything she needed to know.
“My God, they found him, didn’t they?”
“It seems so. And Deirdre and the baby are missing. A few of us are going to help with the search.”
“I’ll come, too,” Nora said.
The Claffey place was still being processed as a crime scene, so the search for Deirdre commenced from the nearest three-way crossroads. A group of uniformed Guards officers was milling about with volunteers, and Detective Molloy was handing out assignments to small groups. “Each team will have a detailed map of the area,” Molloy said. “We’ll be doing a grid search of the areas marked. The girl we’re looking for is Deirdre Claffey. She is sixteen years of age, approximately 1.65 meters tall. She has short brown hair and brown eyes. We’re working on the assumption that she has a child with her—her son, Cal, nine months. If they were on foot, it’s quite likely they haven’t traveled far. If you find Deirdre, try and persuade her to stay put; make it clear that we just need to talk to her. And ring that number on your flyer straightaway.”
Cormac and Niall Dawson arrived while Molloy was talking, and they joined Nora and Shawn to make a full search party. At last their turn came with the organizers. They were assigned a small area of meadow and woodland rising up from the edge of the bog just below Anthony Beglan’s farm. Nora studied the map as they began making their way to the assigned area. They had to circumvent a hedgerow of furze, a wall of thorns, obviously untrimmed for several years. Once they’d reached the area marked on their map, they walked along in close flanking formation, scanning the ground and the undergrowth for any sign of human activity. About a hundred yards up the hillside from the bog, they were nearing a small stone ruin.
“I didn’t imagine bringing you here under these circumstances,” Shawn Kearney said. “This is Killowen Chapel, the place we were talking about last night.”
They passed by a flat corbelled doorway, completely filled with rubble, and the stump of a round tower, sheared off about ten meters above the ground.
“The carving I mentioned is just inside,” Shawn Kearney said, leading them through a fine Romanesque arch on the far side.
“Here he is, the scribe of Killowen,” Kearney said. The carving beside the doorway showed a figure holding what appeared to be a stylus and a wax tablet. He wore a flowing cloak that pooled around his feet, and his head seemed to be naturally balding rather than tonsured in the Irish style. Nora felt the tug of intrigue.
“See the Greek letters on his tablet,” Cormac said, stepping closer. “Alpha and omega. That’s unusual. Most tenth-century inscriptions were in Latin. There’s a kind of monogram as well—interlacing letters, it looks like an I and an O, maybe an H. Hard to see. You were never at this place before, Niall?”
Dawson glanced away. “As I said, I was only here briefly. Had to get back to Dublin.”
“Listen, we can come back to that carving later,” Nora said. “Remember why we’re here.”
They spread out and began to search, poking through the tall grass that grew up through the floor of the chapel and all around the exterior. Nora spied the open door to the round tower and stepped inside. The tower had no roof, but a piece of blue tarp material was secured to the wall to make a kind of shelter inside. Somebody had been here, and fairly recently, too. Nora knelt and found a plastic carrier bag under one corner of the tarp. Inside the bag were a few items of clothing for a young child. If Deirdre were running away, why would she not go back to Killowen Farm, where she obviously felt safe? Or perhaps Deirdre and the baby weren’t running at all but had been taken away by force—an especially frightening possibility if Deirdre had seen the person who killed her father.
“It looks like they might have been here,” Nora said, rejoining the others. “I found a bag in the tower, with some baby clothes and some extra nappies.”
“Look at this.” Cormac poi
nted to several cigarette butts on the ground next to a crushed packet. “Silk Cut. That’s Anca’s brand, isn’t it, Shawn?”
Shawn Kearney turned to him. “How do you know that?”
“I’ll spare you the long story. We know she’s still here somewhere. The real question is, why are you all pretending otherwise?”
Shawn stared at the ground. “Anca’s been hiding out. I’m sure you’ve read stories in the papers about the Romanian gangs and what they do to young women, promising them good jobs here and then forcing them into prostitution. The people who brought Anca to Ireland were into all sorts of things—not just prostitution, but cigarette smuggling, identity theft. It’s a huge operation. Anca was so afraid of what would happen if they ever found out where she was, and she was our friend, so of course we hid her. You’d have done the same.”
Nora turned to Niall Dawson. His face betrayed a greater degree of concern than one might expect from someone who didn’t even remember the girl. A quick glance at Cormac told her that he’d seen it, too.
“Let’s leave everything here just as we found it,” Nora said. “I don’t think there’s any way around it, Shawn. You’ll have to tell the Guards what you know. They’ll protect Anca.”
“Can they protect her? You have no idea how much money is involved. That makes it impossible to trust anyone, even the police.”
“There’s also Deirdre and her child to think about,” Nora reminded her. “I’m afraid we have no choice, Shawn. We have to call this in.”
Shawn Kearney turned away with a frustrated sigh. “Do what you have to do.”
* * *
As they waited for Cusack and her team to arrive at the chapel, Niall Dawson was standing a few yards apart, speaking to Shawn Kearney. Cormac moved closer to Nora and lowered his voice. “I haven’t told Cusack about what I heard last night at Beglan’s place, about Anca. I don’t know why—”