by Erin Hart
Driving on for a bit, he turned around and found a field gate and parked beside it. He tapped “Hawthorn House” into his phone and found that it was part of a network of residential rehabilitation centers for people with brain injuries. If the Gwynnes were smuggling a stolen manuscript hidden in a wheel of cheese, why bring it to a place like this?
Cormac drove onto the grounds. There was a small car park at the side of the main building, a rambling old gray limestone mansion. He left the car there and circled around to the front door. Perhaps he could see about a tour…
No one was at reception. Cormac waited, taking note of the surroundings. All the furnishings were new, none of the draperies yet faded by sunlight. Someone was spending a bit of dosh, keeping this place updated. It was private, which meant fees were probably steep. If the Gwynnes did have someone here, how on earth could they afford it? Their own modest living arrangements boasted no such luxury, and calligraphy, unless you were the warranted scribe of some royal family, wasn’t exactly a lucrative profession these days.
Cormac walked to a tall window that looked out over the back garden, a spectacular formal arrangement, with miniature boxwood hedges, rosebushes, and other colorful blooms. The edges of the beds were as sharp as if they’d been cut with a razor.
From the window, he could see the Gwynnes strolling through the side garden, coming upon a younger woman sitting at a table on the terrace, under the shade of an oak. They greeted her warmly, but she remained diffident, barely looking at them. Tessa Gwynne reached into the basket and brought out the brown paper package, unwrapping it carefully. She’d brought a knife and cut into it—nothing but a wheel of soft cheese.
He turned his attention to the younger woman. She was short and slight, dressed in a pair of pale green corduroys, a patterned blouse, and what looked like a hand-knitted cardigan; a long dark plait fell down her back. She sat up eagerly to the table now, looking for a taste of the cheese. Tessa Gwynne reached out to touch the younger woman’s hair, but she pulled away, shrugging off the attention. Tessa’s disappointment at the rebuff was visible, even at a distance. Who was this person? The touch implied some sort of close relationship, but he could have sworn he remembered someone at Killowen saying that the Gwynnes’ only child had died. Cormac felt ashamed, following these people like some sort of half-arsed private investigator, prying into their personal business.
Tessa Gwynne seemed to have recovered. She stood close to the younger woman, speaking softly. Cormac was so intrigued by the miniature drama unfolding in the distance that he didn’t hear the footsteps approaching behind him.
“Can I help you, sir?”
He turned to find a fresh-faced receptionist standing at his elbow. Her name badge read FIONA.
“Are you here for an appointment with Dr. Carnahan?” she asked brightly. “I can ring and let him know you’ve arrived.”
“Sorry, no,” Cormac said. “I just happened upon your website and thought I might have a look around. My father’s recovering from a stroke, you see, and we’ve got him at home just at the minute, but my wife and I, well… we’re looking for a place where he might receive more intensive therapy.” He’d just managed to spit out a plausible lie. “I suppose it’s not all stroke patients here.”
“Oh, no, we get the lot—car accidents, sport injuries, strokes, and falls.”
Cormac threw a glance over his shoulder. “Your garden is certainly stunning.”
“Isn’t it, though? Designed by the father of one of our residents,” the girl explained. She joined Cormac at the window. “There she is now, with the parents—Derryth. They’re here every Sunday, but she’s in that garden all the time. Hard to get her indoors, even when it’s raining. Anyway, the father’s some class of artist, I think. He made up the plans for the garden. Fantastic, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Cormac said. He didn’t say any more, hoping that Fiona would try to fill the silence. He didn’t have to wait long.
“Very sad, what happened to her, poor craythur.” The girl’s voice dropped to a whisper. “They say she tried to hang herself, over some boy. By the time they found her, she’d gone without oxygen for too long. She’s been here near on twenty years like that.” A shaking of the head suggested the extent of the damage done. “You’d never catch me trying to top myself over some man. Nothin’ but a shower of shites, the lot of ’em—well, present company excepted, I’m sure.” Fiona suddenly seemed embarrassed. “God, I’m an awful eejit. Shouldn’t have gone and opened my yap. I’ll just go and ring Dr. Carnahan for you, will I?”
When the girl turned and left the room, Cormac slipped out the front door and made his way to the car. He had what he’d come for, to see where Tessa Gwynne had taken her package. And he had something else: the knowledge that the Gwynnes’ daughter was not dead after all.
6
Pulling into the car park at Killowen, Cormac had a notion about how he might be able to find out more about the Gwynnes. He reached for his phone and punched in a number.
Robbie MacSweeney was Cormac’s oldest friend. He and Niall and Robbie had a regular session at the Cobblestone, which of a Wednesday night became an island of wild, wind-tossed West Clare music in the heart of Dublin. Perhaps he should tell Robbie about Niall being arrested—but Niall wasn’t ready for that information to reach Dublin quite yet.
“Robbie, I’m ringing to ask a favor.”
“Fire away.”
“Could you find out anything about a fella called Martin Gwynne? He’s something to do with handwriting or old manuscripts, I’m not quite sure.”
“Say no more. That’s G-W-Y-N-N?”
“And an e at the end,” Cormac said. “I think he’s Welsh—he worked at the British Library and may have been in academia at one time, if that helps.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why I’m on the lookout for this fella?”
Cormac hesitated. “I wish I could, Robbie. Just ask around and see what you can suss out, will you? Ring me back as soon as you have anything.”
A wise decision, ringing MacSweeney, the best researcher Cormac knew. If past experience was any guide, he would have something from Robbie within a couple of hours.
The house was quiet. Everyone must be outside. Cormac went straight to the sitting room, curious to see if there was any pattern to the books collected there. He crossed to the Irish history section and paid closer attention this time to the titles, all about the early Christian era into the Middle Ages, and a great preponderance of books about books, manuscripts, scribal arts. And a large-format book about artifacts, treasures of the National Museum—a treasure hunter’s sourcebook hiding in plain sight. He found an appendix at the back, a gazetteer of priceless objects, including exact GPS coordinates of each findspot. How exactly had Shawn Kearney happened upon that stylus?
But she had turned it in. Perhaps that was why Niall seemed to trust her.
He felt a presence behind him and turned to find Shawn Kearney herself standing in the doorway. He closed the book and slipped it back on the shelf.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“Is what true?”
“About Niall Dawson being arrested?”
Word traveled fast here. He didn’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of telling the truth. “I’m afraid so.”
“He didn’t harm anyone. He couldn’t.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Cormac said. “Niall’s one of my oldest friends.”
“Then you want to help him, too.”
“Is there something you know, Shawn? Something that could help Niall?”
She came closer and lowered her voice. “He told me this morning why he was here in April, investigating a ring of treasure hunters—”
“Shawn, have you ever heard of the Book of Killowen?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Nora found John O’Donovan’s notes online last night, with the reference to the shrine and to the book being burned. We thought th
at might have been a ruse.”
She glanced behind her, checking to see that they were alone. “I need to know exactly what’s on that wax tablet you found on the bog man.”
“How did you—”
“Martin told me. He showed me the photographs you left with him. Do you still have the originals?”
Cormac took the camera’s memory card from his pocket. “On here.”
“Let me have a look. Please.”
He handed over the card, and she plugged it into the laptop on the corner table. Her reaction was similar to Gwynne’s. What did they all know that he and Niall were missing? “Shawn, do you know what it says?”
She turned to him. “I should let Martin explain, he’s much better at translation than I am. How much do you know about the Book of Killowen?”
“Only that it’s mentioned in the Annals of the Four Masters, and there are stories about people coming to blows over it, and that neither the book nor the shrine has surfaced since the eighteenth century—a hundred years before O’Donovan wrote about it in his Ordnance Survey letters. He was basically reporting on rumors on something that might not even exist anymore. One of the Beglans was supposed to have burned the book because he was fed up with the controversy.”
Shawn Kearney threw him a skeptical glance.
Cormac took a step back. “Hang on, is the Book of Killowen still here? What about the shrine?”
“I can’t say any more.”
“Wait a minute. Does the book have anything to do with the death of Benedict Kavanagh or Vincent Claffey?”
“I don’t know. Please don’t ask me any more. Look, you’ve got to be careful. There are certain people here who would—” A sudden noise in the hall pulled her up short. “I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.” She opened the door and looked both ways, then slipped away.
Cormac’s memory snaked back to Anthony Beglan following the cattle, the foreign-sounding words flowing from him, and Martin Gwynne’s reaction to the Latin script on the tablet, the ancient writer’s thoughts about evil and malice.
7
Nora studied Joseph Maguire’s sleeping face, searching for traces of the family resemblance. She found hints in the cut of his jaw, the shape of the earlobes, the curve of his lower lip. Joseph had been subdued all day, after the bath incident last night. He shifted in his lounger, opening one eye only briefly to see that she was there. “Nero,” he said, one of his many names for her.
She checked her watch: nearly four. Eliana should be back soon. From where she sat, she could see the gap between the car park at the front of the main house and the path that headed off toward the cottages in the wood. Graham Healy pulled a black BMW into the car park’s end space and hefted a couple of large carrier bags—one filled with clinking bottles of wine—and what looked like a petrol container from the back of the car. He disappeared down the path. Strange that no one had seemed too concerned about Healy paying off Vincent Claffey. Why was that? Come to think of it, had anyone found a fat packet of cash when they searched Claffey’s farm? The Garda Síochána weren’t exactly immune to opportunity; there had been ample proof to the contrary. But somehow Stella Cusack didn’t strike her as the light-fingered type. So why was Graham Healy still walking around while Niall Dawson was sitting in jail? If stopping blackmail was the motive for Claffey’s murder, surely both men had at least an equal stake in that. Everything came back again to Benedict Kavanagh and what he was doing in the boot of that car.
Nora looked to the woodland path again, surprised to see Eliana emerging from the oak grove. The girl walked quickly, and Nora detected a disturbance.
“Is something bothering you?” she asked when Eliana joined them.
“No!” The girl’s eyes darted back to the edge of the wood.
“Eliana, please tell me. That man who just went down the path, did he say something?”
“No, he said nothing.” She paused. “He only stared at me.”
Nora looked through the woods where Healy had gone. “Perhaps it’s better to stay away from that path. There are plenty of other places to walk.”
Nora glanced back at Joseph. His eyes were open, and he’d apparently been listening in on their conversation. “Who’s stack-stack-staring?”
“It’s nothing at all,” she said. “Nothing for you to be concerned about.”
“Is it all right if I leave you two here for a bit?” Nora asked. A notion was taking shape, her curiosity catching on Graham Healy’s odd manner just now.
She’d have to double back around the orchard so that Joseph and Eliana wouldn’t see her go down the path. Easy enough, just head for the bog and turn right behind the goat barn and the cheese storehouse. Lucien and Sylvie must have rooms dug into the hill for aging their cheese; they sold their produce at the local markets, and there was no way all that could fit into the tiny storehouse. There must be caverns full of cheese in there.
She made sure no one was watching, then followed along the barn and ducked behind it. To her left was the road leading to Anthony Beglan’s farm and the bog, and straight ahead a narrow path led back up into the wood above the storehouse.
The light was different on this visit to the oak grove. The cloud cover was heavier, and the sky cast a yellow light that made the moss underfoot glow a most unnatural fluorescent green. A crack sounded ahead, and Nora slowed her pace. She was off the path entirely now, stepping over hummocks and boulders, the snake-like and moss-eaten roots of giant trees. She detected movement about a hundred yards ahead. Healy, it had to be. But what was he doing? She crept closer, moving only when his back was turned, until she was close enough to observe him. He’d heaped a large pile of dead branches in the center of a circle of fallen logs and was breaking branches over his knee and pitching more wood onto the pile. He bent over, and Nora spotted the petrol can at his feet.
Healy left the container at the edge of the woodpile, evidently not ready to start the fire just yet. Maybe they were waiting for cover of darkness, so that smoke from the fire wouldn’t be visible. This far from the house, you wouldn’t smell it or see the light through the trees. It wasn’t Midsummer, or Samhain or Imbolc, or any cusp of a changing season, so what was this fire for—a celebration, some sort of ceremony? Or perhaps the simplest reason of all: to burn something.
8
Stella Cusack had reached an impasse with her prisoner. Niall Dawson sat across the table with his head in his hands.
“I don’t know how many more times I can say it. I did not kill Vincent Claffey.”
“But you admit that he was blackmailing you. How much had you paid him?”
“I already told you—two thousand euros. It was all I could manage.”
“And he wanted more.”
“Yes, but I was going to work that out. I would never have killed anyone over something as…” Dawson shook his head and sighed.
Cusack kept silent, waiting for the weight of guilt to do its work.
“Look, I went home to Dublin yesterday, told my wife everything—about all the mistakes I’d made, about Anca, about paying off Vincent Claffey to keep him quiet. I should have told her everything ages ago. I wouldn’t be here now if I had.”
He looked as if that wasn’t all he had to say. Cusack waited.
“I was there, in Claffey’s shed, two nights ago. He was dead when I arrived, I swear. But he wasn’t up on the machine, the way we found him the next morning. He was on the floor, and there was a small pool of blood under his head. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, so I left him there. I ran. I’m not proud of it, but there was nothing to be done.”
“You could have rung emergency services.”
“And made myself a suspect right away?”
“So what were you doing there, in the middle of the night?”
“I needed to speak to Anca. Cormac said he’d heard her at Beglan’s, so I headed there first. But no one was about, so I headed over to Claffey’s—she obviously had some connection to the man. They might
have been working together, or he might have been forcing her to do things, I don’t know.” He stopped and looked at Stella. “I never did find her.”
“There was no one at home at Beglan’s, at three o’clock in the morning?”
“No, but the door was open. I just needed to talk to Anca. But there was no one home.”
“Where was Anthony Beglan?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I never saw him, or Anca, or anyone except for Vincent Claffey, who was—”
“—already dead when you arrived. Did you bother to check for a pulse?”
“There was no need, Detective. It was obvious that he was dead.” Dawson let out a breath, reliving the moment of discovery.
“Anca Popescu says she was hiding in the shed. She says you and Claffey argued, that you pushed him, and that he fell backward, hit his head—”
“That’s not true! Anca might have done for Claffey herself, did you not think of that? She had as much in the way of motive as I had. And easy enough to pin the crime on me, stumbling over the body like some feckin’ gombeen—”
The phone on her hip began to play Lady Gaga, and Stella rose from the table. The tiny screen said, “Home,” and Stella remembered with a stab of regret that it was past five on Sunday. Lia was due back from her father’s now. She’d hoped they could have dinner together, maybe watch a film on television. Shit.
Stella took the call in the corridor. “I’m sorry, I’m right in the middle of an interview here, Lia.” She couldn’t say anything about the case, or the Serious Crimes Unit. All of that meant sweet F-A to a seventeen-year-old anyway. “Why don’t you have something to eat, just to tide you over until I get home? I can swing by and pick up a pizza on my way—”
Lia put her hand over the mouthpiece, and the muffled sounds seemed as if she was conferring with someone. “Lia, is someone there with you?”
After a brief pause, a familiar male voice came on the line. “It’s me, Stella. I can take her back to the flat if you’re tied up.”