by Erin Hart
Stella said, “So who’s your one at Killowen calling herself Claire Finnerty? Any chance we’ve got her prints on file?”
Molloy shook his head. “Never any reason to collect them.”
“Except now we know she isn’t who she pretends to be.”
“Want me to talk to her?”
“No, I’ll go. What else have you got?”
“The arson investigators found a few fragments of the papers burned at that bonfire site. Thought you’d like to see them.” He lined up on the tabletop about half a dozen clear polythene bags, each holding a bit of partially charred paper. “Not much left, but…”
Stella took the magnifying glass from Molloy and peered at each one in turn. “No, but look—does that seem like a date from a newspaper article?”
Molloy peered at it. “Yeah, Irish Times, looks like the eighteenth of August 1991. We can check that. What about this?” He held up one of the other fragments. “That colored pattern looks almost like a bit of a passport.”
Stella turned the clear packet over. The numbers 463 stood out clearly at one corner. “Let’s start there, get a list of Irish passport numbers ending in four, six, three. See if anything leaps out.”
Molloy’s phone began to buzz. Stella couldn’t hear what the caller was saying, but it seemed to be good news. He pressed the phone to his shoulder. “They’ve found the girls and the baby. Up in a forestry preserve above Mountshannon. The car got stuck, but they’re all right. The local sergeant already called social services for Deirdre Claffey and the child.”
“Good! This time we’re going to keep closer tabs on Anca Popescu. I don’t think Murray will get over the trauma.”
“Tied up by that slip of a girl? He shouldn’t get over it.”
“Fergal, why don’t you head over to Mountshannon and bring Anca back here? I’ll get to work on these.”
Stella locked up the evidence, then stashed her notebook where she’d scribbled the newspaper date in her bag. The local library ought to have newspapers from that era, on microfilm or online. She left the station by the front door, traveling out John’s Place to the oval, and then turned right at Wilmer Road, the N52. The Birr library was in a nineteenth-century chapel built by the Sisters of Mercy. Stella stepped into the nave of the old church, now the main reading room. In the center stood a display case, lit from above. She felt herself drawn to the large book inside. The sign said it was a facsimile of the MacRegol Gospels, supposed to have been made at Saint Brendan’s monastery, Birr. Stella knew the place, now just a small ruined churchyard around the corner from the Guards station in Church Lane. She read:
The MacRegol Gospel Book is a manuscript copy of the Four Gospels, written and illuminated by an abbot of Birr about 800 AD. It consists of 169 vellum folios (leaves) about 345 mm high and 270 mm wide. The script used is a formal one called insular majuscule or insular half-uncial and it somewhat resembles one of the hands of the Book of Kells. A translation or gloss in Old English cursive script was inserted between the lines about a thousand years ago. Eight pages are illuminated in the style of the eighth or ninth century AD with pigments including red lead, verdigris, and orpiment probably bound with the white of an egg. About 1681 John Rushworth presented it to the Bodleian Library, where it was known as the Rushworth Gospels and presumed to be of Anglo-Saxon origin. But Charles O’Conor STD of the O’Conor Don family demonstrated by internal evidence in 1814 that the manuscript must have originated in Ireland. He pointed to the colophon on the final page of the manuscript, which read: “Macregol dipinxit hoc evangelium. Quicumque legerit et intellegerit istam narrationem orat pro Macreguil scriptori.” (Macregol coloured this gospel. Whoever reads and understands its narrative, let him pray for Macregol the scribe.)
Stella propped her elbows on the glass and gazed at the book. This was only a photographic copy, and yet she felt herself pulled in by the tiny spirals and twisted birds, the serpent that formed the border, the odd rectangular shapes of letters hidden in plain sight. And the colors—red the color of half-dried blood, gold, green, and black—and eyes, everywhere, creatures staring unblinking from every corner of the page.
“Very fine, isn’t it?” The librarian’s voice startled her. “The original is in Oxford, but it was made at the monastery right here in Birr.”
“Yes, I was just reading about it,” Stella said. “I suppose there were lots of books like this made in the monasteries around here.”
“Yes, but only a few survive. Which makes them all the more valuable.”
“I wonder, you wouldn’t happen to have heard of the Book of Killowen?”
“Ah, the lost book of Killowen and its shrine.”
“If the book was lost, how do you happen to know about it?”
“There are several accounts of it. Monks wrote down the stories of important books, who made them, who kept them, any controversy. They say the first copyright case in the world was over a manuscript illegally copied by Colmcille himself. We librarians are like a secret society, Detective. Even in the digital age, we make it our business to know about books.”
Stella was puzzled. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
“Not formally, but I’ve seen you about. Mary Anglim—I should explain. I know your daughter, Lia. She often comes to our writers’ workshops for young people. You must be pleased—she’s turning into an excellent writer.”
“Yes… yes, she is,” Stella said, although this was the first she’d heard of any literary aspirations. She’d never even seen her daughter with pen in hand. What on earth did Lia write about? And why had she kept this part of herself so well hidden?
“Must be frustrating,” Stella said. “Reading accounts of something like the Book of Killowen and never being able to see it. Especially if it was as spectacular as this. Where do you suppose MacRegol’s book was between the time it was made and the time it was presented to the library at Oxford?”
“Most likely in private hands, but there’s no way to know for certain. Were you just here to see the Gospels, or was there something else?”
Stella said, “No, I came to see if you have the Irish Times on microfilm. I’m looking for a specific date.”
“Anything before 1996 is searchable on the Irish Times website. Let’s have a look. What’s the date?”
“Let’s start with the eighteenth of August, 1991,” Stella said. Mary Anglim brought up a search screen on a library computer beside them and typed in the first date. Smudgy black-and-white images of newspaper pages came up on the screen.
“Thanks.” Stella got down to it, letting her eyes wander over the headlines, anything that might pop out as connected to Vincent Claffey and his black market in secrets. Follow-up reports on the freeing of the Birmingham Six and the IRA firing mortar bombs at 10 Downing Street a few months earlier. There were items about the brouhaha over the minister of defense being spotted at an IRA funeral, and preparations for the opening of the Dublin Writers Museum at Parnell Square. A small headline on page six stood out: “Gardaí still seek leads on missing woman.”
Stella made the article larger and began to read. “Gardaí investigating the disappearance last month of Co Dublin woman, Ms Tricia Woulfe (23), have not ruled out the possibility that the case could become a murder investigation. But Supt Gerald Murray from Harcourt Street, who is in charge of the investigation, said yesterday there was no evidence to suggest that the young woman has been murdered. Tricia Woulfe, from Greystones, Dublin, was last seen in the Cuffe Street area of the City at around 1 am on 13 August.”
That was the day before the Cregganroe bombing. Twenty-two years ago this month. A photograph accompanied the article, a blurry black-and-white image showing a young woman with short dark hair and a broad smile, her friends obviously cropped out of the frame.
Where was Tricia Woulfe now? Stella thought she had an idea.
4
Cormac looked up from his work at the excavation site to see a figure approaching through the small trees and clumps of sed
ge that dotted the surface of the bog.
“Nora,” he said. She stopped digging. Niall Dawson was about forty yards away. Cormac climbed up out of the cutaway and waited for his friend. “They cut you loose,” he said.
“Didn’t have enough to hold me. Never did. What a mess.”
Nora shaded her eyes as she looked up from the pit. “I’m so glad. Welcome back, Niall.”
“Tell me what you’re up to here,” Dawson said. “I’m in desperate need of distraction.”
Cormac jumped off the bank into the hole once more, while Niall peeled off his jacket and began to roll up his shirt cuffs. The three of them stood in the middle of the large rectangular void.
“We’ve finished going over the area where we found the satchel,” Cormac said. “So I thought we’d get going on a couple of test pits. I was just going to start breaking the surface in that area.” He indicated a plot that he’d finished marking off with stakes and twine. “Maybe you’d care to let off a little steam?”
Cormac handed his friend the pick, and Niall attacked the dense, spongy peat. Once the top layer was broken, they would use spades and trowels and eventually graduate to bare hands to sort through the increasingly sodden material below.
“I stopped by the farm—Claire told me about the fire,” Dawson said, breathing heavily as he slung the pick. “She said there were old books in that storehouse.”
Cormac said, “Yes. That nice French couple turned out to be Swiss art thieves on the run from Interpol.”
Dawson stopped his work. “Lucien and Sylvie? Claire didn’t mention that.”
“They were the only people missing after the fire,” Cormac said. “They must have seen us go into the storehouse and saw their chance to escape.”
“Yes, but why start a fire?” Dawson asked. “Why not just lock you in while they made their getaway? That level of violence, it doesn’t fit the profile of book thieves I’ve seen. They like money, or they like books, but very few resort to murder.”
“Unless they were involved in Kavanagh’s death.”
“Why stick around after he was killed? That doesn’t make sense either.”
“Unless they didn’t have what they’d come here to find. Niall, did you ever hear of a manuscript called the Book of Killowen? Shawn Kearney seemed to know about it,” Cormac said. “She seemed rather frightened, to tell you the truth.”
“I found a brief mention of it in John O’Donovan’s Ordnance Survey notes,” Nora added. “It was evidently a special book, but it was said to have been burned back in the twelfth century. O’Donovan also mentioned a fancy book shrine, but it may have been melted down after the book was destroyed. And the family that was reported to have done all this were called Beglan.”
Dawson stopped swinging the pick and leaned on the handle. “What else do you know?”
“The Beglans were successors to the founder of the monastery at Killowen. But it’s all so convoluted,” Cormac said. “I meant to tell you, Niall, we showed the photos of the wax tablet to Martin Gwynne. I thought it was rather curious that a medieval manuscript expert should be living here at Killowen, so I rang up Robbie and asked him to check into Gwynne’s background. Turns out he was sacked from the British Library over a stolen manuscript, twenty years ago. The thing is, the stolen book was a revised edition of Deeds of the English Bishops by William of Malmesbury—”
“I know the one,” Dawson said. “Gesta Pontificum Anglorum.”
“Then you know it has a connection to Kavanagh’s subject, Eriugena.”
“Yes, well, William of Malmesbury was probably just repeating all the juicy stories he’d heard. If I’m remembering right, he even had one about Eriugena being murdered, how his pupils were supposed to have stabbed him to death with their styli because he insisted that they think for themselves—a cautionary tale for all academics. Robbie must have explained that William of Malmesbury had a reputation for embellishment.”
“Well, he did mention the stories were considered apocryphal.”
Nora said, “Hey, guys, I’ve found something.”
She dropped her trowel and began to work with bare fingers while Cormac and Niall Dawson crowded around. A smooth brown ridge began to protrude. Cormac and Niall joined in the digging, working quickly, until they had uncovered a single leather corner and a ragged hash of soft brown material.
“Sweet holy Jaysus,” Dawson said. “I don’t believe this. It’s a book. It’s Killowen Man’s missing book.” He gingerly picked away more peat, and a few words of Latin script appeared under his fingertips, the vellum page shiny with wetness and miraculously still readable. Dawson sat back on his heels. “I really don’t believe this.”
Cormac tried to get his head around the shape, the book splayed open, the upper left corner folded over and the pages dog-eared, the center almost rotted away, a mass of letters floating free in wet peat, independent of their vellum matrix. “I think you’re right. It is a book, though it looks a bit more like—”
“Lasagna,” Nora said. “What the hell do we do now?”
“First, we get the camera.” As Dawson turned to dig into his bag, Cormac’s eyes began to pick out details: a yellow bar appeared, and then an almost circular letter D, with an S-curve clearly visible inside. “Look here, Niall, I think this is a capital, and a gold border.”
Nora leaned in to try to read the script as Niall peered through the camera lens, snapping away as quickly as he could. He said, “See that line of text, dead center? Can you read it? Looks to me like ‘in ualle lacrimarum.’”
Cormac dredged up his decades-old knowledge of Latin. “Something about a vale of tears. Psalms, maybe?”
“There’s one way to find out,” Nora said, quickly typing the letters into her phone. “You’re right. Psalm 83, verse 7: ‘in ualle lacrimarum in loco quem posuit.’ ‘In the vale of tears, in the place which he has set.’ So our bog man was walking here, maybe reading his book of Psalms, and he’s attacked by a couple of assailants, they throw his body into the bog, and then his book, and his satchel after him.”
“So maybe he was robbed,” Niall said. “Remember what the textile consultant told us, that he ought to have been wearing a brooch, and we didn’t find any. Maybe it was as simple as that.”
But the words on Killowen Man’s wax tablet weren’t verses from Psalms, Cormac thought. They were something about freedom of rational thought, and malice and evil. He had often experienced this same sensation out on excavations, a feeling of hurtling down a tunnel through time. Now he felt himself spat out, centuries ago, on this same squelching bog, where the ancient man in the hospital cooler had once walked and perhaps written his last thoughts, and where he’d been brutally murdered. Cormac suddenly understood in a flash how everything they’d found was connected, down through the centuries, all the way from the Dark Ages directly to Benedict Kavanagh. He heard voices from a distance, then felt his thoughts zooming back into the present.
Niall had his face pressed to the wet peat and was using a flat probe to try and get a look between some of the other pages. “I can see another illuminated border.”
“We’ll have to get it out of there as quickly as we can,” Cormac said. “I’ve got some plywood in the back of the jeep. Would that do as a stabilizer for now?”
Niall nodded. “It’ll have to do.”
On the way to the hospital, Cormac’s thoughts came back to the present as he glanced over at Nora in the passenger seat. She was nodding off. Dawson’s eyes, too, were closed in the backseat. Cormac felt tremendous relief, looking at the white gauze wrapped around Nora’s forearm, that neither of them had been badly injured last night. They were lucky that Diarmuid Lynch had heard them. Surely the police would track down the book thieves, and the case would be wrapped up shortly. Still, it was chilling to know that someone at Killowen had wanted them dead.
5
Stella was on her way to Killowen when her mobile began to buzz. “Cusack here.”
“She’s dead, Ste
lla. Anca Popescu is dead.”
“Fergal, what are you talking about? What’s happened?”
“I met the uniforms at Cappaghbaun, the place above Mountshannon where the girls got stuck on the forestry road. Social Services had charge of Deirdre Claffey and the baby, and I was carrying Anca back to Birr, like you said…” His voice broke. “You told me to keep close tabs on her this time, and I should have been watching—”
“Just tell me what happened, Fergal.”
“I brought her in the car with me. But I never locked the fuckin’ passenger door, Stella. I never thought—”
“What happened?”
“We were coming over the top of the mountain, and the next thing I know she’s got the door open and she’s trying to jump. I reached out for her, but I couldn’t hold on.”
Stella was imagining the scene as Molloy described it: a rough forestry road, fir trees, and a vicious drop. She felt a punch to the gut. Did the girl dread being sent back to Romania so much that she would risk losing her life rather than face that? “Are you with her now?”
“Yes. I had to climb down to her. I checked her pulse, but there’s nothing. She’s dead.” He sounded on the verge of tears.
Stella heard her own voice take on a steely edge. “Fergal, listen to me. Stay where you are and ring Emergency Services. Do it now.”
She heard a sharp exhalation. Finally he said, “Right. It’ll be all right. I’ll just tell them what happened.”
“Phone Emergency Services right now, Fergal. Don’t move her, don’t touch anything else. I’m on my way.”