The Lazarus Bell, an Irish Murder Mystery

by Patrick Dunne

  We both expected him to pass, but instead he approached us purposefully. There was no mistaking the waxy complexion, the combed-back mane of grey hair. I’d seen him in the church on Sunday.

  The man stared intently into Groot’s face. ‘Dr Groot, I must speak with you.’ He spoke with an educated English accent.

  Groot stood back. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘We haven’t met. My name is Mortimer, Ross Mortimer. I need to talk to you about Terry Johnston.’ The closer he came, the more lizard-like his skin seemed; his lips were non-existent, his eyelids were drooping purple membranes.

  Groot and I looked at each other.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ Groot asked him.

  ‘I’m staying at the same hotel as you. I tried to contact you in your room, but you had left in a taxi. The receptionist who ordered it told me where you were going. I decided to walk out here.’ I noticed a thin film of sweat on his deeply lined forehead.

  ‘You were in the church after Mass on Sunday,’ I said. And I knew it was he who had visited Johnston in the hospital.

  Mortimer looked at me suspiciously.

  ‘My name is Illaun Bowe.’

  ‘Ah. Terry worked for you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Can I ask why you’ve come here to Castleboyne?’

  ‘Why? To find the Holy Grail, of course,’ he said sarcastically. He turned to Groot again. ‘What caused Terry’s death?’

  ‘Why should I tell you? Are you related?’

  ‘We were close, once. Until he began his itinerant way of life. He’s been – was – HIV positive for some years now. He always hoped a cure would be discovered. But recently he had turned to…alternative methods, let’s call them. A couple of weeks ago he wrote to me in London looking for money, saying that he needed to take extreme measures to treat his illness.’

  ‘Is that what brought you over here?’ I asked. ‘To loan him money?’

  A muscle twitched in Mortimer’s gaunt cheek. ‘Perhaps…but I was too late, wasn’t I?’ His eyes bored into Groot’s. ‘So what did you find?’

  ‘Find?’

  ‘At the autopsy I believe you carried out today. Aids patients are always riddled with diseases.’ He said it with some disgust. ‘Which one got him in the end?’

  ‘He died of septic shock.’

  ‘That’s like saying someone in a car crash died of his injuries. I’m talking about what brought about his sudden deterioration.’

  ‘That hasn’t yet been established.’

  Mortimer’s cheek twitched again. ‘I’ll call on you again later in the week.’

  ‘That won’t be possible. I’ll have gone back to South Africa.’

  Mortimer gave Groot an enigmatic look. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps not.’

  He turned to me. ‘Is it hollow?’

  ‘Is what hollow?’

  ‘The statue you found. Is it hollow?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I have my reasons,’ he said, and turned back to the bridge.

  We watched him merge with the shadows again. Then, by unspoken agreement, we began to retrace our steps to the Mayfly.

  Groot was the first to speak. ‘What was that about the statue?’

  ‘Terry Johnston must have phoned him on Friday and told him about it. It wouldn’t be unusual for a wooden carving of that kind to be hollow, but the way he’s asking, he’s got something else in mind.’

  ‘You said you saw him in the church.’

  ‘Yes. It was after Mass. He was looking at a stained-glass window of Our Lady of Castleboyne.’

  Ascending the steps to the restaurant, I looked back at the bridge and saw a great shadow sweeping towards us along the river. Above us, the moon was drowning in a dense slurry of cloud, the opaque murk snuffing out its brightness as it sank. We stood leaning on a wooden rail in the dark; the only sound was the occasional ‘plink’ of a fish rising below.

  ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ Groot remarked. ‘Those people accused of bringing the plague to Castleboyne would have come past this very spot on their journey upriver from – where was it? Drogeeda?’

  ‘Droh-hedda,’ I corrected. ‘Yes. It’s a port on the mouth of the Boyne. As far as we know, the plague arrived in Bristol at around the same time, which sounds like it came into both towns from the Continent. But that gives us a wide range of choices: from Italy up to Norway, from Spain to Flanders and Holland – all of which we were trading with at the time. My vote goes to the Low Countries. And, if I’m right, we may well have found the remains of the very people who brought it here – or were thought to have brought it.’

  ‘That’s astounding. How would you know?’

  I could see his face again. The moon had ridden out from behind the cloud, brushing a layer of silver-gilt onto the river.

  ‘The annals mentioned their strange attire and their behaviour at the shrine. At first we thought that was just a way of reinforcing a negative view of these people – pointing out their weird dress and customs. But during the excavation we found the bodies of two men and a woman buried together. There were several odd things about them. They weren’t buried in an east-west direction, which meant that they either were non-Christians or had offended their faith sufficiently to be given a dishonourable burial. One of them, at least, wore a hood with several differently coloured patches on it – which might count as “strange attire”. And then there were the profane pilgrim badges we found with them. Without going into too much detail, there were two lead brooches depicting male and female genitalia. We don’t know much about profane badges – why they were worn or by what kind of people – but, given the other evidence, I’d say our visitors from the Low Countries were wearing them because they were members of a sect. So, whether or not they brought the Black Death to the town, their unorthodox ways probably got them blamed for it.’

  ‘And why do you think they were from the Low Countries?’

  ‘Because there were more profane badges made there than anywhere else, and because it was a nursery for all kinds of mystical sects.’

  ‘Maybe one of them was an ancestor of mine,’ Groot said, smiling. It wasn’t just his lips that smiled – his whole face seemed to join in.

  Chapter Twenty

  I declined Groot’s invitation to go back to his hotel for a nightcap, so the taxi dropped me off first. As I was waving good night, the door of the house opened behind me, and I turned and saw someone silhouetted in the doorway. I hadn’t expected my mother to be at home, so I was surprised to find her there – and in my part of the house. Then the person turned on the outside light and I was even more surprised. It was Finian.

  ‘Couldn’t make it tonight, eh?’

  ‘I can explain, Finian. It… You see, what happened—’

  ‘It’s quite simple, really. You had another date.’

  ‘No, that’s not true.’

  He smiled grimly. ‘You shouldn’t insult my intelligence, Illaun.’

  ‘Peter rang me to find out where he could get a decent meal. I recommended the Mayfly, and he invited me to join him. It’d been a long day, I was tired and hungry. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘Well, maybe it wasn’t,’ he said, brushing past me. His Range Rover was parked beside the Freelander. I hadn’t seen it from the back of the taxi. He turned once before getting into it. ‘I had time on my hands, so I made use of it, as promised.’ He got in, slammed the door and reversed all the way around to the front of the house without looking back at me once. Then I heard a screech of tyres as he blasted off into the night.

  It wasn’t like Finian to lose his temper, but I could hardly blame him. I dragged myself inside and wearily closed the door. Finian had let himself in with his own key, just as I had a key to his home. He had left the living-room light on, but even before I walked in I could smell them: sitting on the chunky coffee table in one of my crystal vases was a bouquet of freshly cut flowers, jasmine and bergamot, their perfume filling the room. My heart
soared but almost as quickly sank. Now I felt really guilty. I flopped onto the couch, kicked off my sandals and stared up at the ceiling.

  There was little doubt that Groot was hitting on me, and, while I wasn’t exactly encouraging him, I was nevertheless enjoying it. But he was probably only looking for a quick fling without strings, while I was putting my whole future at risk. Come to think of it, I knew nothing at all about his present or previous relationships – he might even be married, for all I knew. There was also the fact that he was aware Finian and I were engaged. If having a night of sex with me before flying home was his objective, then it made his behaviour less than honourable. But was mine any better?

  What would Fran say? I looked at my watch. It was far too late to ring her. And she might be on night duty anyway. I’d talk to her as soon as I could.

  I swung my legs off the couch, sat up and pulled down one of the jasmine stems to get the full scent. Finian’s notes were in an unmarked brown envelope beside the vase. The rest of the table was strewn with the contents of my shoulder bag, which I’d sifted through earlier when selecting what to take with me in the borrowed handbag – lipsticks, scribbled notes to myself, receipts, the labelled key to the Heritage Centre, a packet of fruit pastilles that I’d forgotten I had… I would have to sort all this stuff out, sooner or later, but I felt the envelope tugging at me.

  The pages began with a note from Finian:

  References to the image of the Virgin at Castleboyne, 1400 – 1550 approx. The entries span about three hundred years, so I decided to start with a trawl through the second half of that period – the hundred and fifty years leading up to the time when its fate was decided and it disappeared from the records.

  Finian

  The fifteenth century was nearly blank. It began, promisingly, with an item in 1402 indicating that King Henry IV, ‘at the supplication of the Prior of Our Lady’s, Castleboyne, took under his protection all pilgrims, whether liege men or Irish rebels, going on pilgrimage to said priory, according to immemorial privilege’. This proved that the shrine was revered by both the native Irish and the colonists whose allegiance was to the English crown. But after that, all Finian had been able to turn up were repeated references to the shrine’s miraculous powers of healing – culminating in a bizarre account of a 1444 case in which, by its intervention, ‘cats were brought forth by a big-bellied woman that was thought to be with child’!

  The attempt to raise interest in the shrine with sensational stories spoke of religious decline, of a monastic culture gone to seed. In a way, the scene was being set for the Tudor Reformation of the sixteenth century. I skimmed through more entries about the shrine’s power until I came to 1538. In June, Archbishop Brown of Dublin wrote to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s Chamberlain: ‘The image of the Virgin at Castleboyne is as false as was the Boxley Rood. It deserves to be plucked down and to share that idol’s fate.’

  The description of a statue as an ‘idol’ and its denunciation as ‘false’ were the standard terms used to justify the destruction of thousands of religious images in a State-sponsored outbreak of iconoclasm beginning in the late 1530s. With Taliban-like rage, Henry VIII’s forces smashed, defaced, tore down or burned statues, crucifixes, reliquaries, church furniture, stained-glass windows, paintings, frescoes and inscriptions.

  By comparing Our Lady of Castleboyne to the Boxley Rood, though, Brown was using one kind of false image to besmirch another, deliberately confusing theological issues with puppetry. The Boxley Rood from Kent was a contraption worthy of the Wizard of Oz himself – a crucifix on which, by means of wires and springs, the effigy of Christ could move its head and limbs, roll its eyes, smile, frown and even shed tears. It was hard to imagine people being deceived by this equivalent of a fun-fair attraction; they might have come to marvel, but they hardly believed. And, Bishop Brown’s denunciation apart, none of the references to the Castleboyne image suggested any trickery of this kind.

  The next entry was from the autumn of the same year and showed that Archbishop Brown got the sanction he needed from the top to carry out his conscientious duty. ‘October. The most miraculous image of Our Lady, which pilgrims from all parts of the country and beyond had enriched with their offerings and which was in the priory at Castleboyne, was publicly burnt and the gifts of the pilgrims were taken away from thence. The value of the many vases, jewels, bells, plate, brooches and other ornaments of gold and silver taken from the shrine was £186.15.2. The priory was suppressed by Parliament and granted to the King.’

  The accumulation of wealth by statues and relics had been a source of worry to many in the Church before Henry saw his chance to smite the shrines righteously with one hand while pocketing their proceeds with the other. It was only now that I began to think about this aspect of the shrine at Castleboyne. How much treasure had it accumulated? It was said that the precious objects with which Walsingham had been endowed occupied an area the size of a tennis court.

  And what about the fate of the image itself? ‘Publicly burned’ left little room for doubt – Our Lady of Castleboyne had indeed been destroyed. So what was the carving standing in the Heritage Centre? Nothing in either century had hinted at the existence of a rival or a successor to the miraculous image. We would have to go back further in time. And, before someone from the National Museum came to remove it, I would examine it again and try to assess its function.

  Mortimer’s query about it being hollow raised once again the possibility that it was a receptacle of some kind – a container for a relic, perhaps. Cavities inside sculptures were often used for that purpose. Or sometimes reliquaries were commissioned to look like the body part they were intended to contain, or to be a representation of the entire person associated with the relic.

  The phone in the hall rang. I checked my watch. 1.20 a.m. When I lifted the phone I heard a male voice, spitting venom: ‘Stephen Bolton is dead. And so are you, bitch.’

  I slammed down the phone and backed away from it, as though the man were capable of grabbing me through the handset. I had to think fast. Get out of the house, Illaun. Never mind where – just move!

  I was in a summer dress, my feet bare. I ran into the bedroom and snatched some underwear from a drawer, a T-shirt from another, the jeans and sweater I’d left on top of the laundry basket and my trainers from under the bed. Boo, my Maine coon cat, was probably out prowling – no time to worry about him just now. I knew I should be ringing the Gardaí, but I could do that on my mobile…

  I ran around closing the windows, bumped into my sandals and shoved my feet into them. Time to get out of here. I switched on the outside light and checked around, saw nobody and ran to my car.

  I threw my spare clothing onto the passenger seat, and as I fiddled to insert the ignition key it struck me that I was probably still over the alcohol limit. I promised myself to take it easy on the road once I had escaped from the vicinity of the house. I drove out and turned left towards Dublin; I would stay the night at Aunt Betty’s. Finian would not have been very welcoming, and anyway, whoever had threatened me could easily find me at Brookfield. Betty’s house was ten kilometres away and well off the beaten track. I rang Directory Inquiries and asked to be put through to Castleboyne Garda station, but the phone rang and rang. There was no reply. What was going on?

  That question was answered as I neared Oldbridge. A squad car was partially blocking the junction of the bridge and the Dublin road. A young Garda was placing cones to seal off the remainder of the road, while on the far side another officer was flagging down a car approaching from the Dublin side.

  I slowed down, and the Garda leaned down to address me through the open window – the night was still warm. It was the same man who had been on duty at the hospital earlier.

  ‘You’ll have to turn back,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong? Has there been an accident?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that. We’re closing all the roads. No one’s allowed in or out.’

  ‘Why?’
r />   ‘Castleboyne’s been put under quarantine. Government decision.’

  ‘Are you serious? Has it got to do with the… infection?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Now, if you don’t mind—’

  ‘But I do. I just received a threatening phone call to my home, but there was no reply from the station when I rang, so I’m damned if I’m waiting around for someone to come and attack me.’

  The Garda sighed. ‘Wait there a moment,’ he said. He moved away from the car and mumbled something into his chest-mounted radio. An unintelligible reply crackled back.

  ‘The sergeant will talk to you now,’ he said, and sauntered back to his car. The other officer joined him for a moment, then came towards me. I recognised him and relaxed. I’d had numerous dealings with Sergeant Eamon Doyle in the past few months. He was an easygoing individual and normally very helpful. I got out of the car, closed the door and leaned back against it.

  Doyle stopped for a moment to look me up and down; then recognition dawned. ‘Ah, it’s yourself, is it?’ The name hadn’t materialised yet, but he knew me all right. ‘I didn’t recognise you out of uniform, so to speak.’ Doyle had probably never seen me in a dress. ‘What’s the trouble?’

  ‘I just got a phone call. A guy threatening my life.’

  ‘Do you know who it was?’

  ‘No… Maybe someone connected with a family who’ve lost a child.’

  ‘You’d better explain.’

  I told Doyle about Stephen Bolton and my encounter with his parents.

  Doyle tilted his cap back and scratched the nape of his neck with it. ‘People get upset. There may have been drink taken. I’d say it was a knee-jerk reaction, not to be taken too seriously. And as you can see here’ – he glanced towards the Garda car – ‘we’re a bit stretched. It was only announced tonight, and we’re having to man all the roads into the town until the army arrives.’

  ‘The army?’

  ‘How else can it be done? We haven’t got the manpower. And we should be dealing with problems like yours – not this nonsense.’