‘One day Terry said he couldn’t wait any more and that he would have the rest of the money on his birthday. I tried to persuade Latifah to let him have sex with her – that it was her way to freedom and that the risk of infection from one act of sex was low. She refused at first, until I told her I had already taken some money from him and I was honour-bound to keep my side of the bargain, because I couldn’t pay it back. That night, the night of his birthday, she allowed him to have intercourse with her…but he…he didn’t have the rest of the money, the three thousand euro he’d promised – he said he would pay her when he found some lost treasure he was searching for. That’s why she was so angry with me.’
‘And what were you and Byrne talking about out here on the bridge?’
‘He’d left a note in my door telling me to get out of the house and meet him. When I did, he told me that police had informed him there was a crackdown on illegal immigrants in Castleboyne coming, that I would be better off staying in Navan. I can see now it was a way of keeping me from connecting the finding of the body with Latifah’s disappearance.’
‘Which delayed her identification and helped to confuse the inquiry. But did he say why he was tipping you off?’
‘He said Terry Johnston had told him about the lost treasure and that I could return the favour sometime by helping him to find it.’
‘But in fact it was Latifah who had first mentioned it to him. So when the statue was found, Byrne went to the hospital and, under pressure, Terry told him it might contain something of value. Then, after failing to break into the Heritage Centre, he found out that it was more likely the treasure was buried here. And I suspect he spied on Ross Johnston and me today, which confirmed it for him.’
‘He came by this afternoon and said he wants me to dig up a grave. When I refused, he threatened to tell the police that I had forced Latifah into prostitution. He said they already had proof Terry had murdered her and that things would go very badly for me if he told them.’ Adelola began to weep quietly.
I was about to start looking for my phone when the lights of a Garda car lit up the sky outside the graveyard.
‘I left something in your house tonight,’ I said. ‘Ross Johnston sent you the money his brother owed to Latifah.’
‘I can’t accept it, you know that.’
‘She would want you to have it, Ben,’ I said. ‘And, believe me, you’re going to need it.’
My hand was throbbing. I suspected there were several fingers broken. As I examined them, I noticed that the object Adelola had handed Byrne was on the ground beside me. I picked it up with my left hand. It was the size of a large brooch, and as I held it up against the sky it looked like a translucent, marble-sized planet surrounded by an orbiting ring of silver. I held it up against the darker side of the sky, and the light of the moon picked out tiny white particles cascading down inside the sphere, like the stars falling to earth.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
To my surprise, Groot was in his hotel room when I phoned. It was coming up to midnight. I explained what had happened since his departure for Dublin.
‘I suspected Johnston was hoping to cure himself of Aids by having sex with Latifah Hassan,’ he said. ‘That’s what I was about to tell you when Finian arrived the other night. But at least we know now it was with her consent – and that he didn’t kill her. The irony, of course, was that she infected him with a disease that proved fatal within days.’
‘Ben Adelola said he was familiar with the practice. I find it hard to believe.’
‘I know that where Ben and I come from can seem like a different world sometimes, not just a different continent. And it’s not sick and depraved – it’s sick and it’s ignorant. It’s sick from Aids and it’s ignorant about treating it. As was the case with the Black Death in the Middle Ages in Europe, people resort to bizarre methods.
‘One is the raping of prepubescent girls, often by their own relatives. They believe that sex with a virgin will keep them disease-free, or cure HIV if they have it, and so it’s spread to otherwise sexually inactive girls. An Aids worker told me that teenage virgins are becoming so hard to find that men are turning to girls as young as ten or under. Sometimes they pay their parents cash for them. So a mature, unmarried woman with severe infibulation is an enticing disease-free prospect for a man who doesn’t want to have sex with a child.’
‘But it’s not a guarantee of virginity, is it?’
‘In theory, no. But in practice, yes – until marriage, that is. FGM exists partly to ensure fidelity – genitally mutilated women aren’t inclined to sleep around, both for physical reasons and because it would affect their marriage prospects.’
‘Tell me – would Latifah have died from her illness eventually?’
‘Impossible to say. We don’t know how long she had it, where she picked it up or what stage it was at when she infected Terry Johnston. But the World Health Organisation will pay a lot of attention to her case. Melioidosis is found in Nigeria, but it’s not all that common, so they’ll be monitoring the area she came from, for a start. Not that it means that’s where she became infected.’
‘You mean she could have picked it up here.’
‘Or somewhere along the way. It’s a bit like your pilgrims – did they bring the plague with them, or were they infected after they came to Castleboyne?’
‘Speaking of visitors – but on a much lighter note – why are you not out exploring Dublin’s nightlife?’
‘Because I stayed in and watched TV. I’ve turned over a new leaf, you see. It’s your good influence.’
‘Don’t go changing on account of me.’
‘I can’t think of a better reason. By the way, I never asked – do you mind if I drop you an occasional e-mail?’
‘Please do. Do you want to write down my address?’
‘No need. I already got it from Peggy. Just one more thing – what did you do with the relic?’
‘It’s back where it belongs,’ I said.
My father died the next morning, while I was collecting Richard at the airport. It was the first of June.
It was when Richard came through into the arrivals hall, and I saw how much like our father he was, that the dam burst. The emotions that had been seeking expression in the past few days found their outlet. And Richard understood. He had needed to see me, too, for it to become real.
That day and the next, Finian was attentive to me, in a formal, strained way, but following the removal to St Patrick’s on Sunday evening I decided to have a brief and to-the-point conversation with him. This was after we had spent several hours fielding questions about our wedding from relations and friends gathered in the house for drinks and sandwiches. When Finian was leaving, I followed him out and caught up with him as he got into his Range Rover.
‘This can’t go on,’ I said. ‘I want to break off our engagement.’ Perhaps because I had expended so much feeling by then, I found myself being curiously matter-of-fact about it.
‘If that’s what you want,’ he said, starting the engine.
‘But let’s not say anything for now – it wouldn’t be fair to my mother.’
‘Agreed,’ he said, and drove off without another word.
The choir sang at the funeral service on the Monday, and I took the solo in Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, one of the pieces my father had requested. At the graveside, Richard recited ‘June’ by Francis Ledwidge, the poem my mother had asked me to find. Somehow she had known her beloved Paddy would hold out until his favourite month and had read it to him just before he slipped away.
Hundreds of local people attended the funeral, and their ranks were swollen by my father’s many associates from television and the theatre. Fran and Matt returned early from their long weekend to be there, and Malcolm Sherry came to pay his respects, as did Muriel Blunden and Cora Gavin. Finian brought his father to the graveside, and Arthur took my hand and said, ‘They don’t make them like P.V. Bowe any more.’ Then Finian said he had to take Arthu
r back home for his nap and couldn’t join us and the other mourners for lunch in the hotel.
On Tuesday I called into the Town Manager’s office. Usher had reminded me at the funeral that he wanted to see me.
‘We had a meeting of the Town Council last week, and as a result of our discussions I was asked to propose something to you,’ he said, spreading his hands out on the desk.
‘Oh?’ I had no inkling of what he was about to say.
‘The Maudlins excavation and the discovery of this statue reminded us forcibly that we have nowhere to mount a permanent exhibition of the new finds that are bound to come to light as we develop the town. But to get designated status for a museum, we would need to have a qualified curator – who, with a bit of top-up training, could be you.’
‘Me?’ I was already shaking my head. ‘No, I would never—’
Usher had his hand raised. ‘Hear me out, if you don’t mind. We wouldn’t expect you to give up your consultancy. The curator job would only need to be part-time, although there would be some travel initially – you’d have to see how it’s done here and abroad. If we can get it up and running, I can see it becoming the county museum before long.’
‘I’ll think about it, Dominic,’ I said. ‘As you can imagine, it’s not an ideal time for decisions of any kind.’
‘I know. Come back to me when you’re ready.’
I thanked Usher and left, intrigued that his proposal had come hot on the heels of Finian’s career-changing decision. With all that had happened in the past couple of weeks, it was as if the life I was familiar with was being unhitched from its moorings and set adrift. At first I found the prospect scary; but as the day wore on, an entirely different emotion began to take shape – an exhilarating sense of anticipation about what the future might hold.
That evening I opened my e-mail for the first time in days, and there was one from Peter Groot: ‘Look what I’ve just bought for planting in the window-box of my apartment.’
It came with a photograph of a garden-centre display of Cape plumbago, which Groot had relabelled ‘Illaun’s Eyes’.
A week later, the sculpture went on exhibition in the Heritage Centre. This was what I said about it.
VIRGIN AND CHILD
Mid-Fourteenth Century
This painted and gilded polychrome wooden carving of a Virgin and Child was found during recent excavations at the Maudlins graveyard in Castleboyne.
Carved in Germany from limewood, possibly by an Italian artisan, it is of a type known as a Shrine Madonna. It was intended to house a relic of Our Lady contained in a small relic-holder that would have fitted in a compartment inside the statue. It is likely to have been a relic of the Virgin’s breast milk. From early Christian times, people took scrapings of a chalky deposit from the walls of a cave in Bethlehem where Mary was believed to have spilled some drops of her milk while nursing the Infant Jesus on the Flight to Egypt. The flakes were then mixed with water.
No relic was actually found with the statue.
After being exhibited at the Heritage Centre, the carving will be taken to the National Museum for conservation and further study. It is hoped that the statue will eventually be placed on permanent exhibition in a new museum to be built in Castleboyne.
Postscript
JUNE
By Francis Ledwidge
Born August 1891, Slane, Co. Meath.
Died July 1917, near Ypres, Belgium
Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
And plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
Floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair
Tanned face of June, the nomad gipsy, laughs
Above her widespread wares, the while she tells
The farmers’ fortunes in the fields, and quaffs
The water from the spider-peopled wells.
The hedges are all drowned in green grass seas,
And bobbing poppies flare like Elmo’s light,
While siren-like the pollen-stainéd bees
Drone in the clover depths. And up the height
The cuckoo’s voice is hoarse and broke with joy.
And on the lowland crops the crows make raid,
Nor fear the clappers of the farmer’s boy,
Who sleeps, like drunken Noah, in the shade.
And loop this red rose in that hazel ring
That snares your little ear, for June is short
And we must joy in it and dance and sing,
And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.
Ay! soon the swallows will be flying south,
The wind wheel north to gather in the snow,
Even the roses spilt on youth’s red mouth
Will soon blow down the road all roses go.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my agent, Darley Anderson, for his unshakeable faith in me, Lucie Whitehouse at the agency for her enthusiasm and tenacity, and Alison Walsh at Gill & Macmillan for saying ‘yes’ – in English!
Gill & Macmillan
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© Patrick Dunne 2006, 2015
First published by Tivoli, an imprint of Gill & Macmillan 2006
This ebook edition published by Gill & Macmillan 2015
978 07171 3807 4 (print)
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission of the publishers.
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The website addresses referred to in this book were correct at the time of first publication.
About the Author
Patrick Dunne, born in Trim, Co. Meath, is an internationally successful crime writer. After a few years working with Bord na Móna in Dublin, Dunne studied English and Philosophy at UCD at night before joining RTÉ’s new station 2FM as a producer in 1979. After many years working on the station’s flagship Gerry Ryan Show as an actor and producer, he retired in 2004 to become a full-time writer.
Dunne is the author of a number of bestselling crime novels, including A Carol for the Dead, The Lazarus Bell and The Godstone which feature crime-solving archaeologist Illaun Bowe. His work has been translated into a number of languages, including German, Dutch, Polish and Russian. His first two books, Days of Wrath and The Skull Rack, were No.1 bestsellers and sold 100,000 copies each in Germany.
He now lives in Celbridge, Co. Meath, with his wife Theckla.
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The Lazarus Bell, an Irish Murder Mystery Page 30