Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16 (15 page)

“But most of what we know about the Celts—from their legend and lore through their history—was pr
e
served and has come down to us only because of the very same Christian monks whom this video castigates.

“In fact, a better case could be made for Celtic ci
v
ilization having achieved its highest form of expre
s
sion when it assumed and melded with Christian infl?uences.

“So, in my opinion, almost all of that”—she moved her glass toward the screen—“is self-serving drivel, merely an attempt to justify grand theft and the mu
r
der of Raymond Sloane. Has it appeared on national television?”

“Not that I know of.”

“It will. Mark my words. Publicity is what they’re after. Exposure. To become the bad boy of Irish politics, rather like the IRA once was to its political party, Sinn Fein. Here, the New Druids to Celtic United. They’ll have every mixed-up, misinformed, romantic lad in the thirty-two counties beating down their door
to join. They could now mail back Kells, Durrow, and Armagh, and they would have accomplished at least a major recruitment effort.”

But why, then, make a point of murdering Raymond Sloane and so gruesomely? After having as much as autographed the deed with the videotape.

McGarr fast-forwarded to the burning of the page, pausing where it curled up after catching fi?re.

“Before I came here, I stopped at Trevor Pape’s.”

“Oh?” Turning her head to him, she seemed disa
p
pointed.

“Gillian Reston—know her?”

Kara’s eyes fl?ashed down at her glass. “Yes.”

“Who is she? In regard to Pape.”

Closing her eyes and averting her head, almost as though from a blow, she pulled in a breath. Then, “His latest bauble.”

“I don’t understand—Pape, how old can he be?”

“He’s sixty-four. Just.”

“And looks every day of it, in ways.”

Her head tilted, but she did not reply.

“Drinks, drugs.”

She looked back down at the glass.

“OxyContin. We’ll fi?nd that in Sloane’s body when the reports come in tomorrow, I’m told. Is it as good as they say?”

Eyes still on the glass, her head shook slightly. “I don’t know why you’re asking it of me.”

“Have you tried it?”

“Yes.”

“Is it as good as they say?”

“Yes. It’s”—her head came up, and she looked off across the room—“euphoria. A euphoria that you could never know without it. In life.”

“Did you take it tonight?”

“No.”

“Do you take it regularly?”

Her eyes met his. “I’m disappointed you’re asking me these questions. I took it only once.”

“With Pape?”

She drew in a breath, sighed, then nodded.

“Which is a problem with him?”

“I don’t think he would see it so. But, yes—I think it’s a problem. It affects his personality, with it or wit
h
out it.”

“Where does he get it? Who
’
s his connection?”

Yet again she shook her head. “As I said, I tried it only once. And I must say, I feel like I’m being inte
r
rogated about drugs, which alone is a criminal ma
t
ter. Perhaps I should have a solicitor present. Didn’t you say you needed an opinion on something techn
i
cal?”

“At least two. Who were the Beaker people?”

“A little over four thousand years ago, a group a
r
rived here in Ireland who produced a kind of pottery that was much different from the stuff associated with earlier periods. It was delicate with fi?ne lines and much of it took the shape of—?” She cocked her head.

“A beaker.”

“There you are.”

“It’s Celtic pottery?”

“No. It’s not even pre-Celtic, although some later Celtic pottery seems to imitate its shape. The very fi?rst wave of Celtic immigration about which we have hard evidence came about sixteen hundred years later, around 600
B.
C
. Trevor Pape collects Beaker people pottery and is proud of it.”

McGarr nodded. “Worth much?”

“Tons, if he chose to sell and could get a buyer with tons. Problem is, the institutions interested in that stuff are rather poor—Trinity, the National Museum, and several in other countries. Those that aren’t, like the Metropolitan in New York, are poor when it comes to acquiring Beaker people pottery. Acquisition being a matter of priorities.”

“But he could sell the collection, if he chose.”

“That’s the catch. I think he’d rather die, which, I b
e
lieve, Trinity is waiting for. Trevor may not think much of the Book of Kells, but he’s a committed antiquarian.”

“Technical question number two—the word
facsi
m
ile
in regard to the Book of Kells. What does that mean to you?”

She brightened, as though relieved that the subject had changed. “At last, a technical matter.”

Finishing the drink, she set the empty glass on the arm of the chair and then arranged her feet with the dust-mop booties—which so clashed with her othe
r
wise elegant appearance—on the hassock before her. Settling back into the seat, she moved her hand out and touched the back of his wrist. “Well, Mr. Detective— the story goes like this.

“Back in the early nineties, an Irish-Canadian fou
n
dation decided to produce a facsimile edition of the Book of Kells so that the cultural glory of Ireland’s past could be disseminated to other libraries around the world. They had the good sense to hire a printer who produced nearly faultless photocopies with excellent color and so genuine that even the wormholes in the ancient vellum were included.

“Every one of the facsimile copies was snapped up at a cost then of around eighteen thousand dollars, U.S.”

“Vellum?” McGarr had heard the word before in r
e
gard to writing paper.

“Yes, the Book of Kells—the original—was pr
o
duced on vellum. The word comes from
vitulis,
Latin for calf. In most manuscripts of that vintage, the cal
f
skins used were taken from very young calves and treated with lime and other substances.

“The vital difference in the Kells book—and what has aided in its preservation—is that the major pages of decoration were drawn on the skins of calves two or three months old. The vellum is thicker and more r
o
bust, as if the monks who created Kells planned for the work to last millennia.

“The sheer amount of vellum necessary for its timely completion reveals much about the religious community that produced it.” Her left hand had come up again and was chopping off little blocks of thought. Having raised and tilted her head slightly to the side, she seemed to be speaking to a high point on the opp
o
site wall. And there was a faraway look in her deep green eyes.

“In order to produce that many young, a herd of at least twelve hundred animals would have had to be available on Iona, where most scholars believe the book was created. Which gives some idea of the pro
s
perity of the community there. Little wonder they were a continual target of Viking raids.”

“But the facsimile editions of the book were repr
o
duced on paper?”

She nodded. “High-quality paper.”

“Then”—he touched the remote, and the video b
e
gan rolling again—“does this look like burning vellum to you? Or paper?”

Again they watched as the fl?ame of the gas torch
was held to the page, which smoldered a bit, burst into an orangish fl?ame tinged with blue, then fi?nally curled.

“Vellum, because of the way it rolled up.” Her hand moved to his wrist again and lingered. “Go back.”

He did.

“There.” Her fi?ngers squeezed his wrist. “See? And did you notice how long it smoldered under such i
n
tense fl?ame before igniting? Paper, even new paper, would have caught immediately.” Her head swung to him, and her eyes, fl?ecked with bits of brighter green, lingered in his. She smiled. “I’m going for a refi?ll. What about you?”

McGarr held her gaze, her touch making him feel at once uncomfortable and—he tried to sort it out— surely alive to what might transpire between them. He tugged his eyes down to his glass, which was still quite full. “I’m very happy as I am.”

“I have a question for you, then.” Still, her hand r
e
mained. “But it can wait. In the meantime, back the tape to the part when that ransom demand fi?rst comes on.”

“Is that an order?”

“No”—she smiled in the way that transformed her rather stately face—“just a test. I’m not sure I fancy a willful man, and you bear all the hallmarks of unreh
a
bilitatable independence.”

Squeezing his wrist harder still, she lowered the booties and slid off the chair. McGarr’s head turned— like a puppet in a Punchinello show, it came to him— to follow the graceful lines of her body into what he supposed was the kitchen.

He glanced down at his wrist, wondering at his own vulnerability—that so little as her fi?ngers on his skin
and a fl?irtatious remark, doubtless sparked by the whiskey, could so transform him.

In a nanosecond, he had posited what it would be like again to have a woman in his life. And such a woman. She was, well... charming was the least of it. The most being her beauty and the contrast between her obvious sophistication and her equally apparent naïveté in regard to Pape and perhaps the husband as well.

If McGarr’s decades of police work had taught him one thing, it was this: After two years of hearing not
h
ing from a husband or wife—not a note, phone call, or ransom demand—he or she was gone, one way or a
n
other.

He backed up the tape.

“Now, you’ll notice,” Kara said, as she approached her chair, glass in hand, “those medallion-like objects behind our Darth Vader look-alike.”

Having been concentrating on the fi?gure and the ga
r
bled voice, McGarr had taken only scant notice of the background, apart from judging it a drab interior with a lime-green wall and a dingy white door. The objects on the wall were only in partial focus and seemingly distant.

He shook his head.

“Shall we fi?nd out?” Raising an eyebrow, she shot him a sidelong glance. “You’re supposed to ask how.”

“How?”

“Why, by a miracle of modern technology is how.” Advancing on the television cabinet, she retrieved another small device. “Trinity supplied me this to study the details in illustrated manuscripts on fi?lm that we might acquire. If you spool the tape back to where
those objects are most conspicuous, I’ll demonstrate.”

McGarr complied.

“Now,run forward to...there.”

Wielding the wand, she both magnifi?ed the screen in successively larger stages and focused in on one of the several objects beyond the fi?gure’s shoulder.

The larger the image became, the more it began to resemble a human face. But the image sometimes b
e
came grainy.

McGarr got to his feet and approached the television.

“The quality of the videos I’m supplied, of course, is superior. But what are we seeing here? Doesn’t that look like . . . ?”

A human head. One that had been fi?xed with several others, Janus-like, to one side of the door with—Mc-Garr had to squint—what looked like a spike through the hairy skull just at the point where the nose met the forehead. The head of the spike gleamed like a shiny, tenpenny bit.

Lowering the device, Kara turned to him and shook her head. “The Druids—the ancient Druids—believed that if they decapitated their enemies in battle they would not come back for revenge in another life.

“But can I tell you something?—I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

McGarr switched off the television and hit the rewind button. With head lowered, she was staring down at the toe of one of the homely booties that she was moving over the carpet.

“Who are these people?” McGarr asked through the whirring of the VCR, if only to distract her. He pointed to the long table.

“Family.”

Most of the photos were obviously dated. One
showed a handsome couple as young adults who in other portraits added three children, the youngest of whom was obviously Kara.

“Where’s home?”

“Mull. Actually, Salen.” It was a fi?shing village on Mull, the large island in Scotland.

“And who’s this with you?”

“My husband.”