The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (26 page)

“Never thought of it that way, but I suppose you’re right.”

She returned to the briefcase, finding numerous modern handwritten pages in the same distinctive rounded hand as the notes. They were beautiful to look at, although the words were mostly incomprehensible, the kind of scholarly language that made her eyes glaze over. She turned the page around to read tiny shorthand notes in the margin:

Extant mss:

1) Reims, B municip, 875, ff. 1
^r
–358
^v
; s. ix
²
(apart from ff. 212–7, c. AD 1000); numerous additions and corrections in Irish hands, i
¹
and i
²
; origin perhaps Saint-Médard de Soissons; provenance Reims.

2) St Gall, Stiftsb, 274, p. 4; s. ix [fragment of book 1].

3) Laon, B municip, 444; s. ix
²
(AD 870–875); origin Laon.

4) Feadán Mór?

There was a gap below the last entry and then a hastily scribbled note:

IOH returns to IRL, great work unfinished—Malmesbury mentions An Feadán Mór, revised ed
Gesta Pontificum Anglorum
(ff. 153–200v).

Stella frowned. “I don’t know what any of this has got to do with Kavanagh’s wife being here at the artists’ retreat. But I don’t think we’re on the wrong track with her. I’m going out there to have another chat. In the meantime, Fergal, why don’t you get on the phone and see if you can do some checking into Graham Healy’s background.”

“Looking for . . . ?”

“Any experience with heavy machinery. Somebody dug that hole in the bog.”

“Art school type,” Molloy scoffed. “Doubtful if he’s ever got his hands dirty.”

“You never know,” Stella said, remembering the construction materials piled in Mairéad Broome’s house. “Sometimes art can be more industrial than people imagine.” Stella looked back at Kavanagh’s notes. “While you’re at it, Fergal, why don’t you also put in a call to your pals on the Antiquities Task Force? And what about Interpol—they investigate art forgery and book theft, right? Give them the names of the players in our little drama, see if any of them have form in that area. You said Martin Gwynne was suspected of nicking something from the British Library. Let’s see if there’s anything else in his record.”

Molloy nodded. “They had us read a few case histories on the task force. Did you know the Brits once nailed this fella who’d stolen over a million pounds’ worth of old books? They called him ‘The Tome Raider.’ Good, isn’t it?”

“Very clever.” Stella was fond of books. She liked holding them, savoring their inky, wood-pulp smell. She especially loved wasting a whole weekend whenever she could manage it, holed up with a glass of wine and a juicy potboiler. But how could a book—any book—be worth killing for?

A lowering sky threatened to unleash a midmorning shower as Cormac and Niall Dawson set out for Vincent Claffey’s farm. The time had come to speak to Claffey about the recovery of the artifacts associated with Killowen Man. The law was fairly generous when it came to rewarding citizens for turning over any found objects. Still, trying to keep those citizens honest was a constant challenge when it came to priceless ancient treasures, especially considering the current state of the economy.

The shed door was open. A whirr of machinery caught Cormac’s ear as he stepped from the car. He glanced over at Niall, trudging toward the door wearing a grim expression, clearly not relishing the prospect of the conversation before them.

There would be no negotiation. Vincent Claffey lay on the conveyor belt of a contraption that filled almost half of the small shed. The machine was whirring and clanking, jerking the man’s body from side to side. Cormac took a step closer. Claffey was completely encased in cling film, and his eyes were open and glassy. His mouth gaped open, and several dark round objects protruded from it. Gallnuts.
I know your secrets
, Claffey had said last night at dinner. Someone had clearly taken his words to heart.

From slightly behind him, Dawson managed a strangled whisper. “He’s dead, is he?”

“I’m afraid so,” Cormac said. He located a red emergency switch, at last putting a stop to the machine and its futile whine. Claffey’s head sagged, and Cormac had to resist the urge to support it. They really ought not touch anything. He placed two fingers gingerly on the man’s temple. No pulse, and through the plastic, the skin felt cold. He must have been dead for some time.

Cormac found himself counting the hours since four
A.M
., until a voice inside his head said,
Stop
. He glanced up at Dawson, who was staring at the corpse, unable to move. “We should ring Detective Cusack,”
Cormac said. “Will you check and see if Deirdre Claffey is around? We don’t want her wandering in here.”

“No, no, of course not.” Dawson began backing slowly away from the body.

Cormac had dealt with plenty of corpses in the course of his work, but there was something uniquely unsettling about this one. Now his training kicked in. Something in him turned on automatically in situations like this, reading a site for what it could tell. Vincent Claffey’s apparent penchant for clutter continued inside this shed. The only really remarkable item was the machine, fairly new and astonishingly clean, compared to everything else. What was Claffey doing here? A cardboard carton on the ground beside him was half filled with plastic tubes, with labels that read: “Tir na nOg—Authentic Irish Moor Peat, 500 ml.”

He looked at the gallnuts again. Nora had told them about the handful she and Dr. Friel had found in Kavanagh’s mouth. They were clearly some sort of message, but in a language as yet undecoded. It was as if someone knew that he and Niall would be coming to visit Vincent Claffey today, and his body had been left for them to find.

He thought of Niall Dawson’s old connection to Benedict Kavanagh and wondered about all the unknown threads that bound together the people he and Nora had met at Killowen. And how many more connections would Cusack begin to uncover, once she started to dig?

“The girl’s not here.” Dawson spoke from the shed door. “I’ve looked everywhere. No sign of the child either.”

Stella Cusack was on her way to Killowen on the N52 when her phone rang. It was Cormac Maguire. Her stomach sank as she received the news of Vincent Claffey’s murder. “There’s something else as well, Detective,” Maguire said. “We can’t find Deirdre Claffey or her baby.”

When she hung up, her first impulse was to ring Lia, just to hear the sound of her daughter’s voice. It was almost noon on Saturday. Where would Lia be now? She pictured her daughter with a small knot of friends, wandering aimlessly through piped-in music and shiny window displays at the Bridge Centre in Tullamore. When Lia answered, Stella could hear the echoing background noise and knew she’d guessed correctly.

“You don’t need to be checking up on me, Mam. Everything’s fine. Everything’s
wonderful
.”

Tears welled up as Stella rang off. Everything wasn’t wonderful. She couldn’t help thinking of Deirdre Claffey. If something had happened to that girl, or her child . . . Lia had no idea how fragile life was, how everything could be fine one minute and gone in the next second.

Still sitting in her car at the side of the road, she rang Molloy, then Dr. Friel, her third call to the state pathologist in as many days.

“It’s getting to be a regrettable habit for both of us, isn’t it, driving the N52?” Catherine Friel said. “I do hope this will be my last trip down that road.”

Arriving at the Claffey farm, Stella slipped immediately into crime scene mode, wading through the uncut grass that brushed against her legs. The shed she’d wanted to get inside for the past two days was wide open, and Maguire was standing to one side of the door with Niall Dawson.

Stella found Claffey’s body cocooned in cling film, his mouth open and stuffed with gallnuts, exactly like Benedict Kavanagh. A grubby plastic tub at one end of the machine held a glistening mass of wet black peat, the wonder substance Vincent Claffey was apparently packaging for sale. She should have known what he was up to in that protected
bog. Pulling moor peat out of the ground, slapping on a label, and selling it for a hundred euros a liter—so obvious now. It was almost like free money. Claffey wouldn’t have been able to resist.

Stella returned to the door to speak to the two men. “Tell me what happened.”

Maguire began. “We found a few more artifacts from the bog site, so Niall and I came here to talk to Mr. Claffey about a possible reward. As the landowner, he’d be due some compensation. He was dead when we got here.”

“What exactly did you notice when you arrived?” she asked.

Again, it was Maguire who spoke. “We heard a sort of clanking noise from the shed—”

“That’s when we came in and found him,” Dawson managed to add. He still looked shell-shocked. “The machine was still going.”

“You haven’t touched anything?”

“No,” Maguire replied. “Well, apart from switching off the machine, seeing whether he was still alive.”

Dawson said, “I must have touched the door handle when I went to look for Deirdre.”

“I’ll need statements from both of you. Have either of you seen Deirdre Claffey in the past twenty-four hours?”

“She was at Killowen last night; she and the baby were with us for dinner,” Maguire said. “But her father came and collected her—”

“Dragged her off, you mean,” Dawson said. “It was a bit of a scene.”

“What time was that?” Stella asked. “And what happened, exactly? Tell me as much as you can remember.”

Maguire told her. “Must have been about half-seven, maybe closer to eight. Vincent Claffey called everyone at Killowen ‘fuckin’ hippies.’ Said he knew our secrets. He looked at every one of us, Niall, didn’t he? If I’d any secrets, I’d have the wind put up my back by that look, and no mistake.”

“What happened after they left?” Stella asked.

“Claire seemed to imply that it wasn’t the first time Claffey had come after Deirdre, that they had to figure out some way to get the girl away from her father,” Dawson said.

Maguire added, “Someone—Martin Gwynne, I think—mentioned having no evidence of abuse.”

“Nothing but the evidence of our own eyes,” Dawson murmured.
“He was pretty rough on the girl. And he shoved Claire Finnerty at one point, as well.”

“But no one rang the police?”

Dawson shook his head. “Not as far as we know.”

“And no one said any more about the incident?”

Maguire glanced at Dawson. “We wouldn’t know. It was all guests out of the kitchen after that, so we didn’t hear any more discussion.”

Stella was processing all that she’d heard so far. Claffey could have been killed by someone wishing to protect his daughter, or someone with a secret so great he or she couldn’t afford to risk exposure. “Tell me who, exactly, was at the dinner table.”

“Claire Finnerty and the Gwynnes, Diarmuid—I’m sorry, I don’t know his second name,” Maguire said. “Shawn Kearney, the archaeologist, Anthony Beglan—”

“The French couple,” Dawson added. “Lucien and Sylvie.”

“My father and his minder, Dr. Gavin, and Niall and myself.”

No mention of Mairéad Broome or Graham Healy. Perhaps Vincent Claffey had seen something he wasn’t meant to see, perhaps someone, or even more than one person, coming back from the bog where they’d buried Kavanagh. Stella had to admit, she still liked the widow and her young man for Kavanagh’s murder, maybe this one as well. She walked closer to Vincent Claffey, his head dangling at an awkward angle. “Can you describe for me how you found the body?”

“The machine was going,” Maguire said. “Back and forth, like it was stuck, and he was on the conveyer belt, just like you see. I found the emergency switch and turned it off, then checked for a pulse, but it was no use, he was long gone. I sent Niall to look for Deirdre and phoned you as soon as he returned.”

She said, “If you would stick around until my partner gets here, he’ll take your statements. You can wait outside if you like.”

Alone inside the shed, Stella reached for her torch. The place was filthy, which made the one clear spot on the floor under the hayloft stairs particularly noticeable. The torch beam showed a rectangle on the floor, devoid of dirt or peat, with a footprint about the size of a small chest. At a crime scene, sometimes what was missing ended up being just as important as what remained.

Stella crouched and peered under the stairs, shining her tiny light all around the cramped space. In the farthest corner, tucked in under the
steps, she could see the corner of a yellowed cutting from an old newspaper. She got down on her hands and knees and reached for the paper. The cutting was torn in half, but she could tell from what was left what it was about: a bombing in a small border town called Cregganroe. A car packed with Semtex had peeled shop fronts from buildings in the high street. The blast that had gone off without warning. She was familiar with the story.