The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (35 page)

But she had turned it in. Perhaps that was why Niall seemed to trust her.

He felt a presence behind him and turned to find Shawn Kearney herself standing in the doorway. He closed the book and slipped it back on the shelf.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“Is what true?”

“About Niall Dawson being arrested?”

Word traveled fast here. He didn’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of telling the truth. “I’m afraid so.”

“He didn’t harm anyone. He couldn’t.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Cormac said. “Niall’s one of my oldest friends.”

“Then you want to help him, too.”

“Is there something you know, Shawn? Something that could help Niall?”

She came closer and lowered her voice. “He told me this morning why he was here in April, investigating a ring of treasure hunters—”

“Shawn, have you ever heard of the Book of Killowen?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Nora found John O’Donovan’s notes online last night, with the reference to the shrine and to the book being burned. We thought that might have been a ruse.”

She glanced behind her, checking to see that they were alone. “I need to know exactly what’s on that wax tablet you found on the bog man.”

“How did you—”

“Martin told me. He showed me the photographs you left with him. Do you still have the originals?”

Cormac took the camera’s memory card from his pocket. “On here.”

“Let me have a look. Please.”

He handed over the card, and she plugged it into the laptop on the corner table. Her reaction was similar to Gwynne’s. What did they all
know that he and Niall were missing? “Shawn, do you know what it says?”

She turned to him. “I should let Martin explain, he’s much better at translation than I am. How much do you know about the Book of Killowen?”

“Only that it’s mentioned in the
Annals of the Four Masters
, and there are stories about people coming to blows over it, and that neither the book nor the shrine has surfaced since the eighteenth century—a hundred years before O’Donovan wrote about it in his Ordnance Survey letters. He was basically reporting on rumors on something that might not even exist anymore. One of the Beglans was supposed to have burned the book because he was fed up with the controversy.”

Shawn Kearney threw him a skeptical glance.

Cormac took a step back. “Hang on, is the Book of Killowen still here? What about the shrine?”

“I can’t say any more.”

“Wait a minute. Does the book have anything to do with the death of Benedict Kavanagh or Vincent Claffey?”

“I don’t know. Please don’t ask me any more. Look, you’ve got to be careful. There are certain people here who would—” A sudden noise in the hall pulled her up short. “I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.” She opened the door and looked both ways, then slipped away.

Cormac’s memory snaked back to Anthony Beglan following the cattle, the foreign-sounding words flowing from him, and Martin Gwynne’s reaction to the Latin script on the tablet, the ancient writer’s thoughts about evil and malice.

Nora studied Joseph Maguire’s sleeping face, searching for traces of the family resemblance. She found hints in the cut of his jaw, the shape of the earlobes, the curve of his lower lip. Joseph had been subdued all day, after the bath incident last night. He shifted in his lounger, opening one eye only briefly to see that she was there. “Nero,” he said, one of his many names for her.

She checked her watch: nearly four. Eliana should be back soon. From where she sat, she could see the gap between the car park at the front of the main house and the path that headed off toward the cottages in the wood. Graham Healy pulled a black BMW into the car park’s end space and hefted a couple of large carrier bags—one filled with clinking bottles of wine—and what looked like a petrol container from the back of the car. He disappeared down the path. Strange that no one had seemed too concerned about Healy paying off Vincent Claffey. Why was that? Come to think of it, had anyone found a fat packet of cash when they searched Claffey’s farm? The Garda Síochána weren’t exactly immune to opportunity; there had been ample proof to the contrary. But somehow Stella Cusack didn’t strike her as the light-fingered type. So why was Graham Healy still walking around while Niall Dawson was sitting in jail? If stopping blackmail was the motive for Claffey’s murder, surely both men had at least an equal stake in that. Everything came back again to Benedict Kavanagh and what he was doing in the boot of that car.

Nora looked to the woodland path again, surprised to see Eliana emerging from the oak grove. The girl walked quickly, and Nora detected a disturbance.

“Is something bothering you?” she asked when Eliana joined them.

“No!” The girl’s eyes darted back to the edge of the wood.

“Eliana, please tell me. That man who just went down the path, did he say something?”

“No, he said nothing.” She paused. “He only stared at me.”

Nora looked through the woods where Healy had gone. “Perhaps it’s
better to stay away from that path. There are plenty of other places to walk.”

Nora glanced back at Joseph. His eyes were open, and he’d apparently been listening in on their conversation. “Who’s stack-stack-staring?”

“It’s nothing at all,” she said. “Nothing for you to be concerned about.”

“Is it all right if I leave you two here for a bit?” Nora asked. A notion was taking shape, her curiosity catching on Graham Healy’s odd manner just now.

She’d have to double back around the orchard so that Joseph and Eliana wouldn’t see her go down the path. Easy enough, just head for the bog and turn right behind the goat barn and the cheese storehouse. Lucien and Sylvie must have rooms dug into the hill for aging their cheese; they sold their produce at the local markets, and there was no way all that could fit into the tiny storehouse. There must be caverns full of cheese in there.

She made sure no one was watching, then followed along the barn and ducked behind it. To her left was the road leading to Anthony Beglan’s farm and the bog, and straight ahead a narrow path led back up into the wood above the storehouse.

The light was different on this visit to the oak grove. The cloud cover was heavier, and the sky cast a yellow light that made the moss underfoot glow a most unnatural fluorescent green. A crack sounded ahead, and Nora slowed her pace. She was off the path entirely now, stepping over hummocks and boulders, the snake-like and moss-eaten roots of giant trees. She detected movement about a hundred yards ahead. Healy, it had to be. But what was he doing? She crept closer, moving only when his back was turned, until she was close enough to observe him. He’d heaped a large pile of dead branches in the center of a circle of fallen logs and was breaking branches over his knee and pitching more wood onto the pile. He bent over, and Nora spotted the petrol can at his feet.

Healy left the container at the edge of the woodpile, evidently not ready to start the fire just yet. Maybe they were waiting for cover of darkness, so that smoke from the fire wouldn’t be visible. This far from the house, you wouldn’t smell it or see the light through the trees. It wasn’t Midsummer, or Samhain or Imbolc, or any cusp of a changing season, so what was this fire for—a celebration, some sort of ceremony? Or perhaps the simplest reason of all: to burn something.

Stella Cusack had reached an impasse with her prisoner. Niall Dawson sat across the table with his head in his hands.

“I don’t know how many more times I can say it. I did not kill Vincent Claffey.”

“But you admit that he was blackmailing you. How much had you paid him?”

“I already told you—two thousand euros. It was all I could manage.”

“And he wanted more.”

“Yes, but I was going to work that out. I would never have killed anyone over something as . . . ” Dawson shook his head and sighed.

Cusack kept silent, waiting for the weight of guilt to do its work.

“Look, I went home to Dublin yesterday, told my wife everything—about all the mistakes I’d made, about Anca, about paying off Vincent Claffey to keep him quiet. I should have told her everything ages ago. I wouldn’t be here now if I had.”

He looked as if that wasn’t all he had to say. Cusack waited.

“I was there, in Claffey’s shed, two nights ago. He was dead when I arrived, I swear. But he wasn’t up on the machine, the way we found him the next morning. He was on the floor, and there was a small pool of blood under his head. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, so I left him there. I ran. I’m not proud of it, but there was nothing to be done.”

“You could have rung emergency services.”

“And made myself a suspect right away?”

“So what were you doing there, in the middle of the night?”

“I needed to speak to Anca. Cormac said he’d heard her at Beglan’s, so I headed there first. But no one was about, so I headed over to Claffey’s—she obviously had some connection to the man. They might have been working together, or he might have been forcing her to do things, I don’t know.” He stopped and looked at Stella. “I never did find her.”

“There was no one at home at Beglan’s, at three o’clock in the morning?”

“No, but the door was open. I just needed to talk to Anca. But there was no one home.”

“Where was Anthony Beglan?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I never saw him, or Anca, or anyone except for Vincent Claffey, who was—”

“—already dead when you arrived. Did you bother to check for a pulse?”

“There was no need, Detective. It was obvious that he was dead.” Dawson let out a breath, reliving the moment of discovery.

“Anca Popescu says she was hiding in the shed. She says you and Claffey argued, that you pushed him, and that he fell backward, hit his head—”

“That’s not true! Anca might have done for Claffey herself, did you not think of that? She had as much in the way of motive as I had. And easy enough to pin the crime on me, stumbling over the body like some feckin’ gombeen—”

The phone on her hip began to play Lady Gaga, and Stella rose from the table. The tiny screen said, “Home,” and Stella remembered with a stab of regret that it was past five on Sunday. Lia was due back from her father’s now. She’d hoped they could have dinner together, maybe watch a film on television. Shit.

Stella took the call in the corridor. “I’m sorry, I’m right in the middle of an interview here, Lia.” She couldn’t say anything about the case, or the Serious Crimes Unit. All of that meant sweet F-A to a seventeen-year-old anyway. “Why don’t you have something to eat, just to tide you over until I get home? I can swing by and pick up a pizza on my way—”

Lia put her hand over the mouthpiece, and the muffled sounds seemed as if she was conferring with someone. “Lia, is someone there with you?”

After a brief pause, a familiar male voice came on the line. “It’s me, Stella. I can take her back to the flat if you’re tied up.”

“I’m not here all night, Barry, I just have to take care of a couple of things, and then I’ll be home. It’s not a problem.”

“Look, it would be easier, wouldn’t it, if I just take her out for dinner? You can let us know when you’re home.”

“Are you not busy with Allison this evening?” Stella cringed at the sound of her voice, the tone that managed to sound both chilly and pathetic.

There was the briefest pause before Barry said, “No, not tonight.”

Stella held the phone to her ear, trying to stay calm. “Could you put Lia back on?” When her daughter took the phone again, Stella said, “Your father says he’ll take you for a bite to eat. That might be best—I’m rather tied up here at the minute. But I’ll see you when I get home—”

“No you won’t. I’m going back to stay at Da’s.”

“I’ll only be a couple of hours—”

“That’s what you always say.” There was a curt beep as Lia rang off.

Stella gave the wall a vicious kick before joining her suspect once more.

“We had a look around your room at Killowen,” she said to Niall Dawson, “and we found these in your case.” She opened her hand and let a handful of gallnuts spill onto the table. Dawson stared at the incriminating evidence, then up at her.

“They’re not mine, I don’t know where they came from. Someone else must have put them there.”

“You do know what they are?”

“Of course I do. They’re oak galls.”

Stella set one of the gallnuts on the table directly before him. “Can you think of any reason why these might have been left as a calling card in two murders?”

“Two murders?”

“You’ve admitted you were at Killowen between the twenty-second and the twenty-fourth of April, when Benedict Kavanagh disappeared into the bog. Tell me something. If I start digging, will I find that you have a prior connection to Kavanagh as well?”

Dawson looked at her, jaded now, mistrustful. He reached out and carefully moved the single gallnut back to her side of the table. “Back to you, Detective. Someone’s trying to frame me. I suggest you find out who it is.”