The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (44 page)

Cormac glanced up to see Stella Cusack standing behind Niall. “Looks like you can tell her right now.”

“Apologies for the interruption,” Cusack said. “But I have a few
more questions, particularly for you,” she continued, turning to Mairéad Broome. “When did you find out that your husband was the father of Deirdre Claffey’s child?”

Claire Finnerty reached out to her friend. “It’s all right, Mairéad.”

Mairéad Broome’s voice was quiet but strong. “Vincent Claffey informed me of that fact just after my husband went missing. It seems they’d had a . . . financial arrangement, but Mr. Claffey never had a chance to collect.”

“And that’s why Mr. Healy was paying him off when you arrived here?”

Mairéad Broome nodded. “I agreed to honor the arrangement he’d made with my husband, but I wanted to add one condition. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I don’t expect you to believe me, Detective.”

Graham Healy spoke. “What Mairéad wanted was to raise the child and to look after Deirdre as well, give her a better start in life. But Claffey was holding out for more money. He knew Mairéad would give anything to help the girl and her child.”

“It was the only way I could think to protect her, to get her away from that man. Deirdre will have to make her own decisions now, but Cal will eventually inherit the bulk of my husband’s estate, according to the terms of the family trust.”

“You all knew this,” Cusack said, issuing a challenge to the assembled Killowen residents.

“Mairéad has suffered enough,” Claire Finnerty said. “But you can’t accuse her of murder. For God’s sake, she loved Benedict. She’s still protecting him. Can you not see that?”

Mairéad Broome spoke quietly. “Please, Claire, that’s enough. We’ve been through it all, Detective. Graham and I were on the other side of the Slieve Bloom Mountains when my husband disappeared. I know we can’t prove that to your satisfaction, but it’s the truth.”

“And if I choose to believe you, then that means my investigation will have to focus elsewhere,” Cusack said. She looked in turn at each of the people around her. “Do you know what I’m beginning to think? That one of you deliberately brought Benedict Kavanagh here, knowing that it was the perfect opportunity to get rid of him, not only for your friend’s sake, but for your own. Or perhaps for all your sakes.”

The detective took a few more steps, walking behind Shawn Kearney, as she thought aloud. “I have my former colleague, Detective Molloy, to thank for some of what I’m about to tell you,” Cusack said. “Before the worm turned, he’d actually done some police work. You must have wondered where Vincent Claffey got all the material he used for blackmail. Molloy was supplying it. He used his position to dig into your backgrounds, your histories, and discovered that you were all running from something. He’d found out, for instance, that at least one of you is using an alias.” She stopped behind Claire Finnerty, who shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Cusack moved to the next person at the table, Diarmuid Lynch. “I even considered that Benedict Kavanagh’s death might have been carried out by more than one person. You all had reason to hate him—”

Lynch turned to face her. “Say whatever you’ve come to say, Detective.”

“All right.” Cusack continued on her circuit around the table. “We’ve had plenty of distractions, if you want to call them that. Book shrines and treasure hunters, ancient manuscripts, Vincent Claffey and his blackmail schemes. But it struck me just today that this whole case goes back to what sort of a man Benedict Kavanagh was. Intelligent, yes, but also arrogant, aggressive, blind to his faults, and more than willing to use other people in pursuit of his own aims.” Cusack stopped, fixing Martin Gwynne with a steady gaze. “But perhaps most telling was the evidence we found suggesting that Benedict Kavanagh was a serial seducer of young girls. Why did you insist on telling everyone that your daughter was dead, Mr. Gwynne? I can understand if the shame of attempted suicide was too much to bear—”

“No!” A jagged cry erupted from Tessa Gwynne. All eyes were on her as she leapt up from the table and tried to put herself between Stella Cusack and her husband. “No, it was never shame. I won’t have you saying that. And don’t look at him, don’t—Martin . . . ”

Gwynne’s look pleaded with his wife. “Ah, Tess, you don’t know what you’re doing—”

“I know, my love. I do know.” She turned back to Cusack. “I think you have a daughter, Detective. You cannot know what you would do if someone . . . if someone brought such grievous harm to your child.”

Cusack said nothing.

Tessa Gwynne continued: “Our Derryth was such an open spirit, so gentle, so full of joy—”

“Until she met Benedict Kavanagh.”

“Until he destroyed her. She met him at that conference in Toronto where Martin spoke all those years ago. I’ve thought about it so much since then, all those philosophers wasting their breath arguing against the existence of evil when he was right there in their midst, that serpent, that
villain
—” She stumbled, but Cusack reached out to keep her upright. “Martin and I, we didn’t know what had happened. When we returned to England, she tried to stay in touch with him, this man to whom she’d given everything—
everything
—and he—” Her legs buckled and she fell against Cusack for support. “He tossed her aside, like so much rubbish. My beautiful, beautiful child. Only fifteen years old. And so she tried to kill herself, by swallowing these, a half dozen or more.” Tessa Gwynne brought a fistful of gallnuts from her pocket, her hand shaking. “She believed they were poisonous, you see, just kept shoving them down her throat until she couldn’t breathe anymore. It was too late when we found her, too late to reverse the damage. You see, don’t you, why I did what I had to do? I brought Benedict Kavanagh here. I didn’t know anything about Deirdre, or the baby. Mairéad, I swear, I meant to stop him sooner.”

“How did you manage to get Kavanagh down here to Killowen?” Cusack asked.

“It wasn’t difficult. I knew he wanted the book, you see, the fabled Book of Killowen. I knew he’d have done anything to get it. I heard Martin and Anthony talking about it and knew that Kavanagh wouldn’t be able to resist. So I rang and told him that what he was after was here, that it could be his for the right price. I told him to come and see the carving at the chapel, if he didn’t believe me.”

“The figure with the wax tablet,” Niall Dawson said. “The Greek letters. And the initials below,
IOH
—for Iohannes Scottus Eriugena.”

“And that was the first time Kavanagh came here, eighteen months ago?” Cusack asked.

“Yes. I’d whetted his appetite for the spoils but missed my chance to get him alone. He came, and saw the chapel, and then he escaped. I had to wait more than a year for another opportunity. I couldn’t fail this time. I rang again, asked him to meet me out on the bog, at night. I was to bring the book this time. He didn’t know me—who I was, what
I was doing here. I showed him Martin’s copy of the old manuscript, and when he leaned into the boot for his case of money”—her muscles began to spasm, limbs jerking awkwardly—“I hit him,” she said, reliving the horror of it. “As hard as I could, and he crumpled, just like a marionette. I tied his hands and feet, and stopped his breath—one bitter serpent’s egg for every one my child had swallowed. After he was dead, I gave him a proper serpent’s tongue as well.” She fell to her knees, arms and shoulders writhing, her face a grimace.

Martin Gwynne dropped to his knees beside her. “Tessa, no!”

“What’s wrong with her?” Shawn Kearney asked. “Why is she shaking like that?”

Nora darted forward and seized Tessa’s wrist. “Mrs. Gwynne, have you taken something? You must tell us.”

Tessa Gwynne pushed her away. “Leave me alone. Let me talk.” She turned to Cusack again. “You wanted to know about the car, how I managed to bury it. My father was in construction. He taught me himself how to handle a JCB. Always said I was the neatest excavator he’d ever had.”

“And you came across the bog man when you were digging the cutout for Kavanagh’s car,” Cusack said.

Tessa Gwynne nodded, her lips curling back once more in a ghastly grin. “I had no choice, had to put him in the boot. No one would have found them, but for Vincent Claffey grubbing after money in moor peat.” Her breaths were coming shallower. “I’m not sorry he’s dead. As bad as the other, the way he used Anca, his own daughter.” Tessa Gwynne cried out as her body convulsed, her back arching uncontrollably.

Nora took her wrist again, this time checking for a pulse. “Mr. Gwynne, has your wife taken something?”

“I don’t know,” Gwynne replied helplessly.

Nora looked around at the circle of anxious faces. “Did she swallow anything in the last few minutes? Did anyone see?”

Martin Gwynne wept as he tried to still his wife’s body, now wracked with spasms. “I didn’t think . . . she takes so many tablets. My wife hasn’t been herself these last few months, she’s been ill. Oh, Tessa, my lovely Tess.”

His wife looked up at him, between spasms now, and raised a hand to his face. “I had hoped . . . all this would pass, and you would never
know . . . but how could I let you or anyone else take the blame? You see that, don’t you, my love? Don’t forget—” Tessa Gwynne’s back arched once more, until it seemed as if her spine would snap. Her husband clasped her to his chest, but her eyes were staring, vacant now. Stella Cusack turned away, her head bowed.

Uch a lám
,

ar scribis de memrum bán!

Béra in memrum fá buaidh
,

is bethair-si id benn lom cuail cnám.

Alas, O hand,

so much white parchment you have written!

You will make the parchment famous,

and you will be the bare peak of a heap of bones.

—Epigram left by an Irish scribe in the margin of a medieval manuscript

Nora pushed through the wide door at the morgue just as Catherine Friel pulled the sheet over Tessa Gwynne’s body on the mortuary table, shaking her head in resignation.

“The poison was mercifully quick. I think we’ll find it’s strychnine, when the toxicology reports come through. She hadn’t much time, in any case. There were some fairly advanced histopathologic changes in her brain and muscle tissue, consistent with multiple myeloma. I’m sure the disease was beginning to affect her quite significantly by this stage. I’m amazed that she had the strength . . . ”

A moment of silence hung between them. Nora thought of the desperate act of a grieving mother, unable to countenance the continued existence of the man she held responsible for her child’s living death.

“I would never condone what she did,” Dr. Friel said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t imagine what she felt. If it had been my child—”

The door opened, and one of the local mortuary staff stuck his head in. “There’s someone here to collect one of your patients, Dr. Friel—Anca Popescu.” Nora could see Claire Finnerty and Diarmuid Lynch standing just outside the mortuary.

“You can tell them to come through,” Dr. Friel said.

“So you’re taking Anca back to Killowen?” Nora asked Claire. “Does she not have family in Romania?”

“None that wanted her,” Claire replied. “So we’re going to keep her here, with us.” She looked away, trying to keep her composure.