Whispers in the Mist (4 page)

“Gemma’s more comfortable with animals than people,” Dermot said. “What the hell kind of dog is that, anyhow?”

“That slobbering beast would be the fecking ugliest dog there is,” Seamus said. “Uglier than a toad’s arse.”

“She’s a
dogue de Bordeaux
. A rare breed.” Alan raised his voice. “Or, a French mastiff to the lot of you
crétins
.”

The crows laughed. It was something of a game with them to poke at Alan and for Alan to poke back.

Alan addressed Dermot. “Just so Gemma doesn’t feed scraps to my dog. That’s forbidden.”

“Ay, she’ll be fine. Like I said. You can tell her yourself if you want.”

“She’ll hear me?” Alan said.

“She hears just bloody fine, thank you kindly.” He shook his head. “Christ.”

Gemma pushed a jumper hood off her head and out bounced a mass of tight curls. She gazed down at her lap, where her hands rubbed over an object Alan couldn’t make out.

Remembering the quote he’d meant to write, he returned to the chalkboard.
The meaning of a word is its use in language.
He thought this was true, but whatever their usage, words were meaningless most of the time. Words fooled. Actions did not. He’d learned this lesson long ago, and it was a good one.

“What’s that malarkey you’ve written now?” Elder Joe said.

Alan didn’t bother answering as he set about pulling more pints. Outside, the fog pressed against windows and tried to breathe its isolation over the premises, over Alan. Inside, the bar counter shone and firelight cast a cozy glow onto his customers. His realm. The door opened and a slim figure stood silhouetted before Alan made out Merrit Chase. The fog must have been clammier than it appeared from the inside because Merrit made straight for the fireplace. She rotated in a shivery circle while scanning the room.

“She’ll not make a matchmaker, that one,” Seamus said.

Seamus muttered amongst his brethren as Alan stepped out from behind the bar toward Merrit. She’d cocked her head the way she did sometimes, no doubt aware that her presence always elicited speculation.

“I won’t stay long,” she said. “I’m looking for someone. Plus Liam asked for tea.”

She rubbed at the back of her neck and came away with fingers smudged with blood. A miniscule amount, but it startled Alan, who pulled her toward the peat fire for a closer look. He felt the locals observing them, ready to pass on the word later. On the return run, he might learn that he’d snogged Merrit in full view of his customers.

She pulled her hair to one side and obliged him by leaning into the firelight. She continued to peruse the room, now on tiptoes. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a scratch.”

A perfect line of abraded skin rounded the back of Merrit’s neck. “Who did this?”

She pointed toward Bijou and Gemma.

“Her?” Alan said.

FOUR

D
ANNY SETTLED HIS EXPRESSION
into a neutral mask. Unflappable. Detached. Objective. Yet inside he felt a squirm clear into his bone marrow. He’d never get used to death. If Danny could, he’d escape into the fog that shrouded the thickets. He’d blend into the murkiness, his own version of Grey Man, he supposed.

Instead, he settled his gaze onto the far edge of the pasture in which he stood, toward a few lingering shops and pubs marked the edge of the village proper. He’d sent one of his men to manage the gawkers who had already started to gather. Detective Officer Simon O’Neil and some of the others strung crime scene tape. Other than that, Danny had the scene to himself and a few minutes to look on his victim as more than a case number.

The boy lay as if he were sunbathing. He looked to be asleep, with an angelic smile and his eyelashes resting on the tender skin below his eyes. His pale skin held memories of life, still waited for his first shave. His chapped lips hadn’t started to draw back.

Danny’s forensic suit crinkled as he stooped to get a closer look at the boy’s head. Blood had dribbled out of his hairline toward his ear, and Danny thought he could make out a lump on the side of the boy’s head.

This boy was too far from home, lost. This boy in his skinny black jeans laid out in front of grass bundles that stood almost as tall as Danny’s six-plus feet. What was a boy with three silver rings, a pierced eyebrow, and useless city boots doing in Blackie’s Pasture?

With a surreptitious glance at his men, Danny peeled off one of his gloves and reached toward the boy’s cheek with the back of a finger. The warmth startled him and he jerked back when the boy’s eyelids twitched. Heart thumping, Danny placed his hand on the boy’s chest and pressed down. Air wheezed out of the boy’s mouth. When Danny let up, the boy’s chest heaved on an inhalation.

“Jesus and Mary.” Danny scrambled for his mobile and dialed. “I need an ambulance.”

While he spoke, blue eyes, dulled but aware all the same, blinked up at him. Danny rang off and grabbed one of the boy’s hands. He had articulate hands, like an artist with slender fingers, or simply the hands of a sensitive boy.

Danny leaned over the boy, hoping that he found comfort in Danny’s presence. Please, let there be comfort.

“You’re okay. I’m here. You’ll be okay. An ambulance is coming.”

The boy continued blinking as if he’d already caught sight of his luminous afterlife. His mouth moved around words that slid past in an undecipherable mumble. His eyes closed but the half smile remained as his hand slipped to the ground.

“No,” Danny said. “No, no, no.”

He tilted the boy’s head back, pinched his nose shut, and blew two breaths into his mouth. The boy’s lips were so warm that he must be alive in there somewhere. A rush of chirping and flapping wings sailed over Danny as he proceeded to pump the boy’s chest. Birds, yes, call him back with your song. Danny grew lightheaded but he continued breathing and pumping.

Behind him, footsteps approached at a run. “Sir? Benjy the Bagger’s here.”

“Get him over here.” Danny was panting. “Tell him to forget his fecking cigarettes for once.”

“Ahern,” he heard a moment later, “what the bloody hell are you doing?”

Benjy, the state pathologist, shoved at Danny hard enough that he stumbled as he stood. He moved off, giving Benjy space to resuscitate the boy. Ten minutes later, Benjy checked his watch. “Death confirmed, 10:53 a.m.”

Danny watched as a small flock of sparrows hopped and fluttered about on top of the mounds of fodder. In one wave they rose, leaving one to flounder with a droopy wing. It flew a few feet with a lopsided flutter, only to crash-land in the grass next to the boy’s shoulder. Its head cocked toward Danny.

“Oh and here we are,” Benjy said, “a proper harbinger of death, this one. Sparrows carry the souls of the recently departed.”

“And you know this how?”

“Me sainted mother, God rest her soul.”

Benjy grinned and made a move toward the bird—a male with a brown head, black bib, and grey belly. Danny waved Benjy away. “Leave him alone. Let him find his wings again.”

“True or not, I swear there’s a hovering that hangs over some bodies. Sometimes I can feel it in the morgue like a lingering stain. And this victim? Worse than usual, poor soul.”

Danny breathed deep. What little dappling effect the sun had over the landscape had disappeared. A grey envelope of cloud passed over them, sealing them into its gloominess. The boy had looked straight at him, right into the murkiest part of his soul. Danny swallowed down a rookie’s urge to vomit.

Serious again, Benjy squinted up at him. “Sorry, Dan-o, I suspect there would have been no saving him even if an ambulance had arrived in time.”

“I checked his pulse, but I didn’t feel anything.”

“The carotid is a bigger pulse but it can be harder to find. And it doesn’t help that you’re wearing gloves. It’s not your fault.”

Oh, but it was. He should have checked the boy’s wrist when he didn’t feel a pulse on his carotid. Instead, he’d assumed he was looking at what he’d been told he’d find: a potential suspicious death. He’d let lingering family concerns distract him from his job.

“No identification, no mobile,” Benjy said.

Danny gazed down at the victim. Tall and gangly like he, Danny, had been as a youth. And like Petey looked to be growing into.

“He looks seventeen at most.” Danny averted his gaze once again. “A boy.”

Besides the obvious puzzle of a city boy laid out in the middle of Blackie’s Pasture, Danny sensed that the hovering something Benjy had mentioned had already insinuated itself into local life. Into
his
local life.

Danny strode away from the silage bundles, noting their expanse of shiny black plastic. There were three of them, and they sat in the pasture like entombed beasts ready to burst out of their shells. He shook the image out of his head. He didn’t like his imagination sneaking up on him like this. He’d spent too much time alone in the year since he’d moved out of the house. He had to stick with reality. A boy—a lost boy—had died in his arms.

“Sir,” Detective Officer O’Neil called after him. “Crime scene tape all hung now.”

“Better get started on the door-to-door,” Danny said. “And we’ll need a sketch artist too. I’d like a picture for the newspaper.”

He continued on toward the other end of the field, nicknamed Blackie’s Pasture after a swaybacked gelding that had befriended everyone who cut across his territory. The horse was long gone but the name had stuck. It was only a five-minute walk back to the plaza but this side of the village was sparsely laid out and not well lit at night.

Two men stood next to a harvester that stank of petrol and grease, and Danny imagined it belching its waste into the otherwise crystalline air. He used the image to help him regain his footing: detective sergeant, remote, official.

It didn’t work. “Which one of you sorry bastards found the boy?” he said.

The men smoked and stared. The older one performed a quick sign of the cross before nodding askance toward the younger one. Danny knew the look of an old codger who wanted nothing to do with events. He’d seen that flinty gaze and those sucked-in lips dozens of times over the years. Danny turned to the younger man, who extinguished his cigarette with his fingers and tucked it behind an ear.

“That would be me,” the man said. He introduced himself as Milo, owner of an operation called Milo’s Silos, a for-hire grass harvester. He pointed out the man next to him as the owner of Blackie’s Pasture, who had arrived after Milo called him with the sorry news about the death. “I work all through Clare and Galway,” Milo said. “Quite the thriving business, I have.”

“That’s just plummy,” Danny said. “Tell me, did you check the boy’s pulse?”

“What the hell for? Even I know not to touch a dead body.”

Danny gritted his teeth. “The boy was alive. Maybe he could have been saved if you’d called an ambulance when you bloody well found him.”

Milo’s already buggy eyes went buggier. He stepped back, holding out his palms. “You can’t blame me—”

Catching himself, Danny drew in a long breath. Milo may be more stupid than a box of hair, but Danny couldn’t blame him. Danny blamed himself instead.

“Fine, let’s get on with it.” The remnants of a shiner told Danny that this git spent a good portion of his profits in the pubs. “A little late in the season harvesting this field, aren’t you?”

The field owner made a spitting noise.

In a subdued voice Milo stated that he’d had a family emergency this week. “I got part of the harvest done last week, and what’s today? Wednesday? Grant me leave to take care of me poor ma, will you?”

The owner grunted what sounded like “fecking bollocks.”

Upon closer questioning, Milo confirmed that he hadn’t visited the pasture since the previous Friday when he’d finished work for the weekend.

“And neither of you had so much as peeked at the pasture since then?” Danny said.

“And why would we?” Milo said. “I had me business, and this bag of bones lives with his cows over toward Doolin.”

“So you with your pub mates never take to hauling off to a dark pasture for a business transaction of some sort?” Danny asked.

“Transaction? As in drugs?”

“You tell me,” Danny said.

Milo’s googly eyes satisfied Danny that the man was as daft as he’d surmised. Still, he took down their names and numbers, and promised that one of his officers would be speaking to them in depth at a later time. Meanwhile, they agreed to wait for the scenes of crime techs to arrive for fingerprinting.

In his notebook, Danny jotted the date and time of their conversation. He’d have to take care with this case because his career wasn’t exactly in high gear these days. Last year’s disastrous investigation, the one that had caused the rift between him and Merrit, had all but sunk him in the eyes of his superintendent.

Across Blackie’s Pasture, a spasm of surprise jerked at the guards now gazing down at Lost Boy. A moment later, the sparrow flew out of the cluster.

“Jaysus,” Benjy said when Danny returned. “You missed it. That bird hopped onto the victim’s chest, chirped a bit, and then flew away right as rain. Took our Lost Boy’s spirit away with it, I’ve no doubt.”