The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (10 page)

When the bath was full, she stripped off her clothes and lowered herself into the water, snipping the end off one of the tubes of moor peat and squeezing it out onto her knees. This peat was the next thing to mud, but not remotely mineral—its texture was smooth and silky, its color the darkest chocolate. She rubbed the ooze between her palms until it finally dissolved, turning the steaming bathwater a dark brown. This was the same peat that preserved bog butter, wooden roads, all those ritual sacrifices. Ten thousand years, that’s how long it had lain in a suspended state in the bottom of a bog, and now it was being disturbed, for what? Beauty treatments whose effects were at best transitory. The impossible quest for youth. She thought of all the endangered bogs and suddenly began to feel guilty for enjoying the fruits of such exploitation.

As she closed her eyes, the vision of the two men in the car boot resurfaced—limbs at all angles, intertwined like two figures in a medieval knotwork design. The first corpse she’d already begun to refer to as Killowen Man, with his delicate hands and cutwork shoe, who, despite being dead, had also become a miraculous survivor in a way. She was eager to begin learning more about him tomorrow. Those cuts in his garments said he hadn’t simply fallen into a bog and drowned, but his remains were too recent to have been a ritual sacrifice. So maybe he was
the victim of a crime of passion, a domestic dispute, or a robbery gone wrong? One thing was certain: people murdered one another centuries ago for the very same reasons they did today.

It was the other man, the one they believed to be Benedict Kavanagh, who was more unsettling, especially as he might have been pushed into that boot by a killer who was still nearby. Perhaps very near. Nora tried to shove that thought out of her mind, realizing that she hadn’t even thought to lock the door behind her.

As if on cue, she heard a small
whoosh
as the door to the thermal suite began to swing open. She sank down, keeping as still as possible and letting the peaty water lap against her chin. She held her breath.

“Nora?” The sound of Cormac’s voice loosed a small flood of relief. “Are you there?”

“Back here. And there’s definitely room for two, if you—”

“Say no more.” In a few seconds, he had peeled off his damp clothing and sunk down into the bath beside her. “Great stuff,” he said. “Somehow I had forgotten all about the grinding physical labor involved in fieldwork.”

Nora slid closer. “Well, then, a spa treatment is just what the doctor ordered.”

He leaned in, brushed his lips against hers. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Did you get something to eat? And did you check on your father?”

Cormac nodded. “Yes and yes. Sleeping peacefully.”

“And you got the two gents settled at the mortuary?”

“Ready and waiting for your ministrations in the morning. Anything strange here?”

Nora considered for a moment. “I’m not sure. I looked in on Eliana just before coming down here, and she seemed to be crying. She said it was the sad story she’d been reading, but I don’t know.”

“It’s possible that she’s just homesick. I got the feeling that she’s led a rather sheltered existence up to this point.” Cormac frowned. “And you know yourself what a confounding old goat my father can be, even at the best of times. We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t feel like we’re abandoning her here, expecting her to be alone with him all day long. I know it’s only temporary, but—”

The door swung open and they both started in surprise, though not as much as the astonished female who’d just walked in on them.

“Sorry!” she said. “I didn’t realize anyone was in here. We usually flip
over the sign on the door.” A fellow American, Nora noted, thirtyish, with an uncomfortable smile and a pair of bright blue eyes that she was trying studiously to keep averted.

“No, we apologize,” Nora said. “We haven’t been here long enough to know the house rules. Just arrived today.”

The woman’s voice brightened. “Oh, you’re the archaeologists from the National Museum. Me, too. I mean, I’m an archaeologist—Shawn Kearney.” Then, suddenly realizing that she was still the only person in the room wearing a stitch, she put a hand to her eyes and blushed furiously. “Sorry! Not the best time to chat. I’ll just—sorry!” She flipped the sign on the door and was gone.

“Not quite how I imagined getting acquainted,” Nora said, when she and Cormac were alone again.

“Good to know about the sign, though,” he said. “We must employ it in future.”

Cormac’s forefinger traced an elaborate cipher along her collarbone. “You know, there was something else I noticed out on the bog today. I hate even to bring it up, but—” He seemed to be fighting with himself. “Well, it was strange. When Niall found out the car was registered to Benedict Kavanagh, he never said a word.”

“And why is that strange?”

“Because he knew Kavanagh. They were at university together. We were all there at the same time, Niall and Robbie McSweeney and I—and Benedict Kavanagh, though I didn’t know Kavanagh personally. He and Niall were best mates in their first year. I know it’s a long time ago, but still, you’d think Niall would have mentioned that he and Kavanagh were acquainted.”

“You said they were good mates, past tense. Was there some sort of falling-out?”

“You could say that. It only started coming back to me as we worked. The Philosophical Society had this tradition of sponsoring a head-to-head debate between their two most promising undergraduates. Philosophy became a spectator sport eight weeks into the fall term, because you were guaranteed a bloody good argument. I mean, rooting sections and everything. But that year, it was even more interesting, because the two chosen combatants happened to be best mates.”

Nora nodded. “Niall and Benedict Kavanagh. So what happened?”

“I can’t quite recall the topic of the debate, but it was impossible to
forget the outcome. Poor Niall was left sputtering, while Kavanagh ran rings around him. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.”

“And you think Niall remembers, too?”

“I don’t see how he could forget. The way I heard it, the whole experience made him chuck philosophy. He very nearly dropped out of university altogether. It was only his good friends—Robbie and a few others—who saved him from going down the rabbit hole.”

“And you think he may have held a grudge against Kavanagh all these years?”

“That’s what’s strange. From the little I know, Niall never held Kavanagh responsible for his failure in that debate. He blamed himself for being ill prepared.”

Nora was thinking aloud. “So, if he didn’t hold anything against Kavanagh, why not mention the old connection to Cusack?”

“Exactly what I was wondering. It’s not like he could keep it from surfacing sooner or later. He and I have never spoken about Kavanagh. I don’t know if Niall’s even aware that I was at that debate. We didn’t meet until he switched to archaeology—”

A noise came from the direction of the doorway. Surely not the embarrassed intruder again, Nora thought. Cormac put a finger to his lips, and they both froze in place, waiting. Then the bathroom door closed with a loud click.

Stella arrived home well after midnight, greeted by an empty house. A sense of impending doom washed through her, thinking about the mortgage she could barely afford, all the other bills that had to be paid now out of one pay packet. Yet another reason for Lia to prefer her father’s place. He wasn’t exactly flush, given the current state of the economy, but at least he wasn’t trying to scrape by on a Garda detective’s salary. There had been a time not so long ago, Stella thought, when she felt strong, decisive, like she was actually capable of making her own choices. Now, more and more, the choices seemed unworkable, and she seemed to be sinking in a swamp of indecision.

She thought of the words Barry and Lia and her colleagues at the station in Birr would use to describe her: reliable, thorough, organized, responsible, competent, sensible, words that enclosed her like the bars of a prison cell. She was all those things, to be sure, but wasn’t there even a spark of something more, or had she become just another steady plodder? Whatever happened to that bracingly alive creature she had once been, the one who jumped into everything with both feet?

Looking in the mirror each morning, she could see how her hair, her eyes, had gone dull. Her eyesight was going; she had to squint to read anything. She felt the scratch of the safety pin hitching up her brassiere strap and glanced down at the hem of her sleeve, held together with a staple. Pathetic. She was barely holding it together most days—maybe no one had blamed Barry Cusack for walking out. What happened when you turned out to be a stranger, even to yourself?

Stella ripped off her rumpled suit with its stapled sleeve and flung it on the floor. She stripped off her blouse and bra and knickers, and dumped a whole drawer full of faded, worn-out underclothes onto the pile. Into the feckin’ rubbish bin with all of it—she was sick to death looking at it. It was only when she put her hand on the kitchen door handle to peg the pile of clothes outside that Stella realized she was stark naked. Retrieving one pair of knickers, she put on her favorite
plush tracksuit and returned to the kitchen, where she poured herself a large glass of wine, and pushed everything from the table.

She pulled out the missing person file on Benedict Kavanagh. The photo inside was the same one she’d received on her phone: a vigorous face, perhaps forty years of age, with intense blue eyes, an aristocratic-looking nose and cheekbones, well-formed lips. He was clean shaven and beginning to gray at the temples. Dynamite on television, one would imagine. Stella tried to visualize this man cocking an eyebrow and delivering a verbal deathblow to his debating opponent.

She started making a list of the interviews they’d have to launch: Kavanagh’s wife and all known associates, anyone else who might have benefited from his death. Surely a serious scholar like Kavanagh would have professional rivals. He was also on television, which meant he could have been killed by an obsessed viewer who took exception to something he’d said or, as Maguire had mentioned, perhaps by one of the many guests he’d enjoyed humiliating. Then there were the locals: Vincent Claffey and his daughter, Claire Finnerty and her crowd. A long list.

But the wife was first priority—after all, who had more motive for killing a man than the one person who knew him most intimately? The next thought unsettled her. What if the person who knew a man most intimately wasn’t his wife? Happened all the time. And yet another motive for the spouse. Kavanagh’s wife had kept her own name—Mairéad Broome. Molloy’s “in her own right” comment pricked at her again. According to the file, at the time of her husband’s disappearance, Mairéad Broome had recently been elected to the Aosdána, the national artists’ association, and had just launched her first solo show. How was Benedict Kavanagh reacting to his wife’s increasing success? On that, the file was mum.

Stella reached for a fresh sheet of paper and began listing locations she ought to visit: the crime scene at the bog, Killowen, Claffey’s place; an arrow pointing eastward stood in for Kavanagh’s home in the city and the Dublin Academy for Advanced Scholarship, where he was a fellow. What did that mean, exactly? Did he teach, or was it mostly research? And what sort of research was involved in a field like philosophy? Stella had little exposure to the world of academia and found herself intrigued by people who could work up a froth splitting hairs over a single word. Then there was the whole political side of things, the usual hurts about who got passed over for chairmanships and committees, the
pressures of publication, how the system turned a few academics into stars and the rest into pillocks. All of Stella’s firsthand knowledge of workplace politics came from her time in the Guards, but how different could it be, really? Human beings were essentially the same selfish, venal creatures no matter the sphere.

She flipped through the contents of the files: interviews with his wife, the producer of his television program, his colleagues at the academy, the neighbors. Everyone had a slightly different take, it seemed, so the portrait of Kavanagh ended up like one of those dotted paintings she’d seen once in a museum. Stand too close, and you couldn’t make out the image. Only by stepping back could you get any perspective. She forced herself to focus on Benedict Kavanagh’s habits, his routines. From what she was gathering, he’d had a rather light teaching schedule—one seminar, which met once a week on Monday afternoon. He wrote every morning between eight and eleven, and prepared for his television program after lunch. The show taped from four to six on Thursday afternoon.

Stella had an impression that the interviewees were holding back, not telling all they knew about Benedict Kavanagh. Words like “difficult” and “brilliant” seemed to recur with regularity, almost always in the same breath, as if you couldn’t be one without the other. He had gathered a chosen few around him, a coterie that his larger circle—behind his back, of course—had gleefully dubbed “the Children of a Lesser God.”

Benedict Kavanagh had grown up in Dalkey, the pampered only son of a prominent heart surgeon and his wife. Had a stellar career as a student, earned multiple degrees at University College Dublin, and slipped naturally into a cushy post at the Dublin Academy for Advanced Scholarship. What he did there apart from the single seminar was anyone’s guess, but he was paid a decent salary for it. Nothing out of place in his financial dealings. From the look of things, he traveled and lectured in Europe and America, on his particular area of expertise, listed as “Neoplatonist Philosophers of the Carolingian Court.” Someone had included the title of one of Kavanagh’s papers: “Eriugena’s Commentary on the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy.” Stella stared at the words on the page, struck by the notion that they were legible, neatly typed, and in English. They might as well have been Swahili or Cantonese for all they communicated to her. What prompted people to delve so deeply into
a subject that their work was incomprehensible to the vast majority of the planet’s population? Perhaps this was a man who’d been raised to believe that he had no equals. That kind of thinking led to all kinds of dangerous situations, in her experience.