The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (11 page)

The details surrounding Kavanagh’s disappearance had been tracked four months ago, as far as possible: he’d taped his program as usual on a Thursday afternoon, and no one reported him missing until his wife phoned the Guards on the first of May. After the taping session, the trail had gone cold. His seminar was not scheduled to meet on the following Monday because it was a bank holiday weekend; there were no cashpoint withdrawals, no credit card receipts, nothing to pinpoint where he went or with whom. His car did have an eToll tag, but he’d evidently avoided the M7 motorway on his route to Killowen; there was no record of his tag activating the system. Was he deliberately trying to evade detection for some reason?

Stella found herself resenting the fact that this case would probably be handed over to Serious Crimes in Dublin, as if she and her colleagues weren’t capable of investigating a high-profile murder. But that was the way politics was played these days in the Garda Síochána—the big-city task forces wanted any case guaranteed to bring them a dose of media attention, which helped justify their existence in the minds of people in charge of budgets and bottom lines. But even if it came to that, they couldn’t stop her from doing her own inquiry. She kicked herself for not going to Dublin herself right away, this evening, to speak with Kavanagh’s wife.

Even though Benedict Kavanagh was a minor celebrity, and news of his disappearance had been all over television for a short time, no one had come forward to report seeing him after he’d finished the taping session. His wife had been out of town herself and only reported him missing ten days after he was last seen. News of his body turning up might now bring out someone who remembered clapping eyes on him, and then again, it might not. Serious Crimes would be working that angle anyway; using the media to flush out witnesses was their specialty, not hers. But she had tools of her own. She had seen the body out on the bog—those bulging eyes, the distended cheeks. This crime was not about money or abstract intellectual principle. Benedict Kavanagh’s death had been intensely personal for someone. The question for Stella was: For whom?

Truagh sin, a leabhair bhig bháin
,

tiocfaidh an lá, is budh fíor
,

déarfaidh neach os cionn do chláir:

“Ní mhaireann an lámh do sgríobh.”

This is sad! O little white book!

A day will come in truth,

when someone over your page will say,

“The hand that wrote it is no more.”

—Verse written by an Irish scribe in the margin of a medieval manuscript

The kitchen at Killowen was filled with morning light. Cormac found his father sitting at the table, and Eliana nowhere to be seen.

“Have you had your breakfast?” he asked, then noticed a scattering of crumbs on the table before them, an answer to his question. “Where’s Eliana?”

Joseph’s eyes flickered to the window. “Ticka boffing majuscule.” He shielded his face from the figures in the garden, where Cormac could see Eliana talking to Claire Finnerty.

“What is it? Something about Eliana?” Cormac was conscious of the girl’s dark head glinting in the bright sunlight outside.

Joseph seized his hand. “She’s the porpoise—no, no, these are bad wugs.”

“Is something wrong? Are you not happy with Eliana?”

The old man’s lips worked, hands fluttering in vague gestures above the table’s surface.

He’d been making progress over the past three or four months, even incorporating a bit of sign language into his speech therapy sessions. Most of the signs concerned everyday occupations—eating, getting dressed, all the tasks that came with trying to relearn the words for items a person might use in any ordinary day. They hadn’t progressed to the more difficult concepts.

Cormac remembered glancing into his rearview mirror yesterday, seeing his father’s eyes locked on Eliana. Was he ill at ease with this new caretaker? Cormac had tried making a study of his father’s various facial expressions over the past twelve months, but this latest agitation was something new, like nothing else he’d seen. So many possible shades of meaning in the touch of his hand—fear, urgency, panic.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” He watched the old man’s face crumple in frustration, feeling helpless and dull-witted, bereft of words himself. Words were a false currency in expressive aphasia, a translation machine gone seriously haywire.

Out in the garden, Claire Finnerty turned and led Eliana back into the kitchen. Joseph dropped Cormac’s hand and stared at the tabletop, unable—or unwilling—to make eye contact with any of them.

“Look what Claire has brought for our lunch today,” Eliana said. “I like the name I read in a book once—‘string beans.’ That’s quite funny, isn’t it?” She held up a perfect specimen in front of Joseph’s face. “Perhaps you would help me.” She gestured, showing how she was going to snap their tender necks.

Joseph didn’t look up; he made a noise halfway between grunt and sigh. Eliana looked at Cormac. “Have I said something wrong?”

Cormac shook his head. “No, Eliana, I’m sure he’d be glad to help.” Seeing the expression on his father’s face, like a man being led to the gallows, Cormac crouched beside him and spoke quietly: “I’ve got to go now—we’ll talk later, all right?” He took his father’s hand again, offered a reassuring squeeze. The old man pulled his hand away and stared out the window.

Cormac headed out to wait for Niall Dawson, wondering if he was missing something important because he was distracted by this work out at the bog. How ironic that he should be the one feeling guilty, this late in the game, when it was his father who had been missing for so much of his life.

While he waited, he rang Nora, who was on her way to the hospital in Birr.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. My father was trying to tell me something. Something about ticks, or porpoises. He didn’t want me to leave.” Cormac hesitated. “I suppose whatever it is, we can sort it out this afternoon. Eliana seemed in great spirits, by the way.” He remembered the gentle playfulness in the girl’s face as she offered his father the beans. “Whatever upset her last night seems to have passed.”

“I’ll be back from the hospital after the exam, so I’ll try talking to Joseph.”

He was silent for a brief second. “You’re so good with him, Nora—”

She cut him off. “Ah, now, remember our agreement.”

Early on in their odd household arrangement, they had agreed that there would be no silliness about things like indebtedness between them. They were all just doing what was necessary, what had to be done. And it was as if she had understood quite clearly from the beginning that she
would be a kind of buffer between father and son, taking the role that Cormac’s mother had once filled, if only briefly. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the three of them—himself, Nora, and his father—holding hands in a line, like a group of children striking out into uncharted territory. The stroke had picked them up and landed them in a place where nothing was familiar, but Cormac knew it was the only place he wanted to live.

Stella rose before dawn on Friday and took the M7 into Dublin, enjoying the smooth comfort of the motorway but quite missing the drive through the winding old coach roads, the sight of the pubs where her father invariably stopped for refreshment on the way in and out of the city, following his true religion—sport, and championship hurling in particular. But time was money these days, and the gleaming white concrete motorways were a sign of the new religion.

She’d decided late last night to make this trip herself and not leave it to anyone else. This was her investigation, and Serious Crimes could get seriously stuffed if they hadn’t made it over to interview the victim’s spouse by now.

It was just gone half-eight when she pulled up in front of Benedict Kavanagh’s house in the city center. The Kavanagh/Broome residence was one of those Georgian monstrosities on North Great George’s Street. Artists and other creative types had snapped up these grand but crumbling houses for next to nothing back in the eighties, living with scaffolding for years until development made the street fashionable again. Stella stood before the door, painted a brilliant aquamarine under the fanlight, and rapped twice with the huge brass knocker shaped like a fist. Had to be a story behind that. There was a story behind most things, if you were paying attention.

When the door swung open, it revealed a barefoot and stylishly stubbly young gent in black jeans and an expensive cashmere jumper. “We’re not open.” He pointed to a brass plaque beside the door:
TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS ONLY, BY APPOINTMENT
.

“That’s all right,” Stella said, producing her ID. “I’m not here about art.”

The young man’s eyes narrowed as he comprehended the nature of her visit. He ushered her into the foyer, and she saw that the whole ground floor was done up as a gallery, with large paintings that nearly covered the walls. The cracked plaster behind them was real, impressions
of centuries behind wallpaper, a fresco of evidence to a trained eye. Here and there a chair or a table with a vase of flowers that beautifully set off the paintings. What was it like to have such an eye? Stella wondered, thinking of her own drab sitting room with its insipid wallpaper and matching suite.

The young man left her alone while he went upstairs, giving her a chance to look around. The paintings in the front room were angry seascapes, thick-painted stormy skies and waves and weather, the paint applied with such passion that you could almost hear the surf. Not just grays and blues and greens, but also shades of yellow, brown, and purple. Stella went up close and studied the nearest canvas. How did a person work at close range like this and understand what effect the brushstrokes would have at a distance? There was mystery in it, how the eye perceived the parts and the whole. She glanced up the stairs and saw no sign of the young man returning. So she made a quick round of the ground floor, from the rooms in front, with their large casement windows that looked over the street, to the back rooms—a galley kitchen stocked with wineglasses, coffeemaker and tea urn, industrial dishwasher. The kitchen adjoined a tiny room that functioned as an office, with desk, file cabinets, and a glowing laptop. On the laptop screen was a spreadsheet with recent sales to museums. Stella had to stifle a curse as she glimpsed the number of zeros behind each figure. She slipped from the room and took up her previous position just as the young man appeared again at the top of the stairs.

“Mairéad says she’ll talk to you in the studio. I’m sorry I neglected to introduce myself—Graham Healy, I’m her assistant.”

Stella followed him up a graceful cascade of pale marble held in place with a wrought-iron railing. Orchestral music poured down from above, louder and louder as they traveled upward, past the living areas on the first floor, all the way up to a garret at the very top of the house, transformed by a bank of windows on the north wall into a painting studio. A whiff of mineral spirits assaulted the nostrils, and music blared loudly from speakers all around the room, filling the airy space with the throb of violins and cellos, the crash of cymbals and booming kettledrums. Mairéad Broome signaled the young man to turn down the music, and as he did so, Stella’s gaze traveled through an open doorway to a bedroom where the walls, sheets, and furniture were all stark white. Amid the
rumpled luxury of bedclothes, she spied a few discarded garments—his and hers, from every appearance. Stella turned to give Kavanagh’s wife her full attention.