The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (25 page)

“Some medieval Irish philosopher,” Molloy said. “Used to be a picture of him on the old five-punt notes. That’s all I know.”

The phone on Stella’s desk gave three chirrups in rapid succession, and she reached for the receiver. “Cusack here.”

The voice was hesitant. “They said on the television this was the number to ring . . . about the man that went missing.” The caller sounded not well educated but respectable, and certainly not used to telephoning the police.

“Yes, this is the number. I’m Detective Cusack. We’re trying to find anyone who’d have information on Benedict Kavanagh.”

“Well, that’s not the name he used when he came here to me. But I recognized him straightaway from that photo they showed on the television. Always suspected he was up to no good, but murdered! I’ve no wish at all to be mixed up in things like that,” she said, though it was clear from her breathless tone that it was exactly what she wished.

“First things first,” Stella said. “Where are you ringing from?”

“The Groves B and B in Crinkill.”

“And your name?” There was a pause, as if the caller finally realized the situation she was in and might be entertaining second thoughts.

“I only kept his things because he left without paying, you see.” The woman spoke in a rush, worried how the situation might begin to reflect badly on her. “I don’t take money up front like most of them are doing now. Old-fashioned, I suppose, but he was the first whoever left without paying, and—”

Stella cut her off. “Are you saying that you kept Mr. Kavanagh’s things?” She said it for Molloy’s benefit and gestured for him to stand by with his notebook and Biro.

“It’s not much, only one bag, and a briefcase with some papers and a small little computer yoke. I thought I’d just tuck them away until he came looking for them, and get what was owed us before he’d get them back. No harm in that, is there? We’ve all got to make a living.”

“We’re going to pop round and collect Mr. Kavanagh’s belongings, Mrs. . . . what was the name? Right, Mrs. Dolan.” Molloy was ready with paper and pen, as Stella repeated the address. “The Groves, Roscrea Road, Crinkill. Thanks, yes, I’ve got it. Imelda Dolan. We’ll be out to you straightaway, Mrs. Dolan. If you would do us a favor, and not touch any of the items, just leave them exactly where they are. Thanks very much for ringing.”

They rolled up to the house twenty minutes later. It looked a lot like the place Stella had imagined while speaking with Imelda Dolan. Immaculate, with every shrub in the garden pruned into a perfect globe. Sharp edges on the flower beds, a completely weed-free lawn, and gravel so clean it appeared to have been run through a dishwasher. Three stars from Bord Fáilte, no doubt, but nary a whiff of warmth or personality. What was Benedict Kavanagh doing at a place like this? She’d had him pegged as a five-star man all the way.

Imelda Dolan answered the door with excuses at the ready, before they’d even crossed the threshold. “I’d never have kept his things, you see, only he’d gone off without paying his bill. Then I was out of the country, visiting my sister in Tasmania, so I mustn’t have heard the news about the poor man going missing. Bernard—that’s my husband—he said I shouldn’t get fussed about it, but it certainly puts the heart crossways in you, doesn’t it, hearing about someone you know being murdered?”

Stella showed her the photo of Kavanagh. “Is this the man who stayed here?”

“That’s him, and no mistake.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“Oh, I’d know him anywhere. I knew there was something strange about him. A bit unnatural, he was, the way he’d probe at you with those eyes—”

“And did he say anything about the reason for his visit?”

“The first time, he was looking at some historic sites in the area.”

“Excuse me, ‘the first time’?”

“He’d stayed with us once before, oh, it must have been right around eighteen months ago. I can check our visitors’ book, if you like. But the second visit, not a word out of him. And I refuse to pry, not like some—”

“Can you tell us anything more about the day he arrived in April?”

“I remember, ’twas a Thursday night—the twenty-first of April it was—and he booked in through the weekend.”

“And when did you discover that he’d gone missing?”

“He was out a lot, not much in his room. But when Sunday came around, and he didn’t turn up for his breakfast, I went to the room and found his bags on the bed. All packed and ready to go, if you don’t mind. There was no sign of him, not that day, nor the following morning. I suppose it was a bit strange to leave the bags. But I suppose he didn’t intend to leave, did he, if he was murdered? Still, you can’t blame us for thinking he’d scarpered. Took his room key and all. Very annoying, that. Because it’s hard to get keys for the old locks anymore, you see. Bernard’s been after me to just replace the old doors, but I—”

Stella interrupted. “Excuse me, Mrs. Dolan, could we see Mr. Kavanagh’s belongings, please?”

Imelda Dolan kept talking as she led them through her sterile-looking house to a small room with a wall of built-in cupboards beside the back door. She spoke under her breath, almost like rubbing at a bruise, Stella thought. “Didn’t call himself Kavanagh when he was here. Scott, it was, Mr. John Scott. ’Twasn’t his real name at all—I should have known.” She pulled open one of the doors to reveal a small black leather overnight bag, a laptop, and a zippered briefcase. “I had to move his things, you see, to make way for the next guests.”

“And you didn’t happen to look inside the bags, or remove anything from them?”

“I resent the suggestion. I run an honest house here—”

“I wasn’t suggesting anything, Mrs. Dolan,” Stella said. “Only asking.” She grasped the handle of the overnight case.

Mrs. Dolan said, “Take it all away, right now, this minute. I want nothing more to do with any of it. Imagine if word were to get round about where the man was staying when he was
murdered
.” She crossed herself hastily.

Stella resisted the small urge to point out that any association with a
gruesome murder might actually boost business. After a few more questions, including checking the register for the earlier visit, they took their leave, bringing the cases and laptop back to the station for further inspection.

“What are you hoping to find?” Molloy asked as they spread out Kavanagh’s belongings on the table in their small back room.

“Maybe some indication of what he was doing here,” Stella said, taking inventory of the usual items in the overnight case, all ordinary things a man would take with him on a trip out of town for a few days: clothing, toiletries, prescription bottles for various tablets—blood pressure, allergies, vitamins. “What do you make of these?” she asked, pointing out a small vial of blue tablets.

“Interesting,” Molloy said. “Especially if those tablets are what we think they are.”

“Oh, they’re the ‘little blue pills,’ all right.”

“So the question is, did he carry them on principle, or had he made plans?”

“Exactly.” In among the pill bottles, Stella noticed a small gold cross with a broken chain. She picked it up, squinting to see the letters engraved on the back:
From Mum.
Not a man’s jewelry, that much was certain. “All right, let’s have a look at the briefcase.”

Molloy placed the attaché case on the table and flipped it open, perusing the papers inside. “Looks like notes for a book or a paper about marginalia—”

“Why does that sound a bit unsavory?”

Molloy smiled. “It’s just the little notes that monks used to write at the edges of their manuscripts. Some wrote poems, or scribbled down random thoughts they had while copying.”

Stella was pleased to see that Molloy’s secondment to the Antiquities Task Force last year was paying off. But she was thinking about Benedict Kavanagh, not about monks. “So this trip may have had more to do with his work than with his wife?”

“Seems that way, so far at least. There’s nothing at all about her and quite a lot about old manuscripts. He seems to have made a translation of a poem in Irish. Here, read this.” He offered her a handwritten page, alive with scribbled notes and underlines.

“This Kavanagh’s handwriting?” she asked.

“Looks to be.”

Stella turned the page sideways, following several lines of text that seemed written with particular force:

A little hut in the wood, none knows it but myself.

A lowly, hidden hut, among the paths of the forest
,

Will you return with me to see where it lies?

The stags of Feadán Mór leap from its streams amid sweet meadows.

From my hut great Arderin can be seen to the east.

A clutch of eggs, sweet apples, heath peas, and honey;

haws, yew berries, nuts from the branching green hazels.

After the poem came a cryptic code in Kavanagh’s hand: “i,
¹
!!!!?”

“Any idea what this means—i-one?”

Molloy shrugged. “No, but the poem sounds like something a monk would have scribbled at the edge of his manuscript. We read a few of these, studying Old Irish at school.”

Stella remembered that Molloy had been educated at a
gaelscoil
, where everything was taught through Irish language—maths, physics, geography, the lot. And at that moment, the distance between the two of them seemed incrementally wider. They might as well have come up in different centuries, for all they had in common.

“What’s this?” Stella pointed to another notation, where Kavanagh had written “An Feadán Mór, 8k sw Birr, off N52.” She paused for a moment, thinking back to something Mairéad Broome had said in Dublin, about the breakthrough her husband had just made in his work.
This is going to rattle some bones
, he’d said. Two bodies in the boot of a car was a rattling of actual bones. There was something right under the surface here, she could feel it.

“Fergal, do you think Kavanagh could have been mixed up with treasure hunters?”

“Not out of the question, I suppose. They try to get all sorts of people in those smuggling rings—museum staffers, even coppers.” Molloy grinned. “They know we’re always skint.”

“But Kavanagh wasn’t. He’d plenty of money, according to the wife.”

“Ah, but some of them aren’t in it for the money,” Molloy said. “For
them it’s all about getting your hands on something very old and rare. And book people are especially fanatical—or so I hear.”

Stella took a marker and started writing on the time line. “So, from the landlady we know Kavanagh arrived at the B and B in Crinkill on the evening of Thursday, April twenty-first, where he stayed for at least two nights, and went off between Saturday the twenty-third and the morning of Sunday April twenty-fourth and never returned.”

“Let’s put the wife’s time line up next to his,” Molloy said, grabbing a blue marker. “She and Graham Healy drive down to Cork for the exhibition installation on April fourteenth; they supposedly arrive at the friend’s house in Mountrath on April twenty-first and stay for a week, then head home to Dublin on the twenty-eighth. She waits around three days before reporting the husband missing on the first of May.”

Stella added a red line. “Work on the geothermal system at Killowen commences on April twentieth, and wraps up on the thirtieth. Niall Dawson is there for a couple of days around April twenty-second.” She paused, thinking of the way Kavanagh’s body had been left—tongue cleaved down the middle, gallnuts blocking his airway. There was a message in all that, but what was it? “What does a split tongue say to you, Fergal?”

“Signifies a liar, doesn’t it, someone who can’t tell the truth?”

“The serpent in the garden,” Stella murmured. “Let’s fire up that laptop.”

Molloy was keen on computers of all kinds and had no trouble navigating his way through the laptop to find out which files Kavanagh had accessed most recently.

“Seems like he’s downloaded quite a few images,” Molloy said, squinting at the monitor. He looked up at her. “Internet porn—what’ll you wager?”

“I’m not betting on anything. Let’s have a look.”

Molloy pushed a button, and dozens of files opened on the screen.

“Hah! Well, they’re skin pictures, right enough,” he said, “just not the sort of skin you’d expect.” Rather than rosy human flesh, the images were close-ups of parchment pages, Latin words inscribed in translucent brown ink. “Old manuscripts,” Molloy said. “Book of Kells old.”

“They were Kavanagh’s thing,” Stella said. “Isn’t that what everyone’s been telling us?”

“It’s the same poem as he’s translated.” Molloy was staring at the image on the screen. “Amazing.”

“What’s amazing?”

“Well, think of it: there used to be whole libraries full of books like this, copied out by hand. Jesus, all the time and effort those poor buggers the monks put into each one. We take it for granted now, don’t we—the printing press, the copy machine, the Internet. I mean, words lose their value, in a way, don’t they, when you’re drowning in them?”