The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (29 page)

“John Scottus Eriugena, John the Scot—call him what you like. Everything Benedict did had something to do with that bloody man. I’m sick to death of hearing his name.”

At a quarter past three in the afternoon, Cormac and Niall Dawson returned to the excavation site. With the discovery of the wax tablet in Killowen Man’s garments, it became vitally important to search for other any other associated artifacts.

Cormac stood at the edge of the cutaway with his clipboard and pencil, ready to climb down into the pit. Niall had been silent and withdrawn since they’d discovered Vincent Claffey’s body.

Cormac knew this moment was his best chance to excavate the past, as it were, to begin turning up whatever his friend was hiding. He took a deep breath.

“Niall, I’ve no wish to pry, but you’ve not been yourself these past few days. You flinch at the mention of this Romanian girl, Anca; you’re wandering about at all hours of the night. I saw you coming back to your room, Niall, it was nearly four in the morning. I haven’t said anything to Detective Cusack because I wanted to get your side of the story first.”

From the length of the pause before Dawson spoke, Cormac surmised that his friend was wrestling with a heavy conscience. “If I tell you what’s happening, can I count on your discretion?” Dawson asked.

“Of course.”

“My visit here in April was in connection with a treasure-hunting investigation for the Antiquities Task Force. No one at Killowen knew the real reason I was here. I received an anonymous tip about someone poking about, a ring of treasure hunters operating in this area. Sometimes it’s a group of amateurs with metal detectors, sometimes it’s professionals who’ve identified a particular artifact or group of artifacts from the records about a site. It happened that this group, according to the caller, was looking for an old manuscript. Then, only a day later, and apparently out of the blue, I got Shawn Kearney’s call about the stylus. That gave me an easy excuse to come down and have a look around.”

“Your tipster didn’t happen to say who it was, poking about?”

“No names were mentioned.”

“You’re saying a disembodied voice on the phone told you that someone was digging up this little corner of Tipperary searching for an ancient book?”

“Sounds completely daft, I know, but that’s about the size of it.”

“But surely the phone records—”

“The call came in on the museum’s main line, and you know yourself, our system is so antiquated there’s no way to tell where it was coming from. And I didn’t think to record anything.”

“What about Benedict Kavanagh? Did you know he was in the locality when you arrived?”

“I hadn’t a clue, but of course I can’t prove that. I’ve spent the last two days trying to work out whether he might have been involved with the treasure hunters. Kavanagh had a very particular field of study, you see, the Neoplatonist philosophers of the late ninth century, and one man in particular, John Scottus Eriugena. It did make sense that if Kavanagh was here, it had something to do with his work on Eriugena.”

Frankly, this wasn’t at all what Cormac had been expecting to hear. “So you think these treasure hunters have got something to do with his murder?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to work out. Without access to any of Kavanagh’s papers, I haven’t been able to crack what his connection might have been to Killowen. So I started reading up on his man, Eriugena. It’s a bit insane—we’re talking about someone who was born around 815
A.D
., apparently educated in Ireland. He went to France to run the palace school for Charles the Bald, the Holy Roman Emperor, around 845. But the most interesting detail I found about Eriugena was his reputation as a Greek scholar.”

The import of what Dawson was saying took a moment to sink in. Cormac flashed back to the Greek words on the wax tablet, the figure in the chapel doorway holding a tablet with the letters alpha and omega. “You think there might be some sort of connection between this Eriugena and our bog man?”

“I don’t know. What I’m saying is that we need to find out more about him. It’s tempting to jump to conclusions, but we have to do our work and see where it leads.”

“I still don’t see what any of this has to do with Kavanagh being murdered.”

“Eriugena’s work was his singular obsession,” Dawson said. “Benedict
Kavanagh would have paid any price to get his hands on information about the man, something no one else knew. Suppose the treasure hunters came across new evidence, something they realized Kavanagh would pay for, and something went awry in the transaction. Suppose he wouldn’t pay, or threatened to expose their operation. That’s sufficient motive for murder, don’t you think?”

“Wait a minute, how would they know to contact Kavanagh?”

“If you’re stealing ancient manuscripts, you’ve got to be something of an expert at what you’re doing. To know what they’re worth, who’d pay for them. Treasure hunters are not your garden variety thieves. They have to understand enough about the potential market to know which pieces will fetch a good price.”

“What sort of ‘new evidence’ about Eriugena were you imagining?”

“Well, look, we’ve already got a stylus, a wax tablet, a satchel, but what haven’t we found? Something you’d expect to find with all those other artifacts that we still haven’t got our hands on?” Dawson’s voice had taken on a kind of fevered urgency.

“Well, a manuscript.”

“Exactly! We’ve found the body of a murdered scribe, his wax tablet, and very likely his stylus and satchel, but there’s no sign of any book so far. Maybe his book survived, or was stolen for some reason.”

“You’re not making sense, Niall. Whoever killed Kavanagh wouldn’t have known there was an ancient body in the bog until he dug the cutout for the car. The satchel and tablet were found with the ancient body. The stylus was the only artifact that turned up here before we arrived. It’s just not tracking.”

“I know. I know it’s not making perfect sense, but I’m convinced that we’re on to something here. Can you not feel it?”

“Maybe. But you’re avoiding my real question. None of this explains where you were last night, Niall. Where were you until four in the morning? It’s something to do with that girl, isn’t it? With Anca.”

Niall Dawson’s face fell. His hands moved nervously. “I know it doesn’t look good, with what happened to Claffey. That’s the reason I haven’t said anything, to you or to Cusack.”

“It also doesn’t look good to be covering things up. Surely you see that.”

Dawson rubbed his forehead, frustrated. He began to pace. “All right.
I went to try and find Anca. I just needed to talk to her. She wasn’t at Beglan’s place, so I went to Claffey’s.”

“Why did you need to speak to her? And why look for her there?”

“Just let me tell you what happened, all right? It’ll all become clear soon enough. When I got to Claffey’s place, he was already dead. I didn’t see anyone else. But here’s the thing, Cormac—he wasn’t up on that machine when I found him. He was on the floor, and there was blood.” Dawson pointed to the back of his neck. “It looked as if he’d fallen and hit his head on an old engine block up against the wall. I didn’t know what to do. I suppose I panicked. I just wanted to get the hell away from there as quick as I could. I headed straight back to my room at Killowen. Couldn’t close my eyes after that. I kept seeing his face, those eyes staring at me.”

“So there was no cling film, no gallnuts in his mouth?”

“No, no, none of that. He was definitely dead, though. If there had been any chance to save him, I would have rung for the ambulance straightaway. You do believe me, don’t you?”

“Why are you so jumpy when anybody mentions the girl?”

Dawson ran a hand through his hair, even more agitated now. “There are a few more bits I haven’t told you, unfortunately. About Anca. How she and I—”

“You had an affair with the girl?”

“No, no, not an affair. God, how I hate that word. It was just sex, and only the one time. I can’t even explain why it happened. I love Gráinne, Cormac. She’s the mother of my children. You know I’d never purposely do anything to hurt her. I’ve never been unfaithful, until that one fleeting moment of . . . I was at the chapel, and Anca was there, too, and we got talking. She seemed so . . . so alone, so fragile. I suppose it sounds stupid to say that I felt sorry for her. I can’t even tell you what happened. It was just this brief moment of delusion or connection or both, and then it was over and done with and forgotten.” Dawson ran both hands through his hair again. “Until the photographs started showing up in the post.”

Cormac’s thoughts raced back to Claffey’s threats at the supper table.
I know your secrets
, he’d said, the small, dark eyes drilling into every one of them. He winced. “Jesus, Niall, you were set up.”

“I know that now. The photos were taken from that tower at the
chapel. I realized it as soon as I saw them. But don’t you understand, even if it was a setup, that doesn’t absolve me. And it didn’t mean that Vincent Claffey couldn’t ruin my marriage, destroy my family. I didn’t know what to do except pay him off. I couldn’t risk him saying anything to Gráinne. But I never killed him, Cormac. I wished him dead, so many times over, but I never . . . I swear to you on the lives of my children—I am not a killer.”

“But, Niall, if they’ve found the girl, Anca, all this is bound to come out. There’s no way to stop it.”

“Help me.” Dawson’s eyes pleaded. “I can’t think what to do. Everything’s falling asunder.”

Cormac took a moment, considering. He thought of Niall’s wife, Gráinne, his three lovely children, all the hours he and Niall had spent playing music together at sessions, all the meals and countless bottles of wine he’d shared in the Dawsons’ back garden, and the sight that always affected him, his friend’s arm slung around Gráinne or one of the children. Niall stared at the ground, his shoulders sagging.

“If Vincent Claffey was blackmailing you, how likely was it that he was holding things over other people as well?”

Dawson’s head lifted suddenly. “Yes, if we could just work out who
did
kill Claffey and Kavanagh, none of this ever need come out.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Cormac said. “But perhaps we can stop you being the focus of the investigation. Back up and tell me again about this tip you got about the treasure hunters.”

Dawson took a deep breath and pulled himself together. “The caller was a man. He seemed to
know
things.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“That there was some illegal activity going on around Killowen that might bear looking into.”

“You’re sure the caller mentioned Killowen by name?”

“Yes. Made sure I knew it was Tipperary he was talking about and not some other Killowen.”

“And Shawn Kearney’s news about the stylus came the very next day—that didn’t strike you as odd?”

“Of course it did. But when I arrived, she seemed forthcoming about what they were finding. Her license was up to date, and she had her whole excavation very well documented.”

“And Shawn didn’t seem worried about security?”

“Apparently not. She never mentioned it to me.”

“I don’t like to cast aspersions, but how can you be so sure of Shawn Kearney’s honesty? There’s no way, for instance, she could be in league with the treasure hunters, perhaps accidentally left something out of her report?”

“She’d have had to enlist the cooperation of everyone at Killowen—they were all helping with the excavation. Everyone living there would be complicit in the lie.”

“And that’s not possible?”

“I honestly don’t know. A lot of our business depends upon trust. You know we can’t possibly keep an eye on all the sites that need monitoring, so we have to hope that national pride can overcome baser instincts.”

“If we could just figure out what Kavanagh was doing here,” Cormac said. “You know more about his work than I do, and you think he wouldn’t have come here except for some new discovery about this philosopher, Eriugena. He couldn’t have had any other motivation—his wife being here, for instance?”

“But that’s just it—she wasn’t here at that time. There were no visiting artists during the excavation and construction those last two weeks of April. They only let me stay because I convinced them that I was used to rough conditions.”

“What could have made Kavanagh drop everything and rush out here? And doesn’t it seem like there are only a few people in the world who would have understood the sort of information he’d be interested in? So the question is, who around here knows a thing or two about old manuscripts? What about Gwynne? Shawn mentioned him as the resident expert, but he’s only a calligrapher, isn’t he?”

“Try paleographer with a degree in medieval history from Cambridge.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t mentioned it before now. Why the hell is he working out here in the back of beyond and not at some great university?”

“He used to work at the British Library. I gather that he left under some sort of cloud, but I haven’t had time to find out what it was. I dread prying into people’s personal lives.”

“We might have to pry, if we’re to save you from becoming a suspect. You’ve got to come clean to Cusack, tell her that Claffey was blackmailing you, and why, that you and Kavanagh were friends at university.
And you have to tell Gráinne what’s going on. You have to do it, Niall. Can you really justify keeping this from her when it’s bound to come out? That would be even more hurtful. She loves you. You have to trust her.”