The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (30 page)

Dawson swallowed hard. “It could all go pear shaped.”

“Tell her the truth. It won’t.”

Niall Dawson was still trying to convince himself. “Gráinne first, then Cusack.”

“You’re a decent man, Niall.”

“A decent man doesn’t end up making a fuckin’ bollocks of everything.” Dawson held his gaze for a few seconds, then climbed up out of the pit. He looked down at Cormac from the bank. “I can’t just ring her. I’ve got to go home. I don’t know when I’ll be back—it’ll depend on what happens.”

“Go, then. Don’t worry about me. I’ll carry on here, and I can walk back to the farm.”

Watching Niall Dawson’s disconsolate posture as he trudged across the overgrown bog, Cormac felt a twinge of guilt, having urged his friend to come clean. Some things between people were better not said.

The house was empty when Nora returned to Killowen. She headed to the kitchen to work on her report about Killowen Man, curling herself onto a short sofa with camera and laptop. Time to concentrate on work.

But all the events of the past few days had her head in a muddle, especially after seeing Cormac’s anxiety about staying here.

Nora had felt enormous relief when word came that Deirdre Claffey and her baby had been found. They all should have stood up to Vincent Claffey last night, kept him from taking his daughter away. He might still be alive if they had just found a way to resist. And what would become of Anca? She was probably not much older than Deirdre. Impossible to know how bad things had been for Anca at home, that she’d had to seek a better life here.

Nora shook herself, trying to clear these thoughts out of her head. There was nothing she could do to help right now. Better to stop worrying and just stick to her work. She pulled the memory card from her camera and slid it into her laptop to begin downloading the new pictures of Killowen Man, the ones they had taken this morning with the textile expert.

The first images were shots of the stab wounds in Killowen Man’s chest. She clicked through the pictures, pulling descriptive details: the visible pores in his brown skin, the size and placement of the wounds. From all these elements she could begin to weave at least a fragmented story for an unknown, fragmented murder victim. He did have a name, once.

Looking at close-ups of the gashes that had allowed a man’s lifeblood to escape, Nora suddenly felt the spark of vitality that had once been in the form before her. She felt the man’s pulse, his breath inside her, along with the fierce burst of mingled fear and joy that must have seized him at the very instant that he merged with the infinite. All at once, the letters on that stone carving on the chapel loomed forward in her consciousness.
Alpha and omega. The beginning and the end. Nora found she couldn’t breathe. She reached forward and snapped the computer shut.

She pushed the laptop away from her, and as she did so, her elbow brushed against a tweed throw that someone had left tossed casually over the arm of the sofa. She looked down to see the corner of a Moleskine notebook peeping out from under the dark woolen fringe. Her curiosity aroused, Nora opened the cover to discover whose book this might be. It was a journal. The writing was small, compact, and in a female hand, it seemed—and in Spanish, which perhaps answered her question. Was this the sad story that Eliana had been reading on the evening they arrived? Nora tried to recall whether the book she’d seen in the girl’s room had a yellow cover like this. She scanned a few phrases at the top of the page:  . . .
y la forma en que me mira . . . A veces parece que diga el nombre de mi madre, pero quizás es sólo por accidente.
Something about an accident? She could read the letters, but the words themselves formed a cipher, a code she could not crack.

She heard someone coming. She quickly closed the cover and slipped the journal back into its cushioned crevice.

It was Claire Finnerty.

“Wonderful news, that they found Deirdre and the baby,” Nora said.

“Yes, a great relief. We’re all very glad to know they’re safe.”

“And Anca as well,” Nora said.

Claire threw her a suspicious look. “Yes.”

“I don’t blame you for trying to keep her name out of the investigation, telling us that she’d left. Shawn gave us the whole story this afternoon.”

Claire Finnerty swung around to face Nora full on. “Did she, now?”

“We found Anca’s cigarettes during the search. Shawn had to tell us. She said you were trying to protect the girl. I think that’s commendable.”

Claire offered no response.

“It’s hard to know what to do, sometimes, to protect people.” Nora knew she was in danger of overstepping, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Maybe last night wasn’t the first time you’d seen Deirdre’s father treat her that way. But I know what it’s like, not having any legal standing to intervene—”

“Please stop, just stop talking!” Claire Finnerty was grasping the edge of the sink. Her voice sounded strangled. After a long moment, she
turned and fled the kitchen, leaving the water running over some salad greens.

Nora turned off the tap. She shouldn’t have pushed Claire so hard just to satisfy her own curiosity. And yet, recalling the shock and anger in the faces around the dinner table, she was sure that her memory wasn’t mistaken. It had been Claire Finnerty insisting that they find a way to get Deirdre Claffey away from her father. Someone had found a way, but perhaps it wasn’t what Claire had in mind.

Joseph and Eliana came ambling up to the kitchen through the courtyard garden. Both of them had witnessed the scene at dinner last night, but as far as Nora knew, they were still ignorant of Vincent Claffey’s death. Better if they were spared the details. The way Cormac’s father had clung to Eliana’s hand after Claffey’s outburst last night—you could read it as a protective gesture. Was that what was going on later on as well, when the girl was in his room?
He didn’t want me to leave
, she’d said. Was he afraid Vincent Claffey would come back to Killowen? Cormac had the same protective streak as his father, which could be maddening at times, but it was also oddly reassuring. And Cormac probably had no idea where he’d picked up that character trait.

“Time to wash up for supper,” Eliana was saying to Joseph, letting go of his arm. “Would you like to rest a minute here before we go upstairs?”

Nora saw Eliana check under the throw on the sofa and slip the yellow notebook out between the cushions and into her bag.

“I’ll take him to get washed up, Eliana, if you’d like a break before supper,” Nora said. She motioned Eliana a short distance away so that Joseph might not overhear their conversation.

“Did you have a good day?” Nora asked.

Eliana glanced at her briefly. “Yes, everything is fine today. We were studying these cards—what do you call them?”

“Flash cards.”

“Yes, the flash cards. He likes the pictures, but he gets eh . . . nervous?” She tried to find the proper way to express it.

“Flustered? Or perhaps you mean frustrated?”

“Yes, that’s it—
frustrated
. I try to tell him he will learn the words again. That it will take patience.”

“That’s true,” Nora said. She glanced over at Joseph, who seemed to be nodding off in his corner of the sofa. “I wanted to ask if there’s anything more that Cormac and I could be doing to help you.”

Eliana’s eyes flicked away nervously. “I hope I am doing the right things . . . ”

“You’re doing great work, Eliana. He seems to enjoy the time spent with you.” Nora reached up to give the girl’s shoulder a squeeze. “I want to make sure you know that we’re here, both Cormac and myself, if you have questions about anything, or just want to talk.” Eliana nodded without looking up. “Now, a little time off.”

“I don’t need it.”

“I insist,” Nora said. “I can stay with Joseph, and you can do whatever you’d like to do.”

Eliana looked doubtful. “You’re certain?”

“Yes, go and enjoy yourself.”

Eliana rose slowly from her chair and headed for the stairs, not visibly cheered by the prospect of time to herself. This reluctance to leave Joseph was becoming a pattern. A worrisome pattern, if she were honest.

Nora turned back to find that Joseph had cracked one eye open. He’d been watching them the whole time, the sly old devil. “Narb a fisking torrit,” he said, drawing his hand over his face. “Her fox, it’s a looken peas. Peas.” He shook his head and with one hand seemed to bat the words away, a gesture that said he knew what was happening and was buggered if he could do anything about it. Here he was, back at the peas again. That was the way this thing seemed to work; he’d make steady forward progress and then would come a sort of verbal hiccup, and he’d drop back to where he’d been a week ago. Back with the vegetables.

“I think Eliana’s all right,” Nora said. “Probably just a bit homesick.”

He looked puzzled.

“Missing her family, you know.”

He looked at her with such a fixed stare that she wondered if he understood.

“Neary, shows a brick.” He put his palms together, then opened them like a book. Like an endless game of charades, Nora thought, and he can’t even tell us when we’ve guessed right. “A brick,” he said, and made the book gesture again.

“A book?” She exaggerated the O shape of her lips, trying to show him. “What is it about a book?”

“Hermakes a voil.” Here he scooped one hand, as if to say,
Come here
, and she moved closer. “No! A voil in it, a spog, a spogget.” Beads
of sweat were beginning to form on his forehead, as if the effort of making oneself understood was hard physical work. She searched his face for hints, clues to the meanings he was going for, to no avail. He definitely had something to tell her, perhaps something important. That was the trouble—no way to know.

“Bollocks,” he muttered.

“Now
that
I understand,” Nora said. “And you’ll forgive me if I concur.”

Cormac looked up from his work in the cutaway. He was digging directly below the spot where they’d found the satchel, hoping there might be a few more clues buried in the peat. Killowen Man’s brooch was still unaccounted for, not to mention the contents of his satchel. The likeliest scenario was that both the books and the brooch were stolen by the assassins who had stuck their blades into Killowen Man’s belly.

It was nearly five; Niall had probably made it back to Dublin by now. Cormac tried mightily not to think about Gráinne Dawson’s reaction, not to feel in his own gut the punch his friend was about to deliver at home. He had never been married, so how could he possibly know what it was like? Surely a true marriage required a certain acceptance of all the shades of human complexity; to deny imperfection, or to allow a momentary weakness to undo years of connection seemed extraordinarily severe. And yet what would his reaction be if Nora came to him with a similar story to Niall’s, not a long-term affair but giving in to a brief flash of desire? He looked down at his feet, stuck into wellingtons that seemed to be melting into the wet peat, and realized that he was still standing on shifting ground. Was there nothing solid at the bottom of it all? After a full year together, he found himself still craving assurances that Nora, no matter how desperately he loved her, might never be able to provide.

He started packing up his tools. They hadn’t had any security out here since the crime scene detail left, and now he wondered if they should ask the Guards to post someone on site overnight. That’s when treasure hunters usually did their work, going over sites with their outlawed metal detectors.

Niall’s anonymous tipster had mentioned a manuscript. The real question was whether there was a manuscript, or whether the tipster only wanted to draw the National Museum’s attention to Killowen. The stylus was discovered a few days before Benedict Kavanagh went missing and just before Niall had received the tipster’s call. Considering Vincent
Claffey’s obsession with rewards, could he have been the anonymous voice on the phone? Not likely that Shawn Kearney and the others at Killowen would have kept Claffey posted on their excavation, given the frosty relations between them. Then again, Claffey seemed to have no problem spying on people. He should have asked Niall a few more questions: what sort of accent the caller had, the exact language he had used.

As Cormac stood in the cutaway, he heard someone moving through the scrubby birch saplings at the bog’s edge. A strong, low voice carried over the heather: “How, hi, hi, how!” Anthony Beglan carried a thin hazel rod as he drove his cattle home from the pasture beside the bog. Cormac could see only the top half of Beglan’s body and the tip of the hazel. He had to struggle to make out the language—not English, that was certain, nor Irish. Straining to hear, he climbed up out of the cutaway, trying to follow without being detected, safely screened behind the saplings at the edge of the road.

Every language had its own music, Cormac thought, tuning his ears to the sound. If it wasn’t English or Irish, what were the possibilities, logically speaking? The sound was almost like Italian, or perhaps Beglan had begun to learn a few words of Romanian from the girl he’d been hiding in his house.

When they reached his farm, Beglan penned the cattle and slipped the leather strap from the basket over his head. Cormac followed at a distance. The rank smell he’d noticed the other night was stronger now and seemed to be coming from the shed across the haggard, a low building with a corrugated fiberglass roof.