The Lake (8 page)

Frank hated churches. He hated everything about them: the beady-eyed statues, the crucifixes, the hard wooden hassocks, the sounds, the smells. Particularly the smells. Old wood and candle wax and musty garbs. And incense. Especially the incense. One sniff of the stuff, even from the last pew of the church during a funeral, and Frank was transported back to his youth, when he had reluctantly served as an altar boy every Sunday and most mornings during Lent. That smell was as powerful as any magic potion. And that’s what the lot of it was, in his opinion. Hocus pocus. He tried to respect other people and their traditions, but it meant nothing to him.

But that smell. Even here in the relatively secular surroundings of the church sacristy, his nose could pick up on a hint of frankincense and it made him jumpy. He noticed Dr. McKenna raising an eyebrow at him, not for the first time, and he stopped pacing the room and leaned heavily against an old wooden cupboard.

‘Everything all right, Detective Sergeant?’

‘Yes, doctor. Of course.’ Frank coughed. ‘Unless I can assist you there in any way?’

But the doctor had resumed ignoring Frank, and was mumbling to himself again, just as he had down at the lake.

When they arrived at the church less than twenty minutes earlier, they were greeted at the door by a balding, middle-aged priest in a plain black garb. Before he had spoken to either of them, he had said something in Latin over the coffin being borne by two of the undertaker’s men. They had followed the priest through a side door and into the room, where two tables had been arranged in the middle of the floor. The coffin had been let down on one. Under Dr. McKenna’s instruction, the two young men had unscrewed the lid and lifted a sheet, holding the remains, out and onto the second table. The contents of the sheet seemed ridiculously light and small; too small to be a real person. The postbag was very obvious now it was free of the silty sand, for the most part, although some still clung wetly to it in places. The letters ‘P&T’ were evident, and the indignity of it made Frank’s heart feel heavy. Dr. McKenna had taken one final photograph of it intact before cutting down the middle of the sack from top to bottom with a pair of small metal scissors, lifting it carefully as he went.

Frank had seen many lifeless bodies over the past ten years, but none so grey, so utterly devoid of any memory of life that it seemed as inanimate as the jute sacking that enclosed it. He could clearly see a woman’s arm, draped out over the front of her body, over the silt that had washed itself into the bag and found rest inside. An arm so lacking in any colour, he might not have noticed it against the grey sand had he been any further away. The doctor had used a gloved hand to push some of the sand to one side, revealing part of the woman’s clothing. At once, Frank had felt both relieved and sad: relieved, because it seemed the woman was not naked, which gave Frank some comfort; although he knew it didn’t make her any less dead, and sad, for the life that had once been sanguine enough to wear a red cardigan.

Frank had noticed the priest close his eyes in silence for a moment, before nodding at Dr. McKenna and leaving the room with the undertakers. It had struck him how rehearsed the scene seemed, considering the highly unusual circumstances. But that was priests for you. Rehearsed. Collected. It was impossible to rattle a priest. They were the same no matter how unsettling the situation, how gruesome the find, how stark the realities of a crime scene or a traffic accident. Frank always thought it unnatural. Another reason not to trust them.

‘Detective Sergeant?’

Frank jumped. The doctor’s head was turned slightly in his direction. Frank approached the table. His nose had been so full of the memory of incense that it hadn’t picked up on the acrid, pungent aroma wafting up from the table where the doctor worked, but standing next to him now, it was very evident. Frank made an involuntary gagging noise in his throat, and Dr. McKenna glanced up at him.

‘There will be an increasingly strong smell,’ he said, looking at Frank with some distaste. ‘The remains have been under anaerobic conditions for some time. Exposure to the air is going to result in rapid breakdown of the cellular structure.’

Frank just nodded. He couldn’t speak while he was holding his breath, and he certainly couldn’t breathe. He noted with awe how the smell and the sight seemed to have such little impact on the doctor.

‘I was right to carry out a prelim here. By the time the remains get to Dublin, the degradation is likely to be such that important aspects of the crime may have been lost.’

Frank mustered every ounce of strength within himself and took a deep breath through his shirtsleeve and into his mouth. ‘You’re convinced of a crime?’ He looked from the poor unfortunate on the table below him to the doctor.

‘Well, I would have thought the postbag might be clue enough to that.’ The derision in the doctor’s voice was clearly audible. Frank cursed himself. Of course it was a crime. He knew that. He just couldn’t think straight with the smell.

Dr. McKenna said, ‘At this stage, it seems clear that the woman’s clavicle is broken.’ He pointed with a silver instrument towards the woman’s neck, or at least, to the place below her head. It was almost impossible to make out any neck at all.

‘There is some discolouration not in keeping with that of the rest of the body. And it seems clear, without the certainty of a full PM of course, that the collarbone here’, he jabbed at the side of the neck closest to them, ‘is misshapen. Broken.’

Frank could see what the doctor was referring to, although it impressed him that he had been able to make it out; the body seemed all broken and discoloured to Frank.

‘I’ll have to get her up to Dublin.’ The doctor kept on talking. Frank could only be certain he was being addressed because there was no one else in the room. ‘I’m fairly sure that the bag will be dated to the early Fifties. You’ll need confirmation, but I’d be confident of that being an accurate assumption. Her clothes too. It’s not certain; of course, we’ll need to take samples. She’s not wearing any shoes, unfortunately.’ He looked up at Frank. ‘Shoes are often the best tell in cases such as these.’

He looked back down at the sorry sight on the table before him. ‘I’d say she was late teens. Early twenties perhaps.’ He sighed again. ‘It’s hard to guess what she could have done to deserve this end.’

The two men stood in silence for a moment. Sometimes Frank hated being a man. Even after ten years of witnessing the aptitude humans had for cruelty, it still shocked him to think that people could be reduced to such debasement. Because it seemed clear now that this young girl, for that’s all she was, had been strangled, put in a postbag, and buried on the shores of the lake.

Frank did a quick calculation. If she had been killed in the Fifties, it was possible that she was put in her shallow grave before the lake was there. She might have been buried in a field that was now part of the lake bed. And if that was the case, it meant Frank suddenly had a very narrow time frame to work with. If either her clothes or the bag gave him an earliest possible date for the girl’s demise, the lake gave him the latest. It would be far more likely that he would find a missing person if he knew when to look.

But then Coleman’s words from the night before returned to him. So many had left when the dam was built. They hadn’t kept track of them all.

He forgot about the smell for a moment. ‘What’s that?’ He leaned over a little to inspect something dark that seemed to be resting on the woman’s breast, just under her damaged collarbone. He recoiled when he took a breath, and brought his sleeve to his face again.

‘Ah yes.’ Dr. McKenna bent and gently poked at the dark line with a blunt-looking scalpel. ‘It appears that she is wearing a chain of sorts.’ He poked at the chain a little more, until it seemed to come away from the flesh beneath it. With the scalpel and his steel Parker pen, he slowly lifted the length of it until a tinkling noise startled Frank. The doctor lifted the end of the chain, and two heavy looking rectangles of metal dangled from his pen above the woman’s chest. For a wild second, Frank thought he saw the woman’s black lips move, and his heart leapt inside him.

‘Dog tags.’ The doctor inclined his head on his shoulder in an effort to read them. ‘Well. That should help you with your search for the perpetrator, Detective. Assuming of course that they are not her own. Ha!’

The idea of the poor fragile body before them having served in any army appeared to be highly amusing to the doctor. Frank tried to ignore the impropriety of the man’s reaction, and instead attempted to read the metal tags that were still dangling from the Parker pen.

‘Here,’ he pointed at a box of tissues and Frank handed him one, which he used to wrap the dog tags carefully, holding them in his left hand, while he lifted a small pair of pliers with his right, and cut the chain that held them. He handed the tissue to Frank. ‘They’ll be of no use forensically, of course. Not having been submerged for any length of time. We’ll leave the chain in situ,’ he said. ‘I’ll take a picture of the tags now, and make a note that you have taken custody of them.’

The doctor busied himself laying the tags out on the end of the white sheet and photographing them. Frank’s mind raced. He needed to contact his superiors in Dublin. This was clearly no bog body. Something sinister had taken place here and it was now a criminal investigation. He opened his palm to the doctor who set the tags on it carefully. He lifted one up and squinted at it; tarnished with water and time, but the letters embossed on the metal were still clearly visible:

MAXWELL JOHN R

Who was John Maxwell? And what connection had he with the girl lying dead on the table before him? Frank tried to make out the numbers and letters beneath the name, but they made no sense to him. An army serial number, no doubt. Something that would lead them to John R Maxwell. Whether or not it helped him find out what had happened to the girl, remained to be seen. It was of course possible that she had somehow acquired the tags by chance, and had been wearing them simply as jewellery. Lots of people wore weird stuff like that nowadays. But then Frank was fairly certain that young girls in the 1950s hadn’t accessorized with imitation army dog tags. Not so soon after the war. No. It was more likely that there was some connection between the girl and John R Maxwell. But where was John R Maxwell now?

There was a knock on the door and it opened slowly to reveal Garda O’Dowd.

‘Doctor McKenna, there is a message for you from your office. You’re wanted in Crossmolina as soon as possible.’

The young guard stood in the doorway, crinkling his nose. Frank noticed him glance over at the body on the table and avert his eyes just as quickly.

‘Right.’ The doctor wrapped his instruments in a cloth bag and returned them to his case. ‘The hearse will drive her up to Dublin.’ He shrugged his camera bag over a shoulder. ‘I’ll call ahead and let them know to expect her. I’ll forward on the PM report as soon as possible. Might be Tuesday at this rate. Detective.’

He nodded at Frank, and turned to leave. What, no goodbye hug? Frank thought to himself. Garda O’Dowd stepped back to allow the doctor past.

‘Might you be needing me here, sir?’ he looked at Frank, his hand still on the doorknob, his feet still the far side of the threshold.

‘The undertakers will be moving her up to Dublin,’ Frank said, staring at the metal tags in the palm of his hand. ‘Just make sure they get off okay, Michael.’ He closed his hand around them and took one last look at the girl lying on the table. He sensed she was listening to him, but instead of being unnerved, he felt somehow reassured. He looked up at Garda O’Dowd. ‘I’ll see you back at the station later in the afternoon. Right now, there’s someone I need to have a chat with.’

The peace that had settled on Casey’s Bar that Saturday afternoon was a brittle one. Peggy sat at one of the lounge tables surrounded by a stack of invoices and a stack of delivery notes, trying to reconcile one with the other. Jerome stood with his back to her, his attention on a piece of wood he had leant against the bar. She hadn’t exchanged more than two words with him since their earlier conversation, and Peggy had no intention of relenting. She regarded him as he rummaged through their father’s old tin toolbox. He had changed his clothes since his arrival, and was now more sombrely dressed in jeans and runners and a plain blue shirt. His Crumm clothes. They certainly contrived to make Jerome blend in more with his surroundings, but his changed appearance made Peggy feel sad. Paisley prints and floral patterns suited Jerome. She thought of how he had looked when he had arrived home earlier, all flamboyance and colour. Now, standing with his shoulders bent over his would-be shelf, he seemed, lacklustre. Deflated.

Peggy slumped back on her stool as she watched her brother grapple with some metal brackets. It wasn’t right that Jerome should have to change every time he came home. To have to shrug off his real self and wear the clothes and the demeanour others expected of him. That was no way to live. She stared hard at the back of her brother’s head, trying to read what might be going on inside, beneath his glossy black locks. Their mother had loved his hair, even when the others had teased him for its girlish sheen. Her Naoise, she used to call him, with hair like a raven, cheeks the colour of blood, and skin like snow. The most beautiful boy in all of Ireland. Looking back now, it was clear that Jerome had always been the favourite child, not that their mother would ever have admitted it. Peggy wondered what she would have said to Jerome now. She had a feeling that she would have encouraged him to leave Crumm. To stay in Dublin if that was what he really wanted. To live the life he needed to live himself, and not to give two seconds’ thought to any Bernie O’Shea or Frances McGowan or anyone else around here who had opinions to the contrary. She missed her mother badly, but Peggy knew the others must miss her too. Maybe she should be more of a mother to Jerome. He had no one else to advise him, that she knew of. And Carla was certainly not one for giving out sisterly or maternal advice. She thought about her mother. What she might do.

‘Jerome?’

His name was out of her mouth before she had a plan formulated.

‘Huh?’ He didn’t turn from his task.

Just then, the door opened and a young man in his twenties walked in.

‘Miss Casey,’ he said when he saw Peggy. ‘Ah Jerome. Good to see you, man. It’s been a while.’ He set a small box down on the bar and shook Jerome’s hand. ‘I met Carla sunning herself outside.’ He tipped his head to the door. ‘Having a family reunion, are we?’

‘You might be forgiven for thinking that, Paddy,’ Peggy said as she walked over to the bar and inspected the contents of the box. She lifted out a cardboard disc, stamped with the name of a beer. ‘I’m honoured to have both my siblings in residence today. Although they’re both supposed to work here, it’s not surprising that you’d be shocked to actually see them doing any work.’

She stuck her tongue out at Jerome who repaid the compliment.

‘I wonder why we try to stay away,’ Jerome said, holding up the wood and a hammer for them to see. But Peggy saw that he was smiling. ‘Kept busy, Paddy?’

‘Ah, ya know yerself, Jer … ’

‘I don’t fucking believe you.’

The three of them stopped what they were doing and turned to see Carla stalking in through the bar, the front door crashing open behind her. She was followed by a man, who stalled in the porch, clearly unsure as to whether he should enter or not. Carla stormed past the others as if they weren’t there. She went behind the bar and took a bottle of Coke from the shelf, almost breaking it in two at the opener. She stood, swigging from the foaming bottle, staring at the man who was cowering just inside the door.

From his attire and his years, Peggy guessed who this stranger could be. She looked at the fourth finger of his left hand, and there it was, glinting in the afternoon sun shining through the open door behind him. He seemed circumspect for a school principal. Peggy had imagined him all business and bluster, but he seemed shy and subdued. Then again, who wouldn’t be subdued under Carla’s glare? His slacks and V-necked, sleeveless jumper gave the impression of an ordinary, middle-aged guy. Less Friday-night adulterer, more Saturday-afternoon Daddy. Which, Peggy realized with a sickening feeling, is what he was. His eyes seemed blotchy, like someone who had had a late night. Or been crying. Carla was still standing behind the bar, taking her venom out on the bottle of Coke. She stared over at Tom Devereaux, like a bull sizing up its matador.

Peggy looked at Jerome and Paddy, but they were both still standing with their gobs hanging open. Typical. She’d have to rescue the situation. She turned to Tom.

‘Eh, hello. I’m Peggy. Carla’s sister.’

The man looked at Peggy as if she had offered him a life ring.

‘Hello, Peggy. I’m … ’

‘Oh, no. Don’t even start introducing yourself.’ Carla slammed the Coke bottle down on the bar, making all four of them jump, and paced over to where Tom Devereaux was standing. She grabbed him by the hand and pulled him after her, past Peggy and Jerome and a clearly nonplussed Paddy, through the door into the main house. She didn’t lift her eyes once to meet her siblings’ as she passed. Tom managed to nod quickly at Peggy, but then he was gone. Swallowed up by the main house and whatever fate Carla had for him therein.

‘So. That’s Carla’s new fellah?’ Paddy said with raised eyebrows.

Before Peggy had a chance to say anything, the front door opened again to reveal Frank. Peggy glanced up at Jerome, but his eyes betrayed nothing.

‘Good afternoon,’ Frank said, looking around him as he came in. ‘Lovely day out there.’

‘It is, Detective Sergeant.’ Jerome was the first to answer. ‘What can we do for you, sir? Can we get you a drink?’

Peggy held her breath. She stood still as Jerome walked around the bar and proceeded to tidy away the box of beer mats.

‘No. No, thank you. I … I was wondering if Peggy mightn’t walk down to the lake with me.’ He looked at Peggy. ‘If you have the time, of course. There are just some questions I have. I could use some local knowledge to help me answer them. If you wouldn’t mind.’

Frank glanced at Paddy, and acknowledged him with a quick nod of his head.

‘Paddy Delahunt,’ Paddy introduced himself. ‘Old friend of the family’s’.

‘Frank Ryan.’

Peggy watched them shake hands. She could hear her heart beating in her ears, and she felt very warm. Frank raised his eyebrows at her.

‘Of course, Frank.’ She looked up at Jerome, silently willing him not to make a fuss. ‘You’ll manage for an hour?’

He paused a moment. ‘Sure,’ he said at last. ‘You go on ahead. I’ll be grand here.’

Peggy wanted to hug him, but instead she just smiled. As she walked towards the door with Frank, she turned and pointed at the paperwork set out on the table where she had been sitting.

‘I’ll tidy that up,’ Jerome said before she had a chance to speak. Peggy just smiled at him again, and walked through the door Frank held open for her.

‘Well,’ Paddy swung around and grinned at Jerome. ‘If I’d known that there was this much excitement to be had in Casey’s on Saturday afternoons, I’d make it my business to be in Crumm every weekend.’

‘And you haven’t even heard about the dead body yet,’ Jerome said with a sigh. ‘Sit down there, Paddy. We might as well have a pint.’