Lake of Sorrows

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I hated her too, and I’m not sorry she’s dead.” Ward had been around canals and locks enough to know how to stick in a wedge and keep the floodgate open once it was cracked. His job right now was to lever it further open, keep the flow going.

“We have it on good authority that Cadogan’s affair with Ursula Downes was not over.”

“Who told you that?”

“We have an eyewitness who saw them engaged in—what would you call it?—a rather intimate conversation.” Ward watched as this information did its corrosive work on Aileen Flood’s pride.

“She was a right scheming bitch, that Ursula—thought she could just come back and start ordering Owen about. She never cared about him. You should have seen her, coming into his office and asking had he worked up the courage to ask me for a ride, in that horrible, mocking tone. She laughed at him, then expected him to fall down on his two knees and adore her—”

Ward said as gently as he could, “But he did adore her, didn’t he? He was still obsessed with her. Couldn’t stop thinking about her. And there was nothing you could do.” He watched as Aileen Flood’s eyes filled with tears once more. “You’ve never actually slept with Owen Cadogan, have you, Aileen?”

Her voice came out in a choked whisper. “No.”

There it was, Ward thought, the strange and shameful truth—and it was not that Aileen Flood was carrying on with someone else’s husband, but that she was in love with a man who had so little regard for her.

“It hardly seems fair that if Owen Cadogan killed Ursula and only came to you afterward, you can still be charged as an accessory to murder, just as if you had helped him.”

Her eyes grew large. “It’s not true. You’re just saying that.”

“It is true, Aileen. But you didn’t stop to think about it, did you, when he came to you for help that night? You’ve gotten much better at lying since all this began, haven’t you? But one thing I can promise you is that Owen Cadogan has gotten much better than you. It’s become so easy for him that he does it all the time now. No bother on him at all. He lies to his wife, he lies to his friends. He lied to you about Ursula once, Aileen, when he said he was finished with her. Why wouldn’t he do it again?”

Brennan said, “Do you know what he did to her, Aileen? Shall I tell you—”

“No, please, please, I don’t want to know. And I’m telling you, whatever was done, Owen didn’t do it. He arrived at my house at a quarter past two and said he’d been at Ursula’s and that she was dead, someone had murdered her, and he needed my help. I couldn’t say no. He said she was dead when he arrived, and I believed him. I had to believe him, didn’t I?”

“Do you want to go and talk to Cadogan now?” Brennan asked, once they were in the car and headed back toward the station. “We might not have any reason to hold him, but we can let him know what we’ve got—his own admission that he was at Ursula’s house on the night of the murder. We can at least make him sweat. I’d like that.”

“Let’s go, then. You know where he lives?”

Brennan nodded. “It always amazes me,” she said, “how men can go on behaving like such absolute shite hawks, and women still manage to be astonished. Stupid cows.”

Aileen Flood’s performance seemed to have touched a nerve, but Ward wasn’t sure it would be entirely appropriate for him to go probing into his partner’s personal life. It wasn’t only women, he reflected, stealing a glance at Maureen’s strong profile beside him. All of us insist upon our illusions, upon substituting dreams and distorted memories for the real thing. He’d certainly done it himself, and did it still, as the beautiful, quiet girl he’d fallen in love with became brightly polished over time, and the real Eithne—the thin limbs, haggard face, and compulsive gestures—had almost faded away in the reflected light of the favored image. It seemed to him that delusion was the most natural of human states; it was honesty that was the aberration.

5

“We’re going in circles,” Nora said. She looked at all the papers she and Cormac had laid out on the table before them: Charlie Brazil’s two drawings, the book about Iron Age metalwork, the list of Loughnabrone artifacts from the National Museum. They’d spent the entire afternoon and evening going through all the facts, an exercise that had proved almost entirely fruitless. Cormac had tried placing a few phone calls to establish whether Rachel Briscoe was the daughter of his former colleague, but no one he’d spoken to so far had been able to make that connection.

“Maybe we should quit trying to work it out,” Nora said, “and just bring Ward all these scraps of things we’ve found. He’s got different pieces of the puzzle as well. Maybe some of this will make more sense to him than it does to us.” She began searching under the papers for the policeman’s card.