Lake of Sorrows

But the killer had shown his hand by going after the drawing. It was the one thing that definitely linked Danny Brazil’s death with Ursula Downes. Rachel Briscoe might just have become an unfortunate liability, if she’d seen someone at Ursula’s house the night of the murder—or perhaps there was some other reason she’d been singled out. Loughnabrone…It suddenly struck Nora that last night the lake’s poetic name had become literally true. She didn’t even have to close her eyes to imagine Rachel Briscoe’s pale form pitching forward in the moonlight, helpless and alone as her blood mingled with the water. What desperate need had required so terrible a sacrifice? She felt a clench of regret and felt hot tears come to her eyes, reliving those fleeting moments in the car the other day, remembering the defensive pitch of Rachel’s dark eyebrows, her self-protective posture, and most of all the naked confusion and anger in the girl’s face. She should have made an effort, done something more. What good did it do now, wiping away useless tears when they were too late? Stop it, stop it, said the voice in her head. Stop beating yourself up and think about the drawing.

It had come from Charlie Brazil’s shed. He must have known that Ursula had taken it. Nora thought of Charlie’s hands around her ankle, his own triple-knotted necklace, how terrified she had felt when he mentioned Ursula’s interest in the significance of the three knots.

If Charlie was involved, it was possible that he wasn’t acting alone. What if dealing in stolen antiquities had been a family endeavor, the thing that had gotten Danny Brazil killed? It could be that Charlie was acting on his father’s behalf. Ursula might have found out what they were up to, and threatened to expose them.

Owen Cadogan wasn’t completely off the hook either. She’d spent some time thinking about him after they’d gotten home last night. Those things he’d dumped in the canal may have been evidence of his connection with Ursula, or Rachel Briscoe, or both of them. It looked as if he enjoyed tying people up. Maybe things got out of hand, and the whole staged ritual was just a cover-up for an accidental killing. But it was possible that Cadogan was involved in smuggling artifacts as well. His relationship with Ursula could somehow have been connected.

All these elaborate conspiracies were just possibilities—and pure conjecture, really. She knew from bitter experience that what the Guards would need was concrete proof.

Nora suddenly remembered that she and Cormac had been planning to talk to Brona Scully, to find out whether someone had frightened her last night. If Cormac was right about somebody being after Brona, maybe she could identify the person. Charlie Brazil she’d know, certainly; but she might not know Owen Cadogan, except by sight. Nora remembered the picture of Cadogan she’d seen last night in Michael Scully’s file on Loughnabrone. She dived into the jumble of books and papers on the floor, found the file, and flipped quickly past the raft of yellowed newspaper cuttings.

She came to a stack of black-and-white news photos. Most of them featured only the Brazils, with Danny in front holding up a corroded metal blade. One of the pictures was the same shot she’d seen in Cadogan’s office, of Dominic and Danny Brazil accompanied by a third man. This picture had not been cropped, and the lower part of the third man’s face was visible. There was something vaguely familiar about him, she thought—perhaps the posture, the body language; she couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. Was it just that she’d seen him in the other photograph?

Then her eyes fell on the perfectly knotted tie and the unusual pin. The image was minuscule but unmistakable, a testimony to pleasing and deceptively simple Iron Age design: a triskelion.

All this time, they had been so focused on the objects in the hoard that they hadn’t paid enough attention to the people involved. She looked more closely at the hands in the photograph, remembering the elegant fingers arranging coins on a table into triangles and rows of three. The missing link between Ursula Downes and Danny Brazil had been staring her in the face since the day she’d arrived, but now she knew his name: Desmond Quill.

8

Teresa Brazil set her small brown suitcase by the kitchen door. She had packed the case only twice in her life before, once the day before she was to be married, and once—

It was all right to think about it now. The past had been blocked off, dammed up; but the sight of that triple-knotted cord on the policeman’s desk a few days ago had started a slow drip that had grown into a steady flow, and finally into a deluge that she was powerless to stop. The long-dry lakebed of her soul was flooded with images, words, feelings, and sensations long denied. Staying here would be fatal; it would mean drowning in memory.