Lake of Sorrows

“They were necessary sacrifices. I’m afraid you’re looking for saints, hearts of gold where there were none. Beneath her damaged exterior, Ursula Downes was nothing but a vicious, drunken slag. I was actually quite fond of her, but that is the truth. And did you even know Rachel Briscoe? She came into Ursula’s house that night with a knife drawn. I’m sure she would have slit Ursula’s throat in a heartbeat—if I hadn’t done it already. She saw me and tried to get away. It took me until last night to find her, the daft little bitch. I gave each of them something more: a triple death. A perfect death.”

Nora stood still, hoping for a chance to reach for the dagger, as he drew closer. Quill reached up and put his fingers around her throat. His face was only inches from hers, and she knew he could feel the pulse beneath her skin.

“I’ll be sorry about you, Dr. Gavin. I’ve actually enjoyed talking with you. And not everything I told you about Ursula was a lie.” Quill’s plummy voice resonated in his chest; she could feel its vibrations traveling through his flesh and bones into her own. His eyes regarded her without feeling.

If she could create a distraction, maybe Brona could escape. She reached up and felt Quill’s fingers around her throat. Her voice came in a hoarse whisper: “Don’t you want to know what gave you away?” She let her eyes slide down to the triskelion design on the pin that held his tie in place. “You were wearing that same tie pin in the newspaper pictures taken after the discovery of the Loughnabrone hoard. Is it real, or a replica? You must be very attached to it, to have worn the same piece for twenty-five years. That’s how Ursula knew you were involved, and that’s how I figured it out as well.”

Quill’s lips curved in a mirthless smile. “Aren’t you clever? Ursula thought she was clever, too, thought she’d outwitted me.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Do you know what her grand plan was? First of all, she assumed that I had murdered Danny Brazil. Her plan, if you could even call it that, was to use the paltry evidence she’d scraped together to blackmail me—as though fear of exposure would be enough to make me do whatever she wanted. All she wanted was enough money to buy a one-way ticket to someplace warm. She thought all this was about money.”

“So if it’s not about money, what is it about?”

“I doubt you would understand.”

“Let me try. If you’re going to kill me, you owe me some sort of explanation. I want to understand.”

He moved behind her, tipping her head back and looking down into her eyes. His upside-down face looked distorted and strange. “You know, somehow I believe you do. But how do you explain something that isn’t based in reason? Look out there—” He tipped her chin down again and gestured toward the lake and bog that stretched before them. “You might as well ask for reasons from the earth, the water, the wind.

“It grieves me when people talk about an artifact only in terms of its monetary worth. As if its significance can be quantified, reduced, vulgarized in that way. I used to work in museums, and now they depress me unutterably—the contents of votive hoards, fallen from powerful talismans to mere trinkets and curiosities, and all those throngs of bored schoolchildren and gaping tourists trooping past, sullying sacred objects with undeserving, jaded eyes.” He held up the collar with his free hand. “Can anyone be blamed for wanting to keep this from them? Apart from its exquisite form, an object like this is nothing less than a window through which we can gain access to a mind that grasped the most astonishing and sophisticated concepts. The person who created it worked in a miraculous material that never decays, never corrodes. He shaped it truly believing that his inspired creation would confer superhuman power on the person who wore it. Who are we to disparage his beliefs? We carry them within us still. What is Christianity but blood sacrifice masquerading as modern religion? We’ve lost our faith in the world around us, in our own deeper selves—in the sacred connection between blood and death, the places on earth that can lead us deeper within ourselves. The destruction of this bog is a case in point. I detest that superior attitude we hold today toward ancient people; it releases a kind of fury in me. You probably can’t understand that, can you?”

“To a point. But is any object—even something so exceptional and exquisite and powerful—really worth the lives of three people?”