Lake of Sorrows

“It’s nothing. We’re happy to do it. You said you have one last question, but I hope you don’t mind if I have a few as well. I’ve been trying to work out how everything fits. Nothing is straightforward, is it? It all seems tangled up. How do you begin to unravel it?”

“Like untying a knot, I suppose; one thread at a time.”

“How do you know when to stop?”

“In my case, it’s usually not a matter of choice. Other cases begin pressing, and eventually the old ones have to be abandoned. It’s got to be that way; otherwise there would be no end. Not what you wanted to hear, is it?”

“No, but I understand. That’s the way it happens.”

Cormac rejoined them wearing a worried expression.

“Is everything all right?” Nora asked.

“It’s nothing urgent. I can tell you later,” he said. “Carry on.”

“I was just going to tell you that we found a lot of interesting material in Desmond Quill’s house in Dublin, including keys to a lockup that was filled with artifacts—mainly Iron Age, from what the experts are telling us. There were also detailed records showing that he’d been doing a great business in stolen antiquities, items nicked from museums. No one even knew they were missing. In addition to the items he’d sold, there were hundreds more he’d apparently kept for himself, all cataloged and documented. Quill was working for the National Museum at the time of the Loughnabrone hoard, overseeing conservation of items from the hoard. He would have had contact with the Brazils, working out here.”

“And they showed him drawings of the things they’d found,” Nora said. “Things they hadn’t handed over to the museum. Can you imagine someone like Quill, only able to see a drawing of that collar, one of the most magnificent archaeological finds in the last fifty years? It must have driven him nearly mad. You said his obsession was Iron Age artifacts?”

“There are a few items from other periods, but that seems to have been his particular fancy. All the items he’d kept were Iron Age, give or take a century.”

“That may be one reason he was so interested in the whole idea of triple death,” Nora said. “He tried to explain to me how he saw bloodletting and sacrifice as spiritual, as though he was giving Ursula and Rachel and Dominic Brazil something greater by killing them. He talked about the astonishing beauty of blood.”

Ward said, “We found at least a half-dozen ceremonial bronze daggers in the lockup, like the one he used on Dominic Brazil, and probably on the other victims as well.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” Nora said, “is why the Brazils would try to sell the collar in the first place. Why wouldn’t they be satisfied with a reward? Even if it was only a fraction of what the collar was worth, it would have been more money than they were ever likely to see in their lifetimes.”

“But to qualify for it,” Cormac said, “they’d have had to prove that they had acquired the collar legally, legitimately. The minute they moved it from the findspot, the provenance became suspect, and their claim would most likely be rendered invalid. Under the treasure-trove laws, the state could have seized the collar, and the Brazils wouldn’t have seen a penny of any reward. Quill was probably smart enough to make it seem as though their best choice was to turn it over to him.”

“And it’s easy for us to sit here and analyze after the fact. Situations like that only seem simple from the outside,” Ward said. “Mistrust is a very corrosive force, especially among three people. If Quill set the Brazils against each other, he knew exactly what he was doing. He probably hoped for a betrayal of some kind; he just didn’t anticipate that he would end up without the collar.”

“Here’s something I don’t understand,” Cormac said. “Why did Quill wait so long to try to find the collar? Danny Brazil disappeared twenty-six years ago. If Quill didn’t believe Danny went off on his own, why would he not try to find him, prove that he never went anywhere?”

Ward said, “I imagine he did try to trace Danny, and came up empty. He probably even suspected that Dominic had done away with his brother, but without a body or some evidence of foul play, there was no way he could prove anything.”

Nora said, “But from what Quill said out on the bog, it sounded as if he’d kept pressure on Dominic Brazil all these years. Dominic never broke, because he didn’t know where the collar was. But Quill didn’t know that for certain. He couldn’t risk killing the person who was his only possible lead. But when Danny Brazil turned up, Quill knew exactly who was responsible. He must have heard enough about Danny’s body to assume it was a triple death, and he made sure that his victims’ wounds matched Danny’s—maybe to throw you off, or maybe because he felt some attraction to the method, some connection to the idea of sacrifice. I think in some strange way, it pleased him to see the ritual angle being pursued.”

“All of this was buried for so long. What opened it up again?” Cormac asked.