Lake of Sorrows

She pulled away slightly and turned to look into his eyes, black pools in the encroaching darkness. “How did you know?”

“You’re not a person who gives up, Nora.” He ran one finger along the edge of her jaw and down her throat. “But neither am I.”

She searched his face for proof that he would not give up, even when she was thousands of miles away, tangled up once more in the threads of a dark web that kept spinning and would never allow an end to grief. No matter how much Cormac might reassure her, and no matter how much she might wish for it, no such proof existed.

“Don’t think about any of that right now,” he said. “Rest yourself.”

“But do you know why I have to go? I want you to understand. It’s not that I want to leave you, Cormac. I don’t. It’s not just for Triona’s sake, but for my niece, for my parents—”

“I know,” he said, pressing his lips close to her ear. “Shhh.” She felt his arm close around her, locking them together at least for tonight, and she felt safe, surrounded, quiet inside. Eventually she drifted off, worn out by the long day, the wine, and a surfeit of emotion. She slept profoundly, heavily, like a person drugged.

14

At half past eleven, Liam Ward sat washed in the golden glow of his desk lamp, going through his coins. He wasn’t a serious collector, not like the fanatical dealers with whom he’d corresponded from time to time. The coins in his collection were certainly old—mostly Roman-era English—but not all that rare; none of them could be considered extremely valuable. His was more an aesthetic appreciation; he enjoyed the artistry and symbolism of the form, liked feeling the weight of the coins in his hands, their surfaces worn smooth from touching the palms of generations before him. He liked to imagine their history, to envisage the multitude of debts each piece had paid.

They’d have to find out more about Danny Brazil’s part in discovering the Loughnabrone hoard. Everyone had heard the rumors that there had been more to the hoard, that the Brazils hadn’t turned everything over to the museum. Ward wondered whether Danny and his brother had shared everything equally. He had sensed some tension when Dominic Brazil spoke about the farm. It wouldn’t be the first time that property had caused bitterness between family members, the kind of bitterness that sometimes led to murder. If Dominic had paid the brother for his share of the farm, where had all that money gone when Danny Brazil went into the bog? But if money was the motive, why go to such trouble—why not just bash him over the head, dump the body, and be done with it? No, the method suggested there was more to the story than simple money-grubbing. There were all the signs of sacrifice, and something in that smelled to Ward of revenge, of humiliation.

Another possible—though much less likely—theory was that Danny Brazil was a fallen hero, a champion cut down in his prime. Dr. Gavin’s mention of damaged or deformed sacrificial victims had brought that into Ward’s head. He thought about how seriously some of them took the hurling around here. You’d have thought it was their lives on the line with the outcome of a match. And what was sport, underneath, but a kind of sanitized, ritualized violence? Danny Brazil’s injury had probably cost his teammates the championship, the coveted McCarthy Cup…. Ward had never been that much interested in sport himself, but he thought of the faces he’d occasionally seen as a child—red faces contorted with pain and anger as a match slipped away. What was sport but a thin veneer over the factional fighting it had replaced—ritualized violence, bloody entertainment?

Everywhere around them, in religion, in sport, in politics and entertainment, were daily reminders of how quickly one could go from being carried on the shoulders of a jubilant crowd—greeted with palm fronds, as it were—to being reviled, cast down, crucified and torn to pieces. The pattern was too recognizable not to be seen. Blood lust he understood—someone pushed too far over a tipping point. What he couldn’t fathom was the conspiracy that made it possible to carry out and cover up an atrocity. But history was full of figures able to disconnect, to carry out horrific acts and still pose as decent family men.

They’d have to get back to the Brazils, dig a little deeper. Ward had a sense that Teresa Brazil and her husband knew more than they’d told him, with the husband’s illness providing an excuse when he didn’t feel like talking. And tomorrow he and Maureen could also start on Danny Brazil’s old hurling teammates, to see if they could shed some light on the man. The farm, the family, the hurling, the workshop… where else could Danny Brazil have got in over his head? Some of the seemingly ritual murders carried out recently had turned out to be drug-related executions. But illegal drugs—at least on the scale that usually accompanied killings—had been practically unknown in this area twenty-six years ago.