Lake of Sorrows

There were plenty of leads to follow on this one—too many. And many layers had settled over this murder in the years since the deed had been done. Who knew what would come up when they started probing around under the surface? Ward closed his coin album, placed it carefully back in the desk drawer, and turned the key in the lock.

15

Owen Cadogan drove to the abandoned storage shed at the edge of the Loughnabrone works and parked his car among the trees. He wasn’t terribly worried about being seen. No one used the back road anymore since the pipe factory had closed down a few years ago. Thirty years earlier, when the bog was in full production, they’d built a factory adjacent to the workshop, to make cement drainpipes for siphoning the water off the peat. The factory had closed once all the drains were laid. Eventually it would all be gone, he thought, and himself with it.

He unlocked the storage shed with a key from the chain on which he kept his office and car keys. This was where he and Ursula had met last summer, hastily and on the sly. The taste of those illicit encounters lingered on the back of his tongue. She’d felt the same kind of excitement, he knew; now she claimed it was over, that she’d moved on, and didn’t need him or want him anymore. After he’d spent the whole bloody winter dreaming of her, anticipating the next time.

He’d even started fantasizing about leaving Pauline, only to find out that what they’d done had meant nothing to Ursula. He had seen it in her eyes when she’d arrived this summer. He’d been a temporary diversion to her, nothing more. Anger and jealousy welled up in his throat, choking him. Nothing was over until he said it was over. He’d make sure she understood that.

No one else had a key to this building. He surveyed the small, crowded room, trying to keep alive the memory of how he’d felt there, looking at Ursula’s glistening face, certain in the knowledge that he’d made her feel something. He’d enjoyed having her in this place, not at all like the comfortable marriage bed, but hard, rough, and dangerous. A person might get hurt here.

Moonlight filtered through the filthy glass of the window. He looked down and saw his own handprint on a bag of cement stacked in the corner of the shed, evidence of where, a few months earlier, he’d stood with his trousers around his ankles, gasping and straining against her. He’d never done with his wife the things he did with Ursula. The intensity of the release he felt with her actually frightened him, made him feel that he was somehow abnormal. But once tasted, it had spurred a hunger that nothing else would fill. And now she was demeaning him further by making him beg for it, by holding his need over him like a club.

He went over those first few moments again, as he had a thousand times before. He’d given Ursula a lift home after some official function over in Birr. The Carlton Arms Hotel. He remembered almost nothing about the journey now; it had been wiped out, obliterated by what had happened when they arrived at her place, what he’d come to think of as his final moments as an ordinary man. When he’d pulled the car up the drive of her rented house, she’d reached over without a word and unzipped his trousers. They’d both been half pissed, but not completely out of their heads, and he hadn’t said no. How different everything would be now if he had.

After that night, they’d met almost daily in this old supply shed. There had been a few other places as well: in the woods bordering the canal, and once—only once, and most spectacularly—right out in the middle of the bog, on the sweet, yielding surface of a fresh peat stockpile under a full moon. That time had been so intense he’d thought he was having a heart attack, or a stroke at the very least.

Trying to re-create the intensity of that night, he’d emptied a dozen or more bags of peat moss onto the floor. Over the peat he’d draped woolen blankets. He now gathered them up and took them to the door and shook each one vigorously, until no more dust emanated with each snap of the rough fabric. When he had arranged the blankets once more, he stepped back and surveyed the scene. It was like a nest, an animal’s lair. Perhaps that was why he’d never been able to recapture those few ecstatic moments out under the broad mantle of sky.

From behind a stack of cement bags, Cadogan coaxed a large metal toolbox. He flipped the latch to open the lid. No one had touched these things for a long time, the handcuffs, the velvet hood, the silk scarves. It was just games, he’d told himself, just elaborate playacting. Harmless, really. And it had all started innocently enough, when the necktie he’d taken off had become the rope in a playful tug-of-war. It was Ursula who’d suggested going further; he’d had to be talked into it. But the craving was within him now, had wormed its way into his mind like a sinister, corrupting force. He’d become an animal, a monster.