Lake of Sorrows

Ward arrived at the excavation site at a quarter past eleven, and was greeted by the uniformed officer who stood to one side of the sturdy wooden steps leading up to the door of the tea hut. Maureen was already there, taking the team’s names and addresses down in her notebook. Five pairs of eyes followed Ward as he took a chair at the far end of the table, which was littered with boxes of teabags, biscuit packets, and several open milk containers. Someone had made a pot of tea, and several of them warmed their hands on mugs. Their faces were reddened from sun and wind. There was a reason they were all so young, Ward thought as he looked around the room at the apprehensive faces. The work was physically hard, temporary, grim, seasonal—a stepping-stone to other things, not an end in itself. Was he getting old, that they all looked so unformed to him, so unmarked by experience? The shed where they sat was a flimsy trailer; he could hear and feel the wind outside, trying to blow away the whole structure, this paltry affront to its power. Even if it didn’t blow them away, the wind always succeeded, eventually, in wearing down the people who worked here. Soon enough they would all be gone, replaced by others, and the constant wind would still be blowing over the face of the earth.

Ward was acutely aware that he had to treat even such an inexperienced group as potential suspects, until they could safely be eliminated. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about what’s happened,” he began.

“Nothing,” said a stocky lad with close-cropped sandy hair and large gray eyes. “We’ve heard nothing at all. We’ve been here working all morning, and all we know is that we were told to come in here and give our names.” Ward looked down through the list Brennan had handed him, and she pointed to a name: Tony Gardner.

“Then I’m sorry to have to tell you. Ursula Downes was found dead this morning, and it appears that she’s been murdered.”

He could feel the collective jolt as his words registered around the room. He watched their faces for a reaction, that familiar first denial, parrying reality’s brutal thrust, as if a simple “no” could reverse the facts. Such news was always too immense, too illogical, too impossible to accept. “I can’t tell you any more at the moment, except to say that we’ve been in contact with your employers, and they’re sending someone from the firm out here straightaway. I’m here to ask you a few questions about Ursula, and about your work here, to see if we can find a reason anyone might have had to wish her harm. What happened when she didn’t show up at the site this morning?”

Gardner replied for the group: “Nothing. I mean, we didn’t think anything of it, because she wasn’t meant to be here this morning. She was taking the day off, she said—a long weekend. I’m not sure if she was going home to Dublin or somewhere else. She didn’t tell us her plans.”

“So the last time you saw Ursula was—”

“Yesterday evening when we were finishing up here.” Maureen pointed to another name: Trish Walpole. She was an English girl in her early twenties, as Ward guessed most of them were. The natural color in her face had been heightened by the sun, and her fair hair was streaked and layered like straw from the constant wind. She played with a teaspoon as she spoke. “We all took the minibus back to the digs, and I presume Ursula went home as well. She had her own car.”

Beside Trish was a quiet young woman with long dark hair and frightened eyes, who sat on her hands and never looked up. Ward looked down through his list again: Sarah Cummins. This must be terrifying for some of them, perhaps their first time away from home.

“How well did you all know Ursula Downes?”

“Not all that well,” another of the young men replied. “Barry Sullivan,” he added, looking at Ward’s list. “Most of us were just hired on for the summer season. She had her own digs, didn’t really hang around with us. We only saw her out here on the job.”

“Given that limited interaction, were you aware of anyone who might have wished her harm?”

“Not really,” Sullivan said. “I mean, she had a few rows with Owen Cadogan, but I guess I thought they just didn’t get on. The managers have to put up with us, but most of them don’t really give a toss about what we’re doing here; I think they just see us holding up their bloody production schedules. The sooner they can get rid of us, the sooner they can get back to raping the landscape.”

“There’s no need to be melodramatic, Barry,” said Trish Walpole. “They’re really quite good to us here.”

“But Ms. Downes’s relationship with Cadogan was strictly professional, as far as you knew?”

“Yeah. As far as we knew,” Sullivan said. None of the others disagreed.

“And what about her relationship with Charlie Brazil?” Several of the crew shifted in their seats, and Ward could see damp clods falling off their heavy boots onto the layer of brownish peat that already covered the floor.