Lake of Sorrows

Ward sat forward slowly, so as not to draw attention to himself, and watched Owen Cadogan’s lips form the words of his answer—the truth this time, or a lie? They had no proof that Cadogan had been involved with Ursula Downes. But somehow his story seemed false. If only there were some foolproof clue to mendacity. The trouble was, most liars were clever enough to mix in some truth with their lies, so it wasn’t whole cloth. You had to sort it out, check everything they said, not just the parts that seemed suspicious. There were many kinds of lies and many kinds of liars. There were embellishers, people who told things the way they remembered them, usually to their own advantage. Some people set themselves rules about lying, when it was all right and when not acceptable. There were those whose words were never false, but whose actions invariably were. The best liars, in Ward’s experience, were those who knew how to embroider, to stitch together truth and fiction into a seamless fabric. What sort of a liar was Owen Cadogan? As he mused, Ward found himself looking not at Cadogan, but at the secretary working in the next office, separated from them only by a partition that was half glass. He wondered how much she could hear. It was only a single pane, and Brennan’s voice was rather loud. The secretary seemed to be going about her work with a kind of forced concentration that led him to believe that she could hear it all. At this moment, she had her back turned and was typing furiously.

Ward rose and ventured out to her desk, closing the office door behind him. “I wonder if you could point me in the direction of a water tap?” The woman raised her head and pointed wordlessly to the galley kitchen across the hall. “I’m supposed to take this tablet an hour before my dinner,” Ward offered, by way of explanation, “and I nearly always forget. Thanks, Miss…”

“Flood. Aileen Flood.”

Ward ducked across the hall and downed his aspirin tablet with a sip of water, throwing back his head to make sure it went down properly. She regarded him curiously. Then he came back across the hall and observed that the sound from the inner office was indeed perfectly audible, as though there were no partition at all. “Thanks,” he said again, and rejoined Cadogan and Brennan, who hadn’t missed a beat.

“All right. All right. The lad’s name is Charlie Brazil. He got himself into an awful twist about her last summer. If you ask him, he’ll deny it. Some people say he’s not the full shilling, but he’s all right. A good lad—a bit odd, but a good worker. She’d no business messing with him.”

“Does your wife know about your talks with Ursula Downes?” Ward asked.

“Leave my wife out of this,” Cadogan said. His eyes narrowed as he looked across the desk at them.

“I’m afraid we can’t leave your wife out of this, Mr. Cadogan, because you’re on our list as a suspect, and we’re going to have to talk to her about where you were last night.”

Cadogan looked down with the dejected air of someone who was well and truly in it. “She took the children up to her mother’s place in Mayo. They go every summer for a fortnight. She left two days ago.”

“So no one can vouch for your whereabouts last night?”

Cadogan looked away, then back at Brennan. “No, I was home. Alone.”

“And no one saw you at the house, no one phoned you there? I’ll remind you, Mr. Cadogan, that we’re investigating a murder, and that you’re under very serious consideration as a suspect. Can anyone give evidence about where you were last night?”

“No.” Even as his lips formed the word, Cadogan’s eyes flicked over to the window, where his secretary was continuing the pretense of going about her work. But the woman’s stony facial expression, her overprecise movements, betrayed her intense agitation.

“Look, if someone can tell us where you were between one and four o’clock this morning, we’d be delighted to cross you off our list.”

Ward made a point of turning, ever so slightly, so that he was looking straight out at the anxious woman in the next office. But Cadogan wasn’t going to bite.

“There’s no one, I swear. I was alone all evening. All night.”

Brennan regarded Cadogan evenly, giving him a last chance to come clean, then glanced over at Ward. He closed his eyes to tell her he had no additional questions, so she stood, and said, “That’ll do for now. We’ll be in touch when we have any more questions, and of course you can always ring us if you remember anything further.”

Cadogan looked slightly surprised that they were finished with him so soon. He tried to mask it, placing his hands on the table and making a show of getting out of his chair. As they took their leave and headed down the corridor to the exit, Ward glanced back briefly, to see Owen Cadogan crouched by his secretary’s desk. It wasn’t his submissive posture, but the woman’s worried face that piqued Ward’s interest. He turned back to Maureen.

“We won’t have time today, but do you fancy calling in on Ms. Flood at home tomorrow?” he asked.