Lake of Sorrows

It was still early in the investigation, Ward realized, but they were very short of information on the victim. The house where Ursula Downes had been staying was only temporary quarters, and it had yielded very little useful information about her; the testimony they’d been able to gather so far from people who’d had contact with her here was sketchy and incomplete. They needed a fuller picture of the victim in order to imagine the crime.

He reached for the rucksack he’d brought back from the scene, and started to go through the contents. Brennan listed and described each object on an inventory form as he extracted it from the bag. “Appointment diary—not much in it; I’ll have a look through that. Clipboard and paperwork—related to the excavation, looks like. Pens and pencils. Small purse with identification, driving license, business cards, fifty-seven euros and—” He counted out the change. “Forty-three cents. Mobile phone. Why don’t you have a look at the phone—check all the calls made and received in the past few days. By the way, what’s the word from Dublin—have they been in touch about the search of Ursula’s flat?”

“They’re sending a team over right now,” Maureen said, looking at her watch. “Anything else you need from them? What about Desmond Quill—hadn’t we better check his alibi as well? I mean, it’s unlikely that he drove out here, cut her throat, and then hung around to see who might discover the body, but we’ve still got to check him out.”

“Yes, see if they can send someone ’round to check Quill’s story for Thursday evening. He says he was playing his usual chess game that night, and was occupied with that until quite late. Dr. Friel puts time of death between midnight and four a.m., so if we can eliminate Quill, we can concentrate on a few of the others.”

“Ah, yes—the others.”

“Let’s go over the interview notes, see where we might have a few holes where we can start digging.”

Maureen reached for her notebook and flipped back a few pages to the start of the interviews on the case. “Nora Gavin says she saw Owen Cadogan making threatening gestures toward Ursula Downes on Monday afternoon last. Dr. Gavin also says that the following day, Ursula turned the tables, giving Cadogan a slap in the face and a right old tongue-lashing. A couple of very public quarrels with the victim in the days running up to the murder, and no alibi for that night.”

Ward remembered Cadogan’s tight-lipped secretary. “Unless perhaps Aileen Flood has a slightly different story than the one he gave us. Let’s wait and talk with her tomorrow. And don’t forget we also have Desmond Quill’s statement, saying Ursula was seeing Owen Cadogan last summer, and that he’d been harassing her since she arrived last week—ringing her mobile, leaving crude messages on her windows. There was something that looked like red spray paint on the broken window glass in the bin in Ursula’s kitchen. I sent it along to the lab; if it was one of those messages Quill described, they might be able to reconstruct it, tell us what it said. Her mobile also ought to tell us if Cadogan was the person ringing her up day and night.”

“His story about warning Ursula off Charlie Brazil sounds to me like a complete load of rubbish. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Ursula wasn’t somehow involved with Charlie Brazil.”

Ward considered that possibility. “We’ve got Dr. Gavin’s statement that she overheard Charlie speaking with Ursula Downes—she was blackmailing him, threatening to expose something he’d been hiding.”

“What do people normally want to keep hidden?” Brennan said. “Bastard children, buried treasure, family skeletons…Whatever it is, though, we’re going to have a job finding out, since he flatly denies that conversation ever took place. We should also check out that place he mentioned—the pipe shed on the road to the old power station.”

“What do you think of Charlie’s story about building a midsummer bonfire?”

“Ah, come on, Liam. Nobody does that anymore.”

Ward thought back to Charlie Brazil’s guarded expression when he’d talked to them about the bonfire. Brennan wasn’t often wrong, but he thought she was mistaken in this case. The attraction of fire was deep and instinctive, inexplicable, and there were certain areas, especially in the West, where people still made huge bonfires on special nights. Ward felt suddenly pierced by the memory of an incident that had happened more than thirty years ago, one of his first official tasks as a young Garda officer. He’d been asked to put the boot down on a Saint John’s Eve bonfire, at the request of a parish priest who had no time for such remnants of pagan foolishness. He had driven out to the spot thinking it was probably harmless enough, wondering what the hell he was doing there. Then he’d seen the huge fire. He had stood for a long time, watching as flames and embers reached skyward, through them seeing human faces, their reddened features exaggerated and transformed into surreal masks by the firelight.