Lake of Sorrows

The memory receded, and Ward said, “We’ll have to go up there and check the place where Charlie Brazil said he built his bonfire. It won’t tell us if he was there all night, but at least we’ll know if he was telling the truth about the fire. Did anything turn up in the files about other ritual murder cases?”

As if reading his thoughts about conflagration, Brennan said, “There was a body found burnt to a cinder in Wicklow last winter. At first there was speculation that it might be some sort of ritual thing, but they eventually found out it was a disagreement over drugs. The victim had a bullet in him, and the fellas who put it there tried to make the killing look like a sacrifice to throw investigators off.”

“That’s it? Nothing else?”

“Nothing local, at least nothing with a human victim. Just that case you mentioned to Charlie Brazil.” She took a file from a stack on her desk and tossed it over to him. Ward opened the file and perused the reports and photographs it contained, stopping at the pictures of the butchered kid goat suspended from a slender branch. He studied the detail shots of the narrow noose, the animal’s protruding tongue, the deep gash in its distended throat, the blackening entrails. Poor harmless creature. The ground beneath the kid’s hind legs was exactly as he remembered it from the scene: stained a deep rust red, with three circles drawn in blood. A hideous prank, or some demented notion of a sacred rite?

“Tell me more about that case,” Maureen said. “You said you worked on it?”

“I’d only been here about three years. There were three separate incidents, two lambs and a kid goat killed in some apparent ritual sacrifice. It was bad—you’ve seen the file. I had a suspicion at the time that Charlie Brazil was probably just a convenient scapegoat. Now I’m not so sure.”

“What about Maguire?” Brennan turned the pages of her notebook to their most recent interview. “He says Ursula Downes reported a prowler and asked him to come over and investigate, which he did. He says she’d cut herself on glass from the kitchen window, which was broken when he arrived, and he got blood on his clothing when he helped her bind up the wound.”

“There was a fairly deep cut on Ursula’s left hand. We should ask Dr. Friel to check for any fragments of glass in the wound.”

“Right, but Maguire also admits that it’s his skin under the victim’s fingernails. He claims she attacked him when he questioned her story about the prowler and refused to stay any longer. He says he put his bloodstained clothing into the washing machine when he arrived home. Claims he doesn’t know what happened to his waterproof gear. He did keep it outside the back door of the house where anyone might have taken it. And why would you wear your own kit if you’re planning to kill someone? Wouldn’t you get a nice disposable mac? But I suppose that sort of mistake makes sense if it was a crime of passion, spur-of-the-moment. You’ve done the deed; you’re covered in blood, and for some reason you can’t take the time to get rid of the evidence. So you plant the waterproofs somewhere and hope someone will buy the idea that you’re being stitched up.”

Ward remembered the plumes of blood on Ursula Downes’s bathroom wall. She had probably been unconscious but still alive when her throat was cut, a fact that didn’t square with Maureen’s spur-of-the-moment theory. And the tableau, all that peat heaped around the bathtub, also smacked of ritualistic obsession, not crime of passion. “But why bring the waterproofs in the first place? It wasn’t raining on Thursday evening. And what about motive? Maguire admits he was involved with Ursula Downes years ago, but it doesn’t seem to have been a terrible secret. Not worth killing for.”

“Maybe it’s something else. They’re both archaeologists; maybe it’s professional. She knows something about him that he doesn’t want other people to know—something to do with his academic work, his research; something that might compromise his career, his ambitions to be department chairman one day. We’ve got to at least check him out.”

“Agreed. Let’s add him to the list for the boys in Dublin, get some background on him.”

“It would be so nice and simple if it was Maguire.”

“Wouldn’t it, though? Somehow I doubt this case is going to untangle that easily. I keep going back to this thing with the three knots,” Ward said. “Both bodies found in the bog had knotted leather cords around their necks. One’s a couple of thousand years old, one’s more recent. But the cord was how the newer body was identified; Teresa Brazil said her brother-in-law Danny always wore a similar cord with three knots, some sort of good luck charm. And then, three days after Danny’s body turns up, somebody strangles Ursula Downes with the same sort of triple-knotted cord. Both also had their throats cut. One was found in a bog, one in a bathtub that had been heaped around with peat.”

“What’s the peat supposed to mean, do you think?”