Lake of Sorrows

“Dr. Gavin mentioned at Danny Brazil’s postmortem that his injuries were very like some she’d seen on ancient corpses from bogs—like the one that turned up here last Friday. She said it’s not certain, but some archaeologists think they might have been human sacrifices. The idea was niggling at me, so I called around yesterday evening to ask her a few more questions about it, and she referred my questions to Maguire. He seemed well up on ancient sacrificial rites, especially the triple death Dr. Gavin mentioned—it’s supposed to have included strangulation, throat-cutting, and drowning.”

“Unfortunately, a lot of people could have had all the pertinent details on the manner of Danny Brazil’s death.” Maureen started ticking off the witnesses on her fingers. “There’s Ursula Downes, for a start, all six people on her crew, and Nora Gavin. And Maguire obviously knew about it, if you talked to him. We know for a fact that Charlie Brazil told his mother about the triple knots, because that’s how she came to think it might be Danny. And that’s not even mentioning all the people that any one of those witnesses could have spoken to after that morning. You know how information travels here; I’m betting that half the county was well up on it by Tuesday afternoon.”

She was right, of course. Still, they would have a look at the two cords. It was at least a possible connection, and there might be others as well. Ward reached for the preliminary autopsy report on Danny Brazil, and turned to Dr. Friel’s description of the injuries: The initial wound is present on the left side of the neck, over the sternocleidomastoid muscle, 6 cm below the left auditory canal. There was something tentative about the injury, as if the assailant hadn’t quite maintained control of the situation, and the victim had struggled. They didn’t have the autopsy report yet, but it was clear from what he’d seen this morning that Ursula Downes’s throat had been cut from side to side, deeply enough to sever the main arteries. Danny Brazil had drowned. Even though the modus operandi seemed similar, the two attacks had had very different results. Were they looking at the same killer, or at someone who for some reason only wanted Ursula’s death to look like Danny Brazil’s?

“What else do we know about Danny Brazil?” Ward asked. “He was twenty-four years old when he was last seen in June 1978. He was unmarried, employed at Bord na Mona as a fitter, and helping his brother, Dominic, work the family farm. Played for the Offaly senior hurling team until he suffered a career-ending injury in 1977. That was also the summer he and Dominic found a significant stash of Iron Age artifacts out on the bog. Just before Danny disappeared, they’d each received ten thousand pounds in reward money.”

“Must have thought they’d won the Lotto,” Maureen said. “Especially at that time. Nobody had two shillings to rub together.”

She was right. The amount seemed almost paltry now, but ten thousand would have been a huge sum in those days. And there were the stories that the Brazils had held out, kept some of the best pieces from the Loughnabrone hoard. People took it for granted that the rumors were true. The brothers had mostly kept to themselves, and hadn’t gone out of their way to refute the common assumption. Ward had thought at the time that the suspicions of the older generation might have been a factor in the whispered accusations against Charlie, but those were things that you could never quite describe or quantify in a file. Some people said that finding the hoard had actually brought bad luck on the Brazils. The question remained: Was there some connection between Danny Brazil’s death and the murder of Ursula Downes, or did someone just want them to make a connection?

“I know it’s tempting to make a link with the older murder,” Maureen said, “but I think we’re looking for something much more recent. At this point I’m still leaning toward a jilted lover, which would lead us straight to Owen Cadogan or Cormac Maguire. They both have motive. Cadogan’s been rejected, and after his carry-on with Ursula the previous summer, that probably wouldn’t sit well. He’d probably feel entitled. Maguire told us his relationship with Ursula Downes was long over, but suppose it wasn’t. Suppose he goes over there hoping to cool things off, and she refuses—maybe threatens to tell his new girlfriend about them. He admits arguing with her; we’ve got traces of his skin under her fingernails, and her blood is all over his waterproofs, for God’s sake. Sometimes it is just that simple, Liam.”