Lake of Sorrows

No, it isn’t, Ward thought. Things were never that simple. Not just every crime, but every second of existence was fraught with complications, misunderstandings, lies, and cock-ups. Ninety-nine percent of their work was sorting through the chaff to find one solid clue. They could follow dozens of leads in this case, waste precious time pursuing every twisting road to its ultimately fruitless end. Their job over the next few days or weeks would be to try to find the connections between people, connections those people were often trying very hard to hide.

It seemed to Ward that he spent half his life immersed in a shadowy, fictional world, conceiving scenarios that may or may not have happened. Most people imagined detectives as people who dealt in facts, in hard evidence—and that was a vital part of what he did. Still, much of his life remained in the subjective tense. He breathed speculative air, and so, he realized increasingly, did everyone else around him.

11

Once the ice pack had reduced the throbbing in her ankle, Nora reached into her jacket pocket for the drawing she’d robbed from Charlie Brazil. She wasn’t even sure why she’d taken it, except that it seemed somehow significant. She tried to collect her thoughts, to impose some order on all the possibilities that tumbled about in her brain. What use could her feeble theories be against the powerful reality that two people were dead? Danny Brazil and Ursula Downes had been brutally murdered. There were similarities in the way they’d been killed, but she couldn’t shake the thought that something else connected them as well, something that no one had yet grasped. The line back to Danny Brazil went even further into the past, to the time when he and his brother had discovered the Loughnabrone hoard—and, according to the rumors, gold. But if this place was anything like the other places in Ireland where she’d spent time, folklore and legend were on a fairly equal footing with fact.

Just because Charlie Brazil might be involved, that didn’t mean Cadogan was innocent. They could both have been mixed up with Ursula, for similar or very different reasons. Maybe they had all three been in something together, and no one had yet figured it out. And the boyfriend, Desmond Quill…he seemed to have no illusions about Ursula’s character, despite the fact that he was in love with her. What had Ursula thought of Quill?

Nora looked down at the drawing, its edges curled and speckled with black. Struck with a sudden idea, she carried the sketch to Cormac’s work table and rummaged through the papers for his magnifying glass. The artist’s pen strokes leapt out at her through the thick lens. The detail was exquisite; the shield’s curved surface appeared as tiny dots that blended together to form a shadow. She turned the drawing over and saw a series of circles lightly sketched in pencil, and a scribbled inscription: Below a city of sisters, beside a lake of sorrows. That was the way it was here; double and even treble meanings hidden everywhere.

The door rattled against the jamb. Was Charlie Brazil coming after her? She slipped the drawing into the nearest book and kept very still, until she heard Cormac’s voice calling through the stout door: “Nora? Are you there? I haven’t got my key.”

She crossed quickly to the door to let him in, throwing her arms around him, pressing herself into his chest. He seemed a little surprised at her greeting, but not unhappily so. “I wasn’t gone all that long, was I?” he asked. “Everything’s fine. They just asked me a lot of questions.”

“And have they finished with you now?”

“For the moment, anyway.” He tried to give her an encouraging smile, but she sensed his worry.

“How did you get home?”

“The Guards gave me a lift. I tried ringing your mobile, but I couldn’t get through. Did you have it switched off?”

“No, I was waiting for you to call. I was out of the house for a bit; maybe the signal is weak out here in the middle of the bog.”

“You shouldn’t really be wandering around by yourself, Nora. It’s not safe, not after what’s happened. Where did you go?”

“First I tried to find Brona Scully. I thought if she’d been out at the tree, she might have seen you leaving Ursula’s house the other night. Then I went over to Charlie Brazil’s apiary. Something Ursula said to him the other day made me think about it.” She limped back to the work table where she’d hidden the drawing.

Cormac’s alarm was immediate. “Nora, what happened to your leg?” She could hear the anguish behind his words, the jangling fear that she might have gone somewhere she shouldn’t have, on his behalf.