Erin Hart - Lake of Sorrows

Still kneeling, Brazil pressed the tin to his chest and prised off the lid. Bundles of old hundred-pound notes fell onto the ground, and Quill’s face went rigid when he saw what else was inside. “Give it to me,” he said. Brazil lifted out a cloth-wrapped bundle and handed it over to Quill, who dropped the spade, putting one foot on it before he began pulling at the corners of the cloth.

It was probably the color—a luminous, deep yellow-gold—that made the most immediate and indelible impression. It must have been easy to believe that the wearer of this object possessed some supernatural power, such was its exquisite and incorruptible beauty. The rich golden metal seemed to give off its own light.

Quill stood frozen, mute, and Nora began to believe that this was the very first time he’d laid eyes on the collar, after dreaming about its existence for twenty-five years. He had been waiting almost half a lifetime to gaze upon this object with his own eyes, and now he couldn’t tear them away.

“I have a confession to make,” Quill said, finally. “I’ve been toying with you. I know the real reason you killed your brother.” Brazil’s head came up, his haggard features displaying honest curiosity.

“As I said, at first I almost believed that Danny had gone away. There was no other explanation for the fact that the collar was gone. I’ve been watching you all these years, and I have excellent contacts; I would have known if either of you had tried to take it to someone else. But you never did.

“The idea only occurred to me after Danny turned up dead. He might have been planning to swindle both of us. It’s easily done: he moves the collar, plans to take it with him when he leaves the country. But if that had been your reason for killing him, you’d still have the collar and the money. So how did it happen that Danny is dead, but you don’t know where the collar is? There’s only one explanation: you killed him before you found out that he’d taken it and hidden it somewhere else. But, I asked myself, why would Dominic Brazil do something so extraordinarily stupid?

“And suddenly I grasped the whole picture. It was nothing whatever to do with the gold, the money, or the farm. The collar wasn’t all that Danny was taking with him, was it? If you let him get away, you were going to lose a treasure worth more than any gold. This was where you found them, wasn’t it?”

Dominic Brazil didn’t speak for a moment. “They were going to go away, the very next morning. I was just outside, under the window, and I heard them talking, and—” Brazil’s voice and face transformed as he relived those dreadful, decisive moments. “After she’d gone home, he was still lying there in his pelt, smoking a fag. He didn’t even hear me come in. I caught him by that stupid fuckin’ leather cord; all I had was my penknife, but I was going to cut his thieving throat. I got one good cut in, but he started fighting like the devil and knocked the knife away. That’s when he ran out onto the bog—it was all wild bog around here that time. I couldn’t find the knife, so I picked up a hurley and followed him. I caught up to him and hit him a clout, and down he went. I thought he was dead, so I dragged him to the bog hole. I was just looking for someplace to hide the body until I could come back. I saw his eyes open down there at the bottom of the hole. But I couldn’t stop; I just kept piling in everything I could find, down into that hole, until he was gone. He was just gone, and everything was peaceful and quiet.”

Dominic Brazil looked as if he hadn’t much more life in him. His complexion was ashy, and his face telegraphed pain with every shallow exhalation.

“You didn’t know he’d taken the collar?” Quill asked.

“Not until afterward—when I went to the spot where we’d hidden it. It was all Danny’s idea to keep the fucking thing. I never gave a curse about the gold. I knew it was bad luck having anything to do with it, with the likes of you. He could have taken every one of those bloody yokes we found, and good riddance, if he’d only let me have my Teresa, my own wife. When Danny was gone, I thought she’d belong to me. Fuckin’ daft, I was then. It took me another twenty-five years to suss it out, that she never belonged to anyone but herself.” He looked up at Quill, and Nora felt an icy finger down her backbone as she wondered why Dominic Brazil used the past tense in speaking about his wife.

Neither man moved or spoke for a long moment; then Quill broke the silence. “What about the whole ritual, then—the triple death?”

Dominic Brazil’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no triple anything.”

Quill shook his head in disbelief. “You’re telling me it was accidental? What about Ursula Downes and the other girl, Rachel Briscoe? Don’t tell me those deaths were mere accidents as well?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re on about. I didn’t kill those girls—”

Dominic Brazil started to protest, but Quill twisted behind him, wrenched his forehead back with one hand and with the other drew the dagger sharply across his throat. A fountain of blood gushed forth. Nora felt Brona Scully go rigid with terror beside her, and quickly clamped a hand over the girl’s mouth to keep her from crying out. There had been no warning. A man was dead, and they hadn’t even had time to react.

Dominic Brazil’s suddenly lifeless body sagged sharply sideways, his mouth still open in protest. Quill leaned forward to close Brazil’s staring eyes and murmured, “No, you didn’t. You might as well have. They never would have died except for you.”

Nora watched in frozen horror as Quill felt for a pulse. Satisfied that there was none, he reached into his pocket for several lengths of knotted black cord and laid them beside the body, pressed Brazil’s right hand firmly around the dagger handle, and then let it fall. No doubt he had taken the same exquisite care in arranging the bodies of Ursula Downes and Rachel Briscoe. Nora pressed herself to the wall and felt the air closing in around her.

At last Desmond Quill moved away, stopping to cast one last glance back at his ghastly tableau, as if considering the effect the scene might have on the person who eventually discovered it. Nora felt Brona begin to tremble beside her. Quill was still lingering, considering his handiwork, when she felt her mobile phone begin to vibrate against her hip. She reached for it instinctively, but by then it was too late: the quick double ring had given her away.

Quill’s voice was chilling. “Come out where I can see you.”

If he came any closer, he might see them both. Nora climbed to her feet, pressing Brona Scully’s head to the ground and willing the girl not to move.

“Closer,” Quill said. She moved toward him, stepping to the side to draw his vision away from where Brona was hidden in the weeds beside the shed. The phone had stopped ringing by the time she stood face-to-face with Desmond Quill. He’d taken the dagger from Dominic Brazil’s hand, and he used it to direct her movements. “Give me that mobile.”

She tried to press the call button as she passed it to him, but he must have seen the slight movement; he deliberately switched the phone off before putting it in his pocket. Then he picked up one of the knotted leather thongs and marched her ahead of him to the lakeshore, where he hurled the mobile as far as he could out over the water. “Thousands of years from now, they’ll dig up that curious artifact and display it as a votive offering. So now you know the whole story, Dr. Gavin.”

Nora knew she had to keep him talking as long as she could. One way was to appeal to his vanity. “Not quite. I still don’t know how you knew where the collar was.”