Erin Hart - Lake of Sorrows

Nora attacked the loose photos that had been dumped on the floor. She had previously just scooped them up and put them back in the box, but now she sat down to reorder them. She had a box like this herself, photographs that wouldn’t fit in any album, odd sizes, or single shots of events no one remembered. Most of these pictures were ruined, curled and with mottled, berrylike wine stains. She’d have to take them back to Evelyn and let her decide what to do with them. She started sorting through old black-and-white photographs of Gabriel and Evelyn in their younger days; snapshots taken at parties where everyone was drinking and smoking; pictures of Gabriel at work on an excavation; a copy of an image she’d seen at Cormac’s house, of himself and Gabriel in a trench, proudly displaying their discovery. About halfway into the pile was a faded color photo, crumpled into a ball. She opened up the wrinkled print and saw the image, faded now; Gabriel and Evelyn McCrossan, and Desmond Quill. Their hair had been darker in those days, their faces unlined. From the clothing, the men’s haircuts and long sideburns, Nora guessed the picture had been taken sometime in the early seventies.

Quill’s words came back to her like an echo. Haven’t you ever wanted something so much, Dr. Gavin, that you were willing to do anything to get it? She’d assumed he was talking about the collar, but perhaps he had meant something else as well. It suddenly came to her what Quill had meant out on the bog about Evelyn McCrossan being careless, leaving a key where anyone could find it. A shiver slid down her spine.

The front doorbell sounded, and Nora instinctively shoved the picture back in the box and put the lid on. She checked the small diamond-shaped window and saw Liam Ward standing outside the cottage door, head bent, his expression thoughtful.

“Good evening, Dr. Gavin. Sorry to be disturbing you again—”

“Not at all. Please come in, Detective.” Cormac was just coming down the stairs.

“Good, I’m glad you’re both here,” Ward said. “I have a bit of official business, one last question, if you have a minute.”

Nora was about to show Ward into the sitting room when Cormac’s mobile sounded. He looked at the number and said, “Sorry, I should take this.” He headed back upstairs, and they could hear him answer. “Hello, Mrs. Foyle. Is everything all right?” Geraldine Foyle was the neighbor Cormac had asked to check on his father from time to time, at the house up in Donegal—something that had proved a source of tension with his father several times before. Nora hoped it wasn’t something more serious this time.

She led Ward into the sitting room, where they settled in a couple of chairs near the fire, but the policeman seemed somewhat ill at ease. Nora studied his ever-present olive raincoat, the slender wrists and hands that emerged from the sleeves, the long nose and soft brown eyes, the wiry salt-and-pepper hair. This was a man who projected an air of gentleness, and Nora wondered again what had pulled him into police work. No doubt the same thing that drove her and countless others: intense curiosity, a need to know, to learn, to connect the dots—though now it seemed to her that the more you actually learned, the less it was possible to understand.

“I’ve just come from Michael Scully’s,” Ward said. “He said you’d be taking him to the hospital to see Brona in a while. I wanted to thank you for that, and for everything you’ve done.”

“It’s nothing. We’re happy to do it. You said you have one last question, but I hope you don’t mind if I have a few as well. I’ve been trying to work out how everything fits. Nothing is straightforward, is it? It all seems tangled up. How do you begin to unravel it?”

“Like untying a knot, I suppose; one thread at a time.”

“How do you know when to stop?”

“In my case, it’s usually not a matter of choice. Other cases begin pressing, and eventually the old ones have to be abandoned. It’s got to be that way; otherwise there would be no end. Not what you wanted to hear, is it?”

“No, but I understand. That’s the way it happens.”

Cormac rejoined them wearing a worried expression.

“Is everything all right?” Nora asked.

“It’s nothing urgent. I can tell you later,” he said. “Carry on.”

“I was just going to tell you that we found a lot of interesting material in Desmond Quill’s house in Dublin, including keys to a lockup that was filled with artifacts—mainly Iron Age, from what the experts are telling us. There were also detailed records showing that he’d been doing a great business in stolen antiquities, items nicked from museums. No one even knew they were missing. In addition to the items he’d sold, there were hundreds more he’d apparently kept for himself, all cataloged and documented. Quill was working for the National Museum at the time of the Loughnabrone hoard, overseeing conservation of items from the hoard. He would have had contact with the Brazils, working out here.”

“And they showed him drawings of the things they’d found,” Nora said. “Things they hadn’t handed over to the museum. Can you imagine someone like Quill, only able to see a drawing of that collar, one of the most magnificent archaeological finds in the last fifty years? It must have driven him nearly mad. You said his obsession was Iron Age artifacts?”

“There are a few items from other periods, but that seems to have been his particular fancy. All the items he’d kept were Iron Age, give or take a century.”

“That may be one reason he was so interested in the whole idea of triple death,” Nora said. “He tried to explain to me how he saw bloodletting and sacrifice as spiritual, as though he was giving Ursula and Rachel and Dominic Brazil something greater by killing them. He talked about the astonishing beauty of blood.”

Ward said, “We found at least a half-dozen ceremonial bronze daggers in the lockup, like the one he used on Dominic Brazil, and probably on the other victims as well.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” Nora said, “is why the Brazils would try to sell the collar in the first place. Why wouldn’t they be satisfied with a reward? Even if it was only a fraction of what the collar was worth, it would have been more money than they were ever likely to see in their lifetimes.”

“But to qualify for it,” Cormac said, “they’d have had to prove that they had acquired the collar legally, legitimately. The minute they moved it from the findspot, the provenance became suspect, and their claim would most likely be rendered invalid. Under the treasure-trove laws, the state could have seized the collar, and the Brazils wouldn’t have seen a penny of any reward. Quill was probably smart enough to make it seem as though their best choice was to turn it over to him.”

“And it’s easy for us to sit here and analyze after the fact. Situations like that only seem simple from the outside,” Ward said. “Mistrust is a very corrosive force, especially among three people. If Quill set the Brazils against each other, he knew exactly what he was doing. He probably hoped for a betrayal of some kind; he just didn’t anticipate that he would end up without the collar.”

“Here’s something I don’t understand,” Cormac said. “Why did Quill wait so long to try to find the collar? Danny Brazil disappeared twenty-six years ago. If Quill didn’t believe Danny went off on his own, why would he not try to find him, prove that he never went anywhere?”

Ward said, “I imagine he did try to trace Danny, and came up empty. He probably even suspected that Dominic had done away with his brother, but without a body or some evidence of foul play, there was no way he could prove anything.”