Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

The teenage girl standing behind Claffey rolled her eyes. “Ah, for God’s sake, Da, can we just go?”

Claffey turned on her. “And leave this lot to say what they found or didn’t find? I’ll not have any of this bunch of cute hoors trying to smuggle away our good fortune, and that’s that. What are you doing here, anyway? Who’s minding the chipper? Get back there, yeh little slapper!” He pointed the way.

Deflated, the girl turned and trudged toward the van parked at the roadside. Claffey turned back to them, folded his arms across his chest, and planted his feet. “Well, what are ye all lookin’ at? Get on with it, why don’t ye?”

Detective Cusack pressed her lips together as if to keep from saying something she might regret. She turned her back on Claffey and continued leading them to the white tarps set around the drain.

“Before we begin,” Cormac said, “I wonder, could you point out whoever it was found the body? Just in case we have questions for him.”

Cusack nodded toward the boilersuited young man being interviewed by a television journalist about fifty yards away. “That’s him, the digger operator—Kevin Donegan. Not sure he’ll have time for you between media interviews, but you can ask.”

“He was cutting a drain here, is that right?” Cormac asked.

Cusack nodded. “I don’t know what Claffey’s up to, or whether it’s even legal, to tell you the truth. Right, I’ll leave you to it. I’m still trying to track down the car’s registration. You’ll keep me posted if anything important turns up?”

Nora followed behind Cormac as Niall Dawson led them around the tarp wall, where a partially cut drain ran straight up to the open boot of a car that had been completely submerged in the bog.

“Dr. Friel asked Cusack to pack extra peat around the body after she was here,” Dawson said. “Nobody’s disturbed anything since then.”

Nora knelt beside the drain as Cormac stepped down into it and began removing a few handfuls of peat. As he picked away at the soggy pile, the wrinkled sole of a foot began to materialize from the dark wetness. The skin appeared brown, with a faintly bluish cast. A bone jutted from the peat, and a litany of Latin words began humming through her head: caput humeri, tuberculum majoris, infraspinatus, teres minor. All part of the minutiae she had absorbed years ago, names for the various parts and surfaces belonging to the long bone of the upper arm. She recognized the humerus by its distinctive rounded cap, the pair of fan-like tuberosities. And she knew from the exposed surfaces that the bog man’s arm had been literally wrenched from the socket.

A faint, electric tracery of adrenaline flushed through her, something she didn’t generally experience in the presence of the dead. It was a reminder of the day she’d given up working with live patients, unnerved not only by surgery but even the act of piercing a vein to draw blood, the sight of a wound or scar. But they had been warned about the state of this body. What was it, then? Perhaps the fact that whoever had put the bog man in the boot had been in such a hurry that the remains of a fellow human had been nothing more to him than a nuisance.

“According to Donegan, the fella who found him, the legs and feet are at the left side, the head and torso toward the right side of the boot,” Dawson said. “At this point we’re not sure if he was dismembered before he went into the bog, or if he was pulled apart by the digger that buried the car. We know a digger was used from the backfill around the car. But whoever dug the hole wouldn’t have been best pleased to find a body—must have decided to chuck the bog man into the boot with his spoil.”

Nora stared down at the protruding bone, now seeing the folds of flesh and connective tissue that surrounded it. The usual procedure for remains found in situ was to remove the whole block of peat containing the body and return it intact to the lab at Collins Barracks for processing and examination. Since this body had already been disturbed, the usual protocol was out the window. Instead, they would have to extract the body parts right out here on the bog and go through the rest of the spoil in the car boot one handful at a time. They’d already been robbed of a whole range of important clues—the body’s position in the bog, composition of the original surrounding material, proximity to any artifacts that might have been nearby.

Niall Dawson said to Cormac, “I’ve got some boards and a roll of polythene in the back of the Rover. Give us a hand?”

Cormac climbed out of the hole and the two men ducked around the tarp again, leaving Nora alone with the body.

No matter how many times she encountered a human being preserved like this, it was impossible not to feel dumbstruck. She stepped down into the drain and sank slowly until her face was level with the bone, trying to let the minute details sink in. These moments of silent observation were not exactly prayerful in any traditional sense, and yet she felt something sacred in them, something reverential in the acknowledgment of a common thread of humanity. She tried to imagine the quicksilver thoughts, the fears and desires that had once coursed through these limbs, this heart, this brain. How had he ended up here, separated from the rest of his tribe, floating alone in the middle of a bog?

If they were fortunate, all that would come; his story would begin to emerge, little by little, as they dug into the peat. Nora pulled a camera from her bag and zoomed in on the shod foot and its cutwork shoe. Very like one discovered in a Westmeath bog fifty years ago—she’d seen it in reserve collection storage at the National Museum last year. She set the camera down and began removing peat from around the shoe, only to discover a second foot—this one bare—a few inches removed from the first. A few more handfuls and she could see that the ankle was fully flexed; a few inches below the furrowed arch, five toes lined up neatly, one tucked under the next, like peas in a pod.

Was it possible to read a part of this man’s life story in a thickening of his rounded heel, the flattening of his metatarsal arch? It was apparent that he had walked—a lot. His feet offered a record of the accumulated miles of a lifetime. Not at all like the sacrificial victims of the Iron Age, who were more often strapping young men who went to their graves untraveled and uncalloused. This man was different. His knobby toes and the sole of his foot bore proof of experience, of a long life, fully lived. She would be wise to linger over details like this now, while she had a chance. Once they’d removed the remainder of the peat, there wouldn’t be any time for leisurely study; they’d have to get him into the container and packed off to the fridge at Collins Barracks. In some ways, finding a body like this was like opening the pages of an ancient book, getting a direct glimpse into another time.

Nora climbed out of the trench and started snapping photographs of the drain where it met the buried car. A grave often told more about the person who dug it than the person buried there. She could see the toothmarks of a mechanical digger and places where the spoil had clearly been backfilled around the car. It occurred to her that whoever had buried this car might be here right now, watching the police and archaeologists at work, worrying about what they might find.

She climbed back into the cutaway and moved on to the area beside the bog man’s feet, carefully picking away the wet peat with gloved thumb and forefinger, reserving the spoil in case they had to go through it again. Bit by bit, the outline of a head and upper torso began to emerge.

If Killowen Man’s bare foot had made an impression, his distorted face, with its gaping mouth and unblinking eye sockets, formed an image that was utterly unforgettable. He had a high forehead; his cheeks had apparently been shaved a few days before he died, and the extra folds of skin about his neck seemed to confirm what she had guessed earlier about his rather advanced age. Tucked around his torso were folds of a thick woolen fabric, perhaps a cloak. There were the slits Dr. Friel had seen as possible stab wounds. Beneath the material she could trace the outline of a shoulder and flexed arm, following the curve of the elbow until she saw, nestled in the folds of the cloak, a curled fist, the right thumb and first two knuckles of the forefingers on his hand clearly visible. Reaching for her camera, Nora focused in on the thumbnail and pressed the shutter release, capturing the image. At least this portion of the body seemed intact. If they could manage to extract the head and torso without doing any further damage…