Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

The young man left her alone while he went upstairs, giving her a chance to look around. The paintings in the front room were angry seascapes, thick-painted stormy skies and waves and weather, the paint applied with such passion that you could almost hear the surf. Not just grays and blues and greens, but also shades of yellow, brown, and purple. Stella went up close and studied the nearest canvas. How did a person work at close range like this and understand what effect the brushstrokes would have at a distance? There was mystery in it, how the eye perceived the parts and the whole. She glanced up the stairs and saw no sign of the young man returning. So she made a quick round of the ground floor, from the rooms in front, with their large casement windows that looked over the street, to the back rooms—a galley kitchen stocked with wineglasses, coffeemaker and tea urn, industrial dishwasher. The kitchen adjoined a tiny room that functioned as an office, with desk, file cabinets, and a glowing laptop. On the laptop screen was a spreadsheet with recent sales to museums. Stella had to stifle a curse as she glimpsed the number of zeros behind each figure. She slipped from the room and took up her previous position just as the young man appeared again at the top of the stairs.

“Mairéad says she’ll talk to you in the studio. I’m sorry I neglected to introduce myself—Graham Healy, I’m her assistant.”

Stella followed him up a graceful cascade of pale marble held in place with a wrought-iron railing. Orchestral music poured down from above, louder and louder as they traveled upward, past the living areas on the first floor, all the way up to a garret at the very top of the house, transformed by a bank of windows on the north wall into a painting studio. A whiff of mineral spirits assaulted the nostrils, and music blared loudly from speakers all around the room, filling the airy space with the throb of violins and cellos, the crash of cymbals and booming kettledrums. Mairéad Broome signaled the young man to turn down the music, and as he did so, Stella’s gaze traveled through an open doorway to a bedroom where the walls, sheets, and furniture were all stark white. Amid the rumpled luxury of bedclothes, she spied a few discarded garments—his and hers, from every appearance. Stella turned to give Kavanagh’s wife her full attention.

Mairéad Broome couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, but her hair was prematurely white. It was short and asymmetrical—an artistic statement. She had the fresh and slightly weathered complexion of someone who spent days out of doors—perhaps she painted at the seaside as well. When she turned to set down her paintbrush and rag, the dark brown eyes she fixed on Stella radiated curiosity and intelligence. “You’re here about my husband,” she said. A statement rather than a question. She’d been expecting a visit like this for some time.

Stella appreciated directness and decided that she ought to respond in kind. “Yes. A body has been found, and we have reason to believe it might be your husband.” She watched for an initial reaction. There was none. Mairéad Broome’s steady look never wavered, as if something she already knew had been confirmed. The young man began to speak, but she stopped him with a glance. “Where did you find the body?”

“A few kilometers from Birr.” Stella felt as if she ought to say more. “You may have heard news of an ancient body that turned up yesterday. Your husband was later found at the same location. His car was submerged in the bog.”

At this news, Mairéad Broome stood frozen, staring at Stella as if seeing through her. “I’m sorry, where?”

“Eight kilometers outside Birr, just over the Tipperary border.”

“I see. And my husband?”

“I’m afraid he was inside the car.”

A short pause, then, “How did he come to be driving in a bog?”

“We’re not sure he was driving. It doesn’t appear to have been an accident.”

“You’re saying my husband was murdered?”

“That’s what we believe, from the evidence so far.”

Mairéad Broome shook her head. “But how do you know it was murder?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t really share any details at this point.”

“Because I’m a suspect?”

“Until we know more, everyone’s a potential suspect.”

Mairéad Broome’s gaze followed Stella’s, through the bedroom door. “It’s easy to jump to conclusions, isn’t it, Detective? But people’s lives are complicated. They don’t fit into tidy categories. Surely that’s one thing you learn from police work.”

Stella moved to her next question. “I have to ask if there was anyone who would profit from your husband’s death.”

“Apart from myself, you mean? My husband had a pretty sizable family trust. Since there are no children, I suppose it would come to me. But I didn’t marry Benedict for his money. I didn’t give a damn about his bloody money.”

“What did you care about?”

“Difficult as it may be to believe—and not to mention as difficult as he tried to make it sometimes—I did love my husband.”

“You were married for how long?”

“Seventeen years.” She took in Stella’s curious look. “I’ll save you the trouble of doing the sums, Detective. I was fifteen when we met and eighteen when we married. Benedict Kavanagh was… well, he was unlike anyone else I’d ever known.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “Bastard.”

“How did you meet?” Stella asked.

“At my parents’ house. Benedict was a colleague of my father’s, a rising young star at the academy. He used to come to dinner about once a month. My father loved to sit around the table and talk philosophy, and of course Benedict was brilliant at it. No one better. I was young and easily dazzled. There was a minor scandal when we eloped. My parents were furious, but what could they do? Force an annulment? Not quite the thing for a couple of radical advocates of free will. I was so certain about what I wanted then. The path seemed so clear.”

“Not as clear since?”

She turned and looked at Stella directly for the first time. “Are you going to tell me you’ve never had any regrets, Detective? Anyone who makes that claim is a liar in my book.”

“Your husband was gone more than a week in April before you reported him missing.”

Mairéad Broome’s eyes flashed. “I was out of town. I didn’t know he’d gone missing until I returned home.”

“You still waited three days.”

“I explained all this to the police at the time. There had been a couple of… previous instances… where it turned out that he was simply caught up in his work. I didn’t like the idea of wasting police time if Benedict was just buried in old books—” She stopped short and turned away, apparently remembering where her husband’s body had turned up.

“Can you tell me about the last time you spoke to your husband?”

“It was just before I left for Cork. April fourteenth. It was my first solo exhibition.”

“So you never phoned him while you were away? And—you’ll forgive my curiosity—your husband couldn’t find time to attend your first solo exhibition?”

“We had our own work, Detective, our own schedules. Benedict was as busy as I was—busier, even—with his writing, and his work at the academy, and the television program. With my odd hours up here in the studio, there were some weeks we hardly saw one another.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know what your husband was working on at the time of his disappearance?”

Mairéad Broome sighed. “He often traveled to London, to the British Library, and to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, usually something to do with his old manuscripts. When he got back from his last trip to London, he did mention something about a breakthrough. He didn’t say much more, just that he’d found something that would turn the world of philosophy on its ear. I remember his exact words. He said, ‘This is going to rattle some bones.’ You could see that he relished the prospect—he loved lighting fires under people. It’s always been a mystery to me how a few words scribbled down a thousand years ago could be so earth-shattering today. But that was what my husband lived for.”