Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

While his crew covered the car in black polythene for its trip to Dublin, the head of the crime scene detail jumped down onto the boards that rimmed the excavation area, leaning forward to examine the impression of the vehicle’s underside, the depressions where the four tires had rested in the peat. “Looks like we’re through here, lads,” he said. “Let’s let the archaeologists have their site back again.” He took the hand Niall Dawson offered and heaved himself up out of the pit. “We’re heading back. Be sure to let us know if anything else turns up.”

Cormac had watched them go over the car, collecting anything that might have a bearing on the case, which meant everything they could find—even the older bog man was forensic evidence in the case they were investigating. The gap where the car had been was roughly four meters by six, a couple of meters deep. The surface was churned up in some places, flat in others where the vehicle’s undercarriage had been pulled away.

Cormac eased down one of the stout planks the crime scene crew had placed around the perimeter and his perception began to shift. Since everything in a bog tended to be the same color as peat, you had to keep an eye open for subtle differences in texture. Would they happen upon another item of clothing belonging to Killowen Man, any items he might have been carrying on his person when he went into the bog—his other shoe, or a walking stick, perhaps, or a sack of provisions? Or maybe they’d find evidence of an ancient road, the reason someone would be out here in the middle of a bog. His eye caught upon the fringe of a willow hurdle, a type of woven fencing laid over brushwood centuries ago to make a footpath through soft bog. It was about chest-high in the wall, and ragged, cut through by the digger but amazingly intact, the bark still on the osiers used to weave it. He shifted the planks, stepping from one to the next and pulling the other board to set in front of him. At the far end he found more evidence of a roadway, birch branches thick as a man’s arm, eaten up centuries ago by the encroaching moss.

Dawson came back from seeing the scene-of-crime officers on their way with the shrouded vehicle. “Down to us, now,” he said. “Let’s see what we can find.”

Gathering their tools, they began measuring and marking out a grid on the floor of the pit with stakes and string, as they would with any excavation. The surface of the peat was uneven, revealing the impression of a muffler and driveshaft, the axles of the car. Niall was down on his hunkers, taking photos and sketching the features of the surface in his allotted squares from the grid; Cormac did the same in the opposite corner. He leaned in to snap a photo of a shallow pool that had formed under the car’s chassis.

The site was deserted now. They worked in silence for twenty minutes, each caught up in his own thoughts. Cormac wondered about Dawson and Kavanagh again. How had Niall Dawson come to know about Killowen? He’d mentioned the farm as a place to kip when they’d discussed coming down to help with the recovery. Before they even knew about Benedict Kavanagh. A small detail, easy to overlook. Cormac knew what it was like to be suspected when you were innocent, but there were so many things about people that were impossible to fathom, even if you’d been friends for years. There was no explaining the way people behaved sometimes. Perhaps he should urge Dawson to come clean, to get the connection with Kavanagh off his chest.

“Look, Niall, I don’t know how to say this except straight out. You and Benedict Kavanagh were friends at university. I was there, too, remember? I watched him destroy you in that debate. So why didn’t you say anything to the police? When we found the car was his, even when we found the body?”

Dawson’s trowel stopped moving. “I haven’t seen Benedict Kavanagh for nearly thirty years, Cormac. Surely you don’t think—”

“No, of course not. I just can’t understand why you kept quiet.”

The trowel hung loose in Dawson’s hand. “Because it’s water under the bridge. I didn’t see a need to dredge any of it up again. I’m more than satisfied with my life now, you know that. In a way, I was grateful to Benedict, for opening my eyes.” He gestured to the plot they were excavating. “This is my life’s work. Getting trounced in that debate made it clear that I wasn’t cut out for the philosophical rough-and-tumble. Not in the same way Benedict was, certainly.”

“Maybe the rough-and-tumble got a bit too rough. The man was murdered, Niall.”

“Well, not by me. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I’m not trying to make a big deal of this. I just thought you might be better off mentioning your old connection to Kavanagh, before someone else does.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Dawson said. “I’ll have a word with Cusack.”

As he turned back to his own work, Cormac’s eye caught on a shape about an arm’s length in front of him. A flat strip, like a belt, with a loop projecting just slightly from the peat’s surface. “Niall, take a look at this.” Cormac’s bare fingers continued scraping at the peat, uncovering more of the leather strap.

“I see it,” Dawson said. “Keep going.”

The strap was long, and at last Cormac reached the place where it joined another piece of leather. The peat was very wet here, squelching as he worked his hand into the material. He could feel the thickness of the leather, swollen with water, and formed a picture of it in his mind as he worked. Generally rectangular, rounded at the corners, stitching on the inside. He turned to Dawson. “It looks like a satchel—do you see the flap in front? Do you suppose our bog man could have been carrying this?”

“And if there happened to be a book inside—” Dawson sounded short of breath with excitement. “You know, that’s been one of our leg-pulls for years. I phoned up Redmond in the conservation lab not three weeks ago and told him some poor sod had stumbled on an illuminated book in a bog. He always knows straightaway I’m taking the piss. What’s he going to say now?” Dawson used his fingers to lift the front flap and reached into the satchel’s open mouth. Almost immediately, his posture signaled disappointment. “Nothing there. It’s empty.”

Cormac began to have a strange feeling, the same sort of presentiment he occasionally got while working on a site, as if he could see down through all the layers of history and sense the connections between things that seemed completely unrelated. Perhaps it was only coincidence that Kavanagh’s body had come to rest here in the bog in the very spot where some ancient scribe lost his life, or perhaps there was more to it, something they had yet to discover.

Dawson glanced up at the clear sky. “It’s warm. Let’s get this covered up again, quick-like. Hand us that roll of cling film, will you?” Oxygen was the enemy here. They carefully replaced the wet peat over the satchel, then laid several sheets of film over the sodden mess. After dipping a roll of resin bandage in a nearby water-filled bog hole for a few seconds, Dawson began, with Cormac’s help, to stretch lengths of tape across the satchel to preserve its shape, careful to press out any air between the wet peat and the film.

Dawson was thinking aloud as he worked. “If only there had been a book. I mean, Jaysus, think of it. How many early medieval manuscripts have survived in Ireland—a dozen, give or take? If you think about it, there must have been hundreds. Every monk had his Psalter.”

Cormac had been pondering the same thing as they worked on the satchel. Now he said,

“Niall, don’t you think it strange that Benedict Kavanagh happened to be found here?”

Dawson looked up. “What do you mean?”