Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

It was nearly five; Niall had probably made it back to Dublin by now. Cormac tried mightily not to think about Gráinne Dawson’s reaction, not to feel in his own gut the punch his friend was about to deliver at home. He had never been married, so how could he possibly know what it was like? Surely a true marriage required a certain acceptance of all the shades of human complexity; to deny imperfection, or to allow a momentary weakness to undo years of connection seemed extraordinarily severe. And yet what would his reaction be if Nora came to him with a similar story to Niall’s, not a long-term affair but giving in to a brief flash of desire? He looked down at his feet, stuck into wellingtons that seemed to be melting into the wet peat, and realized that he was still standing on shifting ground. Was there nothing solid at the bottom of it all? After a full year together, he found himself still craving assurances that Nora, no matter how desperately he loved her, might never be able to provide.

He started packing up his tools. They hadn’t had any security out here since the crime scene detail left, and now he wondered if they should ask the Guards to post someone on site overnight. That’s when treasure hunters usually did their work, going over sites with their outlawed metal detectors.

Niall’s anonymous tipster had mentioned a manuscript. The real question was whether there was a manuscript, or whether the tipster only wanted to draw the National Museum’s attention to Killowen. The stylus was discovered a few days before Benedict Kavanagh went missing and just before Niall had received the tipster’s call. Considering Vincent Claffey’s obsession with rewards, could he have been the anonymous voice on the phone? Not likely that Shawn Kearney and the others at Killowen would have kept Claffey posted on their excavation, given the frosty relations between them. Then again, Claffey seemed to have no problem spying on people. He should have asked Niall a few more questions: what sort of accent the caller had, the exact language he had used.

As Cormac stood in the cutaway, he heard someone moving through the scrubby birch saplings at the bog’s edge. A strong, low voice carried over the heather: “How, hi, hi, how!” Anthony Beglan carried a thin hazel rod as he drove his cattle home from the pasture beside the bog. Cormac could see only the top half of Beglan’s body and the tip of the hazel. He had to struggle to make out the language—not English, that was certain, nor Irish. Straining to hear, he climbed up out of the cutaway, trying to follow without being detected, safely screened behind the saplings at the edge of the road.

Every language had its own music, Cormac thought, tuning his ears to the sound. If it wasn’t English or Irish, what were the possibilities, logically speaking? The sound was almost like Italian, or perhaps Beglan had begun to learn a few words of Romanian from the girl he’d been hiding in his house.

When they reached his farm, Beglan penned the cattle and slipped the leather strap from the basket over his head. Cormac followed at a distance. The rank smell he’d noticed the other night was stronger now and seemed to be coming from the shed across the haggard, a low building with a corrugated fiberglass roof.

Beglan crossed to an open lean-to against the shed, where he took an eel from his basket. Cormac looked away as Beglan held a nail to the creature’s head, and he flinched as the first hammer blow drove the nail through its skull. Cormac looked up to see the eel’s tail flex once and then lie still. Beglan took a knife and scored around the creature’s neck, then used pliers to peel back its skin. Finally he slit the belly and gutted it, paying close attention to the entrails and carefully separating out one small portion, which he slipped into a cup on the nearby bench. The eel went into a bucket at his feet.

As he watched Anthony go about his work, Cormac wondered about the conversation he’d overheard here the other night between Beglan and Anca. Shawn Kearney said the Killowen residents were trying to protect the Romanian girl. So why had she run away with Deirdre Claffey? Why not flee to Killowen? If Niall had been set up by Vincent Claffey, the girl must have had something to do with arranging the incriminating photos of her and Niall, either as coconspirator or unwilling pawn. Either made her a possible player in Claffey’s death.

Cormac had no more time for rumination. Anthony Beglan was such a practiced hand that the half dozen eels in his creel were skinned and gutted in the space of about twelve minutes. He rinsed off his hands under the tap in the shed, reached for the bucket of eels and the small container from the workbench, and set off down the lane toward Killowen.

Anthony never slowed or turned around. As Cormac struggled to keep up, it occurred to him that the old spelling for Beglan would have been Ó Beigléighinn— beag for small, and léighinn from the word léigh —to read or to study—scholarship, in other words. Put it all together and the name meant “descendant of the little scholar.” In all the conversations about Cill Eóghain, they’d gone back and forth about what sorts of scholarship might have been carried on at the monastery here more than a thousand years ago. Was it possible that Beglan’s family had some connection to this place from that time? Centuries had passed, to be sure, but it was true in Ireland—as it was true everywhere, in fact—that artifacts, roads, structures, and even people sometimes did not stir from where they’d remained for generations. There was clearly some powerful force that connected human beings to their ancestral places.

Cormac watched Anthony Beglan fifty yards ahead of him. Here was a man far removed from the bookish pursuits of his presumed forebears. How ironic it would be if this descendant of the little scholar could himself neither read nor write.

Arriving at Killowen, Beglan went first to the kitchen, where he dropped the bucket of eels, then crossed to the north wing of the house, where Martin Gwynne kept his studio. Still in Beglan’s left hand was the small cup from his workbench, with whatever he had taken from the eels’ insides. He stuck his head through the door and spoke to Martin Gwynne. Cormac could hear a few words of the conversation:

“…like you asked,” Beglan said.

“Very good, Anthony, I appreciate you going to the trouble,” Gwynne replied.

“Nuh-no trouble, really,” Beglan said. “All for a guh-good cause. I’ll get some more gallnuts as well.”

Beglan left by the outside door of the studio, and Cormac tried to get close enough to peer in through the window.

Martin Gwynne fished something out of Beglan’s cup, a small bluish organ, and held it steady over a glass jar. He lanced the thing with a sharp scalpel, releasing a bright yellow liquid into the jar. Gwynne carefully repeated the same procedure five more times. What could it be? Best to ask the anatomist—surely Nora would know.

Stella Cusack decided to begin by interviewing Deirdre Claffey. The girl was in one of the two tiny, airless rooms they had for talking to suspects and witnesses. The uniforms had taken the baby away for the moment. Deirdre had appeared exhausted when they brought her in. The circles under her eyes were dark as bruises, and she obviously hadn’t slept.

Getting information from people wasn’t as difficult as everyone imagined. Most of them wanted to speak. Deirdre’s head was on the table when Stella entered and took a seat across from her.

“Before we begin, do you need anything, Deirdre, cup of tea, a biscuit, maybe a sandwich?”

The girl didn’t raise her head but rocked it side to side. “Where’s Cal?” came a small voice from the tabletop.