Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

Claire Finnerty rushed up to them. “Are you all right?” she asked, as Diarmuid came up behind. “Was anyone else in there?”

Cormac shook his head. “Someone… locked Nora and me in the storehouse… and started the fire,” he said between gasps. He watched the expressions on the faces around him, the glances of disbelief and denial as they all realized who wasn’t among them.

The phone on Stella Cusack’s bedside table intruded into a dream about herself and Barry, the one she had nearly every night, where he’d brought her to the circus, and just as the lights came up on the ring, he said, “I’ll be right back,” and then disappeared into the crowd. Whatever it meant, Stella was sure she didn’t know, but it kept spinning in her subconscious, like bathwater circling a drain.

The clock read 2:38 A.M., and the voice on the phone was the duty officer, Hartigan. An emergency call had come in, a fire at Killowen Farm.

“Anyone hurt?” she asked, fearing the worst. If only she’d been paying more attention.

“A couple of minor cases of smoke inhalation, but somebody got to them fairly sharpish, so they’ll be all right, thank God. I already rang Molloy. He’s on his way over there now.”

Stella rang off and looked over at the other side of the bed. When had he left? She reached out and ran her hand over the sheets. Slightly cool to the touch.

It was a quarter past three when Stella pulled into Killowen’s car park. She found a crowd of emergency personnel milling about with Killowen residents and guests, and about sixty goats in a makeshift pen between the house and the damaged barn. The ambulance crews were still tending to Nora Gavin, Cormac Maguire, and Diarmuid Lynch. Molloy was herding the other residents into the farmhouse kitchen, preparing to take statements. He glanced at her with no glimmer of acknowledgment. Probably for the best. She should never have let him into the house last night.

Suiting up, Stella entered the fire scene, noting a stench of burned milk. She addressed herself to the local fire brigade’s chief arson investigator, Thomond Breen: “What have you got, Tom?”

“Come through,” he said. “One thing I can tell you is that it would have been one hell of a lot worse if someone hadn’t turned a hose on. From what I can tell so far, it looks as if an accelerant was splashed about here.” They were in some sort of storage room. Strands of melted cheese dripped from charred wooden shelving, and Stella noted the scorched petrol tin tossed to one side. Broken shelves at the back of the room showed the entrance to another space, also steaming and blackened. “Look here,” Breen said, stooping to pick up a small black object from the floor. “Looks like these were used as fire starters. Can you smell the petrol?”

He set the charred walnut-shaped thing in her outstretched hand. “Some are burned more than others. That one’s not too bad. Just what the hell are they, do you suppose?”

“Gallnuts,” Stella murmured.

She headed for the house and found most of the farm’s residents and current guests crowded into the kitchen with emergency service personnel. “We’ll need statements from everyone,” she said to Molloy. “I’d like to talk to them, if you don’t mind. I’ll take the sitting room, start with Dr. Gavin and Maguire, if you’d send them in. Give me about two minutes. Have we a call out for the two gone missing?”

“Just went out on the wire.”

“Bloody Interpol,” Stella said. “I’m guessing this all could have been avoided if they’d been on the ball.”

Molloy shot her a sheepish look and reached into his jacket. “I meant to show you these last night, Stella,” he said, then lowered his voice. “That’s why I came over, actually. Sorry I got distracted.” He handed over a couple of pages from the station fax machine, mug shots of two Swiss nationals wanted for theft of rare books from a library in St. Gallen. The names were different, of course, but it was definitely the supposedly French couple from Killowen.

She didn’t look directly at him. She could still feel the grip of his hands, the heat of him against her. “One more thing, Fergal. What were Maguire and Gavin doing out in that shed in the middle of the night, anyway?”

Molloy gave a shrug and the slight jerk of an eyebrow. “You’ll have to ask them.”

Often the best witness in an attempted murder was the intended victim. Stella’s advantage in this case was that she had two best witnesses, and not just ordinary witnesses, either, but scientists, trained observers of detail. Perhaps this whole case would be wrapped up tonight, if she was lucky. She went to the sitting room and waited for Dr. Gavin and Maguire.

“Have a seat,” she said when they joined her. “You were both very fortunate tonight.” That came out differently than she’d intended, more like an admonishment. “Can you tell me what you were doing in the storehouse tonight?”

Maguire sat forward in his seat. “I went there. I thought Nora was asleep, but she followed. I went because I’d seen suspicious activity there a couple of nights ago. It was two people, a man and a woman, but I couldn’t make out who they were, in the darkness. Tonight I went looking for any evidence that could help Niall Dawson—”

“Evidence?” Stella couldn’t help herself. She had almost forgotten about Dawson, still in custody down at the station.

Maguire said, “I had a notion that Benedict Kavanagh’s death, and maybe Claffey’s as well, had something to do with an ancient manuscript—”

Dr. Gavin jumped in: “And as it turned out, we did find evidence that Lucien and Sylvie were stealing old books. I’m sorry that the fire destroyed the evidence.”

“Don’t worry, we’ve got all we need to go after those two,” Stella said. “Tell me how you arrived at that conclusion, about Kavanagh’s death being connected to a rare manuscript.”

Maguire’s face was still marked with soot. “This place, Killowen, used to be a monastery. You know about the metal stylus that was found here last April?”

“Niall Dawson told me it was his excuse for being here then. My colleague’s just off a stint with the Antiquities Task Force last year—he was very interested in that find.”

“Well, a few more things have turned up since then,” Dr. Gavin said. “The bog man, for a start. And while we were going through his garments with the textile expert, we found a wax tablet tucked into the folds of his cloak.”

Maguire picked up the story. “Niall and I also found a leather satchel out on the bog, the kind the monks used to carry books a thousand years ago. It was empty. We started to think there might be a missing book, but it was all so vague. Then there were the gallnuts turning up everywhere—”

Stella sat forward. “Used to make ink.”

Dr. Gavin said, “That’s right. Then I happened upon some old accounts of a manuscript called the Book of Killowen—”

“And what sort of manuscript would that have been?”

Maguire was hedging his words. “Perhaps a special illuminated edition of the Gospels, like the Book of Kells or the Book of Durrow, perhaps something else. We don’t really know.” He looked at Nora. “It’s possible that several important books might have come from the monastery here. Tradition has it that the Book of Killowen was guarded by a family called O’Beglan, and that there was a cumdach , an elaborate book shrine, made for it sometime in the tenth century. But evidently possession of this particular manuscript was so contentious that one of the O’Beglans got fed up with the fighting between the priests and bishops, and claimed to have burned it in the twelfth century. Seven hundred years later, one of that Beglan’s descendants was supposed to have sold the shrine to a clockmaker, presumably to have it melted down.”