Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

“I know the one,” Dawson said. “Gesta Pontificum Anglorum.”

“Then you know it has a connection to Kavanagh’s subject, Eriugena.”

“Yes, well, William of Malmesbury was probably just repeating all the juicy stories he’d heard. If I’m remembering right, he even had one about Eriugena being murdered, how his pupils were supposed to have stabbed him to death with their styli because he insisted that they think for themselves—a cautionary tale for all academics. Robbie must have explained that William of Malmesbury had a reputation for embellishment.”

“Well, he did mention the stories were considered apocryphal.”

Nora said, “Hey, guys, I’ve found something.”

She dropped her trowel and began to work with bare fingers while Cormac and Niall Dawson crowded around. A smooth brown ridge began to protrude. Cormac and Niall joined in the digging, working quickly, until they had uncovered a single leather corner and a ragged hash of soft brown material.

“Sweet holy Jaysus,” Dawson said. “I don’t believe this. It’s a book. It’s Killowen Man’s missing book.” He gingerly picked away more peat, and a few words of Latin script appeared under his fingertips, the vellum page shiny with wetness and miraculously still readable. Dawson sat back on his heels. “I really don’t believe this.”

Cormac tried to get his head around the shape, the book splayed open, the upper left corner folded over and the pages dog-eared, the center almost rotted away, a mass of letters floating free in wet peat, independent of their vellum matrix. “I think you’re right. It is a book, though it looks a bit more like—”

“Lasagna,” Nora said. “What the hell do we do now?”

“First, we get the camera.” As Dawson turned to dig into his bag, Cormac’s eyes began to pick out details: a yellow bar appeared, and then an almost circular letter D , with an S-curve clearly visible inside. “Look here, Niall, I think this is a capital, and a gold border.”

Nora leaned in to try to read the script as Niall peered through the camera lens, snapping away as quickly as he could. He said, “See that line of text, dead center? Can you read it? Looks to me like ‘in ualle lacrimarum.’ ”

Cormac dredged up his decades-old knowledge of Latin. “Something about a vale of tears. Psalms, maybe?”

“There’s one way to find out,” Nora said, quickly typing the letters into her phone. “You’re right. Psalm 83, verse 7: ‘in ualle lacrimarum in loco quem posuit.’ ‘In the vale of tears, in the place which he has set.’ So our bog man was walking here, maybe reading his book of Psalms, and he’s attacked by a couple of assailants, they throw his body into the bog, and then his book, and his satchel after him.”

“So maybe he was robbed,” Niall said. “Remember what the textile consultant told us, that he ought to have been wearing a brooch, and we didn’t find any. Maybe it was as simple as that.”

But the words on Killowen Man’s wax tablet weren’t verses from Psalms, Cormac thought. They were something about freedom of rational thought, and malice and evil. He had often experienced this same sensation out on excavations, a feeling of hurtling down a tunnel through time. Now he felt himself spat out, centuries ago, on this same squelching bog, where the ancient man in the hospital cooler had once walked and perhaps written his last thoughts, and where he’d been brutally murdered. Cormac suddenly understood in a flash how everything they’d found was connected, down through the centuries, all the way from the Dark Ages directly to Benedict Kavanagh. He heard voices from a distance, then felt his thoughts zooming back into the present.

Niall had his face pressed to the wet peat and was using a flat probe to try and get a look between some of the other pages. “I can see another illuminated border.”

“We’ll have to get it out of there as quickly as we can,” Cormac said. “I’ve got some plywood in the back of the jeep. Would that do as a stabilizer for now?”

Niall nodded. “It’ll have to do.”

On the way to the hospital, Cormac’s thoughts came back to the present as he glanced over at Nora in the passenger seat. She was nodding off. Dawson’s eyes, too, were closed in the backseat. Cormac felt tremendous relief, looking at the white gauze wrapped around Nora’s forearm, that neither of them had been badly injured last night. They were lucky that Diarmuid Lynch had heard them. Surely the police would track down the book thieves, and the case would be wrapped up shortly. Still, it was chilling to know that someone at Killowen had wanted them dead.

Stella was on her way to Killowen when her mobile began to buzz. “Cusack here.”

“She’s dead, Stella. Anca Popescu is dead.”

“Fergal, what are you talking about? What’s happened?”

“I met the uniforms at Cappaghbaun, the place above Mountshannon where the girls got stuck on the forestry road. Social Services had charge of Deirdre Claffey and the baby, and I was carrying Anca back to Birr, like you said…” His voice broke. “You told me to keep close tabs on her this time, and I should have been watching—”

“Just tell me what happened, Fergal.”

“I brought her in the car with me. But I never locked the fuckin’ passenger door, Stella. I never thought—”

“What happened?”

“We were coming over the top of the mountain, and the next thing I know she’s got the door open and she’s trying to jump. I reached out for her, but I couldn’t hold on.”

Stella was imagining the scene as Molloy described it: a rough forestry road, fir trees, and a vicious drop. She felt a punch to the gut. Did the girl dread being sent back to Romania so much that she would risk losing her life rather than face that? “Are you with her now?”

“Yes. I had to climb down to her. I checked her pulse, but there’s nothing. She’s dead.” He sounded on the verge of tears.

Stella heard her own voice take on a steely edge. “Fergal, listen to me. Stay where you are and ring Emergency Services. Do it now.”

She heard a sharp exhalation. Finally he said, “Right. It’ll be all right. I’ll just tell them what happened.”

“Phone Emergency Services right now, Fergal. Don’t move her, don’t touch anything else. I’m on my way.”

Stella rang off, feeling numb. Anca Popescu was only nineteen, but she had probably experienced more horrors than any human being could be expected to endure. And all Stella could see now was that haunted expression in the girl’s eyes, the nervous, darting hands, the way she’d sucked that smoke from her cigarette, as if it were pure oxygen. That, and how Anca had turned her gaze into a silent plea as Stella had left the safe house the other day, as if she had somehow known it would be their last meeting. Why the hell had she sent Molloy? She ought to have gone with him, or picked the girl up herself, and none of this would have happened. She sat in the car, hands on the wheel but going nowhere, not sure what to do next.

Her phone buzzed again.

“Mam, it’s Lia.”

Stella didn’t say anything, afraid that if she opened her mouth to speak, she would begin to sob.

“I’m sorry about hanging up on you yesterday,” Lia said, her voice sounding less like the stroppy seventeen-year-old she’d been lately and more like the child she used to be. “It was rude. I only wanted… it just makes me crazy when you and Daddy are so unhappy. I don’t mean to mess things up.”

Stella forced herself to speak. “Oh, Lia, you haven’t messed anything up. What happened between your father and me, it’s not your fault, sweetheart. It’s nothing to do with you. Are you all right, staying with Daddy for another little while? It’ll only be a day or two more, I promise. I’ll ring you.”