Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

“And that’s why the writing in our bog Psalter is intact,” Niall Dawson added. “Despite being wet for centuries.”

“Indeed,” Gwynne said. “It’s the gall that makes the words indelible.”

“You said you weren’t the only one following Eriugena’s trail,” Cormac said. “We know about Kavanagh, and the corrupt detective Molloy and his accomplices who were after the shrine, but were there others as well?”

Martin Gwynne smiled wearily. “Remember what I said a few moments ago, about Eriugena’s ideas being too dangerous still? We have had in our midst these last eighteen months a Catholic priest, an investigator sent here by the Vatican to find and destroy the Book of Killowen.”

Cormac shook his head. “How do you know—”

“I have it from the man himself. I always knew that Diarmuid Lynch wasn’t what he claimed to be,” Gwynne continued. “Tried to pass himself off as an itinerant when he came here, but anyone could see that his hands were far too soft for any farm laborer. Diarmuid finally confessed his true purpose to us just the other night, how the Church had been seeking the Book of Killowen for years and had given him the mission to discover its location. But in doing all that digging, he had a chance to study Eriugena’s work in detail, and he’d been won over by the man’s ideas. So he began lying to his superiors at the Vatican about new information he’d found, about the book’s location. He realized, long before he ever came here, that he could never go through with destroying such an important manuscript.” Gwynne looked at Dawson. “And that was why he phoned you with a story about treasure hunters, hoping the National Museum would take an interest and send someone down to investigate. He reckoned that the Church would be in an awkward position if the book’s existence were made public in that way.”

“Why didn’t he just hand it over when I was here?” asked Niall.

“Cuh-cuz he never knew where I kept it,” Anthony said.

Cormac was still puzzled. “Kavanagh, he’d been after the manuscript as well for years, hadn’t he?”

“Indeed,” Gwynne said. “And I was going to show it to him. That was my grand plan, God help me. I wanted to invite him here, to see the blackguard’s face as I snatched away the one thing that was most precious to him.”

Gwynne sank into one of the chairs, looking spent. “At first, I simply closed my eyes to Kavanagh’s crimes, because I knew we could do nothing. We’d no evidence against him, only our daughter’s word about what he had done, and since she’d gone from us—” He paused briefly, overcome. “I’d told Tessa about all my discoveries here, the carving at the chapel and the notes in O’Donovan, about the Beglans and their legacy. I never mentioned Kavanagh by name, but I didn’t have to—she knew very well that he would stop at nothing to get this book. And she had the courage to act, while I…” His head dropped forward, and he let out a long breath. “My beautiful Tess, she suffered a long and painful death, these past twenty years. Punishing herself, wrestling with demons. And I stood by all that time and did nothing. I ought to have protected her, I ought to have helped her.”

Cormac’s father had been silent, taking in the strange conversation all around him. Now the old man reached over and placed a hand on Martin Gwynne’s arm.

“Peas,” he said. “Now your author shall have peas.”

Stella Cusack sat at her desk, just having returned from the required visit to the district commander’s office. Since she’d managed to bring embarrassment on the force by arresting her own partner for murder, inquiries had to be made. Just as she anticipated, Molloy had stopped talking the moment he was extracted from the furze. His solicitor was probably going to argue coercion on the confession, but they still had the mark of his shoe on Anca Popescu’s skin. And Stella was hopeful in that regard, because Catherine Friel was known as an outstanding expert witness.

Tessa Gwynne’s husband had given his full cooperation. He swore that he had begun to suspect his own wife’s involvement only after Benedict Kavanagh’s murder was discovered. According to the Director of Public Prosecutions, simply suspecting one’s wife was not enough to warrant criminal charges as an accessory after the fact. Vincent Claffey’s death had finally been ruled an accident, from the blow to the head when Anca Popescu apparently pushed him. It looked like premeditated murder only after Molloy mutilated the body and shoved the gallnuts in Claffey’s mouth to throw Stella off the scent. She blushed to the roots of her hair, remembering how had she let that bastard play her. Best not to think about that now.

She turned the key in her largest drawer and brought out a metal strongbox that looked as if it had been through the wars. It had turned up in a search of Molloy’s flat, this nest of secrets that he’d removed from Claffey’s shed. She hadn’t had a chance to go through the whole jumble of newspaper cuttings, official documents, scribbled notes, and photos, but it was clear from the contents that Molloy himself had been feeding Vincent Claffey blackmail fodder for months, a way to keep him mum about the treasure-hunting ring. It turned out that Claffey had been writing cryptic threatening notes to the people at Killowen, hoping to extract money from everyone. And he’d evidently succeeded. Stella found Mairéad Broome’s fat packet of cash, along with a few rolls of twenty-euro notes. Hard to fathom how Molloy had managed to scrape up some of this dirt. Everyone at the farm was represented. There was information on Shawn Kearney being slighted by the academic committee that had turned down her bid for a doctorate, newspaper cuttings about Tessa Gwynne’s father attempting suicide in police custody after he was charged with fraud in the 1980s.

There was also a series of photographs, taken at Killowen Chapel, of Diarmuid Lynch, lying facedown on the ground at the altar. She found a piece of paper stuck to the back of the last photo. It was an image clipped from a magazine, showing three smiling men looking over an architectural drawing. Stella adjusted her desk light and reached for her magnifier, peering through the glass at the picture. Nothing but a concentration of dots, so close up. Still, the man in the center looked familiar. All three were wearing clerical collars. The caption read: “Monsignor Guido Mariani, the papal nuncio, and members of the Vatican party, Monsignor Andrew Fothergill, and Canon Michael Feery, looking over plans for the new building at the Apostolic Nunciature on Navan Road, Dublin.”

She spotted one of her uniformed colleagues approaching and moved to cover the image. Guarda Pollard tipped his head toward the front of the building. “Stella, someone to see you. Duty sergeant asked me to pass it along.”

Stella headed to the front reception area, a tiny cramped foyer with a window for the duty sergeant. She pushed open the security door to find Claire Finnerty waiting outside.

“Detective Cusack, I wanted to let you know that we’re holding a wake for Anca, tonight, at the farm, in case you’d like to—”

“Thanks for letting me know. I’m not sure if I can make it.”

“There was something else I wanted to ask.” Claire Finnerty looked away. “We could have done so much more for Anca. She probably arrived at Killowen thinking it would be a safe place, and it turned out to be anything but safe. I don’t know how we could have been so blind. None of us had any idea what Vincent Claffey was doing—”

“What was it you wanted to ask?”

“Maybe it’s a foolish notion, but I thought you might know of people who find places for young women like Anca, where they can recover from everything they’ve been through. I’ve talked it over with the others, and we’re all agreed. We’d like Killowen to become a sort of sanctuary. We’ve got the space, and, well, digging in the dirt and growing things sometimes has a healing effect.”