Erin Hart - Haunted Ground

In the case of accident or suicide, you’d expect to find bodies. Certainly there were cases of people disappearing down bog holes. Mina Osborne hadn’t lived in the area long enough to know the safe shortcuts through the bog like the locals did. But hardly anyone traveled on foot through bogland anymore, not like in the old days, and nothing in the circumstances immediately suggested that possibility. Besides, Drumcleggan Bog was on the other side of her home from the village; there was no reason to be crossing it at all. No, if Mina Osborne was in the bog, it wasn’t her own doing. Murder was the likeliest scenario, and Hugh Osborne remained the likeliest suspect.

Osborne had phoned the Dunbeg Garda station at 10 P. M. one night in early October, just over two and a half years ago. His story was that he’d been away for three days, attending an academic conference at Oxford. He’d taken an early afternoon flight from Heathrow and driven up from Shannon Airport. When he got home around six that evening, he found his wife’s car in the old stable that served as their garage, but she and their son were nowhere to be found. According to another occupant of the house, a Lucy Osborne, Mina had left for Dunbeg with her son around one o’clock that afternoon. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for her to travel the short distance to the village on foot, with Christopher in a collapsible pushchair, so the car in the garage suggested nothing out of order. When there was still no sign of them at half-seven, Osborne reported that he’d begun searching the house and grounds, and that just after ten he had phoned the Gardai. But because Mina Osborne was a responsible adult, and because there was no evidence of foul play, the police could do nothing further until seventy-two hours had elapsed from the time she was last seen.

When the next day and the next passed without word, extra Guards were brought in to help mount a search. They began scouring the fields and roadsides between the house and the village, and combing the grounds at Bracklyn House on foot. Photos of the missing mother and child were dispatched to seaports, train stations, and air terminals all over the country. The police also began questioning people in town. Mina Osborne had first gone to the local Allied Irish Bank branch, where she had withdrawn two hundred pounds. Then she’d taken her son into Pilkington’s and bought him a new pair of red boots, which he had worn out of the shop. She was last seen leaving the village on the Drumcleggan road, presumably on her way home. Those who had seen her in the village described Mina’s mood as quieter than usual, even downcast. No one had ever found the pushchair. Heavy rain in the days following the disappearance had washed away any evidence of tracks. When the ground search turned up nothing by the fourth day, they searched the lakebed around the house and the village. The divers had come up empty-handed.

It was only then that the police had begun questioning Hugh Osborne more closely concerning his whereabouts on the actual day of the disappearance. He had indeed been traveling home from a conference, but his return flight from London had landed in Shannon at noon, a full six hours before he’d arrived home at Bracklyn. The drive from the airport couldn’t have taken more than two hours. The only explanation Osborne offered was that he’d been up late the night before, that he’d felt tired and pulled over along the road above Mountshannon and fallen asleep in the car. They’d found no one to confirm or refute his story. He’d been the primary suspect from that point on. If he were just making it up, surely he could do better than that. They had only the word of two other inhabitants of Bracklyn House, Lucy and Jeremy Osborne, to confirm that Hugh had indeed arrived home from Shannon at six. Now there was a strange setup, Devaney thought: Lucy Osborne was only the widow of some distant cousin, and yet she and her son had been living at Bracklyn for the past eight years. It was possible these two were lying, of course; why should they want to jeopardize their position by grassing up the person who fed them and put a roof over their heads?

Osborne apparently had no major assets other than the house and a few small parcels of land, and in fact was rather strapped for money at the time of his wife’s disappearance. Devaney paged through the file until he found the document he was looking for. According to a statement from Kevin Reidy, a representative from Hanover Life Assurance, from the time of his marriage Hugh Osborne had a substantial life insurance policy on his wife—750,000 euros—and the same amount on himself, each with the surviving spouse listed as beneficiary. Maybe that wasn’t an unusually large amount for someone like Osborne, though by anyone’s standards, it provided motive enough for murder. But what was the use of killing your wife for the insurance money if you couldn’t produce a body? No damning evidence of foul play that way, Devaney supposed, but no claim could be made either, until she was legally dead—seven years in the case of a disappearance.

All right, say you wanted to get rid of a body—or bodies, in this case—so that they’d never be found…Devaney’s thoughts ticked through the various methods of disposal. Whichever you selected, it was a challenge, and the choice often depended on whether the murder was a crime of passion or carefully planned. Burning and burial both took time. The search had concentrated on the outdoors, looking within a radius of ten to fifteen kilometers from Dunbeg, and mainly for any areas of disturbed earth that might indicate a shallow grave. The police had also searched open wells and bog holes. But what about the inside of Bracklyn House? When the focus narrowed in on Osborne, the place was gone over, but old fortresses like that were usually rotten with secret rooms and passages. Nuala had pressed him into a family trip to Portumna Castle last summer, and he remembered the tour guides showing off a hollow built into one of its walls where the family had hidden priests during penal times, when Catholicism was outlawed. Devaney made a note to check on any architectural drawings of Bracklyn House, past or present.

Maybe trying to come up with bodies wasn’t the best approach. In every murder investigation, you tried to get to know the victim. The more you knew, the easier it became to imagine why anyone would want her dead. Mina Osborne was an artist—a painter, he seemed to recall. It might be useful to take a look at her work.

Those years in Cork had taught him that there were plenty of incentives for killing—greed, jealousy, revenge, even love that had turned to bitter hatred. Maybe the investigation had failed to go deep enough into that shadowy realm of impulse and instinct. He remembered, as a young policeman, attending the postmortem of a young woman, an apparent suicide by poisoning. The pathologist had explained what he was about to do: We’ll go for the poison, and we’ll go for the womb, and I’ll wager we find our answer in the latter. And so they had: the girl was several months pregnant—by her married lover, as it eventually turned out.

Hugh Osborne had indeed appeared devastated out on the bog. Did that mean he couldn’t possibly be responsible for killing his wife? Nothing could be taken for granted, not even a father’s love for his own child. Devaney closed the file with a sigh, and remembered the expression on Hugh Osborne’s face when he saw that the person in the soaking turf was not his wife—a complicated mixture of dread, disappointment, and relief. But was the relief from realizing that the woman he loved might still be alive, or simply that her body had not been found? Whoever she was, that red-haired creature in the bog had managed to set something loose, like the genie from a bottle, and he was going to make fucking sure it didn’t get back in again.