False Mermaid

“You can—come.” He took her arm, and they walked down the corridor to the stroke unit, with patients behind glass windows. Cormac stopped and let her look in at a white-haired man, asleep with his mouth open, insensible to the world around him.

“I haven’t introduced you to my father,” Cormac said. “You may never have a chance to know him as he was. I’ve barely had that chance myself. Whatever brief time we had may be over. But being here with him these last few days has taught me something, Nora. I need to understand who he is, where I’ve come from—just as Elizabeth will need to understand, one day.” He turned her face to him, stroked her cheek. “Please believe me, Nora. She will come back to you—if you give her time.”

Nora gazed through the glass at Joseph Maguire, tears streaming down her face.

3

Nora stared out the car window through a light rain. The sky couldn’t decide whether it was stormy or fair; showers were mixed with bouts of sunshine. They were on their way back to the house, and had just come through a festival-clogged Glencolumbkille when Cormac’s mobile rang.

After a brief conversation, he snapped the phone shut and turned to her. “Garrett Devaney,” he said. “Are you up for a quick detour? Devaney says he has information on the case that he’d rather convey in person. He’s at a bar called Cassidy’s. On this road, he says, up near the crossroads at Largybrack. I gather there’s a sort of hideaway session going on there. Are you up to it?”

“To tell you the truth, I could use a drink.”

Cassidy’s was an old stone building at the side of a crossroads near the mouth of a glen. Cormac ordered up a pair of large whiskeys, and brought them back to where Nora sat in the mostly empty lounge. She glanced over at the small group of players in the back corner of the bar, and saw that Garrett Devaney had spotted them as well. After the next reel set finished, he put down the fiddle and made his way over.

“And how’s Elizabeth?”

Nora didn’t seem able to answer. Cormac jumped in: “A little better—she’s awake. But she hasn’t had a chance to process everything. She knows her father was killed, but—”

Devaney grimaced. “Still denies he did anything wrong?”

“She blames me,” Nora said. “For everything.”

Devaney shook his head. “Now listen, you can’t be thinking like that. It’s rough, I know, but you can’t.” He glanced around at the pub packed with patrons, and lowered his voice. “I’ve been checking with a few contacts. I’ve a mate over at the Serious Crimes Unit, the crowd that are handling the investigation. Here’s something he told me—searching through Hallett’s bags, they found his BlackBerry, with a link to a tracking device planted inside Miranda’s mobile.”

Cormac asked, “What does that mean, exactly?”

Nora said: “That makes sense. Peter knew where Miranda was all along, just as they both knew where Elizabeth was. Peter didn’t leave anything to chance. He must have known what she was up to—that she was coming after us. He was using her to get to me.”

“That’s not all,” Devaney said. “The scene-of-crime squad also found a small bottle of eyedrops—”

“But it wasn’t eyedrops at all. I can tell you what it was. GHB—liquid ecstasy. He told everyone that my sister was addicted to the stuff, out of control, but he was feeding it to her. Out there on the headland, I asked Miranda if she ever had blackouts—from her reaction, I think Peter had done the same thing to her. There’s probably no way to prove it.”

“But finding the stuff in his possession proves that he knew where to get it,” Cormac offered. “That’s something.”

Devaney pursed his lips and looked slightly uncomfortable. “I’m not sure how to tell you this last bit, except to say it straight out—your man Hallett was evidently into wearing women’s clothes. The state pathologist found lacy underpants on him at postmortem, under his regular clothes. I can’t say what it means—I’ll leave that to the psychologists. But I thought you ought to know about it, in case something should leak out in the press.”

Nora could hear Cormac ask a question, but her thoughts were far away, back in the cardboard evidence boxes at Saint Paul police headquarters. All those items of unwashed lingerie the crime scene investigators had found stuffed into the backs of drawers and under Tríona’s bed, all marked with her DNA, and Peter’s, along with unknown donors, male and female. They had always assumed Peter’s DNA was present because he and Tríona were married—and it was a logical assumption—but now there was another possible explanation altogether.

The river was where people went to become someone else. To shed all the strictures, the guises they maintained above, in the real world.

There are things you don’t know, Nora. About Peter, about me—

“For I have seen the false mermaid—” she whispered.