Lake of Sorrows

“What’s going on?” Ursula demanded. “And you—” she said to the television cameraman who had wandered over to see what was happening “—get the hell off this bank before I run you.” He raised his free hand in a gesture of submission and beat a hasty retreat back to his van. Ursula turned to the crew. “Now, somebody tell me quick what’s going on here.”

Several of them responded at once: “Rachel fell into the drain—”

“We had to pull her out—”

“I was concentrating on what I was doing,” the girl said. “I accidentally stepped off the end of the plank. I didn’t ask anyone to rescue me.”

Ursula’s tone was incredulous. “I can’t believe you’re all in such a state about having to pull someone out of a drain. For Christ’s sake—”

“It’s not that,” said the young woman who’d called them over. She stepped aside and pointed to the corner of the cutting. “We nearly stepped on him trying to get Rachel out.”

Looking toward the spot the girl had indicated, Nora could just discern the outline of a distorted face. She dropped to her knees beside the cutaway for a closer look, and it took a moment for the totality of the terrible image to sink in. The skin was dark brown and the features slightly flattened, the nose smashed to one side, but the eye sockets, skull vault, and jawline clearly marked it as human. One skeletal, clawlike hand was curled into a fist and raised above the head, as though he’d been submerged and was trying to come up for a breath of air.

Ursula heaved an exasperated sigh. “You must be coddin’ me. Two bloody Iron Age bog men in the space of a week.”

“I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions,” Nora said, looking up into the circle of anxious faces peering down at her. “This man seems to be wearing a wristwatch.”

3

Detective Liam Ward had just set the phone in its cradle when he noticed the fresh drops of blood staining his shirt front. The plaster he’d applied to the shaving cut on his throat had evidently come loose. He didn’t really have time for this; the phone call had been from the duty officer, ringing with news that another body, the second in as many weeks, had just turned up at Loughnabrone Bog. The first had been officially declared at least five hundred years old, but this one looked as though it might be modern. Whatever the circumstances, it wouldn’t do to have the detective in charge show up looking as if he’d just been in a brawl. He stripped off his shirt and went into the bathroom to clean the cut and apply another plaster. When he returned to his bedroom, the bloodstained garment lay crumpled on the bed. Like evidence from a crime scene, he thought, more mindful this time of the plaster as he buttoned his collar.

Lugh seemed restless. Perhaps it was something to do with the smell of blood. As Ward put the knot in his tie, he glimpsed the dog pacing down the hall and into the kitchen, setter’s plumelike tail on alert, nails beating an anxious tattoo on the tile floor. For some reason the sound reminded Ward of his mother. He remembered the noise of her high-heeled shoes on the same floor, as she tried in vain to convince him to leave this house on the day after his wife’s funeral. Of course he hadn’t left, but had stayed on, anchored by memories, by the stones in the garden. He knew his mother thought he’d been relieved of a great burden when Eithne died. Could it already be eleven years this summer since his wife had walked down the riverbank, her pockets laden with dozens of small stones from their own garden, never intending to come up for air? He could see the stones: black, gray, white, pink, their smooth and rounded shapes. He’d put them out only a week earlier, to help keep the weeds down around the roses. He pictured Eithne at the edge of the grass, down on her knees but long past any hope of prayer, selecting the stones one by one and slowly filling the pockets of her dark green raincoat. He could imagine her performing that simple act, but he could go no further. Her final moments were obscure and inaccessible to him. They’d returned the stones with her personal effects after the inquest. He couldn’t bring himself to put them back in the garden. It seemed wrong somehow, or perhaps just bad luck, so he’d flung them back into the river where they belonged.

He’d met Eithne at a spring wedding. One of his younger colleagues had taken the plunge. He remembered how the young sergeant and his friends had all slagged him as a perennial bachelor. Up to that point, he had never found anyone who had moved him enough—until the moment he’d glimpsed a wondrous creature playing a harp in the corner at the wedding dinner. He’d been struck at once by her sorrowful eyes, but above all by the dignity in her bearing, the graceful way she moved. She had seemed so regal, so self-contained, and he was a man who noticed such things.