Lake of Sorrows

Nora was just about to inquire if they were finished with her when another vehicle stopped at the side of the road, and two people emerged. One was a tall man, well-dressed and serious—perhaps in his early fifties, she guessed, from the dark curly hair just going to salt-and-pepper gray. The dress shoes and immaculate raincoat looked out of place on the bog, but it was clear from the junior Guards’ attitude that this man was in charge. The woman with him was evidently his partner. At the site, he nodded briefly to his fellow officers, then addressed Nora. “Dr. Gavin? Detective Liam Ward, and this is Detective Maureen Brennan. Are you connected with this excavation?”

“Not exactly. I’m actually here to help recover the bog body that was found the other day. I just arrived early.” Nora glimpsed a plaster peeping out over the top of Ward’s shirt collar, marked with a dark drop of blood.

“There’s a whole van-load of people on their way from the National Museum as well. They should be arriving shortly.”

“There’s no way we could contact them, request that they delay the trip?”

“We could ring them, but they’re nearly here, and I’m afraid it wouldn’t be prudent to delay. The body they’re coming to recover is in a very fragile state, and getting it to the lab as quickly as possible is critical.”

Ward turned to Brennan. “Looks as if we’ll need a few extra uniforms on crowd control.” He motioned for Nora to accompany him to the cutting. “Is there anything you can tell me? Who was it found this body?”

“One of the archaeologists working here at the site. They called her Rachel, but I’m sorry, I don’t know her surname. I only arrived a short while ago myself.”

Ward consulted a list he’d been handed by one of the uniformed officers. “Briscoe, it says here. Rachel Briscoe.”

They’d reached the edge of the cutaway. The policeman seemed unfazed by the sight of the corded brown arm that stuck up out of the peat. “Ursula Downes and I were having a look at the other findspot when they called us over,” she said. “I think at first we both assumed this was another set of old remains, until we saw the watch.”

Ward’s eyebrows spiked. “A wristwatch?”

“Yes—I can show you, if I could just climb down into the drain for a second.” Ward nodded. Nora dug out a foothold in the drain face and stepped down onto the board that rested on the mucky floor. She had to hang on to the edge of the cutting and tread carefully to keep the plank from tipping. If she fell off, she’d be mired to her knees in a second.

Through her magnifying glass, she examined the dead man’s flexed hand, his long fingers with their well-formed oval fingernails, and noted the fibrous black peat embedded beneath the nails, which were slightly ragged, as though bitten off rather than clipped. The delicate flesh on the back of the hand was shrunken and slightly decayed from being near the exposed surface of the bog, but the palm appeared wonderfully intact, the fingertips wrinkled as if he had just lingered too long in the bath. With gloved fingers, Nora scraped the wet peat from around the watch, its wide metal strap buckled around a once-solid wrist now reduced to moldering flesh and exposed bone.

Ward crouched on the bank above the cutting for a closer look. “What else can you tell me?”

Nora peered through the glass at the disfigured face. The man was clean-shaven; his eyes were closed, but not sunken in the sockets. Reddish lashes rimmed the lids. It was impossible to tell his age; immersion in astringent bog water tended to make even youthful skin appear shrunken and wizened, and this man had already begun to take on a tanned-leather appearance. Though he couldn’t have been buried here more than a few decades, this body was not quite as well preserved as the older corpse. There was nothing odd in that; bog preservation happened by accident, depending on fortuitous water levels and chemicals mixed by capricious nature. Sometimes the acidic bog water preserved skin and internal organs but had the opposite effect on bone; Nora remembered reading about a bog man in Denmark whose entire skeleton had been completely decalcified, leaving behind only a flattened, human-shaped sack of leathery skin. What could she tell Ward? The dead man’s nostrils and open mouth were filled with peat. Perhaps it was only an impression, but to her he seemed to have been captured in the posture of dying, at the very moment when life’s frenetic energy ceased: dividing cells stopped in their tracks, coursing blood slowed to a halt, the brain’s constant storm of electrical impulses suddenly ceased.