Lake of Sorrows

Ward showed no adverse reaction to the gruesome sight before them, but a young uniformed Garda who came up beside him only looked at the body for a moment before turning away abruptly, and being violently sick all over his shiny black shoes. Nora saw the detective’s hand rest briefly on the younger man’s shoulder. It made her think that perhaps Ward had experienced similar distress when faced with his first corpse in the line of duty. Without a word, he signaled another uniformed officer to come look after their ailing colleague. Nora couldn’t help feeling a surge of compassion for the ashen-faced Guard as well. She had never been affected by the sight of death; it was physical insult to living creatures that provoked in her an extreme visceral reaction. The embarrassing truth was that she’d barely made it through her surgical rotation in med school.

“Here’s Dr. Friel,” Ward said, ducking under the blue-and-white police barrier, and Nora looked up to see a silver Mercedes pull up along the road. She’d heard the state pathologist, Malachy Drummond, speak of his new colleague, but had never yet had the opportunity to meet Catherine Friel, despite the fact that their offices were only a short distance apart at Trinity. The slim, silver-haired woman who emerged from the car carried herself with a fresh, energetic demeanor. To look at her, one would never have imagined that Dr. Friel traversed the country several times a week on the trail of deadly violence. It was a regrettable sign of the times that Malachy could no longer keep up with the caseload all on his own.

Nora studied Ward’s formal, deferential posture as he greeted Dr. Friel and escorted her to the excavation site. With his calm, soft-spoken manner, he seemed more like a family doctor than a cop. What had prompted him to join the Guards? What did he enjoy about a job that many viewed as nothing more than dredging up the unsavory details of other people’s lives? She’d often tried to fathom what it took to be a detective, a person obliged to look behind hedges and ditches and through the walls of houses, stripping away the veils of propriety and convention to find a world of strange and untidy reality.

When Ward introduced them, Catherine Friel said, “Nora Gavin. That name seems so familiar…” Her face brightened. “I remember what it was. Malachy showed me an article you wrote recently for one of the anatomy journals, about bog chemistry and soft-tissue preservation?” Nora nodded. “Fascinating stuff. I’m certainly glad now that I read it with such interest.” She turned to Ward. “It might be wise, as long as we have Dr. Gavin here, to make use of her expertise—if she’s willing, and you have no objection.”

“No objection at all from my end,” Ward replied. “Carry on.”

Nora felt her stomach begin to grumble; she hadn’t eaten since six that morning and it was getting on toward one o’clock. But this was not the time to be worrying about hunger pangs; they would pass.

Moments later, outfitted in a white paper suit, Nora was down in the cutting again, this time beside Dr. Friel, who asked for her observations so far. At this point, she didn’t have much to offer. “The position of the body, the presence of peat in the mouth and nose and under the fingernails—all of that could point to the possibility that this man just fell into a bog hole. But there’s one thing that seems really strange.” Nora reached for a handful of the black peat and rubbed it between her fingers. “Look at the texture of this stuff right around the body, how it breaks up into small clumps. It’s definitely backfill. So even if he did just stumble into a hole, it looks as if somebody might have gone to a lot of trouble to cover him up.”

“I knew there was a very good reason to keep you here,” said Dr. Friel. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

They very carefully removed the remaining peat from around the dead man’s neck and upper chest. “Odd that he’s not wearing a shirt,” said Dr. Friel. “How many people venture out onto the bog half-dressed, even in fine weather like this? And look here.” Nora leaned closer and saw a thin leather cord. Dr. Friel traced its length to just below the man’s left ear. “Could be a ligature,” she said.

“Yes, but wouldn’t it be tighter if it had been used as a garrote?”

“You’re probably right.” The pathologist’s fingers probed gently at the leathery flesh beneath the dead man’s chin. She lifted a small fold of skin, and Nora spied one end of a gash just under the jawline. “Doesn’t look terribly deep,” Dr. Friel said, “but it might have bled quite a lot—unless he was strangled first, and the throat wound was inflicted postmortem.”