Lake of Sorrows

Ursula took another swallow of wine and watched, fascinated at how the liquid clung to the side of the glass. It was true what she’d told Cormac—that she didn’t really give a damn about what vintage she was drinking, but maybe that would change. Desmond Quill said he would teach her about wine, and maybe she’d let him. She had to admit that Quill wasn’t at all her usual type. For one thing, he’d pursued her. When they had first met at that museum reception in the spring, she’d been struck by the hard glint in his eyes, the strength of his handshake. He’d kept staring at her through the crowd, and when they bumped into each other at the bar, he’d slipped one hand around her waist and steered her right out the door and into a waiting taxi. She hadn’t even asked where he was taking her, and when the taxi pulled up in front of a Georgian house, she had followed him inside and straight up the staircase to his bedroom. They had not spoken a word. The memory of that first encounter still excited her. She and Quill were very much two of a kind. He was probably at least thirty years older than she was, and he never seemed to have the desperate, guilty quality of the partners she usually chose. She felt transparent to him, in a way that she’d never felt with any other human being—as if he could see right through her, into her bones, into the darkest thoughts that occupied her existence. He had never asked about her scar, but he’d often traced the outline of the damaged skin as though it were the map of her soul.

Ursula’s reverie was suddenly punctured by a loud crash, then another, and another. Jagged fear sang through her veins. It sounded like someone breaking down the door. She leapt from the bath, leaving the water lapping and sloshing in her wake. Her fingers felt clumsy as she quickly turned the key in the lock. Then she covered her ears and sank down to the floor, trying to imagine what she would do if someone started to batter down the bathroom door. But no one came. The house had gone dead quiet.

Ursula had no idea how long she waited—ten minutes, perhaps fifteen. She heard no movement, no sounds of life from the other side of the door. She knew it might be a ploy to draw her out, but she couldn’t stay in there forever, and her mobile phone was out in the kitchen. She found a small pair of scissors to use as a weapon, then pulled on her bathrobe and silently turned the key. No figure loomed out of the shadows at her, no hand reached out to grasp her by the hair. The house was still. She almost thought she had imagined it all, until she turned the corner into the kitchen and saw the word scrawled on the glass in red paint: SLAG. Ursula looked down at the small scissors in her hand and felt as though she was going to be sick.

Returning to the bathroom, she saw that the nearly empty wine bottle had toppled over and was spilling onto the white tile floor. The dark pool shimmered in the electric light, its surface disturbed by drops that seemed to fall in slow motion from the bottle’s open mouth.

Book Two HUMAN CRIME AND BLOODSHED

What then, think you, is the honor, what the piety, of those who even think that the immortal gods can best be appeased by human crime and bloodshed?

—the Roman writer Marcus Tullius Cicero, writing about the Gauls in the first century B.C.

1

The postmortem on the second murdered man from Loughnabrone took place the following morning. The mortuary at the regional hospital in Tullamore, twelve miles northeast of Loughnabrone, was a drab, anonymous room with institutional tiled walls, anemic fluorescent lights, and two stainless-steel tables. Dr. Friel had gone into the next room to take a phone call, leaving Nora alone with the corpse, which lay partially covered by a plain white sheet on one of the tables, ready for their initial external examination. There had been no clothing to itemize and remove; upon taking the body from the bog, they’d found the deceased completely naked but for his leather cord and wristwatch.