Lake of Sorrows

Nora paused, realizing that what she was about to say might be all wrong, that she might have to backtrack somewhere down the road. She took a deep breath, hoping she wouldn’t regret what she was about to say: “This man apparently went into the bog completely naked. He’s probably been strangled with a leather cord, and his throat has been slashed. If he hadn’t been wearing the wristwatch, we might quite naturally assume he was much older.”

“And why is that?” Ward seemed intrigued.

“Well, he has similarities to the other body from Loughnabrone, and to remains found in England, Germany, and Denmark, and other places as well. The finds over the past fifty years or so have all been pretty well documented. Some of them had similar types of wounds: they were hanged or strangled, their throats were cut, and they were buried or staked down in watery places. Some people have taken those things as proof that many of the bodies were victims of ritual sacrifice.”

Ward seemed troubled by this interpretation. “So what are you saying—you think this might have been some sort of ritual killing?”

“I don’t think it can be ruled out. When we find the same evidence on an older body, it’s always one of the possibilities. Any one of those wounds was probably enough to kill him, so why the excessive violence? If he were from the Iron Age, then the injuries would be consistent with what’s been found before. But if he’s clearly modern, then the mystery is why someone today would have used those three forms of violence in particular.”

“Why, indeed? Shall we see what this fella can tell us?” Dr. Friel said, reaching for the garden shears that lay on the stainless-steel tray near the dead man’s head. She didn’t seem to notice that Detective Ward was already beating a hasty retreat out the mortuary door.

2

As he drove the twenty-three miles back to his station in Birr, Ward was thinking about Dr. Gavin’s words. Ritual killings, or murders that looked like ritual killings, were rare, although probably not as rare as people might imagine. Some were committed by self-styled occultists, but murders carried out for other reasons were sometimes covered up by staging the scenes to look like ritual killings. He’d seen a few examples where the ritual aspect had turned out to be misleading.

The first challenge here would be to find out who the victim was. He pulled out his mobile and punched in a number. “Maureen, it’s Liam. Do me a favor, will you, and pull all the missing-person files? How many are there from the last twenty years, do you reckon?…Maybe we should go even further back…. Yes, sort those out if you would. I’m on my way. I’ll have a look at them when I get there. And I’ll tell you more about the PM when I get in.”

They’d be lucky if it was a local disappearance. If the victim happened to be from somewhere else, they’d have to search missing-person files from the whole country. It could take a long time just to establish identity, not even talking about evidence for a murder case. There was that date on the watch, but it only told the day of the week and the date. No indication of the year or month, unless…The watch had to know what month it was, in order to tell the date accurately. Maybe it had to be set by hand; but perhaps there was a mechanism inside the watch that calculated how many days were in each month. At the very least, they might be able to get a manufacture date for the watch and eliminate the years before it was made.

How strange was it that the victim was naked? He’d seen the body out in the bog; there was no suggestion that this had been a careful burial—just the opposite, in fact. So how had the victim come to be naked, and why—especially out on that broad expanse of milled peat? There was no evidence from the postmortem that he’d been bound—or was there? Victims of ritual killings were not usually cooperative, unless they were incapacitated in some way. Dr. Friel hadn’t mentioned any blows to the head, and they’d have to wait for toxicology results to see if there had been any drugs involved. But the peat under the nails might suggest he hadn’t been unconscious going into the bog. Ward was crossing a similar stretch now, along a straight bog road, the surface rutted and patched, crumbling away at the sides. He suddenly realized that he relished this moment in a case, when the whole thing lay before him, complicated as a Chinese box, waiting to be opened, to confound and mystify.