Lake of Sorrows

Beside Dawson another figure moved slightly, and for a fraction of a second she thought it might be Cormac. In another heartbeat she realized it wasn’t him, but she wondered how she had known, so quickly and so absolutely. She also understood that the same thing would happen to her again and again, perhaps for the rest of her life, if she turned away from him now. In the years to come she’d see the back of a man’s head, a shoulder turning toward her, and his image would come to her like a ghost. Was it possible for the living to haunt their fellow creatures? For something as intangible as the mere memory of a gesture to slip into the subconscious unbidden and remain there until some firing synapse, some chemical key set it free? She had studied Cormac with her anatomist’s eye—how his bones were put together, how the layers of muscle and sinew lay upon those bones in a very particular way to create the face and form she loved. And she did love him. The knowledge filled her suddenly, like a great breath. She’d been fighting it, denying it out of guilt and fear, but now she felt overwhelmed by the certainty of the feeling. Strange how epiphanies arrived in between things, when they were least expected.

There was nothing to be done about it now. She hiked her bag up on her shoulder and tried to prepare herself to work.

The wind was cool today, and everyone wore jackets; great cloud towers billowing past periodically threw everything into high relief or heavy shadow. The white marquee still shielded the bog man; its sides puffed in and out with the strong wind—it was a wonder the thing hadn’t lifted off and blown away. Niall Dawson, directing the crew that was building the transport crate for the body, looked up as Nora reached him. “Welcome back. How did your postmortem go?”

“Very interesting. A bizarre coincidence—well, bizarre anyway; I suppose we’ll have to find out if it’s really a coincidence. It looks as if he was killed almost exactly like our man here—strangled with a ligature, throat slashed—”

“Really? And how long do you reckon he’d been in the bog?”

“That’s what’s odd. From the style of the watch he was wearing, I’m guessing probably twenty or thirty years at the outside. Maybe less.” Nora saw Charlie Brazil turn toward them. He might have heard what she’d said about the cause of death, and she realized that she probably shouldn’t have said anything—to Niall Dawson or to anyone. “You’ll keep all this under your hat, won’t you, Niall? It’s officially a murder investigation, and I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

“You know me, Nora—the soul of discretion. We’re just about to do the honors here, if you’re ready.” He held the tent flap as Nora ducked into the white marquee.

Inside, she paused for a moment to put on a pair of latex gloves. It was difficult to believe this was real. All the hours she’d spent digging through musty old files and museum records, trying to string together known facts into never-before-discovered patterns—all the hours she’d spent trying to imagine from quaint, antique descriptions the reality faced by earlier discoverers of ancient bog remains; and here was another whole trove of information, in the flesh.

The purpose of this partial excavation today was to photograph the bog man in situ before removing him to the National Museum conservation lab at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Because the body had already been removed from its original location, there was an extra urgency about getting the remains into the protected and controlled environment of the lab. Today they would expose the arrangement of the limbs, record the things that might change once the body was moved, just as police photograph a crime scene—as an aid to memory, capturing empirical evidence exactly as it lay. The crew had already taken the obligatory shots of the telltale body parts that emerged from the peat, with markers to show the scale. Now it was time to draw back the peaty blanket and to find the full, fascinating horror that lay beneath.

First Nora uncovered the crown of the bog man’s head, bare except for a matted carpet of skin and hair. She remembered reading an account of bog workers finding and tossing around something they jokingly called a “dinosaur egg,” only to find later that it was a badly decayed human head, a vessel that had once held memories, sensations, fears, the spark of an individual life. She uncovered a deeply furrowed brow, a left ear bent nearly in half, a left eye squeezed shut. She looked up at Dawson; he was uncovering the man’s right forearm, which was flung out away from the body, chasing the sodden peat from between the finger bones so that they would be distinct when photographed.