Haunted Ground Part 21

"You f.u.c.kin' b.a.s.t.a.r.d," roared Brendan McGann, advancing toward Una and Hugh, his face blotchy with rage. "Your wife's not yet in her grave and you're back making a hoor of my sister. Get out of my way, Una. Get out of the way!" He seized his sister by the shoulders and pushed her roughly aside, then turned his attention to Hugh Osborne, who half stood, blinking in disbelief. Brendan McGann landed a fist to Osborne's jaw that sent him sprawling backward onto the table, and the sugar bowl and mugs of tea smashing onto the stone floor. "Come on, you f.u.c.kin' hoormonger, get up and fight." Osborne was stunned, and staggered forward, but before Brendan could throw another punch, Cormac hooked Brendan's arms from behind and pulled him away.

"Well," Brendan shouted, "what have you got to say for yourself, Englishman? Eh, f.u.c.kin' Sa.s.senach?" Spittle trembled at the corners of his mouth.

Una rushed to steady Osborne, then whirled on her brother. "What right have you to come in here flinging accusations? You know nothing about what's between us. Nothing. I found those things you had hidden away, Brendan, all the cuttings, Aoife's birth cert, and the hair clip--Mina's hair clip--and I said nothing. I couldn't believe you would harm anyone, but I don't know anymore, Brendan, I don't know you."

As he listened to her words, all the fight drained from Brendan McGann's limbs, and Cormac gradually released his hold.

Brendan spoke quietly: "You think I--ah, Jaysus, Una, you actually believed that I could hurt a woman--and a child? I found it," he continued, his voice breaking. "I found that clip in a f.u.c.kin' jackdaw's nest, Una, I swear it. And the other things, you can't blame me for being suspicious, people see him giving you a lift every day along the road, and you turn up pregnant, what were we to think? We're not stupid. And to top it, he goes off and gets married, and leaves you and Aoife to get along as best you can. It tears at me to see you working so hard, and him sitting up here in his big f.u.c.kin' house, telling people what to do, not willing to fork over a few shillings for his own flesh and blood. He's the one you want to mind, Una, not me." His finger jabbed toward Osborne. "Ask him how his wife and son ended up dead. Ask him."

Osborne still looked dazed as he wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. He seemed completely bewildered, but as he studied Brendan's defiant expression, a light began to dawn. "You sent the hair clip. And that letter accusing me, to the private detective's office in Galway. And you sent Mina a letter, too, didn't you?" Brendan's eyes shifted guiltily. "Didn't you? Just before she disappeared. Lucy gave it to me the other night; she said she found it only a couple of days ago going through some of Mina's books. When I phoned home that night from the conference--she seemed so distressed, but she wouldn't tell me what was troubling her. It was that vicious, cowardly letter. You made her believe that I'd betrayed her, and I never had a chance--you sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d--" This time it was...o...b..rne's anger that boiled over, and he made a savage lunge for Brendan's throat.

"Stop it, stop it!" Una screamed, using all the strength she possessed to get between them and push the two men apart. She turned to face her brother; she was trembling with outrage, and spoke only inches from his face. "Hugh is not Aoife's father. Do you need to hear it again? Sometimes I wish to Christ he were, but he's not. But he was the only person who befriended me when I got pregnant, the only person who noticed or cared that I was so miserable and confused. Just so you know, Aoife's father was one of my teachers at university. I should have known better--and I went away, Brendan, only because I was ashamed to think what a f.u.c.k-wit I'd been. Hugh knew what people were saying about us all these years. He put up with all the looks and the whispers because I asked him not to say anything. Are you satisfied now, Brendan? Are you f.u.c.kin' satisfied?"

"Why didn't you come to us, Una? To Mammy and me? Why did you have to go to a stranger? We'd have looked after you, Una. We'd have helped you." The hurt in her brother's voice appeared unfeigned, but Una's face was incredulous.

"You know it wouldn't have happened that way, Brendan. I'm sorry for everything I've done. I know you went through an awful time with Mammy, and I am sorry I wasn't there to help you. But I can't regret having Aoife, I can't. And I came back here in spite of all the small-mindedness and suspicion, because I wanted my daughter to have a home and a family, Brendan. You and Fintan are all that we have, G.o.d help us."

Brendan's hands moved feebly at his sides. "Una--"

"Your apologies are no use to anyone at this stage. Go home, Brendan. Will you just go home?"

He turned to leave, but stopped at the open door, and looked outside as he addressed his final words to Cormac. "I'll pay for the cost of repairs to your cars. I got drunk. Lost the head." That was the sum of Brendan's confession. He pulled the door closed, and was gone.

Una knelt to pick up the pieces of shattered crockery that littered the floor. Now it was Hugh Osborne's turn to comfort her. He stooped and took the pottery shards from her hands and set them on the table, then lifted Una to her feet and put his arm around her. Initially she resisted, but could not hold back a choking sob as he sat her down beside him on the bench beneath the windows. Cormac and Nora worked together without speaking to finish the task Una had begun, mopping up the milk and tea, sweeping up the spilled sugar, collecting broken bits of crockery and disposing of the debris in the bin. By the time they were finished, Una had pulled herself together; she and Hugh Osborne now sat side by side on the bench, linked only by hands clasped on the seat between them, each staring into the chasm of the past.

5.

As he drove to the postmortem in Ballinasloe, Devaney remembered how his prediction about inquisitive reporters had come true the previous afternoon. The first was an ambitious young man from the Sunday World who had to be escorted from the scene to keep him from crossing the barriers they'd set up near the road; next came the RTe camera crew. At least Devaney was spared dealing with them. As the superintendent in charge of the investigation, Brian Boylan was only too eager to be quoted in the papers and on the television news. Of course Boylan had nothing to say, apart from confirming what everyone already knew, that human remains had indeed been discovered at this site, and that it remained to be determined whether there was a connection between the discovery and the Osborne case or any other unsolved disappearances. He also didn't tell them that the police had found a collapsible pushchair, a pair of small blue shoes, and Mina Osborne's handbag, or that a .22 rifle had also been recovered from the souterrain. As he'd watched his superintendent bask in the television lights, Devaney had imagined the modesty with which Boylan would eventually take credit for shepherding the investigation to this juncture.

Once in Ballinasloe, he drove around the back of the hospital to the mortuary. He'd always dreaded postmortems, and the familiar queasiness started even before he'd parked the car. He got directions to the autopsy room, and found Malachy Drummond just outside the door. Drummond was a thinnish man, balding and bespectacled, known by colleagues for his trademark d.i.c.kie bows and his appet.i.te for good food and drink. His face had become familiar to the general public from coverage of crime scenes on the television news, but Drummond took this exactly for what it was, a kind of spurious quasi-celebrity that had nothing whatever to do with his actual work. To his colleagues in the police, what Drummond did bordered on the repellent, but the man himself had earned their respect for a professional demeanor and methodical work habits tempered by consideration for the dead. He always referred to his charges as "the lady" or "the gentleman," despite the often undignified circ.u.mstances of their deaths.

"Detective" was his laconic greeting to Devaney. "Sad business, this, a young mother and child. Very sad." Devaney had enough experience of the man to know he actually meant it. "I have a few things I want to show you." Drummond led the way into the autopsy room, where Devaney was relieved to see that the bodies had been covered.

"With dental records we were able to confirm the ident.i.ty of the young lady--she is Mina Osborne, without a doubt. And the cause of death seems fairly clear." Malachy Drummond picked up long tweezers from a metal tray, and held up for Devaney's inspection a slightly misshapen rifle pellet. "I found this inside the braincase. But there was neither entrance or exit injury to the skull itself, which tells me a couple of things: one, that she was not shot at close range--which would rule out a self-inflicted wound--and two, that the bullet probably entered the body through soft tissue: the eye, for example, or perhaps the mouth. Difficult to tell with such an advanced state of decomposition."

"And the child?" Devaney asked.

"With the remains almost completely skeletized, it's hard to say. No apparent knife or bullet wounds, no blunt injury. The only evidence of trauma is a hairline skull fracture, but that doesn't appear severe enough to have been the cause of death on its own. However, as I said yesterday, the position of the bodies certainly suggests that they were moved to the location where they were found. I'm ruling both as homicides." Drummond must have heard the small sigh that escaped Devaney's lips. He added, gently, "From the nature of his injury, I'd venture to say the little lad was probably unconscious, Detective, whatever ultimately happened to him."

Devaney himself wasn't sure why the information about Christopher Osborne triggered such an emotional response. He had worked on scores of murders, and had always been able to maintain his objectivity. Lack of sleep, it must be. He straightened. "Thanks, Malachy. I'll look for your report."

As he walked down the corridor from the mortuary to the main hospital building, Devaney tried to work out a scenario in which the different causes of death would make sense. He'd had no preconceptions about what might have happened; why did these facts, taken together, seem so strange? Even after the bodies were discovered, he had wondered about the possibility of a murder/suicide. Such things were not unheard of. But Malachy had found that Mina Osborne's injuries were definitely not self-inflicted. They'd have to get a ballistics test to find out whether the gun found in the souterrain was the same one that fired the fatal bullet. So how did Jeremy know where the bodies were, unless he was somehow involved? The boy didn't seem like the type to plan and commit two murders all on his own. Maybe he had witnessed something. Devaney's head began to ache from the smell of antiseptic, and from the thoughts that kept tumbling against one another in his brain. Christ, he'd give anything for a cigarette.

He turned down the corridor that would take him past Jeremy Osborne's room, where he pulled aside a pa.s.sing nurse.

"Any news on the Osborne lad?"

"Sorry, there's been no change."

Through the large window, he could see that Lucy Osborne still kept her vigil. She hadn't been home since Jeremy had been brought here, but sat silently beside her son. In all the times he'd been to check on the boy, Devaney had never seen her sleeping, and yet she somehow managed to maintain her usual fastidious appearance, despite having to wash in the public lavatory down the corridor. He had not divulged to anyone, even his own colleagues in the Gardai, where the break in the case had come from, but with the burgeoning media attention, there was no way Lucy Osborne could have missed hearing about the recovery of the bodies. No doubt she was trying to block it from her mind, concentrating fiercely on her son.

6.

The day after the scene-of-crime officers had finished and packed off back to Dublin, all that remained was the flimsy barrier of yellow tape staked around the perimeter, wrapped around saplings in the now torn-up woodland at Bracklyn House. Cormac had come back out here looking for Nora; there was no sign of her in the house, and he wanted to let her know he was going to work on the excavation site. He stepped up to the edge of the souterrain, thinking that this secret place, this nest of concealment, had ultimately succeeded too well in its purpose.

Nora was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest and her back up against the wall of the souterrain. A torch lay just out of reach beside her on the clean-swept dirt floor. She didn't look up. "I had to see it for myself," she said.

Cormac eased himself down into the souterrain and sat down a couple of feet from her. Nora's right hand held a jagged piece of stone, and for an instant she seemed unsure what to do with it. Instead of flinging it, as he had thought she might, she began to sc.r.a.pe at the dirt floor beside her, almost unaware of what she was doing.

"I've been sitting up there for days, watching all this, thinking about Mina Osborne," she said. "I wonder if she even knew she was in danger."

Cormac said nothing, only watched Nora's hand scrub a shallow trough in the earth with the stone. She finally spoke: "The night she was killed, I thought my sister would be safe with me. I thought I'd finally succeeded in convincing her that the way Peter treated her wasn't right. That she didn't deserve it. Elizabeth was away for the weekend with my parents. Triona called to tell me she had packed a bag, everything was set, and she was finally walking out. She was going to be all right; she and Elizabeth were going to stay with me as long as they needed to. But do you know what else she told me just before she hung up the phone? That underneath it all, even though she couldn't live like that anymore, that a part of her still loved him. I think she tried to tell Peter what she'd told me, and he finally snapped. n.o.body can prove it, but I know, I know that's what happened. He couldn't keep her, so he made sure she would never be her own, separate person, or anything more than his pathetic victim, forever."

The surface of the floor had begun to break apart beneath the steady scouring of the stone, but Nora didn't seem to notice until her fingers brushed against a tuft of ragged cloth that stuck up from the loosened soil. As Cormac watched, she brushed away the soil to uncover a bundle of what looked like rough-textured woolen homespun. When she carefully lifted the top layer of frayed and moth-eaten fabric, a tiny, fragile-looking skull lay exposed on the surface of the soil, its empty sockets upturned toward the sky.

"Cormac," she whispered. "This is a newborn baby." He experienced a kind of slow-spreading horror at the realization that Mina and Christopher Osborne might not be the only victims entombed here, merely the most recent. "Help me," she said, and began to scratch at the surface of the soil again with the rough edge of stone.

"We should get the Guards."

She paused only briefly to scan his face. "I'm not stopping now."

"At least let me get some tools. Please be careful, Nora. Let me show you what to do." He hurriedly reached up to the bank above their heads and felt around for the handle of his site kit. He handed her a trowel, and used another himself to help clear away bits of soil and animal bones, until the infant was completely uncovered, and what was clearly recognizable as an adult's elbow joint protruded from the earth beside it.

Within the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes, they'd uncovered almost the entire right side of an adult human skeleton, curled around the bundle containing the remains of the child. They really ought to stop now; the standard protocol in the discovery of any human remains was to inform the Gardai immediately. But Cormac knew he'd have a job convincing Nora on that point. Besides, these bones were too old to be of any concern to the police, he was certain. At least a dozen skeletons like this turned up every year, as building foundations were excavated and pipelines and sewage schemes were launched; such discoveries had become almost routine in a place that had been so densely populated for so long.

"See how the surrounding material is full of bones and broken sh.e.l.ls?" he said. "That probably means this area was used as a midden; people had to live in these places for extended periods if they were under siege, so they needed not only a stock of supplies, but also a place to get rid of rubbish. It seems like these two weren't just left in the souterrain, but were actually buried here. Though I couldn't tell you why."

About two inches from the adult skeleton's flexed knee joint, Cormac's trowel suddenly came in contact with what appeared to be a small patch of metal just under the surface of the clay. He quickly sc.r.a.ped away the dirt and gravel to expose one side of an oblong metal container, about the size of a small bread box and rather ordinary-looking. With further digging, the box turned out to be a sort of coffer or strongbox, now heavily corroded from being buried in damp soil. It was decorated with nail heads and secured around with two heavy iron bands. When he finally had the whole thing excavated, Cormac could see the remnants of leather handles on either side that had rotted through, and the rusty padlock that secured the vaulted lid.

"Maybe something in here can give us an idea who they are," he said.

Nora could perceive that Cormac was speaking, but his words didn't register. She had seen hundreds of human skeletons in the course of her career, but each time, she couldn't help being struck by the beauty and ingenuity of the form, the strength and flexibility in the triangular bones of the spine. She was studying the way the soil had infiltrated the child's chest cavity, cradling the breastbone, ribs, and collarbone. She knew how difficult it was to tell whether an adult skeleton was male or female without precise measurements of the pelvic bones, though this one being found in the company of a newborn child increased the probability that it was female. Nora knelt over the mute remnants of what might be the second mother and child hidden in this dark place, and understood from the posture of the whitened bones lying before her, now exposed to the light, that again there had been no laying to rest here, no ceremony, but another hurried inhumation cloaked in secrecy. All at once she began to experience the same p.r.i.c.kling sensation she had in the lab the day she was alone with the head of the cailin rua. "Cormac," she said, "do you realize what we haven't found?"

Nora worked feverishly to remove compacted soil until it was clear that no skull was attached to the end of the adult's spinal column. She quickly counted the vertebrae, careful not to touch the bones themselves for fear of scratching or damaging them. A normal human spine should have seven cervical vertebrae; this individual was missing the first three.

"My G.o.d, Cormac, this could be our red-haired girl," Nora said, then almost immediately reversed herself. "No--that would be just too fantastic."

"Of course it would. But I don't know why it should be. The girl Raftery told us about--Annie McCann--who was executed, she was from around this place somewhere. And what would have become of her body after the execution? You wouldn't very well bury a convicted murderer in the churchyard with all the proper Christians."

If by some remote chance this actually was the cailin rua, why would someone take the trouble to conceal her body in a souterrain--with the corpse of the infant she'd presumably murdered? Of course none of it made logical sense. Nora's head ached, and her shoulders finally began to feel the crushing weight of the last few days' events. She looked down at the child's tiny skull, and tried to imagine what little effort it would take to stop the breath of such a helpless creature. It would be over in a few brief seconds. Is that how this child died, when its mother's touch turned murderous? The infant's empty orbits stared up at her, unanswering, and Nora felt suddenly cold, kneeling in the damp, shaded corner of the underground room.

7.

Malachy Drummond had returned and confirmed Cormac's a.s.sumption that the remains found in the souterrain had indeed been buried there for several centuries. Now he sat with Nora in the evidence room at the Loughrea Garda station. They were waiting for Niall Dawson from the National Museum, who was coming down to have a look at the strongbox and to take it and the skeletal remains with him back to Dublin.

"You're very quiet this morning," Cormac said.

"I'm just thinking about how thin the line is between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. And once it's done, how everything changes."

"We have nothing to be sorry about, Nora. If you and I had never come here, Mina and Christopher Osborne would still be missing. All we did was to help uncover what was already done."

"I know, I know. I keep telling myself that. But the way I went about things here only ended up causing extra pain, to you, to everyone. It's ironic that the whole point of coming back here was supposedly to find out more about the cailin rua, and we haven't even managed to do that."

"Hang on," Cormac said. "We found that bit of a song. Raftery found the story of an execution that fits the dates. And we should know within a few days whether the skeleton from the souterrain belongs to our red-haired girl. That's an incredible amount of information, Nora. What more could we possibly learn?"

Her eyes pierced him. "That she didn't do it. That she didn't murder her own child." As Cormac studied Nora's face, he knew that she was also thinking of Hugh Osborne. The awful uncertainty over the whereabouts of his family had been replaced with an even more dreadful probability--that one or more of the people they had come to know in these few days at Bracklyn might be involved in a double murder. The thought had been weighing upon him as well.

Devaney had remained tight-lipped about the postmortem results, but he and his fellow detectives had begun intensive interviews, particularly of Hugh and Lucy Osborne. They had put out additional public appeals for witnesses and information about the day of the disappearance, but as yet no one had been charged. Cormac couldn't help thinking that nothing would be resolved as long as Jeremy remained unconscious, the words he'd spoken at the tower as much a mystery now as when he'd uttered them. They were all waiting for the moment when the boy would awaken--if he awakened at all.

A few minutes later, Cormac stood by with Nora and Devaney as Niall Dawson launched his examination of the strongbox from the souterrain. Dawson began by taking several photographs of the unopened coffer. He gently tried to work the ancient lock with a thin tool, teasing flakes of rust onto the table below. After a few seconds, the lock cracked apart and fell to pieces in his gloved hand.

"Probably wonderfully strong when they put it on," Dawson said as he lifted the lid. "Hmm. Seeing what's in here may help in dating the box quite precisely." After taking a few photos of the undisturbed contents, he lifted out a slightly concave paten, and a chalice, both of which appeared to be made of pewter or some similar metal. The chalice was set around with uncut stones. The next object was a crucifix, about eight inches long, made of wood, with a crude metal Christ figure.

"See how the arms are very short? Makes it easier to hide up your sleeve, a handy trick if you're saying a Ma.s.s somewhere you oughtn't. These weren't items to be caught with--unless of course you felt compelled to risk your neck. So that presents a dilemma: you shouldn't really destroy them--that would be sacrilege--but you can't risk anybody finding the b.l.o.o.d.y things either. So you bury them, and pray for times to change."

At the bottom of the coffer was a book that looked badly damaged with age, its warped calfskin cover embossed with red and gold. Dawson's gloved fingers opened the pages at random. It appeared to be a Latin Bible, with woodcut ill.u.s.trations and initials. From the quick appraisal Dawson gave the book, Cormac surmised that he had apparently seen at least a few others like it.

"Italian imprint, published in 1588," he said, opening the volume to its flyleaf. "That means the National Library will be at least wanting to take a look at it." He turned to Devaney. "I'm not sure what you were looking for, Detective. These items have some historical interest, but they're not all that rare. There's nothing of great monetary value here, if that was a concern. The Bible is worth a thousand or two at most. You'd find objects of this sort in many local historical museums around the country."

"I appreciate you coming all the way from Dublin on short notice," Devaney said. "It's good to be clear about what we have."

"Not at all," Dawson replied.

"Niall," Nora said, "I wanted to ask if you've found out any more about the ring."

"I'm afraid it's out of my hands. The decorative arts department has possession of it; they might be able to tell you more."

"Why would it go to them? I thought 'decorative arts' meant vases and furniture."

"Well, the general rule," Dawson explained with a wry grin, "is that if an artifact is found in bits it comes to Antiquities; if it's intact, it goes to Decorative Arts. But you didn't hear that from me."

A young Garda officer stuck his head in the door. "Excuse me, Detective Devaney? O'Byrne's just phoned from the hospital, sir. Jeremy Osborne has come around, and says he won't speak to anyone but you."

8.

When Devaney arrived at the hospital, he could see a medical team hovering over Jeremy Osborne's bed. O'Byrne, the young officer posted at the door, eagerly filled him in on what had happened: "I wasn't in the room, sir, but I could hear everything that went on. His mother was in there with him, like she has been all along, and you could hear him rustling in the bed, like. 'Jeremy,' says she, 'lie still. I'll get the doctor.' Well, I can't leave me post, so I flag down a nurse and says to her, 'Get the doctor, yer man's awake inside in the room.' I go in, and the next thing you know he's screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder, and telling me to get her out, get her out, he doesn't want her here, and she's trying to get him to whisht, and he just gets worse, roarin' and shoutin' and carryin' on till the doctor arrives and sends us both out into the hallway until they get him settled down. Then the mother tries to go in, but he's at it again, and the doctor tells her to stay out if she wants what's best for the lad. That's when I rang you."

"Where's the mother now?"

"Over there, sir," O'Byrne said, indicating her with his eyes. Lucy Osborne sat upright in a chair in the corridor outside Jeremy's room. Devaney thought he could finally detect the strain beginning to show in her face.

"Mrs. Osborne, I understand that your son wants to speak with me."

"I should be in there with him," she said, rising and moving toward the door. Devaney stepped into her path.

"I'm afraid that's not possible."

"You don't understand. Even before the accident, he wasn't well."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Osborne, but we're allowed to question him alone if he's over seventeen. I'll have to ask you to wait here. Maybe one of the nurses would get you a cup of tea or something." When he turned away, Devaney could feel her eyes drilling holes in his back.

The nurse was taking Jeremy Osborne's pulse. He looked dreadful, his face still bruised and swollen under the bandages, but Devaney could see relief in the boy's eyes as he dutifully kept the thermometer under his tongue. He and O'Byrne waited until the nurse left the room, then Devaney closed the door and drew a chair up on the far side of the bed. Through the window, he could see Lucy Osborne's anxious face as she strained to catch every gesture, to comprehend what was being said behind the gla.s.s, and found himself praying fervently that he could play this thing right. It might be his only chance.

"h.e.l.lo, Jeremy. This is Garda O'Byrne," he said, indicating the uniformed officer. "I do have to caution you that you're not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. Do you understand that, Jeremy?" There was no response. "I have to make sure you understand."

Jeremy's voice cracked as he answered: "I understand."

"We uncovered the bodies of Mina and Christopher Osborne three days ago, in an underground pa.s.sage near the tower house, just as you said." He watched the boy's face crumble. "Why don't you tell me what happened, Jeremy?"

"Why did he have to stop me? Why couldn't he just let me die?"

Devaney imagined that the boy was referring to Maguire, who had prevented him from leaping into the fire. "Maybe he saw someone worth salvaging."

"You don't understand. I killed them. I killed them both." Jeremy Osborne looked at him, and Devaney could see the effort it had taken for the boy to speak those words aloud, and how much more it was going to take to finally give the full story. He waited, and Jeremy's eyes closed once more. The silence grew until it filled the s.p.a.ce. Finally, Jeremy began to speak again; Devaney had to lean forward to hear his faint whisper.

"I had my birthday the end of September. Mum gave me a hunting rifle, an old one that belonged to my granddad. She said she didn't want me to be afraid of guns just because of--because of what happened to my father. I never even touched a gun before. She said to wait until someone showed me the proper way to use it, but I took it out anyway. I was only going to shoot at birds; ah Jesus, I never meant--" Jeremy's face screwed up again, and Devaney simply waited once more, wishing this could be over.

"I went up to the tower. It was foggy, and when I heard something move, I fired." It was clear he was reliving those endless seconds again, as he had every day, every night for almost three years. "I thought it was a bird." The tears were spilling down Jeremy's face now. His eyes focused not on Devaney, but a place somewhere on the ceiling of the hospital room, where the scene seemed to play itself out before him. Devaney could see it as well: mother and child arriving home from the village, the little boy, wearing his new red boots, climbing from the pushchair and leading his mother on a chase, or a game of hide-and-seek at the edge of the woods.

"I thought it was a bird. But it was Mina." He recoiled at the memory. "I don't know what she was doing there. Her eye was gone, it was all blood--" He reached up as if to touch her face before him, and his hand stopped in midair. "And then I saw she'd fallen on top of Chris. He wasn't moving."

"What did you do next?" Devaney asked.

It was a moment before Jeremy could respond. "I don't remember, I just knew they were dead, and I had to cover them up," he said, and even before he finished speaking, Devaney knew the last part was a lie. Everything the boy had said to this point had the ring of truth in it; why would he begin to lie now?