The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) by Hart Erin

Author:Hart, Erin [Hart, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2013-03-05T04:00:00+00:00

A little hut in the wood, none knows it but myself.

A lowly, hidden hut, among the paths of the forest,

Will you return with me to see where it lies?

The stags of Feadán Mór leap from its streams amid sweet meadows.

From my hut great Arderin can be seen to the east.

A clutch of eggs, sweet apples, heath peas, and honey;

haws, yew berries, nuts from the branching green hazels.

After the poem came a cryptic code in Kavanagh’s hand: “i, 1!!!!?”

“Any idea what this means—i-one?”

Molloy shrugged. “No, but the poem sounds like something a monk would have scribbled at the edge of his manuscript. We read a few of these, studying Old Irish at school.”

Stella remembered that Molloy had been educated at a gaelscoil, where everything was taught through Irish language—maths, physics, geography, the lot. And at that moment, the distance between the two of them seemed incrementally wider. They might as well have come up in different centuries, for all they had in common.

“What’s this?” Stella pointed to another notation, where Kavanagh had written “An Feadán Mór, 8k sw Birr, off N52.” She paused for a moment, thinking back to something Mairéad Broome had said in Dublin, about the breakthrough her husband had just made in his work. This is going to rattle some bones, he’d said. Two bodies in the boot of a car was a rattling of actual bones. There was something right under the surface here, she could feel it.

“Fergal, do you think Kavanagh could have been mixed up with treasure hunters?”

“Not out of the question, I suppose. They try to get all sorts of people in those smuggling rings—museum staffers, even coppers.” Molloy grinned. “They know we’re always skint.”

“But Kavanagh wasn’t. He’d plenty of money, according to the wife.”

“Ah, but some of them aren’t in it for the money,” Molloy said. “For them it’s all about getting your hands on something very old and rare. And book people are especially fanatical—or so I hear.”

Stella took a marker and started writing on the time line. “So, from the landlady we know Kavanagh arrived at the B and B in Crinkill on the evening of Thursday, April twenty-first, where he stayed for at least two nights, and went off between Saturday the twenty-third and the morning of Sunday April twenty-fourth and never returned.”

“Let’s put the wife’s time line up next to his,” Molloy said, grabbing a blue marker. “She and Graham Healy drive down to Cork for the exhibition installation on April fourteenth; they supposedly arrive at the friend’s house in Mountrath on April twenty-first and stay for a week, then head home to Dublin on the twenty-eighth. She waits around three days before reporting the husband missing on the first of May.”

Stella added a red line. “Work on the geothermal system at Killowen commences on April twentieth, and wraps up on the thirtieth. Niall Dawson is there for a couple of days around April twenty-second.” She paused, thinking of the way Kavanagh’s body had been left—tongue cleaved down the middle, gallnuts blocking his airway.

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