A Carol for the Dead, page 2
But Traynor noticed the signals passing between us. ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ he said, rounding on me. Some stray molecules of Polo went up my nose and made it twitch. ‘You have “archaeologist” written all over you.’ He ran his eyes down me as if checking off all the items he needed for verification – green Gore-Tex waterproof parka, ski sweater, jeans, rubber boots, multicoloured woolly hat. He was probably disappointed I wasn’t carrying a trowel. ‘Always trying to stop progress, you lot,’ he growled.
I remained calm. Traynor had perhaps revealed more than he intended. ‘What do you mean, progress?’ I said. ‘What’s so progressive about widening a drain?’
‘Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m not widening a drain; I’m stripping out the entire bog.’
That could only be for one reason. But surely it couldn’t be happening. We were less than a kilometre across the river from a World Heritage site, in a part of the valley off limits for development.
Traynor walked back to his car looking self-satisfied. His scent still hung in the air. The snow had stopped falling and the ominous cloud had fragmented, allowing a cuticle of moon to float into view like a stray snowflake. Darkness was closing in and, with clear skies, the promise of a sub-zero night. And that could pose a problem.
Two of the Forensics clanked past me with lighting and photographic equipment and an inflatable tent, which would provide the team with shelter and the site with some protection from the elements.
As Traynor reversed back up the causeway, I stripped off my latex gloves and fished out my mobile phone from an inside pocket. My priorities now were to get a legal injunction against any further destruction of the site, and to prevent the bog mummy’s tissues from deteriorating through drying out or, as seemed more likely tonight, through frost damage. I called Terence Ivers at the Dublin office of the Wetland Exploration Team, the organisation charged with recording and preserving archaeological material found in Irish bogs. It was he who, after being notified by the Visitor Centre at Newgrange, had asked me to go to the site on their behalf. I left a message, noticing as I did that Traynor had halted near the gate and was talking out his window to Seamus Crean, who was helping the third member of the Forensic team to unload another crash barrier.
My phone chirruped as Crean, carrying one end of the barrier, passed me by. ‘Terence, thanks for getting back … Excuse me a second.’ Crean was walking with his head bowed, blushing. ‘What did Traynor say to you, Seamus?’
‘He fired me, Missus. Said he wanted this place dug by Christmas and I’m after costing him thousands of euros.’
I was stung by the unfairness of it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Crean walked on. Traynor’s spiteful action only reinforced my determination to get the better of him. But Ivers needed to act fast.
‘Terence, I have good news and bad news. First, the find looks old, possibly Neolithic. That’s the good news.’ I knew I was sticking my neck out by suggesting that the remains were from the Stone Age, but it might add urgency to the case. ‘Second, if the find-spot is to be surveyed we need to get a court injunction, fast.’
‘Damn. What’s the story?’ I could imagine Ivers at his desk, taking off his glasses, cradling the phone between jaw and shoulder and polishing the lenses nervously with the end of his tie as he listened. There were probably beads of perspiration already appearing on his temples.
I looked at my watch. It was coming up to four. Ivers had only a very short time in which to get to a court that was in session and lay the facts before a judge. I filled him in briefly, and then together we summarised the main points that we hoped would get us the injunction: find possibly of major historic importance; destruction of site imminent, with loss of further material that would assist archaeological inquiry; permission for development in land zoned as a Heritage Park highly unlikely to have been granted in the first place.
‘I’ll liaise with Malcolm Sherry on what to do with the body in the short term, if that’s OK with you.’
‘You do that,’ he said. A droplet or two of sweat had probably run down his jowls by now, and, judging his tie unequal to the task, he was dragging a drab-looking handkerchief from his pocket.
‘And I take it you’ve notified Muriel Blunden at the National Museum, as well.’
Ivers grunted confirmation. Because of their overlapping responsibilities, there was a degree of friction between WET and the Museum, frequently made worse by Muriel Blunden’s abrasive personality and her readiness to assert the Museum’s statutory authority over the junior organisation.
‘Then we’d better keep her informed of what we’re doing now,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you do that, Illaun? I’ve got to get going on this injunction.’ Ivers put down the phone.
I gritted my teeth and rang Muriel Blunden’s mobile number. Powered off or out of reach. I rang the Museum and got a secretary, with whom I left a brief message for the Excavations Director. It was a relief not to have to talk to Muriel.
Then I introduced myself to the Garda sergeant who had spoken to Traynor. ‘And I’m letting you know, Sergeant … ?’
‘O’Hagan’s the name. Brendan O’Hagan.’
‘You should be aware, Sergeant O’Hagan, that we’re seeking an injunction to stop any further work on the site here.’ I handed him one of my business cards.
Without looking at it, he slipped it into his breast pocket. ‘You’ll have a fight on your hands going up against Frank Traynor.’
‘You know him well, then?’
‘Ah, he’d be a well-known businessman in this part of County Meath. Tough customer when it suits him. All above board, of course.’
‘What’s his line of work?’
‘Frank Traynor?’ He winked at the Garda officer accompanying him, then sighed loudly, as if underlining for the other man the kind of patience you had to display when dealing with strangers. ‘Frank’s a property developer – hotels, mainly.’
I gasped. I had imagined a house, a private dwelling with maybe, at most, a craft shop selling coffee and souvenirs to tourists. Even that would have contravened the ban on development. But a hotel? Not here. Not along this flat expanse of river meadows, whose only contours were unexplored grassy mounds in which were stored secrets as old as time.
Chapter Two
Angels we have heard on high
Sweetly singing o’er the plains,
And the mountains in reply
Echoing their joyous strains:
Glo-o-o-o-o–
‘Hold it – hold it, please … Hello?’
Gillian Delahunty, our musical director, had ceased playing the organ and was trying to call a halt to the runaway choir. A few harmonised voices carried on regardless, until Gillian clapped her hands loudly and they sheepishly petered out.
‘I said legato, not staccato! It should flow … like so …’ She made a wave-like motion with her hand. ‘All in one breath …’
It was first-night enthusiasm: carol practice in the church, instead of the parochial hall, which was our usual venue for rehearsals. And I would normally have been full of the good feeling carol-singing creates, but I wasn’t.
From the time I’d left the site, something had clung to me like a bad odour. Not the whiff of decay – this wasn’t physical. I would have described it as a feeling of melancholy. But why? Let’s face it: archaeologists like nothing more than finding preserved human beings, be they desiccated in desert sand, cured in salt mines, deep-frozen on mountaintops or pickled in bogs. Mummies are time machines, allowing us to travel back and tick off what was on the menu for a peasant’s last meal, or tell if a monk’s joints grated from arthritis, or trace the tracks of the parasites that gnawed a pharaoh’s liver.
I’d taken a long shower when I got home, for therapy as much as hygiene. And then, still trying to lift my mood, I’d decided to dress up a bit, choosing a seasonal theme for the night that was in it: a dark-green velvet sleeveless dress over a red T-shirt, plus a pair of vintage silver Docs I could never bring myself to throw out, all topped off by silver bell-shaped earrings and a red beret to keep some control over my unruly curls. But despite these efforts – and a brief flicker of amusement when one of our elderly male choristers flirtatiously called me ‘a little Christmas cracker’ – I couldn’t shake off the feeling. My mind was still elsewhere.
I was looking down on a frozen field that for perhaps thousands of years had held the bog woman in its chemical embrace, slowly dissolving her bones, gradually rendering her skin to leather. But how did she get there? And was she as old as I hoped she was?
At least there was a chance we would find out more about the circumstances of her burial. As I drove home to Castleboyne, Terence Ivers had called me to say we had won a temporary injunction from a District Court judge. The likelihood was that the National Museum would license us to carry out a full excavation before any further work on the site was allowed. Ironic, I thought, that what we would be doing as archaeologists was not that far removed from what Traynor had wanted to do in the first place. Archaeological excavation equals destruction, as it says in all the textbooks.
Traynor would have been notified of the injunction, so I had impressed upon Ivers that he should warn the local Gardaí of the court’s ruling about the field, which I now knew was called Monashee. Seamus Crean had told me its name before I left the site, as the snow began to twinkle with points of frost in the lights of the JCB. I thought of the Gaelic word and what it meant. ‘That means “the fairy bog”, I think?’
‘“The Bog of Ghosts” is what we called it as kids,’ Crean said dourly.
‘Spooky, eh?’ I said.
He didn’t smile.
Monashee. Remembering that bodies from the distant past are sometimes called after where they’ve been found, I thought: Monashee … Mona-shee. Here was a ready-made woman’s name.
‘Let’s call her Mona, then,’ I said to Crean. ‘Makes her seem more of a person, don’t you think?’
He didn’t answer.
Accompanying me to my car, he mentioned that people in the area believed Monashee was haunted. ‘It never gets the sun during the day, and they say you should never set foot in it at night.’ I could tell he believed that the remains he had uprooted were proof of the place’s sinister reputation.
But from now on maybe Monashee would not be haunted. The field I could see in my mind’s eye no longer had its tenant. Tonight Mona was in the old morgue at Drogheda Hospital.
I had shared my worries with Malcolm Sherry, about preserving the body as best we could before a decision was reached about its future. It had been in the anaerobic environment of the bog, where there was little bacterial activity; now it would begin to deteriorate, like any organic matter exposed to the air. And this process would be accelerated if it was allowed to freeze and thaw again. Much would depend on how thoroughly altered – in a word, tanned – her flesh was, and this would only be revealed by examining her skin in cross-section.
After a quick examination of what he could see of the woman’s remains, Sherry agreed that the body had been underground for a long time – just how long would require a battery of tests to confirm. In the meantime, he thought it best to proceed as he usually would on discovery of a possible crime victim. ‘Though it will be difficult to work on her here, because she’s wedged in the peat. The question is how we can get her to a morgue.’
‘It would suit my purposes if she could be moved with the slab of peat remaining intact,’ I said. ‘I’ll want every scrap of the matrix examined. So here’s my suggestion. Drogheda Hospital is only a few kilometres away. Why not leave things as they are in the JCB, pack polythene sheeting around the slab and ask the Gardaí to escort Seamus Crean to the hospital? I’ll make sure he gets paid for doing the job. When he gets there, he can lower the load onto the polythene so it can be hauled inside somewhere out of the weather.’
‘Excellent idea. And I’ll leave Forensics here to poke around for a few hours.’
There was something else on my mind. ‘I don’t trust Traynor to stay away from here for long, so if your guys put up scene-of-crime tape and leave the tent overnight with a Garda on duty, it will help to deter him and protect the find-spot until we get the go-ahead to dig.’ I was thinking of other arrivals, as well as Traynor – some just curious sightseers trampling the site; others, far more destructive, armed with metal detectors and shovels.
Sherry told the Gardaí and the Forensic team what we had decided, and I asked Crean if he would transport the body to Drogheda.
‘I would, Missus, but it’s not my digger. Mr Traynor hired it and I’m meant to leave it here. That’s why I have the bike for getting home. It would really annoy him if he found out.’
‘I think Mr Traynor will be quite happy to see it being used if it means getting the body off his land.’
‘I’d prefer if it was going to annoy him. But I’ll give it a go.’
I smiled at Crean’s show of spirit and gave Sherry a thumbs-up.
‘I’m going to take a quick look at the other specimen,’ he called over to me. ‘Then we’ll pack them up.’
I rang my secretary, Peggy Montague, filled her in on what I was doing and asked her to contact Keelan O’Rourke and Gayle Fowler, my two full-time staff. They were out at the proposed site of a new interchange on the M1 near Drogheda, where we were just completing some test-trenching for an environmental impact assessment, an EIA. I told Peggy they would be needed at the hospital early the next morning, to excavate the block of peat in which the body had been lodged – something which would require bagging and tagging a substantial amount of soil.
‘Illaun … Illaun …’ Someone urgently whispering. I felt a sharp sensation in my ribs and snapped back to the present.
‘Would you like to join in with us, Illaun?’ Gillian Delahunty’s eyes were boring into me.
My friend Fran, beside me, sniggered under her breath. It was she who had elbowed me.
‘Sorry, Gillian,’ I said. ‘I was daydreaming.’
Gillian frowned disapprovingly before addressing the choir. ‘Take it from the first “King of Kings” – sopranos, let’s hear you. Ready, please!’
Somehow we had got through ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ and well into the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Messiah without my being aware of it. Had I been singing at all? I had no recollection. But my less-than-full commitment had obviously been noticed in the ascending ‘King of Kings and Lord of Lords’ section, a challenge for the sopranos.
As we sang, I watched Gillian’s feet dancing on the organ pedals and noticed she was wearing green ankle-boots. I wondered if Mona had worn leather footwear and, if so, whether it might have survived. I wouldn’t know that – or even if her lower limbs were intact – until after Sherry had completed his autopsy, something he preferred to perform with only members of the Forensic team present. But, from previous experience, I knew I could rely on him to draw anything he thought relevant in archaeological terms to my attention.
Before leaving the site, I had climbed up into the driver’s cab to take a photograph of the find-spot, which I’d staked out with ranging rods. Below me Sherry’s team were starting to pack polythene sheeting around the peat, while he examined the other occupant of the bucket. Less than a hundred metres away I could see the Boyne sliding like black oil past snow-clad banks; on the far side, crowning the summit of a hill above the river, the low dome of Newgrange with its quartz façade glowed in the dusk, only a shade less white than the snow around it.
I climbed down again, and Sherry came around the side of the digger. He leaned close to my ear and said in a low voice, ‘I think that creature may be your bog lady’s offspring.’
After the Handel piece, our last Christmas carol of the night was ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, one that seemed to be imbued with the same mood that had enveloped me all evening. Through Christina Rossetti’s words my feelings at last found a voice.
In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter
Long ago …
Frances McKeever had been my friend since playschool. The only physical resemblance between us was our pale skin, but she had freckles on hers. She was also red-haired, green-eyed, long-limbed. I was none of these things.
Fran was also a full-time geriatric nurse with two teenage children to rear by herself. She had rung me the day before, to arrange to meet for lunch or dinner before Christmas, and I had promised to get back to her; but it had slipped my mind.
‘It’s always the same at Christmas,’ she said. ‘We see less of each other than we do the rest of the year.’
We were walking down the bare wooden stairs from the choir loft, Fran one step ahead so that our faces were more or less level.
‘Are you on days or nights?’ It wasn’t always so easy to rendezvous with Fran, who worked a lot of unsocial hours.
‘I’m on nights this weekend, Friday to Sunday, then off for the week. Back on duty Christmas night. Not a bad deal, eh?’
‘You’ll miss the practice this Saturday, then?’
‘Yes. But I’m sure you’ll all manage.’
‘OK, let me think …’
‘Hey, how about a drink while you’re doing that? Just a quickie on the way home.’
‘Sorry, Fran. There’s been a bog body found near Newgrange …’
‘I heard about it on the news. You involved?’
‘Yes. And it’s going to keep me busy tonight. Starting with a visit to Finian to get his opinion.’
Fran made a snorting noise. ‘Bah, that guy … he should either piss or get off the pot.’ Fran took a dim view of Finian Shaw. He and I had been close for fifteen years and though of late he seemed to be acknowledging that we were more than just friends, as far as Fran was concerned, he was not only playing with my emotions but also stymieing my chances of getting another man, as she put it.
