Chapter 17: What Cormac Saw

We went up the peat cuts in the dark and the light on the ridge did not come on again.

The ground was soft and black and it smelled of cut turf and old rain, and the banks of the cuttings rose on either side of us like the walls of a lane. Cormac went ahead with his hand out and I followed his coat, and the moon went down behind the sea and the sky went grey and the first birds started up in the furze.

At the top of the cuts there was a flat place where the turf had been stacked to dry, and a heap of old sods gone soft with weather, and we sat down on the lee side of it out of the wind.

"Tell me about the woman in the black boots," I said.

Cormac pulled his coat round him. "She came in March. I saw her on the ridge three times. The first time she was digging up by the old stones and she had a torch and a spade and she was at it half the night. The second time she was sitting on the wall by the church with a map on her knees and she was crying."

"Crying."

"She had her hands over her face and her shoulders going. I did not go near her. I was up on the ridge with the sheep and I watched her from the wall and she never saw me." He was quiet a moment. "The third time was the night before the claim. She came down off the high ground at about eleven and she went to the hall and the Alpha was standing in the door waiting for her and they went in together and the light was on in the hall until three."

"You told me you saw her go into the hall at two in the morning on the Thursday."

"That was the Alpha and my father." Cormac looked at his hands. "The Thursday was the night of the claim. I was in the hall. The Alpha called me in at two in the morning and my father was there and there was a woman on the floor of the hall and it was your sister and she was not moving."

The wind came over the top of the cuts and I pulled my coat round me and did not say anything, because a witness who is talking should be let talk.

"They had her on a blanket by the fire," Cormac said. "She was breathing but it was a bad breathing, like a thing with a hole in it. My father was kneeling beside her and he had his hands on her and he was saying her name over and over. And the Alpha was standing at the table with her back to the fire and she had a book open and she was writing in it."

"What was she writing?"

"I do not know. I was not close enough to see the page. But she wrote for a while and then she closed the book and she said, Declan, get up. And my father did not get up. And she said it again in the pack voice and he got up." Cormac's voice was very low. "And she said, the woman is not to die in this hall. Take her to the boathouse and put her on the floor and put a blanket over her and leave her there. And my father said, she needs a healer, and the Alpha said, she has had a healer, and then she said the thing I have been thinking about every night since."

"Say it."

"She said, this was ordered." Cormac looked up at me. "She said it like it was a receipt. She said, this was ordered and it was done and I will not have it undone in my own hall. And my father stood there with your sister in his arms and he said, ordered by who, and she said, by the Council, and then she looked at me and she said, Cormac, you did not hear that."

The word went through me like cold water. Ordered. By the Council. I had spent fifteen years listening to men tell me who had ordered what, and there was a thing that happened to a case when the word ordered came into it, a thing that changed the shape of everything. An accident is one case. A killing is another case. A killing that someone ordered is a third case entirely, and the third case is the one that goes all the way up.

"Did your father hear her say it was ordered?"

"He heard it. He had her in his arms and he heard it and he did not say another word. He carried her down to the boathouse and he put her on the floor and he put the blanket over her and then he stood in the door of the boathouse for a long time with his back to me and his hands on the frame." Cormac wiped his face. "And then he went down to the harbor and he sat in the office with the light off and I sat outside on the pier and neither of us said anything until the sun came up."

"And the woman in the black boots? What happened to her?"

"I do not know. I never saw her again after the Wednesday." He looked at me. "But the Alpha had a man in the hall on the Saturday. A man in a town coat. And he came in a dark car with no lights on and there was a woman in the car with red hair, and they were in the hall for an hour, and when they came out the Alpha walked them to the car and she shook the man's hand and she said, the boat is at the cove and the rocks are deep and the tide will do the rest."

The sky was going from grey to a thin cold yellow along the eastern edge. Out beyond the headland a fishing boat was coming in, its light small and steady on the water.

"Cormac," I said. "The woman in the black boots. Was she the woman in the car?"

"No. The woman in the car had red hair." He frowned. "But the woman in the black boots had a library card from Dublin and a bus ticket from Galway and she talked like a town person and my father said she was a teacher. And the Alpha told the co-op nine years ago that a woman called Bridget had broken the charter and was banished."

"Did Bridget have red hair?"

Cormac looked at me. Then he looked away, out over the sea, and his face went through a thing I could not follow. "I was thirteen when Bridget was banished," he said. "I remember her. She taught me my letters. She had red hair then. She had hair the colour of a fox and she wore it long and she used to let me hold the chalk." He turned back to me. "I have been sitting on that rock by the boathouse looking at the rope and I have been thinking about the woman in the black boots and I have been thinking about the woman in the car and I did not put them together until now."

"Because a woman can dye her hair," I said.

"Because a woman can dye her hair and come back to the village she was banished from and go up to the high ground with a spade and be let into the hall at two in the morning by an Alpha who was waiting for her at the door." Cormac stood up. "Bridget did not come back to help your sister. Bridget came back to take the thing out of the ground and sell it to the Alpha, and the Alpha paid her, and the payment was a place in this village and a promise that no one would say the word banished again."

I got up. The yellow light was spreading along the edge of the sea and the fishing boat was coming round the point with its nets up.

"You are sure it was Bridget in the hall?" I said.

"I am not sure of anything," Cormac said. "I am telling you what I saw. You are the detective. You are the one who knows what a thing means."

We went down the north side of the peat cuts and along the back road into the village, and we came in past the church and the priest's house and down the lane behind the shop, and the village was quiet and the gulls were up and there was a light on in the priest's window and a smell of bread from the shop. Cormac stopped at the top of the lane.

"I am going to my father," he said. "I am going to tell him what I have told you. All of it. And then whatever he does I will do."

"He will be angry."

"He will be angry with her and he will not be able to say so and he will be angry with me instead and I will take it." Cormac pulled his coat straight. "Niamh. The woman in the black boots. If it was Bridget and she is still in this village, she is the only person alive besides the Alpha who knows what was in that locker. And she was in the hall on the Saturday, in the car, when the Alpha told the man to put the body in the water."

He went off down the lane. I stood at the top of it and watched him go and then I went down the shore road to the cottage, and I got the key out of my pocket and put it in the lock, and the door opened before I had turned it.

Declan was standing in the kitchen with his back to the window and his face grey in the dawn light and his fists at his sides.

"Where is he," he said.

"Where is who?"

"Do not do that. Do not do the detective voice with me." He took a step forward. "Cormac. He was not in his bed when I got up at four and he was not at the harbor and he was not at the boathouse and the whole pack has been on the shore road since midnight because the Alpha called them out to find a rogue." He stopped. "Where is my son, Niamh?"

The pull in my chest went tight. He was frightened and he was angry and under the anger he was frightened, and the bond between us carried it into me so clearly that I had to put my hand on the back of a chair.

"He is on his way to you," I said. "He was with me. He is safe. He is coming down the lane to the harbor office now."

Declan's face did something complicated.

"He was with you," he said.

"He followed me up to the headland. He found me at the boathouse. He told me what he saw the night my sister died." I looked at him. "He told me the Alpha said it was ordered by the Council, and you were there, and you heard her say it, and you carried my sister down to that boathouse and you left her on the floor."

The kitchen was very quiet. Outside, a gull screamed and another answered it.

Declan looked at me and his grey eyes were steady and he did not flinch and he did not look away, and he said, "I do not know what you are talking about."

And the bond between us went taut, and I felt the lie come off him the way a smell comes off a wet coat, and something inside me that had been holding itself together since the first night went quiet and cold and still.