Chapter 26: The Harbourmaster's Boat

I came in and shut the door behind me and stood with my back to it and looked at the three of them at the long table.

The woman with the red hair was Bridget. I knew it now the way you know a thing when the last piece goes into the puzzle. She was somewhere in her forties and she had a thin face and green eyes and there was a faded bruise on her left cheek that had gone yellow at the edges, and she was holding herself very still in the chair as if she had been told to sit and be still and was good at it.

Mairéad had a pot of tea in front of her. Korkut had his hands folded. There was a fourth chair at the table and it was empty and it was pushed out.

"Sit down, Niamh," Mairéad said.

"I will stand."

"Then stand." Mairéad poured tea into the empty cup. "You have been on the shore road tonight. You went up to the headland after the howl. You came down to the cove and you found the boat and you found the boy in it with a can of petrol, and now you have followed a trail to this hall. I know all of that because the whole village knows it and because the enforcer and I have been sitting here for an hour waiting for you to arrive." She set the pot down. "So I am going to save us both a great deal of time. This is Bridget. She has been living in the room above the shop since March. She came back to this village because your sister wrote to her and asked her to. She dug up the cache on the high ground and she brought the thing she found to me, and I paid her for it, and she has been in my service ever since."

Bridget did not look at me. She looked at the table.

"You paid her for the ring," I said.

"I paid her for a box of old papers and a ring that belonged to a woman who has been dead for thirty six years." Mairéad's voice was pleasant. "The ring is in the safe behind the frame. The papers are in the fire. And Bridget is going to tell you the rest of it herself, because I have found that a thing is easier to hear from the mouth of the person who did it."

Bridget raised her head. Her green eyes were wet and her hands were clasped in her lap.

"I was banished in 1988," she said. "I was a teacher here and I was banished for a thing I did not do and I went to Dublin and I have been in Dublin for nine years. And in February your sister wrote to me. She wrote to the school where I was working and she said she had found the proof of the fire in 1961 and she needed someone who had been in this village and who was not known to the Alpha and who could dig on the high ground without being noticed. And she said she would pay me and she said she would get my name cleared." Bridget's voice was thin. "I came. I dug up the cache. I brought the ring and the charter to her and she hid them in the boathouse and then she made her claim and lost and the Alpha came to me the next morning and told me she had the ring and the charter and that if I did not do as she said she would have me declared a rogue in this territory and hunted out of it."

"So you worked for her."

"I did what I was told. I emptied the locker. I took the ring and the charter out of it and I gave them to her. I put the papers in the fire. And then she told me to burn the boathouse and I did not want to burn the boathouse and she said it in the pack voice and I did it." Bridget put her hand over her mouth and took it away again. "I did not know your sister was alive. I swear to you I did not know. The Alpha told me she was dead and I believed her because everyone believed her and because I did not want to think about it. And then on the Sunday I was in the car and the Alpha told me to wait and the man came out and got in and we drove away and I did not ask what was in the water."

The hall was quiet. The candles on the table moved in the draught from the door.

"Where is the ring now?" I said.

"Behind the frame in the safe," Mairéad said. "Where it has been since March. And that is the reason you are not going to do anything foolish on Saturday night, Niamh. You can stand up in this hall on Sunday and tell the co-op whatever you like about a clause in the charter and a woman who was held in a boathouse. The co-op will listen and some of them will believe you. But you will not have the ring and you will not have the charter and you will not have a single page of proof, and I will have the ring in my hand and the charter in my hand and the co-op will see a woman from Dublin with a story." She smiled. "A story is a very fine thing in a hall. A ring is better."

Korkut leaned forward. "Miss Niamh. I am going to say a thing that is not my place to say and I am going to say it anyway because I am an old man and I have seen too many of these. The Alpha has made you a good offer. It is still open tonight. In the morning it will not be." He looked at me with his patient dry eyes. "I have known Mairéad for thirty years. She is not a kind woman. But she is a woman who keeps her word, and her word is that if you leave this village before Saturday night you will leave it alive and with money in your pocket and your sister's name on a plaque in this hall. There are worse endings."

I looked at Bridget. She was crying silently with her hands in her lap. I looked at the frame on the wall behind Mairéad's head, the frame with the charter in it and the safe behind it and the ring I had held in my own hand in my sister's kitchen before I had put it under the flagstone and gone out to Ronan's cottage.

"Where is Declan?" I said.

"In his own house with his son," Mairéad said. "Where he should be."

"Did you send him to the headland tonight?"

Mairéad's smile did not change. "Cormac went to the headland because Cormac is a boy who does not know what to do with himself. Declan went after him because Declan is a father. I did not send anyone anywhere." She lifted her cup. "I have been sitting in this chair with the enforcer since four o'clock and the whole village will tell you so."

I turned and opened the door.

"Niamh," Mairéad said. I stopped. "The offer closes at dawn. I want your answer before the sun is up."

I went out and shut the door behind me and stood on the step in the dark with the candles behind me and the sea in front of me and my heart going like a hammer.

She was lying. She had been lying from the first day and she was lying now with a chair pushed out and a cup poured and an empty answer waiting. But she had been sitting in that chair since four and the whole village would say so, and Bridget had been in the hall with her, and the footprints on the shore had gone from the headland to the hall and not from the hall to the headland, and I stood on the step and turned that over and over.

The footprints went to the hall. They did not come from it.

I went down the shore road to the harbor office. There was a light in the window and Declan was inside with his back to the door and Cormac sitting in the chair by the stove with a blanket round him and a bandage on his hand. Declan turned when I came in and the bond in my chest went warm and then went cold, because his face was the face of a man who had been sitting with a thing for an hour and had not found a way to say it.

"Cormac told me the rest," he said.

"What rest?"

"The rest of what happened on the Thursday night. Not the boathouse. The hall." Declan looked at his son and then at me. "Niamh. He did not tell you everything. He did not tell you that when the Alpha sent him to the boathouse that night, he was not alone. There was a woman waiting for him on the shore road with a bag in her hand. A woman with red hair. And she said to him, the Alpha says you are to do exactly as I tell you, and she took him down to the boathouse and she stood in the door and she watched while he put the blanket over your sister. And when he had done it she said, now go home, and she stayed."

The stove ticked. Cormac was looking at the floor.

"Then she was in the boathouse before you were," I said.

"She was in the boathouse before I was. She was in the boathouse when I carried your sister down. She was in the boathouse all night." Declan's voice was very flat. "And she was the one who told my son to cut the rope."