Chapter 30: The Weight That Fits a Hand

I turned the weight over in my hand on the church steps with the wind coming up off the harbor and Cormac breathing hard beside me.

"Where did you get this?"

"Out of her drawer. The drawer in the hall. She keeps the charter numbers in a box in the drawer and I have seen her take one out and give it to a wolf who was going to make a claim and tell him to put it on the table of the one he was claiming against." Cormac wiped his forehead. "She gave this one to Bridget in March. I saw her do it. She said, put it where it will be found, and Bridget said, where, and the Alpha said, on the table of the woman who is going to be dead by morning."

I looked at the fish and the number. Forty one.

"Then she did not use it to kill my sister," I said.

"No. It is a token. She gave it to Bridget and Bridget put it on your sister's table after she was dead, so that when the co-op came to look at the cottage they would find a challenge weight and a note and they would say, the woman made a claim and it was answered." Cormac's voice was thin. "The weight is not the murder weapon. The weight is the story."

I stood on the church steps and looked at the weight and thought about a thing I had been turning over since the first night.

"Cormac," I said. "The night of the claim. The Thursday. There was a fight on the headland and your father heard it from the harbor and your sister lost and Mairéad came down the hill alone. What happened in the fight?"

"I was not there. Nobody was there. That is the law. A challenge is between the two wolves and no other wolf."

"And when it was over, Mairéad came down the hill with clean boots and my sister was in the hall bleeding on a blanket." I put the weight in my pocket. "A wolf who wins a fight on the headland does not come down with clean boots. The headland is peat and rock and wet grass. Your father told me that on the stairs and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since."

Cormac looked at me. "You think there was no fight."

"I think there was a fight and I think it did not happen on the headland." I started down the steps. "Come on. We are going to the harbor office and you are going to show me the co-op's voting tokens and I am going to match this weight to the others."

The harbor office was cold and the stove had gone out and Declan was not there. There was a note on the desk in his handwriting that said, gone to the hall, the Alpha sent for me. I did not like the look of it but I did not have time to like or not like anything.

The co-op's voting tokens were in a tin box in the bottom drawer of the desk. There were forty of them, iron, with a fish stamped on the face and a number on the side of the fish, and they were the same size and the same shape and the same weight as the one in my pocket, and they were the same as the one Declan had taken off my sister's table on the first night and put in his pocket and then put in a drawer in this office and then lost.

I took the weight out of my pocket and put it on the desk beside the others and looked at it. Then I picked up the tin and took it to the window and turned it over and looked at the bottom of it.

There was a mark on the bottom of the tin. It was a number, stamped into the tin, and the number was forty one.

"Cormac," I said. "How many families are in this co-op?"

"Forty."

"Then why is there a forty one on this tin?"

Cormac came to the window and looked at the tin. "There were forty one families once," he said. "My father told me. There was a family that left the village in 1961 and the co-op kept the number open for them in case they came back."

"Whose number was it?"

"I do not know. My father would know." He looked at the weight. "Niamh. If the number was kept open for a family that left, and the Alpha gave that number to Bridget in March, then the weight she put on your sister's table was not your mother's weight at all. It was the number of the family that left."

I stood at the window with the tin in my hand and looked out at the harbor. The tide was in and the twenty boats were floating and the Mary Rose was at the end of the pier with her mast up and a man on the deck with a bucket.

"Forty one," I said. "My mother's charter number was forty one. My sister's letter says so. The page of names in the ledger says so. The date beside my name says so." I turned round. "So either my mother's family was the family that left, or someone has been using the number of the family that left for thirty six years and calling it my mother's."

Cormac's face was very still.

"The woman in the garden," I said. "He told me there were five claimants before my sister and not one of them in the ground on the hill. He told me the two votes in 1975 were Ronan and Fionn. And he told me your father's father went out in a boat on a day when the sea was wrong." I put the tin down. "Cormac. Where is the co-op's book of charter numbers?"

"It is in the hall. In the frame with the charter. There is a book beside the charter with all the numbers and the names of the families and the date each number was given."

"Then I need to get into that frame before Saturday." I picked up the weight and put it in my pocket. "And there is a thing I should have seen on the first night. The weight that was on my sister's table was heavy. Heavier than this one. I held it in my hand and I thought, this is heavier than it has any right to be, and I did not ask myself why. A weight is a weight. It should weigh the same as every other weight in the tin." I looked at Cormac. "Unless it is not a weight. Unless it is hollow and there is something inside it."

Cormac stared at me. Then he said, "Give it to me."

I gave it to him. He turned it over in his hands and put it to his ear and shook it and there was a small sound inside it, a dry rattle, like a seed in a pod.

"There is something in it," he said.

I took it back and looked at the fish on the face. The fish was worn nearly smooth on the one from the drawer but the fish on this one was sharp and clear and the number forty one was cut deep into the side of it, and where the tail of the fish met the body of the fish there was a seam, fine and dark, that I had taken for a scratch.

I got my penknife out and worked the point of it into the seam and the weight came apart in my hands. It was two halves, screwed together, and inside the hollow there was a folded piece of paper, thin and dry and brown at the edges.

I unfolded it on the desk.

It was a page from a book of records, torn along one edge, and it was in the cramped legal hand of the charter. It was a list of names and numbers, and at the top of the page there was a heading: "Charter numbers of the families of Dún Aonghasa, given at the meeting of 1921."

Number forty one was not there.

The list went from one to forty and stopped. And at the bottom of the page, in a different ink and a different hand, there was a note.

"Number 41 was given in 1921 to the family of Maeve, Alpha, and was surrendered by her daughter in 1961. It has not been given since. The weight of 41 is held by the Alpha and is not to be used."

I read it three times. Then I put it down on the desk and looked at Cormac.

"Your Alpha gave Bridget a weight that the charter says is held by the Alpha and is not to be used," I said. "She gave it to her and told her to put it on my sister's table so that the co-op would find it and say my sister made a claim. And the whole time the number on it was the number of the family that left, and the family that left was my mother's family, and the number was surrendered in 1961 by a daughter who was sixteen years old and who had just watched her mother burn."

Cormac was white. "Then the claim your sister made was not a claim at all."

"The claim my sister made was a claim and it was answered and she lost. But the weight she used was not a lawful weight and the number on it was not hers to use, and if the co-op had known that in March they would have said the claim was void from the start." I folded the page and put it in my coat. "And there is another thing. The note on the page says the weight of 41 is held by the Alpha. It was held by Eileen and then by Mairéad. The Alpha has been keeping a hollow weight in her drawer for thirty six years with a page inside it that proves she had no right to give it to anyone."

I was at the door before Cormac caught up with me.

"Where are you going?"

"To find your father. He is at the hall with the Alpha and she sent for him and I do not like it." I opened the door and the wind came in. "And Cormac. The man in the garden said there was a box in the locker in the boat with the Council's seal on it. If the Alpha is putting the ring into that box and the box is going onto the Mary Rose on Saturday, then the ring and the box and the seal are all in the same place, and that is the one place in this village where the whole co-op is going to be looking."

I went out onto the pier. And then I stopped, because the Mary Rose was not at the end of the pier any more. The end of the pier was empty. The Mary Rose was out in the harbor with her sails coming down and a man on the deck with a bucket, and there was a second boat beside her, a dark boat with a town man in it, and they were tied together and the man in the town coat was stepping from one to the other with a box in his hands.