Chapter 42: The Moonlit Boathouse

We went down to the boathouse at midnight.

The moon was up and the tide was out and the shell of the burned shed was black and silver in the light, and the slip was dry and the mud below it shone. I had the lamp and Declan had a crowbar and a coil of rope and we went in through the gap in the seaward wall and stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the flagstones.

“The safe is not here,” Declan said.

“It is here. Your sister told you it was in the harbor and she told you to leave it, and you found it under the wall of the pier. But the pier is not this boathouse and the wall of the pier is a mile along the shore.” I put the lamp down on the stones. “There is a thing I have not told you. When I was in this shed with Cormac I saw a stain on the stones and a rope that had been cut, and the stain was blood, and the blood was old. But there was something else in this shed that night and I did not look at it properly. There was a flagstone that was not the same as the others. It was in the corner by the seaward door and it had a ring in it, an iron ring, and I took it for a mooring ring.”

Declan looked at the corner. Then he picked up the crowbar and went to the corner and knelt down and put the point of the bar into the crack round the iron ring.

“It is a lifting stone,” he said.

He levered it up. It came up slowly with the iron ring screeching and the stone grated on the ones around it, and under it there was a hole and under the hole there was a shaft and under the shaft there was water.

“It is a well,” I said. “There is an old well under this floor.”

“It is not a well. It is the old net store’s water tank and it has been dry for thirty years and it is not dry now.” Declan put the lamp down into the hole and the light went down and came back off water. “The tide comes in under this shed and fills it.”

I lay down on the stones and put my head into the hole and looked. The light of the lamp went down about six feet and there was water and under the water there was a shape. It was square and dark and it had a handle on the top and it was the size of a strongbox, and it was sitting on the bottom of the shaft in the mud.

“That is not the safe in the harbor,” I said. “That is a second safe.”

Declan was already taking off his coat. “It is the one she did not want anyone to find. The one in the harbor was for the co-op to find and say it was rusted and empty. This one is the one she put here so that she could come back for it.” He tied the rope round his waist and gave me the other end. “Hold it. If I pull twice, pull me up.”

He went down. The water closed over his head and the lamp on the stones threw his shadow up the wall and I held the rope with both hands and counted. He was down for half a minute and then the rope went slack and then it went tight twice and I pulled.

He came up with the safe in his arms. It was green with weed and the mud was running off it and it took the two of us to get it over the edge and onto the stones, and we sat on the floor of the burned boathouse with the lamp between us and the safe in front of us and the water running off it.

The door of the safe had a brass plate on it. The brass plate had a name cut into it. Ahern.

“The enforcer before Korkut,” Declan said. “The man who signed the deed in 1961.”

I put my hand on the handle. It was stiff and the salt had got into it and it took the two of us to turn it. The door came open with a sound like a bone going and inside there was a package wrapped in oilcloth and tied with tarred twine and a small leather bag with a drawstring and a book bound in black leather with a clasp on it.

I opened the book first. It was a ledger and the pages were ruled and there were dates down the left hand side and names across the top and figures in the columns, and the dates went back to 1961 and the names were the names of the families of Dún Aonghasa and the figures were the rents paid to the enforcer of the region out of the co-op’s money. And on the first page, in the same thin elegant sloping hand I had seen on the receipts, there was a note: “Received from the Alpha of Dún Aonghasa, on account of the lease of the shore and the waters, the sum of one hundred pounds, this first day of May 1962. For the Council, Ahern.”

The package in oilcloth was a charter. It was smaller than the one in the hall and it was bound in green leather and there was a clasp on it and the pages were parchment and the writing was the cramped legal hand of 1901. It was the copy that had been in the old charter house on the night of the fire, and on the last page there was a list of the Alphas of Dún Aonghasa, and the last name on the list was Maeve, and beside it there was a date and a space and the space had never been filled in.

And in the front of the book, tucked into the binding, there was a page that had been torn out of another book. It was old and brown at the edges and it was in a hand I did not know, and it was a record of the vote of 1921 that had given the number forty one to the family of Maeve and had made her Alpha. And at the bottom, in the same hand, there was a note that said: “The ring is the seal of the Alpha and is given with the seat. It is not to be worn by any wolf who has not been voted into the seat by the co-op. Any wolf who wears the ring without the vote wears it as a thief.”

I sat on the floor of the burned boathouse with the page in my hand.

“This is the missing charter page,” I said. “This is the page that was in the locker and that Bridget took out and that Mairéad burned. It is not burned. It is here. It has been here since 1979 in a well under a boathouse and she did not know it.” I looked up at Declan. “She has been looking for this page for eighteen years and it has been under her feet the whole time.”

Declan took the page and read it. His face did not change and he read it twice and then he put it down on the stones.

“The safe went into the harbor in 1979,” he said. “My mother was in the hall that night. She was the healer’s assistant and she was in the hall and she came home and she was never right after it.” He looked at the ledger. “She was in the hall when the Alpha opened this safe and took the ledger and the charter out of it. And she saw what was in it and she knew what it was, and the Alpha knew she knew.”

“And she died in the autumn of that year,” I said.

“She died in the autumn of that year.” He put his hand on the ledger. “And there is a thing in this book that will hang the Alpha and the enforcer both. It is eighteen years of rent paid out of the co-op’s money to a man who owns the shore. It is not a tithe. It is theft in writing and it has Ahern’s name on every page.”

I stood up and put the page and the ledger and the charter in my coat.

“Then we take it up to the church,” I said. “Tonight. To Father Byrne. And in the morning we take it to the hall and we put it on the table in front of the whole co-op and we ask for the vote.” I looked at him. “And there is one thing I have to ask you and I want a straight answer. The woman in the black boots. My mother’s sister. If she is in this village and the Alpha is keeping her, then the Alpha is going to use her on Saturday the way she used the boy. Where would she keep a woman she has been keeping for thirty six years?”

Declan looked at the safe and then at the water in the shaft and then at me.

“There is one place in this village that no one goes,” he said. “It is the old coastguard cottage on the north side of the headland. It has been shut since I was a boy and the co-op pays for it to be kept shut and I have signed the paper every year for twenty years and I have never once asked why.”