Chapter 53: A Wolf in the Interview Room

Ahern gave me the use of the hall for the afternoon and told me to bring the boy in and take his statement in writing and have it signed and witnessed, because a statement taken by the enforcer's own hand was worth more than a statement taken by a woman from Dublin.

I brought Cormac in at two o'clock.

He came in with his coat off and his hands clean and his hair combed and he sat down across the table from me and put his hands flat on the wood and looked at them.

"You are not to be frightened of this," I said. "It is a room and a table and a pen and me. There is no Alpha in this room and there is no pack voice and there is no wolf who can hear what is in your head except your father and he is standing by that wall and he is not going to say a word."

"I know." Cormac did not lift his eyes. "I have been sitting on the boat all morning thinking about what I am going to say and I have got as far as the first line and I cannot get past it."

"Then say the first line."

"The first line is, my name is Cormac and I am twenty two years old and I was in the hall on the night of the Thursday." He looked up. "And after that there is a thing I have to say and it is the thing I have not said to anyone, not to my father and not to you and not to the old woman in the room above this hall. And if I say it in this room then it is written down and signed and there is no taking it back."

I put the pen down.

"Cormac," I said. "I am not going to take a statement from a man who is being made to say a thing he does not want to say. We have the margin note and we have the old woman and we have the notebook and we have the print off the lid and we have enough without you. So if there is a thing you cannot say, then do not say it and we will go on without it."

"There is nothing I cannot say." He looked at me and his grey eyes were steady. "There is a thing I have been ashamed of since I was fourteen and it is not the boathouse and it is not the rope and it is not the water. It is that I knew. I have known since I was fourteen that she was using me and I let her do it because when she used me she looked at me and no one else in this village looked at me. My father looked at me and saw a boy he had to protect. The village looked at me and saw the Beta's son. She looked at me and saw a thing she wanted and I have never in my life been wanted by anyone except her."

Declan moved by the wall and did not speak.

"So I am going to say the whole of it," Cormac said. "And you are going to write it down and I am going to sign it and then it is out of me and I do not have to carry it any more."

I picked up the pen and wrote for an hour.

He told it in order and he told it plain. The first time she called him when he was fourteen and the thing she asked him to do and the way she asked it in the pack voice. The years after that and the things he had done and the things he had seen. The night of the claim and the hall and the woman on the floor and the two hours he sat behind the table with his hands over his ears. The boathouse and the blanket and the rope and his father in the door. The night he cut the line. The morning the body went into the water off the rocks. The boots and the bag and the can of petrol and the thing he could not do. The note she gave him on the boat and the words on it.

When he had finished I read it back to him and he said yes to every line and I put the pen in his hand and he signed his name at the bottom and Declan came across the room and signed it as a witness and I signed it under him and put the date and the hour.

And then the green door of the hall opened and Mairéad came in.

She came in alone and she came in quietly and she walked up the floor to the table and stood at the end of it and looked at the paper and then at Cormac.

"I have been in the church," she said. "I have been sitting in the church with Father Byrne and I have been praying for this village. And I have come to say a thing to the boy before he signs a paper that will put his father out of this territory and his own name in a file in Galway that will follow him for the rest of his life."

"He has signed it," I said.

Mairéad looked at the paper and at the signatures on it.

"Then I am too late," she said.

"You are too late."

She stood at the end of the table and did not move and I watched her face and I saw the thing I had not seen before. I saw her look at Cormac. Not the way a woman looks at a witness. The way a woman looks at a thing she has had in her hand for eight years and has just dropped.

"Cormac," she said. "Look at me."

Declan said, "Mairéad."

"Be quiet, Declan." She did not look away from the boy. "Cormac. I have been a hard woman in this village and I have done things that no wolf should do and I am not going to stand in this hall and say I am sorry for them because I am not sorry. I did what I did to keep this village alive and fed and hidden from the men who would have come with guns if they had known what we are, and the price of that is a great many wolves who hate me and one boy who was useful." She put her hand on the table. "But there is a thing I want you to know before you go out of this hall. Your mother did not step off that cliff because of a false bond. She stepped off it because I told her that her husband had a true bond with another woman and that the bond she had with him was counterfeit, and I told her that because she was going to leave this village and take you with her and I could not have that." She looked at Cormac. "Your mother died because I lied to her. Not because of a false bond. Because of a lie. And I am telling you now, in this room, with the woman from Dublin and the pen on the table, so that when it is written down it is written down properly."

Cormac looked at her for a long time.

"Why?" he said.

"Because you are signing a paper that says I ordered a woman held and put in the water," Mairéad said. "And it is true and I am not going to be judged on it by a boy who thinks I killed his mother with a false bond when I killed her with a lie." She turned to me. "Write it down. Write all of it down. The lie and the false bond and the fire and the deed and the rent and the rope in the boathouse. Write it all down and sign it and put it in front of the enforcer in the morning and let him do what he was sent to do." She walked back down the hall. "I am going up to the hall to sit in my chair. I will be there until the morning. Send a wolf for me when it is time."

She went out and the green door shut behind her.

Cormac sat at the table with his hands flat on the wood and his face wet.

And then he picked up the pen and turned the paper over and wrote on the back of it in his own hand, in a hand that was shaking and pressing hard, and he signed it and pushed it across the table to me.

I read it.

"I, Cormac, being of sound mind and twenty two years of age, say that the Alpha of this pack did order a woman to be held and put in the water and that I was ordered to help her and that I did help her. And I say that the woman whose name was Siobhan was not killed. She was put into the water alive and taken off the rocks by men in a boat and she is alive in the north and she has been alive since April."