Chapter 67: The Handwriting That Matches

Ahern took the key and the lamp and went down to the hall with the whole co-op behind him, and we stood in the burned back room with the smell of paraffin and char still in the air and he opened the press and took out the box.

It was a wooden box about the size of a shoebox with a brass clasp and a wax seal on the clasp, and the seal was red and stamped with a crescent moon. Ahern broke it with his thumb and opened the lid and took out a bundle of letters tied with string and put them on the long table in the hall.

There were eleven of them. They were in the thin elegant sloping hand of the enforcer Ahern who had signed the deed in 1961, and they were addressed to a woman called Eileen, and the dates on them ran from 1957 to 1961. Ahern read them and did not read them aloud. He read them with his jaw set and his face going greyer with every page and at the end he put the last one down and said, "My father was a thief and a blackmailer and he took money from this pack for thirty six years and he wrote in his own hand that he was ashamed of it."

"What do they say?" Ronan said.

"They say that Eileen had a thing on him from 1957 and the thing was a woman in Galway and a child and a promise he had made and broken. And they say that in 1961 she told him that if he did not sign the deed she would send the letters to the Council and to his wife. And they say that he signed the deed and that he wrote the note in the file in the same month and that he wrote the note because he knew the deed was a crime and he wanted a thing in the file that would one day hang the woman who had made him sign it." Ahern put his hand flat on the letters. "He was a coward and he was a thief and he tried to leave a trap for the woman who blackmailed him and the trap has been sitting in a file in Galway for thirty six years and nobody has ever sprung it."

I stood at the table with the letters in front of me and the red ledger and the burned pages and the green book and the ring.

"Then the files and the letters and the ledger and the second charter all say the same thing," I said. "The seat was taken by force in 1961 and it has never been voted on and every Alpha since has been sitting in it on a title that does not exist."

Ahern sat down at the head of the table.

"The co-op is going to vote," he said. "It is going to vote on the seat and it is going to vote tonight and it is going to vote on the claimants of the blood. The woman Siobhan of the line of Maeve. The boy Cormac of the line of Fionn. And there is a third claimant who has not been heard and who is not in this room and whose name is Korkut and who is the son of Fionn and Deirdre and who was taken out of this village in 1975." He looked at Declan. "Do you want your brother heard?"

Declan looked at the table.

"He is not in this room," he said.

"That is not an answer."

"He is not in this room and he has been taking money from this pack for eighteen years and he signed the sentence of the headland in March and my sister has been in the north for twenty years telling this village that she is the heir of Maeve and she is not." Declan put his hands flat on the table. "I do not want either of them heard. I want them both out of this territory and I want the co-op to vote on the woman who was put in a boathouse with a rope round her neck and the boy who has been used by the Alpha since he was fourteen." He looked up. "And I know that is not the law. And I am not going to pretend it is the law. The law says a claimant of the blood is heard if he comes to the hall and makes his claim. Korkut has not come to the hall and he has not made his claim. So he is not heard."

"Then the co-op will hear two claimants," Ahern said. "The woman Siobhan and the boy Cormac."

And then Mairéad said, "No."

She was standing at the end of the table with the lamp in front of her and her silver hair down and her hands at her sides.

"No," she said again. "The co-op is not going to vote tonight. It is going to vote in the morning when it has slept and when the whole village is in the hall and not forty wolves in a burned room at midnight. And before it votes there is a thing I have to say that I have been keeping since March and that I am going to say now because there is no one left in this village who can say it for me." She looked at my sister. "Siobhan. In March you made a claim and I answered it and I did not answer it on the headland. I answered it in this hall with two wolves holding you down and a weight in my hand. And then I put you in a boathouse with a rope round your neck and I signed the sentence of the headland in Korkut's name and I had you put in the water. And I did it because you claimed my seat and because I had held that seat for fourteen years and because I could not let it go." She put her hand on the table. "I did not do it because of the charter. I did it because I wanted to. And the sentence of the headland was a paper I signed and a thing I said to make it lawful, and it was not lawful, because there was no fight and there was no answer and there was no sentence. There was a woman in a hall with two wolves holding her down."

The hall was very quiet.

"And there is one thing more," Mairéad said. "The fire in the back room tonight was not set by me and it was not set by Eileen and it was not set by any wolf in this village. I have been in this hall since nine o'clock and I have not left it and the whole co-op has been watching me. So there is a wolf in this village tonight who is not in this room and who set a fire to burn the parish record of 1975 and who knew what was in the chest. And I am going to say a name, and I am going to say it because I have been sitting in that chair for fourteen years and I know every wolf in this village and I know which of them is the one who does the things that no one sees." She looked at the door. "Tom. Come out from behind those wolves and stand where the co-op can see you."