PANIC IS A hangover cure. This I discovered one morning in September as I tore along the coast road from Glendara to Ballyliffin, managing to avoid about one in every three potholes. My old Mini was not happy – her springs conveyed their displeasure in no uncertain terms. The windscreen wipers screeched as they did battle with the heavy rain. The car was humid, the windows fogged up from the inside. The sky was an angry mix of yellow and charcoal and the sea was that particularly bleak shade of gunmetal gray it so often is on Donegal mornings. Visibility was lousy.
I wiped the windscreen with a filthy pink rag I’d picked up God knows where, but it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. The splitting head I had woken up with two hours previously had been replaced by a pins-and-needles-type sensation that was traveling down my neck and into my shoulders. Peering over the steering wheel, I caught sight of the mannequin advertising the Famine Village just in time to slow down, take a sharp right and cross the narrow causeway, over the mudflats and on to the Isle of Doagh. This morning the shrieking gulls and little oystercatchers held no interest for me; the dread in the pit of my stomach was all-consuming. Guilt made me nauseous, a bit like a hangover but a lot less cosy. Panic and guilt – now there was a song I knew by heart. I felt like running around in a circle, waving my hands in the air and screaming at the top of my voice.
Instead, I continued along the narrow road that snaked through the center of the island, scraggy hazel hedges blocking the view on either side. Unable to see fully around the next corner, I swerved suddenly to allow a tractor to pass by with a trailer full of cattle. Then I remembered. It was Wednesday – Mart Day in Glendara. The office would be like a zoo. But there was nothing I could do about that now; I had to find out what had happened.
I emerged at a wide grassy clearing where the sea appeared again in front of me. The tide was out and the long beach was just about visible as a biscuit-colored stripe beneath water and sky – providing, that was, you could see past the three squad cars and I counted seven gardai blocking the view. Every guard in Inishowen must be here, I thought. Tucking the Mini in behind the last squad car where it wouldn’t be seen from the road, I tugged hard on the handbrake. The salty wind that lunged at me as I clambered out of the car made me pull at the collar of my coat and hunch with my arms crossed as I made my way towards the blue figures. At least the rain was easing off.
A tall guard was bellowing into a mobile phone, trying his best to be heard over the wind: Sergeant Tom Molloy – a native of Cork, honest, principled, and utterly committed to a job he arrived at late, after an abandoned career in science. I’ve known Molloy for seven years, although sometimes it feels as if we’ve only just met. Which makes things difficult for me since I’ve been thinking a lot about him lately. What began as a working relationship became a friendship of sorts, but then nine months ago something changed between us, culminating in a moment when we had almost … Almost because Molloy had pulled back. He still hadn’t told me why. It was clear there was something holding him back, but we’d brushed aside what had happened and carried on as before. The problem was, I cared about him, more than I wanted to admit. And I knew he cared about me; he had shown it when I had needed him most.
He caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye, finished his call, and came over.
“Ben, what are you doing here?”
My parents’ fondness for an obscure fifth-century Italian saint has landed me with the middle name Benedicta, which did not make my convent school days any easier. Ironically, it’s now the name I use – or a shortened version of it. And thankfully, despite his dislike of nicknames – which I suspect comes from the difficulties in trying to police an area where nicknames are rife – Molloy has managed to make an exception for mine.
“Is it true you’ve found a body?” I tried to sound less breathless than I felt.
Molloy raised one eyebrow. He has dark eyebrows, framing deep gray eyes. “Where did you hear that?”
“Oh come on, Tom, it’s all over the town. Do you know who it is? Is it Marguerite – Marguerite Etienne?”
He relented. “We think so. One of the Malin guards was able to identify her.”
“Is he sure?”
“Yes. Seems she wasn’t in the water that long. Did you know her?”
“She was a client.” That was enough for now, I decided. “When was she found? Who found her?” My voice sounded shrill. I’d like to have blamed it on the wind, but it wouldn’t have been true.
“Iggy McDaid. He’s over there talking to McFadden.” Molloy nodded in the direction of a man with a face the color of a ripe plum, talking to a young guard. “He was out checking lobster pots about seven o’clock this morning when he came across her washed up on the shore. All knotted up in the seaweed. Came close to standing on her, according to him. He was pretty upset.”
I looked over at the two men. Uncharitably, it occurred to me that McDaid’s starring role in the whole drama was compensating quite a bit for the shock. He was leaning against one of the squad cars talking animatedly while McFadden took notes. Every so often he’d grab the notebook, take a look at it, point something out, and hand it back.
I cleared my throat. “May I see her?”
“Christ, Ben, why on earth would you want to?” Molloy said.
“It’s just something I need to do.”
He shook his head. “I can’t let you. The state pathologist is on his way up from Dublin. He should be here in about half an hour.”
“Please, Tom. I just need to be sure it’s her.”
Molloy paused for a second and made a quick decision. “Right. Okay. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to have a second ID. Come on.”
He led the way through the rough marram grass, over the dunes and along the narrow pathway leading down to the beach; his long strides forcing me to trot after him, my high heels sinking into the wet sand.
He spoke briefly to the young guard at the bottom of the path then continued over the stones, on to the beach and towards a cluster of craggy black rocks about twenty meters to the left. As we approached, a large white tent covering part of the rock came into view with another guard standing outside it. He was stamping his feet and clapping his hands together to warm them against the wind but stopped abruptly as soon as he saw the sergeant approaching.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Molloy asked me.
I nodded.
He walked over, lifted the flap of the tent, and went inside. I took a deep breath and followed him. A smell I didn’t recognize assaulted my nostrils. Salt mixed with something else I couldn’t identify. Something unpleasant. My stomach lurched. Next to the rock, looking at first glance like a pile of shiny red ribbons, was a stack of dulse seaweed.
Molloy stayed back as I took a step forward, slowly. Tangled up in the midst of the seaweed, lying in a fetal position and cradled by the rock, was a woman’s body. From a meter away it looked as if she was naked, but as I approached her, I could see that she was wearing sheer, lacy underwear. Short dark hair was plastered against her forehead. I forced myself to look at her face.
“Well?” Molloy was beside me. He touched my arm. “Are you okay?”
I swallowed, then turned to look at him. “It’s her. It’s Marguerite.”
“There wasn’t really any doubt. Did you notice this?” He squatted down beside the body.
Clearly visible on the left upper thigh was a crude black mark like a tattoo. It consisted of two intersecting arcs, one end of each extending beyond the meeting point. From one angle, it looked like a fish. From another, a noose.
Walking back across the beach with Molloy, I made a decision.
“She came to see me yesterday,” I said.
Molloy kept walking, but I knew he was listening.
“Professionally, I mean. At the office.”
He stopped and looked at me.
“She wanted to make a will,” I said.
“I see.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“What am I thinking?”
“Tying up her affairs. Suicide.”
“Well, it is the most likely cause of death,” he said. “We found her clothes and shoes on Lagg, and her keys were in the pocket of her jacket. You know that stony section just before you turn the corner to come on to the main beach?”
I nodded.
“With the way the currents are, if she’d gone into the water over there, this is where she’d wash up. And very quickly.”
Molloy was right. The Isle of Doagh is an island attached to the mainland by a narrow causeway. Directly across from it, on the other side of Trawbreaga Bay, is a long golden stretch of beach called Five Fingers Strand, so named because of the five pointed rocks sticking out of the water on its western side. The locals call it Lagg, after the townland. But the currents in Trawbreaga Bay are dangerous and unpredictable. Bréag in Irish means falsehood, lie: Trawbreaga or Trá Bréige is Treacherous Strand.
I remembered walking on the beach at Lagg when I first came to Inishowen and seeing some teenaged boys playing with an old football. One of them kicked it out to sea and he stood watching it float away like a little boy until one of the others shouted that he knew where it would wash up. The Isle of Doagh, he said, it’ll be on the Isle. And off they sped in their souped-up car to drive the twenty-odd kilometers by road in search of their ball, circling the inlet. Whether they found it or not, I have no idea, but the memory – in light of what we were talking about now – made me feel ill again.
“She can’t have committed suicide,” I insisted.
“Why?”
“Because she didn’t sign her will. I haven’t even drafted it. She had to come back in. Why would she have gone to the trouble of coming to see me, give me instructions for a will, and then kill herself before she signed it? That doesn’t make sense. If that’s what she was doing, tidying up her affairs.”
“Maybe she didn’t realize she had to come back in. Thought it was all done and dusted.”
Molloy lifted the cordon, and I walked through. The rain had started again. I shivered, whether because of the chilly wind or the memory of what I had just seen, I couldn’t be sure.
“She knew,” I said, as we made our way back up towards the road.
Molloy smiled at me for the first time since I’d arrived. A wry one. “Are you sure about that? You’re not the clearest sometimes, you solicitors.”
“Thanks.”
“Look, we won’t know anything until the pathologist gets here. We may not even know then. It’s not easy to tell with drowning.”
“The pathologist. It’s not …?”
Molloy shook his head. “No. It’s the Assistant State Pathologist this time, I think.”
“Will you call me after?”
“Look, Ben, I’ll try. But you know what it’s like.”