‘So what’s your opinion on the flat stone?’
‘For what it’s worth, O’Connor, I think the stone is a pillow.’
‘A pillow?’ he said, surprised.
‘You heard me. Do you have a spare desk I can use? I’ll need to work here for a while. Home isn’t an option right now.’
‘Take that one in the corner,’ he said, nodding to the far end of his office. ‘Kate, I don’t like how this investigation it filtering out. I know clear cut cases are rare, but this one is like a bloody maze.’
‘There is a core O’Connor, and our killer is right in the middle of it. All we have to do is figure out where.’
‘And bloody fast, Kate. Look at the room out there, once those calls start flooding in about the ribbons, plaiting and talk of ritualistic burials, we’ll be so far under we might all as well be buried up in that bloody mountain.’
Meadow View
BACK AT MEADOW VIEW, HIS FORM COULDN’T HAVE BEEN better, having made excellent time returning from Wexford. The stroll from the garage in Terenure had pleased him too – nothing like fresh air to get a better perspective on things. Looking out the kitchen window, he reflected again on how the days were getting shorter. Despite enjoying his outdoor recreational pursuits, a part of him didn’t mind the reduction in daylight hours, believing one should always go with the seasons.
He regretted his neglect of reading material over the past few days, something he would put right very shortly. Making himself a cup of Mokalbari tea, he reviewed the books he hadn’t yet read and some he planned to read again. Shortly after he moved to Meadow View, he’d arranged for wooden bookshelves to be fitted either side of the fireplace. He liked rearranging the books, placing his new favourites on the top, giving them the status of importance they deserved. To him, books were precious, they were fuel for the imagination. He remembered his summers as a child, reading on the beach, and how in winter, when he needed to avoid his mother’s male friends, they were his greatest ally.
If he wanted to, he could convince himself he was one of the characters in whatever novel he was reading, imagining places he had never been. As a boy, he had read comics too, many of which were still in the big house. He was fond of most of the superheroes and even when he progressed to older reading material, he had always kept some old comics at hand.
The year his mother told him about Tuscany, it had sounded like the biggest adventure ever. He plagued her for days with questions: how they would get there, who they would see, why they were going, how long they would stay. She told him very little. All he knew was that they would take the train to Dublin and then fly from Dublin airport; their final destination was a place called Suvereto, in Livorno. He couldn’t wait to visit the mobile library at the end of the month, like a scavenger, to read everything he could find on Italy. Although the holiday had come out of the blue, he had embraced the idea of such a wonderful adventure, even if his mother didn’t explain why they were going there to begin with. He wasn’t to know then that the trip was going to change everything. Even in that second blissful week, he did not have any inkling about how his life would turn out at the end of it.
He remembered the place so clearly: the extreme heat, how his clothes stuck to his body, how the shade was a blessed relief, how the midday sun made the air hard to breathe. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze in those hours between midday and three o’clock, nothing like the winds that flanked the beach at home. The people were different too. At first, he liked listening to them speaking Italian and moving in ways that were so different from people at home – the heat made them move slower, made them happier to stop and sit and spend endless hours seemingly doing very little. At Ciampino airport he had listened to the announcements over the speaker system, the voices sounding strange with their accents and also loud, like people shouting. The airport unsettled him. Almost immediately, he felt people were staring at him, as if he was something odd, something that needed to be worked out. When they looked at his mother, it was different. The women checked her from head to toe, as if she were a mannequin in a shop window; the men smiled, following her movements by turning their heads.