Brotherhood of the Tomb (16 page)

Page by page, the dead were ranged in front of them, living only in a single moment. Who they were, what they represented, what their deaths signified remained a riddle. Had they all died young, soon after these portraits were drawn or these photographs taken?

Patrick turned the pages as though hypnotized, drawn from picture to picture, as though a child, having taken him by the hand, was leading him through vast chambers hung with the portraits of his ancestors. On average, there were about seven or eight pictures to each name. But some names had fewer, beginning at a later date, while one or two had

more and went back much further, to the sixteenth and even fifteenth centuries.

The etchings showed their subjects in formal poses, usually seated, often beside a statue of the Virgin or a crucifix. Even across a range of generations, there was little variation. The photographs largely followed the formalities of the earlier drawings, but here and there a note of innovation had been introduced. Some stood in front of the portrait of a predecessor, others before a family tombstone.

He had just passed the half-way point when he felt his mouth go dry with fear. For a moment he did not even know what it was that had frightened him. His hand froze on the page as though turned to stone.

‘Mr Canavan, what’s wrong? What is it, Mr Canavan?’

He heard Makonnen’s voice, but it sounded dull and remote, as though it reached him from behind high walls. He did not reply. He felt as if he had been struck dumb.

There was no need to look at the name at the top of the page. The faces coalesced into a single face, the eyes became a single pair of eyes, the mouth a single mouth. At first he thought another hallucination had begun, but as the moments passed he realized that what he was seeing was wholly real.

Her photograph was at the bottom of the right-hand page, the very last in the series, the most recent. It was both fresh and painfully familiar. In a box at home, buried beneath dust and trivia, he had an album of his own, filled with photographs like it. Francesca alone, Francesca with a group of friends, Francesca and himself together, on the bank of the canal, taken by Paolo on an autumn evening seventeen years ago. They had been in Venice together on

holiday, staying with her family. A year later, he had returned to bury her among mist and cypresses, in a vault of crumbling stone on the cemetery island of San Michele.

TWENTY-ONE

A crack runs through the centre of the universe. Images of Francesca fly through his brain like moths - moths with jagged tearing wings, hungry for light. He fears the onset of further hallucinations, of madness, of desperation. Another reality, a phantom world, takes on form and substance all about him. It threatens to suck him into itself, to drag him down like a crippled ship, into eternal cold and darkness. He fears ghosts, sees mottled faces touch the edges of his vision and shy away again.

But there is nothing ethereal about the picture: it is physical, tangible, as solid in its materiality as himself. His fingers can touch it, just as they can touch the table or his own face. He clings to it like a drowning man to wreckage. It is not a ghost. It will not shimmer in the darkness. It will not go away.

Slowly, a piece at a time, the world fits itself together again.

Breathing hard, Patrick slipped the photograph out of the old-fashioned corners that held it and closed the album. Makonnen watched him, perplexed and a little frightened. What could be in the photograph that disturbed the American so much? Patrick glanced at the photograph again, then put it into his jacket pocket.

‘Father,’ he said, turning abruptly, ‘will you please stay here in the cottage? I want to go out to look for Ruth. She’s been gone a long time.’

Beyond the window, the first signs of approaching evening had appeared. Patrick took his Burberry down from the wall and pulled it on. It was a city

coat, out of place here in the country. He lacked Ruth’s ability to blend into her surroundings.

At the door, he paused.

‘Father, please lock the door when I’ve gone. Only open it to Ruth or myself. You’ll find a shotgun in the cupboard behind you.’

‘I can’t...’

‘I don’t expect you to fire on anyone, but I would suggest you hang on to it. If anybody looks like making trouble, try waving it at them. Look as though you mean business. I won’t be long.’

He tied the belt of his coat tightly and pulled the collar up against the cold. As he stepped through the door, he shivered. Behind him, he heard Makonnen turn the key in the lock.

She was nowhere in the garden. He called her name gently at first, then loudly, but there was no reply. At the end of the garden, a low gate led onto the road. He looked up and down it: a tractor trundled slowly in the direction of Laragh, towing a cart stacked with bales of hay. The light was fading from the air. In three-quarters of an hour it would be dark.

He crossed the road and walked down to the path behind the hotel. An atmosphere of melancholy had settled over everything. It suited his mood perfectly. The lake was to his right, out of sight from the path. Closer at hand, the round tower and the cluster of slate-grey ruins that circled it were visible through the trees.

Out of season, the ruins were deserted. He saw a bent figure among the gravestones and called Ruth’s name; but it was an old woman in a headscarf arranging winter flowers on a recent grave. He nodded and went on. New graves gave way to old, domes containing plastic flowers to moss and lichen. In place of sharp inscriptions in English, the slabs bore faded

lettering in Latin or Irish. Or do Diarmait, A prayer for Dermot. Or do Pddraig, A prayer for Patrick. He turned his head, but the old woman had vanished.

He had come here once with Francesca. It had been spring: the end of March or early April. He remembered pink blossoms on the trees and sunlight on grey stone. The following day, he had written a poem for her. He could still remember its opening lines:

By a sharp stone in Glendalough

I saw a raven stand and shiver in the wind;

and I saw Kevin walk

over dark waves

from shore to sorrowing shore.

Even now, in that dank, unlovely graveyard, his fingers stained with innocent blood, and the years lying like a great wilderness between, the words of the poem came back to him out of the past. The words came, and with them images they conjured into life in the thin air of the present: long hair falling against a dimly-lit shoulder, grey eyes in the half-light of a book-lined room, white teeth against soft lips, the slope of rounded breasts against thin fabric. And a gold pendant engraved with the sign of a seven-branched menorah, topped by a cross.

As he walked down to the lake, his thoughts turned restlessly to the photograph in Balzarin’s album. That it was Francesca, he was absolutely sure. An entire section of his memory was devoted to her face. Already the photograph from the album had lodged there, among a thousand other images. Calmer now, he considered it again, trying to understand what it could be doing pasted among the rest. More than that,

he struggled to see how, if at all, this changed things. Was this the real connection, the knot that tied him to De Faoite, Chekulayev, and their killers?

Turning a corner, he slipped on damp grass and fell awkwardly against a gravestone, winding himself. As he started to pick himself up, he noticed that the lettering on the stone was worn and illegible. Nothing remained to identify the white bones underneath: no name, no age, no date of birth or death.

And in the next moment, as he straightened up, leaning his weight against the weathered stone, a thought of the purest horror came to him. He staggered, dizzy, almost retching. For the second time in less than an hour, he felt his world lurch and crack from side to side.

‘It can’t be true!’ he thought. But in his heart he knew it was. He reached inside his jacket and took out Francesca’s photograph. It
 
had
  
not
 
been
  
obvious
  
at
 
first.
  
There
  
had

been tombs in so many of the photographs. And

his thoughts had been fixed on Francesca herself.

But now, as though emerging from the winter mists

that had once shrouded it, he saw quite clearly the

tombstone in the background. Francesca had been photographed standing in front

of her own grave, alive, half-smiling, a ghost trapped

in a trick of sunlight.

TWENTY-TWO

In the west, the sun had started its long journey towards the Atlantic. There was a sound of birds preparing for night. The wind was rising again, bending the naked tops of the trees. There was still just enough light to see by.

He continued on down towards the lake. His first priority was to find Ruth. She had not responded to any of his calls, and he was growing anxious.

The lake came into view directly ahead of him. This was the smaller of the two lakes at Glendalough. Dark hills ringed it about, and along its fringes tall, slender reeds waved like ripples of woven silk. Across its surface, a solitary white bird glided, its feathers touched red by the setting sun. Light and water fused in its wake. In the shadows along the shore, a bittern boomed, welcoming the darkness.

He looked up and down the vast expanse of reddening water. The light made searching difficult, and he knew her green jacket would camouflage her at any distance. Cupping his hands together, he hollered loudly. But only a faint echo came back, as though mocking his concern. Perhaps she had already started back towards the cottage, taking a different path from usual.

Taking the left-hand path, he walked quickly along the lake-shore. As he turned a bend, he saw her several yards away. She was sitting among the pebbles near the water’s edge, her back against a large rock. A few minutes more and she would have been invisible, merely a dark green shadow fading to grey. He called her name and hurried in her direction.

He noticed the blood before anything else. A small

pool of it lay at the base of the rock. Then he saw the angle at which her head was bent.

Her hands had been trussed firmly behind her back and a gag thrust hard into her mouth so she could not cry out. The gun had probably been silenced. The blood had dried around the tiny bullet-hole in her forehead. Most of the bleeding had been through the larger exit hole at the rear. Her eyes were still open, staring across the lake, as though watching the gliding bird. He closed them and removed the gag, then stood looking at her, wondering what to say. He felt awkward and embarrassed. She would have known, he thought. She would have known exactly what words were appropriate. But the only sound was the lake stirring beneath a cold north wind.

He stood up and looked across the grey water. It shivered furtively, but told him nothing. He clenched his hands, the nails cutting into his palms, drawing tiny flecks of blood.

A sudden sound brought him back to himself: a helicopter passed by overhead, swooping low, as though looking for a place to land.

‘Jesus!’ he thought. Makonnen was still in the cottage, alone.

Tearing himself away from the lake, he turned and ran to his right. A short-cut went over the fields, across low stone walls and down to the road. He ran jerkily, avoiding rocks and tussocks scarcely visible in the rapidly thickening darkness. The thin air scoured his lungs. Underfoot, the ground was damp and yielding, dragging at his feet. He scrambled through bracken, up a steep slope. The helicopter passed again, tail-lights winking, one red, one white.

At the top, he climbed the last wall and dropped down to the road. The cottage lay to his right, with three bends of the road between. He headed towards

it, at walking pace, his heart pounding, forcing himself to remain calm.

As he drew near the gate, he made out the silhouette of a man standing outside, just on the grass verge.

‘Is that you, Michael?’ he said as he approached within speaking distance. The man did not reply.

‘Sure, and I thought you was me friend Michael,’ he said, drawing closer. If the man was looking for an American, he hoped the phony accent and the darkness would deceive him.

He reached one hand into his pocket and saw the tell-tale stiffening as the stranger reached inside his coat. He drew out a pack of cigarettes and the man relaxed.

‘Have you got a light, sir?’ he asked, taking a cigarette from the pack. ‘Jeez, and I could do with a smoke!’

The man fumbled inside a pocket briefly and took out a box of matches. Patrick stepped up to him, the cigarette in his mouth. The stranger struck the match. As it flared up, he saw Patrick’s face and realized too late his mistake. Patrick punched him with all his strength, full in the guts. As the man jack-knifed, breathless, Patrick brought his knee up hard, connecting with his chin. There was a crisp snapping sound and the man toppled backwards onto the road, striking his head hard against the tarmac.

Patrick found the gun and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers. He straightened and looked up and down the road. No sign of anyone. But the helicopter might have landed nearby and dropped more men. He had to act quickly. Quickly and silently.

Between the gate and the cottage lay about two hundred yards of garden, mostly overgrown. There were lights in the kitchen, which lay to the right of

the front door, to Patrick’s left. He could also make out a light in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

He removed his Burberry: it would only serve to give him away in the darkness. Beneath it he wore a dark jersey and slacks. Bending, he rubbed his hands in clay and smeared his face with it.

Keeping away from the path, he moved towards the cottage, a shadow gliding through the darkness. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, and he was familiar with the terrain. So far, things were going in his favour.

There was a clump of rhododendrons near the front of the cottage. Crouching low, he moved up behind them. He could just make out the shape of a single man keeping watch by the door. A strange car had been parked next to Ruth’s Mercedes.