answer. He leaned in as close to the exposed material as he could without falling onto the sand himself. It was coarse, like flax or some other type of sacking. It was certainly somewhat degraded. Definitely not new. He reached down and lifted the raw edge a little. Without turning, he could sense the trepidation of his two companions.
‘It’s just beneath the sacking, sir.’ Garda O’Dowd swallowed loudly. ‘You can, I think, see some, eh, remains.’
Sure enough, Frank could make out what seemed to him to be matted, black hair. Human hair. He dropped the cloth and stood up straight, wiping his hand roughly on his jeans.
A moment of silence passed between them. Cormac O’Malley blessed himself quickly three times, the reality of what he had been guarding only apparently dawning on him at that second.
Frank collected himself. ‘You were right to call it in, Garda O’Dowd,’ he said at last.
The younger man flushed, nodding in vindication. Frank stared down at the pitiful strip of mounded sand. What poor unfortunate had ended up here? He was fairly sure it was an old grave, but not old enough, he guessed, that it predated a coffin burial. Whoever it was, they had been buried in a sack, and that was no fitting end for any of God’s creatures. He ran his hand through his hair, damp from the heat of the afternoon.
‘You’ll stay here a while longer, Cormac?’ He looked at the boy, who nodded, clearly delighted to be considered worthy of assisting a Detective Sergeant all the way from Dublin.
‘Sir,’ was all he said.
Frank looked at Garda O’Dowd. ‘We’ll go up to the station, Michael,’ he said. ‘I’ll need to call the pathologist, and update him on the situation. And you, Michael,’ he lowered his gaze back to where the tiniest glimpse of black hair was visible in the ground, ‘you might go and bring the priest.’
The bar was a little busier than usual that evening. Although the local angling club’s competition had been cancelled due to the low water level in the lake, some of the more committed fishermen had decided to make the journey anyway. Since five o’clock, Peggy had already fed two groups of three, when another two strangers walked in through the door of the pub in sleeveless poacher jackets and bucket hats. They sat up at the bar, and one of them ordered two pints of Guinness. Peggy half filled two glasses and left them to settle.
‘Would ye like to see the menu?’ she asked.
‘Ara, no thanks love.’ The older of the two looked at his companion. ‘I’ll have to make tracks after this one. I told herself I’d be back for the dinner.’
Peggy nodded, and finished pulling the two pints. She thought of how busy the weekend could have been. Sometimes a hundred people attended the last competition of the season. They wouldn’t all have eaten in the pub, of course, but it could have been a really lucrative weekend, nonetheless. Even in the days before they had started serving food, the Casey teenagers would have been expected to hang around on competition weekends in case they were needed in the bar.
She put the two pints in front of the men and took the money handed to her. It would have been around this time of year when she had first been asked to help out herself. A rite of passage in their household, she still remembered the day clearly. She had been sitting outside under the big tree, reading Little Women, when her father’s bald head had appeared at the door of the pub. He had asked her to collect the empty glasses that had been abandoned on the wooden bench outside. After leaving them on the bar, she had stayed, listening to the fishermen talk as they stood drinking pints, hiding behind them so her father wouldn’t see her.
But after a while, she had realized that her father was too busy with customers to notice her at all, and she had started to clear empties from tables inside the pub too. She’d watched Carla, probably only fifteen at the time, flirting with strange men from Dublin as she wiped spills and stacked used pint glasses in the crook of her arm. Carla had been tall even back then. She could easily have passed for seventeen, or even eighteen. Hugo and Jerome had been behind the bar with her father. Peggy closed her eyes for a moment, trying to see her mother in the picture. She turned back to the two anglers who were ogling their untouched pints. She handed the older one his change. Where had her mother been that day? And then she remembered, and she could see her sitting in the back kitchen next to the Aga, her face pale with pain, her hands thin and anxious, her smile bright as she saw Peggy come in from the bar to make her a cup of tea.
That had been the first day she had worked for her father in the bar, but not the last. Who would have thought, that of the four of them, it would be Peggy working here alone now most days? Not for the first time, she tried to imagine her father’s reaction to the situation. He would certainly have been surprised. He would have expected Peggy to be working in one of the hotels in Galway or Dublin by now, maybe even assistant manager of one of the smaller ones. That had been the plan. But then isn’t that the way with plans? They have a tendency not to pan out as expected. And he would have been disappointed in Jerome and Hugo, that was for sure. Especially Hugo. Peggy thought about her eldest brother, away in London, working at God only knows what. He had been expected to take over the family business, like a million eldest sons before him. Their father had expected it, their mother had expected it, the whole village had expected it. Peggy herself had taken it as a fact of life. When her father needed him to, Hugo would come back from London, or wherever he might have been, and pick up where Patrick Casey had left off. It was generally assumed that Mr. Casey had died of a broken heart. But Peggy was of the opinion that the shock of Hugo’s refusal to stay on in Crumm after their mother’s funeral did more damage to their father.
‘Another round? Miss? Are you with us?’
Before Peggy could react, a voice from behind her said, ‘three pints? I’ll drop them down,’ and Carla materialized out of nowhere. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ She took three pint glasses from the shelf and tilted one under the tap. ‘Are you asleep? It’s not Waterford crystal you know.’ She nodded at the tumbler Peggy was polishing with a cloth.
Peggy looked at the glass and put it down on the shelf. ‘Where did you come out of?’
‘I was just checking to see if you needed any help.’ Carla started on the third pint. ‘I can stay here for a while if you like. Do you want to get some dinner in the back?’
‘No. No thanks.’ Peggy stood up and flexed her shoulders. ‘I’m grand here.’ She walked out from behind the bar and went to collect empty plates from a table where three men were sitting.
One of them smiled up at her. ‘That was lovely now, thanks girl,’ he said, his ruddy cheeks and crackled nose telling of many seasons on the lake. ‘Did you make it yourself?’
‘I did.’ Peggy smiled back.
‘Beautiful, beautiful.’ One of the other two men at the table lifted his hand in thanks, his eyes never leaving the pint glass in front of him, his grey beard bouncing against his collar.
‘Could ye be tempted to a slice of homemade apple tart with cream?’ Peggy asked.
‘Oh Lord,’ the affable, red-faced man patted his ample stomach. ‘I’m sure we shouldn’t but if it’s as good as the stew, sure we’d better give it a go.’ He nodded at the other two who seemed happy to go along with whatever their companion decided.
Peggy smiled at him and took the
