Free The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) by Erin Hart

chipper. That’s all.”
    “But he told you what he’s doing here?”
    “No, he didn’t. My da is into all sorts of stuff I know nothin’ about.”
    Thus sparing you from prosecution , Stella thought. Very decent of him. She’d have to try a different tack. Glancing over the tired-looking menu board with its hash of mismatched letters, the spattered fryer and the bags of crisps on their clipboard, the cans of Sprite and Diet Coke stacked up against the back wall, she was caught in the undertow of memory. “I worked in a chipper once—I was about your age.” All right, so she was fishing, trying to soften the girl up, but it was the truth. “Hated that fryer with a passion—it seemed like I could never get the stink off me—but at least the job got me out of the house at weekends. You do meet all sorts, working in a chipper.”
    The girl almost smiled. “Yeh, most of them stocious.”
    Also true, Stella thought. She felt the tug of memory, of the late-night conversations she’d carried on with maggoty young fellas at one o’clock in the morning after the pubs closed. “I used to like market days,” she said. “People always seemed in a cheery mood when they were making a few bob.” Fishing again, hoping the girl wouldn’t notice.
    “Yeh—” Deirdre started to say, when the startled noise of an infantcame from somewhere near her feet. She stooped to pick up a baby from its carrier and rested him on her hip. She reached for a bottle of formula and slipped it into the baby’s mouth; he helped hold it in place. After his nap, the child appeared plump and rosy; he beamed at his mother. Deirdre’s eyes, too, lit at the sight of her child.
    “I wonder, you wouldn’t remember if you ever saw this man anywhere around?”
    She held up her phone with the photo of Benedict Kavanagh. Watching Deirdre Claffey’s eyes dart away, her expression flattening, Stella picked up another whiff of a scent. Hold up , said the voice in her head. Don’t pounce. Just let her talk.
    “Dunno,” Deirdre said. She fiddled with the front of the baby’s jumper, switched him to her opposite hip. “Like you said, you meet all sorts.”
    But not many you remember so well, Stella thought. And surely not many who ended up dead at the bottom of a bog hole.

10
     
    It was nearly eleven by the time Nora returned to her room at Killowen. The National Museum team had worked into the night, lights rigged up inside the tent, which glowed out in the darkness of the bog like a giant luminaria. After they’d recovered as much of Killowen Man as they could from the boot, the coroner’s team had come in and removed the second body. Both sets of remains were now headed to the morgue at the regional hospital, where they’d each undergo a preliminary postmortem in the morning. Nora had elected not to go along, partly because she wanted to give Cormac a chance to catch up with his old friend Niall Dawson and partly because she was desperate for a bath after the day’s grubby work.
    They’d not taken much time to get Cormac’s father settled in before heading out to the bog, so it was only now that she began paying attention to the surroundings at Killowen. A small sign marked COTTAGES pointed down a path to the right as she pulled Cormac’s jeep into the car park alongside the main house.
    “House” was probably a misnomer, because the place still resembled the barn or granary it had once been: although two stories, the broad-beamed structure seemed to hug the ground, with vine-covered limestone walls and a slate roof. The entry was a graceful glassed-in room built out from the arch of an old doorway. A few lights glowed in the upper windows now, and Nora realized that she hadn’t met any of the residents except for Claire Finnerty, who’d greeted them when they arrived. It turned out that Killowen was no ordinary bed-and-breakfast guesthouse but an artists’ retreat. She crunched across pea gravel in the car park, wondering if she’d