Free The Lake by Sheena Lambert Page A

could remember it no other way. Her own family had not been adversely affected by the dam; indeed, the new lake had brought opportunity and business to her father. But although she had known that some of the older people living in Crumm had once lived in the valley the lake now filled, she had never really stopped to consider what it might have been like for them to pack up their belongings and walk away from their houses and farms, knowing they were soon to be destroyed.
    The washed-outs, they had been dubbed: Coleman and his older brother, old Mrs. King, Mr. Murphy out the Ballyknock road; there were very few left, really. But then, who would want to live next to a lake, knowing that your home was at the bottom of it?
    Peggy drained her tea. It was ironic, how so many had been forced from the place not a quarter century before, and yet she had somehow managed to get tethered here herself. And while some days Peggy loved being the proprietress of The Angler’s Rest, on others she worried that’s all she would ever be.
    She thought about Hugo, and how apparently easily he had set down the reins of the place and walked away into a new life. There was no stopping her doing the same.
    She thought about Frank. Sometimes it took an outsider to illuminate the familiar, to show it up for what it was. He reminded her of a boy she had studied with in catering college. They shared the same fair hair. There had been a time when she had entertained the idea of going away with him, to London maybe, or even America. They might have found their own place. Their own story. She hadn’t thought of that boy in months. He’d gone to Boston not long after her father had died, and she had moved back to Crumm to manage the bar. He had sent her a postcard from a very fancy looking establishment called Parker House, where he was working as an assistant manager in housekeeping. It had sounded very grand to her. It had sounded a long way from Crumm.
    She stood and brought her empty plate and mug over to the sink. She could smell smoke wafting from her clothes and her hair as she moved. She needed a bath, but she was too tired. And the smoke never went away anyway. Her lasting memory of her father was his warm, comforting smell of beer, and tobacco, and turf fires. That smell never shifted. It became part of you. It had become part of him. And as long as she ran The Angler’s Rest in Crumm, Peggy knew that she would be no different.

NINE
    Saturday, 27th September 1975
    Frank could feel Bernie O’Shea’s homemade black pudding swilling around in his stomach. Crouched below him, the State Pathologist, Dr. Aloysius McKenna was using what looked like a metal spatula to push back the wet sand from the area of the body already exposed. He muttered to himself as he worked; nothing Frank could decipher. Every now and then he would stop, lean back, and gesture at Garda O’Dowd, who would move in a little closer and take a photograph with a Nikon 35mm. He said nothing to Frank as he worked; indeed, he had hardly uttered two words to Frank since they had met for the first time at the station that morning. As one of the youngest Detective Sergeants in the force, Frank knew he looked just a little too young to be taken seriously on the job. Respect came with age in this game. In that, he and Michael O’Dowd had common ground, he thought, looking at the guard as he held the doctor’s camera as if it was made of eggshell. Dr. McKenna stood up and scribbled in a hardback notepad, which he leaned on his upper thigh. He continued to mutter all the while.
    Frank used the opportunity to take in the changing scenery around him. When they had arrived that morning, the early sun had cast shadows on the lake and the shore where they stood, but now, under the clear sky of late morning, there was nowhere to hide. The still air sat heavy on the lake water, the tall evergreens towering silently above their heads. It felt to him as if the whole place was holding its