The Curse of Medusa

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Seeing Taobh na Gréine for the first time in so many years brought back some serious memories for Lea Donovan. It didn’t take her long to work out the last time she had set foot on the property. It was the day she and her mother had locked the place up after her father’s death. Her mother had vowed never to return and she had kept to her vow. She was good at sticking to a vow.

Lea didn’t have to try so hard. She was only a young girl, and did as her mother told her. Then when she was older she joined the army and left the county. She needed no vow to stay away from Taobh na Gréine.

“So, are we going in or are we going to stand here all damned night?” She turned to see Danny Devlin at her side. The sea breeze was ruffling his greying hair and part of his face was obscured behind his trademark up-turned coat collars.

She nodded. “Of course we’re going in. We’ve got to go in. I want to know why someone murdered my father, and the answer’s in this cottage.”

Now it was Devlin’s turn to nod in understanding. “So, you have a key?”

“Dad always kept one under that pot over there by the garage — where he used to keep his motorbike.”

Lea walked across the drive, her boots crunching on the loose gravel chips. She shivered and pulled her coat up around her as she knelt to tip up the pot. Spending so much time in the Caribbean she always forgot how cold Ireland could get sometimes, even in the summer.

“Sod it.”

“Not there?”

She shook her head. “Stupid to think it would be here after so long. Mum probably took it somewhere. She hated the place after Dad died.”

“So how are we going to get in?”

Before Lea could reply, they all heard the sound of breaking glass. Lea stood and turned to see Mikey grinning at them. “By the way, I just put a brick through the kitchen window.”

“A genius solution,” Devlin said.

Lea reached inside the shattered window and flicked open the lock. “And so stealthy, too.”

Inside now, they began the search. Mikey and Kyle took downstairs while Lea and Devlin searched the bedrooms upstairs. Luckily, her mother had removed most of their belongings over the years, so the ghost-count was lower than Lea had feared, but there were still occasional items that transported her back in time — the rocking chair by the window, the smell of some leftover linen in the airing cupboard… the pencil marks on the back of the door where her father had measured her height when she was growing up.

She felt a flood of relief that whoever had killed McNamara hadn’t known about the cottage or they would have destroyed this place as well. She thanked God her mother had bought it in her maiden name before the marriage.

After clambering down from the loft hatch, Devlin announced the whole place had been searched from top to bottom, and when Mikey and Kyle emerged through the bedroom door, they concurred.

“Wait a minute!” Lea said. “There’s somewhere we haven’t tried yet — when I was a kid, me and my brothers used to play hide and seek here. I used to hide in a secret place I thought only I knew about. They never found me when I hid there, but Dad must have known about it.”

“Where is it?”

“Downstairs in the kitchen — there’s a hatch in the larder floor leading to a small cellar where they used to store meat in the old days when it got too hot.”

They hurried downstairs and Lea opened the hatch with bated breath… this was the moment that her entire journey hinged on. If it wasn’t in here then it was lost forever.

“Is it there, Lea?” Devlin asked, trying to look over her shoulder.

Lea smiled, then her eyes filled with tears. “I think so, Danny… I hope so.”

She picked it up and blew a heavy layer of dust from the box-file. “Oh my God… this must be it.”

She stared at the file for what seemed like forever, her eyes wide with anxiety. She pulled it from the small compartment and walked it out into the candle light of the main kitchen.

Devlin moved closer. “What’s the problem?”

“I… I’m scared of what I might find in here, that’s all.”

“Do you want Uncle Mikey to look first?”

She looked up, startled by O’Sullivan’s booming voice so close. He too was standing almost beside her, and Kyle a foot to his right. It seemed everyone was more than a little curious about the contents of Dr Harry Donovan’s enigmatic box-file.

Lea tried to smile, but it wouldn’t come. “No… this is something I have to do. Maybe this is where my whole life has been pointing.”

Lea walked to the table and took another moment simply to stare at the old, dusty box-file before her. She knew the last person to have touched it would have been her father, and that alone made her sad before she even opened it to see what he had been researching — what he had looked into that had cost him his life — what had caused some bastard to take her father away from her when she was so young.

“Jeez, would ya just open the thing already!”