Chapter 2 The Weight on the Table

I did not sleep. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that went cold in my hands and watched the window for the wolf until the grey light came up over the harbor and the gulls started arguing on the pier. By morning I had decided two things. The first was that I had seen what I had seen. The second was that I was going to be very careful about who I told.

The weight was not on the table. Declan had taken it, and the empty spot where it had sat was a clean circle in the dust, and I sat looking at that circle and drinking cold tea and thinking about a man who would pocket a dead woman's things and then tell me not to ask questions.

I had interviewed men like him. That was the trouble. I had sat across from men like him in grey rooms with bad coffee and watched them be reasonable and helpful and steady, and half of them had been exactly what they seemed and the other half had been something else entirely, and the tell was always small. A man who gave you too much detail. A man who knew the shape of a question before you finished it.

Declan had told me about the coroner and the sergeant before I had asked.

At eight I washed the cup, put on my coat and walked down to the harbor.

The rain had stopped but the wind had not, and it came across the water sharp enough to make my eyes stream. The village was smaller in daylight than it had been in my memory. A row of cottages along the road, whitewashed and slate roofed, nets drying on the walls. The co-op hall with its green door and its noticeboard full of tide tables. O'Rourke's shop, which had been O'Rourke's shop when I was a girl and was still O'Rourke's shop, though the O'Rourke was dead and his daughter ran it now. The pier, the twenty boats, the smell of diesel and salt and old rope.

People nodded to me. That was all. A nod and a look away. In Dublin a wake drew neighbors out of their houses like wasps to jam, but here the village had the look of a place holding its breath.

Declan was on the pier with a clipboard, checking something off against the boats, and he saw me coming from a long way off. He did not look surprised. He handed the clipboard to a thin young man in a yellow oilskin and walked to meet me at the top of the steps.

"You slept," he said.

"I sat up. There is a difference." I put my hands in my pockets. "I want the weight back."

"You are not getting it back."

"Then tell me why."

He looked past me at the village, at the cottages and the hall and the shop, and something went across his face that I had seen once before on a man in an interview room, a man who had decided how much of the truth he was going to give and was now putting the rest away in a box.

"Come up to the harbor office," he said.

The office was one room over the old net store, with a stove in the corner and a window that looked straight down the pier. There was a chart on the wall with the soundings marked in pencil, and a kettle, and a mug with a chip out of the rim that he filled for me without asking. His desk had a photograph on it, a boy of about twenty with a narrow face and his father's grey eyes, standing on a boat with a rope in his hands and a look in his face like he was about to say something and had thought better of it.

"Your son," I said.

"Cormac." He did not offer more.

"Where is he this morning?"

"Out. He is always out." Declan sat down behind the desk and folded his hands on the blotter. "The weight. You want to know why I took it."

"I want to know why you told me not to touch it."

"Because it is not a fishing weight." He said it flat, like a man reading out a tide. "It is a token. A challenge token."

I waited. When he did not go on, I said, "A challenge for what?"

"For the co-op." He paused. "For the village."

"That is a weight with a fish on it. The co-op hands them out at the start of the season so the catch can be counted."

"That is what we tell the county council." He turned his mug a quarter turn on the blotter. "The weight on your sister's table was not the sort we hand out. It was older. It had a number stamped on the side of the fish, did you see it?"

"Forty one."

"Forty one is a charter number. Every family in this village has one. O'Rourke is seventeen. The healer's family is nine. Mine is twenty two." He looked at me. "Forty one was your mother's number. It has not been used in twenty years."

The stove ticked. Down on the pier someone laughed and a gull answered it.

"My mother was a fisherman's wife," I said. "She kept hens and she sang at mass and she died when I was nineteen."

"She was more than that." Declan stood up and went to the window, and the light came grey around him. "Niamh, I am going to say a thing to you and then I am going to ask you to sit down and hear the rest of it before you walk out of this office. Your sister was not drowned. She was killed. And the weight on the table was the legal notice of the killing, set there by the person who did it, because that is how it is done under the charter."

I sat down. My knees had made the decision for me.

"Go on," I said.

"Siobhan claimed something she had no right to claim. The Alpha's seat."

"The what?"

"The co-op has a leader. The county council calls it a chairman. The village calls it something else." He turned around. "We are not like other villages, Niamh. We are a pack. We have been a pack on this coast for four hundred years. There are rules, and the rules are written in the charter, and the charter says a claim on the Alpha's seat is answered by the one who holds it, and the answering is done in the old way. Siobhan made the claim in front of the whole hall in March. She was answered. She lost."

I heard my own breathing. "You are telling me my sister was killed in a fight and no one called the guards."

"The guards have no part in it. The sergeant knows what we are. He has known his whole life. His grandfather was one of us." Declan came back to the desk and sat on the edge of it, close enough that I could see the grey in his stubble. "You think I am mad."

"I think I am sitting in a room with a man who is telling me a story." My voice came out level, which surprised me. "I have heard a lot of stories. I have told a few myself. There was a wolf on the headland last night, a big grey one, and I watched it from my sister's window and it watched me back. So do not tell me I think you are mad. I am asking you what it makes me."

He did not blink. "It makes you one of us."

"Say it plainly."

"You are a wolf, Niamh. You have always been one. It did not wake in you because your mother died before she could take you to the healer, and your sister did not know how, and you went to Dublin and lived among people who do not know what we are, and it slept in you like a fire in wet wood." He said it without any gentleness, which was how I knew he believed it. "Last night the wolf on the headland was my son. He was watching for you. He could smell what you are from the far side of the village and he wanted to know if you were going to shift."

I stood up. The chair went back and caught the wall. "I am going to my sister's house," I said, "and I am going to sit in it, and tomorrow I am going to bury her, and then I am going to drive back to Dublin and put this village behind me like a bad year."

"The weight was not on the table when I left last night," Declan said.

I stopped with my hand on the door.

"I took it. I put it in my pocket and I walked home and I put it in a drawer in this office and I locked the drawer." He had not moved from the edge of the desk. "This morning the drawer was open. The weight was gone. The lock had not been forced."

"Then someone in this village has a key to your office."

"Three people have a key. Myself, the healer, and the Alpha." He looked at me then, and his grey eyes had gone hard and unhappy. "If the weight is back on the table in your sister's kitchen, then the Alpha is telling you something. She is telling you that the claim is still open. That there is still a challenger in this village worth answering."

I walked out. I went down the stairs and along the pier with the wind cutting at my face, and I did not go back to the cottage. I went the long way, along the shore road, so that I could see the headland in daylight. There was nothing up there but grass and rock and the white wash of the sea on the black stones.

When I got to the cottage the back door was open.

I stood in the yard a moment with my hand on the gate. The bolt had been thrown from the inside. The bolt had been thrown by me. I went in through the back and through the hall, and the kitchen was exactly as I had left it, the cup washed and on the rack, the chair I had sat in still pulled out from the table.

The weight was on the table.

The fish faced the door this time. Someone had turned it. And beside it, where the note had been, there was a new piece of paper with three words on it in handwriting I had never seen before, thin and elegant and sloping to the right.

Bring her to me.

I stood there for a long time. Then I picked up the weight and put it in my coat pocket, and it was heavier than it had any right to be, and I went out the back door and left it standing open behind me.