We return to Inishowen and its mysteries.
Ben, the narrator and solicitor, drives to the spot where the police have found a drowned woman. She talks to DS Tom Molloy and asks him to let her see the woman as she suspects it can be a client of hers, Marguerite Etienne. Ben identifies the woman, andthey Tom tells her that the odds are that Marguerite committed suicide. Ben tells him that Marguerite ccame to make her will, but the process was not finished because she was supposed to come again to sign it.
Ben is troubled as she remembers that Marguerite came to see her when she (Ben) was too tired after a long day. Marguerite told her that she wanted to leave everything to her daughter Adeline, who was 23, and she gave her the address of the girl. She also mentioned the father, Alain Veillard, but she said that he was not her husband, and he died last year. Marguerite was upset to learn that the will wouldn't be finished that day. Now Ben thinks that there was something about Marguerite that day; she wanted to tell her something, but she was in too much of a hurry to give her the chance. Marguerite seemed scared.
The next day Ben reads that the death of Marguerite is considered suspicious, and she is called to go to the police station. There is another detective apart from Tom Molloy, and Ben is told that Marguerite died of a heart condition when in contact with the freezing water, and there are marks on her body, but nobody can tell whether the marks were made before or when she was in the water. When Ben is asked what she talked to Marguerite, she says that client confidentiality prevents her from revealing Marguerite's business, but if the police subpoeana her, she won't have problems to cooperate.
Ben feels compelled to find out more. When she talks to Myllis Kettle, the owner of the second-hand bookshop where Marguerite worked on Saturdays, the woman tells her that Marguerite was a very private person and she never talked about her matters. Myllis tells Ben that the funeral is the following day as it was the only day her daughter could. That means that the police know about the daughter. Later Ben starts looking into the name of the man who was the father of Marguerite's daughter. She discovers that he died last year, just as Marguerite said, and what surprises her is that the man led a cult "Children of Damascus", and the cult leaders were accused of causing the death of sixteen people. Ben discovers that when France passed a law to control cults, the cult moved to Norway, which is where Marguerite's daugther was living. That means that Adeline was still with the cult.
Ben thinks about what Phyllis told her about Marguerite acting strangely in the last weeks, and she thinks that maybe she was having therapy for her trauma with the cult. When she goes to hospital about a client, she talks to the psychiatrist, and when she asks him, she realises that Marguerite was having therapy with him, but the doctor can't tell even tell her that Marguerite was his patient.
I wonder what happened to Marguerite and if she was murdered, who wanted her dead. Ben is also worried because she feels that she is being watched. One morning when she woke up, she saw the image of a man in the mirror, but when she called the police, nobody was in the garden. Who could be spying on her and why?
Apart from the main mystery, Ben is busy with different clients. There is the old man who needs to leave his will. There are two developers who want to build a hotel in Malin Head, one of whom owned the cottage where Marguerite lived. There is a young man Hugh O'Connor, who has been charged with dangerous driving and some other accusations, and he wants Ben to help him as he can't afford to have a conviction as in the future he wants to run for an election.
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