Crowned and Dangerous (A Royal Spyness Mystery) (17 page)

T
UESDAY
, D
ECEMBER
4

An unexpected drop-in visit.

So we decided to check the dig next and see if anyone was working. We turned toward the castle’s front gate and sure enough there was activity in the field opposite. There was also a Garda constable standing outside the castle gate, watching everything that was going on. Darcy turned the Rolls onto the track leading to the field gate and brought it to a halt.

“Is this one of your fields?” I asked, as the thought had just occurred to me.

“All the fields around here used to be Kilhenny land. I believe this is part of the home farm, which is rented out to tenants these days.”

“So any treasure found in this dig would still belong to your family?”

“Belong to the dead American now, I suppose,” he said. “I’m not sure what the conditions of the sale were and whether he bought all Kilhenny property or just the castle and stables.”

The young Garda constable was now walking toward us.

“No reporters, please,” he said. “No stopping here. Please move along.” Then his face changed. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Darcy. It’s a long time since we’ve seen you around here. Sorry it has to be in such tragic circumstances now.”

“How are you, Kevin?” Darcy said. “Or do I have to say Constable Byrne these days?”

The constable grinned, looking ridiculously schoolboyish. “I bet you never thought I’d be on the right side of the law one day, did you?”

“Not after the number of times we caught you poaching rabbits on the estate.” Darcy was smiling too. “Look, Kevin.” He leaned out of the motor window. “I’d like a word with the archeologists. Your inspector from Dublin seems convinced that my father is guilty. So it’s up to me to try and prove his innocence. All I want to find out is whether these people saw anyone going to the castle in the days before Mr. Roach was killed.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Darcy.” Kevin looked worried. “I’d like to help but my orders are—”

“The dig is not part of a crime scene,” Darcy said. “I’m sure your inspector can’t prevent people from speaking to each other in an open field.”

“I suppose not,” the young Garda replied, his forehead still wrinkled. “All right, then, but don’t be long. I don’t want to get that inspector breathing down my neck.”

Darcy helped me from the motorcar and we plowed through mud to the field. Tarps had now been removed and a large trench was revealed. Two women were down in this hole and a man was standing at a trestle table on which sat what looked like some lumps of mud. He glanced up as we approached him.

“Sorry, this place is off-limits,” he said, coming around the table to fend us off. He was thin, bald and worried looking and had that distinctive academic air to him—the worn tweed jacket and baggy trousers.

“I’m Darcy O’Mara, heir to the Kilhenny title, and this land has been in my family for at least a thousand years,” Darcy said. “Any antiquities you find represent my family’s history.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Mara—or is it ‘Lord’ something?” he asked.

“Just ‘mister.’ So can you tell me what made you excavate here and what you hope to find?”

“We’re excavating here because Pamela, down there in the trench, is doing her PhD thesis on burial chambers, and from aerial photographs she is convinced that she has found an ancient settlement here. Based on the present lay of the land she thinks the burial chamber must be close to this position. And of course the historic Burda club was found nearby, wasn’t it? That’s what really inspired the dig and gives us hope.”

“What have you found so far?” I asked.

He turned to look at me with interest and I could see him sizing up who I might be. “Only the usual, such as one finds in almost any field in Ireland. Pottery shards. Old farming implements. A couple of nice spearheads. Would you like to see the latest?” And he led us to the table on which the brown lumps now revealed themselves to be muddy shards.

“Are you Pamela’s professor?” Darcy asked, looking down at the girl in the trench who had now stopped work and was watching us.

“That’s right. Alex Harmon, professor of archeology, Trinity College.” The man held out his hand.

“And just the three of you working here? All from Trinity?” Darcy continued.

“Not just the three of us. The numbers fluctuate depending on who has time to come and help, and the weather conditions. Sometimes we’ve had as many as ten . . . but that’s a bit of overkill, actually. We get in each other’s way.”

“But they are all your students?”

“Students and faculty. Some of my fellow teachers enjoy getting
down and dirty sometimes.” And he smiled, making the worried expression vanish from his face.

“But no outsiders?”

“We’ve had a couple of visiting academics as well as a reporter or two from Dublin.”

“How recently?”

The man sighed, thinking. “It’s been raining a lot so we haven’t been able to get out here much.” He looked down at the trench. “Pamela, Carol, do you remember when we last had a visitor?”

Pamela shook her head. “Not for a couple of weeks. The weather has been beastly.”

“These visiting academics,” Darcy said. “All from Ireland, were they? People you knew?”

Pamela looked at Carol and grinned. “There was that American professor, remember? He was really funny.”

“Amusing? Witty?”

Pamela shook her head. “Strange. He didn’t really seem interested in what we’ve found. He seemed awfully keen on gold, didn’t he, Carol? I told him the likelihood of gold in a burial chamber is not very high, but he didn’t seem to have much clue about Irish burial customs. I suppose old in America is two hundred years, not two thousand.”

“Do you remember where he was from?”

“University of Southern Nebraska, was it?” Pamela asked.

“Did he join in the dig?”

“We invited him, but he said he was in his traveling clothes and didn’t want to get dirty.”

“Who invited him to come?” I asked.

“Nobody. He just showed up one day and said he was touring Ireland and had heard about us and had to come and see for himself,” the professor answered.

“Do you remember his name?”

“Peabody. Professor Peabody,” Pamela said. “We had a bit of a giggle about it because he was quite large and Carol whispered that she had never seen a pea that size.”

“Thank you,” Darcy said. “Good luck with your dig. Does a portion of any gold found go to the O’Maras?”

“If it’s valuable it’s all treasure trove and the government has first pick,” the professor said with a smile. “Naturally we hope that any significant find will be donated to Trinity. But we’ll obviously let your family know exactly what has been found. We plan to have an exhibition at Trinity if the site eventually warrants it.”

“Why start now? At this time of year?” I asked Pamela. “Wouldn’t the summer be more pleasant?”

“Definitely.” She smiled at me. “But I wanted to get started on the research part of this PhD, so as soon as I identified the site in the photographs, I asked if we could start work right away.” She paused and grinned at Carol. “I’ve regretted it several times already when we’ve been up to our ankles in mud and freezing our fingers off. I can’t think what January will be like.”

“Good luck,” I said. “I hope you find something worthwhile.”

We exchanged a smile.

“Before you go back to work,” Darcy said, squatting to be closer to them, “have you noticed anybody going into the castle in the last week or so?”

“There are deliveries from time to time,” Carol said. “A grocer and butcher from Dublin about once a week.”

“But no visitors?”

The girls checked with each other. “I don’t think so. We’re concentrating quite hard when we work, so we might not have noticed anybody on foot. But we would have heard a motorcar.”

“There was that priest,” Carol commented. “A young man wearing heavy specs. He asked if Lord Kilhenny was still at the castle and we said he wasn’t. Then he asked if the American was Catholic
and we said we didn’t know. And he said it was his duty to visit everyone in the parish and he’d give it a try.”

“Did he get in?” I asked.

Carol shook her head. “I don’t know. We went back to work. He was on foot.”

“And then there was the newspaper reporter that time,” Pamela said. “I don’t think she got in, did she? She tried asking us questions but of course we knew nothing. She’s been around a few times since, but never got in.”

“I suppose you’ve had quite a few reporters since . . . since the American died?” I said.

“Oodles of them. It’s too bad we can’t dish the dirt, as they say, but of course there’s nothing we can tell them. We didn’t know the man. We never saw him, except once or twice coming out in the backseat of a big black car.”

There really seemed nothing more to ask. I looked at Darcy. He nodded to the three of them. “Sorry to have taken up your time. Do let us know if you dig up the O’Mara hoard.”

He gave them a good-natured wave, then took my arm and steered me across the muddy clumps in the field.

“Well, that all seems aboveboard, doesn’t it?” I said. “I mean, I thought it was interesting at first that they had started a dig right across the road from the castle so recently. And I began to wonder whether they might actually be digging a tunnel to get into the grounds or something.”

“It would have to be a long tunnel,” Darcy said. “But I have to think they are what they claim to be. And so easy to check with Trinity as to who is out here.”

“So strike one line of inquiry,” I said and he nodded.

The policeman was still standing beside our motorcar.

“Thank you, Kevin,” Darcy said. “We’ll be off now.”

“Did you learn anything?” Kevin asked.

“There was a visiting American professor,” I said. “And a young priest. They seem to have been the only visitors.”

“Young priest?” The constable looked thoughtful. “Now, I wonder who that would have been? Father Flannery is over seventy and I can’t think of a parish around here that has a young curate.”

Darcy looked at me. “Interesting,” he said. “Two people who could have been checking on Mr. Roach. Now I’m really interested to find out more about him.” He turned to me. “Let’s head for Dublin right away.”

“What about the stables?” I asked as we climbed back into the vehicle. “Didn’t we say we’d find out what we could there first?”

“Don’t we know all there is to know?” Darcy said shortly. “Either my father doped that horse and was found out and fired, or Mr. Roach had someone else dope the horse and let my father take the blame when the horse dropped dead. Either way he has a strong motive for revenge, doesn’t he?”

“It certainly seems that way,” I agreed.

“And his anger could have been festering all this time, so that when they had that final blowup the afternoon of the murder it was the final straw. He went home, got drunk and then decided to kill Roach.”

We looked at each other for a long moment. It seemed all too plausible, but one of us had to stay positive.

“We need to find out what that final argument was about,” I said.

He nodded. “If we can get the stubborn old fool to tell us.” He sighed. “All right. We’ll visit the stables first since they are right here.” And we drove down that little lane, past the lodge, until we came to a handsome whitewashed building with a weather vane of a galloping horse on top of a red tiled roof. At the center of that building was an arch leading through to a stable yard beyond, and as we watched, a horse was led across that archway, walking with the easy graceful strides of the Thoroughbred. Darcy stared, went
to say something, then turned away, and I saw now why he was not anxious to visit the stables. It was too painful for him to visit a place he had loved that no longer belonged to him.

“If you don’t want to do this, it’s all right with me,” I said. “I know it must be hard for you.”

“I got over it long ago,” he said. “When my father first sold up it was very hard. I’d always imagined myself taking over the stables from him one day, training a Gold Cup winner. Now who knows what will happen. It’s all lost, everything.”

I touched his hand gently. “We’re going to have a good life together somewhere,” I said.

He nodded, still staring in front of him. I got out of the motorcar and started to walk toward the archway. I heard Darcy slam his door and his footsteps clattered on the cobbles as he came after me.

“Hey, you,” a voice shouted, and a young man came striding toward us. He was redheaded, red faced and scowling. “What do you want? Not more reporters, are you? You’re the third lot this morning and we’ve work to do.”

“Who are you?” Darcy asked him.

“Ted Benson, stable manager,” the man said, eyeing Darcy with dislike, “and for that matter who might you be?”

“Darcy O’Mara, Lord Kilhenny’s son and heir.”

The man sneered. “I’m surprised you dare show your face around here after what your old man did.”

“My old man, as you so crudely put it, is innocent until proven guilty,” Darcy said. “And what happened to Harry?”

“You mean the old man who looked after the horses when your father ran the stable? Mr. Roach got rid of him. Too old to do the job anymore. He needed a younger man, with more modern ideas.”

Darcy was looking around the stables where a horse’s head looked out of each open door. “You’ve still got Sultan, I see,” he said, and went over to stroke the nose of a big dark bay. The horse whickered and rubbed up against Darcy.

“He seems to like you,” Ted Benson commented, sounding surprised. “He doesn’t get on with anyone else here and he’s a devil to ride. Pity because he’s strong over the jumps.”

Darcy gave the big horse a final pat and came back to me.

“So you weren’t here when there was the doping incident?” he asked.

“I was not. Mr. Roach hired me after he got rid of your father. He tried running the place himself for a while but that was a disaster. He knew nothing about horses, did he? Not a thing.”

“So what is going to happen to the stables now?” Darcy asked.

“Search me,” Benson said. “I don’t even know if my wages are going to be paid. And we certainly can’t go ahead and enter any of the races in the upcoming meetings. I’m not paying jockeys out of my pocket and the Garda have said nothing. Looking for a will and the next of kin, I suppose. Probably put the whole bally lot up for auction. Some good horses here.”