Authors: Dicey Deere

The Irish Cairn Murder (13 page)

BOOK: The Irish Cairn Murder

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P
anting a little from the stairs, Sara Hobbs, owner and manager of Nolan's Bed and Breakfast, came into the small parlor that served as the reception room. Ms. Brenda Plant was sitting in one of the rattan basket chairs that was, to Sara's mind, exactly right against the rose-patterned wallpaper that Sara loved. She'd chosen the wallpaper herself, and Brian, her husband, had put it up.

“Ms. Plant? Here's the magazine, October issue. Hern's Newspaper Shop had it. So
lucky
! It was the last copy!” Sara handed the magazine
Body Beautiful
to Ms. Plant. On the way back from Hern's, she'd read the titles of the stories:
Keep-Your-Curves Workout. You Can Be Svelte and Strong. Hoop Exercises to Music. Eat Meat or Not?

“Thank you, Mrs. Hobbs.” Ms. Plant wore a cowl-necked cashmere sweater, almost the shade of her heavily mascared blue eyes. Her beige pants hid the bandage on her ankle from Monday night's sprain.

Sara looked admiringly at Ms. Plant. She was really a handsome woman, with that full figure, and the red hair, dyed likely, but she had the right, hadn't she? Fine posture, too. Kept her shoulders back. Unconsciously, Sara straightened. Brian nagged her a bit about her posture. She was forty-five, about Ms. Plant's age.

The wall clock behind the desk chimed the noon hour. “So
late!”
Sara clicked her tongue. “And I haven't half done the rooms! I expect Sergeant Bryson will be along for you any minute.”

Ms. Plant gave the tiniest sigh. “I expect so.”

Sara Hobbs gone, Brenda Plant riffled the pages of the magazine. Hardly a minute alone since that accident at the gates of Sylvester Hall! Sara Hobbs acting like a guardian angel. And Sergeant Jimmy Bryson, always at her heels, protective as a rottweiler guard dog.

It had been like living in a glass bubble. She itched to leave Ballynagh. And now the bad luck of turning her ankle. Her ankles were her one vulnerable spot. She wouldn't budge from Ballynagh until it was fully healed.

As for Sergeant Bryson's attentions, obviously there wasn't enough crime in Ballynagh to keep Sergeant Bryson busy. And now he'd become infatuated with antiques. And with her! He was even upset that she'd miss the antiques show in Cork because of her ankle. He'd hinted that he'd been planning to ask Inspector O'Hare for a day off to accompany her to Cork. Really, now!

Still, the infatuation of a man of twenty-four was pleasurable. A dozen years ago, men of Sergeant Bryson's age were falling all over her. And she was even now in fine physical shape. She ate wisely and did her exercises every day, no slackening. Probably she was in better shape than Sergeant Jimmy Bryson himself, or than that Ms. Tunet, always on her bicycle. Or the deep-breathing Winifred Moore who'd go striding through the woods as though on an elephant hunt.

Brenda Plant pulled in her stomach. She opened her magazine.

In five minutes, she was so deeply intent that she didn't hear the quick, light footsteps of someone on the stairs.

Coming into the little parlor, Torrey stopped short, annoyed at seeing Brenda Plant sitting there over a magazine. She'd somehow expected to find the room empty. She slanted a glance toward the flat-topped table where the guest register lay. Relax. Just
relax.
She forced a smile. “Hello, Ms. Plant.”

Ms. Plant gave a startled jerk and looked up. “Oh! I didn't hear you!” A pencil she was holding over the open magazine slipped from between her fingers and fell to the carpet.

“Sorry.” Torrey picked up the pencil and handed it to Ms. Plant.

“That's all right.”

Torrey said, lying, “I was looking for Sara Hobbs, is she about? I wantedâ”

But someone was whistling, coming up the stairs. An instant later Sergeant Jimmy Bryson appeared, uniform immaculate, buttons gleaming, shoes mirror bright. Probably, Torrey thought, he'd even polished the face of his wristwatch.

“Well, now! Ms. Tunet!” Sergeant Bryson's eyebrows went up in surprise, but he gave her only a glance before turning to Brenda Plant. “Ready, Ms. Plant? I've brought the cane. And you can just lean on me.” He glanced back at Torrey. “The antiques auction in Dunlavin. There's an Irish credenza, circa 1850. I'm going to bid on it if Ms. Plant thinks it's worth it. I can't go too high, though.”

“Good luck,” Torrey said. She suppressed a smile. Jimmy Bryson passionate over antiques. And apparently over Brenda Plant. She watched them leave, Ms. Plant leaning heavily on Sergeant Bryson to favor her good ankle, Sergeant Bryson looking like he'd found the Holy Grail.

A pity, Torrey thought. Minutes ago on Butler Street, she'd seen eighteen-year-old Hannah, Jimmy Bryson's girlfriend, going into Miss Amelia's Tea Shoppe. Hannah had looked pale and unhappy.

Alone, Torrey went immediately to the guest register. She leafed quickly back through the pages. Brannigan â¦ Brannigan. Ah, here! Tom Brannigan, middle of the page. Arrived Saturday, a week ago, around noontime, no earlier, no later. Sara Hobbs always noted, in parentheses, time of arrival. So â¦ within two hours of his arrival, Brannigan had been struck down at the gates of Sylvester Hall.
By a manI hate. A Canadian. Ricard's his name.

Torrey leafed farther back, day by day: Saturday, Friday, Thursday Wednesday, Tuesday, Mondayâah! Monday. Raphael Ricard. So Ricard had arrived in Ballynagh six days earlier than Tom Brannigan. Six days during which this Raphael Ricard had been attempting to blackmail Natalie Cameron. Blackmailing her until he got his throat slashed.

Torrey crossed to the rattan chair and sank down. She rubbed her forehead. Natalie Cameron, since being out on bail, had not set foot outside of Sylvester Hall. Too many photographers from gossip magazines lurked about the gates to the hall and sat in cars along Butler Street, eating sandwiches from Finney's. So Jessie did the shopping, with a list from Breda, the cook. Dakin was currently working on the Piersons' roof. Luce after school made a beeline for Dakin, wherever he was working.

“Why, Ms. Tunet!” Sara Hobbs, pulling off an apron, bustled into the parlor. “So nice to see you!” Her eyebrows went high, questioning. Torrey said, easily, “I just stopped in to seeâI'm wondering, Ms. HobbsâWhen you're cleaning up, ashtrays, for instance, in any of the guest roomsâhave you noticed any cigarette butts that're a Sinbad brand?”

“Cigarette butts?
Ash
trays? Mother of God, no! No smoking at Nolan's. A notice is posted in every bedroom. Brian has to smoke out in the garden.
Sinbad?
Never heard of that one. Why?”

“Oh â¦ I just wanted to know where they're available. An American friend of mine likes them and doesn't know where to get them in Ireland. I thought maybe one of your guests could tell me.”

Sara Hobbs, taking off her apron, said, “Good to see you anyway, Ms. Tunet. Since you're here, can you stay a minute? So's I can just run down and get the post?”

“Of course,” Torrey said. Sara Hobbs was one of her favorite people in all of Ballynagh, never mind that Sara's idea of afternoon tea was two glasses of sherry and interminable reminiscences of her childhood and the Mediterranean ship's cruise she and Brian Hobbs had taken on their honeymoon twenty-two years ago.

Waiting, Torrey picked up
Body Beautiful,
an American magazine, which lay on the end table beside the chair. It was what Ms. Plant had been reading. She'd turned down the corner of a page. Torrey opened to the page. It had an article on the benefits of exercise for women. At the bottom of the page was an ad: “
The Roslina Exercise Method. Three Videotapes: Raise your Breasts; Narrow Your Waist; The Perfect Stance
.” Ms. Plant had made a penciled checkmark beside the ad and had doodled on the ad itself.

“There!” Panting from the stairs, Sara Hobbs laid the bundle of mail on the desk. “Thank you
so
much, Ms. Tunet.”

“Not at all.” Torrey put the magazine back on the end table.

I
t had rained since early morning. At Grasshill Hospital, by the two o'clock visiting hour, it was pouring hard, there were flashes of lightning and the rumble of thunder.

The visitor splashed his way in from the parking lot. Once inside, he shrugged out of his raincoat and walked down the corridor to Nurse Huddleson's desk.

“Nurse Huddleson?”

She looked up. The visitor handed her his card. Reading it, Nurse Huddleson's eyes widened. Jasper Shaw. Jasper
Shawl
The investigative reporter for the
Irish Independent.
The Omaga massacre. The Veronica Guerin murder. The Cavan drug exposure. The Ulrich shipping revelations.

“Visiting Tom Brannigan.” Mr. Shaw had a deep baritone. He could be a romantic-lead movie star if he lost a dozen pounds and had a full head of that dark, curly hair that rimmed the back of his head. Nurse Huddleson patted her own blond chignon.

“Tom Brannigan,” Mr. Shaw said again. Nurse Huddleson felt a thrill of excitement. Was there an important story in Mr. Brannigan? Surely Jasper Shaw wouldn't be here otherwise!

But â¦ Inspector O'Hare? If it came to
that!
Surely, though, Inspector O'Hare had meant only that the young
woman, Ms. Tunet wasn't to be allowed to visit Mr. Brannigan. Surely that's what Inspector O'Hare had meant. Only Ms. Tunet. Surely. And it was visiting hours, two-fifteen right now.

Nurse Huddleson conducted Jasper Shaw down the corridor to room 312.

A half hour later, while Nurse Huddleson was going over charts on her desk, Jasper Shaw's baritone voice above her, said, “Thank you, Nurse Huddleson.”

She looked up only in time to catch a flash of his dark blue eyes, then the raincoat swirled around his shoulders and he was gone.

It was four o'clock. In Ballynach the rain had stopped. At the groundsman's cottage, rain dripped from the eaves. Inside the door, Jasper hung his raincoat on the hook.

“Did you get it?” Torrey asked. She surreptitously slid the burned scones into the garbage under the sink. She'd made them as a teatime surprise. But instead, they'd have the brown soda bread Jasper had baked yesterday. She'd toast it, and there were sardines and butter and jam.

“Yup.” Jasper said. “Brannigan shuffled around a bit, then broke.” He took the tape from his raincoat pocket and slid it into the cassette player on Torrey's desk. “What's that burnt smell?” He was grinning. “I've a taste for my twenty-minute drop biscuits.” He was already at the flour bin, whistling under his breath.

Torrey sank down at her desk and turned on the tape. A whirring sound. Then Tom Brannigan's voice, already stronger than yesterday.

“Ricard. I didn't trust him or distrust him. At first, he was only someone who'd drop in and browse among the books in The Citadel. That's a bookshop I owned. To understand what
happened, the ugliness of it, I have to go back to when I first came to Canada. So you'll understand. Because I followed Ricard to Ireland to kill him.”

Listening, Torrey could see the twenty-year-old Tom Brannigan living in a third-floor walk-up in Montreal. She saw him at work in a teller's cage at the Bank of Canada wearing a white shirt and gray dust jacket. Evenings, heartsick, he sat at a table in the little flat writing long letters to Natalie, then tearing them up.

“All I had of Natalie was the one keepsake she'd given me: her father's ivory penknife. Nothing else except a little charm bracelet with three dangling unicorns I'd bought her. She loved it, but she'd broken the clasp. She'd given it to me to fix.”

Miserable, aching for Natalie, he'd begun attending one of the evening writing classes offered at McGill. “Since I was a kid, I'd been scribbling poems. So I thought, why not? It was something to escape to.” Meanwhile, he didn't touch the five thousand pounds that Sybil Sylvester had banked in his name. “The thought of using it disgusted me.”

He ate indifferent meals in coffee shops. Daily he bought the
Irish Times
and the
Independent
, never missing an issue. “I inched over the pages, always hoping to see something about Natalie. I was starved for word of her.

“Word of Natalie! A bitter news item, when it came! The announcement of her marriage to Andrew Cameron within a month after I'd left for Canada! It near destroyed me.”

No sound now on the tape. Torrey leaned forward and saw that the tape was still turning. She waited. Then, at last, again Brannigan's voice.

“But what happened next was much worse. Or as I came to think of it later, when my brain could finally handle it, a world lost. A whole world lost!”

In the
Irish Times,
within a year of his arrival in Montreal, he saw in the list of birth announcements, “Born, to Natalie Sylvester Cameron and Andrew Cameron, a son, christened Dakin.”

“That's when I knew. I walked around my room like a crazy man, laughing and crying. Sybil Sylvester had lied to me! The baby was mine! Natalie had named the baby Dakin, just as we'd planned! Dakin was our name for the baby if it was a boy. Dakin was my father's and grandfather's name.
Dakin!

“So Natalie was married to Andrew Cameron but they had
my
baby.”

The cassette stopped. Torrey, stunned at what she was hearing, popped out the tape and turned it over. Brannigan's voice yearned back toward that lost world.

“What had Natalie's great-aunt told her? Likely that I'd abandoned her. That given the choice of money, or of a struggling life of poverty with her, I'd chosen the money.”

On the tape, startlingly, a woman's cheerful voice: “Ten minutes more, Mr. Shaw. Visits are limited to a half hour.” Then Jasper's voice, “Right you are, Nurse,” and the pneumatic closing of a door followed by a momentary silence. Then Tom Brannigan.

“That's when I started writing the Dakin poems. Several appeared in little magazines. Gradually, over the years, they accumulated.”

So uneven, Tom Brannigan's voice, unfolding his tale. Now, besides reading the Dublin papers, he got subscriptions to newspapers in Wicklow. Over the years he read that Andrew Cameron and his six-year-old son, Dakin, won a trout-fishing contest; that Dakin Cameron, aged ten, was
playing doubles in a junior championship tennis match in Bray; that thirteen-year-old Dakin Cameron had come in third in a county school spelling contest.

“I read that another child was born to Natalie and Andrew Cameron. A girl, they'd named her Lucinda.” He clipped the items from the papers.

Meanwhile, he opened The Citadel Bookshop. The bookshop was a success. It gained a reputation for an eclectic selection of literature. Tom Brannigan moved into an expensive flat on Wheelock Street. The Citadel took up all his time, he had acquaintances rather than friends. His solace was in books. “I preferred it that way. To read. To write. To dream.”

But thenâ

“Two years ago, at breakfast I opened the
Irish Times
and read that Andrew Cameron had been killed in a drug-related cross fire in Dublin.”

At once, he'd fantasized going back to Ballynagh. He would go to Sylvester Hall, he would go up the avenue to the hallâ“No, I'd go to the coach house. Natalie would be there. We would look at each other. Natalie would say â¦ But then I thought, âToo late, too late!'”

A silence. Then the clink of a glass, and Jasper's voice. “Take a sip. It's still cold. You'll be all right.”

A pause. Thenâ“Thanks. I thought, finally, âGive up. It's done. It's over.' But then!
Then,
a month ago
The Dakin Poems
won the Halsey Prize. I could hardly take it in. The Halsey! And I suddenly became encouraged again.

“I
would
go back! At once! I remember laughing out loud. I was reaching for the phone when I happened to look down at the
Irish Times
and saw, among the social announcements, the engagement of Natalie Sylvester Cameron to the architect Marshall West.”
Behind Torrey, Jasper said, “Turn it off. Better have your tea before you hear the rest of it. Or you might lose your appetite.”

“Why? Is it bloody?” She turned off the cassette.

“Worse. It's Raphael Ricard.”

BOOK: The Irish Cairn Murder

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