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Authors: Dicey Deere

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BOOK: The Irish Cairn Murder
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A
t nine-thirty Wednesday morning, Torrey braked her bike to a stop at the entrance to Sylvester Hall. Two furiously barking hounds came running from the mansion.
“Crackers! Buster!” Jessie, in the doorway in her aproned uniform, clapped her hands and the dogs turned and raced inside. “They're fake fierce, Ms. Tunet,” Jessie said. “They're really cream puffs.”
“I would've called,” Torrey said, “but my phone's out.” The lie came easily. “I wondered—even with all the tragic—the unfortunate events, I came because I'm hoping Dakin can do some more work for me at the cottage.” Another lie.
“Dakin's gone off, he didn't say where. Ms. Cameron's left for Dublin to meet with her attorney. We're all so upset! There've been reporters and photographers, come like a swarm of bees all yesterday afternoon. But we stayed closed up, even the shutters.”
Jackpot! Nobody home. “I can imagine!” Torrey shivered. “Frightening, what's happened. And now, so dismal! Such a damp and chilly morning! More like November. I should've worn something heavier.”
Take pity on the poor little match girl that I am!
“Well … if you don't mind the kitchen, Ms. Tunet, Breda's made a full pot and there's brown bread.”
 
“So,” Jessie said, elbows on the long kitchen table, teacup in both hands, “back then, in Sybil Sylvester's time, my mam was housekeeper. Those days ! Sybil Sylvester oversaw the land and stock with an eye like a magnifying glass. As for the household! My mam, in charge of the household, had to count the linens, see to their repair, no raveled edges, no rips or tears. Then there was the china, the silver, the maids and cleaning. It was ‘Mrs. Dugan this, Mrs. Dugan that.' My mam was run ragged.”
“My!” Torrey spooned sugar into her tea.
“Ms. Sybil checked every day how much Moira the cook spent and where she traded. Every
day,
my mam said. And the gardens! Checking right down to the seeds Sean O'Boyle put in the ground and the plants he was growing in the hothouse.”
“My!” Torrey sipped.
“Same thing with the young one, Natalie. Her marks at school, from the time she was left in Ms. Sybil's care. What she was allowed to eat. The weekly laundering of the white school blouses and maroon ties and knee socks she wore to that school. Along with the cleaning of the navy blazer and pleated skirt. Disciplinarian sort of place, Alcock's Academy. Strict. Kept the girls close. And studying hard. There was only that one time when Natalie and another little girl, her best friend, were caught smoking. They were about fourteen, then. Quite a fuss Ms. Sybil made. Blamed the school. Then, let's see. There was the chauffeur, Olin Caughey with the red nose, who took care of the cars, that silver Rolls, and some other car, I don't remember. Had to account for every drop of petrol, or she'd have had his head on a platter.”
Breda, the cook, fifty, dumpy, and hard breathing, shook her head in admiration. “I wasn't here then, but I've heard. A proper overseer, Sybil Sylvester!”
“Well,” Jessie said, “except for the time she had the burst
appendix. Had to be rushed to the hospital. Weeks it was. My mam said it was the only time, with Ms. Sybil out of the way,
she'd
had a chance to relax!”
“The appendix,” Torrey said. “When would that've been?”
“Ummm … fifteen, twenty years ago. My mam said it was touch and go. Ms. Sybil had to stay in bed almost a month. August, it was. Then, after, for a while, she'd only go out for a half hour's drive of an afternoon.”
The kitchen clock struck nine, Jessie got up. “More tea, if you'd like, Ms. Tunet, and try one of the buns. Breda will keep you company, I've to do the bedrooms and the marketing. You've got the list, Breda?”
Torrey got up. “Thanks, Jessie. I'm going.” She went toward the door, then turned. “Jessie? That other little girl, Natalie's friend? Who was she?”
“Ho! Came of a proper family, that one! Not that you'd know it now! She's still about. Paints pictures in O'Sullivan's barn. Wild parties and such. Divorced more than once. Back to using her own name. Kate Burnside.”
“
M
a?” In the far, dusty corner of the coach house, Dakin turned the tarnished gilt latch and pulled open the carriage door. But the carriage was empty. Odd, he could smell her perfume; she had to be about.”Your mother? She came back from Dublin an hour ago,” Jessie had told him ten minutes ago when he'd got home. Yet he couldn't find her, she wasn't in her bedroom or the library or anywhere in the house.
“Ma?”
“Over here.” Click of a car door opening. He turned around. The old silver Rolls. He was surprised. It had never been the Rolls, always the carriage. His mother stepped out of the car. Dakin, approaching, felt a wave of compassion. His mother's beautiful eyes under the black brows were haggard; she had pushed her hair behind her ears, but wisps fell untidily across her cheeks. The skirted gray suit she'd worn to Dublin was rumpled and there was a stain—wine?—on one lapel; lunch with the attorney and his legal associate must have been a misery. His mother! Always so forthright, so warmhearted and funny. And now involved in this nightmare.
“What, darling?” She was looking at him, looking so closely that he felt a tightening behind his ears, a wariness. Not that she could know, or suspect; it had been his secret for two years.
“Ma! I've been looking all—When will Marshall get here? He'll know what to do. What did he say? How long before he gets here? By tonight?”
She didn't answer. She was still looking at him in that strange way. As though she had never seen him before. Studying him. It gave him a bereft feeling, like being in a boat that had lost its mooring.
“Ma?
When?
” Marshall was a master at handling difficult situations, getting to the nub. In his wars for decent housing, he'd learned brilliant legal ways to scatter enemy troops. That was all that was necessary. In this case; get them off the scent.
Get them off the scent
!
“Ma?”
His mother said wearily, “I didn't call Marshall.” She was twisting the ring on her finger, the diamond engagement ring that Marshall West had slipped on her finger barely two weeks earlier. “I'm not going to.”
“You … What do you—
Why?
”
“Because I'm not, Dakin, that's all. I'm not.”
D
ry leaves crunched under Torrey's brogues as she approached the O'Sullivan's barn.
Snoop.
From the Dutch. Irresistible. Like being a buck-skin-clad Indian in a forest scenting something in the wind, following a trail, seeing the vestige of a hoofprint on a leaf, a bit of earth freshly turned up, seeing overhead the lazy wheeling of a hawk that would make a sudden plunge.
How had Jessie put it?
Back then, the two fourteen-year-old girls caught smoking. “Natalie Cameron's best friend.”
There was no doorbell, no knocker. Just the fifteen-foot-high barn doors and a shiny black lock. Torrey glanced up. Above, a bank of small-paned windows.
“Hello?” She knocked, then waited, looking about. The O'Sullivan's farmhouse in the distance was unoccupied, there was only this rented barn; it lay in a field that was mostly furze, the spiny shrubs with their yellow flowers now turned brown and dry. A rutted road led to the barn; a blue convertible BMW, dried spatters of mud on its sides, stood a few feet from the barn door.
Torrey called again, louder, “Hell
o!
”
“Give it a push!”
Torrey pushed open the barn door and came into an enormous room, paintings leaning against the walls. She was
aware of an unmade bed with a tumble of silken blankets sliding off it, she smelled whisky and perfume, she saw a refrigerator door ajar, but mostly she saw Kate Burnside, who stood in front of a mirror in a plum-colored robe that hung open, revealing nakedness. She was apparently having difficulty trying to comb her long, black hair. At that moment, the comb hit a snarl and slipped from her hand.
“Shit!”
She kicked the comb aside and looked at Torrey. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face a little swollen. “Oh … I thought you were Nora. My sometime maid. You're what's-your-name. From Castle Moore's old groundsman's cottage.” She pulled her robe closed and tied the sash.
“Yes, Torrey Tunet.”
Kate Burnside had to be approaching forty. She was still a beauty, though the ravages of late nights and unchecked drinking had drawn lines around her lush, pretty mouth. Right now she appeared hung over, shaky, and spooked about something.
Torrey hesitated. It seemed crass, now, to have come here to poke into Kate Burnside's past friendship with Natalie Cameron, considering that Natalie was being charged now with yesterday's gruesome murder. Crass, to snoop into—
“I always have a drink about now. What about you?” Kate Burnside wiggled her bare feet into floppy slippers and padded to a sideboard. She picked up a bottle.
“Too early for me,” Torrey said. She watched Kate Burnside pour herself a gin. Her hand was shaky. The bottle clinked against the glass.
“Dreadful about Natalie Cameron,” Torrey said, “being charged with such a crime! I'm so sorry. I'd only met her once. Jessie at Sylvester Hall was telling me this morning that you and Natalie Cameron were best friends in childhood. Back at Alcock's Academy? And later, in your teens. So I thought—”
Crash! The glass slipped from Kate Burnside's hand and shattered on the floor. She gave a strangled sob and went down on her knees. With her bare hand she began to flick the shards of glass into a pile.
“
Don't!
” Torrey said, too late.
In the bathroom, Torrey put Band-aids on the half dozen cuts on Kate Burnside's fingers. The bathroom was elegant, with a granite tub and an oval-shaped enclosed shower. Really an enviable bathroom, so unlike the makeshift bathroom at the cottage. Here, beside the gleaming shower, was a row of Lucite hooks. And there, on one of the hooks, was a familiar-looking mustard-colored jersey. This one bore the head of a gazelle.
 
Alone in the barn, sunk back among the pillows on the divan and holding her second gin in her bandaged hand, Kate said aloud, “What
good?”
What good to have told Torrey Tunet anything? What secret she could tell would only bury Natalie deeper. Natalie's great-aunt Sybil, that sweet-faced old bitch, had had influence. Sybil knew people in high places who could, and would, with a quiet phone call here or there, erase things as though they'd never happened. But she, Kate, knew the truth.
She looked down at the gin in her glass. She was seeing Rafe Ricard's disbelieving face, his jutting jaw, when at their first meeting she'd told him why Natalie would never come to the cairn.
“More likely, she'll alert the Gardai,” she'd warned him, “They'll trap you!” Lying there in the field, her back protected by his diamond-patterned sweater, she'd been confident he'd give up.
But two days later, this time in O'Sullivan's barn, he'd told her he sent Natalie a third letter. She knew then that she was
helpless to make him believe what she had told him about Natalie.
“You don't believe me!” she'd cried out in despair. “But it's true! It's true!” She was wearing her robe and under it a thin silk chemise.
“Liar!” he'd said, half laughing, and he slid a hand through the opening of her robe and caressed the round of her breast, his thumb running back and forth over her nipple, and at his touch she'd felt a swelling and that familiar ache, she couldn't help it. “Liar!” he'd repeated, and he laughed. “You're just trying to protect your friend! Or someone's been having you on! She'll come, all right! She'll come to the cairn on Tuesday with the money and a shivering down to her toes that the truth might out. Pour us a scotch.” And he'd loosened his belt.
Now, alone on the divan with her bandaged hand, she couldn't think how insane she must have been to have gone, as in a trance, yet hearing the village clock strike noon that Tuesday—how insane to go to the cairn where Rafe waited for Natalie to show up in response to that third letter. She saw herself crossing the field, her thoughts all mixed up with owing Natalie; it was about Dakin, it was shameful, she'd been shameless. And why was she crossing the field to the cairn? What had she expected to … to do? How had she expected to make up for the past?
On the divan, she looked down at her bandaged hand. Blood had seeped through the bandage. She closed her eyes. But she still could see it. Blood was everywhere. On the leaves scattered under the oak. On his jutting jaw. On the diamond-patterned sweater. Blood everywhere.
A
t four-thirty Wednesday afternoon, the door to the police station opened and Sergeant Bryson came in carrying something.
O'Hare stared. “What's that?”
The three-legged stool that Sergeant Jimmy Bryson now carefully set down just inside the door beside Nelson's blanket looked like a dirty old milking stool.
“An antique.” Bryson brushed his blue sleeve across the top of the stool, clearing away a bit of dust. “Cost me six pounds. Ms. Plant said I was lucky to've spotted it. It was at the back, behind a coal scuttle, she didn't even see it herself.” He stood back and with hands on hips surveyed his purchase. “Lucky I had my day off. We'd gone to five places before—”
“Six
pounds
?”
“Ms. Plant says that in two or three years that stool will fetch double that amount. Triple, even. Say twenty pounds. The longer I hang on, Ms. Plant says, the more valuable it'll be. There's a lot going on about Irish antiques. ‘A burgeoning interest,' Ms. Plant says. And not just in America, Ms. Plant says. She says—”
“Sergeant Bryson! We've had a murder in Ballynagh! A gruesome, bloody murder. We've also had an attempted murder,
so that a man now lies unconscious in Glasshill Hospital. Antiques!” O‘Hare was exasperated. Jimmy Bryson, Sergeant Jimmy Bryson, had been in the garda four years now, he'd hardly begun to shave when he'd started. Eager, interested, promising. And now what? Was he falling prey to a siren's song? A middle-aged siren? Almost as old as his mother. After Ms. Plant's frightening experience at the gates of Sylvester Hall, it was fine that Jimmy, with his soft heart, had offered to take her to Finney's for supper. At the village's expense, of course. Jimmy was a kind young fellow, everybody knew that, and Ms. Plant was alone, and what with her being a bit frightened and upset—But then, Finney's again on Monday night! The lamb shanks, Monday's special. And at Bryson's own expense. And wasn't he using something on his hair? O'Hare could smell it. Even the whites of Sergeant Bryson's eyes looked whiter and his color was high. Not good. And what about young Hannah, up at Castle Moore? Tomorrow was Thursday. Thursday night was Hannah's night off, when Jimmy always took her to the movie at Dunlavin. What about that?
“Going to give it a bit of a wash.” Sergeant Bryson picked up the milking stool. Whistling, he carried it across to the bathroom.
Inspector O'Hare looked down at the papers on his desk and at once forgot about Sergeant Jimmy Bryson.
There were two reports. Both concerned Raphael Ricard. The one that had arrived this morning at ten o'clock was from the Montreal Police Department. It gave Raphael Ricard's address, age, marital status (single) and occupation. Three tickets for speeding. Nothing else on the police record.
The second report had arrived an hour ago. It was from Frank Lash, the Dublin attorney representing Natalie Cameron. It had been furnished to Lash by a private detective agency in Montreal. O'Hare reread it for the fifth time.
Raphael Ricard, a financial advisor who pretends to be a cousin of Patrick Ricard, CEO of Pernod Ricard, the world's fifth largest wines and spirit companies with more than eighty brands in forty-five countries of the world … a fact that Raphael Ricard is prone to mention in casual conversation.
In actuality Raphael Ricard is the only son of a Quebec grocer and his wife who retired to Florida six years ago. He uses his fictitious ploy of “cousinship” to the CEO who lives in France, to open doors socially in Montreal and obtain accounts as financial advisor to the aspiring newly rich. Cultivates possible clients at social gatherings and at expensive health and exercise clubs. Personal appraisal: risk-taker. Gambler personality. No scruples re women or money. A user.
O'Hare sat back. Raphael Ricard hadn't come to Ballynagh to fish. But what had he to do with Natalie Cameron? Whatever it was, a pity. Tangled butter-colored hair, raising her eyes, trancelike, to Sergeant Bryson when he took the penknife from her. Almost as though she weren't conscious of him or Winifred Moore or any of them around her, or even of the man's body lying almost at her feet.
“Wouldn't be surprised,” Sergeant Bryson said, coming from the bathroom with the three-legged stool, “if we've got some antique stuff in the shed at home. Things from my granny and the old man. Could be worth something. When you think of it, half the furniture in every cottage in Ballynagh is antique.”
BOOK: The Irish Cairn Murder
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