The Irish Cottage Murder (13 page)

“You
what?
”

“Wednesday night at the lake, you were having Desmond on, weren’t you? Carrying on like a banshee about losing the necklace. You must’ve guessed what he was up to with you. Tempting you. Did you? Guess?”

She stared at him. “Yes, I guessed.”

“Then sneaking down to the lake, getting the necklace from under the rock—you had me fooled. When’d you give it back to him?”

“Next morning. In the library.” She was stunned, then bewildered. “But why, then, in Dublin, in that pub—? You threatened me! Threatened to tell Desmond I’d stolen—”

“Yes. At first, I thought—So I would’ve turned you in for stealing the necklace. As I warned you in the pub.”

“You’re leaving me far behind,” Torrey said. “What are you telling me?”

“I’m saying that I didn’t twig it until later. Until early this morning in fact.” He gave her a straight look. “Now I’m asking you: Did you give the necklace back to Desmond the next morning?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” Luke said. “And then Desmond gave you back the necklace for good. Buying you into bed.”

She felt her face go red. Anger? Shame? “And now I suppose you believe I was peddling the necklace at Weir’s? That I’d decided to become Desmond’s whore?”

“Of course! Damn it! Desmond must’ve expected something in return! He wasn’t a philanthropist. You were making a deal with him!” His voice shook with anger as he glared at her.

She folded her arms and stared at him. Why was he so angry?

“Obviously it was a deal: you and Desmond.”

*   *   *

Bewildered, she said, “What are you up to, Luke Willinger? What game? I’m not a fool, Luke.” And when he only looked back at her, she said slowly, the thought forming as she said it, “You’ve got a reason!
For some reason
you believe Desmond later on really did give me the necklace. That’s why you posted bail for me.”

She felt, as she said it, that a breeze, cool and fresh, had swept across the meadow, taking her confusion with it. She said, “What is it? What’s the reason?”

Then she waited, somehow relaxed. She felt she had an infinity of time, the meadow, the hills and mountains in a hazy distance, the grasshoppers humming, the sun warm on her head. She could see that Luke Willinger’s forehead was getting sunburned. Likely, hers, too; neither of them had thought to wear a hat. She put her hand to her forehead. Hot. And now, relaxed, waiting, because in this particular chess game it could only be his move. She even smiled at Luke Willinger.

He said, “You’re pretty damned acute. I’ve a good reason.” He eyed her. “It won’t be the sweetest thing to your ears.”

“Try me. I’m a big, brave girl. Woman.”

“Good. Because in Dublin early this morning in a coffee shop, I met someone who confided to me something about Desmond and the necklace. I can’t tell you who that person was or how they knew. I had to swear to keep her out of it. But here’s what I learned.”

*   *   *

He paused, seeing himself at seven o’clock this morning in the coffee shop, Janet Slocum on the plastic stool beside him, her pockmarked face serious, telling him between bites of the sweet bun what she’d long since discovered.… Janet Slocum saying, “If Ms. Tunet killed Desmond Moore, he had it coming. It was justice. A crazy kind of justice! If she really stole the necklace and killed Desmond Moore, as the police say she did, she stole a necklace worth only five pounds!” And when Luke looked at her in disbelief, “’Tis true! He had a cache of those paste necklaces that he palmed off on young girls who he then used sexually.” Janet laughed scornfully. “Had a whole box of them in his bedroom, he did! I know a girl, only sixteen, who tried to pawn one of those necklaces. Poor thing! She was pregnant and needed an abortion. But abortion’s illegal in Ireland, so she went to London. When she tried to pawn the necklace to pay for the abortion, she was offered only five pounds.”

*   *   *

“So that’s it.” Luke folded his arms. “Desmond gave you a necklace worth peanuts.” He expected to see Torrey’s face stricken, outraged. Instead, she only went a little pale. Then she looked off and gave a little laugh. “Would I have sold my pure white body in exchange for the necklace? As Desmond expected? For a minute there, in Weir’s jewelry shop, I almost thought yes. But I’ll never know. If I’d given in, if I’d played Desmond’s game, I suppose he’d have used me a time or two in bed before I tried to sell the necklace and discovered it was a fake.” She shuddered, then frowned. “I’m sorry for those other women.”

“Girls, not women. He used young ones … I was told. But there was something particular about you.”

She cast him a quick glance. “Variety, maybe. I’m going to demand that the gardai have the necklace appraised. When they discover it’s worthless, they’ll have to admit that Desmond Moore might have given it to me … that although he wouldn’t have given me a necklace worth maybe twenty thousand pounds, he’d certainly give me one worth five pounds.”

He regarded her uneasily, hating to point out her still precarious situation; nevertheless, he said, “But the gardai may suggest that you believed the necklace was worth twenty thousand pounds and so you stole it.”

“Oh, damn it, of course! Where’s my head.”

“Better to wait, not tell the gardai anything, not insist on having the necklace appraised. It’s too weak a defense. So far. But if we—”

“We?”

He said impatiently, “Why not? Waste of years, waste of emotions, that snare I trapped myself in in North Hawk. And trapped you in. You caught it from me, like a virus, that hatred. Yes, ‘we.’ I’ll help you … if that’s all right with you? I’ve already got an idea or two.” He flashed an encouraging look at her. Unfortunately, he was lying; he had no ideas. But he’d work at it. His glance slid past Torrey’s shoulder, down to the left where the meadow ended and the long bulk of the stables lay. There, on the scrubbed concrete floor outside Black Pride’s stall, Desmond Moore’s blood was now a pale pink stain.

They left the five-bar gate and walked the two miles to Ballynagh. Luke had earlier told Janet that they would not be having lunch at Castle Moore. “Too much for us to talk privately about,” he’d said to Torrey, “and Sheila Flaxton has a dozen ears and besides she thinks you’re guilty as hell. Makes for a lousy appetite.”

So at O’Malley’s Pub in Ballynagh, noisy with its lunch crowd of regulars, they ate plates of eggs and ham, hunks of bread slathered with sweet butter, and drank steaming hot black tea from ten-ounce mugs. They ate as hungrily as though they were soldiers stoking up for the battle of their lives, which, as Torrey pointed out, was grimly true for her. Luke, over a second mug of tea, said, “In North Hawk—What happened to the peacock bandanna? Blue peacocks on it? I used to see you walking on Main Street when you were a kid, looking like a pirate with that bandanna around your head. And little Donna Lefebvre trotting beside you. The pair of you, off on your adventures, your excitements. Later, when I had to hate you, I’d get flashes of you in that peacock bandanna. It made hating you more difficult.”

“My father’s gift, that bandanna, before he went away for good. I heard five years ago, from my mother—she’s married again and living in California—that my father had died in New Zealand. The flu. Overnight. He’d been captaining a tourist cruise boat. White uniform, spic-and-span, with a captain’s gold-braided cap that said H
ARMONY
C
RUISES
. Perhaps that shamed him; it wasn’t the high adventure he’d gone to find.”

“Every person hungers,” Luke said. “All kinds of restless, confused appetites. My stepfather’s, for instance. I’ve sometimes wondered, did something make his tax evasion ‘all right’ in his mind? Justify it? A highly respected psychoanalyst. Yet hiding suitcases of money.”

“Like Desmond Moore and his sexual avidity,” Torrey agreed. “All unleashed. No boundaries. As though he had a right, had found a reason to justify—” She shuddered. “But that’s just my feeling.”

Luke said nothing. Torrey, sensing something held back, looked at him. “What is it?”

Luke frowned. He shook his head. “I’m thinking of something that affected Desmond. But I don’t want to make a peach pie without peaches.”

“Try,” Torrey said. “The peaches may appear.”

Luke said, “The night before Desmond was murdered, he got drunk and told me a tragic tale. In the castle library, did you notice that portrait over the fireplace?”

“The jolly looking gentleman in whiskers and flowered waistcoat, with a gold-knobbed cane? Looked eighteenth century.”

“‘Jolly’? Oh yes, with a jolly gold-knobbed cane.”

“What about him?”

“Albert, the Duke of Comerford. Castle Moore was Castle Comerford before the Moores owned it. The Comerfords were Anglo-Irish. The Anglo-Irish—they were really English—became the great Irish landowners in Ireland after England conquered Ireland. Anglo-Irish means a different religion, a different nationality, a different class from the Irish. Really English and Protestant landowners. They held despotic power over the conquered Irish. Perhaps you know?”

“I know Irish history, yes.”

“Desmond kept that portrait of the Duke of Comerford over the fireplace to remind him. ‘To look at it and remember,’ he told me.”

“Remember what?”

“Albert, the Duke of Comerford, had once beaten an Irish stable boy to death. A stable boy of sixteen. The boy had neglected to feed one of the Duke’s breeding horses.”

Torrey clattered down her mug of tea. “Oh, no! I can’t—! Was he imprisoned for it? The duke?”

“Not even fined. Not even hushed up. All an accident. Had lost his temper. Gave the stable boy’s family ten pounds. Desmond said the boy was put in the ground, the priest said his words, and the grave digger threw in the dirt. Catherine Comerford, the wife of Albert, sent a wreath of roses to the burial. It was said that the same week, Albert, Duke of Comerford, entertained the mayor of Dublin at dinner at Castle Comerford.”

“God! Do you believe it actually happened? The stable boy beaten to death?”

“More to the point, Desmond did. In fact, he knew. It was Moore family history.”

“How? Are you telling me…”

“Yes. The stable boy was Terence Moore, Desmond’s great-great-grandfather’s young brother.”

*   *   *

They sat. Torrey said, “That’s quite some peach pie you’ve dished up. What’s your point?”

“I’m not sure. Desmond’s personality—or maybe character. Why, for instance, would he keep Duke Albert’s portrait before him, a red flag, reminding him? Any healthy-minded person would have had the portrait carted away, or sold or burned. But Desmond kept it there above the fireplace, facing his desk. Something weird about that, as though he were using it in some way. He even had a spotlight shining down on the portrait. On the jolly Duke of Comerford.”

“Yes. Weird.”

*   *   *

They took a short cut back to Castle Moore, crossed a meadow, and skirted the low, white stables where a blowy west wind raised a swirl of dust in the stable yard. In the chill of the wind, Torrey shivered. She gazed at the stables where the stable boy had been beaten and died. A red-haired young man in suspenders, jodhpurs, and ankle boots was crossing the stable yard with a bucket, probably oats for the horses. She recognized Brian Coffey and remembered that Coffey had ridden with Desmond Moore to a horse auction in Wexford the morning that the man from Helsinki, Mr. Kasvi, had been strangled in the woods. Desmond Moore had planned to develop a Castle Moore stable, with Brian Coffey as the stable manager. She felt sorry for Brian Coffey, who would now likely be out of a job. So would the new lad, Kevin, hired to help Brian Coffey. A pity.

*   *   *

The lad, Kevin, came into the tack room carrying a broken pitchfork. The fork had come loose from the handle because the handle was rotting. It would have to be cut down. “I was tossing and tidying the straw bed around Big Shot,” he said to Brian Coffey, who was putting down an empty bucket, “and it just came off. It—”

“Let’s have a look.”

Kevin handed over the pieces. He was glad of the warmth of the tack room, which was heated by the stove whose dry warmth protected leather from mildew and dried the dampness out of the horse rugs.

Kevin gazed around with satisfaction; he liked the neatness, the warmth, the horse smell. Mr. Coffey had put him to work cleaning up this neglected tack room first thing when he’d hired him a month ago. The saddles and bridles were now neatly ranged, the brushes on shelves, the straps hung on hooks.

Over on the left, the three-pronged harness hook still held the bridle that Mr. Desmond had last used when he rode the chestnut, Black Pride, the day that he and Mr. Coffey had ridden to Wexford and bought Darlin’ Pie. The red-and-black plaid rug that went under Black Pride’s saddle was still on a line near the stove; Mr. Coffey had told Kevin to put the rug there to dry out the dampness.

“It can be fixed, Kevin.” Mr. Coffey handed him back the fork and handle. “Meantime, you’ll find another fork in box number four. Four is storage, for now.”

“Yes, Mr. Coffey.”

Taking down the other pitchfork, Kevin wondered if he and Mr. Coffey would be out of a job. They said in the kitchen that Winifred Moore, the new owner, didn’t plan to keep a stable. Mr. Coffey had a long face on him about it. Troubled, he was. Gloomy. And a bit jumpy.

37

It rained all weekend. The mountains around Ballynagh disappeared, hidden by drifting rags of fog. Hazy yellow lights shone from O’Malley’s Pub and the few shops. The fruit on Stevens’ outdoor stand was wet; people sloshed with hunched shoulders; the bus splashed its way on the main street, north to Dublin, south to Cork. Sergeant Bryson had Saturday afternoon off; he was in his garage at home, working on his bicycle.

In the Ballynagh garda station Saturday afternoon, Inspector O’Hare sat absorbed over an open account book on his desk. Strange and revealing this account book. In some way that he couldn’t understand, it gave Inspector O’Hare a sense of poetry. Yet there was no poetry on the pen and ink pages. It was, simply, a small account book he had taken from Miss Tunet’s bedroom at Castle Moore.