The Irish Manor House Murder
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Authors: Dicey Deere
Tags: #Mystery, #Detective, #Woman Sleuth
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Contents
St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Dicey Deere
Other titles from St. Martin’s Minotaur Mysteries
To Marijane and “the Crowd” at Ashawagh Hall
1
It was a horror. First, Torrey heard the horse’s hoofs pounding; it was like a thudding in her heart.
She was coming from the old groundsman’s cottage in the woods to take the shortcut across the Ashenden meadow to the village. October, three o’clock, bright sunlight.
She drew in a breath of the fresh-cut grass as she reached the fence that enclosed the meadow. A hundred feet to her right, on a hill, rose Ashenden Manor with its four stone chimneys.
Then Torrey saw a figure. Someone was crossing the meadow, coming from the manor and going toward the woods at her left. She recognized the spare, upright figure of Dr. Ashenden, who must have just arrived home to the manor from his office in Dublin; he was still in city clothes.
Then suddenly the
pound, pound, thud, thud,
shaking her —
A great gray horse came galloping across the meadow toward Dr. Ashenden, the girl astride him crouching low on his neck, her red hair wild, lips drawn back, Reaching Dr. Ashenden, the horse reared, neighing, eyes rolling, frantic. But the girl on his back, gripping the reins, fiercely forced him to do her bidding, and his great hooves rose and came down like giant hammers on Dr. Ashenden … then again … and again. All the while, the girl in the saddle was screaming down at the man’s fallen body. Then abruptly she wheeled the horse and was gone.
“No!” Torrey moaned, stunned, sickened,
“No!”
* * *
On her knees, Torrey brushed dirt and crushed grass from Dr. Ashenden’s face. He lay on his back, jacket torn, his white shirt ripped, his tie twisted. His face was dirty and bruised, his eyes closed; his silvery hair was globbed with mud. Dead?
“Dr. Ashenden…?” But now he moaned. He opened his eyes, heavy-lidded eyes under thick, gray-white eyebrows. His dazed look, unfocused, met Torrey’s. He moved his lips and said faintly, “My shoulder … broken, I think. Or maybe … I rolled aside just in —” his gaze sharpened in recognition of Torrey in her faded navy turtleneck and jeans. “Ah, Ms. Tunet.” He took a breath, gasped in pain, then in his elegant clipped style, he said quickly, irritably, “That damned stallion! Rowena can’t control him! I’ve warned her again and again, but she doesn’t listen!”
Torrey gaped, stunned. “Yes, yes.” She saw that Dr. Ashenden was trembling. He must be in terrible pain and, of course, shock. He was in his late seventies. And this murderous attack! Was he out of his head, thinking the hellish attack was an accident?
Confused, she gazed at a dark red bruise covering his cheek. Then blinked. Odd that it was already swollen. Something off.
“… or if not broken, possibly sprained.” Dr. Ashenden was probing his shoulder with trembling fingers.
Definitely off. But clearly he didn’t want anybody to know that his granddaughter Rowena had tried to kill him. Torrey shifted her knees in the grass and looked down at Dr. Ashenden. “Can you get up? I’ll help you.”
“No. No thank you, Ms. Tunet, I can manage.” He raised himself on an elbow and shook his head as though to clear it. “I’m all right.”
But a hearty Wicklow-accented man’s voice at Torrey’s shoulder said, “Here, let me, Dr. Ashenden.”
Only then did Torrey realize that she and Dr. Ashenden were not alone in the meadow. Someone else had witnessed Rowena’s murderous attack on her grandfather.
She looked up at Sergeant Jimmy Bryson.
2
“So that’s when I arrested Rowena Keegan,” Sergeant Jimmy Bryson said to Inspector Egan O’Hare at six o’clock in the glass-fronted room that was the Ballynagh police station, “When I got Doctor Ashenden back to the manor, by luck Dr. Padraic Collins was there. He’d dropped in, as usual. Between us, we got Ashenden upstairs. Sprained shoulder, contusions, and some undetermined kind of blow to his face. Abrasions and so on. I’d’ve sworn he’d be dead.”
Sergeant Bryson pushed his cap up off his forehead and looked over at his neatly typed report on Inspector O’Hare’s desk. He was twenty-two, narrowly built, and loved a bit of excitement, which ordinarily was in short supply in Ballynagh. Still, the ugliness of what he’d seen in the meadow a bare two hours ago had rattled him. “What a shocker! I was coming back from O’Shaugnessy’s when I saw it. Jesus! Rowena Keegan galloping into the meadow and riding her grandfather down like a crazy woman. She meant to kill him.
I saw her face!
” —
Inspector Egan O’Hare glanced at the report, then leaned down from his desk chair to give Nelson, the black Lab, his six o’clock biscuit. Nelson took it delicately between his teeth and settled down by the Coke machine. O’Hare said to Bryson, “Well, now, Jimmy, you say that Ms. Tunet was crossing the meadow. Torrey Tunet. So presumably she’d be a witness. But she denies —”
“Absolutely, Inspector! Swears she didn’t see a thing! Looked me right in the eye and said she’d accidentally stumbled over Dr. Ashenden’s body.”
Inspector O’Hare sat back, pursed his lips, and for a moment regarded the wall behind Sergeant Bryson. “Ms. Tunet may not be the soul of truth, considering that she and Rowena Keegan have become such fast friends. Walking the woods and hills, tea at Miss Amelia’s Tea Shop, feeding acorns to squirrels. Keep an eye out, Jimmy.”
“That I will, Inspector.”
O’Hare tapped a finger on Sergeant Bryson’s typed report. “This, about O’Malley’s pub. Sean O’Malley says Rowena Keegan’s hardly ever been there before.” He frowned down at the report. According to Sean O’Malley, Rowena Keegan had come into O’Malleys and started drinking heavily about an hour before her attack on her grandfather. Straight whiskeys. Leaving the pub, paying Sean, she had muttered under her breath, “That bastard! That inhuman bastard! He belongs in hell!” Sean had sworn those were her words. He said the girl was crying.
“That’s it, then, Jimmy?”
“Everything, Inspector. Except that Sean O’Malley said that for a pretty girl, Rowena Keegan looked a sight, her red hair wild and those green eyes all bloodshot. Made me think, Jesus! What’s happened? Them always so thick before, Rowena and her grandfather.”
Inspector O’Hare, reading the report and listening to Sergeant Jimmy Bryson, was wondering the same thing. He was fifty-four years old and had been Inspector in Ballynagh for the past twenty-two years. There was little he didn’t know and much that he remembered. He was recalling now that from the time Rowena Keegan was three or four years old, she’d been her grandfather’s darling. Dr. Ashenden taught the child to ride, to swim, to fish, to play tennis. By the time she was twelve, they rode together daily when Dr. Ashenden returned from surgery in Dublin. Whenever Rowena Keegan caught a cold, had an earache, or cut a finger, Dr. Ashenden treated it like a major emergency. In the village, they laughed about it, what with Rowena Keegan being such a bloomingly healthy young woman.
In any case, the bloomingly healthy young woman was at present not in residence at Ashenden Manor. She was, instead, in the only cell that the police station in the village of Ballynagh possessed, exactly twenty-five feet away from where Inspector O’Hare now sat. At half past six o’clock, Sergeant Bryson would go across to Finney’s to get her dinner. It was Friday night. Baked shad, mashed potatoes, spinach.
3
The cottage was chilly when Torrey woke up. She hadn’t known about October in Ireland. Shivering, she took her morning shower; the water was lukewarm as usual and only a frustrating dribble. Back in the damply cold bedroom, she put on a gray woolen skirt and her heaviest cotton jersey, a red turtleneck that she’d bought two months ago back home in North Hawk, just before going on to the Boston airport. “Have a nice trip, Ms. Tunet,” the elderly clerk had said, taking her credit card. “How I do envy you!”
“Thanks.” But this time it wasn’t her usual trip. It wasn’t an interpreting job, staying in Europe’s luxury hotels, speaking Danish or Italian or any of her dozen other languages, wearing her tailored suit, her time-sweep efficient watch on her wrist. No conference rooms and occasional evenings of polite formal dinners, wearing glittering earrings and discussing political and European Union problems.
No. This time it was the dilapidated old groundsman’s cottage in Ballynagh. The Children’s Language Institute had offered her a contract: a three-language series of books for kids. She hadn’t been able to resist. Kids and languages! Four months of hard work and she’d deliver the first book in the six-book series. “Half payment in advance,” they’d stipulated cautiously about this first book, “the other half on delivery and acceptance.”
Hardly enough money to scrape by on. She had no savings. Having grown up poor, she enjoyed spending. So now it was back to her early days of half cans of tuna, dried beans, powdered milk. But irresistible. Kids and languages!
She’d thought back to the time in North Hawk when she was twelve and won that prize of twenty-five dollars translating for little kids from Spanish-speaking countries who didn’t speak English. She’d learned Spanish from tapes she took out of the library. Why? “I don’t know,” she’d told the
North Hawk Weekly
reporter. These days they said it was genetic, her peculiar language ability. Her Romanian father had been the same. So had two other interpreters she’d met at the United Nations. Yet how she had slaved for years to learn! She was now twenty-eight and had a passport stamped with exotic foreign destinations and an unflattering, rather wistful-looking photo showing her dark, wavy, short hair, her narrow chin, and her gray eyes that somehow looked better without mascara. She was five feet four, slim, and addicted to pasta and chocolate bars with almonds. She was also helplessly fascinated by other people’s lives. Nosy, some people called it.