The Irish Cottage Murder (8 page)

“I would sell my pasture to buy her a pint,” the skinny man said.

“She’s taken, Seamus,” the other man said—and to Luke, “Excuse my friend, mister. We’ve been celebrating. His wife just had her sixth. Weighs in at seven pounds.”

“That’s all right.” Luke lifted his cup of tea to the skinnier man. “Congratulations.”

*   *   *

Her briefcase, so close he could touch it, lay on the pub chair beside him. He glanced at it; then again … and again. In it would be papers relating to the conference. What else? The stolen necklace? Did she keep it with her, not daring to leave it in her bedroom at Castle Moore?

When had her thievery started?

She’d had few friends in North Hawk after her father went off adventuring. Abigail Hapgood Torrey was a poor manager. She and her daughter moved into a run-down tenement. The town proved to be social snobs.

But Torry had a worshipper. She had faithful little Donna Lefebvre from a poor French-Canadian family, her father a postal worker. Donna, two years younger, idolized Torrey and did whatever Torrey said.

So Torrey, passionately alive and with the spark of her adventurous father in her, was the ringleader of a gang of one—Donna, fair-haired, innocent, willing, pudgy. Poor little Donna. As it turned out, tragic little Donna.

Luke gazed, frowning, at the black briefcase. Thievery, thievery.

Torrey, the instigator. Donna, her acolyte, following the dazzling pinwheel that was Torrey, the mischief, the excitement, the incredible fun. Luke remembered one autumn day seeing them, aged thirteen and eleven, Charlie Chaplins, each twirling a cane, with burnt-cork mustaches and in baggy pants and old top hats, strolling down Main Street at 5:00
P.M.
And it wasn’t even Halloween.

It was the following year that Torrey began to baby-sit. She baby-sat for Luke’s little brother, Joshua.

In the pub, Luke closed his eyes but he could not block out the horror he was seeing in his mind.

*   *   *

When Torrey returned from the pay phone and sat down, he said immediately, sharply, “That’s it. Make your choice. Return the necklace or I tell Desmond you stole it.”

She laughed. Or rather, it was a giggle. Then, suddenly sober, she gave him a straight look. “You want the truth? Desmond was playing a nasty little sex game. He wanted me to swipe the necklace. I obliged. Anyway, in the morning I gave him back the necklace. And—surprise! Desmond then gave it to me. For good.”

Luke stared at her. “Jesus! What kind of jackass d’you think I am—to believe Desmond gave you a family heirloom worth more than twenty thousand pounds!” He leaned toward her over the table. “You stole the damned thing!
Stole
it! You could—”

“Listen,” she began, “I—”

“
Stole
it! You could go to prison,” he said, and found he was shaking with bitter anger, “not like that first time.”

24

Torrey flinched. Hopeless to make Luke Willinger believe her.

“Well, then…” She stood up. At the bar she got change for a pound note. She came back and dropped the pence she’d borrowed from Luke onto the table. “Go ahead! Tell Desmond I stole his heirloom necklace. Go on, tell him!”

“I’ll do that.” Tight-lipped, Luke glared at her. She shrugged and walked out of the pub. It was drizzling; she put up her folding umbrella.

Back at the Shelbourne, she learned that the fussy Hungarian delegate had had a stomach upset; the afternoon meeting was cancelled. She came out again into the drizzle. She’d had no lunch, only tea at the pub. But she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat. All she could think of was the necklace in her briefcase. What was it worth? Twenty thousand pounds? More? Thirty? Enough, certainly, for the surgery that would release Donna from the wheelchair. Yet the thought of being in bed with Desmond Moore sickened her.

In the rain, she wandered blindly through Dublin, gazing unseeingly into shop windows, staring from the bridge into the sluggishly moving Liffey, biting a fingernail, unable to make up her mind. She was not a cat with nine lives; she had only this one. “Tantalus,” she said, aloud. She was tantalizing herself, an agony of indecision. Pawn or sell the necklace and have money for Donna’s surgery? Or return the necklace to Desmond and be free of him? The drizzle stopped; she was hardly aware of it.

Grafton Street. Ahead, across the street, she saw Weir’s. It was one of the most prestigious jewelry shops in Dublin. Torrey hesitated. Then she crossed the street.

*   *   *

“Good afternoon.” She placed her leather briefcase on the plateglass counter. An air-conditioner hummed. There was a smell of lemon oil–polished mahogany and a feeling of quiet elegance. Several clocks on a counter delicately chimed the quarter hour: 4:45. She’d run it close; most shops in Dublin closed at five.

“Good afternoon.” The clerk smiled courteously. He was clean-shaven, in a dark suit, impeccable. At a counter nearby, an elderly woman clerk, polishing a silver urn, smiled at Torrey. Three or four customers browsed.

“My necklace.” She had wrapped it in a tissue and put it in a business envelope. She snapped open the brass clips of the briefcase, took out the envelope, and unwrapped the necklace. “Perhaps you can help me. I’m told it’s quite valuable. But I don’t know. It was left to me by an aunt. I thought you might be able to tell me…” Or perhaps Weir’s itself might be interested in buying the necklace.

“Left to you by your aunt, was it?” The clerk nodded encouragingly.

Torrey held up the necklace. The diamonds glittered; the pear-shaped emerald at the V shot green fire.

The clerk shifted the black velvet pad on the counter but did not touch the necklace. “’Tis its worth you’re interested in?”

“Yes.”

“We have a department for—”

“Mr. Colby? Can you help me a moment?” The elderly clerk at the next counter was beckoning.

“Excuse me, please.”

Waiting, she dropped the necklace onto the velvet pad. She pushed it around, gazing at the glittering stones. She didn’t really like diamonds, couldn’t see what the fuss was all about; it was just that they were valuable. She preferred a burst of fireworks. Or what was that tangerine-colored bird? It would be the male; the male always had the plumage, brilliant colors like the male peacocks on the bandanna from her father.

She glanced over at the next counter. Mr. Colby was not there. She had been waiting almost ten minutes. Ah, here he came, skirting another counter at her left.

“I’m sorry to’ve kept you waiting.” He looked down at the necklace on the black velvet. He was perspiring. He looked up at her, then he looked past her shoulder and gave a great sigh.

She turned. Two gardai in blue uniforms were coming toward her.

*   *   *

“But it is
my
necklace!” Torrey said, frightened and angry.

No one looked at her. The elderly woman clerk was repeating to Detective Inspector O’Gorman, who had just arrived from the
Garda Siochana,
what she had told the two gardai minutes before. “I recognized it as the Moore necklace from the photo in
The Sunday World
about the diamond exhibit last year, the V of diamonds with the emerald at the base. And having heard about the murder on the radio—”

“What has my diamond necklace got to do with the murder of Mr. Kasvi?” Torrey looked in bewilderment from the two gardai to Detective Inspector O’Gorman.

“Not Mr. Kasvi,” Detective Inspector O’Gorman said, “the murder of Desmond Moore.”

25

Inspector O’Hare wanted to retch. That would have made two of them because Moore’s new stable lad, a seventeen-year-old, was throwing up onto a bale of hay beside Darlin’ Pie’s box. Brian Coffey, Moore’s skinny red-haired trainer, in jeans and a faded maroon jersey, was standing, mute, his white, freckled face contorted; he was shaking his head back and forth, his eyes denying the ugliness he stared at.

Desmond Moore’s knife-slashed, bloody body lay just outside box four; but the horse, Black Pride, was gone, the stall door splintered. The scent of blood in the stable had stirred the other three horses in their boxes. There was a frightening cacophony of shrill whinnies, stamping, and neighing. Darlin’ Pie, in box three, reared and screamed.

O’Hare swallowed saliva. Two murders in Ballynagh within a week. As though a serial killer was on the loose. He looked down at Desmond Moore, who lay face up.

“My!” Sergeant Bryson squatted down beside Moore’s body. Bryson’s young face looked appalled. “Oh, my!”

A knife must have been driven into Moore’s stomach and yanked upward between his ribs to his breastbone. His yellow cashmere sweater was red-black with the blood that must have spurted, maybe even jetted out like a fountain. One hand was clenched at his breast, as though in reflex to stem the flow.

“He would’ve died at once, I hope,” Bryson said pleadingly, as though asking someone indeterminate for confirmation. He reached out a hand as if to close Desmond Moore’s staring eyes, but—

“Don’t touch him,” O’Hare said. “You know better, Sergeant!”

From the police car in the stable yard, O’Hare called the Murder Squad at headquarters in Dublin. The van with the technical crew would arrive shortly; Castle Moore was only twenty-five minutes from Dublin.

Back again in the stable, O’Hare scanned the floor, the murder weapon—a bloody knife, surely, by the look of Desmond Moore’s slashed body—could be lying somewhere here. But it wasn’t. Had the murderer taken it with him?

“See if there’s a knife in that bale of hay or along the stalls,” he said to Sergeant Bryson, “But don’t touch it; wait for the gardai from Dublin.”

He looked around for Brian Coffey, who still stood mute and staring. Coffey and the new lad, Kevin Keating, had found Desmond Moore’s body only a few minutes ago, when they had returned from Flaherty’s Harness Shop in Ballynagh and entered the stables. Minutes later, an incoherent Brian Coffey had rung up Inspector O’Hare. The poor fellow still looked in shock, eyes wide, face white. The lad, Kevin, had ridden off in search of Black Pride. In the stable yard, Janet Slocum and Rose stood hugging their arms and looking around in fear and excitement.

*   *   *

“I was at that card table,” Brian Coffey said to Inspector O’Hare, jerking his head toward the rickety table in the stable office. “About two o’clock it was, just before I went to Ballynagh to meet Kevin at Flaherty’s. I was making out the list, the tack we needed to buy. And I heard voices. Mr. Desmond talking with somebody in the stable.”

Inspector O’Hare stood over Brian Coffey, who was sitting forward on the edge of a faded, overstuffed tartan couch, elbows on knees, hands clasped. The room was small, not much bigger than a horse box. The walls had glossy photographs of horses and racing events tacked up. There was a calendar from a feed company. The card table served as the office desk. Sweaters and a duffle coat hung on a rack in one corner. Beneath the rack were a couple of pairs of worn boots. A wood floor had been crudely laid down.

“And…?”

“Yes, well—” Brian Coffey’s red hair was wet with sweat; nervous sweat it had to be; the room was not that warm—“so I was making out the list.”

Brian Coffey moved his hands up his skinny white arms, shoving up the sleeves of the faded maroon jersey, rubbing his arms as though they were cold. He hunched his shoulders and licked dry lips. “Mr. Desmond had this store room made into an office last month, temporarylike. He had plans for a yard of a dozen horses, to start. He’d be buying at auctions. He wanted to—”

“Yes,” O’Hare said, trying to be patient, his jaw aching with the strain. Sergeant Bryson sat at the card table, making notes with a ballpoint pen. “So it was two o’clock?”

“Yes, about two. A few minutes after two, anyway. I’d had Kevin sort out some old boxes of harness—a sad lot, rust and corrosion—we’d get rid of it. Mr. Desmond said to charge the new harness at Flaherty’s. T’was a big list. The stables had been let go. Even paint for the stables had—”

“Yes,” Inspector O’Hare interrupted. He clicked his thumbnail.
Get on with it.
“So you heard Mr. Moore talking with someone…?”

“Near box number four, they were, Black Pride’s stall. I heard Mr. Desmond’s voice go up, high like, the way it sometimes gets when he’s angry, but most people’s goes down low when they—”

“Any words? Did you understand what they—”

Brian Coffey shook his red head. “No … But angry! Mr. Desmond and the other one. But none of my—And not worrisome. Mr. Desmond often gets angry, like with jobs not done right, wrong stuff delivered, things like that. So I just finished making out the list.” Brian Coffey looked down.

Something wrong. O’Hare sensed it. Since he’d been a kid, he could always tell: a silence across the supper table between his mom and dad, his mom’s quick look down at the plate, a bruise glimpsed on her arm, the half-heard crash of a dish in the night.

“Go on.” O’Hare leaned forward, trying to look into Brian Coffey’s brown eyes. Coffey had the kind of thin white face that to O’Hare meant working-class Irish. They worked in shops, tilled fields, drove with their carpenters’ tools in the back of their van, hopefully strummed guitars, their minds whirling with movie star and television dreams. Some went to Trinity; some had Ireland’s love of horses and became jockeys, groomers, trainers. They worked or rode for rich owners or breeders. Some knew the inside of prisons; most knew the inside of pubs. Brian Coffey, with a boy’s thin frame, was still unmarried at thirty-five, like a third of the Irishmen of his upbringing—never marrying because, as iconoclastic O’Hare saw it, between no birth control and the economy, they did not quite dare.

“And then?” O’Hare said.

Brian Coffey gulped. “Flaherty closes up at three. And it wasn’t my place to—So I went out behind, where I keep my motorbike, and I went off to Flaherty’s.” Brian shook his head. “We’d’ve been back sooner, but coming out of Flaherty’s we met Mr. Callaghan and—”

“Who? Who’s Mr. Callaghan?”

“Mr. Fergus Callaghan, a man who traces your ancestors. He—”

“A genealogist, you mean?”

“That’s right. One of those. He’s been tracing back for Mr. Desmond, the Moores’ history and where they—”