The Irish Manor House Murder (24 page)

Inspector O’Hare regarded Mrs. McLaughlin. But he was seeing a table laden with a feast of ham and roast of beef, and seated at the table, two small wide-eyed children. He blinked away the image.

“So,” Nora McLaughlin heaved a sigh, “Kathleen Brady remained pregnant. Donal told Gerald Ashenden he couldn’t understand it, that possibly the X ray hadn’t been strong enough.”

Someone under his breath whispered, “My God in heaven!” O’Hare pretended not to hear. His gaze was fastened on Mrs. McLaughlin.

She continued, “Then, right after, Ingeborg disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Went off, you mean?”

“Off to Denmark, I imagine. Heartbroken, I imagine. In horror at what Donal told her, I guess. Donal in his cups! Loses his head and maybe blabs something to Ingeborg. I asked him, had he said anything. He couldn’t remember; he couldn’t remember anything he said or did when he was on the drink. Once, a family came to move into our house. They said Donal had sold it to them; they’d given him a down payment. They had it on paper, Donal’s signature. Donal couldn’t even remember.”

*   *   *

A waiting. In her lap, Mrs. McLaughlin began abentmindedly snapping her purse open and closed. Open, closed …
snap, snap
 … open, closed. There was no other sound in the police station, open, closed. She sat looking off into space. Inspector O’Hare coughed. Mrs. McLaughlin blinked. Her fingers on the purse went still.

She said, “So Gerald Ashenden married Kathleen Brady. Six months later the Ashenden baby was born. Caroline they named her. Poor little thing! Pitiful. Damaged. Bones so weak! I heard of it from Donal.

“But Donal swore to me again that he’d done no X ray on Kathleen Brady.” Mrs. McLaughlin was silent. Then, pensively, “Once in a while I’d see a write-up in the papers about Gerald Ashenden getting some medical award at a dinner or banquet. But never any mention of Kathleen and the little girl. Never in all those years.”

The little girl. O’Hare tried not to look at Caroline Temple, sitting there beside Mark Temple, but he looked anyway. So did everyone else. Caroline’s hazel eyes were gazing dreamily at Mrs. McLaughlin.
As if she is hearing a fairy story,
thought Inspector O’Hare,
Hansel and Gretel in the woods.

“Never a mention,” Mrs. McLaughlin repeated, “never in all those years.”

In all those years.
Inspector O’Hare drew in a breath. Years. So many years later: death from a strong hand holding down a drunken face in a bog. O’Hare had been a young man, Jimmy Bryson’s age, when it had happened. Inspector O’Hare remembered it. In the woods north of Ashenden Manor. The nighttime call, in the dark woods the flashlights crisscrossing the bog, the muck on the man’s body. The bulk of Dr. Collins standing nearby. Now, arms folded, Inspector O’Hare waited.

Mrs. McLaughlin said, “But then Donal, after being in AA for sixteen years, went back on the drink. We got desperate again for money. Donal said he’d visit Gerald Ashenden in Ballynagh and get enough money from him to pay what we owed, so he could start over, clean slate, no drink. ‘Five hundred pounds,’ Donal told me, ‘that should clear us.’

“And he told me, ‘Nothing to worry about. I’ll tell Ashen-den I’ve had a bout of conscience about X-raying Kathleen back then, and I’m going to make a clean breast of it to the law. I’ll go all guilty and penitent, Nora, never mind that I had nothing to feel guilty about. But implying at the same time that for five hundred pounds I’d have to reconsider about my conscience.’”

For the first time, Nora McLaughlin looked around at the fascinated faces of the listeners. Then she said to Inspector O’Hare: “I thought how mighty strange it was. Ironic. Because my Donal never did anything wrong except take money from Gerald Ashenden to do a wrong thing he never did. And now Donal was going to try to get more money for the wrong thing he never did. You understand me, Inspector?”

“Yes.”

Nora McLaughlin nodded. “Well. So Donal went to Ballynagh, to Ashenden Manor. And they say that Donal got drunk and had a heart attack and fell down in a bog and suffocated. I couldn’t make it out. I’d heard of Russian peasants getting drunk and falling down in the snow and freezing to death. But a bog? A heart attack? I couldn’t make it out.

“A Dr. Collins had found him. I ask myself often, was that really what happened to my Donal? But what could I do? Donal and I — we’d never known Donal had a bad heart. Do you have to have a bad heart to have a heart attack?”

“I expect so,” O’Hare said.

73

In the silence, a crackle of paper. Then Nelson thumped his tail. Everyone in the room looked around. Sergeant Jimmy Bryson guiltily stopped his noisy opening of the box of dog biscuits. Inspector O’Hare refrained from raising his eyes to heaven.

Scott Keegan was gazing from under his brows at Mrs. McLaughlin. He said bitterly, “Would that your tale were true, Mrs. McLaughlin. That your husband never —”

“But it
is
true! Donal never lied to me!” Nora McLaughlin’s rosy face went rosier with indignation.

“Come, now, Mrs. McLaughlin! Look at me!” He slid his trouser leg up for the second time. “D’you think I suffer this brace on my leg to amuse myself? In or out of his cups, your husband Donal had you on. A fabrication. A pretty and lying tale. God knows why!”

Mrs. McLaughlin looked about to cry. “No! I — he wouldn’t! Not Donal! Never! He wouldn’t —” She half turned and looked up at Jasper O’Mara standing beside her chair. “Please! Please, Mr. O’Mara! You said just tell the truth! And so I did! I did! And that you’d a way to … I forget the word.”

“Corroborate,” Jasper O’Mara said. “From the Latin,
rober,
meaning ‘to strengthen.’” He slanted a glance toward Torrey Tunet. “I won’t let you down.”

Inspector O’Hare for an instant closed his eyes.
Now what?

74

A somewhat dirty brown envelope the size of typing paper.

Jasper O’Mara shook its contents out onto Inspector O’Hare’s desk. Everyone leaned forward to see. “What
is
it?” Sheila Flaxton, who was nearsighted, said fretfully to Winifred Moore, who had eyes sharp as an eagle’s.

“Not exactly the crown jewels,” Winifred answered. Trinkets. A small, tarnished silver cross on a chain. A few old lace doilies. A Bible with a peeling leather cover. A half dozen yellowing snapshots.

“What’s all this?” Inspector O’Hare frowned down at the miscellany.

“Ah,” Jasper O’Mara said in his pleasant baritone, “a bit of property that once belonged to a woman named Alice Coggins. Spinster aunt of Kathleen Brady. From the attic of Nolan’s Bed-and-Breakfast. Courtesy of Sara Hobbs, who was good enough to allow me…” He pushed at the few snapshots. “Family shots of the Bradys. This one,” and he slid a snapshot forward.

For a long moment, Inspector O’Hare gazed down at the photograph. A smiling little girl standing alone by a barn. Clean, checked dress, pigtails with bows. The little girl on crutches, a steel brace.

Inspector O’Hare took a breath and closed his eyes. It had all gotten away from him. He even felt dizzy. He became conscious of Torrey Tunet over there by Nelson. He said, “Mr. O’Mara, I am by no means sure —”

“But I am,” Jasper O’Mara said, “An hour ago I called the parish priest in the Brady’s village near Galway, out toward Clifden. Yes, he told me, he remembered the Brady family well. Genetic problem. Now and again it surfaced. Too often, alas. A pity.”

A vehement whisper, “Winifred, I’m
missing
it. What are they
saying?
” No answer.

Inspector O’Mara looked down one last time at the snapshot in his hand: pigtails, pretty little eager face, one of the Bradys that had drowned. Then reluctantly he handed the snapshot to Caroline Temple. He didn’t have the heart to look over at Rowena Keegan, the granddaughter of Kathleen Brady. And pregnant.

75

Caroline Temple gazed down at the snapshot in her hand. “Oh,” she whispered. “
Oh!
”

Inspector O’Hare found the moment difficult. Caroline Temple, such a delicate face, and the startled, white-lidded hazel eyes that she now raised to his. Then she said, “Scott,” and handed the yellowed photograph to her son who sat on her left, his trousered leg in the brace awkwardly stuck out.

Scott bent his fair head over the snapshot. Then a long, drawn-out breath and, incredulously,
“Christ!”
He thrust the snapshot at Rowena who’d turned startled eyes to him. “Take a look, Rowena! Take a look, for — oh,
Christ!
” He put up his finely manicured hand and rubbed his forehead, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “And all the
time!
The wicked old bastard thought
he’d
done it! All the
time!
He with his damned X ray. And he kept paying me off! Letting me bleed him!”

Inspector O’Hare looked over at Torrey Tunet, who stood at the corner of his desk. She had this morning led to revealing Dr. Collins as a double murderer. But what help could she now be to Caroline Temple and her two children? No help at all. O’Hare felt a wave of pity for the family from Ashenden Manor.

Rowena Keegan, holding the snapshot, ran a fiercely angry hand through her red hair. “Whose
fault
doesn’t matter! I thought it was
his!
So, in the meadow — Either way, any child of mine would be born damaged, Maybe crippled. To suffer. So I won’t ever have children.
Never!
”

“Don’t fret, Rowena.” Scott’s voice was so low that O’Hare, hardly a breath away, had to strain to hear. “Dr. Sunshine will light up your life.”

But, unbelievably, a soft laugh from Caroline Temple. “Oh, darling!” she said to Rowena. “Not you!” She took a breath. “Not
you,
Rowena! It doesn’t apply.”

“Ma,” Scott said. “For God’s sake, Ma, this is
real.
So don’t —”

“Scott, be quiet.” To Rowena: “When I married Tom Keegan, my father was furious. He carried on about Catholics always wanting children. ‘You’re not physically able! You’ll die in childbirth!’ he raged at me. It made Tom afraid for me. I was surprised at my father’s solicitude. He acted … strange. He proposed that, instead, Tom and I adopt a child.
Now
I understand why. He couldn’t bear the thought of another genetically — He said that if Tom and I agreed, I’d inherit Ashenden Manor and all the Wicklow estate. And the child would inherit the Kildare property. But —”

“Ma, what’re you —”

“Be
quiet,
Scott. But two provisos: The adoption was to be kept secret. His associates, his friends,
no one
to know. And second:
He,
with his superior medical knowledge, would select the baby. ‘A healthy baby,’ he said. ‘A perfect little specimen.’”

Caroline’s thin shoulders suddenly shook. “I remember thinking then,
Not like me. Not a pained, whining, frail thing like me!
That’s what he meant. I knew it. He could have said it aloud:
Not like you.
Hating the sight of me, tortured by it. Because — though how could I have known his secret? — he thought
he
had done it.”

Caroline reached over and took the snapshot from Rowena. She gazed down at it. “What a sweet little face! And those pigtails. She must be one of my mother’s little sisters. Yet, my mother, like Rappaccini’s daughter, was glowing, a beauty. My beautiful, black-haired mother! But harboring within her —” Caroline’s voice quivered. She looked at Scott. “Later, when I became pregnant with Scott, my father was beside himself. But I rebelled. I rebelled even against Tom’s fears for me. I wanted to have my baby. Mine and Tom’s.”

Not a sound in the room. It was as though the listeners held their breath.

“So —” Caroline turned to Rowena, who sat staring at her. “
Anyway,
back then, two years before I had Scott, my father went over there and got you himself and brought you back. You were four months old. The
healthiest
baby.”

Rowena said, green eyes wide, “Went over there? Where?” She looked in shock. She pushed her red hair impatiently behind her ears as though to better hear her mother’s words.

“To Denmark. He was adamant that the baby come from Denmark. Though why you have red hair, I can’t imagine. It’s so … so
Irish.
”

It was Scott who began helplessly to laugh. Then Caroline joined in, then Rowena. They all three laughed so hard that tears came to their eyes, and sometimes too it sounded like sobbing. For some minutes they were unable to stop.

76

At Collins Court, Padraic came into the great hall and without even stopping to take off his jacket or cap went into the drawing room. Because first thing, he had to know.

He went across to the mahogany table where the beautifully inlaid box with the Chinese chess set lay. He opened the box. Carefully, he took out the chess pieces. So exquisite. Each piece both cool and warm to the touch.

And there, at the bottom of the box, was — ah, yes! — the twist of green paper with the pair of wooden knitting needles. He had hidden them here, and here they were.

Padraic shook his head. He couldn’t help but smile. That clever Torrey Tunet! Not only clever with words! She’d fooled him. She must’ve bought another pair of the wooden needles at the Grogan sisters’ shop. She’d have given them to Inspector O’Hare. Had she told Inspector O’Hare she’d found them in the garbage at Collins Court? Or what? How much of this had Inspector O’Hare known? In any case, O’Hare had cunningly played out his part.

In the great hall, the clock chimed. Half past two o’clock. Delicious smell of baking from the kitchen, Helen Lavery’s scones. And there’d be the cod. After his late lunch, which by now would so late that it would really be a high tea, he’d still have plenty of time. In October it did not get dark until seven.

*   *   *

Half past four o’clock. What a fine feast Helen had given him! First a mushroom soup with bits of carrot. Then the cod. And the cranberry scones with the tea. He’d miss all that.