The Irish Cottage Murder (21 page)

Torrey, startled, stood shivering. Then she moved cautiously forward, placing her feet in their damp brogues as noiselessly as possible. A dozen steps, and she saw him.

He was kneeling on the weedy bank of a pond. His back was to her. He took what she thought of as “the thing” from beneath his bomber jacket. He unwound the cloth that had wrapped it. Leaning forward, using the cloth and a handful of grit from the bank of the pond, he began to rub what he held. He was muttering under his breath.

Torrey thought of runes of witches, yet knowing it was only Brian Coffey’s muttering and the wraiths of fog drifting through the woods and dimming black branches of trees to gray that gave her such nonsense thoughts. Better to keep her head clear. She blinked her eyes to keep Brian Coffey’s kneeling figure sharply in focus and took a step forward.

Under her foot, a twig cracked. Brian Coffey turned his head. Their eyes met. Then she saw what he had been washing and that he now held like a weapon. It was long and gleaming and dripping water from the pond, dripping clear water now, not blood, that gleaming kitchen knife.

*   *   *

Torrey stepped clear of the woods. No way now to retreat. She’d have to play it for what she could. She said, “You should have gotten rid of it. Buried it. Sunk it in the pond. Something.”

He said, mechanically, staring at her, “It was too good to throw away.”

Pack rat.

“Anyway”—he stood up, his grasp tight on the knife—“I’m safe now. I washed the blood off it that first day. And the next day, and—” His tone was defiant, triumphant, a winner’s tone:
You can’t catch me!

She thought,
Yes, you washed the blood off that first day … and the next day … and the next. Lady Macbeth in a black bomber jacket: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

“Why out here in the woods, in the pond?” She eyed him, curious, oddly unafraid. “You’ve got a kitchen sink, haven’t you?”

“Ah!” His pale, freckled face was triumphant. “Sulphur! Sulphur in this pond; everybody knows that. The pond’s full of sulphur. It kills. It does the trick.”

“Sulphur?” She shook her head. “You can’t ever get it clean enough, Mr. Coffey. The blood will show up. Because of DNA. Desmond Moore’s blood. And maybe someone else’s blood? It that it, Mr. Coffey? Desmond Moore’s … and whose blood? Yours?” Was it true about blood showing up? She didn’t really know.

His pale eyes widened. He shrank into himself; then he snapped at her, “You can’t know that! It’s not true!” Yet she saw that he believed her. Like a desperate, cornered animal he sprang at her, the knife upraised, and she, stumbling back, thought belatedly how rashly, carried away with her triumph, she had trapped herself.

“No!”
she cried out, and tried too late to pull the little pistol from her jeans pocket, hoping desperately that it was real and loaded.
“No!”
and in despair felt the pistol snag, caught on the edge of her pocket.

“Stop!” She struck out with her fist and felt the painful impact shoot up her arm as her fist struck his forehead. Then they were in a grotesque embrace. She clawed at his upraised arm. She smelled the acrid sweat of fear on his T-shirt beneath the bomber jacket that now in the struggle was half-wrenched off him. In mindless terror she sank her teeth into his shoulder, clinging to him, incomprehensibly, for safety. He screamed again and tore himself away. Then he was making a keening sound. He struck her on the mouth and she tasted her own blood. Their faces were close now. She saw the same mindless terror in his face. He raised his arm and she looked up to see the knife coming down on her.

63

Inspector Egan O’Hare was not happy. It wasn’t because of the rotten, nasty, gloomy, cold, rainy morning, either. The sadness was like something in his bones, nothing he could help. Because after all, Ms. Tunet had brought it on herself.

The kettle on the two-burner electric began to whistle. The nine o’clock cup of tea.

“I’m opening another tea,” Sergeant Bryson said. He tore open a fresh packet then leaned over and sniffed the brew; he always did that.

O’Hare looked distastefully at the phone. In a minute he would call Ms. Tunet at Castle Moore. He would request her to come in. He could see her entering the station, that jaunty, alive style of her. She would close her umbrella, she would tip her dark head, inquiringly, and—

And he would hold up the crumpled message from her wastebasket. “Forty thousand dollars. Quite a sum to come up with, wouldn’t you say, Ms. Tunet?”

He didn’t want to see it, Ms. Tunet’s gray eyes go wide with shock.

Nevertheless. He reached for the phone.

“Uh-oh…! Here comes the heiress,” Sergeant Bryson said. He was standing near the door, glancing out into the street. O’Hara took a look, hesitated, and turned from the phone. A few minutes wouldn’t matter.

“Greetings!” Winifred Moore strode in out of the rain. She wore a dashing tweed cape and a green suede hat. Sheila Flaxton followed with a dripping umbrella. Her pinched little face peered out of a plastic rainhood that was falling over her eyes. She wore a transparent raincoat over an an Irish wool sweater and long paisley skirt. Her nose was red. She nodded a good morning and sneezed.

“So, then!” Winifred Moore boomed out. “What’s the word from the
Garda Siochana?
About Desmond’s plaid horse blanket? Blood, or what? We couldn’t wait, Sheila and I.”

“We don’t yet—” began O’Hare, but at his elbow the phone rang. He picked it up. Chief Superintendent O’Reilly.

“Good morning, Superintendent.” O’Hare listened, gazing at Winifred Moore. “Yes. Thank you so very—Yes, you’re very—I was lucky is all, Chief Superintendent. Thank you. Thank you. And to you, too, sir.” He hung up. Cat with a dish of cream.

“Blood,” he said. “Mr. Lars Kasvi’s blood on Desmond Moore’s horse blanket. And that yellowish vegetation on the blanket besides. Conclusive. I’m afraid, Ms. Moore, that your cousin Desmond, ah … that he … ah.”

“No need to pussyfoot with me, Inspector,” Winifred Moore said. “I knew my cousin only too well. Poor Mr. Kasvi.”

“I’m sorry.” For the thousandth time Inspector O’Hare wondered irrelevantly what they did in bed, Winifred Moore and Sheila. That is, if they really were. He wasn’t quite sure. Whatever they did, it couldn’t be as good as what he thought of as “the real thing.”

“Blood? But he was strangled,” Sheila Flaxton said in her high little voice. “So how could—”

“Blood from his nose,” O’Hare said.

“Is that tea?” Winifred Moore had spotted the kettle on the electric two-burner and the can of tea. “African? My favorite.”

O’Hare gave Sergeant Bryson a look, and Bryson poured the visitors each a steaming mugful.

The door opened. Fergus Callaghan came in. He clicked the button on his dripping black umbrella and it snapped closed. He wore a mackintosh and a tweed cap. His face looked gray and tired, bags under his eyes. “I was just passing. Good morning. I was wondering—Any word yet? The plaid horse blanket, I mean.”

Inspector O’Hare told him.

“As expected.” Mr. Callaghan sounded depressed. “So I suppose…” His voice drifted tiredly away. He nodded to Winifred Moore and Sheila Flaxton. His glance strayed to the kettle steaming on the two-burner. Inspector O’Hare raised an eyebrow at Sergeant Bryson, who grinned, asked, “Tea?” and filled a mug for Mr. Callaghan. Mr. Callaghan nervously plunged his umbrella into the brass stand and accepted the tea with, Inspector O’Hare noticed, a shaking hand. Obviously Mr. Callaghan was not in top form.

The door was flung open. “Damn and hell!” Luke Willinger said impatiently as the door, driven by a gust of wind, slammed back against the wall. He yanked it closed and looked around. “Hello! What’s this, a tea party? I thought I’d better report—I’m looking for Ms. Tunet. Her car’s still at the castle, but she’s disappeared. Anybody here seen her?” Mr. Willinger’s jaw was tense, his eyes worried. He wore a black knitted cap and a red plastic raincoat over a black turtlenecked sweater with gray wool pants and heavy country shoes. “Damn and blast! I’ve looked for her on the hills and in the woods, even in O’Malley’s Pub.”

“Maybe she took the bus to Dublin,” Winifred Moore said, “working with those conference—”

“She’s not, for God’s sake! I called the Shelbourne. One of the delegates has laryngitis. There’s no meeting today.” Mr. Willinger looked frustrated and angry.

“I saw her,” Fergus Callaghan said, mug of tea in his shaky hand, “in the woods. A half-hour ago. I’d taken the bridle path on my motorbike. It’s a shorter way to Ballynagh from Dublin. She was near the little pond by the oaks. She was talking with a man.”

“What man?”

“Irish, by the stance of him, Irish somehow. I only saw his back. So I don’t—”

“You can’t tell if someone’s Irish by his back,” Sheila Flaxton said. “It’s prepost—”

“Shut up, Sheila,” Winifred Moore said. “Of course you can tell. I do believe that nationality, a specific culture, even a person’s class can be—”

Inspector O’Hare did not hear the rest of Winifred Moore’s comment. He was looking toward the door, which again had opened.

Maureen Devlin came in.

64

“What is it? I have to get back to O’Curry’s.” Maureen Devlin closed the door behind her and looked questioningly from Inspector O’Hare to the others. “And she isn’t even here!”

Inspector O’Hare blinked. “She? What she? I don’t understand, Mrs. Devlin.”

Maureen Devlin said slowly, “It’s like yesterday, isn’t it? All of you here.” She wore her shabby black dress, with a gray shawl against the rain, but she hadn’t even bothered with a scarf for her hair. Her face was pale and her damp, glinting, wavy brown hair brought the word
tresses
to the inspector’s mind. Botticelli. Another painter in his wife’s art books.

“She,” Maureen Devlin said, “the American, that young woman staying at Castle Moore. Ms. Tunet. She telephoned me at O’Curry’s. She asked could I come to the Ballynagh garda station.”

“Called you when?” Luke Willinger demanded.

“Maybe twenty minutes ago. Mr. O’Curry was busy with customers. I had my little girl there. I couldn’t leave her with no one to watch her; I had to call Mrs. Blake and then wait until…” She glanced at the wall clock. “She’ll be all right, but I can’t be too long. And there’s my pay to think of.”

“I’m sorry,” O’Hare said. He felt as though someone outside him were running his life. “I’m not sure exactly—” He broke off. The sound of a motorbike reached them from the quiet morning street. The sound seemed to fill the one-room garda station.

The sound stopped. A moment later two people came in, blown about, wet with rain, looking as though they’d had a violent confrontation; and with enmity like a sword between them.

To Inspector O’Hare they momentarily looked like a young Irish couple who had had a violent quarrel; he was used to that, a tale of drink and broken crockery. Except that the girl, in a figured bandanna tied under her chin, was Ms. Tunet. She had a red welt on her neck, and her mouth was swollen and her face bloodless, so that her black-lashed gray eyes looked huge. The young man in the torn black bomber jacket and bloodied T-shirt, and with a white freckled face and red hair, was Brian Coffey. He had a wicked-looking purple contusion on his forehead.

Ms. Tunet looked around. Her gaze came to rest on Maureen Devlin in the worn black dress and gray shawl. Ms. Tunet said, “Mrs. Devlin … Thank you for coming.” She lisped a little because of her swollen mouth. “I thought it was owed you to be here”—and at Maureen Devlin’s blank look—“to hear who killed Desmond Moore.”

*   *   *

Brian Coffey looked suddenly near collapse. Sergeant Bryson swiftly pushed forward the one sturdy chair left. Brian Coffey sank into it. He said shakily, as though in shock, “She spied on me! She stole my pistol! She’s a thief! She stole—”

“It kept you from killing me!” The lisp made it sound incongruously like “kissing me.” “Maybe I’m not the first person you—”

“She’s trying to frame me!” Brian Coffey flung out his hands in appeal to Inspector O’Hare. “She might’ve shot me! In the woods! Then she told me, ‘We’re going to Inspector O’Hare with this. You washed it a dozen times but there’ll be blood on it, on the handle and in the screws. Desmond Moore’s blood. It’s evidence you’re hiding. Evidence in a murder.’”

An umbrella fell with a clatter, making O’Hare jump. The tea kettle began again to whistle; an unknown hand abruptly shut it off. O’Hare was conscious of startled murmurs, of Sergeant Bryson at his elbow.

The inspector looked at Brian Coffey’s bruised face, “Mr. Coffey,” he said, “blood on what? What’s this about?”

At that, Ms. Tunet reached into one of the cavernous pockets of the drooping big mackintosh that hung almost down to her brogues. She pulled out something in a dirty cloth. “For your delectation and delight.” She winced as she moved her swollen lip. She unwrapped the object and laid it on the inspector’s desk. It was a meat knife, long and razor sharp. The handle had scalloped indentations to provide a good grip.

*   *   *

Brian Coffey plucked the wet T-shirt away from his chest; a rivulet of rain slid down one side of his opened bomber jacket. He said furiously, “She might’ve killed me! She was like on fire. I never saw a woman act that way. Not in Oughterard, not in Galway. Not even in Dublin.”

At O’Hare’s shoulder, Winifred Moore laughed.

“So then”—O’Hare leaned toward Brian Coffey—“this is the knife that killed Desmond Moore? Concealing evidence, were you, Mr. Coffey? Why? What’s this about your blood on the knife?”

Bran Coffey said angrily, “That was all true! Everything I told you yesterday! Mr. Desmond killing that Finnish man at the cottage. But I couldn’t tell you the rest. I couldn’t because he’d say I was lying, making it up! But now because of her”—and he turned and glared at Ms. Tunet.

“He?”

“The next day…” He stopped. “The next day…” He looked at Inspector O’Hare.

O’Hare gave him an encouraging nod and said kindly, “The next day, Mr. Coffey?”

Brian Coffey looked back at Inspector O’Hare as though the inspector had wrapped him in a cozy blanket; and then he told it as though he and Inspector O’Hare were alone, two friends in the snug of a firelit bar, O’Malley’s, maybe, confiding to each other over a jar or two.