The Irish Cottage Murder (23 page)

Inspector O’Hare surprised himself by having to suppress a smile. He looked at Ms. Tunet in her bandanna of blue peacocks. “You said that?”

Ms. Tunet, one finger worrying her swollen mouth, gave him back a level look. “Wouldn’t you have? I’ve got only one life.”

“She said that because of the necklace,” Brian Coffey said, “you’re positive she killed Mr. Desmond. She told me, ‘Inspector O’Hare wants my blood.’”

*   *   *

The inspector felt his face go red. He avoided looking at Ms. Tunet. He turned back to Fergus Callaghan. “Mr. Callaghan, we’re taking you into custody. I’m afraid we’ll have to—”

“You bastard!” Ms. Tunet’s voice was a sob. O’Hare, outraged, jerked his head around. But Ms. Tunet was not looking at him. She was glaring at Fergus Callaghan, her chin thrust forward. “You would’ve kept quiet! You would’ve let me go to prison! All to keep it a secret! All to protect—All for
her!
” And she looked over at Maureen Devlin.

“Ms. Tunet,” Inspector O’Hare said sharply, “The law is concerned only with facts. And now, certain facts concerning Desmond Moore’s murder have come to light.”

“Facts?” Fergus Callaghan said. He straightened, folded his arms, and looked Inspector O’Hare squarely in the eye. “’Tis facts you want, Inspector O’Hare? Facts, is it? The facts are that Desmond Moore and I had a money quarrel. He owed me for genealogical work I’d done for him. He wouldn’t pay. He acted irrational about it, out of control. So when I came to the stable I brought the gun. I thought to defend myself if Desmond Moore tried—I didn’t trust him. But to kill him? No! And with a knife? I wouldn’t have!” He shuddered. “But that’s the way it turned out.”

Inspector O’Hare, pulling at his chin, regarded Fergus Callaghan. Here it was, the killer’s confession. That’s what had been wanted. He at last had the murderer of Desmond Moore.

As for Fergus Callaghan’s motive, Inspector O’Hare slanted a glance at Maureen Devlin. He’d be a fool not to see that Fergus Callaghan would stick to his money-quarrel story. As for the doll, the little shoe, let them stay buried. For an instant, a flash, he saw his mother powdering over a purplish bruise on her neck, concealing it. He sighed and rubbed his chin.

Fergus Callahan said, “So off I went, back to Dublin, home to Ballsbridge.”

“Well…”

In the silence that followed, Inspector O’Hare thought how different one silence is from another; how there is a silence in which you can hear a mouse in the wall; a silence in the horror of a motor accident, with people standing wordlessly by a person’s body waiting for help; the bleak silence following a confession. “Well,” he said, helplessly.

Maureen Devlin, as if roused from a trance, turned to Ms. Tunet. “’Tis a good thing, Ms. Tunet, that you’re a fighter. Fighting for your life, with all that about stealing the diamond necklace against you; the law believing that’s why you killed Desmond Moore. But in the end, Mr. Callaghan would have spoken. Would have saved you.”

Torrey Tunet gave Maureen Devlin a sidelong, skeptical look and turned to Fergus Callaghan. “Mr. Callaghan?” And waited: peacock bandanna, mackintosh drooping from her shoulders, gray eyes questioning Mr. Callaghan.

Fergus Callaghan looked down at the mug of cold tea he still clutched, then back at Ms. Tunet. He blinked. “Oh, if
then!
Oh, yes. Yes. Of course.”

*   *   *

Outside the garda station, Winifred Moore, striding toward her car, Sheila trotting beside her, tossed one end of her plaid scarf back around her neck. “Fishy. Smells to heaven. Knifed Desmond right through his shirt and vest? Fergus Callaghan hasn’t the muscle. That’s all belted tweed and shoulder padding.”

Sheila clicked her tongue in exasperation. “Oh, Winifred! Brian Coffey wasn’t lying! He told what he saw.”

Winifred said, “Maybe what he
thought
he saw.” Then, frowning, “But that’s not quite it. There’s a piece missing, Sheila. Something’s off.”

“You’re not making sense,” Sheila said.

“Ah,” Winifred said, “there’s more than fish in that bowl.”

67

By midafternoon, RTE, the Irish National Television News, had shots of Fergus Callaghan emerging from the
Garda Siochana
headquarters in Dublin after being booked for the murder of Desmond Moore. It was reported that Mr. Callaghan had furnished bail and been released on his own recognizance. It was also reported that his counsel would ask for acquittal of the murder on the grounds of self-defense.

News reporters attempted to follow Fergus Callaghan, who drove off in a taxi that wove so fast and skillfully through the Dublin traffic that they lost him. At his Georgian home on Boyleston Street in Ballsbridge, the door with its bronze knocker remained closed. Phone calls went unanswered.

*   *   *

By two o’clock that same afternoon, news photographers from Dublin arrived at Castle Moore and jostled each other taking pictures of the vindicated American, Torrey Tunet, who, no longer thought to be a murderer, obligingly posed for them in a white shirt, jeans, and sneakers, standing in the stable before the splintered stall door of Black Pride, who placidly munched a bucket of oats and swished his tail.

As an added news story, they photographed the new owner of Castle Moore, the prize-winning poet, Winifred Moore, a forthright woman, whom they found in the great kitchen, teetering in a tipped-back chair at the kitchen table and devouring a currant cake topped with whipped cream. Ms. Winifred introduced the press to her English publisher, Ms. Sheila Flaxton, who was drinking tea and delicately picking currants from the cake and eating them.

At approximately the same time, in Dublin, in the office of Chief Superintendent O’Reilly of the the Murder Squad, Sergeant Fitzroy gave a grunt of disgust and placed the third anonymous letter before the chief superintendent. “Ahhh, no! The late Desmond Moore! Sick in the head, if you ask me. Handing out fake diamond ‘heirloom’ necklaces like penny candy. All to young girls he then used sexually. This letter’s from a twelve-year-old. Barely literate. Says she got four pounds for it, poor little twig.”

Chief Superintendent O’Reilly said, “Stick our heirloom ‘evidence’ in an envelope, Sergeant, and personally deliver it to Ms. Tunet. No apologies, mind. But it’s hers. Mr. Desmond gave it to her. She might want to keep it as a souvenir of Ireland.”

*   *   *

Several of the newspeople, after leaving Castle Moore, found their way to the old groundsman’s cottage, having heard that a widow who lived there had been in some way involved with Mr. Callaghan. But they had no luck. The door, with its peeling green paint, remained closed. There was only the smell of fresh-baked bread. The photographers among them had to satisfy themselves with exterior shots: the dilapidated cottage with scuffed grass on one side, a scummy pond a few yards away, and a broken hedge, beyond which lay the access road.

From inside the cottage, Fergus Callaghan watched them depart.

Maureen was setting the table for a late tea: warm, crusty bread, a jar of ham paste, raisin buns, and gooseberry jam. Fergus, exhausted and feeling pursued, had arrived at her door on his motorbike barely a half-hour ago, coming through the woods.

They sat down at the table. Maureen, pouring the tea, said, “When I discovered about Finola, I stole a knife. Mr. O’Curry was having his afternoon lager at O’Malley’s, his fifteen-minute siesta. I’ve a key to the butcher shop. I meant to kill Desmond Moore. Would I have? I was crying inside so hard, so hard! I was bewildered when I learned that someone’d got there ahead of me. When the police arrested Torrey Tunet, I thought she’d killed him. But I wasn’t sure. It could have been … somebody else.”

“Somebody else.” Fergus nodded. “Me.” Carefully, he spooned sugar into his tea. It was hard for him to get it into his head that he had killed Desmond Moore. At the stable, even hearing Janet Slocum calling and approaching as he stumbled away with the gun, he had looked back in the hope that by some miracle Desmond Moore had sprung to his feet and, dreadful as it would be, was coming after him.

Later, home in Ballsbridge, he had a surge of hope: maybe medical evidence would show that Desmond Moore had died of a heart attack before being knifed—something like that. But that hadn’t happened either. The medical reports proved otherwise. So, one after another, each feverish hope died.

“Fergus, what can we do?”

He smiled at Maureen. “We can have our tea.”

*   *   *

At Castle Moore, Winifred, teetering on the kitchen chair, was polishing off the currant cake when the girl came into the kitchen. She was about sixteen, slight and pale, with drooping shoulders and a waterfall of pale brown hair. Her face with its blue eyes had a look of vulnerability.

“This is Rose’s sister, Hannah,” Janet, who was peeling potatoes, said to Winifred. “She’s staying a few days with Rose, in Rose’s room. She got here an hour ago.” It was already getting on to five o’clock.

“Oh, yes, Hannah. How do you do? Rose asked me about you. Yes, I think three days a week, twelve pounds, and doing the laundry, if that’s all right with you, Hannah? Because Ms. Flaxton here”—and she nodded toward Sheila—“Ms. Flaxton and I will be constantly back and forth between England and Ireland, and we’ll often be having guests.”

“Yes, ma’am. Quite all right. Thank you very much, ma’am.” A smile quivered across the girl’s pale face.

“And stand up straight,” Winifred said. “Meet life head on. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Hannah. Take life by the scruff of the neck and shake it about a bit. Right? Good for the blood.”

The girl gone, Winifred turned to Janet, at the potatoes. “You were saying—About the knife?”

“Dozens of knives, generations of knives, in this kitchen.” Janet looked about at the immense oak cupboards, the tables, sideboards, chests. “Whoever would know of a knife missing? Or even a cupboard or a table itself?”

Sheila said, “I’ll never understand people, how they can—What inner—I don’t have a nasty mind, Winifred, but the minute Brian Coffey mentioned a doll bought with Desmond’s Visa card, I took one look at Maureen Devlin’s face and I twigged it. How
could
he have?”

Winifred said, “I think I know what Desmond was about. A sexual exploiter, all unleashed. With any excuse to justify the evil in himself. Drumming up excuses for his … well, evil. Desmond used past history to justify what he was doing. The past hundred years or the past thousand years—the English, the Vikings, the whomever, all the invaders of Ireland—it didn’t matter. It never does matter to people like Desmond. Nothing strange about that pattern. We’ve seen plenty of it. Some of it in uniform. Some not.”

“But how could he—” Sheila began, but Winifred cut her off.

“Justifying! Desmond even had some cock-and-bull tale about the Comerfords beating a stable boy to death! A stable boy who was one of the Moores. How he could have convinced himself of that when we Moores never left Sligo until we shipped to America to keep from starving. Well,
you
tell
me!
As for our being come-down aristocracy, hogwash! We farmed our stony fields in northwest Ireland since—since God knows—Cro-Magnon man. So much for that.” Winifred gazed off into space. She said softly, “Any excuse. Any.”

*   *   *

Janet Slocum was alone at the kitchen table, just sitting and gazing into the basin of potatoes, only half of them peeled, when she heard someone come in. Ms. Tunet.

“Well, Janet,” Ms. Tunet said, blowing out a breath, “the press has left, TV vans and all.” She went to the sideboard and took a soda cracker from the wicker dish. Then she leaned back against the sideboard, crossed her sneakered feet, and looked back at Janet. “Now it’s just us chickens.”

“If it’s tea you’re wanting, Ms. Tunet, I can just—”

“No, thanks, Janet. Come on, Janet, tell me. I’m curious! Did you think I did it? Murdered Mr. Desmond?”

“Oh, Ms. Tunet!” Janet said. “How can you joke about yourself like that!”

Ms. Tunet laughed. “Oh, well!” She nibbled the cracker. “Did you? Did
you
think I killed Mr. Desmond?” She was looking hard at Janet.

Janet picked up a potato to peel. “Oh, no, Ms. Tunet!
I
didn’t think so. And the police couldn’t
prove
you killed him. ‘Unsubstantiated evidence’
The Irish Independent
said. So I knew you’d get off and go away to America or foreign places. Out of Wicklow. Out of Ireland. Away from here.” Fumbling, she dropped the potato peeler; it clattered against the basin of potatoes.

Ms. Tunet was looking at her. She’d finished the cracker and was whistling softly between her teeth, just leaning back against the sideboard and whistling. Then “That’s right, Janet,” Ms. Tunet said. “But it’s different with Mr. Callaghan, isn’t it, Janet? He’s confessed to killing Desmond Moore.
He
won’t get off. Or go off to foreign places. Or marry Maureen Devlin. No. Fergus Callaghan will go to prison. Or hang.”

Janet just sat there, Ms. Tunet looking at her. Ms. Tunet’s voice was soft and friendly. “Right, Janet?”

“I guess.”

Ms. Tunet recrossed her sneakered feet. Janet, peeling the potato, could see them beneath her lashes; it was as though Ms. Tunet was settling in for something. Then Ms. Tunet said, very offhand, “Remember, Janet, that time when we were here in the kitchen, and you said that Mr. Desmond was ‘niggardly’ about money?”

“Down here in the kitchen?” Janet’s mouth felt dry. She swallowed. “I don’t recall exactly…”

“I do,” Ms. Tunet said. “Particularly because you used the word
niggardly.
A very interesting word. Middle English, back then
nyggard,
equivalent to
nig;
in Scandinavian dialect,
niggard.
That meant parsimonious. Stingy. In Swedish,
nugg.
”

Janet said, “I guess that’s what I might have said.”

“Stingy,” Ms. Tunet said. “Still, Mr. Desmond gave that red motorbike to Brian Coffey.”

Janet held the potato peeler still.

“If I remember,” Ms. Tunet went on, and Janet, looking up, saw that Ms. Tunet was watching her, “when I asked why, since Mr. Desmond was so niggardly, you said, ‘Maybe Mr. Desmond liked Brian Coffey more than he liked the rest of us.’”