The Irish Cottage Murder (7 page)

“Yes,” Rose told her. “Mr. Desmond’s been out touring the grounds with Mr. Willinger since eight o’clock. He’s in the library now. With Mr. Callaghan, the genealogy man.” Rose tucked the napkin farther around the breakfast rolls, which smelled of cinnamon. Torrey couldn’t resist. The roll was warm; it had raisins and tasted heavenly.

From behind her, came Winifred’s voice. “Ah, yes, the genealogy!” She reached past Torrey and took a roll from the basket. “There’s something in my cousin’s head that rides him like a witch!” Winifred gave her booming laugh. “Delicious rolls! I’ve already had breakfast—sausages, scrambled eggs, tea, two kinds of breads. I’m omniverous.” She chewed the roll. “You’re off to your labors, Ms. Tunet?”

“A witch?” Torrey asked, but glanced at her watch.

“Well, not
literally
a witch, Ms. Tunet. Allow me a little poetic license, if you please. But something does ride Desmond, and my poetic side assures me that he’s trying to prove … what? Unfortunately, my poetic side doesn’t tell me precisely what.”

Torrey smiled at Winifred and licked a bit of cinnamon from a finger. “See you later.”

She walked quickly through the great hall with its gilt-edged portraits and into the library. “Good morning, Desmond.”

He was bending over a mahogany desk clear of anything but an immense chart. Genealogy, she saw. He was alone. From the open window came the sound of a motorbike starting. Mr. Callaghan departing.

“Torrey.” Desmond faced her, smiling. He slouched, somehow a rich man’s indolent slouch, hands in the pockets of his designer jeans. He wore a yellow cashmere sweater, thick and rich, over his bare skin. His smile was a shark’s smile. “I hope you didn’t stay awake worrying about my grandmother’s necklace. I—”

“I didn’t.”

He went on as if he hadn’t heard. “I’m not going to have divers search the lake for the necklace. Waste of time.” His cold green-yellow eyes were clear, his voice vibrant. An air of self-satisfaction emanated from him, irritating her. He was eying every inch of her; he was so sexually aware of her that she felt it like an invasion.

“Divers? Yes. Definitely a waste of time, Desmond.” She smiled back at him, feeling good, feeling fine, happy with herself. She drew something from the pocket of her navy jacket and tossed it onto the mahogany desk.

“What the—!” His voice broke off.

It lay there, sparkling, the heirloom diamond necklace with its single, pear-shaped emerald.

Desmond looked up from the necklace. He stared at her. “So you had it all the time.” His voice was soft, his eyes calculating. “You could have conned me and gotten away with it.”

“Could I have? In a way, yes.” She eyed him, her lips quirked. “What kind of a serpent was it, Desmond?”

“What serpent?”

“The one that tempted Eve.”

A silence. A vacuum cleaner went on in an adjoining room. For a full minute Desmond Moore stood silent, slouching against the desk.

Then he laughed. “You guessed I was trying it on? I’ve never met a woman, rich or poor, who was above temptation. A little temptation, a little guilt—you would have owed me. You’re the kind of woman who would pay the debt. It would have been interesting in bed. How could I have known you’re smart enough to have guessed.” His voice was admiring.

She shrank into herself. He was uncannily right about her: she would have paid for the necklace, paid in the coin he wanted.

“Not that I would have lost anything, anyway.” Desmond drummed his fingers on the desk, eyeing her. “Did I mention the necklace is insured for forty-five thousand dollars?”

“Did you? I don’t remember.”

Desmond gazed at her. He smiled. He licked his lower lip, then bit it, holding it between his teeth.

An instant ago, she had been in control. Now he was making her nervous.

Desmond picked up the necklace. He held it, swinging it back and forth, watching her. “You’ve turned out to be so honorable. What if I were to say that you could have the necklace?”

“What?” Puzzled, she stared.

He came close to her. An inch away, he took one of her hands and clasped her fingers around the necklace. It was a rough gesture, so rough she winced. Her fingers felt bruised. But of course it was not intentional cruelty … or was it?

“… on account,” he added softly.

“On account?” She stared at him.

“Keep it until tomorrow.
Then
make up your mind if you want to keep it for good.” His jaw had a brutish look; his greenish eyes were cold and avid. He licked his lips, clearly thinking of lustful favors, plenty of them of various sorts. Over a period of time. His home was in Brookline, in Massachusetts.

Forty-five thousand dollars. If this was the miracle she needed, it was a punishing one. That many dollars’ worth of bedding with the lickerish Desmond Moore. Months of it. She felt sick. She felt sick, too, that he would give away his grandmother’s necklace for his sexual kicks. Incomprehensible. But she’d bet anything that he’d collect his forty-five thousand from the insurance company, claiming the necklace had been lost in the lake. He’d even had a witness: Luke Willinger.

He was leaning toward her. He gripped her hair at the crown, pulling back her head. His mouth came down, but not on her mouth; it came down on the tiny mole on the side of her neck, below her ear, his tongue flicking out, licking the little mole over and over, his breath quickening. She felt almost overcome with nausea.

The phone rang. Desmond pulled away, his breathing heavy. He picked up the phone; his hand was unsteady. “Hello?”

Estate business, as it turned out. She felt too shaken to move. He put down the phone. “I have to leave.” He nodded toward the necklace that she still unconsciously clutched. “Take your time. Take … until you get back from your conference tomorrow in Dublin.” She hated the way he looked at her.

When he was gone she opened her cramped hand that clutched the necklace. She looked at the red bruises on her fingers. There was a cut on her forefinger, blood oozed. What a sick bastard he was!

She thought of Desmond Moore’s hands on her, and she almost gagged. And he’d make her pay cruelly in bed for having trumped him. She shuddered to think how.

But if she had the money! Massachusetts General Hospital, the surgeon from Texas, the physical therapy, the wheelchair become an artifact. Her mind formed the dazzling pictures because …
because it could happen.
Finally.

She took a deep breath. She closed her fingers and slipped the necklace into her pocket. She was no longer a thief. Could she become a whore?

Leaving the library, she felt numb. In a way, she almost had to laugh. She had wished for a miracle to bring her the money she needed. And this, at last, was the miracle. A miracle almost too bitter to bear.

23

In Dublin, shortly before twelve noon, Thursday, Luke Willinger strode purposefully across Saint Stephen’s Green toward the Shelbourne. The sun shone, the flowers in the formal gardens tossed in the light breeze. Noontime picnickers on benches were unpacking lunches; children raced about. A breeze snapped the flag above the hotel.

The elegant lobby was quiet, gracious, soothing. Luke’s eyes still ached after a sleepless night and two strong cups of morning coffee. Pacing the planned landscaping acreage at eight o’clock this morning with Desmond Moore, he’d been unable to concentrate on landscaping possibilities. Desmond, in high spirits, hadn’t seemed to notice. He’d something up his sleeve and was tickled about it. He’d worn jeans and a yellow cashmere sweater over bare skin. His brassy hair had gleamed.

*   *   *

In the Shelbourne, Luke approached the reception desk. “Good morning. The Hungarian-Belgian Conference. Can you find out what time they have a lunch break?”

“Hungarian-Belgian, sir? I’ll inquire.” The clerk tapped on a computer then picked up the phone. “Conference Room Six.” As he did so, the elevator doors opened and Torrey Tunet emerged. She was alone. She looked crisp and fresh in a businesslike dark suit and beige silk shirt. She carried a briefcase. Even from the reception desk, Luke could see an excitement in her, a wide-awake look of satisfaction, something accomplished. Did she love her work that much? He felt a surge of pleasure at her business triumph—and immediately thought,
What the hell am I thinking?
In five minutes he was going to nail this miserable little thief. That’s why he was here. She’d cough up that heirloom necklace. Or else. For an instant he seemed to smell her perfume as she’d gone past him where he’d hid, coming from the lake in the moonlight.

Torrey Tunet, a skinny Romanian-American kid back in North Hawk, Massachusetts. Luke was eighteen when Torrey committed her first crime, the crime that had changed his life. He’d been at Harvard that autumn, a junior. He was going to be a doctor like his psychoanalyst father. A solid future. He’d felt privileged; he was the son of one of the richest and most highly respected men in North Hawk. Then his world exploded. Because of the Romanian kid—Torrey Tunet.

*   *   *

“So cough it up,” Luke said. “You can pretend you found it later on the shore.”

“And if I don’t?” She leaned back in the captain’s chair. She stared back at him across the table. The pub smelled of fries. It was around the corner from the Shelbourne. It was five minutes to twelve and still empty, except for a lone customer at the bar. Outside, it had darkened. Rain spattered against the plateglass window. Another few minutes and the lunchtime crowd would begin surging in.

There was a plate of chips on the table. They both had poured tea from a teapot; it was steaming in their cups.

“Or I tell Desmond.” He felt coldly implacable.

“Why didn’t you tell him before?” She was studying him, a look of curiosity.

Why hadn’t he? He hesitated; something had puzzled him. “To give you a break. A chance to make up a story. Maybe that you’d gone down to the lake, searching, and had found the necklace on the shore.”

“Give me a break, why? You hate me.”

He knew abruptly what had held him back. It was that he always had to understand things. He did not understand why she had stolen the necklace when Desmond had implied she might become his wife. Did she have an uncontrollable desire to steal? Like a kleptomaniac? He doubted it.

She sipped tea. “So … why?”

“I thought you might be interested in marrying Desmond. In that case…”

“In that case, why steal from him? I see.” She was eyeing him over the rim of the teacup. “I would never marry Desmond Moore.”

“Oh, no?”

“Neither would he marry me. He was only implying it to torture his cousin Winifred.”

So she was a realist. And acute. He was chagrined that she’d made a shrewder assessment of Desmond than he; because now that she’d said it, he recognized it was true about Desmond torturing his cousin. Added to that, he felt annoyed that he had not assessed Torrey accurately either … his assumption that she would have married Desmond.

“Excuse me, I’ve a phone call to make.” She got up. He watched her get change from the bartender and go to the phone on the wall. She still had that jaunty walk he remembered.

*   *   *

That unforgettable jaunty walk. As a boy, he’d seen her around North Hawk, seen her growing up. A gangling kid, tall, thin, with dark curvy hair and eyes like a gray storm. Not pretty but passionately alive. Her father, the Romanian, had married into the town, had arrived in North Hawk one day, darkly handsome, wiry, with a warm handshake, a heavy accent, and a watchmaker’s knowledge. He’d fallen in love and married quiet, soft-spoken Abigail Hapgood Torrey who had no family and worked in the bank. But Vlad Tunet had a head full of dreams of adventure—expeditions in Alaska, explorations in Peru, mountain peaks in Tibet, treasure under the seas fringing New Zealand. A watchmaker’s shop in a New England town could not hold him. He’d gone off exploring half a dozen times before he’d finally departed North Hawk for good, leaving a quietly heartbroken Abigail Hapgood Torrey Tunet and her young daughter.

“Have you got eight pence?” Torrey was at his elbow. “I need more change for the phone. The bartender’s gone in the back.”

He felt in his pocket and gave her a handful of pence.

“Thanks.” She went back to the phone. He heard the chimes as she dropped in the coins.

She’d been eleven when her father had left North Hawk forever, her romantic father. She had adored him. Once, he’d brought her back a present, a bandanna, orange, with a design of blue peacocks. A Chinese-looking thing. Even after her father was gone for good, she’d worn the bandanna around town like a headband, peacocks on her forehead. Incongruous, what with the jeans resting on her skinny hips. Yet the whole of it somehow exotic.

Like him, she was a reader. Luke, four years older, and a frequenter of the North Hawk Library, would see her there with a stack of books. She read devouringly. Winter nights, the library closed at nine. She would sit until late at one of the little reading tables, the radiator hissing underneath; it was an old building with hot water heat. She wore woolen socks, and her bare knees were red and cracked from coming in from the cold. “Hi, Torrey,” he would say, with kindly superiority, going past, his books under his arm. She would look up, bemused, her stormy, black-fringed gray eyes hardly aware of him, “Hi,” and go back to her reading. She could speak Romanian. Other languages came easily to her. When she was twelve, there’d been a piece about her in the
North Hawk Weekly.
She’d won a prize of twenty-five dollars for translating for little grammar school kids from Spanish-speaking countries who spoke no English. She had learned Spanish from tapes borrowed from the library. Why? “I don’t know,” she’d told the
North Hawk Weekly
reporter.

*   *   *

The pub door opened, a spatter of rain swept in on a wind, and two men in caps came in, took off dripping raincoats, and hung them on an antlered mahogany rack. The bartender, cutting lemons into a dish, nodded a greeting.

“Lord save us, that’s a lovely girl,” the skinnier of the two men said. He was looking at Torrey Tunet. She was standing on one leg, rubbing the back of her calf with her other foot while she talked on the phone. Her short dark hair was damp from the rain, one wing-shaped lock curved on her cheek.