The Irish Manor House Murder (25 page)

At his desk in the little surgery, he made out a check to Helen Lavery: A thousand pounds a year for her twenty-two years of service at Collins Court. He put the check in an envelope, with a note.

Next, his confession, for Egan O’Hare. The inspector called it a statement. Weasel word,
statement.
A confession. A confession of murder. Of two murders. But before writing it, he tore up an earlier confession he’d written many days before, just on the chance that Rowena might be found guilty of the knitting needle murder of her grandfather, not that he’d believed Inspector O’Hare would ever have gotten enough evidence against her. Still, he’d slept better.

He wrote the new confession carefully, read it over, and, satisfied, signed and dated it. In the great hall, he put the envelope with the confession on the central round table, propping it against the silver bowl with the Collins family crest, the bowl that had been there since he was a boy. Inspector O’Hare would be coming for him in the morning. Well, this would have to do.

Upstairs in his bedroom he put the envelope addressed to Helen Lavery on his dresser.

Next, he packed a few travel articles. He had money, pounds. He knew what he was about. By the time they found out, he’d be gone. A pity he couldn’t take the Chinese chess set, but it was too heavy. There’d be months maybe while he’d be carting it around.

In the bathroom off his dressing room, he squeezed a blob of medium ivory, number 3 makeup base onto his middle finger, dabbed it around his eyes, then carefully smoothed it, blending it in. Fine. At one time, he’d thought of wearing glasses to conceal those ugly brownish circles. But he had perfect vision, and besides, he’d always disliked the look of glasses.

Before going downstairs again, he stood a moment at the tall bedroom windows. He could see the walled kitchen garden below, and rising beyond it the high hills where sheep browsed. At his death, Collins Court would, finally, go to Jeremy Collins, a distant cousin in Australia.

The last thing before he left was to put on the old tweed cap of his father’s.

Leaving Collins Court, going through the great hall, he thought what a pity it was to leave his books behind. Still, Tennyson’s
Ulysses,
“’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

Going out the door into the purpling dusk, he felt a wild surge of euphoria such as he’d never felt before. His new life.

77

Reaching Ashenden Manor with Caroline in the old Rolls, Mark Temple said, “I’ll be right down,” and went upstairs to his dressing room where he took off his country squire clothes and put on a shirt, sweater, and trousers — all clothes from the old wardrobe he’d brought from Dublin.

“What’re you doing?” Caroline in the doorway. Mark went over, took Caroline’s hands in his, and sat her down on the bed. He kissed her. “I’m not a country type, my love. I had a romantic notion for a while that Ashenden Manor would fulfill an old dream of mine. But no, it turns out it doesn’t.”

Caroline said, “I’m glad. I’ve always hated living here. Tom and I, we dreamed of leaving. But, money. We thought until we had enough
money
—”

“But you’ve been hanging back about leaving!”

Caroline said, “I thought Scott was sleeping with men for money. I thought if something dreadful happened and he needed me, I could protect him. I couldn’t leave him at Ashenden Manor without me.”

Mark looked at his wife’s delicate frame. Protect her son! How? Then Caroline’s hazel eyes met his. Protect her son? Yes, if she had to, she’d find a way. He imagined her pulling a bright sword from its scabbard and launching forward, fair hair flying in the wind.

*   *   *

Downstairs, Scott and Rowena sat at the dining room table going through the yellowed old photographs of the Brady family. Scott after some minutes leaned back and looked at his sister. “What about Flann? Where’s he now?”

“I don’t know. Jasper wouldn’t tell me. Said that was safest.” She sighed. “Flann’s never been to Ashenden Manor. He couldn’t visit me here; you know Grandpa. So no one in Ballynagh knew about him. The thing was —”

“Ah, yes, Grandpa! And Flann a scribbling Irish nobody, son of a stonemason! Cry havoc! To arms! Rowena, his perfect creation, destined for the most aristocratic Anglo-Irish or English marriage! We can’t have this raiding Irish fox slipping into the fold and —”

“God! You make it sound so Charles Dickens!”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“I guess.” Rowena drew lines on the tablecloth with her fork.

“About Padraic,” Scott said. “Later, when I’m alone, I’ll think about Padraic. For Padraic, a private requiem.”

“Yes,” Rowena said. They were silent. Rowena gazed down again at the old photographs of the Brady family, a family whose blood was not hers. Then she looked over at Scott. “Any chance of getting our money back from Dr. Sunshine?”

“Please! Can a cat turn into a canary?”

*   *   *

At the Ballynagh police station, at three o’clock, Inspector O’Hare said into the phone to Chief Superintendent O’Reilly at Dublin Castle, “Absolutely, sir! We’ll be getting a full confession. We’ll be bringing Dr. Collins to Dublin in the morning.”

To Sergeant Jimmy Bryson, Inspector O’Hare’s face had that full-blooded look it always got with success. His eyes were brighter. His gray hair looked crisper. He lounged back in his chair, phone in hand. “Ah, well, sir! Thank you, thank you.”

Inspector O’Hare put down the phone. “So!” He rubbed his chin and looked over at Jimmy. “What a windfall! I called this informal meeting, and voilà! As the French say.”

“Right, sir. Voilà.”

“We ought to buy chairs of our own, Jimmy, and not have to borrow from the Grogan sisters every time.”

“We could do that,” Bryson said. “You want lunch, sir? I’m going to Finney’s.”

“I do, Jimmy. Bring me back a fish sandwich, will you? And some crisps. I’ll make tea here.” He stretched widely. He could hardly wait for tonight to tell Noreen about it.

Jimmy Bryson gone, O’Hare sat gazing out at Butler Street. Slowly, his satisfaction was draining away. Under his left pants leg, the long scar from the scythe, that time when he’d tripped on a stone, clearing his field. Dr. Collins’s careful stitching. Fourteen years ago? Or sixteen. He sighed.

*   *   *

At Castle Moore, Sheila found Winifred standing before the library fire, warming her backside and sipping bourbon.

“Winifred?” Sheila sat down on the fringed hassock beside the fire. “I’ve been thinking. How
ironic.
Considering that back in the days when Gerald Ashenden tried to abort Kathleen’s baby with radiation, the medical profession itself hadn’t the least idea that X ray could have any harmful effects on a fetus. Birth defects, for one. They’d no
idea
—”

“A castle’s so damn chilly,” Winifred said. “Thank God for bourbon! Yes, Sheila, the medical profession didn’t yet know. But there’s hardly a scientific advance that isn’t accompanied by smarmy activities that go on sub rosa. Unethical fringe activities. Such as, in this case those known to a dog breeder in Cork. Then to Hotchkiss. And then, alas, to young Ashenden.”

They were silent. The fire crackled. A log shifted and a plume of sparks shot upward. On the hassock, Sheila hunched her shoulders and rubbed her arms. “Then all those years, Ashenden living with what he’d done.”

Winifred said, “Oh yes, that. But then, there was Rowena. A compensation? In Gerald Ashenden’s head, Rowena was his child. His and that Ingeborg’s child. A Scandinavian saga, if ever there was one!”

“
Act
ually,” Sheila said, “you might make a sonnet of it, Winifred. A dark kind of Irish sonnet. I could use something like that in
Sisters in Poetry.
I’m short the next issue. Or if not a sonnet —”

“No.” Winifred shook her head. “If I were to write anything, it would be a long poem, more romantic than Scott’s young Lochinvar who came out of the west.” She looked down into her glass. “It would be about Padraic Collins.”

*   *   *

At the groundsman’s cottage, Jasper said, “Torrey.
Torrey!
What is it?”

Torrey stopped pacing. “Hmmm? I’m just — Nothing.” The gypsy. She saw the gypsy’s dark face, all crafty and hinting, and heard again, “A reward, is there? You think about it, Missus.” But the gypsy’d had the goods on Padraic Collins, no way for him to wriggle out. And he was rich.
Then why come to me?
Something wrong.

78

It was February, and in Dublin a snowfall during the night had slowed the morning traffic. So at half past eleven, Jasper, in Dunleavy’s pub around the corner from the Shelbourne, half expected Torrey to be late.

It had been four months. Belfast first, then an investigate bit in the Mideast. Now home to Dublin. Dust on the garaged Jaguar, musty smell in the closed-up apartment. On the bathroom scale, he’d weighed himself. Gained six pounds. That wonderful Turkish food, eggplant in a thousand guises.

“Jasper. Hello.”

Torrey sat down and shrugged off a fleecy-looking coat. He saw that she had lost weight. She’d become too thin. It had put shadows under her cheekbones and somehow drew attention to her mouth, which at this moment smiled at him, bewitching him as usual. Her short wavy hair was damp from the snow, as were her short black eyelashes, so that they starred her gray eyes. She had on the same red turtle-necked sweater he remembered. He sighed with pleasure.

“So. Tell me all,” he said and took her cold hands in his big warm ones, “Tell me how you are. Did you get my letters? Every time I called the cottage, I got your recording. Frustrating, but at least it was your voice. I had to imagine the rest, you at the laptop, a crackling fire in the fireplace…”

“Yes. I tried to buy the cottage from Winifred Moore, but she won’t sell. So I’m only renting. But it’s cheap. The gypsy’s murder in the cottage helped, if you want to be cynical about it. Here’s the waiter.” They ordered. Hot tea for her, beer for him.

“And the kids’ book?”

“I met the deadline. Two weeks later the publishing company went bankrupt.” She gave a little shiver of pleasure. “You know, I’m glad? Interpreting’s my thing; it fits my skin. Ballynagh’s now my base, my jumping-off place. Tomorrow I’m off to Greece, a five-day job. So I’ll still eat. Modern Greek is easy. Fascinating too, once you know what it’s derived from. I love the Greek tragedies,
Medea,
for instance. Myths and tragedies.”

Jasper said, “Speaking of Greek tragedies, any news about Padraic Collins? Have the Gardai caught him yet?” And when Torrey, gazing at him, only shook her head, he said, “Now
there’s
a Greek tragedy for you. To kill one’s best friend! That’s the pity of it.”

“Oh,” Torrey said, “Padraic Collins didn’t kill Dr. Ashenden.”

79

When it was over, and to Inspector O’Hare’s mortification Dr. Padraic Collins had slipped from between his fingers, the news media forgot Ballynagh. As Winifred Moore said, “They went baying off after fresher blood.”

Torrey was alone, Jasper gone to Belfast. She finished the three-language book and sent it off. She walked the hills with pregnant Rowena, learned Gaelic, restlessly bit her fingernails, and read the
Dublin Times,
the
Sunday Independent,
the
Sunday Tribune,
the
Evening Herald,
and a gaggle of news magazines. She was on edge, searching for something, she didn’t know what. Waking in the morning, she would think restlessly,
Something wrong.

The gypsy woman had been a fellow Romanian. Now, any mention of things Romanian in the news caught Torrey’s eye. The Romanian gypsies lately escaping into Ireland had joined the itinerant population of tinkers, those “travelers” who crisscrossed the countryside in painted wagons and caravans, sharpening knives, selling kitchenware, and occasionally stealing. They were largely illiterate. Most pubs barred them from entering, and they were unwelcome in villages; hospitals admitted them only grudgingly. Their caravan camps hung on the fringes of villages, of towns, of cities like Dublin. Torrey read that the Irish government was trying to better the tinkers’ situation, even to building housing. But tinkers and gypsies were footloose. Torrey thought of her explorer father and wondered if the Tunets had once been gypsies in Romania.

Then one Sunday morning, over her breakfast of tea and buttered toast, she came upon a small newspaper item. It spoke of an incident in a Romanian gypsy caravan encampment in southwest Ireland, on the outskirts of Clonakilty, a small town near Skibbereen: A gypsy child’s arm was nearly severed under a wagon wheel but was saved by one of the Romanian gypsies, an old fellow who surprisingly had some medical knowledge. The gypsy was even said to help with gypsy women in childbirth, generally a woman’s job.

Torrey sat back. Her tea grew cold. A gypsy with medical knowledge. A shiver slid down her spine. That night she lay awake.

*   *   *

Four days later, she was driving a rented Toyota west on Route 71 beyond Cork and through Bandon. It was mid-afternoon. A dozen miles ahead lay Clonakilty. Pastures and hills, and a cold salt-smell of the sea; no tourists in winter. Only, on the edge of Clonakilty, a straggling gypsy caravan of three wagons.

Torrey drove slowly into the encampment. There was an air of activity: men and boys harnessing horses, women packing away goods. Departure was almost palpable.

*   *   *

“An hour later, and they’d’ve been gone,” Torrey said to Jasper. She pulled the fleecy-looking coat closer around her shoulders. “I would’ve missed them. So I was in luck, wasn’t I?”

Jasper, sitting with folded arms, staring at her, said, “I don’t know yet. Go on.”

*   *   *

It was the biggest of the three horse-drawn wagons, really a small trailer. “I went up the steps. He was there.”

Padraic Collins. He was sitting up against pillows in a bunk bed, his legs crossed at the ankle, reading, wearing bifocals. A picture of ease, of comfort, his pouty little belly given freedom — he’d unbuttoned the top button of his worn-looking pants that must once have been orange. He was just the same. Padraic Collins, small, balding, chubby. He took off his reading glasses and looked Torrey over speculatively, as though checking to see if she still had signs of the flu. Then he asked her if she’d like a cup of tea.