The Irish Manor House Murder (6 page)

His name was Jasper O’Mara, he told her. He was a rare-book dealer on a bicycling trip, searching out old books in castles and village cottages. And unmarried. Stopping at bed-and-breakfasts along his planned route. He’d been bicycling toward Ballynagh on the access road when he’d seen Torrey standing on the road, “looking green around the gills.” He was booked to stay at Nolan’s Bed-and-Breakfast in Ballynagh.

Lovers. First friends, for all of three weeks, while Torrey slowly got well, her convalescence helped along by savory meats and delicately seasoned soups and poached eggs in aspic, dishes created by Jasper O’Mara. Then to Torrey’s amazement, after an incredibly delicious dinner of a casserole of veal scallops with ham and cheese, they became lovers. Am I doing this? Is it really me? Am I seduced by puff pastry and honey-roasted chicken? Ensnared by mouthwatering grilled salmon with fresh thyme? Suborned by
gigot farci, rôti á la moutarde?
Alas, yes.

Besides, Jasper O’Mara could talk endlessly about the books she loved. He was also intrigued by her being a gifted interpreter and children’s book writer. He was black-haired, white-skinned, and comfortably overweight by a good dozen pounds. He had a longish face and a narrow nose whose nostrils would twitch when he said something he thought was funny. A kind of silent laughter. He had arrived wearing tan jeans, serviceable boots, and a windbreaker over his shirt and sweater. He was traveling coast to coast, Dún Laoghaire to Clifden, with all the necessities of life, to his mind: a bicycle pack of underclothes, a razor, an extra woolen shirt, camera, thermos, brimmed canvas cap, sweater, a two-by-six-inch notebook, pencils, and the
Larousse Guide to Food,
unedited edition, weighing in at seven pounds.

To her surprise, Torrey found herself sporadically revealing bits of her past to Jasper O’Mara. It seemed to her that he was somehow “safe,” that he would not judge her. So Jasper knew that she had once been a thief. He knew that her theft had resulted in a tragic death back in North Hawk. “Inspector O’Hare discovered it last year when he and I were on opposite sides in a murder case here in Ballynagh. The whole village knows of it now. But I bested O’Hare in the case. He’ll never forgive me for that. And he’ll always be suspicious of me. And determined to get even.” She added, “Inspector O’Hare and I — we’re two enemy beasts meeting in a forest.”

But one thing she did not confide in Jasper O’Mara was Rowena’s pregnancy and Rowena’s wanting to abort the baby. Rowena’s secrets, Torry felt, were not hers to confide.

Altogether tempting, this Jasper O’Mara, to whom she’d confided so much else. But of course not to live with. Torrey had learned earlier in life that, working, she had to live alone. No semiconnubial bliss for her. Not if she wanted, as in this case, to deliver a completed three-language kids’ manuscript, ready for illustrations, to Spindling Press within the next three months. It was a deadline she couldn’t afford to miss. Neither morally nor financially. She was thankful that the rent on this cottage that she paid to Winifred Moore of Castle Moore was so low.

“All set?”

“Yes.” She zipped up her jacket and pulled the knitted cap snugly down over her ears.

12

“Just to the bridle path and back,” Torrey said, shivering. “It’s getting too cold. Damn! I should have worn my padded jacket.” They were in the Ashenden woods, had been walking for fifteen minutes. The setting sun flickered like a scattering of diamonds; a small, brisk wind had sprung up.

“Right — Christ!” Jasper had abruptly stopped. “My wristwatch! I looked at it two minutes ago. Must have dropped it. You go ahead. Meet you at the bridle path marker.” And he was gone, disappearing back through the woods.

Torrey walked on. Thankfully, the wind was lessening, but she was anyway glad of her muffler.

Five minutes later she reached the marker, a granite slab that marked the boundary between Ashenden Manor and Castle Moore. It was perhaps three feet from the bridle path. Torrey sat down on the slab and waited. The granite slab was cold as an ice cube and the sun was setting.

Ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Where are you, Jasper? She was getting hungry for dinner. She wasn’t a Spartan. She’d walk back and meet him.

She got up and started back along the bridle path. At the cottage, they’d make a fire and have a hot rum, plunging the red-hot andiron into the mug to make the rum sizzle. Jasper had some sort of French stew, Provençal-inspired, with white beans, keeping warm on the stove. Stove in Greek was
therma’stra,
she had once counted twenty-six
therm
prefixed words in her dictionary, all meaning heat in some way. After the stew, apple crisp, warm from the oven. And with the crisp —

Pound, pound,
like a thudding in her heart. For a moment, again she had a déjà vu of the meadow, of Rowena’s red hair and wild face. And there —

There, on the bridle path heading toward her, she saw the galloping stallion, and astride him, Dr. Ashenden, left shoulder bandaged and arm in a sling. She stumbled back and felt the wind of the passing of the plunging horse, saw his stretched neck, heard the creak of leather, the jingle of harness. Breathless, she turned and looked after horse and rider. And then —

A terrible, unforgettable sound as the horse screamed, then reared, and she saw the rider go flying back. Then the horse sank back on his haunches, wavered, slipped onto its side, stomach heaving, and lay still.

13

They stood about. It was not yet dark. Jasper was beside Torrey, hands in his pockets. A few feet away, Winifred Moore stood whistling softly between her teeth. Winifred had been taking a before-dinner racewalk on the bridle path. Like Torrey, she had witnessed the accident and made the call to Inspector O’Hare from the cell phone that was always nestled at her belt.

Rag doll, Torrey thought. Dr. Gerald Ashenden. Like a thrown-away rag doll in riding breeches and maroon jersey, the body that had been Dr. Gerald Ashenden lay on the stones and twigs beside the bridle path.

“Here they are,” Sergeant Jimmy Bryson said. Across the field they could see the flashing blue and red lights of the ambulance. The attendants would have to come on foot with the gurney.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, when the sound of the departing ambulance grew faint and was gone, Winifred Moore said, “Who’s to tell them at Ashenden Manor?” She wore a brimmed cap with a green emblem that read
NATIONAL RACEWALKERS ASSOCIATION
. No one answered. It was, anyway, a rhetorical question.

Inspector O’Hare, in his dark blue, circled the stallion, stumbling over twigs on the edge of the bridle path. Hard to take in: Dr. Ashenden dead, terrible, such an accident. The vicissitudes of horseback riding, one lived with it. And sometimes, like now, died of it. Inspector O’Hare gnawed his lip.

“Heart attack?” suggested Sergeant Bryson doubtfully, hands on his hips. “The horse, I mean.” He blushed.

“Gogarty’ll tell us,” O’Hare said. The vet was coming straight from the Sheehens’ barn where he’d been seeing to a newborn calf.

Torrey walked slowly toward the dead beast. His silvery gray coat shone. He looked immense and tragic. Torrey went closer. The stallion’s head was stretched up as though in agony, his unseeing eye glared, his lips were drawn back in final terror. Torrey thought of Picasso’s
Guernica,
the agonized horse, victim of men’s battles. The stallion’s silvery gray coat — something caught Torrey’s eye. On the stallion’s thigh, a tiny scar.

She leaned closer. No, not a scar. Something like a dark flaw on the silvery gray. She squinted. The dusk made it harder to see. But, no, it wasn’t a flaw. Not a flaw. More like a tiny … puncture? And a spot of blood, red on the silvery gray. Blood.

Torrey straightened. She stood very still. She could not move away. The cold that she felt was not from the damp. The woods around the path seemed to darken. She suddenly thought of the grammar school pageant in North Hawk when she was ten, with two boys humming and two boys singing the remembered refrain,
When I was young I used to wait / On my master and give him his plate / And pass the bottle when he got dry / And brush away the blue-tail fly.

“Torrey? What is it? You all right?” Jasper, beside her.

It was humming through her head,
One day he rode about the farm / The flies so numerous they did swarm / One chanced to bite him on the thigh —

“Torrey?”

The devil take the blue-tail fly.

Yes, and the rest of it, the fourth graders in the pageant, the two boys singing, two humming.
The pony run, he jump, he pitch / He throw’d my master in the ditch / He died and the jury wondered why / The verdict was the blue-tail fly.

“Torrey, you look so —”

But she was turning her head, looking around. The dry woods, crystal air, a wind moving the leaves of the bushes beside the bridle path; there could be no flies.

14

“Ah, no!” Torrey whispered involuntarily, kneeling there by the dead stallion in the crisp, dry air. Somehow hoping that the blood spot might nevertheless be from an insect bite. Because otherwise … otherwise …

Low as her whisper was, Inspector O’Hare was instantly standing over her. “What’s that you —?” And then he was looking down past her shoulder at the spot of blood on the stallion’s thigh. “Well!” he said softly, after a moment. “Well!”

*   *   *

Torrey stood up. Jasper came over and cupped his big hand on the back of her head. “You all right?” he asked again. She nodded, and he gave her a grin and for an instant pulled her head close to his chest.

Winifred Moore gave a yank to the brim of her race-walking cap and stepped nearer to the dead stallion. “Got something on the hob?” she said to Inspector O’Hare, looking curiously from him to Torrey. “You and Ms. Tunet?”

“Possibly, Ms. Moore.” Inspector O’Hare glance glanced at Torrey and smiled at her in a way she hated, a shark’s smile. “Very possibly, Ms. Moore.”

They waited in the darkening woods for Liam Gogarty, the veterinarian, Torrey shivering with cold but stubbornly hanging on. Winifred Moore, alive with curiosity, Jasper whistling between his teeth. But by the time Sergeant Bryson on his cell phone learned from Liam Gogarty that the lamb’s birthing at the Sheehens’ had developed complications, it was full dark with a sliver of a moon. On Gogarty’s instructions, the dead horse was to be covered with a tarp overnight. Gogarty would be there at seven in the morning.

On the way back to the cottage with Jasper, Torrey said determinedly, “So will
I
be.” She hated what she knew O’Hare was thinking.
Rowena. This time Rowena had succeeded.

15

It was the biggest pair of tweezers Torrey had ever seen. She stood watching Liam Gogarty probe the thigh of the dead horse. Gogarty was skinny, bespectacled, sure-handed. Last night it had rained; water dripped from the leaves of the trees along the bridle path. It was by now seven-thirty, and the sky was clearing. Torrey was conscious of Inspector O’Hare breathing heavily. He stood beside her, bulking large in his police uniform.

“This is an official investigation, Ms. Tunet,” O’Hare had said irritably fifteen minutes ago when he’d arrived and seen her already there and chatting with Liam Gogarty who was pulling his nose and contemplating the dead horse.

“I know, Inspector,” she’d answered, trying to keep a chip-on-her-shoulder tone out of her voice. “I’m taking an interest. My presence isn’t illegal, I believe.”

At that, a muscle in the inspector’s jaw had jumped, a sign of his exasperation. Torrey in the past had seen that muscle jump more than once. Well, too bad, Inspector Egan O’Hare. Here I am again. A fly in your soup.

“Hello, hello,
hello!
” Winifred Moore came striding up. Amusement made her lips twitch at Inspector O’Hare half-suppressed moan at sight of her. “Had to know what strange thing did Dr. Ashenden’s horse in. Might be a poem in it. That a
tweezers,
Liam Gogarty?”

“
Got
it!
Got
it!” Gogarty drew something from the horse’s thigh and held it up in the tweezers. A small, narrow object.

Blood on it, but a dull shine. “Aluminum,” Liam Gogarty said, turning the object slowly this way and that, looking at it curiously. “Huhh! Must’ve been cut off of one of a longer pair. This piece is maybe an inch and a half. About.”

Mystified, Torrey gazed at the narrow object.

“Longer pair of
what?
” Inspector O’Hare, impatient, squinted at the object.

“Longer pair of knitting needles,” Liam Gogarty said.

*   *   *

For a minute they were all silent. The veterinarian, still kneeling, rummaged in his bag and found a plastic envelope. He dropped the piece of knitting needle into it. He stood up and handed the bag to Inspector O’Hare. “Your bailiwick, Inspector.” He took off his glasses and wiped raindrops from them. “Got to get to Donovan’s. A calf.” He put his glasses back on and looked at Torrey. “As I was saying before, Ms. Tunet, seen you about with Rowena Keegan. Helping her at the animal center. Her giving shots and all.” He looked down at the dead horse, than back at Torrey. “Understand you spotted it?” She nodded. “Hadn’t been for you, then, I’d’ve thought the horse had died of a heart attack. Saw that kind of death more than once. Including last year at the Kerry Gold. The winning horse, Daisy Belle, a minute after her victory, jockey still astride, dropped dead. Embolism.”

“Thank you.” She wanted to cry. She’d been hoping desperately that by some kind of miracle a real insect had stung the stallion, all right,
not
a blue-tail fly, but there were other insects in these woods, weren’t there? She stiffened her jaw, aware suddenly that Inspector O’Hare was looking at her.

“Well,
now
we’re getting somewhere,” Inspector O’Hare said. He was holding the plastic envelope with the knitting needle and smiling at her, a smile that chilled her.

“I’m off,” Liam Gogarty said. “Nice to’ve met you, Ms. Tunet. Fascinating this police work, isn’t it? A knitting needle! Somewhere out there a murderer!”