The Irish Village Murder (5 page)

BOOK: The Irish Village Murder
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A
pint,” Michael McIntyre said to O'Malley's youngest—Corinne—and off she went. It was twelve noon, lunchtime, folks already coming into O'Malley's Pub. Smell of beer and frying onions. Today was cod. With a gnarled hand, McIntyre ruffled his thicket of white hair. The leaded glass window beside his table was half open. He could see cameramen and press people clustered in front of the police station down the street; an RTE truck of television equipment half-blocked the narrow cobbled street. Murder last night of the distinguished Irish historian John Gwathney. At the bar behind McIntyre, a handful of lads were swapping stories about Gwathney's generosity to the village over the years. Shock and incredulity at his murder. Who could have? And for God's sake, why?
A shadow across McIntyre's table. He looked up. Ms. Torrey Tunet. Not unexpected.
“Mr. McIntyre.” Cool gray eyes, mouth like a flower, and wearing that bandanna around her head, turquoise peacocks on her forehead. Swatches of dark hair, each side. Nice.
“Only so many servings of cod,” McIntyre said. “Better order it now. Sit down, lass. A pint?”
She nodded.
McIntyre beckoned Corinne over, ordered the pint for Ms. Tunet and, with another nod from Ms. Tunet, the cod with
mashed for both. He took a sip of his pint and sat back, rubbing the stubble on his chin to hide a smile. Ms. Tunet. He'd have guessed it. Do dandelions grow, do cocks crow? He was in his seventies, Wicklow-born, but weathered by the life of a sailor, and every autumn drawn back to Ballynagh. “Thick as a bog with secrets, and I most privy to them all,” he'd once told Torrey. “Many's a quiet little laugh I have up my sleeve.” He knew the ancestry of every cottage, farmer, shop owner and estate owner in Ballynagh, and the foibles and secrets—shameful, laughable, or plain horrendous—of even the most secretive. So he waited.
“Megan O'Faolain,” Ms. Torrey Tunet said.
 
“Six years ago,” McIntyre said, “early spring. I had the sciatica, so I couldn't ship out. Megan O'Faolain showed up in Ballynagh that April. She was driving a ten-year-old Austin piled with boxes full of hanks of wool, and with a loom sticking out the car window. A weaver. Came from County Sligo. Yeats country. You know the Irish poet, Yeats? ‘Come out of charity, Come dance with me in Ireland.' There's a poet for you! Sligo, a bit wild, on the northwest coast, Sligo, yet worth the beauty. But Megan O'Faolain had a married sister with a handful of kids living in Dublin.”
McIntyre pulled his nose. “She was maybe thirty-five, thirty-six. Called herself Ms. and wore no wedding ring. But had the
look
of having known the marriage bed. You sense it in a woman.
“She set up shop, renting next to the Grogan Sisters Knitting Shop, with an eye to tourist business. She lived in the back room and wove shawls and throws. Did well that summer—fine weather, tourists wanting stuff better than Irish souvenirs like factory-made tablecloths stamped with shamrocks.
“But in the fall, rainstorms, clouds like flocks of black sheep blocked out the mountaintops. Winds tore the leaves from the
trees.” He shrugged; his glass was empty, he looked around, caught Corinne's eye, and circled a forefinger over his glass.
“So … the tourist business?”
“Went off. Megan O'Faolain sat in that shop by a peat fire, reading old magazines and drinking cups of tea. Coyle's let her have the over-the-hill carrots and potatoes for a few pence. In the woods, she shot partridge and small game. She was a good shot. Tried fishing, but hadn't the patience. She got thin, then thinner. In November, she gave up.”
“To leave? To go off? Back to Sligo? Or Dublin?”
He tousled his hair. “Indeed, yes. But then—the hand of fate! John Gwathney, back from a research trip abroad, was passing the shop and got caught in a very tempest of rain. He ducked into the shop.
“Next morning, eight o‘clock, Megan O'Faolain came into O'Curry's bright-eyed and happy and ordered a leg of lamb charged to John Gwathney and sent to Gwathney Hall. Then she went across Butler Street to Coyle's and got fresh peas and some foreign-type mushrooms, and I don't know what all. At Flaherty's Harness, she got that wax polish for leather boots that some say is best for polishing furniture.”
Michael McIntyre watched Corinne set down Ms. Tunet's cod, then moved his glass aside for his own plate. Fried cod and mashed, and green beans with a slab of butter melting on them.
“Then she'd … ?”
He nodded. “Been running Gwathney Hall ever since. Made it gleam like a Royal Navy ship. No more hit-and-miss help from Dublin claiming they can cook, and Ballynagh schoolgirls with never a notion of how to make a shipshape bed.” He forked up mashed potatoes. Could use a bit of salt. “Then, of course, pub talk: the comely housekeeper and the widowed gentleman. Natural. A womanly woman and a man in his prime.” He salted the beans. “And propinquity.”
Cold wind up his back, the door opening, then slammed shut.
Liam Caffrey in a duffel coat and black-billed cap went past to the table beside the other window.
“Mr. McIntyre?” He looked up to meet Ms. Tunet's gray eyes. She said, “What was he like? John Gwathney.”
“A gentleman. Kind. Generous. But …” He chewed over a thought. That cold wind, Liam Caffrey in his black-billed cap sitting at the table by the other window. An incident. Not worth his breath to mention. Not an incident. An accident.
“But what, Mr. McIntyre?” Gray eyes watching him, relentless young woman, no backing away from it now. He poked at a green bean. “A time last month. Gwathney stopped in for a whiskey, neat. Sat at the bar next to Liam Caffrey, who was having a pot of tea. When Caffrey got off the barstool to leave, Gwathney's cane accidently slid between his legs. Could've broke Caffrey's leg.”
Ms. Tunet had stopped eating. “Does Inspector O'Hare know about that … that, umm, incident?”
McIntyre bit into the green bean. “Egan O'Hare? Like as not, even the cat in Miss Amelia's Tea Shoppe and the fish in the fish tank at the Grogan Sisters Knitting Shop know of it.”
 
 
T
he gleaming gunmetal Jaguar was parked on the side of the access road, close to the hedge. Jasper! Back from Glasgow.
Torrey, smiling, got off the bike and walked it through the break in the hedge to the cottage. The latticed window beside the door was open, she could hear the whir of the electric eggbeater. Whipping up something delicious for tea. It was coming on to four o'clock.
Jasper, my darling
. And he'd have brought back new dinner recipes for his JASPER column. Juggling her groceries, she pushed open the door. And stared.
“What
happened?”
The fireplace kitchen looked a wild mess: drawers of the hutch hung open, papers on her corner desk were scattered. Cushions from the shabby couch were upended.
“What …
?
” She dropped her groceries on the table.
Jasper turned from the kitchen counter. He had on her red-checked apron over his flannel shirt and dungarees. He shut off the mixer, grinned at her, came over and rocked her back and forth in a hug. Then he drew back and looked at her. “My love! You've had a visitor. Who? Why? I left it for you to get the full impact. Sometimes, my girl … Been up to something? Need I ask?” He wiggled his eyebrows at her. He had a longish kind of Irish face with a narrow nose and was a good dozen pounds overweight and cared about it, but not enough. His dark curly
hair had receded to rim the back of his head, though he was only thirty-five.
“Me
?
I've done nothing!” She felt indignant. “It's robbery! But … ridiculous! What could anyone want? I don't own anything worth a tinker's—My jump rope? My box of chocolate bars? My dictionaries? My Georges Simenons?”
But nothing was missing. Not in the bedroom, either, where drawers had obviously been searched. By four o'clock, they'd got the cottage straightened up and sat down to a tea of Jasper's warm apple tarts. He could stay only overnight. “Wicked political doings in the north; I've got to be in Belfast by noon tomorrow.” He helped himself to a third tart. “I should have been a chef. What's this I heard on my car radio? John Gwathney. A shotgun, for God's sake!”
Torrey told him everything. “Only last night!” she finished, incredulous. “But already there are whispers in the village. About Megan O'Faolain. And Inspector O'Hare is honing in on her, I'm sure of it.”
“Lovers, were they? Gwathney and Megan O'Faolain?”
“So they say, in the village.” She told him then about staying with Sharon that morning, while Megan had gone to give her statement to Inspector O'Hare. “And I …” She stopped.
“You what?” He was studying her.
“Oh … I explored Gwathney Hall a bit. Came across a John Gwathney manuscript—the book he'd been working on and apparently finished.” She was seeing the thick manuscript with the word
Final
in the strong, jagged handwriting.
“You 'came across' his manuscript?” Jasper was grinning. “Can you be a bit more explicit?”
“Well,
found
. In his desk drawer.” She felt herself flush. And then she was back in Gwathney's study again—smell of tobacco, bronze bookends shaped like swans, snapshots of John Gwathney, a green leather desk chair, and sliding open a desk drawer.
“More exactly,” Jasper said. “Let's get with it.”
She gazed down into her teacup. She said,
“Eight miles into the desert, I found the monastery. The Berber gatekeeper, squatting at the gate, could not underestand me, nor I him. But then, in desperation
…” Surprisingly, she was remembering it all. “
But then, in desperation, I used the French word chercher, and at once I saw recognition in his
sable eyes, and he answered me
in French … It was a door
opening
…
As it turned out, the door.

“Well,
well!
” Jasper gave her a sidewise look. “Total recall. It must interest you mightily.”
Torrey frowned at him. “Roger Flannery … he's Gwathney's assistant,
was
his assistant—told me that Gwathney had scrapped the book he'd been working on. I felt so disappointed. I wanted to read on. An Ali Baba tale? Like in the
Arabian Nights.
What? Certainly not Irish, though. Anyway, now I feel deprived.”
“Easily remedied,” Jasper said.
“How?” She stared at him.
“You want to finish the tale? Go back to Gwathney Hall and read on. What's the difference? Since, you tell me, Gwathney had anyway scrapped the book.” He rose. “How about a walk? Work some of this fat off me, so I can pig it up at the Kinsale Gourmet Festival next month.” He shrugged into his old moss-green woolen jacket. “Tonight I'm fixing us
navarin printanier
. That's lamb stew with vegetables, French style. Stuff's in the icebox. You'll have enough left for three days.” Icebox was a conceit; he didn't like the word refrigerator. “Better take your heavy sweater, you might catch cold and I don't want my consort keeping me awake tonight, hacking like a crow.”
She took her cable-knit sweater from the hook beside the front door and put it on. The right-hand pocket was a bit weighed down, something in it. She pulled out the objects. A pocket-sized journal and a small smoke-colored address book. “But I
thought …”
She was startled. “I
thought
I'd swept them
back into the desk.” Hearing Roger Flannery's footfall from the hall behind her, she had quickly, guiltily brushed the journal and address book into the shallow drawer … or not?
“Enlighten me,” Jasper said.
She told him, riffling though the journal that was in Greek. “I honestly could have
sworn
…” She shook her head.
“Your nefarious instincts,” Jasper said, and his nose twitched as it always did when he teased her. Even before they'd ever made love, she'd told him about her nefarious past, the long-ago theft that Inspector O'Hare, digging deep into Torrey's past, had discovered.
“A journal and address book,” Jasper said, “a bonanza for Inspector O'Hare. They could furnish clues to John Gwathney's murder. So better get them over to him. Fast.”
“Hmmm?” She was turning the pages of the little fawn-colored book. Beside one address was a penciled-in date of a few days ago. As for the journal … she riffled again through it. “Too bad my Greek's so poor. Otherwise, with a little time, I might—”
“Do I hear quibbling, my love? Greek. Farsi. Pig latin. It's a job for the Crime Department at Phoenix Park.”
“Of course. First thing tomorrow morning.”
 
 
M
egan O'Faolain left Gwathney Hall and walked down the road. It was getting on to five o'clock. The sky was gray, crows like black specks wheeled and cawed. The road wound through the woods, a tangle of bushes on either side. It was damp and cold, and she had put on woolen stockings, a long heavy skirt and her old shawl-collared pullover. Yesterday at this time John Gwathney had been alive. And today, since noontime, the press, television cameras, an invasion of Gwathney Hall. It had been exhausting. But by four o'clock, they had gone.
John. John Gwathney. Six years. She could see him now, the famous historian, rain-soaked, handsome and tall, white hair in clusters, his keen eyes taking it all in, as he looked about the emptied shop on Butler Street, her packed boxes, her old suitcase. And marvelously, the next day she was his housekeeper at Gwathney Hall and was hiring local “girls” aged fourteen to seventy to come in two days a week, so that Gwathney Hall was spotless. And then … and then … Within a month after she'd begun to cook and serve his dinner, he'd insisted she dine with him. Three months later, they were lovers.
On the road, she stumbled and put a hand to her eyes. How could she not have fallen in love with John Gwathney? They told each other their pasts, they laughed together, they talked
about his work. And how could they not have felt such trust in each other? Five years. But then.
Then
…
Ahead, she saw on the left the path to Liam Caffrey's pottery shop. Hardly a year ago, walking past the old stone outbuilding that had been turned into a shop, she'd smelled new wood and seen a narrowly built, dark-haired man overseeing workmen who were replacing the old shingled roof.
A year ago. She closed her eyes. So short a time ago! A month later, wanting a glazed bowl, she'd gone up the path and entered the pottery shop. Liam Caffrey was at the potter's wheel, his back to her, strong brown hands at work; she could see the muscles in his arms. At the sound of the door opening, he'd turned his head and looked at her. It was a long look, with a slight widening of his eyes; then his eyelids flickered.
And now? Now she was in a state of madness, of love and despair and fear.
Standing on the path, she put up a hand and covered her mouth, her eyes wide. She couldn't ask him, because how can you ask such a terrible question? And worse, she feared the answer.
But because she could not help herself, as always during this past year, she went up the path to the pottery shop.
BOOK: The Irish Village Murder
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