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Authors: Dicey Deere

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BOOK: The Irish Village Murder
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A
scurrying sound—racoons?—on the corner of the roof that sloped down to the bed where they lay.
“Megan,” Liam said. “Megan.” He raised himself on an elbow and smiled down at her, then with a finger he traced along the curve of her cheek. This snug back room of the pottery shop was already dark at four o'clock. Outside, the wind bent branches, but the fireplace with its peat fire warmed the room.
“We'll marry,” Liam said. But live at Gwathney Hall? He closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he stared into the hated face of John Gwathney. He put a hand to his throat and turned his head from side to side. “Better to sell it all.” Have no memory of it, as though Ballynagh itself had never been. They would live in Dublin, a Georgian house, perhaps on Merrion Row. Or—
“At Collins and Sheedy …” Megan's voice faltered. “They told me John wanted his ashes scattered in the Irish Sea, off Drogheda. The Gwathneys were from there. I said I'd take them.” And then, as though she expected his protest: “I owe John that!”
He nodded. “I'd go with you, but …” But Inspector O'Hare and the whole village would be watching. A wind shook the window, and he pulled the quilt up around Megan's naked shoulders. She was gazing beyond him to the fireplace where there was only the wood box and, beside it, the shotgun in its
usual place. Despite the warmth of the quilt, again she fell to shivering. Then: “Oh!” The word had escaped her.
“What's the matter?” he said. “What is it?” He was looking closely at her. But she could only hug her arms, she could not stop shivering.
 
 
A
t eight o'clock in the evening, in the dining room of Castle Moore, Winifred settled down to dinner with Sheila and their three guests. Winifred poured the wine as Hannah served the first course, which was crayfish.
It was two weeks after the murder of John Gwathney, but long enough for Roger Flannery, who was seated on Winifred's left, to have turned “from a really shabby frog into a prince,” as Winifred later said to Sheila.
Roger Flannery was wearing a cinnamon-colored cashmere jacket with a Turnbull & Asser shirt. On his wrist was a Piaget watch. His reddish-brown hair gleamed and a small silver clip held back his minuscule ponytail. One hand on his wineglass, he leaned back in his tapestry-padded chair across from Torrey. “Of course,” he said apologetically to Blake Rossiter, who sat next to Sheila, “I would have gone to
you
about arranging the sale of my Landseer, but I thought you were still in Paris—”
“Brussels,” Blake Rossiter said, tight-lipped, drawing his sandy eyebrows together in a frown. He wore a loose big-sleeved white sweater and dove-gray suede pants. His tanned face was slightly flushed, and Torrey wondered if he'd been out in a meadow with his paints and easel despite the brisk autumn weather.
“Oh, right,” Roger Flannery said, “in Brussels. Right. So I
brought the Landseer to Beacon's. First I'd thought Sotheby's, but then I decided on Beacon's, partly because if I put the Landseer in their hands, along with the provenance which Collins and Sheedy had given me, ‘an
impeccable
provenance,' Willie Beacon told me, they would advance me … Anyway, the painting is in Beacon's hands, Willie Beacon's, and they've advanced me …” Roger Flannery shook his head, marveling. “Unbelievable!” Perspiration had come out on his forehead. His face was flushed and his brown eyes shone. Torrey, on his right, smiled sympathetically. Roger Flannery, of the frayed shirt cuffs, the resoled shoes, and run-down old Nissan, couldn't get over his good fortune; it still bewildered him.
“And to think,” Flannery said, taking a toasted round of bread from the silver dish that Hannah had just set down, “that Megan O'Faolain has maybe three or four more paintings worth … God knows what! She might be interested in letting one or two of them go. And since you're an art dealer, Mr. Rossiter …”
A muscle in Blake Rossiter's jaw jumped. He gnawed his sandy mustache, glared at Flannery, and turned sharply away, bending his head toward Torrey on his left. “I understand, Ms. Tunet, that you're an interpreter?”
“And
translator
,” Winifred said, smiling at Torrey. Winifred was in a plum-colored velvet shirt that revealed her weather-beaten neck, around which she'd hung a strand of fake pearls she'd bought at a tag sale for two pounds. “Torrey is translating some Gaelic for me. All about Maeve, the Warrior Queen of Connaught.”
“Indeed?” Blake Rossiter said. He leaned a bit closer to Torrey, his light blue eyes studying her with such intensity that she remembered that Jasper had called the green dress she wore her “mermaid dress,” the way the thin but warm green wool clung to her body. “Gaelic? Unusual, if you're not Irish. Difficult, translating the Gaelic, is it?”
“A bit.” She didn't read Gaelic easily and was sometimes surprised that she read it at all. Still, there was that linguistics professor at Harvard who'd written a paper about her, explaining that her facility with languages was genetic, so maybe he was right.
“Interesting,” Blake Rossiter said, but obviously not interested at all, because already he had turned to Winifred, a frown furrowing his brow. “I thought you told me … I thought you'd invited Megan O'Faolain for dinner this evening.” He sounded disappointed. “I was under the impression …”
“Oh, Megan,” Winifred said, “poor thing, what with all the ugly gossip in the village. Yes, I did ask her for dinner tonight. But she had to go off to Drogheda with John Gwathney's ashes.”
“
Ashes!
” Sheila hunched her shoulders and made a face. “How
primitive!
Shuddery! Burning up a body, instead of decently interring—”
“Not at all!” Winifred grinned. “When it comes time for
me
to go to my dirt nap, I—”
“Dirt nap! Winifred! What a
disgust
ing—”
“Here's the lamb.” Hannah was already setting down the serving plate before Winifred, who leaned forward over the roast and drew in a deep, pleasurable breath. “Can't you just smell the rosemary!”
 
“Thanks for the lift,” Torrey said. She got out of Roger Flannery's gleaming new green Mercedes, and Roger Flannery went around to the back of the car and took her collapsible bicycle out of the boot, unfolded it, and set it on the road beside the break in the hedge to the cottage.
“Let
me
,” he said gallantly when Torrey reached to take the bicycle from him, and he grasped the handlebars and wheeled the bicycle through the break in the hedge. Torrey followed. There was no moon and not even a glimmer of light reflected on
the surface of the little pond as they skirted it and went past to the cottage.
At the cottage door, Roger Flannery leaned the bicycle against the wall where Torrey habitually left it. “Thanks again,” she said. She could barely see Roger Flannery, it was so dark. She'd meant to leave a lamp lit in the cottage as a guide; it had promised to be such a dark night with no moon, and because of the little pond, the path would be a bit tricky. But she'd forgotten. As for her flashlight, as usual she'd run out of batteries.
“Well, then, safe at home,” Roger Flannery said. He was a dark bulk. “I may get a little weekend cottage myself one of these days. Besides a house in Dublin. Been looking at houses.”
“Really? Well, thanks.”
She watched him disappear into the dark.
Inside the cottage, she turned on the lamp, then stood, thinking. Roger Flannery had offered to give her a lift home from Winifred's dinner party, but even in the car he'd never asked her where she lived. And then, in the moonless dark, he'd stopped on the access road at the narrow break in the hedge; and in the dark he'd wheeled her bike ahead of her unerringly through the break in the hedge and even around that booby trap of a pond to the cottage.
Well, well.
 
 
B
y ten o'clock next morning, Torrey had checked her finances, abandoned her attempt to sew a new couch cover to replace the worn-out, faded old corduroy cover, and had stared several times from the window at the sun-dappled trees and thought that if it were only spring, she could start a small garden on the east side of the cottage. She had also checked her e-mail twice, in case the Portuguese assignment from Myra Schwartz at Interpreters International had a definite date. So far, nothing.
The fact was, she couldn't stop thinking of Roger Flannery.
“No use, Jasper!” she said aloud. “Your lover is a fanatic.” Because she couldn't let go. Last night, Roger Flannery making his way unerringly to her cottage door. He wasn't some sort of bat that knew its way unerringly in the dark, if that's what bats did.
So who else but Roger Flannery had stolen John Gwathney's journal and address book from the cottage? There had to be something in them that Roger Flannery didn't want Inspector O'Hare to know.
Flannery. If a thief, why not a liar, too? Telling the press that John Gwathney had “consigned his manuscript to the flames.”
Manuscript gone. Pocket journal and address book gone. But … totally gone? Torrey closed her eyes; she was seeing
herself, Jasper beside her, riffling through that fawn-colored little address book, seeing a page with an address, and penciled in, beside it, a date that had caught her eye. A date of a week before the murder.
Still … the address. The address, for God's sake! Somewhere in the south of Ireland. If she could deal with recalling the Hungarian subjunctive in toto, then why not be able to recall a simple address somewhere in the south of Ireland? Some … Baltimore! In Cork. And it wasn't a name and house number. It was a place. A
place
. Forested? With meadows? Or by the sea? Should she go through the alphabet, searching through … She shook her head. No, the address was something romantic, at least romantic to people who build castles in the air. She caught her breath. Castles. Of course!
So, by her usual circumlocutions, she had arrived at the name.
She took a deep breath.
Stay out of it.
Not likely. She crossed to the hutch and took her road map from the top drawer.
 
At eleven-thirty, in a car rented from Duffy's Garage behind Nolan's Bed-and-Breakfast, she drove south on Route N9. She was in her navy wool skirt and her heavy cowl-necked sweater, and she'd tied the peacock scarf around her head as a bandanna. The road south was uncrowded; beyond Carlow she bypassed Kilkenny and drove on to Waterford. Then she got onto the N25 and drove into Cork, where she parked and in a nearby pub drank a mug of hot tea and wondered if she was out of her mind. At the same time, she felt an extraordinary exhilaration.
Back in the car, she looked at the map. It would be through this flatter countryside, past Bandon and down into Clonakilty, then Ross Carbery, a kind of poetry in this land. Then Skibbereen, a more sea-drenched kind of poetry. So … ragged sea-coast, old battles, old ruins, old betrayals and tragedies. At the very tip, on the sea, Baltimore.
The address. It wasn't hard to find. “Castle Creedon? Right in yer lap,” a lad on a bicycle told her, and he pointed up a road going north from Baltimore. Torrey drove up the road, and then, only a quarter of a mile farther on, on her right, in the distance, she saw it.
Castle Creedon. Set in the distance, beyond a limpid lake, it seemed at first a mirage. Perhaps seventeenth century, of gray stone, and not huge, but beautifully proportioned, the castle had a single tower and a facade that was heavily covered with some kind of deep-green ivy. Ancient trees on both sides seemed to form a kind of frame.
Torrey drove through the open iron gateway, rounded the lake, and reached the castle where, on the east side, a crenellated terrace held pots of brilliant red geraniums in its notches, never mind the October weather.
 
“Not
close
friends,” Torrey said. “But I'm helping to plan a memorial for him.” She leaned forward in the soft chair beside the fireplace in the rather drafty drawing room of Castle Creedon. But at least there was a decent-sized fire in the fireplace that had carvings of shields and swords and helmets in the stone facade.
“A memorial? But why come to us? We're not friends of John Gwathney.” Owen Thorpe, fiftyish, fair-haired, in tweeds and a sweatshirt, stood beside the fireplace. He had an athletic-looking body and a tanned face with shadows under his dark eyes. His tone was hard, dismissive, faintly irritated. “Didn't really know Gwathney. Terrible, of course, what happened. Rotten state the country's getting into.”
Torrey said, “Oh, I'm sorry if I've …” She looked over at Owen Thorpe's wife, Constance, who was sitting on the sofa absentmindedly hugging a pillow. She was the most beautiful woman Torrey had ever seen. Possibly in her fifties, Constance Thorpe had short, wavy gray-blond hair, sky-blue eyes, and a
lovely curve of cheek. She wore an awful sweater set and her nails had chipped pink polish.
Torrey said, “It's just that you're in John Gwathney's address book, and I happened to be visiting friends nearby, in Skibbereen, so I thought I'd—” She got up.
“Oh, you mustn't feel …” Constance Thorpe said. She looked over at her husband. “Darling?”
Owen Thorpe hesitated, then shrugged. “A few months ago, John Gwathney visited us. Researching the history of castles in the area for a book he was writing. Constance's family acquired Castle Creedon in the late seventeen hundreds from the O'Driscolls, a family that had been in residence after the Creedons. That was over two hundred years ago. Constance's family has been in residence ever since.”
“Oh.” Torrey smiled over at Constance Thorpe. “I expect you were pleased with Mr. Gwathney's interest in Castle Creedon's history.”
“Actually,” Constance Thorpe said, “we'd never been particularly … But there are occasional tour groups, and a few historical … So we gave him tea and cranberry buns and showed him about.” She looked over at her husband.
“That was all.” Owen Thorpe's voice was sharp, dismissive.
 
In the gravel drive of Castle Creedon, Torrey found the lid of her rented Honda up and two jeans-clad lads with their heads bent over the engine, except that when she said, “Hey! What's up?” and they looked around, one of them turned out to be a girl. Or at least had a ponytail of fair hair. But the two faces were almost identical. Red-cheeked, blue-eyed. “Twins,” the girl said. “I'm Willow, he's Charles, known as Buddy. So I'm the one that'll never have to shave. And
I'm
the better car mechanic.” She giggled. “We sneaked around and heard you blah-blahhing to our ma and pa about the great John Gwathney.”
“An eccentric,” Buddy said.
“Crackers,” Willow said.
“A kleptomaniac,” Buddy said. “He swiped a relic. Pocketed it! Worthless, musty old thing.”
“What sort of relic?” Torrey said.
“Sexy, maybe, in some way,” Willow said. “A hairbrush.”
Buddy ran a grease-stained hand through his fair hair. “All those old scholarly guys are a bit off. Too much dust in the cranium. They snuff it up their nose at academy libraries, researching stuff older than the Book of Kells.”
 
On the sofa in the drawing room, Constance Thorpe was alone. Owen had gone out to the stables. Constance gazed into the fire. It was a nightmare, because there had been a second visit from John Gwathney. Then, barely two days later, Tuesday morning—so short a time ago!—she was alone in the breakfast room, having a totally delicious omelet and waiting for Owen to come down, when she'd heard the startling news on the radio. And then Owen had come into the breakfast room, and she'd said, “Darling! John Gwathney's been shot! It was just on the news!”
Owen had leaned over and poured his tea, but instead of sitting down, he'd taken it to the window and stood looking over the lawn. “Out hunting, was he? Badly wounded? What happened? Hunters are so damned careless.” He seemed to be studying something out the window. His voice sounded tired and his shoulders slumped; he'd been off at the horse fair in Ennis for two days and had arrived home very late last night.
“No,” she'd said. “That's not … Owen, somebody shot and killed John Gwathney.”
BOOK: The Irish Village Murder
10.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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