The Irish Cottage Murder
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Contents
Other titles from St. Martin’s
Minotaur
Mysteries
To my sister Edna, and to the one and only Charles
1
Just past a castle glimpsed on a hill, he spotted the pond through a break in the hedgerow and stopped the yellow Saab. Shakily, he got out of the car.
There was a greenish scum on the pond the other side of the hedgerow. He knew it was only algae, but at the last minute, kneeling there on the bank, he couldn’t drink it despite his thirst, the furnace in his throat. Vodkas and brandies and a couple of Irish whores picked up outside that pub in Rathdrum. What a night! The worst hangover since his wedding twenty-six years ago in Helsinki. Only thirty miles more to get back to his hotel in Dublin on the access road, but his thirst couldn’t wait.
He drew back from the scummy pond. Through the trees he saw a shack. No, it was a small, decrepit cottage. Maybe they’d have a well, cool well water and a tin dipper, or even a refrigerator with ice-cold Cokes, or beer. He had traveler’s checks and a few Irish pounds and some pence.
He stumbled toward the cottage. It was a dreary-looking, tumbled-down dwelling with a lopsided wooden bench by a low door that was scabbed with peeling green paint. Small, square open windows; dead silence. He stopped. Something odd. His brain felt fuzzy. He was remembering when he was in the army, coming into a supposedly empty village; the strange kind of silence. So instinctively, instead of knocking, he moved cautiously to an open window and looked in. At first, nothing. Then, his eyes probing, he saw.
“Christ!” he said aloud. A head turned; he saw the face, the eyes looking at him. He stood motionless. The door opened. He backed away. “Christ!” he said, again. It was the last word he was ever to utter.
2
The voice on the telephone from across the ocean rang like a dark bell. “Forty thousand dollars, Ms. Tunet,” said a cultured Boston accent.
Torrey couldn’t answer. She stood there, naked, shivering, hair dripping, clutching the towel, chilled from the shower, staring from one of the long bedroom windows of the castle. The voice from Boston dimmed the morning’s view of the mountains north toward Dublin; it fuzzed the ragged edge of blackthorn that bound the castle’s woods and hazed the leafy entrance to the bridle path.
Forty thousand dollars.
It brought a bitter metallic taste to her mouth, a copper penny from childhood on her tongue. Water from the shower slid down her legs and puddled on the rug; the damp towel was cold.
“Ms. Tunet?” Boston, polite, but impatient. In Boston it must be 3:00
A.M.
She swallowed. She’d find the money. She had to. “Please go ahead.” Having said it, she felt a moment of panic.
She put down the phone. She picked up the towel she had let fall. She had run from the shower when she’d heard the phone; Boston calling back.
Today was what? Tuesday, July second. So she had three weeks. Forty thousand dollars. She didn’t even have four thousand. Or three. Or two. Back home in North Hawk, north of Boston, population seven thousand, she rented a one-bedroom apartment above an antique shop. Her car was an old 1985 Cabriolet convertible Volkswagon with perennial engine trouble. “Wasting your money, driving this baby,” Larry the mechanic said each time. What else? Lump all her jewelry together and it might bring five hundred dollars.
She had to find a way.
She had to.
She stood biting a fingernail. She’d get two thousand for her interpreting job this coming week. The Belgian-Hungarian conference in Dublin. But her next job assignment could be weeks away. Longer. She lived on the edge. She loved the risk of it. It was a high-diving kind of life. Maybe she was a gambler. Maybe she had inherited a love of adventure from her Romanian father, an explorer. “The ice floe was green and huge, and us a black speck like a bug in its lee.…” “They threaded the snake on a spit…” “The women’s palms were tattooed in patterns like lace…” Her father. She, the same. Though her exploring was in languages, endless, absorbing.
But—forty thousand dollars!
She gazed helplessly from the window. In the distance, she glimpsed a flash of yellow, a yellow car on the road that went past the castle gates; it was going toward Dublin. She glanced at the clock on the ornate mantel. Quarter past nine. She’d better dress and get on the road to Dublin herself.
In the bathroom, brushing her teeth, she thought wryly that at least she had the luxury of staying in this castle when she so desperately needed money. Interpreters International had booked her into a second-rate hotel in Dublin. But here she was in Castle Moore. Funny, she didn’t really know her host. She’d met Desmond Moore just once, a week ago, through that mishap with the spilled plate of soup in the restaurant in North Hawk. When he’d learned she’d be working at a conference in Dublin, he’d insisted she be his guest here in Wicklow. “It’s only a half hour from Dublin,” he’d assured her, smiling.
Why not?
she’d thought. A castle! So she’d cancelled the reservation that Myra Schwartz at Interpreters International in New York had made for her in Dublin. When she arrived at the airport, she’d rented a Mini-Cooper. With the slip of paper with Desmond Moore’s directions to Castle Moore on the dashboard, she’d driven southwest to this castle in Wicklow. She had arrived late last night. Desmond Moore had not been there. A plump little maid named Rosie had shown her to her bedroom. Jet-lagged, she had slept until eight this morning. Rosie had brought her breakfast: black tea, brown bread, boiled eggs, sausages.
She glanced around the bedroom. It was bigger than her whole apartment in North Hawk. She’d hated it on sight. Heavy damask curtains she’d love to rip down, a bed canopied in swaths of raspberry satin, a furbelowed dressing table, tapestried walls, a fireplace filled with silk flowers, a scattering of priceless little cherrywood tables with Moore family photographs in gold and silver oval frames—all the marks of historic pretension via an expensive decorator. All this was presumably Desmond Moore’s taste.
So Desmond Moore, an American of Irish antecedents. She knew nothing more about him. She guessed he was in his thirties. He was obviously rich. Certainly hospitable. Yet, oddly, she’d felt repelled by his assessing yellow-green eyes.
“Ma’am!—I’m sorry, ma’am!” In the bedroom doorway, hand to her mouth, giggling, staring, blushing, stood Rosie in her blue uniform and starched white pinefore apron. “I thought you’d left for Dublin, ma’am. I came for the breakfast tray.”
“That’s all right, Rosie.… Is Mr. Moore about?” Torrey held the bath towel to her breasts to cover herself. She was twenty-seven and felt she had no reason to be embarrassed. After all, she was sleek and slim in spite of eating so much pasta with gorgonzola and all those chocolate bars with almonds. She didn’t care if Rosie saw her naked. But she’d once read that European aristocrats in earlier centuries thought of servants as animals and had no modesty before them. She wouldn’t do that to Rosie. Or to anybody. Except on purpose. Out of malice. Or mischief.
“Mr. Desmond’s gone to a horse sale in Wexford, ma’am. He and Brian Coffey, who’s in charge of the stables. They left over an hour ago. He said to tell you drinks in the library, seven-thirty, before dinner.”
“Fine, Rosie.”
“Anything else, ma’am?” Rosie picked up the tray.
“No, thanks. I’m off to Dublin.”
Alone, she dressed quickly in her businesslike, navy suit and white shirt. She ran a comb through her hair, which was short, dark, and wavy. She slid a geranium-colored lipstick across her mouth. Her eyes were gray, with short black lashes, but they somehow looked better without mascara. She strapped on her watch, a man-sized Timex with date, day, and world time sweep. It was nine-thirty. The watch looked too big on her narrow wrist. But it was vital to her business.
“Ready?” She stood soldier-straight before the mirror. “Ready.” Torrey Tunet, interpreter. She was proud of herself. She had struggled out of a morass. She had studied twelve hours a day for ten years to achieve this career. She knew, with a sometimes lurching heart, how lucky she was to be doing work she loved.
But now—
forty thousand dollars.
It was as stunning as a hammer blow on her head. Where would she get that much money?
She picked up her briefcase and headed for the door.
And stopped.
That claw-footed, gleaming mahogany table near the door. Silver-framed Moore family photographs. In an oval frame, a dowager, regal-looking, white hair piled high. Around her bare neck was the same diamond necklace that was in her portrait in the great flagged hall downstairs. The diamond necklace with a pear-shaped emerald at the throat.
Torrey’s heart beat faster; her temples pounded; she shivered.
No, never that! Once she had been a thief. Recidivism. Once a thief, always a thief?
Recidivist.
From the Latin,
recidivus,
“recurring”; from
recidere,
“to fall back”; from
re plus cadere,
“to fall”; “to one who relapses”; “an habitual criminal.”
No, never! It had taken years. But she had left the horror behind. She had become somebody. The past was over. Forgotten. Never to be exhumed or thought of. Buried. None of it could touch her now.
In the castle driveway, she slid into the seat of the Mini-Cooper. She put her briefcase on the seat beside her, drove down the winding tunnel of ancient oaks, and turned left onto the access road to Dublin.
Forty feet beyond the castle gates, she said, “Hey!” indignantly, and swerved to pass the empty yellow Saab that someone had left parked carelessly, half off the road.
3