The Irish Cottage Murder (12 page)

“Why not?”

“Oh, Winifred! Of course Torrey stole it. She wanted money for Donna Lefebvre’s surgery. Commendable, I’m sure. Nevertheless, theft and murder.” Sheila shuddered. “And may I remind you, Winifred, that the necklace is rightfully yours, as part of your inheritance.”

“Rightfully? Desmond just might have given it to Ms. Tunet. She’s not beautiful, but she’s got something different, special. Poetic, you might say. Anyone could see Desmond was tomcatting after her. He might’ve given her the necklace. For future sexual favors.”

“Sexual favors? Ridiculous!” Sheila yanked at the fringe of the hassock. “Desmond was rich and attractive. He could get all the sexual favors he wanted. He wouldn’t need to bribe a woman with expensive gifts. He’d only to say a flattering word and crook his little finger.”

Winifred gave a bark of a laugh. “Desmond despised women! Seducing a woman with a necklace, buying her, in effect, gave him license to do whatever he wanted with her. Or rather…” She shrugged.

“Or rather, what?”

“—Or rather,
to
her. To Desmond, women were contemptible flesh to be used. Knowing Desmond, I’d say used sadistically.”

“Oh, Winifred!” Sheila pulled nervously at the fringe of the hassock.

“As for Torrey,” Winifred said, “there’s something pristine and courageous about her. He’d have the added pleasure of turning her into a slut. He’d gloat.”

“That’s disgusting. You can’t really believe your cousin Desmond would—”

“You’re ruining that fringe, Sheila …
my
fringe, now.”

“—really believe Desmond was that … that perverted. You’ve no foundation. You just arbitrarily think such awful things.”

Winifred shrugged. Still, she was positive that there was more to it than the months of punishing sex-on-demand, sex of every variety Desmond might have demanded from Torrey Tunet, or even the vicious pleasure of turning Torrey into a slut. Slut wasn’t quite right. Victim was closer.

“You make things up out of thin air,” Sheila said.

“Maybe so.” But there it was: her suspicion that a certain kind of ugliness in her cousin Desmond had started years ago, such long, sad years ago.

34

Fergus Callaghan, with an aching sense of foreboding, knocked and almost stumbled into Maureen Devlin’s cottage, barely waiting for her to call out to him to come in.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Devlin.”

He stood just inside the cottage door, holding the can of green paint he’d brought and seeing Maureen spottily because of the bright sunlight he’d come in from and the dimness of the room. Maureen Devlin had done what she could with this old deserted gamekeeper’s cottage, but she couldn’t punch out windows and let in the sunlight.

“I had my kitchen painted,” he said, distractedly, “and I had this green left over, almost half a can. I thought maybe for your front door.” He tried to quell his feeling of apprehension. No, more than apprehension: fear. “I could paint it for you.” His voice shook. Green paint. Pitiful excuse for coming to the cottage.

“Paint?” Maureen’s voice was dull. Fergus felt an even sharper unease. Maureen was at the stove, moving pots around in an aimless, distracted way. She was in her long, black skirt and a gray blouse with the sleeves rolled up. Her curly, burnished-looking hair, tinged with gray, was held back from her forehead by small, curved combs on each side, above her ears.

Now that Fergus could see better, he saw fearfully that Maureen’s face was pale and strained. And when she glanced toward him, there was not the usual mischief in her eyes as though she was teasing him, laughing at his awkward shyness with her. She seemed, in fact, not even to see him.
Finola,
he thought.
Does she know about Finola?
He felt a choking in his throat. He managed, “I thought … maybe if you don’t want green, I have some white left over from the trim. I’d only have to throw it away if I didn’t give it to you.” What did she know about Finola? Where was Finola? The door to the bedroom where she and Finola slept was closed.

“I’ve no time for painting.” She didn’t even thank him; she just stood rubbing her arms and looking into space as if he weren’t there.

He felt dizzy with a kind of panic. He said, “I could paint it for you … the front door. I could use the brush the painter used for my kitchen.”

Maureen didn’t answer. She uncovered a big bowl on the table, punched down a batch of dough, and covered the bowl again with the towel.

A kitchen timer pinged. Maureen put on mitten pot holders and took a pan of bread from the oven. “Finola put these in for me. They’re just ready.” She put the loaves on a wooden rack on the table, six fragrant loaves. The delicious smell of fresh-baked bread filled the room.

Maureen stood very still for a moment, her back to him; then she turned. “The papers say that the American young woman, Torrey Tunet, killed Desmond Moore. What will they do to her? The police?”

Fergus said, “I don’t know.”

Only now did Maureen meet his gaze. The anguish in her eyes was like a blow. He felt such a rush of pity and love and horror and terror that he might have screamed or fallen to the floor. But he only stood there holding the can of green paint, the wire handle cutting into his fingers.

Maureen said, “Leave the paint. And thank you … Did you come to order bread? You can have one of these loaves if you like.”

He lowered the can of paint to the floor.

“I’ll make holes in the bag because the bread’s still hot; it mustn’t get soggy.” Maureen put a loaf into a brown paper bag. She pierced the bag several times with a fork. Fergus put down his pounds and pence and picked up the bag. He could feel the heat of the bread rising from it.

Outside, going toward his motorbike, Fergus felt dizzily at war with himself, as though he were two people. All his life he had been a man of honor.

So this was agony. Agony because of the patent leather doll’s shoe that he’d seen on Desmond’s desk in the library at Castle Moore on Thursday morning. He had been putting his briefcase of genealogy papers on the library table when it had caught his eye. A doll’s shoe, black patent leather, with a pink rosette, a tiny fake diamond centered in the rosette. Staring at the little shoe, he had felt sick. But could a maid have found the shoe and put it on the desk? He had to know.
He had to know.
He had then searched through Desmond’s desk, searched through his personal papers, found his Visa statements, and run a trembling finger down lists of purchases. And stopped at one. The doll had not been bought in Dublin, but in another city. And with reason: Careful, ugly planning. That kind of reason. And its fruition. A child’s fear and guilt. But then something had gone wrong for the molester, and Finola had put the doll in a plastic bag and buried it in the woods.

But even then he had not been able to believe it.
Was it really so?
He had left the library and in the woods where he had seen Finola bury her treasure by the bramble bush, he had brushed away the dirt and uncovered the little doll’s shoe still wrapped in his handkerchief. It was the mate to the doll’s shoe that was now in his pocket. Or was it really the mate?

For a moment, he just knelt there. Then he dug deeper.

The doll was in a plastic bag. He could see pink and blue through the plastic.

He’d pulled off the plastic and gazed at the doll. Expensive. Golden-brown hair, a delicately painted ceramic face, the glass eyes with their curly lashes, the silk dress, and the crocheted socks; the socks had each a tiny rosebud. But the shoes were missing. Of course. One had been wrapped in his handkerchief, the other in his pocket.

It was the rosebuds on the socks that somehow filled Fergus with horror, as though they made him realize the actuality of the doll being there, having been buried and now in his hands.

He’d carefully put the doll back in the plastic bag and gone back to his motorbike beside the bridle path. He’d slid the bag into the carrier on the motorbike.

He had not returned to Castle Moore. All the way back to Dublin, he was sick with rage. In his kitchen on Boylston Street, he sat for a long time with his head in his hands.

*   *   *

Now, this terrible Friday morning, holding the bag of bread, Fergus stumbled away from the cottage. He was filled with fear and pity for Maureen. That fearful anguish in her eyes, anguish because she knew. Maureen at the stove moving pots around in an aimless, distracted way, her face pale and strained. The way she seemed not even to see him. Maureen of the lovely white feet, of the delicious bread, the droll humor, the love for her little girl. Maureen, Maureen, Maureen …

But if Inspector O’Hare learned of the molestation of Finola and its perpetrator, the owner of Castle Moore, he would train his sights on the dangerously wild-hearted Maureen Devlin. He loved Maureen Devlin. Above all, he loved Maureen. The arrest of Torrey Tunet as a suspect in the murder of Desmond Moore had stunned him. He had blindly assumed that Desmond’s murder would forever remain a mystery. What now was he to do?

*   *   *

When Fergus Callaghan was gone, Maureen folded her arms and shivered. She stood gazing unseeingly at the fresh-baked loaves on the rack. Hours crawling with horror, the night a waking nightmare. A chestnut horse with a red-and-black plaid blanket; she had known in shock who it was when Finola had said it.

“Who is ‘he’?” she had asked Finola. In her apron pocket she had clutched the car keys she’d found under the cottage window, the keys on a key chain that said Volvo … so the man from Helsinki had stopped his rented yellow car only a hundred yards from the cottage … he had come through the hedge to the cottage … he had looked in the window and seen something so secret and ugly that he had to be killed. The pediatrician in Dublin had confirmed what Maureen had suspected in horror about her child so strangely quiet and lethargic.

“Who?” Maureen had repeated to Finola’s bent head, flushed cheek.

“I don’t know. A man. One time he came on a horse. A chestnut. It had a red-and-black plaid blanket. He brought me a doll.”

“One time?” Her heart lurched. “He came more than once?”

“Three times. He hurt me. But he brought me that doll. When he’d leave, he’d take the doll back. He said each time that next time he’d give it to me for good. This last time, he … he … something happened. And he forgot the doll. So now it’s mine. It—I buried it, I was afraid.”

“Something—What happened?”

Finola’s eyes went wide and strangely blank. Her voice was a whisper. “Someone came.”

35

At six-thirty, Dennis O’Curry, trembling, locked the door of his butcher shop and pulled the green shade halfway down, as usual. Everyone in Ballynagh knew that meant he’d closed up.

His heart thumping, he went to the butcher block and picked up the wire brush. He scraped it back and forth on the wood, cleaning it, a rhythmic motion he always found calming.

But this time it couldn’t soothe the knot of anxiety in his chest. Was he going crazy? He used to have dizzy spells, maybe a half-dozen in all, up to five or six years ago. But after his wife had made him go to the doctor and stop eating the leftover ends of cold cuts, the dizziness had stopped.

So what was this … a new craziness? He’d gone across to O’Malley’s Pub for his usual lager at four o’clock. Everybody in Ballynagh knew it was his siesta time, just like in Spain and maybe Portugal; it was his four o’clock fifteen-minute siesta.

And when he’d come back, there it was. Beside the butcher block, as usual. Where it belonged. The knife. His good butcher knife that had been missing since yesterday. He’d picked it up and stared at it. Here it was. And he’d been blaming Maureen Devlin for mislaying it. Yesterday he’d wanted to telephone Maureen to ask where she might have put it, but it was her day off and she didn’t have a telephone. Not that she’d even remember! Absentminded, Maureen was, these last few days, going stock-still, staring blankly across the marble counter at this or that customer as though she was in a trance. Like this morning when he’d asked about the knife, just a blank look. A week ago he’d considered raising her by four pounds a week. She was worth it, he’d thought, so he’d always bent a little, like allowing her an hour off last Tuesday morning because she’d said she had “personal business.” She’d always been closemouthed. None of his affair anyway—a good-looking widow, what she did and with what man in her bed, was up to her. He’d even been planning to lace into her about being careless, about putting things in their proper place. Knives, especially. So he wasn’t going to give her that raise. Not yet, anyway.

Someone was knocking on the glass. Old Mrs. Reardon. She had bent down and was peering under the green shade. He shook his head. Closed meant closed.

At the butcher block he stood thinking, anxious, bewildered. He looked again at the knife. Those dizzy spells. Could it be that the knife had fallen on the floor and later he’d picked it up without thinking and automatically put it in its proper place beside the butcher block?

Best to say nothing. Not to his wife, not to anybody over at O’Malley’s, not to anyone … or before you knew it, they’d be carting him off to a bedlam place.

36

The five-bar gate was two hundred years old and made of hickory, most of the bark long gone. Torrey reached the gate and found Luke Willinger waiting, one foot on the bottom railing of the gate, gazing across a meadow where sheep grazed.

Suspicious, still stunned that he had posted her bail, she said with deliberate coldness, “Hello, Luke,” and when he turned and saw her, “Why’d you post bail for me? It isn’t as though I’m your favorite person.”

He took his foot from the gate and faced her, wearing jeans and a tan jacket over a black T-shirt. Torrey expected to see the tension come back to his jaw that was there whenever they met. But this time, it wasn’t. He was simply looking at her. She was startled, unnerved. “Well?” She pushed a fingernail under a piece of bark on the gate and chipped it off. “Naturally, I’m confused.”

“Naturally,” Luke said. “I’m a little confused myself. You might say that I posted bail for you because this morning I started remembering the kinds of pranks you played as a kid in North Hawk. So—”