The Irish Cottage Murder (15 page)

For the next five minutes he stood leaning back against the wrought-iron footboard of Desmond Moore’s bed, arms folded, staring at the gilt-framed oil painting on the Regency-striped red-and-gold wall. So this was the painting that Janet Slocum had told him about. “Shows he wasn’t right, upstairs”—tapping her temple—“or why’d he have
that?
”

It was a portrait of a lady in silks and satins. She was seated on a stone bench in a garden. She had two children at her knee, a boy and a girl, exquisitely dressed, and three lean hounds lying nearby. The little boy was about three, the girl about eight or nine.

The gold plaque on ornate frame said
CATHERINE, DUCHESS OF COMERFORD AND HER CHILDREN
, 1790.

*   *   *

Luke finally stirred. Downstairs, he came into the raftered kitchen with its cavernous fireplace, heavy cupboards, and the big, modern iron range.

Rose was there, alone. She was at one of the marble counters, cutting bread, singing under her breath

“Morning, Rose … Is Janet about?” There would be corners of Janet’s mind, that, stirred up, would bring something important to the surface that he could grasp. He had the damndest feeling that if he could discover the machinations of the mind of the late Desmond Moore, he might save the very alive Torrey Tunet.

Rose shook her head. “Janet’s gone to Dublin. Has one of those—” she stopped, almost biting her tongue. She went red.
One of those meetings,
Luke guessed. An AA meeting. A meeting for drunks. Like me.

Rose cut herself a thick slice of bread. The crust crackled under the knife. “Would you like a slice, Mr. Willinger?”

“No, thanks, Rose.”

“You’re sure? ’Tis bread from heaven, that tasty! Still warm from Mrs. Devlin’s oven. I must ask Ms. Winifred, does she want to keep on having the bread delivered. T’was Mr. Desmond who’d always insisted on it.”

“Yes?” He was restlessly wandering the kitchen, thinking of the portrait in Desmond Moore’s bedroom; Dublin was a half-hour away. If Janet Slocum had gone to the eight o’clock meeting at Saint Anne’s she might be back at Castle Moore by nine-thirty.

“This here’s the heel,” Rose said. “It’s the best part, and with a dab of butter on it. Chewy.” Rose buttered the heel and put it on a plate. “Go ahead … This past week, Maureen Devlin’s been delivering it herself. A hardship, it must be, what with her having to get to O’Curry’s in Ballynagh at six.”

“Who? What?” He picked up the buttered heel and bit into it.

“Where she works. Mrs. Devlin. O’Curry’s butcher shop. Till last week, the little girl delivered the bread. Half-asleep she’d be, flaxen hair, hardly combed, lids halfway down over her eyes. Just slits of the bluest blue showing. Shy, she was. Sometimes I’d be up and have the kitchen door open and she’d hand me in the bread. A pretty little thing, the child. Finola, her name is. About eight. You’d see her playing in the woods.”

“A pretty little thing,” Luke repeated. He was staring at Rose. “Finola. Playing in the woods.”

*   *   *

For some ten minutes after leaving the kitchen, Luke sat in his rented car before the castle. The sun reflected on the hood of the car; birds sang in the bushes, a squirrel hopped onto the broad stone steps of the castle, held a bit of something between its paws, nibbled and nibbled it, then whisked off.

Luke started the car. He would go to the village. Exactly why he was going to Ballynagh, he could not pin down. Finola was only a name. Yet he had a peculiar sense of foreknowledge. It had happened to him before, more than once, in dealing with landscaping clients—as though he were glimpsing a fully completed project when, amazingly, he had barely started the conception.

In Ballynagh, he drove slowly up the main street. Likely the butcher shop, O’Curry’s, would be somewhere along here.

There was almost no traffic on the cobbled street. The sun struck the cobbles and reflected upward; the morning was warm and breezy. Three or four women were getting on a bus marked D
UBLIN
; the bus driver was chatting out the bus window with a man in shirtsleeves and a greasy vest. A horse and cart stood before O’Malley’s Pub. A couple of men in shirtsleeves touched their caps to Luke as he drove past. Across from O’Malley’s Pub he saw a shop with gold lettering on the window: O’C
URRY’S
M
EATS
.

He parked a few feet past the butcher shop and sat for a minute.

“Which way to Dublin, mister?” A couple of teenagers on motorbikes, Canadian emblems on their caps, and gunning their motors, stopped beside him on the cobbled street. “Lost our map.”

“Straight ahead, two miles up. You’ll see the road signs.” He watched them out of sight.

Rose in the kitchen, the bread crackling under the knife,
“A pretty little thing, the child. Finola.”

He got out of the car, pulled open the door of O’Curry’s, and went in.

A couple of customers, stocky housewives with shopping bags, were at the counter, trading laughter and remarks with a heavyset, red-faced man in a white apron, who was cutting meat at the butcher block. The shop smelled of smoked meat and spices. Behind the counter, next to the cash register, a dark-haired woman, also in a big white apron, stood with bent head, wrapping a package of meat in shiny butcher paper.

“And what’s the little one doing here, Mrs. Devlin?” one of the woman customers said and jerked her head toward the back of the shop. Luke turned.

The child sat on a chair, legs folded under her. She looked to be about eight years old. She wore a navy cotton jumper over a white T-shirt and was reading a book, her finger moving slowly over the page, her lips moving soundlessly. Her silky pale hair fell across her cheeks.

“She’s come to learn the butcher business!” the red-faced Mr. O’Curry said, with a jolly sounding laugh.

“No,” the dark-haired woman said, head still bent. She was tying string around the wrapped package of meat; she had a low-toned voice, music in it, to Luke’s mind. “School opens in another week. I want her doing her reading instead of going off berry picking.” And in a lower voice, “You know how children are.”

“That I do”—said the woman customer—“having five of my own! You leave them alone for a minute and—Mother of God!—who knows what they’ll get into!”

Maureen Devlin lifted her bent head to hand the package of meat across the counter to the customer and for the first time Luke saw her face … the very blue eyes, the glossy brown hair in curls and ringlets, untidy and mixed with gray strands, the shape of the woman’s face.

And stood dumbfounded.

It was a face he had seen barely an hour before in the portrait in Desmond Moore’s bedroom. The face of the Duchess of Comerford.

43

Luke drove back to Castle Moore. He found Winifred on the weedy tennis court smashing balls across the net, practicing her serve. When she saw Luke, she came off the court and mopped her sweaty, sunburned face with a towel.

“If I weren’t a poet, I’d be on the tennis circuit,” she greeted him. “Inspector O’Hare wants to see me for questioning. Maybe I did away with Desmond is the idea.”

“That genealogist,” Luke said, “the fellow who was researching the Moore family background for Desmond?”

“Fergus Callaghan. What about him?”

“What happened to Callaghan’s research? His genealogical research for Desmond? What did he find out? About the Moores?”

Winifred grinned. “God knows! Probably nothing. Mr. Callaghan quit on Desmond. Couldn’t stand my bastard cousin, no doubt. I couldn’t even find a bill from Callaghan. If I know Desmond, he wanted this Callaghan to fudge up exalted phony stuff about our family.”

“I always thought genealogists delivered phony stuff,” Luke said, “if they figured that’s what you were paying them for.”

“Did you, now?” Winifred draped the towel around her sweaty neck and gave him a derisive look. “Not this Fergus Callaghan. He’s a special breed of Irishman. More interested in Irish history than in a pint of Guinness. He’s deep into Irish tradition; writes little essays in Gaelic for the Gaelic press. I’ve a friend with similar interests; he reads Callaghan’s stuff. That’s how I know. Can you imagine Desmond trying to subvert a man like that? Not that I can prove it. Not that I even care to.” She looked shrewdly at Luke. “What’s this about?”

“I’m in a forest,” Luke said, smiling at her, “following a trail of bread crumbs.”

“You mean,” Winifred said, “you’re falling in love with her.”

44

In the late Desmond Moore’s bedroom, Rose turned the key and locked the door. She went to the gold-leaf Chinese cabinet. She slid open the drawer and lifted out a box. She opened the box and took out one of the diamond necklaces. She held it up. The diamonds glittered, the emerald sparkled. There were at least six or eight of them left. Mr. Desmond had always kept one in a red leather jewelry case in the Florentine desk in the library. Rose imagined Mr. Desmond in the library lifting a necklace from the velvet in the red leather case, a girl’s eyes widening, the girl giving a gasp.
Come into my parlor.
The world was stocked with girls transfixed like rabbits at the sight of a diamond. And offered to them by the rich and handsome Desmond Moore. Rose dropped the necklace back in the box, returned the box to the drawer, and closed the cabinet.

“Swoon first, weep later,” Janet said, when they’d found out about it, though too late, too late.… Rose could feel her face squinch up. She shouldn’t cry; she’d look a mess, serving lunch. Janet said she should stop coming in here and brooding about it; she was just driving needles under her fingernails.

Now Janet had told Mr. Willinger about the necklaces and how Mr. Desmond did it. “I wouldn’t have told him anything, except that he’s, you know, one of … one of…”

“Yes,” Rose had said. Janet meant because Mr. Willinger was AA, like her; the AAs had some kind of understood thing among them, a communion like, like they were all Catholics or something.

Rose dug her handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. Hannah was all right now; their mother didn’t know a thing. “It’s like nothing ever happened,” Janet had comforted her when she’d got back from London yesterday. They’d had a biscuit and tea in Rose’s room, Rose still shivering in spite of her warm flannel robe.

Rose had managed a smile over her biscuit. She truly loved Janet; Janet was her best friend. It was good to be back at Castle Moore in her cozy room, comforting somehow, and always good things to eat down in the big kitchen.

45

The house at Fourteen Boylston Street was Georgian, of white stone. It was tall and narrow and had a paneled front door with a fanlight.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The leafy street was quiet. Luke had driven to Dublin directly after lunch; Winifred had gone back to the tennis court; Sheila was chasing balls for her. Torrey had not appeared for lunch. He’d felt a sharp disappointment. Where was she? Doing what? Meantime—

There were two polished brass nameplates beside the door. Luke pressed the bell of the upper one. Because he was expected, there was the immediate sound of a buzzer. He pushed upon the door and went up a curving staircase that had a white banister with mahogany trim. Another door. He knocked.

“Ah,” Fergus Callaghan said, opening the door, “Mr. Willinger.” He wore tan corduroy pants and over a blue shirt, the kind of shapeless beige cardigan that made Luke think of Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in
My Fair Lady.
Fergus Callaghan was short, thick in the waist, and balding; but to Luke there was somehow a romantic quality to the man, perhaps because Winifred Moore had told him of Fergus Callaghan’s interest in Irish history. Luke thought of old Irish folktales and romances, wars and famine, Gaelic songs, ruined old towers, Vikings, Norman adventurers, and Cromwell.

Yet as he came into Callaghan’s airy, spotless study, he saw that the long table beneath the bow window held the newest model of a fax-computer-printer machine. It was expensive state-of-the-art equipment. It was, in fact, the same equipment that Luke himself owned. So this genealogist, Fergus Callaghan, wasn’t kidding around.

“Well, then,” Callaghan said, “sit down, Mr. Willinger.” He waved toward a green leather armchair and himself settled on a similar chair facing it, hands clasped between his knees, face patiently inquiring.

“Thanks … Interesting photographs.” Luke glanced around. On the walls were black-and-white photographs of manor houses and castles, thatched-roof cottages, and even a blacksmith shop. Over a bookcase of thick reference books was a three-foot-long color photograph of heraldry, perhaps twenty-five to thirty coats of arms.

“Yes … some clients bring photographs.”

Luke said, “I’ll get right to it. I’ve become a partisan of Ms. Tunet in this investigation about the murder of Desmond Moore. You probably know I posted bail for her?”

“Yes. It was in the
Independent.
”

“Now I seem to’ve become an amateur detective. I’ve taken a bite out of the apple and I like the taste.”

Fergus Callaghan gave a kind of inquiring laugh, more of a cough.

“In relation to the murder,” Luke said, “I’ve become curious about the Comerfords, the Anglo-Irish family to whom the English king—Charles the Second, was it?—gave the castle and its six hundred acres. And it remained Castle Comerford until about twenty-five years ago when the Moore family came into possession. Isn’t that right?”

“Quite. Quite accurate.” Fergus Callaghan’s brow was furrowed; he looked puzzled.

“A cause for deep satisfaction in the Moore family, no doubt,” Luke said, “though possibly tinged with bitterness.”

“Bitterness? Because of Ireland’s history, you mean? The suffering under English rule? Possibly. Still, all in the past, what with the Irish republic. One can’t keep blaming—”

Luke leaned forward. “Ideally, yes, Mr. Callaghan. But I can imagine someone, for whatever reason, putting on a hair shirt of … of remembrance, let’s say. Wounds of the past. Rubbing in the salt. Thinking about their family’s bloodshed. And how often they died of starvation while the great Anglo-Irish landlords in Ireland, landlords like the Comerfords, for instance, ate beef and drank cream.”