The Irish Cottage Murder

by Dicey Deere

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Teaser

  Other titles from St. Martin’s Minotaur Mysteries

  Copyright

  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

  Fourteen-foot-high bookshelves lined the walls of the library at Castle Moore. Arched windows soared. It was noon. A bronze clock ticked on the Florentine desk with its red leather top.

  Fergus Callaghan, genealogist, working at the desk, flung down his pencil in exasperation. His wrist struck his teacup. Tea spilled onto the red leather desktop and onto Fergus’s tweed trousers. “Shit!” Fergus said.

  On his feet, swearing, mopping with his handkerchief, Fergus thought enviously of the American girl in the red Mini-Cooper he’d seen earlier this morning disappearing up the oak-lined drive. He wished he had such freedom from care. He sighed and went back to feeling angry and frustrated.

  “Mine is a noble and ancient Irish family,” Desmond Moore had announced to Fergus in his overbearing, pompous manner.

  That had been at their first meeting. Desmond Moore had arrived by appointment at Fergus’s state-of-the-art office in the Dublin suburb of Ballsbridge.

  “I want my family traced, Mr. Callaghan. Our lands were taken from us in the seventeenth century, at the time of Cromwell. This box is my grandfather’s records. It’s all I have. Search me out my branch of the Moores, Mr. Callaghan. You’ll provide a genealogical chart, of course.”

  “But—”

  “And a coat of arms.”

  Fergus had swallowed. Integrity was his watchword. Genealogy was a tricky business. It had been his business for thirty years. He had a reputation.

  That had been two weeks ago. From his office window on Boyleston Street, he had watched the retreating self-assured figure of Mr. Desmond Moore. He had found Mr. Moore unpalatable.

  But he had accepted the job. He had accepted it because he was in love. He was in love with the widow, Maureen Devlin, who lived in a decrepit cottage in the woods a half mile from Castle Moore in Wicklow. Ordinarily, he would not have come to Castle Moore at all. He never worked on a client’s premises. He kept a distance. But—Maureen. So here he was.

  Working with the handful of barely legible documents, he’d scoured regional archives, parish records, land grants. He’d tracked back through both Protestant and Catholic records so as not to miss anything. But even the Genealogical Research Office on Kildare Street at the National Library, usually an unfailing source, had failed him.

  Now here he was, unhappily righting a teacup in the library of Castle Moore.

  He ran a hand over his balding head. He was fifty years old this past April. This was his third morning at the castle. Disliking every minute.

  “Keep on,” Desmond Moore had said at eight o’clock this Tuesday morning in the library. He had stood over Fergus, tall, hard-bodied, slapping his leather gloves against his riding breeches; he was off to a horse auction in Wexford. “Let’s see some progress. Let’s say, on the chart? Let’s say by next week?”—and significantly—”I expect you’ll come through, Mr. Callaghan”—hands in the pockets of his tweed hunting jacket, yellow-green eyes cold—“considering what I’m paying you.”

  Provide me a genealogy chart-cum-crest out of your own noggin, Fergus Callaghan. As though he, Fergus Callaghan, were a charlatan, a weasely faker of antecedents … so Desmond Moore, an arrogant thirty-six-year-old, could hang a tapestry coat-of-arms on the walls of Castle Moore in county Wicklow, Ireland. Fergus had blushed in shame at the veniality of mankind. A genealogy chart! Woven out of air.

  Desmond Moore, with brassy fair hair and cold yellow-green eyes, had an eastern Massachusetts accent. He pronounced chart like chaat. His great-grandfather, Flann Moore, had been born in Hingham to Mary and Liam Moore, who had emigrated from county Wicklow in one of the “coffin” ships to escape starvation during the potato famine. “My grandfather, Erin, Flann’s oldest son, got rich in America,” he’d told Fergus when he’d hired him. “Cement, not politics. And not running booze through Canada during Prohibition.” Desmond Moore, smoking a Havana cigar: “My father visited Ireland twenty-six years ago and bought Castle Moore. It was Castle Comerford then.
The Comerford family were English. Anglo-Irish. Usurpers. Six hundred acres, riding to hounds, the sheep-rich lands of Wicklow, Irish renters in thatched huts. Around nineteen-seventy, the Comerfords touched bottom. Stupid management. Bad investments. Buying the wrong horses.” Desmond Moore had laughed; he’d had a high-pitched laugh that had made Fergus wince. “They had to sell. Pa bought it. So the Comerfords were out. Likely weeping and rending their garments. I was ten then; I’m an only child. My mother felt lucky she’d managed the one. We spent a month here every summer after that. I own this place now. My parents died in a plane crash five years ago.”

  “Any other relatives who’d have Moore family records?” Fergus had asked hopefully.

  “None. I’ve only got one cousin. Winifred. Winifred Moore. She’s thirty-eight, two years older than me. A lesbian. Looks like a walrus. Lives in London. Writes poetry. Doesn’t believe in antecedents, family stuff. If she’d had family records, she’d likely have torn them up. Or burned them.” He shrugged. “A bitch. Doesn’t like me any more than I like her.” So that had been that.

  Standing beside the Florentine desk, Fergus looked for the tenth time at his watch.

  Quarter past twelve. Now. He shoveled the documents from the desk into his briefcase. His heart beat faster.

  * * *

  Outside, he put the briefcase in the basket of his motorbike. Getting on the bike, he felt sweaty and ugly. He was five feet, seven inches tall and twenty pounds overweight, and his belted tweed jacket was too heavy for the July day, though in this part of Wicklow the summer temperature was sometimes as low as twelve Centigrade, and this morning when he’d arrived at Castle Moore, he had shivered in the chilly air. Lately, he’d felt the cold more. He shrank from thinking of his age. He felt drearily that he had a nerve being in love with a widow who was only thirty-one.

  In love. This morning, as always, he’d left his brand-new white Toyota in Dublin and ridden the thirty miles to Castle Moore on the motorbike. That way, returning to Dublin, he could take the bridle path that wound through the woods; he could leave the bike on the path, skirt the bogs, and a five minutes’ walk through the woods would bring him to Maureen Devlin’s cottage near the hedgerow. He’d just as lief not be seen visiting her; he felt a romantic fool. Others would agree. So he didn’t want to leave his Toyota parked on the access road by the hedge for all to see.