The Irish Cottage Murder

by Dicey Deere

  He started the throttle on the motorbike and glanced at his watch. Almost twenty past twelve. Just right. Any minute, Maureen would be arriving back at the cottage from her morning job in Ballynagh. His excuse to visit her would be that he’d come for a loaf of her bread. It was always the same excuse. But the truth was that just the sight of Maureen Devlin would ease his heart.

  4

  Twelve-fifteen. On the narrow access road between the tall hedges of blackberry bushes, thistle, and holly, Maureen Devlin, six years widowed, wheeled her bicycle to a stop. In her bicycle basket were two five-pound bags of flour. In a few minutes she’d be home in the cottage with her feet in a basin of hot water. Then she and Finola would have a tomato sandwich for lunch and a cup of tea. After that, she’d bake the bread. She already had three orders.

  Who had left that yellow Saab parked near the hedge? The car door was hanging open. Maureen looked around. Nobody. No sound except for birds and the rackety hum of a mowing machine in the McInnerny’s field a quarter mile away.

  She wheeled the bicycle toward the break in the hedge. She could feel the pebbles through the soles of her black sneakers, though she’d put on heavy woolen stockings against the early morning cold. The full skirt of her navy cotton dress came almost down to her ankles. She had rolled up the sleeves of her faded red sweater so that the raveled cuffs and elbows didn’t show. When Desmond Moore paid her for the loaves, she’d buy the blue dress at Clery’s in Dublin for Finola’s birthday. Finola would be eight next month. Maureen would take the bus to Dublin on her next day off. She got one day off a month. Mr. Moore wanted six loaves. He had guests. He paid her two pounds a loaf. But the way he handed her the money! Holding out the pound notes folded the long way, his head turned a little aside, as though to avoid contamination. Lord-of-the-manor dispensing largesse to a beggar. As though those Moores hadn’t come up from a dung heap! Come up? What did she mean, up? Joyce to Desmond Moore was likely only a girl’s name. And the poetry of Seamus Heany so much gobbledygook.

  But baking bread was the only way she knew to make a living. Working in O’Curry’s butcher shop in Ballynagh from six in the morning to twelve noon came to only thirty-five pounds a week. Still, what choice did she have? In Dublin they wanted young girls for the jobs. Besides, her looks were shot—her skin was no longer soft and creamy, and although her curly brown hair still had a burnished gold look, it was striated with crinkled gray strands. Gone was the passion, the surging love and wild whispering nights and her skin throbbing with joy. Now she had no husband. But at least there was Finola.

  That yellow car. A Saab. Maybe a man had stopped to urinate behind the break in the hedge? A pity, a perishing pity if he was modest. She had to get home!

  She gave a loud cough to warn the fellow urinating and made her way as usual through the break in the hedge.

  5

  “Ah, my darlin’ Sheila!” Winifred Moore said. “Look at that baby-sized castle! Eighteen bedrooms. Desmond won’t dare protest that he hasn’t room to put us up. Though he’d rather have a cobra than me!” The Jeep she drove with careless expertise through Castle Moore’s iron gates was from Hertz, rented in Dun Laoghaire when the ferry arrived from England.

  It was Tuesday noon, half after twelve, lunchtime. The sun was high. From somewhere in the distance came the sound of a mowing machine. A wind blew the faint sweet-sharp smell of cut grass from a meadow.

  “I’ve a mind to say in front of Desmond’s servants that I haven’t got two pence to nestle together,” Winifred went on. “Desmond’ll start blinking his yellow-green eyes in a rage, hating me to say it before servants. ‘Blinky’ Desmond’s how I always think of him.” She laughed her full-throated laugh, showing strong white teeth. Her face was square-jawed. Her cheeks had a high russet color, like a stain. There was a look of suppressed humor about her mouth and in her hazel eyes. A worn, tan suede hat with a floppy brim was pulled down over her brown hair, which was twisted up into a knot just above the collar of her navy shirt. She was big-boned, but with little fat. She wore jeans and sturdy brown brogues.

  “Winifred, really!” Sheila turned to look at her, “You know I can deduct our expenses, everything from London on.” Sheila Flaxton owned and edited London’s well-known Sisters in Poetry, six issues a year, fourteen pounds annually. Sisters had published the four poems for which Winifred Moore, born and bred in Dun Laoghaire, this coming Friday, would receive the year’s Irish Women’s Poetry Award at the Women’s Academy in Dublin. The prize was one hundred Irish pounds. A tea would be laid on.

  Sheila was forty, short and wispy, with a blue-eyed look of innocence in a somewhat squishy-looking, pasty face. She favored long, flowered skirts and wore flat-heeled shoes that looked vaguely like ballet slippers. She recognized quality in literature and admired Winifred Moore’s poetry tremendously. A pity there was little money in it and, often, none.

  A maid in a white-aproned, blue uniform was washing a flower-filled iron urn on one of the pedestals that flanked Castle Moore’s great curving sweep of stone steps. She turned and squinted toward them as Winifred Moore drove up.

  “Rose?” Winifred Moore called out, “Is that you? Remember me … from last August? Time of the Kerrygold Dublin Horse Show? Winifred Moore, Mr. Moore’s cousin, from London.”

  “Of course, Miss … Ms. Moore.” Rose smiled, twisting the damp rag in her hands.

  “I didn’t phone. I thought I’d just come out. Need digs for a week.” Cheap digs, free digs. She was the poor mouse, Desmond the rich one. The pity of it was that she would likely never inherit because Desmond was still young, alas, two years younger than she and healthy as a prize hog. And what if he were to marry? “I figured Mr. Moore would have room to put us up. This is Ms. Flaxton, from London.”

  “Yes, ma’am. How do you do, ma’am. Mr. Moore’s off at a horse sale in Wexford. I’ll just let Janet Slocum know you’re here. She’s the maid in charge. She’ll see to getting you settled in.”

  “A sandwich first thing, if you don’t mind, Rose, we’re starved. And a lager. Orange juice for Ms. Flaxton, though.” Winifred sprang from the Jeep, then reached back, yanked out two soft-pack suitcases, and went up the steps. Sheila followed.

  In the great circular hall, Winifred asked, “Any other guests, here?”

  “Just one, ma’am. An American young woman, Ms. Tunet. Ms. Torrey Tunet. She arrived last night.”

  Winifred’s brows went up. She grinned at Sheila. “Desmond’s latest, no doubt!—another eager young woman who thinks, erroneously, of marriage-cum-Desmond. Disillusionment, followed by tears enough to overflow the Liffey.” And to Rose, “That’s all?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But there’ll be a landscaping man. Architect is it? Coming this afternoon.”

  “Designer, you mean?”

  “I guess, ma’am. For laying out the gardens.”

  “Gardens? What d’you mean, gardens, Rose?”

  “Something about the taxes on the castle, ma’am. Mr. Desmond saw in an American magazine about how this architect, pardon, ma’am, designer, laid out a garden for Laughlin House in county Meath. So last month—June, wasn’t it, when he was in America—he visited that architect—designer, I mean, excuse me, ma’am—and…” Rose stopped. It was getting too complicated. And Winifred Moore was looking at her as if she wanted to laugh. Rose herself wanted to cry. She so envied people who didn’t get flustered but could explain things without blushing and being afraid of mixing everything up.

  “Rose,” Winifred said, “some fool, some oaf, has parked a yellow Saab a couple of hundred yards up the road on the wrong side. I almost ran into it. You might ring up the village police. If the car is still there, it should be ticketed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  “What a clever apple, that Desmond!” Winifred said to Sheila. “Landscaping! Taxes. That’s what Desmond’s about.”

  They had unpacked and were drinking lager and orange juice and eating ham sandwiches with mustard o
n Irish soda bread on the stone-flagged balcony of the bedroom that Janet Slocum had chosen for Winifred.

  “Delicious bread,” Sheila said. “I wish I could gain.” She was thin and anemic. “Taxes?”

  “In Ireland,” Winifred said, “if you have a Georgian house or castle or other historical gem and you open your gardens to the public one month of the year, on a certain day of the week each week of that month, you don’t have to pay a property tax.”

  “So … your cousin, Desmond…?”

  “It’ll save him a pile in taxes. But—” Winifred frowned down at her sandwich—”on second thought, I don’t think that’s exactly it with Desmond. I wish it were. I wish it were just money.”

  “You sound weird, darlin’. Maybe your cousin Desmond simply loves gardens. People do.”

  “Not Desmond. It could be more of his autocratic—that overlord obsession of his.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘overlord’?”

  “Oh…” Winifred shrugged. “His trying to be an autocrat like those Anglo-Irish Comerfords who once owned this castle.” Winifred bit into her ham sandwich. “Getting even, somehow.”

  “I never can understand,” Sheila said, “why people can’t just be themselves.” She took a last sip of her orange juice. “Anyway, I’m sleepy. I’m going to take a nap. Wake me in an hour, will you?”

  6

  In Dublin, at lunchtime Torrey left the four-star Shelbourne Hotel on Saint Stephen’s Green. The first session of the Hungarian-Belgian conference had been long, grueling, exhausting, and exciting. It was always a high-wire act. Each time she was confident she could perform flawlessly. One misstep wasn’t sure death to her career, but close. She loved it.

  She walked fast, aimlessly, taking deep breaths. The conference promised to be a challenge. The Hungarian representative had been fussy, contradicting himself, stumbling and stuttering besides. Stock exchange was tozsde in Hungarian; gold was arany, government was kormany. She needed to keep her head clear.

  “Oh, look! Lovely rings, aren’t they, Albert? And look at those turquoise earrings!” A woman’s breathy English voice; Torrey could see her dumpy figure reflected in the jewelry shop window, the man beside her. “Come on, Alice,” the man said. “You think I’m the Bank of England?” The two people disappeared up the street.

  Why was she standing here on Grafton Street staring into the window of this elegant jewelry shop? Why? Her eyes widened; her heart beat faster. In the back of her mind, was the question lurking: Did they sometimes buy jewelry, as well as sell it?

  “No!” she said, aloud, vehemently. But—

  Money, money, money. Money makes the world go round.… Liza Minnelli, spangled, strutting and singing in Cabaret. Joel Grey, deadpan, comic-grotesque stick figure mincing on a nightclub stage, rouged cheeks, white face, Money, money, money.

  She bit her lips. Her theft in North Hawk those years ago had led to such terrible tragedies. But now she had a chance to make up for one of those tragedies: The new surgery for that particular kind of injury, the surgery that could make a person with useless legs stand up and walk again. It could be done. It would cost forty thousand dollars. But if she couldn’t pin down the time frame by committing the money within the next three weeks, there would be the wait of a year. Another year of Donna’s thin body in the wheelchair.

  “Watch out, ma’am!” Two young boys on skateboards swooped past, one after the other. Torrey looked unseeingly after them, then walked slowly up Grafton Street away from the jewelry shop.

  7

  That goddamned plate of asparagus soup.

  Luke Willinger swore under his breath. Jet-lagged, head aching, eyes grainy, he stood on a gravel path in the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin. It was Tuesday. A clock bonged the noon hour; he’d head for Castle Moore after a pub lunch. Desmond Moore had given him the directions. And he had a map, courtesy of the car rental company at the Dublin airport.

  But, goddamn it!—

  Torrey Tunet. The thief. She was far worse than a thorn in his side. Torrey Tunet. Destroyer of his family. Through her, destruction and death. His mother’s tears, his kid brother’s numbed little face, the black-bordered notice in the North Hawk Weekly.

  And now, like him, she was a guest of Desmond Moore at Castle Moore. Tonight, and all week, he’d be sleeping under the same roof as Torrey Tunet. Christ!

  All because of the asparagus soup that evening two weeks ago at the Waterside Inn in North Hawk. He saw himself and his new client, Desmond Moore, Massachusetts resident and owner of a castle in Ireland, being ushered by the headwaiter to his table, passing the candlelit table of the little thief, become so elegant a young woman … saw Desmond Moore’s sleeve accidentally brush her table, rucking up the white tablecloth and sweeping the plate of cold asparagus soup into her lap. Confusion, laughter, waiters, bus-boys mopping up … Desmond Moore apologizing, Desmond spotting the little thief’s book of Gaelic grammar on the table, his curiosity, then his awakening sexual interest as he looked into the gray eyes with their rim of short black lashes.

  “Gaelic?” Moore had asked, nodding toward the book.

  “Just recreation,” she’d answered. She was an interpreter and translator. She would be in Dublin on an interpreting job in a couple of weeks, French and Hungarian. Ireland was neutral terrain. “But I always like to be familiar with a few words of the language of any country where I’m working. Gaelic—I understand it’s called ‘Irish’ these days?—is the official language of Ireland, isn’t it? And still used mostly in the Gaeltacht parts of Ireland.”

  “Dublin? You’ll be in Dublin?” Desmond Moore had exclaimed. “I’ve ruined your dress with that asparagus soup. You’ve got to be my guest at Castle Moore.”

  “No, really,” with a laugh, “but thanks.”

  And Moore, “I mean it! Twenty minutes from Dublin. I’ve a stable, good horses to ride, a lake…”

  The rotten little thief had slanted a glance at Luke, a malicious glance, cold as dry ice, smoking cold. Almost as though she were daring him to tell Desmond Moore what he knew about her. Or was she remembering the stone shattering the windshield when she was eighteen and necking one night with Jeremy Lowe in Lowe’s car on old Forsythe Road? Who else but he, Luke Willinger, had flung it? Ten years ago. He was then twenty-two; now, at thirty-two, he flexed his fingers as though they were gripping another stone.

  “… dating back to 1795”—a Botanic Gardens guide leading a tour group past, was saying—”twenty thousand varieties of plants, also including a rose garden and a vegetable garden.”

  He left the Botanic Gardens. In a nearby pub he had a meat pie and coffee. An asparagus soup had ruined any pleasure in his forthcoming week at Castle Moore, where he’d be studying the terrain and working out landscaping plans. Desmond Moore was very rich. Luke swallowed the last of the coffee. Sixteen acres of garden, a challenging project. A good fee was in order.

  As for the little thief—

  He swore under his breath. Whatever he could spoil for Torrey Tunet, he would spoil. Whatever he could ruin, he would ruin.

  8

  At half after twelve, Fergus Callaghan wheeled his motorbike off the bridle path and propped it beside a stand of birches. He’d left his genealogical research for Desmond Moore in the Castle Moore library, and momentarily he felt happily free of it.

  He walked through the woods. They were speckled with sunlight, leaves rustling in the breeze.

  Fergus reached the cottage. A peaceful-sounding buzzing of grasshoppers came from the weedy grass. A rabbit stood on hind legs, eyed Fergus an instant, and vanished.

  “Mrs. Devlin?” Fergus stood before the stone lintel of the cottage and cocked his head, listening. He could hear her singing to herself, an old ballad he couldn’t place. The door was not on the latch but open an inch.

  Had she heard him? He waited patiently, gazing at the peeling green paint on the door. He’d be happy to paint the door for her. He could bring his electric sander and get rid of the bubb
led old flaking paint. He would smooth it down, slick as peeled birch. Or maybe she’d like a different color. He’d bring a color chart; she could choose the color. Dare he suggest it?

  He glanced around. Each time he came to the cottage, with the pretense that he’d come for bread, he thought it a pity that Maureen Devlin had no time for a patch of garden. Vegetables, maybe; the pleasure of picking her own vegetables. Not much space for a garden though. There were only a few feet of uncut grass and weeds, enough so that the cottage was not engulfed by the surrounding woods. There was a grassy path worn by Maureen’s going daily to and from the cottage, past the little pond and farther on to the break in the hedge in order to reach the road.

  Fergus squinted at a trampled patch of weeds beneath one of the small windows. It looked scuffed; a clod of fresh earth was turned up. Perhaps a badger had been investigating, foraging for food. Anyway, that spot got plenty of sun. If ever Maureen had a vegetable garden, it should be there.

  Low, her contralto voice humming now. Perhaps she hadn’t heard him. “Mrs. Devlin?” he called again, louder.

  “Fergus Callaghan? Come in.”

  He pushed open the door. She was in the old rocker by the stove, soaking her feet in a dishpan. She looked exhausted and beautiful. Her navy skirt was rucked up above her white knees, which showed blue tracings of veins. The water in the battered dishpan reached above her ankles. Fergus felt a painful rush of love and embarrassment. He blushed. “You’re fine, I hope, Mrs. Devlin?”

  “As fine as ever I’ll be, Mr. Callaghan.” Tired as she seemed, there was a teasing glint in her dark blue eyes. “You have a good reason for stopping by?”

  “Reason? Stopping by?” He felt very warm. “Bread. Yes, I just left Castle Moore; I’d had an appointment. I was going past through the woods on my motorbike when I thought, bread. Bread. That you might be baking. Or have baked … might have baked…”