The Irish Cottage Murder

by Dicey Deere

  The Ballynagh police station was a glass-fronted room, twenty feet wide. It was on Bishop Street, the main street of the village, and across from O’Malley’s Pub. When the wind blew from the east, it smelled of beer.

  “Petrol?” O’Hare asked.

  “Near empty. Could’ve made it to Dublin. Just.”

  Inspector O’Hare ran a guiding finger on the car-for-hire contract. “Lars Kasvi, 19 Vuorikatu, Helsinki, Finland. A Saab, automatic shift. Rented at the airport in Dublin, so he might’ve come by way of England. Heathrow. He got Murray’s 10-percent discount for drivers over fifty-five.”

  The phone rang. It was Chief Superintendent O’Reilly of the Murder Squad at Dublin Castle. “Strangled,” O’Reilly said. “Wallet was in his pants pocket. Lars Kasvi, fifty-eight, Finnish. Married, invalid wife, children, grandchildren, he—”

  “Kasvi.” Just as O’Hare had suspected. “Lars Kasvi left a yellow Saab from Murray’s on the access road near Castle Moore yesterday morning. We just had it hauled in.”

  “That right? A minute, O’Hare.”

  O’Hare waited. He could hear Chief Superintendent O’Reilly talking to someone, a murmur of voices. Then O’Reilly came back on the wire.

  “O’Hare? We’ve got his business notebook with names and addresses. Buyer of woolen goods for Stockmann’s in Helsinki. Stockmann’s is the biggest department store in Finland; fills an entire block. Mr. Kasvi was on a buying trip. We’ll check his sources in Cork, Limerick, Wicklow, and so on; might turn up something. He visited six counties.”

  “Any theory? Though it’s still too early—”

  “Right. But his wallet was empty. Only a couple of pounds in a pants pocket. Robbery a possible motive. So many teenagers lately getting high on Ecstasy, other drugs, needing money. Aside from that, I’ve been in touch with Helsinki. Kasvi was a heavy drinker. Also, in Helsinki, given to picking up women in Sibelius Park. Has a snow white polar dog, his companion. Change that to past tense.”

  “Strangled,” O’Hare said. “So it would have to have been a man? The killer?”

  “Or a woman. Mr. Kasvi had such a high level of alcohol in his system, he couldn’t have fought off a mosquito. Or let’s say a woman of average strength. Maybe no bigger than the young woman who found the body. That American woman.”

  “Miss Tunet. Miss Torrey Tunet.”

  “Yes, Superintendent.” O’Hare nodded into the phone. He would, of course, check Miss Tunet’s background. Routine.

  * * *

  At seven-thirty, Inspector O’Hare telephoned the news of the dead man’s identity, and the confirmation that he had been murdered. By dinnertime at Castle Moore, when Rose brought the bucket of ice into the library for the before-dinner drinks, they all knew.

  “God! Murder!” Winifred Moore said, grinning. She raised her drink, which was vodka, and looked around the library at the others. “Here’s to civilization on planet Earth … I’m starved; it’s almost eight o’clock. I could eat a cow. Or a sheep.” From her place near the library fireplace, she glanced at Luke, who was drinking a Coke with a twist. “You an alcoholic?”

  “Yup.” He never hid it. Let people make of it what they would. In the bull’s-eye mirror above the library fireplace he eyed Torrey Tunet. She looked tired and sober. It irritated him that tiredness became her, softened something in her. She wore wide-cut, black satin slacks and a red silk knitted sweater that clung to her delicately curved body. He thought of his enraged throwing of the stone through the windshield years ago in North Hawk. She knew it had been him because the next morning he had found the stone in a box, ribbon-tied, at his front door.

  “That damned Finn!” Desmond Moore burst out angrily. Desmond was on his second drink. His cousin Winifred and her poetry editor friend Sheila were finishing their first.

  “That damned Finn!” Desmond repeated. “It’ll get about that there was a murder on my property. It’ll militate against people coming to visit my projected gardens.”

  “Quite the opposite, you fool!” Winifred said scornfully. “People love blood and gore.”

  “A fool, am I?” Desmond gave his cousin a baleful look. His eyes were bloodshot, had been bloodshot all day. He stared at Winifred with hatred. Then he smiled at her, a cold, mirthless drawing back of his teeth. “But I’m a rich fool, Winnie, keep that in mind. A fool who might even … marry.” He wet his lips, half-turned and smiled at Torrey, then looked back at Winifred, “So, Winnie, my dear cousin, don’t have any great expectations.”

  Winifred Moore took a gulp of her vodka. Luke saw her face redden, her usual good humor abruptly eclipsed like a light going out. Something like misery took its place—then, rage. He saw Sheila Flaxton quickly put a restraining hand on Winifred’s arm and shake her head in warning; but Winifred yanked her arm free.

  “I’d like to go to the airport,” Winifred said between gritted teeth, “and hire a small plane and fly it over all of Dublin County, trailing smoke that spelled out ‘Desmond Moore is an asshole.’”

  “Ahh,” Desmond said, still smiling. “Indeed?”

  “Indeed,” Winifred said, and threw her drink in Desmond’s face.

  * * *

  Desmond wiped drops of vodka from his chin. For a half minute he stood gazing at Winifred. Then he turned and walked with deliberate steps to the Florentine desk. He pressed an inlaid corner of the desk; there was a click, and he pulled open a narrow drawer. He took out an oblong maroon leather case and opened it to reveal a diamond necklace on a black velvet cushion. He held up the glittering necklace with a single emerald pendant.

  “Heavens!” An awed gasp from Sheila.

  Desmond turned to Torrey Tunet. “I’ve noticed a couple of times how much you admired the portrait of my grandmother wearing this necklace, the portrait on the staircase. The necklace is a family heirloom. I’d like you to wear it during dinner this evening. It would suit what you’re wearing. In fact, it suits you.” He went smiling to Torrey, stepped behind her, and clasped the necklace around her neck; his fingers lingered an instant longer on her nape, then slid away, caressingly, down her back.

  “But … No!” Torrey said. She looked stunned. And—Luke had to give her that—stunning. Lightly tanned throat sparkling with diamonds down the V-necked red silk sweater, the emerald pendant between her breasts. He felt a sexual stirring; in helpless anger he warred against it.

  A small cough from the doorway. Rose, white-aproned, eyes downcast, announcing dinner.

  13

  “The hell with her!” Desmond poured a Bordeaux into the Baccarat glasses. He felt excited, almost feverish. The green emerald between Torrey Tunet’s breasts caught the candlelight in the centerpiece of the dining table. They were sitting down to a dinner of grilled salmon with leek sauce and potatoes mashed with spring onions. There were just the three of them: he and Torrey Tunet and Luke Willinger. His cousin Winifred had strode from the castle snorting like a dragon, followed by her acolyte, Sheila Flaxton. They’d climbed into the Jeep and torn off to Dublin for dinner with “civilized creatures,” as Winifred had flung at him hoarsely in parting.

  “Gone to some leather-jacketed dyke hang-out, for Christ’s sake,” Desmond had said to Luke and Torrey.

  He felt the expensive weight of the Baccarat glass in his hand. He looked at the exquisite cut on the crystal. It signaled more than richness, more than luxury. It signaled authority. Power. He felt it almost as a sexual ecstasy. For those hundreds of years, the English aristocracy in Ireland, in their great mansions and castles, had wielded a cruel power throughout Ireland. But that was the time of his forebears. The power had shifted. Things political had changed, would change more. But he was not one for Sinn Fein. Not one for the IRA. Never, for him, to band together with anyone. Always, as if in some twilight place, he got revenge his own way. Power, through riches, was his. His! Not any longer for a Moore to be a stable boy under the lash of English lords. Arrogant lords. The Comerfords. He gave a sudden shudder.

  “Why is it
so hot!” Torrey Tunet was looking at him, questioningly.

  At her words, he saw the wine glass in his hand, felt the warmth of the evening, and then—another shudder; it was always, always as though he himself were a stable boy of that cruel time, feeling the searing whiplash. He could feel the red welts rising, the scream in his throat.

  “Why is it suddenly so hot?” Torrey appealed to him. Beads of perspiration were on her upper lip. She blew a breath upward and reached for her glass of water; ice tinkled.

  Desmond forced himself from that strange miasma of the past that so often overtook him. He blinked his eyes; he became aware of the humid warmth of the evening. He watched Torrey lift the glass to her lips. Did she know what the shape of her lower lip did to men? He had plans for this young lady.

  “Kasvi,” Luke Willinger said, “Lars Kasvi. Poor fellow. And his family in Finland. Makes me think how in The Virgin Spring, that Swedish movie of Ingmar Bergman’s, the thieves who raped and murdered the girl stole her robe. That bit of thievery gave them away.” He half-turned away from Torrey on his right. He looked through the great arched dining gallery windows to where beyond the long sweep of cropped lawn lay the woods. It was barely dark and the sky was a wash of lilac and magenta, darkening to purple; the woods looked black. “Kasvi,” he said, “Lars Kasvi driving along a country road in Ireland was possibly—”

  “Plant,” Torrey Tunet said, sounding absentminded.

  “What?” Luke looked at her.

  “In Finnish. Kasvi means ‘plant’ in Finnish.”

  “Oh.” Was there any language that Torrey Tunet didn’t dance around in? The air had grown thick and humid. Tendrils of dark curls, dampened by perspiration, clung in flat, Matisse-like clusters to her brow; they looked varnished on. Luke wanted to shed his jacket; he could feel a trickle of perspiration sliding down his rib cage under his shirt.

  “Weird, this heat,” Desmond said. “It happens sometimes. We’re at fifty-two to sixty-eight Fahrenheit in July in this part of Wicklow, then—bang!—humidity comes in thick as a fog. It rolls up to the castle from the lake beyond the southwest fields a quarter of a mile away. The lake itself is like a cold drink.”

  “Ummm,” Torrey Tunet said. There was dew on her upper lip. “Sounds delicious.”

  Desmond, looking at her, ran a finger along the rim of his wine glass. “I’ve a bathhouse at the lake. Stock of towels and the like. A case of lager. Swimsuits for the chaste or modest.” He leaned toward Torrey. “Why not? After dinner, why not cool off the way God meant us to?”

  “Yes,” Torrey said. “Why not?”

  14

  They left right after dinner, pushing back their chairs and going out through the great hall.

  It was a ten-minute walk on a grassy path. Tree branches above the path were dark against the magenta; there was a vestigal moon, still white. There was no breeze; here and there a firefly’s momenary flicker.

  Desmond led the way, talking over his shoulder about the Moore estate, but feverishly conscious of Torrey walking behind him at Luke Willinger’s side. In his mind’s eye, he saw her legs moving against her loose, black pants, saw the swell of her breasts with the emerald blazing between them, saw the small brown mole on her neck beneath her left ear, the diamond necklace sparkling on her throat. He had planted a seed; what would she do with it? Very soon he would know. He swallowed, tickled at the possibilities. Either way, she would lose.

  “Southwest,” Luke Willinger said, “Dublin’s to the northeast, right?”

  “Yes … I’ve six hundred acres,” Desmond said. “Toward the northeast are the mountains, very wild; below are ancient sheep meadows; then the woods that harbor deer and small animals. The bridle path that meets the road goes through those northeast woods.”

  “That’s where I found Lars Kasvi’s body,” Torrey said.

  “East of the bridle path is a mess of swamp and bogs. Farther on, toward the access road to Dublin, are three or four scummy pools. Nearby only an old groundsman’s cottage is still livable. The woman who bakes the bread we had tonight lives there.”

  “Romantic,” Torrey said, “Old cottages, thatched roofs. And now, cars for hire, flights into Ireland on a dozen airlines, the Irish police force: the garda—or gardai if it’s plural—officially the Garda Siochana, that’s Gaelic.”

  “Meaning what?” Luke Willinger asked.

  “Protector of the Peace,” Torrey said. She looked up through the trees; the white moon was now almost gold. Between herself and Luke Willinger there could never be peace. Luke Willinger, a man with style and humor and with a touch of genius in his work, owed it to himself to despise her. Death had created a chasm between them. A death she had caused. And now, ironically, here he was at Castle Moore.

  “There’s the lake,” Desmond said.

  Through the trees ahead, she glimpsed the flat silver of the lake; a fragment of fog like a piece of cotton lay over it.

  15

  At Pizzaland Pizzeria at Saint Stephen’s Green, Winifred and Sheila were eating deep-dish pizza because Winifred had been too angry to settle down to a calm, normal dinner in a Dublin restaurant, despite Sheila’s expense account.

  “God! How I hate him!” Winifred said bitterly, “Not to mention that I got cheated. Desmond, that arrogant pig, inherited it all. Even though my father and Desmond’s father were brothers.”

  “You never did say why he got it. Do you know?”

  “Of course I know. My poor father, Danny Moore! Officially, he died under a wagon in Dun Laoghaire, but actually he died of maudlin self-pity helped along by booze. My father was brother to Desmond’s father, Sean. When pa was twenty, he visited Ireland and fell in love with a shipfitter’s daughter named Sarah O’Shea from Dun Laoghaire. He got her pregnant and married her, though the Moores raised holy hell.

  “She wouldn’t leave her family in Dun Laoghaire, so pa stayed and went to work clerking in a ship’s chandler’s shop … to the shame of the Moores in America. They’d maybe have forgiven him, but ma died in childbirth when I was born. In some crazy heartbroken way, pa blamed the family, as though they were some vengeful, spiteful power who’d done it to punish him and my mother. He swore he’d take nothing from them, ever. And he never did.”

  “So that’s how you grew up in Ireland. You never wanted to say.”

  “Yes … Grew up in Dun Laoghaire, with the piers reaching out to the sea, the harbor with the mail boats leaving every day taking emigrants from Ireland to seek their fortune in London. I ached with longing, a dirty-faced kid whose father wept in pubs. I grew up scribbling, then cleaning rooms in a guest house and taking the bus to Dublin to study lit at Trinity. Then the bus back to Dun Laoghaire, where I’d stand at the harbor watching the boats move off, whistles tooting. A month after my father was killed, I bought my boat ticket. It cost all the money I had. I was nineteen.”

  “So your father was a ship’s chandler’s clerk? If the Moores were so pissed—so angry at your father—how come you’re in line to inherit Castle Moore?”

  “Moores for the Moores. It was in Sean’s will that the Moore property devolve on the Moores. So if Desmond died and left no wife or progeny, the property would go to Danny or his progeny. That’s me, darlin’.” She dropped her pizza crust on the table. “Damn Desmond! I could have done with a decent dinner and a bottle of Desmond’s vintage wine. And Rose said there was a rhubarb pie and some special bread a woman bakes for Desmond. Damn him! And tonight. Just trying to torture me!” She glared at her pizza crust. “Sometimes I’d like to kill Desmond.”

  16

  In the wooden changing cubicle beside the lake, Torrey pulled off the silk knitted sweater. She got out of her flat black sandals and slipped down her pants and panties. The swimsuits were in a big woven basket. They were all bikinis. She chose a dark blue that looked a fairly decent fit and put it on.

  She unclasped the diamond necklace and laid it on top of her clothes on the folding canvas stool. She stood still, looking down at it.
She was aware of a faint rustle of leaves; a small breeze had come up. She heard voices outside, Desmond Moore and Luke Willinger making their way down to the lake. Their voices became fainter. She heard splashing; they were already swimming about.

  She turned from the necklace. Don’t think. Don’t think. There was a basket of Japanese rubber sandals near the little swing door. She chose a pair and put them on.

  She opened the door to leave. For a moment she stood there, looking out. In the moonlight she saw that the two swimmers were already a couple of hundred feet from the edge of the lake.

  She turned back. She picked up the diamond necklace and clasped it around her neck. She ran out and down to the lake. She waded, gasping, into the icy water, then dived into the blackness.

  17

  In the stables, the bay mare, Darlin’ Pie, neighed and stamped. “’Tis the moonlight,” Brian Coffey mumbled, turning in his bed. His rooms were a former gardener’s quarters at one end of the U-shaped stable, right over the mare’s stall. He’d put Darlin’ Pie in box number three because he liked to keep an eye on a new-bought mare, “tune in to her,” was the way he put it.

  He sat up. Eyes half-closed, he got out of bed and went sleepily to the bathroom. When he came back he sat down on the edge of the bed, head hanging, elbows on knees, pushing his fingers through his red hair, rubbing his scalp.

  Outside the stables, voices. Brian lifted his head, listening. Mr. Desmond’s voice, a woman’s, and that landscape man’s, the American’s. They’d be coming from the lake. Three people. Usually it was just Mr. Desmond and a woman. Once it was an English society girl; another time a student from Trinity College; once, a village girl, just a kid. All kinds.

  Brian pulled the sheet back over him, shut his eyes, and burrowed his face in the pillow. Some things he didn’t want to know about.