The Irish Cottage Murder

by Dicey Deere

  “Hungarian-Belgian, sir? I’ll inquire.” The clerk tapped on a computer then picked up the phone. “Conference Room Six.” As he did so, the elevator doors opened and Torrey Tunet emerged. She was alone. She looked crisp and fresh in a businesslike dark suit and beige silk shirt. She carried a briefcase. Even from the reception desk, Luke could see an excitement in her, a wide-awake look of satisfaction, something accomplished. Did she love her work that much? He felt a surge of pleasure at her business triumph—and immediately thought, What the hell am I thinking? In five minutes he was going to nail this miserable little thief. That’s why he was here. She’d cough up that heirloom necklace. Or else. For an instant he seemed to smell her perfume as she’d gone past him where he’d hid, coming from the lake in the moonlight.

  Torrey Tunet, a skinny Romanian-American kid back in North Hawk, Massachusetts. Luke was eighteen when Torrey committed her first crime, the crime that had changed his life. He’d been at Harvard that autumn, a junior. He was going to be a doctor like his psychoanalyst father. A solid future. He’d felt privileged; he was the son of one of the richest and most highly respected men in North Hawk. Then his world exploded. Because of the Romanian kid—Torrey Tunet.

  * * *

  “So cough it up,” Luke said. “You can pretend you found it later on the shore.”

  “And if I don’t?” She leaned back in the captain’s chair. She stared back at him across the table. The pub smelled of fries. It was around the corner from the Shelbourne. It was five minutes to twelve and still empty, except for a lone customer at the bar. Outside, it had darkened. Rain spattered against the plateglass window. Another few minutes and the lunchtime crowd would begin surging in.

  There was a plate of chips on the table. They both had poured tea from a teapot; it was steaming in their cups.

  “Or I tell Desmond.” He felt coldly implacable.

  “Why didn’t you tell him before?” She was studying him, a look of curiosity.

  Why hadn’t he? He hesitated; something had puzzled him. “To give you a break. A chance to make up a story. Maybe that you’d gone down to the lake, searching, and had found the necklace on the shore.”

  “Give me a break, why? You hate me.”

  He knew abruptly what had held him back. It was that he always had to understand things. He did not understand why she had stolen the necklace when Desmond had implied she might become his wife. Did she have an uncontrollable desire to steal? Like a kleptomaniac? He doubted it.

  She sipped tea. “So … why?”

  “I thought you might be interested in marrying Desmond. In that case…”

  “In that case, why steal from him? I see.” She was eyeing him over the rim of the teacup. “I would never marry Desmond Moore.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “Neither would he marry me. He was only implying it to torture his cousin Winifred.”

  So she was a realist. And acute. He was chagrined that she’d made a shrewder assessment of Desmond than he; because now that she’d said it, he recognized it was true about Desmond torturing his cousin. Added to that, he felt annoyed that he had not assessed Torrey accurately either … his assumption that she would have married Desmond.

  “Excuse me, I’ve a phone call to make.” She got up. He watched her get change from the bartender and go to the phone on the wall. She still had that jaunty walk he remembered.

  * * *

  That unforgettable jaunty walk. As a boy, he’d seen her around North Hawk, seen her growing up. A gangling kid, tall, thin, with dark curvy hair and eyes like a gray storm. Not pretty but passionately alive. Her father, the Romanian, had married into the town, had arrived in North Hawk one day, darkly handsome, wiry, with a warm handshake, a heavy accent, and a watchmaker’s knowledge. He’d fallen in love and married quiet, soft-spoken Abigail Hapgood Torrey who had no family and worked in the bank. But Vlad Tunet had a head full of dreams of adventure—expeditions in Alaska, explorations in Peru, mountain peaks in Tibet, treasure under the seas fringing New Zealand. A watchmaker’s shop in a New England town could not hold him. He’d gone off exploring half a dozen times before he’d finally departed North Hawk for good, leaving a quietly heartbroken Abigail Hapgood Torrey Tunet and her young daughter.

  “Have you got eight pence?” Torrey was at his elbow. “I need more change for the phone. The bartender’s gone in the back.”

  He felt in his pocket and gave her a handful of pence.

  “Thanks.” She went back to the phone. He heard the chimes as she dropped in the coins.

  She’d been eleven when her father had left North Hawk forever, her romantic father. She had adored him. Once, he’d brought her back a present, a bandanna, orange, with a design of blue peacocks. A Chinese-looking thing. Even after her father was gone for good, she’d worn the bandanna around town like a headband, peacocks on her forehead. Incongruous, what with the jeans resting on her skinny hips. Yet the whole of it somehow exotic.

  Like him, she was a reader. Luke, four years older, and a frequenter of the North Hawk Library, would see her there with a stack of books. She read devouringly. Winter nights, the library closed at nine. She would sit until late at one of the little reading tables, the radiator hissing underneath; it was an old building with hot water heat. She wore woolen socks, and her bare knees were red and cracked from coming in from the cold. “Hi, Torrey,” he would say, with kindly superiority, going past, his books under his arm. She would look up, bemused, her stormy, black-fringed gray eyes hardly aware of him, “Hi,” and go back to her reading. She could speak Romanian. Other languages came easily to her. When she was twelve, there’d been a piece about her in the North Hawk Weekly. She’d won a prize of twenty-five dollars for translating for little grammar school kids from Spanish-speaking countries who spoke no English. She had learned Spanish from tapes borrowed from the library. Why? “I don’t know,” she’d told the North Hawk Weekly reporter.

  * * *

  The pub door opened, a spatter of rain swept in on a wind, and two men in caps came in, took off dripping raincoats, and hung them on an antlered mahogany rack. The bartender, cutting lemons into a dish, nodded a greeting.

  “Lord save us, that’s a lovely girl,” the skinnier of the two men said. He was looking at Torrey Tunet. She was standing on one leg, rubbing the back of her calf with her other foot while she talked on the phone. Her short dark hair was damp from the rain, one wing-shaped lock curved on her cheek.

  “I would sell my pasture to buy her a pint,” the skinny man said.

  “She’s taken, Seamus,” the other man said—and to Luke, “Excuse my friend, mister. We’ve been celebrating. His wife just had her sixth. Weighs in at seven pounds.”

  “That’s all right.” Luke lifted his cup of tea to the skinnier man. “Congratulations.”

  * * *

  Her briefcase, so close he could touch it, lay on the pub chair beside him. He glanced at it; then again … and again. In it would be papers relating to the conference. What else? The stolen necklace? Did she keep it with her, not daring to leave it in her bedroom at Castle Moore?

  When had her thievery started?

  She’d had few friends in North Hawk after her father went off adventuring. Abigail Hapgood Torrey was a poor manager. She and her daughter moved into a run-down tenement. The town proved to be social snobs.

  But Torry had a worshipper. She had faithful little Donna Lefebvre from a poor French-Canadian family, her father a postal worker. Donna, two years younger, idolized Torrey and did whatever Torrey said.

  So Torrey, passionately alive and with the spark of her adventurous father in her, was the ringleader of a gang of one—Donna, fair-haired, innocent, willing, pudgy. Poor little Donna. As it turned out, tragic little Donna.

  Luke gazed, frowning, at the black briefcase. Thievery, thievery.

  Torrey, the instigator. Donna, her acolyte, following the dazzling pinwheel that was Torrey, the mischief, the excitement, the incredible fun. Luke remembered one
autumn day seeing them, aged thirteen and eleven, Charlie Chaplins, each twirling a cane, with burnt-cork mustaches and in baggy pants and old top hats, strolling down Main Street at 5:00 P.M. And it wasn’t even Halloween.

  It was the following year that Torrey began to baby-sit. She baby-sat for Luke’s little brother, Joshua.

  In the pub, Luke closed his eyes but he could not block out the horror he was seeing in his mind.

  * * *

  When Torrey returned from the pay phone and sat down, he said immediately, sharply, “That’s it. Make your choice. Return the necklace or I tell Desmond you stole it.”

  She laughed. Or rather, it was a giggle. Then, suddenly sober, she gave him a straight look. “You want the truth? Desmond was playing a nasty little sex game. He wanted me to swipe the necklace. I obliged. Anyway, in the morning I gave him back the necklace. And—surprise! Desmond then gave it to me. For good.”

  Luke stared at her. “Jesus! What kind of jackass d’you think I am—to believe Desmond gave you a family heirloom worth more than twenty thousand pounds!” He leaned toward her over the table. “You stole the damned thing! Stole it! You could—”

  “Listen,” she began, “I—”

  “Stole it! You could go to prison,” he said, and found he was shaking with bitter anger, “not like that first time.”

  24

  Torrey flinched. Hopeless to make Luke Willinger believe her.

  “Well, then…” She stood up. At the bar she got change for a pound note. She came back and dropped the pence she’d borrowed from Luke onto the table. “Go ahead! Tell Desmond I stole his heirloom necklace. Go on, tell him!”

  “I’ll do that.” Tight-lipped, Luke glared at her. She shrugged and walked out of the pub. It was drizzling; she put up her folding umbrella.

  Back at the Shelbourne, she learned that the fussy Hungarian delegate had had a stomach upset; the afternoon meeting was cancelled. She came out again into the drizzle. She’d had no lunch, only tea at the pub. But she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat. All she could think of was the necklace in her briefcase. What was it worth? Twenty thousand pounds? More? Thirty? Enough, certainly, for the surgery that would release Donna from the wheelchair. Yet the thought of being in bed with Desmond Moore sickened her.

  In the rain, she wandered blindly through Dublin, gazing unseeingly into shop windows, staring from the bridge into the sluggishly moving Liffey, biting a fingernail, unable to make up her mind. She was not a cat with nine lives; she had only this one. “Tantalus,” she said, aloud. She was tantalizing herself, an agony of indecision. Pawn or sell the necklace and have money for Donna’s surgery? Or return the necklace to Desmond and be free of him? The drizzle stopped; she was hardly aware of it.

  Grafton Street. Ahead, across the street, she saw Weir’s. It was one of the most prestigious jewelry shops in Dublin. Torrey hesitated. Then she crossed the street.

  * * *

  “Good afternoon.” She placed her leather briefcase on the plateglass counter. An air-conditioner hummed. There was a smell of lemon oil–polished mahogany and a feeling of quiet elegance. Several clocks on a counter delicately chimed the quarter hour: 4:45. She’d run it close; most shops in Dublin closed at five.

  “Good afternoon.” The clerk smiled courteously. He was clean-shaven, in a dark suit, impeccable. At a counter nearby, an elderly woman clerk, polishing a silver urn, smiled at Torrey. Three or four customers browsed.

  “My necklace.” She had wrapped it in a tissue and put it in a business envelope. She snapped open the brass clips of the briefcase, took out the envelope, and unwrapped the necklace. “Perhaps you can help me. I’m told it’s quite valuable. But I don’t know. It was left to me by an aunt. I thought you might be able to tell me…” Or perhaps Weir’s itself might be interested in buying the necklace.

  “Left to you by your aunt, was it?” The clerk nodded encouragingly.

  Torrey held up the necklace. The diamonds glittered; the pear-shaped emerald at the V shot green fire.

  The clerk shifted the black velvet pad on the counter but did not touch the necklace. “’Tis its worth you’re interested in?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have a department for—”

  “Mr. Colby? Can you help me a moment?” The elderly clerk at the next counter was beckoning.

  “Excuse me, please.”

  Waiting, she dropped the necklace onto the velvet pad. She pushed it around, gazing at the glittering stones. She didn’t really like diamonds, couldn’t see what the fuss was all about; it was just that they were valuable. She preferred a burst of fireworks. Or what was that tangerine-colored bird? It would be the male; the male always had the plumage, brilliant colors like the male peacocks on the bandanna from her father.

  She glanced over at the next counter. Mr. Colby was not there. She had been waiting almost ten minutes. Ah, here he came, skirting another counter at her left.

  “I’m sorry to’ve kept you waiting.” He looked down at the necklace on the black velvet. He was perspiring. He looked up at her, then he looked past her shoulder and gave a great sigh.

  She turned. Two gardai in blue uniforms were coming toward her.

  * * *

  “But it is my necklace!” Torrey said, frightened and angry.

  No one looked at her. The elderly woman clerk was repeating to Detective Inspector O’Gorman, who had just arrived from the Garda Siochana, what she had told the two gardai minutes before. “I recognized it as the Moore necklace from the photo in The Sunday World about the diamond exhibit last year, the V of diamonds with the emerald at the base. And having heard about the murder on the radio—”

  “What has my diamond necklace got to do with the murder of Mr. Kasvi?” Torrey looked in bewilderment from the two gardai to Detective Inspector O’Gorman.

  “Not Mr. Kasvi,” Detective Inspector O’Gorman said, “the murder of Desmond Moore.”

  25

  Inspector O’Hare wanted to retch. That would have made two of them because Moore’s new stable lad, a seventeen-year-old, was throwing up onto a bale of hay beside Darlin’ Pie’s box. Brian Coffey, Moore’s skinny red-haired trainer, in jeans and a faded maroon jersey, was standing, mute, his white, freckled face contorted; he was shaking his head back and forth, his eyes denying the ugliness he stared at.

  Desmond Moore’s knife-slashed, bloody body lay just outside box four; but the horse, Black Pride, was gone, the stall door splintered. The scent of blood in the stable had stirred the other three horses in their boxes. There was a frightening cacophony of shrill whinnies, stamping, and neighing. Darlin’ Pie, in box three, reared and screamed.

  O’Hare swallowed saliva. Two murders in Ballynagh within a week. As though a serial killer was on the loose. He looked down at Desmond Moore, who lay face up.

  “My!” Sergeant Bryson squatted down beside Moore’s body. Bryson’s young face looked appalled. “Oh, my!”

  A knife must have been driven into Moore’s stomach and yanked upward between his ribs to his breastbone. His yellow cashmere sweater was red-black with the blood that must have spurted, maybe even jetted out like a fountain. One hand was clenched at his breast, as though in reflex to stem the flow.

  “He would’ve died at once, I hope,” Bryson said pleadingly, as though asking someone indeterminate for confirmation. He reached out a hand as if to close Desmond Moore’s staring eyes, but—

  “Don’t touch him,” O’Hare said. “You know better, Sergeant!”

  From the police car in the stable yard, O’Hare called the Murder Squad at headquarters in Dublin. The van with the technical crew would arrive shortly; Castle Moore was only twenty-five minutes from Dublin.

  Back again in the stable, O’Hare scanned the floor, the murder weapon—a bloody knife, surely, by the look of Desmond Moore’s slashed body—could be lying somewhere here. But it wasn’t. Had the murderer taken it with him?

  “See if there’s a knife in that bale of hay or along the stalls,” he
said to Sergeant Bryson, “But don’t touch it; wait for the gardai from Dublin.”

  He looked around for Brian Coffey, who still stood mute and staring. Coffey and the new lad, Kevin Keating, had found Desmond Moore’s body only a few minutes ago, when they had returned from Flaherty’s Harness Shop in Ballynagh and entered the stables. Minutes later, an incoherent Brian Coffey had rung up Inspector O’Hare. The poor fellow still looked in shock, eyes wide, face white. The lad, Kevin, had ridden off in search of Black Pride. In the stable yard, Janet Slocum and Rose stood hugging their arms and looking around in fear and excitement.

  * * *

  “I was at that card table,” Brian Coffey said to Inspector O’Hare, jerking his head toward the rickety table in the stable office. “About two o’clock it was, just before I went to Ballynagh to meet Kevin at Flaherty’s. I was making out the list, the tack we needed to buy. And I heard voices. Mr. Desmond talking with somebody in the stable.”

  Inspector O’Hare stood over Brian Coffey, who was sitting forward on the edge of a faded, overstuffed tartan couch, elbows on knees, hands clasped. The room was small, not much bigger than a horse box. The walls had glossy photographs of horses and racing events tacked up. There was a calendar from a feed company. The card table served as the office desk. Sweaters and a duffle coat hung on a rack in one corner. Beneath the rack were a couple of pairs of worn boots. A wood floor had been crudely laid down.

  “And…?”

  “Yes, well—” Brian Coffey’s red hair was wet with sweat; nervous sweat it had to be; the room was not that warm—“so I was making out the list.”

  Brian Coffey moved his hands up his skinny white arms, shoving up the sleeves of the faded maroon jersey, rubbing his arms as though they were cold. He hunched his shoulders and licked dry lips. “Mr. Desmond had this store room made into an office last month, temporarylike. He had plans for a yard of a dozen horses, to start. He’d be buying at auctions. He wanted to—”