The Irish Cottage Murder

by Dicey Deere

  She turned and looked quickly about. Between the casement windows was a dresser, on it a couple of framed family photographs, groups of smiling people, women with babies, and shock-headed little redheads in knee pants. Devlins, surely. The family-proud Devlins of Oughterard. Maureen’s a whore.

  She pulled open the top drawer and rummaged, searching. Socks, crumpled underpants, a half-pack of cigarettes, an unopened package of condoms. “‘Hope springs eternal,’” she whispered aloud, whimsically … and felt a momentary shame; everyone deserved his privacy. But my life may depend on finding what I’m looking for.

  She searched quickly through the next drawer … and the next. If she could only find it, it would be a start. There was always a trail; you had only to find the initial starting point. She felt herself growing hot with tension and anguish. Besides, the raftered room was stuffy, the casement windows closed against the damp morning air.

  Feverishly, despairingly, she looked about. No other place in which Brian Coffey could hide anything. Only this dresser.

  She pulled at the bottom drawer. It was not locked. There was no lock, but she couldn’t open it. She pulled harder and managed to inch it part way open. She saw then that the drawer was so full, its contents so heavy, that that had been the difficulty. With a strong, final pull, she had it open.

  She gazed down at the jumbled contents. She picked up a steel watchband, so damaged that fixing it would be hopeless. She saw a Swiss army knife with a broken blade, a bent little picture frame with a cracked glass, a couple of tattered romance novels. There were bits of string, so short as to be unusable.

  Torrey sat back on her heels. A pack rat! Brian Coffey was a pack rat. He was unable to discard anything, no matter how useless. She gazed at a broken, inch-long bit of pencil that rested on a girl’s brassiere, pink, faded. She lifted the brassiere and dangled it from one hand. Where it had lain, she saw a snapshot of a freckle-faced girl with flyaway hair. She dropped the brassiere and turned over the snapshot; the date on the back was eight years ago.

  Hopeless. Useless to find among this old stuff what she was searching for. She stirred the contents of the drawer with an indifferent finger, and her eye was caught by a grubby envelope. She opened it. Inside was a single sheet, an official document: Brian Coffey, Oughterard, County Galway, six months’ probation, two years ago. Theft of a motor part. So a fellow thief! Brian Coffey had not been a model citizen. Had Desmond Moore known?

  She put back the document. Beside it lay a toy pistol, hardly the size of her palm. Not likely real. Still, on the off chance that it was, she’d feel safer if it were kept out of Brian Coffey’s hands. She slipped it into her pocket.

  Give up. Look somewhere else, not in this pack-rat drawer of old stuff. And hurry up. Get out of here.

  She shoved at the drawer to close it, but at that instant a small green envelope caught her eye. She looked at it in surprise. It contrasted oddly with the rest of the contents of the drawer, it was so clean and new looking. She pulled it out. She opened it. Two tickets to a horse auction in Cork. Her glance fell on the date of the auction. It was almost a week ago, Thursday, so the tickets had been unused.

  Thursday. That Thursday, six days ago, was the day Desmond Moore had been murdered.

  59

  “Now, now, no cutting up,” Kevin said severely to Fast Forward, the chestnut mare. She was inclined to be skittish when he curried her. Kevin hardly had the words out when he heard the motorbike. Mr. Coffey returning.

  Kevin stood still, holding the currycomb, one hand on Fast Forward’s haunch. Apprehension slowly made a tight feeling across his chest. Did the American girl, upstairs in Mr. Coffey’s quarters, hear the motorbike? He hoped so. Mr. Coffey was edgy lately, like ghosts in a closet were jumping out at him. Strange-acting, too. He sometimes disappeared into the woods for a half-hour or more. And he had sudden, ugly moods, where he had not had them before. He’d blown up yesterday, saying Kevin should’ve had the water buckets filled by noon, and here it was half after twelve. A bit frightening it was. It spoiled things for Kevin. He still admired Mr. Coffey for what he knew about horses, but he no longer liked to be near him.

  In Fast Forward’s stall, Kevin began slowly to pull the currycomb through the mare’s tail, his head cocked, listening. He heard Mr. Coffey park the motorbike just inside the stable. Then Mr. Coffey came walking past the horse stalls. He stalked past Fast Forward’s stall without even giving Kevin a nod or saying hello. His face was white and tense. He went in a beeline toward the end stable and up the stairs to his quarters.

  60

  Kneeling before Brian Coffey’s dresser, Torrey was about to close the bottom drawer when she heard the footsteps on the stairs.

  She’d been so absorbed she hadn’t heard the motorbike returning. Only now did she seem in retrospect to hear its racket.

  Too late! He was on the stairs. She had an intuitive realization that the boylike, innocent face of Brian Coffey concealed something dangerous. Dangerous, why? At once she knew: Brian Coffey was living in fear. His fear was as sinister as a knife, as lethal as the bite of a cobra.

  Helplessly she looked about. No way out but the door. She ran into the bathroom, almost tripping over her flapping mackintosh, and stepped into the tub. The shower curtain was skimpy; it did not quite close.

  In the mirror above the sink she saw Brian Coffey’s reflection … saw him circle the room twice, walking jerkily, muttering to himself. Then abruptly he headed straight for the dresser, knelt down, and drew out that bottom drawer. He pushed aside his rat-pack collection and lifted a thick piece of newspaper that lined the bottom of the drawer. He drew something from beneath it, something flat, wrapped in a thin cloth.

  At that instant, Kevin’s voice came from the stairs. “Mr. Coffey?”

  With a swift movement, Brian Coffey slipped the cloth-wrapped object in his hand under his black jacket, forced the drawer closed, and stood up. The expression on his face was so threatening that Torrey felt it like an icicle sliding down her back. He was an animal at bay, teeth bared.

  “Mr. Coffey?” Kevin, from the doorway, said, “I … I put the liniment on Black Pride’s foreleg … where the scratch from the fence was? But maybe you’d better look, I’m not sure…”

  Brian Coffey gave a wild little laugh. “Ah, you’re always—! All right.” He pushed impatiently past Kevin, shaking his red head in disgust. “Come on, then.” He clattered down the stairs.

  Torrey hardly breathed. Kevin stood looking around the room; his glance rested for a moment on the partly open bathroom door. For an instant Torrey fancied their eyes met. Then the lad turned and followed Brian down the stairs.

  * * *

  She was stiff with cold. For the last twenty minutes, since sneaking hurriedly from the stables, she’d been crouching on this wet stump in the woods, watching the stables. Waiting. Hoping. But she could be all wrong! It was just a guess.

  She shivered. Her face was wet with the drizzling rain and her neck and wrists felt cold and clammy. She’d had no breakfast. She ached with hunger. The miserably wet weather made it worse. She imagined Winifred and Sheila and Luke Willinger at breakfast in the castle. Rose would have laid a fire in the grate in the breakfast room, a cheerful, warming fire. On the table would be hot biscuits and buttered scones, ham and rashers of bacon, lots of hot, fragrant coffee, and a pot of tea steaming on the—

  There! Brian Coffey was crossing the stable yard. She went tense. He was heading toward the woods to her left. He wore his black bomber jacket and jeans and boots. He walked with a kind of single-minded purpose, his shoulders hunched against the drizzle. His red head was a dot of color in the bleak landscape of rain-darkened trees and gray skies. A red beacon.

  The woods swallowed him.

  Hunger forgotten, Torrey followed.

  61

  By nine o’clock Wednesday morning in Ballynagh, rain was falling and the sky was so darkly threatening that Sergeant Bryson turned on the wall lights in the garda stat
ion. Inspector O’Hare, arriving late, shrugged out of his wet raincoat. He had barely sat down when Sergeant Bryson smoothed out a crumpled bit of paper and laid it triumphantly on the desk before him.

  “This message, sir. I found it in a wastebasket of stuff from Ms. Tunet’s bedroom at Castle Moore. Someone’s been pressuring her for money. Forty thousand dollars.”

  Inspector O’Hare put on his half-glasses and read the wrinkled note. He looked up over the rims of the glasses at Bryson. “The Moore heirloom necklace must be worth forty thousand.”

  “For sure, sir.”

  O’Hare rubbed his chin. The fax he’d received from North Hawk regarding Ms. Tunet, past and present, had indicated her current account in the North Hawk Savings Bank was eight hundred dollars. Never mind the other revelation about the young woman’s moral character. A pity. “Desperate measures,” he said softly. “Murder.”

  He glanced down at the crumpled paper, the schoolgirlish scrawl. “Who took the message?”

  “Rose … Rose Burns, a maid at the castle. I questioned her. She said it was from Boston. A woman’s voice.”

  Inspector O’Hare looked out at the rain. Never mind that he had awakened to miserable weather. He’d enjoyed a hearty breakfast of blood pudding, eggs, brown soda bread with honey, and strong black tea. He had also basked in the knowledge that the Lars Kasvi murder was solved.

  Next on his agenda: the murder of Desmond Moore.

  And now this message falling into his hands. Serendipitous. And yet … O’Hare felt a flicker of regret. Something about Ms. Tunet touched him, something clean and courageous, an untarnished something. Untarnished! That was a joke … considering this phone message alone. Rain pounded the window; he thought how it was raining on the hills and in the glens, and on the craggy wild mountains of Wicklow. A very sad rain, a rain like a shroud.

  At his elbow, Sergeant Bryson said, “About the Lars Kasvi murder—I suppose the Garda Siochana will call this morning, confirming that the bloodstains on Desmond Moore’s black-and-red-plaid horse blanket were Mr. Kasvi’s?”

  “I expect so.”

  62

  In the woods, rain dripped. Under Torrey’s wet brogues, the ground was soggy. But the dampness kept the twigs she stepped on from crackling. Still, she stayed well back from Brian Coffey. He was walking purposefully, unwaveringly, as though on an habitual path.

  The woods thickened, then thinned. She heard voices, the clink of horses’ hooves on an occasional stone, the jingle of a bridle. Through the trees she saw two riders, a man and a woman in yellow rubber ponchos single-filing their horses; they went on and disappeared into the mist. That must be the bridle path, Torrey realized. Ahead, Brian Coffey crossed the path. A few feet farther, he vanished.

  Torrey, startled, stood shivering. Then she moved cautiously forward, placing her feet in their damp brogues as noiselessly as possible. A dozen steps, and she saw him.

  He was kneeling on the weedy bank of a pond. His back was to her. He took what she thought of as “the thing” from beneath his bomber jacket. He unwound the cloth that had wrapped it. Leaning forward, using the cloth and a handful of grit from the bank of the pond, he began to rub what he held. He was muttering under his breath.

  Torrey thought of runes of witches, yet knowing it was only Brian Coffey’s muttering and the wraiths of fog drifting through the woods and dimming black branches of trees to gray that gave her such nonsense thoughts. Better to keep her head clear. She blinked her eyes to keep Brian Coffey’s kneeling figure sharply in focus and took a step forward.

  Under her foot, a twig cracked. Brian Coffey turned his head. Their eyes met. Then she saw what he had been washing and that he now held like a weapon. It was long and gleaming and dripping water from the pond, dripping clear water now, not blood, that gleaming kitchen knife.

  * * *

  Torrey stepped clear of the woods. No way now to retreat. She’d have to play it for what she could. She said, “You should have gotten rid of it. Buried it. Sunk it in the pond. Something.”

  He said, mechanically, staring at her, “It was too good to throw away.”

  Pack rat.

  “Anyway”—he stood up, his grasp tight on the knife—“I’m safe now. I washed the blood off it that first day. And the next day, and—” His tone was defiant, triumphant, a winner’s tone: You can’t catch me!

  She thought, Yes, you washed the blood off that first day … and the next day … and the next. Lady Macbeth in a black bomber jacket: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

  “Why out here in the woods, in the pond?” She eyed him, curious, oddly unafraid. “You’ve got a kitchen sink, haven’t you?”

  “Ah!” His pale, freckled face was triumphant. “Sulphur! Sulphur in this pond; everybody knows that. The pond’s full of sulphur. It kills. It does the trick.”

  “Sulphur?” She shook her head. “You can’t ever get it clean enough, Mr. Coffey. The blood will show up. Because of DNA. Desmond Moore’s blood. And maybe someone else’s blood? It that it, Mr. Coffey? Desmond Moore’s … and whose blood? Yours?” Was it true about blood showing up? She didn’t really know.

  His pale eyes widened. He shrank into himself; then he snapped at her, “You can’t know that! It’s not true!” Yet she saw that he believed her. Like a desperate, cornered animal he sprang at her, the knife upraised, and she, stumbling back, thought belatedly how rashly, carried away with her triumph, she had trapped herself.

  “No!” she cried out, and tried too late to pull the little pistol from her jeans pocket, hoping desperately that it was real and loaded. “No!” and in despair felt the pistol snag, caught on the edge of her pocket.

  “Stop!” She struck out with her fist and felt the painful impact shoot up her arm as her fist struck his forehead. Then they were in a grotesque embrace. She clawed at his upraised arm. She smelled the acrid sweat of fear on his T-shirt beneath the bomber jacket that now in the struggle was half-wrenched off him. In mindless terror she sank her teeth into his shoulder, clinging to him, incomprehensibly, for safety. He screamed again and tore himself away. Then he was making a keening sound. He struck her on the mouth and she tasted her own blood. Their faces were close now. She saw the same mindless terror in his face. He raised his arm and she looked up to see the knife coming down on her.

  63

  Inspector Egan O’Hare was not happy. It wasn’t because of the rotten, nasty, gloomy, cold, rainy morning, either. The sadness was like something in his bones, nothing he could help. Because after all, Ms. Tunet had brought it on herself.

  The kettle on the two-burner electric began to whistle. The nine o’clock cup of tea.

  “I’m opening another tea,” Sergeant Bryson said. He tore open a fresh packet then leaned over and sniffed the brew; he always did that.

  O’Hare looked distastefully at the phone. In a minute he would call Ms. Tunet at Castle Moore. He would request her to come in. He could see her entering the station, that jaunty, alive style of her. She would close her umbrella, she would tip her dark head, inquiringly, and—

  And he would hold up the crumpled message from her wastebasket. “Forty thousand dollars. Quite a sum to come up with, wouldn’t you say, Ms. Tunet?”

  He didn’t want to see it, Ms. Tunet’s gray eyes go wide with shock.

  Nevertheless. He reached for the phone.

  “Uh-oh…! Here comes the heiress,” Sergeant Bryson said. He was standing near the door, glancing out into the street. O’Hara took a look, hesitated, and turned from the phone. A few minutes wouldn’t matter.

  “Greetings!” Winifred Moore strode in out of the rain. She wore a dashing tweed cape and a green suede hat. Sheila Flaxton followed with a dripping umbrella. Her pinched little face peered out of a plastic rainhood that was falling over her eyes. She wore a transparent raincoat over an an Irish wool sweater and long paisley skirt. Her nose was red. She nodded a good morning and sneezed.

  “So, then!” Winifred
Moore boomed out. “What’s the word from the Garda Siochana? About Desmond’s plaid horse blanket? Blood, or what? We couldn’t wait, Sheila and I.”

  “We don’t yet—” began O’Hare, but at his elbow the phone rang. He picked it up. Chief Superintendent O’Reilly.

  “Good morning, Superintendent.” O’Hare listened, gazing at Winifred Moore. “Yes. Thank you so very—Yes, you’re very—I was lucky is all, Chief Superintendent. Thank you. Thank you. And to you, too, sir.” He hung up. Cat with a dish of cream.

  “Blood,” he said. “Mr. Lars Kasvi’s blood on Desmond Moore’s horse blanket. And that yellowish vegetation on the blanket besides. Conclusive. I’m afraid, Ms. Moore, that your cousin Desmond, ah … that he … ah.”

  “No need to pussyfoot with me, Inspector,” Winifred Moore said. “I knew my cousin only too well. Poor Mr. Kasvi.”

  “I’m sorry.” For the thousandth time Inspector O’Hare wondered irrelevantly what they did in bed, Winifred Moore and Sheila. That is, if they really were. He wasn’t quite sure. Whatever they did, it couldn’t be as good as what he thought of as “the real thing.”

  “Blood? But he was strangled,” Sheila Flaxton said in her high little voice. “So how could—”

  “Blood from his nose,” O’Hare said.

  “Is that tea?” Winifred Moore had spotted the kettle on the electric two-burner and the can of tea. “African? My favorite.”

  O’Hare gave Sergeant Bryson a look, and Bryson poured the visitors each a steaming mugful.

  The door opened. Fergus Callaghan came in. He clicked the button on his dripping black umbrella and it snapped closed. He wore a mackintosh and a tweed cap. His face looked gray and tired, bags under his eyes. “I was just passing. Good morning. I was wondering—Any word yet? The plaid horse blanket, I mean.”