“I can imagine.” Duffy was not a Dubliner, but he let what to a Cork man was nothing short of an insult, pass. “According to the statements taken before I arrived here, the family from Moore Court went to Dublin Airport to meet their cousin. Can you make any suggestion as to why Miss Allison should know more about his movements than they apparently did?”
The auctioneer and his wife looked at Duffy and then at each other in what seemed to be genuine astonishment; it was Mrs. Flynn who recovered first. “Do you mean that they all went up to Dublin to meet him while he was actually landing at Shannon as Joanie had expected?” she asked.
Duffy nodded. “It looks as if she had anticipated not only his landing but the fact that the family would go to the wrong airport to meet him. She told you that she wanted to interview him when no one else was around to get in his hair.”
“That’s right.” Mrs. Flynn blinked, but in surprise rather than to dispose of tears; she had stopped crying. Her fat body still maintained its formidable repose; it seemed that only her head and her hands were capable of movement. “That’s not the way I thought of it at all.”
“How did you think of it?”
“Well, I didn’t examine what she said to me the way you’re doing now. I suppose I thought Joanie was exaggerating, the way one does, that she meant there’d only be one or two of the family at Moore Court to welcome their cousin. You know about the wedding?”
“If you mean the girl that used to work at Moore Court, yes. I know all the servants were at her party.”
“And if the family didn’t go too, it would give great offence. The girl’s father and all before him for generations were tenants of the O’Brien Moores. I suppose I thought that the old lady, and perhaps one of the children would stay behind to welcome the man from America while the rest went to the wedding party–if I thought about it at all.”
“I see.” Duffy avoided the anxious eye of James Flynn who was following these exchanges with puckered brow, as if he suspected that in them there might lurk some implication derogatory to him and his. “I may have got the wrong idea of old Mrs. O’Brien Moore, but even from what you’ve said this morning I got the impression that she’s not the sort of person to take kindly to any guest of hers being ambushed by a journalist on arrival at her house–without an appointment.”
The auctioneer’s mobile face admitted the truth of this even before he exclaimed–“By God! She’d go up in smoke. But Joanie would never have dreamt of crashing in there without arranging it first. You know that, Dulcie. Tell the man it’s the truth.”
Mrs. Flynn shook her head in puzzled fashion; she was apparently not quite so slow on the uptake as her husband. “She can’t have arranged it, James,” she said, “otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a mix-up. The O’Brien Moores wouldn’t have gone dashing off to Dublin if they knew their cousin was going to land at Shannon. Joanie knew that, so she must have known, too, that the family was going on a wild-goose chase. That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it, Superintendent?”
“I’m getting at a little more than that. Whether intentionally or not, whoever gave your niece her information assured that on last Tuesday afternoon the girl would be alone at Moore Court–except for her murderer. It’s vitally important to find out who she made the arrangement with and who else, apart from yourselves, knew that she intended to be at Moore Court at that time. When did she tell you about it?”
It appeared that it was over lunch on the Tuesday that Joan had told her aunt of her intention, just a couple of hours before the girl had set out on what was to be her last journey. Rack their brains as they would, neither of the Flynns could make any suggestion as to who might have been her informant. They reiterated that everybody in the district knew as much about one’s business as one did oneself; the snag in this case was that the O’Brien Moores had obviously not known their own business, so any information that leaked out to the staff, and so to the neighbourhood, must have been similarly inaccurate. Joan had not mentioned visiting anyone in particular, nor had she given any other hint as to how she had spent the Tuesday morning. She had, apparently, been in the habit of walking by herself on the seashore and wrestling with the problems of authorship; on that particular morning her aunt had assumed her to have been so engaged. James Flynn, having spent the day at his office in Moycarrick, the county town, knew nothing at all of the matter but what he had been told by his wife. His eloquent face spoke merely of puzzlement.
“There’s one other point,” Duffy observed, as he gathered up his papers and prepared to go. “It seems fairly obvious that, if Hector O’Brien Moore had got to Moore Court in time to be interviewed by your niece, the whole story would have been bound to get to his aunt’s ears. It follows, I think, that the old lady would have been pretty annoyed.”
The auctioneer whistled. “She’d have been white-hot hopping mad,” he said, his voice hoarse with awe at the spectacle which he had envisaged. “But Dulcie and I are the ones who’d get it in the neck; she’d just treat Joanie as if she’d never existed.”
“Yet your niece knowingly risked all that. Really it was more than a risk–a virtual certainty. What was so important about interviewing this young man from America? He’s no celebrity, as far as I know.”
“To the people round here he is, or so my daily says,” Mrs. Flynn asserted. “They’re all talking about the Yank millionaire.”
“That’s right,” her husband agreed. “This place isn’t like Connemara, or Kerry, or any of the tourist beats. We hardly see any foreigners at all. To us any well-to-do visitor from The States is still a millionaire, more especially if he’s an O’Brien Moore. The labouring man’s cousin comes home from Detroit with a cinecamera and a pocketful of dollars, so the squire’s cousin from New York must have his own aeroplane and a Rockefeller bank balance–and must have the President’s ear as well. Joanie was a journalist, always on the lookout for something interesting; probably the local gossip made her think this young chap more important than he is.”
“I should have thought that with her experience she’d have been able to assess his news-value with complete accuracy,” Duffy objected. “However, I could be wrong. You don’t think she might have wanted to talk to him about the book she was writing rather than for her paper?”
“Sure what’d be the hurry to see him about her book? Wasn’t she going to be here for another fortnight nearly? She could have found a more convenient time to have a word with him. In any case she hadn’t even heard of him till a few days ago when she arrived here to start her holiday. Not at all, my dear man! You can depend on it that she just thought him to be more important than he is and wanted to get a piece about him in her paper before anyone else beat her to it.”
Duffy was far from agreeing, but he did not press the point He felt that if Hector O’Brien Moore were in any way famous or even notorious some hint of it would have reached the Guards at Newtown Moore. He thought it much more likely that Joan Allison’s interest in the young man had sprung from some discovery that she had made in the course of her delving into local family history. He could not, however, even guess why the matter had apparently seemed to her so urgent.
“One last question,” he said, getting to his feet. “As you know, your niece’s brief-case was found in her car with some books of notes and the typescript of the first few chapters of her book. Do you know if she had all her material with her or if there might be any further notes in her flat in London, or anywhere else?”
James Flynn’s brow once more became corrugated in thought, but it was his wife who did battle with a new spasm of crying to answer the question. “No. I’m sure everything’s in her case; she as good as told me it was, the poor lamb. And, after all, her field for research is here, not in London.” She mopped her face again with the big handkerchief.
Duffy thanked Mrs. Flynn and took his leave of her before being escorted back to his car by way of the garden. It seemed to be habit rather than deliberate intention that prompted
the auctioneer to choose the slightly longer route through the midst of his obviously beloved flowers, but he stopped by a bed of rose-trees that were just beginning to bud. He jerked a hand towards them and barked a few monosyllables which suggested that these were Joan’s particular property. The sound of sobbing was audible from the drawing-room window.
“I’m afraid my visit has been upsetting,” Duffy said. “The only practical consolation that I can offer is that it has probably brought nearer the identification of the murderer.”
“I thought you’d got him. Wasn’t he under lock and key before you ever came down from Dublin? Only the motive’s in doubt, surely?”
“You mean Martin Clohessy, of course; he does seem to be the obvious person,” the detective admitted. “A bit too obvious, though, perhaps, and I’m told that he has an alibi. We haven’t even heard his story yet.”
“But in heaven’s name who else could it be?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out. Good-bye, Mr. Flynn.”
Sergeant O’Callaghan, his heavy face impassive, was waiting in the car. His newspaper was open at the sporting page, but there was a particularity in his manner which to anyone who knew him–and Duffy knew him very well indeed–suggested that the sergeant had been brooding on something other than racing form. He did not speak, however, till the car was bowling along the freshly tarred road towards Moore Court.
“Nice place they have back there,” he observed at last.
“Beautifully kept,” Duffy agreed. “A bit too perfect for my taste.”
“A pity the wife never goes out. She’s ashamed of her bulk, poor woman, it seems. She’s better spoken of than the man himself.”
“Where did you hear all this?”
“I had a stroll round, sir, while you were inside, and found the gardener in the potting-shed; he was getting dahlias ready for planting out. He says your man, Flynn, is a divil for the girls.”
“Oh! Was this just gossip, or did the gardener seem to think we ought to be interested?”
“Well, he was hinting at something all right, but I couldn’t get anything more definite out of him than that. He’s under notice for being drunk on the job, so I suppose what he says doesn’t count for much.”
In bright daylight the gradual rise in the road from Newtown Moore was more apparent than it had been to the American visitor some thirty-seven hours previously, nonetheless the view from the bare hilltop took Duffy, too, by surprise. He stopped the car on the crest and took out the ordnance maps of the district to compare them with what he could see before him of the O’Brien Moore demesne. He wanted to orient himself properly before following the road down to the dark woods. It was not only his first, if distant, prospect of the scene of the crime but his first sight on this trip of the Atlantic Ocean.
Some twenty miles to the westward of where the detectives stood, and in a remote age, the sea had found a narrow gap in the rocky defences of the coast and had come pouring through to inundate an immense area of low-lying land. The marine lake thus formed, unruffled by storm but too shallow for navigation, its waters changed by every tide and augmented by innumerable streams and one considerable salmon river, was a paradise for small boats; it might have attracted tourists by the thousand but for the conservatism of the two or three landowners who controlled access to its shores. The O’Brien Moore property was by far the most considerable of those concerned, so it was not to be wondered at that Moore Court had been built in a particularly choice setting. A semi-circle of low hills protected the site from the north and east, while the thickness of its own woods screened the house from the westerly winds. Only ornamentally planted parkland was to be seen in the little valley, the O’Brien Moores’ more productive acres being situated on the other side of the hills. The most distinctive feature of the demesne, however, was that it occupied a peninsula, formed by two reaches of the great shallow bay which had crept in under the lee of the protecting arc of high ground. From his vantage point Duffy could see the gables of the house and, some distance behind it, the roofs of out-buildings; the entrance gates were hidden in the trees, but it was possible to follow the course of the road as it crossed the narrow neck of the peninsula, skirting the water on either side, and then wound its untarred way out of the valley. It seemed that the County Council gang had carried its repair work no farther than Moore Court. More importantly, it appeared that no one could have entered or left the demesne otherwise than by sea without being seen by the men; certainly no vehicle could even have entered the valley undetected. Duffy folded up his maps and nodded to the driver. The car began to coast slowly down towards the woods.
“ ’Tis a lovely place,” Sergeant O’Callaghan observed judicially.
Duffy grunted. “It always rains when I’m on holiday, but I can bet on seeing the country at its best when I’m after a murderer. Crime seems so much less forgivable in a place like this than among the smells of a Dublin tenement.”
Here and there under the trees on the landward side of the road were great clumps of flowering rhododendrons, but it was when they had passed between the gate-piers with their mouldering stone eagles that the detective saw the blossom really running riot on either side of the long avenue; Duffy’s mind, however, was on other things. As the car swept round the last bend and the big grey house was revealed, he spent a moment speculating on its period but found himself unable to make a better guess than that it had been a fortified manor house of great age which had been restored in early Georgian times; he was quite sure that the outward curving guard-walls on each side of the steps leading up to the hall door were a later addition. What chiefly exercised his thoughts was the difficulty of isolating, among all this shrubbery and woodland, the exact spot on which Joan Allison had been killed–obviously if she had died, and bled, in the house, the local officers would already have found the place. Getting out of the car, Duffy climbed the steps and rang the bell.
According to his usual custom he turned his back on the open hall door and looked out over the arm of sunlit water that curved beyond a thin fringe of trees on the far side of the croquet lawn. He had always felt that, where they did not clash with his duties, the decencies of life should be preserved, and he firmly believed that a detective should announce himself and his intentions before beginning to pry, rather than crawl into a place on his hands and knees with his lens at the ready. On this occasion he was rewarded for his sensibility with an inspiration. He heard footsteps in the hall and swung round to face whoever it was that had come in answer to his ringing.
In the doorway stood a trim maid in morning-pink and wearing an expression in which professional impassivity, the sadness suitable to a house of death, and youthful curiosity were nicely blended. It was certainly nothing in the girl’s appearance that made Duffy believe that, merely by turning on his heel, he had discovered the place and the manner of Joan Allison’s death.
“Good morning,” he said. “My name is Duffy. Mrs. O’Brien Moore is expecting me.”
CHAPTER III
THE ROOM into which Duffy was shown was dark-panelled and, where the sunlight did not directly fall, dim. The detective was aware of shelves of books and of dark heavy furniture, but no background would have been able to distract his attention from the woman in the window.
She sat at an enormous desk, the bareness of which was only emphasised by a silver writing set and a folder of papers. She wore a tailored blouse of some striped material held together at the neck by a cameo brooch; the sleeves were long and fastened with gold cuff-links. Her left hand held a smoking cigarette in a plain black holder, her right she offered to Duffy. “How do you do, Superintendent,” she said. “Do sit down and help yourself to a smoke.” She waved towards the chair on the other side of the desk. “We so seldom see people in this remote corner of ours that I’ve been lookin’ forward to your comin’ in spite of the reason for it. Will you have a cup of coffee–or whisky perhaps? I don’t think I can be classed as a suspect since I was a couple of hundred miles
away when that wretched gell got herself killed.” Her voice was a brisk, pleasant contralto.
“No, thank you very much, but I’ll have a cigarette, if I may.” Duffy helped himself from the box which she had pushed across to him and used one of the three lighters that lay on the desk. Through his first puff of smoke he briefly studied the owner of Moore Court.
She was not really a handsome woman; her face was too strong for that, though it was brought near to beauty by the expressiveness of her extraordinarily youthful eyes of vivid light blue, in which there seemed to lurk a suspicion of amusement. Her hair was white, streaked here and there with a darker colour. Duffy wondered about her age. She appeared to be intensely vigorous, both in mind and body, yet she tended to drop a final g–when it followed an n–and she had referred to Joan Allison as a gell, mannerisms of speech which fell into desuetude as the generation which had used them died out early in the years between the wars.
“We’ve never been mixed up with the police before,” she observed; she had lighted a fresh cigarette and now began to winkle its predecessor out of the holder with a pin. “Our chief superintendent has made plain to us how lucky we are to have you to conduct the investigation; he says that you are unbelievably patient and forbearin’ with addle-pated old people like myself. In his enthusiasm he almost used the work simpatico. I only hope we shan’t put too much of a strain on your patience.”
“There’s not much point in being impatient,” said Duffy. He wondered whether he were being put at his ease or in his place. “As long as people are doing their best to help.”
For a moment she looked directly into his unrevealing grey eyes, then she leaned over to press a bell-push that was set in the wall by the window casing. “We propose to be as helpful as possible; I object to having my favourite carvin’-knife put to an unsuitable use. What questions do you want to ask me?”
“None for the moment. I merely came to announce myself and to tell you that we’re getting on with the job. When I’ve had a look round I shall start with your guest, Mr. Hector O’Brien Moore, who first reported the matter to the local Guards. Your nephew, I believe?”
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