“Except that by going on you might have prevented a murder,” Duffy suggested. “You should have got there just at the critical moment.”
“Oh! D’you think so?” She looked neither convinced nor regretful. “That sort of thing is in the lap of the gods anyhow.”
“I don’t think murders are arranged in heaven,” Duffy observed. He forebore to remind her that it is marriages which are said to be made there. “The other place, perhaps. Who was in the car in front of you?”
“I didn’t recognise anyone, didn’t really get close enough to see who was in it.” She spoke as rapidly as ever, and each word was as sharply clipped, but there was the suggestion of a new wariness in her manner. “It was the sort of small black car that every second inhabitant of Newtown Moore seems to drive–Canon Murphy for one.”
“I suppose you didn’t notice the number, or if there was a G.B. plate on the car?”
She hesitated for a few seconds before saying–“Women don’t notice that sort of tiling, Superintendent.”
“At what exact point on the road did you change your mind and turn round?”
“Just at the top of the hill, where you get the first view of this place. I watched the car ahead of me go down into the wood; when it didn’t come out at the far side it must obviously have come in here.”
“It would seem so. Did you get out of your car at all?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I did. There’s nowhere to turn between the top of the hill and the front gate, and I’m hopeless at backing, so I left the car in a handy spot and walked on to where I could see from. I’d already made up my mind to turn back, you know, unless by some remote chance the people ahead went right on through the wood.”
“Can you give me an approximate time for that?”
“I can give it to you exactly. I’ve just remembered.” She seemed almost childishly pleased. “It was exactly half past three, just the time that the canon would call; that’s one of the things that made me so sure that the car was coming here, that it wasn’t just someone from the County Council going to see how the men were getting on with tarring the road.” Her triumphant smile vanished suddenly; her voice had lost something of its confidence when, as a hurried afterthought, she added–“At least I think they were tarring the road. I could hear the rattle of the roller.”
Up to that point it had been a reasonably convincing story. It was only natural that a wife at odds with her husband and her mother-in-law and on her way to have things out with them would prefer to have the field to herself; if she suspected the presence of callers, or more especially if she recognised a particular caller as the woman whom she perhaps looked on as her husband’s mistress, she might well turn tail–though afterwards she might be unwilling to admit to the recognition. It was even possible that the sound of the roller had been occasionally audible from the top of the hill; modern road-rollers, silent though they seem when crawling backwards and forwards over a freshly tarred and sanded surface, can still rattle hollowly at speed on uneven ground. Again, it was conceivable that in the still air the smell of the tar had risen to the hill-top. What did not seem natural, however, was the young woman’s apparent appreciation of the significance of her knowledge that the road menders had been there at all and her–again apparent–realisation that their operations had not been visible from outside of the wood, a fact which the local chief superintendent had been at some pains to establish. The story might still be true, but it was also possible that it had been invented to fit in with what Duffy must obviously know of Ivy O’Brien Moore’s movements. If it was she whom her cousin-by-marriage Peregrine Walton had seen at the top of the hill–and it surely must have been, though for their individual reasons they had pretended not to recognise each other–she must have seen him and could therefore assume Duffy’s knowledge. At the same time her behaviour, as described by Peregrine, did not at all fit in with Duffy’s idea of the murderer’s movements.
“Did you see anyone on foot or on a bicycle between here and the village?” the detective asked.
“I may have done.” She had recovered her poise and had adopted with it a faint air of boredom. “I really can’t remember.” She began to pull on a pair of pigskin driving-gloves.
“What were you wearing on that day?”
“Wearing?” She looked up sharply at Duffy. “I couldn’t possibly be sure now: slacks probably, some sort of a sweater. I don’t know.”
“A headscarf?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have been wearing a hat and I usually put something on my head when I’m driving, so I think a head-scarf. Yes.”
“I see.” Duffy got to his feet. “Well, thank you, Mrs. O’Brien Moore. I shan’t delay you any longer to-day. You’ve been most helpful.”
She stared at him for a moment in frank surprise, then acknowledged his thanks with a formal little bow. “Only too glad to do what I can, Superintendent.” She gave him a fleeting smile as he held the door open for her to go out of the room.
The two children were still sitting on their grassy bank; Duffy could see them from a window without having to go sufficiently close to it to make his watching obvious. Dominick, strolling about on the lawn, contrived to look both aimless and impatient. No one else was in sight. After two or three minutes, however, a brisk step sounded on the gravel and Ivy O’Brien Moore appeared, walking straight towards her car. It seemed that it was only when her hand was on the door handle that she saw her children and she waited there for them to come slowly over to her. She bent down and held out her aims; after a little hesitation Michael launched himself upon her and covered her face with kisses. It was Mary who pulled her little brother away and firmly held his hand while in her turn she gave her mother what appeared to be a perfunctory peck on the cheek. Dominick stood watching suspiciously, as if he were afraid that his wife might try to kidnap the children by physical force; she gave no sign, however, of wanting any longer to take them with her.
“Well, I’m off now,” she said, staring straight in front of her and addressing, it seemed, no one in particular. The words carried clearly to Duffy through the open window.
“All right.” Dominick looked both surprised and relieved. “When shall we see you again?”
“I don’t know.” She got into the car and turned the key in the ignition switch. “Does it matter to anyone?”
Her husband cleared his throat, but said nothing. It was Mary who called–“Good-bye, Mummy darling,” in a brisk business-like tone. “You do realise why we can’t go with you, don’t you?” The question sounded more like a politeness than a request for information.
“Too damned well,” Ivy O’Brien Moore snapped. With a racing engine she started, jumping off almost, in a flurry of flying gravel, barely missing the steps as she swung the car round to head down the avenue at a dangerous speed. Her family remained staring at the trees that hid her from view; Michael surreptitiously wiped his eyes with his shirt-sleeve.
It is impossible to say for how long the man and the two children would have continued to gaze at nothing, except perhaps the images in their own minds, had not Duffy decided to break up the scene. He strolled out onto the steps and addressed Dominick.
“Would it be possible to borrow one of your boats, Mr. O’Brien Moore?” he asked. “Your daughter very kindly promised to show me the bay.”
“Of course.” It seemed as if the young man rather welcomed the interruption of his thoughts. “Mary knows the bay as well as anyone.” His quick glance at his daughter suggested that he welcomed, also, the opportunity for her to be kept happily occupied for the rest of the afternoon. “So does Michael. By the way, do you mind taking my cousin, Miss Walton, too? It’s only about half a mile over to her cottage by water, though it’s nearly eight by road.” He began to lead the way down towards the jetty.
“Yes, she told me that,” said Duffy. “I shall have to call on her sometime, so it will be saving me a journey as well.”
The boat which Dominick indicated on arrival
at the water’s edge, was a plain serviceable one with two pairs of oars but, somewhat to Duffy’s relief, a big American outboard motor of a type with which the detective was familiar was produced from the boat-house and put in position. Its well-cared-for look was reassuring.
“Mary’s pretty good with these things,” Dominick observed. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble. There are no currents to watch out for in this part of the bay, not on a rising tide anyhow.” He turned to his son. “Michael run back to the house and tell Aunt Cynthia were ready when she is.”
The little boy capered off up the path with all the delight that the very young take in running errands; in what seemed an impossibly short space of time he was back again, Cynthia Walton’s Irish setter running at his heels and a bag of sweets firmly clenched in his fist.
“Aunt Cyn’s coming,” he said. “Hector’s bringing her bike. Can he come too? There’s plenty of room.”
Duffy nodded in answer to Dominick’s questioning glance. “The more the merrier,” he said. He was glad that he had had the forethought to wear a grey flannel suit with self-supporting trousers; his proposed reconnaissance of the bay seemed to be coming more and more to resemble a picnic, but he was not entirely displeased. It was the sort of case in which he might expect greater profit from taking part in conversation than from conducting formal examinations. A detective pulling an oar, or removing seaweed from an entangled propeller, was less likely to be treated with reserve than if he were surrounded by all the circumstance of his office. Duffy took off his jacket and tie and stowed them in a locker in the stern, which seemed to be reasonably free from old oil and fish scales.
“Come aboard,” Michael shouted and, suiting the action to the word, clambered into the bows where he perched himself like a figurehead.
When at last Hector, Miss Walton and her bicycle arrived at the jetty it was swiftly demonstrated that it was not the first time that the machine had been taken from Moore Court by boat; with a sureness of movement which could only have come from practice Dominick lifted down the bicycle, laid it along a seat amidships in such a way that a section of wheel projected a little way over the gunwale on either side and was prevented from slipping by thole-pins between the spokes. He and Duffy steadied the boat to let the newcomers climb aboard, a proceeding that was somewhat hampered by Cynthia Walton’s setter.
“You’d better let the superintendent sit in the stern with Mary,” Dominick suggested. “She’s showing him round.”
“It will be a better balance that way too,” said Mary practically. “He’s the heaviest of us, and without him here the propeller would be too high in the water. All right, Papa–be seeing you sometime.”
The tide had passed its lowest ebb and had begun the slow business of inching back into the bay, almost imperceptibly here, so far from the bay’s narrow mouth. There were no waves; only an occasional ripple broke the mirror-like surface of the water to lap noiselessly against the muddy shore. This sheltered reach of sea in its setting of motionless trees was still and silent as a picture. It was in exactly similar conditions and at about the same state of the tide–assuming the correctness of Duffy’s theory–that Joan Allison’s murderer had fled from the scene of his crime. It did not seem possible that he could have crossed this bright bareness, over the sensitive sounding-board of the water, unheard and unseen; the local Guards had, indeed, assured themselves that the muddy banks of the peninsula on which Moore Court stood showed neither footmarks nor any sign of the beaching of a boat. Nevertheless Duffy had instructed Sergeant O’Callaghan to make a further examination of the shore to coincide with his own reconnaissance by sea in the hope of establishing finally that the murderer could have come in no other way than from the road. With these things in his mind the superintendent shoved the boat off from the jetty and into deeper water. Mary started the engine with the ease of practice, and they were under way.
“You know, I hadn’t expected anything like this at all,” observed Hector. After a parting wave to Dominick, which was somewhat unenthusiastically returned, the young American had settled down to an admiring study of the bay. “You’d think I’d remember it, but I don’t. I have a picture in my mind of enormous waves breaking against great granite cliffs. That’s what I thought all the coast of Ireland would be like.”
“I’m afraid we’re still failing to live up to your preconceptions, Hector.” Cynthia Walton showed her teeth in a rather preoccupied smile; she was trying to cope with an outburst of affection on the part of her setter. “Down, Mr. K! Your breath smells of fish. There’s plenty of variety in this little country–that’s the best that can be said for it–but you can’t expect the grandeur of American scenery. Don’t be too disappointed.”
“Oh, I’m not,” Hector protested. “I think the scenery here is fine, what I’ve seen of it. Anyhow this character I was telling you about who was on the plane, his theory was about people, not things. He said I’d find that everyone in Ireland would play up to my preconceptions, be anything from stage-Irish to West British at the drop of the proverbial hat–but he excluded the O’Brien Moores who, it seems, are a law unto themselves and immutable. He was probably just talking nonsense to pass the time.”
“Surrounded by the family, you haven’t had much chance to find out,” Cynthia objected. “We have lots of professional stage-Irishmen in public life.”
“I haven’t met any yet, except in a pub.” Hector grinned and then gave a polite little bow towards Duffy. “I hadn’t expected to meet a detective, but the superintendent is more like what I’ve always felt sleuths ought to be than I could ever have anticipated; I mean, he’s professional without being obvious. If he’ll forgive me for being personal.”
Mary’s clear voice drowned Duffy’s modest protestations. “He’s not thin enough for the ideal detective,” she said unkindly. “Come to think of it though, as a family we are rather a law unto ourselves–Grandmama is anyhow.”
With a look of pained disapproval on her face Cynthia Walton giggled unexpectedly, like a schoolgirl surprised into laughter at a half-understood impropriety. “Really Mary,” she said, “that’s the sort of sweeping statement that only a child could make; and it’s quite untrue. Your grandmother is a very strong-minded woman, but she only exercises her will on matters of which she is properly a judge because of her age and position.” It seemed that Cynthia’s severity was largely the result of her own momentary betrayal of amusement; she had reddened slightly, and her teeth were more than ordinarily prominent. “That isn’t being a law unto herself but simply doing her duty under the moral law.”
“Well, she finds it her duty to be very obstinate sometimes,” muttered Mary, unabashed. “Even when she’s in the wrong.”
“If you’re referring to the question of going to Dublin to meet Hector, she had a perfectly good reason for coming to the decision that she did,” the elder woman snapped, adding with an assumption of geniality–“Not that anyone can blame Hector, of course, for a slip of the pen.”
Up to that point Duffy had assumed that the matter uppermost in Mary’s mind was the family difference in which her father, her mother and her grandmother were the chief disputants; he was not even now convinced that he had been wrong, for the child looked a little taken aback. Since, however, the latest turn in the conversation was one that particularly interested him, the detective only wished that he could put in a question without seeming professionally curious and so inhibiting the flow. He was gratified, though not altogether surprised, when Hector asked the first of his questions for him.
“That’s been puzzling me ever since I got here,” the young American announced. “Now will somebody please tell me what slip of the pen I did make? I could swear I didn’t mention any particular airport.”
“You didn’t–but in your letter to Aunt Josephine you said that you were looking forward to seeing Lough Derg from the air,” Cynthia explained. “Flights from Shannon to Dublin pass over the lough, but that is not the case with flights int
o Shannon from the west. My aunt is so meticulous about detail that she assumed–rather unreasonably, I think–that you’d know that.”
“So that was it.” Hector grinned rather ruefully. “There used to be a painting of Lough Derg in my father’s study–he used to talk sometimes about making the pilgrimage there. I knew it was the lowest of the Shannon loughs and I thought it was a fair bet that it could be seen before landing at the airport–No! That’s not quite right. I didn’t really think about it at all.” He hesitated, as if searching for a word or a memory; he might have been trying to justify a misdeed instead of explaining “a slip of the pen.” Absent-mindedly he went on tapping a cigarette on his case. “It’s not always easy to write a chatty letter to an aunt one can’t remember, especially if she is herself a formidable correspondent. I wanted to say something nice about the country without getting too folksy or dragging in Killarney’s lakes and fells, as you’d expect some hick from the Middle West to do, so I said I was looking forward to seeing the first place that came into my head–Lough Derg. I wasn’t to know that–that–well, that my vagueness about the choice of an airport was to make the difference between life and death for anyone.”
“Good gracious me! Do you suppose it did?” Cynthia Walton started so violently that she rolled her setter from the comfortable position which he had taken up against her feet and had to grab him by the collar to prevent him from getting on with the game which he seemed to think she had started. “Do you imagine that someone lured that unfortunate young woman here to meet you and then–then––?” Her voice faded away; open-mouthed, she gazed from her cousin to the detective.
“That seems to be the prevailing theory,” Hector agreed. “So one of Aunt Josephine’s gardeners informed me anyhow, though I think the idea is a bit far-fetched. I mean, what makes me a suitable lure? Why on earth would the wretched girl have wanted to see me? I’m not news.”
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