by Dicey Deere
Meantime, those gossip reporters were prowling around the Sylvester Hall gates and in Ballynagh having a pint in O’Malley’s and chatting up young Sean O’Malley as though he were privy to secret goings-on at Sylvester Hall. As for Dakin, he’d given up doing jobs around Ballynagh, what with people plaguing him with questions about his mother. Natalie’s attorney, Mr. Morton, had’come from Dublin three times and had left frowning, his jaw set. The inquiry would be next week, in Dublin.
A smell of coffee wafted from the library window, and again the murmur of voices.
Ms. Tunet had arrived almost a half hour ago. “She called around ten o’clock,” Jessie had told Sean while he was doing the rhododendrons that had begun to tower over the sills of the breakfast room windows. It was something to do with a meeting tomorrow morning at the Garda station. “Ring! Ring! That telephone!” Jessie had said. Earlier, it had been Sergeant Jimmy Bryson calling. “Yes, Sergeant Bryson, Ten o’clock, Friday morning?” Natalie had said. Nothing got past Jessie.
“Hey, Sean.” From behind him, Dakin’s voice. “‘What bodes the day?’ Did Shakespeare say that or did I make it up?”
Sean turned, smiling. Dakin wasn’t even wearing a jacket. Just jeans, and a jersey with the sleeves rolled up for washing the jeep. It was one of his batch of mustard-colored jerseys that he’d bought from a catalogue. This one had a raccoon on it.
“I think you made it up,” Sean said. Not that he had any idea.
When Dakin went inside, Sean didn’t start clipping again. Holding a rhododendron leaf and rubbing its shiny, dark green surface, he just stood there beneath the open library window, head cocked, listening to the voices.
49
At eight o’clock Friday morning, Jasper picked up the phone in his bedroom suite at the Actons Hotel in Kinsale and dialed Torrey’s number in Ballynagh.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, already dressed. Crew-necked black sweater, white pants, and sneakers. In the tipped bureau mirror on the left side the room, he could see the reflection of the harbor; the sea glittered in the morning sunlight; yachts and sailboats and other small craft seemed barely to move. On the bedside table beside him lay the program for the ten-day International Gourmet Festival at Kinsale, the gourmet capital of Ireland. He’d arrived last night from Dublin, driving south on the N9 in the Jaguar. He’d dined at Kieran’s on the celebrated roast wild boar, but his taste buds had betrayed him. He could have been eating Styrofoam.
“Torrey?” But it was her machine that answered, her familiar “Torrey here. You’re calling the right number … at the wrong time—” only then to be picked up. “Hello?”
“Torrey?” He grinned. She would be in that long striped flannel shirt she wore as a nightgown. Yawning, half-awake despite the cold water dashed on her face, she’d be in the kitchen taking his shaped biscuits from the refrigerator and baking them, maybe even remembering to let the butter get—
“Jasper? Jasper! Hello.” Suprise and pleasure in her voice.
He said, “You’re sabotaging my taste buds. I keep seeing you sleuthing away. My investigative nature—”
“Jasper, listen.” Torrey’s voice was sober. “Since you left, I’ve been tracking through a labyrinth that the Minotaur himself could get lost in. Then, by a sheer fluke …”
While she told him, he gazed out at the sunlit harbor. The yachts and small craft seemed to take on an innocence that had not been there before.
“So,” Torrey was saying now, “when I started to tell Inspector O’Hare, he got that exasperated, stay-off-my-turf look. Then gradually as I talked, I could tell he thought I was simply crackers. Finally, he began to take it in, thank God. So then he started wiggling that tough jaw of his around that way—you know how he does—then I guess he figured he couldn’t risk ignoring it. So, ‘Better run it past Dublin Castle.’ Right?”
Jasper, bemused, said, “Right.”
“Just in case I wasn’t a total idiot. So then, when yesterday he got the report back from forensics at Dublin Castle, he called for an informal meeting at the Garda station.”
“When?”
“This morning, ten o’clock. I’ve still got to dress and have breakfast. I keep wishing you were here. Jasper?”
“Yes?”
Torrey’s voice was serious, sad. “If I’m right about what happened—You know that expression, ‘unalloyed joy’? Is it ever possible? In real life, no matter how delicious the apple, there’s always a worm. Twice in the past, I’ve uncovered the truth behind a murder. And each time it has exposed … each time there’s been a cruel price that somebody, innocent but entangled, had to pay. In this case, it’ll be Natalie Cameron. The exposure. A pity. But there’s no other way. And then, of course … Dakin.”
Jasper, gazing out at the sunlit harbor, said, “Yes, that. The son.” He was thinking hard.
“Jasper?”
“I’m still here.” He paused, then: “All of a sudden I find myself wearing my Jasper Shaw investigative reporter hat. Tell me again. What was it that Kate Burnside told you about that Rolls Royce trip to Dublin, the two girls, Kate Burnside and Natalie Cameron?”
She told him. Then, “Why? What’re you thinking?”
“I don’t know yet.” And he didn’t; it was too elusive. But out there somewhere. He said, “And what about Tom Brannigan? What’s going on with him?”
“I don’t know. Because up to now Grasshill wouldn’t tell me anything about his condition. They had orders from Inspector O’Hare to treat me like yellow fever.”
After they hung up, Jasper sat for some minutes, thinking. Then abruptly he reached out to the bedside table, picked up the program of the International Gourmet Festival and dropped it into the wastebasket.
A half hour later, outside the Actons Hotel, Jasper, in corduroy pants and brogues, and with a windbreaker over his sweater, slung his bags into the back of the Jaguar.
He drove north, up through Cobh and on through Youhal. By the time he reached Dungarvan on the N25, the sun had given way to clouds; in Waterford he turned onto the N9, broad and fast, and at Nass got onto the N7. In a pouring rain, he passed the turnoff that would have brought him, finally, to Ballynagh, but drove on. Twenty minutes later, he was on the N81 from western Wicklow into Dublin. Traffic was slowed by the rain, then stopped; there’d been a washout. Raincoated Gardai splashed along the roadside.
Jasper, arms resting on the steering wheel of the Jaguar, watched the windshield wiper click back and forth. Torrey. As always, the thought of Torrey brought a humorous twitch to his lips, not quite a smile. Torrey. Hopeless as a cook, a genetic marvel at languages, and as stubborn as Joan of Arc. Out of so simple an incident! She on her Peugeot, a nasty pair of young bullies on the road, and then Dakin, her rescuer. Out of that incident, Torrey would valiantly fight the equivalent of the War of the Roses.
In the gray rain, a flashlight was signaling. The cars ahead were beginning to move. Jasper inched the car forward, thinking: But, no. It wasn’t that Torrey felt she owed Dakin something. It was about Dakin’s belief in his mother’s innocence. Torrey didn’t know that Natalie Cameron hadn’t killed Raphael Ricard. But if there was any chance that Dakin’s mother was innocent, Ms. Torrey Tunet, the stubborn Ms. Tunet, was going to try to prove it. But she’d do it with sadness because, win or lose, what it was going to expose would break Dakin Cameron’s heart. So, then.
“Move on, move on!” A garda in a yellow slicker waved his flashlight in an arc and the line of cars picked up speed.
The outskirts of Dublin, finally. He looked at his watch. Twenty past nine. He drove onto Clanbrassil Street, made a right at South Circular Road, then took the first left. He drove slowly down this unfamiliar, narrower street. Ah, there! A car was departing, leaving room to park. He tooled his way into the spot, shut off the motor, and said aloud, “For you, Torrey, my love, I’ve given up the Twenty-fourth International Gourmet Festival.” Days of dining at the Kinsale Good Food Circle, the ten choicest restaurants in Ireland.
So what he was about to do had better pay off.
50
At nine-forty on Friday morning, Winifred Moore, seated at a window-side table in Finney’s, crushed out her cigarette in the extra saucer beside her teacup. Through the window, she watched Sergeant Bryson carry folding chairs, four at a time, from Grogans’ Needlework Shop to the Garda station directly across the street. He had already made two trips. In the window glass, she could see her reflection. She was wearing her favorite hat, the Australian outback hat with the chin strap. She and Sheila had breakfasted at eight o’clock at Castle Moore. Then she’d taken a half hour’s invigorating walk to the bridle path and back, pedometer strapped to her ankle. Now this soul-satisfying, body-satisfying cup of hot tea. It was still twenty minutes before the informal meeting that had been so suddenly called by Inspector Egan O’Hare.
“What’s it all about?” Sheila asked, poking at her empty teacup. She’d been fretful ever since yesterday when the call had come from Sergeant Bryson. She’d planned a morning of correspondence.
“If I were a betting woman, Sheila, I’d say it’s something Torrey Tunet has a hand in.”
“Winifred, that’s an incredibly awkward sentence!”
Winifred, gazing from the window, said, “There’s Natalie Cameron with Dakin. They’re just going in. She’s the most romantic-looking woman I’ve ever—And look, that blue BMW What a careless way to park! It’s Kate Burnside. Why’s she here?”
At a few minutes to ten, Inspector Egan O’Hare, standing beside his desk, said “Good morning,” and smiled at the expectant faces. Here they all were, or almost all. Among them, a murderer.
An informal meeting. “Be sure to say informal,” he’d told Sergeant Bryson, giving him the list. He’d long since discovered that psychologically the word informal made the guilty lay down their guard. They translated it as “negligible.” It wasn’t official. It didn’t count. It was safe. The guilty would feel they had a chance to spy, get the lay of the land. Yet each time in the past, the innocent-appearing informal meeting had trapped the guilty. What looked like honey was actually glue.
O’Hare glanced over at Ms. Torrey Tunet, who was standing at the back, beside the soda machine. She was wearing that bandanna around her dark hair, the turquoise scarf with the peacocks. Her talisman, he’d heard, something to do with her father, the Romanian. She had on a red jumper and jeans. Nelson, that opportunistic dog, sat beside her, as though on guard. Give him a biscuit and he was yours.
Ms. Tunet met O’Hare’s gaze. And he thought, All right, then, Ms. Torrey Tunet, here we are. Leave no stone unturned. That was the motto of Chief Superintendent Emmet O’Reilly at Dublin Castle. O’Hare thought wryly: What good that a man feared neither God nor the devil, yet quailed before the cold-eyed assessment of Chief Superintendent Emmet O’Reilly, each word in his overly educated voice an icicle? He dared not risk it. Five minutes past ten.
“Oh, sorry! We’re sorry!” The door had opened once again. “We’re sorry! Marcy’s bike had a flat.” Willie Hern and Marcy McGann. A flurry. Sergeant Bryson unfolded two more chairs and set them down beside Brenda Plant, who nodded hello.
So that was it. All here. Inspector O’Hare’s gaze took them in: Winifred Moore in a sort of cowboy-looking hat with a chin strap; beside her was her London friend, Sheila Flaxton, who was wrapped in a fuzzy beige shawl. In front of them sat Kate Burnside, whose dark hair was in two long braids though she was a woman in her midthirties. Still a beauty, despite the ravages of unchecked drinking and God knows what, there were unsavory rumors. She had shrugged off a brown shiny leather jacket and wore a peach-colored silk shirt open at the throat.
In front of Kate Burnside sat Natalie Cameron. O’Hare had the passing thought that her kind of beauty was indefinable. A broad brow, a blunt nose, the curve of a cheek; you could look a thousand times and never define the source of that unutterable beauty. She was in a black sweater and dove gray pants. Beside her was the boy, Dakin. Dark-haired, his mother’s broad brow, a handsome, troubled face. For a change the boy wasn’t wearing one of his yellow-brown jerseys but a suede jacket and navy shirt. On the folding chair beside Dakin sat Sean O’Boyle, freshly shaved, in a real suit. Next to him was Jessie Dugan, hands clasped in her lap and looking like an attentive schoolgirl. All here, Ms. Tunet.
It would be tricky. Standing before his desk, he managed a cryptic statement about exploring a possible connection between two recent violent events in Ballynagh, “both of which involved Canadians.” He smiled at the mystified faces, though of course everyone knew that by “violence” in one of the cases, he meant “murder.” He felt perspiration under his arms. So. The witnesses. He took a breath:
“Ms. Plant. If you don’t mind.”
“Oh, my!” Ms. Plant gave a startled laugh. Then with a shudder, she recounted her terrifying experience at the gates of Sylvester Hall. She wore a navy suit over a high-necked lavendar sweater, and with her short peroxided hair tamed and anchored above her ears by two curved little combs, she looked composed, though in the telling, she put a hand to her heart and her mascared blue eyes went wide. “Then, jazz music! And Ms. Tunet on her bicycle!”
Inspector O’Hare nodded. Marcy McGann was next. Marcy, in cherry-colored lipstick, said she hadn’t seen a thing. “Not a thing,” she mumbled, and cast a sidelong glance at Ms. Tunet. Neither had Willie Hern seen anything, “because of the curve in the road.”
“Miss Tunet?” Torrey Tunet told the rest, right up to the arrival of the ambulance and the victim, Mr. Thomas Brannigan, taken off to Grasshill Hospital. So that was that. “I would’ve died of fright in Ms. Plant’s shoes!” came Sheila Flaxton’s whispered voice, followed by Winifred Moore’s exasperated shushing.
But, curiously, Inspector O’Hare now smiled indulgently around at the attentive faces. “As you’re probably aware, witnesses often are confused about what they’ve seen. Tests have shown a remarkable discrepancy between what actually happened and what a person thinks he saw happen. In this case, that appears to be so.
“Among the brambles at the gates where Mr. Brannigan was struck down, our investigation has turned up a bloodstained stone. The blood is Mr. Brannigan’s blood type. So there you are! Ms. Plant saw something strike Mr. Brannigan. As for the rest, hysteria surely played a part.” He smiled sympathetically at Ms. Plant.
“But—” Brenda Plant looked bewildered. “A stone? But I saw—You mean it wasn’t a club, it was a stone? But I distinctly—Well, now I don’t know!” She rubbed her forehead.
Someone’s hoarse whisper: “Hallucinations, Sheila. The stuff of poetry!”
A rustling and shifting of feet while Inspector O’Hare leafed through a batch of papers he picked up from his desk. Willy Hern tiptoed quietly to the soda machine, but then there was a clank and the can rattled down. Marcy McGann stifled giggles until her pretty face turned almost as red as her hair.
“Now.” Inspector O’Hare tapped a sheet of pale green paper and looked up. “Two Canadians attacked, one killed. Naturally, one presupposes a connection. I turn now to the results of forensic tests made concerning the murder of Raphael Ricard.” His gaze came to rest on Katherine Burnside. “Miss Burnside. A few questions.”
51
In the folding chair a few feet from O’Hare’s desk, Katherine Burnside raised her brows in surprise. “Yes, Inspector O’Hare?” Amusement in her voice. She ran a hand over the back of the neck of her peach-colored silk shirt and pulled a thick braid forward to lie on her breast. Holding it, running her fingers absentmindedly along it, she gazed back at him. He drew a breath.
“Ms. Burnside, I have a report here from Dublin Castle. It concerns the killing of Mr. Raphael Ricard on Tuesday, October seventeenth. A penknife was the murder weapon. Forensic tests have revealed vestiges of various fingerprints on the knife. Yours among them.”
Indrawn breaths from the listeners, someone gasped, then a waiting. Nelson snapped at a fly. In the silence, the snap of his teeth could be
heard.
Inspector O’Hare did not take his eyes from Ms. Burnside’s face. Her look was one of stunned disbelief. She said, “My fingerprints? I can’t—That can’t be, Inspector! Impossible!” And again, “Impossible.”
“An error is always possible, Ms. Burnside,” O’Hare said agreeably, “though we have a set of your fingerprints taken from—but that doesn’t matter. Fingerprinting is a simple procedure. So if you object, and if you would submit your fingerprints to confirm the match of—”
“Never mind!” Kate Burnside’s long and beautiful and paint-stained fingers twisted and twisted the black braid. She bit her full lower lip and stared at Inspector O’Hare. Then she shrugged. “Well?”
Inspector O’Hare, triumphant, suppressed a strong desire to again look over at Ms. Torrey Tunet. My compliments, Ms. Tunet. He said, “If you would care to explain, Ms. Burnside …”
“No, Inspector. I would not care to explain. But I hardly have an alternative … or am I wrong?” Even cornered, Kate Burnside was mocking him. Never mind.
“Quite right, Ms. Burnside.” He folded his arms. “So if you please …” On his left, he was aware of Dakin Cameron swiping a hand through his dark hair. The wall clock ticked. Waiting, O’Hare had the impression that Kate Burnside had begun to hold on to that braid as though on to a life line.
“This is exactly what happened.” Her throaty voice had a defensive loudness; no one in the room had to strain to hear her:
“I’m an old friend of Natalie Cameron’s. I’ve known Dakin since he was a child. We remained friends, though his mother and I had drifted apart. Once in a while he’d confide in me. So …” A deep breath.
“A week ago Thursday, Dakin visited me. He told me that someone was blackmailing his mother, demanding that she deliver money to him at the cairn. And he said, ‘She says she will never go to the cairn and give him money. But for some reason she refuses to report it to Inspector O’Hare.”