by Dicey Deere
Torrey was thinking, Why, Rowena, why?
“And Inspector O’Hare keeping me overnight in the Ballynagh jail.”
“Poor Rowena.” Rowena’s wild, contorted face, the rearing stallion.
“So for now,” Rowena went on, “I’m moving into the old horse trainers’ quarters above the stables at Castle Moore. Later I’ll find a place in Dublin. I exercise the two horses at the castle, and I know it’ll be all right with Winifred Moore. She’s not in residence, anyway. I’ll phone my mother this morning to pack some clothes and have Jennie bring them to Castle Moore. Thank God my mother wasn’t home yesterday afternoon! By now she must think the world’s gone upside down.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. And your brother, Scott.” The boy with the deformed leg.
Rowena went still, then she shrugged and turned out her hands in a helpless gesture. “Yes. Scott.”
“There’s nothing you can tell them? Your mother and Scott?” And me? But Rowena’s green-eyed gaze slid away, her lids lowering. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, a characteristic habit when she was upset.
Torrey said, “Rowena? If there’s anything, I’m here, at my hot little computer. Keep it in mind.”
At that, Rowena hesitated, then abruptly she flicked her fingers good-bye. She smiled, but her green eyes were strained. “I’d better get on. Bye, Torrey.”
Troubled, Torrey watched Rowena walk toward the open door. Rowena’s walk was … what? Different, somehow, heavier these last weeks, and something else. What? A bloom, a blossoming. Something. Torrey rubbed her forehead. What? What? And as though seen in retrospect minutes ago, yes, the unfamiliar tightness of Rowena’s favorite plaid shirt straining across her breasts. Torrey, guessing wildly, called out, “You’re pregnant, aren’t you, Rowena?”
4
At Torrey’s words, Rowena stood still. Her figure, half turned away, seemed to shimmer in the sunlight reflected up from the lintel.
Stunned at her own discovery, Torrey said, “None of my business. I’m sorry. If you’d’ve wanted me to know, you’d’ve told me.”
Rowena turned fully around. Her face was pale. “I wish you hadn’t guessed. Nobody else knows.” She slid her hands deep into her pockets, thrust out her chin, and looked squarely at Torrey. She said carefully, distinctly, “I’m going to abort it.”
In the small silence that followed, they stood looking at each other, then Torrey said “Oh?” as though Rowena had merely said It’s a nice day. She had an odd feeling that Rowena would otherwise shatter into pieces. Then, “Sit down. You can’t just tell me you’re going to abort your baby and then walk out the door.”
Rowena’s look softened. She came back and sank down at the table. Torrey pulled out the chair opposite and sat down. And waited. Then without looking up, Rowena said, “I don’t want to kill my baby. But I’m going to. If I could tell anybody why, it would be you.” Now she did look up at Torrey. “But I can’t. So that’s it. That’s the whole tale. The end. Finis.”
Torrey said, reasonably, “Just tell me this, Rowena, just tell me, so I won’t feel so obtuse: Exactly what are you talking about? You’re pregnant. You don’t want to abort your child but you must. Well, as a friend, is there anything I can do?”
Rowena slanted a green-eyed glance at her and managed a half smile. “You are a caution, Torrey. Thanks for wanting to help me. But you can’t. The subject isn’t up for discussion either.” She got up. Against her plaid shirt her slender neck looked white and vulnerable. “I have to do it.”
“Have to? Oh, please!” Suddenly impatient, Torrey too stood up. She leaned across to Rowena, both hands on the table. “Come on, Rowena! You have a choice. I understand that you’re dying to get your degree. You’ve put in four years — five years? — of backbreaking work. And you’re not married, but —” She stopped. Something about the way Rowena was standing there told Torrey that she wasn’t hearing. She was in some other place, some far-off dimension from which she now said, so low that Torrey barely heard, “It would be a crime to let this baby be born.”
Torrey felt a chill. She looked at Rowena, who now lifted her gaze. Her green eyes stared at Torrey from that other place, wherever it was. “Forget it, Torrey. Don’t try to help me.”
“But — the baby’s father! What about him? Doesn’t he have any say?”
“The father.” Rowena stared at her. “The father? No. No say at all. Torrey, please! Have done with it! I’m going.”
“Rowena, wait! Let me help.”
“Stop it!” Rowena said fiercely. “Don’t!” And more quietly, “Do me a favor. Forget all this.”
But it was too late to forget. It had been too late from the moment Torrey had guessed so wildly and accurately as Rowena had walked toward the open door of the cottage.
“All right,” Torrey said, “not another word. I promise. It’s not my business. But … just one quick question?” She didn’t wait. “How many months pregnant are you?”
Rowena gave an exasperated laugh, “You are a bulldog, aren’t you, Torrey? You never give up. Is it too late for an abortion? Still not the second trimester. I have about three weeks left before it’ll be too risky.”
“I see. I was just asking.” Risky. A better word was dangerous. And in any case, not legal in Ireland. Rowena would have to go to England or elsewhere.
“So I have to hurry.”
“Yes,” Torrey said. “Before it’s too late.”
5
At ten minutes past eight that Saturday morning, Inspector O’Hare abruptly jerked his hand holding the coffee mug. Coffee spilled across his desktop. “Turn it off! Turn the damned thing off!” he said, and Sergeant Jimmy Bryson turned off the radio on top of the Coke machine. The news commentator’s last words still hung in the air. “A speedy recovery to you, Dr. Ashenden.”
Inspector O’Hare, jaw tense, blotted up coffee with a paper napkin. “The Ashenden family’s making us look like fools, Sergeant.” He looked at the wall clock. “I give it ten minutes.”
They waited. Sergeant Bryson meantime put vinegar on a bit of a rag and wiped the front windows of the police station. Inspector O’Hare drew triangles. Nelson lay just inside the front door, nose between his paws. The morning sun shone on the still-empty street.
Twelve minutes. The phone rang. O’Hare picked it up. “Inspector O’Hare here.”
“Good morning, Inspector. Hold for Chief Superintendent O’Reilly, please,” Chief O’Reilly of the Murder Squad at Dublin Castle. The Dublin Metropolitan Area comprised Dublin city and the greater part of the country and portions of County Kildare and Wicklow.
“Good morning, Egan,” came the cultivated voice of Chief O’Reilly, “This about your report. Attack on Dr. Ashenden by his granddaughter? And your detaining of the young woman? What’s going on, Egan?” The chief superintendent’s ordinarily pleasant voice was somewhat less than pleasant.
Five minutes later, Inspector O’Hare hung up, a taste in his mouth bitter as an unripe orange. He looked over at Sergeant Bryson. “Dr. Ashenden is not happy at Inspector O’Hare’s action in imprisoning his granddaughter on suspicion of attempted murder.”
“Isn’t he, now!” Sergeant Bryson said. “He’s not happy? Doesn’t like what’s going on here? What went on there was attempted murder! And them all buttoned up about it, Including her. That’s the crux, Inspector. Ms. Torrey Tunet! Collusion! Snake in the grass! Lying for her friend, Rowena, swearing she saw nothing!”
“Collusion,” O’Hare repeated; he was making more triangles.
“She and Rowena Keegan! From the time Ms. Tunet found that dog the gypsies left and brought it to Rowena Keegan, you’d’ve thought they exchanged blood.”
Inspector O’Hare made another triangle.
“Not that they’re lesbians, mind you,” Jimmy Bryson said. “I’m not saying they’re gay. Leastways, Ms. Tunet’s got that fellow from Cork. Since last month, anyway. Fixed a leak in her roof’s the story. Him on a bicycle trip’s the story, Dún Laoghaire
to Clifden. He as good as lives with her.”
“Collusion.” O’Hare gazed out through the plate-glass window at Butler Street, so empty. “Right, Ms. Tunet had to’ve seen it. That stallion’s as big as a mountain.”
“Bakes bread, I’ve heard,” Sergeant Bryson said, “Cock-a-leekie soup. Beans with a bit of smoked pork. Fancy stuff, too. Good as a chef. From Cork. Just turned up at the cottage, time she had the flu, right? Jasper O’Mara, from Cork. Looking for a bed-and-breakfast. Stumbled on the cottage.”
“Collusion,” Inspector O’Hara repeated the charge.
“Jasper O’Mara, from Cork — he got hold of Dr. Collins on Ms. Torrey Tunet’s phone and Collins came and gave her some, uh…”
“Antibiotics.”
“Antibiotics. Right. Could’ve been a love potion. Her and Jasper O’Mara since.”
“Collins?” Padraic Collins. Yesterday, Dr. Collins had treated the bruised and injured Dr. Ashenden at Ashenden Manor. Collins was Ashenden’s oldest friend, closest friend. Played chess every Saturday evening at Ashenden Manor, so he’d heard. Still occasionally rode together, too, the spare, still-handsome Dr. Ashenden and the balding, belly-pouting, round-shouldered little Dr. Collins.
Inspector O’Hare felt a faint twitch, more like a flutter, in front of his ears. An optimistic sign. Had on his “thinking cap,” as his mother used to say.
Friends. Through propinquity rather than predilection. Collins Court and Ashenden Manor were the two biggest estates in this mountainous corner of Wicklow, barring Castle Moore. Local Anglo-Irish society. No surprise that Gerald Ashenden and Padraic Collins had known each other since boyhood, gone shooting and riding together, though Ashenden was maybe a year or two older than Collins. By chance, both young men had chosen the medical profession and begun practicing in Dublin. Gerald Ashenden a surgeon, Doctor Collins in family practice. Padraic Collins had never married. One rumor had it that a boyhood skiing accident had made him impotent. Another was that, Protestant though he was, he was inclined toward the priesthood and celibacy. Or perhaps he had been disappointed in love? Not to anyone’s knowledge. But Inspector O’Hare, who more than once had occasion to ponder the subject, knew that Padraic Collins indeed had an eye for women. O’Hare had wondered if Collins arbitrarily — and perhaps admirably? — refused to be coerced into marriage by society’s expectations. Altogether peculiar, folks thought. There had been evenings when, seeing Dr. Collins in O’Malley’s having a quiet small whiskey, Inspector O’Hare had quoted to himself Dickens’s “secret and self-contained as an oyster.”
Kindly, though. Three years ago, Collins had given up his practice in Dublin. “I’m a country man,” he liked to say. In Ballynagh, a call for help to Collins Court always brought him out even if it was pouring torrents. He wore country clothes and had a taste for checked vests under his tweeds. Sentimental, too; he wore a tweed cap that had belonged to his late father.
“You want me to do the November budget now, Inspector?”
“Right, Jimmy.”
So, close friends, Collins and Gerald Ashenden. Might Padraic Collins be able to shed some light on why Rowena Keegan tried to murder her grandfather? Sergeant Bryson had half carried the injured Dr. Ashenden back to Ashenden Manor. “No one was about,” Jimmy Bryson had reported, “except the maid, Jennie O’Shea, and — thank God! — Dr. Collins. He’d dropped in at Ashenden Manor for a visit, like he often did. He helped me get Dr. Ashenden up to his bedroom. Uff! Collins himself looked in shock, Inspector. His fingers were shaking like dry peas in a pod when he treated Ashenden’s shoulder. I left them there in the bedroom.”
O’Hare gazed into space, seeing the two old friends in the bedroom, the door closed. He imagined Ashenden looking into his friend’s questioning face and confiding. Confiding … justifying … confiding. Confiding what?
O’Hare tapped a pencil on his desk blotter. Surely Ashenden and Collins must have shared many a confidence through the years. He wondered if Ashenden knew about the hookers in Cork who had their hooks into the good Dr. Collins, not impotent but needed a little fancy work to get him going. Amazing the odd bits of information that reached one’s ears.
A whiff of blood supplied by Dr. Collins, innocently, willingly, or unwarily, and he’d be on the scent. Rowena Keegan’s motive. And the back of my hand to you, Chief Superintendent O’Reilly at that mahogany desk at Dublin Castle.
Inspector O’Hare picked up the phone.
6
It was a ten-minute walk. Then an immense hedge, and around the next bend, Inspector O’Hare saw the great circular drive, and at the apex, the six white Palladian pillars that fronted the entrance to Collins Court. He walked up the sun-dappled drive. Magnificent yet somehow chaste, the simplicity of Collins Court with its rows of windows, glittering now in the morning sun. Off to the left was the entrance to a walled garden, a curved oak door in a vine-covered stone wall. A bit away from the wall, and edged with tall, feathery greens, was a pond dappled with flat-leaved water lilies. On the right, he could see, far back, a corner of the stables. O’Hare imagined generations ago the jingling of harnesses, scarlet-coated horsemen and their ladies up on horses that jostled each other, dogs barking, servants handing up stirrup cups to the riders. But certainly not in Padraic Collins’s time. Dr. Collins was an animal rights advocate who disapproved of hunting.
Helen Lavery, Dr. Collins’s housekeeper and cook, let him in. “A bit of luck, Inspector, Dr. Collins being home this morning.” She had taken his call; she always answered the telephone for Collins, who disliked doing it. She was a bustling, round-faced woman in her midfifties with small, kindly blue eyes. She wore a red-checked apron over a navy cotton dress and had a smudge of flour on one cheek. She cooked for Dr. Collins and was known to be one of the best bakers of pastry in this corner of Wicklow. In Inspector O’Hare’s opinion, Helen Lavery was in love with Padraic Collins. It was an accepted fact that governesses and middle-aged housekeepers were in love with the widowers or single men who employed them.
“This way, Inspector, and mind the step at the end.” She led him into a long-windowed drawing room. “I’ll call Dr. Collins.”
O’Hare looked around and raised his eyebrows, surprised. Roly-poly Dr. Padraic Collins! Unexpected. Padraic Collins, who wore his father’s old tweed cap and a worn woolen vest, Collins, who rattled along in his eight-year-old Honda at late hours to this or that cottage where a man lay sick, or a frightened mother wrung her hands over a coughing or bloodied child.
The books, the pictures, that elegant piano. O’Hare approached the piano. He had never seen one like it before, with its delicate, shell-like finish that of course was not shell but a kind of whorled wood. Not varnished. Buffed. Buffed! A pile of music books, well thumbed, lay on the stand. The carpet was thin, worn, with an oriental look. The bookcases that ranged around the room were a mellow oak.
Waiting, Inspector O’Hare ran his hand over a row of leather-bound books. Morte D’Arthur. Lancelot. Galahad. Queen Guinevere … and thought: lost loves, brave encounters, dragons slain.
Footsteps. Then, “Well, Inspector! Sit down! Sit down! Glad I was here when you called. Helen will bring us some tea. A midmorning cup, eh? What with this chill in the air. Almost like November. And we’ll have some tarts, baked this morning. Already had two at breakfast, but I’m peckish. This weather, and … and…” Dr. Collins’s voice ran out of its frenetic, forced cheerfulness. He sank down suddenly in a chair beside a gateleg table, his plump face pale, dark puffs of sleeplessness under strained-looking, reddened eyes. His voice shook. “A shock. Altogether a shock. I happened to be right there, you know, at Ashenden Court when Jimmy — when Sergeant Bryson got Dr. Ashenden back from the meadow. Thank God for that!”
Inspector O’Hare sat down. He looked curiously at Dr. Collins in the chair across the gateleg table. Lancelot, Galahad. Morte D’Arthur. Secret romantic, wearing a sweater-vest and well-worn tweed trousers, and resorting to hookers in Cork.
“What I’m int
erested in,” O’Hare said, moving his knees so Helen Lavery could more easily put down a tray with tea things and delicious-smelling tarts, “and knowing your close friendship with Dr. Ashenden, Did Ashenden ever say anything to you? Maybe while playing a game of chess of a Saturday afternoon? Maybe something he might’ve mentioned just lately? About anything not going well between himself and his granddaugher? Some difficulty? A problem that might have arisen…?”
“A problem?” Padraic Collins looked uncertain. “No. Oh, no!” He shook his head. “Definitely not.” He reached out and picked up a tart. He said unhappily, “I’d remember if he had. That dreadful — out there in the meadow, it was some kind of mix-up, what happened. Rowena would never have — never.”
Three fruit tarts and two cups of tea later, and having phrased the question obliquely in as many ways, Inspector O’Hare gave up. Waste of time. What the devil had he expected, coming here?
“Well, then,” he said and stood up. Best get on with the other arrows he had in his quiver.
On his way out, Helen Lavery pressed a bag of still-warm tarts into his hands. “Cherry, apple, and blueberry. I use the canned fruit. It comes out just as good.”
7
Ten o’clock Saturday morning. “The black nylon traveling bag,” Caroline Keegan said to Jennie O’Shea, coming into the kitchen where Jennie in her striped kitchen apron sat at the table polishing the silver. “It’s in the box room. Bring it up to Ms. Rowena’s room, Jennie. I’m packing a few of her things.” At Jennie’s alert look of curiosity, she added, “That was all a misunderstanding last night, Jennie, Ms. Rowena being overnight in the Ballynagh jail. Inspector O’Hare had her released early this morning … as you’ve probably already heard?” And at Jennie’s confirming blush, “Inspector O’Hare somehow … anyway, Jennie, the bag.”
“The black nylon with the red stripe, is it, ma’am?”
“Yes, Jennie. Ms. Rowena’s going away for a few days.”