by Dicey Deere
Mrs. McLaughlin said, “But then Donal, after being in AA for sixteen years, went back on the drink. We got desperate again for money. Donal said he’d visit Gerald Ashenden in Ballynagh and get enough money from him to pay what we owed, so he could start over, clean slate, no drink. ‘Five hundred pounds,’ Donal told me, ‘that should clear us.’
“And he told me, ‘Nothing to worry about. I’ll tell Ashen-den I’ve had a bout of conscience about X-raying Kathleen back then, and I’m going to make a clean breast of it to the law. I’ll go all guilty and penitent, Nora, never mind that I had nothing to feel guilty about. But implying at the same time that for five hundred pounds I’d have to reconsider about my conscience.’”
For the first time, Nora McLaughlin looked around at the fascinated faces of the listeners. Then she said to Inspector O’Hare: “I thought how mighty strange it was. Ironic. Because my Donal never did anything wrong except take money from Gerald Ashenden to do a wrong thing he never did. And now Donal was going to try to get more money for the wrong thing he never did. You understand me, Inspector?”
“Yes.”
Nora McLaughlin nodded. “Well. So Donal went to Ballynagh, to Ashenden Manor. And they say that Donal got drunk and had a heart attack and fell down in a bog and suffocated. I couldn’t make it out. I’d heard of Russian peasants getting drunk and falling down in the snow and freezing to death. But a bog? A heart attack? I couldn’t make it out.
“A Dr. Collins had found him. I ask myself often, was that really what happened to my Donal? But what could I do? Donal and I — we’d never known Donal had a bad heart. Do you have to have a bad heart to have a heart attack?”
“I expect so,” O’Hare said.
73
In the silence, a crackle of paper. Then Nelson thumped his tail. Everyone in the room looked around. Sergeant Jimmy Bryson guiltily stopped his noisy opening of the box of dog biscuits. Inspector O’Hare refrained from raising his eyes to heaven.
Scott Keegan was gazing from under his brows at Mrs. McLaughlin. He said bitterly, “Would that your tale were true, Mrs. McLaughlin. That your husband never —”
“But it is true! Donal never lied to me!” Nora McLaughlin’s rosy face went rosier with indignation.
“Come, now, Mrs. McLaughlin! Look at me!” He slid his trouser leg up for the second time. “D’you think I suffer this brace on my leg to amuse myself? In or out of his cups, your husband Donal had you on. A fabrication. A pretty and lying tale. God knows why!”
Mrs. McLaughlin looked about to cry. “No! I — he wouldn’t! Not Donal! Never! He wouldn’t —” She half turned and looked up at Jasper O’Mara standing beside her chair. “Please! Please, Mr. O’Mara! You said just tell the truth! And so I did! I did! And that you’d a way to … I forget the word.”
“Corroborate,” Jasper O’Mara said. “From the Latin, rober, meaning ‘to strengthen.’” He slanted a glance toward Torrey Tunet. “I won’t let you down.”
Inspector O’Hare for an instant closed his eyes. Now what?
74
A somewhat dirty brown envelope the size of typing paper.
Jasper O’Mara shook its contents out onto Inspector O’Hare’s desk. Everyone leaned forward to see. “What is it?” Sheila Flaxton, who was nearsighted, said fretfully to Winifred Moore, who had eyes sharp as an eagle’s.
“Not exactly the crown jewels,” Winifred answered. Trinkets. A small, tarnished silver cross on a chain. A few old lace doilies. A Bible with a peeling leather cover. A half dozen yellowing snapshots.
“What’s all this?” Inspector O’Hare frowned down at the miscellany.
“Ah,” Jasper O’Mara said in his pleasant baritone, “a bit of property that once belonged to a woman named Alice Coggins. Spinster aunt of Kathleen Brady. From the attic of Nolan’s Bed-and-Breakfast. Courtesy of Sara Hobbs, who was good enough to allow me…” He pushed at the few snapshots. “Family shots of the Bradys. This one,” and he slid a snapshot forward.
For a long moment, Inspector O’Hare gazed down at the photograph. A smiling little girl standing alone by a barn. Clean, checked dress, pigtails with bows. The little girl on crutches, a steel brace.
Inspector O’Hare took a breath and closed his eyes. It had all gotten away from him. He even felt dizzy. He became conscious of Torrey Tunet over there by Nelson. He said, “Mr. O’Mara, I am by no means sure —”
“But I am,” Jasper O’Mara said, “An hour ago I called the parish priest in the Brady’s village near Galway, out toward Clifden. Yes, he told me, he remembered the Brady family well. Genetic problem. Now and again it surfaced. Too often, alas. A pity.”
A vehement whisper, “Winifred, I’m missing it. What are they saying?” No answer.
Inspector O’Mara looked down one last time at the snapshot in his hand: pigtails, pretty little eager face, one of the Bradys that had drowned. Then reluctantly he handed the snapshot to Caroline Temple. He didn’t have the heart to look over at Rowena Keegan, the granddaughter of Kathleen Brady. And pregnant.
75
Caroline Temple gazed down at the snapshot in her hand. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh!”
Inspector O’Hare found the moment difficult. Caroline Temple, such a delicate face, and the startled, white-lidded hazel eyes that she now raised to his. Then she said, “Scott,” and handed the yellowed photograph to her son who sat on her left, his trousered leg in the brace awkwardly stuck out.
Scott bent his fair head over the snapshot. Then a long, drawn-out breath and, incredulously, “Christ!” He thrust the snapshot at Rowena who’d turned startled eyes to him. “Take a look, Rowena! Take a look, for — oh, Christ!” He put up his finely manicured hand and rubbed his forehead, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “And all the time! The wicked old bastard thought he’d done it! All the time! He with his damned X ray. And he kept paying me off! Letting me bleed him!”
Inspector O’Hare looked over at Torrey Tunet, who stood at the corner of his desk. She had this morning led to revealing Dr. Collins as a double murderer. But what help could she now be to Caroline Temple and her two children? No help at all. O’Hare felt a wave of pity for the family from Ashenden Manor.
Rowena Keegan, holding the snapshot, ran a fiercely angry hand through her red hair. “Whose fault doesn’t matter! I thought it was his! So, in the meadow — Either way, any child of mine would be born damaged, Maybe crippled. To suffer. So I won’t ever have children. Never!”
“Don’t fret, Rowena.” Scott’s voice was so low that O’Hare, hardly a breath away, had to strain to hear. “Dr. Sunshine will light up your life.”
But, unbelievably, a soft laugh from Caroline Temple. “Oh, darling!” she said to Rowena. “Not you!” She took a breath. “Not you, Rowena! It doesn’t apply.”
“Ma,” Scott said. “For God’s sake, Ma, this is real. So don’t —”
“Scott, be quiet.” To Rowena: “When I married Tom Keegan, my father was furious. He carried on about Catholics always wanting children. ‘You’re not physically able! You’ll die in childbirth!’ he raged at me. It made Tom afraid for me. I was surprised at my father’s solicitude. He acted … strange. He proposed that, instead, Tom and I adopt a child. Now I understand why. He couldn’t bear the thought of another genetically — He said that if Tom and I agreed, I’d inherit Ashenden Manor and all the Wicklow estate. And the child would inherit the Kildare property. But —”
“Ma, what’re you —”
“Be quiet, Scott. But two provisos: The adoption was to be kept secret. His associates, his friends, no one to know. And second: He, with his superior medical knowledge, would select the baby. ‘A healthy baby,’ he said. ‘A perfect little specimen.’”
Caroline’s thin shoulders suddenly shook. “I remember thinking then, Not like me. Not a pained, whining, frail thing like me! That’s what he meant. I knew it. He could have said it aloud: Not like you. Hating the sight of me, tortured by it. Because — though how could I have known his sec
ret? — he thought he had done it.”
Caroline reached over and took the snapshot from Rowena. She gazed down at it. “What a sweet little face! And those pigtails. She must be one of my mother’s little sisters. Yet, my mother, like Rappaccini’s daughter, was glowing, a beauty. My beautiful, black-haired mother! But harboring within her —” Caroline’s voice quivered. She looked at Scott. “Later, when I became pregnant with Scott, my father was beside himself. But I rebelled. I rebelled even against Tom’s fears for me. I wanted to have my baby. Mine and Tom’s.”
Not a sound in the room. It was as though the listeners held their breath.
“So —” Caroline turned to Rowena, who sat staring at her. “Anyway, back then, two years before I had Scott, my father went over there and got you himself and brought you back. You were four months old. The healthiest baby.”
Rowena said, green eyes wide, “Went over there? Where?” She looked in shock. She pushed her red hair impatiently behind her ears as though to better hear her mother’s words.
“To Denmark. He was adamant that the baby come from Denmark. Though why you have red hair, I can’t imagine. It’s so … so Irish.”
It was Scott who began helplessly to laugh. Then Caroline joined in, then Rowena. They all three laughed so hard that tears came to their eyes, and sometimes too it sounded like sobbing. For some minutes they were unable to stop.
76
At Collins Court, Padraic came into the great hall and without even stopping to take off his jacket or cap went into the drawing room. Because first thing, he had to know.
He went across to the mahogany table where the beautifully inlaid box with the Chinese chess set lay. He opened the box. Carefully, he took out the chess pieces. So exquisite. Each piece both cool and warm to the touch.
And there, at the bottom of the box, was — ah, yes! — the twist of green paper with the pair of wooden knitting needles. He had hidden them here, and here they were.
Padraic shook his head. He couldn’t help but smile. That clever Torrey Tunet! Not only clever with words! She’d fooled him. She must’ve bought another pair of the wooden needles at the Grogan sisters’ shop. She’d have given them to Inspector O’Hare. Had she told Inspector O’Hare she’d found them in the garbage at Collins Court? Or what? How much of this had Inspector O’Hare known? In any case, O’Hare had cunningly played out his part.
In the great hall, the clock chimed. Half past two o’clock. Delicious smell of baking from the kitchen, Helen Lavery’s scones. And there’d be the cod. After his late lunch, which by now would so late that it would really be a high tea, he’d still have plenty of time. In October it did not get dark until seven.
* * *
Half past four o’clock. What a fine feast Helen had given him! First a mushroom soup with bits of carrot. Then the cod. And the cranberry scones with the tea. He’d miss all that.
At his desk in the little surgery, he made out a check to Helen Lavery: A thousand pounds a year for her twenty-two years of service at Collins Court. He put the check in an envelope, with a note.
Next, his confession, for Egan O’Hare. The inspector called it a statement. Weasel word, statement. A confession. A confession of murder. Of two murders. But before writing it, he tore up an earlier confession he’d written many days before, just on the chance that Rowena might be found guilty of the knitting needle murder of her grandfather, not that he’d believed Inspector O’Hare would ever have gotten enough evidence against her. Still, he’d slept better.
He wrote the new confession carefully, read it over, and, satisfied, signed and dated it. In the great hall, he put the envelope with the confession on the central round table, propping it against the silver bowl with the Collins family crest, the bowl that had been there since he was a boy. Inspector O’Hare would be coming for him in the morning. Well, this would have to do.
Upstairs in his bedroom he put the envelope addressed to Helen Lavery on his dresser.
Next, he packed a few travel articles. He had money, pounds. He knew what he was about. By the time they found out, he’d be gone. A pity he couldn’t take the Chinese chess set, but it was too heavy. There’d be months maybe while he’d be carting it around.
In the bathroom off his dressing room, he squeezed a blob of medium ivory, number 3 makeup base onto his middle finger, dabbed it around his eyes, then carefully smoothed it, blending it in. Fine. At one time, he’d thought of wearing glasses to conceal those ugly brownish circles. But he had perfect vision, and besides, he’d always disliked the look of glasses.
Before going downstairs again, he stood a moment at the tall bedroom windows. He could see the walled kitchen garden below, and rising beyond it the high hills where sheep browsed. At his death, Collins Court would, finally, go to Jeremy Collins, a distant cousin in Australia.
The last thing before he left was to put on the old tweed cap of his father’s.
Leaving Collins Court, going through the great hall, he thought what a pity it was to leave his books behind. Still, Tennyson’s Ulysses, “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
Going out the door into the purpling dusk, he felt a wild surge of euphoria such as he’d never felt before. His new life.
77
Reaching Ashenden Manor with Caroline in the old Rolls, Mark Temple said, “I’ll be right down,” and went upstairs to his dressing room where he took off his country squire clothes and put on a shirt, sweater, and trousers — all clothes from the old wardrobe he’d brought from Dublin.
“What’re you doing?” Caroline in the doorway. Mark went over, took Caroline’s hands in his, and sat her down on the bed. He kissed her. “I’m not a country type, my love. I had a romantic notion for a while that Ashenden Manor would fulfill an old dream of mine. But no, it turns out it doesn’t.”
Caroline said, “I’m glad. I’ve always hated living here. Tom and I, we dreamed of leaving. But, money. We thought until we had enough money —”
“But you’ve been hanging back about leaving!”
Caroline said, “I thought Scott was sleeping with men for money. I thought if something dreadful happened and he needed me, I could protect him. I couldn’t leave him at Ashenden Manor without me.”
Mark looked at his wife’s delicate frame. Protect her son! How? Then Caroline’s hazel eyes met his. Protect her son? Yes, if she had to, she’d find a way. He imagined her pulling a bright sword from its scabbard and launching forward, fair hair flying in the wind.
* * *
Downstairs, Scott and Rowena sat at the dining room table going through the yellowed old photographs of the Brady family. Scott after some minutes leaned back and looked at his sister. “What about Flann? Where’s he now?”
“I don’t know. Jasper wouldn’t tell me. Said that was safest.” She sighed. “Flann’s never been to Ashenden Manor. He couldn’t visit me here; you know Grandpa. So no one in Ballynagh knew about him. The thing was —”
“Ah, yes, Grandpa! And Flann a scribbling Irish nobody, son of a stonemason! Cry havoc! To arms! Rowena, his perfect creation, destined for the most aristocratic Anglo-Irish or English marriage! We can’t have this raiding Irish fox slipping into the fold and —”
“God! You make it sound so Charles Dickens!”
“Well, isn’t it?”
“I guess.” Rowena drew lines on the tablecloth with her fork.
“About Padraic,” Scott said. “Later, when I’m alone, I’ll think about Padraic. For Padraic, a private requiem.”
“Yes,” Rowena said. They were silent. Rowena gazed down again at the old photographs of the Brady family, a family whose blood was not hers. Then she looked over at Scott. “Any chance of getting our money back from Dr. Sunshine?”
“Please! Can a cat turn into a canary?”
* * *
At the Ballynagh police station, at three o’clock, Inspector O’Hare said into the phone to Chief Superintendent O’Reilly at Dublin Castle, “Absolutely, sir! We’ll be getting a full c
onfession. We’ll be bringing Dr. Collins to Dublin in the morning.”
To Sergeant Jimmy Bryson, Inspector O’Hare’s face had that full-blooded look it always got with success. His eyes were brighter. His gray hair looked crisper. He lounged back in his chair, phone in hand. “Ah, well, sir! Thank you, thank you.”
Inspector O’Hare put down the phone. “So!” He rubbed his chin and looked over at Jimmy. “What a windfall! I called this informal meeting, and voilà! As the French say.”
“Right, sir. Voilà.”
“We ought to buy chairs of our own, Jimmy, and not have to borrow from the Grogan sisters every time.”
“We could do that,” Bryson said. “You want lunch, sir? I’m going to Finney’s.”
“I do, Jimmy. Bring me back a fish sandwich, will you? And some crisps. I’ll make tea here.” He stretched widely. He could hardly wait for tonight to tell Noreen about it.
Jimmy Bryson gone, O’Hare sat gazing out at Butler Street. Slowly, his satisfaction was draining away. Under his left pants leg, the long scar from the scythe, that time when he’d tripped on a stone, clearing his field. Dr. Collins’s careful stitching. Fourteen years ago? Or sixteen. He sighed.
* * *
At Castle Moore, Sheila found Winifred standing before the library fire, warming her backside and sipping bourbon.
“Winifred?” Sheila sat down on the fringed hassock beside the fire. “I’ve been thinking. How ironic. Considering that back in the days when Gerald Ashenden tried to abort Kathleen’s baby with radiation, the medical profession itself hadn’t the least idea that X ray could have any harmful effects on a fetus. Birth defects, for one. They’d no idea —”