The Irish Manor House Murder

by Dicey Deere

“A castle’s so damn chilly,” Winifred said. “Thank God for bourbon! Yes, Sheila, the medical profession didn’t yet know. But there’s hardly a scientific advance that isn’t accompanied by smarmy activities that go on sub rosa. Unethical fringe activities. Such as, in this case those known to a dog breeder in Cork. Then to Hotchkiss. And then, alas, to young Ashenden.”

  They were silent. The fire crackled. A log shifted and a plume of sparks shot upward. On the hassock, Sheila hunched her shoulders and rubbed her arms. “Then all those years, Ashenden living with what he’d done.”

  Winifred said, “Oh yes, that. But then, there was Rowena. A compensation? In Gerald Ashenden’s head, Rowena was his child. His and that Ingeborg’s child. A Scandinavian saga, if ever there was one!”

  “Actually,” Sheila said, “you might make a sonnet of it, Winifred. A dark kind of Irish sonnet. I could use something like that in Sisters in Poetry. I’m short the next issue. Or if not a sonnet —”

  “No.” Winifred shook her head. “If I were to write anything, it would be a long poem, more romantic than Scott’s young Lochinvar who came out of the west.” She looked down into her glass. “It would be about Padraic Collins.”

  * * *

  At the groundsman’s cottage, Jasper said, “Torrey. Torrey! What is it?”

  Torrey stopped pacing. “Hmmm? I’m just — Nothing.” The gypsy. She saw the gypsy’s dark face, all crafty and hinting, and heard again, “A reward, is there? You think about it, Missus.” But the gypsy’d had the goods on Padraic Collins, no way for him to wriggle out. And he was rich. Then why come to me? Something wrong.

  78

  It was February, and in Dublin a snowfall during the night had slowed the morning traffic. So at half past eleven, Jasper, in Dunleavy’s pub around the corner from the Shelbourne, half expected Torrey to be late.

  It had been four months. Belfast first, then an investigate bit in the Mideast. Now home to Dublin. Dust on the garaged Jaguar, musty smell in the closed-up apartment. On the bathroom scale, he’d weighed himself. Gained six pounds. That wonderful Turkish food, eggplant in a thousand guises.

  “Jasper. Hello.”

  Torrey sat down and shrugged off a fleecy-looking coat. He saw that she had lost weight. She’d become too thin. It had put shadows under her cheekbones and somehow drew attention to her mouth, which at this moment smiled at him, bewitching him as usual. Her short wavy hair was damp from the snow, as were her short black eyelashes, so that they starred her gray eyes. She had on the same red turtle-necked sweater he remembered. He sighed with pleasure.

  “So. Tell me all,” he said and took her cold hands in his big warm ones, “Tell me how you are. Did you get my letters? Every time I called the cottage, I got your recording. Frustrating, but at least it was your voice. I had to imagine the rest, you at the laptop, a crackling fire in the fireplace…”

  “Yes. I tried to buy the cottage from Winifred Moore, but she won’t sell. So I’m only renting. But it’s cheap. The gypsy’s murder in the cottage helped, if you want to be cynical about it. Here’s the waiter.” They ordered. Hot tea for her, beer for him.

  “And the kids’ book?”

  “I met the deadline. Two weeks later the publishing company went bankrupt.” She gave a little shiver of pleasure. “You know, I’m glad? Interpreting’s my thing; it fits my skin. Ballynagh’s now my base, my jumping-off place. Tomorrow I’m off to Greece, a five-day job. So I’ll still eat. Modern Greek is easy. Fascinating too, once you know what it’s derived from. I love the Greek tragedies, Medea, for instance. Myths and tragedies.”

  Jasper said, “Speaking of Greek tragedies, any news about Padraic Collins? Have the Gardai caught him yet?” And when Torrey, gazing at him, only shook her head, he said, “Now there’s a Greek tragedy for you. To kill one’s best friend! That’s the pity of it.”

  “Oh,” Torrey said, “Padraic Collins didn’t kill Dr. Ashenden.”

  79

  When it was over, and to Inspector O’Hare’s mortification Dr. Padraic Collins had slipped from between his fingers, the news media forgot Ballynagh. As Winifred Moore said, “They went baying off after fresher blood.”

  Torrey was alone, Jasper gone to Belfast. She finished the three-language book and sent it off. She walked the hills with pregnant Rowena, learned Gaelic, restlessly bit her fingernails, and read the Dublin Times, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Tribune, the Evening Herald, and a gaggle of news magazines. She was on edge, searching for something, she didn’t know what. Waking in the morning, she would think restlessly, Something wrong.

  The gypsy woman had been a fellow Romanian. Now, any mention of things Romanian in the news caught Torrey’s eye. The Romanian gypsies lately escaping into Ireland had joined the itinerant population of tinkers, those “travelers” who crisscrossed the countryside in painted wagons and caravans, sharpening knives, selling kitchenware, and occasionally stealing. They were largely illiterate. Most pubs barred them from entering, and they were unwelcome in villages; hospitals admitted them only grudgingly. Their caravan camps hung on the fringes of villages, of towns, of cities like Dublin. Torrey read that the Irish government was trying to better the tinkers’ situation, even to building housing. But tinkers and gypsies were footloose. Torrey thought of her explorer father and wondered if the Tunets had once been gypsies in Romania.

  Then one Sunday morning, over her breakfast of tea and buttered toast, she came upon a small newspaper item. It spoke of an incident in a Romanian gypsy caravan encampment in southwest Ireland, on the outskirts of Clonakilty, a small town near Skibbereen: A gypsy child’s arm was nearly severed under a wagon wheel but was saved by one of the Romanian gypsies, an old fellow who surprisingly had some medical knowledge. The gypsy was even said to help with gypsy women in childbirth, generally a woman’s job.

  Torrey sat back. Her tea grew cold. A gypsy with medical knowledge. A shiver slid down her spine. That night she lay awake.

  * * *

  Four days later, she was driving a rented Toyota west on Route 71 beyond Cork and through Bandon. It was mid-afternoon. A dozen miles ahead lay Clonakilty. Pastures and hills, and a cold salt-smell of the sea; no tourists in winter. Only, on the edge of Clonakilty, a straggling gypsy caravan of three wagons.

  Torrey drove slowly into the encampment. There was an air of activity: men and boys harnessing horses, women packing away goods. Departure was almost palpable.

  * * *

  “An hour later, and they’d’ve been gone,” Torrey said to Jasper. She pulled the fleecy-looking coat closer around her shoulders. “I would’ve missed them. So I was in luck, wasn’t I?”

  Jasper, sitting with folded arms, staring at her, said, “I don’t know yet. Go on.”

  * * *

  It was the biggest of the three horse-drawn wagons, really a small trailer. “I went up the steps. He was there.”

  Padraic Collins. He was sitting up against pillows in a bunk bed, his legs crossed at the ankle, reading, wearing bifocals. A picture of ease, of comfort, his pouty little belly given freedom — he’d unbuttoned the top button of his worn-looking pants that must once have been orange. He was just the same. Padraic Collins, small, balding, chubby. He took off his reading glasses and looked Torrey over speculatively, as though checking to see if she still had signs of the flu. Then he asked her if she’d like a cup of tea.

  * * *

  They sat at a small table that hinged down from the wall. Padraic had put the kettle on. “I knew you were clever,” he told her. “Are you going to turn me in?”

  She said she didn’t know. She kept looking at him; he still wore the light makeup around his eyes, but some of it had rubbed off, showing darkness.

  The stove was kerosene, the blue flame was small under the kettle. “I might’ve known,” Padraic Collins said. “That newspaper item! A clever young woman like you. You fooled me that time in Ballynagh.” He sighed and gave her a smile. “You don’t let go, do you?” And when she waited, “Might as well
tell you.”

  * * *

  Sitting opposite her at the hinged table, Padraic, his fingers turning a spoon over and over, said, “It was two days after Gerald Ashenden’s death on the bridle path. I couldn’t sleep for the horror of it all. By three in the morning, I was exhausted. And, finally, hungry. Helen had baked cranberry scones, my favorite. I knew there were some left. I went down to the kitchen. I got out the scones and butter. I opened a kitchen drawer, I was looking for a knife. And there was the knitting needle with its tip cut off.

  “In the morning, I faced Helen Lavery with the knitting needle. She collapsed. She confessed she’d shot the knitting needle tip into Gerald’s horse. ‘I was afraid for you!’ she told me, ‘because of what you said when you came home from bandaging his shoulder! That you knew that Dr. Ashenden had killed Mr. Slattery in the bog. And that he knew you knew.’”

  Padraic Collins glanced around at the kettle over the blue flame; no steam yet. He put two mugs on the table. “It had been my mistake, a terrible mistake! Losing my head, shaking with the horror of it, babbling. Blurting out too much to Helen Lavery! She was always there, just the way my governess had been when I was little, a trusted presence.” Padraic rubbed his eyes, the gesture brushed away even more of the light makeup. “So she wanted to save me. She’d shot Ashenden with my old pop gun. She’d found it in the nursery years ago. It was Swiss made and could shoot pellets a good fifteen feet. She always used it to shoot kidney beans at the rabbits to drive them out of the kitchen garden. She’d become an expert shot. Why a knitting needle? She never thought such a tiny puncture would be discovered. And it wouldn’t likely have been, but for you.”

  Steam rose from the spout of the teakettle. Padraic turned off the flame, gave the china teapot a quick rinse, and put in a handful of tea leaves. He waited; then he carefully filled the teapot from the kettle.

  “The gypsy woman had been nearby in the woods. She saw Helen Lavery shoot the knitting needle tip into Thor. So in the kitchen, that morning with Helen, I thought, Get rid of this cut-off needle! It was by then seven or so, the sun already up. I went outside to the pond by the garden wall and threw the cut-off needle as far into the pond as I could. It flew up in an arc, it was steel or aluminum, a good ten or twelve inches, the sun flashed on it, a pretty sight. Unfortunately witnessed by the gypsy woman who was hanging about. My second mistake! So she saw. And thought of course that Helen Lavery and I were in it together, that we’d murdered Gerald Ashenden.”

  Padraic Collins carefully poured tea into the chipped mugs and set out butter and a plate of scones. “That pair of wooden knitting needles in the twist of green paper? That the gypsy brought to blackmail me? Naturally me, not Helen Lavery! I being the rich one, owner of Collins Court and eight hundred acres! She even came into my library at Collins Court and threatened me. Blackmail. If she told what she’d seen on the bridle path and that she’d seen me throw the evidence into the pond, Inspector O’Hare might well have the pond dredged. She threatened me with that. And laughed.”

  Sipping from the mug, Torrey gazed at Padraic, who was absentmindedly running a finger beneath an eyebrow. He said, “Helen Lavery would go to prison! All my fault. I couldn’t let that happen. I was tempted to pay off the gypsy woman.” But then he’d thought that next year she would be back. And the following year. Blackmail is an open-ended business.

  “I couldn’t let the gypsy tell Inspector O’Hare what she’d seen on the bridle path! Helen Lavery had done it to save my life! To save me from Gerald. Can you imagine, Ms. Tunet, what it must have cost Helen Lavery to do that? A decent, hardworking, honest woman become a killer? In all my books about romantic heroines with flowing golden hair, I’d never found a one like Helen Lavery.”

  80

  In the pub, waiters were beginning to get tables ready for the noontime crowd. Jasper O’Mara, chin in hand, couldn’t take his eyes from Torrey Tunet’s intense face.

  “So you see,” Torrey said and sat back. She ruffled her drying hair.

  Jasper said, “And the gypsy? Smothered in your bed. Are you going to tell me now that Helen Lavery also killed the gypsy?”

  Torrey shook her head. “Oh, no! It was Padraic Collins killed the gypsy, just as he told Inspector O’Hare. And as Padraic Collins said to me in Clonakilty, in that gypsy trailer, ‘Blackmail’s like a mushroom growing in the night. It gets bigger and bigger. So I had no choice.’”

  “I see.” Jasper nodded. “But —”

  “Shaw! Back, are you!” A beaming red face, flat blond hair. Jasper introduced him. Matt Quinn, of the Sunday Independent. Full of news and questions. Torrey didn’t even hear. Clonakilty …

  Outside the trailer, men’s voices, a horse neighing, a radio was playing rock and roll. Inside the trailer, Torrey asked Padraic Collins, “And you have no … no guilt over it?”

  “Oh, yes! Yes, Ms. Tunet! Guilt is what I live with,” Padraic Collins said, “Guilt. And expiation.” Again running his fingertips under his eyebrow. “It’s mostly the children that need medical care. Hospitals aren’t friendly to gypsies and travelers — ‘tinkers,’ they’re called. Ireland is changing, the government is trying, but still…”

  * * *

  “Nice meeting you, Ms. Tunet.” Matt Quinn departed. It was already noon; customers were shrugging out of parkas and coats, waiters were, beginning to take orders. Jasper blew out a breath and regarded Torrey. “How about lunch? They have a Wednesday special. And a good cook in the kitchen.” He paused. “Or would you rather…? I’ve missed you.”

  “I’d rather.”

  * * *

  After, as they lay near naked side by side on the bed in Jasper’s apartment on York Street, Jasper, one arm beneath Torrey’s head asked, “Are you going to turn him in? Padraic Collins?”

  Torrey was quiet. Then, “From almost the first,” she said, “when I came into the trailer, I knew something. Padraic Collins’s face. Something about around his eyes. And when he poured tea into the mugs, and I looked more closely, there came into my head, The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, / And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.”

  “Blake? Kipling? But why?”

  “Byron. It was the word wolf. At first I didn’t know. Then I did.”

  “Know what?”

  “That Padraic Collins had been concealing something else. Out of vanity, likely … I don’t know.”

  * * *

  It was like a mask that Padraic Collins had tried to hide. So faint, but clear, the wolflike shape of that darkness, when Collins, absentmindedly brushing fingertips around his eyes, had rubbed away the makeup, and she saw. And at first, was puzzled.

  Now, lying beside Jasper, she sought out his hand and laced her fingers with his, as though to hold onto his strength. She said, “Jasper? In the trailer, looking at Padraic Collins while he talked, I thought at first: In Greek, wolf is lykos. Then I thought: And in Latin, wolf is lupus. The wolflike shadow, like a mask across the eyes.”

  Jasper’s fingers, after an instant, tightened on hers. “Lupus. Lupus erythematosus.” He was silent. After a moment, he slid an arm beneath Torrey’s head and drew her close. “Is that why you didn’t turn him in to the Gardai?”

  Torrey nodded. “How could I? Padraic, in his late seventies, and on the run, living a gypsy life and doctoring whoever needed medical help. And with lupus! Lupus demands proper care. How long could he last without it? Collins knew it was risky. But he made his choice. And you know” — she tipped up her head within Jasper’s encircling arm —“I love him for it.”

  81

  It was after seven and dark when Torrey got off the bus beside the break in the hedge that led to the groundsman’s cottage. In Jasper’s apartment, lying in bed, between talking, napping, and making love, hours had passed. Then in his state-of-the-art kitchen, Jasper had made them a high tea of a Turkish dish that was mostly eggplant and was indescribably delicious. At six o’clock he’d gone to an editorial meeting and Torrey had taken the bus.r />
  A crusty snow crackled under her feet when she stepped down from the bus. She drew a deep breath of the pure cold country air. She could see the few lights of Ballynagh down the road. What was Ballynagh anyway, that she was in love with it? Nothing but a few streets and cottages and two or three manor houses and a castle owned by an ironic poet. Nothing but Nelson of the gold-brown eyes and wagging tail, and the smell of dark beer from O’Malley’s pub, and Finney’s crisp-fried cod and the white fluffs that were sheep grazing on the high hills. Nothing but the drawing in of a breath of air that was like a drink of pure, cool water. And the way, last night at dusk, the sun slanted across the mountains so that they became violet, then deep purple.

  In the cottage, she turned on lamps. She knew that it was not over with Jasper O’Mara, or should she say Jasper Shaw? She was happy about that: Their lives crisscrossing, she going off on interpreting jobs, Jasper on investigative jobs.

  But there were some things she wasn’t ever going to tell her darling investigative reporter, Jasper Shaw. For instance, what she knew about Helen Lavery having gone to live on her brother’s farm in Meath and a few weeks later reported to have disappeared. What she, Torrey, knew? Or did not quite know. But there in the gypsy trailer, at the hinged table across from Padraic Collins, she had suddenly asked, “Where is Helen Lavery?” her question startling herself.

  Padraic was spreading butter on one of the scones. He didn’t even look up. “I’ve no idea,” he said. He put down the knife and bit blissfully into the cranberry scone.

  * * *

  So, no. Some things Jasper Shaw was never to know. And there was at least one thing she herself didn’t know and now never would. Why had the Romanian gypsy woman, drunk, thrown out that tantalizing hint? A gypsy’s words, they might be smoke. A lady like you is different, could make something of it. A backup? In case Dr. Collins resisted blackmail, and Inspector O’Hare wouldn’t likely believe a roving gypsy’s tale as against Dr. Collins’s word? Not believe it enough to have the pond dredged? Likely, that. But no way now to know.