The Irish Cottage Murder

by Dicey Deere

  “You sound like a lad in a Latin class, Mr. Callaghan. What about ‘would have baked’?” She reached down and rubbed one of her bare feet. “I suppose you think I have no shame, chatting with a visitor with my feet in a dishpan? I haven’t a single loaf on hand, Mr. Callaghan. But I’m baking in an hour. Let’s see … That’s bread for tonight for Castle Moore; and baking in the night again for bread ready in the morning: three orders, two for in the village when I go to work. How many loaves would you be wanting? And when? The oven’s only so big. Six at a time is what I can do. Sit down while you’re thinking, Mr. Callaghan.”

  Fergus pulled at his tie. Was she laughing at him? “Well.” Should he ask for two loaves? Two, at least. “I’m thinking two loaves. I could pick them up tomorrow noon … if that’s all right? I have to be at Castle Moore again in the morning. So I can come by afterward.” He looked away from her white knees with their delicate blue tracings. Was she ever lonely? Did she sometimes waken in the night and long for a man in her warm bed? Did she keen in the dark for her late husband? Emmet Devlin had been a carpenter. He had fallen from a ladder and struck his head and died two days later in the hospital. Six years ago. The little girl, Finola, had been only two.

  “Yes, come by tomorrow. After Castle Moore.” Maureen Devlin gave Fergus a sidewise look. “And how are you getting on with the genealogy for Mr. Desmond Moore?”

  “Well…” Fergus wished she hadn’t asked, “You know, like a lot of Irish Americans, Mr. Moore believes—But one can’t always trace a family back to … ah … ahh…”

  “To Celtic kings? Or only to lesser nobility?” Derision in Maureen Devlin’s voice.

  “Ah, well…,” Fergus said, awkwardly. He was remembering Maureen Devlin’s own antecedents, those Anglo-Irish, who they had been. And it had come to this, an old groundsman’s cottage with a fireplace kitchen for a living room, with its pine table and chairs and two worn chairs and a shabby couch. The black iron gas stove for the bread. Besides this main room, the cottage had a small bathroom and a bedroom, where Maureen and Finola slept. The cottage belonged to Desmond Moore, as did all the surrounding woodland, and the glens and streams and mountainsides.

  Maureen Devlin took a clean, ragged towel from the arm of the rocker and began to dry her feet. So white, they were! “Did you see Finola outside?”

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “She must still be picking blackberries,” Maureen said. “I should buy her a watch. She gets thirty pence a box for the blackberries. I bring the boxes to Ballynagh. She wants a set of doll’s dishes with the money when she has enough.”

  Maureen put down the towel. She smiled at Fergus. “I’m so lucky. Finola’s very capable for an eight-year-old. I go to work before six in the morning. Then she makes her own breakfast and does an hour’s reading. She’s afraid of not keeping up, for when the fall semester starts.”

  “Kids!” Fergus said, sympathetically.

  “She’s so good. She fixes us something to eat at noon, for when I get home from work. She makes sandwiches, peanut butter, or chopped egg, or tomato, and wraps them in plastic wrap and puts them in the refrigerator. She has the kettle filled, ready for tea.”

  Maureen Devlin folded the towel and put it on the arm of the chair. She slipped her feet into flat rubber sandals and stood up.

  “You’ll have a sandwich or two with us, Mr. Callaghan? And a cup of tea?”

  “Well…” He wanted to. Oh, how he wanted to! “Thank you.”

  “I’ll just add more water to the kettle,” Maureen said. At the stove, she lifted the kettle. Then, motionless, she held the kettle. “Why, I don’t—After all my bragging! Finola has forgotten to fill the kettle again. That’s the third time. Her mind’s off in the sky someplace. And not eating right. A bit worrisome.” Slowly she filled the kettle under the faucet. “And where is she? She’s always been so responsible.”

  Fergus, noticing that Maureen’s hand trembled a bit as she put the kettle back on the stove, said comfortingly, “Even little kids change from one week to the next.”

  9

  Six hundred acres of mountainous countryside, glens filled with fern-lined brooks, wooded lands thick with pine and oak, broad sheep meadows, the lake shaped like a whale, at least to Rose’s mind. Bogs and ponds, hare and quail. Most of the Moore estate in Wicklow lay north and west of the castle.

  Castle Moore itself was of gray stone. It had no turrets or flying buttresses. It was a combination of styles and periods, From the north corner rose a tower dating from the sixteen hundreds. At the foot of the tower, roses and ivy covered a bit of ruined wall, all that was left of a twelfth-century fort. For three hundred years, the castle had been Castle Comerford before falling into the hands of Sean Moore, Desmond Moore’s father. It was Sean Moore who had installed the plumbing throughout, so that even the servants’ rooms had a bathroom for each two bedrooms. Rose shared her bathroom with the senior maid.

  Tuesday night at midnight in the west wing of the castle, Rose sat bent over the writing desk in her bedroom. She was writing to her younger sister, Hannah, who’d gone to London two weeks ago. Hannah was staying in a bed-sitter in that vast city. Hannah was a shy girl, fearful, and she knew no one. Rose had promised to write. Anyway, Rose loved to write letters.

  “… so that makes the four of them,” Rose wrote.

  Ms. Torrey Tunet got here last night. Winifred Moore and her friend Sheila came from London around noon today. The American landscape man, Mr. Luke Willinger, arrived early in the afternoon and went right out and tramped all over what was once the parkland. He has a long, handsome face; he’s fiercely angry … the way he slung his bags into his room, expensive bags they were, too. He came back with mud on his brogues, but a little calmer. He has eyebrows thick as mustaches. Hair like a thicket, brown and curly. Dark eyes. He likes Winifred Moore, that cousin of Mr. Desmond’s from London. They got on over dinner.

  But he, this Luke Willinger, didn’t get on with Ms. Torrey Tunet. Oh, no! I was serving the before-dinner sherry, only Ms. Winifred’s was vodka and Mr. Desmond’s was Jack Daniels, as usual; Ms. Tunet’s was a martini and Mr. Willinger’s was a Coke. Ms. Winifred’s friend Sheila had sherry. Anyway, Ms. Winifred was talking very instructivelike about how there had never till now been any Irish women poets; it was the male Irish syndrome: “Women were nothing in Ireland back then, good merely to cook and breed a pack of kids. Irish poets exalted men and wrote stupid, romantic nonsense about women. Only one Irish poet ever pointed out a truth about the sexes,” and then Ms. Winifred quoted from a poem. I wrote it down later in the kitchen: “‘Bloody treason, murderous act/Not by women were designed/Bells o’er-thrown nor churches sacked/Speak not ill of womankind.’”

  “I get it,” Mr. Desmond said, swirling the Jack Daniels around in his glass, the way he does, “It means men mess up the world and blame the women. That it?”

  “You’re close, for once, Desmond,” his cousin Winifred said, ironiclike, and her friend Sheila Flaxton said, “Oh, Winifred!” reproving, as though Ms. Winifred were a naughty child.

  Honestly, Hannah! Then Mr. Desmond said, a bit nasty, “Must have been a damned liberal, that Irish poet.”

  At that, Ms. Torrey Tunet (she looked like a mermaid in a skinny green wool dress) gave a kind of giggle and said, “Fourteenth century. By the poet, Gerald Fitzgerald.”

  “How did you know that?” Ms. Winifred asked, as though a frog had just spoken English, and Ms. Tunet said, “Oh, well,” and shrugged her shoulders.

  And then, such a look, sneering, you might say, that Mr. Luke Willinger gave Ms. Tunet, and he said, significantlike, quoting again from the poem, “‘… murderous act/Not by women were designed’?” like a question, and he added, staring at Ms. Tunet, “Mr. Gerald Fitzgerald was not wholly right.”

  I was stationed by the sideboard for when Mr. Desmond would nod, but he only poured himself another Jack Daniels. He was smiling and very flushed as though he were enjoying Mr. Willinger being shar
p to Ms. Tunet.

  “You read Gaelic?” Ms. Winifred asked Ms. Tunet, surprised, “Gaelic poetry?” Then it came out what Ms. Tunet does for a living, interpreting at diplomats’ meetings and Common Market delegates’ sessions and such, but not much money in it. She loves it. She’s all about words, languages. She can skip around like hopscotch in words and languages.

  I got the signal then from Mr. Desmond, and I went to the kitchen. But I heard Ms. Winifred say, “Genes, it’s all in the genes! They’ve made tests. Languages are natural to some folks. That’s a scientific truth! You can check it out on the Internet.”

  I have to go now. Take good care of yourself, Hannah. It will be all right. I know it.

  Rose sighed and wrote, “Your loving sister,” and signed her name.

  Hannah was the youngest child, then herself, then the three older brothers who lived in Cork. She and Hannah had always been close, so close.

  Rose picked up the pen and added a postscript: “That garda sergeant, Jimmy Bryson, who likes you? I talked to him on the telephone this afternoon. About a yellow car, a Saab that someone had left parked on the road. Up near the break in the hedge. Ms. Winifred almost ran into it. Jimmy said he’d go see. He asked after you.”

  10

  A cloud drifted across the moon and the dark bulk of the stables merged with the woods. Desmond Moore stumbled and said, “Bloody Christ!” and turned on his flashlight. “Mind the muck.”

  “Right,” Luke said. He wished gloomily that he were in bed. It was already midnight, but after dinner Desmond Moore had wanted to sketch out a couple of landscaping ideas in the library. Desmond was a little drunk, which didn’t stop him from downing two more sizeable whiskeys. Then he had insisted on Luke seeing his new horse, “A bay mare I got at a sale in Wexford, a beauty, Darlin’ Pie. You’ve got to see her. Bought her this morning. Had them bring her this afternoon.… Brian!” he called suddenly into the darkness.

  A light went on in a casement window above the end stable, a minute later there was the clatter of feet on stairs; from a horse stall came a neighing and a stamping of hooves. A slight figure appeared and crossed the stable yard. “Mr. Desmond?”

  “Brian Coffey, my know-it-all: trainer, groomer, manager.” Moore made the introduction with a drunkenly wide sweep of a hand. They stood in the light of a glaring bulb above the stable door. Brian Coffey was a thin young man, red hair rumpled from sleep. He wore well-slept-in striped boxer shorts and a beige T-shirt. He squinted at them as though the light hurt his eyes. His white, freckled face looked drugged with sleep.

  “Brian’s an expert on horseflesh; took him with me this morning to the horse sale. He went over Darlin’ Pie like a blind guy feeling a new girlfriend’s body. Perfect little mare. Let’s have a look, Brian.”

  Smell of fresh hay, clean concrete paving, water troughs, tack neatly hung beside each stall; neighing, rustling, snorting. The end stall. Luke gazed at the gentle-eyed little mare who nickered softly. Darlin’ Pie. He didn’t care if Darlin’ Pie went up in a puff of smoke. He didn’t care that this morning Desmond Moore had gone and bought a bay mare. He was still jet-lagged. Sleep was what he cared about. And he was chilled by the night air, though he wore a heavy wool oatmeal cardigan of Desmond Moore’s. He’d come to Ireland to do a landscaping job. That was all.

  In the stall, Darlin’ Pie stamped a hoof, arched her neck, and shook her head.

  “Look at that!” Desmond Moore said softly, “Noble, her bloodline! I’ve got her papers, her whole lineage! Her … genealogy.” He gazed at the mare for a long moment, then turned away. “Let’s go. It’s frigging cold out here.”

  Leaving the stable yard, Luke glanced back. Brian Coffey was standing in the stable doorway under the light, looking after them. Then the light went out.

  11

  At four o’clock Torrey arrived back at Castle Moore, changed into jeans and loafers, and went for a walk in the woods. She’d had no particular destination; she’d simply wanted to enjoy the woods. She walked pleasurably through a shady glen and came to a bridle path. Through the trees she glimpsed a run-down cottage, old-looking, somehow sadly romantic. She walked on along the bridle path through sun and shadow, hearing birds singing and the rustle of small animals in the brush and smelling honeysuckle and pine. Then, drawn by the shadiness, she walked deeper into the woods. She had gone on hardly ten minutes when the ground fell away and began to feel spongy under her feet. She smelled the rank odor of rotting vegetation. Bogs. Better to turn back, find dry, higher ground, fresh piny scents.

  She turned to skirt a bog and saw something puzzling, something that, of course, could not be, but … She went closer.

  A hand. On the brown, decayed surface of the bog, it looked oddly like an exotic, pinkish tan flower growing out of the waterlogged, spongy ground. A hand.

  It couldn’t be. It was. Torrey went closer, squinting, placing her loafer-clad feet carefully on the marshy ground. She knew it was a bog. Bog, from the Gaelic bogach meaning “soft ground.” It would be swampy with rotted vegetation. She might sink in.

  Two feet away, she leaned forward. A man’s hand. On his hairy, half-submerged wrist, a wristwatch. It was only when Torrey saw the watch that she believed what she was looking at. It meant that below the swampy ground would be a man’s body.

  She backed away, appalled. The stench from the bog rose to her nostrils. Under there, a body. Maybe the man had gotten drunk and lost his way and fallen into the bog; maybe because of the rain it had been dangerously swampy and he had been too drunk to save himself. She shuddered. She must race back to Castle Moore and have them call the gardai, report this horrifying—“Yes, Officer … Around four o’clock I returned from my day in Dublin and was taking a stroll through the woods when I came upon…”

  But for a moment, Torrey felt too sickened to move, too filled with pity and horror. She just stood staring at the man’s hand, the sun glinting on the wristwatch.

  A voice behind her said, “What’s so fascinating in a bog, Torrey, when I’ve got six hundred acres of mountain and meadow, lakes and pools and glens … some of the most stunning views in county Wicklow?”

  She turned. But Desmond Moore was no longer looking at her. His gaze had gone beyond her. He was staring into the bog. “What the hell?”

  He went closer until he stood at her shoulder, looking at the pink-tan flower that was not a flower. Then he whistled. “My, God! I’d better call Ballynagh. Inspector O’Hare.”

  12

  At 4:45, Insp. Egan O’Hare and Sgt. Jimmy Bryson of Ballynagh, tugged and heaved until they had dragged the man from the bog and flopped him over onto firm ground. An ugly sight, the man’s sodden, corpulent body in a weedy tangle of brownish yellow vegetation.

  Silent watchers stood all around: Desmond Moore and the American woman who’d found the body; Moore’s cousin Winifred, who kept muttering, “Poor bastard!” and Winifred’s English friend with the pasty face and a handkerchief to her mouth. Desmond Moore’s other guest, a gangling American with a pencil behind his ear, stood biting the inside of his cheek and frowning.

  Inspector O’Hare, a heavyset, keen-eyed man in his fifties, knelt and gently wiped muck from the dead man’s face. A blunt-featured face, open eyes bulging, a man possibly in his sixties. His sodden hair was discernibly gray. He wore an open-throated, short-sleeved, navy knit shirt, tan pants, leather loafers.

  “Anybody know this man?” O’Hare looked around. A negative shaking of heads. A wind stirred leaves in the trees. Otherwise, silence.

  “Anyone seen him about?”

  No luck there either. O’Hare frowned at the man’s bulging eyes, then squatted down and wiped muck from the thick neck. He tipped up the man’s head and studied his neck. Then O’Hare stood up and unsnapped the cellular phone he wore at his waist.

  “What’s going on?” Desmond Moore asked, shifting impatiently.

  “Just routine.” O’Hare tapped in the number of headquarters of the Garda Siochana, the Irish polic
e, at Dublin Castle, Phoenix Park. In a moment he spoke to a sergeant. Would they send a van with the technical staff and their equipment. “A quarter mile west of Castle Moore, village of Ballynagh.… No. Undetermined.” He clicked off the phone. He looked around and said politely, “No need to wait.”

  He watched them trail off toward Castle Moore, then stood with arms folded, looking down at the dead man.

  “What d’you think?” Sergeant Bryson said.

  “Strangled,” O’Hare said. “That’s my off-the-record guess. Those purple marks on his throat…” He ran a hand over his chin. “That yellow Saab on the road could be his. Check it out and have it towed to Kelly’s garage.”

  “Yes, Inspector.”

  Alone, O’Hare waited. By five-thirty, the van with the Garda Siochana technical staff and their equipment arrived from Dublin. Carefully, efficiently, they inched over the ground and took the photographs. By six-thirty, they were through. They lifted the bundle of the dead body onto a gurney and carried it through the woods to the van, which they’d had to park in the castle drive.

  * * *

  At 6:45 Inspector O’Hare arrived back at the Ballynagh garda station. Sgt. Jimmy Bryson was waiting, excited, face flushed.

  “The yellow Saab,” he said, when O’Hare wearily sat down at his desk, “a car-for-hire.”

  Tea mug in hand, Bryson stood at the inspector’s shoulder looking down at the car-hire contract he’d placed on the desk. “Hired from Murray’s Europcar. No keys in the car. The boot was unlocked but nothing in it, just the emergency equipment. This Murray’s contract was in the glove compartment. And their complimentary map. That’s all.”

  Sergeant Bryson sipped tea, happy for a bit of a mystery. He felt competent and pleased with himself, the sunny weather, and his job. He was twenty-one, narrowly built, and wore his dark blue uniform with style, his stomach held in to do the uniform justice. He loved his life.