The Irish Cairn Murder

by Dicey Deere

  “I know that,” Ms. Tunet said.

  There was a sudden hum from over on Sergeant Bryson’s desk. A paper slowly began to emerge from the fax machine. Nelson wagged his tail at the machine. Inspector O’Hare got up. Standing over the fax machine, he waited. Ms. Tunet stood beside him whistling “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” under her breath. O’Hare suppressed a sigh of exasperation. The fax machine stopped and he impatiently twitched the fax from the machine. It bore the letterhead of the Montreal Police Department.

  Back at his desk, O’Hare grudgingly read the message aloud; Ms. Tunet at least had the good grace to stand on the other side of the desk, rather than peering over his shoulder:

  “‘Thomas B. Brannigan. No arrests or convictions. Unmarried. Graduate of McGill University. Owns and runs The Citadel, an upscale bookshop on Ste. Catherine Street. Member of Foursquare Literary Club. Recipient of this year’s Halsey Prize for a volume of poetry.’”

  The door opened; the wind slammed it shut behind Sergeant Jimmy Bryson. “Bitch of a wind,” Bryson said, then noticed Torrey Tunet beside O’Hare’s desk. He blushed. He never used bad language before women. He was twenty-four, played soccer in O’Shaugnessy’s field on Sunday mornings, dated Hannah, who worked at Castle Moore, and loved his life, complete with his blue garda uniform, and a bit of action like now. An ambulance siren stirred his blood. Real things happening.

  “All set with Ms. Plant,” he said to O’Hare, “Sara Hobbs will keep an eye out.” Sara Hobbs, who with her husband, Brian, owned Nolan’s Bed and Breakfast, was related to Jimmy on his mother’s side, so he’d had a bit of luck there. Sara had moved Brenda Plant into the room adjoining her own. “I’m right there and a light sleeper,” Sara had reassured Ms. Plant, who seemed a little nervous after her upsetting experience.

  “Fine, Jimmy, fine,” O’Hare said. He looked a frowning good-bye at Ms. Tunet, but she just put her hands in her pockets and smiled at Sergeant Bryson, who said, “What I was thinking, Inspector—It would be nice if I took Ms. Plant to Finney’s for supper tonight, like under the auspicies of the Ballynagh Police Department? Considering.”

  O’Hare frowned. The budget was small.

  “Shepherd’s pie tonight,” Sergeant Bryson said, “and considering her cooperation, and the unfortunate—Anyway, she’ll be leaving in a couple of days, the antiques show in Cork. So I was thinking—”

  “Fine! Fine!” O’Hare frowned, annoyed that Ms. Tunet was standing there, listening. A thorn in his side. This was police business. Confidential.

  “I’m going.” Ms. Tunet went to the door, then she turned. “If there’s any way I can help—”

  Not even if I had burning straws under my fingernails. Inspector O’Hare refrained from saying it aloud. Instead, he nodded. “Certainly, Ms. Tunet.”

  But she hadn’t yet gone: “I was wondering—those teenagers? Willie Hern and Marcy McGann. Did they see anything of the attack?”

  “Nothing.” O’Hare put up a hand and gently probed below his breastbone. It was definitely not the two pieces of pie. It was the nosiness of Ms. Torrey Tunet. “Unfortunately, they came walking up the road too late to see anything.”

  “Well, a shame.” The wind slammed the door shut behind Ms. Tunet.

  15

  Torrey braked her bike to a stop at the gates of Sylvester Hall and got off. She stood looking about. Yesterday, Marcy McGann and Willie Hern had told Inspector O’Hare that they hadn’t seen anything of the attack. They’d been coming from the opposite direction, from the McGann farm, which lay a half mile beyond Sylvester Hall.

  Torrey walked toward the bushes beside the iron gates. She ought to give Inspector O’Hare credit for a thorough investigation. But the fact was, she didn’t. Maybe there was something that O’Hare and Sergeant Jimmy Bryson had missed. Maybe something in that clump of bushes where Thomas Brannigan had fallen when he’d been struck down. Easy enough to have overlooked something.

  The bushes were low and straggly along the roadside. In her brogues, Torrey tread carefully, peering down, eyes narrowed. There were pebbles and stones and bits of road debris and dried bits of dead branches and leaves. Nothing more. Give up, forget it.

  An odd, shivery sensation. Someone was there, stone still, watching her. She looked around. On the other side of gates was a figure. After an instant, Torrey gave a laugh, relieved. It was only Sean O’Boyle!

  “Mr. O’Boyle! Hello!” Sean O’Boyle. Torrey knew he did the landscaping at Sylvester Hall. He tended the flower beds and the shrubberies, he kept the avenue weeded, he babied seedlings in the greenhouse and oversaw the kitchen garden. Dependable. A quiet man. Hardly ever opened his mouth, but for a Good day or Good evening, unless he was talking about plants.

  “Morning, Ms. Tunet.”

  Torrey came closer to the gates. Sean O’Boyle was holding a tape measure, the retractable steel kind. He must have seen her curiosity. “Bushes alongside the gates,” he said. “They’ll have to come out. I’ll be putting in yews. Should’ve been done a hundred years ago. Yews, you can depend on yews. We’ll do the planting before it gets cold. Best chance to get well rooted.”

  “Yes, well … Mr. O’Boyle? Were you nearby yesterday? When that man was struck down? It was right there”—and Torrey waved a hand toward the brambles.

  Sean O’Boyle shook his head. “I only heard about it. I was in the greenhouse, back of the hall. Setting out seedlings. And there’s the herbs. Time to shift them around, what with the sun moving. Some have got to catch the sun. But like the rosemary …” and he explained about the rosemary.

  While he was explaining, Torrey got back on her bike. Why was Mr. O’Boyle carrying on so about majoram and rosemary and sage and so on? She’d only asked a simple question. To which he was giving an interminable nonanswer.

  “Well, thanks, Mr. O’Boyle. See you soon.” Feet on the pedals, she pushed off.

  Alone, he stood holding the tape measure, pulling it out and snapping it back. “None of anybody’s business,” he said under his breath. He looked about at the trees, the shrubs, the things he loved. He was nobody’s business himself, either. Stay away from it. Keep to yourself. He lived with Caitlin, his widowed oldest sister. Caitlin cared for nothing but the church and her television shows. Made him decent meals. He wasn’t the only man in Ireland who hadn’t married. For some fellows, there wasn’t always the money. Or … different reasons. Like himself.

  He put the tape measure in his pocket and started back up the avenue, he had plantings to do in the greenhouse. For himself, he was careful, always careful. He kept his fingernails dirty and a bit of stubble on his chin. In O’Malley’s, he talked about the soccer scores as though he cared. He drank just the one pint, being cautious. Sipped at it. Times when he was parched for a second pint. But resisted. The one pint make his thighs weak. Two might make his brain weak. Incautious. About it. They’d never understand. Nor did he.

  Partway up the avenue, he stopped. The hall in this midafternoon light had a softness, the manor’s Georgian splendor was blurred, it looked so like the painting of Sylvester Hall on wall of the main staircase and like those early painting of some of the other great houses or castles of Ireland. He laughed suddenly. Natalie! That first day he’d come to work at Sylvester Hall! A grubby little charmer, a little devil, aged eight, she’d made him laugh. He’d caught her starting to eat the red berries off a bramble bush. Someone had told her you’d die if you ate them, she didn’t believe it, she wanted to see if it was really true. That Alcock’s Academy must have half torn its hair out, taming down that little whirlwind.

  Only nineteen when she’d married Andrew Cameron. Dakin, an early-born baby, was a sturdy little chap. Worshipped his father from day one. The boy was a puppy jumping around at his father’s knees. He’d almost lost his mind two years ago when his father was killed in the cross fire.

  “Sean!” Breda the cook, squat and fat, was bustling up the avenue from the house toward him. She was carrying a casserole. “Rabbit stew! I pr
omised Caitlin. Enough for two meals for the pair of you. Put it in your car. Not on the seat. Set it on the floor, so it won’t tip over. And thank her for the raisin biscuits.”

  Sean took the casserole from Breda. His connection with Sylvester Hall and the family within it gave him a warm, safe feeling. It was like having a uniform with a crest on the pocket. He was part of something. He belonged.

  16

  Torrey sat propped up against the pillows in bed with Jasper Shaw. The old quilt lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. They had made love twice, then dozed. A blue haze of evening darkened the windowpanes. It was six o’clock, almost two hours since Torrey had returned home from her encounter with Sean O’Boyle.

  Jasper had appeared at the cottage shortly before four o’clock carrying a knapsack and wearing his old moss green sweater and dungarees, as though he hadn’t arrived in the gleaming gunmetal Jaguar that as usual he’d left parked in Ballynagh on Butler Street. He’d gained at least a half dozen more pounds. “The more of me to love you, my girl.” He’d grinned at her, and his nostrils twitched as they always did when he said something he thought was funny. He had a narrow nose in a longish kind of Irish face.

  Now, lying with one arm beneath Torrey’s head, he said comfortably, “All right, now you can tell me. A murderous attack? I heard a bit of something on the RTE. A Canadian?”

  “Yes. I was bicycling on the road over the bridge, the road that goes past Sylvester Hall. I almost saw it happen. But not quite, damn it. Tom Brannigan, a man from Montreal. Someone bashed him with a club. Could’ve broken his head. It was pretty awful. There’s a piece in the Independent about the attack. It’s on the bureau in the kitchen. This Brannigan had arrived in Ballynagh only a couple of hours earlier. He’d put up at Nolans. Likely a tourist, but nobody knows.” She shivered, suddenly chilled. “Funny thing, I saw him having a pint in O’Malley’s maybe a half hour before he was attacked. Anyway, you can read the piece.”

  “I will.” Jasper yawned. “So … peaceful village life gets a bit of a shaking up. Stimulating. Keeps the blood flowing. Right? Unfortunately some of the blood was Mr. Brannigan’s. What else have I missed? Besides you, of course.” His hand affectionately caressed her nape the way she loved.

  “There is something else.”

  “Do tell.” Jasper resettled the pillow behind his back.

  “Well …” She told him then about the threatening telephone call when Dakin was working at the cottage and how after he’d left, she’d gone into the woods. “Look at this.” She took the old tin lozenge box from the drawer in the bedside table, opened it, and held up the cigarette butt she’d found under the oak. “I can’t tell the brand. There’s an S, then I think an I. The rest’s burned away. It’s imposs—”

  “Sinbad,” Jasper said. “Relatively new. Canadian company. Getting popular up there.”

  “Canadian!” For a moment she was bewildered. Then she felt a protest rising in her. No, no! Head bent, she put the cigarette butt back in the box. Slowly she closed the lid. She didn’t want to look at Jasper.

  “Say it,” Jasper said.

  “Well … coincidence.”

  “Coincidence?” Jasper said. “That the man on the telephone threatening Dakin Cameron’s mother was likely Canadian … at least that Sinbad cigarette butt suggests it. And Brannigan, whom someone then bashed at the Sylvester Hall gates—I’m only saying someone—tried to kill—was a Canadian? A Canadian who might have made a threatening call to Dakin Cameron and was a threatening presence to Natalie Cameron? A Canadian who was presumably terrorizing—”

  “I don’t think—”

  “The boy. Dakin. Close to his mother? Maybe, if he were sufficiently spooked—What’s he like?”

  “Like?” She stared at Jasper, but she was seeing the leering faces of the two Dublin lads on the access road as she bicycled toward them, she was seeing the dirty hand that grasped the handlebars, stopping her. She was seeing, then, the blur of a mustard jersey on her left, she was hearing a voice saying to the dirty hand’s owner, “You don’t really mean that, do you?” and in response to have the other Dublin boy lash at his face and land a blow. And in return get clobbered.

  “Like?” she said to Jasper; and she told him about the encounter on the road. “I’d say he’s more a knight errant. Not likely to attack anyone except to defend himself.”

  At seven o’clock they left the cottage and walked up the road to the village. Jasper didn’t want to miss Finney’s Monday night supper special of stew made with lamb shanks, carrots, curry, and stout, a four-star dish, in his estimation. Next week he’d be at the Kinsale Food Festival savoring and tasting, and reporting on Kinsale’s famous restaurants in “Jasper,” his food column.

  They came into Finneys, to the warmth and the usual suppertime hubbub. At the bar a handful of local farmhands and shop owners were deep into politics and swapping local gossip. One tiddly old fellow, holding on to the bar, was humming “Reilly’s Daughter.”

  Torrey and Jasper settled at the only available table, one of a small cluster of tables beside the bar, and Torrey said hello to Sergeant Bryson and Ms. Plant, who were finishing supper at the next table. Ms. Plant was having wine with her lamb shanks, Jimmy Bryson a dark beer. Torrey smiled at Jimmy Bryson. Thoughtful of him to take Ms. Plant to supper. Never mind that it was at the Ballynach village expense. Ms. Plant, sipping the last of her wine, had managed to pull her rather fleshy self together. She was in a soft brown wool dress, and with her hair now neatly combed she looked composed and even attractive despite an overabundance of blue eye shadow.

  Jasper had just ordered when the tiddly old fellow at the bar said to his younger companion, “That fishing chap, with the suede fishing hat? Fished for a bit of cuddly and caught himself a lulu. Billy spied them going into her studio, O’Sullivan’s old barn. Fancy bit of fishing, all right!” He put a finger aside his nose and snickered. “She’s not got much of a reputation as a painter, but the other—”

  “Shut up, Danny!” Sergeant Bryson glared at the old fellow. “Shut up! There’s ladies around!” And it was true, the shocked look on Ms. Plant’s face.

  As Torrey said to Jasper five minutes later, after Sergeant Bryson and Ms. Plant had left, “For a second, I thought that the gallant Sergeant Bryson would take a swing at that old fellow.” Was it possible, she wondered, that Sergeant James Bryson, aged twenty-four, was a bit too protective of Ms. Brenda Plant, who was certainly at least in her mid forties. Yet there was something about the set of his shoulders, so protective, as Ms. Brenda Plant preceded him out of Finney’s.

  “Worth ten lines in ‘Jasper,’ that lamb shanks with curry,” Jasper said when two hours later they got back to the cottage. They were barely inside when rain spattered on the windowpanes and gusts of wind rattled the windows. Jasper put more peat on the fire and added a handful of coal.

  Torrey settled down on the shabby old couch with the third Georges Simenon. Jealousy, a lawyer husband with a mistress, murder. It all took place in Paris. But in good, colloquial Hungarian. The clock on the dresser ticked. The rain made it feel cozy inside.

  “How about this one?” Jasper said. He was lazing at the kitchen table with his tattered Official Guide. “‘Abram’s advice: When eating an elephant take one bite at a time.’

  “Hmmm?” She ought to read the Hungarian aloud, though, get the rhythm of phrases. A smart tolmacs—“interpreter,” in Hungarian—would do that.

  “Or this one,” Jasper said: “‘Jinny’s law: There is no such thing as a short beer. As in”I’m going to stop off at Joe’s for a short beer before I meet you.”’”

  Torrey blinked. Not Joe’s for a short beer. O’Malley’s. A short beer. Strange that Thomas Brannigan of Montreal had stopped in at O’Malley’s for a beer he hadn’t even touched. His narrow, pale face had been thundrous with anger, his jaw clenched. She could see him now, standing at the bar, scrutinizing everyone who came in, Watching, even, to see who came out of the men’s room. And that
untouched glass of beer on the bar before him. Then abruptly he was gone.

  17

  On Tuesday morning a few minutes before noon Natalie Cameron arrived back from an early-morning meeting in Dunlavin where she’d passionately supported a low-cost housing proposal. In the front hall, she picked up the morning’s mail from the tray, stared down at the letter, and tore it open. The message this time was on a scrap of ruled paper:

  Tuesday noon at the cairn. Forty thousand pounds. If you don’t appear, Cloverleaf goes to the Dublin papers. An ugly tale for your son and fiancé to bear on television news or read about in the press. This is final.

  The sharp handwriting had dug into the paper.

  Natalie cried out, an inarticulate cry of … anger? fear? rage? She hardly knew. She crushed the letter spasmodically in a fist.

  “Ma’am?” Jessie, coming from the kitchen, looked alarmed. “Is something the matter?”

  “No … no.” She ran past Jessie and up the stairs In her bedroom, she went directly to the dresser, fumbled out what she wanted and ran back down the stairs. Jessie was still in the front hall, looking worried, and said instantly, “Mrs. Cameron? Rose at Castle Moore says Coyle’s has raspberries, I can get some for lunch if you—”

  “Never mind.” She tried to pull herself together, Jessie was looking at her so funny. Lunch seemed a foreign word. “Eggs—eggs will do, Jessie. Omelettes? Dakin’s off on a job.” Luce was at school. “Eggs. I’ll be back in—shortly.” In her right-hand jacket pocket her fist tightened on the letter.

  Past the coach house, walking fast, she turned left and climbed over the rail fence and half ran across the meadow, the long, dry grass swishing against her pants legs. She’d meet him, all right, this blackmailer! She drew in a breath that turned into a shuddering sob. She reached the stand of fir trees where the woods began and passed the tree where as a child she’d buried treasures of dolls’ clothes, bits of gimcrack jewelry, play money.