by Dicey Deere
Winifred Moore was standing at his left, and beyond her was Sheila Flaxton. Winifred was smoking one of her brown cigarettes, a book under her arm. She had called him ten minutes ago on the cell phone that was always on her belt. She’d said enough for him to avoid wasting time: he’d phoned headquarters of the Garda Síochána, the Irish police, at Dublin Castle, Phoenix Park; the van with the technical staff would be arriving in thirty or forty minutes. The Dublin Metropolitan area comprised Dublin city and the greater part of the county and portions of County Kildare and Wicklow.
“I’m going to be sick,” Sheila Flaxton said.
“No need to stay.” O’Hare was jotting down notes. “Nor you, Ms. Moore. We’ll be in touch.”
“Hmmm?” Winifred Moore said. She was looking off across the meadow. She grinned. “No surprise.”
Inspector O’Hare followed her gaze. Crossing the meadow toward them, walking swiftly, was Ms. Torrey Tunet.
“So,” Torrey said to Jasper, slathering butter on the brown bread that Jasper had baked and taken from the oven a half hour earlier, “when I got to Sylvester Hall, and Jessie told me that just ten minutes before, Natalie Cameron’d come tearing out of the coach house hysterically saying, “The cairn, the cairn!” and I’d only come to the hall to ask her about trying some late plantings of—”
“”Only to ask her’ nothing,” Jasper said. “Late plantings! You? Hah!” They were at the kitchen table, it was four o’clock, and a fire in the hearth warmed the kitchen. Jasper grinned at Torrey and refilled her teacup.”Your color’s high, rose on a peach; you look as made-up as Gilbert and Sullivan’s ladies in The Mikado. Insupportable excitement. You can’t keep your nose out—”
“That’s got nothing to do with it. I’m—”
“Looking for trouble. You don’t believe Natalie Cameron managed to slit that fellow’s throat with a penknife, right? Hardly possible, either. A penknife! And Natalie Cameron could never have committed such a horrible crime, right? After all, she’s your friend Dakin’s mother and you’ve met her for all of ten minutes. So, in your considered—”
“Stick to your shortnin’ bread,” Torrey said. “Besides, I’m not going to do anything.” She took a sip of tea.
At six o’clock, Inspector O’Hare telephoned his wife, Noreen. He’d be an hour late for supper. There’d been phone calls and faxes to and from Chief Superintendent O’Reilley at Dublin Castle. Sergeant Bryson had typed up the report. Meantime, the murder, already known as the Cairn murder was on the six o’clock RTE news.
Natalie Sylvester Cameron, thirty-six, of Sylvester Hall, Ballynagh, Wicklow, arrested in connection with the murder of Raphael Ricard, forty-four, of Montreal, Canada. According to Inspector Egan O’Hare of Ballynagh, Mr. Ricard, a financial advisor on a fishing vacation, was killed with a small penknife, his throat slit. No known motive as yet. Mrs. Cameron is at Sylvester Hall, bail having been furnished by her attorney, Daniel Morton.
O’Hare rubbed his eyes, then doled out a large-sized dog biscuit to Nelson, who ambled over to his blanket by the soda machine and settled down with the biscuit.
“I just gave him a biscuit,” Sergeant Bryson said from over at the computer.
“Then he’s a lucky dog,” O’Hare said. He tapped the desk with his fingertips, frowning. The penknife was already in the forensic department at Dublin Castle in Phoenix Park. But what motive? What was the Canadian to Natalie Cameron that she’d killed him?
An hour ago, Natalie Cameron had sat right here beside his desk. Her bloodied sweater and shirt were in a plastic bag on the shelf, already tagged for Dublin Castle. Natalie Cameron wore an old plaid jacket of Jimmy Bryson’s that had hung on a hook by the police station door for months. She was waiting for her attorney from Dublin; he would make bail. In a husky whisper she told the horror of it, hazel eyes wide with shock. “Yes, Inspector, I was out walking. I came to the cairn and saw him lying there, blood thick around—It was horrible! I thought, ‘Go for help!’ But then … . I could tell he was dead. I picked up the knife without thinking … What, Inspector? No, a man I never saw before.” And “The knife? I recognized it. My father’s penknife … No I don’t know how it came to be there … . Objects have been stolen from Sylvester Hall before, the doors are always left open for the dogs to go in and out … . Yes, Inspector, I picked it up, I suppose I was in shock. The man’s appalling-looking body, after all! One hardly expects …”
After she was gone, accompanied by her attorney, Sergeant Bryson swung around in his chair by the fax machine. “Out for a walk, was she? Far’s I know from Jessie, going out for a walk Mrs. Cameron’d always whistle for the dogs to come. That was her habit. But this time she’d gone off alone.”
Inspector O’Hare gave Jimmy Bryson a surprised look. More to the lad than he’d thought.
“Another thing,” Sergeant Bryson said, “What about them both being Canadians—this murdered fellow, Ricard, and the other one, Brannigan, who was attacked at the Sylvester Hall gates? What’s the connection?”
O’Hare rubbed his eyes. So far, their only information about Raphael Ricard came from his passport, driver’s license, and business cards, all of which had been among his effects at Nolan’s Bed and Breakfast. “We’ll have the Montreal police report on Ricard by tomorrow, Jimmy.” Maybe the report would reveal not only a connection to Brannigan but to Natalie Cameron.
24
At nine-thirty Wednesday morning, Torrey braked her bike to a stop at the entrance to Sylvester Hall. Two furiously barking hounds came running from the mansion.
“Crackers! Buster!” Jessie, in the doorway in her aproned uniform, clapped her hands and the dogs turned and raced inside. “They’re fake fierce, Ms. Tunet,” Jessie said. “They’re really cream puffs.”
“I would’ve called,” Torrey said, “but my phone’s out.” The lie came easily. “I wondered—even with all the tragic—the unfortunate events, I came because I’m hoping Dakin can do some more work for me at the cottage.” Another lie.
“Dakin’s gone off, he didn’t say where. Ms. Cameron’s left for Dublin to meet with her attorney. We’re all so upset! There’ve been reporters and photographers, come like a swarm of bees all yesterday afternoon. But we stayed closed up, even the shutters.”
Jackpot! Nobody home. “I can imagine!” Torrey shivered. “Frightening, what’s happened. And now, so dismal! Such a damp and chilly morning! More like November. I should’ve worn something heavier.” Take pity on the poor little match girl that I am!
“Well … if you don’t mind the kitchen, Ms. Tunet, Breda’s made a full pot and there’s brown bread.”
“So,” Jessie said, elbows on the long kitchen table, teacup in both hands, “back then, in Sybil Sylvester’s time, my mam was housekeeper. Those days ! Sybil Sylvester oversaw the land and stock with an eye like a magnifying glass. As for the household! My mam, in charge of the household, had to count the linens, see to their repair, no raveled edges, no rips or tears. Then there was the china, the silver, the maids and cleaning. It was ‘Mrs. Dugan this, Mrs. Dugan that.’ My mam was run ragged.”
“My!” Torrey spooned sugar into her tea.
“Ms. Sybil checked every day how much Moira the cook spent and where she traded. Every day, my mam said. And the gardens! Checking right down to the seeds Sean O’Boyle put in the ground and the plants he was growing in the hothouse.”
“My!” Torrey sipped.
“Same thing with the young one, Natalie. Her marks at school, from the time she was left in Ms. Sybil’s care. What she was allowed to eat. The weekly laundering of the white school blouses and maroon ties and knee socks she wore to that school. Along with the cleaning of the navy blazer and pleated skirt. Disciplinarian sort of place, Alcock’s Academy. Strict. Kept the girls close. And studying hard. There was only that one time when Natalie and another little girl, her best friend, were caught smoking. They were about fourteen, then. Quite a fuss Ms. Sybil made. Blamed the school. Then, let’s see. There was the chauffeur, Olin Caughey
with the red nose, who took care of the cars, that silver Rolls, and some other car, I don’t remember. Had to account for every drop of petrol, or she’d have had his head on a platter.”
Breda, the cook, fifty, dumpy, and hard breathing, shook her head in admiration. “I wasn’t here then, but I’ve heard. A proper overseer, Sybil Sylvester!”
“Well,” Jessie said, “except for the time she had the burst appendix. Had to be rushed to the hospital. Weeks it was. My mam said it was the only time, with Ms. Sybil out of the way, she’d had a chance to relax!”
“The appendix,” Torrey said. “When would that’ve been?”
“Ummm … fifteen, twenty years ago. My mam said it was touch and go. Ms. Sybil had to stay in bed almost a month. August, it was. Then, after, for a while, she’d only go out for a half hour’s drive of an afternoon.”
The kitchen clock struck nine, Jessie got up. “More tea, if you’d like, Ms. Tunet, and try one of the buns. Breda will keep you company, I’ve to do the bedrooms and the marketing. You’ve got the list, Breda?”
Torrey got up. “Thanks, Jessie. I’m going.” She went toward the door, then turned. “Jessie? That other little girl, Natalie’s friend? Who was she?”
“Ho! Came of a proper family, that one! Not that you’d know it now! She’s still about. Paints pictures in O’Sullivan’s barn. Wild parties and such. Divorced more than once. Back to using her own name. Kate Burnside.”
25
“Ma?” In the far, dusty corner of the coach house, Dakin turned the tarnished gilt latch and pulled open the carriage door. But the carriage was empty. Odd, he could smell her perfume; she had to be about.”Your mother? She came back from Dublin an hour ago,” Jessie had told him ten minutes ago when he’d got home. Yet he couldn’t find her, she wasn’t in her bedroom or the library or anywhere in the house.
“Ma?”
“Over here.” Click of a car door opening. He turned around. The old silver Rolls. He was surprised. It had never been the Rolls, always the carriage. His mother stepped out of the car. Dakin, approaching, felt a wave of compassion. His mother’s beautiful eyes under the black brows were haggard; she had pushed her hair behind her ears, but wisps fell untidily across her cheeks. The skirted gray suit she’d worn to Dublin was rumpled and there was a stain—wine?—on one lapel; lunch with the attorney and his legal associate must have been a misery. His mother! Always so forthright, so warmhearted and funny. And now involved in this nightmare.
“What, darling?” She was looking at him, looking so closely that he felt a tightening behind his ears, a wariness. Not that she could know, or suspect; it had been his secret for two years.
“Ma! I’ve been looking all—When will Marshall get here? He’ll know what to do. What did he say? How long before he gets here? By tonight?”
She didn’t answer. She was still looking at him in that strange way. As though she had never seen him before. Studying him. It gave him a bereft feeling, like being in a boat that had lost its mooring.
“Ma? When?” Marshall was a master at handling difficult situations, getting to the nub. In his wars for decent housing, he’d learned brilliant legal ways to scatter enemy troops. That was all that was necessary. In this case; get them off the scent. Get them off the scent! “Ma?”
His mother said wearily, “I didn’t call Marshall.” She was twisting the ring on her finger, the diamond engagement ring that Marshall West had slipped on her finger barely two weeks earlier. “I’m not going to.”
“You … What do you—Why?”
“Because I’m not, Dakin, that’s all. I’m not.”
26
Dry leaves crunched under Torrey’s brogues as she approached the O’Sullivan’s barn.
Snoop. From the Dutch. Irresistible. Like being a buck-skin-clad Indian in a forest scenting something in the wind, following a trail, seeing the vestige of a hoofprint on a leaf, a bit of earth freshly turned up, seeing overhead the lazy wheeling of a hawk that would make a sudden plunge.
How had Jessie put it? Back then, the two fourteen-year-old girls caught smoking. “Natalie Cameron’s best friend.”
There was no doorbell, no knocker. Just the fifteen-foot-high barn doors and a shiny black lock. Torrey glanced up. Above, a bank of small-paned windows.
“Hello?” She knocked, then waited, looking about. The O’Sullivan’s farmhouse in the distance was unoccupied, there was only this rented barn; it lay in a field that was mostly furze, the spiny shrubs with their yellow flowers now turned brown and dry. A rutted road led to the barn; a blue convertible BMW, dried spatters of mud on its sides, stood a few feet from the barn door.
Torrey called again, louder, “Hello!”
“Give it a push!”
Torrey pushed open the barn door and came into an enormous room, paintings leaning against the walls. She was aware of an unmade bed with a tumble of silken blankets sliding off it, she smelled whisky and perfume, she saw a refrigerator door ajar, but mostly she saw Kate Burnside, who stood in front of a mirror in a plum-colored robe that hung open, revealing nakedness. She was apparently having difficulty trying to comb her long, black hair. At that moment, the comb hit a snarl and slipped from her hand. “Shit!” She kicked the comb aside and looked at Torrey. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face a little swollen. “Oh … I thought you were Nora. My sometime maid. You’re what’s-your-name. From Castle Moore’s old groundsman’s cottage.” She pulled her robe closed and tied the sash.
“Yes, Torrey Tunet.”
Kate Burnside had to be approaching forty. She was still a beauty, though the ravages of late nights and unchecked drinking had drawn lines around her lush, pretty mouth. Right now she appeared hung over, shaky, and spooked about something.
Torrey hesitated. It seemed crass, now, to have come here to poke into Kate Burnside’s past friendship with Natalie Cameron, considering that Natalie was being charged now with yesterday’s gruesome murder. Crass, to snoop into—
“I always have a drink about now. What about you?” Kate Burnside wiggled her bare feet into floppy slippers and padded to a sideboard. She picked up a bottle.
“Too early for me,” Torrey said. She watched Kate Burnside pour herself a gin. Her hand was shaky. The bottle clinked against the glass.
“Dreadful about Natalie Cameron,” Torrey said, “being charged with such a crime! I’m so sorry. I’d only met her once. Jessie at Sylvester Hall was telling me this morning that you and Natalie Cameron were best friends in childhood. Back at Alcock’s Academy? And later, in your teens. So I thought—”
Crash! The glass slipped from Kate Burnside’s hand and shattered on the floor. She gave a strangled sob and went down on her knees. With her bare hand she began to flick the shards of glass into a pile.
“Don’t!” Torrey said, too late.
In the bathroom, Torrey put Band-aids on the half dozen cuts on Kate Burnside’s fingers. The bathroom was elegant, with a granite tub and an oval-shaped enclosed shower. Really an enviable bathroom, so unlike the makeshift bathroom at the cottage. Here, beside the gleaming shower, was a row of Lucite hooks. And there, on one of the hooks, was a familiar-looking mustard-colored jersey. This one bore the head of a gazelle.
Alone in the barn, sunk back among the pillows on the divan and holding her second gin in her bandaged hand, Kate said aloud, “What good?” What good to have told Torrey Tunet anything? What secret she could tell would only bury Natalie deeper. Natalie’s great-aunt Sybil, that sweet-faced old bitch, had had influence. Sybil knew people in high places who could, and would, with a quiet phone call here or there, erase things as though they’d never happened. But she, Kate, knew the truth.
She looked down at the gin in her glass. She was seeing Rafe Ricard’s disbelieving face, his jutting jaw, when at their first meeting she’d told him why Natalie would never come to the cairn.
“More likely, she’ll alert the Gardai,” she’d warned him, “They’ll trap you!” Lying there in the field, her back protected by h
is diamond-patterned sweater, she’d been confident he’d give up.
But two days later, this time in O’Sullivan’s barn, he’d told her he sent Natalie a third letter. She knew then that she was helpless to make him believe what she had told him about Natalie.
“You don’t believe me!” she’d cried out in despair. “But it’s true! It’s true!” She was wearing her robe and under it a thin silk chemise.
“Liar!” he’d said, half laughing, and he slid a hand through the opening of her robe and caressed the round of her breast, his thumb running back and forth over her nipple, and at his touch she’d felt a swelling and that familiar ache, she couldn’t help it. “Liar!” he’d repeated, and he laughed. “You’re just trying to protect your friend! Or someone’s been having you on! She’ll come, all right! She’ll come to the cairn on Tuesday with the money and a shivering down to her toes that the truth might out. Pour us a scotch.” And he’d loosened his belt.
Now, alone on the divan with her bandaged hand, she couldn’t think how insane she must have been to have gone, as in a trance, yet hearing the village clock strike noon that Tuesday—how insane to go to the cairn where Rafe waited for Natalie to show up in response to that third letter. She saw herself crossing the field, her thoughts all mixed up with owing Natalie; it was about Dakin, it was shameful, she’d been shameless. And why was she crossing the field to the cairn? What had she expected to … to do? How had she expected to make up for the past?
On the divan, she looked down at her bandaged hand. Blood had seeped through the bandage. She closed her eyes. But she still could see it. Blood was everywhere. On the leaves scattered under the oak. On his jutting jaw. On the diamond-patterned sweater. Blood everywhere.
27
At four-thirty Wednesday afternoon, the door to the police station opened and Sergeant Bryson came in carrying something.
