The Irish Cairn Murder

by Dicey Deere

  “Ma?” Dakin said suddenly “What’s Cloverleaf?”

  “Cloverleaf? That’s the name of the company in Bray that mailed me my pregnancy test results.” She looked at Tom Brannigan. “Mr. Ricard was holding it over my head. To return in exchange for the blackmail money.”

  Tom Brannigan said, in his light, cultured voice with the touch of brogue, “The Cloverleaf? I was drunk enough to’ve told Ricard about it, but it’s in my safe deposit box in Montreal.”

  “What?” But then she laughed and put a hand up to her eyes, and the bracelet with the unicorns made a tinkling sound. She would wear the bracelet now and again. Marshall would have to cope.

  “Well!” Sheila Flaxton said to Winifred, who was pulling on a plaid jumper for their before-lunch walk. There was even frost in the air and Sheila was well bundled up and had her Finnish gloves on already. “Well, Winifred. I saw Tom Brannigan in the village putting his bag into his car. He’s off.”

  “A tragedy,” Winifred said, “A damned tragedy! He’s lost his son. In his head for all of sixteen years, Dakin was his son. His pride and joy. Saving reports of Dakin’s tennis trophies, his wrestling matches, his school prizes.”

  “Yes, dreadful.”

  “Still … Maybe now he can let go of the dream of uniting with Natalie and Dakin. He’s what? Barely forty? Not too late to wake up from the dream. To look about, start a new life. Even to—”

  “To fall in love!” Sheila gave such an ecstatic wiggle that her woolen shawl almost slipped off her shoulders. “I am absolutely with you there, Winifred!”

  Noontime, Sergeant Jimmy Bryson came into Finney’s for his midday meal. He was getting over his injured feelings that Inspector O’Hare hadn’t briefed him beforehand about what he’d been up to at that meeting. Colluding with Ms. Torrey Tunet! Jimmy had spent a sleepless night about it, and on top of that, the shock about Brenda. Brenda! In the morning, Bryson had shaved with a trembling hand and nicked the side of his chin. But at eight o’clock when he got to the station, Inspector O’Hare had hot tea going and Bryson’s favorite apple-cinnamon bun and had explained, “Knowing your, ah, fondness for Ms. Brenda Plant …” and so on. Bryson had to admit he could see that. Brenda! It would be a while before he’d get over it. Still, in a way, a relief.

  “Here you are.” Mary, Finney’s wife, set down the plate, hot corned beef, boiled potatoes and mustard pickles. Jimmy’s mouth watered. And tonight was Hannah’s night off; they were going to a film in Dunlavin.

  “Good morning, Mr. O’Boyle.”

  Sean stopped raking the gravel. He hadn’t heard her biking up. She was wearing that turquoise-and-gold peacocks bandana around her head and a dark red jumper and jeans. She ought to get new brogues, they were scuffed and worn.

  “Morning, Ms. Tunet.” Tunet. Lucinda had said it meant “thunder” in Romanian.

  Ms. Tunet was smiling at him. “Ms. Cameron safe, after all! Been quite an ordeal for her. And of course for everyone at Sylvester Hall. You’ve been here the longest, Mr. O’Boyle. You’ve seen Natalie grow up. So I can imagine how worried you must’ve been.” It was almost a question. Ms. Tunet seemed to be waiting.

  “Yes,” Sean said. He moved the rake a bit on the gravel.

  Ms. Tunet yawned. She was still sitting on the bike, “It was electrifying at the meeting when Mr. Shaw told what he’d discovered. About what happened that night at Meath Hospital.” Ms. Tunet put a forefinger to her chin. “I guess Ms. Sybil was the only one who knew about the spontaneous abortion. What with her getting the bill from Meath Hospital.”

  “I expect so.” Under his hand, the rake handle felt slippery. It was dry weather but the sun was hot.

  “At the meeting, you mentioned that in those earlier years, you were the one who picked up the morning post. Remember?”

  “Yes. I suppose.” He moved the rake a little on the gravel, a bit to the left there, it was humped up, it needed evening off.

  “After all these years, you probably wouldn’t remember any particular letter, of course. The one from Meath Hospital, I mean.” Ms. Tunet heaved a sigh. “Life is peculiar, isn’t it, Mr. O’Boyle?”

  Sean looked up from the gravel; for an instant he looked into Ms. Tunet’s gray eyes, then he turned away. “I’ve things to do in the greenhouse, Ms. Tunet.”

  “Oh, sorry!” Ms. Tunet put one foot on a bike pedal. “Stingy, wasn’t she?—Ms. Sybil. So I’ve heard. Even saving a few cents over lamb chops! Honestly!” She pushed off. Sean watched her down the avenue.

  At one o’clock, Sean arrived home for the usual hour off that he allowed himself. Caitlin was out somewhere and had left a loaf and some sliced ham on the table for him. He took a piece of the ham and stood munching it. Then he went upstairs.

  In his bedroom, he unlocked the top bureau drawer and took out the envelope from Meath Hospital addressed to Sybil Sylvester. He unfolded the bill. A list of charges for drugs, therapy, even surgery. What it came to was treatment of arm injury, concussion, spontaneous abortion.

  Back then, when he was the one who picked up the Sylvester Hall post, he’d found the bill. It had arrived the week after Ms. Sybil had taken Natalie off to Italy in such a hurry. Sean had thought of that hurried departure as a kind of kidnapping, as though Ms. Sybil had placed a hand over Natalie’s mouth and tied her hands behind her back. He’d heard things, seen things—kitchen talk.

  He’d had no excuse for opening the envelope. All he had was a kind of worry about Natalie. Then he’d opened the bill. A week after, he’d paid it. He knew Ms. Sybil wasn’t one to ring up the hospital asking for a bill she hadn’t received. Later, through the years, he often thought how Sybil Sylvester would always believe that Dakin was the chauffeur’s son.

  Now he folded the bill back into the envelope and put it into a pocket of his windbreaker. Then he knelt down and pulled open the bottom drawer. He unwrapped the tissue and shook out the yellow party dress. He could still see the ugly look on Ms. Sibyl’s porcelain-stiff face as she’d thrust the yellow dress deep into the trash bin that would be emptied into Egan’s cart. Why he had rescued it, he didn’t know. No more did he know why he had kept it.

  Downstairs, he added peat to the coal fire that Caitlin had left. Then he thrust the bill from Meath Hospital and the yellow party dress into the fire and watched them burn. After that, he made tea to go with the bread and ham. Sitting at the table and eating, he thought of when he’d first known about the thing gone wrong in Natalie’s head, that had now gone right again. It was about the dog. When she’d got back from Meath Hospital, she’d come out to the greenhouse where he’d been working, she’d come to ask after a newborn pup a week old. “Tom,” she’d said, “is he coming along all right?” But the pups were five months old and there was no Tom.

  A week later, Dakin drove the Jeep down the rutted road and stopped beside the O’Sullivan’s barn. There was a brisk wind, so that tree branches creaked and dry leaves skittered across the road. Dakin sat for a minute in the car, hands resting on the steering wheel. The blue BMW with its mud-splashed sides was gone; it wouldn’t be seen here again. The barn already looked neglected—one of the windowpanes above the door was broken. Why he had come, he couldn’t have said. But this time he came without his usual desperate need, drawn back helplessly to this barn, thirsting for the feel of her hands and the soft, chuckling laugh, and the need at first as though he were an inexperienced girl surrendering, and then he became a boy, and then a man, yet each time he was more and more in thrall, bewitched, no will of his own. Kate. Kate.

  She was gone now, even her Georgian house in Dublin shut up. Majorca for the winter. Then, who knew where. She got about, mostly in Europe.

  Dakin backed up and turned the Jeep around. It hadn’t rained for a week; driving off, he could still see the tracks made by that dirty, mud-splashed blue BMW. “Why clean it?” Kate had once said, screwing up her face. “Everyone knows that under the muck it’s a beauty.”

  62

  A knock on the co
ttage door. Or was it the wind rattling a branch against a windowpane? It was late afternoon, a cold, brisk wind curling around the cottage, but in the kitchen there was the warmth from the fire.

  Alone in the cottage, Torrey had just finished packing her carry-on and brought it into the kitchen. She’d packed the essentials first: jump rope. A Georges Simenon in Hungarian. The peacock bandanna. A peanut butter sandwich and a couple of chocolate bars for the flight, because who knew? Then the rest, including dangling black jet earrings and the fake diamond necklace and sleeveless black dress in case of a diplomatic dinner, and jeans and sneakers in which to roam Budapest.

  She put the carry-on beside the kitchen dresser. She would travel in her warm but lightweight parka, under it her tailored suit and white shirt, on her wrist the man-sized Timex with date, day, and world-time sweep hands, too big for her narrow wrist, but vital to her business. At six o’clock tomorrow morning, Jasper would drive her to the Dublin airport. Then he’d continue north to Cavin, some sort of political agitation.

  There, again! Definitely, someone knocking, though light, light. She crossed to the door and opened it.

  “Well, hello!” In pleased surprise, she looked down at her small visitor. “Your hair! How lovely!”

  Lucinda no longer wore the billed cap, her head lice must be gone. With her burnished-looking curly brown hair, she was pretty to see. Sweet little chin and sea green eyes looking innocent as sea shells.

  “Come in, Lucinda. I’m glad to see you.”

  Standing in the kitchen, Lucinda didn’t even take off her mittens. “I have my piano lesson. I only came by because Dakin said that … that if it weren’t for you. You know. So, thank you.”

  “Thank you, Lucinda. If it hadn’t been for you …”

  “Well, good-bye.”

  Windy and cold as it was, Torrey watched from the open doorway as Lucinda skirted the pond and went through the hedge. Then she closed the door and went and stood close to the fire. She smiled. She was hearing Jasper say, as they lay in bed a week ago, his arm under her head, “My compliments. You played it fast and loose. But what if Kate Burnside hadn’t spoken up that she’d been making love in the meadow with Brenda Plant’s lover? Admittedly, you brought that horse to water. But it was pure luck that it drank.”

  At that, drowsily, she’d said, “Luck? Oh, no! If Kate Burnside hadn’t spoken up, I’d have had to drag in Lucinda to tell that she’d seen them making love. I hated the thought of using Lucinda. Though maybe she would’ve liked it. I never can tell with kids.” She’d nestled closer to Jasper, he was so warm and solid.

  “So … You and O’Hare. Between you, with a nudge here and a shove there, you forced Brenda Plant into a corner.”

  “It wasn’t easy. About on a par with the Hungarian subjunctive.”

  Jasper had suddenly hugged her close. “Kudos to you, my pretty.”

  Kudos. From the Greek kydos. Praise. But it had been scary. All though the meeting her heart had been thumping: Because she hadn’t actually known. The frightening part was that it could have been Kate Burnside who’d killed the blackmailer. The only way to know that it hadn’t been Kate had been to play it out, she and her enemy, Inspector O’Hare. It had been agonizing.

  “How did you—?” she began, then stopped. Jasper wouldn’t tell her; he never did. How he had gotten access to what musty hospital files she was never to know.

  Now, after Lucinda’s visit, she stood gazing into the fire. Risky, heart stopping. But it had worked out. What norac! Norac. Luck. One of her Romanian father’s words, he had believed in luck, had left North Hawk in search of it.

  But of course, with her, it wasn’t norac. Always she’d made her own luck. Only she called it persistence. Jasper called it her stubbornness.

  She stretched and took a deep, satisfied breath, then looked at the clock. Jasper would be coming back from the village with the lamb chops and zucchini, he’d gone on foot, wanting the exercise, saying he’d begun to look like something in a fun-house mirror.

  She put on a heavy sweater and went outside. The wind had lessened, there was a moon, it made the dark woods silvery, and cast a gleam on the pond. She thought of the family at Sylvester Hall and she thought of the Dublin-to-Cork bus driver and his Get off my bus with yor fookin’ drugs! to the two skinny Dublin boys with pipe stem legs, and how lucky for her that Dakin had appeared … Dakin who later came to make her a window frame.

  Then she went past the pond and through the hedge onto the road to meet Jasper.

  Be Sure to Read These Riveting Torrey Tunet Mysteries by Dicey Deere

  The Irish Manor House Murder

  The Irish Cottage Murder

  Available From

  St. Martin’s/Minotaur Paperbacks

  THE IRISH CAIRN MURDER

  “Shows off some intricate plotting and a cast of eccentrics, including Jasper, Tunet’s overweight gourmand boyfriend, and her rival, the inept and vengeful Inspector O’Hare.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE IRISH MANOR HOUSE MURDER

  “Good writing, all the twists and turns of a complicated plot, peopled with well-rounded characters … should satisfy the most discriminating mystery lover.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “Interesting characters keep one moving through the labyrinthine plot, and the local color is the green and silvered gray of Ireland.”

  —Booklist

  THE IRISH COTTAGE MURDER

  “There are easily enough plots, subplots, and full-bodied characters to supply a half-dozen novels. An excess of riches, then, in a most promising debut.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Every page has a new discovery, a surprise, a twist, a new character revelation. And the solution to the mystery is as convincing as it is unexpected.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  THE IRISH CAIRN MURDER

  Copyright © 2002 by Dicey Deere.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  eISBN 9781466821323

  First eBook Edition : May 2012

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001057712

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / May 2002

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / March 2003