The Irish Manor House Murder

by Dicey Deere

  “Thanks, Mrs. Hobbs.” Jasper slipped the note into his corduroy pants pocket, smiled at her, and took himself off down the carpeted stairs.

  Sara Hobbs settled down at the desk and went back to working on the accounts. Mr. O’Mara had the best room, the one with its own bath. And a telephone besides. He made only a few telephone calls. Most of them to other countries. Spain, Italy, France. But lately only to Portugal. She carefully billed the calls to his account.

  44

  It was windy at Kastrup Airport outside of Copenhagen and about fifty degrees, though the morning was sunny. Torrey felt smugly pleased that she had thought to wear her heavy jacket. She took her knitted woolen cap from her shoulder bag and put it on: it was shaped like a casque and snugly covered her ears. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes past two. The eleven o’clock morning flight from Dublin airport had taken two hours. But there was the hour’s time change. She felt a familiar sense of excitement, something exhilarating that made her feel alert, as though her blood ran faster. I’ve got the wind up, she thought. The gold-and-silver ring with its Danish inscription was in an envelope in her shoulder bag.

  Dr. Steensen. The address was in Nyhavn. That would be the old harbor area. Torrey remembered it from two years before when she’d been in Copenhagen on an EU interpreting job. Nyhavn was an old part of the city, hundreds of years old, and the one-time notorious hangout of sailors, roving and drunk. But in recent years Nyhavn had become an elegant quarter of Copenhagen. The conference at which Torrey had interpreted had been held at the eighteenth-century Hotel D’Angleterre in Nyhavn, the most expensive hotel in Copenhagen. The roistering harbor was now fashionable apartments and elegant private houses.

  Dr. Steensen’s address was on a narrow street that was quiet and spotless. It was one of a row of low, cream-colored buildings.

  * * *

  “Ms. Tunet? Dr. Steensen is expecting you.” The girl who opened the door spoke in English. She was not much more than a schoolgirl, with short-cut blonde hair, and wearing corduroy jeans and a round-necked sweater. She was pulling on a puffy red windbreaker, one arm already in a sleeve. “I’m on my way out. Dr. Steensen’s in there,” she added as she jerked her head back, grabbed up a shoulder bag from a chair, and was out the door. It closed behind her with a solid click.

  Torrey pulled off her knitted cap and combed her fingers through her hair. It was so quiet, so richly quiet. The hall had ivory walls and a rainbow-patterned rug on the bleached oak floor. A V-shaped translucent wall sconce sent soft light upward. Nothing else but a small green chair beside the door and an antlered coat stand of pale, polished wood. Torrey blew out a sigh of sensuous pleasure. Then she took off her jacket, hung it on an antler, and walked down the hall.

  * * *

  The room she entered struck her as dazzling yet comfortable. To her left was a brushed steel spiral staircase. In the center of the room, two brilliant red couches faced each other across an African woolen rug. Between the couches was a low black coffee table that held a few tattered magazines, a dish of cookies, and a Danish silver tea service that Torrey recognized as Jensen. Beyond, a scattering of rattan chairs faced a half-moon fireplace in which a small fire burned. The room smelled of hickory smoke.

  But Dr. Steensen? The room was empty. Prickles of anxiety slid down Torrey’s spine. Could Dr. Steensen have decided against seeing her? Would an efficient secretary appear with an excuse? I’m sorry, Dr. Steensen has been taken ill. Or maybe, Dr. Steensen was unexpectedly called away. Some excuse. Any excuse, having had a change of heart.

  Too apprehensive to sit down, Torrey picked up one of the tattered magazines from the coffee table and flipped the pages. A bit of blue paper marked a page. Torrey read, “Dr. Steensen invariably looks as though she has just returned from Africa or the Far East, having dispensed vitally needed medicines and information on pedriatics. That often is true. Primarily in —”

  But she was interrupted by quick, sure footsteps and a contralto voice, “So sorry! A phone call!”

  Dr. Ingeborg Steensen, tall, straight-backed, came toward her. She wore a lavender silk-knitted sweater and gray flannel skirt. Her long fair hair was drawn back from her forehead and worn in a bun at her nape. The hand she held out, and that Torrey clasped, was warm and strong.

  Torrey gazed at Dr. Steensen. She thought that a Scandinavian princess of a thousand years ago might have had that perfect face. Dr. Steensen must now be in her midseventies. There were fine wrinkles around her brown eyes and on her oval, tanned face. There were silvery streaks in the flaxen hair.

  And just now, a scrutinizing, unsmiling look in Dr. Steensen’s brown eyes as she met Torrey’s gaze. “Please sit down, Ms. Tunet.” As they sat down opposite each other on the red couches, Dr. Steensen said, “I see you’ve been trapped by one of the magazines my grandchildren insist on keeping.” But it was a mechanical phrase, and Torrey was aware of a waiting tension in Dr. Steensen’s straight back. How to start?

  “Tea?” Dr. Steensen asked. “This is African; I think you’ll like it. Very popular in Ireland, I remember.” Dr. Steensen’s contralto voice faltered over the word Ireland. She poured tea and held put the plate of cookies, “These are —” But abruptly she put down the plate, her hand so unsteady that the cookies slid off the plate onto the table. She looked squarely at Torrey.

  “When you called me from Ballynagh, you said, ‘about Dr. Gerald Ashenden.’ I knew he was dead. Murdered. It was on the RTE news from Ireland. I don’t know who you are. You said you wanted to bring me something. You said that it might help reveal who … who —”

  “Yes. Reveal who murdered Dr. Ashenden.”

  “But,” Dr. Steensen looked puzzled. “But according to the reports, the Gardai already have reason to believe they know who killed him. It was his granddaughter, Rowena Keegan.”

  “So they suspect,” Torrey said. “But I don’t. She wouldn’t. Not Rowena! She’s my friend. I know her.”

  Dr. Steensen sat back against the red cushions and folded her arms. The thin lavender sweater clung softly against her neck and shoulders; her brown eyes gazed at Torrey. She sighed and shook her head, and the light shone on her silvery hair. “And in what magical way do you think I can help solve this mystery? And save your friend Rowena?”

  Torrey reached down to where she had rested her shoulder bag against the red couch. She slid in a hand and withdrew the envelope and handed it across the table to Dr. Steensen. “There’s this.”

  Watching Dr. Steensen open the envelope, her heart began to beat more rapidly. All the way on the plane from Dublin, she had thought of that gold ring with its chaste design in silver. It was a man’s wedding ring with the inscription in Danish: To Gerald, my love, to our union. October 1940. Ingeborg.

  But Gerald Ashenden had married Kathleen Brady in August of that same year.

  * * *

  “Where did you get this ring?” Dr. Steensen’s voice was husky. She slipped the ring onto her middle finger, where it hung loosely. “Where?”

  “I borrowed it. Dr. Ashenden left it to you in his will. I have to return it so that it can be sent you properly, through the lawyers.”

  “I see. And this is your magic? To bring me this ring! As though I could know something that might help save your friend? Your friend Rowena, who murdered her grandfather? Ah, no, Ms. Tunet! Ah, no!”

  “But she didn’t! She didn’t kill him! When I read the inscription in the wedding ring, I thought, Go to Dr. Steensen! Maybe she knows something that would help me. Help Rowena, I mean.” She was gabbling, she knew, but she couldn’t stop. “I thought at least you could … could give me a lead. Or, oh, I don’t know!” Abruptly she felt ridiculous, a fool. What in God’s name was she doing in Copenhagen in this apartment with its satiny steel spiral staircase and red couches, looking across a Jensen teapot at this beautiful Scandinavian woman named Ingeborg Steensen who after all had not married the young Dr. Gerald Ashenden. Fool, fool! And what, anyway, had it to do with Rowena? Was s
he losing her mind? A wasted trip.

  “I’m sorry.” She rubbed her temples. She would have to ask for the wedding ring back, then leave. She looked at Dr. Ingeborg Steensen, who gave no smile in return, nothing but a steady regard from her brown eyes.

  “You see,” Torrey burst out impulsively, defensively, “Rowena is pregnant!” And then she thought, But what has that to do with it?

  Dr. Steensen’s brown eyes widened. “Ahhh!” It was almost a groan. Then, softly, “I pity her.”

  “Pity her? Why? What do you mean?”

  Dr. Steensen said quietly, “Because now I know that I truly cannot tell you anything that will help her.”

  * * *

  They sat staring at each other. “What?” Torrey managed at last. “What is it?”

  Dr. Steensen turned the ring around and around in her fingers. She looked down at it. “I was a medical student in Dublin. I was in love with Gerald Ashenden. We were going to marry. Then something terrible happened. I learned of it only by chance from a drunken X-ray technician. When I learned of it, I was filled with horror. I packed my clothes and student books and fled home to Denmark.” Dr. Steensen drew a breath, “Yet” — she shook her head in disbelief —“yet years later I fell to answering Gerald’s letters. Even though, in my mind, I rehearsed over and over what he had done and why I fled from him. An endless round, round, and round. Strange. I had long since married. I had children, I have grandchildren.”

  A silence. Torrey waited. She was seeing Ingeborg Steensen, a flaxen-haired young medical student, brown eyes wide with horror, stuffing clothes and books into a traveling bag with brass clasps. Yet, years later, letters …

  “So, Ms. Tunet, I will tell you why I fled. Can it help Rowena Keegan? Alas, no. I can only tell you that, were I Rowena, I might have tried to kill him too.” Dr. Steensen put the Danish ring down on the coffee table and slid it slowly toward Torrey. “It is not a tale you will enjoy hearing, Ms. Tunet.” She looked at her wristwatch, then sat back against the red cushions. “We have time.”

  45

  “Winifred?”

  “Sheila, you’re interrupting me. When I wear my cap on backward, it means the Muse is with me. Which you very well know.”

  “Yes, but —” Sheila came farther into Winifred’s workroom in the old tower section of the castle. It was midafternoon, but dull. A green-shaded lamp glowed on Winifred’s heavy old oak desk with a blotter set in an old-fashioned blotter holder with leather edges. There was a glass filled with a miscellany of pens and pencils and a dish of paper clips and rubber bands. Right now, but not usually, a bottle of ink rested on a corner of the blotter. On a nearby table was a computer, temporarily shrouded with a kitchen towel.

  “But what?”

  “I’ve been to see Inspector O’Hare. To confess about Rowena Keegan. My conscience! Torture! Sleepless nights! Tossing and turning.”

  Winifred carefully put down the feather pen on which she’d been working on a rondel. A rondel was not a computer poem, but a feather pen poem. It made a difference. “Sheila, I want no clichés in this room. No ‘tossing and turning.’ No ‘sleepless nights.’ It sticks to the walls.” But the look she turned on Sheila was serious. “You’ve been to Inspector O’Hare to confess what about Rowena Keegan?”

  “That day on the bridle path? When Dr. Ashenden was killed? The hot water heater went off and I wanted to wash my hair and have a bath. I couldn’t find Meecham’s address under plumbing, and neither could Rose, and it turned out you’d gone off racewalking. So I went looking for you. I went past the bridle path just five minutes before that awful — just before Dr. Ashenden came galloping, cantering, whichever. Anyway, I saw Rowena Keegan right there. Looking very sneaky, somehow. Up to something. I could tell.”

  Winifred regarded Sheila. “What did Inspector O’Hare say to that?”

  “Say? He asked me to repeat it and told Sergeant Bryson to type up what I said.”

  “And then you signed it? What Sergeant Bryson typed?”

  “Yes. But now I’m worried about it. It doesn’t actually prove anything against Rowena. And I like her. She’s one of my favorite — but finally I had no choice, it was a matter of my conscience. At night I kept tossing and —”

  “Sheila, please!”

  46

  “Got you!” Inspector O’Hare said aloud. He was alone in the station and pacing fast, Coke machine to toilet door and back. He was on a coffee high. One eight-ounce morning cup was usual, but he’d had two. It was a jubilant occasion, after all. “Got you!”

  Stunned. Exactly how he’d realized Rowena Keegan was pregnant, he couldn’t say. That creamy look under her chin? No, not that. Nothing different in her figure, either. But he had only to think of Noreen to know.

  Lying in bed last night beside Noreen, he’d thought, Pregnant by whom? Strange that Rowena Keegan had never brought a young man or two to Ashenden Manor. It would’ve been common knowledge if she had. Old Mrs. Brennan would have known, would have gossiped about it, would have ferreted out the possible suitor’s age, religion, business, family background, social position, likely inheritance, height, education, drinking habits, and whether he was country or city bred. All of Ballynagh would have known. Besides, Jennie O’Shea at Ashenden Manor was a magpie on the phone to Rose at Castle Moore and would have mentioned this or that prospective suitor, and Rose’s younger sister Hannah kept company with Jimmy Bryson, not that if Hannah had mentioned to Jimmy …

  Indeed. Because this was Ballynagh, where a cat’s spawn in a barn was known within minutes, as well as O’Malley’s daughter’s having taken ten pounds from the till to go larking in Dublin.

  In bed, Noreen’s soft breathing. O’Hare, staring into the dark, was remembering having years ago seen a newspaper photograph of the pretty little Rowena when only eight being held astride a mettlesome young horse by her grandfather, as though the three of them had become one, something sexual in it. He was remembering and remembering; other scenes through later years floated across his vision.

  So now, was it possible? His heart beat hard. All those years, the girl a victim? And now, finding herself pregnant. Yes! Her repressed rage bursting forth. Revenge! That elusive why of Rowena’s attack on her grandfather in the meadow! And, finally, the murder of her grandfather on the bridle path.

  Now, pacing the police station, O’Hare told himself, Sit down, but instead he gave a laugh and a shudder and kept pacing. He’d have to work out his procedure. But now that he had the link, the nexus, however tenuous, he’d forge ahead, get proof. He was sharp and had proved himself in the past. He thought of the confession he’d ultimately get from Rowena Keegan. He thought of delivering his final successful, startling, sensational conclusion of the Ashenden case to Chief Superintendent O’Reilly at Dublin Castle. Those damned eyebrows above the chief superintendent’s cold blue eyes would —

  “Morning, Inspector.” Sergeant Jimmy Bryson, a half hour late — it was already nine o’clock. He was taking something from a paper bag. “I got this for Nelson.” A fake bone, meat-flavored. Nelson was standing up and going to Bryson, wagging his tail and nosing into Bryson’s hand. He always knew.

  “Very nice.”

  “The forensic report about the gypsy, Inspector. It came in by fax last night. I put it in the green folder.”

  At his desk, O’Hare flipped open the folder. The forensic crime report was short. Death: eight-fifteen P.M. Alcohol level in the woman’s body: point three three. So, very drunk when smothered with the pillow. No blood. No fingerprints. A cigarette butt in the grass beside the sill.

  Sergeant Bryson said, “I’d lay a thousand pounds, Inspector, that they’ll just file it away. Unsolved. It isn’t upper-class society. Not even drug-related. Or bloody and sexy.”

  O’Hare nodded. The gypsy’s wagon had proved unrevealing: A stack of pots and pans. A dishpan full of cheap earrings, bracelets, necklaces. A kneesock contained thirty-four pounds and some pence. The gypsy’s sad-eyed, shaggy little pony was n
ow in the Castle Moore stables, courtesy of Ms. Winifred Moore.

  O’Hare closed the green folder. It was to the shame of Ireland, as he’d said more than once to Sergeant Bryson, that those itinerants — gypsies, tinkers, and “travelers” as those folks in their caravans were called — were scorned as lesser citizens.

  And meanwhile! Meanwhile, look at the shenanigans of the rich landowners in such stately homes as Ashenden Manor!

  “Inspector?” Jimmy Bryson was looking out onto Butler Street. “Them, again, isn’t it?”

  Inspector O’Hare followed Bryson’s gaze. Two people going past. He recognized them. They’d been in Ballynagh on a previous case. That skinny photographer in his black turtleneck and duffle and camera bags was from the scandal sheet Scoop. The fat girl with the shaggy bangs and big behind was his assistant. The sharks were closing in.

  47

  On the plane from Copenhagen heading southwest toward Dublin, Torrey ate the last half of the chocolate bar with almonds she’d bought at the Copenhagen airport; she’d had no time for lunch. Against the dark windowpane, she saw Ingeborg Steensen’s face and heard her voice: I can only tell you that, were I Rowena, I might have tried to kill him too.

  Torrey rubbed her temples. Devastating to hear, but — something off, something missing. Two things: Rowena, because she was Rowena, would never have committed anything premeditated like the bridle path murder. Never! Not Rowena.

  The second thing was the perplexing question: Why, up to the very day that Rowena tried to ride down her grandfather in the meadow, had she and her grandfather been such close, loving friends? Up to that very day. Up to that very afternoon.

  That very afternoon.

  * * *

  In Dublin it was raining. The plane touched down at the Dublin Airport in Collinstown eight miles north of the city center. The temperature had fallen. Outside the airport it was cold, with gusts of rain. In minutes, Torrey’s heavy woolen jacket and knitted cap were damp. Shivering, she looked around for the 41A bus to Dublin. The bus would be chilly, clammy, smelling of damp newspapers and rubber. In Dublin, she’d have to get the local bus south and finally get off the bus on the access road to Ballynagh. She couldn’t afford the luxury of a taxi even to Dublin; the taxi fare was about fifteen pounds, and then the tip. The shockingly expensive air fare to Copenhagen and back had knocked out her budget for the next month. In her shoulder purse right now she had two pounds and a handful of twenty and ten-pence coins, enough for the regular bus fare to Dublin, which was a pound thirty pence and would take until doomsday to reach the city in this miserable wet weather. People were hurrying past her, wet mackintoshes and umbrellas on all sides.