The Irish Manor House Murder

by Dicey Deere

  Well, now she’d told it, she was relieved. Not that it amounted to anything. And the rest didn’t count. She was getting cold; it was nippy and she had only her cardigan. She could do with a hot cup of tea. She hesitated. She looked off, like checking on the sheep up there on the mountainside. She knew her face was getting red and that Ms. Tunet was seeing her face get red. She had a feeling that Ms. Tunet, having seen it, was going to keep her here until Doomsday until she knew top to bottom about that Friday. Though for her part, she couldn’t see how the rest was related to anything, but separate.

  “So then, there you were, standing in the hall, holding the mail,” Ms. Tunet said, like giving her a hard little shove.

  “Yes, holding the post, the mail. And I turned around and Dr. Collins was coming from the library. I said ‘Oooff!’ I was a bit startled. Dr. Collins has the run of the house, though. He likes to drop in and maybe spend a few minutes in the sitting room with Mrs. Temple, such a sunny room. She likes to knit in there. Or he goes to sit in the library before the fire in that big wing chair and snoozes, so cozy, so hidden. You’d never know he was there!

  “Anyway, there he was, he looked like, well, his face. It was all blotchy, and then he just stood, like a store dummy, so still, I got frightened, you hear about heart attacks and strokes and such. I said, ‘Are you all right, Dr. Collins?’ But he just looked at me for a whole minute, like in a trance. Then he said, ‘A little flutter of the heart, Jennie. But I’m fine. I’ll just sit here for a bit.’ And he sat down on a side chair, and I went into the dining room to sort out the letters. That’s all, Ms. Tunet.”

  Jennie felt funny, then, the way Ms. Tunet was staring at her as though she’d been struck by a blow. Been hit by something. But all she said was, “Thank you, Jennie. I’m going back inside with you. I want to use the phone.” They went together back to the house, Jennie not saying anything more, except, “You’ve got your sweater on inside out, Ms. Tunet,” and Ms. Tunet looked down at her sweater, surprised.

  Sorting the mail in the dining room, Jennie could hear Ms. Tunet on the hall telephone. It was the strangest thing, Ms. Tunet calling Collins Court and saying to Helen Lavery, Dr. Collins’s housekeeper — Helen always took the calls at Collins Court — that there was an emergency, a boy in a tractor accident at the McGinnis farm, and was Dr. Collins there? And then telling Helen Lavery, well, tell Dr. Collins to please come immediately, the boy had crushed his leg. Then there was silence in the hall, and Jennie knew that Ms. Tunet had gone.

  50

  Helen Lavery was frightened, shaking, crying in her sleep and awakening bewildered, her gray hair long enough to be damp with tears, the way she rolled her head around in bed, must have done, and the bedclothes all tangled up. For days now.

  She kept seeing that late Friday afternoon when Dr. Collins had bandaged up Dr. Ashenden’s shoulder. It had been so peaceful at Collins Court, the afternoon sunlight reflected on the glass-fronted bookcase in the library. She’d been vacuuming the rug that Dr. Collins’s great-great-grandfather had brought from India, when she saw Dr. Collins reflected in the glass-fronted bookcase.

  Helen shut off the vacuum and turned around. Dr. Collins looked terrible, all white and shaken, and the makeup he used around his eyes that he thought nobody knew he wore, it was all runny. He took the decanter of whiskey from the tray that had come down from his great-aunt Agnes, who’d had the Victorian house in Bray and that Helen used the special silver polish on, the best polish, to Helen’s mind, though it always left a bit of dried pink in the embossed edging. Dr. Collins splashed whiskey into one of the cut-glass tumblers that Helen kept sparkling clean. Dr. Collins never drank except the one whiskey before dinner, and on the evenings he played chess with Dr. Ashenden, when he’d sometimes come home feeling good if he’d won. Then he’d have a small one. Tiny.

  But that afternoon of the meadow! “She rode him down, Helen! Sergeant Bryson saw it! Such a dreadful —” and he started to cry, which made the makeup run even worse. Helen had never seen him cry, not in all those twenty-two years.

  And then with the whiskey glass trembling in his hand and the tears smearing his makeup, he’d begun babbling such awful, frightening things about back then in the woods, something that had happened. At first she couldn’t make it out. But seeing his misery, she understood in some roundabout way that she loved Dr. Collins and suffered when he suffered. A revelation.

  And now, with Dr. Ashenden gone, Dr. Collins at least had her, Helen Lavery. She knew that she would always care for him and protect him. She always had done.

  Anyway, now, except for nighttimes with the frightening dreams, Helen felt pretty much in charge of herself. Answering the phone as usual, cooking the meals, shopping for the foods Dr. Collins liked, and taking messages. Right now, from the kitchen window, she could see that a rabbit had gotten into the kitchen garden and was hopping down toward the carrots. She shook out a handful of dried kidney beans from the glass jar. She’d get rid of Mr. Rabbit in two shakes, as usual. But the doorbell was ringing. She’d answer it first.

  She went unhurriedly through the great hall to answer the door. Right now Dr. Collins was out, off on an emergency: a boy in a tractor accident at the McGinnis farm. The boy had a crushed leg, the excited caller had said.

  Helen opened the door. She recognized the young woman standing there. The American young woman who’d rented the old groundsman’s cottage that belonged to Castle Moore. Ms. Torrey Tunet.

  Ms. Tunet smiled at her, a friendly smile. But for some reason Helen felt a tension at the back of her neck and along her shoulders.

  51

  At lunchtime, the bar on Parliament Street was jammed and noisy. Scott Keegan, at a table in the narrow room, said to the waiter at his elbow, “Here she is,” and shot up a hand to signal to Rowena who’d just come in and was looking around. He added, “Two lagers, Aiden.” Rowena liked a lager.

  His sister came over. “If I’m late, I’ll think of a reason in a minute.” She put her clutch of vet books on the floor, hung her windbreaker on the back of the chair, and sat down. He was glad of the books, glad she’d gone back to classes, the hell with the gossipy whispers of her classmates.

  But the way she looked! He was less glad about that. Rowena was hardly the fresh-faced, glowing young beauty of weeks ago. Puffy lids over her green eyes, pale face. Pregnancy alone? Or fear and anguish? She wore a midcalf navy skirt and one of those androgynous tunic tops.

  “Did you talk to him?” Rowena’s eyes were anxious.

  Scott nodded. “I just came from seeing him. Our current best friend. ‘Dr. Sunshine,’ as he calls himself. Maybe he has a sense of humor. Here’s the menu. I ordered us a lager.”

  Rowena took the menu but didn’t look at it. Scott saw that she’d been biting her nails again, as she’d done when she was ten or so. “What did he say?” She was leaning forward, her eyes anxious, “You told him why I’m so worried? because I swear I can actually feel…” Her voice faltered, her face went even paler.

  “Yes, I told him. About feeling it move. The good Dr. Sunshine says that’s nonsense; it’s way too early. But all right, he’ll move it ahead to this coming Wednesday. Says he’s unusually booked up, so it’ll be ten percent extra. He gets the whole thing up front. Cash. No checks. No credit cards. I gave him the money.”

  “Then it’s all set? For Wednesday?” When Scott nodded, Rowena gave a near-hysterical laugh. At that, he leaned forward and covered her nail-bitten hand with his own carefully manicured hand. “Hang on, Rowena. Just hang on. By this time next week, It’ll all be over.”

  “Yes.”

  “As though none of it ever happened.”

  “Yes.”

  All over, courtesy of Dr. Sunshine.

  Then all Rowena would have left to worry about would be the possibility of being found guilty of murdering their grandfather.

  52

  “Lamb,” Jasper said to Dennis O’Curry in O’Curry’s Meats. It was two o’clock Friday aftern
oon. O’Curry had finished wrapping Mrs. Leary’s package of beef kidneys and made her change. “Lamb chops, Mr. O’Curry. Four of them.”

  “Ah,” Dennis O’Curry said, “going to make that Chinese dish again, Mr. O’Mara? With the candied ginger? Liked it, did she? Ms. Tunet? With the vermouth in it, and all?” He was jocular, in no hurry; there were no other customers,

  “Smacked her lips,” Jasper said. “Used up eight paper napkins. You’ve got to use paper. And your hands. Like you do with asparagus, which we also had and are having again.”

  Mr. O’Curry said, “Lamb’s in the cold room.” He went into the cold room, which had a window into the shop.

  Waiting, Jasper stood jingling the change in his pocket and gazing out at Butler Street. Yesterday at the Dublin airport, seeing Torrey’s rain-battered figure and white, exhausted face, he’d felt an unaccustomed emotion. Falling in love was hardly his style. It interfered. He frowned.

  “The best of Wicklow.” Dennis O’Curry heaved the side of ribs onto the block. “Small and sweetly marbled.” With an artist’s love of his work, he sliced carefully, then put the chops on shiny butcher’s paper and held them out for Jasper’s inspection. “There you are. What’s that buzz?”

  “My cell phone. Wrap them up, please. Be with you in a minute.”

  Outside, he stood in the lane that ran between O’Curry’s and the vegetable stand, the phone to his ear. A buzzing, a crackling, a woman’s voice in Portuguese. The call would be coming from Portimão on the southern coast. “Hello, hello! Flann?”

  Then, “Jasper!” Flann’s voice, angry, outraged, even in that single word.

  “Flann! Been trying to —”

  “Damn you for a devil! Why didn’t you tell me? I just saw it on Portuguese television! The RTV News. Rowena accused of murdering her grandfather.” Fury, rage, betrayal. Flann’s voice was choked. “And I can’t get there! What the hell is going on?”

  “I’ve been trying to reach —”

  “Christ! Rowena wouldn’t hurt a black widow spider! What do they take her for? Can’t they see?” Flann’s voice broke. The brilliant young news correspondent was going to pieces. “How is she? Still feeling weak? And sick? The pregnancy’s been giving her such a bad time. I’ve been worrying. We don’t want —”

  “She’s fine, Flann. She’s —”

  “We don’t want to lose the baby! It would break her heart! And mine! Jasper, for Christ’s sake! I’m —”

  “Flann —”

  “I’m going crazy! I can be there tonight, there’s a TAP plane to Heathrow, then I can —”

  “What about Rory?”

  A silence. Waiting, Jasper could see Flann’s anguished face, the responsible son caught in his father’s political mess. In the dark of night Flann had bundled the old man, if you could call wrong-headed Rory Fallon, age fifty-five, an old man, onto the thirty-five-foot Dancing Waters and in the dark had put-putted quietly out of Crosshaven at Cork Harbor. What good were Rory Fallon’s regrets now? Penitent, yes, and sickened, and covering his head with ashes, rethinking the break with Sinn Fein and his joining the renegade group and their setting off of the explosion. Oh, yes, Rory was rethinking now, but too late. And was he yet safely away?

  “I’ll figure out something about Rory. But Rowena! She must be half out of her —”

  “For God’s sake, Flann, don’t come! It would only make fodder for the gossip sheets, raw meat for the vultures. The good news is that I’ve a smart friend here. She’s onto something that’ll whisk Rowena out of the line of fire.” It was a lie, full of assurance, of comfort.

  Twelve minutes later Jasper, shirt soaked with sweat, clicked off his phone, sure of having convinced Flann Fallon to stay on his father’s case in Portugal.

  Back up the lane again, in O’Curry’s. “Four punts six,” O’Curry told him, handing over the wrapped chops.

  “Thanks.” His voice was thick, his mouth dry. He felt he’d run a marathon and, chest bursting, had collapsed across the tape.

  * * *

  The dark, polished bar at O’Malley’s had four white plates with little squares of cheese on toothpicks and the like, all for free, “Sean O’Malley being no fool,” the old fellow with the wild white hair said to Jasper. Sharp, shrewd eyes, lyrical voice. Talk and laughter, a scattering of toothpicks on the bar, a burst of laughter at some fellow’s low-toned joke. Sean’s second son, bartender in a green apron, topped off the twenty-ounce glass of Guinness for Jasper. The package with the lamb chops and the bag of asparagus lay on the bar. He desperately needed this short respite at O’Malley’s, then he’d be off. His sweat-dampened shirt felt clammy under his jacket.

  The white-haired man put his sweater-clad arm on the edge of the bar, and with a hand clasped around his glass turned toward Jasper. “You the fellow buys elephant garlic at Coyle’s? And wanting those pea-sized Greek black olives and the like? Boiling and bubbling potions to enchant the lass in the groundsman’s cottage?”

  Jasper’s nostrils twitched, repressing laughter. He felt his tension begin to disappear, soothed away by the lyrical voice and the long, cool draft of beer sliding down his throat. “That I am.”

  “McIntyre, here. The American lass all involved, a white knight out to rescue the Ashenden Manor maiden. Rowena. Old English name, Rowena. I’ve heard the grandfather named her himself. Old English. Rowena. Ivanhoe, Knights Templars. One hears things.”

  A little drunk, McIntyre, at four in the afternoon, stabbing squares of cheese, smiling to himself; a man with secrets. Jasper found him soothing, but not for long.

  “Rowena. That knitting needle murder.” A shake of the head. “The first death in these Ballynagh woods near Ashenden Manor, not since Cromwell —”

  “The first death? I heard tell of a child lost in a landslide in the woods, a heavy rain one spring.” Jasper speared a square of cheese. Then recalling more of what Torrey had told him, “And didn’t Gerald Ashenden’s wife die in a fire in the woods?”

  McIntyre looked into his glass of beer. He said softly, “So she did. Kathleen her name was.”

  Jasper said, “And in the woods, another — something about a guest at a dinner party at Ashenden Manor. Wandered off drunk and fell facedown in a bog and suffocated.”

  McIntyre’s thickets of white eyebrows rose. “By God, that’s so! I was in Ballynagh then, just back from New Zealand, the Polynesian Islands. Right you are, sir! A friend of Ashenden’s, an X-ray technician in Dublin, fellow with a crooked eye. Suffocated in the bog. There’d been a rain, bog like thick oatmeal. Can’t remember his — Slattery! Donal Slattery! That’s it. I’ve a cousin, Donald Slattery in Dingle, so it stuck in my mind. New Zealand, now, the native Maoris are wide as barns and strong as oxen.…”

  53

  Incest. The newspapers and a couple of Dublin’s scandal sheets lay on Inspector O’Hare’s desk. Nothing flat out. But underlying hints of incest in the gossip columns about “The Knitting Needle Murder” that involved Dr. Ashenden’s granddaughter, who was something of a looker. Obvious hints.

  Inspector O’Hare gazed in frustrated anger at a gaggle of photographs splashed across the front page of the scandal sheet Scoop: eight socialite photes of the handsome Dr. Gerald Ashenden with his pretty little granddaughter, Rowena, from the time she was six years old. Horse show photos, she at ten, at twelve, at fourteen, astride her grandfather’s winning horses; she and her grandfather waltzing together at her eighteenth birthday party: lunching tête-a-tête at the Merrion, snapped having tea at the Shelbourne; the pair of them visiting a dog shelter in New Ross. “A close relationship?” inquired the scandal sheet, “or a significantly loving relationship?”

  And where, Scoop inquired maliciously, were the Gardai getting in their investigation of this titillating Knitting Needle Murder case?

  “God damn it!” O’Hare’s shoulders ached with tension. Chief Superintendent O’Reilly’s rage would be monumental if a news reporter scooped the Gardai, making the Gardai look like the f
lapping tail on a kite. “God damn it!”

  “But, Sir! It’s only what-d’you-call-it? — supposition.” Sergeant Jimmy Bryson, at his corner desk, pushed away the copy of Scoop he’d been reading. He’d blushed as he read the column with its smarmy hints about little girls and the writer’s recollection of a family murder by a forty-year-old woman who’d been molested as a child. “I got even,” she’d said. No actual finger-pointing, not related to the Ashenden case, of course.

  “Those gossipmongers are too damn close,” Inspector O’Hare said bitterly. Scoop’s rhetorical question about the Gardai had instantly dried up the saliva in his mouth. He looked down at his lunch from Finney’s: hot, crisply fried cod that Jimmy Bryson had put down on his desk only minutes before. He pushed it away and got up.

  Pacing, frustrated, he hated Scoop, his job, Ballynagh, Ms. Torrey Tunet, the weather, this damned murder case, and Chief Superintendent O’Reilly of the ice-blue eyes.

  Then abruptly he stopped pacing, struck with a sudden wonderful realization: Of course! Of course! He was way ahead of those gossipmongers! Miles ahead! He knew something they didn’t know.

  He knew that Rowena Keegan was pregnant.

  Ah, yes, indeed. Wonderful! Couldn’t be better. Pregnant, Rowena Keegan would be visiting a doctor, likely in Dublin.

  O’Hare sat down at his desk, picked up the phone, and got through to the Crime Investigation Department at Dublin Castle.

  * * *

  When O’Hare put down the phone, he stood up and stretched, smiling. It was all in place: The Crime Investigation Department would put a trail on Rowena Keegan. She’d likely be using a false name. But once they had the doctor, he’d confirm that the young woman was pregnant. Then she wouldn’t be able to hold out. They’d have her confession.