by Dicey Deere
So! It would be the Gardai and not those smarmy rags who’d uncover the truth. It’d be the Gardai who’d open up the whole rotten fruit. Not that he didn’t feel sorry for Rowena Keegan. She must’ve been through quite enough horror.
He looked over at Sergeant Bryson. “You heard?” and at Jimmy Bryson’s nod, “Keep mum. Not a word even to Hannah.” Hannah was Bryson’s girlfriend. “And you might see to the Dolans’ fuss about their chickens and the Sullivans’ dog.”
Jimmy Bryson gone to the Dolans, O’Hare had only time to give himself a thumbs-up sign when the door opened. He looked over.
Ms. Torrey Tunet.
54
It startled O’Hare, the look of Ms. Tunet. An excitement that was almost electric emanated from her. Nelson rose lazily to greet her, his tail wagging, and she wrinkled her nose and said, “Phew! You stink, you darling!” and she leaned down and scrambled her fingers along his neck, and Nelson gave her his moony look.
O’Hare regarded this nemesis of his, this liar, this obstruction to the truth. Ms. Tunet approached his desk. Her face was blazing with suppressed excitement. “God! I’m glad you’re here, Inspector! I’ve something to —” Her glance fell on the fish sandwich he’d pushed away. “You going to eat that? I haven’t had lunch. I’m starved.” O’Hare nudged the sandwich, cold now, toward her. He watched the blissful way she gulped it down. She was wearing some kind of many-colored bandanna on her dark hair. One end had come free and hung down along her neck. Her sweater was on inside out. While she ate, her gray eyes promised him something. Not that he needed anything Ms. Tunet could deliver. Ms. Tunet who was his adversary, his barrier to the truth, his antagonist, his nemesis, his … He ran out of bitter analogies. Besides, likely in days he’d have the pregnant Rowena Keegan’s confession and the case wrapped up.
The sandwich finished, Torrey said, “Thanks.” She sat down on the varnished chair beside his desk, pulled it closer, and began to talk.
55
“Winifred?”
“If it’s about the manure, tell him we manufacture our own. After all, we’ve got two horses. And we hardly need the garden, what with being in London.” Winifred was at the dining room table laboriously sewing up a rip in the pocket of her brown corduroys.
“That’s not it,” Sheila said. It seemed to her that she was always standing in one doorway or another asking or telling Winifred something important that was invariably viewed by Winifred as nonsense. “Sergeant Bryson called. Inspector O’Hare wants me to be at the Ballynagh police station tomorrow morning. For an informal inquiry.”
“What time does he want us?”
“Not us, Winifred. Just me. Only those involved. Because I saw Rowena near the bridle path.”
“Just you? Oh, no! Not without me! Just let Inspector O’Hare try to throw me out!” Winifred jabbed the needle hard through the corduroys and Sheila shuddered for Inspector O’Hare.
* * *
Mark Temple stood looking down the hill from the rise above Ashenden Manor. In the late afternoon sunlight that was fading to a pale gold with a lavender tinge, the manor and the stone outbuildings reminded him of paintings he’d seen in the British Museum. So. Ashenden Manor. It was his now. His and Caroline’s. The snake was gone from Paradise.
Caroline was down there by the stables, a small figure, waving to him. He waved back and made his way down. When he got to her, he saw that her face was pale, and his heart constricted. He kissed her. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes. Only” — she drew a wavering breath —“only that we’ve had a call from Sergeant Bryson. Ten o’clock tomorrow. An informal inquiry. Have you seen Rowena about?”
* * *
Rowena was washing Scott’s red Miata just outside the stables. She was in a sweatshirt, old jodhpurs, and rubber boots. She was hosing off splashes of mud because Scott had driven through the rain from Dublin late last night. Scott was leaning against the fence, looking chilled, though he was wearing the motheaten old chinchilla coat that he’d found hanging in the back hall. He said soberly, “The inspector is fishing, that’s his modus operandi, getting passions flaring, enmities clashing. Raw flesh. We’ll keep our cool, won’t we, Rowena? No matter what entrails are exposed.”
Rowena put down the hose. She dipped the sponge in the pail of water and squeezed it, dripping water on the hood of the car. “It’s all phony. He’ll be skittering around trying to dig out why I tried to kill Gerald.”
“Don’t refer to the old bastard as Gerald at the inquiry. Call him ‘my grandfather.’”
“What if O’Hare finds out I’m pregnant? Pregnant! That would put the cap on it. I can imagine him rubbing his hands.”
“Just hope he won’t find out. Keep wearing that tight rubber thing under your jodhpurs. And Dr. Sunshine is right around the corner.”
“But Torrey guessed.”
“Torrey knows you intimately. And she has a special antenna. I can almost see it growing out of that satiny thatch of hair. I’ve known you all my life, but I wouldn’t’ve known if you hadn’t told me —”
“When I threw up in the stable.”
“Yes. But —”
“You’re my darling little brother. I wanted you to know.”
56
“… and New Zealand doesn’t have any snakes. Not a single snake in those islands! Ever hear of the kea? They have keas. A kea’s a parrot that can fly.”
“That so?” But Jasper hardly heard. Slattery, who’d suffocated in the bog. Jasper put down his half-finished beer. “Been a pleasure,” he said to the rampant-haired Michael McIntyre, and two minutes later he was out of O’Malley’s and across the road to Nolan’s Bed-and-Breakfast.
In his room he put the bag with the lamb chops and fresh asparagus on the bureau, sat down on the bed, picked up the bedside phone, and called Torrey. No luck. Where was she? He was onto something — or might be. He left a message on her machine: “If my phone’s busy, try again.”
He picked up the Dublin phone book from the bedside table, leafed through it, and found the listing: Slattery. Slatterys, plentiful as confetti. Adelaide Road, Burlington, Clyde, Elgin, Oxmantown Road, Sandymount, Howth. Dozens of them. Slattery, Donal. Several. A son named for his father, if he was lucky. Even a grandson? But what if not in Dublin any longer but in a village or town in Meath or Armagh or Mayo, or Roscommon, or Country Clare or God knows where. Jesus!
* * *
“Cup of tea, Mr. O’Mara?” Sara Hobbs, smiling in the doorway, Chinese tray in hand, teapot and cookies.
Jasper had just crossed off another Slattery, his ninth fruitless call. From the sheen in Mrs. Hobbs’s eyes, he saw that she’d had her five o’clock sherry, not tea, and he inwardly groaned; the sherry always made her chatty and sentimental. Sara Hobbs was very taken with Torrey. She’d told Jasper three different times how Ms. Tunet, his American friend, had come up the stairs of Nolan’s Bed-and-Breakfast a week ago, and how they’d had a lovely chat, all about Nolan’s early days and Sara’s childhood, and how back then Kathleen Brady who’d married Dr. Gerald Ashenden would come to Nolan’s to visit her old spinster aunt, Alice Coggins, and would bring her little girl, Caroline, “a year younger than me,” Sara Hobbs would say, “and we’d play jacks and all.” Sara Hobbs, eyes brightened by the sherry and often tears, would add, “Lost under the sea, the whole Brady family, and she, Kathleen, poor lass, left all alone but for her aunt. So tragic!”
Jasper managed a smile, declined tea, and wished Mrs. Hobbs would disappear in a puff of smoke. He knew the story by heart, Mrs. Hobbs’s five o’clock sherry story. He looked at his penciled check marks in the phone book and rubbed his forehead. So damn many Slatterys!
Some time during the next hour he looked up and noticed that Sara Hobbs was gone but had left tea and cookies. He ate a cookie and drank cold tea. His eyes ached. But he couldn’t let go. He dialed again, a wrong number as it turned out, and had a conversation with a Patrick O’Toole, age eight, who said, “You want me da, but
he’s still at the shop and anyway his name’s Liam.”
It was getting on toward six when he called a Donal Slattery and a teenager’s voice answered, “Donal Slattery? Yeah, that’s me. My da? Him, too. Doctor Donal Slattery? You’ve got the wrong number. Not on your — ooops! I guess you’d be wanting my grandpa?”
“Right.” Grandpa. The Donal Slattery, dead in a bog? “I’d like to get in touch with him. Do you have his number?”
“Not likely! Never met the old man. Died before I was born. Had a crooked eye, my pa said. Would that be the one?”
He held his breath. Then, “What about your gran? Is she —”
“Grandma Nora? She’s Mrs. Patrick McLaughlin now. Lives in Kilkenny. You want the number?”
He’d done it. For an instant he couldn’t believe it. Now, if only, if only!
* * *
When he hung up he made two more phone calls. The first was to Kilkenny, where he talked for some minutes. The second was to Torrey, leaving a message on her machine saying that he had an appointment, couldn’t make it for dinner tonight, and would call her in the morning.
Downstairs, on the way out he stopped by the reception desk where Sara Hobbs was reading a copy of Queen. He handed her the bag with the lamb chops and asparagus. “These’d be good for your tonight’s dinner or even tomorrow’s if you put them in the refrigerator. Have you tried a bit of mustard on lamb chops? Grilled with rosemary?”
“Mustard? Oh, dear! I’m not sure my Tom would — but thank you so much, Mr. O’Mara. From O’Curry’s, are they? And asparagus! In October!”
* * *
South on the N81, then onto N9 through to Carlow. Thank God he kept the Jaguar in Ballynagh now instead of garaged at his apartment in Dublin. No secrets now from Torrey. Or at least only a few.
The sun was setting. This was gentler country, not the mountains of the western part of Wicklow. Here were hills and plains and small farms, a more placid countryside. Dirt lanes branching off from the highway looked red-gold in the evening sun.
Onto the N10, broad highway, Kilkenny ahead, “Branch to the left,” she’d said, a Dublin accent, “quarter mile beyond the third Kilkenny sign.” Already a rose-tinged, lavender dusk. The road to the left no longer touched by sun, a wide lane, clipped grass edging the gravel. People who cared. Fogarty Lane.
The house was well kept, a brick house, set back, with a fenced bit of lawn. Two black Lab puppies, tails wagging, nipped at his heels as he went up the walk. It was almost eight o’clock when he rang the bell at 34 Fogarty Lane.
57
On Butler Street, McIntyre bit into a Finney’s hot-sausage-on-a-bun. Ah, yes, he knew the seas from Antartica to the Indian Ocean, and in the West Indies he’d drunk exotic hallucinations from a coconut shell. North of Reykjavik, he’d seen green-black ice floes like jewels. And in Madagascar hadn’t he frolicked with ladies of unimaginable skills?
But nothing better than standing on Butler Street in Ballynagh at half past nine of a flag-bright Saturday morning biting into a Finney’s hot-sausage-on-a-bun. Not to mention having a bit of a laugh, watching widow Bryson’s boy, Jimmy — Sergeant Jimmy Bryson now — carry those folding chairs from Grogan’s Needlework Shop across the street to the police station. Three trips the lad had to make. Every time Inspector O’Hare had more than six people at a meeting in the Ballynagh police station, Jimmy Bryson had to go borrowing the Grogan sisters’ chairs.
A few of the morning regulars drifted out of Finney’s, warming their hands around containers of steaming tea or coffee. “What’s it all about, McIntyre?” a newcomer wanted to know.
“About probing the deviousness of man,” McIntyre said, “which is a bottomless pit.” He took a bite of the sausage-on-a-bun. He had a sweater over his navy shirt, and over that, his worn old tweed jacket, a bit raveled at the cuffs but good enough. The breeze was knocking his hair about, but his cap was in some bureau drawer or other, so never mind. He watched the scene with a feeling of waiting. Had an eye out for that American young woman, his friend from O’Malley’s. She was in the thick of it, he’d be a fool not to know it.
And here came the handsome, crippled gay boy, Ashen-den, arriving in a gleaming little red convertible, his sister beside him. Rowena. The lass that gave fodder to the scandal sheets. Possible murderess. And if she did it, he, McIntyre, was all for it. Provided the girl had a good reason, of course. Ashenden had been a seeming gent if you didn’t look too close into his eyes, but he, McIntyre, had once looked close and didn’t care for what he saw. The girl wore gray pants and a navy pea coat with the collar up, her face down in the collar, just the top of her red hair showing.
Ah, the poet! Winifred Moore. Drawing up in a Jeep and parking it skillfully. And with her, her “companion” they called it nowadays, the skinny, wispy English woman with a bit of a fringe on her forehead. At McIntyre’s shoulder, a stranger, likely a tourist, said admiringly, “The big one, in the plaid cape. A fine-looking woman!” To which McIntyre said drily, “Not on the market, mister.”
Next, on foot, having parked their car farther down in front of Coyle’s market, here came the Temples. Passing McIntyre, the fair-haired Caroline, mother of the possible murderess, turned her head, and her great beautiful hazel eyes looked at him. Slender woman in a long black coat. He always had an eye out for a glimpse of her in the village. She had a cocky jaw, a bit of mischief there, but this morning somewhat in absentia because of the circumstances. Her new husband, Dr. Temple, manipulator of folks’ bones, wore country squire clothes. He had short, rusty hair, and his body had the thickness of a wrestler.
Butler Street was empty now except for the tea and coffee container drinkers. McIntyre took the last bite of the sausage bun. Where was the darling young woman, the American? Listened like a shadow on the wall, listened like a moth at the edge —
Here came Dr. Collins. Padraic Collins in his father’s old tweed cap. Family-proud Anglo-Irish, generations of it. Collins Court. At Dr. Collins’s elbow was his housekeeper, stocky Helen Lavery, in a rump-sprung wool skirt and buttoned jacket that strained across her bosom. Dyed hair, must’ve dyed it herself, a waste of dye. But known to be a kind woman and hardworking. Took care of Dr. Collins’s needs except for sex, which McIntyre’d heard the good doctor found elsewhere … though Helen Lavery likely was pining away with love of him, housekeepers always were. Or governesses. Jane Eyre types abounded. What a —
Ah, there! Riding up on a bike, the American young woman, Torrey her name was. Lovely looking thing even in the navy pants and red sweater. A gray-eyed, satin-haired young woman with a mouth like a flower. Parked the bike, and going past him into the police station, gave him a bit of a nod and a wink. Sassy. High color in her cheeks, back straight as a soldier’s.
“Well, then, McIntyre, what’s it about?” Someone behind him gave a laugh and jogged his elbow. “You always know.”
“About modern life,” McIntyre said, “and civilization, or the lack thereof, from the time of the Ice Age.” One of that lot, now inside the police station, was a murderer. Or maybe two of them were killers — there’d been the gypsy mixed up in it too.
Good luck to you, Inspector Egan O’Hare.
58
Inspector Egan O’Hare, half sitting on the edge of his desk, looked at his watch. Five minutes to ten. There was low talk and rustling. They’d all arrived.
Yesterday afternoon when Torrey Tunet had burst into the police station, he’d listened skeptically to her startling tale. He’d even smiled. After all, he already had the Ashenden murder case well in hand.
Yet … yet. Such an incredible tale! And, strangely, unwilling as he was to think so, possible. And he’d thought, Best to cover myself, because what if in fact there was something valid in Torrey Tuner’s astonishing tale? If he ignored it, he risked ending up having bet the wrong horse. A thousand-to-one chance. Still … So “an informal meeting,” he’d told Sergeant Bryson.
Now here they all were.
* * *
/> The clock on top of the Coke machine gave its tinny chimes. Ten o’clock. The low talk and rustling subsided. Winifred Moore, glaring, crushed out her cigarette in the paper plate that Sergeant Bryson held out while he shook his head and mouthed, “No smoking.”
O’Hare cleared his throat. He remained half sitting on the front edge of his desk, swinging one leg. Informal, that was the ticket. He smiled at the attentive faces. Nine people. “It may seem odd, this informal inquiry. But in earlier cases, I’ve found that bringing together those concerned invariably elicits remarkably helpful information that —” Smiling, smiling, on he blathered, knowing that he wouldn’t get a damned bit of new information from the eight of these nine people he’d questioned in the past weeks. He’d questioned all of them. All but one. Fake it. Go through it. Question the lot. Lull that ninth witness.
“Ms. Sheila Flaxton,” he began, “now you stated that…”
* * *
In the next hour, he questioned one person after another with seeming narrow-eyed intensity. He had never before practiced such trickery.
He carefully did not cast even one glance toward the seated figure at the left who, not yet questioned, was the key to not one murder, but two. At least according to the information from Ms. Torrey Tunet. In any case, he was still having the Gardai in Dublin follow the pregnant Rowena Keegan.
Several times during the questioning, he slid a glance toward Ms. Tunet, who stood against the wall beside the Coke machine. Nelson lay at her feet. Nelson’s tail thumped each time Ms. Tunet shifted, which Inspector O’Hare noted was often. Edgy, a high color in her cheeks. She’d brought him such an astonishing revelation, a revelation that, if proved true, would in the next few minutes certainly exonerate Rowena Keegan. Ms. Tunet obviously thought she had placed a sword in his hand. Well, that remained to be seen. No wonder she was edgy, and Nelson sensed it.
But what could be the killer’s motivation, if Ms. Tunet was on the right track? Inspector O’Hare felt a chill, not coldness, but a kind of titillation of the nerves. If, in fact, he could in the next few minutes pinpoint who had murdered Dr. Ashenden, he still didn’t know the why of it.
