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Authors: Dicey Deere

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BOOK: The Irish Cairn Murder
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S
ean O'Boyle started walking down the avenue from Sylvester Hall. Ms. Cameron's check for McGarrey's Nursery was in his pocket. It was getting on to late afternoon, just past four o'clock. McGarrey had promised delivery of the new shrubs at four o'clock. He'd unload the truck at the gates. Sean had his retractable tape measure. He'd set the shrubs along the iron fence, spacing them right. Twenty-four inches apart, say.
He walked briskly for pure enjoyment, breathing deeply of what might be the last of the autumn days scented with apple and hay. He was pleased that he still moved with the gait of a young man. And he had a young figure, too! Never mind his age. He'd have dyed his hair—colored it, they called it now—but in O'Malley's they'd have looked at him sideways, their eyes getting small and suspicious with odd notions, so better not. Besides, what would his sister Caitlin make of it? She was up on everything, what with all she saw on television.
“Mr. O'Boyle! Hel
lo!
”
Ms. Tunet's bike skidded to a stop in front of him. Her short, shiny brown hair, was tossed about by the breeze. Those jeans weren't warm enough, even with this sun, but
that was her business. And no jumper on over her jersey. She had a blue knitted muffler around her neck and one end hung down long enough to get tangled in the spokes of her bike. In the bicycle basket was an Irish oatmeal-colored jumper and atop it was a broken-off half of a chocolate bar, the kind with almonds. Ms. Tunet always made him think of the word
lass,
though you didn't hear it much anymore. Except maybe in fake tourist places, putting on the Irish.
“They're all out,” Sean said. He'd save her time, she could turn around and go.
“
Act
ually,” Ms. Tunet began. Then stopped. She smiled at him and turned her bike around. They walked together toward the gates.
Walking beside Ms. Tunet, Sean was edgy at first. He was sure Ms. Tunet, like everybody else in Ballynagh, would be all excited about Natalie Cameron and the murder. She'd try to pump him about the latest. He couldn't go twenty steps in Ballynagh without someone stopping him with a million questions.
So it was a relief that Ms. Tunet didn't ask him a single thing about the murder. He relaxed and told her about the new shrubs that McGarrey was coming to deliver. She seemed very interested. Maybe she was only being polite, but anyway he went on to explain the different kinds of shrubs to her and why some would thrive along the roadway and others wouldn't. It made conversation that was safe from other things, it was a guard against them.
“You're putting in the same kind of shrubs that were there in Ms. Sybil's day?” Ms. Tunet asked him.
“Yes, the same, they're what Ms. Sybil would've wanted. Ms. Sybil always knew exactly what she wanted. When she told you, it was like it was being handed down from—Excuse me, ma'am, I don't mean—”
“That's all right, Mr. O'Boyle. From what I've heard about
back then, I guess Ms. Sybil was something of a martinet.” And Ms. Tunet laughed.
“Ms. Sybil? Like a martinet?” He snapped and unsnapped the button on the tape measure in his pocket. “I suppose so.”
“Like—well, chatting about the old days, Jessie—or maybe it was Breda—”
“Breda wasn't
at
Sylvester Hall in the old days. Breda's been here only six years, so—”
“Well, then, Jessie, I guess. Talking about the price of petrol, something like that. How the chauffeur back then—”
“Olin Caughey? He was the chauffeur. Half the time in shirtsleeves, polishing the in
side
of that silver Rolls just the way Ms. Sybil wanted.”
“Well,” Ms. Tunet said, “It wasn't about polishing, more about, well … I don't remember. Where's Olin Caughey now? There's no chauffeur at Sylvester Hall.”
Sean gazed down the avenue toward the gates. But he was seeing Olin Caughey in his blue twill chauffeur's uniform and the black-billed cap on his gray head standing stiffly by the open door of the Rolls waiting for Ms. Sybil to come down the steps to go off to one of her bridge games or dinner parties. “Olin's long gone, Ms. Tunet. Poor old Olin! Times when he had a tongue as cutting as a buzz saw, but that was the drink. And when he had the pains. Kidneys a pest. In hospital that last time, he said to me, ‘I'll be like twenty again.' ‘You mean like sixty,' I said back. ‘Have to go on furlough'—that's the way he put it, going into hospital. ‘Not out to pasture, mind you,' he told me. ‘They'll fix me up. I'll be back at Sylvester Hall in no time.' He was wrong. Lived a good six years after, chipper as a squirrel. But never able to put on his chauffeur's cap again.” Sean, remembering, felt sad. In his pocket the tape button went snap, snap.
“His chauffeur's cap?” Ms. Tunet said. “You mean Ms. Sybil had to hire another chauffeur?”
Sean shook his head. “No, not Ms. Sybil. She was in hospital herself with her appendix when Caughey got that last attack. Caughey got his nephew, his sister's youngest, to come from out around Sligo. By the time Ms. Sybil got home to Sylvester Hall, the young fellow was driving the Rolls smooth as a swan gliding on a pond.
Smoooth
as a swan.”
Rumble of McGarrey's Nursery truck. Half past four exactly, and here he and Ms. Tunet were now, at the gates. He gave McGarrey a mock salute.
“What was his name?” Ms. Tunet said. “Olin Caughey's nephew.”
“Hmmm? Don't rightly remember. Was only at the hall maybe three, four months. Lived above the coach house, never went into the village. Writing stuff, up there.” He was watching the truck. “Jack McGarrey's got a clock for a heart, Ms. Tunet. What about that!” And then, with relief, he was guiding McGarrey's truck, signaling to back the truck to the verge. Ms. Tunet took the hint and left.
I
t was early evening, six-thirty. In Dublin, Torrey, just off the bus, walked down busy Nassau Street and made a right into Dawson Street, and there was Waterstone's Bookshop. They were open until eight-thirty on Wednesdays, so she needn't hurry. And with five floors of books, they were bound to have what she was looking for.
Inside, she found the poetry section. Aisles of poetry, rows of slim books, fat books. Famous poets, infamous poets. She was at a section at the end of the alphabet. Yeats, Wilde, Williams, Tate, Wallace Stevens. She rounded a corner into another section … then another. Here, at last, were the
B's
.
“Something I can help you with?”
Torrey smiled at the young woman clerk. “Do you have any poetry by Brannigan? Tom Brannigan.
Thomas
Brannigan?”
“Brannigan? Oh,
Bran
nigan! Absolutely! Right here. The book that just won the Halsey.”
It was a handsome book with a blue cover, the title in gold letters.
“Only this one copy left,” the clerk said, “you're in luck. We'll have to reorder. Anything else I can help you with?”
Torrey didn't answer. She held the volume of poetry in
both hands, looking down at it. She couldn't believe what she was seeing.
“Ma'am?”
Torrey, feeling in a trance, blinked, then looked up. “Oh! Oh, thanks. Sorry. No, thanks. This will do for now.”
 
An hour later she got off the bus from Dublin on the access road, the bus driver obligingly having stopped at the break in the hedge. She stood a moment on the dark road. She somehow needed the stillness, the cold air. From above came the drone of a far-off plane. She looked up and saw the plane's light blinking. She moved her hand and felt the outline of the book in her shoulder bag. Then she blew out a breath that made a white fog in the air, and went through the break in the hedge.
There was a light on in the cottage. But Jasper was not there. Instead, she found a note on the kitchen table.
Off to Belfast. Damn the lot of them, both sides! This is the longest running show extant. No other comment need apply. Ham in the oven, heart of my heart.
She hungrily ate the ham with bread and tea, then washed her hands thoroughly with soap so as not to get any grease spots on the book.
She read until ten o'clock at the kitchen table, turning the pages forward, then back, sometimes not actually reading but just looking up from the book and gazing off.
At eleven, she went to bed, first setting the clock for seven in the morning. The bus heading south on the access road would go past the break in the hedge about eight o'clock. She didn't want to miss it.
A
t Glasshill Hospital, Head Nurse Huddleson was barely starting her morning tea, and here was this young American woman, though visiting hours weren't until two o'clock. But since the young woman was so excited, having just read in a week-old copy of the
Irish Times
about the attack on the patient, Brannigan, and it seems he was a cousin of hers—Well, under the circumstances …
A nurse's aide in a blue uniform conducted the young woman to room 206. The patient was asleep. The young woman looked at the patient's bandaged head and bruised face. “How
dread
ful! Poor Tommy!” and to the nurse's aide, “I'll just sit here until he wakes up.”
“Quite all right, I'm sure,” the nurse's aide said sympathetically. ‘Nurse Huddleson will be in, in a bit.”
“Thank you.”
 
Torrey pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat down. She was taking the book from her shoulder bag when she knew suddenly that the man in the bed was watching at her.
“Poor Tommy,” he mimicked her. His voice was husky; he cleared his throat. “Poor Tommy, indeed! A knight with a broken lance.” A world of bitterness in his voice. It was a cultured
voice with a touch of brogue, just enough to bring it down to earth. His eyes were gray. He stared at her.
“Here in this cocoon, you wouldn't have heard,” Torrey said. She hesitated, then plunged telling him who she was and pouring out the last ten days' events, beginning with the threatening phone call to Dakin at the groundsman's cottage and ending with the murder of Raphael Ricard at the cairn, with Natalie Cameron the suspect. Thomas Brannigan's eyes never left her face. His own face had begun to sweat.
“I'm here,” Torrey finished, “because I don't believe Natalie Cameron killed that stranger from Canada. And I care about Dakin. And I think you can help. Because
you're
not a stranger, are you? Far from it, because—” She held up the book that had won the Halsey. Watching Tom Brannigan's face, she read the title aloud,
“‘The Dakin Poems'”
.
 
Behind Torrey's chair, the door opened with a pneumatic hiss, a nurse's aide put her head in, said, “Oh, pardon!” and withdrew. Through the window from the other side of the hospital bed, came the sound of birds chirping. After a minute, Tom Brannigan at last said, “Well?”
“The poems,” Torrey said, “reminded me of A. E Housman.
A Shropshire Lad.
Oh, not ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff. You eat your victuals fast enough,' or ‘About the woodlands I will go/To see the cherry hung with snow.' But lyrical, in that same way. Lyrical about a youth. But in
The Dakin Poems,
a boy is growing up. He's three years old. He's five. He's eight years old. And on.” Torrey leaned forward. “All the stages of a lad's growing up, a loved child, in, say, a countryside like western Wicklow: the hills, the rushing streams, the mountainsides.” Torrey paused, watching Tom Brannigan. “A boy who has a mother with hazel eyes and hair the color of honey.”
 
 
A crash of dishes from the corridor. Someone swore, someone laughed. Torrey, holding the book, realized that her hands here clutching it as though she could wring something from it. In the hospital bed, Tom Brannigan slid his fingers along his brow, below the bandage that swathed his head. He closed his eyes.
Torrey said, “I see that each poem has the date when it was written, and where. Beginning fifteen years ago. All the poems were written in Montreal. Where you were living?”
A sigh. “Yes. This is the first—”
The pneumatic door hissed open. Nurse Huddleson, alert, face beaming, wiping the corners of her mouth for stray crumbs. “So! How does it feel, Mr. Brannigan? A visit from your cousin!” She looked more closely at the patient. “Perked you up, I can see that! A bit of color in your face! We'll call Inspector O'Hare in Ballynagh soon's Dr. Bascomb has a look at you.” She turned to Torrey. “Your visit's done him a world of good, Ms … Ms … ?”
“Tunet.” Torrey smiled back at Nurse Huddleson, who said, “Well, then!” The door hissed closed behind her.
Torrey said, “The date on that first poem. That would be when Dakin Cameron was only a year old.”
Tom Brannigan lay back and gazed at the ceiling. He brought a hand to his bandaged head as though it head possibly contained too much to hold. Then, “My God!” followed by a strangled laugh. “Quite a journey you've made, Ms. Tunet! Delving, diving, discovering—hoping to save my Natalie! My Natalie, who is not mine! Can it be done? She had cause enough, God knows, for murder. But she never would have. Not Natalie!
Never
.”
Torrey leaned forward. “Then help her!
Tell
me.”
 
 
No sound, a stillness in the room, a hush that seemed to extend into the corridor outside the door; from the open window no twitter of a bird, no wind that fluttered a leaf. Then, from the bed, an enormous sigh.
“Back then,” Tom Brannigan said, “I was twenty. Working on my father's farm in Drumcliff, County Sligo. The call came from my uncle Olin. Fill in, for a bit, chauffering at Sylvester Hall until he was up to it again, his kidneys all fixed. Better me, his nephew, than a stranger who might try to settle in for good, steal Olin's job. ‘You'll go,' my father said. ‘Save Olin's place for him. It'll expand your horizon, too, Tom. You'll have more to scribble about than farming in Drumcliff.' They laughed about my writing at night, but they were proud of it, especially my mother.
“So, Sylvester Hall. I arrived on a Friday noon. It was August. The housekeeper, Mrs. Dugan, had the second maid bring me out to the coach house, to where I'd stay, a room up above. On a hanger was my uncle Olin's summer uniform. Blue twill. It had been cleaned. I put it on. Too big in the waist, and I was taller, but it fitted well enough. Then I went down to look at the cars.”
His voice stopped. After a moment, a sigh. “There were only two cars in the coach house. One I don't remember. Ordinary. The other was a silver Rolls. A Rolls! I'd seen only one Rolls in my life. It was in Galway, parked in front of the Great Southern, it had a diplomat's license. And now my second. Made me gasp.
“I got in the car. It felt strange. Here I was, the son of a farmer with a piece of land the size of my shoe, and I was sitting behind the wheel of a Rolls on a seat of the softest leather. The car's upholstery was green leather. The wood was polished walnut. The fittings gleamed. There were keys in a green marble ashtray on the dashboard. I poked about,
looking for a manual, but I couldn't find one. I sat there trying to figure out what to push and pull. Then I heard a voice. Husky and laughing. ‘There's a booklet in that little drawer, you press the button to make it open. Anyway, Mr. Chauf feur, I know how the bloody thing works.'
“It was Natalie. She got in the car beside me. Smelled like sweat, sweet sweat and horse sweat; she'd been riding. Hair in a tangle of curls, sunburn across her nose. Looked sixteen, which she wasn't, she was eighteen to my twenty. ‘Shove over,' she told me, ‘I'll show you.' Talked a blue streak, you'd have thought she'd taken a course in mechanics, what with all she knew. Slangy, too. Dirty mouth for a girl. I didn't know what to make of her. There was an open tin of tobacco in with the manual, my uncle Olin must've left it. Putting the manual back, I scratched my hand on it, the palm. ‘Double shit!' she said, ‘Poor lad!' and she ducked her head and licked it clean, her tongue on my palm. Then, like a joke, she pulled my hand up to her mouth and kissed the palm and laughed. ‘Salty!' she said, ‘Blood always is … red and salty.' At that I was—it was as though my head got turned around, I didn't know what. But something changed in me. I was never the same after that, right from the beginning. She was in my … my blood. And I in hers.”
In the hospital room, Torrey looked at Thomas Brannigan's narrow, pale face. He had turned his head toward the window, but she had a sense that he was smiling. Gone was the cultured voice that over the years in Canada had become his. He had gone back, years back. The young chauffeur, telling his tale, spoke in the voice of the twenty-year-old from Drumcliff.
“All that August I'd drive her to Dublin in the Rolls to visit her great aunt in hospital. She wore a navy suit that was too small, she'd grown so. She had no dresses, only a white afternoon
dress for proper social occasions and the suit ‘for tea or the dentist in Dublin,' she told me, making a face, and a pair of jodhpurs for riding. The rest were school uniforms, but she'd graduated from her girls' school in June.”
His voice drifted off, came back. “In Dublin, we'd eat sausages and mashed at a Bewley's. Then we'd wander around St. Stephen's Green or poke through bookshops. A bit of ice cream off a cart, sometimes. Then we'd drive back home to Ballynagh. But the fourth time we went to Dublin was different.” Again he stopped, then went on:
“That fourth time, after Bewley's, Natalie wanted to go to shops, look in department stores, even buy something. But her allowance wasn't enough to buy more than a pencil case. I had my pay, but she wouldn't let me use it. She was in a daring mood, laughing and excited. We went to a shop where Natalie's great-aunt bought her school clothes, and Natalie bought a yellow party dress with flounces. Beautiful and expensive. She charged it to her great-aunt's account. She thought the manager would refuse or ask her questions. She almost didn't breathe, signing the charge. But they just thanked her and gave her the dress in a box, all in tissue paper. When we got outside with the box, she said,” ‘I've been let out of school! In actu
ality
!' It was as though freedom from school and from her great-aunt in hospital had gone to her head, made her daring and wild. And she laughed so hard that people passing looked at her and couldn't help smiling.
“But in the Rolls driving back, she started to cry, so anguished I couldn't bear it. So I offered to let her drive, she'd never driven though she knew the manual by heart, she hadn't been allowed. The driving calmed her down. But that night she came to my room over the coach house.”
Tom Brannigan rubbed a hand over his face and drew
an enormous breath. “She had on the yellow party dress. She'd put on lipstick. She stood looking at me. Then with the back of her hand she wiped off the lipstick and came to me.”
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