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Authors: Dicey Deere

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BOOK: The Irish Cairn Murder
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“
M
a?” The coach house no longer smelled of horse and feed, but old harnesses still hung from iron hooks. Dakin always thought of sleek horses harnessed to carriages and trotting with arched necks down the avenue. A smell of gasoline now, though, from the cars. Light came only dimly through the high horizontal windows. Dakin walked past the cars to the far end and approached the boxlike old carriage.
“Ma?”
She was in the carriage. He'd suspected she would be. Even as a small boy, he'd known it was her refuge, as though it had some indefinable power, some mysterious means of soothing whatever troubled her.
“It's me.” He put a foot on the step and pulled himself up; the springs creaked. He sat down on the faded mulberry-colored button seat opposite his mother. “What's it about?”
“What's
what
about?”
“Don't
you
know?” He was startled. “Yesterday, I was doing some carpentry for a friend of Winifred Moore. That old groundsman's cottage that belongs to Castle Moore? While I was there, I got a phone call, a man's voice. It was a threat. He said, ‘Tell your mother to pay attention to the blue envelope communication. If she ignores it, her secret will
become public knowledge. Tell her! Everyone will know the truth about her! As for you—And he laughed. It was too—a nightmare! Out of the blue! It stunned me. When I hung up, he tried to call back. I should have answered, but I couldn't, I was too—too—Is that what shock is like? Bile in one's throat? Sickened?” Dakin leaned toward his mother. “Ma, who's that man? What did he mean? I wanted to kill him!”
His mother said, helplessly, “I've no idea. A man, was it? Anyway, a blackmailer. I want to laugh it off as nonsense. But …” She told him then about the two letters and her father's stolen penknife. “That's what bothers me. The penknife. That someone sneaked into Sylvester Hall and stole it. It couldn't have been anybody in the house; Jessie and Breda have worked at the hall for years.” She plucked at a frayed bit of the mulberry-colored velvet.
“Ma, you have to call Inspector O'Hare right away. He'll get in touch with Dublin Castle. The crime division will send Gardi to stake out the cairn. When the blackmailer shows up for the money, they'll grab him.”
His mother was frowning. “Dakin, I'm thinking. There are people who prey on other people's feelings of guilt. Maybe this Mr. X is one of them. There's that theory that everyone feels guilty about something—or
almost
everybody. Once, to prove it, a psychologist picked ten people's names out of the telephone book and sent them each a telegram saying, ‘All has been discovered. Leave town immediately.' Eight of them left town.”
“But—”
“
May
be, Dakin, this blackmailer is working on the same principle. Maybe he preys on women! Frightens them into paying him thousands of pounds. So maybe I should just ignore his—”
“Ma. What about your father's penknife?”
His mother stared at him. Then her hazel eyes, so much like his own, wavered. “Yes … that.” She bit her lips.
“Then you'll call Inspector O'Hare?”
“You're right, Dakin. I'll call O'Hare.” But even as she said it, she realized she wasn't going to call O'Hare. It had something to do with … with what? She raised her hand and brushed her fingers across her brow; it was as though a gray veil hid something almost glimpsed.
“Good!” Dakin said. “That's that, then.”
But because Natalie had never lied to her son, she said, “No, Dakin. I'm not going to call O'Hare. I'm not sure why not. But I won't call him.”
Dakin looked at his mother, her ordinarily glowing face had gone pale, her bright hair in the dimness of the carriage had a dull sheen. Against the faded color of the carriage, she looked like some lost Renaissance princess, never mind her sweater and gray pants to which a few nettles still clung.
Dakin said, appalled, “That letter! Saturday noon! You mean you're going to get the money and go to the cairn to meet with this blackmailer?”
“And give him thirty thousand pounds? Of course not! I haven't done anything to warrant this! And what's Cloverleaf? I've no idea.” She leaned forward. Her honey-colored hair fell across her brow. “Darling.” She laid her hand over the strong, tanned hand that rested on his knee. “I wish you didn't know about any of this.”
But he was glad he knew. Because if he hadn't known, there wouldn't have been anything he could do about it.
 
Dakin gone, she leaned back in the old carriage, soothed as always by its musty-smelling, faded mulberry upholstery. Overtired, that was it, working too hard on the housing project. Otherwise, why this strange little lurching of the heart,
as though there was something … but how could there be? Yet … She raised a hand and brushed it across her eyes. Something glimpsed. Blood oozing on the palm of a hand.
Poor lad
! Laughing, bending her head to lick the palm, the taste of blood. A green … box? A marble what? … cold to the touch.
“What?
What?
” she said aloud. She gave a jerk as though suddenly roused from sleep. She pushed open the carriage door and stepped out. She was trembling, it was so cold. She should have worn a sweater. It was, after all, October.
A
few minutes before noon, two hours after Torrey had left Castle Moore, she leaned her bicycle agaainst the wall outside O'Malley's Pub. It wasn't just that she owed Dakin because of the two lads of the fookin' drugs. It was also inherent outrage at the cruel telephone call. So, no use trying to ignore it.
Connaître le dessous des cartes
, as the French had it: know the undersides of the cards. Something in her demanded to know.
There was only a handful of customers in O'Malley's this early. Young Sean was behind the bar cutting cheese into half-inch squares and piling them into bowls and putting out the little glasses of toothpicks. The table at the end of the bar was occupied by Michael McIntyre, its usual occupant at eleven-thirty.
“Mr. McIntyre.”
“Ah, the American lass! Sit down! Sit down! A glass or a pint? Have no fear of the bill, ‘tis my birthday.” Michael McIntyre swiped a hand through his thicket of white hair. He was in his seventies, with a weathered face and brown eyes. He was Wicklow born and at twenty-two had departed Ballynagh for the life of a sailor. But every October, an aging Peter Pan, he returned to Ballynagh. “The village is a drug to me,” he'd once told Torrey, “more than a pinch of any powder
you'd snuff up your nose in a brothel in Thailand. Thick as a bog with secrets, and I most privy to them all. Many's a quiet little laugh I have up my sleeve.” McIntyre knew the ancestry of every cottager, farmer, shop owner, and estate owner in Ballynagh and the foibles and secrets, shameful, laughable, or plain horrendous, of even the most secretive.
“Soup,” Torrey said. She sat down. “The Thursday special, lamb and barley.” She contemplated McIntyre, who was lifting his pint to take a draft. Whatever she might want to know, she could learn from Michael McIntyre. She knew he liked her, as she liked him; he'd dance about a bit, but he wasn't likely to hold back.
So after she'd taken a few spoonfuls of the lamb and barley, she had only to mention the family at Sylvester Hall. At that, Michael McIntyre studied the ceiling and then the depths of his pint:
“The spinster, Sybil Sylvester, was the last to bear the Sylvester name, but for her great-niece, Natalie. The child, Natalie, had the misfortune to be brought up and guided into pure womanhood by Ms. Sybil.” McIntyre drained his pint and held up the glass, signaling to young Sean behind the bar. Sean nodded and said a word to his sister Emily, the barmaid.
“Misfortune?”
“Indeed, indeed! A barrelful of that.” McIntyre raised a hand and gave another stir to his mass of unruly hair. “The spinster, Sybil Sylvester, looked a jolly little person, a buttercup, a daisy, twinkly blue eyes, rosebud mouth. Porcelain figurine seen in a souvenir shop window. Had a fiance and marriage all arranged for her, but he was killed in the war. They say she was relieved because his estate had shrunk. Bad management and a fire. Hah! Then, as the finger of destiny decreed, her nephew, Natalie's father, along with her mother, disposed of by an earthquake—on terra firma of course. And they say the sea's a devil!” McIntyre gave a snort of a laugh.
“So Ms. Sybil was left in command. And with the child to bring up. According to her lights.”
Torrey stirred her soup. “And what lights were those, Mr. McIntyre?”
“Disciplinary lights! In the extreme. As for the rest, all well ordered: Sybil Sylvester spent her days running Sylvester Hall and its farmlands with a gimlet eye. Evenings, stiff dinners, black tie, or playing bridge with ladies and gentlemen of equally exalted family backgrounds. No Catholics allowed. Thank you, Emily.” McIntyre picked up the pint that Emily set down before him.
Torrey said, cautiously, “But you mean, about discipline ‘in the extreme,' about handling her responsibility to the child, Natalie—”
“Hah!” McIntyre set his pint down so hard that the beer splashed on the table: “A child, desperate, trying to swim in a tight corset! Underwater, drowning, tearing at the laces. Frantic! I saw it, and I thought, God knows what it can lead to!” McIntyre's voice was hoarse with emotion. Then the lids of his dark eyes flicked in a way that Torrey recognized: the curtain coming down.
McIntyre said, “In the Aleutian Islands—I was thirty-two then. That November the
Octavia
ran into a storm. The sea became wild, waves high as mountains, the
Octavia
began wallowing … .”
So that was all, for now. Bewildering. A very slender thread to that threatening phone call.
D
akin couldn't help it. Like now, looking down at Kate Burnside lying there in the tumble of bedclothes on the divan in O'Sullivan's barn. She was still asleep though it was already noon, and she was surely drunk, her full-lipped mouth a little open. Whenever he saw Kate, he got all heavy breathing and would think of silk or satin, some sliding, slippery material. Kate was his mother's age, maybe a year younger.
Divan. That's what Kate called the bed. It was like a wide couch, “Persian,” she'd told him, “sultans slept on divans. Potentates with their concubines.” She kept her paints and a jumble of her expensive clothes in O'Sullivan's barn, it was her studio. Her paintings, splashy abstracts that didn't sell, leaned against the walls. In Dublin she had an elegant town house.
“Kate! Wake up! Come on!” He bent over and shook her shoulder. He needed her help. Almost from babyhood Kate and his mother had attended Alcock's Academy and been best friends. True, his mother and Kate had drifted apart years ago. Their lives had become too different. Kate had had two notorious divorces, her children lived with their fathers. Her friends were fellow painters, men who were, it was said, often her lovers.
“Kate! Come on! wake up!”
Kate's eyes opened. She squinted at Dakin, then yawned so widely that her eyes teared. She stretched. She said lazily, “Dakin! You dear thing. I'm thrilled to see you. My mouth is an absolute—I could use some orange juice. And make some coffee. Use the filter thing. It's on the drainboard.”
 
“So,” Dakin said, “she's had these two letters.” He hunched forward on the hassock beside the divan and ran a finger around the rim of his coffee cup. He'd taken off his parka and was wearing a long-sleeved jersey. The studio was warmed by a peat fire in a cast-iron stove, yet he gave a sudden shiver. “What's so crazy is that my mother doesn't even know what the blackmailer's talking about. She's perplexed. But she refuses to go to Inspector O'Hare! Why not? She doesn't even seem to
know
why not! She just acted somehow …
off somewhere
.” He could see his mother across from him in the coach, he saw her raise her hand and her slender fingers brush in front of a hazel eye. “Off somewhere,” he repeated. Edgy, he ran a hand through his hair.
Kate, cross-legged on the divan in a pink satin nightgown with a bit of torn tan lace on one shoulder, was holding her coffee cup in both hands, and watching him.
He leaned forward. “Kate, d'you remember anything that happened? That this blackmailer could've misconstrued?”
“No! Nothing!” Kate sounded so irritable that Dakin was startled. “You're assuming the blackmail's about something that happened years ago. Maybe Natalie made some financial transaction a year or two ago that wasn't exactly on the up-and-up. A profitable, and not-quite-legal bit of—”
“My
mother
?” Dakin gave an incredulous laugh. “Not on your life! And there's that about her father's penknife, it must've been stolen. And what's it supposed to signify to my mother?
She
doesn't know. She's in the dark. She—” He
stopped. Funny, the way Kate was looking at him, not seeing him all of a sudden. Then she gave herself a little shake. She put her coffee cup down on the end table. She pulled her long black hair back in a ponytail and snapped a rubber band around it. Her white-lidded brown eyes were heavy and reddened. “Poor Natalie! What's she going to do? Will she go to meet this blackmailer on Saturday? Or not? Don't keep me waiting with bated breath.”
Dakin said tightly, “I thought I said. No. She won't. She's not giving any phony blackmailer even one pound. She says she's done nothing to warrant being blackmailed. Nothing.”
Kate drained her coffee cup, then put it down and got up from the divan. Barefoot, slender, and full-breasted, the pink satin nightgown falling off one shoulder, she wandered to the bookcase against the far wall. She ran her fingers slowly over a row of books. She said, lazily, “I'm in a mood to read. Maybe
The Brothers Karamazov
. Or
Remembrance of Things Past
. Something in the French or Russian style.”
Dakin sighed. He felt heavy, burdened. A waste of time, coming to Kate Burnside. What, after all, could she know that might help?
And here she was, coming back, coming up behind him where he sat on the hassock, he felt her warm bare arms sliding along the sides of his neck and then her breasts pressing against his back, and he breathed in her bed warmth, and he thought, Yes, again, like last time and the time before and before that, ever since he was fourteen. Kate. Kate.
BOOK: The Irish Cairn Murder
10.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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