The Irish Manor House Murder (3 page)

“Collusion,” Inspector O’Hara repeated the charge.

“Jasper O’Mara, from Cork — he got hold of Dr. Collins on Ms. Torrey Tunet’s phone and Collins came and gave her some, uh…”

“Antibiotics.”

“Antibiotics. Right. Could’ve been a love potion. Her and Jasper O’Mara since.”

“Collins?” Padraic Collins. Yesterday, Dr. Collins had treated the bruised and injured Dr. Ashenden at Ashenden Manor. Collins was Ashenden’s oldest friend, closest friend. Played chess every Saturday evening at Ashenden Manor, so he’d heard. Still occasionally rode together, too, the spare, still-handsome Dr. Ashenden and the balding, belly-pouting, round-shouldered little Dr. Collins.

Inspector O’Hare felt a faint twitch, more like a flutter, in front of his ears. An optimistic sign. Had on his “thinking cap,” as his mother used to say.

Friends. Through propinquity rather than predilection. Collins Court and Ashenden Manor were the two biggest estates in this mountainous corner of Wicklow, barring Castle Moore. Local Anglo-Irish society. No surprise that Gerald Ashenden and Padraic Collins had known each other since boyhood, gone shooting and riding together, though Ashenden was maybe a year or two older than Collins. By chance, both young men had chosen the medical profession and begun practicing in Dublin. Gerald Ashenden a surgeon, Doctor Collins in family practice. Padraic Collins had never married. One rumor had it that a boyhood skiing accident had made him impotent. Another was that, Protestant though he was, he was inclined toward the priesthood and celibacy. Or perhaps he had been disappointed in love? Not to anyone’s knowledge. But Inspector O’Hare, who more than once had occasion to ponder the subject, knew that Padraic Collins indeed had an eye for women. O’Hare had wondered if Collins arbitrarily — and perhaps admirably? — refused to be coerced into marriage by society’s expectations. Altogether peculiar, folks thought. There had been evenings when, seeing Dr. Collins in O’Malley’s having a quiet small whiskey, Inspector O’Hare had quoted to himself Dickens’s “secret and self-contained as an oyster.”

Kindly, though. Three years ago, Collins had given up his practice in Dublin. “I’m a country man,” he liked to say. In Ballynagh, a call for help to Collins Court always brought him out even if it was pouring torrents. He wore country clothes and had a taste for checked vests under his tweeds. Sentimental, too; he wore a tweed cap that had belonged to his late father.

“You want me to do the November budget now, Inspector?”

“Right, Jimmy.”

So, close friends, Collins and Gerald Ashenden. Might Padraic Collins be able to shed some light on why Rowena Keegan tried to murder her grandfather? Sergeant Bryson had half carried the injured Dr. Ashenden back to Ashenden Manor. “No one was about,” Jimmy Bryson had reported, “except the maid, Jennie O’Shea, and — thank God! — Dr. Collins. He’d dropped in at Ashenden Manor for a visit, like he often did. He helped me get Dr. Ashenden up to his bedroom. Uff! Collins himself looked in shock, Inspector. His fingers were shaking like dry peas in a pod when he treated Ashenden’s shoulder. I left them there in the bedroom.”

O’Hare gazed into space, seeing the two old friends in the bedroom, the door closed. He imagined Ashenden looking into his friend’s questioning face and confiding. Confiding … justifying … confiding. Confiding what?

O’Hare tapped a pencil on his desk blotter. Surely Ashenden and Collins must have shared many a confidence through the years. He wondered if Ashenden knew about the hookers in Cork who had their hooks into the good Dr. Collins, not impotent but needed a little fancy work to get him going. Amazing the odd bits of information that reached one’s ears.

A whiff of blood supplied by Dr. Collins, innocently, willingly, or unwarily, and he’d be on the scent. Rowena Keegan’s motive. And the back of my hand to you, Chief Superintendent O’Reilly at that mahogany desk at Dublin Castle.

Inspector O’Hare picked up the phone.

6

It was a ten-minute walk. Then an immense hedge, and around the next bend, Inspector O’Hare saw the great circular drive, and at the apex, the six white Palladian pillars that fronted the entrance to Collins Court. He walked up the sun-dappled drive. Magnificent yet somehow chaste, the simplicity of Collins Court with its rows of windows, glittering now in the morning sun. Off to the left was the entrance to a walled garden, a curved oak door in a vine-covered stone wall. A bit away from the wall, and edged with tall, feathery greens, was a pond dappled with flat-leaved water lilies. On the right, he could see, far back, a corner of the stables. O’Hare imagined generations ago the jingling of harnesses, scarlet-coated horsemen and their ladies up on horses that jostled each other, dogs barking, servants handing up stirrup cups to the riders. But certainly not in Padraic Collins’s time. Dr. Collins was an animal rights advocate who disapproved of hunting.

Helen Lavery, Dr. Collins’s housekeeper and cook, let him in. “A bit of luck, Inspector, Dr. Collins being home this morning.” She had taken his call; she always answered the telephone for Collins, who disliked doing it. She was a bustling, round-faced woman in her midfifties with small, kindly blue eyes. She wore a red-checked apron over a navy cotton dress and had a smudge of flour on one cheek. She cooked for Dr. Collins and was known to be one of the best bakers of pastry in this corner of Wicklow. In Inspector O’Hare’s opinion, Helen Lavery was in love with Padraic Collins. It was an accepted fact that governesses and middle-aged housekeepers were in love with the widowers or single men who employed them.

“This way, Inspector, and mind the step at the end.” She led him into a long-windowed drawing room. “I’ll call Dr. Collins.”

O’Hare looked around and raised his eyebrows, surprised. Roly-poly Dr. Padraic Collins! Unexpected. Padraic Collins, who wore his father’s old tweed cap and a worn woolen vest, Collins, who rattled along in his eight-year-old Honda at late hours to this or that cottage where a man lay sick, or a frightened mother wrung her hands over a coughing or bloodied child.

The books, the pictures, that elegant piano. O’Hare approached the piano. He had never seen one like it before, with its delicate, shell-like finish that of course was not shell but a kind of whorled wood. Not varnished. Buffed. Buffed! A pile of music books, well thumbed, lay on the stand. The carpet was thin, worn, with an oriental look. The bookcases that ranged around the room were a mellow oak.

Waiting, Inspector O’Hare ran his hand over a row of leather-bound books.
Morte D’Arthur.
Lancelot. Galahad. Queen Guinevere … and thought:
lost loves, brave encounters, dragons slain.

Footsteps. Then, “Well, Inspector! Sit down! Sit down! Glad I was here when you called. Helen will bring us some tea. A midmorning cup, eh? What with this chill in the air. Almost like November. And we’ll have some tarts, baked this morning. Already had two at breakfast, but I’m peckish. This weather, and … and…” Dr. Collins’s voice ran out of its frenetic, forced cheerfulness. He sank down suddenly in a chair beside a gateleg table, his plump face pale, dark puffs of sleeplessness under strained-looking, reddened eyes. His voice shook. “A shock. Altogether a shock. I happened to be right there, you know, at Ashenden Court when Jimmy — when Sergeant Bryson got Dr. Ashenden back from the meadow. Thank God for that!”

Inspector O’Hare sat down. He looked curiously at Dr. Collins in the chair across the gateleg table. Lancelot, Galahad.
Morte D’Arthur.
Secret romantic, wearing a sweater-vest and well-worn tweed trousers, and resorting to hookers in Cork.

“What I’m interested in,” O’Hare said, moving his knees so Helen Lavery could more easily put down a tray with tea things and delicious-smelling tarts, “and knowing your close friendship with Dr. Ashenden, Did Ashenden ever say anything to you? Maybe while playing a game of chess of a Saturday afternoon? Maybe something he might’ve mentioned just lately? About anything not going well between himself and his granddaugher? Some difficulty? A problem that might have arisen…?”

“A problem?” Padraic Collins looked uncertain. “No. Oh, no!” He shook his head. “Definitely not.” He reached out and picked up a tart. He said unhappily, “I’d remember if he had. That dreadful — out there in the meadow, it was some kind of mix-up, what happened. Rowena would never have —
never.
”

Three fruit tarts and two cups of tea later, and having phrased the question obliquely in as many ways, Inspector O’Hare gave up. Waste of time. What the devil had he expected, coming here?

“Well, then,” he said and stood up. Best get on with the other arrows he had in his quiver.

On his way out, Helen Lavery pressed a bag of still-warm tarts into his hands. “Cherry, apple, and blueberry. I use the canned fruit. It comes out just as good.”

7

Ten o’clock Saturday morning. “The black nylon traveling bag,” Caroline Keegan said to Jennie O’Shea, coming into the kitchen where Jennie in her striped kitchen apron sat at the table polishing the silver. “It’s in the box room. Bring it up to Ms. Rowena’s room, Jennie. I’m packing a few of her things.” At Jennie’s alert look of curiosity, she added, “That was all a misunderstanding last night, Jennie, Ms. Rowena being overnight in the Ballynagh jail. Inspector O’Hare had her released early this morning … as you’ve probably already heard?” And at Jennie’s confirming blush, “Inspector O’Hare somehow … anyway, Jennie, the bag.”

“The black nylon with the red stripe, is it, ma’am?”

“Yes, Jennie. Ms. Rowena’s going away for a few days.”

*   *   *

Upstairs, the morning sun slanted across the tapestry-covered window seat, sun-faded but beautiful, in Rowena’s bedroom. Caroline closed the tall arched door behind her. Even that was an effort: this was one of her weaker days, her legs aching, those friable bones, and today that familiar, enervating pain at the back of her neck. She wore her usual flat-heeled shoes, a shirt, and pants and had pulled on a somewhat raveled navy cardigan against the morning chill. She had found an old barrette of Rowena’s under the Sheraton chair on the landing, and not knowing what to do with it, she had used it to clasp her thin, fair hair back from her forehead. A skinny, overage Alice in Wonderland, she thought and made a face, then shrugged and smiled. She was forty-seven and was four months into her second marriage, in love with Mark Temple, her new husband. Wildly in love was how she thought of it.

Rowena’s telephone call had come some twenty minutes ago, dismaying and exasperating her. “Pack some clothes? You’re going to live above the stables at Castle Moore? But
why?
Just because you lost control of Thor in the meadow? Oh, for God’s
sake,
Rowena! Your grandfather —”

“Later, Mother. Please,” and Rowena had rung off.

Caroline looked around the bedroom. Of the nine bedrooms at Ashenden Manor, Rowena’s was the biggest and most beautiful, with its marble fireplace and tall arched windows. Rowena was sixteen when her grandfather had had the room redecorated and gave to her for her birthday. Dark gold wainscoting, blue-green walls, and a frieze of ivory plaster horses prancing around the ceiling. The sleigh bed was buried under a luxurious peach-colored down comforter that Gerald Ashenden had had especially made in Munich where he’d been giving a lecture on thoracic surgery. At the Munich factory, he had himself selected the quality of down. A gift for Rowena’s seventeenth birthday. Seven years ago.

Caroline felt the barrette sliding through her thin hair. She reclasped it, remembering when during her childhood this had been a heavily curtained dark mahogany bedroom with a big carved black bed where her father and mother had slept. The black bed, a dark night, moonlight falling across the bed … A memory surfaced, she saw herself coming crying into this room one moonlit night when she was about eight: saw herself shivering and barefoot in her flannel nightgown, neck aching, that painful aching, frightening her. At her weak cry, her father reared up in that black bed, such a fierce, angry, repudiating look on his face, glaring at her, that she stumbled back, frightened. And her mother? Her mother lying there on her back, asleep, tangled dark hair strewn on the pillow, one beautiful white arm hanging over the edge of the bed. Even then, Caroline had known her mother was drunk. Her mother, who loved her, yet was locked away in some secret place within herself, helpless.

“Ma’am? Here’s Ms. Rowena’s carrying bag.” Jennie O’Shea came in and put the black nylon bag on the bed. “I gave it a good brushing.”

*   *   *

Caroline packed the clothes. They were mostly worn and stained jodhpurs and boots. When Rowena wasn’t at her vet classes in Dublin, she mucked out the horse stalls at the manor and at Castle Moore and exercised the three horses at the castle a mile west of Ashenden Manor. Winifred Moore paid her thirty pounds a month. But Rowena would have done it for free. She was a lover of animals: dogs, horses, pigs, cats. She didn’t mind getting dirty, mucking out stables. Besides, she was active, vigorous; she loved exercise.

Caroline zipped the nylon bag closed. The simple act sent a twinge of pain through her shoulder and made her gasp. Pain, since the beginning, since babyhood, always pain. She sank down on the bed. When she caught her breath, she’d take one of the pills. Pain …

*   *   *

Pain … and always her father, the already-famous surgeon, Dr. Gerald Ashenden, looming like a giant, hating the very sight of her. A pitiful-looking thing, with bluish-white skin, fair hair, and bewildered hazel eyes. She whimpered in her sleep, rocked by her mother. Aching bones, thin legs, pains in her neck when she turned her head. School could not be considered. She was tutored at home. Afternoons, when her father returned from his surgery in Dublin and happened upon her, she hardly dared look at him. She shrank into corners. She was afraid of him and ashamed of being the pitiful little thing she was, so that he could not love her. She knew her mother loved her, but her mother, her beautiful mother, would go off to the village. The two maids whispered about it; Caroline sometimes caught the murmured words, “O’Malley’s pub,” and once, “staggering on the access road.” She heard other whispers. Her mother had been Kathleen Brady: she’d been a girl, eighteen, come from Galway to live with a spinster aunt above a shop in Ballynagh. She’d gotten a job as a waitress at a pub. Whisper, whisper, the young intern, Gerald Ashenden, heir to the Ashenden estate, had one evening dropped into the pub … whisper, whisper. “Milk and honey,” Father Donovan said to Father O’Neal. “No Catholic girl has a right to look like that.” Whisper …