The Irish Manor House Murder Read Free Page B

Jimmy Bryson said. “I’m not saying they’re gay. Leastways, Ms. Tunet’s got that fellow from Cork. Since last month, anyway. Fixed a leak in her roof’s the story. Him on a bicycle trip’s the story, Dún Laoghaire to Clifden. He as good as lives with her.”
    “Collusion.” O’Hare gazed out through the plate-glass window at Butler Street, so empty. “Right, Ms. Tunet had to’ve seen it. That stallion’s as big as a mountain.”
    “Bakes bread, I’ve heard,” Sergeant Bryson said, “Cock-a-leekie soup. Beans with a bit of smoked pork. Fancy stuff, too. Good as a chef. From Cork. Just turned up at the cottage, time she had the flu, right? Jasper O’Mara, from Cork. Looking for a bed-and-breakfast. Stumbled on the cottage.”
    “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