Read Online The Irish Cairn Murder by Dicey Deere - Free Book Online Page B

Jessie was looking at her so funny. Lunch seemed a foreign word. “Eggs—eggs will do, Jessie. Omelettes? Dakin’s off on a job.” Luce was at school. “Eggs. I’ll be back in—shortly.” In her right-hand jacket pocket her fist tightened on the letter.
    Past the coach house, walking fast, she turned left and climbed over the rail fence and half ran across the meadow, the long, dry grass swishing against her pants legs. She’d meet him, all right, this blackmailer! She drew in a breath that turned into a shuddering sob. She reached the stand of fir trees where the woods began and passed the tree where as a child she’d buried treasures of dolls’ clothes, bits of gimcrack jewelry, play money.
    She walked faster. Her brogues scattered dry leaves. Sun filtered through the trees. In a minute she’d come out at the ridge and reach the cairn, that pile of stones marking the division between Sylvester Hall and Castle Moore.
    Cloverleaf ? It meant nothing to her.
    A thought widened her eyes and slowed her steps. What if … Could this extortionist know some secret about Andrew? Something she’d been ignorant of? Loving Andrew, bearing his children, was there something hidden that all along she hadn’t suspected? Another life? She thought of Andrew’s business trips to Dublin, she saw him walking up a garden path to a secret little house in Ballsbridge, saw a door opening, heard a woman’s lilting voice—
    Oh, stop it! Not Andrew! Never. Besides, the extortionist’s first letter had said a revelation about you, hadn’t it?
    For a moment, she faltered. She brushed a hand across her eyes. Something, a flash of light, a glimpse of a yellow party dress, shutter-clicked across her vision and was gone. She slowed, then hurried on. All around her was the peaceful countryside looking like a tourist’s brochure of the Irish landscape in Wicklow, the field with the hillocks of green,
the tumbled stone fence enclosing it, the mountains beyond, and high on their slopes the scattering of grazing sheep. So innocent.
    She slowed again, feeling a growing uncertainty. It was madness to come to meet this blackmailer. He was crazy indeed to expect her to deliver forty thousand pounds on a Tuesday morning. Did he think she kept money in her dresser drawer rather than in a Dublin bank? But no, he must know how in hours she could access it through her money market.
    But … And now she stopped. It was not the blackmailer’s presumed madness but something else, some inner turbulence, a questioning, a fear, something frightening her because of what she had brought with her in her left-hand pocket, while the blackmail note was in her right-hand pocket.
    She took a breath. She could see a figure standing under the oak tree by the cairn.
    She crossed the field.

18
    â€œ M ushrooms!” Sheila said, “Winifred! We could get poisoned. You can’t just—”
    â€œDon’t be silly. The illustrations are precise. Mushroom Gathering, by Dodson Barnaby. Cost me fourteen pounds.” Winifred turned pages. “Recipes in the back.”
    It was Tuesday morning, ten o’clock. They were in the tower room at Castle Moore, it was where Winifred wrote her poetry whenever she stayed at the castle. She used a quill pen for the occasional romantic poem and her state-of-the-art laptop for the others.
    â€œBut Wini fred! What about that Sacha Guitry film, The Story of a Cheat? The whole family of thirteen died after dinner from eating mushrooms they’d picked in the woods.”
    â€œYes, Sheila. The whole family, except the boy who’d been bad and was sent to bed without any dinner. That’s a lesson to profit by, as he decided: be bad and stay alive to have a good and naughty time.”
    â€œWinifred, really! Sometimes you make me—”
    â€œSheila, do go down, it’s too cold up here for you, you’re turning blue. Besides, I