Free The Irish Cottage Murder by Dicey Deere Page B

store room made into an office last month, temporarylike. He had plans for a yard of a dozen horses, to start. He’d be buying at auctions. He wanted to—”
    “Yes,” O’Hare said, trying to be patient, his jaw aching with the strain. Sergeant Bryson sat at the card table, making notes with a ballpoint pen. “So it was two o’clock?”
    “Yes, about two. A few minutes after two, anyway. I’d had Kevin sort out some old boxes of harness—a sad lot, rust and corrosion—we’d get rid of it. Mr. Desmond said to charge the new harness at Flaherty’s. T’was a big list. The stables had been let go. Even paint for the stables had—”
    “Yes,” Inspector O’Hare interrupted. He clicked his thumbnail. Get on with it. “So you heard Mr. Moore talking with someone…?”
    “Near box number four, they were, Black Pride’s stall. I heard Mr. Desmond’s voice go up, high like, the way it sometimes gets when he’s angry, but most people’s goes down low when they—”
    “Any words? Did you understand what they—”
    Brian Coffey shook his red head. “No … But angry! Mr. Desmond and the other one. But none of my—And not worrisome. Mr. Desmond often gets angry, like with jobs not done right, wrong stuff delivered, things like that. So I just finished making out the list.” Brian Coffey looked down.
    Something wrong. O’Hare sensed it. Since he’d been a kid, he could always tell: a silence across the supper table between his mom and dad, his mom’s quick look down at the plate, a bruise glimpsed on her arm, the half-heard crash of a dish in the night.
    “Go on.” O’Hare leaned forward, trying to look into Brian Coffey’s brown eyes. Coffey had the kind of thin white face that to O’Hare meant working-class Irish. They worked in shops, tilled fields, drove with their carpenters’ tools in the back of their van, hopefully strummed guitars, their minds whirling with movie star and television dreams. Some went to Trinity; some had Ireland’s love of horses and became jockeys, groomers, trainers. They worked or rode for rich owners or breeders. Some knew the inside of prisons; most knew the inside of pubs. Brian Coffey, with a boy’s thin frame, was still unmarried at thirty-five, like a third of the Irishmen of his upbringing—never marrying because, as iconoclastic O’Hare saw it, between no birth control and the economy, they did not quite dare.
    “And then?” O’Hare said.
    Brian Coffey gulped. “Flaherty closes up at three. And it wasn’t my place to—So I went out behind, where I keep my motorbike, and I went off to Flaherty’s.” Brian shook his head. “We’d’ve been back sooner, but coming out of Flaherty’s we met Mr. Callaghan and—”
    “Who? Who’s Mr. Callaghan?”
    “Mr. Fergus Callaghan, a man who traces your ancestors. He—”
    “A genealogist, you mean?”
    “That’s right. One of those. He’s been tracing back for Mr. Desmond, the Moores’ history and where they—”
    “Yes, yes, all right, Brian. So in Ballynagh, coming out of Flaherty’s…”
    “Yes, well we talked a minute, Mr. Callaghan wishing Kevin well on the job at the Moore stables. He thought he knew Kevin’s family, but it turned out to be other Keatings. He—”
    O’Hare, impatient, cut him off. “Yes, well—At the stable—You didn’t glimpse the other person? You only heard their voice?”
    “Who?” Coffey blinked, his white face strained, his voice exhausted.
    “The killer”—O’Hare said patiently—“who killed Mr. Moore.”
    “Oh,” Brian Coffey said. “Yes. Just his voice.”

26
    At 6:30 P.M. , Thursday, Winifred Moore, at a table in Keenen’s Pub on Parliament Street in Dublin, shouted wildly from a corner table. “Sheila! Over here! Sheila!”
    Sheila, red-faced with embarrassment, threaded her way through the throng around the bar and plumped down. “Really, Winifred! You don’t have to scream. Anyone’d think you’d been brought up in a