The Irish Cottage Murder Read Online Free PDF

casement window above the end stable, a minute later there was the clatter of feet on stairs; from a horse stall came a neighing and a stamping of hooves. A slight figure appeared and crossed the stable yard. “Mr. Desmond?”
    “Brian Coffey, my know-it-all: trainer, groomer, manager.” Moore made the introduction with a drunkenly wide sweep of a hand. They stood in the light of a glaring bulb above the stable door. Brian Coffey was a thin young man, red hair rumpled from sleep. He wore well-slept-in striped boxer shorts and a beige T-shirt. He squinted at them as though the light hurt his eyes. His white, freckled face looked drugged with sleep.
    “Brian’s an expert on horseflesh; took him with me this morning to the horse sale. He went over Darlin’ Pie like a blind guy feeling a new girlfriend’s body. Perfect little mare. Let’s have a look, Brian.”
    Smell of fresh hay, clean concrete paving, water troughs, tack neatly hung beside each stall; neighing, rustling, snorting. The end stall. Luke gazed at the gentle-eyed little mare who nickered softly. Darlin’ Pie. He didn’t care if Darlin’ Pie went up in a puff of smoke. He didn’t care that this morning Desmond Moore had gone and bought a bay mare. He was still jet-lagged. Sleep was what he cared about. And he was chilled by the night air, though he wore a heavy wool oatmeal cardigan of Desmond Moore’s. He’d come to Ireland to do a landscaping job. That was all.
    In the stall, Darlin’ Pie stamped a hoof, arched her neck, and shook her head.
    “Look at that!” Desmond Moore said softly, “Noble, her bloodline! I’ve got her papers, her whole lineage! Her … genealogy.” He gazed at the mare for a long moment, then turned away. “Let’s go. It’s frigging cold out here.”
    Leaving the stable yard, Luke glanced back. Brian Coffey was standing in the stable doorway under the light, looking after them. Then the light went out.

11
    At four o’clock Torrey arrived back at Castle Moore, changed into jeans and loafers, and went for a walk in the woods. She’d had no particular destination; she’d simply wanted to enjoy the woods. She walked pleasurably through a shady glen and came to a bridle path. Through the trees she glimpsed a run-down cottage, old-looking, somehow sadly romantic. She walked on along the bridle path through sun and shadow, hearing birds singing and the rustle of small animals in the brush and smelling honeysuckle and pine. Then, drawn by the shadiness, she walked deeper into the woods. She had gone on hardly ten minutes when the ground fell away and began to feel spongy under her feet. She smelled the rank odor of rotting vegetation. Bogs. Better to turn back, find dry, higher ground, fresh piny scents.
    She turned to skirt a bog and saw something puzzling, something that, of course, could not be, but … She went closer.
    A hand. On the brown, decayed surface of the bog, it looked oddly like an exotic, pinkish tan flower growing out of the waterlogged, spongy ground. A hand.
    It couldn’t be. It was. Torrey went closer, squinting, placing her loafer-clad feet carefully on the marshy ground. She knew it was a bog. Bog, from the Gaelic bogach meaning “soft ground.” It would be swampy with rotted vegetation. She might sink in.
    Two feet away, she leaned forward. A man’s hand. On his hairy, half-submerged wrist, a wristwatch. It was only when Torrey saw the watch that she believed what she was looking at. It meant that below the swampy ground would be a man’s body.
    She backed away, appalled. The stench from the bog rose to her nostrils. Under there, a body. Maybe the man had gotten drunk and lost his way and fallen into the bog; maybe because of the rain it had been dangerously swampy and he had been too drunk to save himself. She shuddered. She must race back to Castle Moore and have them call the gardai, report this horrifying—“Yes, Officer … Around four o’clock I returned from my day in Dublin and was