The Irish Manor House Murder by Dicey Deere

“Who’s to tell them at Ashenden Manor?” She wore a brimmed cap with a green emblem that read NATIONAL RACEWALKERS ASSOCIATION . No one answered. It was, anyway, a rhetorical question.
    Inspector O’Hare, in his dark blue, circled the stallion, stumbling over twigs on the edge of the bridle path. Hard to take in: Dr. Ashenden dead, terrible, such an accident. The vicissitudes of horseback riding, one lived with it. And sometimes, like now, died of it. Inspector O’Hare gnawed his lip.
    “Heart attack?” suggested Sergeant Bryson doubtfully, hands on his hips. “The horse, I mean.” He blushed.
    “Gogarty’ll tell us,” O’Hare said. The vet was coming straight from the Sheehens’ barn where he’d been seeing to a newborn calf.
    Torrey walked slowly toward the dead beast. His silvery gray coat shone. He looked immense and tragic. Torrey went closer. The stallion’s head was stretched up as though in agony, his unseeing eye glared, his lips were drawn back in final terror. Torrey thought of Picasso’s Guernica, the agonized horse, victim of men’s battles. The stallion’s silvery gray coat — something caught Torrey’s eye. On the stallion’s thigh, a tiny scar.
    She leaned closer. No, not a scar. Something like a dark flaw on the silvery gray. She squinted. The dusk made it harder to see. But, no, it wasn’t a flaw. Not a flaw. More like a tiny … puncture? And a spot of blood, red on the silvery gray. Blood.
    Torrey straightened. She stood very still. She could not move away. The cold that she felt was not from the damp. The woods around the path seemed to darken. She suddenly thought of the grammar school pageant in North Hawk when she was ten, with two boys humming and two boys singing the remembered refrain, When I was young I used to wait / On my master and give him his plate / And pass the bottle when he got dry / And brush away the blue-tail fly.
    “Torrey? What is it? You all right?” Jasper, beside her.
    It was humming through her head, One day he rode about the farm / The flies so numerous they did swarm / One chanced to bite him on the thigh —
    “Torrey?”
    The devil take the blue-tail fly.
    Yes, and the rest of it, the fourth graders in the pageant, the two boys singing, two humming. The pony run, he jump, he pitch / He throw’d my master in the ditch / He died and the jury wondered why / The verdict was the blue-tail fly.
    “Torrey, you look so —”
    But she was turning her head, looking around. The dry woods, crystal air, a wind moving the leaves of the bushes beside the bridle path; there could be no flies.

14
    “Ah, no!” Torrey whispered involuntarily, kneeling there by the dead stallion in the crisp, dry air. Somehow hoping that the blood spot might nevertheless be from an insect bite. Because otherwise … otherwise …
    Low as her whisper was, Inspector O’Hare was instantly standing over her. “What’s that you —?” And then he was looking down past her shoulder at the spot of blood on the stallion’s thigh. “Well!” he said softly, after a moment. “Well!”
    *   *   *
    Torrey stood up. Jasper came over and cupped his big hand on the back of her head. “You all right?” he asked again. She nodded, and he gave her a grin and for an instant pulled her head close to his chest.
    Winifred Moore gave a yank to the brim of her race-walking cap and stepped nearer to the dead stallion. “Got something on the hob?” she said to Inspector O’Hare, looking curiously from him to Torrey. “You and Ms. Tunet?”
    “Possibly, Ms. Moore.” Inspector O’Hare glance glanced at Torrey and smiled at her in a way she hated, a shark’s smile. “Very possibly, Ms. Moore.”
    They waited in the darkening woods for Liam Gogarty, the veterinarian, Torrey shivering with cold but stubbornly hanging on. Winifred Moore, alive with curiosity, Jasper whistling between his teeth. But by the time Sergeant Bryson on his cell phone learned from Liam Gogarty that the