A Shameful Murder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Cora Harrison

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A Selection of Titles by Cora Harrison

  The Burren Mysteries

  MY LADY JUDGE

  A SECRET AND UNLAWFUL KILLING

  THE STING OF JUSTICE

  WRIT IN STONE *

  EYE OF THE LAW *

  SCALES OF RETRIBUTION *

  DEED OF MURDER *

  LAWS IN CONFLICT *

  CHAIN OF EVIDENCE *

  CROSS OF VENGEANCE *

  VERDICT OF THE COURT *

  CONDEMNED TO DEATH *

  The Reverend Mother Mysteries

  A SHAMEFUL MURDER *

  * available from Severn House

  A SHAMEFUL MURDER

  Cora Harrison

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2015

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2015 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2015 by Cora Harrison.

  The right of Cora Harrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Harrison, Cora author.

  A shameful murder. – (A Reverend Mother mystery)

  1. Nuns–Ireland–Cork–Fiction. 2. Murder–

  Investigation–Fiction. 3. Ireland–History–Civil War,

  1922-1923–Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9’2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8511-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-614-5 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-665-6 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ONE

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Videtur quod voluntas Dei non sit causa rerum.

  (It can be seen that the will of God is not the cause of things.)

  It was Reverend Mother Aquinas who found the body of the dead girl. It lay wedged within the gateway to the convent chapel at St Mary’s of the Isle, jettisoned by the flood waters. For a fanciful moment she had almost imagined that it was a mermaid swept up from the sea. The long silver gown gleamed beneath the gas lamp, wet as the skin of a salmon, and the streams of soaked curls were red-brown just like the crinkled carrageen seaweed she had gathered from the windswept beaches of Ballycotton when she was a child. Her heart beating fast, the Reverend Mother unlocked the gate and looked down at the sightless blue eyes that stared up from beneath a wide high brow at the blanched, soaked flesh of the cheeks and knew that there was nothing that she could do for the girl. She bent over, touched the stone-cold face and then with a hand that trembled slightly she signed the forehead with a small cross. The Reverend Mother had seen death many times in her long life, but in the young she still found it was almost unbearable.

  She straightened up and looked around. There was no one near. She had left the convent hurriedly, gone out into the fog, unable to bear with patience the sanctimonious comments of Sister Mary Immaculate about the floods being the will of God. Reverend Mother Aquinas, like her namesake, the great philosopher Thomas Aquinas, had no belief in the doctrine of the will of God – it was, for her, just an easy way out, of excusing man’s inhumanity, inefficiency and lack of social responsibility. These terrible floods would not happen season after season if some of the wealth of the city was spent on preventing them. Sister Mary Immaculate, she thought with irritation, would not have been so quick to trot out the customary platitude about God’s will if she, like the families of the children who attended the school of St Mary’s of the Isle, lived in one of those crowded crumbling buildings flooded with sewage by the overflowing drains. As always it was the poor who had suffered. The rich moved to the hills outside the city.

  Floods were nothing new in Cork. The city had been built on a marsh, criss-crossed by streams, beginning with a small monastic settlement, named St Mary’s of the Isle, progressing, with the advent of the Vikings, to a second island and then, with the Normans, to a third. Later the inhabitants linked the Viking and Norman islands with a bridge and enclosed them with a high wall, forming the medieval city of Cork, perched just above the swamp, edged with a sheltered harbour and joined to the ocean by the River Lee. The city had become rich, trading its butter, its meat and its hides from the hinterland with nearby England and not-too-distant France and Spain. In the eighteenth century the wealthy merchants had tamed the channels of the river with limestone quays and had built stately homes above basement warehouses, their entrances, like those to medieval castles, placed high above the water with steps leading up from the mooring places. Like a Venice under a grey northern sky, the city grew prosperous and ambitious; but unlike in Venice the merchants were not content with their waterways. They confined the marsh streams into culverts and built wide streets on top of all but two of the river channels. And these two arms of the River Lee, the north and south, still encircled the town and the water beneath the streets remained part of it. From time to time it escaped and the city flooded.

  Dead bodies washed up by the flood waters were nothing new, either. The Reverend Mother sighed as she rang the bell on the gate for the gardener, sent him to fetch Sergeant Patrick Cashman from the barracks and waited resignedly for Sister Mary Immaculate to pop out to find the reason for the summons.

  ‘I was just coming to see you, Sister,’ said the Reverend Mother as soon as her assistant appeared. ‘Could you go into the kitchen and ask Sister Rosario to serve some hot porridge to any of the children who manage to get here this morning. Oh, and get some of those socks out of the cupboard so that they each can have a dry pair.’ That, she thought with some satisfaction, should keep Sister Mary Immaculate busy until the bell rang for the beginning of mo
rning school. Then she excused her lack of charity to her fellow nun by reflecting with pleasure on the comfort that hot porridge and thick warm socks, knitted in such profusion by some of the very elderly nuns, would give to the children. She fished out from her capacious pocket the watch that hung on a silver chain from her belt and looked at the time. Still only quarter to nine – Patrick would probably not arrive at the barracks before nine o’clock and already she could hear the voices of the children coming down the street, excitedly capping each other’s stories about the overnight flooding and the size of the rats that scampered around the hallways and crumbling stairs of those four-storey Georgian buildings in Cove Street and Sawmill Lane. Smiling to herself at their animation, and their high spirits, she went back to keep watch over the body, glancing at her watch from time to time as the slow minutes ticked away.

  And then she tightened her lips with a grimace of annoyance as she heard the back door to the convent open and the high-pitched voice of Sister Mary Immaculate shouting orders. Of course, she should have remembered that the nun had the habit of marching the older girls into the chapel before the start of morning school.

  She was only just in time. Sister Mary Immaculate had already lined up the senior girls, each with a prayer book in hand, for their daily trip to proffer up prayers to God. She’d be better off teaching these thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds extra arithmetic so that a few of them might have some remote hope of getting a job in shop or as a clerk, thought the Reverend Mother tartly as she ordered them to return to their classroom. And then her eyes widened. The last girl in the line was wearing a six-inch-wide flounce of yellow flannel pinned with enormous safety pins to the bottom of her navy-blue gymslip.

  ‘What on earth is Nellie O’Sullivan wearing?’ she asked. Nellie, with her mass of curls, was a pretty girl who from the age of five had always come to school looking fairly clean, tidy and well dressed – in cast-off clothes distributed by the St Vincent de Paul Society. Since Nellie’s taste ran to pink frilly party dresses, eventually Sister Mary Immaculate bestowed an ancient navy blue gymslip on her and added a lecture about suitable clothes to wear in school.

  The Reverend Mother rather liked Nellie. She was not particularly academic, but was a well-motivated, cheerful girl who had not escaped from school at the first possible moment – like her eldest sister, Mary – but had stayed on and worked hard. A confident girl, with a strong streak of common sense; the Reverend Mother was annoyed to see her victimized.

  Sister Mary Immaculate smiled with pious satisfaction at her question. ‘Some of those girls have been shortening their gymslips to a ridiculous degree – so every morning, first thing, I make them kneel on the floor and if their skirt does not touch the boards then they wear the frill until they let the hem down again,’ she said smugly.

  For heaven’s sake! Reverend Mother choked back the words. These girls, she thought, did not have much fun. They were poor in a prosperous city. Their youth was being spent in a country at war. The War of Independence had started in early 1919 and had petered out in July 1922 with a treaty that agreed to the partition of Ireland and less than a year later the bitter civil war had begun when brothers and cousins had lined up against each other, and where Michael Collins, hero and leader in the struggle against British troops, had been shot by his former companions. A plague on both your houses, the Reverend Mother had often thought, but her pupils were caught in the centre of the hostilities. Day after day, for the last few years, they had been sent home early from school because there had been shooting on the streets; first between the Republicans and the Black and Tan auxiliaries to the Royal Irish Constabulary and later between the Free State Army and the Republicans; between those who were for the treaty and those who were against it – the bitter civil war was almost over in theory, but in practice the guns still spluttered. The children had witnessed the burning down of Patrick Street by the Black and Tans, had dodged the grenades, and the armed battles that had followed each outrage, had endured raids, poverty, disease, poor feeding and bad housing. She was pleased to think that they had life and spirit enough left in them to turn up the hems of their ugly, shapeless gymslips to a 1920s fashionable length. She would have to have a quiet and tactful talk with Sister Mary Immaculate, who was in charge of the school – perhaps get the children to agree on a sensible length for a gymslip – no more yellow flannel, though, she decided – there was something about that image which revolted her.

  However, this poor dead girl on her doorstep had to be cared for now. She sent a messenger around to the other classes ordering that the children be kept within doors for the next couple of hours and then went back to her vigil over the quiet body until she heard the sound of the convent doorbell.

  ‘Sergeant Cashman to see you, Reverend Mother.’ Sister Bernadette, keys clanking, came in through the garden door. He’s been quick, thought the Reverend Mother; well, this is the age of the car and the bicycle. She moved up the path to greet him, nodding pleasantly at Sister Bernadette. A nice woman, but a terrible gossip, so she waited until the lay sister had disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, before addressing the civic guard.

  ‘Well, Patrick, how are you and how is your mother?’ she queried. Even a dead body would not be considered a reason to omit the customary enquiries, although his widowed mother lived next door to the convent and probably Mother Aquinas knew as much about her health as did her busy son.

  Patrick Cashman, like all the small boys of the neighbourhood, had attended the convent school until the age of seven, when they had sent him on to the Christian Brothers’ elementary school. She remembered all of her pupils, but he had a special place in her heart. He had first come to her notice about fourteen years ago, because he had refused to return from the playground to the classroom until he had finished counting the ants that were coming out of a hole at the bottom of the wall. He had ignored a couple of sharp smacks on his bare and rather dirty leg from his teacher and had persisted. Mother Aquinas, usually appealed to as the last sanction, had come out from her study to save him from further punishment. Sister Philomena, red with anger, had marched the other children inside, leaving the playground empty except for one small boy and one middle-aged nun who was wrestling with a problem. How long would he keep it up for, she had wondered and then had allowed her thoughts to drift back. Should she leave this place and accept the suggestion made by the Bishop that she should go to Rome as Mother-General of the Order? Had she done all that she could do in making this school somewhere to give hope to the poor? Would she stagnate if she stayed? Would the new position offer a challenge to her brains, to her organizing ability? Should she go, or should stay? She had looked down at the small boy still muttering numbers under his breath and waited peacefully, allowing her mind to take a rest from the problem.

  The answer to both of their questions came minutes later when the seven-year-old had looked up at her with a beaming smile, made rather endearing by a couple of missing teeth.

  ‘You’ll never guess, Reverend Mother,’ he’d said confidently. ‘Not even Holy God himself would have guessed. There’s nine hundred and fifty-seven of them little ants all living in the one little house under that brick.’

  Worse even than the slums of Cork, had thought Mother Aquinas: overcrowding in Cork was officially set at a figure of over nine people living and sleeping in the one room and even so the statistics were frightening. Aloud, she suggested that they go and tell the rest of the class about this. She had been amused at the time, but in the years to come she had thought it had been a good indication of his character. He was not outstandingly clever, but was tenacious and hard-working and once he had something to do he could not be deflected until it was finished. And that day she had taken his concentration, and the intense interest shown by the other seven-year-olds in the life of ants, as a sign that she should stay where she was and try to offer a worthy education to the sharp-witted slum-dwellers of Cork city. She had not regretted her decision. And, partly because h
e had been connected with her deciding moment, she had always kept an interest in Patrick Cashman. Through sheer hard work and perseverance he had got one of the coveted scholarships to the Christian Brothers’ Secondary School at the age of fourteen and so, on leaving school, had the education to get into the newly formed civic guards which had replaced the Royal Irish Constabulary after the War of Independence.

  And now there he was, a fortunate young man, earning three pounds a week, in a city that despite independence from England was still full of unemployment and terrible poverty.

  He replied politely to her queries and then waited to see what she wanted, glancing in a puzzled way at her as she led the way down towards the chapel.

  ‘There’s a body washed up in the lane; it came from the river, I suppose,’ she said abruptly once they were alone. ‘Come and see, Patrick.’

  He was as methodical and sensible as ever, she thought. No loud exclamations; just followed her down through the fog-enveloped gardens. And then there was a quick appraisal of the situation. He checked the body, as she had done, for signs of life. He produced a notebook and pencil and began to write in a fluent and rapid hand that did credit to the teaching of the Christian Brothers. Then he made a few measurements with the tape measure that he took from his pocket, drew a neat map in his notebook. She watched him with an indulgence which reflected their past relationship, but with the impatience of a quick mind confronted with a slower and more methodical one.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked; her eyes were on the dead girl. She could barely contain her impatience to get to the heart of the puzzle.