A Shameful Murder Page 7

  ‘That was very kind of you, Lucy,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all,’ returned Lucy. ‘They’re so pleased, aren’t they? It’s amazing. I don’t think that any one of my granddaughters would thank me for a book.’

  ‘These children haven’t had much fun in their lives,’ said the Reverend Mother simply. ‘They’ve had a shock. The whole district is being searched for the gunman who shot the Bishop. They’re all frightened, though that’s nothing new for them. They haven’t had an easy time over the past few years. I suppose you could say that they’ve grown up with fear. A box of books is a nice diversion.’

  She said no more until they were safely ensconced in her room. She did not bother to ring for Sister Bernadette. Lucy had something to talk about and the sooner it was aired, the better.

  ‘I was having a chat about Joseph Fitzsimon to Rupert, last night,’ she began and the Reverend Mother wondered momentarily about that very detached tone.

  ‘He was telling me about the wife,’ continued Lucy. ‘I thought you might be interested to hear.’

  The Reverend Mother bowed her head and tucked her hands into her sleeves. She did not lower her eyes, though, but kept them fixed on her cousin’s face.

  ‘Joseph,’ continued Lucy ‘is, of course, the living image of his father.’ Her voice hardened and her enormous blue eyes were stony and fixed. ‘He’s the same selfish bastard,’ she declared and the Reverend Mother did not contradict or reprove.

  ‘Somehow the wife did not suit him, so he managed to bribe Dr O’Connor to certify her and to place her in the lunatic asylum. Who would want to be the wife of a man like that? And, of course, now he has the use of her money – that’s all that matters to him – he’s just like his father.’ Lucy’s voice was venomous, though the placid appearance of her well-powdered face did not alter.

  ‘And what about the children, Joseph’s children,’ said the Reverend Mother, keeping her voice even and detached while she watched her cousin’s blue eyes. The marriage with Rupert Murphy had resulted in three girls and that, perhaps, had suited Lucy. She had been a good mother, and was now a good grandmother to a bevy of fashionable young ladies.

  Lucy gave a shrug. ‘He doesn’t seem to have done well by them,’ she said. ‘Not if the girl committed suicide.’

  ‘I think that, more likely, she was murdered,’ said the Reverend Mother, looking at her cousin. Her gaze, she knew, was very straight and very direct and it gave Lucy no way out.

  ‘And murder,’ she added firmly, ‘must not be allowed to succeed.’

  ‘Murder,’ said Lucy slowly. ‘But who would have wanted to murder the girl? Unless … Yes, I remember now – something that Rupert told me a couple of months ago. It was that girl; it must have been.’

  The Reverend Mother said nothing. It would be no good to urge Lucy to tell what she knew. Under that sweet appearance she was as stubborn as ever.

  ‘Well, I suppose I can trust you to keep Rupert’s name out of this,’ said Lucy after a moment. ‘You seem to have the police eating out of your hand – like all nuns.’

  ‘There is always a way of putting matters forward in a discreet fashion, and without mentioning names,’ said the Reverend Mother, mildly, and Lucy gave a chuckle and leaned forward.

  ‘Well, you know that Rupert’s office is up on the first floor on the South Mall and Sarsfield, the solicitor, has his rooms on the floor beneath, well one day Rupert was coming down the stairs and he stopped on the landing to light a cigar and then he heard Sarsfield shout: “It’s for your father to question me about your mother’s fortune, Miss Fitzsimon, it has nothing whatsoever to do with you.” And Rupert waited for a minute until Sarsfield had gone back into his office – you know men – they hate anything embarrassing – but when he went out down the steps, there was a young lady standing there on the pavement and Rupert said that she was Joseph’s daughter, he thought. Looked like him, he said.’

  ‘Was Rupert surprised?’ The question came out mechanically, to prompt further revelations. It was obvious that Lucy had more to say.

  ‘Not really, there had been talk about Sarsfield, before – you know – just privately among the solicitors.’ Lucy lowered her voice and gave a quick glance at the curtained door. ‘You know how it happens, murmurs at law dinners, on the golf course, that sort of thing. But, according to Rupert, if Anne Woodford’s fortune, her dowry, had been embezzled, then it was certain that the husband, that Joseph, was in on it as well as Sarsfield. It’s just the sort of thing that his father would have done,’ added Lucy viciously. She was one who did not forgive easily.

  ‘So Angelina Fitzsimon was asking questions about what happened to her mother’s fortune,’ said the Reverend Mother slowly.

  ‘Of course Joseph had no right to it. It’s not like when you and I were young. Nowadays women have control over our own money.’

  ‘Unless they are shut up in an asylum, of course.’

  ‘You nuns are so cynical,’ said Lucy with a twinkle. ‘I’m sorry about the girl, though. Was she pretty?’

  ‘Very,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘She had the blue eyes and the same chestnut-coloured hair …’ She said no more. They both had their memories of that summer so long ago when the sea was always blue and the sun drew the scent from the gorse-covered cliffs.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave it with you. You’ll say nothing about Rupert in all this business.’

  Her tone was quite unconcerned, quite certain, and her trust in her cousin was absolute. She got to her feet, drawing the cosy furs around her neck and checking the angle of her close-fitting hat in the mirror above the cupboard.

  ‘I must go,’ she said. ‘I daren’t keep the chauffeur waiting any longer. Those servants rule our lives, you know.’ She paused at the door and looked back. ‘Of course embezzlement in a solicitor would be a very, very serious matter. It would ruin him for ever.’ She gave one of her dramatic pauses and said impressively: ‘I’d say that a man could kill to keep a secret like that.’

  And then she was off, popping into the classroom before she went and exchanging a few merry words with the girls and left promising to send some pretty clothes that her granddaughters had grown tired of. No doubt their fond grandmother would replenish their wardrobes at regular intervals.

  Lucy, thought the Reverend Mother as she made her way back to the classroom, would have been a good grandmother for a lonely, worried girl, whose mother was missing from the family home. She sighed at the thought.

  Just as she was thinking about this she heard the peal of a bell at the visitors’ door and listened intently at the shuffling of Sister Bernadette’s slippers – the lay sisters all wore sheepskin slippers which kept their feet warm, and polished the shining wooden floors that they trod – an innovation of which she was proud, especially since she had managed to manipulate a wealthy cousin of hers, a hides and wool merchant, into donating the skins. And, as an extra bonus, some of the young lay sisters, many of them not more than fifteen, did enjoy virtuously skating up and down the glass-like floors in order to maintain the high polish.

  And yes, it was Patrick. She knew his step by now. She busied herself with her account book and just raised a head when he came in. She was ashamed that she was so eager to see him, so eager to use her brains on something new. She was stale, she thought. The convent and the school ran like clockwork. Her reputation in the city was so high that funds flowed in – she had even recently set up a kitchen where the older girls learned to cook with the ingredients that were donated to them from the shops and market stalls. Tasty breakfasts and nourishing lunches for half-starved children were turned out by the fourteen-year-olds – by the time that they left school, if they were ever lucky enough to have a house with a kitchen, they would have learned to cook cheap meals for their families, but, since most of them lived in one room, there was little use for their skills in their present homes. Still, it might help some to get jobs as servants in the houses of the moderately well off and then they might get a cha
nce to cook.

  But she wanted to use her brain more than she was doing and somehow she had found herself speculating on the death of this girl – this Fitzsimon girl. Now that she knew the surname her interest had become painfully intense. It was all very well for Lucy to shrug her expensively clad shoulders, but there was such a thing as responsibility and the death of this girl had to be solved, no matter what the cost. Her thoughts went back to that summer by the sea, picturing in her mind’s eye that long steeply descending grassy path that led to the dark sandstone cave in the cliffs. Still, that was over fifty years ago. At the moment the present was what counted and she would do her best to get justice for Angelina.

  ‘Well, Patrick,’ she said graciously.

  ‘I just called in to tell you that you were right about the Fitzsimon girl being put down into the sewers,’ he said. ‘There were a couple of her hairs caught into a rough piece of metal at the side of the manhole cover.’ He cleared his throat self-consciously. ‘I felt a bit like Sherlock Holmes – brought down a big magnifying glass. Joe was most impressed.’

  The Reverend Mother sat back and succeeded in setting her mouth so that a smile of triumph would not spread over her face. She should, of course, modestly attribute the inspiration to God, but rejected the thought as a waste of time and a piece of hypocrisy.

  ‘So what happens next, Patrick?’ she asked.

  His face clouded over. ‘The superintendent thinks I should leave it alone – still thinks it’s a suicide because of the pregnancy – says that we’re understaffed at the moment – every man that can be spared from the barracks is out looking for this fellow who took a shot at the Bishop. There’s a house-to-house search for him around here. Waste of time! He probably slipped through the crowd around the Cathedral and was most likely on the back of a motorbike as soon as the shot was fired and is now holed up in one of those deserted cottages in west Cork. Most of the Republicans are hiding out in these places.’

  Probably, thought the Reverend Mother. Although it was more than seventy years since the Great Famine had devastated the countryside, many of the homes of those who had died or who had left the country had been kept in rough repair by neighbours who found the places useful to house a few lambing sheep or a cow and calf during the worst of the winter weather. It was rumoured that the Republicans had taken over lots of these, put tarpaulins beneath rotting thatch and nailed wood over broken windows. She thought again about the brilliantly clever little girl, the Eileen for whom she had hoped great things, hiding out in one of these places, and her heart moved in pity.

  ‘I’m more interested in clearing up this murder business, Reverend Mother,’ Patrick was saying. He looked at her appealingly and she responded to that appeal. Patrick, she thought, was worthy of her help. Every fibre in him wanted to solve this murder case – he knew that there was something badly wrong and his logical, analytical mind resented being fed the official line on this, but she, being world-wise and shrewd, also knew that it would be quite a feather in the cap of the young officer if he managed to solve a high-profile case like this and did achieve a conviction of murder against the person who had murdered a young lady like Angelina Fitzsimon. For various reasons, for his own sake, for assisting him on his struggle up from his background to his present position, but also because of events that had occurred long before he was born, the Reverend Mother had resolved to help him as much as she could possibly do.

  ‘It’s this business of the ticket to Liverpool, and the travel bag,’ he said, without raising his head from his notebook.

  ‘I know,’ said the Reverend Mother reflectively. ‘It doesn’t seem to fit in with suicide.’

  ‘She’d do either one or the other – plan to commit suicide, or plan to go to England; not both – and then there’s the bruise on the throat. How does that fit with suicide? And what sane person commits suicide by jumping into a sewer when there is a river less than half a mile away?’ He didn’t wait for an answer to his questions, but snapped his notebook shut and put it and the pencil back into his pocket. ‘I’d better get on,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be doing a house-to-house search.’

  ‘I’ll ring for Sister Bernadette,’ she said.

  ‘And, Sister, could you send a message to Dr Scher and say that I would be pleased to see him when convenient,’ she said when the lay nun appeared. She saw Patrick’s eyes go to her and she gave him a slight inclination of the head. Of course, officially she could not interfere, but there were more ways than one of obtaining information and she was not surprised when Dr Scher turned up half an hour later and didn’t bother making pretence of visiting Sister Assumpta before asking to be conducted into her presence.

  ‘I wanted to ask your advice, Doctor,’ she said when the door had closed and she had listened for the sound of the soft slippers shuffling away, down the polished corridor. ‘I wondered whether to pay a condolence call on the Fitzsimon family. They are, of course, relations of mine.’

  She looked at him blandly and was pleased to see a spark of interest in his eyes.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said after a minute, ‘the Newenham connection.’

  It wasn’t the linking up of dynasties that interested him, though. She was sure of that. All of these families in Blackrock and Montenotte were related – it was notorious that the merchant princes of Cork sought for mates for their children among their own class. No, Dr Scher was wondering why she had interested herself. She made herself wait and after a minute her patience was rewarded.

  ‘Strange case,’ he said meditatively.

  She gave him a quick glance and then looked down at the table. She knew the effect of it. A flash from her green eyes, a lowering of the perfect oval of the face: it intrigued and stirred curiosity. Often she had used it to prise a substantial contribution to her school from a businessman and she was not surprised when Dr Scher said heartily: ‘I’ll drive you down there, Reverend Mother. Now, if you wish. I’m semi-retired these days – a few old patients, three hours a week at the university – the odd post-mortem for the civic guard, sure I don’t know what to do with myself half the time.’

  SEVEN

  James Connolly, 1916:

  ‘The worker is the slave of capitalist society: the female worker is the slave of that slave.’

  After leaving the convent grounds, Eileen departed the city on the back of a motorbike, her hair well tucked into her beret and her coat collar turned up against the wind and rain and her arms around the waist of a young former medical student called Eamonn. She giggled a little at the thought of what the Reverend Mother might say if she saw her as they sped through the wet streets and climbed the hill out of town, going south towards Ballinhassig. No conversation was possible with the wind driving in their faces and she contented herself with beginning to formulate an article for the Cork Examiner. No one quite understood whether the paper’s owner had secret Republican sympathies or whether he just liked to sell his newspaper to all, no matter what their politics were, but he had proved surprisingly willing to take chatty articles and had paid well, so well that Eileen hoped she might get a new typewriter at some stage.

  Ballinhassig village was about five miles south of Cork city. The Republican Party had been given the use of a farm just outside the village by an elderly farmer whose sons had all gone to America. John Cahill had been a belligerent Land Leaguer in his youth and had obtained this twenty-acre farm with the Gladstone distribution of the land. It had a far better house – a two-storey one – than his own cottage, but he had never liked it and had handed it over to the Republican Party and now it was used as a training camp.

  It had everything that they wanted – it was located in the mountains, within the dip of a hill, remote and surrounded by trees. They had made a four-bedroom accommodation within it, cheerfully scrubbing, mending, painting and cleaning and chopping enough wood from fallen trees to keep it warm and dry, but best of all, the farm was on top of the half-a-mile-long tunnel of the Cork to Bandon railway and a ve
nt came up in one of the fields. A steel ladder hung from top to bottom of the vent in one of the bends of the tunnel, and in the case of a raid everyone could disappear into the tunnel and hide in one of the alcoves there. Also, it had three different lanes leading to the farm so their comings and goings were not too noticeable. All in all, it was the perfect hide-out for an illegal organization.

  ‘Listen,’ said Eamonn as he switched off the engine of the motorbike when they stopped in the farmyard. There was a sudden sound of clicking that filled the silence.

  ‘Eileen! Eamonn! We’ve got six new Lee-Enfield rifles!’ A girl with very short hair came running out of the barn. ‘Come and try them. We’re going to have targets this afternoon when we get used to firing them dry. I’ve a bruise on my shoulder from it, but I’m getting the hang of it.’

  ‘Prefer the pistol,’ said Eileen, swinging her leg over the wheel. ‘Anyway, I’d better report to the boss. You’ve cut your hair, Aoife.’

  ‘I’ll do yours if you like,’ offered Aoife, and then with a glance at the house, ‘Tom Hurley’s here. He’s waiting to see you.’

  Tom Hurley was the chief of the three South Cork Units so Eileen went straight into the house. She had been composing a literary effort for the Cork Examiner, but the report that Tom would require from her would be something quick, simple and to the point. A man on the run wanted something different to a man sitting with his newspaper over his morning cup of tea. Eileen’s lips twitched as she remembered the Reverend Mother talking to the top class about different styles of writing for different audiences and reading extracts from an eighteenth-century writer called Addison and then comparing them with the leading article in the Irish Times. Little did she know that one of her pupils would find her words so useful!

  ‘Well,’ said Tom Hurley when she entered the room. It was the first time that he had been here since they had painted this room and she looked around her critically, trying to see with his eyes the dazzlingly white limewash on the walls and the doors and windowsills painted a daring black. The thick curtains had been made from threadbare mouldy old blankets, found in the loft, boiled to a solid, felted consistency and then dyed a cosy dark shade of red and they looked great against the white walls. Eamonn had even cleaned a century’s worth of soot from the iron crane in the big fireplace and the kettle that dangled from it was now only slightly blackened.