Murder In The Academy : A chilling murder mystery set in Belfast (Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 1)

by Maggie Feeley

  Breen had come hastily up through the ranks from favoured graduate and doctoral research assistant to fulltime staff member and senior lecturer. Jackson Bell was known to be her ardent supporter and frivolous speculation about the exact nature of their relationship was an ongoing item of common-room gossip. They didn’t seem like a potential couple on first or even subsequent impressions but it was hard otherwise to understand Bell’s uncritical loyalty to her. There could be no belief that her favour was rooted in hard work or even ideological commitment. With an audacity that left her colleagues exasperated, she worked the system to her own advantage whilst somehow seeming to maintain a workload that was less strenuous than most of her peers. Youth and good looks were possibly on her side. She was forever citing energetic gym practices and regularly ran marathons, allegedly for a host of noble causes. Many suspected correctly that she was uncompromisingly her own good cause. No grey was ever visible in her shoulder-length sleek, black mane that she habitually smoothed downwards from the crown with flattened palms. In a signature movement that rivals mimicked with vitriol, she would trace the contour of her head – hands coming to rest on her shoulders for the length of time it took her to inhale deeply and exhale. It was as if she was reaffirming that all was securely under her control. Her make-up was discreet and flawless and her vague references to a carefree social life all added to the youthful image.

  Ralph Wilson, a genuine believer in the departmental mission of ‘healing through honest, inclusive dialogue’, now felt publicly ambushed. He was unsure if her remark had deliberately contained the degree of malice it had delivered and yet the way she kept him in her sights over the rim of her coffee cup suggested his response was being carefully measured.

  Others watched as the struggle that had played out in the meeting continued.

  He tightened his jaw, produced some sort of ineffectual snorting sound and, lifting his tobacco tin, headed for the outdoor deck space, vigorously shaking his head and muttering something about “pipes of peace”.

  Breen barely registered a reaction to this, bar the slight lifting of one eyebrow. Nonetheless, she recorded it as a victory from which she garnered some small degree of satisfaction. She was looking forward to the sport this term would provide as she worked through her plan to reap the greatest rewards for the least effort. This was where she would devote her energies and the wearisome business of peace and reconciliation could be the concern of the muppets who were her colleagues. She was her own area of special interest and the likes of Wilson and his emotional outbursts only served to make her look stable and measured by comparison.

  She made a mental note to arrange lunch with the new head of the Faculty of Human Sciences. Janet Hartnett had been a few years ahead of her at school and she could certainly make some mileage out of that. She would let the dust settle on the new term and then devote her efforts to ‘Project Professor’ as she had secretly dubbed her goal for this academic year. She smoothed her hair in her customary manner and sighed contentedly.

  5

  Next door to the Common Room was the Department Administrative Centre and the preserve of Mairéad Walsh – Department Operations Manager. A feisty woman of mature years with an enduring Dublin accent, she was a custodian of information, official and otherwise, on all aspects of Department staff and business. She was unflagging in her enthusiasm and capacity to gather, store and analyse data from every staff member that passed through her office. Alongside her privileged role as minute-taker in all department meetings, this made her an invaluable source for those with whom she shared her secrets and those few whose interests she had at heart. Favourite amongst these was Ralph Wilson with whom she had long felt an affinity and with whom she often spent a discreet evening of harmless self-indulgence.

  The aftermath of the morning’s meeting was playing out in her territory with even greater intensity than the verbal scuffle in the common room next door. She had already set one of the juniors to work transcribing the audio recording of the meeting from which, under normal circumstances, a brief minute would later be produced. The transcribed version would be kept for a period of time to allow for verification of accuracy should any disputes arise. Mairéad was adept at covering her back. Her skills in diplomacy had been honed in the community where she had lived for decades with her six children and her husband Phillip. He was often away because of the nature of his work and as a southern Catholic in the Protestant suburbs of Belfast she had worked hard to preserve amicable relations with most neighbours. She was an artist in the use of humour to diffuse or deflect tension and frequently entertained colleagues with her knowledge of Hiberno-English. Under her tutelage, the term gurrier, Dublin slang for an ill-mannered loutish person, had become part of common parlance in the department. It was amazing how many it seemed to aptly describe, both academic staff and students.

  “Jackson Bell was practically dancing around the office,” Mairéad reported later as she sipped on a large gin in the company of Ralph Wilson. She smiled roguishly as she recalled the performance.

  Bell had been anxious about the wording of the minutes of the meeting, which would be the first official representation of the Department to the new Faculty Head. He particularly didn’t want Wilson’s criticism of his management style to be elaborated nor the constant accusation to take hold that he was not the epitome of conciliation and consensual working practices. The cosmetic version of the morning’s events had taken time to construct before they had been dispatched with every appearance of efficiency to Professor Janet Hartnett’s new corner office on the south face of the fifth floor.

  Hartnett, originally from the North, was recently returned from London where she had been director of a postgraduate college specialising in counselling, psycho- therapy and post-trauma rehabilitation approaches. The snide comments about how her therapeutic background would prepare her for her new post had circulated at all levels of the institution. Despite her disciplinary background, she was reputed to be tough and unforgiving of professional weakness, and Bell had no intention of giving her any opportunities to upbraid him. He had already given his backing to Helen Breen’s plan to use her old schoolgirl relationship with Hartnett to further DePRec’s standing. Breen was the one staff member that he knew unquestioningly shared his vision and was utterly loyal to the Centre and its work. He would be prepared to stake both their lives on that certainty.

  As he was leaving her office, Bell had announced to Mairéad that the smaller inner room off the main office was to be prepared for the visiting postdoctoral scholar from City University New York. The partnership with CUNY had been long-lasting and the exchange of staff and postgraduate students was a regular occurrence. Mairéad Walsh had a son in Boston and she saw it as almost a familial duty to make visitors from the United States feel right at home in Belfast.

  “This one should fit in well,” sniped Bell in a rare display of emotion. “She’s a detective by profession with a PhD in restorative justice.” In a tone of mock resignation, he continued, “She could maybe do some work with the staff before she thinks about looking at any community groups. After this morning’s meeting we are well on the way to setting ourselves up as a conflict-resolution case study, without ever needing to leave the building.” That said, he gave an exasperated sigh and marched out of the room.

  Mairéad’s eyebrows had arched sharply at this display of petulance.

  In the subdued lighting of the city-centre Library Bar, she enacted the entire performance for Ralph and enjoyed his obvious delight at her ridicule of his nemesis. He nodded to the barman to bring another couple of gin and tonics and felt his tensions ebb away in eager anticipation of Mairéad’s soothing maternal embrace.

  6

  Over one hundred miles south in the School of Criminology, South Dublin University (SDU), Professor Tara Donnelly reviewed her plans for the forthcoming Social Harm Convention that she organised annually with a few colleagues from other universities in a number of continents. All these colleagues w
ere committed to exposing harms that were continuously done in society but weren’t recognised as crimes in the way that theft of property was. No one, aside from disadvantaged communities, was supposedly responsible for poverty or poor housing or educational inequalities. Tara and her colleagues enjoyed getting together to share their ideas and their research, and their discipline was growing in popularity amongst academics on the left. Because Dublin was the venue this year, she had the bulk of the work to do in relation to all the site issues. She had three months before the event but that wasn’t as generous a gap as it might seem. There was a lot to do between this and December and she was a devil for the detail.

  Her attic office, in one of the oldest buildings on the huge SDU campus, gave a sense of being housed in the upper levels of the trees. The birdlife outside the window was noisy and totally captivating at different points in the year. Nesting could be synonymous with low academic productivity for Tara as the level of distraction reached a peak. Generally, the peacefulness was a cause of constant appreciation for her, and she had passed up several offers to be re-accommodated in one of the many stylish new builds on campus. Her treehouse office and the refuge it afforded from the wider university bustle was a delight and she had no desire to be closer to the daily battles for parking spaces or the lengthy queues for coffee. She was content to slip into her workplace by a side entrance for pedestrians and cyclists and only join in the madness when it was absolutely necessary.

  SDU campus measured about 200 acres and the green areas were well maintained by a fleet of grounds staff. They had recently been clearing areas of shrubs to promote greater safety for women students crossing the campus on dark evenings. The degree of thought that had gone into that decision had impressed Tara almost as much as she had been angry about the need to think like that in the first place. Women were certainly more important than shrubs, but it was a shame to be forced to make those choices because of the misogynistic behaviour of a few Neanderthal men.

  Rising levels of email traffic recalled her from her internal chatter. She was one of the university’s youngest professors and, despite a genuine lack of ambition, had already had a fairly stellar academic career. Her hurried departure from Northern Ireland was ironically when the peace process was well advanced and because Belfast was no longer the place she felt at home. As a founder of DePRec, she still commanded respect from international donors and academics alike but, since moving south, she had taken a step back from the specifics of the North to a wider interest in social harm generally. Her writing was prolific and widely published and she maintained close connections with communities of interest established to challenge accepted views of what constituted social justice. It was in these local projects that she learned most and where she felt more at home than in the academy.

  A believer in research that had a strong ‘action’ element, Donnelly had constructed a working life that involved a lot of community activism, counterbalanced by enough writing and on-campus visibility to keep her colleagues and managers happy. The funding and public profile she secured for the university gave her a great deal of academic freedom, but she wore this mantle modestly. She worked very selectively and collaboratively with a small number of colleagues dotted about the globe and had no urge to grow that number or participate in the frenetic activity through which some colleagues felt obliged to demonstrate their worth. Although she had family and other connections in the North, she never crossed the border, preferring the quiet domestic arrangements she had made for herself in the South.

  Today, for some reason, Tara Donnelly was pulled back repeatedly to her days in Belfast. She was leafing through applications from people who wanted to talk about their work at the two-day December event and was struck by the number of northern would-be contributors. Of course, people were more political there and critical of the state and its potential for simultaneous tyranny and subterfuge. They had good reason. Since the creation of the state in 1921 they had been plunged into a recurring bloody context that laid bare the consequences of inept political decisions, and some of its public face. Of course there was a whole world of political machination to which ordinary people were never made privy. Tara knew from her research that people were easily distracted from the truth. They were seduced by the managed media rhetoric and remained unaware of the clandestine forces that were really influencing northern society in order to bolster their own dogma. Agents of the state employed in various wings of the intelligence services had worked constantly behind the scenes to discredit those who disagreed with partition. To British Intelligence these were enemies of the state. Republican resistance was portrayed as fanatical, and poor nationalist and loyalist communities were set against each other rather than being allowed to see their reasons for common cause. She had come close to learning too much about this darker side of the North and had gladly (and hastily) left it all behind when she had moved across the border.

  Reading the conference abstracts from applicants now, she could discern familiar threads of northern life drawing her back to her days up there. She was still conscious of coming from that other jurisdiction even if she herself felt no need for the border to preserve or protect anything she held dear, either material or ideological. The ‘borders of the mind’ was a favourite theme of hers that she had elaborated down the years both academically and creatively. Back in the early days of DePRec she had worked closely on that subject with a feminist artist in Belfast. They had run creative workshops and mounted exhibitions with schools and communities. Through the work, they had explored the cultural divides that were part of every aspect of northern society. The creative approach had covered ground that would have been gained much more slowly if they had been limited to verbal approaches. In terms of generating research data, images had shown they could go where simple dialogue was less effective.

  She was glad that Jackson Bell had continued that focus on visual sociology in DePRec. She had a lot of time for his work and followed most of the DePRec publications and events from the remote sanctuary she had made for herself in Dublin. Her watchfulness was not without ulterior motive. She knew that manipulative interests were still at work in DePRec and her observations were constantly and vigilantly aimed at tracking the direction those influences were taking. For now she only watched but the day might come, she knew, when she would also need to act.

  7

  January 2014

  Post-doc scholar Alice Fox had spent the latter part of December and the New Year south of the Irish border. There had been the Social Harm Convention in South Dublin University and afterwards two weeks in Wicklow exploring the impressive hillwalking trails that area offered. The first week of January 2014 brought chill winds, freezing temperatures and the threat of snow. On Alice’s return north, the city Christmas lights no longer offered any relief to the generally grey Belfast cityscape and even the cheery Santa and sleigh on the front of the City Hall had been extinguished. This everyday Belfast was stern and unforgiving in comparison to the gregarious Dublin she had left behind the previous day.

  Since her arrival in Ireland at the end of August, Alice had been dividing her time between DePRec and EXIT, a project for at-risk youth in the west of Belfast. She had cemented a strong relationship there with Hugo, the project leader, and a core group of eight young people, seven young men and one woman. They met several times a week and Alice was piloting a new course in self-defence with them that combined two of her own big interests – Tae Kwan Do and effective relationship management. She wanted them to learn that making good relationships was a way of keeping yourself and those around you safe. Poor communication and an inability to read your own and others’ emotions just led to trouble and often that spilled over into conflict and violence. The mix of talk and action was working well so far.

  Together, and with a view to challenging academic norms, they had recently co-authored a paper for the conference about social harm and Alice had presented it in Dublin in late December. The group’s idea had pleased
Alice greatly. She loved the wisdom of those that society disregarded and how it ruffled feathers when it was given a public airing. The group’s argument was that although as young offenders they were encouraged to make right their wrongs against society in face-to-face meetings with victims, no one felt moved to take responsibility for the impact that poverty and poor education had on their lives.

  She recalled with satisfaction the evening that the gaps in the one-sided restorative-justice system had become clear to them.

  Rae, the only young woman in the group, had made the initial breakthrough.

  “A lot of what we all do here is face up to the hurt we’ve caused to other people, right? We have to literally face people and explain ourselves … why we robbed their car or killed their cat or whatever. Am I right?” There had been nods and mutterings of assent around the circle. “Well, then, where is the chance for those ones who have harmed us to account for themselves? Nobody has ever said they were sorry I lived in a shit flat with nothing in the fridge most of the time. Do you see where I’m going, anybody? Why are we the ones doing all the apologising?”

  “You’re right, Rae. You are so right.” Jed’s face had been triumphant. “Who has ever taken responsibility for the fact that I can hardly read and write. I’m twenty-three years of age and Ra’s wee nephew can read more than me and he’s only five. Hugo, you have taught us all that we have to make up for what we have done to people. Restore justice. Isn’t that the saying? Who’s restoring my justice? And Rae’s? And everybody else’s? We never had any justice to begin with!”