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

by Maggie Feeley

  Alone in the office, Mairéad paused in dealing with the list before her to consider the bigger picture. Helen Breen was dead. Someone had actually killed her and it appeared from the imminent police presence that it might be a work-related issue. It wasn’t a private affair but one that would bring the PSNI into DePRec in search of answers. She didn’t like the picture that developed in her mind in response to these considerations. Who would have an interest in having Helen Breen out of the picture? Who might she have angered to the point of these extremes of violence? Might it have been an accident or a prank that went badly wrong? For all the times that she and Ralph had discussed Breen with extremes of vitriol, actually committing an act of brutality and bloodshed was another matter altogether. Ralph Wilson had a fiery character and Mairéad liked that spark in him immensely, but she couldn’t believe that he could be a killer. She could, however, see all too clearly that Ralph might well be an object of some suspicion in all this and she instantly felt a desire to protect him from any unpleasantness.

  15

  Lost in consideration of the enormity of such a murderous act, Mairéad was taken by surprise when the office door opened and Alice Fox came in, slightly flushed from her run up five flights of stairs. She was exuding her customary energy and good humour which clashed tangibly with the atmosphere in the room.

  She quickly picked up on Mairéad’s perturbed expression and stopped in her tracks. “Everything OK with you, ma’am? The building has survived the flood anyway.”

  Mairéad motioned for her to close the office door and placed a finger on her pursed lips to communicate that she was about to impart a secret. Alice’s attention was fully captured.

  “You’re going to hear this at breaktime in any case,” Mairéad said, excusing her indiscretion in advance.

  Alice waved the memo she had just collected at the front door to show she was following. She sensed a familiar prelude to something of grave significance and the chill that accompanied it. Mairéad confirmed this immediately.

  “Something dreadful has happened,” she stage-whispered.

  Alice immediately realised that this was indeed more than the usual daily dramatic performance. She remained still and fixed on Mairéad’s perplexed gaze.

  “Helen Breen has been murdered. Her body is in the morgue at the police station and Jackson had to identify it last night.”

  Alice was truly taken aback by the announcement. She had not expected anything from the memo beyond a New Year lecture about student numbers and some fallout from the previous days’ storm closure.

  “The detectives will be arriving in the Shipbuilding Offices at any minute to begin an inquiry. I don’t know why they are going there but the murder seems to be something to do with work. That’s all I know. It’s all going to be announced at the meeting at breaktime but I know you won’t betray the confidence. You understand these things. Just get on about your business as if you never heard a word I said. I just needed to let it out to somebody.” And without allowing for any response Alice might make, she turned purposefully back to her schedule for staff interviews as if the lapse in discretion had never happened.

  Alice went into her own office and closed the door. She sat at her desk and closed her eyes. This was surely a turn-up for the books. Her old life was encroaching on the new in a most unexpected way. Despite her new identity, she instantly moved into detective mode. Motive, means and opportunity – who might have had all three and acted upon them? Helen Breen had not been a likeable person. In fact, she was quite the opposite but that kind of workplace animosity didn’t usually lead to a killing spree in a third-level educational institution. In her experience, people treated the hypocrisy and unpleasantness of colleagues as a reason to whinge and complain but not as an incitement to violence. This wasn’t a falling-out in an inner-city housing project in Lowell, Massachusetts, where someone’s drug patch was being poached and daggers were swiftly drawn, literally and metaphorically. Northern Ireland may have had a violent profile in the past but, as far as she knew, it was never a means of sorting out differences of opinion in higher education colleges.

  From her office framed in glass Alice gazed out over the Titanic Quarter at the iconic vista of the Belfast Shipyard where, somewhat ironically, an ill-fated vessel had become a focus of a successful regeneration drive. The towering yellow gantries, biblically named Samson and Goliath, had come to symbolise much that was anachronistic and intransigent in the northern psyche. Despite the demise of the shipbuilding industry that meant the huge yellow cranes remained largely unused, they were beloved by locals as an iconic image of home for those who had made their lives elsewhere. Holding on to things that had outlived their sell-by date was not unique to Northern Ireland, Alice mused. It was a bad habit for individuals and social groups the world over but perhaps more common in places with a disputed identity and a divided culture. Giving up something did not come easy, and the logic of the attachment was rarely questioned as the entrenched position was taken and then became solidified.

  Over the years Alice had thought long and hard about what actually provoked a person to knowingly and wilfully take a life. It was one thing when someone was high on drugs and driving recklessly. Accidental death was no less dreadful but more understandable than the premeditated act designed to permanently remove another human being from the planet. Feuds between criminal gangs were a frequent cause of death in her experience. Punishments were allotted with shocking alacrity by those who operated outside the law as a way of life. In the lives of most of the population, the degrees of anger or fear, or hatred, or jealousy that provoked such acts were not so easily arrived at. Helen Breen had somehow provoked just such an extreme reaction in someone she knew or had moved a stranger to inflict a death sentence on her. The idea was chilling to contemplate and Alice resigned herself to the fact that today she would not be very productive in addressing her own New Year list of resolutions. Her mind was already gripped by the violent death to which she found herself inescapably close.

  In the course of her first semester in DePRec, little by little Alice had been acquiring the measure of her colleagues. This information was filtered through Mairéad Walsh whose interaction with them Alice overheard through the thin wall that divided their offices. There was a raft of part-timers who dropped by to discuss administrative matters with Mairéad. She could be overheard smoothing over difficulties, gleaning snippets of departmental gossip and generally holding court. Occasionally one of her admin assistants would leave the office across the corridor and call in person with a query but mostly these conversations took place by phone. The assistants were rarely seen and their work was controlled entirely by Mairéad. They were photocopy drones and behind-the-scenes copy typists with a high production record but little direct contact with staff.

  The Professor called fairly frequently, by phone and in person, and Mairéad managed these visits with the utmost diplomacy. Alice noted that Jackson Bell had, in some respects, earned Mairéad’s cautious respect and she made sure that DePRec was run in a way that caused him little recrimination from students, temporary teaching staff and other tenured colleagues. She spared him her more flamboyant performances and remained the essence of demure efficiency in his presence. Their relationship was not without warmth but the theatrics that Alice had heard bestowed on Ralph Wilson and a very small chosen few amongst the other college senior admin staff were not performed for the Head of Department. For his part, Bell remained entirely task-focused and rarely engaged in any discussion or revelation about his private life. What Alice did know was that Jackson Bell and Helen Breen had a relationship that surfaced frequently in staffroom gossip. Bell’s unshakeable admiration for Breen was a puzzle to many who saw her as self-serving and disinterested in the matters of peace and reconciliation or student welfare. Only a few days previously she had witnessed his extreme distress at Helen Breen’s failure to attend a meeting with him on the first day of term. It was unthinkable to him that she would neglect such
a commitment and the depth of his reaction had given Alice cause for rumination at the time.

  For Professor Janet Hartnett, Faculty Head of Human Sciences, Mairéad’s level of delivery was raised to resemble the tone and pitch of a BBC Radio announcer. This involved much pursing and flexing of her upper lip and crisp articulation of every utterance.

  Alice had discovered that the diverse range of radio stations she could access from her Belfast flat was a wonderful source of cultural information. Comparing media coverage of the same event locally on Radio Ulster, from the south on Radio Telifis Éireann (RTÉ) and from the UK mainland on BBC Radio 4 was a revealing study for an outsider to complete. The different cultural perspectives, and versions of spoken English, were quite fascinating. Mairéad Walsh’s life experience made her fluent in a range of these accents. Her natural Dublin brogue was interspersed with northernisms that she had acquired through decades spent on that side of the border. For her grandest delivery she went full throttle for ‘Anglo’ landed gentry that was not too far off the textbook BBC delivery. All this she managed to do instinctively and without compromising her own status. She never became fawning or ingratiating and for that she won the admiration of Alice Fox for whom courage was a prized characteristic. Alice had had little or no dealings with Janet Hartnett except to have learned through Mairéad that Hartnett and Helen Breen had known each other at school and that Breen was capitalising on that connection to place herself favourably for an upcoming promotion. Alice had been in Dublin when Hartnett had hosted the departmental Christmas drinks party and so she had missed even the insight that such events afforded of a colleague’s homelife.

  From her listening post in the inside office, Alice soon learned that Mairéad and Dr Wilson shared more than a sense of humour. Wilson was a frequent telephone caller and Alice could distinguish the tone of voice that Mairéad reserved for these moments. The older woman’s voice would deepen and her gurgling laughter often suggested that some salacious innuendo had been uttered at the other end of the line. When Wilson came by in person there was loud whispering and a conversation might end abruptly if someone else came in. It appeared that Mairéad kept a range of snacks in her top drawer with which she rewarded Wilson for his visit. Their conversations were peppered with the rustling of wrappings and munching sounds. Alice was already familiar with Mairéad’s devotion to the rice cracker, which she called ‘ceiling tiles’ for their resemblance to polystyrene wall insulation from the 80s. She worked her way through packets of them and was keen that others should join in her habit. “Sure it’s like eating fresh air for all the calorie content in them,” she would coax. “Come to think of it, you need something more substantial than this. We need to fatten you up a bit,” she would banter playfully with Alice. “You will need a bit of surplus to get through the Irish winter,” and she would push the packet a little closer by way of encouragement. The sense of eating slightly salty Styrofoam was not altogether unpleasant and Alice frequently gave way to temptation.

  The liaison between Mairéad and Wilson amused Alice, as did the fact that she was not being excluded from knowing about it. By dint of Mairéad’s quasi-adoption of her, Alice’s inclusion in this inner family unit meant that she quickly gained some insights about DePRec personnel that otherwise might not have been so readily accessible.

  Alice reflected now that Mairéad and Wilson had not guarded too much against what Alice overheard about their shared dislike of Helen Breen. The older woman had displayed a particular clamped-mouth pattern, accompanied by an exaggerated frown when Dr Breen passed by the office. Her response to Breen’s request for information or her instruction about an admin task had been noticeably colder than towards other colleagues. This negativity had exceeded simple indifference or the careless observations she exchanged with most people. For her part, Breen had showed no sign of being aware of this and treated Mairéad almost mechanistically. Her indifference was scathing and had often provoked a barely concealed, frosty disdain in Mairéad.

  Wilson had been more outspoken in his dislike of his colleague, wasting no opportunity to point out her shortcomings and his perception of her as inexplicably favoured by Jackson Bell. Alice recalled one typical outpouring from Wilson.

  “I just can’t fathom how an intelligent man is so utterly hoodwinked by her. She rarely delivers on the demands that Bell makes around contributions to publications and stuff like that. Yet she is complimented on every minor utterance no matter how facile. It’s as if she has cast a spell on him that clouds his critical faculties.” This outburst had been accompanied by a deal of spluttering, desk-thumping and laboured breathing.

  “Don’t give yourself a coronary over it, Ralphie,” Mairéad had soothed. “That would hand her the professorship much too easily altogether.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Wilson had sounded downtrodden. “I am far too easily read to be in competition with that sly vixen and that’s for sure. It just exasperates me the way she plays people and hoodwinks them. I can see absolutely clearly that she is feckless and egocentric, and I really can’t fathom how others are oblivious.” He had fallen into a silent reverie about the incomprehensible level of respect Bell held for Breen, then took up his subject again with renewed vigour. “One thing is certain anyway: the influence she has on Jackson allows her to carry on coasting with impunity. I’ve tried hinting at how flimsy her devotion is to the cause of peace and reconciliation, but it ends up sounding like sour grapes on my part while inevitably Jackson rushes straight to her defence. I was standing next to him the other day when I went in to discuss the trade union postgraduate bursary. His emails were open on his screen and there were at least ten messages from her in his recent mail. Everyone knows it’s hard to get her to respond to anything and yet she is on to him about every small issue that arises. No wonder he thinks she is the most loyal, hardworking member of staff. She has him totally groomed.”

  On that occasion, Mairéad had gently coaxed him with the exaggerated calm one might use with a petulant child. “Well, maybe you need to think about a change of tactics. If she is gaining all the ground with Bell and Hartnett, you will need to come up with some way of disrupting those advances.”

  Alice had thought that Mairéad suggested this a little half-heartedly.

  “Ralph, you need to focus less on attacking Bell and Breen and more on establishing your own strengths as an international postgraduate programme coordinator. For the new post they want someone who will attract foreign, fee-paying people and inspire confidence about our support networks and academic excellence. Your constant critique of everyone and everything overshadows your many skills. It needs to be ‘eyes on the prize’, Ralphie! You need to demonstrate you have what it takes and not let her romp away with something that is yours on merit if not by right.”

  This had been sound advice and, without thinking, at her desk in the next room Alice had found herself nodding in agreement. Now, in the light of today’s revelations she really hoped that Wilson had heeded Mairéad’s advice and cooled his fury against Helen Breen. Alice had to admit to herself that in her cursory review of staff relations with the murder victim, Ralph Wilson did not emerge covered in roses by any means. She was sure that Mairéad Walsh and others would quickly arrive at the same conclusion.

  16

  In a leafy suburb of south Belfast, Lisa, the Filipino residential care worker of Agatha Breen, was finishing clearing away the breakfast things when the doorbell sounded. It was early for callers but Frank, eldest child of the Breen family, often sent small packages in the post from Australia to his mother. Sometimes it was a collection of drawings done by her grandchildren and a small treat like a headscarf or some indigenous printed cloth. He was the best of the bunch and, in Lisa’s secret opinion, it was a shame he had settled so far away. The two adult children who lived closer to home were infrequent callers unless it was in their own interest. Lisa observed much but said nothing as old Mrs Breen was entitled to her dignity and she remained stubbornly
loyal to her son and daughter, Michael and Helen. Michael had a tile-importing business and Helen was an academic. Neither was close to their mother although she held firmly to any details she had about their lives for the rare occasion when she could boast about their achievements to some of her dwindling number of friends.

  Lisa opened the door to a uniformed woman police officer of mature years – in her mid-fifties, estimated Lisa, who was in and around that age herself.

  “Is Mrs Breen at home?” the policewoman asked. “I have an urgent matter to discuss with her.”

  It was immediately clear that this was not a casual matter and Lisa nodded and smiled courteously and secretly hoped that documentation was not at issue.

  Lisa glanced at the pile of post on a table inside the door and the envelope on top was franked at Belfast City College and addressed to Dr Helen Breen. “Her post,” she said, as if considering what should be done with it.

  Sandra Woods noted that Helen Breen evidently received her mail at the family home, which explained why this had been provided as her home address by the college.