A Shocking Assassination

by Cora Harrison

  There was still a heavy silence over the normally noisy market. The gas lamps cast light down but left many shadows. Several of the stallholders had lit candles and were fiddling with goods on their stalls by the feeble light. Michael Skiddy lit a second candle, illuminating his wares. He had been another one of the many victims of the Black and Tans’ burning of the centre of Cork city two years ago, when a prosperous men’s clothing shop had been set on fire and Michael Skiddy’s soap and candle shop in a nearby lane had been unlucky enough to be in the path of the flying embers. Candles and soap had all gone up in flames; though the Skiddy family had managed to rescue some of their machinery and candle moulds to set up a new business in one of the stalls at the English Market.

  She must purchase some candles from him before she left, was her thought and then she looked back at Sam O’Mahony. What could have possessed the boy to choose such a public place for this so-called execution? She supposed that his masters in the Republican Army had wanted this to be an example to all other municipal officers who might abuse their position.

  ‘Better get that gun,’ said Captain Robert Newenham, the town planner. ‘Would you like me to take charge of it, superintendent? I was in the army, you know. Spent four years in France fighting Fritz! Not much I don’t know about guns.’ He moved forward towards the fountain with an air of authority and then, as the Reverend Mother stepped into his pathway, he stopped abruptly.

  ‘Oh, Reverend Mother,’ he stammered. ‘I didn’t know that you were here.’ His eyes went to her basket and widened slightly. They met from time to time at the bishop’s gatherings and he always made a big fuss about them being cousins – second cousins, once removed, in fact, but she allowed him to claim the relationship. He was visibly astounded at the sight of her doing her own shopping, but he recovered after a minute. ‘I’ve got my car here. Let me drive you home, take you out of here.’

  ‘I would be most grateful, once the inspector allows us to leave, of course,’ said the Reverend Mother, primly, wondering how he would like taking his expensive car through the mud along the quays. ‘I think, Captain Newenham,’ she murmured in his ear, as he stretched out his hand towards the fountain, ‘I do think that the gun should be left until the inspector arrives, don’t you? But, of course, you would know more about those things than I.’

  He looked annoyed, but she stayed there, smiling blandly at him. ‘I suppose that the gun will be quite safe in the fountain until the civic guards arrive, isn’t that right, Mr O’Donnell?’ she said as the superintendent approached.

  ‘Quite safe, Reverend Mother, don’t you worry. Nothing for you to worry about.’

  The Reverend Mother looked across at the white, blood-smeared face of the woman now clinging on to the edge of her stall and then at the angry, terrified face of her son and thought that there was very definitely something to worry about. Sam O’Mahony was a talented young man who had made a bad mistake when he attacked, by name, a prominent citizen, like the city engineer, in his newspaper column. That had been stupid, but it was a mistake that was easily made in the arrogance of youth and hopefully he would get another job, or, like many others, get the boat to England or America. He was clever and well-educated and could be expected to make a success of his life.

  But if he were found guilty of this killing he would be hanged. The Reverend Mother stirred from her position, took the piece of ragged towelling from Patsy’s limp hand, dipped it into the icy cold water of the fountain and handed it to Sam’s mother.

  ‘Just hold that to your nose for a few minutes,’ she said authoritatively. It was, she thought, the only practical thing that she could do at the moment.

  Ten minutes later, the inspector and his team arrived. Inspector Patrick Cashman was newly promoted from the position of sergeant, but already he had begun to look older, thought the Reverend Mother, noting his gravity and self-possession as he arrived at the English Market flanked by a group of civic guards. He had been one of her pupils, one of the few successes amongst the many who were lost to emigration, prostitution, unemployment, chronic illness and death, either from disease or from suicide. She was proud of him, but did not underestimate the difficulties and dangers of his position.

  Patrick came in very quietly, spoke softly to the superintendent, noticed the Reverend Mother with a quick glance, looked sharply at Sam O’Mahony, at the two beadles who still held his arms, at the white-faced, dry-eyed woman beside them and then turned his attention to the body, kneeling down in the sawdust and touching the dead face momentarily. After less than a minute he rose to his feet.

  ‘It’s Mr James Doyle, the city engineer,’ said the superintendent and Patrick nodded gravely.

  ‘God have mercy on him,’ added the superintendent.

  ‘Wasn’t he a Protestant?’ asked one beadle to the other in a loud whisper, over the top of Sam’s head.

  The superintendent glared and everyone else politely pretended not to hear.

  ‘Does anyone know what happened to Mr Doyle?’ asked Patrick. There was enough emphasis on the word ‘know’ to inhibit the normally vociferous market stallholders and their customers. Only the town planner, Captain Newenham, stepped forward.

  ‘This young man, so competently secured by the good superintendent of the market and his beadles, was found standing over the body with a gun in his hand,’ he said. ‘That gun is now in the fountain; he deliberately threw it in there. I’m a witness to that. I thought it best to leave it there until you arrived.’ His voice, clipped, assured and the accent sounding English to Cork ears, made everyone look at each other silently but no one else spoke.

  ‘And your name, sir? And your business here at the market this morning?’ Patrick nodded at his assistant, Joe, who produced a shorthand notebook and a pencil. It took only a minute for the details to be written down but it was long enough for Mrs O’Mahony to find her courage.

  ‘Sam had nothing at all to do with this, inspector, sir,’ she said. Her voice raw and hoarse from shouting her wares at the market was now broken with suppressed sobs. ‘He was nowhere near Mr Doyle. He was over beside my stall, standing there as quiet as anything. And then the shot went off, just after the lights failed. He had a notebook and a pencil in his hand, just like the guard there. Look, here they are, just where he dropped them. You saw him, Patsy, didn’t you?’ She whirled around to confront Patsy Mullane and her broom and Patsy cleared her throat and muttered something nervously, looking sideways at Sam.

  Patrick was kind, the Reverend Mother was glad to see. He nodded gravely, made no pretence of not knowing Mrs O’Mahony – he would often have been sent to the market for tripe, the mainstay of the poor, by his mother when he was a boy – and he waited until Joe’s pencil had stopped before thanking her and then he turned to Sam.

  ‘Your name, sir?’ he asked formally and Sam gave it without a tremor in his voice. Anger was still holding him up and he glared across at the town planner as though blaming Robert Newenham for everything.

  ‘Would you like to tell me what happened, sir?’ invited Patrick. ‘Or would you prefer to wait and to tell me in private?’

  Away from his mother, perhaps. But she came across and stood beside her son.

  ‘Tell the truth, Sam, tell them what happened. Where did you get the gun?’ She gazed up pleadingly at him, but he looked away, embarrassed, perhaps. Patrick nodded to his assistant, Joe, who approached with notebook and pencil in hand.

  ‘I wasn’t anywhere near him, inspector. I was taking down James Doyle’s speech to the stallholders, hoping I could sell it to some newspaper,’ said Sam, speaking rapidly. ‘I was purposely keeping away from him. He’d lost me my job on the Cork Examiner before and I knew that he’d get me thrown out of here if he saw me writing, so I stayed over there beside my mother’s stall, beside the tripe and drisheen stall. The lights went out; they’re always going out and I was waiting for the superintendent to get them lit again.’ Sam pointed towards the door to the gallery stairs and Patrick nodded.
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  ‘Go on,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Then I heard the shot, like everyone else. They were all pushing and shoving to get back against the wall and then someone dropped the gun, right on top of my foot. I didn’t know what it was. I picked it up automatically, but I didn’t even look at it. I pushed my way forward to see if there could be anything done for the man. I was taught how to stop bleeding when I was a boy, when I was in the Fianna Scouts; I have a certificate from the St Patrick’s Ambulance Association. That was my first thought, to give first aid; I’ve seen lots of gunshot wounds over the last few years, working there in the centre of the city.’

  ‘And the gun, sir?’ asked Patrick, his eyes on the young man’s face. They would be about the same age, thought the Reverend Mother. Probably may not have known each other, though. Patrick was from the slums on the south parish side of the city and the O’Mahony family, thanks to Mrs O’Mahony’s hard work, lived, she thought, somewhere near St Luke’s Cross to the east of the city and, of course, Patrick was a scholarship boy at the North Monastery while Sam had been sent to a fee-paying school.

  ‘I told you,’ said Sam impatiently, ‘someone dropped it at my feet; it hit my toe. I just stooped down, picked it up and held on to it, I don’t know why. Perhaps to stop it being fired at someone else, to keep it safe, I just can’t tell you. It was an impulse of the moment. Wish to God I had never touched the wretched thing. I wish I had done like everyone else and stood back and looked out for myself.’

  ‘Did anyone else see where this gun came from?’ Patrick faced the cluster of people huddled around. There were about twenty stalls in this section of the English Market, not all of them occupied, but with the customers and including the city planners and engineers, there must be about fifty people present. No one spoke though, and the Reverend Mother was not surprised. After four years of turmoil and street fighting, everyone was wary. A near neighbour, a cousin, or even a brother or a sister could be a spy for some party or other.

  ‘Perhaps everyone would go to where they were standing when the shot was fired, or when the lights went out? How long between the two things?’ He looked across at the superintendent.

  ‘Not more than a minute or so between them,’ said the superintendent. ‘The lights went out and I was just taking my keys out of my pocket to send Patsy up to switch them on again when the shot went off.’

  ‘They are always going off. It’s a terrible system,’ said the woman who had taken her place back behind the chicken stall.

  ‘Dreadful unreliable,’ said Michael Skiddy removing the wax from the side of his candle.

  There was no one in front of his stall, now, noticed the Reverend Mother and yet she had seen that figure there, just a minute before the lights had gone out, a man in a belted raincoat with a slouch hat pulled well down over his face. She looked all around at the people standing in front of the stalls and the group awkwardly reassembling around the dead body of the city engineer, but there was no man dressed like that in this part of the market. Now that her mind was focused, she remembered quite clearly that she had seen him bend over the counter and blow out the candle that was probably kept lit by Michael Skiddy in order to advertise the wares. The man had blown out the candle; it had been he, not Michael Skiddy; she was sure of that, and then she had seen no more of him. This must have been a few minutes before the lights went out because she could clearly remember Michael Skiddy’s face looking anxious; angry and anxious, she thought. Once again she scanned the crowd, but there was no sign of that figure in a raincoat, no sign of that over-large hat pulled down to obscure a face.

  She looked back at Michael Skiddy’s soap and candle stall. Who had been the man in the belted coat and slouch hat who had blown out the candle just before the lights failed, or were extinguished, and who had then melted away? Michael Skiddy himself, now standing beneath one of the gas lamps, had a scared look on his face, but then so did others. No one would be keen to volunteer information if there was any suspicion that the Republican Army might be involved.

  Patrick gave Sam a long considering look and then turned his attention back to the huddled group.

  ‘Who was standing beside Mr Doyle when the shot was fired?’

  ‘I was. I am his assistant, Thomas Browne, Assistant City Engineer.’ A man moved forward. That would be one of the Brownes from Sundays Well. He had the family looks, that long nose, the full-lipped sensual mouth, the cleft chin, the very black hair with one long lock falling down over his forehead, looked rather like the poet Yeats as a young man, she thought, examining his face with interest. It was, she decided, the face of a dreamer rather than a man of action. She had heard that one of the Brownes had become an engineer, though most of the others were stock market traders or had gone into banking, like their grandfather before them. He wouldn’t be as monied as the other members of his family, she thought and then chided herself for thinking of gossip when a man lay dead on the floor in front of her.

  Doyle, now, the dead city engineer, he came up from nowhere. It was not a name that the Reverend Mother knew, and she knew all the names of the merchant princes of Cork. He, she thought, would have come from one of those families like Sam O’Mahony, some family where either the mother or father was self-sacrificing enough to pay for a good education for a bright child and to encourage them along the path of a lucrative profession. She had heard that he had been an apprentice and had worked his way up. Like Sam O’Mahony his brains had helped him to move out of his class.

  There might have been a difference, though. Sam, judging by an article of his that she remembered reading in the Cork Examiner, had been high-minded and very sincere. James Doyle’s meteoric rise in the power structure of the city seemed to hint at something else. She had heard rumours about his ruthlessness and there were reports that he was feared and hated. Dr Scher, she thought, had hinted about this and she wondered whether the doctor would be conducting an autopsy on the body of the city engineer. And just at the very moment when she had thought of the doctor, he appeared at the Princes Street gate to the market, dressed in overalls and accompanied by two hospital orderlies carrying a stretcher. He gave an annoyed look around at the crowd of people and whispered something to Patrick who nodded, but made no move to clear the crowd. He was looking from side to side, picturing the scene just before the shot rang out, while Dr Scher kneeled beside the body.

  ‘What about the gallery?’ he asked the superintendent. ‘Was there anyone there?’

  Mr O’Donnell shook his head firmly. ‘Not possible, inspector, I keep the keys and that place is locked unless I go up there myself and even then I lock the door behind me. We keep all the money up there so I am very, very careful about locking that door and keeping the keys in my own pocket all day long.’

  ‘So it was not possible that anyone could have been up there?’

  ‘Not a chance, inspector. I hadn’t even gone up there myself this morning. When the lights went out, I was just going to send Patsy up there to get them working again, but that very moment the shot rang out and of course we were all in a bit of bother …’ He tailed off, feeling, no doubt that this was an inadequate comment on a man’s murder. ‘Am I right, Patsy?’ he said turning to where she stood, awkwardly clasping her broom as if wishing to sweep all unpleasantness away.

  ‘You’re right, Mr O’Donnell,’ she said, but the superintendent ignored her, fishing his keys from his pocket and inviting Patrick to see for himself. One of the guards was despatched upstairs to make a cursory search. All eyes went back to Sam.

  ‘Bless us and save us,’ said Cornelius O’Flynn from the egg stall audibly. ‘What possessed the langer to wait there like a goldfish in a bowl?’

  TWO

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Pro patria ad Deum

  (For the fatherland to God)

  ‘Let me carry your basket, Reverend Mother,’ said Robert Newenham. His tone was deferential, though his expression was slightly dubious as he gazed from his immense height down a
t the eggs and the drisheen sausage and the crusty loaf of bread. The crowd was thinning out as all names and addresses had been taken. Sam had been escorted to a police car, but Mrs O’Mahony had resolutely refused to go home and had taken her place once more behind her stall. The Reverend Mother found herself rather bored at the prospect of making conversation with this pompous man and had meant to make an excuse saying that she had another errand in the town as they walked out together, but one glimpse of his splendid car made her resolve to get him to drive her to the very gates of her school. It would be around the time of the dinner-time break and all of the small boys would be fascinated by the appearance of a Rolls Royce.

  ‘Thank you, but no,’ she said briskly, keeping a firm hold of her basket. ‘I’m sure you are at home with guns, Captain Newenham, but I venture to think that you may not have much experience with carrying a basket of eggs. I must continue to be responsible for them. If I may, I will place them in the footwell of your back seat and I will sit in the front.’

  ‘Very nice eggs at the English Market,’ he said after a minute’s silence. He had opened the door to the back of the car obediently, but still eyed the basket dubiously as if suspecting it of containing a bomb.

  ‘Very,’ agreed the Reverend Mother, but then she took mercy on him. It would, after all, be far more interesting for the two of them to discuss the terrible events of the morning rather than him to spend time silently speculating on any possible reason why the Reverend Mother might have popped out of the convent in order to buy buttered eggs.

  ‘They are for my gardener,’ she explained. ‘He’s been looking very unwell and has lost a lot of weight. Sister Bernadette tells me that he eats very little. He lived in the country when he was young and his mother used to keep hens. He was talking about them one day, telling me that his mother used to produce them for the English Market and how once he had one for his birthday. Since Dr Scher thinks he should try to eat as well as possible, I decided to get him some buttered eggs from the market.’