A Shocking Assassination

by Cora Harrison

  ‘What if the Republicans deny that he was their agent?’

  ‘Well, then, according to the superintendent, Sam did it because he was angry at the role James Doyle played in getting him the sack from his job at the Cork Examiner.’

  ‘And in that case,’ said the Reverend Mother feeling rather as though she were the lawyer for the defence, ‘in that case, you must account for the pistol, where did Sam O’Mahony get a pistol unless he was agent of the Volunteers, or the Republicans?’

  ‘Could have been stolen,’ said Patrick briefly. ‘It’s British army issue. Probably picked up on the night that Cork was burned down by the Black and Tans. I was there myself, that night, a few of the lads from school were with me and we were ducking in and out of the lanes, daring each other to get closer. We saw them set fire to Grant’s and then to Cash’s and then the Munster Arcade went. They were going mad. They were all drunk as lords that night, lobbing cans of petrol into shops, shooting the fire brigade men, cutting hoses. A lot of guns were rumoured to have been lost that night. These fellows had no discipline. They fired off all their bullets, dropped the gun, couldn’t find it in the dark, and then went for another one. They had fresh supplies of guns and ammunition in their lorries and just helped themselves, so I’ve heard. Sam was a junior reporter on the Cork Examiner at the time and some of them were out on Patrick Street that night. He might have picked it up out of the embers.’

  The Reverend Mother thought about it. It did seem plausible, although more likely that the guns were picked up by the Volunteers as they were known then. That reminded her of something. The image of the man in the belted trench coat and slouched hat was still in her mind. There had been something very professional about the way that he had melted away before anyone else had moved. And surely he had been responsible for the blowing out of the candle on Michael Skiddy’s stall.

  ‘I suppose it seems likely that there is a Republican involvement in this killing, is there, Patrick?’ she asked.

  He frowned and after a moment said heavily, ‘Most of the killings in this city have something to do with them, one way or the other. Either the Republicans or the Anti-Sinn Féin party trying to incriminate them. There’s a lot of that going on these days. I’m not sure really. Sometimes I think that if the Republican Party was involved, more than one man would have been shot. After all there was the assistant city engineer, Mr Browne, and the town planner, Captain Newenham, there also. If they had decided to shoot, they would have taken them out, too. But the word is that the volunteers are very short of weapons and of ammunition. It will be just a matter of weeks before they give in and ask for a peace treaty, from what I’ve heard.’

  It was a good point. And yet the Reverend Mother was fairly sure that the figure in a trench coat and hat well pulled down over his face was, in all probability, a Republican. Since uniforms for civilians were banned, these garments had been adopted as an unofficial uniform. Still, the fact that he had disappeared quickly did not mean that he was guilty. Any member of the Republicans would be used to quick action to avoid suspicion. She put the thought aside, therefore, and turned her attention towards Patrick.

  ‘You look worried,’ she said. ‘What is it that bothers you?’

  ‘I think that Sam is telling the truth,’ blurted out Patrick. ‘Goodness knows, I have enough experience of people telling me tall stories. I feel that I doubt everything by now, even if someone tells me that there’s going to be a shower, I think that they are probably lying.’

  ‘That, indeed, must be the height of scepticism,’ murmured the Reverend Mother with a glance out at the everlasting drizzle trickling down the window glass.

  Patrick’s worried expression didn’t lighten. ‘And yet, somehow, I think that I have the wrong man. It probably was an assassination. A man shot out there in public before a crowd of people. It’s just the sort of thing that the Republicans would do – it makes them popular, gets them new recruits, makes everyone think that they are on the side of the general public. People who want their jobs and their living quarters back would like to hear of the death of James Doyle, who was reputed to be quite corrupt, and was in the game for as much as he could get out of it, they’d have been glad to hear that he got his comeuppance. But, I just don’t think that Sam was one of the Republicans. He denies it, and I must say that I’ve never heard that he was, when usually I hear things like that. That’s why I came to see you, this morning, Reverend Mother. I hope you don’t mind, but you were there, weren’t you? You saw him with the gun in his hand, didn’t you? What was your impression?’

  The Reverend Mother shut her eyes for a second, though the vision of that scene yesterday morning was still quite clear on her inner eye.

  ‘He looked startled,’ she said slowly, ‘incredulous.’ She opened her eyes again, waited for a moment, still turning over the events of the morning within her mind. ‘He didn’t act like a guilty person,’ she continued. ‘He didn’t make any attempt to run, or even to hide the gun. The light was very poor there, yesterday morning, Patrick. There was a heavy wet fog. Sam could have just allowed the gun to slip down onto the ground, kicked it into the sawdust around the stalls and then disappeared. And, of course, one would have expected that the assassin would have moved away instantly, there was enough of a crowd around the entrance to the Grand Parade side of the market. He could have lost himself amongst them and been out on the street before people had recovered from the shock, but Sam didn’t do that. He just stood there, looking dazed. It was a couple of minutes, at least, before the beadles grabbed his arms. He had time to get away.’

  Just as the man in the belted raincoat and slouch hat had done, she thought, and then wondered whether Michael Skiddy had anything to do with the murder. He was a man who might have expected that the compensation paid for the burning of Cork would have given him his shop back a year ago. James Doyle, with his grandiose plans for personal fame and fortune, had scuppered the hopes of a lot of small businessmen. ‘Any useful witnesses?’ she asked aloud.

  Patrick shook his head. ‘That’s the extraordinary thing. I have statements from everyone there and they are all the same. Everyone heard the shot, moved back to the wall; goodness knows that’s not surprising. There’s been enough shooting in Cork over the last few years. You can see the same thing out in the streets if a car backfires. The instinct is to get your back to the wall, to get away from the line of fire.’

  ‘And no one saw anything?’

  ‘And no one saw anything except, of course, a minute or so later, Sam O’Mahony standing there with the gun in his hand. We have to hold onto him. He’s our only suspect at the moment. He had a motive, too, you know. He was sacked from his job because James Doyle made such a fuss over the article he wrote in the Cork Examiner, threatened to bring the paper to court unless the journalist was turned off instantly. And, of course, if we could prove that he was a member of the Republicans, well then any jury would probably convict him.’

  ‘So he had motive, opportunity, and, if you’re right about guns going missing on the night that Cork burned, well then he would have had the means, also.’

  ‘As you can imagine, my superintendent thinks that the case is shut. “We have our man!” that’s what he’s been saying. He’s applied for a court hearing already.’

  ‘But you’re not happy, Patrick, are you? And I agree with you. Sam O’Mahony didn’t act like or have the look of a man who had just committed a murder, but you have interviewed all present and got no satisfactory answers to your questions. Perhaps it is time to start asking other questions.’

  ‘Other questions?’ He had a half-startled, half-enquiring look on his face.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the Reverend Mother firmly. ‘If Sam O’Mahony did not murder James Doyle, then someone else did, and it has to be someone who was there at that Princes Street Market, between the fountain and the Grand Parade archway. So you start asking, was there anyone else there who would want to kill James Doyle.’

 
‘Do you mean that it wasn’t an assassination? A private murder?’

  The Reverend Mother ignored that question. ‘It would be easy enough,’ she mused. ‘It would be easy enough to drop the gun and melt away through the crowd if you were quick-witted and alert. Or perhaps not run away, but just move back with the rest of the people and counterfeit that same expression of shock and horror. No matter how used everyone is to gunfire, there is probably an initial few seconds when you freeze and then you move. In my case I was beside the buttered eggs stall when I heard the shot, and I was hardly aware of my movements but found myself flat against the wall a few seconds later. And the crowd that had been gathered around James Doyle in the centre of the aisle seemed to sweep me along. Others, of course, would be quicker on their feet than I would have been.’

  ‘So nobody was looking to see who fired the shot.’

  ‘Self-preservation seems to come first for us all – it’s instinctive, isn’t it? Do you know that the minute baby lizards are born, they immediately run away from their mother as otherwise she would eat them. Something I learned by sad experience in my youth,’ added the Reverend Mother as she noticed his startled expression.

  ‘Well, Sam’s mother is not like those lizard mothers,’ said Patrick ruefully. ‘I thought that she would eat me.’

  ‘He’s her whole life.’ The Reverend Mother thought about Mrs O’Mahony’s request to her. Was her conscience or a sense of righteousness worth two lives? What would she feel if she had to stand at the foot of a gallows and watch a young man die a terrible death from strangulation and a broken neck? Heart rending and almost unbearable for anyone; for a mother it would be worse than any torture. And she, Reverend Mother Aquinas, could prevent this event just by one small lie. Put like that, it seemed a trivial matter. And yet, she thought, once a sacred oath means nothing then the fabric of civilisation is torn down, the veil of the temple is rent. Somehow, she had to save Sam without flouting the laws of God and of man. She turned with a sudden energy to Patrick.

  ‘I don’t think that Sam is the murderer of James Doyle,’ she said decisively. ‘Let’s look at the others who were there, standing there, either around him, or by the stalls on either side of the corridor. Let’s consider their possible motives.’

  ‘Someone else who wanted to be revenged on James Doyle.’ Patrick’s eyes were thoughtful, reviewing the names of those present. ‘I suppose Sam wasn’t the only one who bore a grudge against him. I could start working on that, dig around a little, though I don’t think that the superintendent will be too happy.’

  ‘He didn’t have the reputation of being a very kind man, James Doyle, I mean,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘Perhaps you might find someone that he sacked from a job, someone who had been sent to prison on his evidence, some builder who knew that he would not be employed by him. Or, perhaps even more important, someone who felt threatened by him. I suppose that anger and greed are motives, but fear may be an even greater one. Some people collect guilty secrets and hold them as a threat over the heads of their victims. There have been a lot of foul deeds done in this city over the last five or six years. People have disappeared; murdered, one presumes. It seems to me that respect for human life is very low these days. Public assassinations can lead to private murders.’

  ‘I suppose of the people who were standing around that morning, the only ones who would have known him well would have been Mr Browne, who was his assistant, and is now acting city engineer …’ Patrick left a pause, waiting for her reaction, but she said nothing, just waited, so he went on. ‘And then there was the town planner, Captain Newenham. You know him, Reverend Mother, don’t you?’

  ‘I know him,’ she admitted, ‘but not well,’ she added. She would, she thought, keep her thoughts to herself for the moment about Captain Newenham. She would wait to see what Lucy thought.

  ‘And the bishop’s secretary, Father de Courcy, he was there, too, of course. And then there’s Michael Skiddy, the man who has the soap and candles stall. He was fined a few months ago at the district court for lobbing a stone at the car window when James Doyle was driving down the Grand Parade. I had to arrest the man, caution him, bring the case to court, though I’d have preferred just to warn him. There was no real damage to the car, Michael Skiddy was just letting off steam, but James Doyle insisted on him being prosecuted.’

  ‘And his anger could have festered during these few months.’ The Reverend Mother made up her mind. She had to do her best for Sam. If nothing else, multiple suspects could muddy the waters. She would give Patrick other suspects to investigate.

  ‘It may be nothing, Patrick,’ she said, ‘but I did notice a man at Mr Skiddy’s stall, wearing a belted raincoat and with his hat pulled down over his face. I saw him there before the lights went out, but when I looked afterwards, when the superintendent was telling everyone to stay still, well, he was no longer there. It may be, of course,’ she said after a minute when she tried to recall the scene exactly, ‘it may be that while everyone was looking at Sam, he made his way to the Grand Parade entrance. This was before the superintendent told everyone to stand still, so it could be that the man just did not want to be involved.’

  Patrick nodded and made a note. ‘I’ll have a word with Michael,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few others who moved off quickly. A lot of people in this city have learned to get out of the way fast once trouble starts. I’ll get Joe on to questioning the stallholders on the Grand Parade side, near to the Princes Street entrance. They would have been busy at the fish stalls since it was a Friday, but you’d never know. Some of those stallholders are very sharp. They learn to keep an eye on what is going on around them or else they start losing stock. And, of course, there’s young John Murphy, the butcher. He’s working with his brother now, but he owned one of the stalls that was burned out at the Patrick Street end of the market. He’s had no compensation; the stall was supposed to be rebuilt, but James Doyle was delaying the matter, hoping to get a bigger commission to redesign and rebuild the whole market.’

  ‘Yes, I saw him,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘He had a cleaver in his hand, though, not a gun.’ Her mind visualized a map of the English Market, built in the centre of a space between Patrick’s Street, the Grand Parade and Princes Street; it had entrances from all three of these places.

  ‘Could have dropped the one and picked up the other,’ said Patrick. He was pacing up and down energetically, only pausing now and then to make a note. ‘Well, Reverend Mother, you’ve given me lots of ideas. I’ll be off now. I’ll have a word with Michael Skiddy before I go back to the barracks. It will be interesting to see whether he knows the man with the hat pulled down over his face and whether he can explain why he suddenly blew out the candle and then disappeared. And, of course, if he went towards the Grand Parade side of the market, well then he would have passed the place where Sam O’Mahony was standing and he could well have dropped the gun there at his feet.’

  The Reverend Mother said her farewells. Patrick would do all the good police work, would survey the scene, take statements, painstakingly match accounts of what happened.

  As for her, she thought that a gossip with her cousin Lucy might be fruitful.

  SEVEN

  Cork Examiner:

  If G. Horgan is not returned by 4 o’clock on Today (Friday) 10 December, Rebels of Cork BEWARE!

  As one man and one shop shall disappear for each hour after the given time.

  Signed: The Black and Tans.

  ‘The superintendent told me to give you the Cork Examiner, inspector,’ said Tommy, the duty constable. ‘He’s marked a page for you.’

  The Cork Examiner had been opened at the advertisement page and was folded in half. A thick blue line from a nib that leaked ink into the paper had been drawn around one of the advertisements. It read:

  Our City Engineer was assassinated by the Sinn Féin party because of his religion. We call for the immediate arrest and execution of all those who planned and exe
cuted this deed.

  Signed: The Anti-Sinn Féin Party

  Patrick stared at it with annoyance. ‘As if things weren’t bad enough,’ he muttered. ‘I thought the Anti-Sinn Féin Party had gone quiet, these days.’

  ‘They say that they have a membership of 2000,’ said Tommy helpfully.

  ‘I wish the Cork Examiner would stop printing these things,’ muttered Patrick under his breath. The Cork Examiner had declared itself to be impartial, would print anything from either party, or, as Patrick thought privately, any advertisement that was paid for, no matter what trouble it caused. ‘Was he a Protestant, then, James Doyle?’ he asked aloud. The words of the beadle at the English Market came back to him suddenly. Tommy would know. He knew everything that was to be known about the inhabitants of Cork city.

  ‘Yes, he was, inspector,’ said Tommy. ‘Used to go to that big square church at the end of Anglesea Street, just opposite to the Blind Asylum. They say that he got a new roof put on the church with money that should have been used for the rebuilding of the library. Well, they’ll bury him there now, I suppose. I’ve seen him on a Sunday, with his shiny top hat and his polished boots. Used to look the real gentleman. You’d be surprised to know that his father was nothing but a poor tailor who worked in a cellar down in South Terrace.’