A Shocking Assassination

by Cora Harrison

  When it came to a matter that involved the merchant princes of Cork city, it was only sensible that a boy from the slums like himself should proceed with great care. He gave a quick glance across at Joe and saw that his assistant had laid down his pencil and so he rose to his feet.

  ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve been immensely helpful to us.’

  EIGHT

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Ordina, Deus meus, statum meum, ut faciam, tribue ut sciam; et da exsequi sicut oportet et expedit animae meae.

  (Regulate, oh God, my life; and grant that I may fulfil it as is fitting and profitable to my soul)

  Lucy was the Reverend Mother’s first cousin and a great friend. Though their lifestyles were so different, they shared a common background. They were quite near in age, but Lucy was so well preserved, so well dressed and so manicured, so much a product of skin cream and expert hairdressing, that she looked almost twenty years younger than her real age. She was the wife of a prosperous solicitor, Rupert Murphy, the senior member of a well-respected law firm on the South Mall. Rupert was immensely proud of his pretty and clever wife and rumour told that he consulted her about most matters and that he owed quite a lot of success to her sharp wits as well as her skill as a hostess.

  ‘I hear you were in the front line when James Doyle was assassinated,’ she said now, taking off her hat and studying her hair in the small mirror that hung over a chest of drawers. It had been dyed a subtle shade of ash blonde, warm enough to be flattering, but so cleverly done that it looked quite natural, neither blonde nor grey, just an elusive hue between both colours. ‘You nuns do get about,’ she added, carefully outlining her lips in soft pink and running a finger over her neat eyebrows.

  ‘Come and sit by the fire, Lucy.’ The Reverend Mother eyed her with affection. Lucy was her nearest relation, almost a sister to her, and though very different in almost every way, they had a relationship where much was understood by a nod and a quick glance.

  ‘Or don’t you think it was an assassination?’ Lucy gave her a keen look before she smoothed her fashionably short skirt and eyed her silk stockings with satisfaction.

  ‘I’m sure that you, out in the world, know more than I,’ said the Reverend Mother modestly.

  ‘Rubbish, you always find out about what’s going on; and don’t think I don’t know why I got a royal summons, today. You’re looking for information, so you might as well come straight out with it, Dottie.’

  ‘I was thinking about the Newenhams – our cousins. Which one was the father of the present man, Robert?’

  ‘Robert? He’s Timothy’s son. You remember Timothy, surely. He was gun-mad. And hunting-mad, too. Of course everyone hunted, but he took such a delight in it. Used to go out with the keeper stopping up earths and laying traps for badgers, bashing the unfortunate animal over the head, cutting off the foxes’ tails after the dogs had killed them – we never liked him much, did we? Robert is his. Must be in his late thirties. Not the eldest son; that was John. Yes, John was the heir. Robert was at the end of the tail, he went into the army.’

  ‘So he told me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have much money, Timothy pulled some strings to get him that job as town planner. But that would be all that there was to leave him. Even John’s not very well off, these days, I seem to remember hearing. Of course the value of land has dropped like a stone after all this wretched fighting. It’s bad enough in England; but over here it’s a disaster. I was talking to William Boyle the other day and he was saying that you might as well give the acres away these days.’

  ‘So you hob-nob with earls these days, Lucy; you must introduce him to me.’ said the Reverend Mother thinking that William Boyle, the Earl of Cork, should contribute to a Cork charity like her new enterprise.

  Lucy smiled demurely. ‘So what do you want to know about Robert Newenham? He was there, wasn’t he, standing there when James Doyle was shot. Rupert had all the news when he came home yesterday. Don’t tell me that the young man who shot him was one of your former pupils and you want to prove that he had nothing to do with it, even though half of Cork saw him with the gun in his hand. You want to muddy the waters, that’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sam O’Mahony is not one of my pupils and no one really knows who actually did shoot James Doyle. Post hoc is not necessarily propter hoc, you know.’

  ‘If you are going to talk Latin, I shall put on my hat and go,’ said Lucy firmly. ‘I suppose what you are trying to say is that it is not completely proved as yet.’

  ‘I don’t think that Sam did fire that shot. I think that he is telling the truth when he said that he picked up the gun when he felt it strike his foot. I think that the real murderer hastily dropped or threw the gun from him.’

  ‘And then ran away?’

  ‘Or perhaps, more cleverly still, did not run away but stayed with the crowd and gasped with horror at the deed.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Lucy thoughtfully. ‘And you think that it might be our dear cousin or second cousin, Robert, taking after his father, of course. How dear Timothy did love to kill things!’

  ‘It may not have been a random killing; somehow he struck me as a careful, cautious individual. He has a very expensive car, a Rolls Royce,’ added the Reverend Mother.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Lucy thoughtfully. ‘That’s interesting. He wouldn’t be that well paid, you know. There isn’t too much money around, these days. Not one of them, including the city engineer, is well-paid. A bad idea, according to Rupert. You can guess why, can’t you?’

  The Reverend Mother nodded thoughtfully. ‘Leaves them open to bribery, I suppose,’ she said placidly.

  ‘Nuns are such realists,’ murmured Lucy, sipping her tea elegantly. ‘The late lamented James Doyle was widely known as having a preference for builders who met him in a pub, handed him small oblong packets wrapped in plain brown paper and carefully tied with string. Or, better still, just left the packets on the table without a word. Rupert has a story about how James Doyle, pint of Murphy’s in one hand, without even glancing at the man, picked up his raincoat with the other hand and placed it neatly over one of these packets and it stayed there, safely hidden, until they had finished their drinks.’

  ‘And Robert Newenham?’

  ‘Never heard anything much about him,’ said Lucy regretfully. ‘He was supposed to be just a “yes man” – did what James Doyle wanted, signed anything put in front of him. He wouldn’t have the power in the same way, of course. Interesting that he has such an expensive car, though, isn’t it? Where do you suppose that he got the money? They didn’t get much when they were demobbed, you know.’

  ‘He was in the Dorsetshires Regiment, did you know that?’

  Lucy nodded briskly and then with a look at her cousin’s face added, ‘And?’

  ‘And so was Captain Charles Schulze, the man in charge of the regiment of auxiliaries who burned down the buildings in the city on that night two years ago, or so the postman told Sister Bernadette, but no doubt Rupert will know if that is true.’ The postman, she thought, probably had it right. He and the lamplighter usually knew what was going on. Their currency was gossip and they traded on it in the pubs and on the doorsteps.

  Lucy frowned thoughtfully. ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘You know there was a lot of talk about the fact that there was a list in the pocket of this Captain Schulze on that night. When someone shouted to him, “Stop your men; the owner of this shop is a Protestant!” apparently he took a piece of paper out of his pocket, looked at it and then put it away again and said, “I can’t help it; that number is here on my list.” Interesting, isn’t it? And who better to feed details about the owners of buildings and business premises than a town planner? And the same thing happened up in Dillons Cross. How could an Englishman know exactly which houses to burn and which ones to spare?’

  ‘And you think that Robert Newenham would be paid for information like that?’

  ‘Of course! Spying and pass
ing information was the best business in town a couple of years ago, Rupert says. The city would have been bankrupt, according to him, if the British weren’t pouring in money in an effort to hold onto the country. But of course, that wouldn’t be true any longer now that we’ve got our independence. Robert would have bought that car a couple of years ago, I’d say. He doesn’t live anywhere smart, just one of those villas up in Summerhill.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘The car was bought in January 1921, so a knowledgeable person told me.’ Her mind went to six-year-old Paddy Maloney. He was a bright boy. Yes, she thought, she could well describe him as knowledgeable. ‘And that,’ she added, ‘would have been one month after the burning down of Cork.’ She thought for a moment and then added, ‘If it’s true that it was discovered that he gave to Captain Schulze names and addresses of places to burn down in December 1920, then he would be a target for assassination by the Republicans.’

  ‘But it was James Doyle who was assassinated,’ pointed out Lucy. ‘And he wouldn’t have the same sort of knowledge available to him as Robert Newenham. In any case, why do it two years after it was all over and done with?’

  The Reverend Mother thought about that. It was true that the burning of Cork had happened more than two years ago. Nevertheless, she, more than Lucy, perhaps, knew that the aftermath of that terrible night had gone on resounding through the lives of ordinary people in the city. People, often quite humble people, like Patsy Mullane, the librarian who now swept the sawdust from the passageways in the English Market; people like Patsy who had lost a richly fulfilling job as a consequence of the burning of the Carnegie Library, and who was still waiting patiently for the rebuilding. And there were others who had lost a house, lost a room that they called home, lost a shop, like Michael Skiddy. And her own gardener who had lost his bicycle shop. Perhaps for these people it was not over and done with, but was a festering sore that needed a bloodletting to clear its effects.

  ‘What about,’ she began slowly, her thoughts ranging over the possibilities, ‘what about if it was Robert Newenham who gave that list to Captain Schulze, his fellow officer, his friend, perhaps, from their days in the same regiment during the war. He could have done that; been paid for it and so bought his expensive car; thought no one would ever know. And then somehow, James Doyle heard a rumour, got some proof, after all, he must have been in and out of the town planner’s office fairly often.’

  ‘Blackmail,’ purred Lucy.

  ‘It is possible, isn’t it? A list like that would probably have had a rough draft first of all; it would need a bit of checking, wouldn’t it? And then when he was sure of his facts he would probably have made a fair copy. In fact the original list may well have been on Cork City Council paper and that would have immediately led back to Robert Newenham if it fell into the hands of the Republicans, so he would have definitely copied it out onto a blank sheet of paper.’

  ‘And you think that that draft fell into the hands of James Doyle?’

  ‘It’s possible, isn’t it? By all accounts, it was chaotic that night. Something like a sheet of paper, a list, could have been dropped. James Doyle as city engineer would have been in and out of those half-burned-down buildings. There would be measurements to be made, floor space, height of building in comparison to its neighbours, the back yards and the lanes behind to be surveyed. He could have picked up a piece of paper on the Monday morning, or even on that Sunday. I understand that the place was crowded on that Sunday after the morning. All the children were full of tales when they came into school on the Monday morning. It was obvious that there would have to be a great new building project. After all Patrick Street is the focus of shopping in Cork, these days, isn’t it?’

  Lucy nodded. She wore the air of a woman who knew all that was to be known about the fashionable world and their shopping habits. ‘Yes, of course. No one that I know would dream of shopping in North Main Street or South Main Street. And I’ll tell you something else. Robert Newenham sent us a card for an invitation to a party to celebrate the reopening of the Munster Arcade and I remember saying to Rupert, “What fancy handwriting!”. It was like something that our grandmother might have written. I think he probably had an old-fashioned governess – the Newenhams were rich when we were young, were they not? They probably imported some governess from England, the boys went to school in England; I remember that. It was no wonder that when he left school he joined an English regiment and fought against the Germans. And some of these fellows, according to Rupert, found it hard to settle into the real world when they had left the army.’

  The Reverend Mother bowed her head and tucked her hands into her flowing sleeves. These young men who went off to the war in 1914, she thought, young men such as her relative Robert Newenham, and such as Captain Charles Schulze, they were not wholly mature, just overgrown school boys, dropped into a lifestyle as an army officer, where they were encouraged to be as violent as young boys will be if not checked. And then suddenly in 1918, the war was over and they were thrown, rudderless, into a totally different world. But Sam O’Mahony, if innocent, should not hang for the deed of another. She forced her brain to return to the practical matter before her.

  ‘So,’ she said briskly, ‘if James Doyle came across that piece of paper … It might have been scorched, half-burned even, but if the handwriting was as distinctive as you remember it to be, Lucy, then he might have said to himself, “This looks familiar”, and he might have wondered why, for the sake of argument, there was a tick or a cross placed opposite to each shop or business place number in the centre of the city.’

  ‘And then guessed,’ said Lucy triumphantly. ‘I’m sure that you are right. James Doyle was not a pleasant man, but he wasn’t stupid.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t be.’ Anyone in this city who rose up from a poor background, who rose from being the son of a jobbing tailor, working in a cellar which was workshop and home for himself and his family, anyone who managed to struggle out from that sort of poverty and gain a top position like city engineer would have been clever.

  And perhaps ruthless.

  ‘So, of course, if he found the list in Robert Newenham’s handwriting, he could have denounced him to the authorities, to the newspapers or he could have kept quiet and blackmailed him,’ she finished.

  ‘And, of course, Robert would have to pay and to go on paying. He would have lost his job if this got out, but more seriously, he would have been assassinated by the Republicans. His life would not have been worth this.’ And Lucy snapped a finger against a thumb and the blood-red nail varnish flashed in the firelight.

  ‘And he wouldn’t be rich, you think,’ mused the Reverend Mother.

  ‘Lives very poorly,’ confirmed Lucy. ‘He has rather dropped out of society. After all, he could hardly ask anyone to that poky little house of his in Summerhill, so people have stopped asking him to their parties. The last time that I met him was at that affair in the Munster Arcade and, of course, that was all paid for by the city council funds.’ She gave a demure smile and added, ‘Of course, my dearest Rupert would say that there is not a scrap of real evidence against the men. Solicitors are always so pernickety. Myself I go by the pricking of my thumbs, don’t you?’

  ‘I’d like to talk to him, to get some idea of what sort of person he is. Is he capable of murder? You know him. What do you think?’

  ‘Anyone is capable of murder if the motive is strong enough,’ said Lucy robustly. ‘I’m sure that when I was seventeen years old, if I’d had a pistol in my hand and a means of escape I would have murdered …’ She broke off, her mouth tight and her cousin did not ask her what she meant. The picture of that man, the sneering words, the threats that he had uttered were in both their minds, although it had all happened more than fifty years ago. Lucy had ended up with a happy life, but the conduct of a man who had been her guardian when she was in her teens would never be forgiven by her.

  But was it true that anyone could murder, she wondered? She d
idn’t think that Sam O’Mahony had murdered in order to revenge himself for the loss of a job, but his mother, she felt sure, would, if the opportunity presented itself, murder in order to safeguard her son’s life. Perhaps it was true that many people were capable of murder, given a strong emotion: fear for your safety, for your life, violent hate, motherly love, intense greed, emotional patriotism; yes, there were many situations she could envisage that would tempt many people into taking human life.

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Lucy thoughtfully. ‘Why don’t you get Robert Newenham here, go on about all your charitable works, make him think that you are going to ask for a donation and then when he starts to wriggle out of that, you can ask him to hold a party to raise funds for you. He’s the sort of man who likes to ingratiate himself with the important people in the city. The rebuilding of Roches Stores has finished now – they’ve made a splendid job of it. The city council will pay for the food and the drinks. I’ll tell you what, find out when he can come and then let me know and I’ll just happen to be there. I’ll take all the catering out of his hands, perhaps your girls can do some of it – we’ll make sure that the convent is paid for it. I’ll pretend to confer with him – he’ll be flattered,’ said Lucy complacently, sure of her position as a leading light in Cork society. ‘And I’ll make sure that he gets the right sort of guest list. It will be fun. And you will have an opportunity to cross-question him; otherwise you’d probably never see him again. And you can find out all that was going on in this rebuilding of Cork. Rupert says that it’s a hothouse of corruption, the whole business.’