‘How are you, Sam?’ she said passing her hand beneath the barrier and gripping his firmly.
‘Not too bad,’ he said and she could not tell from his expression whether he had felt the small, thin piece of paper torn from a cheap jotter. She kept her hand in his.
‘Don’t despair, Sam,’ she said earnestly. ‘We’re all –’ she allowed a small pause to ensue before finishing with the conventional – ‘praying for you.’ He knew her link with the Republicans and knew that daring raids and rescues had been effected by them. He himself had written a dramatic article about the attack on St Luke’s Barracks.
She felt his hand move within hers and the slight scratch of well-trimmed nails and then he had taken his hand away. She took her own hand back and laid both hands, palms upturned on the shelf beneath the barrier. The piece of paper had disappeared.
‘We all know that you didn’t do it, Sam,’ she said earnestly.
‘No talking about the case,’ said the warder from behind her and that gave her an opportunity to turn and look at him. She got up and moved over and stood before him, her head bowed, the very picture, she hoped, of submission and respectable poverty.
‘What can I talk about, sir,’ she whispered loudly.
He looked at her with amusement. ‘Talk about anything you like, my darling, talk dirty to your young man if you want to. I don’t care. I’ll just be sitting here reading my newspaper peacefully. Just don’t mention the case that has yet to be tried.’ And then ostentatiously he yawned and turned over to the death notices in the Examiner. She waited for an extra moment, as though overwhelmed with fear or embarrassment and then she moved back and took her seat again beside her mother. Sam, she noticed with satisfaction, had just finished chewing something and now his hands lay in front of him, conspicuously empty. He was a quick reader. He would have had plenty of time to understand and memorize the short message. There was a new expression on his face, now, though she could see how he tried to subdue it.
‘We got a lift in this morning with the man who brings fowl to the English Market,’ said her mother suddenly. ‘You wouldn’t believe this, Sam, but he turned out to be a cousin of mine, and a cousin to your grandmother, too, Lord have mercy on her soul. He was talking to me about her. She was buried on the night of the Big Wind, would you credit that?’
Sam was looking slightly startled but he rallied enough to insert the conventional: ‘It’s a small world’ and then sat back and allowed her to fill the uneasy silence with a long and complicated tale about this mythical relation that Sam shared with them and of the various things that had happened to her throughout her life. Eileen watched him and saw him relax into a grin. There was nothing that he and she could discuss. Not the murder, not their love for each other, not her belief in his innocence. She blessed her mother’s talent for making up stories. No one could object to this flow of reminiscences and anecdotes. Beneath it, her eyes met Sam’s and she deliberately looked around, directing his towards the figure of the warder, immersed in his newspaper and the telephone and the door to the outside. And then their eyes locked for a long moment.
‘I remember her,’ he said aloud, addressing himself to her mother. ‘She drank a few pints of stout a day, a great one for the stout, she was, wasn’t she?’
‘Never!’ By now her mother had begun to believe in this mythical grandmother of Sam’s and her voice was loud and emphatic. ‘I’ll have you know, young man, that your grandmother was a living saint. Wore out her knees, she did, what with all the praying. And the rosaries that she would be saying all the night long!’
Eileen began to feel that her mother had gone beyond her brief. If it were the same warder tomorrow, he would be astonished that such a talkative woman had suddenly turned dumb. In any event, he gave an enormous yawn, as though he was finding the conversation to be very dull.
‘One more minute,’ he said warningly and she seized the opportunity.
‘We’ll come again tomorrow at the same time, Sam,’ she said and then added in as petulant a tone as she could manage, ‘And perhaps I’ll be allowed to do a bit of the talking myself then, otherwise, I’m just not coming.’
And her mother, her magnificent mother, born to be on the stage, said in resigned tones, ‘I won’t say a word, alannah, cross my heart and hope to die. You can talk to your heart’s content. I won’t say a word from start to finish.’
‘That will be the day,’ said the warder. He gave a wink at Sam, and then he bent over his desk, lifted the telephone and said abruptly into it, ‘Visitors are leaving.’ He put the instrument down, turned around, dragging the keys from his pocket, and leaned down to open the door.
Eileen, followed by her mother, was right behind him, waiting patiently to be escorted out and through the double set of gates.
THIRTEEN
St Thomas Aquinas:
Etsi homines falles, deum fallere non poteris.
(You may deceive men, however, it is not possible to deceive God)
‘Dr Scher to see you, Reverend Mother,’ said Sister Bernadette, adding hastily, ‘he said to tell you that it was urgent and that he wouldn’t keep you for too long.’
The Reverend Mother paused. She had been on her way to the senior classroom on this Tuesday morning. She was loathe to allow anything to interfere with her precious teaching time, but Dr Scher had never before sent a request like that. His usual practice was to arrive at the end of the school day, or during the weekend, with, always, a joking pretence of just passing the door and being overwhelmed with longing for Sister Bernadette’s fruitcake, or else using the excuse of visiting Sister Assumpta who had been gently fading away for the past twenty years and would probably have another year or two in the same state. He was not a man to say that a matter was urgent unless it truly was. Quickly she thrust the pile of copy books into Sister Bernadette’s hands.
‘Bring Dr Scher into my room, and then find Sister Mary Immaculate and ask her to take my class for the moment. The girls can be doing their corrections and reading my notes. Oh, and, sister,’ she called after the retreating figure, ‘we won’t need any tea or refreshments.’
If Dr Scher said it was urgent, then she wanted no interruptions, no small talk while awaiting the appearance of the tea trolley. She hoped that her face had not betrayed her, but she was apprehensive. There was a name in her mind. Dr Scher knew that Eileen had been a pupil of hers and that she was fond of the girl. Had she been arrested for some illegal activity? Her heart gave a painful lurch. The new Free State had proved itself even more savage than the occupying English troops in crushing all opposition. There had been several Republicans shot or hanged inside the grounds of Cork Gaol and their bodies thrown into an unmarked grave.
She seated herself at the desk and awaited him, quietly tucking her hands into the large sleeves of her habit and placing her feet side by side beneath the desk. Her face, she knew, would show nothing.
Dr Scher’s face, though, was filled with distress. He often, she had thought in the past, had the comfortable, chubby look of one of those teddy bears displayed in the windows of the expensive shops in St Patrick Street at Christmas time, but now he wore a wilted, depressed look, and there were black shadows under his brown eyes. He came in silently and dropped into a chair beside the fire without saying a word.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked as soon as the door had closed behind a puzzled Sister Bernadette.
‘There was a shoot-up at the Coal Quay Market last night,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘A ship had delivered corn and the prices were sky high. The Republicans wanted a free distribution of a hundred-weight sack for each family. Just the one-off distribution and after that the corn could be sold at any prices they liked. Well, of course, that could not be allowed. A bit too Utopian, wasn’t it? The army was sent down from Collins Barracks and it all turned into a pitched battle. The usual thing. Luckily no deaths, but lots of gunshot wounds and one lorry crashed into a wall when the driver was shot in the arm and the fellows in
it were all badly injured, really smashed up, not like good, clean gunshot wounds. Anyway,’ he said and he bore, she thought, the aspect of a man reluctantly coming to the point, ‘anyway,’ he repeated, ‘the hospital was working at full strength so when the guards were called out to a woman who had taken poison, Patrick sent someone for me. He’s a sensible lad; knew that taking her to hospital would probably end with a long wait and then a dead body; they would have had no time to deal with her with men bleeding to death under their hands.’
The Reverend Mother cautiously let out a breath. The woman, it appeared, was not dead. But would Dr Scher call the seventeen-year-old Eileen a woman?
‘Who was the woman?’
He did not reply to this question, but bent down and opened his attaché case. ‘This was on the table in her room. It’s addressed to you.’
He handed over a brown-paper-wrapped small parcel addressed in strong bold capital letters to: ‘THE REVEREND MOTHER, ST MARY’S OF THE ISLE’.
Not Eileen, she thought, as she struggled with the knots in the string. She knew her handwriting, a close imitation of her own italic hand. The parcel felt limp and flexible and once the brown paper was off she could see that it was a parcel of three school copy books, just like the ones that she had sent across to Sister Mary Immaculate. These, however, were twice the usual bulk and not filled with written work, but every page had a cut-out article from the Cork Examiner pasted upon it. The Reverend Mother turned over the pages. The first article was dated almost three years ago and the last in the book at the bottom of the pile was dated several months ago and dealt with the corruption among those charged with the rebuilding of the burned-down city and ended with a list of questions aimed at the city engineer’s office. Well-written and no doubt the young author of the articles was clever enough to know that you cannot libel an office, only an individual. Nevertheless, Sam O’Mahony had lost his job at the Cork Examiner. She put down the third copy book carefully on her desk and looked up at Dr Scher who was now striding restlessly around the room.
‘Mrs O’Mahony?’ There was a question in her voice, though she had already guessed the answer, and he just nodded in reply.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘The woman in the room below the O’Mahony’s place heard the sound of terrible banging, as though someone was calling for her, she thought. She went up the stairs as quickly as she could go but by the time she raised the latch the sounds had stopped and Mrs O’Mahony was lying unconscious on the floor. She didn’t know what to do, but she ran down into the street and by a piece of luck, Patrick was there, patrolling Kryls Quay with his men. The disturbance at the Coal Quay Market was over and done with, but he was just making sure that all was quiet before he left the place. It was lucky that the woman found him. He sent one of his men to the hospital for an ambulance and sent young Joe down to the South Terrace to get me.
‘And?’
‘Well, violent shaking and then unconsciousness sounded like rat poison to me, so I grabbed some tannic acid and some chloroform and jumped into my car and was there in a few minutes. She was too far gone to be sure of saving her, but I did my best until the ambulance came. They pumped out her stomach when they got her there.’
‘Did they find out what was wrong with her?’
‘What I had expected. She had swallowed rat poison. A lot of the deaths in this city, by accident or by design, are due to rat poison. The place is full of it.’
‘Was it an accident?’
Dr Scher shook his head sadly. ‘She left a note …’ He hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘It was beside the parcel that she had addressed to you. She had meant to slip it inside, I think.’
‘What did it say?’ The Reverend Mother had begun to stretch out her hand and then withdrew it. No doubt the note was now in possession of the police.
‘It said: “I can’t go on” …’ Dr Scher said the four words slowly and his brown eyes were moist. ‘Poor woman,’ he added. ‘There was an ink blot on the page as though she had dropped the pen then, probably had begun to feel ill. She would have been shaking violently. That’s what happens. A sort of rigor sets in. I don’t think there is much hope for her, to be honest. Her jaw had begun to lock. I gave her as much chloroform as I could before I left the hospital and now it’s a matter of waiting. Poor thing. A terrible way to kill herself.’
‘Suicide?’ The Reverend Mother heard her voice shake. Mrs O’Mahony had threatened it in her hearing. What was it that she had said? I can’t see myself wanting to live if Sam is taken from me – so you will have my death, also, on your head.
‘I wouldn’t have thought that she would do such a thing,’ she said after a long breath to control her voice. ‘Not while there was still hope, not while Sam was still alive and needed her.’
‘The dark hours of the night …’ said Dr Scher. ‘She had had her supper, but she hadn’t eaten all of it. There was half a drisheen left in a frying pan and it looked as though she had an egg with it and she had eaten half a slice of soda bread. And there was an empty cup with tea leaves in it.’
The last supper, thought the Reverend Mother. In the Bible the Last Supper had been followed by despair. Mrs O’Mahony had no one to watch with her during her agony. She bowed her head and said nothing. She heard, rather than saw, Dr Scher move towards the doorway. His words came back to her.
‘I’ll drop in again later on. I’m off to the hospital now. I haven’t much hope, though. That rat poison is terrible stuff. That poor boy in prison. What a terrible, terrible thing. Someone will have to break very bad news to him, I fear.’
And with that he went away abruptly, not waiting for her to ring the bell so that Sister Bernadette could conduct him to the doorway with her usual ceremony. When he left the room, the Reverend Mother tried to rise to her feet, but she felt her legs trembling. She seemed to hear the words of Mrs O’Mahony scurrying around in her head. What’s a small lie compared to a human life. We tell lies all the time; and it’s not a lie; Sam was standing just in front of my stall and I saw the pencil in one hand and the notebook in the other. I saw him a second before I heard the gun.
And then more words, self-accusing words: vain-glorious; puritanical; hypocritical; false, unkind, uncharitable.
She put both hands on to her desk and managed to lever herself up. Sister Mary Immaculate and all of her senior class for English Studies would have seen Dr Scher go down the pathway towards the gate and they would be expecting her. She forced herself to walk in as upright a fashion as she could manage and to ignore the trembling of her legs as she entered the classroom, thanked Sister Mary Immaculate and then turned to the girls.
‘Before we start, I would like you to say three Hail Marys for a special intention,’ she said.
And as the young voices chanted the words at the usual breakneck speed, her mind, gravely and solemnly enunciated the sentence from the Bible: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.’
Dr Scher’s battered Humber car was in the roadway when the children were going home from school that afternoon. The Reverend Mother was at the gate lending an ear to the mother of a fourteen-year-old girl who had taken to slipping out of the family’s one-roomed accommodation late in the evening and walking around the quays with her school friends.
‘I’ve talked and talked until I am blue in the face, but not a blind bit of notice will she take of me. So I said to myself, I’ll just pop along and have a word with the Reverend Mother and she’ll be able to sort her out.’ The woman looked at her trustfully.
‘I’ll have a word with them all,’ said the Reverend Mother. Her tone, she realized with compunction, was a little absent-minded. She was busy studying Dr Scher’s face. Was the news good or bad? It was difficult to tell. Death, for a doctor, especially for one who conducted autopsies for the police, was probably a weekly occurrence, at least, she thought. And suicide, as well as murder, happened often
in this city of abject poverty living side-by-side with great wealth. With an effort she turned back to the woman.
‘You’re quite right, Mrs O’Callaghan,’ she said briskly. ‘I’ll have a word with Annie and the other girls about the dangers of going down the quays at night. And remember, you’re the mother and she is the child. It’s for you to say what she should or should not do. Don’t allow any argument.’ Privately she felt sorry for the lively girls who did not want to spend their evenings cooped up in one damp room with a depressed parent and lots of small brothers and sisters. If only some philanthropist would set up a place where these girls and boys could go of an evening. Her cousin Lucy’s grandchildren were mad on jazz, according to Lucy. No doubt, the girls of her school would like an opportunity to listen to music, also. The difference was that instead of listening to records in their own or in friends’ houses, going to concert halls and cinemas, these children had to hang around the public houses. How much, she wondered, as she took leave of Mrs O’Callaghan, would a Victrola phonograph cost? And which rich businessman could she persuade to donate one to the school?
And then she forgot about Annie O’Callaghan and her friends. Dr Scher had got out of his car, moodily slamming the slightly warped door with a noise which caused heads to turn. As he came towards her, she read the news in his downcast face. She asked no question, however, when he approached her.
‘Come in and join me in a cup of tea, doctor,’ she said quietly. ‘I usually have one just after school finishes.’ She gave a quick glance around. Child abuse and child prostitution was a major problem in this part of the city and she tried to make sure that every child in her school was collected by a parent or went home with neighbours, or in a large enough group of the older girls so that a predator could not target a solitary unhappy youngster and win confidence with presents of sweets or some tawdry ribbons.
A Shocking Assassination Page 15
