by AJ Wright
The expression on his face suggested an uncertainty as to the exact nature of the visit. Personal, or official?
‘My dear Ambrose,’ said the chief constable, reading the expression and reaching out to grasp the great man’s hand. ‘I have come merely to offer my very sincerest condolences.’
‘Thank you. Thank you. Please.’
He indicated a leather armchair that stood before the hearth. As his visitor sat down, he followed suit in the companion chair.
‘It goes without saying, Ambrose, that we are doing our utmost to bring the … we are doing our utmost to bring this to a speedy conclusion.’
‘Of course.’
‘I have my finest detective, Sergeant Brennan, on the case. He is a rather tenacious character, and if anyone can bring the guilty one to justice …’ He let the encomium fade into inference, and immediately lowered his voice. ‘Your brother was a fine man.’
‘None finer.’
‘I can see him now, regaling us all with his experiences in Chicago. How he wasn’t annoyed that the Monster Cheese from Canada was bigger than the piece of cannel coal he was exhibiting because … how did he put it?’
‘“My exhibit had a far sweeter smell!”’ Ambrose added, and both men laughed gently at the memory.
There was a pause then, a mournful and companionable silence, during which Alexander Bell watched the slow sway of the candle flames for a few minutes.
Finally, he said, ‘Confidentially, Ambrose, it is entirely possible that we may have a suspect in custody as we speak.’
‘Indeed?’ Ambrose Morris’s eyebrows rose up, whether to express satisfaction or incredulity it was impossible to say.
At that moment Mrs Prudence Morris entered the room, and Captain Bell immediately stood. He had known her for years, and had always been impressed by the gentle way she comported herself. He knew she suffered from a debilitating rheumatic condition, sometimes walking with a spring in her step, while at other times she could barely walk at all and required the support of a walking stick.
If Arthur were regarded as the lion of the relationship, she might well be regarded as the lamb. Indeed, where Arthur blustered and allowed his whiskers to bristle and crackle like a forest fire whenever he was crossed in debate or thwarted in some way, Prudence would lay a hand on his arm, give it a gentle squeeze, and smile at every one of her guests the way a mother would. It was to protect and to scold at the same time.
A part of Alexander Bell had always been smitten by her elegance, by the decorous beauty she must undoubtedly have once been and still retained despite the slow corrugation of time. It was a layer of regard he naturally kept hidden to observe the proprieties of social intercourse.
Ambrose immediately went to her and offered her his seat, which she accepted with a curt nod.
‘Thank you for coming, Alexander,’ she said in a hoarse whisper.
He wondered how many tears she had already got through. Her eyes were indeed rimmed with a redness beneath the black weeping veil. She wore a black crape dress, unadorned and without the usual fripperies found on other, more joyous occasions. On her head she wore a widow’s cap.
‘My condolences, ma’am,’ he bowed his head.
‘They say the veil should be worn back, on the head. But I prefer the old traditions.’ Her voice was low and timorous. ‘Are you here in … an official capacity?’
‘Merely as a friend.’
She gazed up and looked into her brother-in-law’s eyes. ‘Where is my son?’
When she spoke, there was, Bell thought, an asperity in her voice. It was no surprise to him. It was known among their circle that she merely tolerated her brother-in-law. Some had suggested she found his confidence altogether overpowering, while others, of whom Alexander Bell was one, thought that she felt her husband, despite his shrewd if sometimes acerbic business acumen, was somehow eclipsed by his proximity to the greatness of Westminster. Not even death had thawed the coldness she showed towards him.
‘He left some time ago.’
She cast her eyes to the carpet. ‘A great pity,’ she said, almost to herself.
As Molly Haggerty made her way home with the others, she kept her head bowed low beneath her shawl. The others were walking arm in arm, giggling and making the occasional ribald comment to whichever youth was foolish enough to stop on the pavement and offer some injudicious comment.
‘You all right, Moll?’ one of them asked.
‘Course,’ she said, hoping the brevity of her response would forestall any further query.
‘Only you look pale.’
Before she could respond, she felt a hand tug at her skirts. She wheeled round, about to give whoever dared touch her a mouthful, when she saw a small ragamuffin, no older than seven, with dirt smeared across his face and a tight curl to his pinched lips. His coat was stained and filthy, and he was shivering badly.
‘This your new fella, Moll?’ May Calderbank called out with a nudge and a smirk that spread across the row of girls like the rattle of a loom. Despite the child’s tender years, the girls tried to outdo each other in coarseness.
‘What d’you want?’ Molly asked.
‘Him o’er yonder s-says can you s-spare a word.’
The child swept an arm across the road and pointed a thin finger. A tram was rattling its way past, and as it moved along he came into view, standing on the opposite side of the road, framed by the doorway of a shop. It was Ranicar’s Emporium. There seemed something morbidly fitting about him standing outside a funeral shop.
Michael Brennan sat in the small alcove at the furthest end of the bar, his favourite spot when he needed to converse and where he was in little danger of being overheard.
Constable Jaggery sat rubbing his hands and contemplating the thick froth of the pint before him. His glinting eyes, the ruddy glow of his flushed cheeks, were obvious signs of his pleasure.
‘So,’ Brennan began, ‘Saturday night Mr Arthur Morris was found savagely done to death in Scholes. Our house enquiries have yielded a sum total of nothing.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Strange, isn’t it, Constable? Of all the Saturday nights in the year, Arthur Morris is killed on this one.’
‘Why’s that strange?’
‘You tell me what Scholes would be like if this strike hadn’t gripped its throat and choked the life out of it. On a Saturday night?’
Jaggery saw what the sergeant was getting at. He’d spent enough time on the streets in that district knocking drunken heads together and breaking up innumerable fights, Saturday night being by far the worst. The pubs were alive with singing, yelling, and all manner of cursing until the early hours. There would be public houses filled to the rafters, many with Irishmen singing their sad laments of the old country, laments that would be liberally peppered with tales of murderous excesses by the forces of the Crown, of glorious sacrifices from young revolutionaries, and the bright green hope of a country free from John Bull’s yoke. The police never went there alone, and on many occasions the cells at the station were so full they had to commandeer the cellars of compliant public houses to keep some of the offenders locked up in what was in truth a most ironic incarceration.
But on the night Morris was found – and for a good few weeks before that – the public houses had served a mere trickle of customers. Money was in scarce supply, and children had to be fed. There was little singing these days.
‘So,’ Brennan went on, ‘either the good folk of Scholes were fast asleep at the time of the assault – which, according to Doctor Monroe probably took place sometime before midnight – or they’ve all become victims of a rare plague that renders everyone not only blind but deaf as well.’
‘They hated him, Sergeant. I reckon if the streets had been packed wi’ folk dancin’ on the cobbles no bugger would’ve seen owt. Else they’d have danced round the body like a tribe of savages.’
‘Well then. Let’s say no one saw or heard a thing. Unlikely, but impossible to disprove.’
He raised a fi
nger.
‘Question number one. What was the man who locally instigated the coal dispute doing in the middle of Scholes where he is hated? Two.’ He raised another finger. ‘How did Arthur Morris get there?’
‘Cab?’
‘Possibly. Or omnibus. There’s no tram service into Standish, but the omnibus runs along the main road into town. From there he could have walked to Scholes. Or again, taken a cab. Ask around the hackney drivers, see if any of them took a fare up to Scholes Saturday night.’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
Jaggery took another sip, wondering which one of the constables owed him a favour. Buggered if he was going to spend a day talking to sour-faced cabbies in the freezing bloody cold.
‘Three. Was he the victim of a spur of the moment attack? You know the sort of thing: “Hey, that looks like Arthur Morris, I think I’ll stab him to death with this long-bladed knife I happen to have in my pocket.”’
Jaggery frowned. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely, Sergeant.’
Brennan sighed, wondering if irony could ever permeate that stubborn and unimaginative skull of his. ‘Fourth question. Who had reason to kill the victim?’
Jaggery was about to say something, but stopped himself just in time.
‘Other than everyone above the age of five in Scholes. Question number five. Who is the one-eyed man?’
Jaggery, who hadn’t been privy to either the interview with Muldoon or its outcome, wondered if the sergeant was suffering from brain fever.
Quickly, he explained the significance of his cryptic comment. ‘According to Jem Muldoon, he’s been seen hanging around some of the public houses up there. Strangers, especially one-eyed ones, arouse interest.’
‘Could be owt. Could be nowt,’ was Jaggery’s pithy response.
‘I agree. Still, it’s something we can pursue, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
‘And soon I must speak with the family. Ambrose Morris is back from London. He was present at the dinner on the night his brother was killed. He may have noticed something, spoken in confidence to him. He may even be able to give us the answer to question number six.’
‘Not another, Sergeant.’
The elevation of a sixth digit, from the left hand, gave him his answer.
‘What, if anything, is the significance of the scribbled note found in the dead man’s pocket? “Strike causes hell – O Lord end suffrin. Or die.” It’s obviously some kind of threat.’
‘An’ thousands could’ve written it.’
Brennan grunted. ‘But why should such a scrawled threat send Arthur Morris to Scholes in such haste? And how would he know where to go to seek out the writer of such a threat? Unless …’
Jaggery slurped at his pint, knowing when to keep his mouth metaphorically shut.
‘Unless he recognised the handwriting. In which case he would need no address, would he?’
‘Buggered if I know,’ the constable sighed, scratching his head in confusion.
‘Oh, and one more thing.’
‘Bloody hell. What now?’
‘How did Frank Latchford know that Morris had been stabbed through the heart?’
After they had explored several possible versions of what might have happened that night – and having come up with no rational explanation for question number one, from which all other questions and answers sprang – they parted company just before closing time.
A thick fog had descended. The cloying white mist clung to every building, every lamp post, in a chilled embrace. Immediately, they both felt the cold pinch their cheeks, the pub warmth vanishing so rapidly it felt as if they’d been suddenly immersed in a vat of crushed ice. Constable Jaggery coughed and spat a mouthful of phlegm as he heaved himself aboard the last tram, while Brennan shook the haze of the smoke-filled pub from his mind and resolved to walk home, despite the freezing fog and the curious effect it had on his sense of direction.
Wallgate sloped downwards, past the railway station of the same name and beneath the bridge, so it was a relatively simple matter to find his bearings. Not even fog could cause the walls of a railway bridge to vanish.
As he got to the walls, and reached out to feel the thick coating of ice that followed the contours of the misshapen bricks like a shroud, he thought he heard something. An echo. With each step he took, he heard a corresponding echo a split second behind him, step … step … step … step. When he stopped, the echo stopped. A trick of the fog, perhaps?
He gave a shrug and continued to walk.
But so did the echo.
He turned round and faced the way he had come. ‘Anyone there?’ he called out.
Silence. The silence of the fog. Thick. Hovering.
He swallowed hard and resumed his journey. Keep the pace quick, he told himself. It’s just this damned fog. Quick, but just the sane side of running.
Straight along, then turn left at the second street, past St Joseph’s Church on Caroline Street. Then a matter of cutting through a small entry that led on to his street. He made his way along the pavement, passing the church on his left and noticing the heavy wooden doors locked shut at this hour. Fleetingly he thought of frozen statues inside, and the sanctuary of the holy ground, the peace of the altar and the wary solitude of the confessional. He turned round once more, but could see nothing in the thick swirl of mist that turned the route he had taken into a mere memory. In his haste he slipped on treacherous cobblestones, crossing the street to the entry and reaching out to steady himself in the narrow confines of its walls.
That was where they got him.
CHAPTER SIX
When she was Bridie Hanlon, back in Charlestown, County Mayo, she had spoken at great length to her parish priest, Father James Higgins, about joining the sisterhood. She had sat for many an hour in his house on Chapel Street, sharing with him her plans for the future and a life devoted to the service of Jesus in the closeted sanctuary of Carmelite prayer and the contemplative life. There seemed something safe, something sacred, in kneeling day after day clad in the brown scapular knowing that you were one among many, praying alongside others who had the same love in their hearts, and devoting your life to Jesus and the selfless devotion of the Blessed Virgin.
Then she turned fourteen and saw a rather different future for herself, as the good and wise Father Higgins had predicted.
‘Sure, ye have no vocation, child. Just a yearnin’ for escape, an’ a yearnin’ for peace. Ye want love, in both senses of the phrase.’
Father Higgins knew her father well.
Now, as she lay there in the dark, listening to little Tommy in the next room snoring gently, she let herself drift back to those days.
To the time she was sixteen and she met Seamus, who breezed into her life with all the force of an Atlantic gale, with his tall stories and his mischievous grin and that mop of jet-black curls.
Seamus Haggerty.
‘Sure an’ I’ll break every bone in his body!’ her da had yelled when he caught them doing what they shouldn’t on a village trip to nearby Tample to visit St Attracta’s Well.
He had made sure Father Higgins was informed, too: a shrine dedicated to St Attracta, and whose holy waters from the bullaun were said to cure rickets, and that sinful daughter of his sees fit to commit all manner of lewdness which was ‘not only an insult to the holy saint who was converted by Saint Patrick himself, but to the hundreds of wee children whose tortured wee bones would even now be aching in shame at what she had done. D’ye think she’ll burn in hell, Father?’
‘Sure it was only a kiss, Da!’ she had complained with a blushing nod to the good Father, whose kindly frown showed he already accepted the inappropriateness of her Carmelite pretensions.
‘There’s no such bloody thing as only a kiss!’ snarled her da. ‘Beggin’ ye pardon, Father.’
The young Bridie had never realised a chaste kiss could cause so much agony.
She smiled now as she recalled the whispered communications from the
bedroom window a few weeks after the thrashing, the wild, hasty plan to flee to England where the streets were paved with coal dust, the flight through the night vaguely reminding her of something biblical, terrified of turning round in case she became a pillar of salt, and then the landing at Liverpool, the strange confusion of accents, the foreign country that was Wigan. And Scholes, where Seamus’s grandmother lived.
The bitch.
‘Sure she can stay here, Seamus me boy, when she’s bringin’ in the money an’ not before.’
And she had promptly arranged for her to begin work as a skivvying domestic.
As a kitchen maid at the grand home of Mr Arthur Morris. Where, as a live-in servant, she lasted a whole three months, seeing Seamus rarely, gradually growing more and more despondent at his inability to stand up to the ferocious harridan that was his grandmother. Then two things happened within a fortnight of each other. The first was a letter from Seamus informing her that the bitch was dead.
The second was what happened in the laundry room.
The stinking hot cigar breath. The frantic fumbling. The indescribable pain.
For years afterwards, she convinced herself that God had His reasons for allowing the molestation to take place, for He had already provided her means of escape with Seamus assuming the tenancy of the house in Scholes.
And so he became her knight in shining armour once more, and within a few months they were married.
But for a long time, the shadow of what had happened to her at the Morris residence was always trailing behind her. It darkened her dreams, and she would wake in the middle of the night in a cold, damp sweat, unable to explain to her new husband that the nightmare that lay siege to her sleeping hours had been real.
