Beyond Absolution

by Cora Harrison

  ‘But when you’re drinking, time passes quickly.’ Dr Scher gave a wise nod.

  ‘Why did Eamonn feel that he had to keep an eye on them?’ asked the Reverend Mother.

  ‘He was very honest about it. He said that he knew it was not a Republican killing and therefore it had to be one of the man’s friends.’

  ‘And could it be?’

  Patrick thought that he saw a glint of interest in the Reverend Mother’s eyes. She was worried about Eileen, he thought.

  ‘Not, if everyone was telling me the truth,’ he said briefly. ‘And if someone was lying then everyone was lying. There’s absolutely no way out of that place except for the front door, or the front window. You know how they are built, terraced and back to back, just one tiny window at the Charlotte Quay end. They were all in the front of the shop, the bottles and the glasses were on the counter. Jonathon had asked Robert to help him to carry down a table that he had been working on upstairs. Miss Morgan had gone to the bathroom and Rose O’Reilly had gone to look at one of the newly cleaned pictures, and then, it seems they all started drinking again and didn’t notice the time passing until I arrived. Took me ten minutes to arrive, I’d say, add another three or four for Eileen MacSweeney to get across to the Imperial Hotel and get the porter to phone the duty sergeant. He came straight upstairs to me. I hadn’t gone to bed and I went immediately.’ He thought back on the evidence that he had taken the night before. And why should anyone of them murder Peter Doyle? And if someone did, why should everyone else lie to protect the guilty person? Once again, he wondered whether they were all in it. That was the only possibility that seemed to make sense. The Reverend Mother wore a very pensive look and he waited for her to respond.

  She seemed to think for a moment, and then to make up her mind. ‘Patrick, on Saturday afternoon, my cousin took me to the antiques shop to buy me a present.’ She got to her feet and took the silver tray from her desk. ‘I chose this.’

  ‘Good piece of Cork silver,’ interjected Dr Scher.

  ‘Yes, but that wasn’t my reason for choosing it. Both my cousin and I remembered a silver tray, with one missing handle, just like this one, lying on the hall table of a house, Shanbally House, which you may remember was supposedly burned down by the Republicans some time last year.’

  ‘Supposedly …’ put in Dr Scher, and Patrick nodded quietly. Things were beginning to come together. Suspicions that had been in his mind during that midnight interview seemed to crystalize.

  ‘The ceramic hawk, Dr Scher,’ he said. ‘The superintendent said that you reported Father Dominic was upset about a ceramic hawk. Did you and your cousin notice the ceramic hawk, Reverend Mother?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, we both remembered the hawk, a Japanese Arita hawk. It stood on a shelf in the corner of the stairs in Shanbally House. I remembered two hawks. And when I remarked on it, my cousin recollected how one was broken and the other damaged. The hawk in the antiques shop was damaged on the beak. There were other things in the shop, also, that we were sure came from that house.’

  ‘So you think that Peter Doyle was connected with the Republican movement,’ said Patrick.

  The Reverend Mother shook her head. ‘I am fairly satisfied that he was not,’ she said. ‘Forgive me if I don’t mention my source of information.’

  Eileen MacSweeney, thought Patrick, but he nodded. Bother, he thought, just when things were beginning to get sewn up, they began to unravel again.

  ‘There were other pieces, other antiques, vases, furniture, as well as silver, from houses that my cousin and I remembered, but that had been burned down, supposedly by the Republicans.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ said Patrick.

  ‘When I was young, my cousin and I often visited the houses of the Anglo-Irish. My family were wine merchants and they supplied most of those families,’ she said quietly. ‘Father Dominic is an old friend of mine. He and his brother, the present prior of the Capuchins in the city, Prior Lawrence, they also knew all of these houses. I have a very clear recollection of us all as visitors, spending time in houses that have been burned down during the last few years. Many of the houses were quite shabby, even then – the Great Famine had reduced the rents. Nevertheless, these families had been in the past very rich with huge estates and the houses were treasuries of Georgian furniture, silver, glass and paintings. How easy and how lucrative to stock an antiques shop from articles from these burned-down houses.’ She sat back and tucked her hands into her sleeves.

  ‘You’re suggesting that the antiques shop stocked their shelves by simply raiding these old houses of the Protestant ascendancy.’

  ‘Very lucrative,’ said Dr Scher.

  ‘Very,’ agreed the Reverend Mother. ‘Think of the price of your coffee pot, Dr Scher.’

  ‘A spectacular fire in the front of the building and a lorry around the back,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Precisely,’ said the Reverend Mother. Patrick was glad to see her smile. He was beginning to feel a certain excitement rising within him. He hadn’t noticed a lorry when he had called to the shop, but that man, who had given evidence about seeing Peter Doyle, had talked about filling their lorry with petrol. Why a lorry when anything bought in the shop could be delivered more easily in a van? He had not thought of that at the time, but now it seemed to him significant. And the man had mentioned cans. Why should people working in an antiques shop need cans of petrol? But the IRA had lorries; many of them captured from the British army. And the accounts of the burning down of those houses were all the same. A lorry drove up, masked men jumped out, carrying cans of petrol. Went into the house and gave the inhabitants twenty minutes to get out. Yes, it all began to make sense.

  ‘And if Father Dominic had come to the same conclusion as you and your cousin …?’ he asked.

  ‘He would have tackled the man instantly,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘Dominic was a very straightforward person. He would have thought of it as a matter of saving a man’s soul.’

  ‘So, Father Dominic visits the antique shop, sees the ceramic hawk, recognizes that it comes from a house supposedly burned down by the IRA, perhaps, like you and your cousin, Reverend Mother, he recognizes other things. Then he goes and has a word with Peter Doyle and Peter Doyle tells him some lie or other, perhaps, but realizes that the game is up. He has to get rid of the priest, but he doesn’t want any suspicion to come to his door. And where is the last place that you would expect to find an Englishman and a Protestant,’ he said to Dr Scher.

  ‘I don’t know, Patrick, you tell me.’ Dr Scher glanced over at the Reverend Mother. She had a very reserved look on her face. She knows something else, thought Patrick, but she may not want to tell me.

  ‘In a Catholic church, of course,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Well done, Dr Scher. Without your account of seeing Father Dominic in the shop and noticing his distress at the sight of this Japanese hawk – well, Peter Doyle would have been the last person in the world to be suspected. But, of course, Father Dominic was called the IRA priest by some people. He visited them in jail; I know that.’

  ‘So you’ve solved both murders, you think,’ said Dr Scher. ‘Peter Doyle murdered Father Dominic. And the Republicans murdered Peter Doyle.’

  ‘For a moment I thought that was a good solution, but now I’m not sure. The Reverend Mother doesn’t think so. Her informant denied that the Republicans had anything to do with it, and I’d say that her informant was well-informed,’ said Patrick. ‘That young man with Eileen had the look of a Republican. A lot of those college boys joined up. He had been a medical student, apparently.’ Patrick delved in his pocket, held the card out towards them both. ‘And then there is this. It puzzles me a little. Do you see anything odd about this, Reverend Mother, Dr Scher?’ he asked, looking from one face to the other.

  ‘I may touch?’ asked the Reverend Mother.

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ said Patrick.

  She took the card, went over to the window and put it down on the small table tha
t stood there. Dr Scher followed her.

  ‘I had to copy this out for the Examiner reporter. I tried to do it like a picture image, to copy it exactly as it was written and I found …’

  ‘That the lettering was odd,’ said the Reverend Mother quietly, ‘inconsistent,’ she added.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Patrick.

  ‘I didn’t notice that,’ said Dr Scher and then he nodded, ‘but, yes, I can see now.’

  ‘The “o” is what I noticed first,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s quite different in “found” to the way that it is written in “of” and again slightly different in the word “order”. I think someone tried to disguise the handwriting. And yet it seems unlikely that anyone in the IRA would want to do that. We’ve seen some of their stuff before, just straightforward printing. Still, one never knows.’ The Reverend Mother, he thought, was staring very intently at the card. It was hard to read anything from a nun’s face. The white linen wimple that smoothly covered the forehead right down to the eyebrows gave them an untroubled look. He produced his notebook.

  ‘No one knows who wrote that card,’ he said, ‘but I thought that I might collect samples of handwriting from everyone possible that night and so I wrote out a statement here, mainly based on what Miss Gamble told me, and then I asked everyone to print their name and address beneath it.’

  ‘Printing so that you could compare with the card. But you don’t really suspect any of that crowd, do you? Why should they kill Peter Doyle, even if he killed Father Dominic? Father Dominic was nothing to them.’ Dr Scher sounded impatient.

  Patrick’s eyes were on the Reverend Mother. After a moment, she placed a forefinger under the ‘o’s of Jonathon.’

  ‘I noticed that, too,’ said Patrick.

  ‘I remember admiring the sign outside the shop. The style is Gothic, very well done. He is a most artistic young man,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘This is a modified style, of course, but the letter “o” has that angular shape.’

  ‘And, apparently, he is the partner. That’s what he said, anyway. Miss Gamble was talking about him selling up and going back to England. It would be interesting to look at the bank statements. If we are right and they are getting all of their goods free of charge, then the profits, once they had paid for the renovation of the shop, must be enormous.’

  ‘Doesn’t strike me as the type who would kill a harmless old priest, though, does he?’ said Dr Scher. ‘I’d have thought that the other fellow, Peter Doyle, would have been the more likely of the two. What do you think, Patrick? And you, Reverend Mother? You met them both, didn’t you?’

  ‘“There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”,’ said the Reverend Mother.

  Probably Shakespeare, thought Patrick. A fleeting thought crossed his mind. Would he have been a more educated person if he had stayed on at the convent, rather than going to the hard labour and monotonous rote learning which brought the Christian Brothers such good examination results from slum children like himself. Eileen, he remembered, had quoted Shakespeare last night.

  ‘I think that it makes sense that it is a revenge killing,’ said Dr Scher decisively. ‘There must be a connection and that makes sense. Don’t you agree, Reverend Mother?’

  ‘And the only people who would want to avenge Father Dominic would be the Republicans, is that what you are thinking, Dr Scher?’

  ‘No family, had he, Reverend Mother?’ asked Dr Scher. ‘Except for that elderly prior, his brother, poor man.’

  ‘None, except for the prior,’ said the Reverend Mother. And then there was a silence. She seemed, thought Patrick, to be thinking hard and when she spoke, it was with her usual decisiveness.

  ‘I would say, Patrick, that both murders were committed by the same hand. A murder breeds fear, and fear, in its turn, breeds more murders.’

  THIRTEEN

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  ‘Scimus quod aedificati parietes non prius tignorum pondus accipiunt, nisi a novitatis suae humore siccentur; ne si ante pondera quam solidentur, accipian.’

  (We know that, while walls are still new and damp, they cannot bear weight; and if a weight be placed upon them before they be dry, the whole building will fall to the ground.)

  From four to five in the afternoon, when the children had gone home, was always a quiet time at the convent. The Reverend Mother was conscious that she was very tired. Dominic’s funeral had been sad. A pointless death, she had thought. She found anger welling up in her and tried to suppress it. Recently she had found that anxiety or emotion seemed to cause breathlessness. I must take care of myself, she thought, but knew that she would have no rest until she worked out why the gentle priest had been slaughtered. For once, the midsummer weather was kind and the Reverend Mother took herself out into the garden and admired the rows of vegetables, which, by her orders, were gradually replacing the sterile ornamental clumps of Pampas grass and the odd, starkly-solitary rhododendron.

  ‘Vegetables takes lots of work,’ warned her gardener.

  ‘Well, you will have saved all that time that used to be spent mowing grass and pruning bushes,’ said the Reverend Mother crisply. She wasn’t going to have any criticism of her lovely vegetables. Rows and rows of dark green potato leaves, runner beans shooting up higher every day, feathery carrot foliage; whenever the Reverend Mother felt depressed, she came out and looked at them and diverted her mind by planning. By the autumn, they might be able to offer a midday meal to the children. She gave herself a little treat by imagining their delight at the sight of a heaped plate.

  There was a snail-infested summerhouse at the bottom of the garden, near to the river and she eyed it with sudden interest. It had been donated about two years ago by the heartbroken father of a new recruit. He imagined, no doubt, his pious daughter sitting there with her rosary beads. The reality of teaching ABC to slum children, however, proved too much for the carefully nurtured girl and she had left the convent after the first six months. The Reverend Mother had thought of mentioning the summerhouse at the time, but then refrained. It might be useful one day.

  ‘Hens!’ she said aloud and then turned away as she saw a few heads of nuns who were enjoying the sunshine turn towards her. She walked briskly towards the summerhouse. Yes, it was ideal. And a sawmill not far away! She was sure that she could get them to donate a cartload of sawdust from time to time to cover the concrete base and with a bit of luck they might even donate a few planks to make perches. She was a little vague about the needs of hens, but very sure of their benefits. They surely would not cost much to keep. Hens could eat the slugs and snails that infested this damp land around the river. They would also consume waste from the kitchen and in return, they would produce eggs that could be made into nourishing dishes for the children.

  Feeling cheered up by this idea, the Reverend Mother went indoors to find Sister Mary Immaculate.

  ‘Oblige me by chaperoning me on a walk,’ she said briskly. The woman had been complaining of a headache and would be the better for a little fresh air and exercise, but only sighed heavily at any suggestion that she should go out-of-doors. However, there was a rule somewhere or other among the tons of paper that she had inherited, that stated sisters should always be accompanied by another when walking through the town. In order to avoid giving scandal, she seemed to remember. She, personally, never took much notice of that rule, but Sister Mary Immaculate would find it important. It worked, anyway, as the nun rose obediently at the words. She didn’t look well, despite Dr Scher’s tonic, thought the Reverend Mother. But then she had looked like that since the day when Father Dominic was found dead in the confessional stall. And the news of the murder of Peter Doyle had brought on another fit of hysteria, causing her to sob in the middle of the evening meal and to declare that no one was safe these days.

  What was the connection between the murders? The Reverend Mother thought about the matter while making routine enquiries about her deputy’s state of health. After all, it may have been a coincidence. P
eter Doyle, a business man from England, a man with a certain mystery about him; his murder was more understandable than the killing of a saintly priest inside a confessional stall. And the copycat nature of the murder, the use of a hairpin, the note supposedly from the Republicans, these could have just been an effort to establish a connection, where, in fact, there was none. Someone may have wanted to get rid of Peter Doyle; may have seized upon the murder of Father Dominic as an ideal smokescreen. Somehow, she didn’t think so. And then, with a qualm of conscience, she turned her full attention to Sister Mary Immaculate.

  ‘Just look at the size of that runner bean. It’s a good six inches higher than it was yesterday,’ she said enthusiastically to her unresponsive companion.

  Sister Mary Immaculate stared dully at the base of the runner bean and sighed heavily. The Reverend Mother controlled the exasperated words that rose to her mind and persevered. The woman did not look well, she told herself firmly.

  ‘I must bring Jimmy out here and tell him the story of Jack and the Beanstalk,’ she said. ‘I wonder whether if I wrote out the story a sentence at a time and got him to repeat the sentence back to me that he might get the notion that reading is fun.’ She was talking for the sake of talking, but to her surprise, Sister Mary Immaculate turned an animated, if annoyed face towards her.

  ‘That child is a liar, Reverend Mother,’ she said vehemently. ‘I don’t think that you should encourage him to believe in fairy stories. He makes up enough of them himself. I had to be very cross with him when I overheard him the other day in the playground. He was telling a very tall story about his cousins to some of the little children. He had them all sitting on the ground, pretending to be a teacher, if you please, and he was telling them some ridiculous tale.’