‘Do you think that they are connected, then, Reverend Mother?’
‘What do you think, Eileen, you and Eamonn?’
‘We’re not sure,’ said Eileen. ‘We’ve been talking about it. But I wanted to tell you about that lot, well, some of them anyway, there is something funny about them. I saw James O’Reilly, the fellow in the bank, taking drugs. He took some white powder from something that looked like a woman’s compact. And Jonathon Power knew all about it. And I think from something he said that they are paying James O’Reilly to do something for them.’
‘Can you remember what he said?’ asked the Reverend Mother. ‘I’m sure that you can. I remember how very excellent you were at learning poetry off by heart.’
Eileen felt a little rush of pleasure. The Reverend Mother was always encouraging, but she was sparing of too much praise.
‘Yes, I do. It really made an impression on me because up to then I thought that Jonathon was a very nice fellow. I liked him much better than any of the other four men.’ She thought for a moment, trying to remember exactly how that English accent shaped the sound of the words. ‘“Just remember, James, you won’t get the money to fund that expensive little habit just from your salary in the bank. You need us more than we need you. Just you remember that.” He did sound very menacing when he said those words, Reverend Mother. I think that it scared James O’Reilly. Jonathon took his arm and led him back and I got the feeling that he was holding him up.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ said the Reverend Mother and Eileen got the impression that this was no news to the Reverend Mother. People told her things, told her secrets, she just sat there, with her hands tucked into her sleeves and it was a bit like going to confession. No matter what you had to say, there was no response, no gasps of horror, no disbelief. And then Eileen thought about the priest. Of course, that was why the Reverend Mother was so interested in this affair.
‘I saw James O’Reilly going into the Holy Trinity Church the day before Father Dominic was killed,’ she said. ‘I remember wondering why he was going to confession on a Wednesday. It seemed a funny thing for a bank clerk to be going to confession on a Wednesday. It’s mostly just women on weekdays. Most people wait until Saturday so that they have their soul clean for Sunday morning communion.’
‘They have a half day from the bank on Wednesday, don’t they?’ The Reverend Mother sounded rather absent-minded, thought Eileen.
‘And Tom Gamble, has a … well, he has a girlfriend, although he’s a married man. Eamonn has seen her. They’re a funny lot, all of them. And they seem to have money to burn.’
The Reverend Mother sat for a moment, deep in thought and then she roused herself.
‘“For the love of money is the root of all evil.” That is from the Bible, Eileen, and like a lot of things from the Bible, though not everything, there is considerable wisdom in the saying.’
‘Yes, Reverend Mother,’ said Eileen. The Reverend Mother, she thought, looked very old and quite sad. She had got to her feet and Eileen rose, also. She was beginning to follow the Reverend Mother’s thoughts. Perhaps between them they would clear the Republicans of a false suspicion. And find out who murdered these two very different men.
FIFTEEN
St Thomas Aquinas:
Ex nihil, nihil fit
(From nothing, nothing will be made.)
The Reverend Mother listened carefully to Jimmy’s disjointed story and tried to sort the truth from the fantasy.
‘So you and your cousins lit a fire in one of the old empty places,’ she said, going back to his words of earlier.
‘On a flagstone,’ said Jimmy virtuously. ‘I was the one to think of that. I told them not to light it near to the floor. All soft and crumbly some of that wood, you know, Reverend Mother.’
‘But it spread.’ Inevitable, of course with a crowd of excited small boys and all that lovely rotten wood, blazing like tinder. ‘That was a bit dangerous, wasn’t it?’
‘I told them. They didn’t take no notice of me. That’s because I’m the youngest.’ Jimmy’s face wore a disapproving look, the look of a boy who knows fires should not be lit in derelict buildings. But, after a minute, a smile began to pucker the corners of his cheeks. ‘You should have seen the flames, Reverend Mother. Jumping up. Size of giants, they were. You should have felt the heat from them!’
The Reverend Mother allowed him to talk. Experience had taught her that it would be of little use to express horror or to scold. The event was over until next year and by next year, any words of hers, uttered now, would be completely forgotten. Perhaps next year a bonfire could be organized on St Mary’s Isle, close to the river. Not so much fun, of course, as the excitement of almost burning down a derelict building and experiencing the heat and colours of your very own fire. Nevertheless, she made a mental note to try to organize something less dangerous, but fun for next midsummer’s night. If only there were more fathers around who were willing to pay some attention to the children they had generated. Perhaps Eileen could organize a few young men and Patrick a couple of bored policemen who could be assigned to look after public safety.
‘What happened next, Jimmy?’ she enquired, hoping that her face showed none of the horror that she was feeling at the thought of those small boys and a fire within a rotten building.
‘Well, that’s what I was telling you, Reverend Mother,’ said Jimmy. ‘The fire spread a bit and some of the floor slipped and the big piece of timber fell through the giant hole and there was a road down there and my cousin’s dog got himself free and he just jumped. We was all screaming. We thought he’d be burned to death, but then we heard him barking so Bob, my biggest cousin, he’s fourteen, he jumped up and down on one of the other floorboard and when he’d broke it, he smashed a giant big hole and he slipped down and then he shouted out that there were a million rats down there!’
‘A million,’ echoed the Reverend Mother in awestruck tones. Her mind was very busy.
‘That’s right and then Frank and Thady and Benjy went down and I followed them to keep an eye on them,’ said Jimmy, righteously determined to prove his superior virtue and law-abiding principles. Originally he stayed with his older cousins every Saturday night when his mother worked in a public house on South Main Street but she had the impression that he seemed to be there most of the time, now. She suspected that he was rather in awe of these cousins of his, and that he was bolstering his ego by imagining that he was in charge.
‘How far down was it? You jumped, didn’t you? How far a jump was it?’
‘About a million …’ Jimmy’s imagination began to falter.
‘Like from that chair to the ground?’ The scorn on his face was enough so she proceeded carefully. ‘Like from the top of that table to the ground, bigger than that, are you sure, Jimmy?’ Through long practice, she knew that her face bore a look of incredulous shock.
‘About from the top of the curtain to the ground,’ said Jimmy triumphantly.
‘Goodness, gracious me. Oh, Jimmy!’
Knock off a few feet, and that would be about eight to ten feet, she thought. Far too much for an ordinary foundation.
‘Tell me what happened next,’ she said.
‘We was all running after the dog and we was shouting, “Patch! Patch!” and …’
‘What was under your feet?’ asked the Reverend Mother.
‘A road,’ said Jimmy. ‘I was telling you, Reverend Mother, it was a road.’
‘Hard, like a road, are you sure, Jimmy, really sure?’
‘Really and truly, Reverend Mother, cross my heart and hope to die! It was a real road.’
‘And you were running, or were you crawling?’
‘Running,’ said Jimmy slightly impatiently. ‘Running real fast.’
‘Even the big boy, Bob?’
‘He was in front. I was catching up with him. And the rats were all running up the walls and scrabbling around over our heads.’
If a fourteen-year-old could run,
and if the rats were over all of their heads, then this underground road must have been at least six feet high.
‘The fire was big,’ she printed carefully. But then she crumpled up the piece of paper impatiently and flung it impatiently into the bin. No point in reducing the child’s dramatic story to the level of a primer, she thought.
‘It was a dark, dark night,’ she wrote, reading aloud as she went. She would do justice to his story. As good as Mr Wilkie Collins, she thought, as she strove for a clear and dramatic retelling. ‘And did you find the little dog, Patch, in the end?’ she asked. She had read it through twice, had asked for his opinion, had meekly changed certain words at his suggestion, but had made no effort to get him to read it. Let him enjoy his story without any of the accompanying feelings of shame or inadequacy. ‘And Patch,’ she wrote and then looked at him enquiringly.
‘You’ll never guess, Reverend Mother!’ He paused dramatically and then breathed. ‘Patch got right as far as the river and we found him inside a boat eating a giant rat.’
‘Inside a boat! A giant rat with a boat!’ Memories of one of Lucy’s grandchildren clutching The Wind in the Willows came to her mind. The little girl had been enchanted by the story, but the Reverend Mother had regretfully rejected the possibility of the children of her schools being equally enthralled by the whimsical adventures of Mole and Rat in their riverside boat.
Jimmy eyed her sternly. ‘It wasn’t the rat’s boat, Reverend Mother. It’s that boat that belongs to Mr Beamish. The fellow that goes rowing on the river. He’s made hiself a little shed for his boat, there under the quay. Got an iron ladder so that he can climb down to it. And ropes that tie it up, ropes tied to big iron handles into the side of the quay.’
‘Mr Robert Beamish.’ But she hardly waited for the reply. So Robert Beamish housed his boat on Jimmy’s underground road. That was very interesting. Her mind went back to her father’s tales about the building of the Holy Trinity Church. The foundations slipped and the building fell down, her father had related the story dramatically, but she strove to remember details of the rebuilding. Slab after slab of stone, she seemed to recollect. They had built pillars with the slabs. After all, the Cork builders had learned how to roof in rivers and streams and lay roads above the water. She seemed to remember that the Holy Trinity had been rebuilt using that same technique, erecting a platform and building the church on top of it.
Churches were very important in Cork and the collective memory was strong when it came to their history. Individual buildings, such as warehouses, though; that might be a different matter. It was hard now to picture how rapidly and excitingly the landscape of Cork city changed during the 1700s. And, of course, there must have been trial and error when marshes were being drained, quays constructed, streams and waterways roofed over. That triangular piece of land, named Morrison’s Island, less than twenty acres in its entirety, she thought, was valuable for the storage of goods, brought right to the centre of Cork in the small ships of the day. Perhaps, copying the second and successful attempt at building the Holy Trinity Church, these later warehouses, also, were built above the ground.
‘And we found Patch, safe and well, eating a giant rat inside a boat,’ she finished. So Robert Beamish must be aware of the subterranean remains of Morrison’s Island’s past. He lived, she remembered, close by, had lodgings above a solicitor’s office on the southern side of the South Mall, in a house that fronted on the South Mall, but whose rear overlooked Morrison’s Island. She took another piece of paper and she wrote rapidly, ‘Patrick, you might be interested in Jimmy’s story. Get him to tell you all about Mr Robert Beamish and his boat.’ Quickly she summarized the child’s words, added her memories about the building of Morrison’s Island and then she put the page into an envelope, sealed it and printed ‘Inspector Cashman’ on the outside.
‘I think that Inspector Cashman will be very interested in your story, Jimmy,’ she said, crossing the room to stand beneath the map. ‘I’d like you to tell him about everything if you agree? What do you think?’
‘I know him. He came to school with my mam, but he lives in Barrack Street, with all the other peelers, now,’ said Jimmy. He wore a wide smile. He was quite happy helping with the little children in Sister Philomena’s class, but delivering the Reverend Mother’s letters was his big excitement in life.
‘Now let’s see if we can find Barrack Street on the map,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you a clue. It begins with the same letter as “boat”. But,’ she paused dramatically, ‘I have another letter for you and it’s for Miss MacSweeney. Now let’s see, Jimmy, can you remember the first letter of her name?’
‘“M” for Mam,’ shouted Jimmy, his eyes swivelling towards the drawer where the sweets were kept.
‘The bank manager is here, Reverend Mother. I told him that I didn’t think that you were busy.’ Sister Bernadette gave a perfunctory knock on the door and then popped her head in, looking pointedly at Jimmy. According to Sister Mary Immaculate, the sisters in general, both the lay sisters and the professed nuns, felt that a busy woman like the Reverend Mother spent far too long with Jimmy and paid him far too much attention. The boy would be better off sent back to the Brothers, Sister Mary Immaculate had said and then, having received a cold stare, had fallen back feebly on her usual ‘I thought that you would like to know what was being said.’
‘Thank you, sister,’ said the Reverend Mother to Sister Bernadette. ‘I’ll ring when I’m ready for you to show him in. Now Jimmy, show me the way you will go to deliver the letter to Miss MacSweeney. Go there first. Yes, that’s right, just near to Dr Scher.’ She had little idea of how long it might take to print Jimmy’s little story, but the sooner it was begun, the better. ‘I’ll find the money, whatever it takes,’ she had promised Eileen recklessly, but hoped that this Republican printing press would be merciful towards her over-stretched purse.
‘It’s so very kind of you to call upon me, Mr Broadford. You’ll have a cup of tea; I’m sure. Sister …’ But Sister Bernadette had immediately fled to the kitchen to gather up a tasty snack. A bank manager was an important visitor. Even the most unworldly of the sisters knew that. The state of the weather, thought the Reverend Mother, would fill the gap nicely until tea arrived and so they discussed the terrible June, the torrents of rain that had fallen in the last twelve hours and the hot and sunny Junes of the past. He was new to his position, quite a young man for a responsible post, not too hidebound yet, she hoped as the tea trolley came in and he was cut the regulation chunk of cake by Sister Bernadette.
‘I won’t waste the time of a busy man like yourself,’ she said briskly, once he had swallowed his cup of tea and praised the cake. ‘The fact is, Mr Broadford, I find it hard to make ends meet, as you may have noticed from our account. The new furniture for our infants’ class was expensive and our fundraising for it a little disappointing.’ As a charity, it had not appealed to the merchants of Cork – they had found extravagant the idea of buying child-sized tables and chairs to replace the old-fashioned metal-bound desks where tiny children balanced on ledge-like seats with no support for legs or backs. She had stubbornly gone ahead, but now finances were restricted.
‘Perhaps an overdraft,’ suggested Mr Broadford. ‘Would that suit your needs? We wouldn’t want to keep you short with all the good work you do here in this convent.’
She felt her face relax into a smile. ‘Would it be possible? I wondered whether His Lordship, the bishop would need to be …’
She allowed the words to trail away and looked at him enquiringly.
‘No, no,’ he said soothingly. ‘Just a little arrangement between ourselves. Let me see, the bishop’s secretary audits your accounts at the end of the financial year in April – so about another nine months. We’ll have everything straight for him, by then, don’t you worry, Reverend Mother. The thing is to have the account looking healthy at the end of each month. Try to pay your bills in the beginning of the month. Leave it in my hands. Bless you, Reveren
d Mother; big businesses do this all the time.’
‘You are very kind,’ said the Reverend Mother. She said this so often that it had become almost a meaningless phrase for her, but this time she meant it. It would be so wonderful to leave all financial matters in someone’s safekeeping. She would be delighted to leave her accounts in his hands. She had often wished that some truly mathematical girl would decide to become a nun and she could hand over the money affairs to her. It didn’t seem to happen, though. The mathematical girls seemed not to be endowed with vocations for life in a convent. She tended to get the dreamers, the lovers of sentimental poetry and the idealistic girls coming to her, full of enthusiasm for a life of prayer and of self-sacrifice. ‘I am most grateful to you,’ she added.
‘I am very glad to be able to be of service to you,’ he said and then hesitated a little. ‘You were very good to my mother and she has never forgotten you. When she heard that I was to be promoted to Cork, the first thing she said was, “You must go and see Reverend Mother Aquinas. I owe everything to her teaching. Her name was Agatha Colfer, but I don’t suppose that you remember her,’ he added, though he looked at her hopefully.
‘Of course I remember Agatha,’ said the Reverend Mother after a hasty trawl through memory. Colfer was a Waterford name – quite unusual in Cork. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I remember her well. A bright girl, a pleasure to teach.’
And an extremely stubborn one, she thought, looking back into the past. She almost smiled to think of the battles that she had with Agatha who was determined to leave school and to get a job in a public house, instead of staying on and attaining her Intermediate Certificate. But the Reverend Mother had won. Agatha had done very well at that examination and by some marvellous piece of luck had got a job as a junior clerk in a bank somewhere in west Waterford. It must be more than forty years ago, she thought, as she sent her love to Agatha.
Beyond Absolution Page 21
