Sister Caravaggio

by Maeve Binchy

  She had brought her elbow up to deliver a defensive chop when she smelt a very dusky perfume, undercut with hints of tuberose.

  ‘We’d heard you’d found your true callin’, Detective Sergeant Dunwoody,’ whispered Natalie Scanlon.

  Alice brought down her elbow. A round-faced, once-pretty woman with hair dyed raven black and wearing enormous earrings was sitting beside her.

  ‘I was just leaving, Mrs Scanlon. Now if you wouldn’t mind …’

  ‘Please!’

  Alice felt her arm gripped again. She drew in her breath. Two large glassy tears were rolling down Natalie Scanlon’s cheeks. Maggie was transfixed.

  ‘My Bruno’s gone missin’,’ she whispered.

  ‘How do you mean, missing?’ Alice asked.

  ‘I don’t know what’s goin’ on.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Will you help me?’ Natalie asked. ‘Please. Deep down he’s a good man.’ Maggie looked pleadingly at Alice.

  ‘Mrs Scanlon, I’m the last person on earth you should ask to help find your husband.’

  ‘He looks up to you, honest he does,’ said Natalie Scanlon. ‘He respects you.’

  ‘We could just try a teeny bit,’ Maggie suggested.

  ‘Maggie!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘He lights candles for you,’ Natalie said.

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ Alice cried. ‘Come on, drink up, Maggie.’ ‘On the heads of my children, I swear it,’ Natalie said.

  ‘On the heads of her children,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Please, Detective Dunwoody,’ Natalie said imploringly. ‘I’m beggin’ you. Will you help me? I don’t want Bruno to die.’

  Alice took a deep breath. ‘Okay, I’ll find him,’ she said, and lowered her glass. ‘Yes, I will, yes.’

  Doonlish

  17 June, 7.00 AM

  Bruno Scanlon had left Dublin after six. He was hungry. He hated getting up early and having his routine disturbed. This morning he had persuaded himself to do so on the basis that he would have breakfast on the road. Double eggs, over easy, black and white puddings, rashers, hash browns and a steak done Southern chicken style. Except that there was no place open and no service stations existed on the effin’ motorway. By the time he reached Doonlish, Bruno would have eaten roadkill. Bruno had gone to ground – for his own sake and for his family’s. If Natalie didn’t know where he was, then she couldn’t tell Brice, even if he tortured her. The thought of Natalie being tortured made Bruno want to cry. Eff it! Why had he ever taken on this job?

  The Wicklow hills came into view on the left, their light and colours ever-changing. Bruno’s last conversation with Jeremy Meadowfield had been by public telephone on the morning of the robbery. Meadowfield had been so scared, he was unable to speak.

  ‘Have you got the effin’ painting?’ Bruno had roared into the phone. ‘The Cara-effin-vaggio?’

  But the line went dead. That was the last Bruno had seen or heard of the pansy bastard. Until two days later, of course, on the Six One News.

  Something had happened, Bruno thought despairingly, something really bad. Meadowfield, the fool, had been intercepted. Or, worse, amateur that he was, he had subcontracted the job. Oh, Jesus, Bruno thought as he got chest pains. That’s what happened! Meadowfield had laid off the risk and given the job to someone else. Which meant that the painting on which Bruno’s life now depended was in the hands of someone else entirely – a person, or persons, who wouldn’t care if Bruno Scanlon lived or died.

  As he came into Doonlish, he made a decision to buy a defibrillator and keep it in the car at all times. The village was still asleep. Abbey Motors had the shutters down. Beside it, Beppe’s Bistro was also closed, but two trays of milk had already been delivered to the door. Bruno pulled over, nicked a two-litre plastic carton and gulped it down as he sped away. He belched. Now he had heartburn.

  He drew level with an elderly man, eased down the car window to ask directions, but then decided not to. The sat-nav instructions to Meadowfield’s house were clear. As the window hummed closed, Bruno heard a church bell in the distance. It might do him no harm to get down on his knees and say a few prayers, he reflected. He remembered the rosary from his childhood, the whole family kneeling around a picture of the Sacred Heart, and his father, a man with a list of criminal convictions that ran to six pages, giving out the Sorrowful Mysteries. The Queen of Heaven had made Bruno feel loved; he had prayed hard as a child, his head lowered, his little chin tucked into his chest. Mother of Mercy, To Thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. Bruno sighed deeply. It would be good to pray again.

  But not just yet, he decided, as he drove through the village and out the road about half a mile until he came to a lane. Moss crunched beneath the car’s wheels as Bruno funnelled in between neatly trimmed hedges. Bruno hated the countryside, the abundance of nature. He parked outside the thatched cottage and got out. The silence was oppressive. A cow looked over a hedge. Jesus! Bruno hadn’t been as near to meat this size since he was last in Shanahan’s Steak House. He wished he’d brought his iPod, on which he’d installed a track with background city sounds, especially for a job like this.

  ‘Eff off!’ he growled at the cow as he pushed in the little white gate.

  He took out a large screwdriver from his jacket pocket and approached the hall door. The screwdriver’s blade bore the stain of dried blood. It slid gently into place between the door and the frame. Twenty seconds later, he was inside, sitting at a cheap desk, rummaging through the drawers.

  Bruno frowned. He was sure he’d locked the hall door behind him. A shadow had fallen over the desk. Bruno tried to turn around.

  Chapter Five

  Doonlish

  17 June, 8 AM

  Davy Rainbow had awoken at four with a splitting headache, drunk six pints of water, swallowed four aspirin, gone back to bed and slept for three and a half hours. Now he was showered, dressed and, for the first time in years, utterly resolved. Although Sister Diana had tried to trade the information he wanted, Davy had resisted.

  ‘We need to turn it into cash, Davy,’ she had said and clenched her big fist, ‘and we need to do it fast, before anyone else finds it.’

  ‘First, I’m going to check out what you’ve just told me,’ Davy said, ‘and then, Di, you know what? If you’ve told me the truth, you can keep whatever it makes for yourself.’

  Sister Diana’s dense eyebrows plunged together.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ she asked. ‘Do you know how much money is involved? Have you forgotten how much you owe the bookies?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Davy said. ‘It’s not the money I want.’

  And for the first time ever, Sister Diana had looked at him with genuine respect.

  Now he bit his lip nervously as he looked at his wooden dresser. He imagined as he stared at the upper shelf that he could actually see the catch that made the panel slide back. Sister Diana knew where Davy was headed. She knew how long it would take him to drive there and back. What if she came in here and tore the place apart? The secret hiding place was the only leverage Davy had over her.

  And then a calm came over Davy – a type of serenity that he recognised with almost pathetic gratitude. He would find her and all would be well again. She was all that mattered. Making a quick sign of the cross, he gathered his car keys and went out.

  Dublin – Doonlish

  17 June, 10.30 AM

  Green fields stretched to the horizon on either side as Maggie sat in the passenger seat, immersed in her laptop. Alice hit her hand hard against the steering wheel. Snap into what Eckhart Tolle has made a fortune out of! The Obvious. The Present Tense. The Now. The Caravaggio! Where is the Caravaggio, she asked herself? Think outside the box. The answer was there, right in front of her.

  Her hands were firm on the steering wheel of the Berlingo, though her eyes kept darting down to the changing images on Maggie’s laptop screen.

  ‘Stop flipping.’


  ‘Oh, look!’ Maggie shouted, so loud that Alice wondered had she found the painting.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Filthy Manky Little Bitches.’

  ‘What?’

  Alice glanced down at the laptop screen and saw a quartet of girls in torn jeans with their tattooed arms around each other.

  ‘Filthy Manky Little Bitches is my niece’s rock band,’ said Maggie. ‘They’re very good, or so I’m told.’

  Alice swerved around a crossing cat as Maggie mewed with pleasure.

  Ned had called Alice thirty minutes before, just when Alice had decided that the best way to find the painting was by perpetual contemplation.

  What Ned had reported had made all the hairs on Alice’s neck bristle.

  ‘And look at this!’ Maggie said.

  ‘More members of your family?’

  ‘No – it’s a picture of Sister Columba.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Taken on a sports day forty years ago and later published in her school magazine. On the gym team. She’s got terrible acne,’ Maggie said, and touched her own smooth face for reassurance.

  ‘The gym team?’

  Maggie turned the laptop so that Alice could see the tiny novice mistress, her elfin face peeping from a mass of athletic female bodies.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Alice murmured as she drove through the gates of Doon Abbey and pulled up. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  Doonlish

  17 June, 10.40 AM

  The Limousin heifers were in the far end of the field, away from the convent gate lodge, munching with archetypal calm. A steady stream of white smoke rose from the gate-lodge chimney into the blue sky. Water dribbled from the over-full barrel, which had taken last night’s rain from the roof gutters. Bees buzzed in and out among the nasturtiums. In the window nearest the door, a blue-veined hand moved the curtain aside and quickly dropped it again. Panda, the convent’s sleeping black-and-white tomcat, outside on the window ledge, awoke, stirred a paw.

  ‘Panda, love,’ Maggie murmured with a surge of guilt.

  Alice pressed hard on the ceramic bell. Inside, the chimes could be heard echoing and dying. As Panda stood and arched his back in a prolonged stretch, a noise came from within as the iris of an eye disappeared from the spy-hole. Bolts were being drawn across; then the door opened slightly until it was held taut by a hefty chain. Two heads appeared, one on top of the other.

  ‘Thanks be to God. We thought it might be her back again,’ whispered Eleanor Hogan.

  ‘Her back again,’ echoed Gabrielle.

  ‘I’m Sister Alice, this is Sister Mary Magdalene,’ Alice said, ‘from the abbey, ladies.’

  The twin sisters gawked.

  ‘We’ve changed into summer clothes,’ Alice explained. ‘It’s easier when we leave the convent.’

  ‘We have permission,’ Maggie added, in a way that immediately suggested they didn’t.

  Panda made a lunge to get in through the narrow aperture, but met the barrier of four shins. He bounced back out.

  ‘May we come in?’ Alice asked.

  The door was unlocked and they stepped into the chilly hall. In her heels, Maggie was towering over the elderly twins.

  ‘Would you care for tea, Sisters?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘If you don’t mind, not this morning, but next time,’ Alice said. ‘Now, ladies, can you tell us exactly what you told Mr O’Loughlin?’ ‘Ned – he’s such a nice young man,’ Eleanor beamed.

  ‘Yes, he is lovely, isn’t he?’ Maggie said.

  Don’t start me, Alice thought.

  ‘Well, Gabrielle was outside, cutting nasturtiums for breakfast,’

  Eleanor said, ‘weren’t you, Gabrielle?’

  ‘They keep us both regular,’ Gabrielle whispered.

  ‘And the next thing, there was this enormous woman in a huge hat standing beside her!’ Eleanor cried. ‘Isn’t that right, Gabrielle?’ ‘A very strange lady with a huge big green hat,’ Gabrielle confirmed.

  ‘In what way was she strange?’ Alice asked.

  ‘The way she stared at you. Isn’t that right, Gabrielle?’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Oh, God forgive me, the way she stared at me!’ Gabrielle cried.

  ‘Can you describe her?’ Alice asked gently. ‘Gabrielle?’

  Gabrielle looked to her sister and took a deep breath. ‘She was wearing dark glasses and her nose was very long and fat. But her hands …’

  ‘What about her hands?’ Alice asked.

  ‘They were huge,’ Gabrielle said. ‘And she had them clenched in two big fists. I was terrified, Sister, absolutely terrified.’

  You had right to be, Alice thought, as the CCTV images from Liffey Valley flashed through her mind.

  ‘But she was beautifully dressed, wasn’t she, Gabrielle?’ Eleanor piped up.

  ‘Oh yes, beautifully dressed,’ Gabrielle said.

  ‘And what did she say to you, Gabrielle?’ Alice asked.

  ‘She asked her for directions to poor Mr Meadowfield’s cottage, and the minute she told her, she tore away like a bat out of hell,’ Eleanor replied.

  ‘Like a bat out of hell,’ echoed Gabrielle.

  ‘And this was this morning?’

  ‘Just after breakfast. We rang Ned,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Ned O’Loughlin,’ Gabrielle said.

  Outside the cottage, as they left, Maggie patted Panda on the warming windowsill.

  ‘Thanks for your help, ladies,’ Alice said.

  ‘Be careful. Terrible things are happening,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Terrible things are happening,’ Gabrielle chimed.

  Alice reversed the van and turned it round.

  ‘But we have to return to the convent,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Not just yet, we don’t,’ said Alice crisply, and floored the pedal.

  County Kildare

  17 June, 10.45 AM

  He was getting more impatient by the second. Why was there no answer? He tried ringing the other mobile. It too rang out. He didn’t leave a message, but cursed in his own Kazakh language. Why wasn’t Brice answering? Brice always answered. Metro poured a black coffee into his Real Madrid crested mug. He had been trying to reach Brice since seven that morning,

  He had been born in Almaty, in the world’s largest land-locked country, Kazakhstan, and now one of his homes was in the land-locked county of Kildare. The other homes were in Amsterdam and London. Through the window of his Irish home he could see his Irish wife, Siobhán, out in the courtyard brushing down her favourite horse, Cracklin’ Diamond. Recently Siobhán had had her hair coloured. It was now jet black but it held a hint of crimson, and when the sun caught that crimson streak, it was like a mysterious signal. Was it to say, I know all about your other women, and one day I’ll exact my price? It was the children that kept them together.

  He strolled towards the garage, went in and locked the door. On the landline, he dialled the numbers once more. He hated using the landline. He knew all his calls were monitored by the Drugs Squad in Harcourt Street and by that turd from the Sunday World who had his own surveillance team listening in.

  No answer. Metro began to sweat. In the half-dozen years during which he had employed Brice, there had never been a hitch. Brice was a machine, albeit a very well paid one. The sides of Metro’s mouth turned down beneath his moustache. He considered Brice a low-life, someone beneath his contempt. Brice’s methods were crude, but highly effective. He was Metro’s instrument, and one didn’t socialise with an instrument. Nonetheless, as he listened to the unanswered ringing tone, it slowly dawned on Metro that he had come to depend on this instrument more than he realised.

  He walked out from the garage and, as he did so, stopped. His eye had caught a glint from a hill, about a mile away. A sharp, distinct flash. He stepped into shadow and then stepped out again. The glint had ceased.

  Could be anything, he thought, and stroked his moustache with his square-tipped fingers. Could it be a farmer, or a child at play, or �
��? Suddenly he felt hemmed in down here, visible, vulnerable like an insect under a microscope. Something was going on. He thumbed a number into his phone. He scanned the hillside. No glint.

  ‘Bring the car,’ he spoke harshly, aloud. ‘Bring it now.’

  Doonlish

  June 17, 11.30 PM

  The Berlingo purred up one country lane and down another, as if happy to be back in its familiar hinterland. Wild honeysuckle burst from the hedgerows as the sweet scent of the land oozed through the open windows.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Alice said to Maggie. ‘Are you worried about us not being back for midday prayers?’

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ Maggie said pensively as she cracked a match alight and put it to the tip of her cigarette. ‘It’s just that I grew up in little lanes and boreens like these.’

  ‘It’s so beautiful here, isn’t it?’ Alice said. ‘You must have wonderful memories.’

  ‘Our house was just a basic little cottage where Daddy had worked the land all his life,’ Maggie said. ‘I remember him sitting in his shirtsleeves at the kitchen table, forking out a potato from the big pot, saying, “Balls of flour every one of them – they’re from the top field!” And Mam would be as lovely as ever, saying that a man on a galloping horse wouldn’t see it as she wiped up gravy stains with the corner of her apron.’ ‘You sound sad,’ Alice said.

  ‘Only because I feel so much at home in Doon Abbey,’ Maggie said, exhaling smoke. ‘All the sounds and smells of my childhood are here. It would break my heart if the convent had to close.’

  ‘Then we must see to it that it doesn’t,’ Alice said, and swung right.

  The little van nosed up the lane between neat hedges. At the front of the house, red roses leaned out over the borders of the manicured lawn. In a fenced-off field, a cow stood observing Alice and Maggie as they pulled up.

  ‘Look! Mr Meadowfield’s car!’ Maggie said.

  An ancient red Volvo P1800 was parked to one side. Alice got out of the van and went over to the rear of the car, where she bent down and stuck her hand in underneath it.

  ‘Small rupture in the exhaust,’ she said with a knowing nod, and then, as Maggie was about to ask why: ‘It doesn’t matter.’