Sister Caravaggio

by Maeve Binchy

  Dublin Southside

  18 June, 9 AM

  Ned rushed from the apartment, ran down the stairs and opened the front door of the block of flats. There, melting into the shrubbery in the front garden, was a large but elegantly proportioned woman. She seemed older than Ned, but nimble.

  ‘Wait! Please wait! What do you want?’

  Ned stumbled towards the flowerbed and plunged into the bushes. Lost sight of the woman. Got badly scratched by holly leaves. Realised that his new sky-blue pyjamas and light silk dressing gown might not be the best attire for this kind of expedition. Then something moved beside his head, and his brain exploded into pure white.

  He was down among the shrubs and roses, the taste of earth filling his mouth. His eyesight was fading, then gone. He had a splitting headache. He was trying to breathe, but something was blocking him. A tightness around his throat, caused by a string. Or a rope? No: a steel wire, cutting into the soft flesh of his neck, and lifting him off the ground, like a fish caught on a hook. He tried to grasp the wire with his fingers. Couldn’t get his fingers near it.

  ‘Maybe Miss Alice will mind her own business now,’ the woman’s voice hissed.

  Mention of Alice made Ned instinctively jerk back his head. It made contact with something hard.

  ‘My nose!’ cried the woman’s voice in his ear.

  The wire around Ned’s neck went slack for a split second, during which he slid back down to earth, rolled under a bush, and heaved himself to his feet on the far side. Through branches of holly, he was staring into the face of the large woman whose nose was pumping blood. Ned almost felt compelled to offer her assistance, but then she tweaked her nose carefully between finger and thumb – she was wearing shiny black gloves – and a glob of blood fell to earth.

  ‘Round one to you,’ she announced, as though this were some kind of sporting contest. ‘The rest remains to be seen.’

  She started to circle the holly bush, like a sumo wrestler looking for the first opening. As she pursued a relentless clockwise advance, Ned danced an anti-clockwise retreat, so that they changed sides more then once. Then she made a sudden darting lunge, and he, skipping backwards, tripped over a tree stump, scrambled to his feet and burst out of the shrubbery on to the tarmac car park surrounding Sive’s apartment building. But the big woman was quick. He could hear her rasping breath behind him and then her gloved hands fastened on his neck.

  ‘Not much of a fighter, are we?’ she sighed as she forced him to the ground once more. ‘One of life’s little victims, are we, Ned? Always ready to yield to superior power.’

  She had again slung the garrotte around his neck, and tightened it viciously. His breath was blocked. This was the end.

  And then a voice came screaming: ‘Get away from him, you bitch!’

  Ned had never heard Sive use such coarse language. As the grip on his neck was loosened, he managed to turn his head and saw Sive wielding a curling-tongs. It caught Ned full in the face. He went down on his knees, momentarily paralysed.

  When he could see again, several neighbours had emerged from the building into the car park, and his assailant was leaving the apartment complex like an Olympic hurdler, clearing the low boundary wall with a single leap before vanishing around the corner.

  Sive was on her knees, by his side. ‘Ned, are you all right? Ned? Ned?’

  He struggled to get his breath back. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ he gasped, holding his nose.

  Sive’s eyes filled with tears. She threw her arms around his head. Her tears fell on his face like baptism.

  ‘I love you, darling,’ she whispered.

  Doon Abbey

  18 June, 9.15 AM

  The convent was eerily quiet, even by its own standards of sepulchral silence. Sebastian held his revolver two-handed, pointing down, as Alice and he made their way in under the main arch.

  ‘Where did she make the call from?’ Sebastian hissed.

  ‘Had to be from Sister Mercy Superior’s room,’ Alice whispered. ‘I have the mobile, and that’s where the only other phone in the convent is.’

  They darted between morning shadows across the courtyard, using the castle’s deeply inset windows as cover, until they came to the main door. Sebastian nodded. Alice kicked the door open and dived inwards, rolling. How many times had they done this routine together? One covering the other? But never in a religious institution.

  Pausing beside a large blue and white plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin, Alice glanced up the stairwell. She could see nothing. There was no sound. She flattened herself against the wall of the marble staircase and began to work her way upwards, with Sebastian behind her, his revolver now held out in the combat position. She had come up these same stairs just three days ago with Maggie, when they had demanded to see Sister Mercy Superior. It seemed like a lifetime ago. A scream was suddenly heard.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Sebastian said.

  Alice nodded. ‘That was Maggie,’ Alice said, and her face was dark.

  At the top of the stairs, she turned left. The religious iconography on the walls leered down at her. After five steps she pointed right, to the heavy wooden door. She held up three fingers. Sebastian nodded. Alice mouthed, ‘One, two, three.’

  She hit the door with her heel and, once more, rolled. Sebastian came in with the gun probing.

  ‘Drop the gun, Sebastian!’ Maggie cried. ‘Drop the gun or she’s going to kill us all!’

  Doon Abbey

  18 June, 9.25 AM

  Alice got slowly to her feet. She saw Sister Mercy Superior cowering in a corner of the room and Sister Columba lying at her feet on the floor. Maggie, ashen, sat in a chair, with Panda, the convent tomcat, twitching convulsively at her feet. Standing behind Maggie, holding an aerosol spray can pointed at Maggie’s face, was a very thin, young-faced woman with nose studs and ear studs, and wearing a magenta, spiky-haired wig.

  ‘Ah, Sister Alice and Mr Hayes, thank you for coming,’ the woman said in a slightly lisping voice. ‘Now that we’re all here, allow me to introduce myself. For the sake of our proceedings, you may call me Miss Lily. Now, Detective Sergeant Hayes, kick the gun you have just dropped across the floor to me. Yes, like that. Thank you. Would you and Sister Alice care to join my other guests in the corner? Slowly please, if you wouldn’t mind. Sudden movements may make me discharge this spray into Sister Maggie’s lovely face, and we wouldn’t want that, would we? Not after what has befallen poor Panda.’

  ‘Panda,’ Maggie wailed.

  The cat was sneezing pathetically and making swimming gestures with all four paws.

  Alice and Sebastian crossed the room very slowly, never once taking their eyes off the woman called Miss Lily. Sister Columba was on the ground, breathing weakly, with Sister Mercy Superior on one knee, down beside her.

  ‘The next step in our performance,’ said Miss Lily, ‘is a demonstration for the benefit of our latest arrivals. Sister Mercy Superior, would you be so kind as to open the closet door to your left?’ Sister Mercy Superior climbed to her feet, glaring.

  ‘You’ll never get away with this,’ she growled.

  ‘Now, now, your manners, please,’ said Miss Lily. ‘The closet.’

  Doon Abbey’s head nun opened the closet door, and Alice stared as a small-sized man, bound and gagged, fell out.

  ‘Bring him over here, Mercy,’ ordered Miss Lily.

  ‘It’s Davy Rainbow,’ Sebastian said from the side of his mouth.

  Mercy Superior half walked, half frog-marched Davy to the centre of the room, where he went down on his knees with a painful whack.

  ‘Thank you, Mercy,’ said Miss Lily. ‘Now, Davy here is what we in the business call “unfit for purpose”. What he knows, he won’t tell, and what he tells is useless. Except for one thing: my demonstration.’ She held aloft the spray can.

  ‘In order to show you how this works, I shall expose Davy’s skin to a single blast from my little can, and further explanations will then be unnecessary.’
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br />   She bent to Davy.

  ‘Sorry about this, sir,’ she said, and directed a tiny cloud of the spray towards his face.

  As Davy’s eyes bulged and he fell forward, Miss Lily deftly removed his mouth gag. Davy began to writhe and gasp.

  ‘He will die of coronary embolism within thirty to forty-five minutes,’ Miss Lily said, stepping back behind Maggie. ‘There is no antidote. Now …’

  On the floor, Sister Columba had begun to weep uncontrollably. Sister Mercy Superior stood full square, her hands in fists.

  ‘… I am going to ask questions,’ Miss Lily continued, ‘and if I don’t get immediate answers, I’m going to spray each one of you, starting with the lovely Sister Mary Magdalene here. Actually, when I said “questions”, I misspoke, for there is only one question, really, and this is it. Where is the Caravaggio?’

  No one moved or spoke.

  ‘Oh dear, it’s going to be like that, is it?’ said Miss Lily, and angled the can at Maggie’s ear. ‘Sorry about this, Sister.’

  ‘Wait! Stop!’

  Sister Mercy Superior stepped forward.

  ‘I have a confession to make.’

  ‘Really?’ said Miss Lily. ‘How unexpected! Well go on, Sister Mercy Superior.’

  Mercy seemed to be shrinking as she reached for a white linen handkerchief and began to dab at her eyes.

  ‘Mr Meadowfield, or whoever he really was, made me do it. There was no alternative. I had to comply with his vile demands in order to protect poor pregnant Winifred!’

  ‘And so you stole the very painting on which the future of your order depended?’ asked Sebastian.

  ‘What people see in that painting is beyond me,’ hissed Sister Columba from the floor. ‘A painting done by a murdering pervert, of the man who betrayed Our Lord? What sort of art is that to keep in a convent?’

  ‘How did you do it, Sister?’ Alice asked quietly. ‘The base of the picture was nine feet from the ground, and the brass screws holding it in place were set at eleven feet and fourteen feet. Even if you were strong enough to move some church furniture under the picture – and the big choir stalls weigh several tons each, so that is not likely – you still could not reach those screws. I reckon you measure about six feet two inches in height, which leaves another three feet to be reached.’

  ‘On the night we had agreed,’ Sister Mercy Superior began, ‘I switched off the CCTV I was meant to be monitoring. I knocked out the alarm system by unscrewing the main fuse. I blocked the supply hose to the backup generator. Then I went in to the chapel with a screwdriver. Columba jumped up on my shoulders, unscrewed the picture, and passed it down.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ said Miss Lily. ‘That this elderly consumptive stood on your shoulders?’

  Maggie spoke weakly: ‘She was all-Ireland gymnastics champion and at the Commonwealth Games in Perth, nineteen seventy-two, she was placed third in the overall competition. I found it on the Internet. It was before she joined the Aurelian Order. Check it out if you like.’

  ‘Go on, please,’ said Miss Lily, now amused.

  ‘The picture was in a light frame,’ Sister Mercy Superior continued. ‘We carried it through the convent, up the stairs to this room, out the window onto the roof, and down the fire escape. We never had to open the main door.’

  ‘Mr Meadowfield was waiting halfway down the avenue in his car,’ Sister Columba added.

  ‘Petrol engine, ruptured exhaust pipe,’ Alice said concisely.

  ‘He took the painting from us and drove away. We never saw him again. May the Lord have mercy on his soul,’ said Sister Mercy Superior.

  ‘Not good enough, I’m afraid,’ Miss Lily said. She grabbed Maggie by the neck so that Maggie had to stand, then, with the spray can to Maggie’s throat, walked backwards with her to the window. ‘You see, the gentleman I work for has invested a lot of money in this painting already, and he doesn’t like taking losses. Furthermore, he knows all about your weakness for dressing up and wearing funny hats, Sister Mercy Superior.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Sebastian said.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sister Mercy Superior rumbled. ‘Let my librarian go.’

  ‘I will,’ said Miss Lily, backing further to the window. ‘But not in the way I think she’d like me to.’

  She had dragged Maggie up until she was standing by the window, which she swung out, open, so that Maggie was teetering over the void. ‘Where is the Caravaggio, for the final time?’ asked Miss Lily.

  Without warning, a dark shape materialised on the fire escape behind Miss Lily.

  ‘Davy Rainbow, you wretch!’ shouted Sister Diana, and swung her bottle of poitín with such force that it knocked the spray can from Miss Lily’s hand. ‘I’ll kill you!’

  Alice, in wonder, saw the can fly through the air. Simultaneously, and in a single bound, Sister Columba had landed on Sister Mercy Superior’s desk, and, in a second leap, gained the top of the green metal filing cabinet, just in time to catch the spray can.

  But Miss Lily was already halfway across the room.

  ‘Sister Mary Magdalene!’ Columba shrieked, and lobbed the can back towards the window.

  Maggie caught it in two hands and stared at it. Miss Lily, with a balletic back-flip, was within a stride of her.

  ‘Throw!’ Alice cried.

  Maggie, wide-eyed, pivoted like a quarterback, then pitched the can. Alice had to dive to catch it, and already she could hear the wind whistling as Miss Lily sprang. Holding the can out, praying to God that the nozzle was pointing the right way, Alice sprayed. A mushroom of white spume enveloped Miss Lily. She seemed to hover for a moment in midair. Then she fell to the ground, gasping and kicking.

  Alice ran over to Maggie.

  ‘It’s over, now, Maggie, it’s all right.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Maggie sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Sister Diana was standing over Davy Rainbow.

  ‘You think you can fool me, Davy boy?’ she slurred. ‘Get up and take your medicine.’

  Sister Mercy Superior stepped forward.

  ‘Diana!’ she cried. ‘Have you been drinking?’

  Chapter Eight

  Doonlish

  18 June, 12.30 PM

  Alice and Maggie sat at a window table in Beppe’s Bistro. Outside, swallows swooped back and forth in the peaceful, blue sky. A man rode by on a sturdy horse, followed by a child on a white pony. Calm lay on the land.

  Maggie drained the glass of Australian Shiraz that she had ordered for her stomach’s sake, and promptly ordered another from Beppe himself, who kept saying how great it was that the nuns from Doon Abbey had finally crossed his threshold. Alice, on a San Pellegrino, had ordered two beer-battered cods and chips. She badly wanted a smoke, but knew that to be seen smoking on the pavement outside Beppe’s might be a step too far.

  They had left young Joe Foley in charge of Doon Abbey, since Sebastian had taken Sister Mercy Superior and Sister Columba into Naas Garda Station for questioning. Sister Diana, when Alice had last seen her, had been comatose.

  ‘Any word on Davy?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘They think he’ll pull through,’ Alice replied. ‘Alcohol residue in the blood, at the level it was found in Davy, effectively acts as an antidote to Miss Lily’s poison, although I bet she didn’t know that.’

  Maggie shook her head darkly at the mention of Miss Lily, and stopped herself making a sign of the cross. ‘At least Panda will be fine,’ she said. ‘The poison doesn’t work on cats either. Joe Foley gave him a shampoo and he’s breathing better already.’

  ‘Let’s drink to Panda,’ Alice said, and they clinked their glasses together.

  Alice knew they had done as much as they could, and that the Caravaggio might never be found. Sister Mercy Superior would be a tough nut to crack, but everyone cracked under interrogation eventually, Alice knew, and Doon Abbey’s former head nun would be no different. It might take a few days, but she would eventually confess to the murder
s. Alice shivered. It might so easily have been her neck, she reflected. Or Maggie’s. They had a lot to be grateful for.

  ‘The media are going to be hysterical when they get hold of this,’

  Alice said. ‘Is there any place other than Doon Abbey we can hide?’

  Maggie thought for a moment. ‘We could go to our sister house in Rome. They’d never find us there.’

  ‘Brilliant idea,’ Alice said, as her phone rang. She glanced at the caller’s name and sighed. ‘Oh, hello Ned.’

  As the cod and chips arrived, Maggie was suddenly ravenous; she dipped a chip in the little bowl of Beppe’s sauce and closed her eyes with pleasure as she ate it.

  ‘What time exactly did this happen?’ Alice was saying. ‘I need you to be absolutely certain about this, Ned.’

  Maggie wished that Ned would hang up. She picked up a corner of the crispy cod in her fingers and sank her teeth into it. Rome would be fantastic, she thought. Maybe they could even stay there indefinitely. Great restaurants, great wine.

  Alice was on her feet. ‘I don’t believe this!’

  ‘What is it?’ Maggie asked between mouthfuls.

  Alice was pacing up and down, shaking her head.

  ‘That was Ned,’ she said eventually, putting down the phone. ‘He’s in hospital in Dublin recovering from a broken nose that Sive gave him.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ Maggie murmured.

  ‘But she wasn’t aiming for Ned,’ Alice said, and then explained how, but for Sive, Ned would have been garrotted by a powerful woman wearing a hat.

  ‘What?’ Maggie said. ‘When did that happen?’

  ‘This morning,’ Alice said grimly, and filled Maggie in on the details.

  ‘Has to be the same woman.’

  ‘So she can’t be Sister Mercy Superior?’ Maggie said.

  Alice sat down heavily and pushed away her fish and chips.

  ‘Damn!’ she said. ‘I’ve spent the last three days with this feeling! This feeling that the answer to everything is right here, beneath our noses!’