Sister Caravaggio

by Maeve Binchy

‘Pray to Saint Anthony,’ Maggie suggested. ‘I find he’s the best when you’re looking for something.’

  ‘I already have!’ Alice cried. ‘I want to scream!’

  ‘Everything all right, Sisters?’ asked Beppe, looming anxiously.

  ‘It’s lovely, thanks,’ Maggie said, and reached for a chip from Alice’s plate.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ said Alice with steely determination. ‘Meadowfield blackmails the convent, Mercy and Columba succumb. They take down the painting exactly as they describe. They bring it down the fire escape and hand it to Meadowfield.’

  ‘Who drives away in his red Volvo P1800,’ Maggie said, and recited the registration number.

  ‘Small rupture in the exhaust,’ Alice said. ‘But what happened then? I mean, why is his car outside his house when he was found murdered in a hotel in Liffey Valley.’

  ‘Why was his car parked outside his house?’ Maggie asked, helping herself discreetly to more of Alice’s chips.

  ‘What do you mean, was?’

  ‘It was parked outside his house. We saw it there when we found Brice’s body,’ Maggie said, ‘but now it’s parked on a car transporter outside Abbey Motors right behind you.’

  Alice was already out the door when Maggie caught up with her. Back in the restaurant, Beppe was looking distraught.

  ‘Hi,’ Alice said to a man in blue overalls who was about to climb into the cab of the transporter. ‘Sister Alice from Doon Abbey, this is Sister Mary Magdalene.’

  The man smiled at the two nuns. ‘How’yez. Dick.’

  ‘That’s Jeremy Meadowfield’s car,’ Alice said.

  ‘I know, we used to service her here,’ Dick said. ‘In fact, I used to look after her meself.’

  ‘Do you mind me asking, Dick, where are you taking it? I mean, her?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you this,’ said Dick, and looked left and right, ‘but she’s been seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau.’

  ‘You used to service his car,’ Alice said, and screwed her eyes closed as she fought to find the tiny speck of truth that she knew was floating there, somewhere, right in front of her. Please, Saint Anthony, she implored. Please! Then: ‘When was she last serviced?’

  ‘Not so long ago,’ Dick said. ‘A week or ten days ago at the most. Ask them in the office.’

  ‘The office,’ Alice repeated, and knew that her hands were shaking. ‘Maggie, stay here with Dick.’

  ‘I have to …’ Dick began, but Alice had already disappeared into the garage.

  ‘She looks very old,’ Maggie said conversationally.

  ‘She’s actually a classic,’ Dick said.

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘She’s a little gem,’ Dick said. ‘She’s got a B-18 engine with SU carburettors and five main crankshaft bearings.’

  ‘She sounds … fantastic,’ Maggie said, and smiled beatifically.

  ‘She has a manual gearbox,’ Dick continued, warming to his topic, ‘but later models …’

  Alice came running back. ‘The service book,’ she said. ‘It’s in the car.’ She looked up at the car on the top of the transporter. ‘Can we see it please?’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Sister,’ said Dick, looking at his watch, ‘I’m meant to be …’

  ‘It’s very important,’ Alice said.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m meant to …’ Dick said.

  ‘You made her sound so amazing,’ Maggie said.

  ‘All right,’ Dick sighed, ‘I’ll get it.’

  ‘The ninth of June,’ Alice whispered, as they watched Dick climb up on the transporter.

  ‘What about the ninth of June?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Was when this car was last serviced,’ Alice said with barely restrained excitement. ‘The day before the Caravaggio was stolen.’

  Dick was climbing back down with a leather wallet in his hand. Alice opened it and folded back the most recent page: a report headed Abbey Motors. She scanned the report.

  ‘Nothing about the exhaust,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’ Dick was frowning.

  ‘This car has a ruptured exhaust,’ Alice said, ‘but there’s no mention of anything the matter with the exhaust in this report.’

  ‘I serviced her myself,’ Dick said defensively, ‘and if I didn’t find a ruptured exhaust, then the exhaust wasn’t ruptured.’

  ‘So the exhaust ruptured after the service,’ Alice said.

  ‘This is a very old car,’ Dick said.

  ‘Can you please check the exhaust yourself?’ Alice asked. ‘Like, now?’

  ‘I’d have to take the car down off the ramp,’ Dick said, ‘and I can’t do that because, as I’ve already told you, the gardaí have told me to bring her up to Dublin. So now, Sisters, if you’ll excuse me …’

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Alice Dunwoody,’ Alice said. ‘Please take the car down from the ramp.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant who?’ Dick said.

  Maggie nodded. ‘She is.’

  Dick shook his head unhappily. ‘Look, I’m under orders to do this job, so I don’t care who you are, I’m not taking that car down off the ramp.’

  ‘In that case, I’m arresting you for obstructing a garda investigation,’ Alice said, stepping forward.

  Dick blinked. ‘I’m taking the car down off the ramp,’ he said.

  Five minutes later, he was on his back under the rear of the Volvo.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, sliding out on a wheeled mechanic’s tray, ‘you’re right. What’s more, someone has tried to patch it. Look for yourself.’

  He got up and Alice slid in. A crude collar of metal had been affixed to the circumference of the car’s exhaust pipe.

  ‘Whoever did it knew what they were doing,’ Dick said as Alice re-emerged. ‘It’s quite a professional job. But with these old cars, the steel in the exhaust is pure shite, if you’ll excuse me, so it was bound to go again.’

  But Alice was scrutinising the service report.

  ‘One hundred and twenty-three thousand, six hundred and one,’ she read. ‘I presume these are miles?’

  Maggie suddenly got it. She went to the Volvo, opened the front door and leaned in. ‘One hundred and twenty-three thousand, six hundred and eighty-six,’ she called.

  ‘Which leaves …’

  ‘Eighty-five,’ Maggie said.

  Dick was looking intently from one nun to the other.

  ‘The car travelled eighty-five miles since you serviced her,’ Alice said. ‘But we know she has been parked here since the tenth of June, and that her owner was murdered on the evening of that day in a hotel in Liffey Valley. What’s more, we know that he travelled to his death by taxi and bus. Why? Because he knew he couldn’t depend on this car to get him there!’

  Dick’s mouth hung open.

  ‘We need a map!’ Alice cried and took out her phone. ‘What’s half of eighty-five?’

  ‘Forty-two and a half,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Damn!’ Alice swore, ‘the maps on this phone only show kilometres.

  What’s forty-two and a half miles in kilometres?’

  Maggie closed her eyes. ‘Sixty-eight point three nine seven one.’

  ‘We’ll settle for sixty-eight point four,’ Alice said. ‘Here goes. A car leaving the outskirts of Doonlish travels sixty-eight point four kilometres.’ She thumbed in the distance and watched as a red arc appeared on the phone’s screen. Maggie was beside her, looking in. Even Dick tried to see what was going on.

  ‘Oh God,’ Alice whispered, ‘do you see what I see?’

  Maggie bit her trembling lower lip. ‘Yes.’

  The red line went directly through the Jesuit house at Aylesmere.

  ‘And who in Aylesmere could mend a ruptured exhaust?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Brother Harkin!’ Maggie gasped.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Alice with venom. ‘Brother Harkin.’ Then she frowned.

  ‘Maggie, are you all right?’

  Aylesmere Jesuit Residence, Dublin

&n
bsp; 18 June, 6 PM

  The doorbell rang inside the big old house – a wheezy, echoing note that reminded Alice of asthma and arthritis. Earlier, having dropped Maggie in the A&E department of Naas Hospital, where acute food poisoning was diagnosed, Alice had driven to her aunt’s house in Kilmainham, where, four months before, when she had entered Doon Abbey, she had left her Renault 4. There was nobody at home. Alice’s aunt liked to visit an old friend in Edinburgh at this time of year, and tended to leave spare keys under a concrete block at the back of the house, in case she lost her handbag. In the garage, Alice found the Renault’s toolkit in a cardboard box. She took the box. It could be useful in emergencies.

  Now, as she rang the doorbell again, bolts were suddenly shot, a key was turned, and the great wooden door was heaved slowly open. Alice braced herself, for she now realised that Brother Harkin’s appearance belied his true strength. The mind of criminal deviants would always amaze her – their ability to adapt, to cover their tracks. To appear as one person but, deep down, to be another. A face appeared. The Rector himself stood there. He looked exhausted and out of breath.

  ‘Sister Alice? Am I expecting you?’

  ‘No, Father Rynne, and I apologise for not giving notice, but something has cropped up, and I must talk to you in person.’

  The Rector’s expression was pained. ‘Well … we mustn’t leave you standing, Sister. Do come in.’

  He stood aside, and she stepped into the large hall, then helped him push the door closed.

  ‘No Brother Harkin?’ said Alice lightly.

  ‘Harkin,’ said the Rector, and shook his head. ‘I don’t know where Harkin is, unfortunately. He’s been going out a lot at night, recently, and to tell you the truth, I don’t like it one little bit.’

  ‘But he’s not here,’ Alice said. ‘I mean, you’d know if he was here, wouldn’t you, Father?’

  The Rector looked pale. ‘Things have changed so much, Sister,’ he said. ‘There was a time when I knew everything that went on here, but nowadays …’

  His voice trailed off and he looked old, Alice thought.

  ‘Father, I wonder if you and I might have a chat?’ Alice asked. ‘I’m afraid I have some disturbing news.’

  The Rector’s shoulders slumped.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, and set off across the hall – more of a shuffle than a walk. He opened a panelled door in the wainscoting that Alice had not noticed on her previous visits, and led the way down a staircase. Alice followed, into a kitchen in the basement, where weak light filtered through barred windows. On the table, someone had been making a big bouquet with fresh-cut flowers: roses, irises, sunflowers and hollyhocks.

  ‘This is Brother Harkin’s domain, so to speak,’ said the Rector as he filled a yellow kettle. ‘He looks after the flowers for our chapel.’

  ‘Very artistic,’ Alice said, as the Rector prepared a brew of Barry’s Gold Blend in a flowery china pot and dispensed it into china cups.

  ‘Indeed he is,’ the Rector said. ‘Did you know that he is also a very gifted picture restorer?’

  ‘Brother Harkin?’

  ‘Oh yes. A very considerable connoisseur of European art – although he has never aspired to more than the humble status of lay brother. I used to have the greatest admiration for Brother Harkin.’

  Curiouser and curiouser, thought Alice as she sipped her tea. ‘Father Rector, I’m afraid I’ve got some news that may upset you.’

  His handsome features drooped so miserably that her heart went out to him; yet she made herself continue: ‘We have been forced to the conclusion that Jeremy Meadowfield, who stole our Caravaggio, drove here, to this house, with the painting, on the night of the theft.’

  ‘What?’ The Rector’s eyes were enlarged and he struggled to find his breath. ‘You mean …’

  ‘We don’t yet know why, but all the indications now are that he and Brother Harkin were involved in this together. We also think that the painting may still be here in Aylesmere,’ Alice said.

  ‘Harkin!’ the Rector gasped. ‘I knew it!’

  ‘You knew it?’ Alice asked.

  The Rector sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. ‘He never stops talking about Caravaggio,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Did you know that Harkin has a criminal record?’

  ‘Brother Harkin?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the Rector gloomily. ‘Years ago, before he entered the religious life, he had convictions for stealing cars. We forgive, you see. Oh yes, we forgive.’

  ‘So Harkin is a thief,’ Alice said.

  ‘There’s a lot more to Brother Harkin than meets the eye,’ the Rector said. ‘Come, let me show you.’

  Drawing aside a red velvet curtain, the suddenly animated Rector started down a dark passageway.

  ‘Brother Harkin?’ he called. ‘Are you here?’

  Alice, with mounting apprehension, followed. The Rector opened the door at the end of the passage and ushered her in, flicking light switches as he entered the room. Spotlights, floodlights, lamps, up-lighters sprang into life.

  ‘This is where he spends all his time,’ said the Rector.

  Alice took in the whitewashed walls of the windowless room where portraits in oils, printed maps, medieval scenes of the Annunciation and lush blue landscape paintings hung side by side. The Rector flicked another switch and there, spotlit in an alcove, stood Brother Harkin.

  ‘Oh!’

  Alice drew in her breath.

  ‘Never fails to get that response,’ said the Rector. ‘Uncanny, isn’t it?’

  Rendered in dark oils on uneven wooden boards, Brother Harkin was whelmed in a black cloak, the hood drawn down onto his oddly sinewy shoulders. One large white hand was fastened around a dark crucifix. His white hair and pale skin seemed to shimmer out of the darkness, while his colourless eyes on either side of his slightly bulbous nose fixed the viewer with chilling intensity.

  ‘Pedro Velázquez de Cuellar, one of the first followers of St Ignatius Loyola, slain by a traitor in 1546 from within the Society’s own ranks,’ the Rector explained. ‘Found here in an attic, almost ruined beyond redemption. Harkin has an amazing ability to transform even the most mundane objects.’

  ‘It does look remarkably like him,’ Alice murmured, as her eyes were drawn down to a corner of the alcove where, from behind a drape, metal glinted.

  The Rector had moved along from the alcove to two large canvases hung in gold frames, each depicting a large, naked woman in a woodland scene, surrounded by flowering bushes. Alice hung back. ‘For a celibate lay brother, Harkin has a particular appreciation of the female form,’ the Rector was saying. ‘Here is Saint Susanna, for example. And a very lovely Mary Magdalene, showing all the temptations of created beauty.’

  Alice wasn’t listening. Stretching back her foot into the alcove, she nudged aside the hanging drape. A pair of ten-kilo cast-iron dumbbells winked at her from their hiding place. Her mind was working at high speed. Those heavy front doors, pulled back by the seemingly bent-over, wraith-like Brother Harkin; the six-inch-plus heels worn by Meadowfield’s tall, mystery assailant, captured on CCTV in Liffey Valley.

  They climbed back up the stairs. Alice was glad to have left the cellar; at any moment, she expected Brother Harkin to appear.

  The Rector stood in the hall, his hands joined before him.

  ‘What do you think I should do, Sister?’ he asked. ‘What you have suggested is a vista almost too appalling to contemplate. But if evil has taken place here, it must be expunged.’

  ‘I want you to do nothing for the moment, Father,’ she said. ‘You are a good man, and I apologise for having upset you today. What I suggest is that you don’t mention any of this to Brother Harkin, just let the gardaí deal with the case from now on.’

  ‘I will say nothing to him,’ the Rector said. He shivered. ‘Do you think he’s dangerous?’

  ‘He could be, Father,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll see to it that he’s taken in for questioning this evening.’

  The
y had reached the hall door.

  ‘Do you think I should resign?’ asked Father Rynne. ‘I mean, I am ultimately responsible.’

  ‘No way. Your help and conduct has been exemplary. I will testify to that,’ Alice said.

  ‘Thank you, Sister Alice,’ he said as he reached for the long door. His voice fell away to a low tone. ‘Would you like me to hear your confession?’

  For a split-second, Alice was tempted to accept. To unburden herself of Bruno Scanlon Junior. But no. This was neither the place nor the time. Her modest, downcast eyes lingered. Then, suddenly, she was looking squarely at him.

  ‘Thank you, but I must go,’ she said.

  The Rector was struggling to pull back the door; Alice heaved it with him.

  Dublin Outskirts

  18 June, 7.15 PM

  As Alice drove towards Doonlish, the sky was darkening rapidly. She had just received a phone call from Sebastian: Sister Mercy Superior was vehemently denying that she had killed anyone. Sebastian was keeping the head nun and the novice mistress in the garda station overnight. Although he could have arrested them for theft and for misleading the gardaí, his superior had warned him to do nothing until it had been cleared with higher authorities.

  ‘We can’t be seen to be persecuting nuns,’ Sebastian had said.

  ‘That’s a good decision,’ Alice told him, ‘because I’ve now got information that will make your hair stand on end.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Sebastian said.

  But Alice’s phone was showing red on the battery. ‘I’ll meet you in Naas Hospital,’ she said, and explained what had happened to Maggie.

  As she drove south, Alice’s mind was awash with images – so many that they threatened to blot out her ability to see the road ahead. Get a grip! she swore, as she yanked the wheel and overtook a truck. The old Alice would have cut and sorted the images, her mind like cheese-wire.

  ‘Damn!’ she swore.

  She pulled over on to the hard shoulder and sat back in the seat of the Berlingo, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of her nose and breathing deeply. Fifty seconds later she sat upright, as if a bolt of electricity had passed through her.

  ‘Oh! My! God!’ she cried out.

  Sebastian answered on the first ring. ‘Sebastian, listen carefully: this phone is almost out of juice, and I don’t have a charger with me. But you’ve got the Liffey Valley CCTV images on your phone, right? The ones showing the murderer at the hotel?’