Murder at the Queen's Old Castle

by Cora Harrison

  Patrick gave a quick glance around at the assembled members of the dead man’s family. By now the shop had been cleared of all except the employees and the family members of the dead man. The widow was there, flanked by her two middle-aged daughters. Her son, the floor manager, Robert, hovered uneasily, making an effort at lining up the numerous sales staff in a position, according to rank, where they could be questioned by the police. A young lad in a shop apron was standing beside the Reverend Mother, looking as though he had decided to lock himself to her shielding presence and ignored an angry signal from the floor manager to take his place beside the other three apprentices. In any case, the boy’s eyes were fixed eagerly upon the other brother, upon the major, who, as the eldest of the dead man’s family, had taken charge. Patrick turned an attentive ear to the major, while eyeing the corpse and then looking up at the small office forty feet high above the shop floor. Eventually Patrick gave a nod of such finality that the major dried up quite suddenly and Patrick turned his back on him.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Fitzwilliam. I’m Inspector Cashman and this is Sergeant Joe Duggan,’ he said now, looking neither at the major nor at Robert, but bending solicitously over the widow. She looked dazed and unwell, he thought, and he was very sorry for her. She did not reply, nor did she even look at him but stared bleakly straight ahead of her. ‘I’m very sorry for your trouble, Mrs Fitzwilliam,’ he continued. ‘We will have to take your husband’s body away now so that Dr Scher can find out what happened to him. I’ll let you know as soon as I know myself.’ His tone was as gentle and soothing as he could make it, but there was no response from the widow. She neither looked nor spoke to him but stayed sitting on the chair staring intently ahead. Monica and Kitty looked down at her uneasily and Monica murmured something indistinguishable. Dr Scher bent down and patted the woman’s hand once more. He was very solicitous towards her. Patrick saw the Reverend Mother look from one to the other and he wondered whether Mrs Fitzwilliam had been a patient of Dr Scher. As far as he knew Dr Scher had given up all private practice when he reached the age of sixty-five, retaining only his position at the university and his work for the police. And, of course, he continued to visit the convent. In fact, when Patrick thought of it, this much vaunted retirement of his, this change in lifestyle which was going to herald a new leisurely time of getting up late in the morning and indulging in his hobbies, had not amounted to any great reduction in the doctor’s work load. The poor of the south parish still blessed his name whenever he was spoken of and it was possible that he still attended some of his more vulnerable patients. Perhaps someone like that poor tragic woman slumped upon a hard shop chair. The sooner she was taken away, the better. He would keep questioning to a minimum. She wouldn’t have anything to add over and above the account given by her son. His eyes went to Dr Scher. They knew each other very well. The sheer number of dead bodies found in the city of Cork, victims of violence, of sectarian killings, of suicide and of murder, were, he remembered reading, higher than any other city in Europe. Dr Scher had examined and pinpointed the cause of death of the majority of them and although he still had not clinically examined the body in the morgue, he probably, thought Patrick, had a fair notion of the cause of death of this body. Enough suspicion, anyway, to have phoned for the police. With his eyes, Patrick signalled and the doctor left Mrs Fitzwilliam’s side, picking up his briefcase and following Patrick over to a dark corner beside the shoe counter. Once ensconced behind the high counter, he rested his attaché case upon a stool and clicked it open.

  Patrick looked inside, but did not attempt to touch anything. There was the usual untidy clutter of pieces of paper, but lying on top of everything else was a handkerchief, loosely wrapped around a small brown canister.

  ‘Lying on the floor beside the body,’ said Dr Scher quietly. ‘That bright young lad standing beside the Reverend Mother spotted it. He was going to pick it up, but I stopped him. Thought you might do something clever about fingerprints from it.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’ Patrick looked interrogatively at the doctor.

  ‘Smell,’ said Dr Scher.

  Patrick bent over the attaché case and inhaled.

  ‘Gas, is that it?’

  ‘That’s what I smelled too.’

  ‘And the corpse? Did he die from the gas?’

  ‘I think so. There’s a blueish tinge about the skin. Tell you more when I’ve had a chance to have a proper look at him. Just as well to leave this where it is for the moment. I’ll put it in an envelope once I have my rubber gloves on and I’ll drop it into your office. You might be able to get some fingerprints from it.’

  ‘But how …’ Patrick broke off and looked where the doctor was looking. Dr Scher had raised his eyes to the wire that ran from the counter up to the small office high on the wall. He remembered how as a small child, he and another boy had sneaked into the Queen’s Old Castle and had watched with fascinated interest as the sales staff moved the iron rods and sent the change carriers zooming through the air and waited to receive the change and the receipt. At the time, he thought that Mr Fitzwilliam, old even then, had the best job in the world. He would have loved to be the master of all those whizzing barrels, receiving and despatching them with the greatest of ease.

  ‘It’s just the right size,’ he said, looking at the small canister. ‘We can do a few experiments once I have tested it for fingerprints, but by eye, it would definitely fit into one of the change barrels.’

  ‘He’d take it out – he wasn’t a patient of mine, but very few men of his age would have perfect eyesight, so I doubt that he’d notice any difference. That’s probably what happened. He’d take it out, unscrew the lid. Airless little place up there, probably. And the gas on, of course.’ Dr Scher raised his eyes to the small, seemingly sky-high office. ‘I’ve heard of these things used during the war,’ he went on. ‘A friend of mine, someone that I knew at medical school; he told me all about them. They used to throw them into a trench to get rid of the rats.’

  ‘So he’d breathe it in. He’d know, of course. He’d have smelled the gas.’

  Dr Scher nodded soberly. ‘He’d get out of that tiny office. It would have been his first instinct to get out. But, of course, by then he would be sick and giddy. And so he pitched over the rail of the passageway. By the look of him, I’d say that he was dead by the time that he hit the stone floor. No bleeding or anything. Could have been a heart attack, but I won’t know until I get him on the table.’

  FIVE

  Eileen hammered away at the keys of the typewriter. It had been good instinct that had prompted her to follow Patrick and Dr Scher into that dark corner. ‘Gas’, she had heard the word and now she knew how it had been done. The man had been gassed with something that looked just like the canisters for the customers’ receipts and change. The storeroom had a shelf load of them. She had heard that said.

  But if he had been gassed, who had sent up that deadly capsule?

  And was he the person for whom it had been intended?

  The shrieked words of his wife, the half-mad utterances, there was nothing secret about them. Anyone who had been in the crowded shop had overheard them. The trick was to make a story out of it. Rouse the readers’ interest, get them debating what had happened, get them reading and rereading her article.

  She revelled in the feeling of the words flooding out from her brain and oozing through her fingertips. She had read through her notes once, but that was enough and now she firmly put them back into her bag and concentrated instead on painting the scene. The enormous shop, the panic-stricken screams, the terrible sound of the body falling, the accusations – she would have to be very careful here, but she knew how to hint. By now most of Cork would have heard of the tragedy and if her article could appear in the Evening Echo and also the next morning’s edition of the Cork Examiner, well then the papers would be a sell-out.

  Did Mrs Fitzwilliam really think that her husband had tried to kill her? And that it was by accident that the dead
ly capsule had reached him, rather than her. Was the woman sane? Well, that isn’t my business, Eileen told herself. But her mind went to the other members of the family and their reaction. Stunned, shocked, dumbfounded, stricken, all the words went through her brain and down to her fingertips as she typed away rapidly.

  ‘That’s not for me, is it? Don’t tell me … No, thank goodness, something for the Cork Examiner, is it?’ Jack, the compositor, had come back from his job of loading lines of type ready to print out some leaflets. He didn’t wait for an answer but turned over the pile and began reading. Eileen wasn’t worried. The owner of the printing works was quite happy for her to do articles for the Cork Examiner if there was no other job waiting to be done. She was a fast and efficient worker and so she had plenty of spare time to write about anything that took her fancy. But was this going to be printable? The editor had been alarmed. Fascinated, nevertheless, he had been alarmed and a little non-committal about publishing. Now she watched Jack’s face with a degree of apprehension.

  ‘Christ, Eileen! Are you hoping that the Examiner will print this!’

  ‘Why not? It’s the truth. It’s what happened. I was there. I saw everything.’

  Jack read it through again, a slight smile on his lips. ‘And to think what a nice little girl you were when you first came here. Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. A bit of a history of jail breaking and revolver firing, but apart from that … And now you’re trying to ape the gutter press of England.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Jack,’ said Eileen. ‘It’s time that the Examiner woke up and made things a bit interesting. All this printing of columns of names attending a funeral and those tedious sports results. Wait until my article is printed. Can’t you just imagine? The whole of Cork will be asking each other whether they’ve heard about the Queen’s Old Castle. The paper will be a sell-out.’

  ‘Doesn’t bother you about the family, does it?’ asked Jack. ‘They’re not going to like this, are they? You’ve skirted around it, but anyone reading this will be asking themselves what was going on in that family. They’ll be wondering if this is really an accident.’

  ‘Don’t care,’ said Eileen. ‘The Fitzwilliam family don’t do much for anyone except themselves. It’s one of the worst shops in the city to work in. What do I care about them? I just care about money in the bank and having enough to be able to go to university.’ She could hear a note of defiance in her voice and knew that he could hear it as well.

  ‘Don’t get too hard, Eileen,’ he said. ‘Money isn’t everything. University isn’t everything. Lots of happy people around who never passed through the doors of U.C.C. Clever people too. People who read and think about what they read. Still, you have your heart set on it and if God wills it; well, you’ll get there in the end.’

  Eileen said no more. She had no belief in a benevolent God, but Jack had been very kind to her and had helped her to make a success of this job. She wasn’t going to quarrel with him, but she knew what was important to her. And God, she thought, wasn’t too good at responding to the most fervent of prayers or else the poor of the city might live in better conditions. Still, for people like Jack, God was important. He must be nearly sixty and he had gone on believing all of his life and wasn’t going to change now. He was reading through the typewritten pages again now and a slight smile puckered his lips.

  ‘Well, you certainly won’t be popular with the Fitzwilliam family if anyone finds out who wrote it,’ he said and added, ‘as they will. You know what Cork is like.’

  Eileen shrugged. She knew, as well as he did, what Cork was like. Her items always went under the by-line of ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, but that didn’t guarantee privacy. Some other reporter would tell a friend who would tell a friend and then the news would be alive down the length and breadth of ‘Pana’ as the main street in the city was always known.

  ‘And you won’t be popular with the police either,’ went on Jack. ‘Still, what’s new? Between ourselves, do you think one of them had something to do with it? Not a happy family from what I’ve heard.’

  ‘What have you heard?’ Eileen asked. Jack could never resist a good story, so she took her fingers from the typewriter keys and prepared to listen to him.

  ‘Well, a neighbour of mine was telling me that Mr Robert, if you please, has been seen going into the cinema with that nice little girl from the Ladies’ Shoes department.’

  ‘Shock, horror,’ said Eileen disdainfully. ‘What’s exciting about that? Are you talking about Maria Mulcahy? And she’s no girl, either. She’s twice my age if she’s a day.’

  ‘Ah, but listen to the rest of it. The woman who cleans the place in the morning overheard the father having a big row with Robert. Telling him that he wasn’t to see the girl again. And threatening that if he did, he would fire him.’

  ‘Fire him!’

  ‘That’s right. “For going out with a shop girl.” That was the words. And, according to Mrs Murphy, he threatened that “he would tell the world about that other business”.’

  ‘What other business?’

  Jack shrugged his shoulders. He had the air of one who had, perhaps, told too much. ‘Haven’t a notion,’ he said. ‘But anyway, it’s a nicer story if it’s about a son killing him than your one that seems to hint at the wife. Wives shouldn’t kill husbands. There was the woman in Limerick who was hanged for that recently. Jury of twelve men. Didn’t like that thought at all, not one of them, so they brought in a unanimous verdict. Judge put on his black cap and they hanged the woman. Going out with his own nephew, apparently. They hanged the nephew too, of course.’

  ‘It’s up to the police to get evidence,’ said Eileen stubbornly. ‘I’m just describing the scene, just in the same way as I would if Inspector Patrick Cashman bothered to ask me what I had seen. Fifty people will tell him the story. And do you know what, Jack, it will be buried because we’re talking about a rich and respectable family, not a poor peasant. And that’s Cork for you, Jack.’

  She put her fingers to her typewriter and began to type. ‘It is commonly rumoured that the inheritor of this prosperous shop will shortly be getting married himself. And that his choice, to the satisfaction of those who are romantic at heart, has fallen on one of the counter hands. A little bird tells me that Mr R. has been seen going into the cinema with Miss M.M. Perhaps this is what the Queen’s Old Castle store needs. Some young blood, an experienced couple, but young enough to take an interest in the fashions and tastes of the young people in Cork city …’ She hammered on the keys and watched the words, line by line, appear on the page wound around the typewriter cylinder.

  SIX

  There is something very odd going on here, thought Patrick. The smell of gas from the small capsule was still in his nostrils. His eye went to the wires that snaked around the upper reaches of the tall building. No accident, anyway. He was sure of that. Dr Scher had done the right thing to call him. He looked appraisingly around at the staff and family who clustered around, standing stiffly to attention as though ready to serve him with some goods.

  ‘I think I’d like to have a word with the members of staff who sent these change barrels up to the office. But perhaps, first of all, sir, you could show me the counters which sent them.’ Patrick looked up at the wires that snaked across the ceiling and led down to the counters. He addressed himself to Robert, ignoring the major, who, up to now, had done most of the talking. Robert was the one who knew everything about the running of this shop. Major James Fitzwilliam was only seen in the city once or twice a year.

  Patrick knew the Queen’s Old Castle shop well. Once he had saved enough of his salary after his appointment to the Garda Siochána, he had bought a small house for his mother and furnished and stocked it for her. He had been in and out of the Queen’s Old Castle, buying sheets, blankets and other such household goods on many occasions during that time and Robert had always seemed to be in charge of the shop floor. Robert would be the one who was most familiar with the working of the shop. R
obert gave a rapid glance upwards, tracing each of the opened barrels back down its wire to its counter and naming it aloud. ‘Ladies’ Millinery, Ladies’ Shoes, Gents’ Shoes, Household Linens, Haberdashery, Curtains.’ And then he frowned. Patrick took them down in rapid shorthand and when he looked up he saw that Mr Robert, as he was known in the shop, was still frowning heavily.

  ‘There shouldn’t have been anyone on the Gents’ Shoes counter. Don’t know why money was sent up from there.’ The words were uttered loudly and aggressively. He looked around at the staff and the apprentices, standing huddled together in silence watching the family, looking from the spot where their employer fell to his death and then back at the dead man’s family. Robert’s face had gone an angry shade of purple. ‘Séamus O’Connor,’ he called authoritatively, ‘I thought I told you to leave the Men’s Shoes counter closed this morning and to carry on with sorting the stock.’

  ‘I did, sir. The counter was closed for the morning. I told one of the lads on the Ladies’ Shoes department to come for me if I were needed.’ Séamus O’Connor’s eyes moved from the office up on high and turned back to look behind where they stood. A high wide counter, four chairs, arranged neatly, legs aligned with the counter and placed with an almost mathematically correct distance between each of them. Behind the counter, on the long narrow shelves were box after box of shoes and boots, each neatly arranged on a shelf bearing the appropriate size number. At the end of the counter was a large, high, wire basket filled with river-stained shoes, each knotted to its partner, but otherwise thrown in higgledy-piggledy. Then his eyes went to a pair of men’s shoes which lay on top of the basket in front of the Reverend Mother.

  Dr Scher looked uncomfortable. ‘These are mine, inspector,’ he said hastily. He went across and picked up the large pair of shoes. ‘Quite right, Mr O’Connor. There was no one at your counter when I went there; I was looking for someone to pay for these,’ he said to Séamus O’Connor and produced his purse, giving an embarrassed glance around.