Murder at the Queen's Old Castle

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Name of Christy Callinan.’ Patrick checked through his notebook. ‘Did he look guilty, look as though he had been told to keep a secret?’

  ‘I must confess that he just looked bored,’ said Dr Scher. ‘Shame to have a young lad like that confined indoors from eight in the morning until eight at night. Should be out kicking a ball.’

  Patrick looked slightly startled at that. ‘He’s lucky to have a job and a future,’ he said severely. ‘But I wonder where Miss Maria Mulcahy had got to.’

  ‘I remember reading an old copy of a magazine at my tailor’s – called The Tailor and the Cutter. Anyway they had an advertisement for staff and at the end of a long list of requirements it said, invitingly: “The calls of Nature are permitted and Clerical Staff may use the garden below the second gate.” I wonder whether Mr Fitzwilliam made any such provision for his unfortunate staff,’ mused Dr Scher.

  ‘I should imagine, Dr Scher, that there could be many valid reasons for Miss Mulcahy to be absent from her counter,’ said the Reverend Mother, a stern eye quelling the doctor before he speculated any further and Patrick, feeling that blush creep up again, busied himself with turning over the pages of his notebook. ‘Query: Miss Mulcahy missing from counter,’ he wrote and then read it aloud.

  ‘And that would have been just a few minutes before Mr Fitzwilliam fell to the ground, because I had gone off towards the main door looking for someone to take my money when I heard the crash,’ said Dr Scher in placid tones. ‘Well, well, well, Reverend Mother. Sister Philomena’s niece and all, as they say here in Cork.’

  The Reverend Mother, noticed Patrick, gave Dr Scher a sharp look, but she said nothing, though her face when she turned it towards him, bore an expectant look, as though she expected him to challenge the doctor.

  ‘Can’t see why Miss Maria Mulcahy could have any reason to try to murder her employer,’ said Patrick readily. ‘Jobs are scarce enough in Cork and she was lucky to have her place. I don’t think that Mr Robert Fitzwilliam, as floor manager, was particularly popular so there would be no reason to get rid of the old boss in the hope that the son would be any nicer. And at that stage, most people would have thought that Robert Fitzwilliam would go on managing the business after his father’s death, just as he always did.’ What an extraordinary business that was. To cut out the son who had worked in that shop for at least twenty years, or longer, in order to leave the whole business to the son who had hardly darkened the door during all the time that Patrick had known the shop.

  ‘Would it be possible for Miss Maria Mulcahy to have known about the proposed change of the will?’ asked the Reverend Mother. ‘Presumably she knew that the shop had been left to Robert originally. It was probably the reason why she went to the cinema with him. It formed a second string to her bow and meant that she had matters of interest to communicate to Mr O’Connor.’

  Patrick looked at her without surprise. Amazing how the Reverend Mother usually knew about all of those matters. She had heard about Robert taking the shop girl to the cinema. ‘Mr Robert could have told her that he would inherit the shop, I suppose,’ he said. Dr Scher, he noticed, was grinning. So he knew, also. Terrible place for gossip, this city, thought Patrick.

  ‘Could have whispered it into her ear while the credits were rolling on the big screen,’ said Dr Scher. ‘They were very great together. So the word on the street goes, anyway.’ Not a Cork man, but he had acquired the Cork love of gossip. He looked from one to the other of them, obviously waiting for exclamations.

  ‘I’m sure, Dr Scher, that you don’t mean that our police should listen to gossip on the street corners,’ said the Reverend Mother tartly. ‘Patrick is a man who deals in facts and in reliable information.’

  Patrick smiled. He began to feel better. He sat back in his chair. So Michael Dinan was right. Well, well, well. He said nothing, though. And he would have laid a large bet on the certainty that the Reverend Mother knew all the facts about Robert, that he had been known to fiddle the books, and possibly that he had been to the cinema with Maria Mulcahy. A wise man holds his tongue. Someone had said that. Could it have been a quote from the Bible? And, of course, ‘woman’ could be substituted for ‘man’. Wherever it came from it was a true saying. He cast a quick look at the impassive face opposite to his and then looked back at Dr Scher.

  ‘Tell me all about it, doctor,’ he invited and crossed his legs. ‘What’s the word on the street, then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Dr Scher with an air of huge enjoyment, ‘lots of excitement about this. Everyone chatting about it in the university today. The way I heard it, Major Fitzwilliam would no more be interested in managing a shop than the man in the moon. The word is that the brothers will quarrel, Robert will go off; Blarney Mills have been advertising for a manager and so the major will have to have someone to manage for him and Séamus O’Connor is the senior man, so Séamus O’Connor becomes the manager and the major installs tills at each counter and gets rid of all of the paraphernalia of those change barrels whizzing up and down the shop. And then the major goes off, to Palestine, I’ve heard, leaving arrangements for the profits to be lodged in his bank. And so it might be a happy ending for Sister Philomena’s niece, Reverend Mother. She can have her pick. Either Séamus O’Connor, or the new manager in the Blarney Mills. And, I suppose, that if Sister Philomena’s niece helped the old man on his way, well, she can go and confess her sin to a priest and be forgiven.’

  Dr Scher, thought Patrick astutely, was deeply worried. It was not like him to mock the religious ceremonies of the church, nor to try to rile the Reverend Mother like this. The Reverend Mother he saw was looking across at the man with concern. She, like Patrick, would have heard the note of pain in the doctor’s voice. Mrs Fitzwilliam! There would be a strong relationship between a vulnerable patient and a caring doctor. Patrick had noticed how careful he was of her. And now he was very concerned to remove any chance of suspicion falling upon Mrs Fitzwilliam or upon her daughters.

  Patrick got to his feet. He had a lot of new ideas in his head and his thoughts felt as though they had been sifted and were now sitting in orderly heaps ready for him to inspect them. He would walk along the quays for a while and then go back to his office. Efficient paperwork, meticulous checking of evidence, that was what would solve this murder case.

  FOURTEEN

  Sunday for the nuns and the lay sisters at the convent of St Mary’s Isle was the usual day for visits from family and friends. Sister Bernadette in the kitchen always baked some cakes, and various parlours, as well as the recreation room, had fires lit and were available for the entertainment of the visitors.

  The Reverend Mother usually walked around the convent for half an hour or so, available to all, looking in through open doors, ready to nod and smile or to exchange some words, but never intruding by opening closed doors or by interrupting any low-voiced conversations. However, when she approached the north parlour that day, she was arrested by a chorus of exclamations and by the words ‘Queen’s Old Castle’. Somebody was telling an exciting story, drawing it out, judging by the gasps. The Reverend Mother slowed to a halt and wondered whether to join the animated crowd, searching her conscience for an excuse. At that moment, Sister Bernadette came down the corridor trundling a heavily weighed trolley with a squeaking wheel; she might, if she lingered, be of use to her in opening the door. However, despite the sounds of questions and interjections from within the parlour, sharp ears had heard the sound and the door was thrown open by a young boy before she could lift her hand to knock politely.

  ‘Goodness me, who is this new nun?’ asked the Reverend Mother. The wit was feeble by any standards, but Christy Callinan, apprentice to Maria Mulcahy, was young enough to enjoy the joke. When he became older, thought the Reverend Mother, he might become self-conscious about those very protruding teeth, but now they added to the charm of his broad grin and hearty laugh.

  ‘The Reverend Mother thought that I was a nun,’ he called back to the group in the parlour a
nd Sister Philomena got up in rather a flustered way, while her niece Miss Maria Mulcahy looked embarrassed. Amazing how all of those holy nuns were enjoying so intensely the story of that terrible death. Still, thought the Reverend Mother, most of their lives are fairly dull. This event, the story of the gas canister being sent up, hidden inside a change barrel, was, after all, an extraordinary one.

  ‘How nice to see you again, Miss Mulcahy,’ she said, coming into the room and shaking hands with the guest. It was good of the woman to bring the boy with her, she thought. It showed that she had a motherly attitude to her young apprentice. His accent was that of a boy from the country, it had the sing-song lilt of west Cork. Unlike Brian Maloney, he would not have school friends to see on his one day off and might well be bored and miserable unless a relative made the long journey into the city to see him.

  ‘We’ve all been admiring his jacket. Look at that for smartness!’ Sister Philomena beamed at the boy. ‘Tell the Reverend Mother who bought that for you, Christy, won’t you?’

  ‘Miss Mulcahy,’ said the boy. He did not, thought the Reverend Mother, say it with gratitude, nor even with a childlike pleasure, but with a certain measure of self-satisfaction, or was there even a slightly sly note in his voice. Not cheap, that jacket. Good wool. She felt it admiringly. A good Donegal tweed.

  ‘Got it in the Munster Arcade, would you believe it?’ continued Sister Philomena determined to display her niece’s generosity. Not in the Queen’s Old Castle, then, but in the much more expensive and more up-market Munster Arcade, in the heart of Patrick Street.

  Interesting!

  ‘Nothing for me, thank you, Sister Bernadette,’ said the Reverend Mother, rising to her feet after a few minutes. ‘I’m going to take a turn in the garden. Christy, would you like to come with me and see our hens?’ It was the only thing that she could think of that might possibly interest a young boy on the convent premises, but the chorus of approval and of voices assuring Christy that he would love to see them gave immediate approbation to her suggestion. Christy, himself, didn’t look at all convinced of this. Probably a country boy who had seen hens all of his life, unlike the city children of the school who had all been fascinated by the sight of those colourful creatures who laid tasty food for their benefit.

  Nevertheless, she had enthusiastic backing for her offer. The convivial crowd in the parlour wanted to get rid of Christy. His novelty had faded. Now they wanted to question Maria Mulcahy without sharp ears listening in, and so Christy was told firmly that he would love the hens, was presented with a slice of cake by Sister Philomena and was ushered quickly to the door and told to be a good boy by Miss Mulcahy.

  The Reverend Mother gave him a couple of minutes of peace to chew on the cake as she led the way towards the door to the garden. The river, she noticed, interested him more than the hens. He was from Baltimore, by the sea, and he wanted to be a fisherman, he told her, licking the crumbs from between his fingers. Didn’t like the fish in Cork, not nice. Not fresh. He wished that he was back in Baltimore and out on a boat on a fine day like this. And his mam would fry up some fish with a bit of dripping that she got from the woman she worked for. He was knowledgeable about fish. Shrewd, too. Could see the problem of fish in Cork city. Too much filthy muck went into that river, he told her assertively, adding, ‘You need to have fresh water for fish, Reverend Mother, and then when you catch them, you need to fry them when they are fresh. Fish do be going off awful quick.’

  Half the time his father and his brothers couldn’t sell their catch, apparently, before it started to go off. The locals caught their own fish, so they had to get them to the towns inland, or even to the city itself. Not an easy life, but there was a strong note of nostalgia in his voice.

  ‘So what do you do if you can’t sell the fish?’ asked the Reverend Mother, pleased to have found a subject that interested him since her hens had failed so miserably to engage his attention.

  ‘Well, we’d be smoking the mackerel on the beach,’ he told her. ‘You get tons of them in August. The sea do be black with them. Not a chance of selling them in August. Everyone catches their own. So we smoke tons of them and keep them to sell in the winter time. We eat them ourselves too. Plenty to go around. When the mackerel come in, you’d be able to fish them out with a bucket from the pier. Even someone like you would be able to do it, Reverend Mother,’ he told her, his face animated and his very blue eyes glowing. She was touched and moved by his enthusiasm. And then a shadow came over his face.

  ‘I’d give anything to be back there.’ His lips closed over the protruding teeth. ‘Don’t like that place. It’s boring.’ There was an unchild-like look of determination on his face, and, perhaps, the look of one who feels he may have said too much.

  ‘So you don’t fancy spending your life working in a shop?’ The situation intrigued the Reverend Mother as she half-listened to his description of how boring all of the adults in the shop were – though he did make an exception for the major, who was, according to Christy, a gas man. The boy from the country had already picked up the Cork slang word ‘gas’ and the Reverend Mother listened with amusement to the major’s efforts to amuse the young apprentices and astonish them with stories of tricks played in army life. But then she went back to thinking about Christy. The journey to Baltimore could take six hours by horse and cart to the city of Cork. What had brought the boy to a shop here in this city that he hated? If the boy wanted that sort of work, then there must surely be plenty of shops in Skibberean.

  He shrugged and made a face when she put the question to him. ‘It was me mam’s idea.’ And then reluctantly he continued, ‘Me brother was drowned and she didn’t want me to go on the boats, too.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘Are you the youngest boy?’ It didn’t, she thought, explain the long distance. The substantial town of Skibberean would have been relatively near. She was sure that Skibberean had plenty of big shops, if a career in a shop was wanted for the boy. And then inspiration struck.

  ‘Was your mother from the city here?’ she asked.

  He gave her a quick upwards glance. A smart boy, she thought. There was immediate comprehension in his face as if he had followed her thoughts.

  ‘She talked me uncle into it. My Uncle Séamus,’ he said more formally.

  ‘Séamus?’

  ‘Mr O’Connor. Gents’ Shoes. I live with him and me grannie.’ His explanation was succinct and explained everything. A large family, probably, a dangerous way of making a living, a much-loved youngest son. An obliging brother in Cork and then a boy from the glittering seas of West Cork was transplanted to the dank fogs of this marshy city. He didn’t like it and she could not blame him. Life on a fishing boat was exciting and challenging. Standing around in a shop all day was poor exchange for battling with the waves. Being servile to counter hands, employers and customers was an even poorer exchange for the excitement of landing a net full of glittering mackerel. As for death, well, it was not something that a twelve-year-old worried too much about. Nor did the Reverend Mother. Christy, she thought, had more chance of picking up the deadly tuberculosis in this fetid city as of being drowned among the Atlantic waves of West Cork.

  ‘You’d like to go back to Baltimore.’ Not a real question and he didn’t proffer any reply, but his lips closed tightly again over his teeth and there was something very dogged about the face that gazed out into the murky depths of the polluted river. Her mind turned over various ideas. The connection between Séamus O’Connor and the apprentice made Miss Mulcahy’s benign and maternal attitude to her young apprentice appear understandable. But in her experience, uncles were not that interested in nephews. What did she hope to gain?

  And even if Séamus O’Connor was devoted to young Christy Callinan, a jacket from the Munster Arcade for the man’s nephew was an excessively expensive way of currying favour with the uncle. The Reverend Mother looked down at the determined face and turned matters over in her mind.

  And
then she pounced. ‘Why did Miss Mulcahy buy you that jacket?’ she asked bluntly.

  He was very taken aback. She did not take her eyes off him, but stayed looking appraisingly at the sulky face. A hen scuttled past them, giving a sudden squawk, but he did not move, just stayed looking defiantly up at her. Boys, she thought, reached a growth spurt much later than girls and some boys did not start to shoot up until they were seventeen or eighteen. He had broad shoulders and looked well-fed, well covered with flesh, but undoubtedly small for his age, something that probably endeared him to Miss Mulcahy who could regard him as a child. But there was now something quite unchild-like about his face. He had heard something in her voice, had extrapolated some hidden meaning in her words and it had made him wary. He opened his mouth, displayed the protruding teeth in an endearing and child-like grin.

  ‘She’s ever so nice,’ he said winningly.

  The Reverend Mother raised her eyebrows at him.

  It worked with him, worked as well with boys as with girls, she told herself. He knew that she didn’t believe him. The blue eyes flickered as he began to talk, quite rapidly, and in a voice that held a note of anxiety as he strove to convince her.

  ‘I do be doing lots of jobs for her,’ he said, a child-like cadence in his West Cork sing-song voice. ‘I’d do be picking up things from the floor, and polishing the counter and tying the ladies’ shoe laces and putting shoes back into boxes and dusting the footstools and …’ His invention began to run out and the Reverend Mother was unimpressed. She nodded her head impatiently.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That would be what an apprentice would have to do, wouldn’t it? I was talking to Brian Maloney and he was telling me the jobs he had to do in the Men’s Shoes department.’