Foggy tonight! Place was wetter than ever. The raw damp had made the walls stream. No glimmer of light from overhead. Just blackness pressing down. Cloudy, wet, foggy evening. Just the one flame illuminating a man’s sour face and yellow teeth as Séamus O’Connor got ready to count down the moments until the room would be left to odour-filled darkness.
Tonight, there was definitely something different about the familiar smells. A stink of rotten eggs. Gas! His heart jumped into his throat, choking, retching. For a moment he thought of his mother, gone off with her fancy man and leaving him alone. He blinked the tears from his eyes. He had to manage on his own.
‘Get on, Maloney, get on with you; undress; get into bed. I’m warning you, all of you. Sixty seconds! And then I blow out the candle. One … two … three …’
Brian took off his shoes and then his suit as fast as he could. If it wasn’t hanging up within seconds there would be trouble. It didn’t matter about inner clothes, but the outer had to look smart and clean. Three fresh shirts a week. Suits cleaned every three months. That was the rule. He sat on the edge of his bed still wearing his shoes and socks. He felt something hard beneath the thin flock mattress. He pulled on the old pair of trousers and tattered jersey that he wore to clean the glass. He would sleep in those. Nothing odd in that. Many of the boys did it. The place was freezing at night. But he felt strangely shaky. The smell was stronger by the minute; not just the usual dust, dry and itchy to the nose, nor the usual moulds, rotten and pungent, but the deadly sweet smell of gas. And it was coming from his bed. Too near to him! He nerved himself to scream. Scream! Quickly! Quick before the door was closed! But just when he needed all of the power of his lungs, his throat closed over.
‘… fifty-eight … fifty-nine … sixty!’ And then darkness.
‘Christ! I smell gas,’ shouted Henry Spiller. ‘God, Maloney, it’s coming from your bed. Help! Gas!’
But it was too late. The door had slammed shut. The key had rattled in the door. Footsteps echoing down the flimsy staircase. They were locked in until six a.m. on the following morning. Brian felt around the edge of his bed, lifted the flock mattress. Knew what would be underneath, on top of the iron springs. Screamed! Small, rounded, barrel-shaped. Hand moving over, counting, mechanically counting. ‘Gas canisters! Under my mattress. Six of them! Christ Almighty!’
‘Don’t touch them, Maloney!’ Too late! He had sat on them! The lids had fallen off. Tom Donovan, almost hysterical. Henry Spiller screaming ‘Help!’ John Joe retching. Christy Callinan crying, ‘Mammy! Mammy!’ Wished they’d shut up. He had an idea. Something to do. Now it had come back into his mind.
He needed to unscrew the metal ball on the top of his bed! Had done it often enough out of sheer boredom when the thunder of the rain on the glass roof had kept him awake. But now was different. Now his hands trembled and his mind was foggy. Couldn’t turn it. Didn’t open! Sick and dazed! Wrong way! Stupid!
Now it was coming, travelling smoothly on the metal grooves! Not too much time to waste. Getting giddy. Tried to ignore it, to keep calm, to take the time needed. If only they’d stop screaming and shouting, bursting his eardrums. No point in it anyway. The whole of the Queen’s Old Castle had been empty except for Séamus O’Connor when they were sent up to bed. He’d be long gone by now.
The ball on the iron bedframe was off. ‘Take cover!’ It was all that his lungs could manage to spit out. He was gasping for breath and struggling against nausea and the pressing need to vomit. He raised his hand. Heavy as a ton, that iron ball. His muscles almost refusing to move. He should have told them all to stand back, to go towards the door, but he knew that there was no way that his befuddled brain could get the words out. The gas from the six canisters had affected him very quickly. He tried to remember where the wall was, and then recollected that it must be an arm’s length in front of him. If it had to brain someone, it had better be Henry Spiller. The thought was in his head when he gulped hard and knew that he was going to vomit.
It was no good. His hand, weighed down by the heavy iron ball dropped down to his side. He wobbled and then reached out and held onto the iron frame of his bed. His legs trembled and his head was sick and dizzy. He tried to straighten himself, tried to stop the dizziness overwhelming him and swallowed back the vomit. Not now! The words shrieked through his ears. He gathered up his remaining shreds of energy, raised his arm and flung the iron ball as high as he possibly could.
The crash when the glass smashed into smithereens miraculously restored him. Raw damp foggy air flushed the sick sweetness of the gas from his mouth and nose. He felt blood trickle and then flow down his face. He reached up, touched his head and found it wet and sticky. Sliced by a shard of glass. The pain from the cut overwhelmed the nausea. He sat on the side of the bed and bowed his head in his hands.
‘Christ Maloney! You’ve gone and done it. They’ll kill you.’
‘They’ll string you up!’
‘I’m cut!’ Christy Callinan sounded about seven years old.
‘God, my bed is covered in glass!’
‘Don’t think that we’re going to cover up for you. You’re the one that done it and you’re the one to take the blame!’
‘You’d better cut your throat with one of them pieces of glass. They’ll hang you for that.’
No, they wouldn’t. Won’t get a chance. He said to himself. He had his shoes and his socks on. Could move about. The glass crunched beneath his feet. He touched his head once more. Getting stickier now. He didn’t care. Still a bit of a smell of gas, but it was going, evaporating, mopped up by the raw, wet air. He grabbed his bedclothes, dirty old blankets, sheet and pillow and the mattress, too. He could feel his way. Should know this room as well as the back of his own hand. Bundled the bedclothes under one arm, hand fastened onto the top of the mattress, dragged it onto the floor. Three steps forward, turn left, between the beds now. Could hear them all shouting and complaining. Didn’t care. Better to be wet and cold than to be choked to death by the gas in that stinking room with no windows.
He stumbled once, but got to his feet again. The voices guided him. The two oldest boys, Henry Spiller and Tom Donovan, had beds nearest to the door and Henry Spiller never stopped talking, never stopped complaining though he was the furthest away from the broken glass. Still, he was glad to hear him for once. He guided himself that way. A black night with not a star or a slit of a moon to help. No smell of gas left, though. No gas left! He repeated these words again and again. They seemed to help. No wet down this end either. Should have told the kids, Christy and Jimmy, to follow him, but he was too weak and sick to make the effort.
‘What are you going to tell them, Maloney? Christ! O’Connor will flog you raw in the morning.’
Good! Keep talking, Henry, lad! Brian stumbled on, dragging his load with him. It was important to get to the door. Another few steps. He tried the handle, but knew that he wouldn’t be able to do anything. That door was locked every night with an enormous key the size of his foot. Without replying or saying a word to anyone, he dropped the mattress, and the pillow just in front of the door.
By now he was quite reckless and knew that there was no future for him in the Queen’s Old Castle. By feel, he stripped off the pillow slip, made a pad with half of it and then tore the rest into shreds so as to bandage his head and stop the flow of blood over his face. And then he dropped down upon the mattress and covered himself with the threadbare old blankets, pulling them right over his ears so that he didn’t have to listen to Henry Spiller any more. A sharp pain from his lacerated scalp, but he smothered it with plans for the future.
A faint grey light had filled the attic room by the time that Brian Maloney woke up. The woman who came in to scrub the floors stumped up the stairs every morning, banging her bucket on each step, rattling the mop handle against the handrail and the newel rod, shouting, ‘Up all of ye!’ at the top of her voice. The quicker she could get them out, the quicker she could get the stairs, the passageway to the o
ffice and the office itself, mopped out. Brian was ready for her as soon as the key turned in the lock.
In a flash, he was past her. Running down the stairs. No trace of sickness, now. His head hurt, but the bleeding had stopped. He snatched off the blood-stiffened pad of the pillow slip and dropped it on the stairway. It bled again a little, but only a little. Before the first boy, carrying his pot of night soil down to the yard, had put a foot on the stairs, Brian had turned the key in the front door and was out on the pavement of the Grand Parade. Nobody much was around, just a few people going to six o’clock early mass and communion in the Augustinian church nearby. They gave him a few curious looks and he guessed that he had dried blood on his face. He stopped at the fountain in the middle of the Grand Parade, dipped the end of his sleeve in and then changed his mind. Let it alone, he thought and crossed back over to South Main Street and headed towards the convent on St Mary’s Isle.
NINETEEN
The Reverend Mother spent longer in the convent chapel after the six o’clock early morning service than was her wont. The celebration of the feast day of the Irish Saint Brigid had reminded the convent chaplain that he had not yet been provided with a set of green robes to do full honour to his native country. The Reverend Mother, suffering from a pain in her chest, but aware of the dangers to her reputation of appearing parsimonious to the Church, had listened very carefully to his grumbles, had agreed whole-heartedly with his speculations on how good they would look, but was sorrowfully lacking in ideas as to how money should be raised for this purpose. She listened to various suggestions with a dubious face and slightly raised eyebrows, and then when he ran out of ideas said, with a sudden flash of inspiration, ‘I know what I’ll do, Father. I’ll write to the bishop. I’ll do that straight away.’ And with an air of decision, she left him and strode quickly down the path towards the back door, smiling to herself as she foretold the bishop’s pained response about the lack of diocesan funds for such a cause.
It was just as she had lifted a hand towards the latch that someone spoke from behind a bush.
‘Reverend Mother,’ a hoarse, cracked adolescent voice, but one that she knew well.
‘Brian,’ she said, ‘what on earth …’ And then she stopped. Brian Maloney had edged his way past the laurel leaves and presented a face shockingly smeared with dried blood.
She assessed him quickly. There was a patch of blood-hardened hair on his scalp, cuts, lightly scabbed over, on his hands, and one, long, narrow slit running down one cheek. All superficial, she guessed.
‘Come into my room,’ she said. She held the door open until he was through and safely in the passageway and then she led the way. His story could wait. By now Sister Bernadette would have placed her breakfast and a pot of tea on a tray and the fire would have been burning since before the early morning service. A cup of tea, some food, some warmth and then he could tell his story. The rest of the community had filed into the refectory to eat their porridge and boiled eggs so they met no one on their way. The Reverend Mother unlocked her door, ushered him to a seat by the fire, poured him a cup of tea and set a plate of bread and butter beside him. ‘Wait here,’ she said, but took the precaution of locking the door before she went up the corridor and secured some warm water and an old face flannel.
By the time that she came back, he had eaten and drunk all that she had provided for him. Nothing much wrong with him, she thought as silently she mopped his face with the flannel. His hair she left untouched. Scalp wounds bled profusely; she knew that from all of her years of coping with playground falls. She wouldn’t risk disturbing the healing scab that had spread over the dried blood. She was rather touched by the trusting way in which he turned his face up to her and submitted to her thorough cleansing of the blood from his face and about how patiently he waited until she told him to tell her what had happened.
She listened carefully until he came to the end of his story. A brave boy, she thought, and she admired the quick thinking that had spurred him to undo the iron knob from his bed and hurl it through the glass roof of the Queen’s Old Castle. According to his story, his resourcefulness had saved his own life and perhaps the lives of those in the beds on either side to him. He had told that story well, she thought. Had made her see that dormitory with its damp, unplastered walls, and the ten beds on either side of the long room beneath the glass roof, made her hear the exclamations of the boys, had made her almost experience the horror of that moment when he had plumped down on that flock mattress and smelled the dangerous odour.
‘I think, Brian,’ she said after a few moments’ thought, ‘I think that I should send for Inspector Cashman. This sounds as though it were an attempt to kill you.’ She sat back and looked for his reaction. Not too upset by the whole affair, she thought, considering that he was only fourteen years old. These children grew up very quickly. They became accustomed to unpleasant, difficult and dangerous situations from a very early stage in their existence. It wasn’t so much bravery as a certain stoicism, an acceptance of what life threw at them and a clear understanding of how much, or how little, they could influence events around them. The poor, she thought, were more cynical about the powers of the police than the society to which she and her cousin Lucy belonged were. He bore a resigned look upon his newly washed face now, she thought. Much more resigned than relieved. There was no impression to be got from him that he, in any way, felt that this would solve his problem.
‘I suppose that you’d have to,’ he said, rather more to himself than to her.
She had risen to her feet in order to go to the telephone, but then something in his voice stopped her. She cast a glance at the clock over the door. A bit early, anyway, she thought, and she sat back onto her chair again. His phrase interested her.
‘Is there anything else that I could do?’ she asked respectfully, thinking that after his heroism and his quick thinking the night before that he deserved to be consulted.
He thought about that for a while. ‘I knowed, before now, that they were out to get me,’ he said eventually. ‘The old woman. Miss Kitty. Tom Donovan. Mr O’Connor. They were all saying that I was the one that dunnit. Saying they saw me send up a change barrel with a gas cylinder in it. I went to see Eileen, you know, Eileen MacSweeney, she used to be one of the big girls when I was a little mickey man here in the convent. I thought that Eileen might get me in with the Shinners, get me a bit of protection, like.’
The phrase amused her, but she was careful to keep a smile from her face. He deserved serious attention. There was little doubt in her mind that the presence of six gas canisters in his bed did appear to be strongly connected with the murder of Mr Joseph Fitzwilliam.
‘And what did Eileen say?’ she enquired with interest.
‘She put the peelers on to me,’ he said in disgusted tones.
‘I see,’ she said. Just as she had intended to do herself. It obviously hadn’t worked then, and it might not work now. She looked across at him. ‘And what did Inspector Cashman do?’ she asked.
‘He took me back. Talked to Mr O’Connor. Told him that he wasn’t to blame me for going to the police, that it was police business. Did his best, I suppose.’
‘But what did Mr O’Connor do?’
He thought about that. ‘Told Miss Kitty,’ he said. ‘Told her that I had been to the barracks. Said I had been complaining. Henry Spiller, her apprentice, told me. Said I was in bad trouble. The two of them had their heads together, talking about me.’
That had been an unexpected reply. She had expected that the owner of the business might have been involved.
‘And Miss Kitty had been one of the ones that had accused you …’ The Reverend Mother thought about the complexities of this business. ‘And what happened next?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Didn’t say nothing.’ And then added, ‘That scared me.’
Once again she silently applauded his astuteness. He would, she thought, have preferred punishment.
‘I told myself
to be very careful.’ He said that as much to himself as to her. A reminder, she thought it was.
She nodded approval at his words. And, indeed, she told herself, it certainly behoved him to tread carefully. That seemed a rather unholy alliance between the daughter of the owner and an ambitious counter hand.
‘And then the major made this speech. Said his old mam was a bit gaga-like, but …’
The Reverend Mother bit her lip. ‘But, it didn’t work.’ She finished his sentence for him and then sat and thought what was best to do.
‘Well, the old lady hasn’t been in the shop since then. Miss Kitty had to take her place, gave John Joe Burke a bad time. Could hear her shrieking at him. Didn’t say a word to me, though.’
‘So nobody said anything to you, since the major spoke to them, is that right, Brian?’
‘That’s right. Though I’d prefer they’d be slagging me off than poisoning me. That’s a terrible way to kill anyone. Just like rats in the tunnel, the whole twenty of us there in the dormitory.’
The Reverend Mother shared his horror. Though from what she had been told of those gas canisters, she reckoned that they would not have been powerful enough to kill the boys in that dormitory with its unplastered, roughly laid, stone walls and its high glass roof. Nevertheless, Brian, himself, had probably been in acute danger, especially if, like lots of children, he had stuck his head under the bedclothes. Keeps your nose and lips from freezing, a five-year-old girl had explained, displaying to the Reverend Mother the picture that she had sketched of herself and her four sisters, outlined as five neat lumps under one blanket.
‘Brian,’ she said. ‘Who could have put these gas canisters in your bed?’
He looked at her with the slight amazement that children show when their teacher admits to not knowing the answer. ‘It was Mr O’Connor, wasn’t it? He’s the one that keeps the key to the dormitory.’
Murder at the Queen's Old Castle Page 21
