A Gruesome Discovery

by Cora Harrison

  And then she saw it. It was obvious. A large yacht was anchored there and it stood proud, not leaning, plenty of water there. Drake’s Pool. Not muddy, not ebbing, deep water, she could be sure. She saw a sea creature, smooth-headed, perhaps a whale, rise up and then dive deep into the smooth, reflective water. Carefully she steered her little boat across, the engine chugging away happily.

  SIX

  St Thomas Aquinas

  ‘Et secundum eandem rationem sequitur quod tristitia causet odium.’

  (And in the same way it follows that hatred arises from sorrow.)

  Saturday was a good day for the Reverend Mother to meet her cousin Lucy. School finished at half-past eleven in the morning and the nuns then had Saturday afternoon to themselves, a free afternoon to do some shopping, to take a walk, to prepare lessons or to pray, according to their individual tastes. From time to time, once breakfast was over, she glanced at the clock, but her cousin was not an early riser and so she hesitated to contact her and instead tried to concentrate on a submission to the newly formed Dáil on the importance of funding secondary education for all children and not just subsidising it for the children of the well-off.

  ‘Mr Hayes, the auctioneer to see you, Reverend Mother,’ said Sister Bernadette, putting her head around the door after a polite knock. ‘He doesn’t want to disturb you, but he’d be grateful for a quick word, if you can spare the time.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said the Reverend Mother cordially. ‘Will you come and remind me that I have a class at nine o’clock, sister?’

  ‘By all means, Reverend Mother.’ Sister Bernadette respectfully withdrew, without even a single glance at the clock standing conspicuously on Reverend Mother’s mantelpiece showing the time to be now five minutes to nine.

  Mr Hayes was already in full flow when ushered in by Sister Bernadette. The terrible times was his theme. ‘Dreadful the things that happen in these distressful days,’ he was saying as he paused for breath and allowed the sister to tap on the Reverend Mother’s door. It was a good phrase, was her thought as she called out ‘Come in, sister.’

  ‘Dreadful’ and ‘distressful’ had the advantage of sympathizing with the community about the mischance of a dead man being delivered to their convent, if they knew all about it, and, if they didn’t, of being interpreted as a general verdict on the prevailing malaise in the city.

  When left alone with the Reverend Mother, though, Mr Hayes fell silent, thrust out his open palms in a gesture of despair, before saying, ‘Reverend Mother, what must you think of me?’

  This was an unexpected opening and the Reverend Mother took immediate advantage of the dramatic moment of silence that followed it. ‘How nice of you to come, Mr Hayes, do sit down. I was thinking only this morning about you and the auctioneer business and I wondered whether that trunk was in your main saleroom, the place where you conduct the auctions.’

  Mr Hayes looked taken aback at this abrupt approach. ‘No, it wasn’t, Reverend Mother. We only put the better stuff in the main showrooms. That would have been upstairs, or perhaps in the hallway. I’d say it would have been upstairs, though. But, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you for sure.’

  ‘So how did my cousin, Mrs Murphy, come to bid for it?’

  ‘Well, you see, Reverend Mother, we work like this. Small, valuable objects are brought up to me into the main showroom by one of the boys. I hold it up and then start with a low figure and raise the bidding step by step. But the furniture and the heavy stuff doesn’t get moved at all. We’d be all day over one sale if we did a thing like that, so for each sale we get a load of leaflets printed out. I go out to the house and scribble down a list of everything to be sold, you see, Reverend Mother, and I get them printed up by a little printing works just off South Terrace – nice little girl, Eileen MacSweeney from Barrack Street, came to school here, didn’t she – well, she types it up, lovely and neat; sweet little girl, well, they run off a hundred copies on their printing works, we put them in the windows of shops, leaving them outside our own premises so that anyone can take a leaflet and on the day of the sale one of my boys hands them out to the people there. I always tell them to give one to everyone in the building whether they are interested in the lot or not. People put a bid in, you see, Reverend Mother, when the bidding is low and then they get interested. It catches them, like; they get carried away. And I use the same leaflet to get through the sale, go through them quick as I can. Keep everything lively and moving fast, make people think they’ll lose a bargain if they hesitate. That’s how it works. There was another trunk, too, among the goods, nothing worth much in it either, old curtains, cushions, tablecloths. Someone had stuck labels on the trunk giving what they held, you see. One of the family, I suppose.’

  ‘And the trunk marked “Old School Books”?’

  ‘Number 159,’ said Mr Hayes. ‘I think that number will be on my tombstone. I’ll never forget it. I came to it, called it out, said it was a trunk full of old school books, twelve children, the man had, you know, Reverend Mother, and I’d say they’d passed the books down from one to another of them. Well, I gave the details and then I looked straight across at Mrs Murphy, God help me! And I said, “Now who will start me off at half-a-crown?” And she raises one finger and I look all around the room, give it a few seconds, and then I say, “Sold to Mrs Murphy for half-a-crown.” And then I just went onto the next item. I never waste time with the small stuff. Clear it out and make room for the next sale. That’s always my motto. Can’t even remember what that next item was now. I’ve been in such a state about the whole thing. I’ve been in the business for fifty years, man and boy, and never a thing like that has happened to me before. I came over to apologize to you, but God knows, I don’t know what to say to you, Reverend Mother.’ Like a gramophone whose turntable had slowed to a stop, Mr Hayes fell silent and mopped his face with a large handkerchief.

  ‘My dear Mr Hayes, you must not feel so badly. The whole thing has been much more of a shock to you than it was to me. I do hope that the unpleasant affair has not affected your business?’ The Reverend Mother had her eye on the clock. There was a sound of a door closing in the distance and then the click of Sister Bernadette’s metal-tipped shoes going to the convent door. This would be the postman, a very punctual man who always delivered his letters before nine o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Well, now, I wouldn’t say that. You know Cork people. Very curious, they are,’ admitted Mr Hayes. ‘It’s made for a lot of interest in the city.’ He began to look more cheerful as he thought of that. ‘In fact, when I came out here this morning, there was already a queue of people waiting for the doors to open and then popping in to get a leaflet for today.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said the Reverend Mother. The click of heels now came from the corridor and she rose from her seat. He stood up, also, though he looked as though he had more to say, but Sister Bernadette’s knock sounded on the door.

  ‘Ah, sister, you are summoning me to class. Are the children in? Goodness, is it that time?’ She held out her hand. ‘It was unnecessary, but very, very kind of you to come to see me, Mr Hayes, and please do be assured that I value your kind intention very well. We are grateful for all contributions to our work here.’

  ‘If anything else comes up, then you can be sure that I’ll think of you, Reverend Mother,’ said Mr Hayes, his cheerfulness quite restored. ‘No, no, don’t worry, sister, I’ll find my own way out.’

  ‘Mrs Murphy telephoned when you were with Mr Hayes,’ said Sister Bernadette as the door closed with a reverentially careful snap behind the auctioneer. ‘She just wanted to leave a message that she was going to drop in this afternoon. She’ll be here at three o’clock unless she hears from you. I told her that I thought you were free and that you would be pleased to see her.’ Sister Bernadette beamed her pleasure. Touchingly the whole convent were solicitous for their Reverend Mother’s health after her gruesome discovery.

  ‘Thank you, sister,’ said the Reverend Mother as she w
ent rapidly down the corridor and into the classroom where the senior girls, under the stern eye of Sister Mary Immaculate were studying a poem about daffodils which the good nun had decreed they were to commit to memory. Their bright, pleased faces when she came in cheered her somewhat. She had, she remembered, promised a debate on whether girls should be allowed to wear trousers by parents and schoolteachers, something that had seemed to be of great interest to these young ladies who were certain that the 1920s had changed all and that they could look forward to a brighter future than their mothers.

  ‘Well, let’s start by summarizing the advantages,’ she said cheerfully as soon as Sister Mary Immaculate had closed the door behind her. ‘How do you think that wearing trousers would make life easier for girls?’ Little by little was always her motto. First the easy stuff, then the more difficult work of getting them to look on the other side of matters, to see things from the point of view of the older generation, to appreciate the point of view of those who had, as she had thought earlier when meditating on Mr Mulcahy, come up the hard way. By the time that the lesson was over she was happy with her hour’s work. These girls were not natural readers or writers, but they were great talkers, all of them, and talking was the way whereby they could be led to formulate thoughts. A few groaned when she asked them to write down the arguments, but most seized pens eagerly while the ideas were still fresh in their heads. When all was peaceful and the only sound was the monotonous dipping of steel nibs into inkwells, her mind wandered back again to the Mulcahy murder. Could the hard life imposed by the man onto his family, his wife and children, even if it had been done with the best of intentions, with a fanatical impulse to raise his family into the upper echelons of the city of Cork, could this have resulted in one amongst them being driven to murder?

  But of course, actions, rather than intentions, are what are remembered. Would it be probable that at least some of Mr Mulcahy’s twelve children hated rather than revered their father? She endeavoured to recall the expression on Fred Mulcahy’s face when she had thrown back the lid of the trunk, but all that she could remember was the impassionate denial that he had anything to do with it. No sorrow; none that she had seen. And, of course, his words about his mother.

  And then as she sat in the silent classroom her ear caught the sound of the convent doorbell and the cheerful voice of Dr Scher joking with Sister Bernadette. Now there would be some answers. She gave him a few minutes to be settled in her room, fed with tea and cake by the kitchen and then organized the collection of the scripts, promised a small prize for the best argued of the submissions and dismissed the girls for a five-minute run around the playground before their next class. It would, she thought, not be in the best of taste to discuss the autopsy with Dr Scher as he gulped down the strong tea and relished the sweet cake.

  Dr Scher, however, did not seem to have much diffidence about approaching the subject. ‘You’ll never guess what I found when I opened the man up, Reverend Mother,’ he said with his mouth full of cake as soon as she came into the room.

  ‘Gunshot, or knife wound?’ she asked, after thoughtfully waiting until he had stopped chewing and had swallowed another slurp of tea.

  ‘Neither,’ he said, his chubby face alight with amusement.

  She frowned in puzzlement.

  ‘What then? What killed him?’

  ‘He was hit on the back of the head with, I would guess, an iron bar. Killed him instantly. What do you make of that? Bled profusely, of course.’

  ‘What about the shot fired by Fred Mulcahy?’

  ‘Didn’t kill him, of course, bullet went right through the body and out the other side. Embedded in the skins. I’ve ruined those skins, I’m afraid, doused them in formaldehyde; mind you they were soaked in the man’s blood. I’d say that he might even have obligingly fallen into the open trunk after the blow that killed him.’ He was speaking lightly, but she could see that he was scanning her face for evidence that the matter might be upsetting to her.

  ‘That, I should imagine, is of small consideration,’ she said impatiently. ‘But that was unexpected, was it not? So where did the blood come from, the blood that we both saw on the man’s coat?’

  ‘We’re not too far advanced in those things,’ he said with an apologetic air. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure, but I think that it is fairly likely that it came from the dead man. There’s a massive wound on the back of the head. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that the man who dealt the fatal blow might have been punched on the nose by Mr Mulcahy. It wouldn’t be the first time in my experience that a punch on the nose might have led to a murder. I suppose that it’s possible that it came from someone else.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘You are hinting that perhaps Mr Mulcahy had an argument, an argument or a fight with someone. That someone could have resented the blow, resented the shedding of blood …’ Deliberately she refrained from using a pronoun. Was the argument, the fight, the blow received and then returned, perhaps, was that with his wife, one of his sons, or perhaps even his grown-up daughter. Susan; that was the name. She remembered her well. A clever girl. Bridie had been proud of her, though Fred, the eldest of that large family, was her great love.

  ‘That’s a possibility,’ he admitted. ‘There could have been an altercation. All that I can, in my poor scientific way, tell you is that someone, with a reasonably strong arm, picked up an iron bar and hit the man on the back of the neck. He would, I think, have been killed instantly, would have dropped to the floor and never moved again. The injury to the brain was massive.’

  ‘And school books,’ asked the Reverend Mother. ‘Were there school books there? Were there books beneath the body, beneath the hides and skins?’

  Dr Scher shook his head. ‘No, there were no books in it.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, really, when I think about it. After all, why try to sell off old school books when the youngest Mulcahy boy is only six years old. Mr Mulcahy may have made enough money to build himself a house in Montenotte, but he wouldn’t be the type to waste money. No, I’d say that the school books would all have been carefully kept. Was there anything else in the trunk?’

  ‘No, nothing was in that trunk except the body of the man and the hides and skins that were packed around him.’ He hesitated for a moment, almost looking inwardly into his memory of the morning. ‘I would be pretty sure that the skins were in the trunk first,’ he said slowly. ‘They were packed down, weighed down by the body, blood-soaked. Perhaps the skins were in the trunk, perhaps for carrying purposes. Make what you like of that.’

  ‘I see,’ she thought about it for a moment. ‘When I first thought about those skins, untreated, crawling with maggots, I felt that it was an action of hate that had packed them around the body of the dead man,’ she said slowly. ‘But now that you tell me they may have been there before the body, then there may be a different interpretation. In that household, skins of dead animals were a normal fact of life. If it happened as you suggest, then it looks as though the murderer had no normal distaste for handling these objects. Whatever way it was, this is a strange and unsettling crime and I feel very worried about it.’

  ‘Worried.’ He had picked up that word and there was an interrogative note in his voice. ‘Why worried?’ he asked.

  ‘Murder is always worrying,’ she replied. ‘There is always a great measure of fear attached to the deed. I remember a child, you remember him, too, Dr Scher, little Jimmy, clever little fellow, and he used to say to me, very earnestly, the way that those young boys impart information to elderly nuns, he used to say, “Be very careful of a cornered rat, Reverend Mother. No matter how big you are, they will bite you if they can’t escape you”. There may now be other people in danger because of that initial murder.’

  ‘You suspect that the wife or one of the children, one of the boys, have had something to do with it. Is that right? Or could he have been involved in some criminal activity?’

  The Reverend Mother thought abo
ut it. It was, she supposed, a possibility, that this man, this self-made man, this man, who according to his own account of himself, arrived as a barefoot man in the city of Cork; yes, it was a possibility that he was engaged in some nefarious dealings. On the other hand, he could just have been a hardworking merchant, a dealer in hides and skins, who had a knack of exploiting the market, a knack of marketing his goods to the highest bidder.

  ‘Who else could have killed him?’ she said the words aloud and looked interrogatively at the doctor.

  ‘An iron bar striking a man across the back of the neck looks like anger to me, Reverend Mother. This murder doesn’t bear the mark of a business rival deciding to get rid of a man more successful than he. You imagine someone picking up an iron bar and hitting a man across the back of the head. That, to me, spells raw and uncontrollable anger. A business man or some political rival would be much more likely to put a bullet into him on some dark night, perhaps when he was up there at his new tanning yard, or anywhere, in fact. There are parts of Shandon where the sound of a shot would have the residents locking doors and drawing curtains across windows. No, I have a feeling that this is a domestic murder. Strength would have been needed, but then, I’ve heard that the wife and family worked long hours in the tanning yard.’

  ‘And the blood on the front of the coat, we have to go back to that. Was it the result of a fight? Was there any mark on the dead man, other than the final fatal blow?’

  ‘No, no mark that I could see. He was a man who had worked with his hands all of his life and the hands were calloused and scarred, but no, there were no fresh marks on him. So if there was violence, he was the person who inflicted wounds, not received them.’

  ‘How much strength would have been required to hit a man on the back of the head with an iron bar, hard enough to kill him? Would it have required great strength?’