A Gruesome Discovery

by Cora Harrison

  Unceremoniously he took Dr Scher’s tea tray and dumped it onto the broad windowsill before returning and opening up his attaché case. He removed a folder from the inside and then carefully took envelope after envelope from it and spread them over the table. Each envelope, she saw, was labelled in Patrick’s neat handwriting.

  ‘This was the first label,’ he said. ‘This was the label on the trunk that held the body. You remember it, Reverend Mother.’ He opened one envelope and held it up. It said ‘OLD SCHOOL BOOKS’.

  ‘Yes, I remember it,’ said the Reverend Mother. She peered at it and then took her glasses from the drawer of the desk. ‘Yes, I thought that I remembered that very distinctive full stop. Rather an old-fashioned way of making a full stop. I had a distant cousin who always made full stops like that. Whoever wrote that hand, I would say that they learned it from an old-fashioned governess.’ She looked from one to the other and for a moment, to her shame, slightly enjoyed their puzzled expressions. She could see them mentally going through all of the inhabitants of the house in Shandon on that fateful day when the auctioneer’s men removed the trunk and its gruesome contents. An old-fashioned governess did not seem to fit into that picture.

  ‘And the handwriting samples, Patrick?’

  ‘I’m afraid that I have had no luck with these,’ said Patrick regretfully. ‘These were the people in the house on that Tuesday afternoon and evening before the trunk was removed to the auctioneer’s rooms. I asked each person to print those three words on a similar label. In fact, I got them to do it twice, one on each side of the label.’

  ‘That was clever,’ said Dr Scher admiringly. ‘Didn’t give them a chance to match their first version.’

  ‘That was Joe’s idea. Didn’t work, though,’ said Patrick ruefully. One by one, he ranged the neatly labelled envelopes on the table reading them aloud as he pulled the label out. ‘Mrs Mulcahy, Susan Mulcahy, their servant, Bridie, Mr Hayes, the auctioneer, Mr O’Sullivan the solicitor, Mr Richard McCarthy business colleague and executor of the will. And this is Fred Mulcahy’s handwriting, just in case he was still in the house after his father arrived. You can compare them for yourself. I’ve been over and over them with a magnifying glass. Not one shows any resemblance and certainly none of them make a full stop like that.’

  The Reverend Mother allowed Dr Scher to do the checking. Patrick, she knew, was utterly meticulous and his eyes were fifty years younger than hers.

  ‘And the card sent with the chocolates to Eileen, what about that?’

  Patrick picked it up. “‘Thought you might like to have these”, that’s all it says, but the parcel was addressed to Susan Mulcahy. This is the card, nice card, isn’t it? Little fancy border on it.’

  The Reverend Mother looked at it. Yes, a good quality card. Lucy used cards like that – it suited her cousin’s impetuous nature to dash off a card rather than to write a formal letter. And yes, the handwriting was an elaborate copperplate, seldom seen these days.

  ‘And you checked this also with the handwriting of these people who were in the house at or near to the time when Mr Mulcahy was murdered.’ It was an assertion rather than a question. Patrick would have done that.

  ‘Not a single one resembles it. And you can see for yourself, Reverend Mother. The handwriting here is quite different to the one on the “School Books” card. You can see that, Dr Scher, can’t you?’

  ‘How was the box of chocolates wrapped?’ The Reverend Mother withdrew her attention from the card.

  ‘Just in brown paper,’ said Patrick. He delved once more into the folder and this time brought out a large envelope. Carefully he extracted a piece of brown paper, slightly stained and very much crumpled, though it had been carefully smoothed out before being put into the envelope. Stuck to the centre of it was yet another luggage label. And on the label was written ‘Miss Susan Mulcahy, Shandon Street.’

  ‘Not a full address, of course, but posted in Cork city, that was enough. Everyone knows Shandon Street and everyone knows about the Mulcahy family in Shandon Street.’ Patrick hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘I found this in the rubbish bin, that’s why it looks so crumpled.’

  ‘You are very thorough, Patrick,’ said the Reverend Mother.

  ‘Not thorough enough,’ he said with a grimace. ‘I’m afraid that it was only yesterday that I thought of sending a man up to search the rubbish bin. Susan Mulcahy had told me that she couldn’t remember what had happened to the wrapping paper. She thought her mother had probably burned it. But here it is now.’

  ‘And you can’t find any match for that, either, I suppose,’ said Dr Scher coming over to join them.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m afraid that I have. The writing on the card is unknown, fits nobody’s handwriting as far as I can judge from the samples, but the handwriting on the parcel label is almost certainly the handwriting of Miss Susan Mulcahy herself. Look for yourself.’

  The Reverend Mother donned her reading glasses again and bent over the table, looking from the label stuck onto the piece of brown paper to the label written by Susan. Careful, good handwriting, well-formed and perfectly mature. Yes, there was no room for doubt. The handwriting was the same.

  ‘But, what on earth? Why should the girl send chocolates to herself? Poisoned chocolates, too. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘You forget, Dr Scher, Susan Mulcahy disliked chocolates.’

  ‘So, of course, someone else sent them to her. Picked up a label in her handwriting.’ There was a note of great relief in Dr Scher’s voice. He had, of course, worked tirelessly over the burned body of the girl, anointing wounds, administering pain-deadening draughts, dragging her back from the gates of death. It must be, she thought, a process akin to creation. To lose Susan now would be a pain akin to a mother’s loss of her child; she understood that.

  And then she dismissed Susan from her mind. This murder had to be solved, but she had to be certain before making an accusation. She stared down, meditatively, at the label on her desk which she had taken from the bin, the label from the toy post office. Handwriting, like fashions in clothing, changed over the years. The Victorians would be shocked to the core to see the short dresses and form-fitting clothes worn by Eileen’s generation. And Victorian governesses would be horrified to see the plain, unadorned style of handwriting practised nowadays by the grandchildren of their charges who had spent weeks and months practising swooping, intricately curved letters. Handwriting for them was an art form. It would have been practised by all of her generation. The young people of the 1920s would soon be bashing out letters and essays on typewriters. Parchment, except for lawyers’ documents, had now dropped out of use. She shrugged her shoulders. The world had to move on. Her generation were busy dying or were already dead and buried. A husband, or a wife gone. A house sold and its contents sent to an auction. Progress, she thought, was, on the whole, a good thing. Why spend so long drawing letters when it was the meaning of the words that counted.

  TWENTY-TWO

  St Thomas Aquinas

  ‘… nihil factum, id est nullum praeteritum est eligibile.’

  (… nothing over and done with, that is nothing past, is an object of choice)

  ‘Come in, Mr Hayes, how very kind of you to come. I just wanted to ask your advice, to have a little talk with you, to decide on the best thing to do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be one to be giving you advice, Reverend Mother. You’d run rings around me.’ Mr Hayes looked a little embarrassed.

  Probably very little education and a hard childhood. His father had been a rag and bone man and then a door-to-door seller of old furniture in the narrow back lanes behind the old cathedral. But the son had been born with a silver tongue, or full of the oul blarney, as Cork people put it. And so Mr Hayes had graduated from a small shop in South Main Street to his present palatial auctioneering premises beside the South Mall, buying and selling to the rich citizens of his native city.

  One of the few who had managed to
rise from poverty to prosperity. Good suit, good house, she had heard, brand new car …

  ‘I see that you have your starting handle with you, Mr Hayes,’ she said.

  He smiled and his puzzled air vanished. Now he was on home ground and he launched into his usual explanation. ‘Better be sure than sorry, Reverend Mother. I’m never one to leave temptation in the way of anyone. Cost a raft of money that Ford car of mine. Wouldn’t want to lose it. Not saying a word about the people around here …’ And then, uncharacteristically, he ran down fast and cast a puzzled glance around the small chapel into which she had escorted him.

  ‘Let me put it over here, Mr Hayes.’ Politely, but firmly, she held out her hand and took the heavy starting handle from him and laid it on the high ledge of the stained glass window.

  ‘You were talking about a wooden chest, Reverend Mother,’ he prompted, placing his respectable black bowler hat on top of the starting handle, with, no doubt, an obscure feeling that hands had to be empty in a convent chapel.

  ‘Yes, of course, Mr Hayes.’ She led the way to the other side of the altar and indicated a space to the side of the marble steps, close to the altar boys’ seats. ‘Something that would fit here. Something that would hold about fifty small prayer books. You can see that we leave them on the window sill at the moment, but they get very damp.’

  ‘That would be the way of it, Reverend Mother. You’re near the river here, aren’t you? Terrible place for damp, here, I’d say, Reverend Mother. Not that the good Lord would mind; he’d be at home anywhere.’ Mr Hayes had taken out a professional looking tape measure and was busy jotting figures into his notebook. ‘Or you could have it over there by the stove,’ he said with a quick glance around the chapel. ‘Yes,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘That would be the very place for it. If I’ve said it once, Reverend Mother, I’ve said it a thousand times, Cork is a very damp city. And damp is a terrible thing. Does harm to everything, harm to houses, harm to furniture, harm to books—’

  ‘But not as bad as fire,’ interrupted the Reverend Mother.

  And he stopped abruptly. Very intelligent eyes, she noted. Even by the dim light of the overhead gas lamp she could see them. Intelligent, calculating eyes. She had gone too far now to take a step backwards and so she plunged on.

  ‘Dreadful that fire in the Mulcahy household, wasn’t it? I suppose,’ she said, hearing with surprise how detached and dispassionate her voice sounded, ‘I suppose that the fire was meant to destroy all evidence of Mr Mulcahy’s accounts, including, of course, the money that was owed to him for the sale of the house on Shandon Street. It was sold by auction, wasn’t it?’ She did not wait for a reply. Eileen had told her everything yesterday evening as they had both sat by the hospital bedside of an unconscious Susan. ‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘he might have been able to be put off for a while with tales of a non-payment by the buyer of the house, but Mr Mulcahy was a shrewd businessman. He knew that something was wrong. That was the reason for the meeting in Shandon Street, wasn’t it, nothing to do with a will, was it?’ The signature on that will had definitely been forged. Patrick had been sure of that once he had compared the signature on Mr Mulcahy’s bank account. Whether there had been another will, making provision for the children; that was yet to be established, but there was no doubt that the will held by Mr O’Sullivan had been forged. Mr Mulcahy, a courageous man, had wanted to have it out with those whom he suspected of swindling him.

  Mr Hayes had recovered and, as usual, took refuge from embarrassment in a flow of words. ‘Yes, yes, Reverend Mother, it’s all very upsetting, isn’t it? That terrible fire in the house, and that poor fatherless girl at death’s door. You’d be dead with worry about her, that’s it. You have a great heart, Reverend Mother, I’ve said that time after time again. “You can search the length and breadth of the city and you won’t find anyone with a better heart than Reverend Mother Aquinas”. You can ask anyone, Reverend Mother and they’ll tell you that’s what I say about you,’ he said in the tones that he probably reserved for elderly senile customers. He was edging slightly away from her, slightly towards the window where his hat reposed like bird of ill-omen on top of the deadly starting handle. She schooled herself to stay very still.

  ‘It’s interesting about those labels,’ she said. And had the satisfaction of seeing how he stopped abruptly.

  ‘You see, Mr Hayes,’ she said, ‘the “Old School Books” label and the card sent with the poisoned chocolates, both with a very outmoded style of handwriting, were a bit of a puzzle. But then I wondered if they could possibly be cards left over after the sale of goods. An auctioneer might well have a drawer full of such labels and cards – perhaps a card sending some extra goods to the auction. And that label, that card, well, they did make everything rather confusing. As for the box of poisoned chocolate with a label saying “Susan Mulcahy, Shandon Street” just stuck on to the wrapping paper … I suppose Susan had probably labelled some of her personal possessions that she had not wanted to be taken to the auction.’

  ‘Old labels, always throw them out. I suppose anyone could pick them from the rubbish,’ he said, but his heart was not in it. He was moving again, now, one foot on the altar step.

  ‘Please do not step on the altar stone, Mr Hayes,’ she said abruptly and, with that automatic respect that Cork people have for the voice of nuns who had scolded them when they were tiny children in the infant school, he stepped back obediently and looked at her abashed.

  ‘Bridie’s death was just so unnecessary,’ she said and heard a note of deep sadness in her voice.

  He heard it also and she saw his head swing around. The glowing red light on the altar brought a touch of colour to his cheeks and lit those keen eyes.

  ‘Poor old Bridie, nice woman. No wonder you’re upset, Reverend Mother. Devoted she was, absolutely devoted. She’d let those children run rings about her. So the neighbours said. A slave to them all, she was, and that’s the truth, Reverend Mother. I was talking to a woman, very nice woman, a raft of children, she had and that’s what she said. “I wouldn’t tell you a word of a lie, Mr Hayes, but that poor Bridie, she’s a slave to the family, and as for that young Fred; well, Bridie would lie down and let him walk over her.” Those are her very words, poor woman, lives in one room in Chapel Lane. Dreadful place.’ Suddenly he had cheered up and the fluency had returned. A man who believes too strongly in his ability to talk himself out of anything, she thought, as the words poured out from him.

  ‘Poor old Bridie. That’s right. A slave to them all. I saw it myself anytime that I was in the house. Running around after them all, poor woman. And I suppose that was her downfall, poor woman.’

  ‘Inclined to gossip,’ put in the Reverend Mother and he responded eagerly.

  ‘Well, there you are, Reverend Mother, I wouldn’t deny that. Henry Mulcahy himself said the very same thing to me. “Sees everything, that woman”, that’s what he said to me. Used to wear those slippers, and you’d suddenly find her behind you, pretending that she was just going up to her little bedroom at the top of the house. But there you are, Reverend Mother, I always say that if the heart’s in the right place, then you can forgive a lot, isn’t that right, Reverend Mother?’

  ‘It was so very kind of you to give her a lift when she told you that she was going up to the barracks,’ murmured the Reverend Mother, bending down to pick up a hat pin from beneath the kneeler of the front seat.

  ‘Well, she suffered from rheumatism, Reverend Mother, I knew that, of course, always one to tell everyone everything, that was Bridie for you, Reverend Mother …’ Suddenly Mr Hayes stopped and the little chapel became very quiet. He had made a mistake. Had betrayed his knowledge of where Bridie had been going on that fatal morning. Her mention of her destination would have frightened him. He might have been nervous, all the time, that Bridie knew, that she had seen him. After all, she slept right up in the attic, and may have slipped up to her bedroom. She was on her way to the barracks when he picked her up in th
e car. She told him where she was going, poor thing. Bridie always poured everything out to everyone, or almost everything. He didn’t know why she was going to the barracks, of course. He didn’t know that she had been induced by Mrs Mulcahy and Susan, egged on by Mr McCarthy, to confess to the murder, in an effort to save Fred. But Mr Hayes, of course, feared that she might have seen him. He would have known she had been around the house cleaning and might have been in the attics at the time of the murder; had thought that she might have seen him come back into the house.

  ‘You were very useful to the family, Mr Hayes,’ she said aloud. ‘I suppose that you arranged for the sealing up of the partition between the two attics. It was kind of you to do that.’

  ‘Not at all!’ Now the man had relaxed. Perhaps she had misunderstood his step towards the deadly weapon on the opposite window sill. ‘All part of the service, Reverend Mother, all part of the service. No good showing people over a house and telling them that it’s going to be partitioned. Empty the furniture, get the place painted and build that partition in the attic. That’s what I told Mr Mulcahy, God have mercy on him! Found a good little carpenter for him, too.’

  ‘And I’m sure that you went up yourself to make sure that the job was carefully done,’ said the Reverend Mother cordially. Susan had heard the man leave, had heard the door slam; had heard him cranking up his car. But, of course, the auctioneer would have made copies of the keys, would have known that the two houses were joined at the attics. He had driven away, parked in a back street, came back, perhaps through the yard, went into the empty house, up the stairs, unscrewed a panel, came back into the first house, murdered Mr Mulcahy, tipped his body into the trunk and then went back by the same way. And, of course, if for some reason Bridie had slipped up to her room, then she may well have seen him come back in. In any case, he could not run the risk once he had heard from the woman that she was on her way to the barracks.