A Shameful Murder

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Do you remember the day when you spotted the lizard, there sunning itself on the side of the cliff?’ Lucy’s voice broke into her thoughts, uncannily almost reading them, though, perhaps, in talking about Joseph, it was inevitable that both should think back to that late summer’s day.

  ‘And I insisted on taking it back to show to the children.’ She could remember it well, could remember her feelings, her jealousy that he had placed a finger under Lucy’s chin and had dropped a kiss on her blonde curls. Her insistence on giving the children the lizard had arisen from that rather than from any kind feelings on her part. Neither she nor Lucy had taken too much notice of the younger ones that summer.

  Lucy heaved a sigh. ‘And it all happened that afternoon.’

  ‘I know.’ She had instinctively known at the time that something was going to happen; had looked back when she reached the bend on the cliff walk and had, for once, not looked forward to feast her eyes on the sight of the two islands, but had turned back. They had been just at the entrance to the cave, Thomas and Lucy, both figures dwarfed by the enormously tall entrance. And she had not seen them for hours.

  She had pondered for the whole afternoon on what they had been doing. Even while she joined with Thomas’s children in making a house and garden for the lizard and catching flies for it to eat she had been speculating on what might be happening.

  It had been her fault. She had felt that afterwards. Lucy was the younger of the two and she had promised her father to look after her when they had first gone to boarding school together.

  Perhaps that enforced promise had brought a certain jealousy with it. She had been jealous of Lucy’s prettiness. Had she been ignorant of Thomas’s intentions; of his lack of control, lack of decency, or had it been a case of her just not wanting to know? That was a question that she had never managed to answer. She brooded on it for a moment until her thoughts were interrupted by Lucy.

  ‘Tell me about Joseph’s girl, about Angelina. What was she like?’

  ‘A very nice girl, it seems,’ said the Reverend Mother, reverting instantly to the modern world of 1923. ‘She was very good to the poor, very charitable, so Professor Lambert told me. She worked in the St Vincent de Paul shop. I’m sure that you would have liked her.’

  ‘She was my granddaughter,’ said Lucy sadly and then, after a minute, ‘Well, who murdered her, then?’

  ‘The police,’ said the Reverend Mother demurely, ‘will do their best to find out that.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Lucy energetically. ‘Rupert says that superintendent is a fool and the other one is too young.’

  ‘He was a pupil of mine,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘I have confidence in him.’

  ‘One of yours, was he?’ Lucy looked interested. ‘I suppose you have him feeding out of your hand. You needn’t try to pretend to me, Dottie.’

  The old familiar nickname made the Reverend Mother smile. It was a long time since anyone even called her by the more stately name of Dorothea. In public, Lucy and she were punctilious with their ‘Reverend Mother’ and ‘Mrs Murphy’.

  ‘Anyway, you’ve got far more brains than any of those men. You always had brains. You were the one that first thought out that Bordeaux plan. I thought that I would go out of my mind when Thomas wouldn’t do anything.’

  Thomas Copinger, like his son after him, had married a rich wife. Lucy’s news had filled him with horror, almost with terror. He pretended to disbelieve her, denied that what they had done could have made her pregnant, threatened to tell everyone that she had been out all night with one of the young fishermen, had absolutely refused to have anything more to do with them and had told them they would have to leave his house by the end of the week.

  ‘Do you know, I was seriously thinking of throwing myself over the cliffs when you came up with your Bordeaux plan?’ Lucy’s well-rouged mouth had tightened to a hard line as she gazed into the fire, but she passed a hand across it, allowed her features to assume their usual pleasant aspect and then said lightly, ‘Of course, I always knew that you were clever, but that was pure genius.’

  It had been a sudden flash of inspiration. They had been sitting, the two of them side by side, in a little secluded dip in the cliffs, hidden from the path above by a large gorse bush, she had her arm around her cousin, listening to the sobs in a slightly detached way – things were, she had thought, too bad for easy comfort. It had been a foggy day and the lighthouse that crowned the cone-shaped island flared its beam across the water and, as if the light had illuminated her mind the thought suddenly flashed upon her. Angela and Edmund Fitzsimon, their cousins out in Bordeaux, who managed the French side of the wine business, had given up hope of a baby. She had heard that said. They were rich, kind, and could have been ideal parents, everyone said that, but Angela had failed to conceive after ten years of marriage, ten years of hoping and praying. What could seventeen-year-old Lucy do with a baby? But to them it would seem the most wonderful gift in the world.

  ‘Lucy,’ she had said bracingly on that foggy morning. ‘Stop crying and listen to me. You and I are going to learn to speak French fluently. We are going to spend a year in Bordeaux.’

  And it had all worked out. Nothing was said. They both went back to Cork. Her father, quite unsuspecting, thought it was a wonderful idea, an inspirational way of rounding off their education and he was confident that he could persuade Thomas Copinger to agree on Lucy’s behalf – and of course met with no opposition! As soon as they arrived in Bordeaux she had packed Lucy off to bed and then told the story. Edmund and Angela were touched by the plight of the childlike Lucy, shocked, also, when they heard the whole story that night; though looking back on it later, she thought that they had not been surprised at Thomas’s behaviour. But, above all, they were only too delighted to have a baby of their own blood. Nothing would be said; Thomas was a father of five young children; there could be no scandal. Lucy would have her baby and then would get on with the rest of her life.

  A nice couple, Edmund and Angela, she thought. What a terrible pity for Joseph that they were killed in that train crash while he was still quite young. Robert had taken the young child back to the Fitzsimon house in Blackrock, but his heart was not in childrearing; Joseph was left to a nanny and a governess and then after the death of Robert’s own sons in the first Boer War was packed off to boarding school while still quite young. Not the best of upbringings, she thought now and then her memories were interrupted by a chuckle from Lucy and she looked across at her cousin enquiringly.

  ‘I was just thinking what a wonderful thing a crinoline was. I was saying that to one of my granddaughters the other day when she was laughing about that portrait of me that was painted after I got married. “Wait until you start a family, young lady,” I said to her. “Those skirts won’t hide an inch. I could go up to the last month and no one the wiser,” that’s what I was telling her. It was a bit of luck, too. Do you remember me? No one noticed anything. And you, you clever thing, had the idea that Angela should shorten the laces on her crinoline so that she could look as though she were expecting.’

  It had all been done very discreetly – the midwife was a very young nun from a nearby Bon Secours hospital and convent in Bordeaux. Edmund had donated large sums of money to the babies’ ward in the hospital and Sœur Marie Madeleine had sworn to keep the secret as sacred as one told in the confessional. The two girls had returned to Ireland as soon as Lucy had recovered and that had been that. Their ways had parted soon afterwards. Lucy had fallen in love with young Rupert Murphy – or was it the other way around? In any case, she had two beautiful little blonde girls by the time that Angela and Edmund were killed.

  ‘And you went into the convent.’ It seemed more of a statement than a query and the Reverend Mother did not reply. There were certain questions that had never been aired between them. She had never asked Lucy why she did not offer to adopt Joseph after the train crash and Lucy had never asked her why she had taken the decision to become a nun. Both, pe
rhaps, felt that the answer was known – and possibly both were wrong in their surmise.

  ‘I never saw him as a child, you know,’ said Lucy in a low tone. ‘I think that he must have been about thirty years old when I saw him first. And I hated him when I saw him. He was the image of his father.’

  ‘But the girl, Angelina.’ There was no point, thought the Reverend Mother, in dwelling on the past.

  ‘Killed by her father, I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Lucy smartly. And then, though her cousin had said nothing, she went on with her usual decisiveness. ‘Joseph is nothing like the Fitzsimons. He is like his father, like Thomas Copinger. Money is everything to him. The girl, according to Rupert, was stirring up trouble, was enquiring about what happened to her mother’s fortune, if she succeeded, Joseph could have lost that and then old Mrs Woodford’s money was to go to Angelina. Rupert told me that, also. So there were he and his son with an expensive lifestyle and there’s not the same money coming in as before the days of all of those troubles with so many big families going back to England and shutting up their houses and their estates – that’s what Rupert says. There wouldn’t be the tenth of the entertaining done these days. So Joseph, without his wife’s fortune, might not be able to keep up the house in Blackrock. And Angelina was asking questions about that fortune. Of course he killed her, waited his opportunity to have a lot of people around, to have others to throw the blame on to; that would have been the way his father would have done something, that sort of person doesn’t care what he does as long as he himself is safe,’ she ended, speaking decisively, forcefully, but without bitterness, almost like someone who prides themselves on knowing how men act.

  It was a convincing notion, though somewhat startling. Joseph Fitzsimon, from Patrick’s observations, was emerging as a man without much feeling, a man who could place his wealthy wife in the lunatic asylum and then use her fortune for his own ends. Did he care about his daughter? He hadn’t appeared to show much sense of loss or of sorrow, neither at the house when she had visited, nor, according to Patrick, when first confronted by the dead body.

  ‘What would he have gained from it?’ she asked.

  ‘Security, continued source of funds,’ snapped Lucy. ‘You’re so innocent, you nuns. You don’t realize the importance of money.’

  I think about money all of the time – more than I think about God, thought the Reverend Mother cynically. She was under no danger of overlooking its importance, though she had not realized that the recent wars had so threatened the wealth of the merchant princes of Cork city. It would, of course, have been possible for Joseph to have approached his daughter in the dimly lit, noisy hall, to have offered her something to drink that had been laced with either, to have persuaded her into the lift, half-strangled her, taken her down into the cellar and pushed the body into the sewer beneath.

  And yet, somehow there was a feeling within her that the whole story had not yet been uncovered.

  Thomas Copinger, she thought, must have been a man of strong carnal appetite if he had carelessly seduced and impregnated his own seventeen-year-old ward, although he had a wife and family close by. It had been a dim understanding of his nature, of his mood that day which had frightened her and kept her away from him, had made her turn back from the cliffs when she could almost sense his arousal.

  Later she had judged herself harshly, had thought that there had been a lot of angry jealousy in the way in which she had gone away from them that day.

  But there had been no excuse for his actions – Lucy was his ward, a young girl, almost a daughter. Looking back and judging him later, he had been, she thought, a man without scruple, a man for whom his own wants, his own desires were paramount and who did what he wanted to do without the slightest compunction for the hurt which he inflicted. His reaction to Lucy’s panic-stricken realization of her pregnancy: to deny everything and to warn her that he would spread a story about her and one of the young fishermen all around Cork if she dared to name him, had been despicable.

  It could be, she thought, that his son, Joseph, had inherited this obsession with self, with money, with satisfaction of his appetites, no matter what the cost to others.

  Joseph may have had a strange gestation time in the womb, she thought, with a grain of compassion. He had not been wanted by either his father or by his natural mother. Lucy had been filled with moods: emotions of depression, grim anger and, sometimes, abject fear during the months when she bore this unwanted baby concealed beneath the wire circumference of her crinoline and perhaps that would have an effect on the developing child. Never once had Lucy expressed any interest in the infant; just looked forward to shedding her burden. It had been a long and difficult birth and it was Angela who bore the newly born baby away from the heavily chloroformed young mother, Angela who bottle-fed the baby, who sang to him, cuddled him, cared for him, while Lucy kept to her bed and seemed to want to be treated as an invalid for the couple of months following the birth.

  And that almost breakdown had lasted until she and her cousin had returned to Ireland and Lucy had immediately blossomed into new beauty and had captivated the very young Rupert Murphy.

  THIRTEEN

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Utrum in Deo sit voluntas malorum …

  (Whether in God there is the will for wickedness … )

  Dr Scher’s Humber drew up outside the convent gate just as the younger children were going home from school. The Reverend Mother was at the gate. She liked to stand there at that time of the afternoon. It gave an opportunity to any parent who wanted to voice a concern about a child, or to quietly ask for a loan of some clothing, it also gave her a chance to chat informally with the mothers about their children and it made sure that no undesirables were hanging around the school gates looking to befriend unaccompanied children. Child prostitution, she was aware, had a strong presence in a city of poverty-stricken families. There was, she often thought compassionately, a strong instinct within these women to make sure that their children had food to eat, cost what it might, and this provided an opening for the perverted and the wicked.

  She noticed that Dr Scher had a young man in the car with him, not anyone that she knew, but he was probably another doctor as he was dressed in a white coat. He seemed, she thought, to be asleep. His hat was off and his head, adorned with crisp red curls, leaned against the passenger window in an abandoned posture.

  She waited until the women had gathered up their children and had departed and until she had checked that any unescorted children were safely under the wing of a neighbour and then she went across to the car. The young man with the red hair still slept deeply.

  Dr Scher jumped out immediately. His face was full of triumph.

  ‘I’ll bring him in,’ he said, before she could say anything. ‘I’d say that he could do with a good breakfast – been up all night.’

  It was two o’clock of the afternoon, but she did not argue. She just went back into the convent, met Sister Bernadette and said: ‘Dr Scher and his friend have been up all night in the hospital. Do you think, Sister, that you could bring them something to eat, something substantial, bacon and eggs, perhaps.’

  As she could have guessed the kind woman’s face lit up at the request and she disappeared instantly towards the kitchen. She went back to the car, looked dubiously at the sleeping man, hoped he wasn’t drunk, but said: ‘Bring him in, Dr Scher.’

  It took a bit of good-humoured taunting from Dr Scher before he managed to get the young man on his feet. Even still he walked in a manner of an automaton, groping his way, touching the gate and even the top of the sooty, unlovely hedge of laurel as he made his way towards the front door to the convent. Once in the Reverend Mother’s study he lapsed back into sleep again, relaxed in the visitor’s armchair and snoring loudly.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked the Reverend Mother. She did not bother to lower her voice. It was obvious that the young man would not be easily awakened.

  ‘His name is Munroe – Dr Munroe �
� he works in the Eglinton Asylum, the lunatic asylum,’ added Dr Scher giving the name that most Cork people gave to the immense and menacing long line of a grey and red, angular-faced building on Sunday’s Well, high up above the River Lee.

  ‘I do some work there occasionally, just the odd night, here and there,’ he said, sounding almost apologetic – Dr Scher liked to appear hard-boiled and cynical. ‘This is a nice young fellow, not as hardened as most who bring themselves to work in that place.’

  ‘Let him rest for the moment.’ The Reverend Mother noted with pity the dark shadows under the eyes and the continual twitch of the cheek muscles. When Sister Bernadette pushed open the door so that she could wheel in the trolley, he jumped to his feet immediately, shouting, ‘Yes, what’s the problem?’

  ‘Relax, have a drop of whiskey,’ said Dr Scher. He took one of the tumblers, emptied the water from it into the fireplace and poured out some golden brown liquid that came from a bottle, produced from his pocket. He held it to the young man’s lips in the way that a mother would hold milk to the lips of a suckling child and the red-headed young doctor drank it obediently.

  And then he blinked blue eyes at the Reverend Mother and gave her a bewildered stare.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked as she placed a small table beside him.

  ‘Have something to eat,’ said Dr Scher and pushed a plate of bacon and eggs towards the young man, making sure that he took knife and fork into his hands.

  ‘He’s exhausted,’ said Dr Scher in a low voice. ‘Very few are willing to work there, these days. I met him coming out and declaring that he won’t go back. He will, of course, just like I will, though I swear that I won’t. These poor people up there have to be looked after. He’s a young Englishman,’ he added.

  The Reverend Mother said nothing, just buttered a few slices of soda bread and after some thought, spread them thickly with marmalade. Sister Teresa, the cook, always made her marmalade with the maximum amount of sugar. It would be good for this exhausted, drained young man. When he had finished his bacon and eggs and had tilted some of the whiskey down his throat she fed him, piece by piece, the bread and marmalade. There was, she was glad to notice, some colour coming back into his cheeks and the dazed eyes had begun to focus. There were a few sugar buns on the tray and she split one, buttered it and handed it to him. It was the ultimate sugar boost and he smiled, pushed the whiskey aside and swallowed a cup of hot, strong tea.