A Shameful Murder

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Clever girl,’ said Dr Scher appreciatively.

  ‘But, of course,’ said Patrick thoughtfully, ‘there is now another problem.’ The Reverend Mother noted how he looked from one to the other, at the two pairs of elderly eyes, each on either side of the fireplace and how he bent his neatly clipped black-haired head and studied his well-kept hands while thinking. Now he raised his head and looked directly into her eyes. ‘Perhaps this is more of a police problem, more of a matter for the civic guards, but it must be solved. We have to decide who was the intended victim of this murderer – was it Angelina, or was it Mary O’Sullivan?’ He sat back and blushed slightly as the Reverend Mother gave him an approving nod. He really was going to be very good at his job, she thought smugly, and allowed Dr Scher to release a string of questions and surmises.

  At that stage the Reverend Mother rang for fresh tea. The troops need feeding was her thought. Sister Bernadette beamed at sight of the empty cake tray and when she came back she brought with her some hot scones, dripping with butter and decorated with pats of blackberry jam from the pantry.

  ‘I suppose you send some child labour out to pick the blackberries,’ teased Dr Scher, but she refused to be deflected. This matter was too serious. As soon as Sister Bernadette had gone, she began to put her thoughts into words.

  ‘If Angelina was the intended victim, and the man who thought that he had killed Angelina Fitzsimon finds out that she is still alive, then she is in terrible danger,’ she said soberly and knew that this was a matter with which she had to concern herself. Her mind went back to Lucy’s words. ‘Could it have been her father, himself?’

  ‘I still think it was the brother,’ said Patrick. ‘He had everything to gain.’

  ‘Motive – he inherits the grandmother’s fortune; opportunity – he was present at the Merchants’ Ball; and the means – he could supply the ether to make her feel weak and dizzy, a brother handing a sister a drink would go unnoticed. And he could easily get her to leave the dance hall, saying that her father had summoned her – something like that. Even if we remember that it was Mary O’Sullivan, not Angelina, wouldn’t she respond to his tone of authority, to his obvious certainty that she would do as he wanted.’ Dr Scher looked around. ‘Wouldn’t she, Patrick?’ he asked.

  ‘It would seem strange, though, wouldn’t it, that the brother would not recognize the sister, would not know that this was a different girl if he actually talked to her. I know we have decided that the father might have made a mistake, but that was a bit different. The girl was dead by then. Bodies look subtly different after death, especially ones that have been in the water – there is a certain bloating, a swelling – and I’ve noticed that often relations don’t even want to look properly at the face. They can’t bear to do so sometimes. And if Gerald actually danced with his sister, although he denies this, or even if he just handed her a drink with the ether in it, then you would expect him to realize that something was wrong – that it was not the same girl.’ Patrick frowned over the problem. ‘The trouble is,’ he said eventually, ‘up to now we have been investigating the murder of Angelina Fitzsimon – all the work that we’ve done has been looking at suspects who might have a reason for murdering her, but now I don’t know what I am investigating.’

  ‘I would just carry on the way you are going,’ said the Reverend Mother encouragingly. ‘Who have you been talking to?’

  ‘I’ve had interviews here with the lecturer, Eugene Roche, and with a young chap, Spiller, who was the only one of the students at the university who remembered dancing with her – neither of them were much help. Spiller danced with her, but Roche did not remember seeing her. It turns out that he is engaged to one of the Lavitt family.’ Patrick cocked an eye at the Revered Mother and saw her nod thoughtfully. ‘I’ve discounted Spiller,’ he said,’ but I’ve kept Roche on my list. Perhaps if he made Angelina pregnant then the Lavitt heiress would probably give him the push. But then, of course, he could marry Angelina and from a worldly point of view, that would be as good a match.’ He stopped and looked exasperated. ‘Of course, Angelina wasn’t pregnant; it was Mary O’Sullivan. So that takes his motive away, doesn’t it? Unless he, like Mr McCarthy, guessed that she was pregnant, put the question to her and for some mad reason …’

  Patrick paused and looked across at the Reverend Mother.

  ‘What does your instinct tell you?’ she asked bracingly.

  ‘It tells me that this is all nonsense,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘And it tells me that this girl, Angelina Fitzsimon, as she was described by Dr Lambert, would not take either young Spiller or Eugene Roche too seriously.’ He looked across at her and saw her nod and felt pleased – pleased with himself and with his diagnosis.

  ‘It’s very hard to find many people who remembered Angelina – Angelina or Mary O’Sullivan, that night,’ he continued. ‘I do think she may have been killed early in the evening.’

  ‘What you need is some sort of chart,’ said Dr Scher dogmatically. ‘Have a big list of all the motives, of all the links, everything and then put big arrows across where any names meet … or something like that. I remember going to some medical lecture where the chappie did something like that about diseases of the blood. Very clever fellow. I fell asleep unfortunately, but it all looked very clever to me.’

  The Reverend Mother allowed them to chat on while she went through Patrick’s notes. He was certainly very thorough, she thought approvingly. His English was concise, succinct but the whole interview could be visualized by the reader. Her mind imagined the scene, the two scenes with two men, one a lecturer, one only a student, but both, she got the impression, quite young and fairly carefree. She agreed with him that it did not look as if either of them, as he had described them in his notes, could be the murderer of that poor girl on the night of the Merchants’ Ball.

  The Reverend Mother put the notes away thoughtfully. Dr Scher and Patrick seemed to have abandoned the idea of the chart with the arrows and were discussing Gerald Fitzsimon.

  ‘Which is the greater force in human nature, fear or greed?’ she asked them in the tones of one who knows the answer to the question that she has set.

  ‘Fear,’ said the doctor without hesitation.

  ‘I wouldn’t agree with that exactly,’ said Patrick. His tone was polite but assured. ‘In my experience, I’ve found that a man will kill for a pound note if he is desperate for food.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the Reverend Mother, ‘the two can be the same. Perhaps man will kill from fear – fear of starvation is one fear, but there are other fears and their importance differs from person to person. What is essential for a human being is survival, survival of the body and survival of the spirit. Perhaps the motivation that drives a man to commit murder depends on the man himself, depends on what is necessary to him, what he feels is essential to the survival of body or spirit. Sometimes that may be something quite nebulous, neither food, nor safety.’

  An idea had come to her but she wanted to think about it before she committed herself to an opinion. She let a pause develop and then glanced at the clock. Patrick took the hint and got to his feet and Dr Scher followed him looking at his watch and exclaiming that he would be late for his lecture at the university – throwing pearls in front of hung-over, brainless swine, as he expressed it. She rang the bell for Sister Bernadette, but when the nun arrived, Patrick politely took the door handle and waited for the sister to go through, laughing and joking eagerly to Dr Scher. And then he quickly closed the door on the two in the hallway and said apologetically: ‘There is something that I must tell you. The superintendent wants another search of the convent, Reverend Mother. Eileen was definitely seen entering the grounds. I’m sorry it will have to—’

  ‘You must do your duty, Patrick,’ said the Reverend Mother serenely, though her heart skipped a beat at the thought of what her cupboard held. ‘I have to go out on urgent business just now, but if you’d like to come back with your men in half an hour or so, that would be th
e time, after school, when it would be the most convenient to search the place without disturbing and upsetting the children.’

  NINETEEN

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Bonum communae praeminet bono singulari unius personae.

  (The good of the community has to have preference over the good of single persons.)

  When Patrick had gone the Reverend Mother went immediately into her bedroom, took up a soft leather bag and stuffed into it Eileen’s breeches and coat – the blood by now had turned into a hard black patch, and would, she reckoned, be there for the life of the garment. Still Eileen might not mind that, might wear it like a decoration, she thought, and her lips twitched slightly. She did not approve of guns or of shooting, but courage, resolution and a feeling of wanting to better the lives of your fellow citizens were something that she understood and applauded. Thomas Aquinas, she thought, felt the good of the community was more important than the individual’s and hoped that would absolve Eileen from the sins of the present. In any case, Eileen, she thought, would go on doing what she felt that she had to do, and there was little that she could say which would deflect her from her chosen route. The girl would be pleased to have her rather dashing uniform returned to her.

  But then the Reverend Mother wondered what to do with the gun. Dr Scher definitely did not want it and it would not be fair on him to bring it to the house on South Terrace and she could not dump a dangerous thing like that for a child to find. She could leave it in her cupboard among her linen. It would, she thought, be a brave civic guard who would dare to disturb a Reverend Mother’s clothing. However, one never knew. Eventually, she ruthlessly sliced a swathe of pages from the centre of the old Victorian Bible on her shelf, placed the gun within it, bound the book with a faded ribbon and put it into a hinged Bible box. She doubted that the search of her private quarters would be thorough, but it was just as well to be certain. Then she rang the bell, gave her instructions to Sister Mary Immaculate about facilitating the search of the convent and its grounds by the civic guards, endured the passionate exclamations and queries about what the world was coming to and then put on her cloak, picked up the leather bag, declared that she was already late for a meeting and bustled out of the convent, walking swiftly through the puddle-filled lanes until she reached the South Terrace.

  The door was opened to her by Eileen, wearing, rather incongruously, a calf-length dress, far too large for her, belonging perhaps to Dr Scher’s housekeeper, a grandmotherly cardigan and a pair of down-at-heel slippers. She was touchingly pleased to see the Reverend Mother and led the way to the kitchen, where, she explained, she had been left in charge of the doctor’s supper as it was the housekeeper’s afternoon off and the maid had popped out to buy herself some hairpins.

  A few pots were bubbling feebly on the black range, but Eileen seemed to be more engaged in putting a high shine on her well-moulded leather boots and the scrubbed deal kitchen table was littered with buffing sponges, chamois leathers, tins of polish and a bar of saddle soap.

  ‘Nice, aren’t they?’ asked Eileen, holding the boots up for admiration.

  ‘Lovely,’ agreed the Reverend Mother, conscious that there was a scrap of envy in her voice. She did rather envy those boots, not just as comfortable and practical footwear, but as a symbol of everything in life that had passed her by. All was changing for women, she thought. Short skirts were convenient for girls to run in and indeed, she thought, rather pretty; the first women doctors had already qualified from University College and one of her own past pupils had authoritative articles published in the Cork Examiner. The Reverend Mother thought back to her own life when she was Eileen’s age and when the possession of a dress made from chartreuse-coloured satin, draped over a whalebone crinoline, was the summit of her desires.

  Eileen, she knew, was leading a dangerous existence as a prominent member of the Cork Republican Party, on the wrong side of the law – at the moment – though any moment the situation could be reversed, the treaty with England which meant that Ireland forfeited the most prosperous six counties of the country, almost the whole of Ulster, might be repudiated, the Republicans of de Valera might gain ascendency over the Free-Staters of Michael Collins; and Eileen, like Countess Markievicz, whose uniform she copied, might end up a member of parliament. She smiled slightly at the idea, hoped that if it were true that Eileen would stand up for the rights of the poor and the powerless. The Bishop of Cork, she knew, would not agree with Thomas Aquinas that the good of the community must take preference over the good of the individual but then, thought the Reverend Mother, the Bishop of Cork was not a very intelligent or thoughtful man.

  ‘How’s the arm?’ she asked. The girl looked well, she thought. The colour had come back into her face and she seemed to be able to move her left arm without any noticeable wince of pain.

  ‘Great,’ said Eileen enthusiastically. ‘Dr Scher put some silver on it – silver salts, he called it and there’s no infection – it’s as clean as a whistle. We could do with some stuff like that, I was telling him,’ she went on casually, but with an eye on her former teacher.

  ‘And what did Dr Scher say to that?’ enquired the Reverend Mother calmly.

  Eileen giggled. ‘He told me just to take some because he’d prefer to give it away than to have a visit from the boys. But whatever I do, and he made me promise this, I must make sure that they don’t take his silver in the cabinet – have you seen his silver, in that little room leading off his study, Reverend Mother? He’s been telling me all about it, showing me a teapot that ladies would have used in the time of Jane Austen. He’s got cream jugs and trays, and they’ve all got special marks on them, hallmarks – he’s been explaining them all to me. One of them is very old and it’s got a little ship coming down a passageway through two castles – a tiny little picture, stamped on the silver bottom of a teapot. They’re all Cork-made silver, but this one is the oldest of them all. You should get him to show it all to you, Reverend Mother.’

  The Reverend Mother had seen Dr Scher’s silver on many occasions – he was a notable collector and had a small cabinet leading off his study filled with baize-covered shelves and kept spotless and dust-free by his incessant presence and his gentle handling and replacement of his beloved articles. She had had to endure many of his learned lectures on it, so she hastened to cause a distraction by opening her leather bag and took out the tweed coat and well-cut breeches. Eileen’s face lit up.

  ‘Thank you, Reverend Mother,’ she said with shining eyes.

  ‘Well, keep these clothes hidden or Dr Scher won’t sleep well at night.’ The Reverend Mother frowned thoughtfully. ‘You never thought about taking the veil, Eileen, did you?’ she asked.

  ‘Jesus! Reverend Mother.’ Eileen stared at her in consternation. ‘That wouldn’t be me at all!’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’ There was an idea at the back of her mind, but she left it there for the moment. ‘What’s it like being a Republican?’ she asked curiously. And then feeling that she was being irresponsible, she said hastily, ‘You’re living outside the law, Eileen, and that must be a terrible worry for your poor mother.’

  Eileen looked scornful. ‘Have you ever been in to my mam’s kitchen, Reverend Mother?’ She didn’t allow the question to be answered, but rushed on – ‘Well, it’s got the walls absolutely covered in pictures of Patrick Pearse, McDonagh and John Connolly and all of those 1916 lads. They’re all heroes to my mam. She’s even got framed speeches up on the walls.’ She quoted softly: ‘“If you strike us down now, we shall rise again and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom; if our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it with a better deed.”’ Her eyes were shining and slightly moist with emotion.

  I’m old, thought the Reverend Mother, that’s what’s wrong with me. I’m old and I’m practical. I don’t want the lives of idealistic youngsters to be thrown away. She was willing to fight injusti
ce and inequality with words, to fight with reason, with logic, with deceit and with flattery if necessary, but she was not willing to take human life for a possible gain.

  ‘We have such fun, you know, Reverend Mother,’ said Eileen unexpectedly. ‘There’s a great crowd, in our place, lots of them were university students, but they gave up everything to set their country free. Liam Lynch has us all organized into divisions. Our division swears by the ideas of Liam Mellows – he was a socialist and the Free-Staters executed him,’ she said passionately and the Reverend Mother’s heart sank at the note of hatred in the seventeen-year-old girl’s voice. However, in a moment, Eileen was smiling again as she thought of the fun and comradeship in those remote encampments in the empty countryside.

  ‘We all know what to do and we trust each other with our lives. We have great discussions about things – about distribution of wealth and suchlike. But you should hear us, sometimes, Reverend Mother. We’re like a pack of kids in sixth class. We have great craic. One of the lads has a banjo and a couple of us have tin whistles and we have a bit of fun with dancing jigs and reels up there in the mountain with no one to hear us.’ She stopped and her tone changed to a slightly apologetic note. ‘I wouldn’t have ever made a nun, Reverend Mother.’

  ‘I know that, Eileen, I was thinking of something else, actually. I was thinking of how I dressed you up in the habit and then you just looked exactly like one of the sisters.’