Murder in an Orchard Cemetery

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Would you like me to drop in at your convent and tell everyone that you are well, Reverend Mother. I could say that I had been talking to you and that you were as well as could be expected?’ she enquired, hardly hearing the answer while she kept an eye on the young gardener. He was on the grass lawn between them now, plucking up a weed and self-consciously fidgeting with the soil in the hole left behind. In a moment, he was beside them.

  ‘Well, looks as though I might have to water the grass,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Never did that in a month of Sundays! How are you, Reverend Mother?’ He spoke to the elderly lady, but Eileen knew that his attention was on her while the Reverend Mother thanked him for his enquiry and said that she was very well.

  ‘Most have been a terrible shock to you, too!’ Eileen said. It would be a wonder if he were not under suspicion, she told herself. His hole, his bag of fertilizer, and perhaps a can of diesel from his shed also.

  ‘At least I had no diesel,’ he said, as though reading her thoughts. ‘Whoever stole the fertilizer had to bring his own diesel. I never use the stuff, just a few sticks and a few twists of the Cork Examiner – very good paper for lighting a fire. Sister Mary Agnes in the kitchen saves them for me. I keep a pile of them in the shed on the top shelf to keep them dry.’

  ‘You weren’t too near, were you?’ Eileen did her best to put a note of concern into her voice. Young fellows like that liked a girl to take an interest in them.

  ‘Naw, I was in my shed, on a ladder, searching the top shelves for the missing bag of fertilizer. Heard the bang and turned around, saw it. Like a sheet of flame. Gave me the shock of my life! I can tell you; my hands were trembling like I had a fever.’

  I can do some good stuff from that, thought Eileen. She surveyed the convent grounds carefully, looking from the crater to the small wooden shed. She would start with a description of the desecrated ground, and then move back in time and relate all through the eyes of the gardener. It could make a good dramatic story told like that from the point of view of a boy on a ladder in a shed. Eagerly she questioned him, forcing him to pull small impressions from his muddled brain. What did he hear? What did he see first when he looked through the window? Where were the other people? Who spoke? Who did he go to? Where had he kept the bag of fertilizer? She poured out the questions but left her notebook in her pocket. Any minute now Patrick would arrive and tell her politely that she had no business here. She would have to rely on her memory and strong visual impression of the scene.

  Maureen Hogan was hovering at a distance, but Eileen ignored the young solicitor. Who was Padraig MacDonnell to give her instructions? In any case, he was wrong, completely wrong. Patrick, she told herself, would be more likely to be suspicious of the young solicitor if she were to endeavour to persuade him that Maureen Hogan had nothing to do with this murder. I’m keeping out of it, thought Eileen. The very idea that the Reverend Mother and other teachers had been so close to losing their life in an explosion filled her with horror. If the IRA or Maureen Hogan had anything to do with that matter – and it did seem to her that the IRA were more likely suspects than Bob the Builder – well, in that case, she told herself firmly, she, Eileen, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the matter.

  ‘I’d better be off, before I get thrown out,’ she said eventually while the gardener was endeavouring to hold her attention by describing, once again, how he shook, and how he was soaked in sweat. ‘Very relieved to see you safe and well, Reverend Mother, I’ll be sure to drop in at the school and let them know,’ she called out in a clear and carrying voice, meant for Patrick’s ear, and then without greeting either him or Joe, and totally ignoring Maureen Hogan, she grabbed her motorbike and wheeled it towards the gate. It was only after she was through the gate and had mounted the saddle that she looked back and saw the furious expression on the young solicitor’s face.

  ‘Well, there goes my chance of an apprenticeship,’ she muttered to herself. But she didn’t care. Something would turn up and the worst thing of all for her now was to return to being entangled in the affairs of the IRA. If that was the price that Maureen Hogan demanded, then she, Eileen, was not willing to pay that price. She wanted to make a success of her life, to pay back her mother for all the years of drudgery, long hours every day spent cleaning out pubs and scrubbing floors and making do with very little food when her daughter had given up her schoolwork in order to go off and join the IRA. She was years older now and hopefully, she said to herself, I have a bit more sense. She then banished the thought of Maureen Hogan from her mind and concentrated on putting words together to form an exciting and attention-grabbing article for that night’s Evening Echo.

  EIGHT

  Patrick felt a little awkward with the young soldier. He had saluted and called Patrick ‘sir’ – but Patrick felt that the soldier was the knowledgeable one and he was the inexperienced recruit. He said nothing, though and listened in silence.

  ‘I see,’ he said at the end. The man was English which gave him a strange feeling. Among Cork people, the English soldiers – both the regular soldiers and the Black and Tans, who were known as the ‘auxiliaries’ but who were reputed to be mainly jailbirds, remnants from the Great War who had for some reason or other ended up in prison – did not have a good reputation in Ireland, but oddly some of them had decided to stay behind and to join the new army and the new police force. This man was about his own age, had joined the English army when he was only fourteen years old, lied about his age and had been trained as a bomb expert; he had told Joe all of that. He had been busy and terse with his team, but now seemed to be waiting with a touch of impatience for questions.

  ‘How do you like Cork, Sergeant?’ Patrick asked the question tentatively, thinking that if they were to work together on this puzzling case, then friendly relations should be established.

  ‘Like it well enough. Especially the beer, Murphy’s Stout and the craic!’ said the soldier briefly. ‘Feel at home here, inspector. Mam was from Cork and Dad from Liverpool. Got a few cousins here in the city. My second name is Patrick. First name Christopher, known as Chris.’

  Patrick nodded. This was different. If his own father had bothered to get in touch with the wife and baby he had left behind and, of course, to send money from wherever he went to after disembarking from the Cork to Liverpool ferry, then he himself might have been brought up in Liverpool. It was an odd thought.

  ‘Call me Patrick,’ he said. ‘Joe and I drop all this inspector/sergeant stuff when we’re on a job. Now tell me how this bomb worked.’

  ‘Well, I’ve found out how they did it,’ said Chris. ‘Kept finding bits of metal and trying to put them together, but the gardener here recognized one bit and he cleared up the problem for us. Said that there were rust holes in a downpipe from his shed and when he replaced it, he kept the old pipe in case it came in handy. One of the bits that we picked up had the curve on it – swan neck, he called it. So, myself and the constable, we worked out how it was done. Took a bit of a risk, igniting it, I’d say, but if the man was busy reading, well then they might have taken the chance on not being seen. Apparently, he always sat on that bench.’

  ‘Petrol, or diesel, what do you think?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know, really,’ said Chris. ‘The fertilizer was stolen from the shed, but the gardener said he didn’t use petrol or diesel. Cuts his grass with a scythe.’

  Patrick thought about it for a while. He hated to confess to ignorance. Not even to Joe would he say, ‘I don’t understand’, but would sit up for hours at night, going over and over matters in his head. But bombs were not something that he thought he could read up about. He didn’t suppose that he could take a book about bomb-making out of the library. Even if he could find one, he would be the talk of the town if he did.

  ‘Of course, the IRA use fertilizer to make bombs, don’t they?’ he said tentatively after a few moments.

  ‘That’s right. Easy to steal, especially in the spring when the farmers have a ton of the stuff
stacked up in sheds ready to put on the fields once the soil warms up a bit. Good stuff, fertilizer. Course they need a bit of sugar with it to make the explosion, so they tip the diesel into it. Diesel is full of sugar, you know. A man I know, had a dog that died from licking diesel from his garage floor, liked the taste of it, poor dog.’

  ‘I see,’ said Patrick. He still did not know why fertilizer was used for bombs, or why sugar was needed, but perhaps Joe might know, or might even ask the question. Joe, he thought, didn’t mind too much if he did not know something. He just immediately went to find someone to explain it to him. Patrick hated revealing ignorance. He turned back to Chris.

  ‘Looks like an IRA job, then, do you think? More the army business than mine, in that case.’

  Chris shook his head. ‘Don’t see the IRA wasting time like that, stuffing the fertilizer into a rusty drainpipe, and blowing up a single man in a convent cemetery. If they wanted to get rid of him for some reason, they’d shoot him one day, shoot him in the street, or in his house – he lived alone, so Joe told me – easy enough to take a potshot at him when he walked around the garden on a fine sunny evening. Bombs would only be used for crowds, normally.’

  Patrick nodded. He wouldn’t ask the man to do any more speculating. He had been sent down to identify a bomb and he had come up with an explanation. He probably wanted to be off, back to his mates in the barracks at the top of Wellington Road.

  ‘How long would it have taken to make this bomb?’ he said, looking at the piece of broken metal.

  ‘I’ll take you through the process and then you can make your mind up.’ Chris’s voice was brisk. He was keen to finish up his task and get back to barracks. This was not going to be army business; that was obvious to both, thought Patrick. This could be a clumsy effort to make a private killing look as though it had something to do with the IRA. He would, he decided, leave all speculations until he was alone with his own sergeant.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said, and took out his notebook and indelible pencil.

  ‘As far as I can guess, the fertilizer was stuffed into the pipe, diesel, probably, poured over it, and then a fuse, rope, candle, taper, whatever, was lit and as soon as the flame reached the fertilizer soaked in diesel, it exploded. I’d say that from the fact that the body was in bits, and from looking at the hole, that the pipe was very near to the bench where the man was sitting. Risky, but it worked. That’s about all I can tell you, as a bomb expert.’ He gave a bit of a grin and added, ‘But if I was Sherlock Holmes, then I’d not have the gardener on my list of suspects, because, to be honest, we mightn’t have tumbled to the drainpipe business if he hadn’t recognized the twisted bit from the bottom of the pipe, the swan neck, he called it. The fellow from the fire brigade thought it was a bit of an alarm clock, but it wasn’t. No alarm clock! Nothing like that! This was detonated with a piece of rope soaked in diesel or something like that.’

  ‘So not a very professional job.’ Patrick mused about that.

  The bomb expert shook his head. ‘Amateur,’ he said. ‘This guy picked up a few ideas, perhaps studied chemistry, something like that. Heard about bombs that had been made from fertilizer. Might even have put his own life at risk. Depends on the length of the fuse – probably a length of rope, I’d say. Could be an IRA fella, not experienced and a bit of a maverick, acting on his own, but most unlikely, I’d say. Much more likely that it’s someone with a grudge against this Mr Musgrave and who wanted the IRA to take the blame.’

  ‘I see,’ said Patrick. He was conscious of a feeling of regret. So much easier if it were the IRA. Sooner or later someone would talk. They were all at daggers drawn, Sinn Fein, Cumann na Gael, all bloodthirsty and alike in wanting to kill each other. He was fairly sure that the dead man, the stockbroker, was not a member of either party, not the right type, not the right age. Some of these lawyers and accountants and doctors might do a bit of messing around with the IRA when they were young students, but that usually finished once they qualified. And this man was in his fifties – so Joe had found out.

  ‘Well, many thanks,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Safe journey home!’

  He was conscious of a feeling of relief when the bomb expert climbed back into the truck and roared off. Joe and he would ask questions and listen to the answers today and then they would go back to their barracks and put their heads together. And if he didn’t feel like talking today, well Joe would ask no questions, but would be available whenever he wanted to open his mind. However, he was always punctilious about letting Joe know all the evidence which he had picked up, so now he went in search of him.

  Joe was busy with his notebook, sketching the scene when he found him, sitting on the convent wall. He had quite a gift for sketching, and Patrick knew that when they were both back at the barracks, that this sketch might prove invaluable as a check to their memory of the position of the buildings and the paths. Nevertheless, Joe had looked up with an expectant look when he heard him approach and Patrick immediately answered the question in his sergeant’s eyes by a quick shake of his own head.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, they don’t think it was the IRA. Too amateur for them, according to the bomb expert. Would never waste setting up an elaborate bomb, which might or might not work just to kill one man. Much easier to aim a shot at him. In any case, they’ve searched and searched and found no sign of an alarm clock, or any other timing device.’

  ‘What about that piece of metal?’ Joe had, thought Patrick, grasped the difficulties that were ahead if this turned out to be a murder committed by one of the convent occupants. He looked hopefully at Patrick who shook his head.

  ‘It turned out to be part of a rusty drainpipe which was taken from the gardener’s shed. That and the bag full of fertilizer. They either put some bags of sugar in with it, or else they added diesel. Either way it exploded. But since it had no timer, as far as they can make out, the murderer must have been present to detonate it, probably with a rope soaked in diesel, but it could even have been some newspaper and a match.’

  ‘Seems a most complicated way of killing a man,’ said Joe, dubiously.

  Patrick shook his head. ‘Not if you are a very respectable citizen and want to direct the police’s attention in the direction of the IRA,’ he said.

  ‘And the hole?’ asked Joe.

  ‘The hole,’ said Patrick, ‘was dug by the gardener because he had time on his hands and knew that one of the elderly nuns was reputed to be on her last legs and it was nice, fine weather and the soil was easier to dig than it would be after a week of rain. So he told the bomb experts. Sounds a bit odd to me.’

  Joe shrugged. ‘Why should he want to blow up a respectable gentleman. Doubt he ever even spoke to him in his life.’

  ‘Still, we’d better interview him, just out here, nothing too formal.’

  ‘I’ll fetch him,’ said Joe. ‘He’s been bobbing in and out of the shed for the last half hour. Doesn’t know what to do with himself. Sorry for him, really. He’s just a young fellow.’

  Seen close up, and without his cap, the gardener was quite a young fellow. Not much more than seventeen or even sixteen, thought Patrick and so he tried to put him at ease.

  ‘You’re the man who has the place looking so good,’ he said and then thought it was not too sensible an observation as the lad’s glance went immediately to the terrible wreckage within the orchard cemetery. Patrick moved on quickly to getting the details.

  The gardener’s name was Martin Maloney. He was sixteen years old. He lived in a small cottage at the gates of the convent and paid almost half of his wages in rent for it. That surprised Patrick. He would have thought that it would have made sense for someone as young as that to live at home and save the rent.

  ‘Your previous address?’ he asked, his eyes still on his notebook. There was a pause, long enough to make him raise his eyes and look at the boy.

  ‘Greenmount.’ The answer came slowly and reluctantly and then in a rush of words: ‘They taught me gardeni
ng. I used to do the lawns and the paths and look after the shrubs.’

  ‘Taught you very well, too,’ said Patrick, and hoped that he did not sound falsely enthusiastic. Poor fellow. There was always a mark on those children from orphanages. No wonder he was willing to pay out half of his wages in order to have a place of his own.

  ‘I hear you have been a great help to the army fellas,’ he said. ‘Solved the problem of the piece of twisted metal for them. Now, tell me why you dug the hole.’

  ‘It was Sister Mary Agnes in the kitchen said to me that old Mother Brigid didn’t have long to go and it might be just as well to have a word with one of the nuns and ask them where they would want her buried, just so that I was all ready for the funeral,’ he said.

  ‘And who did you ask?’ Patrick continued to write as he waited for the answer to the question.

  ‘I chose it myself,’ said the boy. He shot an uneasy look at Patrick and added, ‘The nuns don’t mind. Some of that ground is terrible to dig because of the limestone being near the surface in some places, but I’ve picked out the good bits during the time that I’ve been here.’

  ‘So no one but you decided on that spot,’ said Patrick.

  ‘That’s right. Can I go now? I want to select some vegetables for the dinner tomorrow. Sister Mary Agnes will be after me if I don’t have good ones, and plenty of them with the crowd that is here for the retreat.’

  ‘You can go,’ said Patrick. He had a vague feeling of unease, but he was sorry for the boy.

  ‘They gave them a hard time in some of those orphanages, so I’ve heard,’ he said to Joe after the gardener had disappeared. ‘Not surprising that he’s a bit jumpy. Can’t see why he should have reason to murder a stockbroker,’ he added and shut his notebook with a snap and looked away from Joe’s surprised face.