‘Come with me,’ she said to both men and took them with her up the uncarpeted backstairs and down the echoing bare boards of the corridor.
The room was dead silent when they came in. For a moment, the Reverend Mother feared that the girl was dead, but then she heard a sound as a sighing breath was inhaled. The eyes fluttered open and fixed upon the priest and then moved towards Patrick.
‘I want to confess to you both, to tell you what I have done.’ The voice was tiny, but the priest and the policeman moved in unison once the words were uttered, both standing, side by side, beside the bed. Dr Scher moved to the other side of the bed, his back to the window and the syringe still held within his hand. The Reverend Mother took up her position at the bottom of the bed and all the laity crossed themselves as the priest began to go through the last rites raising his voice slightly as he came to the last words: ‘Indulgeat tibi Domine, quidquid per visum, audiotum, odoratum, gustum, et locutionem, tactum gressum deliquisti’, speaking the words and making the gestures with practised speed, touching the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and limbs with the holy oil. And then he waited.
It took a superhuman effort, but the Reverend Mother had witnessed enough deaths to know that the administration of extreme unction brings moments of strength and lucidity to the dying person. The girl’s eyes opened, and she fixed them, not on the priest, but on the gleaming medal in the centre of Patrick’s cap, which he held clasped to his chest.
‘I confess to Almighty God and to you, Father, and to all here that I am guilty of the mortal sin of murder. I planned it. I stole some sugar from the kitchen and a bag of fertilizer from the garden shed and put it in the hole just beside my father’s seat early in the morning before anyone else was up. I took a box of matches from the church, and waited until after lunch when we were scrubbing the church. I looked out, saw he was there and when it was my turn to fetch the bucket of water from the well, I threw the match down onto the sugar and the fertilizer and ran away.’ She stopped there and Dr Scher bent over her, but the thin whisper began again before he had to use his syringe.
‘My father was an evil man. He killed my mother, he drove my brothers across the sea and would not allow me to leave the convent where I was unhappy, though I had confessed my sin. I killed him, just I. No one else had a hand in it, no one, but me.’
The frail whisper faded out. The eyes shut for a moment and then opened again. The Reverend Mother took a step forward, touched Patrick on the arm, opened the door and kept it open until Dr Scher, also, went through. And then she closed it behind them and came back to stand beside the bed.
‘My child,’ she said gently. ‘You have told your little story to Inspector Cashman. Now you must tell the truth to God and to Father Hayes. None other will hear it.’ She gave a quick glance at the chaplain and reassured by the calm, elderly face, she went through the door, and closed it silently behind her. The two men were standing by the corridor window. She looked expectantly at Patrick and after a long moment he spoke.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said, and the Reverend Mother admired the ring of conviction in his voice. ‘It doesn’t make sense, Reverend Mother,’ he repeated with even more energy. ‘How could that frail, thin girl climb down into that hole, carrying a sack of fertilizer and a heavy iron pipe and stuff the fertilizer into the pipe, wearing that long white dress and white veil? How did she know where to find the fertilizer and that rusty downpipe? It was in the gardener’s shed. How did she carry it over there? And then she says that she triggered the explosion by flinging a match down. That could never have worked. The match would have gone out well before it ever hit the top of the downpipe. In any case, a match doesn’t stay alight if you throw it down a hole. And sugar doesn’t ignite so easily. She’s made the whole thing up. But why?’ Patrick looked from one elderly face to another and the Reverend Mother looked expectantly at Dr Scher.
He did not fail her. ‘These drugs!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Diamorphine has great painkilling properties but can have strange hallucinatory effects. Poor child. Who knows what prompted that nightmare?’
The Reverend Mother nodded approval. ‘God alone knows,’ she said piously.
‘The only thing that puzzles me,’ said Patrick with a frown creasing his brow, ‘is how on earth did she know about the fertilizer and the sugar. The bomb expert thought it was diesel, but sugar would have done too, he told me that.’
‘I think I can explain,’ said the Reverend Mother quickly. ‘When she was a child, her brothers experimented with a combination of fertilizer and sugar and almost blew themselves up. She was younger than they, but it would have stayed in her mind, I suppose. My cousin Lucy told me that story. She said that she would never forget the way one of the twins stood in her kitchen, pouring blood and with a piece of metal stuck into his arm.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Patrick. He took his notebook and pencil from his pocket and began to write rapidly. ‘Do you spell diamorphine with a “y” or with an “i”, Dr Scher?’ he enquired without lifting his eyes from the notebook.
‘With an “i”,’ said Dr Scher steadily. ‘These hallucinatory effects are quite a common side effect of the drug,’ he added helpfully, and Patrick nodded while continuing to write rapidly. He had replaced his notebook when he spoke again.
‘No proof, of course,’ he said decisively, ‘but it’s fairly obvious now that it was the IRA after all. And the wrong man, of course! I’ll have a private word with Willie Hamilton, tell him that he might find the climate of Northern Ireland a bit healthier. If the IRA are after him, they’ll get their man eventually. Well, thank you, Dr Scher. I think we’ll just forget this confession; don’t you think?’ He looked towards the closed door with an air of sorrow. ‘God bless her and give her the grace of a happy end,’ he said with a note of deep feeling in his voice as he shook his head sadly. He replaced the notebook, bent his head to the Reverend Mother and then slipped out.
‘Nice fellow, young Patrick. Did you notice the tears in his eyes?’ said Dr Scher. He said nothing for a moment. Both their eyes went towards the closed door, but nothing except the steady voice of the chaplain reciting the prayers for the dead could be heard.
‘A lot to be said for religion in times like these, I have to admit,’ said Dr Scher and then with a quick change of voice, he said, ‘Well now, Reverend Mother, perhaps you would like to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to an old heathen.’
The Reverend Mother stroked her upper lip meditatively. ‘God alone knows the truth, the whole truth,’ she said reprovingly, ‘but there is nothing in the scriptures to say that man should not use the brains, the capacity for logical analysis and then ability to listen, with which He has endowed mankind. Perhaps in this particular case, the ability to listen has been more important,’ she added and then when he did not respond, her voice became more animated. ‘My cousin, Lucy, Dr Scher, has a great gift for making you see the people whom she describes. Certainly, she made the Musgrave family come alive for me. The father, a man for whom money and his place in Cork society was of the utmost importance. And then, his wife, warm-hearted, devoted to her children, amused by the twins and their jokes, encouraging them to experiment and to have fun, keeping the quiet, shy, little girl with her as much as possible, teaching her to share the love of plants, of gardens and of their design. Only God knows how they would have grown up, of course, if she had lived, but they may have developed into affectionate, loving adults who found their way to a rewarding way of life when they reached the end of their childhood. But then, of course, tragedy struck. The mother was killed, killed because her husband drank too much at a party and crashed the car on an icy stretch of road, something for which, certainly the boys and possibly the little girl, also, blamed him. A tragedy and worst of all was the effect on the children. They were banished from their home, sent to boarding school, grew up rebellious and badly behaved, the boys neglected their schoolwork, were troublesome and probably only the father’s money an
d status persuaded the Jesuits to keep them in Clongowes. There were hints that the girl may have committed what to him was an even more serious sin. The adoption of the name of a reformed prostitute, Mary Magdalen, was most revealing.’ The Reverend Mother grimaced with a feeling of distaste.
‘So, the girl was forced into a convent, and the boys packed off to Australia,’ remarked Dr Scher.
‘Where, I’m afraid, they did not do at all well,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘They wrote to their father and he responded, apparently, not by bailing them out, or giving them more money to invest in their farming enterprise, but by sending the bare minimum to purchase two one-way tickets. However, true to his class and to his breeding, he sent enough money for a first-class fare for each, and that was enough for the purchase of two return third-class fares. And so the plan was woven.’
‘I’m quite confused,’ complained Dr Scher. ‘Why two return tickets? Surely just one of the twins came back to Ireland – Peter – and he arrived well after the murder. Patrick checked the landing register and he definitely arrived on the RMS Orient from Sydney and went back on it when it made the return journey.’
‘One of the pieces of information which my cousin Lucy gave me,’ resumed the Reverend Mother, ‘was that the twins, as well as loving to play tricks by their likeness to each other, were also great mimics and fond of dressing up as people from other countries. I feel that the young German, looking for agriculture work, who assisted the nuns’ gardener to dig the pit was probably one of the twins. The relationship between the boys was very strong, but I suspect they were also very fond of their sister and her letter sent at Easter, pleading for help to escape the convent triggered the plan. I also suspect, by the way that the twin who remained behind, let’s call him Peter, covered his brother Paul’s absence in some way, gave him an alibi for a week. Paul arrived in Cobh a week or so earlier, made his way up to the city, would have found the whereabouts of his father, hung around, noted that his father sat on this particular seat everyday and his boyhood prank of making a bomb from fertilizer and some form of sugar might have suggested a method of murder which would probably be attributed to the IRA.
I would surmise that once he had persuaded the gardener into digging the hole, he suggested that it be covered with the tarpaulin and then came back at dawn, with a can of diesel, and using a key to the gardener’s shed, which he had purloined, he was able to rig up the bomb and probably a rope soaked in diesel. He would have been hidden from sight under the tarpaulin, though as dawn comes early in June, he ran little risk of being seen. He may well have lurked in the hole during the morning, but more likely hid in the woodland and waited until his father was in position and the coast was clear. The one dangerous moment was the lighting of the fuse or, more likely, the length of rope soaked in diesel when, in fact, he was seen by his own sister, but, if it had been anyone else they would probably have taken him for the gardener.
‘So he tricked the gardener into helping him to dig the hole, perhaps suggested to him to cover it with planks and a tarpaulin, comes back at dawn with the key to the shed, he murders his father, takes the ship back to Australia that very night and probably passes his twin brother, Peter or Paul, somewhere near Gibraltar! Well, well, the God of Abraham and Isaiah, put a lot of ingenuity into the human brain,’ exclaimed Dr Scher.
‘Indeed,’ said the Reverend Mother, quietly.
‘But what put you onto it?’ He had raised his voice slightly and then looked guiltily at the door. The steady sound of Latin words still came to their ears. Dr Scher went across and noiselessly turned the handle and looked in and then closed it again and came back to the Reverend Mother. ‘No change,’ he said to her and lowered his bulk back onto the windowsill.
‘The twins, of course,’ continued the Reverend Mother in a low voice, ‘were notorious for their mischief in the respectable confines of Montenotte and they were not popular with the householders on the whole. Luckily for them they were, according to my cousin, endowed with the sort of good looks, the blond hair, the very large pale blue eyes, that old ladies love. One such old lady, a sharp old lady, named Mrs Maureen Clay, who lived in Montenotte up to a couple of years ago, but who is now in a nursing home in Cobh, a nursing home built quite close to the sea, saw a familiar-looking young man at the harbour front – and she recognized those pale blue eyes. You may not have noticed, Dr Scher, but here in Ireland we have brown eyes and green eyes, but when the eyes are blue they are almost invariably a very dark blue, “put in with a smutty finger”, so they say. Pale blue eyes are unusual and much admired. So there was a young man on the harbour front at Cobh, a young man with those familiar pale blue eyes, but with a very scruffy and untidy beard which he had grown as a disguise, probably, but she is a sharp old lady and it didn’t fool her. She probably tried to talk to him, but he brushed past her. However, when, the following week, she saw those familiar blue eyes again, in the presence of Eileen, she greeted him as “young Musgrave” and congratulated him on getting rid of his beard and tidying himself up. According to Eileen, who told Patrick about this, she didn’t like the way that Peter Musgrave was rude to a very old woman from the nursing home, something that made Eileen, who has been well brought up, regard him with dislike.’
‘I see,’ said Dr Scher. ‘And Reverend Mother Aquinas put one and one together and made it one hundred and one! So, now, what do you do?’
‘Nothing,’ said the Reverend Mother firmly. ‘Their sister probably saw her brother, one of her brothers – who knows whether it was Peter or Paul – with a match in his hand to light a fuse in order to detonate the bomb, to set fire to a rope soaked in diesel – remember she had been scrubbing the porch and came out to get water from the well just before the explosion, but she was an adoring young sister, who knew how much their mother loved the boys, and so she offered up her life for them, deliberately caught diphtheria, and who am I to try to nullify her sacrifice? In any case,’ she finished briskly, ‘it would be an impossible and heartrending task for Patrick to accumulate enough proof to make even a case to apply for extradition; a safe conviction for murder would be an impossibility. Lucy tells me that Rupert was quite unsure as to whether it was really Peter who came to his office and declared that it may well have been Paul. No,’ she ended decisively, ‘the IRA have many unacknowledged sins upon their conscience; let them bear the weight of one that is undeserved.’
She stopped, listened, then went to the door and opened it. The old priest was by the bedside holding up a small, carved crucifix. The girl was very still, as still as death almost, but then a long sigh came from her and her eyes fixed themselves on a patch of sunlight on the ceiling. The Reverend Mother came forward, fell upon her knees beside the bed and then there was one more sigh, this time louder and harsher and an unmistakable change in the blue eyes, still fixed on the ceiling, but now wide and without sight.
The Reverend Mother crossed herself, then rose to her feet and gently closed the girl’s eyes, pressing down the lids and holding them in place as she prayed that the last image had been that of a very beloved mother and that little Nellie was safe in loving arms. Softly she quoted from Revelation: ‘“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”’
Murder in an Orchard Cemetery Page 25
