Murder In The Academy : A chilling murder mystery set in Belfast (Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 1)

by Maggie Feeley

  Murder

  in the

  academy

  maggie feeley

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, businesses, organisations and incidents portrayed in it are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published 2021 by Crimson

  an imprint of Poolbeg Press Ltd

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  www.poolbeg.com

  Email: info@poolbeg.com

  © Maggie Feeley 2021

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  © Poolbeg Press Ltd. 2021, copyright for editing, typesetting, layout, design, ebook

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978178199-443-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.poolbeg.com

  About the Author

  Maggie Feeley is an Irish educator and an activist on issues of gender, sexuality and equality. As a new endeavour, she is exploring how to continue the discussion of equality and social justice through the medium of writing engaging detective fiction.

  For Ann

  1

  Dr Helen Breen sat with her back to the door, silhouetted against the orange glow of the Anglepoise desk lamp. Outside, the lights of the Belfast nightscape were refracted in the gently falling rain on the external wall of glass around her corner office. The face of the new Belfast City College Campus which looked out onto the Harbour Estate and Belfast Lough was an uninterrupted façade of glass that blurred the distinction between inside and out. In Helen Breen’s office, all was meticulously ordered. The two internal walls were lined with an impressive collection of legal books, only some of which she’d actually read. A tasteful arrangement of impersonal images was fixed to the curved surface of the central stone pillar that was a feature of her prime corner-office space. The pillar served as a partial room-divider, concealing the occupant of the desk from the view of anyone coming in through the office door.

  Helen heard herself emit a short, guttural purr of contentment.

  It was the final day of the lecturing term in DePRec – the Department of Peace and Reconciliation in Belfast City College. Tomorrow she planned to complete her exam entries on the system and be heading for home by lunchtime. She was doodling on the sheet of paper in front of her and absent-mindedly contemplating her position. As was often the case, things were moving in the direction she wanted. She had forensically orchestrated most of the pieces in her latest game plan and now it was just a case of letting things take their inevitable course. The sense of success suffused her with satisfaction, and she sighed deeply. In her memory the pleasant smell of cut grass filled her nostrils and connected with some benign childhood recollection. A flash of her father with shirtsleeves rolled back to reveal muscled, tanned arms caught her unawares. She shook herself free of the image. Waiting was not her forte, but she had taught herself to control the tendency towards impatience and to relish the different stages of each new strategy. For now, what she had internally dubbed ‘Project Professor’ was definitely moving in the right direction.

  The sudden hum of student activity out in the corridors roused her from her reverie. In the silence that followed she smoothed her hair in the reflection in front of her and glanced at the clock on her laptop. It was getting joyfully close to nine twenty. Soon she could head for home, having shown herself to be at her desk for an admirably long day. The head of DePRec, Professor Jackson Bell, had been so grateful that she could cover for him at short notice as senior manager on evening duty. She snorted contemptuously. Obviously, he had an urgent prayer meeting to attend or perhaps a more salacious demand on his attention. She smirked at the very idea of it. In any case, she had filled her time well. She had requisitioned a new state-of-the-art laptop from a research budget, done some online clothes shopping, booked a short break in the sun for April and poked around in the email and Facebook accounts of some colleagues. Best of all, she had freed herself up from family expectations by announcing that she would be away over the holidays. Her brother Michael would have to attend to the demands of family Christmas without her. She relished the expanse of two whole weeks that stretched ahead of her without any tedious responsibilities.

  As she closed her laptop and reached for her bag, the door pushed open a little too forcefully, banging against the doorstop and rebounding awkwardly against the incomer’s shoulder, eliciting a string of expletives. Helen stood and moved towards the door.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, genuinely taken aback. “Why so hot under the collar?” She was only mildly interested in the response.

  There was no reply. Only her fixed expression of incredulity as her head was taken in hand by a bunch of her smooth black hair and a dull, stupefying thudding as it was pummelled repeatedly against the concrete pillar, quickly silencing her outrage. So long after life was extinguished, the rhythmic beating continued and garish red-and-grey matter dripped unattractively onto the highly polished industrial concrete floor.

  Then all was silent. The lights were extinguished and the distant mosquito-like sound of the lift descending from the fifth floor meant that another day, another term in the academy had almost come to a close.

  Despite all her carefully manipulated plans, Helen Breen’s ambitions had been forever thwarted.

  2

  Five months earlier

  Wellfleet, Massachusetts

  August 2013

  Alice Fox rolled effortlessly onto her back and allowed the silky-soft waters of the Great Pond in Wellfleet to ease her spirit. The early sun warmed her bones. She had left her mother and sisters still asleep in their summer cabin on the Cape and cycled the few miles here for one last swim before heading off to Ireland later that same day. She tilted her head back and drank in the big cobalt sky. Overhead, chattering tree swallows dipped and skimmed the surface of the pond, catching insects along the way, and Alice momentarily regretted that she would soon be far away from all this easy tranquillity.

  Northern Ireland sometimes assumed a dark profile in her mind, and she had mixed feelings about this new venture. In the next few days, she was due to take up a post-doctoral place in Belfast. She didn’t like to be in the limelight and she knew that this new academic post would place her under the scrutiny of strangers, at least initially. Then she would do what she was good at and blend unobtrusively into the background. She wasn’t shy as such, but she preferred to be a little off-centre in terms of attention. In that way she could watch what was happening without having to be totally socially engaged. That she had found to be her peaceful place.

  Since its formation in the early nineties, the Belfast-based college department, widely known as DePRec, had been in a long-term academic relationship with City University New York (CUNY). Al
ice, who had just completed her doctoral studies in CUNY, would become the latest item in the human traffic back and forth between the two institutions. Her PhD thesis supervisor had suggested that a spell in Northern Ireland would be a good next step in her career trajectory and so the one-year post-doc position had been negotiated. She was due some time out for thinking, it seemed. As well as helping with some local research projects in her field, she hoped to get a book proposal together and maybe even secure some funding for the following year.

  Her work in restorative justice was something about which she felt passionately but, from some preliminary enquiries, she feared there might be a bit of a chasm between her research context with young high-school kids in the US and the unresolved post-war issues that remained a daily reality in the wake of the Northern Ireland conflict. Anyway, she would find out about that all too soon.

  Alice stretched and turned to resume her steady crawl across the lake with a growing interest in her last US breakfast. Her sister, Sam, had promised to make a pancake stack with bacon and syrup and her appetite was steadily increasing in urgency as she headed for shore. She strode from the water, feeling the sun warm her well-honed body. She didn’t do diets but she loved to be in motion and had her best thoughts on the move.

  The youngest of the Fox family, Alice had been a detective in Lowell Police Department for fifteen years, having joined up straight from High School. The job had required her to be fast on her feet and she had made it her business to be strong enough to deal with whatever punks came her way. She had trained in martial arts and enjoyed the discipline and balletic movements of Tae Kwon Do. Although killing wasn’t in her nature, she had been a fair enough shot with a pistol when she had needed to be. She was easy in her skin and carried her strength with an effortless beauty that many worked hard to emulate. Yes, she was blonde, tall and shapely but never a cliché. If anything defined her, it was her low-key openness and composure, which she had worked very hard to develop.

  The Foxes had a long tradition of service as police officers and firefighters and she had preferred to follow the family track than to carry on with school like most of her peers. In the mid-90s, when her much-loved father was killed by the car driven by a drugged-up teenager she had lost her moorings and little by little her faith in traditional policing. The family had been asked to participate in a restorative justice project with the young joyrider who was by then in juvenile detention. It had been agonising and also ultimately transformational. In the end she had quit the police service and gone to college as a mature student, determined to study more effective alternatives to meeting force with force. Now, fifteen years later, she was an experienced community practitioner working to divert young people from a life of anti-social behaviour and recidivism. Often this highlighted how deep-rooted social inequalities made crime and conflict almost inevitable and, in her opinion, this needed to be the real focus of change.

  Now in her forties, Alice had a sense that all the pieces of her life fitted together. Her knowledge of police work, her own painful life experience and her growing understanding and affinity with poor communities had all found a useful place in the person she had now become. Academics respected her knowledge of the real world and high-school kids saw her as a rare, trusted adult and a bit of a hero.

  As she cycled back to the house, she inhaled the soft, aromatic Cape air and wondered what the coming year would have added to her life story when next she was back in this most relaxing of places. In her wildest imaginings, she didn’t even come close.

  3

  In his cluttered, ill-smelling rooms, Agent Alan contemplated his drab and dwindling caseload. The Palace Barracks, located in Holywood on the outskirts of East Belfast, housed MI5 alongside some Irish Battalions of the British Army and their families. Since the peace process had taken hold in the province his level of community intelligence-gathering had shrunk to a tedious minimum. He was charged with monitoring the intentions of a few uninspiring dissident groups who spent most of their time between internal bickering and trying to cultivate support from a largely disinterested population. His was a world whose moment was past. Often Alan found he had expanses of time on his hands and an ever-smaller number of colleagues with whom to generate a sense of his own importance.

  Another dull encounter with one of his sources the previous evening had offered little promise in terms of future action. Nevertheless, although Professor Jackson Bell was far from cooperative, the research activity of DePRec still had potential to get under the surface of some seditious community elements and he planned to increase the push in that area. Why not? A number of staff changes were mooted in the college department and he hoped to persuade others to help him in this regard.

  He had never held with intellectualising dissent and preferred the traditional approach of covert military intervention. In his view, softly, softly persuasive techniques aimed at influencing political trends would never convince diehard republicans or loyalists to stop playing war games. In that regard he could demonstrate a fair degree of fellow feeling, albeit from the establishment point of view. There was always someone corruptible if you looked hard enough. He hoped that the new academic term would allow him the opportunity to put his theories into practice and felt something quite unfamiliar, akin to enthusiasm, about the prospect.

  4

  The Irish summer rain thrummed relentlessly on the glass roof of the Belfast City College Human Sciences and Library Building. This was an impressive contemporary construction containing vast sheets of glass that constantly reflected the mix of new and old back to the surrounding area. The animated landscape caught on the glass screen was forever changing. The college had a number of campuses in and around the Titanic Quarter which sat alongside remnants of Belfast’s historic shipbuilding industry. In contrast to this ultramodern edifice, the College’s nearby Centre for Maritime Studies occupied the heritage-listed, former Shipbuilding Offices that dated from the mid-nineteenth century. Belfast was experiencing a renaissance after the thirty long years of what was euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’. More slowly than other European cities, it was developing an obsession with all-day takeaway lattes. Wine bars that offered a place to wind down after work were springing up in middle-class areas, whereas the chipper still held its popularity in poorer enclaves. The Ulster Fry sat stubbornly on menus beside the avocado-and-goat’s-cheese on sourdough. It was an awkward city still struggling to determine an identity that wasn’t shrouded in sectarianism.

  In a room on the most northerly corner of the Library Building’s fifth floor, a reluctant assembly of faculty members waited and gazed through the vast windows at the now iconic vista of the Belfast Shipyard. On the meeting-room wall, a colourful post-modern image of a steamship sailing safely around an enormous iceberg bore the cryptic caption: Let’s Change the Past in the Future. In real time, out in Belfast Lough, a mundane car ferry moved steadily towards the open sea and more than a few of those waiting for the first meeting of the new academic year to begin, firmly wished they were safely aboard that departing vessel.

  In the distance, the distinctive, high-pitched mechanical sound of the lift ascending informed them that someone else had arrived at the top floor. After a lapse of the minute or two it took to walk around two sides of the quadrangle of corridor that overlooked the central, sky-filled college library, Professor Jackson Bell made his usual blustering entrance and claimed the vacant seat at the head of the table. With a tap of his biro on the boardroom table and a backward nod of his balding head, the Department of Peace and Reconciliation Studies was brought grudgingly to order.

  Two hours later the DePRec staff Common Room resounded with sighs and muttered expletives after the tense and lengthy meeting. It had reprised well-worn themes of budgets and university league-tables and the increased need to attract funding “to ensure sustainability in the university marketplace”. Students had featured in the discussion only as a very peripheral commodity and there had been little sign of the virt
ues of mutual respect and recognition that those present made a living from espousing.

  “Christ Almighty! Does nothing ever change in this godforsaken institution?” moaned the department’s eldest and least deferential member, Ralph Wilson.

  Ralph still resented Bell’s appointment as Head of School some ten years previously in that it had simultaneously and definitively confirmed his own devalued academic currency. He was trenchantly and authentically old school and resented any moves towards modernisation or a market approach to academic studies. During the morning’s seemingly interminable meeting he had treated his colleagues to a lengthy diatribe on the pervasive and destructive ideology of neo-liberalism in higher education. How were they to promote reconciliation when they were constantly goaded to be more competitive and cosmetically appealing to prospective students? The message and the process were at odds, he claimed. He was articulate and entertaining and eloquently undermined the Head with his declarations of injured moral sensitivities.

  The atmosphere in the glass room had been laden with layers of discord that amply represented the now somewhat jaded Irish peace process and the wider faltering social and political structures that provided the core matter for their academic livelihood.

  “Ironic question really for those involved in the ever-hopeful business of peace-building and societal transformation,” quipped Helen Breen, senior lecturer in legal studies.

  Her remark amused the group of precarious part-timers sitting near her and prompted a burst of heartless laughter. Their disgruntlement with the system meant that they particularly relished signs of strife within the ranks of privileged permanent staff. Breen was high-profile amongst those who used and abused part-time tutors to do work that she found unpalatable or inconvenient. She had especially irked one young postdoctoral scholar by offering him book tokens in lieu of payment for covering one of her classes at very short notice. He had reportedly met the offer with the incredulous retort, “Do you think I can pay my fucking bills with book tokens?”