With Our Blessing

by Jo Spain

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘The woman who’s renting the place next door to the priest’s house. Ciaran is struggling to track her down. I could barely hear him on the phone last night, but he mentioned her name – Catherine Farrell. I happened to be holding Margaret Downes’s file in my hand when I was on the phone. Guess what her middle name was?’

  ‘Catherine?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Same woman?’

  ‘Her file says she entered the laundry in 1973. But she had a baby in 1975.’

  ‘That fits perfectly,’ Michael exclaimed. ‘If Margaret Catherine Downes is Catherine Farrell, she could have been watching the priest’s house the whole time and checking out the convent.’

  ‘Right again. We need to find out what became of Margaret, asap.’

  *

  Tom’s phone rang as they arrived back in the front hall. It was Emmet, back on the road.

  ‘Good to see you’re up and at it, Tom. This case must be killing you – 8 a.m. starts, is it?’

  ‘I’ll have you know I was up with the lark. I suppose you couldn’t wait to get out of the charming B&B. Leave the luscious landlady sated in the bed, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t even stop for breakfast. The good man who runs the garage on the main street was open; he served me a hot sausage roll and a coffee. There’s barely a car on the road. It’s like the 1990 World Cup again; people have abandoned work.’

  ‘How’s the driving?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Slow but steady. I’ll head straight to the priest’s house then up to Limerick HQ to make sure their lab is running the scene evidence properly. Where is Ellie, by the way? I couldn’t get through on the mobile.’

  ‘She’s staying in a B&B in the village. With my deputy, as it happens, who’s planning a proposal. There’s terrible phone coverage here, that’s why you can’t get her.’

  ‘Ha!’ Emmet snorted. ‘I wouldn’t worry about your deputy. Ellie has that effect on all men.’

  ‘If you’re up in the city anyway, will you check in with the pathologist? He’s working out of Limerick hospital. Father Seamus’s GP said the priest had heart trouble and reckons he could have been given some kind of injection.’

  Tom could almost hear Emmet’s brain whirring in the background.

  ‘Hmm. From what I know, Tom, it’s a bit difficult to inject someone using the element of surprise – unless they’re in a deep sleep, or they’ve let you come up close enough. If you tried to stick a needle in someone, approaching from behind, for example, one quick movement and they’d have it out before you could inject all of whatever you had in the syringe.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Did he know the person injecting him, is what I’m getting at. People have used syringes as murder weapons, but it’s usually on victims who have no means of getting away.

  ‘You say he’d a heart condition. There was a nurse in the States – Gilbert, I think she was called – who was injecting her patients with epinephrine. It caused them to have heart attacks. They had heart conditions, anyway. So the other staff in the hospital didn’t think too much of the unusual number of deaths in her care, until there were too many to ignore. I think they referred to her as “the angel of death”. Any chance your priest was having an afternoon nap?’

  Tom paused before replying. ‘There weren’t any obvious signs of struggle, so perhaps. The beds were all made, though, and we got the impression he’d just come down from the attic.’

  ‘Well, if that’s not the case, then you need to focus on who knew him – who would he not be surprised to see, and who would he let get close enough to empty a syringe into him.’

  ‘Would they need medical training?’

  ‘It would certainly help. But you could have somebody who has just done his research. Tom?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘McGuinness hasn’t tried to take the investigation in any funny direction, has he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Tom knew exactly what Emmet meant, but he wanted him to say it.

  ‘You know full well. He hasn’t asked you to consult the quack?’

  Tom smiled. ‘No.’

  Emmet breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Well, just do me a favour. Solve the bloody thing quickly, and let’s keep it all scientific and medical. I do not want to have to encounter she who I will not name while I’m down here.’

  Anyone listening in on their conversation would have thought the Technical Bureau head was talking in tongues. Emmet had a long history with the woman in question, and putting the two of them on the same investigation would be an incendiary proposition.

  Luckily, McGuinness hadn’t mentioned her.

  Yet.

  Chapter 44

  The sisters had kindly left breakfast out again, this time a mixed grill. Willie was already in situ, loading his plate with large pork sausages flavoured with herbs and pepper, slices of crispy bacon, spoonfuls of buttery scrambled eggs and boxty, the traditional Irish potato pancake.

  Even Laura seemed to have regained her appetite and was helping herself to toast and eggs. Her hunger noticeably diminished, though, when she overheard Michael telling Willie that Ray had slept in the village B&B last night, where Ellie had her lodgings.

  Tom joined them and began ladling spiced sausages on to his plate.

  ‘How about a slice of tomato there, Willie, to curb the cholesterol? Maybe some mushrooms?’

  Willie’s withering look indicated that adding vegetables to his plate, even fried, would constitute a crime against breakfast.

  They had no sooner sat down than Tom’s phone rang, the screen flashing Ciaran’s number. He put him on loudspeaker so the others could hear.

  ‘Glad the phones are back, Tom.’

  ‘I have you on speaker, Ciaran. We’re all here. You were trying to tell me last night about the woman in the house next door to Father Seamus.’

  ‘Yes. Catherine Farrell. This has me perplexed. The nosiest woman in the village – that’s Mrs Guckian, Father Seamus’s cleaner – couldn’t tell me anything about her. She has seen her but says Catherine was wrapped up for the weather, so all she saw was a woman of average height, with red hair and glasses. She couldn’t guess an age except to say she didn’t look old. Mrs Guckian did say Father Seamus had conversed with the woman a few times and appeared to like her.’

  ‘What about the agent who rented the property?’

  ‘She dealt with the letting agent by email, so he never met her. Paid everything through an account – rent up front until the end of the year, that’s this month. The fella said she was looking for a property in a rural village where she could write in peace. She suggested a couple of villages but, given her budget, she could only really afford the property in Kilcross.

  ‘I tried to follow up on the references she provided – a former employer and a publishing company. Neither number is in service. I suspect the agent didn’t bother checking when she paid up front and in full. We tried the contact number she provided, but it rang out.’

  ‘What about the bank account?’ Tom asked.

  ‘It’s in her name. But if Catherine Farrell is a pseudonym, she could easily have forged documentation to set up an account. If I want more details from the bank, I’ll have to get a warrant.’

  ‘Hmm. This is bothering me too, Ciaran. Do you think the agent might come to the house and let us have a look inside? Can he do that if he can’t get hold of her – check the property?’

  ‘If he has legitimate concerns I think he can, yes. I’ll ask, but he’s based in Dublin so it mightn’t be until tomorrow. The old lady’s family all live in the capital, so they didn’t use a local agent.’

  ‘Well, see what you can do. Listen, I was just speaking to Emmet McDonagh, the head of the Technical Bureau. He suggested that if the priest was injected with something, he was either asleep or sufficiently comfortable with the person to let his killer get that close.’

  ‘But we think he had just come down f
rom the attic, don’t we?’ Ciaran asked.

  ‘Yes. The attic door was shut, but not locked. He wouldn’t have let anyone up there with him. And I doubt anybody could have surprised him, coming up those creaky steps.

  ‘I have this feeling he was attacked downstairs. All of our suspects at the moment seem to be female, and no woman would have the strength to carry him downstairs after he was dead. If they dragged him down the stairs, his body would have had more marks.’

  ‘The back door was unlocked, as though he’d let somebody in,’ Michael interjected. ‘That also implies he knew his killer.’

  ‘If we’re certain the killer didn’t have a key, or Father Seamus hadn’t left it unlocked,’ Ciaran said. ‘Wouldn’t he be surprised, though, at someone calling to the back door?’

  ‘If he was in the attic, they could have said they’d tried the front and then gone round the back. Maybe he thought he’d left the side gate open? And his cleaner has keys, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, but she also can’t walk at the moment.’

  ‘Could she have loaned her keys to anyone?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll check that out at our end.’

  ‘Might the neighbour have popped in the odd time over the back fence?’

  Ciaran thought about this. ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Keep looking into that Farrell woman, Ciaran,’ Tom urged before ending the call.

  The inspector was about to start tucking into his breakfast when the detectives were disturbed by the sounds of doors banging and a commotion in the kitchen next door. Tom pushed his chair back and hurried towards the noise, followed by the others, in time to see Sister Concepta and Sister Gabrielle carrying Sister Gladys between them.

  For one horrible moment, the inspector thought the old woman had become the latest victim. But her eyes were open and filled with pain.

  ‘Give her space,’ Sister Concepta said to the five or six nuns fussing around, as they gently lowered her into her usual armchair. ‘Mary, get her a whiskey.’

  ‘Make it a large one,’ Sister Gladys said, weakly.

  That brought a smile to everyone’s lips.

  ‘Make way.’ Sister Bernadette pushed through the room, carrying an ancient leather medical bag.

  ‘What happened?’ Tom asked.

  ‘She went out for a walk,’ Sister Concepta answered. ‘The snow has covered some of the low walls out the back and she fell over one. What possessed you to go out in that, Sister? You’re lucky it’s just your ankle and not a hip. If people insist on walking out there, we’ll have to cordon off those ruins so nobody else tries to kill themselves.’

  Sister Gladys accepted a glass spilling over with whiskey from Sister Mary.

  ‘Maybe I just wanted to start drinking early today, Concepta.’

  She was putting a brave face on it but winced as Bernadette, now sitting in front of the older woman, carefully lifted the ankle and rested it in her lap. She unlaced the older woman’s shoe and peeled down a long black stocking.

  ‘I can’t have those men standing there looking at my legs,’ Sister Gladys said, cocking her head at the male detectives, although barely an inch of flesh was visible.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Sister Bernadette said. ‘You’ve nothing they haven’t seen before.’

  ‘They haven’t seen mine before.’

  ‘We’ll spare your blushes and leave the kitchen, Sister. It’s not too badly damaged, I hope?’ Tom addressed this to Sister Bernadette, who was manipulating the ankle tenderly.

  ‘Just a sprain, thank God. If it was a break we’d have to go up to the hospital, but I can deal with this.’

  The police officers left the kitchen, accompanied by Sister Concepta.

  ‘She was out at the orphanage ruins. Said she was “remembering”. Honestly! If she’d been out there for any length of time she would have caught pneumonia.’

  ‘You’re lucky you have Sister Bernadette,’ Tom said. ‘Does she have medical training?’

  ‘Bernadette? Oh, yes. She was trained as a nurse. That’s how she ended up with the missionaries.’

  ‘Is she your only nurse?’

  ‘Fully trained, yes. We’d be lost without her. I have a little knowledge, but not enough for all eventualities. If you don’t mind, I’d better get back in there.’

  ‘Of course.’ He held the heavy door open for her.

  When she was out of sight, the detectives exchanged looks.

  Michael was the first to say it. He counted out each point on his hand.

  ‘Medical training; unaccounted for yesterday afternoon; hated Mother Attracta and had a run-in with her she didn’t tell us about; was a familiar presence to Father Seamus; wasn’t happy that this place was a laundry and had started compiling its records—’

  ‘And she’s not that old,’ Laura added.

  Tom nodded. ‘I think I’ll follow up with Bernadette about yesterday myself, Willie. Let’s listen to her initial interview again.’

  Grabbing some toast on the way, the two men went to Mother Attracta’s office to get the tape recordings.

  Tom rewound to the point where he’d asked Bernadette what she had done on Thursday, the day after Mother Attracta had been kidnapped.

  ‘What did you do all day Thursday?’

  ‘Let me see. I spent most of the day in bed. I felt quite weak. I read for a while but in the afternoon I slept. I fetched some soup from the kitchen later on.’

  ‘Did you see other sisters that evening?’

  ‘Oh, of course. Sister Gladys is in the kitchen most nights. There are generally a couple of us congregating there or in the sitting room at any given time.’

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Tom asked.

  Willie nodded. ‘The “oh, of course”. It’s not that convincing when you think about it. And “Sister Gladys is in the kitchen most nights”?’

  Tom nodded. ‘I’ll talk to her. You grab Michael and Laura, and the three of you start asking the other sisters if they saw Bernadette that day.’

  *

  Back in the kitchen, the nuns were busy making tea and buttering warm scones.

  Sister Bernadette was packing up her medical bag; the patient was reclined in her chair with a smile indicating the prescribed alcohol was having the desired effect.

  ‘Sister Bernadette, may I see you?’ Tom asked.

  ‘No problem, Inspector. Do you want to go somewhere quieter?’

  ‘Please. Mother Attracta’s office?’

  Willie hung back as Tom left with the nun.

  Once inside Mother Attracta’s office, Bernadette filled Tom in on the elderly nun’s condition.

  ‘If she keeps the leg up for a few days, she’ll be fine. She’s very lucky it wasn’t worse.’

  ‘She’s lucky you were here, Sister. Did you train for long as a nurse?’

  ‘I worked in Limerick General for five years. I had a special talent for it. One of the consultants said I should have trained to be a doctor, but my peers would have frowned on that. It was nursing or midwifery for the likes of me. It stood me well in Latin America, I can tell you. I had to have a strong stomach at times.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. You can save lives, then? You’d know all about heart attacks and strokes and such?’

  Sister Bernadette looked at him, amused. ‘Well, that’s what the training is for, Inspector. I’m sure you don’t want to talk to me about my prowess as a medical practitioner.’

  Tom paused, then exhaled loudly. ‘Sister, you informed members of my team yesterday that you had gone for a walk around the time we believe Father Seamus was murdered. I need to follow up on that. Why would you go for a walk in these dreadful conditions, and did you meet anyone while you were out?’

  The sister crossed her arms defensively. ‘Why does anyone go on a walk? Sister Gladys just went on one. Why are you asking me in particular?’

  Tom sat back, resting his hands on the sides of the chair. His body language was open, unthreatening.

  ‘In a
double murder investigation, Sister, it’s normally me asking the questions.’

  ‘If this was a proper interrogation, though, wouldn’t I be entitled to a solicitor?’

  ‘Of course. And if you want to go down that route, that is absolutely your right.’

  She cast him a frightened look. ‘Do I need to go down that route?’

  He shrugged. ‘I need honest answers. You can choose to have that conversation informally, like we’re doing now. Or we can head to Kilcross station and have it formally.’

  She blinked twice. ‘No, I don’t want to do it formally.’ She bit her lip before speaking again. ‘Inspector, I spent a long time dealing with very corrupt police forces, and I saw too many young men and women forced into false confessions behind closed doors. So I get a bit jumpy when someone is asking me a question with a subtext that implies yesterday afternoon I might have murdered a man.’

  ‘I think you’re a few skips ahead, Sister. I’m not going to be forcing any confessions out of you. I’m just asking questions. When you were walking, did you see anybody?’

  She looked over his shoulder and out the window.

  Something had changed in her face. The usual trace of good humour that resided in her eyes was gone. A melancholy had descended.

  ‘In 1980, when I had just started working in El Salvador, there was an incident. Three nuns and another woman travelling with them were raped and executed by the National Guard. You might have heard of it. I’d never met the women, but they were heroines to all of us who worked as missionaries. That was the same year that Archbishop Romero was assassinated.

  ‘The reason I’m telling you this is because we lived in fear. We ministered to the poor people of the countryside, and every day was one of anxiety. I’m not making myself out to be a hero. That kind of experience exposes you to the truth about yourself. Have you ever wondered how you would respond in certain situations and convinced yourself that you would respond bravely? When I left Ireland, I thought I was the bravest woman in the world. Then I was confronted with real situations – and every time I froze. I was petrified. It was quite a coming of age.

  ‘But I did learn to live with myself and my limitations. And maybe I was courageous, because I stayed. By the time I came home I had learned how to handle fear, not in a confrontational way, but by making myself invisible.