A Shocking Assassination

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Come, come, this is not like you, Mrs O’Mahony,’ she said briskly. ‘We need to discuss this matter, now. Sam has only you to rely on, you know. Drink your tea and eat some cake and then we’ll talk.’

  Mrs O’Mahony mopped her face vigorously and gulped a few times. Her fingers were tightly clenched and she struggled visibly to control her sobs. The Reverend Mother stood over her, pouring out the strong tea, adding milk and a spoonful of sugar and watched her drink it before cutting a slice of fruitcake.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ she said when it came to the slice of cake and the Reverend Mother did not press her. Some troubles were just too bad even for Sister Bernadette’s fruitcake. Later, perhaps, when she had unburdened her soul of a little of its anguish.

  ‘Have you seen Sam?’ she enquired.

  ‘No, not yet,’ said Mrs O’Mahony wearily. ‘I was told that I could see him on Monday. Visiting hours are from three to four every afternoon except on Saturdays and Sundays. I’ll be there, but I don’t know how much that will help. I just don’t know what to say to him.’

  ‘Did he shoot the city engineer?’ asked the Reverend Mother mildly and was pleased to see the flush of anger coming over the woman’s face.

  ‘My Sam wouldn’t shoot a stray tomcat,’ she said indignantly. ‘He’s against violence. It’s not made him popular. The Free State fellows don’t like him. He’s too inclined to write articles asking what they are doing now that they have power in their hands. He’s been against murder, been against all of this fighting. He wrote an article that would bring tears to your eyes about the last hours of that man who was killed last year, the R.I.C. man who was shot after bicycling out to do a bit of fishing by the side of the Lee Road. And then when that fellow who calls himself a patriot wrote a piece about what the Republicans would do if they were in charge of the country, well Sam just tore it to pieces, said that raids and shooting were the only things they knew about and that they hadn’t the slightest idea how to manage the economy of the country. They sent him a death threat after that. Well, at least Sam thought it was a death threat. It was a piece of paper with a black spot in the middle of it.’

  The Reverend Mother thought about that and guessed that she knew the person who had delivered the black spot to Sam O’Mahony. She had a pupil once who had loved the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, Treasure Island, and had been so absorbed in the account of blind Pew that she had been found with her head stuck in the book by Sister Bernadette, crouching over the remains of the fire, in an almost dark classroom, hours after the others had gone. For a moment she thought about Eileen in the classroom, her bright face, her absorption in a novel or a poem, her quick wit and love of argument. Once one of her star pupils and now a fugitive, part of the banned Republican army, holed up in some derelict cottage out in the countryside! Perhaps teaching these girls to think and to reason, to look to a better future might have been a mistake. A clever girl like Eileen got to thinking that she might make a difference to the future. But there was little use in regrets, so the Reverend Mother reverted to practicalities, bending over and cutting the thick slice of cake into manageable bite-sized morsels.

  ‘Well, if I were you, Mrs O’Mahony,’ she said, holding the plate in front of the woman and waiting until she took a cube before going on, ‘if I were you, I would remind him that he didn’t shoot the man, therefore someone else did. I would encourage Sam to think hard about that morning. He is an intelligent young man and he has plenty of time to reflect. Let him try to remember any movement, any sense that there was someone missing after the lights were switched on. Tell him to report any suspicions to the police. Both you and he know that he is innocent, so Sam should firmly keep in his mind that he has not done this murder. Make him stick to that. No one who was present yesterday morning at the market seemed anxious to say that they saw him fire the shot. No one seemed to know what happened. It was all so bewildering; the lights went out and the crowd so thick, that it was hard to see anything. The evidence against him is only that he was holding the gun. And his explanation for that was quite reasonable, I thought. He must just keep very calm, and keep asserting his innocence,’ wound up the Reverend Mother, conscious of the fact that Mrs O’Mahony was hardly listening but was absent-mindedly pushing a few crumbs of cake around the plate in front of her.

  She looked up and then looked back down again, picked up the cup of tea and drained the last few mouthfuls. They seemed to give her courage because when she looked up again she met the Reverend Mother’s eye and kept her gaze steady as she said, ‘There’s something else that you can do for me, and for Sam.’

  She’s going to ask for a loan to engage a lawyer for Sam, thought the Reverend Mother and she felt if that was true that she would be uncertain as to whether she could justify it. The school, run without charging fees for any of the children, required a huge amount of fundraising in order to keep it functioning efficiently. And then she had the work unit for the girls who had passed school leaving age, and no longer wanted to engage in book learning, but were willing to learn cookery and typing and other skills that might help them to get a job in a city that was full of unemployment. From time to time, she had squeezed out some money from one fund or other for a past pupil in dire straits, but Sam O’Mahony was not a past pupil and to hire a lawyer to conduct his defence would be an enormous expense. Not one that she could justify, she thought. The bishop’s secretary scrutinised her accounts and this really would be an unjustified use of charitable donations.

  ‘If it’s within my power, I will do my best to help,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘Well, it is within your power and it will help,’ said Mrs O’Mahony. There was a sudden change in her. The woman, who had wept so piteously five minutes ago, was now sitting up very straight, her eyes dry, her mouth a tough firm line. This was the woman who had, single-handed, built up a prosperous business in her stall at the English Market, who, when deserted by her husband, had managed to feed, clothe and expensively educate her son. ‘There is something that you can do for Sam and you will save his life if you do it,’ she said firmly. ‘You can tell Inspector Patrick Cashman that you were standing just beside Mrs O’Donovan’s buttered egg stall, and you saw Sam, over there beside my stall and he had a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other and you could still see him at the very moment the shot rang out.’

  The Reverend Mother kept silent. The room seemed very still, the flames flickered over the burning coals, the rain pattered against the window and the clock struck the half hour. Eventually it was Mrs O’Mahony who broke the silence.

  ‘It would not be a lie,’ she said. ‘Sam was standing just in front of my stall and I saw the pencil in one hand and the notebook in the other. I saw him a second before I heard the gun. There was enough light coming through from the archways to see him. There is no way that he could have fired that shot.’

  ‘Then that is what you must tell the inspector,’ said the Reverend Mother and heard her own voice lay a noticeable emphasis on the word you.

  ‘As if he’d believe me!’

  ‘What does the superintendent of the market think? Perhaps he, also, noticed Sam.’

  ‘He’s no friend of mine.’ Her voice was harsh and aggressive. The Reverend Mother remembered talk of some sort of fight at the market. Wasn’t Mrs O’Mahony convicted of assaulting the weighing scales man? She seemed to remember something about that in the Cork Examiner. She eyed her visitor narrowly, but said nothing.

  ‘They’d believe you,’ said Mrs O’Mahony after a minute. ‘If you said that you saw Sam with the notebook in one hand and the pencil in the other, if you said that you saw his two hands occupied just at the very moment that the shot was fired. If you said that, Reverend Mother, there would be no one in the city who would call you a liar. Sam would probably be released straightaway. The inspector wouldn’t go against your evidence.’

  ‘But I didn’t see him,’ said the Reverend Mother after a pause. ‘I was looking in another direction completely.
I was looking down towards the fountain.’

  ‘But you could say it. After all, what’s a small lie compared to a human life?’

  What, indeed? thought the Reverend Mother. Put like that, the question was a hard one to answer. And yet she had no doubt in her mind as to what the answer must be.

  ‘I could not tell a lie,’ she said firmly.

  ‘A lie,’ the woman shrugged. ‘We all tell lies all the time. Haven’t you ever told someone that they were looking good, when you knew that they were at death’s door? I have. We all have. Haven’t you ever said something like, “it’s so kind of you to come to visit me,” when you were wishing them gone?’

  It was possible. And the small lies of social intercourse, the praise of a cake that she had hardly tasted; the thanks for an unwanted cup of tea; the bracing and completely insincere declared belief in a girl’s ability to understand a difficult poem; the assurance that all was well to a classroom of terrified children as guns roared in the streets outside the school and at any moment a shot could come through the window and kill one of them; of course, she had told lies, had allowed a false impression to go uncorrected. And the worst of it all was that she knew Mrs O’Mahony was right. Patrick would believe her, the barracks’ superintendent would believe her and if it came to a trial, the judge in the court would believe her.

  But she would have to swear to her evidence. Call upon God to be her witness.

  ‘I cannot do it,’ she said again. ‘Anything else that I can do, any influence that I have, I will bring to bear. But to tell a lie like that is not something I could do. My conscience would not allow me.’

  Mrs O’Mahony put back her tea cup, centring it carefully on its matching saucer. She stood up, the broken veins in her weather-beaten face showing a dark red tracery across cheeks and nose. Her eyes were full of anger and when she spoke, she seemed almost to spit out the words.

  ‘Then I hope that your conscience will not trouble you, Reverend Mother, when you have a death, perhaps two deaths – I can’t see myself wanting to live if Sam is taken from me – so you will have my death, also, on your head. Have you ever seen a hanging, Reverend Mother? I haven’t, not until now. But all of last night I could see what it would be like, I stood there and watched it happen time after time. I wouldn’t wish a night like that on my worst enemy and there’ll be worse to come, won’t there?’

  The Reverend Mother touched the bell to summon Sister Bernadette, then rose to her feet also. There was a certain menace coming from the woman but she refused to be intimidated.

  ‘I shall pray for Sam, and for the truth to be uncovered,’ she said quietly as the door opened and Sister Bernadette came in.

  ‘Oh, prayer,’ said Mrs O’Mahony loudly and bitterly. ‘I’ve given up believing in that for a long time. Prayer will do no good; don’t imagine that it will be of the slightest use to poor Sam down there in the gaol, knowing that he may be dancing on the end of the rope before the summer is here.’ She pushed past Sister Bernadette, saying harshly, ‘Don’t bother showing me out. I can find my own way. You can clear away the tea and cake. The Reverend Mother will tell you that I loved it.’ And then she was gone, leaving Sister Bernadette staring open-mouthed after her.

  ‘What …?’ she began and then fell silent.

  ‘I must make a phone call,’ said the Reverend Mother in what she hoped was her normal voice. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to make up the fire, Sister Bernadette? I have some letters to write before I have my ten o’clock lesson with the older girls.’

  It would be nice, she thought, to have a telephone in her own room, rather than having to stand in a draughty corridor, not sure of who might overhear her words. However, she did not feel that she could justify the expense. Charity collections during these last few months had not yielded the usual generous contributions from the city merchants. Ireland’s independence from England had resulted in a fall-off in the export business and she was fiercely determined not to cut back on any of her schemes.

  ‘Montenotte two-three, please,’ she said into the phone and then smiled with amusement as the woman at the exchange said promptly, ‘Yes, of course, Reverend Mother. I’ll put you straight through to Mrs Murphy.’ It was a timely reminder that nothing private should be said to her cousin on the phone. Still, she and Lucy usually understood each other very quickly. They had been best of friends for almost seventy years and both knew every nuance in each other’s voice.

  ‘Good morning, Reverend Mother,’ came Lucy’s musical voice after a minute. ‘I hear that you were centre stage in that shocking assassination. Buying eggs, I believe, when the shot rang out. Rupert said everyone was gossiping about it at the Chamber of Commerce meeting last night. Poor Mr Doyle! And they say that the man with the gun was a member of the Republican Volunteers.’ Her voice purred on, delivering the normal platitudes, but there was an undercurrent of curiosity in it. Lucy would know all the gossip about the city engineer. Her husband, from one of the foremost merchant families in the city, was a prominent solicitor and usually knew everything that Lucy had not managed to pick up at her tea parties. She would be wondering now what would be her cousin’s interest in this murder.

  ‘I’m very well, thank you. I was driven back from the market by Captain Newenham; a distant cousin of ours, isn’t he?’ said the Reverend Mother and then she stopped and waited. The statement, she knew, would sound inconsequential to a listener, but Lucy was very sharp.

  ‘Ah, yes. Yes, of course, you’re right,’ she said and then almost without missing a beat, she added, ‘I must pop in and see you, this afternoon, make sure that you are all right. It must have been a terrible shock to an elderly lady like yourself.’

  ‘And, of course, I don’t use Pond’s Cream, so I look even more elderly than others of my age,’ murmured the Reverend Mother. By now, she thought, no one at the exchange would still be listening in to the conversation, but it would be safest to wait for Lucy’s visit. She arranged a time briskly and then put down the phone, dragging out her round silver watch from her pocket and angling it towards the light of the corridor window. Another half hour before she was due in class.

  ‘Inspector Cashman to see you, Reverend Mother,’ said Sister Bernadette coming down the dark corridor towards her. ‘I’ve put him in your room,’ she went on, fully confident that after the dramatic murder of the city engineer yesterday evening, that the Reverend Mother would be interested in talking with Patrick Cashman.

  SIX

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Quia parvus error in principio magnus est in fine

  (Because a small mistake in the beginning is a big one at the end)

  Patrick Cashman had always, even at the age of seven, been a serious young man – a good scholar, not perhaps the brightest or cleverest in that class, but tenacious and hard-working. There were times, these days, thought the Reverend Mother, when he had reminded her of a Scottie terrier which she had owned in her youth. He had the same bright, alert eyes, the same bushy eyebrows and the same capacity to worry away at something for hours, allowing nothing to distract him. She remembered him as a small child puzzling over a long division sum, continually checking his arithmetic by multiplying back, rubbing his eyebrows and then with a sigh and a squaring of his narrow shoulders, starting back on it again, ignoring his teacher’s exasperation and commands to put away his copy book. Her patron saint, Thomas Aquinas, had recognized the importance of being meticulous, she often reminded herself when her quick brain impatiently sought for an immediate solution.

  Today the bushy eyebrows were knitted when he came into her parlour and greeted her with a mixture of anxiety and of hope. His manners were always very good and he spent the first few minutes enquiring about her health and hoping that she had not been upset by events in the English Market the day before.

  ‘Funny the way that we all still call it the English Market, even after the English have left Ireland,’ mused the Reverend Mother. She had assured him of her good health, but he
seemed reluctant to come to the point so she chatted idly for a minute on the various legends that surrounded the setting up of the English Market and where its name came from – that it contrasted with the Irish Market on the Coal Quay, that it serviced the English ships moored in the great harbour of Cork during the Napoleonic Wars or that English was always spoken there when it was set up first and that the use of the Irish language had been banned within its walls. Eventually she ran out of her stock of potted history of this city built on the marsh under whose main streets still ran the rivers which had once seamed that swampy land, and she looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘You look worried, Patrick,’ she said bluntly. ‘Not surprising, of course, with this murder, or was it an assassination, on your hands.’

  ‘Assassination, in all probability,’ said Patrick. ‘James Doyle was the organizer of the Anti-Sinn Féin party, did you know that, Reverend Mother?’

  ‘No,’ she said, feeling, to her shame, an irrational spark of annoyance. Mostly she did know things. Facts, rumours, arcane pieces of knowledge floated to her every day, borne on the sheer crowd of people with whom she came in contact. She was meticulous about not passing them on; nevertheless, she had to admit that she did like to know. The name Sinn Féin, meaning ‘ourselves alone’ had now become slightly discredited so the party preferred to be called Republicans, or even Volunteers. Nevertheless, the name of the opposition to them remained firmly ‘Anti-Sinn Féin’. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘Well, I suppose it does look like an assassination with Sam O’Mahony as the executioner, or do you doubt that?’

  He gave a wry smile. ‘I’m annoying the superintendent,’ he said. ‘“Don’t know what else you can ask for, lad, you caught the feller red-handed. Had the gun in his hand, didn’t he?” He even mentioned your name – “and you have fifty good citizens of Cork city to bear witness to that fact, including Reverend Mother Aquinas.” And, of course, he is right. I’ve been through all the statements. Everyone says that. First the lights went out, then they heard a shot and then the lights were turned on and then they saw Sam O’Mahony standing over the body with a pistol in his hand. Unfortunately he was able to throw the gun into the fountain so we can’t swear in court that a bullet was fired from that gun minutes earlier, but we can assume that it was the gun which killed James Doyle.’