Sister Caravaggio

by Maeve Binchy

  SISTER CARAVAGGIO

  A NOVEL

  Maeve Binchy

  Peter Cunningham

  Neil Donnelly

  Cormac Millar

  Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

  Mary O’Donnell

  Peter Sheridan

  Devised and edited by

  Peter Cunningham

  Published in September 2014 by Orchard Wall Publishing

  Cover Design: Aine Cassidy

  The selection and concept of the work are copyright © Peter Cunningham 2014, and all the chapters are copyright © their respective authors. All rights reserved to these authors: Peter Cunningham, Neil Donnelly, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (writing as Cormac Millar), Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mary O’Donnell, Peter Sheridan, Gordon Snell. It is the desire of the writers not to disclose authorship of individual chapters within the book.

  The right of Peter Cunningham to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Chapter One

  Doon Abbey, County Kildare, Ireland

  Present Day, 10 June, 1 AM

  During the long passage of those sultry summer nights, Sister Alice often wondered if she had really shot the man. Squeezed the trigger with soft and knowing stealth and then watched his head explode. Sometimes she could see the passage of the bullet in its flight. Could that have been her? Dismay seized Sister Alice as the old images returned. At such moments, God seemed very far away.

  In the flickering glow of the night-light, she looked down at her right hand with its long, unadorned fingers that lately had clasped a rosary instead of a Glock G17 9mm. Sister Alice – Sister Mercy Superior had allowed her to keep her own name until the end of her novitiate – closed her eyes as a squeaking bat manoeuvred the airspace beneath the listing walls of Doon Abbey. The centuries sighed from the turrets and walls and from the elaborate finials that surmounted the castle’s Gothic windows. Moonbeams bathed the moss-covered buttresses and conjured intricate shapes from the ancient escarpments. Sister Alice knew that later she would hear the passage of mice in the corridor going about their nocturnal business, as they had done for generations, safe from the attention of Panda, the convent’s muscular black-and-white tomcat, who slept with Sister Mary Magdalene two cells away.

  Now and then she heard a jet plane in the distant sky and thought: I’m going to die here and no one will ever know. But wasn’t that the whole point? she asked herself. Had she not chosen to renounce the world and enter an enclosed order? To cut herself off from all mortal friendships and her former life? Especially her former life. Sister Alice tugged a lock of her cropped raven hair until it hurt. Ah! the bliss of self-mortification. Ouch!

  It was after one in the morning when Sister Alice suddenly sat up in bed. What had she just heard? There it was again; the sound of an engine on the breeze. She immediately tried to categorise it. Two litres, petrol engine, small rupture in the exhaust … Stop! She would have to try to forget all that. Meditate on a psalm. Think of the warm love of Our Lord. A brook of goodness. But why had the engine suddenly cut out? Here I go again, she thought, with a sigh of longing for the peace that the other sisters had found but she had not.

  Sister Alice became aware that the corridor outside her cell was in darkness – the two wall lights, with their long-life bulbs, had gone out. She frowned. Then she heard the distant engine again, but only for a few seconds before it drained into the night.

  The nearest public road was half a mile away, and so the engine sounds heard during the day came mainly from the convent’s farmyard, where broad-shouldered Sister Diana fed silage to cattle using a front loader fitted to the Massey Ferguson. A local young man, Joe Foley, was employed part-time to help with the milking, but Alice was almost sure that Joe’s car ran on petrol.

  She prayed for sleep. Where was the wind from tonight, she wondered? From the east, she decided – which meant that the engine she had heard might well have come from the public road. Her restless ear picked up the soft sound of cows masticating in the front meadow, a comforting repetition that spoke of healthy udders and lapping cream. Occasionally she heard an owl calling to its mate, and then Sister Alice was overwhelmed by another longing.

  Doon Abbey

  10 June, 2 AM

  ‘Gabrielle?’

  ‘What is it, Eleanor?’

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘I heard nothing. Go back to sleep.’

  The Misses Hogan, twins in their eighty-fifth year, had lived all their lives in Doon Abbey’s single-storey gate lodge. Their father had been a greyhound trainer whose great-grandfather, legend had it, had won the gate lodge in a poker game from the then owner of Doon. Gabrielle and Eleanor had both been primary school teachers in County Kildare, albeit in different schools. Since their retirement in the early 1980s, they had been the backbone of the Doonlish branch of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association.

  ‘I definitely heard something,’ Eleanor whispered.

  ‘Well, then, go and have a look,’ Gabrielle replied.

  Eleanor climbed from the double bed that had belonged to their parents and made her way to the bedroom window that looked out on the final stretch of Doon Abbey’s long avenue. It was chilly out of bed, even though it was summer, and as she drew back the curtain an inch, Eleanor shivered. The half-moon filtered through light cloud, creating ever-moving shadows. Eleanor pressed her nose against the window glass.

  ‘Goodness!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Come and see.’

  Gabrielle joined her sister by the window. A shadow slid away like a theatrical drape. There, on the far side of the avenue, a large woman was loading an object into a car.

  All at once the car’s engine burst into life. Its lights came on. The big woman turned and stared directly in at the gate lodge. As one, Eleanor and Gabrielle sank out of sight. They could hear the car driving away. They stayed down for five minutes, terrified. Although they had not been able to see her features clearly, there had been an aura of menace about that big woman that had sent icy tremors into the twins’ elderly bones.

  At last they raised their heads. The moon danced through the shadows but the large woman had gone.

  ‘Maybe it was just a bad dream,’ Gabrielle said as they returned to bed.

  ‘Maybe it was,’ Eleanor agreed.

  Within two minutes, they were snoring in unison.

  Doon Abbey

  10 June, 4 AM

  Summer darkness lay warmly on the one hundred acres of the estate at whose centre Doon Abbey proudly, if shakily, stood. Doon Castle had originally been built as a fortified square, but now only two and a half sides of the square remained. The base of the square was the east face of the abbey, the elevation that greeted visitors as they emerged from the wooded half-mile-long avenue that connected the convent with the outside world.

  The nuns’ cells and bathrooms were located on the first floor of the east wing, as was Sister Mercy Superior’s room, above the arch. Halfway along the south wing was the small convent chapel constructed in the late nineteenth century and finished in Baroque design. The choir stalls for the chapel were carved from local oak, and numbered thirty-six: two tiers of nine stalls on each side, facing one another behind the altar.

  At the mid-point of the twentieth century, all these stalls had been filled by the pious women who lived the silent and enclosed life in Doon Abbey, manufacturing altar breads that were sold all over Ireland. But that business, like so
many others, was in decline. The surviving five nuns of Doon Abbey now relied almost entirely for their income on the tourists who came to Doon Abbey and formed patient queues to enter the tiny chapel, six at a time, to gaze and wonder at Caravaggio’s The Agony of Judas Iscariot.

  *

  Sister Alice tried to settle on a single image from scripture and bring it with her into sleep. The trouble was that every time she visualised Our Lord on the Sea of Galilee, she saw Galway Bay and the little pub in which she and Ned had so often eaten oysters. Our Lord entering Jerusalem on a donkey gave way almost immediately to the donkey rides she and Ned had once hilariously taken on the beach in Bundoran. Ned, with his big tummy sticking out as he bounced along. How could she ever forget it? Even the Last Supper shamefully morphed into the Michelin-starred restaurant in central Dublin where Ned had brought her on that final night, to try and persuade her one last time.

  A blurred image of her own face looked back from the burnished copper stand in which the night-light sat. The strong nose, the large eyes, the sensuous lips. Could she hack this for the rest of her life, she wondered? With no human verbal exchanges, except during instruction from Sister Columba, the low-sized novice mistress, and cut off from the outside world?

  Sister Alice had come to look forward to the sight of the few outsiders who turned up each morning for Mass and to receive Holy Communion. The Misses Hogan were always first in, and if not, it was Jeremy Meadowfield, a tall, handsome man in his mid-thirties, with a large mop of blond hair and startling blue eyes. Meadowfield was a convert to Catholicism, Sister Alice had learned from Sister Columba, who recounted with pride how Sister Winifred, a nun no longer in Doon Abbey, had instructed Mr Meadowfield in his Catholic doctrine. He was an English accountant, Alice had heard, and he now prepared Doon Abbey’s books for the banks and the taxman.

  The only other regular was Davy Rainbow, a local journalist with the Doonlish Enquirer, whose article a few years before on Doon Abbey’s ‘hidden Caravaggio’ had attracted national attention. In its gilt frame, the canvas measured less than ninety centimetres square. It was technically described as a ‘fragment’ and was most likely a sketch for a larger work, yet there was no denying the power of the painting, and its allure for visitors.

  *

  Sister Alice prayed for sleep to take her painlessly to the bell for lauds at half past four. The reassuringly cold bite of an Irish summer dawn. The deep comfort of Gregorian chant in the chapel, the cool calmness of the carved wooden choir stalls, and the incomparable sight of light rising slowly to illuminate the stained-glass window, setting it alight until the window’s colours drenched the floor of the chapel in a holy flood.

  She sat up, suddenly awake, and choked back a scream. ‘Ned!’ she cried soundlessly.

  The first light of dawn flickered in through the window of her cell.

  Something has happened, Sister Alice thought as she dressed hurriedly, the images from her dream still foremost in her mind. The bell for lauds pealed. Something had changed, she was sure, as she made her way out to the chapel, but she could not yet say what it was.

  Doonlish

  10 June, 4.30 AM

  Davy Rainbow counted out the cash carefully on his bed. He liked order, so he sorted the fifties, twenties and tens into neat piles. Still not enough. He shivered as he heard a thump outside, and went still. Going to the window, he peered out. Christ, his nerves were in fritters. He had covered enough court cases in his day to know exactly how severe the penalty would be for the crime he had just committed.

  Davy was lightly built and low in stature. On the Curragh, where he had grown up, his father had wanted him to become a jockey. When the old man heard that Davy was going to work for a newspaper, he had nearly had a fit.

  Davy took a long swallow from the glass. The neat alcohol charged into his bloodstream and fizzed up his spine. This was the last day – or night – he was going to drink, he told himself. He had made the same vow before, but this time he was adamant. If only he could pay off what he owed.

  He lay on the bed and took out her photograph. She had been so – so serene, was the only word he could think of. So kind. A woman had never treated him like that before. He began to weep. When they had gone for their long walks together, occasionally he would look up at her lovely profile and inhale her calm beauty. Memories of those intimate moments now pierced Davy. He took up the bottle and slugged from it directly. Her picture was hazy – a face picked out from a crowd – but, even so, her strength and her femininity made his head swirl.

  Where was she now? What was she doing? If he could have her, Davy thought as he slipped into sleep, if she could be his only for an hour, he would promise before God never to drink or gamble again.

  Doon Abbey

  10 June, 4.45 AM

  Daylight was filling the horizon as Sister Alice crossed the cloister and neared the chapel door. The first chorus of birds could be heard as Panda, the convent tomcat, strolled languidly towards the kitchens, his scarlet neck collar bright in the early morning. Alice was so grateful for the dawn. She would pray well this morning and put her earlier misgivings behind her. She saw the imposing figure of Sister Mercy Superior emerging from another door of the east wing, the burly nun’s hands wrapped around her opposing arms to fend off the cold.

  At that moment, in the portal of the chapel, the figure of Sister Mary Magdalene appeared. Alice smiled, for she liked the pleasant-faced and kind librarian, who was nearer to her in age than any of the others. But now Sister Alice frowned. Sister Mary Magdalene’s normally serene features were distorted. Her mouth open, as if in a mute cry of grief, she was pointing back into the chapel, where she had just come from.

  And in one awful moment Sister Alice understood.

  *

  Detective Sergeant Alice Dunwoody had made the momentous decision to become a nun only three months beforehand, entering Doon Abbey as a novice. Sister Alice, as she now was, knew that she had enemies. There were the usual grudges from the petty thieves, drug-pushers and wife-beaters whom she had seen put away. And there was Bruno Scanlon Senior, known throughout Dublin’s inner city as a particularly vicious criminal who had spent more than half his adult life in prison. He had, a decade before, handed over the running of part of his crime empire to his son, Bruno Scanlon Junior, who had inherited his father’s cruel streak but not his intelligence. Bruno Junior ran his drugs operation from a disused treacle factory in the docklands, where his opponents, members of other gangs, were routinely executed and their bodies chained to the floating concrete-pile foundations of the building. When the media eventually found out what was going on, they dubbed the internecine gangland violence ‘The Toffee Wars’.

  Alice had spent two years building up a file on Bruno Junior.

  Working closely with young Detective Sebastian Hayes, who became a close friend during that difficult time, Alice had painstakingly tracked down two drug-pushers, who, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, had agreed to testify against Bruno Junior.

  It was meant to be a straightforward arrest. Alice, along with Sebastian and ten uniformed gardaí, surrounded the treacle factory. She wanted to make the arrest herself. She entered the building by way of the rusty fire escape which led directly to Bruno Junior’s office. Her lithe figure swung upwards for three floors. As she drew back to kick in the door, its glass panel sprayed outwards, shattered by a bullet.

  Glass shards ripped into Alice’s face. Too late, she realised there must have been a tip-off. She came into the office rolling, her gun held twohanded. She could taste blood on her mouth. The next couple of seconds expanded into a timeframe particular to intense action and sudden death. Bruno Junior was behind his desk, his eyes wild. He was holding a firearm. He brought his shooting hand down towards Alice. She rolled once and heard the silencer-muffled bullet thud into the patch of linoleum on which she had just been stretched. Another thud sent a glass ashtray flying. She could clearly see the irises of Bruno Junior’s small, cabbage-col
oured eyes.

  ‘Drop it, Bruno!’ she screamed.

  He was, however, programmed for Death – hers or his own – with a capital ‘D’. He made the mistake of aiming too carefully. Alice, with the certainty of hundreds of hours spent on the firing range, squeezed with the utmost softness to keep the Glock steady. Bruno Junior’s mouth seemed to enlarge. The wall behind him went Technicolor. The Toffee Wars were over.

  Doon Abbey

  13 June, 2 PM

  Sister Alice sprinted down the old cart track between rows of overgrown laurels. Attired, by permission of Sister Columba, in a tracksuit and a pair of sturdy boots, she relished the release of energy as her body settled into its old balance and rhythms and her blood moved smoothly, as it had for all those years on the athletics field.

  It was exceedingly frustrating to be at the centre of a theft that must have been on the lips of the nation, but equally to be unaware of what was really going on. For, as garda patrol cars, with their revolving blue strobe lights, came and went interminably, soon followed by throngs of media, Sister Mercy Superior led her nuns in the strict regime of the convent as if Doon Abbey’s Caravaggio was still hanging on the chapel wall.

  Sister Alice yearned to participate, yet she was unable to speak to anyone, or to read a newspaper, listen to the radio, make a phone call or watch television. At the very least, she thought, each nun in the tiny community should have been interviewed by the gardaí investigating the crime. But Sister Mercy Superior’s iron insistence that God came first meant that no exception to Doon Abbey’s daily regimen and vow of silence would be tolerated.

  Sister Alice wanted to at least tell someone about the high-powered engine with the ruptured exhaust pipe that she had heard on the night of the theft, but she was forbidden to do so.

  When the forensics people in their white suits had completed their tasks, the crime-scene tapes were removed and the community moved back into the chapel for vespers, just a light patch on the wall over the side altar indicated where the Caravaggio fragment had once hung.