Sister Caravaggio

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘If we never find the painting, it was worth it to see this,’ Alice said.

  The busty shop assistant shook her head disapprovingly, as if she was personally responsible for these two nuns betraying their vocation. Alice and Maggie walked by her on their way to the tills. ‘God bless you,’ Maggie said.

  County Kildare

  15 June, 4 PM

  Silence was familiar to the two women as they sped along through a raised bog in the convent’s Berlingo. Yet every few minutes Alice let out a hearty giggle.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘This whole crazy set-up that you and I have become involved in,’ Alice said.

  As they had climbed back up the stairs from the basement of the shop and walked out through the cosmetics section, Maggie had headed straight for the counters. Fifteen minutes later, having allowed the beautician to blend a lilac-coloured powder and then a gold one into her upper eyelids – and God knows what else into her face – Maggie looked even more spectacular. Her slightly plump cheeks had disappeared and, instead, there was a fine bone structure. Maggie had huge eyes and full lips that positively pouted. It was as if she had waited fourteen years to play this part.

  ‘You could have been a film star,’ Alice said eventually. ‘Or a model.’

  ‘Who had you in mind?’ Maggie asked, adding quickly, ‘not that I know any of them, of course.’

  ‘Of course not – but I was thinking Naomi Campbell,’ Alice said.

  ‘Oh,’ Maggie said, ‘but isn’t she …? Not that it matters, of course …’

  ‘The legs! The cheekbones! Listen, do you mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Oh, God, I read somewhere that nicotine is more powerful than sex,’ Maggie said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s fourteen years since I gave them up, and now the minute you mention cigarettes, I’m craving one,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Here, light two,’ Alice said, and handed over the packet and the Bic lighter she’d bought in the store when Maggie had gone to the loo.

  Maggie was relishing the trip: Alice drove fast, and Maggie really liked that about Alice too. She’d once had a boyfriend who drove a Harley-Davidson, and Maggie had never forgotten the thrill of riding pillion. As she lit the two cigarettes and handed one across, she wondered if all the remaining excitement in her life was going to be compressed into the next few days.

  ‘What do you think, Maggie?’

  ‘Sorry, Alice, I was miles way. What was the question?’

  ‘How did the thief, or thieves, get the Caravaggio down from the wall of the chapel? The painting was screwed in place, ten feet above the ground.’

  ‘They must have used a ladder.’

  ‘There was no ladder in the cloister that night,’ Alice said. ‘I checked. The extension ladder was down in the farmyard. And before you say that the thieves brought a ladder with them, bear in mind that the metal grille in the arch was lowered and locked. No way could they have got a ladder into the chapel, let alone themselves. I thought about the chapel pews, but they are too heavy to move and, anyway, you were first in there that morning – and nothing had been moved.’ ‘Just the Caravaggio,’ Maggie said.

  ‘I know. And the door was locked.’

  ‘Definitely. I opened it myself that morning.’

  ‘Whoever it was knew the security set-up,’ Alice said. ‘I woke up about four o’clock, and the lights in the corridor were turned off. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now I realise that the thief was probably at work at that very moment.’

  The open cutaway bog was an expanse that ran for miles in every direction. The road was narrow, and beyond where a grass verge might have been was a sheer drop. Maggie’s laptop was on her knees and she had turned it on.

  ‘Why would someone steal our little painting?’ Alice asked, as if thinking aloud.

  ‘Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, born 1571, murdered 1610, aged thirty-eight,’ Maggie said, reading from the screen, blowing smoke rings towards the van’s dashboard. ‘His paintings combine the dramatic use of light combined with a realistic observation of the human state. During his short life he became the most famous painter in Rome, and today people pay tens of millions for his work. The Caravaggio fragment in Doon Abbey illustrates his attraction: you should see the faces of the people who come to look at it. They’re in rapture. Caravaggio has that effect on people. But the question now is, who stands to lose most if our painting isn’t found? And who stands to benefit?’

  ‘Good questions,’ Alice replied, her eyes on the rear-view mirror, ‘but one that I’m afraid we’ll have to wait to discuss.’ ‘Why?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Because,’ said Alice tightly as she rammed the little van into third gear and hit the accelerator, ‘there’s a bloody big four-by-four right behind us, and I don’t think its intentions are honourable.’

  Maggie swung around, just in time to see the bull-bar of an enormous jeep almost on top of them.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she cried.

  ‘See can you make out who it is,’ Alice said, throwing the van across to the other side of the road where it scraped along a line of gorse bushes. Maggie snapped the laptop shut, knelt up in her seat and stretched back towards the rear window.

  ‘I think … I think it’s Mister O’Meara!’

  ‘I thought it might be,’ said Alice through gritted teeth. ‘And he’s driving a vehicle with a rupture in the exhaust, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Call it instinct. Shit! Watch out!’

  The van lurched out of a pothole as if catapulted, came down nose-first and scraped along the ground. Behind them, the driver of the jeep was flashing the lights and blaring the horn. Alice floored the pedal again. Again the dark shadow devoured them as the van’s rear windows were almost blotted out. Maggie turned around and saw the enormous jeep, lights blazing.

  ‘Alice!’ Maggie screamed.

  ‘Hold tight!’ cried Alice as she began to weave crazily from one side of the narrow bog road to the other.

  ‘I think he wants us to stop,’ Maggie said.

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ said Alice grimly as she brought to mind Mr O’Meara’s small, venomous eyes and tufts of ginger hair.

  With a hideous blaring, the jeep was now trying to overtake. Maggie braced her arms on the dashboard, her cigarette clamped between her teeth. The convent van was careening along on the lip of the bog. Alice swerved back over the road as the jeep roared in pursuit. Maggie could see Mr O’Meara, gesticulating wildly. With its engine screaming, the little van powered out from under the jeep’s bull-bar. Maggie watched in horror as Mr O’Meara swung his wheel, but this time, too much. The jeep flew over the steep edge of the bog, then bounced and rolled with awful thuds until it hit the bottom of the slope.

  The convent van shuddered to a halt. Maggie climbed out. She had seen Mr O’Meara’s eyes and his distorted face as he left the road. The two women clung together, watching the scene below: the jeep was upside down, but apart from its still-spinning wheels, there was no movement. ‘Come on,’ Alice said, and they scrambled down the bank.

  Alice approached the steaming jeep carefully. She reached up and dragged open the driver’s side door. Cyril O’Meara fell sideways, suspended by his seat belt. His head hung at an odd angle to his body. ‘Is he …?’ Maggie began to ask.

  ‘He most certainly is,’ Alice said.

  ‘May the Lord have mercy on his soul,’ Maggie said sadly. ‘Do you think he’s the thief?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Alice said. ‘Maybe he even has the Caravaggio in his jeep – although I doubt it.’

  She climbed up, stepping carefully over the dead man. A minute later she emerged from the back door of the jeep and jumped down.

  ‘Nothing there,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here before someone comes along and gets the wrong idea.’

  ‘First, we’re going to say three Hail Marys,’ Maggie said. ‘For the repose of his soul.’


  ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ Alice said.

  ‘I don’t care what you think,’ Maggie said, kneeling down.

  ‘Nuns,’ Alice muttered, as she knelt in the wet bog and let Maggie’s Ave Marias rise in the air. But Alice felt uneasy. Although the exhaust on the overturned vehicle was ruptured, Mr O’Meara’s jeep ran on diesel fuel.

  Dublin

  15 June, 4.30 PM

  Late-afternoon sun was pouring into the small office of the Special Detective Unit on Harcourt Street in central Dublin as Detective Sergeant Sebastian Hayes walked across to the window and pulled the cord to let down the Venetian blind. He slipped the CD into the computer and pressed the ‘play’ button.

  ‘This is the reception in the hotel in Liffey Valley two nights ago,’ he said. ‘Here’s the woman as she approaches the desk.’

  Sebastian froze the frame. The woman was wearing a hat that obscured her face.

  ‘Jesus, she’s big, that’s for sure,’ said Detective Billy Heaslip. ‘Can’t we get her face any clearer?’

  ‘That’s the best we can do,’ Sebastian said. He pressed ‘play’ again. ‘Now she pays for the room for three nights, in advance.’

  ‘What name did she register under?’

  ‘She didn’t register.’

  ‘Isn’t there, like, the Innkeepers Act or something, that says you have to register?’ Billy asked.

  ‘Yeah, and there’s a law against murder too,’ said Sebastian dryly.

  He was in his mid-thirties, with the build of a middle-distance runner going to seed. When women asked him why he wasn’t married, he was used to saying he was married to his job. He loved being a detective sergeant: the slow slog of assembling evidence, the deference shown by the other ranks. The fact that many criminals were more intelligent than he was didn’t bother Sebastian, merely confirmed that his place in the great scheme of things was the right one.

  ‘It’s a hotel that’s used a lot by hookers,’ he said. ‘The hotels just want the money. They don’t give a damn who stays in their rooms. Here she is on the sixth floor.’

  The woman on the screen was wearing a coat that concealed the rest of her clothes. Her hat remained pulled over her eyes. She walked down the corridor and let herself into a room.

  ‘She’s aware of the CCTV,’ Billy Heaslip said.

  ‘Now, two hours later, this is Jeremy Meadowfield entering the hotel,’ Sebastian said, concentrating.

  Meadowfield walked past reception and stood by the lifts. At one point, he turned and looked directly at the camera. His blond hair was neatly cut and his blue eyes could clearly be seen.

  ‘And we have no form on him,’ Heaslip said.

  ‘His prints only went over to Interpol this morning, but I’m not expecting much. He was a daily communicant, according to the nuns.’

  ‘I know a few daily communicants who would cut your throat for sport,’ said Heaslip.

  Sebastian, whose parents had been daily communicants, blinked. ‘Here’s Meadowfield on the sixth floor,’ he said. ‘He goes straight to our mystery woman’s room, so obviously knows the number. Thirty minutes later, here’s our Miss Twinkle-toes leaving the room. Note that she hangs out a “Do Not Disturb” sign … Down she goes in the lift. And she walks out through reception.’

  ‘And vanishes into the night.’

  ‘Thirteen hours later, a maid discovers Meadowfield.’

  ‘And the State pathologist confirms that his neck was broken,’ Heaslip said.

  Heaslip was a big, square-shouldered man with a drinker’s belly and prematurely white hair. Up to recently, he’d been on the beat.

  ‘What’s your gut on this one?’ Sebastian asked, with a smirk at Billy’s protruding midriff.

  ‘Given Meadowfield’s connection with Doon Abbey, his murder is probably connected with the art robbery,’ Billy replied, ignoring the jibe. ‘Our mystery woman must be a professional. The pathologist’s report says the victim’s neck was broken cleanly and there was no evidence of a weapon.’

  ‘So we have a murder investigation – chief suspect a six-foot-plus female,’ Sebastian said, rolling his eyes. ‘Media heaven.’

  As his mobile rang, he looked down at it and made a surprised face.

  ‘Just a second,’ he said, and went into the corner of the room. ‘Hello? I didn’t think they allowed nuns in enclosed orders to have mobile phones,’ he said, and a grin spread across his big face.

  Irish Midlands

  15 June, 5 PM

  The van sped east and reached the motorway. Container lorries thundered by. Maggie looked with admiration at the determined set of Alice’s face. This was all a far cry from vespers.

  ‘I don’t think O’Meara is the thief,’ Alice said. ‘Okay, back there he tried to run us off the road, or so it seemed. But does O’Meara strike you as an art thief? A big, over-aggressive dairy farmer, yes, but I don’t think he’d know a Caravaggio from a caravan.’

  She had called Sebastian Hayes and told him what had happened. Sebastian seemed to think it was quite funny, despite the fact that a man was dead. ‘I’d never bet against you in a car chase, Alice,’ was what he had said. Nonetheless, he had agreed to Alice’s request to see if there was anything on file on O’Meara and to call her back. He had also agreed to notify the local gardaí in Kildare that there was an upturned jeep with a dead man in it in one of their lonely bogs – that is, if the grisly discovery had not already been made.

  As Alice drove, she simultaneously used the thumb of her right hand to dial out a number on the convent’s mobile phone. There was no reply.

  ‘Who are you calling?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Ned,’ said Alice pensively. ‘My ex-fiancé.’

  She thumbed in another number from memory. An out-of-service tone rang in her ear.

  ‘We can’t do this on our own,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to ask Ned for help, but now, after what happened today, I think I need to. Ned’s an insurance investigator. He’ll know where we should be looking for the painting.’

  ‘It must have been lovely when you were planning to get married,’ Maggie said quietly.

  Alice glanced across. ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘I often dreamt about it, before I entered,’ said Maggie wistfully.

  The motorway rushed uphill and burst out on to the Curragh Plain.

  In the distance, the Wicklow Hills twinkled.

  ‘Who was he?’ Alice asked.

  ‘His name was Simon,’ Maggie replied. ‘His father was a racehorse trainer. Simon used to ride in steeplechases.’

  ‘That must have been exciting.’

  ‘We started going out when I was sixteen,’ Maggie said. ‘Then I left school and went into teacher-training college in Dublin. Every weekend I went to the races and met Simon, when he was riding there. He was talented, so athletic.’

  ‘He sounds gorgeous.’

  ‘He was. We talked, made plans. He was so … full of life.’

  Alice looked over, biting her lip. ‘And what happened?’ she asked quietly.

  Maggie sighed. ‘One morning he was out at home, schooling a young horse over fences. The ground was wet. The horse slipped going into a fence and fell on top of Simon.’

  ‘Oh my God, Maggie,’ Alice said. ‘And was he …? Did he …?’

  Maggie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Instantly.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Alice reached over and took Maggie’s hand. ‘I didn’t know.’

  Maggie held her hand tightly. ‘How could you have?’ ‘And that’s why you became a nun,’ Alice said.

  *

  Maggie grew up an only child in the country, on a small farm on the borders of Kildare and Laois. Her parents were poor but cheerful. Dad never threw out a piece of machinery, no matter how old or useless, and Mam was a fine, upright country woman who scraped and saved every penny to give her daughter a good education.

  From as far back as she could remember, Maggie had dreamed of travelling far away. Apart
from one visit to Rome, neither of her parents had ever set foot outside of Ireland; Maggie, in her mind, had hiked in the foothills of Nepal, scuba-dived off the Great Barrier Reef and ridden horses in Wyoming and Arizona. She spent her evenings glued to the television, soaking up travel programmes.

  One summer weekend, when she was twelve, she had gone with Dad in his old VW Beetle to look at a second-hand tractor for sale in a dealer’s yard in County Kildare. Dad sometimes worried about money and how much he owed the bank, but he never complained. Now his old tractor had joined the heap of rusting metal beside the house, and he needed a replacement.

  It was hot that day in the dealer’s yard. Young Maggie tried to find a spot in the shade in which to sit, and a woman came out from the office and gave her a glass of lemonade. After several hours, Dad eventually made the purchase. He was proud of his new tractor but he was also apprehensive, Maggie knew. As they got into the car and headed for home, he said, ‘Maggie, let’s go and light a little candle together.’

  Maggie had never been up such a long avenue before. Enormous trees flanked them, until suddenly Doon Abbey appeared, its turrets and ancient windows like pictures in a book of fairytales. Dad, who seemed to know where to go, parked the car and led the way through an old stone arch and into the convent chapel. It was so cool inside, and light fell through the stained-glass windows in colourful spars. Dad dropped a few coins in the candle-stand and lit a candle; then he and Maggie knelt side by side in the front pew.

  She would never forget the sense of peace and security she had felt at that moment. She knew that Dad was worried that maybe he had paid too much for the tractor, or that his crop of potatoes might catch the blight later that summer, or that the cow and her calf in the top field weren’t thriving. He’d come in here, she suddenly understood, to boost his energy and courage for what lay ahead. Of course, they all went to Mass on Sundays; but this was different. This little chapel, in an old castle hidden deep in the County Kildare countryside, was wonderfully uplifting, a place to come to when your troubles threatened to overwhelm you. Seven years later, when Simon had been killed so suddenly and brutally, and Maggie’s young life had fallen apart, it was that day in Doon Abbey’s convent chapel with Dad that she had kept coming back to.