Death of a Novice

Home > Mystery > Death of a Novice > Page 21
Death of a Novice Page 21

by Cora Harrison


  ‘There have been three young nuns, three novices, attending these classes. I would imagine that you were all present on the last night that they attended. You may, or may not know, the reason why they have not returned. One nun, Sister Gertrude, was ill on her return from the classes and she died early the following morning. The police surgeon found that she had been poisoned. Now, is there anyone here who knows anything about this?’

  There was a dead silence. He had expected no more. Mary MacSwiney, standing at the back of the classroom, glared at him with icy dislike but he ignored her. Not a stupid woman. She had decided that there was nothing that she could do about his presence and so she said nothing while he continued, running his eyes along the rows of young people.

  ‘If anyone does remember anything of significance later on, then they should come to me, either here, or at the barracks. Just ask for me, Inspector Patrick Cashman.’ Seizing a piece of chalk from the rim of the blackboard, he turned his back on them and printed his name in capital letters on the board. There was a murmur of conversation from behind him and he deliberately dragged out the time by adding the name and address of the Garda Barracks, though he was certain that the location of the main police station in the city would be known to all who were present. His ears were very sharp and he was sure that he heard the word Raymond. Someone in the first row, almost directly behind him, had whispered the name.

  And then he turned back to face them. Mainly women, he noticed and that did not surprise him. About six men, all of them sitting together as though for mutual protection in this girls’ school.

  ‘Is Mr Raymond Roche here tonight?’ He didn’t think so but there was no harm in asking the question. Heads were shaken and the students looked at each other beneath lowered eyelids.

  ‘He went out with two of them, with two of the three young nuns, that night, did he not?’ He allowed that to stand while they exchanged glances. No one contradicted him and so he added, ‘Sister Joan and Sister Brigid were to undertake an errand for him, while Miss MacSwiney detained Sister Gertrude, the oldest of the three nuns, in her room, downstairs.’ He left a silence after that statement and then said rapidly, ‘Which of you knew what was going on?’

  He directed his question to a girl in the middle row, directly in front of him and she reacted with alarm.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said and now he was quite sure that she was the one who had mentioned Raymond’s name. Pretty girl, he thought. Enormous brown eyes and red-gold, curly hair, worn quite long. She had a distinctive voice, quite husky, and very low-pitched for a woman.

  He thought that he would let that go. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Half past six. The class had another half hour to run.

  ‘Good,’ he said briskly. He looked down at the desk. There was a register there and all of the names with addresses attached. He took out his notebook and copied in the name and address of Raymond Roche. Montenotte. Well, of course, that was where most of the rich of Cork city congregated, well above the sights and smells of the ancient settlement on the great marsh of Munster that was named Cork after the Gaelic word corcaigh, meaning a marsh. He returned the register to the teacher in charge.

  ‘Please make me a copy of all of the names and addresses on this list,’ he said and without waiting for an answer, he turned back to the class.

  ‘One more question,’ he said. ‘Did anyone here notice whether Sister Gertrude had anything to eat or drink during her last evening here?’

  That seemed to take them by surprise. There was a chorus of murmurs now. Heads were shaken firmly. Everyone was determined to disassociate themselves from any connection with a death from poison.

  ‘A bar of chocolate, a bottle of Coca Cola, or ginger pop, anything like that lying around that she might have eaten or drank?’ he asked, looking along the lines of faces, while making his suggestions.

  ‘I don’t encourage students to bring food here into the school,’ said Miss MacSwiney from the back of the room. Her face had gone very pale. He ignored her and looked keenly at the girl in the middle of the first row. She was whispering to her companion. And then a movement from the back of the room caught his eye. Mary MacSwiney had moved towards the door, opened it and closed it carefully after her with the slightest of clicks.

  Patrick took alarm. Had he made a mistake? Was there something that he should have done before coming upstairs?

  ‘Well, thank you, everyone,’ he said hastily and followed the woman out of the room and onto the stairs. She had moved very quickly. He heard the opening of the door downstairs when he reached the first landing. He turned the corner rapidly, swinging from the post at the top of this flight of stairs and then going down them as quickly as he could. He could hear the noise of his heavy boots thudding on the wooden steps. She would know that he was on her heels, but he couldn’t help that. When he leaped onto the hall, skipping the last three steps, he could hear a sound, a creaking sound from the front room. By the time that he had opened the door, the draught of wet, foggy, river-smelling air met his nostrils and he subdued a curse. The window was wide open.

  A quick glance at the heavy old-fashioned sideboard, described by the Reverend Mother, showed three glass containers still on it. Two completely full and the third about three quarters full. Just as the Reverend Mother had described. So why was the window open, and what had Miss MacSwiney thrown out of it? He sniffed hard. There was a smell of something, something that had been overlaid initially by the river smell that haunted the city of Cork but now rose slightly above the marshy, sour smell and in a moment he had identified it. Burning! Something had been burned.

  Mary MacSwiney wore a long black cardigan over her black dress and one pocket of it bulged slightly. A box of matches – the oblong shape was unmistakable.

  ‘What have you burned?’ he asked and then went to the window, determinedly moving her to one side and leaning out, his elbows on the window sill and his eyes scanning the untidy muddle of overgrown pink flowers that were the sole occupants of the space. He saw it almost instantly. The fragment of a sheet of burned paper, resting upon one of the deeply scored green leaves of the plants. She made a movement as though to hold him back, but he evaded the skinny hand with ease and strode from the room. As he went through the front door, he took the precaution of clicking the catch into the open position. If she tried to shut him out, at least this would give him a few seconds with which to react.

  In a moment he was in the flowerbed. Not raining, thank goodness, nor windy, just a steady damp fog filling the air with moisture. He bent over the scrap of paper, not daring to touch it, but doing his best to read it before a final disintegration took place. He took his notebook out from his pocket and tried to slide it under it, but it didn’t work. The paper was too fragile. A list, he thought. Bending over it and then he knew a moment’s disappointment. ‘Tom’ he read and then something after it that might have been the letter H. Even as he looked that part of the paper curled feebly and then dropped off. Some Republican stuff, he thought. He wondered why she had bothered. The name of Tom Hurley was probably as well known to the army and to the police in the city as was the name of Michael Collins. There were more names. A list of them. Some scorched beyond recognition. Something beginning with an R, but then that too curled and died. He straightened himself, put the notebook back in his pocket and then turned to face the woman. For a middle-aged woman, he thought, she had moved very swiftly, following him out of the house and now was at his heels.

  ‘I suppose you want to handcuff me and drag me off to gaol, now.’ She got the remark in before he said anything.

  He ignored it. Some people always wanted to be martyrs. He wondered whether, deep down, she remembered almost with affection those days when she, like her brother, had gone on hunger strike. In her case, being a woman, she had been sent home every time she looked near to death and so had not died. He had heard, though, that she had been just as stubborn, just as resolved. And, of course, the world’s pres
s hung around the prison, waiting for news of her decline and her near-death episodes. And after that she had visited America, talking about her brother, talking about her own experiences, dragging her brother’s widow with her, and she had collected large sums of money for the sacred cause. He wondered whether her present existence was boring and hum-drum to her after the excitement of those tragic days. The present government had taken the decision to ignore her, to turn a blind eye to her decision to pay no taxes, to her determination to obey no laws that they issued, and that decision had rather isolated her into a position of meaningless protest. He resolved to follow that example; not to allow her to feel victimized, and without any comment he turned and walked back into the house, going ahead of her into the front room in a pre-occupied manner and allowing her to follow as she pleased.

  ‘I said, I suppose you want to handcuff me and drag me off to gaol, now.’ Her voice was high-pitched and incredibly posh. North Main Street; that’s where she comes from, he told himself. Not as poor as his own background, but not rich by any means. Must have picked up that accent when she got a scholarship to an English university. Cambridge, someone had told him.

  ‘I hope that will not be necessary, Miss MacSwiney,’ he said. He hadn’t given a second glance to the burned fragments that lingered, just had led the way back into the house, and now stood stolidly beside the sideboard.

  ‘I have authority here to search your house and to remove such items as might be of assistance to me in solving the crime of Sister Gertrude’s death,’ he said primly. He held out for her perusal a court order. The superintendent kept a small stack of them, already signed by a local judge, locked into the bottom drawer of his desk.

  ‘I don’t recognize the authority of the courts of this false government,’ she said angrily.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss MacSwiney,’ he said mechanically. It never hurt to speak softly, he had learnt that. ‘There’s been a death from poisoning of a nun who spent two hours here before falling ill and I understand that she stayed here, in this very room, in your company, while her two companions, two younger nuns, went home without her.’ He took from his attaché case a small jar with a lid and carefully poured some of the purple liquid into it. This must be the elderberry cordial that the Reverend Mother had spoken of, though he was slightly surprised to see that the level was much lower than she had described. He wondered what it tasted of.

  ‘Utter nonsense,’ she scoffed. ‘Do you think that I would poison that stupid girl? That elderberry cordial is perfectly safe. I drink it all of the time, myself.’

  To his immense alarm, she took a glass from her desk, filled it to the brim with the liquid, her eyes challenging him all of the time.

  Patrick knew a few minutes of acute anxiety. What if she dropped dead at his feet? He could just imagine the scornful headlines in the Cork Examiner, an enquiry from Dublin, the losing of his position; all these thoughts were racing through his head as she sipped the purple liquid, her rather watery eyes fixed on him, with what Patrick imagined to be a mocking expression. For a moment, it had crossed his mind that she might be committing suicide right in front of his eyes. After all, anyone who deliberately abstained from food for days on end, as she had, must have contemplated suicide, must have come to terms with the thought that the end result could be death. A mental image of the superintendent’s purple face and his pungent comments if a suspect committed suicide while being interviewed by his inspector crossed his mind as Miss MacSwiney drained and then refilled her glass, before swallowing some more of the stuff.

  But then he told himself, what would be the point? A hunger strike within a prison brought dozens, or even hundreds, of new believers to join the Republicans, and filled the party coffers with donations from rich Irish-Americans. Suicide in her own front parlour would do neither, only further deprive the Republicans of leadership.

  ‘Would you like some, inspector?’ she enquired, her voice full of undisguised mockery. ‘I can assure you that the drink is harmless.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ He listened to himself critically. He had tried to make his voice sound neutral and felt that he succeeded relatively well. A thought had occurred to him. The fact that the drink in the glass container was innocuous meant nothing. The fatal poison might have been already in the bottom of the glass, already prepared, for the girl. Easy to conceal if the woman stood with her back turned to Sister Gertrude as she took a glass from behind the doors of the bottom part of the sideboard. On an impulse, he took a torch from his attaché case, dropped to his knees in front of the old-fashioned piece of furniture, opened its two doors and shone the torch into the dusty interior. Nothing much of interest, he decided after a few minutes spent moving jars of pickles, bottles of various liquids, some small glasses, discoloured by age and lack of use and a few odd pieces of china, fragile with age and cloaked in dust.

  ‘I may be back,’ was all he said when he got to his feet. He should, he thought, thank her for her cooperation and apologize for having disturbed her, but in the face of her openly mocking expression he felt like doing neither and contented himself with a nod as he strode from the room.

  He lingered outside, though. A glance at the clock in her room had shown him that the class would be over shortly. He took out his starting handle and leaned against the bonnet, twirling it idly in one hand and gazing down over the city and its two winding sheets of water. Odd to think of it once being a marsh, the great marsh of the province of Munster. And then the colonization of the two islands and the gradual spreading of houses and shops along the banks of the streams. And then his ear caught the sounds of young voices; he couldn’t distinguish the words, but knew from the lilt that they spoke in Gaelic. He straightened himself, gripped the starting handle and walked around to the front of the car. There was a right and wrong way of starting the Ford’s engine and he chose the wrong way, inserting the handle only about halfway up the slot and turning it in a lackadaisical way. A few croaks came from the engine and nothing else. Encouraged, he waited until they streamed through the door and then he tried again. The engine spluttered a bit this time and hastily he ceased, just in case by accident he got it going. He straightened himself, passed his wrist across his forehead and looked at the Gaelic League scholars who were coming down the steps.

  ‘Anyone any good with a starting handle,’ he called and the appeal, as he knew, was always irresistible to young lads.

  ‘I’ll have a go if you like,’ offered one and Patrick thankfully passed him the starting handle.

  ‘You’d think they could invent a better way of getting them going,’ he said to the girl who had sat in the front row, the girl with the brown eyes and the red-gold hair.

  She smiled at him. ‘You would, indeed,’ she said shyly and a little colour stole into her cheeks. He felt a little embarrassed. Perhaps he had shown his admiration a bit too openly. He could feel a warmth in his own cheeks.

  ‘What does Mr Raymond Roche look like?’ he asked trying to make his voice sound casual. Luckily the young fellow was having trouble with the Ford. He had banked on that, had learned by experience that it was always best to walk away from it, once you had messed up the initial attempt. For the moment, all the attention was focused on the car and he could chat without arousing any hostility.

  She shrugged a little in response to his question. ‘He’s all right, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘Funny thing to walk home with that nun, wasn’t it?’ He asked the question in a very casual fashion and she shrugged again.

  ‘Well, the other two nuns had gone off early that night and I suppose he thought that he should escort her.’ She giggled a little. ‘Took her to Thompson’s Bakery, too. You wouldn’t believe that he’d do that with a nun, would you? I saw him coming out. She had waited outside the shop for him but I saw him give it to her. He had bought her one of their Swiss rolls!’

  ‘Did he, indeed!’ Patrick did his best to laugh in an amused fashion. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that a nun would be allowe
d to eat in the street.’

  ‘Oh, she didn’t eat it. It was one of their small ones. I saw her put the little box into the bag where her books were. I suppose that she had it later on for her supper. Lucky her! I love them, especially the ones with raspberry jam and cream between the layers.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Patrick. He sounded very fervent, he thought, and hoped that she would put it down to the fact that he had a very sweet tooth and found cakes irresistible – it was the truth, anyway. He too loved that mixture of jam and cream, but he was even more excited by the information than the thought of one of Thompson’s Bakery’s famous Swiss rolls. Raspberry jam and cream. Delicious.

  And bound to disguise any sweet-tasting poison. What was it Dr Scher had said? A couple of spoonfuls would be enough to kill.

  ‘Got it!’ shouted the young fellow with the starting handle. The splutters and silences had now turned into a steady chug, chug. Patrick decided that it was well worth a shilling for a drink for them all. That had been a very valuable piece of information that he’d extracted while they were all busy at the noisy job of starting up his car.

  So Mr Raymond Roche had bought a Swiss roll for Sister Gertrude. And she had waited outside the shop. That meant that he could have done something to the cake before handing it over to her.

  He smiled happily at the girl. Pity he was a policeman on duty. Otherwise he would take her to the Thompson Bakery, only a stone’s throw down the hill from where they stood. And he would buy her as much Swiss roll as she fancied. With some sweet lemonade. He liked the way that she allowed her curly hair to grow down over her shoulders and he liked the full skirt of her dress that went below her knees. He didn’t like a lot of the girls these days with their shingled hair and their terribly short skirts. His mind went briefly to Eileen MacSweeney. Perhaps she and Mary MacSwiney shared a common ancestor a hundred years ago. Some rebel, he guessed and then put them from his mind, resenting the memory of how Miss MacSwiney had mocked him while drinking that elderberry cordial. Raymond, he thought, would be a more likely villain than the elderly schoolteacher, and he was glad about that.

 

‹ Prev