Whatever Happenened to Molly Bloom?

by Jessica Stirling

‘Did Mr Bloom say anything about his wife?’

  ‘When I asked him what she’d said he told me she was sleeping. I asked him why he hadn’t wakened her and he said she was sleeping too sound to waken.’

  The silence in the courtroom was complete. Bloom, bent double, rested his brow on the table, eyes closed. Mr Tolland placed a hand on Bloom’s back and left it there. In the gallery Milly sat up, big-eyed, her thumb crushed into her bottom lip.

  The coroner let out his breath and leaned towards the witness. ‘What did Bloom do then?’

  ‘He hugged me and told me he loved me but Liverpool would have to wait. He said he had things must be done and I should go home and tell no one where I’d been. He asked me to carry the cases back to my house and keep them ready.’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘I don’t know. To leave, I suppose, when everything had been taken care of,’ Gerty said.

  ‘Why didn’t you take a cab?’

  ‘Poldy said it wasn’t safe to take a cab.’

  ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘He was worried for me because of the man. He thought the man might be waiting at the cab rank. He stood with me in the hall for a while then opened the street door and looked out. He told me how to find my way home by the side streets ’cause I didn’t know that part of town. He said he would wait in Eccles Street.’

  ‘Wait for what?’

  ‘Until the coast was clear.’

  ‘What do you think he meant by that, Miss MacDowell?’

  ‘Wait long enough to give me a chance to get home.’

  ‘He was concerned for your safety, in other words?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Gerty said.

  ‘It must have been difficult for you to walk so far carrying two suitcases. How long did it take you to reach Tritonville Road?’

  ‘I did have to stop a lot. It must have been nearer six than five.’

  ‘By which hour there would be people on the street?’

  ‘Quite a few, and the trams were running.’

  ‘Yet no one saw you, no one remarked on a young woman carrying two suitcases at that hour of the morning?’

  ‘At that time of the morning nobody bothers with anyone else.’

  ‘When you got home, were your parents awake?’

  ‘No. I hid the cases under my bed and went to bed for I was wore out. Before I wakened up the newspapers.… ’ Gerty shrugged.

  ‘Quite! Did you tell anyone what had occurred?’

  Gerty shot one swift glance at the gallery then, facing the coroner again, stated firmly, ‘I did not.’

  ‘You kept your head down, as it were,’ Slater said, ‘and didn’t come forward to aid the investigation into Mrs Bloom’s death. Why, Miss MacDowell, did you keep silent?’

  ‘Poldy told me to. I think he was feared the man would find me,’ Gerty said. ‘I think he was feared of what the man might do to me if he knew I’d seen him in the house in Eccles Street.’

  ‘The man you saw in the house, did you recognise him?’

  ‘No,’ said Gerty, ‘but I know now who he is.’

  Below at the defence table Bloom lifted his head and made to rise but Neville Sullivan held him down.

  ‘Him,’ Gerty cried, pointing. ‘It was him.’

  ‘Mr Boylan, do you mean?’ Roland Slater said.

  ‘Yes. Him,’ said Gerty. ‘I saw him plain as day.’

  For years afterwards Jack Delaney threatened to write an account of the affair and publish it in a book but, being Jack, he never quite got around to it. It was left to others to delve into the mystery of what made Bloom tick, why Molly Bloom had traded affection for sex with a scoundrel and why, most mysterious of all, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan responded to young Miss MacDowell’s accusation by reaching under the witness bench, fishing out his hat, sticking it on his head and leaping to his feet.

  ‘Mr Boylan,’ Slater said, ‘you will be recalled in due course to answer the witness’s charges. Meanwhile you must not interrupt.’

  Blazes ignored the admonition. He crossed his hands on his chest and, stiff-necked, tipped his head back, the hat clinging precariously to his hair. It seemed at first as if he was about to burst into song and the court officers, led by Mr Rice, advanced upon him to put him in his place. Roland Slater waved them away.

  ‘She wouldn’t listen to me, not a word I said,’ Blazes began. ‘She wouldn’t bend an inch and laughed when I said I loved her.’

  ‘Mr Boylan, may I remind you that even although you have left the box you have not been dismissed and are, therefore, still under oath.’

  ‘Love, she said, you don’t know the meaning of the word. If you loved me you’d love what’s in me too. God knows, I told her I had a horse at Foxrock loved me more than she did. That wiped the smile off her face. Did I think she was a horse I could buy and break? she said. Well, she said she would not be broken, not by me. She would die before she’d let some whore’s lickspittle tear out the only thing she had worth keeping.’

  ‘Mr Boylan …’ Slater said, and then gave up.

  ‘Your thing, she told me put it there but it’s mine and mine to keep. Good luck to you then, Molly, I told her for you’ll not have me to sponge off, no, nor him either. He’s worth a thousand of you, she said. Then I told her, he’s not coming back. She started laughing again. When I tried to shake some sense into her she told me not to be a fool, Poldy always came back. I told her again what was what with her beau ideal, and she spat in me face. Jesus, Joseph and the Mother o’ God, what right had she to spit in my face. I’d given her the kid and surely I was entitled to have it taken away.’

  ‘What,’ Slater prompted softly, ‘did she say to that?’

  Blazes took his hands from his chest and clasped the nape of his neck like a prisoner surrendering to the militia. His features sagged, jowls swelling against his collar. He kneaded his neck with both hands and rolled his head from side to side. ‘She’d have none of it. Poldy, he was her god and could do no wrong. Your Poldy’s running away with a girl, I told her and, sitting up, she said what girl’s this? I said, a girl called MacDowell who’ll give him what you never could. And she said, you’re a damned liar, Blazes. And I said, it’s the truth. He told me so himself outside Cohen’s not much more than an hour ago. You’re stuck with me, Molly, but I’m damned if I’ll be stuck with you when your belly’s stretched like a pig’s bladder and your tits are hanging to your waist.’

  Mr Devereux’s pen hovered over the paper. He darted a glance at the coroner but Slater was too intent on observing a star witness dying on his feet to notice.

  The coroner said, ‘And then?’

  ‘She hit me,’ Blazes said. ‘The bitch hit me. She’d have clawed my eyes out if I hadn’t … hadn’t …’

  ‘Hadn’t what, Mr Boylan?’

  ‘He was never a man to be trusted,’ Blazes said.

  In the gallery, without a by-your-leave, Michael Paterson clambered over Milly’s knees and headed for the stairs.

  ‘What did you do?’ Slater urged.

  ‘Lost my temper and pished it away, piddled it all away with … Jesus Christ … a teapot. I ask you, a fucking painted … teapot.’

  In a surge of rage, Blazes tore off his hat, threw it to the floor and stamped on it. Then, gaping, he sank to his knees and, just as Kinsella reached out to support him, shouted, ‘Maudie, Maudie, tell them it wasn’t me,’ and, with a final boozy gasp, fell dead at the G-man’s feet.

  THIRTY

  While court officers, assisted by stalwarts from the DMP, cleared the general public from the court, Dr Michael Paterson and Dr Roland Slater, kneeling one on each side of the corpse, made futile attempts to revive it. They removed Blazes’ beer-stained collar, necktie and belt. They prized open his mouth, pulled out his tongue and applied pressure to that region of his chest where his heart might be, all to no avail. Still with two fingers resting on the carotid artery, Michael Paterson looked across Boylan’s chest at the coroner.

  ‘Apoplexy?’
he said. ‘A fatal insult to the brain?’

  ‘That would be my guess too,’ said Roland Slater which, as it turned out, was an accurate diagnosis confirmed by Benson Rule in the autopsy room behind the mortuary the following forenoon.

  There was no precedent, no protocol to guide Roland Slater through the next hour or, indeed, through the inquest into Hugh Boylan’s sudden death conducted before a freshly empanelled jury on Wednesday of that same week. The hearing lasted not much longer than a couple of hours but attracted a great deal of interest from lawyers, journalists and the rabble from Trinity’s medical school to whom Blazes had been something of a hero and who, collectively, were disappointed that he hadn’t met his Maker while engaged in a strenuous act of copulation.

  Present too at the Wednesday hearing were the Misses Boylan, Maude and Daphne, both, quite naturally, distraught. Decidedly less distraught, in fact rather irked at being winkled from his lair in Cork, was Boylan’s father and the skittish young wife to whom he had been married for the best part of a year. Also present was Hugh Boylan’s faithful secretary, Miss Dunne, who, brave girl that she was, managed to remain dry-eyed throughout but who, having better fish to fry by then, did not show up for the church service that preceded Blazes’ interment at Mount Jerome cemetery.

  A weird assortment of mourners followed Blazes’ coffin to the graveside; gamblers, boxers, boozers and advertisers mainly, plus Bartell D’Arcy, two or three entertainers and a shadowy figure in a brown mackintosh whom no one ever managed to identify.

  No tears were shed at the committal but the departed would have been gratified to know that several young women in Upper Tyrone Street sobbed into their knitting and several other ladies, in the privacy of their boudoirs, wept buckets at the news that such a fabulously well-endowed lover was lost and gone forever.

  On that chaotic Monday afternoon, however, Hugh Boylan’s transition from tipsy witness to coffined corpse was the last thing on Roland Slater’s mind. Conscious of the omissions incurred in hastily bringing Bloom to book for a crime he evidently did not commit and well aware that not only was he being observed by a couple of Superintendents but by the Assistant Commissioner too, Dr Slater pulled himself together with such commendable alacrity that his impromptu decisions earned him a footnote in the next edition of ‘The Coroner’s Handbook’.

  He began by snapping out an order to Tom Machin to dig up the medical examiner and fetch him at speed of light to the courthouse while the corpse, covered with a sheet from the mortuary, remained in situ on the courthouse floor. Only then did he permit Miss MacDowell to be escorted from the witness box, to return not to the benches but to his private office where she would be provided with a nice hot cup of tea to calm her shredded nerves, a thoughtful gesture that proved unnecessary.

  Though Gerty had never seen a man die before, she was more relieved than shocked by Boylan’s dramatic exit and sufficiently in control of her emotions to touch Poldy’s hand in passing, a contact that, however fleeting, sent up a little shower of sparks, at least according to Neville’s report to Sarah over dinner that night, an exaggeration that Poppy Tolland, with a mandarin smile, chose neither to confirm nor deny.

  All the journalists, protesting loudly, had been hustled from the courtroom together with the rest of the great unwashed, all, that is, save Jack Delaney who remained defiantly glued to his seat on the press bench and whose account of the last act of the tragic farce cost his colleagues more than one pint of the black stuff in the bar of the Belleville later that evening.

  ‘Say what you like about the old devil,’ Jack said, wiping froth from his lips with his sleeve, ‘he wriggled out of trouble in the end.’

  ‘It would have floored many a lesser man, no doubt,’ Mr Flanagan agreed. ‘Are we talking about Bloom here?’

  ‘Slater,’ Mr Palfry informed him. ‘His neck was on the block as well as Bloom’s. Right, Jack?’

  ‘I would hardly say “on the block”, but awkward questions would have been asked if the case had gone on to a higher court. Tolland would have made mincemeat of his handling before Assize judges.’

  ‘So Bloom walked?’ said Robbie Randall.

  ‘Of course he did,’ said Jack. ‘What choice did Slater have after what amounted to Boylan’s deathbed confession?’

  ‘I always said Bloom was innocent, did I not now?’ said Mr Flanagan. ‘Now, Jack, be a good lad, tell us exactly what happened.’

  ‘Oh, dear me, no,’ said Jack Delaney, grinning ear to ear. ‘If you want the lurid details, chaps, you can read all about it in tomorrow’s edition of the Star.’

  The details were a good deal less lurid than Jack Delaney led his colleagues to believe. The only colourful item in the court room was Blazes Boylan’s shrouded corpse stretched out on the floor where it remained, toes up, while Roland Slater addressed the members of the jury and, waiving anything as convoluted as a point by point review, told them, more or less, how to frame their verdict and what that verdict must be.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ the coroner said, ‘so far as I am aware we have now concluded our examination of the witnesses. In less unusual circumstances I would retire to review the evidence and present it to you in the form of a summing up tomorrow morning. However, I do not propose to delay you longer than is necessary and will, with your permission, bring proceedings to a close tonight. May I begin by reminding you that this is a court of record and the fact that a witness died during it must not divert you from reaching a fair verdict in respect of the death of Marion Bloom.’

  At the defence table Mr Bloom and his counsellors sat quiet as mice, though whether out of respect for the dead man at their feet or in the knowledge that Slater was heading for the door was moot.

  The coroner went on, ‘There is no doubt as to the cause of death: Dr Rule was specific on that point. It is, therefore, given to you to find a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown, which means an open verdict, or to decide that one particular person was guilty of the murder of Marion Bloom.’

  The pace of Roland Slater’s delivery slowed, not to create tension but simply to allow Mr Devereux to catch every word of what he hoped might be a monumental decision or, if not that, at least not another legal blunder.

  ‘It is a rule of court that the coroner does not express an opinion,’ Slater continued. ‘But as we have here encountered a unique situation I will take it upon myself to give you additional guidance. First, let me assure you that as Boylan had not been dismissed, his final statement was made under oath and is, thus, admissible. In other words, the fact that Mr Boylan subsequently died does not negate his testimony. What you must ask yourself is this; was Mr Boylan rational during the last few minutes of his life and was his statement tantamount to an admission of involvement in Marion Bloom’s death? Was he, in fact, the intruder upon whom Mr Bloom laid blame all along?

  ‘I cannot make your verdict for you, but’ – Slater cleared his throat – ‘it seems to me that whatever one may think of her decision to run off with Mr Bloom, Miss MacDowell’s evidence was substantially truthful and very telling. That being the case, Boylan’s account of how the crime was committed should also be taken at face value. We heard from Miss MacDowell that Bloom was anxious to protect her but, acting out of concern for his wife’s safety and believing Boylan to be capable of inflicting harm, he put his own interests to one side and returned to Eccles Street when he could well have fled on the morning boat and no one any the wiser, which, I feel, goes some way to explaining Mr Bloom’s reluctance to give evidence before you.

  ‘What you cannot do is find Boylan guilty of the crime. I am categorical on that point. He was not on trial here. If the Crown Prosecutor wishes to pursue an investigation into Boylan’s part in Mrs Bloom’s murder then that is for him to decide. It has no bearing on your verdict. Therefore, an open verdict,’ Roland Slater said, ‘may be the only safe conclusion. I will express no further opinion than that. Now, I must ask you to retire and consider all that you have heard during this
long and difficult inquiry.’

  The jurymen went into a huddle without leaving the box while Mr Rice read them, rather superfluously, the customary oath to keep without meat, drink or fire until they had reached their verdict, a process that took all of three minutes. Mr Conway scribbled something down on a sheet of paper and rose to his feet.

  ‘Mr Conway,’ Slater said, ‘do you have a verdict to give me?’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  ‘Do you wish to hand me your verdict in writing, Mr Foreman, or will you read it out?’ Slater said.

  ‘I will read it out,’ said Mr Conway.

  ‘Read it slowly, please.’

  ‘After careful deliberation of the evidence submitted to us,’ Mr Conway read, ‘the jury unanimously agree that the evidence is too conflicting to establish the guilt of any particular person and consequently return a verdict of wilful murder against a person or persons unknown.’

  ‘Mr Foreman, you do realise that amounts to an open verdict?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr Conway. ‘We do.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Foreman,’ Roland Slater said.

  Mr Rice formally pronounced the court closed.

  And the inquest on Marion Bloom was over.

  THIRTY ONE

  Neville Sullivan solemnly shook Bloom’s hand. Poppy Tolland, rising, gave Dr Slater a long hard look, as if to say that, thanks to Hugh Boylan’s timely stroke, the coroner had gotten off lightly. Roland Slater, in turn, treated the advocate to what may have been a grin and, gathering up his papers, headed for the side door, followed by Mr Rice, Mr Devereux and the Assistant Commissioner who, far from being peeved at the outcome, wished only to offer the coroner his congratulations on a job well done.

  Tom Machin arrived with the medical examiner who, brusquely stripping the sheet from poor old Blazes, confirmed that the fellow was indeed dead, agreed to issue a certificate to that effect and instructed the constables to lug the body off to the mortuary.

  By that time Michael Paterson had gone in search of Milly who had been shepherded out of the gallery and into the street with the rest of the herd and had found herself in conversation with a tall, fussy-haired young woman who introduced herself as Gerty MacDowell’s best friend and seemed to think that they had something in common. Milly too had experienced nothing but relief plus a certain grisly satisfaction in watching her mother’s lover drop dead. No whit of pity tainted her belief that Blazes had got what was coming to him, that Providence – call it what you will – had meted out just punishment for his gross appetites.