‘So it’s kept locked during the day, is that right?’
‘Except on Sunday,’ he said.
‘And where does Mr O’Connor keep the key?’
‘Dunno,’ he said.
A routine response, she thought, and waited.
‘In his pocket, I suppose,’ he said. There had been an interval of silence while he thought about the question. ‘In his coat pocket,’ he went on, speaking quite slowly now and with a very serious, thoughtful look on his face. ‘He’d be wearing his coat when he locks us up at night. And he’d be wearing his coat when he unlocks. He’s the one that opens the shop in the morning. He keeps the keys. He’d give the key to old Maggie and she’d give it back to him, or to Mr Robert, sometimes, but usually he has it.’
‘And where does he hang his coat?’
‘In the cupboard, behind the counter. All the counters have these cupboards, that’s what they’re called but they’re more like little rooms. He hangs his coat up there and spare boxes of shoes and boots are in there. Not much room for anything.’
The Reverend Mother reflected on this. The shop had seemed hectically busy on the morning when she had visited, but she supposed on normal, non-sale days there might well be slack times when the counter hands visited each other, indulged in a few minutes of chat.
‘Miss Kitty is always coming over to borrow one of our rulers, or our tape measures,’ put in Brian, as though he had guessed her thoughts.
‘Do you think that she might have been the one to put the gas cylinders in your bed?’ She put the question bluntly to him, but he was not taken aback. He considered it carefully.
‘Nah,’ he said decisively. ‘They’d be in it together, the pair of them. If they made up their mind to croak me off, then he’s the one to have done it. Nobody would wonder if they saw him go into the dormitory during the day time, but they would wonder if they saw her.’
A good point, thought the Reverend Mother. ‘And who else could have gone up those stairs and had no one wonder what they were doing?’
‘Mr Robert,’ he said immediately. ‘He’s up and down the stairs all day, now. He’s taken the old man’s place in the office. He has the job of sending the barrels whizzing back down.’ There was a distinct note of envy in his voice, and the Reverend Mother suppressed a smile. This matter, she told herself, was a difficult and a dangerous one and it was a matter that she had to solve quickly. She couldn’t keep a fourteen-year-old boy immured in a convent of nuns, but neither could she condemn him to being sent back to that shop. That glass roof that he had broken would cost a large sum of money to repair. It was possible that Brian’s unfortunate mother or her family would be asked to pay for it. She had heard of such things before now. In any case, the thought of those deadly gas canisters worried her. Six of them had suddenly appeared. Were there others lurking around in the shop, or in the possession of someone connected to the shop? Something terrible could result from any unconsidered action of hers.
She made up her mind.
‘Brian,’ she said, ‘I have no way around this. I have to call the inspector and ask him to come here and to listen to your story.’
To her surprise, he nodded. ‘I was thinking that you would have to do that,’ he said.
She applauded his pragmatic and sensible attitude. ‘And have you any idea of what I could do with you?’
He looked at her hopefully. ‘You could maybe dress me up as a nun?’ His voice held a tentative note.
She looked at the spotty, adolescent face with the slight moustache on the upper lip and the sprouting hairs on the chin.
‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said firmly.
He showed little surprise or disappointment. Just turned the matter over in his mind. She had thought he would suggest that he be sent back to his mother, but that did not seem to be a solution that had occurred to him, or if it had, he had dismissed it as impossible. Sister Bernadette, who knew all the gossip, had hinted strongly that there had been another man involved in Mrs Maloney’s removal from the city.
‘I suppose that the inspector could put me in a cell,’ he said eventually. ‘Not for ever, but just while he was sorting things out. I wouldn’t mind. Give me a bit of a rest, like. And then I couldn’t be blamed if anything else happened? If someone murders the old woman or someone, then no one could say it was me. And if I had a ball, I could play hand ball against the walls.’
The Reverend Mother looked at him speechlessly. This offer had taken her aback. Brian, however, was looking more cheerful, almost as though he felt that he had solved all of his problems.
‘How big do you think that a cell would be, Reverend Mother?’ he enquired. ‘What sort of space between the walls?’
The Reverend Mother seized on the question. ‘I don’t know, Brian,’ she said seriously. ‘But I’m sure that it is something that Inspector Cashman could tell you.’ She could see that he was turning over the possibilities of a private handball court within the precincts of the police barracks. It wasn’t, she thought suddenly, an utterly impossible idea. At least it would bring safety, would allow Patrick a certain amount of time to work out the problems. But then her heart sank. Poverty and desperation brought its own intense problems to this distressful city. Seldom had a night gone by without the noise of gunfire. Drunken fights on the quays were hardly reported these days. The gaols were overflowing and only the other day she had read about the scandal of convicted criminals having to be housed in police barracks as there was no place available for them in the gaol. Patrick would not be able to allocate a cell for the safekeeping of this boy.
‘Or else,’ said Brian, watching her face carefully, ‘you could send for the major, Reverend Mother. He might get me smuggled out of the country and send me over to the British army. That’s what I would really like to do.’
‘What would your mother say to that, Brian?’
He shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t care. She’s gone off.’
‘Have you got her address, Brian?’
‘No.’ The monosyllable was curtly enunciated and the boy’s face closed in a forbidding manner.
‘Never mind,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘I’ll do what you suggest and send for the major, but I think I must send for Inspector Cashman, also. There is this matter of the broken roof. We’ll have to sort that out, make sure that it is on record that you did that, not out of wilful vandalism, but because you were in danger of your life. You, yourself, must tell the whole story to Inspector Cashman.’
She thought that he might protest at that, but he shrugged his shoulders.
‘If you like. Don’t mind. But the major ’ud be the one that would look after me. You’ll get him to come along, won’t you, Reverend Mother?’
‘Yes, I will, Brian.’ The boy was probably right. She should notify the major. Legally Brian was bound to the owner of the Queen’s Old Castle Stores and it was only right that the owner should be informed of his presence here at the convent. ‘Now, while we are waiting for all those people to get out of their beds and have their breakfasts,’ she said cheerfully, ‘I think you might give Sister Bernadette a hand in the kitchen. She needs help with scrubbing the potatoes and putting them in the oven for the little children’s lunch. You don’t mind helping, do you, Brian?’
He seemed enormously relieved at that and assured her that he would like to help. And chop wood or draw water or anything that needed a man’s strength. He was quite effusive in his offers to do any jobs she wanted done. To the Reverend Mother’s pleasure, he remembered Sister Bernadette and had a story to tell about her giving him a piece of cake once when he had been knocked over in the playground. It had been, she thought as she walked him down the corridor, a flash of inspiration. He was unlikely to be a great reader and the parlours were chilly and lonely places for a boy who was used to plenty of company. She left him to Sister Bernadette and went off to telephone Major James Fitzwilliam.
TWENTY
The major was the one who answered the shop phone when she had
called and he already knew the whole story.
‘I’ll be with you in under five minutes, Reverend Mother,’ he said.
The Reverend Mother felt that she needed to see him before Brian burst out with his side of the story and so once she had put down the phone, she lingered in the hallway, near to the front door, passing the time by examining carefully, for the first time in years, the rather faded pictures that hung there. Her cousin Lucy had told her of a convent in Waterford where a picture that hung in the parlour for almost a hundred years had been found to be painted by some Italian artist and to be worth a considerable sum of money. The Reverend Mother did not think that she was an expert, but, nevertheless, she doubted whether any of these uninspired paintings of St Therese of Lisieux, entitled ‘God’s Sweet Little Flower’, or the lurid scenes of the crucifixion would draw any splendid offers from some connoisseurs. She had begun to speculate upon the possibility that in some dark corner of an upstairs corridor there might be lurking an early work by Daniel Maclise, famous for being a friend of Charles Dickens, but a native of Cork city, when a military-sounding step clipped its way along the path to the front door. She slipped a cough lozenge into her mouth and opened the door before the bell could be rung, anxious not to interrupt Sister Bernadette or, indeed, to have Brian Maloney appear prematurely upon the scene.
‘Come in, Major,’ she said politely and ushered him through the hallway and into her room. Presumably he had been served with breakfast in his father’s house not too long ago, so she saw no need to press cups of tea and slices of cake upon him. The sooner they had their talk, the better, and she bade him hang up his coat and hat in clipped and authoritative tones. She moved her chair near to the fire. She was chilled to the bone since her session with the chaplain in that cold chapel. Still, this business about Brian had to be settled.
‘I’m very worried and concerned about this affair at Queen’s Old Castle last night, Major,’ she began.
He made no pretence of misunderstanding her. A man of keen wits and a lot of self-possession.
‘Do I understand that young Maloney came here this morning,’ he enquired coolly.
‘He is a past pupil of the school here,’ retorted the Reverend Mother, doing her best to suppress her cough, but having to yield to it. She wished now that she had ordered tea for the wretched man. Something hot to drink would have helped to soothe the tickle in her chest. ‘He was deserted by his mother once she had placed his future and his well-being in the hands of the proprietor of the Queen’s Old Castle,’ she said once she had recovered. Surreptitiously she slipped another clove lozenge from her pocket and popped it into her mouth. Sabres out, she thought and looked steadily at him. Brian had spoken of him with touching faith, but she could not help thinking how convenient it would be for the Fitzwilliam family if Brian could be the scapegoat.
‘My father,’ he returned.
‘And now you, yourself, of course.’
He sat back in his chair and regarded her with a certain degree of amusement. ‘You hold me responsible for sorting out any differences between the young apprentices of a shop in which I have no interest and which I hope to have sold by this time next week,’ he observed.
‘I hold you, and all men, responsible to prevent wilful murder of a boy entrusted to the care of your family’s business,’ she said swiftly and felt a stab of pain in her chest.
He sat up rather straight at that. ‘Murder is an odd word,’ he remarked.
‘And a most unpleasant affair,’ she said. ‘And if the death of your father is counted as murder, then the attempted death of young Brian Maloney must be reckoned to be attempted murder. Don’t you agree, Major Fitzwilliam?’
He sat back. ‘Let’s hear what his story to you was, Reverend Mother.’
His tone was perfectly polite, but she resented his manner. She was not accustomed to being spoken to like that. For over fifty years she had worked in Cork, had been a Reverend Mother for almost forty of those years, and she had become a person of influence and of importance in her native city and had during these years never hesitated to exploit her position whenever she needed to do so. She looked across at him steadily. A thought had come to her mind.
‘Could you tell me why you brought these gas canisters home with you, Major? A whole suitcase of them, I am informed.’ He looked taken aback at that and she followed up swiftly. ‘Rather unusual in someone of your position to misappropriate army property,’ she said. And then she sat back and surveyed the position as if it were a chessboard.
‘As to that, there was a whole roomful of these things at my barracks, of little or no value,’ he said stiffly. ‘Does that answer your question?’
‘Not really,’ she said. A poor explanation, she thought, but she refrained from drawing an analogy with the theft of one gun from amongst many. She was sure that any foot soldier who had done such a thing would have been court-martialled.
‘We seem to be wandering from the question of young Maloney,’ he said. ‘But since you seem interested, these gas canisters are not often used these days. Surplus to requirements, you could say. DDT is a more effective substance. And as to why I brought some of the gas canisters home with me, well, I did so at the request of my father. I had been talking to him on my last leave about how they remove odours and he was interested in that because of the problem with damp in the Queen’s Old Castle. The place should have been pulled down a hundred years ago,’ he added.
‘And that’s what is going to happen to it now?’ The Reverend Mother excused herself this piece of curiosity. Lucy, she knew, would never forgive her if she passed up on the opportunity to acquire any additional details.
‘That’s right,’ said the major curtly. ‘Once all of the stock is sold off. Three four-storey new buildings can be fitted into that space.’
He was only just restraining himself from asking what business of hers it was, she thought, and hastened to absolve herself from idle curiosity. ‘Presumably, then, all of that dangerous glass will be removed from the roof before work begins on demolishing the building. Brian will be pleased; he has a great admiration for you and would not want to have done you any harm,’ she explained.
To her surprise, he looked touched. Rather embarrassed. Smoothing his hand over the glossy wing of his swept-back hair. ‘I suppose he panicked,’ he said awkwardly.
‘Understandingly,’ she replied and was satisfied to hear a tart note in her voice. Really, those clove lozenges were excellent. She must remember to compliment Sister Bernadette upon them. ‘After all,’ she continued, ‘not much more than a week ago, Brian witnessed the death of your father from just one of those gas canisters.’
‘Wouldn’t have done him any harm as long as he didn’t breathe in the gas,’ he said with an annoying air of indifference.
‘And your father? It did him harm.’
‘My father was an old man with a bad heart.’
‘Was that known?’ she asked.
‘He told me, but no, I don’t think that anyone else knew. He would have been afraid of upsetting my mother.’
The Reverend Mother hoped that her face did not betray her scepticism, but she found it hard to believe in that motive. Dr Scher, she would be almost sure, had not been aware of anything wrong with the man’s heart. There was perhaps a chance of the man going to a specialist in Dublin, but in that case, surely it would have shown up during the autopsy. Still, she told herself, the major would be quite right in hinting that this was none of her business. Her concern now had to be for Brian and she turned over in her mind a way of ensuring his safety.
‘I presume that some of the gas canisters were stolen,’ she said. ‘Who do you think placed six of them in Brian’s bed? Just under his mattress, so he told me.’
‘That’s right. I went up and had a look when my brother phoned me about the broken glass. He had been in early that morning so he had the whole story. Yes, there were six of them, all with their lids off, lying on the bedsprings. I’d say that they were le
ft almost unscrewed and then when he sat on the edge of the bed the lids popped off.’
The Reverend Mother nodded. ‘That would fit with what he told me, but why should anyone have wanted to kill him?’ She would, she thought, bring him to acknowledge that Brian should not go back to the Queen’s Old Castle. Perhaps the major might pull a few strings to get the boy into another shop immediately, rather than remain until the stock was sold.
The major pursed his lips. ‘Another boy playing a trick,’ he suggested. ‘Not that much gas in those things, Reverend Mother. Only dangerous if there is no air in the place. That’s a big room. Went up there this morning. Didn’t think that anyone, except perhaps the boy himself, would have been in any great danger.’
The Reverend Mother left a silence. A particularly stupid suggestion, she thought. From Brian’s description, every boy in the dormitory had been terrified. He had painted a vivid picture of the screaming and the choking noises until he had broken the glass ceiling with the iron knob from the bedstead.
‘They are locked in every night, Major,’ she said after a moment. ‘Locked in from nine o’clock in the evening until six o’clock in the morning. Every boy would know that. Would know that there was no escape. It must have been quite terrifying for them.’
He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Be glad to get that place off my hands,’ he muttered and then looked around as there was a gentle tap upon the door. He sat back on his chair and looked pointedly at his watch while the Reverend Mother called out, ‘Come in.’
‘Excuse me, Reverend Mother,’ Sister Bernadette said apologetically, ‘but Miss Fitzwilliam is here, wants to see you urgently. That’s what she said.’
‘Miss Fitzwilliam?’ queried the Reverend Mother. She glanced at the major and saw that he looked astonished.
‘Miss Fitzwilliam, which Miss Fitzwilliam, sister?’ His manner was polite, but very authoritative. A man who was used to giving orders.
‘Miss Kitty, Major,’ faltered Sister Bernadette. ‘It’s Miss Kitty Fitzwilliam. Says that she knows that you are here.’ She stopped, her colour high and she appeared confused and embarrassed.
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