by Seán Haldane
Quattrini was ready, with his usual energy, to go straight back to work, but I cornered him and requested a brief word in private. Scowling, he agreed, and led me to a small cubicle overlooking the warehouse, expelling the clerk with a few rough exclamations as he had for our previous interview. Quattrini apparently imposed himself on the whole warehouse – now here, now there – not limiting himself to a particular office room. As before we made ourselves comfortable on the hard chairs available, though Quattrini sat a little further away this time. Twitching restlessly, he gave off an air of impatience.
‘I tell you right away who the girl was’, he said as I brought out my notebook. ‘Kathleen Donnelly, though we called her Kathy. A lovely girl, very industrious, very devout. I’ve never employed irreligious girls in my house, and she was the best Irish type – meek, and she knew her place, never gave any trouble at all. She was twenty one or two years old and she’s been in service for me for five years. My brother sent her up to me from San Francisco. Her older sister was in service with him. Why should she do a thing like this? A melancholy attack? The hysterics? Let me tell you, I’m far too busy a man to understand such things.’
He visibly strained upwards with impatience to get up from the chair and back to work.
‘How many servants do you have?’
‘Kathy and another girl, Ellen – also Irish. Good workers. But not too much to do. There’s just me and my kid, Giuseppino, and we’re both down here most of the time.’
‘Did she have friends?
‘I wouldn’t know. Very religious girl. Like I say, she went to church regular, with Ellen. I’m generous with days off. I don’t know what she done with her time.’
‘Has she been in good health?’
‘Why would I know?’
‘So you’ve no idea why she did this – assuming she threw herself in deliberately.’
‘I seen that rock in her dress. Of course she threw herself in. Good way to make sure she went down and stayed down.’
‘Do you care about her?’ This was from my heart, not my mind.
‘Waddya mean?’ Quattrini’s eyes bulged out and he levelled a finger at me like a gun. ‘Why you ask questions like that?’
‘You talk about her in such a neutral fashion now, yet you were upset when we pulled her out.’
‘Can you blame me? Christ! That damned sea star on her face.’
‘Did you know it was she before we pulled her up?’
‘Look, Sergeant, I don’t know what you’re getting at. I can talk to Mr Pemberton about this.’
‘Of course you can. But I have to ask these questions. Did you know it was she?’
‘I thought it might be her. The dress seemed familiar, and she wasn’t home this morning. Ellen was flappin’ about it at breakfast. But I just thought she’d made a mistake about her morning off and gone out early into town to shop or somethin’. Then when I heard someone say there was a stiff just off the quay in the water and I went out and seen that pink dress in the water I thought, Jeez, it might be her. Forgive my language, but yes, it was upsetting.’ He took out a clean white handkerchief and mopped his brow.
‘You say she was devout. What church did she go to?’
‘Same as us. St Pat’s.’
‘You’ve nothing more to say about her?’
‘Nothin’. This gave Quattrini the excuse to rise to his feet.
I stood up too. ‘You know the names of her nearest relations?’
‘I can find out. In San Francisco, they’ll be.’
‘Please do. I’ll come and see you later today or tomorrow.’
‘What for?’ He seemed to feel he had the upper hand again and had become belligerent. ‘I’ll do the right thing by the girl, give her a good funeral.’
‘I mean, if I find out anything that might interest you. There’ll be an autopsy of course.’
‘You mean to see if she had a bun in the oven?’
‘That sort of thing. It’s usual.’
Quattrini’s expression changed again – God, the man was volatile – to one of calm piety. ‘I could swear there’s nothing of that sort’, he said. ‘She was too good a girl for that.’
* * *
Back at the Court House, Parry told me to pursue the case of the drowned girl, to go to the undertaker’s and get the results of the autopsy which was being done, and to explore whatever connections she had in order to ascertain whether it was ‘the usual sort of case’ – a pregnant girl killing herself in panic and despondency – or whether there was foul play involved, which Parry doubted. I could tell he was pleased to give me something to draw me away from the McCrory investigation, which he must see as a waste of time.
A telegram had arrived in response to a query I had sent to the University of Virginia. It was from the Registrar of the School of Medicine.
RE RICHARD MC CRORY DECEASED STOP BORN 1830 ALBANY NEW YORK STOP RELIGION CONGREGATIONALIST STOP DEGREES FROM THIS SCHOOL BONA FIDE BUT PERSONA NON GRATA DUE IRREGULAR ASSOCIATIONS NOTABLY JOHN NOYES PREACHER FREE LOVE COMMUNISM IN ONEIDA COMMUNITY NEW YORK STOP MC CRORY LEFT ONEIDA OR EXPELLED RETURNED VIRGINIA MENTAL ALIENIST WITH PRIVATE ASYLUM STOP UNSUCCESSFUL STOP JOINED CONFEDERATE ARMY AND CASHIERED SUSPICION SPYING STOP MOVED SAN FRANCISCO WHERE ALIENATION OF AFFECTIONS SUIT CAUSED DISREPUTE THIS SCHOOL STOP NO RELATIONS KNOWN HERE STOP SUGGEST TRY ALBANY STOP MC CRORY NOT VIRGINIAN OR GENTLEMAN
I liked this last phrase, remembering Mrs Somerville’s insistence that McCrory was such a gentleman. My attention stuck on the name John Noyes. I had seen it somewhere. Yes: in McCrory’s library, on the spine of a small book or pamphlet. I wrote a note to Rabinowitz who had McCrory’s goods in storage, asking if he would be so kind as to search for the book and send to me urgently.
* * *
Since the undertaker would arrange the funeral, at Quattrini’s expense, and was well equipped to deal with blood and body wastes, there had seemed no point in transporting the girl’s corpse back and forth to the doctor’s office. I caught Dr Powell as he had just finished his autopsy. He was brisk in manner and known to be competent. We talked privately in the undertaker’s office.
‘I’ll write a report’, Powell said. ‘But I’ll tell you my findings, insofar as they amount to anything. Cause of death was drowning: the lungs were full of water. She had been in the water six or seven hours: rigour had only partly set in. Thus, she entered the water some while before dawn. She had, as you will have observed, inserted a heavy rock into the front of her dress. She was not, by the way, wearing stays, by which I assume she got up in the middle of the night and did not bother with her “toilette”. The rock is one such as are piled at the end of the quay near the warehouses where she was found.’ Powell smiled. ‘Forgive me. I’m doing your detective work for you.’
‘That’s all right. Your observations are to the point.’
‘There are no signs of foul play. No bruises or cuts except for a small contusion on one cheek which puzzled me somewhat…’
‘A star fish. It was on her face when we pulled her out.’
‘How ghastly. That explains it. To repeat: no signs of foul play. And no signs of ill health. Nor was she “enceinte”. She was in fact in the course of a “monthly”, and wearing the usual towel. That was the blood you may have noticed. I should mention, though, that she was not “virgo intacta”. Of course the membrane might have ruptured accidentally in the past, but then one might expect the opening to be less than it is. She was a ‘nullipara’ – that is, she had never had children. That is all I can report. She was not known to me personally. Must have been a pretty girl, but in spite of her swollen appearance now, I should say that she was quite thin. Sad business. She was wearing a locket on a chain. You may claim it from the undertaker if you wish.’
We shook hands and Dr Powell left. The undertaker appeared and I asked for the locket. It had been placed in an envelope. I asked permission to examine it in the undertaker’s office, since I planned to be on the move and did not want
to return to the court house. I sat down at a desk and opened the envelope.
The locket was quite large, of silver, oval with an imitation ribbon diagonally across it, also of silver, which gave a slightly vulgar effect. It was on a silver chain. Modestly expensive. I found the catch and pressed it with my fingernail. A small amount of water dripped out onto the table. The locket opened with the usual butterfly effect of two oval recesses connected by the hinge. In one was a curling lock of light brown hair, neatly tied with a silk thread. In the other was a photograph of a face of man wearing a straw boater. But since it had a protective cover of thin glass which was still misted from the damp, the face could not be properly seen. I debated whether to force the glass off, but decided to be patient and let it dry, in case the photograph was stuck to the glass by damp and might be damaged. I put the locket, spread open, carefully back into the envelope which I wrapped tightly around it, secured it with a rubber band from the undertaker’s desk, and put it in my pocket.
My plan was to walk to Quattrini’s, talk to the other servant, and take a look at the dead girl’s effects. On the way I passed the Catholic church she had attended, a large barn-like building of clapboard. I knocked at the door of the priest’s house, beside the church, made of the same clapboard. The door was opened by a boy in a cassock. I was shown into a parlour, where I waited for a few minutes below a picture of Jesus holding out a sacred heart with rays of light emanating from it, so that it looked like a bloody pin-cushion.
The priest entered. I had already seen him at McCrory’s funeral, speaking church Latin. He introduced himself as Father McMahon. His accent was American or Irish. He was black haired, dark jowled, pale skinned, and smoothly plump.
‘I’m enquiring about one of your parishioners, Miss Kathleen Donnelly, whose body was found in the harbour this morning.’
‘Poor thing, poor thing, it’s a tragedy so it is. I heard of it already.’ He spread out his hands in an eloquent gesture of resignation to the will of God.
‘What did you know of the young lady?’
‘Self murder, if it be so – and I’m sure by the looks of it, it is – is a terrible thing, Sergeant. It cuts the poor girl off from her communion from God and consigns her to everlasting night. Alas, we cannot even lay her to rest among her own.’
I had forgotten about this particular Christian spite against suicides. I was almost tempted to remark, as John Donne had in an essay, that since Jesus Christ was God he must have planned his fate in advance and therefore was committing ‘self homicide’ at the crucifixion. Instead I asked, ‘Did she ever come to you in trouble?’
‘Now, now, Sergeant, I take it you are a Protestant.’
‘An Anglican by upbringing.’
‘A Protestant then, so you’ll not know that the secrecy of the confession is sacred. It may never be divulged – not even under the most terrible tortures.’
‘I realise that. I wasn’t thinking about the confessional, but the possibility that she had asked your advice, or confided her worries to you.’
‘Sure these poor girls, they come from country areas – she was from Donegal – they don’t confide their worries to any but their own kind, and that in their own language, the Gaelic, which I don’t happen to speak. It is a language of wantonness and crudeness – without refinement.’
‘But she would have made her confession in English? Surely she spoke English.’
‘To be sure. I did hear her in confessional, of course. And I absolved her in Latin – which your church does not know. Apart from that I never talked with her.’
‘You don’t remember, though, if she came to Mass with any particular friends, or…’
‘Sergeant, at Holy Mass my eyes are not on my congregation as individuals, but as a community of poor sinners come to receive the power of redemption.’
‘Thank you. I won’t waste your time any further.’ I turned to leave. But at the door I could not resist asking a question. ‘Father,’ (although this word almost stuck in my throat), ‘may I ask if you are a Jansenist?’
Father McMahon seemed to swell with pride as he replied with a smile, ‘That’s an astute observation, Sergeant. I suppose it’s my devotion to my calling which elicits it from you. Of course I would not admit to being a Jansenist pure and simple. I am simply a priest of the Holy Roman Church. But my seminary, at Maynooth in Ireland, was directed by priests of a definitely Jansenist persuasion.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘what Dr Powell’s statement on this girl’s death may be. I imagine he may say she died by her own hand, or as a result of misadventure. Perhaps, since she was a religious girl, you can give her the benefit of the doubt.’
Father McMahon’s smile vanished. ‘Of course it was self murder’, he said sourly. They say she had a rock in her dress.’
‘They’ll say all sorts of things’, I said. ‘Who knows what happened?’
‘God knows’, he said triumphantly. ‘It’s not up to me to give her the benefit of the doubt. Do you think we can deceive the all seeing eye of God?’
Faced with the irrefutable, though circular, logic of this question, I gave up and merely said ‘Goodbye.’ I went on my way feeling a puff of intellectual vanity that I had recognised Father McMahon’s Jansenism. This Irish priest was not the kind of warm and accepting man I imagined caring for his flocks on the warm shores of the Mediterranean – whose clear light I had seen in paintings was like the light in Victoria now that Spring had come.
By the time I had reached Quattrini’s house, on the edge of town at Hillside, my new self was back again. I enjoyed being a ‘detective.’ After all my agonising about God’s laws versus the cold inanimate laws of Darwinian Nature, I was content enough to enforce the laws of the world I lived in – which presented problems as ticklish as any in theology. Although Dr Powell had said there were no physical signs of foul play, a pretty young girl did not throw herself into the sea clutching a rock to her bosom unless there had been foul play of another sort than physical.
19
Quattrini’s house was in fact a mansion, with a wide veranda and all sorts of wooden fretwork and design of the sort coming to be known as ‘gingerbread’ – rare, as yet, in Victoria, but apparently coming into fashion in San Francisco. The bell was answered by a servant in a mob cap and apron, no more than a girl, of perhaps sixteen, dark haired and pale cheeked. She opened the door only a few inches and told me there was no one at home.
‘Are you Ellen? You’re the one I’d like to talk to.’
She opened the door more fully and her eyes widened as she took in the fact that I was a policeman. ‘Is it about poor Kathleen?’, she said, pronouncing it almost as ‘Catchleen’, in a lilting, almost Scottish accent. She raised a pocket handkerchief, already in her hand, to her face and wiped her eyes. When she took it away it was clear she had been crying a lot. Her eyes were bloodshot.
‘May I come in?’ I entered the house past the girl. Standing in the hallway, I said ‘I’d like to see Kathleen’s room please. Can you show it to me?’
‘We shared a room, Sir. I’d be too ashamed to let you see it. It’s up in the top of the house, and of course it’s full of our things. It wouldn’t be right.’
I had become used to Victoria’s free and easy lack of procedural restrictions. I could insist on seeing the room right away and barge up there and ransack it if I wished. But I agreed, it would not be right.
‘Could we go and sit down then? So that I can ask you a few questions?’
‘Yes, Sir’. Looking frightened, Ellen led the way back along the hall to a huge kitchen, where there was a mass of freshly washed dishes set to dry in racks near a double sink. She asked me to sit down at the table on which were carrots and celery she had been peeling and slicing.
‘When did you hear of Kathleen’s death?’ I asked.
‘Just now, at lunch time. When Pino came he told me.’
‘Pino?’
‘Mr Quattrini’s son. He sometimes comes home for lunche
on.’ Ellen blushed, then raised her handkerchief to her eyes.
‘Didn’t you miss her in the morning? Or in the middle of the night?’
‘Indeed I did. When I awoke this morning she wasn’t there. I thought maybe she’d gone downstairs early. But she wasn’t here either.’
‘Did Mr Quattrini notice she wasn’t here?’
‘Him? No. He’s in such a hurry to get to work in the morning he’d not notice anything.’
‘And what did you think when she didn’t come back later in the morning?’
‘Nothing. I never know what to think about anything.’ This remark sounded plaintive.
‘Was anything missing from your room?’
‘Not that I noticed.’
‘All her clothes are there?’
‘Yes. Pino said she had her pink dress on, that she was wearing yesterday. He saw her at the warehouse. He said she was all blue and puffed up. It’s horrible.’ Ellen wiped her eyes again, and let out a little sob, then surprisingly broke into an abrupt wailing sound – ‘Ochone, Och a Chatchleen, mo vrone, mo vrone!’ Or at least that is how I transcribe it. She paused and looked at me, wiping her tears. ‘I’ve seen drownded people’, she said. ‘At home in Ireland. I never dreamed Katchleen would end up like that.’
‘Are you from the same place in Ireland?’
‘Och yes. Derrybeg – the Bloody Foreland, they call it. And aren’t we cousins?’
‘And is she what you’d call a good girl?’ I asked, feeling I must be sounding like Father McMahon.
Ellen looked at me in indignation. ‘Of course she was a good girl. None better. Guh mannee jeea air an anam.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘May God’s blessings be on her soul.’
‘How about her stays?’ I was suddenly fed up with getting nowhere.