A Gruesome Discovery

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Well, that’s in the hands of the army, now, they’re out looking for them, but this looks like my affair.’ Patrick gave a nod towards the trunk. ‘It turned up, sent to you by an auctioneer, Dr Scher told me.’

  ‘It says “school books” on the lid and that, I suppose, is why my cousin purchased them for me. She paid a half-crown for the trunk, according to Mr Hayes, the auctioneer, when I phoned him. He said that she bid half a crown and that he immediately knocked it down to her, the trunk and its contents, and that must have seemed to be quite a bargain. I said nothing to him, of course. He took it as a natural curiosity about the donor. I haven’t, as yet, spoken to my cousin, but I presume she could tell no more.’

  The Reverend Mother was pleased to hear how steady her voice sounded. She did not avert her gaze from the gruesome sight in the trunk but forced herself to utter a short prayer for the man’s immortal soul.

  ‘I’m frozen,’ said Dr Scher. ‘Reverend Mother, would you take me indoors and offer me a cup of tea. We’ll leave you and the sergeant to make arrangements, Patrick.’

  ‘You know where the telephone is, Patrick,’ said the Reverend Mother, but was not surprised to find that the sergeant followed them out and before they had re-entered the convent, the police car was speeding its way along the wet road. Joe had been sent to fetch a van and the man’s body would be conveyed to the police mortuary ready for Dr Scher’s autopsy. There was no point in them waiting. She knew how methodical Patrick was. The first task would be to have the body taken care of and after that he would take her statement. He would wait for the result of the autopsy before speculating too much on who may have killed the man. In that, she thought, he was quite unlike Dr Scher who would be full of questions, surmises and sudden brainwaves. Patrick was reticent and discreet. Dr Scher was impatient, indiscreet; prone to sudden leaps of the imagination and wild theories. An excellent doctor, though, and a good friend to the community of nuns, all of whom liked and trusted him.

  She left him to exchange greetings with Sister Bernadette and some of the other nuns and made her way to her own room. She had plenty of time to hang up her cloak and to take her customary seat in front of the desk before he came bustling in, rubbing his hands. He closed the door carefully behind him, heaped an extra shovelful of coal upon the dull fire, riddled it energetically and then turned to her.

  ‘Now, Reverend Mother, you can tell me all about that unfortunate man. And, of course, I suppose that you know by now who murdered him.’

  She thought about the question seriously. It would be important to get this matter cleared up as quickly as possible. There would be a lot of whispering and of speculation once it became known that the dead body of the hide and skin merchant had ended up in the convent on St Mary’s of the Isle. But who had killed him, and why?

  ‘He must be quite a rich man by now,’ she said aloud. ‘I remember, quite some time ago, someone telling me that he made a lot of money during the Boer War – selling leather for boots and belts. And he would have done equally well out of the Great War as by that stage he had developed the wool side of the business; a huge amount would have been needed for all of those uniforms. War, I read once, is good for business. There is little haggling, little beating down of the prices. An enterprising man who can produce the required goods reliably and punctually, and in sufficient quantity, can charge what that service is worth to the army.’

  Dr Scher listened with attention. He was a man with a deep interest in his fellow townsmen. She had often noticed that about him, and had thought that if he were not a doctor, he would have made a good novelist. ‘So a rich man. And now where would his money go, Reverend Mother? I’m sure that you know that.’

  She thought back to Bridie’s words about the family row when young Fred left his father’s house. ‘If he made a will, and not everyone does that, well then I doubt whether he has left any money to his eldest son. He had ten sons and two daughters, all younger than Fred who must …’ Once again her mind went back to the time that Bridie had left the convent and had gone to work for the Mulcahy family. Fred had been a baby then and had helped Bridie to come to terms with her sorrow and her loss. ‘Fred must be about twenty now,’ she said aloud. ‘I think it is about a year since he left home and joined the Republican Party. I understand that the break with his father was because Mr Mulcahy wanted the boy to go into business, as a feather merchant, apparently, and Fred wanted to go to university and study mathematics. A singularly useless choice, in his father’s eyes, I understand.’ The Reverend Mother pondered on that self-made man, on the story of rags to riches. ‘I would think that it is very possible that he did not make a will at all,’ she said after a minute. ‘He would not have been an old man and he would not have felt himself to be old. His business was prospering, he had just had built a fine new house in Montenotte which he had filled with brand-new furniture. ‘No, he would have felt that he was embarking on a new and successful part of his life, not ending it. It will be interesting to see, but I will be surprised if he did make a will.’

  ‘So,’ said Dr Scher thoughtfully, ‘how did that boy, Fred, get on with his mother? You know the family, do you, Reverend Mother?’

  ‘Only at second-hand,’ she replied. ‘A former lay sister in this convent went to work for the family when she left us and she kept in touch. Fred was often here when he was a young boy. I suppose I have retained an interest in him and the older children of the family. As time went on, of course, we saw less and less of Bridie. But, to answer your question, yes, I do believe that he was his mother’s favourite. Bridie used to say that often. Of course, Fred was a great favourite with her when he was a small boy and she may have exaggerated his mother’s fondness for the child. And I’m not sure about the mother’s relationship with him now that he has left home.’

  ‘But this Bridie still works for the Mulcahy family, does she?’ Dr Scher turned around as Patrick, after a discreet knock, pushed open the door and entered the room. He shook his head to the offer of cake and tea but held out his hands to the blaze from Dr Scher’s fire.

  ‘The body has been removed now, Reverend Mother. A certain amount of excitement in the street, I’m afraid, but these things always do get out, sooner or later.’ He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘I’d just like to take a brief statement from you, if you don’t mind, and then I’ll be on my way.’ As he spoke, he produced his notebook, licked the tip of his indelible pencil and began to write rapid shorthand, as she spoke.

  ‘At about five o’clock of the evening, a trunk was delivered to the convent at St Mary’s Isle. It was sent by Mr Hayes, Auctioneer, Princes Street and was labelled “school books”, and with the name and direction of “The Reverend Mother, St Mary’s Isle”. When they left, I decided to check the contents. On opening the lid, it was found to contain the body of a middle-aged man. The man was dead.’ She finished there, thinking about the dramatic event that followed. He looked up from his notebook and across the room at her and she responded immediately.

  ‘The trunk was placed by the auctioneer’s men in an old outhouse because the trunk looked so dilapidated and smelled bad. The men suggested putting it into an old outhouse, which was once the convent coach house a hundred years ago and I agreed to that. When I went in to check on the books to make sure that the children were not disappointed, I was followed by a young man. I was only aware of his presence when he spoke to me. He claimed that the trunk was for him, but once I had opened the lid, he said that he had not expected that. I believe,’ said the Reverend Mother carefully, ‘that his words were: “I know nothing about this, nothing whatsoever.” He went on to say that he expected a trunk to be delivered to him outside the Douglas Street Sawmills, but with a different contents.’

  ‘Guns, I suppose,’ said Dr Scher as Patrick continued to write rapidly.

  ‘He was about to go when I rather unwisely suggested that he should be the one to call the guards and that alarmed him. He pointed his pistol at me, not, I think, with
any real intention of using it and I mention this only to show that when I spoke of his mother and his duty to tell her, then he fired his pistol at his father’s heart. The man, of course, had been dead for some time; even I, without any medical knowledge, could have told that.’

  ‘What made him fire at his father?’ asked Dr Scher as Patrick’s busy pencil scribbled across the page of his notebook.

  The Reverend Mother thought back to that scene in the shadowy coach house. ‘I believe it may have been the mention of his mother that provoked the shot.’

  ‘The lad must have known that the man was dead,’ said Dr Scher, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘It was impossible that he thought he was alive.’

  ‘Certainly I believed that I was looking at a corpse, not at a living man.’ The Reverend Mother looked at Patrick when she said that and saw him nod and make another note. He waited for a moment, and then snapped a rubber band around his notebook, replaced it and the pencil into his jacket pocket, glanced again at the clock on the mantelpiece and then got to his feet.

  ‘Thank you, Reverend Mother. Now I’d better be off to see the auctioneer and hear what he has to say. I’ve sent Joe up to Shandon to tell the wife. Apparently they have sold one of the houses that they lived in, two houses joined together, but they are keeping one on as an office and she’s still there, seeing to the disposal of the furniture and the cleaning out of the place. Joe is good at that sort of thing, breaking bad news. I’ll have to see her myself when she has got over the first shock, but in the meantime, I’d like to see what the auctioneer has to say.’

  And then he went swiftly through the door and they heard the determined tramp of his boots on the wooden corridor outside. No sound of voices. By now Sister Bernadette and the other nuns in the kitchen probably knew all about the macabre discovery in the old coach house and were busily discussing it in the kitchen.

  It would be a good way for an auctioneer to get rid of his enemies, wouldn’t it? Shoot them, pop the bodies in some trunks and then sell them for a few pounds,’ remarked Dr Scher as he helped himself to another cup of the dark orange tea which Sister Bernadette made specially to suit his taste.

  ‘I believe that it only fetched half a crown,’ said the Reverend Mother absent-mindedly. ‘I must speak about it to my cousin, Mrs Murphy.’ It was, she remembered, the auctioneer’s own idea that Lucy should bid for this trunk, but that was understandable. ‘Presumably no one had bothered to look inside the trunk, although it was not locked when it came here.’

  ‘And no keys?’ asked Dr Scher.

  ‘No, no keys, but it did look very old, didn’t it? It may have been fifty to sixty years old. None of the boys went away to school, they were all educated at Farranferris Seminary in Shandon itself, and I suspect that they were not a family for holidays, so it may be that the trunk came with Mr Mulcahy himself when he journeyed from Tipperary as a boy to work with his uncle in Shandon.’

  ‘And I suppose he took another journey, his last journey before his funeral, with it from Shandon to the auctioneer’s premises. Very, very strange. I wonder how Patrick is getting on with the auctioneer.’

  FOUR

  Eoin O’Duffy, Police Commissioner

  ‘I say that a brave guard is braver than a brave soldier. A soldier goes into the fight under the command of his officers. It is altogether different with the policeman. He is at once the commanding officer and private. He fights his fight alone. His enemy, the criminal, ever exists. For the guard it is a fight to the finish. It is a question of either his life or that of his antagonists.’

  Patrick was familiar with the auctioneer’s rooms on Princes Street. When he had first obtained a coveted place on the newly-formed Civic Guards’ cohort in Cork city, he had grimly saved almost all of his weekly wage. His boarding, in the barracks, was free and he had few other expenses. After a couple of months he had saved enough to buy a small house for his mother in a laneway on St Mary’s of the Isle. He had said nothing to her, just gone on saving while she went on living in one room in a tenement. And it was then that he had fun for the first time in a rather bleak, and very hard-working, life. Week after week, he had haunted the auctioneer’s premises, watching, listening, gauging the mood of the buyers and, one by one, he had bought a bed, a kitchen table, an easy chair, and then had added a few cupboards, another chair for a visitor, a wooden press for her clothes and even, a great extravagance, a wooden dresser with a few colourful plates and cups. The little house had been kept warm with rick of turf, stored outside the back door. Every few days he had lit a fire and gloated over the growing contents. It still affected him, whenever he remembered his mother’s reaction to the paradise that her only child had purchased for her and there were tears in his eyes when he turned into the auctioneer’s premises on Princes Street.

  A sale had just finished and people streamed out, chattering amongst themselves. An evening at the auctions was an evening out for a lot of people and those Friday night auctions were very popular.

  Mr Hayes, he was glad to see, showed no memory of him. The auctioneer was perturbed and uneasy.

  ‘Is it about that trunk; that’s it, isn’t it?’ he asked immediately, once Patrick had introduced himself and meticulously shown his identity. ‘I thought that there must be something wrong when the Reverend Mother telephoned me and I’ve been making a few enquiries. I didn’t look at the thing, myself, you know, inspector. I just sell the stuff as it comes in; that’s the way that things go in our line of business. We’d never be able to get through everything if we had to weigh up each item. Half-a-crown, that’s what it was sold for, well, I ask you, inspector, what’s half-a-crown these days. I couldn’t go inspecting everything that goes for half-a-crown. Now, you’re a fair man, inspector, you wouldn’t ask that of me, would you, now?’

  ‘I understand that Mrs Murphy, the solicitor’s wife, placed the bid for it,’ said Patrick stolidly. Get as much out of him before you tell him why you are here; that was the advice that he would have given to his sergeant and now he heeded his own instincts. The man was a talker and a talker usually told what you wanted with just the minimum of questioning. Mr Hayes had the reputation of knowing everything worth knowing about the citizens of Cork. Keep him talking and soon Patrick would know what could be known about the Mulcahy family and about the dead man himself. Already a cascade of words were pouring from the lips of the auctioneer.

  ‘Well, that was the way of it,’ he said waving a hand expansively, ‘and it was myself tipped Mrs Murphy a wink. That’s what happened, without a word of a lie, inspector. You see, I know that Mrs Murphy is the cousin to the Reverend Mother. She bought a Victrola for her once; I remember that. She had it delivered to the convent so that the girls could learn songs from it. And so this trunk-load of old school books – well, that’s what I thought it was, that was what the label said. Well, I saw that Mrs Murphy was still there, chatting to a friend. I said to myself the Reverend Mother would like this and so I gave the nod to her and as soon as she made a bid, well, I counted it out pretty smart, and then I brought my hammer down on it. I thought,’ he said, beginning a winding-down process, ‘that I was doing a favour.’

  ‘And you had no idea about its contents?’

  ‘Not an idea, in the world,’ said Mr Hayes with emphasis. ‘But I’ve heard that the trunk was taken off to the barracks, and now here you are …’ He made a sweeping gesture with his right hand and then collapsed onto the edge of the seat of a tall stool. The show was over as far as he was concerned. Now it was for the inspector to uncover the goods.

  ‘There was a body of man in the trunk,’ said Patrick, endeavouring to make the words sound normal and every day.

  ‘Really!’ Mr Hayes did a good imitation of a man who is stricken by total astonishment, but Patrick had a feeling that the man knew of that all the time. Cork was a small city, filled with excitable, gossip-loving people and it was hard to keep anything a secret within its bounds. The van driver, the man at the mortuary, someone a
t the telephone exchange, the word would have gone out. It was a pity; he would have liked a true reaction to his startling news, but there was nothing that he could do about that just now.

  ‘I suppose that you’ve heard who it was,’ he said grimly.

  Mr Hayes did not acknowledge or deny, just looked expectantly at Patrick. There was a noise of heavy footsteps on the stairs outside, a knock against the banisters that made Mr Hayes wince and then a crash from overhead.

  ‘We’re getting ready for the sale tomorrow,’ he explained. ‘Death of Major Heffernan, you’ll have seen it in the paper a while back. Only relative is out in India, we’ve had an auction at the place itself, out in Fota, and these are just the remnants. They’ll go in with another lot.’

  ‘So when did you collect the stuff from Shandon?’ asked Patrick.

  ‘A couple of days ago, on Tuesday, we made two journeys. Very steep hill that. I didn’t want the lorry to be overloaded coming back down it.’

  ‘So nothing was sold at the house, was it? You didn’t have an auction, there, did you?’

  Mr Hayes shook his head. ‘No, no, it doesn’t work like that, inspector. “Fota” now, a big house, nice area, people go for the day out and then they get tempted to buy, but Shandon, wouldn’t say a word against it, decent, hardworking people live up there on Shandon, but you wouldn’t have people going all the way up there for an outing, now would you, inspector?’