A Gruesome Discovery

by Cora Harrison

  ‘I’d have to see the iron bar, first. I suppose the shorter the bar, the less force that would have been required. Patrick is up there now, up in Shandon, looking around the house – the most likely place, I suppose, but he’s also looking in the new tanning yard.’

  ‘The new tanning yard?’ she queried.

  ‘Yes, apparently he wanted to sell the other house, but there was a problem with the tanning yard located just behind it, so he bought some land from the bishop – a piece of land just behind the cathedral. There’s been trouble about that, so Patrick tells me. It’s been used through the centuries as a cillín. You’ve heard that word, have you?’

  ‘A cillín …’ The Reverend Mother breathed the word and then was silent. The connection was strong between a cillín and a member of the merchant’s household. She sat very still while a feeling of sorrow came over her. She had been harsh and judgemental in those days over twenty years ago. Afraid of the consequences to the convent that she ruled over. Afraid of an English newspaper getting hold of the story. Or perhaps just afraid of the bishop. Would she have made a different decision about poor Bridie if Dr Scher had been physician to the convent at that time? She looked across at him with affection. Pragmatic, kind, never judgemental, truly Christian, she thought wryly; he had become a friend and a confidant and sometimes she wondered whether she could have gone on so long without his cheerful and reliable presence, gone on bearing the heavy burden of ever-increasing poverty and despair among those whom she tried to care for. Over the years she had learned to trust him more and more and to come to have complete reliance in his discretion. If only he had been around then … Nevertheless, she did not finish her sentence, but left the two words to hang in the air.

  ‘Yes, a cillín, a place where poor mothers, poor families, who had lost an unbaptized baby, placed the little bodies. Supposed to be a sacred place. Poor things,’ said Dr Scher compassionately. ‘Well, Patrick went up there yesterday evening. Went to talk to the verger of the cathedral, to check whether Mr Mulcahy had gone up there on Tuesday. He told the auctioneer that he had to see the verger. The verger says no, says that he was leading a procession that afternoon, a blessing of the graves’ ceremony and then was giving tea to the choir and to the clergy afterwards. He definitely did not see the merchant.’

  ‘So it looks as though …’

  ‘Yes, doesn’t it? Looks as though the man was killed in his own house and his body shut away into the trunk. Tuesday would fit well for the day of death. I couldn’t be sure, but I’d say he was about three days’ dead when I looked at him this morning.’

  ‘Would the body have been put in the trunk immediately?’

  ‘Probably. Much easier to cram the body into the trunk before he began to stiffen. And the hides and skins were soaked in blood. Animal blood or human blood? I am inclined to think the latter. Yes, I think that after the fatal blow, he either fell or was heaved into the trunk. Probably fell. That was what I said to Patrick. He was a small man, this Mr Mulcahy, but he was a heavy man. I weighed him. Fifteen stone. A lot of muscle as well as that layer of fat which came with affluence, I suppose. But he would have worked very hard as a young man and built up a solid frame. You’re looking very worried.’

  ‘It’s not a pleasant thought to think that one of a man’s household may have murdered him.’ The Reverend Mother had been about to use the word family, but then rejected it for the more appropriate word, household. Her mind was on one person ever since the mention of the cillín.

  ‘It may not have been anything to do with the wife or those boys, if that’s what is upsetting you,’ said Dr Scher consolingly. ‘Give Patrick a chance to unearth more evidence. The man could have gone down to the city, called into his bank, had a word with a business rival, gone down to the quays to make sure that his leather was safely packed for its voyage across the channel. He sells a lot of it to England, you know, so someone at the university told me.’

  ‘I’d find it hard to imagine that he was killed down in the flat of the city and his body taken back up to Shandon and placed in a trunk there in one of the empty rooms. And don’t tell me that the body in the trunk originated at the auctioneer’s rooms. The old trunk was one of the items that Mr Hayes noted down on his visit to the house on that Tuesday afternoon. He read out from his book to me. There were several containers, each filled with various goods from the house, curtains, cushions, various soft furnishings, and, of course, the trunk load of books. Or so the label said,’ she added.

  ‘There are all sorts of reasons why a man like that could have been killed. He could have been followed home by someone who had made up his mind to kill him. Very easy for someone to knock on the door with a tale of problems at the docks. And the yard is open all of the time, of course. Someone could easily have been invited into the house. Those women, well, they might not have felt that the visitor was any business of theirs. I would say that the man had them well trained to appear when he wanted them, and to keep to themselves when he didn’t.’

  The Reverend Mother thought about that. It made sense according to all of the hints dropped by Bridie over the years. Fred’s words about his mother had shocked her, but she had to admit, reluctantly, that these words, harsh as they were, had not surprised her.

  There was, undoubtedly, a possibility that the suspect list for the murder of Henry Mulcahy, Hide and Skin Merchant, may well have been quite large.

  SEVEN

  St Thomas Aquinas

  ‘Fac me, Domine Deus meus, patientem sine murmuratione, humilem sine fictione, hilarem sine dissolutione, maturum sine gravedine, agilem sine levitate …’

  (O Lord, my God, make me patient without grumbling, humble without pretence, cheerful without dissipation, mature without undue heaviness, quick-minded without levity …)

  Lucy arrived at the convent punctually at three o’clock in the afternoon, followed by her chauffeur carrying an enormous bouquet of flowers, as though to an invalid.

  ‘I’m not dead yet, you know,’ said the Reverend Mother mildly, while Sister Bernadette hurried off to the kitchen in search of a pair of vases that would do justice to such expensive-looking blooms. She looked across at her cousin with an amused expression. Lucy always liked to do the right thing; to make the right gesture.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep getting yourself mixed up in these sordid affairs,’ complained Lucy, but her small, neat-featured face was full of interest as she sank into an easy chair and stretched her hands towards the fire.

  ‘Who was it that actually sent me a present of a corpse in a trunk, then, Lucy?’ said the Reverend Mother getting this in quickly just before Sister Bernadette and a young novice appeared, carefully carrying two well-filled vases. The novice proved to be neat-fingered with flowers, plucking blossoms from Sister Bernadette’s hasty efforts and rearranging them to display their best features. Lucy was loud in her praise and the Reverend Mother prayed a silent prayer for patience.

  ‘Rupert said that I must be sure to ask you whether there were books in the trunk after all,’ said Lucy, once the door had closed. ‘He has a bet on with one of the solicitors on the Mall that you took them out, wiped them down and placed them on the shelf of your classroom before you sent for the police.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have no idea what was at the bottom of the trunk. I know that there were untreated animal skins, hides, packed around the corpse.’

  ‘To stop it moving around, I suppose,’ said Lucy with a dramatic shudder. ‘We’re under suspicion, of course, you do realize that, don’t you?’

  ‘You? Why, on earth?’

  ‘Well, Rupert had no end of trouble with that man. I told you, didn’t I? He’s plonked that awful new house just in the way of our view of the river. Rupert tried to oppose the sale of the meadow to him. That didn’t work. And then Rupert tried another tack. He appealed to get the house moved to one side of the field, but he got nowhere. They say that Mulcahy bribed someone on the city council. One shouldn’t spea
k ill of the dead, I know that, but he really was a most unpleasant man, Dottie. So unreasonable. He could have easily moved that house fifty feet to one side and then we wouldn’t be bothered with them, but he seemed to take a delight in being a nuisance to us. And then he even had the cheek to ask Rupert to act for him at the sale. Rupe was incoherent with rage. It was the Cork Law Society dinner that night and he could talk of nothing else. I was wearing the most fascinating dress, but the whole evening was a complete flop. Rupert was just totally obsessive. Quite put everyone off their beef, going on about the man setting up his tanning yard under our very noses and describing the whole process just as if he were born to the trade.’

  ‘But Mr Mulcahy didn’t actually do that, build a tanning yard next to his new house, did he?’ pointed out the Reverend Mother. ‘He bought land from the bishop, up there in Shandon, so Dr Scher told me. He built a shed there and concreted part of the land so it must have been some little while ago, mustn’t it? That’s what I have heard, anyway.’ Mr Mulcahy, she thought, was unlikely to have really wanted to set up a tanning yard under the noses of Rupert and Lucy. The move to Montenotte represented a move in status. By that, he would have joined the gentry. The fact that he had retained, for the moment, as an office, the ground floor of one of the two houses that he owned in Shandon, until he could build an office by his tanning yard, showed that he had no intention of moving his business to the salubrious slopes of Montenotte where Cork’s merchant princes dwelt. It had probably been a fuss about nothing. Rupert, she knew, though a kind-hearted person, was a highly-strung man, an extremely fastidious person who got easily worked up about things.

  ‘A most unpleasant fellow who caused trouble where ever he went,’ said Lucy roundly.

  ‘He came up the hard way, I suppose. Do you remember that my father used to say that? It was a great expression of his, though I suppose it was true of most of the citizens of Cork. Gentility depended, then, as now, I suppose, on how far back “the hard way” was. Two generations makes everything respectable, isn’t that right, Lucy? Our own ancestors proved that.’

  ‘But you must admit that to make your money by buying and selling tea as our great-grandparents did, was a lot more respectable than by flaying the skins and hides of dead animals,’ said Lucy with a shudder.

  ‘And that’s a very nice leather handbag, that you have, Lucy,’ remarked the Reverend Mother.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so pious, all of a sudden,’ said Lucy. ‘One can have a leather handbag without probing too much into how it was made. Mr Mulcahy, the late Mr Mulcahy, was an unpleasant man with an unpleasant way of making money. But, now, the big question is who actually did kill him in the end. And I forbid you to say Rupert.’

  ‘I was thinking of you, actually. You are the one who sent me the body. Did you see this trunk at all, Lucy, before you so kindly purchased it for me?’

  ‘Well, of course, I didn’t. Perhaps if I had noticed that a trunkful of school books was going for half-a-crown I might have decided to buy it for you, but I would have opened it up and looked at the books first of all, to make sure that they weren’t Latin and Greek or that sort of thing. Funny that no one did, isn’t it? Was it locked?’

  ‘No, no keys,’ said the Reverend Mother. That, she thought, was strange. ‘And I’d say that the lock had been recently oiled, or just well-used,’ she said. ‘I remember how easily the latches clicked open.’

  ‘Very strange.’ Lucy brooded on this for a moment. ‘What did the trunk look like?’

  The Reverend Mother thought about it as dispassionately as she could. ‘Dilapidated, dirty, disreputable.’

  ‘Stop showing off that you know all about alliteration,’ ordered Lucy.

  ‘And it smelled bad, but I couldn’t think of a word beginning with the letter “d” and describing accurately the way it smelled,’ admitted the Reverend Mother. She felt slightly ashamed of the way that she and her cousin often reverted to their youth in the way that they swopped wisecracks when they came together.

  A man has died and his son is in danger of being hanged for the murder, she reminded herself.

  ‘Smelled bad, looked bad,’ mused Lucy. ‘I’d say that the auctioneer’s men would have put that somewhere out of the way. He has them all very well trained; I’ll say that for him. The foreman, Mr Gregory, must have been with him for a good forty years or so.’

  ‘Lucy, have you met Mrs Mulcahy? I’m not sure that I’ve ever even seen her.’

  ‘Nor have I, now that I come to think of it. It’s odd, isn’t it? A man builds a big new house just in full sight of our place. He’s there every few days. I’ve heard him. He had a voice like a foghorn. In fact, you could hear him half a mile away bellowing at the builders. But do you know I don’t think that I ever saw her there. Imagine a woman not wanting to be around while a new house was being built for her. You’d think that she would want to have some sort of say in it? I used to see him coming down the road. And I used to shut my window if it were open. He didn’t drive, you know. He always walked or if it was raining very hard he might come by cab.’

  ‘But never brought his wife, so you think?’

  ‘I’d say that we’d have heard if she made an appearance,’ said Lucy. ‘Rupert was so bad tempered every time he saw or heard that man that the servants got all worked up about it. I’d say that the gardener or the housekeeper or one of the parlour maids was bound to tell him that they had seen Mrs Mulcahy that day. You know how servants are. They love to make a sensation. If Mrs Mulcahy had been seen, then they would definitely have announced it. Rupert says that he heard she was very badly treated and that he had her out there working in his tanning yard when the woman was pregnant. She had twelve children, you know, so the unfortunate woman was probably pregnant for most of the years of her marriage, poor thing. The eldest ran away to join the Republicans but the rest are all still at home. Twelve children in twenty years of marriage. Just imagine!’

  The Reverend Mother nodded silently. What was it that young Fred Mulcahy had said? A happy release for her, poor woman, after all those years of slavery.

  ‘And they say that the children were badly treated too,’ went on Lucy. ‘My housekeeper told me that by the time the boys were six or seven years old, as soon as they came back from school, they would be sent out with buckets to gather up dog mess from the streets. He used that for the tanning of the hides, you know. And if they didn’t come back with a bucketful there would be no supper for them.’

  Frantically building up a business, thought the Reverend Mother. Any of the Mulcahy children that she had seen looked well-nourished and Fred had certainly grown into a fine looking young man. The threat of no supper had probably not been carried out. Neighbours would have been quick to judge. But when she compared them with the many families that she had dealt with, there had been no neglect. All of the Mulcahy children had been educated, sent to secondary school, also, which showed that Mr Mulcahy had been ambitious for them. He had baulked at university for Fred, but that, given the man’s own background, had not been surprising. He probably thought that university was a waste of time and that the boy would be better off setting up in some business.

  Judge not, she thought and changed the conversation back to the trunk.

  ‘It seems amazing to think that the trunk lay for a couple of days in the auctioneer’s rooms and no one attempted to open it or to check on its contents. Why do you think that happened, Lucy?’

  ‘It’s a big building, full of stuff, really jam-packed with goods. Unless someone was interested in school books, I can’t see anyone poking around in an old trunk. No, I wouldn’t be surprised that no one looked at it.’ Lucy was an auction addict as were several of her friends. A cosy hour could be spent looking for bargains or the perfect object to fit an unfurnished corner. And then followed by lunch in the Imperial Hotel where the sale would be discussed, and perhaps, afterwards, a return visit to the auction rooms. Lucy would know the ins-and-outs of the practice at Hayes’ Auctioneers v
ery well, indeed. How long had the trunk rested in those rooms?

  ‘I’m sure that I wouldn’t bother looking at an old trunk full of school books,’ finished Lucy. ‘And I’d say that would be true of most people. You know what old school books would be like. Probably scribbled on. Rude words and silly drawings all over the back pages.’

  ‘And, of course, its appearance and the smell coming from the trunk would probably have put people off touching it,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘What do you think, Lucy?’

  ‘That’s very likely,’ said Lucy. ‘And, what’s more, the majority of people there were left over from the previous sale. You remember Ashgrove, on the old Youghal Road, well, the contents of house and garden were being auctioned off. I was there for that sale and so were lots of others that I saw. It’s always tempting to hang around for the next sale and see what comes up – Mr Hayes knows that and he always runs one into the other.’

  The Reverend Mother nodded. It did seem feasible. A battered, smelly old trunk with mould on it. Why should anyone bother much with it while the expensive contents of Ashgrove House were laid out for them to admire and covet?

  EIGHT

  St Thomas Aquinas

  Ex quo patet quod misericordia non tollit iustitiam, sed est quaedam iustitiae plenitudo.

  (Hence it is clear that mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fullness of justice.)

  The Reverend Mother tapped her foot impatiently on the well-polished hall floor as she waited for her taxi to arrive. Already she was quite late. Why did the bishop always choose a Monday morning to call together all of the headmasters and headmistresses of the religious schools in the city? Surely any man of intelligence could guess that Monday morning was almost always crisis time in schools. Things happened in families during the weekend and the trouble was brought into school on Monday morning. Already she had phoned the guards on behalf of a woman with a very black eye and a broken arm who wanted to find some safe haven for herself and her child, away from her drunken husband who had threatened to set fire to the tenement in which they lived; had rummaged in a cupboard to find a gymslip, blouse and cardigan for a girl whose clothes had been pawned by her mother in order to fund a Saturday night drinking session in her local public house and who, poor child, had arrived in school wearing nothing but a torn petticoat and a huge and filthy shawl; had phoned up the city council on behalf of a family who had received a notice from their landlord to quit their one-roomed home within three days; had doled out some rat poison, safely stored in a sealed tin box with a hole large enough for a rat, but too small to allow little fingers to poke at the deadly contents. She had listened with sympathy to the sad news of the death of a baby, promising earnestly to pray for the little soul; had amalgamated two of the infant classes to cope with the absence of one teacher and sent for a plumber to fix an ominous drip from the kitchen ceiling. By the time that the taxi arrived, she was tired, irritable and her head ached badly. She was on the verge of getting Sister Bernadette to tell a polite lie about a sudden illness to the bishop’s secretary, but when she saw the taxi draw up at the gate she forced herself on. It would never be worth absenting herself. The bishop would only feel bound to call to see her and that would be a worse waste of her time as he would insist on inspecting the whole school, addressing the children, boring them, she told herself and firmly refused to feel guilty. And, of course, his visit would result in bringing down all sorts of unwelcome suggestions on her head. He might even bring up the matter of the money that she spent so recklessly in order to run the school. No, it would be better to go and get it over with and so she was pleased that the arrival of the taxi had taken the decision out of her hands. Rapidly she left the shelter of the porch and advanced towards the gate. Luckily it was a motorized taxi, not a horse-drawn one. She hated to see an animal struggle up the almost perpendicular heights of Shandon Street.