A Gruesome Discovery

by Cora Harrison

  And then when he saw the dead body in the trunk, he had taken fright, he would have realized that one of three women dear to him would be hanged for that murder. He did the stupid thing of attempting to take responsibility by shooting the dead man, and then, later, when he had read the newspaper accounts and realized that his father had been killed probably days earlier, well then, he once again tried to take responsibility by signing a confession.

  Unless, of course, it was all an elaborate double bluff by a young man who had, reputably, a brilliant mathematical brain.

  TWELVE

  St Thomas Aquinas

  ‘Et ideo actus iustitiae per comparationem ad propriam materiam et obiectum tangitur cum dicitur, “ius suum unicuique tribuens” …’

  (Therefore the act of justice, in relation to its proper matter and object, is indicated in the words: “rendering to each his right” …)

  ‘It’s Bridie, Reverend Mother,’ said Sister Bernadette, closing the door firmly behind her and standing with the knob in her hand as she spoke. ‘I keep on telling her that you are very busy this morning. “Reverend Mother has the bishop’s secretary with her and they are going over the accounts, Bridie.” I said that to her. I kept on telling her. “Sit down, Bridie, sit and have a cup of tea.” If I said that once, I said it forty times, but she just wouldn’t. Up and down every minute, that’s the way she’s been. “Surely, he’s gone now.” That’s what she kept saying to me. “Perhaps that bell is not working”, that was the next thing. Of course, I guessed that you showed him out yourself. You always do.’

  The Reverend Mother sighed. Yes, she had showed out the bishop’s secretary, and yes, she always did do that. It was, she had found by experience, the only way to get rid of him. Whenever she proposed to ring for Sister Bernadette, he told her not to trouble, that he would see himself out, and then he would start talking again, airing his views on the best use of diocesan funds, on the way that economies could be made, on the uselessness of lighting stoves in classrooms where active children could easily be kept warm and other economies which occurred to him. However, if she got to her feet and went towards the door while arguing, then he would follow her like a dog so that he could interrupt with his own views. In that way she usually managed to get him to the hall door and to let an icy breeze play over him until he departed hurriedly.

  ‘Send Bridie in, Sister Bernadette,’ she said. ‘I’ll see her now.’ She cast one more glance at the document that the bishop’s secretary had left behind, pages full of empty boxes with minus and plus symbols and daunting looking percentages on the outer margins. Planning of money resources, she had found by experience, was not of much use when crises happened on a regular basis. She preferred to put her energies into raising money when it was needed. The bishop, according to his secretary, was unhappy about the frequency with which she applied to prominent businessmen for funds, had even overheard that her visits were dreaded by the wealthy. The bishop, apparently, was so upset about this that he was even willing to give her the help of his secretary, a person who understood economics. Or so the rather overweight and self-satisfied young man, sitting opposite to her, had said. Carefully she tucked the useful pieces of paper into an overflowing drawer at the bottom of her desk. It bore no label, but in her mind was catalogued as ‘Rubbish from the Bishop’.

  ‘Yes, send Bridie in now, Sister Bernadette,’ she repeated as, with difficulty, she managed to get the drawer closed. She moved away from the desk and took a seat by the fire. Bridie would not have been so insistent if she had not had something serious to talk about. She was owed all of the Reverend Mother’s attention when she came to the convent for counsel. She had been one of the flock and the bond had never been broken.

  Bridie had entered the convent as a fourteen-year-old orphan more than twenty years ago. She had been brought up by an aunt, not very kindly treated, according to her parish priest. A good girl, he had said. Would make an excellent lay sister, was sensible and hardworking, anxious to please. Could read and write a little. Would be grateful for any kindness. Lay sisters were the backbone of convent life, the people who washed, scrubbed, cleaned, cooked and shopped. Those not educated enough to engage in teaching or in nursing, women who had neither fortune nor education, according to the founder of the order. Originally they had been the maidservants of wealthy women who entered into the religious life, but by the middle of the nineteenth century they were mainly from small, impoverished farms and from the families of farm labourers hit by the recurring potato famine. Nevertheless, they took the same vows of chastity and obedience. The new recruit was placed in the kitchen, working under the benign rule of Sister Bernadette.

  Bridie had been most obedient and most hardworking. A model lay sister in almost every way. Yes, obedience came naturally to her.

  Chastity, however, was a problem. Bridie liked men. In the beginning it had been just flirtations with delivery boys, something that Sister Bernadette dealt with firmly. But then Bridie had taken to slipping out at night when the nuns were all in their beds. Sister Bernadette was forced to report her to the Reverend Mother when she found, for the second time, that the person-shaped lump under the blankets of Bridie’s bed was, in fact, a pillow and a nightgown. Bridie received a warning and then another warning and then came a threatened scandal. Bridie was pregnant. Sister Bernadette, in tears, reported the matter to the Reverend Mother.

  Bridie looked nearer to forty than to thirty now, thought the Reverend Mother as the woman came into the room. She was looking smarter than usual, wearing a red coat that seemed slightly too small for her and a black straw hat crowned with an ornate flower. She didn’t look well, looked a lot older than her years could be. A pretty girl she had been when she had first come to the convent, with a fresh complexion, dark blue eyes and thick black hair. The fresh complexion was now weather-beaten and coarsened and the hair, beneath the incongruous hat, was turning grey. A sad-looking woman, locked into middle-age, with nothing much to show for her life.

  ‘Come in, Bridie, come in and sit down. Sit there by the fire. Would you like tea?’

  The Reverend Mother allowed a few moments to elapse after the invitation, but since nothing but silence followed it, she said quietly, ‘No tea, thank you, Sister Bernadette.’ Very unlike Bridie who adored endless cups of tea and slices of cake. What had brought the woman here? It was also very unlike her to insist on waiting to see the Reverend Mother, though hearing that she was busy with the bishop’s secretary, rather than her usual practice of having a confidential chat with Sister Bernadette and allowing the news to be spread second-hand.

  But the Reverend Mother said nothing, asked Bridie no questions. After the door closed behind the lay sister, she bent over the fire, endeavoured to stir it into a livelier state and then leaned back. Bridie, she thought, should be allowed to take her time; should be allowed to think through the implications of what she wished to say. Even when the silence was eventually broken, it took a while to come to the point. But after a long session of remarks about the weather, appreciation of the fire and excuses about her visit, Bridie gathered her courage together.

  ‘Have you read today’s Cork Examiner, Reverend Mother?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Obligatory reading for most Cork people, but the Reverend Mother left it in the nuns’ refectory until after the hour of dinner. By this stage, Sister Bernadette would have informed her of most of its contents, but she still flicked through it while she had her tea.

  ‘It’s Freddie,’ said Bridie with a choke in her voice. ‘It’s Freddie, Fred Mulcahy. They’ve got him up there in the barracks. They found him hiding out in the marshes at Passage West. They say that he has confessed to his father’s murder. But he didn’t do it, Reverend Mother. I know that he didn’t do it.’

  The Reverend Mother sat very still and looked across at her visitor. There had been a ring of sincerity in the voice.

  ‘You think that he is unlikely to have done it, that he is not the sort of person who would have been a
ble to murder his own father?’ As she spoke the memory of young Fred Mulcahy firing repeatedly at his father’s inert body came vividly to her mind. It takes a certain nature, a certain aggression to do something like that, was the thought that occurred to her, but she said no more, just waited to hear what Bridie had to say.

  ‘I’m not saying that. Anyone is capable of anything when it comes to it.’ This was unexpected from Bridie. Bridie was always so tentative, always so anxious to agree and to try to guess at a response before giving her own opinion. Sentimental remembrances of Fred’s babyhood, of his good nature as a child, of the impossibility of a boy like Fred bringing himself to murder his own father. All that would have been more in the usual mode from Bridie, but now she made no exceptions, made no excuses. After that bleak assertion, she said no more, but seemed to be thinking hard. In the silence of the room the clock ticked and the Reverend Mother watched the hand jump to eleven o’clock. The clock chimed and Bridie sat up very straight.

  ‘I know he didn’t do it, Reverend Mother,’ she said as though the clock had given her the signal to speak. ‘I know it because I was the one that did it. I was the one that killed Henry Mulcahy.’ And then, quite abruptly, the frozen look on the woman’s face broke up and she began to cry.

  ‘They won’t hang me, Reverend Mother, will they? I’d hate to be hanged. I’d kill myself first. Could you just tell the guards for me and let me just go off down to the river before they come for me. I’d prefer to do it that way if I was going to be hanged. I’m frightened about that now.’

  ‘Tell me what happened, Bridie,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘Here, take my handkerchief. Don’t cry, just tell me calmly what happened and allow me to sort it out.’ There was an untouched cup of tea that she had left on the mantelpiece while the bishop’s secretary had gorged himself on cake. It would be cold by now, but she stirred two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into it and stood over the woman and saw that she swallowed a few gulps before she returned to her chair.

  ‘Now, Bridie, tell me sensibly. What did happen?’

  ‘He was up in the back attic when I went up there. He was standing there. Just standing in front of the trunk, looking through one of the windows. There wasn’t much light up there, the front attics get light from the street, but the back ones don’t. I didn’t see him at first. I had just come up for a bucket, but then he started pulling at me, the way he always did and I pushed him away. Told him I wanted nothing to do with a man who could build a tannery yard on top of the body of his own dead child. And then he went across and put a chair under the handle of the door. Just so that no one could come in. He knew that I would never be able to escape him. That I wouldn’t try. He knew that I was scared stiff of him.’

  ‘What happened then?’ There was something very artificial about this account. Would Henry Mulcahy really have bothered with Bridie, looking the way she did now? Twenty years ago, it might have been a different story.

  ‘I killed him; I thought that it was the only way that I could ever be rid of him … So I killed him.’

  Bridie had left a long moment of silence between her last sentence and the one that had gone before. It was almost a response to the silence that had greeted her confession. The Reverend Mother studied her carefully while Bridie lifted the cup and swallowed some more of the cold tea. Their eyes met over the rim of the teacup and then Bridie sat back and waited with an expectant air. The Reverend Mother thought about it for a moment. Bridie, she remembered, was not from the city of Cork. A country girl, she had never had the fluency and the stream of words that came from the true city dwellers. And yet there had been quite a flow of words to describe the scene in the attic. Almost as though she had rehearsed the story.

  ‘Tell me, Bridie,’ she said eventually, ‘how did you kill Mr Mulcahy? What did you do?’

  This detail about the death being caused by the blow of an iron bar or cudgel to the lower back of the skull was, she knew, known only to the Civic Guards, to Dr Scher and to herself. Patrick had told her that they were keeping it a secret for the moment. There had been no trace, in the house at Shandon Street, of any instrument that might have caused the death of the merchant.

  It was a simple question, but seemed to be an alarming one. Bridie endeavoured to put the empty cup back on its saucer, but her hand trembled and the cup slipped to the floor. Not broken, the rug had saved it. But Bridie spent some time apologizing, exclaiming about her carelessness and taking the cup to the window to make sure that there was no crack in it. The Reverend Mother waited patiently until the woman ran out of words and then repeated her question.

  ‘Well, that’s my business, Reverend Mother,’ said Bridie flushing a dark red, and then, aghast at her own temerity, she began to cry again.

  ‘Mr McCarthy said that they wouldn’t hang me. He said that to tell them Mr Mulcahy put me in fear of my life. He told me to tell the Civic Guards that it was self-defence. He said that he knew a clever lawyer that would get me off. Susan and the Missus said that they would be witnesses for me. We’ve been talking it over this morning. It was Mr McCarthy who came in with the paper. We hadn’t got ours, yet. Susan is going over to Montenotte to talk to Sally and the boys. I said I’d go straight to the barracks and sign a confession and …’ Bridie ran out of words and started bleakly through the window pane at the fog outside.

  ‘And so you decided to drop in to see me and to get a second opinion on this very serious matter, Bridie.’ The Reverend Mother made her voice sound bracing and Bridie nodded obediently.

  ‘What do you think, Reverend Mother?’ she asked pathetically. ‘Will I just get a few months in gaol? I wouldn’t mind that. It would be a good rest for me and meals regular, they say. Just a few months. That’s what Mr McCarthy thought. That’s what he said to Susan. He said that he had been talking to a solicitor and that was his opinion. Susan wanted to go with me, to make sure that I was all right, but he said that I would be better on my own. What do you think that they’ll ask me? My head is in such a muddle ever since that evening. I couldn’t remember a thing about it much. I remember putting him in the trunk, of course. The auctioneer has been up, telling us all about that.’

  ‘Excuse me, Reverend Mother.’ Sister Bernadette put her head around the door after a perfunctory knock. ‘Mr Hayes, the auctioneer is here. He’d like to have a word. He said to tell you that it will only take a minute of your time, but he has a van waiting at the gate and he’s due himself in Ballinlough in ten minutes’ time. Got his own car, parked behind the van.’

  ‘Very well.’ The Reverend Mother rose to her feet. She felt slightly annoyed at the way that Sister Bernadette graded the social status of her visitors, was willing to interrupt a conversation with poor Bridie, whereas wild horses would not have dragged her to knock on the door while the bishop’s secretary was closeted in the Reverend Mother’s room. Nevertheless, it mightn’t be a bad idea to give Bridie a few minutes to think matters over and perhaps to find a way to climb down from her dramatic purpose.

  ‘Take Bridie into the kitchen will you, Sister Bernadette? Give her a fresh cup of tea from the stove out there. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes, Bridie, and then we can finish our conversation.’

  ‘Reverend Mother! I won’t keep you half a second.’ Mr Hayes on his rubber-soled shoes swept into the room on a flood of words. ‘Busy, I’m sure! Well, don’t I know it! You’re always busy, Reverend Mother. Everyone knows that, God bless the work that you do. Now, you’ll be wondering why I come here bothering you and I wouldn’t have thought of it, wouldn’t have dreamt of it, but for that terrible business last week. I’d have just sent one of the lads over with a note or had a word on the phone with your good sister. But after what happened the last time! Never will I forget it! I said to Jack; my right-hand man, you know. Been with me for more years than I like to think of. I said to Jack, the Reverend Mother of St Marys of the Isle will like these, but I daren’t send them to her unless I’m by her side when she opens it. Come and see it. I’ll gu
arantee that you’ll be pleased with it. Out-of-date, but good stuff. Do come and see, Reverend Mother. I’ll not have an easy moment until you approve.’

  Mr Hayes fidgeted around the Reverend Mother like an over-active sheep dog and she allowed herself to be escorted up the corridor and into the convent hallway. There was a trunk lying there, placed on the sturdy wooden seats of three chairs. And on either side, with the appearance of a guard of honour, were two of the auctioneer’s men, clothed in well-brushed green leather aprons and standing stiffly to attention.

  This was a very different trunk to the other one. It was a good quality heavy leather trunk and plastered all over with travel labels. ‘Calcutta’, she read on one, ‘Marseille’, ‘Bristol’, ‘Singapore’, ‘Southampton’ on others.

  ‘Open it up, boys,’ commanded Mr Hayes and obediently they flung back the lid.

  ‘There you are, you see, children’s clothes. Stuff left over from the Major Heffernan sale. No buyer for them, but very good stuff, Reverend Mother. Feel the thickness of that little coat. Hardly worn. And all those shoes. Look like they’ve come straight from the shop, don’t they? Never wore a passed-down item in their lives, Reverend Mother, did they? New clothes every day of the week; that’s the way it would have been,’ said Mr Hayes, his excitement leading him into a pardonable exaggeration. ‘Look at those lovely little jumpers. Jaeger wool, I’d be bound. And the thick woollen socks. Your little boys and girls would be snug in those, wouldn’t they? And those rubber boots, look at them, Reverend Mother! Brand new! Just out of the shop, clean as a whistle.’