A Gruesome Discovery

by Cora Harrison

  Susan was sitting very still, sitting with her strong chin propped up on one hand while she stared at the floor. Even when Eileen came in, she did not stir for a moment. But then she looked up and got to her feet and came to meet her. ‘I thought that I’d like to talk to you,’ she said. ‘Well, when I went to see Fred in the gaol, he mentioned your name and where you worked. He didn’t say any more, but I guessed that he meant me to ask advice and help from you. There’s not much that you can say, is there, when a warder is listening in?’

  Not much you can say, either, when your boss is in the back office, screened only by a four-foot high counter. The owner of the printing works steered a narrow course between running a legitimate business, producing posters, leaflets and tickets for small businesses and the more furtive printing of political pamphlets and polemical essays. He deprecated any open conversation on political or illegal matters in the confines of the business and most affairs were conducted with a traditional nod and wink, or else printer and customer went for a walk beside the river where all was wide open and no one could lurk in doorways and overhear a conversation.

  Well-versed in the ways of the business, Eileen gave a furtive look around and murmured, ‘Let’s have lunch; will you wait? I’ll only be about five minutes. I just have to finish off something.’ She didn’t delay for a reply, but escorted her visitor back to her chair, found the Cork Examiner and pressed it into her hands and then returned rapidly to her desk. Too late, though. The boss was there, talking to Jack, the compositor, who stood holding a rod full of upside-down and back-to-front letters, nodding his head wisely. They both looked at her as she went to sit behind her typewriter and then the boss disappeared hastily leaving her to Jack.

  ‘You’re not planning anything, are you, Eileen?’ said Jack. He was an elderly man. She got a bit irritated with him sometimes when he tried to pretend that he was her grandfather and was the one to give her advice on all subjects, but mainly she liked him. Now, however, she did not look at him, but began to roll a new sheet of paper onto her typewriter, taking meticulous care that the edges were straight. It didn’t work, though. Jack was a persistent man.

  ‘No’ planning daring raids on Cork Gaol or anything like that, are you?’ he said. ‘No’ dragging your boyfriend out, dressed up as a girl, are you? I suppose there’ll be no holding you now that you have your own motorbike. You’ll be up there in Dáil Eireann waving a pistol at them. But I’d leave Fred Mulcahy alone. You may love him dearly, but he’ll be very well guarded. You haven’t a chance of getting him out of gaol.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Jack,’ snapped Eileen. ‘Fred Mulcahy is nothing but a nuisance to me. He’s certainly not my boyfriend.’

  ‘One of them, I should have said; I suppose the queue would stretch down the length of Patrick Street if you were to put all your boyfriends edge to edge.’

  ‘You’ve dropped a piece of type, look, there it is, under your chair,’ pointed out Eileen and began to pound on her noisy typewriter at full speed. This was the trouble about Cork. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Susan had probably been recognized the minute she set foot in the printing works and the mention of Fred had been enough to set alarm bells ringing. The proprietor steered a careful path between Republican interests and the mechanics of running a profitable business to feed his family. He had been dubious about employing Eileen after her spell of notoriety, but he had given her a trial and had been pleased with her. She had even received a rise in her wage packet recently.

  ‘I’m not going to risk the job just for Fred Mulcahy,’ she said to herself as she mechanically typed out yet another list of furniture, bric-a-brac and framed pictures for Hayes’ auctioneering rooms. Fred was not worth it. She was sorry for him. He was obsessed with his father and how much he hated him and she had often suspected that he had joined the Republicans just in order to infuriate the old man, but that did not make him an admirable person. He had none of the quiet determination and dedication that characterized Eamonn and Danny and most of the other boys that she had known. Fred, she thought, is always trouble, no matter where he goes. She had been lucky to escape with her life and her liberty from that business in the harbour.

  When she finished the job and came into the outer office, Susan was still sitting in the very same position, half turned towards the window; her eyes fixed on its grimy surface.

  ‘Let me just drop these off at the auction rooms and then we’ll have lunch,’ said Eileen. It was an indulgence to go out to lunch. She had a sandwich in her bag and normally made do with that, unless Eamonn came to take her out. But she would treat herself and Susan today. There was a very nice place in Cook Street. A good place to talk secrets if you went upstairs and took a seat beside the back window. The stairs were very steep and, during the week days, not many people bothered to climb them. And the tables were far apart.

  ‘I’ll pay for the lunch, Susan,’ she said when they got outside. She had thought that Susan looked a little worried when she had mentioned lunch. The girl was carrying a handbag, a very old and very old-fashioned handbag, large enough to be a shopping bag, but the possibility was that she might have no money in it. ‘I’ve had a rise in salary,’ Eileen said chattily as they walked along the South Terrace. ‘It’s a lovely feeling.’ And then, a little curiously, she asked, ‘Did you ever think of getting a job, Susan? It’s nice to have your own money coming in. I could teach you how to use a typewriter. It’s easy to get the hang of it and after that, well, you just need practice.’

  Susan shook her head. ‘I don’t want a job; I want to go to university and this is where I need your help.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know much about that,’ said Eileen. She surveyed the girl dubiously. Susan was clever. She knew that. She and Eileen had sat the Intermediate Examination at the same time and had divided the top honours of Cork city together. Eileen had scored the highest mark in most subjects, but Susan had mostly come second to her. And when it had come to mathematics, Susan had easily beaten her. Yes, she would have the brains, but could her mother afford the fees? University cost pots of money and Susan looked poor. In fact, she looked very poor. Her clothes were terrible. Not just dreadfully out of fashion, but just plain awful. They looked as if they might have belonged to her mother. They didn’t even fit correctly. Eileen sent a few quick, surreptitious glances at her as they walked side by side. The coat was far too wide on the shoulders and its sleeves drooped down over her fingertips. And that skirt that she wore seemed to be dipping to one side where it appeared below the hem of the coat. She was a very thin girl, with a small waist and could look great if she had the money for new clothes and a decent haircut. A short skirt, knee length, or above if possible, one of those up-to-date, hip-length cardigans and her hair shingled, then she could look quite fashionable and attractive. That, as Eileen knew well, would cost a tiny fraction of the termly fee at university.

  ‘Can your mother afford university for you?’ she asked bluntly.

  Susan looked at her sideways. ‘The money could be found,’ she said obliquely and then turned to look at the river. Her air was that of someone who wanted to say no more for the moment, and Eileen did not press her and talked a bit more about typing and how she had practised and practised, typing the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ over and over again and thereby acquiring the skill to hit the key of any letter of the alphabet without even looking.

  Susan, however, did not appear to be listening, but when they came out from the auctioneer’s place, she stopped and looked at Eileen.

  ‘Would you mind if we skipped lunch and went up to Pope’s Quay. I have an appointment with my father’s solicitor and I’d like a bit of company. I’d like someone that I could talk to afterwards and see if I am imagining things.’

  ‘Imagining things?’ queried Eileen.

  ‘Imagining if we are being cheated out of my father’s money,’ said Susan, bluntly. ‘I think this solicitor, who is supposed to be looking after our affairs,
I think that he might be cheating us.’

  ‘I’m not too good at the figures,’ said Eileen doubtfully. ‘I only got through the Intermediate because of the geometry and the algebra. I liked those, but I hate adding up. It bores me stiff and whenever I try to check, well, I keep getting different results.’

  ‘Don’t worry about the figures; I’ve got them all here.’ Susan patted the large handbag. ‘I just want you to watch his face, and perhaps ask a question if it occurs to you, sort of innocent-like, and then we can chat about it afterwards on our way back to your workplace.’

  ‘Oh, I can do that.’ Eileen gave a giggle. ‘I love asking awkward questions. What’s the name of your father’s solicitor?’ Did the girl miss her father, she wondered. She had not shed a tear at the funeral, but that just might be Susan. Never one to talk very much; she remembered that from the far-off days when they had both sat the Intermediate Examination at the Model School. All the other girls had been excited, nervous, exhilarated, all talking away while Susan sat quietly in the background studying log tables.

  ‘It’s a Mr O’Sullivan,’ said Susan. ‘I think that he is cheating us. He says that he hasn’t the money from the selling of the two houses. But he must have. The bank doesn’t have it, well, so Richard McCarthy says. They won’t talk to me at the bank; I even dragged my mother down there but they wouldn’t talk to her. Just a lot of plámás – a lot of the old “How are you, Mrs Mulcahy? I’m sorry for your trouble.” All that sort of thing, but no solid facts. They advised her to get Mr McCarthy to talk to her. Said that he is the executor of the will, so he’s the one that she should be dealing with. Mam wants me to talk to him.’

  ‘And did you? I saw him at the funeral,’ added Eileen.

  ‘I did, but I might as well be idle. He’s not telling anything, just going on about how complicated everything is and how we should leave everything to him.’

  ‘What did your mam say to that?’

  ‘She doesn’t want any trouble. She’d prefer to let Richard McCarthy handle everything.’

  ‘But you’re not happy.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Susan’s voice was firm and downright. ‘I’ve been over and over the accounts; I know them well. And I just think that nothing makes sense. Where is the money if it isn’t in the bank, that’s what I want to know? I asked a neighbour and she told me that the money is paid to the solicitor who holds it until everything is fixed up. My father’s house was sold by auction, but I don’t suppose that makes any difference.’

  Eileen thought about it. It did seem reasonable that if a house was sold then the money for it should be somewhere. And then she thought about something else.

  ‘What about the house in Montenotte?’ she asked. The whole city was aware that Mr Mulcahy, Hide and Skin Merchant, if you please, had built himself a large and fashionable house in the exclusive territory of Montenotte. ‘Wouldn’t he have spent the money there?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Susan. ‘No, he would not. That house was budgeted for years ago. It was all bought and paid for and reckoned up, long before the house in Shandon Street was sold. I could show you the figures.’ Once again she touched her enormous handbag. ‘They are all here, all in this accounts’ book. I’ve spent enough time on it. Reckoning up the credit and the debits, writing out cheques and reconciling the figures. There’s nothing that I don’t know about these accounts. In the last few years, my father has left them completely to me. I remember telling him that I had struck a balance, that everything for the Montenotte house had been bought and paid for. He was very pleased. He didn’t have much education, my Pa, he told me once that he had come to the city as a barefoot-boy, but he had a good head for figures.’

  ‘You take after him, I suppose,’ said Eileen. She felt sorry for this poor girl. Susan was a daughter of a prosperous merchant, and she, herself, was the illegitimate offspring of a fifteen-year-old girl. Nevertheless, she knew that in the amount of love and of attention that she had received, she had been very much superior to poor Susan. Her mother thought the world of her, had always done so; had been amazed and noisily celebratory of her achievements from as far back as she could remember. The whole of Barrack Street had been informed of Eileen’s cleverness. And she knew full well, that if there had been any remote possibility that Maureen MacSweeney could have funded a university education for her daughter, that she would have lived on dry bread in order to fulfil that ambition.

  ‘I always liked figures,’ said Susan.

  ‘What do you want to study at university?’ Eileen asked. The Reverend Mother had wanted Eileen to go to university, had wanted her to stay on in school for another year; had wanted to coach her for a university scholarship, a scholarship that would fund fees, books, and living expenses for a degree. She had been tempted. Had thought about it very seriously. Had known deep within her that the Reverend Mother’s faith was not unfounded, had known that with hard work and the Reverend Mother’s guidance, she would have a good chance.

  But she had thrown it up; thrown it up to join the Republicans who were fighting against the ignoble treaty which allowed Britain to retain the north and to retain the important ports, such as Cork Harbour. Still, some day, some day when Ireland was a true republic and when Patrick Pearse’s pledge that all children in the land would have equal privileges, when that day came …

  ‘Not maths, is it?’ she said aloud.

  ‘No, I want to study medicine, to be a doctor,’ said Susan.

  ‘That would be brilliant. A woman doctor. That’s what this city needs. That would shake everyone up a bit.’ Eileen was immediately enthusiastic and began to walk faster. ‘Let’s see what this solicitor has to say for himself,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t possibly show you the will,’ said Mr O’Sullivan. ‘You don’t understand the law, young lady. The will has to go to probate before it can be shown to anyone.’

  ‘In books they always show it to the family straight after the funeral,’ put in Eileen.

  ‘Oh, books!’ The solicitor gave a light laugh and then put his hand in front of his mouth and gave a hollow cough into it. ‘Don’t you worry about the will, Miss Mulcahy. Myself and Mr McCarthy, your father’s executor, we’ll look after it. These matters are very, very complicated, you know. I don’t suppose that either of you have heard of such a thing as probate.’

  ‘Yes, of course we have,’ said Eileen stoutly, her mind flitting through the pages of Bleak House. Surely that word, ‘probate’ had been mentioned somewhere among the eight hundred pages of that huge novel. The Reverend Mother had lent it to her from the series of classical novels kept in the nuns’ refectory and it had been an unspoken secret between them that Sister Mary Immaculate would never know that those sacred books, which reposed, mostly untouched, on their well-dusted shelves had been lent to one of the girls. In the secrecy of her room, the Reverend Mother had overseen the making of a brown paper cover and Eileen had carried it home reverentially.

  ‘I’m thinking about becoming a lawyer myself,’ she said carelessly. ‘So, of course, I have to study things like Probate and Affidavits and Chancery and the Michaelmas term and all that sort of thing.’ She finished with a light laugh and stared confidently across the empty desk at this solicitor. He had an uneasy look, she thought, although he was hiding it under an assumed manner of patronizing ease.

  ‘And, of course, you do have to give Miss Mulcahy an idea of what her father’s estate is worth. Just a round figure,’ she said airily. ‘Don’t worry about the shillings and pence. Just how much did he leave in pounds?’

  She saw how the solicitor’s eyelids flickered and said the word ‘crooked’ to herself. It would be good to have someone like Tom Hurley here to interrogate him. She leaned slightly forward, just in the way that Tom Hurley would have done, shoulders squared, hand going to pocket as if ready to produce a gun at a moment’s notice.

  ‘As I say, probate …’ His eyes went to the door a few times and now he almost seemed as though he were listening. And
yet there had been no one in the other basement room when they had arrived.

  ‘You’ve been expecting me, Mr O’Sullivan,’ Susan put in. ‘I’ve arrived at the time that you appointed. I’m surprised that you are not more prepared for my visit. I did tell you that I wanted to know about my father’s will.’ Susan was, of course, only trying to back up her friend, but Eileen wished that she had kept quiet. The girl’s voice was rough with nerves and it shook badly. She was just giving this crooked-looking solicitor a chance to despise her.

  ‘My client is, of course, very worried and anxious about this matter,’ she said aloud, doing her best to try to imagine how Mr Tulkinghorn in Bleak House would have handled this conversation. ‘She finds it most odd that there seems to be this veil of secrecy over affairs which concern her and her sister and brothers so closely.’

  ‘Oh, don’t concern yourself, Miss Mulcahy. You’ll be fine. The house in Montenotte may have to be given up to pay the costs et cetera, et cetera, but you’ll all be snug in the house in Shandon Street. You and your sister will probably be getting married soon. And your brothers, well, you know, Miss Mulcahy, some of those older boys might be best off going to Liverpool or London and looking for work there. This is a dangerous city for young lads and they, as you know to your sorrow, I’m afraid, they do get into trouble with the police. Bad company leads them astray,’ he said, complacently smoothing his greasy, too long, greying hair behind his ears.

  Eileen knew a moment of indignation and camaraderie on behalf of Fred Mulcahy and even more so on behalf of the boys with whom she had shared a life of exile and self-sacrifice. She opened her mouth indignantly and then shut it again. No point in being diverted by a man who knew how to pronounce et cetera, a word that, up to now, she had only imagined as a one syllabled etc. She would be suave and confident in everything that she said. By now she had thought herself thoroughly into the role of Susan’s legal advisor. She could see the girl fidget with her handbag and sent her a warning glance. This was not the moment to produce the accounts book. Let him give the information first and then refute it if necessary.