A Shameful Murder

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Bit different to the usual bodies that we get from the river; normally it’s the girls of the street and that like; I’ve seen plenty of them,’ he said slowly and she glimpsed, behind the simple words, a world of experience that was even deeper than hers.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said hesitantly, ‘this sort of thing often happens; is that right, Patrick?’

  ‘They don’t usually look so dressed up,’ he said. ‘But yes, we do get plenty of bodies.’

  ‘Seems a shame,’ she said, thinking of the guns, the killing, the plotting, the great speeches, the treaties and the promises. Her emotions told her that it was sad that nothing had changed, nothing had improved for people, but her experience of life told her that it was unlikely that anything else would have happened.

  He shrugged his shoulders. He would not, she thought, be one to bemoan what could not be achieved by him personally.

  ‘There’s a lot of trouble around here,’ he said, almost apologetically, almost as though he were responsible for the unrest that happened in the streets around where he had spent his childhood. ‘Not very good housing, in this place,’ he added and both he and she could visualize the street where he had been brought up, the stately Georgian terraced house which was now a crumbling home for twenty or thirty families with no work, little food and no hope. ‘Lots of fights, people get frustrated, they’ll fight over a handful of coins, and then there are the suicides – some of them can’t stand things any longer. But,’ he said, reverting to the body in front of him, ‘this looks like something different.’

  She knew what he meant, when he said that the body before them looked different. This girl was no prostitute from Sawmill Lane or beggar from North Main Street. Even the soaking from the river water couldn’t disguise the quality of the gown that she wore – satin, she thought – expertly tailored – elbow-length gloves of fine soft leather clung to her arms, a lustrous pearl necklace was around her neck and a pair of expensive-looking, brand-new – by the soles of them – high-heeled satin shoes were strapped around her ankles. Oddly enough there was something familiar about the hair and the eyes, but she could not think of any young lady of her acquaintance – her life, for the last fifty years, had been spent among the poor of the city.

  He was methodical as ever now that he had returned his attention to the dead girl. He took out the notebook again and she could see how his eyes travelled up and down the body, checking that he had noted all the details of the girl’s clothing.

  ‘She’s got something around her wrist,’ he said.

  ‘An evening bag,’ said the Reverend Mother sadly. ‘It matches her dress.’ Her mind went back to the dances of over fifty years ago. The gallant officers who had written their names on her dance programme; did they still do this, nowadays? she wondered. It had been a long time since she had indulged herself enough to think back to the days when she too dressed in silks and satins, wore an evening bag around her wrist.

  ‘I’ll see if I can get it off.’ The string was wound around the narrow wrist twice, but eventually he managed to disentangle it.

  She admired the care with which he opened the soaking wet bag – it was closed only with a drawstring. He put his hand inside it carefully once he had teased the layers apart, drew out something and held it up.

  ‘Ten-pound note,’ he said reverently. It was, she thought, despite his dazzling new salary as a civic guard, still a big sum of money to him. He replaced the bag on the dead girl’s body and put the banknote carefully inside an envelope that he produced from a pocket. He took his indelible pencil from another pocket, licked its tip and then signed his name over the flap.

  ‘Would you mind, Reverend Mother?’ He handed her the envelope and the pencil and she signed below his signature.

  ‘You’re very careful, Patrick,’ she said approvingly.

  ‘I’ll hand it in as soon as I get back to the station,’ he said as he stowed it away. Then he went back to the bag again. Patrick, thought the Reverend Mother, would always go back and double-check.

  He did not comment on the next item, just held it up so that she could see a small dance booklet with tiny pencil still attached. The Merchants’ Annual Ball, it said, printed in a fancy, gold-lettered script, and she nodded. Of course, it was March, the first week in March, and then she frowned.

  ‘The Imperial Hotel?’ she queried. The Merchants’ Balls had been held there in her youth, and were, she thought, still held there. But the Imperial Hotel was not by the river and it was more than half a mile away from St Mary’s of the Isle. How had the body got here? She looked out at the lane where murky water still burst out from what was once a covered drain. The morning tide had receded a little, but the narrow lane that ran beside the convent grounds still bubbled like a mountain stream with water from the drains and from the nearby river. It had been the usual result of days and nights of rain allied to a south-easterly gale that had blown the spring high-tide seawater straight up the River Lee.

  His eyes followed hers, but he did not comment. She felt the sharp, acrid smell of the fog rise up inside of her and swallowed hard.

  ‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘It’s stuck to the lining.’ Slowly and carefully he separated the object from the silk. It was small and oblong in shape, soaking wet but not yet pulp. A ticket, she realized; the print was still black and quite visible. It bore the name of the Cork Steam-Packet Shipping Company and was a first-class ticket for the ferry that left Albert Quay and went across to Liverpool three times a week. The date was printed, also: 5 March, 1923 – the midnight ferry, she thought. Patrick looked at it for a long minute before placing it into another envelope and then into one of his wide pockets.

  ‘What do you think that means?’ she asked eagerly and then was slightly ashamed when he didn’t reply. It was nothing to do with her, this ticket for a journey from Cork to England in a first-class cabin. Her role in this affair should now be at an end. She had reported the finding of a body to the civic guard and they would now take over. He had stood up and straightened himself decisively and she knew that he would not answer: Patrick Cashman did not deal in speculation, but in facts.

  ‘What will you do next?’ she asked then, as a substitute question.

  ‘Send to the barracks for a conveyance for the body to be taken to the vault, check the missing persons’ list, make a report to the superintendent, contact the coroner, send for the doctor to perform the post-mortem …’

  He thought for a moment as though mentally scanning his rulebook and then nodded, ‘And take it from there,’ he finished.

  ‘You go and report and I will stay and keep guard over the body,’ she said. ‘That will get everything moving more quickly and the less said about this the better, in case there are any political links,’ she finished. It was possible that the death was accidental, or self-inflicted, but murder could not be ruled out. Cork, in its first year of independence, simmered in the heat of a deadly civil war and the resolution of political differences was often murder.

  Not the will of God, she thought with a sudden anger. No God could wish evil on this child, whoever she was. Her eyes rested on Patrick. He lingered for a while, gently moved aside a strand of wet hair and then stayed very still for a moment, his eyes on a black bruise on the centre of the girl’s throat. He made another note and the Reverend Mother bowed her head. She had noticed the bruise when she examined the pearl necklace. This girl, she thought compassionately, had known the fear and intense pain of strangulation before death took her.

  TWO

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Ignis est essentia Dei.

  (Fire is the essence of God.)

  Alone with the girl, the Reverend Mother’s eyes lingered over the water-logged body at her feet and then went to the throat. The flood had delivered the body to her gate – she would take that as a sign that she should involve herself in this murder – nothing to do with the will of God, she thought irritably, remembering Sister Mary Immaculate, as she bent her min
d to the problem with a combination of compassion and of intellectual curiosity. This was a girl from a privileged background like her own – she would be a daughter of one of the rich merchant families of Cork; even without the dance programme the dress, the gloves, the necklace of pearls, all of these proclaimed her origins.

  And why did this fortunate girl have a ticket for the night boat to Liverpool tucked into her satin evening bag? Was she going alone? It looked like it. A male companion would surely keep both tickets in a more substantial wallet.

  Reverend Mother shifted uneasily. Her feet were growing cold and the fog that had settled over the flooded city was getting into her lungs and making her cough. She was tempted to go back for her warmer cloak – no one was likely to come – the lane was only an entrance for the local people to visit the small chapel without going into through the convent grounds – after it passed the narrow iron gate, it ended at the river’s edge. The original red sandstone to build the chapel, convent and school had been floated up the south arm of the river and then taken by cart, along this lane, on to the higher ground of St Mary’s of the Isle. Nonetheless, she thought, looking down at the still figure by her feet, to watch by the body was the only thing left to do for her now; the last service that she could pay to this unfortunate girl. She rubbed her hands together and then tucked them into her large sleeves and stood immobile, as though listening to the gospel readings at the Mass, gazing at the flood waters that had delivered the body to her gate. Odd, she reflected, that the philosopher Thomas Aquinas used the analogy of fire for the essence of God. Surely water came first. Water was the source of all life, the source of all good but also the source of all evil, depending on how man used it.

  But her mind, always the most active part of her, was busy. It was over fifty years since she had danced at the Merchants’ Ball in the Imperial Hotel, but she remembered the place well – its cosy, intimate supper rooms upstairs, its magnificent ballroom on the ground floor, the broad stairs of shining wood, the marble-floored hallways with shadowy alcoves. Her mind ranged over it, imagining a quarrel, a struggle. But surely not within the Imperial Hotel! Her memories supplied it with a huge staff, discreetly present in all parts, ready for every eventuality. The Merchants’ Ball was the biggest event of the year. What had happened there last night? And how had the body been taken from the hotel and launched into the river?

  She was deep in thought when a slight noise took her attention and then she realized that she was not alone. A head had appeared above the wall that surrounded the convent gardens; a head wearing a beret, suddenly silhouetted in the hazy light from the gas lamp. The Reverend Mother stood very still, hands tucked into large sleeves, body half-turned towards the gate. Her cloak, she knew, would cover her white breastplate and she lowered her head so that the black veil threw a shadow over the snowy linen wimple that enclosed her forehead. A long leg with a shining boot swung over the wall, and a shining gold ring appeared, held steady in a gloved hand, as the figure lowered itself down with a slight splash into the flooded lane.

  A pistol; thought the Reverend Mother and stayed very still. There was a certain amount of respect still for the clergy, but nerves were at trigger point during these fearful days where brother fought against brother. She had no wish to alarm this young man – a Republican, she thought – and was glad that Patrick had left. He would have felt it his duty to arrest the stealthy figure and the civic guards were unarmed.

  She had been seen, though. A torch was suddenly produced and it flared its light upon her.

  The muzzle of the pistol pointed towards her for a second and then was hastily lowered. And so was the torch.

  But by then Reverend Mother had seen enough.

  ‘Good morning, Eileen,’ she said in icy tones and by the light of the torch saw the long legs shuffle uneasily.

  Eileen O’Donovan had been one of the most gifted and most advanced pupils that the school on St Mary’s of the Isle had ever produced. When the Reverend Mother had seen her last she had been dressed in a navy-blue gymslip with a blouse that was supposedly white, but had turned to pale grey from the smuts and smoky emissions of the foggy city, and a much-darned navy cardigan. Her black hair had been demurely confined to twin plaits, but now it streamed down her back from her beret and instead of a gymslip she wore a tailored tweed jacket, well-fitting breeches and below them a highly polished pair of knee-high leather boots. For a moment the girl said nothing and then, in a voice that she strove to make sound casual, she said politely: ‘Good morning, Reverend Mother. It’s a terrible morning, isn’t it?’

  Reverend Mother ignored this. ‘Are you a member of the Republican Party, Eileen?’ she asked, trying to keep the note of censure from her voice. It was, after all, none of her business what her past pupils did with their lives.

  ‘Yes, I am.’ By the gas lamp Eileen’s face was defiant. She added a perfunctory, ‘Reverend Mother,’ but closed her lips firmly after that. She was not going to make any excuses or explanations.

  ‘Your mother told me that you had a good office job.’

  ‘And so I do; I’m press officer for the Republicans. I’ve had pieces published in all the newspapers – telling our side of the story.’ There was a note of pride in the girl’s voice. She looked in blooming health. She was well and warmly dressed in that good quality cloth and the hollow cheeks had filled out. It was well known that the Republicans paid well – the Reverend Mother had heard that even respectable young solicitors were not averse to taking part in Republican Courts as the fee was double their usual one from the newly formed Free State. What the Republicans needed, they did not hesitate to take from the prosperous shops in Patrick Street, cheerfully assuring the owners that it was all in a good cause.

  ‘You always did write … did write well,’ murmured the Reverend Mother. She had hastily suppressed the words ‘very imaginative stories’ as perhaps an inappropriate phrase in the circumstances. She shouldn’t have been surprised, though; Eileen had always been a rebel. She remembered a lively lesson with the most advanced girls in the school when the struggle through Milton’s poem Paradise Lost had been enlivened by Eileen’s sudden adoption of Satan as a revolutionary hero rising up under oppression. However, words were one thing, guns and the taking of life was another. Her eyes went to the pistol which Eileen had hastily shoved back into her pocket and then to the dead girl at her feet.

  Eileen’s eyes followed those of her former teacher and she shook her head firmly.

  ‘This is nothing to do with us, Reverend Mother, nothing to do with the Republican Party,’ she said with emphasis. ‘We were notified and I was sent up to see what had happened.’

  ‘Notified … I see – Jimmy Logan, I suppose.’ Mother Aquinas had wondered why the gas lamp had not been extinguished, but now the matter was explained. Jimmy, the lamplighter, would be a good source of intelligence for the Republicans as, legitimately, curfew or no curfew, he was on the streets every morning and every evening, carrying his ladder with him, and stopping to talk to everyone in the neighbourhood. An unreliable man, she thought dispassionately, a man who had no aversion to manufacturing news when there was none available. He was, of course, in his element in these troubled times.

  ‘And what have you been sent to do, Eileen?’ She reminded herself that she was no longer Eileen’s teacher.

  ‘First of all to make sure that no one left any false information – you’d be surprised at the number of dead bodies that have a placard around their neck and the words Informer Executed by Order of the Irish Republican Party written on it – mostly misspelt,’ she added with the disdain of one who had mastered spelling of words like ‘committee’ by the time she was eight years old.

  ‘No, there was nothing left like that; I was the one who found the body,’ said the Reverend Mother and her eyes went to the quiet figure at their feet. Young lives wasted, she thought sadly. This girl here, this child of a wealthy family, with everything to live for – she was dead and Eileen, her past pupil,
one of her girls, with all her brains – what would be her future? Long years in prison, death at the end of a rope, death at the back of an alley with a bullet through her heart? Through tears that welled into her eyes, she saw Eileen take out a notebook, rather like the one that Patrick had produced, and make a few notes, looking all around her and then focusing on the body again.

  ‘She’s posh, isn’t she? Is that velvet, Reverend Mother – that dress of hers?’

  ‘No, it’s satin.’ The Reverend Mother heard the note of sadness in her own voice, as she blinked back her tears, and knew that this time the sadness was for Eileen as much as for the poor dead girl. Eileen had devoured stories about well-off young ladies going to balls and parties in the works of Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray, but her practical knowledge of silks, satins and velvets was as imprecise and vague as the convent’s teaching about the angels of heaven and the devils of hell.

  ‘We’ll be blamed for it; you know that, don’t you?’ Eileen was still writing busily. ‘Or at least we will if I don’t get in quickly. Today is Tuesday so there won’t be much in the paper tomorrow – no markets today. I was going to try and do an article on the lunatic asylum and what a disgrace it is that no money is spent on it and they are talking about spending £100,000 on a new city hall – a few of the boys were going to come up with me so that I could have a look without being thrown out. But now, I think I’ll do one about her instead. The other will keep – this is topical.’ She looked thoughtfully at the figure on the ground. ‘Wonder who did it?’ she asked, speaking more to herself than to her past teacher.

  Eileen would have been used to dead bodies over the last few years, thought the Reverend Mother and then was surprised to see her touch one knuckle to the corners of her eyes in a childlike gesture that brought back affectionate memories.

  ‘Poor lasher,’ she said compassionately, the Cork slang word coming easily to her lips. ‘There she was all dressed up – wonder whether she was at the Merchants’ Ball last night. The place was stiff with civic guards in front of the Imperial Hotel when I passed down the South Mall last night. Do you know what, Reverend Mother? I’d love to put a bullet in the mullacker that did that to the poor girl – strangled her, didn’t he? You can see the marks of it on her throat.’