A Shameful Murder

by Cora Harrison

  ‘And neither missed the girl?’

  ‘The old story,’ said Patrick with a grimace. ‘Both drunk, I’d say. Each thought that she was with the other. But that’s not all.’

  He hesitated for a moment and then picked up the travelling bag that he had put beside his chair. Mother Aquinas’s eye had gone to it when he came in. A slightly old-fashioned leather bag, she thought, not new, slightly scuffed, but expensive-looking.

  ‘She left this in the cloakroom,’ he said. ‘Got a ticket for it. The girl in the Imperial Hotel remembered her leaving it there. Was sure that it belonged to Miss Fitzsimon.’

  He gave her a glance and then turned his attention to the bag. She watched while he opened it and methodically took out the garments one by one – skirts, blouses, jackets, nightdress, underclothes, none of them new, some even mended neatly in places, but all of a good quality – expensive clothes, but from a few years back, she thought, looking at the skirt-lengths. Her merry young ladies who turned up the hems of their gymslips would think them dowdy and out-of-date.

  ‘And what’s that?’ she asked, seeing a price tag on an oilskin toilet bag.

  ‘That’s brand new. Bought in the Munster Arcade – bought two days ago – everything brand new inside – soap, wash flannel, tooth powder, comb, hairbrush – never been used.’

  ‘So she was running away – to Liverpool – that’s what the ticket said, didn’t it, Patrick?’

  ‘That’s right and she had reserved a first-class cabin. Why did she want to go to Liverpool?’ He did not hesitate, but answered his own question. ‘Fits with the pregnancy, I suppose – but who was the father of the baby? And why didn’t they get married?’

  ‘Perhaps he was married already,’ said the Reverend Mother sadly, her mind on the past.

  ‘All the more reason for the man to murder her – that would provide a motive – perhaps she threatened to wreck his marriage, or something like that,’ said Patrick quickly.

  ‘But no one saw her leave the hotel? With a man or without a man?’

  ‘That’s right. We’ve questioned everyone. The Imperial Hotel had a full staff that night. The assistant manager himself was on the desk by the door. This is the big event of the year for them. They had to make sure that anyone who went near the ballroom or the suite of rooms above had a ticket, otherwise they were ushered into the bar at the front of the hotel, and, just for that night, the guests at the hotel had to use the back stairs. The assistant manager knows the Fitzsimons well – is quite certain that Miss Fitzsimon did not leave, either by herself or with a gentleman. He’s a bright fellow; remembered the old man, Mr Fitzsimon, going home, and noticed that he was pretty drunk. The brother left with a big party – men and women – and the assistant manager said that he couldn’t swear as to whether the sister was with them or not, but he didn’t think so. He was able to reel off a lot of names – lots of the Blackrock crowd.’

  The Reverend Mother nodded. The merchant princes of Cork city lived on the hill named Montenotte, or on the pleasant banks of the River Lee around the village of Blackrock. Blackrock had been her birthplace. She knew all of the surnames – the Murphys, the Lamberts, the Crawfords, the Newenhams, the Hewits, the Roches, the Fitzsimons and the Dwyers – they had all been part of her once.

  ‘Was there a fiancé? A boyfriend,’ she amended. It was Eileen who had informed her once that the word ‘fiancé’ belonged to the Victorian era and that modern girls of the 1920s used the word ‘boyfriend’.

  ‘I enquired about that – delicately,’ said Patrick with a grimace. ‘Neither the brother nor the father was very forthcoming, but when I told them about the ten-pound note, well, they opened up a bit.’

  He told the story well, she thought, observing him as though he were still one of the pupils. She could see father and son, condescending to this policeman, this member of the newly founded civic guards, whose accent would immediately classify him as one of the lower orders in a city full of uneasy snobbery, where the rich sent their children to school in England – not because the education was superior, but purely in order that they would never, ever, pronounce ‘tea’ as ‘tay’ or ‘quay’ as ‘kay’ and that the difficult digraph th would always be safe in their mouths.

  Patrick would have been impassive, she knew. She could hear his voice, undisturbed, asking the questions, probing.

  ‘So they were astonished to hear about the ticket to Liverpool and the ten-pound note in her evening bag,’ she commented.

  ‘No.’ Patrick thought about this for a moment. ‘No, not astonished for long,’ he said slowly. ‘It was odd really, almost as though it suddenly made sense. It turned out that she had asked for money from her father a few days ago, had demanded it. Gerald, Mr Gerald, the father kept calling him …’ Patrick’s grin was slightly lopsided, but the Reverend Mother did not comment. He would have to learn to deal with this sort of snobbery. It would do him no kindness to sympathize or to express disapproval.

  ‘So Gerald …’ she prompted.

  ‘He was very open about the fuss – hysterical fuss – that Angelina had made, of how she had screamed and shouted and demanded fifty pounds.’

  ‘Fifty pounds,’ said the Reverend Mother meditatively. It was a considerable sum of money. One could buy a small house for that.

  ‘That’s right – Joe checked at the bank. She did cash the cheque. We checked the shipping office, too. She bought her ticket herself. They remembered her well when I showed a photograph.’

  ‘Just the one ticket?’ queried the Reverend Mother. She would have liked to see the photograph, but it was probably back at the station and, really, it could be none of her business. What would Lucy say, she wondered? Would she be interested? It was hard to tell with Lucy.

  ‘Just the one ticket,’ confirmed Patrick. ‘It cost her five pounds, cabin and all.’

  ‘And she had ten pounds in her bag,’ mused the Reverend Mother. ‘That leaves thirty-five pounds unaccounted for.’

  ‘That’s right and that’s not the only thing – the son came out with a name – the father tried to shut him up, but it was too late. Apparently Angelina had wanted to go to college, to study at the university, but her father had not wanted her to, had refused permission but she had signed on to start her studies in English Literature next autumn and she had become friendly with this fellow Eugene Roche, who was a lecturer at the university. I gathered that the father didn’t approve of the relationship.’

  ‘I know the family,’ commented the Reverend Mother. ‘They would have been well off – in my day, anyway,’ she added smiling to think how long distant her heyday was now from this modern year of 1923.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that, but we can look him up.’ Patrick’s voice was suddenly impatient and she understood his feelings. If a man was a lecturer at the university, then surely he could marry and maintain a wife and a family, even if there was little of the family’s inherited wealth for him to share in.

  ‘Was he there, this Eugene Roche, there at the Merchants’ Ball?’ But of course he would have been. Everyone who was part of that circle would have been there. She hardly listened to his answer, her mind shifting through the facts. It was unlikely that Angelina and Eugene Roche planned to run away to England. Any father, faced with a pregnancy, would have immediately capitulated and agreed to a marriage.

  But what if Eugene Roche had not wanted to marry Angelina Fitzsimon?

  Could he have decided to make a quick end to her and to the unborn child?

  ‘Yes, but the father was adamant that there was no relationship between them.’

  ‘Didn’t like the idea?’ Perhaps, thought the Reverend Mother, the Roches had taken a step downwards in the Cork hierarchy.

  ‘He had bigger fish to fry,’ said Patrick. ‘In fact, he told me that he had hoped that soon he would be able to announce an engagement between Miss Angelina and a business associate of his, a Mr Thomas McCarthy, here on a holiday from his tea plantation in India. The marriage was
to have taken place in May before he returned to India.’

  ‘And was this gentleman at the Merchants’ Ball last night?’ Reverend Mother began to feel her brain clicking over, shifting facts, slotting in those figures whose faces she could only vaguely picture, slotting them in beside that dead and slightly swollen face of the girl with red-brown curls and blue eyes. McCarthy, she thought, he must be the son, or perhaps the grandson of Richard McCarthy. Her mind went back to Richard. He had been very dashing, she thought. I wonder what this McCarthy is like?

  ‘Yes. When I asked Mr Fitzsimon about this, well, he hesitated a bit. It took him a minute before he said: “I believe that he danced with my daughter early in the evening, but then he came upstairs and joined my table.” He said that this fellow told him that Miss Angelina wanted to talk with a friend. I thought that sounded a bit odd,’ said Patrick. ‘I didn’t comment, of course, but just asked whether McCarthy was staying with him at Blackrock and he told me that no, he was staying in the Imperial Hotel. I think that he, this McCarthy from India, must be pretty rich if he was going to live for a couple of months there – still, I can look into that.’

  There was obviously something else on his mind so the Reverend Mother waited without comment. He had got up from his chair and was walking restlessly up and down the room, his heavy boots marking out a measured tread on the shining wooden floor.

  ‘But how did her body end up in the river?’ Patrick seemed to be asking the question of himself so she did not reply. ‘It must have gone into the river, but for the life of me, I can’t think how. No one saw her leave the Imperial Hotel,’ he finished.

  ‘She was soaked through,’ began the Reverend Mother.

  ‘That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘And it wasn’t just rainwater – there were traces of sewage in her clothes – you know what the river is like whenever there is flooding – it gets into the sewers and the sewers get into it. She was definitely in the river at some stage.’

  ‘Sewage,’ said the Reverend Mother meditatively. It was true of course that sewage did get into the river, and out on to the streets, and through the crumbling doors of the old Georgian houses on Cove Street and Douglas Lane.

  Nevertheless, the word stayed in her mind.

  When she had been a child she had known the Imperial Hotel very well. Her father, an importer of wines from Bordeaux, had been a great friend of the man who had designed it – the man who had gone on to be City Sheriff and then High Sheriff of Cork and one of its foremost citizens. He was proud of his achievement, this architect – Mr Deane – with an effort she remembered his name. He and her father had often lunched there at the Imperial Hotel and as a petted and spoiled only child of a widowed father she had accompanied him, grown bored with the long conversation and wandered around the splendid rooms and down into the basement. In later years her memories were of the magnificent ballroom and the side parlour where the ladies left their cloaks in the hands of obsequious attendants, but looking back into her childhood recollections of the late 1850s it was the part below ground – the kitchen, the basement and the cellars which had fascinated her.

  And now she remembered the large manhole in one of the cellars. The kitchen boy had tried to frighten her once when he had prised up the iron cover and scraped a pot full of fish innards down into the fast-flowing water beneath.

  ‘Tide’s going out,’ he had said nonchalantly. ‘If you slipped in there you’d end up in the sea in a couple of hours.’ She had taken a step backwards, she remembered, picturing her ten-year-old self, dressed in a full-skirted, ankle-length, dark green gingham dress with elaborately puffed sleeves edged with white lace. She had been proud of that dress and suddenly nauseated at the thought of it being splashed by the water from the sewer. For ages afterwards she had avoided going down there when the kitchen boy was anywhere near. The idea of floating down a dark passage with all of the muck and filth frightened her more than the idea of ending up in the clean ocean.

  But last night, before dawn, there had been an abnormally high tide which had been driven up through the harbour and along the two channels of the River Lee, by a gale-force south-easterly wind that had only dropped down at dawn. The South Mall, the quays, the Grand Parade, even Western Road, leading out of the city, had been badly flooded, as had the rest of the east side of the town.

  ‘Patrick,’ she said slowly. ‘Do you remember your history of the building of Cork?’

  His gaze was puzzled. ‘Cork?’ he queried. ‘I was never too interested in history – never one of your nationalists – we did a lot about Sarsfield and the Treaty of Limerick, I remember, but I don’t think he was from Cork.’

  Reverend Mother felt a moment’s impatience. There was no doubt that the highly nationalistic version of Irish history, the struggles against the English, the futile battles, the organized land wars, as taught by the Christian Brothers, had resulted in a lot of clever boys giving up their studies at the university and going off to join the Republicans and spending their nights hiding out in remote derelict farmhouses and their days in attacking those deemed hostile to their dream of a republic. It was just as well that Patrick, with an elderly mother to support, had not taken that route.

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking of people,’ she said carefully. ‘I was thinking about how Cork was built.’

  He was attentive and polite as she sketched out for him the beginnings of Cork but his interest quickened when she told how the eighteenth-century merchants had built arched and solid brick culverts over the water channels and on top of them streets – streets, such as Patrick Street whose meandering path still mirrored the original stream beneath, also the Grand Parade and the South Mall, streets that even still, a hundred years later, periodically disappeared and reverted to rivers. ‘It used to be like Venice,’ she explained, though she was uncertain whether he would know anything about that city. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which he would have studied for his schools’ certificate, gave very little sense of place, unlike the London plays of the Richards and the Henrys.

  ‘You’ll have noticed,’ she continued, ‘that most of those houses along the South Mall, including the Fitzsimons’ warehouses, have their front door twenty feet above the pavement – with those steps leading up to it – there used to be boats tied at the bottom of the steps,’ she said – the image had always delighted her – but he was beginning to look restive so she finished hurriedly, ‘the Imperial Hotel was built after that, of course. Its front door is at street level, but it was built on top of the remains of an old warehouse and it has a huge manhole in the cellar – or it used to have – and the sewers will go under the street and into …’

  ‘And into the river that was arched over; the river beneath the South Mall!’ He was on his feet. He had grasped the point instantly. ‘So she might never have left the hotel,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘She might have been killed there.’

  SIX

  The Bishop of Cork, Daniel Cohalan, 1922:

  ‘Anyone who within the diocese of Cork shall organize or take part in any ambush, or kidnapping or otherwise, shall be deemed guilty of murder and shall occur by the very fact the censure of excommunication.’

  ‘Have you heard the news, Reverend Mother?’ Sister Bernadette, fresh from her morning chat with her friend, the postman had a flush of excitement on her face. She didn’t wait for an answer, but poured out the whole dramatic story of how the Bishop of Cork, the Right Reverend Daniel Cohalan, had been shot in the arm, probably by a Republican while opening an extension to the nearby Sharman Crawford Technical Institute.

  When the children arrived they were shocked and pale-faced. Most had their houses savagely searched by armed soldiers on the evening before and some even again this morning. The Reverend Mother was pleased when a sharp peal came from the doorbell and a minute later a beaming Sister Bernadette ushered in Lucy, accompanied by her chauffeur carrying a large box packed to the top with books.

  ‘Well, Reverend Mother, these are for your girls,’
said Lucy, signalling to the chauffeur to empty the books on to a table. She was exquisitely dressed. The girls were impressed by the books, expensively bound and gilt-edged, but perhaps more, thought the Reverend Mother, by her outfit. They clustered around her, staring at her in admiration, inhaling the expensive perfume that enveloped her.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said one and then, impulsively, but effectively, Nellie O’Sullivan said: ‘I do like your costume!’

  Nothing could have worked better. Lucy, still a showgirl at heart, did a twirl and showed off the lavender blue of her tweed two-piece and rested her chin on the warm brown of the furs, peeping coquettishly over her shoulder at them. The girls laughed and applauded and then eagerly began to pick up the beautiful books.

  ‘They might as well have them,’ said Lucy. ‘I caught Rupert using one to kill flies. That’s the only time I’ve seen him open one for months, I told him. I think his father bought them by the yard when he furnished the house for us after our marriage. They will be appreciated here. You will tell them all sorts of interesting things about the authors and how wonderful they are.’ She smiled benignly as the girls bent over the box and added in a stage whisper: ‘How singularly unbecoming that wretched gymslip is, isn’t it? I’ll have a word with Susan. Her three girls have more clothes than they know what to do with. We’ll pass them on to these pretty girls.’

  The Reverend Mother smiled. Lucy’s granddaughters’ clothes would be very appreciated by these girls, but she knew that the gift of books was not the only reason why Lucy had appeared on St Mary’s of the Isle so early on the morning.

  ‘I’ll leave you girls to look through the books and to note the titles and authors for the library,’ she said and then escorted her cousin from the room. It was no wonder, she thought, that Nellie had admired the costume of lavender blue – fashionably short, though not, perhaps, short enough for Sister Mary Immaculate to have pinned a frill to it – and the furs on her cousin’s shoulders were luxuriant and glossy.