A Shameful Murder

by Cora Harrison

  The door was opened to her by Catty Cotter, a past pupil; a bright girl, thought the Reverend Mother regretfully. Perhaps if only she might have had the chance to go to Liverpool …

  And then she remembered the problem about Angelina Fitzsimon, and her thoughts about Mary O’Sullivan, and decided to deal with one matter at a time. At least the house here was warm and shining with cleanliness and there was a smell of savoury cooking in the background. Catty Cotter ‘lived in’, as they said, boarded in the house by night and worked there by day, with only one half-day a week in which to amuse herself and to visit her family. However, she was surely much better off spending her days and nights here than in the room where her mother lived, or on the streets and quays of the city, like some of her contemporaries.

  The Reverend Mother thought that there was something to be said for domestic service in a caring home to form a bridge between the children’s birthplace and their ultimate destination in England or in America.

  ‘You’re looking well, Catty,’ she said with approbation, noting the neat apron, the clean dress and the washed hair.

  ‘Thank you, Reverend Mother.’ Catty ushered her into the parlour, evoking cries of delight from Mrs O’Leary and then whispered commands to Catty. The Reverend Mother sat down by the fire and arranged her thoughts until Catty brought in the inevitable pot of tea and slices of cake and then disappeared back into the kitchen.

  ‘God bless you, Reverend Mother, how are you, at all? I heard you had a terrible shock. Found a girl, a dead girl.’ Mrs O’Leary gulped down some of the bitterly strong tea and looked excitedly across at her visitor.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the Reverend Mother and then, very quickly, before she could be sidetracked, ‘The police say that she was one of the Fitzsimons – you know the family – the Fitzsimons of Blackrock.’

  ‘Of course I do, indeed. Didn’t I make hats for her, for Mrs Fitzsimon, God love her?’

  The Reverend Mother nodded. ‘I thought it was probably you. I saw lots of pictures of her when I was down at their place in Blackrock. I saw the hats.’

  ‘Bellamonte,’ said Mrs O’Leary meditatively. ‘Bellamonte, that’s the name of the house, wasn’t it? Many a hat box I sent out to that place. In an asylum now, poor thing, did you know that, Reverend Mother?’

  ‘I did, indeed.’ The Reverend Mother allowed a pause to elapse. She had to fight a small battle with her lifelong custom of discretion, but the need for information was paramount in her mind at the moment. ‘I wonder what happened to her,’ she said as airily as she could manage the words.

  ‘What drove her mad, you mean?’ retorted Mrs O’Leary. Her legs might be crippled with arthritis, but her tongue was as quick as ever. ‘Well, I can tell you that, Reverend Mother, and not a word of a lie – he drove her to it – that husband of hers. Nasty he was, I can tell you that. Did you notice the kind of hats that they were, at all, Reverend Mother?’

  ‘It was the first thing that I noticed,’ said the Reverend Mother, repressing the sudden desire to add: and not a word of a lie.

  She need say little, she thought; Mrs O’Leary was in full flow.

  ‘Well you’ll have noticed that she had hats to go on the left side of her face and hats to go on the right side of her face.’ Mrs O’Leary didn’t wait for any corroboration but swept on. ‘And I can tell you, Reverend Mother, that’s very unusual. Most people – you mightn’t know this, of course, being a nun and all that, but I can tell you, and it’s God’s own truth, everyone has one profile that’s better than the other. But she wouldn’t have it, Mrs Fitzsimon, and do you know why?’ Automatically she cast a glance at the door, but Catty was singing tunefully in the kitchen to the busy sound of a scrubbing brush and so she finished off dramatically: ‘It was him, the husband, that Mr Fitzsimon, he was hitting her. Nearly always had a bruise, on one cheek or on the other; the poor thing was embarrassed and ashamed and was trying to hide them. I had to make these big hats, with feathers, that would hide one side of her face and not let the world know what was happening to her. Poor thing she was ashamed – ashamed, I tell you. Ashamed! I’d shame him, if I had him, him with all his money! I’d cry it from the roof tops!’

  The Reverend Mother felt that she should put in something here – something like: I don’t believe it! But she couldn’t quite bring herself to break her lifetime of reticence. Luckily Mrs O’Leary was a star performer and needed no supporting act.

  ‘And I’ll tell you something else about that fine gentleman,’ she hissed, the sing-song Cork accent rising higher as her story unfolded. ‘Low he was, and that’s a fact. Low, I tell you … Down the quays, he’d be. He’d go with any of them girls, he would. Seen him myself coming out one of the houses in Sawmill Street. Furtive-like. And him with such a nice little wife. Should have been ashamed of himself. And his uncle a bishop!’

  TEN

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Umbram fugat veritas, noctem lux eliminat.

  (Truth eliminates the darkness of the night.)

  Dr Scher turned up early for the journey between the convent of St Mary’s of the Isle and the courthouse. The Reverend Mother was already waiting for him, wearing her best cloak. Wimple and bib were snowy white and stiffly starched and Sister Bernadette fussed around her with a clothes brush, removing a few microscopic fibres or traces of dust. The whole convent was pleasantly excited at the prospect of the Reverend Mother’s appearance in the courthouse and various nuns popped their heads out of classrooms as she passed down the corridor, wishing her luck and praying over her as if she had been about to join an expedition to Mount Everest.

  ‘You’re looking very smart,’ she said graciously to Dr Scher as he held open the passenger door of the car. Usually he wore a grey suit, plentifully sprinkled with cigarette ash and shiny at elbow and knee, but today he was resplendent in a navy pin-stripe which looked shiningly new.

  ‘I’m hoping that splendour of my apparel will distract from the hesitancy of my evidence,’ he said once he had cranked up the car and taken his place beside her.

  ‘Why will your evidence be hesitant?’ she asked, watching how he double-declutched and wondering whether she was too old to learn to drive. She could just imagine how a car would be very useful to the community. Perhaps the new Ford factory on the marina would like to donate one. She began to imagine a few newspaper headlines. ‘Firm donates … Henry Ford remembers the birthplace of his grandfather.’

  ‘Because I’m a bloody old fool and past my best.’ He suddenly shot the words out, distracting her from her composition efforts. And then he added a perfunctory, ‘Sorry.’

  She considered his profile – he didn’t look particularly worried, she thought, but then chubby faces like his seemed to naturally fall into lines of contentment.

  ‘What’s bothering you?’ she asked.

  ‘The age,’ he said explosively and punctuated his words with a musical toot-toot on his horn. A messenger boy on a heavy bike, who had just darted out in front of the Humber, stuck out a tongue at him and Dr Scher chuckled, his good humour restored. ‘Not my own age – the girl’s.’

  ‘You thought that she was younger, when you examined her, that’s right, isn’t it?’ she said as he swung the wheel of the car to direct it over South Main Street. ‘I remember what you said.’

  ‘I thought she was about seventeen when I examined the body and it turns out that she was almost twenty-one,’ he said.

  The Reverend Mother said no more, though she noted his hesitation. South Main Street was full of shoppers, shooting from one side of the narrow street to the other in their search for bargains to fill their baskets, and she had no wish to distract him from his driving. She thought about what he said, though. There had been a note of conviction in his voice and she knew him, by experience and by reputation, to be a clever man. She sat without speaking until they reached what she still thought of as Great George Street but which had recently, and rather quaintly, in this republican city, been renamed Washington
Street to shift the Georgian emphasis from England to America. The river was rising again, she noticed. The water was already inches deep in the gutters and the wide street was beginning to disappear under it. The playwright John Fletcher had said something about the world being a city full of straying streets, and the odd expression had reminded her of Cork and its disappearing roadways when she had first read it over fifty years ago.

  Dr Scher turned down the side street beside the courthouse and parked his car rather askew. He still wore a puzzled frown on his face. He took his round silver watch from his waistcoat pocket.

  ‘We’re early,’ he said. ‘Let’s sit here for a while. It’s freezing in there. Are you warm enough, Reverend Mother, there’s a rug in the back. I can put it over your knees.’

  ‘I’m very warm, thanks to that hot bottle at my feet,’ she said, feeling sorry that she had not expressed her gratitude for his consideration before now. Her mind, however, was focused on the dead girl and Dr Scher’s explosion had drawn another shadow away from the light of the truth.

  ‘Tell me why you thought that she was only seventeen,’ she said, looking directly at him. The rain had begun to fall again and the car was like a small warm room in which they could talk with complete privacy.

  He hesitated for a moment, not looking back at her, but looking straight ahead of him. He had switched off the engine and the car was very quiet – as quiet and as private as a confessional box, she thought. Rather inappropriately, she acknowledged, with a half-smile to herself, as she waited for his answer.

  She wondered whether he would cover up his involuntary exclamation with one of his usual self-deprecating jokes, but when he spoke it was with a simple directness which was a quality that she had always valued in him.

  ‘I must have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘The father must know the age of his own daughter. But …’ Now he looked her full in the face and continued quickly. ‘But I couldn’t have, I just couldn’t – not unless I’m going mad or senile, or something. It was the clavicle – I can see it now in my mind’s eye – it’s all wrong – it has to be wrong – the clavicle wasn’t properly connected – it’s the last bone in the human body to be joined up.’

  ‘The clavicle?’ queried the Reverend Mother.

  ‘The collarbone, Reverend Mother, the collarbone!’ he said as impatiently as though she were one of his students. ‘Sorry,’ he said quickly, turning to face her. ‘Children’s bones aren’t joined, you see – they have cartilage between the bones – gradually as they grow older the bones connect up and the cartilage disappears. The clavicle is the last one, but a girl’s clavicle should definitely have joined by the time she is nineteen or twenty – Angelina Fitzsimon, according to her father, was coming up to twenty-one; she was, wasn’t she?’

  ‘So Mr Fitzsimon said.’

  ‘And there is not the slightest chance that he lied – no reason for him to lie. And she was due to inherit her grandmother’s money when she reached twenty-one – in a few months’ time. Lambert mentioned that when we talked together when we were at the house and he knew her well from her work with the St Vincent de Paul Society, so he told me. He knew all about her, about the grandmother’s will – and about the age of inheritance. So I must have made a mistake,’ he added, when she said nothing.

  The Reverend Mother looked at him. The car windows had completely steamed up by now, but the gas lamp beside the courthouse shed a faint, watery light into the interior of the car.

  ‘Talk me through the post-mortem,’ she commanded. ‘Imagine that I am one of your students.’ Women were now able to study medicine, she thought, and was pleased that times had changed like that, but regretful that she had not had the chance. She would, she thought, have made a good doctor. She esteemed it a higher skill than that of a teacher and of an organizer – and she had to tell herself that these days she was more of an organizer than a teacher. Still, she could not regret her decision to enter the convent; the life had suited her, had given her an arena for her talents, had brought a deep sense of satisfaction and of fulfilment with it.

  And then she switched her mind rapidly from the past possibilities and concentrated on the present.

  ‘Just describe her,’ she said quietly.

  She could see by the dim light that he had shut his eyes and the childishness of the gesture brought out a feeling of affection for him. He was a gossip and could be indiscreet, annoyed her slightly sometimes by his inveterate habit of making silly jokes, but she was fond of him and she trusted him and now listened with attention.

  ‘The body of a girl, aged approximately seventeen,’ he began, still with his eyes, tightly shut. ‘She showed signs of malnutrition in the bone structure of the wrists, in the slightly bowed bones of the legs and in the teeth, which were pitted and stained. The hair was clean – bore traces of soap – but it was thin and rather brittle. She was well below average in weight. The stomach contents were interesting: she had eaten about a quarter of a pound of porridge a few hours earlier and had swallowed probably about a glassful of ether.’

  Dr Scher opened his eyes and fixed them intently on the Reverend Mother. They continued to stare at each other – thoughtful luminously green eyes fixed on the pair of startled brown ones, beneath bushy eyebrows. The Reverend Mother was the one to break the silence.

  ‘You could be describing a girl from the slums, Dr Scher,’ she said, her voice even and without surprise.

  ‘So I’m wrong,’ he retorted, rubbing his glove over his face. She waited until he had secured the handbrake before replying.

  ‘No,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘you may not be wrong.’

  He was silent for a moment and then said in a puzzled way: ‘So you think that Joseph Fitzsimon neglected his daughter, didn’t feed her properly … What am I going to say at the inquest? I’ve had a list of things from the sergeant that shouldn’t be mentioned – like the ether in the girl’s stomach, or …’

  The Reverend Mother reached for the door handle. A car had just pulled off the road and had parked in front of theirs and she could see Patrick and the superintendent climb out of it. It was time that they went into court.

  ‘You will tell the truth, nothing but the truth, Dr Scher,’ she said and half-smiled at the triteness of the words as she waited for him to come around and assist her from the car. ‘Though perhaps the whole truth might be a bit indiscreet,’ she added as he opened the car door for her.

  ‘Talk fast and use plenty of Latin words and medical terms,’ she advised more helpfully as, with his supportive arm outstretched to brace her on the climb from the car to the pavement, she avoided the water welling up from the drains and stepped across on to the stone pavement and turned to greet the two men from the car in front of them.

  ‘Good morning, Sergeant,’ she said formally as she straightened herself.

  ‘Good morning, Reverend Mother,’ Patrick said. ‘May I introduce the superintendent?’

  He did it well, she thought, feeling obscurely pleased that he had introduced the superintendent to her as though she were the more important of the two. She wondered who had taught him that easy manner – had it been part of the curriculum during the few weeks’ training which the young men destined to be civic guards in the new state had received in Dublin before taking up their duties all over the country? He held himself well, too, though not tall. With a sudden pang, as she followed him up the white marble steps, she wondered what his skeleton would show of early malnutrition if he were picked up dead in the streets of Cork.

  He trod resolutely under the marble pillars of the portico and through the fifteen-foot-high wooden door held open by a court official and then turned back to introduce Mr Sarsfield, the solicitor representing the Fitzsimon family, to her.

  The Cork Courthouse was not the same as it had been in her youth as, after a fire, it had been rebuilt in 1895 by William Hill, the architect and Samuel Hill, the building contractor. It was well designed with an open courtyard to its centre in which the bar ro
om was located, providing the barristers immediate access to the two main courtrooms, and was an impressive-looking building – a neo-classical courthouse with Corinthian pillars, she seemed to remember reading. The Reverend Mother had never been inside before and looked around with interest at the magnificent building with its wonderful open space in the centre and the windowed dome above casting light down on the busy figures that hurried to and fro.

  Mr Sarsfield, elaborately garbed in morning dress – striped trousers, cut-away coat – no wig – only a lowly solicitor, of course – greeted her effusively, but soon left them, and took himself across the court in order to whisper in the ear of one of the lawyers wearing a wig. Rupert was there, smoking his usual cigar, which he quickly extinguished before coming across and taking her by the hand.

  ‘Lucy sent me, told me to make sure that you are all right,’ he said with his pleasant smile.

  ‘And to tell her all about it when you come home,’ she supplemented and he laughed but did not deny, patting her hand reassuringly and leaving her in the care of Patrick.

  She looked after him as he crossed over to speak to another solicitor. He seemed popular and very at ease. It had been a good match; she thought. The secret would have been safe with Edmund and Angela Fitzsimon – Joseph was to be brought up as their own child. Rupert still knew nothing; she guessed and then banished the thought of the summer from her mind. That was a time of her life that she preferred to forget. How could she have been so stupid!

  ‘You’ll be the first witness to be called,’ said Patrick, and then with a concern which touched her, ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’

  She considered this matter for long enough for him to feel that she was taking his question seriously.

  ‘No,’ she said with a smile. She didn’t like to tell him that she was quite looking forward to it, nor that her mind was bubbling with ideas. Well, Dr Scher would give his evidence and then the court could decide on its verdict. She hoped that it would not be a verdict of suicide, though.