A Shameful Murder

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Patrick,’ she said earnestly in his ear, ‘you must do your best not to allow them to say suicide. It’s not fair to the girl – and not safe for other girls if this man escapes.’

  She saw his eyes narrow. He was turning her words over in his mind.

  ‘Girl?’ he queried, and then, ‘Do you mean Angelina Fitzsimon? Miss Fitzsimon?’ he amended.

  I’m not sure whether I do, thought the Reverend Mother and wished that they had more time to talk together, but already the court official was calling on everyone to sit down. She thought of all those vulnerable girls that passed through the doors of her school and of her worries for them when they were turned loose on to the streets of Cork.

  The crowd had no sooner complied with this order, the cosy groups of lawyers, witnesses and bystanders all moving to their seats, when there was a roar of: ‘All rise!’ and everyone stood as the coroner entered and took his seat.

  The Reverend Mother listened with interest to the opening statements and then the lawyer called out her name.

  There was a stir in the court and many heads turned. She was well known in the city and it was rather dramatic to have a Reverend Mother called to give evidence for the finding of a body. She walked sedately down the middle aisle and took her place at the stand, raising her right hand and swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and added the ‘so help me, God’ in sonorous, grave and reverential tones which hushed the whole court to the degree that the proverbial pin could have disturbed the silence.

  The lawyer took her through her recollection of the morning as delicately as though he were talking to his elderly grandmother and she kept her answers as short as possible.

  ‘Just tell us in your own words what you saw when you unlocked the gate between the laneway and the path to the chapel,’ he said encouragingly.

  Now’s my chance, thought the Reverend Mother.

  ‘I saw a dead girl, a very thin girl, dressed in a satin gown, and I saw a bad bruise on the front of her throat. I sent immediately for Sergeant Patrick Cashman as I thought that she had been strangled, had been murdered,’ she said and felt pleased at how the words ‘strangled’ and ‘murdered’ rang out.

  The lawyer had frowned a little at the word ‘murdered’ and she saw him take a quick look at the coroner. His Lordship, however, said nothing. One of the Magners, she thought, as she glanced at him. He had been a baby when she had become a nun and she felt a certain perverse satisfaction at picturing him drooling in his perambulator beside their tennis court.

  Patrick was called after she had been thanked and allowed to sit down, a court official even coming forward and escorting her carefully back to her seat.

  ‘Look at you – the queen of the court. An escort back to your seat! They never do that for me,’ grumbled Dr Scher in an undertone.

  ‘Shh,’ she said. She was anxious to hear what Patrick said. He was standing up very straight and appeared quite unshaken. The barrister took him through the morning from the message that arrived by the gardener to the convent, to the summoning of Dr Scher and the arrival at the lane where the body lay. He described the bruise on the throat in rather more technical terms than the Reverend Mother had done, using the word ‘trachea’ and saying that some of the small bones had been broken, which seemed to impress the jury as, one by one, they all scribbled the word on the pads that had been provided for them. He pointed out that there had been significant traces of sewage caught in the clothing and described his visit to the cellar in the Imperial Hotel and how he found some of the dead girl’s hair caught in the manhole when he examined it with the aid of a magnifying glass. There was some excitement among the gentlemen of the press, as the coroner described them. At least the Republican Party had a woman press officer, thought the Reverend Mother scornfully and then sighed over the image of her well-educated Eileen hiding out in some derelict cottage.

  When Patrick came to the stage when Dr Scher had begun the post-mortem, he paused.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant Cashman,’ said the coroner. ‘We’ll hear about that from the doctor. Any questions?’ he asked looking from the court lawyer to the barrister representing the Fitzsimon family, but they shook their heads.

  ‘Call Dr Scher,’ said the court official.

  Dr Scher bustled down the aisle, stepped into the witness box and swore the oath without hesitation. He started off very rapidly: ‘Body of young female; had probably been in the water for about twelve hours; death was caused not by manual strangulation, despite marks on throat, but by water in lungs; drowning,’ he said with a brief glance at the amateurs in the body of court and at the reporters in the gallery and then a lot of long, technical, medical terms to which the coroner made a great show of nodding wisely. To the Reverend Mother’s relief, Dr Scher said nothing about the girl’s probable age. She was glad about that. No point in displaying the hand too quickly at this stage. He didn’t talk about ether in the stomach, either and also omitted the interesting reference to porridge – surely a strange dish for a young lady’s tea. The reasons for ruling out strangulation had to be explained to the jury at the request of the coroner and they all looked most interested and scribbled madly.

  But then at the end the bombshell was dropped. The deceased was pregnant, probably about in the first trimester/three months.

  There was a stir of activity from the press gallery. From the corner of her eye, the Reverend Mother looked up, and saw the pencils flying. Some exciting headlines being composed, she thought with amusement, thinking of the eventual fate of most of these flights of fancy, once the proprietor of the newspaper got to know about them. She saw Joseph Fitzsimon’s eyes go to the gallery also and guessed what he was thinking.

  What had his childhood been like? she wondered. His early life in Bordeaux before Edmund and Angela were killed in that train crash should have been a good one. Then, after that, when he came to Ireland, the education that he had received was the best that could have been given as he had spent eight years as a boarder at Clongowes Wood College, the most expensive school in Ireland. Edmund and Angela had both been gentle and nice people, warm-hearted and generous. She would never forget how kind they had been to Lucy and to herself during the year which they had spent in their home in Bordeaux. Even after their deaths, Joseph would have had a comfortable life with Edmund’s brother, Robert, back in Ireland – the family had a house by the sea, she remembered, as well as the one in the prosperous suburb of Blackrock. He would have been very much younger than Robert’s sons, spoiled, perhaps, over-indulged, certainly petted and given his own way.

  ‘Any questions?’ The coroner looked towards the counsel for the bereaved family and the bewigged gentleman jumped to his feet and proceeded to earn his fat fee by trying to get Dr Scher to admit that the death could be suicide. Great excitement in the press gallery – pencils flying again, whispering between the heads seen above the benches; a couple of young journalists got to their feet and went to the doorway, obviously planning to be the first back to the office with the news. The Reverend Mother sighed to herself. Whosoever was the girl lying quietly in the coffin in Doolan’s funeral parlour, her death would be attended with far more fuss than was usually given to thin, undernourished, pregnant young girls who were fished out of the river in the city of Cork.

  Dr Scher was proof against all of the well-paid lawyer’s hints, insinuations, demands, fits of mock anger, appeals to his sensitivity, to the sympathy that he should feel for the father and family of the dead girl. He repeated monotonously and with a show of impatience the words hyoid bone, manual strangulation had been attempted shortly before death, samples of the girl’s hair found in the manhole at the Imperial Hotel had been matched with hair samples clipped from the body, and the victim was in the first trimester until the coroner got tired of the whole business and asked whether the counsel representing the family had any fresh questions.

  ‘You may step down, Dr Scher,’ said the coroner eventually and Dr Scher stepped down
out of the witness box and walked slowly back to his seat with the air of a man who has been through a battlefield.

  The superintendent was called last of all and he made the best of a bad job, hinting that the civic guard were investigating possibilities of a homicidal maniac breaking into the Imperial Hotel and luring the girl down into the cellar, but his heart was not in it. It was apparent to the Reverend Mother that he had begun the proceedings with the almost certainty that the verdict would be suicide and now, because of Dr Scher’s stubbornness, had been forced to anticipate a verdict of murder. She watched him critically as he stumbled through assertions that the coroner would not like him to divulge anything that could injure that enquiry in any way, and finished with the assertion that the civic guards would do all that was possible to find the guilty person if murder was suspected and that an arrest would shortly be announced – unless, of course, that it proved to be suicide.

  And then the jury were dismissed to their deliberations. They took only a few minutes, which was surprising, and they came back with the verdict of ‘murder by person or persons unknown’.

  There was a buzz of excitement from the press gallery and then, as a solid body, they all started to edge towards the door as the coroner summed up, expressing the court’s sympathy for the bereaved and sorrowing family and purporting to have confidence that the police would soon have an announcement to make.

  ‘Lucy said that she would phone you this evening, Reverend Mother,’ said Rupert appearing at her side. ‘You must come out and see us some time. I’ll send the car to you any time you want. Lucy said to tell you that something has occurred to her.’

  ELEVEN

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Sicut enim maius est illuminare quam lucere solum.

  (It is better to enlighten than merely to shine.)

  ‘I need to talk to Patrick,’ said the Reverend Mother in a low tone to Dr Scher. ‘Would it be possible to have a word with him in your car?’

  ‘Come back and have lunch with me,’ said Dr Scher with his usual enthusiastic hospitality. ‘I’ll go and ask young Patrick to join us. After all, the man has to have his lunch. We can discuss the post-mortem first of all, just to give us all a good appetite.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said with a nod. Dr Scher’s house would be ideal. And lunch sounded a good idea. She hated to rush into things. It would suit her better to feel her way cautiously.

  ‘Pity you can’t go to the pub like a normal human being,’ grumbled Dr Scher, but she had the impression that he was rather pleased to be offering hospitality. She watched him go across to Patrick, who was standing beside the superintendent, and saw to her satisfaction that Dr Scher had the tact to address some remarks to Patrick’s superior.

  They were back in a moment, Dr Scher telling Patrick that he had to sit in the back as ‘Her Ladyship’ liked to sit in the front and keep an eye on his driving.

  ‘Went well,’ he said, as he daringly pulled out right in front of the superintendent’s car and did a spectacular turnaround in the middle of the street, to the annoyance of several lawyers who were desperately trying to safeguard their expensive cars from contact with the shabby Humber.

  ‘So you won’t be out of a job for a while, lad,’ he added over his shoulder at Patrick as he clashed the gears noisily. Patrick did not reply and when the Reverend Mother glanced over her shoulder at him, she saw that he was staring through a hole that he had rubbed free of mist on the window beside him. His face, she thought with satisfaction, was concentrated and intent.

  Dr Scher lived in one of the Georgian houses on South Terrace, handily positioned just two doors down from the synagogue, though the Reverend Mother doubted whether he was particularly religious, judging by some of the outrageous jokes about God with which he endeavoured to shock her.

  The house itself was cosy with a large anthracite stove in the hallway giving a welcome gush of warmth as they came in and the comfortable study into which he ushered them had another blazing, though slightly smaller, stove set within the ornate fireplace. Dr Scher was in his element now, the perfect host, chairs pulled up to the fire, extra cushions, orders and counter-orders flying to the amused and indulgent housemaid, a brave attempt to get the Reverend Mother to drink some brandy on purely medical grounds, and then eventually they were all seated with the promise of a tasty lunch in twenty minutes at the latest. The housemaid firmly shut the door on them all and Dr Scher turned a bright face to his two visitors.

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  ‘I was thinking about the Woodfords, my memory is that they were considered immensely rich – I’m just going back into the past, I suppose,’ said the Reverend Mother apologetically.

  Dr Scher flashed his spectacles at her. ‘Still are … immensely rich,’ he said.

  ‘It’s just surprising,’ she went on, ‘that Angelina’s mother is in the lunatic asylum – check by jowl with the poorest of the city.’

  ‘You think only the poor suffer from mental illness?’

  ‘I think that Reverend Mother is surprised that the poor lady was not placed in a private nursing home,’ said Patrick hastily, though she could have told him that she needed little protection against Dr Scher’s teasing.

  ‘Simple answer to that – the old lady, Mrs Woodford, had been senile for the last couple of years of her life – Mrs Fitzsimon, Anne Woodford, was in a private nursing home when Mrs Woodford made that will, but she had, I think, been certified as insane at that stage – a doctor cousin of Joseph Fitzsimon – man called O’Connor.’

  ‘And presumably Mrs Woodford changed her will at that stage,’ mused the Reverend Mother. She was surprised that Mrs Woodford had not insisted on having her own doctor examine the poor woman, but perhaps the deadly senility had begun to overwhelm her even by this stage. ‘And she, perhaps, wanted to make sure that Angelina took her time over choosing a husband and was not pushed into anything by her father before she came of age.’ She looked interrogatively at him and Dr Scher smiled warmly and gave a congratulatory nod.

  ‘Not that I want to suggest that she decided to leave her fortune to her as yet unmarried granddaughter, rather than to her married, but insane, daughter to be looked after by her grieving husband, you understand,’ he said smoothly. He sat back in his armchair. The light from the lamp flashed back from his spectacles, leaving his face looking bland and uninformative.

  ‘But she was an only child, wasn’t she, this Anne Woodford, Angelina’s mother?’ The Reverend Mother was conscious of a slight feeling of shame that she appeared to be flaunting her knowledge of the rich families of the city, but assuaged her conscience by remembering that her fundraising would never have been so successful if she had not kept herself up to date with all the details of the wealthy.

  ‘And?’ Dr Scher raised an eyebrow and stroked the sparse grey hair from the top of his skull.

  ‘Didn’t her father leave her anything? Hadn’t she got means of her own, over and above anything her mother could leave her?’ With a fortune like the Woodfords’, it would be surprising if everything was left to the wife and nothing to the only child, the daughter.

  ‘What would she want with anything? She was a married woman, wasn’t she? Married to a wealthy man, too. Men manage these affairs so much better than women.’ Dr Scher gave her a teasing look.

  ‘There’s such a thing as the Married Women’s Property Act,’ suggested the Reverend Mother, noticing that Patrick looked from one to the other like a spectator at a tennis match.

  ‘True, true.’ Dr Scher appeared to have finished, but she knew better, and waited.

  ‘You might want to have a chat with that lawyer of theirs, Mr Sarsfield,’ he said after a sip from his brandy glass. ‘My information is that he handles both trusts – the one for the mother’s money and the one for the grandmother’s legacy to Angelina. Cowen was the Woodfords’ lawyer; but it wouldn’t be in his hands now, more’s the pity. Cowen is an honest man.’

  ‘So Angelina’s money
, as well as that of her mother is handled by Mr Sarsfield,’ mused the Reverend Mother. Rupert had said that same thing to his wife, but she would not dream of betraying Lucy and hoped that she sounded as though the idea was a new one to her.

  ‘These trusts,’ she said aloud. ‘They are a source of discontent and sometimes of corruption.’ Her own father had done the same for her once he knew that the cancer was incurable; though her fortune had been tiny in comparison with the money which Angelina Fitzsimon had been due to inherit from her maternal grandmother. She smiled to herself, remembering how much, at the time, she had resented this; feeling, as the young do, that it would be an eternity until she became twenty-one. But of course once she had taken her final vows the money had been swallowed up into the convent coffers. She remembered resenting the fact that she had not been allowed to present it publicly and with a certain amount of drama. And then she sighed at the memory of how full of conceit she had been then and also how naive and silly.

  Still, she could say truly that she had never regretted the direction in which life had taken her. It would not have suited her to meekly defer to a husband and to pretend that his judgement was better than her own. Even though over the years she had learned to subdue her instinct to display her brain power and, now, like St Thomas Aquinas, preferred to illuminate, rather than to shine, nevertheless she would never have been content with a life where she would have had to feign stupidity.

  ‘So if anyone was to murder Angelina Fitzsimon, then it would be the brother who would profit.’ Dr Scher moved forward to tip a generous scuttle-load of anthracite on to the fire.

  ‘The RIC training manual, which we still use, says that investigating a murder involves looking at means, opportunity and motive,’ said Patrick, breaking into the conversation for the first time. He, too, had declined the brandy on the grounds of being on duty and he sipped his soda water dutifully, though he didn’t look as though he enjoyed it. Would have preferred something sweet. She had often seen this in the children of the poor – the deprived childhood led them to crave sweets of any kind.