A Shameful Murder

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A Shameful Murder Page 12

by Cora Harrison


  ‘And those that had opportunity must include all that were at the Merchants’ Ball,’ he went on. ‘Father, brother, potential fiancé: Mr McCarthy from India and then of course there was Mr Eugene Roche – possible lover – excuse me, Reverend Mother.’

  She ignored this. ‘I suppose we are looking for a man in this case – thinking about the hands that squeezed the throat, the lifting of the heavy metal cover of the manhole, pushing the body down into it …’

  ‘Much easier for a man to give her the ether, also,’ said Dr Scher. ‘It’s natural for a man to carry over a glass to a girl.’

  ‘I wonder why he gave her ether. Why do you think, Doctor?’

  ‘That’s an easy one, my boy! Isn’t it good to see a young fellow so innocent? He’d give her ether so that he could bend her to his will, make her allow him to steer her off the dance-hall floor, take her downstairs, pretend to be taking her to the cloakroom, getting a glass of water to make her feel better, anything like that. Or else just seduce her, I suppose. These medical students make cocktails from it.’

  ‘And then when he got her out of sight, he could strangle her?’ Patrick was keeping to the point in a tenacious way that reminded her of a small terrier she owned when she was about eight or nine years old.

  ‘Funny he didn’t make a bit more sure of her, she was a very fragile girl, very thin.’

  ‘He might have thought that he had done the job.’

  ‘You don’t think that he would have checked to see whether she was still breathing.’

  ‘You’d be amazed how stupid people can be – might have had quite a bit to drink. In my experience,’ said Patrick, in an elderly fashion which made her want to smile, ‘wits fly out when drink enters in.’

  ‘Not one of those fellows that have taken the pledge, not one of those Father Matthew boys, are you?’ asked Dr Scher with deep suspicion.

  ‘Ask me that when I’m not on duty.’ This easy-going conversation with Dr Scher was good for Patrick, decided the Reverend Mother, listening to the bantering conversation while conscious of a ridiculous feeling of maternal pride when she thought back to the undersized bare-legged little boy, dressed in filthy and torn clothes. If he were to solve this murder, he would be in line for promotion and that provided an additional driving reason for her to involve herself in this mystery.

  ‘So you think that he, our murderer, might have thought that he had killed her and that he just had to dispose of the body – would have to be someone who knew the Imperial Hotel, wouldn’t it?’ Dr Scher mused over this and took another sip from his brandy glass.

  ‘Probably, but not certainly – might have just planned to leave the body in the cellar and then came across the manhole.’

  ‘Mind you, if he left the body in the cellar, he would run a massive risk. The amazing thing was that there was no search for Angelina Fitzsimon, that she could just disappear like that from a dance where her father, her brother and her future fiancé were all present.’

  ‘Remember how dark it was, the policeman on duty said that it was just candles – they had turned off the gas lamps and then the jazz music would have kept everyone’s attention – the building was rocking with it, so I’ve heard,’ said Patrick.

  Interesting the hint that Dr Scher dropped about the solicitor, thought the Reverend Mother as the maid came in that moment with a loaded tray and proceeded to cover the small round Pembroke table with a well-ironed table cloth, taken from a drawer beneath its centre panel. Amazing the gossip that went around the South Mall! However, gossip was one thing and action was another. There would be nobody left alive who felt it was their duty to check on what was happening to Mrs Fitzsimon’s fortune from her deceased and extremely wealthy Woodford father. And as for the legacy to the granddaughter – Angelina had seemed to be a strong-willed and determined girl with a social conscience very unlike that of the majority of girls of her age and of her class, but she had been under twenty-one and subject to her father’s rule until she attained that age. She picked up the Cork Examiner tucked into the newspaper rack beside the fire and ran her eyes over the headlines. Yes, the news of the death was there, a small discreet paragraph, calling it an unfortunate accident and making it appear as if the girl must have fallen into the river by accident. No mention of the Merchants’ Ball – the proprietor would have been present at that – and elsewhere in the paper there was the usual list of attendees – there was no mention, either, of the police involvement, or of the time and date of the coroner’s inquest. And then her eye was caught by an article further down, under the provocative byline ‘A Patriot’.

  It was a good article. It described, very fully, and very movingly, the body lying out in the floods and the rain; the elaborate satin gown in neat juxtaposition with the miserable fate of the body; it detailed the police response; touched on the father’s place in society, gave a brief description of the house in Blackrock (from the outside); and then it moved on to statistics of the amount of drowned and murdered bodies dragged from the river every year or found dead on the streets and finished up by implying subtly that the police response to the murder of Miss Angelina Fitzsimon, daughter of the well-known businessman Joseph Fitzsimon, was of a very different order to their response to a suspicious death of a denizen of Barrack Street or of Cove Street.

  ‘Bit of a socialist, that fellow – calls himself a patriot but he’s a good old-fashioned socialist,’ said Dr Scher looking over her shoulder. ‘Used to be one of them myself when I was young, but now I just look after my own comforts! Come and have lunch,’ he said abruptly, ‘that freezing courthouse will be the death of me if I don’t get something warm in my stomach – don’t know why they don’t heat it – I bet old Magner wears two pairs of long johns under those judge’s robes of his.’

  Reverend Mother left the paper lying open on the rug in front of the fire. She wondered whether Patrick would be interested to read it and then decided not. He had chosen his path and he would allow nothing to deflect him on his way up from and out of the class into which he had been born. She agreed with Dr Scher: he was correct in stating that the writer of the article was a socialist, someone who felt that society was unfair, and she suspected that Dr Scher, also, despite his protests, still felt that. The doctor was wrong, however, in his choice of pronoun for ‘A Patriot’.

  In fact, she had recognized the style, slightly flowery, from almost the first sentence and had felt absurdly proud of the author. The building of clause upon clause, the juxtaposition of images, the delicately chosen alliteration, even a well-placed colon and an appropriate semi-colon gave her pleasure and she felt in a very good humour as she joined the two men at the table and began to tuck into a delicious soufflé omelette and some excellent brown bread. She resisted the temptation to tease Dr Scher about his well-rounded figure and listened patiently to the arguments and counter-arguments between the two men.

  Patrick was in favour of the notion of Gerald Fitzsimon murdering his sister for the sake of the substantial legacy that he would immediately receive from his grandmother’s estate as soon as the death was proved. He allowed his omelette to grow cold as he took out his notebook and make a note of all the painstaking checking that he planned to do.

  ‘I’ll get a man on to interviewing everyone that was there that night and see whether anyone saw him dance with his sister or even hand her a drink. And I’ll go to see the solicitor myself and find out the terms of the will. And then I’ll get another man on the job of interviewing the servants at the hotel. Surely it would be odd to see anyone in full evening dress going down to the cellar. They went up to the first floor and down again readily – the bar for the Merchants’ Ball was upstairs and the ballroom on the ground floor – but none of them would have a reason to go down to the cellar.’

  ‘There is a lift,’ murmured the Reverend Mother, savouring the crisp outside to her omelette and remembering her days as a child, innocently pressing the button for the first floor on a pretence of seeking out the bathroom
s and then shooting instantly down to the much more exciting cellars. ‘And a lift, you know, can rise and then go down and no one is the wiser.’

  ‘Oh! I see what you mean.’ Patrick looked slightly daunted, but went on with his list, murmuring to himself while he did so. ‘And this Eugene Roche that they mentioned. Would he be a professor, Dr Scher?’

  ‘Just a lowly lecturer, like myself,’ said Dr Scher. ‘Don’t let that solicitor fellow, don’t let that Sarsfield talk you down, Patrick. He’s a great hand at that. Would have you saying black is white before you could blink.’

  ‘And then there is the tea-planter from India,’ went on Patrick, still writing quickly. There was a slight look of resentment on his face. He had not liked Dr Scher’s suggestion that he might be easily taken in by the solicitor. ‘Why should he murder the girl – that was a nice match for him?’

  ‘The strange thing is that the father said they were going to be married before he went back to India – before the girl reached the age of twenty-one – that would mean that she didn’t inherit and that the money would go to her brother.’

  ‘Perhaps he favoured the boy – didn’t worry too much about the girl – just picked out a good husband for her. Some families are like that – wanted to establish a dynasty – rival the Murphys and the Beamishes and be top dogs in the city …’ suggested Dr Scher.

  The Reverend Mother allowed them to talk on. The idea that had come into her head was so fantastical that she wanted to allow it to simmer, to allow her own brain to turn it over in peace before irrelevancies could be argued and could distract her from the facts.

  It was just as Dr Scher deposited her at the convent gate after he dropped Patrick off at the barracks that a question came to her.

  ‘Did you look at her nails when you were doing the post-mortem?’ she asked when he had secured the hand brake.

  ‘Her nails?’ He turned to look at her with genuine surprise. ‘There was nothing strange about her nails,’ he said and then nodded wisely. ‘I see what you mean. You were wondering whether she had put up a fight, had scratched the man, perhaps marked his face, but you’re forgetting, aren’t you, she was wearing gloves, these long, tight gloves that reached right up beyond her elbow. She couldn’t have got those off in a hurry.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the Reverend Mother, but he had already got out and was bustling around to open her passenger door. Dr Scher, she thought, had been slightly obtuse. She glanced at her own nails, clean, short, but well kept – the nails of someone whose only manual work was to hold a pen or a piece of chalk. Hands, she thought, could betray their owner quicker than a face.

  So she went in to the news, from Sister Bernadette, that there had been a huge row between Nellie O’Sullivan and Sister Mary Immaculate and that Nellie O’Sullivan had shouted that she was leaving the school, that, in any case, she had found herself a good job in Paddy’s bar on Albert Quay and then she had rushed out of the classroom and slammed the door behind her. And that half an hour later a scared younger sister delivered to the convent door a hastily brown paper-wrapped parcel containing the gym slip, whose hem had been turned up, a blouse and a matted cardigan.

  And that Mrs Rupert Murphy was waiting to see her, but had gone into the classroom, and was, giggled Sister Bernadette, discussing clothes with the senior girls there.

  TWELVE

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Sic ergo summum gradum in religionibus tenent quae ordinantur ad docendum et praedicandum.

  (Thus the highest place in religious orders is held, therefore, by those who are dedicated to teaching and instructing.)

  Lucy had been as good as her word. As soon as the Reverend Mother appeared, one of the excited girls was despatched to summon the chauffeur. He was a big, broad-shouldered man but he staggered slightly under his burden.

  ‘Your room? Or the classroom?’ Lucy’s eyes sparkled.

  ‘The classroom: put four of the desks together, girls,’ said the Reverend Mother decisively and ignored the disapproving look from Sister Mary Immaculate who was lurking in the corridor waiting to complain about Nellie O’Sullivan. The expensive trunk was placed on the desks and the girls crowded around. Lucy, in her element, kept a hand on the closed lid and counted heads. ‘Nine,’ she said. ‘I thought that there were ten of you.’

  ‘Nellie O’Sullivan had to go home early; perhaps one of you could pick out something for her,’ said the Reverend Mother smoothly. She suspected that they would not see Nellie again. It was surprising that she had stayed as long as she did and if she had some sort of job, even working in a public house, it was unlikely that they would see her again at school.

  The clothes that Lucy had brought were very tasteful. Well-cut skirts, cotton blouses, easy to wash, and jackets in deep blues, browns, purples and dark greens. The sort of thing, thought the Reverend Mother appreciatively, that a girl could wear if going for an interview for an office job. For a fleeting moment she thought about Eileen and then dismissed the thought. Eileen had chosen her own pathway and who was to say that she had chosen wrongly.

  ‘What would look good on Nellie?’ she asked one of the girls and Lucy immediately intervened, picking out, once she had heard about the brown eyes, a pretty skirt, very short, and a stylish short jacket in brown tweed with a pale pink blouse to go with it.

  ‘Let’s leave them to it,’ suggested the Reverend Mother, rather regretting that the classroom had no mirrors, but that the girls resorted to examining themselves in the windows with the day darkening outside and also in seeing their reflections from the approbation in friends’ eyes. Sister Mary Immaculate had peeped in at the discarded gymslips that littered desks and chairs, and then, in disgust, had gone off to supervise the teaching in the next classroom.

  ‘Come and have a cup of tea with me,’ suggested the Reverend Mother and Lucy followed her down the corridor and into the study where a bright fire blazed on the hearth and Sister Bernadette had just finished arranging an afternoon tea, fit for such a distinguished guest, on a small table between two easy chairs.

  Lucy sat down gracefully, waiting until the door had closed behind Sister Bernadette before stretching her hands out to the fire and saying pensively, ‘Do you know, I’ve been thinking about Ballycotton all day.’

  The Reverend Mother said nothing. She had not seen Ballycotton for over fifty years but it still remained vivid in her mind’s eye – the harbour, the cliffs, the Copingers’ house where she and Lucy had spent most of their summer holidays.

  Thomas Copinger had been Lucy’s guardian. He had been her dead father’s partner and was a man with a family of young children. The deadly tuberculosis which had carried off her own mother had also killed Lucy’s mother – both sisters dying soon after the births of their daughters – and twelve years later Lucy’s father had succumbed to the same disease, and had left the girl orphaned. It was surprising perhaps, she thought, that in view of the friendship between the two girls, Lucy had not been left to the guardianship of her father, but perhaps Lucy’s father had felt that the motherly Victoria Copinger would be maternal towards his orphaned daughter and would steer her through the social scene when she came to a marriageable age.

  It had not worked out like that.

  She and Lucy had spent most of the year at the Ursuline Convent boarding school in Blackrock and Christmas and Easter at her home, but every summer they had spent in the Copingers’ holiday home in Ballycotton. Mrs Copinger was fully occupied with her young children so it was left to her husband to entertain the two very much older girls. It had all seemed such fun, then. Going out in Thomas’s boat, swimming in the icy waters of Ballytrasna Bay, climbing the cliffs, discovering caves, lighting fires on the beach; when was it that they both fell in love?

  Both with the same man.

  And, of course, it was almost inevitable. All around there were families with young children, or else a few solitary priests reading their missals on the cliff walk – there were no young boys of their own age, or even
young men – most young people went to the more fashionable seaside resorts – places with dance halls, bathing machines – no, there was just Thomas, more than twenty-five years older, but dazzlingly handsome.

  And ready for a little fun with a pretty young girl, while his heavily pregnant wife struggled with their large family of young children.

  And oddly, it was not with the appealing, blonde, kittenish Lucy, but with her cousin, not pretty, tall, with heavy-lidded green eyes and black hair which in the damp sea air, half an hour after the application of the curling tongs, fell in weighty straight masses across her shoulders.

  And she had flaunted her conquest. Had delighted to lie beside him in the beach, had allowed him to dry her wet hair, even to rub her goose-pimpled legs with a rough towel when she came out of the sea.

  But that had been that. Even at seventeen, thought the Reverend Mother looking back to 1870, even at seventeen she had a strong will, a strong sense of her own value and the knowledge that her father would not approve made her instinctively dodge Thomas’s outstretched arm, from time to time, to deny him playful kisses, to place Lucy between them when they walked the cliffs, to hang a towel over the entrance to the cave where she and Lucy changed into their bathing smocks and trousers, to refuse to go sailing alone with him …

  Only afterwards had she realized remorsefully that she had tipped Lucy into his arms.

  She still remembered every minute of that day, could see the cliffs – the sea below them, azure blue breaking into creamy foam around the sharp, pointed rocks – black when wet with water, but deep rose-red, the colour of unopened apple blossom, in the heat of the sun. That old red sandstone of Cork broke into the sharp angular shapes and the tall pointed entrance to the cave was like an asymmetrical triangle. It went back very far, right back into the cliff.

 

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