A Shameful Murder

by Cora Harrison

  ‘You’ll make me fat,’ he said, looking up at her.

  ‘The Reverend Mother is interested in Anne Fitzsimon and her daughter, Angelina.’ Dr Scher, she thought, had perhaps come to the point too quickly, but then he was probably used to the utter collapse and exhaustion that had startled and frightened her when she had first seen the young doctor.

  ‘You’re from England, are you?’ She put the question in order to give him a moment to think a moment to recall his senses and to focus his mind on the institution that he had just left.

  He grinned in a boyish fashion. ‘Scotland – do you mind?’ he said with mock-reproof and she smiled back at him. His eyes were becoming alert and he replied good-humouredly to her queries about why he was in Cork, explaining how his father at been an officer at the naval base at Haulbowline in Cork Harbour and how, as a schoolboy, he had become addicted to sailing. Had his own boat moored at Crosshaven – a present from his father, bought when he had qualified as a doctor.

  ‘Cork is the second biggest natural harbour in the world, someone told me that once,’ said the Reverend Mother, glad that he was beginning to relax. ‘Dr Scher tells me that you know the Fitzsimons – mother and daughter, is that right?’

  ‘You wanted to talk about Angelina Fitzsimon, or was it about her mother,’ he said, looking from one to the other.

  ‘Angelina Fitzsimon is dead,’ said Dr Scher. The Reverend Mother thought that she would not have used quite such brutality, but she understood that these men dealt with a reality outside her experience.

  ‘What!’ The doctor half-rose to his feet, swayed and then sat down again. His voice had remained soft and subdued and the Reverend Mother, on the alert for raised voices, which might attract attention, took no alarm. Dr Munroe was used to the unexpected, she thought. He dealt with crises day in and day out.

  ‘Dead? Was it an accident? Or was she murdered?’ he asked thoughtfully and watched Dr Scher bow his head. And then unexpectedly, he added in a very low voice, ‘I’m not altogether surprised.’ He looked all around him, almost fearfully.

  Dr Scher hitched his chair a bit nearer to him and leaned across, placing a hand on the other man’s chair.

  ‘What do you know about Anne Fitzsimon?’ he asked.

  ‘The mother?’

  ‘That’s right. She’s been in the asylum for ten years – I’ve looked up the notes.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ The Reverend Mother saw that she was intended to ask that question.

  ‘Everything,’ said Dr Munroe, focusing on her. ‘Everything that would be wrong with you, or rather your niece or grandniece, if she were dragged away from her children, shut up in a madhouse and given cupfuls of laudanum every time that she wept. And allowed no visitors,’ he added.

  ‘I see,’ said the Reverend Mother. She absorbed the explanation without surprise. The thought flashed through her mind that this could have been a terrible threat that Angelina’s father held over her.

  ‘How could that have happened?’ She asked the question, just as she asked many a question – purely because she knew that she was expected to ask it; but she could guess what had happened.

  ‘Easy enough.’ Dr Munroe took a bite from the bun that she had placed on the arm of his chair and then another and another, swallowing each one rapidly. The Reverend Mother crossed the room and put some more on a plate, placing one securely into his hand and putting the others on the hearth at his side.

  ‘God, I was hungry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’ve eaten since yesterday, or was it the day before? It was a bad few days and nights, anyway. What were you asking? Yes, it’s easy enough to have someone shut up in an asylum – if you’ve got the money, and got the power. Do you know two out of three inhabitants of the asylum are women and do you know the diagnosis that is down for most of them – hysteria – and what’s hysteria? You tell me that.’

  ‘You tell me,’ said the Reverend Mother good-humouredly, but she could hear a note of impatience in her voice. She wanted to get back to the question of Angelina.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ said the doctor unexpectedly. ‘I can’t because it isn’t a disease. Everything was much easier when I was training – we cut up a madman once – it was you, wasn’t it, Dr Scher? You brought him in, sawed through the skull and let us all see the brain – all shrivelled up. He wasn’t suffering from hysteria, that old man; he was just mad; his brain had rotted away.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Dr Scher in a low voice. ‘But bring us back to Mrs Fitzsimon. You said that she was not allowed visitors.’

  ‘I sneaked the daughter in – was sorry for her.’

  ‘You knew her, knew Angelina?’

  ‘Met her, met her with her brother. Played tennis with her on one Sunday when I wasn’t working. He introduced us. Lovely girl. Not a bit like him.’

  ‘So you know Gerald Fitzsimon, do you?’ put in the Reverend Mother. ‘I understand that he is studying for your own profession, isn’t he?’

  ‘Pretending to,’ said Dr Munroe cynically. ‘Been at it a long time and not made much progress. He started the same time as I did, but didn’t move on too quickly.’ His eyes looked around the neat parlour and then returned across to the closed door. Even so, the young doctor dropped his voice.

  ‘In it for the drugs, young Fitzsimon; easy enough to lay your hands on them. Some of those professors are pretty careless. And, of course, if you have the money to buy – like Gerald has – well, you can buy direct from the suppliers – get the stuff before they turn it into laudanum. I know there is a law saying that only pharmacists can sell it nowadays, but believe you me they’re not the only source, if you need it badly enough.’

  ‘Opium?’

  ‘That’s right. You can get it down the quays if you have the money for it. Give us another glass of that whiskey. I probably should go back up there to the asylum, but I have to go home and have a kip before I do that.’

  ‘Just tell me something first. How did Miss Fitzsimon get into the asylum to see her mother, if all visitors are forbidden?’

  ‘Because I am a fool for a pretty face.’ The young doctor was looking more relaxed now. He swallowed some more whiskey and leaned back in his chair, gazing up at the ceiling, with a slight smile on his lips, thinking about Angelina, or else thinking about sailing on Cork Harbour, perhaps. A rich man’s amusement, but it would be better than taking drugs; healthier, too. Even in her young days there was a yachting club in the harbour. She wondered whether he had ever taken Angelina out in his boat.

  ‘But that’s not doing her justice to call her a pretty face.’ There was a sudden energy come into the tired voice. ‘Did you ever meet her?’

  The Reverend Mother thought back to the stranded figure lying in the convent gateway, red-brown hair like seaweed tangled by the tide, blue eyes, dull with death, staring up at the grey sky above. And yet there was something else depicted at the back of her mind: a different girl; a girl full of life and spirit, full of energy and of intelligence, a girl such as she had been once. Rapidly she suppressed the image.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said briefly.

  ‘It’s a funny thing, but when I met her first a word came into my mind and that was noble.’ Dr Munroe gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘Like one of those Roman matrons. She was a very nice girl and a very clever girl. And, by Jove, she had courage. She had read up about the Married Women’s Property Act and had been cross-questioning her father about what had happened to the fortune that the mother had inherited from her father, the girl’s grandfather.’

  ‘One of the richest men in Cork,’ said Dr Scher respect-fully.

  ‘Even went down to see the solicitor on the South Mall – Sarsfield, I think was his name, and cross-questioned him, and she tackled dear Dr O’Connor, the one who certified the mother, tackled him herself, asked for details of her mother’s illness and of her treatment. She …’ He looked around furtively and then whispered, ‘You won’t tell anyone about this, will you, but I “borrowed
” a nurse’s uniform for her, she used to slip it on in my room and then she would go off with my keys in her hand and take her mother out of that prison-room of hers, take her down the gardens, try to get her interested in planting things, doing a little bit of digging – we’re supposed to encourage the patients to do that sort of thing – not that any of us have the time for it – anyway, Angelina did that with her mother – anything to try to postpone the time when she would start to cry for her laudanum. Was at it for months until dear Dr O’Connor recognized her! The mother, Mrs Fitzsimon, had a fit, then, almost literally, screaming and yelling at the doctor to get away from her daughter and trying to stop the other nurses from dragging her away. Went berserk! And then, of course, she started howling for her medicine, so they slipped her a cup of laudanum and that was that.’

  ‘Would you say that Mrs Fitzsimon is insane?’ asked the Reverend Mother, noting with interest the annoyed look came upon Dr Munroe’s face.

  ‘Look here, Reverend Mother,’ he said daringly, ‘you seem a sober and sensible type, but I can guarantee that if I got you to take laudanum for a week, you’d find it hard to get off it. If it’s been the only thing between you and despair for ten years; why then it would be impossible to do without it for too long. The only thing you can do for someone like that is gradually lengthen the spaces between administering the drug – can be done, but it’s a long, hard road. I explained that to Angelina.’

  ‘And she accepted it?’ queried Dr Scher.

  ‘Oh, yes, I told you. A very intelligent girl. Had a lot of patience – she told me that she found she could stay patient while she was with her mother because she was rehearsing in her mind what she would say to the fat lawyer in South Mall – he was by way of being her mother’s trustee, you see. She told me about a few of the questions that she had put to him.’

  A smile came over the lips of the young doctor and then it disappeared.

  ‘Dreadful to think that she is dead: I can hardly bear to think of it!’ He rose to his feet. He had not repeated his first words: I’m not altogether surprised. Now that he was fully awake and more in his right mind, he probably would not. But did he suspect Gerald Fitzsimon, or the solicitor, or someone else even nearer to Angelina – like her father, Joseph Fitzsimon, perhaps?

  ‘I’d better be getting home,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the food and for the drink.’

  ‘Take the bottle with you; plenty more where that came from.’ Dr Scher nodded to the half-bottle of Midleton’s whiskey.

  ‘No, I won’t; it might be like laudanum for me. You’re in trouble when you start using alcohol or drugs to keep you going during the long nights,’ he said, suddenly sounding quite elderly. The Reverend Mother walked with him to the front door and Dr Scher followed. They all stood there for a moment, looking at each other. And then he was off, walking with a quick, springing step and disappearing out of the door in an instant. Dr Scher looked at the Reverend Mother when he came back into the parlour.

  ‘Sarsfield,’ he said, echoing Lucy’s words, while he carefully put the half-empty bottle back into his pocket. ‘That’s the solicitor – and now that’s a name that we haven’t properly considered. He had been at the Merchant’s Ball too; the name was on young Patrick’s list. Hadn’t danced with Angelina, though. Not surprising, perhaps, given what young Munroe has said of the interviews that she was reported to have had with the solicitor who should have been looking after her mother’s interests.’

  It was funny, thought the Reverend Mother, as she turned the matter over in her mind. If this was a murder of someone from the slums Patrick would be looking at who knew the girl; who had quarrelled with her; were there two men after her? Who was drunk on that particular night?

  It probably was, she thought, a simpler process.

  In the case of Angelina Fitzsimon – well, it was a different world. A world with she was familiar, but where Patrick, and even perhaps Dr Scher, was not so much at home. It looked to her as though money – earned wealth or inherited wealth – and status in the precarious class structure of the city might have been at the root of her murder.

  Dr Munroe had sketched a portrait of a strong-minded, spirited girl who was determined to get justice for her mother, to restore her inheritance to her, and to free her from the asylum and from her addiction to laudanum; a girl who had the courage to tackle her father, her father’s physician and her family solicitor about the wrongs done to the unfortunate woman. The Reverend Mother was taken by that portrait and her heart swelled with strong feelings of kinship towards that brave and courageous girl. She thought back to Lucy’s words and wondered whether it could be true that the father had killed a daughter like that.

  Or could it have been the brother, Gerald? Perhaps the Copinger inheritance of ungoverned passions and a love of money had gone down from father to son and then to grandson.

  It was no wonder, she thought, that Thomas Aquinas spent so much time debating about whether God allowed, even willed, evil to have its place in the world.

  FOURTEEN

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Qui omni congregationi sit, sicut in societate habet partem ut pars at totum.

  (Whosoever is of the whole community has a part to play in that society.)

  The funeral of Angelina Fitzsimon took place on Saturday morning. The Reverend Mother had wondered whether Dr Scher could attend on a Saturday, but he had sent around a message the night before to tell her that he would pick her up at half-past nine.

  ‘And the postman had a bit of news about Nellie O’Sullivan, Reverend Mother,’ said Sister Bernadette. ‘He said that she was serving drinks last night in Paddy’s Bar on Albert Quay – all dressed up, she was. He hardly knew her.’

  ‘Going the same way as that sister of hers,’ snapped Sister Mary Immaculate, who had just come in with a list of books to be ordered.

  ‘To Liverpool, is that right?’ asked the Reverend Mother mildly. ‘I understand that was where Mary O’Sullivan went.’

  Her deputy sniffed, but did not venture to enlighten her superior to any greater degree and Reverend Mother went back to her accounts in a forbidding fashion which informed both sisters that she did not wish to discuss the matter further. She kept her head down until they left the room, but then lifted it and stared at the opposite wall.

  The accounts could wait; the murder had to be solved. She put them aside, bowed her head into her hands and began to think hard. By the time that Dr Scher arrived to drive her to the funeral her clear mind had formulated a number of questions.

  The cemetery down in Blackrock was full – full of the great names of Cork. They were all there, all very well dressed in shining shoes, expensive broadcloth and starched shirt fronts with starched, snowy-white handkerchiefs peeping from breast pockets. An elderly canon performed the service, a couple of other canons assisting him, then the coffin containing the body of an undernourished, painfully thin young girl was buried beneath a marble angel who kept watch over the hallowed remains of the Fitzsimon family.

  ‘Old money,’ said Dr Scher’s voice in her ear, and she nodded. His father had been a jeweller who had made the journey from Russia, or was it Lithuania, to Manchester and then, for some strange reason, to the city of Cork. Old money would have been reverenced by the jeweller – these would have been the people who patronized his shop and allowed him to accumulate enough to educate his son and send him on to university – but, of course, old money in the case of Irish Roman Catholics meant only a few generations away from the peasant farmer. The starched handkerchiefs were not produced at the graveyard. Angelina’s relations and family friends watched dry-eyed. Perhaps the announcement of the illicit pregnancy had absolved father and son from any excessive show of grief. They stood stony-faced as the coffin was lowered down into the prepared hole and then turned away as the earth was shovelled over it.

  And then the important business of the day began.

  The great and the good lined up to shake the hands of the bereaved family, fat
her, brother and a cousin; and then joined the other long line which had, at its head, a young reporter from the Cork Examiner with a shorthand notebook. A sharp-looking young man, well spoken and with a good instinct for future success, he never once annoyed anyone by asking them how to spell their names, or put any questions about ‘double ts’, ‘en’ or ‘an’, whether it was ‘Mc’ or Mac’ or whether the Murphy standing before him was representing Murphys the Brewers, Murphys the Skins (as the owners of the tanning factory were known) or indeed Murphys the Sausages. He nodded respectfully at each name as if to say that he had immediately recognized its owner and disposed of those ‘representing …’ with a quick flourish of his busy pencil. The Reverend Mother’s eyes were attracted towards Patrick and she heard him say to the superintendent: ‘I’ll give our names to the reporter, sir, while you are condoling with the Fitzsimon family.’

  He moved away quickly before a reply could be made – no reply was needed. Of course, the superintendent wanted his name in the paper. It would be the first thing that he would look for on Monday morning – as would everyone else who was present today. And it would be expected of his subordinate that he would attend to important matters like that.

  Patrick, she noticed, didn’t need to queue up. As soon as he approached, the young reporter waved an astute pencil at him, entered a few hieroglyphs into his notebook and nodded him away. She herself had the courtesy of an almost bow of acknowledgement and she had little doubt that her name also would appear – representing the convent of St Mary’s of the Isle. Amazing how important it all was to people, but perhaps it was important because it ensured their place in the community was openly recognized.