A Shameful Murder

by Cora Harrison

  ‘And that was all?’ Patrick looked penetratingly at the young man and saw his cheeks redden.

  ‘Well, more or less all,’ he said and then, after a minute, ‘Well, I suppose that I was a bit in love with her. She was a sweet girl – a little flirtation; that was all.’

  ‘But no engagement; there was no promise of marriage between you?’ Patrick decided not to mention the pregnancy – since the man had been out of town he would not know about that, perhaps, had not heard about the inquest. He would have to gather some more evidence and see whether this young man should be on his list of suspects.

  ‘Certainly not. As a matter of fact—’ said Eugene Roche, flushing slightly. He stopped and then resumed quickly: ‘I forget what I was going to say.’

  ‘You knew her brother, didn’t you, Gerald Fitzsimon, went to parties that he gave, those parties where you were all experimenting with ether.’

  Eugene Roche looked a little taken aback and then laughed with a hint of nervousness. ‘You know everything, Sergeant. I can assure you that I had nothing to do with the theft from the Mercy Hospital. It was all just a bit of fun, as far as I was concerned. I wouldn’t have condoned robbery. I only went once or twice. Got tired of it. You don’t suspect me of doing anything to Angelina, do you?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Patrick soothingly. And yet, he thought, this man jumped very quickly to the conclusion that ether had something to do with Angelina’s death. Was it exceptionally quick wits, or did he know something about this death?

  He rose to his feet. ‘One last question, sir. Did you attend the Merchants’ Ball?’

  ‘Never miss it – best food and best drink in the town.’

  ‘And did you dance with Miss Fitzsimon?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, actually.’ He looked puzzled. ‘I did expect to see her there, but when I looked around for her I didn’t notice her. Of course, there were loads of girls there that I wanted to dance with, or that I felt I should dance with, so it’s possible that I just overlooked her.’

  ‘I see,’ said Patrick. He wasn’t quite sure that he believed this. If Angelina Fitzsimon was pregnant, the most likely thing was that the baby was of Eugene Roche’s creating. They were friendly, met often, had interests in common. She was a beautiful girl and he was a fine young man. It seemed to make sense.

  But why should he strangle the girl and throw her body into the river? An idea popped into Patrick’s mind. What if the young lecturer were engaged to someone else …?

  ‘And may I ask if your fiancée was present?’ He put the question in a matter-of-fact fashion and the young man looked startled for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

  ‘How did you find that out? It’s supposed to be a secret. Well, you know the Lavitts – I’m no way good enough for their daughter, don’t earn enough for one thing, youngest son in my family, you know. Still, I’m hoping for the best. I need to settle down, do a bit of work, get my doctorate, bump off Professor Clancy and take his position as head of the English Department and then I might be in with a chance. Only joking, Sergeant.’

  ‘And is there anything else that you can tell me about Miss Angelina Fitzsimon?’ Patrick didn’t approve of that sort of joking – dangerous talk, he thought.

  Roche sobered instantly. ‘Nothing, Sergeant, nothing, except that she was a very unhappy girl.’

  He had sounded genuine that time, thought Patrick as he walked back towards the barracks.

  But, of course, that did not exclude the possibility that he had killed her.

  There was no doubt that Angelina was having a hard time with a mother in the asylum and a father who was unsympathetic to everything that his daughter wanted to with her life and who was trying to force her into a marriage that may well have been quite distasteful to her, as well as – and he was sure that Angelina, from what he had heard of her, was clever enough to have realized what was going on – trying to rob her of the fortune which her grandmother had intended to be hers.

  I wonder what the Reverend Mother will make of this, was his thought as he settled down to write up meticulous notes of his three interviews during the day.

  EIGHTEEN

  St Thomas Aquinas:

  Deceptio est corruptio scientiae.

  (Deception corrupts science.)

  ‘I’m going to ask Dr Scher to tea this afternoon, Sister Bernadette; he’s been very good and helpful to me and I would like to thank him.’ No point in mentioning that she had asked Sergeant Patrick Cashman to call in at the same time. There would be plenty of sweet things for both – Sister Bernadette would make sure about that. The Reverend Mother turned back to her work in designing a new annex to her school where the girls would be taught practical skills and would be able to sell the products of their labour to the well-off of the city. Perhaps, she thought, she might be able to involve Mrs O’Leary as a consultant. The ladies of Cork would always need new hats.

  ‘I think it is important to establish the truth about the fundamentals of this case,’ she said firmly to Dr Scher and Patrick when both had eaten a sufficient amount of cake. While they had been eating she had read Patrick’s summaries of his interviews and had nodded approval to him. In the presence of Dr Scher she would say nothing, but allowed them to discuss the situation while she listened in a slightly abstracted fashion.

  They had begun to go around on the well-trodden path of motive, means and opportunity when she interrupted them. They looked at her, slightly startled, and she nodded. ‘It’s almost certain that the body of the girl, the body that I found which had been washed into the chapel gateway, was murdered, but there is another question. And this,’ she said dogmatically, ‘is a very important question.’ She paused, looking keenly at both before saying simply: ‘Who was this girl?’

  She had to bite back an unsuitable smile at their puzzled expressions. After a minute Patrick said hesitantly: ‘She was Angelina Fitzsimon.’

  ‘How do you know?’ She asked the question as if she was examining him on his catechism and he responded like a well-drilled pupil in the sure knowledge that he held the correct answer.

  ‘Because her father identified her.’

  ‘But what if he made a mistake?’

  Neither man answered so she continued. ‘Mr Fitzsimon’s daughter did not come home from the Imperial Hotel on the night of the Merchants’ Ball. He came to the barracks to report a missing person on the following morning. He was faced with the body of a girl, bloated from the river water, possessing the same distinctive colour of hair and of eyes and wearing,’ she said with emphasis, ‘the dress that she had bought for the occasion. Didn’t you say, Patrick, that Mr Fitzsimon said something about how much it cost and that it was from Dowden’s – almost as though he had looked at the gown more than at the girl – perhaps we were all guilty of that, were we not?’ She didn’t wait for a reply, but went on smoothly, ‘But, of course, the actual scientific evidence, the evidence provided by a well-qualified and experienced man like Dr Scher, that evidence was overlooked and disregarded, even by the doctor himself.’

  Patrick looked at Dr Scher, who looked with pursed lips at the Reverend Mother. The doctor was beginning to understand, she thought, but Patrick was still puzzled. He was a boy who dealt in facts.

  ‘St Thomas Aquinas,’ she said, ‘warns us that a lack of truth can corrupt science. The man of science, Dr Scher, found from the fact that the collarbone had not yet knitted together that this girl, the murder victim, was only seventeen, and yet Angelina Fitzsimon, by her father’s and all other evidence, was within three months of her twenty-first birthday. That was the first point. The second was that the murdered girl appeared to have suffered from malnutrition judging by her teeth and by the bones in her legs. I myself noticed that her wrist was very thin. One would not have expected that a girl of that class, probably carefully fed and looked after by a trained nanny, could possibly have suffered from malnutrition. And there is another point.’ She looked at the two attentive faces and smiled at
the wondering expressions. It was, of course, very much against her vows of humility to triumph over them, but her conscience had become more elastic with old age.

  ‘The tea-planter, Mr McCarthy said that she felt different, isn’t that right?’ she continued. ‘And he was a connoisseur in girls, according to himself,’ she added demurely. ‘And then, of course,’ she went on, ‘the contents of the stomach were strange – nothing in it but porridge – an odd and unusual food for a young lady’s afternoon tea or supper, but the mainstay of the poor. Taking everything together, then I do not believe that this girl that we have just seen buried was Angelina Fitzsimon, but was, in fact, a different girl, a girl who had a poor background.’ She sat back and looked at them calmly.

  ‘But, but, it wasn’t just the dress, was it?’ stammered Patrick. ‘She must, they must have looked alike. It seems impossible. The father did, definitely, identify her.’

  ‘They were, I would say, probably extremely alike, certainly in colouring,’ said the Reverend Mother, ‘sisters – half-sisters,’ she amended conscientiously. ‘They shared the same father.’ Her mind went to Mrs O’Leary, the hat-maker, and her comments on Joseph Fitzsimon. A thought of Lucy and her granddaughters invaded her for a moment, but she pushed it aside. Her duty now was to two young girls: to Angelina Fitzsimon, whose whereabouts were a mystery, and who might be in danger, and to the dead girl, who should, she thought fiercely, be avenged and her killer placed where he could do no more harm.

  ‘Who was she, then?’ It was Dr Scher who asked the question, but it was to Patrick that she turned with the answer.

  ‘She was Mary O’Sullivan from Sawmill Lane,’ she said quietly. ‘You remember Mrs O’Sullivan of Sawmill Lane? There are lots of her children here at the school, one of the younger sisters, Nellie O’Sullivan, has just left us – but none of them looked particularly like Mary – in fact there is little resemblance between any of them, which may point to a different father in each case. Mr O’Sullivan,’ she said calmly, ‘went off to England quite a number of years ago. I haven’t seen Mary O’Sullivan for a few years, but I was haunted by the feeling that I knew this dead girl – that I had seen that colouring before on a girl – it’s unusual in Cork, those very bright Mediterranean-blue eyes, almost the colour of those glassy-alleys that the children play with – marbles,’ added seeing Dr Scher’s puzzled face and remembering that as a small child he had played on the streets of Manchester, ‘and the chestnut-coloured hair,’ she continued: ‘we have lots of red-heads here in Cork, but they are light red, or fox-red, not that shade of almost brown, like a horse chestnut just out of its shell. That,’ she said, ‘is quite unusual here in Cork. And then when I heard about Joseph Fitzpatrick’s reputation of being seen around Sawmill Lane,’ she put in that circumlocution in order to avoid shocking Patrick by her knowledge of prostitutes and she saw his eyes widen before she went on thoughtfully, ‘I thought that was the solution. I had known Joseph Fitzsimon’s father, you see, and he had that colouring.’ Eileen, too, she remembered, had probably recognized the colouring, but was distracted by the expensive dress.

  ‘So where is Angelina Fitzsimon now? What’s happening to her?’ asked Patrick.

  ‘Did she run away from home because she was pregnant?’ asked Dr Scher.

  The Reverend Mother sighed impatiently. ‘There is no reason to suppose that Angelina was pregnant,’ she pointed out. ‘Mary O’Sullivan was, but that’s a different matter.’

  ‘How did they meet?’ Patrick, she was glad to see, had gone to the crux of the matter. She turned her attention to him.

  ‘I think it was probably through the St Vincent de Paul Society,’ she said seriously. ‘Angelina Fitzsimon, according to Professor Lambert, helped with sorting clothes. I wouldn’t be surprised if she visited homes, also, although the professor was very careful, very cagey about confirming this as he felt that her father would have disapproved.’

  ‘And Mary O’Sullivan wanted to emigrate because she was pregnant, because she wanted to get away from the life that her mother has led.’

  Reverend Mother was conscious of a feeling of warmth, almost, though it seemed fanciful, of a feeling of self-worth. Patrick was going straight to the heart of the problem. He had justified her faith in him. They looked at each other – the nun in her seventies and the young man in his early twenties. Each knew that the other would strain to the utmost to solve this murder.

  ‘And what about Angelina?’ he asked. ‘What was her motive?’

  ‘She had a lot of pressures on her, this Angelina,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘There was the pressure from her father to marry …’

  ‘So that the brother could inherit; and the father could be free of paying his debts, maintaining him in an expensive and idle way of life,’ reminded Dr Scher.

  ‘And the refusal to allow her to go to university – she needed to get away from her father perhaps in order to begin to establish a new life for herself.’

  ‘It all seems a bit trivial, though,’ objected Dr Scher. ‘Why didn’t she just sit quiet and wait until June? She could do what she wanted then. She couldn’t be forced into a marriage that she didn’t want, not in these days. Why do something so dramatic as to disappear? I just don’t understand that – what could the father do to her? Granted she couldn’t know that the poor girl would be murdered, but …’

  ‘You forget,’ said the Reverend Mother, ‘that her father was instrumental in getting her mother shut up in the lunatic asylum, something that probably meant that he now controls Anne Woodford’s – Anne Fitzsimon’s fortune. Perhaps Angelina feared that this might happen to her – perhaps it may have been threatened.’

  ‘She had only another few months to go,’ said Patrick slowly. ‘From the sixth of March to the eleventh of June – not long; if she could just keep out of the way until she was twenty-one … Perhaps she saw an opportunity and took it; what do you think, Reverend Mother?‘

  ‘And the other girl, this unfortunate Mary O’Sullivan, she was desperate – expecting a child – seeing no future for herself or her baby – down the quays, an early death through disease or violence, and the poor child neglected or abused,’ said Dr Scher in the sorrowful accents of one who had seen many terrible sights.

  ‘The resemblance must have struck them, certainly must have struck Angelina, when they met first at the St Vincent de Paul shop, or even perhaps at Mrs O’Sullivan’s house, room, rather; it must have set Angelina’s mind working,’ said the Reverend Mother.

  ‘So where has Angelina gone now?’ asked Dr Scher. ‘You’re not hiding her, concealed beneath a habit, wimple and veil?’ He directed his question mischievously at the Reverend Mother and she looked back at him coldly and did not bother to reply. But his words did make her think.

  ‘She only has a few months to wait out,’ mused Patrick. ‘You’ll remember that she took a cheque for fifty pounds. She spent five pounds on the first-class ticket and cabin to Liverpool and gave ten pounds to the girl, to Mary O’Sullivan. That leaves her with thirty-five pounds.’

  ‘Wonder why she did that; why she bothered with a first-class ticket and a first-class cabin,’ put in Dr Scher. ‘I don’t suppose this poor girl, Mary O’Sullivan, wanted that grandeur. She probably would have preferred to have the money.’

  ‘You must remember,’ said the Reverend Mother briefly, ‘this was to benefit Angelina as well as Mary O’Sullivan. In hunting terms, she laid a false trail – a trail to Liverpool. By the time that they found out about her purchase it would have been days, even weeks of enquiries. And, of course, those pursuing her would then have sought for her in Liverpool and not found her.’

  ‘Whereas she had stayed in Cork, perhaps, and still possessed thirty-five pounds with which to maintain herself,’ said Patrick. His upbringing gave him an appreciation of that sum of money, but Dr Scher put a different interpretation on it.

  ‘Pocket money for a girl like that,’ he said scornfully. ‘You’ll find that she has holed up with some rel
ation or another. So why not just go straight to that relation and never mind all the changing of identities.’

  ‘Her nearest relative,’ said the Reverend Mother ‘is, of course, her mother. And she is incarcerated within those stately walls of the lunatic asylum. And Angelina’s mother is, of course, Anne Woodford, a considerable heiress in her own right, whose affairs are now arranged by a solicitor and by her husband. I’m not sure …’ she said slowly, scanning through her mind the complicated web of family relationships, and thinking about her conversation with Lucy, ‘… I’m not sure that I know of any near relative who would be in position to take charge of the girl and protect her from her father.’

  There was a dead silence after she said that. Neither man, she thought, was able to get to grips with the thought that one of their brother men, Joseph Fitzsimon, had deliberately locked his wife up within the confines of a lunatic asylum so that he could get his hands on her considerable fortune. She, herself, found difficulty in thinking about it, but her life for over fifty years had accustomed her to dealing with difficult and unwelcome occurrences and she tried to face this as courageously as she could. The important thing now was to save the girl, Angelina, a worthwhile girl who had risen above her background and now badly needed help.

  ‘Angelina gave herself a few days’ start by this switching of identities; no doubt she relied on being sighted, I mean Mary O’Sullivan being sighted, wearing her ball gown and wrap, going down to Lapps Quay towards the shipping office, actually going on board the ship. She would have been a memorable figure, boarding a midnight ferry in those clothes. If there were a hunt for her during the following days someone was sure to remember this strange occurrence – the men in the ticket office for the shipping company – do remember, Patrick, that she gave her true name there when she bought the ticket for Mary – these men would remember and report if there had been enquiries after her. The bank would report that the cheque had been cashed. And, of course, the father and the brother would be certain that it was Angelina herself who had taken the ferry and would assume that she had a friend in Liverpool. In fact,’ said the Reverend Mother, looking back into the past, ‘I think that there was some sort of cousin, one of the Newenhams, who moved with his wife to Liverpool when I was young. Angelina might have relied on a certain amount of time being spent on hunting down any relation, or even school friend in Liverpool or in its vicinity.’