Murder in an Orchard Cemetery

by Cora Harrison

  John Fitzpatrick did not answer for a moment and she wondered whether she had been indiscreet, but then, quite suddenly he laughed. ‘Now here’s a little puzzle for you,’ he said. ‘When I went to Belfast first, I was just a lad, about your own age, I suppose, straight out of university with my shiny new BA and a picture of myself in gown and mortar board, off to my first job. Well, an old fellow on the staff of the Belfast News gave me a bit of advice and now I’m going to pass it onto you – in fact, he wrote it down on a piece of paper for me and told me to keep it in my pocket and to look at it every day. He didn’t write it all out, just three letters and three full stops.’ Deliberately he took his notebook from his pocket, tore a page from it, printed the three letters and the three full stops and then passed it across to her.

  P.I.P.

  She read and smiled. ‘I’m more used to R.I.P. with all those funeral notices in the Cork Examiner,’ she said, but then put her brains to work. The first had to be ‘politics’ …

  ‘Politics is …’ she said. And then, triumphantly, ‘“Politics is Power”. Is that it?’

  He said nothing, just smiled with an air of appreciation, drank a little more of his wine, holding the glass up briefly in her direction as a salute. She had the impression that he was trying to make up his mind about something, and when he suddenly replaced his glass and leaned across the table so that he was very close to her, she knew that she had passed the test.

  ‘I was in London last week,’ he said softly. ‘Doing a piece about the Locarno Pact, I met a friend of mine who used to be on the Belfast News and then moved to the Telegraph in London and he said something quite interesting to me. And this is what he said: “I hear that there is a great need for a new stocking factory in a small town outside that little city of yours.” Interesting that.’

  Eileen stared at him. The words, ‘what did he mean?’ were on her lips but she suppressed them. He had told her all that had been said between the two men. The one in London had heard something in confidence, didn’t want to break that confidence, but wanted to give an old friend a hint that there was something exciting going on in the city where he had chosen to work. John Fitzpatrick, she thought, had been handicapped by his Irish origins. He, too, might have moved to London, moved onto a job on the Telegraph or even on the prestigious Times newspaper, but with the tension between England and Ireland and the disappointment that Ireland had broken the hundreds of years of subservience to the United Kingdom, no southern Irish journalist like John Fitzpatrick would get a job in London. She began to understand now his air of weary superiority which annoyed so many of the young reporters on the Cork Examiner. He felt that his position as foreign correspondent on a provincial newspaper was very much second-best. He had a hint about a story, but it wasn’t his province and now he was passing it over to her. Stocking factory must mean Willie Hamilton – and Willie Hamilton had been present at the retreat in the convent of the Sisters of Charity when a bomb had gone off in the orchard cemetery.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said casually, ‘whether a clean sweep was intended.’

  ‘I hear you are very much in with Reverend Mother Aquinas,’ he said and instantly she understood his meaning.

  ‘I owe everything to her,’ she said. ‘She was a great teacher. Got me through the Honan Scholarship. She and I trust each other.’ That, of course, did not mean that she had access to all that the Reverend Mother knew. That was quite a different matter and she had always been careful not to ask too many questions. She pondered over his mention of the name and guessed that this mystery was somehow tied up with the rich and privileged citizens, people who spoke in the way that the Reverend Mother spoke and people who treated even the mention of her name with huge respect.

  ‘Set you on the road to success,’ he said mockingly, and once again raised his glass in her direction.

  ‘I’m going to study law, to be a solicitor,’ she said proudly. She would disabuse him of the idea that she was intending to earn a livelihood by picking up bits of journalism – ‘a hand-to-mouth existence’, to quote one of her mother’s favourite sayings. Nevertheless, it would be quite a feather in her cap if she made a good story out of this, and perhaps even helped the police in finding the murderer. That would make Patrick regard her as a sensible adult rather than a small girl who had played around the street when he was studying for his leaving certificate. ‘If they had all been in the orchard, then it would have been a straight road for your man,’ she continued.

  ‘Last man standing – and a nice little scapegoat, named IRA, sitting on the fence,’ he said. ‘Now why don’t you try another sip of the Bordeaux. You’ll get to like it; I assure you. Bit stronger than the Beaujolais but you should develop your taste buds – can’t be a little girl all of your life.’

  She ignored him. I’ve more important things than wine to think of, was her brief reflection before she moved back to considering his words. Willie Hamilton was sent down from Belfast to do a job. His cover was the stocking factory, but that was a most expensive cover, and what was more, it seemed to point to a long-term job, not just a one-off assassination. She looked across at John Fitzpatrick. He was tugging at something in the back pocket of his trousers of the rather elderly suit which he always wore to the Cork Examiner offices. When the object emerged, she could see that it was a rather worn and crumpled map of the county of Cork. He unfolded it carefully and spread a section out for her to examine.

  ‘Watergrasshill, great place for racing. Many a point-to-point I went to in that place,’ he said in slightly clearer and louder tones than he had used previously. From the corner of her eye, she could see that one of the lawyers had looked across, attracted by the map.

  ‘Watergrasshill,’ she repeated. His finger was not on that well-known village, but on something with small writing, about ten miles distant, she thought and memorized the name and the correct spelling while John Fitzpatrick reminisced over all of the money that he had lost at these point-to-points in Watergrasshill.

  ‘Good land around there,’ she said, making sure that her tone was casual.

  ‘Great land,’ he echoed. ‘Get great mushrooms there, we used to say when I was a young lad. That’s always the way. These rich and titled people have horses on their land, the horse manure feeds the mushrooms, and the mushrooms feed the hungry young lads. I can remember that myself and a friend used to bring an old frying pan and a box of matches and we used to gather a bit of wood and when all was ready for our meal we used to steal into the fields, pick the mushrooms, and then fry them in butter. Never tasted anything better in my life,’ said John Fitzpatrick as he took the last bite of what was probably going to be a most expensive meal.

  Eileen thought about it. Yes, even a cursory glance at the map had shown her that the land around the village which he had indicated was filled with well-known country estates, no castles, nothing so ostentatious, but lots of beautiful big houses. Most of the wealthy Anglo-Irish in west Cork and in north Cork had been burned out of the country; some assassinated, many frightened out, and a few bought out with sums that were hugely below the value of the land and of the buildings. But these country estates in east Cork had been, up to now, left largely untouched. She wondered why. There must be some reason. She looked across at her lunch companion and he nodded as though he had traced her thoughts from the expression on her face.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Not much talk has there been, don’t you think? Well outside the city, that part of the county, isn’t it? And, you know the old proverb, “out of sight; out of mind”. And, of course, they made sure that they had power. Easy enough. Great friends with the local police, subscriptions, and donations to the local churches, some even swapping religion, marrying Catholics, well, you know how it goes. And, of course, they were a long way out of the city, out there in east Cork,’ he repeated. ‘No one troubled too much about them. And the word had got around that bad things happened to anyone who made any threats or planned any raids. They had
a network of men, you see, a network of protectors, all of them employed in some way so that they would not be noticed. Respectable people, small businessmen, librarians, schoolteachers, quite a few schools, they had – you’d be surprised.’

  Protestant schools, he meant, thought Eileen, and yes, she was surprised. The schools would probably have been built in the last century, on estates or in villages near to estates, well built, too. That was a time when big money was being made from the rich lands around the northern and eastern parts of Cork, in the places where Cork tipped up against Tipperary and Waterford – the Golden Vale, she remembered hearing that it had been called – rich, rich grass that reared splendid horses and cattle. The landowners had been given vast stretches of land by Cromwell and other English leaders, before and after his reign of terror in Ireland. They had brought their own servants with them, of course, had brought farm workers and gamekeepers and woodland keepers.

  She looked across at John Fitzpatrick and he nodded as though he were able to read her thoughts.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Still plenty of them around, all descendants, but not military men, not men to use violence. Peaceful crowd, though, but all of them willing to defend their masters and their own families. But not people for the shot in the dark.’

  ‘Easy for them,’ said Eileen, thinking of the wrongs of the Catholic tenants and workers, and for a moment, despite her caution, her voice rose slightly, and he looked a warning at her. Defiantly she stuck her fork into a succulent chunk of meat and thrust it into her mouth.

  ‘Be that as it may …’ He left a pause after the words, and then repeated them. ‘Be that as it may, they were willing but unorganized; reacted to an emergency but didn’t plan ahead. And, of course, the … the boyoes, our heroes … Well, they had learned their lesson in a hard world, they had been trained and drilled. Big Mick,’ he said, using the nickname for the patriot Michael Collins, ‘Big Mick, God have mercy on him, well, he was a great commander and he did what all good leaders should do: he trained men to train others and to pass on their skills. Did a great job, so he did! A great piece of work it was – who would have thought it – the elephant defeated by the mouse. But to come back to our friend, Tom. Well, he’s another man who is, who was, a great trainer of men. Did sterling work, according to his principles, in certain areas up north until he made it too hot to hold onto him …’

  ‘And now,’ said Eileen. Her excitement was rising. The moment had come for his revelation, and she got ready for it with a quick gulp from the wine that he had called a Bordeaux. It was strong but it sent a fire down her windpipe and she felt her cheeks glow and a mixture of excitement heightened by fear. She sat up very straight.

  ‘And now,’ he said, copying her phrase and leaning across the table until his head almost touched hers and she could sense a certain warmth coming from him as though he felt an excitement from his own words. ‘Well, some people don’t like being frightened out of home and land, so a counterforce is being built up with our friend Tom in charge. He’s got a cover; and you know what that is, he’s got a business, he’s established in Cork. He knows how to organize, how to train some willing workers. But, of course, to be potent, to serve these people in every way, he needs a bit of power, he needs to be doing something more than the work of a small factory, wouldn’t you agree?’

  Her plate was empty, except for a small smear of the rich brown gravy. Deliberately, she licked her finger, traced out the letters P.I.P. and then she sat back and admired the chalk-white of the china plate as it shone through the smears of gravy. She left it for a moment and then broke off a piece of roll and mopped up the remaining gravy and chewed it in silence.

  He sat back. ‘Well, I must say that you are a pleasure to take out to lunch,’ he said. ‘God bless you, but you have a fine appetite. Fancy a pudding or a dessert, as they are calling it in polite society, these days?’

  She shook her head. ‘Just a coffee,’ she said in a careless manner. The meeting was over, now. She knew that. He had, without betraying any confidences, given her an excellent hint and now she had something with which she could follow up the story and find the perpetrator of the murder in the orchard cemetery and discover the reason behind it. These Protestants, they needed organizing, but also, they needed powerful protection. They needed alterations to the hastily drawn up laws of the new republic which allowed tenants the rights to purchase rented farms from owners who had held them from the time of Cromwell, or even earlier. Their tenants would be enabled to purchase back the land for what was claimed to be a fair price, but which was known to be anything but a fair price – its acceptance mostly insured by a mixture of threats and illegal blackmail. This Willie Hamilton had been sent down from Belfast, had been given the money to move his stocking factory which was to form a screen for his true activities. It was going to be important for him to be a businessman, a man known in the city and then to be elected as alderman and from alderman to progress, next year, to the post of lord mayor of the second biggest city in Ireland.

  The coffee was black and very bitter, not at all like a comfortable cup of tea, but she drank it down without comment. The coffee should sober her up. She had no desire to go, half intoxicated, back to her desk and even less inclination, with the wine running through her veins, to ride her motorbike out to Watergrasshill and beyond.

  He read her thoughts as they both drank their coffee. When he had paid the bill, he took her leather jacket from the waiter and put it around her shoulders.

  ‘Back to the office then.’ He said the words loudly. It was, she knew, a command, and it was probably nothing to do with the fact that she had been drinking wine and was not used to doing that at lunchtime. No, he was being ultra, ultra cautious and wanted to have no link from himself to any journeys she might make into the heartlands of wealthy landowners in east Cork. In any case, what could she find out by walking around and asking questions? She would certainly arouse suspicion and when it came down to it, although she wouldn’t mind giving poor old Patrick a bit of a nudge in the right direction, basically what she wanted to do was to write a good article for the Cork Examiner. The university term had finished. Her place was ensured for next year’s work and now the four months of holidays scrolled out ahead of her. She would study, that went without saying. Study was a part of her life and a day would seem wrong without it. She would study, and perhaps be able to get a bit of experience in a solicitor’s office, but she and her mother needed to eat, and she hoped that she would get a pound or two every week of work from the Cork Examiner.

  As they walked together up Academy Street she said aloud, ‘Innuendo.’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’ She had startled him out of some thoughts of his own.

  ‘Innuendo,’ she repeated. ‘It’s a great way of stirring up interest.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He took off his hat and bowed towards her. ‘I shall remember that interesting word, so thank you for your most kind advice,’ he said with solemnity.

  ‘And thank you for such an extremely good lunch,’ she replied graciously, with a slight nod of her head. She was beginning to feel a slight fizzing in her brain and had the supremely confident feeling that she was about to write a magnificent article for the Cork Examiner, all filled with questions and with innuendos. It would be a masterpiece of fine writing, something that would even garner a few words of praise from the notoriously grumpy professor of English at UCC.

  ELEVEN

  ‘I’ll interview the lady solicitor, Joe.’ Patrick had finished writing and now he looked up at his sergeant. ‘You pop into the kitchen and just check that this Sister Mary Agnes did suggest that the gardener dig a grave to be ready for the old nun when she dies.’ Joe, he knew, would get on well in the kitchen and he preferred not to have him around while he was talking to Miss Hogan.

  Patrick had an instinctive dislike of people like Maureen Hogan. By now, though having been brought up in the slums of Cork, he had achieved a manner which made him feel quite comfo
rtable in the presence of the wealthy professional and businessmen of the city. He never pretended to be other than he was. Cork was a small city, and everyone knew the origin of everyone else – ‘breed, seed and generation’ was a great Cork saying. He had slightly modified his accent, toned down the sing-song tones of his boyhood, took some care to make sure that he bore in mind the second letter in the digraph ‘th’ and assiduously tried to widen his vocabulary by studying one of the classics, dictionary by his side, for half an hour every day when he wasn’t too tired.

  But Maureen Hogan did not fit in. For one thing, she wanted to be too matey, too much as though she had met him in a public house, rather than being a respectable solicitor who was being questioned by a police inspector, after the brutal murder of a respectable citizen.

  ‘Let’s go and sit on that wall,’ she said in a friendly fashion. ‘And, for heaven’s sake, stop calling me Miss Hogan, Patrick. You’re making me nervous. Don’t be so stiff.’

  Resentfully, he followed her. He didn’t mind her sitting on the wall, though he did dislike the way her skirt was so short that when she perched upon it, she displayed most of a pair of shapely legs. No stockings either, he noticed. And he certainly resented the way in which she called him ‘Patrick’ as if he were one of her drinking pals.

  ‘I won’t keep you long, Miss Hogan,’ he said as briskly as he could manage. He debated whether to sit on the wall also – then he could avoid looking at her legs, but he felt that would gravely threaten his dignity and so he compromised by putting his notebook on the flat stone which topped the gate pier and keeping his eyes fixed upon it. He occupied a few minutes in asking her name, address and occupation and noting the answers before proceeding to his more probing questions. He had settled on asking everyone their movements after the midday luncheon at the convent and to ignore their movements during the morning when mostly they all seemed to have been occupied in a group with religious matters. The chances were that the makeshift bomb had been planted in the very early morning or even overnight, but it would, according to the bomb expert, have had to be ignited shortly before it exploded as there was no trace of an alarm clock or timer. The gardener reported the prepared grave had been covered by him at the end of the previous day with a few planks, supporting a heavy, dark-green, canvas tarpaulin, which, in turn was decorated with a few pots of flowering plants. No one, whether the usual inhabitants of the convent or any of the visitors, would have had any reason to uncover this tactful display. The gardener himself had made it plain that he would not touch his handiwork until the morning of the funeral.