Gruesome Discovery, A

ONE

St Thomas Aquinas

‘… potest, igitur, lex naturalis deleri de cordibus hominum, vel propter malas persuasiones, … vel etiam propter pravas consuetudines et habitus corruptos.’

(… natural law, therefore, can be blotted out from the human heart … either by evil persuasions, or by vicious customs and corrupt habit.)

There was a dreadful stench from the trunk. Damp, perhaps. Stronger than that, surely. Decay of some sort, thought the Reverend Mother, bending over it. Fifty years of working in the slums of Cork, a city where periodically high tides and south-easterly winds drove the river to flush out the sewers and empty them onto the streets and into houses, had inured her to smells of all kinds: excrement; rotting carcases of rats, dead cats and dogs; bodies unwashed for years, an everyday experience for her; and occasionally an overlooked corpse of a beggar who had died behind the convent chapel.

And yet this seemed to be a worse stench than most she had encountered. She was not surprised, now, that the men who had delivered it to her had hesitated to follow her orders about depositing it in a classroom and had suggested placing it in this century-old, unused outhouse at a distance from the school and the convent. She had acquiesced. There would be no point in disappointing the children next morning if the trunk only contained rubbish and now that she looked at it more carefully, she was afraid that would prove to be the case.

An old trunk with broken corners, disfigured by greyish patches of mould. A printed label in the precise centre with the name and address of an auctioneer on Princes Street, and beneath it, on another label, written in indelible purple pencil, in large, even, block capital letters: ‘THE REVEREND MOTHER, ST MARY’S ISLE’. The Reverend Mother stretched forward a hand, withdrew it and looked at the trunk dubiously. Like all who seek charitable contributions, she was gifted frequently with items that, on examination, she would designate as rubbish. There was another, smaller label in a different hand, a brown luggage label, attached to the handle of the trunk. ‘Old School Books’ it said in fancy, ornate handwriting, finishing by a neat and perfectly rounded full stop, with a hollow centre. Useless, probably, she thought, imagining torn copies of The Christian Brothers Latin Grammar. But perhaps not. Heavy, anyway. The auctioneer’s men had staggered under their load. They could well be hardback books, even perhaps expensively bound. The poor of the city did not send their unwanted goods to auctioneers. The rag-and-bone man would be the destination of their leavings. These might be good books, despite the appearance of the trunk.

The Reverend Mother stretched out a hand to open the lid and then stiffened as a voice from behind her said softly, ‘I think that might be my property, Reverend Mother.’

The Reverend Mother did not reply. She did not turn around or draw attention to her name on the label. From the corner of her eye she could see the belted raincoat, the slouched hat, pulled well down. Almost a uniform for the proscribed Republican movement. Bother, she thought. Usually the convent was not troubled by their nefarious doings. There was something about the assumption of authority in that soft voice which annoyed her. Without answering, she leaned forward and flipped open the lid of the trunk. It moved more readily than she had expected, flopped over quite suddenly, striking the side of the table with a slight thud. And then there was a terrible stench of putrefaction, a sour, sickening smell.

She had not thought to bring a candle; the small, old roadside building was well lit by a gas lamp on the pavement outside the window. There were shadows everywhere, but there was enough light to see the contents of the trunk.

Not school books, but a man, a body, a corpse surely by that smell. The Reverend Mother forced herself not to recoil, and bent a little more forward so as to examine it. The body was wedged into the trunk. A small body, but it barely fitted, the legs doubled up, with the knees pressed up against the chest. A man, a very short, stout man, dressed in a respectable frockcoat, black broadcloth, starched white shirt, top hat rammed down upon his head, the eyes, just visible below the rim, stared up at her.

But that was not all. As her own eyes became accustomed to the dark, the Reverend Mother saw that there was something else. Packed all around the body were the rotting skins of dead animals, green, white, glistening silver with decomposition, gobbets of blood, lumps of fat, some crawling maggots.

There was a sudden gasp from the man at her shoulder and the Reverend Mother turned back to her companion. Bigger than his father, was her first thought, but not as tall as his younger brothers. She knew them better, but Fred was instantly recognizable. He had been the only red-headed child in the large family. She hadn’t seen him for a few years, but the face, oddly, had changed very little since childhood, the eyes wide with apprehension, the vulnerable mouth, bottom lip trembling, the aspect of a child who dreads a blow, she had often thought.

‘It’s Fred Mulcahy, isn’t it?’ she enquired. And then when he made no reply, she added calmly, ‘Surely that is your father. What has happened?’

He backed away from her hastily. ‘I know nothing about this, nothing whatsoever.’ He cast a sick look of loathing at the body and then averted his eyes. In the light from the street gas lamp his face was almost as white as that of the corpse before them.

‘But you were expecting something?’ She looked at him closely. His outstretched hand was shaking. His breath came quick and fast.

‘Not that, not that at all. I was expecting something. It was to be handed over at the Douglas Street Sawmills, just outside the Sawmills, that was what they said, these were my orders. I was to go to the Sawmills and receive a trunk, supposed to be landed at Douglas Passageway. Come by sea. Not that at all.’ His voice was high and breathless. Awkwardly, he removed his soft, slouch-rimmed grey hat and stood clutching it to his breast. ‘When I saw this trunk on the back of a van I followed it. I thought that they had taken the wrong turning but I was slower – got stuck behind an old donkey. They had carried it into the convent before I could stop them. I thought the men had made a mistake.’

The Reverend Mother surveyed him dispassionately for a moment. Cork was a small city and she knew most of the inhabitants and she certainly knew all about the Mulcahy family.

The dead man, Henry Mulcahy, had been a country boy who came to the city well over fifty years ago. He had worked as a barrow boy for his uncle for a few years and quite soon had seen a way to profit from the busy meat market at Shandon, buying hides of cows and skins of sheep at very low prices, and transforming them into marketable leather and sacks of wool. He had married well; she had heard that his wife had been the daughter of a prosperous farmer; had sired ten sons but neither of the older boys, she had been told, was keen to follow their father in his trade. Fred, she knew, had rebelled and left home. Rumour said that he had joined the Republicans and rumour, she thought, surveying his slouch hat and belted raincoat, had not lied.

‘You were expecting a trunk, but not this trunk?’ she queried and then as he turned away, she called after him. ‘I shall have to say that I saw you, Fred, so it may be as well for you to tell me what you were expecting to see when the lid of the trunk was raised,’ she warned as he went towards the door.

He stopped abruptly, started violently and then turned towards her. She could see how his face grew even paler. He produced a revolver from his raincoat and pointed it directly at the starched bib that lay over her chest. Her heart skipped a beat, but she stood very still, not looking at him, but eyeing a small maggot that crawled across the dead man’s trouser knee. The boy’s face was chalk white and his hand shook. There was a possibility, remote, but nevertheless present, that he might fire. Guns were an evil invention, she had often thought. They allowed killing to be at a distance, they depersonalized it. Much harder to stick a knife or a sword into living flesh than to pull a small trigger from a remote point. She said a quick prayer; should be an act of contrition, she thought, but incongruously only the words of St Thomas Aquinas: ‘Grant me, O Lord, a penetrating mind to understand’ came to her thoughts.

‘I think, Reverend Mother, you would be best to forget that you have seen me.’ His voice was high, shaking and his face grew even whiter. She wondered when he had last eaten. ‘Give me your word that you will say nothing of seeing me,’ he screamed at her impatiently.

She made no reply to this, but studied him speculatively. He would be one of the republicans, one of the Irish Republican Army, as they named themselves, one of those who had rebelled against the treaty that left the six most northerly counties still as possessions of Britain. It was, of course, a lost cause by now. Michael Collins was dead; but the government he had set up was firmly established as a Dáil, a parliament. The ceasefire with the rebels had been agreed, de Valera was out of the country. Only the very dedicated, the very fanatical and the very desperate still kept the rebellion going. Which of these was the young man in front of her? The last, she thought. He must be about twenty now, she thought. It was a stubborn age. Only complete desperation would now drive him to return to Shandon as a prodigal son. While there was a cause to be fought for, then he kept away from his father.

And the man lying dead in front of her would have been unlikely to kill the fatted calf in celebration at the return of his son – more likely, she thought, to send him out to the yard to work on flaying the calf’s skin.

‘When did you last eat?’ she asked and then when he did not reply, she added, ‘I was thinking that if I showed you the telephone, you might ring Inspector Cashman and tell him the story. No need for you to await his arrival. I will deal with that. But at least you would not render yourself the first suspect in the killing of your father if you were the one that reported the finding of the body. But before you go, you must have a cup of tea and a slice of Sister Bernadette’s fruit cake. You remember Sister Bernadette, don’t you? She always had some little treat for you when you were a boy and when Bridie used to bring you here.’ The reference to the past might calm him, make him feel less threatened. Did Bridie still work for the Mulcahy family, she wondered. Recently the woman had ceased her visits to the convent that had once sheltered her.

‘I don’t want anything to eat and I don’t want anything to do with police or with … that carrion.’ He spat out the words, but his voice trembled and the hand that held the gun trembled even more.

‘Your mother must be told,’ said the Reverend Mother in a practical tone of voice. ‘Death brings its duties,’ she added, keeping her voice calm and resisting the temptation to ask him to put that pistol back into his pocket.

‘A happy release for her, poor woman, after all those years of slavery.’

‘Nevertheless,’ she said persuasively, ‘over twenty years of marriage brings its own affections, its own bonds.’

He didn’t reply to her comment, didn’t even turn his head, but he had heard her, she was sure. A clever boy, she had learned this from Bridie, who had worked in the Mulcahy household since his birth; young Fred had done well at Farranferris Seminary but had declined an offer from the priests to become a clerical student and progress to the priesthood. He wanted to go to university to study mathematics while his father had wanted him to become a feather merchant. No doubt the poor boy was now hiding out somewhere in a derelict cottage in west Cork. Let him go now, she prayed, let him lose himself in the back streets, or make for the Western Road and be outside the city before a hunt was organized. And once he had left the premises, then she could go indoors to the convent, lift the phone to telephone Inspector Patrick Cashman and leave the matter to him. Dead bodies were his affair; live, young, undernourished bodies and minds were hers.

But he did not go. He lifted the pistol with great deliberation, taking care to steady it by placing his left hand beneath his right wrist, aimed it carefully, not at her, but at the man in the trunk. There was a small explosion, a strong clean smell and then the rancid odour intensified. Light from the roadside gas lamp flooded in as the door was opened and receded as he closed it behind him. He had left and now she was alone with the body; the body which had just received the outpouring of a pistol.

The Reverend Mother took several seconds to recover. Her legs were trembling. Old age is no excuse for cowardice, she said to herself severely as she forced her unwilling limbs to move forward and to stand beside the trunk. No blood, she thought, nothing really to be seen without bending over the body. And even then it was impossible to see anything. The well-tailored black broadcloth would conceal any stain of blood.

But she had a strong impression that Fred Mulcahy had shot his father through the heart. For a moment she stood very still, visualizing the scene and picturing the angle of the pistol; picturing the young man steadying his shaking hand; trying to remember the sound. She looked back again. She had been very sure that the man was dead when she had opened the lid, but the smell of decay had been so strong that it was an obvious conclusion. It had been a little later when she had noticed the rotting hides and skins. She forced herself to look again. Yes, he was undoubtedly dead. The maggots continued on their grisly work, undisturbed, and one even crawled across the dead man’s rigid eyeball.

Abruptly the Reverend Mother closed down the lid of the trunk. There was no key. She remembered now how quickly and easily she had opened it. The small latches had been well oiled, she thought, as they clicked into position with the slightest of pressures. She had opened it just by sliding the round metal lock. There had definitely been no key protruding from the lock and nor were they tied to the handle of the trunk. She slid her hand along it to be sure and then went resolutely to the door of the old building, taking out the large bunch of keys from her capacious pocket and turning back to lock it after her.

There was no one around in the hallway, or in the corridor beyond when she had gone back into the convent. A rattle of tea cups and a sound of voices came from the convent refectory. The nuns were at tea. The Reverend Mother continued down towards the back door, and unhooked the telephone receiver from the side of the instrument.

‘Get me Inspector Cashman, will you, Miss Clayton,’ she said wearily. She should, of course, give the number of the police barracks, but she was too tired to look it up.

‘Yes, of course, Reverend Mother. He should be still in his office. I’ll have him on the line in a moment.’ Miss Clayton sounded alert and interested. The Reverend Mother reminded herself that she would need to be careful or else sensational stories would be flying around Cork within minutes. As she waited, she could hear a muffled sound. Miss Clayton had her hand well over the receiver, but her telephone speaking voice was penetrating and shrill and she could distinguish the words: ‘she wants the guards’.

‘Good evening, Reverend Mother.’ Patrick sounded fairly breathless. ‘Not in his office,’ she could imagine Miss Clayton telling her fellow workers.

‘Good evening, Inspector,’ she said formally. Face to face, she called him Patrick and still saw him fondly as an earnest, hardworking, determined six- or seven-year-old boy in her school, but in public she always addressed him as ‘Inspector’ and the telephone exchange, she often reminded herself, was a public place. ‘I was wondering whether you could spare the time to come here to the convent, if you are in the neighbourhood,’ she continued feeling unable to invent an innocuous reason as to why he should come swiftly and perhaps bring the police doctor with him.

‘I’m on my way down there just now and will drop in, Reverend Mother,’ he said obligingly and his speed of response made her realize that there had been a slight shake in her voice. She carefully hung up the receiver, touching it to make sure that it was in position. Her cloak was a light one. No doubt that was why she was shivering and so she went swiftly to her room and donned a heavier cloak over the top of it. It and the heat from the fire gradually warmed her. Sister Bernadette, she was touched to see, had not only brought in her tea, but had placed the teapot, with a fancily knitted woollen cosy protecting its swelling sides, on the hearth just in front of the glowing fire. She poured a cup from it, not bothering to add milk, but conscientiously taking some sugar, although she loathed the taste. Sugar is good for shock, her old friend, Dr Scher, had told her that. It would keep her going until Patrick took the responsibility from her hands.

And then she thought of something else, something puzzling. She braved the icy corridor again and went purposefully down towards the back door. Once again she unhooked the receiver from its hook beside the telephone and spoke into it after the immediate greeting.

‘Oh, Miss Clayton, I wonder would you be kind enough to get me the telephone number of Mr Hayes, the auctioneer.’

‘Yes, of course, Reverend Mother.’ Miss Clayton sounded unsurprised. Probably knew all about the trunk-load of books already, thought the Reverend Mother, too shaken to smile to herself. She took in a deep breath and set herself, while she waited, the task of counting backwards in sevens, starting at one hundred. This, she knew, required concentration and kept other images from her mind, as it traversed the lines of numbers from 100 right back to 2. She had just reached 23 when a series of clicks brought the auctioneer onto the line.

‘Reverend Mother! I was just about to phone you to make sure that the books arrived safely.’ Probably Mr Hayes was going to do nothing of the sort, but he was an excessively polite man and would not like even to hint a surprise at hearing from her. Still he had confirmed that the trunk had been meant for her and that was something that she had wanted to know.

‘Yes, indeed, and thank you very much for sending them over,’ she said. Were they a ‘left over’ when the sale had finished, or did someone deliberately send that trunk to her? She had only to wait expectantly and Mr Hayes, as usual, would fill the silence with his fluent, rapid delivery.

‘Not at all. It’s a pleasure, Reverend Mother. I hope you find them useful.’ He gave a little chuckle. ‘Grist to the mill, eh! They were left to the end of the sale of Mr Mulcahy’s goods, the stuff that he wasn’t taking with him to the new house. You know Mr Mulcahy, Mulcahy the Skins, Reverend Mother? Well, he’s moved to a fine new house in Montenotte and he had a lot of stuff in those houses of his in Shandon Street that he wanted cleared out – good stuff, you know, but a bit battered. Twelve children grew up in those two houses, ten of them boys and you know what boys are like, Reverend Mother! They will tilt their chairs, and kick the legs of the tables and slam the doors of the cupboards. Not that it wasn’t good, serviceable stuff. Quite a few bargains, there, for those who had an eye for a well-made piece of furniture. Yes, we had a nice dining-room set, some wardrobes, be as good as new if a carpenter did a few repairs, one of those big, old tables, sand it down and you’d have it looking good, quite a few oak presses, a couple of trunk-loads of curtains and cushions, an old clothes horse, that sort of thing. Good stuff, but not what the man wanted in his new house in Montenotte and not what the new owners wanted either. You know the way it goes, Reverend Mother. New house, new furniture! That’s what—’

‘And the trunk that you sent to me.’ Mr Hayes, as a true auctioneer, was able to cram ten words into each second, and would, like a wound-up clockwork toy, go on with great fluency until interrupted.

‘Well, your cousin, Mrs Murphy, was still there from the sale before, bought herself a lovely old croquet set, the young ladies will enjoy that if we ever get a summer; that’s what I said to her. So I tipped her a nod when it came to the trunk of school books – I knew that you would like them, Reverend Mother, so as soon as Mrs Murphy said, half-a-crown, well, I brought my hammer down and said sold!.’

So it was her cousin, Lucy, who had purchased the books. For a moment, the Reverend Mother wondered what to say. Mr Hayes, when he heard the truth of the contents of the trunk, sold for half-a-crown to Lucy, would be disconcerted and angry, perhaps, that she had said nothing. However, Patrick had to be the first to know about the grisly contents of the battered old trunk.

‘Well, Mr Hayes,’ she said eventually, ‘you’ve solved one puzzle for me, and now here comes Inspector Cashman to solve another. Goodbye, Mr Hayes, and thank you, again, for thinking of us.’

And then decisively she hung up the receiver. Despite the events of the past hour, she felt a smile begin to warm her lips as she pictured Mr Hayes’s machine-like brain rapidly shuttling reasons for any connection between a trunk-load of old books and the arrival of a senior member of the local Guards. ‘Tommy,’ he would say to his assistant, ‘did you take a look inside that trunk, at all? It was never a load of dirty books that we sent over to the Reverend Mother in St Mary’s Isle. Would you tell me, Tommy, was there any chance of that, at all?’

The Reverend Mother went straight towards the front hallway once she had replaced the telephone receiver. Patrick had said that he was on the way down – those had been his words – and so he would not be long arriving. He was probably on his way to pay a visit to his elderly mother, she thought with some compunction. Now his evening would be filled with activity, people to see, orders to be given, reports to write. She waited by the front door until she saw the lights of a car illuminate the garishly coloured glass of the convent front door. She checked, as was automatic with her, that her bunch of keys were still in her pocket, and then stepped over the threshold, pulling the door shut with the softest of clicks in order not to disturb Sister Bernadette at her evening meal.

But it was not the brand-new, shining black Model T Ford, the property of the Cork Police Barracks, which drew up at the edge of the pavement, but a battered, old, grey Humber with a large dent on the mudguard of its front wheel. And the man that climbed out from the driver’s door was not a slim, young police officer, but a rotund and elderly figure. The Reverend Mother went to the gate.

‘Dr Scher, how nice to see you. In fact, I am expecting Patrick. Did he telephone you?’

Dr Scher took a little time to slam a recalcitrant front door into submission and then shook his head.

‘No, I was with him when you telephoned. He said that your voice was shaking. I came along as support.’

‘I’m perfectly well,’ said the Reverend Mother sharply and then she relented. ‘Well, I have had a rather unpleasant experience. Something most unexpected has happened. But where is Patrick?’

‘Well, we were on our way when Patrick must have spotted a man that the police were looking for, young fellow, standing outside the door of a van, leaning on the bonnet, smoking a cigarette, young fool. Patrick stopped his car, just in front of me, miracle that I didn’t go smack into him. He jumped out to arrest this young fellow. Young fool pulled a gun on him, but it didn’t do any harm, no bullet in it, hadn’t been reloaded after the last shot, according to Patrick who took it off him. And then along comes another lad on a motorbike, drives straight at them, shouting Jump, Fred! Patrick stood back to save himself and the young fellow jumps on the back of the motorbike and off the pair of them went. Patrick went after them, though I don’t think he has much chance of catching up with them. Those motorbikes weave in and out of the donkeys and carts, the cars, and the pedestrians. I’d say that he wouldn’t be here for an hour or so, but in the meantime, you’ve got me. Cold out here! Shall we go inside?’

‘I want to show you something first,’ said the Reverend Mother, ‘but tell me who was arrested? What was his name? The young man with the unloaded pistol. Who was he?’

‘I heard Patrick say his name. I bet that he was mixed up in that raid up Douglas Passageway. They seized a barracks just beside the harbour. Something in the Cork Examiner about it this morning. There was a lot of shooting