A Lesson in Malice

by Catherine Kirwan

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

A lawyer attempts to solve a murder and prove her own innocence in this pacy, atmospheric tale

She said yes to a dinner invitation, and now she's a murder suspect . . .

When an old university friend invites Finn Fitzpatrick to speak at a conference at her alma mater, Finn reluctantly agrees. Now working as a solicitor with a side interest in investigation, Finn is busy with her own troubles but feels she can't say no to her former law school classmate. Even though she has no idea why she's been invited to the conference, or to the exclusive dinner in the College President's private dining room afterwards.

Then, three days later, a body is discovered in the College grounds, and everyone who was at the President's dinner is a murder suspect. Including Finn.

Finn is determined to find the killer, and to clear her name. But, as she starts to look into her fellow dinner guests, she unearths a slew of dark secrets, bitter rivalries and hidden agendas. Will Finn let sleeping dogs lie, or risk it all to uncover the truth?

Hear what everyone is saying about Catherine Kirwan's novels:

'A propulsive mystery that feels both fresh and assured' Catherine Ryan Howard

'Atmospheric and intriguing with a brilliantly relatable heroine and an explosive, gripping conclusion' Sam Blake

'Money and greed, office gossip and secret affairs; twisty and pacy' Andrea Mara

(P) 2023 Hachette Ireland

Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland

Print pages: 320

Sample

Annabelle Leahy had just turned seventeen and for a long time she had been top of her class. The arrival of new girl Zoe Harris had changed everything. Zoe Harris and her willowy blondeness and her perfectly accented French and her genius-level maths and her A pluses in English. Barely six months into the school year and the top student award that Annabelle had won easily for the last four years straight was slipping further and further out of reach, even though she worked as hard as ever. Late at night, every night, in the privacy of her bedroom, Annabelle cried. And she was tired of crying.

So, she showered early and blow-dried her hair. Pulled on her favourite black leggings, the ones that made her belly disappear, and wore lenses instead of glasses even though the contacts made her eyes sting. After a light breakfast – sourdough toast with a scrape of hummus, which Annabelle considered a more planet-friendly spread than butter – she cancelled her Saturday-morning chemistry Zoom study group and left the house in the small 1970s estate where she lived with her parents and two younger brothers. She told her mother only that she was going for a ramble, a breath of fresh air. She said she didn’t know where she might go. But she did.

Striding quickly downhill from Shanakiel and on through Sunday’s Well, she entered the narrow gap between two high walls. Descending the steps to the river, she crossed the north channel of the Lee via the pedestrian suspension bridge universally known as the Shakey. She did not pause to sample the characteristic wobble as Cork people invariably do, or to admire the gracious period homes and the long lush gardens overlooking the water.

Barely glancing right and left, she crossed Western Road and the small slatted footbridge over the south channel of the river. After a restorative uphill pull through the Brookfield medical faculty complex, she turned onto College Road. It was student party central all around this area for most of the year, apart from the little convent of the Poor Clares – where the nuns depended on donations and never left their compound and were so old-fashioned they probably didn’t even have wi-fi – and, further along, the Bon Secours, a large private hospital founded by a different order of nuns who, Annabelle guessed, weren’t remotely poor.

She made her way to the main campus and kept going until she came to the quad, four perfect squares of lawn divided by neat gravel paths, surrounded on three sides by buildings, open to the south. A polished brass plate inscribed ‘PRESIDENT’S OFFICE’ gleamed on one of the three doors to the East Wing, which was closed, as it always was at the weekend, but the other two wings were open.

Walking amid the carefully tended shrubs and herbs and climbers, and the old stone that was the same colour as the sky, Annabelle felt calmer than she had in weeks. She checked the time. Three minutes to ten. As a weak sun struggled through the clouds, she sat on a bench and shut her eyes. She told herself that none of Zoe Harris’s achievements, however stellar they might be, had anything to do with her. Annabelle would still get the grades she needed. She’d still be able to study medicine, and specialise in paediatrics. Probably. Or become a GP. Maybe. Whatever. The details didn’t matter. The point was that, in less than two years, she’d be here in UCC every day. And the misery that Zoe Harris had caused would be ancient history.

Time passed, and Annabelle started to feel cold. She rose from her seat and went inside, to the Aula Maxima. Pausing, she inhaled the silence. Before now, she’d been here only when the hall had been full, with other students from her school on the College open day. They hadn’t been allowed up to the gallery, though they’d been shown the narrow door off the corridor, and the steep steps immediately behind it. They’d been told that, for health and safety reasons, it was closed to tour groups. That they were lucky to see the stairs. Luck wasn’t something Annabelle believed in, either the good or the bad kind. She believed in science and in hard work. But Zoe Harris moving from Dublin and rolling into Annabelle’s class at Mount Mercy? That was just random, which, when you thought about it, was another word for luck.

Annabelle walked towards the back of the room, running her fingertips along the grating that protected the shelves of musty leather-bound books. It was darker underneath the gallery and the air was denser there, thicker. When she reached the internal door to the East Wing, she pressed her palm against it. It opened. She went through it and walked quickly to the far end of the corridor, trying most of the doors with her left hand as she passed. They were locked. Returning more slowly the way she’d come, she noticed an odd unnameable odour. And she remembered the little door to the gallery. She hadn’t tried that one. She went to it. Stood for a moment. The smell seemed stronger here. She pressed her nose to the wood. Definitely stronger. She turned the knob. The door creaked as it fell open. She took a single step but went no further.

Because blocking the cramped staircase was a man. Wedged against the steps. Hunched in a position incompatible with life. Bloated. Starting to leak.

It took several seconds for her brain to analyse what she was seeing. Then a scream began in Annabelle’s throat that she forced herself to swallow. Wrapping her scarf tightly over her mouth and nose, she turned her back on the open bloodshot eyes. On the gathering stench.

She called 999. Got the words out somehow. No, she was sure that an ambulance wouldn’t be needed. Just the gardaí. She ended the call and waited. Preserved the scene. Kept vigil with the corpse. Tried to say a prayer. Couldn’t.

And she couldn’t help thinking that, whoever he was, no one had come looking for him. That he had been left to die. To decay like a rotting magpie she’d seen once on the riverbank at the far end of the Lee Fields where the footpath runs out and, in summer, the vegetation grows wild, and high enough to make it scary, if you’re a girl on your own. Annabelle had almost forgotten that magpie. But she would never forget the dead man’s red staring eyes.

THAT DAMP WEDNESDAY IN APRIL, I WALKED FROM Western Road, through the ornamental ironwork gates that marked the main entrance to the campus. Before leaving my house less than half an hour earlier, I’d scraped my long, thick black hair into a tight high ponytail. It swished back and forth as I moved, reminding me that I should’ve washed it.

Fifteen minutes to nine and the avenue was busy with staff and students, all on foot, all trudging forward without visible enthusiasm. Some branched off, via the stone staircase, towards the south. I kept on, up the curving slope, edged with mature greenery and trees that met in the middle. Ahead of me, where the ground flattened, lay my destination.

But I was early and so, to kill time, swerved right in the direction of a small paved viewing promontory by a wall topped with railings. Gripping the narrow vertical bars, I peered over the cliff edge into the watery meadows below and the wrinkled Lee rushing eastwards. I wished for a little wooden boat, a blue one. I saw myself floating with the current under bridge after bridge, past the tip of the island and the mouth of the harbour as far as the open sea. Except I had this thing to do, a thing I should never have said yes to in the first place.

Turning, I passed over grass and tarmac and up the seven steps and through the carved limestone Gothic doorway that was the rear entrance to the Aula Maxima, one of the university’s original buildings.

Unbuttoning my charcoal raincoat, I emerged from the short vestibule into the hall – large, vaulted, book-lined. Parallel to the back wall, a table with a floor-length white cloth was set out with stacks of cups and saucers and a Burco boiler. Along the side wall, above the bookshelves, huge pointed north-facing windows lit the space, empty but for the wall of past presidents’ portraits – all male – staring darkly down from their gilt frames. Moving up the aisle briskly, between the banks of seating to the front, I sent a text message: In the Aula. Am I in the right place?

Seconds later, the reply came: Through the left-hand door at the back of the dais. Coffee and other fortifications await.

A sudden loud noise, as if a book had fallen off a shelf, startled me. I jerked, swung a half-circle on my heel. But the room was as empty as it had been and I found no likely source for the disturbance, although, it has to be said, I didn’t look very hard. I went on about my business and thought little of what had happened, putting it down to a cross-draught, a creak of the old wood.

With the benefit of hindsight I see how wrong I was that morning. About how the day would go. About what I would do that evening. About nearly everything.

THE ‘OTHER FORTIFICATIONS’ TURNED OUT TO BE the conference attendee’s friend, an artery-clogging array of mini-pastries – croissants, pains au chocolat and the like. I stressate a couple in quick succession and washed them down with an unwise quantity of black coffee. We were in an over-furnished peach-coloured room, the chief organiser of the event Agnes Heaney, a former classmate who’d roped me in close to the last minute when one of her other speakers had had to cancel, various other people who seemed to belong, and me.

‘I’ve never been in here before,’ the thin man standing beside me said. I’d noticed him a few minutes earlier, chatting with Agnes. He’d worked the room briefly, nodding and smiling, before coming to a halt by the buffet table. He was my height, five foot eight, and looked about thirty. He wore a slim-fitting navy suit, white shirt, red tie and pointy tan leather shoes. I had on a navy suit and white shirt too, though my suit was pinstriped and the skirt was too tight, thanks to the ten pounds I’d gained in the past few months, and I was wearing flat black shoes. I can’t be doing with heels lately. Or earrings. ‘Have you?’

‘No,’ I said.

I bent my head to read his nametag. ‘Sean?’

Too quickly.

‘Senan,’ he said. ‘Dr Senan Dunford. I know who you are. Finn Fitzpatrick, I …’ He spoke with a flat Limerick accent. He had a nice face and the kind of charm people called boyish. Though it might have been the Communion suit. All he was lacking was a white rosette. He went on, ‘I’m, em, I’m down from Limerick for the day. But I did my undergrad degree here. I went sideways at it. Did commerce at the start. Hated it except for the law bits. Got a transfer from comm to the School of Law in the end. Took a while. Certain people didn’t lay out the welcome mat.’

He made a face, tipped his head in the direction of Professor Martin Casey, the dean of the faculty, who had taught me property law, just then harvesting another pastry from the buffet. I remembered him as a great lecturer of an unpopular and difficult but necessary subject. Strict, though. Demanding. I could see how he might rub a person up the wrong way.

‘What do you do in Limerick?’ I asked.

‘I, well, I’m attached to the law school at UL. Came down this morning. The traffic! They really need to do something about that road.’

‘Right.’ There was no way I was getting dragged into a discussion on the controversial stalled Cork–Limerick motorway project. ‘I’m sorry, Senan, I have to, um, check the timetable with Agnes.’

‘I have a spare,’ he said, and swiftly handed me a typed lilac A4 sheet. ‘You’re in the first panel. Speaking second. After me, in fact.’

That soon?

I grabbed my bag from the side table where I’d left it. ‘Too much coffee, I need to … See you inside. Looking forward to your paper.’ I gave what I hoped was a regretful smile and slipped out the side door into the Stone Corridor, an enclosed cloister containing the high point of the UCC walking tour – twenty-seven ancient Ogham-inscribed pillars, as straight and silent as a platoon of soldiers on inspection. Dim daylight filtered through the diamond-leaded glass windows.

After washing my hands, I stood by the sink and checked my script again. Cobbled together from my notes on a recent high-profile murder case I’d been involved with, ‘New perspectives: the view from a very peculiar practice’ was no more impressive than it had been the last time I’d read it. I drew a diagonal line through an especially weak paragraph and folded over the pages. I dug an old lipstick out of the bottom of my bag – Russian Red. It went on smoothly and took some of the grim from my face but I was about to wipe it off again when the door behind me opened.

‘There you are,’ Agnes Heaney said.

She dashed into a stall and locked it. Smaller than me and heavier than the last time I’d seen her, she had a faded flyaway mousy bob that could have done with a trim or a run of the straightener. She wore a baggy pilled black knitted dress that made my dull suit look designer.

Through the door Agnes said, ‘You’re hanging around for dinner, aren’t you?’

I said, ‘I’ll stay for as much of the conference as I can. I’m sure it’ll be … So, I was thinking I’ll head away, not immediately, of course, but maybe later on this morning.’

There was no maybe about it, as far as I was concerned. I had a pile of work waiting for me back at the office and, that night, a hot date with a takeaway and my Netflix account.

But when Agnes came out of the cubicle, she’d gone pale. She grabbed my upper arm, her fingers pressed into the bone. ‘Whether either of us likes it or not, you’re here now,’ she said. ‘You have to stay. All day. And the evening.’ Quickly, she ran cold water over her hands. She didn’t stop to dry them. ‘Come on,’ she said.

In the long months since the events of that day, I’ve become convinced that, if only I’d asked her at that point, she might have told me; that if I’d known sooner, it might have changed what happened later. Instead, to avoid the temporary discomfort of an argument, I said nothing.

On such seemingly insignificant decisions, the world turns.

WHEN WE RETURNED, THE FRONT HALF OF THE HALL had filled with a smattering of students and eager post-grads, various lecturers from the law school and visiting conference participants from other Irish universities and overseas. Mercifully, there were no local solicitors or barristers present to watch me making a holy show of myself, though some might sign in later to collect a few Continuing Professional Development hours, before being ‘unavoidably’ called back to the office. CPD points excepted, the conference – ‘Lies and Consequences: whither the rule of law in a post-truth world?’ – was too highfalutin to attract the interest of most lawyers in practice. And too vague. Or maybe that was the point? Make the topic flexible enough for speakers from differing specialisations to get away with rabbiting on about it for twenty minutes? It was going to be a long morning.

Agnes went to the lectern and tapped at the microphone. A very young curly-haired man in a headset, wearing an open red checked shirt and a grubby Thin Lizzy T-shirt, and carrying a small handheld video camera, stepped forward to assist her. They seemed to know one another well. I glanced around and spotted a second, more professional-looking camera on a tripod being operated by a man in a suit. At some point in the future my speech, or extracts from it, would probably surface on YouTube. I winced. I definitely should have washed my hair.

Throughout all of this, Professor Martin Casey was sitting in the front row, tutting loudly and shaking his jowly head, like a disappointed clergyman. I took a seat with the rest of the speaker panel at the far side of the platform between Senan Dunford and a woman I hadn’t yet been introduced to. Beside her was a man I hadn’t met before either. They each shook my hand in turn and murmured their names.

Surreptitiously, I glanced at the programme: Dr Béatrice Mbemba lectured at Panthéon-Assas University in Paris; Dr Padraic O’Flaherty at the University of Galway. Any other day, I wouldn’t be breathing the same legal air as these people. I didn’t have a master’s degree, let alone a doctorate. A jack-of-all-trades, I worked out of a tiny attic room at MLC, a corporate law office in the centre of town. Barely tolerated by the partners because the fees I generated were considered too pathetically low to justify my employment, I was retained for the simple reason that I was useful – useful for cleaning up the multifarious messes that tended to arise every now and again for the staff and clients of a big firm like ours and that none of the other solicitors would deign to touch. Also, over the last while, I’d developed a sideline in investigative work. It was one of those cases that Agnes had asked me to talk about.

She’d called me on my work number on Friday of the previous week. My surprise at hearing from her had intensified as she delivered her request. We’d been in the same year at UCC, neither friends nor enemies, mixing in different circles, apart from a few shared tutorial groups. She was intelligent and focused, quietly on her way to first-class honours from day one, but always helpful to everyone else, sharing her spectacularly comprehensive notes willingly if anyone happened to miss a session. That kindness was surely at the root of my inability to say no to her. That and the thought that, if Agnes was asking me of all people, she and the law school, to which I owed some fealty, had to be badly stuck. Plus, she’d been forceful on the phone. I hadn’t felt like I had a choice. I’d been left with the very definite impression that another speaker had cancelled late and that she needed me to fill in.

I wondered about that now. Had she mentioned a name? Going over the conversation in my mind, I became sure that she hadn’t. And that she’d never actually used the word ‘cancelled’. Taking out the timetable Senan had given me, I ran my finger down the schedule. All of the other events had three contributors. Ours, the opening session, was the only one with four. Even more oddly, I was listed as a ‘special guest’. Yet the way she’d spoken in the bathroom had me thinking she hadn’t wanted me here at all. That she’d been stuck with me?

I looked up from the page. At Agnes. Saw her properly for the first time. Too shabby for her big day. Too pasty-faced to be healthy. My pulse quickened. Something strange was going on.

I WAS INTRIGUED. IF AGNES HADN’T WANTED ME to come, she had to have had another reason for the invitation. Presumably she’d let me know what it was eventually. But, until my speech was done, I had to concentrate on that.

Agnes made the usual contradictory opening remarks: welcoming everyone with one hand and, with the other, imparting dire warnings on escape routes in the event of fire or other cataclysmic events. She spoke succinctly, assuredly. She’d been doing this kind of thing a while. She’d published several books. Whatever was wrong, her work couldn’t be the problem. After less than five minutes, she gave way to Professor Casey.

‘Settle in,’ Senan Dunford, beside me, muttered. ‘He may be some time.’

He was. Effusive gratitude to all distinguished guests. Special mention for the event sponsor Lexbonay Investments (an ‘ethical fund’, according to the conference programme, that had ‘a well-established and mutually beneficial relationship’ with the law school) and a particular welcome, with a round of applause, for their CEO Nathaniel Simpson (in the front row, directly in front of the lectern, a sleek, bald man with a tan, wearing an expensive open-neck white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a chunky watch with a steel bracelet). Long pauses for brow-wiping and water-sipping. All followed by an almost interminable exposition of his own thoughts on the conference topic.

‘The rest of us might as well pack up and go home,’ Senan said.

I disguised a laugh as a cough. Casey paused and glared at no one in particular but, as the fidgeting and throat-clearing in the audience increased, had the good sense to declare the conference ‘well and truly open’ and to finish.

Senan Dunford was next. Agnes retook her place at the microphone to introduce him. She spoke with real warmth, reciting his academic achievements, the scholarly articles he’d written and that he was just ‘completing’ a fellowship at the University of Limerick. So that’s what he’d meant when he’d said he was ‘attached’ to the department up there. It looked like the poor guy would be out of a job soon. In the circumstances, it had been decent of Agnes to give him the opening slot.

But he was good. Nervous at the start, he grew more confident as he went on. His presentation was lucid, expertly put together. He spoke well, and with a conviction that was refreshing, as if he was sure that what he had to say was worth hearing. If he managed to get a post somewhere, I reckoned he’d grow into the kind of ‘expert on everything’ academic who’d turn up on radio panel shows and talking-head documentaries. For all kinds of reasons, in Ireland, such academics were rarely female.

At the end of Senan’s presentation, Agnes spoke again and invited another round of applause, saying, ‘You can all see why we’re writing a book together. He’ll keep me on my toes!’

Watching Professor Casey’s response, I was mildly surprised to note that he seemed to be clapping as enthusiastically as everyone else. It looked like the grudge went only one way.

As the room stilled, Agnes said, ‘And now, our special guest, a graduate of UCC, a solicitor and, in more recent times, an amateur sleuth. Ladies and gentlemen, Finn Fitzpatrick.’

I gave silent thanks for the brevity of the introduction and made my way slowly to the podium. Although I couldn’t shake the nagging sense that coming here had been a mistake, I told myself that, in fifteen minutes, my self-imposed ordeal would be over.

Adjusting the microphone, I moistened my lips and started to speak.

DESPITE, OR BECAUSE OF, THE FACT THAT IT BORE more resemblance to a true crime documentary than an academic paper, my speech appeared to go down well with most of the audience. I retook my seat and Agnes waited by the lectern. When the clapping ceased, she began her introduction of Béatrice Mbemba, a lengthy note of achievements and qualifications.

Béatrice was stylish. She wore a fitted purple wrap dress. Her black, naturally curly hair fanned out from her head like a halo, held back at the front by a pink headband that exactly matched her lipstick. When she spoke, her English was flawless with a barely there French accent. In her opening remarks, she said that she intended to talk about how moral concepts of truth and honesty related to the legal duty to disclose relevant information. After listening to a few crisply delivered sentences, I zoned out and heard hardly a word she said. I had cause to regret my inattention later but, at the time, I was mentally berating myself again.

On the Friday afternoon that the phone call had come from Agnes, I’d called into Gabriel’s office to discuss a few ongoing cases. Gabriel was one of the founders of MLC and the firm’s managing partner. He worked on the first floor. High ceilings. Tall sash windows. Antique partner’s desk. No clutter. No dust. The exact opposite of my paper-crammed garret, in fact.

He was the one who’d given me a traineeship way back when I’d passed the Law Society entrance exams. At the time, I was distributing CVs like confetti to every law firm in Cork. I had no contacts in the legal profession, and little hope of a positive response. Unexpectedly, I was called for an interview at MLC, though looking at the other candidates in the waiting room, most of whom I knew from UCC, I’d had the feeling I was a wild-card entry. Yet I clicked with Gabriel, and my meeting with him had gone as well as it could. All the same, with the possible exception of Gabriel himself, no one could have been more astonished than I was when he’d rung and offered me the job. I started a few weeks later, and I’d stayed. For sixteen years.

That Friday, we chatted amiably, concurring on strategy as, a lot of the time, we did. I liked turning things over with him, especially when he was as relaxed as this, all too infrequent an occurrence. But he’d had a couple of big successes recently and the finances of the firm were back on track after the violent death of one of the partners had led to a crisis that, for a time, had threatened to derail MLC permanently. As I’d been instrumental in helping the firm avoid disaster, my star was briefly in the ascendant. I wasn’t enjoying my time in the sun much. I knew it wouldn’t last. Almost as an afterthought, as I was leaving his room, I . . .