‘Can we get to the point, Inspector?’ Cohen affected an air of boredom. Paula looked forward to blowing it to smithereens.
‘Mr Martinu, you are the groundsman at the convent of the Order of the Blessed Pearl?’
‘You know all this,’ Martinu said. ‘I told you already. All three of you that came round to hassle me.’
‘How long have you worked there?’
‘Do I have to go over all this again?’ Plaintive, looking at his lawyer.
‘For the tape,’ Paula said.
Cohen nodded. ‘It’s irritating, but it’s fine. I’ll tell you when it’s not fine.’
‘Twenty years. When they shut down the convent, they kept me on a retainer to look after the grounds. So it wouldn’t look like it had gone to seed. I bought my cottage off them and I lease the land where I grow my fruit and veg.’
‘What did your job entail, Mr Martinu?’
‘Mowing the grass. I’ve got a ride-on mower, you need it for a place that size. I supplied some of the fruit and veg for the convent and the school. Not all of it. I mean, obviously. It’s not a farm, just a bit of a market garden sort of thing. I looked after the odd jobs around the building – checking the guttering, bits of joinery, repairs, the occasional bit of plumbing or electrics. Nothing major. They got contractors in for stuff like painting and decorating and fixing the roof.’
‘Sounds like they’d have been lost without you,’ Paula said. ‘You had another job too, didn’t you?’
He glanced at his lawyer, who leaned forward. ‘Where are we going with this, Inspector?’
‘Mr Martinu’s already explained his role in the discoveries that have been made in the convent grounds. I’m referring initially to the extensive human remains that have been uncovered under the lawn in front of the main convent building. Jezza, tell me about those graves.’
He looked helplessly at his lawyer. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I just did what I was told.’
‘You didn’t question what they were asking you to do?’ Paula persisted.
He frowned, uncomprehending. ‘It was my job. I’m a good Catholic. They’re nuns, they’re in charge. Doing God’s work. It’s not for me to question them.’
Steve shifted in his chair. Paula hoped he’d stay quiet. ‘Was it the Reverend Mother who gave you those orders?’
‘Not always. Sometimes it was Sister Mary Aquinas. She was kind of Sister Mary Patrick’s deputy. You could see it wasn’t easy for them, when a girl died. But they wanted to do the best they could by them. Those girls, they had nobody. No visitors, no family, no nothing except St Margaret Clitherow’s. Sister Mary Aquinas said it could be a blessing, when you thought how their lives might end up. “Easier to be with God,” she’d say, so’s I wouldn’t feel too bad about it.’
It was chilling to hear the matter of fact way Martinu wrote off the dead girls. She couldn’t quite work out whether this was the detached attitude of the psychopath or the profound lack of imagination of someone who simply wasn’t very bright. ‘And so, what? You’d dig a grave?’
He nodded, with another uneasy glance at his lawyer. Paula was mildly surprised at the lack of intervention from the brief.
‘Did nobody ever stop and ask you what you were doing? None of the other girls?’
Martinu frowned. ‘I did it after dark. The dormitories were round the back, so they wouldn’t see the lights. The nuns didn’t want to upset the other girls, see? So I’d dig the grave, then the nuns would do the funeral service and I’d fill it in again.’
‘Just the nuns? Not the priest?’
A long moment of silence. Martinu stared at the table, brow furrowed, apparently deep in thought. ‘No,’ he said at last, meeting her eye. ‘Never the priest.’
‘And you didn’t think that was odd? A funeral without a priest?’ Paula didn’t know much about Catholic doctrine but she was pretty sure there was supposed to be a priest. Particularly in a church that paid so little regard to any woman who wasn’t the Virgin Mary.
‘Look, I did what I was told. Reverend Mother, she said it was OK, she said they’d had the proper service in the chapel, this was only the burial.’ His strong hands bunched into fists. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I just did my job.’
‘As my client says. What exactly do you imagine you’re going to charge him with?’ At last, an intervention from the lawyer.
‘This is a witness interview, Mr Cohen. Any charges arising? That’s above my pay grade.’ Paula smiled. ‘Has this been going on all the time you were working for the nuns, Jezza? The whole twenty years?’
He frowned. She could see the wheels going round. Was it memory or scheming? Hard to tell. At last, he said, ‘I’d been there about four or five years before the Reverend Mother asked me to do it.’
‘Sister Mary Patrick?’
‘No, it was before her time. Sister Bernadette, it was back then.’
‘How many girls have you buried over the years, Jezza?’
Another sideways glance at the lawyer. ‘I didn’t keep count,’ he said. ‘It’s not like it happened every week, or anything. Maybe once or twice a year at the most.’
Shaken by the numbers as well as his casual demeanour, Paula struggled to maintain her composure. ‘Once or twice a year? For, what, fifteen? Sixteen years? That’s a helluva lot of dead girls not to be asking about, Jezza.’
‘Look, if you think something dodgy went on with them, you need to be talking to the nuns. All I did was put them in the ground, like I was told to.’ He scowled at her, daring her to take issue with him.
‘And we will be talking to the nuns, Jezza. But right now, we need to talk about the other bodies.’
Now the solicitor sat up straight in his seat. ‘Other bodies?’
‘Did your client not mention them when he briefed you? I guess they haven’t made the headlines
