by Nicola White
The desk Garda came back and pointed Swan to a side corridor where Superintendent Munnelly was waiting. There was often a bit of jockeying when the murder squad was called in to assist the local Gardaí, but Munnelly didn’t look put out. A little distracted, if anything. He led Swan to a room for a briefing with the Gardaí who had been first on the scene and a couple of women officers who had been taking statements.
They ran through the facts of the incident quickly, where the child had been found and the apparent cause of death. The two schoolgirls who found it and a nun who had been at the scene were now at the station, and had given initial statements. Yes, they’d been held separately, and yes, their stories tallied – mostly. The nuns in reception were refusing to leave until their sister nun was free to go.
‘How do you mean their stories tally mostly?’
‘There was some disturbance of the scene, sir.’ This was from the youngest looking guard, a lanky fellow with crinkly hair.
‘You were there?’
‘Yes, sir. The nun moved the infant for purposes of baptism, sir.’
‘Why? The child was dead, I thought.’
The Garda shrugged. ‘In case it hadn’t been before?’
‘So she moved it –’
‘And poured water on it.’
‘And rearranged the shed,’ Munnelly added with a sigh. ‘We answer to different authorities, eh?’
Swan held his tongue.
He said he would start with the girl who found it first.
‘Carmen Fitzgerald.’
‘Yes.’
The interview with the Fitzgerald girl didn’t take long. She was a nervy little thing and too upset to be fully coherent. She kept going on about matches and cigarettes. He had expected her to be wearing some kind of uniform, but she was in jeans and a blouse, with smeared scarlet lipstick on her mouth, and mascara under her eyes. Not like the schoolgirls of his day.
‘What year are you in?’
‘I’m not in any year. We graduated in June.’
‘Why were you at the school?’
‘They had us back for a reception. The ones who were going to college. Can I go home soon?’
Home would be a nice house in Rathgar, or some other leafy address. No wonder she was upset. She was the kind of girl that bad things shouldn’t happen to. After the good school, she would take an arts degree at college, maybe spend a year in Florence or Paris, and return to tennis clubs, marriage, children with cod Irish names.
‘Off you go. We may have to talk again.’ Swan turned to the guard by the door. ‘Can we give Miss Fitzgerald a lift to… where is it, pet?’
‘Eh… Donnybrook’
Close enough.
As the girl left, Munnelly came in.
‘Do you think you could see the nun now?’
Swan pretended to consult his notes before agreeing.
He hadn’t been close up with a nun since he was ten and at national school. They hadn’t been especially cruel there, though they were quick enough to snap a ruler across small knuckles. Back then he had a dread of them just because they were so alien, towering pillars of blackness. When they patrolled the aisles of desks, the folds of their habits would brush against your bare arm or leg, soft and cold.
This nun was younger than he expected, pale and tall with a touch of the Deborah Kerrs about her. He read her statement aloud and she listened solemnly, absolutely still.
‘I have a few questions,’ Swan said, putting the page down on the table.
‘And I have one for you,’ she replied.
‘You go first,’ said Swan
‘The baby. Where is she now?’
‘I haven’t been to the school yet, but I expect the body is still there while our officers piece things together. Then it’ll be brought to our mortuary.’
Sister Bernadette raised her hands to the table, watching her fingers slowly interlace as if they had a life of their own.
‘And then?’ She addressed her hands.
‘Hopefully we find her people and there can be a burial. Why?’
‘If there is anything our order can do…’
‘Sister – my doctrine is a little rusty – what was the point in baptising a dead child? Surely its soul had already departed.’
The look she gave him had just a hint of pity in it.
‘There is always a point in doing what you can.’
‘You said in your statement that the child was naked when you took it from the bag?’
‘I found something to cover it with – something to hand. I didn’t want people – the girl was with me – to see it.’
He was tempted to press her harder about handling the child, but there was little point at this stage. Find the mother, that was the first thing.
Sister Bernadette was adamant she knew of no girl or member of staff being pregnant.
‘It can be hard to tell.’
‘I’m not a naïve woman,’ said Sister Bernadette, ‘I see plenty of the world.’
Swan was tempted to let the other girl go home too, but Munnelly said her recall was particularly good. Swan looked through the pages of statement and conceded. He asked one of the Ban Gardaí to come with him to the interview room this time.
Alison Hogan was drawing some kind of diagram when they entered the room. The sweet diligence of her face was at jarring odds with her bird’s nest hairdo. She was dressed like some kind of vampire shepherdess.
She blushed as he introduced himself to her, put a hand over her drawing.
‘I was doing a sketch of the shed for the officers,’ she explained. ‘I’m good at maps.’
Eager to please, despite the hairy get-up. Another nice middle class girl. Good at things.
‘May I?’
It was a birds-eye view of the shed, with neat lettering pointing out features – ‘door’, ‘bench’, window’. There was a little oval shape in the centre – ‘basket’. In the centre of the oval was an X. No word for it.
‘Sister Bernie – she shouldn’t have moved it, should she?’
‘How’s that?’
‘You’re supposed to leave things as you found them – that’s what they do on television.’
‘Indeed they do.’ Swan smiled and laid her statement on the table, turned a couple of pages.
‘You say the baby was wrapped in a white cloth. Sister Bernadette and your friend say it was in a paper bag.’
‘It was in a big brown paper bag, but there was something white wrapped around it – inside the bag.’
‘What kind of cloth was it?’
‘Just cloth-cloth,’ said Ali. ‘You know. Like a sheet or something.’
‘How much time passed between you and your friend leaving the shed and you coming back with Sister Bernadette?’
‘Not sure. Two minutes. Three?’
‘Could there have been someone else in the garden, someone you didn’t see?’
The girl’s eyes widened.
‘I don’t know…maybe…’
‘I don’t want to put anything in your head. No-one you saw?’
‘No.’
Swan continued to scan the statement. There was a thin plastic cup of water by the girl.
‘Do you mind?’
She shook her head and he took a sip from it. It was stale, with an aftertaste like pencils.
‘When do I get my bag back?’
‘The bag you say the nun took the scarf from?’
‘Yea, it’s got a lot of stuff I need.’
‘Not for a while. Sorry.’
The girl pursed her lips.
‘Do you get on well with the nuns?’
She shrugged. She was going quiet on them.
Swan turned to the woman police officer, a sensible looking sort, with thick black hair pull
ed back in a knot.
‘She’s been a great help, hasn’t she?’
‘Good enough to join the force, I’d say.’
‘I’m sure Ms. Hogan has even loftier plans than that. College isn’t it?’
‘Well…’
‘What are you going to study?’ said the officer.
‘Law.’
Swan and the policewoman shared a smile.
‘No offense,’ explained Swan, ‘some solicitors are a great trouble to us.’
The girl looked upset.
‘I’m sorry. You’ve had a dreadful morning. Why don’t we let you get back to your mum and dad?’ He went to give her hand a pat, but she flinched from him.
‘I don’t have a Dad. He died.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘He was a solicitor.’
‘Ah.’
‘I’ll just go and see if there’s someone waiting for you,’ said the Ban Garda.
Swan walked the girl towards the reception area. She was taller than he had realised.
‘We may need to talk to you again, Alison, and in the meantime, I’d be obliged if you kept the details to yourself, eh?’
The girl asked if there was a toilet she could use. Swan flagged down one of the station guards for directions and said he’d meet her at reception. The flock of nuns had departed. Only two people were sitting on the line of orange chairs, an ample woman in an unusual tweed garment and a floppy-haired young man hooped in concentration over a newspaper, folded tight into a square.
‘Anyone here to meet Alison?’ Swan offered.
‘I’m her mother,’ the woman said, pressing an anxious hand to her chest. ‘Deirdre Hogan. Are you in charge?’
Swan claimed he was.
She rose and came towards him, her layered wrap swirling about her. The garment was held together by a Celtic brooch the size of a saucer. Mother and daughter obviously shared a taste for exotic costume.
‘Is it true about Ali finding a baby?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘Well, she was one of the people there. We just needed a word with her.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘She’s been very calm, actually – very grown up. You should be proud.’
This didn’t soothe the woman. She looked round quickly at the young man before taking a step closer to Swan.
‘It’s not fair…’ she said.
‘What’s not?’
‘Once would be bad enough. But twice… it’s beyond sense. You see, it’s happened before.’
FOUR
Ali woke sweating from a dream. She had been on her knees in the Rosary Garden, trowelling through black clay while Sister O’Dwyer stood over her crying, begging her to come to the chapel, that prayers would start soon. Ali tried to explain that she had to find something, that she’d be along later. She looked down at her trowel and there was half a worm on it – a white worm as big as a finger – writhing, blindly searching for its lost half.
The morning light leaked through her thin curtains. She was telling herself it was just a dream when she remembered what wasn’t a dream, and images from the previous day assaulted her.
Ma and Davy had treated her so gently when they collected her from the police station, and later Davy went out and got a bucket of fried chicken and a bottle of white wine for dinner, as if her brush with death called for something – not a celebration, certainly – but an occasion outside everyday rhythms.
After they ate, her mother went to visit a friend in hospital and Ali went to her uncle’s room to sit side by side across his bed and watch a spy film on RTE2. They didn’t talk much. Davy said he felt stunned by what had happened, so he couldn’t imagine how it was for her. They’d shared a half bottle of Southern Comfort until her eyelids drooped and she lost track of who was who in the film. She didn’t even remember getting to bed.
She hauled herself out of bed and washed the remains of makeup from her face at the sink in the corner of her bedroom. There was a shower next to the sink, like a plastic phone box parked against the wall, a remnant of the house’s former life as a warren of bedsits. Ali used it as a wardrobe, hanging her clothes from the top edge of it, inside and out. She picked up yesterday’s dress and hung it over the layers already there. Then she changed her mind and bundled it into one of the boxes of junk under her bed. She didn’t feel like seeing it again. When tears started, she sat on the floor and waited for them to pass, like weather.
Davy was down in the kitchen reading a newspaper, his fringe almost touching the page. When he noticed her, he made a halfhearted attempt at hiding it.
‘Just looking at the jobs,’ he said.
Davy had come to stay with them three weeks before. He was trying to find a job in Dublin, saying there were none to be had down in Clare. Each morning he would phone a few companies from the Yellow Pages and asked if they’d anything going.
‘Saves the feet,’ he’d say.
‘But not my bloody phone bill,’ Ma complained.
Ali liked having him around. He was the baby of his family, nearer her age than her mother’s and had a quick energy to him that altered the dull atmosphere of their house. He pottered around at all hours fixing things, hacking back the garden, surprising them. He hadn’t landed as much as an interview for a job.
Davy pressed the paper to the table with his palms. ‘I didn’t want you upset. I just thought I’d look. There’s hardly anything.’
Ali tugged at the paper and he allowed it to escape. There was a small headline and a paragraph underneath. Dead Baby Found in Convent. It was a strange relief to see the words there, the matter-of-factness of it.
‘I thought it might be worse,’ she said.
Her mother appeared in the doorway. ‘That’s just the start, apparently.’
She was wearing a loose dragon-print kimono over her nightdress and her dark-dyed hair sat in a careless knot on top of her head, like a cast member of a slovenly Mikado.
‘Sean O’Loan told me the guards were trying to keep the lid on, but he expects the press will soon be crawling all over it.’
‘When did you talk to him?’ said Ali. ‘I thought you were visiting Angela Farrington and her new hip.’
‘Well, when I came out of Vincent’s I had a while to wait for the bus, so I dropped into Lamb’s and he happened to be there.’ Ma had assumed her posher voice. She was a lousy liar.
‘You told him all about it, didn’t you?’
Ma took down the gas lighter and stood silent by the cooker, waiting for its ticktick sparking to ignite the hiss of gas. The blue flames flattened as she put the kettle down and turned back to her daughter.
‘Well, I don’t know all about it do I? You’ve told us very little. What harm if a friend gets to know something ahead of the pack?’
‘The policeman said I wasn’t to say anything, and you go straight to a journalist. You could get me into trouble.’
‘You didn’t say anything. I did. It’s my affair and I’ll take the responsibility.’
‘Oh its your affair, all right.’
‘You’re a cheeky little pup…’
‘Ah, stop it, now!’ said Davy.
Ali felt a stab of shame, just a little one. She wasn’t comfortable with the men her mother hung around with. No doubt the media crowd in Lamb’s were entertaining, but Ali couldn’t get past the fact that all these men had homes and families to return to and dinner waiting in the oven. Her mother was never invited to share that dinner or sit at their tables.
The doorbell rang. They all looked up the hall to where the big panelled door was framed by threads of daylight.
‘It won’t be for me,’ said Davy.
Deirdre Hogan moved, closing the kitchen door as she went. Davy and Ali listened to the muffled exchange on the threshold. The other voice was a m
an’s, and there seemed to be some kind of negotiation going on.
After a minute, her mother re-appeared.
‘Love?’ she started, and Ali bristled, ‘Sean sent a photographer.’
‘What?’
‘He says they’re doing an article, but they’ve no photos to go with it. All he wants is a quick snap.’
‘No way.’
‘I’ll just have to give him your school photo then.’
‘Very funny.’
‘It’s the only decent one I have.’
Her sixth-year photograph sat framed on her mother’s dressing table, under a fine film of talc. In it Ali wore her uniform, a hair-band and a submissive chin-tucked smile. She hated the girl in the photo.
‘Hal-oo-oo?’ The photographer was walking down the hall.
‘You’re unbelievable.’
Her mother opened the kitchen door. The man had a big canvas bag over one shoulder and a tripod in one hand. He looked around impatiently.
‘Is there a cosy corner somewhere we could do this, ma’am?’
Ali stood up, ‘I’ll just go and change.’
‘Change? Change?’ said the photographer, ‘sure aren’t you perfect as you are? You make my job easy. I’ve snapped all the great and the small, so you’re safe with me.’
‘How about the garden?’ said her mother.
The photographer looked doubtful, then his expression changed.
‘A garden was where this thing happened, wasn’t it? Just awful – yeah – the garden would do.’
He shot off through the back door and down the steps. Ali got up and checked her reflection in the kitchen mirror. She was wearing an old black jumper and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. No makeup, no rubbish, just get it over with.
It was lucky that Davy had managed to create something like a patch of lawn by getting down on his knees with a pair of old shears, but a thicket of creepers and shrubs still held sway over most of the garden. On fine nights, she and Davy would sit out on a rug, with candles in jam jars, drinking strange cocktails created from the furthest reaches of her mother’s drinks cupboard. Those nights felt like ages ago. Ali clutched the metal rail as she went down the steps, thinking of escape, but moving towards the photographer.