by Nicola White
‘What have we got?’ said Swan, taking a chair.
‘The girls say she arrived about a month ago, and mostly kept to her room. ’
‘Do we have a name?’
‘Peggy!’ said a girl with very fine blond hair.
‘Did Sister Bernadette bring her here?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Esther, ‘She just came down to the kitchen one day…’
‘And she had a baby with her?’
‘Not when she arrived,’ said Considine. ‘As far as I can establish, cries were heard from the room two weeks after, not long before she left.
‘We never saw the kid,’ said Esther. ‘I think she was keeping it away from us, you see, out of kindness.’
‘What did she look like?’ Swan asked.
‘She was about nineteen or twenty, I’d say. Lovely thick hair –like a conker.’ This from the blond girl. Considine scribbled away on her notebook.
‘Was the baby delivered here or in hospital?’ Swan was wondering if this girl could be someone they had already accounted for, someone that came up in the hospital searches. He needed to keep a lid on this exultant, headlong feeling.
‘Sister Bernadette would know. I think they got on well.’
‘Who got on?’
‘Sister Bernadette and the Peggy girl. I heard them talking in her room a few times – when I was praying in the chapel.’ The two other girls looked at Esther sceptically.
Swan had managed to get hold of TP Murphy in Dundalk. The investigation into the creamery shooting was going slowly and he had agreed to go and fetch Sister Bernadette from Newry. He would be there within the half hour. With Sunday traffic, he could get back to Dublin with Sister Bernadette by four or five.
‘When did she leave here? Tell me about that…’
The girls looked at each other.
‘Dunno,’ said Esther, ‘It was about two or three weekends ago, we just sort of realised she’d disappeared. Gone home.’
‘Home to where?’
Esther checked silently with the other two. ‘Dunno. Country girl, anyway. Nowhere near me. Galway, maybe?’ The quieter girls just shook their heads.
Swan became aware that Sister Dreyfus, standing with her back to them at the kitchen sink, had given up an semblance of lunch preparation and was listening intently, completely still.
‘Sister?’
She turned slowly, clutching a dish brush in her yellow gloved hands.
‘Did you see this girl?’
She nodded.
Considine asked the girls to wait in the TV lounge, assuring them that they would get their lunch soon. Sister Dreyfus removed her rubber gloves and sat at the table, simultaneously hesitant and determined.
‘I know it was a Sunday, because there was only me here. I was on my way upstairs, after the girls had their tea, and she came out of her room. She had a big coat on and she had a bag. She was holding something inside the coat – I thought it might be the baby. She didn’t notice me – it was almost dark. I followed her up the hall. There was a car outside. She got into it and drove off.’
‘When you say she drove off – did she drive the car herself ?’
Sister Dreyfus thought for a moment, her face a scowl of concentration. ‘She can’t have. She was holding the baby still. There must have been someone driving. She just went away’
‘Was Sister Bernadette here at the time?’
‘No’
‘Did you see the baby move, or hear it cry?’
Sister Dreyfus’s eyes grew large behind her glasses as she realised the implications of what he meant. She shook her head.
‘I went into the room after. It was like she’d never been there.’
Above them he could hear male voices, raised. The guard at the door fending off Monsignor Kelly.
‘Did you discuss this with Sister Bernadette?’ A quick shake of the head, a cowed look.
‘Did you not think, when the baby was found in the convent, that there might be a connection?’ said Swan.
‘No, I thought she had decided to keep her child. That was why she sneaked off. By rights she should have left it with us.’
An idea was beginning to form in Swan’s mind, something that would make sense of the convent’s secrecy.
‘Who adopts the babies, sister?’
‘I don’t know anything about that. Mother Mary Paul, you should talk to her.’
Swan waited for Considine to finish her notes, thanked the nun for her time.
Sister Dreyfus held a pale finger in the air. ‘Wait!’
‘What is it?’
‘Her name!’ The nun went to a drawer in one of the kitchen cabinets and took out a notebook. Several nibbed pens were bound to it by a thick rubber band. Sister Dreyfus brought it to the table and opened it. It was a kind of copy book, where names and letters were drawn in the familiar, mannered thick-and-thin stroke calligraphy Swan recalled from the name signs upstairs. Sister Dreyfus flicked through the pages and stopped, put her finger to a name repeated three times in three varied styles – Peggy Nolan. Peggy Nolan. Peggy Nolan.
‘That’s her. I make the name signs. I made one for her door, but she took it off.’
It was a common name. There must be hundreds of Peggy Nolans throughout the land. Maybe it had already come up in the investigation.
‘Familiar?’ Swann asked Considine.
She frowned. ‘I’d have to check.’
‘Please go ahead with your lunch, sister, and thank you. Your help has been invaluable.’
Sister Dreyfus smiled, a mercurial spasm.
Up in the front office, Swan found that Barrett and Mother Mary Paul had run out of conversation. The nun gazed anxiously out the front window.
‘Monsignor Kelly is outside, waiting,’ she complained.
‘How much do they pay you for the babies?’ asked Swan.
She glared at him, full beam. ‘How dare – Nothing! That’s not the way it is – even slightly! If the parents choose to show gratitude, that is completely – ’ she jerked in her seat, ‘I think you should talk to Monsignor Kelly about this.’
‘We can’t let anyone else into the house now, mother, we need to search it. In fact, it might be an idea for you to take the girls back to the convent with you.’
‘I can’t take them back to St. Brigid’s, it’s not suitable.’
‘I’m sure you’ll sort it out. By the way, does Sister Bernadette drive?’
‘Yes she drives. And I hope she gets back soon to help me sort out this… misunderstanding.’
‘We’ll be first in line for Sister Bernadette. Tell me, is the name Peggy Nolan familiar to you?’
‘It is not.’
Swan showed Barrett and Considine the back bedroom where this Peggy had stayed. They didn’t enter the room, but stood close together on the threshold.
‘Can you find out about locking this, Declan? And supervise the exit of the girls and nuns. I’m thinking the baby could have been killed right here, in the bedroom. There’s no immediate signs but it would account for her hiding it under her coat, wouldn’t it?’
‘Could be,’ said Barrett.
‘Gina?’
Considine was frowning at the carpet, miles away. At the sound of her name she quickly met his eye.
‘It’s odd, but I’m pretty sure there was a girl down in that town, Buleen, called Peggy Nolan. The guy I met was Doctor Nolan, right? And his daughter, the receptionist, she was a Peggy. I remember thinking it was and old fashioned name for a girl.’
They looked at each other for a few seconds. Weighing the idea.
‘Sister Bernadette,’ said Swan, ‘where would you say her accent was from?’
‘I’d say Tipperary,’ said Barrett.
‘Could it be east Clare? It’s soft, though.’
/> ‘It could be Clare,’ said Barrett.
Considine shrugged.
‘If the nun was from the Buleen area, maybe she knew your Peggy Nolan already. Did your girl have hair like ‘a conker’?’
‘Yea,’ said Gina, ‘dark reddish. She was the right age too.’
A phone was ringing upstairs. Swan took the steps two at a time. When he got to the office, Mother Mary Paul was holding out the receiver to him. TP Murphy was on the other end..
‘You’ve got the nun?’ asked Swan.
‘You little bollix,’ replied Murphy, ‘A complete wild gooser. And now I’ve got the RUC on my back. They insisted on accompanying me to Newry, and now they want me to fill in a stack of forms, threatening me with cross border infringement. It’s going to take me hours to get home.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She wasn’t there at all. The priest who finally deigned to break his silence said she phoned last week to cancel. You owe me.’
Damn. Where had she got to? Swan’s mind raced as he went back down the stairs to his colleagues.
‘Barrett – stay here until it’s secure and empty. Make sure the tech bureau are coming soon as. Gina, I want you to put out a call for Sister Bernadette, but also I want you to get the team to trace all the Peggy Nolans you can find just in case your one’s too good to be true. Then come join me.’
‘Where?’
‘Buleen, of course! Wherever the hell that is. Oh, and give that girl with the short hair a tenner – no make it twenty. I’ll see you right.’
On the doorstep, Monsignor Kelly was pacing and smoking – an expensive looking brand with a gold band around the filter. He threw down a long butt as Swan emerged and came forward to shake his hand. Cufflinks in the shape of a cross.
‘Bit of a mix-up with your officer here,’ said the monsignor, as if they were old friends temporarily kept apart by a harsh world.
‘Sorry about that, Monsignor, thing is, I’ve got a bit of business to do, so perhaps we could catch up later.’
‘Is everything alright?’
‘Smashing, Father. Lovely place they have here, beautifully kept.’
Monsignor Kelly looked relieved, grateful.
‘My officers are taking a few statements from the nuns and residents, so Garda O’Malley here can keep you company till that’s finished.’
‘But it was you I needed to – ‘
‘No can do – father.’
Swan set off down the front steps. At the bottom, he turned back.
‘Must take a good lot of donations to keep a place like this in the style, eh?’
Monsignor Kelly’s determined smile dribbled off his face.
‘But as I said to the reverend mother, we’ll talk later, eh? After I’ve seen the adoption board.’
Swan headed home. He couldn’t see the end of it yet, but he was starting to see the beginning. Peggy Nolan could’ve known Sister Bernadette of old, and persuaded the nun to help her, to let her stay at Percy Place. She delivers the child there, with the nun’s help, because the nun knows nursing, but three days later the child is beaten to death. The nun sneaks her away. Bernadette knows the Rosary garden well. It’s her idea to bury the child there, but for some reason it gets left in the shed.
But why – why kill it? Was it an accident?
At home, he poured himself a finger of whiskey, searched out a couple of clean shirts, underwear, toiletries. He had hoped, without too much hope, that Elizabeth might be there. The only sign of her presence was a small sheet of paper torn from a notebook, the left edge frilled where she had ripped it from the spiral. Auntie Josie had taken another dip, it said, she was needed there, it said. With luck she’d be back tomorrow.
He made some calls, and packed his things in a briefcase, sat on the bed for a time. He didn’t want to go away with things as they were between them, without doing some little thing to thaw the ice, though he wasn’t sure how.
He woke before dawn, relishing the idea of driving the empty roads west as the sun rose behind him. He made a cup of coffee and fed the cat, stood looking at Elizabeth’s note on the table as he supped. Just as he was leaving, he turned the note to the blank side and wrote quickly.
It’s not just there you’re needed. I need you.
I’m sorry for any coldness. We’ll do as you want.
I love you,
V
He stared for a moment at his hokey words. She’d think he’d gone mad. Fuck it.
He left the note on the table and ran out the front door before he could change his mind.
TWENTY - SEVEN
Father Philbin’s homily didn’t mention Joan’s time in Damascus House. He also avoided anything particular to the circumstances of her death but opted instead for generalised gravitas and veiled allusions to ‘a young life snuffed out in its prime’ and ‘which of us knows the time and the place of our calling’. Under this roof, in these circumstances, there was no question of Joan having had a conscious role in the slip or fall that took her into the river’s flow. If her death was suicide, they would not be having this mass; therefore it was not suicide.
The church was packed when Ali arrived. Many more than at that Sunday mass Una had dragged her to when she first arrived. A little over a week ago, but felt like so much longer.
At first, an uneasy silence reigned among the congregation, torn here and there by muffled coughs and shuffling footsteps. Finally the moan of the organ washed down on their heads and she turned to see the small coffin being carried in on the shoulders of six men, one of whom was Ivor. His hair was combed back and flattened with some lotion or oil that darkened it. His expression was full of effort. She looked down at her hands as he came level, couldn’t bear the chance that their eyes might meet. All through the mass she thought about Joan, how unbelievable it was that she lay inside that box. How she herself may have had some part in it by making Joan angry outside the dance. It would be easier to think it an accident, join in the church’s version, but she just could not.
The choir of reed-voiced pensioners struggled into the sweet first lines of Bring Flowers of the Fairest. The coffin was hoisted once more and the men stepped it back down the aisle. Ivor was on the opposite side of it now, screened from view. After the coffin came Joan’s mother, who had pressed the medal on her, not knowing she’d need all the compassion of Mary for herself. A ruddy-faced man in a tight black suit walked in line with her, presumably Joan’s father. They didn’t touch or lean on each other. The space between them was marked.
Ali joined the rest of the congregation to follow the coffin as it was carried down the street, an empty hearse driving behind the crowd. The graveyard was new – a field at the edge of town occupied by only two and a half rows of shining stone tablets adorned with wreaths, small statues, domed displays of plastic flowers. The rest was mown grass, waiting for the dead to come, many of them breathing now in this gathering. Two mounds of earth marked the hole where the procession would end.
The women gathered close around the grave, murmuring Hail Marys together, a decade of the rosary. The men were scattered to the periphery by some invisible force, many solemn with clasped hands, just observing the backs of the women, others starting to chat in low voices, just like they were attending any village occasion, the perpetual banter. A soft, sieved rain billowed down the valley, but few took shelter under umbrellas. Coat shoulders darkened. Ali hadn’t even a jacket to protect her, was soon soaked through in her black cardigan and skirt.
She caught sight of Roisín and Una on the other side of the crowd, but otherwise did not know many people there. Joan’s family came from Ennisbridge, two miles up the road and a world away. At the edge of the graveside, she recognised Peggy Nolan’s pale blue mac. The woman beside her shared her umbrella, holding the big black wing of it low over both their faces. Doctor Nolan stood several p
aces behind them, straight as a soldier.
Ali wondered how well the Nolans had known Joan. She thought of Doctor Nolan on that Christmas day, the present in his hand, the daughters in their good coats. Had he been brought into the secret of what had been found? She vaguely remembered the two Nolan girls sitting side by side in the living room, obediently bored. Their father out of the room, possibly with Joan.
The first note of a laugh broke through the air and was immediately stifled. Ali wheeled round to see Davy looking down at the ground, kicking a stone away. The man beside him had a guilty hand near his mouth, and his eyes checked the crowd. They couldn’t just keep quiet for ten minutes, always the jokes, always the bit of crack, even here. She turned back to the gathering at the graveside and noticed that a few of the women were also looking over to Davy and his crony, among them Peggy Nolan, whose placid face was unusually alive, eyes burning as she looked at the boys. Ali thought of Peggy standing at the edge of the dancefloor in the marquee, that same still attention. At that moment the woman beside Peggy lifted the umbrella that hid her face.
It was just for an instant.
The woman’s eyes met Ali’s and the umbrella dipped down again. She was wearing her veil as usual, looked no different than when she stalked the corridors of St. Brigid’s, but Ali’s first shocked thought was – Antoinette Nolan.
It was as if two different photographs – one of Peggy’s prim teenage sister and one of Sister Bernadette standing at the front of her classroom had been superimposed and found to be identical. Sister Bernadette was who Antoinette Nolan had grown up to be, the colouring, the stature, the pale hand that still rested on Peggy’s shoulder, all so vividly obvious now. Peggy had said her sister was in Dublin, that was all. She didn’t say she was a nun.
The prayers ended and the crowd loosened, moved away from the grave as two men with shovels came forward. Ali pressed through the shifting bodies towards the spot where Sister Bernadette and Peggy had been standing, but when she got there, they were gone.