In the Rosary Garden

by Nicola White

  ‘Chatty. Says she recognised the baby in the shed as her sister’s. She thinks her sister snapped and killed it.’

  Considine let a grin escape. ‘Yes!’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Swan, ‘ She’s assuming no one else was involved, but who was driving the car that picked Peggy up from St. Jude’s – it wasn’t her sister.’

 

  Peggy Nolan sat in the corner of a small sofa in a bright little room off the kitchen, her bare feet tucked under her. The room was painted yellow with pale green woodwork, little mirrors and pictures livening the walls, just the kind of old-fashioned things Elizabeth would like. He remembered the sentimental note he had left for his wife and quickly bundled her from his mind.

  Apart from her russet colouring, Peggy was quite different from her sister, made from some heavier element, her face full and sensuous but lacking animation. Moving quietly, Swan took a chair opposite. Considine sat on the sofa beside her, while Fitzmaurice lurked somewhere behind him.

  ‘This is Detective Swan, my boss,’ said Considine, ‘Can you tell him what you told me?’

  Peggy moved her gaze slowly from Considine to Swan.

  ‘My baby is in England, in a house by the sea.’ Swan wondered whether the girl was doped. Her dark eyes were hard to read.

  ‘That sounds pleasant. Who took her there?’

  She opened her mouth slightly and closed it again, her gaze dropping to the floor.

  ‘Can’t say.’

  ‘Was it someone you met in Dublin?’

  A slight shake of her head.

  ‘Your sister doesn’t think the baby was adopted. She says she recognised her as the one found in the Rosary Garden.’

  ‘That baby was NOT mine.’ Although she didn’t raise her eyes, an edge of defiance had come into her voice, an anger stirring.

  ‘Look at me, Peggy. We have a way of proving the baby in the garden wasn’t yours. You want that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All we have to do is take blood from you and from your child’s father. That’s the way to prove the dead baby’s not yours.’

  ‘The only way?’ The girl was agitated, slurring her words slightly.

  ‘We’ll take care of the arrangements if you just tell us his name.’

  ‘Come on now,’ said Garda Fitzmaurice from the doorway. His voice was low, and managed to convey an infinite reasonableness. Peggy looked at him in hope.

  ‘He said we’d have a fresh start. It was him found the good home for it.’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘But now he won’t talk to me at all.’

  ‘I could have a word with him,’ said Fitzmaurice, ‘straighten things out for you.’

  ‘Could you really?’

  ‘No bother.’

  Tears tipped suddenly from Peggy’s eyes as she got to her feet and shuffled over to put her arms around Garda Fitzmaurice. Swan held his breath and prayed that no one would enter the room to see this.

  ‘Where is he today?’ Fitzmaurice asked, smooth as one hand slipping into another.

  Peggy shook her head, rubbing her forehead against his uniform jacket.

  ‘Remember that lovely mild evening, Peggy, back in the autumn. When I saw you up in the quarry wood? You were parked in your father’s car with someone, weren’t you? Davy Brennan, I think it was.’

  Peggy had gone very still. Her arms dropped off the Garda’s shoulders, and her hands came to cover her face.

  ‘He’ll be angry with me. Don’t tell him I said.’

  ‘Was it Davy Brennan that took the baby away to be adopted?’ asked Swan.

  She nodded. ‘In England. He gave me a photo of the couple. They have a lot of money, he said, and they’re Catholic.’

  Swan and Fitzmaurice retreated to the hall. The Garda said he’d seen this Davy in Buleen that morning, but that he’d been up in Dublin for a while.

  Dublin. Swan’s heart quickened.

  ‘What’s he like, this Brennan?’

  ‘Bit of a boyo, but from a respectable family. As you know.’

  ‘What do I know?’

  ‘Sure he’s part of the Devane’s at Caherbawn. Mrs. Devane’s maiden name is Brennan. Like your one on The Late Late Show, only she goes by the name of Hogan. He’s her uncle.’

  Swan’s brain raced to absorb this information, throwing up a picture, a memory, from Rathmines Garda station on the very first day of the case. When he walked into the reception area after interviewing Alison Hogan, there had been two people sitting in the chairs. The emotional Deirdre Hogan had shaded her companion into obscurity. But he had been sitting right beside her. Swan tried to conjure him back into memory, but could only see the way his fringe fell forward to hide his features, the dark slouch that he had read as boredom.

  He asked Fitzmaurice to phone the farm, to check if Davy Brennan was there.

  ‘Pretend it’s nothing important.’

  The Garda came back after a short exchange.

  ‘His sister says she hasn’t seen him, says he might be away to Kinmore. She was very keen to know why I wanted him, though. I’ll put a call out, if ye want.’

  ‘Yes, but no more hanging about – let’s just go there. Leave two of the lads here and round up the others. I’ll join you in a minute.’

  THIRTY - TWO

  Davy pushed Ali through the hall of the bungalow and into the kitchen. ‘I need a drink. We both need a drink.’

  He worked his way along the line of cupboards, opening and shutting doors on empty shelves.

  ‘Is there beer?’ said Ali, laying the doll on the dirty counter. The place seemed even more of a wreck than it had been when Davy returned from Dublin. A bucket beside the sink overflowed with rubbish and the cement floor was splashed with brown stains. A queue of bottles stood against the skirting board.

  ‘No beer – I’ve whiskey somewhere.’ He twirled round to face her. ‘I haven’t told anyone about the slurry pit in – what – more than ten years. It’s stupid for you not to know. You’re not a child anymore.’

  Davy walked over to the small fridge, opened the door and stared into it, even though he had searched it a moment before. ‘That’s not to say I’m not a little bit annoyed with you.’ He addressed the fridge, not her.

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘You keep bringing these policemen sniffing in your wake.’

  ‘What’s that to do with us?’

  ‘What indeed!’ Davy slammed the fridge and walked out of the kitchen. Ali followed. From the hallway she watched him do a circuit of the small bathroom, searching.

  ‘I don’t want you to be annoyed with me,’ she said.

  She hoped he would calm down, hoped he wouldn’t find any whiskey and that not finding it wouldn’t make him angry. She followed him into a bedroom. Davy got down on his hands and knees and started going through his suitcase and the pile of clothes beside it. She needed to ask him something. She wasn’t sure she wanted the answer, but the question kept nagging around her head.

  ‘You said that Joan’s baby was sickly. She told me it was stillborn.’

  Davy sat back, cross-legged on the floor.

  ‘They made that up afterwards, Una and herself. I know what I saw… I saw its little arms waving… I saw it. They treated me like an idiot. Never took a breath, Una says, but I heard it – mewing like a kitten. I was looking through the window at them. When Una laid it on the table it wasn’t moving anymore. I don’t know what they did to it, or which one of them did it. Una said I didn’t see what I thought I saw.’

  Ali moved to the mattress on the floor, crawled over it so that she could sit with her back against the wall. She needed to sit very still. Davy was looking at his hands. She remembered him as he was at sixteen, a tall hero. She tried to figure out the likely truth of what he said – whether
he could have been mistaken, or spinning a tale. She thought of her mother’s story of her grandfather forcing them to kill animals as a mercy.

  Minutes passed.

  ‘When I went into the kitchen, Una was tending to Joan. She told me to put it away – so I did – I hid it for her. The next day I saw her coming back down from the pit with the box and she says to me it’s in a better place with that pious bloody face on her.’

  Davy turned to look at Ali, his eyes re-focussing.

  ‘Aaah!’ he cried, and she flinched as he lunged in her direction. His hand came from behind a pillow, gripping an almost full bottle of Paddy by the neck. He rolled away and spun the metal top from it with one rub of his palm. He threw back a slug and held out the bottle to her.

  ‘You look like you need it.’

  ‘I don’t like it straight.’

  ‘Don’t be a fairy.’

  She took the bottle and swallowed. It burned inside her mouth and made her lips sting, but as it went down she felt blood stirring within her limbs, like coming back to life. She took another sip and Davy smiled. She wanted to change the subject.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘aren’t these my mother’s sheets?’

  ‘Must’ve taken them by mistake.’

  ‘Mistake?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering to go to university – you should just go straight into the cop shop – or the Gestapo – go snooping with the piggy pigs, oink oink.’ He grabbed the bottle from her, swallowed deep then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Ali tried again to think of something to talk about, something to make him come back to himself, away from this story. And then she thought of him laughing in the graveyard, the sound of it carrying over Joan’s open grave. And how Peggy had stared at him, her eyes burning, and Sister Bernadette beside her, looking too, angry with him for something more than just the laugh.

  Ali stood up, wobbled on the mattress.

  ‘Where’re you going?’

  ‘I’m going to get a glass – water for the whiskey.’

  Ali let the tap run. The night of the marquee dance, she had seen Peggy on the edge of the floor looking out at the dancers with the most miserable expression. And when Ali had taken her place, Davy was two feet away dancing with Valerie, the woman who had broken it off with him for his wandering eye. What was the connection between Davy and Peggy?

  She heard him move about the house, then a loud crack of splintering wood. She didn’t know what he was up to, but stayed at the sink, moving the glass under the water’s flow, filling it and emptying it again and again. What was it that Joan had said to her? She knew nothing. Nothing at all. She did have a sense that if she tried to leave now, Davy would stop her. If she could wait it out, this mood would pass over, or he would pass out.

  ‘You got a lighter?’ He was in the doorway.

  She wiped her hands on her skirt and took her lighter and cigarette packet out of her pocket and offered them up.

  ‘Get us a glass too – I’m lighting a fire in the front room.’

  Ali sat on the sofa, smoking, supping her whiskey and water steadily while Davy assembled a pile of thin wood and newspaper in the rough hole where a fire surround might go one day. He hummed as he touched the flame to the edges of the paper. The wood crisped and spat.

  ‘That’s cosy now,’ he said, balancing two peat briquettes over the flames. He came to join her on the sofa, filling the tumbler she’d brought for him with whiskey before settling back against the cushions.

  ‘You’re very quiet. I’m sorry – but it’s better you know. This is what the world is.’

  Her tongue in her mouth was clumsy. ‘Did something happen between you and Peggy?’

  ‘Aw, Jaysus – that too? Let me make one thing clear – I never fancied her. It was a moment of weakness. You know I’m given to moments of weakness.’ Davy put his hand on Ali’s knee and give her a rueful smile. She didn’t smile back, but glimpsed a foggy image of Davy’s face lowering towards hers in darkness. He sighed and removed his hand, picking up the tale.

  ‘It was just once or twice. In the back of her Daddy’s Jag, what can I say – the situation appealed to me. Should have just fucked the car instead. She said she was on the pill, said her Daddy got her a supply and I believed her. Next thing she’s up the pole, and telling Valerie about it. And I got no say in any of it. That’s not fair is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I said she should get rid of it, and do you know what she said to me? She said she would if I’d be her boyfriend. She was trying to hijack my life. My whole life.’

  Davy thumped the arm of the sofa so hard the drink in her glass trembled. She raised the glass to her lips and tipped all the liquid into her mouth.

  ‘I convinced her to get it adopted – had a place set up for her in some residential place out in Connemara. Might have led her on a little bit about my feelings to get the job done, okay, but then Antoinette takes Peggy off to Dublin with her, says she doesn’t want her to make any rash decisions…’

  Ali thought of the Rosary Garden, of Sister Bernadette standing bereft outside the shed with a dead baby in her arms.

  ‘No,’ Ali managed to say, ‘no, wait…’

  ‘Like I’ve no rights, like I’m some fuckin’ plank of wood. You women think it’s all down to you. I was just trying to get my say. It was half mine.’

  Ali tried to get to her feet, but Davy grabbed her hand and pulled, holding her down next to him and pointing a finger in her face.

  ‘You listen – I’ll tell you how it was supposed to go and then I’ll tell you how you messed it up.’

  ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Davy looked around for the whiskey bottle, but he couldn’t reach it and keep hold of her at the same time. ‘Bugger. Anyway, Peggy goes to Dublin to have the baby, and I follow after. The nun’s trying to persuade her to keep it, to come back to Buleen and live openly with her little bastard in my own town. I’d never be rid of her.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I sorted something out. It was perfect. I told her I had a family in England, rich people desperate for a baby, who would give it the life of a princess. We do a deal. I persuade Peggy to give me the baby one night in Dublin, and tell her I’m going to take it over on the ferry.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. I would have been stopped at the first post. It was just a tale. No, I had a better plan. I figured I could drive as far as Portlaoise and back without your mother missing her car. Drop the baby near the hospital in the dark. I even had a wee bed set up in the back of the car, a Dunne’s Stores towel to wrap it in. They’d be searching the midlands for the mother. Nothing to connect it to her or me.’

  ‘It’s still alive?’

  ‘It would be if you hadn’t arrived at the door with your little blondie friend.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your house. That night. The thing was screaming – a noise that would strip the skin off you. I popped back to Deirdre’s, figured I could get some milk and whiskey down it. Just dope it, like. I knew no-one was in, but still it won’t stop crying. I was in the laundry room with it when I hear the key in the door and you two giggling in the hall. You made me panic.’

  His voice was accusing, but he wouldn’t meet her eye. Ali remembered coming in with Fitz that night, just because Fitz wanted to meet Davy, wanted to meet any man she could, and him coming out of the laundry room all flustered, and her thinking it was shyness.

  ‘What have you done, Davy?’

  ‘I’ve done no worse than millions of women, than my own sister did. What difference is there between a foetus and a just born baby that knows nothing or no one – days that’s all it is.’

  ‘There is a difference,’ said Ali. His hand grabbed the back of her neck and tighten
ed.

  ‘Don’t give me crap. You don’t know enough to keep your knickers on either. I had to leave it somewhere, so I thought I’d put it in that little garden you talk about so much. A nice present for Sister Bernadette and her meddling. And there you were, under a tree, getting your titties out for some boy.’

  All the air disappeared from her body. He had been there, the figure walking on the path down to the Rosary Garden. He had seen her with Ronan. This wasn’t made up.

  Davy let go of her, turned away. When he spoke, his voice was barely there.

  ‘I just needed it to shut up.’

  ‘Davy, it wasn’t an ‘it’.

  He wrapped his arms around his head as if warding her off.

  Ali leapt for the hallway, grabbing at the jamb to pivot herself towards the front door. She fumbled with the snib while he called her name from the living room, a forlorn wail that almost made her waver, but the door was opening now and she could see the dusky sky and the path through the trees beckoning her out of there.

  Ali stepped out into air, forgetting the ground would be so far. Her body pitched forward, flying down towards the cement stump that suddenly filled her vision.

  THIRTY - THREE

  Swan knocked on Doctor Nolan’s study door. Outside, in the dwindling light, his small team readied themselves for the short trip to Caherbawn,

  ‘Come in!’

  It was more of a library than a consulting room, though an examination bench covered in nasty fawn vinyl lurked against one wall. The sight of it reminded him of Ali, and what she had been subjected to on his orders. He soothed his guilt with the thought that the girl and the mother hadn’t been quite honest with him – they had never mentioned an uncle being with them in Dublin.

  Doctor Nolan was sitting at an old fashioned writing desk, a fat reference tome open before him, a brass lamp casting a civilised light. He slid off some wire rimmed reading glasses as Swan approached. There was a ring of falseness to the pose, as if he had been waiting to be interrupted.