In the Rosary Garden

by Nicola White

  Swan explained to the doctor that his daughters had offered contradictory statements, Sister Bernadette willing to identify the Rosary baby as her sister’s child while Peggy claimed the child had been adopted. Nolan’s face betrayed no emotion.

  ‘What’s your own view, doctor?’

  ‘I would think that Bernadette would be your more reliable witness. My younger daughter’s state of mind is not strong.’

  ‘When did you notice she was pregnant?’

  Doctor Nolan hesitated a moment. ‘She concealed it from us. I didn’t know till quite late along.’

  ‘I thought the signs would be more obvious to a medic,’ said Swan.

  The doctor tightened his jaw. ‘The girls tend to rely on their mother for those kind of confidences.’

  There was no regret for his lost grandchild, nor did he seem inclined to protect Peggy against her sister’s implied accusation.

  ‘We’ll need to take a statement from you and your wife tomorrow at the station.’

  ‘Can’t it be done here?’

  ‘I’ll see – perhaps if you can help me with another matter.’

  Nolan nodded.

  ‘Twelve years ago at Christmas time, another baby was found, at Caherbawn. I believe you were there.’

  ‘Your officer asked me about that previously. Una Devane called me to Caherbawn and I examined the mother.’

  ‘Did the child’s body have any marks on it, any signs of violence?’

  A hesitation. The doctor shook his head.

  ‘You didn’t inform the guards.’

  ‘The child never lived, didn’t attain independent existence, as such. Some people’s lives are hard enough. I don’t see that there’s any benefit in making a song and dance.’

  ‘What happened to the body?’

  ‘I can’t recall. It was left with the family. You should see Una Devane about it.’

  ‘Are you sure you actually examined the child?’

  Doctor Nolan picked up his glasses as if eager to get on with his reading. ‘I don’t see the point in all this.’

  ‘The mother of the child that you didn’t record was buried this morning, drowned. Did you sign off her death certificate?’

  ‘There was nothing to suggest Joan Dempsey’s death was anything other than an accident.’

  ‘Don’t you need an autopsy to determine that?’

  ‘I examined the body and spoke to Father Philbin and the police. We did not deem it necessary.’

  A big man in a small town, thought Swan. Practised here all his life, knew all the secrets. Decided what was best. Deemed it.

  ‘Well, I’m just going to have to order one myself.’

  The doctor paled.

  ‘What about my daughter?’

  ‘She can stay here for the moment, but we will be back, you can be sure.’

  As he rose to go, Swan noticed the little wire glasses trembling in the Doctor’s grip.

  THIRTY - FOUR

  Branches moving against a deep blue sky. Twilight and shifting air, everything mobile. She thought she was back in the convent grounds with Ronan, that he was about to kiss her and that this time it would be lovely. A face hovered over her, Ronan’s face approaching, blocking out her view of the sky. The face wavered, became Davy’s, so close to hers that all the light disappeared and she was floating in blackness.

  When she woke again, she was aware of stones under her, and although the air was mild, her head was cold and clammy.

  Ali raised a hand to her scalp, felt her hair clumped together, sticky. Now she was properly awake, could recognise the outside of Davy’s bungalow. She put a hand to the concrete stump beside her, used it to lever herself to sitting. Her hand left dark prints on the grey. She wanted to be sick.

  The house was in blackness; the door stood open. Ali got shakily to her feet and tried to think. If he was still there in the living room he could see her through the dark window, might be looking straight at her now. She knew now that he would hurt her if he felt he had to.

  Ali turned and hobbled away, picking up speed as she reached the trees, ears straining for steps behind her. Half way along the path she held on to a sapling and stopped to look behind. She couldn’t see him, but the trees and their shadows shifted in the breeze, rustled. He could be very close by.

  If she could reach the farmhouse, surely her family would protect her. But Davy was family too, closer to the rest of them than she was. A line of fresh blood dripped down her cheek, and she held a hand to it. She had no choice – she might even be dying. Ali staggered in the direction of the farm. She would not die here.

  The barn loomed up behind the trees. Not far to go, she told herself. Her feet hit the concrete of the yard and she could see the light from the kitchen window fall across the patch of grass at the back of the house. On the ground to her left, she registered two squares of darkness where the awful slurry tank was. There should only be one drain cover, but now there seemed to be two, one square darker than the other, and something else, some object beside them.

  Keep going, she told herself, but her eyes clung to the squares, halting her feet, wanting to make sense of it.

  The slurry tank had been opened. One square was the metal cover, pulled aside, the other was the black void it should be covering. She took a few steps towards them. Except for her own ragged breathing, all remained quiet, nothing moved. From six feet away, she peered at the open hole and what was left beside it. It was hard to make it out in the dim light, and Ali moved closer. Now she could see it wasn’t a single object after all, it was double, a pair of black brogues. She knew she’d seen them recently, but her head was so fogged it took another long moment until she could make sense of it and remember where.

  She stumbled backwards from the open hole, letting her throat open to unleash a wail. In answer to her scream, a raw light burst from a lamp on the side of the barn, raking across the ground. Another voice joined hers and she turned to see Una running from the house towards her – her face distorted in panic.

  But even as she turned towards her aunt, Ali couldn’t rid her eyes of what she had glimpsed as the light burst across the yard. A dark shape like a sack, or perhaps a rounded back, lolled in the glossy brown swill of the slurry.

  THIRTY - FIVE

  The scene that greeted Swan at Caherbawn was like some twisted medieval altarpiece – suffering and gesture stamped in light against the grainy dark.

  Four figures were illuminated below harsh white floodlights. Two men, smeared with muck, laboured with wooden poles twice their height. They seemed to be prodding the ground, but the poles kept changing lengths and Swan realised they were probing some kind of hole. At their feet crouched two female figures, one middle aged, kneeling with her arms cast out to either side of her in a kind of supplication, her hair wild and her eyes to heaven, the other on her hands and knees, staring into the hole, a shining trail of blood caking one side of her milky face. Ali. His heart contracted at the sight.

  Considine leapt out of the passenger seat before Swan could fully absorb what he was looking at, the two guards from Kinmore following. Ali shouted something as they approached, pointing into the hole in the ground. The two men with the long poles froze where they were. The woman got to her feet and stepped behind the men.

  The smell was awful, thick in his nose and throat, intimate and revolting. By the time he reached the group he could feel it soak his clothes and skin. One of the Kinmore Gardaí stepped away to retch, affording Swan a view of the dark pit that all attention was centred on. Two feet below the opening he could see the stewing surface of some vast reservoir of faeces. The men had been stirring this with their poles, trying to fish something from it, and in the ordure there was a lump that seemed more solid than the rest. At first glance he took it to be a cat or dog that had somehow fallen in, a suggestion of matted fur or hair.


  He lifted his eyes. Considine had her arms around Ali, was trying to inspect her head injury even while she tried to calm the shivering girl. The younger man was wearing a blue boiler suit. His red hair and arms were streaked with slurry as if he had been half dipped into the tank.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Swan asked him.

  ‘She’s says – she says its Davy,’ he replied, gesturing at Ali.

  ‘It can’t be Davy,’ the older woman said.

  ‘Well, it’s someone,’ said the young man and the older man turned away at his words, trailing the hooked pole after him, heading off into the darkness, his shoulders heaving.

  They eventually persuaded all the family to go into the house, even the older man, Joe Devane, who they found shaking in a corner of the barn, still gripping his smeared pole.

  Fitzmaurice put a call in for an ambulance and the fire brigade. He asked Swan if it was worth getting the Garda divers too.

  ‘Let’s see what the fire boys can do first.’

  It took two hours to get him out, two hours of argument and speculation, of ropes and pulleys and improvised scaffold. The young fireman who volunteered to go down neck deep and attach a line to the body deserved a medal. At last, they managed to haul it out by a rope looped under its armpits, and it hung for a while under the scaffold in the lights, slowly rotating as the muck dripped from it, sliding off in gobbets. The suited body looked tarred, tortured. Swan checked again that the curtains were closed in the farmhouse.

  Four men lowered the corpse onto the ground next to the opening.

  ‘That’s Davy Brennan, alright,’ said Fitzmaurice .

  ‘Should we hose him down, clean him up a bit, for the family, like?’ asked one of the firemen

  ‘No. We need him as he is,’ said Swan, ‘The guards will take care of it from here.’

  Two paramedics leaned against their ambulance, waiting. The yard and driveway were jammed with an assortment of vehicles now, a static pile-up.

  ‘Don’t touch the drain cover,’ he said to one of the fireman who had bent to grasp it. ‘Leave everything now, and thanks for your help, lads.’

  The body was photographed before being lifted into the ambulance. Swan watched it move away, lights blazing, then he turned and entered the farmhouse. Considine was waiting for him.

  ‘No-one saw him go in. Ali was the last to see him alive, they were drinking together in the next house along. Davy Brennan’s own house.’

  ‘It would be her. Christ. Did he give her the crack on the head?’

  ‘She says she fell running away from him, says he told her he killed the baby in the Ranelagh house.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  Considine screwed her mouth up. ‘Well – it fits with what the Nolan girl said. He was the last person to have the baby. ’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  She nodded her head towards a closed door.

  In the old-fashioned living room beyond, Swan found Ali Hogan sitting on a sofa while Doctor Nolan stood over her, bandaging her head. He had the odd sensation that he was watching a play with a very small cast, the same faces appearing again and again.

  ‘They called me,’ Nolan said immediately, defensively.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Swan, dismissing him, ‘thank you.’

  Doctor Nolan quickly tucked the end of the bandage in, picked up his bag and left.

  The girl was horribly pale, and her eyes were black as soot, blurred looking. She still wore her dark funeral garb, even more stained than it had been when he saw her last, spatters of blood now added to the smears of clay and grass.

  ‘We need to go through everything with you again.’

  ‘Where will you take me?’

  ‘We can do it here if you like,’ said Considine.

  Ali shook her head, clamped her mouth.

  They decided to take her to the hotel, to leave the rest of the family to Fitzmaurice and his recruits for this evening. The body of Davy Brennan was on the road to Limerick, to a morgue and a post-mortem exam. Swan had ordered another for the body of Joan Dempsey – that would involve disinterring her from her new grave.

  Swan helped Ali out of the room while Considine collected some clothes for her. Hanging on to his elbow, she staggered, so he adjusted the arrangement, put an arm about her waist to support her better, his fingers resting on her ribcage. She was skinnier than he had ever imagined, and he found himself pondering who it was he was holding so intimately – an innocent caught in the crossfire of other people’s desperate acts or an instigator.

  They waited on the front doorstep for Considine. Fitzmaurice was conducting traffic at the side of the house, looking ten years younger than he had that morning. Another police car had arrived, and Ali’s aunt was manoeuvring a car out of the way to make more space. Swan thought that in the circumstances, one of the guards should have offered to move it for her.

  ‘Little more,’ said Fitzmaurice, gesturing the car back, ‘… little more. That’s it!’ He rapped the boot sharply with his hand and the woman hit the brakes – one brake light shone white where the red plastic had come away.

  ‘Need to get that fixed, Una,’ said Fitzmaurice automatically. At that moment Considine appeared with a purple rucksack and headed for the car. Swan started to follow, but Ali seemed stuck to the spot, her eyes riveted to the back of her aunt’s car as the lights died and the engine stopped. She seemed terrified.

  He wondered if he should bring her back into the house, but she suddenly walked out of his embrace, hurrying after Considine without a backwards look.

  THIRTY - SIX

  Swan sat in a winged armchair in the lobby of the Buleen Hotel, waiting for Considine and the girl to finish breakfast. He was all set to drive back to Dublin, would bring Ali back with him. When he looked over the top of his newspaper he could see them through the dining room doorway, among the sunlit tablecloths and the sheen of china. Ali didn’t appear to be eating, but Gina was making up for her, addressing the big cooked breakfast with the relish of a woman who lived alone.

  Swan veiled his smile behind his paper. His mood was buoyant. He had phoned Elizabeth first thing, wary of her reaction to the little note he’d left. But she practically cooed down the line at him, asking when he was coming home, flirting almost. He was stunned at how simply their marital winter could be thawed, just by telling her that he loved her. But even as she hinted she’d be staying in Dublin more, he found himself wondering how such a thing could be sustained. Would he have to say it all the time – and if he did, wouldn’t it wear out?

  He turned to the television listings. With any luck he’d be home on the sofa tonight. The killer of the Rosary Baby was dead, it seemed. Between the statements they had gathered and what a forensic examination of Hogan’s unkempt laundry room would tell them, he was sure they’d find it had died at Davy Brennan’s hands, just like the girl said.

  All evening they had questioned her in the little TV lounge of the hotel, Considine writing down reams of stuff on borrowed paper, not just about what Brennan had said he had done with Peggy Nolan’s baby, but also her account of Joan Dempsey and of how her baby had been disposed of in the same slurry tank that Brennan had ended up in.

  Ali was scrupulous in her details, just like that first time in Rathmines, but last night she kept stopping, scanning the tastefully grained wallpaper as if something was eluding her. Occasionally she asked them questions too, testing her own account.

  ‘Do you think he could have been the father of Joan’s baby?’ she said at one point.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Swan answered. ‘ Our forensics people say that the bones of the child may well be at the bottom of the tank, even after all these years. They’ll start draining it tomorrow.’

  Ali’s eyes grew wide in the lamplight.

  ‘You say it was your uncle put it in the tank?’

 
Ali had squinted away, nodded briefly.

  It made some kind of dark sense, thought Swan, this pairing. The first baby brought back into consciousness by the killing of the second. And maybe he killed the first one too, this Davy Brennan, and followed them both to oblivion.

  ‘I think maybe he thought he’d killed me too,’ said Ali at one point, ‘Or that he’d be blamed for it. He saw me lying outside his house.’

  The dead had a strong pull on the living, even the smallest of them. Joan Dempsey too – following her dead child to the grave of her own will or possibly made to follow. Davy Brennan had been at the same dance the night she died, but no-one had seen them together. There was only one sighting of Joan alone on the road, heading towards Buleen. The body might tell them something more of her death.

  With Davy Brennan dead, the urgency had gone out of the case. He would fill in his reports, but he doubted if court would come in to it. Four lives lost, four furrows ploughed through those who remained.

 

  ‘Put on your seatbelt, now.’

  He had to say it twice. The girl didn’t seem to be hearing properly. She still had a little tremor to her movements, and the bandage around her head made her look even more of a tragic waif. Swan hoped that the doctor who came to the hotel the previous evening was right, that she wasn’t concussed. He wasn’t going to take Doctor Nolan’s word for anything, so he got a young guy in from Kinmore who held up various fingers for her to count, and looked deep into her eyes at close range, briefly bringing an embarrassed flush to Ali’s cheeks.

  Considine stood on the pavement beside the car, arms folded and brow furrowed. She tapped on his window and he rolled it down. Dipping her head, she spoke across him to the girl.

  ‘If you feel sick or anything, just say, and he’ll stop.’

  ‘Of course I’ll stop,’ said Swan. What was he, an ogre?

  ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I finish here, boss’