She opened the door wider so that Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán could step inside and then she led her along a long panelled corridor with arched gothic windows on one side and framed engravings of biblical scenes on the other. Halfway along the corridor, in an alcove, stood a life-size bronze figure of a woman in a long robe, polished to a high shine. Her arms were extended and her eyes raised to heaven.
‘Saint Margaret,’ said the young nun, bowing her head as she passed the statue, almost as if it were alive.
The convent smelled of boiled cabbage and stale incense. Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán was wearing high-heeled boots and her footsteps made a loud clacking sound on the parquet flooring, so that she felt even more intrusive.
‘And what’s your name?’ she asked the young nun.
‘Oh, me? I’m Sister Rose – Sister Rose O’Sullivan.’
‘You’re wearing the white, so I suppose you’re a novice?’
‘That’s right. I have another five months to go before I take my temporary vows.’
As Sister Rose showed her into the waiting room outside the mother superior’s office, Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán was tempted to ask her what had led her to take up holy orders. She could understand a sense of duty to the community. She felt that herself, and strongly. But it was possible to serve the community without devoting yourself completely to God, and remaining single, and chaste.
‘If you’d like to take a seat, I’ll go and find Mother O’Dwyer for you,’ said Sister Rose.
‘Thanks,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. When Sister Rose had left, though, she didn’t sit down, but went to the window and looked out at the convent’s vegetable garden, where knobbly yellow stalks stood, stripped of their sprouts. Then she slowly circled around the room to examine the photographs hanging on the walls.
All of them showed groups of young women, every one them cradling babies in their arms or holding small children by the hand. On either side of these groups stood sisters of the congregation of the Bon Sauveur in their black cowls and habits. Each of the photographs was labelled ‘Saint Margaret’s Mother and Baby Home’, and dated. The earliest was March 1927, the latest April 1975.
What caught Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán’s attention more than anything else was that nobody in the photographs was smiling, neither the nuns nor any of the young women, nor even the little children. Their expressions were all strained and anxious, as if they had just received distressing news and their whole world was about to fall apart.
Walking slowly around from one photograph to the next, she felt unexpectedly saddened. What made her sadness even keener was that she could do nothing to help any of the young women who were staring out at her so worriedly. Even if they hadn’t passed away long ago, they would be elderly now and their children would be grown up, or gone, or passed away, too.
‘I understand that you have tragic news,’ said a thin, sharp voice.
Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán turned around to see Mother O’Dwyer standing in the doorway, as if she had been watching her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid that I have.’
‘And you are—?’
‘Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán, from Anglesea Street Garda station.’
Mother O’Dwyer was a tiny woman, almost like a religious figurine herself. She was wearing the same black habit and black scapular as the nuns in the photographs, although she was also wearing an oval silver medallion hung around her neck, with the image of a sad-faced female saint on it. She wore rimless glasses that reflected the wintry light from the window so that she looked as if she were blind. Her face was round and pale, but her nose was triangular and up-tilted, like the gnomon of a sundial, and there was a large wart close to her right nostril.
‘Sister Rose said that Sister Bridget Healy has been found murdered.’
‘Yes. I’m very sorry to have to bring you that news. You have our condolences.’
‘You had best come into my office,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. She looked suspiciously around at the photographs on the walls, as if she didn’t want the young women and children in them to overhear what they were going to say.
She opened her office door and gestured that Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán should go inside. She then followed her and closed the door very quietly and tightly.
The office was small and stuffy and smelled of leather and faded potpourri. One wall was filled floor to ceiling with books, mostly religious. On the facing wall there was a framed print of a saintly looking woman with her arms outspread, staring up at the sky with an ecstatic expression on her face. Beside her, a naked cherub was holding up a wooden cross, his modesty covered by a coil of blue cloth that conveniently happened to be floating past.
‘Please, Sergeant, sit down,’ said Mother O’Dwyer, and seated herself behind her own leather-covered desk. Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán sat in a low but high-sided chair, which made her feel that she was sitting in a bucket.
Mother O’Dwyer fussily and precisely closed a prayer book on her desk and moved an empty teacup to one side, tutting as if she expected that one of the novices would have come to collect it by now.
‘Perhaps you can apprise me of the circumstances of Sister Bridget’s passing,’ she said.
‘She was found dead in her own bed this morning at about seven-fifteen,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘Our chief technical officer thinks that she was suffocated, probably with her own pillow. There will, of course, be a full post-mortem.’
Mother O’Dwyer crossed herself, twice. ‘That’s dreadful. Just dreadful. Do you have any notion who might have done such a terrible thing?’
‘It’s far too early to say yet. We don’t have any immediate suspects. But there was something unusual about her murder and we think that it might give us some kind of a lead. That’s the reason I’ve come to see you.’
‘What do you mean, “unusual”? The deliberate taking of a sacred life can never be considered to be “usual”, can it?’
‘Well, no, of course not. But this was unusual whichever way you look at it. If I can ask you first, though, Mother O’Dwyer, how long were you and Sister Bridget contemporaries here?’
‘Let me see...’ said Mother O’Dwyer. ‘I became a candidate here when I was twenty-six, in 1973. Sister Bridget left in 1994, when she was sixty-two years old, because of her health. So that’s, what? Twenty-one years.’
‘And how did you and she get along together?’
‘That’s a very strange question, sergeant. All of the sisters in this community “get along together”, as you put it. We were called by God and we have to “get along together” in order to fulfil our holy duty.’
‘How many sisters do you have here now?’ asked Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán.
‘Thirteen now, altogether. There used to be more when Sister Bridget was here – twenty-one when I joined. But since we no longer provide residential care for single mothers and their infants, there’s not the need for sisters that we used to have, and sadly fewer young women these days are feeling that they’re called by Jesus. We’re living now in extremely amoral times, I’m sorry to say. I blame the interweb myself. Twitter, it’s Satan’s own notice board. Well, that and lower-class behaviour. Drinking in the streets. Promiscuity. Girls don’t have the decorum any more.’
‘Would you say that you and Sister Bridget were close?’
Mother O’Dwyer took off her spectacles. She had a slight cast in her left eye, so that it was difficult for Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán to tell if she were looking at her directly or not. ‘“Close” is not the word I’d use,’ she said. ‘Of course, Sister Bridget was older than me, but she was also a very private individual. Her closest relationship was with God. She liked to see things done after a certain fashion, though, especially when our assistant superior, Mother Kelly, was unwell and Sister Bridget temporarily took over her duties. She was extremely what you might call “meticulous”.’
‘Did that irritate anybody? I don�
�t necessarily mean you. but was there anybody else you can think of who found her annoying?’
‘Like I say, sergeant, in this congregation we all “get along” together. It’s our vocation.’
‘That’s not really what I asked you, Mother O’Dwyer. Getting along with people means that you tolerate them and keep your mouth shut even when they give you ire. You had a very closed environment here – twenty-one women of varying ages living in each other’s pockets. If I’m correct, you weren’t allowed out at night, either, in those days – you had all to be back here in the convent by the time it fell dark. Not only that, you also had the stress of taking care of unmarried mothers and their children. You can’t make me believe that you never got on each other’s nerves, ever. You may have been called by God, but you were still human, and more than that, you were women.’
Mother O’Dwyer replaced her spectacles on her pointy nose and pursed her lips to show that she wasn’t going to comment any further, but that lack of response was enough to suggest to Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán that at least some of the sisters in the convent had found Sister Bridget overbearing – ‘haughty’, as Nevina Cormack had put it.
‘You said that there was something unusual about her death,’ said Mother O’Dwyer.
‘Yes. She was sexually assaulted.’
Mother O’Dwyer crossed herself again. ‘She was raped? Oh, dear Mary Mother of God! After eighty-three years of keeping herself chaste for the Lord!’
‘We don’t know for sure yet. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy. But she was sexually assaulted with a religious figurine, and that religious figurine was left inside her.’
‘A religious figurine? Of what?’
‘The Immaculate Heart of Mary.’ Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán held out her hands about a foot apart. ‘It was approximately this big.’
‘Oh dear God, you’re making me feel quite faint,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. ‘The Immaculate Heart of Mary was the figurine that Sister Bridget kept on her window sill in her room and always used for prayer and meditation. She was devoted to the inner life of Our Lady, her virtues and her hidden imperfections, and to Our Lady’s faultless love for her Son Jesus Christ.’
‘So this particular figurine was important to her?’
‘Important? It was everything. In spite of all the wounds that Our Lady’s poor heart sustained, her love never wavered. It was Our Lady’s inner strength that helped Sister Bridget to understand how she, too, could give her love wholeheartedly to God. That’s if you follow what I’m saying.’
‘Of course,’ nodded Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. She had caught the gist of what Mother O’Dwyer was trying to explain to her, although she had never been very bright when it came to catechism. When she was six years old, her first attempt at answering ‘Who made me?’ had been ‘Mummy and Daddy’. But it wasn’t Sister Bridget’s devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary that interested her. It was the likelihood that her murderer had known her well enough to violate her body with the one figurine that she had held to be most sacred.
‘I don’t like to harp on about it,’ she said. ‘But are you totally sure there was nobody at the convent when Sister Bridget was here who actively didn’t like her? Maybe it wasn’t another sister, but a visiting priest, or a member of the public that she was tending to? Or maybe one of the unmarried mothers?’
Mother O’Dwyer stood up and walked around her desk. She went up to the engraving of the ecstatic woman and the cherub with the cross and said, ‘Do you know who this is, sergeant? This is Saint Margaret of Cortona, in one of her frequent communications with Jesus. She is the patron saint of single mothers and protector of illegitimate children, both born and unborn, and she still shields them from harm, even today. That is because she herself was a single mother and succumbed many times in her early life to the temptations of the flesh.
‘However, she became penitent, and when her father refused to have her back in his house she went to Cortona to take care of fallen young women like herself, for no remuneration, living on bread and water. Her selfless service to those who had wandered astray morally was beyond reproach, which was why she was canonized, and Sister Bridget was the same. If Sister Bridget’s words were ever sharp, it was only because she was speaking in a young woman’s best interests, and those of her child.
‘I find it impossible to believe that any member of our congregation would have harmed Sister Bridget, nor any of the young women that Sister Bridget looked after. And that’s all I can say to you.’
‘There must be some other sisters here who knew Sister Bridget,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘Is it possible that I can have a word with them, too?’
‘They’re all meditating at the moment, I’m afraid – as indeed I was, and shall have to return to it. Perhaps you’d like to call back later this evening, after our supper. Seven-thirty would be the most convenient time.’
‘All right, then,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. She stood up and straightened her skirt. ‘I’ll probably bring another officer with me, if that’s all right, just to get through things quicker.’
‘No bother at all,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. ‘I’m absolutely certain, though, that you’ll be wasting your time. You’ll hear the same story from every single one of them. We’re a community of women who have given their lives to God and to helping those unfortunate individuals who, for one reason or another, are incapable of helping themselves. We get along very well, thank you. That’s one of the reasons they call us “sisters”. Sisters of Jesus Christ, sisters to each other.’
Mother O’Dwyer opened the door and Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán stepped out into the waiting room and took a deep breath. It had been so leathery and stuffy inside Mother O’Dwyer’s office that she had been close to suffering an attack of claustrophobia.
Sister Rose was sitting outside, in her white novice’s habit. She stood up immediately and Mother O’Dwyer said, ‘I hope I’ve answered all of your questions, sergeant, and put your mind at rest, at least as far as this congregation is concerned. Sister Rose will show you out. God be with you.’
‘Thank you, and with you,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán, and followed Sister Rose along the corridor towards the front door.
When they were out on the porch, though, Sister Rose nervously looked back and then closed the door behind her until it was only an inch ajar.
‘I don’t know if I should be showing you this,’ she lisped.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘This,’ said Sister Rose. She reached underneath her scapular and took out a pale-blue handkerchief, folded into a pyramid. She glanced behind her again and then looked left and right across the glistening wet asphalt car park. When she seemed satisfied that nobody was watching them, she held up the handkerchief in the palm of her hand and carefully unfolded it.
Inside it was a small curved piece of bone, only a little more than three centimetres long. One end was slightly stained, as if it had been soaked in tea. At the other end there were three tiny teeth.
‘Where did you get this?’ asked Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. She took a pair of crumpled latex gloves out of her coat pocket and tugged one of them onto her right hand. Then she reached across and carefully picked up the bone up between finger and thumb.
‘In the garden, at the back,’ said Sister Rose. ‘I was weeding and I just found it there, sticking out of the flower bed.’
‘When was this?’
‘About six weeks ago. I didn’t know who to tell. I showed it to Sister Brenda and I asked her if I should take it to Mother O’Dwyer, but she said best not to. She said best to throw it in the bin and forget I ever found it. There would be all kinds of trouble and they might even close down the convent.’
Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán turned the bone this way and that. ‘Why didn’t you throw it in the bin?’ she asked.
‘Because it’s part of a small child’s jawbone, isn’t it? Sister Brenda said it might be a dog’s, but I did b
iology at school and I know it’s not a dog’s.’
‘Well, I’d say you’re right,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘It is a child’s jawbone, and these are its milk teeth. If you were going to show it to anybody at all, you should have showed it to us.’
They heard the sound of footsteps inside the convent hallway and Sister Rose turned around in panic, wringing her hands together.
‘Please don’t tell Mother O’Dwyer I gave it to you! Please! This is what I’ve wanted ever since I was at school, to join the convent! If she finds out what I’ve done, she’ll throw me out! She’ll probably have me excommunicated!’
Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán dropped the piece of bone into the left-hand latex glove and tied a knot in it to make it secure. Then she laid a reassuring hand on Sister Rose’s shoulder and said, ‘Look, don’t worry. We don’t have to say where it came from. But we’ll have to investigate. If there was a jawbone in the garden, there could be more bones, too, the rest of the child’s skeleton; and if there’s one child’s skeleton there, there could be more.’
‘I know,’ said Sister Rose, and there were tears sparkling on her eyelashes. ‘That’s why I kept it. It’s a sacred part of that poor child’s body. I prayed for its little soul. I don’t know who it was or how it died but I prayed that it didn’t suffer, and I commended its spirit to God, and to the Virgin Mary, so that She could be its mother and take care of it now.’
‘Well, it’s taken you some time, but you’ve done the right thing now,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘What I need to know is exactly where in the garden you discovered it. I don’t want you to show me now because we’d be seen and soon as we send a technical team to search the convent grounds the sisters would realize it was you who tipped us off. Do you have access to a computer?’
‘Yes, in the secretary’s office.’
‘Then draw me a sketch map of the garden, with a cross to mark the spot where you found the jawbone, scan it and send it to me. Here’s my card with my email address. Do it as soon as you can, please, Sister Rose. Meanwhile, I’ll be taking this jawbone to have it examined and a DNA sample taken. With any luck at all it will be possible to find out how it died, this child, and who it is. And hopefully we can find the rest of its remains and give it the decent burial it deserves.’
Blood Sisters Page 4