The Rosary Garden

by Nicola White

An acid gush filled Ali’s throat even as Bernadette moved to cover the little body again, now so obviously lifeless and broken. A crackle of static travelled through the air, a radio rasp. Ali turned to look at the gate, where the silver buttons on several Garda uniforms flashed in the bright sunlight beyond the garden.

  3

  A line of nuns occupied the six plastic chairs in the reception area of Rathmines Garda station. Vincent Swan could feel their eyes on his back as he walked up to the front desk and introduced himself.

  ‘Detective Inspector Swan … from HQ.’ Some old instinct kept his voice low.

  The Garda at the desk nodded and disappeared. Swan tried a casual glance behind, but the nuns were still staring, except for an ancient one on the end, who had bent to her beads.

  He had dropped Elizabeth at the station that morning, and the late start led to him working through lunch. When the call came, he was the only one in the office.

  Swan would have preferred to go straight to the school, have a look at the scene and check that the tech guys were doing their thing, but the Rathmines chief, Munnelly, was anxious to get his station clear of nuns before the papers got a sniff of it. Swan could have pointed out it was Munnelly’s fault for bringing them to the station in the first place, but there was no use getting retrospective. You just had to work from where you stood.

  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 and nervous, if anything. He led Swan to a back office for a briefing with the Gardaí who’d been first on the scene and a couple of women officers who’d 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 the baby, and a nun they brought to the scene, were now at the station and had given initial statements. Yes, they’d been held separately; and yes, their stories tallied – mostly. But 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 the 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 first girl who found the child.

  ‘Carmen Fitzgerald.’

  ‘Yes.’

  *

  The interview with the Fitzgerald girl didn’t take long. She was a nervous little thing and too upset to be fully coherent. She kept going on about matches and cigarettes. He’d 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 left in June.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why were you in 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 probably 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 might 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 to him, 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-looking – 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 Deborah Kerr 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.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘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 only 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 her 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 he didn’t have enough of the whole picture yet. See the place it was found, locate the mother: those were the pressing things.

  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 the nun. ‘I see plenty of the world.’

  Swan was tempted to let the other girl go home too, so he could get to the convent, but Munnelly said her recall was particularly good. Swan looked through the pages of her statement and conceded. He asked one of the female Guard to come with him to the interview room.

  Alison Hogan was drawing some kind of diagram when they entered. 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 bird’s-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 middle 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 brown paper bag, but there was something white wrapped around the baby – 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 pencil lead.

  ‘When do I get my bag back?’

  ‘The bag you say the nun took the scarf from?’

  ‘Yeah, 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 pulled 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?’ asked the officer.

  ‘Law.’

  Swan and the policewoman shared a smile.

  ‘No offence,’ explained Swan, ‘but 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 away from him.

  ‘I don’t have a dad. He died.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘He was a solicitor.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’ll just go and see if there’s someone waiting for you,’ said the Guard.

  Swan walked the girl towards the reception area. She was taller than he had realised, eyes on a level with his own.

  ‘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 sat on the line of orange chairs: an ample woman in an unusual tweed garment and a floppy-haired young man hunched in concentration over a tightly folded newspaper.

  ‘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.’

  4

  Ali woke sweating from a dream. She’d been on her knees in the Rosary Garden, trowelling through sooty 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 first. 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 day before flooded her mind.

  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 RTÉ2. They didn’t talk much. Davy said he felt a bit 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 up on her feet and washed the remains of her make-up off 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, inside and out. She picked yesterday’s dress off the floor 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 half-hearted attempt at hiding it.

  ‘Just looking at the jobs,’ he said.

  Davy had come to stay with them three weeks earlier. 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 ask if they’d anything going.

  ‘Saves the feet,’ he’d say.

  ‘But not my bloody phone bill,’ Ma complained. ‘You need to get out there.’

  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. But he hadn’t landed so much as an interview for a job.

  Davy shook out the newspaper and began to fold it up. ‘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. She found a small headline and a paragraph underneath. Dead Baby Found in Convent. It was a strange relief to see the words there, out in the world. The matter-of-factness of it.

  ‘I thought it might be worse,’ she said.

  Her mother appeared in the doorway. ‘That’s only 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.

  ‘Seán O’Loan told me the Guards were trying to keep the lid on it, 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 the hospital 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 tick-tick sparking to ignite the 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
our 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, it’s 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 those 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.

  ‘Well, 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 man’s, and there seemed to be some kind of negotiation going on.

  After a minute, her mother reappeared.

  ‘Love?’ she started, and Ali bristled. ‘Seán 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 hairband and a submissive chin-tucked smile. She hated the girl in that 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?’ He smiled at Ali and held out his hand. ‘Eamonn Owens at your service.’

  Ali stood up. ‘I need to go and change.’