by Nicola White
‘Change? Change?’ said the photographer, ‘sure aren’t you perfect as you are? A lovely young one. I’ve snapped all the great and the small – you’re safe with me.’
‘How about the garden?’ said her mother.
Eamonn looked doubtful, then his expression changed.
‘A garden was where this thing – this awful thing – happened, wasn’t it? Yeah, the garden would do.’
He shot off through the back door and down the steps. Ali got up and checked her reflection in the kitchen mirror. She was wearing an old black jumper and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. No make-up, no frills, just get it over with.
It was lucky that Davy had so recently managed to create something like a patch of lawn by getting down on his knees with a pair of old shears, but a thicket of creepers and shrubs still held sway over most of the garden. On fine nights, she and Davy would sit out on a rug, with candles in jam jars, drinking strange cocktails created from the furthest reaches of her mother’s drinks cupboard. Those nights felt like ages ago. Ali clutched the metal rail as she went down the steps, thinking of escape, but not acting on it.
The photographer asked her to stand under the old apple tree and to look back at the house over his shoulder. It was uncomfortable to be examined so intently. The lens was huge, and the clicks kept taking her by surprise. The side of her mouth started to flutter in a nervous spasm.
‘Don’t smile,’ he warned, ‘think of … well … something sad.’
Ali let her eyes drift out of focus and allowed the pictures to rise in her mind – the garden, the shed – and with them the feeling that the last twenty-four hours, including this ludicrous photograph, were an elaborate hallucination over which she had no control.
Something was shifting in her mind, trying to surface, to make itself known.
It flickered into life.
The camera clicked on, but Ali was somewhere else, twelve years in the past.
Because it was so heavy, she held the box across her arms. She hadn’t noticed when she lifted it, but now it felt clammy against her skin, the cardboard sticky. Ali went down the farmhouse stairs one by one.
The door to the living room was shut and she had no hand free to open it. She was wearing her party shoes for Christmas Day, the black patent ones, and she lifted her right foot and pressed a shiny toe to the door. It swung open without a sound. The family were all there. Her cousins on the floor playing with their toys, teenage Davy crouched over something too. Ma looking sad and strange in her tight dress and make-up, Uncle Joe bare-headed for once, his hair plastered down, wearing his mass-suit.
They didn’t see her, not at first. Ma looked up, and the others followed her gaze.
‘What have you got there?’ Ma asked.
‘I found it,’ Ali said. ‘I found the doll.’
‘Turn your head. Chin up, but look at the ground. Almost there.’
All of them looking at her. The photographer, now, looking at her. The shame.
‘Is that enough?’ she said. ‘Can that be enough?’
He took the camera from his face, and she headed straight for the house, leaving him to follow in her wake.
Her mother showed Eamonn out. Low voices mumbling by the door, a few exaggerated sighs. Ali waited in her bedroom until the coast was clear, then went down to the phone.
Their telephone was a black wall-mounted payphone in an alcove under the stairs. They left the money drawer open so that the same well-worn ten-pence piece could be circulated round and round.
Ali hooked the coin out of its cranny and put it in the slot. She pressed button A when Fitz answered.
‘My mum’s trying to keep me away from the phone,’ Fitz said, ‘you’re lucky you got me.’
‘How’re you holding up?’
‘I don’t know. Fuck, Ali, I keep seeing the little face.’
‘Yeah …’
‘Could hardly sleep a wink.’
‘Me and Davy got a bit pissed – that helped.’
‘Your uncle’s cool. I like him.’
‘Did you say anything to the police about where we were on Sunday night?’
‘No, they didn’t ask. Did you?’
‘I only thought of it afterwards. It gives me the creeps …’
‘Hey – you won’t believe this – a reporter from the Independent phoned this morning and I had to pretend I wasn’t here. I said I was my sister.’
‘You didn’t talk to them?’
‘No way. My dad says they’re vultures. Did they try you?’
‘No calls … but there was a photographer here, and my ma let him in.’
She told Fitz about her mother talking to Seán O’Loan. ‘I feel like a right fool.’
She waited a beat for Fitz to contradict her, but Fitz just changed the subject to how horrible the police station had been.
A few seconds of silence opened into a chasm. Ali suggested that she could come over, but Fitz said it wouldn’t be a good idea – they were about to have lunch.
‘What are you having?’ asked Ali, desperate to get back to normal.
She heard Fitz let out an impatient puff of air.
‘Salad or something. It’s not interesting.’
Ali let her go. The instant she put the receiver back on the cradle it rang, vibrating through her hand.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello. Am I speaking to Alison Hogan?’ The elongated vowels had a velvety cadence that was somehow familiar.
‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘Great. My name’s Mary O’Shea …’
The rest of her sentence was lost, drowned out by the panicked flurry in Ali’s head. Mary O’Shea. Of course she knew the voice, but the voice should be coming out of a radio, not out of their cracked old phone. Ali tried to catch hold of the flow of words as they poured into her ear, suddenly seizing on the name ‘Seán O’Loan’.
‘… so Seán said it would be all right for me to give you a little bell and see how things stood.’
‘I see …’
‘He said you were a very smart girl. Going to do law, he said.’
‘I hope so – if I get the results.’
‘And he said your mother was a wonderful women; a strong independent spirit was what he said.’
That didn’t sound much like her mother, but the outside world judged things differently. Ali looked up to see the independent spirit pass by, still in her kimono, carrying a tray full of mugs and glasses to the kitchen.
‘That’s nice …’ Ali waited for her mother to get out of earshot.
‘Look, here’s me going on,’ said Mary. ‘It’s hard to have a proper chat on the phone. I know you must feel absolutely shattered, but I was wondering whether you and I couldn’t get together for a little talk. I’d really appreciate it.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘How about coffee at the Shelbourne? Just the two of us.’
5
Swan placed the pristine copies of the Press and Herald on the table in front of him. There was nothing on either front page, so he’d sit for a minute, enjoy his coffee and the dark peace of the Gravediggers on a summer’s day. The barman leaned his crossed arms on the counter, surveying his own paper spread flat on the wooden surface. A burst of bronchial laughter carried over the top of the wooden screen that separated the small back bar from the front of the pub. He had passed two aul’ wans on his way in, drinking glasses of stout side-by-side, merry as girls. Here in the back there was just the whisper of pages turning, the slow tick of the clock and the gurgle of cisterns beyond the brown lacquered toilet doors. All it needed was the thump of a collie’s tail on the floor and you could believe you were in some country town.
He should have gone straight back to HQ from the convent, but took a little detour instead. He needed to see what the papers were saying – he needed to think.
Kavanagh, the chief superintendent, had phoned him at home that morning, just after seven, to say he wanted a quick finish to this case, it had
too many ‘knobs on’. Crudely put as always, but he understood what Kavanagh meant – this one had knobs, bells and miraculous medals all over it.
A dead baby in a convent – that was slaughter and religion, for starters, with a background of sexual activity. The fact that it was one of the most affluent schools in the city brought in money and class. Coming hot on the heels of the ‘pro-life’ referendum, when the country had screamed itself into a bitter divide over whether it loved its foetuses more than their mothers, this delicate atrocity was sure to keep the fires aglow. No wonder Kavanagh was jumping around like a bluebottle on a window.
Swan turned back to what he’d been putting off: checking through the evening papers to see what they’d got hold of. The press announcement wasn’t scheduled until later, but you never knew. One of those girls could be the daughter of some blow-dried RTÉ journalist.
He opened the Evening Press and was assaulted by toothy grins on the social-diary pages. The high life in Ireland the previous day had consisted of a reception at a stud farm in Naas and the opening of a gallery in the Powerscourt Centre. All the photographs featured good-looking women with big hair and big earrings. It was a world that Swan rarely came into contact with, but it was the world that girls like Alison Hogan grew up to inherit.
That thing the mother said about the girl having found another baby at a relative’s farm clung to him. Buleen, she said the place was. Ali Hogan was just six at the time. He hadn’t got much more of the story from her before the girl appeared and Mummy clammed up. It was grisly luck all right.
If he could find someone to look into it, though, he could have some answers ready, in case the press or Kavanagh got hold of it. He tried to think who he knew in Clare or thereabouts, reaching for his coffee and enjoying a thoughtful sip. It was cooling now, but the brandy gave a nice gingery kick. If one of the lads happened into the pub, he would look as innocent as a lamb.
As a teenager, Swan had inherited a suitcase of old paperbacks when his Uncle Tony died. They were the first books, apart from school books, that he could call his own. He propped them up on the mantelpiece in his bedroom, with two bricks for bookends, and felt himself a man of the world. Half of them were green-spined Penguins by a man called Simenon, and he had spent weeks of one summer lying on his bed reading through them, lost in the pale stone and twisted staircases of Paris, mouthing words like préfecture and gendarme and imagining what an Algerian might look like. Maigret, the morose detective, would pop into bars throughout his working day for a quick drink, but never got drunk. The French didn’t go for swilling bucketloads of Guinness and licking the foam from their faces. No, they supped one small crystalline drink, and on they went with their day.
That was the main lesson he’d taken from Maigret. The fact that he signed up with the Gardaí at the end of that summer was coincidence, really. College hadn’t been an option. His father wanted him to come and sell furniture with him in the shop in Phibsborough, but the Saturday afternoons Swan had spent there throughout his teens – squeezed between bedroom suites and veneered telephone tables – felt like being trapped in a vault. His father standing, looking out the window, so forbearing, whistling through his teeth and dreaming of the pub later, the camaraderie of men and the bottomless pint.
The papers had the story on their second and third pages, a four-inch column in one and a double column with big headline in the Herald. All they said was that the body of a newborn infant had been found in the grounds of St Brigid’s, Milltown. Mother sought. Nothing about the injuries. Good. Nothing too specific about the whereabouts. Good. The Herald filled in some background on St Brigid’s, which included the information that the convent housed forty nuns. Just as a matter of record – hint, hint. He could see that the nun-angle might grow in the coming days.
Was it feasible that a nun might have given birth? It didn’t seem likely; it seemed like the stuff of jokes about sexy nuns and randy priests that the tough boys down the lanes would tell. Candles out before bedtime, Sisters. And it wasn’t a possibility that he – a man with two decades of police work under his belt – had had the balls to confront the Reverend Mother with.
Mother Mary Paul had greeted him that morning with level eyes, professional to professional, had walked him around the grounds and answered all his practical questions. As she spoke, she kept withdrawing a crumpled hankie from a sleeve, touching it briefly to her impressive nose before tucking it back into the pendulous folds of her sleeve. It seemed a preventative measure rather than a real mopping operation. Or maybe it was her way of expressing a kind of regret.
The school grounds were impressive, but depressing – the gloom under the big trees, the holy statues watching over emptiness. They stood together for a while on the raised path they called the Rosary Walk and took in the view. It was a fine bit of land they had still, but, beyond an ugly brick wall, new houses pressed in around them, the march of the suburbs.
That was the moment he should have turned to her and asked plainly about the ladies of her community, but his brain would not form the correct words. Instead, he’d made another appointment to see her in the morning, in her office. He rationalised this as building a steady relationship, but knew he was just putting it off, hoping for a lucky break elsewhere.
Beyond those convent walls, dozens of detectives and Gardaí were going door-to-door along the quiet streets, searching for a woman known to be pregnant but with no baby to show for it, tapping into gossip, nosing out illicit liaisons, sudden weight gain or families where there might be ‘a bit of a problem’. By the time he got back to the office, something might have been shook from the tree.
The barman stretched his arms above his head and roared out a long yawn. He pointed at Swan’s coffee cup and raised an eyebrow.
‘Maybe half a cup,’ said Swan. The barman lifted the coffee flask from its dock and reached up for the brandy bottle with the other.
‘Just the hot stuff, Joe.’ He wasn’t going to break the Maigret rule, especially during a wave of self-doubt.
There was something so bleak about the nature of this crime, the pathetic waste of it. What was there to say about a baby? There was no story to a person whose life could be counted in hours. It wasn’t like the student nurse coming home alone after a dance, or the father of six stabbed in a pub fight. Until they found the baby’s people, she floated alone, just an idea of a life.
No one had come forward to claim her yet. But things were ticking along, and now he had a new piece of the jigsaw. He looked down at the sealed bag beside him on the bench. What was inside might be a key.
Swan had parted with Mother Mary Paul outside the Rosary Garden. A lone Garda sat inside the gate on a rusty chair, looking eager for a chat, but Swan nodded briskly and passed into the gloom. A filament of cobweb stretched and broke across his face.
He paused and passed a palm over his cheeks, took in the scene – a few mossy benches, a rockery that looked more like a plum pudding than the side of an Alp, beds filled with indistinguishable green plants crawling over each other. Ground cover – the phrase came to him from one of his wife’s gardening programmes.
The shed in the corner fitted in with the atmosphere of shabby romance, with its little cottagey windows and tiled roof, but green algae crawled up its painted walls and the bottom of the wood-slat door had gone soft and gappy. There was always a thin line between romance and rot.
Had the shed been a stopping-off point for whoever had the baby? Maybe they went in there to get a spade, but were disturbed by the girls. It would have been hard to get out of the shed without being noticed.
Two Technical Bureau personnel were still at work inside, but said Swan was welcome to have a quick look. The interior was unexpectedly dry, the floor covered with dregs of desiccated peat moss. Chalk marks and smears of fingerprint dust showed on the floor and walls.
‘You taken much out?’ asked Swan.
‘Not really,’ answered one of the men, pulling down his mask. ‘A few items that
might have been weapons – but look at it.’ The shed was filled to the gunnels with all kinds of metal tools, not to mention hundreds of old pots, boxes, bits of string and netting and a stack of dusty deck-chairs. They were going through it all, bit by bit, and so it happened that Swan was standing there when the other masked man lifted a deckchair from the stack and opened it to reveal a bundled knot of white concealed in its striped fold. The luck of it warmed him.
A mother-of-pearl button gleamed on an edge of it, and they could see some brownish staining in the depths of its folds. It could be the white cloth that Ali Hogan said the baby was wrapped in. The technicians slipped it gently in a bag, and agreed Swan could take it straight back to the labs. Well, it would get there soon enough.
The front section of the pub was growing noisy, the door opening and closing, letting in sweeps of sunshine. Three men in black suits came through and stood together at the bar. Glasnevin graveyard was next door, so funerals were a common part of the custom. He wondered whether the regular intrusion of mourning was one of the reasons he liked it here.
Enough wondering. Swan leaned back to root for coins in his trouser pocket. He picked up the evidence bag, walked over to the phone cupboard at the back and rang the office number. Declan Barrett, the newest recruit to the murder squad, answered.
‘I’m on my way in.’ Swan pulled the folding door tighter to damp the background noise. ‘Did pathology call yet?’
The baby’s body had been moved to the morgue late the previous evening. A tiny thing stranded on an adult-sized slab. No larger than a loaf of bread under the cloth. Full autopsy would take about a week to come in, if he was lucky, but he’d put in an urgent request for a rough estimate of the child’s age and time of death.
‘Just a tick, boss,’ said Barrett, a slight stress of his voice managing to make the word ‘boss’ sound like a bit of a joke between them. The lad was giddy with his new posting. He’d better settle down soon. ‘Here it is: estimated time of death between twenty and sixteen hours before forensics got to the scene at three p.m. yesterday. Newborn infant, female, approximately two to three days old, cord cut approximately five inches from the body and healing, body washed of vernix, some fibres present. Now I’ve looked up the medical dictionary, and apparently the vernix is waxy stuff that coats it when it’s born—’