by Nicola White
They climbed back into the van and Brendan steered a fast U-turn, then turned left over the old bridge and out onto the road that gradually swept them a field’s distance from the river. She recognised little landmarks along the way – the ruined chapel, the cattle mart, the brutal concrete of the handball alley in front of Glinchy’s farm. Dark squares of pine plantation patched the hills over towards Ennisbridge.
In a minute she would be at the farm, Caherbawn, with a bathroom and food and afterwards a bed to lie on. She could make out the white gate posts ahead, but instead of turning up the driveway, Brendan drove past it and pulled into a rough track about a hundred yards beyond.
‘You don’t want to go to the old folks yet,’ said Brendan, ‘you want to see Davy’s new place first.’
She looked at Davy, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything. They bumped up the track and stopped in front of a new bungalow, identical to thousands of others throughout the country, a low grey shoebox with a brown tile roof and nothing to recommend it beyond the cheapness of the build. This one wasn’t quite finished. The breezeblock foundations were left bare, and the ground around it was churned mud, baked into ruts by the summer heat. A lone oak tree rose from the wasteland, a couple of its lower limbs roughly lopped. Ali suddenly recognised the site as the place where the farm’s stables used to stand, home to an ancient carthorse and her cousin Roisín’s envied pony, Skipper.
‘So where does Skipper live?’ said Ali, confused.
‘She’s long gone,’ said Davy, and Brendan drew a finger across his throat and grinned.
‘Dog food. Davy and the twins have supplanted her.’
‘Are the twins living here?’
‘They were here on sufferance!’ said Davy. ‘And they can get their own lodgings when they come back.’
‘Does it have a toilet?’ said Ali.
‘It did when I left,’ said Davy, ‘but God knows.’
It appeared that the construction had been abandoned just before the final push. An open ditch ran around the outside walls, with pipes laid along the bottom. Near the front door a pillow of solidified cement stood on its end, the plastic bag that once contained it blowing in tattered ribbons around its base. The step up to the porch was knee-high.
‘Did they not finish the front steps?’ asked Davy.
‘Nothing to do with me,’ said Brendan.
‘They’re supposed to have done work in exchange for rent,’ Davy said as they hauled themselves up onto the doorstep. He opened an elaborate front door with patterned glass panes and held it wide for her, annoyance bringing a dark flush to his face.
Ali thought Davy had come to Dublin to make a new life in the city. It was odd he never mentioned this place. The walls and doors and brass-coloured light switches were all pristine, but the floor was a concrete screed, raked like corduroy. In the front room, an old sofa was complemented by a massive low table made from a sheet of chipboard propped on breezeblocks. The battered television in the corner stood on an empty cable reel.
Davy stopped in the middle of the hall, looking dazed, as if he hardly knew the place.
‘Toilet?’ said Ali.
‘Second door on the right,’ said Brendan, bringing up the rear.
She passed a bedroom furnished only with a mattress on the floor and glamorous mirror-fronted wardrobes built into the walls. The bathroom had a new suite but no toilet seat. The edge of the bath still had paper tape on it. Ali hovered over the cold porcelain to pee and hoped that no one would try the lockless door.
Brendan was in the corridor, waiting, when she came out.
‘Y’all right?’
‘Shouldn’t I go down to the farm?’
‘Don’t be fretting.’ He went into the bathroom and shut the door.
In the front room Davy was pulling out bottles from a six-pack of beer that must have come from Melody’s. He had an unlit cigarette in his hand.
‘You don’t smoke,’ she said.
He looked at it for a moment, wondering, put it behind his ear.
‘Sometimes I do, but it’s horrible.’
Ali sat beside him on the sofa, retrieved the fag from his ear and lit it herself.
‘Where are the twins?’
‘They got a job in a pea factory in England. Seasonal work. That’s why Brendan needs a hand.’
‘A pee factory? Is that a joke?’
‘A pea factory – P-E-A – little green yokes, canning them, eh, Brendan?’
Brendan edged around the table to join them on the sofa.
‘Give us a bottle there. D’you want one, Ali?’
‘I’m okay, thanks.’
‘But we only got Smithwick’s cos you like it.’
Davy put a bottle in her hand and gave another to Brendan.
Ali slumped into the couch and the boys talked over her, Brendan giving wandering updates about the local team and minor village scandals. They weren’t going to mention the baby. They weren’t going to mention the Late Late. It was good to come here, to escape it all. She leaned her head against Davy’s shoulder.
A sharp rapping shocked her awake. There was a strange figure pressing against the window, in a darkness that had gathered from nowhere. He wore a mackintosh and a cap; she couldn’t see his face. The boys exchanged guilty glances. Davy motioned the figure to come inside.
Her Uncle Joe had aged a good deal since she had last seen him, and his open mac framed an impressive dome of belly. He was wearing a vexed expression.
‘Una had dinner ready an hour ago. Did ye not think to bring her down? Hello, Ali.’
‘Sorry, Da,’ said Brendan, ‘lost track of the time.’
Joe looked pointedly at the bottles and the butt-strewn saucer. With a push from Davy, Ali got to her feet and went over to kiss her uncle on the cheek.
‘I’m sorry, Uncle Joe. I’ll come down with you now.’
‘You coming too?’ he asked the boys.
‘Later. Few things to sort out here – about the business, like,’ Davy said.
Joe gave a little snort and lifted Ali’s rucksack lightly onto his shoulder. She followed him out, stepping carefully off the front porch into the darkness.
They followed a path through trees that widened into a dirt drive. She could sense the bulk of the barn looming to her right – darker and heavier than the gloom about. Up the hill on the left, she saw the roofs of the pig sheds, a dull gleam of iron. They walked around the corner of the barn and the lights of the farmhouse appeared, the kitchen window spilling a buttery glow into the dimness.
Ali caught her breath. She could see the corner of the big range, the table with its faded oilcloth, the dresser stacked with delft. Caherbawn. Nothing had changed; it was like stepping out of the dark and into the past. Sensing her pause, Joe stopped too and for a moment they stood wordlessly, looking on as Aunt Una appeared like a figure on a stage, passing through the lit square with a stack of plates in her hand.
‘I’m sorry’ were Ali’s first words of greeting to her aunt.
She wondered if there would ever be a time in her life when there would be no need to apologise. Una stood with her back to the range, a thinner, more worn-away version of her own mother. Her face was plain, and her short bobbed hair was pushed firmly behind her ears. It was a lighter colour than Ali recalled, a kind of faded blonde. Una came forward to press her dry cheek to her niece’s.
‘Your dinner’s in the range.’
‘She was kidnapped,’ said Joe.
‘Is Davy not with you?’
‘He’s up in the bungalow with Brendan,’ said Ali.
‘Talking business,’ said Joe, taking off his coat and cap in the scullery, ‘like a pair of Nelson Rockefellers.’
Ali sat at the kitchen table, and Una put a big plate of stew in front of her, yellow domes of boiled potatoes rising from a brown pool of gravy that had lost its shine. Una said that she and Joe were going through to watch Tenko and Ali could come and sit with them when she had finished.
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‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Not at all,’ said Ali.
‘We’ll talk properly tomorrow, eh?’
‘Sure.’
If discussion could be put off once, it was more likely to be put off again. Ali mashed her potatoes into the stew and started to bolt it down, but by the time she was halfway through she felt stuffed.
She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so she took her plate through the scullery to the back door and surrendered it to the yard cats. Five creatures ran to her – skinny black-and-white cats, some with splodges of tabby brown. They hissed and swiped at each other as they fought for position around the plate.
She remembered a kitten she fell in love with that December, a little black one with a white front paw. She smuggled it upstairs to sleep in her bed, but woke in the dark to find the kitten curled tightly around her neck, making it hard to breathe. She moved the kitten away, but it kept trying to be at her neck. Every time she removed it, the kitten would mew, showing its tiny needle-teeth. She grew scared of those teeth next to her neck. She couldn’t make it understand. Finally, in exhausted tears, she snuck downstairs and put it out the back door into the freezing night.
There wasn’t a speck of stew left on the plate, but two cats still worried away at the glazed surface with rasping tongues. Ali lifted the plate and stepped back into the kitchen. As she closed the door, she remembered something else. That long-ago night, taking this very same route from yard to kitchen, a groggy voice had called to her from the sofa in the corner. She had nearly jumped out of her skin with fright. But it was only Joan, sleeping under a pile of blankets. Telling her to go back to bed.
Only Joan. Joan’s face filled her mind, the paleness under the freckles, the wary look she often wore as if she was hiding inside herself. The cloud of hated curls. Ali remembered taking the chance to pat those curls one morning, when Joan was crying over a lamb that hadn’t made it through the night. Joan seemed so much older than her then, a woman like Aunt Una, but was probably only the age that Ali was now, only a grown girl.
The old sofa was still here, dressed in a flowered slipcover now. It was strange to realise how many scenes from her past this house contained, ready to spring into life. She had hardly given the place a thought in years. But the farm and her family were here all that time, waiting for her.
12
When Sister O’Dwyer appeared in the doorway of the convent parlour, her frailty made Swan and Barrett jump automatically to their feet. The old nun might have been all of five foot if she was able to stand up straight, but gravity or curvature of the spine had bent her towards the ground so that she now cleared no more than four. Barrett rushed forward to support her arm during the last leg of her journey across the room. Her other hand clutched the knob of a varnished blackthorn stick that she poked into the carpet in little hops. But Sister O’Dwyer’s frailty was only physical, Swan noted. As she took her seat she tipped her face up to look at him eagerly, berry-eyed, apparently delighted to engage with a couple of policemen.
Swan smiled warmly at her.
‘I’ll assume you know why we’re here – what happened in the Rosary Garden – but I’ve been hearing that some girls call it Sister O’Dwyer’s Garden.’
‘Well, I’ve been nominally in charge of the place for thirty years now, so the girls associate it with me. It’s only called the Rosary Garden because of the Rosary Walk beside it. It has no religious use of its own. In fact some would say it’s quite a pagan place.’
‘Why would they say that?’
‘You mustn’t take me too seriously. All I mean is that the girls who use it don’t necessarily have God on their minds. Gossip, sweets and the odd cigarette are their main devotions. Oh, and the occasional bit of forced labour with a rake.’ She gave him a dry smile.
‘It’s a credit to you.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far. Even if I had the knowledge, I don’t think you could make a decent kind of garden in that spot. Too shady, too dry. But gardening’s not really the point.’
‘It isn’t?’
The nun leaned forward, her face aglow, light through parchment. Swan sensed Barrett shift beside him, impatient at this circuitous talk.
‘Are you familiar with the term sanctuary?’ said the nun.
‘Of course.’
‘It has religious connotations: the sepulchre, the place of something precious. But I’m an admirer of St Francis, Detective, and when I think of the word “sanctuary”, I think of a bird sanctuary. That is what my garden is – in a literal sense because of all the nests in those hedges – but, really, it’s a girl sanctuary!’ And she clapped her hands together and wheezed a laugh.
Barrett was doodling on the page in front of him, drawing a man’s face, bland, square-jawed. You wish, thought Swan and gave Barrett’s leg a little kick. She had something about her, this old bird, and Barrett should do her the courtesy of looking like he was listening.
‘That seems a wonderfully liberal approach, Sister. Can I ask, when were you last in the garden?’
Her face clouded. ‘On Monday, after they found the mite.’
‘And before that?’
The nun looked down at the carpet beside her chair, as if the answer might lie in its pattern. ‘Sometime in spring. I seem to remember crocuses.’
‘I thought you ran the gardening club.’
She looked up at him and frowned. ‘Perhaps you’re trying to flatter me. As you can see, I don’t get about like I did. My supervision has been at a distance, but someone else will be running the club soon.’
‘Another nun?’
Barrett was jiggling his leg now, sending vibrations up Swan’s chair.
‘Yes, Sister Bernadette, a wonderful young woman. She’ll pull it back into shape, I know.’
‘She seems very cool-headed all right,’ said Swan.
‘I forget you’ve met. She’s far more than that – Bernadette is worth ten of me to our little community. She knows nursing, she did a course in social work, she leads all of our city initiatives … she has such energy.’
‘Sister – I need to ask you – if your girls thought of the garden as their sanctuary, is it so unlikely that one of them might bring their baby there?’
‘I don’t think any of them were in that kind of trouble. And none of them would murder a child.’
‘How can you know for sure? You weren’t around much.’
‘I know it in my heart.’
It was difficult to argue with that kind of defence, but Swan pressed on.
‘Could the child have been born to anyone in the convent?’
He expected immediate rebuttal, but Sister O’Dwyer appeared to think it over, as if running through an album of people in her mind.
‘We would have known.’
‘So what do you think happened? Indulge me. I can see you’re a woman with a decent imagination.’
Sister O’Dwyer smiled slightly at her clasped hands, and strained her face up to meet his eye once more. ‘Do you know cats, Detective?’ she said.
‘I have one that abuses my hospitality, yes.’ He thought of Benny, curled tight as a snail on Elizabeth’s side of the bed, even when it was empty of her.
‘Well, you’ll know how they sneak away to a dark place when they’re sick or giving birth. My garden is a place like that. I think it was a local girl or woman who sought it out by instinct.’
‘Is the shed ever locked?’
‘No. Though Bernadette says we must do that, from now on.’
‘Sounds like Sister Bernadette might be a bit stricter than you.’
‘I don’t like expecting the worst of people. Not that Bernadette does – that’s not what I’m saying. She’s out in the world more than I am. It’s a different perspective.’
‘We’ll be talking to Sister Bernadette later,’ said Barrett.
‘Oh, I thought she’d be at St Jude’s; it’s a Saturday today, isn’t it?’
Barrett drew himself up in his c
hair, moved a sleeve over his doodle. ‘We stipulated that all the nuns be here today to talk to us, Sister. I believe Sister Bernadette has agreed to that demand.’
Sister O’Dwyer raised her eyebrows and gave one slow nod of her head to Barrett, acknowledging or perhaps mocking his great power.
‘What’s St Jude’s?’ asked Swan. He should be winding this up; they had more nuns to see.
‘It was where I trained as a novice, Inspector, before the order moved out here to the suburbs. A lovely house by the canal, on Percy Place. It was once the home of a famous writer – now was it Gogarty or Synge? Are you fond of reading?’
‘Enormously. What is the house used for now?’
‘Oh …’ The nun looked confused for a moment, losing focus, ‘I believe it’s a … community project.’ She said the phrase triumphantly, as if she had retrieved it against the odds. But the light drained from her suddenly and she looked even smaller than when she came in. Swan tried to calculate her age, as Barrett went through the rigmarole of giving her a card and asking her to get in touch, if anything … et cetera. More than eighty, certainly. Possibly in her nineties. She asked Barrett to ring a bell beside the fireplace. Within moments, young Sister Dreyfus appeared to help Sister O’Dwyer out of her chair and guide her to wherever she spent her daytime hours. Swan hoped it was somewhere comfortable, light-filled.
Swan asked Sister Dreyfus to send Sister Bernadette to them.
As they waited, Swan sneaked a look at the day’s Independent. The public hand-wringing went on. The Rosary Baby was being dragged into expositions on the family, the decline of religion, the promiscuity and ignorance of the young. There was no editorial that couldn’t be spiced up with an innocent dying for society’s many sins. Only the banal or brutal truth would put an end to it. Kavanagh was pressing him for results, but all the Technical Bureau and most of the murder squad had been diverted to work on an armed robbery at a creamery outside Dundalk, where a woman office worker and an off-duty Garda had been shot dead. What kind of cheapjack set-up was it when the country could only deal with one murder at a time?
‘Shall I get us a coffee, boss?’ asked Barrett.