by Nicola White
23
Swan set off for the hospital the minute Considine phoned. He met his wife coming up the garden path, her blue overnight case in her hand.
‘Better?’ he asked.
‘So-so,’ said Elizabeth and bent away from him to tickle the cat who was lying on the hot dirt of the flowerbed.
As he started the car he realised she might have been referring to herself, not Aunt Josie. But there wasn’t time to go back and check.
The hospital was strangely deserted, fluorescent light falling in the empty corridors, dusk pressing at the windows. At last he spotted Considine looking through a door into a room beyond. He called her to him.
‘The gynaecologist’s in with her,’ she said.
‘Did you get the one the pathologist recommended?’
‘No. Goretti Flynn gave me a name, says he’s very well regarded – Donald Beasley.’
‘Beasley. The name’s familiar all right. Well done.’
‘The staff said we could make use of an office down here.’
She led the way to a side room. The lighting tubes rattatted on, revealing two Formica tables and a scatter of chairs. Health-service posters lined the walls: a smiling skeleton with a red heart hovering in its ribcage; an old man sitting beside an electric fire with a Thermos flask on his blanketed lap. Dominating one corner was a humansized cardboard cutout of Postman Pat.
‘How’s our girl?’
‘Looking a bit shook – she said something about a friend committing suicide. I didn’t know whether to believe her.’
‘But she agreed to be examined,’ said Swan.
‘Well, I persuaded her. But I’m not sure now if—’
There was a knock on the open door and Swan turned to see an oddly familiar face.
‘I’ve completed the examination. Do you want me to run through the initial findings?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Considine.
‘Eh. Just give us a minute,’ said Swan.
Dr Beasley agreed to come back shortly.
‘Jesus, Gina!’ Swan hissed, once the doctor was out of earshot. ‘Him! Did you not see that Late Late?’
Considine stood silent and thin-lipped, while Swan ranted about how it could compromise the evidence, the bastarding smallness of Dublin and their generally atrocious luck on this case.
‘Flynn said he was the top man,’ she said. ‘Done dozens of expert-witness slots for the force – I’m sure his evidence will stand up in any case. How was I to know the girl made him look a tit on the telly?’
Beasley reappeared with a camel-coloured coat over one arm and a snappy, un-doctorly attaché case.
Swan invited him to sit at the table with them and talk through his findings.
‘There are certain signs to support your theory – extra weight carried on the abdomen, slight swelling of the uterus, the evidence of recent abrasion at the mouth of the vagina. Also, I’m sure that she lied to me about her sex life. She’s certainly no virgin.’
‘Her virginity wasn’t the question. We just need to know if she was recently pregnant,’ said Swan.
‘Well, it’s difficult to be definitive on this. As I say, she’s young, very healthy. Things can return to normal quite quickly. There’s little research to measure it against, so I don’t want to rule anything out.’
‘What about the cervix?’ asked Considine.
Beasley’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. ‘What about the cervix?’
‘I believe it changes, or the womb entrance does – something about a slit, not a dot.’
Beasley brushed the back of his hand over the table, as if wiping away her question. ‘It’s really not as simple as that.’
‘Okay, Doctor,’ said Swan, ‘this is what it sounds like you’re telling me. There’s no evidence that she was recently pregnant, but at the same time you won’t rule it out. Is that it?’
‘What I’m actually telling you is that I will prepare a full report, as requested, and I’m happy to testify in court that a pregnancy can’t be ruled out. If that’s what you’re after. I’ll write up my notes tonight and telex you a copy. And I’ll send the invoice to the finance office.’
Top man, indeed. The baby was born only a couple of weeks past. Surely that would do something to a woman’s insides that you’d notice. Swan was a great admirer of the resilience of women, but Christ, that would be some bounce-back.
‘What about a scan?’
‘Yes, a scan, as I said, would be helpful, but the machine operator won’t be in until Tuesday, unfortunately. If you would like to bring the suspect back then …’
‘We’ll let you know,’ said Considine and showed him to the door. Swan stared at the innocent face of Postman Pat across the room.
‘What do you think, Gina? From a woman’s point of view?’
‘I think he’s a prick.’
‘I mean about her being pregnant.’
‘He says he can’t rule it out. And there’s all the other stuff – the blouse, the fact of her being on the spot. But you’d think a doctor could tell.’
‘You would,’ said Swan.
‘Are we going to get her scanned?’
‘I think what we need is another doctor.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry for biting your head off.’
Swan found Ali alone in the examination room, sitting stiff-backed on a chair behind the door, a pair of socks in her hands, tears wet on her pale face. He squatted down in front of her, wondering if it was Beasley that had upset her.
‘Can I go home?’ she asked, her voice polite but strained.
‘Detective Considine told you why we had to do this.’
‘What did he say? Did he say I had a baby?’
‘Did you?’
‘No! Is that what he said? He hates me.’
‘He’ll do a report for us. Is there anything you want to tell me?’
Ali shook her head vigorously. As her dark hair swung back he spotted a mark on her neck – a smudge of bruising with a dotted crimson centre. The mocking voice of Beasley came back to him. She’s no virgin. Well, she mightn’t be a virgin, but it didn’t mean she was a mother. There was no real evidence for it. He felt that familiar deflation of a neat theory beginning to disintegrate.
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘No. I’ll get a car to bring you home. We’ll have a chat tomorrow.’
The girl bent forward to put on her socks with shaking hands. Pink socks, dotted with little hearts.
24
Swan caught himself smiling at some children in their mass clothes outside Rathmines church. He was sitting in traffic, waiting for the lights to turn, and a tiny girl with a ponytail sticking up from the top of her head raised a little hand and wiggled her fingers at him. Without thinking, he grinned like a cretin and waved back. A bigger boy behind her put a protective hand on his sister’s shoulder and flicked a V-sign at Swan. That was more like it. He laughed and drove on.
By the time he’d got home from the hospital last night, Elizabeth had made the house cosy again, in a way he never managed to. Table lamps glowed, Benny purred on a fringed cushion. They didn’t discuss his work and they didn’t discuss her time in Enniscorthy with her aunts. Their sparse chat was about what was on the radio, how well the garden looked. The stuff of strangers at a bus stop. How had this happened to them? It was only when she sat at the piano, at his urging, and music flowed about them that he felt joined to her, emotional, speechlessly close.
He drove on to Ranelagh and parked outside Hogans’. Considine was standing by the gate. Before they reached the front door, it opened and Deirdre Hogan appeared, dishevelled in that fancy dressing gown again, then drew him in by the sleeve, leaning close to whisper that Ali wasn’t herself, would hardly budge from her room.
Swan refused her offer of coffee.
‘We’ll just go on up to her room, if that’s okay.’ As they walked through the hall, he noticed that the receiver was dangling down from the payphone in the hall.
He looked at Considine, and she nodded to say she’d noticed it too.
The bare steps creaked and bowed as they climbed the curved staircase. It could be such a lovely house. He imagined the home that Elizabeth would make of it.
Ali was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, wearing men’s striped pyjama bottoms and a baggy jumper.
‘A woman from RTÉ News has been calling here all morning looking for me,’ she said. ‘One of your lot must have said something, because I didn’t.’
Swan immediately thought of Beasley. ‘It wasn’t us. Maybe someone in the hospital recognised you from the Late Late.’
‘Oh, my fault, is it?’
‘I didn’t mean that. Look, could we have a chat?’
Ali turned and walked back into her room. They took it as an invitation.
‘Dr Beasley took things further than required,’ he said, as they followed her. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t be admitting any fault to her, but the guilt was itching him. He’d been taken aback at the full gynaecological detailing of Beasley’s report, which had arrived promptly that morning.
He hadn’t really thought it through, had left it to Considine and the doctor and had allowed himself to assume there were less invasive ways to determine these things.
‘You insisted that she was examined,’ Considine had countered. ‘What did you think a gynaecologist would do?’
She managed to get the home number of the consultant at Holles Street who the pathologist knew. Swan read Beasley’s findings over the phone to him before he showed the report to anyone else. The consultant laughed off the idea that the girl described had delivered a full-term child a fortnight before.
It was as Swan suspected. After Elizabeth’s last miscarriage she had been in bed for a week and the bleeding had gone on and on. That was after only four months, and the baby would have been no bigger than … than something that could be in your palm, perhaps. He hadn’t seen it himself, the little thing, just stood outside the locked bathroom door as Elizabeth wailed with a ferocity that made her a stranger to him. That was when the chill had come down between them, that second time.
The consultant from Holles Street said a scan wasn’t even necessary to clear Alison Hogan, but Swan was wondering if it might still be useful to kill Beasley’s report. Close the door on it.
‘Why did it have to be him?’ Ali was asking now. ‘And that nurse was so horrible—’
‘I think maybe we should get another doctor – perhaps a woman doctor – to look at you. Give you a scan.’
‘I could stay in with you this time,’ offered Considine, but Ali ignored her.
‘How could I have a baby and not know it?’
They were all standing in the middle of her bedroom.
‘Can we sit down?’ asked Swan.
There was more floor showing than before, an attempt at tidying, but no surface was completely clear. Ali walked over to a mound of clothes and produced a little basket-weave stool from underneath, which she brought back to the middle of the room for him. She flounced down on her bed and started to comb her fingers through her hair, inspecting the ends. Meanwhile Considine had drifted off to lean against the shower cubicle in the corner, out of the girl’s line of sight, disappearing her presence.
‘Do you know what a poltergeist is?’ Swan asked.
‘I saw the film.’
‘It was a little girl in that film, if I remember right, but your paranormal experts would claim that poltergeists are more attracted to teenage girls – that the power of adolescence stirs up all kinds of commotion.’
‘Is this about the state of my room?’
Swan laughed, relieved that she would joke. ‘No, no … what I was trying to say – badly – is that you remind me of one of those girls: so many bits of this case keep leading back to you. See, I don’t believe in poltergeists, Ali, but there’s a hell of a lot of disturbance happens around you.’
She shifted her eyes slightly to meet his, a veneer of defiance.
‘I want to show you something.’ Swan opened his briefcase and took out an evidence bag. ‘You said the baby was wrapped in a white cloth.’
‘Is that it?’
‘You tell me.’
He placed the bag on his knees and slowly drew out the white blouse her mother had given him.
‘I suppose,’ she said.
‘Actually, this is one of your own school blouses.’
‘Oh. All I saw was some white cloth.’
‘There’s something I need you to explain.’ He beckoned her over, tilted the material towards the light of the window. ‘What are these?’
At first she seemed to be just staring at his fingertip moving over the material.
‘These little holes,’ he persisted, and she bent closer. She lifted one hand to the right side of her chest.
‘Badges.’
‘What badges?’
Ali went over to a gaping chest of drawers and took out an old leather collar box. She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him and opened it, dipping her fingers into a tangle of plastic beads, outsize rings and knotted chains, selecting four round badges from the bottom, which she held out on her palm like coins. Swan put the blouse back in the envelope and took them from her.
One was very small, the size of a five-pence piece. It depicted a feminist symbol of a clenched red fist inside a circle, with a cross at the bottom. Two middle-sized ones said Free Nelson Mandela and Art is Revolution. The last was the largest – a scrawl of punkish writing against a black background; ‘SPUC OFF’, it said.
‘A little bird told me that the school doesn’t allow badges.’
‘They can’t see them under my tunic.’
‘What’s the point of that?’
She shrugged. ‘I know they’re there.’
A timid rebel, thought Swan.
‘Do other girls do the same thing?’ He willed her to say yes.
‘I don’t know.’
He held up the SPUC OFF badge. The initials stood for Society for Protection of the Unborn Child.
‘Does this mean that you’re pro-abortion, Ali?’
‘I think women should have a choice.’
‘Is it what you would do?’
‘Depends. Maybe.’
‘How would you know where to go? There’s a ban on information now.’
‘The small ads in any British women’s magazine have phone numbers. I’ve seen them.’
‘Have you now? And what if your pregnancy had gone too far?’
‘What did Dr Beasley say to you?’
‘He said he couldn’t rule you out.’
‘I didn’t have a baby. Jesus! Look at me.’ She stretched her arms out from her body. Swan wondered what he was supposed to be looking at; what he saw was a well-built girl in a jumper so baggy she could be concealing a toddler.
‘A blouse exactly like yours – holes and all – was found in the shed. How could it have got there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Did you ever change your clothes there?’
‘Yeah, we could wear rough clothes for gardening. But I don’t think I ever left anything there.’
‘And what exactly were you doing in St Brigid’s that Sunday night?’
Ali went back to sit on the bed, started fiddling with her hair again. The colour rose in her face.
‘I was with my friends. We were drinking in the trees by the hockey pitch.’
‘And you saw nothing?’
She turned to look at Considine behind her, hoping for intervention perhaps, but Gina’s face was a perfect blank. Ali turned back to him with a bullish expression.
‘I didn’t give birth between beers!’
‘Detective Considine here said you mentioned something about some trouble down in Buleen – the place you were staying.’
‘The Gardaí said someone drowned after a dance. Was that the person you knew?’ asked Considine, coming round to stand beside Swan.
The girl’s chin wobbled a little, her s
tate so volatile now that any questioning seemed overbearing. Yet necessary.
‘It was Joan,’ she said eventually. ‘Joan Dempsey. She used to cook for my aunt. Then she was in a mental home, a hospital, until last week.’ She made a little broken noise like a hiccup. ‘They say that she jumped into the river. I don’t know.’
‘Why was she in a home?’
Ali was raking the fingernails of one hand down the pale inside of her opposite forearm, red lines rising to the surface of her skin.
‘The baby I found … back before, you know – it was Joan’s. She told me so last week.’
Swan and Considine looked at each other for a minute. There was the distant sound of footsteps climbing the stairs.
‘So you see, Mr Swan, you’re not so far off with your poltergeists – I do have special powers—’ Whoever was coming up the stairs was humming now, signalling their approach. ‘People die around me.’
The door swung open to reveal Deirdre Hogan with three mugs and a packet of biscuits on a tray.
‘I know you said not to, but there were these Jaffa cakes staring at me from the shelf, and I thought: well, if they don’t eat them, I might, so I better bring them up to the guardians of the peace and my slim daughter toot-sweet. And a cup of coffee to wash them down. Only instant, mind.’
During this patter she wandered deep into the room, trying to clear a surface, tutting and laughing. But her eyes kept checking on her daughter. Ali seemed to have fallen back into herself, staring down at the mug that her mother had passed her.
‘You’re not going to take her anywhere, are you? I’m not happy about what she was put through yesterday … And now the phone keeps ringing.’
‘I took it off the hook,’ Ali said. Her mother nodded. They were allies now, Swan noted.
‘We were just here for a chat, Mrs Hogan.’ He got to his feet. ‘Get some rest, Ali.’
‘Bit of a dead-end, don’t you think?’ said Considine when they reached the pavement. ‘She didn’t have a baby. And there’s an innocent reason her blouse could have been lying in the shed.’
‘I just don’t know. What are you up to?’
‘I think I’ll go and revisit the doctors’ surgeries round here. There’s a chance some woman might have come in by now. I don’t know, either, but I feel like we must have missed something.’