The Rosary Garden

by Nicola White

  He tried a door with no name on it and peeked into a simple bedroom. The single bed was stripped back to its floral mattress. The white wardrobe and matching bedside and dressing table all had the same gold squiggly handles. If not exactly luxurious, it was comfortable and fresh, a lot better than most charity gaffs.

  A home for pregnant girls. What were those bloody nuns at – not telling them about this place? Or was it the unit’s fault for not locating it? He was sure it hadn’t turned up in their checks of mother-and-baby homes.

  ‘Are you finished yet?’ The girl had come to keep an eye on him.

  ‘Seems a nice place.’

  She made a non-committal noise and leaned a shoulder against the wall.

  ‘Are you from round here?’ asked Swan.

  ‘Naw. I’m from Clonakilty.’

  ‘How are you liking Dublin?’

  ‘We don’t go out much. They think someone might spot us. From home.’

  ‘Which one are you?’ Swan pointed to the doors with names on them.

  ‘Esther McDaid. No longer a maid.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘You got any money?’

  ‘What do you need money for?’

  ‘They don’t let us have any. They say it might be stolen, if we had it.’

  ‘Maybe I have. Tell me, who was the last girl here to have a baby?’

  Her bold smile dimmed and she examined him closely. He stared her out, trying to simultaneously look kindly and hide the eagerness he felt. He wondered whether he should be so blatant as to take out his wallet.

  She turned round and headed for the stairs, looked back at him over one shoulder. He followed her down. On the landing of the last flight of stairs she stopped and opened a door he had presumed was a bathroom. It led to a corridor, an extension on the back of the original house, and the end of the corridor was a little chapel, with miniature pews for about eight people. A hanging candle in a small red glass signalled Christ’s presence. Esther bobbed a quick genuflection, leaning back to balance her bump.

  She led him to the left, to a blunt little offshoot passage with a door at the end.

  ‘She stayed here, not for long. A couple of weeks ago. We weren’t even supposed to know about it, but she came out some nights and talked to us, once the nuns were gone or asleep. One day I heard a baby cry in there. She didn’t give it up. I heard her arguing with Sister Bernadette about it.’

  ‘Are you going to keep yours?’

  ‘They won’t let me. They tell me it’ll ruin my life. I told Bernadette that wasn’t fair, and she told me that I would spoil the baby’s life too, if it grew up as a bastard. She used that word.’

  There was a name-holder on this door too, but the little card was blank. Swan tried the handle. It opened into a bedroom larger than the ones upstairs, with a sofa and a double bed. The carpet that ran seamlessly between the skirting boards was a rich cornflower blue. He let out a whistle, then walked to the centre of the room and slowly looked about. His veins hummed with excitement. There were no personal belongings, nothing that drew his eye. He opened the wardrobe door. It was empty, except for a padded plastic rectangle with teddy bears on it. Inexperienced as he was, Swan recognised it as a changing mat.

  He closed the wardrobe and looked round. Esther had disappeared. Instead, Sister Dreyfus stood there in a grey anorak, her habitually tense expression turned to frank alarm. He suppressed a terrible urge to laugh.

  ‘Can I help you, Detective?’

  He backed her out of the room, closed the door behind him. Esther McDaid was sitting on one of the chapel pews, pretending to pray. He would have to remember to slip her some money. At least enough for a train fare.

  ‘I need a telephone, and then I need to see Sister Bernadette. Here. Now.’ He tried not to shout it.

  Mother Mary Paul was having extraordinary difficulty backing the convent’s station wagon into a quite generous space across the road from St Jude’s. Swan watched her efforts through the window of the front office that he had commandeered as his own.

  More than an hour had passed since he hit the phone. Sunday was a bad day for excitement – the world wasn’t geared up to meet it. Considine was at home, and offered to locate Barrett and come to Percy Place as soon as they could manage. Rathmines Garda station would send two uniforms over to secure the scene. There was nobody in the technical lab, so he left a message at the duty desk. He was tempted to phone Goretti Flynn at home, but she would probably just tell him to lock the bedroom door and wait for morning.

  The nuns had been elusive too. Nobody answered the main phone in the convent, and it was only by bullying Sister Dreyfus that he managed to reach Mother Mary Paul on a private line. Mary Paul said Sister Bernadette was on retreat across the border in Newry, but she would come herself right away, didn’t bother to fake surprise or ask why. Sister Dreyfus was supposed to be downstairs making lunch for the residents, but kept appearing at his elbow with cups of tea. Hovering.

  Mother Mary Paul finally gave up her struggle with the car, leaving it at an angle to the kerb. She slammed the driver’s door with surprising force and shifted her shoulders back, military-style, before heading towards the house. Swan opened the front door and directed her into the front office.

  ‘Monsignor Kelly is on his way,’ were the first words out of her mouth.

  He was about to shut the front door when he heard a little skid of tyres, and Considine jinked her Mini into a small space at the kerb. Barrett was with her. Swan asked Mary Paul to wait in the office and went to meet them.

  They clustered on the pavement. He turned to Considine first, couldn’t resist a bit of finger-pointing.

  ‘You were supposed to check out every lying-in home and refuge in the land. Remember this one? Run by the nuns from – where is it? – oh yes, St Brigid’s, where the baby was found!’

  ‘There’s no central register, boss. No proper system. This place wasn’t on the adoption-board list and didn’t come up in any enquiries.’

  ‘If the Rosary Baby was born here, we’ve wasted a lot of time. I want you to go in there and talk to the residents. They’re down in the kitchen. Get me some background on the girl who stayed here two weeks ago and left with her baby.’

  Considine flared her nostrils slightly and walked stiffly up the steps while getting her notebook out of her shoulder bag. Barrett smirked.

  ‘And I’ve no time for that,’ Swan said, finger in his face. ‘You come with me while I talk to the Reverend Mother.’

  He took a chair opposite the nun.

  ‘So when were you going to let us in on this little secret?’

  ‘It wasn’t – isn’t – a secret. We’ve nothing to hide.’

  ‘Did you not think that the fact you were running a home for pregnant girls might interest us?’

  ‘It’s nothing like that. Just a few referrals from the country – nothing formal. The few residents here are in a fragile state; there was no point in putting them through police questioning. There’s no connection between St Jude’s and the child in the garden, I’m perfectly satisfied with that, and you will be too.’

  Mother Mary Paul’s hand disappeared into the folds of her habit and emerged with a ring of keys. She rose and went to a quaint cupboard in an alcove beside the fireplace and unlocked one of the doors. It was empty except for a couple of files, a book and what looked like a petty-cash box. Mary Paul pulled out this book – a black ledger, the paper dyed a rosy-pink along the edges. She flicked through it, arriving at the place she wanted, handed it to Swan.

  ‘I checked this myself. Afterwards.’

  The list of names ended halfway down the left page. In the columns next to the names was written the name of a town, a priest, then two columns of dates. At the top of the first column of dates it said ‘Arrival’. Above the second column were the letters ‘DLV’. The last three entries were the same names as those he had read on the doors upstairs. They only had an arrival date next to them, nothing in the column marked DLV.

  ‘T
his second date …?’

  ‘That’s the date they gave birth.’

  The latest delivery date recorded was 3rd June 1984, more than six weeks before the Rosary baby was born. That might explain why this place hadn’t turned up in Considine’s investigations of recent births. Swan flicked back through the earlier pages. The register went back seven years. The busiest year was 1978, when twelve girls stayed. Not exactly an avalanche.

  ‘The information here seems a bit minimal, Mother. What about the girl’s addresses, the details of adoption?’

  ‘We just provide a place for the girls to stay. They are referred by their parish, and all adoption details are dealt with privately.’

  ‘Privately between whom?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you need to talk to Monsignor Kelly, if you wish to pursue this.’

  The doorbell rang, and Swan answered it to two flush-faced young Guards from Rathmines. He sent one down to the back door and told the other to stay on the steps and prevent arrivals and departures.

  He sat down again to face the nun.

  ‘The thing is, Mother, a girl stayed here recently who isn’t on this register. She had her baby in her room with her, and now she’s gone. Disappeared about the time that the baby was found in your convent grounds.’

  ‘She must be on the register. Sister Bernadette wouldn’t allow it otherwise.’

  ‘Well, she’s not. Though the other girls remember her. It’s a pity Sister Bernadette’s not here to explain yet. We’ve sent a car up to Newry to collect her from the retreat house. Seems they don’t believe in answering phones there, either.’

  ‘It’s a silent retreat,’ said Mary Paul. To one side of her, Barrett rolled his eyes.

  ‘I’ll leave you here with Detective Barrett,’ said Swan, ‘in case anything pertinent comes to you.’

  In the basement kitchen, Considine sat at the table with the three pregnant girls, while Sister Dreyfus busied herself by the stove, a big blue apron practically brushing her sensible shoes. The cloying smell of packet minestrone permeated the room. A plate of white sliced bread and some industrial-looking cheese were laid out on the table.

  ‘What have we got?’ said Swan, taking a place at the table.

  ‘The girls say she arrived about a month ago, and mostly kept to her room.’

  ‘Do we have a name?’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell us,’ said a girl with very fine blonde hair.

  ‘Who brought her here?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Esther McDaid. ‘She just came down to the kitchen one day …’

  ‘And she had a baby with her?’

  ‘Not when she arrived,’ said Considine. ‘As far as I can establish, cries were heard from the room two weeks after, not long before she left.’

  ‘We never saw the kid,’ said Esther. ‘I think she was keeping it away from us, you see, out of kindness.’

  ‘What did she look like?’ Swan asked.

  ‘She was older, twenty-five or so, I’d say. Lovely thick hair – like a conker.’ This from the blonde girl. Considine wrote quickly in her notebook.

  ‘Was the baby delivered here or in hospital?’ Swan was wondering if this girl could be someone they had already accounted for, someone who had come up in the hospital searches. He needed to keep a lid on this exultant, headlong feeling. The girls looked at each other and shrugged.

  ‘Sister Bernadette would know. They got on well,’ said Esther.

  ‘Who got on?’

  ‘Sister Bernadette and the Peggy girl. I heard them talking in her room a few times – when I was praying in the chapel.’ The two other girls looked at Esther sceptically.

  Swan looked at his watch. T. P. Murphy had volunteered to fetch Sister Bernadette from Newry. He would be there within the half-hour. With Sunday traffic, he could get her back to Dublin by four or five.

  ‘So when did this Peggy leave here? Tell me about that …’

  The girls looked at each other.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Esther. ‘It was about two or three weekends ago, we just sort of realised she wasn’t here any more. Gone home.’

  ‘Home to where?’

  Esther checked silently with the other two. ‘Dunno. Nowhere near me. Galway, maybe?’ The quieter girls just shook their heads.

  Swan became aware that Sister Dreyfus, standing by the kitchen sink, had given up any semblance of lunch preparation and was listening intently, completely still.

  ‘Sister?’

  She turned to face them, clutching a dish brush in her yellow gloved hands.

  ‘Did you know this girl?’

  She nodded.

  Considine asked the girls to wait in the TV lounge, assuring them that they would get their lunch soon. Sister Dreyfus removed her rubber gloves and sat at the table, looking simultaneously nervous and determined.

  ‘It was a Sunday, because there was only me here. I was on my way upstairs, after the girls had their tea, and she came out of her room. She had a big coat on and she had a bag. She was holding something inside the coat – I thought it might be the baby. She didn’t notice me; I was on the lower stairs. When she closed the door, I went to the window. There was a car waiting across the road. She got into it and drove off.’

  ‘When you say she drove off, did she drive the car herself?’

  Sister Dreyfus thought for a moment, her face a scowl of concentration. ‘She can’t have. She was holding the baby still. There must have been someone driving. Yes.’

  ‘And Sister Bernadette wasn’t here at the time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see the baby move, or hear it cry?’

  Sister Dreyfus’s eyes grew large behind her glasses as she realised the implications of what he meant. She shook her head.

  ‘She would never harm her child.’

  Above them he could hear male voices, raised. The Guard at the door fending off Monsignor Kelly, it sounded like.

  ‘Did you discuss this with Sister Bernadette?’

  A quick shake of the head, a cowed look.

  ‘Did you not think, when the baby was found in the convent, that there might be a connection?’ said Swan.

  ‘No, I thought she had decided to keep her child. That was why she sneaked off. By rights, she should have left it with us.’

  An idea was beginning to form in Swan’s mind, something that would make sense of the convent’s secrecy.

  ‘Who adopts the babies, Sister?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that. Mother Mary Paul, you should talk to her.’

  ‘We’ll do that.’

  Swan waited for Considine to finish her notes, thanked the nun for her time.

  Sister Dreyfus held a pale finger in the air. ‘Wait!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Her name!’ The nun went to a drawer in one of the kitchen cabinets and took out a notebook. Several nibbed pens were bound to it by a thick rubber band. She brought it to the table and opened it. It was a kind of copy book, where names and letters were drawn in the mannered thick-and-thin stroke calligraphy that Swan recognised from the name signs upstairs. Sister Dreyfus flicked through the pages and stopped, put her finger to a name repeated three times in three varied styles – Peggy Nolan. Peggy Nolan. Peggy Nolan.

  ‘That’s her. I make the name signs. I made one for her door, but she took it off.’

  It was a common name. There must be hundreds of Peggy Nolans throughout the land. Maybe it had already come up in the investigation.

  ‘Familiar?’ Swan asked Considine.

  She frowned. ‘I’ll have to check.’

  ‘Please go ahead with your lunch, Sister, and thank you. Your help has been invaluable.’

  Sister Dreyfus smiled, a mercurial spasm.

  As they climbed up to the first floor, Swan turned to Considine and shook his head in wonder.

  She gave him an answering grin. ‘Unbelievable.’

  Up in the front office they found that Barrett and Mother Mary Paul had run out of conversat
ion. The nun gazed anxiously out the front window.

  ‘Monsignor Kelly is being kept outside, waiting,’ she complained.

  ‘How much do they pay you for the babies?’ asked Swan.

  She glared at him, full beam. ‘How dare you! That’s not the way it is – even slightly! If the new parents choose to show gratitude, that is completely—’ She jerked in her seat. ‘I think you should talk to Monsignor Kelly about this.’

  ‘We can’t let anyone else into the house now, Mother, we need to search it. In fact it might be an idea for you to take the other girls back to the convent with you.’

  ‘I can’t take them back to St Brigid’s – it’s not suitable.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll sort it out. By the way, does Sister Bernadette drive?’

  ‘Yes, she drives. And I hope she gets back soon to help me sort out this … misunderstanding.’

  ‘We’ll be first in line to talk to Sister Bernadette. Tell me, is the name Peggy Nolan familiar to you?’

  ‘It is not.’

  Swan showed Barrett and Considine the back bedroom, where this Peggy Nolan had stayed. They didn’t enter the room, but stood close together on the threshold.

  ‘Can you find out about locking this, Declan? And supervise the exit of the girls and nuns. I’m thinking the baby could well have been killed right here, in the bedroom. There’s no immediate signs – it’s all been cleaned. It might account for her hiding it under her coat, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Barrett.

  ‘Gina?’

  Considine was frowning at the carpet, miles away. At the sound of her name she quickly met his eye.

  ‘It’s odd, but I’m pretty sure there was a girl down in that town in Clare called Peggy Nolan. The guy I met to talk about the Buleen baby was Dr Nolan, right? And his daughter, the receptionist, she was a Peggy. I remember thinking it was an old-fashioned name for a girl.’