by Nicola White
Four men lowered the corpse onto the ground next to the opening.
‘That’s Davy Brennan all right,’ said Fitzmaurice.
‘Should we hose him down, clean him up a bit, for the family, like?’ asked one of the firemen.
‘No. We need him as he is,’ said Swan. ‘The Guards will take care of it from here.’
Two paramedics leaned against their ambulance, waiting. The yard and driveway were jammed with an assortment of vehicles now, a static pile-up.
‘Don’t touch the drain cover,’ he said to one of the firemen who had bent to grasp it. ‘Leave everything now, and thanks for your help, lads.’
The body was photographed before being lifted into the ambulance. Swan watched it move away, lights blazing, then he turned and entered the farmhouse. Considine was waiting for him.
‘I have them in separate rooms, now. The Guards are ready to take initial statements. No one saw him go in, apparently. Ali was the last to see him alive, they were drinking together in the next house along. Davy Brennan’s own house.’
‘It would be her. Christ. Did he give her the crack on the head?’
‘She says she fell running away from him; says he told her he killed Peggy Nolan’s baby in the Ranelagh house.’
‘Do you believe her?’
Considine screwed her mouth up. ‘Well, it fits with what the Nolan girl said. He was the last person to have the baby, as far as we know. ‘
‘Where is she now?’
She nodded her head towards a closed door.
In the old-fashioned living room beyond, they found Ali Hogan sitting on a sofa while Dr Nolan stood over her, bandaging her head. Swan had the odd sensation that he was watching a play with a very small cast, the same faces appearing again and again.
‘They called me,’ Nolan said immediately, defensively. ‘That looks very neat now,’ said Considine, and opened the door to the hall to hurry him out.
Dr Nolan quickly tucked the end of the bandage in, picked up his bag and left.
The girl was horribly pale, and her eyes were blurred-looking, pupils wide and black. She still wore her dark funeral garb, even more stained than it had been when he saw her last, spatters of blood and muck now added to the smears of grass.
‘We need to go through everything with you, Ali.’
‘Where will you take me?’
‘We can do it here if you like,’ said Considine.
Ali shook her head, clamped her jaw.
They decided to take her to the hotel, to leave the rest of the family to Fitzmaurice and his recruits for this evening. The body of Davy Brennan was on the road to Limerick, to a morgue and a post-mortem exam. Swan had ordered another for the body of Joan Dempsey – that would involve disinterring her from her new grave.
Swan guided Ali out of the room while Considine collected some clothes for her. Hanging onto his elbow, Ali staggered, so he adjusted the arrangement, put an arm about her waist to support her better, his fingers resting on her ribcage. She was skinnier than he had imagined, and he found himself pondering who it was he was holding so intimately – an innocent caught in the crossfire of other people’s desperate acts or someone more deeply involved.
They waited on the front doorstep for Considine. Fitzmaurice was conducting traffic at the side of the house, looking ten years younger than he had that morning. Another police car had arrived, and Ali’s aunt was manoeuvring a car out of the way to make more space. Swan thought that, in the circumstances, one of the Guards should have offered to move it for her.
‘Little more,’ said Fitzmaurice, gesturing the car back, ‘… little more. That’s it!’ He rapped the boot sharply with his hand and the woman hit the brakes – one brake light shone white where the red plastic had come away.
‘Need to get that fixed, Una,’ said Fitzmaurice automatic ally. At that moment Considine appeared with a purple rucksack and headed for the car. Swan started to follow, but Ali seemed stuck to the spot, her eyes riveted to the back of her aunt’s car as the lights died and the engine stopped. She seemed terrified.
He looked round and could see nothing that would account for it. She was probably just overwhelmed. Ali suddenly walked out of his embrace, hurrying after Considine without a backwards look.
36
Swan sat in a winged armchair in the lobby of the Buleen Hotel, waiting for Considine and the girl to finish breakfast. He was all set to drive back to Dublin, bringing Ali Hogan back with him. When he looked over the top of his newspaper he could see them through the dining-room doorway, among the sunlit tablecloths and the sheen of china. Ali didn’t appear to be eating, but Gina was making up for her, addressing the big cooked breakfast with the relish of a woman who rarely got one.
Considine deserved someone who would be good to her, he thought; at thirty, she shouldn’t be sharing with a female flatmate. You needed the solid ground of a good relationship in this job. He caught his own sanctimony in time, and hid his smile behind his paper. He was hardly the boy to pontificate on personal relations. And yet.
He had phoned Elizabeth first thing, wary of her reaction to the little note he’d left. But she practically cooed down the line at him, asking when he was coming home, flirting almost. He was stunned at how simply their marital winter could be thawed, just by telling her that he loved her. But even as she hinted that she’d be staying in Dublin more, he found himself wondering how such a thing could be sustained. Would he have to say it all the time – and if he did, wouldn’t it wear out?
He turned to the television listings. With any luck he’d be home on the sofa tonight. The killer of the Rosary Baby was dead, it seemed. Between the statements they had gathered and what a forensic examination of the Hogans’ unkempt laundry room would tell them, he was satisfied they’d find it had died at Davy Brennan’s hands, like the girl said.
What had happened to Davy Brennan was another question, one he was happy for Considine to supervise for now. A bit of a step up for her.
All evening they had questioned Ali Hogan in the little TV lounge of the hotel, Considine writing down a torrent of words on borrowed paper, not just about what Brennan had said he had done with Peggy Nolan’s baby, but also her account of Joan Dempsey and of how her baby had been disposed of in the same slurry tank that Brennan had ended up in.
Ali had been scrupulous in her details, like that first time in Rathmines, but last night she kept stopping, scanning the tastefully grained wallpaper as if something was eluding her. Occasionally she asked them questions too, testing her own account.
‘Do you think he could have been the father of Joan’s baby?’ she said at one point.
‘It’s possible,’ Swan answered. ‘Our forensics people say that the bones of the child may well be at the bottom of the tank, even after all these years. They’ll start draining it tomorrow.’
Ali’s eyes grew wide in the lamplight. ‘I think maybe he thought he’d killed me too. Or that he’d be blamed for it. He saw me lying outside his house.’
He would have been in desperate state, Swan thought. The baby, then the niece, knowing the police were in town. There are easier ways to take your own life, though.
‘You say it was your uncle put the first baby in the tank?’
Ali had hesitated, squinted away, nodded briefly.
It made some kind of dark sense, thought Swan, the first baby brought back into consciousness by the killing of the second. And maybe he killed the first one also, this Davy Brennan, and followed them both to oblivion.
The dead had a strong pull on the living, even the smallest of them. Joan Dempsey too – following her dead child to the grave of her own will, or possibly made to follow. Davy Brennan had been at the same dance the night she died, but no one had seen them together. There was only one sighting of Joan alone on the road, heading towards Buleen. The body might tell them something more of her death.
But none of it might ever get to court with Davy Brennan dead. Four lives lost, four furrows ploughed through
those who remained.
‘Put on your seatbelt, now.’
He had to say it twice. The girl didn’t seem to be hearing properly. She still had a little tremor to her movements, and the bandage around her head made her look even more of a tragic waif. Swan hoped that the doctor who came to the hotel the previous evening was right, that she wasn’t concussed. He wasn’t going to take Dr Nolan’s word for anything, so he got a young guy in from Kinmore, who held up various fingers for her to count, and looked deep into her eyes at close range, briefly bringing an embarrassed flush to Ali’s cheeks.
Considine stood on the pavement beside the car, arms folded and brow furrowed. She tapped on Swan’s window and he rolled it down. Dipping her head, she spoke across him to the girl.
‘If you feel sick or anything, just say, and he’ll stop.’
‘Of course I’ll stop,’ said Swan. What was he, an ogre? ‘I’ll ring you later this afternoon for an update, boss.’
‘Thanks, Gina.’
Swan turned the key in the ignition and pulled out, unsure for a moment which direction to take. Ali pointed at the road over the bridge.
‘Is that the best way?’
‘I need to pick up something from Davy’s house.’
He parked where she told him to, on the side of the road just past the farmhouse and out of sight of it. She wouldn’t come up to the house herself, but gave him very exact directions of where to find what she wanted.
The Guards had stretched perimeter tape around the bungalow, but there was no one about to see that the barrier was observed. Swan gazed at the unfinished house, the lump of concrete smeared with dried blood in front of it.
The doll was where she said it would be, lying on a kitchen surface. This house was almost as depressing as the ruined cottage where they dug it up. A defeated kind of place. And the dirty old doll in the middle of it. He had a notion to just throw it away, to tell the girl it was gone.
He lifted it into the crook of his arm and went over to the stainless-steel sink that tilted from one wall. He took his handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wet it, then wiped the doll clean of dirt as best he could. It was an ugly little thing, the pouchy eyes shut fast.
‘What’s to become of us?’ Swan said, wiping its plastic brow. ‘What’s to become of us at all?’ He had rarely held a baby, didn’t know how he felt about holding one. It’s different when it’s your own, they always said. He couldn’t imagine the pleasure ever being more than the worry.
There was a plastic carrier bag lying on the floor. Swan left his muddy handkerchief by the sink and quickly dunked the doll in the bag, head-first. You could think about things too much.
Ali slouched down in the passenger seat and waited. There was a chance that Una had seen them pass, might come down to the road to talk to her. Ali sank her head lower, fingered the edge of her bandage, wondered what was keeping Swan.
If her aunt came down, so what? Una didn’t know what Davy had told her, about the child on the kitchen table and Una disposing of it. She didn’t know that Ali had seen her car with its broken brake light outside the marquee, had heard a familiar voice call for Joan.
No one would know.
Last night, as they tried to get Davy’s body out, in the stink and panic, her aunt had taken Ali in her arms, folded her into her body so that they were crying into the crook of each other’s necks, rocking there on their knees in the dark, like being at sea, like being washed in the storm and the salty sea. All of it flowing from her, jagged pain turned to water. And a thought had come clearly into Ali’s head. I won’t give her up.
A sharp tap came on the glass by her temple and she jerked away, raising her hands to protect her head.
Swan walked round the front of the car and got in.
‘Sorry, that was stupid. You didn’t see me coming.’
He leaned over and placed a plastic bag in the footwell beside her legs. Two little feet stuck out of it. She picked up the bag, wrapped it more tightly around the doll and twisted round to put it on the back seat. She couldn’t bear to look at it.
Swan drove back to the village and turned left, passing Melody’s pub and the pink church. Goodbye, Ali thought as she counted off the landmarks. Goodbye. Goodbye.
The regimented field of the new graveyard was next. There was a large yellow digger in the middle of it, next to where Joan was buried. Swan slowed the car down to look.
‘You’ll be glad to know,’ he said, ‘we’re going to give Joan Dempsey a proper post-mortem. There’ll be an investigation, too, see if they can’t find out a bit more.’
Ali didn’t dare meet his eye, just kept looking at the digger.
‘I thought you’d be glad.’
‘I am glad,’ she mumbled.
But he made no move to drive off. ‘I wonder how they’re getting on. Looks like they’ve made quick progress.’
Ali prayed he wouldn’t get out and keep her waiting when they were so close to escape. She turned her head away, and there, on the other side of the street, stood Ivor, his wild hair flowing in the wind. He was looking at the digger too, showed no signs of noticing her.
She remembered his fingers on her lips, the tang of tobacco in his hair. Their time in the van together that night seemed tawdry now, worse than tawdry. He should have been minding Joan. She shouldn’t have gone with him.
‘Can we go?’
Swan looked at her, but didn’t say anything, just pressed his foot on the accelerator and they eased away. Ivor saw her then, turned and took one step after the car. She watched him grow small in the side mirror.
She didn’t know if the body of Joan would somehow lead them back to Una. She couldn’t be certain that Una had anything to do with it, anyway. She hadn’t lied to anyone. If she had sinned, her sin was one of omission. And by that omission she had chosen to save her aunt. She needed to save someone.
‘There’s a kind of wheel on the side of your chair there,’ Swan was saying. ‘If you turn it, the seat will tilt back and you can get a bit of a rest maybe – rest your head anyway. Three hours and we’ll be home. Your mother will be glad to see you.’
Ali tipped back her seat, removing herself from Swan’s eyeline. She watched the reflection of overhead branches slide down the windscreen. She would be glad to see her mother but was dreading the house, knowing what Davy had done there. She would go up to her room as soon as she could, lock the door and climb under the covers.
And in the middle of the night, when everything was still, she would get up and go downstairs to the garden and dig a hole between the roots of their apple tree. The place where she and Davy drank and laughed, and perhaps kissed in the warm July nights.
She would bury the doll there, bury it all.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to especially thank the Scottish Book Trust and their New Writer Award scheme, for providing the cash, encouragement and mentoring that helped develop the first draft of The Rosary Garden some years ago. Thanks also to the Dundee International Book Prize and the staff of the sadly defunct Cargo Books, who first published and supported it. To my editor Miranda Jewess and all the Viper team, endless thanks for your commitment, fine minds and good cheer. Lastly, gratitude and respect to the best of agents, Jenny Brown.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicola White is a writer, former curator and documentary maker. She won the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2008, and in 2012 was Leverhulme Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University. The Rosary Garden won the Dundee International Book Prize, was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize and was selected as one of the four best crime debuts of the year at Harrogate Festival. She grew up in Dublin and New York, and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. Find her on Twitter @whiteheadednic.
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