The Rosary Garden by Nicola White (best books to read now TXT) 📕

near Kinmore. He’d need to look it up on a map – he didn’t know his own country as well as he should. His visit had been a bit of a waste. Then he thought of something Mrs Hogan could do for him.

‘While I’m here … could I borrow one of Ali’s school blouses? One was found in the convent gardens, and we’re trying to gather a few comparisons. I’d be obliged.’

He followed Mrs Hogan – call me Deirdre, please – up two flights of bare stairs to the top of the house and into the girl’s bedroom, while she flung apologies over her shoulder about the state of the place.

The room looked like someone had stolen half the furniture, then exploded a basket of clothing, kitchenware and toiletries over the remains. Painted floorboards were visible here and there through the wreckage. The lilac walls were decorated with posters and leftover blobs of Blu-tack.

Deirdre Hogan rifled through a chest of drawers and emptied out a dirty clothes basket. While she searched, he examined the pictures of pop stars on the wall, their young faces twisted in sneers and dumb, malevolent stares. He wouldn’t be young again, for anything. All that pretending you didn’t care. He winced at the ramshackle shower cubicle festooned with clothes and the old sink unit in the corner. On the floor under the sink an electric kettle shared a tray with some mugs and a jar of instant coffee. This room had been a bedsit – a complete home to someone. He looked at the door and saw there was a lock still on it. A tingle ran up the back of his skull.

Was it possible for a girl to deliver a baby on her own and conceal that fact for some time? If she had a lock on the door, didn’t have to share a bathroom, it would help a great deal. But could she be as cool as Ali Hogan was, after the fact? That would take some acting. He recalled the first sight of her: the clownish clothes, her eagerness to help. But now he was remembering other things. That baggy dress she had on. He’d seen other girls in dresses like that. He knew it was the fashion, but it could serve another purpose entirely.

For those two or three days that constituted its brief life – its only life – the baby could have been kept somewhere like this, out of sight, out of hearing.

Mrs Hogan was picking up clothes at random from the floor, stirring some larger piles with her foot. There was no carpet here, though, no blue carpet fibres. Although a rug would be easy enough to roll up and remove.

‘I give up. There might be one in the laundry room.’

Swan followed Ali’s mother down the stairs. When they got to a landing, he asked where her own bedroom was. He wanted to judge the distance between the two.

She stopped still and gave him an amused, searching look. ‘Just down here at the front.’

‘And this laundry room?’ he asked quickly.

‘By the kitchen.’

She led him to a narrow room under the stairs that was made even more constricted by the heaps of newspapers massed against the walls and shelves stacked with useless-looking stuff–washed yoghurt cartons, jars, bags full of more bags and folded wrapping paper. There was an old ceramic sink, so big you could stand a child in it, and Mrs Hogan started to sort through one of several plastic laundry baskets massed on the metal counter beside it.

‘Where’s the one with the ironing?’ she asked herself. ‘Things are always going missing on me … Ah!’

She pulled out a crumple of white from a tumble of towels.

‘We got there at last.’ She handed the shirt to Swan, showing her dimples. ‘How about some more coffee?’

‘You’re very kind. May I take one of these bags?’

He pulled a yellow bag from a clutch of plastic bags stuffed into a cardboard tube and put the blouse inside it.

As Deirdre Hogan made the coffee, he asked more about the house, how long they’d been there and who else shared it.

‘The lodgers are all gone now,’ she said. ‘Just the separate basement flat rented out. I bought it after Gareth died, and it did keep us afloat. I practically evicted the last tenant a year ago, but do you know, now they’re gone, I don’t know where to start with it. Ali and I rattle about. Maybe I’ll get lucky and she’ll marry a builder.’

Swan stirred his coffee. Pretending concern for Ali’s state of mind, he got Mrs Hogan to go through her daughter’s movements before the finding of the baby. She was happy to talk. She said she was away with friends on the Sunday – the day before Ali found the baby, the day the pathologist determined it was killed. Ali had been home when she got home, Mrs Hogan thought, but that was late. She said Ali had been hanging around the house mostly, since school ended.

‘She complains she has no money, but does nothing about finding a job. My young brother’s the same.’

There was nothing in what the mother said to contradict Swan’s tenuous new theory. For all her warmth, Deirdre Hogan didn’t keep very close tabs on her daughter. Ali had the means to conceal a baby, she wore baggy clothes and she was on the spot when the child was found. Was that because she had recently concealed it? Guilt drawing her back? He remembered the large patchwork bag of hers they had taken from the shed. The one she tried to get back from them. Big enough for a child. The convent was just round the corner from here. Maybe the attention-seeking was part of it, some twisted form of remorse.

Deirdre Hogan released her hair from its metal clasp and started to twist it into some new arrangement at the back of her head. As she held her arms up, her wide sleeves fell down to her