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

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