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

Ali stood up. ‘I need to go and change.’

‘Change? Change?’ said the photographer, ‘sure aren’t you perfect as you are? A lovely young one. I’ve snapped all the great and the small – you’re safe with me.’

‘How about the garden?’ said her mother.

Eamonn looked doubtful, then his expression changed.

‘A garden was where this thing – this awful thing – happened, wasn’t it? Yeah, the garden would do.’

He shot off through the back door and down the steps. Ali got up and checked her reflection in the kitchen mirror. She was wearing an old black jumper and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. No make-up, no frills, just get it over with.

It was lucky that Davy had so recently managed to create something like a patch of lawn by getting down on his knees with a pair of old shears, but a thicket of creepers and shrubs still held sway over most of the garden. On fine nights, she and Davy would sit out on a rug, with candles in jam jars, drinking strange cocktails created from the furthest reaches of her mother’s drinks cupboard. Those nights felt like ages ago. Ali clutched the metal rail as she went down the steps, thinking of escape, but not acting on it.

The photographer asked her to stand under the old apple tree and to look back at the house over his shoulder. It was uncomfortable to be examined so intently. The lens was huge, and the clicks kept taking her by surprise. The side of her mouth started to flutter in a nervous spasm.

‘Don’t smile,’ he warned, ‘think of … well … something sad.’

Ali let her eyes drift out of focus and allowed the pictures to rise in her mind – the garden, the shed – and with them the feeling that the last twenty-four hours, including this ludicrous photograph, were an elaborate hallucination over which she had no control.

Something was shifting in her mind, trying to surface, to make itself known.

It flickered into life.

The camera clicked on, but Ali was somewhere else, twelve years in the past.

Because it was so heavy, she held the box across her arms. She hadn’t noticed when she lifted it, but now it felt clammy against her skin, the cardboard sticky. Ali went down the farmhouse stairs one by one.

The door to the living room was shut and she had no hand free to open it. She was wearing her party shoes for Christmas Day, the black patent ones, and she lifted her right foot and pressed a shiny toe to the door. It swung open without a sound. The family were all there. Her cousins on the floor playing with their toys, teenage Davy crouched over something too. Ma looking sad and strange in her tight dress and make-up, Uncle Joe bare-headed for once, his hair plastered down, wearing his mass-suit.

They didn’t see her, not at first. Ma looked up, and the others followed her gaze.

‘What have you got there?’ Ma asked.

‘I found it,’ Ali said. ‘I found the doll.’

‘Turn your head. Chin up, but look at the ground. Almost there.’

All of them looking at her. The photographer, now, looking at her. The shame.

‘Is that enough?’ she said. ‘Can that be enough?’

He took the camera from his face, and she headed straight for the house, leaving him to follow in her wake.

Her mother showed Eamonn out. Low voices mumbling by the door, a few exaggerated sighs. Ali waited in her bedroom until the coast was clear, then went down to the phone.

Their telephone was a black wall-mounted payphone in an alcove under the stairs. They left the money drawer open so that the same well-worn ten-pence piece could be circulated round and round.

Ali hooked the coin out of its cranny and put it in the slot. She pressed button A when Fitz answered.

‘My mum’s trying to keep me away from the phone,’ Fitz said, ‘you’re lucky you got me.’

‘How’re you holding up?’

‘I don’t know. Fuck, Ali, I keep seeing the little face.’

‘Yeah …’

‘Could hardly sleep a wink.’

‘Me and Davy got a bit pissed – that helped.’

‘Your uncle’s cool. I like him.’

‘Did you say anything to the police about where we were on Sunday night?’

‘No, they didn’t ask. Did you?’

‘I only thought of it afterwards. It gives me the creeps …’

‘Hey – you won’t believe this – a reporter from the Independent phoned this morning and I had to pretend I wasn’t here. I said I was my sister.’

‘You didn’t talk to them?’

‘No way. My dad says they’re vultures. Did they try you?’

‘No calls … but there was a photographer here, and my ma let him in.’

She told Fitz about her mother talking to Seán O’Loan. ‘I feel like a right fool.’

She waited a beat for Fitz to contradict her, but Fitz just changed the subject to how horrible the police station had been.

A few seconds of silence opened into a chasm. Ali suggested that she could come over, but Fitz said it wouldn’t be a good idea – they were about to have lunch.

‘What are you having?’ asked Ali, desperate to get back to normal.

She heard Fitz let out an impatient puff of air.

‘Salad or something. It’s not interesting.’

Ali let her go. The instant she put the receiver back on the cradle it rang, vibrating through her hand.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello. Am I speaking to Alison Hogan?’ The elongated vowels had a velvety cadence that was somehow familiar.

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘Great. My name’s Mary O’Shea …’

The rest of her sentence was lost, drowned out by the panicked flurry in Ali’s head. Mary O’Shea. Of course she knew the voice, but the voice should be coming out of a radio, not out of their cracked old phone. Ali tried to catch hold of the flow of words as they poured into her ear, suddenly seizing on the name ‘Seán O’Loan’.

‘… so Seán said it would be all right for me to give you a little bell and see how things stood.’

‘I see …’

‘He said you were a very smart