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

‘I hope so – if I get the results.’

‘And he said your mother was a wonderful women; a strong independent spirit was what he said.’

That didn’t sound much like her mother, but the outside world judged things differently. Ali looked up to see the independent spirit pass by, still in her kimono, carrying a tray full of mugs and glasses to the kitchen.

‘That’s nice …’ Ali waited for her mother to get out of earshot.

‘Look, here’s me going on,’ said Mary. ‘It’s hard to have a proper chat on the phone. I know you must feel absolutely shattered, but I was wondering whether you and I couldn’t get together for a little talk. I’d really appreciate it.’

‘I don’t know …’

‘How about coffee at the Shelbourne? Just the two of us.’

5

Swan placed the pristine copies of the Press and Herald on the table in front of him. There was nothing on either front page, so he’d sit for a minute, enjoy his coffee and the dark peace of the Gravediggers on a summer’s day. The barman leaned his crossed arms on the counter, surveying his own paper spread flat on the wooden surface. A burst of bronchial laughter carried over the top of the wooden screen that separated the small back bar from the front of the pub. He had passed two aul’ wans on his way in, drinking glasses of stout side-by-side, merry as girls. Here in the back there was just the whisper of pages turning, the slow tick of the clock and the gurgle of cisterns beyond the brown lacquered toilet doors. All it needed was the thump of a collie’s tail on the floor and you could believe you were in some country town.

He should have gone straight back to HQ from the convent, but took a little detour instead. He needed to see what the papers were saying – he needed to think.

Kavanagh, the chief superintendent, had phoned him at home that morning, just after seven, to say he wanted a quick finish to this case, it had too many ‘knobs on’. Crudely put as always, but he understood what Kavanagh meant – this one had knobs, bells and miraculous medals all over it.

A dead baby in a convent – that was slaughter and religion, for starters, with a background of sexual activity. The fact that it was one of the most affluent schools in the city brought in money and class. Coming hot on the heels of the ‘pro-life’ referendum, when the country had screamed itself into a bitter divide over whether it loved its foetuses more than their mothers, this delicate atrocity was sure to keep the fires aglow. No wonder Kavanagh was jumping around like a bluebottle on a window.

Swan turned back to what he’d been putting off: checking through the evening papers to see what they’d got hold of. The press announcement wasn’t scheduled until later, but you never knew. One of those girls could be the daughter of some blow-dried RTÉ journalist.

He opened the Evening Press and was assaulted by toothy grins on the social-diary pages. The high life in Ireland the previous day had consisted of a reception at a stud farm in Naas and the opening of a gallery in the Powerscourt Centre. All the photographs featured good-looking women with big hair and big earrings. It was a world that Swan rarely came into contact with, but it was the world that girls like Alison Hogan grew up to inherit.

That thing the mother said about the girl having found another baby at a relative’s farm clung to him. Buleen, she said the place was. Ali Hogan was just six at the time. He hadn’t got much more of the story from her before the girl appeared and Mummy clammed up. It was grisly luck all right.

If he could find someone to look into it, though, he could have some answers ready, in case the press or Kavanagh got hold of it. He tried to think who he knew in Clare or thereabouts, reaching for his coffee and enjoying a thoughtful sip. It was cooling now, but the brandy gave a nice gingery kick. If one of the lads happened into the pub, he would look as innocent as a lamb.

As a teenager, Swan had inherited a suitcase of old paperbacks when his Uncle Tony died. They were the first books, apart from school books, that he could call his own. He propped them up on the mantelpiece in his bedroom, with two bricks for bookends, and felt himself a man of the world. Half of them were green-spined Penguins by a man called Simenon, and he had spent weeks of one summer lying on his bed reading through them, lost in the pale stone and twisted staircases of Paris, mouthing words like préfecture and gendarme and imagining what an Algerian might look like. Maigret, the morose detective, would pop into bars throughout his working day for a quick drink, but never got drunk. The French didn’t go for swilling bucketloads of Guinness and licking the foam from their faces. No, they supped one small crystalline drink, and on they went with their day.

That was the main lesson he’d taken from Maigret. The fact that he signed up with the Gardaí at the end of that summer was coincidence, really. College hadn’t been an option. His father wanted him to come and sell furniture with him in the shop in Phibsborough, but the Saturday afternoons Swan had spent there throughout his teens – squeezed between bedroom suites and veneered telephone tables – felt like being trapped in a vault. His father standing, looking out the window, so forbearing, whistling through his teeth and dreaming of the pub later, the camaraderie of men and the bottomless pint.

The papers had the story on their second and third pages, a four-inch column in one and a double column with big headline in the Herald. All