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

they said was that the body of a newborn infant had been found in the grounds of St Brigid’s, Milltown. Mother sought. Nothing about the injuries. Good. Nothing too specific about the whereabouts. Good. The Herald filled in some background on St Brigid’s, which included the information that the convent housed forty nuns. Just as a matter of record – hint, hint. He could see that the nun-angle might grow in the coming days.

Was it feasible that a nun might have given birth? It didn’t seem likely; it seemed like the stuff of jokes about sexy nuns and randy priests that the tough boys down the lanes would tell. Candles out before bedtime, Sisters. And it wasn’t a possibility that he – a man with two decades of police work under his belt – had had the balls to confront the Reverend Mother with.

Mother Mary Paul had greeted him that morning with level eyes, professional to professional, had walked him around the grounds and answered all his practical questions. As she spoke, she kept withdrawing a crumpled hankie from a sleeve, touching it briefly to her impressive nose before tucking it back into the pendulous folds of her sleeve. It seemed a preventative measure rather than a real mopping operation. Or maybe it was her way of expressing a kind of regret.

The school grounds were impressive, but depressing – the gloom under the big trees, the holy statues watching over emptiness. They stood together for a while on the raised path they called the Rosary Walk and took in the view. It was a fine bit of land they had still, but, beyond an ugly brick wall, new houses pressed in around them, the march of the suburbs.

That was the moment he should have turned to her and asked plainly about the ladies of her community, but his brain would not form the correct words. Instead, he’d made another appointment to see her in the morning, in her office. He rationalised this as building a steady relationship, but knew he was just putting it off, hoping for a lucky break elsewhere.

Beyond those convent walls, dozens of detectives and Gardaí were going door-to-door along the quiet streets, searching for a woman known to be pregnant but with no baby to show for it, tapping into gossip, nosing out illicit liaisons, sudden weight gain or families where there might be ‘a bit of a problem’. By the time he got back to the office, something might have been shook from the tree.

The barman stretched his arms above his head and roared out a long yawn. He pointed at Swan’s coffee cup and raised an eyebrow.

‘Maybe half a cup,’ said Swan. The barman lifted the coffee flask from its dock and reached up for the brandy bottle with the other.

‘Just the hot stuff, Joe.’ He wasn’t going to break the Maigret rule, especially during a wave of self-doubt.

There was something so bleak about the nature of this crime, the pathetic waste of it. What was there to say about a baby? There was no story to a person whose life could be counted in hours. It wasn’t like the student nurse coming home alone after a dance, or the father of six stabbed in a pub fight. Until they found the baby’s people, she floated alone, just an idea of a life.

No one had come forward to claim her yet. But things were ticking along, and now he had a new piece of the jigsaw. He looked down at the sealed bag beside him on the bench. What was inside might be a key.

Swan had parted with Mother Mary Paul outside the Rosary Garden. A lone Garda sat inside the gate on a rusty chair, looking eager for a chat, but Swan nodded briskly and passed into the gloom. A filament of cobweb stretched and broke across his face.

He paused and passed a palm over his cheeks, took in the scene – a few mossy benches, a rockery that looked more like a plum pudding than the side of an Alp, beds filled with indistinguishable green plants crawling over each other. Ground cover – the phrase came to him from one of his wife’s gardening programmes.

The shed in the corner fitted in with the atmosphere of shabby romance, with its little cottagey windows and tiled roof, but green algae crawled up its painted walls and the bottom of the wood-slat door had gone soft and gappy. There was always a thin line between romance and rot.

Had the shed been a stopping-off point for whoever had the baby? Maybe they went in there to get a spade, but were disturbed by the girls. It would have been hard to get out of the shed without being noticed.

Two Technical Bureau personnel were still at work inside, but said Swan was welcome to have a quick look. The interior was unexpectedly dry, the floor covered with dregs of desiccated peat moss. Chalk marks and smears of fingerprint dust showed on the floor and walls.

‘You taken much out?’ asked Swan.

‘Not really,’ answered one of the men, pulling down his mask. ‘A few items that might have been weapons – but look at it.’ The shed was filled to the gunnels with all kinds of metal tools, not to mention hundreds of old pots, boxes, bits of string and netting and a stack of dusty deck-chairs. They were going through it all, bit by bit, and so it happened that Swan was standing there when the other masked man lifted a deckchair from the stack and opened it to reveal a bundled knot of white concealed in its striped fold. The luck of it warmed him.

A mother-of-pearl button gleamed on an edge of it, and they could see some brownish staining in the depths of its folds. It could be the white cloth that Ali Hogan said the baby was wrapped in. The technicians slipped it gently in a bag, and agreed Swan could take it straight back