I put a note in its shawl saying ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please take care of my baby. They won’t let me keep her.’ The nuns would believe it was illegitimate, and the note would indicate the mother couldn’t raise it by herself because of the shame it would bring on her family.
Thanks to all that stigma stuff they’d attached to illegitimacy, dumping unwanted kids was easy. I couldn’t have done it without them.
And the reason I’d chosen this particular orphanage: I didn’t want the kid found. It was in Connemara and Connemara was a generation behind Dublin. In some instances, ten of a family eking out a living on a few acres, living in a cottage with a tin roof and mud floor, no electricity or running water – let alone a TV to see the news – was not common, but not unheard of either. And Irish was spoken as much if not more than English. Dublin news wasn’t exactly widespread in that part of the country. A too-easy view to take, I know. Connemara was hardly the Amazon jungle. People there would hear of it. I mean we’re talking about a cop’s kid being kidnapped. Then again, on the face of it, it was just another little baby girl born into a world where she wasn’t welcome, dumped on the steps of a home in the middle of the night with no birth cert. And I knew that the Church had made a career of keeping babies. I knew the system – that keeping her gelled with what I knew about them.
I forgot about the kid for a while after that. Then I took to renting a cottage in the village she was near for the occasional week over the next few years and got on nodding terms with a couple of the nuns. In the summer months the kids worked the land they had there, growing vegetables and stuff. They used to sell them to the public, and I was a customer. Gradually I got to know some of the kids by sight. One in particular stood out. At my reckoning she was just coming on six years of age, and she had a birthmark just above her elbow, which I had searched for the night I’d brought her there, to identify her to me later on. But that wasn’t what made her stand out. She had what had turned out to look like a second birthmark – a blotch in the corner of her eye. The wallpaper paste had scarred her. A very minor mark, not unattractive, strangely enough, but it looked permanent. The nuns hadn’t treated it, and it had burned her.
So I’m standing there in my walking gear, as if I’d holidayed in the area for that purpose, complimenting this nun on their set-up, and admiring the rows of meticulously weeded vegetables, when the girl came over with a basket of carrots she’d dug up. She emptied it onto a cart then turned to the nun.
‘Can I give Jack one, Sister?’ she asked.
Sister smiled like the Virgin Mary at her and the girl gave the donkey the carrot, patting him and all that, saying, ‘There’s a good boy, Jack.’
Not to be too obvious about singling her out, I asked a couple of other kids their names. ‘Gemma Small’ and ‘Rebecca Donagher’ they said.
‘And what’s your name?’ I then asked her.
She, like the others, looked at the Sister for permission to speak.
‘That’s our Lucille,’ said the Sister. ‘Aren’t you, Lucille?’
‘That’s a nice name,’ I said. ‘And what’s your second name?’
‘Kells,’ she said, all shy. ‘Lucille Kells.’
Now that I knew what they’d renamed her, I could let the years roll by and see what happened. Fifteen years went by before I went looking for her again. Only now I didn’t know where she was.
A pretty secretive world, the orphanage system. Tracing kids isn’t easy. I could break into the Health Board’s office and go through their computers till her name came up. The same for adoption placement agencies. Maybe she’d later been adopted. Break into Church computers, those of the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Everything’s computers these days. Employ a snoop? I know a few good ones, who could get me any kind of info. Lucille Kells could be registered with credit-card companies, the driving-licence department; have a medical card, store cards. Any number of ways of finding her.
A lot of guys in my position would’ve kept closer tabs on her through the years – tailed her the day of her release, got to know her by being helpful until, and if, she made a move on Clonkeelin, then taken it from there. All kinds of options. Not me. Why would an apparent stranger go to those lengths? Why risk being seen by the law as the first person to help her on her release then, following the deaths of those she believed were her birth family, the Donavans, leave yourself open to all kinds of suspicion?
What I’m saying is – if it could be proven that I’d taken an interest in Lucille, it would form a link. Fuck that. I’m way too cautious for that. How do you think I’ve stayed ahead of the law all these years? As far as anybody knew, I did not know Lucille, and she did not know me. And that’s how it was gonna stay.
The fact was Lucille was in her early twenties before I tracked her down. A car accident left me with two broken legs and, because the left one’d been broken when I was a kid – Christian Brothers threw me out of an upstairs window – and hadn’t been treated properly, the second break wrecked it. Left me with twenty-eight per cent bone density from the shin down, screws, plates, all that, crutches for a couple
