The front section of the pub was growing noisy, the door opening and closing, letting in sweeps of sunshine. Three men in black suits came through and stood together at the bar. Glasnevin graveyard was next door, so funerals were a common part of the custom. He wondered whether the regular intrusion of mourning was one of the reasons he liked it here.
Enough wondering. Swan leaned back to root for coins in his trouser pocket. He picked up the evidence bag, walked over to the phone cupboard at the back and rang the office number. Declan Barrett, the newest recruit to the murder squad, answered.
‘I’m on my way in.’ Swan pulled the folding door tighter to damp the background noise. ‘Did pathology call yet?’
The baby’s body had been moved to the morgue late the previous evening. A tiny thing stranded on an adult-sized slab. No larger than a loaf of bread under the cloth. Full autopsy would take about a week to come in, if he was lucky, but he’d put in an urgent request for a rough estimate of the child’s age and time of death.
‘Just a tick, boss,’ said Barrett, a slight stress of his voice managing to make the word ‘boss’ sound like a bit of a joke between them. The lad was giddy with his new posting. He’d better settle down soon. ‘Here it is: estimated time of death between twenty and sixteen hours before forensics got to the scene at three p.m. yesterday. Newborn infant, female, approximately two to three days old, cord cut approximately five inches from the body and healing, body washed of vernix, some fibres present. Now I’ve looked up the medical dictionary, and apparently the vernix is waxy stuff that coats it when it’s born—’
‘Barrett, I know what vernix is.’
‘So I figure the baby was washed and cared for.’
‘Do you now? Have they checked the wounds?’
‘No – the pathologist can’t get to it yet. Backlog. I’ll call again: harry them a bit.’
‘Is Considine about?’
‘Gina?’
‘She’s not Gina to you, Barrett.’
A pause. Swan could hear a muffled remark and someone laughing.
‘She’s on a call with Hannigan. Anything I can help with?’
‘No.’
Swan hung up on a wave of irritation. Barrett’s keenness needled him out of all proportion. And so did the fact that Sergeant Gina Considine was every detective’s preferred support these days, and not just his. She was smart and hard-working. The other detectives gradually overcame their chauvinistic prejudice once they realised how good she could make them look.
This was a case Swan wanted her opinion on. He shuffled the coins in his hand and thought for a moment. Seeing the child last night, and the fullness of its features, made him suspect this wasn’t a case of neonatal panic. There had been an incident last year, a baby left in a carrier bag under a bench by the Royal Canal. He had seen into the bag himself and could never forget the look of the poor scrap – smeared with a mixture of what looked like wax and old blood, its froggy little body squashed into shrouds of newspaper and plastic bag. Suffocated at birth, they said. Hard to tell if the lungs had ever drawn air, the eyes ever registered light.
A bubble of hopelessness rose in him and all at once he was aware of the heat and claustrophobia of the booth. He lifted the receiver once more, put in a coin and dialled his home number. Across the square from the Gravediggers, in a terraced red-brick house, a phone rang and rang. He imagined the sound echoing round the hallway, ricocheting off the dark furniture salvaged from his father’s shop. He imagined Elizabeth walking downstairs towards the sound, or turning her head among the flowerbeds at the back, rising slowly to her feet. He let it ring until there was no hope of an answer. She hadn’t come back yet.
6
Ali looked up at a torch-bearing maiden poised on the balustrade of the Shelbourne Hotel, the thin copper drapery emphasising rather than veiling the statue’s voluptuous figure. She remembered staring at these figures when she was small, her attention caught by their prominent breasts; her father laughing when he saw what she was looking at, and she’d got embarrassed, but he’d swung her hand back and forth, making her body twist, forcing her to smile.
If only she could remember more of him. At least she could still feel that sensation of her own small hand in his large one, the comfort of that.
When he was alive, the two of them would go into town on a Sunday morning. After mass in Clarendon Street they’d buy Sunday papers from a man with blackened fingers and walk hand-in-hand to a nice hotel like the Hibernian or sometimes the Shelbourne, and Daddy would read his papers while she drank lemonade through a straw and ate her way through a little dish of salty, bitter-skinned peanuts. Often an acquaintance of her father would stop by to talk and she would try to look as well behaved as she could.
She hadn’t been in the Shelbourne since – the days of expensive little treats long gone. The entrance hall was the same: high Georgian mirrors and walls the colour of mint ice-cream. And right in the middle of the hall stood Mary O’Shea, surrounded by a gaggle of hotel staff, eager with laughter.
‘Oh, Mary, you’re killing us,’ said one, clutching his stomach.
‘That’s the best yet,’ said another, holding on to the edge of the reception desk for support.
Even the chandeliers seemed to favour Mary, the light haloing her bobbed golden hair and winking from her polished nails as she waved her hands around.
Ali stood outside the group for a moment, wondering how to make herself known. She thought about walking back out of the place, but just as she started to turn she heard ‘Alison?’
Mary O’Shea walked out of the circle of men to stand in
