‘It wasn’t necessary to go any younger than the fourth year, I thought.’ Mother Mary Paul had recovered herself. ‘The others are girls who left in the last few years.’
Swan simply looked at her.
‘We thought it would help,’ said Monsignor Kelly, ‘if you had a list of girls who, their teachers suspected, may have been in intimate contact with boyfriends and the like.’
‘How can they tell?’ said Swan.
‘You can’t, for sure,’ said Mary Paul, in a reasonable tone. ‘But in every year there are always a few who test the limits, and no doubt test their parents too. They’re the risk-takers, and sometimes they wind up in trouble. They’re all off on holiday or graduated, but I had a feeling a girl in trouble might just seek the shelter of the school she knew and loved.’
‘Do you have a reason to believe that any of these girls were pregnant?’
‘Only one for certain. Sixth year … Eileen Vaughan.’
Swan found the name on the list.
‘She’s not the one you’re after, though.’
‘Oh?’
‘She left the school in March. I’ve enquired and she was delivered back in May.’ The nun pressed her lips together.
‘I’ll need her address. And all these others?’
‘Suggestions.’
‘Thank you, we’ll look into it.’
Swan took the list, folded it and put it in his inside pocket. The hypocrisy of them. It wouldn’t be right to mention sex to any of the nuns, but here’s a bunch of schoolgirls you might want to grill instead. Again he rose to his feet, and this time the nun and priest rose too. T. P.’s hand was on the doorknob when Mother Mary Paul’s grave voice said, ‘Perhaps a little prayer for the baby?’
They stood with clasped hands and bowed heads while the nun led them in a Hail Mary linked to some longer bit that Swan only half-recognised. Who was the hypocrite now? He mumbled the ‘Amen’.
Monsignor Kelly walked them back through the maze of empty corridors, trying to interest T. P. Murphy in the history of the building. Swan’s mind was on the list of girls. Just because their teachers thought them a bit wild didn’t make them child murderers. Even if this Eileen Vaughan had been politely disappeared, that only proved the point. Most of these girls would be well taken care of, if they slipped up – a trip down the country for a few months or a shorter trip to England in some cases. Infanticide mainly happened in conditions of ignorance or secrecy. It wasn’t the bolshie, confident girls you wanted. It was the quiet, mousy ones with only a vague grasp of the mechanics, or the ones being abused at home, or by a neighbour or friend of the family. Friend of the family – that’s how they always referred to some old bastard with his eye on the kids.
Thing was, this time felt different. The other cases Swan knew were plain tragic, drenched with desperation. But this one: three days of food and care, love perhaps, before someone changed their mind. Maybe the mother was being watched by her own mother, say, and had to wait for her chance to do away with her child. Or was it the reverse: the mother had been content with the child, then someone else had discovered its existence?
Outside, Monsignor Kelly stepped into a shining black Mercedes and drove off with a roar.
‘Great car,’ said T. P. Murphy as it swept out the gate.
‘Off to another crime against the faith,’ said Swan, ‘Do you ever get the feeling there’s more than one police force in this town?’
‘If it wasn’t for the whole celibacy stuff, I’d happily join theirs. They know how to look after their own.’
‘I can’t quite picture that,’ said Swan.
‘You’d pass,’ said T. P., ‘you’ve a whiff of incense about you, and we’ve never seen this wife you claim to have.’
Swan glanced back and caught sight of a pale old nun watching their departure from a first-floor window.
A maroon Ford was pulled up beside their brown one. Detective Garda Barrett was propped against it, reading a paper in a slightly studied way. At the opposite end of the car, Detective Sergeant Gina Considine stood with her arms crossed, scanning the convent windows.
Barrett folded the paper back on itself and held it up in front of his chest like a sign. ‘You should look at this, sir.’
Swan took the paper and T. P. pressed in beside him to share it. The pictures registered first: a portrait of Alison Hogan looking like she’d lost her puppy and a shot of the gate to the Rosary Garden, its metal scrolls thinned with rust in a way that looked suddenly sinister. At the top of the page the incongruously smiling face of Mary O’Shea rested on a thick stripe of black, and below it the headline: Suffer the Little Children: The Tragedy of the Rosary Baby.
Shit.
Less than forty-eight hours since the find and Mary O’Shea was interviewing key witnesses. How had they got hold of that daft girl? He skimmed the article: Under the petrified gaze of a stone Pietà … eerie bower … tiny corpse … privileged walls. It was mostly a colour-piece, a lot of breast-beating about the truths behind respectable surfaces – nothing substantial. Then Swan’s glance froze on one sentence: According to witnesses, the baby did not die of exposure, but suffered a violent death at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
Ali Hogan was quoted extensively, saying although she was shocked by the find, she couldn’t find it in herself to condemn: ‘This can be a cruel country for girls in trouble.’ The article went on to say that even in a school like this, girls were not immune to mistakes, and that St Brigid’s had experienced one schoolgirl pregnancy last year.
Shit and damn. This
