‘I thought you ran the gardening club.’
She looked up at him and frowned. ‘Perhaps you’re trying to flatter me. As you can see, I don’t get about like I did. My supervision has been at a distance, but someone else will be running the club soon.’
‘Another nun?’
Barrett was jiggling his leg now, sending vibrations up Swan’s chair.
‘Yes, Sister Bernadette, a wonderful young woman. She’ll pull it back into shape, I know.’
‘She seems very cool-headed all right,’ said Swan.
‘I forget you’ve met. She’s far more than that – Bernadette is worth ten of me to our little community. She knows nursing, she did a course in social work, she leads all of our city initiatives … she has such energy.’
‘Sister – I need to ask you – if your girls thought of the garden as their sanctuary, is it so unlikely that one of them might bring their baby there?’
‘I don’t think any of them were in that kind of trouble. And none of them would murder a child.’
‘How can you know for sure? You weren’t around much.’
‘I know it in my heart.’
It was difficult to argue with that kind of defence, but Swan pressed on.
‘Could the child have been born to anyone in the convent?’
He expected immediate rebuttal, but Sister O’Dwyer appeared to think it over, as if running through an album of people in her mind.
‘We would have known.’
‘So what do you think happened? Indulge me. I can see you’re a woman with a decent imagination.’
Sister O’Dwyer smiled slightly at her clasped hands, and strained her face up to meet his eye once more. ‘Do you know cats, Detective?’ she said.
‘I have one that abuses my hospitality, yes.’ He thought of Benny, curled tight as a snail on Elizabeth’s side of the bed, even when it was empty of her.
‘Well, you’ll know how they sneak away to a dark place when they’re sick or giving birth. My garden is a place like that. I think it was a local girl or woman who sought it out by instinct.’
‘Is the shed ever locked?’
‘No. Though Bernadette says we must do that, from now on.’
‘Sounds like Sister Bernadette might be a bit stricter than you.’
‘I don’t like expecting the worst of people. Not that Bernadette does – that’s not what I’m saying. She’s out in the world more than I am. It’s a different perspective.’
‘We’ll be talking to Sister Bernadette later,’ said Barrett.
‘Oh, I thought she’d be at St Jude’s; it’s a Saturday today, isn’t it?’
Barrett drew himself up in his chair, moved a sleeve over his doodle. ‘We stipulated that all the nuns be here today to talk to us, Sister. I believe Sister Bernadette has agreed to that demand.’
Sister O’Dwyer raised her eyebrows and gave one slow nod of her head to Barrett, acknowledging or perhaps mocking his great power.
‘What’s St Jude’s?’ asked Swan. He should be winding this up; they had more nuns to see.
‘It was where I trained as a novice, Inspector, before the order moved out here to the suburbs. A lovely house by the canal, on Percy Place. It was once the home of a famous writer – now was it Gogarty or Synge? Are you fond of reading?’
‘Enormously. What is the house used for now?’
‘Oh …’ The nun looked confused for a moment, losing focus, ‘I believe it’s a … community project.’ She said the phrase triumphantly, as if she had retrieved it against the odds. But the light drained from her suddenly and she looked even smaller than when she came in. Swan tried to calculate her age, as Barrett went through the rigmarole of giving her a card and asking her to get in touch, if anything … et cetera. More than eighty, certainly. Possibly in her nineties. She asked Barrett to ring a bell beside the fireplace. Within moments, young Sister Dreyfus appeared to help Sister O’Dwyer out of her chair and guide her to wherever she spent her daytime hours. Swan hoped it was somewhere comfortable, light-filled.
Swan asked Sister Dreyfus to send Sister Bernadette to them.
As they waited, Swan sneaked a look at the day’s Independent. The public hand-wringing went on. The Rosary Baby was being dragged into expositions on the family, the decline of religion, the promiscuity and ignorance of the young. There was no editorial that couldn’t be spiced up with an innocent dying for society’s many sins. Only the banal or brutal truth would put an end to it. Kavanagh was pressing him for results, but all the Technical Bureau and most of the murder squad had been diverted to work on an armed robbery at a creamery outside Dundalk, where a woman office worker and an off-duty Garda had been shot dead. What kind of cheapjack set-up was it when the country could only deal with one murder at a time?
‘Shall I get us a coffee, boss?’ asked Barrett.
‘Yeah, see if you can whistle up a cup.’
Barrett was gone only a minute when the parlour door opened and Sister Bernadette walked in. She wore a veil that reached just past her shoulders and what looked like a black pinafore over a longish black dress. She reminded Swan somehow of that picture of Alice in Wonderland after she had drunk the bottle that made her grow. She was so long and pale and had an odd way of stretching her neck up when she looked at you.
‘Please sit down. I know we talked at the station, but now we’re building a fuller picture of events.’
‘I see.’
‘And you’ll have had time to gather your thoughts.’
Sister Bernadette walked over to the table, pulled the chair back and sat in front of him. The action was compliant, the face wasn’t. It was the face of someone willing to endure something unpleasant.
‘My colleague’s gone to fetch coffee. We’ll have to wait for him to get back.’
She acknowledged his statement with only
