‘What’s the point of that?’
She shrugged. ‘I know they’re there.’
A timid rebel, thought Swan.
‘Do other girls do the same thing?’ He willed her to say yes.
‘I don’t know.’
He held up the SPUC OFF badge. The initials stood for Society for Protection of the Unborn Child.
‘Does this mean that you’re pro-abortion, Ali?’
‘I think women should have a choice.’
‘Is it what you would do?’
‘Depends. Maybe.’
‘How would you know where to go? There’s a ban on information now.’
‘The small ads in any British women’s magazine have phone numbers. I’ve seen them.’
‘Have you now? And what if your pregnancy had gone too far?’
‘What did Dr Beasley say to you?’
‘He said he couldn’t rule you out.’
‘I didn’t have a baby. Jesus! Look at me.’ She stretched her arms out from her body. Swan wondered what he was supposed to be looking at; what he saw was a well-built girl in a jumper so baggy she could be concealing a toddler.
‘A blouse exactly like yours – holes and all – was found in the shed. How could it have got there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Did you ever change your clothes there?’
‘Yeah, we could wear rough clothes for gardening. But I don’t think I ever left anything there.’
‘And what exactly were you doing in St Brigid’s that Sunday night?’
Ali went back to sit on the bed, started fiddling with her hair again. The colour rose in her face.
‘I was with my friends. We were drinking in the trees by the hockey pitch.’
‘And you saw nothing?’
She turned to look at Considine behind her, hoping for intervention perhaps, but Gina’s face was a perfect blank. Ali turned back to him with a bullish expression.
‘I didn’t give birth between beers!’
‘Detective Considine here said you mentioned something about some trouble down in Buleen – the place you were staying.’
‘The Gardaí said someone drowned after a dance. Was that the person you knew?’ asked Considine, coming round to stand beside Swan.
The girl’s chin wobbled a little, her state so volatile now that any questioning seemed overbearing. Yet necessary.
‘It was Joan,’ she said eventually. ‘Joan Dempsey. She used to cook for my aunt. Then she was in a mental home, a hospital, until last week.’ She made a little broken noise like a hiccup. ‘They say that she jumped into the river. I don’t know.’
‘Why was she in a home?’
Ali was raking the fingernails of one hand down the pale inside of her opposite forearm, red lines rising to the surface of her skin.
‘The baby I found … back before, you know – it was Joan’s. She told me so last week.’
Swan and Considine looked at each other for a minute. There was the distant sound of footsteps climbing the stairs.
‘So you see, Mr Swan, you’re not so far off with your poltergeists – I do have special powers—’ Whoever was coming up the stairs was humming now, signalling their approach. ‘People die around me.’
The door swung open to reveal Deirdre Hogan with three mugs and a packet of biscuits on a tray.
‘I know you said not to, but there were these Jaffa cakes staring at me from the shelf, and I thought: well, if they don’t eat them, I might, so I better bring them up to the guardians of the peace and my slim daughter toot-sweet. And a cup of coffee to wash them down. Only instant, mind.’
During this patter she wandered deep into the room, trying to clear a surface, tutting and laughing. But her eyes kept checking on her daughter. Ali seemed to have fallen back into herself, staring down at the mug that her mother had passed her.
‘You’re not going to take her anywhere, are you? I’m not happy about what she was put through yesterday … And now the phone keeps ringing.’
‘I took it off the hook,’ Ali said. Her mother nodded. They were allies now, Swan noted.
‘We were just here for a chat, Mrs Hogan.’ He got to his feet. ‘Get some rest, Ali.’
‘Bit of a dead-end, don’t you think?’ said Considine when they reached the pavement. ‘She didn’t have a baby. And there’s an innocent reason her blouse could have been lying in the shed.’
‘I just don’t know. What are you up to?’
‘I think I’ll go and revisit the doctors’ surgeries round here. There’s a chance some woman might have come in by now. I don’t know, either, but I feel like we must have missed something.’
Swan sat in his car for a while before turning the engine on. To believe Ali Hogan or not?
He counted up the infanticide cases he’d had experience of – the baby by the canal, the one under the garage in Clondalkin two years back. Oh, and there was that case in Drimnagh – two tiny skeletons in a boarding-house cupboard, fishbone ribs covered in paper-thin skin. The woman from Achill who had put them there twenty years before said she hadn’t known anyone in Dublin at the time. That was her only explanation.
He remembered the words of a farmer he’d met once in a bar in Athlone. He’d said that it used to be a common thing for the bog-strippers to turn up the remains of infants. The little bones scattered over the flayed land.
He thought the man was being morbid in drink, but maybe it was he who was naïve. Perhaps the whole country was dotted with tiny corpses waiting to be found – babies tucked behind gateposts, eased under floorboards or thrown into sacks, with the company of stones to take them down into brown water. An Irish solution to an Irish problem. Grown secretly in the dark, and to the dark so quickly returned, some never surfacing at all to feel air inflate their lungs, the trickle of warm milk filling new stomachs.
And what of his own babies: would they ever make it into the world or would there only be more pain? Two conceived, both faltered in the womb. Two months. Four months. He was forty-three. Elizabeth thirty-eight already. Perhaps they were too old, or a bad match. All
