‘We’ll need to take a statement from you and your wife tomorrow at the station.’
‘Can’t it be done here?’
‘I’ll see – it might be possible, if you can help me with another matter.’
Nolan nodded.
‘Twelve years ago at Christmas time another baby was found, at Caherbawn. I believe you were there.’
‘Your officer asked me about that previously. Una Devane called me to Caherbawn and I examined the mother.’
‘Did the child’s body have any marks on it – any signs of violence?’
A hesitation. The doctor shook his head.
‘You didn’t inform the Guards.’
‘The child never lived, didn’t attain independent existence, as such. Some people’s lives are hard enough. I don’t see that there’s any benefit in making a song and dance.’
‘What happened to the body?’
‘I can’t recall. It was left with the family. You should see Una Devane about it.’
‘Are you sure you actually examined the child?’
Dr Nolan picked up his glasses as if eager to get on with his reading. ‘I don’t see the point in all this.’
‘Did you see the baby?’
‘Una Devane is a reliable woman … it was Christmas. A house full of children.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘I was shown it briefly,’ he finally conceded.
‘The mother of the child that you didn’t record was buried this morning, drowned. Did you sign off her death certificate?’
‘There was nothing to suggest Joan Dempsey’s death was anything other than an accident.’
‘Don’t you need an autopsy to determine that?’
‘I examined the body and spoke to Father Philbin and the police. We did not deem it necessary.’
A big man in a small town, thought Swan. Practised here all his life, knew all the secrets. Decided what was best. Deemed it.
‘Well, I’m just going to have to order one myself.’
As he rose to go, Swan noticed the little wire glasses trembling in the doctor’s grip.
34
Branches moving against a deep-blue sky. Twilight and shifting air, everything mobile. She thought she was back in the convent grounds with Ronan, that he was about to kiss her and that this time it would be lovely. A face hovered over her, Ronan’s face approaching, blocking out her view of the sky. The face wavered, became Davy’s, so close to hers that all the light disappeared and she was floating in blackness again.
When Ali woke, she was aware of stones under her, and although the air was mild, her head was cold and clammy.
She raised her fingers to her scalp, felt her hair clumped together, sticky. Now she was properly awake and could recognise the outside of Davy’s bungalow. She put a hand to the concrete stump beside her, used it to lever herself to sitting. Her hand left dark prints on the grey. She wanted to be sick.
The house was in blackness; the door stood open. Ali got shakily to her feet and tried to think. If he was still there in the living room he could see her through the dark window, might be looking straight at her. She knew now that he would hurt her, if he felt he had to.
Ali turned and hobbled away, picking up speed as she reached the trees, ears straining for steps behind her. Halfway along the path she held onto a sapling and stopped to look behind. She couldn’t see him, but branches and their shadows swayed in the breeze. He could be very close by.
If she could reach the farmhouse, surely her family would protect her. But Davy was family too, closer to the rest of them than she was. A line of fresh blood dripped down her cheek, and she held a hand to it. She had no choice – she might even be dying. Ali staggered in the direction of the farm. She would not die alone out here.
The barn loomed up behind the trees. Not far to go, she told herself. Her feet hit the concrete of the yard and she could see the light from the kitchen window fall across the patch of grass at the back of the house. On the ground to her left, she registered two squares of darkness where the awful slurry tank was. There should only be one square, the drain cover, but now there seemed to be two, one darker than the other, and something else – some object – beside them.
Keep going, she told herself, but her eyes clung to the squares, halting her feet, wanting to make sense of it.
The slurry tank had been opened. One square was the metal cover, pulled aside; the other was the black void it should be covering. She took a few steps towards them. Except for her own ragged breathing, all remained quiet, nothing moved. From six feet away, she peered at the open hole and what was left beside it. It was hard to make it out in the dim light, and Ali moved closer. At first she thought it was a stone, then she saw it was a shoe, a black brogue. She knew she’d seen one like it recently, but her head was so fogged it took another long moment until she could make sense of it and remember where.
A tremor ran through her body and her throat opened to unleash a wail. In answer to her scream, a raw light burst from a lamp on the side of the barn, raking across the ground. A voice called her name and she turned to see Una running from the house towards her – her face distorted in panic.
But even as she turned towards her aunt, Ali couldn’t rid her eyes of what she had glimpsed as the light burst across the yard. A dark shape like a sack, or perhaps a rounded back, lolled in the glossy brown swill of the slurry.
35
The scene that greeted Swan at Caherbawn was like some twisted medieval altarpiece – suffering and gesture stamped in light against the grainy dark.
Four figures were lit up by harsh white floodlights. Two men, smeared with muck, laboured with wooden poles twice
