They waited on the front doorstep for Considine. Fitzmaurice was conducting traffic at the side of the house, looking ten years younger than he had that morning. Another police car had arrived, and Ali’s aunt was manoeuvring a car out of the way to make more space. Swan thought that, in the circumstances, one of the Guards should have offered to move it for her.
‘Little more,’ said Fitzmaurice, gesturing the car back, ‘… little more. That’s it!’ He rapped the boot sharply with his hand and the woman hit the brakes – one brake light shone white where the red plastic had come away.
‘Need to get that fixed, Una,’ said Fitzmaurice automatic ally. At that moment Considine appeared with a purple rucksack and headed for the car. Swan started to follow, but Ali seemed stuck to the spot, her eyes riveted to the back of her aunt’s car as the lights died and the engine stopped. She seemed terrified.
He looked round and could see nothing that would account for it. She was probably just overwhelmed. Ali suddenly walked out of his embrace, hurrying after Considine without a backwards look.
36
Swan sat in a winged armchair in the lobby of the Buleen Hotel, waiting for Considine and the girl to finish breakfast. He was all set to drive back to Dublin, bringing Ali Hogan back with him. When he looked over the top of his newspaper he could see them through the dining-room doorway, among the sunlit tablecloths and the sheen of china. Ali didn’t appear to be eating, but Gina was making up for her, addressing the big cooked breakfast with the relish of a woman who rarely got one.
Considine deserved someone who would be good to her, he thought; at thirty, she shouldn’t be sharing with a female flatmate. You needed the solid ground of a good relationship in this job. He caught his own sanctimony in time, and hid his smile behind his paper. He was hardly the boy to pontificate on personal relations. And yet.
He had phoned Elizabeth first thing, wary of her reaction to the little note he’d left. But she practically cooed down the line at him, asking when he was coming home, flirting almost. He was stunned at how simply their marital winter could be thawed, just by telling her that he loved her. But even as she hinted that she’d be staying in Dublin more, he found himself wondering how such a thing could be sustained. Would he have to say it all the time – and if he did, wouldn’t it wear out?
He turned to the television listings. With any luck he’d be home on the sofa tonight. The killer of the Rosary Baby was dead, it seemed. Between the statements they had gathered and what a forensic examination of the Hogans’ unkempt laundry room would tell them, he was satisfied they’d find it had died at Davy Brennan’s hands, like the girl said.
What had happened to Davy Brennan was another question, one he was happy for Considine to supervise for now. A bit of a step up for her.
All evening they had questioned Ali Hogan in the little TV lounge of the hotel, Considine writing down a torrent of words on borrowed paper, not just about what Brennan had said he had done with Peggy Nolan’s baby, but also her account of Joan Dempsey and of how her baby had been disposed of in the same slurry tank that Brennan had ended up in.
Ali had been scrupulous in her details, like that first time in Rathmines, but last night she kept stopping, scanning the tastefully grained wallpaper as if something was eluding her. Occasionally she asked them questions too, testing her own account.
‘Do you think he could have been the father of Joan’s baby?’ she said at one point.
‘It’s possible,’ Swan answered. ‘Our forensics people say that the bones of the child may well be at the bottom of the tank, even after all these years. They’ll start draining it tomorrow.’
Ali’s eyes grew wide in the lamplight. ‘I think maybe he thought he’d killed me too. Or that he’d be blamed for it. He saw me lying outside his house.’
He would have been in desperate state, Swan thought. The baby, then the niece, knowing the police were in town. There are easier ways to take your own life, though.
‘You say it was your uncle put the first baby in the tank?’
Ali had hesitated, squinted away, nodded briefly.
It made some kind of dark sense, thought Swan, the first baby brought back into consciousness by the killing of the second. And maybe he killed the first one also, this Davy Brennan, and followed them both to oblivion.
The dead had a strong pull on the living, even the smallest of them. Joan Dempsey too – following her dead child to the grave of her own will, or possibly made to follow. Davy Brennan had been at the same dance the night she died, but no one had seen them together. There was only one sighting of Joan alone on the road, heading towards Buleen. The body might tell them something more of her death.
But none of it might ever get to court with Davy Brennan dead. Four lives lost, four furrows ploughed through those who remained.
‘Put on your seatbelt, now.’
He had to say it twice. The girl didn’t seem to be hearing properly. She still had a little tremor to her movements, and the bandage around her head made her look even more of a tragic waif. Swan hoped that the doctor who came to the hotel the previous evening was
