The Ballymara Road (12 page)

By now Maura was beyond speech. When he spoke, Tommy’s throat was thick with unshed tears.

‘How do ye know, doctor,’ he asked softly, ‘that we have a lot on our plate?’

Neither he nor Maura had said Kitty’s name out loud since the day of her funeral.

‘My brother is the doctor in Bangornevin and he told me about the accident. Harry asked for his sister Kitty and then became distressed, for a short while. When he said a few things I put two and two together. I hope ye don’t mind my mentioning it. He is fine now that he is breathing much more easily.’

‘No, we don’t mind,’ croaked Tommy.

Just at that moment both he and Maura turned as they heard the footsteps of Peggy and Little Paddy, their ever faithful friends and neighbours, heading down the hospital corridor towards them.

The arrival of Father Anthony and Harriet had transformed everything, despite the fact that his first mass had been for little Kitty. It could barely be heard above the sobs of every resident of the four streets. They crammed into the pews and the aisles, with many gathered outside the church. They stood, a sombre gathering, not a dry eye amongst them.

Howard – the detective and now the new fiancé of Miss Alison Devlin, teacher at the four streets convent school – had been the first person at the Dohertys’ house, following a phone call from the County Mayo state solicitor after Kitty’s drowning. It had been his responsibility to take a witness statement from them on behalf of the police in County Mayo.

Howard met Peggy on the way out of Maura and Tommy’s back door.

‘What the fecking hell do you want?’ Peggy asked, dispensing with even the most basic pleasantry.

Peggy had hardly slept the previous night. How could she? The most unimaginable thing that could happen to any mother had befallen the house next door. Howard, afraid that she might thump him, noticed that her right fist was clenched, ready. It was not unheard of for neighbours like Peggy to risk a prison sentence, in loyal defence of their friends. Howard, having served his probation on the beat in Liverpool and now having been elevated to the CID, knew that such communities took loyalty to an impressive but all too often self-destructive level.

‘Ye had better not be sniffing round here, to take Tommy Doherty to the station on one of yer trumped-up charges, ’cause if ye do, ye have me to answer to. The man is beside himself with grief. Have ye no fecking respect?’

‘I do, Peggy,’ Howard replied, softly and meekly. ‘I am here to offer my respects and to have a form signed, so that Kitty can be brought back to Liverpool to be buried. I am not here to arrest Tommy. The investigation into the priest’s murder is over and we all know Tommy had nothing to do with it.’

‘Aye, well, just ye fecking remember that,’ Peggy had said grudgingly, ‘and, if ye want anything else, come to one of us, don’t go barging in there. We will be looking after them, for as long as it takes. Maura is on the floor with grief and Tommy with her. We will make them right again, but we can’t do it with the likes of ye sniffing around here, causing worry, so we can’t.’

And with that, in her damp, rancid slippers she had shuffled across the cobbles, out of the back gate and into her own home next door.

As he opened the back door to Maura and Tommy’s, Howard was greeted by Sheila, who was stirring a huge pan of broth on the stove, and Jerry, who was squatting in front of the fire, carefully stoking the coke. He had been more welcoming altogether.

‘Hello, Howard,’ Jerry whispered. ‘Everyone is lying down with their own thoughts. Can I help?’

As Howard had looked at Jerry, he had been consumed with guilt that he and Simon had ever suspected Jerry of being involved in the priest’s murder. Here he was, rushing straight to his neighbour’s side in a time of crisis. Howard knew that his own Alison had baked a plate of biscuits and dropped them over earlier. Howard was in awe of how much people cared for everyone else here. How could he and Simon have ever thought the murderer had been so close to home?

The tragedy that had greeted her on her arrival at the four streets enabled Harriet to play her part. She spent a great deal of time with Nellie, as a result of Nana Kathleen voicing her need for help.

‘I am at the end of me wits, with nowhere to go, what with Nellie and Maura and Tommy. Everyone is in shock, but I have never known our chatterbox to be so quiet. She’s scaring me, so she is, and I have to admit, I’m at a loss what to do.’

Harriet had left the Priory at that moment and accompanied Kathleen home. Whilst Kathleen organized others to help care for the Dohertys, Harriet spent hour after hour sitting with Nellie, holding her hand and slowly trying to coax her to speak.

Nellie barely uttered a word for almost a month and, when she did, it was as an accompaniment to a flood of wretched tears.

‘I have never heard nor witnessed such sad tears, Anthony. They sounded as though they were pouring straight from her heart,’ Harriet had confided in her brother over supper that evening.

‘Maybe that is it now. Maybe she will begin to accept what has happened and improve,’ Anthony had replied.

He himself was weary from struggling with Maura and Tommy. He felt that, along with losing their daughter, they were losing their faith, somehow blaming the Church. It was as though they didn’t altogether trust him.

‘How did she drown, Anthony, do we know? It seems so tragic. One of the women told me that her cousin lives in Bangornevin and that the water where Kitty was found was less than a couple of feet deep. Can that be so?’

‘Well, sure enough, if it had happened in England, it would be suspicious, certainly, but it wasn’t even in Bangornevin, Harriet. It was on a remote farm just outside, in a place called Ballymara, with no one and nothing around for miles. She must have slipped and knocked her head on a rock. ’Tis a stony river and a famous one for the salmon, so I’m told.’

Jerry and Kathleen would be forever grateful to Harriet.

They were well aware that it was only because of the time that she had spent sitting at Nellie’s bedside, soothing, reading and even singing to her, that Nellie had surfaced from her own deep grief.

On one of the rare nights when Kathleen had allowed herself to break down, she had cried to Jerry, ‘If wasn’t for Harriet, I think we would have lost our Nellie with the grief as well as Kitty. I have never known the like, a child not wanting to eat or speak. I was out of me depth, Jerry, we both were.’

It was only when Nellie had recovered that Kathleen allowed herself to grieve. Once she knew everyone else was out of the woods, in the privacy of her own home, beside her own fireside, when Jerry and Nellie were asleep, she allowed her tears to flow.

Little Paddy and Scamp did all they could. Paddy would step silently into the Dohertys’ kitchen each morning, whilst Scamp waited patiently by the back door, to ask both sets of twins the same question every time.

‘You all right, lads? D’you wanna game?’

Each time they said yes and the boys slipped out, to escape the gloom within. Too guilty to leave the house on their own, they jumped at the chance when Little Paddy called and offered.

For Harry, his asthma made running difficult and football impossible. Often he didn’t play but just sat on the stone at the edge of the green, watching them all and waiting. He sometimes cried as he sat there, for his Kitty. Although by day, the mood of the house had improved, by night, everyone cried their own tears, under the cover of darkness.

THE WINTER HAD
passed and it was the first sunny day of the year when Daisy walked up to the large greenhouse with her basket and an order from Maggie for Frank.

‘Morning, Joan,’ shouted Frank, giving Daisy a wink.

‘That girl tells me she is simple,’ Maggie had said to Frank on Daisy’s second day. ‘She is not simple. Daisy has just never had anyone talking to her for any length of time and she’s been frightened out of her wits by the priest she worked for. She speaks funny, mind, but ’tis her tongue not being exercised enough, nothing else. I tell you, one week of working with me in that kitchen and she will be talking as well as I do. No one will be calling her simple then.’

‘What’s she doing here? Have you found out why she arrived in the early hours on Christmas morning?’ Frank enquired.

‘I’m trying, Frank, but it’s hard. I can’t help the others if I am caught out so I have to be careful. Here, one of the girls sneaked me a letter. Can ye take it to the post office?’

Frank nodded and put the letter into his large coat pocket. Being caught would mean him and Maggie being turfed out on their ears. They were too old for that to happen a second time, but it never stopped him helping the girls when he could.

Maggie and Frank grinned at each other.

‘Come here,’ said Frank and, removing the short distance between himself and Maggie, he threw his arms round her.

Maggie was uncomfortable with affection of any description, preferring to display a tough and practical exterior. A front belied by her acts of kindness and the degree of danger she frequently placed herself and Frank in, by helping the girls in the mother and baby home.

‘Ger off, you fat lump,’ she exclaimed as she pushed Frank away, but he took no offence.

Frank knew his wife’s capacity to love. He had seen her face as she held their baby. That was when Maggie had been soft, on the days she had walked out to the fields, carrying his lunch in one hand and holding their son on her hip with the other. That Maggie had never pushed him away. That Maggie had laughed when he threw his arms round his wife and baby son. If he closed his eyes for long enough, he could see her back as they walked away from him in the sunlight, his child, resting on his mother’s shoulder, smiling at his da and his small hand waving goodbye.

‘Maggie has sent me for greens, Frank,’ said Daisy.

‘Has she, now? Well, let’s grab some of these, then, shall we?’

Daisy followed Frank, whom she liked and trusted, into the greenhouse.

It had taken Daisy her customary while, but she had eventually opened up to Maggie and Frank. Each day, Maggie extracted a little bit more of Daisy’s extraordinary history.

‘How is it up at the kitchen today then? Is Maggie’s temper holding up?’ Frank said.

Daisy laughed. ‘Yes, it is. She gave one of the novices a right scolding. I thought the girl was about to faint with indignation, but Maggie doesn’t care.’

‘Aye, that’s because she knows they would fall apart if she left. They don’t want to be on the wrong side of Maggie or they would all starve, so they would, but I wouldn’t dare push it, mind. Me and my Maggie, we don’t have too many choices now. Are ye coming down to us for supper?’

‘I am, Frank. I have something to ask you and Maggie this evening but I would like to ask you together, if that’s all right with you?’

‘Of course it is, Daisy,’ said Frank.

‘Shh,’ she said as she looked around. ‘You know the trouble we get into for using our real names.’

Daisy wasn’t really angry with Frank, and, with a smile, she picked up the wicker basket and headed off back to the kitchen.

That night, as Daisy sat in Maggie and Frank’s kitchen, she told them her tale in detail.

She left nothing out. She spoke about her abuse at the hands of the priest and the bishop. It had been the very same bishop who had appeared in Maggie’s kitchen and had spoken to her on Christmas night.

‘He told me that I was here for my protection. That I should never tell anyone anything at all about my life in Liverpool. He said that there were some very bad people around and I could suffer the same end as my friend, Molly Barrett, who was murdered in her own outhouse. He really scared me when he said that. Molly was the only person who knew I had seen the murder. I know that on the night she was killed, she had told the policeman about it that very same day. It was the same policeman as brought me here to the convent.’

Maggie and Frank both made a sharp intake of breath. They interrupted only to whisper the words, ‘Yeah, yeah, go on now,’ as encouragement for her to continue.

She told them about Miss Devlin, and how Daisy’s family in Dublin had made contact, wanting her home for Christmas. She told them about Sister Evangelista and the school and all the residents on the four streets. As Maggie poured mug after mug of tea, worried that Daisy might stop, she told them about Maura and Tommy Doherty, and about little Kitty, who, she was sure, the priest had made pregnant, which was why he had been murdered by Kitty’s da, Tommy.

And the last thing of all that she told them was about the goings-on at the Priory. How strange men came with pictures of children and how she and Sister Evangelista had found hundreds of black-and-white pictures in the dead priest’s desk drawer.

‘All the children in the four streets are poor and the priest is very powerful. If I or anyone else told what happened to us, no one would believe us.’

‘Aye, well, ’tis no different in Ireland,’ said Maggie. ‘Make such an accusation in any of the villages around here and in no time at all ye would find yerself living as a penitent in a place like this, that’s for sure.’

‘It is all so wrong,’ said Frank, ‘and I don’t mind saying that I don’t understand all that much of it, but I do know this: you have to go back to Liverpool, Daisy, and see justice done. You have to take all of this to the Gardai.’

‘How can I?’ asked Daisy. ‘The bishop knows what I have seen at the Priory and what he has done to me himself. That is why he has me prisoner here. I am trapped.’

‘He was terrified of you telling your brother anything, Daisy. That’s why you were as good as kidnapped by that policeman, who is obviously in cahoots now with the bishop, wouldn’t ye say so, Frank?’ said Maggie.

She had no trouble at all in picking up the various threads of life in a city she had never visited and, having never left the countryside, could barely imagine.

‘You were sent here to be hidden and to be hushed up,’ said Maggie. ‘Do ye have the address of your family in Dublin?’

‘No, I don’t. Miss Devlin arranged everything. They would have been waiting for me at the port, but the policeman took me off the ferry. We passed through what looked like a kitchen and I saw him hand a man who worked in there a ten-shilling note and then we came out of a door and down a ramp different from the one I saw everyone else leaving by. I never even saw my family. They must be worried about me and Miss Devlin will have been out of her mind.’