Himself(75)

Shauna nods. ‘There was soot all right, and swallows.’

‘Well, there would be. This storm is a symptom of the huge quantities of paranormal energy that have been converging on this village. Jesus, the weather hasn’t been normal in weeks, has it?’

Desmond goes to open his mouth; Mrs Cauley stops him with a look. She turns to Bridget. ‘What do you expect from this storm, Doosey?’

‘What does this investigation need most of all?’

Mrs Cauley narrows her eyes. ‘A body.’

‘Exactly.’ Bridget nods. ‘This storm will unearth Orla Sweeney. It will lead us to her body.’

Shauna shivers. ‘Oh God. Can’t anything just be normal around here? Can’t a storm just be a bloody storm?’

Mrs Cauley holds up her hand. ‘No it can’t. Go on, Doosey.’

‘Tomorrow we go out and we find Orla’s body, because tonight the forces of nature will unearth her. That’s what I risked my arse to come up here and tell you.’ Bridget sits back in her chair triumphantly.

‘So she’ll just be there on the lawn in front of me? I’ll be falling over her bones when I put the washing out?’ asks Shauna.

Bridget is undeterred. ‘Maybe not, but there’ll be clues. Lightning-struck trees, boulders rearranged in a circle, that sort of thing. They will lead us to her grave.’

‘Shauna, go and find a shovel,’ says Mrs Cauley, with a terrible gleam in her eyes. ‘We move out at first light.’

Bridget toasts Mrs Cauley with a loaded glass. ‘And some rubber gloves. We will no doubt be handling evidence.’





Chapter 41


March 1950


The priest walked the floor outside the door all night, praying hard and fast. Annie heard his voice grow louder on every exhale, his breath propelling an urgent murmur of words.

She was only here at his asking.

She would be the first to see what came out of this devil.

As the morning broke, the mottled grey moon of a baby’s head appeared.

The girl looked at it. It was no more than a scrap of skin, smeared and alien in her arms. Annie dressed the umbilical with gauze and wrapped the afterbirth in newspaper and hauled it into a bucket. By the time she had turned back, the girl was asleep.

Annie took the baby and laid it on the table.

Mucus whitened each wrinkled fold. A halo of black down surrounded a soft walnut skull. Its limbs twitched, and then floated, in turn.

Annie stared down at its face.

It didn’t look like him, if he was even the father. It didn’t look like anyone.

Its grey eyes, membraned and cloudy, stopped slaloming and gazed right back at her. It flexed its tiny hands, the fingers, with their too-long nails, furling and unfurling in some sort of pagan prayer. It opened the pink wound of its mouth to speak. It was casting a druid’s spell, putting a curse on her. Annie felt it heating up the base of her spine.

She should have dashed it against the wall but she could hardly bear to touch it. So she swaddled it quickly, holding her breath, hastily tucking in the limbs. She dropped it in the wooden box at the foot of the mattress and pushed the box with her foot to the corner of the room.

Then Annie turned to its mother.

The girl had her head at an awkward angle, tucked in a little to her chest. Her hair was wet and her mouth was open. Annie slid the rubber sheet away, folded a thick pad between the girl’s legs and pulled her nightdress down over her thighs. She put her arms down by her side and tucked a sheet firmly in and around her body.

Then Annie took up a pillow.

With the blood rushing in her ears she didn’t hear Bridget Doosey come into the room but she felt her firm touch on her forearm.

‘I’ll take it from here, Annie. You can go now,’ she said.

Bridget rocked the baby in her arms by the hearth and he sucked her finger, which gave her a deep thrill of delight. His eyes flickered over her, sometimes hesitating, sometimes sweeping on. He’s reading me, she thought, and she smiled warm at him.

Father Jim got up from the table. ‘I should take him now, before she wakes.’

‘She’d never forgive you, Father.’

‘It would be the right thing to do.’

‘He belongs to her.’

The baby closed his eyes but his grip on Bridget’s finger didn’t diminish. She blessed him in his sleep. ‘She wants to bring him up herself.’

The priest ran his hands through his hair. ‘They’ll never accept it.’

‘They’ll have to.’

The priest looked down at her. ‘It’s only a matter of time before they take matters into their own hands. You know that as well as I do.’

‘It’s all talk, Father.’

Father Jim seemed to have aged a thousand years. He shook his head. ‘Is it? She is collecting enemies, and this little fella isn’t going to help. I can’t protect them for ever.’

‘I won’t let you take him, Father.’

‘She’s a child, Bridget.’

‘No, she’s a mother.’

The priest lightly touched the wrapped bundle in Bridget’s arms before he left.

The light was out on the front porch so that Father Jim could only make out a dark shape moving against the wet leaves of the ivy.