Where the Wild Roses Grow Read online

  He called for a cab, corrected his hair, winked at himself in the mirror, and then left for the date he had planned to be followed by the sex of a lifetime.

  41

  July 2015

  “So, what do we have?”

  I looked at Morten, who was watching TV next to me on the bed with the remote on his chest. We had been back at the hotel for a couple of hours and Morten had fallen into some soccer game that didn’t exactly excite him, but managed to keep his interest. Meanwhile, I had been staring into the computer trying to research, but not getting very far. I had read everything there was to read online about Father Allen. He was quite the media-darling, known for being a rebel within the Catholic Church. Not only had he had his own radio and TV shows, he had also put out two albums back in the nineties that had earned him the nickname “The Singing Priest.” In the late 1960s, Allen had challenged the Catholic clergy's attitudes to celibacy, sex, and marriage in an Irish documentary that shocked the country. He admitted to a personal preference for being married and having a family, but claimed that the role and necessary sacrifices of being a priest were a valid substitute. As part of his pushing limits, he once claimed to have tried every drug except heroin. I had no idea if there was anything important in all this knowledge about the priest, who was now in his late seventies, but he was very interesting to read about. He seemed like a very interesting character. Especially, his compassion for the poor and the unfortunate was remarkable. He had run a home in Enniskerry for young girls who had gotten themselves into trouble, or if their parents couldn’t have them for some reason.

  “What was that?” asked Morten distantly.

  “I’m just trying to sum up what we have so far,” I said.

  He didn’t look up from his game. “We have two dead women,” he said. “One was in her thirties, the other in her early twenties. Both had no father, which we still don’t know if it is just a coincidence, but their mothers didn’t seem to like to talk about it much. They were both killed and thrown into the river with a rose in their mouth.” He looked up. “That’s about it, isn’t it?”

  “Well, that’s not all,” I said. “They were also both single women, and one of them was on a date the night she was killed, with a man that hasn’t been found yet. I wonder if…”

  Morten drew in a deep breath. “I know where this is leading to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want to hack, don’t you? You want to get your hands on the autopsy report.”

  He was right. That was what I wanted to do. That was what I had been thinking about all afternoon. I knew it was probably in by now. And I needed more details. I had very little so far.

  “Well, I can’t deny that it would be very helpful.”

  Morten laughed. “You’re impossible. Aren’t you ever scared that they’ll get to you?”

  “Constantly. But then again, I’m also afraid of spiders and sharks in the ocean, and that isn’t very rational. I still take selfies, even though I just learned that it kills more people than sharks. I am also terrified of being in a car accident, and yet I get into a car every day.”

  I spoke while letting my fingers run fast across the keyboard. I knew what I was doing might get me into deep trouble, but I had to do it. I simply had to know more.

  Morten leaned his head in my lap. “How do you do it?”

  “It’s not so hard once you’ve been in once…once you’ve detected the hole in their security.”

  He laughed. “I don’t understand anything of what you’re doing right now. It’s quite mesmerizing.”

  I pressed a key and the page appeared, letting me know I was now inside. I looked at Morten. “I’m glad you think so, because you are officially now an accomplice to this. You do realize that, right?”

  He shook his head. “I know. I’m sure I’ll regret it sooner or later. You’re going to get me fired one day.”

  42

  July 2015

  I found the autopsy report and read through it. A lot seemed to be similar to the death of Bridget Callaghan. The rose, the fact that she was found in the river, and also the blunt force trauma to the back of the head that the forensics concluded must have been made by a rock. It all fitted with the song, and the old legend of the man who falls in love with a girl, then brings her to the riverbank and hits her with a rock. Now that it had happened twice, I had no doubt in my mind that the killer was copying the old story. But why? And who was he?

  I read through the interviews with her relatives and what the police had learned from her apartment and computer.

  “Aha,” I said.

  “What, Sherlock?” Morten asked. He had returned to his game, where someone had just scored and was running around the field like a crazy person. By the sound of his voice, I could tell it wasn’t the team he was rooting for.

  “She met someone on Match.com, whom she agreed to meet with on the night she died.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, it says here she was corresponding with someone for a longer period of time through the dating site, and then they started to write to each other privately on Facebook and email. They were supposed to meet on the night she was killed. They went to a place in Dublin, according to eyewitnesses working at a pub there. That’s the last place Fiona was seen alive. The waitress at the pub described the man she was with as a fairly handsome man wearing a nice suit. She didn’t remember much, but she did tell the police she noticed that the man wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but he did have a mark from one. You know, like an area that wasn’t tanned right there on the ring finger.”

  “So, the bastard is married?” Morten asked.

  “Sure sounds like it. He could, of course, have been recently divorced. But it sounds like he targets these girls by asking them out on dates. The weird part though is that there are no signs of rape or any abuse of their bodies. So it doesn’t seem like there is a sexual motive.”

  “That does sound a little strange. Usually, men who target girls through dating sites have a sexual motive.”

  “And that’s the other thing. According to this, the first victim, Bridget Callaghan, didn’t use dating sites. She met the man in her boutique. Her employee told the police that he came in several days in a row and asked her to go out with him. The employee never met him, though.”

  “He probably made sure to come in when she was alone to limit the number of people that can recognize him,” Morten said. “That’s why he chooses a small remote pub in Dublin, where no body knew either of them, and where lots of different people come in every day. He’s clever, this one. A sly one.”

  “Not to mention gruesome,” I said and scrolled in the report and found the cause of death. I read what the coroners had concluded, then felt sick to my stomach. I looked at Morten.

  “What?” he asked concerned. “You’re all pale.”

  “She wasn’t killed by the blow to the back of her head like Bridget Callaghan was.”

  Morten frowned. “I don’t understand. You just said she suffered blunt force trauma to her head and that they believed it was caused by a rock?”

  “I know. But it didn’t kill her,” I said, and turned the computer so he could see it for himself. He read the paragraph, then looked up at me, his eyes filled with terror.

  “There were signs of hemorrhaging,” I said. “Blood in the lungs where the sheer force caused them to bleed, and furthermore, in the lungs they found remnants of the surroundings in which the deceased was found. Pieces of plant life only found underwater.”

  “She drowned,” Morten said, his voice thick with revulsion. “She was still alive when she was thrown in the river.”

  43

  July 2015

  Mary Margaret was panting heavily as she entered the church. She pushed the second door open and walked in. She put a bill in the box and grabbed a couple of candles, which she lit. She kneeled in front of them, making the sign of the cross.

  “Dear Lord, please save us all.”

 
; Holding the crucifix in her hand, she began praying the Rosary, going through it one bead at a time. She reached the end and finished her ten Hail Marys and was about to start the Glory be to the Father, when she sensed someone was behind her.

  Mary Margaret gasped and looked up.

  “Mary Margaret,” Father Allen said.

  Mary rose to her feet. “Father.”

  “You have a worried mind again,” he said.

  “With good reason,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Earlier today, I was approached by an author who is writing a book about the killings. She already spoke to Mrs. Delaney. They were asking questions, Father. Questions that frightened me and should frighten you too.”

  Father Allen chuckled. “I don’t let myself get frightened that easily.”

  “I think you should,” she said. “I feel the rope tightening around my neck, Father. It’s like I cannot breathe. They’re talking about those killings everywhere. I can’t eat or sleep.”

  “I have said this before and will say it again. You worry too much, my dear Mary. God’s got it under control. I believe He will take care of us. We did, after all, only act on His will.”

  Mary Margaret grabbed the father’s arm. “How do you know? How do you know that what we did was the good Lord’s will? How can you be so sure it wasn’t of the Devil?”

  The father shook his head. “Mary, Mary. You must learn to trust the Lord’s ways. We only did what was right; we agreed on that many years ago. Now, tell me, what did you tell that author?”

  “She came to my door and knocked. She asked me about Bridget and told me she was writing a book. Then she asked me about Bridget’s father.”

  Father Allen looked serious. “Did she, now?”

  “I don’t know what Mrs. Delaney told them, but it struck me as odd that they asked that very question.”

  “You say they? There was more than one?”

  “She was with someone. A man. They weren’t from around here. Had an accent of some sort.”

  “I see.”

  Father Allen looked at her pensively. It seemed like he was making a very important decision. Mary Margaret just hoped she was getting through to him, finally. She couldn’t stand being alone with all this, being the only one who took this threat seriously.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  Father Allen stared at her with those brown eyes so deep and tender. He cared for her, she knew he did. He cared for all of them in the small village. And they needed him more than ever.

  Finally, Father Allen smiled widely. His eyes narrowed and he looked very calm, like he had reached a conclusion.

  “Don’t you worry about it, Mary. I will take care of everything. It will all be resolved. Don’t you worry.”

  Mary grumbled, not feeling convinced that the dear father understood exactly how serious it all was. But, what could she do except trust him to take care of it?

  44

  January 1978

  Life at the Magdalene asylum was nothing like what Violet would have expected. She was told from the first day by the nuns that she was there because she was a bad person. The place housed women of all ages, but at least half of them were under the age of twenty, and the youngest was only nine. At only fourteen years old, Violet was still among the youngest. The place housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. They were told they weren’t allowed to leave, and Violet soon heard stories of the few that had tried to leave and how the police had tracked them down and brought them back to the asylum, where they were punished in ways that would discourage anyone else from ever trying anything similar.

  During the day, from eight in the morning till six in the evening, the girls worked in the basement of the house, in the laundry. Here, they washed priests’ and nuns’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. Violet had almost no contact with her family back home. She was allowed to write one letter a month, but that was read by the nuns before it left the convent, and she wasn’t allowed to write anything bad about the place.

  “You shouldn’t worry your poor father with such things,” Mother Superior told her the first time she tried to write a letter about how she was really doing, how terrible this place was, and how much she hated having to work in the laundry for no wages. The letter never made its way to her father. It was stopped by the nuns and handed to Mother Superior, the most feared sister of them all. She showed Violet the letter, then told her to never write such atrocities again.

  “Your father is paying for your education here. Tell him only good things, like what you have learned and how well you’re behaving.”

  Then, Mother Superior got a thick string and she tied it around Violet’s neck for three days and three nights, and she was forced to eat off the floor every morning. In front of all the other girls, Violet had to get down on her knees and say, I beg almighty God's pardon, Our Lady's pardon, my companion's pardon for the bad example I have shown, before she was allowed to eat the bread or porridge they had thrown on the floor for her. Violet had been constantly starving since she got to the asylum, so she ate it, even though the floor was dirty and had ants crawling on it.

  And it worked. After that experience, Violet only wrote letters to her family about how wonderful it was for her to be at the asylum, and how much she had learned about hard work and behaving well. She told them she was doing well, that she was happy that they sent her there, and that now she understood why.

  It was all she dared to write.

  No visitors were allowed at the asylum, so Violet didn’t see her family anymore, and she wasn’t allowed to leave either. When they weren’t working in the laundry, they were told to scrub the corridors and floors all over the asylum. At night, Violet cried in her bed, her knees so sore. She made no friends, since they were told to keep quiet at all times and never talk to one another, but after a few months, she managed to get acquainted with the girl in the bed next to her. They had been scrubbing the floors in the common room all day when the girl told her that her name was Ava, and that they could talk if they did it with low voices, since Sister Abigail who was supervising them, was almost deaf and could only detect they were talking by looking at their mouths. As long as they kept their heads bowed, they were safe.

  Violet was so relieved to finally talk to someone. She had a million questions to ask Ava, and they spoke for hours, while scrubbing their fingers to blood.

  Ava was fifteen and had been at the asylum since she was twelve. She lost her mother at only eight years old, and then went to live with her grandmother. When the grandmother suddenly died a few years later, Ava was caught stealing bread from a shop. When they found out she had nowhere to go, the police brought her to the asylum.

  “I walked up the steps that day and the nun came out and said, ‘Your name is changed; you are now Claire.’ I didn’t know what to do, but I went in and I was told I had to keep my silence,” she said. “I refused to change my name, though, so they call me Claire. I call myself Ava. ‘Cause it’s the name my parents gave to me.”

  “That sounds tough,” Violet said, thinking about her baby, and wondering if she would have to stay at the asylum for the rest of her life. The thought filled her with terror. She had told herself it was only till the baby was born, that was what she had believed, but she knew her father wanted the baby to be raised here as well. For how long was he expecting her to stay in this hideous prison? Till the baby was fully grown? She wasn’t sure she would survive that.

  “At least I have a roof over my head,” Ava said. “At least I didn’t have any parents when they brought me here. At least I’m not in Sibeal’s shoes. Now that would be awful.”

  “What’s her story?” Violet asked, remembering having seen the girl in the sleeping quarters.

  “Her parents sent her here just because she has a bad hip and her family didn’t know what to do with her. She couldn’t work, so they simply sent her away. Can you imagine?”

  “No, not real
ly,” Violet said.

  “So, you’re one of the pregnant ones, huh?” Ava asked.

  Violet smiled. It wasn’t something she had done a lot the last two months while in this place. There hadn’t been anything to smile about except when thinking about the baby. The expectations of the baby’s arrival kept her going. She knew it was going to change everything. She missed her books terribly, and she even missed school. It was almost unbearable. Now the baby was all she had left in her life. It was the one and only thing that kept her going day after day. She couldn’t wait to hold her baby in her arms.

  “Yeah. At least I have something good coming, right?”

  Ava stared at her in disbelief.

  “Right.”

  45

  July 2015

  Deidre was late. Carrick arrived at the restaurant at ten minutes past eight, just to make sure he was the last one to arrive, but she wasn’t even there yet. That annoyed him immensely.

  Didn’t she care about meeting him at all? She was probably just playing hard to get, as usual. He was getting fed up with all of her little games.

  He grunted and entered the restaurant. He went to the bar to wait for her, ordered a whiskey, and gulped it down before ordering a second. He looked around the small Italian place that Deidre had chosen for them to meet in. It looked nice. A little too nice for his taste. Boring even. There was very little to say for the décor, and he wouldn’t even get started on the paintings on the brick walls. How some people could call themselves artists and make a product like that was beyond his comprehension.

  He had just gulped down his second whiskey when the door opened and she stepped in. Carrick couldn’t help himself. A thousand different emotions went through him as he spotted her standing there in the doorway. The waiter approached her and he pointed at Carrick in the bar.