tell me why I don’t know anything about any of this, and you do.’
‘I don’t know much, really. I’m trying to work backwards.’
‘I’m a simple soul, Miss Rosen. Why not start at the beginning?’
She looked at him, hesitant, still not quite sure she could trust him.
‘Whatever it is you wanted from Keller, you didn’t get it, did you?’
She shook her head, watching him before she continued.
‘I’ve been away from Ireland for quite a long time. It’s almost a year and a half. In Palestine, I live there now. I’m probably going to stay there.’
The last words were spoken more reflectively. They weren’t for him at all. Clearly Palestine wasn’t a simple issue for her. But whatever issue it was it couldn’t have much to do with Hugo Keller and the Garda Special Branch.
‘I came back to Ireland for a reason. I came home be-cause –’ She had made her decision now. She liked him. She would trust him. ‘My friend, my oldest friend, Susan Field is – missing. She’s disappeared. She’s been gone for over five months. No one’s heard from her. No one knows where she is.’ She paused. Stefan just nodded, but didn’t say anything. She went on.
‘Susan and I have been friends since we were children. We grew up together in Little Jerusalem, in Lennox Street. We went to school together. We did everything together once. And all the time I’ve been in Palestine we’ve written to each other. A lot – I mean every few weeks. Her letters stopped coming at the end of July. I didn’t think there was anything wrong at first. I knew there was something, well, a problem – we still told each other everything. I thought that must have affected her. I thought she might not want to talk about it for a while. But somewhere I knew that wasn’t true. She would have written. There would have been even more reason to write if she was in trouble, not less. And then I got the letter from Susan’s father.’
Before she had been holding his gaze as she spoke, but now she was looking away from him. She was trying not to show how painful this was.
‘He said she’d disappeared. She’d been missing for almost six weeks then. None of her friends knew anything. The Guards couldn’t find any trace of her. They were still searching. He had to tell me – and he had to ask me –’
She met his eyes again now.
‘He had to ask me if I knew anything. I told him. But it didn’t make any difference. It was as if Susan had just walked out one morning and vanished off the face of the earth. The Guards, well, after all the weeks of looking for her, or supposedly looking for her, all they could come up with was that she’d taken the boat to England, and simply run away.’
‘Is that what Mr Field thinks?’
‘I don’t know. I think now he’s … almost forced himself to believe that. If he doesn’t, then what does he believe? She was twenty-three, Mr Gillespie. She was bright and full of life and independent and utterly bloody-minded. The idea that Susan would ever run away from anything is mad.’
‘You said there was a problem. What was it?’
‘Susan was a student at UCD. She was always very clever. But however clever you are you can get yourself into stupid situations. She had been having an affair with a man at the university. He was a lecturer. It started last year. She went into it with her eyes open. She made a choice.’
‘He was married?’
‘No, he was a priest.’
‘So that was the problem …’
‘It was one problem.’
‘Just tell me about it, Miss Rosen.’ He could see she needed to talk.
‘Well, I suppose … it was all very exhilarating at first. Susan needed that. She was always searching for excitement,’ Hannah smiled fondly. ‘But after a while it started to feel … claustrophobic. They couldn’t go anywhere. They couldn’t be seen together. And then she realised she was pregnant …’
‘That’s where Mr Keller comes in?’
She looked at him, trying to gauge his response, then she nodded.
‘Who else knew she was pregnant?’ he asked.
‘The priest. I don’t know …’
‘What about her parents?’
‘Her mother died five years ago. I’m sure she’d have talked to her if she’d been alive. Mrs Field was the heart of that family. Maybe too much. Susan always said she took the heart with her when she went.’ Hannah stopped, thinking about the past as much as the present. ‘Her father’s never been the same. I suppose he’s turned in on himself. He’s the cantor at the Adelaide Road Synagogue now. That’s his life, all his life. She couldn’t tell him. And her sisters are married. They’ve left Ireland. Things change, don’t they? It’s funny, I was always jealous of how close they all were.’
Stefan let her find her way back to the present before he continued. ‘A boat to England’s a common solution. It happens every day.’
‘Not Susan. And there was already a solution, wasn’t there?’
‘She’d made arrangements with Keller?’
‘It was the priest who knew about him. He did the arranging.’
Stefan couldn’t hide his look of surprise. It seemed to irritate her.
‘I didn’t mean to shock you, Sergeant.’
‘Shock would be overstating it, Miss Rosen.’ He smiled wryly.
‘Anyway, he knew where to go. He told her it was a proper clinic too, with a proper doctor. And he was going to pay for it all, she said.’
‘A gentleman as well as a scholar. It’s not what you’d expect.’
‘I don’t know. How do priests usually deal with these things?’
‘I don’t know either, Miss Rosen. I’m very rarely on my knees.’
‘That’s reassuring at least.’
‘So Susan wrote to you about the abortion?’
‘I had one letter telling me it was happening. Then she wrote to me again, the day before she went to the clinic. That was at the end of July. She was going on the twenty-sixth. I didn’t know it when I got that letter of course, but she disappeared the day after she sent it. And that’s all there is. No one knows where she went. No one’s seen her since.’
Stefan took this in.
‘Did she seem distressed about what was happening?’
‘I don’t think so. And I’d have known, even if she’d been putting on a brave face. It was something she had to do. She wasn’t jumping for joy, Sergeant, but I’d say the strongest feeling she had – was about drawing a line under it.’
Hannah dropped her head as she had done before, when she felt she was talking about Susan’s feelings in a way that didn’t quite fit a conversation with a policeman. Her hair fell forward each time and she brushed it out of her eyes, looking back up at Stefan with a slightly awkward combination of forthrightness and reserve. And each time, as their eyes met again, he was conscious that she was trusting him with her feelings as well as the facts. He somehow knew she didn’t do that easily. It happened of course, when people had no one else to talk to, when they’d bottled things up inside that they couldn’t tell anyone. As a policeman you relied on that sometimes. But this was different. At least he wanted it to be different. The sound of conversation and laughter all around him in Grace’s had faded away completely. Hannah spoke softly, but by now her words were all he heard. And he was conscious that he didn’t want her to stop talking to him.
‘So, do you think this abortion happened?’