‘Give her air,’ Cook said.
‘Damn the air, tell me where Ruby is,’ Reynolds shouted.
Cook put his hand on Reynolds’s shoulder.
‘Christ only knows what this woman’s been through,’ Cook said. He knelt in the grass.
‘Mrs Ryan?’
The woman looked at him. She was terrified. She nodded. Looked at the shelter.
‘He’s gone,’ Cook said.
The woman relaxed. Still scared, but the panic subsided. Cook had seen it before, in men back from a raid across no-man’s-land. Gradually accepting that the worst was behind them.
‘Was Ruby here?’ Cook asked her.
She looked him in the eye. Nodded.
‘Where is she?’ Reynolds asked. Cook put his arm out to keep Reynolds back.
‘What happened?’ Cook asked.
The woman’s eyes flicked past Cook, past Reynolds. She thought the priest was coming for her. Couldn’t quite believe it was over.
‘He can’t hurt you any more,’ Cook said.
Cook stood up, looked around. The garden. The orchard. The distant trees, crows circling in the grey sky. Then he saw it.
‘We’re too late,’ Cook said.
‘Where is she?’ Reynolds yelled.
‘She’s here,’ Cook said.
Reynolds pushed himself to his feet and turned to see for himself. The two men stood in silence, looking at the patch of ground on the edge of the orchard.
A row of graves. Five covered with grass, just humps in the ground. The sixth looked different. A line of disturbed earth. Six foot long. A recently dug grave.
104
‘When?’ Reynolds asked.
‘Yesterday,’ she said. ‘Poor mite. He’d been having his way with her, but she wasn’t having any of it. I kept telling her to play along, but she was a fighter.’
Cook looked towards the carnage in the Anderson shelter.
‘What happened in there?’ he asked.
‘I put an end to it,’ she said. ‘Disgusting business. All those girls.’
Cook felt empty. They’d failed. Worse, they’d come close. A day too late. He thought of the time he’d wasted, watching prostitutes, messing around with gangsters. Spending the night with the American woman. All distractions.
‘She came here when she was younger,’ Cook said.
The woman nodded.
‘Just before Frankie was born,’ he continued. He wanted to see how the woman reacted. She looked down.
