He watched the story unfold in the papers. The first report appeared the day after he arrived, the last just as he left. The whole tragedy spanned the two weeks he spent in Cork, sorting through his mother’s effects and tying up the loose ends of her life. Reading the papers at lunchtime in Ryan’s pub down the road and catching up on the details of the case was a break from the depressing but necessary business in hand. The first report was short and simply noted the discovery. By the next morning it had made the front page.
 
All the papers agreed on the essential details. Michael O’Sullivan had left the pub at 11.30pm fuelled by several pints of stout. His way home took him along the well-lit river path. Halfway home he spotted something tangled in the sticks at the water’s edge. He fished it out thinking it was a doll and might make a present for his daughter. But it wasn’t a doll at all. It was a baby.“I’ve never sobered up so fast in all my life,” was the quote all the papers had.
 
Over the next few days, the story caught fire. By the end of the second day, every paper in Ireland was leading with it. He read it all with an uneasy fascination. He found it put his own misery into some sort of perspective. However sad his mother’s death, and however much he felt her loss, this was a real tragedy. The child was barely six months old.The parents must be going through a living hell, he thought.
 
Lorna and Joe Macrae were an ordinary couple. Neighbours said so. On the day baby Bella went missing, Joe Macrae was out at work and Lorna had just finished the ironing. The television was on low and baby Bella was asleep on the sofa having her afternoon nap. Lorna went upstairs to put away the freshly ironed things in the bedroom drawers. She was gone for a minute, maybe two. When she returned baby Bella had gone.The living-room door which led out onto the patio and garden was open, but the garden gate that led on to the river path was firmly closed as it always was, and the handle was high up as a safety precaution against children wandering into danger. According to a mixture of police reports and the stories of neighbours that the press had gathered, Lorna had frantically searched her house, her garden, and everywhere, but baby Bella had simply vanished. She had called in her neighbour who helped her search again. Still finding nothing, she telephoned the police and Joe, her husband, who rushed back from work.
 
During the day he kept the radio on to keep up on the bulletins, but alsoto take the edge off his tendency to plunge down into a deep and painful grief as he looked through old photographs.The distraction of the baby Bella story somehow kept him on an even keel. He worked his way through all his mother’s papers in the living room and even found some of his dad’s things at the back of the bureau. One or two of these he kept to bring back with him.
 
It was on the fifth day that Lorna and Joe Macrae emerged from their house to go to baby Bella’s funeral. The media interest was extraordinary. Joe dived into the car, but Lorna stopped to talk to the press who were out in force. She called for witnesses to come forward. Somebody must have seen something, she said. But it was her appearance that changed everything. Lorna Macrae was tall, dark-haired and startlingly pretty.  The world expected to see a woman haggard and tortured in appearance.What they got was a perfectly groomed, quietly spoken, well-dressed young woman who looked very sexy in black and appeared to be unaffected by what must have been, should have been the papers pointed out, the most harrowing experience of her life. Her manner was calm and collected (some said cold and emotionless) both going to and coming back from the funeral.
 
The press smelt blood, and the story gathered pace. A series of leaks to the newspapers (presumably from police ranks) revealed that investigators had found no evidence of abduction. Another story suggested that the initial emergency call to the police was anything but hysterical (which would have been understandable). The inference was clear: this was not a woman demented with grief and loss. Reports in the press used the language of speculation but their tone invited suspicion.
 
His lunchtime visits to Ryan’s and his avaricious reading of the papers punctuated the days spent arranging matters with the bank or working through the backlog of paperwork. Everyone seemed to need a copy of his mother’s death certificate. Undertakers, monumental masons, florists and caterers all had to be paid. He felt able now to write to the many people who had sent cards or had attended the funeral. He had to buy a huge roll of black bags and sort out her clothes, which needed to be folded, packed and taken to the local charity shop. He had a bonfire in the back garden and burned all
the private letters from her youth as well as the adoption papers, which he had finally tracked down in her bedside cabinet. It was a very busy time, but not an easy one.
 
The Sunday newspapers took an analytical view of the baby Bella story and described for the first time the full sequence of events. A graphic illustrated the position of the house, the path and river, as well as the point at which Michael O’Sullivan had found Bella’s body, about half a mile downstream. Encouraged by a sustained trickle of gossip (one of Lorna Macrae’s boyfriends from before her marriage, described her as “sex-mad and selfish”. People were now finding it hard to imagine that she was not involved in her daughter’s death. A common thing to hear in Ryan’s among the lunchtime drinkers was that people do not just sneak into a house, grab a baby and toss it into a river.Why do it? What would the motive be? There was simply no evidence to show that this had occurred. Then Joe Macrae dropped a bombshell. He let it be known, through friends, that he wanted a divorce from Lorna and suggested it was because she was repeatedly unfaithful. No specifics were given.
 
Just in time for the evening TV bulletins, Lorna stepped out of her house to talk to the press for a second time. Retaining the same composure in front of the cameras, and smiling unnecessarily, she looked what people felt she was, free and easy. She denied any suggestion of impropriety and said this was a very difficult time for her husband and herself, but Bella’s death had been unconnected to their private difficulties. No tears, no breaks in her voice, no emotion. It was a compelling moment. It was no surprise when she was called in for questioning, and the next day Lorna Macrae was charged
with the murder of her infant daughter, Bella. Speculation about the motive filled the papers every day for the next week. Some said that Lorna had done it because her husband was thinking of leaving her and she needed to be free. Others suggested Lorna had got fed up with having to look after a baby and wanted to be rid of it. Every possible suggestion from sleep deprivation to the baby blues was put forward to explain Lorna’s horrific infanticide. To one group she was a repressed woman, terrorised by a bullying husband, to another, a brazen and shameless tart who couldn’t give a damn about her child. It seemed clear that no-one knew the real reason and in the absence of knowledge the most commonly held opinion was that Lorna was simply mad.
 
On the same day she was arraigned, he received a call from the solicitors to say that probate had finally been granted and the money transferred. It was time to go. He caught a plane back to London the next morning, happy in the knowledge that by burning his mother’s papers, the last existing links had been destroyed. He wondered if Lorna knew she had been given for adoption. Now the adoption papers were ashes, Lorna could never find out who her mother had been. She would never know she had a brother, and with the death of Bella, there would never be any other claim on the money.
 
As he settled down to sleep that night, he speculated that Lorna would spend the next 30 years in jail – well out of harm’s way. Thirty years would be the minimum for murdering her baby – the child he had so easily and so gently lifted up while her mother was upstairs putting the ironing away. The child whose eyes were still closed in sleep as he had slipped her into the river and walked away.