The Scholar

by Dervla McTiernan

  ‘She might as well hear it,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is you’ve come to tell us, she’ll have to deal with it soon enough.’

  Cormac nodded, his eyes on the little girl. Geraldine didn’t look up, seemed to be completely absorbed in her work.

  ‘I’m very sorry to tell you that Della was hit by a car on Friday night,’ Cormac said. ‘Her injuries were severe and she passed away at the scene. I’m so very sorry for your loss.’ His voice was as gentle as he could make it. He hated to do this. Hated to steal away hope and love. Eileen Lambert was not a good person, had certainly not had an easy relationship with her daughter. But some part of her, at least, must have loved her daughter.

  At first, the expression on Eileen Lambert’s face didn’t change. Then she spoke. ‘You knew this, didn’t you? When you came here the other day.’ Eileen twisted her face into a grimace, and her voice, though still quiet, was vicious. ‘Della was already dead, wasn’t she? And you knew it. You kept it from me on purpose.’

  As the tone of Eileen’s voice changed, Geraldine picked up her colouring page, curled her hand around three or four crayons, and silently left the room. She didn’t look at her mother, or Cormac or Fisher. Just left. Fisher caught Cormac’s eye, waited a moment, then followed.

  ‘Della’s injuries made it difficult to identify her,’ Cormac said, when the door closed behind them. ‘When we were here last we knew it was a possibility that Della was the victim we were trying to identify, but at that stage it was only one of a number of possibilities. That’s why we asked you to sign the release for Della’s dental records. The confirmation of Della’s identity came in less than an hour ago, and our first action was to come and tell you what we had found out.’

  ‘I suppose you want me to thank you, do you? For telling me that my daughter is dead.’ Eileen held the tea towel in one hand; she pressed it to her eyes, her breathing ragged.

  Cormac pulled a seat out from the table. ‘You should sit, Eileen. I know this must be a terrible shock.’ She allowed him to lead her to the chair, her body rigid. Her eyes when she let the tea towel fall away were painfully dry. She sat and stared into space, and Cormac sat too, waiting. A minute passed and she said nothing, asked no questions.

  ‘Della was at the university when she died. It was Friday night, not too late. We think around 10 p.m. Do you have any idea what she would have been doing at the university at that time?’

  ‘What?’ Eileen looked at him, and there was confusion in her eyes – genuine, if he had to call it. ‘At the college?’

  ‘Yes. On the road just beside the university chapel. Do you know of any reason why she would have gone there?’

  Eileen shook her head. ‘Della didn’t go to university. She was a waitress.’

  ‘You told me before that she did attend once, a couple of years back. She couldn’t have gone back to study?’

  ‘She didn’t like it. Della dropped out just after Christmas her first year. Didn’t even tell her father or me. She got a job without telling us, got a flat, then moved out. She told Paul what she was doing, and we had to hear it from him. She didn’t want to study anymore, she told him. Wanted a job so she could have her independence.’

  Fisher had gone looking for Geraldine. He didn’t find her in the small, cluttered living room, so he turned and went up the stairs. The carpet felt sticky underfoot. As he reached the top of the stairs he found himself locking eyes with Paul Lambert. The boy was sitting on the edge of his bed, his bedroom door wide open. His face was very pale, his shoulders rigid with tension.

  ‘Della’s dead, isn’t she?’ The boy’s voice was tight, rasping.

  ‘I came to look for Geraldine,’ Fisher said. ‘Make sure she’s okay.’

  ‘She’ll be in her room. Ger knows to get out of the way when trouble’s brewing. Della’s dead, isn’t she?’

  Fisher hesitated. He should leave notification to Reilly, but there was no point in denying the truth now, when the boy had obviously either overheard or figured it out. ‘I’m very sorry,’ Fisher said.

  Paul nodded once, grimly. He blinked hard, but tears escaped and slipped down his face. ‘That was Della’s body you found on Friday night, wasn’t it? I read about it online. About you not being able to identify her. Because of her injuries.’ Paul bent over double at the last, the pain of his grief suddenly and violently contracting his body. He sobbed and sobbed again, then straightened himself. He tried to pull himself together, gasping in a deep breath and shuddering, scrubbing tears from his face with the sleeve of his jumper. After a few moments his breathing slowed to a more normal rhythm, but his tears kept coming.

  Fisher shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sorry it took us so long. If you hadn’t come forward it would have taken longer. I’m so sorry for your loss, Paul.’

  ‘It’s so shit,’ Paul said. ‘She’d only just got out of here, and then this happens.’ He pulled in another deep breath, forced himself to sit upright.

  Fisher let his eyes wander around the bedroom. It was very clean, very tidy. The walls were painted a grubby magnolia, but the bed was neatly made. There was a desk in the corner. Lots of books on the desk, on the bookshelves. Tattered copies of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula Le Guin. A neat stack of books too on the desk, though these were textbooks.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Paul. It seems like you and Della were close.’

  Paul scrubbed again roughly at tears that kept coming. ‘She was my sister.’ His tone said of course, as if there was no question, as if all siblings were close. Fisher was an only child, but he had plenty of friends from big families, and besides that had been a cop long enough to have seen sibling rivalry taken to the extreme.

  ‘Where’s your dad?’ Fisher asked. ‘Can I call him, get him home for you?’

  ‘He’s gone for a walk. That’s all he ever does since he lost the shop, just goes walking for hours and hours. He never takes a phone, so you can’t call him. He doesn’t want to be here. None of us do.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Paul,’ Fisher said again, after a pause. He shifted his weight, wished for a moment that Reilly had come up here with him, or maybe Carrie O’Halloran. She was good with the younger ones. The ones that got under your skin. He wanted to ask Paul why he wasn’t in school, but it wasn’t the time. Paul looked up at him. ‘She was so smart, you know? Della was so good, and so smart. You’d think if anyone would be safe out in the world it would have been Della. But if you’re a good person, it’s like you’re a magnet for the shitheads.’

  Fisher blinked. He leaned against the door jamb, looked the boy over carefully. ‘Were there bad people in Della’s life?’

  Paul stared at him, eyes raw and red-rimmed, for what felt like a long time. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in the end. ‘Della doesn’t … didn’t have friends, not really. She wasn’t lonely or anything. She just … liked different stuff. She wasn’t the same as everyone else …’

  ‘If there’s anything you want to tell me,’ Fisher said carefully. ‘Anything at all. I’d like to hear it.’

  A spasm of frustration and grief crossed Paul’s face. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said. ‘That’s why I came to you, wasn’t it?’ He screwed his eyes shut in an effort to stop the tears, but they kept coming, a raw, hard manifestation of his grief. ‘Can you just go?’ he asked. ‘Please?’

  Fisher wanted to stay, offer the lad a bit of comfort. But there was nothing he could say that would make things better. And he was here as a policeman, not as a friend. He couldn’t switch that part of his brain off. If he stayed to talk he’d be watching, analysing everything Paul Lambert said, and right now, in this moment, something about that felt dirty.

  ‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ Fisher said. He pulled a card from his pocket and gave it to the boy. ‘Some people will come and talk to you in the next few days. It might be me, it might be someone else. But if you need to speak to me at any time, you’ll get me on that number, all right?’ The boy took the card without looking at it, and Fisher retreated q
uietly, pulling the door closed behind him.

  He opened the door to the second bedroom as quietly as he could. Geraldine was there all right, playing with dolls, her back to the door. Her room was very different from Paul’s. The bed could barely be seen under the weight of soft toys. An empty packet of Jacob’s cream crackers stuck out from under the bed. She must have felt the weight of his presence. She turned and looked at him seriously.

  ‘Do you want to play?’ she asked. ‘You can have a turn of my best Barbie.’

  Fisher took a seat beside her on the carpet.

  Downstairs Eileen Lambert had started to clean the kitchen. She clattered the dishes in jerky movements, but her eyes were dry.

  ‘Where was Della working?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘At that coffee place, off Shop Street. The Long Bean. Something like that.’

  ‘You’ve never been there?’ Cormac asked.

  She shook her head, looked away.

  ‘We spoke to the manager,’ Cormac said. ‘He said he’s worked there for over a year himself, and he had no memory at all of Della.’

  Eileen shook her head again, her mouth set in a grim line.

  ‘Della didn’t tell you about a change of job? Didn’t say anything in passing?’

  ‘Della never told me anything. Why would she? I was only her mother.’ Distress in her voice, getting louder.

  ‘When did you last speak to her?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘January,’ Eileen said stiffly. ‘Or it might have been February.’

  Cormac was silent for a long moment, waited for the tension to ebb a little before he spoke again. ‘Can I call your husband for you? Or a friend?’

  She looked towards the front door. ‘He’ll be walking,’ she said. ‘He’ll be home soon enough.’ She looked down at her hands, then stood abruptly, pushed her chair back under the table, and turned to Cormac, the expression on her face tight and closed.

  Cormac stood too. ‘Della was living in an expensive apartment. The rent would have been more than she could have afforded on a waitress’s salary. Did you or your husband support her at all? Or did she have other money, independently?’

  ‘We didn’t give Della any money. She was old enough to support herself. She could have lived here, could have kept going to college, but she chose to leave and the first thing she did was get her own place. After that she was on her own.’ Eileen looked towards the door. Her face twisted in sudden, furious anger. ‘Get out of my house,’ she said, her voice low and vicious. ‘I’ve answered your questions, as best I can. Have some decency and leave us alone to grieve.’

  ‘The key to it has to be the money, doesn’t it?’ said Fisher, as they made their way back to the station. ‘Chances are it was something illegal, whatever she did that got her paid.’

  Cormac nodded, but said nothing. His mind was occupied with sorting through his impressions of the house, of the family.

  ‘But what, like?’ Fisher asked. ‘D’you think it might be drugs? The books in her room, they were all about chemistry, weren’t they? Do you think it could be a meth thing?’

  ‘It’s an idea,’ Cormac said, half-listening.

  Fisher cast him a sideways glance. ‘An idea, but not a very good one?’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s impossible.’ Cormac gave up on the introspection, came back to the conversation. ‘But I keep going back to the ID in her back pocket.’

  ‘You think her death is connected to the Darcy girl?’

  ‘I think the money and the ID make it a strong possibility. I want to find a connection between those girls. I think Carline has been lying to us, and if she has we need to prove it.’

  ‘So where do we go from here?’

  ‘Start with the financials,’ Cormac said. ‘Get bank statements for Della Lambert, see if there’s any unusual activity on her account. If we’re very lucky something will show up there.’

  ‘And the Darcy girl?’

  Cormac shook his head. ‘No basis for a warrant, and we have to step carefully with her.’ He left out the fact that Murphy had warned him off. Fisher had been around long enough to read the lay of the land. They pulled into the station.

  ‘I’ve somewhere I need to be. Get started on the warrant for the financials. If you need help McCarthy will walk you through it.’

  ‘Before you go …’ Fisher said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Paul Lambert was upstairs. I spoke to him in his room. He’d either overheard or figured out that Della was dead. He was upset, understandably.’ Fisher looked a little tense, as if expecting a bollocking.

  ‘Right,’ Cormac said. ‘Why wasn’t he at school?’ He would have preferred to tell the boy himself, if the opportunity was there, but there wasn’t much Fisher could have done about that.

  ‘I didn’t ask him,’ Fisher said. ‘He didn’t look sick, just, you know … he was obviously upset. He was crying.’

  ‘Right.’ Cormac asked Fisher to run through his impressions of Paul, everything the boy had said and how he’d looked when he’d said it, but he was listening with only half an ear. His mind was elsewhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Cormac got home after seven, and Emma was there before him. She was in the living room, curled up on the couch in pyjamas and one of his old jumpers, watching television. She turned to smile at him as he entered, but the smile fell away as she took in his appearance.

  ‘You look awful,’ she said. ‘Did something happen?’

  ‘It’s just been a long one.’

  He sat beside her, she pushed her feet under his leg, wriggled her toes against him.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  He put a hand on her leg, let his head drop back against the couch. ‘Let’s talk about something else. How’s everything at work?’ He spoke without thinking. The last thing he wanted to do was interrogate her. But he felt like the words hung in the air between them, and when he turned to look at her he was struck by the weariness in her face. She wasn’t sleeping – the last few nights the nightmares had been as bad as they’d ever been. She didn’t say anything for a long moment.

  ‘This whole Galway thing, it’s been a disaster for you, hasn’t it? This move,’ Emma asked. She’d picked up on his mood, maybe misinterpreted the reason for it.

  Cormac paused. Emma knew that things at the station had been challenging. They’d spoken about it, more than once, but he’d kept the full truth from her. She didn’t realise how unusual it was that he’d been kept to working cold cases for a full year. She didn’t realise how strained his relationship with Murphy had become. In Galway he had the constant sense that things were not exactly right, that everything was slightly off kilter. A year had passed and he still didn’t know his team well enough to trust them. Murphy may finally have given him a live case but he’d given it reluctantly and he was looking over Cormac’s shoulder. It might be paranoia, but Cormac wondered if he was being set up to fail. Or did the problem lie with him? After what had happened the previous year he found it harder to trust anyone in the station. But he didn’t want to share any of that with Emma. He wanted her to feel that she could rely on him. Besides which, he wanted to stay positive. He was sure that with enough time, he could get things on the right track.

  ‘Emma.’ He waited until she looked at him properly. ‘Moving to Galway was my decision as much as yours.’

  ‘I know, yeah. I know it was.’

  ‘I was ready to leave the special detectives unit. I’d been working out of the same office, with essentially the same bunch of people, for over twelve years.’

  Something in his tone had caught her attention. She was really listening now.

  ‘We were getting bogged down in process. Every operation was the same as the last one. Systems of cross-checking information back and forth before we take an action. We’d turned into a bunch of statisticians, doing … what did you call it? Backstrapping?’

  She smiled. ‘Bootstrapping the data.’

  ‘Exactly. There was very l
ittle room for intuition. For following your instinct and an unlikely lead. I’m not saying it wasn’t work worth doing, but there was no challenge in it for me anymore. No satisfaction.’ He’d started talking to try to cheer her up. But as he spoke he realised there was truth in his words. It wasn’t all bullshit, he had been ready to leave. And one year down the line, even with everything that had happened, wasn’t he doing more actual police work than he had in years?

  ‘Why haven’t you said any of this before?’ Emma asked, looking at him steadily. ‘About Dublin, I mean. I’ve thought you must be missing it.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve missed having live cases. I’m not going to pretend working thirty-year-old cold cases is where I want my career to be. But I don’t miss the SDU. I don’t miss Dublin Castle. And now I’m running cases again, things are good. There’s real talent on the team. Fisher, for starters, but some of the younger ones too.’

  He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her closer, but she leaned back, keeping a bit of distance between them. Her eyes searched his face.

  ‘You wouldn’t go back to Dublin, if you could? If we both went, I mean. Or somewhere else, abroad even.’

  Cormac shook his head. ‘Galway is home now,’ he said. ‘Whatever comes our way, we’ll sort it. There’re bound to be … challenges. We just have to give it time to work itself out.’

  She looked at him for another long moment, as if trying to assess whether or not he was telling the truth, then she kissed him briefly, and relaxed against him, laying her head on his chest.

  ‘We should talk more,’ she said. ‘Life gets so busy, and sometimes I look up and days have gone by since we’ve really talked to each other.’

  Emma’s eyes were closed but there was a trace of tension in her face. Cormac felt disconcerted. Had he read her right? Something was bothering her. Maybe it was something more than just the Galway move. Before he could say anything she’d given him a final hug, then sat back, putting distance again between them.