Previous Work by Catherine Ryan Howard
Distress Signals
Short-listed for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger
Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Ryan Howard
E-book published in 2018 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Kathryn Galloway English
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5384-4101-5
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5384-4100-8
Fiction / Mystery & Detective
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
To Dad, for publicity services rendered
* * *
It’s 4:17 a.m. on Saturday morning when Jen comes to on a battered couch in a house somewhere in Rathmines, one of those red-brick terraces that’s been divided into flats, let out to students, and left to rot.
He watches as her face betrays her confusion, but she’s quick to cover it up. How much does she remember? Perhaps the gang leaving the club on Harcourt Street, one behind the other. Pushing their way through the sweaty, drunken crowds, hands gripping the backs of dresses and tugging on the tails of shirts. Maybe she remembers her friend Michelle clutching some guy’s arm at the end of it, calling out to her. Saying they were moving on to some guy’s party, that they could walk there.
“Whose party?” he’d heard her ask.
“Jack’s!” came the shouted answer.
It was unclear whether or not Jen knew Jack, but she followed them anyway.
Now, she’s sitting—slumped—on a sofa in a dark room filled with faces she probably doesn’t recognize. The thin straps of her shimmery black dress stand out against her pale, freckled skin and the makeup around her eyes is smudged and messy. Her lids look heavy. Her head lolls slightly to one side.
Someone swears loudly and flicks a switch, filling the room with harsh, burning light.
Jen squints, then lifts her head until her eyes reach a single bare, dusty bulb that hangs from the ceiling. Back down to the floor in front of her. A guy is crawling around on all fours, searching for something. She frowns at him.
This place is disgusting. The carpet is old and stained. There are broken bits of chips, hairs, and cigarette ash nestled deep in its pile. It hasn’t been laid. Instead, the floor is covered with large, loose sections of carpet, ragged and frayed at the edges, with patches of dusty bare floor showing in between. The couch faces a fireplace that’s been blocked off with chipboard, while an area of green paint on the otherwise magnolia chimney breast marks where a mantelpiece once stood. Mismatched chairs—white patio, folding camping accessory, ripped beanbag—are arranged in front of it. Three guys sit in them, passing around a joint.
Another, smaller couch is to Jen’s left. That’s where he sits.
The air is thick with smoke and the only window has no curtains or blinds. The bare glass is dripping with tributaries of condensation.
He can’t wait to leave.
Jen is growing uncomfortable. Her brow is furrowed. He watches as she clasps her hands between her thighs and hunches her shoulders. She shifts her weight on the couch. Her gaze fixes on each of the three smokers in turn, studying their faces. Does she know any of them? She turns her head to take in the rest of the room—
And stops.
She’s seen them.
To the right of the fireplace, too big to fit fully into the depression between the chimney breast and the room’s side wall, stands an American-style fridge/freezer, gone yellow-white and stuck haphazardly with a collection of garish magnets.
Jen blinks at it.
A fridge in a living room can’t be that unusual to her. As any student looking for an affordable place to rent in Dublin quickly discovers, fridges free-standing in the middle of living rooms adjacent to tiny kitchens are, apparently, all the rage. But if Jen can find a clearing in the fog in her head, she’ll realize there’s something very familiar about this one.
She’s distracted by the boy sitting next to her. Looks to be her age, nineteen or twenty. He nudges her, asks if she’d like another drink. She doesn’t respond. A moment later he nudges her again and this time she turns toward him.
The boy nods toward the can of beer she’s holding in her right hand, mouths, Another one?
Jen seems surprised to find the beer can there. Tilting it lazily, she says something that sounds like, “I haven’t finished this one yet.”
The boy gets up. He’s wearing scuffed suede shoes with frayed laces, jeans, and a blue and white striped shirt, unbuttoned, with a T-shirt underneath. Only a thin slice of the T-shirt is visible, but it seems the design on it is a famous movie poster. Black, yellow, red. After he leaves, Jen relaxes into the space he’s vacated, sinking down until she can rest the back of her head against a cushion. She closes her eyes—
Opens them up again, suddenly. Pushes palms down flat on the couch, scrambling into an upright position. Stares at the fridge.
This is it.
Her mouth falls open slightly and then the can in her hand drops to the floor, falls over and rolls underneath the couch. Its contents spill out, spread out, making a glug-glug-glug sound as they do. She makes no move to pick it up. She doesn’t seem to realize it’s fallen.
Unsteadily, Jen gets to her feet, pausing for a second to catch her balance on towering heels. She takes a step, two, three forward, until she’s within touching distance of the fridge door. There, she stops and shakes her head, as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing.
And who could blame her?
Those are her magnets.
The ones her airline pilot mother has been bringing home for her since she was a little girl. A pink Eiffel Tower. A relief of the Grand Canyon. The Sydney Opera House. The Colosseum in Rome. A Hollywood Boulevard star with her name on it.
The magnets that should be clinging to the microwave back in her apartment in Halls, in the kitchen she shares with Michelle. That were there when she left it earlier this evening.
Jen mumbles something incoherent and then she’s moving, stumbling back from the fridge, turning toward the door, hurrying out of the room, leaving behind her coat and bag, which had been underneath her on the couch all this time.
No one pays any attention to her odd departure. The party-goers are all too drunk or too stoned or both, and it is too dark, too late, too early. If anyone notices, they don’t care enough to be interested. He wonders how guilty they’ll feel about this when, in the days to come, they are forced to admit to the Gardaí what little they know.
He counts to ten as slowly as he can stand to before he rises from his seat, collects Jen’s coat and bag, and follows her out of the house.
She’ll be headed home. A thirty-minute walk because she’ll never flag down a taxi around here. On deserted, dark streets because this is the quietest hour, that strange one after most of the pub and club patrons have fallen asleep in their beds but before the city’s early-risers have woken up in theirs. And her journey will take her alongside the Grand Canal, where the black water can look level with the street and where there isn’t always a barrier to prevent you from falling in and where the street lights can be few and far between.
He can’t let her go by herself. And he won’t, because he’s a gentleman. A gentleman who doesn’t let young girls walk home alone from parties when they’v
e been drinking enough to forget their coat, bag, and—he lifts the flap on the little velvet envelope, checks inside—keys, college ID, and phone too.
And he wants to make sure Jen knows that.
Mr. Nice Guy, he calls himself.
He hopes she will too.
will, now
The words floated up out of the background noise, slowly rearranging the molecules of Will’s attention, pulling on it, demanding it, until all trace of sleep had been banished and he was sitting up in bed, awake and alert.
Gardaí are appealing for witnesses after the body of St. John’s College student Jennifer Madden, nineteen, was recovered from the Grand Canal early yesterday morning—
It was coming from a radio. Tuned to a local station, it sounded like; a national one would probably have reminded listeners that the Grand Canal was in Dublin. The rest of the news bulletin had been drowned out by the shrill ring of a telephone.
As per the rules, the door to Will’s room was propped open. He leaned forward now until he could see through the doorway and out into the corridor. The nurses’ station was directly opposite. Alek was standing there, holding his laminated ID to his chest with one hand as he reached across the counter to pick up the phone with the other.
In the moment between the silencing of the phone’s ring and Alek’s voice saying, “Unit Three,” Will caught another snippet—“head injury”—and by then he was up, standing, trying to decide what to do.
Wondering if there was anything he could do.
Unsure whether he should do anything at all.
He decided to speak to Alek. They were friends, or at least what qualified as friends in here. Friendly. Will waited until the nurse had finished on the phone before he crossed the corridor.
“My main man,” Alek said when he saw him. “They said you were sleeping in there.” Alek was Polish but losing more and more of his accent with each passing year. Five so far, he’d been working here. The last four in Unit Three. “You feeling okay?”
“I was just reading,” Will said. “Must have dozed off.”
“Anything good?”
Will shrugged. “Can’t have been, can it?”
Alek picked a clipboard up off the counter and started scanning the schedule attached to it. “Shouldn’t you be in with Dr. Carter right now?”
The news bulletin had moved on to the weather. Rain and wind were forecast. In keeping with tradition, the disembodied voice joked, tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day parade would be a soggy one.
Will hadn’t realized that was tomorrow. It was hard to keep a hold of what day of the week it was, let alone dates and months.
“That got moved to three,” he said. “I think because she has a court thing …?”
Alek looked up from the clipboard. Patients shouldn’t know anything about what the staff did outside of the high-security unit but Will had just revealed to Alek that he did.
If Alek was going to reprimand Will for it, now would be the time.
But Alek let the moment—and the breach—pass.
He treated Will differently than the others. They all did. That’s how Will knew his counselor had a court appearance in the first place. She’d let it slip at the end of their last session when she was advising him of the schedule change, less careful with him than with her other patients. He appreciated this differential treatment and never took it for granted. He felt like he’d earned it over the last ten years. He’d never caused them any trouble. He’d always done whatever he was told.
And now he was going to have to take advantage.
Will checked the corridor. No one else was around. Mornings were for counseling and group sessions; Will wouldn’t be here either if it wasn’t for Dr. Carter’s trip to court.
It was pure chance he’d heard the bulletin.
“Ah, Alek,” Will started. “The radio—”
“Oh, shit.” Alek dropped the clipboard onto the counter and moved in behind it, reaching up for the little transistor radio sitting on the top shelf. The radio clicked off. “Sorry. That isn’t what woke you up, is it?”
“No, no,” Will said. “It’s fine. I was just going to ask you—were you listening to the news just now?” Alek raised an eyebrow, suspicious. “I thought I heard something there about the, ah, about the canal?”
A beat passed.
Alek picked up his clipboard again. “I wouldn’t worry about it, man.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I was just wondering …” Will paused, swallowed hard for effect. “Was it about me?”
“About you?” Alek shook his head. “No. What made you think that?”
“We’re coming up on ten years, aren’t we? I thought maybe it was something to do with that.”
“It’s not.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Alek looked at him for a long moment, as if trying to decide something. Then he sighed and said, “That was Blue FM. They do their news at ten to.” He met Will’s eyes. “It’s almost one. I’ll put on a different channel.”
“Thanks,” Will said. “I really—”
“Don’t thank me, because I didn’t do this.” He reached up and switched the radio back on, moving the dial until he found a station promising a lunchtime news bulletin after the break. Then he took a seat behind the counter and pushed a leaflet about the benefits of mindfulness toward Will. “Pretend you’re reading that, at least.”
It was the top story.
The leaflet’s text blurred in front of Will’s eyes as he banked each detail. Jennifer Madden. A St. John’s College student. A first-year, going by her age. Found in the Grand Canal near Charlemont Luas station yesterday, having last been seen at a house party in Rathmines on Saturday night. Gardaí are treating her death as suspicious. Believed to have suffered a head injury before going into the water. Anyone with information should call the incident room at Harcourt Terrace.
And thanks to the weather report, Will could add another detail: this had happened a few days before St. Patrick’s Day.
Warm relief flooded his veins.
Finally, after all these years, it was happening.
And just in the nick of time, too.
“Alek,” he said, leaning over the counter, “I need to speak to the Gardaí. Right now.”
alison, now
They came to my door the morning after Sal’s dinner party.
I was still suffering. It’d been a St. Patrick’s Day one, held in my honor, me being the sole Irish member of our group. Sal and I had drifted into a motley crew of ex-pats who’d bound themselves to an arrangement to get together once every couple of months, taking it in turns to be Chief Organizer. There was a core group of six or seven who could be relied upon to show up, and then several more who occasionally surprised us. We called ourselves “The EUs” because while we could claim nationalities in nine different countries, they were all within a train ride or Ryanair flight of our adopted home. One of Sal’s goals in life was to infiltrate Breda’s American ex-pat community and convince at least some of them to join our gang.
I’d arrived early to help Sal and Dirk set up, but was forbidden from doing anything except sitting on their sofa holding a champagne flute of something Instagram had apparently claimed was called a Black Velvet. It looked a bit like bubbly Guinness. I don’t actually like Guinness, but I kept that tidbit to myself. Instead, I watched as Sal, looking like a 1950s housewife in her belted green dress, bright red lipstick, and neat blonde bun, unloaded a bag of garish decorations onto her dining table: gold confetti, rainbow-colored novelty straws and serviettes with cartoon leprechauns on them.
“Classy,” I remarked.
“They are compared to what else was on offer,” Sal said. “You can thank your lu
cky charms I didn’t get any hats.”
“You know ‘lucky charms’ is more of an American thing, right? A breakfast cereal? We don’t actually say that.”
“Is a rant about ‘Patty’s Day’ coming next?”
“No, I’ll wait until everyone else gets here for that. They all need to hear it.”
Sal rolled her eyes. “Something to look forward to, then.”
“I still can’t believe you’re throwing a dinner party,” I said. “Even if it is one with novelty straws and leprechauns. You’re such a grown-up.”
“Don’t remind me.” Sal paused to appraise her table. It was set for twelve, an impressive showing for The EUs. “We own white goods, Ali. White goods. And then there’s this bloody thing.” She held up her left hand, wiggling her ring finger. The platinum band glinted under the ceiling lights. “I’m still not used to it.”
They’d only been married a month. Dismissive of tradition, Sal had had her wedding here, forcing her family to travel over from London. The skin on her forearms was still lightly browned from their honeymoon in the Maldives, and I hadn’t yet worked my way through all the luxury toiletries she’d swiped for me from the bathroom of the five-star resort they’d stayed in. My bridesmaid dress was still at the dry cleaner’s.
The doorbell went then and Sal hurried out of the room to answer it. I wondered where Dirk was, then realized he must be the one making all the clattering sounds coming from the kitchen.
I took a tentative sip of my drink and discovered it was, literally, bubbly Guinness. Guinness topped with champagne. A crime against both substances. I was grimacing at the sour aftertaste when the door to the living room opened and an attractive man I’d never seen before walked in, closely followed by Sal, smiling demonically and making suggestive faces at me behind his back.
“This,” she announced, “is Stephen.”
I knew what was coming before she said it: Stephen was Irish too. He had that look about him. Not the red-headed, freckled one we’re famous for, but the more typical reality: pale skin, blue eyes, black hair. Sal had found another one of us and she seemed very excited about it. As she explained that he was a colleague of Dirk’s, that he’d just moved here a fortnight ago, that he didn’t really know anyone yet but we’d snared him for our group now and did I mind sharing my Guest of Honor spot with him for the evening, I realized why: she thought she’d found him for me.
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