The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Malone looked down the hall. I did too. Will was being led out of the room where we’d had our meeting, flanked by an angry-looking O’Neill and an annoyed-looking Shaw. Alek followed behind, smiling at me apologetically before following the rest of them around the corner and out of sight.

  Malone looked back at me. “The thing is, Alison …” He bit his lip. “When Will says he’s innocent, I think he might be telling the truth.”

  * * *

  Sundays, they’re for fishing.

  This one is cold with painfully bright sun. He rises early, does his exercises and drives to three different newsagents so he can buy a copy of every Sunday paper without drawing attention to himself. He leaves his coat in his car at the first one, pulls on a woolen hat before entering the second and wears his coat going into the last. Everywhere has security cameras these days.

  He parks then at a blustery Sandymount Strand, facing the sea, the gray cement of the Poolbeg chimneys an anomaly against the expanse of blue sky. Only runners and dog-walkers are on the seafront path this early in the morning, and his is one of just six vehicles in the car park.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, he scans each page of each newspaper until the tips of his right thumb and forefinger are black with ink.

  Jennifer has slipped from the front pages but there is no shortage of coverage inside. A few of the glossy magazine supplements have longer features reminding everyone what happened ten years ago, drawing comparisons, asking what the connection could be. For Jennifer, they have photos credited to Instagram accounts, condolences shared on Facebook, and a screenshot of her final, inane tweet (Getting ready is the best bit about going out. It’s all downhill from here!), granted an undeserving resonance now by her dying less than ten hours later. The writers all ask the same question—why?—even though the answer is right there, all over their pages. There is, however, some talk of a curfew being imposed on St. John’s students. That’s something.

  Just before ten o’clock, he leaves the car at the beach and starts the walk to the coffee shop to see Amy. It will take about twenty minutes, he thinks. She’ll be there by then.

  At Pembroke Road a young girl dressed all in black—a work uniform, he thinks—crosses to his side of the road and falls into step a few feet behind him. She’s talking loudly on the phone. He stops, pulls his own phone from a pocket and frowns at the screen, letting her overtake him. It’s just as he suspected: white buds are fixed in her ears, the cord threaded through her fingers, one short stretch held close to her mouth with her right index and middle fingers. That’s why she’s talking so loudly—because she doesn’t realize she is. And she looks like she’s talking to herself too, but she either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care.

  He doesn’t get this, this epidemic. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people, walking around the streets of Dublin doing exactly the same thing. It drives him crazy. Just this past week he’d been passing a restaurant when a woman walked out its door and said, “Well, hello!” and he’d stopped and turned toward her, thinking she was addressing him, thinking she was someone he knew from work, maybe. He saw the little white buds just in time.

  And they all talk so loudly, these earbud people. You can hear everything they say from several steps behind. Don’t they realize the information they’re giving away to anyone who cares to collect it? Don’t they read the papers? Don’t they see what’s going on?

  Really, he should do something. Draw this girl’s attention to the risks she’s taking, to the potential danger she’s putting herself in.

  But he has to go see Amy.

  The coffee shop is just off Upper Baggot Street and huge, a big open space filled with overstuffed armchairs and communal tables. It’s supposed to have a rustic, recycled look to it, but in reality everything is brand new, carefully arranged by the chain’s corporate-America overlords.

  He hates the place.

  She’s sitting at one of the communal tables, facing him. He’s not sure it’s her at first, it’s been so long since he’s seen her. He takes his coffee to the condiments stand, slowly selects a brown sugar while watching her out of the corner of his eye.

  It’s her all right. Definitely.

  He chooses a seat on the opposite side of the table, but not directly across from her. There are plenty of empty seats elsewhere in the cafe; it would look suspicious to be any closer. He can’t see any cameras but no doubt there’s some sort of video-feed security system in here too.

  This can’t be a memorable encounter, at least not for anyone but him.

  As he sits down, she glances up at him. But that’s all. Her attention is reserved for her phone. She’s holding it in her right hand, swiping at the screen with her thumb, while taking frequent sips from the cereal-bowl-sized coffee mug in her left. All he can see in it is frothy milk. Two hefty texts with the grubby, off-white page-ends of secondhand books sit on the table in front of her, a St. John’s College academic diary sitting on top of them.

  He takes his own phone out and starts swiping at it.

  He lets a minute pass.

  Then he says, “Sorry—is the Wi-Fi working for you?”

  She looks up at him, frowning slightly, while she absorbs the surprise of the interruption. For a moment he worries she’ll recognize him, remember him from their brief encounter several months before.

  It’s okay if she does. He can just leave her be. It’s not yet too late.

  But she doesn’t.

  She says, “Um … yeah?” and twists her wrist, angling the screen of her phone at him. A square photograph. The familiar banner text across the top. “It’s working fine for me.”

  He smiles. “I bet I’m doing it wrong.”

  He goes back to his phone. Waits until he senses her having gone back to hers.

  Opens up Instagram. Selects search, selects places. The first option in the menu is near current location. He scrolls, but the coffee shop is not listed. St. John’s, however, is. They are less than a block from the main campus entrance. He taps that. Thumbnails of pictures taken on campus fill his phone’s screen.

  “Ah,” he says to Amy. “Working now.”

  She smiles at him briefly.

  He scrolls down, past popular to most recent. There she is, right at the top: a picture of her coffee and her textbooks above a caption complaining that the college library is too cold and doesn’t allow hot drinks. Her username is some nonsense involving a word he can’t make sense of and a string of numbers that seem random. She’s even entered her name as “Aims B’, which explains why he failed to find her on the app just by searching.

  No matter now.

  He should wait until he gets home—and he will, to really study them—but he can’t resist scrolling quickly through her pictures, conducting an initial scan, careful to keep any view of his phone’s screen away from her.

  Book covers. They’ll tell him what classes she’s likely taking, and he can use the St. John’s class schedule, available online if you know where to look, to find out when and where those classes will be.

  Selfies taken in her bedroom show the view from her window. They’ll help him pinpoint which campus accommodation block she’s in, maybe even what floor she lives on.

  Regular postings from repeat locations—a fast-food restaurant, a local park, the dressing room of a high-street clothing store—will fill in the blanks for him about the rest of her daily routine.

  There’s plenty here to add to her file, plenty to add to what he’s already gleaned from her Facebook page. That’s how he found out she was coming here. A friend posted about how horrible the college library was, and Amy commented underneath: That’s why I go to the Starbucks. Warm, wi-fi AND caffeine. Really quiet early on Sunday mornings. (Most peeps in bed hungover?!) You should try it!

  But this, this account, these photos—it is much more valuable. The information they don’t reali
ze they’re sharing always is.

  Sundays, they’re for fishing.

  It’s not even eleven o’clock and he’s already caught all that he needs.

  alison, now

  I opened my eyes expecting to see the hotel entrance, but Malone had parked the car on a suburban street. My neck ached from resting my head against the vertical strap of the seatbelt, my jacket was crumpled in a heap on my lap and the thin material of my T-shirt felt cold and clingy against my back. All I wanted to do was wash the morning off me with a hot shower, crawl back into my hotel bed, and sleep for as long as my body would let me.

  Sleep and forget.

  “Where are we?” I asked Malone.

  In front of us was a complex of seventies-era red-brick apartment blocks, mostly hidden behind leafy green trees. To my left, a row of kegs was stacked outside the entrance to a pub so quaint it could be on a “Greetings from Dublin” postcard. Emerald-green tiles clad the exterior and stained-glass windows protected the patrons’ privacy, preventing passersby from peering inside. It looked like the kind of place that refused to show sports or play music. The kind of place that inspired the Irish pub back in Breda, which enthusiastically advertised the fact that it did both.

  “A good place for breakfast,” he said, opening the driver’s door. He was out of the car before I could tell him I wasn’t hungry, that I didn’t have the energy to be. I grabbed my jacket and got out too, getting a whiff of stale beer as I did.

  As I followed him across the street, I felt a vibration in my jeans pocket: my phone was ringing. Sal, no doubt. I let it go to voicemail and hoped she’d assume I was deep in a codeine-soaked slumber. I should text her soon, though, or she might get worried and call around.

  We’d parked outside a café, a tidy storefront with a green awning stretched out over two sets of chrome table and chairs. The ashtrays on them were filled with rainwater, black cigarette butts floating inside. A few buzz words du jour were stenciled on the café’s windows: fresh, nourish, clean. Inside, only three tables were occupied, all by lone diners. It was uncomfortably quiet. There were no sounds other than our shoes on the floor, the chipping of cutlery against china, and, deep in the background, the smooth patter of talk radio turned down low.

  The hostess greeted us with a wide smile, and I realized we must look like a couple. I briefly fantasized about telling her the truth: that Malone was a Garda detective and I was a serial killer’s ex-girlfriend brought here under false pretences to meet with him for the first time in ten years.

  Best not, though.

  We took the furthest table from the other diners and the door. Malone ordered full Irish breakfasts, overriding my request for no food at all. Two unappetizing plates of greasy fried things appeared in front of us minutes later along with a large glass beaker, the kind they used to have in the science lab at school. This one, mercifully, was filled with filter coffee. I quickly downed a cup’s worth, imagining that I could feel the caffeine bubbling in my bloodstream. I cut up the various pig parts on my plate and moved them around until it looked like there was a little bit less of them than before, just to be polite.

  Then I leaned back in my seat and said: “What’s going on here? Really?”

  Malone wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “We’re the same age. I was a first-year in college back then too. NUI Galway. I went there before I applied to Templemore. I remember sitting with my mother watching the press conference about Will’s arrest on RTÉ, and her turning to my father and saying, ‘It really couldn’t be any worse, could it?’ But”—Malone put his elbows on the table, leaned forward—“it could be, Alison. It could be a lot worse. We could have got the wrong guy.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t have to,” I said, “because it isn’t up to me to decide. Will was arrested because there was evidence that pointed to him, then he confessed, then he pleaded guilty. And a judge had to rubber-stamp the lot, right?” This was the argument I’d always clung to. That it didn’t matter what I thought, because I wasn’t trained in the law or crime detection. I was therefore absolved of all responsibility when it came to determining his guilt. All I had to do was accept the verdict of the ones who were responsible for such decisions and as nonsensical as it had once seemed to me, I didn’t see that I had any choice but to do exactly that. “I don’t see why—or how—him suddenly changing his mind ten years later changes anything.”

  “The new cases,” Malone said. “I can’t talk to you very much about them, because they’re open. But you know we’ve had two and we’re due a third any day. Now, there’s things we can do to try to prevent another one happening. We’re talking to St. John’s about a campus curfew, for example, and we’ll have the canal crawling with plain-clothes officers every night this week—”

  “A campus curfew didn’t work so well last time.”

  “Yes. Well.” Malone cleared his throat. “Even if we stop him, we still need to catch him. As of right now, we’ve nothing to go on. No witnesses to any of his crimes, no physical evidence that we can match to anyone in our database, no motive that we can establish beyond he just wants to do this. It seems he’s stalking them in the run-up to the attacks, yeah, but we don’t know why. Why these girls in particular. We’ve nothing yet that might help us determine who he’s out there following right now. We’ve got analysts building models of these girls’ last days, looking for patterns, connections, but we have mountains of data to get through and we only established a connection between our two victims one week ago. And that kind of thing takes time. We don’t have enough of it.”

  “I understand all that,” I said. “I do. I get why you went to him. But Will was just wasting your time.”

  “The original Canal Killer case,” Malone said, “the team on it, they worked around the clock. For months. They brought in help from other jurisdictions. Other countries, even. They consulted with the FBI. We’re talking about a lot of man-hours, Alison. I’ve seen the files. The boxes take up half a warehouse. If Will is innocent, I can add all that legwork to my case. I can use it. If this is the same guy, I can look for him in there—because he will be in there. He has to be.”

  This sounded like wishful thinking to me.

  “But Will isn’t innocent,” I said.

  “Because he pleaded guilty, there was no trial. The evidence against him was never interrogated in open court. So …” Malone turned up his palms.

  “But a judge has to sign off on it all, right? Or the DPP or whoever. You—or the Gardaí back then, Shaw—they had to prove their case against Will regardless. The evidence was good enough for that. And I don’t know if I mentioned this, but he confessed.”

  “Plenty of people confess to things they didn’t do,” Malone said.

  I made a face. “Even murder?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “And then they stick to that story for ten years or more?”

  “No,” Malone admitted. “That is unusual.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  I picked up my cup of coffee and drained it. Malone remained quiet, twisting his own cup between his fingers. It gave me the opportunity to study his face. He looked tired, I realized. Exhausted, even. The team on this new guy, they were probably working around the clock too.

  “Look,” I said, “I get it. I do. You want to catch this guy. I want you to catch this guy. But this feels like … this feels like clutching at straws. Sorry.”

  “Just imagine for a second,” Malone said, “that Will is innocent.” I couldn’t—wouldn’t—but I didn’t have the energy to argue. “What’s the evidence that suggests otherwise?” Malone pulled a sugar packet out of the cup in the center of the table, pushed his plate to one side and lay the packet down flat in front of him. He tapped it with a finger. “First of all, Will can be connected to all the victims. Both he and they wer
e all students at St. John’s and all living in campus accommodation. One of them, Lauren Murphy—the first one—even lived in the same block as him, on the same floor. And there was, ah, Liz Whelan, his last ...” I tried not to react to this and thankfully Malone pushed on, giving me no opportunity to. “Then we have the folder.” He laid another sugar packet down. “Found in Will’s locker in the lobby of the college library after his arrest. Filled with detailed information on each of the victims, to varying degrees. Not only was the locker secured with a padlock and assigned to Will, but they pulled five prints from its cover that matched those of Will’s left hand.” A third and a fourth sugar packet. “A key forensic find: a spot of dried blood under the desk in Will’s room is a DNA match for Ciara O’Shea, his penultimate victim, although she was found last. Found while he was in Garda custody, in fact. And Liz’s mobile phone records show that she called Will at 3:35 a.m. and that the call lasted for forty-three seconds. But Will says he never spoke to her.”

  “I thought you were arguing that he’s innocent,” I said.

  “I’m about to.”

  “But all that makes it sound—”

  “Open and shut, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “But, all evidence is open to interpretation,” Malone said. “In isolation, what’s the St. John’s connection, really? Going by that logic every one of the school’s six thousand and something students is a suspect too.” He slid one sugar packet away to the side. “And Will knew Liz socially, so the phone call in itself doesn’t prove anything. He might have had the phone in bed, rolled over and pressed the answer button by accident.” Another sugar packet gone. He tapped one of the two left with a finger. “Now the folder, that’s interesting. It was in Will’s locker and his prints were on it. If we stop there, it’s cut and dried. But consider this: the information inside had been typed on A4 pages, on a computer, so there was no handwriting for us to compare. And there were other prints on the cover—lots of them—that we couldn’t identify. And if Will had been handling it a lot, and he would’ve had to in order to put it together, then why would there only be one handprint of his on the whole thing?” He pushed the one packet aside. “Now we’re down to just one piece of evidence, the blood spot. Why would there be any blood in his room, when the murder took place in the canal? And why just one tiny spot of it? And why didn’t the forensic team find it on their first search of the room? How come they didn’t spot it until their second? There’re enough questions there for reasonable doubt.” He pushed the last packet aside.