The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Liz stood up to let him do the same. She sat back down again in his vacated seat.

  Will came straight to me, still standing by the side of the table, and slipped an arm right around my waist, pulling me toward him.

  “I don’t know what the hell that was,” he whispered in my ear. “She just jumped in my lap.” He kissed my cheek. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”

  After he walked off, I resumed my seat: the one next to Liz.

  “We’re all really good friends,” she was saying to Dan. She turned to me, put a hand on my thigh. “I think I need a bathroom break too. Come with me?” When I looked up at her face, she was staring at me with a similar look to the one Will had had on his face a few moments before, like she was trying to tell me something, reassure me.

  I didn’t know what was going on.

  “I can watch your stuff,” the red-haired guy offered.

  I let Liz pull me up and off toward the bathrooms. She started swearing under her breath before we’d even cleared the dance floor.

  “That guy,” she spat. “Dan. He’s been following me around all night. He is such a weirdo.”

  I’d never seen him before I’d seen him at our table.

  “I’m sorry about Will,” Liz said in a gentler voice. “I just thought that was the best thing to do when he came over. So Dan would think I had a boyfriend. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Ah. Now it all made sense.

  I could feel warm relief flooding my veins, loosening my stomach muscles, restoring order to the world.

  “No,” I said. “No, of course not.”

  “He might leave me alone now,” Liz said, pushing open the door the ladies’ bathrooms. “Let’s hope.”

  * * * * *

  Sometime the following afternoon I woke up in Will’s bed. In a matter of weeks I’d gone from being paranoid that I was the only eighteen-year-old on earth who hadn’t had sex yet (and also feeling abject terror at the thought of changing that) to sleeping with Will almost every night. It wasn’t a big deal. It felt perfectly normal. It reminded me of something I’d read in a magazine a few years ago that I didn’t quite understand at the time. Sex is like air. It’s only important if you aren’t getting any.

  We’d stumbled home after the sun had come up, having stayed out for so long that we’d come back practically sober, and fallen into bed, happily exhausted. I didn’t have a headache but my stomach was sore and unsettled, which I put down to the bottle of Cava that had appeared toward the end of the ball. I wanted a shower, something greasy for breakfast, and a day spent watching movies on my laptop. With Will, in bed.

  Not this bed, though. The room was stale and smelled of beer. We should go do it at mine. When Will woke up, I told him this.

  “That was weird last night,” he said as I lay in his arms. “With Liz. Wasn’t it?”

  I hadn’t had a chance to tell him why Liz had done it: to get rid of that weird guy by convincing him she had a boyfriend. I did now.

  “Hmm,” was all Will said.

  “What?”

  “It’s just that … I don’t know. It happened before that guy Dan ever appeared. Liz had been sitting in my lap for, like, more than five minutes when he came over.”

  I sensed there was something Will wasn’t telling me. I rolled over onto my stomach, rested my chin on his chest. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “She’d had a few too many. And she’s your friend. I’m sure it wasn’t … It probably wasn’t anything.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  Will touched my hair. “You were gone to the bar. Just. She started going on about how we’d make a great couple. Her and I. And then she was all, “‘I’ll prove it,’” and that’s when she got up and sat on my lap.”

  I turned and lay on my back again, stared at the ceiling.

  “Are you mad?” Will asked.

  “No.”

  He smiled. “Liar.”

  “She just had a few drinks. A few too many. Like you said.”

  “I meant at me.”

  “At you? You didn’t do anything.”

  “I tried to let her know I was really uncomfortable.”

  I wanted to ask how he had done that. I wanted a second-by-second debrief on exactly what had occurred. I wanted reassurance, several times over, that he hadn’t for one moment enjoyed the feeling of Liz being so close to him, that he hadn’t imagined for as much as a second what it might be like if he was with her instead of me.

  But more than all that, I didn’t want Will to think I was crazy.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  We lay there in silence for a minute. Then Will leaned over and kissed me, pulled me closer.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Mmm.”

  “You and Liz … Do you even like her?”

  I scoffed. “Of course I do. She’s my best friend.”

  But Will’s question was a tug on the thread. Soon, there would be an unraveling.

  alison, now

  Malone drove me to his place.

  We took the motorway. Outside of the city, grassy hills rose up into the sky ahead of us. The Wicklow Mountains, I presumed. This was an unusual sight for me: the Netherlands was as flat as a pancake, with uninterrupted horizons on offer as far as the eye could see.

  After a half hour or so, he took an exit named for a place I’d never heard of, leaving the mountains behind us. We passed a massive retail park and then, a stretch of nothingness later, turned into a complex of newly built apartment blocks, the only blip on an otherwise flat and featureless landscape. The block closest to the entrance had a number of commercial units on its ground floor, each one sitting vacant with a prime retail space opportunity sign hanging amidst the grime and dust on the storefront. The windows on the first floor were dark and bare. Someone or something had punched a jagged hole in one of the panes of glass.

  Malone turned the car onto a road to the left, the tires crunching on loose gravel.

  “Ghost estate,” he explained to me. “Ran out of money before they could finish it.” I could see a large green area on our right, tall with grass and thick with weeds. Beyond it, access to a row of small, boxy houses, sans windows, was blocked by a chain-link fence. “It’s bleak, I know. They say they’re picking construction back up in the next couple of months, though, now that the country’s getting back on track a bit.”

  Those were the first words either of us had spoken since we’d left the CPH. After we’d got into his car, Malone had told me that this is where we could go. I’d nodded silently, then turned to stare out the window.

  I could only think about my meeting with Will, the pain etched on his face, the sick feeling in my stomach. I’d feared, all this time, that the Gardaí picking him up back then had had something to do with me correcting my statement. I’d always told myself that there had to have been more to it than that.

  But was there?

  “It’s fine,” Malone was saying, “so long as you don’t look out the windows too often. And we got it for a song. I just keep telling myself that.”

  The we brought me back. Was there going to be someone else here? I couldn’t face a stranger right now. Malone wore no ring, but that wasn’t to say he wasn’t living with someone.

  “I spoke to your mother,” he went on. “That was when I thought we were going to Pearse Street station, though, but she knows you’re with us. I said you’d be back to Bray tonight once the press pack outside give up for the day, but I think she’d appreciate a call from you. She said to tell you your dad’s back. Oh, and your suitcase is in the boot. Garda Cusack collected it for you from the hotel. We checked you out of there.”

  “What about the girl?” I said. “The missing one.”<
br />
  “We’re looking for her.”

  “Do you think she’s …?”

  Malone kept his eyes straight ahead. “We don’t know yet. The Sub-Aqua team is at the canal.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Her name’s Amy Boylan. One of her roommates raised the alarm this morning. Under normal circumstances we wouldn’t move on this so quick, but with circumstances being what they are …”

  “Where was she last seen?”

  “That’s the thing: in Halls. Someone saw her go into her apartment around nine last night. But she’s not there now and she hasn’t been heard from since. Plus there’s some … Well, let’s just say there’s a couple of reasons to be concerned for her safety, based on what we found in her room.”

  “Her room? Do you think he was in there?”

  “We don’t know. We don’t know anything yet.”

  “What about the guy in my photo?”

  Malone had pulled up in front of an apartment block to the rear of the complex. He cut the engine, turned to me. “We’ve made some progress. The photo was posted by several online news outlets an hour or so ago, and I hear we already have several actionable leads. And I have a list of St. John’s Hall residents for the year you were there. You can have a read of it. You might spot his name. Remember it when you see it.”

  “So you don’t know who he is yet?”

  “I think we will soon. Especially because his face is going to be all over the papers in the morning. With a headline about another girl missing, so people will have to take notice. We’ve also got officers canvasing the public along the canal, from Grand Canal Dock all the way to Portobello.”

  His apartment was on the second floor of a four-story block, overlooking the wild, weed-filled green and facing the fenced-off, unfinished houses. I parked my suitcase in the hallway, next to the cardboard archive box Malone had carried up with him from the car. I paused to listen, but elsewhere in the apartment there seemed to be only silence. I was relieved we were alone.

  I walked into an open space that seemed to be the kitchen, dining room, study, and living room all rolled into one. It was spacious and full of natural light, but also felt bare and cold. The fading light coming in the double balcony doors had an odd quality to it, as if this was a film set and the bulbs playing the part of the sun had been hung in the wrong place. Furnishings-wise, there was only an oversized black leather couch, an IKEA coffee table with a coffee ring in one corner and a large, flat-screen TV on an eighties-era chrome stand. A silver laptop was thrown on the couch. There was nothing on the walls and few personal effects.

  “I know,” Malone said. “It doesn’t get much better inside, does it?” He started a circuit of the room, turning on the three floor lamps—more instantly recognizable IKEA bargains—as he went. “My ex was the decorator and she took it all with her.” He pointed to the wall above the couch where, now that I looked, I could see a number of bare picture hooks and, close to the window, the faint outline of something that might have once hung there. “I’ve been embracing the minimalist look. Maybe now that we’ve a few hours to kill you can help me buy some cushions online or something. I don’t have a clue. Your place was really nice. Really homely.”

  He turned and smiled at me.

  I burst into tears.

  It was as if I couldn’t hold back the pain, the stress, the shock of all this another moment longer; I’d spent everything I had doing it this long. I didn’t have any strength left to be embarrassed about it. I just let myself break open.

  And then Malone was there, putting his arms around me, holding me, which only made things worse, even more embarrassing.

  His skin against mine.

  Like Will’s had been.

  I pulled away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes, regretting that today of all days was the one I’d elected to wear a coat of my mother’s mascara. “I’m sorry, I just … That meeting with Will was—” I stopped. I couldn’t say it.

  “What happened?”

  “I told him something.” I sat down on the couch, pushed my hair out of my face, trying to pull myself together. “He didn’t react well.”

  Malone sat down beside me. “What did you tell him?”

  I explained about overhearing what Will had told the Gardaí when they’d come to talk to us on campus, and initially telling them the same thing. But then realizing, after I saw the tutor appointment on my calendar, that I’d mixed my days up and, actually, I hadn’t stayed in Will’s room the whole night.

  “I didn’t really think it was a big deal,” I said. “I didn’t want to get in trouble, that’s all. I didn’t want him to get in trouble either. I didn’t think he would—he’d been asleep, how was he to know?”

  A shadow of something crossed Malone’s face, but all he said was, “Hmm.”

  “But I think now that’s why Will was brought in for questioning. Shaw said the others on the list had alibis, so when I took Will’s away, effectively … And if the confession was coerced … This could all be my fault.”

  “Alison, you can’t think like that. Really. You don’t know what would’ve happened. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Easier said than done.” I shook my head. “This is such a mess.”

  “Everything might be different tomorrow.” Malone sighed. “Are you hungry? I could order some food. Or make some, but that would just delay the ordering because, trust me, we’d end up doing that anyway.”

  I managed a smile. “Okay.”

  “Pizza all right?”

  “Pizza’s great.”

  Malone took his phone out of his pocket and pulled up a delivery app. “Any dietary requirements?”

  “Just calories.”

  I waited until he’d placed an order. Then I asked him, “Do you still think he’s innocent?”

  Malone frowned. “I never said I did. I said I thought there was a chance he was. I wasn’t sure.”

  “Because the evidence doesn’t match up?”

  “Because I’m not sure it would’ve survived in a courtroom.”

  “Shaw said it’s always like that. Not everything adds up.”

  “That’s true,” Malone said, nodding. “That’s very true. But I think this goes a bit further than that.”

  “In what way?”

  A beat passed.

  “Look, Alison. Shaw pulled me up this morning for telling you too much, and he was right to. I’ve tried to stick to the closed case, to Will’s case, and I would argue I haven’t told you anything that you couldn’t have read online somewhere. You didn’t, though, did you? Read stuff about the case? Before we came to see you in Breda?”

  I shook my head. “Until you knocked on my door, I’d avoided knowing anything about it.”

  “So you’re hearing all this for the first time.”

  “Yes. But now I want to know. I want to know the truth. I want to know what actually happened. I don’t want to go back home and spend the next ten years wondering if I spent the last ten being right or wrong.”

  I met Malone’s eyes.

  “In that case”—he got up to pick a remote off the TV stand—“I have something to show you.”

  “What?”

  Malone collected his laptop from the floor and came and sat next to me.

  “Will’s confession,” he said, opening the computer’s lid. “Video of it.”

  alison, now

  “Back in September,” Malone explained, opening an internet browser, “a two-part documentary aired here on TV3. The theme was personal safety in the digital age, but they did a segment on the Canal Killer case. They opened with it, actually. Their thesis seemed to be that people around the country—especially in Dublin—changed their behavior because of it. Women avoided walking home alone, they regularly changed their daily routines, they didn’t shar
e personal information in public arenas. But now, ten years on, the lessons of it have been forgotten, things are worse than ever, we need to be more mindful of how we use social media—that kind of thing.”

  What a luxury it must be, I thought, to be able to forget.

  “They featured a few cases,” Malone continued, “from here and abroad, where online information—Facebook posts, geo-tagging data in photos, video blogs—inadvertently provided what was essentially a digital map to the victims’ doors. They also brought in some security experts who combed through the digital footprints of some willing participants to show them just how much information could be mined about their whereabouts, habits—things like that. The segment on Will featured footage from his confession. Now the whole tape is, like, ten hours long or something, so what they showed is a snippet. And I should say, Shaw is both a great detective and a seasoned interrogator. He’s actually delivered interrogation training to some of us, myself included. But I watched this when it aired and, well …” Malone picked up the TV remote and pressed the power button. “See for yourself.”

  His internet browser was on a catch-up TV player. He navigated to a list of video clips, selected one and then clicked the icon that would make it play on the TV screen.

  “Have you ever seen any of this?” he asked me. I shook my head, no. “If you want me to turn it off at any point, just say so.”

  “Is there …?” I swallowed. “Does he … does he give details?”

  “There’s nothing graphic in these clips, no.”

  Malone skipped the video through the opening titles and shots of a man with gray hair walking along Grafton Street, speaking directly into the camera, faces in the crowds of shoppers behind him turning to look.

  “I’ll just show you the interrogation bits,” he said as a shot of a nineteen-year-old Will being led into a Garda car in handcuffs flashed up on screen.

  My palms were suddenly clammy. I rubbed them against my jeans.

  Then there it was: the interrogation, playing on screen.

  The footage was of low quality, fuzzy like a well-worn VHS tape, despite only being ten years old. It showed a small corner of a gray room, in which a table had been pushed up against a wall. A flat black box was sitting on it: the recording equipment, I supposed. The camera was mounted on the ceiling.