But that was all forgotten, though, when, on the Thursday morning, my mother knocked on my bedroom door to wake me up, poked her head in once I’d sleepily responded and said to come downstairs.
There’d been a girl found in the canal near St. John’s. They were saying on the news that she was a student. Liz was waiting on the phone.
“It’s Lauren,” she said when I got on the line. “Claire’s friend? She came out with us a few times?”
I wasn’t even awake yet. “What’s Lauren?” I asked through a yawn.
“It’s her, Ali,” Liz said. “On the news. She’s the girl who’s been murdered.”
alison, now
“Mam,” I said as soon as she answered her phone, “listen to me. Places we went to see in Dublin. Where were they?”
“Hmm?” My mother was distracted by something, I could tell by her voice. “What? Alison, what’s going on? I thought you’d ring me last night. Your dad’s been waiting to talk to you. Where are you?”
I was running across the lawns outside the library, heading for Haddington Hall. I didn’t think to look for Malone in the faces of the students milling about, or about how I was only drawing attention to myself by running across the grass, shouting into my phone.
There was no time for that.
“Mam, listen. We went to look at places. Student accommodation. Apartments. Remember? With Liz. Because we didn’t know if either of us was going to get a place at Halls.” I was hurrying under the arch now and could see Malone’s car parked across the road. “Where did we go, Mam? Do you remember? There was a place in Rathmines. A tiny room in this really awful, dirty house. I think there was also an apartment, maybe? It was really expensive, though. And a house. There was a house with a tiny room up in the attic and a young guy showed us around, his father owned it.” A horn blared as I darted between passing cars to get across the street. “Is any of this ringing any bells? Where were those places?”
“Alison, what in the name of God is going on? You sound like you’re being chased. I’m going to get your dad, hang on—”
“No, don’t. Mam, listen.” Malone wasn’t in the car and pulling on the passenger door handle told me it was locked. “I need you to think about this, Mam. Try to remember. It’s important.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have time to explain. Just do it.” That sounded a bit harsh so I added a, “Please.” There was an electronic beep-beep. Malone was coming toward me, pointing his keys at the car. I pulled the door open and got in. “Mam, are you there?”
“I’m thinking, Alison, I’m thinking.”
The driver door opened and Malone sat in too. I mouthed pen at him and made a scribbling motion with my free hand. He pulled one from his pocket. I pulled the picture of CCTV Man—Daniel—out of mine, turned it over to the blank side and took the cap off the pen with my teeth.
“Mam?”
“What’s going on?” Malone whispered.
I held up a finger to indicate that I’d tell him in a second.
“Okay,” my mother said, “well, the expensive apartment, I know where that was. Sandymount. We only went to see it because the man who owned it was a friend of your father’s. Liam Keane. The bank owns it now.” My mother sounded inordinately pleased about that. “It was never going to be a realistic option, that place. Between you and me, I just wanted a nose around inside.”
“Do you remember where in Sandymount?”
“In the village,” she said. “It overlooked the little green there.”
“Was it a new build?”
“Well, new-ish.”
“Great.” I rolled my eyes. “Any other details?”
“There might have been trees? Right outside it.”
I wrote these details down on the paper.
Sandymount. New (ish). Trees?
“What about the other two we went to see?” I said. “Do you remember those?”
“Well, I don’t know the name of the road in Rathmines, but it was a long line of red-brick terraced houses, sort of curved at one end. That was the place with the awful bedsit. Where you could flush the toilet and make your dinner at the same time. And what they were charging for it!”
“Near the canal or no?”
“Ah … Near it. But not close enough to see it.”
“So a street back from it?”
“At least.”
“Anything else?”
“It could’ve done with being demolished. It was like something you’d see on Hoarders.”
Rathmines. Red-brick terraced. Curved street. Near canal. Hoarders.
“Okay, good. What about the other house, Mam? There was one with the room in the attic, I think?”
“That was … Out past Rathmines.” A pause. “Dartry, maybe?”
Dartry.
“Do you have a street name, or an estate?”
“No,” my mother said. “What is all this about?”
“What about the place itself? Do you remember anything about it that might help us find it now?”
“What do you want to find it for?”
“I’ll explain everything later.”
“Is this to do with the murders?”
“Mam, please. There isn’t time.” I took a deep breath to keep myself from swearing, which would only set her off on a reprimand about that. “I really just need you to answer the question. Do you remember anything else about the place in Dartry?”
“What about you?” she said. “What do you remember? Your mind was considerably younger than mine was back then.”
“But I didn’t know Dublin at all. You did.”
“That’s hardly going to help me with remembering what a house looked like from the outside, now, is it?”
I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up an image of the Dartry property, but all I could see was the house in Rathmines and a modern apartment block built by my imagination, overlooking a patch of grass in Sandymount village.
“There was a secret garden,” my mother said then.
“What?”
“A secret garden. Like the one in that film. The one with … Oh, what’s her name? You know your one. With the teeth. I remember it because I’d never seen one before. Not here, I mean. London, yes. Dublin, no. Oh—what was the name of that film?”
“Mam,” I said, “forget about the film. Tell me about the garden.”
Malone tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “Speakerphone.”
I’d forgotten he was there. I pulled the device from my ear and pressed the speakerphone icon.
“One of those ones in the middle of all the houses,” my mother’s voice said, booming now inside the car and accompanied by white noise that wasn’t there when she’d just been in my ear. “With a big fence around it. You could only go in if you lived there. And it was just like in the film too because there was all trees and bushes right up against the fence so you couldn’t even see in. Oh, God, what was the name of it? I can see it, you know. I just can’t think—”
“Notting Hill,” Malone said.
“That’s it!” my mother shrieked. “Wait, who’s that?”
“Detective Garda Malone,” he said, leaning closer to me and so to the phone. “We met yesterday, Mrs. Smith. You said the garden was in the middle of the houses. Does that mean the houses were arranged in a square, all around it?”
“I don’t think there were houses facing the main road,” my mother said. “That was where you drove in. So maybe a U-shape. Or three sides of a square?”
I added garden and U-shape/3 sides to my list.
“Okay, great,” Malone said. “So arranged around a fenced garden, but only on three sides. Were all the houses the same or were they different?”
My mother made a hmm noise. “I’m not sure …”
“If you had to make
a guess, which one would you pick?”
“I’d say they were probably the same. It was a small estate.”
“Old or new?”
“Am I guessing again?”
“Yes,” Malone said.
“Old, then.”
Same. Small. Old.
“Do you remember anything else, Mrs. Smith?”
“No. Sorry. What’s this about?”
“I’ll call you later,” I said, “and explain everything, okay?”
“Why can’t you explain it now? Where are you? And your father wants to talk to you.”
“Gotta go, Mam. I’ll call later, I promise. Bye.”
I pressed the end button on the phone and turned to Malone.
“I have some questions too,” he said with a half smile.
“Hang on.” I pulled out the business card Heather had given me and started tapping her office number into my phone. The call rang once, twice. I wondered if she’d pick it up when that girl who’d been waiting outside was probably sitting across from her right now. It rang a third time.
“Heather Buckley,” a voice said then.
“Hey, it’s me. Alison.”
“Well, that was quick.”
“Here’s what I have. You ready?”
“Go.”
“A new apartment in Sandymount.”
“Sandymount?” Heather laughed. “I was a student, not a stockbroker.”
“Okay, next one. Red-brick terrace in Rathmines. On a … a curved street? Near the canal. Could that be the one you were talking about?“
“No, that was at the opposite end.”
“Last one, then.” The rush of thinking I was onto something was fading fast. “Houses arranged in a sort of U-shape around a fenced garden that only residents had access to, somewhere in Dartry. Possibly the houses were—”
“Yes.”
“—all the same. Wait, did you say yes?”
“Yes, I went to see a place like that. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was near Trinity Hall. Which is in Dartry, right? And I remember the garden, because I thought it reminded me of the one in—”
“Notting Hill,” I finished.
“Yeah.” A pause. “What does this mean?”
“I don’t exactly know yet, but when I find out, I’ll let you know. Thank you.” I hung up and turned to Malone. “Okay. The man in the CCTV images is Daniel O’Dowd. Heather knows him. He’s her brother-in-law, in fact. He was in St. John’s too, back then, and nowadays he writes a blog all about the Canal Killer case. She’s already had a visit from the Gardaí today so the appeal must have worked. That’s what Cusack told you this morning, isn’t it? She said something about the news on the CCTV?”
Malone nodded. “Yeah. She told me they had a short list. His name was on it. They haven’t picked him up yet, I don’t think. He wasn’t at home.”
“I don’t think it’s him. He’s not the Canal Killer. He’s just obsessed with the case—and with proving the killer isn’t Will. I think he called me in my hotel room and sat outside my hotel and put that letter in my suitcase. But I don’t think he killed those girls.”
Malone’s facial expression was neutral, giving nothing away about whether or not he believed this.
“Okay,” he said. “So, what’s all this about the houses?”
“Heather Buckley was attacked that September by the canal, by a man she says wasn’t Will or Daniel. Right? Then there were five victims, including Liz. All six of those girls had something in common: they were all waitlisted for a room in Halls. With only a small number of students overall ending up on the waitlist and then getting a room after all, that’s a big coincidence not to be some kind of connection. So what do they do that other students don’t? They look for somewhere else to live, just in case. Liz and I, we went looking, because I was on the waitlist too. We were going to share if we didn’t both get allocated a room.”
“But—” Malone started.
“I know, I know. It’s too random, because we’re all going to look at different places and we all use different methods to find them. There’re ads in the newspaper, ads online, going into agencies, just hearing about places from other people … There’s loads of ways. That’s what I thought, too—at first. But then I started thinking: there’s actually not loads of properties. You want a place close to college, right? You want a place that’s cheap. You can only look at places that are still available in the week or two before college begins, which alone dramatically narrows things down. Now and back then. So what if all six went to see the same place, and that’s the connection? What if they met the killer there?”
“Louise Farrington,” Malone said. “She was waitlisted for a room at Halls. I remember seeing the blue form in her file … I don’t know about the other two, but … Jesus.” He was staring out the windscreen, looking a bit shell-shocked. “And with the Dublin rental market the way it is at the moment, this guy could be asking them to do anything, even just for a viewing. Fill out forms, submit photo ID, provide bank statements …”
“And the way it is now is similar to the way it was then. We went to St. John’s at the height of the boom, and now things are getting back on track here, right?”
Malone nodded. “Yeah. There’s a queue of fifty people to see every half-decent bedsit.”
“And here’s the kicker,” I said. “He’s not their landlord. They don’t see him again after the viewing, because they don’t actually move in. They move into Halls instead. So it doesn’t even look like a link. And now we know that Heather and Liz went to view the same place around the same time: the secret-garden house in Dartry. I was there. I went with her. So if he was there … I might recognize him. We just need to find the house and hope he still owns it. Or, failing that, that whoever’s there now can give us his name or something.”
Malone had turned around in his seat to face me. “This is good, Alison. This is really good.” He reached over me to open the glove box, retrieved a tablet computer from inside. “We need to find some Wi-Fi.”
“What about Will?” I asked. “Where does he fit in to all this?”
I asked because I was thinking, I’m not sure he does anymore.
“One thing at a time,” Malone said, starting the engine. “One thing at a time.”
alison, now
There happened to be a parking space by the café, a quaint little storefront with a vintage bicycle parked outside and a white picket fence separating the outdoor tables and chairs from the street. It looked familiar.
“I think I used to come here,” I murmured.
Malone killed the engine and booted up the tablet computer.
I frowned at him. “Aren’t we going in?”
“Let’s check if we can pick up the Wi-Fi first. We may not have to.”
“I think they call that stealing, Garda Malone.”
He grinned. “We’ll come back and buy something later, if it makes you feel better.”
I checked my phone for messages. Sal had sent me one, looking for an update on yesterday’s meeting with Will.
My chest burned at the memory of that conversation, of how upset he’d been. If he’d really had nothing to do with this, then I really was responsible for him being in that place, for him being convicted of five murders, for him losing the last ten years of his life …
I pulled myself back from there, told myself we weren’t sure of anything yet.
“Should you tell someone what Heather said?” I asked him. “About Daniel? Like Shaw, I mean?”
“What did she say?”
“That he’s an innocent. Harmless. Although I don’t know about that. I mean, he did break into my hotel room to leave that letter … If that was him. But who else would it be? And it’s weird, isn’t it? A normal person would’ve just slipped it under the door.”
�
��Didn’t you say the Gardaí already spoke to her?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s assume she told them too. I bet she did.” Malone was powering up the tablet. “And somehow I don’t think her saying Daniel is ‘harmless’ will have Shaw calling off the search for him. Do you? Besides, there’s another way of looking at it. Daniel is obsessed with the Canal Killer. He has a blog, a podcast, whatever, and he wants more people to notice it. So he uses his extensive knowledge of the original crimes to attempt to recreate them, thus bringing fresh attention to the case, thus bringing new readers to his blog.”
This hadn’t occurred to me. “Do you think that’s what happening?”
“My feeling is no,” Malone said. “But you never know.”
“And she said her attacker definitely wasn’t Will, so that torpedoes Shaw’s theory that Will was part of a duo.”
“Well, I make a point of not telling Shaw he’s wrong, so …”
“Where does he think you are right now?”
“Asleep in bed. I’m not in until later so I can work tonight. I’m on canal duty.”
“Can we find out if Jennifer Madden and the one who’s missing—Amy Boylan, isn’t it? Can we find out if they were on the waitlist for Halls? And maybe get a list of places they viewed if they were?”
“I’ll call Emily, get her to do it. Right”—he was swiping at the tablet’s screen—“let’s do this. I’m going to start by Googling ‘Dartry secret garden estate.’”
I raised my eyebrows at him.
“What?” he said. “Maybe it’ll be that easy.”
It wasn’t.
“No luck,” he said. “It seems to think I’m actually looking for a dirty little secret in a garden and all the results are tabloid stories about neighbors from hell.”
“Great. Well, Heather said it was near Trinity Hall, the Trinity College accommodation complex. Maybe try that and ‘secret garden’?”
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