The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  More tapping.

  “Nope,” Malone said then, swiping at the screen. “Now it’s all just stuff about Trinity Hall. What if we just look for it? Visually, I mean. On Google Maps. A garden with houses around it on three sides, near Trinity Hall. Can’t be that hard to find, surely? How many estates in Dublin have fenced-in gardens in the middle of them?” He leaned closer to me so I could see the screen better, and opened the Google Maps app. It automatically loaded at our current location. He started swiping, moving the map southwest. The green areas stood out starkly against white streaks of streets and the dull gray background.

  Immediately, I saw a problem.

  “The only green areas are really big ones,” I said. “Parks and golf courses. A little communal garden in the middle of a housing estate isn’t going to show up on this.” I shook my head. “Shit.”

  “Hang on.” Malone tapped the screen. “Let’s try Satellite View.”

  The screen changed to an intimidatingly detailed overhead shot filled with what must be hundreds of tiny houses. It looked a bit like a close-up of the circuits on a computer chip.

  My heart sank. “We’ll never find it in all this.”

  “Let’s start at Trinity Hall and work out.” Malone zoomed in until we could make out the complex’s accommodation blocks and then started systematically searching the area around it. I looked too, but I couldn’t make out anything that might be the estate we were looking for.

  Then: “There,” Malone said, pointing. “Could that be it?”

  On the map, to the east of Trinity Hall, was an approximately square patch of green filled with what looked like huge trees. A road encircled it, and facing that road were …

  Eight houses? No, sixteen. They were semi-detached.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Can you do Street View?”

  Malone tapped. The screen changed to an image of a street alongside a fenced-in green area. The houses were across from it, on the left. Malone tapped the screen again, angling the view toward the green. A thick hedge pressed up against the chest-high wrought-iron railings while, beyond it, a dense network of tree branches and their leaves obscured all but a few patches of blue sky beyond. The screen moved again, shifting to the left. The view now was of a large gate in the fence with a keypad mounted by the lock.

  “That’s it!” I said. “I remember it.”

  “‘Doolyn Gardens,’” Malone read. “Are you sure?”

  “As sure I can be. Unless by some crazy coincidence there’s a similar estate nearby?”

  We spent a few minutes scanning the map, but that was the only one of its kind we could find. All the others had open green areas with neatly mowed grass and no trees.

  We went back to Doolyn Gardens. It looked to be about three streets from Trinity Hall. A five-minute walk, at most.

  “Don’t suppose you’d know which house?” Malone said.

  “They all look the same. I doubt it. But let’s do a loop with Street View, just in case.”

  But they didn’t all look the same.

  Most of them did, yes. Red-brick, semi-detached, a bay window on the ground floor and a dormer window in the highest. A small, mature garden behind a low wall, more large trees dotted in almost every one. Shiny new front doors. Polished brass knockers. Proud homeowners inside, presumably.

  But one of them wasn’t like all the others.

  One of them had a front door whose paint was peeling. What looked to be original windows, left to rot and grow a thick, grimy film. A massive, overgrown tree in the front garden that completely blocked the bay window that must be hiding behind it. Plastic bins outside the front door with “23” written on them in white paint, black refuse sacks poking out from beneath the lid. No garden gate at all and, in the gap left by its absence, a view of uneven paving slabs, being forced up from below and kept company by the weeds growing in the cracks.

  “Well,” Malone said, “we are looking for student accommodation. Let’s see what happens when we Google the address.”

  The top result was a listing for a rental property, an attic studio, at 23 Doolyn Gardens, Dartry, Dublin 6. There was a collage of four photos at the top of the screen. A view of a red-brick semi-D with bay windows. A picture of a large double-bed with a brightly patterned two-seater couch backed up against it. A small but clean bathroom suite the color of avocado. A tiny kitchenette with a dining table just big enough for two, pressed up against a window offering a view of the garden outside. The top of the tree in the house’s own garden was brushing against the very bottom of the window pane.

  “That’s it,” I said. “A shoebox, right up in the attic. That’s it!”

  Online, it looked lovely. No wonder we’d gone to see it. There was no Google Street View back then to warn us off. These days, I presumed it was the demand/supply imbalance that still sent people to it. On the flight on the way here I’d overheard the passengers seated in front of me talking about how affordable rental properties were so scarce in Dublin, people on shift-work were time-sharing bedsits.

  The listing was marked as “TO LET” at 850 euro a month.

  “That’s not a bad price for that,” Malone said. “That’ll get people to come look. And it’s a private letting, no agency involved.” He scrolled down the screen with the tip of an index finger. “There isn’t even a first name on this. Or a phone number. You can only contact the owner by messaging them through this site.” He looked up at me. “That alone is a bit suspicious.”

  “So what now?”

  Malone considered the question. “Let’s go there. Do a quick drive-by.” His phone beeped with a new text then. “Shit,” he said, reading it.

  “What?”

  “Daniel.”

  “What about him?”

  “They’ve found him at a house in Stillorgan.” He sighed. “They’re going in to arrest him right now.”

  He’s called in sick to work. Last night, he swallowed a sleeping pill before he went to bed and didn’t set an alarm. Made sure the blackout curtains met each other and closed the bedroom door so no light would leak in from the landing. He let his body tell him how many hours of rest it needed, let sleep stay until all the hours of it he’d missed the night before had been replaced.

  It was nearly noon when he finally woke.

  He’s made some breakfast and taken it into his study, sitting the plate of hot, buttery toast and cup of sweet tea down next to his laptop on his desk. Messy stacks of printed papers, pages torn from magazines, and stories cut from newspapers take up the rest of the space. He boots up the computer and gets to what he likes to think of as his morning rounds, leaving sticky fingerprints on the keyboard as he works.

  He starts on the Beneath the Surface website, checking for new comments, mostly. He likes to know what people are saying about the case. Sometimes he even responds to what they say, although always anonymously and only with thoughts that wouldn’t draw any unwanted attention to himself. The latest post is, of course, about Amy. A commenter calling himself Derek0294 thinks it’s too soon for the Gardaí to be dragging the canal, considering that Amy is so different to the other girls, what with her being last seen at St. John’s Halls.

  He wants to leave a comment commending Derek0294 on this insight, but he doesn’t think that would be a good idea.

  He moves on to news. Puts Amy’s name into Google and scans the results for the latest stories. He reads them quickly, scrolling constantly down the screen, as most of them contain the same details only wrapped up or arranged differently. A theme, he notices, is emerging already. They’re saying she vanished off the face of the earth.

  It’s the last known sighting of her entering her own apartment that has them all shocked and confused. Apparently another student passed her in the hall on the way in. They also have the electronic lock record, which shows she used her key seconds later to gain entry to her place. He
hopes they don’t notice the lack of activity immediately after that, or that if they do, they’ll mistake it for Amy turning in for the night.

  Not him systematically deleting all entries he made with his own key, surreptitiously programmed in the security office during his very first shift. If St. John’s have noticed deletions from the security cameras, they haven’t let the press find out yet.

  He wonders for a moment if this is actually more effective than doing it along the canal. He has, from time to time, read subtext in the reporting of those ones like this is what happens to you when you walk home in the middle of the night, girls, drunk and alone. But Amy was at home, and at home because she elected not to go out drinking. She couldn’t be any more blameless if she tried. He’ll have to keep this in mind, although he doesn’t want to deviate too much from the original blueprints.

  Still, little adjustments can be made if they serve the cause.

  Like the one he’s going to make for Alison Smith.

  He didn’t recognize her at first, her pinched face turned away from him on the front page of a Sunday paper. It was the headline that got him. Poring over the story at home, he put the pieces together: she had been that idiot guy’s girlfriend. And it had been her friend who got herself added to the victim list. She was only a teenager at the time, this Alison; not even he could blame her for being so stupid. But she was a woman of, what, thirty now? And visiting this guy in prison, ten years after the fact?

  He couldn’t allow that.

  He eyes his black leather notebook, within reach on the desk. Should he start a chapter on her? A quick internet search leads him to believe he’d have very little to add to it: he can find no social media accounts for her. And really, he only wants to talk to her. He doesn’t need to demonstrate that her decisions may have terrible consequences when she’s already quite effectively demonstrated that herself. He only needs to remind her of it.

  The doorbell rings: a three-note electronic call that sounds foreign inside this house, followed by a sharp knock.

  He hurries downstairs to see who it is, still thinking of Alison, and maybe that’s why he opens the door without looking through the peephole first, and when he sees who’s on the doorstep, his heart leaps into his mouth and he thinks, I should’ve looked. I should’ve checked. I shouldn’t have answered.

  But it’s too late now.

  alison, now

  Outside my window, shopfronts were rushing by. We were on a kind of main street, packed with restaurants and boutiques. It had a village feel and, judging by the cool, expensive clothing I was seeing fly by on mannequins in windows and the number of artisan coffee shops with pithy sayings on chalkboards set outside, everyone in the village had a lot of disposable income.

  Malone brought the car to a stop at an intersection, flicking on his right indicator. When I looked I saw that, across the street, on the other side of a lane of traffic going in the opposite direction, was a neat U-shaped row of red-brick houses. A blue street sign had been set into the perimeter wall by the entrance. It said doolyn gardens beside a box with a “6” in it—the postal code.

  There was a space just a house down from 23. Malone pulled into it, cut the engine.

  I turned to look at the house. It was exactly as it looked on Street View. The only thing missing was the bins.

  “That’s it,” I said. “It looks exactly the same as it did online.” I started unbuckling my seatbelt.

  “Whoa,” Malone said. “What are you doing?”

  I looked to him. “What?”

  “We’re staying in the car.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this could be the home of the serial murderer at the center of this investigation. We can’t just go knock on the door. You, especially, cannot have anything to do with this. You’re not only a civilian, but a potential witness. You could jeopardize the entire case, if he does have something to do with it. We stay in the car.”

  I rolled my eyes, frustrated. I wanted to get out, to do more, to be closer. “Then why did we come here?”

  “To verify it still looks like it did online,” Malone said. “To check that there isn’t a kid’s bike in the garden and new windows in. To see if he still owns it.”

  “How do we know that from sitting here?”

  “Let’s just watch for a few minutes.”

  I lasted no more than ten seconds of sitting in silence.

  “Can’t we go talk to the neighbors or something?” I said then.

  Malone shook his head. “No.”

  “You let me talk to Heather.”

  “I gave you a lift to St. John’s so you could talk to an old college classmate. That’s different.”

  “I could pretend to be a prospective renter or something.”

  “Alison, no.” Malone looked at me. “What’s with you?”

  Momentum was what was with me. Figuring out the waitlist connection, talking to Heather, putting everything together—it felt like a rush, a flood of adrenalin that was still pulsing through my veins, urging me not to sit still, but to keep going, to keep moving.

  I didn’t want to stop now.

  And somewhere below that, there was an undercurrent of anger. Of frustration. Of rage, even. Because a girl was missing. Because she was the eighth one. Because it was becoming increasingly clear that what I’d thought for the last ten years didn’t match the truth and I couldn’t take a moment more of just waiting for the real story to emerge.

  And if the real story was different to the one I knew, then Will was somewhere he shouldn’t be.

  And I was someone I shouldn’t be.

  I wanted it to end.

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  I don’t know what Malone thought I was apologizing for but he started to smile and say, “That’s okay. I get impatient t—” But by then I’d depressed the handle on the passenger-side door, pushed it open and was getting out.

  “Alison. Alison!”

  I closed the door. The window was down a crack and through it I said, “I’m just going to go knock on the neighbor’s door. I can’t just sit here. It’ll be fine. I won’t give my name.”

  Malone was hurriedly unbuckling his seatbelt. “Alison, get back in the car.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “Alison.”

  I turned and started toward number 24.

  A few steps later I heard a car door open and close and footsteps rushing to catch up with me.

  “Alison,” Malone said when he was alongside me, “for God’s s—”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  He shook his head. I didn’t know him well enough to be able to tell if he was mad but I thought I could take an educated guess.

  He was furious with me.

  But it was too late: we were on No. 24’s garden path now. Bundling me back into his car would draw more attention.

  Through the house’s bay window I could see a sliver of the living room: a large TV screen fixed to the chimney breast and a leather chair sitting to one side of it, its back to a built-in bookcase. The front door was painted a glossy emerald green and had a “2” and a “4” affixed to it in polished brass, below a frosted windowpane. I pressed the doorbell and a short musical note sounded in the house.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” Malone said. “You shouldn’t. I should’ve stopped you.”

  I could see movement through the frosted glass, a dark blurry shape, growing bigger.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Let me do the talking.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  We could hear footsteps on a hard surface, coming closer.

  “It’ll be fine,” I whispered. “It’s just a neighbor.”

  The door opened and a man I would’ve guessed to be in his mid to late thirties appeared. The hallway behind him was dark
. A small gut was pushing against the material of his T-shirt, making a bid for freedom over the waistband of his jeans. He appeared sleepy, his hair sticking out at odd angles. He was looking at us both questioningly for a moment, then stared at me.

  “We’re sorry to bother you,” I said. “This is a bit awkward but we’re trying to track down one of your neighbors. Your next-door neighbor, actually. He owns the house next to us and his tenants are driving us crazy. Parties all night, rubbish in the garden. It’s … Honestly, it’s been a nightmare.” I nodded toward the tree in 23’s garden. “I think you might know what I’m talking about?” The man glanced toward the house next door but said nothing. I could feel Malone’s eyes on me. “The thing is, we can’t get him on the phone. You wouldn’t happen to have a number for him, would you?”

  The man’s mouth was hanging open. He turned to Malone, looked him up and down, looked back to me. Blinked rapidly.

  “Yeah,” he said then. “I probably have a phone number somewhere.” He rolled his eyes. “For that useless fecker.”

  “You know him, then?”

  “To see. To wave at. Not well.”

  “What’s he doing with that tree?” I jerked my head toward the monstrously overgrown one in the garden of 23.

  “Don’t get me started,” the man said. “The roots are actually coming in here now, under the wall.” He pointed out the damage: a crack of daylight in the middle of the low brick divider between the two gardens. “It singlehandedly brings down the average house price in this estate. But there’s just no talking to him.”

  “No need to tell me that,” I said, making a face to go with it. “How long has he had the place here? We’re not too bad, he only just bought the one next to us a few months ago.”

  “Ten, eleven years, maybe?” the man said. I had to consciously not react to this. “His father had it before him, but he used to look after it. Nice man, his father was.”

  “So he owns the whole house?”

  “Yeah.”