Rewind

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I said so.’

  ‘But what if I need—’

  ‘Turn it off.’

  The hand that had been holding up the phone was freezing cold and the arm attached had long been burning with lactic acid from the effort, and so Audrey was happy to drop it now. She needed to keep recording, though; she had no idea what Richard might come out with next. She made a show of pressing a button and then slipped the device into her coat pocket, microphone-end out. It was the volume button she’d pressed. She had no clue whether or not she was about to record anything except the sound of voices muffled by the material of her coat, but she figured it was worth a try.

  When Richard had her full attention again, he said: ‘The truth is, I knew she was there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘If I might speak,’ he snarled, ‘without the constant threat of interruption.’ He exhaled through his nose before restarting. ‘I knew she was here, in Shanamore. Because I had heard she was. I was in Murphy’s on Monday evening having a pint at the bar when someone came in – I couldn’t tell you who it was – and said a girl had got off the last bus and started off up the lane dragging a suitcase behind her. They were … Well, they were amused is probably the word. Or bemused, perhaps. As in, where does she think she’s going, up there, in the dark, in silly shoes with a heavy case? But I knew there was only one place she could be going, unless she was horribly lost, and I thought to myself, a young girl—’

  Audrey had to bite her lip to keep herself from screaming: She was thirty-one!

  ‘—all alone up there, with him.’ Richard made a tut-tutting noise. ‘Well, I thought it was my duty to warn her. About him. Andrew.’

  He paused.

  Audrey was getting sick of the amateur dramatics and refused to indulge him. After a few seconds, he had no choice but to continue.

  ‘He’s a little peeper, you see. That Andrew. He has cameras, hidden in the bedrooms. It all feeds back to his computer so he can watch them. His guests, I mean. While they sleep. And … and do other things.’ He sighed sadly. ‘But I didn’t get to warn her. I just couldn’t find a way to say it. Not without frightening her, and perhaps unnecessarily. I never imagined … But now …’ He looked away. ‘Now I feel like I have her blood on my hands.’

  Audrey felt a chill that hadn’t come from the cold.

  ‘Blood on your hands,’ she repeated. ‘Are you saying you think she’s dead?’

  He turned back to her, met her eyes. ‘Oh, I know she is.’

  Audrey wanted to ask how but she didn’t trust herself to speak. And did she want to know, really, when she was standing in an empty car park with him, off a desolate beach, in the dark?

  Richard took another dramatic pause, his most interminable yet.

  Then he lifted a hand and pointed towards the sea.

  ‘I know she’s dead,’ he said, ‘because I just found her body.’

  The black oil.

  That’s how Andrew thought of it. Thick and slick and so dark that it sucks up all the light around it. Consumes it, even. A true black.

  It was like a sludge living in the deepest chambers of Andrew’s heart, filling it just to the point before overflow, always there but, mostly, contained. Its presence, the weight of it, sometimes made it hard to breathe. Sometimes a trickle of it escaped, leaking through a tiny pinprick of a hole made by the recall of a dream or the blur of a fragmented memory.

  And then there were the days when he woke up feeling as if, during the night, the black oil had leaked out while he’d slept and now that was all that was pumping through his veins. Flooding his chest cavity. Adhering itself to the crevices in his brain, making his thoughts sluggish and sticky. It descended like a curtain behind his eyes, clouding his vision, a pulsing migraine. Every cell was a little black hole, swallowing up everything else around it. His own body turned predator and its prey was the light.

  Bad things happened when the black oil leaked out.

  Andrew would lie in bed and wrap the sheets tight around himself, trying to keep it all inside, keep it contained, like the people he’d seen on TV who’d died of some horribly virulent disease in sub-Saharan Africa. Layers upon layers of constriction, a barrier that would hopefully halt the spread. A mummification of sorts, only he wasn’t dead yet.

  Underneath it all, he felt like he was rotting from the inside out. And underneath that, he felt like he deserved it. Because of the things he’d done.

  The things he still wanted to do.

  And then, invariably, after a few days of trying to hold himself together, he would go and do those things.

  He considered it Caroline’s parting gift to him, this black oil. After all, it was because of her that he had this problem. She was the only girl he’d ever loved and he’d loved her when she was a girl. He didn’t know how to love women and had little interest in trying.

  What he really wanted was to go back, to go back to Caroline then, but that was impossible. So other girls of a similar age to the girl in his memories …

  Andrew considered it the next best thing.

  Afterwards, every time, he dreamed of Caroline. Snatches would come back, suddenly, hours later and, whenever he felt the oil recede long enough to allow a clear thought, he’d try to piece them together.

  It was always one of three scenarios:

  Caroline when she was right, sitting at the water’s edge, skimming stones, rubbing the back of his neck with her free hand because, she said, she just wanted to touch him.

  Caroline when she was wrong, cowering in a hotel bed, inexpertly applied make-up smudged beneath her eyes. Shifting and rearranging and morphing into someone, something else, before him. A reverse changeling.

  Caroline, looking like she did the first day he saw her, white socks pulled up to her knees, red hairband holding back straw-coloured hair, pleading with him to stop, to stop hurting her.

  There had been three adult women, total, over the first decade of his adult life. He’d meet them online, get chatting. Go through the motions for a while. Suggest meeting up. He always travelled to Dublin to do this so he could practise in private, so that no one he knew would see his pathetic, bumbling attempts to interact with women his own age, so the excruciating shame was his and theirs only, a relatively private show.

  The most recent excursion had been in August. Mary. She said she was a student nurse. Flat-chested. Make-up-free skin. A spray of freckles across her forehead. Her profile said she was twenty-five.

  Andrew had made a reservation at a cheap hotel in the city centre, a nicer place than he usually stayed, seeing as he wasn’t, for a change, worried about cameras in the lobby or credit cards or ID-checks. It didn’t matter if he left a trail because he wasn’t doing anything wrong, not this time. He was just a normal guest. A normal man. It took some getting used to.

  They’d arranged to go see a film in the cinema on O’Connell Street, a plan which quickly revealed itself to be the most terrible of ideas. She was a little late, hampered by a car stuck on the Luas tracks, so after identifying each other they rushed to buy their tickets and snacks and go on inside. The trailers started almost immediately, outlawing conversation and giving Andrew nearly two full hours to incubate his anxiety undisturbed.

  By the time the credits rolled, he was sweating profusely and could barely speak. She took one look at his wet, flushed face and said she was tired and had an early start.

  Back at the hotel, alone, Andrew had undressed, brushed his teeth, turned off the lights, set an alarm for the morning and got into bed. He would do what he was supposed to do on this trip, no more, no less. He lay awake in the dark dissecting his evening and feeling, in a strange way, a little proud of himself. But the black oil liked the dark. He could sense its approach, its advance, a slick and glistening tide, rushing up the sheets, getting ready to slither inside him, flooding his veins.

  Andrew reached for his phone.

  _________

  The video arrived
exactly one week after he returned to Shanamore.

  It came attached to an email sent to his personal address that included his full name, telephone number and the URL of the Shanamore Cottages website.

  Even at that, Andrew would’ve dismissed it as spam if it wasn’t for the subject line. A souvenir for you from your night in Dublin! He clicked on the message and scanned the rest of the text, at first confused, then disbelieving, then struggling to breathe as wave after thunderous wave of abject terror crashed over him, shaking him to his core.

  Guess what, Mr Paedo? I made you a little souvenir from your night in Dublin. This copy is just for you. But I have one for the Gardaí, and one for everyone you know, and one for everyone you don’t know too. I will send it the moment you refuse to do as I say. Instructions to follow. I look forward to working with you, you sick fuck!

  With a shaking hand, Andrew traced a finger across his laptop’s trackpad and clicked PLAY.

  It took him four attempts to watch the whole thing through.

  He was clearly identifiable. The girl didn’t move around as much as he did so her face wasn’t as readily seen, but there was no mistaking the fact that her body was years too young to be subjected to what he was doing.

  By the time he finally reached the end of the recording, he’d vomited into his own lap. He felt like he was spinning and couldn’t stop it. The world had tilted crazily and now everything had lost its purchase and was sliding off, and he was going with it, and he didn’t know where he was going to end up.

  His phone began emitting its angry buzz.

  To his surprise, the voice on the end of the line was female.

  In the next moment, he understood why: it wasn’t the sender of the email he was talking to. It was the receiver of another, similar email. She didn’t go into details. She just cried and sobbed and said they were forcing her to do this, and she was sorry, and she had no choice because she had a video too.

  She said they said to say he must listen carefully.

  Then she gave Andrew his instructions.

  The television in the station was busted, so Seanie went home to watch the Six-One news bulletin and to make himself something to eat.

  It was the second story in the headlines preview at the top of the programme. An older male reporter was standing at the entrance to the cottages, broadcasting live, unflatteringly lit by an intense white light. He told the anchorwoman in the studio that Gardaí now had reason to believe that Natalie O’Connor had come to Shanamore and, following an initial forensic examination of one of the ‘holiday homes’ behind him (the screen changed to footage, captured much earlier in the evening going by the light, of figures in white overalls carrying equipment into Cottage No. 6), her case had been upgraded from missing person to murder investigation, although Gardaí were denying that a body had been found. A local man, who local sources said was the live-in manager of the complex, had been detained for questioning and a wide-scale search of the area was due to commence at dawn.

  A knock at the door.

  Seanie was, at first, surprised and then embarrassed to find DS O’Reilly standing outside.

  ‘Sorry,’ O’Reilly said, pointing to his right. ‘I could see you weren’t in the station, so …’

  ‘Is there news?’

  O’Reilly shook his head, no.

  The detective’s eyes fell to the remaining half of a sloppy chicken sandwich Seanie had in his hand.

  ‘I was, ah, just grabbing something to eat while I could.’

  ‘Good idea,’ O’Reilly said. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance have another one of those, would you?’

  The two men ate with plates balanced on their knees, sitting side by side on the couch in front of the fire. Seanie kept his eyes fixed firmly on the news – he’d rewound the bulletin to the start so they could both watch it in full – and tried not to react to the absurdity of the situation: the big detective down from Dublin sitting in his little living room, the unexpected spotlight on his sandwich-making skills, a murder in Shanamore. They didn’t really speak at all until they’d both finished their makeshift dinners and Seanie had brought out dessert: a pot of strong tea and a packet of digestive biscuits.

  ‘Thank God,’ O’Reilly said. ‘I couldn’t drink another coffee today.’

  ‘There’s something you should know about me,’ Seanie started. He hadn’t yet sat down; he was looking down on O’Reilly. ‘I know I should’ve said something before …’

  O’Reilly froze mid-pour to look at him questioningly.

  ‘I used to come here. Stay here, I mean. In Shanamore.’

  Now the detective put down the pot and raised an eyebrow.

  Gardaí couldn’t be stationed any closer than 50 kilometres from anywhere they’d ever lived; before they joined the force, they had to disclose an exhaustive list of home addresses. This wasn’t technically a violation, but Seanie was the only member here. He should’ve said something.

  ‘We never lived here,’ he clarified. ‘We stayed a week at a time, a few times every summer. And not every summer, just for a few years until I was, like, sixteen or so. I didn’t know him. Andrew Gallagher. But I did … I saw him around.’

  ‘Okay …’

  ‘There weren’t too many living in the village back then,’ Seanie said, ‘and hardly any lads my age. You’d notice the ones that were. Sure you’d meet half of them around the pool table in Murphy’s. Well, it was sort of in Murphy’s – Peggy’s sons had one in the house, and she’d let the summer kids in to play on it if she was in the mood. But Andrew was always off to the side, on the edges. And there were …’ He stopped to take a breath. Why did it suddenly feel hard to breathe and talk at the same time? ‘I don’t want to use the words rumours because I’m not sure anyone ever said anything to me. I just picked it up somewhere, somehow, that, um, that he liked young girls. He was young too then, of course. I mean girls younger than him. Much younger.’

  Seanie sat down on one of the armchairs, opposite the detective now.

  ‘I was, ah, I was sixteen,’ he said, ‘when it happened, so Andrew would’ve been … probably eighteen? Could’ve been nineteen by then, I suppose.’ Seanie knew he was just imagining it, but his throat felt like it was threatening to close. He took a swig of his tea so he could trace the momentary burn of the hot liquid as it travelled down his oesophagus, proving to him that the airways were still open and clear. ‘My sister, Aoife, she’d just turned thirteen. I was thinking about this today and there’s something about that “-teen” that makes this … I don’t know, less? But the truth is her birthday had just been three days before. I still hadn’t even got used to the idea of her being a teenager. In my head, she was still a child. She was twelve, you know? But not in her head. In her head, of course, she was already feckin’ sixteen.’

  O’Reilly nodded.

  Then he asked, ‘What happened?’

  And finally, Seanie told him. Someone.

  That night was a Saturday night and every Saturday night in Shanamore followed the same routine. Around eight o’clock, the rumbling of empty stomachs would force the Flynn siblings up from the beach and the smell of fish and chips would lure them directly to the kitchen table. Seanie’s mother and grandmother would’ve already eaten something better, something more sensible, like a salad (‘It’s too hot for warm food,’ was one of his mother’s favourite summer refrains when what she meant was she didn’t want to get hot cooking it), and while the younger generation tucked into their trans fats, mother and daughter would say their goodbyes, get in the car and head to Murphy’s for a few glasses of wine and a natter.

  At the height of the summer it could remain bright for another two, two and a half hours, so contrary to what their mother might have believed, Seanie and his younger brother, Cathal, and sister, Aoife, would run back down to the beach once the food was polished off. Seanie was in charge but he was an easy-going guardian. The rule was there were no rules other than, one, stay within sight of the swing-set outside the
hotel and, two, be in that spot at half past ten or before dark.

  That evening Seanie and Cathal waited by the swings as ten thirty came and went without any sign of Aoife.

  Ten forty.

  Still no sign, no familiar figure running towards them at high speed, flailing her arms and apologising for being late.

  Ten forty-five.

  Perhaps the bright lights of the hotel were responsible but it suddenly seemed as if darkness was here, not threatening or descending, and within minutes the sea was no longer blue but a pitch-black horizon on which shards of broken moonlight were floating lazily.

  Ten fifty.

  Ten fifty-five.

  Eleven.

  Seanie began to panic.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t concern for his sister that was the driving force of this anxiety but the threat that, in less than half an hour, his mother and grandmother might return to an empty house. A couple of lads he knew were lingering over long-gone cans of cider smuggled out of their respective houses by the picnic tables around the side of the hotel. Seanie enlisted their help, left Cathal on a chair in the hotel’s lobby and took off towards the beach with a torch.

  ‘We found her pretty quickly. In the dunes on the east end of the strand, all tangled up with him. He was drunk. She said she hadn’t been drinking but her eyes … Her pupils were like saucers, so. And I, uh, I remember seeing her—’ Seanie had to stop here to take a deep breath. He hated even knowing this detail, let alone saying it out loud (he had never) but O’Reilly needed to know the truth about Andrew Gallagher. He looked down at his hands. ‘I remember seeing her underwear crumpled up on the sand.’

  ‘What did you do?’ O’Reilly asked.

  ‘I grabbed him. Started just, like, pummelling him. And roaring at him, “She’s thirteen, you sick fuck. Thirteen!”’ Seanie rubbed the knuckles on his right hand, remembering the way the skin had torn, broke open over them, and left him with scabs that his mother had never believed had come from a fall off his bike. ‘I thought I could kill him with my bare hands, I was that angry. I might’ve done if the other lads hadn’t pulled me off him.’