Rewind

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  But as soon as she closed her eyes, she saw the leg.

  Sticking out of the rock pool.

  And exposed and bloody on a computer screen, captured by a camera that had been concealed in a room in which Natalie O’Connor was a guest.

  Audrey opened her eyes.

  Then sat up and reached out to turn on the lamp by the bedside.

  Then she got out of bed and pushed at light switches again until every square inch of the room was blindingly illuminated.

  She started her sweep in the bathroom, working methodically and systematically, examining the ceiling first, then the shower cubicle, then all around the mirror above the sink. There was a smoke detector or something mounted on the ceiling just inside the door; she pulled over the chair from the desk and stood on it so she could examine it closely for marble eyes. (Is that what it would look like? She was only guessing.) No part of the device looked like it shouldn’t be there, but then she hadn’t noticed anything back in the bedroom of Cottage No. 6 either and, for all she knew, the camera that had captured Natalie’s final moments had also recorded her afternoon nap. Audrey checked inside the wardrobe, then realised that didn’t make any sense. (Or less sense, because had this made any sense to start with?) She opened the curtains, revealing a view of what looked like a staff car park and a loading bay. She closed them again, checking to make sure that they had completely covered every inch of the glass. She unplugged all the electronic devices in the room: the television, the alarm clock beside the bed, the phone on the desk. Finally, she fished her own phone out of her bag and climbed back into bed with it, burrowing down until the duvet was almost completely over her head.

  When she tapped the phone to life, she saw she had numerous WhatsApp and text messages, five missed calls and a migraine’s worth of new social media notifications. She ignored them all and started typing a text to Dee that promised everything was fine and that she’d call her in the morning. She was halfway through when she noticed the minuscule lens eyeballing her from just above the screen, and she stopped and stared at it staring back at her.

  She stuck her thumb over it before continuing.

  _________

  A phone was ringing.

  The sound reached through the realms of sleep, piercing it, before rudely shaking Audrey awake. She opened her eyes to a pitch-black room and an expanse of unfamiliar bed that offered no clues as to where or even when she was.

  Then it started to come back to her, in pieces:

  Shanamore.

  A ride in a Garda car.

  A bluish white leg sticking out of a rock pool.

  She could feel the hard shell of her phone stuck uncomfortably beneath her left shoulder blade but when she pulled it out from there, the source of the ringing didn’t move with the motion.

  Confused, Audrey hoisted herself up on her elbows and looked around, her eyes struggling to discern shapes out of shadows.

  There was a blinking red light on the other side of the bed.

  It was the hotel phone that was ringing. She’d missed it during The Great Unplugging the night before.

  She picked it up.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘This is Ava at reception,’ said a female voice. ‘I’m very sorry to bother you at this hour, but you have a visitor. A Miss Sandra Cotter?’ Someone away from the phone said something inaudible and then Ava added, ‘Ms Cotter.’

  The name rang a distant bell.

  ‘What time is it?’ Audrey asked, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.

  ‘Almost half five. Five thirty a.m.’ The person in the background – Ms Sandra Cotter, Audrey assumed – spoke again. ‘She, ah, she says she’s from the paper. Sorry, the paper. She says to tell you that Joel sent her. And that she has coffee.’

  The crime reporter, then. The proper one.

  What was she doing here?

  ‘Does she have coffee?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ava said. ‘She does.’

  ‘Tell her to come on up then.’

  Audrey dumped the phone back in its cradle and patted the wall until her fingers felt a switch. The lamp there, the lamp on the desk and the ceiling light all came on; there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the wiring in this place. She got out of bed and touched an exploratory toe to her crumpled jeans, but her skin met rock-hard, gritty denim. She dug around in her bag until she found the only other pair of pants she’d brought with her: black leggings that had been rendered loose and misshaped by their double-duty as pyjamas. She went into the bathroom to pat down her hair and swill some mouthwash.

  She was brought back out by two sharp knocks on the hotel-room door.

  Sandra Cotter was fortyish, Audrey guesstimated, and sporting the kind of short, razor-cut, white-blonde hairstyle that should really only work on edgy Swedish popstars and models for conceptual clothing stores whose name no one quite knew how to pronounce. Sandra was pulling it off effortlessly but Audrey wondered if it was more to do with time-saving than style. The T-shirt under her leather jacket looked like it had last been in a ball under her bed and there were smudges of mascara at the corners of her eyes. She had probably left Dublin in a hurry, like Audrey, and not stopped moving since.

  There was a cardboard tray in her hands with two enormous takeaway cups wedged in it, which she held out now like an offering.

  ‘Audrey?’

  ‘Sandra.’

  ‘We meet at last.’

  Audrey motioned for her to come inside.

  Sandra set the cups down on the desk and pulled the chair out from under it.

  ‘Latte or Americano?’ she asked.

  ‘What has more caffeine in it?’

  Sandra gave her the Americano. Audrey took it back to her still-warm spot in the bed and took up a position with her back against the headboard.

  The coffee tasted like it had come from a petrol station kiosk and had been brewed the night before – which it probably had, and it probably was – but she sipped it gratefully, thankful for the caffeine buzz she hoped would kick in soon.

  ‘Are you up early,’ Audrey asked, ‘or late?’

  ‘I don’t know … What day is it?’ Sandra lifted the lid off her cup and sighed into it. ‘I think I’ve been up for almost twenty-four hours now.’

  ‘You’re the proper crime reporter.’

  Sandra laughed. ‘That I am.’

  ‘Did you just come from Shanamore?’

  ‘Yep. I think they gave me your old room at Murphy’s.’ She nodded towards Audrey’s bag, its contents pulled out and dropped as if in some kind of explosion. ‘I think the imprint of that is still on the bed.’

  ‘They thought it’d be a good idea to get me out of the village,’ Audrey said. ‘The Gardaí, I mean. I have to go in and give a statement first thing in the morning about what happened down by the beach and they didn’t want the locals trying to get it out of me first. Oh, and I have to get my bloody laptop back too. Hopefully.’

  Sandra raised an eyebrow. ‘The guards have your laptop?’

  ‘The video is on it.’

  ‘In an email, though. Did they really need to take the machine?’

  ‘I don’t know, I was too tired to argue.’ Audrey took another slug of coffee. ‘So. Sandra. The suspense is killing me.’

  ‘You want to know why I’m here.’

  ‘Joel sent you to stop me.’

  ‘The Paper sent me and Joel asked me to help you, actually.’

  ‘Help me do what?’

  ‘Write a story. Three thousand words. It’ll go online as The Paper’s first ever long-form piece on Saturday morning and they’re going to promote it full blast all weekend. You’ll get paid for it, a premium. It’s almost a certainty you’ll be moved upstairs. We can all get the facts, but only you can tell your story. You met the killer. Alleged killer, but come on. You slept in the room where it happened. In the very bed. They know how valuable that is and, in turn, how valuable you are. They’ll look after you. And it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, because you
’ll have a job to pay the bills for the next few months or year, while you work on your book.’

  Audrey raised her eyebrows. ‘My what now?’

  ‘True crime is’ – Sandra put on an OTT American accent – ‘so hot right now. Anything could happen for you. I’m willing to bet a book deal will. In the meantime, I’m supposed to fill you with caffeine, set you in front of a computer and help you write your piece.’ She paused. ‘This is going to be national news, Audrey. And not just for the weekend. In the last hour, Gardaí found a cache of over two hundred hours of hidden camera footage on a hard drive belonging to Andrew Gallagher. He tried to throw it off the cliffs in Ballycotton but it didn’t make it into the sea. A local hill-walker had found it a few days ago and brought it home, but he didn’t know what he had until he saw the news last night. And that might not be the only illicit thing on there, if you know what I mean. Seems our Andrew likes girls and I’m not using that word like thriller writers do. I mean, like, actual girls. Very young ones. I’m also hearing that Richard Flynn is a made-up name and that the guy calling himself that was involved in some major bank robbery in London years back.’

  ‘Shit,’ Audrey said.

  ‘My point is that this is only going to get bigger and bigger. What we know is only the tip of the iceberg. The real story is what we’ve yet to find out. Like, why did Natalie O’Connor come to Shanamore in the first place?’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘What, waking you up at five o’clock?’

  ‘Helping me.’

  Sandra shrugged. ‘I’m just sending the elevator back down, aren’t I? Mind you, there’s a charge for the ride. I want to see the video.’

  Audrey sighed. ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Worse than you can imagine.’

  ‘I still need to see it.’

  ‘Need or want?’

  ‘I’m a crime reporter.’ Sandra gave a half-smile. ‘So, both.’

  ‘You’ll have to watch it on my phone,’ Audrey said. ‘They took my laptop.’

  ‘It was sent to your email, right?’ Sandra hopped up and went for her bag. ‘Here, we can watch it on mine …’

  _________

  Sandra lifted the computer’s lid and moved her finger across the trackpad, then sat back down in the chair to watch as the video played. With her eyes on the screen, she said, ‘Does this make sense to you?’

  Audrey frowned. ‘What, the video?’

  ‘Andrew Gallagher as the murderer. You met him. What did you think?’

  ‘Well …’ Audrey considered the question. ‘I didn’t think, Oh, this guy is definitely a serial killer, if that’s what you mean. And I don’t know why he’d admit to finding the body, dumping it and cleaning up the scene if he hadn’t killed her. And if it’s not him, who could it be?’

  ‘But why didn’t he just go the whole hog and admit that too?’ Sandra said. ‘Or not admit anything at all and try to get away with it?’

  ‘Maybe because he doesn’t like jail?’

  ‘I detect sarcasm.’ Sandra sighed. ‘I’m just not buying him as the killer. Sorry.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘I mean, do you even think that’s him?’

  Audrey really didn’t want to watch that video again, but she didn’t have to. She could recall it perfectly, replay it in her mind.

  And now that she thought about it, actually, she wasn’t sure.

  There was nothing that ruled Andrew out as the figure in black, but then there was nothing that proved it was him either.

  They watched it through in silence, and then again at half-speed.

  ‘It’s not Richard Flynn,’ Audrey said. ‘I’m sure about that. He’s bigger, taller. Wider.’

  ‘But is it Andrew Gallagher?’

  ‘You know …’ Audrey squinted at the screen, then got up so she could look at it more closely. ‘There’s something weird about the clothes. The shape of them …’ She clicked until the video had gone back to about a third in, when the figure began to advance towards the bed, pausing it in mid-stride. ‘Look.’ She pointed. ‘Something’s off, isn’t it?’

  Sandra squinted at the screen now too. ‘Yeah. But what?’

  ‘Could it be …?’ Audrey paused. ‘Could that be a woman?’

  They turned and looked at each other, then back at the screen.

  ‘What woman, though?’ Sandra asked.

  ‘This was an opportunist thing, right?’ Audrey said. ‘Andrew is Norman Bates the Second, just without the mother stuff, and he killed one of his guests, randomly. Who was there, randomly.’

  ‘Was she there randomly? She was chasing down suspicions about her husband, wasn’t she?’

  ‘All I know is she asked him if he’d heard of Shanamore the morning she left.’

  ‘So where did she hear about Shanamore?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Does Mike?’

  ‘I don’t think he did when I spoke to him,’ Audrey said. ‘Or maybe he did but he just didn’t want to tell me.’ She paused, thinking. ‘There are other women in this story, though. When I spoke to Mike, he said that Natalie had a few crazy followers. One of them apparently called to the house … He didn’t get to finish telling me about it, some Gardaí arrived. Well, some more Gardaí because there were two already there. Because … because that morning, the morning the appeal went out, some woman tried to break into their house.’

  Sandra’s eyes grew wide. ‘What? Who was she?’

  ‘Don’t know. Mike wasn’t there when the first one came to the house. And actually, he wasn’t there when the other one tried to break in. Unless… Could they be the same woman?’

  They were both quiet for a moment, considering this.

  ‘She was in the back garden,’ Audrey said then. ‘A neighbour spotted her. So presumably she was trying to get to the back door. It has glass in it, it wouldn’t have been that hard to smash a pane and reach in to unlock it. Hang on …’ She moved to get her phone. ‘I have a picture of it.’

  Sandra raised her eyebrows. ‘You took pictures inside the house? Mike gave you permission for that?’

  ‘Those,’ Audrey said, ‘are two different things. Here.’ She sat next to Sandra and held the phone so they both could see it. Then she started swiping through the photos she’d taken inside the house on Sydney Parade Avenue, looking for one that included the back door.

  But she stopped before she got there.

  The photo of the noticeboard.

  The Visa bill with something circled in red.

  ‘What?’ Sandra said, looking from the phone to Audrey’s face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘What does that say?’ Audrey stretched two fingers across her phone’s screen to zoom in, then handed it to Sandra so she could take a look. ‘Doesn’t that look like “Shanamore Cottages”?’

  ‘Maybe …’

  ‘And it’s circled in red. So, what? Natalie found a charge on the credit card and went to investigate?’ Audrey paused before answering her own question. ‘No, that doesn’t make sense – because according to Mike, she asked him about Shanamore. If she knew there was a charge from there – if she’d found this bill – why didn’t she just ask him about that?’

  ‘Maybe she did,’ Sandra said. ‘Maybe Mike wasn’t completely truthful with you.’ She paused. ‘Or his wife.’

  Audrey turned to her. ‘You have your car here, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘Feel like driving to Dublin?’

  ‘Now?’ Sandra looked horrified. ‘Not even a little bit.’

  Audrey grinned. ‘But you’ll do it anyway?’

  ‘You have to give your statement, don’t you?’

  ‘That can wait. I need to talk to Mike.’ Audrey pointed to the photo of the Visa bill. ‘About that.’

  The door to the interview room opened and two Gardaí walked in, one Richard didn’t recognise and one he did: Sergeant Seanie. He wouldn’t trust either of them with a rental car. Where were all the s
enior Gardaí? Why had they sent teenagers to tackle a case of this magnitude and complexity? This outfit was as good as the Keystone Cops.

  ‘Richard,’ Seanie said, taking one of the two seats opposite. ‘Thanks for coming in to talk to us this morning. We really appreciate it.’ He had a thick file in his hands and he lay it down now on the table.

  Richard pressed his lips together to hide a smile. As if he didn’t already know that trick – and every other trick in the book.

  ‘Sergeant Seanie,’ he said. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘I think his name is Flynn,’ the other officer said.

  ‘Sergeant Flynn,’ Richard said. ‘My sincere apologies.’

  ‘There’re just a few things we need to go over,’ Seanie said.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  The other officer raised an eyebrow. ‘Why, should you be?’

  Richard fixed him with a stare. ‘And you are …?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant O’Reilly.’

  ‘Pleasure.’

  O’Reilly grunted. ‘I fucking hope not.’

  ‘We have a few questions,’ Seanie said.

  Richard sat back, folded his arms, smiled. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘You told the reporter – Audrey Coughlan – that Andrew Gallagher was, quote, a peeper, and that he recorded his guests with cameras hidden in their rooms.’ Seanie paused. ‘Can you tell us how you knew that?’

  ‘So he was? He did? I was right?’

  No one answered him but the implication was in the question: they had found cameras up at the cottages, making Richard right.

  The little pervert.

  ‘Thought so,’ Richard said. He touched his tongue to his front teeth.

  ‘Did you ever see any evidence of these cameras?’ Seanie asked. ‘Or was this just a suspicion?’

  ‘I saw him once, looking at footage on his laptop.’ Both Gardaí shifted in their seats. Their eagerness to hear the rest was coming off them in waves. Richard hoped neither of them played poker. ‘He was in his living room, at the table. I could see the whole thing. At first I thought he was watching, you know, porn or whatever, but then I realised what it was.’