Rewind

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  ‘Where did you get this?’ he blurted out.

  O’Reilly said, ‘We ask the questions, Andrew. So here’s one for you: why were you recording your guests?’

  If she had sent the video, he thought, that changed things.

  Andrew felt the buzz of gathering panic.

  ‘Security,’ he said tonelessly. ‘The camera is for security.’

  ‘Security?’ O’Reilly scoffed. ‘Yeah. And I’m fucking Santa Claus.’

  She was setting him up for this. He saw that now. The other stuff, the other video, she didn’t care about that. That was nothing compared to this.

  If you murdered someone, you went away for life.

  For all of your life.

  Andrew felt a rising nausea reaching up into his throat.

  ‘We know that’s not why you have it,’ Seanie said. ‘Don’t try to spoof us, Andrew. We have our tech guys round there now examining every square inch of that place.’ He pointed at the figure in black. ‘Who is that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Andrew mumbled.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Have you seen this video before?’

  Andrew shook his head, no. His eyes were fixed firmly in his own lap now. He couldn’t face the relentless glares of the two Gardaí any more.

  Then O’Reilly placed a large colour photograph in front of him.

  Natalie O’Connor’s body, pierced and bruised and bloated. Some skin pale with a bluish tinge, other skin crimson with blotches. Limbs exposed. Seaweed tangled in her hair. Eyes, mercifully, closed. Lips thin and receding, stretched back in a ghastly, clownish smile.

  Andrew tasted bile.

  O’Reilly tapped the photograph.

  ‘You moved the body,’ he said.

  Andrew took a deep breath.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I did move the body.’ He could sense the air in the room change, charge. ‘But I didn’t kill her, I swear.’

  The two Gardaí looked utterly unconvinced.

  ‘Well,’ O’Reilly said, ‘let’s take this one step at a time. Tell us about moving the body.’

  Andrew described discovering what had happened. He’d been panicking, terrified that the police would think the murder was his doing. He recounted rolling Natalie up in the sheets from the bed, and then putting more clean sheets around that bundle, and then putting the body into two large refuse bags, one on each end, taping them together at the joint in the middle. The effort of sliding the body down the stairs, the surprising weight of it, struggling to get it into a wheelbarrow that he kept around for doing the gardens. Going back into his own cottage to change. Going back to Cottage No. 6 to clean up. Spending hours and hours scrubbing every floor and surface, washing the things that could be saved, burning the things that had to be disposed of. Then, when it was finally night again, wheeling the body across the road and lining it up with the boot of his car. Transferring it from one to the other.

  All he left out was his first visit to the crime scene. And the fact that the reason he’d returned was because she told him to.

  She had made him do all that.

  ‘Tell us about the beach,’ Seanie said.

  Andrew had driven to the cliffs above the Far Strand, until the tide was in as far as he knew it would come. He’d checked and checked again that there was no one around. Then he’d dragged the body out of the car and pushed it over the cliff edge.

  ‘All by yourself?’ O’Reilly asked.

  Andrew nodded.

  ‘Must have been a lot of work, that.’

  Andrew didn’t respond.

  ‘And after all that effort, she didn’t go very far.’ O’Reilly slid another picture across the table. This one showed a white, waxy body, driven through with stab wounds and mauled by the sea, lying half-in, half-out of a shallow rock pool. You couldn’t see Natalie’s face in this one, thank God. ‘Didn’t take her long to come back to us, now did it? Lucky for us. And for her family. Her husband. Her friends.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Andrew said.

  He meant it.

  ‘So,’ Seanie said, ‘you admit to moving the body, cleaning the scene and disposing of the body at the beach – or attempting to?’

  Andrew nodded, then said, ‘Yes,’ quickly and firmly, before O’Reilly could warn him again.

  ‘And that’s you in the video?’

  ‘What? No.’

  ‘That’s not you in the video?’

  ‘No. No, no. That’s not me.’

  ‘The man in black,’ Seanie said, pointing at the laptop with his pen. ‘That’s not you?’

  ‘No.’ How could they even think that? ‘No.’

  ‘You’re saying you didn’t kill her,’ O’Reilly said.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Then help us understand, Andrew,’ Seanie said, leaning in closer. ‘Why did you do it then? Clean the scene, dispose of the body. Get rid of the camera. Why not just ring us? Why not ring an ambulance? Why, if you weren’t the killer, would you do all that? It just doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘I know,’ Andrew said miserably.

  How could it when he’d left out the worst bit?

  It was because of her, he said silently. Because she told me I had to. Because she said if I didn’t clean up the mess, they’d find out and they’d release the video. The other one, his one. This was their mess and they wanted him to get rid of it.

  At some point since, of course, Andrew had realised that there was no they.

  There was only her.

  But how could he explain that to the Gardaí? How could he prove it? He didn’t even know her name. No one had ever seen her at the cottages. Everything exchanged between them was encrypted.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ Andrew said again. ‘I would never do such a thing.’

  ‘What kind of things would you do?’ O’Reilly asked.

  Andrew saw Seanie shift in his seat and look away, and he recognised why. Unease. Disgust. Hatred.

  And he realised that they already knew.

  They knew about him.

  The girls.

  What surprised him, though, was how he felt about that: relieved. He hadn’t been able to contain the black oil by himself but, if he was locked away, there’d be nowhere for it to go. It would have to stay in his head.

  This was probably for the best.

  Is that why she’d done this? Did she want him behind bars? Was this some kind of vigilante justice? How did a murder fit into that?

  Andrew’s head swam with confused thoughts. He was just so, so tired. He wanted this to be over. He wanted to sleep.

  He slumped in his chair.

  Across from him, the two men exchanged one final glance.

  Then O’Reilly put down his pen, checked his watch.

  ‘Interview concluded,’ he said. ‘For now.’

  It had been a relatively quiet night at Sycamore House.

  Room Two, a solo man, had had a visitor just after ten, but they’d both managed to get under the covers fully dressed and then they’d managed to stay under there throughout. Aside from a bit of humping action and the odd bare leg, there was nothing to see.

  DELETE.

  Room Twelve, a solo woman, had watched porn, presumably, on her phone before bed and acted accordingly, rather enthusiastically, but she’d turned the lights out first and sunk low beneath the covers and the angle didn’t offer very much for the spectator.

  DELETE.

  But she was staying again tonight. There might be something there yet.

  Room Sixteen, a couple, had gone at it for over an hour, on top of the covers, various positions, both completely naked. She even faced the lens full on for at least ten minutes and both of them were young, slim and strong. If it wasn’t for them, there’d have been nothing at all. Everyone else had just climbed into bed and gone to sleep.

  SAVE TO FILE.

  But that was slim pickings, truth be told. One short clip on a night when Sycamore House didn’t have
one vacant room. It had been like this a lot lately. It had been fine when Shanamore Cottages – or Shanamore Cottage No. 6, specifically – was supplementing her stock, but now that that was gone, she’d need to take action.

  Another seller on the forum swore by backpackers. There was a third-party booking site aimed just at them. If you listed there, you wouldn’t get as much money for the rooms but you’d get a much younger, much more adventurous, much more energetic clientele. The kind who liked to book in and then go out to find a stranger to bring back.

  Jennifer made a note in her diary. She’d look into that.

  Yes, there was a lot going on, but she couldn’t afford to neglect her business. Her real business.

  She watched the footage from Sixteen for a second time, at high speed. She extracted a twenty-second segment that would best serve as a teaser, trimmed it, scrubbed it and then uploaded it through the secure server. It went live on the forum with a reserve of a thousand dollars. They were young and attractive, it was a clear shot, yes, but straight and boring. Vanilla. She’d be lucky to get that amount for it.

  Jennifer shut everything down, locked the laptop away in the safe and left the room, double-checking the door was locked behind her.

  Then she went downstairs, let herself out of the back door of Sycamore House, her private residence, and crossed the courtyard to the backdoor of Sycamore House, bed and breakfast. A commute of less than twenty seconds.

  Breakfast hadn’t hit its full stride yet so the place was relatively quiet.

  Jennifer relieved the night manager and half-listened as he passed on his report from the night before, gibbering on about a dripping tap and some guest whose luggage was still in Amsterdam. In summary: nothing interesting. Then she sat down at the reception desk and started on her morning tasks: reading emails, checking arrivals, closing out departure bills.

  That’s where she was when she heard it, drifting across the hall from the TV lounge.

  ‘Gardaí in East Cork have arrested a man in connection with the murder of Natalie O’Connor, the Dublin woman and popular blogger who went missing from her home in Sandymount on the fifth of November last. Although the man’s name has not yet been released, sources say he works at the holiday village near Shanamore Strand, where a woman’s body was found late yesterday evening. Locals say Ms O’Connor had been staying there. For more on this, we can go now to—’

  ‘Can I trouble you for a washcloth?’

  Jennifer looked up at the voice.

  The guest standing on the other side of the reception desk was American. Somewhere southern, going by her drawl. Seventy if she was a day. Silver hair carefully coiffed into a low bun. Wearing a shiny tracksuit top over a T-shirt with the Guinness toucan on it and – Jennifer could only assume, as the desk was in the way, but she’d have bet money on it – pastel-coloured cropped pants with an elasticated waist and slip-on runners with socks. A pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses hung from her neck on ruby-coloured beads and a wide, kind, earnest smile stretched across her face. She was part of a coach group overflow from the chain hotel across the street that had taken three rooms the night before.

  Room Eighteen, as far as Jennifer remembered.

  ‘A washcloth,’ the woman said. ‘Would you have one?’

  A facecloth, Jennifer corrected silently. For some reason, American guests always asked for them. Sycamore House kept a small stack in the laundry room expressly to satisfy these requests, but Jennifer usually lied and said they didn’t have any because, well, what the fuck? It’s a smaller version of a towel, people. There’re four of them in your room. Just use one of them instead, for God’s sake. Who had the time for this kind of crap?

  But this time, Jennifer stood and said, ‘Of course. Let me grab one for you. I’ll be right back, okay?’ because she needed some time to think about what she’d just heard: they’d arrested Andrew.

  The woman beamed. ‘Thanks so much.’

  Jennifer pushed against the door and entered the back office. She reached out and grabbed the first warm body she encountered which happened to be Louise, one of the waitresses. She told her to get a facecloth for the woman waiting at reception and then to stay there until she got back.

  Louise’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. ‘Stand out there?’

  ‘Just for a few minutes, Louise.’

  ‘But what do I do? I don’t know how to use the system, I—’

  ‘Just stand there,’ Jennifer said, ‘and write down anything I need to do when I get back because you can’t. I won’t be long.’

  ‘But what about check-outs and things?’ Louise was getting panicked. ‘Money and credit cards—’

  ‘Louise!’ Jennifer shouted. The girl stepped back, stunned. ‘Go to the desk and just figure it out, okay? I’ll be back in half an hour. At least pretend you’re not completely helpless, for fuck’s sake.’

  Jennifer turned and followed the corridor to her right until another door deposited her back into the yard between the two buildings. She used her key to open her back door and then walked through her kitchen and into the hall, where she grabbed her coat off the banister and kept going, out the front door, down the drive and out on to the footpath, into her car and away.

  Andrew has been arrested and charged.

  It was all over now, surely. The body had been found. The culprit was in custody.

  Her and Mike were free now, free to be together.

  The plan had worked perfectly.

  But she needed to see him. She couldn’t wait any longer. She gunned the engine and headed for Sandymount.

  _________

  She’d started out as a mere viewer, back when she used to frequent The Club.

  Members met once a month. Usually in a large house out in the countryside somewhere. Never the same venue twice. Background checks required. Regular testing expected. You could do what you wanted, with whoever you wanted, and then go back to your normal, mundane, everyday existence with no one around you knowing a thing.

  It was Peter – or the man who gave his name as Peter – who’d first told her about the forum. Hidden sex-cams, he explained. In all sorts of places. Some vanilla, some taboo. Some downright disgusting. Hotel rooms. Private homes that were rented out to holidaymakers. Student dorms, the kind at college and the kind in boarding schools. Peter claimed to have once seen footage from a camera in a cell in a women’s prison. Truth be told, Jennifer liked a lot of things, but this didn’t appeal to her at all. Mainly because she didn’t believe for a second that any of it was real.

  Peter told her how to access the forum and two nights later, that’s what she did. And she saw that she was right. Most of the footage, the vast majority of it, featured people who were clearly just pretending to be unaware of the lens. It was all in the details. The room that was supposed to be in a hotel, but that also appeared in a video that was supposedly a dorm. The schoolgirls who seemed inexplicably concerned with keeping their long hair from obscuring the shot and who looked old enough to be teaching teenagers. The prison cell with a fire evacuation plan on the back of an interior door – and, heck, an interior door.

  There were only a handful of videos that seemed like they could be the real deal, like they could actually be from cameras hidden in the most private of places, their subjects unaware.

  Jennifer noted with interest that these had the highest view counts; the audience for these things could clearly sniff out authenticity.

  Then she discovered the most interesting thing of all: that these weren’t the actual videos, but teasers for them. Trailers, like in the movies. If you wanted to watch the whole thing, you had to pay up. Sizeable sums. And that would only give you access for a limited time. You couldn’t, apparently, download the footage. This thing was a money machine.

  Jennifer couldn’t even say she came up with the idea. It was there, on a platter, presented to her for the taking.

  All she’d had to do was turn her head and look at it.

  _________
>
  It had just hit the hour and all that was on the radio news was Natalie this, Natalie that. People were horrified. Jennifer was already over it. She switched it off and thought about mistakes instead.

  Everyone makes mistakes. That’s what people believed. But Jennifer didn’t. She didn’t believe it because she didn’t make them. She was too careful.

  Instead, she made sure to take advantage when others did.

  Mike’s mistake, she was willing to forgive. He shouldn’t have let things get this far. He should’ve just left that silly bitch before she ran off out of the house and he had to tell a nation that he loved her and missed her and wanted her home.

  That had really hurt. It hurt Jennifer now, just thinking about it.

  As had the radio silence. As it continued to do.

  That, though, she understood. Too risky. It wouldn’t look good. And it wouldn’t be good either, would it? Mike was concerned with such things.

  She knew he was hurting too, though. She could understand that much, even though she didn’t like it. Okay, so, his marriage had effectively ended, but he’d been with Natalie for a decade before that. It was natural that Mike would be grieving her death, that it would be intensely painful for him and confusing, what with his feelings for Jennifer mixed up in everything as well.

  Whether it was right or wrong, appropriate or not, she wanted to be there for him now. To comfort him. To be able to hold him and tell him that everything was going to be all right. Because everything was going to be all right now that they could be together.

  Jennifer had seen to that.

  _________

  Andrew’s mistake, meanwhile … Christ, take your pick! That idiot was made of them. Mistakes were in his DNA. Checking into a hotel with a thirteen-year-old girl was probably the best place to start. That sick fuck. And Andrew had unwittingly doubled down on that whopper, because the hotel he’d checked into was hers.

  Jennifer had never actually blackmailed anyone before. To be honest, it hadn’t even occurred to her to do it. Selling the footage was cleaner, quicker and much less work – but Andrew had been asking for it.

  He was astonishingly stupid and had taken no steps to conceal his identity. He’d paid in cash but, when she’d asked for an email address to put on file, he’d not only readily provided one, but handed her a business card to read the address off.