56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  She’d rather not have to use it, but she can if need be.

  She’ll figure something out.

  They have just ordered a third round when he says, “You’re not going to believe this.”

  Her cheeks feel warm, her limbs languid, her tongue loose. She’s not yet drunk but drunker than she expected she’d get, than she knows she should be. It’s because she didn’t have any lunch. Couldn’t have any; nerves had stolen her appetite. She pulls her glass of water closer and silently resolves to drink it all before she takes even one more sip of alcohol.

  She says, “Try me.”

  He shows her a flash of something on his phone. “The film started ten minutes ago.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “We could make a run for it. They’re probably still on trailers and it’s only a couple of minutes away.”

  “Would it be terrible—” she starts at the exact same time he says, “Or we could just stay here.”

  They both laugh.

  “I hate rushing,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  “And I like drinking.”

  “Me too.”

  “And I like you.”

  “Well, I am very likable.”

  He laughs. He’s impressed with her.

  After that quip, she’s a little impressed with herself.

  “So,” she says, clearing her throat. She needs to change the subject, to give herself some time to come back from the tipsy cliff edge. “Do you come here often?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I genuinely want to know.”

  “This is actually only my second time here,” he admits. “And the other time was with work. I just . . .” He pinches the stem of his glass and slides it back and forth a little until the liquid starts to slosh around inside. “I wanted to come back here with . . . not work.”

  “Not work. Wow. I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “Do you like it?”

  Their eyes meet as he asks this and it occurs to her that up until now, practically sitting side by side, she hasn’t been making much eye contact with him at all.

  It’s just as well because the way he’s looking at her now . . .

  She never really understood the phrase piercing when applied to eyes, but that’s what his are. He’s not just looking at her but in her, it feels like, right through the thin veneer of this pretending. It’s as if he has X-ray vision that can effortlessly penetrate all the way to the real Ciara, the one who’s curled up and careful and desperately trying to protect herself from what it might feel like if this evening goes horribly wrong.

  She looks away, back to her glass.

  “I do,” she says. “I do like it. I mean . . . look, it’s not really where I’d usually be, let’s put it that way.” The alcohol fizzes in her bloodstream, disintegrating walls his gaze has been weakening all night. She can’t let them fall away completely, not on this, their very first date, but she can put her face to one of the gaps and speak to him across clear air without having to risk a step outside the boundary. “I can’t really afford to come to places like this, to be honest. Not on the regular, anyway. And if I’d known this is where we’d end up, I would’ve dressed differently. I was afraid the doorman was going to stop me and say, ‘Sorry, love. No Primark apparel allowed inside.’ ”

  “He calls you love and says apparel? Who is this guy?”

  She slaps him playfully on the forearm.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “For the record,” he says, “I think you look lovely.”

  She mumbles, “Thank you,” to her glass.

  “It’s just a bit special, isn’t it?”

  He could mean the bar. Or the drinks.

  Or this night, with her in it.

  “Here’s what I like about this place.” She’s careful to speak her words more slowly than she’s thinking them, distinctly pronouncing each one. Or so she hopes. “It’s hidden. It’s not a secret, but it’s not on show. You can’t know this is here when you walk past this building on the street, but come inside and turn a corner and it’s revealed to you, this beauty that’s been here all the time. Waiting. And I love that. I love discovering places like this because it makes me wonder about what else is inside all these buildings I walk past every day. What else is just waiting to be discovered? There’s a whole hidden city. Several hidden cities. All hiding in plain sight in this one.”

  “So you like secrets,” Oliver says.

  “No.” It comes out too quickly, sounding too harsh. She says it again, slower and softer. “No. It’s . . . There’s a place in New York, a bar, that you have absolutely no way of knowing is there unless you’re told about it by someone else who has been told about it because no part of it faces the street and there’s no sign, and the only way to get in is through a secret door in another bar.”

  “That sounds exhausting,” he says.

  “And so unnecessary. Like, just serve good drinks and be nice to people and stop with all the shite. But that kinda thing—that’s a secret. And secrets are about denying people things. The truth, yes, but also the experience, the knowledge . . . You’re just trying to keep them out of the cool gang. You’re trying to decide who gets to be in the cool gang, and that’s just . . .” Ciara stops, having lost her train of thought. Where had she been going with that? The warmth of the alcohol is spreading unbidden throughout her body. “It’s not secrets I like. It’s discovering things that are new to me but actually were always there. Secrets are a different thing. They’re destructive.”

  Silence.

  She dares to turn and look at him and finds that his eyes are on her. For a second she thinks he might be about to move to kiss her, and she hopes not because she’s not ready, she’s not prepared, and she’s definitely a little bit drunk and she’d rather not be, not for that, but instead he nods and says, “I know what you mean,” and then that he has to go to the bathroom again.

  “Three times in one night?”

  “I’ve broken the seal,” he says gravely.

  “I actually have to go, too. I’ll go when you get back.”

  “I can wait?”

  “I can wait longer.” She waves a hand. “Go on.”

  This time, when he’s gone, she forces herself to finish her water in three long gulps. Then she takes one of the clean cocktail napkins from the table, folds it neatly, and tucks it inside her bag. When she looks up the waiter is standing there, smirking at her conspiratorially, and she flashes him a guilty smile and says, “A souvenir.”

  “It’s going well, then,” he says.

  “I think so.”

  “I think so too.”

  He sets down their fresh drinks, winks at her, and leaves.

  When they’ve both drained their glasses, he suggests they make a move. She’s surprised by how late it is—almost ten, how did that happen?—and she says so. She finds out that he paid the bill while she was in the bathroom and she protests but not too hard, and thanks him.

  His hand is on the small of her back again as they descend the stairs, but it’s pressed firmly against her body now. She’s carrying her coat over her arm and can feel the heat of his skin through the thin material of her dress. She hopes he can’t feel the band of her tights sticking into her flesh. She wonders what he can feel.

  They face their own reflections in the dark glass of the doors, and she is struck by how good they look, him and her, coupled together.

  And then, how quickly this has happened, how fast they’ve gone from strangers in a supermarket line to him here beside her, touching her, telling her things about himself.

  Maybe this can be easy.

  But what comes next?

  She assumes they will go somewhere else, have one for the road, and maybe grab some late-night fast-food somewhere—God knows she could u
se it—or maybe—

  “Can we get a cab?” Oliver says to the doorman, a different one from before.

  This throws her but she doesn’t outwardly react. She wants to know where they’re getting this cab to but she also doesn’t want to threaten the delicate equilibrium of these next few moments. She feels like a time traveler exercising extreme caution in the present, which is actually the past, because she knows how good the future is and doesn’t want it to change one bit.

  It’s harder not to react when the cab pulls up and Oliver opens a door and motions for her to get in, but then after she does stays there, standing outside the car.

  He’s not getting in, she realizes.

  He leans down, one hand on the roof, until his face is level with hers.

  “I’m gonna walk home,” he says.

  “Oh.” Disappointment washes over her in a wave. “Sure. Right.”

  “Are you around Thursday evening? We could actually go see the film this time.”

  She nods. Smiles briefly. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll text you.”

  “Okay. Great.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  He closes her door for her and moves to the front passenger side, where the window is rolled down. He bends to drop something into the seat—enough money to cover the fare, she’ll figure out in a second—and waves at the driver.

  He gives her another wave as the car pulls off.

  She doesn’t quite understand what just took place. He wants to see her again, okay, but not any more tonight? Not now?

  “Where to, love?” the driver asks over his shoulder.

  Any confidence she had in her ability to navigate these waters dissipates. She doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing. She should just give up now.

  “Home,” she says absently, before realizing that he’s asking for an address.

  Today

  Lee noses the vehicle in behind a squad car parked on double yellows outside a curved apartment complex of smooth gray brick, glass, and exposed steel off Harold’s Cross Road. Karl finishes his breakfast—a can of Red Bull—just as she cuts the engine.

  She can see a uniform waiting for them outside what looks like the main entrance: a pair of glass doors under a sign that says The Crossings in polished gold lettering. His thumbs are hooked into his ballistics vest and he’s shifting his weight from foot to foot. Lee can’t tell from this distance whether it’s Ant or Dec but she’s not sure she could from up close either. Same with their namesakes. She settles on Presumed Dec for the time being.

  There’s no sign of their reinforcements yet, but it’s barely been ten minutes since she hung up on Stephen.

  She checks her phone for the message she’d asked him to send: the body is in apartment number one. She hopes there’s only a handful of units on each floor. The closer the scene is to the main entrance, the fewer people will see them arrive, thus the more chance they have of fixing this before things go any more wrong.

  She turns to Karl.

  “Are you clear on what you’re doing?”

  “Cleaning up the massive soft shit this pair just took?”

  “This isn’t their fault, Karl. It’s whatever eejit sent them out here, alone. And we don’t know what they did yet, so try not to go in there all, you know, being you.”

  “Funny and attractive?”

  “An absolute dickhead.”

  Karl clamps a hand on his chest as if he’s just been shot in the heart.

  “They’ve only been on the job five minutes,” Lee says. “Cut them some slack, is all I’m saying.”

  “You know, you should really put something on that bleeding heart of yours.” He opens the passenger-side door. “I think I might have seen a first-aid box in the back . . .”

  Once they’re outside, the uniform hurries toward them.

  They meet on the path.

  “Detective Inspector Leah Riordan,” she says to him, “and Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly. What have we got here . . . ?”

  “Michael,” the young guard finishes. He pulls down his mask. “Garda Michael Creedon.”

  “What’s going on here, Michael? In brief.”

  Lee is encouraged by the fact that he flips open his notebook before answering.

  “Well, we, ah, got here around half seven,” he says, scanning his notes. “Seven twenty-six. One of—”

  “Seven twenty-six?” Karl asks. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I wrote it—”

  “Not seven twenty-seven?”

  The young guard’s cheeks start to color, and Lee digs Karl in the ribs before motioning for Michael to continue.

  “Ah, yeah, so . . .” He clears his throat. “One of the residents was here waiting for us—Gillian Fannin. She lives in number four. She’s the one who called it in.”

  “What did she call in,” Lee asks, “exactly?”

  “A smell in the hall that she thought was coming from her neighbor’s apartment. Number one. Three doors away from hers but in the same corridor. She presumed it was just rotting food waste or something at first, but it was getting worse so . . . This morning she goes to knock on the door—but the door is open.”

  “Open how?”

  “She described it as pulled closed but not fully shut. The lock wasn’t engaged. She pushed it open a couple of inches—she was going to call out, see if anyone was home—but the smell was much worse then and she retreated, went back to her own apartment and made the call. Well, two calls—one to the station, one to 999 for an ambulance.”

  “So she didn’t actually go inside?”

  “She says she didn’t, no.”

  “What was the door like when you first saw it?”

  “As she’d described,” Michael says. “Like she found it. It doesn’t seem to lock unless you pull it shut.”

  “Does she know who lives there?”

  “She thinks it’s a young guy, in his twenties or thirties, but that’s it. She hasn’t seen him in a while, maybe a couple of weeks. I checked the letterboxes but they only have numbers on them. No names.”

  “Good thinking,” Lee says, throwing the guy a bone. She can practically feel Karl roll his eyes at this beside her. “The paramedics—they went in?”

  “One of them”—he looks down at his notes again—“Paul Philips, he went in briefly. Came back out, said this wasn’t anything they could help with and advised us to call the station and tell them what was going on. Said he hadn’t touched the body, that it was clearly in an advanced state of decomposition. And that if he had to make a guess, he’d say whatever happened in there happened a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Did they leave?”

  “I think they’re parked around the back, by the vehicle entrance. He said something about pronouncing death for you if you didn’t want to wait for the pathologist . . . ?”

  “Yeah, they’re able to do that now. But let’s wait and see. Did you go in?”

  “No, Declan did. Again, very briefly. The body is in the bathroom, the first door off the hall, so he didn’t have to go in very far. And from there he said he could see into the living room and the bigger bedroom. Seems to be empty apart from . . .” He clears his throat again. “He was only in there a few seconds.”

  Still plenty of time to destroy critical evidence, but maybe the blast zone won’t be as big as Lee had feared.

  “Is the front door the only access?”

  Michael shakes his head, no. “The ground-floor apartments have railed-in terraces. You could easily hop over. The sliding door that leads out of number one looks closed from the outside, but I didn’t check if it was locked. I was trying to touch as little as possible.” He points over his left shoulder. “There’s also a side gate and two fire exits, all alarmed according to Ms. Fannin, plus you have the underground car
park. The entrance to it is round the back.”

  “Anyone coming or going?”

  “Not in or out this way. I think the time of the day is on our side there. One guy did try to leave for a run but he went back without much hassle. But we don’t know about vehicles.”

  “Fire exits—is there one at the far end of the corridor?”

  Michael nods.

  “So there’s nothing between that exit and the door to apartment one? No other apartments?”

  “There’s a door to the stairwell,” he says, “but that’s it.”

  Lee nods at Karl, who understands: the fire exit will be their main access through the cordon. They’ll have to get the alarm system disabled first.

  “Okay, good. Michael, I’m going to leave you with DS Connolly here to help him get things organized while I go inside and see what we’re dealing with. We should have a few more hands on deck any second now and once we do, I want to get that car park blocked off and this place secured. Hopefully, Number Four is just an early riser and all her neighbors are still asleep.”

  Michael winces. “No such luck there, I’m afraid, Inspector. When we arrived, we thought we could go in via the side entrance. But when we pushed it open, well, it turns out it was an emergency exit. The fire alarm went off throughout the building, woke everybody up. So by the time we located Ms. Fannin—she met us in the courtyard—we, ah, we had an audience. The residents were all out on their balconies, watching.”

  “Oh, great,” Karl mutters.

  “The main thing now,” Lee says to Michael, “is making sure everyone stays put.” To Karl, “I’m going to take a look inside. You’re good to go out here?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Lee says a silent prayer for Garda Michael Creedon as she turns and heads inside.

  One of the glass doors has been propped open with a fire extinguisher; a keypad and electronic sensor suggest it’d be locked otherwise, accessible only by residents.

  As soon as she crosses the threshold, the smell hits.

  A sign on the wall directs her to the right for apartment number one, but the corridor curves so she can’t tell how many feet away from its door she is right now. Judging by the shape and size of the building, she must have somewhere between thirty and forty feet to go yet, and a door is open directly behind her and the air this morning is fresh and cool, and yet . . .