Normally in a situation like this Lee would send someone else in to pretend to be the ranking member on-scene—this is, after all, the equivalent of asking to speak to a manager—but considering the name on that envelope . . .
“All right,” she says to Claire. “I’ll go.” Then to Karl, “Get that envelope into evidence for me and check on our Incident Room, will you? Once the pathologist has been and gone, I want to assemble everyone there and see what we have, so let’s be ready to go. And watch out for our friend with the CCTV. And get someone in that bloody KB Studios place who actually knows something on the phone. We have a family to notify and we have no solid information about which family that might be yet.”
Karl nods. “On it.”
“And don’t say anything about—”
“I know, I know.”
Lee indicates then that Claire should lead the way, and together they head back inside the cordon, slipping on masks as they go.
Apartment fourteen is on the opposite side of the complex to the scene—they turn left off the lobby—and one floor up. They step into a lift that has a sign printed in bold type on a sheet of paper warning that only one household can use it at a time.
When the doors open onto the second-floor corridor, Lee is relieved to find she can’t detect any unpleasant smells. She asks Claire to wait by the elevators and then goes to knock on fourteen.
The door opens so fast that the woman who appears in its place must have been standing, waiting, directly on its other side.
She is blond and lean in a way that suggests she knows exactly what her percentage of body fat is and is actively working to make it a smaller number. Late thirties, ish. Wearing loose sweatpants and a well-worn T-shirt with tiny holes in the shoulder seams. Lee catches a glimpse of a thin, white scar just above the T-shirt’s collar before the woman puts a hand there, pulling on the material absently while scanning the hall, right and then left, as if nervous that someone else might overhear them.
“Good morning, I’m Detective Inspector Leah Riordan.” She flashes her ID. “My colleague tells me that you have some information you’d like to share with me.”
“Can you come inside? I don’t really want to talk about it out here.” The woman steps back, opening the door all the way, revealing a hallway that looks identical to its counterpart in apartment one. “It’s just me. We can stand at opposite ends of the living room. And I’ll open the windows.”
Lee hesitates. “Do you have a balcony?”
The woman nods.
“Let’s talk out there, then. We’ll keep our voices low.”
The woman turns and starts down the hall. Lee follows her inside, letting the door swing closed behind her.
She notes that it doesn’t lock—there’s no click from the mechanism sliding into place—which suggests the door in apartment one could have suffered the same fate. It wasn’t necessarily open on purpose. Someone could’ve thought they’d closed it, not realizing it hadn’t actually locked.
This apartment is a mirror image of the scene, with the living room to the right off the hall. As the woman hurries to the other end of it, to the balcony door, Lee does a quick scan of the space.
Everything is the same. Same glossy, clinical kitchen. Same brown leather couch. Even the abstract print on the wall is exactly the same.
What’s weird is that something else is the same, too: the bare, impersonal vibe. Just like the scene, this looks like a show home someone is squatting in for a few days. There’s almost nothing on the kitchen countertops, no personal items, no decoration outside of what came with the place.
This one doesn’t even have the George Clooney coffee machine.
“Do you live here?” Lee asks as she steps outside.
The balcony is bare. It has a nice view of the courtyard and there’s a frosted privacy screen between this and the next balcony over, to the right. A leafy tree almost obscures the view of apartment number one’s terrace, but when Lee bends down a little, she finds clear air. If you were sitting down out here, you’d be able to see it perfectly.
“It’s, ah, like a corporate let.” The blond woman has gone to stand in the farthest corner of the balcony, maximizing the distance between them. “I’m just staying here for a few weeks.”
Lee pulls down her mask. “Where are you normally resident?”
“Well . . .” The woman shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “Dundrum.”
That’s not even half an hour’s drive from here.
“So why are you . . . ?”
“That’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“All right then.” Lee takes out her notebook, flips it open, clicks the end of her pen. “Why don’t you start with your name?”
“Laura Mannix. Two n’s and an i-x on the end.”
The woman reaches behind into her pocket and pulls out her phone, which has one of those credit-card-sized pouches stuck to its back. She slides a small yellow card out of it and holds it up, stretching so Lee can read what’s on it.
Bitten nails, Lee notes. Chipped red polish.
And then—
NUJ.
The National Union of Journalists.
It’s a press card.
Lee flips her notebook closed.
“All press inquiries need to go through the Press Office,” she says, “as you well know.”
She moves to go.
Fucking chancer.
“No, no, wait,” Laura protests. “Please! It’s not . . . it’s not that.” Her chin trembles; she looks as if she’s about to cry. “I didn’t do anything, okay? I swear. But I think that whatever’s happened in there . . . I think it could be my fault.”
28 Days Ago
When Oliver wakes the next morning, he finds the other side of the bed empty and cold. This in itself isn’t unusual; Ciara often gets up before him on weekdays. But then the events of the night before come back to him like a spray of bullets: one at a time but in rapid succession, each one compounding the pain of the previous hit. The fire alarm going off. Her possibly seeing the text message from Rich. Him trying to keep her inside. Her talking to the woman from the Westbury.
Her not talking to him at all when she came back in, except to say that she was going to sleep in the other bedroom.
The sound of the lock turning in its door a moment later had hurt him almost as much as the dragging of jagged glass across his skin had years earlier.
But he couldn’t dwell on it, because he was consumed with the fact that the woman with whom he’d randomly spoken outside a hotel door a few weeks back just happened to be living in the same apartment complex in a city of half a million people, and the implications of it.
One problem at a time.
But now he worries that it was a mistake not to talk to Ciara last night, to try to explain himself.
She could have gotten up this morning and left, not just the apartment but him as well—
At the tinkle of steel against china, coming from the living room, Oliver’s muscles sag with relief.
She’s still here.
He finds her sitting on the couch, close to the patio door, which is standing open a few inches and letting in both a breeze of fresh, cool air and a soundtrack of chirping birds. Her legs are tucked underneath her, and a cup of coffee rests in her lap. Her phone is on the arm of the chair, within easy reach.
“Morning,” he says.
She turns and looks at him, her face expressionless. “Morning.”
He takes a seat at the opposite end of the couch.
“What time is it?” he asks.
“Just gone eight.”
“Look,” he starts, “about last night—”
“Maybe this was a mistake.”
Her tone isn’t angry or upset, just flat and tired.
But he
thinks he can detect an invitation in it, as if this isn’t a declarative statement but a proposal that he’s being invited to discuss.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on his part.
“I don’t know anything about you,” Ciara says, “except what’s in the present tense. What you like. What you’re like. What you’re like with me, to me. Under normal circumstances, that amount of information might be a normal amount to have. I mean, we’ve known each other, what? A month now? But there’s nothing normal about this. We’re living together, being together, twenty-four-seven. But I haven’t met a single other person who knows you. No family, no friends, no colleagues. I was just sitting here thinking, if I had to prove you are who you say you are—”
“Why would you need to do that?”
“—what evidence would I have? On the one hand, it’s like you’re this mystery man, but on the other, you’re the closest person in the world to me right now. It’s like we’re on this road where there’s two lanes going in the same direction, one accelerating everything, the other one slowing everything down, and I’ve got a wheel in each one and I’m stuck. And last night . . . You made me afraid, Oliver. You made me feel afraid.” She bites her lip. “Of you.”
The words make his chest tight with pain.
“I didn’t mean to,” he says. “I just wasn’t thinking . . . No, I was thinking, but only about how I’d told Kenneth you’d moved back to your own place, and what would happen if he found out I’d lied . . . And I was right, wasn’t I? It was a false—”
“Don’t,” she says in a tone that instantly silences him.
A beat passes.
“I’m sorry,” he says then. “But I can’t undo it. And I’m not trying to excuse it. I can only explain what was going through my head and promise that it won’t happen again.” Oliver pauses to take a deep breath. “So where does that leave us?”
She looks away.
“You know, I could say the same about you,” he says tentatively. “I only know what’s in your present tense.”
“But the difference is I want to know more.” Ciara stretches to set the coffee cup on the table, then settles back into the couch and folds her arms: defensive pose. “You don’t seem to be at all interested in the rest of me. Not that there’s anything particularly interesting or exciting there, it’s just . . . Sometimes I’d just wish you’d ask.”
He can’t, of course, tell her the truth about why he doesn’t, which is that he can’t tell her the truth about himself. The more she shares, the more he’ll owe it to her to do the same, and the more lies he’ll have to tell to fulfill that bargain.
If she shares details about her family, he’ll be forced to admit he’s only in contact with one member of his. If she recalls adventures from her teenage years, he’ll have to cover up the fact that he missed his entirely. If she lists her dreams, he’ll have to come up with a good reason for why he doesn’t dare to have any.
Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.
He tries not to tell any more of them than is absolutely necessary.
He says, “What do you want me to ask?”
“Well . . .” There’s a hint of a smile on her face, which relaxes something inside of him, vents a little fear from the pressurized chambers of his chest. “I suppose I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to rant about how my mother is the worst person in the world. Or about how my best friend up and left for Australia—just abandoned me to go and have this absolutely amazing bloody time, and I kind of hold it against her that she didn’t ask me to go with her, even though I know I would’ve said no. Or about how I’m not sure I like this job, or want it. I don’t know what I want. I have no clue what my passion is and I worry that I don’t have one.” A pause. “Okay, so. I’m realizing now that I’m just giving you excuses not to ask me questions.”
“No, no.” Oliver smiles. “All good stuff. Very much looking forward to hearing all about it.”
“You’re going to have to do a much better job of faking being interested than that.”
“I am interested.”
Her face falls serious again. “Then why don’t you ask?”
A version of the truth is always the safest bet.
“I just feel like I don’t need to know all that right now,” he says. “I kind of like our blank slates. No baggage. Nothing weighing us down. We have these stories we tell ourselves—and other people—about ourselves, based on what happened to us in the past, or what we did, or decisions we made, and then they become our future just by the telling. It’s like a . . .”
“Self-fulfilling prophecy?” she offers.
“Yeah. We want things to be different but we start by telling the other person how they were the last time, and that kind of, like, limits us to being that person again . . . I suppose what I’m saying is that, for once, I’d like to start something clean. Without any stories limiting where this can go, who we can be.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” she says, frowning.
“What if you’d told me you were shy? Just for example. I wouldn’t have thought so otherwise, not based on your actions, but you said you are, so that’s what I think now, and I treat you differently. Maybe we don’t do things or go places we would’ve otherwise, because I’m worried it’ll make you uncomfortable, because you’ve told me you’re shy. But what if you’re not really? What if it’s something you mistakenly believe about yourself, or that someone else made you feel, or mistook you for? Wouldn’t it have been better then that I didn’t know, that you didn’t tell me?”
I just want a chance to try to convince you of who I am before you find out what I did, before you find out what they say I am.
“When you’re working out here,” Ciara says, indicating the living room, “are you actually, or have you been watching old Oprah shows on repeat?”
He grins. “Hours of it.”
“Thought so.”
“And, Ciara . . .” He takes a deep breath. “Look, the truth is there isn’t really anyone for you to meet. Not here in Dublin, anyway. My family aren’t here, and all the guys at work are older than me, and married with kids, and kinda boring, and I haven’t really had the chance to meet anyone else yet. I’ve only been here a few weeks and, well, how do you meet people except through work and college and stuff? I didn’t go to college here and I don’t play sports and, well, we can’t go anywhere or do anything now, can we?”
She smiles. “You’re so lucky you met me.”
“I am.”
“And I’m in the same boat,” she says, “in lots of ways. You’re the only person I know here. So I get all that. But . . . Well, there are things I do want to know, that I want you to tell me.”
“Like what?”
He holds his breath.
“Like, who was texting you at four o’clock in the morning?”
“My brother,” he says. “Richard. Rich.”
She nods, understanding. “The one in Australia. The time difference.”
“It was lunchtime there.”
“Okay, but why get up in the middle of the night for it? It was just a text. And you were dressed; you didn’t just hop out of bed because you heard the notification.”
He has to give her something, he thinks.
“I didn’t get up for it. I was already up. I usually am, at that hour. I don’t really sleep.” Admitting this reminds him of one of those sequences from nature documentaries warning of climate change: the cracking of ice, a cliff of it suddenly breaking off from a gigantic glacier, the steady downward slide as it sinks and disappears into the sea. He feels lighter, but what’s just happened is a terrible thing—he’s revealed a secret. “I’m an insomniac.”
Ciara raises her eyebrows. He thinks what’s on her face reads more like
concern than suspicion, but he can’t be sure.
“On a good night,” he says, “I get about two hours. Three is great. Three is positively refreshing. I go to bed and fall asleep, like normal, but at some point, I wake up and that’s it. I cannot get back to sleep. Doesn’t matter what I do. Usually by five, six a.m.—it depends on the time of the year, it seems tied to when it gets light outside—I manage to doze off for another hour or two, if I’m lucky, but it’s not proper sleep. Certainly not the restorative kind. Then I wake up, get up, and feel like absolute shit all day. Repeat as required.”
“Do you get up every night?”
“Most nights, yeah. Before you were here, I might have turned on a light and tried to read a book or watch something on my phone, but I don’t want to disturb you, so . . .”
“But how do you function on so little sleep?”
He shrugs. “You just get used to it.”
“Can’t you take something? A sleeping pill?”
“I do take something, sometimes. Tranquilizers. But they’re pretty strong. They knock you out, basically. I get a great night’s sleep but then I’m groggy for the next two days. So I use them sparingly. I go as long as I can without them and then when I’m in danger of having, like, hallucinations, I take one. Usually on a Friday night, so I can just veg out for the weekend and be okay for work on Monday. That’s the only thing that works for me. All the other stuff is like swallowing Tic Tacs.”
“When did you last take one of those tranquilizer things?”
“The weekend after we met. It’ll be time to again, soon.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I suppose I was embarrassed.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s weird.”
“It’s a medical condition.”
He sighs. “Still.”
“Is there anything else I should know that you’re too embarrassed to tell me?”
He considers the question.
And then he says, “Well . . . I don’t want to get sick.”
She waits for him to say more and when nothing comes, laughs and says, “Oliver, none of us wants to get sick.”
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