56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  A promise of the future, dropped casually into the conversation. Ciara takes it and holds it and adds it to her collection, along with something he said about Ranelagh being a fun place for them to live and how she’s going to love his brother’s wife, Nicki, whenever it is they manage to travel home from Australia again.

  Even though she shouldn’t be collecting such things.

  Even though she should destroy the ones she already has, because that’s what’s going to happen to them anyway, eventually, and why torture herself until then by pretending that there can be another way?

  You can’t erase the past. You can lock it in a box, yeah, but you can’t make it go away.

  The box is here now, sitting on the grass between them.

  But Oliver doesn’t know it exists and she’s stubbornly pretending she doesn’t see it.

  “Do you ever think about what we’d be doing if all this wasn’t happening?” he asks. “If there wasn’t a pandemic?”

  “No.”

  This is true. This set of circumstances has proved so dangerously perfect in so many ways, she doesn’t like thinking about what might have happened otherwise.

  What might have had to happen.

  “Really?”

  “Nope.” She shakes her head. “Why, do you?”

  “All the time. In fact . . .” He takes out his phone, taps the screen a few times, and then holds it out to her. “I do more than that.”

  She can’t see through the glare of the sun on the screen, so she takes the phone from him and cups her hand around it until there’s enough shadow to make out what it is. He’s opened his Notes app to a list, it looks like.

  “What’s this?”

  “Places I’m going to take you,” he says. “After. Things we’re going to do.” He pauses. “Things I want to do with you.”

  She only manages to read the first few items on the list before the words begin to blur.

  Stella Cinema

  Killiney Hill

  Chapter One (chef’s table)

  National Gallery

  Long Room

  Sunrise @ Sandycove (swim?)

  She doesn’t even know what to say, much less feel.

  She’s stunned that he would admit to this, that he would show her such a thing. She’s touched that he made this list. She finds it amusing that so many of the things on there are the same things that appear in tourists’ schedules, that it’s a list designed for two people new to Dublin, keen to explore the city but lacking any real knowledge of where to go. She’s scared that she wants to do all this too, with him, that she can already picture them walking hand in hand around the streets, like they did earlier today but with normality having returned and there being nothing left to fear.

  Apart from the thing that will never go away.

  Ciara feels a sudden flare of heat on her cheeks. His face is inches from her own; there’s nowhere to hide a reaction. She works to keep her expression neutral as she feels wave after wave of feeling rush up and crash over her, pulling her under and lifting her to the surface, leaving her dizzy and disoriented, her throat dry.

  “And it’s not on the list,” he says, “but there’s a hotel in Killarney where you wake up and you’re just looking out at the lakes, and the mountains beyond, and you can’t see anything except green and blue. When we can go places again, I thought we might go there. Just to not see city for a while.”

  It was never supposed to go this far.

  But now that it has, she doesn’t want to turn back.

  And really, what did she think was going to happen? Isn’t there a part of her that wanted this all along, despite the cost of it? Hasn’t she been lying to herself just as much as she’s been lying to him?

  “I want to do those things, too,” she says. “With you.”

  It’s the truth.

  He traces a finger along her forearm, connecting her freckles with an invisible line.

  “Except for the swimming bit,” she adds. “Because I would definitely drown.”

  “I’d save you.”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll save you the bother.”

  “You don’t swim?”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a very good sinker.”

  He laughs.

  “I do miss the water, though,” she says. “Looking at it, that is. I could see it from my apartment in Cork. The harbor. Well, estuary. I don’t know, maybe they’re the same thing. Anyway, I didn’t realize how much I liked seeing it until I left. I feel a bit landlocked here.”

  Another truth.

  “I hate to break it to you, but we’re on the coast.”

  She slaps his arm playfully. “We’re near a river. I’m talking about seeing nothing but water all the way to the horizon. The beaches are well outside our two K.”

  “There might be somewhere else, somewhere closer. Come on.” Oliver moves to get up. “Let’s go.”

  Less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the bright greens of Merrion Square Park and the washed-out reds of the Georgian townhouses that surround it sits an industrial, futuristic feast of silver, gray, and blue: Grand Canal Dock. Ciara has never been, and it’s not at all what she was expecting from the name.

  A shimmering square of water stretches toward the sea, overlooked by glass-fronted boxes: apartment blocks and office buildings. Everything is smooth and new, and stone, steel, or glass. The open sea beyond the mouth of the Liffey is blocked from view by a row of buildings in the middle distance, but she can see the Poolbeg chimneys rising into the sky beyond, and there’s more than enough water here to soothe her soul.

  “Thank you,” she says to Oliver. “This works.”

  He grins. “This isn’t it.”

  He leads her past the water and down a narrow street, a gap in the glass-and-steel boxes. They pass closed restaurants, a bank, and a slew of dark office doors, but there are pockets of normality here too: teenage boys in wetsuits diving gleefully into the water, a couple of skateboarders crisscrossing the smooth pavement of the main square, a couple emerging from a grocery shop with takeout coffees.

  She has no idea where he’s taking her until finally, they emerge at the other end and she follows him across the road—

  He’s brought her to the river, a stretch of it she’s never seen.

  On her left, the delicate white curve of the Samuel Beckett Bridge rises into the sky like a bird in flight. Through its tension cables, she can see more familiar Dublin landmarks in the distance: Custom House, the tip of the Spire piercing the sky. Feet away from them is a bright-orange diving bell, according to its signage. She wouldn’t have had a clue what it was otherwise.

  She looks to Oliver, who is watching her look. “This is—”

  “Still not it. But if you’ll just follow me . . .”

  He pulls gently on the hand he’s holding and they both start to turn in the other direction, to the right, so they both see it at the same time.

  A navy vessel is docked just feet away and on its deck, three people in full biohazard gear—overalls, gloves and boots, hoods fitted with plastic visors and respiratory masks—are using the spraying devices on their backs to hose down surfaces with what has to be disinfectant. Next to the ship is a large, long, sea-green tent surrounded by metal railings. Signs say it’s a Client Referral Testing Center and point to the Entrance This Way and warn Referrals Only, No Walk-Ins. The railings have black plastic tarps tied to the inside: makeshift privacy screens. A gangplank connecting the ship to the shore says it’s the LÉ Samuel Beckett.

  They both stand, gaping at it, transfixed.

  Since lockdown began, Ciara has been glued to the news. It’s on for the hour that Oliver is out running, so she watches it alone. They usually start with the numbers, and those are never good. But the numbers are never the worst part, partly because that’s all they are
, because it’s too much to take in to match them to the scope of human suffering that they represent. It’s the details beyond the headlines, the sentences filled with words she knows but which, put together, don’t make any sense, that catch in her throat.

  Like how a convention center in the middle of New York City had been turned into a 1,200-bed field hospital with a potted plant next to every bed because it was supposed to have been hosting the World Floral Expo. Or how, when someone dies of this thing in an Irish hospital, they have to be left in the clothes they have on, fitted with a mask even though they’ve stopped breathing, and zipped inside not one but two body bags, neither of which will ever be opened again. And how a ship docked down in Cork is prepped to become a makeshift morgue if needs be.

  But all of these things have been on the television, safely on the other side of the screen, at the start of evenings she and Oliver spend cuddled up on the couch watching TV shows that don’t know this is coming, hermetically sealed time capsules of Before, and being safe and well and kinda liking this. Walking out into the world and seeing them with her own eyes, right in front of her, is another thing entirely. She looks at the faceless bodies moving about in the biohazard gear and feels like what they’re washing away with that chemical spray is every good thing about today.

  “I didn’t know this was here,” Oliver says. “If it wasn’t, you’d be able to see down as far as the port, to the mouth of the river, and a horizon of water, just like you said. Maybe if we walk down there a bit, we can—”

  “I just want to go home.”

  He doesn’t argue. He squeezes her hand and they turn and walk back the way they came, mostly in silence, until they are back alongside the canal itself, back inside the mirage.

  People are still lounging by the water, lit now by the late-afternoon sun. Music drifts out of open windows. The puffed-popcorn blooms of pink cherry-blossom trees sway gently in the breeze.

  But it all looks like playing pretend now.

  When they get back to the Crossings, Ciara’s eyes go to the letterboxes. A slim, cream envelope is sticking out of the flap of the box for apartment one.

  “Oliver,” she says, pointing. “Look.”

  He follows her direction, frowns.

  “Junk, probably,” he says. “Or a menu.”

  He pulls the envelope out of the flap and looks at it for a second, blinking rapidly. Something is handwritten on the front—a name, it couldn’t be anything more—but when Ciara takes a step closer to try to see it for herself, Oliver abruptly turns and slips the envelope into the letterbox beside his, the one for apartment number two.

  “What did it say?”

  Oliver’s response is, “It wasn’t for me,” which, she’ll think afterward, doesn’t at all answer her question.

  Today

  Lee stands on the kitchen side of the breakfast bar with her notebook open in front of her and a pen in her hand. Karl is in the doorway that connects the living room to the hall, leaning against the frame, arms folded. Laura Mannix is perched on the farthest seat of the couch, rocking back and forth a little, wringing her hands in her lap, head down.

  The balcony door is open all the way and both Lee and Karl are wearing masks. It isn’t ideal, but they can’t have this conversation anywhere anyone else might overhear.

  “Right,” Lee says to Laura. “Tell him what you told me.”

  She has no idea how cooperative this woman is going to be. During the ten minutes they spent alone together, waiting for Garda Claire O’Herlihy to find Karl and bring him up here, Laura oscillated between bouts of cocky indignation and brittle nervousness.

  When she speaks now, her tone hits somewhere in the middle.

  “I’m a journalist. Currently the senior producer on The Jason Dineen Show. Previously features editor for ThePaper.ie.”

  Karl greets this news with a shake of his head that Lee knows him well enough to know means he’s not angry, just disappointed.

  “Tell him why you’re here,” Lee says. “When you own a house in Dundrum.”

  Laura looks down at her hands and mumbles something.

  “Try telling us at an audible level.”

  “I said”—she’s flipped back to indignation—“I’m here because of the Mill River case.”

  Lee and Karl exchange a glance.

  Karl says, “Do elaborate.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Oh, do you have somewhere you need to be? Apologies, but we have a guy putrefying downstairs so we’d really appreciate it if you could spare us just a few minutes of your time.”

  Laura glares at him. “I was at the Tribune back then. When it happened. We all knew their names, it was an open secret. A few months back, a group of us go out for pints and someone brings it up. One of the guys, a crime correspondent, says he heard that St Ledger was in London, living it up. Girlfriend, good job, the lot. And I thought, Well, that’s just the kind of injustice our listeners would want to know about—”

  Karl mutters, “Be unnecessarily outraged about, you mean.”

  “—so I started doing a little digging. Figured if I found anything tangible, I could use it for the show but also get a feature out of it too, maybe.” A pause. “And I wouldn’t call it unnecessary, Detective. He’s a convicted murderer.”

  “Who served his time. And it’s Detective Sergeant.”

  Karl correcting her on his rank, Lee knows, means Laura is definitely not on the Christmas-card list.

  “You can’t report his name,” he continues. “Or risk identifying him in any way. So what good is a feature to you?”

  “I can change identifying details. And there’s still plenty to write about. There was that case last year, with the two teenagers—they couldn’t report their names but they still got column inches out of it, didn’t they?”

  Column inches, long-form articles, front-page headlines—for weeks. Lee had remarked at the time that calling the defendants—now convicted murderers—Boy A and Boy B only served to increase the public’s appetite for information, because without their names and faces, without details about their home lives or their hobbies or their family backgrounds, without their ordinariness, they were untethered from normality from the get-go and ascended to the ranks of Evil Psycho Killers right away.

  Just like how, last year, the faceless, two-decades-long terror of the serial killer known as the Nothing Man had been instantly vaporized by the reveal of his actual name: Jim.

  “I got a tip,” Laura says, “that actually, something had happened in London, something went wrong, and St Ledger is on his way to Dublin, to work at a company owned by a family friend. All I was given was the name of the company, but that was more than enough to find him.”

  This is the point at which, when Laura talked about this the first time, out on the balcony, Lee had put a stop to it, and ever since the next question has been waiting patiently on her tongue.

  “How?”

  Laura shrugs. “I have my ways.”

  Lee and Karl say nothing; they just wait her out.

  “Fine. I used the Wayback Machine.”

  Karl says, “The fucking what now?”

  “The Way-back Ma-chine.” Laura pronounces each syllable distinctly, as if she’s talking to someone who’s still learning English. “It’s an internet archive that takes snapshots of websites and stores them. You can put in any URL and find out what that page looked like on, say, twelfth January 1999 or sixteenth September 2012. If the archive took a snapshot of it, that is. The further back in time you go, the less you find, of course. And it’s really only the major sites when you get way back. But it had a snapshot of the KB Studios ‘Meet Our Team’ page from a couple of months ago, so I was able to compare that with the current one and identify the new hires. There were two. No pictures or much of a bio—they were clearly junior members of the team—but one of t
hem had a Swedish name and had recently worked in Dubai, and the other was called Oliver Kennedy and had previously worked in London. It wasn’t exactly rocket science.”

  “But how did you know it was him? The Oliver you were looking for?”

  “That was my next job. Like I said, there was no picture of him on the company website, and no social at all, nothing—which I took as further confirmation. I had to get a look at him in person. I tried a few different things but, in the end, what worked was patience. I sat in the window of the café directly opposite the building and watched everyone who came in and out. About three days in, I saw a guy who could be St Ledger—right age, right coloring—come outside with the managing director of KB Studios, who I knew from his photo on the website. And when I got a closer look, I knew. It was him. No doubt.”

  “How could you possibly—”

  “It’s the ears,” Laura says. “They don’t change with age. You can always tell by comparing the ears. And he was going by Oliver Kennedy. Kennedy was St Ledger’s mother’s maiden name. I mean, come on. It’s like he wanted me to find him.”

  Karl swears under his breath.

  “How did you know what the ears looked like in the first place?” Lee asks. “What did you have to compare them to?”

  “Photos. In the primary school’s newsletter.”

  “And where the hell did you get that?”

  “Same place I got the tip, let’s just say.”

  “Which was where?”

  “I can’t reveal my sources. I won’t.”

  “Let’s come back to that.” Lee is having to work to keep her voice even; her patience is wearing thin. “So, you get a tip-off that Oliver St Ledger is coming back to Dublin to work at KB Studios. You figure out that a guy about the right age using the name Oliver Kennedy, his mother’s maiden name, starts work at KB Studios shortly thereafter. You see a guy come out of the office that’s a visual match for a photo you have of Oliver St Ledger, plus seventeen years. That about right?”

  Laura nods. “Yeah.”

  “But how did you end up here? In his apartment building?”