56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “I just followed him. He doesn’t drive, he walks everywhere. Um, walked. I looked the place up online, just to see if maybe there was a unit for sale or something so I could get inside, have a look around, and this listing came up. Short-term let.”

  “I meant what were you planning on doing?”

  “Collecting more information. Approaching him, maybe. Eventually.”

  “Did you?”

  Laura looks away. “No. But I did speak to his girlfriend.”

  For a moment, Lee thinks she’s misheard. She looks to Karl, who says, “His girlfriend?”

  “Yes. His girlfriend. Her name’s Ciara.”

  Laura can’t keep the triumph off her face; she’s clearly enjoying telling them something they didn’t already know.

  “Did she come here with him from London?” Karl asks.

  “Don’t know. Her accent was Irish, though. Cork, I thought.”

  “And what was the highlights reel from that conversation?”

  “Conversations, plural. There were two.”

  “Did you tell her who you were?”

  “Hardly. There wouldn’t have been a second conversation if I had.”

  “What about a last name?”

  “Didn’t get it.”

  “Did she know about his past?”

  A beat passes.

  “I don’t know,” Laura says then. “I thought if she didn’t know, I should warn her. But I kept it vague. I told her I knew he’d done something bad and that his last name wasn’t really Kennedy. And she said . . .” Another shrug. “Well, not much.”

  Karl is getting a little red in the face.

  “Right,” he says. “So. To recap: you, a complete stranger, walk up to this woman and say, hey, I know your boyfriend’s done some bad shit and his last name isn’t really what he says it is, and her reaction was ‘not much’?”

  “I figured she was protecting him.”

  Lee considers this, lets it percolate. Either this mystery girl was in a relationship with a convicted murderer and was protecting him from Laura or . . .

  Lois Lane here had the wrong Oliver.

  Karl asks Laura when she last saw this woman.

  “Probably . . . three weeks ago?”

  “Were they living together?”

  “Could’ve been.”

  “So,” Lee says, “you never actually spoke to him, but presumably this Ciara woman relayed your conversations . . .”

  “I sent him a note. I dropped it in his letterbox. Explaining that I didn’t want to expose him necessarily—”

  Karl snorts.

  “—but I did want to talk to him. Hear his side of things. I never heard back.” She folds her arms, lifts her chin. “Look, I wasn’t wrong. I know it was him. And I didn’t do anything wrong here. I wasn’t harassing them—”

  “Yeah, right,” Karl mutters.

  “—and by law I couldn’t have revealed his name or where he was, but maybe the fact that he thought he was about to be exposed . . . Maybe that’s why he did what he did.”

  “You seem very cut up about it,” Karl deadpans.

  Laura glares at him. “I didn’t do anything wrong. He did. It’s not my fault he couldn’t live with himself.”

  “We found an envelope,” Lee says, “in the letterbox for apartment one addressed to Oliver St Ledger. That from you?”

  Laura nods.

  “What are we going to find when we open it?”

  “Just a letter explaining that I’m not trying to expose him, I’m only trying to talk to him.” Her eyes widen. “Are you saying he never got that?”

  “When you first spoke to me, before my colleague here came and joined us, you indicated that you’d never been inside apartment number one.”

  “Why would I have been?”

  “So you haven’t?”

  “No.”

  Lee has been taking notes while Laura speaks; now, she makes a show of setting down her pen. She pinches the front of her mask and pulls it away from her face for a couple of seconds, letting some air in, breathing it in, and moistening her lips because every time she talks for too long with this thing on, she ends up feeling like she’s been lying facedown in desert sand. Then she lets it go, fixes it back into position, and picks up her pen again.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do, Laura. That was all very interesting. Fascinating, even, at times. But I’m going to ask you to tell us it all again, right from the beginning, only with one little difference.”

  Laura looks confused.

  “This time,” Lee says, “you’re going to tell us the truth.”

  26 Days Ago

  His heart is beating so fast and hard he’s worried that Ciara will see it pulsing through the skin on his neck. She must see something because once they get inside the apartment and she turns to look at him, she frowns and asks him if he’s okay.

  Her voice sounds oddly distant, muffled, as if they’re underwater.

  Or just that he is.

  She tells him he’s sweating. He mumbles something about the heat and the sun and walking so far after drinking at lunchtime, and Ciara disappears to find a moisturizer she says he should put on his face and two paracetamol for the headache he’s lying about having.

  In the half-minute she’s gone, he does his best to collect himself, splashing his face with palmfuls of cold water over the sink and wondering what the hell he should do.

  He needs to see what’s inside that envelope, he decides.

  That’s the priority.

  When Ciara comes back in, he blurts out, “Let’s order something for dinner,” followed by a smile to smooth over the abruptness. “I don’t feel like cooking.”

  She could offer to cook—or try to. She could say it’s too hot for hot food, like his mother used to when he and his brother were small. But she does something else that doesn’t work for his plan: she suggests they download a food-delivery app.

  “Yeah,” he says noncommittally. Ciara hands him a tub of something and he slowly unscrews the lid and sniffs at the white cream inside while working furiously to come up with a reason why that’s a bad idea. “Problem with them, though,” he has to pause to lick his lips, his mouth is so dry, “is that my Eircode never comes up on their system, so the drivers always get lost. The couple of times I’ve tried it, I just ended up having to direct them here on my phone before eating cold, soggy food. What about Georgie’s?” A dine-in restaurant nearby that they went to once, by chance, the night before all restaurants were ordered to close to indoor diners. “They’re doing collection now. I can just go and get it.”

  Ciara looks doubtful. “I thought you weren’t feeling—”

  “I’ll be fine,” he says, cutting her off and then regretting it. He picks up the paracetamol tablets she’s set on the counter for him. “After these, I’ll be grand.”

  They look the menu up online and then Oliver calls them to place the order. When they ask for a telephone number he gives them his own but with the last two digits transposed, as per his habit; he doesn’t provide any personal information unless it’s strictly necessary.

  It’s only afterward he worries that Ciara might have noticed, but she doesn’t say anything.

  Georgie’s tells him the food will be ready for collection in forty-five minutes.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he says to Ciara when he’s ended the call. “I might as well head there now.”

  “Want me to come?”

  “No.” He clears his throat. “I mean, um, no need. No point in both of us going. Minimize contact and all that, right?”

  “Shame we can’t eat outside,” she says, looking wistfully toward the terrace. “When it’s still so warm.”

  That envelope was hand delivered to a secure building and it turns out a woman he thought he met randomly outside
a hotel a few weeks back lives here too. They are definitely not going out onto that terrace, now or ever again.

  “I think I’ve had enough heat for one day,” he says, pointing to his forehead. The skin there has started to feel hot and tight. He checks he has his keys and his wallet and turns to leave. “Back soon.”

  He puts on a mask before he goes into the corridor.

  Not long after he’d moved into the Crossings, Oliver realized he’d never been given a letterbox key. The next day at work, he’d asked Louise, the office manager, about it. She was tasked with overseeing the employee accommodation but had no idea where the key was. She had the keys for the other KB Studios apartment, though, which she said no one was using at the time. She’d slipped its letterbox key off its set and handed it to him, saying, “Think they’re all the same at that place,” with a shrug.

  At the time he thought that was an easy way for people to get their property stolen, and made a mental note never to have anything delivered while he was staying there. Today, he hopes she was right—and that his next-door neighbor hasn’t had a sudden urge to check for post this late on a Sunday.

  Oliver finds the lobby empty, but there’re a few residents in the courtyard, making the most of the evening sun. None of them are looking his way.

  Aware of the fish-eye lens of the CCTV camera hanging behind him, he angles his body into a position he hopes will hide the fact that he’s opening the “wrong” box.

  He slips the small key into the lock in the box assigned to apartment number two, holding his breath—

  Click.

  It turns easily.

  Oliver pulls down the flap.

  The envelope lies facedown, on top of a postcard advertising meal deals at a local pizza place.

  He allows himself one second of self-delusion, one moment of hoping that everything isn’t about to come crashing down, that this might not be the beginning of yet another end.

  Then he reaches into the box and takes it out, turns it over.

  Oliver St Ledger.

  Handwritten in blue ink. Cursive.

  A woman’s hand, he’d guess.

  The envelope looks innocuous, its threat invisible—but the fallout from it could be potentially cataclysmic. It’s a shard of graphite ejected from the reactor in a nuclear explosion.

  Fear freezes him in place, standing in front of a letterbox that isn’t his, holding an envelope with his real name on it, in a semipublic place.

  His heart pounds in his chest.

  The paper trembles in his hand.

  And then the mental Geiger counter in his head starts to beep, loud and piercingly, once, twice, then several times in rapid succession, and when he still doesn’t move it starts to scream in an unbroken, high-pitched beep—

  Oliver shoves the envelope into a pocket of his jeans, locks up the box, and leaves the building.

  Even though April has barely begun, there’s a lazy haze in the air that he associates with summer evenings.

  He thinks of one in particular now, from back in London, from last July.

  A group of them, crowded around a picnic table at a food-truck festival in Shoreditch, with a canopy of string lights strung above their heads. The bulbs grew a bit brighter for every inch the sun slipped lower in the sky.

  He thinks of the exact moment he realized that Lucy, sitting beside him, had draped her arm casually across his thigh, and how he waited for her to realize and remove it, but she didn’t, and instead she’d turned and met his eye and told him silently that she knew it was there, that she’d put it there on purpose, and that she’d done it because she wanted him in a way that she didn’t want the others.

  He’d felt a heat start to spread across his chest then—and not the kind he was used to. Not the burning, dangerous, panicked kind that tightened his windpipe and made it difficult to breathe, but a warm glow of happiness, of belonging, of safety.

  But unbeknownst to him, even then, at that moment, everything was already falling apart.

  And now, it’s happening again.

  With Ciara, who makes him feel like that all the time.

  And even more so.

  Oliver walks in the direction of Georgie’s with the envelope shoved in his back pocket, so acutely aware of its presence, it may as well have a pulse. Halfway there, he stops at an empty parking lot into which a neighboring coffee shop has moved a couple of picnic tables. The coffee shop has been closed since the start of lockdown, and the entire spot is in shadow. Oliver goes to the table farthest from the street and sits with his back to it.

  Pulls out the envelope, rips it open.

  There’s a single piece of paper inside: a white sheet, folded horizontally into thirds.

  He takes a deep breath and unfolds it—

  And blinks in surprise, because the paper is completely blank.

  He turns it over, checks the back. Nothing there either. He goes back to the envelope and looks inside, looks at the underside of the flap. Blank there too. Why on earth would someone send him—

  To see if he really is him, he realizes.

  Which means he’s just made a terrible mistake.

  It would’ve been so easy to neutralize this threat. He sees it all the time: other residents receive mail in error, usually for former tenants, and they leave these envelopes and packages sitting on top of the letterboxes with things like Not at this address and Return to sender scribbled across them. All he had to do was the same, only he didn’t even need to write anything. Just leaving the envelope there would’ve communicated that he wasn’t him, that that wasn’t his name, and without an apartment number he didn’t know who it was intended for. Yes, other people might have seen the envelope as they collected their own post, but his name wasn’t in the public domain. It was illegal to put it there. All he needed to do was let the person who’d thought they knew it know they were wrong.

  But instead, he’d taken the bait.

  And in taking the envelope, confirmed for whomever had sent it that their search had led them to the right door.

  That he is Oliver St Ledger, Boy B from the Mill River case, notorious child murderer.

  He crumples up the paper and lets it fall.

  He puts his head in his hands and cries.

  23 Days Ago

  Yesterday morning, Oliver had been what he told her is called doomscrolling—mindlessly browsing bad news stories on his phone—when he’d come across an article that said movies like Contagion and Outbreak, virus thrillers that had come out years before, were rocketing to the top of streaming and rental charts all over the world. When Ciara said she’d never seen Contagion, Oliver had snapped his fingers and said, “That’s tonight sorted, so.” She’s reminded of a scene from it now as she leaves the midday sunshine behind and enters the gaping entrance of Stephen’s Green shopping center. She’d been surprised to see it open; shopping centers, as far as she knows, are supposed to be closed.

  The last time she was here, the entrance was a bustling meeting place with steady streams of shoppers going in and out; today, it’s just her and the masked security guard making sure she avails of the hand-sanitizer station and follows the newly implemented one-way system once inside.

  After passing through the dim of the entrance, Ciara emerges into an enormous atrium of glass, light, and iron girders painted white. Storefronts line the balcony levels, which rise two stories above her head. Even though she can’t immediately see every corner, it’s obvious the place is deserted, lights off, shutters rolled down. Her footsteps squeak on the linoleum floor and the background music, playing from unseen speakers, echoes around the space.

  The shops on the ground floor are all closed too, it looks like, and access to the higher levels is forbidden, the stairways roped off and the elevator locked. A handwritten sign warns that the public toilets are closed, which immediately makes her feel l
ike she needs to go. She’s wondering why on earth the place is even open at all when she turns a corner and finds out: one of its tenants, Dunnes Stores, is too.

  Ciara feels elated, almost giddy, at the thought of being able to walk around a department store, to potentially shop for things that aren’t edible—or even just to look at them, since she can’t really afford to buy. She makes a beeline for the door where two female staff members stand in plastic visors and latex gloves, wearing tense expressions. They point her to a small line inside waiting patiently in front of a down escalator.

  “Grocery,” one of the women says when they see Ciara’s confusion.

  She doesn’t need to buy any food and she knows that Oliver wouldn’t love to hear that she’d done an extra, unnecessary trip on her own. But she’s here now, she thinks, and if she just goes down for a look, for a walk around, who’s to know?

  She joins the line, making sure to stand right on the strip of yellow tape stuck to the floor. No one else in the line is wearing a mask so she doesn’t take hers out of her pocket. There is a little table by the door offering customers complimentary plastic gloves—the clear, cheap, baggy kind that are surely a total pain in the arse to wear—but no one seems to be taking up the offer.

  From behind her, a woman calls out, “Sir? Sir?”

  When Ciara turns, she sees a tall man in a duffle coat striding into the store without stopping, leaving the two staff members glaring murderously at the back of his head.

  He’s wearing noise-canceling headphones and the kind of rigid, ridged face mask that she’s seen tradesmen on TV wear when they’re stripping lead paint or working in plumes of dust. Every pore in his body is emitting a mix of self-importance and impatience. He’s ignored the women, it seems, mustn’t have heard them calling after him with those headphones on. But there’s no excuse for his not seeing the line waiting to descend to the basement, which he blithely strides past now.

  As Ciara watches this masked-up man earn a look of pure disgust from everyone standing patiently, spaced two meters apart, on strips of yellow tape, she can’t help but note the strangeness of the scene and what she would have made of it a month ago. Today is the eighth of April. On the eighth of March, she was still twenty-four hours from her first date with Oliver, the night they ended up in the Westbury.