56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  She moves the mouse, clicks.

  Ciara only needs a few seconds on Justice, Not Protection! to ascertain what it is—or more specifically, who it’s for: keyboard vigilantes. The aim of the game, it seems, is to expose the protected identities of convicted criminals who the group, playing both judge and jury, has decided should be exposed.

  Each post is, supposedly, a tip, and there are hundreds of them. They seem to follow a standardized format: a bad photo of someone either blurred by the movement of the camera or taken from too far away to capture any detail, paired with a caption that makes claims like, this is so-and-so (1st degree murder, Preston, 2004) in the Waitrose on Chatham Way and my wife and I made so-and-so at Cinema World, Belfast, last night—100% him and he knew I was looking but I just stared him down, authored by people hiding behind blank profile pics and gobbledegook usernames. Underneath each one is a trail of dozens of comments, most of which seem to be either fantasists outlining what injuries they’d inflict on the criminal given the chance or fully paid-up members of the Outrage Brigade spouting ill-informed nonsense about the law of the land.

  It’s a cesspool and Ciara feels ill just looking at it. Plus it seems very much UK-centric and so unlikely to be of any use to her.

  But at the top of the page is an empty box and an invitation to Search this group.

  She types in Oliver St Ledger and hits Enter, holds her breath—

  There’s a match.

  23 Days Ago

  “It went on for a while,” Oliver continues. “I don’t know how long. And then Shane stops, and sort of sees Paul for the first time, properly, like he hasn’t even realized what he’s been doing, like he’s been in some kind of fugue state, and Paul has got blood all over him and he’s got this cut.” Oliver traces a line through his right eyebrow with a finger. “There’s a lot of blood. I remember, one of his eyes was filled with it. He looked . . . It was terrifying. But what we didn’t realize was that it was just a small cut that bled a lot and that it looked much, much worse than it actually was. We panicked. We’d had PE that morning, I had my clothes in my bag—I got out a T-shirt, my NASA one, and gave it to Paul to hold against his forehead, to try to stop the blood, but it just kept . . . It kept coming. And then Shane and me, we look at each other, and that’s when . . . That’s when—”

  The rest comes quickly, in a rush.

  Almost there, he thinks.

  “—Shane says to Paul, we’re going to wash the blood off in the river. And I just knew what was going to happen, what he’d decided to do, but it was like—It was like there was one half of me that felt like, yeah, good idea, that’s what we have to do, what I have to do now, to help Shane, to protect him, to stop him from getting in trouble. But at the same time, the other half of me was looking at Paul, all covered in blood, saying okay and obediently following Shane down to the water, and that part wanted to scream, ‘What the hell are you doing? Run. Run away.’ But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything. Instead, I . . . I just followed them to the water and I helped Shane push Paul into it and then I helped hold him down.”

  One last breath, three more words, and then it’ll all be out.

  He inhales; it makes his chest hurt.

  “Until . . . Until he drowned.”

  Silence.

  Ciara says nothing, remains staring blankly out through the glass of the patio doors.

  Oliver can’t stand to let the words he’s just said hang in the air any longer, so he carries on.

  “The guards came that night. To our homes. Shane had come up with a story that he said we both needed to stick to, that was basically, yeah, we saw Paul on the way home, but he ran off toward the river and we just carried on. But we’d been spotted with him, by several people—he’d had on this distinctive jacket, a bright-red one—and the sightings didn’t match up with what we’d said, and when they found him . . . they found the T-shirt, too.”

  He pauses here, remembering the moment that realization dawned, when he knew with absolute certainty that there was no way out of this, that they had committed an act so horrible that it had literally ended one life and, figuratively, two more: the ones he and Shane were supposed to have.

  “Everything happened really quickly after that. We were charged and sent to Oberstown—it’s a juvenile detention center. There was a trial. Our identities had to remain a secret so we became Boy A and Boy B. We were both found guilty of murder, but got different sentences based on our level of . . . involvement. I got out on my eighteenth birthday and Shane . . . Well, Shane took his own life on his. He still had another fifteen years to go at that point.”

  Now, finally, Ciara raises her head.

  Oliver doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t risk losing his chance, doesn’t even wait to interpret the look on her face, the way her features are crumbling—

  “I’m not some evil seed, Ciara. I’m no psycho monster. I was just a child who, for five minutes, completely lost his fucking mind. A kid who, on the way home from school one afternoon, made a stupid, terrible mistake because he didn’t want to look like a coward in front of his older, bigger friend. I was twelve. I couldn’t undo it so I did the next best thing: from that moment on, ever since, I have tried to make up for it. I have done every single thing I was supposed to. I took my punishment. I was a model detainee. Did all the therapy, obeyed all the rules. Whatever they asked of me, I did it and then more besides. And since the day I was released I haven’t as much as littered. But it doesn’t matter what I do because all anyone thinks about, all anyone cares about, is what I did.”

  He moves closer to her.

  One step, two.

  “And then I meet you. And you like me. And when I’m with you, it’s like . . . I feel like me. The me I should’ve been. The me I really was. Am. And even though I knew it couldn’t last, knew you’d find me out eventually, I kept wanting to feel that way, so I kept seeing you. And then, unbelievably, a bloody global pandemic comes along, and we hear there’s going to be a lockdown, and you’re living in this tiny apartment, working from home, just moved to Dublin, not knowing anybody and”—he shakes his head in disbelief—“you don’t even use social media, so I think to myself, I’ll just take these two weeks. I won’t tell her for two more weeks. And I hoped, I desperately hoped, that by the time the truth came out, you’d have seen enough of me to know that this is me. Now. Here.”

  Oliver stops, holds his breath. So long as she’s still here, so long as she’s willing to listen to him—

  But then Ciara gets up and runs out of the room, into the bathroom.

  And starts retching.

  78 Days Ago

  FYI Oliver (Ollie) St Ledger back in Ireland—KB Studios Dublin.

  A “Jane Smith” with no profile picture posted that in Justice, Not Protection! one week ago.

  The comments on it are either advising her to repost it following the established format or expressing confusion because no one knows who Oliver St Ledger is. A few members ask for the victim’s name or other details so they can identify the case, but “Jane” never returns to answer their questions. When Ciara searches within the group, she can’t find any other posts from this user.

  On a hunch, she searches for Oliver (Ollie) St Ledger Dublin across all of Facebook, but filters the results so that they’re confined to mentions in groups. It turns out that “Jane Smith” posted the exact same thing in at least eight other places, including a victims’ rights organization and a group obsessed with Irish true crime.

  Her profile is set to private, but the lack of a profile picture suggests there wouldn’t be much useful information there anyway. Whoever she is, she really wanted someone to do something about Oliver St Ledger’s supposed return to Dublin, even though, a few anonymous Facebook posts aside, she seemingly wasn’t prepared to do much about it herself.

  KB Studios.

  When Ciara googles this, she finds a web
site for a firm of architects based on Upper Baggot Street, Dublin 4—and then on their Meet Our Team page, a brief bio for an Oliver Kennedy—with no headshot.

  OLIVER KENNEDY

  BSc (Hons) Arch Tech

  Oliver graduated from Newcastle University with a 1.1 BSc (Hons) in Architectural Technology in 2013 and joined us in 2020 from MPQ Engineering in London. He brings with him a passion for sustainable design, a flair for innovation, and a wealth of experience in projects large and small.

  Ciara’s blood runs cold. Intellectually, she knows none of this adds up to much. There’s a guy named Oliver who could be the same age as Oliver St Ledger, and he used to work in the same city Richard St Ledger visited a few months ago—so what?

  But instinctively . . .

  She just has a feeling that this is him.

  The Oliver.

  Ciara glances at the other window she has open on her screen, the one that shows she has seventeen unopened emails and only a couple of hours left in the workday to resolve whatever crises they contain.

  That’s what she should be doing, because this is ridiculous. What does she think it’s going to achieve, this online wild-goose chase? She’s letting her imagination run away with her. She’s distracting herself from the reality of the situation, which is that her mother is dying and soon it’ll just be Siobhán and her, and no “truth” is going to change that.

  This isn’t him.

  But if it were, how might she confirm that?

  Another email pings into her inbox.

  Ciara glances at the time stamp. It’s five minutes to the hour.

  She’ll give herself those five minutes, she thinks, just five minutes more, and then she’ll stop.

  She goes back to Facebook to search for Oliver Kennedy, but the profiles she finds don’t look like they’re for the same person. The scant few details she has—Newcastle, London, Dublin—don’t match up. She goes back to Instagram on her phone and does the same thing, also to no avail.

  Then she has an idea. She brings back up Richard St Ledger’s Instagram and starts scrolling through the list of people he’s following.

  There’s no Oliver Kennedy, but there are Kennedys.

  Several of them, in fact.

  She picks one at random—Maurice—and scans his pictures, stopping at a picture of Sydney Harbour from back in November. It has no caption or hashtag, but there is one comment.

  K Meara: Lucky you! Holiday?

  Maurice Kennedy: Visiting family!

  Family.

  Adrenaline starts to fizz in Ciara’s veins.

  She opens Richard’s Instagram on her computer screen, scrolls back to November, and starts systematically comparing the two accounts. She has no idea what Maurice looks like, but going by his social media skills and his amateur, unfiltered photographs, she’s guessing he’s an older man. No one like that appears in Richard’s photos, and Maurice doesn’t post pictures of people at all, only badly framed landscapes and random objects sitting in low light.

  The best she can hope to find is a commonality, something that shows both men were in the same place at the same time.

  And she does.

  On November seventh, last year, Maurice Kennedy posted a picture of a line of vintage cars with a wide, sandy beach and cloudy skies visible in the background.

  On November eighth, Richard St Ledger posted a picture of himself posing next to one of those cars.

  Richard was the family Maurice was visiting. The St Ledgers are related to the Kennedys. Kennedy could even be Oliver St Ledger’s mother’s maiden name, which would make him choosing it as his new name entirely plausible.

  Ciara goes back to the bio on KB Studios and stares at the text until it blurs.

  This could actually be him. The only person left who really knows what happened on that day in 2003.

  The person who could, potentially, provide her with the answers she seeks.

  But how is she supposed to ask him her questions?

  Today

  “Just try not to think about it,” Tom says, his voice muffled by his mask and the papery layer of forensic coveralls over Lee’s ears. “Take shallow breaths. Focus on the scene. We won’t be in there long. You ready?”

  Lee nods.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Tom turns and steps over the threshold of apartment one, and she follows him.

  A series of metal step-plates have been placed in the hall; they move carefully from one to the other, as if navigating stones set across a fast-moving river.

  Voices and rustling noises from the living room tell Lee that the scenes-of-crime officers are still at work in the other rooms. Just as they reach the bathroom, the next open doorway—the smaller of the two bedrooms—flares with a bright camera flash.

  “After you,” Tom says, waving a hand. “Step into the far corner for me, to your right.”

  When she enters the bathroom, she sees their reflections in the mirrored wall above the sink: two earthbound astronauts in ill-fitting spacesuits, their true selves only visible for the two inches of skin between the top of their face masks and the hood of the coveralls.

  There’s no danger of catching anything while walking a crime scene, that’s for sure.

  She goes to the step-plate Tom has directed her to and then carefully rotates on the spot, shuffling her covered feet until she’s facing the body.

  It’s in the same position as it was on her previous visit, but the surfaces around it—tiled wall, sink, mirror, what remains of the glass—are now dirty with smudges of black fingerprint dust. A portable scene-light has been erected in the opposite corner to where Lee stands, on a diagonal from the body, its harsh white bulbs pointed down at it. Someone has collected the safety glass pebbles.

  Tom takes up a position a couple of feet away, closer to the deceased. Between them, the portable light and the bathroom fittings, there is no room left for anyone else to enter the room without disturbing the body or the area immediately around it.

  It’s also starting to feel like some kind of terrible sauna where not only do you have to wear your own clothes, but layers of them. Lee feels a warm bead of sweat slide down her spine and settle in the small of her back.

  “You okay?” Tom asks.

  “Yes. No.” She waves a gloved hand. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  He turns toward the body. “All preliminary at this stage, as you know. Caucasian male, late twenties, about six foot. Dead, at my best guess for now, for round about two weeks. No flies because the apartment was as good as sealed to the elements, which I think you’ll agree we’re all very grateful for today. The deceased is lying facedown in the remnants of the shower door with some shards of it on his clothing and in his hair, suggesting that it was his fall through the glass that caused it to break. He has a wound to his left temple”—Tom points at the head, then at the brownish smudge on the bathroom wall, which, since she saw it last, has gained a small piece of yellow tape with a number written on it stuck just alongside it—“which corresponds with this bloodstain here, indicating that that is the point at which he hit his head immediately after he went through the shower door.”

  The stench feels like it’s gotten so thick that it’s taken on a solid shape, and that shape is coiling around Lee’s neck like a deadly python, slithering and tightening, making her windpipe dangerously small.

  “Accident?” she asks, being economic with her words so as to avoid letting the python inside.

  “The fall was possibly, yes, but I don’t think that’s what killed him. The scalp tears easily and bleeds a lot, so lacerations can look a lot worse than they actually are. Their impact is mostly aesthetic. Of course, I’ll have to wait until we do the postmortem to prove it, but I’d be surprised to find a skull fracture. He’d really have to have walloped himself off the wall there with some mighty force
in order to sustain a fatal head injury and”—Tom holds out his arms—“you can’t swing a cat in here. You wouldn’t have the space to build up to it and going through a pane of glass would slow you down.” He pauses. “Let’s talk about why he fell. Did you look in the medicine cabinet when you were in here before?”

  Lee nods. “There’s Rohypnol in there.”

  “He has a prescription for it, I’d say. We know it for its more nefarious uses, but it’s primarily a tranquilizer used to treat things like chronic insomnia. But I’m confused as to why, if he’d taken it—and we have to wait for toxicology to confirm that—he was in here in the first place, still mostly dressed, walking around. There are more pills missing from the pack in the cabinet, so presumably, he’d taken them before. He must have known it’d be a wise idea to already be in bed when he swallows them.”

  “The blankets,” Lee says. “They were pulled back on one side. So he was probably in bed . . .”

  “I think so, yes. And then he got up for some reason. Although he’s not dressed for bed, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway”—Tom winks at her—“are you ready for the riddle?”

  I’m about ready to projectile vomit, Lee thinks, so I’d rather just skip to the bit where we leave this stench-fest.

  But she says, “Go on.”

  “Where’s the blood? Can you see any? Apart from our little smudge there on the wall.”

  Lee hasn’t been looking. She’s been pretending that the entire area to the right of Tom is pixelated, that she can’t see what’s there, that she can’t see the discoloration, the bloated face, the skin slipping and—

  She swallows hard and breathes in deep, trying to capture every last molecule of the VapoRub’s remaining menthol scent.

  “Why don’t you just tell me whether or not there is,” she says, “and I’ll believe you?”