56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “There’s no blood, Lee. And even the smallest, shallowest wound to the scalp bleeds profusely. The scalp is chock-full of blood vessels. And yet, no blood, except for our impact on the wall there. None on the floor—”

  “How can you tell? There’s that . . . sludgy stuff.”

  “That’s not blood and that came after. It’s like there’s a halo of cleanliness all around the head and upper part of the body. But there was blood, with a scalp laceration like that. So, where did it go?”

  Lee tries to think, but almost immediately her thoughts are back on the smell, and how it’s so incredibly overpowering that she could have shoved an open jar of Vicks up each nostril and she’d still be smelling the damn thing. She can feel it. It’s not just hanging in the air, it’s clinging to it. And everything else as well. The second she gets home tonight she’s burning everything she’s wearing. She’ll have to wash—

  “Water,” she says. “The blood got washed away.”

  “Yes!” Tom seems excessively pleased about this. “Because . . . ?”

  “The shower was on.”

  “I think”—Tom indulges in a dramatic pause here—“he might have died by drowning.”

  Lee looks down at the body, immediately regrets it, looks away again.

  “He what now?”

  “Death by drowning doesn’t require submersion, you see. There just needs to be enough liquid to inhale, to get into the lungs. So, hypothetically, if our friend here had taken a tranquilizer and then got back out of bed, stumbled in here—perhaps he needed to use the toilet—and fell through the shower door, and he landed as he is now with his mouth and nose on the tile—and right, I may add, in the little depression formed by the drain where water would tend to pool—and the shower was on . . . Well, he might have been a little stunned by the blow to the head, or the Rohypnol was kicking in, or both, and he falls unconscious in that position, which of course means he keeps breathing, and he drowns in a couple of inches of water in his own shower.” Tom pauses. “This is why I truly will never understand why people go skydiving and bungee-jumping and all that malarkey. It’s so easy to die. Why try to make it happen?”

  “Why was the shower on in the first place?”

  “Good question. He could’ve simply hit the lever during the fall or in his attempts to get back up from it. Those things”—he points at the shower handle—“all it takes is a little force and the water would start to flow. He could’ve been planning to have a shower and just misjudged how quickly the tranquilizer would kick in. But that’s not your million-dollar question, Lee.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “It isn’t?”

  “The million-dollar question is: Who turned the water off?”

  Her stomach sinks.

  “We might have a problem with that,” she says.

  “Oh? How so?”

  “There’s a woman here who’s been annoying the hell out of us since lockdown began. Noise complaints, ratting on her neighbors, etc. When she rang this morning, the station thought it was more of the same. They sent out two new recruits. One of them said he turned off the tap, that it was dripping.”

  Tom nods a couple of times, considering this. “I can’t rule out that he didn’t turn off the water himself, in the last throws of consciousness. But either way, I doubt there was anything of evidentiary value on the lever anyway.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Tom clasps his hands together and rests them on his stomach. Lee likes the guy, but she wishes he’d tone down the Golden Age–detective routine.

  “The whole place is wiped clean,” he says, “according to your scenes-of-crime fellas. Every single surface wiped down throughout the apartment. Thorough job. They haven’t found a single print. So that’s your real riddle. Why would someone wipe down an apartment after an accident? And why on earth didn’t they call for help?”

  23 Days Ago

  She doesn’t close the door to the bathroom, and Oliver doesn’t want to go in there and loom over her while she’s being sick, so he waits in the doorway of the living room while she retches.

  “I’m so sorry, Ciara,” he says. “I know those are just words, but I am. I’m so sorry I did this to you.”

  After a while, she climbs to her feet, splashes some water on her face, and meets his eyes in the reflection in the mirror over the sink.

  When she turns around to face him, she looks pale and broken.

  “So who’s Laura?” she says.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know her. But presumably, she’s found out where I am and is trying to get to me. To write about me, I suppose.”

  “But you said you were Boy A and Boy B. She can’t report your name.”

  “No, but . . . she could still cause trouble.” He pauses. “She already has.”

  There’s a silence then that he doesn’t dare break, because he isn’t quite sure what is happening here.

  Ciara is still here. That’s not what he was expecting.

  And she’s asking questions, which . . . He doesn’t know what to make of that. But he’ll let her dictate these next few minutes. They can go at her pace.

  He knows this must be a lot to take in.

  “How did you get your scar?” she asks. “Really?”

  “In the rec room at Oberstown.”

  “What happened?”

  She’s wrapped her arms around herself now; she looks likes she’s literally holding herself together. He wants to reach for her, wants to do the holding-together for her, wants to tell her everything will be all right.

  But he can’t. He doesn’t know if it will be.

  “Shane did it to me,” he says.

  She blinks at him. “What?”

  “We’d been in a few years by then. He’d grown pretty disturbed. He just fell apart when we were in that place. Couldn’t cope at all. And he . . . he blamed me. For not sticking to the story, I suppose.”

  Ciara is looking paler still.

  “What happened in London?”

  “I met someone,” Oliver says. “Lucy. And she was careless. I mean, I didn’t tell her the truth so she didn’t know not to be, but . . . Reporters can’t print my name or show my face, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who wouldn’t know me, who wouldn’t recognize me, and go running off to Facebook or Twitter to tell everyone what I look like now and who I am. Guys I went to primary school with, old neighbors—relatives, even. No one apart from my brother really even speaks to me now. So I have to be careful. I don’t put anything online. But Lucy did. Instagram stories, with me in the background. I didn’t realize. And there’s all these forums, you see, where these nutjobs, these vigilante idiots who think it’s up to them to be judge and jury and the prison system while they’re at it . . .” He shakes his head, angry at some long-ago memory. “A picture from Lucy’s Instagram somehow made its way on there. Onto one of these forums. They couldn’t confirm it was me, of course. How would they know? There’s nothing to compare it to. But that didn’t stop them trying. They had Lucy’s name—from the account—and started messaging her, asking her questions, and then she started asking me questions . . .” He exhales. “I had to leave, to stop things from really blowing up.”

  Ciara starts to cry.

  “I have to, too,” she says, her voice wavering. “Now. I can’t stay.”

  Oliver takes a step toward her, then another when she doesn’t react to the first.

  He holds up his hands as if to signal that he comes in peace. She holds up hers to tell him not to come any closer.

  He stops. “Can I hold your hand?”

  She shakes her head but doesn’t move, doesn’t resist when he reaches out and takes it. He presses it to his chest, to his heart.

  “This is me,” he says. “Here, now. Not that boy, that child, who was stupid and cruel and made a terrible, terrible mista
ke that he can never undo and never be sorry enough for and never take back but—”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Ciara, you know me. I am who you think I am, who I’ve been these last few weeks. This is me. The real me. And I wanted you to see that, to know that, before all this—”

  She jerks her hand away, takes a step back.

  “Why did you do it? Back then? Why didn’t you put a stop to it? Why didn’t you save him?”

  She’s crying harder now, cheeks glistening with tears.

  “I don’t know,” Oliver says. “I really don’t know. I’ve thought about it so many times . . . For years it was all the time. But I can’t explain it. It just happened, I wasn’t thinking . . . A therapist told me once that when you’re that age, you have no sense of permanence. It’s hard for you to intellectualize forever. You understand the difference between right and wrong, and you sort of understand that your actions have consequences, but you don’t really accept that those consequences can’t be undone. It’s not an excuse, but . . . that made sense to me. And things like this, Ciara, they’re not about good and evil. I wasn’t some psychopath-in-training. Things happened, a series of things, that created this moment in time when Shane and I made a decision we shouldn’t have and, you know what? That happens all the time. But in our case, the stupid thing we did had the worst consequence imaginable.”

  Ciara starts moving toward the bedroom door. “I have to go.”

  “Please don’t, just stay, for—”

  “You don’t get to ask me for anything,” she spits at him.

  She goes into the bedroom, pulls her suitcase up onto the bed and starts throwing her things into it.

  He watches, helpless, hanging back at the door.

  “Where will you go?”

  “Back to my place,” she says.

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t fucking know, Oliver.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out—”

  She reels on him. “You’ve just told me you killed a child.” It comes out as a scream whose volume seems to surprise even her.

  He nods, acknowledging this.

  “When I was a child,” he says quietly.

  This freezes her in place for a second, and hope rises in his heart.

  But then she turns back to the bed and zips up the case. Lifts it by its handle and plonks its wheels on the floor. Turns around and waits for him to step aside so she can get out of the room without having to touch him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I don’t know—”

  She pushes past him and leaves.

  64 Days Ago

  The man Ciara thought could be Oliver St Ledger worked on the fourth floor of a glossy new office building that loomed over all the other, older, smaller ones on Baggot Street Upper—according to what she could glean from Google Street View. The firm of estate agents who’d been tasked with finding tenants for it had made a slick video showcasing the building’s interior and posted it to their website. Inside were four floors’ worth of glass-box offices, a reception desk large enough to accommodate three gatekeepers in the lobby, and electronic turnstiles protecting access to the stairs and elevator.

  You couldn’t just walk in and wander around.

  She’d need a reason to be there.

  Pretending to be a client, she figured, would be the quickest way to get found out; she would have no idea what to say or who to ask for—and what were the chances that, even if she managed to keep up some kind of pretense for a while, the firm would choose Oliver Kennedy to meet with her? Going by the website, he seemed like a junior member of staff.

  She’d thought about impersonating a courier who was delivering something that had to be signed for, but almost immediately that plan revealed itself to have two flaws. One of those three receptionists would probably insist on taking it off her hands and, even if they allowed her upstairs to deliver the package in person, what could it possibly contain that wouldn’t immediately set alarm bells ringing for the recipient? If Oliver Kennedy was Oliver St Ledger, he’d spent his whole adult life protecting his real identity. Someone else might dismiss it as a mix-up or mistake, but he wouldn’t. And then he’d be on high alert.

  Which just left one option, as far as Ciara could see: apply to work there.

  Get inside under the guise of a job interview.

  On the KB Studios website, the Join Our Team link had led to two listings for current vacancies, one of which was a junior office manager. Ciara set up a new Gmail account under a fake name and sent in a CV with it. A week had passed, draining her nerve away a little more each day. What the hell was she doing? How did she think this was going to end? What was her plan: walk up to this guy and say, Hey. Are you Oliver St Ledger? Great. Would you mind telling me exactly what happened on the afternoon that you murdered Paul Kelleher? But when a message arrived in her inbox calling her for an interview, she found she had just enough nerve left to say yes.

  So now she’s sitting on a cushioned bench in the lobby, looking at the enormous reception desk in real life, rubbing clammy palms on her polyester trousers.

  Thinking there’s absolutely no way she can go through with this.

  Can she?

  She’d arrived ten minutes early and has been instructed to take a seat and wait. Someone will come and get you, the receptionist had said. For one wild, fleeting moment, Ciara had pictured that someone being Oliver St Ledger—but it was difficult to. Besides the astronomical odds, she couldn’t quite build a mental image of his face.

  Up until the murder, her mother had kept everything: every school report, every crayon drawing, every souvenir. Afterward, she’d stopped not only adding to her collection, but looking at it, too. There were dozens of dusty shoeboxes and dented biscuit tins piled up in the attic, and in the last week, Ciara had spent a day going through them. She thought the chances were good that her mother had accidentally archived a picture of a future killer, and she was right.

  The Mill River Boys’ National School published a glossy newsletter at the end of every academic year and her mother had saved them all. The class photos they included weren’t captioned, so they were of no use, but the newsletters also included collages of action shots from the school’s various sports teams, and they were. Twelve-year-old Oliver St Ledger had played rugby. There were two full-color photos of him in the newsletter sent home in June 2003. One of them showed him running with the ball, his features blurred by motion, but in the other, he was standing with his hands on his hips, in full-color and looking perfectly clear.

  Ciara had stared at the photo for hours, studying every detail—and then cut it out and slipped it into a discreet pocket of her wallet, which was now in her bag by her feet.

  But she has no idea if she’ll be able to match it to the adult now.

  Or what she’ll do if she can.

  “Ciara Murphy?” A young, slim, blond woman in a tight-fitting black dress has appeared in front of her.

  Not knowing how good of a liar she could really be, Ciara had hedged her bets. She’d kept her own first name but adopted a fake second one: Murphy, the last name of every other person on this island, seemed like a safe choice. She’d taken the same approach with her CV, listing her real jobs up until her last one—Customer Experience Specialist at Blue Wave, which roughly translated into Call Center Minion for a cruise company—but pretended that she was still there, that that was her current role when, in reality, she’d been working in events for a hotel chain for nearly six months. She hadn’t bothered making up any college education.

  “We’re almost ready for you,” the blond says. “If you come with me, I’ll bring you upstairs.”

  Ciara stands, collects her things, and starts to follow the blond toward the bank of elevators, trying to ignore the thunderous beating of her heart in her chest. It’s so hard it’s loud, and it’s
so loud she’s worried that when they get into the elevator and the doors close behind them, the other woman will be able to hear its pounding too.

  “Don’t be nervous,” the woman says. “He’s very nice.”

  “‘He’?”

  The elevator doors open and they step inside.

  “Kenneth Balfe.” The blond punches the button for the fourth floor. “He’s the managing director. He likes to do all the interviews himself, even for the admin staff.”

  Kenneth Balfe.

  KB Studios.

  The strength goes out of Ciara’s knees and her body slumps against the side of the elevator.

  Why the hell didn’t she put two and two together before?

  Because she was too busy focusing on Oliver St Ledger. Who definitely works here, because his brother’s friend apparently owns the joint.

  The blond is frowning at her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, fine, thanks.” Ciara smiles weakly. “I’m just not great with elevators.”

  “Oh, you should’ve said.”

  “No, no. It’s fine.”

  “We’re almost there, anyway.”

  A ding signals that they’ve arrived.

  The doors slide open to reveal another reception area, this one outside a pair of double-glass doors with KB Studios stenciled on them in gold. Two gray sofas form an L shape around a coffee table strewn with glossy brochures while, in the corner, a water dispenser gurgles next to a scale model of an office block. Its miniature trees look like wispy cotton balls that have been spray-painted green.

  “Take a seat,” the blond says. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  Ciara obeys and watches her disappear through the glass doors. Beyond them, she can see the promise of an open-plan office space, people milling about. She’s too far away to properly search their faces, but—

  Her eyes land on a framed picture hanging on the wall next to the doors.

  It’s of a smiling, slightly red-faced man in his late fifties, early sixties, accepting a chunk of blown glass from a woman in a glitzy evening dress. And he looks exactly like what the Ken Balfe she found on Instagram might in a few decades’ time.