The door clicked behind her and she made her way to the corner of the room, throwing herself into a velvet chair next to a writing desk. From it, she took a bottle of water and guzzled thirstily from it.
Colin snuck a glance in her direction, pity panging in his chest. Judging from the mascara smudged below her bloodshot eyes, whatever news she had to impart was not good.
Adam took in the room. It was almost identical to theirs; similar abstract art on the walls and a large window with a view that matched theirs. The big difference was that her room had two single beds.
A light bulb illuminated in Adam’s mind. But first, to business.
‘Vicky, we’ve come to speak to you about Danny.’
She sniffed, trying to hold back a sob, but to no avail. The floodgates burst open and she let out a wail.
Both men’s eyes widened in alarm as they looked at each other, both pleading silently with the other to be the one to do something about it. Eventually, Colin rolled his eyes and got up from the bed, tiptoeing towards her slowly as one might approach a wild animal that might lash out at any second.
He tore a tissue for a box that was sitting on the table and reached it to her. She accepted with a quiet thank you before blowing her nose and placing the used tissue in the bin at her feet. She took a minute to compose herself, apologised and fixed them with a sad smile.
‘What do you want to talk about Danny for?’ she asked.
‘Well, obviously you heard about what happened to him…’
She confirmed that she had with a slight nod of her head.
‘…Well, we don’t think that it was accidental. We think someone meant to kill him, so we’re asking around. Someone hinted that you might have some information.’
‘Ross,’ she said. A statement, rather than a question.
‘Can you tell us what you know?’
‘As you know, Danny and I went out for about a while, about three years ago. He broke up with me and we started seeing new people. My mum and dad hated him, so it was never going to last, and I was quite relieved when he ended it. About three weeks ago, he started texting me again, completely out of the blue. Maybe he thought that there was a chance of seeing each other at the wedding and he was getting his feelers out early.’
‘Did you text back?’
‘Yes, but only a few times. I told him I had a boyfriend and that it was inappropriate for him to be contacting me. It didn’t stop him. In fact, not even my boyfriend ringing him put him off, even though Neil gave him a right old shouting at.’
‘Where is Neil?’
‘He was here last night, but had to leave after the party because he was working today. He’s coming back tonight… I hope.’
With that, she burst into tears again. This time, they let her get it out of her system without interfering. She wiped at her eyes, smearing black across her cheeks like warpaint.
‘Why wouldn’t he come back?’ Adam asked when he thought it was safe.
‘Because… I slept with Danny once he’d left. He’d said sorry downstairs at the party for texting, and told me to pass his apologies onto Neil. He’d already gone by this point. At the end of the night, there was a knock on my door. It was Danny. I was drunk and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I let him in. He seemed… pleased with himself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, the usual Danny Costello swagger – boasting about this and that, and he was walking with a spring in his step.’
This news was unexpected. According to Sam, Danny was pissed off and cooped up in his room, still feeling stung about their argument. Although, him being up here, propositioning his ex-girlfriend explained where he was when Ross went a-knocking.
‘Did he say why?’
‘We didn’t say much at all, if you get my drift…’
Something permeated the room – an awkwardness that Adam felt he could almost decant from the air and bottle. It hung thick around them.
‘Do you remember what time this was?’
Colin asked the question, his words acting as a welcome candle in the dark.
‘He came up at just after one o’clock and left at about quarter past. He didn’t hang around.’
‘And that’s why you’re worried Neil might not come?’ Colin said.
She nodded, fresh tears forming in the corners of her eyes.
‘Is there anything else that happened?’
‘Actually, yeah,’ she said, straightening up in her chair. ‘When he was putting on his jacket, after… you know… an envelope fell out. It was open at the top, but I couldn’t see what was in it. Though, when it dropped on the floor, it sounded heavy.’
‘Heavy?’
‘Yeah, it was loud. It didn’t bang, it sounded more like a slap. Like it was full of folded paper or something.’
A physical clue – interesting.
With nothing more to go on, they left Vicky’s room and were half way down the corridor when Adam turned back, hammering on the door again. Vicky opened it, tears flowing like a river down her cheeks.
‘I was just wondering if… well…’
He paused, wondering how to word it to keep the offence to a minimum.
‘Spit it out,’ she said.
‘Well, our room has one double bed and you have two singles. I’m assuming that, after what happened last night, Neil won’t be coming tonight, so was wondering if you fancied swapping rooms? It’d make our lives so much easier.’
The door slammed shut in Adam’s face milliseconds after he finished asking the question. Colin dragged him away before Vicky returned with something sharp.
‘Idiot,’ his friend said, punching him on the arm.
12
ANOTHER SNOOP
‘Well, one thing is for certain,’ Adam said, while unlocking the bedroom. ‘If Danny was sober enough to, you know…’
He made a crude hand gesture which caused Colin shake his head.
‘…for a bit of how’s your mother,’ he continued, noting his friend’s displeasure. ‘It meant he definitely couldn’t have been drunk enough to choke on his vomit.’
It was an interesting idea, Colin thought as he followed Adam into the room. He threw himself onto the bed; the traipsing around the long corridors mingling with the stupefying heat caused a sudden wave of exhaustion.
‘Do we have time for a rest?’ Colin asked, stifling a yawn.
Adam checked the time and shook his head.
‘I’ve got a theory. I think someone did this to stop the wedding.’
Colin was unconvinced, but waved his hand at Adam for elaboration.
‘If whoever killed Danny did it for that reason, it didn’t work. The wedding is happening tomorrow, which means whoever did the killing may do more. We’re working under a time constraint here.’
He sat down on the bed too and threw his eyes towards the ceiling.
‘What I’ve realised is just how amateur we’ve been so far,’ he said. ‘We looked a bit at Danny’s face, which didn’t help us work out how he’d been killed. I think what we need to do is search his room. We know he had an envelope, but we don’t know what was in it. Perhaps, whoever killed him was after whatever was inside.’
He thought for a few more minutes.
‘We’re going to split up. You go and search the room while I do a bit of work elsewhere.’
‘Why do I have to search the room?’ Colin asked, the colour rising in his cheeks. The thought of spending another second in the room with Danny’s corpse caused a shiver to run through his spine.
‘Well, you’re used to bodies, in your line of work and…’
‘You’re a wimp,’ interrupted Colin.
Adam was in no position to argue. Colin accepted his mission with a small nod of the head.
‘What am I looking for?’ he asked, rising from the bed.
‘The envelope and anything that seems out of the ordinary,’ Adam said, unhelpfully. ‘Check anywhere you think something might be hidden. Desk draw
ers or in the suitcase, that kind of thing.’
Colin left the room with a sense of unease. How were they supposed to solve a crime, if they didn’t even know what they were looking for?
He trudged down the corridor, hoping that some sort of Spidey-sense would awaken within him, though he didn’t hold out much hope. He made his way down the grand staircase and passed a few people sitting in groups around tables in the foyer, catching snippets of conversation, all about the stricken best man.
He made his way down the corridor towards Danny’s room, turning back every few steps to make sure no one was following him. The last thing he needed was company, or even worse, someone mistaking his meddling as guilt. Visiting the room once was a risk, let alone venturing in again with no suitable explanation as to why if he were to be questioned.
Casting one last clandestine look around, he slipped in the door, a sense of déjà vu enveloping him. Everything was as they’d left it.
The lifeless body was still on the bed; the bruises unmoved, though slightly darker, and the vomit uncleaned. Perhaps the police had instructed the hotel staff to leave the room untouched until after the body was collected.
Colin scanned around. He ignored the light switch for fear of alerting someone to the room, instead letting his eyes adjust to the dusky hues. He made his way to the middle and turned a full circle, hoping for some little detail to leap out at him.
Nothing did.
Instead, he moved over to the body and rooted through the pockets of his jacket and trousers. Inside, there were a few card receipts from the bar last night, but nothing of great importance.
Something else caught his attention.
The smell.
At first, as on the previous times, the overriding smell was that left behind from the vomit. But underneath it was something else, something smoky, medicinal almost.
Whiskey.
A small grain of doubt fell into the cogs of Colin’s thinking, causing them to shudder to a stop.
The whiskey, coupled with the vomit, was a very obvious sign that pointed to an accidental death. If it weren’t for Adam’s persistence that something was amiss in all of this, Colin would’ve downed tools there and then.
Instead, he pressed on.
For a while, he searched in drawers, pushing the contents this way and that, coming away empty each time. He moved from desk to bedside cabinet to wardrobe, but there was no sign of anything suspicious.
Frustration rose like a beast inside him.
Why had Adam sent him on a fool’s errand?
The silence in the room was interrupted by voices in the hallway outside. Voices that were growing louder by the second. Panicking, Colin crossed the bedroom in three giant strides, rushing into the bathroom and closing the door as quietly as he could behind him.
He stepped into the bath and pulled the shower curtain, wincing as the metallic rings scraped against the curtail rail. Visions of Psycho plagued him as he waited with his breath held.
Outside the bathroom door, two men were talking. From what he could make out, they were here to collect the body. They quickly discussed how they were going to move it, before putting the plan into action. Colin heard grunting, the rustle of fabric and a quiet bang as something fell over.
‘You’ve knocked the bin over,’ said one of the voices.
‘Ah, the cleaners will get it later,’ replied the other.
The voices were muffled as the sound of the bedroom door slamming filled the room. After that, Colin heard no more, though he didn’t move from his spot for a few minutes, just in case. When he was sure the coast was clear, he scurried out of the bath and splashed water over his sweating face at the sink.
He grabbed a handful of paper towels and dabbed them on his brow before looking around, dismayed to find nowhere to put the sopping material. He walked into the bedroom and saw the upturned bin, stopping short when he registered the contents strewn across the floor.
Next to the desk was a tattered brown envelope and the empty silver packaging of painkillers.
He lifted the envelope first, smoothing the creases and returning it to as near its original state as possible. There was nothing on the outside to mark it as different to the millions of other massed produced envelopes currently in circulation.
He turned it in his fingers before reaching inside. Whatever was in there to make it heavy was now gone. In its place was a single piece of paper, its thin blue lines scrawled over in black biro. The hand that wrote it appeared both rushed and angry to Colin’s mind.
He took in the message, turning it around in his head in order to try to make some sense of it, before shoving the missive back inside the envelope and the envelope inside the pocket of his shorts.
Next, he lifted the silver packaging. It belonged to regular paracetamol, though all eight blisters were empty. There was also no sign of the box from which they’d been procured.
Which made sense.
Danny would have no reason to own a box of paracetamol, since he was allergic to them.
Colin rose from the floor, eager to get back to Adam to discuss the things he’d found. As he moved towards the door, a quiet beep emitted from somewhere nearby.
Colin tried to zone in on where it had come from.
Getting down on his knees, he groped around under the bed, his hand settling on only cobwebs and lumps of dust. He moved around to the other side of the bed and repeated the task.
This time, his fingers touched something small and rectangular. He pulled it out from under the bed and held it in the shaft of light coming through the curtains.
It was a phone.
But not the up-to-date iPhone Danny made sure to get on release day.
It was a thin Nokia, as nondescript as they come. A small black-and-white screen told him that the battery was low. He dismissed the message with the click of a button, pocketed it and left the room, aware more than ever that time may be slipping away from them.
13
TUBTHUMPING
Once Colin had left, Adam had a quick lie down. He felt bad, leaving his friend to do the legwork in the room, but he really couldn’t face seeing the body again.
He also felt bad, knowing that he’d sent his friend on what could be a wild goose chase. There might be nothing incriminating in the room, but if there was, he fully trusted his friend to find it.
As partners went, he’d pick Colin every day of the week. He was loyal, trusting, and had stuck up for Adam since their first day at primary school together. He had a big heart, as evidenced by the job he’d chosen – a job not many other twenty-something year old lads would be seen dead doing. He was clever too – cleverer than he thought he was. He just needed some confidence.
Pushing Colin out of his mind and letting Danny in, he considered what came next. The case (he still felt weird calling it that) was progressing nicely, though it was becoming hard to keep track of the comings and goings. He resolved to fix that.
Jumping up from the bed, he grabbed the key from the sideboard and marched towards the door.
Adam looked around the library. It was a nice space, not anything grand like the rest of the house, but rather cosy. All four walls were lined with bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling, an elaborate chandelier casting sprinkles of light across the dark wood.
A wide selection of books filled the shelves; the cracked spines hinting that they had been well thumbed by many a visitor. It was a nice touch, having this room readily available in a place so remote. The solitude of the house probably seemed perfect for a getaway, but after a few days, Adam could imagine the books acted as a welcome distraction.
He moved the mouse in order to bring the computer screen to life. He tapped a few buttons, logging in with the details he’d been given at reception, before navigating to Facebook. He was a reluctant social media user, but the website was all he needed right now.
For ten minutes, he searched for what he required and collected his printing from the machine in the
corner of the room.
Pulling the door open, he left the room, colliding with a solid mass that caused him to fall to the floor, his papers dropping around him like snow.
‘Sorry, man,’ said Mike, offering a hand and pulling Adam to standing. ‘Didn’t see you there.’
Adam took him in as he bent down and began collecting the papers. Mike, the bride’s brother, had been in the same year as Adam, but was never in his friendship group. He’d been a sort of loner, regularly eating his lunch in the toilets, making him easy fodder for the bullies who’d made his school life miserable. He’d used university as a chance for change, emerging with muscles Arnie would be proud and a new found sense of confidence, as evidenced by the clothes he chose to wear.
Mike handed Adam the pieces of paper he’d scooped up without comment.
‘How are you feeling today?’ Adam asked, folding the wad of paper and putting it in his pocket.
‘Alright,’ Mike said, curiosity clouding his features.
‘You were pretty smashed last night,’ Adam elaborated.
‘Oh, that. Yeah,’ Mike laughed. ‘I had a blast, from what I can remember, anyway.’
‘I didn’t think Emily’s side of the family were coming until tonight.’
‘We had a family meal at the house, and then Emily and her bridesmaids went off to sort what colour their nails were going to be. It was either sit around on my own or come to the party.’
‘Party wins every time,’ Adam said.
‘Indeed it does,’ chuckled Mike, before turning serious. ‘Pretty bad about Danny. I felt awful for Emily when I heard – she’s been planning this day since she was a wee girl. I heard you are doing a bit of detective work.’
Adam confirmed he was with an embarrassed half nod.
‘Good man, yourself,’ he said. ‘If you find out who did it, give him an extra slap from me. The last thing my family needed was more stress on the eve of the wedding.’
Adam was about to tell him that he hoped it would never come to blows, but Mike was already saying that he’d see him at the dinner tonight while wandering off towards the stairs.
The Curious Dispatch of Daniel Costello Page 5