Where She Lies

by Michael Scanlon

  ‘When’s this interview startin’?’ He forced a yawn. ‘I’m getting bored.’

  ‘We’re expecting the senior investigating officers, Darren. Once they heard we had a suspect for the murder of Tanya Frazzali, well, they dropped everything to get down here as quickly as they could. Won’t be much longer.’

  Darren’s face crumpled into shocked surprise. ‘Whatever,’ he sighed, trying to recover his composure, but his shaky voice gave him away.

  There followed a silence, and Beck hoped it was heavy for Darren, that it pressed down onto his shoulders. Beck allowed that silence to linger, like seasoning on a steak, softening Murphy up.

  ‘I think we’ll just get on with it,’ Beck said. ‘What you think, Darren? Unless you want to wait for them? It’s up to you.’

  Darren turned his close-set eyes onto Beck. He was no longer able to hide his panic.

  ‘Ya, ya,’ he blurted, ‘let’s get on with it.’

  Beck had lied.

  He was not waiting for Wilde or O’Reilly, although he had rung Wilde and told him Murphy was in custody, but nothing more.

  Beck was about to press the red button on the recorder when Darren spoke.

  ‘Before you do that,’ he said.

  Beck threw a glance at Claire.

  ‘Yes?’ Claire said to Murphy.

  ‘I was thinking…’

  ‘You were thinking,’ Beck said.

  Darren looked at Beck’s finger, poised above the red record button. ‘I want to have a word with Garda Somers here. Privately.’

  ‘You can’t have a word with me privately. We have rules and regulations about that sort of thing.’

  ‘You didn’t heed the rules when you held me down and took the bandage off my fuckin’ head, did ya?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Darren,’ Claire said. ‘Now say it out loud. What is it?’

  ‘I didn’t kill Tanya Frazzali, okay?’

  ‘You said that already,’ Beck said.

  ‘The DNA won’t be a match. You’ll see. And I was in The Noose. You already checked. And then I was in the hospital soon after. I didn’t have time to kill anybody.’

  ‘You a detective now, Darren?’ Claire said. ‘You left the hospital before receiving treatment. Did you think we wouldn’t check? Just accept your name was on the patient register and not question it? We’re not that thick, Darren.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he responded, ignoring the remark.

  Beck knew everything Darren had just said was probably true.

  ‘But you are here, Darren, and will be until this time tomorrow. Then, if everything works out like you think it will, no problem, you’re out of here, except, that is, for the small matter of the false reporting of a robbery. In the meantime…’

  ‘In the meantime?’

  ‘For starters, we search your home,’ Beck said. ‘From top to bottom.’

  ‘I want to talk. Off the record.’

  ‘Off the record,’ Beck said.

  ‘Off the record.’

  ‘Talk. I’ll decide if it’s off the record or not.’

  Darren fell silent, thinking. Then, ‘Suppose someone has a grow factory. I mean, a big fucking grow factory. Maybe a hundred plants, ya.’

  ‘What about it?’ Claire said. ‘Is that what you’re telling us, Darren?’

  ‘Give the man a chance,’ Beck said, flashing a smile of reassurance to the drug dealer that said, ‘See, I’m not all bad, play your cards right and I could be your friend’.

  ‘Go on, Darren.’

  ‘I can give you a name and address, ya. They’re worth about fifty thousand euro.’

  ‘Give us the name and address,’ Beck said.

  Darren looked at Beck, and that smirk of his reappeared. ‘You think I’m stupid? You have to let me go first.’

  There was an edge to Beck’s tone now. ‘You think I’m stupid, Darren? I didn’t come down in the last shower. You’re trying to get another dealer out of the way, while you get to keep whatever it is you’re hiding in your house. Clever. But stupid at the same time. Look, you probably made up that cock and bull story about being assaulted, right? Because you’re telling other certain people the same thing. That you were robbed. But there’s consequences for telling people like that lies like those, isn’t there, Darren? Unless you can convince them that you really were robbed. But that’s the stupid part. Because it won’t make any difference. And I couldn’t give a flying fuck about any of it, Darren, so you read me wrong on that. I’m trying to find the sick fucker who killed a young girl. That’s the part that I’m interested in, to hell with the rest.’

  Darren laid his hand on the table, said matter-of-factly, ‘Okay. What about this? I do actually know who Tanya Frazzali was seeing.’

  Beck felt his breath catch at the back of his throat.

  ‘If I can walk out that door – and my house isn’t searched, that is – I’ll tell you.’

  Twenty-Five

  Superintendent Wilde shook his head and stuck his hands into his pockets. ‘He’s a lying toerag, gets away with murder, maybe literally in this case.’

  He was standing by one of the high windows in his office. When Beck had appeared in the open doorway he’d been leaning over a filing cabinet, flicking through some files. He looked out the window now. ‘Murphy can’t be trusted to lie straight in a bed.’ He began chewing on a corner of his lip. ‘He’s a lying toerag.’

  Beck walked into the centre of the room. Suddenly he didn’t feel so good. ‘Mind if I sit down, boss?’

  Wilde turned and looked at him. ‘Not feeling so good? No surprises there. No need to sit down, Beck. Go back and tell Murphy he can fuck off. Search his house immediately. The DNA comparison will take hours anyway. He’s going nowhere.’

  Beck felt like throwing up. He took a deep breath.

  ‘The assault didn’t happen,’ he said. ‘It’s a cover, for what I don’t know. He pocketed a delivery maybe, something I don’t particularly care about.’

  ‘Neither do I, not right now anyway. You can tell him that, too, that we’re not wasting any more time on him. And no deals. But still, if you can wrangle the information about the grow house out of him, tell him what he wants to hear, whatever it takes, that’d be great. Inspector O’Reilly can look after it.’ Wilde winked. ‘Should get a feather in his cap for that one – put a smile onto that crinkly face of his.’

  Beck turned and started for the door. ‘I’ll get on with it.’

  He went to the bathroom at the end of the corridor, sat quietly on a closed toilet bowl in a cubicle, gathering himself. When he felt better, he got up and went out to the sinks, ran a cold water tap, splashed some onto his face. Then he headed back to the interview room.

  Murphy was leaning his forehead on the table, arms outstretched on either side of his head. He sat up when Beck came in. He didn’t speak. Beck glanced at Claire and sat in the chair beside her again.

  ‘Give me the name, Darren,’ Beck said.

  ‘So we have a deal then?’

  We have a deal. Beck hated that term.

  ‘We have an arrangement, Darren, yes.’

  ‘If I give you the name, I can walk?’

  I can walk. Jesus.

  ‘Yes, Darren,’ Beck lied.

  ‘You better be telling the truth.’ There was a cut to Darren’s voice, like a threat, a glimpse into his nasty side.

  ‘I haven’t got all day, Darren,’ Beck said. ‘Name.’

  ‘Drum roll,’ Darren said, cockiness seeping in now.

  ‘Last chance,’ Beck said.

  ‘His name…’ Darren began.

  And finally he said it.

  Claire’s voice squawked. ‘What?’

  ‘You’d need to be careful, people,’ Murphy said. ‘He’s good friends with your boss, so he is.’

  ‘Which one?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Yer man, Inspector O’Reilly. That prick.’

  ‘Steady,’ Beck said. ‘That name. It rings a
bell.’

  Murphy said it again.

  ‘Christ,’ Claire said. ‘It should.’

  Twenty-Six

  The trees murmured to each other, soft sighs and whispers, the gentle wind soothing them, carrying their leaves in a slow but persistent culling. Devoid of leaves, the branches were like clawed hands, stark against the grey sky. He remembered when he was five years old, or thereabouts. Yes, he could remember back that far. Waking in his mother’s arms. To find her staring at him. Silent. Still. Just... staring. He had started to cry. But it made no difference. And in that moment, something changed. Forever. In that moment he became aware. That his mother was alive. But so too was she dead. It was those eyes. He could never forget them.

  The trees were entering their winter twilight world now, caught between life and death. What was it like, he wondered, to be like that, neither dead nor alive? He thought about it all the time. He thought about all those who suffered, like him, walking the ungodly paths through a world corrupted.

  That’s when it had started. On his mother’s lap. Soon after, there was that episode with the cat. Not that he’d wanted to kill it; no, just merely deny it sufficient oxygen so it would pass out. He’d wanted to experiment on its unconscious body. He’d wanted to know if pain could only be felt when the body was conscious. He’d wanted to know that if he tortured the animal long enough, would it wake up?

  The cat was a bad idea, though; it squirmed about in his hands, spitting at him, lashing out with its claws. He hadn’t thought of it doing anything like that. It cut him almost immediately, four identical parallel lies of smudged blood on his right arm. He dropped the animal, stifling a scream for fear his mother would hear.

  It was two weeks later before he got another chance. Walking home from school one day, a neighbourhood friend’s puppy wandered out onto the street in front of him… He had prayed for forgiveness that time. But it had been necessary to do it. It was something that had to be done.

  Because he was fascinated by the vortex, the black hole, that existed between life and death.

  To be neither dead nor alive.

  To be neither dead. Nor alive.

  He waited, though. He’d been waiting quite a while. He could almost smell it: the decaying twigs mixed with moss and herbs. It was everywhere.

  Twenty-Seven

  Ned had worked his way through town and ended up more or less back where he had started. He cursed Cross Beg for not being any bigger, for not having more alleyways for him to slink along and hide in. Cursing, he turned, and with his peculiar duck walk even more pronounced now because of his frustration, he went from Plunkett Hill onto Bridge Street. He crossed here, oblivious to the traffic. Someone blew a car horn, unusual for Cross Beg.

  On the other side of the street, he went through a gap in the low wall and down the steps to the muddy riverbank. It hadn’t rained in the last couple of days, and the edge of the bank by the wall was dry. He went along here, following the trail worn into the soil by the feet of fishermen. He walked until the trail ended in high, wild, dead grass. He stopped and turned around, looking back at the town. He could see the first bridge and the buildings on either side, the spire of the cathedral. No matter where you went, the spire followed you like a bad conscience. He sat down, felt the dampness through the thin fabric of his trousers. The wind was enough to stir white tops on the fast-flowing water, high in tide now, speeding its way to the wide estuary where the Brown Water met the Atlantic.

  Ned had a couple of cans in each pocket.

  He lay down and looked at the sky, black puffy smokes of cloud here and there. He could feel the sharp edge of cold in the air. There was a storm coming. He knew what he had to do. Survive it, that’s what he had to do. Survive the storm.

  There was a sound, lost again on the wind.

  Ned sat up. He heard it a second time. It was his name.

  A coldness crept through him, but it was a coldness not caused by the weather. He turned his head in the direction of that sound. And saw him.

  ‘Ned, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

  There was nothing Ned could do but bless himself.

  Twenty-Eight

  Beck was brooding. They were sitting at a corner table in a café a little down from the station. He stirred his overpriced lukewarm coffee in its fancy blue mug. Superintendent Wilde had refused permission to arrest for the purposes of securing a DNA sample. Without it, there was no way to prove if Murphy’s accusations were true.

  ‘Wilde never gave his consent for any deal with Murphy, did he?’ Claire said. ‘You lied to me.’

  ‘What? Oh, I’m afraid not,’ Beck said. ‘The means justify the ends, you know.’

  Her empty plastic water bottle was on the table in front of her. In anger she flicked it with the back of her hand harder than she’d intended and it flew from the table onto the floor. A couple at the next table turned to look. She reached out and picked it up again.

  ‘It’s the way you do things, isn’t it?’ Her voice was like escaping steam. ‘Off the books. You want to put us all in danger?’

  ‘I squared it with him.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘Murphy.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t think you want to know.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I don’t think you want to know.’

  ‘Tell me, Beck.’

  So he told her that, as he was returning Murphy to his cell after questioning, he gave him his phone and allowed him to make a call while he waited outside. There would be nothing found when his house was searched later.

  ‘The means justify the ends, do they, huh?’ she said.

  ‘Lesser of two evils. The drugs search in Sligo will yield significantly more.’

  Claire fell silent, thinking. Beck sipped from his coffee, which was now cold.

  ‘Why are we waiting? We should lift him immediately, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘We can’t,’ Beck said. ‘I spoke to the Skipper. He’s adamant. Evidence first. Something other than the word of a convicted drug dealer. Something that’s not going to be a key to a money vault for a litigation lawyer. His words: “Things work differently in Cross Beg”. He mentioned the man is friendly with O’Reilly, too, by the way. I think that might have something to do with it.’ Beck pushed his coffee cup away. ‘I didn’t even want to get into this.’

  ‘You’re in it. What do we do now?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m thinking.’

  They both fell silent. Both thinking.

  Twenty-Nine

  They walked back to the station in silence, the clouds that had been drifting in from the north all morning concentrating into a mass of deep black that stretched across the sky.

  Beck sat at a desk in the Ops Room. A detective collating notes from door-to-door enquiries the previous day informed him that O’Reilly had left for Sligo in a hurry a half hour before. Beck smiled, drumming his fingers on the desk. It wasn’t his desk. He didn’t have one. But being desk-less suited him fine.

  ‘Sergeant Beck.’

  The uniformed officer was standing by the desk. He looked familiar. Beck tried to remember where he’d seen him before. Then it came to him: he’d been one of the two at the bottom of the embankment on Monday as he walked back from the body of Tanya Frazzali.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Something you might be interested in.’

  Beck closed his eyes and ran a hand over his face.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, opening them again. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’

  ‘Dempsey. Fergal Dempsey.’

  ‘So, what is it, Dempsey?’

  Dempsey looked uncertain. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ Beck said, and immediately regretted the irritation in his voice.

  ‘A couple of weeks ago we got a shout, myself and my partner. A female reported being attacked on the footbridge at the back of the hospital. It’s a shortcut into town. About eleven o’clock at night.
Said someone tried to strangle her. She had marks on her neck.’

  ‘I didn’t know about this.’

  ‘We went to her address. She declined to make a statement. We didn’t record it as an assault.’

  ‘Did you record it at all?’

  Officer Dempsey looked sheepish. ‘No. The inspector doesn’t want us recording incidents unless a statement is forthcoming.’

  ‘You have this person’s details?’

  ‘Yes. In my notebook. Right here.’

  ‘Give them to me, please. Write them down.’

  Dempsey opened his notebook, tore off a page, came to the desk and wrote down the details, handed the page to Beck. ‘She’s a Russian national, by the way. Works in the catering section at the hospital. First name’s Nina, surname Sokolov.’

  Beck took the piece of paper, looked at it. ‘Thanks, Dempsey. Anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  Dempsey nodded once, turned and left the Ops Room.

  Thirty

  First things first, Beck considered, putting his thoughts in order. He needed to speak to Nina Sokolov. But before that, and indeed before they pursued the man who Murphy had claimed was Tanya’s boyfriend, Beck had to get firm confirmation Murphy himself wasn’t involved.

  He picked up the desk phone. He didn’t have a number for blood analysis, so he dialled Garda HQ and asked to be put through to the lab instead. When he was connected, he spoke to a female. She whispered, ‘Hello, blood analysis.’

  Beck could hardly hear her. He stuck a finger in his other ear, told her who he was and asked if Morgan Ryan still worked in the section, and if so, could he speak to him.

  ‘Morgan’s busy,’ she replied in a whisper.

  ‘I’m finding it hard to hear you,’ Beck said. ‘Are you whispering?’

  She raised her voice just enough for him to hear. ‘Yes, sorry. The Commissioner is on a visit. That’s why he’s busy. Morgan.’