City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  She knows she likes that forcefulness sometimes, that decisive quality, but not when it was used so…brutally, that’s what it was. God, she’s raging yet. Although if she had just said no, he would of course have said okay. So rationally, it takes two. But Anne doesn’t feel like being rational, and hadn’t much felt like it last night when she got home and, instead of going to bed, asserted her independence and autonomy by sitting up at the kitchen table drinking white wine and listening to the new Bat for Lashes album and flicking through back issues of World of Interiors magazine, telling herself she was working, even though her eyes were beginning to swim halfway through the second (of five) glasses.

  The Second of FIVE. On top of…

  Not surprisingly, this morning was Hell. So this was the perfect morning for Aoife to decide she was old enough to have juice out of a glass, not a plastic beaker, then to prove she was not old enough not to break the glass on the kitchen tiles, the glass smashing into a thousand shards, only one of which Aoife needed to step on in order to cut her foot, and the weeping, and the wailing, and the blood, and the tissues and plasters and kisses, and by the time Anne successfully got the pair of them to school she felt the day surely couldn’t get any worse.

  Then Geri Foster calls and says she isn’t sure she wants to proceed with the design commission, she really likes the ideas but she just needs time to think, and Anne, who is feeling rather Down On Men, wants to tell Geri she’s only saying that because of Jack Donovan suddenly coming back to her and what business is it of his, sure he probably won’t notice one way or the other but since she doesn’t really know a) Geri Foster, or b) the half of it, she simply says fine and okay and tells Geri she should really let her know as soon as possible, otherwise Anne will run into scheduling difficulties. With all those other jobs she has lined up. How many? That’s right, none.

  And if that all seems grim enough, it’s merely the overture for the grand opera that is the evening performance. First, the girls have been sent home from after-school with a note declaring that they have nits, possibly head lice, bizarrely a not uncommon occurrence in Irish schools high to low. This means the washing of the hair with the Lyclear and the leaving it in for ten minutes and the painful combing with the nit comb, with more cries and yells and tantrums and tears until the house feels like full moon in a women’s penitentiary, and then Anne decides she had better give herself the treatment as the girls spend half their lives in and out of her bed and God knows how long they have had nits.

  While she is doing this, in her own bathroom, Aoife, who likes very much to have a bath, and has felt obscurely cheated by the imposition, for medicinal reasons, of the shower, has taken it upon herself to run a bath for her and Ciara (the bath is the forum for all sort of story making and role playing, and, since it’s one of the few places the girls can be guaranteed privacy, is also a great place for secrets). Under an entirely separate piece of legislation, since the battery in Aoife’s phone has died, Anne has given permission for games to be played/amusing videos to be filmed etc. on her phone. The unauthorized conjunction of these two privileges results in an eerily quiet house as Anne emerges from her bedroom, freshly rinsed and, she trusts, deloused. Fearing the apocalyptic worst, she runs to the bathroom, to find two girls properly naked in the bath, Ciara at one end, wrapping the phone, which has Fallen In The Water, of course, in a facecloth, Aoife at the other end, crying softly and steadily.

  Oh, the shouting. The red-faced, foot-stamping THIS INSTANT shouting, and the furious toweling dry and the enraged blow-drying of hair and the door banging as Anne retreats to her room, delirious with exasperation and exhaustion, a headache flaring like magnesium fire behind her almost blinded-with-rage eyes. And then the wailing of the girls, and the unbearable guilt, and everyone into Anne’s bed for making-up hugs, and everyone comfortable except Anne, and carrying the now rather heavy little brutes back to their beds.

  Later, much later, Anne is awoken by a stone on her window and a voice calling her name, in singsong fashion, a not unmelodious voice. She gets out of bed and lifts the blind. It’s Jack Donovan, swaying, drunk, insensate: he raises his arms up to her when he sees her face, his own beatific:

  “Anne, Anne, Anne!” he sings, louder each time.

  “Shusssh!” she says.

  “I didn’t want to wake the house by ringing the bell,” Jack says.

  “What do you want, Jack?”

  “To talk to you, Anne. To ask your advice. About Geri. About…marriage. Women. You and Ed. A Good Thing. I have kept my own counsel long enough.”

  Jack delivers the last line as if he is in a Shakespeare play. Anne looks at the clock. It’s half two in the morning.

  “Jack, it’s half two in the morning. Come back tomorrow.”

  “Anne, Anne, Anne!”

  “Shusssh!”

  “Anne, I need your advice.”

  “You need my advice?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Here’s my advice.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s half two in the morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck off, Jack.”

  He has forgotten about digging, how grueling it is, how hard he has to work. He has forgotten also: how chastening it is of the spirit, how mortifying of the soul, especially since it is toward that grim end, the burial of the dead. It always feels like this, and he always forgets, and then he always remembers. In this, as in so much, he is all too human. He remembers why he stopped killing: because the unspeakable physical facts of handling decomposing human flesh were almost too difficult to bear. But he can’t remember why he started to kill again. Not at this stage, not with the pungent ammonia smell in his nose, the taste of rank humanity in his mouth. He smells it for days, weeks afterward. When they did Macbeth at school, he remembers the teacher saying that Lady Macbeth trying and failing to wash her hands of blood was such a sublime metaphor for guilt and so on. But it isn’t. It barely rises above the level of the documentary. He knows pathologists use nose plugs and surgical masks and so on. He doesn’t want to do that. He feels that would be to professionalize his crimes. That way he would lose his bearings altogether. This is the right way, he knows: to atone through suffering, or at least, to suffer. Once he is done—and the pit is almost deep enough now—he will know, as he knows each time, the other condition of absolution: a firm purpose of amendment. But it’s never been firm enough, has it? Like an alcoholic in the morning jigs, it’s never again, never again, and then midafternoon turns into evening and that insatiable thirst arises, whispering: better to quench me than to suffer.

  He knows that craving, too. He has never conducted any of the burials sober. For a start, there are two bodies already stowed somewhere, and since he rarely has access to refrigerated rooms or even ice, decomposition is always in progress, and handling the bodies is complicated and unpleasant.

  And he always feels as if the third girl is one too many, but too late he always feels it: the craving is so intense—is it physical, or mental, or spiritual?—but in the act, in the moment, he always regrets it. Above all else, he does it to see the look in their eyes when they die. It gives him immense—not pleasure, but a sense of great, occult power. The last glimpse of life, of light, that she has is her own death, reflected in his eyes. It is the perfect danse macabre, the ultimate duet. It has a kind of perfection, a spiritual communion, that no work of art can match. But the third time is once too often, it sickens him, he sickens himself, his own greed. The glutton’s need for satiety leads inevitably to self-disgust. He should remember this: that life is about longing, in the greater, but also in the lesser things. Rather wish for another drink than end up in the gutter as a result of it.

  He wonders about the killing in threes, about the concept of the Three-in-One Killer. It is preposterous, on one level, like something from a comic book. And yet it springs from an authentic place within him. He remembers an interview with a colleague, who said you make your first film to see if you c
an make a film, and your second to check whether the first wasn’t some kind of fluke. It’s only on your third that you begin to feel, even though you probably only feel it unconsciously: Now I can take a risk or two. Now I am expressing myself fully. Now I can speak from my soul.

  And there is the crucifix with the initials carved on it, standing at the graveside, waiting to go down. Because he does believe in God, in the Trinity, three persons in the one God. He just does. If that sacred mystery is at the very core of your psyche, then inevitably it shapes your philosophy. He doesn’t know how to explain that in any greater depth, any more than he can explain what being Irish, or being an artist, means to him. It Just Is. That’s why he included it in the anonymous letters. It’s central.

  That’s deep enough. He goes to the shed and drags the bodies out, one by one, using a tarpaulin he has bought for the purpose. He disposes of that later, along with the girls’ clothes. He insists they go into the pit naked. It isn’t a sexual thing, not at this stage, far, far from it. It’s just…like any part of a ritual, fulfilling it bestows a kind of calm. Perhaps that feeds into the Three-in-One business: compulsion, he must call it: that once there is a ritual to be observed, it’s injurious to the soul not to observe it. To the letter.

  Yes. That is as much consolation as he can take. No matter that the third girl felt excessive, no matter that the burial was arduous and nauseating, he could no more shirk his duty than a priest could refuse to say mass. He takes the crucifix from the ground where it lay and tosses it down, looking about him the while.

  He is not overlooked here, and there is sufficient light from the conservatory. This is only the second time he has buried the bodies where he was staying. The first time was on The Last Anniversary, the house on Coldwater Canyon. Each time he has rented anonymously, through an agency; in the Canyon, he had rented two: one to live in, and one to bury the girls. He doesn’t need to do that here; his own house, where the Guards visited him last night, is a mile or so around the corner. He wonders if they visited the other three, expects they did. Loy is in L.A., but he hasn’t found anything conclusive. He doubts if he will.

  But it is running down, there is no doubt about that. Flinging the first shovelful of earth down onto the twisted limbs, the matted hair, the unseeing eyes of the three lost girls, he feels such an intense burst of self-loathing, of self-disgust, of petrifying shame. He falls to his knees at the graveside, crying, a cawing, drizzening kind of cry. He has already vomited; now in his weakness he loses control of his bladder. He feels the hot piss seep down his crotch and along his thigh and nestle in his ankles where he crouches, hunkered down among the dead.

  Now he has told them, they will find him, and put an end to it.

  Is that what he wants?

  It is, he knows at this moment, what he deserves.

  But in the same moment, he thinks of the Garda Detective, O’Sullivan. Prying into his life. Asking if he can come in and look around. Of course, welcome, even without a warrant, what have the innocent to hide?

  Who the fuck does he think he is?

  Loy the same.

  He would like them to suffer the way he has suffered.

  He feels these both, within the same moment: shame, and rage.

  Maybe they’re the same craving, just as a drink quenches the craving for a drink at the same time as it creates the craving.

  It is a paradox.

  Three-in-One, One-in-Three.

  It is his nature.

  And maybe he is not going to get away with it much longer.

  If they’ve narrowed it down to four.

  If the LAPD and the FBI are involved, then just how badly could the Guards fuck it up?

  And there is Ed Loy.

  He could sit back and wait. That would take patience, and nerve, and courage.

  He has those.

  But does he want to?

  How much longer can he endure this?

  He has to consider his own welfare.

  In another couple of years, another movie, the sap slowly rising, the old desires insisting on being assuaged, one girl good, two girls better, and then the squalor and degradation of the third, the inevitable letdown, the misery and self-laceration on some desolate hillside…it is a kind of hell.

  Is he willing to continue, a condemned man?

  He flings the last shovelful of earth on, pats the mound down, spreads the mulch from the adjacent compost heap in a haphazard manner, strews a few dead plants and a dried-out pine tree around and inspects the artfully compiled garden mess.

  Production design. Not his area, but anyone can lend a hand.

  The first rays of dawn are starting to trickle through.

  He needs a shower, and a drink, and his bed.

  One thing has changed.

  In the past, all the girls were lost girls, runaways, few had family connections. He always made sure of that. Although he notices with grim amusement how, in L.A., all sorts of human dreck has emerged from the mire with placards of their missing loved ones, as if he was to blame for them all. Where are they the rest of the year?

  But he has not done that this time. These girls are not lost.

  Could he stop?

  He thinks of Macbeth again, a play he loves. He remembers his English teacher’s horror at quite how much he loved it.

  “But it’s so dark, so nihilistic, so lacking in humanity, so devoid of the light. Even the children are murdered.”

  Yes, he nodded, it is so beautiful.

  What is the quote?

  I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as going o’er.

  Something like that.

  Yes, something like that.

  CHAPTER 26

  Keith’s Komix shares dingy mini-mall space with a used-record store, a head shop dealing in all manner of joss sticks, herbal highs and hemp-related products and a Moroccan fast-food outlet. There’s a pervasive aroma of patchouli, chamomile, falafel and that ripe late-teen and twentysomething pheromone, part sweat, part sebum, part why-don’t-we-do-it-in-the-road. What there aren’t in any great numbers are customers. Keith closed the shop to make the trip to Point Dume; he unlocks it now and leaves me waiting while he goes upstairs to collect Janice’s stuff.

  The store is not big, and it’s shabby, if clean, but it has a wide range of stock, from Batman to the Hernandez Brothers, manga to Robert Crumb. I find a half-dozen old Teen Titans books which I know Aoife and Ciara don’t have, and some Scooby-Doo comics for Geri Foster’s girls.

  When Keith Holloway comes down carrying a six-bottle cardboard half crate with Prosecco dei Colli Trevigiani—Bortolomiol on the side, I get two shocks at once: one because of the wine, which Maurice, Jack, Mark and Conor had all extolled the other night in Eden as their trademark, their celebratory wine from way back; the other because Keith Holloway looks even paler and more drawn than he had out in Malibu.

  “You okay, man?” I say.

  He hands me the box.

  “Kind of all catching up with me,” he says. “Didn’t really sleep last night. Shock, I suppose you’d call it.”

  “You want to get a bite to eat? On me.”

  “I need to open the shop. As you can see, business is not exactly booming. Can’t afford to miss my customer of the day.”

  “I am that guy. Look,” I said, and I show him my selections.

  “You’re a Teen Titans fan? I’d have put you down for Batman.”

  “They’re for my…” I say, and falter at the cliché. Keith Holloway grins.

  “Oh yeah? Your niece?”

  “Forget it. Is this enough?”

  “It’s more than I did yesterday.”

  “Okay, then let’s get out of here.”

  We find a dark old Italian place a block away, near the ocean. I have a pizza with anchovies, black olives, capers and green chilies and Keith has one with fresh basil and cherry tomatoes and mozzarella and we share a bottle of Chianti Classico and I have a Negroni up fro
nt and Keith has a Peroni. I did have some vague notion that I should stay off booze while I was in L.A., and driving, more to the point, but we have been at a mass grave, and there’s a rule about having a drink even after you’ve been to an ordinary graveside, and I didn’t make the rule, so don’t blame me.

  The box is half full of books. There are a few notebooks in there as well. I start to inspect them, but I want to ask Keith questions as well, so I ask him for a favor.

  “Look. I think whoever killed your sister is in Dublin right now, and that’s where I need to get to. There’s a couple of flights leaving this evening—”

  “I thought you told Coover you’d go downtown and make a statement,” Keith says.

  “Yes, well, it’s always a good idea to tell cops what they want to hear. But the truth is, on this case, L.A. is the past. The present is happening—has just happened—in Dublin. I want to try and prevent there being a future.”

  “So what are you asking, you want to take these with you? They’re all I have. I’ve been through them over and over, there’s no reference to anyone, some even have the dedication pages ripped out—”

  “I just…there might be something among them, however tiny, a detail, a glimmer, that I might spot…you’ll get them back, I guarantee it, hey, I’m coming back anyway, I’ll have to make that statement for Coover at some stage. Look, what I’ll do is, we’ll eat lunch, and then I’ll sit here and work my way through the books, and whatever I haven’t got through, I’ll take with me. How does that sound? It’s all in the service of getting this guy.”