The Scholar

by Dervla McTiernan

  ‘What’s this?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘I wanted five minutes. Figured if I brought lunch I’d have a better chance of getting it.’ The expression on Moira’s face told Carrie she didn’t want to have the conversation in the open squad room. They went to a meeting room, shut the door. Carrie unwrapped the sandwich. Egg salad on granary, it didn’t appeal. She sipped the coffee and listened.

  Immediately after her conversation with Moira, Carrie went looking for Cormac Reilly. She found him at the university. She had just parked when she caught sight of Reilly and Fisher walking back towards the car park. Carrie got out, leaned against the car, and waited.

  Whatever else you could say about Cormac Reilly, and right now she felt like she could say plenty, he wasn’t stupid. He knew she wasn’t there for a social chat as soon as he saw her. He exchanged a few words with Fisher, then sent him on his way, walked in her direction.

  ‘Carrie,’ Cormac said, as he reached her. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ It pissed her off that he looked good, that he looked rested.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she said. It came out sharper than she’d intended, and her irritation rose. She’d wanted to be cool, calm, just as in control as he always seemed to be, but she was worried now, and her frustration was boiling over.

  ‘Grand,’ Cormac said. ‘I’ve sent Fisher back to the station. Do you want to get coffee, or …’

  ‘No coffee,’ she said. ‘This won’t take long. I want to know why you’re not pushing the Henderson case.’

  He gazed back at her, an unreadable expression on his face. She wanted him to be angry, to have a go, because then she could have a go too, and a good row might lance the festering boil of anger and frustration in her belly. Instead the bastard just stared her down.

  ‘There are three kids at risk in that house, Cormac. Rob Henderson is making solid progress towards an unfit to stand trial plea, and you’re out here messing around doing interviews that Fisher could be handling alone.’

  ‘Moira Hanley talked to you.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘And she told you that I cut the interview with Lucy short.’

  ‘You weren’t even there ten minutes. You basically awarded her Mother of the Year and walked out the door. Are you distracted? Is it the hit-and-run? Is it Emma?’ She glanced in the direction of the road, where they’d stood together over a body only a few days before.

  Cormac’s steady eyes were on her. There was no anger in his voice when he answered. ‘Did Moira Hanley also tell you that Lucy was on tranquillisers? That she was high as a kite when we arrived and getting worse by the minute?’

  Carrie opened her mouth to reply but nothing came out. Tranquillisers? She tried to think back to her own interview with Lucy, the slow speech, the abstraction. She’d thought Lucy had been in shock, in denial.

  ‘Did she also tell you that I spent time talking to the sister, working to get her on board? We’re going to need her help to get Lucy sober enough to talk to us. Sober enough to realise what’s going on under her own roof.’

  Christ. Suddenly Carrie felt an overwhelming and unfamiliar urge to cry. She swallowed it. She was fucking things up but that was no reason to make things worse. She felt a spatter of raindrops, looked up at the clouds gathering overhead. ‘You need to get her in. You need to get her talking,’ she said, uselessly.

  ‘I know that, Carrie. I’m working on it.’

  She nodded, glanced away, swallowed again. ‘Right.’

  The rain started to fall in earnest. He was still taking her measure. Christ, was that sympathy in his eyes?

  ‘I’ve sent Fisher off,’ Cormac said. ‘Give me a lift back to the station?’

  She drove for the first few moments with only the sound of the windscreen wipers breaking the silence.

  Eventually, he said, ‘Things aren’t so great at home?’

  She didn’t answer. Had absolutely no urge to discuss her home life with him or anyone at the station. She just shook her head and they lapsed into silence again.

  ‘We went to the lab,’ Cormac said eventually. Maybe he felt sorry for her, wanted to shift the focus of the conversation. ‘I’m not sure that we’re focusing on the right things,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know if the lab connection is going to get us anywhere.’

  Carrie nodded. The car was idling at the lights on University Road. ‘I heard Fisher interviewed Emma,’ she said. ‘How did that go?’

  Cormac turned to look at her. She said nothing, kept her eyes on the road.

  ‘Is there something else you want to ask me, Carrie?’

  Carrie hesitated. She’d been way off on the Henderson thing, which made it much harder to open her mouth about something this sensitive. But she didn’t have a choice. This was too important. ‘Emma found the body. She works at the lab, and it’s clear that there’s a connection there. She lied when I asked her if the girl could have come looking for her on Friday night. People are asking if you’re the right person to lead the case, that’s all. It’s not personal.’

  It was a moment before Cormac responded, and when he did the edge to his voice let her know that this time, his self-control had taken effort. ‘Are you volunteering to take over, Carrie? Because my memory of the thing is that you’re not really in a position to do that right now.’

  Carrie said nothing. What was she doing? Testing him? Helping him? The lights turned green and she was finally able to inch out, but the traffic was brutal, had slowed to a crawl as the rain came down.

  ‘I’m going to say this once, and only once,’ Cormac said. ‘Emma had nothing to do with this.’

  ‘I never said she did.’

  Cormac gave her a sideways look. ‘No bullshit between us, all right? You’ve already said that everything about this points to the labs. I’m not blind to the connection. The university was closed, so there were very few places she could have been going. It’s looking like she wasn’t a student, and she had an ID in her back pocket that belonged to Carline Darcy. Not just an ID, a security swipe for the lab. And the first witness at the scene was Emma, who works there. I understand what that might look like to the wrong eyes, but I’m telling you that wherever we end up, it won’t be with Emma in our cross hairs, so don’t waste time and energy working up a theory involving her.’

  Carrie looked out through the windscreen at the falling rain. It was almost hypnotic, sitting there in the car, only the quiet sound of her own breathing in her ears, the rain a soft counterpoint, conscious of Cormac as a silent presence beside her. She replayed his words in her mind. Why did it feel like he was trying to convince himself, rather than her?

  ‘That rumour, about Emma, last year,’ she said in the end.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never asked you about it then.’

  Cormac shifted in the passenger seat beside her, suddenly seemed much too big for the small space.

  ‘I’m asking you about it now.’

  Carrie learned something about Cormac Reilly that day. That cool, calm exterior was not impenetrable. She asked her question, and as he turned his head in her direction, his body suddenly tense with unmistakable fury, she was abruptly aware of the vast physical differences between them. Carrie never let herself be intimidated. She was the kind of woman who stepped up to every challenge. Got in its face and stared it down. But every now and again she was confronted by realities that no amount of chutzpah and confidence could overcome, and this was one of those moments. He was so much bigger than her, so much stronger. She told herself that she wasn’t afraid of him.

  He jabbed a finger across her field of vision.

  ‘Turn down there,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There,’ he said, impatiently, and if she’d been a second later responding she knew he would have reached for the steering wheel himself.

  She turned down Canal Road and pulled in. He didn’t speak until she turned to look at him.

  ‘You’ve met Emma. You know her. Are you seriously asking me if
she’s a murderer?’

  Carrie said nothing. She wasn’t willing to say out loud what she was thinking, which was that making polite chitchat with the partner of a colleague on a handful of occasions did not equate to knowing someone.

  Cormac’s mouth was set in a grim line. ‘Because that was the story, wasn’t it? That Emma murdered someone and I helped cover it up. Christ, Carrie, you’re not stupid. How the hell do you think I would have pulled that off?’

  Carrie shook her head, her tired brain failing to provide her with something sensible to say. ‘There are rumours …’

  ‘There are always fucking rumours, Carrie. What’s different is that this is the first time that I’m aware of that you’ve listened to them.’

  Carrie looked out at the grey day through the rainwater running in little rivulets down the windscreen. She drew in a long breath and let it out. ‘The story I’ve been told is that Emma killed someone. In Dublin. She met you when you were investigating the case. You got involved and pulled strings to make the case go away.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He sounded horrified.

  She turned to him. ‘I ran a search on PULSE, Cormac. All I managed to find was a case reference number. Everything else has been expunged somehow, almost as if it was never there. There are just traces, a few hints left behind. But there’s enough so that I know there was a case. And Emma was involved.’

  The expression on his face was a combination of fury and disgust. Involuntarily, she dropped her eyes to his hands and saw that his fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were whitening. But his gaze followed hers. With an obvious and deliberate effort, he relaxed his fists, shifted his position so that he was facing away from her and out of the window, and drew in a long breath. Let it out. A moment passed, and he started to speak.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ‘The first time I saw Emma, she was unconscious on an ambulance gurney,’ he said. ‘She was battered and bruised. Her right hand and sleeve were covered in blood. They wheeled her past me outside the house and she never opened her eyes.’

  Carrie stayed very still. The rain was falling gently, silently around them. The road was quiet. The car felt like a cocoon, a confessional, as he told the story. It came in fits and starts, as if he’d never spoken about it before.

  The beginning was that Emma came from money. Her father, Richard, had been an investment banker. He made his fortune in London, in the City. A talented investor, he made his millions, made his tens of millions, and got out while he was still in his forties. The family left London, moved back to Dublin, where Emma’s mother Caroline returned to college to finish her medical studies and qualify as a GP. They built a beautiful house in Dalkey, overlooking the ocean. The girls went to private school. Richard did a bit of day trading. Life was good.

  A few years passed. It was 1995 and the Irish property market had put on cleats and taken off at a promising pace. Richard, bored with his day trading, set up a property investment company with friends. It did well. Better than well. For eight years the investment company made Madoff-level returns, and Richard, who really didn’t need the money to fund his modest (relatively speaking, at least) lifestyle, was quietly satisfied that he still had it. But in time he had seen the complete absence of regulation, the bankers only too eager to offer one hundred and twenty percent finance on any deal going, the unsophisticated investors piling into the market with equity borrowed on family homes and credit cards, and he wanted out. By 2003 he was shedding investments as fast as possible. Some of his partners in the fund, grown too used to thirty per cent plus returns year on year, objected. They didn’t want out. They were sure there was more on the table. A deal was struck. Richard sold his stake in the firm to his partners. He retreated back to his quiet family life, fortune comfortably expanded and intact.

  In Richard’s absence, his partners looked around at an overheated, under-regulated market, and saw opportunity. For opportunity, they needed capital. They opened the partnership up to people who had no business in that sort of high-octane, highly leveraged environment. They invested and re-invested. When the subprime crisis hit America in 2007, liquidity froze, Irish property prices fell by fifty per cent or more, and the fund was suddenly and irrevocably insolvent. Some of the original partners went broke. Some of them were wealthy enough that they were able to wash their hands of it, move on to their other investments with nothing more than a backward glance and a lesson learned.

  But those little investors, those eager men and women who read the fine print without understanding it and signed on the bottom line, they lost everything. The banks came for their investment properties, then their family homes. If they held on to their jobs the banks garnished their incomes. The Irish government, which had pledged the credit of every Irish man and woman to pay back German bankers, imposed budget repair levies and cut human services to the bone.

  Carrie listened to him talk. She didn’t need Cormac to tell her how the country had suffered after the bust, but better to let him tell it his way.

  ‘You know all this about Richard Sweeney, or this is what you were told?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘Emma told me a lot but I confirmed most of it through the investigation, directly or indirectly. Richard definitely sold out of the fund. By 2004 all the paperwork was done and dusted and the money paid over. After that he had no business relationship with his former partners. If he saw them at all it was for the occasional round of golf.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Some hack did a hatchet job on the family in the Herald. Big splash about how Richard had made a fortune and sold his part to the little guys just before the shit hit the fan. Big photo of the family home in Dalkey. A photo of Emma’s little sister getting out of a limo. It was her bloody debs night, by the way, and a friend had rented the car.’

  Carrie was conscious of the time ticking by, conscious of the work waiting for her attention at her desk, conscious that her children would soon be boarding school buses and heading home. She wanted to get going but she needed to hear this too, and Cormac needed to tell it.

  ‘More than one investor blamed everything on Richard, after the Herald was done with him. But there was one guy who made it personal. Padraig Flynn. Flynn had invested a quarter of a million in the fund. He’d pulled the money together from a range of sources, some of them more legitimate than others. He re-mortgaged the family home, forged his wife’s name on the paperwork. Flynn lost his job in the crash, then the fund went under, and he couldn’t make the repayments on the second mortgage. His wife left him. The bank came calling. He fought the bank in the courts and lost. He fought his wife for custody of the kids and lost. Look, there’s no doubt Flynn had a tough run, but he was a dirty bastard. Loads of priors for assault, including domestic violence. When the dust settled and Flynn was left with nothing, he looked around for someone to blame and decided to focus on Richard. He started with a bit of social media ranting, and then he escalated. Flynn played dirty. Dog shit through the letterbox. Threatening letters. Some petty vandalism. Then he escalated again. Started following the girls home from school. Showed up at Emma’s mum’s medical practice, pretending to be a patient.’ Cormac twisted his face in disgust. ‘He said he had an infection on his penis, and when she was bent over examining him he told her the truth.’

  ‘Christ,’ Carrie said.

  The next bit came out in a rush. ‘One day Emma was at home alone, and the guy broke into the house. She was in the kitchen, with music playing.’ Cormac’s voice thickened. ‘Emma loves music, you know?’ He didn’t turn to look at her, and Carrie looked straight ahead, out through the windscreen.

  ‘He hurt her, badly. Beat her. He had a baseball bat. She had three broken ribs, a fractured arm. Her jaw was broken. She had internal bruising. She tried to fight back, but she hadn’t a chance. Tried to get away, but she couldn’t. And then her little sister came home.’

  Oh shit.

  ‘Roisín was only seventeen at the time. She opened the door a
nd saw him. She could have run but Emma was unconscious on the floor and she didn’t want to go without her sister.’

  There was nothing objective about Cormac’s retelling of this story. He wasn’t a cop recounting witness statements. He was intimately involved. He told it as if he had been present.

  ‘When Emma woke up Flynn was on top of Roisín. He had his hands around her throat. By then Emma’s left arm was broken but her right arm was working fine. She pulled herself up off the floor, took a kitchen knife, came up behind him, and slit his throat.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Carrie said. She felt the shock of it. Thought of that beautiful girl. The scientist with the manicured nails and expensive clothes. Carrie wouldn’t have thought her capable.

  ‘Afterwards she went into shock. Roisín was the one who called 999. Emma fainted again. She was hospitalised. She was badly injured, of course. She was also in a profound state of shock. Just withdrew completely. It took days for her to recover enough to be able to tell the whole story. And that’s the only reason she was ever technically a suspect, when it was clear to even the dumbest fucker on the scene that it was a self-defence situation.’

  There was silence for a moment in the car. ‘And the records?’ Carrie asked.

  Cormac shook his head. ‘I worked for the anti-terrorist squad. You know that. Long after the case was put to bed, when Emma and I started our relationship, I reported it up the line. After that everything on PULSE about Emma and her family became need-to-know.’

  Almost every member of the Garda Síochána had some level of access to PULSE, and quite a few civilian officers too. Access to some information – particularly personal information regarding serving members of the anti-terrorism unit – was therefore restricted, for obvious reasons. Cormac didn’t say it, but his tone made it clear that she should have thought of that, and he was right.