The Scholar

by Dervla McTiernan

  ‘I can’t face cooking, can you?’ She picked up her phone. ‘Let’s just order in.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer, flicked through screens on her phone as if she were absorbed in choosing takeaway, but he could still see the tension in the set of her neck.

  ‘Earlier, when I came in, I thought you looked very tired. Are you sleeping?’

  She put the phone down for a moment, held it between her hands. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Work is hard. We’ve run into some problems I didn’t anticipate, we’re having some problems duplicating results.’ She held up a hand to forestall questions. ‘You know this is just par for the course. It’s the nature of the work, there are good days and bad days. We’ll get there. In the meantime …’ She lifted the phone to her ear with a sideways smile. ‘Pizza okay?’

  He nodded, and she ordered. She read the look on his face and saw that he wasn’t going to let it go. When she hung up she came back to him, kissed him deeply. ‘Sometimes we need to talk, and sometimes there are better options.’ She kissed him again. ‘Pizza’s going to take at least half an hour. Let’s not talk for a while, all right?’

  He had no argument with that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Carline waited until the apartment was very quiet, waited for Valentina to turn off her music, and for the light under Mark’s door to go out, then waited for another hour. When she was sure, she locked her bedroom door and dressed in clothes she had bought earlier in the day. A pair of boy’s black jeans, her size, but cheaply made and straight legged. A black hoodie. They were both second-hand, the hoodie greying a little with age. She dressed quickly, put on her own runners, tied her hair back and pulled the hood up. She glanced at the mirror, then stopped, arrested. She looked so different. So anonymous. That had been the point, of course, but wearing it, being it, was stranger than she had expected. She shifted her weight so that it fell evenly on both feet, let her shoulders droop and her head drop forward a little. So different. There was nothing to see in that person before her. Nothing to assess or judge. Her face was in shadow. Her small breasts were enveloped by the jumper, her slight curves overwhelmed by the heaviness of the fabric. She felt – oddly, given what she was about to do – a little bit safer. Was this what it was like to be a man? She made a face at herself in the mirror, then turned away, picking up a plain navy backpack and slinging it over her shoulder.

  Taking the car would be a bad idea. There were at least three cameras between the apartment and the college that she knew of, and God knows how many others. Walking felt dangerous too. It would take too long for her to get there, too long to get away. The apartment was in darkness, but she used the light of her phone to find Mark’s keys were he had left them, as always, on the kitchen counter. He cycled to college sometimes. That way he could have a drink or three in the afternoon and cycle home. He stored the bike in the basement of the apartment building, but he was obsessive about locking the thing up, so she would need his keys.

  It was strange, cycling through the quiet streets. It had rained in the afternoon and evening, but the clouds had cleared to reveal a starry sky, and the air was fresh and clean. Maybe it was the air, maybe the clothes, but she had a sense of being newborn. Of being free.

  She cut down by St Joseph’s college, and around by the cathedral. She kept her head ducked low as she entered the campus. There were cameras for sure by the new engineering buildings, and near the library and the main concourse entrance, but she’d walked the route and was sure there were none on the little access route that ran under the concourse. The lane wasn’t secret. During the day it was used a bit – there were bike racks under there, and doors that you could use to reach the ground floor classrooms. But it wasn’t a popular place – it was creepy and dark, even during the day. Keeping her head low, she cycled around and under, then dismounted, and locked the bike to one of the bike stands. For the first time that evening, Carline felt a tangle of unease. It was freaky under here at night. Shabby. Old looking. An old crisp packet blew along the ground. Broken glass crunched under her feet; the noise too loud in the quiet. Carline kept walking.

  If she’d screwed up and missed a camera it shouldn’t matter. If her theory about what had happened was wrong, then what she was about to do would cause a great deal of fuss, police would be called in and tapes would be reviewed. If she was right, then it would be kept very, very quiet. She didn’t know which outcome she was hoping for, but she was prepared regardless. If a camera did catch her she shouldn’t look anything like Carline Darcy. She adopted a slouched adolescent gait, exaggerated it to the point of caricature, then abandoned it with a hysterical giggle.

  She left the road long before she reached the laboratory, finding the water’s edge and walking by the riverbank until she reached the lab building. The water was black, silent. Carline knew the window she was looking for. It was a locked office, one to which her swipe card would not grant access. She would have to be very quick. Campus security weren’t completely useless, and they might do a drive-by. She had a brick in her backpack. She hefted its weight in one gloved hand, and threw it as hard as she could, heard herself gasp involuntarily as the glass shattered loudly. She reached a shaking hand through the broken pane, unlocked the window, and climbed inside.

  She turned on a light, worrying less about being seen now than about finding what she thought might be there and getting out quickly. She searched frantically, overturning papers and emptying cupboards as fast as possible. There was a locked cupboard to the left of the desk. She hadn’t brought any tools, felt a moment’s apprehension. Carline wedged her fingers into the small gap at the top of the cupboard door and pulled hard. The lock gave. The cupboard was stuffed with old papers, notebooks, copies of scientific journals. She rifled through it, pulling papers out onto the floor. For a moment she didn’t see it and relief swelled within her. Then she shifted another bundle of notebooks, and there it was. Plain, black, a little scratched and completely innocuous looking. She could have cried then, felt tears threaten, but she blinked them back, lifted the computer out and slid it quickly into her backpack. There was a charger and she took that too, then stood, climbed back out through the window and started retracing her steps.

  So now she knew. Della had been murdered and she had a choice to make. Between justice and her own future. The tree branches moving in the breeze were suddenly threatening. The access road where Mark’s bike was waiting was like a black maw under the concourse, waiting to swallow her whole. Della had died very close to here, only a few nights ago. Died on the street. Died alone. Carline pressed on. She had started crying, somewhere between the lab and Mark’s bike. Why hadn’t Della left everything as it was? Everything had been perfect. Everyone had been happy.

  Carline wiped her nose on her sleeve, unlocked the bike, and settled the bag on her back before cycling silently off through the campus. The wind dried the remaining tears from her cheeks.

  Wednesday 30 April 2014

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning Fisher came to Cormac’s desk, a stack of bank statements in his hands. Cormac saw the Bank of Ireland logo straight away.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘The warrant came through this morning and Dave McCarthy walked it straight over to the bank himself. His brother used to play Gaelic football with the assistant manager. Gave Dave a cup of coffee and had the statements printed out there and then.’

  ‘Good work,’ Cormac said. ‘Run them through the copier. We’ll talk when we’ve both been through them.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Fisher asked.

  ‘Everything and nothing,’ Cormac said. He stood up, empty coffee cup in one hand. ‘We don’t know anything about this girl. Let’s start filling in that picture.’

  Minutes later Cormac was back at his desk, pen in hand, working his way through the stack of paper. The first statements, from Della’s few months as a student, held no surpr
ises. She hadn’t been a spender, Della Lambert, no five-euro coffees for her. No spending sprees in Brown Thomas. There were small fortnightly electronic deposits to her account – probably her waitressing salary. The charges to her card were for cheap, subsidised meals in the college canteen, was his best guess. No pub charges, no major cash withdrawals. She charged forty euro a month to Iarnród Éireann. About the cost of a monthly pass for the train from Athenry to Galway. So Della was living at home, going to college, and working part-time as a waitress to cover her fees, her books, and her food. Based on the bank statements, she hadn’t had a social life. All that changed in January 2013.

  For two weeks over Christmas the electronic deposits increased back to four hundred a week but in the second week of January, the deposits stopped abruptly. No action for the next two weeks, no deposits, no withdrawals. Then on 28 January 2013, a cash deposit of just over eighteen thousand euro was lodged to her account. A week later, a direct debit for rent came out, paid to the estate agent, nineteen hundred euro. That withdrawal came out like clockwork on the first of the month thereafter. But if the rent payments were like clockwork, so too were the deposits. First Friday of every month, Della Lambert went to the Bank of Ireland branch on Mainguard Street and made a cash lodgement. Every month for the past fifteen months Della had made a lodgement of eighteen thousand euro to her bank account.

  After that first January deposit there was a sudden flurry of spending, charges to clothes shops, to bookshops and restaurants. And exactly four weeks later, there was an electronic transfer of five thousand euro to another Bank of Ireland account, this one in the name of Eileen Lambert. That transfer had also been repeated every month since. However Della Lambert was getting her money, she was using it to support her family.

  A shadow loomed over the pages. Fisher, eagerness all over his face.

  ‘Did you see it?’ he said. ‘Cash lodgements, all under twenty thousand euros. Bank of Ireland prompts its tellers to ask questions about any lodgement in excess of twenty thousand. Do you think she knew?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Cormac. Almost certainly. ‘It would explain the cash in her apartment. Maybe she got all of the money in one cash payment, wanted it in her bank account but realised she’d have to break it up into smaller lodgements to avoid difficult questions.’

  ‘She was supporting her parents. She paid utilities from the account, and a weekly food shop at Tesco. Went a bit mad at the shops for a few weeks, although she knocked that on the head fairly quickly, did you see?’ Fisher asked. ‘Where was she getting it?’

  Cormac shook his head slowly. Fisher sat against the next desk, eyes on Cormac’s face.

  ‘There’s nothing in there to connect her or the money to Carline Darcy,’ Fisher said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And no chance of getting a warrant on Carline’s accounts, not with what we have.’

  Cormac leaned back in his chair, looked at the statements and other paperwork spread out on his desk. ‘We don’t know this girl,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who she was, what she liked, what she disliked, who she spent time with apart from her little brother. The mother told me she had no close friends from school, no particular hobbies or interests.’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t know that she’s the most reliable source. She must have known Della wasn’t working as a waitress. There’s no waitress job would let her pay her mother five grand a month, plus the rent on the apartment. Eileen Lambert has to be lying.’

  ‘She knew that Della wasn’t working as a waitress,’ Cormac said. ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean that she knew the truth of what was going on. She might not have asked the question, might have been happy to keep the money and keep her mouth shut. Particularly if she thought she already knew.’

  Fisher thought it through for a moment. ‘She thought Della was working as a prostitute?’

  ‘That was our first assumption. Maybe it was her mother’s too,’ Cormac said. He thought of Eileen going on about Della being an adult, about Della making her own decisions.

  ‘Christ,’ Fisher said. ‘And she was happy to live off it.’

  ‘We need to know more about her,’ Cormac said. ‘We need to get back to the college, find people who knew her when she was there.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Nathan Egan was happy to meet but had meetings in the morning and plans for the afternoon – a conference in Manchester – which required him to leave the university by 3 p.m. He agreed to see Cormac at 2 p.m. and this time when Cormac arrived the academic looked genuinely pleased to see him. He shook Cormac’s hand, invited him to take a seat.

  ‘I understand you identified the poor dead girl,’ Egan said. ‘A waitress, I understand. Tragic, tragic.’

  Cormac hid his irritation, unimpressed by more evidence of the speed and efficiency of the Galway grapevine, but unwilling to display his frustration in front of Egan.

  ‘We’ve identified the victim as Della Lambert. She was eighteen years old. I’m told she was enrolled here, from September 2012, but that she dropped out after her first semester. Can you confirm those details?’

  Egan’s face fell. ‘But … I was told that you had identified the victim, and that she had no connection with the university.’

  ‘I’m not sure who could have told you that, Professor. No one connected to the investigation, I’m sure.’

  Egan flushed. ‘Who told you she was enrolled here?’ he asked.

  ‘Her bank statements,’ Cormac said baldly, and waited.

  Egan, who had been hovering beside his chair, finally sat, and put his right hand on his mouse. ‘I should be able to confirm enrolment,’ he said slowly. Cormac hoped he wasn’t about to invoke data protection legislation. But Egan’s mouse hand moved and clicked, clicked again, and a few moments later he nodded his head.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have her here. Della Lambert. Date of birth third of March, 1996. Yes?’ He looked up at Cormac and waited for his nod before continuing. ‘Yes, she was enrolled. Bio-Pharmaceutical Chemistry. But as you say, she never returned for the second semester.’

  ‘Do you know why?’ Cormac asked.

  Egan spread his arms in a helpless gesture. ‘It’s not unheard of. At NUIG we have a nine per cent dropout rate. That’s vastly better than the Institute of Technology, which last year was running at almost twenty-five per cent. It’s not something we’re proud of, and we’re always working to bring the number down, but it’s inevitable, to some degree.’ He paused, but when Cormac didn’t speak he continued. ‘People think that there’s a correlation between the points you need to do a course and the difficulty of the subject matter, but that’s not always the case. Points are a function of popularity and supply. Points for Medicine are among the highest, because it’s a prestige course, and there are limited places. Medicine is demanding, of course, but so are some of our science courses that have admission points in the low three hundreds. We have young people going into these courses woefully underprepared for what lies ahead of them.’

  It felt like a speech Egan had delivered many times before.

  ‘And that’s what happened to Della Lambert?’ Cormac asked. He felt sure that it wasn’t. Something else had prevented Della from returning to college, something that had also delivered hundreds of thousands of euros into her hands.

  ‘Possibly. Most of the time it comes down to the fact that the student just doesn’t have the ability to keep up with the work. They realise that for themselves and drop out. Sometimes the kid has the academic ability but not the psycho-social nous to get by. They’re the ones who come from an over-protected, structured childhood where parents did everything for them, up to and including filling in their university application form. Most of them struggle to some degree at university, but they’ll often turn it around in second year, if we can get them that far. But there are kids who should never have been admitted, and for those we can do very little.’

  Cormac glanced at Egan’s computer. ‘Do you have Della’s aca
demic record? Any way to determine if she was one of those kids who was just out of her depth?’

  Egan pulled the keyboard towards him, re-entered his password, and clicked his mouse. ‘Right,’ he said. He read for a moment, then turned the screen a little in Cormac’s direction. ‘Well, she wasn’t failing out. She sat her Christmas exams, got solid 2:1s across the board, except in Chemistry where she managed a low first. Quite good results. Really, very good.’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘Good, but not brilliant.’

  Egan grimaced. ‘Not everyone aspires to brilliance, detective. For most people it’s enough to be able to get a job.’

  ‘And then there are those who don’t need to work at all.’

  Egan compressed his lips into a thin line.

  ‘Carline Darcy studies Bio-Pharmaceutical Chemistry,’ Cormac said. He said it as if he already knew, though it wasn’t more than a solid guess – until Egan’s reluctant nod confirmed it. ‘I’m told she works hard. Surprised me. Attractive girl, with her kind of money. Her father was something of a playboy.’

  Egan leaned forward across his desk. ‘Whatever her father might have been, Ms Darcy is exceptional. Don’t misunderstand me, detective. I’m not saying that she’s a bright girl, or even that she’s gifted. I’m telling you that she has the kind of mind that comes along once in a generation. Like her grandfather. Carline will do great things. We are privileged to have her at this university.’ Egan’s lips were dry and chapped, and there were little white flecks in the corners of his mouth.

  ‘But Della Lambert, as a student, wasn’t particularly memorable?’

  As intended, the change in direction put Egan off balance. His eyes narrowed for an instant before his face reassumed its guileless, sincere expression. It was clear that Egan wasn’t sure how to take the question. Wasn’t sure if it was intended as an accusation, or just a simple statement of fact.