The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Now there were none in front of him.

  “Right,” I said. “And remind me: Which sugar packet is him confessing to the crimes?”

  Malone half-smiled. “Let’s pretend for a second that Will is innocent. We’d have to explain how the blood got into his room and the folder into his locker, right? If Will had nothing to do with those girls’ murders, who put them there if it wasn’t Will himself?” Malone stopped, presumably expecting me to suggest an answer, but I didn’t want to play this game. “The real killer,” he continued. “The real killer would’ve had to put them there, presumably with the aim of framing Will. What would’ve needed to happen for that to happen?” Another pause for my benefit, another opportunity I didn’t take to speak. “He had to have known him. Right? The killer knew Will. Which suggests that Will knew the killer.”

  I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to lie down. I was tempted to make a pillow out of my folded arms and lay my head down on the table, like we used to do in primary school during Quiet Time. Instead, I leaned on the table and rested my head on a hand.

  I didn’t want to hear any more of this.

  “There was no trial,” Malone was saying. “No one whose job it was to drill down into all this stuff and ask if it really pointed to Will’s guilt. And he was only ever interviewed as the prime suspect. Never as a witness. They picked him up thinking they already had their man. It’s textbook confirmation bias. Who knows what might have been missed? If we set his guilt aside, we might find he has information that can help us catch this guy. The real guy. The one who’s out there now, following his next victim as we speak.”

  “Is this …?” I could feel color rushing to my cheeks at the mere thought of it, at the anticipation of the thought of it. “Are you telling me all this because of what … what I said to that newspaper?”

  Malone frowned.

  “Because that doesn’t mean anything,” I rushed on. “I was young and I was confused and I was upset—and I didn’t know that before it’d go to print, he’d have bloody admitted he did it.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “What I mean is, don’t take that as, like, evidence that I think he might be innocent. Because it’s not. I didn’t have all the information. I think he’s guilty. I know he is.”

  “No,” Malone said. “I know. I wasn’t even … I hadn’t even thought about—”

  “Good.”

  My face grew hot in the silence that followed.

  “Why do you want this so bad?” I asked Malone then. “It’s almost like you need him to be innocent.”

  “And you don’t need him to be guilty?”

  “I don’t need any of this. I don’t even want to be here.”

  Our waitress materialized beside us and asked us if we were done. We let her take away the plates, and Malone asked for the bill. When she’d left us again, he said, “I knew Louise Farrington wasn’t an accident.”

  “You … What?”

  “The first new victim. Shaw and I caught the case. He thought she’d just had a slip and fall, drunk on the way home. She was caught on a CCTV camera walking along the canal alone, there were no witnesses, and the state pathologist said the injury to her forehead could be consistent with a fall. But something about it felt off to me. I didn’t see how she could’ve fallen on the path and then ended up in the river by herself. It didn’t match the physical evidence at the scene at all, the lack of it.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to tell me—”

  “But I didn’t push it. I went with Shaw. And that’s why we’ve already lost two months on this, why we didn’t even know this guy was out there until last week. I won’t make the same mistake again.”

  “And what does Shaw think?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of Will.”

  “That was his case too.” Malone looked me straight in the eye. “We have to take that into consideration.”

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to infer from this, only that I was supposed to infer something.

  I didn’t want to hear any more.

  I put my hands back down on the table and he reached across and covered them with his. Such tenderness was, at best, a distant memory, and in the here and now, like an electric shock against my skin. I jerked my hand away like I’d been burned by him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly.

  I nodded toward the door. “Can we go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “Are you going to leave now? Go home?”

  “Why would I stay?”

  “Look,” Malone said, “Will didn’t just want to meet with you. He said he’d only talk to you, period. But now I need to talk to him. So if I’m going to do that, I’m going to need your help. And, you know, it might help both of us.” He leaned forward, over the table, lowered his voice. “Don’t you want to know for sure what happened back then, Alison? And why it did?”

  alison, now

  The hotel turned out to be just around the corner from the café, so close that the thirty-second journey there in Malone’s car left me embarrassed. In fact, part of that red-brick apartment complex actually faced onto the canal.

  He turned to me as we pulled up outside the main entrance, looking like he was ready to play another episode of Malone Convinces Alison to Stay and Help.

  “I have your number,” I said quickly, and got out of the car.

  I was too tired to think, and grateful for it. I made my way to my room on autopilot. But when I got there, what I saw coldly snapped me back awake.

  The door was open.

  I stopped with my plastic keycard suspended in midair, ready to swipe, staring at the bright inch or so of daylight wedged between the edge of the door and the frame. The do not disturb sign I’d left on the handle was still there; housekeeping shouldn’t have been inside. So why was it open? I doubted it had been my doing. I was sure when I’d left the room earlier, I’d pulled the door shut behind me and waited for the confirmation click.

  I looked up and down the hall. There was no one in it but me.

  I strained to listen, to see if I could detect any movement or noise coming from within the room.

  Nothing.

  I called out a “Hello?” but got no response.

  When I pressed against the wood, once, gently, the door swung back, slowly revealing my unmade bed and my small suitcase sitting on top of it, the lid down but not zipped, the legs of a pair of sweat pants spilling out over the side.

  Definitely not housekeeping, then.

  I took a step forward, onto the threshold, called out “Hello?” again.

  Still nothing.

  I thought of something then: the electronic door lock.

  Years ago I’d had to attend a Suncamp conference in London, which involved staying three nights in a soulless airport chain hotel that seemed to have been built at the end of the main runway, going by the jet engine roar outside. The real treat of the place was how every time I returned to my room and slid my keycard into the lock, the door refused to open for at least the first three or four attempts. Same thing was happening to my colleagues. I’d mentioned this to the front desk on check-out, and got a weary, “Yeah, it’s the batteries,” in response. Apparently there were batteries in these doors locks, that’s how they worked, and these batteries lasted a certain length of time, and in this hotel they’d all been installed at the same time during a renovation a few years back, and were now all dying en masse. Was that what had happened here?

  I slid my keycard through the lock. Nothing. No click, no indicator light glowing red or green. I didn’t want to chance closing the door and repeating it from the outside in case I couldn’t get back in, but I was willing to believe the lock was dead. Could that account for the door being open, though? If the battery died in the electronic part, did the actual door l
ock, the mechanical bit, just release?

  I decided I was tired enough to decide that it did.

  I went into the room, shutting the door behind me with a loud bang. I stopped first at the bathroom, throwing its door open, flicking on the lights. Back into the main room, pulling open the wardrobe doors, flipping back the top of the suitcase, appraising the arrangement of pillows and sheets on the bed. I unzipped the compartment on the underside of the lid of my case and slid my hand back and forth inside it until they met my passport. Everything seemed to be just as I’d left it, except for the door itself.

  I thought I should ring the front desk about my dead door lock, but if I did they’d send someone up to fix it and that would delay my shower and sleep. I’d do it later. Afterward. Not now.

  I closed the curtains, kicked off my shoes and wandered back into the bathroom. I looked at the bath, considering it, but I was so tired I was sure I’d fall asleep in there. Instead, I pulled off my clothes and got into the shower. I stayed in the spray until my fingertips started to prune and the skin on my chest was bright red from the heat. There was a luxurious toweling robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door. I wrapped it around myself as tight as it would go.

  Thoughts of Will—memories, images of him from today, arguments for and against Malone’s theory from the voice in my head—were just beneath the surface, all clamouring to burst through.

  I pushed them down. I knew how to. I’d gotten good at it, over the years.

  And if I didn’t, I knew Liz would come next.

  I filled the tiny kettle at the bathroom sink and then, back out in the main room, set it to boil. There were Barry’s teabags in the little amenities tray. Even though I’d had at least one cup of Cork’s own brew every day of my adolescence, I didn’t think I’d tasted it once in the last ten years. I carried the cup back to the bed, setting it down on the nightstand before climbing under the covers, and then promptly fell asleep before I could take a single sip.

  I dreamed I was back at St. John’s, only with Sal instead of Liz. Will was coming to meet us, old Will, my Will, and I was so excited that I was finally getting to introduce Sal to him, to tell her about him, that when the ringing of a phone pulled me back to the surface, I felt disappointed.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but I was groggy enough to know that it had been a while. Hours maybe. My hair was damp now more than wet, and the light in the room seemed different. I swapped out my cold, wet pillow for a dry one before I reached over to pick up the phone beside the bed, putting the receiver to my ear as I lay back down.

  “Hello?”

  Silence on the line.

  “Hello?” I said again.

  Beep-beep-beep.

  Whoever it was had hung up. Wrong number, probably. A single incorrect digit would get you through to the wrong hotel room.

  The LCD display on the phone was showing the time: 3:30 p.m. I’d been asleep for more than three hours. I went to the window and scanned the view I had of the street outside. Nothing much had changed from earlier, except for a clouded sky and slightly more traffic.

  I looked across the water to scan the opposite bank.

  That’s when I saw him.

  He was sitting on a bench by the water. The canal was between us, so his features were mostly indistinct to me. But he was definitely a he, wearing black tracksuit pants with a white stripe down the side and a bright red baseball cap. And, it seemed to me, he was looking up at my window.

  Looking right at me.

  The phone rang again.

  I didn’t say anything this time, just held the receiver at my ear and waited instead.

  “Alison?” It was Malone.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “No … Well, I was. I woke up before you called.”

  There was noise on the line. Wherever Malone was calling from, there were a lot of voices in the background.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Um”—I stifled a yawn—“yeah.”

  “Alison, there’s been a development.”

  “What does that mean? Something’s happened? What?”

  “I’d rather tell you in person.”

  “Why?”

  “And I need to show Will something.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You mean you need me to show Will something.”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  Malone hesitated. “Really, I’d prefer not to talk about this over the phone. I can come to you?”

  We arranged to meet at the hotel in an hour’s time.

  After I hung up, I went back to the window.

  The man on the bench was gone.

  alison, then

  “What,” Liz whispered from beside me, “the actual—”

  My mother’s head snapped toward us, and Liz fell silent, midsentence.

  “I know it’s small …” the estate agent said. His was wearing gold cufflinks in the shape of little keys and a pink pocket square, and his hair was so thick with gel that it looked to have hardened. “But look at it this way: you won’t have far to travel to your first cup of coffee in the morning, will you?” He laughed heartily at his own joke.

  “That’s certainly true,” my mother muttered. She glanced at the A4 page on which she’d printed a list of all the properties we’d booked appointments to view today. “And this one was …?”

  “Only eight hundred a month.”

  The four of us were squeezed into a room smaller than my bedroom at home. But while my room had a bed, a wardrobe and a desk, this had a bed, a two-cupboard-wide kitchenette, a washing machine, a wardrobe, a dining table for two and, in the far corner, a tiny bathroom whose entire floor was also the shower tray and which had a plastic, accordion-style door because there just wasn’t any room left for the arc of a normal door to swing out or in.

  Everything looked grimy or damp, or both, and nothing matched. If I’d been told every item had been saved from a Dumpster, I wouldn’t have blinked. The journey to the room hadn’t been anything to write home about either. It was one of ten bedsits carved out of a three-story Georgian terrace house that seemed to be rotting from the outside in.

  As a test, I put one hand on the cold, damp mattress of the single bed. I reached out and touched the buttons on the microwave with the other.

  The crazy thing was it wasn’t the worst property we’d seen today, nor was it the cheapest.

  My mother pointed at us. “There’s two of them, though.”

  The agent didn’t miss a beat. “We can swap the bed for bunks.”

  Liz and I exchanged a glance.

  We already knew what our lives were going to be like in Dublin; we’d spent the last year talking of little else. This place … They wouldn’t fit into it. Looking around, I wasn’t even sure I’d risk bringing my laptop in here. I wasn’t even sure I’d risk sleeping in here myself. With each viewing our Dublin daydreams were increasingly just that: dreams. The reality was devastating. If I had to live in a place like this, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go to college here. I might just stay in Cork.

  “Well,” my mother said, “I think we’ve seen enough.”

  As we walked back down the stairs, carpeted in an ugly pattern of brown and orange, Liz whispered to me, “I bet we’ll see this place again—on the news in a few years’ time. Bodies under the patio. Mark my words.”

  My mother’s phone rang and after she’d answered it and listened for a few moments, she turned to us with a smile. “Your father’s novenas must have worked, Ali. A letter arrived this morning: you got a room in Halls. Thank God for that.”

  When Liz called home, she had one too.

  At the time, it felt like the best news either of us had ever got in our lives.

  * * * * *

 
We traveled by convoy to Dublin, each set of parents having to take a car, because our stuff—suitcases full of clothes, boxes of books, packages of brand-new bed linen—wouldn’t fit in one.

  St. John’s offered the option of moving in on either the Friday or the Saturday ahead of Freshers’ Week, with an action-packed schedule of orientation and welcome activities planned just for Halls residents all day Sunday. Liz and I opted to travel up Friday. We planned to swiftly dispose of our parents and then spend Saturday exploring our new college and the city beyond it.

  At that stage, Dublin to me consisted of O’Connell Street (the Spire), Grafton Street (shopping), and Temple Bar (tourists). I knew about Molly Malone and the Phoenix Park, and on a school trip once we’d visited Leinster House and seen the Book of Kells in Trinity College. I knew about Stephen’s Green, but to me it was a shopping center, not a historic park. The first time I’d seen the canal was when Liz and I had come up on the train to attend the St. John’s open day back in November. Before then, I hadn’t even known there was a canal. I was yet to find out there were actually two of them: the Grand on the south side of the city, the Royal on the north.

  “This is a nice area,” my father said as we drove parallel to the water, down Mespil Road, toward the St. John’s campus.