“Nah,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“Is your shirt okay?”
I looked down at it. “It will be when I tie it up again.” I looked back up at him. “Which I will do when you let go of my hand.”
“You can’t do it with one?”
“No.”
“You’re not even going to try?”
I smiled. “Can I have my hand back, please?”
He let it go.
“I’m Alison, by the way.”
“I’m Will.”
alison, now
Malone said he’d be an hour, but he took closer to three. He called to say he’d been held up at the station and would be a little bit late, and then again to say he’d be a lot later than that. I hadn’t booked a return flight and neither Shaw nor Malone had said anything about one, although before we’d left the Netherlands they’d made vague promises about my being back in time for work on Monday morning. Earlier, I’d checked the Aer Lingus website and found one seat left on that evening’s flight to Amsterdam, mine for just over half a month’s rent. I wasn’t sure I could book it and send the bill to An Garda Síochána, so I waited. By the time Malone called to say he was parked outside, the seat was sold.
I wondered if that had been his strategy all along and how much longer, realistically, I was going to stay here.
It wasn’t the only strategic move I suspected him of. I hadn’t actually agreed to go see Will again, but Malone was waiting for me in his car with the engine running. As soon as I sat in, he took off. When I asked what the development had been, what it was he needed Will to see, he said it was in the trunk and that I’d have to wait until we got to the CPH to see for myself.
“What about my flight?” I asked as we idled at a red light at Leeson Street bridge. “Do I book that or …?”
“We can do that for you. I’ll get someone at the station to do it. When do you want to go back?”
“Well, I suppose now it’ll have to be tomorrow.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Does anyone know I’m here?” I asked.
“We’ve kept knowledge of your involvement to as small a group as we possibly can. We don’t want the press getting wind of it.” Malone glanced at me. “Why? Did something happen?”
I was thinking of the hotel-room door and the man in the red baseball cap looking up at my window. But what had happened, really? I’d called the front desk and told them about the lock, and the receptionist reacted in a way that made me think she heard this kind of thing all the time. The batteries would be replaced by the time I got back. Nothing had been moved or taken. No big deal. And as for the man in the red baseball cap, well … So what? Man Sitting On Public Bench Looking Around Shocker. And it might have only seemed like he was looking at my window. He was, really, too far away for me to be sure. Or maybe he’d just been looking at me because I’d been looking at him.
“My parents,” I said. “I haven’t told them I’m here. I wasn’t going to, when I thought it’d just be for the night. Easier that way. But now I probably should.”
“Do they still live in Cork?”
“Actually, no. They live in Bray now.”
“Bray?” Malone laughed. Bray was a seaside town a little over half an hour’s drive away, just over the county border in Wicklow. “You’re going to have to call them, then. You’ll never get away with that.” The lights changed and we moved off. “Where in Bray? Are they near the seafront? I always think that’d be a nice place to live.”
“I actually don’t know. I’ve never been there.”
“So they just moved there?”
My instinct was to answer yes. Yes, they just moved here and that’s why I hadn’t visited yet. If I was having this conversation with anyone else, I wouldn’t even consider saying anything different. But Malone already knew the awful secret. He already knew who I was, who I’d loved, what I’d done. There was no point in lying to him. I didn’t have to.
“I’ve never been back,” I said. “To Ireland. This is the first time I’ve been here in ten years.”
The freedom of this, the weight of my customary conversational caution lifted off my shoulders, made me feel momentarily lightheaded.
“How come?”
“My life is in the Netherlands,” I said. “I’ve lived there since I was nineteen. It’s my home now. I’m an only child and both my parents are one of two, so it’s not like we’ve this huge extended family I’m duty bound to keep up with. And I see my parents, like, four or five times a year. They come visit me or we go on holidays together.”
“But why don’t you visit them here?”
“Because I don’t want to be here.”
Malone kept his eyes on the road. “Why not?”
Because of bad memories. Because of the constant threat of someone realizing who I am and asking me about him. Because every girl I went to school with, it seemed to me, had efficiently done all the things you’re supposed to do by now—get coupled up, buy a house, add to the population—leaving me standing out like some unwanted, spinster thumb. Because you weren’t allowed to not want those things, only to fail to get them. Because none of this existed in Breda, but my job did. Sal did. My lovely home did. Because there really was no good reason to come back here. Because being from someplace didn’t mean you had to automatically like it.
Because he was here, physically and figuratively, and I didn’t want to think about him.
But I didn’t need to say all that, or even some of it, because mostly the reason I didn’t like being here was because—
“I’m embarrassed,” I said.
“Embarrassed? About what?”
“About falling for it.”
“For …?”
For Will.
“For Will’s lies,” I said.
“Alison.” Malone said my name so softly and sympathetically that I felt an abrupt unlocking, a loosening, and I turned toward the passenger window in case tears were coming next. No one ever said my name that way, because I never let anyone know that I needed to hear it. “You were nineteen. Nineteen. You have absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about. And embarrassment needs an audience. Who’s in yours? Yeah, people remember Will, but that’s about it. It’s been ten years. I can tell you, most people don’t even remember the victims’ names. Unfortunately. Trust me, you really don’t need to feel that way.” A pause. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
We drove the rest of the way to the CPH in silence.
I’d been convinced that, in the fading light, the Central Psychiatric Hospital would transform into some sort of stereotypical horror-movie-style asylum, a Psycho house perched on the hill only with bars on the windows and tortured screams coming from somewhere inside. But the building where Will was looked no different than your average office block now, because its mostly dark windows and fading light made the grates fixed over the glass harder to see.
Will was meeting with his counselor, we were told. We’d have to wait a few minutes.
Malone and I sat side by side on gray plastic chairs in the lobby. He went to the vending machine and came back with two steaming plastic cups. Coffee for me, tea for him. We sipped them while we waited.
“Where’s Shaw?” I asked. “He’s not coming this time?”
“No.”
“Does he know about this? Me being here, seeing Will again?”
“You’re only doing what I asked you to, and I’m just doing my job.”
I took that as a no. “Will you get into trouble for this?”
“Trouble?” Malone laughed softly. “No.”
He had carried a large manila envelope in from the car with please do not bend stamped on it in red. When we sat down, he’d set the envelope on the empty chair on his other side.
“Is that the development?” I said, pointing.
&n
bsp; Malone nodded. “We’ve got some CCTV images. Luckily. There aren’t many cameras in that area. Mostly traffic ones, which point at the road. There’s one mounted above an ATM machine near where Louise Farrington was found that we figured he’d have had to pass if he was on foot, but we found nothing on the night of her murder. Then one of the civilian analysts had an idea. She thought, okay, he avoided it the night of the murders, but he has to be familiar with the area in order to pull this off, so he must go there regularly. She started looking for regulars, but odd ones—like someone who only walks there alone very late at night, and tends to double back the way they came.”
“And she found someone?”
“She found a few someones. But our prime candidate is a guy we see in the days after Louise Farrington was found, and both before and after Jennifer Madden was, walking alone along the canal late at night and, more often than not, doubling back the same way he came.”
“Couldn’t he just have been going to someone’s house?” I asked.
“We’re talking about him reappearing minutes later, like he’s just walking up and down the banks of the canal.”
A loud electronic buzzing noise cut through the air, signaling that the door that led off the lobby was opening. A grumpy-looking security guard appeared and beckoned us with a finger.
“Go time,” Malone said, standing up, collecting the manila envelope from the seat beside him.
We took the same route as we had the day before, descending into the harshly lit bowels of the hospital building. There was no way of knowing what time of the day it was outside. When we reached the room I could see Alek standing in there through the pane of glass in the door, but there was no uniformed Garda.
“I’ll be doing the watching this time,” Malone said when he saw the look on my face. “You ready?”
“No, not really. But then I wasn’t ready yesterday either.”
Malone put a hand on my arm and gave it a squeeze. This time, I managed not to bolt away. I could feel his touch, a buzzing heat source, through the sleeve of my jacket.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt something like that.
Actually, no. I could. There’d been that thing at Christmas, the dinner in Rotterdam with sales managers from the London office. One of them, Thomas, had said goodbye to me outside the restaurant by catching my right hand with his left and leaning in to kiss me on the cheek. Not the usual air-kiss, not a kissing sound made somewhere in the region of the other person’s cheek, but an actual kiss, lips pressed against my skin, the bristles of his stubble rubbing against my cheek. But it was the hand, his fingers squeezing around mine, that really stunned me. Surprised me. Disassembled me.
I’d thought about it for weeks afterward. He probably didn’t even think about it at the time.
I felt a sudden desire to throw myself into Malone, to bury my face in his chest, to let him hold me. To let him hold me together.
Because it was so utterly exhausting doing it all by myself.
So now I did pull away.
“The photos,” I said.
Malone opened the envelope and slid out the contents: several A4-sized glossy photographs. I could only see the shot on top: a grainy image, dark, blown up to the point where, if you focused on any one section of it, you only saw squared pixels in shades of gray. If you looked at it for long enough, an image emerged: a figure in dark clothes walking along a stretch of footpath.
Wearing a baseball cap.
I swallowed. “That’s him?”
“That’s someone we need to talk to so we can eliminate him from our inquiries.”
“Isn’t that what you guys always say? Doesn’t that actually mean yes?”
Malone smiled. “We just want to talk to him.”
“And, what? You think Will might know him?”
“If he’s the real killer and Will didn’t do it, and the real killer framed Will, then yes.” Malone sighed, acknowledging the astronomical odds of this. “Look, it can’t hurt to ask.”
But it could.
Every moment in that room would hurt.
“What about the general public?” I asked.
“We’ve released them to the press. They should already be on all the online news sites. We’re too late for tomorrow morning’s papers but we’ll get them in there Tuesday.”
“There’s not much to go on, though,” I said, looking at the photo. “Even if you knew this man, you’d have a hard time recognizing him from this.”
“That’s one of the traffic-cam shots.” Malone shifted through the stack, pulling out one. “We got this from the ATM.”
This shot was much better. It hadn’t been enlarged as much as the others, so it was easier to collect an impression of the man’s features without the intrusion of obvious pixels.
It was also in color.
He was also looking up, almost directly into the camera, with a hand on the peak of the cap as if adjusting it. He was pale and thin, with reddish hair, and he was wearing what looked like a gold ring on his left hand. Due to the angle of the camera, the shadow thrown by the peak of the cap covered half of his face but I thought maybe if you knew him, you could identify him.
The baseball cap was red.
I studied the photo, the face. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining I was seeing something or making myself do it, but I felt a flicker of recognition. A faint one, but it was there.
I knew this man from somewhere. I’d met this man before.
And he was wearing a red baseball cap, just like the man I’d seen from my hotel-room window.
The door to the room opened with a clang and Alek stuck his head out.
“Let’s get this show on the road, lads,” he said. “Come on.”
alison, now
Inside the room of buttery yellow walls, there was a marked change in Will’s demeanor. His reaction to me was the exact opposite he’d had this morning. This time, he barely reacted to me at all.
He was slouched in his chair, his face slack, eyes glazed, arms folded. He looked like he’d just woken up, or been woken up. But he’d been meeting with his counselor, so I knew that couldn’t be the case. I looked to Alek, who’d resumed his position against the far wall, but he was looking at his watch.
I pulled out the empty chair, sat down and fanned the photographs across the tabletop between us. With an index finger I spun the best photo around so that Will would see it the right way up.
“The Gardaí,” I said, “they’d like you to take a look at these. Do you recognize this man at all?”
I said nothing about the fact that I thought I knew the man in the picture, because I didn’t have the first clue from where. It was more of a feeling than a fact. But I could picture his face, better than it appeared in these images, looking at me. Looking down at me. And … Smiling? I tried to visualize the background but there was no detail. Only gray, blurry blankness.
“This is important, Will,” I said. Still, he didn’t look at the photo. He was staring vacantly into the space over my left shoulder. “If you don’t want to talk to me, just say so. I’ll go.”
I’d be happy to, because where I wanted to be right now was somewhere quiet, alone, so I could pick up my memories and shake them, see what might fall out. Who was the man in the picture? Where had we crossed paths? Had we ever, or was I just trying to convince myself that I saw something I knew in that image? All the answers felt just beyond my reach.
If I did know him from somewhere, it must be St. John’s. Either at the college itself or during the time I was enrolled there. It was unlikely I had met him in the Netherlands. Here he was on CCTV in Dublin, after all. And I doubted very much that I knew him from my six years at an all-girls Catholic secondary school back in Cork. Plus, the camera had picked him up only a couple of blocks from campus.
St. John’s, or something I did when I was
there, had to be the link. Which linked this man on the CCTV—potentially, the same man who’d been sitting on that bench across the water—to Will, too.
You didn’t even need Malone’s cockamamie theory about the so-called real killer knowing Will. With the exception of lectures, I was nearly always with Will. Not because we did everything together but because we did almost nothing except be together. So if there was someone who looked familiar to me because we’d known each other or met somewhere during that time, wouldn’t Will have known or met him too?
“You didn’t believe it,” Will said. “Not at first.”
It took me a second to pick up the threads of his thoughts.
“Not at first,” I said, “no. It was the day after, Will. I wasn’t in my right mind. I was still trying to get my head around the fact that Liz was—” I stopped. I wouldn’t discuss her with him. There was a line, and she was on the other side of it. “I didn’t know which way was up.”
He finally looked at me. “You knew enough to give an interview to a national paper about how it was all a huge mistake, how there was absolutely no way I could’ve done what they were accusing me of.”
“And I was wrong to.”
I’d been so stupid. But also, so completely convinced. And desperate to do something to help him, to alleviate the physical pain I thought I could feel in my chest at the thought of Will—my Will—being accused of something so horrific, so unimaginable, that I snuck out of the house to call the news desk of a broadsheet and gave their crime reporter an exclusive interview. girlfriend stands by canal killer, the headline read—because by the time it went to press, Will had confessed to all five murders.
He’d actually been doing it while I was on the phone. He’d been talking to Shaw while I’d been telling a stranger about our love.
My body burned now with the shame of it.
“Is that why you thought I’d believe you now?” I asked. “Because I did back then, for a minute?”
“I hoped you would.” He met my eyes. “I didn’t do this, Ali. I wish I could … I don’t know, find a way to make you feel what I feel or see into my mind or … I don’t know. I don’t know what to do to convince you. I can’t seem to prove it to you, so words … telling you is all I have. I know that’s not enough for anyone else, but I thought it might be for you. I hoped it would be. Hoped for ten long years, Ali. You know me. You say you knew me, past tense, but it’s not in the past. Because I haven’t changed. I haven’t been able to change because I’ve been locked up in here, away from the world, waking up every morning in a punishment for something I didn’t do that happened when I was nineteen years old. And I can’t—” His voice broke. “I can’t take this much longer. I can’t.”
The Liar's Girl Page 9
