The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  His eyes had filled with tears and he looked away, embarrassed. In that moment, it was impossible not to feel sorry for him.

  I had to remind myself that this was about more than feelings. It was also about cold, hard facts.

  I asked why now.

  He turned back to me. “What?”

  “Why are you only saying this now? It’s been ten years.”

  Will threw up his hands. “Because who’d believe me? I said I did it, they had—apparently—evidence to convict me, and I listened to my solicitor when he said I should do myself a favor and enter a guilty plea. Avoid a trial. He said there was no way in hell we were ever going to win it, and my parents …” He swallowed. “My parents agreed with him. It was like they couldn’t get me locked away fast enough. I was such an embarrassment to them. And you were gone. So who could I even tell? The people in here? They hear it all the time. It was pointless. So I just … I just gave up. In more ways than one. The first few years here, I don’t even remember them, to be honest.” He glanced at Alek. Quieter now, he continued, “Then two things happened. The first was last year, when this new guy arrived on the unit. John. He was really … Well, he had a lot of problems. They ended up moving him into High Dependency, as far as I know. Anyway, he knew who I was. And it turned out that he was, like, obsessed with true crime and had read all this stuff on the internet about me and this case.”

  “I take it you don’t have …?”

  “What? Access to the internet?” Will snorted. “Ali, we don’t even get to pick the TV channels around here.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  “So he tells me that there’s this website that says I’m innocent and has all these, you know, documents and witness statements and stuff that apparently proves it. Or tries to. And he was able to tell me things that I never knew. For instance, you know that blood they found under my desk? Did you know they didn’t find it on the first search? That it was during the second?”

  “Under a desk,” I said. “Easy to miss.”

  “Or easy to plant. There must have been thirty people in and out of that room in between those two searches. At least. Any one of them could have put it there. And the locker with the folder in it. There were loads of prints on that thing that weren’t mine—but no fingerprints at all on the combination lock on the locker door. Don’t you think that’s weird? And apparently—get this—someone sent a letter to the St. John’s News claiming to be the killer, talking about how girls should be more careful and not walk home alone and all this creepy stuff. Did you ever hear that? I’m not surprised. No one did. It was just dismissed. A crank, they said. But what if it wasn’t? And not only that, but the student reporter who received it passed it onto the Gardaí, and they bloody went and lost it. Did you know that?”

  The truth was, until yesterday, I’d done all I could to avoid knowing anything. Details were my enemy. They filled in the blanks, colored in my nightmares. And once you knew one, you could never forget it.

  Like the shopping cart.

  Hours after Will was charged, I’d flown to the Netherlands and taken refuge in my cousin’s house in the Hague. My first few days there, the house was full of whispers. Ella and her husband whispered to each other in the hall while I sat in the living room; they whispered to each other in the kitchen before I came downstairs in the morning; they whispered to each other in bed while I lay awake, unable to sleep, in the room just next door.

  And, sometimes, they forgot to whisper, sending shards of horror through the walls.

  They think he was following them for weeks before he did it.

  Knocked them out and then pushed them underwater so they drowned.

  Her friend? Found tangled up in a rusted shopping cart.

  They were obsessed with the details of the case, like everyone who’d bought those tabloid newspapers at home. I knew when they perched next to me on the sofa, patted my limbs and said that I could talk to them about anything, anytime, what they were really saying was, Please, tell us more. Tell us everything. Leave nothing out.

  “It was a joke,” Will was saying now. “They made so many mistakes.”

  What he’d described sounded more like a few loose threads to me, and inconsequential ones at that. And were they even true? He’d heard about them secondhand, from someone who was receiving psychiatric treatment. And that person had read about them on the internet.

  If any of this had even happened at all.

  “What was the other thing?” I asked.

  “The new cases. There really wasn’t anything I could do to prove I wasn’t the Canal Killer, but maybe out there somewhere, someone could prove that someone else was. Because he was still out there. But who’d bother when they thought he was me, and I’m locked up in here? Then, a few days ago, I hear a report about this girl Jennifer Madden on the radio. And everything’s the same: St. John’s, the canal, a head injury. And the weather report said something about the Patrick’s Day parade, so I knew the timing fit as well. I didn’t even know there’d been another girl before her until Shaw and that other guy told me that when they came here.”

  “Why would they tell you that?”

  “I don’t know.” Will shrugged. “I asked if there’d been others, and they said yes. One other. I think they were trying to humor me, to get me to talk. But I said I’d only talk to you.”

  “Because you thought I’d believe you.”

  “Yeah. But I’d no way of contacting you.”

  “And then what? You get me here, I believe you—what then?”

  “Then,” Will said, “you help me.”

  “But how?”

  “If I was out there, Ali, out of this place, I could look into these things. I could … I could do something. I can’t do anything in here. They’re not even letting me watch the news now, so I don’t know what’s going on with these new girls. But if you were … If you were on my side, maybe you could do those things for me. Maybe you would.” He looked away again. “But it turns out, you think I did this. So none of it matters, does it?”

  “What difference would it make, Will? Let’s say I did find something. Let’s say I find that letter. What happens then? It doesn’t change the evidence against you, and it doesn’t negate the fact that you confessed. You confessed. I can’t …” I sighed, exasperated. “It’s not going to change anything. You’re not going to get out. So why even bother with this, dragging all this … all this horror back up?”

  The silence that followed thrummed, like the air in a room where the TV is on mute.

  “This horror,” Will repeated softly. “This horror is your past, but it’s my present.” He leaned forward; instinctively, I sat back. “Ten years ago, they told me I’d committed five murders. They showed me what they said was evidence. They got me to say I did it. And no one—not my friends, not my family, not even you—put their hand up and said, ‘Wait a second. Something’s not right here. He can’t have done this.’ Everyone just accepted it. Everyone thought it was the truth. Which means there was something in me, something about me, that made people think I could have done this. And now, it’s all so long ago, I’m starting to forget things. I’m on medication. It makes you foggy. And what I do remember isn’t as clear as it once was. So sometimes, I think, could I have done this? Sometimes I wonder,” his voice trembled, “did I?”

  The last two words hung in the air between us.

  “I just need to know, Ali. That out there is something real, something tangible, that proves I didn’t do this. If it exists, I need to know about it. For me. It doesn’t even matter whether or not the Gardaí give a shit. I don’t think they will. But I need to know. Because the only thing worse than spending the next fifty years in here waiting to die would be spending the next fifty years in here waiting to die and wondering if maybe I deserve it.”

  I met Will’s eyes.

  He held my gaze.


  I didn’t like what I saw in his face in that moment, what I felt pass between us, because it contradicted everything I thought I knew for sure, every conviction my adult life was built on.

  And if this was a lie, just another performance, a manipulation …

  Then why did it feel like the truth?

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Will said. “You don’t even have to help me. But there’s a guy out there killing young women again and he’s a few more to go. Forget about what that means for me. Think about what it means for him, out there. You could catch him. Stop him.”

  “You can too, right now.” I slid the photograph across the table to him. “Do you know this man?”

  Will said nothing, waiting.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll look into that website for you. But I’m not promising anything. It might not even exist.”

  Which was exactly what I planned on telling him, should there come a time when I had to tell him anything.

  Right now I was planning on never seeing him ever again.

  “Thank you,” Will said, relieved. “Thank you.”

  He picked up the closest print to him, the best one, studied it for what felt like an age. Then he set it aside and repeated the process with the photo underneath, and so on through the pile.

  The seconds ticked by.

  “He looks familiar,” Will said, “but I can’t remember from where.” A pause. “Maybe St. John’s?”

  Without thinking, I said, “I think it is.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  Shit. “He, ah …” Too late to take it back now. “He looks familiar to me too.”

  Will looked at me for a long moment.

  “But I don’t know from where either,” I added. “I just think if I think he looks familiar, and you think so too, then it has to be St. John’s, right?”

  Will looked down at the image again. “Could be someone we saw around,” he said, “on nights out or something. I don’t think he was in my class. Or yours. We’d remember him then, wouldn’t we?”

  “Well, it’s been ten years.”

  A beat passed.

  “Ali,” Will said then, “do you still have the Brick?”

  “The Brick?”

  I’d lugged a digital camera around campus that first year, producing it at opportune moments with a (misplaced) smugness, like it was the first iPhone and I was Steve Jobs. It was a cumbersome thing, bigger than the kind that took film, and had interchangeable lenses. We’d nicknamed it the Brick. I hadn’t thought of it in years.

  “Cutting-edge technology, that was,” Will said.

  “For about five minutes. And long before I got it.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “My dad won it in a raffle at work and then gave it to me for Christmas. Problem was the raffle and that Christmas were, like, two years apart. He’d stuck it in a drawer and forgotten about it. By the time I was using it, it was practically obsolete—and three times the size of everyone else’s.”

  “That’s right,” Will said. “Yeah, I remember now.”

  We both fell into our memories for a moment.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “It surely got thrown out.”

  “What about the photos you took with it?”

  “What about them?”

  “You must have had hundreds. And you had them in albums, with all the names and dates and stuff. Do you still have all those?” Will pointed at the pictures on the tabletop. “Ali, this guy—he could be in one of them.”

  * * *

  Amy was supposed to work until nine, and then go straight from the café to meet her friends at a bar on Dawson Street. This is her usual Sunday-night routine. But now it’s not even ten and she’s come home, angry about something, stomping around and slamming things. She dumps a book bag onto the floor of her bedroom and something sparkly and black falls out of it, followed by one high heel: the clothes she’d brought with her to change into after work.

  Her plans have changed, which means his have too.

  He waits to see what she does next.

  She spends some time in the kitchen. He’s seen it: all the lights are on in there. Tonight, the remnants of a pizza delivery sit on the table amid numerous empty bottles, cans, and plastic cups.

  The state of the kitchen, he can only assume, is what has apparently annoyed Amy even more. She comes back into the bedroom and starts picking through things on the floor—clothes, socks, the cables of various hairstyling instruments—while swearing under her breath.

  While he holds his.

  Amy plucks her phone charger from the detritus and shoves it into a wall socket. Connects her phone. Throws it on the bed to charge.

  Thud.

  Back out into the kitchen, switching the light off in the bedroom as she goes through the door.

  It sounds like she’s clearing things away while the kettle boils. Crockery clattering. A rush of water into the sink. The crinkling of a plastic refuse sack. Cupboard doors open and close.

  Amy boils the kettle for a second time, and then there’s the sound of tea-making: the tinkling of a small spoon stirring the contents of a cup. The microwave comes on, runs for half a minute or so. An odd, greasy smell fills the air. Dinner must be reheated pizza.

  Click.

  The light goes off in the kitchen.

  Click.

  Her bedroom burns with brightness again. The shade from her ceiling light is missing and that’s what casts such a harsh light: the bare bulb.

  Amy roots around in various places: among the cosmetics on the dressing table, in the drawer underneath it, in a toiletry bag that was upturned at the end of the bed.

  Then she undresses.

  She leaves the items where they fall, at her feet. She stands naked for a moment, turning this way and that, studying her body in a mirror he can’t see. Then she takes the toweling robe that’s hanging off the back of her door—it’s purple and covered in orange make-up stains—and leaves the bedroom again.

  Down the hall, the door to the shared bathroom opens and closes. For the next ten minutes or so, the shower runs.

  It’s too short a window for him. He can’t risk it. But a shower—that’s promising. She might be heading back out again, like he first thought.

  But when Amy returns, she changes into what, for her, seems to constitute pajamas. A pair of shorts with a butterfly pattern on them and a T-shirt flecked with bleach stains. Then she turns off the light and crawls into bed.

  It’s so cheap and poorly constructed, it sags beneath Amy’s weight—which isn’t much—and the horizontal wooden slats shift and creak as she settles into a position.

  It is completely dark, then it is dimly blue.

  The light is from the phone, he realizes. Her phone. Amy has a new something. A message of some sort. But she makes no move to get up and see what it says, even though she has only just got into bed and has to still be awake.

  Instead, she rolls over.

  Soon, the room falls completely dark again.

  Some time later, her breathing settles into a regular pattern.

  Some time after that, she starts to lightly snore.

  He waits another half an hour, just to be safe, before he crawls, slowly and stealthily, out from under her bed.

  alison, now

  The next morning I awoke with a start, as if disturbed by a noise. I sat up and surveyed the room, watching as the darkness relented, as forms took shape and slowly emerged from the black. There was nothing unexpected among them. Whatever woke me must have been in my dream.

  I flopped back down and tried to go back to sleep.

  Ding.

  My phone was sitting on one of the bedside tables, its screen glowing.

  Sal had sent me a string of texts. Some late last night, one just now.
They were all along a similar theme: if I didn’t call her soon, she was calling the police. Knowing Sal, she was only half joking.

  I’d never told Sal about Will. Or Liz. When I first met her, it was much too soon. Too raw. I still hadn’t made sense of it myself. Then, there never seemed to be a right time. Now, it felt like it was too late. I didn’t know how she’d react to the news that I’d been keeping a secret from her as long as we’d known each other, and that I’d had to lie to her in order to do that.

  Besides, I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want her to know. Sal had a husband now; I couldn’t ask her to keep things from him. So telling Sal would be telling Dirk, potentially, and as much as I liked Dirk, I couldn’t trust him to not tell someone else. It unnerved me even to imagine it, but I could: all this, in my other life. Whispers spreading like an infectious disease. Other members of the EUs Googling old news stories. Looking up at our next get-together to catch someone looking at me, and knowing by the way their face would start to color that they’d been sitting there thinking, How could she have really not known? How could she?

  But I had to tell Sal something. I couldn’t keep up the pretence of period pain for three days in a row. So I sent her a text saying something had come up, that everyone was all right but I’d had to travel to Dublin to see my parents on very short notice. I said she wasn’t to worry and that I’d call her later today to explain all.