It hadn’t been that way much this past week, and I wondered if that was partly why I felt so exhausted. It’d been all new people, all of the time. But Liz and I, alone together, was familiar and easy.
Most of the time.
“I feel like I’ve barely talked to you all week,” she said to me.
“I know.”
“It’s been so busy.”
“Yeah.”
“And we’re way behind on Lost.”
I smiled. “Priorities.”
“We could’ve skipped the library tour.”
“That would’ve been one episode, maybe one and a half.”
“What time is it?” Liz checked her watch. “We could squeeze one in now, maybe?”
Liz suggested we go to her apartment, because her weird roommate was always out during the day. I wondered if this was really because she didn’t want Claire coming back and joining us. And I wondered how she was going to react when I told her about Will.
I did it just before we hit the play button.
“Liz,” I said, “I’ve something to tell you.”
“It better be about the guy you met on Sunday night.”
“What? You … you know?”
“Of course I know. Do you think you were wearing your invisibility cloak that night in the club? I saw you and him. He looked cute, actually. I’ve been waiting all week for you to tell me about him. So”—she put her hand under her chin in a theatrical show of intense interest—“who is he? What happened? Does he have any equally good-looking single friends?”
I rolled my eyes. “All right, all right. Calm down.”
“Tell me everything, Ali. Come on.”
So I did.
And Liz wasn’t bothered at all. She was delighted. She lapped up every detail. She made all the appropriate sounds.
She was so enthusiastic, I felt bad that I’d thought badly of her.
I shouldn’t have.
alison, now
A minute, I gave myself. I let the tears flow, sank into my sadness, let it all in. Then I pulled some tissues from the box on the windowsill, wiped them away and said, Okay, that’s enough. That’s it.
The back bedroom turned out to be, essentially, a nicely decorated storage room. There was a single daybed pushed against one wall, facing a row of white, built-in wardrobes with sliding doors. As I pushed them back, rows of opaque plastic boxes were revealed, neatly placed on the shelves inside and all labeled in my mother’s handwriting. They were all filled with stuff of mine. The last compartment had no shelves, just a rail. A number of garments hung from those kind of quaint, stuffed hangers that have little bows on them and smell of floral things. After a second, I realized all the clothes were mine as well.
A fall of black with a splash of diamante, encased now in a dust cover: the dress I’d worn to the Freshers’ Ball. Thick, gray cable-knit: the sweater I’d practically lived in during Sixth Year, because it was baggy and warm and comforting, and perfect for studying late at night in. Silvery silk shirt with a delicate floral print, the wraparound silk belt carefully detached, smoothed out and tied neatly around the hanger: what I’d been wearing the night I’d first met Will.
It had been Liz’s, originally.
I’d loved that shirt so much, loved how I’d looked it in. It had probably been the first item of clothing I’d owned that wasn’t from some disposable-fashion store, that needed to be treated delicately, that won compliments whenever I put it on. I fingered the silk, trying to remember being the girl who’d worn such a beautiful thing, who’d wanted people to turn and look at her, who felt good when they did.
What would she be doing now, if things had been different?
Who would she be?
I took the gray sweater off the hanger, pulled it on over my pajama top. It smelled faintly of lavender, which I guessed was the hanger’s fault. It wasn’t quite as billowing on me as it had once been, but it still felt like a security blanket.
Bracing myself, I turned to the boxes.
I had no idea what I was about to find. When Will had been arrested my parents had come to collect me from Halls and take me back home with them to Cork. Two days later I was on a flight to the Netherlands with only the bag I’d packed in a rush two days before. It was in the weeks after that my mother had gone back to St. John’s and cleared out all the stuff I’d left behind. I think she thought I’d be back soon, that I might even pick up college somewhere else in Ireland come September.
I already knew: I was never coming back.
Let’s start with something easy.
I pulled out the box marked books and sat it on the floor. The contents comprised entirely of the texts on the English Lit first-year reading list. The Riverside Chaucer. Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Literary Theory: An Introduction. All hefty, expensive tomes. Their smooth, unblemished spines and the clean gloss of their covers were a reminder that I’d been a terrible student, distracted by all the shiny bits of the college experience that had nothing to do with being educated. The heady rush of being away from home for the first time. The endless adventure that living in a city like Dublin offered. Will and his eyes and his arms and his touch.
I replaced the lid and pushed the box to one side.
Next up, desk.
Did this mean the stuff that I’d kept in my desk in Halls? Lifting the lid, I saw a clear plastic wallet with my proof of college registration and college ID inside it, so yes. This was the contents of my three junk drawers, which my mother had evidently organized and neatly stored. There was a lilac envelope thick with ticket stubs that, as far as I remembered, had been tacked to a noticeboard in my room. I saw her in my mind’s eye, carefully unpinning each one. Two grubby, yellowing refill pads were held together with an elastic band; I had a flashback of bringing them into lectures and then only doodling nonsense across their pages while the lecturer droned on. I worked my way through various folders, a St. John’s prospectus, little trinkets and mementos I’d collected along the way, and got to the bottom of the box without finding a single thing connected to Will.
No cards, no pictures, no CD, or borrowed notes. Had I thrown them away or had she? I hadn’t had time to. I scanned the remaining boxes but nothing was marked as obviously as will.
My mother hadn’t been merely organizing my stuff. She’d been editing it too.
I pulled down a box marked photo albums.
I took a deep breath before I removed the lid—and then laughed at what was sitting on top of the stack of albums inside, as if waiting for me all this time.
The Brick.
It wasn’t even fifteen years old but the world had such a ferocious appetite for new tech—and the tech companies were in such a rush to satisfy it—that the camera looked now like a relic from a bygone era, a prop from a Space Age show that envisioned a future of jet packs and teleporting, a future that had never transpired. It was about the size of a half-dozen egg carton, and just as clunky. Sharp corners, thick buttons, sliding switches (switches!) and a match-box sized screen. Its dull gray case was heavily scratched and the strap was missing. I pressed the on button but nothing happened, the batteries inside long dead.
I smiled at the idea that I’d once thought I was the height of sophistication with that thing, lugging my little brick around, carrying it in my bag on nights out. In my defense, our phones were just about taking blurry pics back then and we couldn’t do much with them except send them to each other.
I set the camera carefully on the floor and started on the photo albums. I couldn’t put them off anymore.
The first album was nearly all shots of campus in the snow. I’d got the camera at Christmas and when we’d returned to St. John’s in January, there’d been one day, just for a few hours very early in the morning, when the entire place was blanketed in white, fluffy snow.
Most of the shots were
of me and Will. Liz must have taken them.
I imagined her, holding the camera in front of her face, looking at the little screen.
I wondered what she’d been thinking at the time.
Thinking about her now, I felt a stab of pain.
I tried not to linger, but I didn’t go quite quickly enough to stop myself from falling into some of those memories, marveling at this nineteen-year-old version of me who seemingly knew how to have more of a life than this twenty-nine-year-old one. I was smiling in every picture, my eyes sparkling. In many of them a hand or a fall of hair would be blurred, because I’d been moving, unable to stay still even for one moment.
I looked so alive.
I didn’t like getting my photo taken now. I didn’t like the dark possibility of where the images might one day end up.
I stopped at a picture of Liz and me, stood in evening dresses the night of the Traffic Light Ball. They were our Debs dresses; we’d just swapped them over for the occasion so we’d each have something new to wear. Liz’s floor-length, fishtail black strapless dress looked different on me than it had on her, the material stretched across the small swell of my stomach, the corset part of it pinching the skin under my arms. She’d told me I’d looked beautiful in it.
I looked at Liz, her wide smile, thought about what was coming toward her, hurtling toward her, and none of us knew it—
The picture blurred.
I turned the page.
Overleaf was one of Will, sitting on my bed with his phone in one hand—a Motorola RAZR, all the rage back then—and looking into the lens with a question on his face, as if I’d just called his name and caught him by surprise. He was wearing a navy sweatshirt I remembered well, whose material I could feel now, well-worn and thick, soft against my face.
I could almost remember the smell of it. Of him.
In the picture, there was a half-smile on his lips, as if whatever I could want from him, whatever request I had of him, he’d be willing to give.
Because he was kind. Because he was a good person. Because when I pressed my hand to his chest to feel his heart beating, he’d look down at me and say, “That’s all for you,” and it didn’t feel cheesy or fake, but real and incredible, and I wanted to feel it again, just for one second.
I didn’t believe I would ever feel it again, couldn’t with anyone else.
I’d give back the whole of my first year in St. John’s, those nine months with him, just for one more moment with him now because I missed him, I missed that, I missed us.
I loved him and I missed me, the old me. I wanted to be with him and I wanted to be her again.
But he’d killed the girl on the previous page.
And, in other ways, he’d killed the girl I was supposed to become.
I was crying again, salty tears dropping down my cheeks, the taste of them on my lips.
The truth was I’d never stopped loving Will. I’d just accepted that the Will I’d known and loved was dead. Ten years later, I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that he’d never really existed in the first place.
I looked at the caption on the photo: January 28, 2007. If Will was guilty, then the boy in this photo—the kind, good boy who’d loved me—had, at that very moment, already ended a life and had successfully—totally—hidden all traces of his dark secret from me.
And was planning his next.
Was that even possible?
Yes, okay, it was possible. Psychopaths were skilled in such deceptions, because entire personalities could be performances, a costume of humanity easily put on or taken off. I’d watched enough TV to know that.
But was it likely?
I thought back to him in that buttery yellow room, pleading with me, pleading his case. Wishing he could show me what was in his head so that he could prove to me that he was telling the truth.
Just as an experiment, I tried it on: the idea that Will was innocent.
It took some effort. Will would have to have been incredibly susceptible to coercion, if that confession was false, and caught the eye of the country’s most prolific serial killer just at the moment he was looking for someone to frame. And then Will would have had to lack the sufficient motivation to do anything about it for nearly ten years.
But I imagined it anyway.
Just for a second, because that was all I could stand.
Because it instantly brought everything crashing down. What I’d done then. What I hadn’t done since then. The promise that was Will and me, broken for no reason at all.
Liz, killed by a stranger. Even more terrifying than what I’d imagined in the dark corners of my mind these past ten years.
If Will really was innocent it felt like I might lose everything, like the ground would shift and tilt and everything I had would slide away and fall off.
So he couldn’t be.
Anyway, he wasn’t innocent. There was too much evidence against him. Evidence I couldn’t ignore. Behavior I couldn’t get past. Coincidences too improbable.
I swiped at my eyes before hurrying through the rest of the album. Pulled out the next one; flipped quickly through that. More Will, me, and Liz, and a sea of smiling faces I’d long forgotten. Closed it; on to the next one. An album filled almost entirely with crowded group shots, candid snaps, taken during nights out. People changed by having been caught in action, bodies turned away, dim lighting or a plume of cigarette smoke or spots of rain on the lens changing faces, hiding characters, obscuring identities.
I went through each one, sliding my finger across the photos, as if I was following words on a page.
At some point, I heard the garden gate creak from outside. My mother was back. My stomach started to growl at the anticipation of food.
I found it in the third-last spread from the end.
There was a photo of us standing in a row: Will, Liz, me, and two girls who I think might have been in my Early Theatre class. One peroxide blonde, one jet-black hair. A picture taken on a dance floor of some nightclub, the harsh light of the flash illuminating our sweaty faces, our dilated pupils, the shabby decor of the club beyond. All hidden from us by the dark, on the night.
The first thing I noticed was that Liz wasn’t looking at the camera. I was standing in between her and Will, and her head was turned, looking in my direction but past me, at him. She wasn’t smiling but it was hard to read the expression on her face.
The second thing I noticed was who was standing behind Liz, with one arm slung casually around her waist.
The man from the CCTV images. Red Baseball Cap.
Out with us, in a club. Back then.
With his arm around Liz, one of the Canal Killer’s victims.
Downstairs, keys rattled in the front door. Footsteps in the hall, followed by the murmur of voices.
I pulled the photo from the album and brought it close to my face, studying every detail. Who was this guy? Liz hadn’t dated anyone while we were at St. John’s that I could remember. Was it just some random connection at the club? Just a pose for this photograph?
How could this possibly be a coincidence?
It couldn’t be.
I had to tell Malone. I took my phone from my jeans pocket, found his number and pressed call.
Somewhere in the house, a phone started ringing.
My mother’s voice, calling up from the hall. “Alison? Alison, are you up there? There’s some people here to see you.”
Malone picked up after one ring.
“We’re here,” he said. “Shaw and me. Downstairs.”
alison, now
They were in the kitchen.
Shaw was pulling out a chair at the dining table while my mother fussed around him, producing a milk jug and matching sugar bowl, and asking him what strength he liked his tea.
Malone was standing just inside the door, waiti
ng for me.
“Are you all right?” he asked. I nodded. He touched my arm. “You sure?”
I remembered then: I’d been crying. I was probably all red and splotchy, puffy-eyed.
“Yes, fine,” I said. “My mother and I, we were talking. I got upset … It wasn’t about before.”
“What happened before, exactly?”
“Just like I said in the text I sent you. Reporters and photographers outside the hotel. I couldn’t go back there.”
“But why were you outside?”
“I wanted some fresh air.”
Malone sighed. “Well, next time, let me know.”
“I did.”
“Before you leave. And then wait for me to get there so I can take you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t plan on going outside ever again.” I looked over at Shaw. “What’s happening?”
Malone motioned toward the table. “Let’s sit down.”
“As long as it’s hot,” Shaw was saying to my mother amidst the clinks of crockery and cutlery. “That’s all I require. Don’t be going to any trouble now, Mrs. Smith.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble.” My mother turned and saw me. “Alison, I got you some lunch—”
“I’ll have it later,” I said. “Thanks, Mam.”
Shaw was sitting on the far side of the table. Malone took the seat next to him. I wondered if they were contractually obliged to always sit side by side.
“We’ve met before, I think,” my mother said to Shaw. “Haven’t we?”
“Just the once, Mrs. Smith. I came down to Cork.”
The electric kettle clicked off.
“Tea?” my mother said to Malone.
“Mam,” I said, “can you, ah, go into the other room?”
“But, Alison, I … Well”—she looked to Shaw—“shouldn’t I stay?”
“Please.” I smiled tightly at her. “Thanks.”
“Don’t worry,” Shaw said to her. “It’s nothing serious. We’ll only be a few minutes.”
“Well then, why can’t I stay?” she asked him.
The Liar's Girl Page 13
