The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “Because I’m thirty years old,” I said. “Mam, please.”

  “Twenty-nine,” she corrected. Then she hovered, looking uncertainly at her tea-making accoutrements.

  “Really won’t be long,” Shaw said with a smiley face that didn’t suit him. “Just a quick chat, that’s all we’ll be having.”

  “I’ll make the tea,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  “There’s biscuits in the—”

  “Mam, please.”

  “All right, all right.” She held up her arms. “I’m going, I’m going.” After throwing me a look that said I’d proved her point—I was acting like a teenager—she finally, reluctantly, left the room.

  I poured two cups of tea and brought them to the dining table, pushing one across the tabletop to Shaw and another to Malone before realizing I hadn’t asked him if he’d wanted any.

  The radio was off now, I noticed, which meant it’d be easier for my mother to eavesdrop on our conversation from the other side of the door. But then Shaw said, “Do you think the lady of the house would mind if I had a smoke out the back there?” He nodded toward the patio doors, giving me the opportunity to suggest that we all move out into the garden.

  The chairs out there were missing their cushions, but Shaw sat on one anyway. Malone perched on the low wall that separated the patio from the higher, green level of the garden. I remained standing, facing the house, looking at my own reflection in the extension’s windows.

  “I hear you’ve had quite the morning,” Shaw said. He lit his cigarette and the smoke immediately began to drift in my direction. He waved a hand at it. “Sorry about that.”

  “Can I have one?”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You don’t smoke.”

  “I don’t.”

  He snorted. “Nah, neither do I.”

  Shaw held the packet out to me and I took one, lit it with his lighter. He watched me with a smirk on his face, that infuriating look some men who smoke give women they’ve just discovered do—or do sometimes—as they wait to see if we know how, if we’ll actually inhale.

  He offered the box to Malone next, who shook his head.

  I made a point of taking a long first drag. Bitter tobacco taste filled my mouth. I’d smoked for a couple of years when I’d first moved to the Netherlands, on and off, eventually giving up one particular freezing January when, buoyed by New Year motivation, I couldn’t face standing outside and I refused to stink out my house. Every time I’d smoked since it was the idea of it, the anticipation of that first drag, that was the only bit I enjoyed. But I’d bloody smoke this whole sour thing now, though, just to show Shaw.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I thought the press wasn’t going to find out I was here.”

  “We did our best, love. Unfortunately their job is to find out the things we don’t want them to know.”

  I took another drag. Each one tasted worse than before. If I took long pauses between them, at least most of the cigarette would burn down by itself.

  “They called it a date,” I said.

  “They want to sell papers.”

  Shaw took a long, deep drag of his cigarette and looked to Malone, signaling for him to talk.

  “We want to bring Will in for a formal interview,” he said.

  I asked why.

  Malone opened his mouth to answer but Shaw cut in before he could.

  “We just do,” he said flatly. “And he’s refused.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “Will’s already serving five life sentences,” Malone said. “Threats of further punishment are like water off a duck’s back.”

  “Look,” Shaw said, “yeah, we could arrest him, haul him in, threaten him with charges, and he could sit there and tell us “No comment” every thirty seconds for the rest of the day. But we’d prefer it if he wanted to talk to us.” He paused to inhale, then he pointed the lit end of the cigarette at me. “I think if you put your mind to it, you could convince him to do it.”

  “You want me to see him again?”

  Both men nodded.

  I didn’t want to, but I wondered if maybe Will would know the man in the photograph.

  “I have something for you.” I pulled the print from my back jeans pocket and explained where it’d come from. “That’s the man from the CCTV pictures, isn’t it? Who was wearing the red baseball cap? And that’s me, Will, and Liz on a night out somewhere in Dublin.” I handed it to Malone. “Will, Liz, me—we’ve all met him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Shaw breathed. “And Mickey here said you saw this guy outside your hotel as well?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “He was too far away to know for sure.”

  “Who is he?” Malone asked me.

  I shook my head. “That I don’t know. Sorry. But you must have ways of finding out, right? That’s a much better picture, and maybe you could find one of those other girls and they’d remember. Or maybe Will would—he hasn’t seen this yet. And it tells you this guy was in or around St. John’s back then. That’s good, right? I mean, why would he be copying the original crimes if he didn’t have some connection to the first lot?”

  Shaw was making a face like he’d swallowed a fly. “He could still be at St. John’s, that’s the problem. One of those guys who stay there getting degree after degree, postponing the real world. That would explain his midnight canal walks. He could just be going to and from campus. He could have nothing to do with this.” Shaw handed the photo to Malone. “Get this to the incident room.”

  “He might be one of the names,” Malone said.

  “What names?” I asked.

  “The phones have been hopping since we released the CCTV images. We collate all the names supplied and make a list of the ones that come up again and again. We can’t check everyone so that’s how we narrow it down.”

  “Malone,” Shaw said warningly.

  Malone turned and went inside. I watched through the glass as he walked through the kitchen and out into the hall. I didn’t know if he was leaving but I was afraid that he might be.

  When I turned back to Shaw, he was stubbing out his cigarette and watching me watch Malone.

  “He’s very chatty altogether,” Shaw said, “isn’t he?”

  I knew by “chatty” he meant overly generous with details of Garda investigations.

  I feigned ignorance. “Is he?”

  “Do you believe him?” He took the cigarette pack out of his pocket and started to light another. “Hurley and his little innocence spiel?”

  My cigarette was finally done. I flicked the butt into one of my mother’s plant pots and sat down on the spot of the wall Malone had vacated, feeling a little lightheaded from the smoke.

  “I don’t have to believe him,” I said. “It’s not up to me. I’m not the one handing down judgments.”

  Shaw snorted. “You’re saying if Hurley was innocent but still stuck inside, it wouldn’t bother you because you’re not the one handing down judgments?”

  “Is he?”

  “What?”

  “Innocent.”

  “No.”

  Shaw met my eye and we stared at each other for an uncomfortably long moment. I felt like he was waiting for me to break, for tears to come, for some other truth to burst out.

  But I held my nerve.

  “He is guilty,” Shaw said, hoisting himself out of the chair. “And he should be in a prison, but nah, we have him in the CPH because he’s”—Shaw made air quotes—“depressed. So they put him with a therapist three times a week, and give him some coloring pencils or whatever it is they do. At least the holiday’s over soon. Off to Clover Hill he goes. You know what’s ironic? If you consider the turnover of staff in the CPH and the sheer number of them Will encounters there on a day-to-day basis, he’s had more contact with people who live in the outside world than
he would’ve had with his fellow prisoners if he’d been in Clover Hill all this time.”

  “What does that have to—”

  “Back in 2007, we found this girl, right?” Shaw started pacing around the patio, waving his cigarette around as he talked. “Heather Buckley. She’d been mugged walking home early one Sunday morning after a night on the town during Freshers’ Week. Attempted mugging, I should say, because two guys out for a dawn cycle came upon the scene while the incident was in progress, and the guy ran off. They didn’t get a good look at him, but nothing in the description they did give would rule Will Hurley out. And this happened by the canal. And Heather was in St. John’s.” He was standing in front of me now and he stopped there to tell me the next part. “I think that was his first attempt, thwarted by the two Lycra Lads. Here’s what’s interesting, though. Heather said that the guy who ran off wasn’t her attacker. He was actually a Good Samaritan who’d stopped to see if she was all right, prompting her actual attacker to run off. But when the cyclists came on the scene, the Samaritan runs off himself. What does that tell you?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not following.”

  “There’s Boy A and Boy B, right? Boy A attacks the girl. Boy B comes along and scares Boy A off, thereby leaving Boy B alone with the girl. She thinks he’s a nice guy, stopped to help a girl out. Her knight in shining armor. Then maybe he offers to walk her home, maybe he offers her his couch while they wait for the guards to arrive. Or this is 2007, so maybe he says you can use my landline. Landlines, eh? Remember those? My point is, he’s got her, this Boy B. She trusts him. And if Boy A and Boy B are buddies, well …”

  Shaw looked at me pointedly.

  “You think they were working together,” I said, “and that the cyclists ruined their plan, and that one of them was Will and the other was the guy who’s out there, the new cases.”

  “Clever girl.” Shaw took a deep drag, even though his cigarette was already down to the filter and I could see the paper glowing dangerously red against his fingers. “Have you ever considered a career in An Garda Síochána?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I know. The hours are terrible and the pay is shite.”

  “I meant your theory.”

  He coughed loudly, a wet, phlegmy sound. “I even had a code name at the ready. ‘Operation Gentleman.’ What do you think?”

  “I think you should probably stop smoking.”

  “It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? Like how he manages to incapacitate these girls and get them into the water five feet from a busy road, in the dead of night when a splash would be a loud noise. And then walk away, soaked to the bone.” Shaw paused to cough again. “I think it’s quite clever, actually. Tag-teaming. One attacks, the other saves—but the one who saves is the real attacker.”

  “And then what?”

  “Who knows? Maybe they both come back to do the deed, or maybe they take turns being the Good Guy.” More coughing. Shaw was going a little red in the face and his eyes were watering. “Now, maybe I’m wrong. That girl had been through something, and she was upset. Maybe the guy ran away because one of the Lycra Lads was his dad or his older brother and it was five o’clock on a Sunday morning and his eyes were like bloody saucers. It’s just a theory. But because our Willie Boy has got a case of the sads and is in the CPH, he’s easier to get to than he would be in prison. If you needed to, you know, plan something. Do you see what I’m getting at, love?”

  “You think he might have got to Will in there. The new killer.”

  “Exactly. We’ve checked all visitation applications. No joy. But I know the first thing I’ll be doing with that photo is checking it against their employee records. This morning I got them to search Will’s room. I’ve got guys going through all the correspondence he saved, just in case.”

  “Have you talked to that Heather girl?”

  “She was never able to provide us with a detailed description.”

  “You could show her the photo now,” I suggested.

  “We will.”

  “So when do I go?”

  “Home?”

  “To the CPH.”

  Shaw looked at me sideways while stubbing out his cigarette. “You’re saying you’ll go?”

  I stood up, pausing to check the lightheaded feeling had passed. “I want to know who the guy in the photo is too.”

  “One more thing,” Shaw said. “I’ve been in this job a long time. I can’t tell you how many times I knew a guy wasn’t telling me the truth but I didn’t have the evidence to prove it. You can’t just go in and tell the judge, ‘I know he’s lying.’ Unfortunately. Now with Hurley, we did have the evidence. We had forensics and his little stalker manual, which, helpfully, he was keeping in his own locker. But even before that, I knew we had our guy. Because from the moment he came into that interview room, I knew he was lying to us.” He stepped closer. “There’s no case where everything fits together perfectly, love, okay? You never get all the dots to join. That’s just the nature of the beast. Hurley, he might say things to you that make you think, Hang on a second, there could be something here, but trust me, that’s not what we think when we hear them. We think, Oh, okay, this is just like any other case, then. You’re always going to have discrepancies.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I’m sure Will’s already provided you with a highlights reel. Let me guess. We forced him to confess, the blood was planted, he’d never seen that folder before in his life?”

  “Pretty much,” I said, “yeah.”

  “It’s all bullshit, love.” Shaw’s expression had softened, and his tone was more gentle now. “I’m just trying to help you, you know. Get you back to Holland in one piece.”

  “You said you knew Will was lying when he came in for the interview, before you found the stuff in his locker and the blood?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What made you bring Will in in the first place, then?”

  Shaw hesitated a moment. Then he said, “He was on our list.”

  “What list?”

  “The list. Of suspects.”

  “But why?”

  Shaw looked away, into the kitchen. “Well, he knew Liz Whelan.”

  “So did a lot of people.”

  “Yeah, well. A lot of people had alibis.”

  “For when? For the night of Liz’s murder?”

  “For all of the nights. All of the murders.”

  “And Will didn’t?”

  Shaw looked back at me. “Why do you ask?”

  Now I hesitated.

  “I don’t really remember the order of events,” I said then. “It’s all a bit of a blur to me.”

  “I can understand that. By the way—thank you.” Shaw said this with an uncharacteristic sincerity. “For doing this. For coming here. You did the right thing.”

  “Well … That’s okay.”

  “Now if you could just get Will to have a little chat with us, I’d really appreciate it, Alison. Really.”

  “When you knocked on my door, you didn’t think he actually had any information, did you? You thought it was a waste of time.”

  “I most certainly did.”

  “Then why bother asking me to come here at all?”

  “It was for him.” Shaw nodded toward the house. “Mickey Boy. He was beating himself up over Louise Farrington. He wanted to exhaust every possible avenue. I was just letting him.”

  “And now?”

  Shaw frowned. “What?”

  “You haven’t sent me home yet.”

  “Well, now that you’re here, love, we may as well make use of you, eh?” Shaw grinned.

  “Yeah.” I smiled back. “You know something?”

  “What?”

  “You’re pretty chatty too.”

  I turned on my heel and
went inside.

  Malone was coming through the kitchen. Any relief I felt at his still being here instantly dissipated when he said, “We need to go. We have a female St. John’s first-year missing since last night.”

  * * *

  The pressure in his skull is so bad he fantasizes about the bone cracking open, fissures starting at the crown and spreading out in all directions, releasing it. Releasing him. He punches two chalky tablets out of a blister pack and swallows them with a mouthful of cloudy water from the kitchen sink, wincing at the bitter taste when one of them begins to dissolve on his tongue. Sweat collects at his hairline and under his arms. He wipes at his forehead with a sheet of cheap paper towels and puts on his blazer to hide the damp patches on his shirt. He rests his palms on the kitchen counter, leans his weight against it, closes his eyes. Tries to convince himself the blackness brings at least a slight relief.

  When he opens them again he sees the garden shed, thirty feet away at the end of the garden. The window over the sink frames it perfectly. The shed sits at an angle, its front directed a few degrees away from the back of the house, and from this vantage point he notices something he didn’t before: it has a large window set into its left side.

  The doorbell rings. They’re early.

  The man on the stoop is friendly, all smiles. The woman next to him is straining her neck to see into the hall, a sour expression on her face, as if the house is a muddy field she’s going to have to navigate in nice shoes.

  As he checks their names against his appointment book and welcomes them to the house, he feels the woman’s eyes wander onto his forehead, to the beads of sweat he knows must be glistening there. This only makes him sweat more. When he turns to lead them down the hall into the kitchen, he feels a warm stream of it sneak down his spine and pool in the small of his back.

  The pain in his head throbs in time with his pulse. It hurts to think. Although his spiel is well practiced, he’s not sure he can deliver it just now. He needs the pills to kick in, to sand down the sharp edges of the pain. So he hands over one of his glossy brochures and suggests they go explore the house by themselves. He says he’ll meet them after, here, in the kitchen, to answer any questions they may have.