The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  He’d been expecting this, I realized.

  “We should go in,” he said.

  “Who is it?”

  All I got in answer was the rattle of keys against the front door. By the time I’d picked up my coffee, stepped back inside, and slid the balcony door closed behind me, Garda Emily Cusack was standing in the living room.

  And she was glaring coldly at me.

  “Here it is,” Malone said, handing her the plastic wallet he’d put the letter in. “I talked to Shaw last night so he’s expecting it. Alison handled it so we might need her to come in and provide prints.” He looked at me.

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “You found this in your suitcase?” Cusack asked me.

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  Malone asked Cusack if she remembered whether or not the outside pocket had been open when she’d picked it up from the hotel.

  “All I did was throw the stuff in and zip up the main compartment.” She held up the plastic wallet. “And this could be nothing. It could’ve just been from some crank. That’s what they thought at the time. It might not even be that letter. Somebody could’ve made this on their computer.”

  Then she turned and looked at me.

  Accusingly, I thought.

  “Want some coffee?” Malone said to Cusack. I got the distinct impression he was trying to distract her. “I made the proper stuff.”

  “I highly doubt that,” Cusack muttered. But she went into the kitchen, opened a cupboard and took down a mug. “Did you hear? About the CCTV appeal?”

  Malone glanced at me.

  “I have to call work,” I said. “I’ll do it from the bedroom.”

  I dialed Suncamp’s number and left a message confirming I wouldn’t be in today either, and that tomorrow was looking bad. After I hung up, I listened: low mumblings were coming through the wall. Malone and Cusack clearly needed a few minutes to discuss in private whatever had happened with the CCTV appeal, so I took the opportunity to call Sal.

  Voicemail. I checked the time. Breda was an hour ahead. She’d already be at work. I left a message saying I was fine and I’d try to call her later.

  I waited in the bedroom for another three minutes, perched on the edge of the bed, looking out the window. Then I went back outside. Just as I opened the bedroom door, I heard Malone say, “… watched the confession.”

  Cusack was rolling her eyes. “You and your conspiracy theories. You’ll need a tinfoil hat soon.”

  Malone saw me. “Everything all right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. All good.”

  All three of us stood there in awkward silence then.

  “Right,” Cusack said, “I’m off.” She took one last swig of her coffee and set the cup down on the countertop. To Malone, “Can we, ah, talk for a second?” She jerked her chin toward the hall.

  The two of them left the room, him following her.

  A moment later, furious whispers started in the hall.

  This time, I didn’t think they were talking about the case. I was guessing Cusack was the one with all of Malone’s decorative accessories. She had keys to this apartment and knew her way around his kitchen.

  Still, I couldn’t see it, couldn’t imagine them as a couple. Although wasn’t the point that they weren’t together anymore? That was easier to see.

  My eyes fell on the cardboard box Malone had brought in from the car last night. Someone had scribbled in marker on its side: sj accommodation apps 2006/07. Application forms for on-campus accommodation in St. John’s, I was guessing. A single A4 sheet that we’d had to submit by post. Thanks to the idiocies of the Irish college application system, you only found out if and when you’d got a place a few weeks before term began, making late summer a mad, desperate dash for student digs in every college town in Ireland. St. John’s guaranteed a room on campus for all incoming freshmen, but only for those who’d won their places in the first round. Liz, for instance, had only got in on the second one, and so had to go on the waitlist. I’d managed to accidentally end up on the waitlist after failing to properly confirm acceptance of my first-round place.

  Hadn’t Malone said something about getting me to look at a list of residents to see if I recognized CCTV Man’s name? We’d never got around to it, overtaken by confession videos and letter discoveries.

  I looked toward the hall. The whispering was still going strong.

  I hoisted the box up onto the coffee table and lifted off the lid.

  There were three ring-binders inside: application forms for the academic year 2006/2007, arranged alphabetically by surname. I sat down on the couch and transferred the first one into my lap. The first page in it was completed in barely legible handwriting, dated August 2006. The binder was several inches thick with more.

  I took another sip of my coffee and started working my way through.

  The forms were well thumbed, some folded down at corners, many curled and yellowing. A handful were in plastic wallets because their punched holes had ripped through to the edge and would no longer stay on the binder’s rings. Some had handwritten notes scribbled on them; others had been branded with a date stamp. In the bottom right-hand corner of each was a large blank box marked allocation, and these had been filled with a code that corresponded to single rooms in Halls: A4, B18, C20. Each letter was a floor, each number a room on it. Each form was signed and dated by a member of St. John’s staff.

  I scanned only the student’s name on each form. I recognized some as my former classmates, but none seemed possible candidates for the man in the photo.

  The majority of forms were on white paper, but some had been printed on blue. I was halfway through before I realized why that was: all the blue ones had a box marked “W” ticked at the top and a submission date in September.

  “W” stood for waitlist.

  Waitlist. The word snagged on something in my subconscious.

  It started rising, tugging an idea to the surface.

  Quickly, I flipped through the inch-thick sheaf of paper in each binder and pulled out all the blue pages, all the waitlist forms. I ended up with a stack of thirty or so. Every form had a room allocation written on it, so these were, clearly, only the forms of people on the waitlist who had subsequently secured a room.

  I licked a finger and thumbed through the blue stack.

  Lauren Murphy. Check.

  Caroline Brady. Check.

  Rachel Folen. Check.

  Elizabeth Whelan. Check.

  Ciara O’Shea. Check.

  They were all there, all five victims from before. All five of them had been on the St. John’s Halls waitlist.

  And someone else was in there too: Heather Buckley. Also an incoming freshmen in the autumn of 2006, also on the waitlist for accommodation in Halls. That had to be the same Heather Buckley who Shaw had said was a victim of a thwarted attack, the one saved by a Good Samaritan who’d then inexplicably run off.

  When Malone came back into the room a couple of minutes later, I was tapping keys on his laptop.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I think I found something.” I turned the machine’s screen toward him. Heather hadn’t changed her name and, better yet, she hadn’t left Dublin. She hadn’t even left St. John’s. According to the university website, she was working there as a research assistant, based in the college library.

  “Who’s that?” Malone asked, squinting at the screen.

  “Someone who can help us, I think.”

  “Help us do what?”

  “Find the Canal Killer.” I looked up at him. “Can you drive me to St. John’s?”

  alison, now

  “We never really had to consider that,” Malone said as we crawled through the South Dublin suburbs in heavy morning traffic. “How he was choosing them, I mean. Will did it, he was a student, he lived in Halls. So did all the vi
ctims. That was the connection. Case closed.”

  “But if it wasn’t him,” I said, “then how he chooses them becomes important, right?”

  “To say the least.”

  “And if we figured it out, it could help find the guy now.”

  “Possibly, yes.”

  The car inched forward.

  “The letter said the focus should be on the victims,” I said, “not the killer. If that’s real, it sounds like he’s saying there’s a connection between them other than him. Right?” I felt Malone’s eyes on me and I turned to him. “What?”

  “Are you saying …?” He looked at me questioningly.

  “I just want to know the truth,” I said. “I’m not saying anything yet.”

  We were stopped at red lights that had just turned green, and Malone hit the horn to alert the driver in front of us to this fact.

  “What does them all being on the waitlist tell us?” he asked.

  “Maybe nothing,” I said. “But I can’t believe that. You saw how many accommodation forms there are. Halls must be able to take hundreds if not thousands of students. But only thirty or so of the freshmen in that binder—the freshmen who ended up living in Halls—came from the waitlist. And all five victims, plus Heather Buckley, who Shaw thinks might have been the Canal Killer’s practice run or failed first attempt or whatever, were on it too. It has to be the connection. They must have all done something or met someone or been somewhere that only people who are on the waitlist do or meet or go.

  Before we’d left his apartment, Malone had printed out the best shot of CCTV Man from the images the Gardaí had collected, and a copy of the photo I’d found of him in my old album from a scan of it Malone had stored on his phone. They were sitting in my lap.

  “I think this is a bad idea,” he said as he took a right turn onto a street that ran parallel to the canal. “You walking around that campus.”

  “That’s where Heather is.”

  “Maybe I should come in with you.”

  “No. That makes it too serious, too scary. I just want her and me to be able to have a chat.”

  The canal was a hive of activity. I counted several uniformed Gardaí, two satellite trucks, and dozens of nosy onlookers, collected by the garda scene: do not cross tape that had been strung between the trunks of the trees on the canal bank.

  “Did they find something?” I asked.

  “No,” Malone said. “Not yet.”

  He parked across from the main entrance to the campus on Haddington Road.

  “You sure about this?” he said, turning to me.

  “I won’t be long. I don’t plan on hanging around.”

  “I’m going to follow you, but I’ll keep a distance behind. Where’s her office?”

  “In the basement of the library.”

  “Okay, well, when you go in there, I’ll wait outside. Afterward, we meet back here. If you see any press or anyone starts bothering you, call my phone. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I got out of the car and crossed the street.

  The first thing I saw was the lettering above the entrance: st john’s college, dublin. A different font to what I remembered; they must have rebranded since.

  Everything else looked exactly the same.

  I bit back the urge to turn around and run. It’s just a place. Buildings made of brick and glass, surrounded by strangers. Nothing bad had happened here, if you discounted my meeting Will—which actually, technically, hadn’t happened here. We’d met in a bar in town.

  It wasn’t a bad place, it just held bad memories. Or good memories gone bad since.

  St. John’s campus had always seemed to me to be a metaphor of sorts for what being a St. John’s student was like. The entrance on Haddington Road was a narrow archway between two imposing limestone buildings, the classical architecture reminding you that St. John’s had been around for a couple of hundred years and your brief enrollment there would be but a blink in its history, so don’t go getting any notions. The campus had been built on the site of an old army barracks but Haddington Hall, as it was known, was the only original building the college had kept. It was what everyone thought of when they thought of St. John’s: history, tradition, money. It even formed the logo.

  But walk through the arch, and you’d soon see what St. John’s looked like to its mildly disappointed student body: a sprawl of eighties-era structures, haphazard and mismatched, almost every one of them an eyesore. The science block with its innards on the outside, aiming for the Pompidou Center but landing much closer to a sewage treatment plant. Postgraduate accommodation clad with white panels that had looked sleek and clean for about five minutes, and then only dirty and streaked with deep brown rust stains after that. A library built to look like a giant concrete block with long, narrow windows buried deep in folds of gray brick. One summer, it had been used as a filming location for some bleak dystopian Hollywood movie. It had served as a prison in it.

  People sent their children here because they figured it’d been around for so long, it must be something special. But students soon discovered that the sheen of reputation, much like the cobblestones, didn’t extend much beyond the archway. Inside, it was just like any other college.

  It was still early Tuesday morning; the campus was busy, but not thronged with people yet. I headed straight for the library, walking fast, eyes down. I had no plan, really, other than to find Heather’s office, knock on her door, and tell her who I was.

  I hadn’t anticipated the turnstiles, or what to do to get around them. When I’d been a student here, we’d just walked straight in. I pushed against the horizontal steel rod at my hips, but it didn’t budge. A small black device with a glowing red light was mounted on the side, sliced through the middle: you needed a keycard to get in. Your student ID, probably.

  While I stood there trying to decide what to do, a young girl with headphones on approached the next turnstile over. I watched as she whipped her ID card through the device. The light turned green and there was a little electronic beep. When she pushed against the steel rod, it gave.

  After shooting me a look, she sauntered on through.

  “Are you all right there?”

  I turned. There was a counter off to the left, and a woman wearing a campus security T-shirt was standing behind it, looking at me questioningly.

  She narrowed her eyes now and said, “Library’s just for students.”

  I didn’t want to say that I was here to see someone, because that would no doubt necessitate providing a name and Heather being warned in advance of my arrival. So I said, “I forgot my ID.” That probably sounded a bit weird considering I was making no effort to search for it in any pocket or in my bag, so I added, “I just realized.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What course?”

  “English. First year.”

  The other brow shot up. “You’re a freshman?”

  I smiled. “Yes. A mature one.”

  We stood there for a second longer than was comfortable, with her staring at me and me smiling inanely at her. God, what did she think I was going to do in there: steal a load of literary theory texts because I found them just so damn riveting?

  Another student approached the desk then, putting Security Lady under pressure. She threw me one last suspicious look before pressing some unseen button, turning the light on my turnstile green.

  “You won’t be able to borrow anything,” she warned.

  “I’m just checking something.” I pushed through. “Thanks.”

  I walked past a long counter manned by library staff, through a seating area, around some sort of gallery exhibition showing photos of the campus throughout the years, and on to the elevators. I didn’t see any stairs so I got in the first available car and pressed B for basement.

  When the doors opened a floor below, I found myself in a
labyrinth of gray-carpeted corridors, each one the same as the one before. Little signs hung beside every office door but the numbers seemed, at best, to be following some sort of hidden code, rather than any logical sequence.

  “Can I help you?”

  A short, gray-haired man was suddenly standing in front of me, clutching a sheaf of papers with one hand and pushing his thick-framed glasses back up his nose with the other. He managed, somehow, to look both suspicious and friendly at the same time.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Well, maybe. I’m a bit lost. I’m looking for Heather Buckley’s office?”

  The man looked me up and down. “Are you here for the interviews?” He turned and pointed down the hall. “Go right, then left. You’ll see a waiting area. Have a seat there and she’ll come out and get you.” He winked at me. “Best of luck, now. Don’t be nervous. Heather’s lovely.”

  I thanked him and started down the hall. I soon found the seating area, but no one was waiting there. I sat down.

  Moments later, the door to the nearest office swung open, throwing golden light out into the dim hall. A young girl of maybe twenty came out first, smiling and laughing, turning to say something to the older woman who was following behind.

  Heather.

  It had to be.

  Her unnaturally white-blonde hair was chopped up short into a style that aimed for ease rather than flattery although it flattered her all the same, and she was tall and thin, but not gaunt-looking. She was dressed head to toe in black: black boots, black tights, black skirt, black shirt. She wore no make-up that I could see but still managed to look luminous, somehow.

  Maybe because she didn’t wear any.

  “Thanks so much for coming in,” she was saying to the young girl. “And sorry again for making you wait. It’s been a bit of a morning around here. We’ll hopefully be in touch in the next couple—” Her eyes landed on me. She frowned, then took a step closer. “Alison?”

  “Hi,” I said, surprised that she’d recognized me. But then I remembered that my face had been on front pages yesterday, and someone who’d potentially had a brush with the Canal Killer might be interested in keeping up with the facts of the case. “I was, ah, hoping we could talk? If you have a minute?” When a look of horror crossed Heather’s face I added, “I’ll be really quick.”