The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  The younger girl was looking from one of us to the other and then back again, unsure of whether she should stay or go.

  “Thank you,” Heather said to her pointedly, and the girl turned and went. Then, to me, “I’m going to bloody kill him.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The Gardaí have only just left. Please don’t tell me he’s been bothering you too?”

  I was completely lost. “Sorry—who?”

  “Daniel,” Heather said with an eye-roll. “He’s why you’re here, isn’t he? What else has he bloody gone and done?”

  alison, now

  Heather’s office was small, the width of the window that ran floor to ceiling at its far end. One wall was taken up with rickety bookshelves, thin MDF slats affixed to unsightly brackets, each one bending and bowing under the weight of books, papers, and stacks of magazines. A desk was pushed up against the other one, with only a computer, a bottle of water and a neat stack of manila folders sitting on it.

  Heather slid in behind the desk, motioning for me to take the hard plastic office chair on the other side. I noticed a thin silver band on her wedding finger but there were no personal photographs anywhere in the room. I wondered who she was married to, if it was someone she’d met in St. John’s. I wonder if maybe I knew him.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, once we’d both sat down. “You were in a few of my classes.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t. “No, sorry.”

  “Did you really not know?”

  “It’s all so long ago,” I said. “And I try not to remember—”

  “I meant about him.”

  “I …” I felt my cheeks coloring. “I—”

  “Sorry,” Heather said. “That was rude of me. Forget I asked.” She folded her arms. “Should you really be here? I saw the newspapers. Yesterday and today. Isn’t this like ground zero? Aren’t you making it easy for them to find you? And if they do, they’ll get a shot of you on campus. I don’t think that’s good for you or the university. Do you?”

  I didn’t know if it was my lack of sleep or Heather herself, but I was finding it hard to navigate this conversation.

  And who was Daniel?

  “I came to ask you for your help.” I took my phone out and brought the nightclub picture up on screen. I passed it to her. “Do you know who—”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s him. And it’s him in those CCTV pictures too. I told the guards all this already.”

  “You told … I’m sorry, I’m not quite following.”

  “That’s Daniel,” Heather said. “Daniel O’Dowd. And no, I don’t know where he is if he’s not at home.” She looked at the picture again. “Where did you get this? Is that you?”

  “It’s mine; I had it in an album. So was Daniel at St. John’s too or …?”

  There was a blur of movement in my peripheral vision. I turned to my left and saw that someone had arrived at the seats outside the office and was looking around. Another young girl. She hesitated for a moment, then sat down. Heather’s next interviewee, probably. When I turned back, Heather had begun tapping something out on her keyboard. I thought for a second she was trying to get rid of me until she twisted the monitor around to show me what was onscreen.

  A website. The header photo was a moody black-and-white shot of water with a hand-sketched map of what looked to be Dublin layered over it. Superimposed on that, cartoonish red lettering dripping with droplets of blood: beneath the surface.

  “That’s Daniel,” Heather said. “That’s his”—she rolled her eyes again—“blog.”

  I could only see the title of the most recent blog post. Breaking News: Garda Water Unit Searching for SJC Student in the Grand Canal. He must have posted that this morning.

  “He’s obsessed,” Heather said. “Started off with this, must be, I don’t know, six or seven years ago? Added a podcast a couple of years back when that other true crime one got really big. That American one. I think he’s convinced he’s headed for the big time too but as far as I can tell, it’s only a handful of people listening.” Another eye-roll. “That was before the new girls, though.”

  I peered at the screen. “Daniel blogs about crime?”

  Heather frowned. “Don’t you ever Google yourself? Daniel doesn’t blog about crime. He blogs about one crime. He’s the internet’s foremost nutter when it comes to the Canal Killer case.”

  I tried to get this information straight in my head. Daniel O’Dowd was the man captured on CCTV and the man in my photo from back then. He was probably the man who’d been sitting outside my hotel, on the bank of the canal, too. And his main occupation was blogging about all things to do with the Canal Killer?

  I was tempted to pause and text Malone his name right now, but Heather seemed all over the place and I didn’t know how she’d react.

  “He has credibility because”—Heather put on a dramatic, movie-trailer voice—“he was there. In first year, although it was his second year on campus because he changed course. And in the beginning, yeah, okay, it wasn’t that weird. We were all obsessed with it, in our own ways. I mean, any student who was here at the time is lying if they say they didn’t trot out that fact whenever the subject came up. I bet hundreds of graduates are still feeding off the anecdotes at cocktail parties, first dates, whatever.”

  I thought of Stephen, Sal’s newest ex-pat find, leaving a dramatic pause during introductions back at the Patrick’s Day dinner party.

  Then I thought, God, had that just been four days ago?

  It seemed like another lifetime now, felt like another planet.

  “But Daniel was different,” Heather said. “He was serious. He got stuff from the investigation: photos, reports, that kind of thing. God knows how. And then he declared he was going to prove what really happened, whatever that meant, and started badgering me to sit down for an interview about the night I was attacked.” She sighed. “Look, I like the guy. He’s an innocent. And he had some trouble a few years ago. All this blog and investigation stuff, it helped him get back on track. Gave him focus. And it was harmless when it was all back in the past. But since these new girls started showing up in the canal, he’s wandered right off the reservation. Especially these last few days. Especially when he found out you were in town. He’ll freak when he finds out you were in my office.”

  My mind was racing, desperately trying to sift through all this, looking for the pieces that, when fit together, would make some kind of sense.

  “So you’re friends with him?” I asked.

  “Duty bound.” Heather sighed. “I’m married to his sister.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Guess you didn’t remember that, either.”

  “Heather, look, it’s not just you. I really don’t remember a lot from back then. I try not—”

  “I feel sorry for him,” she said, cutting me off. She turned to look out the window now. “He had a thing for Liz. A secret thing. So when she died, he was grieving too, but he couldn’t show it. He was afraid people would think he was just trying to elbow his way to the front of the mourners’ queue, after the fact. And they would’ve thought that because people are assholes, aren’t they?”

  I was furiously flipping through my memories of back then, looking for something—anything—of Daniel. I couldn’t remember the night that the photo had been taken. But what was that thing that had happened at the Traffic Light Ball? The weird guy she’d said had been bothering her? Could that have been Daniel?

  “Do you know if he tried to contact me?” I asked. “These last few days?”

  “He did say he was going to try to call you at your hotel.”

  “I think maybe he did. I had a hang-up.”

  Heather shrugged. “Maybe he chickened out.”

  “How did he know where I was staying?”

  “Wasn’t it in the papers?”<
br />
  “Maybe …” Only after Daniel had paid me a visit, so he must have found out by other means. “I think maybe he broke into my room, too.”

  Heather blinked rapidly, theatrically. “Um, no. No, he didn’t. He wouldn’t do something like that. He’s a crazy, yeah, but not breaking-the-law crazy. Which is what I told the Gardaí.”

  I decided to switch gears. “Did you know Daniel back then, back in college?”

  Heather nodded. “We were in the debating society together. He’s how I met Deirdre.”

  “So there’s no possibility that Daniel could be one of the men who attacked you? You would’ve recognized him, right?”

  Yet another eye-roll. “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m just trying to figure this all out, Heather.”

  “How nice for you. But keep Daniel out of it. He’s done nothing wrong.” She turned her computer monitor back to face her. Then she looked back to me. “Wait. ‘One of’?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘one of the men’ that attacked me. There was only one.”

  “I just meant, like, one of the men there. The attacker or the guy who came and helped afterward—but then ran off?”

  Heather looked at me for a long moment. Then she said: “Neither of them was Daniel.”

  “Was either of them Will?”

  She shook her head, no.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I knew Will. Well, to see. I would have recognized him.”

  I let a beat pass.

  “Detective Shaw,” I said. “You might have spoken to him about this? He has a theory about what happened to you that night. Well, two theories. The first is that it was, like, a practice run. That it was the Canal Killer—”

  “Will,” Heather said.

  “—warming up. Wait—I thought you said it wasn’t Will?”

  “I don’t think Will was the man who attacked me that night. But I also don’t think what happened to me had anything to do with the canal murders.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She turned up her palms. “Because I’m not dead.” I thought it was more because Heather didn’t want to think that she’d only just escaped the clutches of a serial murderer by the skin of her teeth, but I didn’t say this out loud. “What’s this detective’s other theory?”

  “That the guy who came to your aid—the one who ran off—was actually part of it. That he was the attacker’s partner in crime, literally and figuratively. He swoops in, knight in shining armor, wins your trust. Then, well … You know. Why else would he have run off when those cyclists came?”

  Heather drummed her fingers on the table. “Is this conversation just between us?”

  I nodded, because saying yes without actually saying it felt like less of a lie.

  “Look, I knew the other guy, okay?” Heather said. “He was a friend. We’d been out together that night and he—being the complete idiot that he is—made a move on me. I didn’t want it; he didn’t want me not to want it; I decided to go home. He was following me. I mean, not like stalker following me. Just a friend following me, making sure I actually got back to Halls. So he sees someone cross the street to walk behind me, he sees something happen, sees me disappear from the path, he comes running. I’m in the damn reeds when he gets there, almost in the water.”

  “When was this?”

  “The Thursday night of Freshers’ Week.”

  Within a college term, someone would have started murdering girls by attacking them on their walk home to campus and pushing them into the canal to drown. How could she possibly think her attack wasn’t connected?

  “He starts shouting,” she continued, “kicking the guy who’s, like, on top of me by now, and that guy runs off. Maybe ten seconds later, the two cyclists rock up and the first thing one of them says is, ‘I’ve called the Gardaí.’ Well, that sent my friend bolting. Because he hadn’t just been drinking. Neither had I, as a matter of fact. When the Gardaí came, I didn’t want to tell them about him, because I knew they’d go pick him up and find out that he was off his face, and he’d get in trouble just for trying to get me out of some. So I said I didn’t know him either, or why he’d run off.”

  “But you really didn’t know the first guy, the attacker?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “No.”

  “But he wasn’t Will or Daniel?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be—”

  “He was taller. Wider. And he just seemed … I don’t know. Older.”

  If Daniel was obsessed with the Canal Killer case, that would explain his frequenting the canal late at night. That would eliminate the CCTV images of him as being anything other than his bad luck. There was also, potentially, not quite an innocent explanation for me seeing him outside my hotel, but an explanation nonetheless.

  But who had attacked Heather? Was there a third suspect, someone totally unknown, someone never captured on CCTV, who was, in fact, the real Canal Killer? Someone who was able to go about his business while the Gardaí thought they had got their guy way back when and were now searching the city for a guy doing research for his blog?

  “I never even saw the guy,” Heather said. “Neither did my friend—I checked. He came up behind me. I never saw his face.” She shifted in her seat. “I have an appointment now. I think she’s waiting outside.”

  “Right. Sorry.” I stood up. “Just one other thing, Heather. All the victims back then—and you—were on the waitlist for a room in Halls. Can you think of anyone you might’ve met on campus or some place you would’ve gone—something you did—that first-years who weren’t on the waitlist didn’t need to do?”

  “Well, yeah. I went looking for somewhere to live.”

  Searching for alternative accommodation.

  It was so obvious, now that I thought about it. Students who were assured of their room at Halls all along wouldn’t have to bother. Those who may or may get a room needed a Plan B.

  “This girl I knew from home,” Heather went on, “she and I were going to be roommates if Halls didn’t work out, and honestly, we really thought we were going to be like Monica and Rachel until we actually started going to see the kind of places we could afford. Jesus, they were grim.” She shook her head at the memory. “There was this one house, I’ll never forget it. Harold’s Cross. Student Shit-tips R Us. The garden was all overgrown. The front door was rotting. All the doors inside were just, like—what’s that really cheap, flimsy stuff? Chipboard? MDF? Anyway, not door material. And the dirt, I’d never seen anything like it. The room itself was like a cupboard with a toilet in it. You could actually flush the toilet from the bed. But the worst bit was that when we were leaving, this guy who was living downstairs came out of his room, and not only was he in his underwear in the middle of the day and in it in the hall, but he also had what looked like a serious case of pink eye, which—correct me if I’m wrong—I think you get from scratching your arse and then poking your eye?” Heather made a face. “It was truly disgusting. And miles from campus, anyway. And get this—too expensive for us.” She laughed. “We were lucky we got into Halls.”

  “Yeah,” I said absently. “Listen—how did you go about that? Did you go to an agency or something?”

  “No,” Heather said. “We just looked places up online.”

  “How many did you go see?”

  “Six, maybe? Seven?”

  It was a bit too random to be the connection. Five girls on the waitlist, each one searching for properties on the internet, each one ending up going to different ones …

  But this would’ve been near St. John’s, only days before college began, and in Dublin City during the height of the boom.

  “Heather,” I said, “can I take your phone number?”

  alison, then

&
nbsp; Christmas break was going to be a month long.

  As much as I loved Christmas, it was just one day. Two, if you included Christmas Eve. That left nearly four weeks of being stuck at home, with Liz and without Will. He was going away to some ski resort in the French Alps for a fortnight. He left at lunchtime on the last day of term. Liz and I were taking the train down to Cork together the following morning, so I had a night on campus without him. Claire had already left, so I had the whole apartment to myself. I was looking forward to hunkering down for the evening, with a movie or a good book, drinking endless cups of tea, and just basking in a night of alone time. If I couldn’t spend the evening with Will, it was the next best thing.

  But Liz wanted to do something.

  “I know,” she said, sitting across from me in the student cafeteria. “We should have a Christmas night. Go look at the Christmas shop in Brown Thomas. Get some hot chocolate at a fancy hotel. The Westbury, maybe. Or the Shelbourne. I bet their decorations are amazing. That’s what we should do. Have ourselves a little Dublin Christmas before we go down to Cork.”

  Liz’s eyes were bright with excitement and I couldn’t help but think that, actually, that would be a nice thing to do. I’d never been in Dublin at Christmastime and the last couple of weeks had been the shock of exams suddenly looming over us and then a mad scramble to shove enough information into our heads to fill the answer booklet before they got here. I hadn’t really had a chance to go walk around the shops. I was only ever off-campus at night, and then huddled in a corner with Will in a pub or out at a club with everybody, drinking.

  I was guessing the fact that Will couldn’t join us was also contributing to Liz’s enthusiasm. She wouldn’t run the risk of being a third wheel. I felt bad that a night with just the two of us was now a rare occasion. I actually couldn’t remember the last time we’d had one that didn’t involve studying or pulling an essay-writing all-nighter.