The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “No, can’t say that I did. But they said he was on campus back then, as a postgrad? It’s possible my path crossed with his somewhere. They think he knew they were closing in on him, he saw me talking to the Gardaí, he realized I knew Liz, and he got to work. Planting the folder in my locker. Planting the blood in my room—maybe. I mean, he would’ve have access, right? He lived there at the time. And that Daniel guy, from the Canal Killer website—I heard they’d arrested him?”

  “They did. He was the guy on the CCTV images—and in that photo I found of all of us on a night out. But it was just wrong place, wrong time. He had a thing for Liz. But he had nothing to do with … With the recent cases. He’s just obsessed with the Canal Killer. Or was. I’m guessing he’s had his fill now.”

  “Do you think …? Liz used to say some weird guy was following her, didn’t she? Do you think that was Daniel?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe she saw him once and the other times it was Brian Conway, and she just assumed it was all Daniel. I don’t know.” I paused. “What’s your plan, then? For when you get out?”

  “Besides getting some really good food and having a proper shower that doesn’t smell of disinfectant—oh, and sleeping in a room where it goes completely dark at night—I don’t know, really. I did hear The Late Late want me, though.”

  “To do an interview?”

  “Yeah.”

  I exhaled. “Wow.”

  “I know. It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “I think so, yeah.” He paused. “They, ah, they might want you, too …?”

  “What?” I laughed. “No. God, no. I’m outta here. Back home to the Netherlands. Back to where nobody knows me. There’ll be no prime-time national TV for me, thanks very much.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  We smiled at each other.

  “I am sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Still.”

  “Thank you. I wonder—” Will stopped, hesitated. “Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened to us, if this hadn’t?”

  The truthful answer was no. Up until a few days ago, I didn’t want to imagine such a hypothetical, because I never thought of the boy I’d loved who turned out to be a serial killer.

  Now that I knew he wasn’t, that he had always been that same boy I’d loved, I couldn’t bear to.

  “It was a long time ago, Will. We were so young—”

  “We still are. Can we be friends, at least?”

  “We can stay in touch, yeah.” I wasn’t sure that was the truth, but it couldn’t hurt to be kind in this moment. “There’s something I need to know first, though.”

  Will raised his eyebrows. “What?”

  “I need to know exactly what happened the night Liz died,” I said. “Because I know you talked to her. I know you lied.”

  alison, now

  Ten seconds passed during which Will stayed completely silent. His eyes were down. He barely moved.

  “The Gardaí,” I said. “Back then. They didn’t bring you in because I corrected my statement. They brought you in because they knew you’d talked to Liz that night, even though you initially told them you didn’t. I’ve seen Claire Collins’ phone records.”

  He looked up, surprised. “Who?”

  I told him what Malone had told me. There’d been a call from Liz’s phone to Will’s phone at 3:55 a.m. on the night she died that lasted for forty-three seconds. Will maintained that he’d been asleep when the phone had started to ring, and he’d reached out intending to silence it but had accidentally hit the accept button. On the other end, he suggested, Liz must have accidentally dialed his number. Otherwise, why stay on the line for forty-three seconds when no voice came down the line?

  At first, the Gardaí had been inclined to believe him. But then a witness, Claire—my roommate in St. John’s Halls—had come forward to say that Liz had come up to her on Harcourt Street and asked to borrow her phone. Liz said the battery on hers had just died. When the Gardaí checked Claire’s mobile phone activity, they found that Liz had used it to call Will a second time.

  At 4:02 a.m.

  This time, the call lasted ten seconds.

  “One accidental answer they could believe,” I said now, “but two is stretching it.”

  Will hung his head.

  “What happened?” I asked. “What did you guys talk about? You must have been the last person to speak to her, before … Before him.”

  “That’s why I didn’t want to say anything.” His words were muffled, the sound buried in his chest. “Because I didn’t help her.”

  “Help her do what?”

  Will looked up. “She was still in town,” he said, “and couldn’t get a taxi. She thought she’d seen the guy she said had been following her. Or maybe it was some other weird guy. I’m not sure. She was rambling, not making much sense. She sounded … At the time I thought she was drunk, but now, looking back on it … I think maybe she was just scared.”

  I concentrated on breathing to steady myself.

  In. Out. In.

  The world was threatening to tilt crazily and slide again.

  “She wanted me to come meet her,” he said. “She didn’t want to walk home alone, didn’t want to have to deal with campus security—because she’d be coming back in after the curfew. And I …” He shook his head, as if disgusted with himself. “I said no. I couldn’t be bothered, to be honest. I hung up on her and went back to sleep. A few minutes later she rang again from Claire’s phone. Claire wasn’t coming back to Halls, she was going somewhere else. I said just go wherever Claire was going. Walk home when it’s bright. That wasn’t far away. An hour, maybe an hour and a half. She didn’t want to do that and I … I didn’t want to do anything except go back to sleep, so I did.” He swallowed. “And now I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

  “She didn’t call me,” I said.

  Will shook his head. “She didn’t think you’d answer.”

  I let this sink in.

  Then I said, “So you knew I wasn’t there all night, all along?”

  “Yes and no. You weren’t in the bed when I woke up, but the light was on in the bathroom, and I was still half asleep … And then when I woke up in the morning, you were there. You were already dressed, but I assumed you’d brought those clothes in a bag or something. I just thought you’d stayed the whole night. But to be honest, Ali, I didn’t think too much about it. I was more worried about whether or not you knew Liz had called, and whether or not you’d be mad at me for not going to get her. You didn’t mention it, so I said nothing. And then … Well, then we got the news.”

  A beat of thick, heavy silence.

  “I should’ve gone,” Will said, “I know. If I had—”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I think I do.”

  “Well, if you failed her,” I said, “so did I.”

  “You were only nineteen.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at him. “Exactly.”

  More silence.

  “You told the Gardaí all that?” I asked then.

  “Yeah,” Will said, “but not right away. That was the problem. My mistake. Well, my second one. I should’ve just been honest with them from the start. I didn’t …” He smiled sadly. “I actually didn’t want to tell them because I was so embarrassed about it, so ashamed. I thought they’d think I was the worst person in the world. Can you believe that? I was worried about what kind of person they thought I was when I should’ve been worried about the fact that they suspected me of five murders.”

  “You probably couldn’t even imagine it, let alone anticipate it.”

  “Yeah, well. It was hours in when I finally came clean, and then—of course—they thou
ght I was lying, because I’d spent so long telling them I hadn’t talked to Liz at all. That was, like … I don’t know, fuel for them or something. Proof that I was a liar. I was so tired by then, I couldn’t even think straight. But they were, like, stronger than ever. They had me now. That’s what it felt like. It was all downhill from there. I couldn’t … I didn’t know how to get things back to normal. Everything … It had gone too far.”

  “God.” I rubbed at my face. “Don’t you wish we could just go back and do it all over again, but right this time?”

  “All the time. But the past is behind us now. And we can’t change it.”

  “No.”

  Our eyes met.

  “I better go,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I hope you … I hope you like it out there.”

  Will looked surprised. “You won’t be back again?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” His shoulders slumped. “Okay.”

  I stood up.

  “Ali?”

  “Yeah.”

  Slowly, Will got up too and came around to my side of the table. He looked at me, as if for permission, and then pulled me into a hug.

  “Thank you,” he said into my hair. “I mean that. Really. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be staying in here. I know … I know it’s probably not appropriate, and you don’t have to respond—in fact, please don’t—but I just want to say to you, just one more time: I love you.”

  I couldn’t say it back, but I wanted to give him something.

  So I said, “I loved you.”

  “That’s enough,” he said, after a beat. “That’s enough.”

  * * * * *

  Malone was waiting outside. He took my hand and we started down the corridor.

  My lips were trembling, tears threatening. I’d been fine in the room but now the shock of it, the truth of it, the enormity of it, was hitting home.

  It was over.

  Will was getting out.

  Yet in other ways, it was only just beginning. The After I thought I’d made it ten years into had just been swept clean away. The pain was once again fresh.

  I had to start all over again.

  Malone squeezed my hand. I nodded in response because I couldn’t speak. Tears were spilling out now, down my cheeks.

  He stopped and pulled me into his arms.

  “So, I have a question for you,” he said. “Is now a good time to go cushion shopping?”

  will, one week ago

  The words floated up out of the background noise, slowly rearranging the molecules of Will’s attention, pulling on it, demanding it, until all trace of sleep had been banished and he was sitting up in bed, awake and alert.

  “Gardaí are appealing for witnesses after the body of St. John’s College student Jennifer Madden, nineteen, was recovered from the Grand Canal early yesterday morning—”

  It was coming from a radio. Tuned to a local station, it sounded like; a national one would probably have reminded listeners that the Grand Canal was in Dublin. The rest of the news bulletin had been drowned out by the shrill ring of a telephone.

  As per the rules, the door to Will’s room was propped open. He leaned forward now until he could see through the doorway and out into the corridor. The nurses’ station was directly opposite. Alek was standing there, holding his laminated ID to his chest with one hand as he reached across the counter to pick up the phone with the other.

  In the moment between the silencing of the phone’s ring and Alek’s voice saying, “Unit Three,” Will caught another snippet—“head injury”—and by then he was up, standing, trying to decide what to do.

  Wondering if there was anything he could do. Unsure whether he should do anything at all.

  He might just make things worse.

  He looked around—at his small, bare room; the grate on the window; the yellowing sheets on the narrow bed—and rolled his eyes for thinking things could get any worse.

  But actually, they could.

  He could be moved to Clover Hill. A proper prison. There’d been talk of it for a while now. He’d done his best to convince Dr. Carter that he should remain in the CPH, which was probably a resort hotel compared to Clover Hill, but he wasn’t sure it’d worked.

  Time was running out to get out of here.

  Until now, his plan was to potentially come clean. One of the other patients had mentioned a recent case to him where the charge was downgraded from murder to manslaughter, a case that actually involved a drowning. Both charges came with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, but manslaughter usually got ten to fifteen years, and there was every chance that if Will’s charge was changed, his sentence would be too. He might even get out straightaway on time already served.

  That had been his plan, but it was fraught with problems. Getting someone to listen to him. Getting someone—anyone—to believe that he was telling the truth now but had been convinced to lie back then. Even if it worked, there was no knowing what the outcome would be. He might end up in Clover Hill anyway, and he might have to stay there for the rest of his natural life, having played his only remaining card.

  But now there was a girl in the canal. A new girl.

  What if he had put her there?

  Will had always been convinced that the man who had done it would kill again. That kind of thing, it wasn’t an isolated killing spree. That guy wasn’t out there now being normal. He’d have had to do it again.

  He hated to say such a thing, but Will hoped he would.

  Because it would be a lot easier for him if the Gardaí finally got the right guy, the actual Canal Killer, than it would be for Will to try to convince them that he wasn’t him.

  He was just the scapegoat, the guy the Canal Killer had framed.

  * * * * *

  He should never have answered the phone that night. Every minute of every day after, he would wish he hadn’t.

  Liz had sounded hysterical, upset, crying down the phone. At first, she was talking about Ali and something they were fighting about, but then her tone changed and she said, “Oh, God. Will, I know this is awful to ask but can you come meet me, by any chance? There’s, like, no taxis and I don’t want to walk home alone.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “That weird guy, the red-haired guy, he’s here. He’s across the street from me, staring. I bet he’ll follow me back.”

  Still half-asleep, Will had said, “Where are you?”

  “Harcourt Street. By the Luas stop. But hang on—” Muffled sounds, like Liz was talking to someone there while holding the phone to her chest. Then, “But these guys, they’re heading for Trinity so I could go with them as far as Stephen’s Green? Would that be better?”

  Lying in bed, Will rolled his eyes. Stephen’s Green was still ten, fifteen minutes’ walk away. And fifteen minutes’ walk back.

  And it was four in the morning.

  And he’d been asleep.

  But …

  What if something happened to Liz? What if he said no, I can’t be arsed, and then something happened to her on the way home? He’d be to blame.

  Going to meet her was doing the right thing.

  “Okay,” he said, throwing back the sheets, sitting up. He noticed that Ali wasn’t there, that the sheets were cold. He had a vague recollection of hearing her get up. The bathroom light was on, but there was no noise coming from beyond its door. Had she gone home? “I’ll meet you there. Wait—where in Stephen’s Green? Top of Leeson Street?” No response. “Liz?”

  He pulled his phone away from his ear and heard the beep-beep-beep of a disconnection.

  Now he was confused. Had they agreed to meet? Did Liz hang up because she thought he was already on his way to Stephen’s Green?

  He got dressed.

  The phone rang again. He didn’t recognize the number, but it was Liz
on the line again.

  “Sorry,” she said. “My phone’s died. The ATM at the top of Leeson Street. Is that okay?”

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” Will said. “Well, ten.”

  He grabbed his keys, left the room. As soon as the apartment door locked behind him he realized he’d forgotten his phone, but was there any point going back for it? Liz’s phone was dead and he’d be coming straight back here.

  He decided not to bother.

  No one knew exactly what would happen if you tried to get on or off campus after the infamous curfew, but Will discovered now that the answer was not very much. There was a security guard at the exit onto Haddington Road, but all he did was nod at him. Maybe it’d be harder to get back in, but from the look of things, he doubted it.

  Will followed the canal up to Leeson Street bridge and turned from there onto Leeson Street Lower. He jogged most of the route, both trying to get there quicker and trying to wake himself up.

  It was deathly quiet out. The place was practically deserted. He passed one, maybe two other people on his walk, and he suspected one of them was a plain-clothes Garda going by the suspicious look the man gave him.

  It’d be light within the hour.

  Liz gave him a big wave when she saw him, then started hurrying toward him. Her eye makeup was smudged and her pupils were enlarged, but he’d known she was drunk before he’d got close enough to see that. She was wobbling slightly, teetering on her heels.

  She grabbed his right arm and linked her left through it.

  “Thanks so much for this,” she said. “I owe you big time.”

  “No problem,” he murmured.

  He wondered what Ali would think about it when he told her tomorrow morning.

  At first everything was fine. They just chatted easily about Liz’s night. But when they reached the bridge, she said something about a stone in her shoe and led Will a few feet off the path, down to the water’s edge, to one of the benches overlooking the dark canal.

  “Sit down,” she said to him, when he didn’t.

  “We should get going, Liz.”

  “I want to talk to you about something.”

  “Now?”