Too Close to Breathe

by Olivia Kiernan

  Baz pulls out a large notepad from beneath the coffee table. Clicks his pen.

  “May I?” he asks, and when I nod, he opens it up.

  At the top he writes, “Sequence.”

  “We’re saying that Peter Costello and Amy Keegan met online, on some unknown site on the Dark Web, possibly Black Widow?”

  I place the mugs of tea between us and sit across from him, curl my legs beneath me on the floor. I nod in reply. “A work in progress, but for the moment that’s what we’re going on.”

  He makes bullet points as he speaks.

  “Right. Priscilla hasn’t seen her brother for, now, twelve weeks. He’s been ill. She’s tried to call but didn’t appear to worry about him until his wife’s death. His phone was in the same areas around Dublin frequently, along with Amy Keegan’s. There is strong evidence that they were having an affair. Amy has an argument with her father on the phone where she confesses to having an affair with the husband of one of her lecturers. Two days later, Eleanor Costello is found hanged in her home. Still no sign of Peter.

  “The killer then takes Amy to an unknown location, where he films and brutally murders her, streaming the entire thing live onto the internet. The killer takes Amy Keegan’s body, in a vehicle not yet discovered, to her hometown of Clontarf—”

  I hold up a hand. “He could live in Clontarf, remember. He may not have had to travel far. The house where he killed her could be anywhere.”

  Baz nods. “Okay. He waits until darkness to stake Amy’s remains in the center of the town’s annual Halloween bonfire. Hours later her body is discovered by her father’s work colleague, Tom Quinn. So far so good?”

  My eyes are closed. I’m listening. Listening for the answers that lie somewhere in the midst of the story. I nod and wave my hand. Continue.

  “Interviews with both Priscilla Fagan and Tom Quinn corroborate the supposed sequence of events, however Priscilla insists on Peter’s innocence. Costello’s neighbor Neil Doyle has implied that Peter could get frustrated with his wife but also suggests that he may be a victim of abuse. Priscilla has a clear dislike of Eleanor Costello and may be sympathizing with her brother’s frustrations with his wife.

  “We know Peter Costello was likely depressed from his continued unemployment, and a daylight lamp in his office implies that this time of year was particularly difficult for him.” He stops, sighs, turns over a page in his notepad.

  Wrapping my hands around my tea, I fill in the remaining blanks.

  “Peter is Irish-Italian, self-made in finance but unemployed for the past four years. No children; culturally, that may have significance and may be a further source of disappointment for him. To help bridge his time, he has become something of an amateur art historian and occasionally enjoyed painting. A well-known artist’s pigment was placed by the killer on both bodies. The bristle of a paintbrush was found caught in a wound postmortem on Peter’s deceased wife’s left arm.

  “According to his sister, he’d been suffering from ill health for at least a year. This appears to have weakened him sufficiently in that his neighbor also seemed to comment on it. He seems to have had little professional contact or done any networking over the last year, seeing that the only reference listed on his CV is his neighbor Neil Doyle.” I take a sip from my mug, enjoy the strong bitter taste of the tea, then sigh. “And we still have no idea where he is.”

  My mobile flashes and vibrates across the coffee table toward us. I am almost grateful for the interruption.

  “Hello, Sheehan.”

  “Frankie, it’s Jack.”

  I straighten. “What’s happening?”

  “They’ve only pulled fucking Costello from the bloody Liffey,” he says. Eloquent as ever.

  CHAPTER 16

  VICKY, MY NEURO consultant, waves the light in front of my eyes. First the left. Pause. Then the right. Pause. She clicks the penlight off, slots it into her pocket. Unconscious movements. Performed many times daily. Her index finger is upright before me. I fix my vision to it, follow the movement as she passes it in front of my face, drawing a crucifix in the air before me. A medical benediction.

  “Prussian blue. Have you heard of it?”

  “Prussian blue? Hmm. I dunno. Why do you ask?” She has turned, is making notes.

  “An interest.”

  She looks up, her mouth pinched at one side. “An interest?” She shakes her head. Laughs.

  “Oh, all right then. A case. Don’t worry, I won’t quote you,” I say.

  She stands, directs me to do likewise. She raises both my arms with her fingertips until they are straight, outstretched, shoulder level. I know this test. Have performed it many times. I close my eyes.

  She pats me on the hand.

  “Sit,” she commands, and continues to fill in her notes. After a while, she signs her name to the bottom of my file.

  “Firstly, you continue to show a clean slate. No indications of trauma or pathology. Your scar is healing nicely, although I know it still pains you. I can only say that it will get easier. The knife went through a minor cutaneous sensory nerve branch and it’s regenerating, which may go to explain some of the burning sensations and tingling you’ve been feeling. Worst-case scenario, eighteen months. Otherwise, you’re good.”

  I can’t help the smile. Part happiness, part cynicism. My physicality is not the lasting problem.

  “Thanks, Doc,” I reply.

  Eleanor Costello is knocking on the inside of my skull. Peter Costello was a mess. No phone was found with his body, not that he could have been making calls to me. He’d been in the water for near on two months. The fact that he’s been missing almost as long corroborates Abigail’s estimations. On the morning that his remains were found, there had been a spring tide, causing exceptionally low water levels in the Liffey. Costello’s dark head had been spotted, bobbing about like a seaweed-clad buoy, by an early-morning walker.

  Initially, the walker hadn’t thought much of it, but as the water leveled, the ghostly shape of Peter’s face flashed in the grim depths. And from there, the walker had contacted the guards. At first, like Eleanor’s death, it appeared to be suicide.

  There’s no way of knowing whether Peter Costello was dead or alive when he hit the riverbed—forensics can only give us so much—but the opening call of the autopsy was murder. The injuries on his body indicated foul play. There were numerous stab wounds along his sides and the insides of his thighs. If he hadn’t drowned, he would have bled to death.

  In short, his remains were in a state but, to be honest, not in the state he should have been in for so long in the water. The cold start to the winter months was for once working in our favor.

  Abigail pushed through some early tox reports. Time is not on our side, and with our sole suspect turning up bloated and months dead we have to bend time. Anything she could detect in Costello’s blood that had to do with the compound Prussian blue, I wanted to know about as soon as possible.

  “I’ll deal with Finance later,” I had said, to Clancy’s openmouthed protest. “I can’t risk missing something again, unless you want still to be figuring this out in a year from now, with our reputation torn to shreds in the press and a body count up round our ears.”

  He’d kept his mouth shut and walked away. Let me at it. And so I went at it. After it.

  Abigail ran the tests, and there it was: no Prussian blue, but its associated poison, thallium.

  Vicky answers my question finally. “We use Prussian blue mostly in the treatment of those who have been exposed to radioactive material. It’s extremely effective. But there are other uses; in years gone by it was used as an antidote to a neural poison, a heavy metal called thallium. Not the most fashionable poison nowadays, although I’m not sure why, it would be highly effective.”

  “Why would you say that?” I step behind the screen in her office, step out of the role of pati
ent, victim, and into my work clothes. Armor.

  She laughs. “Are you sure I’m not on trial here?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know about your other crimes, Doc, but on this one, you’re safe.”

  “In that case, I’ll oblige. To be frank, it’s bloody difficult to diagnose. It’s simply not on our radar. It should be, it’s nicknamed ‘the poisoner’s poison.’ But generally, it’s effective because unlike some of the other”—she sighs—“preferred poisons, it’s colorless, odorless, and you can make it slow-acting. Which generally means a culprit can have left the scene long before their victim succumbs to the effects. Presentation of symptoms can vary depending on a person’s metabolism or their build, but it’s a miserable death in any case.”

  “I see. It wouldn’t have to be a deliberate poisoning, would it? I mean, could someone ingest it by accident?”

  I come around the screen, adjust the collar of my coat, push my sleeves up. Regain control.

  “Anything is possible. But in the amounts required to kill someone”—she clicks a few keys on her computer, then turns to face me again—“I don’t think so.”

  I push my luck. “Symptoms?”

  She looks to the ceiling. “Oh, now you’re testing me. Neurological, mostly. I think. Hair loss. It’s been a long time since I studied it. Hang on.” She reaches up, removes a thick medical tome from a shelf above her desk. Searches the index, then flicks through the pages. “Ah. Yes, alopecia. Here.” She folds down the corner of the page and passes the book to me. “You can drop it back when you’re done.”

  I tuck it under my arm. “Thanks.”

  I leave the medical center and head down the quays. The Liffey rolls by beside me. I brace myself against the cold December breeze and lean over the wall. The river moves thickly between the busy streets, the water brown, heavy with silt and grime. The current sucks and laps up against the concrete banks.

  I let myself gaze down into the water. Imagine the chill that must have enveloped his body. Could a wife do this to her husband? Could Eleanor have done this to her husband?

  Within the depths, he’s stone-cold, skin flabby and bloated. His hair moves like seaweed, his head tugged left, then right, with the weight of water; his body leaning backward in the direction of the current, toward the sea, toward nothingness.

  I can’t help the wave of goose bumps that erupts along the base of my neck, travels down the length of my arms. The sensation has nothing to do with the cold. I can’t keep the image of his passport picture out of my mind. He was handsome. Attractive. A perfect match for his wife. And now he’s lying in a body bag, ravaged by the grimy Liffey waters.

  There is a coffee shop that I used to go to years ago, when I first started out as a fresh-faced, honest-to-goodness Garda, where innocently I believed that, as long as I kept my nose and soul clean, I could stand by justice and watch her cut through badness like the proverbial hot knife. Right and wrong. Easy morals. But a compass does not only point in two directions. There are four poles. Two distinct and definite paths between north and south. The in-between—that’s the world I live in.

  I cross the river, walk away from the quays. On Lime Street, just up from what used to be Windmill Lane Studios, I find the café. The geography has changed since the last time I came up here. The studios have been sold, regenerated, remolded into something more enterprising in a midrecession Dublin, but there it is, the café. The fascia gray, aluminum. The type of café that doesn’t bother with anything grander than plastic-backed chairs and shining easy-to-clean tablecloths but doesn’t skimp on the coffee and doesn’t ask you to sell your firstborn so that you can afford their takeaway.

  It’s late afternoon and it’s comfortably occupied. Three or four individuals searching for answers in the contents of their cups. No one sits at the window, the high stools empty, punters unable to relax with their back to a room. I order a filter coffee, which the barista serves promptly from a pot already brewing. She informs me of their free refill option if I pay an extra thirty cents. The free option that you have to pay for. I suppress a smile and shake my head. No, thanks.

  Sliding into a seat at the back, I open the page that Vicky had been reading from. Peter Costello would not have experienced symptoms of his thallium poisoning immediately. He might have had nausea, stomach cramping, diarrhea, even vomiting if doses were high enough, which at first glance they seem not to have been. Abigail is still unraveling how the poison affected his body.

  His medical notes have been released, which was less trouble than we envisaged. His doctor seemed either to have great sympathy for Peter or to be fearful he might be found guilty of negligence. He released the notes without any to-do, barely glancing at the warrant.

  Peter had been ill for almost a year. His GP appears to have checked for everything from Lyme disease to psychosomatic illnesses. In the end Peter was given a weak diagnosis of some diffuse autoimmune disorder coupled with chronic fatigue syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome. The man’s hair had been falling out in chunks.

  He’d suffered moments of weakness in both legs. There was one episode where he had fallen in the street, having lost all sensation in his foot. His ankle had been badly sprained by the incident, and he’d cut open his hand, enough for stitches, but still the GP stuck resolutely to his diagnosis.

  It’s safe to say that if he had been diagnosed, he would have had permanent defects from constant exposure to thallium. Possibly, he would have died from it eventually anyway. We are searching through the Costello house again, looking for where Peter Costello could have been exposed to such a deadly poison. But my feeling is that it was through his food and it’s long since been disposed of.

  There is guilt rotting in my chest, stinking up my insides, and unease is unfurling in my stomach. If Peter Costello has been in his watery grave for some time, who has been using his handset? Who is my caller, the breath in the darkness, the presence on the other end of the line? In my mind, Eleanor turns, glances back at me, smiles. And I know that smile now: She knows something. Has a secret. Had a secret. She was taking the ultimate control over her husband. Drip-feeding him poison. Weakening him.

  I’m hoping that, somewhere in the Costello house, there’s an explanation. A simple one that resets the scales. Takes me back to firmer ground where he’s somehow the culprit we’re after. But it can’t be. The best I can hope for is that she poisoned him to protect herself. The Prussian blue found in her gut is too much of a coincidence. Well, not a coincidence at all, as Abigail reminds me. Prussian blue is evidence that Peter Costello’s wife tried to murder him or at least toyed with that idea.

  I find the passage in the textbook. Titled “Decontamination.” There. Prussian blue, or potassium hexacyanoferrate, is to be given as an antidote when thallium poisoning is suspected. It binds to the compound in the large intestine so that the toxin can be discharged from the body. At some point Eleanor must have feared she had ingested the poison too, or maybe she had done her reading. Thallium is very toxic; contact with the skin is enough to result in illness or death. Maybe at some point she decided she had been too close to her husband. Or maybe she experienced some of the symptoms he was going through.

  Ultimately, she decided to take matters into her own hands, to regain a foothold in her personal life. What was it he had done to draw her eye to this? How far can one person push another? As far as a fractured wrist, apparently, or an affair with a younger woman.

  When Baz phones, I’m not deflated by what he says; I’ve grown used to the idea that Eleanor might have wanted to punish or kill her husband. Thallium has been found in his deodorant, he tells me. Something she could rely on him using most days. An aerosol. Skin absorption. He couldn’t have killed either his wife or his lover. He had been dead for longer than either of them. And this opens up the field.

  I close my eyes. Think about the victims and what kind of person would want to kill them in t
his way. The killer will have known all of them. Not necessarily intimately. The acquaintance may be very superficial, a shop that they frequented or a restaurant or someone who watched them from the anonymity of the Dark Web.

  I close the textbook and pick up my phone. I dial my family liaison officer, let her know I have to cancel our meeting with my family.

  Back at the office, the whiteboard is filling up with information. I take the duster and clean the word “suspect” from beneath Peter Costello’s name. I’m angry that I allowed myself to believe in the stereotype. A man murders his wife, then kills his lover in rage, in jealousy, in an expression of power. I’ve seen it too many times, and it’s why I should have realized that these murders don’t fit the picture.

  These deaths were planned and carried out by someone with no remorse, a cold hand. A small voice in the back of my mind whispers, Someone like Eleanor.

  Baz stands beside me, pulls up a chair for me. I give him a weak smile.

  “So, this is what square one looks like,” he says, gazing at the case board.

  “Pretty much,” I say.

  “It doesn’t change the fact that Costello was a controlling fucker, does it? I mean, his wife’s remains tell us that much. There are scars on her body too.”

  I sigh. “Neither does it change the fact that his wife was probably trying to kill him. Prussian blue is the antidote for thallium poisoning, and she was taking it regularly.”

  He blows air through his lips. Leans against the wall. “It seemed so likely that the pigment in her system was related to his love of painting.”

  “Here we have it. All the grays of an investigation,” I say.

  “And no phone?”

  I shake my head. “Someone must have taken his handset, changed the SIM. We haven’t had a sniff from it since Costello was found.” I pull out my phone, check the screen for good measure; in the cold, comforting light of day I’m not intimidated by a silent phone call. “Nothing.”