Page 84 of 56 Days
“Who served his time. And it’s Detective Sergeant.”
Karl correcting her on his rank, Lee knows, means Laura is definitelynoton the Christmas-card list.
“You can’t report his name,” he continues. “Or risk identifying him in any way. So what good is a feature to you?”
“I can change identifying details. And there’s still plenty to write about. There was that case last year, with the two teenagers—they couldn’t report their names but they still got column inches out of it, didn’t they?”
Column inches,long-formarticles,front-pageheadlines—for weeks. Lee had remarked at the time that calling the defendants—now convicted murderers—Boy A and Boy B only served toincreasethe public’s appetite for information, because without their names and faces, without details about their home lives or their hobbies or their family backgrounds, without theirordinariness, they were untethered from normality from theget-goand ascended to the ranks of Evil Psycho Killers right away.
Just like how, last year, the faceless,two-decades-long terror of the serial killer known as the Nothing Man had been instantly vaporized by the reveal of his actual name: Jim.
“I got a tip,” Laura says, “that actually, something had happened in London, something went wrong, and St Ledger is on his way to Dublin, to work at a company owned by a family friend. All I was given was the name of the company, but that was more than enough to find him.”
This is the point at which, when Laura talked about this the first time, out on the balcony, Lee had put a stop to it, and ever since the next question has been waiting patiently on her tongue.
“How?”
Laura shrugs. “I have my ways.”
Lee and Karl say nothing; they just wait her out.
“Fine. I used the Wayback Machine.”
Karl says, “The fucking what now?”
“TheWay-backMa-chine.” Laura pronounces each syllable distinctly, as if she’s talking to someone who’s still learning English. “It’s an internet archive that takes snapshots of websites and stores them. You can put in any URL and find out what that page looked like on, say, twelfth January 1999 or sixteenth September 2012. If the archive took a snapshot of it, that is. The further back in time you go, the less you find, of course. And it’s really only the major sites when you getwayback. But it had a snapshot of the KB Studios ‘Meet Our Team’ page from a couple of months ago, so I was able to compare that with the current one and identify the new hires. There were two. No pictures or much of a bio—they were clearly junior members of the team—but one of them had a Swedish name and had recently worked in Dubai, and the other was called Oliver Kennedy and had previously worked in London. It wasn’t exactly rocket science.”
“But how did you know it was him?TheOliver you were looking for?”
“That was my next job. Like I said, there was no picture of him on the company website, and no social at all, nothing—which I took as further confirmation. I had to get a look at him in person. I tried a few different things but, in the end, what worked was patience. I sat in the window of the café directly opposite the building and watched everyone who came in and out. About three days in, I saw a guy who could be St Ledger—right age, right coloring—come outside with the managing director of KB Studios, who I knew from his photo on the website. And when I got a closer look, I knew. It was him. No doubt.”
“How could you possibly—”
“It’s the ears,” Laura says. “They don’t change with age. You can always tell by comparing the ears. And he was going by Oliver Kennedy. Kennedy was St Ledger’s mother’s maiden name. I mean, comeon. It’s like hewantedme to find him.”
Karl swears under his breath.
“How did you know what the ears looked like in the first place?” Lee asks. “What did you have to compare them to?”
“Photos. In the primary school’s newsletter.”
“And where the hell did you get that?”
“Same place I got the tip, let’s just say.”
“Which was where?”
“I can’t reveal my sources. I won’t.”
“Let’s come back to that.” Lee is having to work to keep her voice even; her patience is wearing thin. “So, you get atip-offthat Oliver St Ledger is coming back to Dublin to work at KB Studios. You figure out that a guy about the right age using the name Oliver Kennedy, his mother’s maiden name, starts work at KB Studios shortly thereafter. You see a guy come out of the office that’s a visual match for a photo you have of Oliver St Ledger, plus seventeen years. That about right?”
Laura nods. “Yeah.”
“But how did you end up here? In his apartment building?”
“I just followed him. He doesn’t drive, he walks everywhere. Um, walked. I looked the place up online, just to see if maybe there was a unit for sale or something so I could get inside, have a look around, and this listing came up.Short-termlet.”
“I meant what were you planning ondoing?”
