Page 130 of 56 Days
He can’t do anything.
He tries to lift his head, but only manages to move it slightly, so that now he’s looking at tile.
And then he hears something else.
Feelssomething else.
Water.
Not just in his mind but here, in reality. And not adrip-drip-driplike before. This is a thundering downpour, splashing all around him, filling his head with its gushing sound.
And Ciara crying, still.
And then no more.
The tide is in.
Tonight
“We’re meeting the Super in twenty minutes,” Lee says. “So for the love of God, find me the crime.”
Karl shrugs. “I’m not sure we have one.”
They’re at the station, sitting opposite each other at one of the desks in the back. Lee is slumped in a swivel chair, absently swinging it a couple of inches from left to right and then back again, her eyes red from rubbing them in frustration a few moments ago. Karl is on a hard plastic chair that he’s pulled up to the end of the desk. He’s leaning an elbow on it and leaning his chin on his hand. Thegrease-stained,brown-bagremnants of a McDonald’s dinner lay strewn between them. Lee is still pickinghalf-heartedlyat a box of cold, limp McNuggets.
It’s approaching nine o’clock and almost completely dark outside, and they’re both absolutely exhausted. Butatnine o’clock, they have to meet with their Superintendent to bring him up to speed, brief him on their investigation and give some indication of where they plan on taking things next.
And despite everything, they still don’t have a crime.
To Kenneth Balfe’s credit, after they’d suggested to him that the tenant in one of his apartments might have had a role to play in the death of the one in the other, he’d got both Laura Mannix and his wife Alison to come down to the station for voluntary chats.
Alison Balfe had quickly admitted that her husband wasn’t as discreet as he liked to think he was, and that she’d known full well who it was in apartment oneandworking in her husband’s office. She hated Oliver St Ledger, didn’t want anything to do with him, and thought he shouldn’t be anywhere near the family’s business, and she saw an opportunity to make the problem go away by whispering about it to her old college friend, Laura, who these days happened to be working for a radioshock-jock. But since the court order protecting Oliver’s identity only covered thereportingof it, there was nothing Lee or Karl could do to Alison Balfe. She hadn’t broken any laws.
Laura’s tales of Wayback Machines and ears not aging and fortuitously convenient corporate lets made a great story, but that’s all it was. She’d been trying to keep Alison out of it, she told them. Karl had told her she should write a crime novel.
But she had admitted entering apartment one, taking photos of Oliver’s body, and leaving again without alerting anyone to his death. She hadn’t even toldAlison, which might have contributed to the current state of affairs: the two women were refusing to talk to each other. Laura insisted that she hadn’t touched anything while she was inside, and so had no reason to wipe anything down before she left again, but shedidadmit to deliberately setting off the fire alarm at the complex at least twice. These were attempts to flush the residents outside, including Oliver St Ledger and his mysterious girlfriend, to create opportunities for her to see and maybe even approach them.
The postmortem had concluded a couple of hours ago: Oliver St Ledger had officially died by drowning. Toxicology would take longer to come back, but the working theory was he’d taken a Rohypnol, which he had a prescription for, and fallen in the shower. Right about now, Kenneth Balfe was formally identifying the body.
Whoeverhadwiped down the surfaces in apartment one had done a bloody good job. Of the prints they did find, only two sets were not a match to the deceased, and they were inlow-trafficareas: the back of the TV unit, the bottom of a wardrobe door. They could plausibly belong to previous occupants. They didn’t match anything on file.
The only item of interest recovered was Oliver’s phone, which showed text messages exchanged with a user he’d entered as “Ciara,” the last of which was from nearly three weeks before.
Twenty days ago, Oliver had sent a text to this woman saying:
I know it’s over but I don’t want it to end this way. Can we talk? We can meet somewhere public if you prefer.
Eighteen days ago, he’d received a response from her.
Maybe we can have a drink after lockdown ends. Stay safe x
The content of their historical messages suggested that Oliver and this Ciara woman had been seeing each other, but had evidently broken up before his death. No one was answering at the other number now; ringing it got you an automated message saying the user could not be reached at this time. The text messages contained no useful detail that might help identify the sender. They were awaiting registration information from the service provider, but in the meantime, they’d been informed that it was apay-as-you-go number. The user could have potentially registered any name and address they liked because none of it was subject to verification.
Also on Oliver’s phone were a string of text messages and missed calls from his brother, Richard, wondering why he wasn’t answering. One of them apologized for an earlier conversation in which Richard had apparently told Oliver that he shouldn’t be staying in that apartment, that he knew Alison Balfe “hated his guts” and couldn’t be trusted, and that Oliver needed to get out of there for his own safety. The last one, sent last night Irish time, had said if Oliver didn’t check in within the nexttwenty-fourhours, Richard was going to send Kenneth to his door.
When Lee spoke to Richard this afternoon, just before he boarded the first of three flights that would eventually land him back in Dublin—and facing atwo-weekself-isolation—he’d explained that he was the only member of the family still in contact with Oliver. After a threat of exposure in London a couple of months earlier, Oliver had cut all contact with the friends and colleagues he’d had there. He’d had a therapist, Dan, but they were only speaking once a month at the moment.
Richard had asked that the court order continue to be observed and no information about his brother’s true identity be released to the press. Lee assured him that would be the case. The Garda Press Office, as a rule, released as little detail as possible, and the story that appeared on ThePaper.ie this afternoon had contained about as much information as the press were ever going to get.
