Page 60 of The Trap by Catherine
A tense beat passed.
Roland began pacing the floor in front of her. When he turned toward the window, the streetlight’s glow lit his face a little but gave him two dark hollows for eyes.
He stopped suddenly. “Are you recording this?”
“What? No.”
“Prove it. Where’s your phone?”
“I said I’m not—”
“Prove it.”
Lucy got up so fast she knocked over her chair. She hurried to what remained of the butcher’s countertop, reached over and unhooked the strap of her bag from the other side of it. She found her phone and turned to show it to him, tapping its screen to demonstrate its lifelessness. She’d turned it off after she’d received his text saying he was on his way.
“OK,” he said. “Now empty the bag.”
She didn’t argue. She upturned it, letting its entire contents spill out on to the dirty, dusty floor.
Roland bent to pick through it, checking.
“I’m not recording this,” Lucy said. “Really, Roland. I just need to know.”
He straightened up.
“Listen to me,” he said through clenched teeth, “because I’m only going to say this once.I didn’t kill Tana. I had nothing to do with her disappearance. Yes, we fought and, yes, sometimes things got a little... But it was both of us. It was her just as much as me. And she fucking knew how to push my buttons, you know? Sheprovokedme.”
Lucy bit her lip to keep herself from reacting to this, the go-to, pathetic refrain of people who beat their partners.
“I don’t have a time machine,” he went on. “I can’t take it back. But I’m telling you, I didn’t kill her. I didn’t. I don’t know what else I can say to get you to believe me, but whatever this thing is with her and those other women, it’s got absolutelynothingto do with me, all right?”
But Lucy didn’t believe him.
She didn’t know if that was because of who he was, of how he acted. Because of what she herself had just seen of his anger, that sudden flare of rage and its promise of violence that had seemingly come out of nowhere.
Or if it was because Roland Kearns was the only thing she had that was even shaped like an answer. In all this time, there hadn’t even been a hint of another one, not so much as an indiscernible shape in the mist.
If she believed in his innocence, she’d be left with nothing.
“Why did you come here?” Lucy asked. “Why did you text me?”
Roland was already moving toward the door.
“Because I know what it’s like,” he said. “The wondering. The questions. When I saw you tonight, pleading, when you looked into the camera and said you wanted to talk... I knew you were talking to me. Youthoughtyou were talking to me. So here I am. We’ve talked. And now you know that you’re actually looking for someone else. And now you can stop hanging around my place at all hours of the night.” The grin returned. “Unless you’re going to come up.” He pulled on the door, discovered it was locked, turned the key in it, and tried again. “And if I were you, I’d go somewhere else. I wouldn’t be hanging around here tonight, not after what you did. There’s some right fucking creeps out there.”
Then he slipped back out into the night, leaving Lucy alone in the dark.
LAST SEEN ALIVE
Caroline O’Callaghan’s home address wasn’t far from the bus stop where Tana Meehan had last been seen alive. Less than five miles, in fact; Caroline had been driving home at the time.
After Angela had plugged it into the map app on her phone, a disembodied voice sent her south out of the city to the M7 as far as Kildare town and then out of it, before directing her down a long and winding country road with tall hedgerows rising up on either side. Even with the sun still in the sky—just about—the road felt dark and gloomy.
There were no streetlights and Angela groaned at the thought of navigating it in the opposite direction in the dark. She wasn’t used to driving and only did it when she absolutely had to.
Eventually she came to the promised blue dot on her phone’s screen: a small, old, grubby bungalow at the end of a crumbling track, the kind of place you’d see onCheap Irish Homesbut before they did any work to it. As she pulled up outside it, her headlights swept across a structural To Do list: missing roof tiles, a pebbledash wall gone green with moss, rotting window frames, and a crack going from ground to gutter that looked wide enough to put the post through. Every window seemed to have thick, dirty-gray lacy curtains hanging on its other side.
There were lights on inside and a Nissan Micra parked by the garage door. Despite its abandoned vibes, Caroline O’Callaghanwasliving here, and she was home.
