Page 62 of The Trap by Catherine
So that’s all it was, then: a mess.
Angela admonished herself for being so paranoid while, at the same time, trying to remember if she’d seen a planning notice tacked to the gate on her way in.
She was following Caroline inside the house now, over the threshold and into a narrow, dark hall full of muddy browns.
“We can talk in here,” Caroline said, indicating the living room.
Angela went in first.The room was small and cramped and dark—she was beginning to think that was the theme of all the decor—and looked like it’d sat untouched for decades. It also seemed to be home to decades’ worth of stuff: framed photos, knick-knacks, fringed upholstery. It reminded Angela of her great-grandmother’s house, the place she could only vaguely remember visiting years ago, as a child.
There was one new thing in the room: a huge flatscreen TV, tuned to a soap opera.
“Lots of clearing out yet to do,” Caroline said from behind her. “It’s just trying to find the time, isn’t it? We’re both so busy with work, and I have my stuff with the families... Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Water? Have you eaten? I have some muffins I just baked this morning...”
The woman was hyper. Angela definitely wasn’t imagining that.
But then, Denisehadsaid she was a bit of a busybody. And some people were inordinately excited by a visit from the Gardaí.
Or, in this case, the Garda-adjacent.
“‘We?’” Angela repeated.
“Me and my fiancé,” Caroline said.
Angela’s eyes went to the woman’s ring finger on her left hand: bare. Caroline’s eyes followed Angela’s. She put her hands in her jeans pockets.
“What’s his name?”
“Why?” Caroline said. But then, perhaps realizing that this was not a normal response to a polite question, said, “It’s David. Dave.”
“Is he here?”
“No, he’s working late.” Caroline’s expression had darkened a little during this interaction, but now it brightened again. “Are yousureyou won’t have anything? Not even a glass of water, or...?”
“Actually,” Angela said, “would you mind if I used your loo?”
“Sure,” Caroline said after a beat. “Follow me.”
She led Angela out of the living room and further down the dark, dingy hall, to an open door about halfway along it. She reached in and pulled on a string: a light came on, a single bare bulb in the ceiling. It was more than enough to light the space, which couldn’t have been more than five feet by five feet.
“Thanks,” Angela said, with a smile. “Long drive and too much coffee.”
She smiled at Caroline, but Caroline didn’t smile back.
Angela flipped down the lid on the toilet bowl and sat on it, and put her head in her hands to think.
On the other side of the door, she heard Caroline’s footsteps retreat back toward the living room.
She had no idea what was going on here, only the feeling that something absolutely was. Caroline O’Callaghan was making her itchy. She didn’t match this house, and there was something about her demeanor that didn’t quite fit, like it was a performance and she was a terrible actress who kept missing her lines.
It was just all so incongruous, off-kilter. A photo that wasn’t hanging straight.
It could be nothing, though. Or it could be something that didn’t matter. Maybe Caroline was just one ofthosepeople, the ones who just loved to sidle up to the traumatized, the bereaved, the victimized, and insert themselves into their lives.
Angela had encountered plenty of them through the MPU.
A next-level busybody. They saw tragedy as entertainment, something exciting, a bit of drama in their otherwise boring lives. They elbowed their way into it, offering help and support, supposedly, to people in the worst hours of their lives, in the hope that they’d become indispensable to them.
In itself it wasn’t anything criminal but, in this case, Caroline was also playing another role, that of a witness.
