‘Alex?’
AGarda car is blocking the entrance to Delaney Row.
The sight of it adds invisible weights to my limbs, rendering them resistant to my instructions.
I stop and lean against the wall of the bank.
I consider fleeing, crossing the street and hopping on the first bus that comes along.
I don’t care where it’s going; I just want to get away.
But then I think about gardaí crawling all over my home – and Alex, potentially in there again, with them – and the heat of my anger propels me forward and up the lane.
Where I find someone standing outside my front door, silhouetted in the light in the hall.
‘Alex?’
My voice comes out of the shadows before I do, startling him.
‘Ellie.’
‘What the fuck?’
He understands this as what in God’s name is going on? when what I actually meant was why can’t you just stay out of my business and leave me alone?
‘I was hearing things,’ he says. ‘Through the wall. Like, crashing. Breaking. I got worried, so I started calling you. When you said you weren’t home, I came out here and saw the front door was wide open. Sophie told me to ring the guards.’
I move to go inside but he grabs my arm, stopping me.
‘She said to wait out here.’
She. Garda Murphy again, no doubt.
‘Where were you?’ Alex asks.
I’m saved from answering by the rumble of footsteps on my stairs followed by Garda Murphy appearing in my doorway.
‘Ellie,’ she says. ‘We meet again.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing good.’
She jerks her chin, beckoning me to follow her, and goes back inside the house. Alex follows me in and I don’t protest because I don’t want to be alone with Murphy. A lack of privacy might encourage her not to ask questions I don’t want to answer.
She leads us directly to the kitchen, where my jaw drops.
It’s a scene of utter destruction.
Every last cabinet door has been flung open.
The chairs are lying on their sides and the table has been pushed over and against the far wall, where it doesn’t have enough space to fall flat and so is trapped, tilted at an angle.
Pages from a charity-shop paperback I had been reading this morning litter the linoleum.
Every item of food I bought is out of its packaging and spilled on the floor, dumped on to the tabletop or smeared across another surface, and what’s left of the packaging has been dumped with it.
The fixed side of the patio door, for example, is a three-horse race of sloppy clumps of tinned tomatoes sliding to the bottom, and there is a shock of splattered red sauce right across the far wall.
My lone plate and mug lie in broken shards on the floor.
Coffee granules are spilled all over the countertop.
Whoever did this has managed to achieve a staggering level of mess with almost nothing to work with.
And it’s not just mess: the microwave door is open and hanging at an angle, as if someone has tried their best to wrench it off.
Behind me, I hear Alex murmur, ‘What the actual …?’
The absurdity of this is dissipating now, clearing like a mist, revealing the reality of the situation. Everything I bought with what little money I had is lying in ruins. I came here with nothing and now, somehow, I have even less than that.
I fear tears threatening.
Murphy points at the kitchen sink. ‘I turned off the tap.’
Grateful for something to focus on, I pick my way through the debris to take a look. A cloth has been stuffed tightly into the plughole. The sink itself is two-thirds full.
So they tried to flood the place, too.
And they can’t be gone long.
I notice then that the cloth is not a cloth but a torn piece of one of my T-shirts – a T-shirt that, before I left, was folded in my suitcase upstairs.
I turn around. ‘They were upstairs, too.’
Murphy nods grimly.
We trudge upstairs in single file: Murphy in the lead, me following, Alex at the back.
The room with the spreading ceiling stain, the foul-smelling toilet under the stairs and the living room all have their doors closed. I presume she’s already checked them and found they were left alone, probably because there was nothing in any of them to make a mess with.
Small mercies.
When we reach the top stair, I see the bedroom door is all the way open but, in the spill of light from the landing, the room beyond looks the same. Murphy ignores it so I assume she’s already checked in there, too.
I turn my attention to the office, where my makeshift bed remains intact. But my suitcase is on the floor and flipped open, its contents having obviously been rifled through. Quickly, I rifle through them myself; aside from the T-shirt, nothing is missing.
It’s hard to feel any real violation when there’s nothing in there except tatty old clothes. In a strange way, I feel a little triumphant. If you don’t have anything, they can’t take anything from you.
Murphy points to the bathroom and says, ‘Be careful in here.’
I go to the door but no further, because the floor is covered in shards of shattered glass. Shattered mirror, more specifically. Every last piece of it has been smashed out of the medicine cabinet’s door.
‘I’ll need to take statements from both of you,’ Murphy says.
I shake my head. ‘I don’t want to report this.’
The other two turn to look at me, incredulous.
‘What are you going to do?’ I ask Murphy. ‘Arrest someone for making a mess?’
‘This is a break-in,’ Alex says.
‘What did they break? They obviously had a key.’
‘Your microwave. The mirror. And it’s still trespassing. Criminal damage.’
‘All excellent suggestions,’ Murphy says to Alex. ‘But maybe leave the policing up to me?’ She turns to me. ‘I don’t need your cooperation to investigate. That’s not how it works here. Whether or not you want to report it is irrelevant.’ Back to Alex. ‘Would you mind waiting downstairs?’
He nods, glances uncertainly at me.
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Yeah.’
Murphy leans against the wall between the bathroom and bedroom doors, folds her arms and waits until we hear Alex’s footsteps reach the hall.
‘All right, Ellie,’ she says then. ‘Consider this quit-the-shit o’clock. What’s actually going on here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Give me your best guess.’
But I can’t.
I can’t tell her about the Murder House Club, or Steve, or Annalise sending weird messages, and I definitely can’t tell her about the stain.
Because if I tell her anything, this becomes something.
And I can’t let that happen. I don’t want her or any of her colleagues investigating anything. Because, eventually, their attention will turn to me.
All I have left is this house and my secrets. I need to keep them, no matter what.
‘This house has been vacant for years,’ I say airily. ‘It’s probably just teenagers or something.’
‘Teenagers? We’re not in The Wire, Ellie. This is Dundrum. Did you call that locksmith?’
‘They’re coming tomorrow.’
Murphy raises a thick eyebrow. ‘They had a three-day wait?’
‘That’s just when suited me.’
‘Where did you live before this?’
‘Here in Dublin. An apartment in Grand Canal Dock.’
Technically not a lie, since she didn’t specify immediately before.
‘What do you do for work?’ Murphy asks.
‘I’m between jobs, at the moment.’
‘I’ll need to see your ID.’
I think I actually see a flash of white-hot panic before my eyes, like the exact moment a bomb detonates.
What do I do? What do I do? What do I—?
‘I don’t drive,’ I say, ‘so I only have my passport.’
‘That’ll do.’
‘That’s at my mother’s.’
Murphy’s eyes narrow. ‘And where’s that?’
‘Westport.’ The first place on the opposite side of the country that comes to mind.
‘And what are you planning on doing about it?’
‘Well, I was going to get it. Obviously. Next time I see her.’
‘Which will be when?’
‘I don’t know. Things are a bit busy at the moment.’
‘Because you’re between jobs.’
‘I’m busy looking for one.’
A beat passes.
Murphy tilts her head, scrutinizing me. ‘Are you sure we haven’t met before?’
I take a deep breath and say, ‘I think I’d like you to leave.’
‘And I’d like to see you in the station with your photo ID, no later than end of the day Friday.’
My insides feel like they’re in freefall.
‘I … I don’t think I have to do that,’ I say weakly.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ Murphy says. ‘You don’t have to do that. But I have the right to arrest you if you refuse. So, it’s up to you. Choose your own adventure.’ She turns to go. ‘And get that locksmith out here, tonight.’
I hold my breath until she’s on the stairs. I feel hot under my skin but chilled by the cold sweat starting to break out all over it.
I grasp at lunatic notions. I could just ignore her. Procure a fake ID. Cut and run. But each idea is worse than the last and I have no others.
The sound of the legs of a chair scraping on my kitchen floor reminds me that I’m not home alone. I hurry downstairs. Murphy has left the front door closed but not fully shut it, and I don’t shut it either because I’ll be seeing Alex out of it in a moment’s time.
I turn down the hall, go into the kitchen—
And stop when I see that the person standing with their back to me in the open patio door isn’t Alex.
What the …?
‘Can I help you?’ I say sharply.
Annalise whips around.
I catch her slipping her phone back into the pocket of her coat as she turns, and when I look at her face I know that she’s seen me see it.
‘There you are!’ she says, as if what she was doing was, in fact, looking for me. ‘Alex asked me to tell you he’d be back in a minute – he’s just grabbing something …’ She slides the patio door closed and comes towards me. ‘Ellie, I presume? I’m Annalise. From number three.’
‘I know.’
Something flickers across her face, but whatever it was is quickly replaced by a bright, wide smile.