56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

Today

Technically speaking, it’s Friday-morningrush-hour, but Lee has the roads to herself. She makes it to Kimmage in no time at all and lucks into a parking space right outside the house. The street is still, its residents robbed of all their reasons to get up early, to start their days somewhere farther away than another room of their home. There’ve been no commutes for weeks now, no school runs, no tourists arriving in or heading off. Even the plague of early morning joggers from the start of lockdown seems to have tapered off.

The nation’s collective motivation to make the most of this is waning, that much is obvious. She wonders how many sourdough starters have been, by now, unceremoniously fecked in the bin.

Lee rolls down the driver’s-side window and settles in to drink her coffee. The coffee that she had to watch someone make with gloved hands and theatrical caution as if it wasn’t a cappuccino they were making but a bomb, whose cost included the forced sanitizing of her already dry and chapped hands before and after collecting, that only has two sugars instead of her preferred three because now the barista has to put them in for you and she was too embarrassed to ask for that many, the coffee that she’d literally risked life and limb to get.

She refuses to let it go cold after all that.

With her free hand, Lee pulls down the visor and inspects the wedge of her own face she can see in the little mirror there. She seriously needed her roots done before they shut down the salons; the brunette is practically down to her ears and in this natural light, appears to end in a blunt line. Like every other morning she’s left home in a hurry, hair still wet, and now it’s drying into her trademark helmet of electrified frizz. She thought she had thrown some makeup on but it has evidently managed to clean itself off in the last half hour. The smudge of tan foundation on the collar of her white shirt is the only evidence it was ever there at all.

She really needs to get her shit together.

There’s a part of her that wishes she had a different job, the kind that’s normally done from a stationary desk in an office and can now be—now must be—done from home. She’s found herself fantasizing about being one of those women who live alone, temporarily free from all exhausting social expectations, finally able to establish a skincare routine and a yoga practice with that girl on YouTube who everyone raves about; to crack the spine on the healthy-food cookbooks her family has been pointedly gifting her for years; to go for long walks along beaches and clifftops and through woodland, the kind of treks that leave you pink-cheeked and aching with smug self-satisfaction and reconnected with nature (although Lee would have to connect with it first); emerging from the other end of this lockdown a shinier, smoother, brighter version of herself, Lee 2.0.

And honestly, she’d settle for painting her living room and losing half a stone.

But there are no beaches or clifftops or woodland within a two-kilometer radius of her front door, the hardware shops are closed and there is no lockdown for her. She’s still at bloody work.

On the passenger seat, her phone beeps with a new text message.

She knows damn well who it is before a glance at the phone’s screen confirms it: KARLY.

Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly. She’d added the “Y” to annoy him and it had worked a treat.

The message says:

BTA?

Lee doesn’t pick up the phone. She takes another long, slow sip of her coffee. But when her phone beeps for a second time, she curses, shoves the coffee into the cup holder between the front seats, and climbs out of the car.

The house looks exactly as it did the only other time she was here. A narrow, two-story redbrick terrace that, were it in mint condition, would easily sell for half a million around these parts. But this one is crumbling. The bricks need cleaning and the roof tiles repairing. The window frames are wooden and rotting in the corners. Paint is enthusiastically peeling off the front door. A skip is parked in the driveway, half-full with seventies furniture and broken things.

It was there the last time, too. Lee distinctly remembers seeing the cracked salmon-colored bathroom sink because her parents had one just like it. This house was a work-in-progress without much progress, and now, like everything else, its renovation is on pause.

She should ring the doorbell, announce her presence. Should. But she isn’t in a charitable mood this morning. Instead, she goes to the front window and touches her fingers to the underside of its cement sill, feeling for the hollow she’s been told is there. She quickly finds it—and the pointy end of the key that’s inside.

Stealthily, she lets herself in through the front door.

The house is still, the air a little musty, stale. There are no carpets on the ground floor—only bare, dusty floorboards—but a heinous swirl of shit-brown and bright-orange clings to the staircase. She starts up it, moving slowly and carefully, testing her weight on each step so as to avoid a telltale creak.

There’s no noise in the house, no sounds from upstairs, but the quiet has a deliberateness to it.

Someone is maintaining it.

He’s not asleep, then, but awake and waiting for her.

Maybe he even heard her come in.

Lee reaches the landing. Four doors lead off it. One is open onto a room filled with building materials: a workbench, some sort of sanding machine with its electrical cord wrapped around itself, boxes marked “Crackled White 7.5 × 4.” Another is showing her a bathroom that appears to be in mid-update. A third looks like it can only be hiding a boiler. The fourth then, to the front of the house, is the master bedroom.

That door has been pulled closed but isn’t fully shut.

She pauses outside, then kicks it open with such force that it opens all the way, hitting the wall behind it with a thunderclap.

The first thing she sees is the wallpaper. It must have been bought on the same shopping trip that found the diarrhea-after-carrots-carpet on the stairs. It’s an acid trip of bright-blue paisley, and it hurts her eyes.

Then the smell hits: sweat and sex and alcohol, trapped and cooking in the room’s warm air.

She should’ve worn a mask, she thinks now. God only knows what’s floating around in here.

“Well,” she says, “what seems to be the problem?”

Karl is lying on the bed, presumably naked under the fitted sheet that he’s somehow managed to lift off the bottom corners of the mattress and drape across his lower half.

This must have taken some doing seeing as both his arms are outstretched, hands higher than his shoulders, like Christ on the cross.

Only Karl’s wrists aren’t nailed to the headboard, but handcuffed to it.

“Two sets?” Lee frowns. “Where’d you get the second lot?”

“Go on,” Karl groans. “Lap it up.”

“Oh, I fully intend to.”

“You know, I could’ve sworn I heard you pull up outside five minutes ago.”

“How long have you been like this?” Lee asks.

“All bloody night.”

“Did you sleep?”

Karl attempts a shrug, then winces at the pain this move causes him. “Dozed. Hey, do you think you could free me before this interrogation continues? I’d get better treatment in the cells.”

“How did you text me if—”

“Siri.”

Karl nods toward his phone, lying on the bedside table.

“She got a letter wrong in the last one,” Lee says.

“You take your time.”

“Look, you’re lucky I came at all. And I’m just dying to find out what Plan B was.”

“I know this is the best thing that’s ever happened to you, Lee, but I can’t actually feel my hands here.”

She indulges in an eye roll before relenting, fishing her keys from her trouser pocket and moving toward the bed.

“Whatever you do,” she says, “hang on to that fitted sheet.”

Karl scoffs. “Like you wouldn’t love a look.”

“I’ve had a look, remember? Although I barely do. Wasn’t particularly memorable.” She pulls Karl’s right wrist toward her—he yelps in pain—and bends to work the small key into the cuff’s lock. “So where is she, then? Who is she?”

“Fuck knows. On both counts.”

“Ever the romantic, eh, Karl?”

“I’ve seen you open cuffs. What the hell is taking so long this—”

The key clicks in the lock and Lee ratchets the cuff open enough to slide it off Karl’s wrist.

His arm drops onto the bed like a dead weight that’s been cleanly detached from his body. Gingerly, he tries to bend it but only manages a few degrees before spitting out a string of curse words, closing his eyes and giving up.

“Are the keys even here?” Lee asks, moving to the other side of the bed to work on the other set.

“Took them with her. Told me she was going to flush them down the toilet. Well, joke’s on her because it isn’t even connected.”

Lee makes a face. “Where are you . . . ?”

“Porta Potti. Out by the shed.”

“Did she know that before she came back here?”

“No, and she came over.” He grins. “And she came—”

“If you finish that sentence, I swear to God, I’m locking you back up.”

When the second set is removed, Karl lurches forward, wincing as he tries to bring his arms closer to his body, increasing both the vehemence and the range of his muttered swears with every inch.

“Christ. My arms feel like they’re on fire.”

“Well, let that be a lesson to you.” Lee steps back from the bed. “And she lives less than two kilometers away, I suppose, this mysterious, angry woman?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugs. “Didn’t ask.”

“Karl, for feck’s sake. You will end up on Snapchat at the rate you’re going and even I won’t be able to save your arse then.”

A relatively new phenomenon: members of the Gardaí ending up named and shamed on social media. The last one that got the attention of the higher-ups was a video clip from a house party hosted by a known drug dealer, at which a Garda currently stationed in the district was a seemingly enthusiastic and friendly guest.

“I didn’t tell her I was a guard,” Karl says, as if such a thing was preposterous even though he’d managed to get locked in two sets of handcuffs during a sex game with a stranger whose visit to his house also constituted a breach of the country’s current COVID-19 restrictions.

“Where did you tell her you got the handcuffs from, then?”

“I didn’t. We weren’t doing much talking, Lee, if you know what I—”

“Do even less of it now.”

Lee looks down at the second set of cuffs, which she’s still holding, and sees a mark in blue paint near the lock and two initials scratched into the metal by the hinge: E.M.

She shakes her head. “Seriously, Karl?”

“What?”

He looks up at her, at the cuffs in her hand, back at her face. He’s managed to bring his arms into his lap but is rigid in that position, like his entire upper body is encased in an invisible plaster cast.

“Don’t you ‘What?’ me. You know what. These are Eddie’s. Blue paint, initials. That’s what it said on the report the poor guy had to file because he thought he’d lost them.”

“He did lose them. He forgot to take them off that coked-up eejit we hauled out of the house party in Trinity Hall a few weeks back.”

“You know he’s already on thin ice,” Lee says.

“And you know why: he’s shit.”

“It wouldn’t occur to you to help the guy out a little bit?”

“I am helping him out,” Karl says. “Out of the force, because he doesn’t belong in it.”

Lee’s phone starts to ring.

The number on the screen belongs to the station on Sundrive Road, which instantly piques her interest.

Why would someone at the station be calling, when her and Karl aren’t due on shift for another half an hour?

And why not just hail them on the radio?

“Lee,” a male voice says when she answers. “We’ve got a problem.” She recognizes it as belonging to Stephen, one of the lads on the unit. “Can you talk?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Go on.”

“A call came in at the crack of dawn from our friend over at the Crossings, the one-woman residents’ association. We assumed it was just going to be another waste of everyone’s time, so we, ah . . .” He clears his throat. “Well, we sent Ant and Dec.”

“You did what?”

Since the unit’s two newest members look like Confirmation boys and one of them is called Declan, they’d instantly earned a nickname inspired by the eternally youthful duo of TV presenters.

“We didn’t think it was going to be anything,” Stephen says. “Same one has been calling every other day to tell us her neighbors have friends over.”

“And what was it this time?”

“There’s a body in one of the ground-floor apartments. And not a pajamas-in-their-own-bed kind.”

“Fuck,” Lee says.

“Lucky for us, she called an ambulance too and Paul Philips was driving it. As soon as he arrived on-scene, he realized what it was and told Ant and Dec that they’d better call Mummy and Daddy.”

Two green bananas, alone together at a crime scene, with no senior officer to tell them which is their ass and which is their elbow. The first members on-scene in a potential murder investigation. Lee knows nothing more than this, but she can already see any hope of a successful prosecution getting further away with each passing, inexperienced second.

She pinches the bridge of her nose, closes her eyes.

When she opens them again, she sees Karl looking at her questioningly.

“I know this is bad,” Stephen says in her ear, “but we didn’t think—”

“We’ll talk about the not-thinking later. I’m with Karl, we’ll go straight there now. Text me the full address. Send me a few cars. Tech Bureau and pathologist, too. If anyone else gets there before us, tell them to set up the cordon. No one leaves. Then call Ant and Dec back and tell them one of them needs to stand outside the apartment door and the other one needs to meet me outside the building and they are not to so much as breathe until I get there. Keep this off the air until you hear from me again. And start praying that this gets un-fucked-up before our Super gets wind of it. Got all that?”

“Got it.”

After she ends the call, Lee throws Eddie’s cuffs onto the bed in a high arc, hitting Karl square between the legs with their full weight and then some, sending him into a spasm of new pain.

She doesn’t wait for him to recover.

“Get dressed,” she says. “We need to go. Now.”