56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
64 Days Ago
The man Ciara thought could be Oliver St Ledger worked on the fourth floor of a glossy new office building that loomed over all the other, older, smaller ones on Baggot Street Upper—according to what she could glean from Google Street View. The firm of estate agents who’d been tasked with finding tenants for it had made a slick video showcasing the building’s interior and posted it to their website. Inside were four floors’ worth of glass-box offices, a reception desk large enough to accommodate three gatekeepers in the lobby, and electronic turnstiles protecting access to the stairs and elevator.
You couldn’t just walk in and wander around.
She’d need a reason to be there.
Pretending to be a client, she figured, would be the quickest way to get found out; she would have no idea what to say or who to ask for—and what were the chances that, even if she managed to keep up some kind of pretense for a while, the firm would choose Oliver Kennedy to meet with her? Going by the website, he seemed like a junior member of staff.
She’d thought about impersonating a courier who was delivering something that had to be signed for, but almost immediately that plan revealed itself to have two flaws. One of those three receptionists would probably insist on taking it off her hands and, even if they allowed her upstairs to deliver the package in person, what could it possibly contain that wouldn’t immediately set alarm bells ringing for the recipient? If Oliver Kennedy was Oliver St Ledger, he’d spent his whole adult life protecting his real identity. Someone else might dismiss it as a mix-up or mistake, but he wouldn’t. And then he’d be on high alert.
Which just left one option, as far as Ciara could see: apply to work there.
Get inside under the guise of a job interview.
On the KB Studios website, the Join Our Team link had led to two listings for current vacancies, one of which was a junior office manager. Ciara set up a new Gmail account under a fake name and sent in a CV with it. A week had passed, draining her nerve away a little more each day. What the hell was she doing? How did she think this was going to end? What was her plan: walk up to this guy and say, Hey. Are you Oliver St Ledger? Great. Would you mind telling me exactly what happened on the afternoon that you murdered Paul Kelleher? But when a message arrived in her inbox calling her for an interview, she found she had just enough nerve left to say yes.
So now she’s sitting on a cushioned bench in the lobby, looking at the enormous reception desk in real life, rubbing clammy palms on her polyester trousers.
Thinking there’s absolutely no way she can go through with this.
Can she?
She’d arrived ten minutes early and has been instructed to take a seat and wait. Someone will come and get you, the receptionist had said. For one wild, fleeting moment, Ciara had pictured that someone being Oliver St Ledger—but it was difficult to. Besides the astronomical odds, she couldn’t quite build a mental image of his face.
Up until the murder, her mother had kept everything: every school report, every crayon drawing, every souvenir. Afterward, she’d stopped not only adding to her collection, but looking at it, too. There were dozens of dusty shoeboxes and dented biscuit tins piled up in the attic, and in the last week, Ciara had spent a day going through them. She thought the chances were good that her mother had accidentally archived a picture of a future killer, and she was right.
The Mill River Boys’ National School published a glossy newsletter at the end of every academic year and her mother had saved them all. The class photos they included weren’t captioned, so they were of no use, but the newsletters also included collages of action shots from the school’s various sports teams, and they were. Twelve-year-old Oliver St Ledger had played rugby. There were two full-color photos of him in the newsletter sent home in June 2003. One of them showed him running with the ball, his features blurred by motion, but in the other, he was standing with his hands on his hips, in full-color and looking perfectly clear.
Ciara had stared at the photo for hours, studying every detail—and then cut it out and slipped it into a discreet pocket of her wallet, which was now in her bag by her feet.
But she has no idea if she’ll be able to match it to the adult now.
Or what she’ll do if she can.
“Ciara Murphy?” A young, slim, blond woman in a tight-fitting black dress has appeared in front of her.
Not knowing how good of a liar she could really be, Ciara had hedged her bets. She’d kept her own first name but adopted a fake second one: Murphy, the last name of every other person on this island, seemed like a safe choice. She’d taken the same approach with her CV, listing her real jobs up until her last one—Customer Experience Specialist at Blue Wave, which roughly translated into Call Center Minion for a cruise company—but pretended that she was still there, that that was her current role when, in reality, she’d been working in events for a hotel chain for nearly six months. She hadn’t bothered making up any college education.
“We’re almost ready for you,” the blond says. “If you come with me, I’ll bring you upstairs.”
Ciara stands, collects her things, and starts to follow the blond toward the bank of elevators, trying to ignore the thunderous beating of her heart in her chest. It’s so hard it’s loud, and it’s so loud she’s worried that when they get into the elevator and the doors close behind them, the other woman will be able to hear its pounding too.
“Don’t be nervous,” the woman says. “He’s very nice.”
“‘He’?”
The elevator doors open and they step inside.
“Kenneth Balfe.” The blond punches the button for the fourth floor. “He’s the managing director. He likes to do all the interviews himself, even for the admin staff.”
Kenneth Balfe.
KB Studios.
The strength goes out of Ciara’s knees and her body slumps against the side of the elevator.
Why the hell didn’t she put two and two together before?
Because she was too busy focusing on Oliver St Ledger. Who definitely works here, because his brother’s friend apparently owns the joint.
The blond is frowning at her. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine, thanks.” Ciara smiles weakly. “I’m just not great with elevators.”
“Oh, you should’ve said.”
“No, no. It’s fine.”
“We’re almost there, anyway.”
A ding signals that they’ve arrived.
The doors slide open to reveal another reception area, this one outside a pair of double-glass doors with KB Studios stenciled on them in gold. Two gray sofas form an L shape around a coffee table strewn with glossy brochures while, in the corner, a water dispenser gurgles next to a scale model of an office block. Its miniature trees look like wispy cotton balls that have been spray-painted green.
“Take a seat,” the blond says. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”
Ciara obeys and watches her disappear through the glass doors. Beyond them, she can see the promise of an open-plan office space, people milling about. She’s too far away to properly search their faces, but—
Her eyes land on a framed picture hanging on the wall next to the doors.
It’s of a smiling, slightly red-faced man in his late fifties, early sixties, accepting a chunk of blown glass from a woman in a glitzy evening dress. And he looks exactly like what the Ken Balfe she found on Instagram might in a few decades’ time.
The man who’s about to interview her must be Kenneth Balfe senior. Not a teenager at the time of the murder, but a grown man. An adult whose teenage son was friends with the brother of one of the killers.
Which makes him, she thinks, far more likely to remember things from back then. Including peripheral figures. Like the other family members, for instance.
Her, possibly.
She can’t chance meeting him. She has to get out of here.
Ciara grabs her bag and starts to walk away, just as she becomes aware of the glass doors to the office swinging open behind her. She holds her breath, thinking it’s the blond woman coming to collect her, waiting for the call of her name.
But it doesn’t come.
She can’t risk waiting for the elevator, so she starts hurrying down the stairs instead. Blood rushes in her ears. She winces at the conspicuous clacking of her heels on the marble. She reaches the first landing and turns to start down the next flight—
And that’s when she sees him.
Standing at the top of the stairs. Looking at his phone in his hand. Tall. About her age. Neither muscular nor soft, but solid. Broad-shouldered. Dark hair, thick and messy, but in a way that suggests it was carefully teased to look so.
Oliver St Ledger.
It’s him.
It’s him it’s him it’s him it’s him it’s him.
She knows this for sure, even if, at the same time, she can’t quite believe it.
Out of sight, she hears the double doors to the office swing open again and a female voice say, “Ciara—? Oh,” and then, after a pause, “Oliver, did you happen to see a woman here when you came out? Brown hair, black suit?”
Oliver’s head begins to rise, his gaze lifting from his phone.
Ciara hurtles herself forward, nearly missing the first step, awkwardly regaining her balance and then dashing out of sight, heels clacking loudly, all the way down the stairs.