56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

Today

Lee noses the vehicle in behind a squad car parked on double yellows outside a curved apartment complex of smooth gray brick, glass, and exposed steel off Harold’s Cross Road. Karl finishes his breakfast—a can of Red Bull—just as she cuts the engine.

She can see a uniform waiting for them outside what looks like the main entrance: a pair of glass doors under a sign that says The Crossings in polished gold lettering. His thumbs are hooked into his ballistics vest and he’s shifting his weight from foot to foot. Lee can’t tell from this distance whether it’s Ant or Dec but she’s not sure she could from up close either. Same with their namesakes. She settles on Presumed Dec for the time being.

There’s no sign of their reinforcements yet, but it’s barely been ten minutes since she hung up on Stephen.

She checks her phone for the message she’d asked him to send: the body is in apartment number one. She hopes there’s only a handful of units on each floor. The closer the scene is to the main entrance, the fewer people will see them arrive, thus the more chance they have of fixing this before things go any more wrong.

She turns to Karl.

“Are you clear on what you’re doing?”

“Cleaning up the massive soft shit this pair just took?”

“This isn’t their fault, Karl. It’s whatever eejit sent them out here, alone. And we don’t know what they did yet, so try not to go in there all, you know, being you.”

“Funny and attractive?”

“An absolute dickhead.”

Karl clamps a hand on his chest as if he’s just been shot in the heart.

“They’ve only been on the job five minutes,” Lee says. “Cut them some slack, is all I’m saying.”

“You know, you should really put something on that bleeding heart of yours.” He opens the passenger-side door. “I think I might have seen a first-aid box in the back . . .”

Once they’re outside, the uniform hurries toward them.

They meet on the path.

“Detective Inspector Leah Riordan,” she says to him, “and Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly. What have we got here . . . ?”

“Michael,” the young guard finishes. He pulls down his mask. “Garda Michael Creedon.”

“What’s going on here, Michael? In brief.”

Lee is encouraged by the fact that he flips open his notebook before answering.

“Well, we, ah, got here around half seven,” he says, scanning his notes. “Seven twenty-six. One of—”

“Seven twenty-six?” Karl asks. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I wrote it—”

“Not seven twenty-seven?”

The young guard’s cheeks start to color, and Lee digs Karl in the ribs before motioning for Michael to continue.

“Ah, yeah, so . . .” He clears his throat. “One of the residents was here waiting for us—Gillian Fannin. She lives in number four. She’s the one who called it in.”

“What did she call in,” Lee asks, “exactly?”

“A smell in the hall that she thought was coming from her neighbor’s apartment. Number one. Three doors away from hers but in the same corridor. She presumed it was just rotting food waste or something at first, but it was getting worse so . . . This morning she goes to knock on the door—but the door is open.”

“Open how?”

“She described it as pulled closed but not fully shut. The lock wasn’t engaged. She pushed it open a couple of inches—she was going to call out, see if anyone was home—but the smell was much worse then and she retreated, went back to her own apartment and made the call. Well, two calls—one to the station, one to 999 for an ambulance.”

“So she didn’t actually go inside?”

“She says she didn’t, no.”

“What was the door like when you first saw it?”

“As she’d described,” Michael says. “Like she found it. It doesn’t seem to lock unless you pull it shut.”

“Does she know who lives there?”

“She thinks it’s a young guy, in his twenties or thirties, but that’s it. She hasn’t seen him in a while, maybe a couple of weeks. I checked the letterboxes but they only have numbers on them. No names.”

“Good thinking,” Lee says, throwing the guy a bone. She can practically feel Karl roll his eyes at this beside her. “The paramedics—they went in?”

“One of them”—he looks down at his notes again—“Paul Philips, he went in briefly. Came back out, said this wasn’t anything they could help with and advised us to call the station and tell them what was going on. Said he hadn’t touched the body, that it was clearly in an advanced state of decomposition. And that if he had to make a guess, he’d say whatever happened in there happened a couple of weeks ago.”

“Did they leave?”

“I think they’re parked around the back, by the vehicle entrance. He said something about pronouncing death for you if you didn’t want to wait for the pathologist . . . ?”

“Yeah, they’re able to do that now. But let’s wait and see. Did you go in?”

“No, Declan did. Again, very briefly. The body is in the bathroom, the first door off the hall, so he didn’t have to go in very far. And from there he said he could see into the living room and the bigger bedroom. Seems to be empty apart from . . .” He clears his throat again. “He was only in there a few seconds.”

Still plenty of time to destroy critical evidence, but maybe the blast zone won’t be as big as Lee had feared.

“Is the front door the only access?”

Michael shakes his head, no. “The ground-floor apartments have railed-in terraces. You could easily hop over. The sliding door that leads out of number one looks closed from the outside, but I didn’t check if it was locked. I was trying to touch as little as possible.” He points over his left shoulder. “There’s also a side gate and two fire exits, all alarmed according to Ms. Fannin, plus you have the underground car park. The entrance to it is round the back.”

“Anyone coming or going?”

“Not in or out this way. I think the time of the day is on our side there. One guy did try to leave for a run but he went back without much hassle. But we don’t know about vehicles.”

“Fire exits—is there one at the far end of the corridor?”

Michael nods.

“So there’s nothing between that exit and the door to apartment one? No other apartments?”

“There’s a door to the stairwell,” he says, “but that’s it.”

Lee nods at Karl, who understands: the fire exit will be their main access through the cordon. They’ll have to get the alarm system disabled first.

“Okay, good. Michael, I’m going to leave you with DS Connolly here to help him get things organized while I go inside and see what we’re dealing with. We should have a few more hands on deck any second now and once we do, I want to get that car park blocked off and this place secured. Hopefully, Number Four is just an early riser and all her neighbors are still asleep.”

Michael winces. “No such luck there, I’m afraid, Inspector. When we arrived, we thought we could go in via the side entrance. But when we pushed it open, well, it turns out it was an emergency exit. The fire alarm went off throughout the building, woke everybody up. So by the time we located Ms. Fannin—she met us in the courtyard—we, ah, we had an audience. The residents were all out on their balconies, watching.”

“Oh, great,” Karl mutters.

“The main thing now,” Lee says to Michael, “is making sure everyone stays put.” To Karl, “I’m going to take a look inside. You’re good to go out here?”

“Yes, boss.”

Lee says a silent prayer for Garda Michael Creedon as she turns and heads inside.

One of the glass doors has been propped open with a fire extinguisher; a keypad and electronic sensor suggest it’d be locked otherwise, accessible only by residents.

As soon as she crosses the threshold, the smell hits.

A sign on the wall directs her to the right for apartment number one, but the corridor curves so she can’t tell how many feet away from its door she is right now. Judging by the shape and size of the building, she must have somewhere between thirty and forty feet to go yet, and a door is open directly behind her and the air this morning is fresh and cool, and yet . . .

She can already smell it: the cloying, pungent aroma of rotting human flesh.

Like a cheap perfume years past its use-by date mixed with meat that’s been left to turn in the sun, spores multiplying and warming and spreading until they’ve replaced every last molecule of unscented air. It’s not that bad in the lobby, but it’s bad enough in the lobby to know that that’s how bad it’s going to get.

She thinks about poor Declan, standing outside the apartment’s door all this time. This will definitely be a story he trots out over pints with the lads in the years to come. She just hopes he won’t be ending it with and that’s the day I decided to quit.

Lee has a rummage in the pockets of her blazer, triumphant to find the very end of a packet of forgotten Silvermints just about still wrapped in their foil. There are benefits to forever failing to be organized and making clothing choices based purely on what looks the cleanest.

Two clean mints, one fuzzy with lint. She puts them back in her pocket, then takes a face mask from another one and snaps the bands around her ears.

The lobby is small but bright, benefiting from a second pair of glass doors directly opposite the ones she’s just come through. They lead to a central courtyard. Lee doesn’t go out there but scans it through the glass: a pleasant area landscaped to within an inch of its life, with vibrant green trees, wooden benches, and a trickling water feature that she knows will make her want to pee as soon as she hears it. The building bends around the space in a gently curved U shape, with a pair of large, wrought-iron gates filling in the open end. Emergency vehicle access, she guesses.

She counts three floors of apartments, about thirty in all if each one has one balcony. The ground-floor units have little tracts of private space outside patio doors, maybe about a narrow parking spot’s worth, demarcated by a metal railing. But the railings are low and open between their horizontal lengths, so easily climbed over, just as Michael said. There’s no one in the courtyard that she can see and from this angle, it’s hard to tell if there’s anyone watching from a balcony.

She turns back around.

Next to the main doors is a small and clearly brand-newhand-sanitizer dispenser. She looks for a lever before realizing it has an electronic sensor and sniffs the air as she rubs the clear liquid into her hands.

Lemongrass. Fancy.

The steel holder where the fire extinguisher should be is attached to the wall below a row of framed notices. The first is headlined “House Rules” above a bulleted list of—Lee squints—twenty-three separate instructions the residents of the Crossings apparently have to abide by.

Sounds like school, she thinks. Or prison.

The second is one of the government-issued, bright-yellowCOVID-19 information sheets. One of the early ones, going by the fact that it only contains three recommendations: wash your hands, practice good coughing etiquette, and maintain a distance of two meters away from other people.

The third framed notice is what to do in case of an emergency. Lee takes out her phone and dials the number for the management company printed in red across the top. It’s immediately picked up by an answering machine that instructs her to call a different number outside of office hours.

She checks the time on-screen: eight forty-five.

She dials the second number from memory. It rings twice before bringing her to the very same voicemail.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” she says out loud. She leaves a message with her name, rank, and number and a demand that someone call her back immediately.

Then she turns to the letterboxes. Four neat rows of slim boxes with stainless steel doors fixed low to the rear wall. She pulls a pair of blue latex gloves from her trouser pocket and puts them on, snapping them over the cuffs of her blazer to form a seal. She uses an index finger to open the narrow flap of the box marked “1,” bending down to see if she can see what’s inside.

There’s a slim, white envelope, but she can’t see any text on it from this angle.

She starts down the corridor, passing a set of lifts. It’s lit by strips of overhead fluorescents, motion activated; they flick on as she goes. The corridor curves to the left, revealing three more doors and Garda Declan—Casey? Is that his last name?—standing with his arms folded outside the door marked “1.”

He has two masks on: an inch of the blue, papery material of a disposable one is just visible behind the black cloth that covers his face from the bridge of his nose to his jawline. Not a bad idea, Lee thinks. A thin sheen of sweat glistens by his hairline and what she can see of his face seems to have a bit of a grayish tinge to it.

“You can go wait outside,” she says. “Get some fresh air.”

The young officer doesn’t need to be told twice; he’s moving away before she’s even finished talking.

The apartment door is about an inch from being completely shut—closed, but without the locking mechanism lined up. No visible marks or stains on the door, the frame, or the handle. Looks like there’s a light on on the other side.

Lee takes out the two clean Silvermints, lifts her mask with a finger, and pops them into her mouth. She lets them sit on her tongue, waiting until she can detect the sting of their menthol. Then she exhales hard, filling the mask with the smell of peppermint. It won’t last long—the mints are already softening, chalky edges crumbling—but it’s better than nothing.

She pushes open the apartment door—lock looks intact, nothing stuffed in the mechanism—revealing a narrow hallway. Hardwood floor, white wall, a silver-framed mirror hanging on the wall to the left just above a console table. The light is coming from a fixture on the ceiling but it looks like there’re other lights on elsewhere in the apartment too.

On the right is a door that opens outward, open about halfway, blocking most of her line of sight into the rest of the apartment.

Hitting her is what feels like a solid wall of smell.

Smellisn’t even the word for what’s in the air. A smell is something you have to breathe in to detect. What’s emitted by a decomposing body does all the work for you, leaving you no choice in the matter. It floods your nostrils and rushes into your mouth and claws at the back of your throat. It clings to every skin cell and clothing fiber and strand of hair. It makes your eyes water. It’s less of a smell and more of an invasion. An all-out assault.

So much for her bright idea with the mints—every last molecule of menthol is immediately vaporized.

Lee steels herself and steps inside.