The Doll's House

When Kate got back to the apartment after her run, she put on Sky News, deciding to grab a sandwich before Charlie came home. In less than fifteen minutes the first full police briefing would be under way in Harcourt Street. Lynch had agreed to give her an update afterwards.

Each bulletin posted on Sky News glossed the reports as if they were offering something new about the murder. Various psychologists had been lined up and interviewed about the downside of celebrity culture – subjecting your professional and personal life to public consumption. The merits, or otherwise, of reality television, where ordinary people hung out their dirty linen in public for their fifteen minutes of fame, were well thrashed out on account of Keith Jenkins being the latest addition to the fallen stars.

Kate wondered how many people, including Imogen Willis, looked up to these celebrities, aspiring to copy them, not for any particular skill but for their status. The world might think they knew Keith Jenkins, but his television persona was most likely very different from reality.

Keith Jenkins may have been known to many, but behind the makeup and the flashy lifestyle there was simply a man. Even if this killing was random, the psychological inner map of Keith Jenkins and the killer was part of the reason why their paths had crossed. The voice inside the killer’s head, formed through life experience, was the route to his identity, and the map that had led him to the murder of another.

There was no doubting, even in the early hours of the morning, that it was an open and exposed location. Why had the killer driven there? Why had he chosen drowning over stabbing, and why had he risked killing in the open with no attempt to hide his identity?

Monica Bramble from Sky News began interviewing ex-contributors to Keith Jenkins’s television show. According to his fans, Keith Jenkins made them feel he was their friend, a good mate to have in your corner. Of course, not everyone got the same treatment. Some participants in Real People, Real Lives received the sharp end of Keith Jenkins’s tongue. Monica Bramble might not be interviewing those participants on live television, but Kate was fairly sure the detectives investigating the murder would.





Clodagh


Walking back along the strand, I feel like a thief. I have my mum’s old papers and photographs hidden in my bag. If she was alive, I wouldn’t have dared take them. I had planned on removing just one photograph, the one with Dominic and me standing on the strand, with the twin red-and-white chimneys of Sandymount behind us. In the photograph, our arms are wrapped around each other, me with my wild ginger hair blowing across my face, him wearing a pair of flashy black sunglasses. I was five, and he was ten. We both look happy.

I pass row after row of houses overlooking the sea. When I was younger, if the tide was out, I used to look back at them in the distance. Their different-coloured doors reminded me of toy houses. Even now, all these years on, there is something about the sound of water that conjures up my father. If I try hard enough, I can imagine his voice floating in the rhythm of the waves, his words soft, calling me, saying things will be okay. During my eight weeks of rehab at Rosses Bay, I thought about a great many things, including how everything changed once he was gone.

At the house, the drawer in my mother’s dressing table had resisted when I first tried to pull it open. I needed to give it a good tug. It was filled with papers, chequebook stubs and old bills. The contents, unlike the rest of the house, were a mishmash of everything – an old television licence, bills, bank statements, and a diary from 1967, the year Dominic was born. It was full of handwritten notes about childhood injections, when both of us had measles and other illnesses. I took the diary with their marriage certificate, Dad’s death certificate and a clutter of old photographs stuffed into a large brown envelope, including the one with me and Dominic on the strand. I don’t recognise that little girl in the photograph. She doesn’t seem real to me, but real or not, I’m not ready to let her go just yet.

That was another thing I realised in rehab. For all the parts of my childhood that I can remember, huge chunks are completely lost to me, gaping black holes, especially around Dad’s death, and also Emmaline’s. I’m ashamed of being jealous of her. She was only a baby. Five days old. Cot deaths are tragic. I can’t imagine losing Ruby. I was seven when Emmaline died, shortly before Dad, but I remember little of it. Sometimes it feels like things were much easier when I was drinking. At least back then I could choose to opt out for a while.