Read Online Can Anybody Help Me? by Sinéad Crowley - Free Book Online

After a moment he blinked, levered himself up off the floor and returned her handshake limply. His face was as white as his glistening shirt cuff, she noticed. Lives with his mammy, she decided.
    â€˜We’ll need to have a chat with you about what happened.’
    The young man looked at her again, his blank stare leading Claire to wonder if he needed a doctor rather than a guard. Andthen he blinked again, a nervous tick that seemed to allow him the space to gather his thoughts.
    â€˜I’m just, like, the estate agent?’
    â€˜Mmm.’
    Technically she was supposed to pack him off to the station at this stage. But she hadn’t actually asked him for a statement yet so she made use of her old friend, the non-committal pause to see what else he could come up with.
    â€˜We, like, let this place?’
    Ow, that accent. Claire wondered just when the memo had been sent out to every Irish person under the age of thirty that they had to end every sentence with a question mark.
    â€˜I was just checking. To see why the rent hadn’t been paid. I mean we have a key, it’s totally okay for us to let ourselves in …’
    The young man’s face crumpled. He was even younger than she first thought, Claire guessed, maybe closer to twenty-three. She reached out again and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.
    â€˜We’re going to have to take an official statement from you, is that okay?’
    He nodded, tears streaming down his face.
    Claire turned and winked at Flynn who was staring at the carpet as if a clue to the crime had been mashed in along with the chow mein.
    â€˜Detective Flynn will show you down to the car …’
    Flynn looked up and gestured at the man to follow him. Claire watched as the two departed, Flynn’s erect figure dwarfed by the loping gait and sagging shoulders of the young estate agent. Usually at this stage people were beginning torealise the seriousness of the situation they had come across, might even manage a brave ‘this has nothing to do with me, you know!’ but this poor fecker couldn’t even manage a line ripped off CSI. He just seemed … empty. Broken by what he had seen. By whatever lay behind the door of number 123. The young Guard, Siobhan O’Doheny Claire thought her name was, had once again taken up a position outside the apartment. Claire jerked her head in the direction of the door.
    â€˜Dr Sheehy inside?’
    O’Doheny nodded.
    â€˜Grand.’
    She ducked under the tape and pushed open the apartment door, which swung smoothly on its hinges, opening silently onto a small empty entrance hall. The place looked like it had been furnished by a computer. Bare magnolia walls, a clean laminate wooden floor. There was just one element ruining the clean lines though. The smell that was prickling against her nostrils.
    Moving slowly as if afraid to disturb the very atoms in the air around her, she walked through the entrance space and into what she assumed was the main living room. Three white-suited members of the Garda Technical Bureau were deep in conversation with the tall, dark-haired Deputy State Patholo-gist. Dr Helen Sheehy looked up at Claire, nodded briefly and continued her conversation. Claire had attended enough crime scenes to interpret the signal. Come in, have a look, don’t mess with anything. That was an instruction she would be happy to follow.
    With five of them in the sitting room, the space was almost comically overcrowded. As had been the case with the hallway,there was no personal touch, no sign that anyone other than the carpet fitters had ever been inside. The furniture was scant, one brown leather sofa, one long low coffee table which contained neither books nor magazines. A letter from a telephone company offering cheaper bills lay on top of the dusty mantel-piece. Claire walked over, looked at the address. ‘To the Occupant’, printed in bold black letters. Her nostrils