If I Never See You Again (2 page)
The sloped lawn was only the size of a postage stamp, but it had looked permanently shabby since Dan had left. Much as she enjoyed gardening, Jo liked the idea of keeping potential buyers at bay for as long as possible even more. Even in a recession, she could never have afforded this place now that Dundrum town centre and the city’s ring road had sprung up so close. But back when they were buying, this place had been considered the sticks, and the house in need of complete refurbishment. Times had changed, Jo thought as she struggled with the shopping. At weekends, a fleet of hip young professionals wearing shades on their heads and driving convertibles converged on the picnic benches outside Lamb Doyles or the Blue Light pub to drink cider and take in the view from the smog-line perch over the city. Jo had become adept at dodging the estate agent’s calls.
She had a splitting headache and was having no luck
trying to shake the bag free of the stroller in the boot so as not to disrupt Harry, her mobile phone gripped between her teeth. There was a sixteen-year age gap between her boys and, on days like this, the having-it-all dream seemed more like a downright lie than a myth. Eventually, the bag containing the dinner crashed out on the tarmac, bringing with it the stroller and a stack of fluttering paperwork, and Jo snagged her finger in snapping metal in the process. She sucked and shook her hand miserably, stamping on the documents before bending sideways to scoop everything back up and in.
Once the balancing act had negotiated its way through the front door, Jo dropped her bags where she stood and carried Harry, who was still – miraculously – sleeping, to his cot beside the bed in her room. After tucking him in snugly, she flicked the baby monitor on.
Heading back down the hall, she swung into the sitting room and leaned over the back of the couch. She plucked a beer bottle and remote control from the armrest.
‘Hey,’ Rory protested, scrambling to his feet and turning around.
Her eldest son scrunched his eyes shut as Jo flicked the light on.
‘Next time, I tell your father,’ she warned, hitting the mute button. Incoherent gangsta rap came to an abrupt halt.
‘Yeah, cos, like, he’ll take the call,’ Rory jeered.
She froze with her back to him and began the silent count to ten. ‘Would you like your dinner now? Will Becky have some? And does her mum know she’s here?’ she said, walking into the kitchen, where yesterday evening’s dirty dishes confronted her.
‘Yes, please, and yes, Mrs Mason,’ the body that had been
squirming under Rory on the couch called back. The pretty blonde teenager sat up and buttoned up her blouse quickly, smoothing her long hair back into place.
Jo glanced at the yellow Post-it stuck to the broken dishwasher door that was supposed to have been a foolproof reminder to Phone a plumber!!! for the last two days. She sighed, pulled up a sleeve and rooted under the bottom of the stack of dishes in the sink for the plug.
‘We’re starving,’ Rory announced, arriving and asking behind her, ‘Okay if Becky stays the night?’
‘Spag Bol in approximately forty-five . . .’ Jo said. ‘And yes, if Becky puts her mum on the phone to clear it.’
Rory grunted.
Jo turned and eyed the handsome teenager towering over her. He looked so like his father suddenly that she caught a breath. Rory’s shoulder-length hair needed a cut, his grungy clothes needed a wash and the swollen new piercing in his right eyebrow needed a doctor. His rebellious phase had kicked in the minute she’d brought Harry home and had culminated with him deciding to move in with Dan. It didn’t feel like home without him.
‘Don’t you bloody well dare light that in here,’ she warned, seeing the roll-up he was licking.
‘I wasn’t planning to, Mother,’ he said.
Jo turned her back to him as she pulled open the medicine press and pushed horse-dosage pink and yellow tablets out of the blister pack and into her mouth, crooking her neck to gulp them back. She was so used to eating and drinking on the run, a glass of water didn’t occur to her. The box also stipulated that you only took the yellow tab if the pink didn’t work.
Who had time to wait?
Headaches were something she lived with on a daily basis.
‘Rory, can you get that?’ she called, wiping her streaming eyes on the back of her sleeve. ‘Blast!’ she complained when it chimed again. She cocked an ear to see if it had woken Harry, glanced from the pan sizzling on a hotplate to the door, then hurried down the hall, throwing her eyes up to heaven as she passed the sitting room and spotted Rory making out on the couch again.
Peering through the spyhole, she stepped back suddenly, muttering, ‘Shit,’ under her breath. It was Dan, with the baby’s overnight bag slung over his shoulder. She’d forgotten it was his night for Harry. She tilted her head against the front door briefly, then pulled it open and stood aside.
Her ex-husband was tall and broad, with a boxer’s nose and hands and Rory’s blue-black hair, which he wore just shy of a crew cut to minimize his lightly receding hairline. His shirt collar was still buttoned closed, meaning he’d come straight from the station. She was still furious with him for showing up at the training session earlier when he must have had a million jobs that took priority, but,
realizing that tension was practically steaming off him as he entered, she held her tongue.
Living with him before a suspect was nominated used to be a nightmare. It was like waiting for a pressure cooker to blow. Jo had left the murder scene as soon as the forensic team had arrived but she knew from the fidgety way Dan was behaving that he had been there too. Jo couldn’t contain her feelings when she was working on a case, but Dan would bottle it all up. He’d nearly lost it after a child’s body was found in the Phoenix Park a few years back. He had kept it together during the inquiry, and then when the case was finally solved he’d erupted over something incidental – she’d forgotten to set the video to record some match he’d wanted to watch after work. He’d reacted like it was the end of the world. He’d walked out on her and stayed away from home for two nights, refusing to answer any of her calls to his mobile. Afterwards, he claimed he’d stayed in a hotel to get his head straight, but refused to tell her which one.
They differed in other ways too. Dan got stressed by any deviation from routine; Jo liked change (as long as it didn’t involve gadgets). Maybe they’d never have married if she hadn’t got pregnant with Rory when they were both still students in Templemore Training College. But definitely they’d still be together if she hadn’t got pregnant with Harry. Dan hadn’t wanted another baby, not with jobs as demanding as theirs, he’d said, though Jo knew he now loved Harry every bit as much as she did. If he hadn’t had a fling after they separated, while she was heavily pregnant, Jo would probably have taken him back the second she watched him take Harry in his arms for the first time. But then she’d found out the other woman was his secretary, Jeanie. And that she couldn’t forgive. Too many lines had been crossed. Jeanie had been
Dan’s secretary for ten years. Had those years been one long flirtation, and was there more to it, as Jo had regularly suspected? Why wouldn’t he just tell her the name of the hotel?
‘I’m just making dinner,’ she told him, holding her hair off her face with her arm.
‘Sorry, you go ahead, I’ll wait in the car,’ he’d said uncertainly. He’d been brought up in Manchester and his accent still had the twang.
Jo gave the door a flick behind him. ‘Why don’t you join us? You eaten?’
Dan managed a clenched smile. ‘You’re cooking?’
Jo pulled the dishcloth off her shoulder and whipped it off his leg. ‘Very funny,’ she said.
‘What did you make of her?’ he asked, following Jo down the hall.
‘Rita?’ Jo replied. ‘The killer went to a lot of trouble.’
‘That’s what I was afraid you were going to say,’ Dan said, glancing through the sitting-room door and calling, ‘Oi, haven’t you any homework to be getting on with?’
Jo began attempting to peel a clove of garlic at the butcher’s block but was all fingers and thumbs.
Dan had spotted the Post-it and pulled the dishwasher door open. ‘What’s the trouble?’ he asked.
‘Won’t work,’ Jo said, studying the back of a tube of tomato purée.
He walked the machine out from under the bench as if it were as light as a feather and lifted the trays out on the floor, kneeling to inspect inside. Jo used to marvel at the span of his shoulders. She forced herself to look away.
‘She was on the game,’ he said, reaching behind the machine and jolting something.
‘I gathered,’ Jo answered.
‘I wasn’t on my own. Foxy was with me,’ Jo said, abandoning the tube and scraping the onion into the pan. The hissing drowned out the sound of Dan snorting.
‘The forensic team is not happy,’ he continued, reaching across her to turn the heat down then pulling a screwdriver from a junk drawer.
‘Yeah, well, levitation isn’t something I’ve mastered yet,’ Jo replied, trying to squirt the purée on to the spoon then aiming it directly into the pan.
Dan shook his head, straightened up and took it off her. ‘We got an anonymous tip-off that a body was there – a unit of crime-scene examiners had been dispatched,’ he said, going back down on one knee. ‘That’s how they were on the scene so quickly after you.’ He closed the dishwasher door up, pressed the on/off button and nodded to himself at the sound of water flooding in, then turned it off.
Jo threw an arm over his shoulder as he stood up. ‘Thank you.’
He gave her a sidelong glance that lasted too long and she moved away awkwardly.
Dan stepped behind her, placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her away from the frying pan and towards the table, pushing her back into a chair. He tucked the dishcloth into the sides of his belt like an apron and started tossing the pan around the heat. Jo wasn’t about to argue. He was a great cook, while she had difficulty boiling an egg. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked.
Dan stretched across her to the cupboard over her head and pulled down two wine glasses. She suspected he knew
the effect he was having on her because of the way he looked at her when he said, ‘Make mine a small one, I’m supposed to be driving after.’
But when he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, Jo pulled her head away. She hated that he could still make her feel like this after everything that had happened. ‘I want you to put me in charge of the investigation,’ she said tetchily. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of murder cases I’ve been on, but I’m the only inspector in the division who hasn’t headed one up yet.’
Dan returned to the cooker. ‘It’s tricky,’ he said, handing a corkscrew to Jo. ‘You know that.’
Jo had lots of appropriate expletives, but there was no point using them when she knew he was right. Her promotion had finally come only on the back of her threat to take the force to the High Court after she was repeatedly passed over on the promotion list despite a record conviction rate in Store Street station, the divisional drugs HQ for the Dublin Metropolitan Area (DMA). She believed she was being held back because she was too gobby with the staff of the Justice Department. But she couldn’t help it – the system of social apartheid that operated in the courts drove her crazy. She couldn’t bear the way the legal eagles looked down their noses at people, the convoluted language they used, the wigs and gowns they wore. Even the sign on the restaurant door when the criminal courts sat in the Four Courts stipulated ‘Barristers only’, informing them they were ‘Entitled to free iced tea’. It all served to segregate people who were already intimidated enough by the whole process, people the justice system was supposed to serve. But she really wanted this case. If she solved it, she’d some hope of getting a transfer . . .
He placed his hands on her waist and slowly moved her sideways.
‘I worked hard for it,’ she continued, swallowing. ‘I did it by the book. I was in command. I could have done a deal.’
Dan scoffed, popped the cork and poured, clinking her glass. ‘You broke the cardinal rule,’ he said. ‘You started talking about angels, for Christ’s sake! You left Billy between a rock and a hard place. His only way to save face was by going through with it. And don’t even get me started on the shite you came out with about plasma screens!’
‘You’re wrong, Dan. I’d got his first name. I’d got him talking. I’d saved the kid. He wouldn’t have left her, not on her own.’
She took a sip and felt herself instantly start to mellow. ‘You sure you’re not just trying to keep me around?’
‘All right dad,’ Rory said, sticking his head around the door.
Jo moved further away from Dan.
‘Dishes,’ Dan instructed, tossing the dishcloth at him.
Rory headed slowly towards the sink, removing and inspecting the contents of the half-open grocery bag on the island on the way.
‘Do you have any idea how bad monosodium glutamate is for you, Mother?’ he asked, studying the back of a soup packet, then lifting and dropping a block of Parmesan with disdain. ‘Also, the smell of vomit is not conducive to appetite,’ he said.