If I Never See You Again (4 page)
A couple of hours later, Jo had read and flattened all the dog-eared reports and newspaper cuttings arced around her
on the desk. She leaned her forehead on her hands as she studied the victims’ photographs closely. Stuart Ball had that hard look that came from seeing too much of what human beings are capable of doing to each other. At the same time, he had the unearthly expression people always seemed to assume when they meet a tragic end. That look was probably the only thing he shared with the dead prostitute, Jo surmised. Rita was at the opposite end of the criminal spectrum: she sold herself to survive. Stuart sold her the drugs that forced her on her back. For this reason, Jo kept all the information on their cases in two separate piles.
Next, she placed a sheet of A4 paper landscape on the desk and wrote both the victims’ names on the left-hand side, drawing a line separating them from the space spanning the rest of the page. Alongside each name, in the larger right-hand column, she charted the element of spectacle in each death, listing the body part ‘hand’ beside Rita, ‘eye’ after Stuart.
A knot formed in her stomach as she realized that both had also been found in a state of undress.
She pushed the piece of paper aside and reached for the keyboard, running a broad internet search under the words ‘murdered’ and ‘stripped’. The search engine threw back multiple hits. She qualified her trawl with the word ‘symbolism’ then clicked on a leaked CIA document entitled ‘The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual 1983’, and read how some killers had been observed to take a sadistic glee in tampering with something as sacred as death by stripping or mutilating the corpse to instil fear in an enemy. This behaviour had become a recognized psychological technique of warfare. Deliberately humiliating the dead was a way of terrorizing the living.
Jo scraped her hair back off her face and stared at the page, then entered the list of body parts into the search engine. What it threw up made her sit back from the screen with a start. She was staring at a parable from the Book of Exodus. ‘A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a stroke for a stroke.’
‘Can you draw a magic carpet for me, so we can fly up off the ground and away from things?’ Dr Forte asked her.
Ryan glanced around the sterile office – filing cabinets and ornately framed qualifications were hardly likely to
stimulate a child whose imagination had been delivered a fatal blow.
Katie looked at the crayons and paper on the table in front of her then back again at the light playing between the wooden slats of a blind opposite. She started to flick her fingers in front of her eyes, studying them intently.
Ryan sighed heavily and jumped to his feet, heading for the water canister to pour himself a drink. He couldn’t stand this inactivity. He had to do something . . .
‘Ryan,’ his wife, Angie, chided.
He gulped the contents back, squeezed the plastic till it cracked and tossed it into the waste-paper basket before returning to his seat, shifting around uncomfortably. He felt every bit as powerless here in the shrink’s office as he had been the day that Katie vanished.
Dr Forte took Katie’s hand and pulled a puppet over it, inviting her to let it speak on her behalf. But her hand might as well not have been connected to her body, because she stopped moving it and began to rock gently instead. There was no room for flying carpets or puppets wherever she was. Ryan tapped his foot steadily against the leg of the desk.
‘Ryan,’ Angie said again.
Ryan placed his hand on his leg to remind himself to keep it still. Everything in his life had been spinning out of control from the second he’d switched from being the reporter to being the story itself. But only the people he’d have trusted with his life knew about the nightmare. He’d managed to keep Katie’s attack out of the papers because, instead of reporting the crime, he’d called a personal friend in the gardaí when she went missing.
The head of the emergency services was also a long-time associate, and had reassured him that the ambulance crew
who’d transported Katie to the Sex Assault Unit of Crumlin Children’s Hospital for tests after she was found would keep the incident quiet.
The neighbours had been given a cock-and-bull story about the ambulance having been called because she’d suffered an asthma attack.
No one at the paper knew what had happened. They’d only have found some way of turning it into a story, their ‘exclusive’. Ryan knew only too well how it would have read – ‘Scum Target Ace Reporter’s Kid’. The subheads would have referred to it as the worst attack on the freedom of the press since the murder of his colleague, Veronica Guerin. If he’d been the one reporting a story about someone else’s child, he’d have made sure to get Katie’s age up near the top to lure the voyeur on and in. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the people in his stories, just that human misery was the currency of the newspaper business. If he’d got personally involved in every tragedy he’d covered, he’d have been unable to get out of bed in the morning.
He tipped the swinging-metal-ball gadget perched on the doctor’s desk and watched the chain reaction it set into play. Angie shot him an angry look. Nothing new there. Most of the looks he got from her were angry now.
Katie stood up and walked over to the door, ready to leave. She was so broken-spirited that she reminded Ryan of a kicked dog and made him want to punch the wall. Instead, he swallowed the bile rising in the back of his throat as Angie and the doctor tried to persuade Katie back to her seat.
What had been done to her? Why wouldn’t she tell him so that they could help her get better?
‘I’d like to know how long Katie will be like this,’ he said.
‘For Christ’s sake, not in front of her,’ Angie said despairingly.
‘There’s no way of knowing,’ Dr Forte said, taking the little girl’s hand and opening the door into an adjoining playroom, in which Katie could be seen through a wide, one-way window.
When he returned, he continued where he’d left off as they watched her through the glass. ‘As I’ve already explained, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here. It may well be that Katie suffered a trauma that would have fractured the strongest of adult minds. You have to be patient and prepare yourselves for the fact that she may never recover enough to speak.’
Angie groaned. Ryan put his head in his hands.
‘She’s not responding to the treatment yet because she’s blanked out what happened,’ Dr Forte went on. ‘It’s a classic coping mechanism, where the survivor finds it easier to deny that anything has happened than process the reality. Unfortunately, by disabling the cognitive part of the brain, her ability to communicate has also been paralysed.’
Dr Forte paused and knit his fingers across his chest. ‘To put it another way, if Katie’s case ever results in a conviction and I am invited by the court to give a Victim Impact statement, I intend to give the view that Katie’s mental condition is by far the most devastating I have ever experienced in the twenty-three years that I have been providing therapy to juvenile victims of serious crime.’
Ryan winced. Forte had counselled kids who’d survived rape, attempted murder, seen their parents murdered. What the hell had happened to Katie? He looked at her in the playroom, rocking again, and then tuned out of the rest of Forte’s summation, fidgeting with the handle of his chair,
picking at a hole in his jeans, scratching at the back of his neck till it stung. When Angie ferociously locked her eyes on his, he focused again.
Katie would almost certainly experience flashbacks, the doctor was saying, and that was why, despite her youth, he was treating her with high doses of medication. She was on child’s anti-depressants, and paediatric sleeping tablets to get her through the nights.
‘But it’s vital that the two of you stay calm and close in front of her,’ Dr Forte concluded. ‘Katie needs to feel secure if she’s ever to relax enough to speak again.’
Angie looked at Ryan expectantly, and he nodded his acceptance of the terms. Dr Forte took it as his cue to bring Katie back into the room. Ryan sat silently through the rest of the session, thinking back to the day it happened, remembering where he’d been when he’d first received the news of Katie’s disappearance. He’d been standing at her empty bed when the implication had hit home like a concrete block.
It was all his fault
. The dolls, the diaries with heart-shaped padlocks, the angel figurines Katie collected – all had swirled into props from a horror movie. He really believed, sitting in her bedroom that terrible night she vanished, that she would never come home.
Ryan looked to Katie. She had begun to spin on the spot, faster and faster, head bowed, hands stretched behind her back like little wings.
‘Stop, stop, stop,’ Angie pleaded, her voice becoming gradually more panic-stricken as she looked from Ryan to her daughter, before running across the room and holding her.
Ryan was thinking about that look he kept seeing in his garda friend’s eyes when he’d first called to take down the
details of the abduction. He knew the cop was thinking Katie might be better off dead than being kept hostage and suffering, but Ryan was convinced that, no matter what had happened, if he could just get her home, he could fix anything.
For the first time, as he looked at his wife and Katie, the elation he’d experienced when his daughter had returned was replaced by the suspicion that his friend may have been right. What if Katie really was gone for ever anyway?
She tried winding the window up, but the handle came off in her hand. She tossed it on to the passenger seat, hitching her collar up against the night air. ‘Bloody marvellous,’ she groaned. The car was like a fridge as it was because the heater didn’t work. A cassette in the deck caught her eye, and she pulled it out, squinting to work out what it was from the handwritten scrawl on the side. It turned out to be one of Dan’s compilation albums, which had gone wonky from being played to death. She chucked it on to the seat too, and tried to concentrate on the case.
A couple of minutes later, Jo rubbed her forehead miserably. It was no use, and she knew exactly why. Dan had given her that tape as a present one Christmas years back when they hadn’t had a penny. It had meant the world to her. Every song had been picked for a reason, and he’d bitten her ear as he whispered the reminders – the one playing in the pub on their first date, another that they’d been dancing to when he proposed. She had lain curled up in his arms in bed feeling like the luckiest woman on earth. Next morning
he’d led her into the driveway, holding his hands over her eyes, until they reached the rest of her present – this bloody car. Jo felt her heart sink. It was hard to believe they could have grown so far apart since then . . .
She pulled up outside a block of flats. A billion euro had been pumped into the rejuvenation of Ballymun, a black spot on the north side, but she was still parked beside a lorry container doubling as a grocery shop. Its corrugated, windowless steel was fireproof and, as it weighed several tonnes, it couldn’t be stroked either. The worst part was that the original tenants allocated a place here by the corporation thought they’d landed on their feet. It was a black joke, like the name of the local pub – The Penthouse. The only thing more depressing than the view was the soundtrack, as Ballymun was situated under one of the city’s main airport flight paths.
Jo climbed out, discovering that she couldn’t even lock the door from outside any more, as the window pane had wedged itself against the lock.
You’d be doing me a favour
, she thought about any would-be joyriders.
She watched two kids ride by on a horse, as if on cue. They were riding bareback, holding on to its mane and causing havoc with the traffic. A double-decker bus was trying to pass, but the driver kept losing his nerve and swerving back. It was only a matter of time before someone and, most likely, the horse, got killed. ‘Urban cowboys’ they called kids around here. The thought of bringing her kids up somewhere like this made Jo shudder.
She walked over to the tower block and ducked into the stairwell; the lifts were permanently out of order. The smell of urine hit her taste buds at the same time as it did her nostrils. Jo almost jumped out of her skin when a group of
youths in hoodies taking the stairs three at a time almost knocked her over. She called, ‘Oi!’ after them, ignoring their hand gestures and taunts. Fortunately, Rita’s flat was on the second floor. Jo blew into the space between her hands, and rubbed as she continued on up. Even in summer, her feet felt cold with all the concrete. If you grew up in this part of town, life presented you with only two choices to escape it, she thought: sell drugs or take them. Like Rita.
Finding the door, she rapped a gleaming brass lion’s head and stepped back, checking her shoes and brushing specks of fluff off her jacket. Catching sight of her reflection in the knocker, she realized that old habits die hard. She used to go through the same grooming routine before every death knock. She’d done more than most, as women were considered better purveyors of bad news. Some were; some weren’t. She remembered one who always got a fit of giggles on the doorstep. Formal training for family liaison officers tasked with comforting a family, usually in cases of murder, had only been introduced after a male FLO working with the family of Raonaid Murray – a schoolgirl killed yards from her home – allegedly urinated in the spot where she had been knifed to death.
If Jo’d been the one dispatched here earlier today to break the news of the death, she’d have been practising what to say at this point – not that the words mattered. Most people guessed the second they opened the door.
‘Mrs Nulty?’ she asked the chink of white-haired, spindly pensioner peering behind a safety chain, after she heard the sound of a bolt-action lock.
‘Who wants to know?’ the old woman answered.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Jo Birmingham,’ Jo said, reaching into her bag for her ID then changing her mind, depressed
by another reminder of the amount of crap she carried everywhere. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss . . . I need to ask you some questions about your daughter, if you feel up to it.’
‘Come back tomorrow,’ the old woman whispered. ‘It’s late.’
Jo held up Rita’s two
50 notes. ‘She’d have wanted you to have these.’
The door closed momentarily, then swung open. Jo stepped inside and carried on past the woman, down the hall a few steps, left into the front room. Foxy’s first rule of thumb when it came to interviewing hostile witnesses was, the further inside you got, the more time you had to bring them around to your way of thinking. Procedure required a visit just like this to find out about the victim’s habits, associates, vehicles and movements prior to death, and to obtain particulars of his/her clothing, jewellery, personal effects, recent whereabouts and time of last meal. Ideally, you examined the victim’s bedroom and took possession of photographs, documents, diaries, etc., for potential use in the investigation too.
But Jo wasn’t attached to the investigation, at least not yet anyway.
Inside, the room was small and cheaply furnished but spotless. The air had the dry feel of gas heating, making the sickly-sweet smell of air freshener overpowering. Life-sized porcelain King Charles spaniels sat on either side of a tiled fireplace. Plastic flowers were on display in the window – hydrangeas.
Mrs Nulty was wearing a shiny, navy button-up pinafore over her clothes, and a pair of trendy Uggs that all the teenage girls were wearing. They didn’t lift off the ground when she moved.
‘You’ll have to keep it brief,’ she said.
Jo scanned her face, thinking that her kind of chippy, know-my-rights attitude only came with experience, especially after the news she’d got today. The woman’s eyes were not red-rimmed or puffy, she observed, and Mrs Nulty’s hands and voice were steady.
Because her murder came as no surprise to you
, Jo concluded.
You lost her years ago
.
Jo sat down on a floral-patterned couch and unbuttoned her coat. Foxy also believed in making yourself at home. It helped people to open up. ‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘Like I said, it’s late.’
Jo’s gaze travelled to the Belleek china models of dancing milkmaids on the TV and a brass carriage clock over the fireplace positioned on a crocheted doily. If Rita had lived here, she’d have hocked them long ago to pay for her habit.
‘Please, sit down, Mrs Nulty. This won’t take long.’
‘You asked me if I was up to it. Well, I’m not. Come back tomorrow.’
But tomorrow an investigation team would have been assigned to Rita’s case and, if Jo wasn’t on it, she’d have no business being here. As it was, she could be disciplined for making an unauthorized call-out. She cut to the chase. ‘I need to know if your daughter had recently found God.’
Mrs Nulty shook her head.
‘Maybe she started going to church out of the blue or took up Bible classes?’ Jo persisted.
Still nothing.
‘Mrs Nulty, I’m sorry to press you, but I believe whoever killed Rita may have been some sort of religious fanatic, and it’s really important you think hard about what I’m saying.
Do you remember Rita describing any of her clients as a “holy Joe”, or maybe a “religious freak”?’
Mrs Nulty grappled for the armchair like she was about to break a fall.
Jo took a breath. She couldn’t believe she’d come out with something so insensitive. It looked like Mrs Nulty hadn’t known her daughter’s occupation. Jo had seen other officers harden to the job over the years, and it always shocked her. She was determined not to go that way herself – the justice system was clinical enough. She had lost count of the number of times she’d seen some member of a victim’s family shout out in distress in a courtroom, get held in contempt and be transported to a cell and held there until they purged their contempt by apologizing to the court. Mostly how they felt came pouring out on the steps of the court, to a waiting scrum of journalists, after the trial ended. Usually, all they’d wanted to say in the first place was who they’d lost, and how different the victim was to the person described in court, information treated by the judges and barristers as if it would cause the pillars of the temple to fall. Jo had a big problem with the idea that it was necessary to trash the victim’s character to prove the defence of provocation. The criminal system was going to have to take a leaf out of the civil code and follow the principle ‘You wronged me and I seek rectitude’ if it was ever going to give bereaved families a sense of justice.
‘Tell me about Rita . . .’ Jo said, deliberately softening her voice.
Mrs Nulty stared at her blankly.
‘The kind of person she was, I mean,’ Jo continued. ‘What made her laugh? What made her cry? Who was she?’
Mrs Nulty pulled a length of stringy tissue from her sleeve
and ran it over her eyes and nose. ‘She was a good daughter . . . Until drugs got her. You know, she got leukaemia when she was seven and survived it. And for what?’
Jo shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Started on aerosol cans when she was ten. Had her first hit of heroin at thirteen years old. She told me once she had to get wasted so she could forget.’
‘Forget what?’ Jo asked.
Mrs Nulty shrugged. ‘What does it matter now? My husband’s dead. Rita’s dead. It was between the two of them.’
Jo leaned forward and took her hand, placing the money in her palm. ‘Look, maybe you could have a think and ring the station if anything occurs to you? I’m sure Rita would have wanted you to have this.’
A set of fingers bent at a right angle from swollen knuckles closed around the money. ‘It’s probably nothing, but there was something a couple of days back,’ Mrs Nulty suddenly said. ‘Not a priest exactly. But he said that I could trust him because his twin brother was one . . . a priest, I mean. He called looking for Rita.’
Jo frowned. ‘Did he give a name?’
Mrs Nulty shook her head.
‘What did he say, exactly?’ Jo asked.
‘That’s just it, he didn’t say anything. He just asked if Rita was here, and when I said she was out he asked if I knew where she’d gone. He joked that I could trust him, and then he said it . . . that his twin brother was a priest. I didn’t know where she was. That’s what I told him.’
‘What age was he?’ Jo asked.
‘Late thirties . . . I don’t know, I’m no good at ages, but I never forget a face.’
A defence barrister would have a field day, Jo thought.
He’d ask all about your cataracts, glaucoma, not what you saw. But still, it was a start. ‘Can you give me a description?’
‘Dark, not bad-looking, if you like that sort.’
‘What sort?’
‘Like those gypsies living on the roundabout.’
So most likely to be Eastern European, Jo realized. ‘What about a mobile number?’ she asked. ‘Did Rita have one?’
Mrs Nulty shook her head again.
Jo was losing patience. ‘I need to know where she really lived,’ she persisted.
Mrs Nulty looked surprised. ‘Rita lived here, she just wasn’t in is all. That’s what I told him.’
Why don’t you want to tell me? Jo wondered. Are you scared of losing face with friends and family? Or is it because you don’t want to tell them you turfed Rita out on to the streets? Maybe because of some dodgy social-welfare claim that had her here as a dependent.
‘Mrs Nulty, we can’t catch whoever killed her if you’re holding back on us. She was your daughter, for heaven’s sake!’
‘You must be mistaken,’ Mrs Nulty replied sullenly. ‘This was Rita’s home.’