If I Never See You Again (5 page)
‘
If I tell you one of the things he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up,
’
the killer said as he leaned over to inspect the binds, his face hidden by the flaps of a pointed hood attached to his cloak. Satisfied, he sat his bag on the bed, opened the clasp and pulled out a hypodermic needle
.
The victim’s head bolted sideways, frantic eyes following his captor’s every move. The killer reached into his waistcoat pocket, removed a vial of liquid, turned it upside down and flicked it with his index finger to tap an air bubble towards the top. The needle pierced the foil lid and sucked the contents up slowly
.
The victim’s head bobbed as the killer eyed then pinched the pulsing vein running down his neck
.
With a prick the needle penetrated the artery
.
The victim exhaled deeply through his nostrils as the last twitching muscles in his neck grew still
.
The killer stopped breathing himself, waiting for the
moment he knew was coming, savouring the anticipation. It hit like a tidal wave, endorphins surging through his veins and giving him an overwhelming feeling of omnipotence, the whole point of the exercise. When the ecstasy subsided, he got back to work, removing a knife, chisel, pliers and screwdriver from his case to set about the ritualistic aspect of the proceedings
.
Crossing the street to the National Gallery, she glanced right, where a street away a cricket match would be getting a gentle clap from the crowd on the lawn in Trinity College, and left towards St Stephen’s Green, where parents brought their toddlers to feed the ducks. The last squalid moments of the murdered prostitute, junkie and drug lord seemed to belong to a different city. If Jo’d had her way, every white-collar worker who believed they’d
earned
the right to party
with the so-called recreational drug of their choice at the weekend would have been forced to attend the latest gangland autopsy and made to understand that the trail of responsibility led directly back to the market principle of demand and so straight to them.
Having scrolled through the contacts in her mobile phone as she walked, with one hand she dialled Gerry in Justice and with the other rummaged out a Nicorette tab, which she almost couldn’t bring herself to put in her mouth.
‘You don’t bring me flowers . . .’ she announced, chewing hard as the call connected to the minister’s spin doctor.
‘What happened . . . You run out of flies to pick the wings off?’ he answered.
‘That’s funny, Gerry, but don’t quit the day job . . . The Separate Legal Representation report . . . where are we on that?’
Jo could hear Gerry drumming his pen on his desk.
‘Lawyers for rape victims in court,’ she continued. ‘We’ve got to rebalance the scales of justice to stop victims feeling like they’re the ones being put on trial. I sent the minister a briefing document. I don’t touch-type, Gerry. That means it was a lot of work for me. It’s been on his desk the last six months . . . All fifty-five pages of it, which works out at less than ten pages a month to read. Maybe our boss should consider one of those adult-education programmes . . . When’s he . . .’
‘Birmingham, he’s been a little busy. Thought you’d have noticed. Murder rate goes up, so does the number of times his name appears in a column inch. Speaking of which, they’re all in your district. Where are we on that?’
‘You had your bagel this morning, Gerry?’
‘I’m salivating as we speak, just waiting for you to hang up.’
‘Bacon and guacamole.’
‘Guacamole repeats a lot – maybe try a croissant tomorrow.’
Jo removed the phone from her ear and glanced at it, then pressed it back to be sure. ‘Nice talking to you too,’ she said, shoving it into her pocket and entering the main entrance of the National Gallery.
Inside, she pushed her shades up into her hair and walked with a spring in her step. She knew that no sex customer who’d been about to pay Rita Nulty for oral, anal, a hand job, titty-wank, or whatever it was he was prepared to pay her to perform, would have called to the prostitute’s mother’s home. That meant the man who told Mrs Nulty he was a ‘priest’s twin’ had not been seeking Rita out for sex, which also meant he could have been the killer. If he was someone legit, why the mystery? Why not just tell the pensioner his name? The timing fit too . . . right before the slaying.
It also meant the killer had made his first slip, because now she could possibly have him ID’d by Mrs Nulty in a line-up – once she found him. But first she’d have to work out how he was choosing his victims, because there was no doubt in her mind he would strike again. He was only halfway though the list of body parts . . .
Jo’s heels clicked along the gleaming parquet floor of the gallery. She knew the layout like the back of her hand. Four wings, two levels, the prized Picasso on the mezzanine, and the symmetry of the six archways in the central Milltown wing tricking the eye like a mirror. She’d come to study the religious themes which dominated the Italian collection. This was where she’d come to terms with the car crash that
had killed her father. She had been fifteen years old. In the two decades that had passed since, she’d learned to live with the grief, but nothing could change the simple fact that it had all been her fault.
That night, she’d gotten drunk for the first time. First disco. First fag. First snog – some guy in blue suede crepes into The Cure who asked her to dance to Bros then put his arms around her waist for the slow set. She’d written her number on his arm in black eyeliner after standing still for the national anthem at the party’s end.
She was supposed to have used her last fiver to travel home with her sister Sue, just as she’d promised their dad before heading out. But she was having too good a time. Instead of filling her empty bottle with tap water in the ladies to make it look like she still had something to sip, she’d used her taxi money to buy two more bottles of Budweiser.
She’d had to ring home to ask her father to come and collect her, from a phone box outside. She’d lost her sight temporarily after the crash – maybe that was why the memory of the sounds of what happened were so amplified in her memory: the phone box where she’d rung home being shelled by rain; a moth thrashing off a light bulb over her head, the static twitching after each bash; her change clinking into the slot; the pips ticking like a heartbeat; the round dial whirring back after each number; her father’s sleepy voice agreeing to come and collect her from the disco . . .
He’d found her sitting on the kerb, head hunched between her legs – the whole street swimming. She’d never got the chance to panic about what he thought of finding her in that state. That little rite of passage was supposed to come the next morning, along with the hangover from hell, Sudocrem on her beard rash and obsessing with her friends about whether
Curehead would ring. Instead, she was lying in a hospital bed praying to God that at any minute she would wake up and her father would not be lying in the morgue downstairs.
Later, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her mum or sister what had happened. The truth was, she’d pulled the handle of the passenger door open while her father was driving so she could lean out of it on the carriageway to vomit . . . His pyjama-sleeved arm had lunged across her to close the door, and the car swerved straight into an oncoming lorry.
Jo never told a soul. Not even Dan. What would she have said? That the reason she was so good at getting into a killer’s head was because she was one?
After she’d recovered, she used to come to the gallery because it was the only place it was socially acceptable to stand absolutely still without looking like a weirdo. All around her, life went on regardless as the sounds of that night kept playing over and over, like one of those tunes you can’t get out of your head: a single heel clicking with every second step as she walked to her dad’s car – she’d lost a shoe; the lorry’s horn blowing that deafening foghorn noise; tyres screeching; metal ripping and glass shattering; a hollow brushing sound as her dad was sucked through the windscreen; and the sound of someone crying, almost drowned out by the car alarm – herself.
Who was she before the night her dad died? Jo asked herself. Someone she’d never got the chance to know.
Who was she after? Someone completely different, who’d have traded blindness in a heartbeat – she’d needed cornea transplants – if it had meant freeing herself of survivor guilt.
Her mum and Sue had moved to Australia a few years later, when she was eighteen, to try and ‘put the past behind them’. They’d begged Jo to come, but she couldn’t leave her
father on his own, not in a grave, not when she’d been the one who’d put him there. And she could never shake the feeling that they’d have a better chance of starting over without her.
The smell from the exact same ratio of dust to polish hadn’t changed in twenty years, Jo thought as she stepped out of the lift on to the second floor. As she crossed the Beit Wing, she realized that everything in her adult life could probably be traced back to the accident. The birth of her son, Rory, and marriage to Dan when she was still in her teens: a quick-fix solution to replace the family she’d lost. The connection she felt to victims of crime, because she knew first hand what the agony of grief felt like, and even joining the force, so she could start fending for herself.
Out of the side of her eye, the painting hanging on the furthest wall through the last of the six open arches caught her attention, and she turned to face the Caravaggio, the gallery’s major new addition. She hadn’t come across many works by Caravaggio before, but this one she knew all about because it had been presumed a fake and had been hanging in a Jesuit dining room in Leeson Street since the 1930s, until its recent rediscovery created a furore in the art world.
Jo approached until she was close enough to reach out and touch the paint. Not so much as a brass-slung rope separated her from the moonlight bouncing off the faces of seven life-sized figures, all in profile except for the downcast head of Christ, second from the left, straining away from Judas’s kiss as three soldiers on the right moved in to take him. On the far left, a figure was fleeing, his arms outstretched, his fingers splayed, his open mouth conveying the horror of what was unfolding. On the far right, a man – Caravaggio himself – was straining a lantern over the
soldiers’ heads towards Christ, blocked by a human wall of gleaming, buckled armour.
But it was Christ’s posture that intrigued Jo. In all the panic, he was the only one perfectly still, his hands joined limply in prayer. Only his creased forehead betrayed any torment. Gaunt shadows danced across his face, making flickering hollows of his eyes and cheekbones.
She knew the painting was telling her something about the case but, stealing a worried glance at her watch, Jo realized that if she didn’t leave for the office right now, whatever it was would be irrelevant, because she might not even make the investigation team.
Swallowing her resentment, Jo rapped twice and entered. Breezing past Jeanie with a captain’s salute, she ignored the loud protests and continued on through the adjoining door into Dan’s inner quarters, pressing the connecting door closed with her back.
Dan looked up over his computer monitor and motioned to the chair in front of his desk. Jo’s gaze shifted from the lemon geranium that had appeared on the window sill behind him to his suit jacket draped on a coat hanger on a hook on the coat-stand, and settled on the back of an ornate photo frame propped on the corner of his desk.
‘You wanted to see me,’ he said, taking some papers from the In/Out tray and banging them together before putting them back in exactly the same position.
Pushing her shoulders back a fraction, she said, ‘I’d like to formally enquire if my transfer’s been processed.’ No reply. No eye contact. Dan reached for the mouse and began clicking files shut on his monitor. ‘It’s been six months now since my latest submission and I still haven’t . . .’
Dan’s presidential black leather chair creaked loudly as he shifted position. ‘I’m afraid I find myself unable to recommend it at the moment,’ he said.
‘Why? This is insane. Your life has moved on, Dan. Why can’t you give me the chance to do the same with mine?’
Rows of tired crinkles appeared at the sides of his eyes. ‘I need you to head up the Rita Nulty investigation,’ he said. ‘Solve it, and you get to go whenever you like.’
‘What?’ Jo sat down in the uncomfortable cup chair Dan kept for visitors.
He reached for a sheet of paper from the top tray and slid it across the desk. ‘These are the officers I can spare.’
A murder brief
. Jo felt a jolt of excitement. ‘Thank you, Dan. You won’t regret this, I promise.’ She knew he’d take flak for this – be accused of giving her special treatment – but she also knew that she could solve the case.
Reaching over to take the list from him, she overturned the picture on his desk with her elbow. It fell, face up, revealing the snap behind the framed glass. Dan was standing behind Jeanie with his hands on her shoulders. Jeanie was nuzzling Harry on her lap. Rory stood to one side, looking a hair’s breadth off the centre of the lens, making him seem
removed. Dan had a high, forced smile on his face and a round-necked jumper on – the kind men only wore at Christmas, the kind he didn’t wear, the kind that left her in no doubt that this was not a case of waving at a passer-by and asking them to take their picture. This was a posed shot, and she could tell from the background it had been taken at a photographer’s studio.
Dan stared at the picture as if he were seeing it for the first time too, then caught Jo’s eye guiltily. In that split second she saw the old Dan, the one who would say or do anything rather than hurt her. He reached over quickly and slid the photo towards a desk drawer. ‘I didn’t put that there . . .’ he began awkwardly.
‘You told me last night it wasn’t serious,’ Jo said, her breathing short.
He glanced to the door behind her then lowered his voice. ‘You still haven’t said you want me back, Jo. I can’t wait for ever.’
Jo focused on his hands gripping the desk and pictured them on Jeanie. ‘I’ve taken the house off the market,’ she said. ‘The boys have had enough upheaval. I’m sorry.’
Dan leaned his chair back as far as it would go then stood up and walked over to the window and stared out. Jo wanted to go to him, press her face against his back and wrap her arms around his waist, beg him to come home and tell him that everything would be all right.
‘Don’t you mean you have had enough upheaval?’ he answered.
Jo blinked rapidly, but held her tongue. She made a big effort to concentrate on the names on the page. As she did so, she realized her big break came with a big catch. Dan was assigning Mac and another of the station’s nonentities,
Merrigan, to the case. If Rita had come from some nice leafy estate on the south side with an SUV parked outside and had not had a shitty life nobody cared about, he’d never have pulled a stunt like this. Mac was a liability and would need babysitting so as not to get into any more trouble, and Merrigan was about as politically correct as Bernard Manning. Sending either of them to interview the girls working on the street would be a disaster. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t work with these guys.’
Dan turned around.
‘I need Foxy,’ Jo said. ‘I know he hasn’t been on a live case in years but he’s such a stickler for detail, I could do with a mind like his. And I want Sexton, because of his contacts on the street. As many mules as I need to cover the door-to-doors and checkpoint questionnaires, obviously, and every detective that can be spared.’
Dan loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, revealing a neatly trimmed arc of chest hair. ‘Foxy, fine. Sexton, for now. But Mac needs the experience and Merrigan is doing nothing else.’
‘I don’t like Mac’s history, and Merrigan is bloody useless,’ she said.
‘Fine, forget Merrigan, but Mac stays,’ he said, adding, ‘Final answer.’
She opened her mouth to protest, but he wasn’t having any of it. ‘Get me something to go on and I might even let you keep Sexton for the duration.’
Jeanie burst into the office to ask if he intended to keep his lunch appointment, making Jo wonder if she’d had her ear pressed to a glass on the door outside. She noticed how perfect her hair and make-up looked. The wraparound dress she was wearing emphasized her fantastic figure. If Dan
hadn’t been her ex, she’d have taken Jeanie aside and told her not to try so hard, because the odds were stacked against the relationship working. Jeanie was a civilian, and that meant she was going to take every anniversary dinner he missed because of work and every romantic weekend he cancelled at the last minute personally.
Jo stood to leave. ‘Can you contact these members?’ she asked Jeanie, holding Dan’s list out. ‘Tell them I intend holding the first case conference on the Rita Nulty case in the incident room straight after lunch, and I expect everyone there. No excuses.’
Jeanie turned away, so Jo pressed the list down on Dan’s desk, saying ‘asap,’ in a tone that said she was the one who called the shots on this case now and that she intended to find out who had murdered Rita Nulty in record time. That meant that, from this point on, Jeanie was the least of her problems.
Ryan was watching the CCTV footage taken outside Katie’s school on the day she’d disappeared, as he had a million times before, convinced he had to be missing something. He believed that, once he found it, he’d have the link he needed to begin unravelling Katie’s problems.
The sepia images moving across the screen were so grainy they had a phantom feel. The now dead drug lord Crawley was wearing a trucker cap pulled low over his eyes, the peak barely visible under his hoodie. He wore this under a black leather jacket, elasticated at the waist, with a pair of blue jeans and white trainers.
Ryan pointed the remote at the TV angrily, fast-forwarding to the point when Crawley moved robotically, owing to the slow snapshot speed, towards a mystery car which had pulled up outside the gates. Only a corner of the vehicle could be seen; the rest was just outside the frame. It was impossible to work out the make of the vehicle, though the
right tail-light and last number of the plate were just about visible in the upper left-hand corner.
Four swift frames later: Crawley bending over and into the driver’s window . . . gesturing like a madman by jabbing his index finger in at the driver, his elbow in and out of shot . . . recoiling from an invisible shove from the driver, his cap spinning off his head behind him. Ryan watched Crawley try to reef open the driver’s door then have a change of heart and grab a clump of his hair through the window instead. Long, fair hair came momentarily into view.
A vicious row, but with whom, Ryan wondered, as he had constantly, since first seeing it. What did the woman driving the car know about Crawley’s presence? What were they fighting over? Had she provided him with information about Katie’s movements or helped Crawley identify Katie just before the abduction? And most importantly, if he found her, would she help Ryan unlock Katie from her world of silence in return for immunity from prosecution?
He paused the screen, searching for any new clue as to who the woman was, anything that he might previously have missed. He had already drawn up a shortlist of all the mothers who had collected their daughters that day and had run background checks, but none had anything shady in their past that could be linked to the gangster.
He hit play and felt his stomach constrict like it was about to take a punch. On the screen, Crawley was turning back towards the school and walking, in that cocky, swaggering way he used to have, directly up to the camera fixed to the wall above the main entrance. Once he was as close to it as he could get, he looked up and gave a sneering salute to the person he knew would end up watching this film – Ryan.
‘R.I.P.,’ Ryan said.
Katie entered the room, and he hit the stop button quickly and sat straight up. Cassie stood, wagged her tail and went over to her to nuzzle her hand.
‘Okay, sweetheart?’ he asked.
She moved, oblivious to him, cornflower-blue eyes trancelike, as if she had earphones in and was listening to some secret soundtrack. She knelt beside Cassie and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck, lying her head on her neck. Cassie wriggled free to lick her face.
Katie began methodically to brush the dog’s coat.
Ryan was smiling, but his eyes were brimming.
‘Daddy?’ she asked, suddenly sitting back on her hunkers.
‘Yes, my darling?’ he answered automatically.
‘Do dogs cry?’
Ryan stared. Had she actually spoken? He wanted to leap up and whirl her round. He looked from her to the dog.
‘Do they dream like we do?’
‘Yes,’ he said, gently, kneeling down beside her. ‘In their own way.’ His chest started to heave.
‘What kind of things make them cry?’
He reached for her hand. ‘Being lost, my darling. And scared. And hurt. The same as for us.’
Katie hugged Cassie tightly again. He saw the glaze spreading across her eyes and began kissing the top of her head to try and keep her with him. But she had begun to shake in his arms, slowly at first then more violently.
Angie appeared in the doorway and lunged, trying to pull
him away. ‘Let her go. Ryan! What are you doing . . . Stop! We need to lie her down flat.’
He stood up, trying to explain. ‘No, you don’t understand. She spoke . . . She said . . .’
But Katie’s eyes were rolling in her head.
‘Call an ambulance,’ Angie ordered. ‘She’s convulsing. Ryan, for Christ’s sake, call one now!’
Jo’s fists clenched as she braced herself for what was coming next. She wanted to see the world through his eyes, to feel what he had. She dreaded putting herself through the emotional wringer, but she was going to do whatever was necessary to find him. For the last eighteen months, her professional life had languished because her personal life was falling apart. This was the first chance she’d had to get her teeth stuck into a case, and her adrenaline levels had risen. Dan had been right to laugh at her the previous day – work was a huge part of who she was.
Yesterday, when she stood on this spot, Jo had reached for the light switch. Today, she kept her eyes screwed shut as she thought about what she knew about Rita. She pictured the
kind of looks Rita must have got when she boarded her last bus, dressed in the kind of clothes that would have revealed her occupation as well as any sign around her neck. If the bus had been crowded and Rita sat down beside someone on a double seat, Jo presumed they’d have stood and walked away rather than be associated with her. She wondered how young Rita was when her father first hurt her so badly. Jo was ready . . .
She opened her eyes and held her hand against the apartment door. ‘You’re already angry with her by the time you get to this point, aren’t you?’ she asked out loud. ‘That’s why you forced entry. You both know what she is. Rita Nulty has no right to say no. So why does she? It’s because she already knows you, doesn’t she? She knows what you’re capable of. You’re someone she’s frightened of. Otherwise, why would you have to break in?’
Jo lifted her head. She reached into her leather jacket for her notepad and pen, and scribbled: ‘Ask street workers about recent violent attacks?’
Her eyes roamed to the coffee table where she’d seen the cocaine, now covered with metallic-grey fingerprint dust. ‘Do you keep whatever you used to break in with in your hand or put it down?’ she muttered. ‘Yes, you put it down, for now. You need her calm. The art of ceremony requires preparation, so you’ve brought a peace offering. But you can’t risk her actually taking the coke, can you? Might fire her up for a fight. You’ve too much work to do. That’s why we found it untouched.’
She headed across to the bedroom and flung open the door. She swallowed: the bloodstains were still there, more disconcerting without the body.
Jo held her own hand up at arm’s length, spreading the fingers out, turning it from back to front. ‘Do you take what
she owes you while she’s living or dead?’ Jo knew the forensic analysis of the blood spatter would yield the answer. In her experience, only a pumping heart would blood-spray every surface – even the ceiling. She looked up and saw the telltale signs. ‘You need her alive, of course, because justice requires punishment. What did you use? An axe? A cleaver? You’d have needed to hide it, though, wouldn’t you, along with the crowbar you used for breaking down the door.’ She turned to a new page of her notebook. ‘Long coat? Bag?’ she wrote.
Jo hurried over to the bathroom on the right where the towels had lain before they’d been bagged and taken to the lab. ‘Who washed?’ she asked. ‘You or her? The clock is ticking. Any stray or pre-booked punter could come by at any point . . . her pimp, for example. Why was washing so important? It could have risked the kill . . .’
She reached to the tap in the bath to turn the shower on, but the lever was damaged and the water kept flicking out the bath spout.
She looked around the bath but could see no stray peroxide strands. ‘It’s you who’s in the bath, isn’t it?’ Jo asked the killer. ‘Not all of you, there isn’t time, just your feet . . . like in the Bible? Did you want Rita to dry them with her hair, like Mary Magdalene?’
Jo wrote in her notebook: ‘Have samples of Rita’s hair from PM sent to forensics for contact analysis.’
‘If she’s the whore,’ she asked aloud, ‘who is it that you think you are?’
A knock on the door made her start. The garda who’d been on duty outside stuck his head around the door. ‘You asked me to remind you about your conference, in case you lost track of time,’ he said.
Sexton leaned across the desk. ‘Tell me what happened,’ he said again.
Skinny wasn’t hunched in the plastic chair because of an attitude problem. He just didn’t have any shoulders. The sum of his parts, as far as Sexton could see, was an Adam’s apple and a bum-fluff excuse of a moustache. There was a jerkiness to him that Sexton associated less with drugs and more with the kind of man who liked to hit women; he had
something to hide, and it was making him jumpy, but he was certain it was not Anto Crawley’s murder.
‘I heard Anto Crawley was in the area so I –’ Skinny said.
‘Hold it,’ Sexton cut in, straightening up and pressing his hands into the small of his back. ‘Where are we talking about?’
Skinny rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘I already told ya, Spencer Dock.’ He turned to the overweight detective on his left, who was sitting on a chair beside the door. ‘Can I have another cup of tea? One with sugar in it this time?’
The detective stared straight ahead. His only purpose there was to offset any allegations of garda brutality, which had become par for the course in the days before everything was recorded on camera and audio tape.
Skinny cleared his throat, looked around for somewhere to hawk, caught the glint in Sexton’s eye and swallowed.
‘Address?’
‘Can’t remember, mate.’
‘Time?’
‘I’m no good with times.’
‘Then what?’ Sexton pressed.
‘Then I got a knife and I –’
‘Wait . . .’ Sexton cut in, lighting up a cigarette. ‘Where did you get the knife?’ The smoking ban wasn’t enforced when it came to the country’s prisons, which meant a blind eye was turned to scenarios such as this – encouraging prisoners to talk.
He turned his back on Skinny and studied the view from the window. The city’s bus terminus was directly opposite, the Customs House sat further back, there was a diamond-shaped sculpture of mirrored glass on the forecourt outside, and a couple of nice restaurants had sprung up recently too.
Not that Sexton ate out since Maura had died. It just reminded him of who wasn’t there with him. They’d married in a church just around the corner from here, held her funeral mass there too. ‘By her own hand,’ the bastard of a priest kept saying. Like Sexton needed reminding . . .
‘I got the blade off a fella and I –’
‘What’s the “fella’s” name?’ Sexton interrupted.
‘I’m not grassing me mates up, no way, man.’
‘So you took the knife,’ Sexton said, ‘which your anonymous friend gave you, and you . . .’
‘Anonawha’?’
‘Then what?’
‘Then, when I saw Crawley coming, I went in after him. Crawley was a prick. He was a snout. He had it coming to him, and I made sure he got it. That’s why I smashed up his teeth.’
‘You can’t remember where this was?’ Sexton enquired.
‘It was one of those old warehouses.’
‘What’s it used for?’
‘Nothing, it’s a crack den.’ Skinny puffed out his chest and went on. ‘That slapper who was murdered the other day used to squat there. Even the homeless fellas won’t stay there. It’s a kip.’
Sexton turned around slowly. Had this nonentity just linked two murder victims to the same location? ‘Oh yeah?’ He looked over to the detective. ‘You can get him that tea now.’
‘Great,’ Skinny called after the detective leaving the room. ‘Got any biscuits? HobNobs over Jersey Creams if there’s any going. You coppers only ever have Jersey Creams.’
Sexton grabbed the plastic seat opposite and pulled it around to the side of the table.
Less confrontational
, he
thought. He leaned back, stretched his legs out and took a few drags on his fag, then stood it on its butt so the ash started piling up on itself. Old trick, never spilt a flake, unless someone knocked it.
Keep it nice and casual
, he thought.
Soon as he knows he’s got me, he’ll start playing games
.
‘You heard of Stuart Ball, or Git, as I think he was known?’
Skinny nodded. ‘Him and that slag used to go out when she worked as a lap dancer, before she got real bad on drugs. Heard the pair of them kidnapped a kid for a day and kept her in the warehouse where I knifed Crawley. All the junkies were talking about it. Sick, so it was. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Git and his old mot were killed.’
‘When was this exactly, can you remember?’
Skinny opened his mouth to say something then ran his thumb off the pads of his first two fingers instead. ‘It’ll cost ya.’
Sexton reached into an inside jacket pocket for his wallet but slipped an empty hand out quickly when the detective laboured back in and placed a plastic cup in front of Skinny with a paper plate of miniature Jaffa Cakes.
‘Can’t eat them Lidl ones, they make me teeth hop, man.’
The detective threw his head at the door. Sexton hesitated, then followed as Skinny blew a mouthful of tea in a wide spray. ‘Fucking hell, you can’t make tea in a microwave, it’s bleeding wrong, man,’ Skinny roared.
‘What is it?’ Sexton asked the detective impatiently in the corridor.
‘You’re not going to believe who you’re going to have to answer to on this one,’ the detective told him.
Sexton frowned.
‘The chief’s just given Jo Birmingham the Rita Nulty murder investigation,’ the detective said.
Sexton gave a half-smile. ‘Did he now?’ As the detective tried to continue on into the room, Sexton took a step sideways to block his path. ‘Don’t bother, I’m about to send him home.’
His hand on his wallet, Sexton went back in to speak to Skinny alone. It was nothing personal, he thought. He liked Jo Birmingham, she was one of the most instinctive cops he’d ever worked with. But Ryan Freeman was a close friend, and Sexton had been helping him try and find out what happened to his daughter. And if that meant bribing one of the scrotes who knew the people who had hurt her, then so be it.
Twenty minutes after they were due, Mac sauntered in without so much as an apology, shrugged off his fleece and threw it across a desk. He couldn’t but have noticed Jo’s presence, but the way he didn’t bother to salute her – just swivelled a plastic chair back to front before straddling it, and then peeled an egg mayonnaise sandwich out of its plastic container before getting stuck into it – told her he considered it deserved more respect than she did.
Jo dialled Jeanie’s extension to see if she’d passed on the message. Jeanie said that she had, adding that Foxy had gone home sick.
‘Good of you to tell me,’ Jo said, slamming the receiver down.
Sexton arrived seconds later, not bothering to remove his trench coat, and took the seat beside Mac. Folding his arms, Sexton rested his chin on his chest and settled in like he was about to grab a snooze. After eyeing the three photos on display, he nudged Mac’s shoulder with his own curiously.
Jo headed for the door to close it as Mac muttered to Sexton, ‘You were after this case, weren’t you? You’d be a damn sight better than that! A murder brief for riding the boss, that’s a good one.’
Jo slammed the door. ‘Phones on silent,’ she ordered, before returning to the wipe board.
Mac made great play of rooting out his mobile and doing what she’d asked – squinting and angling the phone into the strobe light overhead, sticking the top of his tongue out as if he were concentrating on a task that required dexterity.
Sexton shoved his phone into his coat pocket.
‘Right, you’re probably asking yourselves what a dead prostitute, a junkie and a drug baron have in common?’ Jo said, pointing at the pictures.
Mac took it as a cue to discuss possible answers with Sexton and didn’t stop when she banged her fist on the table. ‘Oi! You got any ideas about how this lot are linked?’
She may as well not have been there. Mac carried on regardless, as Sexton sighed heavily and studied his shoes.
Jo walked over to Mac’s table and leaned across it, stopping short inches from his face. ‘Very funny. I’m glad you can still find the time to have a laugh considering I’m looking for the first opportunity to turf you off the case. You don’t have what it takes to be here. So by all means, keep it up . . .’
‘Sorry?’ Mac asked through a mouthful of sandwich.
Jo pointed at Stuart Ball’s picture. ‘The Skid, murdered a couple of weeks back.’ She swiped a couple of photocopies from her desk and handed them out. ‘Name was Stuart Ball and, Sexton, you already know his incidentals.’ She watched the heads lower to the paper. ‘You can read up later. Only thing I want you to note at this point is that Stuart’s eye was removed at the scene.’
Mac winked dramatically at Sexton, who was clearly growing tired of him.
One step sideways took her to Rita’s bloodied face. ‘As you know, we found Rita yesterday.’ Two-beat pause. ‘Minus her hand. And last, but by no means least, Anto Crawley,’ Jo continued.
‘There’s a million people wanted Crawley dead, and with good reason,’ Mac protested. ‘His killer did the rest of us a favour, if you ask me.’
‘I didn’t,’ Jo answered. ‘Now, in Crawley’s case, the teeth were extracted.’ She looked directly at Sexton. ‘And not smashed in his mouth as first thought and reported in the press.’ Pulling the cap off a fat red marker with her teeth, she wrote her Book of Exodus quote up on the board. The pen squeaked as she worked.
‘Meet our killer,’ she said. ‘Looks like we’ve got our very own Bible John.’
Sexton got up slowly, walked over to her desk and pulled a chair up in front of it. ‘Okay, Inspector,’ he said, ‘where do we start?’
Jo gave him a grateful smile. ‘We need to go through the
paperwork the team of uniforms on the house-to-house enquiries have brought in, and also trawl through the information gleaned from the checkpoints in the vicinity. I’ve done up the questionnaires . . . the usual: Did they see any working girls that night? Anyone matching Rita’s description? Was she alone? Priority is to get Rita’s mobile number sharpish – we might strike lucky on data analysis. Then there’s the collection of any CCTV in the extended area. The location has been bugging me most. I mean, you said it yourself – what were the chances of our training exercise taking place in the same location that the killer decided to kill Rita? We know our man puts a lot of thought into symbolism. I think he chose the place deliberately.’
‘Someone who knew we’d be there and wanted to leave us with egg on our faces?’ Sexton asked.
Jo nodded. ‘Looks like it. The building was, technically, unoccupied . . . So our priority is to find out where Rita was actually living before she died.’
Sexton studied a ballpoint pen he was walking through his fingers.
‘Also, it has to be more than coincidence that all three were involved in criminality. Two were Skids, so it’s fair to presume Crawley and Ball knew each other. We need to find out if Rita was also mixing in their circles.’
‘Oi,’ Mac said. ‘Anyone remember the name of that victim knocked off a couple of months back out near the airport?’
Jo and Sexton looked at him blankly.
‘White . . . That was it,’ he went on. Heading over to the back wall of filing cabinets, he pulled open a screeching metal drawer. ‘Don’t you remember? That bloke found – there was a page ripped out of the Bible at the scene. Here it is.’
‘Kept quiet for operational reasons,’ Mac replied. ‘You’d have found it on PULSE.’
Jo gave him a ‘pull the other one’ face. ‘Was there mutilation at the scene?’ she asked. ‘And where exactly was the body found?’
Mac licked a thumb and riffled through the pages. ‘Some disused shed near the airport,’ he said.
‘Not our district,’ was Jo’s reaction.
Sexton put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Why don’t I leave you two to argue the toss while I try and find out if any of our victims knew each other?’
Jo nodded. ‘We’ll meet tomorrow in the morgue for Rita’s autopsy. I want everyone to start feeling some empathy for her instead of just seeing her as a tart. Oh, and Sexton, she was a working girl, so she must have had a number for clients. We get it, we can GPS her last movements.’
Sexton hurried out.
‘My victim was
burned
to death,’ Mac said, pointing to what Jo had written on the white board.
‘I dunno,’ she said. Why hadn’t the case come up during her searches yesterday? she wondered. She glanced at the door, which had swung shut behind Sexton. Dan was peering in through the small, rectangular, wired-glass panel, rapping it lightly. She waved him in to join them, but he stayed put.
‘Dan, I’m in the middle of conference,’ she complained, joining him in the corridor outside.
‘My office, now,’ he answered.
‘I’ll be along as soon as we’re finished,’ Jo replied, still holding the door open.
‘That’s the least of your worries,’ he said. ‘You’re off the case.’
Jo let go of the door. ‘You winding me up?’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve only had ten minutes on it. On what grounds?’
‘We’ve got a witness who says you thieved from Rita Nulty.’
Jo crinkled her nose in bewilderment.
‘The dead hooker, Jo!’
‘I know who Rita Nulty is,’ Jo said through gritted teeth.
‘Good, because you’re accused of robbing her last few quid,’ Dan said, looking past her. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do to bail you out of this one. This is way too serious.’
Jo exhaled impatiently through her nostrils and took an extra-careful sip as she ran through the scenarios of why the school would be calling, while watching Foxy down on his hands and knees, working. He was turning the earth around some lettuce, fenced in by barbed wire high enough to fend off either teenage vandals or rabbits on stilts, with a trowel.
Foxy spotted Jo as he headed for the pavement to retrieve some tools which he had left beside a neatly trimmed border.
‘Heard you’re feeling a bit peaky,’ Jo said, leaning across the passenger seat and swinging the passenger door of the car open to block his path.
‘Excuse me?’ Mr Montague asked her suddenly on the phone.
‘No, not you . . . Is everything all right?’ Jo said, sitting back up.
Mr Montague explained that there was no need to be alarmed, but he wanted to arrange an appointment to talk about Rory’s problems. Right now, he’d only got five minutes.
‘What problems?’ Jo asked warily.
Foxy looked back at his allotment then leaned inside the car, scooped up the window handle, cassette tape and several chocolate wrappers and deposited them in the back seat. Climbing in, he swung the door shut and stared straight ahead.
‘Obviously, I’d prefer to do this face to face,’ Mr Montague was saying.
‘Sorry – do you mind?’ Jo asked Foxy, nodding at the door and raising her eyebrows.
‘Yes I bloody well do mind,’ Foxy barked. ‘You wanted me to get in, now I’m in. We get this over with here and now, or I’m off to see to my tomatoes.’
‘Jesus wept!’ Jo pulled her own door open so she could step outside for some privacy.
‘What?’ Mr Montague asked.
‘No, no, no not you!’ she answered, slapping the roof of the car in frustration.
‘Look, it really is better if we do this in person,’ Mr Montague said.
Jo sighed heavily. ‘Mr Montague, I work full time. After work, I battle through traffic to get to the childminder’s to collect my baby. By the time I get home, generally an hour and a half after leaving work, and ten since seeing my infant,
he needs feeding. Getting it ready takes at least half an hour. Sometimes he’s too tired to eat and has nodded off by the time I dish it up in front of him. So any chance you could cut me a bit of slack here and, whatever it is you have to say to me, tell me now?’ She paused for breath.
‘That’s five minutes up,’ Montague said, not unhappily. ‘Ring my secretary if you feel Rory’s truancy is worth fitting into your schedule.’
Jo kept the phone pressed to her ear for a few seconds after the call disconnected.
Truancy!
Foxy had also got out of the car and was gathering up his tools.
‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.
‘I’m feeling ill again,’ he replied, gathering his tools into a wheelbarrow and marching off.
‘Hi ya, Sal,’ Jo called, spotting Foxy’s daughter sitting in the open door of the shed. Sal had Down’s. Her mother had left not long after she was born, and it was just the two of them. Foxy could have afforded a house with its own garden, but he lived frugally so as to put as much aside as he could spare for a fund for Sal when he was gone.
‘Hi Jo,’ Sal answered. ‘Want a cup of tea?’ She shook a teapot good-humouredly.
‘No thanks, sweetheart, I’ve got to rush today. You see
X Factor
at the weekend?’ Jo asked.
‘Yes,’ Sal said. ‘I have it on video if you missed it. The fella I like looks like Rory. He’s gorgeous.’
Jo laughed. ‘We can watch it together when I’ve got a bit of free time, if you like.’
‘Great,’ Sal said.
Foxy handed over the tools to Sal, who began to put them away. Every inch of space in the shed had some labelled
recycled container with different-sized nails and reusable wire. Foxy was the kind of man who could make appliances last a lifetime and was more at home in the shed than his house. It was covered in graffiti, and scorched from a couple of attempts to burn it down, but somehow it had survived.
‘Why did you tell Dan that I’d taken money from Rita?’ Jo whispered to him.
‘I told you from day one that there are bad apples in every walk of life and there’s only one way to deal with them. Did you honestly think I’d do nothing?’
‘If you’d bothered to ask me, you would have learned there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. You know exactly what happens to cash that’s found at a crime scene,’ Jo said, her voice still low.
‘Nothing you can tell me can justify what I saw with my own two eyes,’ Foxy said. ‘The sad thing is, if anyone else had reported you, I’d have said they were barking, gone out of my way to help you defend your good name. But I was there. I witnessed it for myself. And what’s even worse is, I think I would probably even have forgiven you if it had been just a case of sticky fingers . . . But you saw the lines of cocaine. That money was rolled up like a vacuum hose, and you took it anyway. What if the killer used them to snort some of it before paying Rita? A single sweat cell is all they need to get DNA nowadays.’
‘The coke hadn’t been touched and, anyway, no court of law would have allowed that money as evidence! Not at the rate currency changes hands.’
‘So that’s your justification, is it?’ he replied. ‘What if it had given us a new lead? Thrown up someone’s name we could have gone after?’
Sal emerged to ask what was wrong.
‘Nothing, lovely,’ Foxy answered. ‘What time you doing my fish fingers?’
‘Can start them after mass if you like,’ Sal said, checking her watch. ‘Better hurry up, Dad, or we’re going to be late. Do you want to come with us, Jo?’
‘Next time,’ Jo promised, pulling her notebook out and scribbling an address on a piece of paper. ‘I’ve got to get to Rory’s school before it closes.’
She turned to Foxy. ‘When you’re feeling better – after your dinner of course – I want you to head to this address. It’s Rita Nulty’s mother’s. Tell her you need to take a statement concerning my visit there yesterday. Key question is if I handed her any money. When she tells you the amount, I want you to write it down in that notebook of yours.’ She held the page out to him.
‘You’re saying you gave it back?’ he asked. ‘You bloody fool, Jo. You’ve left yourself wide open . . .’
‘Don’t you get it?’ Jo asked, leaning in close. ‘Rita Nulty died because she was prepared to do anything to make that
100. The way I see it, that means the pocket it ended up in mattered, and in my book that means her mother’s. I’m sorry it’s not up to your high standards, but would I do it again? Damn right I would. If you want to discuss this any further, ring me later, and not the chief.’
Jo headed over to the shed and gave Sal a hug. ‘Bye, sweetie. Why are you going to mass on a Tuesday anyway?’
‘I have a special intention,’ Sal replied. ‘I need to find Dad a girlfriend. You sure you don’t want to come? Jesus forgives all sinners.’
Jo couldn’t resist returning Foxy’s grin. But as she climbed back into the car, that niggling feeling she’d had since seeing the Caravaggio in the gallery hit her like a tonne of bricks.
She scanned the lads’ faces for any sign of Rory and recognized some of his mates among the sixth-formers.
Where the bloody hell was he?
she wondered.
Was he on the bloody mitch that day too?
Continuing on down the hall to the staircase, she felt her hackles bristle at the sight of the sports trophies on display. Jo liked sports – it was just the type of sports this school preferred made her feel like a hypocrite: tennis, horse riding, bloody polo! Rich kids’ games designed to set the students a class apart and, in their own minds, above the rest. Jo had believed in a free and equal education system for all, until the time had come to enrol Rory somewhere. Then her ideals went out the window. Dan hadn’t been happy. It wasn’t the money, though it took a sizeable chunk out of their income. He believed a free education was as good as any, but Jo hadn’t been quite so sure. She hated that money could buy the best teachers, a network of friends on course for the best
jobs and a social life that attracted the kind of girls who spoke with the right accent and were on the pill from sixteen because they had ambitions of their own. But she’d wanted to give her son the same chance in life as the ministers’ and judges’ sons.
When Rory first started here, she’d spent a lot of time in his ear reminding him to be his own man and to never condescend because somebody had less than they did – they hardly had much themselves. But she’d backed off when he’d reminded her that the rate she paid a Polish woman to come into the house once a week to clean was, strictly speaking, extortion. An Irish woman wouldn’t have done it for three times as much.
‘It’s easier to be a hypocrite in a clean house, isn’t it, Mum?’ Rory had ribbed, before turning the telly back on.
In any event, the days of hiring help went by the wayside after the Budget, and the split from Dan.
Jo walked straight into Mr Montague’s office and watched him struggle to come up with any one of a hundred reasons why he couldn’t see her unannounced. But the confrontation with first Dan and then Foxy had left her in no mood for the runaround, and Mr Montague appeared to pick up on as much. As she took a seat in front of his desk, she reckoned she could have done a pretty accurate BP readout if she’d counted the twitches per minute in a vein in his temple as he straightened his tie then smoothed his thinning hair with the heel of one hand.
‘Right . . . Rory Mason, here we are,’ he said, pulling a manilla file free of the cabinet to the left of his desk. ‘Anaemia last September; Granny died in October; November, chest infection; December, ah yes, this one I thought particularly creative, “twisted gut”; Granny did a
Lazarus act in January but unfortunately didn’t make it, and it took Rory two weeks to get over the trauma.’
‘No,’ Jo corrected. ‘Dan’s mother did pass away.’ She held back the fact that Dan’s mother had died the previous August, was in her nineties and in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and that her own mother was still very much alive and kicking. ‘And he was very close to his grandmother,’ she added. Rory was a good kid, with a kind heart, and when it came to it, this was all that mattered, she told herself. He may not have been the world’s most academic kid, but he’d held Dan’s mother’s hand every time he’d visited. Jo’d take kindness as a quality for her son over his bloody attendance rate any day.
She looked at the letters Rory had forged, and sighed. He hadn’t even tried to copy her signature.
‘Oh, my condolences,’ Montague went on, not sounding remotely sorry. ‘Still, I’m presuming these are fake.’
‘Far from it,’ she lied.
‘My apologies again,’ Montague lied back.
‘I really do feel you should have alerted us to your concerns about Rory’s truancy a lot sooner.’
‘I’ve spoken to your husband several times. He sat in that very seat you’re sitting in now,’ Montague retaliated, little filaments of spit pooling in the corners of his mouth.
Jo began to fidget with her hands. Constant rows were building up the distance between her and Dan. It was different when you lived together, when you couldn’t leave something unresolved or it would eat into the following day and sour the atmosphere for the kids. When you were together, you put things behind you, accepted when you were wrong or tried not to parade the fact that you were
right. But right now, whatever they’d had was so lost that he believed her capable of robbing a murder victim.
‘What’s the bottom line here?’ she asked, reaching into her pocket for her mobile, which had been vibrating persistently since she’d come in. A quick glance, and she registered Sexton’s name flashing. She’d have to take the call.
‘Bottom line? Rory is below the quota of days necessary at school to sit his exams.’
‘But it’s his Leaving Cert next year! You can’t hold him back . . .’
Mr Montague raised his voice over hers. ‘If he makes a concerted effort to attend school for the short time left between now and the exams, I won’t flag a problem with the Department of Education. But if he misses another day, and I really do mean a single day, I’m afraid drastic measures will be taken.’
‘I understand,’ Jo said, glad she had the phone as an excuse to get away from him.
‘You’d better come quickly, Birmingham,’ Sexton said as the call connected. ‘We’ve got ourselves another body. This one’s still alive, but he’s hanging on by a thread. And we’ll have a hard job linking him to the Skids. The victim’s a priest.’
‘The matron’s refusing point-blank to let us in,’ Sexton explained, blowing his nose. ‘ICU’s a closed ward. It’s relatives only, and only then on the matron’s say-so.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Jo said. She stopped in her tracks, causing him to pause too. ‘You looking after yourself?’ she asked him intently as he turned in surprise.
‘It’s nothing, just my rhinitis,’ Sexton answered.
Jo looked unconvinced.
‘The victim’s name is Father Reginald Walsh,’ Sexton said quickly. ‘His foot was sliced clean off, within a half-mile radius of the other slayings.’
Jo was on the move again. ‘I want you to contact hospital management,’ she told him. ‘Tell them this city’s got a serial killer on the rampage and they’ve got his latest victim on
their premises. Tell them that, if they don’t cooperate, we’re leaking the details to the press, who’ll be all over the place like a rash. It’s not beyond the tabloid journalists to arrive donned in white coats to get what they want. No way will management risk that kind of a security breach. Tell them I only need five minutes.’
Sexton nodded and pointed out the door to ICU up ahead before parting from Jo.
She headed for the door to the unit, which was covered with warning signs about using mobile phones. A couple of fraught relatives clutched each other’s hands, and there were more distraught people crammed in a tiny waiting room opposite. Shelves of blankets and pillows indicated that the couches doubled up as beds at night. The health system in this country made Jo see red – the sick and elderly were left to sleep on trolleys in A&E while wards with beds never slept in had never been opened because all the bureaucrats in middle management were too desperate making sure the cuts never put them on the dole queues.
Within less than ten minutes of Sexton’s departure, a squat matron emerged from intensive care. She seemed to have no problem identifying Jo as the one she wanted. ‘The minute I say leave, you leave.’
Jo entered a poky wash room and followed the instructions pinned to the wall, squirting pink Hibiscrub on to her hands and rubbing her hands with a white, alcohol-based gel that smelled like white spirit and dried instantly – super-bug repellent. Unfurling a white plastic apron, she hooked it over her head and knotted it behind her back, pulling a mask over her mouth before finally entering the ward.
It was loud and fluorescently lit. Four glass cubicles provided screens for three beds, affording a modicum of privacy
to the relatives of those patients closest to the end. The fourth cubicle was being used as a nurses’ station. A television elevated on a wall bracket was tuned to a soap and being watched keenly by some nurses on a break, even though the sound had been muted.
The matron was writing information on a large chart balanced at eye level on a wheeled frame that overlooked the bedside of the priest. He was running to fat and the colour of candle wax. He was rigged up to a mesh of wires and tubes which were attached to flashing monitors that beeped intermittently. Rosary beads dangled from one. His mutilated right leg was held inches above the bed by a sling attached to a pulley in the ceiling.
‘How is he?’ Jo asked.
‘He’s been anointed.’ The matron knelt down at the side of the bedframe to unhook a clear catheter bag and, after measuring the fluid ounces, she made a note on her chart.
Jo scanned the priest’s face.
‘No questions,’ the matron warned, reading her mind.
But the priest was as remote as an embalmed body. His jaw was trussed back horribly off centre with a length of white cotton string double-looped around his chin and tied roughly in a knot at the back of his neck. It held open the throat passage for a clear ventilator pipe that plunged down his windpipe. A nasal gastric-tube-feed travelled through the back of his nostrils and into his stomach to deliver basic nutrients. A dialysis machine beside the bed groaned like a machine being tortured. Cogs spooled rhythmically, cranking pumps as they churned the priest’s blood in and out. An artery in his neck delivered a central line into his heart. It vied for space with a cluster of drips that bunched like stalks out of the tiny space. A plugged cannula inserted into the
back of his hand was at the ready if any of the other lines kinked or were rejected by the body.
Jo noted the high bluish colour on his cheeks, bleeding into the circles under his eyes. ‘What’s causing this?’ she asked.
‘It’s usually a sign that the temperature is spiking and the body overproducing white blood cells to fight an infection. You can give him this if you like.’ She thrust a sponge stick that looked like a lollipop into Jo’s hand in a way that said this was a place for families. ‘The mouth gets very dry when it’s open like that all the time.’
Jo knew she was making a point. She dipped the pink sponge in a plastic cup of water, pressed it against his parched lips and watched how they instinctively twitched. She scanned the equipment that was pulsing average statistics of his heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, temperature and the cardio-vascular pressure on the intravenous line. Then, aware it was only a matter of time before she started thinking about her own personal tragedy, and her father’s death, she said goodbye to the matron and left.
A few minutes later, she was outside with Sexton in the car park. ‘Can you take over until tomorrow?’ she asked him. ‘Something’s come up I need to deal with.’
Sexton nodded. ‘’Course. What do you want me to do?’
‘Find out if Father Reg has a brother,’ she said, remembering what old Mrs Nulty had told her about the man who’d called looking for Rita describing himself as the brother of a priest. ‘We also need to talk to the girls on the street, see if any of them knew anything about Rita and her last client.’
‘Leave it to me,’ he said, offering her a cigarette.
She had found him by phoning Becky, who’d suggested she start looking in Dundrum town centre. Sure enough, Rory had been leaning on a railing staring at the water fountains, looking like an ASBO waiting to happen, his trainers open and the waist of his trousers showing half a foot of boxer shorts. He hadn’t even bothered to change out of his school uniform. Jo had coaxed him home with a bribe –20. She’d put Harry down for a nap, and was trying to humour Rory so that she could build up slowly to the serious conversation she needed to have with him. When he’d finished giving her the lowdown, she stubbed the fag out with her foot, headed into the kitchen, pulled a tub of Häagen-Dazs from the freezer and scooped a few dessertspoonfuls into her mouth before heading back in and plonking down beside him on the couch.
The virtual screen featured a bouncing car.
‘So the gangster’s in there having sex with a prostitute?’ Jo asked.
‘Yep.’ Rory was twiddling the controls furiously.
‘And to win, you have to rob people, cars and banks to make yourself rich, killing anyone who gets in the way?’
‘Yep. See those numbers in the top right-hand corner?’ Rory pointed, as the car stopped bouncing and a hulking Hell’s Angel with a bandana on his head and tattoos all over his neck climbed out.
‘Yeah?’
‘They’re keeping track of my health and my wealth. Now, as you can see, the bad news is my money has just taken a nosedive but, on the plus side, my health’s gone shooting up.’
‘She robbed you?’ Jo asked.
‘Technically, I paid her for services rendered, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m about to rob her back,’ Rory said.
‘Jesus,’ Jo muttered, looking away from the screen. ‘And the cops – they’re fair game too?’
‘Five stars if you kill one,’ Rory answered.
Jo took a few deep breaths. ‘Doesn’t it feel . . . creepy?’
Rory hit pause and turned to face her. ‘No, Mother, it doesn’t make me want to go out and shoot people, if that’s what you’re asking. Drive faster, sure, but kill? No. It’s just a laugh. Anyway, there’s a new one out ages ago now. This one’s ancient already.’
‘Okay,’ Jo said slowly.
‘And as you haven’t yet figured out how to set the video to pre-record, you are in no position to judge the noughties generation’s toys,’ Rory said, reading her mind. ‘Or Bebo.’
‘They can prosecute parents for a child’s truancy, did you know that?’ Jo said casually, after another long pause.
Rory stayed focused on the screen.
‘I get a criminal conviction, that’s the end of my job.’
Still no answer.
‘You do still want to go to college?’ she asked, frowning.
This time he shrugged.
‘I thought law was your first preference.’ Jo could hear the panic in her own voice.
‘What’s the point?’
‘I can show you if you want. I can bring you out in a squad car some night and show you why education is everything. I can bring you into one of the prisons and give you a breakdown of the corresponding literacy rates. I can . . .’
‘I can read and write, Mother,’ Rory said, his voice rising. ‘I’m not going to end up a smackhead sleeping on the streets because I don’t go to college. Loads of successful people didn’t go to college . . .’
‘You
don’t
want to go to college? Since when?’
Rory sighed, turned the game off but kept staring at the blank screen. ‘What’s the big deal?’
Jo stood up and headed back out the front door. Out in the front garden, she lit up another fag and spoke to him more calmly through the open window. ‘I just don’t want to see you waste your potential.’
‘If you cared so much, why did you walk out on us?’
He sounded so young and vulnerable suddenly, Jo felt a pang of guilt. ‘Rory, I didn’t walk out on you!’
‘Yes you did.’
‘Things weren’t working out with Dad, that’s all. I never wanted you to leave. I want you to live with me full time. You have no idea how much I miss you.’
‘Did you really think I could leave Dad on his own? It was bad enough you walking out on him without me rubbing his nose in it. He can’t even work the bloody iron.’
‘So I should have stayed with him to do his ironing?’
‘No, but . . .’
‘Dad’s life has moved on now, Rory. He has Jeanie.’
‘Don’t get me started on that cow.’
‘Don’t call her that!’ Jo snapped. She leaned in through the window and caught Rory’s eye. ‘Why, what’s she done?’
‘She just makes me feel like . . . I’m in the way . . . all the time . . . in my own, or at least in their, house!’
‘Cow,’ Jo agreed.
Rory’s face softened.
‘Move back with me.’
‘Dad says you’ll just turn me into a glorified “manny”.’
Jo pursed her lips. ‘No manny of mine would kill cops for fun.’
Rory laughed. A short half-laugh, but a laugh.
He sat back in the sofa and flicked the game back on. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘For a bit, see how it goes, yeah?’
Jo headed back into the room and hugged him. ‘Would you start turning up for school if I get you the latest version of this God-awful game?’ she asked.
‘Subtle, Mother. Why not offer me some shiny stars while you’re at it?’ He grinned. ‘’Course, if you were talking about a pair of tickets to Oxygen . . .’
‘It’s really important you knuckle down now with the exams coming.’
‘On one condition . . .’ Rory cut her off.
Jo sighed.
‘You give up smoking.’
Jo reached for the box in her pocket, and crunched.
He was high-fiving her when the landline rang. Jo was still smiling as she headed into the hall to answer.
It was Dan, explaining that, on his solicitor’s advice, the only way to maintain his stake in their house was to move back home.
The dancer loosened Sexton’s skinny tie to mid-mast with a pair of streaky, false-tanned hands and jiggled her tasselled boobs inches from his face. Sexton surveyed the tacky room, wondering what Maura would say if she could see him stranded in the middle of this bunch of sad bastards. It would probably be something non-judgemental like, ‘Live and let live.’ She hadn’t had a cynical bone in her body. The first time he’d laid eyes on her, she was busking with a guitar on Grafton Street, her hair in plaits, friendship bracelets and bangles stacked on both wrists. He’d only stopped to watch out of amusement, because she hadn’t a note in her head. Then someone grabbed the cap at her feet, robbing the few miserable quid she’d managed to collect, and Sexton had set off after them. That’s how it had started between them . . .
The dancer coiled a cerise feather boa around his neck, and he grabbed her wrist. ‘I want a word . . .’ he growled, adding with emphasis, ‘Frank.’
‘I’m taking my break in fifteen,’ a deep voice snapped, trying to jerk free.
Sexton spotted one of the bouncers heading over, shoulders braced for the ‘hands off the skirt’ routine. Smashing his glass off the floor, he jumped to his feet, bawling ‘Gardaí’ and demanding to see the proprietor and his licence. The ‘raid’ wouldn’t have seen the light of day in a court of law; he was off duty and well over the limit, but try telling that to the punters emerging from the foam pool and scurrying for their trousers, socks and shoes, running for the exit.
The music came to an abrupt halt. Frankie gave Sexton a dagger look and minced into the dressing room. Sexton followed him.
Frankie’s tacky dressing room was the size of a broom cupboard. A large theatrical mirror surrounded by light bulbs made the space even more depressing. Plucking a postcard from San Francisco off the mirror, Sexton read the back idly as Frankie covered up in an oriental, raw-silk dressing gown and whipped off his flowing mane. His short hair was scraped back off his face with a hair net, and flattened down
by sweat. Plonking himself on to a stool, he pouted at his reflection and dotted blobs of gloopy cream on his face, then made a swipe for the postcard. But Sexton held his arm up and out of reach.
‘Temper, temper,’ he said.
‘This is police harassment,’ Frankie said, peeling off false eyelashes.
‘That’s exactly what it is,’ Sexton agreed. ‘We have an ombudsman now, you should file a complaint.’
‘So your old boys’ club can make my life a complete misery – give over. What do you want?’
‘I want to know all about Rita Nulty.’
‘Never heard of her.’
Sexton took hold of Frankie’s chin and forced his neck around. ‘Look me in the eye and say that again,’ he said. ‘Only she was all over the papers yesterday and today. Last time a hooker was murdered, your lot were up in arms, forming a union to protect yourselves, sending out press releases to the papers. So let’s start again, shall we? Rita Nulty. I’d say this place was full of talk tonight about the murdered slag.’
‘Lap-dancers are not prostitutes,’ Frankie responded. ‘Prostitutes work in parlours or on the streets. Lap-dancers are artistes.’
Sexton released him and bent over his shoulder to talk to Frankie through the mirror. ‘Let me put it another way,’ he said, pulling open the dirty dressing gown. ‘I presume these are courtesy of the Social, yeah? Let me guess how you pulled that one off . . . Your shrink wrote and told them all about your suicidal feelings from the time you realized you were trapped in the wrong body at the age of five . . . You’ve got no income because you can’t work because your
self-identity is shattered, you’re so desperate to be a real woman. Do you think they’ll keep forking out for your hormones when the Revenue discovers you’ve got all this going on? How long does that treatment take anyway? Years, isn’t it? You had downstairs done yet?’
Frankie covered his face with his hands and started to shake. ‘You bastard.’
‘Rita Nulty?’
‘She was hooking for the Skids. Anal, dogging, group – anything went with her, long as she got her supply. She did anything they wanted, but she was way out of her depth. She owed them money, couldn’t pay.’
Frankie looked up at Sexton, his mascara running down his face like black tears. ‘You want to know who Rita Nulty was? A junkie. That’s all. Now fuck off before you get me killed.’
Spotting the look on his own face in the mirror, Sexton took a step back, feeling a pang of shame. Maura wouldn’t have recognized who he’d turned into.
He pulled open the dressing-table drawers and rifled through them quickly, stopping when he found a little black contacts book. By now Frankie had covered his face in his hands again and was wailing. Flicking through the pages, Sexton stopped to study a page then tucked it into his inside pocket.
‘Nice boobs, by the way. Very natural,’ he said before he left.
Satisfied all was quiet, she moved down the hall to the kitchen, rotating her aching shoulders and stretching her arms up over her head. What she needed now was one of Dan’s shoulder rubs, she thought. That said, if he’d laid a finger on her after the things he’d come out with today, she’d probably have swung for him.
She pulled open one of the Mexican pine presses, noticed the hinge was slipping and realized it was at least ten years since Dan had fitted the units.
Where had those years gone?
She pulled out a bottle of Powers and a whiskey glass and poured herself a stiff drink. It had taken them the guts of two years to scrimp and save for the traditional,
country-style units, she remembered, taking a sip of the whiskey and admiring the room reluctantly. Meals out, holidays, even the odd bloody blow-dry had gone by the wayside during that time, as they’d penny-pinched enough to get a loan from the credit union. They’d never have afforded it at all if they’d had to pay the same again for a carpenter, but Dan was brilliant at DIY. He’d put in the floor as well – though he’d had his doubts about Jo’s choice of tiles: dark-red and bottle-green check, which in the end had worked a treat. And if anyone had seen the way they’d celebrated when they’d salvaged an original Victorian Sally rack from a car-boot sale they’d have presumed them barking. For years afterwards while she was still married, Jo had felt a little surge of pride every time she walked into the room and glimpsed the home they’d made for Rory.
She studied the drink she was swirling around in the bottom of her glass. Back then, she’d presumed this kitchen would be the heart of a home that would fill with more children over the years. What had happened? she wondered. Why had there never been a right time for Dan? The old excuse, that he wasn’t getting any younger – he was ten years older than her – hadn’t been a factor when he was still in his thirties. Then it was always the pressure of the latest case. During one of their last heated rows before they split, he’d finally admitted that he resented the prospect of rearing another child when they were just starting to get their lives back. The way Jo saw it, without kids, you had no life. Family meant everything to her.
So how did I manage to lose mine then?
a voice inside her head asked.
She knocked back the last of her drink, organized a pen and notebook from a drawer and pulled a high stool up to the breakfast bar. She needed to get working on her defence
for having taken that money from Rita Nulty. After staring at the blank sheet of paper for a few seconds, she sighed and twisted the cap off the whiskey bottle again, helping herself to another glass.
The liquid warmed her insides, and her thoughts moved to the sense of joy she’d felt at the sight of the little blue cross appearing on the pee stick, telling her she was pregnant again, with Harry. A flush spread across her cheeks as she remembered the shock and hurt – and yes, bloody humiliation – of realizing Dan’s reaction was the precise opposite. He’d actually asked her to have a termination! Right there, at the kitchen table. He’d knitted his fingers in hers, looked her in the eye and come straight out with it. He’d said, ‘You don’t have to go through with it. We’ve got a good life. Why ruin it?’
Jo put the back of her cold hands on her cheeks to stop the heat from the anger spreading, even now, almost two years later. She’d told him it wasn’t going to happen, tried to explain how much she’d longed for the baby, thinking he’d see it her way. But instead he’d dug his heels in, refusing to talk about it, until the long silences between them just wore her down. Eventually, it got so bad she’d asked Dan to leave. She wanted to enjoy what she knew would be her last pregnancy. She’d never meant the separation to be a permanent arrangement; she couldn’t look further than one day to the next without him, that was just how things had turned out.
For a very brief time – twenty-four hours, to be precise – she actually thought they would sort everything out and get back together. The day Harry was born, Dan had taken him in his arms and asked her to forgive him and to allow him home. Jo agreed, only to have Jeanie pay an unexpected visit
to the hospital. After she’d gone, Jo remembered looking at the card on the bouquet of flowers she had brought, wondering why Jeanie had signed them from Dan too. As she waited for Dan’s visit that night, Jo had written her sense of panic off as postnatal paranoia: her hormones were all over the place, after all, and there were plenty of men called Dan. Then Dan had come in, a big blue teddy under his arm, and Jo had made a joke of the card. The moment she’d glimpsed his reaction, she realized Jeanie had not called to see her out of the goodness of her heart at all. That was how she’d found out her husband was seeing someone else – from a congratulations card on a bunch of bloody carnations signed off by his girlfriend with a string of kisses.
And now, just as things seemed set in stone, life was taking another twist and he was coming home after all, she this time having managed to foist her pride out of the equation, and giving her back everything she wanted – her family. So why couldn’t she shake the hole in the bottom of her stomach, stop feeling that it was all too late?
She reached up and adjusted the pots and pans hanging from the Sally rack they’d bought together in that car-boot sale so he wouldn’t start bashing his head into them, like the old days.
Pressing the nib of the pen against the top left-hand corner of the page, she tried to focus on her case. Nothing could happen between her and Dan until she’d sorted the business of what she’d done with Rita Nulty’s money. She would have to tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable. But what did any of it matter when three victims were dead and a fourth battling for his life? Dan’s adherence to procedure was keeping her from doing the only thing that mattered – finding who was responsible.