If I Never See You Again

by Niamh O'Connor

  Foxy gave a tired nod towards an area further down the balcony where they could get some privacy. Jo popped a plug of Nicorette she’d just about managed to rummage from the junk at the bottom of her handbag into her mouth. She chewed at a speed that let him know she was humouring him.

  ‘If it was up to me, you’d have had him, okay?’ Foxy said. ‘But it wasn’t up to me. We had a visitor. He left early.’

  ‘Who?’ Jo prickled.

  Foxy gave her a knowing look.

  ‘Come on, tell me. This is serious. If I fail this course, I’ve no chance of getting my transfer approved.’

  Foxy held Jo’s stare. Most people couldn’t – the pupils of her glassy eyes had been permanently dilated since a childhood car crash.

  ‘Who do you think?’ Foxy said. ‘The chief super, ’course.’

  Jo groaned. Her work relationship with her ex-husband, Dan Mason, was becoming as difficult as their break-up had been. Since they’d split eighteen months ago, Dan had virtually grounded her, with jobs that carried no hope of upping her conviction rate, and now it appeared that he was sabotaging her contingency plan. She’d been signing up for every course going to keep as far away from him as possible. She’d hoped that by acquiring a new set of skills she could fast-track her transfer to some independent republic away from Dan and his cronies’ sphere of influence – somewhere like the Garda National Drugs Unit (GNDU), or the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB). But now it seemed that Dan was determined to interfere even with that. ‘That’s bloody well it, I’m going to kill him!’ she said.

  Foxy spread his hands to indicate that it was nothing to do with him. He was built like a jockey – wiry, with a head that looked too big for his body. He opened his mouth to say something – but Jo’s eyes had moved to the apartment door to his right. She took a couple of steps past him, and ran her hand down its length.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got a breaking and entering on our hands,’ she said, pointing to the forced handle and scuff marks at the base of the door.

  ‘This building is uninhabited,’ Foxy answered, eyes worried. ‘It’s the only way the insurance would cover today’s training.’

  Jo pulled her hand inside her sleeve then pressed the handle down. She took a deep breath when the door gave way.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere. I’ll get assistance,’ Foxy said, glancing across the empty balcony and heading for the stairwell.

  But Jo was already inside and patting the wall for a light switch. ‘Anyone home?’ she called. She gasped and tugged her multicoloured Dr Who scarf over her nose, wincing at the bad smell. It was musty and invasive, like burning Bakelite. The heating was overpowering, and something else about the place she couldn’t put her finger on was making goose bumps break out on her skin . . .

  She jumped as Foxy, who’d doubled back rather than leave her alone, stifled a cough behind her. He had buried his face into the crook of his arm. ‘Jesus, what’s that stink?’ he asked. ‘Christ, it’s rotten. You don’t think somebody’s popped their clogs in here, do you?’

  Jo was on the move, surveying the small sitting room-cum-kitchenette. There were two doors to her right, one on the left, behind the kitchen area. No pictures hung on the walls; there were no personal effects, just a few bits of sparse, mismatched furniture on the laminate floor in need of a mop. She made her way over to a smudged, glass-topped coffee table, licked her little finger and dipped it into a line of untouched Charlie, then tasted.

  Foxy whispered, ‘Hey, have you forgotten everything I taught you? That stuff could contain anything – strychnine, for starters.’

  Jo mouthed a silent whistle. She didn’t have to worry about rat poison. The cocaine was uncut. This place was higher up the food chain than first impressions had suggested.

  She registered the background sound that had been putting her on edge. Bluebottles had only ever meant one thing in her experience. We’re too late, she thought.

  She turned right and took the first door. It opened into the bathroom and it was empty. There were towels on the floor. She reached down. Bone dry.

  She tried the second door: a single room with different outfits laid out on the unmade bed. A nurse’s outfit; a leather jumpsuit and whip; a school uniform. It looks like a prostitution racket being operated from a vacated flat, she thought. All tastes catered for . . .

  Backing out, she crossed the main living space to the third and last door, on the opposite wall, stalling briefly before flinging it open. The new and strongest smell hit her like she’d just walked into a butcher’s shop.

  ‘Foxy, in here, now,’ she commanded. Shaking her head, she rooted around her bag for her small black hard-bound notebook. There was so much crap in the way – lip gloss, tampons, loose change, bloody nappy-rash cream. Her hand was shaking when she finally plucked the pad free and snapped the elastic off. She bent her left arm and held it up to eye level, read the time then noted it in the book. The date is the thirtieth, right? What’s today’s date? Come on, keep it together, Jo. She’d checked the date on the milk this morning against the calendar to see if it’d stretch to a cup of tea. What was it? The thirtieth. She wrote it down.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Foxy said, appearing behind her then bending to throw up.

  The body lay naked just inside the door, splayed on her back like she had been dropped from a height. The victim was in her early forties, maybe younger, junkie-thin with a mass of straggly long hair, dark at the roots, peroxide-blonde brittle everywhere else. Her legs were covered with infections around needle sores. Her arms were propped up over her head: the right wrist ended in a grisly stump where the hand should have been. Puce lipstick had seeped into the creases around her lips like scarlet stitches. Strands of hair had escaped and become matted with congealed blood across her face, blurring with streaks of smudged blue mascara. Blood had spattered and skimmed every surface, as far as Jo could make out.

  ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ Foxy murmured.

  ‘Minimum movement,’ Jo warned, eyes darting around the room as she scrawled the physical details of what she was witnessing.

  Foxy choked again behind her.

  ‘Go back to the front door and secure the scene,’ she instructed. ‘Nobody comes through the cordon without my say-so. I mean, nobody. Contact base. Tell them we need the Tech Bureau asap and a doctor to declare death, and put a request in for the pathologist. Got that?’

  Foxy nodded. She watched him go, over her shoulder, a maternal expression crossing her face. There’s a reason he’s the bookman, she thought.

  Breathing evenly through her nose, she slowly and gently pressed her fingertips against the victim’s midriff.

  ‘Body cold to the touch despite stifling room temperature,’ she wrote.

  Kneeling, she tucked her pen behind her ear and gripped her notepad between her teeth, freeing up her hands to try and locate the sachet of sterile latex baby-blue gloves from her bag and put them on. They were greasy inside and the smell of plastic made the bridge of her nose sting.

  Lifting the victim’s arm up, she peered underneath, placing it back as delicately as if she were handling antique china. Was she alive when you chopped her hand off, you evil bastard?

  ‘Pooling clearly evident on back of victim’s right arm,’ she wrote, adding, ‘Rigor mortis has set in.’

  She made a note of the ten-to-ten position of the arms and the body’s state of undress then placed the pen and pad back in her bag and leaned forwards to pick up a purse discarded on top of some clothes – a fake-leather mini skirt, a lime-green boob tube and a pair of knee-length red leather boots – a few feet away. She flicked open the clasp. Two 50 notes were rolled together tightly inside with a bus ticket dispensed in the city centre dated the twenty-ninth, a letter from the Social Welfare asking what job applications she’d made in the last month, and a plastic photo ID that turned out to be a medical card. She glanced from the picture to the bloody face on the floor and sighed. The victim’s name was Rita Nulty, and she’d an address in Ballymun
. She looked at her again, differently. Based on the income Rita was clearly not making, she appeared to have been a low-class hooker.

  Jo turned around, focusing on a shape in a far corner, talking aloud to herself as she tried to process the image. ‘Flesh in the corner . . . is . . . a hand . . . it’s . . . Rita’s hand.’

  She swallowed and wrote it down, making a note of the bloodstain locations, their size and condition, and recording other details – how the lights had been off, the door forced before she’d entered.

  She turned back to Rita and her mutilated arm. Her fingers hovered over Rita’s candyfloss hair, and hesitated. She pulled a glove off, then touched Rita’s face lightly. ‘You poor love,’ she whispered. ‘What did you do to deserve this?’

  She pulled the glove back on, slid the medical card back in the purse and placed it back where she’d found it. The two 50s she tucked in her coat pocket.

  From the doorway behind her, Foxy said flatly: ‘The lads are on their way.’

  3

  It was early evening by the time Jo pulled into the driveway of her home, a granite cottage with a For Sale sign outside it in Barnacullia, on the Three Rock mountain, six miles south of the city centre. Clutching her sleeping one-year-old, Harry, with one arm, Jo used the other, in sync with her elbow and foot, to battle the boot of her twenty-year-old Ford Escort open and take the M&S bag containing the groceries out.

  The sloped lawn was only the size of a postage stamp, but it had looked permanently shabby since Dan had left. Much as she enjoyed gardening, Jo liked the idea of keeping potential buyers at bay for as long as possible even more. Even in a recession, she could never have afforded this place now that Dundrum town centre and the city’s ring road had sprung up so close. But back when they were buying, this place had been considered the sticks, and the house in need of complete refurbishment. Times had changed, Jo thought as she struggled with the shopping. At weekends, a fleet of hip young professionals wearing shades on their heads and driving convertibles converged on the picnic benches outside Lamb Doyles or the Blue Light pub to drink cider and take in the view from the smog-line perch over the city. Jo had become adept at dodging the estate agent’s calls.

  She had a splitting headache and was having no luck trying to shake the bag free of the stroller in the boot so as not to disrupt Harry, her mobile phone gripped between her teeth. There was a sixteen-year age gap between her boys and, on days like this, the having-it-all dream seemed more like a downright lie than a myth. Eventually, the bag containing the dinner crashed out on the tarmac, bringing with it the stroller and a stack of fluttering paperwork, and Jo snagged her finger in snapping metal in the process. She sucked and shook her hand miserably, stamping on the documents before bending sideways to scoop everything back up and in.

  Once the balancing act had negotiated its way through the front door, Jo dropped her bags where she stood and carried Harry, who was still – miraculously – sleeping, to his cot beside the bed in her room. After tucking him in snugly, she flicked the baby monitor on.

  Heading back down the hall, she swung into the sitting room and leaned over the back of the couch. She plucked a beer bottle and remote control from the armrest.

  ‘Hey,’ Rory protested, scrambling to his feet and turning around.

  Her eldest son scrunched his eyes shut as Jo flicked the light on.

  ‘Next time, I tell your father,’ she warned, hitting the mute button. Incoherent gangsta rap came to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Yeah, cos, like, he’ll take the call,’ Rory jeered.

  She froze with her back to him and began the silent count to ten. ‘Would you like your dinner now? Will Becky have some? And does her mum know she’s here?’ she said, walking into the kitchen, where yesterday evening’s dirty dishes confronted her.

  ‘Yes, please, and yes, Mrs Mason,’ the body that had been squirming under Rory on the couch called back. The pretty blonde teenager sat up and buttoned up her blouse quickly, smoothing her long hair back into place.

  Jo glanced at the yellow Post-it stuck to the broken dishwasher door that was supposed to have been a foolproof reminder to Phone a plumber!!! for the last two days. She sighed, pulled up a sleeve and rooted under the bottom of the stack of dishes in the sink for the plug.

  ‘We’re starving,’ Rory announced, arriving and asking behind her, ‘Okay if Becky stays the night?’

  ‘Spag Bol in approximately forty-five . . .’ Jo said. ‘And yes, if Becky puts her mum on the phone to clear it.’

  Rory grunted.

  Jo turned and eyed the handsome teenager towering over her. He looked so like his father suddenly that she caught a breath. Rory’s shoulder-length hair needed a cut, his grungy clothes needed a wash and the swollen new piercing in his right eyebrow needed a doctor. His rebellious phase had kicked in the minute she’d brought Harry home and had culminated with him deciding to move in with Dan. It didn’t feel like home without him.

  ‘Don’t you bloody well dare light that in here,’ she warned, seeing the roll-up he was licking.

  ‘I wasn’t planning to, Mother,’ he said.

  Jo turned her back to him as she pulled open the medicine press and pushed horse-dosage pink and yellow tablets out of the blister pack and into her mouth, crooking her neck to gulp them back. She was so used to eating and drinking on the run, a glass of water didn’t occur to her. The box also stipulated that you only took the yellow tab if the pink didn’t work. Who had time to wait? Headaches were something she lived with on a daily basis.

  ‘How was school today?’ Jo asked, glancing over her shoulder to find Rory had gone again. She went into overdrive, squirting washing-up liquid in the sink and turning both taps on, wringing a J-cloth and wiping down the surfaces, slapping a pan on the cooker. After losing count of the number of spoons of formula she’d spooned into Harry’s bottle, she washed it out and started again, this time counting aloud and shaking it vigorously before placing it in the bottle-warmer. She’d just begun chopping an onion at arm’s length, straining her head as far as it would turn away, when the sound of the doorbell made her frown. She wasn’t expecting anyone.

  ‘Rory, can you get that?’ she called, wiping her streaming eyes on the back of her sleeve. ‘Blast!’ she complained when it chimed again. She cocked an ear to see if it had woken Harry, glanced from the pan sizzling on a hotplate to the door, then hurried down the hall, throwing her eyes up to heaven as she passed the sitting room and spotted Rory making out on the couch again.

  Peering through the spyhole, she stepped back suddenly, muttering, ‘Shit,’ under her breath. It was Dan, with the baby’s overnight bag slung over his shoulder. She’d forgotten it was his night for Harry. She tilted her head against the front door briefly, then pulled it open and stood aside.

  Her ex-husband was tall and broad, with a boxer’s nose and hands and Rory’s blue-black hair, which he wore just shy of a crew cut to minimize his lightly receding hairline. His shirt collar was still buttoned closed, meaning he’d come straight from the station. She was still furious with him for showing up at the training session earlier when he must have had a million jobs that took priority, but, realizing that tension was practically steaming off him as he entered, she held her tongue.

  Living with him before a suspect was nominated used to be a nightmare. It was like waiting for a pressure cooker to blow. Jo had left the murder scene as soon as the forensic team had arrived but she knew from the fidgety way Dan was behaving that he had been there too. Jo couldn’t contain her feelings when she was working on a case, but Dan would bottle it all up. He’d nearly lost it after a child’s body was found in the Phoenix Park a few years back. He had kept it together during the inquiry, and then when the case was finally solved he’d erupted over something incidental – she’d forgotten to set the video to record some match he’d wanted to watch after work. He’d reacted like it was the end of the world. He’d walked out on her and stayed away from home for two nights, refusing to answer any of
her calls to his mobile. Afterwards, he claimed he’d stayed in a hotel to get his head straight, but refused to tell her which one.

  They differed in other ways too. Dan got stressed by any deviation from routine; Jo liked change (as long as it didn’t involve gadgets). Maybe they’d never have married if she hadn’t got pregnant with Rory when they were both still students in Templemore Training College. But definitely they’d still be together if she hadn’t got pregnant with Harry. Dan hadn’t wanted another baby, not with jobs as demanding as theirs, he’d said, though Jo knew he now loved Harry every bit as much as she did. If he hadn’t had a fling after they separated, while she was heavily pregnant, Jo would probably have taken him back the second she watched him take Harry in his arms for the first time. But then she’d found out the other woman was his secretary, Jeanie. And that she couldn’t forgive. Too many lines had been crossed. Jeanie had been Dan’s secretary for ten years. Had those years been one long flirtation, and was there more to it, as Jo had regularly suspected? Why wouldn’t he just tell her the name of the hotel?

  ‘I’m just making dinner,’ she told him, holding her hair off her face with her arm.

  ‘Sorry, you go ahead, I’ll wait in the car,’ he’d said uncertainly. He’d been brought up in Manchester and his accent still had the twang.

  Jo gave the door a flick behind him. ‘Why don’t you join us? You eaten?’

  Dan managed a clenched smile. ‘You’re cooking?’

  Jo pulled the dishcloth off her shoulder and whipped it off his leg. ‘Very funny,’ she said.

  ‘What did you make of her?’ he asked, following Jo down the hall.

  ‘Rita?’ Jo replied. ‘The killer went to a lot of trouble.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid you were going to say,’ Dan said, glancing through the sitting-room door and calling, ‘Oi, haven’t you any homework to be getting on with?’

  Jo began attempting to peel a clove of garlic at the butcher’s block but was all fingers and thumbs.