If I Never See You Again

by Niamh O'Connor

  ‘Had the victim any previous?’

  ‘Lots – soliciting and shoplifting.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  He shook his head.

  Jo wasn’t surprised. The scale of the resources to tackle the drug problem was a joke, and with all the cuts to public-service pay, morale was at an all-time low. Nobody took chances with their personal health and safety when it came to drug arrests any more. ‘How long had she been there?’

  ‘Pathologist reckoned under twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Could have told you that myself from one look at her bus ticket.’ She blew on and then sipped the scalding coffee. ‘Heard who’s in the running for heading up the investigation yet?’

  ‘Chief super’s due to announce it in the morning. But between you, me and the wall, he’s already given me the nod that it’s mine. He wants this one solved quickly. Did you hear he’s up for promotion? Assistant commissioner!’

  It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Dan was one of only six chief superintendents in the city, which meant that he’d be a contender for the top job of commissioner in a few years’ time. ‘They’d have to move him out of here then, wouldn’t they? It won’t happen. I’d never be that lucky.’

  Sexton laughed.

  ‘Listen, just to give you the heads-up, I’ve asked Dan to give me the Rita Nulty inquiry,’ Jo said. ‘Nothing personal, but I’m going to fight for it. You don’t mind, do you?’

  He nodded several times too often. ‘If that’s how things pan out, so be it. I’ve no problem taking orders from a woman, though a lot of men in here would. As the fella says, “May the best man win.”’

  Jo was typing with her two index fingers when PULSE miraculously threw back the information she was looking for. Sexton leaned over her shoulder to read from the monitor.

  ‘What’s your take on what happened today then?’ he asked, leaning in close. He smelled of one of those trendy, androgynous aftershaves she didn’t know the name of but liked. Too ‘new man’ for Dan. He’d even treated his wedding ring like jewellery and left it on the shelf beside his shaving mirror every morning.

  Jo stretched across the desk for a pen. ‘I get the feeling the killer hasn’t finished yet. And I doubt today’s victim was his first. I’m trying to dig out any old trophy-killer files.’

  ‘Not just a punter coked out of his brain, taking things a bit far?’

  She shook her head. ‘The killer went to too much trouble.’ She tapped the screen with her pen. ‘See what’s turned up. You were involved in this one, weren’t you? It was put down to a gangland hit.’

  ‘Stuart Ball?’ Sexton asked, reading the screen over her shoulder. ‘Yeah, I know him. His nickname was Git. He was a lowlife, a druggie. Used to be high up in the Skids until he started sampling the merchandise. What about him?’

  ‘The thing is, he was found on New Wapping Street,’ Jo said. ‘That’s just around the corner from where we found Rita today.’

  Sexton nodded ambiguously and moved in closer to the screen. Jo knew he’d take an interest once she mentioned the underworld. The Skids were the biggest drugs gang in the country, so named because most had cut their teeth on the juvenile joyriding circuit.

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ she continued. ‘Git’s eye was gouged out and left at the scene. Given what’s happened to the victim we found today, I think it could be the same killer.’

  Sexton straightened up. ‘Interesting . . . You fancy a drink?’

  Mac reacted instantly. He was on his feet, zipping up his jacket.

  Jo checked her watch. ‘Thought drinking on duty was your pet hate?’

  ‘We’re celebrating. Guess who’s just been knocked off? Anto Crawley! Only happened a couple of hours ago – his body’s still warm. Happy days, eh?’

  ‘Really?’ she said, understanding his euphoria. Anto Crawley was the country’s top drug lord and the Skids’ lynchpin. If he’d been taken out, it would be a major blow to the gangland.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sexton said. ‘Someone just did us a big favour. Really had it in for him, whoever it was, and they smashed his teeth in before they killed him.’

  Jo winced as she made a note of the numbers of the files she wanted to retrieve from the monitor.

  Sexton put one hand on the back of her chair. ‘You’re taking this hooker’s case a bit personally, aren’t you? You got no home to go to? Where are your kids?’

  Jo bristled. ‘With Dan. You two go. I’m staying here.’

  A couple of hours later, Jo had read and flattened all the dog-eared reports and newspaper cuttings arced around her on the desk. She leaned her forehead on her hands as she studied the victims’ photographs closely. Stuart Ball had that hard look that came from seeing too much of what human beings are capable of doing to each other. At the same time, he had the unearthly expression people always seemed to assume when they meet a tragic end. That look was probably the only thing he shared with the dead prostitute, Jo surmised. Rita was at the opposite end of the criminal spectrum: she sold herself to survive. Stuart sold her the drugs that forced her on her back. For this reason, Jo kept all the information on their cases in two separate piles.

  Next, she placed a sheet of A4 paper landscape on the desk and wrote both the victims’ names on the left-hand side, drawing a line separating them from the space spanning the rest of the page. Alongside each name, in the larger right-hand column, she charted the element of spectacle in each death, listing the body part ‘hand’ beside Rita, ‘eye’ after Stuart.

  A knot formed in her stomach as she realized that both had also been found in a state of undress.

  She pushed the piece of paper aside and reached for the keyboard, running a broad internet search under the words ‘murdered’ and ‘stripped’. The search engine threw back multiple hits. She qualified her trawl with the word ‘symbolism’ then clicked on a leaked CIA document entitled ‘The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual 1983’, and read how some killers had been observed to take a sadistic glee in tampering with something as sacred as death by stripping or mutilating the corpse to instil fear in an enemy. This behaviour had become a recognized psychological technique of warfare. Deliberately humiliating the dead was a way of terrorizing the living.

  Jo looked away from the screen. Is this what you’re up to? Are you forcing your enemy to submit? she thought. She started rolling out a crick in her neck and was giving serious consideration to joining Sexton for a jar – after all, she was off duty – when she had a sudden idea. Scribbling ‘Anto Crawley?’ shakily at the bottom of her first list, she wrote ‘teeth’ alongside the list of body parts. Then she logged on to the intelligence wire posting bulletins between all the country’s stations and learned that Crawley had been found naked just like the other two, a stone’s throw away from the other two crime scenes, in an apartment off Spencer Dock, and that his teeth were not smashed but removed intact and scattered at the scene.

  Jo scraped her hair back off her face and stared at the page, then entered the list of body parts into the search engine. What it threw up made her sit back from the screen with a start. She was staring at a parable from the Book of Exodus. ‘A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a stroke for a stroke.’

  5

  Death would have been kinder, the crime reporter Ryan Freeman thought as he watched his daughter Katie’s vacant face again fail to respond to the psychiatrist’s gentle coaxing. But mercy didn’t feature so prominently on the Skids’ list of entry requirements. It was just over a month since the gang had abducted his nine-year-old to warn him to stop writing about them, and she hadn’t uttered a word since. He still didn’t know exactly what they had done to her. It didn’t bear thinking about – but it was all he could think about. If Katie wouldn’t tell him what had happened, it was up to him to find out. The only thing he had to go on was the CCTV footage recorded from her school. On the day Katie went missing, the Skids’ boss
Anto Crawley had sneered straight into the camera lens. It was as good as a confession. Ryan had gone from ridiculing Crawley in the paper and belittling him with the nickname Skidmark to trying desperately to contact him to beg him to release his daughter when, out of the blue, Katie had suddenly turned up, unharmed physically but utterly disorientated, on a street near their home.

  ‘Can you draw a magic carpet for me, so we can fly up off the ground and away from things?’ Dr Forte asked her.

  Ryan glanced around the sterile office – filing cabinets and ornately framed qualifications were hardly likely to stimulate a child whose imagination had been delivered a fatal blow.

  Katie looked at the crayons and paper on the table in front of her then back again at the light playing between the wooden slats of a blind opposite. She started to flick her fingers in front of her eyes, studying them intently.

  Ryan sighed heavily and jumped to his feet, heading for the water canister to pour himself a drink. He couldn’t stand this inactivity. He had to do something . . .

  ‘Ryan,’ his wife, Angie, chided.

  He gulped the contents back, squeezed the plastic till it cracked and tossed it into the waste-paper basket before returning to his seat, shifting around uncomfortably. He felt every bit as powerless here in the shrink’s office as he had been the day that Katie vanished.

  Dr Forte took Katie’s hand and pulled a puppet over it, inviting her to let it speak on her behalf. But her hand might as well not have been connected to her body, because she stopped moving it and began to rock gently instead. There was no room for flying carpets or puppets wherever she was. Ryan tapped his foot steadily against the leg of the desk.

  ‘Ryan,’ Angie said again.

  Ryan placed his hand on his leg to remind himself to keep it still. Everything in his life had been spinning out of control from the second he’d switched from being the reporter to being the story itself. But only the people he’d have trusted with his life knew about the nightmare. He’d managed to keep Katie’s attack out of the papers because, instead of reporting the crime, he’d called a personal friend in the gardaí when she went missing.

  The head of the emergency services was also a long-time associate, and had reassured him that the ambulance crew who’d transported Katie to the Sex Assault Unit of Crumlin Children’s Hospital for tests after she was found would keep the incident quiet.

  The neighbours had been given a cock-and-bull story about the ambulance having been called because she’d suffered an asthma attack.

  No one at the paper knew what had happened. They’d only have found some way of turning it into a story, their ‘exclusive’. Ryan knew only too well how it would have read – ‘Scum Target Ace Reporter’s Kid’. The subheads would have referred to it as the worst attack on the freedom of the press since the murder of his colleague, Veronica Guerin. If he’d been the one reporting a story about someone else’s child, he’d have made sure to get Katie’s age up near the top to lure the voyeur on and in. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the people in his stories, just that human misery was the currency of the newspaper business. If he’d got personally involved in every tragedy he’d covered, he’d have been unable to get out of bed in the morning.

  He tipped the swinging-metal-ball gadget perched on the doctor’s desk and watched the chain reaction it set into play. Angie shot him an angry look. Nothing new there. Most of the looks he got from her were angry now.

  Katie stood up and walked over to the door, ready to leave. She was so broken-spirited that she reminded Ryan of a kicked dog and made him want to punch the wall. Instead, he swallowed the bile rising in the back of his throat as Angie and the doctor tried to persuade Katie back to her seat. What had been done to her? Why wouldn’t she tell him so that they could help her get better?

  ‘I’d like to know how long Katie will be like this,’ he said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, not in front of her,’ Angie said despairingly.

  ‘There’s no way of knowing,’ Dr Forte said, taking the little girl’s hand and opening the door into an adjoining playroom, in which Katie could be seen through a wide, one-way window.

  When he returned, he continued where he’d left off as they watched her through the glass. ‘As I’ve already explained, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here. It may well be that Katie suffered a trauma that would have fractured the strongest of adult minds. You have to be patient and prepare yourselves for the fact that she may never recover enough to speak.’

  Angie groaned. Ryan put his head in his hands.

  ‘She’s not responding to the treatment yet because she’s blanked out what happened,’ Dr Forte went on. ‘It’s a classic coping mechanism, where the survivor finds it easier to deny that anything has happened than process the reality. Unfortunately, by disabling the cognitive part of the brain, her ability to communicate has also been paralysed.’

  Dr Forte paused and knit his fingers across his chest. ‘To put it another way, if Katie’s case ever results in a conviction and I am invited by the court to give a Victim Impact statement, I intend to give the view that Katie’s mental condition is by far the most devastating I have ever experienced in the twenty-three years that I have been providing therapy to juvenile victims of serious crime.’

  Ryan winced. Forte had counselled kids who’d survived rape, attempted murder, seen their parents murdered. What the hell had happened to Katie? He looked at her in the playroom, rocking again, and then tuned out of the rest of Forte’s summation, fidgeting with the handle of his chair, picking at a hole in his jeans, scratching at the back of his neck till it stung. When Angie ferociously locked her eyes on his, he focused again.

  Katie would almost certainly experience flashbacks, the doctor was saying, and that was why, despite her youth, he was treating her with high doses of medication. She was on child’s anti-depressants, and paediatric sleeping tablets to get her through the nights.

  ‘But it’s vital that the two of you stay calm and close in front of her,’ Dr Forte concluded. ‘Katie needs to feel secure if she’s ever to relax enough to speak again.’

  Angie looked at Ryan expectantly, and he nodded his acceptance of the terms. Dr Forte took it as his cue to bring Katie back into the room. Ryan sat silently through the rest of the session, thinking back to the day it happened, remembering where he’d been when he’d first received the news of Katie’s disappearance. He’d been standing at her empty bed when the implication had hit home like a concrete block. It was all his fault. The dolls, the diaries with heart-shaped padlocks, the angel figurines Katie collected – all had swirled into props from a horror movie. He really believed, sitting in her bedroom that terrible night she vanished, that she would never come home.

  Ryan looked to Katie. She had begun to spin on the spot, faster and faster, head bowed, hands stretched behind her back like little wings.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ Angie pleaded, her voice becoming gradually more panic-stricken as she looked from Ryan to her daughter, before running across the room and holding her.

  Ryan was thinking about that look he kept seeing in his garda friend’s eyes when he’d first called to take down the details of the abduction. He knew the cop was thinking Katie might be better off dead than being kept hostage and suffering, but Ryan was convinced that, no matter what had happened, if he could just get her home, he could fix anything.

  For the first time, as he looked at his wife and Katie, the elation he’d experienced when his daughter had returned was replaced by the suspicion that his friend may have been right. What if Katie really was gone for ever anyway?

  6

  It was dark as Jo steered towards the address she’d found in Rita Nulty’s purse. ‘Who are you?’ she asked aloud, flicking the radio off as if it would help the killer hear. ‘And who are you avenging?’

  She tried winding the window up, but the handle came off in her hand. She tossed it on to the passenger seat, hitching her collar up against the night air. ‘Bloo
dy marvellous,’ she groaned. The car was like a fridge as it was because the heater didn’t work. A cassette in the deck caught her eye, and she pulled it out, squinting to work out what it was from the handwritten scrawl on the side. It turned out to be one of Dan’s compilation albums, which had gone wonky from being played to death. She chucked it on to the seat too, and tried to concentrate on the case.

  A couple of minutes later, Jo rubbed her forehead miserably. It was no use, and she knew exactly why. Dan had given her that tape as a present one Christmas years back when they hadn’t had a penny. It had meant the world to her. Every song had been picked for a reason, and he’d bitten her ear as he whispered the reminders – the one playing in the pub on their first date, another that they’d been dancing to when he proposed. She had lain curled up in his arms in bed feeling like the luckiest woman on earth. Next morning he’d led her into the driveway, holding his hands over her eyes, until they reached the rest of her present – this bloody car. Jo felt her heart sink. It was hard to believe they could have grown so far apart since then . . .

  She pulled up outside a block of flats. A billion euro had been pumped into the rejuvenation of Ballymun, a black spot on the north side, but she was still parked beside a lorry container doubling as a grocery shop. Its corrugated, windowless steel was fireproof and, as it weighed several tonnes, it couldn’t be stroked either. The worst part was that the original tenants allocated a place here by the corporation thought they’d landed on their feet. It was a black joke, like the name of the local pub – The Penthouse. The only thing more depressing than the view was the soundtrack, as Ballymun was situated under one of the city’s main airport flight paths.

  Jo climbed out, discovering that she couldn’t even lock the door from outside any more, as the window pane had wedged itself against the lock. You’d be doing me a favour, she thought about any would-be joyriders.

  She watched two kids ride by on a horse, as if on cue. They were riding bareback, holding on to its mane and causing havoc with the traffic. A double-decker bus was trying to pass, but the driver kept losing his nerve and swerving back. It was only a matter of time before someone and, most likely, the horse, got killed. ‘Urban cowboys’ they called kids around here. The thought of bringing her kids up somewhere like this made Jo shudder.