If I Never See You Again

by Niamh O'Connor

  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.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ she said to herself. ‘The killer doesn’t worship Jesus Christ, he blames him . . . Before he came along, justice meant “an eye for an eye” but, after him, it was a case of turn the other cheek. Jesus forgave the whore, the downtrodden, the criminals. But our killer is turning back the clock.’

  15

  It was gone 4 p.m. when Jo arrived at Rory’s school. As she entered the main corridor, she stepped up to the framed photos on the wall showing the different classes dressed in the same rugby strip, all the pupils with the same open-legged, arms-folded-high pose, the same hail and hearty grin on all their faces.

  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 h
all 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.’

  16

  Sexton’s tie was hanging loose when Jo approached him at the outpatients entrance of St Vincent’s Hospital, where a group of poorly patients in pyjamas and dressing gowns who should have known better were gathered under the bicycle shelter smoking. Jo would have happily joined them, if there’d been time. She walked briskly with him down the hospital corridors, past the medics still robed in theatre gowns and the luridly painted concrete statues of various saints.

  ‘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 co-operate, 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 fluorescent
ly 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.