If I Never See You Again

by Niamh O'Connor

  Skinny shrugged.

  ‘Well, the man we want also likes to have his way with dead women. That you?’

  ‘What’s she talking about, Skinny?’ a man’s voice called from the crowd.

  ‘Don’t try and deny it. We record everything that takes place in interview rooms these days, or have you forgotten that?’ Jo told the crowd.

  Skinny held his hands up. ‘I was having a laugh,’ he said. ‘It was all bullshit, I’d nothing to do with Crawley’s murder.’

  ‘I believe you, but others may not,’ Jo said. ‘And if anything happens to this woman, we’ll turn over every flat belonging to anyone in here.’

  Without warning, the old lady spat at Jo’s shoes.

  The crowd applauded.

  Jo sighed then walked calmly towards the exit.

  ‘You as bent as the rest of them in Store Street?’ Skinny called after her.

  30

  Jo’s car, which now had the word ‘pig’ scratched on both sides, was refusing to start. After the fifth attempt, Sexton manhandled her into his. Jo protested, until she spotted the crowd emerging from the hall and heading towards her car, shouting angry taunts. Jagged scotoma criss-crossed through her peripheral vision. A migraine was imminent, and it was going to be a big one. Jesus, she thought. Not now. Not when I know the killer’s going to take another life tomorrow.

  As he drove, Sexton phoned Dan from the hands-free, explained what was happening and told him to collect the kids and to send a tow truck to pick up her car. Jo could hear the irritation in Dan’s clipped answers. She didn’t know if he was more annoyed because he was put out or because Sexton was in the driving seat. When it came to Dan, she didn’t know anything any more . . .

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and held on to the door handle, opening her eyes to identify the smell making her stomach heave. A Magic Tree dangled from the rear-view mirror. Jo pulled it free, pressed the window button and chucked it out. Sexton raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  ‘You need to get yourself a life,’ she told him, staring at a box of tissues perched between the cream-leather seats, pulling one free and spreading it flat on the back of her neck. ‘How’d you afford this car anyway?’

  He didn’t answer.

  Jo was sorry she’d put him on the spot. How he spent his money was his business. At least she had the kids, even if it was over with Dan.

  ‘Tell me how well you know Ryan Freeman,’ she asked, changing the subject.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He called the incident room the other day asking for you. Today he shows up at a place where nobody knows you’ll be.’

  Sexton pulled up at lights and turned to face her. ‘He helped me out last year. I was going through a bad patch, and was driving under the influence. I crashed the car.’ He brought his hands together, creating angles over the wheel. ‘Don’t look at me like that. Nobody was hurt, except me.’

  ‘How did you get around a conviction?’

  ‘There was a problem with the warrant.’

  Jo groaned.

  ‘I told you, nobody was hurt. The insurance covered everything, but that wasn’t enough for the guy who owned the car. I mean, fair enough if he’d been in it, but he wanted my job. He tried to get Ryan Freeman to run an exposé about how I got around the charges. Ryan looked after me, so I guess you could say I owe him.’

  ‘Where was I when this was going on?’

  ‘You were away on maternity leave.’ There was another long pause. ‘Is it really over between you and Dan?’ Sexton asked, after another long pause.

  Jo kept her eyes shut. The muzziness in her head was growing.

  ‘I presume it’s serious with Jeanie,’ Sexton went on. ‘I remember seeing the way they were together, a couple of years back. I think it was the inspectors and sergeants annual conference, down in Westport. I thought it then too.’

  Jo wanted to concentrate on anything other than the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. But even more than that, she just wanted to shut Sexton’s words out.

  On the N11, Sexton jerked suddenly as the lay-by in which they were driving came to an abrupt halt. He was going to have to merge with the rest of the traffic, but at the top of the queue a driver in an ‘I love NY’ cap with a row of flashing lights along his front bumper was looking in the opposite direction and refused to let them merge.

  With a screech of brakes, Sexton jumped out of his car and held his palm up, forcing the driver to stop and stick his hazards on. After showing him his ID, Sexton checked his tax and insurance and told him to turn off the engine, as he took down his details.

  Jo watched in disbelief. For the next ten minutes, other drivers beeped and got out of their cars to see what the holdup was. They didn’t care if Sexton was a plain-clothed garda, they wanted to get home. Finally, Sexton got back in the car and pulled out ahead of the ‘I love NY’ driver.

  ‘I want the names of each and every cop who ever interviewed any of our victims on my desk first thing tomorrow morning,’ Jo told him as they neared the Lamb’s Cross junction. The sliproad to her house was just beyond it. ‘Bar the priest, all the victims were criminals to a greater or lesser degree, so there should be quite a few entries on the system.’

  ‘What’s your thinking?’ Sexton asked.

  ‘You heard what Skinny said at the drugs meeting: “Are you as bent as the rest of them in Store Street?” What was he getting at? We know our killer is avenging a crime, and he’s doing it on our patch. Doesn’t that indicate to you that somebody in the station might know what that crime is?’

  ‘You’d take Skinny’s word?’ Sexton said, sounding disbelieving. ‘He’s a lying toe-rag.’

  A newspaper vendor rapped the window as they waited to turn right at Slate Cabin Lane. Sexton waved him off but Jo signalled she’d take a paper, reaching across to Sexton’s window with the change.

  The newsprint stank, making her stomach lurch again, but she pulled it in and placed it on her lap. It hurt to read, but as she made out the headline she realized the good news was they’d just found Rita’s mother. The paper had an exclusive interview under the banner headline ‘My Girl Was No Hooker’. Old Mrs Nulty had probably been holed up in some hotel by the newspaper so no other editor could get her before the story went to print. That meant she was no longer AWOL.

  The bad news was that the small print was dancing nauseatingly in front of her eyes. Jo’s migraine was about to take hold.

  31

  Katie was sharing a room in Crumlin Children’s Hospital with a toddler suffering from a syndrome that reduced her to a permanent vegetative state. The kid’s growth was stunted and a peg in her stomach made her vomit whenever the nurses hooked a feed up to it. She was being sick in her cot right now, making a dragging noise which Ryan knew he’d never forget. Strings from helium birthday balloons dangled over the kid’s cot, telling him she’d recently turned two, even though, at a guess, he’d have put her at six months. He wondered who’d brought the balloons – the nurses, or her family? And where was her family now? He rang the bell for a nurse to come, thinking maybe it was possible there were people out there who were in a worse plight than him after all . . .

  His own sense of indignation came as a bolt from the blue, and he realized instantly why. Him looking down his nose at anyone else’s parenting skills was a bit rich. If it hadn’t been for him, and the criminal activity he’d been exposing in the underworld, Katie should have been getting ready for school this morning, turning the house upside down for her copy book, demanding the crusts be cut off her sandwiches and begging to be let sleep over with her best friend. ‘Please, please, please’ she’d have been saying and, of course, he’d have acquiesced. Instead, the choices he’d made in his own life had changed the course of her life for ever.

  A nurse came into the room and pulled the birthday girl out of the pool of vomit. She was an Irish nurse, a sign of the changed times. Before the recession, the nurses were all Indian or Filipino. At leas
t they were all kind in Paediatric, Ryan thought, not like their angsty counterparts working with geriatrics.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked the nurse.

  She shook her head and rang the bell. Another nurse came and whipped the sheets off the bed and began packing them into sterile plastic sacks. Freeman heard them soothe the toddler by her name – ‘Talullah’. He shook his head. What kind of parent would pick a hippy-dippy Hollywood starlet name for a kid with no life expectancy?

  He moved to the side of Katie’s bed and sat on the chair alongside, watched her sleeping. He felt the lump in his throat rise as he touched her hair. She’d been an IVF baby, conceived after the point when he and Angie had both presumed they’d left parenthood too late. Knowing the lengths they’d gone to to have her and the cotton-wool existence they’d planned to give her added an extra dimension to his guilt.

  She’d been admitted yesterday after the convulsion and was waiting for an ECG to establish if there was any permanent damage in her brain that may have caused the equivalent to what one of the docs had described as ‘a short circuit in her wiring’.

  Ryan glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearly 7 p.m. Angie was due in any second. On cue she appeared in the doorway, looking thin and over-groomed. She strained her head away as the smell of vomit hit her.

  ‘I’m sorry, but this is not acceptable,’ she told the Irish nurse. ‘I don’t want to seem heartless, but it cannot be healthy having Katie in this environment, not with all the bugs going around in hospitals.’

  ‘I’ve already passed your concerns on to the matron,’ the nurse said, tucking new sheets into the cot. ‘As soon as another bed becomes available, we’ll try and move you.’

  Angie came over to Ryan, taking her coat off as she did so.

  ‘I’d have got back sooner, only for that bloody Mad Cow roundabout,’ she said. ‘How are you supposed to get through it when it’s not a roundabout? And anyway, there isn’t even a pub on it any more. I nearly ended up on the Navan road. How is she?’

  ‘No change,’ he said.

  Talullah started to moan and cough as the nurse changed her clothes. Angie was about to kick off again when a rap on the door distracted her. It was Gavin Sexton.

  Both Ryan and Angie stared in surprise.

  ‘I’m sorry, visiting hours are not until –’ the Irish nurse began.

  ‘It’s okay, we know him,’ Angie said.

  ‘It’s not okay, there are children trying to sleep,’ the nurse insisted.

  ‘Why don’t you and I head down to the canteen and grab a coffee,’ Ryan said to Sexton.

  ‘Actually, I need to talk to both of you,’ Sexton said.

  ‘But one of us has to stay here,’ Ryan pointed out.

  ‘It’s important.’

  Ryan looked to Angie, expecting her to protest, but she put up no resistance. After giving the nurse his mobile number and making her promise she’d ring if Katie woke, he followed Sexton and Angie down the corridor.

  By the time they had emerged from the elevator a minute later, Ryan knew two things with certainty. If Sexton couldn’t tell them whatever it was en route, it was going to be something very bad. You don’t need to get people sitting down if you’re delivering good news. He was also convinced that Angie already knew what it was.

  ‘I want to talk about the day Katie was abducted,’ Sexton said when they were finally settled over coffee. ‘I’ve got a pal in the computer section who did me a favour and analysed the last digit of the registration and the make of the car caught in the CCTV footage parked at the school gate the day Katie was taken. I know who the car belonged to, and the name of the woman who was seen arguing with Crawley.’

  Beside him, Angie started to cry softly.

  ‘Who was it?’ Ryan asked, a cold trickle of fear running down his spine.

  Angie turned to him slowly. ‘It was me.’

  32

  Jo lay on the bed with the curtains drawn and her eyes shut. Her breath was short and scared. The pain was as bad as she ever remembered it having been and, in the months after the crash, it had been bad. Four bodies in under a week, she thought, feeling shivery. Quick work.

  She rolled her head sideways slowly, opening her eyes to try and make out the time on the alarm clock on the bedside locker. The red light of the digital display stung too much for her to focus. Seven something – she was sure the first digit was a seven. She closed her eyes again quickly. Since her visit to the warehouse, she understood that inflicting pain meant every bit as much as creating a spectacle to this killer. She had to find him before he made anyone else suffer. Once the migraine had passed, she could get back to work. She prayed it would soon. Otherwise, tomorrow there’d be a fifth . . .

  She could hear Dan and Rory’s muffled voices in the kitchen under her room. She wanted to call them, to let Dan know the freezer was fully stocked and that he could have his pick for the boys’ dinner. But nothing came out. The tablets were finally starting to take effect: she was starting to drift off . . .

  She was in her father’s car, in the back seat with Sue. Their dad was laughing at them for flapping their arms like wings, willing the car up a steep hill. They used to do it at the same spot every day on the way to school. He’d laugh every time. She watched him straining around for a glimpse of them, his green eyes twinkling, the same way they did whenever he turned the garden hose on them instead of sprinkling the flowers. Over his shoulder, Jo could see the lorry coming straight for the car. Sue vanished. Jo opened her mouth to warn her father, but the words just froze in her throat. She tried to point, but her arm wouldn’t move. Her father turned back around, too late.

  Sitting bolt upright in the bed just before the moment of impact in the dream, her skin drenched, her heart racing, Jo gulped deep breaths of air. Her head was pounding, but there was a faint realization breaking through. Tomorrow would be the killer’s most symbolic killing so far. He was going to inflict the ultimate act of vengeance. He was moving on from Exodus. He would need to show just how much he hated Jesus Christ. That meant he was going to crucify his next victim.

  Thursday

  33

  When Jo woke, Dan was standing over her with a mug of steaming tea and a plate of toast.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked, getting that same split-second feeling she did every morning when she wondered why his bits and pieces – watch and wallet, the contents of his pocket, his latest book on some infamous military incursion and the alarm clock from hell – weren’t on his bedside locker. She rubbed her eyes. She could have done with that wake-the-dead clock now.

  ‘How you feeling?’ he asked, placing breakfast on the locker.

  Jo glanced down and realized she was wearing one of Dan’s old T-shirts. She pushed to the back of her mind the vague memory of holding her arms up last night so he could slip it on. The T-shirt was miles too big for her. He’d gotten it at an old Undertones concert and worn it like a badge of honour for years afterwards, even though it was faded and stretched. It was so old she remembered him wearing it when Rory was sitting against the front of it in a papoose.

  ‘What’s the time?’ she asked again, feeling her wrist for her watch and wondering where she’d left it. Last night was a complete blur. ‘And where are the boys?’

  ‘Relax. I dropped them both off so you could lie in,’ Dan said, drawing the curtains. ‘It’s almost ten. Don’t bother rushing. You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. What’s your boss like anyway?’

  Ordinarily, Jo would have made a joke of this with something like, ‘He’s an absolute bollox,’ but she couldn’t believe the time. Anyway, the way Dan had been acting lately, it would have had a ring of truth. No, she thought. Better to stay on her guard until things were back on an even keel between them. And the one thing she mustn’t do was mention that bloody Westport conference Sexton had told her about. Once she brought that up, it was going to trigger World War III. That was the year she had pulled out because of a dose of bloody flu. Dan co
uldn’t have been more understanding. Now, maybe, she understood why. He had been looking forward to meeting Jeanie.

  There wasn’t time to worry about it now. She was running so bloody late, it was a nightmare. She got out of bed and gave her head a little shake. She felt quivery, like her system had been through the ringer, but at least the terrible headache had gone. For years after the crash, she’d lost whole days because of migraines just like last night’s. She’d thought they were a thing of the past and had forgotten how debilitating they could be.

  Dan was looking at her bare legs as she headed for the wardrobe. She sighed. He wanted it every way – to treat her like a skivvy in work and to give her the ‘come to bed’ eyes now they were home alone. Well, she wasn’t able for the emotional rollercoaster; it wasn’t fair.

  ‘Woah,’ Dan said, placing his hands on her shoulders. ‘Nice and easy does it. How’s the head?’

  ‘It’s passed. Look, I’ve got to go, I’ve got Anto Crawley’s autopsy this morning.’

  ‘I rang Hawthorne. He’s moving a drowning up ahead of it.’

  Jo sighed with relief.

  Dan paused, still looking worried. ‘When was the last time you saw that neuro consultant?’

  Jo shrugged. ‘It’s most likely all the chocolate I’ve been eating since I’ve given up fags.’ She slipped her clothes from the hangers. On Monday, Dan had made her fail her training course. On Tuesday Dan’d told her he’d taken legal advice about protecting his financial stake in the house; on Wednesday he’d humiliated her at a disciplinary hearing that was completely unnecessary, then stood by and let Jenny Friar of NBCI sink her teeth into her with a look of pity in his eyes. Pity! She’d show him.

  She knelt down and pulled a pair of black heels from under the bed.

  Dan seemed to sense it was time to change the subject. ‘Is today still bin day?’ he asked.