If I Never See You Again

by Niamh O'Connor

  ‘Shit!’ Jo sprang up and moved the net curtain to see if the neighbours’ had been collected yet.

  ‘Sorted,’ Dan said, moving behind her and pointing to their bin out with the others. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her round so they were facing each other.

  ‘What am I doing wrong here?’ he asked. He’d slipped a tie under his collar and was criss-crossing one uneven length over another.

  ‘Here,’ she sighed, stretching up on her tiptoes and fixing the knot.

  Dan watched her softly. ‘How did you get on with that suspect yesterday?’

  ‘It’s a long story. He’s a drug pusher, and a Shinner, and he retracted his confession in a room full of witnesses.’

  Dan put his hand on her cheek. ‘I know you think I’ve been too hard on you. It’s just I have to do everything by the book. They watch my every move when it comes to you.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said, straightening his tie and smoothing the shirt across his shoulders, ‘that you’re due up for promotion.’

  Dan took a step back and folded his arms. ‘That’s got nothing to do with it, and you know it. For the record, I know, if anybody can find the killer, it’s you.’

  Jo took a deep breath. ‘Then let me, Dan. Stop getting in the way!’

  ‘I’d forgotten how dogged you get when you want something,’ he said, turning away.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means if you put half as much effort into your personal life, maybe we’d still have a marriage.’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Jo said, bundling up her clothes and pushing past him on her way to the bathroom. ‘But if I had time to argue, I’d remind you that you’re the one who had an affair and that you’re the one living with someone else!’

  She slammed the door behind her, then pulled it open again. ‘This is why you’ve been digging your heels in, isn’t it? You can’t bear to see me managing without you. The job’s the only hold you’ve got left over me, so you’ve been making sure I don’t forget it. Well, it’s bloody well worked.’

  She slammed the door again.

  Jo flicked the shower setting to its most powerful jet setting before stepping under the steaming water. It was so loud she didn’t hear the door open. When the water caught the side of her eye she turned suddenly, only to see Dan standing there. She made a grab for the shower curtain, using it like a towel to shield her nakedness. ‘What are you . . .?’

  ‘I miss my wife,’ he said unapologetically.

  Jo wrapped a real towel round herself, rubbing the heavy wet out of her hair. She walked back into the bedroom barefoot.

  Dan followed and sat on the edge of the bed watching.

  ‘One question,’ Jo asked calmly.

  He lowered his head.

  ‘That time you walked out on me during the Phoenix Park child murder investigation . . .?’

  He frowned. ‘Not that again.’

  ‘Where did you stay, Dan?’

  ‘It’s years ago, I can’t rem–’

  ‘Fine, forget it,’ she said, and turned on the hairdryer.

  By the time she was dressed and ready to leave, Jo knew by the way all the bedroom doors were closed that Dan was gone. She was hurrying down the stairs when she spotted the News on the hall table. After setting the house alarm, she pulled the front door behind her, sat in the car and read the story by Ryan Freeman under the subhead ‘Gardaí Hunt Crazed Cleric Killer’.

  Jo’s heart sank. Not only had old Mrs Nulty criticized the way Jo had landed on her doorstep while she was still coming to terms with the terrible news, but she’d also put the details of the ‘priest’s twin’ into the public arena. For the life of her, Jo still couldn’t see how this story beat the one that Freeman was sitting on involving a serial killer on the rampage. And since there was not so much as one mention of the word ‘muti’ or ‘foreigner’ in the story, she realized without a shadow of a doubt that someone on her team was briefing him. And she no longer had any doubts as to who it was.

  34

  The killer moved through the chosen one’s split-level, open-plan home. His bare feet clacked as they moved, soles sticking to the lacquered wooden floor. He stopped only once in his task, to take a closer look at the tropical fish in their shimmering aquarium. Slowly, he tipped the glass box out on the floor, moving to the side of the downpour. The fish wriggled and leapt on the hardwood. He squelched around until he spotted the one he was after, and then he trod on it, wiping his damp hand dry along the back of a low white couch.

  A row of remote controls sat on a nest of wooden coffee tables. He picked one, aimed it indiscriminately, and the framed picture on the centre wall flickered to life as a moving picture of fire flames.

  Next, he switched the flat-screen TV on, and then the stereo system. He pitched both volumes at the exact same level to create a hum of confusion.

  He headed to the kitchen, all gleaming black-PVC-fronted presses and stainless-steel knives and gadgets. Removing a white tablecloth from the bag, he shook and spread it over the round glass table, pressing out the creases with the flat of his hands, nudging the more stubborn ones out with a finger.

  He set two places for three courses – removing the knives, forks, spoons and wine glasses from his carpet bag. A human skull got pride of place as centrepiece, around which he arranged ten candles spaced perfectly evenly apart.

  With a stick of chalk, he wrote the word ‘Golgotha’ on any surface that would take it – the black presses, the dark floor.

  He climbed the stairs, shaking silver coins out of a purse made of sackcloth as he headed for the sleeping area.

  Finally, removing a rope from his waist, he slung it over one of the exposed beams directly overhead. Once the noose was at a height that meant it could be seen from the front door, he made the sign of the cross backwards – tipping his right shoulder first, then left, torso, head. It takes seven seconds to die, suspended by the neck, and in that time the chosen one would experience what it meant to be divine.

  The killer knelt down and began to chant.

  35

  Jo’s car decided to start with no problems next morning, having been delivered on a tow truck to her house the night before. On the way to the station, she used the red-light stops to tidy it, which involved jamming most of the rubbish on the floor under the passenger seat. The driver in front of her had managed to apply her make-up in the same way, and was currently giving her hair a good brush. The man behind was excavating his nose.

  As the lights changed, she shifted gear and threw the phone on her lap, loudspeaker on, to make the calls she was conducting during the green-light sections of the journey. She had already phoned the city’s newsrooms one by one, informing the duty editors that she intended holding a crime conference outside the station at 2 p.m. sharp.

  ‘Gerry?’ she asked as the latest call connected.

  ‘Gerry’s sick,’ a stranger’s voice said.

  ‘Wendy around?’

  ‘She’s in a meeting.’

  ‘You new?’ Jo asked.

  ‘First day.’

  ‘First day!’ Jo said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jim. Who’s this?’

  ‘Jim, you ever heard of Daithi Bhreathnach?’

  ‘Nope. Who’s speaking, please?’

  ‘First day, first lesson in crime and punishment, Jim: the biggest problem with our criminal justice system is that society thinks it’s the injured party. You know the way it is with big corporations – the little guy gets lost.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what’s this about?’

  ‘It’s about a criminal called Daithi Bhreathnach, who shows that the burden of proof has swung too far in favour of the accused.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘David Walsh, aka Daithi Bhreathnach. That’s one of his tricks. He avails himself of all his rights, insists on having everything translated into the Irish language as a delaying tactic. He’s so good at thwarting the system he’s now running a p
aralegal school for criminals – teaching them to switch lawyers as often as possible, take judicial reviews – anything and everything that might stall their case, because if it’s stalled long enough it gets thrown out.’

  Jo heard the receiver change hands, then Gerry came on the line. ‘Birmingham, I thought you had better things to do – like bullying old ladies?’

  ‘SLR, Gerry. Tell the minister to read the report by this afternoon. Victims need rights in court too.’

  Inside the station’s incident room, Sexton’s interview with Skinny was replaying on a TV perched on a rack of steel shelves containing a blinking DVD and video player. Sexton was slouched in a chair, telling someone on the other end of the public hotline to call the press office. Mac, Merrigan, and Frank Black and Dave Waters from the NBCI were studying the TV, and a dozen odd detectives were trawling through the paperwork, collating anything that might be of interest.

  Sexton gave Jo a ‘what’s the story?’ shrug, ripped the top sheet of paper off his pad and scrunched and fired it in a rainbow shot at the bin. It missed and joined a half dozen others scattered on the floor. He covered the receiver with his hand. ‘Thought you’d like the pleasure,’ he told Jo, throwing his head in Jenny Friar’s direction.

  Friar was leaning over Jo’s desk, marking up a copy of yesterday’s Evening News with a pink highlighter. She was wearing a beige-linen trouser suit which made her look chunky but fit. She stood up when she realized Jo had arrived and reached for her pint of Starbucks, a ‘good of you to join us’ expression on her face.

  Foxy sat dead centre in front of the box, wading through a wad of door-to-door questionnaires for anything of significance; Merrigan sat beside him with a pile of as yet untouched paperwork, making a meal of an orange, sucking segments that dripped on to his tie.

  On the screen, Skinny was once again insisting to Sexton that he’d killed Anto Crawley. His arms hung down by the sides of the plastic chair behind his back, his legs were wide open and he kept pulling at the tip of his long nose with his index finger and thumb.

  Jo strode over and switched the TV off.

  ‘Hey!’ Friar protested.

  ‘It’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit. He admitted as much when Sexton and I confronted him yesterday,’ Jo said. ‘Come on, lads, we’ve got work to do.’

  ‘And you believed him?’ Friar asked.

  Foxy and Sexton jumped up. Merrigan seemed reluctant to follow.

  ‘It’s irrelevant what I believe. But one way or another, he’s a liar, and now that he’s retracted his confession, we’ll never get a conviction. You want to do something constructive to contribute to this investigation? Get me Anto Crawley’s NSU file.’

  Friar glanced at her NBCI colleagues then back at Jo.

  Jo understood Friar’s reluctance. The gathering of intelligence by the National Surveillance Unit through covert surveillance was routine when it came to persons suspected of serious crime. Crawley’s form would contain the kind of highly relevant information that would never see the light of day in court. It would list his daily movements, associates, places he frequented, weaknesses such as gambling or a mistress, any or all of which could potentially throw up a new lead.

  ‘You’re joking, right?’ Friar asked.

  ‘We’re dealing with four murders,’ Jo said. ‘I don’t have to remind you of this, do I?’

  ‘I’m not ready to write this suspect off yet,’ Waters, the criminal profiler, said.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll view things differently when the killer strikes again today,’ Jo said. ‘Because Skinny here is going to have a watertight alibi, since Merrigan is going to bring him in and hold him for the day.’

  Foxy nudged Jo’s foot with his own, telling her not to walk herself into a corner.

  Friar made a loud rustling noise with the newspaper. ‘You’re staking an awful lot of your credibility on a hunch, Sergeant,’ she said, not unhappily.

  ‘I’m a DI.’

  Friar held up the paper and shook it at Jo. ‘Your priest theory is going to limit our potential sources of information. People who may have reason to suspect someone else may now be writing it off because their suspect isn’t a priest.’

  ‘Look, I never said our man was a priest,’ Jo said. ‘On the contrary, he’s probably an atheist, and I suspect someone very like us. He probably works in some area of law enforcement, or the military. He’s not a bloody Muslim, he may well have come to our attention previously and the locations of his killings are the key to cracking these crimes.’

  ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush again,’ Friar remarked.

  Foxy stepped up to her defence. ‘You forgot to mention that the killer’s got a grievance with the church,’ he said.

  Jo shot him a look of gratitude. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he gets off with dead chicks,’ Sexton said.

  Merrigan wiped the corners of his mouth. ‘And he’s a darkie!’

  Friar exhaled loudly.

  ‘Thanks for the show of support, lads,’ Jo said, leading the trio into the corridor outside.

  ‘Merrigan,’ she said, turning to face him, ‘I need you to get our colleague’s prime suspect in here. Tell Skinny that if he cooperates we won’t have him charged with wasting police time over making a false statement. Either way, he spends the day here – okay? Having him under lock and key when the killer strikes again may be the only way I can convince them that they’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  Merrigan nodded, puffing out his chest as he took off.

  Sexton reached into his inside pocket and pulled out some sheets of paper folded in half, which he handed Jo.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘The names you wanted of officers who’d had any dealings with our victims,’ Sexton said quietly. He turned the top page over for her and pointed to a name at the bottom of the list.

  Jo stopped suddenly. ‘Is he still down in the incident room?’

  ‘Mac still in there?’ Sexton called out to some officers clustered further down the corridor.

  ‘I passed him on his way into the john,’ one answered.

  ‘Have him in the interview room by lunchtime,’ Jo said. ‘And tell him I want to talk to him about Rita Nulty.’

  36

  Jo drove to the morgue with Foxy, telling Sexton to make his own way there. She was almost afraid to say it out loud, even to Foxy, but discovering that Mac had had previous dealings with Rita Nulty was sounding major alarm bells. He ticked all the right boxes for the killer: knew the law – check; may have been the bent copper Skinny was alluding to – check; and then there was the minor matter that, when attached to the investigation, he had neglected to mention he knew Rita Nulty.

  As soon as Foxy clicked his seatbelt on, Jo found it hard to get a word in edgeways. It was only supposition, he explained, but he’d been in Mac’s home once.

  ‘His place was to die for, something you and I could only ever dream of, Jo,’ he said. ‘I’m the first to admit there could be any reasonable explanation – inheritance, gee-gees – what do I know about how he balances his accounts? All I do know is that while the rest of us are trying to make ends meet, he’s shacked up there in an IFSC penthouse apartment living like a lord. I’m talking paintings on the walls with red dots in the bottom corner because they’ve been bid for at auction.’

  Jo gripped the steering wheel. She knew it wasn’t Foxy’s form to gossip, but Mac’s IFSC address was too close to the murder scenes for comfort.

  ‘There was this other time,’ he continued, ‘when I got caught up in the celebrations for one of the lad’s promotions . . .’ He waved his hand up and down to tell her to slow down.

  Jo sighed. In her opinion, Foxy was a worse passenger driver than she was, and that was saying something.

  ‘You know the way it happens, you say no to another pint and someone puts one in front of you anyway. The lads were going to Lillie’s Bordello, and I thought, why not? Sal was away on a school trip, so there was no reason for me t
o go home at all if it came to it.’

  Jo smiled. It was like trying to imagine her own father in a trendy nightclub hoping to score.

  ‘I wasn’t going there for “action”,’ Foxy clarified. ‘Who’d be interested in an old man like me? I was going to see what it was like. I always got the feeling about that place that, if I’d tried to get in, I’d have been turned away.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘So I went with the gang, and Mac gets us all in, slapping the bouncers on the back on the way in. And inside, you should have seen it, the women were pouring themselves over him. Not just any women, Jo. I’m talking about the ones you see in the papers and those VIP magazines, the ones who are all a shade of orange, and they totter into the ladies – arm in arm, if you get my drift.’

  ‘So let’s look into his background quietly,’ Jo said. ‘See where all that money came from, and if we can find anything that might fire a religious obsession, yeah?’

  Foxy nodded his agreement.

  Sexton had arrived at the morgue ahead of them and was moaning about the distance he’d had to walk across the car park to the road outside for a fag now that smoking was banned from the grounds of all public buildings. Given that the morgue was located at the back of the fire-brigade training grounds, where buildings, cars and containers were regularly set alight, he couldn’t even chance a sneaky one.

  Jo had no sympathy. She’d have walked ten miles for one, if it was an option. She barely grunted in reply, still angry that he had lied to her about briefing Ryan Freeman.

  ‘What do you make of Mac not telling us he knew Rita Nulty?’ he asked. ‘You think he’s involved?’

  ‘You stay outside here, keep an eye out,’ she said to him brusquely. Precautions were sometimes necessary during high-profile autopsies, she reminded him, and Anto Crawley’s was certainly that. The grave of the paedophile priest Brendan Smyth, who’d been a prolific child abuser, had had to be filled with concrete. Up until his death, Crawley had been considered public enemy number one.