She walked over to the tower block and ducked into the stairwell; the lifts were permanently out of order. The smell of urine hit her taste buds at the same time as it did her nostrils. Jo almost jumped out of her skin when a group of youths in hoodies taking the stairs three at a time almost knocked her over. She called, ‘Oi!’ after them, ignoring their hand gestures and taunts. Fortunately, Rita’s flat was on the second floor. Jo blew into the space between her hands, and rubbed as she continued on up. Even in summer, her feet felt cold with all the concrete. If you grew up in this part of town, life presented you with only two choices to escape it, she thought: sell drugs or take them. Like Rita.
Finding the door, she rapped a gleaming brass lion’s head and stepped back, checking her shoes and brushing specks of fluff off her jacket. Catching sight of her reflection in the knocker, she realized that old habits die hard. She used to go through the same grooming routine before every death knock. She’d done more than most, as women were considered better purveyors of bad news. Some were; some weren’t. She remembered one who always got a fit of giggles on the doorstep. Formal training for family liaison officers tasked with comforting a family, usually in cases of murder, had only been introduced after a male FLO working with the family of Raonaid Murray – a schoolgirl killed yards from her home – allegedly urinated in the spot where she had been knifed to death.
If Jo’d been the one dispatched here earlier today to break the news of the death, she’d have been practising what to say at this point – not that the words mattered. Most people guessed the second they opened the door.
‘Mrs Nulty?’ she asked the chink of white-haired, spindly pensioner peering behind a safety chain, after she heard the sound of a bolt-action lock.
‘Who wants to know?’ the old woman answered.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Jo Birmingham,’ Jo said, reaching into her bag for her ID then changing her mind, depressed by another reminder of the amount of crap she carried everywhere. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss . . . I need to ask you some questions about your daughter, if you feel up to it.’
‘Come back tomorrow,’ the old woman whispered. ‘It’s late.’
Jo held up Rita’s two 50 notes. ‘She’d have wanted you to have these.’
The door closed momentarily, then swung open. Jo stepped inside and carried on past the woman, down the hall a few steps, left into the front room. Foxy’s first rule of thumb when it came to interviewing hostile witnesses was, the further inside you got, the more time you had to bring them around to your way of thinking. Procedure required a visit just like this to find out about the victim’s habits, associates, vehicles and movements prior to death, and to obtain particulars of his/her clothing, jewellery, personal effects, recent whereabouts and time of last meal. Ideally, you examined the victim’s bedroom and took possession of photographs, documents, diaries, etc., for potential use in the investigation too.
But Jo wasn’t attached to the investigation, at least not yet anyway.
Inside, the room was small and cheaply furnished but spotless. The air had the dry feel of gas heating, making the sickly-sweet smell of air freshener overpowering. Life-sized porcelain King Charles spaniels sat on either side of a tiled fireplace. Plastic flowers were on display in the window – hydrangeas.
Mrs Nulty was wearing a shiny, navy button-up pinafore over her clothes, and a pair of trendy Uggs that all the teenage girls were wearing. They didn’t lift off the ground when she moved.
‘You’ll have to keep it brief,’ she said.
Jo scanned her face, thinking that her kind of chippy, know-my-rights attitude only came with experience, especially after the news she’d got today. The woman’s eyes were not red-rimmed or puffy, she observed, and Mrs Nulty’s hands and voice were steady. Because her murder came as no surprise to you, Jo concluded. You lost her years ago.
Jo sat down on a floral-patterned couch and unbuttoned her coat. Foxy also believed in making yourself at home. It helped people to open up. ‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘Like I said, it’s late.’
Jo’s gaze travelled to the Belleek china models of dancing milkmaids on the TV and a brass carriage clock over the fireplace positioned on a crocheted doily. If Rita had lived here, she’d have hocked them long ago to pay for her habit.
‘Please, sit down, Mrs Nulty. This won’t take long.’
‘You asked me if I was up to it. Well, I’m not. Come back tomorrow.’
But tomorrow an investigation team would have been assigned to Rita’s case and, if Jo wasn’t on it, she’d have no business being here. As it was, she could be disciplined for making an unauthorized call-out. She cut to the chase. ‘I need to know if your daughter had recently found God.’
Mrs Nulty shook her head.
‘Maybe she started going to church out of the blue or took up Bible classes?’ Jo persisted.
Still nothing.
‘Mrs Nulty, I’m sorry to press you, but I believe whoever killed Rita may have been some sort of religious fanatic, and it’s really important you think hard about what I’m saying. Do you remember Rita describing any of her clients as a “holy Joe”, or maybe a “religious freak”?’
Mrs Nulty grappled for the armchair like she was about to break a fall.
Jo took a breath. She couldn’t believe she’d come out with something so insensitive. It looked like Mrs Nulty hadn’t known her daughter’s occupation. Jo had seen other officers harden to the job over the years, and it always shocked her. She was determined not to go that way herself – the justice system was clinical enough. She had lost count of the number of times she’d seen some member of a victim’s family shout out in distress in a courtroom, get held in contempt and be transported to a cell and held there until they purged their contempt by apologizing to the court. Mostly how they felt came pouring out on the steps of the court, to a waiting scrum of journalists, after the trial ended. Usually, all they’d wanted to say in the first place was who they’d lost, and how different the victim was to the person described in court, information treated by the judges and barristers as if it would cause the pillars of the temple to fall. Jo had a big problem with the idea that it was necessary to trash the victim’s character to prove the defence of provocation. The criminal system was going to have to take a leaf out of the civil code and follow the principle ‘You wronged me and I seek rectitude’ if it was ever going to give bereaved families a sense of justice.
‘Tell me about Rita . . .’ Jo said, deliberately softening her voice.
Mrs Nulty stared at her blankly.
‘The kind of person she was, I mean,’ Jo continued. ‘What made her laugh? What made her cry? Who was she?’
Mrs Nulty pulled a length of stringy tissue from her sleeve and ran it over her eyes and nose. ‘She was a good daughter . . . Until drugs got her. You know, she got leukaemia when she was seven and survived it. And for what?’
Jo shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Started on aerosol cans when she was ten. Had her first hit of heroin at thirteen years old. She told me once she had to get wasted so she could forget.’
‘Forget what?’ Jo asked.
Mrs Nulty shrugged. ‘What does it matter now? My husband’s dead. Rita’s dead. It was between the two of them.’
Jo leaned forward and took her hand, placing the money in her palm. ‘Look, maybe you could have a think and ring the station if anything occurs to you? I’m sure Rita would have wanted you to have this.’
A set of fingers bent at a right angle from swollen knuckles closed around the money. ‘It’s probably nothing, but there was something a couple of days back,’ Mrs Nulty suddenly said. ‘Not a priest exactly. But he said that I could trust him because his twin brother was one . . . a priest, I mean. He called looking for Rita.’
Jo frowned. ‘Did he give a name?’
Mrs Nulty shook her head.
‘What did he say, exactly?’ Jo asked.
‘That’s just it, he d
idn’t say anything. He just asked if Rita was here, and when I said she was out he asked if I knew where she’d gone. He joked that I could trust him, and then he said it . . . that his twin brother was a priest. I didn’t know where she was. That’s what I told him.’
‘What age was he?’ Jo asked.
‘Late thirties . . . I don’t know, I’m no good at ages, but I never forget a face.’
A defence barrister would have a field day, Jo thought. He’d ask all about your cataracts, glaucoma, not what you saw. But still, it was a start. ‘Can you give me a description?’
‘Dark, not bad-looking, if you like that sort.’
‘What sort?’
‘Like those gypsies living on the roundabout.’
So most likely to be Eastern European, Jo realized. ‘What about a mobile number?’ she asked. ‘Did Rita have one?’
Mrs Nulty shook her head again.
Jo was losing patience. ‘I need to know where she really lived,’ she persisted.
Mrs Nulty looked surprised. ‘Rita lived here, she just wasn’t in is all. That’s what I told him.’
Why don’t you want to tell me? Jo wondered. Are you scared of losing face with friends and family? Or is it because you don’t want to tell them you turfed Rita out on to the streets? Maybe because of some dodgy social-welfare claim that had her here as a dependent.
‘Mrs Nulty, we can’t catch whoever killed her if you’re holding back on us. She was your daughter, for heaven’s sake!’
‘You must be mistaken,’ Mrs Nulty replied sullenly. ‘This was Rita’s home.’
7
The fourth victim lay naked on the flat of his back, arms and legs stretched and tethered to the corners of the bed, mouth stuffed with a dirty rag. He could squirm and moan, but barely. Beads of sweat flickered to life across his wrinkled forehead and rolled down the sides of his face.
‘If I tell you one of the things he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up,’ the killer said as he leaned over to inspect the binds, his face hidden by the flaps of a pointed hood attached to his cloak. Satisfied, he sat his bag on the bed, opened the clasp and pulled out a hypodermic needle.
The victim’s head bolted sideways, frantic eyes following his captor’s every move. The killer reached into his waistcoat pocket, removed a vial of liquid, turned it upside down and flicked it with his index finger to tap an air bubble towards the top. The needle pierced the foil lid and sucked the contents up slowly.
The victim’s head bobbed as the killer eyed then pinched the pulsing vein running down his neck.
With a prick the needle penetrated the artery.
The victim exhaled deeply through his nostrils as the last twitching muscles in his neck grew still.
The killer stopped breathing himself, waiting for the moment he knew was coming, savouring the anticipation. It hit like a tidal wave, endorphins surging through his veins and giving him an overwhelming feeling of omnipotence, the whole point of the exercise. When the ecstasy subsided, he got back to work, removing a knife, chisel, pliers and screwdriver from his case to set about the ritualistic aspect of the proceedings.
Tuesday
8
Next morning, after only managing a couple of hours sleep, Jo drove to upmarket Merrion Square. After checking the car seats for valuables, she got out of the car, slotted an exorbitant amount of loose change into the meter and criss-crossed her handbag over her shoulder. The Georgian terraces with their wrought-iron balconies and fanlights over brightly coloured doors looked magnificent, but by night the area turned into a notorious red-light district. If she’d had a penny for every time she’d had to argue against men – especially ones she worked with – that women didn’t sell sex to fund their college education or even because they were turned on by danger, the cost of the parking wouldn’t have been an issue. There was one overwhelming reason she knew of why women went on the game, and whether it suited men’s fantasies or not, it was to pay for drugs.
Crossing the street to the National Gallery, she glanced right, where a street away a cricket match would be getting a gentle clap from the crowd on the lawn in Trinity College, and left towards St Stephen’s Green, where parents brought their toddlers to feed the ducks. The last squalid moments of the murdered prostitute, junkie and drug lord seemed to belong to a different city. If Jo’d had her way, every white-collar worker who believed they’d earned the right to party with the so-called recreational drug of their choice at the weekend would have been forced to attend the latest gangland autopsy and made to understand that the trail of responsibility led directly back to the market principle of demand and so straight to them.
Having scrolled through the contacts in her mobile phone as she walked, with one hand she dialled Gerry in Justice and with the other rummaged out a Nicorette tab, which she almost couldn’t bring herself to put in her mouth.
‘You don’t bring me flowers . . .’ she announced, chewing hard as the call connected to the minister’s spin doctor.
‘What happened . . . You run out of flies to pick the wings off?’ he answered.
‘That’s funny, Gerry, but don’t quit the day job . . . The Separate Legal Representation report . . . where are we on that?’
Jo could hear Gerry drumming his pen on his desk.
‘Lawyers for rape victims in court,’ she continued. ‘We’ve got to rebalance the scales of justice to stop victims feeling like they’re the ones being put on trial. I sent the minister a briefing document. I don’t touch-type, Gerry. That means it was a lot of work for me. It’s been on his desk the last six months . . . All fifty-five pages of it, which works out at less than ten pages a month to read. Maybe our boss should consider one of those adult-education programmes . . . When’s he . . .’
‘Birmingham, he’s been a little busy. Thought you’d have noticed. Murder rate goes up, so does the number of times his name appears in a column inch. Speaking of which, they’re all in your district. Where are we on that?’
‘You had your bagel this morning, Gerry?’
‘I’m salivating as we speak, just waiting for you to hang up.’
‘Cream cheese?’ Jo guessed.
‘Bacon and guacamole.’
‘Guacamole repeats a lot – maybe try a croissant tomorrow.’
Jo removed the phone from her ear and glanced at it, then pressed it back to be sure. ‘Nice talking to you too,’ she said, shoving it into her pocket and entering the main entrance of the National Gallery.
Inside, she pushed her shades up into her hair and walked with a spring in her step. She knew that no sex customer who’d been about to pay Rita Nulty for oral, anal, a hand job, titty-wank, or whatever it was he was prepared to pay her to perform, would have called to the prostitute’s mother’s home. That meant the man who told Mrs Nulty he was a ‘priest’s twin’ had not been seeking Rita out for sex, which also meant he could have been the killer. If he was someone legit, why the mystery? Why not just tell the pensioner his name? The timing fit too . . . right before the slaying.
It also meant the killer had made his first slip, because now she could possibly have him ID’d by Mrs Nulty in a line-up – once she found him. But first she’d have to work out how he was choosing his victims, because there was no doubt in her mind he would strike again. He was only halfway though the list of body parts . . .
Jo’s heels clicked along the gleaming parquet floor of the gallery. She knew the layout like the back of her hand. Four wings, two levels, the prized Picasso on the mezzanine, and the symmetry of the six archways in the central Milltown wing tricking the eye like a mirror. She’d come to study the religious themes which dominated the Italian collection. This was where she’d come to terms with the car crash that had killed her father. She had been fifteen years old. In the two decades that had passed since, she’d learned to live with the grief, but nothing could change the simple fact that it had all been her fault.
That n
ight, she’d gotten drunk for the first time. First disco. First fag. First snog – some guy in blue suede crepes into The Cure who asked her to dance to Bros then put his arms around her waist for the slow set. She’d written her number on his arm in black eyeliner after standing still for the national anthem at the party’s end.
She was supposed to have used her last fiver to travel home with her sister Sue, just as she’d promised their dad before heading out. But she was having too good a time. Instead of filling her empty bottle with tap water in the ladies to make it look like she still had something to sip, she’d used her taxi money to buy two more bottles of Budweiser.
She’d had to ring home to ask her father to come and collect her, from a phone box outside. She’d lost her sight temporarily after the crash – maybe that was why the memory of the sounds of what happened were so amplified in her memory: the phone box where she’d rung home being shelled by rain; a moth thrashing off a light bulb over her head, the static twitching after each bash; her change clinking into the slot; the pips ticking like a heartbeat; the round dial whirring back after each number; her father’s sleepy voice agreeing to come and collect her from the disco . . .
He’d found her sitting on the kerb, head hunched between her legs – the whole street swimming. She’d never got the chance to panic about what he thought of finding her in that state. That little rite of passage was supposed to come the next morning, along with the hangover from hell, Sudocrem on her beard rash and obsessing with her friends about whether Curehead would ring. Instead, she was lying in a hospital bed praying to God that at any minute she would wake up and her father would not be lying in the morgue downstairs.
If I Never See You Again Page 5