If I Never See You Again

by Niamh O'Connor

  Later, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her mum or sister what had happened. The truth was, she’d pulled the handle of the passenger door open while her father was driving so she could lean out of it on the carriageway to vomit . . . His pyjama-sleeved arm had lunged across her to close the door, and the car swerved straight into an oncoming lorry.

  Jo never told a soul. Not even Dan. What would she have said? That the reason she was so good at getting into a killer’s head was because she was one?

  After she’d recovered, she used to come to the gallery because it was the only place it was socially acceptable to stand absolutely still without looking like a weirdo. All around her, life went on regardless as the sounds of that night kept playing over and over, like one of those tunes you can’t get out of your head: a single heel clicking with every second step as she walked to her dad’s car – she’d lost a shoe; the lorry’s horn blowing that deafening foghorn noise; tyres screeching; metal ripping and glass shattering; a hollow brushing sound as her dad was sucked through the windscreen; and the sound of someone crying, almost drowned out by the car alarm – herself.

  Who was she before the night her dad died? Jo asked herself. Someone she’d never got the chance to know.

  Who was she after? Someone completely different, who’d have traded blindness in a heartbeat – she’d needed cornea transplants – if it had meant freeing herself of survivor guilt.

  Her mum and Sue had moved to Australia a few years later, when she was eighteen, to try and ‘put the past behind them’. They’d begged Jo to come, but she couldn’t leave her father on his own, not in a grave, not when she’d been the one who’d put him there. And she could never shake the feeling that they’d have a better chance of starting over without her.

  The smell from the exact same ratio of dust to polish hadn’t changed in twenty years, Jo thought as she stepped out of the lift on to the second floor. As she crossed the Beit Wing, she realized that everything in her adult life could probably be traced back to the accident. The birth of her son, Rory, and marriage to Dan when she was still in her teens: a quick-fix solution to replace the family she’d lost. The connection she felt to victims of crime, because she knew first hand what the agony of grief felt like, and even joining the force, so she could start fending for herself.

  Out of the side of her eye, the painting hanging on the furthest wall through the last of the six open arches caught her attention, and she turned to face the Caravaggio, the gallery’s major new addition. She hadn’t come across many works by Caravaggio before, but this one she knew all about because it had been presumed a fake and had been hanging in a Jesuit dining room in Leeson Street since the 1930s, until its recent rediscovery created a furore in the art world.

  Jo approached until she was close enough to reach out and touch the paint. Not so much as a brass-slung rope separated her from the moonlight bouncing off the faces of seven life-sized figures, all in profile except for the downcast head of Christ, second from the left, straining away from Judas’s kiss as three soldiers on the right moved in to take him. On the far left, a figure was fleeing, his arms outstretched, his fingers splayed, his open mouth conveying the horror of what was unfolding. On the far right, a man – Caravaggio himself – was straining a lantern over the soldiers’ heads towards Christ, blocked by a human wall of gleaming, buckled armour.

  But it was Christ’s posture that intrigued Jo. In all the panic, he was the only one perfectly still, his hands joined limply in prayer. Only his creased forehead betrayed any torment. Gaunt shadows danced across his face, making flickering hollows of his eyes and cheekbones.

  She knew the painting was telling her something about the case but, stealing a worried glance at her watch, Jo realized that if she didn’t leave for the office right now, whatever it was would be irrelevant, because she might not even make the investigation team.

  9

  By mid-morning, Jo was standing outside Dan’s office trying to muster the courage to enter. It was originally an L-shape, but the leg had been annexed off to accommodate Jeanie’s work space. This was the reason Jo was hesitating outside the door. She hated the way Jeanie would try to make her wait in that claustrophobic little space until she’d cleared her entry with Dan first. Jo got the same treatment when she dialled Dan’s direct number: Jeanie always picked up first and asked who was speaking.

  Swallowing her resentment, Jo rapped twice and entered. Breezing past Jeanie with a captain’s salute, she ignored the loud protests and continued on through the adjoining door into Dan’s inner quarters, pressing the connecting door closed with her back.

  Dan looked up over his computer monitor and motioned to the chair in front of his desk. Jo’s gaze shifted from the lemon geranium that had appeared on the window sill behind him to his suit jacket draped on a coat hanger on a hook on the coat-stand, and settled on the back of an ornate photo frame propped on the corner of his desk.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ he said, taking some papers from the In/Out tray and banging them together before putting them back in exactly the same position.

  Folding her arms across her chest, Jo wondered who had selected his chunky pink tie, the type preferred by the younger, sharper solicitors in the courts, the ones who specialized in personal-injury claims, the kind of people she thought he regarded as sharks.

  Pushing her shoulders back a fraction, she said, ‘I’d like to formally enquire if my transfer’s been processed.’ No reply. No eye contact. Dan reached for the mouse and began clicking files shut on his monitor. ‘It’s been six months now since my latest submission and I still haven’t . . .’

  Dan’s presidential black leather chair creaked loudly as he shifted position. ‘I’m afraid I find myself unable to recommend it at the moment,’ he said.

  ‘Why? This is insane. Your life has moved on, Dan. Why can’t you give me the chance to do the same with mine?’

  Rows of tired crinkles appeared at the sides of his eyes. ‘I need you to head up the Rita Nulty investigation,’ he said. ‘Solve it, and you get to go whenever you like.’

  ‘What?’ Jo sat down in the uncomfortable cup chair Dan kept for visitors.

  He reached for a sheet of paper from the top tray and slid it across the desk. ‘These are the officers I can spare.’

  A murder brief. Jo felt a jolt of excitement. ‘Thank you, Dan. You won’t regret this, I promise.’ She knew he’d take flak for this – be accused of giving her special treatment – but she also knew that she could solve the case.

  Reaching over to take the list from him, she overturned the picture on his desk with her elbow. It fell, face up, revealing the snap behind the framed glass. Dan was standing behind Jeanie with his hands on her shoulders. Jeanie was nuzzling Harry on her lap. Rory stood to one side, looking a hair’s breadth off the centre of the lens, making him seem removed. Dan had a high, forced smile on his face and a round-necked jumper on – the kind men only wore at Christmas, the kind he didn’t wear, the kind that left her in no doubt that this was not a case of waving at a passer-by and asking them to take their picture. This was a posed shot, and she could tell from the background it had been taken at a photographer’s studio.

  Dan stared at the picture as if he were seeing it for the first time too, then caught Jo’s eye guiltily. In that split second she saw the old Dan, the one who would say or do anything rather than hurt her. He reached over quickly and slid the photo towards a desk drawer. ‘I didn’t put that there . . .’ he began awkwardly.

  ‘You told me last night it wasn’t serious,’ Jo said, her breathing short.

  He glanced to the door behind her then lowered his voice. ‘You still haven’t said you want me back, Jo. I can’t wait for ever.’

  Jo focused on his hands gripping the desk and pictured them on Jeanie. ‘I’ve taken the house off the market,’ she said. ‘The boys have had enough upheaval. I’m sorry.’

  Dan leaned his chair back as far as it would go then stood up and walked over to the wi
ndow and stared out. Jo wanted to go to him, press her face against his back and wrap her arms around his waist, beg him to come home and tell him that everything would be all right.

  ‘Don’t you mean you have had enough upheaval?’ he answered.

  Jo blinked rapidly, but held her tongue. She made a big effort to concentrate on the names on the page. As she did so, she realized her big break came with a big catch. Dan was assigning Mac and another of the station’s nonentities, Merrigan, to the case. If Rita had come from some nice leafy estate on the south side with an SUV parked outside and had not had a shitty life nobody cared about, he’d never have pulled a stunt like this. Mac was a liability and would need babysitting so as not to get into any more trouble, and Merrigan was about as politically correct as Bernard Manning. Sending either of them to interview the girls working on the street would be a disaster. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t work with these guys.’

  Dan turned around.

  ‘I need Foxy,’ Jo said. ‘I know he hasn’t been on a live case in years but he’s such a stickler for detail, I could do with a mind like his. And I want Sexton, because of his contacts on the street. As many mules as I need to cover the door-to-doors and checkpoint questionnaires, obviously, and every detective that can be spared.’

  Dan loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, revealing a neatly trimmed arc of chest hair. ‘Foxy, fine. Sexton, for now. But Mac needs the experience and Merrigan is doing nothing else.’

  ‘I don’t like Mac’s history, and Merrigan is bloody useless,’ she said.

  ‘Fine, forget Merrigan, but Mac stays,’ he said, adding, ‘Final answer.’

  She opened her mouth to protest, but he wasn’t having any of it. ‘Get me something to go on and I might even let you keep Sexton for the duration.’

  Jeanie burst into the office to ask if he intended to keep his lunch appointment, making Jo wonder if she’d had her ear pressed to a glass on the door outside. She noticed how perfect her hair and make-up looked. The wraparound dress she was wearing emphasized her fantastic figure. If Dan hadn’t been her ex, she’d have taken Jeanie aside and told her not to try so hard, because the odds were stacked against the relationship working. Jeanie was a civilian, and that meant she was going to take every anniversary dinner he missed because of work and every romantic weekend he cancelled at the last minute personally.

  Jo stood to leave. ‘Can you contact these members?’ she asked Jeanie, holding Dan’s list out. ‘Tell them I intend holding the first case conference on the Rita Nulty case in the incident room straight after lunch, and I expect everyone there. No excuses.’

  Jeanie turned away, so Jo pressed the list down on Dan’s desk, saying ‘asap,’ in a tone that said she was the one who called the shots on this case now and that she intended to find out who had murdered Rita Nulty in record time. That meant that, from this point on, Jeanie was the least of her problems.

  10

  Ryan Freeman lay spreadeagled on his couch, studying the TV screen. The new addition to the family – Cassie, a border collie bought for Katie in the hope that she would help reawaken her social skills – was lying on the rug watching him, her head tilting occasionally as if she had tuned into his pain.

  Ryan was watching the CCTV footage taken outside Katie’s school on the day she’d disappeared, as he had a million times before, convinced he had to be missing something. He believed that, once he found it, he’d have the link he needed to begin unravelling Katie’s problems.

  The sepia images moving across the screen were so grainy they had a phantom feel. The now dead drug lord Crawley was wearing a trucker cap pulled low over his eyes, the peak barely visible under his hoodie. He wore this under a black leather jacket, elasticated at the waist, with a pair of blue jeans and white trainers.

  Ryan pointed the remote at the TV angrily, fast-forwarding to the point when Crawley moved robotically, owing to the slow snapshot speed, towards a mystery car which had pulled up outside the gates. Only a corner of the vehicle could be seen; the rest was just outside the frame. It was impossible to work out the make of the vehicle, though the right tail-light and last number of the plate were just about visible in the upper left-hand corner.

  Four swift frames later: Crawley bending over and into the driver’s window . . . gesturing like a madman by jabbing his index finger in at the driver, his elbow in and out of shot . . . recoiling from an invisible shove from the driver, his cap spinning off his head behind him. Ryan watched Crawley try to reef open the driver’s door then have a change of heart and grab a clump of his hair through the window instead. Long, fair hair came momentarily into view.

  A vicious row, but with whom, Ryan wondered, as he had constantly, since first seeing it. What did the woman driving the car know about Crawley’s presence? What were they fighting over? Had she provided him with information about Katie’s movements or helped Crawley identify Katie just before the abduction? And most importantly, if he found her, would she help Ryan unlock Katie from her world of silence in return for immunity from prosecution?

  He paused the screen, searching for any new clue as to who the woman was, anything that he might previously have missed. He had already drawn up a shortlist of all the mothers who had collected their daughters that day and had run background checks, but none had anything shady in their past that could be linked to the gangster.

  He hit play and felt his stomach constrict like it was about to take a punch. On the screen, Crawley was turning back towards the school and walking, in that cocky, swaggering way he used to have, directly up to the camera fixed to the wall above the main entrance. Once he was as close to it as he could get, he looked up and gave a sneering salute to the person he knew would end up watching this film – Ryan.

  Ryan froze the image. Crawley was situated no more than three feet below the lens, the skin taut on his face, his expression one of defiant hatred, his message unmistakable – ‘You get to me, I get to your daughter.’

  ‘R.I.P.,’ Ryan said.

  Katie entered the room, and he hit the stop button quickly and sat straight up. Cassie stood, wagged her tail and went over to her to nuzzle her hand.

  ‘Okay, sweetheart?’ he asked.

  She moved, oblivious to him, cornflower-blue eyes trancelike, as if she had earphones in and was listening to some secret soundtrack. She knelt beside Cassie and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck, lying her head on her neck. Cassie wriggled free to lick her face.

  Katie began methodically to brush the dog’s coat.

  Ryan was smiling, but his eyes were brimming.

  ‘Daddy?’ she asked, suddenly sitting back on her hunkers.

  ‘Yes, my darling?’ he answered automatically.

  ‘Do dogs cry?’

  Ryan stared. Had she actually spoken? He wanted to leap up and whirl her round. He looked from her to the dog.

  ‘Do they dream like we do?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, gently, kneeling down beside her. ‘In their own way.’ His chest started to heave.

  ‘What kind of things make them cry?’

  He reached for her hand. ‘Being lost, my darling. And scared. And hurt. The same as for us.’

  Katie hugged Cassie tightly again. He saw the glaze spreading across her eyes and began kissing the top of her head to try and keep her with him. But she had begun to shake in his arms, slowly at first then more violently.

  Angie appeared in the doorway and lunged, trying to pull him away. ‘Let her go. Ryan! What are you doing . . . Stop! We need to lie her down flat.’

  He stood up, trying to explain. ‘No, you don’t understand. She spoke . . . She said . . .’

  But Katie’s eyes were rolling in her head.

  ‘Call an ambulance,’ Angie ordered. ‘She’s convulsing. Ryan, for Christ’s sake, call one now!’

  11

  After speaking to the officer keeping the cordon on the balcony and waiting for him to log her time of entry, Jo ducked under the ‘Garda No Entry C
rime Scene’ navy and white tape and entered the apartment where she’d found Rita, closing the door behind her. The body was gone, the forensic work finished. Jo was back because she believed that, if the killer had made any mistakes, her best hope of finding evidence of them would be here. If it was him who’d called on Rita’s mother, he was overly cocky and, hopefully, by the time he’d got Rita here, he would have grown careless.

  Jo’s fists clenched as she braced herself for what was coming next. She wanted to see the world through his eyes, to feel what he had. She dreaded putting herself through the emotional wringer, but she was going to do whatever was necessary to find him. For the last eighteen months, her professional life had languished because her personal life was falling apart. This was the first chance she’d had to get her teeth stuck into a case, and her adrenaline levels had risen. Dan had been right to laugh at her the previous day – work was a huge part of who she was.

  Yesterday, when she stood on this spot, Jo had reached for the light switch. Today, she kept her eyes screwed shut as she thought about what she knew about Rita. She pictured the kind of looks Rita must have got when she boarded her last bus, dressed in the kind of clothes that would have revealed her occupation as well as any sign around her neck. If the bus had been crowded and Rita sat down beside someone on a double seat, Jo presumed they’d have stood and walked away rather than be associated with her. She wondered how young Rita was when her father first hurt her so badly. Jo was ready . . .

  She opened her eyes and held her hand against the apartment door. ‘You’re already angry with her by the time you get to this point, aren’t you?’ she asked out loud. ‘That’s why you forced entry. You both know what she is. Rita Nulty has no right to say no. So why does she? It’s because she already knows you, doesn’t she? She knows what you’re capable of. You’re someone she’s frightened of. Otherwise, why would you have to break in?’

  Jo lifted her head. She reached into her leather jacket for her notepad and pen, and scribbled: ‘Ask street workers about recent violent attacks?’