If I Never See You Again

by Niamh O'Connor

  Her eyes roamed to the coffee table where she’d seen the cocaine, now covered with metallic-grey fingerprint dust. ‘Do you keep whatever you used to break in with in your hand or put it down?’ she muttered. ‘Yes, you put it down, for now. You need her calm. The art of ceremony requires preparation, so you’ve brought a peace offering. But you can’t risk her actually taking the coke, can you? Might fire her up for a fight. You’ve too much work to do. That’s why we found it untouched.’

  She headed across to the bedroom and flung open the door. She swallowed: the bloodstains were still there, more disconcerting without the body.

  Jo held her own hand up at arm’s length, spreading the fingers out, turning it from back to front. ‘Do you take what she owes you while she’s living or dead?’ Jo knew the forensic analysis of the blood spatter would yield the answer. In her experience, only a pumping heart would blood-spray every surface – even the ceiling. She looked up and saw the telltale signs. ‘You need her alive, of course, because justice requires punishment. What did you use? An axe? A cleaver? You’d have needed to hide it, though, wouldn’t you, along with the crowbar you used for breaking down the door.’ She turned to a new page of her notebook. ‘Long coat? Bag?’ she wrote.

  Jo hurried over to the bathroom on the right where the towels had lain before they’d been bagged and taken to the lab. ‘Who washed?’ she asked. ‘You or her? The clock is ticking. Any stray or pre-booked punter could come by at any point . . . her pimp, for example. Why was washing so important? It could have risked the kill . . .’

  She reached to the tap in the bath to turn the shower on, but the lever was damaged and the water kept flicking out the bath spout.

  She looked around the bath but could see no stray peroxide strands. ‘It’s you who’s in the bath, isn’t it?’ Jo asked the killer. ‘Not all of you, there isn’t time, just your feet . . . like in the Bible? Did you want Rita to dry them with her hair, like Mary Magdalene?’

  Jo wrote in her notebook: ‘Have samples of Rita’s hair from PM sent to forensics for contact analysis.’

  ‘If she’s the whore,’ she asked aloud, ‘who is it that you think you are?’

  A knock on the door made her start. The garda who’d been on duty outside stuck his head around the door. ‘You asked me to remind you about your conference, in case you lost track of time,’ he said.

  12

  Sexton hadn’t been notified that he’d lost the investigation to Jo Birmingham because he was in the interview room with a skinny scrote who had just confessed to murdering the Skids’ drug lord, Anto Crawley. Sexton didn’t believe for a second that ‘Skinny’, as he was known, had executed Crawley. He hadn’t asked Sexton for a brief yet. Guilty parties always wanted their brief. Sexton suspected that, with the Skids’ succession battle heating up, Skinny here was making a bid for the leadership. Crawley had been tortured, an old underworld way of sending out a message: there were worse things than death – there was a hard death. If Skinny presumed Crawley had been caught touting to gardaí, maybe he figured that he could gain a lot of ground in the Skids’ pecking order by owning up to a crime he didn’t commit.

  Sexton leaned across the desk. ‘Tell me what happened,’ he said again.

  Skinny wasn’t hunched in the plastic chair because of an attitude problem. He just didn’t have any shoulders. The sum of his parts, as far as Sexton could see, was an Adam’s apple and a bum-fluff excuse of a moustache. There was a jerkiness to him that Sexton associated less with drugs and more with the kind of man who liked to hit women; he had something to hide, and it was making him jumpy, but he was certain it was not Anto Crawley’s murder.

  ‘I heard Anto Crawley was in the area so I –’ Skinny said.

  ‘Hold it,’ Sexton cut in, straightening up and pressing his hands into the small of his back. ‘Where are we talking about?’

  Skinny rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘I already told ya, Spencer Dock.’ He turned to the overweight detective on his left, who was sitting on a chair beside the door. ‘Can I have another cup of tea? One with sugar in it this time?’

  The detective stared straight ahead. His only purpose there was to offset any allegations of garda brutality, which had become par for the course in the days before everything was recorded on camera and audio tape.

  Skinny cleared his throat, looked around for somewhere to hawk, caught the glint in Sexton’s eye and swallowed.

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Can’t remember, mate.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘I’m no good with times.’

  ‘Then what?’ Sexton pressed.

  ‘Then I got a knife and I –’

  ‘Wait . . .’ Sexton cut in, lighting up a cigarette. ‘Where did you get the knife?’ The smoking ban wasn’t enforced when it came to the country’s prisons, which meant a blind eye was turned to scenarios such as this – encouraging prisoners to talk.

  He turned his back on Skinny and studied the view from the window. The city’s bus terminus was directly opposite, the Customs House sat further back, there was a diamond-shaped sculpture of mirrored glass on the forecourt outside, and a couple of nice restaurants had sprung up recently too. Not that Sexton ate out since Maura had died. It just reminded him of who wasn’t there with him. They’d married in a church just around the corner from here, held her funeral mass there too. ‘By her own hand,’ the bastard of a priest kept saying. Like Sexton needed reminding . . .

  ‘I got the blade off a fella and I –’

  ‘What’s the “fella’s” name?’ Sexton interrupted.

  ‘I’m not grassing me mates up, no way, man.’

  ‘So you took the knife,’ Sexton said, ‘which your anonymous friend gave you, and you . . .’

  ‘Anonawha’?’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then, when I saw Crawley coming, I went in after him. Crawley was a prick. He was a snout. He had it coming to him, and I made sure he got it. That’s why I smashed up his teeth.’

  ‘You can’t remember where this was?’ Sexton enquired.

  ‘It was one of those old warehouses.’

  ‘What’s it used for?’

  ‘Nothing, it’s a crack den.’ Skinny puffed out his chest and went on. ‘That slapper who was murdered the other day used to squat there. Even the homeless fellas won’t stay there. It’s a kip.’

  Sexton turned around slowly. Had this nonentity just linked two murder victims to the same location? ‘Oh yeah?’ He looked over to the detective. ‘You can get him that tea now.’

  ‘Great,’ Skinny called after the detective leaving the room. ‘Got any biscuits? HobNobs over Jersey Creams if there’s any going. You coppers only ever have Jersey Creams.’

  Sexton grabbed the plastic seat opposite and pulled it around to the side of the table. Less confrontational, he thought. He leaned back, stretched his legs out and took a few drags on his fag, then stood it on its butt so the ash started piling up on itself. Old trick, never spilt a flake, unless someone knocked it. Keep it nice and casual, he thought. Soon as he knows he’s got me, he’ll start playing games.

  ‘You heard of Stuart Ball, or Git, as I think he was known?’

  Skinny nodded. ‘Him and that slag used to go out when she worked as a lap dancer, before she got real bad on drugs. Heard the pair of them kidnapped a kid for a day and kept her in the warehouse where I knifed Crawley. All the junkies were talking about it. Sick, so it was. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Git and his old mot were killed.’

  ‘When was this exactly, can you remember?’

  Skinny opened his mouth to say something then ran his thumb off the pads of his first two fingers instead. ‘It’ll cost ya.’

  Sexton reached into an inside jacket pocket for his wallet but slipped an empty hand out quickly when the detective laboured back in and placed a plastic cup in front of Skinny with a paper plate of miniature Jaffa Cakes.

  ‘Can’t eat them Lidl ones, they make me teeth hop, man.’


  The detective threw his head at the door. Sexton hesitated, then followed as Skinny blew a mouthful of tea in a wide spray. ‘Fucking hell, you can’t make tea in a microwave, it’s bleeding wrong, man,’ Skinny roared.

  ‘What is it?’ Sexton asked the detective impatiently in the corridor.

  ‘You’re not going to believe who you’re going to have to answer to on this one,’ the detective told him.

  Sexton frowned.

  ‘The chief’s just given Jo Birmingham the Rita Nulty murder investigation,’ the detective said.

  Sexton gave a half-smile. ‘Did he now?’ As the detective tried to continue on into the room, Sexton took a step sideways to block his path. ‘Don’t bother, I’m about to send him home.’

  His hand on his wallet, Sexton went back in to speak to Skinny alone. It was nothing personal, he thought. He liked Jo Birmingham, she was one of the most instinctive cops he’d ever worked with. But Ryan Freeman was a close friend, and Sexton had been helping him try and find out what happened to his daughter. And if that meant bribing one of the scrotes who knew the people who had hurt her, then so be it.

  13

  Jo sat on the edge of the top table in the incident room, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded, fingers drumming the sleeves of her plain white shirt. A dull throb had struck up in the back of her head the second she’d stepped into the killer’s skin, but this wasn’t the cause of her darkening mood. Having prepped the room for the briefing, arranged the desks into a semblance of order, cleared the wipe board and organized posthumous pictures of the two other victims of recent murders to stick up alongside Rita, there was still no sign of her crack team of detectives, although the room was packed with a dozen-odd officers who were now at her beck and call.

  Twenty minutes after they were due, Mac sauntered in without so much as an apology, shrugged off his fleece and threw it across a desk. He couldn’t but have noticed Jo’s presence, but the way he didn’t bother to salute her – just swivelled a plastic chair back to front before straddling it, and then peeled an egg mayonnaise sandwich out of its plastic container before getting stuck into it – told her he considered it deserved more respect than she did.

  Jo dialled Jeanie’s extension to see if she’d passed on the message. Jeanie said that she had, adding that Foxy had gone home sick.

  ‘Good of you to tell me,’ Jo said, slamming the receiver down.

  Sexton arrived seconds later, not bothering to remove his trench coat, and took the seat beside Mac. Folding his arms, Sexton rested his chin on his chest and settled in like he was about to grab a snooze. After eyeing the three photos on display, he nudged Mac’s shoulder with his own curiously.

  Jo headed for the door to close it as Mac muttered to Sexton, ‘You were after this case, weren’t you? You’d be a damn sight better than that! A murder brief for riding the boss, that’s a good one.’

  Jo slammed the door. ‘Phones on silent,’ she ordered, before returning to the wipe board.

  Mac made great play of rooting out his mobile and doing what she’d asked – squinting and angling the phone into the strobe light overhead, sticking the top of his tongue out as if he were concentrating on a task that required dexterity.

  Sexton shoved his phone into his coat pocket.

  ‘Right, you’re probably asking yourselves what a dead prostitute, a junkie and a drug baron have in common?’ Jo said, pointing at the pictures.

  Mac took it as a cue to discuss possible answers with Sexton and didn’t stop when she banged her fist on the table. ‘Oi! You got any ideas about how this lot are linked?’

  She may as well not have been there. Mac carried on regardless, as Sexton sighed heavily and studied his shoes.

  Jo walked over to Mac’s table and leaned across it, stopping short inches from his face. ‘Very funny. I’m glad you can still find the time to have a laugh considering I’m looking for the first opportunity to turf you off the case. You don’t have what it takes to be here. So by all means, keep it up . . .’

  She headed back to the wipe board. ‘Meet our victims.’ She turned around and held up her index finger. ‘All linked by one killer.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Mac asked through a mouthful of sandwich.

  Jo pointed at Stuart Ball’s picture. ‘The Skid, murdered a couple of weeks back.’ She swiped a couple of photocopies from her desk and handed them out. ‘Name was Stuart Ball and, Sexton, you already know his incidentals.’ She watched the heads lower to the paper. ‘You can read up later. Only thing I want you to note at this point is that Stuart’s eye was removed at the scene.’

  Mac winked dramatically at Sexton, who was clearly growing tired of him.

  One step sideways took her to Rita’s bloodied face. ‘As you know, we found Rita yesterday.’ Two-beat pause. ‘Minus her hand. And last, but by no means least, Anto Crawley,’ Jo continued.

  ‘There’s a million people wanted Crawley dead, and with good reason,’ Mac protested. ‘His killer did the rest of us a favour, if you ask me.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Jo answered. ‘Now, in Crawley’s case, the teeth were extracted.’ She looked directly at Sexton. ‘And not smashed in his mouth as first thought and reported in the press.’ Pulling the cap off a fat red marker with her teeth, she wrote her Book of Exodus quote up on the board. The pen squeaked as she worked.

  ‘Meet our killer,’ she said. ‘Looks like we’ve got our very own Bible John.’

  Sexton got up slowly, walked over to her desk and pulled a chair up in front of it. ‘Okay, Inspector,’ he said, ‘where do we start?’

  Jo gave him a grateful smile. ‘We need to go through the paperwork the team of uniforms on the house-to-house enquiries have brought in, and also trawl through the information gleaned from the checkpoints in the vicinity. I’ve done up the questionnaires . . . the usual: Did they see any working girls that night? Anyone matching Rita’s description? Was she alone? Priority is to get Rita’s mobile number sharpish – we might strike lucky on data analysis. Then there’s the collection of any CCTV in the extended area. The location has been bugging me most. I mean, you said it yourself – what were the chances of our training exercise taking place in the same location that the killer decided to kill Rita? We know our man puts a lot of thought into symbolism. I think he chose the place deliberately.’

  ‘Someone who knew we’d be there and wanted to leave us with egg on our faces?’ Sexton asked.

  Jo nodded. ‘Looks like it. The building was, technically, unoccupied . . . So our priority is to find out where Rita was actually living before she died.’

  Sexton studied a ballpoint pen he was walking through his fingers.

  ‘Also, it has to be more than coincidence that all three were involved in criminality. Two were Skids, so it’s fair to presume Crawley and Ball knew each other. We need to find out if Rita was also mixing in their circles.’

  ‘Oi,’ Mac said. ‘Anyone remember the name of that victim knocked off a couple of months back out near the airport?’

  Jo and Sexton looked at him blankly.

  ‘White . . . That was it,’ he went on. Heading over to the back wall of filing cabinets, he pulled open a screeching metal drawer. ‘Don’t you remember? That bloke found – there was a page ripped out of the Bible at the scene. Here it is.’

  ‘I never read anything about a page from the Bible in the notes on any of the recent cases,’ Jo said, shocked.

  ‘Kept quiet for operational reasons,’ Mac replied. ‘You’d have found it on PULSE.’

  Jo gave him a ‘pull the other one’ face. ‘Was there mutilation at the scene?’ she asked. ‘And where exactly was the body found?’

  Mac licked a thumb and riffled through the pages. ‘Some disused shed near the airport,’ he said.

  ‘Not our district,’ was Jo’s reaction.

  Sexton put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Why don’t I leave you two to argue the toss while I try and find out if any of our victims knew each other?’

  Jo nodded. ‘We�
�ll meet tomorrow in the morgue for Rita’s autopsy. I want everyone to start feeling some empathy for her instead of just seeing her as a tart. Oh, and Sexton, she was a working girl, so she must have had a number for clients. We get it, we can GPS her last movements.’

  Sexton hurried out.

  ‘My victim was burned to death,’ Mac said, pointing to what Jo had written on the white board.

  ‘I dunno,’ she said. Why hadn’t the case come up during her searches yesterday? she wondered. She glanced at the door, which had swung shut behind Sexton. Dan was peering in through the small, rectangular, wired-glass panel, rapping it lightly. She waved him in to join them, but he stayed put.

  ‘Dan, I’m in the middle of conference,’ she complained, joining him in the corridor outside.

  ‘My office, now,’ he answered.

  ‘I’ll be along as soon as we’re finished,’ Jo replied, still holding the door open.

  ‘That’s the least of your worries,’ he said. ‘You’re off the case.’

  Jo let go of the door. ‘You winding me up?’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve only had ten minutes on it. On what grounds?’

  ‘We’ve got a witness who says you thieved from Rita Nulty.’

  Jo crinkled her nose in bewilderment.

  ‘The dead hooker, Jo!’

  ‘I know who Rita Nulty is,’ Jo said through gritted teeth.

  ‘Good, because you’re accused of robbing her last few quid,’ Dan said, looking past her. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do to bail you out of this one. This is way too serious.’

  14

  Rory’s principal phoned on Jo’s mobile just as she was pulling up outside Foxy’s allotment in Tymon Park in Tallaght, shortly after 3 p.m. After yanking the handbrake, she hit call connect and reached for the takeaway coffee she’d bought after finally stopping off for petrol on the way. The car had been running on bloody air since yesterday, but having reminded Dan before leaving the station that there were protocols in place for serious allegations and having just about managed to swing another twenty-four hours to clear her name, every second now counted. On the other end of the phone, Mr Montague told her to hold.