If I Never See You Again

by Niamh O'Connor

  She looked over the balcony at the rear of the apartment, at the stainless-steel kitchen, and she spotted two glasses in the sink. Did Mac know the killer too? Had he had a drink with him before he’d died? There was no sign of breaking and entering.

  ‘Five dead,’ she said to the killer. ‘It doesn’t get any better than this for you, does it? You must feel like a god yourself now.’

  Now she was back in control. Fear was being replaced by anger. Leaning over, she put a hand on Mac’s chest and felt his body temp, recording it as ‘still warm to touch’. She inspected the rusting nails in his palms; from the size of them they could have been used in the sleepers of a railway track. They could be sourced too, she thought. She crooked her arm, trying to work out how Mac’s killer could have held Mac’s body in place while hammering the nails in, then spotted the red bruising round the neck where the rope – probably the same as used on the wrists – had looped.

  ‘Why did this one get the special treatment?’ she asked, talking to the killer again. ‘If it was Crawley’s idea to abduct Katie Freeman, all the others – even Mac – were minor characters. Why not give Crawley the worst death, on what you consider your special day . . . Unless . . .’

  She looked over at the aquarium as she put it together. ‘Mac made you most angry . . .’ she said, understanding suddenly. ‘Judas was the traitor – Christ’s greatest enemy. That’s why you chose Mac . . . You’re not wiping the victims out because of what they did to Katie, are you? You’re murdering everyone who can tell what happened to her. Judas was the whistleblower, after all.’

  She ran down the stairs and over to the kitchen sink where the glasses sat – in an ideal world, they’d be stained with fingerprints. Depending on who’d been drinking, they might have a hope of more DNA if there were saliva.

  She went to the tall cylinder bin in the corner, pulled her hand into her sleeve and lifted the lid carefully. The only item inside was an empty bottle of wine. She made a note to have it taken, and all the rubbish in the apartment block sifted. She headed over to the table and studied, without touching, what she’d first thought was food but now looked like a molten-candle wax stain.

  She reached for her phone and scrolled through the contacts then hit the dial button.

  ‘Gerry?’ she said as the call connected. ‘It’s Jo Birmingham . . . Yeah, I know what time it is . . . Never mind where I got your home number. No, it’s not about getting support for victims in court. I need a big, big favour.’

  45

  Angie Freeman was sitting in front of the TV in her sitting room watching a panel discussion on a late-night news show. She’d kept the lights off and the volume down out of pure habit, as if Katie were sleeping upstairs and not in hospital.

  Jo Birmingham’s press conference was being replayed for the commentators on the telly. After each sentence, the programme’s host would freeze the frame on a big screen behind a group that included a member of the opposition party, a psychiatrist and a tabloid-newspaper editor and invite the participants to analyse exactly what Jo had meant. Angie rubbed warmth into the tops of her arms as goose pimples began to spread. She was only wearing a light negligée. She turned to identify the draught as the sound of the key in the front door told her where it was coming from. Ryan had entered and was looking at her as if he’d seen a ghost.

  ‘Where’ve you been? You know what time it is?’ she snapped.

  With a sigh he closed the door behind him, giving their dog Cassie time to slink in around his legs. ‘She didn’t get a walk today with everything.’ He paused as he saw what was on the TV. ‘Why are you watching that?’

  ‘Because it’s only a matter of time before they start putting two and two together – and what’s going to happen then? If you’re sent to prison, how am I supposed to cope? How’ll I pay for Katie’s medical bills? If I’ve to go back to work, who’ll take care of her?’

  Ryan made a noise that went with a sneer.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Are you calling me a bad mother?’

  ‘Me? And there I was thinking it was your friendship with scum like Crawley that got us into this mess.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep with him.’ Angie stood and moved towards Ryan. One of the straps of her negligée fell down her shoulder but she didn’t hitch it back up. She slid her arms around his waist and pressed into him, resting her head on his chest.

  ‘I just think we should start to get our story straight and start looking out for each other, like old times.’ She tilted her face up to his.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length. ‘You think I killed Crawley, don’t you? But I had nothing to do with any of it. Much as I wish I had, it wasn’t me who killed him.’

  ‘Well, somebody did, and they’re trying to make it look like it was you.’

  He reached for the zapper and switched off the TV.

  ‘Put it on, I want to see it.’ She sprung at Ryan suddenly and slapped him hard on the face. Cassie whimpered but Ryan didn’t so much as lift a hand or step back to defend himself.

  ‘What kind of fucking excuse for a man are you?’ Angie screamed at him. ‘Don’t you understand anything? Tell me you killed Anto Crawley. Tell me you did it!’

  46

  Jo sat on the covers of Rory’s single bed in a terrycloth dressing gown and a pair of novelty Tasmanian Devil slippers which stared back at her like a ridiculous antidote to the horrors she had witnessed tonight. It was four in the morning, but she couldn’t sleep. A man had been crucified. A man she knew, whom earlier in the day she had accused of being in the wrong, a man who had died an agonizing death because she still hadn’t solved the case.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of snoring in the next room. Friday, early morning, and Rory and Harry were fast asleep in her bed. Rory must have checked on his baby brother then fallen asleep on the covers of her bed. Jo had pulled an eiderdown over him and headed for his bed instead. Rory was a good kid, she reminded herself, and right then the sight of Harry’s chubby little hand jutting through the bars of the cot and sitting bang smack on Rory’s face was just what she needed. It had melted some of the perversions of what she’d just seen done to Mac, whose full name she now knew to be Dave MacMahon. The stiff whiskey she was nursing in her hand was helping too, but it couldn’t change the overriding sense that everything was going to change tomorrow. There’d be the public reaction to her eating out while a killer went on the rampage, and there’d be the change in the station. You killed a cop, whether he was good or bad, and it became personal for other cops.

  The sound of the front door opening made her back straighten. He’d arrived at Mac’s apartment just as Jo was leaving and grilled her in front of the mules about why she hadn’t done things by the book instead of barging in. Jo could have argued, but she was all done arguing with Dan.

  She could hear him banging the presses in the kitchen, then a noise which she presumed meant that the gammy press door had just fallen off. He’s probably looking for the whiskey bottle, she thought, glancing to it on the bedside locker.

  On the landing, he stopped outside the door. She guessed he’d spotted the light under the door and presumed Rory was still awake. He rapped once and put his head around, looking surprised to see her there. He was about to back out when she patted the side of the bed.

  Dan looked exhausted as he closed the door behind him and sat down, the dark circles under his eyes more prominent. He leaned forwards on his knees. His windbreaker had bloodstains on the sleeves. He must have helped get Mac down. She could also smell smoke off him. Dan hadn’t smoked in years. Jo handed him her glass, which he drained. She topped it up.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say it?’ he asked, staring into the glass.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I told you so.’

  Jo opened her mouth, intending to remind him that she hadn’t wanted this to happen, but said nothing.

  ‘Hawthorne went ballistic,’ he went o
n. ‘He’d been at his annual hunt dinner and arrived in his dinner jacket, bow tie – the lot. Said we shouldn’t have interrupted him for something he could have seen to in the morning. You wouldn’t have left a dog strung up like that for the night, Jo. Mac was one of our own.’

  Jo’s heart went out to him. The way you treated the dead mattered to good people like Dan. She put her hand on his shoulders and rubbed his back.

  ‘I’ve been such a bloody fool,’ he went on. ‘You know he came to me, years ago, and told me what happened that night with the kid in the cell: how he’d given him one slap too many, how he’d fallen and cracked his head against the metal frame of the bunk, and he never meant it to happen. I believed him.’

  Jo pulled her hand away. ‘And you said nothing?’

  ‘Don’t start. Not tonight. There’s only one thing to talk about. How are we going to stop this killer? It was one thing when the victims were all linked to gangland – the public doesn’t care about scrotes knocking off scrotes – but now we’ve got a priest, and a cop. Middle Ireland is going to start baying for blood, and it’s going to start right now.’ He turned and looked at her, his face taut with worry. ‘You have to find him, Jo. You’re the only one who understands why he’s doing this and what he might do next.’

  47

  Flanked only by Foxy and Sexton, because nobody had bothered to inform Merrigan, Jo crossed the yard of Mountjoy Prison towards Justice Minister Blaise Stanley, who was posing for photographers at a pre-arranged press call. It was 10 a.m., and the country had woken up to the news that a garda had been murdered. On Morning Ireland, Aine Lawlor had sounded even closer to tears than usual. The Mail story about Jo not being up to the job looked off the wall, because the radio stations had moved on to the story of the cop ‘with her finger on the pulse . . . who’d predicted the crime’.

  Jo had learned from Gerry on the phone during the previous night’s conversation that Stanley was scheduled to launch a new policy document on Temporary Release for prisoners this morning. The prison location had originally been chosen to send out a zero-tolerance message on criminality. But given last night’s development, Stanley had gone into fire-fighting mode and was about to add a state-of-the-nation address. The original plan to pose outside the modern red-brick and ice-block-fronted prison on the North Circular road had been abandoned in favour of the view from behind the prison walls. Inside the grey steel gates, it was strictly infirmary-style granite. Jo knew that the Victorian attitude to justice conveyed by the location had been picked purely because it suited the public mood.

  Either way, the prison looked like what it was, Jo thought, turning around – a moral sewer. Usually drugs, mobile phones and even bottles of vodka came sailing in over the wall. In Wheatfield Prison, the contraband-missile throwers were so prolific an ‘X’ had been spraypainted on the side of the wall that bordered Cherry Orchard Hospital to show the best pitch point. There was nothing that couldn’t be got in prison. During one prison raid, the authorities had even discovered a couple of budgies.

  Gerry had agreed that Jo could have the minister’s ear before he was whisked off to Baldonnell aerodrome, in return for which she had agreed not to call him for a month. Now, as she approached Stanley, Jo suddenly realized the real reason he’d been so uncharacteristically amenable.

  ‘I’ve been set up,’ she told Foxy, watching the way Gerry moved behind the minister to pat his shoulder, whisper in his ear and gesture to Jo with his chin.

  Stanley had been holding up a state-published book with the hallmark harp on the front at various angles – thrust out front, over a shoulder, above his head – for a bunch of photographers clustered in a pack in front of him, lunging towards him on one leg or angling cameras sideways as they clicked. His scowl never changed from shot to shot.

  After listening to what Gerry had to say, Stanley looked up, registered Jo and waved her over.

  The photographers, in various styles of flak jacket, started calling Stanley’s name to get him to pose again. One snapper was lying prostrate in front of the minister, aiming his long lens at Stanley’s chin. The name of the newspaper on the press pass around his neck told Jo why – it was the paper that gave above-fold half-pages to arty shots.

  Jo studied Stanley sceptically, thinking that the only part of him that didn’t look groomed was the hair on his fingers. His face shone with the glow of a weekly exfoliating face mask and the space between his eyebrows was an unnatural width. You’d have to get a lot of people sucking up to you before you’d treat yourself to that much pampering, she thought.

  Foxy leaned in to tell her what he’d found in the photographs of the Stuart Ball murder scene.

  ‘Tools,’ he explained. ‘A chisel and anvil. Turns out they’re the stock tools of a silversmith’s trade.’

  Jo shook her head in confusion.

  ‘The silversmith Demetrius was another of Christ’s enemies,’ Foxy explained. ‘He wasn’t happy with the impact of the messiah’s message on his trade of idols dedicated to the goddess Diana. I think it’s Demetrius who the killer wanted Stuart Ball to represent.’

  ‘And you were right about Anto Crawley representing Pontius Pilate. There was a bowl of water set in the ground. Oh, and the word “Golgotha” scrawled in Mac’s apartment means Calvary.’

  Jo slapped him on the shoulder, and he nudged her back to indicate a reporter, identifiable by the spiral-bound notebook he held in one hand and the folded newspapers he had tucked in both waxy jacket pockets, who had begun moving towards her. The rest began to follow like sheep.

  Stanley waved Jo over to join him again, but she crossed her arms and firmly stood her ground.

  Stanley looked put out but quickly reined in his true feelings for the sake of the cameras. He approached Jo, reached for her hand and shook vigorously, then turned to the cameras as if to say, ‘You getting this?’ Then he clapped her upper arm and leaned in for a quick hug, which was delivered with a paternal pat on the back. ‘They’re all gangland killings, that’s the line,’ he whispered.

  Jo was spitting mad. It was infuriating to have him turn on the charm as if they were old friends, and to have him give her instructions as if he’d a day-to-day, hands-on involvement in the case. The truth was that, without cameras around, she couldn’t have got a call put through to him.

  ‘Detective Inspector Birmingham,’ a reporter called. Jo couldn’t see which one. ‘Another killing, just as you predicted yesterday. How did you know? Is the killer in touch with you?’

  Jo put her hands in her pockets and looked at her shoes.

  ‘Inspector,’ another one – that bald guy from yesterday – called, ‘the public are calling you the prophet policewoman . . . When is he going to strike next?’

  Before anyone else cut in, Jo said: ‘I’d like to take this opportunity to extend my deepest sympathies to the family of Garda Dave MacMahon. I want to assure them we are doing everything possible to find the person or people responsible for this grotesque act, which is a crime against every right-minded member of our society.’

  Jo tried to move off, but Stanley had one arm around her back and the other on her elbow, which he gave a little pull.

  ‘I’d also like to extend my condolences,’ he said, in a well-practised tone that was as effective as ‘Quiet!’. ‘As you know, the last time we lost a member of the force to gangland was when Detective Garda Jerry McCabe was murdered by the IRA when they raided a bank escort. But these are changed times. Since then my party has seen the IRA decommissioned; we have lengthened the powers of detention for gardaí holding drugs suspects; we have created the Criminal Assets Bureau to disassemble the tier of drugs money; and we have put gangsters on the run.’

  Jo wondered why they were letting him run with the political party broadcast when the garda helicopter, which was equipped with heat-seeking equipment, was circling overhead – not to hunt down fugitives, but to provide extra security detail in a place supposed to be the biggest deterrent to crime in the first instan
ce.

  But the reporters were too busy scribbling frantically and thrusting tape recorders inches from his face.

  ‘I have every confidence in Detective Inspector Birmingham and her team,’ Stanley was saying. He gave her the kind of proud look that parents give to children at school plays. ‘As she proved yesterday, she knows exactly what we’re dealing with here, and it’s only a matter of time before she catches this maniac.’ He looked straight into the camera. ‘And I can promise you, when we do catch the Skids responsible, they will feel the full rigour of the law.’

  ‘Inspector, are all the killings linked to the Skids?’

  ‘Inspector, can you tell us anything about the circumstances of Garda Dave MacMahon’s killing?’

  ‘Minister, what are you doing to offset public panic?’

  ‘I’m allocating forty more officers to the incident room, to work under Detective Inspector Birmingham. I can assure you that, whatever the Senior Investigating Officer on the case wants, she will get. I’ve no further comment,’ Stanley stated, opening his arms to give the impression of doing the precise opposite.

  The questions started up again, but Stanley had turned to Jo. ‘We’ll talk further in my car,’ he told her. ‘Find the killer and I’ll give you whatever you want.’

  48

  The state Merc was parked in the bus lane outside the prison, hazards on. After arguing with the garda on Stanley’s driving detail that there was no way her team was going to drive behind them so Stanley could keep moving towards the private Lear jet, Jo climbed into the back seat.

  Stanley was already there, going through the morning’s papers. Gerry was in the front passenger seat, his thumb jerking madly across the keyboard of his BlackBerry. He nodded at the driver, who stepped out of the car.