by Jane Ryan
The Sexual Assault Unit was empty and lukewarm.
‘Last time he was up, Liam said it was like a disused fridge no one had bothered to clean out,’ I said.
‘Well, he has a point. Is everyone out on the streets or chasing down the lads putting the girls on corners?’
‘Hardly anyone on the streets now. Most online. We’re looking at a particular scam targeting professionals using Instagram.’
‘Any one we’d recognise?’
‘Never seen them before. It’s a Georgian gang based out of Longford. Starts off with a ‘Hi, Handsome’ comment on Instagram. When the mark accepts the follower request, their address book is copied – unknown to them. Sexting kicks off, the mark is encouraged to share a dick pic and, when he delivers, he’s blackmailed with the threat of exposure to his work colleagues. It gets worse – some of the marks have allowed themselves be filmed.’
‘Using trafficked girls?’ said Joe.
‘Of course – through Belfast, we think.’
His mouth formed a halo of fine lines. ‘Why aren’t you out there helping them? This is the kind of stuff you were born for.’
My foot tapped on the scratched parquet flooring.
‘DS O’Connor has me hemmed in looking at tax returns of small-time hoods. All eighty thousand individuals and, when I do find something, I have to go cap in hand to the Revenue for more information.’
‘They’ve no interest in helping us. Touchy about their employees being seconded on to CAB as well,’ said Joe.
‘Don’t I know it. I was speaking to Miss Kelly – sounded no more than nineteen and called herself “Miss Kelly” when I asked for her name. But in fairness I got a batch of analysed work recently and it’s good. Someone called “Amy” went to a lot of trouble to find patterns in the transactions.’
‘Surprising,’ said Joe. He was supporting himself by leaning against an old table.
The table was a study relic from the fifties, the veneer a chipped crackled crust from over-polishing.
Joe poked his head in the air, a quizzical expression on his face. ‘Dettol?’
‘Or something like it. The cleaner mops the hall with disinfectant, says the lino is rotten up here. Believe me, it’s better than the original smell.’
The folds on Joe’s uniform shook.
The tea lady and her trolley made an appearance.
‘I’ll do you two cups as a favour,’ she said, nodding at Joe. ‘I’m not supposed to, mind – cutbacks.’
She had quick movements, reminding me of a small bird, the way she moved delph around her samovar and produced cups of tea and custard creams out of thin air. She pushed the coarse clay mug I used towards me. The mahogany-coloured tea was sweet and the smell of freshly mowed lawn filled the dusty squad room.
‘Thank you,’ I said to her. ‘Appreciate you coming up to me.’
‘Much obliged,’ said Joe.
She left, wreathed in smiles and a jangle of old wheels, her trolley having more in common with the temperamental supermarket variety.
‘How’s your wife?’ I asked. ‘Does she mind leaving Wexford?’
‘She’s grand, prefers Calahonda to Gorey. Over there now.’ He put a hand up and rubbed a grey stubbled jaw. ‘Put me on a diet these last months. I’m like one of those candles that’s been shoved into a wine bottle.’
‘Better for your heart, though.’
We drank our tea, enjoying each other’s company.
I gestured at my surroundings. ‘Any chance you’d ask Muldoon if I could be transferred to CAB?’
‘After what you did?’
‘You said you go back with Muldoon?’
‘I do, but I’m not sure that’ll cut it. He’s a single-minded man. Nothing’s as important as the job.’
‘But you called him when you wanted to leave Wexford?’
‘Called in the one favour I had. O’Connor made sure I’d no others.’
I flinched. ‘Sorry, Joe.’
He waved a pasty hand at me. ‘Water under the bridge. That arm-in-the-pig-carcass case made O’Connor. It should have been enough for him but he had to stamp on the both of us just because he could. I’ve heard he’s never off the floor in the DOCB since his promotion. He should’ve let you out of limbo by now. Unless you’ve done something else?’ His brows rose then fell to the bottom of his slab forehead.
‘No!’ My voice was high-pitched. ‘I’ve kept my nose clean and done everything O’Connor told me to. Including monthly evaluations.’
‘With Dr Paul Doherty? That’d be no hardship to you, from what I’ve heard.’
Joe gave an ill-timed wink and I flushed a hot pink.
‘I’m kidding,’ he said. A hand raised in supplication.
‘I’ll kill Liam O’Shea and his bog-baller’s big mouth.’
Joe took a mouthful of tea and choked, laughter pouring out the side of his mouth.
This conversation was a cactus: thorny and going nowhere fast.
‘So can you speak to Muldoon or not, Joe?’
‘Course I can, but no amount of pull will get you into Muldoon’s unit unless you’re of use to him. You’re an ex-barrister and your father’s a retired judge, so I’d polish those connections and think on what you can bring to the table.’
‘But I don’t want to use my legal contacts and get stuck in some liaison-land between the Garda and the Director of Public Prosecutions.’
‘Then I’d get pally with the tea lady – it’s the only company you’ll have up here.’
Chapter 8
Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, thirty, one, two . . .
The van swerved. Seán rolled around, a lumpy turnip bashing into objects he couldn’t see. The hat had fallen down over his eyes and the pain between his shoulder-blades was building to a fiery point. His fingers were lifeless. Blind and trussed up in the back of the van, he was a slaughterhouse delivery. The van accelerated and he shot into what felt like bags of calcified cement, mashing his ribs. Every so often he’d roll by turpentine rags, rearing his head away from the poisonous fumes.
Seán wanted to kill the men driving the van. All of them.
He tried kneeing the back door. It didn’t budge.
The driver slowed and judging by the bumping and rolling it was a tributary road. Best he could tell, they’d been driving for over thirty minutes – he was counting and would do so until the van stopped. He had no idea if it was north or south but the Dublin Mountains were half an hour from Monkstown. People had met bloody ends there since before he was born.
He pictured the inside of the van and searched for the handle with his mouth but found nothing and snagged his lip on the musty-smelling door-fibre. Copper-tasting blobs bubbled on the pink membrane of his mouth. He licked them off and used the door as a prop to shove the hat off his head. As he’d suspected he was in a builder’s van, with shelves and tools. His eyes lit on a scoring blade and wire cutters in a clear plastic drawer. The morons had stolen the van but hadn’t bothered to clean it out.
He see-sawed towards the tools.
The van jolted to a stop.
The psycho opened the door. He grabbed Seán’s upper body and hauled him out, the way you’d throw a leg of lamb onto a chopping board. The thin shirt Seán was wearing made a quick rip-rip noise and gave up trying. Damp air found his skin. He landed on his side with clumps of sharp rocks cutting into his legs. The daylight sliced into his eyes and he squinted at the surroundings. They were in some field behind thorny hedgerows choked with ivy.
The psycho had a knife, the kind that drew beads of sweat from Seán’s body and shrank his privates. The man slashed it, right under Seán’s nose.
‘You and me, eh, Seán?’
‘And the rest of them in the van? Putting on a show, are ye?’
The knife had loosened something in Seán – he was babbling.
‘Ah, not so bright? I was the only one who got in. Rest of them got back on chain gang.’
Seán couldn’t spare t
he brain power to process that statement. One obstacle at a time.
‘You’re going to hack me up with the tags on? What are you? A bitch?’ he said.
The psycho’s mongrel face contorted. He flung away his jacket and sliced towards Seán. A coldness moved down Seán’s body and threatened to void his bowels. The psycho rolled him over on his stomach and he waited for the skewering burn of the knife to tear him from shoulder to buttocks. It’s what he would have done. Instead, the psycho slashed the cable-ties.
‘Let’s go!’ he said.
‘Wait! Gis a chance!’ Seán couldn’t move his arms – from his armpits to the tips of his fingers was frozen.
A squally wind brought the psycho’s meaty, excited smell towards Seán.
‘Let me get some feeling back, give you a fair fight. Where you from – Azerbaijan?’
The psycho’s face registered surprise.
‘Georgia.’ He hopped from foot to foot, not one foot behind the other, as Seán did, quartered in a fighter’s stance.
‘You near Tebilesee?’ said Seán. He knew of a Georgian gang in Longford and they were from the capital. It was a shot in the dark.
‘Tbilisi? How you know about –’
Seán chopped the psycho’s feet from under him but his reflexes were fast and he drove the blade towards Seán. Seán zig-zagged, fearful his bare chest was too easy a target, and lunged for the pyscho’s discarded jacket. In a fluid movement he trapped the psycho’s knife-hand with the jacket. He put his bare foot in the crook of the psycho’s elbow and mounted him up to his neck. Seán hooked the man’s jaw and used it as a fulcrum, throwing his own body off the man’s shoulders.
Momentum carried him down to the other side.
Snap!
The psycho’s bewildered face made him look child-like.
Seán had entered his fourth decade and had few real skills, but he could kill a man. He should have disarmed the psycho, questioned him, found out who he worked for or how he had tracked him down, but at a certain point something took over and it had become a ballet or a swinging trapeze, one action begging the next.
Chapter 9
‘Bridge?’
It was Paul. The sound of his voice hoisting me up with excitement. I tried to keep it light, the tone of a casual acquaintance but, by the expression on his face, I’d failed. My feet had taken me off the cement backstairs of Harcourt Square and onto the third floor Human Resources’ foyer, replete with green Connemara marble tiles. Where I had no legitimate business.
‘Hey, Paul.’
He put a hand out to me, a jerky movement stopping short of my body. We stood beside the brushed metal of the lift doors and our meeting had all the clumsiness of an engineered encounter.
‘What are you doing out and about on this cold Tuesday afternoon?’ I said.
I shut my mouth, dismayed at the hope in my voice, and shifted my weight from foot to foot. He looked formal in his pressed trousers and retro tweed sports coat. I drank in the dark-brown eyes, the moulded cheekbones, the dangerous charm and the undertow of clean male skin. His salt-and-pepper manscaped beard gave him a squared-off, devilish look. Because he needed more appeal.
‘I’m not out and about, I work on this floor and it’s six pm, hardly the afternoon,’ he said.
No smile raised the outer corners of his mouth. He stretched himself to his full height, up and away from me. I wanted him to bend down, to soften his voice, to quell my jangling nerves as I picked up some unknowable signal he sent out in those sour-sounding words.
‘Sorry. Are you usually on walkabout? Fancy a coffee?’ I grinned to take the green desperation out of my voice. Nobody found needy attractive.
‘Do you want to step in here?’ Paul gestured to the door, his hand empty inches away from my back as he shepherded me through the dark-maple double doors into Human Resources. He moved me the way a seasoned waiter would navigate a flambéing plate for a tricky customer.
Ashleigh the receptionist sat at her desk, past her working day. She purred a greeting at Paul and curled her lip at me, her blunt face lathered in make-up. I knew she had the hots for Paul and wanted to pee on his shoe. It made an already awkward situation into cringing comedy.
‘Can I help with anything, Paul?’ she said and contrived to look down her squat nose at me from a sitting position.
He didn’t answer, instead directed me toward a meeting room with a non-committal smile. The continued effort of trying to look laid-back was making my mind numb.
We walked by a standard stationery cupboard and I touched the painted door, trying to conjure the time we’d made love in a similar cupboard on the fifth floor.
He avoided my gaze.
‘What’s wrong, Paul?’
The door was solid wood with a vertical glass inset – it closed with metallic cylinders clicking into place. He kept his back to the glass, blocking any outside view, and faced me in the heavy, unventilated air.
‘Your behaviour isn’t appropriate. If the professional interest I have shown has made you think there’s anything more than collegiate interest, my apologies. It does happen where a patient or client develops unreciprocated emotions for a psychologist, while working together. After all, we see clients at their most vulnerable, even if the client is unaware of their own mental state.’
His expression never changed as his formal words tattooed themselves into my skin.
‘What?’ I said.
He put a pianist’s hand to his face and rubbed the creppy skin under his eye. A grain of yellow sleep floated down onto the table. He didn’t notice. I wanted to reach over and absorb it with my fingertips. Taste it. Taste him.
‘What’s going on? Why –’
His detached expression cut me off.
‘This,’ he wagged a forefinger back and forth between us, ‘was a mistake. I blame myself. I took too much interest in your rehabilitation.’
‘What are you talking about? I want it to be the way we were. Hanging out and chatting, going for coffee and an occasional date –’
‘Please, Bridget. If anyone found out we had a friendship it would derail both of us, and you-know-who’s always watching.’
His unwillingness to name DS O’Connor irritated me.
‘People have mentioned I’ve shown you professional favouritism,’ he said, ‘which I haven’t – but those types of accusations hang around forever. We shouldn’t be fraternising. I never get involved with someone I’m working with, much less someone I evaluated for return-to-duty protocols. I’m sorry, Bridge.’
He opened the door, gave a strained smile and was gone.
I stumbled into the corner, a blind spot for anyone passing the narrow glass panel in the door and screamed into my palm, clamping it over my mouth. The pad of my thumb hooked into the soft muscle of my jaw. Pain to cover pain.
I’m not sure how long I stayed there, until a glimpse of a Super’s navy-and-brass-button uniform passing took me out of my stupor. I pushed myself off the cold brick wall and took a mouthful of dusty water from a tray laid for a meeting days ago. The room pressed in at me on all sides. My blood, given unexpected impetus, roared in my ears and I sneezed. A shocking mucus-filled sound in the silent room and my sinuses blocked. My body’s reaction to Paul’s rejection was to flood me with adrenaline and snot.
Cold nipped at my nose in the carpark as I made for my mother’s ancient motor. I sat in the car, sanded raw from meeting Paul. The underground carpark was an inky black with a few ruptured ceiling lights trying to pry the dark open. The rear-view mirror caught my pale face.
‘Cop yourself on, Bridget Harney. All this over a lad?’
Chapter 10
His body was heavy. Seán rolled the psycho over and checked his pockets for the van keys, tearing the inside of his finger on cheap coat-hanger wire the other man had fashioned a key ring from, with a Dinamo Tbilisi badge he must have brought from home. Red pops beaded between Seán’s fingers. He stared at his own blood but knew better than to suck at hi
s finger. The cold made blood coagulate quicker and he used an icy pebble to help the small wounds clot.
Never one to miss an opportunity, he eyed the dead man’s body and stripped him down to his underwear. He had an overworked physique with a matching steroid rash on his back and was sunbed-tanned, in the way all those cheap Euro mobsters were, but his clothes were clean and new.
The serrated knife caught the sun on the ground and glinted – as if Seán would have left it behind. He rolled the man’s uncooperative body into a shallow ravine, watching his designer underwear revolve until the body was face down in a gulley stream. The shirt and pants were baggy, but chance had given Seán perfect-fitting boots. They were good for kicking forestry-service-cut logs on top of their previous owner. It was temporary – he’d send some lads up to take the body. He’d left trace evidence of course, but if there was no body to be found the gardaí wouldn’t be examining this site.
For now other things rushed at Seán. Such a blatant attempt on his life scoured his insides. He turned the van engine over, it fired first time and he drove out of the field onto a road with a green-and-white sign for Ballyedmonduff Road. He drove through Sandyford and kept to the coastline, ever drawn by a thread to the sea. A scoop of winter sunshine lay melting on the Poolbeg Chimneys, making their silver-coin lights flicker. A respite from the anxiety sucking at him.
Seán made for the Gardens, determined not to draw anyone’s attention. His rising panic forced his foot harder on the pedal and into the rubber-lined base, the tyre-spin setting small stones flying. He wound down the window, breaths of chlorine-tasting city air filling his lungs. The familiar air calmed him and, with his body pushed back in the driving seat, he stayed the impulse to speed. He traced back, moment by moment, what had happened during the abduction. The men were strangers. Seán wasn’t sure if they were even a crew. He knew of few gangs with the clout to infiltrate a company, place their men resurfacing a road and have them walk back to the job, business as usual.