Blink

by Niamh O'Connor

  ‘We’re into the same sports, for starters …’

  Sexton cuts across him. ‘You mean like lacrosse and polo?’

  ‘Ha, ha, very funny. I mean like rugby versus GAA, and netball versus basketball for the girls. We all go to the same discos. When you think about it, the chances of me not knowing someone who knew her are slim. The parents’ associations even organize socials to keep everyone inbred in the same little golden circle. They don’t want anyone seeing someone from the wrong side of the tracks, so they have these classist get-togethers. It sucks. Anyway, Lucy’s not one of the suicide club.’

  ‘Club?’

  ‘Relax, it’s just a word, not an actual Masonic group or anything. You need to take a step back, man. So does my mum.’

  ‘I prefer the word “cluster”.’

  ‘Fine. My point is, Lucy wasn’t part of it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘She didn’t do it in Amy’s Wood. It’s kind of the unwritten rule in the club, or cluster, or whatever you want to call it. Amy was her best friend. If she’d really wanted to die, that’s what she’d have done. No question.’

  Wednesday

  29

  Next morning, the chief listens with a frown as Sexton fills him in on developments, up to a point. McConigle is there too, because her enquiry into the bullying aspect is dovetailing with the report Sexton is compiling on the dead kids, and because she hopes what Sexton has established will help her convince the chief to assign more officers to the case. Sexton tells them everything the headmistress, Bronwyn Harris, has told him about the girls and their relationships to each other. He does not mention anything about the message Lucy Starling has communicated to him. He believes Lucy has suffered enough for the mistakes she’s made. If she is guilty of soliciting a killer to murder someone, Sexton will find him. He doesn’t want the chief and McConigle deciding that she should face very serious charges now that the investigation has changed gear and there are suggestions of incitement and harassment. He believes this is why Lucy’s parents were so jumpy, and so intent on winding up his interview with her once they realized she was communicating with him. He believes they were protecting her.

  McConigle is animated by the news that the principal was concerned about bullying and is pacing up and down the room. ‘Maybe Lucy Starling can tell us more,’ she tells Sexton.

  ‘Unlikely. She’s completely paralysed,’ he snaps. ‘She’s got Locked-in syndrome.’

  McConigle is surprised. ‘Poor kid. Who found her anyway? Did she do it at home? Try to hang herself?’

  ‘No, Lucy crashed her mum’s car,’ Sexton says.

  ‘Oh. Where?’

  He hesitates. ‘A country road.’

  McConigle crosses her arms tightly. ‘A country road where?’

  Sexton knows the more he tries to resist, the more she’ll probe. ‘In the Dublin mountains … Near Boley Wood.’

  ‘But that’s where the other girls died,’ McConigle blurts. Her eyes narrow. ‘When exactly did Lucy crash?’

  ‘January the eighteenth,’ Sexton replies, avoiding her glare.

  ‘You know bloody well that’s the night Melissa died,’ she says, turning to the chief, who looks unconvinced. ‘What time did Lucy crash at?’ McConigle presses.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘How about morning, noon, or night?’

  ‘Night.’

  McConigle sighs heavily.

  ‘I’ll find out,’ Sexton says.

  ‘You do that.’

  McConigle isn’t finished, but the chief cuts in. ‘I’m not prepared to allocate more resources until you give me something more to go on. Anna Eccles has not been buried yet. Is the Prof doing a post-mortem?’

  McConigle shakes her head. ‘Just an external, like the others.’

  ‘Organize a post-mortem on her body and then come back to me with something more – defence wounds … Rohypnol … something. Potentially, we could be talking about having twenty kids exhumed, if he finds anything. I want more proof that something more sinister is involved. Otherwise we are putting the families through the horror of a virtual second death.’

  The chief looks past Sexton at the sound of a rap on the door and barks, ‘Come in.’

  Jeanie, dressed in a belted white shirt and tight black pencil skirt, appears with a stack of paperwork. She walks over to Dan’s side of the desk and places a sheet in front of him, pointing at the spot where he is to sign. The chief gives it a glance and reaches for his pen.

  Sexton turns to McConigle. ‘Any idea who a little red-haired girl in a communion dress on Rutling Terrace might be?’ he asks McConigle.

  ‘Sounds like Rihanna Canon,’ she replies. ‘Based on the fact that she made hers last year, is permanently playing truant, and on her mother’s drug problem. When did you see her?’

  ‘Last night, when I was interviewing some parents for my much anticipated report.’

  ‘Her dad’s that scumbag. Eric.’

  Sexton knows the name. Eric Canon is a small-time street dealer in the Rastas gang in the city.

  McConigle purses her lips. ‘Rihanna’s a little jade, suspected of setting her national school on fire a couple of times just for days off. We think she’s behind the bomb threats too, though we could never prove it. I think the mother has full custody, but she’s an out-and-out junkie. I’m pretty sure that Eric’s only allowed supervised visits. What was she doing so close to her dad’s place?’

  ‘Just hanging around.’

  ‘Maybe Rihanna’s sick.’

  ‘Didn’t look like it.’

  ‘You should log it,’ she says. ‘Or let the lads know. They might want to do something about it.’

  ‘I might want to do something about it,’ Sexton says.

  ‘Somebody’s time of the month,’ McConigle mumbles.

  The chief continues to rant as he scribbles.

  ‘I heard that,’ Sexton tells her.

  ‘You needn’t concern yourself with doing any investigation you haven’t been assigned to,’ the chief warns. ‘And don’t think I’m not still expecting your report today.’

  ‘I need Sexton on my team,’ McConigle argues.

  ‘He’s otherwise engaged,’ the chief answers categorically. He points to Sexton as he uses his walking stick to get up. ‘Today.’

  30

  Sexton paces out of the chief’s office, reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt for his mobile phone, which is vibrating. He reads the text that has just beeped in: ‘The customer has no credit but would like you to call them.’

  Sexton doesn’t recognize the number. He heads into the stairwell and leans against the wall to make room for people passing on the stairs. Despite the constant traffic up and down, it’s the quietest place in the building apart from the john, but nobody wants those background noises during a conversation.

  He hits redial; it’s Rory who answers.

  ‘I got your number off my mum’s phone,’ Rory says. ‘I’ve been doing some digging online. I found out some more stuff about Lucy. She’s not safe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I joined another thread on one of the boards discussing Amy and asked if anyone knew of Lucy. It turns out someone does. She said Lucy’s father’s a pervert,’ Rory continues. ‘I thought you should know.’

  Sexton puts a finger in his ear. ‘Nigel Starling? What makes you say that?’

  ‘Lucy hated him. Sorry, hates.’

  ‘What exactly did she say?’

  ‘She told my … source that he’d been spying on her. Her own dad. It’s disgusting.’

  ‘What do you mean, spying?’ Sexton probes.

  ‘I mean totally invading her privacy, dude. I mean violating her basic civil and human rights. I mean …’

  Sexton rolls a crick in his neck. ‘Yeah, but are we talking spying as in cameras in rooms and holes in ceilings?’

  ‘No, spying as in monitoring her texts, hacking into her email and even reading her diary.’

&
nbsp; ‘Oh,’ Sexton answers flatly.

  ‘You don’t think that’s weird?’ Rory is angry.

  ‘At my age, I think it’s good parenting.’

  ‘OMG, it’s so offside, dude.’

  ‘OK. Let’s agree to disagree on that. I need to talk to this girl. Your source. What’s her name?’

  ‘Sorry, no can do.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I told her I wouldn’t.’

  Sexton sighs hard. ‘Well, did she say if there was any touchy-feely pervert stuff involved? Or was it all just “My dad’s a freak,” “My dad’s a perv”? In other words, did Lucy tell this girl if Nigel actually did anything …’ Sexton stumbles for a word, ‘“inappropriate”, or is it possible Lucy was just being a drama queen because she craved attention?’

  ‘Lucy told this girl her dad used to wait for her to see her coming out of the shower,’ Rory says. ‘She said he’d be standing there watching. Dirty old fart. Happy now?’ He waits for Sexton to react.

  ‘It still could have been innocent, and how do you even know this girlfriend isn’t just making it up? Did your source give her real name?’ Sexton says.

  Rory sighed. ‘It’s a chatroom. Nobody gives their real name, but this girl knew, like, things about Lucy she couldn’t unless they were around her. Like her school, where she lived and stuff.’

  ‘You could get that on her Facebook page,’ Sexton states. ‘Or in news reports about the crash.’

  ‘OK,’ Rory says, like he’s working up to something big. ‘So Lucy told this girl she found her knickers in Nigel’s drawer. That’s, like, sick. Incest … paedophilia, what does it take to convince you, dude?’

  Sexton shakes his head. ‘I need a name, or at the very least the address of that chatroom. Otherwise it could just still be a laundry mix-up.’

  ‘Forget it. She’ll never give it, and if I start asking for them she’ll just disappear off to some other site. There’s millions of them,’ Rory said. ‘Oh, and so you know, Lucy called her dad Nigel.’

  ‘So? I bet you don’t call your old man Daddy.’ Sexton pauses. ‘What do you call him, as a matter of interest?’

  ‘Prick,’ Rory admits.

  Sexton grins.

  ‘Seriously, she said Lucy was really upset because Nigel used to talk about her boobs developing and stuff,’ Rory says. ‘It grossed her out. What are you going to do about this?’

  ‘I’ll call over and have another chat with him.’

  ‘A chat? Aren’t you going to get Lucy out of there? You can’t just leave her there. It’s like being left in a morgue with Jimmy Savile. She can’t do anything to defend herself.’

  Sexton listens. ‘You care a lot, considering Lucy is someone you didn’t really know.’

  ‘Just because I didn’t know her that well doesn’t mean I don’t know what she was going through. Lucy Starling’s dad should be charged with something.’

  ‘That’s a big leap without any foundation. Why are you taking this so personally?’

  ‘Look, I know you need proof and all that, but I have a radar for lies, and this girl is not lying. And …’ he pauses, takes a deep breath ‘… you know the way Lucy was a friend of Amy’s?’

  ‘Amy, who inspired all the copycats? Sure.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that, but yeah, that Amy.’

  ‘Why do kids want to copy her anyway?’ Sexton asks.

  ‘Because she was so beautiful, and talented, but she was, like, bullied by jealous haters. As soon as she was old enough, she was going to enter The X-Factor. But now, all that’s gone. Nobody can touch her. She’s more than famous. She’s an inspiration. She gave her life to stop bullies. She’s immortal.’

  Sexton thinks Rory might be crying. ‘You OK, kid?’

  ‘Poor Lucy,’ Rory goes on. ‘No wonder her friends were such knackers. Some people should not be allowed to have children.’

  ‘How do you know about her friends?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. It turns out I did meet her once. I told you Dublin was small.’

  ‘Where did you meet her?’ Sexton asks. ‘What was the story?’

  ‘It was just a party. Kind of more like a Remember Amy party than an Eat Space Cakes, Get Sloshed party. I got introduced to Lucy, but I never really chatted to her properly because she was bragging about being pals with a real scumbag.’

  Sexton guffaws. ‘Hey, I thought you didn’t subscribe to the snob-school ethos. “Classist”, you called it last night.’

  Rory pauses. ‘I’ve no problem with people who’ve no money, Gavin. I’ve a big problem with people who want to rob to get it. Lucy was waving around this Sunday World article about her mate. He had one of those mad nicknames they give criminals, like Mr Dick or something, a bar over his eyes and this huge tattoo of a scorpion on his arm. She said he was in the Real IRA and he was extorting money from drug dealers. She said he killed someone.’

  ‘Can you remember his name?’

  ‘Nope. It was an old article and it said they couldn’t name him for legal reasons. But you know when you get the feeling that someone would kill you for looking sideways at them? Well, that.’

  31

  The sixteen-year-old girl’s dyed black hair and smudged eyeliner give her a heroin-chic look. She storms down the sideline of the rugby pitches of Doolin College in south Dublin, scanning the faces on the pitch as she paces. Her clothes and nails are black; the only white part of her that’s exposed is her head – her hands are permanently pulled into her sleeves. She bounds up the steps to the school and troops past groups of kids stopping in their tracks at the sight of a girl in the building. There are plenty of female teachers, but never any girls. Her arms are stiff at her sides, making her fast walk look more like a march.

  ‘Where’s the canteen?’ she asks a young kid in a blazer, and he points, open-mouthed.

  She heads for the door, both arms still at her side along the corridor of lockers, when she spots Darren – Amy Reddan’s ex. His uniform hangs off him like a grunge outfit. When he sees her, he breaks into a sprint – in the opposite direction. The girl takes off after him, ignoring a teacher’s shout to stop.

  Darren gets out into the grounds but at the bike shed where a couple of older boys are having a smoke she lunges and gets him to the ground. He’s face down, with one cheek in the gravel. His long blond hair has fallen out of its clasp and covers his face.

  The girl has straddled his back and twisted his arm so high up he’s yelping with pain. The lads are laughing, and a crowd builds around them to clap and chant, ‘Fight-fight-fight!’

  ‘It’s all your fault,’ she screams. ‘I’m going to cut your balls off for Melissa.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it! Let go! You’re mad!’ he says.

  ‘Fight-fight-fight …!’

  She flicks open a Swiss army knife.

  The chanting stops as suddenly as it started.

  ‘If Lucy dies, I’ll be back to cut your head off.’

  He screams and she grabs a clump of his hair at the scalp and starts to cut.

  The teacher who’d followed them into the yard sticks his hands under her armpits and reefs her off him. The girl kicks, wrestles and screams and drops the knife.

  Darren slides out from under her and runs for his life.

  The girl’s face is red and sweating as she screams after him, ‘You’re a murderer!’

  ‘Who are you? What’s going on?’ the teacher shouts at her. When she doesn’t answer he asks the lads watching: ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Beth Brockle,’ one of them answers. ‘She’s Melissa Brockle’s cousin.’

  Beth spits at him and then starts to sob black-tracked tears.

  32

  Sexton is frustrated. He had failed to coax any more information about the chatline out of Rory. Then he couldn’t find a free desk to sit down at to begin his report. To top it all, McConigle has been like a hen on an egg, convinced he is hiding something. He heads back to the St
arlings’, determined to talk to Lucy again.

  He is pulling on to Rutling Terrace when his eye is caught by the flashing neon sign directly across the street from her house. Sexton has done a lot of crosswords to pass the time in dingy pubs, and anagrams come easy. He knows Damm is an anagram of MDMA, the chemical code for the love drug, ecstasy. He grabs the sandwich of battered chicken and the can of Diet Coke he picked up for lunch from the passenger seat and gets out of the car, crossing the street to investigate. He wonders if it has any links to Eric Canon and, for that matter, if Nigel’s run-ins with the neighbours have anything to do with him. He presumes living opposite a head shop might have been a source of concern to Nigel, given that Lucy had been rebelling to such an extent before the accident. He walks with his hands in his pockets, feels a bookies’ chit, which he takes out to check on an accumulator in the Down Royal. He’d inherited a house from an aunt but had sold it for much less than expected thanks to the property crash, and had since blown the lot. If he doesn’t start recouping some of his losses, he is going to lose the shirt on his back. That filly had owed him ever since it had fallen at the first at Cheltenham – over a year ago now. He scrunches the chit up and kicks it to touch.

  ‘They say if you nibble at these things,’ he tells the Chinese man behind the Damm counter, holding up his sandwich, ‘slowly, you give your stomach a chance to fill up, never finish, and actually manage to lose weight in the process. ’Course, if they didn’t taste like cardboard, that would be a big help.’

  The man glances up but goes back to what he was doing – reassembling the parts of at least ten broken-up iPhones spread out on the desk.

  The pokey space is packed floor to ceiling with lava lamps, glass bongs and pipes, weighing scales, wind chimes and novelty gifts in boxes with pictures of cat’s-eye contact lenses on the front.

  ‘They made head shops illegal, didn’t you hear?’

  ‘It’s gift shop,’ the Chinese guy says.

  ‘Funny how you never see “drugs paraphernalia” on a wedding-gift wish list these days,’ Sexton says, looking around.