Blink

by Niamh O'Connor

  Nancy smiles at her husband, and motions at him with her shoulder. ‘He goes around the prisons now,’ she says lovingly. ‘Trying to find people who might be open to new ideas – that love is the answer, not humiliation, not guilt, not penance. I think sometimes’ – she checks to see Nigel won’t disapprove of what she’s about to say – ‘even you have to admit, my love, that some of the people who join us believe it might increase their chances of parole.’

  ‘Without question,’ Nigel says. ‘But you also have to admit that some of them can really sing!’

  Nancy grins. ‘Plenty of practice at karaoke machines in dodgy places.’

  Sexton wipes the corners of his mouth on a napkin and finishes what’s left of the wine in his glass. ‘You have to take Lucy to Florida,’ he insists urgently.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ Nigel says.

  ‘Lucy has never had a passport, believe it or not,’ Nancy explains. ‘She’s never needed one.’

  ‘She was going to apply this summer. She wanted to go to some music festival or other in Spain with a bunch of friends. She filled in the form and got her photos ready, but the paperwork takes days to process. Her photos have to be verified, and the form stamped by a garda. Even if you were willing to do that for us and went and sat in Molesworth Street tomorrow, there are no guarantees they’d process it for us on the day. It’s entirely dependent on how busy they are, and they’re closed for the weekend. By Monday we have no hope of trying to get the drug levels right in her system, and even after there’ll be red tape setting her chances back even further.’

  ‘Book the flights tonight,’ Sexton says. ‘Contact Lucy’s consultant in the States. I’ve got a contact in the passport office who’ll put the paperwork through for me. You can bring Lucy’s paperwork to the station and I’ll stamp it for you.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Nigel asks, sounding like he’s afraid to hope.

  ‘We’ll do it,’ Nancy says decisively. She starts to cry.

  Nigel tops up the glasses and holds his up. ‘To you then, Gavin. And everything you’ve done for Lucy.’

  After coffee and warm apple tart that slides down his gullet much more easily than the dinner, Sexton goes to see Lucy. He hides his alarm for the sake of Nigel and Nancy. She’s awake now but, as he could see earlier, Nancy and Nigel are right: she looks so much worse than when he was last here. He senses she knows it’s him, but her eyes barely flicker and the spark has gone.

  ‘How are you, love?’ he asks her gently.

  But when her eyelids droop down they do not reopen.

  51

  Sexton drops Nigel Starling off at the station, where McConigle intends to interview him herself, and after organizing to have Lucy’s passport form stamped he heads straight for the Red Scorpion Debt Collection Agency, based in a Portakabin in an industrial park off the M50.

  Parking up, he walks past a couple of white vans outside with scorpions painted on them and the caption: ‘Settling Scores – Don’t Get Mad, Get Even’.

  Sexton buzzes the door and flashes a grin for the camera on the intercom before pushing the door at the sound of the lock releasing.

  The blonde behind the makeshift counter looks bored as she hands over a clipboard with a sheet containing a questionnaire asking how much was owed, by whom, and what his credit-card number was.

  ‘Bert doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,’ she says when Sexton asks if the boss is in.

  He holds up his ID card. She reaches for the phone and mumbles something into the handset, telling Sexton to ‘Take a seat.’

  He glances at the couch, which is covered with a picnic-rug-style throw that smells of wet dog. The seat is so low down he’d have needed a cherry picker to hoist himself out of it again. Instead, he walks past her towards a door set in the linoleum-covered wall behind her.

  ‘You can’t go in there,’ she says, but Sexton ignores her and pushes through.

  Bert is leaning back in a dentist-style chair set in the middle of a room. He pulls towels furiously from around his neck. A woman dressed in a nurse’s outfit as if she’s just come from a hen party is holding a barber’s shaving knife in one hand – the old-fashioned type.

  ‘What?’ Bert bellows at Sexton.

  He is sixty-something with over-dyed black hair that has a plum hue, substantial sideburns and a scorpion on his right forearm.

  ‘You missed a bit,’ Sexton tells the nurse, pointing to the spot between Bert’s eyebrows.

  ‘Out!’ Bert roars at her.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Sexton says, taking in the wood-panelled interior that looks as if it has been furnished from skips by Del Boy. A naked mannequin stands beside a lap-dancing pole. A collection of tarnished brass ornaments takes up most of the desk space.

  ‘Such grooming, such finesse,’ Sexton says. ‘Are you saving all this shit for a visit to the Antiques Roadshow?’

  ‘Get on with it,’ Bert says.

  Sexton kinks a net curtain to look out of the window. ‘Your scorpion looks more like a crab. A crab is a crustacean. It comes from larvae. A scorpion is an arachnid. I know because I had a pet tarantula when I was a kid. Used to read up on it.’

  ‘You didn’t come here to give me a National Geographic lesson,’ Bert says. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What did Lucy Starling pay you ten grand to do?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, Bert. There can’t be many of them on your books.’

  ‘Honeytrap?’ Bert asks.

  Sexton’s eyes widen.

  ‘Unless you intend paying the money back, I’m going to do you for extorting money from a minor,’ Sexton says. ‘Who did Lucy pay you to put the squeeze on?’

  ‘Wouldn’t I be breaking a professional code of client privilege or something?’ Bert asks with a sneer.

  ‘As Lucy is hanging on to her life by a thread, she’s got other things to worry about,’ Sexton answers.

  ‘I know nothing about that.’

  Sexton tilts his head. ‘Here’s the way I see it. An internet troll was taunting the kids online, encouraging them to kill themselves. Lucy thought the troll was a girl in her class called Melissa, and blamed her for sending the suicide clip. So she paid you to scare Melissa off. But maybe Melissa wasn’t the troll. Nobody is who they say they are online. What if you were the troll? Maybe Lucy was paying the very person who was stalking those kids. Melissa didn’t come out of the wood alive. Maybe Lucy was paying you to scare you. Was Lucy your little Lolita?’

  ‘That’s funny. You got the first bit right – she wanted me to put the mockers on someone, like you said. The rest is more of your shitology.’

  ‘So who did that person you had to put the frighteners on turn out to be – if it wasn’t you, I mean?’

  Bert walks over to his desk, pulls a drawer open, a DVD out and sticks it in a player under a TV on a swivel arm at a height in a corner.

  ‘Let’s just say, Lucy thought it was someone, but it turned out to be someone else.’

  Before Sexton can probe, an out-of-focus sepia image fills the screen. Sexton squints, trying to make out what he’s looking at. A pair of hands fills the screen. ‘It’s best to use a soft rope,’ a voice booms through a distorter.

  Sexton steps back to get a better view of the screen. There is no face in the frame, though, because, as far as he can tell, the camera is on the ground and the man is standing over it.

  ‘This is how you tie a hangman’s knot,’ the voice continues, weaving one end of the rope over the other slowly. ‘It breaks the neck more easily than the gallows knot …’

  The hands fill the screen – they look male, Sexton notes.

  ‘Sick, isn’t it?’ Bert says. ‘Would you blame Lucy then for wanting to get me involved?’

  Sexton scans the background, notes the cabin-like interior.

  The voice over on the tape continues, ‘A rope at least six feet long is best …’

  ‘Why didn’t Lucy just come to the aut
horities?’ Sexton asks.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t want to have to wait a week for her call to be answered, and a couple of years for a case to come to court. Maybe she thought it was more serious than that, and not another second could be wasted. You could always try asking her, copper. This has nothing to do with me. I’m the guy the kids came to for help. You got it all the wrong way around.’

  Sexton turns back to the screen and listens: ‘… a smaller loop at this end …’

  ‘Did you find out who made it?’ he asks Bert.

  ‘Now you want me to do your job. I won’t. I’ll do my own. Like I said, Lucy organized to bring the person she thought responsible to the wood.’

  ‘Melissa?’ Sexton asks.

  Bert doesn’t object. ‘Only, when the bullets started flying, I wasn’t about to stick around. That’s the beginning and end of my involvement, and no, I won’t be signing a statement to that effect.’

  ‘Why didn’t you warn the girls to stay away?’

  ‘There wasn’t time. Me and Lucy had thought it was Melissa we’d be talking to. We weren’t expecting some other nut to show. So we were kind of taken by surprise, too busy ducking the shooter’s fire to have a conference,’ Bert says.

  ‘How would this other person have known Lucy and Melissa were going to the woods?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. That wood isn’t the easiest place to get to either.’ Bert switches to a different DVD. When he hits play, the voice on the TV changes to one of a young girl. ‘Amy Reddan was my best friend …’

  Sexton sees Lucy’s face fill the screen. She’s unrecognizable compared to the girl in the bed. Make-up makes her look ten years older. ‘All Amy ever wanted was to be accepted for who she was – kind, gentle, talented,’ Lucy continues.

  The camera pans back and McFarland’s weathered face appears on the screen. He is grinning maniacally and whacking a baseball bat into the cup of a hand.

  ‘I know who you are,’ he says, peering into the screen. ‘And I’m coming to get you.’

  Sexton gets him by the scruff of the neck. ‘If you want a chance of immunity from prosecution, you can tell me who was firing, or …’ He becomes distracted by the sound of Lucy talking again: ‘You might as well have murdered her,’ she hisses, brushing a tear from her eye. ‘I won’t let you murder anyone else. Next time you hurt someone, you answer to Bert.’ She makes her signature ‘L’ shape with her forefinger and thumb and stretches her arm out. ‘Hope you understand what it’s like to be made to feel small and scared …’

  The footage ends.

  ‘So what was Eric Canon’s role in it all?’ Sexton asks, giving McFarland’s collar a rough shake.

  ‘That scrote on Rutling?’ Bert asks. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  52

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ McConigle says. She needs to wind the interview up, to get back to the station, as Sexton has texted her that Nigel Starling is waiting for her there, but it would be too insensitive to leave immediately, in the circumstances. Katie Eccles buried her sister this morning. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’

  She reaches forward and clutches Katie’s hand, breaking her own ‘No physical contact with members of the public’ rule. The interview has turned into more of a counselling session anyway. Thirteen-year-old Katie hasn’t said anything yet; her mum is there too and keeps talking through the silence.

  McConigle thinks Katie is holding back, but also that she’s still too deeply traumatized by the death of her sister to talk. Katie needs a bereavement counsellor, medication, and to be watched like a hawk, McConigle reckons. The kid’s fingernails are chewed down to the quick, and her hair – pulled back in a ponytail – looks like it hasn’t been washed in days. Probably not since Monday, when she found out about her sister, McConigle expects.

  ‘Katie, are you listening to me, my love?’ McConigle pushes.

  But Katie continues to stare out the kitchen window, as she has since McConigle arrived to try to find out what she knows about the suicide ‘How to’ video clip that is supposed to have been sent to Anna’s phone.

  ‘Katie shared a bedroom with Anna,’ her mother, Maggie, explains quietly. ‘When they were little, they used to fight over who’d get the top bunk; when they got bigger, it was over who was underneath. They were always at each other over clothes, or pals, or phone credit. But when their nan died, a couple of months back, I found them holding hands in bed at night. Anna would let her arm drop down over the side, and Katie would hold it.’

  ‘Mum,’ Katie says, cringing.

  McConigle is so relieved she’s finally said something, even if it’s only a word, she can’t help but exhale loudly. Sizing up the situation, she decides her only chance of getting Katie to talk is to get her on her own. Perhaps she doesn’t want to admit knowing anything because she’s worried it will come back at her when the next stages of grief follow the loss: anger, recrimination, blame. Perhaps she’s just unable to relax around her mother. When McConigle was JLO, she came to the conclusion that self-consciousness drives every teenage impulse.

  ‘Maggie, would you mind if I spoke to Katie alone?’ she asks. Technically, the child’s entitled to a guardian present at the very least, but McConigle wants to make it as informal as possible, and she’s out of time.

  Maggie glances at her daughter, who doesn’t object. ‘I don’t want her put under any more pressure. If she doesn’t answer you the first time, please let it go.’

  McConigle nods. She waits until Maggie’s gone and then heads back to the kitchen table where Katie’s sitting and kneels down in front of her, taking her hands again.

  ‘When did Anna get sent the video?’ she presses, still without any confirmation that it even exists.

  ‘A few days before she did it,’ Katie says so quietly McConigle has to strain to hear.

  ‘Did she show it to you?’

  ‘No. She didn’t even tell me about it. I just heard her talking to her friend on the phone the night she went missing.’

  Which they are still desperate to recover, McConigle realizes.

  ‘And what did you hear her say?’

  ‘She was kind of joking about it, but Anna always laughed when she was nervous.’

  ‘Do you know which of her friends she was talking to?’

  ‘Darren, Amy’s boyfriend, I think.’

  ‘Did Anna say who’d sent it to her?’

  ‘Anna said she didn’t recognize the number it had been sent from. She told him what it was, and asked him if he knew it.’

  ‘Did you hear his answer?’

  ‘No.’

  McConigle nods. ‘Can you give me Anna’s phone number?’

  Katie reels it off. McConigle draws a breath. The phone provider will be able to give her the records and they might get a lead on who sent that vile clip.

  ‘I could get you the number of who sent the video, if you want,’ Katie says, reading McConigle’s mind. ‘It’s probably still on Anna’s phone upstairs.’

  McConigle checks she’s hearing right. ‘Anna’s phone is here?’

  ‘Yes. It’s upstairs.’ Katie breaks down. ‘She gave it to me the night she died, which I should have realized meant something major was going on in her head. Anna never went anywhere without her phone.’

  53

  Sexton goes straight to Amy Reddan’s ex-boyfriend Darren’s front door as soon as McConigle rings him to tell him what Katie’s told her.

  Darren’s father is shocked to find a garda standing there when he opens it. Brendan Maguire is tall, clean-shaven and dressed in a soccer dad’s tracksuit and trainers. He explains that he’s training for the marathon, and is just about to head out.

  ‘Should I be worried?’ he asks Sexton intently.

  ‘As long as your son tells the truth, there’s nothing to be worried about,’ Sexton reassures him, explaining the conversation they’ve learned Anna had with Darren shortly before she died.

  Brendan steps out of the house and walks Sexton around to the side, where he
releases the garage door. As it glides up, Darren can be seen inside playing drums.

  ‘What is it, Dad? I thought you were gone for a run.’ He looks past him and sees Sexton. An expression of resignation spreads across the teenager’s face.

  ‘Oh, give me a break,’ Darren says, tucking his hair behind his ears.

  ‘Don’t talk to a policeman like that,’ Brendan says, appalled. ‘He’s trying to get to the bottom of this. Tell him whatever it is you know.’

  ‘Look, I don’t know anything, OK?’

  ‘Darren, why did Anna Eccles ring you the night she died?’ Sexton demands.

  ‘Answer him,’ his father warns.

  ‘Someone had sent the suicide clip to her phone. I’d put a post up online saying I was keeping track of the mobile numbers it was being sent from, that I had identified all of them, and people could touch base with me to find out if it was the troll’s number.’

  ‘You knew who the troll was?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I thought it was Melissa. Everyone thought that.’

  ‘I need that list,’ Sexton says, ‘and the chatroom site where the troll was stalking the kids.’

  ‘OK,’ Darren answers. ‘It’s all on my laptop.’

  He stands up to go.

  ‘Wait. Was Amy sent the video to her phone before she died?’ Sexton asks.

  Darren puts his drumsticks down. ‘If she was, she never mentioned it, and I think she would have. Everyone who got it since has talked about it.’

  ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About two months ago.’

  ‘Around the time Amy died?’ Sexton clarifies.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. That’s what made it even worse. Melissa didn’t even wait until her body was cold.’

  ‘What made you originally think Melissa had sent it?’

  ‘I tracked back the numbers. The person who sent it to me was sending it because they thought it was terrible, not because they wanted me to top myself. So I got the number they got it from, and it was the same story. Kids were just sharing it to warn each other there was a psycho out there. The time on her phone was earlier than any of the others. And, like I said, any time it was sent on from that point was because kids were talking about it, they were disgusted. People wanted to see it. I went back as far as I could and, when I got to Lucy, I discovered she’d got it from Melissa. She was the first kid to send it, so we presumed she’d made it.’