Blink

by Niamh O'Connor

  ‘Melissa, and Anna, because I wanted them to die.’

  ‘What did you do with their phones?’

  ‘I got rid of Melissa’s and I warned Anna not to bring hers once I got talking to her in the chatroom.’

  Sexton glances at the glass. On the far side McConigle closes her eyes and thanks God. The information stacks up with what Katie told her.

  ‘How did you get the girls to the wood?’

  ‘Lucy got Melissa there for me. She kept me filled in after Amy died on what was going on. She told me they were bringing Melissa to the wood to teach her a lesson, so I went too.’

  ‘What? Are you saying Lucy was your accomplice?’

  ‘No, no! Lucy’s a good kid. She stayed in touch with me after Amy died. She just wanted me to know that Melissa was going to get a fright for what she did. She had no idea what I had in mind for the little bitch.’

  ‘What happened when Melissa got there?’

  ‘She almost got away. I fired some plastic bullets, but she made it back to a car. She had some help. There were men there. No idea who they were. Otherwise, it would have been simple. They sped off once they got Lucy into her car. Fortunately, Lucy crashed the car and I got a second chance.’

  ‘What about Anna? How did you get her to the wood?’

  ‘I got her number and sent her the video I’d made. She texted me back she was too scared. I offered to help her. I told her it was the most peaceful place on earth, a chance to say a special goodbye to the girls, and I’d go with her if she was afraid. She met me willingly. If I hadn’t done it for her, she’d have done it anyway.’

  Sexton punches the table with his fist.

  58

  McConigle heads into Interview Room 2, directly across the corridor from Sexton, with Eric Canon, who has been brought back in.

  ‘Do you want the good news or the bad first?’ she announces, hoping to appeal to Canon’s most basic instinct – himself.

  ‘Go on then, give me the good,’ he says, sneering.

  ‘We’ve found the man what dunnit,’ she says. ‘You’re off the hook.’

  He checks to see if she’s kidding.

  ‘If’ – she lets the word linger – ‘you explain to me what you were doing in the wood that night, how you came into contact with Melissa Brockle and why the blood and hair from the deer in your yard match that on her clothing. Otherwise I’m going to have you brought before a court this afternoon and charged on multiple counts relating to drugs and obstructing an investigation.’

  Canon is unruffled. ‘Is it any wonder coppers get a bad name? I’m going to break my own golden rule and tell you, if you turn that off.’ He points to Big Brother.

  McConigle considers, then zaps the recorder off.

  He smiles. ‘If you must know, I’m the one who saved Lucy. Thought I’d got the other girl out of harm’s way too, but he must have caught up with her—’

  ‘Give over,’ McConigle says. ‘I don’t have time for this. There’s a court sitting in’ – she checks her watch – ‘half an hour, and a van outside. I’m going to have you put in it.’

  She stands.

  ‘Ask her. Ask Lucy if you don’t believe me,’ Canon protests.

  ‘She can’t talk, Eric, as well you know. This is getting boring.’

  ‘Look, it’s true. She was dealing drugs. I was trying to put her off. She was dealing prescription, and the shit you can get over the counter is heavy duty: Zimmos, Methadone, Ritalin. Had an unfair advantage. So you’ve got nothing on me.’

  McConigle glances wearily at him. ‘What were you doing in the woods? Why did you have a dead deer in your yard?’

  He checks the video camera is still off. ‘I wouldn’t want to get a bad name, have gangsters thinking I’ve gone soft. If you must know, I saw Lucy heading out that night and I knew she was up to no good. Call it my radar for trouble; it’s built in. Me and Gok figured maybe she’s meeting some dealer, planning on getting someone else in on our territory. When Gok took her phone apart he found Bert McFarland’s number in it. We wanted to know if she and Bert were going into business. She was done up like a tart. So, yeah, we followed her, went to get a heads-up, ended up in the woods. All I was going to do was watch, maybe warn her to stay out of my patch, to go back to her homework. But she goes into the woods in the dark with her mate and me and Gok think maybe they’re going to top themselves. There’s this dead deer lying near the entrance. We can hear shots being fired in the wood and reckon the shooter knows something we don’t, like it might be worth a few quid if we hack it up and sell it to one of those posh restaurants. We try to drag it back to the car, only it’s too big, so we have to start hacking it up there and then. Next thing we see the girls come tearing through the wood like they’ve just seen a ghost. I’m there covered in fucking blood like Freddie Kruger. But whatever the fuck is going on in the wood is worse than that, ’cos they took a lift off us back to their car. We heard the gunshots for ourselves. They said they’d parked up outside the wood.’

  McConigle clicks her fingers. ‘If you’d left Lucy there and she was killed, and your fibres and footprints were all over the place … Was that what you were really worried about when you did your Good Samaritan impression?’

  ‘Doesn’t really matter, does it? I’m the one who got her out and back to her car. I heard after, she crashed it and her friend died in the wood. That is what happened, on my kid’s life. I didn’t kill anyone, I saved them. I got them out.’

  McConigle shakes her head super-slowly. ‘I believe you,’ she says. ‘You can’t make shit like that up.’

  59

  ‘I know what happened to Maura,’ Jo says as Sexton enters his flat.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says, starting. ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘Your landlord.’

  Sexton makes a beeline for a bottle of gin and a waiting glass on the kitchen counter. ‘Drink?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I’m driving.’

  ‘Still got the sense of humour.’ He gulps back the drink. ‘There’s something to be said for that after what you’ve been through.’

  He carries his glass and the bottle over and, after pouring another, puts it on the glass-topped coffee table and collapses on an armchair that’s only feet from the TV. Jo turns her head in his general direction.

  ‘We solved the other suicide mystery too, did you hear?’ he asks, sounding distracted.

  ‘Yes, Dan rang me. Congratulations. I knew you had it in you. End of your J-Lo days.’

  ‘Not in this lifetime,’ he gripes, knocking back his drink and topping up again. ‘That bitch did a number on me.’

  Jo pauses. ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘The psychiatrist they hired for post-traumatic stress and anger management,’ he says. ‘She’s a man-hater … like the rest of them.’

  ‘All women are out to get you now, is that it?’

  ‘Not you too … it was a joke. God, the PC brigade is taking over the world. My point is that someone seriously fucked up in the head is in no position to fix mine.’

  Jo waits. ‘Why haven’t you asked me who killed Maura yet?’

  Sexton points the remote at the TV and hits mute before the sound comes on. ‘Sorry, who did it then? Anyone I know?’

  ‘Definitely, based on your reaction tonight,’ Jo answers.

  He pulls a handle in the arm of the chair and the foot rest springs up.

  ‘Don’t you want to say anything?’ Jo asks.

  ‘Just getting comfortable. Chill.’ Sexton flicks through the channels and settles on Come Dine with Me, as any show that features people pretending to be pals, eating their food and then bitching behind their backs and going through their stuff gets his thumbs-up. That’s the real world. He pours himself another shot and downs that one too.

  Sexton sighs. ‘It’s been a long day, Jo. It’s been a longer week, and the longest year yet. Do you mind if I change? I want to get out of the clothes I spoke to Rob Reddan in tonight. They’re contaminated with t
he air we sat in that got soaked in his fucked-up mind. They belong in the washing machine on the boil setting.’

  ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘I’ve only been here four hours, what’s another ten minutes?’

  ‘I’ll be five, promise. I won’t shower until after you’ve gone.’ He pauses. ‘What have you been doing for four hours anyway?’

  ‘Trying to get into the killer’s head, to work it out,’ Jo says.

  ‘And you have? You know who killed Maura?’

  ‘I know.’

  Sexton blinks and leaves the room.

  Jo scrolls through her contacts while he’s gone, selects the number for the taxi company she uses, and calls it. She gives them Sexton’s address and says, ‘Give me half an hour.’ Jo hangs up at the sound of Sexton coming back.

  He is wearing a T-shirt and boxers, ready for bed. He’s too tired for that shower now.

  ‘OK then, hit me,’ he says. ‘Who dunnit?’

  ‘You know exactly who did,’ Jo says. ‘Why are you playing this game?’

  Sexton closes his eyes. ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘Tonight. I mean, up until tonight I wasn’t sure. Up until you came home, I still had a margin of doubt. That’s gone now.’

  Sexton takes a deep breath. ‘Somewhere along the way she’d started hating me. I couldn’t believe she was plotting to leave me, without even having the decency to say goodbye. She’d compromised me with her lowlife friends. She’d got this whole other life planned out for herself that she thought I didn’t know about, because she forgot that what I did for a living was spot the lie.

  ‘So I told her that her little plan wouldn’t work, because I knew what she was up to, and I wouldn’t let her go, and she could forget about the big insurance payout she thought was coming in month thirteen.’

  ‘What’s month thirteen?’ Jo asks. There’s a slight quiver in her voice, because she already knows about month thirteen from the bank documents.

  ‘It’s the time limit some life-insurance policies set before they will pay out on suicide claims. I didn’t think they’d cover suicide, but it turns out I was wrong. They don’t pay if you do it within a year, because anyone who needs to kill themselves for money needs money straight away, and the thought of any kind of delay puts them off topping themselves.

  ‘Maura wouldn’t admit it, but I told her the bank had rung one day wanting to speak to Patricia Sexton. I told them there was a mistake, no Patricia lived at the house. The banker asked me to confirm who lived there and I told him. When I told Maura that last night, she said she knew nothing about it.’

  Sexton points a finger to his temple and shoots an imaginary gun.

  Jo stares straight ahead blankly. ‘Then you left the flat, and when you came back, you found her.’

  ‘It was only much, much later that I put the pieces together. She must have phoned the guy she owed money to – Philly Franklin – and told him that it was all over, their little plan to defraud the insurance company. That her one shot at being someone else who’d lived and died was gone. She only had one middle name on her passport to set up another account and that was “Patricia”.’ He looks at Jo. ‘I thought you’d think it was me,’ Sexton said.

  ‘In all the years we worked together, you never hit anyone until you attacked Philly Franklin,’ Jo says. ‘And you’ve met a lot worse than him in your time. So I realized it was personal.’

  ‘Some time after she died, Franklin called to me to collect the money he claimed she owed him,’ he goes on. ‘I told him in no uncertain terms that the next time he called I’d do him in with my own bare hands. But it was only when I eventually read Maura’s suicide note that I realized the role he must have played in her death. As soon as I saw her suicide note, I knew she wouldn’t have signed it Patricia. He must have come over, decided she was lying, and gone through with it.

  ‘It took me months to find him. I spotted him once at Maura’s graveside, but he took off before I could get to him. I picked him up a while later for extortion in an unrelated case.

  ‘He confessed it all, how he’d dictated it to her, made her write the note. He was still convinced, when he killed her, that he was going to get the insurance money. The original policy had been made out to him – he’d made her do that, he told me. But, it turned out, Maura had had a change of heart a few weeks before she died. She’d written to the bank, asked them to change the beneficiary. Franklin still killed her, believing he was going to get the payout off me. I only found that out after I caught up with him, when I went to the bank and saw the policy and her letter.’

  ‘And the insurance payout? What happened to the money?’

  ‘I told the company the truth, so the policy was void. I didn’t want the money anyway. It was tainted.’

  ‘You loved Maura, right to the end, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course I did. And … I think, in the end, she loved me too. That’s why she changed her mind. The irony of it – no, the fucking tragedy of it—’ Sexton breaks off to gather his emotions ‘— the tragedy is, if she had just told me that day, told me everything, I wouldn’t have stormed off, we could have sorted things out – and she’d probably still be alive.’ Jo said nothing for a while as Sexton took a deep breath. Then he went on: ‘Laying into Franklin, beating him to within an inch of his life, that felt good – much better than any charges would have. If I hadn’t used force, I still wouldn’t know.’

  Jo stands, and lifts her bag up. ‘Maybe he confessed because you were using force. I’ve got to go. My taxi’s outside.’

  Sexton looks over at her slowly. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I told you once that I was to blame for the death of someone I loved without ever having lifted a hand against them,’ Jo says. ‘You and I are exactly the same, Sexton.’

  Friday

  60

  The traffic is gridlocked around the Green, and Sexton is glad he walked from the station to try to meet Beth, as arranged on the phone. He needs a break from putting together the paperwork on the case, and he suspects she’ll be the one who can answer some remaining questions for him. She stands out a mile, near the top, chatting to a bunch of girls in Benedict’s uniform. They disperse when he approaches.

  ‘Were you Rory Mason’s chatroom source on Lucy?’ he asks, offering her a real smoke – John Player’s. The e-fags were great, but now there’s all this concern about the vapours in the atomizers needing clinical tests to make sure they’re not bad for you.

  She shrugs a yeah and pets a straggly mongrel dog curled at her feet beside a guitar that’s covered in peeling stickers. An empty McDonald’s cup is perched on the street for change. It’s a place where Maura used to busk. That’s how they’d met. A lifetime ago.

  ‘How come you didn’t tell me about Rob Reddan and your aunt?’ he asks.

  Beth looks at him, surprised. ‘I like my Aunt Marie. I didn’t want her in any kind of trouble.’

  ‘But you were the one who told Darren about their affair, weren’t you?’

  ‘Actually, I told my cousin, Melissa, who told her archenemy, Amy, who told her boyfriend, Darren. Which is why for a long time I thought he had something to do with all this.’

  ‘How did you find out in the first place?’ Sexton asks, taking a deep drag of the smoke.

  ‘My aunt was getting all dolled up every Tuesday around five and heading out. Martin has tennis on Tuesdays, so she wasn’t meeting him, and Melissa had a singing lesson.

  ‘Marie’s default setting was miserable, so when she started getting all tinkly and happy every Tuesday, I knew she was up to something. I decided to follow her. It wasn’t hard. She doesn’t drive, so it wasn’t difficult to keep up. I followed her to a bus stop the first Tuesday. The following week, I got on the bus at an earlier stop and watched from upstairs to see where she went. I saw her get off the bus four stops later and walk to a café across the street from Rob Reddan’s ad company. If she’d spotted me, I’d an excuse ready for the coincidence of bumping in
to her. She didn’t spot me, though, because she doesn’t do heights. The next Tuesday, I’m in the café too, only on the mezzanine level. I see Rob come in and kiss her hand, pay for her coffee, then the two of them head off together and I know I’m on to something.’

  ‘You went to a lot of trouble.’

  ‘My uncle’s a dickhead. It was payback time. Marie was nice to me, but I didn’t feel like I was shitting on her because I was glad she’d found someone who made her happy. I wanted her to leave that asshole.’

  ‘Were you there the following Tuesday?’

  ‘I went in my friend’s car. It was a piece of piss. Marie doesn’t know him, or his car.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Dunno. We lost them.’

  Sexton stubs his cigarette out on the ground. ‘You’re like a regular Miss Marple.’

  ‘Anyways, I went through Marie’s phone one time she left it down before it locked, and I found all these pictures Rob had sent her of himself in … you know … sexual positions. They were gross. Think he thought he’d turn her on. And one day, when I was pissed with Amy for always getting between me and Lucy, I sent Melissa the pics of Amy’s dad. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did.

  ‘I couldn’t tell Melissa where I’d got them, and that it was her own mother who was so interested in Rob in the buff. But I didn’t expect Melissa would send them on to Rob’s own daughter, Amy. I feel so bad that they must have tipped her over the edge.’

  ‘You still got the pictures?’

  Beth gets her phone out, opens up an album and shows Sexton an image of Rob Reddan.

  Sexton winces.

  ‘Yup, gross, told you,’ she says.

  ‘Did Amy talk about her problems … to Lucy?’

  Beth shakes her head. ‘Amy never said much at the best of times. That was kind of the problem. She internalized everything and then …’ Beth tilts her head and jerks an imaginary rope from it. ‘Will Rob Reddan go to prison?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Marie?’