Free If I Never See You Again by Niamh O'Connor

shirt, revealing a neatly trimmed arc of chest hair. ‘Foxy, fine. Sexton, for now. But Mac needs the experience and Merrigan is doing nothing else.’
    ‘I don’t like Mac’s history, and Merrigan is bloody useless,’ she said.
    ‘Fine, forget Merrigan, but Mac stays,’ he said, adding, ‘Final answer.’
    She opened her mouth to protest, but he wasn’t having any of it. ‘Get me something to go on and I might even let you keep Sexton for the duration.’
    Jeanie burst into the office to ask if he intended to keep his lunch appointment, making Jo wonder if she’d had her ear pressed to a glass on the door outside. She noticed how perfect her hair and make-up looked. The wraparound dress she was wearing emphasized her fantastic figure. If Dan hadn’t been her ex, she’d have taken Jeanie aside and told her not to try so hard, because the odds were stacked against the relationship working. Jeanie was a civilian, and that meant she was going to take every anniversary dinner he missed because of work and every romantic weekend he cancelled at the last minute personally.
Jo stood to leave. ‘Can you contact these members?’ she asked Jeanie, holding Dan’s list out. ‘Tell them I intend holding the first case conference on the Rita Nulty case in the incident room straight after lunch, and I expect everyone there. No excuses.’
    Jeanie turned away, so Jo pressed the list down on Dan’s desk, saying ‘asap,’ in a tone that said she was the one who called the shots on this case now and that she intended to find out who had murdered Rita Nulty in record time. That meant that, from this point on, Jeanie was the least of her problems.
    10
    Ryan Freeman lay spreadeagled on his couch, studying the TV screen. The new addition to the family – Cassie, a border collie bought for Katie in the hope that she would help reawaken her social skills – was lying on the rug watching him, her head tilting occasionally as if she had tuned into his pain.
Ryan was watching the CCTV footage taken outside Katie’s school on the day she’d disappeared, as he had a million times before, convinced he had to be missing something. He believed that, once he found it, he’d have the link he needed to begin unravelling Katie’s problems.
    The sepia images moving across the screen were so grainy they had a phantom feel. The now dead drug lord Crawley was wearing a trucker cap pulled low over his eyes, the peak barely visible under his hoodie. He wore this under a black leather jacket, elasticated at the waist, with a pair of blue jeans and white trainers.
    Ryan pointed the remote at the TV angrily, fast-forwarding to the point when Crawley moved robotically, owing to the slow snapshot speed, towards a mystery car which had pulled up outside the gates. Only a corner of the vehicle could be seen; the rest was just outside the frame. It was impossible to work out the make of the vehicle, though the right tail-light and last number of the plate were just about visible in the upper left-hand corner.
Four swift frames later: Crawley bending over and into the driver’s window . . . gesturing like a madman by jabbing his index finger in at the driver, his elbow in and out of shot . . . recoiling from an invisible shove from the driver, his cap spinning off his head behind him. Ryan watched Crawley try to reef open the driver’s door then have a change of heart and grab a clump of his hair through the window instead. Long, fair hair came momentarily into view.
    A vicious row, but with whom, Ryan wondered, as he had constantly, since first seeing it. What did the woman driving the car know about Crawley’s presence? What were they fighting over? Had she provided him with information about Katie’s movements or helped Crawley identify Katie just before the abduction? And most importantly, if he found her, would she help Ryan unlock Katie from her world of silence in return for immunity from prosecution?
    He paused the screen, searching for