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

Rita. She pictured the kind of looks Rita must have got when she boarded her last bus, dressed in the kind of clothes that would have revealed her occupation as well as any sign around her neck. If the bus had been crowded and Rita sat down beside someone on a double seat, Jo presumed they’d have stood and walked away rather than be associated with her. She wondered how young Rita was when her father first hurt her so badly. Jo was ready . . .
She opened her eyes and held her hand against the apartment door. ‘You’re already angry with her by the time you get to this point, aren’t you?’ she asked out loud. ‘That’s why you forced entry. You both know what she is. Rita Nulty has no right to say no. So why does she? It’s because she already knows you, doesn’t she? She knows what you’re capable of. You’re someone she’s frightened of. Otherwise, why would you have to break in?’
    Jo lifted her head. She reached into her leather jacket for her notepad and pen, and scribbled: ‘Ask street workers about recent violent attacks?’
    Her eyes roamed to the coffee table where she’d seen the cocaine, now covered with metallic-grey fingerprint dust. ‘Do you keep whatever you used to break in with in your hand or put it down?’ she muttered. ‘Yes, you put it down, for now. You need her calm. The art of ceremony requires preparation, so you’ve brought a peace offering. But you can’t risk her actually taking the coke, can you? Might fire her up for a fight. You’ve too much work to do. That’s why we found it untouched.’
    She headed across to the bedroom and flung open the door. She swallowed: the bloodstains were still there, more disconcerting without the body.
    Jo held her own hand up at arm’s length, spreading the fingers out, turning it from back to front. ‘Do you take what she owes you while she’s living or dead?’ Jo knew the forensic analysis of the blood spatter would yield the answer. In her experience, only a pumping heart would blood-spray every surface – even the ceiling. She looked up and saw the telltale signs. ‘You need her alive, of course, because justice requires punishment. What did you use? An axe? A cleaver? You’d have needed to hide it, though, wouldn’t you, along with the crowbar you used for breaking down the door.’ She turned to a new page of her notebook. ‘Long coat? Bag?’ she wrote.
Jo hurried over to the bathroom on the right where the towels had lain before they’d been bagged and taken to the lab. ‘Who washed?’ she asked. ‘You or her? The clock is ticking. Any stray or pre-booked punter could come by at any point . . . her pimp, for example. Why was washing so important? It could have risked the kill . . .’
    She reached to the tap in the bath to turn the shower on, but the lever was damaged and the water kept flicking out the bath spout.
    She looked around the bath but could see no stray peroxide strands. ‘It’s you who’s in the bath, isn’t it?’ Jo asked the killer. ‘Not all of you, there isn’t time, just your feet . . . like in the Bible? Did you want Rita to dry them with her hair, like Mary Magdalene?’
    Jo wrote in her notebook: ‘Have samples of Rita’s hair from PM sent to forensics for contact analysis.’
    ‘If she’s the whore,’ she asked aloud, ‘who is it that you think you are?’
    A knock on the door made her start. The garda who’d been on duty outside stuck his head around the door. ‘You asked me to remind you about your conference, in case you lost track of time,’ he said.
    12
    Sexton hadn’t been notified that he’d lost the investigation to Jo Birmingham because he was in the interview room with a skinny scrote who had just confessed to murdering the Skids’ drug lord, Anto Crawley. Sexton didn’t believe for a second that ‘Skinny’, as he was known, had executed Crawley. He hadn’t asked Sexton for a brief yet. Guilty parties always wanted their brief. Sexton suspected that, with the