‘Did no one even hear a gun going off?’
‘No, but it’s a quiet neighbourhood. They’re not like you. They hear a gun going off and they’re more likely to think it’s a car backfiring.’
‘Whereas I hear a car backfiring and instantly start trying to figure out what calibre it is,’ I said quietly, and I wasn’t proud of it. ‘What about witnesses?’
‘There were a couple, but you’re not listening,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘It doesn’t matter if there were a thousand people on the pier that night. You could tell me the massed ranks of the Dublin Symphony Orchestra were playing hide and seek in and out of the boats and it wouldn’t make any difference. If there’s no evidence Felix Berg’s death was anything other than a straightforward suicide, then there’s no evidence.’
‘Indulge me. What did the witnesses see?’
‘Only you. I’m serious. You stand around on your own long enough and you’re bound to be noticed.’
‘How’d they describe me?’
‘Small, dark, smoking a cigar, couldn’t stand still. I’d recognise you anywhere.’
‘They didn’t mention the fabulously good-looking and sexy part then?’
‘It was dark.’
‘Oh well, I’ve had worse notices,’ I said, and I could feel a panic rising in me as the threads which held together my interest in the death of Felix Berg started fraying, coming apart. ‘I don’t get it, is all. If Felix did kill himself, why the elaborate charade to make me, Alice, everyone, think he was murdered? Why tell me someone wanted to kill him?’
‘Who knows what was going on in his head? Maybe he just needed to make a drama out of his death. Maybe simply dying like everyone else wasn’t good enough for him. Maybe he wanted to make himself the centre of attention even in his absence, keep the world guessing, and who better to rope in than you, famous writer, former FBI agent? Maybe he just wanted an audience and figured you wouldn’t come all the way out there on the back of an invite to the opening and closing night of his one-man suicide show. Or,’ she added in a tone that made me look up and take notice, ‘maybe he planned on taking you along for the ride.’
‘You think now he wanted to shoot me too?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘It’s ridiculous is what it is.’
‘You don’t know what’s ridiculous and what isn’t. You don’t know the first thing about Felix Berg. What he was thinking. What he was capable of. And that’s why you need to just let this go. I mean it,’ she said firmly. ‘You say you’re only going to talk to Alice and not get involved, and the next minute you’re reacting badly because there might be nothing to Felix’s death after all. I’m worried where it’s going to lead. I don’t want you to be dragged into something.’
‘I’m not going to be dragged into anything. I’m just curious.’
‘You know what curiosity killed.’
‘I’m not a cat. I’m restless, is all. I need to be doing something to stop me seizing up. I wasn’t made for sitting round at home watching daytime TV.’ I flipped the cover and handed back the autopsy report. ‘And you know me. I need to know. Felix called me; he arranged a meeting; and when I got there, he was dead. That must mean something.’
‘Suicides are sick in the head. What they do and say doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes things don’t make sense. You know that. Sometimes you never find out what’s going on, it never adds up. You just have to clock it up to experience and move on. That’s one thing I have learned. A case doesn’t always tie up, there are always loose ends, things that don’t make sense. Sometimes you have to accept that you’ll never get all the answers.’
‘I’ve never been able to do that,’ I said. ‘It’s not in my nature.’
‘That’s why you’re always getting into so much trouble,’ she said.
Chapter Twelve
‘Not everyone leaves a note,’ Fitzgerald had said, and she was right there, I thought as I left her office and started walking back to my apartment through the incessant crowds.
Sydney certainly hadn’t.
Sydney just got out of bed one morning, didn’t even bother getting dressed, walked down to the railway line at the back of her house, lay with her head on the rail for a pillow, and waited for the morning train from Boston to Washington DC to come along.
Sydney was my sister.
Had been my sister, I should say. Now she was only a memory in my head, and even that was fading. It got harder and harder each year to remember what she had looked like, and I had nothing to remind me. I don’t keep photographs from my past, since most of the time the past isn’t something I want to remember. Besides which, I never thought I’d need a photograph to remember Sydney by. I always assumed she’d be around.
No one ever understood why Sydney killed herself either, and what made it worse was that no one but me seemed to care about finding out. She was the only one of my family I really had any feelings for. My folks and I had never got along. I had an elder brother who was so stuck up his own ass with self-importance that he’d lost all contact with the real world years ago. Sydney was the baby of the family. She looked up to me. Didn’t judge me by some fake standard like they did. She accepted me for what I was, same way Fitzgerald did.
She’d been married about a year when she died, and I knew it hadn’t been easy for her. Her husband fooled around almost from the day they got together. Turned out later he’d even been banging one of the bridesmaids. A true romantic. What games he played with her head after they were married I’ll never know, but no matter how I tried to persuade her to get out, get a new life, within that year she seemed to lose all sense that she could escape from his influence, all sense of her own strength. The Sydney I’d known vanished before my eyes as he gradually stole every last part of her and locked it away where she couldn’t retrieve it any more. In the end, Amtrak must have seemed like her only salvation.
A case doesn’t always tie up, there are always loose ends, things that don’t make sense. Sometimes you have to accept that you’ll never get all the answers.
Fitzgerald wasn’t to know how those words cut me. I’d never told her about Sydney. She knew I had a brother, because he sent me an occasional Christmas card (he didn’t get one back), but Sydney wasn’t something I felt able to share with anyone, not even her. I’d certainly never bought the illusion that talking about something makes it better.
Only one person knew about my dead sister, and that was Lawrence Fisher, a criminal psychologist I’d first met when I was writing a book about profilers and whose advice Fitzgerald had sometimes sought since in relation to cases she was working on. I counted him among my closest friends, not that that was saying much, but even so, the only reason he knew about Sydney was that he’d once spent a couple of semesters teaching out in Boston and by chance had met people who knew me, knew my family. I’d sworn him to secrecy on pain of, well, pain. I always found that direct threats worked best with Fisher. Men are such cowards.
No, Fitzgerald wasn’t to know, but could I really let it happen again? Let someone die on me and never find out why? With Sydney I’d been trying to dig a tunnel to Newfoundland with a sugar spoon, knowing her husband had been to blame for her suicide, convinced that he’d actually insinuated the idea into her head and manoeuvred her subtly towards it, that he was as guilty of her death as if he’d tied her to the railway track himself and driven the train. But the tunnel of logic kept collapsing in on me; no one would listen; they preferred to read Sydney’s last act as a symptom of some internal fragility rather than the crime I knew it was.
Now along came Felix and it was all happening again.
History repeating itself.
Was I going to let it?
********************
I never made it back to my apartment that morning. Some impulse instead sent me walking out towards Kilmainham, up St James’s Gate and into Military Road, and through the gates into the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. I was standing at the door a
lmost before I knew I’d been headed that way, but once I realised where I was it made sense.
Briefly I wondered if they might have closed down the exhibition of Felix’s latest work out of respect. Then I remembered what Burke had said. Death was good for the box office. There were too many bad reproduction postcards and overpriced coffee table picture books to be sold. These places were businesses, after all. I only needed to look at the notices on the board outside to realise that. Finest seventeenth-century building in Dublin . . . restored in the year yadda yadda . . . coffee shop . . . guided tours . . . excellent conference facilities . . .
Christ, who reads this stuff?
For a while I hung around, finishing a cigar, taking my time, thinking about Sydney and wishing I could remember something about her that could erase the image of her leaving the house in her nightclothes and walking so acceptingly to her death, but there was nothing.
As I stood there, other people began to arrive, and I heard Berg’s name whispered repeatedly. Were we all such ghouls? Did death always have to generate this instant celebrity?
I followed them inside, down a long corridor with bare walls interrupted on one side by windows looking out on to a bright, quiet inner courtyard.
By the side of the door at the end of the corridor was a simple white card with four words typed on it.
New Studies. Felix Berg.
Nothing more. No explanation or analysis, which was a relief.
I stepped inside.
Immersed myself once more in Felix’s head.
There weren’t as many pictures as I’d expected – only twenty-one, I counted, which was not much to show for his first major exhibition since Unreal City – but the photographs themselves were incredible. Here was a complete reversal of all the work that had taken my breath away last night as I sat looking at his book on my balcony.
The swarming city with its ghosts in daylight had vanished, but they had left behind them an atmosphere more unsettling and unnerving than ever. The multitude had been replaced by a city of such eerie emptiness that it made you feel lost, lonely, abandoned just to look at it. There was nothing lifelike in them at all, only an utter emptiness, like the world had been abandoned as surely as the Mary Celeste, like the watcher had woken and found the world had suddenly become empty and depopulated, and the effect was startling.
The photographs I’d looked at last night had seemed mysterious and shadowy, but now, compared with these, they became in my memory almost too busy, too crowded. Too corrupted by the very things they were repelled by. The new photographs had a stillness, a tranquillity, like Felix had captured something of the possibility of silence and solitude – and loneliness – that existed within the most crowded city.
How he’d even managed to take some of the shots I simply couldn’t begin to understand. All of the pictures had been taken in Dublin, but it was a Dublin from which all trace of life had been plucked. Here was Cornmarket at what looked like mid-morning in the rain, but not a soul in sight. How could he have taken such a shot? Cornmarket was never empty. Here was Greek Street and Westland Row and Golden Lane and Lincoln Place, and the pathway outside Tara Street station, and there was Merrion Square and Earlsfort Terrace, Wicklow Street curving into Exchequer Street, all lit with a steely winter light, and all frozen, embalmed almost, in that same sinister atmosphere of depopulation.
Or were they? The more I looked at these photographs, the more I began to notice something I hadn’t seen before.
There were people in the pictures.
Glimpses mainly, faces, details, but there all the same.
Here was a face peering out of a window streaked with rain. Here was a shadow, elongated thinly by a weak afternoon sun, of a figure who must have been standing just out of shot – and the reflection of another, broken into shards on the surface of a puddle. Here was a figure glimpsed distantly in the street, back turned.
In another shot, a trailing foot could just be seen as its owner turned a corner.
Or a hand clutching the edge of a door as it closed. And this? A snapshot placed under the leg of a chair, the face of the person in the shot obscured. They were always there, almost invisible but never quite vanishing, just on the edge of being known, of being seen.
Like they were being watched or, perhaps, were watching Felix.
And I thought: Was that how he’d felt in those final months?
Observed?
Shadowed?
There was something strange about these New Studies, though, and it took me a long time to work out what it is.
Then I saw.
There was snow in some of the pictures.
It was heaped against railings and burying steps and lying along the edges of walls and window ledges and the otherwise bare branches of trees, and in one shot there was even a line of tiny weaving footprints imprinted on it.
And it hadn’t snowed this winter.
I knew that for certain because I have always been something of a connoisseur of snow – it must be my New England genes – and there’s little enough of it falls on Dublin that it has to be savoured when it finally comes, the memory stored away for leaner times.
I read somewhere once that the mildness of the winters here has something to do with the Gulf Stream, but I don’t know about that and never considered it worth my while finding out. Even if I knew why there’s little snow, it still wouldn’t make more snow come.
All I knew was that there hadn’t been a snowflake on the city all winter, so how could Felix have taken some of these pictures since his return from the States in the fall? More likely, I thought, they’d been taken the previous winter, when, unusually, there’d been almost a week of snow and I had relished every second of it, and probably it didn’t matter much.
If he wanted to pass off old work as new, after all, it was none of my business. They were equally impressive whenever they were taken. Summer, fall, winter: who cares?
But as I looked closely to check that I was right about the weather, I noticed something else that was less easy to dismiss. A blurred street sign reading O’Brien’s Place.
The air caught in my throat.
That was where Tim Enright had been gunned down by the Marxman.
A coincidence?
Quickly I began to scan the other photographs to find what I was looking for.
Grosvenor Square.
Main Street.
The Mansion House, in whose shadow Jane Knox had died. A bitten sickle of moon was clinging on to a black sky above the line of buildings.
They were all there.
In each of the places where the Marxman had struck, Felix Berg had taken a photograph and hung it here on the wall as part of his latest collection.
And maybe there was nothing very remarkable about that. He was obsessed by the killings, Alice had told me so herself. What was more natural than that he would take a shot in the places where the Marxman had taken his own shot before him? He thought murder was the key to understanding a city. But this exhibition had opened on New Year’s Day.
Before the Marxman even killed his first victim.
I stood and stared at the photographs, checking, double-checking, making sure I was right, that there could be no doubt, before turning round and making my way back to the main lobby to find a telephone.
I called Alice.
‘It’s Saxon,’ I said soon as she picked up.
‘If you’ve called to commiserate with me on my brother’s untimely suicide,’ she said sarcastically, ‘don’t bother. Some detective who was there that night – Seamus Dalton, is that his name? – called about an hour ago to give me the results of the autopsy.’
‘I wasn’t calling you to commiserate. I don’t think things are as simple as the police believe.’
There was a long silence before she answered, so long that I began to suspect she must’ve hung up.
‘You’d better come round,’ she said at last.
Chapter Thirteen
The front do
or was slightly ajar when I got to Alice’s house. I nudged it gently with my foot, stepped into the hall. Behind the door lay a scrap of paper, folded twice and apparently pushed through the letterbox. Glancing up to make sure no one was there, I crouched down and hastily unfolded it. Inside someone had written: Alice, call me. Please – Gina.
I heard a noise upstairs and guiltily replaced the scrap of paper on the floor.
‘Alice?’ I raised my voice.
A face appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘It’s you,’ she said. ‘Close the door and come on up.’
I shut the door and walked up the stairs to the first floor, wondering if Alice had left it open for me, and if she had, why she hadn’t seen the note on the floor.
Unless she’d wanted me to see it too.
The first thing I noticed when I got upstairs was that she was carrying some clothes over to a bag on the table and laying them neatly inside, pushing them down with her hands to pack them tightly before returning to fetch more from a room off the main living area.
She was wearing dark glasses, though the sun wasn’t bright.
‘What are you doing?’
The words were out of my mouth before I could remind myself I had no right to be asking her questions.
She looked at me for a moment, judging what lay behind the question perhaps, then said simply: ‘I’m going away for a few days. I’ve had reporters bothering me since they learned that Felix was dead. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing, they’ve been knocking at the door, looking for me to say something about Felix. Some of them even offered me money. For what, I don’t know.’ Her face creased with distaste. ‘Did you not see them outside?’
‘I didn’t see anyone,’ I said truthfully.
‘You didn’t?’
Alice’s face showed surprise. She laid down the clothes she was carrying on the arm of the couch and crossed the room. Standing a little back from the windows, she peered out into the lane below. She looked puzzled, almost alarmed.
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 7
