‘They must have gone,’ she said. ‘For now.’
I couldn’t help wondering if Felix’s death had made her a little paranoid. Not to mention why she would leave the door ajar if she was being bothered by reporters.
‘You should say something to Grace . . . the Chief Superintendent,’ I said to her. ‘She might be able to get someone detailed to watch the house and keep the reporters away.’
Not that Fitzgerald would thank me for saying so. The DMP was stretched enough as it was without offering protection from the paparazzi to bereaved art critics.
Alice shook her head anyway.
‘I can deal with it myself,’ she said, and for the first time I glimpsed the frost lurking behind the apparently timid, controlled façade. Alice. There was ice in her very name. ‘Besides, I’m not sure that having them around wouldn’t almost be as bad as the press.’
She returned to her packing. She was taking rather more than I’d have expected for the few days she’d said she was going away, but I reminded myself again that it was none of my business. And it must be tough being here after what had happened to her brother. I could understand the need to escape. I’d felt it after Sydney died too.
‘I wouldn’t go too far if I was you,’ I contented myself with warning mildly.
‘I’m just going to find a hotel. Book in under a false name. Get some rest.’
‘The police might need you again, is all.’
Something in my voice must have alerted her, despite all my efforts to sound casual, because she said: ‘Who are you? Really? You told me when you came yesterday that you weren’t in the police.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Well then, all I can say is that you certainly talk like you are sometimes. What are you even doing asking all these questions about Felix?’
‘I’m not with the DMP,’ I said, ‘but I did use to be a special agent with the FBI, and I’m close to Grace Fitzgerald, the Chief Superintendent you met when you went to identify Felix’s body. Old habits die hard, I guess you could say. I just want to know what happened out there in Howth the other night. Why Felix called me.’
‘The police already think they know what happened,’ she said disparagingly.
‘You don’t think Felix killed himself ?’
‘Of course I don’t believe Felix killed himself,’ Alice said. ‘Why would he have done such a thing? He wouldn’t have thrown away his life, his gift, like that. For nothing. He wouldn’t have left me alone. He didn’t even have a gun. And he wouldn’t have known how to use it even if he did get his hands on one. That’s just one more thing which makes all this so absurd. First they say he killed himself. Then they say he had a gun. What are they going to tell me next? That he was wearing women’s underwear when he died?’
‘The autopsy report said he had gunshot residue on his hands,’ I said.
‘I’m not an expert,’ Alice said. ‘All I know is that my brother wouldn’t have killed himself. And you hinted on the telephone that you thought so too.’
‘I’m just trying to play devil’s advocate,’ I said. ‘Trying to see it from the point of view of the police.’ I hesitated, knowing I was treading on dangerous ground. ‘You did say the other day that Felix wasn’t sleeping, that he was pushing himself too hard.’
‘He was often like that,’ she confessed. ‘Just before Unreal City came out, he suffered a breakdown. And then, last year, he started showing some of the same signs.’
‘Was this after he was attacked in town?’
‘You know about that?’
‘It was mentioned in the obituaries,’ I said. ‘But there was nothing about him suffering a breakdown afterwards. I was just putting two and two together.’
‘It’s not the sort of thing we wanted getting out. Being attacked affected him badly. He was suffering from severe headaches, he was in a deep depression, it seemed like he was lost to us. We felt we needed to keep it secret. Vincent—’
‘Sorry?’
‘Vincent Strange. He’s a friend of ours. He’s devastated by all this. He handled the sale of a lot of Felix’s work. He owns a gallery here in Temple Bar.’
That was where I’d heard the name. He was the genius who’d written all that garbage at the start of Felix’s book about reality being contingent.
‘He and I got together and decided the best thing was to take Felix away somewhere till he got better, so people wouldn’t talk. I took him out to New England, moving around: Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire. We were there about six months. It was difficult at first, but slowly he began to pull himself round, to get a grip on things again, enough that we felt it was safe for him to come back.’
‘When was this?’
‘October. And we found him a new physician here, he was on a new cocktail of medication, he was better than he’d been for a long time. He opened his new exhibition. And then shortly afterwards the damn Marxman started his own work and Felix became, like I told you, obsessed, and it seemed like all our good work was being undone.’
‘You say he was better than he’d been for a long time,’ I said. ‘Was that why he wasn’t taking photographs anymore?’
The silence was forty below.
Her look made forty below seem tropical.
‘Who told you?’ she said.
‘Lucky guess,’ I replied. ‘I went round to see the photographs in Kilmainham. That’s where I called you from. That’s why I called you. I happened to notice there was snow in some of the pictures, but there was no snow in Dublin between his return in October and January when New Studies opened. He couldn’t have taken them when he said he did.’
‘Are you going to . . . say anything about it?’
‘Why should I? I like them. Doesn’t matter to me when they were taken.’
‘You’re right about the dates,’ she said. The frost was melting somewhat now she could sense I wasn’t out to damage Felix. She even stopped carrying clothes over to her case, and came and sat down opposite me, leaning forward slightly like she wanted to make sure I understood what she was saying. ‘He told me himself that they were taken last winter. He hadn’t taken any pictures since he got back from the States. Not since he started to get better. He said it was gone. His creative urge. His eye. He said he was seeing things differently now and he didn’t want to take any more photographs.’
‘Not ever?’
‘He said it had been a burden to him for years and he didn’t want to do it anymore.’
‘The only problem being,’ I said, ‘that he had an exhibition coming up?’
‘Vincent had arranged it for him. Felix didn’t want to let him down. And he said he needed the money. He’d spent plenty of it during his breakdown the previous year. If he was going to start a new life, he needed more money. I told him we’d be OK, I have money enough of my own, but he took out the old photographs and pretended they were new. The gallery never noticed. They were just delighted to have anything from Felix, even if there were so few. They liked them very much. Said they thought they were among his best work.’
‘Maybe someone else liked them too,’ I said. ‘Maybe even liked them too much.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Have you seen them?’
‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘He never let me see his work before it went on show, he never showed it to anyone before he was totally happy with it, but I went with Vincent to the official launch, and then back by myself a few days later to have a closer look.’
‘And since then?’
‘Have I been back, do you mean? No. Why?’
So I told her how the photographs were taken in the same locations as the Marxman killed his victims, and whilst I told her I watched as she took a small bottle of pills out of her pocket, shook three on to the palm of her hand and lifted them to her mouth.
I wasn’t sure if she even realised she was doing it.
Had the doctor prescribed her them after Felix died?
‘That’s impossible,’
she was saying. ‘The exhibition opened on New Year’s Day. The Marxman didn’t kill his first victim until mid-January. You must be mistaken.’
‘You’re looking at it the wrong way round,’ I said. ‘The important thing is not that Felix was obsessed by the Marxman killings, but why he was obsessed. What was it about these particular murders that drew him towards them? There are plenty of murders. Too many murders. What was different about these murders that made him fixate on them? I think it was that he knew the locations of the shootings were the same ones hanging on the walls out at Kilmainham with his name on them.’
‘You’re saying the Marxman went to the exhibition, saw the pictures, and deliberately killed those poor people in the same places? Why?’
‘That I don’t know. But I do know that it’s the only answer that makes sense. The only answer that explains why Felix became obsessed from the start. The Marxman shoots Tim Enright in O’Brien’s Place. Felix thinks that’s a strange coincidence, but not so significant. Then Judge Prior is killed in Grosvenor Square and he starts to notice a pattern. By the third and fourth killings, there’s no doubt. How could he not become obsessed? He never gave you any indication that’s why he was so consumed by the Marxman?’
She shook her head in bewilderment.
‘You never noticed, even in passing, the same link yourself?’
‘No. You’ve seen Felix’s photographs. You could be looking at your own house and not know what it was. He made everything seem alien. Unrecognisable. He had the gift for taking things and making them his own. Refashioning them through his own eyes. Often I never knew where they were taken. He wasn’t one to talk about his work, and he always went out alone to take the shots. After nightfall, more often than not.’
‘The Marxman obviously recognised where they were,’ I said.
Alice got to her feet again and walked back to the suitcase she’d been packing, putting in the last pile of clothes and letting fall the lid, zipping it round briskly, then starting on the straps.
Keeping her hands busy whilst she thought.
‘Did you tell this to the police?’ she said as she worked.
‘I called the Chief Superintendent.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That she’d send someone round to take a look,’ I said.
‘There’s a but there.’
‘There’s always a but,’ I said. ‘The Chief Superintendent said that even if the Marxman did choose the places to kill based on Felix’s photographs, then that only explains why Felix was obsessed, not who the Marxman is, and that’s all she cares about. She said it is not like it’s practical to put surveillance on all the remaining seventeen locations out of the twenty-one photographs in the vague hope that the Marxman might turn up one night. She also said that what I’d told her just added to the argument that Felix killed himself. If he thought the Marxman was using his pictures as a template, she said, then Felix might’ve felt responsible in some way for what was happening, and it was his guilt which drove him to the lighthouse.’
‘How many times do I have to say it? Felix would not have killed himself. Do the police not even care that there’s a killer out there being inspired by my brother’s work?’
‘As far as they’re concerned, it’s a public exhibition. Hundreds, thousands of people have been and gone through the door at Kilmainham since New Year’s Day, and the Marxman could’ve been any one of them, even assuming it isn’t just a coincidence.’
‘You don’t sound convinced.’
‘I don’t believe in coincidences,’ I said. ‘Felix was obsessed with what the Marxman was doing, we know that. Obsessed enough that he wouldn’t let it alone. At the end he said someone was trying to kill him. Between those two events isn’t it equally possible that he tried to find out who was using his photographs and why, and in the course of that discovered something so important that the Marxman’s only option was to neutralise the threat? He may have liked the idea of using Felix’s photographs as a template, but he wouldn’t like it if Felix turned the tables on him. The hunter would start to feel hunted.’
Though that still didn’t explain why he should have gone to all the trouble of staging such an elaborate crime scene. Or how he’d managed to leave no trace of what he’d done.
‘Is there anything you remember,’ I pressed, ‘that suggests Felix was being stalked or followed or harassed in any way? It needn’t be anything dramatic. Unexplained phone calls would do. Letters. Strangers hanging round the door. Anything.’
‘No,’ Alice said, ‘nothing – oh.’
She stopped.
‘What is it?’
‘There was something,’ she said, looking appalled. ‘I remember now. And when I say it was something, I mean it was nothing . . . at least, at the time I thought it was nothing, but, well, we were broken into about two, three weeks ago.’
‘Here?’
‘We were in Berlin for the launch of a retrospective of his work. When we got back here a few days later, a back window had been forced open, a few things were gone. Little things. Worthless things. A watch, money, some jewellery. We tried not to make too much of it. Lots of houses round here have been burgled.’
‘That was all that was taken?’
‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘That’s why it came back to me when you asked about Felix being harassed. He told me some photographs were missing. And a journal.’
Was I right then? Had the Marxman broken in looking for evidence of what Felix knew about him? More to the point, had he found it?
‘Did you report the break-in?’ I said.
‘For what it was worth. The police never catch anyone. We just got a locksmith in to fit us up with a better security system and tried to forget about it. But it was unnerving all the same. I tried to laugh it off, but I felt Felix knew more about it than he was telling me. I never suspected for a moment, though, that it had anything to do with the Marxman.’
‘Maybe it didn’t,’ I said, but I doubted my clumsy attempt at reassurance had worked. I wasn’t convincing myself, let alone Alice.
It was like someone wanted to know what Felix had known.
‘Do you still think it wasn’t Felix who called me that night?’ I asked Alice.
‘I can’t help hoping it wasn’t.’ She sighed. ‘Since our parents died, all we’d ever had was each other. I know I should have listened to him, believed him, I’ll never forgive myself for not being there for him, but I still hate to think of him shutting me out like that.’
‘He probably wanted to protect you from whatever danger he was mixed up in.’
‘I wouldn’t have wanted to be protected,’ she rebuked me. ‘I’m not thirteen years old any more. If he was in trouble, I would have wanted to share that burden with him.’
‘Even if it led to your death too?’
‘Even then. At least we’d be together.’
Chapter Fourteen
For the rest of that day I was holed up in my apartment, trying to write my piece on the Marxman for the next issue of the US crime magazine Felix had found so fascinating. The deadline was coming up fast and I needed to get down whatever fragments of fact, rumour and conjecture I could assemble at short notice into something vaguely resembling sense.
It wasn’t easy. I didn’t even know where to begin. Since I’d written my last piece, Felix had died, and that changed everything. Changed everything for me, that is.
And yet his death had nothing to do with the Marxman, according to the police, according to all the evidence, so it wasn’t something I felt comfortable writing about. I could mention the fact that there had been a killing and that it had been initially attributed to the Marxman, but beyond that what could I say? Should I mention Felix’s call to me that night?
Should I describe his photographs?
Should I say that Alice was still not convinced her brother took his own life?
The important thing, as in any investigation, was to strip away the leaves and leave the bare skelet
on of the tree visible against the sky behind.
See it as it was.
Here that wasn’t possible. What I was confronting was more like a forest, and I couldn’t see which tree it was I was meant to be looking at. The branches tangled together like barbed wire.
In the end, I took the easy way out and concentrated only on sober facts, details, background, those things you use to fill in the gaps between real meaning, and left myself out of it; I still wasn’t ready to talk about that night at the pier, I still needed to take a step back from it. As a result, the piece felt faked, forced. I just knew that anyone who read it would know I was hiding what I really thought. It just died on the page, the words coagulating like blood, and I spent as much time on the balcony smoking cigars as I did at the keyboard.
At least the writing gave me the chance to pull together what I knew so far.
The downside was I realised what I knew wasn’t much. By the time I’d thrown something together and sent it down the phone line into the world, it was nearly midnight and the moon was bright as a new coin above the city.
Would Fitzgerald still be at Dublin Castle? I hadn’t heard from her since I called to tell her about the photographs and she’d been unenthusiastic in response. I didn’t know what she was doing now. She sometimes snatched sleep in her office when she was working late, but the Marxman investigation was a stagnant pool and I couldn’t see her doing that tonight. I thought of calling her at home, but what if she was in bed already? I couldn’t disturb her. No, I’d drop by her place. If the windows were dark, I’d just sit there a while and imagine her sleeping, then come home, or drive around all night, why not?
I didn’t feel like sleep.
I took the Jeep out and drove through moon-bright streets towards the sea.
Where Fitzgerald lived was right across the road from the strand, with a view over to Howth Head on the other side of the huge horseshoe of Dublin Bay, some soulless estate where the houses all looked alike and huddled together in horror of the world around them, where the cars in the driveways gleamed each Sunday like new and the men all played golf.
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 8
