From what reporters on the scene were able to tell, the first victim had been making his way home from a night’s drinking in town and had stopped in the doorway of the church to relieve himself, as drinkers often did, sometimes not bothering to avoid the down-and-outs who were sleeping in the doorway at the time. He’d been shot once in the back, through the heart, from a distance of about ten feet – an impressive effort from our friend the Marxman.
The blood had arced on to the antique wooden doors in a delightful pattern. The TV lights picked it up in close-up, like some undiscovered Jackson Pollock, before the police managed to get the screens up and herd spectators far enough away.
He’d fallen forward head first and died where he lay.
What had happened next was unclear.
About a hundred yards away lay another body. A young woman – little more than a girl really, according to eyewitnesses – in her late teens or early twenties, unidentified so far, who had apparently been making her own way home from a night out. She was wearing red stilettos and a cheap black glittery cocktail dress and clutching a red bag with nothing inside but a house key, some money, and a cloakroom ticket from a club in town.
It was the usual story of a woman killed for walking home late at night rather than taking a taxi, though in her case she’d died, so first impressions indicated, because she’d walked inadvertently on to the scene as the Marxman was taking aim at the first victim.
The initial couple of shots meant for her seemed to have missed, the first hitting a nearby wall, the second shattering a window; and he must have been running to catch her up as he fired, for the third shot had hit her in the right hip and felled her as she ran too, and the next two were delivered from close range as she lay on the ground looking up at the killer, the gun placed directly against the front of the forehead, the trigger pulled. A paramedic who attended the scene was quoted as describing the two circular contact wounds, close together, that he’d seen on her skin, powder burns surrounding them like a halo round the head of a saint.
Other than that, it was difficult to tell much of what was happening. Once the crime-scene tape went up and a small battalion of officers arrived, counting their overtime already, to keep out the curious, there was only so much that could be said, that could be seen.
I saw the City Pathologist turn up just ahead of the van from the mortuary, and recognised faces from the murder squad as they passed grimly through the cordon. There was Sean Healy. Patrick Walsh. Tom Kiernan arrived on his motorbike and walked through the cordon with his helmet under one arm and his camera slung over the other shoulder.
Still no sign of Dalton getting in on the action.
As if on a loop, I watched footage of one reporter trying to buttonhole Fitzgerald for a quote as she arrived at the scene what must have been only forty minutes after leaving the house. I smiled as she just brushed past him as if he didn’t exist and disappeared into the darkness behind the screens. Detective Chief Superintendent Grace Fitzgerald of the Dublin Metropolitan Police arriving at the scene of the latest shooting, read the caption underneath.
It was a curious sensation watching her out there whilst I lay here in her bed, her pillow behind my head, the smell of her perfume in the room.
Over the next couple of hours, as I switched channels looking for anything new, I found only the same confused reports, endlessly repeated, the same small snatches of fact spun frantically in the hope that they would transform into something more valuable. But then the news reporters were masters at making gold from straw; they could keep this kind of thing going for hours, like jazz musicians given a hint of a riff and letting themselves spin off into some crazy innovation that soon took on a life of its own and left its old shell behind.
In place of reliable information, reporters filled in the gaps by talking to residents, oblivious to the fact, or maybe not giving a damn, that if any of the witnesses they spoke to really did have genuine evidence to impart about that night’s double shooting, then it was only going to be contaminated by this endless retelling for the benefit of the cameras and the furiously scribbling pencils of the assorted hacks.
Had the bystanders seen anything?
You bet.
Some claimed to have seen a man running in the direction of the river, though their descriptions of him varied considerably. Black guy, strongly built, said one, and a few backed him up. Well, it was the sort of neighbourhood where, when anything happened, they were inclined to think that a strongly built black guy had been to blame, even though any black guy, strongly built or not, would have been unlikely to move through these streets unnoticed. Dublin was changing fast in that respect, but it was no melting pot. Burke would be lucky not to be arrested by morning. Another reckoned the man was white, and so thin as to be almost skeletal in appearance. He had a beard. He had none. He wore a coat. He was in shirtsleeves. Yet another said she’d seen a woman backing away from the scene.
Another had heard a scream. When? He couldn’t say.
As the stories were retold, they were consistently embellished, like travellers’ tales round a campfire, so that dugongs became mermaids and rhinoceroses were unicorns and nothing was what it had been in the first innocence of the experience, until one man who lived in a house across the way from St Colman’s Church quite seriously declared that he’d been knocked to the ground by what he thought was the killer and distinctly remembered how he had a scar running down the left-hand side of his face; and it was only when he’d told it three times that it transpired this all happened the night before the shootings even happened.
If it happened at all.
This was why it was important for the police to be on top of things. Why hadn’t the witnesses been isolated? Why hadn’t their statements been taken before they had the chance to cross-pollinate their own memories with the seeds of whatever fantasies they picked up floating through the fevered air? Why hadn’t the police—
I stopped myself. There I went again, telling other people how to do their job. It had always been my weakness. This is none of your business, I told myself firmly. I wasn’t police, I was only someone lying in a policewoman’s bed and feeling redundant.
So I listened instead to a discussion with the ancient trembling priest in whose church doorway the man had been shot, who agreed, with that unrivalled talent for piety and platitude all churchmen have, that it was a terrible tragedy altogether and the truth lay with God and all things would come back to God in the end and God would make it right. He would also, he said, be holding a special prayer service for all the community to help them come to terms with this awful event, when, no doubt, his congregation would swell way beyond its normal size as those content to be ungodly the rest of their lives suddenly decided that there were benefits to godliness, not least the chance to share a piece of this action which had intruded so dramatically into their dull lives, and not forgetting a chance to appear on TV.
It was always the way.
I shouldn’t be so cynical, but between the Church and the inevitable grief counsellors who would follow, trawling for trauma to nurture like fishermen trawl for eels, I swear it was a wonder anyone managed to stay sane any more in the days following a tragedy.
The TV itself didn’t help. They kept up a rolling banner of news along the bottom of the screen. Is anyone in the city safe? asked one. Where will the Marxman strike again? There were numbers to call to vote on who was to blame for the crisis. Studio discussions were planned for the morning. Folk in the city had stayed pretty calm, considering, since the shootings began, but then the murders hadn’t really impinged on most people’s lives, and the shootings had been spaced out far enough till now that any risk of panic had had time to subside again; but the more victims who died, the less chance there was of keeping a lid on collective emotions.
I decided finally that the only thing I could do was switch the TV off. A huge weariness was flowing over me. There was little that could be done about murder when it became no more than a diver
sion, an entertainment, for everyone involved save the victims and their families.
When that happened, we were truly lost.
As the screen dissolved to grey, and the chatter of the news channels was replaced by the sound of traffic passing sparsely along the road outside, and the faint wash of the sea, I tried to tune my mind to a different frequency by thinking of Felix Berg, but that hardly helped either. I was pretty sure that St Colman’s Church hadn’t featured in any of the photographs out at Kilmainham. Did that mean Fitzgerald was right to dismiss Felix’s other pictures as coincidental? That his call to me really had been nothing more than a despairing self-dramatisation that had nothing more to do with the Marxman than Sydney’s death did?
If so, it ought to have been a comforting thought, but somehow it wasn’t. One thing I’d realised as I lay here alone tonight was that I didn’t want my own part in all this to end. Fitzgerald was out there, cold and sleepless probably, and envying me, but I envied her too. And I was sure she’d have felt the same if our positions were reversed. I still needed my own crime scenes, my own investigations, otherwise what was I? Nothing. Nothing at all.
Chapter Seventeen
Strange’s gallery was in Temple Bar too, not far from where Felix had lived. I hadn’t bothered telling him I was coming this morning, since I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to refuse to see me.
I didn’t have any reason to believe he would refuse to see me, but why take the chance?
The gallery was called Post.
Postmodern? Postindustrial? Posthumous? The sign wasn’t saying, and why should I care? It was in an old building, the front of which had been removed and replaced entirely with glass, so that all three floors were exposed as though by X-ray. The walls were as white as Felix’s and Alice’s and there were hardly any photographs on them, which meant that there was plenty of blank wallspace to see. The floor was of huge sandstone tiles.
I could see a man through the window, sitting behind a long glass desk, talking into the telephone. It could only be Strange.
He sat there with a sense of total proprietoriality, lord of all he surveyed, wearing a huge fur coat which made him look like a bear, or like he’d wandered in absently from an old Edward Gorey print, and he had the most bizarre moustache I’d ever seen, like he’d grown it for a wager one time and forgotten to shave it off once he’d collected his winnings.
An old-fashioned coatstand stood incongruously behind him.
I tried the door.
It was locked.
So I knocked to get his attention.
He glanced up, and I think was about to ignore me when a flash of something – recognition? – crossed his face and he pressed a button below his desk to activate the door.
It clicked open and I pushed inside.
By the time I’d closed the door behind me, he’d returned smoothly to his telephone conversation, so if he had recognised me he obviously didn’t think I deserved any further acknowledgement. I stood looking at the photographs on the wall instead.
Talk about disturbing.
Female nudes, black and white, very tasteful, except that the photographs were cut off savagely at the head each time. In one of the shots, a woman lay with a knife flat on her belly, the point angled towards her navel; in another the indent of a heavy chain could be seen deep on the skin of her buttocks and the chain itself lay coiled like a sleeping snake on her back. In another, she’d cut herself and the blood was painted on her skin in a coil the same way as the snake.
Title: Self Portraits.
It made me appreciate Felix’s photographs all the more.
‘Do you like them?’
The voice was almost in my ear and I turned swiftly. There was Strange at my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him approach, which on that stone floor was some achievement.
Then I glanced down and noticed he was barefoot.
‘Not really,’ I said, answering his question. ‘I prefer art that doesn’t look like it’s likely to turn up in the courtroom sometime soon as Exhibit A. Who took them?’
‘The artist prefers to remain anonymous.’
‘I don’t blame her.’
‘You find this work sinister?’ Strange seemed surprised, as though the idea that there might be something odd about a woman posing with daggers and chains around her torso had never occurred to him until that moment. ‘It’s very daring. Some people do find it threatening.’
‘Conventional people, you mean?’
‘Not everyone understands,’ he put it more gently.
‘Artists always blame adverse reactions to their work on the hang-ups of the audience. Does it never occur to them that some people might find their work freaky not because of the viewer’s own bourgeois preconceptions, but just because it is freaky?’
‘Freaky’s not a word I’d use,’ Strange said with a smirk. ‘It’s challenging society’s ideas about femininity, about violence, about the body. If it’s disturbing, that’s because it’s meant to be. The watcher’s meant to explore why they feel disturbed, what makes them feel threatened. That way they might learn something about themself. Alternatively, you can always look upstairs, there are other photographs there that you might like better.’
‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘If this is what you put on the ground floor, I’d hate to see what you have hidden up there. Besides, it’s you I came to see. My name is—’
‘Saxon. Yes, I know. Alice told me about you.’
‘Did she describe me too so you knew it was me at the door?’
He didn’t answer the question directly.
‘She said you might call round,’ he said. ‘Won’t you take a seat? I’m afraid I can’t offer you any coffee. There seems little point having a machine here when there’s a perfectly delightful place selling the best cappuccinos in town just around the corner. In fact, why not forget the seat and let’s take a walk round there now? Get some fresh air.’
In the middle of the city?
‘You don’t mind shutting up the store?’
‘I won’t have to close the gallery,’ he said, ignoring my attempts to needle him. ‘My assistant is upstairs, and it’s not as though we’re open to the public anyway. This is a private gallery, viewing is by appointment only. I’ll just give her a call and tell her where I’m going.’
‘Don’t forget your shoes,’ I said, and retreated outside and waited whilst he murmured into the mouthpiece of his phone and slipped his feet into moccasins.
‘I half expected you before this,’ he said when he finally emerged and pointed me in the right direction, and I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed I hadn’t come round sooner. ‘Alice told me you were interested in Felix’s death. What happened to him was a terrible tragedy. He had a great talent – no, talent isn’t right. Rock stars have talent. Felix had genius. A mastery of image.’
I said nothing. I hoped he wasn’t about to deliver another critical appreciation; I’d read enough of his pretentious essay in Felix’s book.
‘But then Alice is a remarkable woman too,’ he went on to my relief. ‘A very great critic. There aren’t many great critics. There are reviewers who can look at a photograph and throw together a couple of hundred or thousand words of praise or blame for some art magazine, but a critic is a rarer thing. You know what Jean Anouilh said about art?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
I didn’t admit that I didn’t know who the hell Jean Anouilh was.
‘He said the object of art was to give life a shape. And the object of the true critic is to give art a shape beyond what you can see only with the eye; it’s about making connections, and Alice is the best there is. Even when she writes about bad art, she’s worth reading, she always finds the right and true thing to say. Indeed, you might say that the mark of a good critic is one who is as worth reading when they’re talking about bad art as they are when they’re talking about great art, wouldn’t you agree? It must be hard for her right now,’ he went on when I didn’t respond to his
question. ‘She and Felix were very close.’
‘So she tells me.’
‘It’s hard to imagine them being apart,’ Strange continued.
‘The prospect of life continuing without Felix, day after day, must be intolerable for her.’
‘She’s told you that?’
‘Not in so many words, no. She doesn’t need to.’
We’d reached the cappuccino place and ordered our drinks, and while we waited I looked around at all the people drifting aimlessly through the square.
Swarming city, full of dreams.
‘That’s why,’ said Strange, ‘I think it would be best if you left her alone. If you didn’t keep getting her hopes up that there’s more to Felix’s death than meets the eye.’
‘He called me,’ I said. ‘He said someone was trying to kill him. Then he died. Maybe you could just shrug something like that off. I can’t. Besides,’ I went on as he tried to dismiss my words with a flutter of his fingers, ‘I haven’t been getting anyone’s hopes up. Alice doesn’t believe her brother killed himself. That is to say, she doesn’t believe that he simply killed himself. It’s Alice who’s encouraged me all along to keep digging.’
‘That’s not the way she tells it.’
‘How does she tell it?’
‘Alice says you’ve been bothering her about Felix.’
‘Me bothering her? That’s crazy.’
‘You’re bothering me. Why’s it so crazy you’d be bothering her too?’
‘In what way am I bothering you?’
‘Asking questions.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 10
