‘I might just do that,’ I said, though there was no might about it. The prospect of seeing Niall Boland on a bike was too good to miss.
Chapter Nineteen
I didn’t have far to walk from Burke and Hare’s to Grattan Bridge, where Parliament Street crossed the river and became Capel Street and where I’d arranged to meet Boland. Spring had gone into cold storage again today and the wind was little daggers off the river; and the daggers felt all the sharper after an hour by Burke’s oil stove.
Thankfully, I didn’t have long to wait before Boland came along.
I saw him cycling, puffing hard, up the sidewalk that ran along the river towards me, wobbling slightly in the wind. The cold had made his face ruddier even than usual, and the helmet he’d jammed down on to his head looked two sizes too small.
Then again, most things looked two sizes too small on Boland. He had a lumbering, thickset quality about him which, like many men his size, hid a surprisingly gentle, shy nature. I’d always liked him, though I’d never met anyone worse suited to being a murder detective. He was still the rookie on the team after switching a while back from Serious Crime, and it was beginning to look like he’d stay that way for ever. He spent most of his time down in Records, shuffling files, which made him useful to me, since there was no one better at digging up information, but didn’t exactly blow away his colleagues.
He even managed to look out of place in the city, like his mind had never got used to being hemmed in by stone and longed for an uninterrupted sky, but it was combined with a baffled expression which made it clear he couldn’t work out what was wrong.
He raised a hand and waved when he saw me waiting, then quickly brought the hand back down to the handlebar when the bike started swerving towards the traffic pouring down the quays in the opposite direction. Cars honked in warning, or it may have been plain annoyance.
Boland seemed to have that effect on some people.
Behind him came a leaner figure in sneakers and sweats and a hooded top with Tennessee State University written across the front. He had the hood up and his head was down as he ran, and the contrast between him and Boland’s square, solid frame, thick hands and clumsy manner couldn’t have been more pronounced. They were from different planets.
‘Saxon,’ said Boland with a gasp when they reached the bridge, and the other man stood catching his breath, hands resting on his thighs, ‘this is Patrick Walsh.’
‘I know,’ I said, because I recognised him from last night at Fitzgerald’s house. I held my hand out towards him. ‘The Chief Superintendent’s mentioned you. Said you’re good.’
‘I do my best,’ Walsh said with a lopsided grin, returning the handshake, and I could see his eyes appraising me, wondering if I was worth the effort, especially since he was bound to have heard plenty about Fitzgerald and me in Dublin Castle.
The usual locker-room talk.
Not that it had stopped him making a play for Grace.
Boland was checking his stopwatch.
‘You were faster that time,’ he said appreciatively.
‘I hear you’re after the record,’ I said.
‘No point doing something if you don’t want to be the best,’ Walsh replied.
‘That’s Saxon’s philosophy too,’ said Boland. ‘Are you two related?’
‘Where you from?’ Walsh asked me.
‘Boston.’
‘Boston, Mass., or Boston, Georgia?’
Was I supposed to be impressed?
‘You’re such an expert, you should be able to tell by my accent.’
‘Course I know,’ he said. ‘I was only teasing.’
‘Is that right?’
‘I’ve seen you before,’ he said.
‘Have you?’
‘Last night. Sitting in a Jeep opposite the Chief’s house.’ So much for my being inconspicuous.
‘You’re an observant boy, Patrick.’
‘That’s what they all tell me, babe,’ he laughed.
Babe?
This once, I decided to let it go.
I wasn’t sure what I thought about this Walsh. He was pretty forward; we’d only just met and here he was talking to me like we were old friends. I’ve always had a bit more old-school reserve, frequently mistaken for indifference, hanging over me. It’s not that I minded him talking to me like that, it just took some getting used to.
Besides, Fitzgerald had said he was a good cop. That was all that mattered to me.
As I waited for my mind to make itself up, I asked Boland what he knew about what had happened last night. I’d never been one for making small talk.
‘You’d better ask Walsh about that,’ Boland said. ‘The Chief gave me the night off. I haven’t even been out to the scene. Patrick can give you all the details.’
Though I wasn’t at all prepared for what he told me.
‘A copycat?’ I said more loudly than I intended. Then lowered my voice as a few passing heads turned sharply in our direction. ‘How the hell do they figure that?’
Walsh held his hands up in supplication.
‘Not so fast. Bear with me, babe. I’m just telling you what the theory was. The Chief reckoned we were getting too quick to see everything as the work of the Marxman.’
Paranoid, I wondered if she’d had me in mind when she said it.
‘Plus,’ he went on, ‘there were points of difference.’
Not those again.
‘The pattern’s always been the same up till now. One shot, one victim. Disappearing without a trace. Clinical. This time it got messy. So messy that the gunman didn’t even pick up the shells before making his getaway. And the first victim turned out to be one Charlie Knight. Known as a bit of a hitman himself. Serious Crime say he’s carried out at least nine contract killings for various gangsters round the city over the last three years, and those are just the ones they know about, and yet he’s never been charged with a single offence, not so much as an unpaid parking ticket. They call him the Grim Reaper in underworld circles.’
‘So the thinking was someone finally took a hit out on him?’
‘Had to happen eventually. The fact that he was standing in a doorway with his back to the gunman when he was shot could’ve been a mere coincidence.’
‘You said that’s what the theory was. What happened to change it?’
‘The shells happened,’ said Walsh. ‘Soon as the firearms boys had a look, they IDed them as coming from the same type of weapon as the previous victims. Whether it’s the same one exactly we’ll have to wait for the usual tests. But—’ He opened his hands in a shrug.
‘How many gunmen can there be running round Dublin with a Glock .36?’ I finished.
‘You’re reading my mind.’
‘What about the girl?’ I said.
‘Looks like she just got in the way and had to be disposed of.’
‘At least there’s no change of tactics then. I was worried last night meant he’d graduated to killing two at a time,’ I said. ‘Does she have a name yet?’
‘Tara, wasn’t it?’ said Boland.
‘Early,’ said Walsh. ‘Tara Early. Sixteen. She lived round by Summerhill in a flat with her older sister. Moved there a couple of months ago because she wasn’t getting on with her parents. They didn’t like her boyfriend, apparently. She’d only just left school and had started working at a supermarket round the corner from where she lived. She’d been out for the night with her mates in town, spending her first week’s wages, seeing which bars would serve them underage. They said she left about eleven. She must’ve been on her way home, cutting through the back streets, when she came across the Marxman at work, maybe let out a cry, got noticed, and it was goodnight Vienna.’
It was that simple. Murder could be so trite, so petty. And I thought of something I’d once heard someone say: ‘It’s not the bullet with my name on it that worries me. It’s the one that says “To whom it may concern”.’ That one had certainly found a home in Tara Early.
&nb
sp; To cover my growing sense of gloom, I suggested we start walking back towards Dublin Castle. We crossed the road and began climbing up Parliament Street.
The gates of the castle were dead ahead at the top of the hill.
‘I was talking to a friend of yours this morning,’ Boland said to me as he pushed his bike and Walsh trotted briskly alongside, making jabbing motions at the air like a boxer.
‘Yeah, who?’
‘Alice Berg,’ he said.
‘You were talking to Alice?’
‘The Chief asked me to give her a call. She said Alice had told you something about how she still thought her brother was murdered, have I got that right?’
I nodded. Fitzgerald had mentioned last night maybe sending Walsh round to deal with Alice. Then the Marxman obviously intervened and Walsh had better things to do.
Boland, though, was always available.
God bless Fitzgerald, still thinking of me in the midst of the Marxman case.
‘You get anything from her?’
‘Are you kidding me?’ said Boland. ‘She’s one of the most infuriating women I’ve ever met.’
‘That include your ex-wife?’ said Walsh.
‘You leave my ex-wife out of it. Only I’m allowed to insult her. This Alice now, she’s something else altogether. I couldn’t get a squeak out of her. She’s a brick wall in the shape of a woman, I swear, she wouldn’t tell me anything. Soon as I mentioned what happened to her brother she clammed up like, I don’t know, a clam with laryngitis. It’s as if she thought I was trying to trick her into saying the wrong thing, when all I was trying to do was get her to say something that’d shed some light on why her brother killed himself.’
I wondered if that was how he’d put it. Little wonder she clammed up if he did. It wouldn’t exactly have endeared him to her.
‘If it’s any consolation, I’ve had much the same experience with her,’ I said. ‘One minute she’s insisting she knew everything about her brother’s life and the next she’s admitting she knew next to nothing.’
Not to mention spinning a whole different line to Vincent Strange, always assuming he was telling the truth. I wondered how many different versions of Alice there were.
‘I met this Berg’s girlfriend, you know,’ announced Walsh unexpectedly.
That threw me.
‘Felix had a girlfriend?’
‘Is there something wrong with him having a girlfriend?’
‘Alice swore to me he didn’t have one, that’s all,’ I said. ‘She said they only needed each other. How’d you find her?’
‘She turned up yesterday morning wanting to see his body,’ said Walsh. ‘I didn’t know who she was at first. I just told her that, for one thing, she was in the wrong place to see anyone’s body, and, for another, she’d need the permission of the next of kin. She stormed out. Said she had as much chance of getting permission from the next of kin as she had of getting laid in a monastery. My kind of woman. I’d give her permission to see my body any time.’
‘What’s her name?’ I said.
‘Gina Fox.’
Alice, call me. Please – Gina.
So that’s what that was about then.
‘I’m glad to see I’m not the only one the sister was holding out on, anyway,’ said Boland.
‘I think Alice is starting to realise Felix had a whole secret life she knew nothing about,’ I said, ‘and she’s afraid of where it might lead.’
‘So now this foxy Gina gets written out of the official history,’ said Walsh, ‘like all those communists who made the mistake of falling foul of Stalin? Is this Alice going to airbrush her out of the family photo album too?’
‘She’s trying to protect him.’
‘I’d say he’s a bit beyond protecting now,’ said Boland bluntly.
‘She’s thinking of his reputation.’
‘He that filches from me my good name,’ declared Walsh, pausing briefly in his dancing, ‘robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.’
Boland and I stopped walking and stared at him.
‘Shakespeare,’ he said with a bow. ‘I used to want to be an actor. I learned that speech once for a part I was reading for. Othello. I didn’t get it. Didn’t get hardly any parts, to tell you the truth, which is probably how I ended up joining the police.’
We’d come to the lights at the top of the hill and waited for a gap in the traffic. I saw Boland’s eye take in the flashing sign for a café further down the road towards town.
Saw him glance down at his watch.
Wrestling with temptation.
I couldn’t help wondering what would become of him. Increasingly, he was like some slow, doe-eyed dog which sat around waiting to be kicked.
All detectives needed to have a spark, a sense of, yes, mission; it was nothing to be ashamed of, and murder squad detectives needed it more than anyone. They had to believe they were different from the rest, that they were better, and sometimes they took it so far they disappeared up their own asses with arrogance. But they still needed it, otherwise they were just making up the numbers, and Boland was drifting pretty close to that state these days.
His get-up-and-go had got up and gone.
The very fact that Fitzgerald had let him keep his night off even after the Marxman struck again, and sent him off today on errands to Alice when Felix’s death wasn’t even in her jurisdiction any more, was proof how little she needed or respected him.
She wouldn’t have done it if Boland wasn’t depressingly dispensable.
I caught Walsh’s eye and he winked at me, grinning, like he knew what I was thinking and he thought the same, and at that moment I despised his conspiratorial grin, and despised myself for having invited it by being disloyal to Boland in the first place. Whatever he lacked in investigative nous, he more than made up for with a good heart, and I needed to believe in that sometimes.
What was equally depressing, though, was that Boland didn’t even seem aware of the silent communication passing between Walsh and me. Or if he did, he was doing a remarkably good job of hiding it, and I’d never noticed that propensity in him before. He had one of those bluff, honest, open faces that just expose all the thoughts inside no matter what.
He caught me watching him and took his chance.
‘Didn’t you say you wanted to get something to eat?’ he said.
‘I thought you were on a diet?’
‘One bacon roll can’t hurt.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel like eating anymore.’
‘More for me then,’ he said cheerfully.
At least he was still hungry for something, I found myself thinking unkindly.
Chapter Twenty
A girlfriend. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was more than I’d had that morning when I woke.
Before we parted, Walsh gave me her number on the strict understanding that I didn’t reveal it came from him; I think he still had plans of his own for calling her up and asking her out, and didn’t want his chances ruined by me; but as it was, Gina didn’t even ask.
Still, she took some persuading before she’d agree to talk to me.
‘You’re not the police?’ she said. ‘Then I don’t get it. What do you want me for?’
‘I’m—’ What could I say? ‘I’m a friend of Alice,’ I put it feebly.
‘Oh,’ she replied. ‘Alice.’
‘She asked me to look into Felix’s death. You knew him. I just thought—’
‘I didn’t know him that well,’ she said. ‘Well, not as well as I thought I knew him.’ She sounded bitter, and I was immediately intrigued. ‘Look, come round if you really want, I’ll talk to you, it can’t do any harm. But I don’t see what help it’s going to be either . . .’
It took a while to find the address she gave me. It was a basement apartment in a quiet street not far from Appian Way on the southside of the city. Potted plants round the door, a windowbox with flowers. Not my kind of thing at all. She probably had
cuddly toys in her bedroom too. She was dressed like I expected from the outside of the apartment too. She had on some kind of shapeless shift with a bright summer pattern, and wore a string of beads round her neck interlaced with tiny silver charms, and she had that weird frizzy hair that never stays combed down for long; it spilled freely long and red past her shoulders.
Seeing her, I wasn’t surprised it hadn’t worked out with Felix. He didn’t seem the type to go for a woman with such a vague, hippyish, New Age vibe about her; though to be fair, she seemed sharp enough when she introduced herself and let me in.
Inside was more austere than I’d expected from the outside too. The walls were bare, exposed brick and plaster, painted white – that seemed to be the required style with artists – and there was little save an iron-framed bed against the wall, the sheets and quilt all white too, and a table scattered with photographs. Her own, I guessed, and self-portraits mostly, some of her tastefully in the nude on the bed here in this tiny room – and there, through a window, I saw a yard and a stone wall painted white too with a covering of ivy, and that was in the background of some of the other nude shots.
She must be popular with the male neighbours.
And maybe some of the female ones too.
Among the photographs were also still lifes: of a watering can and a wooden staircase heaped with books and a window with a cracked pane of glass like a spider’s web, as well as shots of a white cat stretched out in a patch of sunlight, and the same cat chasing a leaf. I was glad to see no sign of a cat round my feet, at any rate, since I wasn’t in the mood for befriending another one. Hare was more than demanding enough.
Gina was silent for a while, letting me look at her pictures.
‘Do you want a drink?’ she said at last.
‘That depends what you mean by drink,’ I said.
‘Never fear, I’m not going to offer you herbal tea or homeopathic tonic, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘I’ve got a bottle of wine here somewhere, you can drink it with me if you like.’
I liked.
The day was still chilly, so I was surprised when she lifted the wine and two glasses, carrying them all in one hand, each finger occupied, whilst with the other hand she pushed down the handle of the door and led me into the yard.
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 12
