‘The accepted wisdom,’ said Fisher, ‘is that artists – and by artists I mean the whole range, poets, painters, composers – don’t become killers.’
‘Why?’
‘Why is that the accepted wisdom, you mean? Because there’s never been an artist who was known to have committed a premeditated murder. Some have been driven to kill in certain circumstances, by rage or jealousy; but not the kind of murder you’re talking about.’
‘No, I meant why don’t they become killers?’
‘Because, you could say, murder is largely a crime of self-esteem. A man or woman who kills repeatedly is doing so because their own self-image is so indistinct, so threatened, that killing is the only way they can gain a sense of self. A false and twisted sense of self, admittedly, but it suffices. Till the next time. They have this huge drive and urgency and a sense of belief about themselves and nowhere to channel it. Artists have another channel to disperse their energies. They don’t need to kill in order to express their desires. Or,’ he went on, picking at his pasta, ‘you could just say artists don’t kill because they’re self-actualisers.’
‘Come again?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘Self-actualisers. Have you ever heard of Abraham Maslow?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Maslow was an American psychologist who conducted a study in the 1950s into people he thought were the best exemplars of mental health. He identified certain characteristics that they shared. A highly developed sense of the ridiculous. An ability to listen to their own feelings rather than the dictates of authority or tradition or majority opinion, though without flouting those norms for its own sake. A respect for other people.’
‘That’s you ruled out on the last one then, Saxon,’ said Fitzgerald.
‘Very funny.’
‘The main thing they held in common, Maslow concluded, was an ability to see the world as it was, not simply how they wanted it to be, so they were more detached, more rational. More able, what’s more, to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty. This is exactly the quality which the kind of killers like the Marxman lack. They cannot accept the world as it is; absolutely cannot tolerate ambiguity. Nor can they laugh at their own weaknesses and failings. And since creativity tends to be more pronounced amongst self-actualisers, and self-actualisers are unlikely to become killers, then it follows that artists can’t be killers.’
‘Sounds like bullshit to me,’ I said.
‘You and me both,’ agreed Fisher. ‘No group is collectively immune from the tangle of impulses that go into making a serial murderer. Not psychologists, not artists, not police, not anyone. Felix could have been your man as well as anyone. In fact, there are things in his work which could have singled him out as above averagely likely, I’d have thought.’
‘Such as?’
‘You can see from the Marxman’s MO that he isn’t picking out specific targets. That’s why you’re finding it so difficult to catch him. Usually there is something linking a killer’s chosen victims that says something about him. That’s the Rosetta Stone of profiling. There’s always a link. So a man who kills blonde single mothers, or bank managers in their forties, has a specific psychology and history which orients him towards those targets. The Marxman, though, whatever the press might have thought initially about his political leanings, doesn’t seem to have any of those targeting mechanisms in his head. He kills across a whole spectrum of society indiscriminately, or seemingly indiscriminately.’
‘He doesn’t feel anything then? He thinks like a paid hitman?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘Not like a paid hitman at all,’ Fisher demurred. ‘To kill people for a living requires a certain psychopathic disengagement that suggests an inability to regard other people as being as real as yourself; but even so, a paid hitman only kills the people he’s paid to kill. Your hitman, your Marxman, is doing something quite different. He genuinely hates the people he kills, but for nothing in particular, just the fact that they exist at all. He hates people in general; he’s almost like a spree killer whose rage towards the swarming masses expresses itself in one violent outburst, in which he seeks to kill as many of that mass as possible. The only difference is that the Marxman is spacing the spree out, taking it one at a time. His rage is controlled, directed. Even the fact that he prefers to take only one shot shows his need for control, though obviously that went a little askew at the church recently.’
‘How would all this fit in with Felix?’
‘I don’t know anything about Berg’s state of mind, I can only go on his work, and the photographs in Unreal City could certainly be seen as dissociative in the same sense. Berg seemed to see individuals as a faceless, indistinguished mass, not as individuals; he set himself apart from them in a way that would make it easier to kill them if that was what he decided needed to be done. He wouldn’t be killing anything important, only an insect, an ant.’
Fitzgerald frowned.
She had a good frown.
‘I wish it had been him,’ she said. ‘That would mean it was all over.’
But she knew things were never that simple.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Fitzgerald and I went from the restaurant straight to the theatre. They were showing some revival of a play I hadn’t even wanted to see first time it came out. I didn’t care much for the theatre, to be honest. If it was up to me, we’d have taken in a movie instead, or just gone home; but Fitzgerald was always trying to improve my mind – introduce me to culture was how she put it – and I didn’t complain too much because it was a chance to be together. And the theatre had one advantage over the movies. They stopped the show halfway through so you could get a proper drink. As it was, we skipped the second half anyway since Fitzgerald agreed that they shouldn’t so much have revived this play as smothered it with a pillow.
Like your mother, I wanted to reply.
But I didn’t. I was on my best behaviour. My sense of humour got me into too much trouble in this town as it was.
Instead, we found some bar and drank whiskey, and I could tell she was tiptoeing round me because she didn’t even complain about me smoking like she usually did. In fact, we were both tiptoeing round one another, since my interest in Felix was still there between us and I knew she was afraid that seeing Alice that morning might have reactivated something in me which she would have preferred to go cold, while I wanted to stay off the whole subject to avoid getting annoyed again that she wouldn’t see what I was convinced I could see, that Felix’s death was connected in some as yet imperceptible way to the case she was working on.
There was nothing to be gained from revisiting that old quarrel.
In the end, she ordered herself a taxi and headed home, saying she had to be in work early – and I didn’t point out that if she wanted to be in work early, then my apartment was surely the best place to start the morning’s journey.
I simply finished my drink then made my way back through the winding streets to my apartment. It was quieter than usual. I hardly passed anyone on the way. The latest killing seemed to have had that effect on the city. Everyone was waiting and fearful.
The door was unlocked when I got back to my building, the lobby deserted, no trace of Hugh the doorman; and the elevator was broken again, which meant I had to climb the stairs. It’s at times like this that an apartment on the seventh floor starts to seem less desirable.
All I wanted was to crawl into bed and leave thinking for the morning. But I immediately sensed something was wrong when I reached my door.
There was a tension in the air.
Something was disturbed.
It was only when I took the key from my pocket and tried to slip it into the lock, and the lock moved backwards as if flinching, that I realised what was wrong.
The door was open, like the one downstairs in the lobby.
Was someone inside my apartment?
I reached instantly for my gun before realising I didn’t carry one any more. No one carried a gun in Dublin.
Except the Marxman.
I guess I should have left it at that and come back with reinforcements, but that was never my style. Why do the sensible thing when you can do a stupid one instead?
So I pushed the door with one hand until it swung back fully and I could see all my living room in shadow down to the glass doors at the far end leading out on to the balcony, and they were open too; and with the other I reached for the light switch and clicked it on.
Instant light flooded the room.
Everything leapt out in sharp relief.
The chair toppled on to its side, the upholstery torn at the back.
The drawers taken out and upended.
Papers fluttering in the breeze from the open balcony.
Books scattered everywhere.
My one painting pulled down from the wall and slashed. Even the cupboards in the kitchen, I realised as I stepped forward into my apartment and gazed round in incredulity, had been searched. Jars had been swept out and smashed on the floor. Bottles broken. And it was the same in my bedroom. Shirts, pants, jackets, underwear, all thrown crazily across the floor; the mattress pulled back and torn cleanly with the blade of a knife; a lamp lay on its side.
On the floor of my bathroom lay a smashed scent bottle. The shower curtain had been pulled off its rings. The sink was filled with bottles pulled down from the shelf above.
Someone had clearly been searching the place – but for what?
The same thing they’d been looking for in Felix’s house?
And here, in the closet at the end of the corridor, was the trunk where I kept my work. The manuscripts of books I’d never managed to complete; research notes which had accumulated over the years with the inevitability of debts; newspaper cuttings, videos, tapes, photographs; my own yellowing articles, and various editions of my books, hidden away here out of sight where I wouldn’t have to be reminded of them every day. The trunk had been discovered by the night’s raiders too, and its contents disgorged and pawed over and ripped till it looked like a wolf had attacked them whilst they slept.
I’d always been wary of people I didn’t know well enough being in my apartment, which was why I was so careful about who I invited here, why I’d been so nervous when I let Alice in. In the early days of our relationship I hadn’t even allowed Fitzgerald to come back here, which she’d considered pretty strange but accepted as part of my alien charm.
Having my own space was important to me. That was one of the reasons why I’d always resisted getting a place together. But knowing a stranger had been in here, looking through my things, touching my possessions, rummaging around in my world – and me not even knowing who it was – was something more nightmarish still. It felt like a violation. Don’t psychologists always say the home is an extension of the self, after all? That was why there was no such thing as a pure crime against property; there was always a personal assault involved too, even if it was only an assault on the mind. And what did ‘only’ mean in that context anyway? It made me wonder too why I’d never taken more precautions to stop it happening. I knew the principles involved in making small spaces defensible against burglary, and yet I’d never even bothered in my own apartment. I guess I’d never imagined that I’d need to. More fool me.
The only consolation was that I kept so few of the personal mementoes that other people gather around them for company that I was able to think of that absence as a barrier between the intruder and myself. It would have been different had he been able to look at private letters, diaries, photographs – but I collected nothing like that. Like Billie Holliday,
I was always travelling light, and I was reminded again of why I preferred it that way.
You didn’t get hurt.
I returned to the living room and closed the balcony doors, then lifted the chair back into its rightful place and sat down on it, wondering who it was had been here.
I could have written the whole thing off, told myself it had been kids looking for money, a random burglary. Like Alice said, people were always getting burgled, especially right here in the centre of the city. But I couldn’t fool myself that easily.
Whoever came here tonight had been looking for something.
Something to do with Felix.
I couldn’t prove that, but I knew it was true. Whilst I’d been following Strange and imagining myself very clever, someone else had been shadowing me. Not only that, but shadowing me much more successfully. They knew who I was, for one thing.
Knew where I lived.
And that realisation was as frustrating as it was unnerving. I hated anyone having an advantage over me. I needed to know what I was up against.
I couldn’t say how long I sat there contemplating the trashing of my apartment, but gradually my eyes must have become accustomed to the mess because I suddenly noticed something I hadn’t seen before. It was attached to the hook where my one painting had been hanging when I left the apartment that morning to go to Felix’s funeral.
My first thought was that it must be a note.
Then I saw what it really was.
A photograph.
Another snapshot like the one I’d found hidden among Felix’s Marxman papers, only this one needed no enlargement to see who it was in the picture.
It was me.
It had been taken this morning at the churchyard as I idled among the gravestones, passing time before the funeral. I could see the line of the wall that ringed the cemetery along the bottom of the picture, meaning that whoever had taken it had been standing in the road at the time. My eyes were turned away from the camera, regarding nothing, and I was frowning; I always seemed to be frowning in pictures, I think my face was just designed to look unhappy.
The photograph had been pressed firmly on to the hook in the wall so that it looked like the point was protruding through my skull, tangled by my own hair.
My visitor sure had a neat way of making a woman feel good about herself.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Conor Buckley had started out with offices in some crumbling, rat-gnawed Victorian hole down by the quays that shook gently when the trains went by, shivering stone overlooking its shivering reflection in the water at its feet. Now he’d fled the heart of the city for some soulless glass and steel monstrosity in the growing financial district, where his fortress sat indistinguishable from the ranks of banks and insurance companies massed alongside it.
There was no point me trying to get past security. Besides, I could tell by looking for his Mercedes in the parking lot that Buckley couldn’t have arrived yet. Not unless he’d started taking the bus, and there was more chance of Warren Beatty taking a vow of chastity.
So I waited in the parking lot.
Yawning mostly.
I hadn’t got much sleep last night. Clearing up made me realise how Sisyphus felt, pushing that rock eternally uphill; and then, when I’d finally brought some semblance of order to my apartment, sleep wouldn’t come anyway. The thought of a stranger rifling through your underwear drawer isn’t exactly the best relaxation known to woman.
When I cornered him that morning, Hugh couldn’t tell me any more than I knew already. He’d knocked off early, one of the other residents in the building must have left the door downstairs open, or maybe fallen for some story and let the intruder in . . .
What he had for me instead of explanations was a letter from Buckley.
Hence the waiting.
Buckley was a lawyer, excuse me whilst I wash out my mouth, and the worst kind: a defence attorney. He’d once represented a killer I was trying to nail, which didn’t exactly endear him to me either. It wasn’t so much that he represented him – everyone is entitled to a defence, right? – so much as that he didn’t seem to care much whether the guy in question was guilty or innocent. For me, that’s kind of a crucial question.
I didn’t have to wait long before Buckley’s Mercedes pulled in. He was driving, and there was some woman in the passenger seat admiring her reflection in the
overhead mirror, like she had to make sure she looked good enough before getting out in case there were paparazzi waiting with cameras.
Buckley hadn’t changed much, I saw as he climbed out. Short and round and bald like Mussolini – that’s who I always thought of when I thought of Buckley, which, I am glad to say, wasn’t often. Ever since I’d known him he’d been stuffed to the same bursting point with self-satisfaction at having made it. He was the archetypal working-class kid with a grudge. Clever, that went without saying, but a man for whom intelligence could never bring as much satisfaction as deviousness, or justice as much as beating the system. It was said of him that he regarded each case he won as another blow to the Establishment. I didn’t go in for that kind of amateur psychology, but it didn’t seem far off the mark in Buckley’s case.
Perhaps I’d introduce him to Burke and they could plot the revolution together.
Except Burke would despise the oily creep as much as I did.
His passenger climbed out too and she was all legs and blonde hair and . . . well, that was about it. Philosophy major? I doubt it. She was carrying a few files, so I guess she must’ve been his secretary; but I doubted Buckley had hired her for her typing skills.
‘Saxon,’ he said when he saw me. ‘Is that a bad attitude in your pocket or are you just displeased to see me?’
‘Spare me the feeble banter, Buckley,’ I said. ‘I want to talk.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Don’t tell me. You’re due in court.’
‘Within the hour,’ Buckley said with a smug smile. ‘I’m representing some young gentleman who had the misfortune to be found at the airport with five kilos of cocaine in his hand luggage.’
‘Let me guess. He didn’t know what was in there. He was the innocent pawn of an evil international trade.’
Buckley pretended to be astounded.
‘Have you been sneaking a peek at my intended defence, Special Agent?’
‘Just a wild guess,’ I said. ‘You know, you must have the unluckiest clients in Dublin. They’re always being arrested for things they didn’t do.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 16
