And then I woke with a gasp – afraid – and I knew there was someone in my apartment. I could hear breathing. Or was it only mine?
Listen.
Listen.
Yes, I could hear them now, moving about in darkness on the other side of the door.
I slid out of bed and tiptoed across the floorboards, placed my ear next to the door and listened – hearing nothing again – before turning the handle and edging it open, slipping through the crack like a shadow and down towards the sitting room, where all was still and unlit and the moon coming through the great window fixed unearthly shapes to the walls like waves frozen in ice, reminding me again of my dream.
Turning the corner, I saw the room was empty as it should have been and began to think I must have imagined hearing someone here – only imagined that my previous unwelcome visitor had returned – and then there was a small, furtive movement and I saw the outline of a figure silhouetted against the light from the moon.
‘Don’t move,’ I said quietly. ‘I have a gun.’
‘You’d better not have,’ said a familiar voice, ‘or I might have to arrest you.’
‘Fitzgerald? What are you doing here?’
A light snapped on, hurting my eyes fleetingly, and there she was, sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, still wearing her coat, her arms folded across her chest.
‘I’m sitting in a chair with my coat on and my arms folded,’ she said.
‘I can see that,’ I said.
‘Then what did you ask for?’ She smiled. ‘Do you have any ice cream?’
‘What time is it?’
‘Will my answer affect your answer to the ice-cream question?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then it’s after two. Now, what have you got?’
‘Chocolate chip, last time I looked.’
‘Yum. Don’t forget to bring a spoon.’
‘You want me to get it?’
‘You’re nearer to the fridge. Plus, you’re up.’
I fetched her the tub of ice cream and a spoon, and perched on the arm of the chair next to her whilst she peeled back the lid and helped herself.
‘I was having a dream,’ I said.
‘That’s what happens when you go to sleep.’
‘I dreamt the whole city was flooded. I was swimming.’
‘You?’
‘I can’t really remember it now.’
‘That’s dreams for you,’ she said. ‘You can’t rely on them to hang around.’
‘You’re in a strange mood,’ I said. ‘Flippant.’
‘You complaining?’
‘Simply observing.’
‘I’m delirious with sleeplessness, that’s all,’ Fitzgerald said as she held up a spoonful of chocolate chip for me and I bent my head to taste it. ‘Nothing ten hours in bed and a new job wouldn’t fix. I’ve just spent the night with Fisher in his hotel room, raiding his minibar and trying to figure out once more the connection between the victims. There’s always something connecting them, isn’t that what the experts say?’
‘That’s a cliché,’ I said.
Fitzgerald gave a laugh.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Your line about clichés is exactly what I said to Fisher,’ she told me, ‘and he said: I knew I’d read it somewhere. It must have been in one of Saxon’s books.’
‘Charming. You two get any actual work done as well as bad-mouthing me?’
‘Not much. That is, we got a lot of work done, but we didn’t get any results. Much better to have it the other way round. Fisher has reached in a handful of days on this case the stage it took most of us weeks to get to. What is technically called the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel phase. He’s looked at every connection between the victims he can think of. Their names. Star signs. What the weather was like at the times they were killed. He’s practically looked at what colour socks they were wearing and where their great-grandmothers lost their virginity.’
‘I never realised before that was an indicator for psychopaths.’
Fitzgerald spooned another helping of chocolate chip ice cream out of the tub, and didn’t even notice as a drop fell off and landed on her coat.
‘We missed you,’ she said. ‘Could’ve done with your input. Did you not get any of my messages?’
‘I got them,’ I said. ‘I just wasn’t sure I’d be much use to anyone tonight.’
‘Is it still Alice?’
She was all I could think about these days.
Alice in the water.
How long had it been since I found her?
Four days?
Five?
I’d lost count.
All I knew was that I couldn’t get the final image of her out of my head. It reminded me of some painting I’d once seen of a young girl floating down a river, dead, surrounded by flowers, the water sparkling. And somehow that painting and Alice had become mixed up in my head too with an imagined memory of Lucy Toner lying dead in the ground at the bottom of her garden in Howth, her tongue heavy with soil, and an image of Sydney sleeping with her head on the rail, because asleep was always how I needed to imagine her in those moments.
That Alice had been pregnant when she died – ten weeks gone, according to Alastair Butler’s autopsy report – only made it worse.
It was like Felix all over again. Only no, not like that. With Felix it never felt right that he’d killed himself, despite his depression, his breakdowns. Alice had had none of the predictive traits, and yet it did feel right when I told myself she’d taken her own life.
The words didn’t knock their head against the ceiling of credibility.
‘You did warn me against becoming emotionally involved,’ I said.
‘It’s easier said than done. I’m not blaming you. Here,’ she added, finally noticing the ice cream on her coat. ‘Hold this while I get a cloth.’
She handed me the tub and got up to go to the kitchen.
She’d only taken a couple of steps when she stopped abruptly.
‘Hello, what’s this?’
She bent down and picked up something that was lying behind the front door.
It was like an oversized playing card with a painted picture on one side. Someone must have pushed it under the door earlier, only it was so dark when she came in that Fitzgerald hadn’t noticed it. The picture showed a young man walking under the sun, in an old-fashioned tunic and yellow boots, holding a flower, a knapsack on a stick over his shoulder, a dog dancing at his feet. He was stepping off a cliff where a rainbow waited to catch him. Two words were printed along the bottom.
The Fool.
‘I know what this is,’ she said. ‘It’s a Tarot card. And see, there’s a number on the back. Looks like a telephone number.’
I took the card from her and looked at it.
‘This is Gina’s,’ I said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
‘And she began to lay the cards face up on the table very, very slowly,’ Fitzgerald told Lawrence Fisher next morning as we sat in her car in the parking lot at Dublin Castle, the psychologist in the passenger seat up front whilst I was stranded in the back with Patrick Walsh. ‘The Moon. The Star. The Hanged Man. The Devil. The Wheel of Fortune.’
‘God, I always hated that show,’ I said.
‘And once she’d laid them all out, she explained even more slowly how Tarot cards were the oldest form of prophecy, and how the cards were originally chapters in a Book of the Dead written in Egypt by the god of wisdom, and how they were copied down on to tablets of stone and then the tablets were copied on to cards, and how each card stands for some aspect of your life or personality or destiny, and how Felix had given her this pack and how he often made decisions based on the way the cards were dealt. And then she told us her theory.’
‘Which was?’
‘That the Marxman was killing people according to the Tarot cards.’
‘No way,’ said Fisher.
‘That’s what she’d come round to my apartme
nt to tell me,’ I said, ‘then, when I didn’t answer the door’ – I avoided Fitzgerald’s eye in the rearview mirror asking me the sleeping pills questions again – ‘she put the card through my door with her number on it because she didn’t have any paper on which to write a note.’
‘According to her,’ Fitzgerald took up the story again, ‘each of the victims represented one of the picture cards of the Tarot. Mark Brook was The Magician. Judge Prior was Justice. Jane Knox was The Hermit. Charlie Knight, aka the Grim Reaper, was Death. Finlay Hart was . . . shit, what was Finlay Hart again, Saxon? I’ve forgotten.’
‘The Emperor,’ I reminded her.
‘The Emperor, that was it,’ she said. ‘Apparently, that one represents authority.’
‘What about Tim Enright, the first victim?’ said Walsh.
‘She admitted she didn’t have a clue which one he was meant to be,’ I said. ‘Her best guess was The World because it symbolised material wealth. Didn’t he work in finance?’
‘She even reckoned,’ Fitzgerald added, ‘that that was what the Marxman meant by whispering in Brook’s ear about being the dead hand. It was nothing to do with Karl Marx. He just meant he was the one who dealt the hand of cards that dealt out death. Dead hand.’
‘And what did you say after she told you all this?’ Fisher asked.
‘Say? It was hard enough keeping a straight face, never mind saying anything,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Tarot cards, I ask you. It’s not even original. I was just worried that when she’d finished with the Tarot she was going to get out a ouija board and suggest having a seance to contact the spirits of the victims.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘we just thanked her for her help and then—’
‘We made a break for it,’ finished Fitzgerald.
And Fitzgerald did catch my eye in the rearview mirror this time and we found ourselves slipping into laughter again, like we’d done last night in my car after escaping from Gina’s basement apartment. An escape was what it felt like.
‘I don’t know what’s so funny,’ Walsh said in all seriousness as he looked between Fitzgerald and me with a blank expression. ‘I think it’s pretty neat.’
‘Neat?’
‘Yeah, neat. What have you got against it, babe?’
‘What I’ve got against it, pretty boy,’ I said, trying not to catch Fitzgerald’s eye a second time in case she set me off again, ‘is that it’s total bullshit. And quit calling me babe.’
‘Children,’ said Fisher soothingly. ‘No squabbling there in the back. Besides, maybe your friend Gina has a point.’
‘You’re not saying you buy into all that mystic mumbo jumbo, are you?’ I said.
‘Buy into it, no. But I wouldn’t call it mumbo-jumbo,’ Fisher answered. ‘The Tarot has it uses. I even studied it in college as part of my psychology course.’
‘They study this crap at college?’
‘It was background for Jung’s investigation into the collective unconscious,’ Fisher explained patiently. ‘The symbols are supposed to represent states of being or qualities which we encounter as we go through life. Miranda still uses the cards in her sessions. Sometimes a patient can be encouraged to read meaning into them, and the meanings they find help them understand what’s going on inside their heads, helps them make sense of the world. It’s similar to interpreting the symbols that pop into the head in dreams; it says something about one’s psyche and the way that psyche adapts to deal with life’s shocks and knocks.’
‘Maybe her patients would make a lot better sense of the world if they didn’t have all these Jungian, Freudian, whateverian delusions floating about in their heads.’
‘Let’s not go there again,’ said Fisher. ‘I think we all know your uncompromising views on therapy, Saxon. And I said I studied it at college, I didn’t say I used to sacrifice virgins and dance naked round standing stones every time there was a full moon.’
What an image.
‘I’m just surprised you bothered with it at all,’ I said.
‘Well,’ said Fisher, ‘you’re only Jung once.’
It was a joke that deserved to be ignored.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s say for argument’s sake – and it’s a pretty feeble argument, but let’s say it anyway – that the Marxman was addled enough in the head to choose his victims according to the Tarot cards. What difference would it make? All it means is you’d have to check out every New Age looper in town, talk to all the places selling scented candles and incense and books of spells, anyone offering horoscopes and feng shui consultancies in their back room or running night classes in astral projection. It’d be a nightmare and it’d still add up to zip, it still wouldn’t tell you who you’re looking for or who he’s going to shoot next.’
‘You know something, Saxon?’ said Fisher. ‘Your brain isn’t working half so well as it used to. You need to trade it in for a younger model.’
‘You’re saying there is something in this?’
‘Not in the way Felix’s girlfriend meant probably. But even red haired cranks can inadvertently stumble on the truth by accident. And don’t jump down my throat again, I don’t mean the Tarot. I mean Tim Enright. She was right to single him out as unusual.’
‘But Enright was no one,’ I said.
‘That’s the point,’ said Fisher. ‘Look at all the other victims. They were all someone. They were all known. All public figures. Terence Prior. Finlay Hart. Charlie Knight. Mark Brook. Even the vagrant woman used to be someone. But Tim Enright wasn’t a public figure, he’d never been important, so why was he shot too? More than that, why was he shot first? The Marxman could have started with any one of the victims. The judge, the politician. That would really have been making a statement. That would have gained him attention right from the off. But he didn’t. He started by killing an unknown, anonymous man. With a whimper, not a bang. Gina got that part right at least. Tim Enright doesn’t fit.’
‘So what you’re suggesting,’ I said, trying to work my way through his chain of logic, ‘is that his significance to the Marxman couldn’t have been in the public sphere, so it must have been in a private one? That Enright might have even known the Marxman?’
‘I’m suggesting it’s a possibility,’ said Fisher.
‘Couldn’t he just have been getting in practice by shooting Enright?’ asked Walsh.
‘That was my thinking initially when Fitzgerald asked me to look into this whole thing,’ Fisher admitted. ‘That Enright’s was an opportunistic killing and only afterwards did the Marxman realise he didn’t need to stop with one murder. He could go on. And on. Now I’m not so sure. If the Marxman did know Enright in some way, and planned the killings in advance, then isn’t it equally likely that he feared Enright exposing him and hence had to dispose of him right at the start? He had to be got rid of to make everything else possible, to give the Marxman the space to be himself.’
‘Then we need to start by finding out more about Enright,’ said Fitzgerald.
She lowered her window and called over to Boland, who’d been left standing by the wall all this time, playing lookout, and he trotted over with a bundle of files in his arms that Fitzgerald had asked him to bring along in case she needed to refer to them.
‘What have you got on Enright?’ she said. Boland squatted down and began flicking through the files one by one.
When he had got to the end without luck, he flicked through them again.
‘Give me a minute, Chief. It’s in here somewhere.’
‘In there isn’t much use to me.’
‘Damn, I could’ve sworn it was . . . ah, here it is.’
He tugged out the correct file finally and put it into Fitzgerald’s outstretched hand, and there was silence as she turned the pages slowly, reading.
‘It’s basically as I remember it,’ she said. ‘His whole bloody life story’s in here. School, college, work, professional qualifications. In other words, nothing much.’
I leaned over and lifted out a page torn
from a magazine whose edge was peeking out from among the other papers. It showed a glossy picture of three men sitting behind a desk, Enright in the middle, all sporting fixed grimacing smiles and casual sweaters with vivid patterns which they wore with that self-conscious embarrassment of men normally to be found dressed only in three-piece suits and ties. Below was a caption: Celebrating Ten Years Of Success.
‘What’s this?’ I said, glancing at it quickly then handing it to Walsh.
‘It’s from some local business magazine which did a profile of Enright’s company about six, eight months ago,’ Walsh said dismissively. ‘The usual corporate PR whitewash. Boland took it out so we had a good picture of the victim for the file.’
‘Other than the one taken at the autopsy, you mean?’
‘It wasn’t his best side.’
Enright smiled out of the picture with the melancholy innocence of the unknowing.
‘Don’t forget he worked in the city,’ said Fisher. ‘That means he must have had a score of clients on his books. That could be an angle worth pursuing.’
‘We’ve been down that road already,’ said Walsh. ‘Enright didn’t have any fallings-out with his clients. No disagreements or rivalries. No one had a motive to want him dead.’
‘Someone did,’ Fisher reminded him mildly. ‘It doesn’t have to be a disagreement, anyway. Perhaps quite the opposite.’
‘A closer than usual professional association, you mean?’ said Fitzgerald. ‘It’s a possibility. Walsh, get on to it. Get me a full list of Tim Enright’s clients going back . . . call it three years. Look for any discrepancies or unusual patterns in his dealings, his accounts, his diary. And speak to his colleagues again. There must be something they can remember. Boland, you see if there’s anything else about Enright in the records that hasn’t come up yet.’
‘Will do, Chief.’
‘You can come with me if you like,’ said Fisher, turning round in his seat as Walsh and Fitzgerald climbed out of the car again. He obviously realised I’d become redundant once more as the official DMP machine geared up. ‘There’re a few people I need to try and see before this afternoon. And before you ask, no, I don’t mean witch doctors.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 25
