‘Whatever you want, I’ll do it.’
‘Then you can start by dropping the rest of the photographs off in Dublin Castle. Healy’s holding the fort there. I’ll give him a call and explain what you found. I’ll try and get a start made on having the people identified so they can be interviewed. After that, why don’t you follow up with Miranda Gray? She might be able to tell you more about whoever took those pictures.’
Only when the call ended did I realise I’d forgotten to tell her about Felix’s journal too.
Absently, I opened it up again and noticed for the first time that there were two pages stuck together right at the front. I eased a nail between them and prised them apart. Inside there was an inscription, scrawled untidily in pen and written out like a poem. I began to read it.
What in Christ’s name was that all about?
Chapter Forty-Four
I tried calling Miranda Gray’s office, but Elaine, the incompetent secretary she’d told me about, said she was out and she didn’t know when she’d be back.
I tried calling her cellphone, but it must have been switched off.
Tried Fisher but he didn’t have any idea where she was either.
Eventually I called back the secretary to ask if she’d any idea where Miranda could be and was told I could always try the Forty Foot.
‘The bar?’
‘No, the place where people go swimming, you know?’ Elaine said. ‘She often goes there if she’s free.’
Now she tells me.
I did know the Forty Foot. I remembered reading something about it once. It was a heap of wild rocks a couple of miles further out along the road on which Fitzgerald lived, originally known as the Gentlemen’s Bathing Place but now open to all, where people went swimming in the sea all year round, risking drowning and hypothermia in the name of tradition. They even used to do it naked, Fitzgerald once told me. Takes all sorts.
I drove out there and parked by a No Parking sign.
Trusting to luck on both accounts because I had no way of knowing if Miranda was actually here.
There was a gate in a wall with the words Forty Foot woven in wrought iron in an arch across the top, and beyond that a stony path leading down towards a rough shore where I could see a few old men towelling their hair dry, their skin wrinkled.
Near the gate was a sign: Togs Required By Order.
That was a relief.
I pushed open the gate and walked down the narrow path towards the rocks. To one side was a flight of rough-hewn stone steps with a yellow railing up the side where swimmers could clamber out, and where a dripping old man was now stepping gingerly back on to shore.
A wind was whipping off the sea, too cold to be quite right for summer, not quite vicious enough for winter, and there was a dullness to the water. It would rain later. Clouds were gathering like a lynch mob on Howth Head across the bay.
A few heads lifted to look at me as I approached. I was looking round with a sort of lost expression, I guess, I didn’t know where to start looking. Rocks fringed the sea and people sat about talking, but I couldn’t hear their words. Rather there was a heavy silence like prayer enveloping everything. Every sense was dominated by the sea.
In the end, I asked the old man I’d seen clambering out.
‘I’m looking for someone. Miranda Gray?’
‘I know Miranda,’ he said. ‘That’s her out there.’
He pointed back to the sea, where I could just make out a head bobbing like a buoy, or like a seal perhaps, lifting its snout and regarding the land like it was an alien element.
Was that her?
It must have been. She was the only presence I could see in all that waste of water. I considered shouting to her that I was here, but I would have felt foolish, and anyway the wind would only have snatched my words away and dashed them against the rocks; so instead I sat down with my back to a boulder and waited and watched her.
She must have been a strong swimmer to manage out there. She seemed so far away, and sometimes the waves rose around her and she disappeared entirely from sight and I was almost convinced she’d slipped below the surface too long – and then she’d appear again.
‘It’s rough, isn’t it?’ I said to the old man, but he only chuckled.
‘This isn’t rough,’ he said. ‘A milder day you couldn’t have asked for.’
Was that what he called it? Mild?
It was only a few more minutes probably before the bobbing head began to make its way back towards the shore, and soon a figure was emerging from the water in a black bathing costume, smiling, hair in a swimming cap so that she was hard to recognise, climbing out with the same faltering steps as the old man, holding on to the yellow railing.
I rose as she got nearer.
The smile vanished when she saw me.
‘Saxon? What are you doing here? Is everything all right? It’s not Fisher, is it?’
‘Fisher?’
‘Something hasn’t happened to him?’
‘No. No. Nothing like that.’
She tiptoed past me and reached to another rock, where her towel was waiting. Wrapped herself in it and pulled the cap off, letting her hair tumble out.
‘I just wanted to talk to you,’ I said. ‘I have to ask you something.’
‘It’ll only take me a moment to get dressed,’ she said.
‘I’ll wait outside then, shall I?’ I said. ‘My Jeep’s there.’
‘I’ll be quick.’
I made my back through the iron gate to the Jeep and sat inside, keeping watch. The old man I’d spoken to came out presently, then a woman I hadn’t seen down by the rocks but who must have been there since there was no other way in or out that I could see.
I waited a while longer, and still there was no sign of her.
Eventually I climbed out of the Jeep again and began to hurry back. I reached out to the gate to push it open – but before I could touch it, it jerked back, and there was Miranda.
We both jumped.
The view behind her was dark with the sea.
There’d be no more swimming today.
‘I’m sorry for keeping you,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t find my shoes, and then I spilled my purse and there were coins everywhere and I was scrambling about for them.’
‘You don’t have to explain.’
‘Sorry. Force of habit. I always explain myself too much.’
‘And apologise.’
‘Yes, I always do that too much as well. Sorry.’ She smiled nervously. ‘You made me feel a little shaky. When you appeared. I thought something awful must have happened.’
‘Being in that water would be enough to make anyone shaky,’ I said.
‘You get used to it,’ she said. ‘It’s the first shock. After that, it becomes easier. Every time it’s easier. I find it takes my mind off things. I’ve been thinking about Alice a lot.’
I nodded. I knew what she meant.
‘Let’s get inside,’ I said.
Soon as we were seated, I asked her straight out.
‘Did Felix ever take your photograph?’
‘Felix? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t have allowed it. I was his therapist, he was my patient. It wouldn’t have been right for me to start posing for him.’
‘I don’t mean posing. Just a snapshot. In the street.’
‘No,’ but a hesitant no now. ‘I’m sure I would’ve remembered. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s probably nothing. Just a dangling thread that needs to be pulled. I only want to know if anyone ever took your photograph in the doorway of the Abbey Theatre.’
‘How – how did you know about that?’ she said.
‘I’ve seen the photograph. Felix had a copy.’
‘Felix? That can’t be right. It wasn’t Felix. I had a call, it must have been over a year ago. Someone called me and told me they were doing a series of photographs of people in the city who didn’t belong, who came from elsewhere, who didn’t quite fit in. They were going to call it S
trangers, they said. There was to be an exhibition. They mentioned some people I’d heard of who’d already had their photographs taken. I was flattered.’
‘So you agreed to have yours taken too?’
‘Not at first. The man refused to say who he was, refused to give any details. That was part of the mystery, he said. All he would say was that it would take no time at all. All I had to do was be at the Abbey Theatre, it would be one shot and that was it.’
One shot.
‘Finally,’ she said, ‘I agreed. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I’m a bit of a camera buff myself. The idea intrigued me. So I went there at the appointed time but he never showed. I hung around for half an hour, perhaps not even that, then I left. I was annoyed about it, as you can imagine. But I had no number to call, no name, no one to complain to.’
‘And you never heard from him again?’
‘Not a word.’ She looked confused. ‘And now you’re saying a picture was taken?’
‘One shot, like you said. It was among a collection of snapshots Felix had hidden in a locker at Central Station.’
‘How did Felix get it?’
‘You don’t think he could’ve been the photographer?’
‘Absolutely not,’ she said firmly. ‘How could I not know Felix’s voice? The accent, the inflection, everything about it was all wrong. It couldn’t be.’
‘Maybe he got someone to call on his behalf.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘You weren’t the only one,’ I said. ‘There were scores of similar photographs. Each person must have had the same call, inviting them to be at a particular place at a particular time, only to turn up and find no one there, not realising a picture had been taken.’
And all of them strangers.
People who came from outside the city.
That was what the people in the pictures had in common.
And maybe Felix was one of them? He didn’t come originally from the city either. Maybe he’d been told to go to Howth lighthouse; he turned up; his photograph was taken – albeit at a much greater distance than the others, which was why I’d needed to blow up his image before he could be recognised; and then – what?
Had it been sent to him? Had the Marxman made contact with Felix after all? All along I’d assumed it was Felix who had stumbled upon the identity of the killer, but maybe it was the Marxman who had chosen Felix, picked him for some role.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘either Felix took the picture of you or he knew who did. That’s why it’s so important if you can remember anything about the man who called you.’
‘I’m sorry. He wouldn’t give me his name,’ Miranda said. ‘I know, it sounds stupid going along to a meeting with someone you don’t know, but at the time the idea connected with something inside me. I’ve never felt I really belonged here. I liked the idea of being one of those strangers. Maybe you think it was silly of me to go.’
‘I went out myself to meet Felix at Howth,’ I pointed out. ‘I have no right to be lecturing you about what you should or shouldn’t have done.’
‘I only wish I could help.’
‘Think about it later when you get home, yeah?’ I said.
‘I won’t be able to think about anything else.’
Chapter Forty-Five
‘There was a man here looking for you,’ said Hugh the doorman when I got back home.
‘He leave a name?’
‘No.’
‘A number?’
‘No.’
‘A message?’
‘No.’
Hugh was a man of few words.
Most of them unintelligible.
‘He leave any lasting impression on you whatsoever?’
Hugh considered the question.
‘He had a beard,’ came the answer.
‘We’re getting somewhere,’ I said encouragingly. ‘Stay close by me now, Hugh, and I think together we can pull through this one. Tell me. Was the beard kind of short and all salt-and-peppered with grey?’
Hugh looked impressed with my clairvoyancy skills.
‘It was.’
‘And did the bearded one have a waistline that made him look in some lights like he was one of our larger planets which had fallen tragically down from space and ended up wandering the streets of Dublin looking for a new orbit?’
That was probably too many words for Hugh to take in all at once, but he worked his way through them one by one, chewing them over carefully like a mouse that had picked up too large a portion of cheese but knew its teeth could get through it given time.
‘I didn’t think he was that fat,’ he said eventually.
‘I do.’
It had to be Fisher.
I called him from the lobby, and it turned out he was in Brown Thomas, a big old-fashioned department store in Grafton Street on the other side of St Stephen’s Green. So as it was, I didn’t get to go up to my apartment anyway.
‘I was looking for something to bring back for Laura and the children,’ he said when I caught up with him on the fourth floor.
‘You going back to London?’
‘Soon,’ he said. ‘I can’t hang around Dublin for ever.’
‘I’ll miss you,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘But you know, you’ll not find anything for Laura and the kids here,’ I pointed out. ‘This is the menswear department.’
‘I know that,’ said Fisher. ‘I’m also looking for some new shirts. I’m running low. I didn’t expect to be here as long as I have. I could really do with some clean underwear too.’
‘Spare me the details.’
I ended up walking round the racks with him, picking clothes. Taking them off the hangers, making him stand in front of mirrors so he could see what he looked like with them up against him. Fitzgerald would have been astonished. Shopping had never been my thing. As long as I could find something that fitted and kept me warm, I was happy.
One pair of jeans was much like another, after all.
Though the peculiar thing was that choosing for Fisher was making me more fussy. I found myself irritably replacing shirts he’d picked out with a terse: ‘Not your colour.’
What was happening to me? I was turning into a girl.
On the way to the counter, Fisher filled me in on what progress had been made in the last few hours. The murder squad, it seemed, had been able to identify over half the people in the snapshots and managed to speak to about half again of that number.
They all told the same story as Miranda Gray.
A man had called inviting them to be at a particular place at a particular time to have their photograph taken as part of a series of pictures to be entitled Strangers. All had made their way to the named location, only to find that the caller never showed. Each had been irritated, perplexed, but none had a clue who the mysterious caller had been.
And none had ever heard from him again.
Could it really have been George Dyer?
‘There’s certainly a similar type of thinking going on there,’ said Fisher. ‘Whoever took those photographs wanted to shoot the subjects as a trophy. Shoot them on film, in his case, but the methodology and language are uncomfortably close. He wanted to capture these people so that they became part of some collection. He was thinking like the Marxman. One shot per victim. It can’t be a coincidence.’
‘Shooting someone with a camera’s a bit different from shooting them with a Glock .36.’
‘Give me some credit,’ said Fisher. ‘All I mean is that you take something from someone when you take their photograph. They’re in your power in some indefinable way. They’re at your mercy. Even the American photographer Diane Arbus said once that it hurts a little to be photographed.’
I thought of the people in the snapshots in Felix’s locker.
How vulnerable they’d looked.
The photographer had taken something from them, even if it was only their peace of mind for an hour. And then he had the record of their discomfort in his possession eternally.<
br />
To gloat over.
To enjoy.
Just as he must’ve gloated over the pictures of the other victims after they died.
‘The only problem,’ I pointed out, ‘is that Dyer didn’t even have a camera. Didn’t have one that we could find, at any rate. So if he didn’t take the pictures, who did?’ I felt frustrated, annoyed with myself. ‘If only Dyer hadn’t killed himself,’ I said.
‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ Fisher said. ‘He wouldn’t have talked. Killing himself was a way of imposing silence on himself, but even if he had been arrested he would have embraced silence anyway. I’ve seen it often enough. Some perpetrators come in and can’t wait to spill the beans; it’s getting them to shut up that’s the problem. Others never say a word about what they’ve done. I think Dyer would undoubtedly have been in the second category. Cutting his own throat was the ultimate proof of that. Maybe that’s why he chose the name Dyer for himself. Dying was always going to be his final vocation.’
‘Isn’t it everyone’s?’ I said.
We paid up and I offered to make him dinner, because it was getting dark now and the stores were closing, and still he hadn’t managed to buy any gifts for his children or Laura.
‘I’ll look again tomorrow,’ he said as we walked round to my apartment. ‘You should come with me. I see now you have a talent for shopping that you’ve never properly tapped.’
‘Count me out. I’ve done enough shopping to last a lifetime.’
‘Saxon! Fisher!’
‘Fitzgerald?’
Her Rover had pulled up alongside the kerb suddenly and the window wound down.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Fisher.
‘Gina Fox is dead,’ she said. ‘Get in.’
She was pulling back into the line of cars before I’d even managed to put on a seatbelt. She was hunched forward on the wheel, willing the traffic to disappear.
‘She was found about twenty minutes ago,’ she explained in a rush. ‘It’s not clear how long she’s been dead. I got a call from Walsh. He’s down at the scene. He says whoever killed her must have fired about a dozen shots into her head from point-blank range. Blown most of her face away, according to him.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 31
