Or pretended to.
I envied him.
A single lamp burned on the desk, a sickly pool of light at its base.
I took a walk down to the river, thinking about nothing, which I generally find is the best thing to think about when I’m feeling low, but unable to stop the image of Strange’s burned-out house swimming into my mind’s eye. George Dyer had died and Strange had given me the photographs and now he was dead too. It was too much of a coincidence to believe that the three events were unrelated. But how they were related was another matter.
When I retraced my steps to Burke’s store, the Closed sign was still there and the door was still locked, though it was only early afternoon, but another light had come on now in the back room and the cat had shifted from its sleeping place.
I rapped loudly on the glass again, and again, and the light went out, and Burke appeared in the doorway leading through to the back room.
He had a book open in his hands, and the cat trailing round his ankles, and his head was bent down to read and he didn’t look up until I knocked again harder than ever – and then I saw that he was wearing headphones because he pulled them back and let them fall around his throat and smiled and came to the door to unlock it.
‘I thought you were ignoring me,’ I said.
‘And lose my best customer?’ said Burke, and he went over and laid the book face down on the desk, where I saw the title staring back up at me in the pale light: Friedrich Engel’s Essential Writings on Politics and Economics.
Burke caught me looking at it.
‘I’ll lend it to you when I’ve finished, if you want.’
‘That’s OK. I’ll just wait till the movie comes out,’ I said, and I sat down heavily in the usual chair, only realising as I did so how much I ached, whilst that damn cat hopped up and started making itself at home with my person.
Burke pulled off his headphones and laid the Walkman on the desk next to the book.
‘What can I do for you?’ he said.
‘Am I that easy to read?’
‘Easier than Engels, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘I can always tell by the way you sit down whether you’re here for coffee or whiskey or something harder to supply. What is it?’
I told him Strange was dead.
That Strange had been murdered.
I told him about the photographs.
I told him about the Strangers series, and all the while he didn’t say a word in reply. Didn’t even wonder aloud why he hadn’t had an invitation to have his photograph taken too. He did that sometimes. Just listened whilst I ran on complaining like an overflowing bath, not spoiling things by interrupting or offering unwanted solutions to problems like I tended to do.
Finally I told him how Paddy Nye’s wife had recognised the photo of Dyer . . . Toner . . . whatever he chose to call himself.
‘Now ain’t that a coincidence,’ he said.
Which was how I knew, if he was interrupting me, that it must be important.
I watched him as he got up and walked back behind his desk.
‘You have something?’ I said.
‘I made it my business to have something,’ he said, ‘since you mocked my ignorance about the subject last time you came in.’
‘I don’t even remember talking about Nye’s wife.’
‘We didn’t,’ said Burke. ‘We were talking about the book on the Ireland’s Eye murder.’
‘And what’s she got to do with it?’
‘She wrote it.’
I was about to object when I realised what a simple mistake I must’ve made.
P.F. Nye.
And Nye’s wife was called Tricia. Short for Patricia. Why had I assumed the P stood for Paddy? It was just as likely to have stood for her name.
‘She’s quite a well-known local historian,’ Burke said.
‘That’s how she got it together with Nye. They shared a mutual interest in the island.’
‘Who told you all this?’
‘She did,’ he said.
‘You went out there?’
‘Thought it might be worth a journey.’
‘You obviously got on better with her than I did. I got the full forty degrees below zero treatment. Got the impression she wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire.’
And then I cringed inwardly as I realised what I’d said.
Bad analogy.
Burke had the decency not to point it out.
‘How did you get her to talk?’ I started again.
‘Some people have it, some people don’t. You don’t because you’re too prickly. Too quick to start a fight. I prefer the smooth approach. So I appealed to her vanity. Said I’d read her book and admired it hugely. That usually does the trick. Soon she was singing like the proverbial canary. I’m quite an expert on old Howth murders now. Reckon I might write a book about them myself.’
‘But did you learn anything useful?’
‘Knowledge is useful for its own sake,’ Burke said. ‘Did they never teach you that in school? However, if you insist on taking a strictly materialistic approach to the subject of wisdom, then yes, I guess I did. I learned, for one thing, that Tricia Peel, who’s now Nye, used to play together with Lucy Toner when they were kids, and that Felix and Brendan were like blood brothers, never out of each other’s company. And I also learned for another thing that she’s always believed it was Felix Berg who killed her friend. I think maybe that’s where she got her interest in long-forgotten miscarriages of justice. Now why aren’t you looking as surprised as I expected you to be? You hear what I’m saying?’
I heard.
But it wasn’t what I was hearing that kept me silent, it was what I was seeing. I was seeing again what I’d read yesterday in Felix’s journal. Why hadn’t I brought it with me?
‘Do you remember what it was about?’ said Burke when I explained what was bugging me.
‘There was something about a corpse being planted in a garden,’ I said, ‘and whether it was blooming or not blooming, and then something else about the frost disturbing it. Or maybe it was a dog. I dunno. It just sounded like garbage to me.’
‘It’s people like you give Americans a bad name. That garbage just happens to come from one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says everyone.’
‘Well, you know my brain isn’t wired for poetry. You going to tell me what it is?’
‘I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you. Wait here.’
He switched on the light in the back room again, and his voice drifted back like an echo as he read aloud through the names on the spines of the books, until—
‘Here.’
And his shadow was returning and handing me a thin book that looked less substantial than a leaf in his huge hands.
The Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot.
‘Those words you half remembered sound to me like they come from The Waste Land. I told you to go read it.’ He opened it flat and pointed triumphantly to a page. ‘There, I was right. Part One, The Burial of the Dead, line seventy onwards.’
I read where his finger pointed and recognised at once the words from Felix’s journal.
And a few lines further up there were more words that I recognised. Felix hadn’t just got the title of his own book, Unreal City, from any part of The Waste Land, but from this very same section, with its forgotten corpses buried and disturbed in gardens.
And all of a sudden I felt so cold it was almost like it was winter again.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Fitzgerald wasn’t impressed by my theory, to say the least.
‘You think Felix Berg killed Lucy Toner?’
‘Don’t jump down my throat,’ I said. ‘Just hear me out.’
She took a drink and replaced it deliberately.
It was coming on for late afternoon. We were sitting in a bar, catching up. A jukebox was playing too loud, but for once I was glad of it. It meant we wouldn’t be overheard.
Telling Fitzgerald was bad enough without an audience as well.
‘That’s what the quote meant at the start of his journal,’ I said. ‘All the stuff about a corpse being planted in the garden, about it being disturbed. Lucy’s was the corpse that was planted in the garden. Hers was the body whose rest was disturbed. What else could Felix have been talking about?
Why else would he fill his journal with those press clippings?
What were they for except to feed his appetite to relive what he’d done? Why else would he call his book Unreal City?’
‘Because Eliot borrowed it from Baudelaire and Baudelaire’s line about ghosts in daylight clutching at passersby fitted what he was trying to show in his work—’
‘That’s only what we were meant to think,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it make more sense to see the title of the book in the context of an ongoing pattern of confession? He told Vincent Strange he used to live in a house with a murderer. Paddy Nye says Felix constantly said one of them was a murderer. He even visited Isaac Little in prison and told him he believed he was innocent. I don’t know what his reason for doing all that was, whether he was tortured with guilt for what he’d done or simply liked playing with people’s minds, playing with fire, risking exposure; but you can’t deny that he did it.’
‘Fisher says artists don’t become killers,’ said Fitzgerald firmly.
‘No he didn’t. He said there hadn’t been many examples of artists becoming killers, but he accepts they’re as likely to become killers in the right circumstances as anyone.’
‘Let’s say Felix did kill Lucy Toner,’ she said. ‘I saw the report on her murder. I saw what was done to her. The soil in the mouth. The rape. You’re not saying that Felix Berg did that and then just got up, dusted himself down and got on with leading a normal life as if it had never happened? Because as a generality, men who rape fifteen-year-old girls and fill their mouths with soil until they choke don’t tend to be able to hide what they are for ever.’
‘Of course I’m not saying that.’
‘Then where did it go in Felix Berg?’
‘I think he was able to sublimate those urges into his work. Into his pictures. Remember how the introduction to his book said his early work was considered violent, highly erotic, some even said semi-pornographic? I think he knew what they revealed about him, which was why he tried in later years to buy back his earlier work. They were like a pane of glass stretched across his skull. Anyone looking at them could have seen right into his mind. He didn’t want them to know what was in there. I don’t believe artists who produce those sorts of extreme images are just exploring issues to do with sex and violence in contemporary culture, like they claim. I think they produce them because, to put it simply, they get off on them, because they make some dark place deep inside them sing.’
‘I’m with you all the way on that,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘But surely Felix had stopped producing those violent pictures?’
‘No, he hadn’t. He was still taking sado-masochistic photographs. He took the ones that were hanging in Strange’s gallery. I saw them. I saw how disturbing they were. And even in his mainstream work, you heard what Fisher said. How it was detached from normal human feeling. Dissociative. Even Strange talked about the rage in Felix’s work. He was like a drug addict getting methadone, a killer by instinct and appetite making do with a substitute, and in his case the substitute was the imagination. Killers often use sick, violent pornography as a kind of self-medication. Felix was producing his own supply.’
‘Killers do often consume other people’s images of cruelty and pain when they can’t make their own,’ acknowledged Fitzgerald, ‘but it never serves to dampen those feelings down. It only fuels the fantasies. Why would Felix Berg have been any different? It’s too risky a strategy. By flirting with those urges, wouldn’t he just risk accentuating them, taking them to a point where he couldn’t control them anymore? If you’re right about Lucy, and I’m not saying you are, then he’d already killed once. He’d know he had it in him to do terrible things. Wasn’t he risking being drawn to killing a second time?’
‘Maybe that’s what he secretly wanted,’ I said. ‘Maybe he wanted to fuel his fantasies whilst pretending to himself that he was controlling them, so that when they did spill over he could tell himself he’d tried his best, it wasn’t his fault, he’d been unable to stop, he’d done everything he could. Or maybe the urges were so strong that he was forced to try any method of controlling them or they would’ve taken over his life.’
‘But they didn’t spill over, did they?’
‘Didn’t they?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking confused. ‘That’s what I’m asking you, isn’t it? You’re the one with all the theories.’
‘They’re not theories,’ I said.
‘If they’re not just theories, where’s the proof?’
‘About a year ago, Felix was out working on the streets, middle of the night, when he was knocked on the head and left for dead.’
‘It was in the obits. I remember.’
‘Where he was hit,’ I said, ‘is the most vulnerable part of the head. The skull’s thin, there’s no protective fluid keeping the brain safe from harm. I spoke to Felix’s doctor earlier this afternoon and he confirmed that Felix sustained significant damage to the temporal lobe region of his brain. Not enough to stop him carrying on a normal life, but enough to mean he’d have serious problems afterwards with self-control. In anyone this would be a problem; in someone like Felix with what you can only call an extreme, violent sexual fantasy life, it could be disastrous. Violent people, people who kill repeatedly, have often been found to have sustained damage to the very part of the brain where Felix was injured.’
‘Just because he took a blow to the head doesn’t make him a killer,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘Or do you want me to go and arrest everyone who went to hospital in the past five years with a sore head on suspicion of being a potential murderer?’
‘I’m not talking about everyone, I’m talking about Felix. His doctor told me Felix suffered blinding headaches following his attack. He had black-outs, periods where he didn’t know where or who he was. This was rather more than the breakdown Alice said he suffered. He was raving. Threatening suicide. Attacking her even. That’s why she and Strange decided that the best thing to do would be to take him away to the States for treatment at some private clinic the doctor recommended. That’s where they spent last summer. But—’
‘How did I know there was going to be a but?’
‘It didn’t work out quite the way they expected. He was leaving the clinic for no reason, going drinking. Next thing Alice discovered he’d been visiting a gun club. You remember he told Miranda the same thing? And now it turns out that even the patrons of the club thought he was a bit odd, erratic, talking to himself, shooting wildly.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I got Burke to call the county sheriff and spin him a line. He’s good at that. He gets people to talk who haven’t even talked to themselves for years. They talk without knowing they’re talking. Seems Felix had become something of a local legend over there. It didn’t take much persuasion to have them recounting all their stories about him.’
‘So Alice and Strange brought him back home?’
‘Yeah, and she said he was doing well, that he was on new medication, that it was working; but shortly after he returned people started dying. The Marxman was in business.’
‘I still don’t see what your point is. Felix killed Lucy Toner? OK, if you say so. He took a bump on the head and turned into a one-man version of Wacky Races? I’ll buy that too. I always told you he was probably screwy, which is precisely why you shouldn’t have got involved. But why’s it so urgent all of a sudden that we have to sit here and discuss it when the whole world seems to be falling apart around us? Felix is dead.’
This was the difficult part.
The part I’d been dreading.
The part
I’d been building up to all along.
‘What,’ I said, ‘if he isn’t?’
‘Isn’t dead?’
It was like I’d told her I was an extra-terrestrial.
‘I didn’t see his face that night at the harbour,’ I insisted before she could start objecting. ‘It could have been anyone. Does Butler know what Felix looked like? How could anyone say that the man hauled out of the water that night was Felix Berg? Half his face must have been blown away by the gunshot wound through the eye.’
‘But why would he want to pretend to be dead?’
‘Because he needed to disappear.’
‘Why?’
‘Here goes.’
Deep breath.
‘Because Felix Berg is the Marxman.’
The howl of the jukebox filled the long silence from Fitzgerald that followed.
‘Saxon,’ she said at last, ‘I really think you’ve flipped this time.’
‘Why is that so unbelievable? He killed Lucy Toner. He’d been behaving erratically, violently before he went to the States. He visited gun clubs whilst he was there. The start of the Marxman killings coincided with his return to Dublin. Maybe Gina’s even right about the Tarot, I don’t know. He did introduce her to the cards, and there are even references to it in The Waste Land.’
‘You were the one who said the Tarot was nonsense.’
‘It is nonsense, but if it’s a nonsense that Felix believed in then maybe we need to look at it again. Think about it. We have the testimony of his sister that Felix was obsessed by the killings. He had the pictures of some of the crime scenes on the wall of his latest exhibition. He even told Miranda Gray straight up that he was the Marxman.’
I was trying to batter down potential objections with words, and it was working. Fitzgerald still wasn’t convinced, but she wasn’t putting up a fight.
‘But Alice identified the body in the water as her brother,’ she said simply.
‘I know. The only thing I can think is that she must have been in on it.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 33
