‘What is it?’ I said impatiently when she turned off the phone.
‘Walsh got the pathologist to show him the report again.’
‘And?’
‘It was Felix,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. The fractures matched. Everything was correct. Walsh even went round to his doctor’s house and showed him the still photographs from the autopsy. Saxon, it was Felix.’
I couldn’t believe it.
‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t him who was doing all this, then who was it?’
‘I think you’ll find that it was me,’ said a voice from the other side of the fire.
Chapter Fifty
And we both turned to the fire, and there stood Paddy Nye – but that couldn’t be right, surely, because the voice hadn’t sounded like his. It had been more distant, and anyway Paddy was turning his head in his turn to look behind him, and there—
There was a figure silhouetted behind him on the hill.
And it had the voice of a woman.
‘Tricia?’ said Nye.
The figure who stepped off the hill into the circle of light wasn’t Nye’s wife, though.
It was Gina.
She wasn’t looking bad for a woman who’d been dead for the last twenty-four hours.
Was hers the boat I’d heard phut-phutting as we stood on the hill a short while ago? Must’ve been, I guess. It never occurred to me that another boat might be coming to the island.
I thought only an imbecile would come here.
As I’d proved.
I wondered why I didn’t feel more shocked to see her standing there with a pistol.
‘It’s a Derringer,’ she said, catching me looking at it. ‘Nice piece, don’t you think? I stole it from Strange’s house. I thought it might come in useful. It’s old but it will do the trick. Which is more than I can say for Strange. All that bad sex I put myself through with him lately in the hope he’d give me the key to Felix’s locker, and in the end he just hands it to you. Talk about ingratitude. Still, I think he learned his lesson. And what else could I do? I’d tried softening him up by sending him threatening letters and breaking into his gallery, and still he said it was his duty to keep Felix’s worldly goods safe from harm.’
‘As a matter of interest,’ I said, ‘who exactly did you kill in Strange’s gallery?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Gina, as though the thought had only just that moment occurred to her. ‘I’m sure she’ll be reported missing soon enough. I just waited in the street until someone who could pass for me at a pinch appeared, and then I pretended I’d been attacked. Put on a big act. Crying. Sobbing. I was rather good at it, I must say. I told her I was afraid of being left alone and would she please, please, pretty please come with me to the gallery whilst I got a glass of water. I told her I worked there. I’d actually stolen the key earlier from Vincent. I let us in, she helped me over to the desk, and then, bang bang, how’s that for a touch of impromptu facial reconstruction?’
‘What are you all talking about?’ demanded Nye. ‘Who is this?’
‘Don’t you remember me, Paddy?’ said Gina.
He stared at her blankly.
‘Why should I remember you? I’ve never seen you before in my life.’
‘She’s Katie Toner,’ I said. ‘Lucy’s sister.’
‘Well figured out,’ said Gina. ‘What finally made the penny drop?’
‘I should have realised it as soon as we knew that the man we thought was the Marxman was Brendan Toner. Who else would he have been willing to cover up for? Who else would he have been willing to die to protect but his little sister?’
Nye was staring at her now even harder.
‘Katie? But,’ he said numbly at last, ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘Everyone seems to think I’m dead. Katie and Gina both. That was the general idea. I wanted to be dead. To be invisible. Life’s easier when you’re invisible.’
Still Nye shook his head, like he didn’t want to believe it.
‘What are you going to do now?’ I said. ‘Kill us all, like you killed Felix?’
‘I didn’t kill Felix,’ Gina said with a laugh. ‘It was Brendan who killed Felix. Poor foolish Brendan, who wanted to protect me from myself. And look where it got him. He thought I was crazy when he realised I was the Marxman, but he still wouldn’t turn me in. He remembered what happened to our mother, how she’d spent half her life in institutions.’
‘Being mad seems to run in the family,’ I said.
‘I guess so, Special Agent. But then stupidity obviously runs in yours. When I think of your face that day I called you, weeping down the line, to tell you I’d been sent a threatening picture. When I think how you rushed round, so earnest, so concerned.’
‘Whilst you were the one taking the photographs the whole time.’
‘That’s right. The Strangers series was mine. Quite a good idea, I thought. I’d never felt as if I really belonged in this city. I got Brendan to make the calls for me, arrange the meetings, then when the subjects turned up I shot them. In a manner of speaking. I used to get such intense pleasure from being able to control people in that way. Say be here or be there, and they’d just do it. And they’d never know what it had been about. That’s how I got to meet Felix too,’ she said. ‘I called him myself and suggested we meet at the lighthouse. I knew it meant a lot to him, that he’d spent hours there as a child. I figured he’d be intrigued enough to come. And he was. Unknown to him, I took his photograph. Next day I sent it to him with a note inviting him to lunch. Our first date, just as I described it, Saxon, on our first meeting.’
‘Where you seduced him.’
‘How could any man resist? Look at me. Felix was mine. I always knew it. It wasn’t Felix and Alice who were two halves of the same person. It was Felix and me who were that.’
‘How can you talk about him like that?’ I said. ‘He killed your sister.’
‘So she was my sister. She meant nothing to me.’
‘He raped her.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I watched him do it.’
‘You were there?’ said Nye.
‘I suppose you could say it was my first sexual experience,’ said Gina. ‘I was hiding in the garden and saw it all. How he pushed himself into her. How he filled her mouth with earth until she choked. How he buried her. I saw it all. I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen, but I thought it was incredible. Exhilarating. It’s the only word. I also knew that what I’d seen created a sacred bond between us. A sacred and unbreakable bond. It didn’t work out quite that way, of course. Mother killed herself and I was sent away to stay with relatives, and when that didn’t work out I was put into care, passed around like a piece of meat. But I hardly cared. I knew Felix and I would be together one day. That kept me going. I kept cuttings about him by my bedside. That we shared the secret of what he’d done to Lucy – even if he didn’t know we shared it – fused us together. It was only a matter of enduring. Of waiting.’
‘Waiting for what?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘For when we’d be together. I told you, everything I did was for him. Soon as I left care when I was sixteen, I headed for London. I knew Katie had to die, Katie had to disappear. That’s why I had Brendan tell everyone I was dead. I became Gina Fox instead. I even picked the name Fox because it reminded me of Felix, and I worked, you don’t know how hard, to be able to afford the plastic surgery I needed if I was ever really to leave Katie behind. I was taking night classes in photography too, just getting myself ready for the day I was finally back with Felix, so that I could be worthy to take my place in his life. I even flew back once or twice to Dublin, testing the waters. And gradually I realised that everyone had forgotten about Katie Toner. Forgotten about Lucy Toner too, because what’s one small murder? The world is full of murders. I was free to return.’
‘When did you come back?’
‘Just over a year ago,’ Gina said. ‘I found myself somewhere to live. I managed
to manoeuvre a meeting with Felix by sending him the photograph. We became lovers. And yes, before you ask, it was everything I wanted it to be. For him too, I think.’
‘He recognised a fellow dark heart,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘Yes, maybe that was it. He gave himself fully to me in a way he never could to anyone else. Not even to little Alice. We began to spend more and more time together. I brought out something in him. It was me who persuaded him to take those photographs you saw at Strange’s gallery; I posed for him, I encouraged him to hurt me, and I could see that he was beginning to enjoy indulging that side of himself again, the side he’d repressed too long.’
‘Did he know who you were?’
‘Not then, no, he didn’t guess. Why would he? It was a long time ago. I looked different. And I wanted to know he was totally in my power before I told him the truth.’
‘But you hadn’t accounted for Alice,’ I said.
‘Alice wanted to split us up,’ Gina said with bitterness. ‘She wanted Felix for herself and she got her way. He stopped returning my calls. Sent my letters back unread. Then they took him away, Alice and Strange. Sent him to the other side of the world. As if I’d gone through everything, gone through hell, just to have him snatched away from me like that.’
‘What did you decide to do?’
‘I decided to kill them all,’ she said. ‘Felix. Alice. Strange. I could imagine them all laughing at me. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone alive being a witness to my humiliation. All I needed was a gun. It had to be a gun, I don’t know why, though I think I know what the psychologists would say. And luckily, that’s where Brendan entered the picture. George
Dyer, I should say. I’d tracked him down soon after returning to Dublin. He was working for Tim Enright and he knew I needed money, so he pulled some strings to get me the commission to take a few pictures of them for some corporate magazine. Which is how I met Tim. He didn’t know I was Brendan’s sister. We started an affair. No one knew about us.’
‘And you got him to arrange for the gun to be smuggled in by blackmailing him?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘There was no need for blackmail,’ she said contemptuously.
‘You think I’d take a risk like that?’
‘Then how did you get him to do it?’
‘I asked him – and he did it,’ she said.
‘Simple as that?’
‘Simple as that.’ She shrugged.
‘He must have fallen for you big time.’
‘Men seem to make a habit of it,’ she agreed lightly. ‘Once I’d got the gun, I waited till I knew Felix was back in town, but it was hard getting close to him even then – Alice was still watching him as if he was a child – and I could feel the tension building inside me. I needed to release it or I’d explode. And it was whilst I was feeling like that that I heard that Felix’s new exhibition had opened in Kilmainham. So I went there – and I saw them. Saw those pictures which he’d taken the previous winter when he was mine. Every night we’d walked the city together, in snow and rain, and there they were. I’m the one whose hands and feet and shadow you can see in the shots. I’m the reflection in the water. And I just knew that this was Felix’s message to me. He wanted us to be together again. All he was waiting for was a sign from me. So I didn’t kill him. I gave him the sign he asked for.’
‘Tim Enright,’ I said.
‘It had to be Tim. I didn’t want him becoming suspicious of me. He knew I had a gun. He’d got it for me. He knew what kind it was. So I lured him out to O’Brien’s Place on a promise of something suitably filthy to celebrate my birthday, and I killed him there. Then I shot the judge in the square. I didn’t know he was a judge at the time. I just chose the place because that was in one of the photographs too, and he was the one who came along. But the press put two and two together and got five and decided that I had some great political motivation. That I was the Marxman. So I decided, why not? Might as well be that nickname as any other. And besides, have you ever seen what’s written on the side of
Marx’s grave in London? The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. That didn’t seem such a bad motto. That’s what I thought Felix and I could do, if we were together, if we were true to ourselves. Change the world. So each time I killed, I sent Felix cuttings from the press about the killings with the names of the places where the victims had died underlined, hoping he’d realise they were from me, that these were the places we were together last winter, that these were the places in his photographs.’
‘And he confronted you.’
‘He came round one day to my apartment and demanded to know if I was the Marxman. It was the first time I’d seen him since he went to the States. It was so good to see him again, it just confirmed to me that I wanted to be with him, that he was the man for me. I confessed gladly. I even showed him the photographs I’d taken of the victims after they died.’
‘Why?’
‘I hoped it would turn him on. That he’d be inspired by what I was doing, want to join me. I told you, I’d seen what he did to my sister, I knew his urges, his appetites, I knew he still had it in him to be the man I desired, I knew he’d called out to me in his photographs. I hoped we’d be able to share this, the same way we had the Self Portraits.’
‘But Felix didn’t react the way he was supposed to?’
‘Are you kidding me?’ she said contemptuously. ‘He told me he felt nothing for me anymore. He confessed that yes, he had bad appetites inside him, that was how he put it, he always had, but he was learning to control them. The only reason he’d put those photographs into the exhibition was because they were all he had, it was as if the medicine he was on had suppressed that part of him, he said, and he didn’t care anymore, he was ashamed of everything he’d been. He wasn’t going to let me destroy his life. He wanted to be with Alice. Whine, whine. Witter, witter. Are you getting the picture? And to make it worse, he said he was also going to tell the police that I was the notorious Marxman.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I used my nuclear option,’ said Gina. ‘I told him who I was. I told him I’d seen what he did to Lucy. I reminded him of details even he’d forgotten. There was no point him denying it. And I told him that if he exposed me, then I’d expose him.’
‘How did he react?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘He went very quiet. He told me he needed time to think it over. What I didn’t realise was that was just a front. He told me he felt dizzy. He asked for a glass of water. And while I was in the kitchen getting it for him, he grabbed hold of all the photographs I’d taken of the Strangers series and the victims, put them in a bag, and fled. He called me from his house and told me he’d say nothing about me being the Marxman, but that if anything was to happen to him or his sister in the meantime, then the photographs would go straight to the police.’
‘And to be sure,’ I said, ‘he asked Strange for a gun to protect himself and Alice.’
‘I didn’t care about that. All I cared about was getting those photographs back,’ said Gina. ‘They were mine, I needed them, I wanted them. So I persuaded Brendan to go to Felix’s house, break in, and find them for me. My brother knew I was the Marxman by then, of course, but he didn’t know what to do. He begged me to stop, but when I said no he had nothing to threaten me with. I was all he had left. He couldn’t turn me in to the police. He’d only lose me that way. So he agreed to try and get the photographs back.’
‘He was the one who broke into their house that time?’
‘He was, but he didn’t find the photographs. What he found instead,’ she said, ‘was Felix’s journal, filled, so he told me, with charming clippings and quotes about our dear sister’s departure, and he realised that Felix had killed Lucy. He’d always trusted it was Isaac Little and now, by utter chance, he discovered the truth. He was so shocked that he forgot to even bring it with him when he left. But it wasn’t as if he needed it any more. He had all the evide
nce he wanted. Everything that had gone wrong in our lives, so far as he was concerned, stemmed from the moment Lucy was murdered, and now he had the chance to put it right.’
‘It was after the break-in that Felix decided to give the photographs and the journal to Strange,’ I said. ‘He knew they weren’t safe at his house.’
‘Especially when Brendan started following him, and calling him up in the middle of the night and telling him he was going to kill him for what he’d done to Lucy. I tried to make him see that it was no use, that he might be wrong, but he just knew.’
‘I still don’t see how he managed to kill Felix.’
‘Well, I can only tell you how Brendan told me it happened. He said he took the Glock without my knowing and followed Felix to the harbour that night. But Felix did something unexpected. He pulled a gun on Brendan too. It was the old piece Strange had given him, a bit like this one, I suppose. So there they both were with guns pointed at one another, and that’s when Brendan told me he came up with the perfect plan to kill Felix. He told Felix they could shoot it out if he wanted, but he had a Glock and Felix had an old thing that hadn’t been fired in fifty years and who knows how it would turn out? He said they could do that if Felix wanted, but if Felix died and Brendan lived, then he would find Alice, rape her, strangle her and fill her mouth with soil until she choked, just as he’d done to Lucy. Or—’
‘Or,’ I said, suddenly understanding, ‘Felix could shoot himself.’
‘Exactly. He could put the gun to his own eye, pull the trigger and die there, just like our mother had done. And if he did, then Brendan promised to let Alice go unharmed.’
‘How could Felix know your brother would keep his side of the bargain?’
‘He couldn’t know it, but what else could he do?’ said Gina. ‘The Glock was pointed at his head. He knew he was going to die one way or another. His one way of keeping Alice safe was to do what Brendan told him. So he had to make a choice. And he did.’
‘Weren’t you furious that your brother had killed this man you claimed to love?’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 35
