Single Obsession

by Des Ekin

  Emma was the first to break free. ‘Hunter, there’s something I want to tell you …’

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you, too.’

  ‘Hunter!’ She looked with alarm at his stitched-up head. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Long story. Later.’ He kissed her again. ‘Emma, I’ve been thinking …’

  ‘And I’ve been thinking, too.’ She laughed breathlessly. ‘About us. I mean, about you and me, and …’

  She stopped short, staring over his shoulder towards the door.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ He turned around sharply.

  In the doorway stood Charley Valentia, slumped weakly against the wooden frame. Her complexion was no longer simply pale. It was the colour of death, and her skin glistened with the sickly pallor of rancid fat.

  ‘I think I need to go to a hospital,’ she said.

  BERNARD Sauvage stared at the Polaroid photographs in his hand. They were proof positive of Joseph Valentia’s guilt. They were the only evidence he had, the only evidence anyone had. The words he was hearing just didn’t make sense.

  ‘Give them back to him?’ he repeated stupidly.

  ‘Yes. They are the property of my client, Joseph Valentia. They were seized illegally from the safety deposit box. He wants them to be returned to him.’

  ‘They were not seized illegally.’ Sauvage slammed his giant paw angrily on his desk. ‘I took great pains to ensure that everything was legal. I obtained a valid warrant from a judge.’

  He stared belligerently at the bespectacled solicitor.

  ‘The warrant is flawed, Inspector, due to technical reasons you wouldn’t understand. Even if it were not, I would point out that the safety deposit box from which you seized this material cannot be in any way directly linked to my client.’

  ‘But you just said it was his bloody property.’

  ‘Any representations I make on behalf of my client are privileged and cannot be used against him.’

  ‘Either they’re his or they’re not his. Which is it?’

  ‘It depends. Either way, I want them back.’

  ‘He’s right, Bernard.’ A grey-haired man had entered Sauvage’s office. He motioned to the inspector to remain seated. ‘We have to return them.’

  ‘But, Super –’

  ‘We’ve had the best of legal advice.’ The superintendent offered around a pack of Silk Cut King Size. He was the only taker. He lit the cigarette from a slim gold lighter; Sauvage noticed that his hand trembled slightly, probably with an anger he was too professional to show. ‘And without this evidence, we have no reason to detain Mr Valentia.’

  ‘We don’t need a reason. We can hold him for six hours anyway.’ Sauvage exhaled in frustration. ‘Listen, can we talk about this in private, Super? There are other things –’

  The solicitor gave a sinus honk that was obviously intended to express sardonic laughter. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector, but you don’t get to “work on him”. Real life isn’t like the movies. Either you release him immediately and return the pictures, or we go to the High Court tonight, and you explain to a judge why it was necessary to get him out of bed to repeat what I’ve explained clearly to you already.’

  Sauvage checked his watch. It was 10.45pm.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bernard,’ said the superintendent. ‘He has to be released.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the solicitor.

  The Bear sprang to his feet. In one swift, fluid motion he fanned the photos across the desk, while his other hand forced the lawyer’s head downwards until his eyes were only inches from the gruesome scenes they depicted.

  ‘Take them,’ growled Sauvage. ‘But I want you to have a good look at them first. Don’t just put them into some legal envelope and pretend you didn’t know about them.’ He twisted the man’s head from side to side. ‘Look at them. I want you to remember them. I want you to see them in your nightmares.’

  ‘Bernard, for God’s sake!’ shouted the superintendent.

  ‘See them? See what he’s done? What he’s likely to do to someone else?’

  The superintendent prised Sauvage’s huge hand free from the lawyer’s neck. Sauvage sat down heavily and turned his back on them. The solicitor stood up and rubbed his neck.

  ‘I apologise for my officer,’ said the superintendent, gathering up the photos and handing them over. ‘He’s been under a lot of strain in this case. You have my assurance that it won’t happen again.’

  ‘I am an officer of the courts,’ hissed the solicitor. ‘You might explain to your inspector that I have a duty to represent my client to the best of my ability, regardless of my personal views.’

  ‘We both realise that,’ said the superintendent, holding the door open.

  ‘I’m still not quite finished with the inspector.’ The lawyer stood his ground. ‘There were other things in that box. Computer disks. Documents.’

  ‘Is that true, Bernard?’

  Sauvage reluctantly turned around and lifted the phone. ‘Ian Arthur, please. Ian? Bring in all the documents from the deposit box. Yes, all of them. As soon as you can.’

  The lawyer waited in silence until Ian Arthur arrived with a cardboard box containing a sheaf of paper and a small pile of floppy disks. He handed them to Sauvage, who wordlessly passed them on.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ said the solicitor. ‘It’s been … an experience. Now, if I might collect my client and leave?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  The superintendent waited until the solicitor had left the room.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Sauvage. ‘We didn’t have any admissible evidence, Bernard.’

  ‘So that’s it? He walks? End of story?’

  ‘Until you get something good enough to take into court, I’m afraid so.’ It was the superintendent’s turn to get annoyed. ‘And don’t try to take the high moral ground with me, Bear. You’re already in deep shit over that Slane shoot-out. Have your people never heard of set procedure for dealing with hostage situations?’

  ‘They probably know it better than you do.’

  ‘Remember what we got drummed into us at a dozen training seminars? The three most important tactics: negotiation, negotiation, and negotiation? Your crew ignored all that and went in there with guns blazing. Where did they think they were, the OK Corral?’

  ‘I take full responsibility.’

  ‘You weren’t even there, Bear. You were on your way to Denmark. I know that.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I take full responsibility.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Well, that’s it, then.’ Sauvage shrugged philosophically. ‘We have to face up to it. Valentia walks. And we admit defeat.’

  ‘Yes. For the moment, at least.’ The superintendent clapped his shoulder uncertainly. ‘And no surveillance on him, Bernard. Not even the nonexistent type.’

  He walked quickly out of the room.

  The Bear sat in silence for a few moments, and Ian Arthur could almost see the steam rising from him. At last the inspector rose, forced himself across to the window and looked down towards the street where Joseph Valentia was walking out into the night, a free man.

  ‘Well?’ he snapped, without turning around. ‘Did you get it done?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Arthur opened his briefcase and emptied its contents over the desk. ‘I copied the lot. Scanned the photos, Xeroxed the notebooks and papers, backed up the disks. Everything.’

  ‘Good.’ Sauvage sat down purposefully at the desk and pushed up his sleeves. ‘Let’s go through it, then. Line by bloody line.’

  EMMA glanced at her car clock and looked around nervously, checking that all the doors in her BMW were securely locked. It was 11.15 at night, and she was sitting alone in a bad area of town. Only a few hundred yards to the west, the city’s cheapest prostitutes were plying their trade in the Victorian red-brick darkness of Benburb Street; beyond that, in Phoenix Park, the rent boys were putting themselves on display for the spotlig
hts of kerb-crawling Mercs and Jags. Here, on the western end of the Liffey quays, there was none of the lively nightlife of central Dublin. There was just the occasional group of ugly drunks, and a few bag ladies whose peaceful sleep in the dank doorways was brutally shattered by the sirens of passing ambulances.

  She flicked through the radio stations. Nothing but late phone-in shows. On one channel, a woman was describing a husband who hadn’t washed or bathed in ten years. On another, a man was publicly lamenting his small penis. Emma kept flicking. She had enough of this sort of thing in her day job …

  She screamed in sudden terror as something struck the bodywork of her BMW with tremendous force. The blow echoed like a thunderclap, the car bounced on its springs. She bit her tongue so hard that it bled, before realising that it was just a passing drunk. The man had crept up unnoticed and slammed his fist hard on the roof. Then he’d lurched on, laughing loudly at her frightened reaction.

  Tears welled up in Emma’s eyes, partly at the pain in her mouth, partly at the drunk’s needless display of aggression, but mostly from shame at her own stupidity in allowing herself to be persuaded to come to this godforsaken end of town in the first place. Why had she let Charley talk her into it? She’d begged with her, pleaded with her to go to a conventional hospital. Instead, Charley had insisted on seeing a specialist in holistic medicine, an American she knew who ran a treatment centre in this end of town.

  Emma knew him too. They didn’t get on. So she’d dropped Charley off at the holistic centre by taxi and arranged to pick her up again in an hour, during which time she’d collected her own car from the airport car park. Now seventy-five minutes had elapsed and there was no sign of Charley. The treatment centre was obviously closed and deserted.

  Emma decided it was pointless waiting any longer. She groped in her glove compartment for her mobile phone, which had been off since the flight, and switched it on. But before she had a chance to phone Hunter, it trilled to announce a message.

  ‘Finished early, Doctor,’ said Charley’s voice, in a message recorded half an hour before. Her voice sounded flat and spiritless. ‘No good news. Just more bad news. And I’m feeling a bit down, to tell you the truth. Guess I’ll just go for a walk and find somewhere I can have a long talk with the man upstairs. We’ve done what we had to do. It’s over. Forget me, Doctor. Go home, get some rest. Just get on with your life, and let me get on with what’s left of mine.’

  ‘ARE you sure you’re in the right place?’ the nurse asked Hunter.

  ‘Pardon me?’ Hunter had been reading a poster on the wall of the hospital waiting-room.

  The nurse peered at his injured head. ‘That’s a right nasty-looking wound,’ she said in a strong Derry accent. ‘You should be in Casualty. It’s just down the –’

  ‘Oh.’ Hunter suddenly understood. ‘No, I’m not a patient. I’m a visitor.’

  ‘You’re a patient, whether you realise it or not.’ She shook her head. ‘Who stitched this for you? Doctor Frankenstein?’

  Hunter moved away. ‘I’ll get it seen to later, thanks. In the meantime, I’m here to see one of your patients. Claire Hermitage.’

  The nurse looked at her watch. ‘At this time of night? We don’t allow visitors.’ She looked at Hunter’s pleading expression and relented. ‘Okay. But only for five minutes. And no excitement. She needs to rest up. This way.’

  She led him into a private ward where Claire lay linked up to a drip feed and a heart-rate monitor. He was relieved to see that there were no obvious injuries and that Claire did not seem to be in any pain.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi.’ He sat down beside her and grinned. ‘When Simon Addison said you were getting the bullet, I didn’t think he meant it literally.’

  Claire smiled bravely. ‘It’s not a whole bullet, just a section of metal from a ricochet. It was just bad luck.’

  ‘Where did it hit you?’

  ‘Lower back. Very close to the spine, but luckily it just missed. They were going to operate right away to remove it, but they’ve held back for a while. They say it’s a bit complicated, just where it’s lying, and they want a second opinion. But they should have it out soon.’

  ‘Good.’ Hunter patted her hand. ‘You’ll be up and about in no time at all.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  He brought her up to date on the night’s developments. ‘Anyway, it’s all over now,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry you had to go through all this.’

  ‘Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The average philosophy student doesn’t get this much fun in a lifetime.’

  She winced and closed her eyes.

  ‘Claire …’ He paused. ‘I’ve never actually had a chance to tell you how much … that is, how I appreciate … I mean, exactly what you’ve …’

  She gave him her best Mona Lisa smile. ‘Whereof one cannot speak,’ she quoted, ‘thereof one must remain silent.’

  ‘Who said that, anyway?’

  ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein.’

  ‘I knew that.’

  ‘’Course you did.’

  ‘Is he one of the County Kildare Wittgensteins? Or is he the one who plays centre-forward for Chelsea?’

  The door opened.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Hunter?’

  He looked up. The same nurse was standing in the doorway.

  ‘Your time’s up. And, anyway, there’s a phone call holding for you.’

  Hunter said his goodbyes to Claire and promised to drop in again the next day. He took the phone call at the reception desk.

  ‘Hunter? Sauvage here.’ The voice was tense. ‘Bit of bad news for you.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Valentia is a free man again.’

  ‘What? You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Take my word for it.’

  Sauvage summed up the situation in a few terse sentences.

  ‘But he can’t just walk!’ Hunter interrupted before he’d finished. ‘You can’t just let the bastard go!’

  ‘Shut up, Hunter!’ The Bear was shouting down the line. ‘I agree with you. Of course I bloody agree with you. But ranting won’t help any of us. Just listen. We’ve been going through all his stuff – notes, disks, everything. He had one special notebook, a black one. Nothing in it, except a list of initials.’

  Hunter stayed silent and listened.

  ‘The first entry was FW. The second was KQ. The third was AR, a name we don’t know yet. And the fourth was KS.’

  ‘All his victims so far.’

  ‘Yes, or maybe his targets. Maybe he wrote the initials before he killed them.’

  ‘Okay. But if we can’t use any of this as evidence, I don’t see how it makes any damn difference.’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A fifth entry. A more recent one.’ The Bear took a deep breath and tried not to betray the anxiety in his voice. ‘Hunter … where exactly is Emma?’

  EMMA stared at the mobile phone, trying to curb her panic and think straight. Charley was in a suicidal state of mind, she had no doubt about that. Besides, she was an unaccompanied woman wandering around on the fringes of a red-light district. For any number of reasons, Charley was in great danger. Emma had to find her.

  I’ll find somewhere I can have a long talk with the man upstairs.

  Presumably ‘the man upstairs’ meant God. Presumably the somewhere was a church. But which one? There were dozens around the city centre, but nearly all of them would be closed at this time of night.

  Emma tossed the phone back into her glove compartment, pulled out a street map and unfolded it to display the area she was in. It was dotted with tiny printed crosses. She selected the nearest ones, marked them methodically from one to ten in ballpoint pen, and began driving around them in order.

  The first five were closed and deserted. But as she approached the sixth building on her list, the nine-hundred-year-old Anglican Church of St Michan, she realised she was in
luck.

  The lights were on and the main gate was open. A dayglo poster announced a midnight vigil to usher in the feast day of its patron, an obscure Danish saint whose life story had long been lost in the mists of history.

  Emma abandoned her BMW on a double yellow line and hurried inside, hardly glancing around her. She was familiar with St Michan’s Church. It was one of the most famous landmarks in Dublin, not because of its unremarkable church building, but because of the gruesome secrets that lay in the much older vaults beneath it.

  The main door was open, but the hallway was deserted. There was no sign of life, none of the expected noises of prayer or singing from inside. Emma crept quietly through the door and found herself alone in a large church of stained glass and polished wood.

  Her footsteps echoed eerily in the silence of the building as she walked around, checking all the corners and crannies. Nothing. No one. Charley was nowhere in the building.

  Emma sighed, and stretched to relieve the tension in her muscles. Another false trail. Four more churches to go.

  She was about to leave when she heard the sound of footsteps in the hallway.

  The door burst open, and Emma jumped backwards in alarm as a stocky figure stormed through, silhouetted in a blaze of light.

  ‘Are you with the young lady?’ the man demanded.

  ‘I don’t … I mean, I’m not sure …’ Emma faltered.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I made you jump.’ The man moved forward, no longer in silhouette, to reveal himself. He was black and in his early thirties.

  He pulled down the zip of his quilted anorak and pointed to a clerical collar. ‘I am the Reverend Timothy Malindi, on furlough from Lagos in Nigeria. I’ve been put in charge of the prayer vigil here. I don’t know why; it’s not even my parish. As you can see’ – he gestured despondently towards the empty pews – ‘it’s been another huge success.’

  ‘You mentioned a young woman. I’m looking for someone like that.’

  ‘Well, there’s a woman here all right – but she can’t stay any longer. I told her she could only go down for a few minutes, and she’s already been down there for a quarter of an hour. It’s most irregular. And slightly disturbing, if you don’t mind my saying so.’