by J. M. Smyth
‘So what have you got, Red?’ Bin asked. Jesus I hate that tone. ‘I asked you if you even know what she looks like?’ ‘Even’, like ‘have’, had sarcasm wrapped around it.
‘Only by the photographs in her flat, Bin.’
Which told her I’d been there and seen them. Where she intended going with this I hadn’t a clue. She hadn’t enough info to take it far. I decided to use it to keep her quiet.
I hit her with what Charlie had indicated. ‘This only happened last night, Bin. It’ll take time to figure out.’
‘Greg will be delighted to hear that.’
Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes, Bin. No point having a go at me. I have my own problems. If Charlie ever gets wind I’m sitting on the laptop, Kane’ll be ‘taking care of it’ boot-firsting me over some fucking cliff.
It just goes to show what families are really like. For a lot of years I’d kept Charlie out of jail by planning jobs that he otherwise would’ve fucked up and got done for. Charlie’s streetwise and the best at what he does – inspiring terror in others; the cunt’s a terrorist – but he’s no Mastermind contestant. Where did she think this fancy gaff came from? The grand in the ‘drawing room’? The nightclubs and the whole pile? I helped build it. And what do I get for it in return? Sarcasm.
I’d always be an outsider to her. Welcome me during good times, occasionally, have a dig at me during bad. There’s no percentage in it. This time I was putting myself first. I’d get Greg off when the time came. I had the evidence at home. But only after I’d dealt with my family – for a change. If this doesn’t tell you how our ‘relationship’ – I hate the intimacy of that word – had weakened over the years, I don’t know what will. Sure I was still the guy who was closest to Charlie. Sure I was still high up in his ‘organised crime’, as Winters liked to label it, with his: ‘Charlie Swags is organised crime in this city’. And that wouldn’t change. But I was still an outsider. A couple of weeks in custody wouldn’t do Greg any harm as far as I could see.
LUCILLE
His studio contained everything you’d expect: easel, palette, brushes, canvas. A zinc-topped table sat in the corner, draped in bloodstained velvet. Beside it an upright fridge-freezer. It contained human hands in plastic bags. Eleven in a row. All right. Three fingers had been cut off each one; only the indexes and thumbs remained, each labelled with their victim’s name and that of a flower.
On a lower shelf lay two more hands, labelled Jackie Hay and Lisa Shine. Their fingers had not been removed.
A tongue in a cellophane bag lay on the bottom shelf: a dog’s.
His wallet was in a chest of drawers. It contained scalpels of various sizes and the protractor he’d used on Gemma. The surgical saw was in the next drawer along with an album full of photographs of his victims, taken after he’d finished with them. A camera sat next to them.
A second album, of newspaper clippings and magazine articles, confirmed that he was Picasso.
All the paintings in the gallery were of girls. One had had her arms and legs removed and rearranged like spiders’ legs around her upright torso. Another had Medusa’s head, only with fingers instead of snakes. All the girls’ heads were slightly bowed to the side. Several wore nuns’ veils. Others wore Christian Brothers’ belts, complete with crucifixes tucked into them. Every girl had a flower on her chest. One a rose, the next one a carnation and so on. Eleven singles, plus one double – a portrait of two girls. It hung in the centre of the main wall: Duet.
None was signed. Each had been stamped with a handprint, before the oil had dried. Of the singles, Gemma would have made twelve. He had been carving a flower into her chest.
Below Duet stood a leather-bound lectern. On it sat a journal. It contained the names of the girls, addresses and personal details, the nights they’d been abducted, how they’d been abducted. Girls who had been killed but not painted had the words ‘unsatisfactory models’ written beside their names.
He had portrayed them all as ugly, grotesque and distorted. All except Medusa. She had two faces, one of a beautiful nun, the other – on the back of her head – of Medusa herself, reflected in a mirror in the background, in which was yet another reflection, of Jesus holding the hand of a frightened boy with blond hair, much like Picasso’s own. The boy had gone to Jesus for protection, but the nun’s Medusa face was turning Jesus into a statue of stone.
The different flowers on the girls’ chests represented the months of the year, according to the journal. The girls in Duet, portrayed limbless, who sat facing each other kissing, arms and legs plaited and briered to form a girdle of thorns around their waists, were friends of Gemma’s. Jackie Hay and Lisa Shine. They’d disappeared while walking their Labrador.
You may guess how the paintings affected me. Viewing them in a public gallery would be one thing, but when you’re condemned to be in one of them, well … I had seen how he had used his scalpels on Gemma while she was still alive, how he would use them on me. I had seen how I would be represented in death.
I’d come to understand my role in this. My hand would lie next to the others. It would be labelled and that label would carry my name and the name of a flower he would carve in my chest.
I was to be December.
‘Hello, Lucille.’
Picasso was back.
RED DOCK
The time had come to deal with the Donavans, and to do that I needed to find Lucille. I no longer saw any point in trying to understand why she hadn’t gone straight to the law when Gemma was killed. To me, she hadn’t gone, she’d stayed in her cottage, and that was that. I will say this: kids ran away from orphanages in Ireland for decades. They went to the law for help, weren’t believed and the law brought them back. Lucille would know that. If she saw the laptop had gone from her car and didn’t trust the law, why go to them if the evidence had been nicked? From her viewpoint, she’d get her name and picture in the paper; she’d have to explain Clonkeelin. Picasso would see it. Would Lucille want that bastard trying to track her down? Leading him to those she thought were her family? Complicated. Who knows what’s in a young girl’s mind?
I was parked in a lane a quarter of a mile away looking down at her cottage through a pair of binoculars. There was no sign of her. But her car was in the drive and the bedroom curtains were still closed. She had to be in there. An hour later there was still no sign. There was an agricultural show on in the village. Maybe she’d gone to it, walked in. In her state of mind, I couldn’t see her going to it, but it wouldn’t take long to have a look.
Not the first show I’d ever been to. I won’t describe it. I’m sure you know what a field with a load of spruced-up farm animals looks like. Brother Conor was there, talking to a guy with a bull, a dopey rosette in its ear. Anne was showing a mare in what the programme I had to buy to get in said was the ‘mare in foal’ class. ‘Clonkeelin Lady’ she had it listed under. A big grey Irish Draught with a white blaze down its face. Lucille wasn’t to be seen.
I tried the bar – a beer tent with a counter on barrels.
My mouth was still dry from that wedding. A pint would cure it. I stood beside my two sisters at the bar. Not as much as a glance did they give me. Not even a ‘Here, don’t you look like one of us? The resemblance is amazing.’ I could’ve been a statue in O’Connell Street for all they knew. Anne came in and went over to them.
‘Now sure you know yourself, Amy,’ the man with them was saying. He was their age, late fifties with a well-trimmed tache.
I’d seen him with them many a time – he and Amy in particular were into going to dances – usually down the local after all the twos, all the sixes and eyes down for a full house. I’d spent long enough planning this to know all about them.
‘I do well, Cormac,’ said Amy, her auburn hair lacquered up like a crash helmet. ‘And what do you think, Edna? Cormac and meself always have a good time, don’t we, Cormac? Eh, and what do you think, Edna?’
‘Sure now,’ said big Edna. I doubt she was even listeni
ng. The Guinness to her lips and the cigarette lining up to take its place had her attention. She downed what was left of it and cocked her cabbage haircut at the barman, showed him her glass then waved a finger in the direction of the others for another round.
‘So we’re on, then?’ said the tache, palming his hair. A guitar has more strands to it.
‘I’d say we are,’ said Amy, and her with the blush. The hairdo was obviously for Cormac, her dance-hall Romeo. ‘Edna?’
Edna seemed to have the shout on this outing. But she was still thinking it over, a bob of the cabbage, a, ‘Hm, maybe’, a drag on her non-tipped.
‘Sure we’ll have a grand time, the three of us,’ said the guitar string.
‘Edna?’ Amy asked.
Edna replied with a big shrug, then, ‘G’on. Might as well. Nah. Maybe not. You two go on yourselves.’ Very decisive.
‘That settles it so,’ said Amy’s fancy man, ‘Saturday night it is,’ and had a drink. Amy smiled like a young girl who’d just been asked to her first dance, while Edna wondered ‘Where t’fuck’s that barman?’
Another waste of time. I already knew what my darling family did for kicks. Some guy squeezed in-between them and started asking Anne about her mare. A prospective buyer trying to find out if she was thinking of selling the foal out of Clonkeelin Lady. I’m sure you already know horsey people do that all the time. If the sire and dam are prizewinners, the chances are they’ll produce one for the ring. Anne told him her mare had six weeks to go.
Still no sign of Lucille.
I went back to my perch and watched her place for a while, gave it a couple of hours then tried the cottage phone. No answer. Fuck it. I went in.
A metal spatula to unlock the latch on the transom of the sash window and I was standing in her living room. Nothing. She wasn’t in any of the other rooms either. The bed hadn’t been slept in.
A mobile rang on my way back out, through the hall. A small vase had been knocked off its table. Flowers had fallen out of it, and the carpet was wet. An accident? Lucille had opened the door and bumped into it? Who knows? The mobile lay next to it. I checked the incoming number on the display, let it ring out then rang the number back.
Chilly Winters answered. ‘Winters.’
Winters had rung her.
Me and him aren’t talking, so I hung up. I was glad I hadn’t answered it – he knew my voice. And he’d obviously done his homework and knew about Lucille. He was bound to anyway. If I could work out that she’d made the call to the Top Towers, so could he.
The mobile rang again. I pressed the button this time, but didn’t say a thing. ‘Lucille? Lucille, I know you’ve just rung me. This is Detective Sergeant Winters. Lucille, it’s vital you contact us about last night. Your life may be in danger. Lucille?’
If that didn’t tell me she hadn’t been to see him, nothing would.
I checked her car. Gemma’s handbag was under a coat on the back seat. In the boot was a suitcase containing Lucille’s clothes. Milk, coffee, cereal and things were in a box. Who the hell moves into a holiday home and leaves their gear and stuff outside?
I went back to my car and waited.
Know the problem with weighing up every possibility in sight but ignoring the unlikely ones? The unlikely ones don’t add up. They only add up when some unknown factor arrives and you say to yourself: ah, so that’s what happened; that explains it. Well, an unknown factor was arriving. How he’d found out about Clonkeelin, I couldn’t even begin to guess since only me and Lucille knew about it. But there he was. Unless, like me, he had a twin, Picasso was getting out of a Transit and going into Lucille’s driveway.
OK, I could speculate as to what I now thought was going on here, but I’d be wasting your time. I didn’t know. What I did know was that Picasso went straight for Lucille’s car and he was searching it in a way that told me that whatever it was he thought he was after, that’s where it was. Every inch of it. And the only way he could’ve known that the laptop – he had to be after that – was in it was by being told. And the only one who knew it was in there was Lucille.
He’d grabbed her.
The question was: would he lead me to her? Or to put it another way: was there anything left of her that was worth being led to?
I’d already been back through the laptop of course. Twenty-six different clients were recorded on it. I’d figured maybe Picasso had been one of them. Most of their names and addresses were listed. Ted Lyle had checked out some of their financial details and had listed them on the hard disk, together with personal stuff, wives’ names, kids and grandkids, in some cases. I’d thought Picasso might have first got to know Gemma by picking her up at an earlier date and going up to her room as just an ordinary punter. By the way he’d gone straight to her room the night he killed her, he had to have known exactly where to find her. How did he know that? Anyway, like everything else, it hadn’t given me the answers I’d been looking for. So I tailed him.
To be honest, even if he hadn’t grabbed Lucille, he was bound to try. The news on the radio’d said that a young woman had rung reception and had called Gemma by name. Lucille was her flatmate. He’d have worked it out that she might have been the caller and gone after her. So I’d expected to catch up with him one way or the other, even if it meant waiting until Gemma’s body’d been released for burial. He’d think Lucille would go to the funeral. He’d snatch her there. Bound to. She was the only one who could ID him, if I was reading this right.
I’ll tell you something else about him – when I saw him first on that laptop, a feeling of déjà vu hit me. I was sure I knew the bastard from somewhere. An older version of someone I’d met years ago. Couldn’t place him though.
Oddly enough, when that funeral did eventually take place – a small cortège it was, Gemma not having any family, just a bunch of mates and a couple of newspaper and TV people – I saw one woman there who got into a car with a Longford plate. Angela Reading maybe. Winters might’ve found that letter of mine and phoned Angela to tell her that the daughter she’d written to was being buried. Wonder what her response was. Denied all knowledge of course. Crying her eyes out she was. Everybody’s got a story to tell.
For now I stuck with Picasso’s.
I followed him to a detached house in an avenue out the Cork road – what you might call leafy middle-class suburbia. And a bit with it if some of the cars were anything to go by. No car in Picasso’s driveway though. And that Transit of his looked out of place in this setting. Whoever owned that house could afford better than his set of wheels. I doubt he lived there. And I needed to know exactly where he did live before paying it a visit.
A taxi arrived at around seven and picked up Picasso and an elderly woman. I followed them to the Shelbourne hotel, parked just outside in St Stephen’s Green and watched them go inside to the restaurant, to a nice table for two by the window. I went in by the side entrance, had a Powers whiskey in the Horseshoe Bar before choosing a quiet table in the corner, not far from theirs, and ordering a steak and a pint of beer. Hungry work this tailing business.
He looked heavier this close up, wore a pilot’s jacket with the zip down, cords and sneakers. His hair, blond of course, was bushy and needed a cut, and he had a baby’s face, chubby, as were his hands, small podgy nose and deep-set eyes. If he’d had a romper suit on, he’d have looked like a big toddler. And there was something in those eyes: dark, menacing and sinister. No there wasn’t. I’m only joking. He didn’t look any more menacing than the waiter who brought my sirloin: rare, just the way I like it. Blood on the knife, just the way Picasso likes it.
I couldn’t hear much of their conversation. He seemed to have other things on his mind – not getting caught, for one. She did most of the talking, rather like a mother advising her son to make something of his life was how it came across, for all he ever did was nod ‘Yes, Mother, no Mother.’ All very formal: a well-dressed old girl deferred to by her boy.
I kept wondering about how he’d targete
d his women. He’d certainly targeted Gemma. Maybe he learnt their habits, where they worked, formed a pattern then rapped their doors. Knew exactly where to go. Whatever way he did it, he’d managed to outwit the likes of Chilly Winters for long enough. Smart. I like that. A bit of thinking impresses me, as opposed to some caped nut straight out of nineteenth-century Whitechapel, who strikes from the shadows then flees at the first sign of a screaming passer-by. Mind you, Jack the Ripper never got caught either, as all those films about him keep reminding us.
I paid my bill, saw his mother paying theirs and made a point of leaving first. A taxi took them back to the leafy avenue, where Picasso went inside for a minute or two then drove off.
He didn’t live in Dublin. I followed him to a farmhouse at the end of a long lane a couple of miles outside a village called Shantallagh. And there he stayed. I had a bed to go to myself. I was knackered. It had been a long day.
OK, you’re wondering why I didn’t go in and save Lucille, or call in Swagsy & Co to do as much themselves. That’s the good guy’s job. I’m the bad guy. You have to hate me in all this. I’m the guy you have to detest. You read about people like me in True Crime stories, not in please-love-my-character fiction. Remember that. It might give you some idea of what makes me the way I am.
Besides, if he’d already scalpeled her, there was nothing I could do about it. And if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t. Not until he got that laptop back. She was his only source of information as far as that was concerned. Once that changed, then he’d see to her.
Nah. He was smart. On form, she’d be dead. While she was of another use to him, he’d leave his scalpels in the drawer.
If you knew the one overriding reason I had for doing this, you might understand. But since I don’t give a fuck whether you understand or not, my reasons are my own.
