by Ingrid Black
Dalton nodded curtly, his eyes telling a story that his tongue wouldn’t dare. There went my chance of a Christmas card.
‘Your turn now, Boland.’ Fitzgerald switched quickly. ‘What did you get from fingerprints?’
Boland, taken by surprise, briskly ran through what he had.
It was the same dead ends. He’d spoken to staff in the Post’s mailroom, who confirmed that the first letter claiming to be from Fagan had come in from a city-centre sorting office, addressed to Nick Elliott, the day before Mary died. Following it back through the system showed that it had been posted at a box not far from Trinity College late the previous afternoon. The envelope had been taken away and dusted for prints, but no matches came back save for those of the staff themselves, who’d all volunteered prints without complaint.
Frankly, I was amazed the editor hadn’t tossed off an indignant editorial about police abuse of civil liberties.
As for results of the fingerprint tests on the letter taped beneath the bench last night in the garden next to St Patrick’s Cathedral, they weren’t in yet; but no one was feeling very hopeful.
And that – give or take some background from Vice on Mary Lynch’s sorry record of long-term drug abuse and short-term prison stays, and a report from Healy on whether anyone on the register of sex offenders looked like a contender for prime suspect (they didn’t) – was that. I could feel the unacknowledged despondency in the air as Fitzgerald handed out the tasks for the day and the meeting broke up. It didn’t surprise me. It’s often said that the first forty-eight hours after the discovery of a body are the most important – and ours were almost up.
‘Boland, do me a favour,’ I said as we got to our feet and the rest of the team filed past us to the door. ‘Point someone out for me.’
‘Anyone in particular, or are you not fussy?’
‘Someone called DS O’Malley. Donal. Ring any bells?’
‘Don?’ said Boland. ‘Pointing him out might be a problem. He’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. Killed himself about six months ago.’
‘Great sense of timing he had,’ I said. ‘What was wrong with him?’
‘How long’ve you got? Stress. Depression. Panic attacks, last I heard. His wife left him.’
‘I’m not surprised. He sounds like a basket case.’
‘She left before he got sick,’ said Boland. ‘She was why.’
‘Ambrose Lynch’s wife left him too,’ I pointed out. ‘Your marriage broke up. You both still manage to keep things together. You’re not having panic attacks.’
‘Lynch wouldn’t allow himself to. He’s like Dr Spock out of Star Trek. He’d think they were illogical.’
‘Mister,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Mr Spock out of Star Trek. Dr Spock’s the baby guy. Everyone makes that mistake.’
‘Oh, right. What did you want O’Malley for, anyway?’
‘Just a case he was handling I wanted to talk about,’ I said. ‘Monica Lee, another prostitute, killed about two years ago. Thing is, the report says that she was seeing someone called Gus as well. I wanted to know if he’d ever tracked him down.’
‘Interesting. I think I remember the case. Was that one of Don’s? I’ll dig out the file and have a look at it myself, if you like.’
‘Are we set?’ Fitzgerald said, as she arrived to take Boland to the autopsy on the still unidentified body. ‘It doesn’t do to keep Ambrose waiting, you know.’
‘I’m set, Chief.’
‘What about you, Saxon? I thought you were meeting Tillman?’
‘So did I, but there’s no trace of him.’
‘Well, you can tag along with us, if you like. Lynch is always pleased to see you.’
‘I’ll give it a miss, if it’s all the same.’
‘Fair enough. I can think of better ways to spend a morning.’
Chapter Twelve
On the way downstairs, we met Tillman coming up in the other direction with Ambrose Lynch.
‘I found this fellow loitering around outside and thought I’d haul him in for questioning,’ the city pathologist quipped.
‘Dr Tillman, I presume?’ said Fitzgerald, stepping forward and shaking his hand. ‘Saxon’s told me all about you. I only hope you realise how much we appreciate any help you can give us, anything at all. We’re not exactly buried under the weight of leads here.’
‘That’s not so surprising this early in an investigation,’ Tillman said, nodding a curt greeting at me as he caught my eye and reaching out a hand to Boland. ‘As I was saying to Dr Lynch as we came in, you’re a long way from finished yet.’
‘You mean it will take more killings before we get a breakthrough?’
‘I’m not here to make anyone feel better.’ He shrugged. ‘So yes, that’s probably the way it will be. Unless you get lucky. An element of luck lies behind most closed cases in the end.’
‘So where do you come in?’ said Ambrose.
‘Sometimes my job is simply to point out the obvious. There’s always a danger of investigators making a case more complex than it really is. Most murders happen for very primitive reasons. Rage, lust, the sheer thrill of transgression, the desire to be heard.’
‘Thwarted creativity,’ said Ambrose.
‘That too. Often the mistake is to become convinced that there’s any great mystery involved. Things are generally simple enough once you reduce them to their basic elements. But,’ and he opened his hands and held them in front of him as if fending off any more enquiries, ‘if you think I’m going to give you a profile before I’ve seen all the evidence . . .’
‘Not at all, no,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘But you know, quick as you can, that’s all we ask. I don’t need to remind you that the calendar is against us.’
‘I appreciate what you’re up against. This morning should be helpful. The initial reports that Saxon had couriered round to my rooms last night in Trinity were intriguing, but what I really want is to see the scenes for myself.’
‘I wish I could come with you,’ said Ambrose. ‘I’d like to see how a profiler works. We don’t get much opportunity in Dublin. Where murder is concerned, we are still, alas, a quiet, sleepy backwater, very much in the lower divisions of crime.’
The ghost of a smile brushed Tillman’s face.
‘Not so sleepy any more,’ he pointed out.
‘True,’ said Ambrose. ‘Things have certainly perked up.’
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ Fitzgerald asked the pathologist.
‘Just dropping in the autopsy report on the second victim,’ he replied cheerily. Then he stopped when he saw the surprise in Fitzgerald’s face. ‘I thought you knew,’ he said, appalled. ‘Assistant Commissioner Draker telephoned me yesterday and insisted that he wanted the report on his desk first thing this morning. I explained that you were due in this morning to watch over me as usual, but he said not to worry, that had all been sorted out. I’m sorry, Grace, really I am. If I’d realised you knew nothing about it, I would have called you.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Fitzgerald sighed. ‘This is obviously just Draker’s way of putting me in my place, reminding me who’s in charge of the department. Is that it there?’
She nodded at the file Ambrose had tucked under his arm.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Here, take it.’
‘At least I get the results quicker this way,’ she said as she reached out for it. ‘That’s one consolation.’ She opened the report and quickly turned through the pages inside. ‘Wait, what’s this? Cause of death wasn’t strangling?’
‘The damage caused to the neck by the cutting off of the head makes it difficult to state definitively that there wasn’t strangulation, but there were certainly none of the normal signs of strangulation I’d expect to find in the internal organs,’ said Ambrose. ‘But there were severe abrasions and bruises, not to mention numerous fractures, consistent with a sustained assault.’
‘With?’
‘An old-fashioned beating then?’
‘Looks like it. The outline of a shoe was imprinted on the skin of the lower back too.’
‘Is there a time of death here?’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I can’t see.’
‘She was killed thirteen days, twelve hours and’ – Ambrose glanced at his watch – ‘twenty-four minutes ago. Though that is merely a rough estimate, naturally.’
‘I’ll take that sarcasm as a no then, shall I?’
‘You know what I think about estimating times of death, Chief Superintendent,’ said Ambrose. ‘It’s as much guesswork as science. But if you insist on forcing me to indulge in it against all my principles, then a couple of weeks is the best guess I can offer.’
‘So where has she been since?’
‘From the preserved condition of the remains, I’d say in someone’s freezer.’
‘Lovely.’
‘She was in her forties?’ said Boland suddenly.
He’d been reading the report over Fitzgerald’s shoulder and now looked like a schoolboy who’d been caught cheating in a test.
‘Again, you have to take all provisos into consideration, but yes,’ said Ambrose, ‘mid to late forties. She wouldn’t have made the hockey team any more, put it that way, but she was still in fairly good physical condition for her age. You seem surprised.’
‘When I heard that the body in the churchyard was older than the others, I didn’t think it meant that old. Not that mid forties is old,’ he added quickly, ‘just old for a prostitute.’
‘What makes you think she was a prostitute?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘Well . . .’ Boland seemed confused for a moment. ‘Isn’t that who Fagan . . . the letter-writer, I mean . . . said he was going to kill?’
‘That doesn’t mean we have to believe him,’ she said sharply.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Boland. ‘I just assumed.’
‘Don’t,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Assume nothing till you know it for a fact. As to that, you’d be surprised how many prostitutes there are over forty. I once arrested one who was sixty.’
She snapped shut the file, but didn’t hand it back to the pathologist.
‘Don’t worry about taking this to the Assistant Commissioner’s office,’ she said to him instead. ‘As the little red hen once said, I’ll do it myself. Draker and I have a few . . . how shall I put it? . . . issues to sort out, and it’s about time we made a start.’ She turned to Boland. ‘As for you, Sergeant, dig out the missing persons files and get reading. I want a name to put on this woman. She must be in there somewhere.’
‘I’ll get down to records straight away.’
‘Leaves me free to tag along with you children then,’ said Ambrose to me and Tillman. ‘What an unexpected treat. Shall we make a start?’
***************
We rode in Lynch’s car, mainly because he refused to ride in mine. He’d only put his faith in German engineering, he said, but I suspect the real reason was that he’d only put his faith in his own driving.
I knew the feeling. I made a bad passenger; and I was tense all the way from Dublin Castle, sitting in the rear, looking at the backs of Ambrose and Tillman’s heads. The traffic was foul, and we were caught in it all the way through town. Lynch was listening to some opera on the radio and humming, tapping the wheel. He seemed to be possessed of some serenity gene which meant he never got annoyed with the traffic. The wipers swished on a thin rain that barely needed them.
I settled back and thought again about Ed Fagan. About Ed Fagan dying. Harbouring my secret in the car made me feel cheap.
The scene of Mary Lynch’s death wouldn’t be preserved much longer, but there was still an officer on guard when we arrived. He looked bored and stood stamping his feet to keep warm.
He recognised Ambrose Lynch as soon as he’d pulled to a halt and climbed out, and he didn’t even ask who Tillman and I were. Ambrose had that natural air of authority that other people deferred to without thinking, without even realising they were doing it.
‘That’s where she was found,’ he explained now, pointing, as we stepped under the tape. ‘You can still see an indentation in the ground – there – where she fell.’
The rain was growing harder each minute, and I turned up my collar, trying and failing to light a match so that I could smoke, damn, trying and failing again, and finally giving up.
Tillman was even worse dressed for the weather than I was. Hadn’t brought a coat at all. I wondered if that was deliberate, if he wanted to feel the cold as Mary Lynch must have felt it on the night she died, for she’d had no coat either, just a thin jacket that didn’t even cover the hem of her mini skirt, much less her bare legs. They were raw with cold that night. And colder now. Or maybe he’d just forgotten his coat. The simplest explanations often make most sense, as Tillman himself had said. I stood and watched as he set to examining the scene.
A crime scene a few days after the body is gone is a strange thing. Momentarily, it seems to be stripped of its macabre mystery. Everything that brought it to attention is gone, everything that marked it out as different is erased, and yet here it still is separated from the world. Often it seems too inconsequential to have made itself noticed. Only much later, when the police have gone, the tape torn down, the scene left again to the elements, does it return to itself, and then something of a dark, tortured spirit attaches to what’s left, or rather comes out of hiding again.
Tillman, any profiler, was expected to see beneath the surface inconsequentiality to capture again that moment – only a moment, if the victim was fortunate – which had wrested a place into disequilibrium. He was expected to live that moment again. At least that was the theory. What he actually felt when he walked a scene was his own secret.
Tillman was certainly inscrutable today. Occasionally he paused and closed his eyes, looked back at the road and down at the canal, but that was about as dramatic as it got. The rain was streaking his spectacles, but he didn’t even take them off to wipe them.
‘What is he doing?’ said Ambrose in a low voice as he came to stand beside me.
‘Getting a feel for what went on here, that’s all.’
‘I could tell him what went on here,’ said Ambrose. ‘I saw it well enough when Mary Lynch was laid out on the table in the mortuary, and I’m not likely to forget it.’
‘You know what was done to Mary Lynch, but you don’t know why, or what it felt like to do it,’ I answered. ‘That’s what Tillman’s trying to do. He needs to know what it was like for the killer that night, what he was thinking, what it all says about him.’
‘And he can tell that just by walking about a bit and frowning, can he?’
‘You’re too practical,’ I said. ‘You need the certainties of science. You find powder tattooing round a gunshot wound, you know the victim was shot at close range. You need to know if a victim drowned in fresh water or sea water, you just check the dilution of the blood in the heart. You know what those things mean when you find them because that’s what they’ve always meant. There’s no formula that tells him what it means to find Hebrew letters written on the heel of a dead prostitute; but he’s expected to come up with an explanation all the same.’
Ambrose looked unconvinced.
‘You remind me of one of his students,’ I said, cupping my hands to my mouth and blowing into them to try get them warm. ‘Boy by the name of Tim, thinks profiling is only so much mumbo-jumbo.’
‘Sounds like an intelligent chap.’
‘But you’re both missing the point. In the end it doesn’t matter what you think of it,’ I said, ‘because it’s just another piece of the jigsaw. Fitzgerald can decide what she wants to do with the piece once Tillman’s finished cutting it out. She doesn’t have to do anything with it, there’s no obligation, it’s just another road to explore. But just because you don’t take every turn-off on the highway doesn’t mean there mayn’t be something worth exploring
down them.’
‘Saxon, you’re mixing your metaphors.’
‘They can stand a little mixing,’ I said.
I looked back again to Tillman and saw him bending down where the body of Mary had lain. Ambrose had been right, you could see an indentation in the grass; there was almost a shadow there, a fairy ring, a cursed mark. Or was I just imagining it?
Ambrose, meanwhile, reached into his inside pocket and drew out a hip flask, then fumbled with his gloves as he unscrewed it, took a swig.
‘Purely medicinal?’ I said.
‘Central heating, my dear,’ said Ambrose. ‘Central heating. One needs it at my age. You wouldn’t deny an old man his pleasures, surely?’
‘You’re not so old,’ I said.
‘I feel as if I am,’ he said in reply. ‘And yes, I know that drinking will only make me feel older still, but there it is . . .’
He trailed off.
‘Have you heard from Jean?’ I said after a pause in which I’d wondered whether to raise the subject or let it drop and in the end decided what the hell.
‘There was a message waiting for me when I got back home last night,’ he said. ‘Naturally, I was out. Some fight outside a bar, a young man stabbed. Bloody awful mess. I thought about returning the call, but it would only have led to another row. I can’t help doing what I do.’
‘Jean knows that,’ I said. ‘She’s probably just pissed at you because you weren’t there one time too often. It happens.’
‘Do you get annoyed when Grace isn’t there because she’s working?’ he said.
‘That’s different,’ I said. ‘I’ve been there. I know what she has to deal with.’
‘That doesn’t make it any easier.’
‘You’re wrong, it does make it easier. At least it does for me,’ I said. ‘Jean’s what? A schoolteacher? Of course it’s going to be harder for her to understand.’
‘Three weeks is a long time to stay, as your delightful expression has it, pissed with me.’
