by Ingrid Black
‘Ambrose,’ I said, ‘she’ll come home.’
‘No, she won’t,’ he said, and he looked me straight in the eye as he said it, and at that moment I knew he was right. Just then he did look old, and I had a vision of him getting older, alone, drinking whiskey out of a hip flask and telling everyone it was for the cold. He smiled tolerantly as I struggled and finally gave up trying to find the words to say he was wrong. What was the point?
‘Well then,’ I said with sudden bitterness at the world for his loneliness, ‘if she’s not coming back . . . then fuck her.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Fuck her.’
The words sounded so odd coming from his mouth that we both laughed nervously, before glancing round guiltily, remembering where we were and seeing Tillman coming towards us, not even looking up in enquiry as to why we were laughing. He probably hadn’t even noticed.
‘We were just discussing someone who looks increasingly likely to be my ex-wife,’ said Ambrose. ‘I don’t suppose you have any advice on that score, do you?’
‘Who, me? No, never married. Never fitted in with the job.’
He was distracted still, affected by the scene. He was shivering, almost as if he could sense the evil which still lingered. Maybe he could. At his back, cold, pale light shone on the water. There was laughter from afar. The hum of the traffic. He’d shut it all out and now it was returning slowly, like waking from a disturbed sleep and not quite remembering where you were.
‘You OK, Mort?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just thinking.’
‘That’s what you’re here for,’ said Ambrose.
‘I’m not sure anyone would want to share my thoughts right now,’ Tillman confessed. ‘What I was thinking is that maybe it’s time I got a different job.’
‘Join the club, my good man, join the club.’
Chapter Thirteen
The rain was coming down hard by the time we made it back to the car.
‘Can I drop you somewhere?’ said Tillman as we climbed in.
‘The National Library,’ I said. ‘I’ve arranged to meet someone there. Professor Salvatore. You know him?’
‘Should I?’
‘He used to know Fagan,’ I explained, ‘though that’s not why I’m meeting him. He’s a theologian. The owner of a religious bookstore down on Nassau Street gave me his name, said he might be able to help me track down the quotes our boy’s been leaving.’
‘All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.’
‘Amongst others. Salvatore’s going to be there all day, researching his latest book; he agreed to take time out for me.’
‘What time’s your appointment?’
‘Three.’
‘Then I’d best hurry.’
I closed my eyes and put my head back against the rest, listening to the quiet, hypnotic swish of the wipers, and I found myself wondering as I always did what I was doing here.
Everyone had something to do except me; I didn’t even know what my role was meant to be. Expert consultant, my ass. I didn’t even have enough pulling power to get on to a crime scene without prior permission, yet I was supposed to be some help here? Come on. It was nothing but vanity on my part, an inability to let go. I’d have been better off back in my apartment just waiting for Fitzgerald to come and tell me how things were progressing. Are you sitting comfortably, Saxon? Then I’ll begin.
That had always been my problem: I never felt settled, never felt that, finally, I knew where I wanted to be. Some people instinctively know where that is. Like Fitzgerald. She had a place here, a purpose; she fitted. I was just loitering. The thought came to me, though, as we drove, the car heater making me sleepy: would she go with me if I asked her? If I told her I had to get away, on to the next place, wherever that was, would she come? Could she leave this life she had behind? It wouldn’t be fair to ask her. I wouldn’t ask her. But say I did, would she come?
At that moment I desperately wanted to know.
‘Hello, hello, hello.’
I opened my eyes at Lynch’s stage policeman’s exclamation, as reluctantly as if I’d been sleeping. It took me a moment to get my bearings and recognise the narrow street where he was now slowing down. There was a church not far from here, I half recalled, infamous because the corpses in the crypt never rotted. Something ancient and dry in the air had preserved them against decay, and visitors used to descend the steep steps to shake their hands. Why the hell had he come this way? This wasn’t the way to the National Library.
The blue flash of a patrol car was splashing the walls of the narrow street. A crowd had gathered. Raised voices.
A hundred yards from where we were parked, a market opened out to fill all available space. To our left, hemmed in by tall grey buildings, the stalls were out, the day’s trade at its height. Traders, shoppers, idlers should’ve been milling about, but it was as if some malfunction had unexpectedly pushed the city’s pause button and all movement had ground to a halt. Lynch slowed down to take a look.
I was out of the car before he could protest, following the blue flash through the frozen crowds, like I was wading underwater.
‘Let me through,’ I said. ‘Police.’
A lie, but it did the trick. They parted to let me pass.
An air of unreality enveloped me as I waded. All around were signs of normality. Christmas trees rested against the market stalls, fairy lights hung from metal bars and awnings, there were stupid ornaments for the season and wrapping paper laid out for sale; stallholders wore Santa hats with twinkling lights, and somewhere a radio blared out ‘Sleigh Ride’.
At the back of the market there was a line of what looked like stable doors, secured with padlocks. Stallholders, I guessed, hoarded stuff here out of sight of taxmen and thieves. One door was open. I saw Niall Boland’s shape imprinted on the darkness that flooded out from it, two more uniformed officers close by. He was peering inside.
At what?
‘You can’t come in here,’ one of the uniforms began.
‘Boland,’ I snapped.
Boland turned his head and saw me.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘she’s with me.’
It was an unsatisfactory answer, but it took the quarrel out of the officer who’d challenged me. He had that wide-eyed, pale look that you only get in someone who’s just seen the body of a murdered person, for I’d no doubt now that that was what it was we’d come here to see.
I wondered if it was his first. Some officers go through an entire career without seeing a single body, without being tainted with those images; but once they have, the stain never leaves their mind. It makes its mark, brands them. Some never recover. I’d known cops who handed in their notice when they found the first one, because they couldn’t handle the memory of it and didn’t want to add other memories to it. Others were unaffected, serene.
Boland was one of those, I realised at once; and in many ways so was I. I stepped up to the door and recognised in his eyes the same distant, abstracted look of one who could step outside himself, do what needed to be done. The horror would come later. I took a deep breath and looked into the dark.
Saw her.
‘Mary,’ I said.
She was lying on her back, arms thrown wide, laid out in a corner in the dark, eyes closed, green twine wound around her neck, the front of her dress stained with dried blood. I couldn’t see a wound or a weapon, but the blood told its own story.
‘Who found her?’ I said.
‘One of the market traders,’ replied the uniformed officer. I checked his name badge: DS Simon Turner. ‘We’ve taken him for a cup of tea,’ he continued. ‘He’s pretty shaken up about it. He opened the door here about twenty minutes ago and found her lying there. He called the station in Chancery Street and we were sent out to check up.’
‘She must’ve been here all day,’ I said. ‘All these people milling about the market, you couldn’t carry a body through here.’
‘Carry?’ said Bo
land. ‘How do you know she wasn’t killed here?’
I sighed, irritated all of a sudden that he hadn’t seen it himself and not caring at that moment if he knew I was irritated.
‘The blood, Boland, look,’ I said. ‘Look how much there is on her. Her clothes are covered with it, but there’s none on the floor or walls.’
He nodded, plainly feeling foolish.
‘She wasn’t strangled then?’ he said.
‘That’s a post-mortem strangling,’ I said. ‘See how tightly the ligature’s been pulled, yet there’s no bulging of the eyes, no protrusion of the tongue. She died of stab wounds all right.’
I stepped forward.
‘Careful,’ Boland said, all policeman again.
‘I won’t touch anything,’ I said, ‘I just want to see. Here, you, pass me your torch.’ DS Turner handed over the torch without complaint and I shone it down on to the woman’s hands. ‘Defensive wounds, see, where she tried to ward off the blows.’
‘Like Tara Cox,’ said Boland with a belated insight.
‘Exactly like Tara Cox,’ I said, for I could see now the open wound in the woman’s throat, a single cut. Everything was the same, except that Tara had been covered with a blanket.
I flashed the light round the dingy interior.
There it was. The market trader must have lifted the blanket off when he came to open up, not knowing what was underneath. It lay in a heap a few yards from the body. I was about to point it out to Boland when a movement in the crowd caught my eye.
‘Great, here comes trouble.’
Scything through the crowd came Seamus Dalton. Civilians fell before him like freshly cut wheat. Make way for the lawman.
‘I hope you didn’t touch anything,’ were his first words to me.
‘The day I need lessons in crime scene preservation from you, Dalton, is the day I go home and blow my brains out,’ I said.
‘Don’t let me stop you.’
He glanced briefly into the dark where Mary lay.
Almost dismissive.
‘She’s been stabbed,’ I said.
‘Stabbed, is it?’ He actually laughed. ‘So you’re a pathologist as well now? How does the FBI manage without you? No wonder the US has the highest murder rate in the world now that you’re not there to take care of law enforcement single-handed.’
‘You know something, Dalton?’ I said quietly. ‘You’re so far up your own ass even your boots are starting to disappear. So let’s get one thing straight. I am not one fraction of one per cent interested in spending the next few days tiptoeing round your delicate little male ego so it doesn’t get bruised. I’ve more important things to do. So should you.’
‘Well, excuse me for talking out of line,’ sneered Dalton. ‘There was me thinking I was the police officer round here and you were just the Chief’s favourite bedwarmer. My mistake. We’ll all just go home now, shall we, and let you get on with closing the case?’
‘Saxon,’ said Boland before I could say anything back.
A warning.
I turned my head and saw Lawlor, Healy and the other members of the murder squad moving through the marketplace. No sign of Fitzgerald yet. The blue tape was going up once more. I wasn’t going to have it out with Dalton in front of them. There was something of the wolf pack about their arrival as they fanned out, taking control, re-establishing a hierarchy.
First thing they did was summon up jobs for Turner and the other officer from Chancery Street, anything to clear them out of the way.
Then Lawlor stepped forward and whispered in Dalton’s ear.
‘If it’s all right with Chief Fitzgerald’s representative on earth,’ Dalton said as a parting shot to me, ‘I’ll be off now to talk to the man who found the body. You have a good day now.’
‘He certainly has a way of making you feel like you’re only cluttering up the place,’ said Boland once Dalton had left. ‘God help us if he ever gets to be chief. I think I’d apply for another transfer.’
‘Back to Serious Crime?’
‘Serious Crime, Traffic, dog unit, you name it.’
‘He’s hard work,’ I agreed.
‘He’s great if you’re one of the gang,’ said Boland. ‘The after-hours-drinking type. It’s the ones who go home to their wives once their shifts are through that he can’t stand.’
‘No women allowed,’ I said.
‘Not if he can help it. Especially not chief superintendents.’
‘Talk of the devil.’
A snatch of ‘She Moves Through The Fair’ came into my head as I watched Fitzgerald weaving through the crowd towards us, head bent as always to her cellphone. Why is it that the mind always throws up such incongruous images at the most inconvenient moments? Our minds conspire against us, that’s why, laughing at all our attempts to tame them.
Boland held the crime scene tape up for Fitzgerald as she ducked underneath. She groaned as she stood upright again, pulling her shoulders tight to dislodge the pain in her back.
‘He’s not leaving much time, is he?’ she said to me.
‘She must’ve been dead already before the article hit the news-stands,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t killed here. That means she must’ve been brought here in the night, before the market opened.’
‘It opens at six,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘but they start putting out the stalls about five. And Benburb Street’s just round the corner’ – she meant the red-light district this side of the river – ‘so there’d have been people in and out of here pretty constantly till, say, three o’clock. That doesn’t exactly leave much time in between for our friend to dispose of a body.’
‘Long enough,’ I said.
‘True. What about a note?’
‘I didn’t see. I didn’t want to touch anything. But if he’s still following the Fagan pattern, and it looks as though he is, then it’ll be inside her bra; that’s where it was on Tara Cox.’
‘Well, we’ll find out soon enough,’ she said, and took a deep breath, she was steeling herself for a dive into icy water. ‘I’d better go in. What are you going to do?’
‘Damn,’ I said, suddenly remembering. ‘I have to meet someone.’ I checked my watch. ‘And I’m late.’
‘I’ll drop you off,’ said Boland.
‘No, Boland, you stay here,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘I want to get an ID trace on this woman as fast as we can. We don’t have much time. Sorry, Saxon, you’ll have to make your own way.’
‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Here, Boland, catch.’
‘My keys.’
‘Good job one of us remembered.’
I’d almost left the marketplace before I noticed the green dome of the Four Courts rising through the rain above the square.
The Four Courts . . . Chancery Street. Fagan had murdered Tara Cox in the grounds of the Law Library on Constitution Hill. Whoever killed this woman couldn’t go back there, not after Mary Lynch and the body in the churchyard had alerted police to his desire to match out the same pattern. He knew they’d be watching, waiting. But that didn’t mean the pattern had to be abandoned completely.
Law Library . . . Four Courts . . . Chancery Street. This was Dublin’s legal district. Connections didn’t come much more tenuous, but it was a connection.
So then, where had Fagan’s next victim died? Liana Cassidy had been killed in Prospect Cemetery, next to the railway line. That was no help. How many cemeteries were there, after all, how many miles of track? The police couldn’t watch over them all.
And then I stopped myself, realising what I was doing. A woman lay dead and my thoughts had already turned to the next one. It was as though I’d written off the chances of catching whoever was doing this before it happened again. And the worst of it was, maybe I had.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Professor Salvatore?’ I said as I came through the revolving doors of the National Library and a tall, graceful figure rose to greet me from one of the benches that lined the wall. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘No need to apologise,’ he said. The bookstore owner had told me Salvatore was Italian, but there was only the faintest trace of an accent in his voice. ‘And I insist you call me Max.’
‘Max it is.’
I recognised him at once from the photograph printed on the back cover of his books. He was an attractive man, with cheekbones you could go skiing on, and he was well-dressed too, with that careless elegance Europeans seem to manage so effortlessly.
‘Traffic a nightmare?’ he said.
‘Something like that,’ I replied, sidestepping the question. Then I wondered why I felt the need to invent excuses when the events of that afternoon were more than reason enough. ‘Actually,’ I started again, ‘the truth is that the police found another body.’
‘That’s awful. I’m sorry.’
‘She was only found about an hour ago. I was passing by chance otherwise I’d have been here on time. I’m grateful you waited.’
‘If this is a bad time . . .’
‘No. Or yes, it is a bad time, but perhaps you can stop it getting worse, like I explained on the phone this morning. This man is leaving messages, religious messages, each time he kills. The police have managed so far to keep the details out of the media, but what they really want, what I really want, is to know if they contain other possible meanings beyond the obvious.’
‘And that’s where I come in?’ he said.
‘You’re a theologian,’ I said. ‘Former priest, trained in Rome. See, I’ve been told all about you – not least that you’re one of the most important scholars right now in the field of Old Testament eschatology. Whatever the hell that is.’
‘The study of different concepts of heaven and hell,’ he laughed.
I noticed he didn’t object to my assessment of his importance.
‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Who better to explain what we’re dealing with here? Plus, from what I hear, you used to know Ed Fagan.’
‘I didn’t know Ed Fagan that well,’ Salvatore said. ‘We attended a few of the same conferences, contributed to some of the same symposiums and journals. He reviewed me once. Badly. Never give an academic a bad review, they’ll never forget it. We don’t make enough from our writings to put up with bad reviews. I wouldn’t have minded so much if he knew what he was talking about, but eschatology was not Fagan’s field. He was more a linguist and historian than a theologian.’
