by Ingrid Black
He edged out awkwardly from behind a car, the light from the street falling on his face.
‘I was looking for your car,’ he said.
‘My car?’
‘The Chief sent me to track you down,’ he said. ‘She’s been trying to call you.’
‘Yeah? I must have my cellphone switched off.’
‘Well, the Chief suggested you might be here so I said I’d drop in on my way home. I was looking to see if your car was here.’
‘You should’ve come into the bar,’ I said. ‘Here, you might as well say hello. This is Lawrence Fisher. You’ve probably seen him on TV. Just pretend you have even if you haven’t. We wouldn’t want to do irreparable damage to his fragile ego now, would we?’
‘As a matter of fact, I have seen you on TV, Doctor,’ said Boland, reaching out a hand to shake Fisher’s. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘You too. And it’s just Lawrence,’ said Fisher.
‘What did Fitzgerald want with me, anyway?’ I said.
‘We think we’ve found Ed Fagan’s body,’ Boland said.
‘What?’
That came from Fisher. I was glad he was so surprised; it saved me from having to pretend that I was too.
‘What happened?’ I asked instead.
‘The killer sent another text message. On a stolen cell phone this time. Directed police to a body, just like before. We managed to trace the number. It belongs to a woman called Megan O’Brien. She’d been in town earlier on and hadn’t even noticed the phone had been stolen till officers went round to her flat to make sure she was OK. They thought maybe . . . well, you know.’
‘That the killer had taken her?’ said Fisher.
‘Exactly. She didn’t know where it had been stolen. The officers who interviewed her got the impression she’d been on a bit of a pub crawl. Her new boyfriend stood her up, apparently.’
Mark. What a loser.
‘Where was the body?’ I said.
‘In the mountains somewhere,’ said Boland. ‘I wasn’t out there myself, but the forensic team’s up there now, trying to get an ID. The clothing matches the description of the clothing worn by Fagan when he was last seen five years ago, but he’s pretty decomposed.’
I remembered the clothes: white shirt, black trousers, green corduroy jacket, cowboy boots. He never did have any style.
‘Was he strangled too?’ said Fisher.
‘No, he was killed by a single gunshot wound,’ Boland said.
‘That’s an innovation.’
‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘That puts paid to the fingerprint theory.’
‘If it is Fagan,’ said Boland. ‘DNA results will take for ever to come back. But it sure looks like it.’
He seemed depressed. Maybe he’d really thought they were getting somewhere at last. Then this. I searched for a way to make him feel better, but sensed that now probably wasn’t the best time to remind him that certainty was better than futile hope.
‘I don’t get it. The knife . . .’
‘The killer’s playing a game,’ I said.
‘But why make us think it’s Fagan and go to all the trouble of using a knife on Mary Dalton that makes us even more convinced, only to suddenly own up?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said feebly.
‘Anyway,’ he said before I could think what else to say, ‘that’s why I was sent to find you. The Chief reckoned you should know what was happening.’
‘So this killer murdered Fagan as well?’ said Fisher to me. ‘There’s a neat twist to the profile. I can’t quite believe it. It certainly makes the killer’s relationship to the earlier sites all the more symbolic. It’s as if they’re truly his now.’
Boland looked blank.
‘Fisher and I were just discussing a theory of his concerning the scenes where Fagan carried out his murders,’ I explained. ‘In fact, we were just about to take a run out to where Tara Cox died and have a quick look round before I drop him off at the airport for his flight home.’
‘You were going to drive?’ said Boland. ‘You’ve been drinking.’
‘This is getting to be like a meeting of the Teetotallers’ Association,’ I said. ‘Is it so obvious?’
‘Obvious enough that I can’t let you drive,’ said Boland. ‘I might not be much help catching serial killers, but I am still a policeman. I couldn’t let you get behind the wheel.’
‘You’d arrest me?’
‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead,’ he said with a grin, ‘but yes, I suppose I’d have to.’
I sighed, conceding defeat.
‘A taxi it is then.’
‘No need for that,’ said Boland. ‘I’ll drive you. My car’s round the corner. It’ll make a change to be of some help.’
‘You don’t have to get home?’ said Fisher.
‘I think I can bear to skip the delights of a cold house, a cheap takeaway and an empty bed for one night,’ said Boland. ‘If I’m not careful, I’ll be turning into Elliott.’
‘Elliott?’
‘His wife left him too, only a few weeks ago. I met him in a bar the other night, drowning his sorrows. He suggested we should form the Abandoned Husbands Club.’
‘I didn’t even know he was married.’
‘Four months ago, apparently.’
‘And it’s over already?’ I said. Though when I considered what Elliott was like, it was probably more of a wonder that she’d stuck with him so long.
‘Making relationships work can be tough,’ said Boland.
‘Oh, Sergeant, you’re making my heart ache,’ I said. ‘Better show us to this car of yours before I start crying.’
A couple of minutes later we were pulling out from the kerb to join the snake of traffic round St Stephen’s Green. Rush hour was over by now, but there were still plenty of cars and shoppers thronging the narrow streets. Tonight was the night for late shopping, I remembered. There they all were outside the window as we passed, as ethereal to me as ghosts. Seeing them was like watching some medieval masque whose outlandish masks and gestures had lost all meaning. A dumb show in every respect. Was that unfair? I didn’t care. I was only glad when we crossed the river into darkness and left them behind.
Rivers form a boundary in all cities. North is north and south is south and never the twain shall meet. What is also true is how the people on one side of a river rarely feel that the city that exists on the other side is as completely theirs. Finding a place that is completely theirs matters to killers too, maybe more than anything. Finding a place symbolically, in the sense of discovering who and what they are; but also physically, finding a literal place where they can be what they are in secret. They need a place where they feel comfortable, so there are no distractions, so nothing comes between them and the act. That’s why they pick places to kill which they already know intimately, as intimately as Tillman told us Mary Lynch’s killer would have known the area round the canal.
Fagan had switched. He started south of the river, then for the third killing went north instead; no one ever figured why. My guess was that he simply started to feel the pressure round the canal – Fitzgerald had told me that the police presence was stepped up massively after Sylvia Judge died, much to the detriment of the local trade in female flesh, and Fagan couldn’t have failed to notice it as he cruised the streets in preparation for his next killing. So he turned his attention to a place where the hookers were easier to hook. Three women died north of the river, but it was the canal where he felt most like himself, and it was there that he was finally arrested. He’d come home.
Was this, I found myself wondering as we drove, the same route Fagan had taken the night he killed Tara Cox? He’d been working late that night, had stopped off with colleagues for a drink in town, then he’d driven to the dark lane that ran alongside the barracks to pick up Tara.
She’d only been working there a couple of months, and the other hookers who worked the barracks pitch agreed that she was different. The job hadn’t defeated her yet. She still believed sh
e was only passing through. They all started like that. But maybe that made her naive as well, so that when Fagan said he wanted to go to the park up by the Law Library for sex, no alarm rang.
And then, somewhere along here, he must have pulled into the side off Constitution Hill, as we now did, and climbed out of the car.
We peered through the railings at the huge building set aloofly well back from the road.
‘Is that it?’ said Fisher.
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Dante put lawyers in the eighth circle of hell. Dublin puts them here.’
‘At least hell would be warmer,’ Fisher replied with a shiver, tugging his collar tightly round his throat.
‘The pay isn’t as good, though,’ said Boland
A few lights glimmered in upper windows of the library, but it was the huge darkness between there and the road that really imprinted itself on the mind. I want to go in there, Fagan must have told Tara Cox. And in she went. Into the darkness. Very symbolic.
‘Do you have a torch?’ I said.
‘In the boot,’ Boland said, and Fisher and I waited without saying a word until he came back with it.
‘Over here. There’s a broken railing, we can climb through there.’
It took us a while to find it. I squatted down to squeeze through into the grounds. I conjured up again the image of Tara as we crossed the grass in silence, the light from Boland’s torch picking the way. Seventeen she was when she died.
That was three years before I’d even set foot in Dublin for the first time, yet I still remembered the horror I felt when I saw the crime scene photographs. Tara had died of multiple stab wounds; thirty-six of them, as the writer of the first letter pointed out forensically. She’d taken every precaution to be safe on the streets, save for the only realistic precaution, which was to stop selling herself to strangers. A black belt in judo, she’d even managed to wrestle free from Fagan when he attacked her; but she hadn’t got far. Thwarted once, he didn’t take the risk of being denied again. The knife was his final answer to her resistance.
‘Here,’ I said quietly, realising as I did so that I was probably the only one of us who’d been here before, though it was daylight when I’d come. I hadn’t wanted to face it in the dark.
‘This exact tree?’ said Fisher.
‘This tree.’
‘You’re sure.’
‘I’m sure.’
Fagan had left her curled beside the tree, as though sleeping. He’d even draped a sack over her like a blanket, covering her head. The only psychologist the police had contacted at the time speculated, predictably, that the killer may have covered the body out of shame, but I didn’t buy that. Animals aren’t capable of shame. Fagan only covered the body so that it wouldn’t be found too quickly, so that anyone who saw the shape lying there in the shadows would take it for a down-and-out sleeping off another bottle of cheap vodka in the park.
This spot was where he’d wanted her to die, where he’d chosen, though analysis of the footprints and blood at the scene afterwards showed that the fatal wounds had actually been inflicted about a hundred yards away before Tara was dragged back, barely alive, but alive, to bleed to death by the tree.
He’d been angrier than usual that night. Even from the photographs, I’d realised that. You’ll die where I say you’ll die, he was telling her by dragging her back. You’re mine.
‘Fitzgerald found her, you know,’ I said, ‘though she wasn’t Chief Superintendent then, of course. Police got an anonymous call eventually that a body had turned up in the grounds of the Law Library. No details. Just that there was a body.’
‘Was it Fagan who made the call?’ asked Fisher.
‘They never established that, but it could’ve been,’ I said. ‘He never called to direct police to any of the other victims, but this one was different, so maybe his reaction was different, maybe he was particularly proud of this one, wanted to show her off. Fitzgerald didn’t know that when she came here, though. It could’ve been the victim of an overdose for all she was expecting. The uniforms were supposed to be on their way, but in the end she got here first. It was about two in the morning and she just saw Tara lying there. And she knew.’
‘That it was Fagan?’ said Boland.
‘Fagan always left an aura.’
I stepped forward, pointing a finger to mark out the coordinates of the scene.
‘She was lying this way,’ I explained, ‘head pointed towards the library. Fitzgerald saw her feet first, poking out from beneath the blanket. Fagan had taken her shoes with him; they were never found. The ground around her was black. Fitzgerald said it was glimmering wet with blood. The blood had spread out like wine spilled from a bottle. Lynch’s autopsy report said Fagan had severed an artery in Tara’s neck and the blood had spurted over a distance of nine feet.’
I looked down at the grass and thought about that blood. Blood lasted, that was one of the things you first realised when you were an investigator. Indoors and out. Didn’t matter how often you tried to wash it away or how often it rained, it never really went away. It just went into hiding. It was still there, like a skeleton under the skin. The rain could come a thousand times and more and wash Tara’s blood into the soil, hammering it down deeper and deeper into the earth to mingle with the stones; but she was still here, scattered through the ground. Each fragment of her DNA, each perfect blueprint of herself, still lingering here to be trampled on. The final insult. Fagan would’ve liked that.
For the next ten minutes or so, we searched the area round the tree in silence, stopping now and then if we found something and calling the others over for a second and third opinion.
Sum total by the end of it: a few discarded condoms (were the grounds of the library still being used by prostitutes?), a couple of crumpled pages from a porn magazine, some coins and candy wrappers. It would be easy to read significance into a condom, a porn magazine and a few coins – but it was only litter, I couldn’t persuade myself otherwise; it had no meaning.
Well, what had I expected – the killer’s address on a scrap of paper with a huge arrow carved into the tree pointing towards it to make things easier? A cryptic crossword with one across spelling out the name of the killer? I needed to get a grip.
‘Come on,’ I said at last, ‘we’re wasting our time.’
And I could tell by the way they didn’t say a word to object that Fisher and Boland had come to the same resigned conclusion. It was time to call it a night.
Then I saw it.
‘Boland, give me the torch!’
Boland handed me his torch and I flashed the light on to the trunk of the tree.
Fisher whistled.
There, carved into the bole of the tree. Not an arrow pointing, but another letter. Another Hebrew letter? How the hell would I know? But it looked like it. Aleph it was the first time . . . now what?
‘You were right,’ I said to Fisher. ‘I don’t know how you knew, but you were right.’
‘I wish I’d been wrong,’ he said quietly.
‘Because of Tillman? It’s not your fault he missed an angle.’
‘He’s still my friend,’ said Fisher.
I nodded as if I understood, but in truth I had too much else to think about at that moment to spare any space in my head for Tillman’s potential hurt feelings. The letter on the tree: what did it mean this time? I stepped forward and raised my hand to touch the carving, like it was braille and I was blind and could read it.
‘No,’ said Boland firmly.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘We’re going to have to seal the scene.’
‘No hurry,’ I said. ‘The techs’ll find nothing here that we haven’t found already.’
‘Even so,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get the blame for contaminating evidence. Great start to my career in the murder squad that’d be. Draker would have a field day with me.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to call through to headquarters,
tell them what we found,’ Boland said. ‘They’ll have search teams out to the last two Fagan scenes within the hour.’
‘You don’t mean—’ I stopped, annoyed. ‘Fisher?’
‘Leave me out of it,’ Fisher said.
‘But I thought we were going to search the scenes ourselves?’
‘Just where Tara Cox died, you said,’ Fisher reminded me. ‘Besides, Boland’s right. We should leave well alone now. You’ve proved your point, and I have a flight to catch.’
They wouldn’t even look at me. It was pointless arguing. I knew I should have come by myself.
Chapter Twenty-One
I didn’t relish the idea of hanging around waiting for the crime scene technical bureau to arrive and take over, not least because that might mean talking to Fitzgerald. I wasn’t ready for that yet. Instead I called a cab and ran out with Fisher to the airport. We hardly spoke at all during the journey, both distracted by our own thoughts, and when I offered to come inside with him, maybe grab a coffee, he politely put me off.
He stood at the entrance to the terminal, watching as I drove off.
What now?
Then it came to me. I’d call Ambrose Lynch. There was something that had been bothering me since I talked to Salvatore at the library, something he might be able to help clear up. But there was no answer from his cellphone when I tried to call. He’d probably switched it off. He hated carrying one, and only did so because the police insisted he always be in touch in case he was needed at a crime scene. ‘What’s the rush?’ he often complained. ‘The body isn’t going to get up and make a dash for it if I’m a few minutes late.’ Switching the phone off now and then was his quiet protest against bureaucracy and the modern world.
In no mood to wait till morning, I simply gave the pathologist’s address to the cab driver, leaned back into the seat, shut my eyes, and let the city flow by unnoticed, until we reached Lynch’s house.
He lived in the city’s embassy belt, an exclusive neighbourhood where security cameras flowered on virtually every tree and spiked iron gates warned off the curious. At this time of evening, it was an almost straight run across town to get there.
