by Ingrid Black
His was a huge detached Victorian villa with a gravel drive, a steep flight of granite steps to the front door, a coachhouse round the back, and enough bedrooms inside to house a football team, though he and his wife had never had any children to fill them. Why they hadn’t I didn’t know; it wasn’t the sort of thing I could imagine asking Lynch about.
I got the cab to pull up outside the front gate and climbed out. The rain had stopped a long time since. Lynch’s Mercedes wasn’t in the drive but he might have parked it round the back.
‘How much?’ I asked the driver, then waited till his tail-lights had disappeared into the darkness before stepping through the open gates and crunching up the gravel to the front door.
I rang the bell.
No answer.
Tried the bell once more. The same no answer.
Lifted the letterbox to peer inside, but there was nothing to see except another door. No light that I could detect. Was he in bed already? Quietly I made my way round the side. I’d been to this house for dinner with Lynch and his wife a couple of times; there’d even been a cocktail party once at which the Commissioner himself had been present, and some minister in the department of justice whose name now escaped me. I was the only woman there who wasn’t wearing a cocktail dress, and that included Grace. But I’d made a real effort and put on some expensive leather trousers that she’d bought me for my birthday.
Grace had looked fabulous in her little black number, but then she always did, whatever she wore; and I thought I looked fabulous too.
No one else seemed to agree.
I was like the token eccentric, having to keep everything polite with Grace so the minister wasn’t scandalised, endlessly explaining what an American former FBI agent without a cocktail dress was doing in Dublin. But Lynch had been charm itself. He didn’t give two hoots what I was wearing – that was how he put it to me, didn’t give two hoots, and I found the owlish expression so charming and odd that I took a note of it and meant to introduce it into conversation next time I had the chance, though the opportunity had never arisen.
My language was usually more forceful.
I remembered the house as it was that other night, light spilling on to the back lawn through the terrace windows, warm summer air scented with the fragrance of plants (Lynch’s wife Jean was a keen gardener), a bright moon in the sky. Lynch had rigged the trees with lights – which is to say, he’d got somebody else to do it; I couldn’t see Ambrose up a ladder hanging lights for a party – and the whole garden glittered like something out of a child’s picture book. The food had come from an award-winning restaurant down by the river; there was champagne; a string quartet played the Kreutzer Sonata. I know that’s what it was because the minister told me; well, chamber music’s not my thing. And maybe he was only bluffing to impress me.
In return, I offered him one of my best Cuban cigars – I was obviously feeling generous – and enlightened him as to why he should introduce the death penalty to Ireland, starting with the people who parked illegally outside my apartment.
Now the house looked dreary, forlorn, the garden filled with shadows as I trudged across the grass to the coachhouse and smeared a space on the dusty window to peer inside. No sign of Lynch’s car there either. He obviously wasn’t home yet, and it wasn’t hard to imagine where he was: some familiar pub, probably, to put off the moment when he had to come home to this blackness. Strange how the absence of one person could have such an effect on a house. Since Jean had gone, the life seemed to have seeped out of the place.
I was just debating whether to drop a note through the letterbox telling Ambrose to call me when a flash of light illuminated the trees and headlights appeared at the far end of the drive. For a moment I was dazzled, till my eyes cleared and I saw him clambering heavily as usual out of his car.
‘Lynch,’ I said.
He was so startled that he dropped the bags he was carrying on to the gravel.
‘It’s only me. Saxon.’
‘For mercy’s sake,’ said Ambrose, ‘you nearly killed me.’ He sounded breathless, edgy. ‘Where are you?’
‘Over here,’ I said and I stepped out where he could see me.
‘I thought . . .’ He trailed off, embarrassed. His hair was wet, as if with rain. He ran his hands through it nervously. I smiled. ‘You thought I was the legendary Night Hunter?’
‘I don’t know what I thought,’ said Lynch. ‘Thought my time was up, that’s for sure. Jumping at shadows at my age. I should be ashamed of myself.’
‘I shouldn’t have been lurking.’
He bent down to pick up his bags. A briefcase first, filled with papers he’d brought home to work on; the other one—
‘I’ll help you with that,’ I said.
‘I’m fine,’ he said hurriedly; and I realised there was a bottle inside the second bag, whiskey no doubt, picked up from an off-licence on the way home. ‘It’s you we’ve all been worried about. Grace was searching high and low for you to tell you what was happening.’
‘About Fagan? I know about that. Boland told me.’
‘Did he tell you about the Evening News as well?’
‘The Evening News?’
‘Obviously not. They got hold of a copy of the latest letter from the killer. They published it in their final edition late this afternoon.’
Why hadn’t Boland told me? Did he just assume I knew already? I should have known, that was true enough. And I would have known if I hadn’t gone AWOL.
‘There goes our head start on the killer,’ I said despondently.
‘It’s even worse than that, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘They published everything, and when I say everything I do mean everything. Their crime reporter got hold of the details of the quotes the killer has been leaving, and the writing on Mary Lynch’s body, and the missing parts of the woman in the churchyard. Need I go on?’
‘How?’
‘It seems that someone telephoned them this afternoon claiming to be an officer with the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He said he wanted to blow the whistle on the investigation in order to expose the corruption and inefficiency of the force.’
‘And they fell for it? They’re worse than the Post.’
‘It gets better. This self-proclaimed shining credit to the force gave his name as Gus Bishop.’
Gus. The same name as Mary Lynch’s creepy sugar daddy.
‘I don’t suppose you have a copy of it, do you?’ I said.
‘Of that rag? My dear, I am grievously insulted. Though you’d better come in all the same,’ he added. ‘No point standing about in the cold even if I have been insulted, is there?’
He took out his key and let me in the door at the side of the house, then led the way down a short passageway into the kitchen.
The house smelt like it hadn’t been lived in for years. Not dirty, just unused and abandoned, unloved. Ambrose went ahead into the kitchen and flicked a light.
I saw at once the unwashed cups and glasses piled in the sink and the empty liquor bottles standing on the draining board. There was a pile of unopened mail on the table, mostly with his wife’s name on, like he’d left it there in case she came back. Since his wife had left, Ambrose evidently hadn’t kept a grip on his domestic situation. That was typical of men of his age and upbringing. They expected life to be ordered about them so they could get on with their affairs, then, when one day it wasn’t, they didn’t know how to cope.
Ambrose put his bags down next to the sink, careful to conceal the bottle underneath his briefcase, before coming back to sit at the kitchen table, ushering me into a seat opposite him.
Then he caught my eye and smiled sadly.
‘Who am I fooling?’ he said, and he went back to the sink, rinsed a couple of glasses and reached into the bag for the bottle of whiskey.
He twisted open the cap, all pretence gone.
‘Can I pour you one?’
‘Might as well.’
What was another one after the day I’d
had?
He seemed more at ease once he didn’t have to put on an act, though he didn’t have to put on any act for my benefit. Or perhaps it was simply the thought of whiskey which put him at ease.
‘How did you get on in the mountains while all this was going on?’ I asked as he poured.
‘Magnificently,’ said Ambrose dryly. ‘What better way to spend the weeks before Christmas than in the company of the dead? The conversation is so sparkling, so witty.’
‘Have you managed to identify the body yet?’
Ambrose shook his head.
‘Since when are our lives ever that simple?’ he said. ‘The body appears to be that of a man about the right age and height to be our Mr Fagan, and between you and me, of course it is him; but for now he remains officially unidentified. Just like his predecessor in the churchyard.’
‘Actually, that’s what I wanted to ask you about,’ I said. ‘Yesterday I spent some time with Professor Salvatore. Have you heard of him? No? He’s a theologian who used to work with Fagan; he pointed out a few interesting things to me. Thought I’d run them by you.’
‘I’m all ears,’ he said.
‘Do you know who Jehu is?’
‘Unlike most people in this modern world of ours,’ said Ambrose, ‘I happen to have had the benefit of a decent classical education, so yes, I know who Jehu is. Old Testament chappie, if I remember rightly. An avenger sent by God to kill the unholy.’
‘He killed Jezebel,’ I said. ‘That’s where the quote came from. Go, see now this cursed woman and bury her.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ he admitted. ‘I can certainly see why it would excite your interest.’
‘Right now I’m more interested in the way Jezebel died. You remember that?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Ambrose.
‘Your classical education did leave some gaps then?’ I teased. ‘She was thrown out of a window. I was wondering if that was a clue to how this woman died.’
‘You think, in choosing this particular quote, the killer was telling us that he threw this unfortunate woman out of a window?’ said Ambrose.
‘Not necessarily out of a window. Off a wall, down the stairs even. You said the injuries were consistent with a beating. Could they be consistent with a fall as well?’
‘Intriguing.’ He reached over to refill his glass. ‘I hadn’t considered that possibility, I must admit. I don’t think so, alas.’
‘Why not?’
‘For one thing, one wouldn’t get the same pattern of injuries in a fall; for another, the injuries would tend to be more severe. One would normally expect some kind of spinal injury to be present. Transection of the thoracic, perhaps.’
‘And there was nothing like that?’
‘Sorry. I’m not saying that it’s impossible,’ said Ambrose, ‘but the injuries simply did not conform to any that I’ve ever observed in the victim of a fall before, accidental or otherwise. But what about you? What have you been doing all day?’
Strangely enough, I didn’t mention sending the text message which had prompted his trip out to the mountains that afternoon. I told him instead about the symbol carved on the tree where Tara Cox died. I remembered that he’d identified the first one. He seemed impressed.
‘Have you a pen and paper?’ I asked. ‘I’ll try to draw it.’
‘Of course I do.’
On the fourth attempt, I got as near as I was likely to get.
‘Lamedh,’ he said at once. ‘And you know, that means ox as well. At least . . . wait there.’
He disappeared for a few moments and returned with a book. He pushed the glasses aside, and laid the book flat, pointing out the definition for me to read: Lamedh, the twelfth letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Transliterated as L. Literal meaning: ox goad (from its shape).
‘What’s a goad?’ I said.
‘A pointed stick,’ said Ambrose.
‘An ox, a pointed stick, the first and twelfth letters of the Hebrew alphabet. One and twelve make thirteen. Is that it? Unlucky for some? This freak’s certainly been unlucky for some.’ I could feel myself growing frustrated. ‘I wish I could work out what it means. Tillman reckons it’s probably something so simple we’ll never even consider it.’
‘Occam’s Razor,’ said Lynch. ‘He could be right.’
‘You mind explaining that?’
‘William of Occam was a philosopher who formulated the principle that the fewest possible assumptions should be made when explaining a thing. It’s called Occam’s Razor.’
‘Is that right? And what principle would this William formulate to explain why someone kills innocent women then leaves little messages hidden all over town like the Easter bunny?’
‘That I cannot answer,’ conceded Ambrose, ‘but what he would say to you, I’m sure, is that you are doing your best and it’s not your fault if you have failed so far to put all the pieces together. You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it, as I believe you Americans put it.’
‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘Beating myself up is about the only thing I’m any good at these days. Well, that and poker.’
‘You play poker?’
‘I play poker the way John Coltrane played the saxophone.’
‘That sounds very much like a challenge,’ said Ambrose, ‘and I hope you realise that I never could resist a challenge.’
‘Save your money and blushes, Lynch. You haven’t a prayer.’
‘That decides it. Where did I put those cards?’ Ambrose rose to his feet and started searching purposefully through the drawers. ‘There’s just one thing I need to ask you first.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Who exactly was this John Coltrane person?’
I think he was joking.
Fifth Day
Chapter Twenty-Two
Later, I learned that her name meant ‘belonging to God’; and she did now.
She was Nikolaevna Tsilevich – not quite the Nikola that the letter-writer had promised, but close enough to have made it possible to identify her before she was killed, if only we had known her real name, but Nikolaevna Tsilevich was known to those around her only as Sadie. She came from Novosibirsk in Siberia, Russia’s third largest city – an empty wasteland, so the travel guides said, of grey Stalinist apartment blocks and filthy factories, where the river was so toxic that it couldn’t freeze in winter. There were coalfields to the east and vast mineral deposits to the west – and nothing in the middle for a nineteen-year-old girl like her.
She’d come to Dublin on a short-hop flight from London about six months ago and disappeared into the city like a diver breaking the water, never to emerge back into the air. She was equally unknown to Immigration and Vice. One more invisible woman. It was a familiar story, and one in which Niall Boland became something of an expert in the coming days. The cops over in Vice explained to him how it worked. Employment agencies throughout Eastern Europe advertised jobs in Dublin for nannies, chambermaids, waitresses, then when the girls got here, lured by the promise of money beyond what they could ever hope to earn back home, they were coaxed, cajoled, intimidated, whatever, into prostitution instead.
They were told that the money which had brought them to Dublin was only a loan and they would now have to pay it back. And what other way was there? Anything they made on top, meanwhile, they got to keep, and for many that did represent a considerable sum.
As I looked through the wardrobe in Nikolaevna’s Temple Bar apartment in the city centre about twelve hours after she’d been killed, and only half an hour or so after her body had finally been taken away by the city pathologist, I found it filled with expensive labels.
‘She was obviously doing well,’ I said, flicking through the hangers.
‘There was about ten thousand a month going into her account,’ Fitzgerald said.
She was standing by the window, looking out. A small crowd had gathered below at the news of another murder.
Why does a crowd always gather? What is it that they
want to see? The dead borne out on stretchers in a public display?
‘You’ve been through her bank records already?’
‘No point hanging around,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘She was sending about two thousand home each month, to her mother and father, spending the rest. She had a kid, a daughter, her parents were looking after her.’
I looked over at the bed where the body of the Russian prostitute had been found by the cleaner when she arrived that morning. I could still see the indentation in the sheet where she’d lain.
I thought about her parents in the cold east, a small child who’d never see her mother, about the friends she’d known who’d watched her flying off to the west, envying her no doubt, entranced by the glamour of departure, the lure of possibilities; and what they’d all think now.
Nikolaevna had been naked when she was found, face down, hands tied behind her back, one foot trailing on the ground, half on, half off the bed. Her neck was crisscrossed with post-mortem slash marks, and it looked as though she’d been raped, though whether this was post-mortem too would have to await the autopsy report from Ambrose Lynch.
And there was the quote we’d all been expecting. He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.
Which was exactly what the killer had done.
The back of Nikola’s head had been all but obliterated by the force of a rock striking down, and the rock itself had been left on the pillow, on top of the scrap of paper with the typewritten message, weighing it down.
That, presumably, was his idea of a joke.
The differences between this murder and the previous three, not to mention between this and the murders carried out by Fagan, were so obvious I hardly needed to list them in my head. In fact, apart from the quotation everything was different. The rape was different – Fagan had never raped any of his victims, nor had this latest killer so far. The use of restraints was different – that reminded me again of Monica Lee, the prostitute dumped in the mountains three years ago. There was the rock too. I wondered if it would turn out on analysis to be the same type of rock whose traces were found on Monica’s body, and I knew in my heart that it would. There was no strangulation.
