The Judas Heart

by Ingrid Black

  “I’ve had better nights.”

  “You manage to snatch any sleep?”

  “Ten minutes in the car.”

  “It must be bad.”

  “How do you quantify bad?” replied Fitzgerald. “Sometimes I think that’s the worst part of this job. Death no longer surprises you. It’s just another night’s work.”

  For investigator and investigated alike.

  Call it the banality of evil.

  “She was definitely murdered then?”

  “I think we can safely say it wasn’t suicide. But you know Alastair Butler,” she said, meaning the City Pathologist. “Until he’s completed the autopsy, he’s not willing to say for certain that it’s murder. A victim could’ve been seen by a roomful of witnesses taking seventeen bullets in the back, but until he’s satisfied himself there’s no chance the cause of death could really have been smoke inhalation, then he’s not going to commit himself.”

  “Pathologists are all the same,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” she sighed. “All the signs are that she was tied naked by the wrists and ankles to the bedposts, mouth taped over, before the bastard put a plastic bag over her head and tightened it with cords until she suffocated. There were some signs of genital bruising too, suggesting a possible sexual assault. He also,” here she hesitated slightly before continuing softly, “cut off one of the fingers of her right hand.”

  “Post mortem?”

  “Thankfully so.”

  “Trophy?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. He left the finger behind.”

  “Then why cut it off in the first place?”

  “A friend we spoke to says she always wore a ring on that finger. It belonged to her mother. It was left to the victim after her mother died. It hasn’t turned up, so it looks like it was the ring he really wanted.”

  “He couldn’t just take it off?”

  “In this case, apparently not. According to Butler, the victim suffered some sort of cadaveric spasm. Her fingers were clenched tight. He wouldn’t have been able to just unfold them to get the ring off. Cutting would have been the only way.”

  Now I understood. It normally takes between two and eight hours for rigor mortis to develop in a dead body. In cases of cadaveric spasm, rigor mortis sets in immediately, sometimes in all the muscles of the body, but generally in a smaller group of muscles. It’s a rare enough phenomenon, but most pathologists were bound to come across it from time to time. The point was that a tightened fist would take considerable effort to open.

  Though that didn’t mean this killer only cut off the finger because there was no other way of getting the ring. Cutting off the finger may have been what he intended to do all along.

  Hence my next question.

  “Did he bring the knife with him?”

  “I see what you’re getting at, but no, he got it from the kitchen.”

  “Making himself at home,” I said grimly. “Did he take it with him?”

  “It was left lying on the floor by the bed. He wiped it clean first on the bed sheet.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Gloves,” she said. “There was also no sign of a break in. So either he knew the victim and she let him into the house, or he had a key, or knew where to get one. Plus it turns out she had a secret camera hidden at her front door, recording who came and went. The tapes have been taken away. Whoever killed her must have known the camera was there. You can’t even tell it’s there from the doorway outside. But until Butler finishes his report and makes it official, we’re not going to be able to release any further details to the press. That’s why they’re going crazy. He can’t be hurried.”

  “You’re the one who’d better hurry up and make an arrest then,” I said. “Give them something to report. I’m disappointed in you. You must be slowing up in your old age.”

  “Give me a chance. We’ve only got a positive ID from her father an hour ago.”

  “Are you allowed to tell me her name?”

  “She was called Marsha Reed.”

  “Reed?”

  Fitzgerald must’ve heard something in my voice.

  “You know her?”

  For a moment, something had flashed into my head. The trace of a memory, though it was gone as quickly as it arrived.

  “Her name sounds familiar,” I answered feebly.

  “It would make things a damn sight easier if you could tell us something about her,” Fitzgerald said. “We don’t have that much on her. She only moved into the area about three months ago. The neighbours know nothing about her. Hardly anyone seemed to speak to her. Some of them don’t even recognise her picture. And none of them heard a thing, naturally.”

  “How long had she been dead?”

  “No more than twenty four hours,” Fitzgerald said. “We’ve got a taxi driver who remembers dropping her at the door on Saturday night about ten o’clock. He says she was drunk, kind of giddy, in high spirits, you know. She needed help to the front door. He had to unlock it for her. He says when she opened her bag to get out the key, there was a large amount of cash inside. He couldn’t say how much, but a few thousands certainly. It wasn’t in the house when the body was found, but he insists he didn’t take it.”

  “That’s what they all say,” I remarked.

  “Don’t worry, Healy and I are heading over to speak to him soon as the forensic team are finished here. But his story seems to stack up in all other respects. Unless he’s the kind of man who’s capable of killing a woman, cutting off her finger and then returning to continue the night shift without any outward signs of stress or disturbance to anyone else.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” I said. “But look on the bright side. If the house was locked and there are no signs of a forced entry and the tapes from the hidden camera are gone, then at least you’re narrowing down the possibilities. It does sounds pretty much like it was someone she knew.”

  “That might not necessarily narrow it down,” said Fitzgerald cryptically.

  “It doesn’t?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it over lunch. Give you something to look forward to.”

  “Can’t wait. I didn’t think you’d be able to get away.”

  “I’ll be here a few hours yet,” she conceded. “You know how long the forensic work can take. They’re vacuuming the place now, and then the fingerprint section will come in, and they’ll have to lift soil and grass samples from the garden, and copy shoeprint moulds, and check for tyre marks, and take apart the plumbing to look for traces of blood in the pipes. But I’ll have to take a break eventually unless they want a basket case with severe exhaustion heading up this investigation. It’ll have to be out at my place, though.”

  “Sure. Any reason it has to be there? My apartment’s closer.”

  “I have to go back and pick up some stuff,” said Fitzgerald. “I’m meeting the Commissioner later this afternoon, remember? I need to get the right outfit. You can’t have Detective Superintendents going in to meetings looking like they’ve spent the night at a crime scene, after all,” she added sarcastically. “Might give the wrong impression.”

  “I forgot about the Commissioner,” I said. “Your place it is then. And listen, I’ll pick up some food before heading out there.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll be there around one, ok?”

  “One it is,” I said.

  I put down the phone, cursing myself for forgetting about Fitzgerald’s meeting with the Commissioner. She’d only been given final word of it three days ago, and since then her preoccupation with the impending meeting had been making her unusually distracted.

  Unusually because being distracted had always been my job.

  The reason for the meeting was the retirement some months previously of Assistant Commissioner Brian Draker, former head of the murder squad, the search for whose replacement had dragged on so long now that Fitzgerald had taken to joking how she was almost tempted to ring up Draker and beg him to come ba
ck. Yeah, in the same way that people in London might be tempted to ring up the Great Plague and ask it to return because they missed it so much. Now it seemed the DMP had finally found their man and Fitzgerald was going to be told at the meeting who she’d be working under for the foreseeable future.

  I’d tried to persuade her to apply for the job herself. Draker had given her plenty of trouble in his time as Assistant Commissioner, and I resented the thought of her having to go through it all again with the next jerk who felt threatened by a strong, intelligent woman.

  But throughout, Fitzgerald insisted she’d rather take redundancy and stay home listening to me gripe all day than be stuck behind a desk - or worse, schmooze her way round Dublin with officials, politicians, civil servants, and other wastes of oxygen, assessing budgets, holding meetings, allocating resources, shuffling paper, as any responsible, career-minded Assistant Commissioner was expected to do. Investigations on the ground were all that mattered to her, all that ever had mattered, and if I was honest I couldn’t have felt the same way about her if her priorities had been any different.

  I don’t know what that said about the two of us. A therapist would probably conclude that our single-mindedness was a sign of some personal or social dysfunctionality. A masquerade to conceal some inner loss.

  That was yet another good reason to stay well clear of therapists.

  Chapter Six

  Hugh, the old guy who minded the door of the building and sorted the mail and banged the pipes half-heartedly when something went wrong with the heating, was sitting on his usual chair in the lobby when I got downstairs. He was reading a newspaper. To be exact, he was reading the sports pages at the back of the newspaper which meant I had a clear view of the front page story: Girl Brutally Murdered In Inner City Tragedy.

  Reporters didn’t hang around like pathologists, waiting for every detail to be meticulously checked out before deciding what had happened.

  “That’s a bad business,” he murmured with a shake of the head when he saw what I was looking at. He had a vaguely reproachful look in his eyes, like he blamed me in some mysterious way for what had happened. “If you ask me, the whole town’s going downhill. There never used to be things like this when I was younger.”

  “There have always been murders,” I pointed out mildly.

  “Not like this,” Hugh said, turning the newspaper over and jabbing a bony finger at the front page. “Says here he sliced her up.” There was a relish in his voice now. Nothing gives people more satisfaction than wallowing in the world’s wickedness. “It makes me glad I’m old. At least I won’t have to live to see it getting even worse. And it will, you mark my words. Dublin’s getting as bad as that place you come from. What do you call it again?”

  “America?” I offered.

  “That’s the one,” he said. “You’re always killing each other over there, aren’t they?”

  “Not all of us,” I said. “A few of us manage to get through each day alive.”

  But he wasn’t really listening. I hoped I wasn’t about to get a lecture from Hugh as well on all the things that were wrong with America.

  In my experience, lectures like that were rarely brief.

  I stopped him in his tracks by handing him a piece of paper.

  “What’s this?” he said suspiciously.

  “The name of a locksmith,” I told him. “He’s coming over to take a look at my door. I’ve been having a few problems with it.”

  “I could take a look at it, if you like. Save you some money.”

  Think fast, girl. Let Hugh near the door and it wouldn’t open till the Second Coming.

  “That’s OK,” I said quickly. “The locksmith’s a friend of mine. I just wanted to make sure you let him in. He’ll be here about eleven. You’ll be here?”

  “I’m always here,” Hugh declared grumpily. “Nowhere else to go, have I? They’ll have to carry me out of here feet first in a box.” And for the second time that morning, it almost sounded like he was relishing the prospect.

  “Well, if you could just hang on until you’ve let in the locksmith, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Very amusing,” said Hugh as I headed to the door. “You should be on TV.”

  I waved goodbye as I stepped out into the morning’s sharpness, but Hugh had already retreated back into his newspaper. The crossword this time.

  He seemed to be coping well enough with the disintegration of Dublin society.

  **********

  Soon as I hit outside, I could tell it was going to be another hot one. The sun hadn’t yet blistered the day, but the air was tense with trepidation, waiting, expecting the assault. It was already growing bright. The trees in St Stephen’s Green were ablaze with colour. Windows shone like silver on fire. The edge of things was furred with light. I slipped on my sunglasses to dim the world into bearability. Last thing I needed right now was a headache.

  I’d woken that morning with a purpose. I knew what I had to do. I was going to head straight round to JJ’s hotel and say hello. And if that turned out to be as easy as it sounded, I’d be lucky. But what was the worst that could happen? He could tell me to take a hike. Plenty of people had told me to do it before. He could join the list. Alternatively, he might’ve been thinking about what happened yesterday, regretting it even. He might be glad to see me.

  And that might be a pig I could see coming into land at Dublin Airport...

  Whatever his reaction, I wasn’t going to think about it beforehand, I was going to plough on and let happen whatever was going to happen.

  And if he did tell me to take a hike, I’d have got him talking at least.

  That’d be progress.

  I walked down Kildare Street and turned right at the end, following the flow of the traffic round by Lincoln Place and into Westland Row, getting caught up in the tide of passengers streaming out of Pearse Street Station, inexorable as always, sheltering as best they could in the shadows of buildings, relieved at every breath of wind, whilst workmen hung from the scaffolding around like half-wild monkeys, shirtless, wolf whistling every woman who passed below. The hotel where Kaminski was staying wasn’t far beyond the station, hiding down a lattice of neglected and purposeless streets, but at first sight I felt certain that this mean, faded building couldn’t be the right one.

  The cab driver had said the Caledonian, right?

  The building looked like it was waiting for the wrecking ball. There was a jagged crack right down the centre of the outer wall like a stroke of lightning. Metal bars hugged the front as if holding the bricks back from throwing themselves down onto the street below.

  Half the letters in the hotel’s painted sign had peeled off, and the railings at the front were buckled inwards as if a car had recently mounted the kerb and rammed into them. Or had it happened years ago and it was simply that no one had got around to fixing the damage?

  The hotel was a reminder that, however much I might imagine I knew the city, the unexpected was still possible. I don’t think I’d ever noticed the place before in all my circuits of the streets. One thing was certain. Either Kaminski had fallen on some seriously hard times, or he was deliberately staying in a place where no one who knew him would ever anticipate finding him. I took a deep breath and walked in through the front door.

  The inside of the hotel was even shabbier and dingier than it looked from the outside, and that was some achievement. It never ceased to amaze me what people would put up with when they booked into a hotel. If they wanted to live like pigs in their own homes, I could respect that, that’s their choice. But why they wanted to live with the accumulated filth of strangers was a total mystery. The place looked like it hadn’t been dusted since the hotel went up over a hundred years ago. The chairs were unpicking themselves with age. The carpets were held together with threads. Come to think of it, the threads were all that was left. Heavy velvet curtains guarded the windows like bouncers, stopping the light from coming in.

  The woman at reception looked up as
I came in.

  She was sitting on a stool behind the desk, smoking a cigarette with one hand and turning the pages of a magazine with the other, though her eyes were actually focussed on a TV at the other end of the counter on which some grim morning chat show was playing.

  She had large breasts and a floral–patterned dress that was way too tight for the strain her chest was asking it to take. She looked flustered and sweaty, and her make up could have been photographed from space. She had that exaggerated femininity that ends up displaying the opposite effect to the one intended. She was... forty? Fifty? Pick a number. Whatever the real age, it was more years than she cared to acknowledge. Her hair hung loose, and blonde as the bottle it came from had made it. Her roots were showing, in more ways than one.

  She regarded me suspiciously.

  “Yes?” she managed eventually.

  “You have a guest staying her by the name of Buck Randall.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to add the last part of his chosen title.

  “I’m afraid Mr Randall left word that he was not to be disturbed,” the woman answered with a look of satisfaction, like she’d won some battle I hadn’t even realised was being fought. Maybe she had a soft spot for Kaminski and wanted to keep him to herself.

  Her voice oozed a fake gentility that people often affect this side of the Atlantic.

  Though why they bothered was an answer that escaped me every time.

  “He won’t mind being disturbed by me,” I said.

  Like hell he wouldn’t.

  A look of deflation passed across her features, but she was still reluctant.

  “Mr Randall was very specific about not being disturbed.”

  “What if it’s an emergency?”

  “Is it an emergency?”

  “It might be.”

  She considered the point carefully, before deciding: “I’ll call his room. Wait there.”

  She eased herself down from the chair, adjusted her clothes awkwardly around her hips, and squeezed through a narrow door into a back room where I heard the sound of a telephone being picked up, followed by silence. A few moments later, she returned.