The Judas Heart

by Ingrid Black

  Rather I thought of Dublin as a city of the shadows of night, of secrets. Partly that was because I lived much of my life nocturnally. I’d happily sleep all day and spend the night wandering round. I was an owl. A hunter. That made me perfect for hunting out other hunters. They preferred the dark too. It was what I was made for. It was as though I could see the city more truly at night. See it in its own shape. Light distorted rather than revealed. If it got too bright, the city had to step back and give the light room. After nightfall the city shuffled off the burden of daylight and revealed itself to those who shared its passion for concealment.

  Dublin, more than most other cities, was a place that came into its own after dark.

  Fogged by dark, it was at its most alluring and beautiful.

  A little like me.

  I smiled.

  That was the attraction of the city. It was a place a girl could hide out. You could disappear inside it like an ant inside an old hollowed-out tree, where no one could find you if you didn’t want them to. You could be overlooked. And that was what I wanted. I wanted to be a ghost drifting, unnoticed, through the city, just watching, observing, listening.

  Now it was like there was too much illumination. The city was overly determined to show itself to the world. To show that it had nothing and nowhere to hide. That it was respectable. It wanted to be liked. I call that a pity. The smoking ban was one part of it. They had attempted to wipe away something they saw as anomalous and in fact had wiped away something that added to the city’s charm. At least that’s what I thought when I’d started to have too much to drink and remembered I couldn’t smoke a damn cigar. It’s the way I am. I need to make everything more dramatic than it really is or I only feel half alive.

  Right now, I was feeling sorry for myself because of JJ. I might not be able to find anywhere to hide in the city anymore but he had managed it. He had hidden from me.

  And there really wasn’t much I could do about it.

  Sure, I could try ringing a few hotels and hoping I got lucky, but I didn’t fancy my chances. He wouldn’t be using any name I could guess at, so what was I going to do? Ring them all up and say: “Excuse me, by chance have any Americans checked in lately?”

  I could have kicked myself for allowing it to happen. Losing him was one thing. Losing him in such a foolish way only made me feel all the more powerless. Like I’d lost control of my life and everything that counted was being decided by other people.

  I should’ve realised he’d figure the whole thing out. He sees me in Temple Bar, then an American woman turns up out of the blue at his hotel? There was no doubt he’d have guessed someone had been in his room also. Dammit. Being so clever, I had simply been outmanoeuvred, and I had a dreadful premonition as I sat here that I’d never find out what his presence here had all been about. And not knowing had always been my worst nightmare.

  It was strange. I had the definite sense that he’d won some game we were playing, and yet I didn’t even know what the game was or how the rules worked.

  To hell with it, I said to myself. It didn’t matter.

  Didn’t.

  Matter.

  And yet I knew that it did. The crust of my defiance was as thin as the ozone layer.

  I guess I could’ve spent all night there, getting more pissed with myself, but at that moment my cellphone went off. The old boy looked at me reproachfully, like I’d broken some unwritten but sacred agreement, like I wasn’t the woman he’d taken me for, regardless of the cigar and the bottle of Budweiser. I shrugged a mute apology. He was probably right.

  I barked out a hello.

  “No need to bit off my nose.”

  “Fitzgerald?”

  “Of course it’s me,” she said. “Who else were you expecting? A secret lover?” She laughed like the thought was absurd. Which it was. Wasn’t it? “Where are you?”

  “Last time I looked, I was in the yard of an atmospheric little place off... let me think now... Baggot Street. I think.”

  “You’re in the pub?”

  “I’m in a bar, that’s right. Or outside it, I should say, me and my illicit cigar. I’m expecting the tobacco police to swoop any moment and drag me away for questioning.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Am I drunk? Of course I’m not drunk. I’m outraged you could ask me such a question. I’ve hardly touched a drip... I mean, I’ve hardly touched a drop...”

  “I think that answers my question. Well, listen. Don’t go anywhere, I’m coming over. Healy can drop me off on his way home. I’ll expect to have a drink waiting for me.”

  “Are we celebrating?”

  “We might be.”

  “You’ve not cracked the case yet, have you?”

  “No such luck.”

  “What’s the big deal then?”

  “The new Assistant Commissioner, remember?”

  “Screw it, I completely forgot. What am I thinking? How did it go? What’s he like?”

  “I think the new Assistant Commissioner’s going to work out just fine,” Fitzgerald said with a conspiratorial laugh. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get there. Think you can manage to get me a drink without spilling it? I shouldn’t be long.”

  **********

  Any resentment I still felt at Kaminski was soon replaced by bemusement at Fitzgerald’s news. First of all, the new Assistant Commissioner in charge of the murder squad was going to be a woman.

  Secondly…

  “She wants to what?”

  “She wants to meet you.”

  It was the same bar, except that we were inside now. Fitzgerald had arrived about ten minutes earlier, looking harassed but sensational as always. Didn’t matter if she hadn’t slept all night, or had spent the day at a crime scene, she still always had that elusive glitz that had certainly eluded me most of my life, no matter how hard I tried to nurture it.

  I think you must either be born with it or not.

  She was sitting on the stool opposite me with her legs crossed, white wine to hand. Men in the bar were watching her purely for the pleasure of seeing her sit there.

  I shrugged in incomprehension.

  Not at the fact men were looking at her – I understood that part – but because of what she was saying. The words sounded straightforward enough, but they might as well have been in Sanskrit for all the sense they were making in my skull.

  “What would anyone want to meet me for?”

  “Beats me,” teased Fitzgerald. “Unless you owed them money.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Or maybe she wants your autograph.”

  “You’re being flippant again,” I warned her.

  “Or maybe,” she continued, ignoring the warning, “she wants to ask you out on a date.”

  “I thought you said she was married.”

  “Divorced. I said divorced. And you know what these divorced women are like. I’ve heard a girl can get some of her most successful pickups with recently divorced women. Sadly, I was never able to find out. You came along and spoiled things.”

  “Then it’ll be you she’s after, not me. You’re a better catch.”

  “I never mix business with pleasure,” she said. “Besides, we’re both out of luck. She’s not the type. If anything, I’d say she’s more likely to want to ask you about the case.”

  Now I really was baffled.

  “Marsha Reed? How can I help there?”

  “I don’t know, I’m merely speculating. She’s already suggested that I ask Fisher to team up on it.” She meant Dr Lawrence Fisher, a celebrated forensic psychologist who had worked on a small number of cases with Fitzgerald before and who’d recently moved to Dublin for tax purposes. He made most of his money now writing popular books on criminal psychology and appearing on TV, and writers pay no tax in Dublin. “I spoke to him this afternoon. He’s taking a look at Marsha’s journal. There’s a lot of nasty stuff in there, stuff she’s written about other people. I thought he might be able to make something o
f it.”

  “That’ll be right up his street,” I nodded.

  “What about you?” she said.

  “Me?”

  “Remember I asked you to draw up a list of the people who were in your class?”

  I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about that.

  Nor could Fitzgerald.

  I considered telling her about Piper’s call, which had driven Marsha Reed out of my mind. But it would take too long, and she had too much else on her plate to start worrying about potential fugitives from justice like Leon Kaminski. More than that, forgetting what she had asked me to do was unjustifiable, whatever my other distractions.

  “I’ll get it to you first thing in the morning,” I promised.

  “You’d better. Or I’ll tell Stella you’re not to be trusted.”

  “You didn’t mention that the new Assistant Commissioner Carson and you were already on first name terms.”

  “It must have slipped my mind. Like making that list slipped yours.”

  “Touché.”

  “You’ll be on first names with her yourself after you meet her tomorrow,” Fitzgerald said.

  “Who said anything about tomorrow?”

  “She did. And she’s the boss, remember, so don’t be late. Ten thirty, on the dot.”

  I took a deep breath. I hate being backed into a corner. Hate losing the initiative even more. I didn’t even remember agreeing to this meeting, and suddenly I was being warned against being late for it.

  “You’d better tell me about her again then,” I said resignedly.

  “What can I tell you? She’s from the North. Belfast. Late forties. She comes from a pretty rough background. She has an uncle in jail for armed robbery. From the point of view of her family, joining the police must have been like a little Palestinian girl suddenly deciding that she wants to be a rabbi rather than a suicide bomber. You’ll get along,” Fitzgerald went on confidently. “She doesn’t believe in tiptoeing carefully around for fear of whose nose might be put out of joint. In fact, I think she rather enjoys putting them out of joint.”

  “I like the sound of her already.”

  “She’s definitely going to ruffle some feathers down here. Not only have they got a woman, but one from the North too. That won’t go down well.”

  “How’d she get the job?”

  “Our masters obviously felt they needed to make a radical break to convince the public we’re still capable of doing our job. You know what things are like in there.”

  She didn’t have to elucidate. The Dublin Metropolitan Police had been under enquiry for the best part of the last two years. There had been talk for decades of corruption, sharp practise, incompetence, occasional misdirected brutality. A retired judge had been appointed to investigate allegations of malpractice. His report had uncovered major institutional failings, widespread nepotism and a culture of hapless endemic ineptitude, not to mention evidence of racist and sexist bullying, at the very heart of the force.

  Fitzgerald had found that last part out to her cost. Every step she’d taken along the path had been against the force of tradition weighing her down. She knew there were still powerful people in the DMP who didn’t think a woman was capable of running a major department, especially one as vital as murder. That she’d got as far as she had was a miracle.

  “How do you know so much about her anyway?” I said.

  “Policing is a small world. I’d seen her around,” said Fitzgerald. “You know, at conferences and the like. We’re always being sent on these courses where police from the North and from Dublin are supposed to meet up, share experience, build contacts, that sort of thing. I even worked with her once, but this was years ago, before I knew you and I was only an inspector. A doorman was shot at a pub in the inner city. Turned out he was a member of the glorious Irish Republican Army and came from Belfast originally so I ended up liaising with Stella Carson. She was rooting out some suspects who’d fled after the murder.”

  “You close the case?”

  “Are you questioning my professional capabilities, Special Agent? Of course we closed the case. Not that there was very much to it. It turned out he was killed by one of his paramilitary colleagues in a row over drug money. So much for the revolution.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “She was fine. She’s like they all are up in the North. She’s hard to get to know. There’s a reticence there, a barrier you never quite cross. And they have these voices.”

  “Most people do.”

  “Not like these voices,” she said. “People from Belfast have the kind of voices where, even if they’re only asking you to pass the salt, it sounds like they’re really intending to haul you up an entryway and kneecap you.”

  I felt immediate empathy.

  “People think I’m aggressive because of my voice too,” I said.

  “No, that’s different. You are aggressive. She only seems like it.”

  “Everyone’s a critic.”

  “Still,” she said, “it’ll be worth having her around just to see the looks on everyone’s faces. You should’ve seen Dalton.” Seamus Dalton was one of the longest serving detectives in the murder squad. A man with a chip on his shoulder so high that it could probably be seen from Boston harbour on a clear day. He thought a woman’s place was either in the kitchen or in the bedroom. Or just in the wrong. He’d see this as an assault on his entire world. “I thought he’d lost all powers of intelligent speech when he heard the news.”

  “You mean, he has some to lose?”

  “All powers of speech then. This is going to be a bigger culture shock to him than the day he was told to stop making homophobic jokes in the canteen. That was suffering enough for him, poor thing. This could finish him off. He was no fan of Draker, but Draker was from his world. He has about as much chance of understanding Stella Carson as he does of understanding nuclear physics. In the meantime, how about you get me another drink?”

  “Why do I always have to go get them?”

  “Because they take notice of you,” she answered. “Barmen just ignore me.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll do it, as long as we can go sit outside so I can smoke.”

  “You win.”

  So I got us more drinks, fending off the attentions of the pin-striped man on the next stool who was taking the opportunity of getting to talk to Fitzgerald by offering to pay for them, and we sat outside where it was still warm, and drank, and I smoked, and then we had a couple more drinks, until it got too crowded outside with people who’d realised at last that bars are no fun without the smokers, and we made our escape, strolling round to a place in Wicklow Street that sold great tapas, and walked further, eating them, as more people wandered past, enjoying the summer evening. The turquoise sky above the city was speckled with pale stars like glitter, and a busker somewhere was playing a distant protest song.

  His angry voice was the only discordant note to the evening.

  We talked a little about the investigation into Marsha Reed’s death, but mostly we talked about nothing much at all, which is sometimes the best thing to talk about, or else let the city talk to us as we walked in silence, eavesdropping on a thousand other conversations. And then we walked back to my apartment, taking the long way so that the walk would last longer. There was something magical about the city that night. An older spirit suppressed in the relentless commerce of the day had come alive and walked among the living. Lights sparkled and shone all around. Or was it just the thought of possible new beginnings?

  The morning would tell me.

  For the moment, I tried to savour it for what it was. Tried to feel content. The feeling never lasted long. It was important to hold onto it as long as possible when it came.

  Chapter Fifteen

  He almost collided into me. He was coming down the steps of Dublin Castle as I was climbing up them, having parked the Jeep out front.

  He didn’t see me till it was too late.

  It was nobody’s fault, but he
scowled at me in annoyance all the same, his high forehead bulging alarmingly. I stepped aside to let him and then watched as he crossed the courtyard.

  Fleetingly, I wondered if this was some bigwig in the DMP that I’d never met before, furious at Stella Carson’s appointment and determined to take it out that day on any woman he encountered. But he didn’t look like a policeman. There was something too casual about his appearance. His grey hair was slightly too long, certainly for a man who must have been in his fifties. He wore brown corduroys. The collar of his shirt was unbuttoned and tieless. He was walking with a kind of defiant sashay, as if he was struggling to contain an energy that was bubbling up inside him.

  And was that moccasins he had on his feet? It was. No one ever got anywhere in the Dublin Metropolitan Police wearing moccasins and corduroy trousers. Or sashaying, for that matter.

  The younger man accompanying him was having to hurry to keep up with him. He wore a pinstriped suit - no moccasins here - and his arms overflowed with cardboard files.

  At the gate, the older man turned round and threw a what the hell are you looking at? glare back in the general direction of the building. Then he turned and was gone.

  “What did you make of him?” a familiar voice said behind me.

  Fitzgerald was standing at the top of the steps, watching me watching him.

  I hadn’t seen her come out.

  “Who is he?” I said, climbing up to stand by her.

  “That’s Victor Solomon.”

  “Should the name mean something to me?”

  “Do you remember the night Marsha Reed’s body was found, we were supposed to be going to the theatre?” said Fitzgerald. “He’s the director of the play we were supposed to see.”

  “Hamlet?”

  “Othello, actually. But you were close.”