The Judas Heart

by Ingrid Black

  “All you have to know,” he continued, conveniently saving me from my lifelong tendency to put my foot in it, “is that Iago, a soldier, has been passed over for promotion by Othello, his captain, in favour of another man called Michael Cassio.”

  “That’s the part Walsh played.”

  “Don’t interrupt. In revenge, Iago then plots to make Othello suspect his wife, Desdemona, of having an affair with Cassio so that he’ll kill her and ruin his reputation.”

  “Seems a bit of an overreaction to missing out on promotion,” I said. “Just as well it never caught on. It’d be a bloodbath out there every time a position was filled.”

  He ignored me.

  It was usually the best way.

  “Iago calls it his cunning pattern,” Burke explained. “He works on Othello’s decent, trusting nature, tormenting him with words, placing one layer of deception on top of another, so that no single character apart from Iago ever knows the truth, they only know their own part in it, until Othello is driven into a kind of temporary insanity by jealousy and murders the one thing he loves best. That’s why the play’s named after Othello, not Iago. It’s his tragedy.”

  “Sounds to me,” I said, “like it was his wife’s tragedy for marrying a man who’d kill his supposed beloved just because he thinks she’s getting a bit of action elsewhere. Didn’t they have divorce in those days? And that’s another thing. How come we’re supposed to feel sorry for this man when he was the one who murdered his wife? That was his decision.”

  “It’s symbolic,” he said. “Think of it as a dark fable of how jealousy and suspicion can corrupt the most honest and noble souls.”

  “You’re starting to sound like one of those cultural programmes I always try to miss on cable,” I said confusedly. “So where does the pound of flesh come into it?”

  “It doesn’t,” said Burke patiently. “That’s The Merchant Of Venice.”

  “Right,” I said slowly, running over what he’d said once more in my mind. “So Iago twists Othello’s mind and sends him mad and then Othello murders his wife and we’re all supposed to feel sorry for him. I can follow that. Apart from the feeling sorry for him part. What I don’t see is how that ties in to Kaminski and Randall. Randall isn’t trying to get Kaminski to murder his wife. According to Kaminski, it’s Randall who did that already.”

  “You’re taking it too literally.”

  “I am?”

  “It’s not the details that matter so much as the way Iago sits at the centre of his web, spinning lies and plots. He even compares himself to a spider right at the start of the play. Iago manipulates Othello’s weaknesses until he has no control anymore over his own mind. He’s like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, leading the children on a merry dance into the darkness. Think about it. Isn’t that what Buck Randall’s been doing to your friend Kaminski the whole time? He’s been jerking his strings from the moment their paths crossed. Even Kaminski’s weak spot is the same as Othello’s: his love for his wife. That’s what makes him vulnerable.”

  “But to what end?” I said. “Why would he want Kaminski to fall for this line about him being the city’s very own killing machine? What does he want him to do?”

  “Finding the answer to that is your job,” said Burke, “not mine.”

  I considered what he’d told me.

  “Maybe,” I said, venturing tentatively towards a possible answer, “Randall wanted Kaminski to come after him all along. He wasn’t trying to escape. He was the hunted leading the hunter into a trap so that the roles could be reversed. He knew Kaminski would never give up, so why not just face the inevitable confrontation and get it over and done with?”

  “Only it’s better to do it on your own terms than your enemy’s?”

  “And in the arena of your choosing. Exactly,” I said. “Which means Buck Randall won’t simply vanish, whatever else Kaminski feared. He’ll stay and finish what he started.”

  “He’s running out of time if that’s the plan,” Burke reminded me.

  “All the more important then that we find Kaminski fast. He’s our only lead to Buck Randall.” I checked my watch again, suppressing irascibility. Though not for long, probably. It wasn’t only Randall that time was running out on. “Where is that damn woman?”

  **********

  I was standing on the kerb at Crampton Quay, waiting for a gap in the hurtling traffic to cross over to the Ha’penny Bridge, when I finally got my answer to that question.

  “Saxon,” she said. “Can you hear me? This signal isn’t good.”

  “You’re cracking up,” I told her.

  “You wouldn’t be the first to tell me that.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m with Walsh. We’re on our way to the theatre as we speak.”

  “Weren’t we supposed to be meeting up at Burke’s place?”

  “Change of plan,” she crackled in my ear.

  The rest of the sentence was lost in static.

  “Fitzgerald?”

  I had my finger in one ear and my cellphone pressed tightly to the other, straining to differentiate her voice from the other noises around me, but I quickly learned that a warm summer’s evening on the riverside in Dublin is not the best place to try and conduct a conversation with a woman in a car any number of streets away.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  In the end, I gave up.

  It didn’t matter. She’d said she was on her way to the theatre. I could talk to her there. Getting back to the theatre had been the plan anyway when I decided to leave Burke and Hare’s five minutes earlier. In the meantime, all I had to do was get across this road.

  Preferably without being run over.

  Before long, I was striding across the bridge, looking down at the strollers idling down the boardwalk that now ran along this stretch of the river as it slapped and wound through the heart of the city. The evening sunshine cut low shadows over the wooden slats at the walkers’ feet and glanced like fire off the steel railings.

  Even the water seemed in a better mood than usual that evening, sparkling and blue-green and innocent where usually it was grey-brown and hungry and resentful of the walls that held it back and told it where to go. The city was gazing languorously down at its reflection in the river and liking what it saw. The low quayside buildings glowed contentedly.

  The fetid, feverish atmosphere of two nights ago seemed to have evaporated again.

  Outside the Liffey Theatre, the same easy mood was in evidence. People stood chatting, enjoying the last of the evening sunshine before plunging inside to Othello’s tormented world, others merely escaping the smoking ban by having a final deliciously wicked cigarette.

  Zak Kirby stared out menacingly from the posters.

  He was right. This version of the play at least should’ve been named after him. The guy playing Othello peeped out on the posters from behind the great actor’s back, almost apologetic for muscling in on his moment of glory. Kirby even had bigger billing than Shakespeare.

  Fitzgerald arrived a few moments after me, climbing out of the front seat of a marked police car as it pulled into the kerb. Then Walsh got out the back door too, and they both walked over to me. That certainly got the attention of the waiting theatregoers.

  “Shall we go inside and get a quick drink?” she said.

  “You think we have time?”

  “There’s always time for a drink.”

  The people around us seemed faintly disappointed. Maybe they’d hoped they were going to see an arrest, namely mine. Instead the three of us now climbed the steps into the theatre, and the police car drove off in the direction of O’Connell Street.

  The bar was crowded when we got inside, so we took up a position by the door and sent Walsh to buy the drinks. I didn’t waste any time.

  “Something happened, didn’t it?” I said.

  “Am I that transparent?” answered Fitzgerald. “Yes, something happened. Though what it means, I still haven’t quite managed to figure ou
t.”

  “Well, are you going to tell me what it is, or do I have to beat it out of you?”

  “You’ll have to get a pair of stepladders first,” she teased me gently. Then her face became grave, and she lowered her voice so as not to be overheard by the people pressing in around us. “We found something,” she said. “Well, I say we found it. What I mean is that her friend Kim found it. You remember you met her at Marsha’s house the other day?”

  “She was picking up Marsha’s stuff,” I recalled.

  “And inadvertently picking up a mobile phone too,” Fitzgerald said.

  “I’m guessing the phone was for the number she left on the online chat rooms for people to call?” Fitzgerald confirmed it. “Where was it?”

  “It was in the pocket of one of Marsha’s dresses. Kim found it entirely by accident. She just happened to notice something hard when she was packing the clothes away into boxes. She looked to see what it was and then brought it round today to Dublin Castle. That’s what kept me. That’s why I wasn’t at Burke’s.”

  “What was on it?”

  “There were calls to only one other number. We don’t know who that belonged to, and she hardly ever spoke to him directly, only sent a whole series of text messages covering a period of two weeks. Basically, she was telling him exactly what she wanted him to do when he came to her house that night and making arrangements to pay him.”

  “The missing money from her purse...”

  “Exactly.”

  “So she did set up her own murder?”

  “That’s the thing,” said Fitzgerald. “It seems that Marsha didn’t really want to go the whole way. She saw it simply as a kind of play acting. They were going to carry out a simulation of her murder, so that she could feel what it was like, test the boundaries of her desire, as she put it, but within a controlled environment. The man was to go through with the act exactly as if it was real, right up until the last moment, when he would stop.”

  “Except he didn’t.”

  “Except he didn’t,” agreed Fitzgerald. “Either because it all went horribly wrong -”

  “Or because he never intended to stop in the first place,” I finished for her, “and she walked right into the trap.” I sighed. “There was no name? No clues as to his identity?”

  “Nothing whatsoever,” Fitzgerald said. “She told him she didn’t want to know anything about him. I think the mystery of the whole thing turned her on. She talked to him about her pretend murder like they were planning on making love.”

  “When did he last make contact with her?”

  “She called him two nights before she died.”

  “She was making the final arrangements?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  I was about to say something else when Walsh returned with our drinks.

  Our faces must have said it all.

  “No need to ask what you’ve been talking about,” he remarked as he passed cold bottles of beer into our warm and grateful hands. I noticed he also had a programme with him. He must’ve picked it up at the bar. There was a telephone number scribbled along the edge.

  The programme clearly wasn’t the only thing he’d picked up.

  That boy never stopped.

  It’s a wonder it didn’t drop off.

  “Either way,” I said, “I don’t see how Victor Solomon fits into it.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Someone has to. You can’t claim Solomon was trying to silence a woman who was threatening to destroy him and was so desperate for cash he stole her necklace and cut off her finger to get a ring that no one can find anyway, and then admit she’d been sending texts to another man begging him to kill her only days before she was actually killed. His lawyers will tear your case to shreds.”

  “Who says Solomon wasn’t her mysterious phone caller himself?”

  “It didn’t sound like it.” said Walsh gently. “In one of the texts she wrote to him: I can’t wait to meet you. She wouldn’t use that phrase if she was talking to Solomon.”

  Fitzgerald groaned.

  “Don’t do this to me. Not tonight,” she said. “I’m just bushed, I can’t think straight. Tomorrow. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Tonight was meant to be an escape.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Forget I said anything. You know what I’m like. I’m the land that diplomacy forgot. Though you know, I’m not sure Othello will be much of an escape.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jealousy, murder, sex, lies, revenge – it sounds more like a normal day’s work for you than an escape,” I commented.

  “I’m impressed,” she said. “Since when did you get to be such an expert on Shakespeare?”

  “Burke was cribbing me in your absence,” I said. “The way he talked about it, he almost made me look forward to seeing the damn thing.”

  “Only almost?”

  “Only almost,” I conceded gruffly. “But you know what they say. Every oak tree started out once as a little acorn.”

  “I see you more as a little nut,” said Fitzgerald. “What do they grow into?”

  “I’ll take a look in the mirror when I get home and let you know.”

  “I think we’re going in,” said Walsh, and, looking round, I saw that the crowd in the bar had gotten much thinner since we arrived. Either the play was about to start, or they were definitely trying to tell us something. Hastily, I finished my beer and followed him up the steps into the dim theatre, where a half-musical murmur, like an orchestra tuning up, was moving through the massed ranks of disembodied heads, the last remnants of conversation before the evening play began. We took our seats in the centre of one row of seats towards the front, and waited, and I wished I’d gone to the bathroom before sitting down here because there was no way I could ask all these people to move again, especially not now the lights were dimming further, and the voices with it, as though the same switch which turned down the lights was able to turn down conversation at the same time. Neat trick if you could do it.

  Oh well, it served me right for never being able to resist a cold beer.

  Gradual as dawn, a pale blue light appeared behind the curtain up on stage, moving, shivering, and as the curtain drew back I saw that it was a light like water rippling, that cast restless shadows over the flat facades of frowning buildings.

  Venice, wasn’t that where the play began?

  Moments later there came approaching footsteps, echoes at first, then louder, and Zak Kirby appeared, followed by another man.

  “Tush, never tell me...”

  And so we began.

  I settled down in my seat and tried to concentrate.

  Kirby was good, I’d give him that. The brash young actor had gone. He was Iago now, the slighted soldier, world weary and cynical and burning with the need for revenge, angry at seeing others less capable promoted ahead of him.

  And I could understand that part at least. I’d seen it often enough in the FBI, as those who came garlanded with qualifications and meaningless academic recommendations strode ahead of the rest, overtaking agents who’d given years of their lives to the Bureau, and had worked more cases than the newcomers had even read about. Promotion too often was for the golden circle. If you weren’t in it to begin with, you stayed where you were.

  Always the outsider.

  His face was snarled with resentment at his ill-treatment, then would switch in an instant so that anyone seeing it would think at once they were in the company of a friend.

  Someone who only had their best interests at heart.

  And then it came to me.

  Unexpectedly.

  Unclearly as yet.

  But undeniable too. At least it was to me. Whether Fitzgerald would be convinced that here lay the lock and key of all the villainous secrets which had occupied us for these past days remained to be seen.

  “We have to go,” I whispered to her.

  “What are you talking about? We can’t just go. We only got her
e.”

  “I can’t explain,” I said. “I know who he is. I know who Iago is. At least I think I do. I don’t have a name for him yet, but I know where to get one.”

  Someone shushed me loudly from the row behind.

  “You’re not making sense,” Fitzgerald hissed.

  “You have to trust me,” I said.

  “Shit, why do I hate hearing those words?”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “This had better be good,” said Fitzgerald as soon as we were outside the door of the theatre and had a chance to talk, “not just another one of your feeble excuses to wriggle out of improving your mind with some culture.”

  “Blame Burke,” I said. “He’s the one who got me thinking.”

  “Burke?”

  “He pointed out the parallels between the play and what was happening with Kaminski and Buck Randall. It all made sense. Someone was leading Kaminski on, setting a trap to entangle him, but think about it. Whoever was jerking his chain had to be subtle, clever, manipulative. Like Iago. Does that really fit what we know about Buck Randall III?”

  “He never struck me as a candidate for Mastermind,” she conceded.

  “It’s like I said to Burke earlier. What does Randall want? In the play, everything’s simple. Iago wants Othello to murder his own wife, so he keeps planting suspicions and winding him tighter till he blows, right? But if Buck Randall’s the Iago in all this, then he’s only planting suspicion against himself. Why would he do that?”

  “I take it that’s a rhetorical question?”

  “If you mean, do I have the answer already, I think so,” I said. “It just came to me in there, out of nowhere. Randall’s not Iago in all this. He’s Desdemona. He’s the one against whom suspicion’s being planted. And maybe, like her, he’s been innocent all along.”

  That would certainly explain a lot. Why Randall would let himself be seen so openly out at Bull Island. Why should he hide his face if he’d done nothing wrong? It explained too why he didn’t care if his fingerprints were found all over the car that was pulled from the water. He had no reason to believe anyone would even be interested in his fingerprints. He probably didn’t even know that Mark Hudson’s body was in the boot. Maybe he just drove the car out there because that’s what he’d been instructed to do, to meet this mythical Peters perhaps, and someone else came later to dispose of it. Each step along the way, he could’ve been planting suspicion against himself without even realising he was doing it.