The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) (16 page)

Chapter Seventeen

I set off straight away. This time of morning, I’d be lucky to make it across town and find a parking space before Fisher’s plane landed. It only took an hour to fly from London.

It was ten minutes alone before I got down Dame Street and crossed the river. Roadworks, according to the notices, though I couldn’t see any sign of work going on. I switched on the radio briefly to catch the traffic update, vainly hoping, like thousands of others, that I’d find the one secret road in the city where cars ran as free as wild stallions. Instead I found myself happening upon a discussion of the Night Hunter case. Their phrase, not mine.

Some feminist was blaming the murders on provocative images of women in the media and the low economic value placed on women’s work; another guest had concluded that the slippage in sexual morality since the sixties had made the murders inevitable. The killer would have been proud of that analysis. He had seen the ungodly flourishing like a green bay tree too. It was always the same story. No matter what happened, those with an axe to grind invariably decided it proved they’d been right all along. Fancy that. I held on until a caller asked the radio panellists what they thought of his theory that the murders were the work of an inner circle of top judges and politicians before realising I preferred the sound of angry horns outside.

I made it to the airport with fifteen minutes to spare, reflecting, as I climbed out of my Jeep in the short-stay car park and crossed to the terminal, on the irony of modern travel: you can be halfway round the world in the same time it takes to get out of the city at rush hour.

Airports always make me restless like that. The world seems so close at hand. All I had to do was get on a plane and I could be back home in Boston in time for dinner if I wanted. Filling up on Mexican food at the Border café, drinking in the Gargoyle— No. Best not get started on that again.

The arrivals board said Fisher’s plane was on schedule, so I simply grabbed a coffee from the nearest kiosk, found a seat and waited.

Twenty minutes and three coffees later, Lawrence Fisher emerged through the doors, clutching a briefcase and glancing round for me. What about that? He had put on weight. His hair was thinning out slightly too, and there was more grey in his beard than I remembered, but he still looked good, still looked attractive enough in that rumpled, abstracted way of his, still carried himself with that air of confidence which only came from years of being indispensable.

He smiled when he saw me and quickened his step.

‘Saxon, you’re here.’

He didn’t bother with a handshake. I appreciated that. I hate that sort of starchy formality.

‘You’re observant as ever, Fisher. Good flight?’

‘As good as any flight can be considering that you’re flying thousands of feet above the ground, vulnerable to being sent plunging earthwards by a stray bird in the engine, terrorist bombs, pilot error, ice on the wings, passengers with air rage . . .’

‘Everyone has to go some time.’

‘I’d rather go with my feet on solid ground,’ said Fisher. ‘Better still, with my feet on a mattress and me fast asleep.’

‘Stop whining. You’re here in one piece. You need to pick up any bags before we go?’

‘It’s all here.’ He held up the briefcase. ‘I’m flying back tonight at ten. Just in and out this time, as the bishop said to the actress.’

We made our way through the crowds of fortunate people waiting for flights out of the city, and soon were easing into the familiar traffic to start the slow crawl back into town. There was nothing I could do to quicken up the journey, so I cut to the chase and asked Fisher to fill me in on what he’d found.

‘I was hoping we could have breakfast first.’

‘With this traffic, you’ll be lucky to get breakfast before nightfall,’ I said. ‘You might as well use the time constructively. I never was one for small talk.’

‘That’s an understatement,’ said Fisher.

‘Then what have you got to lose?’

So Fisher told me that he’d fed the details of the killing of Mary Lynch and the discovery of the body of the woman in the churchyard into Scotland Yard’s computer database, as I’d asked him to do, and last night he’d been rewarded with a tentative match. A prostitute by the name of Ellen Shaw had been working a night shift behind King’s Cross station in London in January when she’d been approached on foot by a punter with an Irish accent who offered her £100 – well above her usual rate, King’s Cross being about as classy a pitch in the vice hierarchy as the Grand Canal – if she’d come back to his bedsit.

‘She agreed?’

‘It was late,’ Fisher explained, ‘she hadn’t had a punter for a while, it was snowing, cold, the money was good. And you know how it is with these women. When they’re desperate, they take risks. So she walked round with him towards Camden, not far, to some old house that had been hacked up into bedsits. They climbed the stairs to the second floor, he unlocked the door, she stepped in. Next thing she felt was a cloth over her mouth and nose and she blacked out.’

‘Chloroform?’

‘Something like that. When she came to, she found herself tied by the hands and ankles and gagged; she was naked and lying on a filthy mattress in the middle of the room, and the walls were plastered with religious prints, pictures of the Crucifixion, quotations from the Bible.’

‘Nice decor.’

‘Totally freaked her out, as you can imagine,’ said Fisher. ‘She didn’t even know how long she’d been unconscious – it was still dark outside the window, but was it two hours, twenty-four? – and her head was aching from whatever it was he’d knocked her out with. She was drifting in and out of sleep, shivering with fear, cold. Remember it was winter. Then he came in.’

‘The Irish entry for the world psychopath games?’

‘The very one. He had a Bible with him and he started reading out loud from it; some bull about angels and sin and death, whispering to start with, getting louder, getting excited. Then he raped her, and, whilst he was raping her, he started to strangle her as well.’

‘And they say romance is dead.’

I watched the normal world go on outside the windscreen and wondered, not for the first time, how normal it really was.

‘Did he use a ligature?’ I asked.

‘A tie,’ Fisher explained. ‘She blacked out pretty quickly, but he simply brought her round and started again, the same routine. It happened a few times, she didn’t remember exactly how many, then she felt the cloth over her mouth like before and she was out cold again. Glad to be out too, as she put it. When she woke next time, she was untied, though still naked. She got up, tried the door, it was unlocked, so she ran out down the stairs to the floor below, where she knocked at a door until someone answered and they called the police. One lucky woman.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she felt very lucky,’ I said sharply.

‘Lucky to be alive is what I meant,’ said Fisher.

‘I know what you meant,’ I said. ‘Sorry, OK? Don’t listen to me. I’m just taking out my frustration. Go on. What did the police in London get from their investigation?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Fisher. ‘Lots of names of possible suspects, but none of them checked out. There was plenty of DNA evidence in the bedsit and on Ellen Shaw too, but again no match. And there were fingerprints. He’d made no effort to be careful about covering his tracks. Police put out a photofit, some calls came in from people who thought they might know him, but in each case the suspect had moved on. Police did find out that he’d done the same thing to two other prostitutes in other parts of the city, and probably more in my opinion; he had a well-established routine. But neither of the two women had bothered reporting the attacks at the time.’

‘That’s not so unusual,’ I said, thinking of Jackie, thinking of the similarities to what had happened to her down by the canal a couple of weeks before Mary Lynch died, and pulling out abruptly at the same time to overtake a bus which had suddenly stopped without indicating to pick up passengers. ‘Going to the police only brings more trouble sometimes.’

‘That’s what the two women said.’

‘Did police find the places where the others were attacked?’

‘Both. Like I said, this attacker wasn’t taking any precautions; he didn’t care if the women led police back to his little den because he didn’t intend hanging around afterwards.’

‘What about Ellen Shaw’s clothes?’

‘Never found. Nor those of the other women. It seems like he was coming into an area, renting a bedsit, paying cash up front for a month ahead. After a couple of weeks, when he could be sure the cash was gone and couldn’t be traced back to him, he’d invite the latest woman back to the bedsit, drug her, tie her up, do his little biblical prophet act on her and then be gone, on to the next bedsit to start all over again. The police have no idea how many times he’d done it before Ellen, but afterwards there were no more. No more reported, I should say.’

‘You don’t think he stopped?’

‘This offender wasn’t going to stop,’ said Fisher. ‘Quite the opposite. He was getting too much out of it, too much pleasure, and the violence was worse with Ellen Shaw than it had been with the others. Classic escalation pattern. It could only get worse.’

‘Murder?’

‘It seemed like the obvious next step. Instead, things went quiet.’

‘Then I contacted you.’

‘And out of the blue we have an actual murderer with an Irish connection, a religious fixation, a thing for strangling with a ligature – oh, and he’d cut off bits of their hair too, like this latest woman of yours, Mary Dalton, did I mention that? Plus you carelessly drop Jack Mullen’s name into the conversation, and what do I find but that he left London in September, eight months after Ellen Shaw was attacked and three months before Mary Lynch was murdered.’

‘He was escalating to murder in London but reached it in Dublin?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ Fisher replied. ‘Enough of one that I had to follow it up, at any rate. If I can get a photograph of Mullen from you, and the police in London get a visual ID from Ellen Shaw and the others, then we can probably move to force a DNA sample out of him.’

I said nothing.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Fisher.

‘Mullen might be,’ I said. ‘Wrong for us, that is. He claims to have an alibi for Mary Lynch.’

‘Alibi schmalibi,’ said Fisher. ‘DNA’s what matters. Fingerprints are what matters. If we can get a match on him for the attacks in London, how long is his alibi going to stand up?’

‘You’re right,’ I conceded. ‘I told you there was something wrong with me today. Your being here might be just what I need to slap me out of it. But you know, you didn’t have to fly in personally to get a photograph of Mullen. I’d have couriered one over for you.’

‘And missed my chance of seeing your happy smiling face again? How could I? To be honest, you should be thanking me. If it hadn’t been for me, you would have been landed with Inspector Taylor, undisputed winner of Scotland Yard’s most charmless detective competition. He’s been handling the Ellen Shaw case from the beginning and it was all I could do when I told him there was a possible suspect not to get on the first plane over here to see what you had.’

‘Seeing what we have wouldn’t have taken long,’ I said.

‘One of those cases, is it?’

‘It’s always one of those cases.’

‘Then here’s hoping I might be able to make it that bit easier,’ he said. He glanced briskly out of the side window. ‘Haven’t we just missed the turn-off?’

Where was my head at? I’d been concentrating so much on what Fisher was telling me, I’d completely missed the turning into Dublin Castle. Come to think of it, I couldn’t even remember crossing the river. Impatient with myself, I found a gap, turned and went back.

Something was going on, I could sense it the moment I pushed at the swing doors and shepherded Fisher into reception. A barely contained air of – what? Excitement, that was it.

‘Lawlor!’

A figure was dashing by. Shouting was the only way to drag it back. Lawlor turned reluctantly, even more reluctantly when he saw it was me.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Lawlor. ‘We got a fingerprint match from the knife that killed Mary Dalton.’

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Fagan, of course,’ he said. ‘Looks like you were wrong. That’s what comes of being out of the game too long. You get rusty.’

‘But Fagan’s dead,’ I said, realising how stupid it must sound.

‘Well, we’ll just have to write out an arrest warrant for a zombie, won’t we?’ laughed Lawlor, smirking back over his shoulder as he went.

Fisher whistled.

‘This is like that old Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times, isn’t that it? Saxon? Saxon, where are you going? Saxon!’

Chapter Eighteen

I walked. I left my Jeep and walked. I had no sense of where I was going, I just needed to get away. Rain was falling, and the Christmas lights looked pale and washed out. It was gloomier than usual for a late morning, even in Dublin, and my mood only made it seem gloomier still.

An awareness of each place that I passed brushed against my mind as I walked, but only brushed. A dour church on the corner of Fenian Street; a gasometer not far past Misery Hill (I smiled grimly at the street signs. God obviously did have a sense of humour). Then what was this? Of course, the water, and now I was looking across towards the North Wall Quay without any memory of the streets between.

I doubled back to cross the river at the bridge.

I considered walking east to where the city expired into warehouses and shipping ports and the stench of oil, but there was something bleak out there that, even in my present mood, I didn’t want to indulge. I might be weary of people at times, perhaps most of the time, but at that moment I wanted them round me all the same. I couldn’t face the ghost-town emptiness of the docks. I needed to know the city was still there. Enough had changed in recent days.

Once over the water, I went west instead, through the back streets to Connolly Station, then north to Portland Row and Mountjoy Square, just like I’d done relentlessly when I first came to the city. Walking was the only way to understand how a city worked, how its parts knitted together. Today, though, the litany of familiar names and sights, the rituals of rain and shadow, offered no comfort. Today they only made me edgier still. The world was disintegrating about me, and I was caught in the collapse. My skin tingled with the proximity of possible danger.

I could almost sense Ed Fagan walking beside me, falling into step.

I’d never be rid of him.

Time and again, I forced my brain to drag itself back to basics. Deliberately, forensically, I conjured up the image of Fagan dying, of Fagan dead. I had buried Fagan, there was no getting away from that; this wasn’t some movie, he wasn’t going to claw his way out of the soil after my back was turned, to make the paying audience jump in the final reel.

Fagan was dead.

I needed to fix that thought.

Fagan.

Was.

Dead.

That was the trick with any investigation. If you kept repeating simple facts, a pattern would emerge. It was bound to. It might not give you the name you were looking for, or a face, but it would make an offender-shaped hole at the centre of things into which someone, somewhere could eventually be inserted.

That wasn’t happening now, and it wasn’t happening because it couldn’t. The offender-shaped hole at the centre of this investigation was hiding a ghost, and ghosts don’t stalk and murder the living. But no matter how often I reminded myself of that fact, my brain would not compute it and kept tormenting me instead with images of Fagan around me in the city. Every face I passed seemed to resemble his, every voice echoed his; every laugh made me turn my head in alarm. I wondered if this was how people went mad, if this was how it started, when reality and fantasy made war inside your skull and ended up cancelling one another out.

And the further I walked – round the City Basin and down to the Wellington Monument; back across the river eventually to Clancy Barracks and Kilmainham – the more unstable my thoughts became. Fractured. Splintering.

I almost found myself growing angry with Fagan. He didn’t even have the decency to stay dead. A man should know when he’s beaten.

I must have been walking two hours before the motion finally got through to me, before that rhythm, that systematic step after aching step, managed to instil some order again into my thoughts. Slowly, possibilities returned, and I was able to sift through them, discarding what didn’t feel right, hoarding what remained, like a miser counting her gold to see how it added up.

First possibility: the fingerprints were forged.

That was once considered impossible, even by fingerprint experts, which only proves how little faith you should have in experts. Experts always say something’s impossible until someone else does the hard work for them and figures out how it’s done. But who would have the know-how in Dublin to forge Fagan’s prints? This wasn’t New York, for Christ’s sake.

OK then. So not forged.

Second possibility: the knife must have once belonged to Fagan himself and been used by the killer to murder Mary Dalton simply to throw police off the scent.

Didn’t matter that Fagan was five years dead. Fingerprints were practically eternal; they’ve been lifted from Egyptian papyrus thousands of years old. And a knife belonging to Fagan wouldn’t be so hard to come by either. Fagan’s house had been sold off a couple of years after he went missing, and there’d been an auction of his entire belongings round about the same time. Someone might have bought the knife then.

I’d once read too that there was quite a trade on the Internet these days in mementoes of murder. Murderabilia it was called. Locks of Charles Manson’s hair; paving stones from the path where OJ’s wife was butchered; you name it. Sales were so brisk that as soon as police had finished examining the house in England where Fred and Rose West tortured and killed nine women, it was taken apart, stone by stone, and ground to dust to stop relics ending up on the market.

Would it be possible after all this time to track down who had bought Fagan’s belongings? Perhaps – but it’d take months, and there was no knowing how many times the stuff had been sold on since. The knife might have had a hundred owners since it was last in Fagan’s hand.

Third possibility: the knife was the very same one Fagan had used on Tara Cox, and it had been lifted by the killer from the evidence store down in the vaults at Dublin Castle. An inside job.

Was that possible? Of course. But risky. Whoever had left the knife at the market alongside Mary Dalton’s body would have to be confident no one would be suspicious enough to order further tests. And there was another flaw. Only someone on the inside could get their hands on the knife, but anyone on the inside would know there was enough suspicion around that the truth could eventually emerge.

Or did the killer agree that it was time for the Fagan charade to end?

I shook my head irritably. I could go on walking the rest of the day, circumnavigate the whole damn city, wear my shoe leather out on every street, and the answer still wouldn’t come to me.

What mattered right now wasn’t figuring out the game. What mattered was putting a stop to it, or at least to this stage of the game. I’d known this morning that it was time. All I needed was the courage. Easier said than done.

I was south of the river now, headed back into town. Best place for what I had planned. This was where I felt most at ease, and being at ease was what it took to be invisible.

Check the time.

Two o’clock.

Fisher was flying back at ten. Time enough to take things slowly.

Might as well make a day of it then, I thought; and I went into the nearest bar, one I’d never seen the inside of before, took a place at the counter and ordered a drink. It was one of those hopeless, dingy, smoked-out places where men with nothing better to do congregated joylessly to drink, out of sight of women and world. They hadn’t exactly fallen silent as I came in, like regulars at the saloon in an old western when the stranger rides into town, but I could feel their eyes on me. Half curious, half resentful, as the barman brought me my beer.

I felt no hostility towards them, these ayatollahs hiding out in their cave as the territory which they once considered theirs alone shrank to the size of a room. It was their city too. They had a right to do whatever it was made it bearable for them. I just didn’t have the energy to waste mourning with them.

Instead I lit a cigar and set about finding out what the bottom of my glass looked like. Something about me – something maybe about the practised, leisurely way I set to the joint task of drinking and ignoring them; maybe just something about the way I looked – must have reassured the ayatollahs that I was no threat, for I quickly sensed their attention wearing thin.

I ordered another drink, and looked round for a phone.

‘Saxon, how’s it going?’ said Fitzgerald when I got through.

‘I’ve been better.’

She sounded excited, out of breath. I recognised that giddy restlessness that comes when you think you’re closing in. I hated what I had to do to her.

‘We’re missing you here,’ she said.

‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘I’m not the most popular girl in town, you know what I’m saying? And I’ll be even less popular if I come down there and start trying to spoil the party.’

‘Why would you want to spoil it?’

‘Because the print is bullshit,’ I said. ‘It has to be. I’ve been thinking it out. Someone on the inside must’ve planted it, it’s the only possibility that makes sense. Either that or the killer managed to get hold of something Fagan once owned.’

Silence.

‘Are you listening to me?’ I pressed.

‘I’m listening,’ she said, ‘but what do you expect me to do? Ignore the evidence?’

‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t you expect there to be more than just one print? One partial print? If Fagan was there when Mary Dalton died? Plenty of prints from the killer I understand, none I understand better. But why only one? He never left any before.’

‘What I expected to find doesn’t matter,’ Fitzgerald said firmly, though I could hear the trace of doubt in her voice. ‘What matters is what the evidence says. You can come up with all the theories you want, but in the end . . . you know, maybe you just have to face the possibility that it is Fagan. You ever think that maybe, just once, you could be wrong? It has to happen sometime.’

‘It’s not Fagan,’ I said. ‘I’m not wrong about that. I might not know what the story is with the print, but I know Fagan isn’t out there playing with us. Someone else is. Maybe someone closer to home than you like to think.’

‘What does that mean?’ she said.

‘Don’t you think it’s too convenient, finding Fagan’s prints just now? It makes everyone’s job a hell of a lot easier if they get to pretend to themselves that the murderer is who the whole city wanted it to be from the start. You can see how badly Draker wants it to be Fagan.’

‘You’re not saying Draker planted the knife?’ said Fitzgerald. ‘It was found before he even reached the scene. Besides, Draker’s a pain in the butt, but he’d not do that.’

‘I didn’t say I thought it was Draker,’ I said. ‘OK, maybe I did. But there are others. Dalton, Lawlor . . .’

Fitzgerald sighed loudly.

‘Why don’t you come in and we can talk about this?’

‘I don’t feel up to it,’ I said. ‘Not today. You’re going to have to cover for me. I need to think. Just do something for me?’

‘Out with it.’

‘Look, Grace, I’m not saying the knife isn’t important. Just check it against the inventory taken from Fagan’s crime scenes; also against the lists of what was in the house.’              

‘What house?’

‘Fagan’s house.’

The pause was fractional, but it was there.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said, ‘but don’t get your hopes up. I know how much you wanted Fagan to be dead. I wanted him dead too, but maybe we both have to face the fact that he got away, and just make sure he doesn’t get away this time. I’m not saying it’s not hard.’

You have no idea how hard, I said to myself. To her, all I said was: ‘I’ll be fine. I just need today to think.’

‘I’ll tell everyone you’re not feeling well.’

‘If anyone asks. Like I say, I’m not exactly Ms Popularity down there.’ She didn’t contradict me. ‘Here, I have to go,’ I said. ‘I’m meeting up with Fisher later to see what he’s dug up, and there’s a few things I need to sort out before then. Catch you later?’             

My drink was waiting when I got back to the counter, but I needed to move on. I paid up and made my way out into the street. Keep moving back towards the centre, that was the plan.

First stop, another bar. A little higher up the evolutionary chain this time. And that’s how the day panned out. Drinking, walking, smoking, moving closer to the centre each time.               I ate a sandwich in one. Couldn’t say what was in it. I was just going through the motions. As I drank, I reflected on the irony of what I was doing. Tillman’s profile said the killer was using alcohol to stabilise himself too, to prepare himself for each killing, put him in control, and here I was doing the same thing.

Idly, I wondered what else we had in common, but I wasn’t going down that road. It was the differences between people that mattered, not the superficial similarities, and the difference between this killer and me was as wide as that between the dark and the day.

As I left the third (or was it the fourth?) bar, I noticed it was growing grey. Above my head fairy lights danced down the narrow curve of Wicklow Street, swaying and rattling in a cold breeze. This was how a day faded to nothing, if you weren’t careful. Drinking, then dark. But I knew what I was doing; I knew what I had to do. The time was close now. I took my place again, unobtrusively, in a booth at a bar I’d chosen specially for the job. It was a place I knew well, I drank here all the time, which was why I guessed no one would take any notice of me. It was strangers who got remembered. They stuck out.