THE DARK EYE
Ingrid Black
A Saxon & Fitzgerald Mystery
Copyright © Ingrid Black
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
About The Author
Chapter One
I didn’t even get a chance to say hello.
‘You’re Saxon,’ the voice said soon as I picked up the phone.
‘I know I am,’ I answered.
‘I don’t suppose you know who I am?’
There was a trace of an accent there, though I couldn’t place the where.
‘Let me guess. Is it Elvis Presley?’
‘My name is Felix.’
‘I don’t get three guesses then?’
‘Felix Berg. You may have heard of me.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘I’m a photographer.’
‘Is that right?’
I sighed and checked my watch. Outside my window another day was dragging sluggishly to a close with nothing done, and somewhere in my apartment a clock was ticking too loudly, taunting me with time wasted. This was the last thing I needed.
‘Listen, Felix, Felix Berg, photographer, whatever, what do you want? It’s late, it’s cold out, I need my beauty sleep. Do you have nothing better to do than call up strange women who don’t give a damn who you are and tell them your name?’
‘I want to talk to you.’
‘I figured.’
‘I want to meet. And I think you’ll want to meet me too once you hear me out.’
‘I wouldn’t put money on that, my friend.’
There was a brief pause before he continued.
‘Someone,’ he said, ‘is trying to kill me.’
And I thought: Here we go again.
I was always getting calls like this. OK, maybe always is an exaggeration, but often enough not to be surprised by them anymore. It came with the territory.
Saxon: crack hunter of serial killers turned bestselling crime writer. That was me.
At least that’s how they described me on cable TV.
Magnet for every crazy in town, more like.
I’d written a couple of books about my all-too-brief years in the FBI, so it wasn’t like they needed security clearance from the President to get the lowdown on me; but still they expected me to be impressed when they rattled off a few details about cases I’d worked, places I’d been, killers I’d known. Like I needed reminding. Hell, I’m as easily flattered as the next former Special Agent, but they really needed to put in some more effort.
Get a new chat-up line.
Still, as introductions go, telling me someone was trying to kill him took some beating, and I told him so.
‘You think I’m joking,’ he said.
‘What I think is, if someone’s trying to kill you, you should go to the police. I’m not some kind of private eye. I’m not any kind of private eye.’
‘It’s too late. They wouldn’t listen to me.’
I didn’t blame them.
‘What makes you think I will?’
‘Because you’re the only one I can count on,’ he said.
‘You’re a stranger here, like me. You don’t belong. And besides—’
‘Yeah?’
‘You know what it’s like to see into the dark.’
And I couldn’t deny that.
I’d been staring into it longer than I could remember, so long that I could scarcely recall any more a time when I knew nothing of murder, knew nothing of death, though I guess there must have been one. A time when the darkness which lurks always at the edge of things, infecting and infesting the world we think we know, was nothing more than a rumour to me; when the dead voices still spoke a language I didn’t understand and had no desire to learn.
Once the darkness has touched the mind, nothing can make it go again. And it had touched mine too often. I had seen crows pecking at the fallen in a wood in winter, snow and old blood and the shadows of branches interlacing like secrets. I had fished skulls from the sea like they were whitebait, and drawn blood out the water of a moss-ravelled well in which a woman’s brutalised body had been dropped still breathing, but only barely, just hours before. I had seen the dead sealed inside walls and left folded in wastepipes as an offering for the rats, greedily unwrapped as a child unwraps its birthday gifts. I had found fingers poking out of the earth where a city decayed into rubble, nails blackened with poison, and recognised in them the handiwork of killers I almost hadn’t thought existed outside my own imagination.
I had searched for lost children that I knew would never be found. With my bare hands I had sifted ashes, not knowing what was dust and what was life forsaken.
I had come to know murder intimately, in all its pallors and moods, in all its hiding places, until the sight was as familiar to me as my own reflection, and I knew that dark things were all that lasted in the end, that nothing else endured. Knew that there was no end to evil, and no matter how hard we fought it there would always be more of it to fight again. Knew too that there are some amongst us, some much closer than we know, who think no more of snuffing out a life than the horse mourns the beetle crushed under its hoof.
You know what it’s like to see into the dark.
I did.
Which I guess was why I was damn fool enough to listen to some nut who called after hours looking for help, instead of putting the phone down, unplugging it from the wall, and climbing into bed. Maybe I should just get the word sucker tattooed on my forehead.
Where had I put those car keys?
Chapter Two
No, I wasn’t late. I checked the clock on the dashboard. Not yet midnight. And here to prove it, rattling alongside the road, was the last train, snaking round by the side of the black water and slowing as it came into Howth. As I parked my Jeep and climbed out, I saw passengers edging out from the station and dispersing like smoke, until they were only shadows and traces of laughter and then less than that, and I thought: I shouldn’t ha
ve come, no.
I didn’t even know what he looked like, I reminded myself grimly.
That was a good start.
Where was it he’d said he’d be?
The lighthouse, that was it – and there it was, standing guard at the end of the harbour wall where the city gave way to the sea, blinking off, on, off.
It looked very far away, but looking at it wouldn’t make it come any closer.
I locked the car and began to make my way out towards it.
In a moment it seemed I’d left Howth behind, and all I could hear was the night tide slapping against the stone and the boats in the harbour knocking together like dull bells.
That, and the flat echo of my own footsteps in the dark that made me think once or twice that someone was following me, though when I turned round there was nothing, no one else about at all, and the only other sign of life save me was some dog that came sniffing along the bollards lining the edge of the wall, strung with metal chains between, and looked at me hopefully for food before realising he was out of luck and running back towards the land.
By the time I reached the lighthouse, I was feeling unnerved. Out-of-the-way places like this always unsettled me, made me lose my bearings – the city was the only place I ever felt comfortable – and I was starting to wonder whether it hadn’t been a bad idea coming out here at all. Especially when I saw that Felix Berg wasn’t even at the red door of the lighthouse where he’d said he’d be. In fact, I was starting to wonder if I’d been taken for a fool.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
I yawned and checked my watch.
A quarter after midnight.
I’d give it ten minutes, I thought – no, five – then I was out of here.
Put it down to experience.
I sat down on the step in front of the door and lit a cigar to keep myself company whilst I waited, and waited, and as I waited I attempted a few half-hearted smoke rings – though I’d never managed to get those right; they just died on me at birth – and pulled my jacket tighter round me to try and stay warm. The wind was turning chilly. It was April, I think I’d read on some calendar that morning. The start of spring. But winter still wouldn’t give up the ghost. It cut in off the sea, hunting, hungry, camouflaged in the wind.
Looking back, I could see the glow of isolated houses like fireflies scattered across Howth Head, and a castle rotten like a tooth against the sky, stars bursting behind. Overhead, planes from the east were banking as they made the final lowering approach into the airport a few miles further inland. Across the water somewhere metal struck metal.
‘Felix Berg,’ I said quietly, ‘your time is up.’
I didn’t know if the five minutes were up, but I’d waited long enough.
I got to my feet and looked round one last time – and at that moment the beam of the lighthouse swept round again and I saw something at the end of the pier, where the stone dropped away to the deep water that stretched out to the lightless hump of an island beyond.
Or rather, I saw two somethings.
Shoes?
That’s what they looked like.
Intrigued, I tossed away the cigar and walked to the end of the pier.
The shoes were perched right on the edge of the stone, laid together neatly, laces folded back to fit inside – and there were other things there too.
Keys bunched on a keyring.
A silver cellphone.
A wallet.
And – what was this?
I took another step forward and immediately felt something crack quietly, a second too late to save it, under my foot. I looked down at a glint like ice.
The ice was broken glass. Not like the glass of a bottle, but thin and fragile like a leaf, and there was a round frame where the glass had been. It was a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles.
Irritated with myself, I shook the glass from the bottom of my boot and took one more step forward, minding where I put my foot this time. I’d expected the wall to drop away sheer to the water, but I realised now that there were rocks below. Black rocks wound with seaweed that resisted the tugging of each wave, and scattered with empty bottles and beer cans and an oil drum and planks of wood.
And there was a final something down there.
It was a man.
Or what had been a man and was now only a body.
He lay face down, jacket twisted, trousers inky with wet, his feet bare, one arm trapped awkwardly beneath himself, the other outstretched and bent to fit the jagged shape of the rocks, his body almost as angular now as they were. And I remembered at once the caller’s last words to me on the phone: You’re not the only one who’s seen into the dark. And sometimes the dark doesn’t like it. Sometimes the dark looks back.
Chapter Three
Seamus Dalton. I should’ve known it would be Dalton. Just what I needed to round off a great evening. Scientists have trawled Africa for years looking for the missing link, and here it was in Dublin all the time, hiding out in the shape of a murder detective.
It was going to be a long night.
He was quick, that’s all I’ll give him, only a few minutes behind the uniforms who were now securing the scene and making the usual inept attempts at questioning. I was standing with a cop called Simpson by a row of boat sheds with metal fronts a couple hundred yards down from the lighthouse when I saw him approaching, adjusting his belt and hitching up his pants as he caught sight of me, pulling a weary face like he knew already that I was wasting his time. That was his ritual whenever we met, which wasn’t often.
And I wasn’t complaining.
‘You know,’ he said as he drew near, ‘people have a bad habit of dying round you.’
‘Never the right ones, unfortunately.’
He almost smiled.
‘Who is it?’ he said.
‘We haven’t been able to identify the body yet, sir—’ Simpson tried to explain before Dalton silenced him with a glance.
‘I wasn’t asking you, son, I was asking her. In fact, why don’t you go and see if you can’t put up some more tape or something. Make yourself useful. In fact, why don’t you pop down over the wall there and take a little peek at the deceased. I’ll take over here.’
Simpson didn’t argue. Few of the uniforms messed with Dalton. He had a reputation for ruining a cop’s evening just for the heck of it. ‘They teach you people skills in police school, or does it all come naturally?’ I said as Simpson backed away.
‘Self-taught. Only teacher I ever needed,’ Dalton said. ‘Now, are you going to answer the question or do I have to put the cuffs on you, take you downtown and book you, as I believe you Americans say?’
Like he’d have the balls to do it. But he chuckled at his own joke; and when you’re as funny as Dalton, you get used to laughing at your own jokes since no one else is going to.
‘How the hell should I know who it is?’ was all I said in answer.
‘The desk sergeant said you mentioned a name.’
‘I came here to meet someone is what I said.’
‘Felix something.’
‘Felix Berg. He told me he was a photographer. Whether it’s him or not, I don’t know. I think it might be.’
‘Think?’ He spoke the word carefully, like it was new to him.
‘Yeah, think. You should try it sometime. Little practice, you might even get to enjoy it. Like I say, I think it might be him. I didn’t want to touch anything.’ Didn’t want to climb down there was nearer the truth, though I wasn’t about to admit that to Dalton. ‘Besides, I never met him before. I wouldn’t be able to ID him even if I wanted.’
Dalton seemed more interested in the fact I was out here meeting a man I’d never seen before than the fact there was a body lying on the rocks a few hundred yards away.
‘What’s the story?’ he said. ‘You suddenly get a taste for men or something? Could be my lucky night.’
‘Not unless I get a taste for slugs, Dalton,’ I said. ‘And you can wipe that leering look
off your fat face. Don’t try turning this into something it isn’t.’
‘So what is it if it isn’t what you say it isn’t?’
I paused.
‘He wanted to talk to me about something,’ I said warily.
‘Talk to you about what?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘He didn’t say?’
‘He didn’t say.’ I sighed. ‘Look, what are you doing here anyway? Where’s Fitzgerald?’
I meant Grace Fitzgerald, Detective Chief Superintendent with the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s murder squad, and Dalton’s superior – professionally, intellectually, evolutionarily, in every sense of the word. The Chief Superintendent and I were what used to be called an item. Stepping out together. Sleeping together. Call it what you will. Had been for a few years now, ever since I arrived in the city from the States, fresh from the FBI.
Though fresh wasn’t quite right. Jaded, finished, exhausted would be more like it. Fitzgerald had helped me get over it – though whether spending so much time with someone on the city’s murder squad had done me much good in getting over my own weaknesses was another matter. Didn’t help sometimes that she was doing what I still, in my more vulnerable moments, longed to be doing and which I knew I had little hope of ever getting back to.
Dalton knew about us, of course; they all did. No one ever said a word when Grace was around, but even then they never let you forget they knew. It didn’t need words.
‘The Chief Superintendent is otherwise engaged,’ was all Dalton said right now. ‘Busy woman. Busy woman. Stabbing down in Portobello. Murder’s a growing business in the city these days, you know. Growth industry. Sorry if that fucks up your romantic plans for the evening, but that’s killers for you. No consideration for anyone else. I blame the parents.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the other uniforms glance over as the sound of Dalton’s loud voice reached him, like he was putting two and two together over the jibe about Fitzgerald.
‘Besides, why would the great Grace Fitzgerald – out of whose rear end the sun doth shine, if you believe her fans in the local press – want to waste her time on a suicide?’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 1