Could this be a sign that someone had had a vendetta against Felix?
The other fact I hadn’t known was that there was currently an exhibition of Berg’s latest photographs at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, housed out in an old building in Kilmainham known as the Royal Hospital. It had been running since New Year’s Day and featured pictures taken in the city since his return from America last fall. I would have liked to head out to the exhibition straight away, partly in search of some further insight into Felix’s recent state of mind, and partly too, if I was honest, just because I wanted to look at those photographs. See what he’d been working on since Unreal City. His photographs had dug themselves into my consciousness. Even this morning, I hadn’t been able to help seeing the city through his eyes. Jostling. Crazy.
Intolerable.
But I had other plans. I was going to call in on Tom Kiernan. I called on my cellphone on the way down the stairs, and his assistant told me he was out at breakfast.
Did I want to call back later?
No, I knew where to find him.
Kiernan was infamous for always eating breakfast at a café round the corner from murder squad headquarters in Dublin Castle that was so bad the food safety officials always came to inspect it in decontamination overalls borrowed from forensics. Even the beat cops wouldn’t eat there, and they were the kind who’d have eaten at Jeffrey Dahmer’s diner if they were hungry enough. Everything on the menu had been dead longer than Lincoln and deep-fried until any resemblance to food as it was normally understood was purely coincidental.
Impurely coincidental, I should say.
‘Company,’ he said brightly when he saw me coming in. ‘Can I treat you to breakfast?’
‘Is this what you call breakfast?’ I said, nodding at his plate.
‘What do you call it?’ he said.
‘An indictable offence under all known hygiene regulations,’ I said. ‘But don’t let me put you off.’
‘You haven’t,’ he said, and took another bite.
I tried not to look. His plate was like a slaughterhouse. Grease had settled thickly over it like sludge on a carpet after a flood. They must use pneumatic drills in the kitchen to get the plates clean. If they ever bothered cleaning them at all.
Fitzgerald should try coming here before she passed judgement on my diet.
Then again, when you spent the day looking at what Kiernan looked at, it was unlikely that the prospect of an occasional bout of food poisoning would put you off.
Kiernan was a photographer, but his shots never wound up hanging in galleries in Temple Bar, since he worked for the DMP, specialising in what he told those who asked was ‘intimate portraiture of the recently deceased’, which was generally enough to make them stop asking for more details. Like all police photographers, he spent his days surrounded by images which, were they found in the possession of an ordinary citizen, would be considered grounds either for immediate arrest or at best a committal to a secure institution.
Like all police photographers too, he also constantly expressed a desire to leave it all behind and spend his days taking pretty wide-angle shots of the sun going down over Dublin Bay, and sleeping kittens; though I didn’t believe it, any more than I’d believed it of all the others I’d known before him. He was driven by a determination to track down the screwballs who provided him with a livelihood as fierce as that of any police officer.
Not to mention that his professional pride probably wouldn’t allow him to step aside and let the next generation take over. He was, after all, very good at what he did.
Which was why I was here now.
I’d come into contact with Kiernan first because he did an occasional sideline in photographs of the living – though he was forced to charge more for those, he said, since the subjects were invariably more difficult to handle than he was used to, and sometimes even insisted on drawing him into conversation, which he considered a waste of his time. He’d taken a shot for the flap of one of my books. And if I’d known then what I knew now about his diet, I’d probably have asked for another photographer, to avoid the risk of Kiernan’s arteries exploding during the photoshoot and me having to go through it all again.
I hated having my picture taken.
‘You’ve got that look in your eye,’ he said as I sat down opposite him this morning, trying not to touch anything in case the stain never came off again.
‘What look?’
‘The look that says you want something. Is it my body?’
‘Afraid not. I’m leaving that pleasure to the rest of the women of Dublin.’
‘It’s a tough job,’ he said, ‘but someone’s got to do it. I just wish it was me sometimes. My love life’s about as successful as the tip I got from Healy yesterday.’
‘What is it with the murder squad and women? You’ve got almost as many failed relationships behind you as Zsa Zsa Gabor. Boland’s divorced. I hear Walsh hits on anything in a skirt. Dalton will never be able to keep a woman unless he builds a cage for her in his cellar – and I wouldn’t put it past him.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Kiernan. ‘Sergeant Boland has a new lady friend, last I heard. And I for one hope it works out and they get married so that I can make a few extra shillings from the wedding photos.’
‘There’s no such thing as shillings any more.’
‘You’re telling me. Nothing stays the same.’
I was silent for a moment, thinking about Kiernan’s news. It just proved to me how little I saw Sergeant Niall Boland these days. We’d worked together on a case when he’d first joined the murder squad and I’d got to know him pretty well. Liked him too, though he had the kind of taking-it-easy approach to policing that was guaranteed to get me kicking the furniture. Now I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him around. That was what came of me keeping myself to myself these days. I should give him a call.
‘What is it you want, anyway?’ said Kiernan.
‘I have a Polaroid of someone. I want to know who it is. Any suggestions?’
‘Ask the photographer?’
‘Ordinarily I would. Only problem in this case is he might be dead.’
‘Bit tricky,’ acknowledged Kiernan. ‘Are we talking about the illustrious Felix Berg?’
‘Might be. Did you know him?’
‘Knew his work.’ Kiernan shrugged. ‘Not bad if you like that la-di-da vibe.’
‘I should have known better than to expect one photographer to have a good word to say about another one.’
‘Is the caped-crusading crime-fighting world any different?’
‘I guess not.’
‘There you are then.’
I took the photograph I’d discovered in Felix’s papers out of my pocket and handed it across the table to him. He wiped his hand on his pants before taking it from me.
Manners maketh man, don’t they say?
‘Is this it?’ said Kiernan. ‘Well, I think I could do something with it maybe. Scan it into the computer and fiddle about with the focus and the filters and the light.’
‘That’s all very interesting, I’m sure, but I don’t want a lesson in your professional technique, Kiernan. Can you do it? That’s all I want to know.’
‘Of course I can do it. You know your problem? You think we’re still all cavemen here. I know this ain’t Quantico, Special Agent, but we have been known to have access to some of the benefits of modern technology. Hell, we even have electricity sometimes when the Chief remembers to put up the lightning rod round the back of Dublin Castle.’
I smiled. I guess I asked for it sometimes.
‘In fact,’ he said, ‘are you doing anything right now?’
‘Apart from getting ready to throw up after watching you eat that crap? No.’
‘Then let’s see if I can’t sneak you back to my lab and lock the door behind us, get the secretaries gossiping about me for once, and see what we can do. What do you say?’
‘Point the way, big boy. I�
�m all yours.’
Chapter Eleven
‘He said the trick was,’ I told Fitzgerald, ‘to blow the photograph up as far as he could—’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Tom Kiernan.’
‘You’ve been borrowing my crime scene photographer?’
‘He said he wasn’t busy. Are you listening? He said the trick was to blow the picture up without losing the focus of it altogether. Don’t go far enough and the image remains indistinct, go too far and it collapses into splodges and splurts. I don’t know how he did it. You know what I’m like with technology. There’s no way I’d get into the FBI these days, recruits all need skills I haven’t got. Proficiency in a foreign language. Computer science. Information technology. Military experience. I’d be flipping burgers for a living.’
‘The burger world’s loss is crimefighting’s gain,’ said Fitzgerald wryly.
We were sitting in her office at Dublin Castle. Rooftops dissected the sky outside her window and the day was clear. A half-bright sunlight was striking off the edge of the table.
I could almost believe springtime was right round the corner today.
She’d sent for coffee, but it must have been coming via Colombia because it looked like there was less chance of it putting in an appearance than the Assistant Commissioner at a crime scene.
‘I’m just telling you what he had to do to the photograph to make the image come out,’ I said. ‘This was the best he could do.’
I tossed the printout Kiernan had given me half an hour ago across her desk.
Fitzgerald picked it up and gazed at it.
‘It looks like Felix,’ she said.
‘It is Felix. At least, I’d be ninety per cent sure it’s Felix. Enough to stake my left leg on it, but then I’ve always been the gambling type.’
‘I’d stake your left leg on it too,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘But what of it?’
‘Only that this shows he might’ve been being watched. Followed. And that he knew it.’
‘It proves nothing of the sort, as you well know. It’s only a photograph. The fact that someone other than Felix took it is irrelevant.’
‘Even if it was the Marxman?’ I said.
‘It wasn’t the Marxman.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
I couldn’t understand why she was so resistant to exploring a possible link here after all the frustration she’d endured on the investigation to date.
I thought she’d have been pleased with my help.
‘Because of this.’ She picked up a folder that had been sitting face down on her desk and tossed it across the table. ‘It came this afternoon. It’s the autopsy report on Felix Berg.’
I picked it up, peeled back the cover.
Scanned through it quickly.
I didn’t need to wade through all the details of the toxicology readings and blood samples and analysis of the stomach contents. I read out the only part that mattered.
‘Death by self-inflicted gunshot wound.’
I could hardly believe what I was seeing. According to Alastair Butler, the City Pathologist, the only possible verdict was that Felix had placed the gun to his own eye and fired the trigger. The angles were all correct for a self-inflicted injury. He had gunshot propellant residue on his hands. There were no signs of defence injuries or marks consistent with any kind of a struggle. He had one small, clean, shallow recent cut on the back of his hand, and some post-mortem tearing to the skin caused by the body striking the jagged rocks, and that was it. He’d also, I noticed, glancing back through the blood samples – looking for flaws? – had three times the recommended alcohol limit in his body when he died.
Getting himself smashed to gather the courage to put the gun against his eye?
He’d been dead less than an hour by the time I found him.
‘But it doesn’t make any sense,’ I said, my voice struggling to come to terms with what the report was saying. ‘He told me someone was trying to kill him. Alice showed me his file filled with clippings about the Marxman. I have it with me here in my bag. I was going to give them to you. And now you’re saying he killed himself? There must be a mistake.’
‘There’s no mistake,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Butler knows what he’s doing.’
‘Did you find a note?’
‘Not everyone leaves a note.’
‘But the bullet went in through the eye,’ I said. ‘Suicides don’t shoot themselves in the eye. There are sites of election. The temples. The forehead. Not the eyes.’
‘That’s just statistics. There are always exceptions. Just because most suicides don’t shoot themselves in the eye doesn’t mean this one didn’t or couldn’t. Besides, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say there’s something fishy about the way he died because he shot himself through the eye and therefore it must have been the Marxman, and then ignore all the evidence which points away from the Marxman’s involvement. Like the same fact that he was shot through the eye. The Marxman’s never done that before. He always shoots from the rear. Besides, the gun was placed directly against the skin before being fired. If the Marxman was able to get that close to Felix, wouldn’t he have struggled, lashed out, resisted?’
‘But . . . you never said anything about finding a gun.’
For the first time, she looked a little uncomfortable.
‘That’s because we didn’t,’ she admitted.
‘You didn’t find a gun?’
‘Dalton thinks it may have sprung out of his hand when he fired the bullet and ended up in the water. It happens. I’ve sent out divers to take a look through the water near the pier. If they find anything, we should be able to make a match.’
‘So what you’re saying is you have no actual evidence Felix even had a gun?’
‘We have evidence that he fired one, and that the bullet from the one he fired passed through his eye socket and part of his brain and ended up embedded in his own skull.’
‘What kind of gun was it?’ I said, sighing with frustration and flicking back impatiently through the notes, looking for a verdict.
‘We’re not sure yet. Some old pistol from the war or thereabouts, looks like. Made a bit of a mess of his face. We haven’t been able to make an exact identification.’
‘But you’re still going to leave it at that?’
‘What else can I do? I’m a murder detective, and what Butler conducted this morning was an autopsy on the body of a man who committed suicide. We’re actively looking for the gun. Meanwhile, there’s no evidence to suggest that any foul play occurred. I can’t investigate every suicide that happens in the city; do you have any idea how many of them there are?’
I was shaking my head in disbelief. I couldn’t think straight.
‘I’m sorry, Saxon,’ she said. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to help you out, but there’s nothing here to give any cause for suspicion about how Felix died. Besides, I took time out today to call Miranda Gray—’
‘Who?’
‘She was Felix’s therapist. Dalton found out about her when he was putting together his report on the death.’ It took all my self-control not to snap out some insult, irritated more than I liked to admit that Dalton had managed to find out something I didn’t know. That just seemed to defy the normal laws of nature. ‘She says Felix was suffering from bipolar depression and had done for years. She said he had a breakdown last year.’
‘Alice told me.’
‘She also said she wasn’t surprised that he might have committed suicide. His life seemed to have been quite complicated. Alice’s too.’
‘What does she know about Alice?’
‘She’s her therapist too.’
‘His and hers matching shrinks. Cosy. Does she have kingsize couches so they can have joint sessions?’
‘She couldn’t tell me much, obviously,’ Fitzgerald continued, ignoring my sarcasm, ‘but she’d had worries about Felix for a while. She even read out some of her notes to me. Felix often talked about the li
ghthouse. He’d lived near there as a child. She said he saw it as something permanent and reliable in his life after his parents died, he said he found it comforting, he used to look at the light each night from his window before he went to bed. She could understand him going there if he was troubled, unhappy, in need of solace. And you know how it is with suicides, they often—’
‘Go back to places that mean something to them when they decide it’s time to die, I know,’ I said testily. ‘Whatever happened to patient-doctor confidentiality?’
‘Don’t be petty. Any other time you’d be bitching if she didn’t give us some details. And you should be glad I took this trouble for you.’
‘I am glad. Really I am,’ I said. ‘But where would Felix have got a gun?’
‘Anyone can get a gun in Dublin if they know what they’re looking for.’
‘Point taken. But this wasn’t just any gun, you said so yourself, it was some kind of antique. From the war. Where’d he get it?’
‘The firearms unit are looking into it. If they find anything out, I’ll pass it on to you. It’s really not up to me. I have other things to do. Like the Marxman enquiry, remember? He’s probably out there now, fishing for his next victim, as we speak. Laughing at us. Four dead bodies is bad enough without adding a fifth to the tally on little more than a screwy sister’s conviction that her brother was the victim of the Marxman.’
‘Is that Miranda Gray’s professional diagnosis? That Alice is screwy?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘Well, I’m not convinced. There are too many points of coincidence to simply let it go. Felix’s interest in the case. His call to me. He was trying to tell me something, I’m convinced of that. Even the fact that he was shot through the eye, it’s too symbolic, like he was being punished for something he’d seen, something he shouldn’t have seen.’
‘And from your experience, you also ought to appreciate how difficult it is to stage a murder to look like suicide.’
I wouldn’t listen. I was floundering for some rope to grasp on to.
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 6