‘You know something? These aren’t bad,’ he said as he ate. ‘Are they for free or do you want something in return?’
‘Only a book.’
‘You’re in the right place. By?’
‘Paddy Nye.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Nor me till this morning. He’s a photographer. Friend of Felix’s. He published a book about Ireland’s Eye a few years back. It’s an island,’ I said when he looked blank.
‘I know what it is,’ he said. ‘I just don’t think I have anything like that. Do you think I keep a copy of every book that’s out there? I ain’t got the room. Every loser’s published a book these days. I can’t keep track of them all. Life’s too short.’
‘It was a book of photographs,’ I said.
‘Look, give me the name of it and I’ll look it up on my computer. Everything’s catalogued in there somewhere. In print, out of print, wanted, unwanted. If it exists it’ll be in there. Just leave it to the magic fingers.’
Burke lifted another doughnut and strode over to his desk.
‘It’s called Eye,’ I told him.
‘Eye by Nye. Catchy,’ said Burke, and he clicked some buttons. ‘Here you are,’ he said after a couple of moments.
‘Published ten years ago, privately financed, long out of print. I could try and track it down for you if you like, but it could take weeks. Expensive too. Tell you what. Seeing it’s you, I won’t charge you the usual search fee.’
‘You’re all heart.’
‘Hold up,’ Burke added. ‘There’s another book listed here by one P. F. Nye. Wonder if it’s the same man? I might even have this one in stock.’
He got up from behind the desk and made his way to a wall on the other side of the store, pushing down his bifocals from the top of his head so he could scan the shelves better.
‘This is the section I keep for local stuff, city guides, maps, that sort of thing,’ he told me as he looked. ‘There’s a whole series of local history too, published by some two-bit company in the city. According to the catalogue, there’s a P. F. Nye who’s written one of their efforts. Reckon I might have one left in stock . . . ah, here it is.’
He pulled out a thin volume, more a pamphlet than a book, and tossed it over to me.
‘The Ireland’s Eye Murder – A Re-Examination,’ I read out. ‘What’s this about?’
‘I keep forgetting you don’t know all this stuff,’ he said. ‘In fact, sometimes I wonder why you even live in this city when you got so little interest in it.’
‘The natives love me so much they keep begging me to stay.’
‘Is that what it is?’ he said. He pointed a finger at the book. ‘This is about a famous murder happened out on Ireland’s Eye in the last century. Last but one, I should say; I keep forgetting. I can’t remember all the details. Some man killed his wife, or the police said he did and he didn’t; and he might’ve been hanged or he might’ve been let off, I ain’t sure.’
‘You’d make a great expert witness.’
‘I never said I was an expert,’ said Burke. ‘Look, why don’t you just take a little beady look at it and see if it’s any use to you?’
I looked at the book. It was pretty cheaply produced, with a sepia print from the nineteenth century on the cover showing Ireland’s Eye as seen from Howth Harbour. The author’s name was indeed P. F. Nye, and there were no other details about him save the phrase: ‘The author lives in Howth and is a well-known local historian.’ Was he indeed?
I opened it up and began to read, whilst outside the traffic snarled past and customers came and went, talking to Burke in whispers, like some people did in bookstores.
The book concerned a young woman who was found dead in an area of Ireland’s Eye known as Long Hole in 1857. She was found lying on a sheet, with a cut on her breast and blood issuing from her ears. Initially it was presumed that she’d drowned – and to be honest, I couldn’t think why, especially since drowning could be a notoriously difficult cause of death to diagnose even now – and only later was her husband arrested and charged with strangling her. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, not hanged at all, and got out after twenty years. Killers usually do in this part of the world.
Seems that the murder of this young woman had been something of a cause célèbre ever since among local historians, most of whom believed the dead woman had indeed simply drowned and her husband was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Nye was of the same mind, though as far as I could see that didn’t explain how she’d come to be laid out neatly on a sheet afterwards. The sea didn’t usually tidy up the corpses it created.
Still, it hardly mattered now. What interested me more was where Nye’s interest in miscarriages of justice came from.
Could it be from the conviction of Isaac Little?
I wanted to speak to this Little, I realised as I sat there, and for that I was going to have to rope in Boland again, suppress my guilt at using him, and see if he could pull some strings to get me a pass into Mountjoy to see Howth’s not-so-favourite son.
I was about to reach into my pocket and pull out my cellphone to do just that when I got that indefinable, inexplicable feeling you get when you know you’re being watched.
It was probably just the damn cat, I thought, glancing up – but I found myself looking straight into the eyes of a man in the far corner of the store.
He was standing with his body turned towards a shelf of books, and one of those books was lying open in his hands, the fingers of one hand poised with a page held between them like he’d started to turn it and then forgotten what he was doing; and his head was turned straight towards me. He was so surprised by my looking up and catching him watching me that for a moment he didn’t even turn away, and when he did it was only briefly, another furtive glance to the side quickly following. I wondered how long he’d been looking at me.
He was tall, dressed in a smart pinstriped suit, gleaming shoes, with an overcoat draped over his arm. His hair was cut short and at his feet sat a briefcase. A tie was knotted obediently at his throat. Get close enough and I’d probably see he had perfect fingernails too. He didn’t look the kind to be browsing in a store with revolutionary pretensions like Burke’s, and maybe that accounted for the awkwardness in him as he stood there. Either that, or he was now aware I was watching him in my turn as he’d watched me. His face was fixed with the same look, as if he was desperate not to give anything away, like he was counting down the seconds until he could close the book, replace it on the shelf and leave.
Sure enough, a moment later he shut the book – but he didn’t replace it on the shelf. Rather he bent down to pick up his briefcase, and then carried the book to the counter, where Burke was trying to work out his monthly accounts on a tiny calculator, his massive fingers making a mockery of his attempts to press only one button at a time.
Burke received the book from the pinstriped man, opened the flap to check the price, and put it inside a paper bag, before taking the folded banknote that was offered and handing back the right change; and all this time, I was waiting for the next glance.
Now?
But no. The stranger didn’t look up again, not even on his way out as he passed my chair. He simply opened the door and left.
I got to my feet and crossed to the window. Looked out through the reversed letters of Burke and Hare’s names at his back as he retreated down the quay in the direction of town.
If he looks back over his shoulder, I thought, I’ll know I’m right.
Yes.
Just as he was about to move out of sight amongst the crowd, he looked back once, straight at the bookstore window, straight at me.
Our eyes met.
Then he was gone.
I was right.
I only wished I knew what I was right about.
Right maybe that what had happened was significant.
‘You eyeing up my customers now as well?’ said Burke behind me.
‘H
e was watching me,’ I said, still staring out at the street in case he came back.
‘Watching isn’t a crime,’ said Burke. ‘You’re worth watching. Is a man not allowed to look at a woman any more without being accused of being a rapist? He’s not to know you’re of the other persuasion.’
‘I don’t mean watching me like that,’ I said.
‘What kind of watching do you mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and for once I meant what I said instead of just saying it to deter further questions. I didn’t even know if I’d have thought there was anything peculiar about him watching me if it hadn’t been for what had happened last night in my apartment.
But last night had happened and I couldn’t change that. It was bound to affect how I saw things for a while. Bound to make me suspicious.
‘You have any idea who he is?’ I asked Burke, returning thoughtfully to the desk and laying down Nye’s pamphlet.
‘Never seen him in here before, now that you mention it, but he did buy a book, so I’m prepared in the spirit of international brotherhood to give him the benefit of the doubt.’
‘What are you on about, international brotherhood?’
‘He was buying a copy of the Grundrisse.’
‘Come again?’
‘The Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.’
‘Burke, would you cut it out and just tell me what the hell you’re talking about?’
‘Karl Marx, sister. He was buying a book by Karl Marx.’
‘And do you get many people in pinstripes buying copies of books by Karl Marx?’
‘More than you’d think,’ said Burke. ‘Working where they do, they see the system from within. They know it stinks.’
‘Something certainly does,’ I said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Was Miranda Gray what I had expected? Hard to say. I hadn’t really expected anything. She was tall, distinguished-looking, long red hair, clothes expensive but understated, the kind of woman who always knew how to dress and look good while making it seem like she never gave it a second thought, or even a first thought. The kind of woman I always felt vaguely inadequate next to, as if they’d some secret no one had ever passed on to me.
Whereas me, I just threw on the first thing that came to hand.
And, as Fitzgerald often teased me, it showed.
‘Where’s Grace?’ said Fisher when I met him at the door.
‘There’s been some kind of break-in at the mortuary,’ I said.
Another break-in.
Was I getting too paranoid in thinking they might be related?
‘It was probably just kids,’ I explained, ‘looking for drugs. But the place is a mess, they really turned it over apparently, there are autopsy reports scattered everywhere. The pathologist’s having kittens. Grace had to go and make sure nothing important was missing.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘Could be all night from the sound of it.’
‘A table for three it is then,’ said Fisher.
All in all, what with Fitzgerald not being here and Miranda Gray looking like she’d walked out of a Noel Coward play, I was more than a little wary, and it was a long time after we sat down to dinner before I started talking to her properly. Till then, I just let Fisher do all the work, and he was good at that, putting people at their ease. It must come from spending so much time in the company of psychopaths.
With those people, you needed to put them at their ease if you weren’t going to end the meeting being carried out in a body bag.
I scanned the menu while he talked.
Fish, fish and then some more fish. And what was this? Well, what about that? Fish again. There was a certain consistency about the menu, I’ll give it that.
The awkwardness soon passed once we’d ordered, and Miranda turned out to be easy enough company. I’d feared enduring a few hours of shop talk between the two psychologists, or worse, that they’d start shooting the breeze about people who meant nothing to me.
In fact, Miranda only seemed to want to talk about Alice.
‘Fisher tells me she’s got you looking into Felix’s death,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ I said. ‘I have my own reasons for being interested.’
‘You’ve got me intrigued.’
‘Maybe I’m just intrigued too,’ I said, because I certainly wasn’t going to start talking about Sydney. Fisher wouldn’t have told Miranda about her, would he? ‘It’s not like I have anything else to do with my time.’
‘Life been dull since you left the FBI?’
‘It was the one thing I was any good at,’ I said, ‘but in the end I couldn’t hack it and I had to leave. I should’ve taken six months off, a year, then gone back. Instead I wrote a book and burned my boats and ensured they weren’t able to take me back.’
‘Is that a common habit of yours?’
‘To raze the ground behind me where I go? You bet. But it’s not something I think about, and,’ I said, ‘it’s certainly not something I want to talk about with a psychologist.’
‘Saxon disapproves of therapy,’ said Fisher.
‘I think it’s self-indulgence,’ I admitted. ‘I mean, don’t you get bored sometimes listening to other people’s relationship problems? How their mother didn’t love them, and they feel like a failure, not to mention all that interpretation of their dreams?’
‘It’s not so bad,’ Miranda laughed. ‘They’re not all so predictable. The dreams or the people. And there are one or two perks of the job.’
‘Like the pay,’ grumbled Fisher. ‘When I think of all the years I spent in prisons, slaving away sixteen hours a day for next to nothing, when I could have been pampering to the Freudian hang-ups of rich narcissists with a need to pretend they’re in the middle of some personal drama. They should try getting a job and then they wouldn’t have time for all that.’
‘Fisher, you’re starting to sound like me,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Miranda said with mock sweetness. ‘He’s a disgrace to his profession. I think he prides himself on it sometimes. It’s not as if you starved all those years, Lawrence. Not judging by your waistline anyway.’
She smiled indulgently at him before reaching out and squeezing his hand.
A small look passed between them and I couldn’t help wondering again if the relationship was as really in the past as Fisher had told me. It sounded weird hearing someone call him Lawrence, I knew that much.
‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ I asked her.
‘Fire away.’
‘Who started coming to you first, Felix or Alice?’
‘Alice. I knew her years ago when I lived out in Howth.’
‘You’re from Howth too?’
‘Not originally. My people came from London, we moved over here when I was a teenager, lived in Howth just round the corner from the Bergs. But I was long gone by the time I started seeing her in any professional capacity. And she was coming to me a year before Felix even set foot through the door. Even then it was a long time before he relaxed, opened up, and really started to get something from the sessions.’
‘Did she persuade him to come?’
‘I got that impression,’ Miranda said. ‘She’s a great believer in psychoanalysis. Reads all the right books, asks all the right questions. Keeps me on my toes, I suppose.’
‘She sounds like hard work.’
‘Harder than some patients. She’s highly intelligent. Much more so than Felix was, I should think. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that. Felix was intuitive, creative, good at lateral thinking. Alice is more single-visioned, deeply intellectual. She’s a formidable woman.’
‘Were they having a sexual relationship?’ I shot at her.
‘Sleeping together?’ said Fisher, and he sounded shocked, bless him.
‘Don’t be such an innocent,’ I said. ‘Happens more often than you think.’
‘Not in my family it didn’t,’ sai
d Fisher. ‘But then you haven’t seen my sister. I’d turn gay first. No offence,’ he added hastily.
‘None taken. Well?’ I said to Miranda.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t think it would be right for me to go into that.’
‘Professional ethics are a new concept to Saxon,’ said Fisher. ‘You’ll have to give her mind time to adjust to the novelty. But even if they were’ – he gave a little mock shiver – ‘sleeping together, what would that have to do with whether he was killed or not?’
‘A thought, is all. Say they were having a relationship, would that make it harder for Alice to accept that Felix had killed himself ? Would it make her angry, bitter, jealous, looking round for someone else to blame to erase her guilt at not having seen it coming?’
‘Not bad,’ said Fisher. ‘You should be a therapist.’
‘I’ll take that as the insult it wasn’t intended to be.’
‘I can see what you’re getting at. It’s a fascinating theory,’ said Miranda. ‘But . . .’
‘You can’t give away client details? I understand.’
I said the words, but I didn’t feel them in my gut. I didn’t understand. Solving the mystery of Felix’s death was more important than not breaching her confidentiality with Alice, surely? On the other hand, it mightn’t look right for a therapist to sit at dinner swapping tales of her patients’ sexual complications. Might not be good for business.
‘Do you think Alice would ever kill herself?’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. She doesn’t have the usual predictive traits. She’s pretty tough. But then you never know. I could see that Felix was fragile, close to some edge, but I was still surprised by what happened. It’s always a shock when a patient kills themself. It’s like a slap in the face. They’re telling you that you can’t help them.’
‘Is that why you were round at Gina’s house? Looking for answers?’
She took a sip of wine before answering, looking pensive.
‘You have to remember that I saw him for an hour twice a week,’ she said. ‘What did I really know about him? If I was going to understand what had happened, I needed to talk to people who spent their lives alongside him. Knew what books he was reading, what movies he watched, what jokes he laughed at. People who slept with him.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 19