‘Terrific’s right,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘Just when I thought I’d seen off Sweeney for good.’
‘Has he heard yet?’
‘He’s already been on the phone to the Commissioner, saying this proves his theory that the shootings are political and that the anti-terrorist unit should take over operational control of the investigation at the soonest opportunity.’
‘How is shooting a guy who pulls rabbits out of top hats and ribbons out of his ears for a living meant to be political?’
‘You’re preaching to the converted here, Saxon – but try telling them that.’
‘The killer’s only trying to throw another red herring into the net. Literally red in this case. He only has to read the newspapers or watch TV to see that there’s bad blood between the murder squad and the anti-terrorist branch over this. So he chucks a little bit of his own communist manifesto into the mix to stir things up, and—’
‘Hey presto, as our friend Brook might say.’
‘He has Sweeney on the case on another reds-under-the-bed hunt.’
‘Which suits the Marxman just fine. So-called Marxman, I should say. He’s no more interested in Karl Marx than I am.’
Fitzgerald stopped suddenly and frowned.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing, I don’t think,’ she said, but she was looking across the road at the usual crowd of curious onlookers who had gathered there at the first sight of a police light.
Word gets out fast.
I turned my head to look at them too, but it was dark now, they were only faces.
‘Did you see someone?’
‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘For a moment there, I thought I saw Alice.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Fitzgerald held a press conference for the early morning news shows.
Following a definite line of enquiry . . . a number of promising leads . . . confident of being able to report development soon . . .
She was a good liar.
The fact that the killer had passed on a message in this way was good. Silence was what was worrying. And if this was a sign he really did want to make contact, be understood, then there was hope he could be caught out that way too. But there was still a long way to go. When no obvious motive existed, catching a killer was made all the harder.
Sometimes impossibly so.
I had different plans for the day. I was driving north through the city towards Mountjoy Prison. Healy had taken me to one side at the hospital shortly before I left and pressed a piece of paper into my hand with a name and number scrawled on it. Boland had told him I was looking to see Little; Healy knew the right people. It would only be half an hour, he said, but the way I saw it, a half-hour was still a half-hour longer than nothing.
I’d told Fitzgerald where I was going, but she’d simply raised her hands palms up in front of her chest to silence me.
‘I don’t need to know,’ she said. ‘In fact, I don’t even want to know. I’d rather have deniability. You do what you have to do. Just be careful, yeah?’
‘Aren’t I always?’
‘I won’t answer that.’
Little himself was apparently eager to meet me. He didn’t get many visitors, Healy said. Correction. He didn’t get any. I approached the gates with that vague feeling of dread I always got from prisons, and there was something especially miserable about Mountjoy. It was the Leonard Cohen of prisons, all hopelessness and misery and gloom. The very stones were stained so black that water couldn’t have made any difference. The guards frisked me when I gave them my name to make sure I wasn’t bringing him in any contraband (though the only drug I’d be interested in bringing in to someone like Isaac Little was cyanide, and only then if I could administer it myself). Then I was scanned to make sure I wasn’t taking in any weapons, and looked at in that suspicious way they have to make sure . . . well, I’m not sure what that was for.
Did they think they could detect malign intent just by looking?
Eventually they decided I was harmless enough and led me hurriedly into the building, down one corridor, into another, corridor leading to corridor, until we entered a small windowless room.
Not the usual room for visitors, that was for sure, but then I was out of hours for visiting. There was only a table, two chairs, not even water. A page was pinned to the wall showing a shift rota. There was a green No Smoking sign above the door.
A dead spider was tangled in its own web in a corner.
‘If there’s anything you need,’ said the guard, ‘just ring this’ – and he showed me the button under the table that activated the alarm. ‘Try not to press it unless you really need to. You’re not supposed to be here. I’ll try and keep an eye on things through the grille.’
Then he was gone.
I lit a cigar, then noticed again the No Smoking sign.
They were probably worried the inmates would get cancer and sue the prison authorities for exposing them, frail, delicate creatures that they were, to the horrors of passive smoking.
Besides, I didn’t want to set off any fire alarms.
I stubbed the cigar out regretfully.
And waited.
It seemed an age before the door opened and Isaac Little came in.
The guard sat him down on the chair.
‘No nonsense now, Isaac,’ he said.
‘With these?’ Little lifted up his cuffed hands. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing.’
He was a surprisingly scrawny man, wizened, husked, sort of shifty in his movements, with thin bony hands, fingers like some variety of medical probes, a mouth studded with bad teeth, scrags of stubble sticking out from his grey chin; he scratched at the growth with his joined hands like he thought he had company there. His hair hung lank as pond weed, and he sniffed constantly as he sat there. Eyes never still. His skin was blotched and poor and dry; he kept licking his lips with slight lizard movements of his tongue but they never seemed to get any less dry. White trash, I’d have called him if I was back home.
What did they call him here?
No need to call him anything.
He was Isaac Little.
That sufficed.
He repelled me, and I knew I’d have to struggle to contain it. I’d met worse than him, and yet there was something revolting, repulsive, rotten about this specimen.
His soul gave off a stench, and it wasn’t even a stench of evil; it only aspired to evil, and had settled in the meantime for a third-rate wickedness. It’s a cliché of policing that child sex offenders look just like everyone else. Little didn’t. There was something noxious that came from his eyes that made me feel infected and dirty just to see it. He was the sort you’d pull your child to your side to avoid if you saw him oozing down the street.
It was hard to think he’d ever been allowed near a child when the maliciousness in him was such a palpable aura hanging round him. Had he always been like that, I wondered, or had he simply allowed his true self to cultivate itself since being locked away, when it didn’t matter anymore, when there was no reason to pretend, ready to assume the right mask again when free?
His eyes looked me up and down, but the lechery was half-hearted. I guess I was too old for him. About thirty years too old, to judge by his file.
I recalled the charge sheet Boland had read out to me over the phone that morning.
Interfering with a minor. Inciting a child to engage in sexual activity. Arranging or facilitating the commission of a child sexual offence. Causing a child to watch a sexual act. Paying for sex with a child. Indecent exposure. Voyeurism. Unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under the age of fifteen years. Knowingly producing, distributing and printing and publishing child pornography. Knowingly possessing child pornography.
Truly it’s a wonderful world we live in.
He’d also worked in a care home for the mentally handicapped for two years, and the offences there had racked up too. Inciting a person with a mental disorder or learning disability to engage in sexual activity.
Causing a person with a mental disorder or learning disability to engage in sexual activity. Inducement, threat or deception to procure sexual activity with a person with a mental disorder or learning disability. Prior to his conviction for the murder of Lucy Toner, however, Little had committed no known acts of violence against a child except insofar as all his offences were acts of violence. That didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of violence – murder often came out of nowhere, no prior warning, like lightning from a clear sky – but it made me wonder.
‘What do you want?’ he said eventually.
No small talk then. Suited me fine. I didn’t exactly relish the idea of finding topics to break the ice with this man. What would we talk about - Mid East affairs, the stock market, the most effective ways to groom a child for the purposes of sexual depravity?
The usual subjects for polite dinner-party conversation.
‘I want to ask about Lucy. You remember her?’
‘Of course I remember her. I killed her, didn’t I?’ Sarcasm dripped off his tongue like poison from a syringe. ‘Laid down the little honey in the sand and smothered her with one hand up her panties, yes indeed, soft and warm, what a glorious morning it was to be alive.’
He grinned at me, trying to shock me.
I kept my face impassive.
This was a part of the job I’d always found difficult. Fisher could do this sort of thing without a thought: meet killers, perverts, treat talking to them like it was shooting the breeze with a stranger at a bus stop about the weather. Any hint of disapproval and they’d curl up like porcupines with the prickles pointing out. You had to befriend them, get in under their defences; that was how you found stuff out.
I’d always been bad at that because I found it harder to shield how I felt; they always caught a glimpse of it and hostility came between us. It was there now, and I knew we could both sense it, but Isaac didn’t curl up porcupine-style. I could only guess it was a long time since someone had come out here and talked to him, and he wanted to see where it might lead, what he could get out of it; he wasn’t going to risk it this soon.
He had some self-control then.
It was just a pity he’d never showed it in the presence of children.
‘I don’t believe you did that,’ I said as carefully as I could manage.
‘I know. I was told. That’s the only reason I agreed to see you.’
‘So do you want to tell me what you really did that day?’
‘Stayed in bed most of the time. I was on this medication. Sleeping all the time, just getting up to eat, take a slash. I got up about four, went down to the kitchen for something to eat, I didn’t see no one all day, then I went back to bed. Next day the police were hammering at the door and I was being pushed about by some inspector looking for promotion who seemed, for some reason, to have taken a dislike to me. Seemed to think I’d murdered some girl down the road.’
‘You absolutely sure you hadn’t?’
‘It’s the sort of thing I’d remember. I’ve got a good memory for little details like that. Faces. Phone numbers. Murders I’ve committed.’
‘You said you were on medication.’
‘On medication, yes. Out of my head, no. I’ve never harmed a child in my life.’
‘Apart from raping them, you mean?’
He flinched.
‘That’s your word,’ he said.
‘What word would you use instead?’
He paused a long time before answering.
‘I loved those kids,’ he said, ‘and they loved me. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Because I’m not a pervert, you mean?’
He sat up straight. ‘There’s a certain pride in being a pervert, as you call it. The niggers and the queers all call themselves that now, don’t they? They’ve claimed the word back for themselves. Why shouldn’t perverts take pride in what they are too?’
‘Perverts of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.’
‘Something like that.’
He grinned, and the bad teeth declared themselves open for business.
I could see him now, in a band.
Pervertz With Attitude.
Number one with a bullet.
Only not straight between the eyes, unfortunately.
‘Look, we’re just wasting time here,’ I said. ‘I came because I’m interested in Lucy’s death. You said you didn’t do it; I believe you. I want to know who you think did.’
‘I know who did it,’ said Little.
‘Yeah?’
‘It was one of those young ones in the house up the street. Hippie types. Plenty of money. Used to live in some kind of commune.’ A joke had come to him. ‘Free love, man.’
‘And what makes you think it was one of them?’
‘Because he told me. Felix. The photographer.’
‘He told you?’
‘Yeah, he wrote to me soon after I was convicted. Sent me a letter right here. Said he wanted to come and speak to me, said he had something to tell me, that he knew I was innocent.’
‘Just like me.’
‘He wasn’t quite so hot.’
I ignored him.
‘You let him come?’ I prompted.
‘Why not? I knew his sister. I got into some trouble when I first moved into the house there. I’d just got out of jail. I’d done some time for robbery, I’d turned over a chemist’s somewhere—’ He wasn’t looking at me now. Didn’t he think I’d read his file and knew the real reason he’d been inside?
‘When they found out who I was, I got some hassle from the neighbours.’ Fancy that. ‘They didn’t like the fact I was lowering the tone of the neighbourhood. Bringing property prices down.’
‘But Alice didn’t join in?’
‘She brought me stuff. Food. Wine she’d made herself. Books. Used to drop them round.’
Proper little Florence Nightingale.
‘She ever tell you why she was doing it?’
‘She said she believed everyone had the right to a second chance. That I’d paid for my errors and now needed to be encouraged to live a virtuous life again.’
I honestly thought I was going to puke.
‘You didn’t tell her then about the stash of pictures of naked children you had upstairs, and the nice view of the playground?’
‘What can I say? It didn’t come up in conversation.’
I’ll bet it didn’t, I thought, and was amazed again how intelligent, educated people like Alice could be so naive, swallowing that bullshit about redemption and second chances. A second chance for monsters like Isaac was just a second chance to ruin more children’s lives.
‘I’m surprised she didn’t come by this place herself,’ I said. ‘For morning coffee and biscuits, you know.’
‘I thought you were on my side here,’ he whined unpleasantly in reply.
‘Not thinking you killed that little girl isn’t the same as thinking you’re some sort of hero or that I have to pretend all the other stuff didn’t happen. You can’t deny you presented a bit of a target for the police. They were bound to come up with your name, and once they did, all the other evidence was just sitting there. You had no alibi, an unhealthy sexual interest in children. You can’t expect everyone to be as understanding as Alice. You still haven’t said why she hasn’t visited you here.’
‘Felix told me she was upset,’ said Isaac with a trace of sulkiness, ‘that she’d moved away. He’d be coming instead now, he said, but he had her full support. His exact words. He told me on his first visit.’
‘Did he bring homemade wine and cookies too?’
Evidently not.
‘He told me he knew for a fact that someone in the house where he lived had killed the girl and he was going to help me prove I was innocent. He was gathering information, he said, and soon as he had enough he’d come forward. He said he’d told the police about his suspicions but they didn’t want to know, but that he had money, lots of it, and he was going to use it to hire peop
le to find out what had really happened, lawyers, PIs, the lot.’
‘He didn’t care that you were a menace to children?’
‘He cared about the fact that I was innocent.’
‘Yeah, you said that already. So what happened?’
‘I heard from him a couple of times, he told me he was getting close. Then nothing. I sent him a couple of letters asking him to get back in touch, but he never answered.’
‘What did you think had happened?’
‘That he’d been warned off by the police. They do that, you know. Or paid off. Either by the police because they wanted to keep me in here, or else by the real killer. I figured maybe he’d found out who did it and had decided to cover up for them because that would cause less trouble for him than letting me rot in here.’ His voice was rising. ‘Then I thought maybe he’d just been leading me on, getting some kind of kick out of building up my hopes.’
‘And now? What do you think now?’
He considered the question.
‘I think he knew damn well who killed the little bitch and just stopped trying to help me for his own reasons.’
‘You know he’s dead now, don’t you?’
‘I heard about it,’ he said dismissively.
‘No great loss to you?’
‘When someone tells you they’re going to help you, then ignores you for years, you kind of lose any attachment to them you might have had. He shot himself. Big deal. I just wish it was me who’d plugged him. He was probably sticking his nose into other people’s business again and they had someone go put a bullet in him. Fuck him.’
There was something in that. Felix digs into the death of Lucy, and is frightened off when maybe he gets too close.
He investigates the Marxman killings – and winds up dead.
Maybe he made a habit out of curiosity one time too many.
Ran out of lives like a cat.
‘The way I see it,’ Little said, ‘is that there’s karma and everything comes back to haunt you. You don’t help those who need help and then in the end there’ll be no one there when you need them. Instead you get back what’s coming to you sevenfold, right up the ass.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 21