There was nothing there.
Nothing there.
Nothing—
I jumped back as a filthy bird, disturbed from its sleep, flapped out of the shattered window of a house I’d just passed; and as I watched it circle against the stars and vanish, silence settling once more like snow, I looked back at the house and knew: He’s in there.
Call it a sixth sense.
I retraced my steps, noticing this time that one of the planks that covered the doorway was loose. I moved it to one side, and a gap appeared, wide enough to squeeze through.
I wished I had a torch.
It was dingy inside.
There might be rats.
Might?
There was no might about it.
It was only when I was standing in the hallway, brushing the dust and dirt off my jacket, that I realised there was someone sitting hunched on the stairs.
I’d walked right into his trap.
********************
But even now that I was here he didn’t move, and he must have heard me enter.
He was sitting bent forward, arms folded, his head resting on the place where they were crossed. The knife dangled limply from his fingers. Dalton’s blood stained the edge.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, without looking up, ‘I’m not going to kill you.’
‘Why not? I thought you liked killing people.’
‘I’ve killed enough of them,’ he said.
And he started to laugh strangely, like it was the funniest joke in the world.
He lifted his head and looked me directly in the eye.
He didn’t look like a killer.
Then again, which of them ever did?
I didn’t know what to do. If I could distract him . . . try to cover the ground before he realised what I was doing . . . but no, it was a calculation I couldn’t make.
One wrong move, and—
I could hear the noises of the city, dulled and distant, beyond the walls. I felt like I was in a belljar, like a trapped insect, with the air running out.
The sirens were far, far away.
I could hardly believe that I was here.
With the Marxman?
And as I watched him, I saw the same uncertainty in his eyes, like he was wondering what to do now – and then the next moment it was gone, it was a moon blotted out by a cloud, and he got to his feet and walked steadily down the steps towards me, and I had nowhere to run.
Besides, I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
When he was about three steps away, he halted.
Lifted up the knife between us.
‘It was nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘And I really am sorry about trying to shoot you.’
And he turned the knife round and pulled it hard across his throat. I heard the scrape of it loud against bone.
When the police entered the derelict building a short time later, their arrival putting an end to the hidden scurryings that had begun to converge on the hallway, I was still standing in the same position. I hadn’t moved. I couldn’t move. I was staring down at the slumped body of the man who’d tried to kill me not a half-hour ago, sprawled in a spreading pool of his own blood.
*********************
‘I can’t believe it. Sometimes,’ said Boland as he drove me back later from the northside to my apartment, ‘I think I don’t understand one thing that’s going on any more.’
All the lights were red against us.
It seemed like a portent.
‘I never liked Seamus Dalton,’ he said, ‘but it’s hard to accept that he could have been killed out there tonight. That I might have come in this morning and he wouldn’t be there giving grief to everyone like he always did. Wouldn’t be there ever again. You know what he said to me the last time I saw him yesterday? I was standing at the coffee machine and he walked up and said: Why don’t you do some work for a change, you fat fuck, instead of standing around drinking coffee all day?’ That sounded like Dalton. ‘Imagine if those were his last words to me. The last thing I had to remember him by. Not much of a memorial, is it?’
As it was, Dalton was going to be fine. He’d lost a lot of blood, and it was a long time before the paramedics could stabilise him enough to get him to hospital. But there’d be no permanent damage; the wound was messy, but the knife had missed the major organs. The doctors reckoned he’d be out within a few days if he took it easy and did what he was told.
They obviously didn’t know Dalton.
He was already complaining about the bed, most likely.
I could understand Boland’s reaction, though. I’d never known an agent who died in the line of duty, but I’d spoken to more than enough cops who’d lost colleagues to know how bad it could get, and tonight the murder squad had come pretty close. It was bound to come as a shock. The chances of a cop being killed in Dublin were still remote compared with other cities, but it was always a possibility, and tonight would make that possibility seem more real than ever.
‘Still,’ Boland continued, ‘Dalton had a point. That is all I ever seem to do these days. Some days I think I’ve got more coffee inside me than the coffee machine itself. I’ve had enough of it.’
I hadn’t really been listening to him up until then. My thoughts were back in that derelict house where George Dyer, as I’d now learned Enright’s former colleague was called, had died. And back further than that in the street when I’d asked if he’d killed Felix and he’d answered: I did.
Now he had my full attention.
‘You’ve had enough of what?’
‘Of all this,’ he answered. ‘Being a detective. Everything. I realise that now. I’m going nowhere.’
‘You can change. Healy changed. Look how he’s leapt up the ladder this last year.’
‘It’s not about climbing any ladders. Healy knows what he’s doing. Healy’s a good detective. I’m . . . I’m just a fat fuck who spends all day at the coffee machine trying not to get in the way and wondering how I ended up here, hoping every minute they don’t catch me out.’
I had no reassurance to offer. He wasn’t wrong. He stood out in the murder squad like a nun in a brothel.
‘So what you going to do? Shift departments again? Get a transfer to a desk job?’
Though in truth he virtually had one of those already.
‘I want out,’ he said. ‘Totally. Not half in and half out. One hundred per cent out. I’m through with feeling like a waster for not being a better detective. For a long time now I’ve felt I needed to be moving up, impressing the right people, or I was nothing, and I’ve been crushed when I couldn’t do it.
But I don’t care anymore. I never really did. Tonight’s made me see that. I just want a job where I can clock on in the morning, finish my shift and clock off in the evening, get paid and go home and watch TV. Live a normal life. Spend weekends in the country fishing.’
‘Policing’s a hard job to leave behind,’ I agreed.
‘Cassie’s been telling me that all along. If we’re to have a chance, I need to be there for her. I wasn’t for my ex-wife, Mary, and I screwed that up completely. Cassie already hates what I do. After what happened to Dalton . . .’
I didn’t know what to say to him. Police work was tough on partners, tough on relationships. Dalton being nearly killed would make everyone jumpy, force them to rethink what they really wanted. Cassie wouldn’t be the only partner begging their loved one to bail out once the news had spread.
Even so, the alternative Boland described – nine to five at some computer screen before going home and watching crap on TV – sounded like a living nightmare to me, and scarcely even a living one at that. But if it made him happy, and I suspected it would, it was his life.
And at least he still had one. Dalton so nearly had not. Dalton would agree with me. Maybe we were more alike than I cared to admit. Obsessive, cranky, short-tempered, thinking everyone around us was incompetent, inadequate.
And where had it got him?
Where had it got me?
‘I hope it works out,’ I told Boland, and meant it; but I was glad when my apartment building came into view through the windscreen and I could climb out and be alone again.
Chapter Forty-Two
Apart from the blue incident tape slung across the gateway, where a police officer was standing guard, it looked like another unremarkable red-brick house in a street of equally unremarkable red-brick houses, each well set back from the road and with steps climbing to the front door. Children rode by on bicycles trying vainly to catch a glimpse inside.
‘What does Draker say about allowing me in?’ I said as we pulled up the next morning in Fitzgerald’s Rover.
‘What Draker doesn’t see can’t hurt him,’ she answered.
‘Besides, you had as much to do with catching this guy as anyone. More. You have a right to see where he lived.’
He, of course, being George Dyer.
The Marxman? That was what we were here to find out.
‘Plus I want to know what you make of it,’ she added.
I saw what she meant when I got inside. The house was completely anonymous, as though its only purpose was to keep up a façade of normality so that the man who lived there could hide his true self behind it. The rooms were bare as any monk’s cell; in fact, it was hard to know what the crime technical team who’d spent the morning combing through the house could have found to take away and analyse.
Here was a front room with nothing in it but a single chair. Behind that a room fitted out with bookshelves, but without any books, and certainly no copy of The Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy or whatever it was Burke had said Dyer had bought in his store that day.
There was no TV, no radio, no CDs.
In the kitchen, everything was kept to an icy minimum.
One cup.
One plate.
A handful of knives and forks and spoons.
All gleaming and perfect save for one small cracked window at the back.
‘I like a man who knows how to party,’ I said grimly.
We climbed bare wooden stairs to the first floor.
Upstairs were the same empty rooms.
A bathroom clinical as a mortuary.
A front room which smelt of paint.
The only furniture was in a room in the back where Dyer had slept.
The blinds were down here. It was a room where it felt like the blinds were permanently down. Fitzgerald pulled the cord, and the room shrank painfully from the light, revealing a single bed, the corners of the blankets turned down sternly and tucked into place, and a rail on which hung six identical suits and six identical shirts and ties. Socks and underwear were separated into neat piles.
Once again, the same absence of anything personal or intimate.
‘Apart from this,’ said Fitzgerald.
She handed me a photograph. It was an old picture, slightly curled at the edges, the colours faded like there was too much sun. A woman was looking at the camera, smiling, and above her head the word ONE was printed in block capitals on a sign.
‘Dyer’s mother?’ I suggested.
‘That’s what I thought. The only other thing we’ve been able to find,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘is a small suitcase under the stairs, with a passport inside and some money inserted into the lining.’
‘In case he needed to leave in a hurry?’
‘That’s the theory,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
‘About the house?’ I said. ‘It’s almost perfect. Fisher said the Marxman would be orderly and you couldn’t get much more orderly than this. There’s only one thing wrong.’
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘There are no newspaper cuttings, no mementoes, nothing at all to connect him to the killings. Maybe he was just careful,’ she suggested, playing devil’s advocate. ‘Forensically careful, I mean. Making sure there was nothing connecting him to the killings if he was ever caught. Or he may have all those mementoes safely stashed away elsewhere.’
A lock-up on the outskirts of town, say, or a rented room.
So that this house was kept pristine.
Untainted.
It was possible.
‘Or maybe he feared that trying to buy a gun would bring him unwanted attention and he decided to destroy everything that could incriminate him beforehand,’ she went on. ‘Or maybe he destroyed it as he went along. There’s a brazier out back and neighbours confirm he often burned stuff in it, but they can’t say if the burnings coincided with the killings. At least some of them claim to remember, but I don’t trust them. You know what witnesses are like for remembering what they want to remember rather than what they do. It’s possible he burned all the evidence; everything that could be found in the ash has been taken away for analysis. But I’m not hopeful.’
‘What you’re saying,’ I pressed her, ‘is that you’ve got nothing to implicate George Dyer in the Marxman shootings at all?’
‘Exactly.’
‘No evidence of any interest in guns prior to last night? No gunpowder traces? Spent shells in the grass? Nothing to make forensics’ day?’
‘We’re still looking,’ she said, but she said it in a way that meant she didn’t expect to find a thing; and looking round, that seemed like a reasonable expectation. ‘Not that I trust half of them here. Sometimes I feel as if I’m the last practitioner of some meaningless rite called processing the crime scene. Don’t touch this. Don’t move that. Take these away for analysis. Healy and Walsh know what they’re doing, but the rest of them blunder through with all the finesse of a rhinoceros on heat.’
‘What did the neighbours make of him?’ I said, as we walked back downstairs and out on to the front steps, glad of air after the suffocating atmosphere that permeated the house.
A white cat sat yawning on the path.
‘He kept himself to himself. That’s the phrase they’re all using. He had no friends, no visitors, no women. He never used to speak to anyone.’
‘Unpopular?’
‘Not especially. They seem to have chalked him up as an eccentric. He was harmless enough. He never caused any trouble, just didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone.’
‘No sign of any family?’
‘No birthday cards, no photographs, no phone book, no addresses,’ she confirmed. ‘He had no numbers stored in his cellphone. There are no obvious traces of any hair or fibres on the furniture other than those he left behind himself, and a few from a cat.’
The white cat on the path, presumably.
If so, it didn’t seem too concerned that its master was gone and the house filled with strangers. Oh to be a cat and give so little thought to the mad bustle of the world.
‘Cat aside,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘he was a complete loner. Utterly self-sufficient.’
‘No man is an island.’
‘Dyer was. Or a remote, isolated peninsula at least. And they said much the same about him at work. He didn’t seem to leave much of an impression on anyone. He was aloof but not unfriendly. Quiet but not sullen. He never had visitors. Never made or took personal calls. Never expressed any particularly strong beliefs or opinions. Rarely took time off.’
‘No one ever thought all that suspicious?’
‘Why would they? No one ever came here and saw how he lived. To them, he was what he appeared to be. A bit stuffy and lacking a sense of humour, they said, but you don’t call the police and report someone because he doesn’t laugh at your jokes. Well, you might,’ she said with the first trace of a smile on her lips that I’d seen all morning, ‘but no one else would. George Dyer just seems to have had an unrivalled knack for leaving a huge blank space in people’s heads where they might otherwise expect their memories of him to be. They think they remember him and then, when they try to come up with some concrete recollection, they find they have none. He slipped off the surface of their lives like water. Which probably explains why we can’t find out any more about him than he was willing to let us
find out.’
‘Did George Dyer even exist?’
‘Only as a name,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Officially there was never any such man. Even the qualifications he presented to Enright before he took him on were forged.’
‘Erasing all traces of his real identity. Taking refuge in an adopted persona. Things would be a lot simpler if he had been a professional hitman. He certainly lived like one. But this,’ I said, gesturing at the house, ‘doesn’t feel like the home of the Marxman.’
‘That’s why I brought you here,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to see it for yourself. I wanted to know it wasn’t just me being paranoid by refusing to believe this was really over.’
‘Could be we’re both being paranoid.’
‘Then at least we’ll have some company in our paranoia.’ She paused. ‘There is one other thing. I didn’t want to tell you until you’d had a chance to see this place for yourself. I didn’t want to influence you one way or the other.’
‘What is it?’
‘The fingerprint we lifted from the gun the Marxman dropped round the corner from Mark Brook’s house? It wasn’t Dyer’s. Healy gave me the results this morning. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean a thing. Dyer could have always handled the gun wearing gloves and the print could be from someone who’d handled it previously, way back in the chain, even in the States. We’ve sent the prints on to be run through for a match. We’ll know soon enough. And let’s face it, this doesn’t feel like the house of a man with nothing to hide. There’s something unnatural about it. But even so, there’s too much here that’s missing. It doesn’t feel like it’s over.’
‘Dyer was in this somewhere,’ I said. ‘He had to be. It’s too much of a coincidence that his boss gets killed and then suddenly, when the Marxman loses his weapon, he’s out looking to buy a gun and attacking the first cop that comes along. He must be involved.’
‘Draker doesn’t think so.’
‘He wouldn’t. What about Dyer’s confession to me about Felix?’
‘Two points there. First, even if he did kill Felix, that doesn’t mean he’s the Marxman. The only thing that connects Felix to the Marxman is his own interest in the case. Nothing else. Second, Draker’s still insisting there’s nothing to investigate in Felix’s death.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 29