‘Despite Dyer telling me that he did it?’
‘Draker says you may have misheard. May have misunderstood. Wait up, Saxon. I’m telling you what he said, not what I said. He said that Dyer may have misheard or misunderstood too. He also personally called Alastair Butler and went through the autopsy report with him line by line until he was satisfied there was no way anyone else could have shot Felix.’
‘Couldn’t you get an exhumation order and have a second, independent autopsy?’
‘That would be a great vote of confidence in Butler,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘He’d hit the roof, and rightly so. And even if I agreed to that, there’s no way Draker would go along with it.’
‘So we just let it go? Drop the whole subject.’
‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘What we do is bide our time. The investigation into Dyer’s past activities will take weeks to conclude whether he was the Marxman or not. All we have to do is leave enough loose threads hanging for Draker to realise that he can’t just sign off on the whole subject without at least attempting to sew them up. Then we explore the Felix Berg angle.’
‘You’ve tried to dissuade me from following up my instincts on Felix ever since he died,’ I said. ‘You saying you agree with me at last?’
‘I’m saying I think it needs to be looked at again. And that’s as much as you’re getting out of me, so don’t push your luck,’ she said. She took a deep breath before starting the next sentence. ‘You can hardly blame me for not understanding why you wouldn’t let it go, though, when you’ve never even told me about Sydney. That is what your sister was called, isn’t it?’
‘I swear I will kill Lawrence Fisher one of these days,’ I said.
‘Lawrence cares about you. And since I know you care about him just as much, I know you’ll not give him a hard time about telling me. He just wanted me to appreciate what you were going through. Why this mattered so much to you.’
‘I’m not mad at Fisher,’ I said, and I was surprised when I realised that I actually wasn’t. ‘In fact, I’m glad you know at last. I never intended to keep it from you. I just wanted to keep it to myself, if you see the difference.’
‘You keep too much to yourself. It’s not good for you.’
‘Like the sleeping pills and the bad diet, I know.’
‘I guess it’s a silly question asking if you want to talk about it.’
‘I don’t even want to think about it,’ I said.
‘Chief?’
We both spun round.
‘What is it, Sergeant?’
‘There’s something here you might want to see.’
‘I’ll be right there,’ she said. ‘You care to join me?’
‘I’d better be on my way,’ I said. ‘Don’t bother about the car. I can walk back to town. I have some chips to cash in with a certain art dealer. He’s expecting me and I’m already late.’
‘Later then.’
‘Later, yeah.’
Chapter Forty-Three
Strange had his nose pressed to the glass of his gallery when I got there, stepping back when he saw me approaching, unlocking the door without a word.
‘Lock it behind you,’ he said when I entered.
He crossed the floor and took up his place behind the desk, looking apprehensive. He was wearing a velvet suit with a scarlet cravat. Maybe in celebration that his secret had died last night. It had been the best of all possible outcomes for Strange. The caller couldn’t disseminate any damaging allegations about Strange’s errant dealings, but the art dealer hadn’t had to put himself in an even more compromising position by turning Santa Claus with his guns.
But it had been no thanks to him that things had worked out.
If he’d had his way, he’d have handed a live gun over.
And I’d be dead.
Not that it would have changed my plans for the morning. I’d still have come round to the gallery as arranged. To haunt him, scarlet cravat and all.
I glanced at the wall again as I followed him to his desk, and saw that the pictures of the woman wound in chains and posing with knives had gone.
I can’t say I missed her.
Strange gestured at the seat opposite, and I sat down whilst he struck the sides of his own chair with the palms of his hands a couple of times, deciding how to proceed.
‘Is it him?’ he said at last.
‘You mean the Marxman?’
‘They’re saying on the news it’s him,’ he said.
‘Must be then, if it’s on the news.’
‘But are they sure it’s the real one?’
‘It’ll take time.’
‘Time,’ he said, and he didn’t try to hide his disappointment.
‘I just need to know that it’s over. Finally over. That I won’t get any more calls.’
‘If you mean can your name be kept out of this, I think so. I did what I said I’d do. I took care of it.’ Though to be honest, I wasn’t so sure I could manage that as easily as I was pretending. Fitzgerald had already started making noises about pulling Strange in for questioning about what he knew.
I figured she could be dissuaded so long as I agreed to keep it between ourselves about where I’d got my information, but even so I couldn’t say for definite that he was out of the woods. I was only telling him what he wanted to hear in order to get what I wanted in turn. No change there then. ‘Now I want to see the photographs,’ I said to him, ‘and then we’ll both be happy.’
‘You still want them?’
‘Of course I still want them,’ I said. ‘Your friend last night told me he killed Felix. And he intended killing me too. He planned on shooting me, yes, I don’t blame you for looking shocked. I wasn’t exactly bowled over by the idea myself. But it does make me ask why, and the only reason I can come up with as to why he wanted us both dead is because we were skirting too close to some truth, maybe without even knowing what it was, and death was the best silencer. I can’t ask Felix anymore what he knew. But maybe I can see what he saw.’
Strange sighed.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I think I should just have taken the photographs and burned them. I’m tired of thinking about them. Worrying about them. Tired of people asking about them. But I almost feel free now after last night. The hiding from shadows is over. I don’t have to be drawn into this net that Felix’s obsessions cast. You can have the photographs. You’ve earned them.’
He stood up and walked over to the coat-stand. His fur coat was hanging there like a captured bear. He put his hand into the pocket and took out a small locker key. He threw it towards me and I caught it in mid-air.
‘Just tell me one more thing before I go,’ I said. ‘Who did take those sado-masochistic pictures you had hanging on your wall that first day I came here?’
Strange shifted his gaze to the wall as if he could still see them there.
‘They were taken by Felix,’ he said almost sorrowfully. It was the last answer I’d anticipated. I’d half expected him to say he’d taken them himself. ‘He liked taking erotic pictures. He called it his release, though he didn’t want anyone knowing about them. They were his secret.’
‘I wouldn’t want anyone knowing about them either,’ I said, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to look at Felix’s other work the same way again. ‘But thanks for telling me, all the same.’
He waited till I reached the door before speaking my name.
I looked back.
‘I hope you find what you’re looking for,’ he said.
********************
My hands were trembling as I lifted the key to the lock and fitted it inside.
Click.
That’s how easy it is to get to the truth sometimes.
I pulled back the door and for a moment I was gripped by a certainty that there would be nothing in here. That Vincent Strange had double-crossed me, for what reason I couldn’t begin to guess. Or even that there’d never been anything there.
But I was wrong. In the locker there
was a brown canvas bag sagging into a heap like a sleeping animal, the shoulder strap curled up neatly like a tail, and I grabbed hold of it and pulled it towards me, carrying it to the nearest bench, sitting down, unfastening the buckle and reaching inside. I took out the first photograph that touched my fingers.
It was another snapshot like the one in Felix’s papers.
Like the one dropped through Gina’s letterbox.
Like the one on my wall.
Only this was no ordinary picture.
Here instead was Terence Prior, the judge, collapsed against his own door, the back of his hair slick and matted with blood. And this, as I lifted out another, was Finlay Hart, kissing a pool of blood that had gathered under his face, teeth obliterated by the force of the bullet.
My eyes shot up and caught sight of a young boy of about ten in a soccer jersey sitting on the other end of the bench, watching me rifling through the obscene photographs.
Had he seen anything?
I didn’t know, but I felt guilty for taking that risk. Hurriedly I shoved the pictures back under canvas, tied the straps tight once more, threw the bag across my shoulder and headed for the stairs, walking fast down to the street again, relieved to be engulfed by traffic.
My plan was to return to my apartment for privacy, but I was so restless with the need to know by the time I crossed the river that I found myself looking for a café that I knew had tables on upper levels, grabbing a coffee, and almost running up the stairs till I reached a quiet corner.
I checked to make sure no one was snooping, then tipped the bag upside down. Photographs rained on to the table, scores of them, and I started to sift through them one by one.
There were only a handful of photographs like those I’d seen in Central Station.
Most showed the living.
There was a shot of Strange, hand on the handle of a bookstore door, about to go in, wrapped in fur as usual.
Another one of Gina coming out of her apartment. There was Paddy Nye emerging from his shop – and another of his wife, taken through the glass as she walked from the counter into the short corridor that led to their garden, unaware she was being watched. There was one of Miranda Gray, too, in the doorway of the Abbey Theatre, fastening her collar. She had a frown on her face of equal parts irritation and puzzlement. The shot was slightly blurred, a passing car had dragged the scene into indistinctness, but it was still unmistakably her.
I soon lost count.
The pictures were always of people and always taken outside. None was looking directly at the camera; they weren’t posing, or if they were then the pose was deliberately indifferent to the camera. Mostly they simply seemed to have been captured in the act of waiting.
Some were glancing at their watches with impatience.
Some craned forward to scan the street.
Others talked into cellphones.
Read newspapers.
Most of the people I didn’t even recognise, but some were familiar to me.
That one there, for instance, was the proprietor of a small Italian restaurant out by the sea who always forgot my name but who adored Fitzgerald and fussed over her whilst she ate. This one was a Czech émigré poet who’d recently published his autobiography describing his years of imposed silence under the communists. The woman sitting glumly outside a café, her fingers folded round a cup of something that was probably going cold, was the Dublin editor of a French fashion magazine. He was a journalist specialising in longwinded, unreadable exposés of corporate skulduggery and political corruption. She was an actress I’d seen briefly on TV.
The photographs all had two things in common.
There was only ever one shot of each subject.
And the subjects were all standing in a doorway when they were photographed, or were shot in such a way as to be framed by the shape of a doorway in the background.
I was bewildered.
Had Felix taken these photographs? Were they in some way his artistic response to the Marxman killings? Had his obsession become so all-consuming that he was acting out in each image what the Marxman had done in reality? Taking one shot of each victim?
Or were these the Marxman’s work too? Was that why Felix had been killed, if that was what had really happened? Because he’d somehow found these pictures and realised what they meant? But that didn’t explain why he hadn’t gone to the police.
He might have held back if he wanted to be sure first before levelling accusations, but how much more proof did he need than pictures of the Marxman’s victims immediately after death? Who else could have taken them?
I felt in the corners of the bag, checking whether there were any pictures I’d missed, and – oh, what was this? Not a photograph, but a book of some kind zipped into an inside pocket. Of course. There was a journal as well. How could I have forgotten? I swept the photographs back into the bag in case anyone came along, and then opened the journal and started to read.
It didn’t take me long to realise that Felix had had an obsession not merely with the Marxman murders, but with the murder of Lucy Toner in Howth as well. The pages of his journal were lost beneath an intense flowering of scribbled notes and press clippings, each snipped out carefully and pasted inside, and there were so many that they frequently overlapped and I had to lift the edge of one clipping to finish reading another. Felix had obviously scoured every paper and magazine at the time for any reference he could find to what had happened to Lucy, and gone on doing so, for there were more recent commemoration notices published each year on the anniversary of her death. Lucy, always remembered, your loving brother Brendan. Lucy, always remembered, your loving sister Katie. Lucy, gone but not forgotten, Patricia.
Page by page, the whole sad story of Lucy Toner had been re-created.
Police have appealed for information about the disappearance of a young girl in the north of the city two days ago . . . Police in Dublin have confirmed that the body discovered in Howth last night was that of missing schoolgirl Lucy Toner, 15, who recently vanished from her home . . . A man has been remanded in custody following the murder of 15-year-old Lucy Toner . . . Sources have confirmed that the man arrested by police over the murder of a teenager in the city last week was convicted paedophile Isaac Little . . . A 37-year-old man has appeared before the Central Criminal Court accused of the murder of a Dublin schoolgirl in July of last year . . . Isaac Little is today beginning a life sentence in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin for the murder of 15-year-old
Lucy Toner of Howth . . . Flowers have been left at the scene of the murder of a young girl in Dublin on the second anniversary of her death . . . Judges are today expected to reject the appeal by a man convicted five years ago of the murder of a schoolgirl . . . Convicted paedophile and murderer Isaac Little is recovering in hospital following a suicide bid in his cell at Mountjoy Prison . . .
On and on it went, relentlessly, every passing reference to Lucy’s death and its aftermath isolated, recorded, cross-referenced, her real life vanishing under a blizzard of details and names, her real suffering transmuted into little more than a list of appeals for information and arrests and court appearances. How easy it is to reduce a life to little more than its constituent parts.
But why, I asked myself, had Felix been so obsessed by this child’s death?
There was one possible answer. What was it Alice had said about Felix? He said the way to understand a city was to look at how the people in it killed one another. I wasn’t sure I accepted that. Spend an hour in any city in the world and you’d hear the same horrors. The ways of murder are finite, after all. But Felix had believed it passionately. Was this journal then his raw material for that study?
Yet this was no investigation of the dark side of the city, not really, only of one small patch of darkness in its long-forgotten past. Could his interest have been sparked then because he knew, or suspected he knew, that this was not the whole story?
Because he knew who really had killed Lucy Toner?
And
even say he had, what did that have to do with the Marxman?
I took out my cellphone and called Fitzgerald. She was en route now from George Dyer’s house to Dublin Castle for another scheduled press conference, at which she intended releasing a photograph of Dyer’s face in time for the evening TV news in the hope that someone could identify the real man. I told her about the photographs, and she whistled softly.
‘If Dyer is the Marxman,’ I said, ‘at least this might explain why there’re no pictures or mementoes in his house connecting him to the killings. Because Felix managed somehow to get hold of them. To hide them.’
‘Not so fast,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘You haven’t heard my news. Remember the sergeant this morning wanted me to look at something in the house? Well, remind me to recommend the boy for promotion, because he’d taken a closer look at Dyer’s passport and noticed there was a stamp for the date of Enright’s murder showing that Dyer was out of the city on business at the time.’
‘That can’t be right.’
‘According to his passport,’ Fitzgerald said bluntly, ‘he was in Vienna that night. Which doesn’t mean he was there, I know, but if he really doesn’t check out for that killing—’
‘Then there might still be a vacancy for the Marxman,’ I finished for her. ‘But why should Dyer kill himself if he didn’t do it? Why try to kill Dalton? It makes no sense.’
I was remembering, though, what he’d said last night when I’d caught up with him in the derelict house and taunted him that he liked killing people. I’ve killed enough of them, he’d said. And laughed. As if this was funny because Felix was the only one he had killed.
Or because – could it be? – he wasn’t a killer at all.
But why kill himself if he was innocent?
Was he covering up for someone else?
‘What we need to do is track down the people in these photographs,’ said Fitzgerald, sensing my renewed despondency down the line and obviously feeling I needed to be given something positive to do to stave it off. ‘We need to know why pictures of them have turned up alongside the pictures of the Marxman’s victims. You can help me there.’
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 30