by Ingrid Black
The Dead
Ingrid Black
A Saxon & Fitzgerald Mystery
Copyright © Ingrid Black
Chapter One
The First Letter
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
The Second Letter
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
The Third Letter
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Fourth Letter
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Epilogue
About The Author
FIRST DAY
Chapter One
The forecasts had been right. Rain was general all over Dublin. It was falling on every part of the dark city, from Howth Head to Dalkey Hill, and invisibly into the sea between, falling softly on quay, square and station, on stranded trees and ghostly cathedrals. It was falling too on lonely churchyards, on crooked crosses and headstones, glistening silver on the spears of little gates, falling to its last end on all the living and the dead.
It was the first day of December, and I was sitting at the window of a café somewhere in the dark early-morning maze of streets between St Stephen’s Green and the river, a cave of light and warmth in all that encroaching winter, eating eggs on rye and drinking black coffee, idly glancing through a two-day-old Boston Herald in search of news from back home.
I came here most mornings. Same place, same time, same table, same breakfast. The food wasn’t up to much, but it was the one place in town where I could be sure they wouldn’t have the radio on, the one place that valued silence as much as I did.
There wasn’t much of interest in the paper that morning, which was why I glanced up as the door chimed and saw him coming in, looking round, shaking off the rain violently like a dog, as if offended by the very business of being wet.
I quickly turned my gaze back to the coffee, a moment before his eyes would have found mine. I knew he was looking for me, because Nick Elliott wasn’t the sort of person who could feign an accidental meeting even if he wanted to – he didn’t have the subtlety or intelligence to carry it off – but I ignored him in the hope that he’d take a hint and leave me alone.
Elliott, though, didn’t even realise he was being ignored, and headed straight to my table.
‘Saxon,’ he said, faking a smile, and ruffling his hair in what someone with a cruel sense of humour must have once told him was a charming way.
‘Some weather, huh?’
I didn’t bother to return the greeting.
Nick Elliott was a freelance with one of Dublin’s largest papers, the Post. He did crime mostly, some interviews, profiles, the occasional why-oh-why column when his editor couldn’t find anyone with anything more interesting or incisive to say to fill half a page – though for my money you could’ve picked a name at random out of the phone book and they would have had something more interesting and incisive to say than Elliott.
I’d never liked him, and he knew it, probably because I’d failed on every occasion we’d ever met to get to the end of the conversation without pointedly reminding him of the fact. I just felt that he was the kind of person who might benefit one day from being repeatedly told that he was unlikeable. It hadn’t had the desired effect so far, but I lived in hope.
‘Can I join you?’
Even his introductions were predictable.
‘No,’ I said.
Elliott laughed. Some people always take rudeness for ironic humour. They don’t realise that sometimes it’s just plain, honest-to-goodness rudeness. He eased himself into the chair opposite, and laid a thin brown A4 envelope gently between us on the table. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking at it. If he wanted something out of me, he could just come right out and ask.
‘Can I get you something?’ he asked instead.
‘I’ve been coming here five years for breakfast, Elliott, I can order for myself. I speak English too, you know.’
‘Then I’ll get something. What did you have?’ He fingered the menu, pretending to consider, and I closed the paper, giving up any hope now of silence. ‘The Boston Herald,’ he observed. ‘You must be pining for home, Special Agent. Ever read the Irish papers?’
‘The day they put something interesting in them, I’ll start reading them.’
‘You don’t like Dublin.’
‘Ten out of ten for observation, Sherlock.’
‘Then why live here?’
‘Remember when the Germans ask Bogart why he came to Casablanca and he says he came for the waters? There are no waters, they say, we’re in the middle of the desert.’
‘And Bogart says: I was misinformed.’ Elliott looked smug.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was misinformed about Dublin.’
‘That’s still no answer.’
‘It’s the only one you’re ever going to get.’
I signalled over the waitress, who had been making ‘who’s that?’ gestures at me behind Elliott’s back. ‘Same again for the man from the Post,’ I said for her benefit, ‘though you’ll understand, Margaret, that when I use the word “man” I only mean it linguistically. And two coffees, black. There, breakfast as you asked. Now, what do you want, Elliott?’
‘I want your help.’
‘Let me guess. You’re getting married, and you want me for a maid of honour.’
‘Not that sort of help, Saxon. Don’t be smart. You know what I mean.’
‘A story?’
‘That’s the general idea.’
‘It must be a big story if you’ve come to me, and it must be a big story if your paper’s interested enough to consider giving the readers a break from all the usual small-town intrigues.’
‘It is. Big, I mean.’
That’s not what I’ve heard, I was tempted to say.
Instead, I said: ‘Come on then, out with it.’
‘I want you to take a look at something for me.’
Without thinking, I glanced at the envelope.
Damn. I’d looked. Strike one to Elliott. He smiled, realising that I’d dropped the uninterested demeanour.
‘Something came to the office,’ he said.
‘For you?’
‘That’s right, for me. It happens. It came a couple of days ago with the morning’s mail. No one knows about it so far but me, the editor, a few people higher up. Somebody wants it published, but we want to check it out first.’
‘And you want me to do the checking?’
He nodded.
‘Some sort of consultant, that’s what you want me to be?’
‘That, yeah, and t
here’ll be writing involved. Some background and follow-up pieces. Your impressions, conclusions, the usual sort of thing. We’ll pay you, of course.’
‘You’re damn right you’ll pay me, if I’m going to be writing for your rag. I won’t do it for less than fifty thousand.’
‘Quit messing, Saxon. You know that’s impossible.’
‘Ten, then.’
A pause. ‘Look, we can discuss all that. The editor’ll be reasonable.’
So it was important. Important enough for them to throw money at me for a few lousy articles and my so-called expertise.
The return of the waitress with Elliott’s breakfast masked my surprise, and I waited as he set to, stabbing fussily at the eggs like some ancestral hunting memory had flashed into his mind and he was worried lest they make a break for freedom before he could free his spear.
‘OK,’ I said, trying to wrestle my thoughts away from the spectacle of Elliott eating, ‘I’m interested. But first I want to know what it has to do with me. I wouldn’t’ve thought I’d be your first choice, not seeing how much you know I don’t like you.’
‘It’s from someone you used to know,’ he said, his mouth still half full. ‘At least, it’s from somebody claiming to be someone you used to know.’
It was strange really, it was almost as if I knew what was coming next. Before his lips had even formed the words, I heard them chime in my head, the tolling of a long-stilled bell.
‘It’s Ed Fagan,’ he said.
A space opened delicately in my head as Elliott spoke, filled with sudden light. I glanced sideways but the window was still streaked with rain, the street still dark. But there it was anyway, the light, sneaking in past my eyes and scraping out my thoughts.
A moment only, and then it was gone, leaving behind nothing but the beginning of what I felt sure would be an epic headache, the Ben Hur or Spartacus of all headaches, Elliott’s gift to me that morning.
I longed to close my eyes, longed for him to be gone.
But there he still was.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Elliott was pressing.
‘Yeah, yeah, I heard you. Fagan,’ I said, and took a long draught of coffee, buying time for a normality of sorts to return to my face. I checked out Elliott. He didn’t seem to realise there was anything odd.
There were benefits to his stupidity.
‘You remember him?’
‘Of course I remember him,’ I said. ‘Fagan’s not the sort you forget in a hurry.’
Seven years ago, Ed Fagan had been picked up on suspicion of the murder of five prostitutes in Dublin in the previous twelve months. Julie Feeney, aged twenty-four, had been the first to be found, strangled on rough ground next to the Grand Canal only a mile or so from where we were sitting now. A month later, in a churchyard not far from there, came Sylvia Judge, nineteen, a history student at University College Dublin who was working part time for an escort agency. Tara Cox was next, two months after Sylvia. She was strangled too, though cause of death was actually multiple stab wounds inflicted, police thought, as she struggled to escape her attacker. A six-month gap and then Liana Cassidy and Maddy Holt were killed within the space of two weeks, neither of them older than twenty-five and both found in exactly the same way.
With each of the bodies a scrap of paper was left on which was typed some wild quote from the Bible. To be carnally minded is death: that was the one I remembered best. The first note was found in Julie Feeney’s purse, then the killer started leaving them inside the women’s clothing, touching hair or nipple in some vicious echo of intimacy.
The final one was stuffed inside Maddy Holt’s mouth: Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. From Psalms, apparently. The words were stained with blood.
Fagan was picked up for kerb crawling six days after Maddy died, and licence number checks showed he’d been in the area on at least three of the nights when the women went missing. Police found garden twine in his car too that matched fibres taken from the throats of each of the five victims, and there was further DNA evidence linking him to at least two of the deaths. He was also positively identified by the only known eyewitness. He protested his innocence, they always do, badgering newspapers and politicians to take up his cause – he had some influential friends – but he was charged on what police felt were the two strongest counts of murder and committed for trial.
He spent the following seven months on remand, only for the prosecution case against him to collapse on the fourth day of trial when it was discovered that a senior detective in the Dublin Metropolitan Police had planted the DNA evidence in an effort to secure a conviction.
I’d been commissioned to write a book about the case – a sympathetic account of Fagan’s ordeal and police corruption, was how the publisher put it to me. Only problem was, it soon became obvious to me that Fagan was guilty as charged, planted DNA or not. I was on the verge of proving it too when he disappeared – everyone assumed because I was about to expose him – and he’d never been heard from since. I hadn’t written the book, but I thought about him often.
Nick Elliott, meantime, had just written his own book about Fagan, Deepening Shadows: Inside the Mind of an Irish Serial Killer, which the Post had carried interminable daily extracts from the week before. It was the usual cuttings job, made up of equal parts sensation and speculation, all tarted up with Elliott’s most purple prose – more of an insight into his mediocre mind, if truth be told, than Fagan’s.
‘Fagan’s dead,’ I said when I finally realised the silence had gone on too long.
‘Disappeared isn’t the same as dead,’ said Elliott. ‘He might just’ve been out of the country, maybe out of the city somewhere enjoying the fresh air.’
‘For five years?’
‘Some people do.’
‘Not Fagan. People like Fagan aren’t made to be inconspicuous; they get themselves noticed whatever they do, they can’t help it. They gotta do what they gotta do. And what they’ve gotta do is hardly conducive to a quiet, unobserved life.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘You wanted my expertise, well there’s my first bit, for gratis. Serial killers don’t stop unless they’re stopped.’
‘Well, not according to what’s in that envelope,’ said Elliott, slurping his coffee. He’d finished eating now, thankfully. ‘According to that, Fagan’s alive and kicking.’
‘And does it say why he’s suddenly decided to make contact again?’
‘He objected to my book, wants to correct a few factual errors. Set the record straight, you might say. He wants us to publish his reply in the Post.’
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
‘Let me get this right. You’re going to have a serial killer writing a column for you? Who you going to get to write the problem page – Jack the Ripper?’
‘Keep your voice down, Saxon,’ said Elliott, glancing nervously to where the waitress was now looking over wonderingly at my laughter. ‘We don’t want this getting out. And don’t get on your high horse about it either. It’s not like we’re going to have him write the fucking editorials. He’s just written this one piece, and we feel—’
His use of the word ‘we’ was beginning to bug me. He was obviously getting very chummy now with the people higher up, as he put it. He’d seen his chance to get in with them and was already rehearsing his excuses. I cut him off before he could get going.
‘What else does it say?’ I said.
‘It says he’s going to kill again. And not just once either. Look, it’s all in there.’
The envelope; a nod of the head.
‘Does he say who?’
‘There’s a name, if you can trust that.’
‘Does he say where, when, how? Does he say why?’
‘No. At least, maybe part of the how, and it’s in Dublin because, well, you’ll see . . .’
‘Right. So you get this article from someone claiming to be a serial killer. Why don’t yo
u take it to the police?’
‘All in good time. We don’t even know if it’s genuine or not. Don’t look at me like that. This is a great story. The police can get their hands on it once we’ve worked out what to do with it, what it is, whether it even is anything. That’s why we came to you. All we’re asking is that you take a look at it, tell us whether it’s genuine. You know Fagan.’
‘Knew.’
‘Knew Fagan, then. You were writing a book on him, just like me. You worked with him for months on it. You might still be writing a book for all I know. You knew him better than anyone. Just tell us if it’s him, that’s all we ask.’
He paused, waited, but he was getting nothing that easily from me. I wanted to see the desperation in him when he finally asked.
Here it comes.
‘Will you do it, Saxon? Please?’
‘I’ll look at it. That’s all I can promise. I’ll look at it. You can call me later, and we’ll discuss it.’
‘We’ll make it worth your while, really. The editor’s going big with this. There’ll be money in it for everyone.’
‘I thought you hadn’t decided whether to print it.’
‘Well, you know.’
Yeah. I knew.
‘Just give me the envelope,’ I said. ‘I have to go.’
He put his hand on it as if about to swear an oath.
‘You won’t show this to anyone else?’
‘Of course I won’t show it to anyone.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise. Jesus, you’ll be wanting me to cross my heart and hope to die next.’
‘It’s just that it was my idea to come to you, so if this gets out I’m in serious shit.’
‘The envelope, Elliott. Give me the envelope.’
He handed it over with the reluctance of a man passing back the consent form for an appendix op with Dr Frankenstein. I drained my coffee, picked up my jacket, left Elliott to pay.
Went back out into the rain.
I felt his eyes watching me as I walked, and had to force myself not to run. Steady now, Saxon, easy does it. Only a few more steps to go. There, a corner turned. Out of sight at last, I closed my eyes like they hurt and laid my face against the wet, cold stone of the wall.