by Ingrid Black
‘On the salary of a man who could only afford her twice a week?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘Things change,’ Elliott said. ‘I’m going places. I had my book out, I had other things lined up, I—’
‘Did you tell her all this?’
‘I tried to.’
A long pause.
‘Elliott?’
‘If you must know,’ he said, ‘she laughed.’
Fitzgerald laughed too.
‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘That must’ve made you angry.’
‘Don’t start those games again,’ Elliott sighed. ‘Not angry, just sad, just wishing it was different. She was better than that.’
‘Don’t tell me. You wanted to take her away from it all.’
‘I did.’
‘That’s very admirable. We’ve obviously misunderstood you.’ Fitzgerald smiled. ‘You’re a hero, that’s what you are – mild-mannered newspaper reporter by day, saviour of fallen women everywhere by night. I can already see the movie.’
‘It’s easy to sneer,’ said Elliott.
‘I’m not sneering,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘The only thing is, I can’t understand why, if you cared about her so much and wanted to save her from herself and the cruel world, you can’t remember the last time you saw her. Does that make sense to you?’
He was looking down at his hands.
‘What’s wrong, Elliott?’
‘I’m hot.’
‘You want a drink, I can get you a drink. Sergeant, see to that.’
The uniformed policeman on watch went to the water cooler and filled a plastic cup for Elliott. He brought it back to the table and set it by the ashtray. Elliott didn’t touch it.
‘The fact is,’ Fitzgerald went on as Elliott lit another cigarette, ‘we don’t need you to tell us when you last saw the woman you call Sadie, because we know. You were there last night. We have a witness.’
‘You’re lying,’ said Elliott, but I could see the sudden fear in him.
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to us; we’ve got prints all over the apartment, her phone records show you clearly had some kind of obsession with her. Add in the witness who saw you arriving, and I’d say we nearly have enough to charge you already. You know a bit about the law. What do you think?’
Elliott sought out understanding in her eyes, but she stayed cold.
‘I was there last night,’ he said at last, ‘but I didn’t kill her, I swear I didn’t kill her.’ He was still looking for that sign that she understood. ‘I phoned her earlier, about seven. The editor had called me into his office that afternoon, he was giving me a pay rise for my work on the Night Hunter case. So I called her. I wanted to celebrate.’
‘Celebrate,’ she said, like the word was alien.
‘Celebrate,’ he repeated defiantly. ‘And how did she react to your suggestion of a . . . celebration?’
‘She said no, at first. She said she’d cancelled all her appointments for that night. Said she wasn’t seeing anyone.’
‘Did she say why?’
‘No, but . . . well, it doesn’t take a genius to work out why now.’
For once, Elliott was right. It didn’t take a genius, as his own insight proved. Nikolaevna must have seen the killer’s latest letter when it was leaked to the Evening News and realised she was a potential target. She’d cancelled her appointments because she no longer felt safe. Elliott’s information only confirmed that the killer must have been well known to her, familiar enough for her to ignore her fears and let him in. As familiar as Elliott, perhaps? She’d obviously been comfortable enough with him to let him come round in the end.
‘What was she like when you got there?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘On edge,’ Elliott said. ‘It wasn’t like her. She kept asking about the Night Hunter, whether the police were close to catching him. She asked about the other victims too.’
‘It’s understandable she’d be concerned,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Prostitutes were dying.’
‘That’s what I thought at the time. This morning, when I heard what had happened to her, I realised she must’ve been worried because she thought she might be next.’
‘She never said anything to you, though? You just went round, opened a bottle of wine—’
‘We didn’t have wine.’
‘No need to get touchy. I meant it metaphorically. You went round to her apartment, you indulged in a little pillow talk about the local serial killer, and then?’
‘Then I screwed her and left, yes. End of story.’
‘You screwed her? You really need to do some work on the language of love, Elliott. You don’t want to be disrespecting your beloved, especially now that she’s no longer with us.’
‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t kill anyone. Christ, I didn’t even know she was called Nikola-whatever-it-is until I got a call this morning that another body had been found. Even when I went round to the building, I still thought it must be someone else the police were talking about. She never told me her real name.’
‘Sounds like you had one hell of a relationship,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘if you didn’t even know her name. Someone certainly knew it.’
‘How many times do I have to tell you? It wasn’t me,’ Elliott insisted. ‘Someone must have come round after I left. Isn’t it obvious? You should be trying to find him instead of harassing me. I know she wasn’t killed until after nine, and I was out of there by eight thirty. At the latest. You can check the CCTV at her apartment if you don’t trust me.’
‘There’s a slight problem with that,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘There isn’t CCTV at her apartment, so it’d be impossible for us to check exactly when you left. But then maybe you knew that already.’ She raised a hand to silence him before he could protest again. ‘Plus there’s one other thing puzzles me. If you didn’t kill Nikolaevna last night, how come you know so much about what time she died? Did I mention what time she died?’
‘I have my sources,’ said Elliott.
‘These sources have names?’
‘I can’t tell you their names. I have to respect their confidentiality.’
‘Like you did with Brendan Harte?’
‘That was different. If I tell you this, my career’s finished. People need to know they can trust me.’
‘And what do you think’ll happen to your career if you’re charged with murder?’
‘I am not telling you my sources, Chief Superintendent. It’s a matter of principle.’
Before Fitzgerald could continue, there was a knock at the door of the interrogation room and Seamus Dalton walked in.
He was smiling at Elliott with that lopsided, smug smile of his as he bent his lips to Fitzgerald’s ear and whispered. A raised eyebrow was all that his words drew from Fitzgerald till Dalton stood up straight again, clicking her tongue as if unsure how to break the bad news to Elliott.
‘When the crime tech team came to lift the body of Mary Lynch,’ she began, ‘they found a bottle placed underneath her. A Coors Light beer bottle, just like the ones in Nikolaevna’s fridge. We couldn’t figure at the time what it was doing there, but we took it away anyway and checked it for fingerprints.’
She waited until Elliott looked up before continuing.
‘Guess whose prints they matched?’ she said.
Healy drew in his breath sharply. This was a risky tactic. There was nothing in the rules said Fitzgerald couldn’t lie to Elliott, but she’d lose the initiative if Elliott realised it was a lie. And the reporter’s immediate response suggested she’d blown it, she’d lost him.
‘You found my what?’ screamed Elliott. ‘How could you have found my fingerprints at the scene? I was never there. I didn’t kill Mary Lynch. I’d never even heard of her before!’
‘Like you didn’t kill Nikolaevna?’
‘Yes!’ Elliott pushed back his chair noisily and made to get up, then changed his mind as Dalton stepped in to stop him. Fitzgerald hadn’t
flinched. ‘You’re . . . you’re setting me up!’
‘Why would we set you up?’
‘Well, someone is! I’m not going to sit here and let you do this to me. You’re trying to sleepwalk me into incriminating myself. I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid. I thought if I only explained to you what happened, that you’d see I couldn’t . . . that I didn’t . . .’
‘You can still explain,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Still make us see.’
It was too late.
‘This has gone far enough. I want a lawyer.’
‘Are you asking for a lawyer?’ she said. ‘Because you know, Elliott, if you bring in a lawyer, I’ll not be able to help you any more.’
‘Get me a fucking lawyer. Now.’
‘Your call,’ Fitzgerald said, and she looked at that moment almost wearier than Elliott. ‘Just one last question. Will any lawyer do, or does it specifically have to be a fucking one?’
I made my way to the vending machine out in the corridor for coffee, but I couldn’t find the right change. Fitzgerald came along just as I was kicking the machine to make the cup drop down.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘I have change.’
‘No need.’ The coffee had suddenly started to appear, though now that I saw it I wasn’t sure I should’ve wasted a kick on it. ‘Must be my woman’s touch,’ I said. ‘You OK?’
‘I blew it. I should’ve taken my time. I pushed him too fast.’
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. You did good,’ I said, taking a sip from the cup. ‘It’s not like you have the time for niceties. It’s not your fault that trying to pull a fast one on him about the bottle backfired.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Fitzgerald. ‘The bottle happens to be true. That’s what Dalton came to tell me. Elliott’s prints matched.’
I could hardly take in what she was telling me.
‘But then why didn’t they show up before? The staff at the Post all gave their prints to Boland to check against the first letter.’
‘No one thought of matching the prints with that sample until now. We haven’t got our fingerprint records on computer yet, you know that, so unless someone thinks of cross-checking them manually, it wouldn’t come up. We only took the prints from the Post’s staff to see if we could isolate the killer’s prints on the envelope, not get a match with the bottle.’
‘Elliott’s prints,’ I said. ‘I can hardly believe it. And the worst of it is, I could’ve sworn Elliott couldn’t believe it either.’
‘I know. I couldn’t tell if he was shocked at realising he’d left incriminating evidence behind when he killed Mary Lynch, or because he couldn’t figure out how his prints had ended up there when he was never anywhere near the place.’
‘It was beginning to make sense too,’ I said. ‘Elliott’s book, the obsession with Fagan; he’s still going on about it and what it could do for his career. Not to mention the split from his wife. Relationship breakdown’s a classic stressor. If he was writing his book, living with Fagan in his head all that time, while outside it his life was going down the toilet, maybe it’d be enough to send him over the edge.’
‘If it’s that easy becoming a psychopath,” said Fitzgerald, ‘we should have picked up Jack Mullen days ago. He’s had to live with his father’s crimes in his head far longer than Nick Elliott. Unless, of course, it was the other way round all along.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Don’t you remember what Ed Fagan said when we first questioned him? He claimed he’d only become obsessed with the Night Hunter murders and offered his help to the police because he suspected his son had committed them. He was always trying to pretend everything he did was for some higher motive.’ She stopped. ‘Saxon, are you OK? You look like someone just walked over your grave.’
Not mine, I wanted to say. It was the memory of another grave that had suddenly immobilised me. One that she’d seen herself only too recently.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Back in my apartment, I lay down on the couch, feeling dizzy. The same thought kept coming back to me. Ed Fagan wasn’t the Night Hunter. It was his son.
I’d killed the wrong man.
Lying there, I made a list in my head of those earlier deaths, remembering the dates. Julie Feeney, late October; Sylvia Judge, early December; Tara Cox, late January. After the first three deaths, a gap of six months before the final two.
Police had been intrigued by that gap at the time. Had the killer been out of the country during those months? In hospital or prison? Had he managed to stop himself temporarily for fear of being caught, or out of shame, only for the urge to kill to grow too intense again as the months passed? Then Fagan had been picked up and charged with two of the murders and the questions had effectively ceased. There were enough demands on everyone’s time, enough other cases to be dealing with. The killer was caught, so why worry about the small details?
But what if the original hypothesis had been right? What if the killer had stopped killing during that time because he was out of action in some way? What if he’d been someplace where he had nothing to do but nurse his fantasies, watch them fester, until, able to act them out once more, he could unleash them in furious succession on Liana Cassidy and Maddy Holt?
Then it hit me with a jolt.
Fagan’s son had been imprisoned once for – what was it? Stealing cars, that was it. Next question. When?
Pulling myself to my feet, I dragged the box in which I kept the notes on Fagan out once more, tipped it upside down and ransacked the scattered papers till I found what I wanted.
There it was.
For four of those six months, Jack Mullen had been behind bars in Mountjoy Prison serving a sentence for car theft.
The room was spinning again. I needed to sit down. I held my head in my hands and closed my eyes and cursed myself for a fool. How could I have forgotten what he’d said about his son? I’d been so convinced Fagan had killed those women, I hadn’t even given a thought to Jack. How could I have missed that the dates tallied?
Now Jack Mullen’s name was staring out at me from my own notes like an accusation. In the clockwork of my head, the cogs started locking together. The dates. The forensic traces in Fagan’s car: Mullen must have been using it. What if Fagan had been unable to account for the presence of the green twine in his car because of the simple fact that he didn’t know it was there?
Even if I had killed the wrong man, of course, I’d still done so in self-defence. Fagan was going to kill me that night. Not because he feared I was about to expose him as the killer, perhaps, but because he feared I was about to expose his son.
I remembered him coming at me, I remembered the flash of the gun. I knew I’d done the right thing, or it would have been me buried in a shallow grave in the mountains for the past five years, not Fagan. Me or him: simple as that.
I’d made the right call.
But that wasn’t making me feel a whole lot better. Instead I felt soiled. I felt wicked. I felt— wait. Why had the eyewitnesses described seeing someone of Fagan’s age and build? Why had he persistently inveigled himself into the investigation from the beginning? That was more likely to draw the police’s attention in his and his son’s direction.
And why – Christ, why did I have to keep remembering that night? – had he said to me when I came across him in the wood: ‘You know, Saxon, I think I’m going to enjoy you best of all’?
His last words. Not quite up there in terms of poetry with ‘this is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done’, but they were seared into my memory all the same.
Most of all, if Mullen was the killer, why would the killings have stopped for seven years? And that was when the next thought started to take shape. The thought which said: what if father and son had been in it together? What if they murdered together? It wasn’t so rare to find potential killers needing one another’s encouragement in order to fulfil their shared fantasies, to become what they each dreamed of being.
Without that encouragement from Fagan any more, that fatherly nurturing, maybe Mullen simply didn’t have it in him to carry on alone – till now. And the more I thought about it, the more the theory that Fagan and his son had been working together made sense.
Take that night. I remembered shooting Fagan and burying his body; I remembered the dark wood; I remembered a car revving up and the sweep of headlights through the trees.
Who had that been?
Some innocent passer-by had been my thought at the time. But what if it had been Mullen? Mullen waiting in a stolen car to take his father home. He was good at getting hold of cars. Not so good that he didn’t get caught now and again, but good enough. That would explain at least how Fagan had got into the mountains that night. That was one thing I’d never understood. When police went to follow up reports that he’d gone missing, they found his own car parked outside his house where he’d left it. At the time, I’d just presumed he was being clever. Of course he wouldn’t have taken his car with him. I was scheduled to die, and Fagan wouldn’t take the risk that, if my body was ever found, his car could be placed at the scene. I wouldn’t have taken mine if I’d known what was to happen that night either.
But then how did he get into the mountains? Police had never managed to trace Fagan’s movements that night. No taxi drivers came forward with memories of having taken his fare; none of the bus drivers recognised his picture as one of their passengers – and there weren’t so many people travelling into the mountains after nightfall that they were likely to forget. Five years ago, I’d come to the unsatisfactory conclusion that he must have made his way there on foot from the nearest train station, or else hitched a lift and the driver, luckily for me, had not seen the appeals for information about the whereabouts of his passenger that night. Now I saw that it was more likely to have been Mullen.
Mullen drove him there, then waited out of sight whilst Fagan went into the woods to kill me. Waited till he heard the shot and realised what must’ve happened. Fagan never owned a gun, after all. At which point he fled, panicked, afraid.
True, the theory didn’t make complete sense. If Mullen knew what I’d done, why had he never come after me himself? I wasn’t the hardest target to get at if he wanted revenge. Or why hadn’t he tipped off police anonymously about what I’d done? But for all its faults, I kept coming back to those same basic facts: a car revving up, Mullen’s four-month stretch in jail to account for the gap in the first sequence of killings, his time in London when Fisher told me more prostitutes had been attacked, the return of the Night Hunter motif since Mullen had returned to Dublin. It was too many coincidences to be coincidental, and certainly too many to ignore. I needed to talk to Lawrence Fisher. Now.