by Ingrid Black
‘A chess piece,’ I said aloud.
‘Not exactly what you’d expect to find in a graveyard,’ agreed Fitzgerald, coming back into the room at that moment and depositing a cup hastily on the edge of the desk. The coffee had burned her fingers and she put them now up to her lips to blow them cool again before resuming her seat.
‘And they found this where?’ I said, skipping back through the sheets.
‘Near where Liana Cassidy was killed.’
‘It doesn’t say what piece.’
‘You want to take a guess?’
I remembered what Ambrose Lynch had told me about the leak to the Evening News.
‘A bishop,’ I said.
‘Congratulations, you win a year’s supply of washing powder. Our friend Gus Bishop has a sense of humour.’
‘At least we know now it was the killer who told the News all the details of the killings.’
Fitzgerald looked puzzled.
‘Who else would it have been?’
‘Elliott came round to my apartment a couple of hours ago – don’t worry, I didn’t let him in. He tried to make out that it was someone in the department who’d leaked the information.’
‘Not Lawlor again?’
‘It looks like Lawlor was behaving himself for once.’
‘Who then? Did he offer any names?’
Should I tell her about Boland?
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well then. I don’t think Elliott’s exactly a reliable witness,’ she said, and it was hard to disagree with that. ‘There was something else there,’ she added. ‘Have you seen it?’
She leaned over and found the place for me with a finger.
Healy had suggested taking a look at Liana Cassidy’s grave, in the same cemetery, in case the killer had been there too – good thinking – and there they’d found words scratched lightly on the smooth nameplate on the front of her memorial stone.
I know of no bishop worth the name.
At the foot of the gravestone was an old fountain pen which, from the scoring of the nib, looked to have been used to engrave the message.
‘More riddles,’ I said irritably.
I don’t know what I’d expected from the searches, but right now I had little patience with the string of enigmatic hints this killer had left for us to find. The very fact that we were chasing after these shadows only showed how little else we had of substance to pursue. It also showed how easily he’d drawn us all into the game. Even our attempts to unravel what he was about only served to make him feel more powerful, in control.
I resented the questions which pricked now at my mind, but prick at it they did. Why the name Bishop? Simply because of the religious connotation, or did it have a more specific meaning? Was it a pointer to his identity? And why Liana Cassidy’s gravestone? Was the fact that it was hers significant?
Tillman had warned us against becoming too enraptured by the scraps the killer had left us, but it was hard. Especially when there was nothing else to go on.
In the end I pushed the report away and reached for my coffee, and for the next hour Fitzgerald and I sat in her office reviewing the case so far. Everything, we quickly realised, went in circles.
Monica Lee and Gus Bishop, Mary Lynch and Gus Bishop. Aleph. Lamedh. I know of no bishop worth the name. Nikolaevna and the stone. Lynch said it was of a similar sort to the one found on Monica Lee’s body. The knots used to tie up Nikolaevna were the same too, photographs showed. But the name Bishop hadn’t come up in relation to the Russian woman, nor was there a Gus Bishop, or any of its possible variations, in the Dublin phone book. There was plenty of fingerprint evidence, especially from Nikolaevna’s apartment, but the only matches so far led to Fagan, who was dead, and Elliott. And Elliott had an alibi.
Nor was there anything in the background check on him to rouse suspicion. Elliott didn’t have so much as a parking ticket for speeding, and colleagues claimed to be surprised that he’d been seeing a hooker. They didn’t think there were any skeletons in his closet. They didn’t think he had it in him to be that interesting.
Brendan Harte, the theatre critic, was embarrassed and furious with Elliott, but confirmed that he had told him about the Russian prostitute. He himself had been at a theatre festival in town on the night she was killed. No, he had no idea who might have killed her but he’d be sure to let the police know if anything came back to him. That was nice of him.
Seamus Dalton had tracked down Elliott’s wife too.
Estranged wife, isn’t that the word they use? It sounds almost exotic. She confirmed the basic facts of the story as told by Elliott in the interview room. They’d been together about a year, got married at a registry office in the summer. Things went wrong shortly after they came back from honeymoon. The only new information she had to offer was that Elliott had started getting mood swings round that time; he was unpredictable, volatile. He started staying out late, drinking, sometimes didn’t come home at all. She thought he might be seeing another woman and he didn’t deny it. Eventually she left him. He tried to coax her back, claimed it was only putting the finishing touches to his book that had made him act so strange, but she didn’t buy it. She didn’t like how he’d changed. She got her own apartment and filed for divorce. Elliott would’ve received the papers about two weeks ago.
Perfect trigger for the killings – if he didn’t have an equally perfect alibi from Lawlor. Unless Ambrose Lynch could be swayed from his estimated time of death?
Both of us jumped as the door opened unexpectedly.
‘Healy, for Christ’s sake—’
‘Sorry, Chief,’ said Healy, stopping dead with his hand still on the door handle and looking embarrassed. ‘I thought you’d gone.’
‘If you thought I’d gone, what are you doing in my office?’
‘I had to leave this.’
He stepped forward and handed Fitzgerald a large brown paper envelope, sealed, with her name and an official DMP stamp on the cover. Fitzgerald looked down at it curiously.
‘Who gave you this?’ she said.
‘Donnelly sent it over from Surveillance,’ answered Healy. ‘He said you’d want to look at it straight away. I told him I’d drop it in on my way out. Help me kill another five minutes before finding out if I still have a wife waiting for me at home. I’ve not seen much of her lately. She’ll be running off with the milkman if I’m not careful.’
‘That’s not such a bad idea. You’d be able to work more overtime then.’
‘Not unless they put more hours in the day, I wouldn’t.’
Fitzgerald waited until Healy had closed the door behind him again before she opened the envelope. She held it up to shake it and a small note fell out on to the desk.
‘Thought you’d want to see these before I entered them into the report,’ she read aloud. ‘Tell me what you want me to do. What’s Donnelly up to now?’
She reached into the envelope and pulled out a small handful of photographs. I couldn’t see the pictures, but I saw the exhausted look that came into her face when she looked at them.
‘Grace?’ I said.
She didn’t look at me, just slid the photographs over.
I felt cold when I saw them.
The first picture showed me hurrying back down the street towards Mullen’s house that afternoon after following Fagan’s son to the main road to see where he was going. I was framed by the curve of the car window through which the surveillance team had taken the shot. In the next, I was slipping into the house where Mullen now lived. The third and fourth showed me hurrying out and down the steps half an hour later. In the last one, I sat in my Jeep smoking a cigar.
I hadn’t even noticed them in the street.
Another triumph, Special Agent.
‘I can explain,’ I said to Fitzgerald quietly.
‘You’d better,’ was all she said in return.
Sixth Day
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sleep and strong coffee. Cure for anythin
g. I had to make do with coffee, for sleep had been hard to come by. Each time it seemed that I’d fall into unconsciousness at last, panic would grip me at how stupid I’d been by breaking into Mullen’s place. Either that, or another memory of Fagan would assault me each time I closed my eyes. The memories were multiplying like viruses this week. I didn’t even need to close my eyes any more to see him as he had been five years ago, melting out of the shadows between the trees and materialising before me. Smiling.
‘Did I make you jump?’ he’d said.
It was as well for me, at any rate, that Finbar Donnelly, head of the surveillance unit with the DMP, was a friend of Fitzgerald’s from her early days in the force, or I would have been out in the cold already, like Lawlor, like Elliott. He’d agreed to keep the photographs of me doing a little freelance breaking and entering out of his official report into the watch on Jack Mullen. I owed him. There were plenty of people who would have loved to see me take a fall.
As for what it might’ve done to Fitzgerald’s career – what it still might do if it came out – well, that didn’t bear thinking about.
She’d ordered the surveillance on Mullen, she’d told me in her office last night, once she heard the information Fisher had brought over from London. I’d gone walkabout shortly after that and had scarcely been alone with her long enough in the hours since for her to tell me about it; and so much else was happening besides. As it was, there’d been little enough to report before my intervention.
I didn’t tell Fitzgerald about the knife I’d taken from Mullen’s kitchen drawer, and I certainly didn’t tell her that I’d thrown it in the river. She was wounded enough at my keeping the break-in from her. Instead I detailed quietly what I’d found in his rooms and she listened carefully, making occasional notes. What she made of what I’d done she didn’t say; she didn’t need to. We’d driven late back to her place without speaking.
Now it was early morning and I was standing at the window of her kitchen, exhausted after counting each passing hour, and idly drawing spirals in the condensation on the inside of the cold glass that only trickled down and spoiled themselves before they were even complete.
Self-destructive impulses. I knew all about those. The light outside was grey like a sickness as the day ground clumsily into gear.
You could see the sea from the kitchen window, weather permitting. It was in view from most of the windows this side of the house. This was the main reason why she’d bought it. That and the fact that it was new, part of a small, functional development just across the busy Strand Road from the seafront, which meant she didn’t have to pay it any attention. In other circumstances, Fitzgerald was much more the sort of woman who’d like to spend time putting homely touches to her surroundings than I was. I could see her painting window frames or repairing cracks, hair tied back; or scouring antique shops and flea markets for ornaments.
But her life left little space for incidental pleasures like that. Left little space for anything, if the truth be told. All she needed at this point was somewhere she could unlock the door at the end of the day, fling down her coat and papers, and be sure there was hot water in the tank and something in the freezer for the microwave.
This place is like a hotel, she often said. Not resentfully; she’d accepted that was the way her life was. But she liked being in my place all the same because, though I paid little attention to my surroundings – as long as they were at the heart of the city, where a glance out of the window could reassure me that everything was still as disconnected and chaotic as ever, that was enough for me – she knew at least that my apartment was lived in, was real, that my thoughts and breath inhabited that space and gave the air some unique quality that it wouldn’t otherwise have had.
‘This place would miss you,’ she’d say to me when we were there. ‘Mine probably doesn’t even notice when I’m gone.’
She hardly ever saw her neighbours and doubted they even knew who she was. No doubt they thought of her as some anonymous businesswoman, out before dawn, back after nightfall.
At least there was the sea at hand for those rare times when she was in her house with no other claims on her hours. She liked walking there, along the shore, when she needed to think. She loved the sea. Sometimes she even spoke about getting a place in the country where we could spend weekends, though she knew how I felt about the countryside, and since when did she ever have weekends to spend anywhere out of range of the Dublin Metropolitan Police?
I heard her, as I stood there, moving about upstairs, and went to put the coffee on and lift out some of yesterday’s bread rolls from the cupboard.
I put them into the oven to coax some semblance of life back into them, and by the time Fitzgerald appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a dressing gown, hair tousled from what little sleep she’d managed, eyes still unfocused by dreams, the bread was resting in a basket on the table, heat rising sluggishly from the crusts as though it was half asleep itself.
I reached for one and broke it open, took a bite.
‘Here, let me,’ she said.
She reached over and took the other half of my roll and raised it to her own mouth to share. A peace gesture – but all I saw was the white flour brushing against her lips like dust. Dust to dust.
Ashes to ashes.
So little time.
Fitzgerald went to take a shower and I turned on the radio to listen to the news. The hunt for the murderer of four women wasn’t even the main story that morning. That’s what happens. A killer takes a break one night and he loses top billing. The public is so demanding. The ads in between the headlines piped out Christmas music. Hark the herald angels sing . . . Silent night . . I switched it off.
Almost immediately, there was a knock at the door.
My instinct was to ignore it. Fitzgerald had been badgered by reporters as much as I had myself. They were on the line all hours for interviews. Had they started calling round too?
Last night in her office, I’d even seen a list of questions which the Evening News had faxed through to her for prior approval for an interview they’d lined up. How tough has it been for you, making your mark as a woman in a male-dominated world? Not that one again. What special qualities can you as a woman bring to the job of chief superintendent of the murder squad? Does the fact that you are a woman make you even more determined to catch this killer? The News was obviously determined to ask all the questions she most hated. I remembered having to answer the same ones after writing my book.
Couldn’t they see that it was only by ignoring moronic questions like those, by refusing to let them eat up the valuable space in her head, that Grace had got anywhere? She had nothing to prove. She just did her job. And if other people had a problem with that, with her, then she wasn’t going to waste time trying to gently bring them round. I wouldn’t have cared about her so much if she did.
The knocking wasn’t put off, however, and soon Fitzgerald’s voice echoed down from the shower.
‘Saxon, will you get that?’
Irritably, I went to the door.
A young man stood outside wearing leathers and a motorcycle helmet with the visor pushed up. Not a reporter, anyway; at least that was something. He was holding an envelope. A courier then. I looked over his shoulder and saw his motorcycle parked by the path. The road was wet, beginning to flood. Another miserable day was in prospect.
He was glancing at the envelope as I pulled back the door.
‘Grace Fitzgerald?’
‘Right door, wrong woman.’
‘The right door’s all I’m paid to find,’ he said. ‘Here, it’s all yours. Just sign here.’
I signed, took the envelope from him and closed the door before he’d even turned away. I tossed it on to the hall table and walked back to the kitchen, listening to the rising roar of the motorcycle engine as he kicked it into life. Fitzgerald’s mail was none of my business. I simply sat down again and reached for another bread roll.
Then I stopped.
T
hat typeface.
It couldn’t be – could it?
The Fourth Letter
At least that’s over. You people cannot imagine how hard it is keeping up the religious fruitcake act. ‘I have seen the ungodly in great power and flourishing like a green bay tree.’
Who talks like that?
Not forgetting: ‘One must be on one’s guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil.’
Though I suppose that part’s true enough.
In one way I am quite annoyed that the deception has to end. I really did have some interesting material for my next letter. My theme was to be the impertinence of the Dublin Metropolitan Police in believing they had any right to interfere with the work of the Lord. Scripture teaches that death is not so bad, after all.
Death is to be embraced, welcomed, yearned for. So who are you to prevent what Scripture says cannot come soon enough? Now all that will have to be scrapped and I must start again. What a waste. What an inconvenience.
Speaking for myself, as I now can, I always preferred the wise words of Noël Coward rather than those of the Good Book. ‘We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?’ he once said. How true that is. The next world might be exactly like this one, only without those glorious distractions of wine, women, song, murder. And what would be the point of an eternity like that? One would surely die of boredom – if one wasn’t dead already. I couldn’t have said so, of course, if I was still being Ed Fagan; if I was still the offerer-up of sacrifices of the ungodly on the altar of . . . well, I forget the details now. But I am not Ed Fagan any more, because what is left of Ed Fagan lies on a mortuary slab having been disturbed from a dreamless five years’ sleep in his shallow soily bed in the mountains.