by Ingrid Black
He lifted his glass to his lips and drank again.
‘Come now, am I drinking alone?’ he said when he saw I wasn’t doing the same. ‘This is the last chance I’ll get. The least you could be is sociable.’
I reached for the glass and took a sip. I was glad I had. I was tired, I’d hardly eaten, everything had moved so fast that I was feeling weak, dizzy. The whiskey sharpened me. Kept me alert.
I drained the glass and let Lynch refill it.
‘Are you going to tell me how you finally figured it out?’ he said.
‘I’ve been drowning in details for days,’ I said quietly after taking another drink. ‘Not knowing what was significant and what was nothing. Everything came together when I opened the box. Tillman wasn’t sent bones. The box for Elliott wasn’t bones. So why was I sent a skull? Because I would have recognised a face. Because it was someone I knew. Then it came to me. Go, see now this cursed woman and bury her, for she is a king’s daughter. You told me right at the start, that night you came to the canal after Mary Lynch died, that your wife’s maiden name was King. It was Jean’s body that was left in the churchyard.’
‘My dear wife,’ said Lynch. ‘Twenty years I was married to her and I swear she got less observant with each passing year. All of a sudden, she started to notice things. She even followed me out to Ed Fagan’s old house. Well, you saw what was there. I had no choice but to kill her.’
‘You threw her down. Like Jezebel.’
‘And some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trod her under foot.’ Lynch laughed. ‘I wasn’t able to supply the horses, alas.’
I stared at him and realised for the first time how little I knew him.
How little I knew anyone?
Patiently, because he seemed to want to know, I explained how I’d put together the missing pieces. How a memory had flashed to mind of something half seen at the time but not taken in because I was distracted.
It was a scrap of paper torn from a religious calendar, marked with reminders of the saints’ feast days. How it said that today, the seventh of December, was St Ambrose’s Day. When the first letter came, we’d wondered if the fact that the killer had promised that the seven days would start on St Agericus’s Day was important. We never thought to look when the seven-day sequence would end and whether that was where the real importance lay.
It had been the same with the names. We’d thought that Mary Lynch’s name might be a pointer because she was called Mary, not because she was called Lynch. And when the next victim was conveniently called Mary Dalton, there seemed no further reason to investigate the first Mary’s name as an angle.
From there, the other pieces fell swiftly into place.
Salvatore had explained that St Ambrose was one of the ancient Church Fathers and bishop to St Augustine. Gus Bishop. That in medieval art he was represented by an ox, a bee and a pen. Like the bee hanging from the keyring in the car that morning. Like the pen that was used to scratch the further riddle on to Liana Cassidy’s gravestone:
I know of no bishop worth the name.
Those words had been kept out of the media, but as soon as I told Salvatore about them he immediately completed the quotation for me.
I know of no bishop worth the name . . . save Ambrose.
‘Then there were the Hebrew letters,’ I said. ‘Aleph and lamedh. They both suggested an ox too, but Tillman had warned all along that the real meaning of them for the killer might be something so simple we’d never even consider it. And what was the most simple explanation of all? Not aleph or lamedh, just A and L. Ambrose Lynch.’
‘Occam’s Razor,’ Lynch agreed. ‘I told you about it myself. The principle that the fewest possible assumptions should be made when explaining a thing. Your mistake all along was to imagine things were more complicated than they really were. And now you know everything.’
‘Apart from why,’ I said.
‘Not that one again,’ said Lynch wearily. ‘As I explained to you on the telephone today, I hate that mechanistic way of explaining motive. Who really knows why anyone does anything?’
‘Surely if you don’t ask why, you’re just an animal, responding unthinkingly to external stimuli, like a rat scurrying through a maze?’
‘Don’t start using big words, Saxon, they don’t suit you. And you can stop the amateur reverse psychology too. What’s the plan? That I will be so affronted at being compared to an animal that I open my heart and reveal the inner Ambrose? Don’t insult me.’
‘Overinflated sense of importance. Easily wounded sense of self-esteem. Classic serial killer traits,’ I said. ‘You’re not even original.’
‘I didn’t become a killer because my self-esteem was wounded,’ said Lynch. ‘If anything, it would be nearer the truth to say it was because I was bored. Bored with myself, with this city, my job, with everything. You have no idea how tedious life can be for a forensic pathologist in a city like Dublin. In New York the medical examiner’s office carries out seven thousand autopsies a year on suspicious corpses. Seven thousand! Here I get the odd treat, but mostly I’m fortunate if I have one unusual case a year to deal with. Two and I’d be throwing a street party. Night after night I am roused from sleep and called out, only to find that it’s yet another drunk stabbed to death outside a nightclub. I’ve lost count of the number of those.’
‘So you took to killing because Dublin failed to live up to your refined tastes in homicide?’ I said sarcastically.
‘Don’t be so glib. It wasn’t like that at all. Have some more.’
Another glass filled.
Was he trying to get me drunk so that he could outwit me? If so, he was out of luck. It would take more than a few glasses of whiskey to disorient me. The alcohol may have been working its vague spell on my senses, but I was still in control, he couldn’t change that.
‘It was Sally Tyrrell’s fault really,’ Lynch said. ‘I met her when she was a secretary for the police. We had an affair; nothing special. It was me who recommended that she find a new job. It would reflect badly on me, I told her, if I was found to be banging one of the staff.’
‘Is that how you put it to her?’
‘I may have expressed myself more romantically. The truth was, I was growing tired of her, and getting her into a new job on the other side of the city was the simplest way I could think of at the time to get shot of her. When she realised what I’d done, Sally got a bit silly about it. That’s women for you, I suppose. She even threatened to tell Jean. I couldn’t have that. I picked her up one afternoon on her way home from an office party. She was a little tipsy, which made things easier.’ He looked almost regretful as he gazed into the dark at the edge of the lamplight. ‘Afterwards, I was afraid she might have done something selfish, such as telling one of her friends about me, or writing a letter to my wife which she’d left unposted and would be found by the police when they searched her home. But it turned out she’d been touchingly discreet to the end.’
‘Where did you bury her?’
‘That, I think, shall remain my little secret. I have to keep something private now that the rest of my life seems set to be exposed to public scrutiny. And I was very fond of her. I wouldn’t want her disturbed now.’
‘You’re all heart.’
‘I like to think so,’ said Lynch, ‘though I do still get cross with her sometimes when I look back. I had to make do with prostitutes after Sally. I couldn’t run the risk of another woman getting silly about things again. It’s not that I would’ve minded having to dispose of them if they did, but how long would I get away with that if I could be connected to the victims? I couldn’t count on luck again after Sally. Prostitutes were safer. Prostitutes knew what they were for.’
‘Like Monica Lee.’
‘Like Monica Lee,’ he agreed brightly. ‘Monica was very fond of Gus Bishop, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think that he would run away with her to a little thatched cottage with roses round the door where they could gro
w old together.’
‘So why kill her?’
‘You’re back to asking why again. Because I wanted to, why else?’ said Lynch. ‘That’s the trouble with getting away with one murder. It only gives one an appetite for getting away with more. I blame the police. If they’d caught Sally’s killer, none of this would have happened.’
‘You should write an angry letter to the newspapers.’
Lynch chuckled.
‘I might just do that. It would make a pleasant change from the other sort of letters I’ve been writing recently.’
He paused as the sound of a door opening reached us from outside, followed by footsteps hurrying along the corridor.
Don’t let it be Fitzgerald, I thought. Not yet.
But the footsteps didn’t even slow down as they passed Lynch’s office. They moved on, faded, another door, gone.
‘I am right about Sally, though,’ Lynch immediately continued. He seemed happy to talk now, for all his earlier contempt for explaining himself. ‘Civilisation is built on boundaries. If there is no punishment for crossing them, boundaries are only pushed further and further back.’
‘I presume you’re talking from personal experience?’
‘Of course. For years I’d contented myself with small transgressions. I only nudged at the boundaries, seeing what I could get away with. Lying under oath when giving evidence in court, tampering with autopsy reports . . . Nothing too drastic to begin with. Just little things that could be explained away as the result of an honest mistake or overwork if they were spotted, and then the worst I might face would be early retirement. As time went on, however, I became more adventurous. Manipulating toxicology levels. Switching blood samples. Tidying up the dead to eliminate signs of foul play. It wasn’t hard to do. I work alone most of the time. Dublin hasn’t even got to the stage of videoing autopsies. It’s positively primitive. But after Sally . . .’ He was growing wistful again.
‘After Sally,’ I continued for him, ‘tampering with autopsy reports wasn’t quite so thrilling?’ He nodded absently. ‘That still doesn’t explain why you don’t care any more about being caught, why you made the riddles all point to you.’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ Lynch said. ‘I have nothing to lose.’
‘Because you killed Jean?’
‘Jean? What has Jean got to do with it? No, it doesn’t matter because I am dying. Cancer. My doctor tells me I should be dead by Christmas. So I thought, why be cautious now, why be careful? I could go out with a bang.’
‘But why pretend to be Ed Fagan?’
For the first time, Lynch grew annoyed.
‘I couldn’t believe the attention that man received,’ he said. ‘I performed the autopsies on his victims and I don’t deny that they were interesting cases, but nothing compared to mine. I left Helen Cranmore in the grounds of Dublin Castle and I even took her there in my own car. Can you imagine the risk I was running? But it was always Fagan this and Fagan that. The final straw was when I saw that Nick Elliott’s book was due out. I knew it would be Fagan, Fagan, Fagan again. I thought, very well, if they want Fagan, they can have Fagan. I would bring him back. The Night Hunter, in pantomime for one week only. Book early to avoid disappointment. More whiskey? There’s enough for another glass each.’
He poured before I could refuse.
‘It wasn’t hard to make the arrangements,’ he said. ‘I leased Fagan’s old house and started moving my little photographic collection there. Started picking the victims too.’
Mary Lynch because he found the idea of a shared name amusing.
Mary Dalton to provide a passable theory for the shared name.
Jackie Callaghan: another cheap joke. Lynch had met him when he came into the mortuary to identify the body of a junkie friend of his, and sealed his own fate in the process.
Nikolaevna Tsilevich just because she was there. He’d been visiting her for months, which was how he knew Nick Elliott was seeing her too. He’d noticed the reporter sneaking in there one day, though Elliott, observant as ever, hadn’t seen him. From that encounter, the germ of an idea began to grow. He found out where Elliott liked to drink after work and arranged to turn up one evening, pretending surprise.
Elliott immediately offered to buy the city pathologist a drink, maybe hoping that Lynch might let slip some juicy snippet which would do for the front page; one drink led to another; and one time when Elliott went to the bar for the next round, Lynch wrapped a handkerchief round the bottle from which the reporter had been drinking and slipped it into his briefcase. Elliott’s number was bound to come up when Nikolaevna’s phone records were checked; and by choosing the journalist as the channel for the faked Fagan letters, Lynch would only heighten the suspicion of him. Elliott being there on the very night that Lynch had arranged for the Russian woman’s death was an added bonus, and one he clearly took great pleasure in.
‘What about Tillman? Where did Tillman come into it?’ I pressed.
‘He was meant to be a simple diversion for the police to allow me time to finish the game. I’d heard about his troubles in America from a colleague over there; and I knew, of course, that you’d had your differences with him. When I heard he was coming to Dublin, it was easy. All I had to do was rent a car in his name, pay for it with dollars, throw some Hebrew mumbo-jumbo into the pot and hey presto, another suspect. What I didn’t anticipate was that Mort would try to join in the game, that he would want to beat us all to prove that he could still do it.’
‘He did beat us all.’
‘Almost all. I still think I came out of the encounter in better shape. But he was on to me unbelievably quickly, I will give him that,’ said Lynch. ‘He worked out the A and L business, read all the right books to crack the symbolism. I saw him two days ago, reading St Augustine, and I just knew. So I sent him a parcel for Christmas, and between Jean’s hands I put a scrap of newspaper from eight years ago with Sylvia Judge’s address on it. He took the bait. He turned up. Alone. He wanted to be sure, he said, that I really was the killer, that the killer wasn’t setting me up, as he had with Elliott, before implicating me with the police.’
‘Then you killed him.’
‘What else could I do? Surrender? Confess?’
Poor Tillman. Doomed by his own sense of fair play. The very sense which had deserted me in my dealings with him.
‘There’s still one thing I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How did you manage to murder Tillman without him resisting? He wasn’t the sort to be easily overpowered.’
‘That part was easy,’ said Lynch. ‘I congratulated him on being clever enough to find me, then offered him a drink of whiskey to celebrate. Drugged, naturally. Sound familiar?’
He laughed as my eye sought out the glass on the desk.
As if staring would make things any clearer.
‘The only difference,’ he went on, ‘is that what I put in Tillman’s drink was only to make him sleepy and easily manageable. What we have in here is . . . well, I can’t quite remember what. A bit of a cocktail, you could call it, but all the ingredients came from little bottles with a skull and crossbones on the label. And I don’t think that meant they once belonged to pirates either.’
Poison.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been drinking it too.’
‘Let me assure you that to a man who has been reliably informed that he will be dead by Christmas, the prospect of being poisoned on the seventh of December does not seem so unbearable. Especially if it means he can take some delightful company with him on the journey.’
I hardly heard him. I was trying to think.
Trying to count back.
How much had I drunk? How many times had the glass been refilled? Twice, said my memory. Or was it more? Had I even been watching him that closely? And how did I know he was telling the truth? No, that was the most idiotic question of all.
He was telling the truth. I sensed the poison inside me, a ghost haunting my veins, and even the w
hiskey was afraid of it.
All Lynch did the whole time was talk.
Trying to stop me from remembering what to do.
‘You were supposed to be the fifth victim, after all,’ he was saying. ‘You were supposed to be at the house; you were supposed to track me down. That was the plan from the start. I was saving the best till last. Then Tillman blundered in and I had to let him take your place instead. But I don’t see now why I can’t add you to the list anyway. Just like you added Fagan to your own little list. Oh yes, Saxon, I know all about that. As soon as the message came through which led the police to Fagan’s body, spoiling all my arrangements, I realised. I, after all, had the one luxury the Dublin Metropolitan Police lacked: I knew it wasn’t me who’d knocked him off. So, as I said in my letter, who had motive, who had opportunity, who had means? It could only have been you. But don’t worry, my dear, I’m not going to judge you too harshly for it. We all have our secrets. All have our lists. We killers have to stick together. Besides, where we are going tonight, what does it matter?’
Lynch put back his head and drained what was left of his whiskey.
‘Cheers,’ he said.
***************
I struggled to my feet, and immediately felt afraid. The poison, whatever it was, was inside me now, infecting and occupying my blood.
I found myself stumbling almost before I could stand, and the gun was spilling out of numb fingers to the floor. I tried to swear but my mouth was dry.
Heavily, I dropped down to retrieve the gun. Where was it? Where was it? There. No.
There.
And then I had to hide it in my pocket again and that took time, and I found that I could barely stand and had to pull myself upright using the chair, which took longer, and then I was striking out on my own for the door, which took years, and Lynch didn’t move to stop me.
Made it.
I pulled the door open – and stopped in sudden alarm.
The corridor dropped sharply away.
What had—
Happened? Nothing, I told myself firmly, at least nothing had happened to the corridor. It was me making the corridor drop away, or rather what Lynch had put inside me. I had to trust my mind instead of my senses. Somehow, I forced myself to keep going, holding the wall for support. One step. Another step. A third – steady.