The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1)

by Ingrid Black

  I’d almost reached the door that led to the stairs when I felt the first pain in my belly, searing, hot, like I’d been stabbed. The pain went deep and twisted, and I had to cling on to the wall to stop myself collapsing. By the time it passed, my head was spinning, the ground was refusing to stay in one place for even one second, and the sweat felt hard like pepper on my face. I stood to gather my breath but the next thrust of pain came too quickly and I knew I couldn’t stay there and wait or I’d die.

  I pushed the door to the stairs and immediately saw a huge window ahead of me, black and speckled with stars.

  Or were the stars inside me now?

  I couldn’t make it.

  I couldn’t—

  Where was my cellphone? That was it. If I could only remember which pocket I’d left it in, if only I could lift my hand to feel inside, if only—

  It was no use. It was too much effort. I couldn’t find it. I didn’t have time to find it. And the pain was coming again.

  I couldn’t cry out.

  I couldn’t even stretch out my hands to save myself as I tried to make a deal with the next flight of stairs, missed my footing . . . fell.

  The stairs unravelled beneath me.

  The stars turned upside down.

  My head exploded into light.

  Epilogue

  Ambrose Lynch was dead by the time Fitzgerald and the others arrived at the mortuary, still sitting in his chair behind the desk, still smiling; and I wasn’t far off being dead myself.

  I had Fisher to thank for being found in time. He’d got to thinking about that story Tillman had told him about me crossing the border into Canada in a snowstorm and how he’d misremembered it and how the killer had misremembered it too, and how the only person he could remember telling, or rather mistelling, the story to him was Lynch that night when both of them had met at Mort Tillman’s rooms in Trinity and talk had turned to me after they found a copy of my book on Tillman’s shelf.

  It was a funny story, relayed to lift the tension, but Lynch had obviously seized on it to make me believe I was talking to Tillman when he called next day.

  Fisher still couldn’t bring himself to think ill of the city pathologist until he heard the description Cassidy’s driver had given of the man who claimed to be Mort Tillman waiting at the airport that morning to pick up his car. And when Healy came back from interviewing the down-and-out who’d been offered money by the killer to send a letter to Fitzgerald, and gave the same description, even Fisher couldn’t deny the truth any more. It was then he recalled, not before time, that I’d said I was going to the mortuary to pick up Tillman’s fingerprints, and Fitzgerald screamed at him why the hell hadn’t he said so before and . . . well, it was over now.

  Since then, at various locations round the city, Ambrose Lynch’s secret life was being excavated and unearthed.

  Painstakingly, each item that had been found in Fagan’s old house was being traced; each woman in the photographs identified. An enquiry was established to discover the extent of Lynch’s abuse of his office as city pathologist. There was talk of ordering new autopsies where doubts remained about his original verdicts, and investigations were reopened into the previously unsolved murders of Monica Lee and Helen Cranmore, the woman whose body was found in the grounds of Dublin Castle a year before Fagan started his killing spree.

  Responsibility for Fagan’s own death was also quickly laid at Lynch’s door, and Fisher was soon talking about writing a new book exploring professional competitiveness among serial killers.

  Sally Tyrrell’s body has never been found, but police did recover the remains of three further women from underneath the floor of the basement in the house that Lynch had shared with his wife for twenty years. Efforts continued to give them names. Traces of Jean’s blood were also found on the stairs leading down to the basement, so whether his story about her following him to Fagan’s old house was true, or only a convenient construct to justify, in his own eyes, a murder which had already happened, would probably never be known.

  Jack Mullen, meanwhile, was positively identified by two of the prostitutes who had been attacked in London and arrested within days. Denied bail, he languished in jail awaiting extradition on charges of rape and false imprisonment.

  As for me, it was three days before I opened my eyes and found Fitzgerald at my side.

  ‘The gun,’ were my first words to her.

  ‘I dealt with it,’ she said simply. ‘No one saw.’

  She said nothing more. She looked at me, that was all, and in that moment I knew she understood everything. About Ed Fagan. About what I’d done. Understood and accepted. Her hand closed over mine and I knew that I was forgiven. I knew too that I couldn’t leave.

  However frustrated I felt here, however constrained, however much I longed at times to get away, this was where I belonged.

  I didn’t ask for the gun back, though.

  I thought that might be pushing it.

  About The Author

  Ingrid Black is the crime writing alias of Irish journalist Eilis O'Hanlon and children's author Ian Mark. Eilis O'Hanlon is a columnist and reviewer with The Sunday Independent, Ireland's largest selling newspaper, and has contributed to numerous other publications, including The Irish Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Guardian, The News Of The World, The Belfast Telegraph and The Irish Times. Ian Mark's stories for children have appeared in a number of publications, including The Sunday Independent and The Kingfisher Treasury Of Irish Stories. Together, they have written four novels featuring Saxon, a former FBI agent turned true crime author, and Chief Superintendent Grace Fitzgerald of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. The first in the series. The Dead, was published in 2003 and won the Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel the following year after its release in the United States. The book was also translated into French, German, Italian and Dutch.