by Ingrid Black
“Mr Randall must be out,” she said, glancing at the rack of room keys behind the chair where she’d been sitting when I first walked in. She frowned. “That’s funny, he didn’t leave his key. I must have missed him. If you want to leave a message for him...”
“I’ll call back later,” I said, and I was halfway across the lobby to the door when an idea suddenly occurred to me.
There was another way of finding out what JJ was up to.
Near the door was a stand of leaflets and flyers telling visitors what cultural delights awaited them in the city: shows, exhibitions, museums, stores. The ones that caught my eye were advertising the Shakespeare performance that Grace and I had missed last night.
Othello, starring Zak Kirby as Iago, 8pm nightly at the Liffey Theatre.
I took one, digging out a pen from the pocket where I always carried one, in the unlikely event that creative inspiration should strike me on the hoof – and I scribbled down the first number that came into my head.
The number didn’t matter, what mattered was what the leaflet would show me.
I folded it in two, then walked back to the reception.
She’d been watching me the whole time from the side of her eye, and gingerly took the leaflet between her long red fingernails as I handed to her.
“On second thoughts, leave this in for Buck,” I said. “Ask him to call me.” I wrote down the number. “As long as you’re sure it’s not breaking the no disturbing rule...”
“I’ll leave it in his pigeonhole, madam.”
And she turned round and popped the leaflet into a small space marked with the number thirteen. Thirteen. That was the room where JJ was staying.
“Thanks,” I said, and flashed a smile.
It wasn’t returned.
Satisfied, I turned round and headed to the door to leave.
Except, of course, I didn’t leave.
Chapter Seven
Thankfully, finding Kaminski’s room was a lot more straightforward than getting up the stairs without the female impersonator on reception realising I hadn’t gone.
And once I found it, getting inside was easier still.
A chambermaid was pushing a trolley piled high with towels and clean sheets and boxes of soap along the corridor. I flashed my sweetest, most benign smile and told her I was JJ’s wife, that I’d forgotten my key and needed to get back inside.
She looked Malaysian, and I’m not sure she understood much English. But she obviously followed what I was trying to say because she fished for the right key from the string at her waist and unlocked the door without objection. She didn’t appear to care either way once she’d established that I was unthreatening. And why should she care? She was one of that international army of foreign workers that keep half the Western world going. Overlooked, overworked, despised, and receiving little for it in return but a total absence of security and a pay cheque that wouldn’t keep a dog in comfort - not to mention the same dog’s basket of abuse from all and sundry into the bargain.
The last few years had seen more of these people arriving in Dublin than in the entirety of the city’s history. Generally the traffic of misery had gone the other way.
That didn’t mean the city’s population was any more willing to be sympathetic to those forced to travel far from home in order to make a meagre living. Instead, as in any city, there were always people who chose to believe that immigrants were coming only to steal their jobs, conveniently forgetting the fact that these were mostly the jobs the natives didn’t want to do in the first place because they considered themselves too good for it.
That’s what they call stealing? If these people were thieves, then they were the kind who broke into your house, before tidying up, cleaning the bathroom, taking out the trash, and putting a roast in the oven to slow cook in time for you arriving back home at dinner.
I tried offering the woman some money for opening the door, but she just smiled awkwardly and shook her head, backing off towards the trolley, looking a little bemused.
And then I felt ashamed for trying to use money to make myself feel benevolent.
By the time I was inside JJ’s room, I could already hear the trolley rattling down the corridor, like a miniature version of the trams that now ran below the windows of my apartment, clanging round St Stephen’s Green into the night. I stood with my back to the door, just making sure there really was no one in here with me. What if JJ had a woman in here? That would’ve been something, stumbling into JJ’s love nest uninvited.
Not that it looked much like a love nest, I thought as I got used to the room and satisfied myself it was empty. The nest of some neglected old eagle who didn’t much care where he spent his time, perhaps. The room was dingy and smelt faintly of damp. The drawn curtains only added to the seedy atmosphere. I tiptoed across the floor to draw them back. Bright light poured through the gap I’d made, then instantly faded in the gloom. Never mind, it was sufficient for my purposes.
Though, as I quickly realised, there wasn’t much to see.
In fact, it had looked better with the curtains pulled over. There was a TV, a chair, a double bed with a table next to it on which sat a kettle, a scattering of tea bags in paper envelopes, cartons of UHT milk, an unopened packet of biscuits, and a copy of the Dublin Street Guide, essential reading for a stranger in town.
The bed didn’t look like it had been slept in.
And I wouldn’t have slept in it either. I’d have taken my chances with the armchair.
JJ was a fastidious man. Least he had been when I knew him. I couldn’t see him willingly picking a place like this. Was it all he could now afford? Or did he figure this was the kind of place where a man could hide out as long as he wanted without being disturbed?
It was certainly the place for hiding things. There were probably a few tropical diseases which had been hiding out here since the world began. They say there are undiscovered species even now deep in the Amazon jungle, but I’d bet the Amazon had nothing on the species of unmentionable life that were to be found in this room.
That made it all the more important I find out why JJ was putting up with it.
Starting with the wardrobe, I began to hurriedly search the room, stopping only once as I heard footsteps in the corridor outside. Voices. A laugh. They passed by.
I pulled open a few drawers. Underwear. T shirts. A couple more pairs of shoes over by the window. Pants and shirts in the wardrobe. Nothing fancy, and he’d always been fussy about how he dressed.
There was also a case on the top shelf of the wardrobe but there was nothing in that either, and shaving stuff in a bag in the bathroom together with an aerosol deodorant and some headache pills. There was nothing under the bed, or in the drawers of the bedside cabinet save for the traditional Gideon Bible left by missionary-minded souls who, for some peculiar reason, had concluded that hotels were the best places to find new converts. Though in my experience, lonely men left alone in hotel rooms were more likely to switch to the subscription porn channels than open up the Acts of the Apostles.
Apart from that, the room held nothing of interest but a copy of a local listings magazine called Dublin Eye folded in the wastepaper basket. I tried flicking through the pages to see if Kaminski had marked anything, but the pages remained as the printer intended them.
I sat on the bed, defeated.
So much for my plan for searching.
Then I noticed a piece of paper poking out from inside Kaminski’s copy of the Dublin Street Guide on the bedside table.
Eureka.
What Kaminski had slid inside the book was a scrap torn from a newspaper, and folded over so many times that the creases had begun to pull apart. Opening the paper out to lay it flat on the bed was an operation which required patience, care, and delicacy.
So naturally I tore the damn thing immediately.
It hardly seemed worth all the effort when the unfolding was done.
On one side of the newspaper was an ad for a sale of di
scount porn DVDs and videos at a store in Capel Street, north of the river, and another for a closing down clear-out at a wholesale pet supplies outlet on the outskirts of town. Talk about an unlikely combination. I doubted that either had much to command Kaminski’s attention, unless he’d developed a taste for porn or poodles since we’d last met. Hopefully not both at the same time.
It must be this on the other side then – but how?
Woman Killed In Accident – a small news item, undated, though I could tell by the print that it came from the Dublin Evening Press, and the pet store ad mentioned something about closing down at Easter which meant it had to be at least four months old.
“The woman who was knocked down and killed in a southside suburb of Dublin yesterday evening has been named as 42 year old Cecelia Corrigan of Priory Crescent, Donnybrook. The unmarried teacher died instantly after being struck by a car in Herbert Road shortly after 7pm, and was pronounced dead on the scene. The driver of the car was questioned by police and later released without charge. ‘There was nothing he could do to avoid hitting her,’ said a witness. ‘She just stepped out in front of him.’ A front seat passenger in the car involved in the fatal accident was later treated in hospital for shock but was not kept in overnight. The dead woman’s remains will be removed from her home tomorrow evening at 8pm, for burial at Glasnevin Cemetery on Friday. Police have asked for any further witnesses to contact them at their nearest Metropolitan Police station.”
And that was that.
There wasn’t even a photograph of her.
I felt weary all of a sudden. I was more at sea now than I’d been before I tricked my way into Kaminski’s room. And that was saying something.
What interest could JJ have in the accidental death of a fortysomething schoolteacher in Dublin months ago? If tracking down the man who killed his wife was the reason he left the FBI, how had he ended up checking out the accidental deaths of spinsters in the suburbs? Had Kaminski known this... what was her name again... Cecilia Corrigan? How could he? Or was there simply more to her death than met the untrained eye, but which had caught Kaminski’s?
I scanned the scrap of newspaper again for a hint of anything untoward, but if there was any suggestion of mystery in the text then it was completely lost on me. Was I was putting two and two together and getting ninety-nine? It wouldn’t be the first time.
Maybe I was losing my touch.
Maybe I never had a touch to lose.
But I folded it up carefully and replaced it all the same. He’d taken the trouble of inserting it there. He must have had his reasons. I just wished I knew what they were.
I checked my watch.
Ten.
Time enough if I hurried.
Chapter Eight
Once outside, I began to feel a touch ashamed of myself for being so inquisitive. Even if Kaminski was interested in this Cecilia Corrigan’s death, what of it? It was someone else’s story, someone else’s jigsaw, not mine. Things often had private meanings to an individual which couldn’t communicate themselves to any other human being.
That lost meaning when they were communicated.
I should go home, forget I ever saw him, forget I’d ever heard the name of poor dead Cecilia Corrigan in whom Kaminski might or might not have an interest. And yet I couldn’t. I had a hunch there was some connection here to what Piper had told me on the phone.
Or was I conveniently imagining I had a hunch as a way of legitimising my curiosity? Grace had warned me about that before.
All I knew is I was going to give it one more shot, to make sense of things before I gave up. Before I learned to mind my own business.
Next stop then was Pearse Street, a short walk from the hotel. The road - once grand, now a shabby, seedy main thoroughfare where no one lingered long if they could help it, and certainly not after dark – ran all the way from Trinity College down to the Grand Canal, where it crossed the bridge and broke up into Ringsend and Irishtown.
Halfway along the street there was a library, home of the City Archives, some dating back to the 12th century.
Closer to my own purposes, the battered brown building also housed the Dublin Collection, incorporating thousands of local, national and international newspapers, some stored bound, most on microfilm. In the past, I’d spent hours in these rooms. Now I came here rarely. Soon I was seated at a desk in a corner of the library, near an old man in a threadbare tweed jacket despite the warm, who sat with his eyes closed, obviously asleep, though his head didn’t droop once. He was obviously practised in the art of dozing unobtrusively.
I settled down to the tedious business of going back through back issues of the city evening newspaper to see if I could find more details of Cecilia Corrigan’s fate.
Local newspapers never cease to astound with the sheer cascading avalanche of pointless details they manage to include about stuff that no one else would surely consider of any importance. Flower shows. Summer fetes. Lost animals. Things that could only be of interest to people who lived in the city, and not so many of them either.
It was the same everywhere. Each city was a capsule separated from the world and existing in some bubble of its own. Each person who lived there had their own map of the city in their heads and it warped their vision so that the city was always larger to them than the surrounding country, no matter how huge, no matter how important. It was what happened on each street and in each neighbourhood rather than in the world beyond which mattered. We are all solipsists.
Reading them at times could be like trawling for one solitary fish in the ocean.
Without a net.
That morning I was lucky. I found the fish. Cecilia Corrigan had died in March. There was a handful of reports on the accident which killed her, a few days of silence, then fewer reports of her funeral. Nowhere was there the slightest hint of any suspicious circumstances surrounding her death. The driver of the car which killed her had even attended the funeral. There was a blurry picture of him in one of the news reports, standing next to a young woman named in the caption underneath as Cecilia Corrigan’s niece, Becky. His name, it seemed, was Mark Hudson. The woman’s surviving family obviously bore him no ill will.
There wasn’t much more in the deaths notices either. In loving memory... with deepest sympathy... fondly remembered... the standard formulae of grief. As far as I could see, only one item stood out from the printed huddle of mourners. That was a message offering commiserations to Becky Corrigan on the death of her aunt from “your colleagues at Dublin Eye magazine.” That was the same magazine I’d noticed in Kaminski’s wastepaper basket at the hotel.
Not that owning a magazine was a crime. Even I had to admit that.
Then I saw it. A couple of weeks after Cecilia Corrigan’s funeral, there’d been a brief security alert at Dublin Airport when a parcel had arrived with her name on the front and a forwarding address from the Terrell Unit in Livingston, Texas.
The Terrell Unit was where Death Row prisoners were housed, though it wasn’t where they were executed. That happened forty miles away in Huntsville, Walker County, in the east of the state. I’d flown down there once to interview an inmate, and a more unnerving town I’d never known. They called it Prison City because one in four of the population is an inmate, and the Texas Department of Criminal Correction is the town’s biggest employer.
Outwardly, everything looks ordinary, unexceptional, quiet.
Inwardly, it feels like the whole place is built on bones.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never been some hand-wringing bleeding heart who thinks the state has no right to take life. It’s just like all the misery the prisoners have caused has been dragged along here with them and holed up in the walls. Some of it is bound to leak out and poison the air. I couldn’t live some place like that. I couldn’t breathe.
Cecilia Corrigan evidently saw things differently. She’d been writing to one of the prisoners on Death Row in Texas and campaigning for his conviction to be overturned.
&
nbsp; That wasn’t so uncommon. There was an unending supply of gullible... sorry, compassionate women, usually past their prime and unmarried, who wanted to strike up relationships with men behind bars. Some were simply lonely. Some were looking for romance. For soulmates, God help them. Having gone so long without the real thing in their lives, they were grasping in desperation onto this meagre, obscene, long distance substitute. Ironically, the fact these men were behind bars made it safer to love them. Nothing would ever come of the romance, so any fantasy could be projected onto it.
Some women went further. They were actually turned on by the thought of what these men had done. They wanted the sordid glamour of a close association with evil.
Others still were motivated by a principled opposition to the taking of life – though why this should manifest itself via an attachment to men who had taken life in far more perverse and brutal ways than any gas chamber ever had was something they’d have to explain. I certainly couldn’t do it. The folks who gathered outside prison gates on the night of each execution, lighting candles and sobbing like it was Mahatma Gandhi who was being put down inside, should try visiting some crime scenes. Ask them then if they still want to idealise men for whom murder lies somewhere between a hobby and a vocation.
Cecilia Corrigan’s correspondent had been a man by the name of Jenkins Howler.
The name meant nothing to me, but then why should it? There were plenty of prisoners on Death Row, and plenty more being added every year.
Murder is a business that never seems to go into recession.
The parcel detained at Dublin Airport purported to be from Howler, though of course it couldn’t actually have come from him. Death Row inmates are not even allowed to smoke, let alone send mysterious parcels to their dead penfriends. Inside was a rough, handmade bouquet of flowers. Howler had obviously found some way of getting the flowers sent in tribute to his late pen friend via a third party. Who it was I had no idea, but that wasn’t so important as the fact I had finally found some thread of a story which it made a semblance of sense for Leon Kaminski to pursue. Was Howler the man that JJ suspected of killing his wife?