by Ingrid Black
But why leave the body uncovered so long only to get suddenly squeamish? Had he come back, intending to wrap up the body for transport elsewhere, only to be interrupted?
“You see why we need your help,” I heard her say distantly as I leafed slowly and with grim fascination through the crime scene pictures.
“Sorry?”
For a moment, the pictures were forgotten.
“I realise what I’m asking must come as a surprise. But you know what I’m saying makes sense. For years now things haven’t been as they should have been in this place. The Commissioner knows it. Draker knew it too, but he was too stubborn to do anything about it. Procedures have been lax. Standards have been let slip. Fitzgerald has held the place together for a long while, but there’s only so much she can do.”
“It’s been a struggle, yes.”
“Exactly. Every new direction has been resisted. Every last penny of funding has had to be prised out of reluctant fingers. It’s no way to run a department. Frankly, I wouldn’t have stood for it in Belfast and I’m not going to stand for it here. I intend to shake things up. We need to be ahead of the game for once and not forever running along behind trying to catch up. At times it feels here like they’re still struggling to get to grips with the twentieth century, never mind the twenty first. I’ve spoken to Dr Fisher already, he’s agreed to get on board.”
“Fitzgerald mentioned he was looking at Marsha Reed’s diary.”
“I hope that’ll only be the start of it,” she said. “Since he’s here in the city permanently now, it makes sense to use his expertise as much as we can. You’re smiling.”
“I’m imagining Fisher’s reaction when he realises how you’re reeling him in,” I said. “He protests so much at his workload already, and yet he allows himself to be drawn every time into offering his services. I half wonder if that isn’t the real reason he left London, so that Scotland Yard wouldn’t be on the phone to him every week with another case.”
“Thankfully, we don’t have the same crime rate as London yet,” the Assistant Commissioner said. “But the key word there is yet. Long gone are the days when Dublin could console itself that murder was something that happened elsewhere.”
“Sounds like Fisher picked the wrong city for a quiet life.”
“You too, perhaps.”
“The difference is that I don’t have the same specialist skills to offer as Fisher,” I said. “I don’t even have a proper job anymore. I’m just an inquisitive meddler.”
“I don’t care what you call the talents you have. All I know is that your experience is something I can’t afford to simply throw away. I’ve already talked this over with Grace. She’s totally behind me. She knows the problems we have. Both of us need to know there’s a collection of people out there that we can call upon when needs be. That’s how it is in most police departments round the world. They understand the value of using the abilities of people with experience to make investigation easier. And you’re an outsider here. Like me. Outsiders see things other people can’t. They make connections and spot anomalies where others on the inside can’t.” She raised an eyebrow sardonically. “At least that’s the theory.”
“And that’s what you think I can do?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is that Dublin’s changing, and the DMP has to change with it. We’re already in the middle of a recruitment drive to try and get more non-nationals into the force. Poles. Lithuanians. Nigerians. There are so many different nationalities and cultures out there now that have been thrown together, it creates new problems, but new opportunities as well. The DMP has to reflect the people who actually live here.”
She suddenly pulled a face.
“Listen to me,” she went on, “I sound like a recruitment ad. Think about it, that’s all I ask. Like I say, you can see for yourself why your input could prove invaluable.”
She nodded towards the crime scene photographs I was still cradling in my hands. I saw what she’d done now. She’d let me see the photographs to soften me up for the approach, knowing I’d be horrified and angry at what I saw, but intrigued too. Intrigued enough not to want to walk away without getting close to the truth.
I took a while answering, and when my answer came it sounded weak even to my ears. “I’m not sure I know what I can do,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said, “but I’m willing to find out. Are you?”
Chapter Seventeen
“What precisely are you asking me for?”
“I wanted the benefit of the esteemed Dr Fisher’s advice.”
“You know what to do,” said Fisher. “You don’t need me to tell you. You should accept. You’ve complained often enough about being out of the loop, about never having enough to do. This is the perfect opportunity to put that right. Plus you’d have the chance to work alongside Grace. With me too, for a while. What more could a girl want?”
“I guess you’re right,” I said a little sulkily.
“Of course I’m right,” said Fisher. “Just make sure you get paid handsomely for your efforts. You know what your problem is, Saxon?”
“You mean, there’s only one?”
“Let me rephrase that. Do you know what one of your problems is? You don’t know how to simply take what you want, even when it’s being offered to you on a plate. You think because it seems too easy that there must be something wrong with it.”
“There usually is.”
“But plenty of times there isn’t,” he retorted. “Sometimes things really are what they seem. Sometimes there are no hidden catches. You agonise about things too much.”
“I don’t trust simplicity,” I admitted.
“Well, it’s about time you started,” he said briskly.
The way he said it reminded me so much of Fitzgerald. They were the two people in my life to whose advice I should always listen to stop myself making bad choices. Like he said, Stella Carson was holding out a possibility that I’d longed for, vaguely, hopelessly for years, the chance to get back into the centre of things, no longer stranded on the touchline.
The only problem was Kaminski.
If I hadn’t seen him a couple of days ago, I would probably have said yes already. But there was something about his presence here in the city which demanded a response from me, and if I did accept the new Assistant Commissioner’s invitation then what would that mean for Kaminski? I couldn’t go on sneaking around behind Fitzgerald’s back, keeping her in the dark about what I’d learned about his presence here. And yet could I really tell her what I knew, or thought I knew, when the police would inevitably have to become involved? Could I betray him like that? Or should I just back off and forget I ever saw him?
But what then if he did something stupid? Kaminski could certainly be impetuous. In the past, he could coil himself so tight you didn’t know when he might snap. When he did, it was usually himself who suffered. His lost year in North Carolina proved that much.
But there’d also been one or two rumours I’d heard about him down the years getting rough with suspects when he felt the situation called for it. I’d never seen it happen myself, but then nor had I asked him about the rumours. That was the weird thing that happened when you worked so closely with someone. You turned a blind eye to things which, in normal circumstances, would make you distinctly uneasy.
So no, I didn’t know if that part was true. But it rang true. When Kaminski got an idea into his head, there was no stopping him. Until I knew what idea he had in his head this time, I didn’t feel in all conscience that I could wash my hands of him.
I almost began to wish as I sat there that I hadn’t seen him at all.
It would’ve made the decision I had to make so much easier.
Not that Fisher was to know that.
As it was, right now we were supposed to be having lunch with Miranda Gray, Fisher’s new Significant Other, as they say in certain circles. Idiot circles, that is. But then, what else could you call her? Girlfriend sounded faintl
y absurd for a middle-aged man. Partner always seemed like the whole thing should come with a business agreement attached. As for lover, I really didn’t want to picture Fisher in the throes of ecstasy. At least not whilst I was eating. The two of them had recently dropped the pretence that they were simply good friends and set up home together in a large Victorian house in the mellow, leafy, bourgeois district round the Rathmines Road. He’d left his wife Laura, and children, back in North London, although he saw them as often as he could, and I know he missed them terribly.
Laura especially, though he’d never admit it.
Miranda’s not being here had its advantages, however. It meant he could fill me in on what he’d found in Marsha Reed’s journal. Though as he spoke, I soon realised that it might have been quicker to tell me what wasn’t in it. As Fitzgerald had said, she had a busy life.
“I don’t even know whether half of what I’m reading is true or not,” Fisher said. “I’ve completed plenty of profiles before on sexual obsessives, people whose entire lives were dedicated to the pursuit of it, but I’ve never known a woman so fiercely driven by the same impulses as Marsha Reed. Her every waking and sleeping thought seems to have been consumed by sex: its planning, execution and aftermath. Everything was written down in detail from her dreams to her regular encounters at the S&M club in town.”
“What makes you doubt the truth of what you’ve read?” I asked.
“Nothing I can put my finger on exactly, except that Victor Solomon doesn’t appear in the pages of her book at all. Why leave him out? Was it because he was her real lover and the rest of them were nothing but figments of her own imagination?”
“They couldn’t be. Fitzgerald has already spoken to people at the club. They remember Marsha well. She seems to have been game for anything.”
“Was she protecting him then by rendering him invisible in her journal?”
“Journals are private. Who would she be protecting him from?”
“Not all journals are private. It could be that she used her journal as part of her erotic life, maybe shared it together in bed with her conquests. She might not have wanted anyone stumbling on the secret of her relationship with Solomon, if secret it was. “Also,” he noted with a frown, “I have to say that the people I’ve known previously who shared the same sexual obsessions as Marsha increasingly found it hard to continue any normal sort of social or professional or family life whatsoever, whereas to all outward appearances her existence seemed unremarkable. Humdrum even. How she managed it is a mystery. Also there were other manuscripts found in her possession which suggested she had a talent for fiction. Or for fictionalising her actual experiences, perhaps I should say.”
“She wrote stories?”
“Erotic crime fiction, you’d have to call it. Short stories in which sex and murder become inextricably linked, often written in the first person so that it’s only small details which make it clear it’s not herself directly that she’s writing about.”
“Did she cast herself as the victim in these stories?” I said.
“Victim or perpetrator, she seemed to have an equal preference for both roles.”
“You think she was acting out one of her fantasies the night she died?”
“It’s certainly a possibility,” Fisher said, “though there was nothing in her writings which corresponded precisely to the circumstances of her own death.”
“Maybe she preferred to try them out first before writing them down.”
“And this time she didn’t get the opportunity? It’s possible.”
It certainly put a new slant on her presence in my classes on criminal procedure. Something darker than mere curiosity had led her there. I only hoped nothing I’d said had unwittingly led her imagination down that one way corridor where it was snuffed out for ever.
“You wouldn’t be responsible for it even if it had,” said Fisher when I confessed my fear to him. “That’s the uncomfortable thing about people. They have minds of their own and no one else is ultimately responsible for what goes on inside them. Not that I should be talking to you about all this business,” he added unexpectedly, “since you insist on still pretending to be undecided about accepting the Assistant Commissioner’s offer.”
“What do you mean, pretending?”
But all he could say in reply was: “What the -?”
And immediately I discovered what had distracted him.
Some drunk, folded in a filthy coat that seemed more fit for winter than the bright summer’s day, had appeared in the street out of my sight through the window of the restaurant and now fell heavily against the glass before slumping in a heap to the ground.
As we watched, he hauled himself with difficulty to his feet, his hands gripping the glass, leaving grey, greasy stains where he touched it, and turned on unsteady legs to face us through the window, looking in as though we were alien fish in an aquarium on which he couldn’t quite focus. His hair was matted and birds-nested with unknown filth, and his face was hidden beneath a tangled beard that looked more like a growth of the same dirt than hair.
Silently he mouthed something to us, but whatever it was we would never know because the waiter had appeared belatedly from the direction of the kitchen and was hurrying towards the door, waving a towel in his hands like he was shooing away a fly.
The old hobo took awkwardly to his heels.
“Charming,” said Fisher as we watched him hobble away.
“I guess that’s what you get for taking a table by the window.”
The waiter by this time was standing at the entrance, looking severe and disapproving, arms folded, the picture of a man who has escaped some fight but wants it to be known that he’d have been up for it if only he’d been around when it started.
My eye, though, was fixed on the road down which the drunk was clumsily making his getaway. As he reached the corner, he turned and looked back at the restaurant where we were sitting. I saw him reach into his pocket and take out a bank bill. He held it in both hands and kissed it, then did a stiff little jig on the corner with delight.
Then he was gone.
“That’s an odd thing,” said Fisher.
“What?”
“Look.”
He pointed to where the old man had climbed up against the glass.
A scrap of paper was stuck there now with chewing gum. I recognised it at once as the other half of the leaflet I’d left for Kaminski at his hotel and which he, in turn, had left for me. On the edge of this half was scribbled a cellphone number.
“He left you his contact details,” said Fisher. “He must want a date. Your lucky day.”
“Ever think it might’ve been you he wanted, Fisher?”
And I laughed to cover my irritation that Kaminski had trumped me again.
I didn’t know where he was to be found in the whole city, but he seemingly knew where I was even having lunch. Was there anything he didn’t know about me?
**********
I finished up with Fisher as quick as I could, turning down his prompting to accompany him to Marsha Reed’s house. Soon as he finished the rest of the wine, he was heading over there to take a look at the place where she’d died. There were some curious details of her murder I might find interesting, he added, trying to reel me in mischievously.
I told him I needed longer to decide whether I should get involved.
“Just make sure you make the right choice,” he left me with.
As soon as I was safely outside, I dialled the number that had been scribbled on the edge of the leaflet on the glass. It only rang once before it was answered.
“You’ve had your fun, JJ. Now are you going to tell me what you want?”
“I’m not JJ,” the voice on the other end answered. “I’m Buck Randall, remember? You can’t have forgotten me already. Or do you make a habit of breaking into everyone’s room?”
“Oh, that Buck Randall? I knew the name sounded familiar. So how are you, Buck?”
“I’m do
ing terrifically. You?”
“Never been better. A bit tired from chasing old friends through Temple Bar, you know how it is.”
“What can I say? I suddenly remembered an urgent appointment I had to get to.”
“Was that what it was? And there was me thinking you were trying to avoid me.”
“You always were on the paranoid side.”
“Look who’s talking. I’m not the one who’s changed my name and dyed my hair.”
“Everything changes. Nothing lasts for ever.”
“Did you get that little pearl of wisdom from a fortune cookie, JJ?”
“Buck,” he corrected me.
“Don’t start that again,” I sighed. “Are you going to give me a break or not?”
“I’m considering it, what more can I do?”
“Hey, watch where you’re going!”
“Excuse me?”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said. “It’s tricky, walking along here and trying to listen to your lectures in philosophy at the same time. You should try it.”
“Who says I’m not doing it right now?”
That was true.
Listening hard, I could hear traffic, faint and discordant, on the other end of the line. I wondered if it was the same traffic I could hear in my other ear, the traffic on the street I was walking along. Then I wondered if he was watching me now, if he was near.
I spun round quickly.
There was a short laugh at the other end, but there was nothing of amusement in it.
I guessed I was right.
He was watching me.
But if I knew Kaminski, I wouldn’t see him no matter how hard I looked. Like me, he knew how to make himself inconspicuous. Or at least like I used to.
“I have to admit,” I said, “that was a neat trick with the hobo.”
“It’s amazing what a few crisp new bills will get you,” said Kaminski. “I told him you were friends of mine, and I wanted to play a prank on you for your birthday. He didn’t even ask any questions, just took the money and did exactly what I asked him to do.”