The Judas Heart

by Ingrid Black

  “Maybe he has Americans asking him to fall into windows all the time.”

  “Could be,” said Kaminski. “Still, it got us talking again.”

  “You wanted that, you could’ve just walked in to the restaurant.”

  “Now look who’s talking. I didn’t ask for any of this, in case you’ve forgotten. You started it. You knew where I was staying, why didn’t you just come round and say hello?”

  “That was the initial plan.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “You were out.”

  “So you broke into my room?”

  “Strictly speaking, I didn’t break in,” I said. “All I did was ask the maid to let me in.”

  “She told me. Did you really say you were my wife?”

  “It was the first thing I could think of.”

  “I’d have thought being married to me was the last thing you’d have thought of.”

  “I must’ve been feeling desperate,” I said.

  “Desperate?”

  “To know what you were doing in Dublin.”

  Silence greeted that remark. I sensed he wanted to ask me if I’d found out what he was doing in Dublin, but he didn’t want to just come right out with it. Instead he said: “I didn’t even know to begin with that you were in Dublin. Didn’t know you were still here, that is. I knew you’d come here years ago. It’s not like you to stay in one place so long.”

  “You said it yourself,” I reminded him. “Everything changes.”

  “Not you,” he said. “The Saxon I used to know wouldn’t have hung around the same city for... what is it now? Ten years?”

  Ten years. Suddenly I felt old.

  “The Saxon I knew was always moving on.”

  “Then we’re even, because the JJ I knew wouldn’t have picked a name like Buck Randall III to book in to hotels under.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “You want to share them with me?”

  “Maybe,” he said, as if he was learning that fact about himself for the first time. “I just need to be sure I can trust you first.”

  “Trust me?”

  “Yeah, trust. You know, the thing two people have between them that means one of them doesn’t go breaking into the other one’s bedroom uninvited.”

  “There you go again. I told you. I didn’t break in. I’m sorry it bugged you so much.”

  And I realised as I spoke that I meant it.

  “I’d no right,” I said.

  “Not then you didn’t,” said Kaminski, “no. But now?”

  He let the prospect hang like a spider on a thread.

  “Now?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t know you were in Dublin at first. Then I saw you in Temple Bar. It spooked me out. I’d just been passing through and I saw your book lying on a table. I picked it up. The next thing I knew, there you were, standing on the other side of the square. It felt like... you’ll say this is insane... it felt like a sign.”

  “I don’t think it’s insane.”

  “Later, I realised someone had broken into my room, and made it my business to find out who it was. The widow who owns the place told me someone had been asking for me at the desk. A short, dark American female. It didn’t take long to figure it out.”

  “I’m not that short,” I protested.

  “I’m only telling you what she told me. Plus she said my mysterious caller had bad attitude coming out of her ears. I knew at once it was you.”

  “She said I had a bad attitude?”

  “She didn’t put it exactly like that. She simply said you were a little... what was the word she used again? Argumentative, that was it. Not even you can deny that.”

  “OK, you got me there.”

  “So I began to ask myself,” said Kaminski, “if that was a sign too. If you were being directed towards me. There was no way I’d expected you to track me down so quickly. I knew you’d do it eventually, I already had plans in place to move on. But that was fast work, Special Agent. I allowed myself to hope there was a reason for it.”

  “You found me pretty fast yourself,” I pointed out.

  “That wasn’t so hard. You’re not hiding out under a false name.”

  “Fair point. But if you wanted my help, why not just come right up and ask me?”

  “I could have done that,” he conceded. “But then I wouldn’t have had all the fun of seeing you put out for once. Of getting one over on you. That’s a rare pleasure. Let me indulge it for a while. Besides, I wanted you to realise you weren’t the only one who could play games. You can’t expect to get your own way the whole time.”

  If only he knew.

  I don’t think I’d got my own way in years.

  How times change.

  “So what now?” I said impatiently.

  “We meet up, I guess. Talk.”

  “And you’ll tell me what your being here is all about?”

  “If you’re anything like the Saxon I once knew,” he said, “you’ll have figured some of it out by now.”

  “I saw the newspaper clipping, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And?”

  He sounded apprehensive.

  “And I know the woman who died was writing to someone on Death Row in Texas by the name of Jenkins Howler. I know too that Howler has passed over to the great beyond.”

  “Anything else?”

  I hesitated before continuing.

  “I also know what happened to your wife.”

  In the long fall between question and answer, I became convinced that he’d broken the connection between us. Only the continuing traffic in that ear told me otherwise.

  “Who told you?” came his voice finally.

  How long did I consider telling him straight that it was Lucas Piper?

  Not even one second.

  If I asked myself why I held that part back, I couldn’t have put it into words. There was something about not wanting him to know that Piper had been talking behind his back. They might have fallen out, but they’d been friends for so long it was bound to feel like betrayal. There was also a worry in me that telling him that part would lead to all sorts of other questions: what had Piper told me, how much did I know, what was I going to do with the information I had. It would take too long to explain to him where I was at in my understanding, and in the time it took to reach the end of the explanation he might’ve been unnerved enough to decide I was too high a risk to whatever plan of action he had in mind.

  In addition, part of me liked keeping this nugget back from him. It gave me some reason to believe he wasn’t holding all the aces.

  In retrospect, I should’ve just come out and told him. It would have made everything that happened afterwards so much simpler. In such ways are the worst decisions often made for the best motives.

  “I read about it in the news,” I told him in preference to the truth.

  I’m not sure he believed me, but he accepted the lie well enough.

  “Then it’s all the more important that we meet,” he said.

  “What about right now?”

  “Not so fast,” said Kaminski. “I need to prepare the ground first.”

  “When then?”

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  “You’re just going to hang up and disappear again? No. Come on, you can’t do that.”

  I was wrong.

  He just had.

  I couldn’t believe it. He was doing it again, teasing me, taunting me, taking control of me, and I was letting him. I was letting him. I stood in the middle of that summer street, suppressing the urge to kick something, anything, feeling as if everything in existence had been created in that instant just to irritate me. The blaring horns of impatient, overheated drivers as they took out their frustrations on one another. The courier cyclists weaving in and out of the traffic, sinister and silent, looking like aliens peering out through fly-like shades. The office girls going by lost in their iPods, frowning slightly as if in concentration to hide the f
act they didn’t know how to work them. The men in suits walking by almost in slow motion, like they were auditioning for a part in Reservoir Dogs, over-compensating for the fact they were accountants. The world was going about its business without asking for permission or approval, but I was letting my every move be controlled by him.

  I remembered suddenly the way I’d felt when I’d gone round to the hotel and found him gone. How I felt like I’d lost control of my life. That everything was being decided by other people. I was exhausted with being the tumbleweed that gets blown from place to place by someone else’s will. I was tired of being other people’s fool.

  That’s when I decided I would take back control of my own life. Whatever happened after that, I would deal with it when it happened. Kaminski had no right to expect anything more from me.

  I turned and made my way back to the restaurant.

  Fisher was still at the table, finishing the last of the wine.

  “Did you forget something?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I forgot to say that I’m coming with you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  West of Aungier Street lay the Liberties. Originally known by the grand designation of the Liberties of the Monastery of St Thomas of Canterbury, this district got its name from the fact that it didn’t come under central control until the 19th century, though whether it was under effective control even now is a matter for some debate.

  At one time, the area was outside the city walls. A place of poverty, deprivation, and political rebellion, where tanners and weavers and linen-workers from continental Europe were thrown together to sink or swim. However hairy the modern city could get at times, it had nothing on that Dublin of old, when you took your life into your hands just walking these same streets. In past decades, there’d been occasional half-hearted attempts at gentrification, with the small, often one-roomed cottages that lined the narrow streets being knocked together and renovated. But the area still had a rough edge to it. It felt raw.

  Some of the city’s more refined residents wouldn’t venture this way if you paid them, let alone live here.

  Marsha Reed hadn’t been one of them.

  This was where she had lived.

  More to the point, this was where she had died, and where Fisher and I came after leaving the restaurant, picking up my Jeep on the way since it was quicker than heading over to Dublin Castle and begging a lift. The church stood out among the low houses as incongruously as a Mother Superior in a strip joint, and when I first caught sight of the narrow laneway running up between the other houses towards it, I feared my presence here would be more incongruous still. But to hell with my misgivings. It was too late for them.

  I found a parking space as near as I could get to her house, climbing out and leaving the car in Ossory Square – initially misreading the sign as Ossuary Square, which was grimly appropriate, considering why we were here – before doubling back to the right entrance.

  The cop standing guard at the wooden gate that closed off the laneway must have been briefed to expect me, because he didn’t seem too troubled when I came along with Fisher. He didn’t even ask to see my ID. He simply pushed open the gate and let us through.

  Beyond the gate stretched a gravel driveway, wide enough for one car, at the end of which stood the church itself. It was only a small building, barely taller than the crouching terraced houses which surrounded it. The doorway on the facing gable took up most of the front wall, with only room above for one modest stained glass window.

  A small spire above pointed crookedly at the sky.

  Around the church, the land was laid out in a pretty garden and the boundary was marked first with trees and then a wall, shielding the house from view. That may have partly explained why none of the neighbours saw or heard a thing the night she was murdered.

  The garden, I noticed as we drew closer, was like a bowl waiting for the light to fill it like water, and right now, in high summer, I doubted there was a more peaceful spot in the whole city. I could scarcely even hear the traffic. I could well understand why Marsha Reed would have wanted to live here, whatever people said about the area’s dangers.

  Next to the door was a stone nameplate with the name of St Gobnat’s inscribed upon it, the O in the name represented by the shape of a bee. There were plenty more bees cut into the heavy oaken door as well, buzzing round chiselled wooden hives.

  I ran my fingers over them, losing count.

  “Apparently, she kept bees,” said Fisher as he stepped aside to let me in.

  “Marsha Reed?”

  “St Gobnat,” he said with a bewildered look. “Does Marsha Reed strike you as the kind of woman to keep bees? Though maybe they’d have come in handy. There’s a legend that says St Gobnat used her bees to see off a band of raiders who were trying to steal cattle.”

  “You might say she told them to buzz off,” I answered.

  “For that joke, I’m almost tempted to refuse to let you in,” said Fisher. “But since I have no authority to stop you getting in, I’ll give you a second chance.”

  I took a deep breath, and crossed the threshold into Marsha Reed’s house, pausing briefly before going in because there was always a moment before entering a place where someone has been killed when you find yourself wondering if you’ll be able to tell something bad has happened there from the very air itself. Whether the poisonous aura which you suspect such places must possess as a result of what happened in them will be detectable, or whether it’s only there in your own imagination. The truth, of course, was that the places where people die are generally indistinguishable from anywhere else at first glance and scent.

  That was what Marsha Reed’s house was like.

  First impressions? That Marsha Reed had money, and plenty of it. Her father had obviously ensured that she wanted for nothing. Once you stepped out of the small stone hallway behind the door, there was essentially just one large open space, laid out with polished wooden floorboards, and with stained glass windows all around and a lofty ceiling above ribbed like the inside of a whale. Mediaeval-style lights hung like descending spiders.

  Expensive designer furniture had been arranged at the front of the room to make an improvised sitting area centred around a table strewn with film and TV magazines bearing the grinning faces of identikit movie stars, the detritus of Marsha’s aspirations, together with a huge plasma TV screen and a tottering pile of DVDs. Behind that a bookcase was stuffed with the novels and true crime paperbacks that Stella Carson had already told me Marsha collected.

  A little further on, steps led to a raised section in the centre of the room like an altar surrounded by a wooden railing, where the victim’s iron-framed bed stood.

  This was where Marsha had snatched her final breath before having the next one, and all the others that should have followed it, snatched from her. I recognised the scene from the photographs the Assistant Commissioner had shown me in her office.

  The bed had been stripped of sheets since then, bagged up and taken away by forensics, and the bare mattress looked forlorn and exposed. Going up to see where she died, I could still identify traces of white powder on the bedposts where the technical team had dusted for prints, a reminder of how easy it was to turn an ordinary home into a crime scene.

  All it took was one random, or not so random, act of violence.

  As for the rest of the church, there wasn’t much to say.

  There were two doors on either side of the far wall. The first led into a small vestry that had been converted into a kitchen, though there was little sign that much in the way of cooking had ever gone on there. Marsha Reed’s active social life had seen to that. The other door opened into a short corridor, off which were a number of equally small rooms where Marsha had hung her clothes and stored her shoes. Again, no expense had been spared. Each label carried the mark of some designer whose name was utterly unknown to me.

  The final room on this corridor contained the bathroom, white as heaven.

&nb
sp; More bees buzzed in the stained glass above the bath.

  I opened the door of the medicine cabinet, knowing it would be bare. Taking away a victim’s pills was one of the first things police did following a murder. They had to check what was actually in the bloodstream of the dead against what was supposed to be there.

  “What medication was she on?” I asked Fisher.

  “Prozac for depression,” he said. “Valium for stress. There was a small cocktail of other prescription drugs in there too, for which she didn’t have a prescription. It seems she was self-medicating, basically taking whatever she could get her hands on.”

  “Recreational drugs?”

  “Some of the surfaces dusted positive for cocaine, and there were a couple of tabs of ecstasy wrapped up and stuffed down the side of a chair in the main room. The lab results aren’t back yet, but her friends confirm she indulged chemically on a fairly regular basis.”

  “Did Daddy know that’s where his money went?”

  Fisher shrugged.

  “Who knows what anybody really knows or thinks?”

  “That’s a reassuring sentiment, coming from a criminal psychologist.”

  “You know what I mean,” said Fisher. “I can make educated guesses with the best of them, but people are always going to spring surprises on you. That’s what they do best.”

  “Did Marsha Reed spring any surprises on you?”

  “Only insofar as there’s not a trace here of her other more unconventional pursuits.”

  “What did you expect to find – whips and chains hanging in the closet?”

  “I expected to find something,” he said. “Instead it’s as if she worked hard to keep the two parts of her life separate and they’re still not on speaking terms now she’s gone.”

  “That’s not so unusual.”

  “No,” he acknowledged. “But it’s noteworthy.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want her father finding out what was really going on in his baby daughter’s head,” I suggested. “Maybe she feared he wouldn’t approve.”

  “So she keeps things neat and anodyne to stop him cutting off her cash supply, saving it all for the privacy of her journal? It’s a possibility.”