by Ingrid Black
No answer came.
Fitzgerald stepped into the gap - and stopped.
A woman lay curled on the floor at the end of the hallway.
**********
Fitzgerald rushed forward and knelt by the woman’s side. Careful not to touch anything, she bent a head to the woman’s mouth and listened.
“She’s breathing,” she said to Walsh. “Call for an ambulance.”
“Is it Solomon’s fiancé?” I said as Walsh hurried out into the street.
Taking a step forward, I could see a knot of blood on the back of the woman’s hair, and a further smear of blood on the floorboard near to a rear window and more on the pane itself. She must have turned herself over after falling there. But what had made her fall?
“It’s her alright,” said Fitzgerald.
“I think she’s trying to speak,” I said.
Trying to open her eyes too.
“Lie still, Ellen. Help’s on the way.”
Another low murmur.
Fitzgerald hooked her hair behind her ear, and bent her head once more to the woman’s lips. But even I could hear what she whispered when the words finally came out.
“Victor.”
“Solomon,” I said.
“Did he do this?”
The woman tried to nod her head, but winced in pain.
“No more talking,” Fitzgerald said.
Ellen Forwood closed her eyes once more, and Fitzgerald got back to her feet and hurriedly examined the scene immediately around the prone figure whilst we waited anxiously for the ambulance. The moments seemed to drag longer than hours.
“What’s taking it so long?” said Fitzgerald. “The hospital can’t be more than three streets away.” But even as she spoke, the faint howl of a siren could be heard through the open door, approaching, getting louder as it turned the corner at the top of the street.
Doors slammed, footsteps hammered on the sidewalk, paramedics appeared. Fitzgerald identified herself quickly then stepped back to let them do their job.
“Come on,” she said to me.
“Shall I stay here?” said Walsh.
“Has Dalton called Dublin Castle yet?”
“They’re sending another car.”
“Then I’m leaving you in charge,” she said. “Make sure Ellen Forwood’s is accompanied to the hospital, we mustn’t let her out of our sight. Secure the scene. Search the rest of the house. Find witnesses if there are any. Don’t try to talk to Ms Forwood herself until I get back. Leave her to the paramedics.”
“Are you going to find Solomon?” I said.
“Who else?”
**********
Dalton already had the car running. I’d barely shut the door behind me when he was away and picking up speed. At the top of the street, he turned left and headed towards Parnell Square. Fitzgerald took out the siren and, winding down the window, attached it to the roof.
“Where does Solomon live?” I shouted above the sudden din.
“Prussia Street,” Fitzgerald said.
“Prussia Street?” I said. “I didn’t have him down as the Prussia Street sort.”
“Solomon hasn’t a cent to his name,” Fitzgerald said. “We’ve been checking him out ever since we knew he was involved with Marsha Reed. He’s lost hundreds of thousands through gambling in the last few years. He did have a big house out by Killiney Bay, but he had to sell it to pay off his debts. He’s been living out this way for the last six months or so. I think his circumstances being made public was the thing he feared the most. He threatened if the press ever got wind of how he was living now, he’d sue us for everything we’ve got. He’s obviously never seen my budget. I’m presuming that’s one of the reasons he fixed on Ellen Forwood to marry. He was looking to go up in the world.”
“Well,” I said, “I’d say a reconciliation’s out of the question now.”
“Fuck it,” cursed Dalton.
The traffic was snarled at the top of Capel Street, and many drivers seemed to consider it a point of honour to wait until the very last moment to pull over and let the police through. By the time we were running down King Street towards Stoneybatter, more precious moments had been wasted. Fitzgerald was on the radio, ordering a second car to meet us at Solomon’s place, and another unit to head to the theatre in case the director had gone there.
“That must be it,” she said as Prussia Street opened up before us.
A blue and white squad car was parked by the side of the road near the 24 hour supermarket, and an officer in uniform was holding up a hand like a traffic cop trying to stop oncoming traffic. Dalton pulled sharply into the left and tugged on the handbrake.
“Is he in?” Fitzgerald asked the uniform as she jumped out.
“There’s no answer from inside.”
A narrow doorway between two low rent stores, one with its window boarded up, led to a flight of uncarpeted stairs. Fitzgerald, closely followed by Dalton, ran up to the second floor, where another uniform was standing guard. He looked faintly alarmed to see us.
“Any sign of Solomon?” Fitzgerald asked him.
The cop shook his head.
“OK, you can go back downstairs, we’ll take over now.”
“Solomon, are you in there?”
Dalton’s fist made the door shake.
“Solomon, you know who we are. Open the door!”
“Right,” said Fitzgerald. “I don’t have time to waste waiting for a search warrant. Dalton, do the honours. We’ll just have to say the door was broken when we got here.”
Dalton took a step back and, lifting his foot, brought his boot heavily down onto the lock. A loud crack. A second time he raised his foot and this time the crack was visible.
The door staggered back on its hinges.
“Remember,” said Fitzgerald, “careful not to touch anything.”
She slipped for a second time that morning into the gap between door and frame.
A mean little apartment opened up before her.
I couldn’t believe a man like Victor Solomon could live in a place like this. He must have fallen on hard times indeed. I wondered if Ellen Forwood knew how desperately the man she had intended to marry must have felt the need to make her his own, regardless of all other considerations. This was the apartment of a man who had sold virtually everything that wasn’t nailed down, and would have sold his soul too if only he could have found the right bidder. I’d known plenty of people like it before at the poker table, men whose eyes blazed with the violence of the desire not so much to win as to just stop losing.
It certainly wasn’t the apartment of a man who could afford to give away necklaces as meaningless trinkets to casual sexual partners that he claimed meant nothing to him.
“He’s gone,” said Fitzgerald.
That diagnosis was hard to refute. Drawers had been pulled out, doors tugged open, dirty dishes were piled high in the sink. All was emptiness and abandonment. A handful of suits lay in crumpled heaps in the wardrobe. Shirts had been flung over the backs of chairs. A pair of shoes sat awkwardly on the windowsill. Someone had been packing.
Hurriedly.
“I want theories,” said Fitzgerald. “Where is he?”
“He’s doing a bunk,” said Dalton. “There are only two places to go.”
“The airport.”
“Or the boat.”
There was no point trying to escape by road. The country beyond Dublin was too small to hide out in for long.
“The airport,” I said firmly. “He needs to get as far away as possible. The boat doesn’t go far enough. And it’s way too slow. You could have police waiting for him by the time he reaches the other side of the water. He couldn’t take the chance. He’s banking on being far outside your jurisdiction before you even realise he’s gone.”
“Plus the next boat’s not till lunchtime,” said Dalton.
That settled the argument.
“The airport it is then,” said Fitzgerald.
“Are we o
n the move again?”
We were.
**********
Getting north to the airport was easier once we hit the main road out. The streets became wider, and the drivers took it less personally when commanded by the siren to pull over and let us through. I heard Fitzgerald back again on the police radio, sending more officers out to the harbour just in case we were wrong about Solomon’s preferred escape route. She also requested back up, preferably armed, at the airport. The police would be getting stretched soon if Solomon wasn’t found.
When we finally reached the airport, not finding Solomon began to look like a distinct possibility. It was summer, after all. The airport’s busiest time. There didn’t seem to be a square inch of the airport terminal that was not occupied already by someone who was either on their way somewhere else or waiting to greet someone returning from elsewhere.
Call it organised chaos, except there were times when it didn’t seem very organised at all. On the board above our heads, destinations fluttered by, faster than birds.
Paris.
Chicago.
Rome.
Bangkok.
Toronto.
There was a world to hide out in. Solomon could have been here an hour ago, two hours, we didn’t know when he’d attacked his fiancé. He could have paid cash for the first plane out to a destination he didn’t even care where. By the time we had been through the passenger lists and established where he’d gone, he could be a continent away, in a place it might be impossible to find him or get him back even if we did find him.
At the back of my mind, there was another thought. If Solomon had run, it was because he was most likely guilty of Marsha Reed’s murder. And if he was guilty of that, then what about Buck Randall?
Was that nothing to do with this at all?
Slow down, girl.
One problem at a time.
Fitzgerald had already taken charge of airport security and got them looking for Victor Solomon, though since it took more than ten minutes to get the theatre director’s picture forwarded electronically from Dublin Castle to the airport office their contribution to the search was more symbolic than practical. She sat in front of a bank of TV screens, scanning faces in the crowds as the cameras picked them out, shouting frequently for the camera to be pulled in closer or further back when she thought she recognised someone.
Dalton had been unable to bear to sit watching TV and was now making a circuit of the coffee bars and gift stores in the terminal, restless with an energy that had no release.
Occasionally he appeared on the TV screens in front of us, each time almost prompting a cry of recognition, his face becoming confused in our heads with Solomon’s, so desperate were we to find a face we recognised, until we remembered it was only Dalton.
“This is some haystack,” murmured Fitzgerald as she scanned another sea of faces.
And the needle in it wasn’t giving out so much as a gleam of metal.
I felt the same impatience that had sent Dalton out into the terminal starting to eat at me too. If I sat there much longer, holding myself in. I’d grow a tumour.
“I’m going to see if Dalton needs a hand,” I said eventually.
Fitzgerald was so engrossed in the screens that she didn’t even acknowledge the unlikelihood of what I’d said. Or maybe she knew it was nothing but words, the first excuse my head could dream up to get me out of that suffocating office.
Whatever it was, I was out.
Everything had slowed right down. The crowds seemed to move and sway in syrup. Sound was a background hum throbbing in my ears. Announcements of flights crackled distantly but might as well have been in a foreign language for all the sense they were making to me. I was trying to tune and fade them all out in order to concentrate on the one thing that mattered – seeing Victor Solomon’s face. Or could he be far from here already?
“Dalton,” I said.
The detective spun round at the sound of his name.
“The fucker’s not here,” he said. “I’ve been round this place a million bleeding times. I’d have seen him. He’s gone. What’s the Chief doing?”
“She’s on the phone to the Assistant Commissioner.”
He snorted.
“What are they doing?” he said scornfully. “Swapping beauty tips?”
“You know that’s not fair, Dalton.”
“Don’t tell me what’s fair and what’s not. I’m the one who’s trying to search this whole building on my own whilst she sits in there on her arse talking on the telephone.”
I was tempted to enquire what else he expected her to sit on. Her elbow, perhaps? But it was a fair presumption that he wasn’t in the mood for jokes. He rarely was. Dalton was one of those people in whose soul humour has never found a welcoming home.
“Chill out,” I said instead.
“Chill out?” He pulled his face into an exaggerated grimace of disbelief. “Tell you what, why don’t you chill out whilst I go take a piss?”
The guy had a way with words that made a lady feel real special around him.
“Where’re the jacks round here, anyway?”
“If you mean the men’s room, it’s over there,” I said, pointing. “You can’t miss it, it’s the one with the picture on the door of the stick figure that’s not wearing a skirt.”
He’d only taken one step towards the far door when he stopped.
“Fuck me,” he said.
Not an invitation I could ever imagine taking him up on.
The outburst was forgivable this time, because at that precise moment Victor Solomon had emerged from the men’s room, clutching a holdall, and was inching his way nervously towards one of the departure gates, his eyes restlessly scanning the airport lounge as if he expected to be challenged at any moment. His face looked flushed, and the bag kept slipping through his fingers like his hands were damp with sweat.
I guess he didn’t have much practise in fleeing the country.
“Get the Chief!” Dalton demanded over his shoulder, as he hastened his step and made to intercept Solomon, who still seemed unaware that his cover was blown.
Fitzgerald, however, was already coming towards us. She must have seen her fugitive on the security cameras. By the time she caught up with Dalton, we were only a hundred yards or so from Solomon and he was almost at the check-in desk for Air Italia.
“This is the last call for the 9.25 flight to Rome.”
So that’s where he was going.
Solomon reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out his passport, sliding it across the counter at the blandly smiling girl behind it.
Then the smile vanished as she looked up and saw us approaching.
Fitzgerald held out her hand and took the passport as Solomon turned, the nervous half-smile he’d rustled up for the check-in girl crumbling as he realised what was happening.
“Victor Solomon,” she said, “I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Marsha Reed and for the attempted murder of Ellen For-”
“I want my lawyer,” said Solomon, interrupting. “I know my rights.”
He was still griping when Dalton put the cuffs on him and led him out to the car.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“He swears he didn’t mean to hurt her,” I told Fisher as we sat together on the steps of City Hall in the sunshine, watching the people go by, and sharing some grapes out of a bag, like we didn’t have a care in the world, like we were tourists. Which, in a way, we both were.
“That’s what they all say,” said Fisher. “How does he explain the fact she had a plastic bag over her head if he didn’t mean to hurt her?”
“Not Marsha,” I said. “Ellen, the fiancé. Or ex-fiancé, I should say. He still totally denies having anything to do with Marsha’s murder.”
“But I thought they found the necklace in his room at the theatre?”
“Says he has no idea where it came from.”
“That’s what they all say too.”
“Don’t t
hey just?”
The discovery of the necklace had certainly been unexpected. A search warrant had been obtained for the theatre following Solomon’s apprehension and, within the hour, it had been uncovered in a plastic supermarket bag stuffed behind a cupboard in Solomon’s office. Why he hadn’t gotten rid of such incriminating evidence was anyone’s guess, but even his lawyer had looked taken aback when presented with news of it.
That’s where Fitzgerald was now with Sean Healy, talking to the director’s colleagues, and supervising forensics as they made a fingertip search of his office, vacuuming up fibres, dusting for prints, looking for fragments of leaf or soil that could be matched to those taken from the grounds surrounding Marsha’s house. Getting a match would undermine Solomon’s contention that he’d never been there, which is why the murder squad was treating the place where her stained scarf had been uncovered as respectfully as a crime scene.
They were looking for the missing ring, too.
So far, it had failed to show.
That night’s performance of Othello had been cancelled. With the director in custody on a murder charge, the leading lady in hospital, and the theatre itself occupied by scores of grim-faced technical staff in white overalls and face masks, that wasn’t so astonishing. A sign outside informed the public that the play would open again tomorrow.
Solomon had refused to speak any further after hearing that the necklace had been found, except to say that he was being stitched up for a murder he hadn’t committed and would sue everyone in the building. It was a pity really, because up until then he’d been doing plenty of talking. This was a man with no intention of exercising his right to remain silent. The police had given him a spade, and he’d kept on digging, digging, digging, ranting angrily at Marsha for having, as he now claimed, stolen from him the necklace he’d bought with the last of his savings for Ellen Forwood and then refused to return it, taunting him with his desperate financial circumstances, offering one moment to use her father’s fortune to help him out if he carried on seeing her, the next moment refusing him a cent.