The Judas Heart

by Ingrid Black

  He didn’t seem to appreciate that his palpable anger against Marsha might not exactly be helping his assertion of being innocent of her killing.

  Mainly, though, he talked about what had happened that morning at Ellen’s house.

  How he’d heard she’d contacted the police the night before and was intending to withdraw her alibi following their break up. He hadn’t really been with her the night Marsha Reed died, he’d simply asked her to say that he was in order to take the heat off him.

  Ellen hadn’t suspected for a moment that he was guilty of the young actress’s murder, but knew that any adverse publicity would be damaging for both of them. There certainly wouldn’t be many celebrity magazines interested in the photos of their wedding if the truth had become known. Only after Ellen learned that her husband to be had been involved in a sexual relationship with Marsha at the same time as they were planning their own wedding had she decided to call the whole thing off, and stopped taking Solomon’s calls. The show of forgiveness for the police when they first spoke to her had simply been a front.

  She wasn’t an actress for nothing.

  Soon after, she further decided, whether from a desire for revenge, or guilt at having lied in the first instance, to come clean to the police. And not just about his alibi.

  Now she was also claiming that Solomon enjoyed tying her up during sex. It wasn’t her thing, she said, but she went along with it to please him. Sometimes he hurt her. He claimed to be sorry, but she’d seen the bright look in his eyes when he was doing it.

  So much for his offended claim not to share Marsha Reed’s appetites.

  Somehow, Solomon had found out that Ellen Forwood had been about to come clean about both things to the police. He’d gone round that morning to beg her not to reveal his secret. He told her she was the only woman he’d ever loved. He threw himself on her mercy.

  When that didn’t work, he threatened he could finish off her career as an actress. A ludicrous claim, considering that she was most likely about to bring his own career to a close by blowing his alibi for murder. There was a quarrel, the quarrel had turned into a struggle, she slapped him, he pushed her, Ellen fell and cracked her head against the windowpane, hence the blood smears. She ended up in a heap in the hall. He panicked and ran.

  That was his version of events, at any rate.

  Fitzgerald was waiting for a chance to talk to Ellen to hear her own version.

  “Is she going to be alright?” asked Fisher.

  “The hospital says she’ll be in for a while yet,” I told him, “but there should be no permanent damage. She’ll have one hell of a headache for a while, though.”

  “I can imagine,” he said. “What I don’t understand is why he didn’t just call for an ambulance if he really was sorry that he’d hurt her.”

  “He says he thought she was dead. He thought he’d killed her. And to be fair, he did look relieved when he learned that she was alive. Then again, he’s a former actor too. How much you can take what either of them says and does at face value is anyone’s guess.”

  “You’re such a cynic.”

  “I’m only going by the evidence,” I said. “The urge to self-preservation is definitely what kicked in when he thought he’d killed Ellen Forwood. First thing he did was race round to his rooms, pack a bag, and head to the airport to get the first flight out of the city. That’s what he was doing when we found him. He was hiding in the men’s room, waiting for the last call for his flight before coming out. It was pure chance that he came out just at the same moment Dalton was headed to the door.

  “Solomon’s just a stage name, apparently. His passport was in his real name of Mahoney. That’s why he wasn’t coming up on computer records of flight bookings. If he’d got onto the plane, we might never have seen him again.”

  “What was he intending to do once he reached Rome?”

  “He grew up in Italy,” I said. “Speaks fluent Italian without an accent. He says the plan was to hide out until he had the chance to clear his name.”

  “Clear him of what? He admits attacking Ellen Forwood.”

  “It was clearing his name of the murder of Marsha Reed he was interested in. He knew once his alibi fell apart that the police would blame him again for her death. He thought that if he could stay out of sight for long enough, then the real murderer would be found.”

  “He’d still have to answer for the attack on his fiancé.”

  “He thought people would understand once they knew what had happened, and the pressure he was under. I know, it’s mad, he wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Fisher intently.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that I’ve obviously had this whole thing the wrong way up from the start. Solomon’s behaviour – fighting with his fiancé – making a metaphorical break for the border like that this morning. It doesn’t really fit the profile I had in mind of Marsha Reed’s killer.”

  “The careful, methodical, make no mistakes kind of guy, you mean?”

  “That was the general idea.”

  “Even methodical types can panic,” I pointed out.

  “And everyone makes mistakes, I know.” He leaned back, extended his arms, folded his hands, and cracked his knuckles softly. The noise always makes me shudder. “You know how it works. You try to insinuate your way into the killer’s head, working back step by step until your thought patterns correspond to theirs. When I did that, it was never Solomon’s eyes I was looking out of. Why would such a careful man take the risk of keeping the proof of his guilt badly hidden where police were bound to find it if they searched? And what about Marsha’s online requests for someone to kill her? Where do they fit in?”

  I said nothing, because Fisher had given a voice to a doubt which I had so far left unspoken and which I wasn’t sure I was ready to admit even to myself.

  The DMP had everything they needed on Victor Solomon.

  He had motive – the need to protect his secret affair from his future wife.

  He had opportunity – no alibi for the night of the murder.

  He had the necklace back in his possession.

  He certainly had a reason for wanting it back. Maybe two reasons. One because it was proof of his relationship with Marsha. Two because he needed the money he could get for it.

  What’s more, he had incriminated himself by running.

  So why did catching him not feel better than it did? I’d kept the doubt silent in my mind because I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t simply refusing to see the evidence for what it was out of a misguided sense of loyalty to Leon Kaminski, that I wasn’t being misled by his aching need to blame Buck Randall for this murder as well as that of his wife. And yet what of the clipping that Randall had sent Kaminski, boasting of Marsha Reed’s murder?

  Did that now mean nothing?

  Or had it meant nothing all along?

  **********

  I tried mentioning the doubts tentatively to Fitzgerald as we walked back to my apartment later, the sun cutting deep shadows into the ground at our backs as we walked into its path, but she had a plausible answer to every one of my questions.

  “You know what Dalton would say, don’t you?” she said.

  “That Kaminski sent the clipping to himself,” I said. “But you don’t believe that.”

  “No, I don’t. But we haven’t found a single scrap of evidence either to connect Buck Randall to the murder of Marsha Reed,” Fitzgerald said. She paused as we waited for a chance to cross St Andrews Street. “All we have is Kaminski’s conviction that there must be a connection somewhere, and how do we know that Buck Randall, even if he did send that clipping to Kaminski, didn’t simply want him to think he’d killed this woman? If he’s playing tricks with Kaminski’s mind, it makes sense.”

  “So you’re saying these two strands are entirely separate?” I said.

  “Why not? We thought there was some connection between Marsha’s secret sadomasochistic life o
nline and what happened to her, between her online fantasy life and her murder, but now we’re faced with the likelihood that there wasn’t. Why shouldn’t these strands be separate too? They make no sense if we try to make them run parallel. If we see them as separate strands which merely happened to run together for a while at a given point, then everything falls into place. Solomon killed Marsha. Buck Randall is involved somehow in the disappearance and death of Mark Hudson. Randall simply used Marsha as a weapon in the psychological battle he’s waging on Kaminski. And,” she added hastily before I could object, “even if there is some further connection between the two strands that we are failing to see clearly, then the next course of action remains entirely the same. It’s about reeling in Buck Randall. Once we have him in custody, we can take it from there.”

  “OK, I’ll buy that,” I said reluctantly.

  “Then let’s get on with it,” said Fitzgerald. “We’re already searching the city for him. Did you know Randall was a heavy drinker? Practically an alcoholic, according to the reports I got from Texas. That means he has to surface somewhere: bars, off- licenses, supermarkets. Most of all, there’s tonight. That’s still our best chance to catch him.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Our steps were leading us away from Dublin Castle where, for the last couple of hours, the final briefing before tonight’s huge surveillance operation had been taking place. I hadn’t got a chance to talk to Fitzgerald during the meeting, the room was so crowded.

  That had its advantages too. It had been crowded enough that I’d become blessedly invisible again.

  A small clutch of officers had tagged along undercover earlier that day as part of a final routine police inspection to check that safety regulations were in order. It had given them a good working knowledge of the layout of the site which they then proceeded to pass onto the team which would be carrying out that evening’s surveillance.

  There’d been a tense mood in the air that always came when something major was in the offing. The presence alone of John Haran from the armed response unit was sufficient to ensure no one took what was happening lightly, though as always on such occasions it seemed like half the room was engaged in a testosterone contest with him.

  Seamus Dalton in particular had spent the meeting leaning back in his chair, chewing gum, feet up on the table, doing everything bar unzipping himself and slapping it on the table to prove that he was man enough to match any fellow officer with a gun.

  It’s like they felt threatened by Haran’s presence and needed to prove their own macho credentials. Dalton’s mood was high too because he’d captured Solomon that morning and was currently feeling like a cross between Eliot Ness and Philip Marlowe.

  Sometimes you wonder how far man really has evolved from the Stone Age - and when I say man, I don’t mean it in the all-inclusive sense of mankind. I mean those members of society who seem to keep half their IQ hidden in their pants. And as to where the other half’s hidden, no one knows because they’ve never managed to locate it.

  Haran had pinned a map of the area around Merrion Square to the wall, and a smaller rough sketch of the layout of the fair itself, and was explaining precisely where the armed response officers would be located in case of trouble, stressing all the while that his men were there only as a last resort and the best outcome would be if they went unneeded.

  Dalton had snorted scornfully at that.

  “That’s right,” he was heard to mutter. “Leave the hard work to us as usual.”

  It was, to say the least, a blessing when the meeting was called to an end and we could head back to my apartment to snatch a shower and something to eat. We didn’t have much time. Fitzgerald wanted to see Kaminski one last time before waving him off to the fair.

  For me, the night couldn’t come quickly enough. I was impatient to begin. An end of sorts seemed tantalisingly close, like we only had to reach out and take it. But the minutes between now and then stretched out like the vastness separating stars, and the light itself seemed to be trying to frustrate us. The day never wants to step aside and hand the world to darkness in summer, but there was no chance of Buck Randall turning up at the fair until it had. Everything until then was just a question of waiting. I’d never been good at that.

  I let Fitzgerald climb into the shower first whilst I found some fragments of salad hiding out in the corners of the fridge, threw them together with some dressing, cut some bread that didn’t feel too stale, and tried to make an omelette to go with it all.

  Unfortunately, there’s something about an omelette that always defeats me, and this one was no exception.

  “That looks good,” Fitzgerald said appreciatively all the same when she appeared ten minute later from the bedroom with wet hair and clean clothes. The hot water had knocked some of the exhaustion out of her face, but she still wasn’t going to fool anyone that she’d been giving Sleeping Beauty a run for her money in recent days.

  Her mouth still yawned involuntarily at regular intervals. Her eyes were still too wide with the effort of keeping them open.

  She groaned as her cellphone made a pleading noise at the exact moment we sat down to eat, and she reached down for the jacket which she’d dropped on the floor next to the couch on her way to the bathroom, rummaging around in the inside pocket until she found it.

  She checked her messages cursorily.

  “I need to recharge,” she said. “The phone and me likewise.”

  “Any messages?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Unless you count the press. No matter how often I change my private number, they always get it. I don’t know why they bother. It’s not like I ever tell them anything.”

  “Have you heard any more about Ellen Forwood?” I asked.

  “I dropped in on her at the hospital again before going to Dublin Castle,” Fitzgerald explained. “She’s in the same hospital as Rose Downey, so I was able to kill two birds with one stone. Ellen’s been in and out of consciousness, so I only managed to spend a few minutes with her, but I’ve never seen anyone more eager to make a statement.”

  “She did withdraw her alibi then?”

  “She did. Unfortunately she also confirmed his story about what happened between them at her house in North Great George’s Street. He came round to confront her, they argued, grappled briefly, she fell and hit her head. Pure accident, she says.”

  “So the attempted murder charge will need to be quietly dropped?”

  “That was always the icing on the cake anyway,” she said. “More important is making the murder charge stick. That, and what happens tonight.” She suddenly looked apologetic. “Actually, Saxon, do you mind if I don’t finish this omelette?”

  “I wasn’t aware,” I said, “that you’d even started it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  It took me a while to notice later that we were walking down Kildare Street past the front gate of Parliament Buildings and on towards the huge grounds of Trinity College where, behind the railings on Nassau Street, a group of men in shorts were playing cricket for fun in the last of the light, the thwack of the ball hitting the bat hanging dully in the air.

  “This isn’t the way to Kaminski’s hotel,” I said.

  “How observant you are today,” teased Fitzgerald. “I didn’t want to take the risk of just turning up at Kaminski’s door. For all we know, Buck Randall may be watching the hotel. He always seems to know where Kaminski is. I asked Malachy Stack – you remember him from the crime team meeting? – to bring Kaminski along somewhere quiet nearby.”

  Fitzgerald’s definition of quiet was evidently different from mine. A couple of minutes later, we were turning into Lincoln Place and I found myself being led up the steps of the Dublin Dental School, into a reception area on the first floor lined with plastic chairs. Luckily, there was no sign of any patients. Either the place was closed or they’d all been put off the idea of coming in for treatment by the gruesome posters lining the walls.

  They made the i
nside of your mouth look like Vietnam circa 1975.

  In the middle of one row, Kaminski was sitting on a chair next to Detective Stack.

  He didn’t look happy.

  Kaminski, that is, not Stack. Though on second thoughts, Stack didn’t exactly look the picture of joy either. The conversation had obviously been a little strained.

  “Stack,” said Fitzgerald, “take the door, will you, check no one comes in after us?”

  The detective rose gratefully and did as he was told.

  “What’s with the babysitter?” asked Kaminski when the other man had gone.

  “I had to make sure you were behaving yourself,” Fitzgerald said, taking the seat next to him whilst I sat on the row in front, turning round in my seat to face him.

  “I’m a big boy,” said Kaminski. “I don’t need Mary Poppins holding my hand. And what’s with this place? A dental hospital? Do you offer all the people you’re holding against their will a free dental check-up, or is this a special offer for me alone?”

  “No one’s holding you prisoner,” said Fitzgerald. “How melodramatic you are sometimes. You remind me of Saxon. You’re free to walk away at any time.”

  “Free to get subsequently arrested for being an accessory to murder, you mean.”

  “All choices have consequences,” she said smugly. “That doesn’t mean we’re not free to make them. It’s one of the perplexities of the human condition.”

  Kaminski must have decided there wasn’t much mileage in that complaint, because he didn’t bother answering her. Instead he turned his attention to me.

  “What’s with the dark rings round the eyes?” he asked. “Didn’t you get any sleep last night? Or did you two hit the town to celebrating screwing up all my plans?”

  “We were otherwise engaged,” I said.

  “Actually,” said Fitzgerald, “we arrested someone for the murder of Marsha Reed.”

  Kaminski looked stunned.

  “You’ve got Buck Randall?”

  “I said we arrested someone for Marsha Reed’s murder. I didn’t say it was Randall.”