The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) (2 page)

Seamus Dalton. I should’ve known it would be Dalton. Just what I needed to round off a great evening. Scientists have trawled Africa for years looking for the missing link, and here it was in Dublin all the time, hiding out in the shape of a murder detective.

It was going to be a long night.

He was quick, that’s all I’ll give him, only a few minutes behind the uniforms who were now securing the scene and making the usual inept attempts at questioning. I was standing with a cop called Simpson by a row of boat sheds with metal fronts a couple hundred yards down from the lighthouse when I saw him approaching, adjusting his belt and hitching up his pants as he caught sight of me, pulling a weary face like he knew already that I was wasting his time. That was his ritual whenever we met, which wasn’t often.

And I wasn’t complaining.

‘You know,’ he said as he drew near, ‘people have a bad habit of dying round you.’

‘Never the right ones, unfortunately.’

He almost smiled.

‘Who is it?’ he said.

‘We haven’t been able to identify the body yet, sir—’ Simpson tried to explain before Dalton silenced him with a glance.

‘I wasn’t asking you, son, I was asking her. In fact, why don’t you go and see if you can’t put up some more tape or something. Make yourself useful. In fact, why don’t you pop down over the wall there and take a little peek at the deceased. I’ll take over here.’

Simpson didn’t argue. Few of the uniforms messed with Dalton. He had a reputation for ruining a cop’s evening just for the heck of it. ‘They teach you people skills in police school, or does it all come naturally?’ I said as Simpson backed away.

‘Self-taught. Only teacher I ever needed,’ Dalton said. ‘Now, are you going to answer the question or do I have to put the cuffs on you, take you downtown and book you, as I believe you Americans say?’

Like he’d have the balls to do it. But he chuckled at his own joke; and when you’re as funny as Dalton, you get used to laughing at your own jokes since no one else is going to.

‘How the hell should I know who it is?’ was all I said in answer.

‘The desk sergeant said you mentioned a name.’

‘I came here to meet someone is what I said.’

‘Felix something.’

‘Felix Berg. He told me he was a photographer. Whether it’s him or not, I don’t know. I think it might be.’

‘Think?’ He spoke the word carefully, like it was new to him.

‘Yeah, think. You should try it sometime. Little practice, you might even get to enjoy it. Like I say, I
think
it might be him. I didn’t want to touch anything.’ Didn’t want to climb down there was nearer the truth, though I wasn’t about to admit that to Dalton. ‘Besides, I never met him before. I wouldn’t be able to ID him even if I wanted.’

Dalton seemed more interested in the fact I was out here meeting a man I’d never seen before than the fact there was a body lying on the rocks a few hundred yards away.

‘What’s the story?’ he said. ‘You suddenly get a taste for men or something? Could be my lucky night.’

‘Not unless I get a taste for slugs, Dalton,’ I said. ‘And you can wipe that leering look off your fat face. Don’t try turning this into something it isn’t.’

‘So what is it if it isn’t what you say it isn’t?’

I paused.

‘He wanted to talk to me about something,’ I said warily.

‘Talk to you about what?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘He didn’t say?’

‘He didn’t say.’ I sighed. ‘Look, what are you doing here anyway? Where’s Fitzgerald?’

I meant Grace Fitzgerald, Detective Chief Superintendent with the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s murder squad, and Dalton’s superior – professionally, intellectually, evolutionarily, in every sense of the word. The Chief Superintendent and I were what used to be called an item. Stepping out together. Sleeping together. Call it what you will. Had been for a few years now, ever since I arrived in the city from the States, fresh from the FBI.

Though fresh wasn’t quite right. Jaded, finished, exhausted would be more like it. Fitzgerald had helped me get over it – though whether spending so much time with someone on the city’s murder squad had done me much good in getting over my own weaknesses was another matter. Didn’t help sometimes that she was doing what I still, in my more vulnerable moments, longed to be doing and which I knew I had little hope of ever getting back to.

Dalton knew about us, of course; they all did. No one ever said a word when Grace was around, but even then they never let you forget they knew. It didn’t need words.

‘The Chief Superintendent is otherwise engaged,’ was all Dalton said right now. ‘Busy woman. Busy woman. Stabbing down in Portobello. Murder’s a growing business in the city these days, you know. Growth industry. Sorry if that fucks up your romantic plans for the evening, but that’s killers for you. No consideration for anyone else. I blame the parents.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the other uniforms glance over as the sound of Dalton’s loud voice reached him, like he was putting two and two together over the jibe about Fitzgerald.

‘Besides, why would the great Grace Fitzgerald – out of whose rear end the sun doth shine, if you believe her fans in the local press – want to waste her time on a suicide?’

That threw me.

‘What makes you so sure this guy killed himself?’

‘Because I talked to one of these uniformed bozos on the radio whilst I was on my way over,’ Dalton said. ‘He gave me the full lowdown. Shoes taken off, phone, keys, wallet, glasses all laid neatly to one side. Classic pre-suicidal behaviour. Which,’ he went on before I could protest, ‘is why I find it hard to figure out why you came to the murder squad with it. You arrange to meet some guy, for what purpose I couldn’t say, none of my business, right? Then he throws himself in the water rather than put up with the pleasure of your company, which, you know, I understand, I can respect that. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just call in the local cops. They could have fished him out of the water for you. Held your hand while you made a statement.’

‘I didn’t call the murder squad,’ I said, doing my best to ignore his taunts. ‘I called Fitzgerald. I wasn’t to know her calls were being transferred. And don’t you think you should leave it to the pathologist to decide how he died before jumping to conclusions?’

‘Call in a pathologist, I never thought of that,’ said Dalton sarcastically. ‘What would we poor chumps do without your expertise as an ace crime-solver to guide us?’

I tried to ignore him. He was just trying to put me in my place. I was an ex-investigator. Ex-FBI. Ex-everything. That meant I was nothing. A civilian. The lowest of the low. I might’ve helped out the DMP before, if you could call it help, but it certainly had never been appreciated by the likes of Seamus Dalton. In fact, me thinking I could help was just another demerit against my name. And at that moment I knew I’d tell him nothing else.

‘Let’s just get this over with, OK?’ I said instead.

‘What’s the hurry? No rush. I’ve got nothing better to do, and’ – Dalton glanced over at the lighthouse – ‘I don’t think your boyfriend’ll be going anywhere for a while. We might as well make a night of it. Besides, the dead are always with us. They should have more respect for me instead of disturbing my shifts with this shit. You just hold your little white horses while I take your statement and then we can both get back to doing what we do best. Though Christ knows what that is in your case.’

‘I’d rather give my statement to one of the uniforms.’

‘And I’d rather be in bed right now with Cameron Diaz. Come to think of it, so would you probably. Shame we can’t both get what we want. Meantime’ – and he took out his notebook, opened it, lifted a pencil from his pocket, put the point of the lead lasciviously to the tip of his tongue, holding my eye the whole time – ‘we’ll start with all the details. Do everything by the book. Keep the paperwork in order. So, name?’

I stared at him.

‘Fuck you, Dalton. You know my name.’

‘Sorry?’ Dalton tipped his head to one side and tapped his pencil to his ear like he couldn’t hear too well. ‘I didn’t quite catch that. You mind repeating it?’

‘I said: Fuck. You.’

‘Listen, this is a real pain for the both of us, but you know we’ve got to get the details right. All the formalities. So are you going to be a good little girl for daddy or do I have to ask Simpson to put you under arrest? Think how bad it’ll look if the Chief Super’s favourite bedwarmer was up in court on a charge of assaulting a police officer.’

‘Since when were you assaulted?’

He reached out a hand suddenly and touched my hair.

Without thinking, I raised my own hand and batted his away.

‘Since then,’ he answered.

And he grinned his charmless baboon grin just for me. I looked at him and realised there was no point making a stand out of it. He was pissed at being sent out here when the real action was happening elsewhere, and pissed too that I wouldn’t tell him what exactly had brought me out here, and I was going to get the brunt of it to make him feel that the trip hadn’t been entirely wasted. I saw it in his eyes and realised that whatever I did, he’d come out on top in the end. He saw it too in my eyes. That resignation.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I like a woman who does what she’s told.’

But Dalton never got a chance to savour his victory, because at that moment the sound of quickening footsteps made us both glance up to where Simpson was hurrying back from the direction of the lighthouse towards us. He stopped a couple of paces away.

‘Sir,’ he began nervously.

Dalton redirected his hostility back to the cop.

‘What is it now?’ he said.

‘It’s the dead man, sir.’

‘What’s happened? Has he got up and started asking for a taxi home?’

‘It looks like . . . like he was shot.’

Dalton was speechless, probably for the first time in his life. And there was another look on his face, a look almost of hope, excitement, the pleasure of something finally happening. And I knew what had caused it to appear.

The Marxman.

First to die had been Tim Enright. In mid-January, for some reason no one had been able to discover, he’d driven out to the northside of the city after work and parked his car in a spot known as O’Brien’s Place. At about 7.30 p.m. two women returning home had found him slumped across the wheel. He’d been killed instantly by a single shot to the back of the head at point-blank range. It was a classic gangland hit of a kind that Dublin had more than its fair share of these days – there’d actually been a fivefold increase in such shootings in the city in the last five years – except there was nothing to suggest it
was
a gangland hit.

The thirty-six-year-old Enright’s background had been thoroughly checked out. He’d had no dodgy dealings and no enemies that anyone could find. He’d worked downtown in the swanky Financial Services Centre as a futures trader, whatever the hell that was, running a firm inherited from his late father, and the Criminal Assets Bureau had never heard of him. The fraud squad, vice, serious crime all drew a blank. Every criminal contact the Dublin Metropolitan Police called in insisted no hit had been ordered on him, and they would have heard if it had. Nor was there anything in his private life that could be uncovered as a possible motive for his shooting. No jealous husbands, no secret gay life; his bank records showed no signs of irregular payments either in or out, there was no suggestion of blackmail.

Colleagues and friends alike spoke of a man with no worries, no dark side, who’d spent the days before his death preparing for a coming weekend away with his wife in Paris.

He was Mr Average. All of which might have been good for his eternal soul but was fatal for the police’s chances of pulling anyone in for the killing. It seemed that either his death was the result of mistaken identity, or else it was as motiveless as any killing ever can be.

The enquiry gathered dust.

A month later came the second shooting, and it wasn’t Mr Average this time. Terence Prior was a High Court judge, aged sixty-seven, widowed, a pillar of respectable Dublin society, with all the right political connections and wealth to make sure that his conservative voice on most social issues was heard above that of the common herd. Unpopular in the self-styled progressive press for jailing a woman for contempt for breastfeeding in his court, and for frequently bemoaning that he was unable to pass the death sentence on the killers of children and policemen, he had seemingly revelled in his bogeyman image to the point where even his supporters felt he’d ridden out long since on to a wide-open prairie of self-parody. He was shot in the doorway of his own house in a classy Georgian square in the south of the city as he returned from another day dispensing frontier justice to the great unwashed. Like the first victim, he was felled by a single shot at point-blank range, again from the back, this time through the heart. Same weapon: a Glock .36 with, before Enright, a clean history. The press swiftly dubbed the killer the Marksman.

That there were now two victims of what seemed certain to be a single killer – and that one of those victims possessed a well-known name to have carved on his gravestone – at least intensified the investigation considerably. What the DMP had allowed to settle into a routine gathering of evidence and statements in the vague hope that something would turn up had now become more of a cause célèbre. The press were on the murder squad’s backs, looking for leads, fresh angles. If her colleagues sometimes thought that Fitzgerald, simply by being one of the highest-ranking female officers in the force, got an easy press, she certainly hadn’t on this one. Her life was swiftly taken over.

More resources were allocated to the enquiry, a larger team was put together, efforts were concentrated on trying to find a connection between the two victims.

There was always a connection, that was the accepted wisdom of any investigation; in fact, it was all that kept an investigation moving sometimes, the hope that some link would be found and that this link would lead to another link and that link to another, like the knee bone was connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone to the hip bone in the old rhyme, until the whole chain was assembled and, eureka, the perpetrator was shackled to the end of it. Only it didn’t quite work out that way.

No connection was found between these two victims because there
was
no connection, that much quickly became clear. They hadn’t frequented the same circles, they lived in different parts of the city, they’d certainly never met, they were different ages. It didn’t seem that the killer had targeted them because of who they were at all.

At least that was the general conclusion until Finlay Hart, a slick, smirking, up-and-coming right-wing politician with a stance on most issues that made the late Judge Prior look like an anarchist, and a junior post in government which everyone in the know confidently predicted was only the first step on a rung that would lead him sooner rather than later to high office, was gunned down by the same .36 in the doorway of his office in Main Street early one morning as he arrived to begin another day’s work as a master of the political universe.

At last there was a connection, and the DMP’s antiterrorist unit was not slow to exploit it. Two public figures with a stance that would not normally be expected to have the average radical leading a standing ovation had been murdered in the space of weeks, and before Hart’s body had even been cleared from the steps of his office or his blood sluiced into the gutter, Paddy Sweeney of the anti-terrorist unit was angling to take over the case, and he would no doubt have made the same mess of it as he had the killing of some minor foreign diplomat a year ago, to which he had confidently assigned a similar political motive from the start, remaining unswerving in that belief right up until the point the man’s live-in male lover walked into Dublin Castle and confessed.

Sweeney started offering whispered briefings to the press that the killer was some freelance devotee of Marxist communist theory, and remained equally unshaken in that belief even when the fourth victim of what the press were obliging by now calling, with their usual talent for bad puns, the Marxman – and who was swiftly becoming a hero of the hour among the radical left – was identified as Jane Knox, of unidentifiable age though she’d never have seen seventy again, a one-time radical left-wing nun known as Sister Bernadette who had suffered some sort of breakdown and was now living rough among an army of stray cats on the streets round the Mansion House.

Knox was gunned down in the rear yard of the Water Margin restaurant, again with a single shot from the same Glock .36 to the head, only this time from a distance of some yards; the City Pathologist couldn’t say exactly how far, and ballistics analysis was still in the Stone Age in Dublin so that couldn’t help. She’d been out early in the morning looking for one of her cats among the trashcans when she was hit, and it was nightfall before she was discovered slumped across the step by one of the waitresses who’d sneaked out to the yard for a cigarette.

What kind of radical Marxist terrorist targets both wealthy right-wing judges and politicians
and
radical nuns turned dispossessed vagrants? Sweeney’s attitude was give him three months and a fifty per cent increase in his budget and he’d find out – and he might have got it if Fitzgerald hadn’t gone over the head and against the specific instruction of the Assistant Commissioner who nominally oversaw the murder squad to keep control of the case. Ego came into it – wanting to keep Sweeney off her territory – but she was also deeply convinced that, whatever strange motivation the misnamed Marxman had, politics wasn’t it.

He wasn’t even making any attempt to communicate with the press or police, and killers with causes rarely lost an opportunity to make their voices heard.

Sweeney had backed off begrudgingly, but he was still there in the background bitching like a girl, determined to make life as difficult for Grace outside the department as Dalton was making it inside. The only difference was she now had his balls for a souvenir of their encounter and she wasn’t going to let him forget it. Not that she had time to enjoy the triumph, since the Marxman enquiry was now rapidly expanding like some malignant vermin-carried virus, consuming every moment of murder squad time to the point where stabbings in Portobello must have felt like some kind of surreal relief. She’d never been under so much pressure. A nervous public. An overexcited press. It wasn’t a healthy mix.

And it wasn’t helped by the fact that, for the three weeks since the last shooting, the murder squad had been in that terrible stasis which afflicts all police departments when dealing with a serial offender. They knew he would strike again, knew that even now he would be selecting, identifying, perhaps even watching his next victim. He was in what those who study such matters call the trolling phase, and all the police could do was wait, trying as best they could to predict the killer’s next move, an almost impossible task, and meanwhile sifting the few fragments of clues they had so far in their own hands.

What seemed obvious was that the Marxman was deliberately trying to make sure there were no possible connections between the victims, teasing investigators occasionally with the hint of a link, and then switching 180 degrees to throw them off the scent again. Everything pointed away from a pattern. The Marxman shot both men and women, from different social classes and different parts of the city; he shot them in the head and chest, from point-blank range and distance; he shot at night and in the morning.

The only solid connection, in fact, was that he only ever fired one bullet, and that each of the victims up until tonight had been killed in or through a door of some description.

Doorways: entrances to another world?

Thresholds.

A symbol of crossing over, passing through, from one state to another?

It wasn’t much, but I guess every psycho needs a trademark.

I’d tried to keep the case out of my thoughts as much as I could. Tried to stay serene, detached, uninvolved. Not because what was happening didn’t fascinate me. Nothing would have made me happier than to be working with Fitzgerald on such a case, to be sharing it, and I knew she felt the same, because without that connection between us there was bound to be a huge part of her world that I couldn’t enter. But it was easier if I took two steps back. This was her life, not mine anymore, and I couldn’t pretend a place for me in it into existence.

Thus my role in the affair hadn’t stretched so far beyond that of an interested spectator. Last few months I’d been writing regular updates on the case for an American crime monthly. The job paid peanuts but it kept me feeling like I was still in the loop, still had something to say. But even then we kept things separate, because she’d have been compromised if anything had appeared under my name which could be traced back to her. All I could write was what was in the public domain, so anything I did find out independently – like the fact that the Marxman always carefully picked up the empty shell casing that was ejected from the pistol on firing, which I’d learned from some young cop I’d buttonholed in a bar and spent a couple of hours pouring drink into, knowing he’d crack if I was patient – I’d had to make sure appeared elsewhere before I could use it.

And now here was Felix Berg threatening to blow apart those neat boundaries I’d erected between the two separate worlds.

As I sat there on the harbour wall, watching Dalton yell at the other cops whilst trying to belatedly secure a scene he’d been treating with contempt until a matter of minutes before – and meanwhile waiting for the car Dalton had ordered up to take me to the nearest police station to complete my statement, probably just to get rid of me before Fitzgerald arrived – I went back painstakingly over what Felix had said to me on the phone that night.

Someone is trying to kill me
.

What had he known? What had he seen? Had he unwittingly peered into the dark that he had spoken of and seen the Marxman? Maybe even recognised the Marxman? That would certainly explain why someone might want him silenced, want him dead.

But why had he come to
me
?

And more importantly, how had the Marxman known where to find him tonight?