The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) (7 page)

‘I’ve never been able to do that,’ I said. ‘It’s not in my nature.’

‘That’s why you’re always getting into so much trouble,’ she said.

‘Not everyone leaves a note,’ Fitzgerald had said, and she was right there, I thought as I left her office and started walking back to my apartment through the incessant crowds.

Sydney certainly hadn’t.

Sydney just got out of bed one morning, didn’t even bother getting dressed, walked down to the railway line at the back of her house, lay with her head on the rail for a pillow, and waited for the morning train from Boston to Washington DC to come along.

Sydney was my sister.

Had been my sister, I should say. Now she was only a memory in my head, and even that was fading. It got harder and harder each year to remember what she had looked like, and I had nothing to remind me. I don’t keep photographs from my past, since most of the time the past isn’t something I want to remember. Besides which, I never thought I’d
need
a photograph to remember Sydney by. I always assumed she’d be around.

No one ever understood why Sydney killed herself either, and what made it worse was that no one but me seemed to care about finding out. She was the only one of my family I really had any feelings for. My folks and I had never got along. I had an elder brother who was so stuck up his own ass with self-importance that he’d lost all contact with the real world years ago. Sydney was the baby of the family. She looked up to me. Didn’t judge me by some fake standard like they did. She accepted me for what I was, same way Fitzgerald did.

She’d been married about a year when she died, and I knew it hadn’t been easy for her. Her husband fooled around almost from the day they got together. Turned out later he’d even been banging one of the bridesmaids. A true romantic. What games he played with her head after they were married I’ll never know, but no matter how I tried to persuade her to get out, get a new life, within that year she seemed to lose all sense that she could escape from his influence, all sense of her own strength. The Sydney I’d known vanished before my eyes as he gradually stole every last part of her and locked it away where she couldn’t retrieve it any more. In the end, Amtrak must have seemed like her only salvation.

A case doesn’t always tie up, there are always loose ends, things that don’t make sense. Sometimes you have to accept that you’ll never get all the answers
.

Fitzgerald wasn’t to know how those words cut me. I’d never told her about Sydney. She knew I had a brother, because he sent me an occasional Christmas card (he didn’t get one back), but Sydney wasn’t something I felt able to share with anyone, not even her. I’d certainly never bought the illusion that talking about something makes it better.

Only one person knew about my dead sister, and that was Lawrence Fisher, a criminal psychologist I’d first met when I was writing a book about profilers and whose advice Fitzgerald had sometimes sought since in relation to cases she was working on. I counted him among my closest friends, not that that was saying much, but even so, the only reason he knew about Sydney was that he’d once spent a couple of semesters teaching out in Boston and by chance had met people who knew me, knew my family. I’d sworn him to secrecy on pain of, well, pain. I always found that direct threats worked best with Fisher. Men are such cowards.

No, Fitzgerald wasn’t to know, but could I really let it happen again? Let someone die on me and never find out why? With Sydney I’d been trying to dig a tunnel to Newfoundland with a sugar spoon, knowing her husband had been to blame for her suicide, convinced that he’d actually insinuated the idea into her head and manoeuvred her subtly towards it, that he was as guilty of her death as if he’d tied her to the railway track himself and driven the train. But the tunnel of logic kept collapsing in on me; no one would listen; they preferred to read Sydney’s last act as a symptom of some internal fragility rather than the crime I knew it was.

Now along came Felix and it was all happening again.

History repeating itself.

Was I going to let it?

********************

I never made it back to my apartment that morning. Some impulse instead sent me walking out towards Kilmainham, up St James’s Gate and into Military Road, and through the gates into the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. I was standing at the door almost before I knew I’d been headed that way, but once I realised where I was it made sense.

Briefly I wondered if they might have closed down the exhibition of Felix’s latest work out of respect. Then I remembered what Burke had said. Death was good for the box office. There were too many bad reproduction postcards and overpriced coffee table picture books to be sold. These places were businesses, after all. I only needed to look at the notices on the board outside to realise that. Finest seventeenth-century building in Dublin . . . restored in the year yadda yadda . . . coffee shop . . . guided tours . . . excellent conference facilities . . .

Christ, who reads this stuff?

For a while I hung around, finishing a cigar, taking my time, thinking about Sydney and wishing I could remember something about her that could erase the image of her leaving the house in her nightclothes and walking so acceptingly to her death, but there was nothing.

As I stood there, other people began to arrive, and I heard Berg’s name whispered repeatedly. Were we all such ghouls? Did death always have to generate this instant celebrity?

I followed them inside, down a long corridor with bare walls interrupted on one side by windows looking out on to a bright, quiet inner courtyard.

By the side of the door at the end of the corridor was a simple white card with four words typed on it.

New Studies. Felix Berg
.

Nothing more. No explanation or analysis, which was a relief.

I stepped inside.

Immersed myself once more in Felix’s head.

There weren’t as many pictures as I’d expected – only twenty-one, I counted, which was not much to show for his first major exhibition since
Unreal City
– but the photographs themselves were incredible. Here was a complete reversal of all the work that had taken my breath away last night as I sat looking at his book on my balcony.

The swarming city with its ghosts in daylight had vanished, but they had left behind them an atmosphere more unsettling and unnerving than ever. The multitude had been replaced by a city of such eerie emptiness that it made you feel lost, lonely, abandoned just to look at it. There was nothing lifelike in them at all, only an utter emptiness, like the world had been abandoned as surely as the
Mary Celeste
, like the watcher had woken and found the world had suddenly become empty and depopulated, and the effect was startling.

The photographs I’d looked at last night had seemed mysterious and shadowy, but now, compared with these, they became in my memory almost too busy, too crowded. Too corrupted by the very things they were repelled by. The new photographs had a stillness, a tranquillity, like Felix had captured something of the possibility of silence and solitude – and loneliness – that existed within the most crowded city.

How he’d even managed to take some of the shots I simply couldn’t begin to understand. All of the pictures had been taken in Dublin, but it was a Dublin from which all trace of life had been plucked. Here was Cornmarket at what looked like mid-morning in the rain, but not a soul in sight. How could he have taken such a shot? Cornmarket was never empty. Here was Greek Street and Westland Row and Golden Lane and Lincoln Place, and the pathway outside Tara Street station, and there was Merrion Square and Earlsfort Terrace, Wicklow Street curving into Exchequer Street, all lit with a steely winter light, and all frozen, embalmed almost, in that same sinister atmosphere of depopulation.

Or were they? The more I looked at these photographs, the more I began to notice something I hadn’t seen before.

There
were
people in the pictures.

Glimpses mainly, faces, details, but there all the same.

Here was a face peering out of a window streaked with rain. Here was a shadow, elongated thinly by a weak afternoon sun, of a figure who must have been standing just out of shot – and the reflection of another, broken into shards on the surface of a puddle. Here was a figure glimpsed distantly in the street, back turned.

In another shot, a trailing foot could just be seen as its owner turned a corner.

Or a hand clutching the edge of a door as it closed. And this? A snapshot placed under the leg of a chair, the face of the person in the shot obscured. They were always there, almost invisible but never quite vanishing, just on the edge of being known, of being seen.

Like they were being watched or, perhaps, were watching Felix.

And I thought: Was that how he’d felt in those final months?

Observed?

Shadowed?

There was something strange about these New Studies, though, and it took me a long time to work out what it is.

Then I saw.

There was snow in some of the pictures.

It was heaped against railings and burying steps and lying along the edges of walls and window ledges and the otherwise bare branches of trees, and in one shot there was even a line of tiny weaving footprints imprinted on it.

And it hadn’t snowed this winter.

I knew that for certain because I have always been something of a connoisseur of snow – it must be my New England genes – and there’s little enough of it falls on Dublin that it has to be savoured when it finally comes, the memory stored away for leaner times.

I read somewhere once that the mildness of the winters here has something to do with the Gulf Stream, but I don’t know about that and never considered it worth my while finding out. Even if I knew why there’s little snow, it still wouldn’t make more snow come.

All I knew was that there hadn’t been a snowflake on the city all winter, so how could Felix have taken some of these pictures since his return from the States in the fall? More likely, I thought, they’d been taken the previous winter, when, unusually, there’d been almost a week of snow and I had relished every second of it, and probably it didn’t matter much.

If he wanted to pass off old work as new, after all, it was none of my business. They were equally impressive whenever they were taken. Summer, fall, winter: who cares?

But as I looked closely to check that I was right about the weather, I noticed something else that was less easy to dismiss. A blurred street sign reading
O’Brien’s Place
.

The air caught in my throat.

That was where Tim Enright had been gunned down by the Marxman.

A coincidence?

Quickly I began to scan the other photographs to find what I was looking for.

Grosvenor Square.

Main Street.

The Mansion House, in whose shadow Jane Knox had died. A bitten sickle of moon was clinging on to a black sky above the line of buildings.

They were all there.

In each of the places where the Marxman had struck, Felix Berg had taken a photograph and hung it here on the wall as part of his latest collection.

And maybe there was nothing very remarkable about that. He was obsessed by the killings, Alice had told me so herself. What was more natural than that he would take a shot in the places where the Marxman had taken his own shot before him? He thought murder was the key to understanding a city. But this exhibition had opened on New Year’s Day.

Before the Marxman even killed his first victim
.

I stood and stared at the photographs, checking, double-checking, making sure I was right, that there could be no doubt, before turning round and making my way back to the main lobby to find a telephone.

I called Alice.

‘It’s Saxon,’ I said soon as she picked up.

‘If you’ve called to commiserate with me on my brother’s untimely suicide,’ she said sarcastically, ‘don’t bother. Some detective who was there that night – Seamus Dalton, is that his name? – called about an hour ago to give me the results of the autopsy.’

‘I wasn’t calling you to commiserate.
I
don’t think things are as simple as the police believe.’

There was a long silence before she answered, so long that I began to suspect she must’ve hung up.

‘You’d better come round,’ she said at last.

The front door was slightly ajar when I got to Alice’s house. I nudged it gently with my foot, stepped into the hall. Behind the door lay a scrap of paper, folded twice and apparently pushed through the letterbox. Glancing up to make sure no one was there, I crouched down and hastily unfolded it. Inside someone had written:
Alice, call me. Please
– Gina
.

I heard a noise upstairs and guiltily replaced the scrap of paper on the floor.

‘Alice?’ I raised my voice.

A face appeared at the top of the stairs.

‘It’s you,’ she said. ‘Close the door and come on up.’

I shut the door and walked up the stairs to the first floor, wondering if Alice had left it open for me, and if she had, why she hadn’t seen the note on the floor.

Unless she’d wanted me to see it too.

The first thing I noticed when I got upstairs was that she was carrying some clothes over to a bag on the table and laying them neatly inside, pushing them down with her hands to pack them tightly before returning to fetch more from a room off the main living area.

She was wearing dark glasses, though the sun wasn’t bright.

‘What are you doing?’

The words were out of my mouth before I could remind myself I had no right to be asking her questions.

She looked at me for a moment, judging what lay behind the question perhaps, then said simply: ‘I’m going away for a few days. I’ve had reporters bothering me since they learned that Felix was dead. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing, they’ve been knocking at the door, looking for me to say something about Felix. Some of them even offered me money. For what, I don’t know.’ Her face creased with distaste. ‘Did you not see them outside?’

‘I didn’t see anyone,’ I said truthfully.

‘You didn’t?’

Alice’s face showed surprise. She laid down the clothes she was carrying on the arm of the couch and crossed the room. Standing a little back from the windows, she peered out into the lane below. She looked puzzled, almost alarmed.

‘They must have gone,’ she said. ‘For now.’

I couldn’t help wondering if Felix’s death had made her a little paranoid. Not to mention why she would leave the door ajar if she was being bothered by reporters.

‘You should say something to Grace . . . the Chief Superintendent,’ I said to her. ‘She might be able to get someone detailed to watch the house and keep the reporters away.’

Not that Fitzgerald would thank me for saying so. The DMP was stretched enough as it was without offering protection from the paparazzi to bereaved art critics.

Alice shook her head anyway.

‘I can deal with it myself,’ she said, and for the first time I glimpsed the frost lurking behind the apparently timid, controlled façade. Alice. There was ice in her very name. ‘Besides, I’m not sure that having them around wouldn’t almost be as bad as the press.’

She returned to her packing. She was taking rather more than I’d have expected for the few days she’d said she was going away, but I reminded myself again that it was none of my business. And it must be tough being here after what had happened to her brother. I could understand the need to escape. I’d felt it after Sydney died too.

‘I wouldn’t go too far if I was you,’ I contented myself with warning mildly.

‘I’m just going to find a hotel. Book in under a false name. Get some rest.’

‘The police might need you again, is all.’

Something in my voice must have alerted her, despite all my efforts to sound casual, because she said: ‘Who are you? Really? You told me when you came yesterday that you weren’t
in
the police.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Well then, all I can say is that you certainly talk like you are sometimes. What are you even doing asking all these questions about Felix?’

‘I’m not with the DMP,’ I said, ‘but I did use to be a special agent with the FBI, and I’m close to Grace Fitzgerald, the Chief Superintendent you met when you went to identify Felix’s body. Old habits die hard, I guess you could say. I just want to know what happened out there in Howth the other night. Why Felix called me.’

‘The police already think they know what happened,’ she said disparagingly.

‘You don’t think Felix killed himself ?’

‘Of course I don’t believe Felix killed himself,’ Alice said. ‘Why would he have done such a thing? He wouldn’t have thrown away his life, his gift, like that. For nothing. He wouldn’t have left me alone. He didn’t even
have
a gun. And he wouldn’t have known how to use it even if he did get his hands on one. That’s just one more thing which makes all this so absurd. First they say he killed himself. Then they say he had a gun. What are they going to tell me next? That he was wearing women’s underwear when he died?’

‘The autopsy report said he had gunshot residue on his hands,’ I said.

‘I’m not an expert,’ Alice said. ‘All I know is that my brother wouldn’t have killed himself. And you hinted on the telephone that you thought so too.’

‘I’m just trying to play devil’s advocate,’ I said. ‘Trying to see it from the point of view of the police.’ I hesitated, knowing I was treading on dangerous ground. ‘You did say the other day that Felix wasn’t sleeping, that he was pushing himself too hard.’

‘He was often like that,’ she confessed. ‘Just before
Unreal City
came out, he suffered a breakdown. And then, last year, he started showing some of the same signs.’

‘Was this after he was attacked in town?’

‘You know about that?’

‘It was mentioned in the obituaries,’ I said. ‘But there was nothing about him suffering a breakdown afterwards. I was just putting two and two together.’

‘It’s not the sort of thing we wanted getting out. Being attacked affected him badly. He was suffering from severe headaches, he was in a deep depression, it seemed like he was lost to us. We felt we needed to keep it secret. Vincent—’

‘Sorry?’

‘Vincent Strange. He’s a friend of ours. He’s devastated by all this. He handled the sale of a lot of Felix’s work. He owns a gallery here in Temple Bar.’

That was where I’d heard the name. He was the genius who’d written all that garbage at the start of Felix’s book about reality being contingent.

‘He and I got together and decided the best thing was to take Felix away somewhere till he got better, so people wouldn’t talk. I took him out to New England, moving around: Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire. We were there about six months. It was difficult at first, but slowly he began to pull himself round, to get a grip on things again, enough that we felt it was safe for him to come back.’

‘When was this?’

‘October. And we found him a new physician here, he was on a new cocktail of medication, he was better than he’d been for a long time. He opened his new exhibition. And then shortly afterwards the damn Marxman started his own work and Felix became, like I told you, obsessed, and it seemed like all our good work was being undone.’

‘You say he was better than he’d been for a long time,’ I said. ‘Was that why he wasn’t taking photographs anymore?’

The silence was forty below.

Her look made forty below seem tropical.

‘Who told you?’ she said.

‘Lucky guess,’ I replied. ‘I went round to see the photographs in Kilmainham. That’s where I called you from. That’s
why
I called you. I happened to notice there was snow in some of the pictures, but there was no snow in Dublin between his return in October and January when
New Studies
opened. He couldn’t have taken them when he said he did.’

‘Are you going to . . . say anything about it?’

‘Why should I? I like them. Doesn’t matter to me when they were taken.’

‘You’re right about the dates,’ she said. The frost was melting somewhat now she could sense I wasn’t out to damage Felix. She even stopped carrying clothes over to her case, and came and sat down opposite me, leaning forward slightly like she wanted to make sure I understood what she was saying. ‘He told me himself that they were taken last winter. He hadn’t taken any pictures since he got back from the States. Not since he started to get better. He said it was gone. His creative urge. His eye. He said he was seeing things differently now and he didn’t want to take any more photographs.’

‘Not ever?’

‘He said it had been a burden to him for years and he didn’t want to do it anymore.’

‘The only problem being,’ I said, ‘that he had an exhibition coming up?’

‘Vincent had arranged it for him. Felix didn’t want to let him down. And he said he needed the money. He’d spent plenty of it during his breakdown the previous year. If he was going to start a new life, he needed more money. I told him we’d be OK, I have money enough of my own, but he took out the old photographs and pretended they were new. The gallery never noticed. They were just delighted to have anything from Felix, even if there were so few. They liked them very much. Said they thought they were among his best work.’

‘Maybe someone else liked them too,’ I said. ‘Maybe even liked them too much.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘Have you seen them?’

‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘He never let me see his work before it went on show, he never showed it to anyone before he was totally happy with it, but I went with Vincent to the official launch, and then back by myself a few days later to have a closer look.’

‘And since then?’

‘Have I been back, do you mean? No. Why?’

So I told her how the photographs were taken in the same locations as the Marxman killed his victims, and whilst I told her I watched as she took a small bottle of pills out of her pocket, shook three on to the palm of her hand and lifted them to her mouth.

I wasn’t sure if she even realised she was doing it.

Had the doctor prescribed her them after Felix died?

‘That’s impossible,’ she was saying. ‘The exhibition opened on New Year’s Day. The Marxman didn’t kill his first victim until mid-January. You must be mistaken.’

‘You’re looking at it the wrong way round,’ I said. ‘The important thing is not that Felix was obsessed by the Marxman killings, but
why
he was obsessed. What was it about these particular murders that drew him towards them? There are plenty of murders. Too many murders. What was different about these murders that made him fixate on them? I think it was that he knew the locations of the shootings were the same ones hanging on the walls out at Kilmainham with his name on them.’

‘You’re saying the Marxman went to the exhibition, saw the pictures, and deliberately killed those poor people in the same places? Why?’

‘That I don’t know. But I do know that it’s the only answer that makes sense. The only answer that explains why Felix became obsessed from the start. The Marxman shoots Tim Enright in O’Brien’s Place. Felix thinks that’s a strange coincidence, but not so significant. Then Judge Prior is killed in Grosvenor Square and he starts to notice a pattern. By the third and fourth killings, there’s no doubt. How could he
not
become obsessed? He never gave you any indication that’s why he was so consumed by the Marxman?’

She shook her head in bewilderment.

‘You never noticed, even in passing, the same link yourself?’

‘No. You’ve seen Felix’s photographs. You could be looking at your own house and not know what it was. He made everything seem alien. Unrecognisable. He had the gift for taking things and making them his own. Refashioning them through his own eyes. Often I
never
knew where they were taken. He wasn’t one to talk about his work, and he always went out alone to take the shots. After nightfall, more often than not.’

‘The Marxman obviously recognised where they were,’ I said.

Alice got to her feet again and walked back to the suitcase she’d been packing, putting in the last pile of clothes and letting fall the lid, zipping it round briskly, then starting on the straps.

Keeping her hands busy whilst she thought.

‘Did you tell this to the police?’ she said as she worked.

‘I called the Chief Superintendent.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That she’d send someone round to take a look,’ I said.

‘There’s a but there.’

‘There’s always a but,’ I said. ‘The Chief Superintendent said that even if the Marxman did choose the places to kill based on Felix’s photographs, then that only explains why Felix was obsessed, not who the Marxman is, and that’s all she cares about. She said it is not like it’s practical to put surveillance on all the remaining seventeen locations out of the twenty-one photographs in the vague hope that the Marxman might turn up one night. She also said that what I’d told her just added to the argument that Felix killed himself. If he thought the Marxman was using his pictures as a template, she said, then Felix might’ve felt responsible in some way for what was happening, and it was his guilt which drove him to the lighthouse.’