The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) (22 page)

‘What was she like when you got there?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘On edge,’ Elliott said. ‘It wasn’t like her. She kept asking about the Night Hunter, whether the police were close to catching him. She asked about the other victims too.’

‘It’s understandable she’d be concerned,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Prostitutes were dying.’

‘That’s what I thought at the time. This morning, when I heard what had happened to her, I realised she must’ve been worried because she thought she might be next.’

‘She never said anything to you, though? You just went round, opened a bottle of wine—’

‘We didn’t have wine.’

‘No need to get touchy. I meant it metaphorically. You went round to her apartment, you indulged in a little pillow talk about the local serial killer, and then?’

‘Then I screwed her and left, yes. End of story.’

‘You screwed her? You really need to do some work on the language of love, Elliott. You don’t want to be disrespecting your beloved, especially now that she’s no longer with us.’

‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t kill anyone. Christ, I didn’t even know she was called Nikola-whatever-it-is until I got a call this morning that another body had been found. Even when I went round to the building, I still thought it must be someone else the police were talking about. She never told me her real name.’

‘Sounds like you had one hell of a relationship,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘if you didn’t even know her name. Someone certainly knew it.’

‘How many times do I have to tell you? It wasn’t me,’ Elliott insisted. ‘Someone must have come round after I left. Isn’t it obvious? You should be trying to find him instead of harassing me. I know she wasn’t killed until after nine, and I was out of there by eight thirty. At the latest. You can check the CCTV at her apartment if you don’t trust me.’

‘There’s a slight problem with that,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘There isn’t CCTV at her apartment, so it’d be impossible for us to check exactly when you left. But then maybe you knew that already.’ She raised a hand to silence him before he could protest again. ‘Plus there’s one other thing puzzles me. If you didn’t kill Nikolaevna last night, how come you know so much about what time she died? Did I mention what time she died?’

‘I have my sources,’ said Elliott.

‘These sources have names?’

‘I can’t tell you their names. I have to respect their confidentiality.’

‘Like you did with Brendan Harte?’

‘That was different. If I tell you this, my career’s finished. People need to know they can trust me.’

‘And what do you think’ll happen to your career if you’re charged with murder?’

‘I am not telling you my sources, Chief Superintendent. It’s a matter of principle.’

Before Fitzgerald could continue, there was a knock at the door of the interrogation room and Seamus Dalton walked in.

He was smiling at Elliott with that lopsided, smug smile of his as he bent his lips to Fitzgerald’s ear and whispered. A raised eyebrow was all that his words drew from Fitzgerald till Dalton stood up straight again, clicking her tongue as if unsure how to break the bad news to Elliott.

‘When the crime tech team came to lift the body of Mary Lynch,’ she began, ‘they found a bottle placed underneath her. A Coors Light beer bottle, just like the ones in Nikolaevna’s fridge. We couldn’t figure at the time what it was doing there, but we took it away anyway and checked it for fingerprints.’

She waited until Elliott looked up before continuing.

‘Guess whose prints they matched?’ she said.

Healy drew in his breath sharply. This was a risky tactic. There was nothing in the rules said Fitzgerald couldn’t lie to Elliott, but she’d lose the initiative if Elliott realised it was a lie. And the reporter’s immediate response suggested she’d blown it, she’d lost him.

‘You found my what?’ screamed Elliott. ‘How could you have found my fingerprints at the scene? I was never there. I didn’t kill Mary Lynch. I’d never even heard of her before!’

‘Like you didn’t kill Nikolaevna?’

‘Yes!’ Elliott pushed back his chair noisily and made to get up, then changed his mind as Dalton stepped in to stop him. Fitzgerald hadn’t flinched. ‘You’re . . . you’re setting me up!’

‘Why would we set you up?’

‘Well, someone is! I’m not going to sit here and let you do this to me. You’re trying to sleepwalk me into incriminating myself. I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid. I thought if I only explained to you what happened, that you’d see I couldn’t . . . that I didn’t . . .’

‘You can still explain,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Still make us see.’

It was too late.

‘This has gone far enough. I want a lawyer.’

‘Are you asking for a lawyer?’ she said. ‘Because you know, Elliott, if you bring in a lawyer, I’ll not be able to help you any more.’

‘Get me a fucking lawyer. Now.’

‘Your call,’ Fitzgerald said, and she looked at that moment almost wearier than Elliott. ‘Just one last question. Will any lawyer do, or does it specifically have to be a fucking one?’

I made my way to the vending machine out in the corridor for coffee, but I couldn’t find the right change. Fitzgerald came along just as I was kicking the machine to make the cup drop down.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘I have change.’

‘No need.’ The coffee had suddenly started to appear, though now that I saw it I wasn’t sure I should’ve wasted a kick on it. ‘Must be my woman’s touch,’ I said. ‘You OK?’

‘I blew it. I should’ve taken my time. I pushed him too fast.’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. You did good,’ I said, taking a sip from the cup. ‘It’s not like you have the time for niceties. It’s not your fault that trying to pull a fast one on him about the bottle backfired.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Fitzgerald. ‘The bottle happens to be true. That’s what Dalton came to tell me. Elliott’s prints matched.’

I could hardly take in what she was telling me.

‘But then why didn’t they show up before? The staff at the
Post
all gave their prints to Boland to check against the first letter.’

‘No one thought of matching the prints with that sample until now. We haven’t got our fingerprint records on computer yet, you know that, so unless someone thinks of cross-checking them manually, it wouldn’t come up. We only took the prints from the
Post
’s staff to see if we could isolate the killer’s prints on the envelope, not get a match with the bottle.’

‘Elliott’s prints,’ I said. ‘I can hardly believe it. And the worst of it is, I could’ve sworn Elliott couldn’t believe it either.’

‘I know. I couldn’t tell if he was shocked at realising he’d left incriminating evidence behind when he killed Mary Lynch, or because he couldn’t figure out how his prints had ended up there when he was never anywhere near the place.’

‘It was beginning to make sense too,’ I said. ‘Elliott’s book, the obsession with Fagan; he’s still going on about it and what it could do for his career. Not to mention the split from his wife. Relationship breakdown’s a classic stressor. If he was writing his book, living with Fagan in his head all that time, while outside it his life was going down the toilet, maybe it’d be enough to send him over the edge.’

‘If it’s that easy becoming a psychopath,” said Fitzgerald, ‘we should have picked up Jack Mullen days ago. He’s had to live with his father’s crimes in his head far longer than Nick Elliott. Unless, of course, it was the other way round all along.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Don’t you remember what Ed Fagan said when we first questioned him? He claimed he’d only become obsessed with the Night Hunter murders and offered his help to the police because he suspected his son had committed them. He was always trying to pretend everything he did was for some higher motive.’ She stopped. ‘Saxon, are you OK? You look like someone just walked over your grave.’

Not mine, I wanted to say. It was the memory of another grave that had suddenly immobilised me. One that she’d seen herself only too recently.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Back in my apartment, I lay down on the couch, feeling dizzy. The same thought kept coming back to me. Ed Fagan wasn’t the Night Hunter. It was his son.

I’d killed the wrong man.

Lying there, I made a list in my head of those earlier deaths, remembering the dates. Julie Feeney, late October; Sylvia Judge, early December; Tara Cox, late January. After the first three deaths, a gap of six months before the final two.

Police had been intrigued by that gap at the time. Had the killer been out of the country during those months? In hospital or prison? Had he managed to stop himself temporarily for fear of being caught, or out of shame, only for the urge to kill to grow too intense again as the months passed? Then Fagan had been picked up and charged with two of the murders and the questions had effectively ceased. There were enough demands on everyone’s time, enough other cases to be dealing with. The killer was caught, so why worry about the small details?

But what if the original hypothesis had been right? What if the killer had stopped killing during that time because he was out of action in some way? What if he’d been someplace where he had nothing to do but nurse his fantasies, watch them fester, until, able to act them out once more, he could unleash them in furious succession on Liana Cassidy and Maddy Holt?

Then it hit me with a jolt.

Fagan’s son had been imprisoned once for – what was it? Stealing cars, that was it. Next question. When?

Pulling myself to my feet, I dragged the box in which I kept the notes on Fagan out once more, tipped it upside down and ransacked the scattered papers till I found what I wanted.

There it was.

For four of those six months, Jack Mullen had been behind bars in Mountjoy Prison serving a sentence for car theft.

The room was spinning again. I needed to sit down. I held my head in my hands and closed my eyes and cursed myself for a fool. How could I have forgotten what he’d said about his son? I’d been so convinced Fagan had killed those women, I hadn’t even given a thought to Jack. How could I have missed that the dates tallied?

Now Jack Mullen’s name was staring out at me from my own notes like an accusation. In the clockwork of my head, the cogs started locking together. The dates. The forensic traces in Fagan’s car: Mullen must have been using it. What if Fagan had been unable to account for the presence of the green twine in his car because of the simple fact that he didn’t know it was there?

Even if I had killed the wrong man, of course, I’d still done so in self-defence. Fagan was going to kill me that night. Not because he feared I was about to expose him as the killer, perhaps, but because he feared I was about to expose his son.

I remembered him coming at me, I remembered the flash of the gun. I knew I’d done the right thing, or it would have been me buried in a shallow grave in the mountains for the past five years, not Fagan. Me or him: simple as that.

I’d made the right call.

But that wasn’t making me feel a whole lot better. Instead I felt soiled. I felt wicked. I felt— wait. Why had the eyewitnesses described seeing someone of Fagan’s age and build? Why had he persistently inveigled himself into the investigation from the beginning? That was more likely to draw the police’s attention in his and his son’s direction.

And why – Christ, why did I have to keep remembering that night? – had he said to me when I came across him in the wood: ‘You know, Saxon, I think I’m going to enjoy you best of all’?

His last words. Not quite up there in terms of poetry with ‘this is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done’, but they were seared into my memory all the same.

Most of all, if Mullen was the killer, why would the killings have stopped for seven years? And that was when the next thought started to take shape. The thought which said: what if father and son had been in it together? What if they murdered together? It wasn’t so rare to find potential killers needing one another’s encouragement in order to fulfil their shared fantasies, to become what they each dreamed of being.

Without that encouragement from Fagan any more, that fatherly nurturing, maybe Mullen simply didn’t have it in him to carry on alone – till now. And the more I thought about it, the more the theory that Fagan and his son had been working together made sense.

Take that night. I remembered shooting Fagan and burying his body; I remembered the dark wood; I remembered a car revving up and the sweep of headlights through the trees.

Who had that been?

Some innocent passer-by had been my thought at the time. But what if it had been Mullen? Mullen waiting in a stolen car to take his father home. He was good at getting hold of cars. Not so good that he didn’t get caught now and again, but good enough. That would explain at least how Fagan had got into the mountains that night. That was one thing I’d never understood. When police went to follow up reports that he’d gone missing, they found his own car parked outside his house where he’d left it. At the time, I’d just presumed he was being clever. Of course he wouldn’t have taken his car with him. I was scheduled to die, and Fagan wouldn’t take the risk that, if my body was ever found, his car could be placed at the scene. I wouldn’t have taken mine if I’d known what was to happen that night either.

But then how did he get into the mountains? Police had never managed to trace Fagan’s movements that night. No taxi drivers came forward with memories of having taken his fare; none of the bus drivers recognised his picture as one of their passengers – and there weren’t so many people travelling into the mountains after nightfall that they were likely to forget. Five years ago, I’d come to the unsatisfactory conclusion that he must have made his way there on foot from the nearest train station, or else hitched a lift and the driver, luckily for me, had not seen the appeals for information about the whereabouts of his passenger that night. Now I saw that it was more likely to have been Mullen.

Mullen drove him there, then waited out of sight whilst Fagan went into the woods to kill me. Waited till he heard the shot and realised what must’ve happened. Fagan never owned a gun, after all. At which point he fled, panicked, afraid.

True, the theory didn’t make complete sense. If Mullen knew what I’d done, why had he never come after me himself? I wasn’t the hardest target to get at if he wanted revenge. Or why hadn’t he tipped off police anonymously about what I’d done? But for all its faults, I kept coming back to those same basic facts: a car revving up, Mullen’s four-month stretch in jail to account for the gap in the first sequence of killings, his time in London when Fisher told me more prostitutes had been attacked, the return of the Night Hunter motif since Mullen had returned to Dublin. It was too many coincidences to be coincidental, and certainly too many to ignore. I needed to talk to Lawrence Fisher. Now.

* * *

My first mistake was to call his house in north London. The phone was picked up by his au pair. She was from the Far East somewhere and sounded like English wasn’t even her second language, never mind her first, but she understood well enough that I wanted to speak to Fisher and communicated well enough back that he wasn’t there.

I tried his office next. His secretary told me that Dr Fisher was out of the country. I knew that, I explained, because it was me he’d come to see, but he ought to be back by now. She said she didn’t know anything about that. Was there a number where he could be contacted?

She said she didn’t know that either.

Anyone I could speak to?

No.

Did she ever wonder, I asked finally, how she managed to keep her job despite obviously having the intellectual capacity of an amoeba?

She said she didn’t like my attitude.

I said I didn’t like that she was an idiot but we were both going to have to live with it.

The line went dead.

Scotland yard next. Inspector Neil Taylor was the name Fisher had given me, and he proved easier to track down, at any rate.

‘I recognise your name,’ he said once I’d introduced myself. ‘Lawrence told me all about you. He said you wrote books, isn’t that so? Maybe I should pick one up, eh?’

I tried not to sound too impatient, but my words came out quickly as I tried to stop him starting a conversation.

‘Is Fisher there now, Inspector? I really need to talk to him.’

‘You’d have more idea where he is than I would,’ he said.

‘Me?’

‘Fisher’s not going to be back here for a few days. He called me last night, said he was staying on in Dublin a while longer. He had the photographs couriered over to me this morning; you just caught me as I was heading out the door to show them round.’ He paused as if not knowing what else to add. ‘Did he not tell you?’

‘There must’ve been . . . a misunderstanding.’

It sounded feeble, but I couldn’t think of any word right now that would cover the fact that Fisher hadn’t been straight with me.

Why hadn’t he told me he wasn’t going home?

And more to the point, where the hell was he?

I extricated myself from the call as quickly as I could and sat staring out beyond the terrace to the tempered steel of the sky, a coldness creeping over me. Eventually I phoned the airport and asked to be put through to the British Airways desk.

‘Hello, how can I help you?’

‘I want to check whether a passenger made a connection to London Heathrow last night.’

‘And you are?’

I explained about the investigation, dropped a few names and a few hints without quite admitting that I didn’t have the authority to be delving after Fisher’s personal details.

‘It’s important,’ I added as a footnote.

‘Hold on a moment.’

I heard the rattle of a keyboard in the background and a tannoy announcing the last call for a flight to Düsseldorf.

‘What flight did you say he was on?’

I gave her the flight number. ‘It was scheduled for take-off last night at twenty-two hundred hours.’

‘Yes, I have it here. What was the name again?’

‘Fisher. Dr Lawrence Fisher.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘there was no one on the plane by that name.’

Maybe he’d used a different name.

‘Could you try the night before?’ I said. ‘A flight came in from Heathrow at twelve fifteen, I met him off the plane.’

More rattling.

‘Yes, according to the records a Dr Fisher was booked on to that flight.’

‘Does it say when he was due to return?’

‘I’ll check.’ She checked. ‘It was a one-way ticket.’

‘A one-way ticket?’

‘That’s right, madam.’

‘Right, I’m going to ask you to do something for me.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘I want you to check all the flights that left Dublin last night for London. All airports, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, see if Dr Fisher was booked on to any flight. Can you do that?’

‘It may take some time.’

‘Quick as you can. I’ll give you my number.’

Nothing made sense any more, I reflected bitterly after I hung up. The only reason Fisher would have me take him all the way out to Dublin Airport when he had no intention of making a flight was to fool me into thinking he’d left the city when in fact he was still here.

But why would he want to do that? He’d got what he’d come for; at least he’d got what he’d told me he’d come for. I couldn’t suspect him of being involved in anything sinister, I simply couldn’t, but it was difficult to imagine any benign reason why he would have lied to me. The one thing I had to cling on to was the hope that I’d misheard him when he told me he was on the 2200 flight, or that he was the one who was mistaken and he’d actually been booked on a later plane. That still wouldn’t explain the one way ticket, but one step at a time.

Half an hour later, the girl from British Airways called back. Fisher’s name had not appeared on the lists for any of the flights leaving Dublin for England last night. He was still in the city. And he obviously didn’t want me to know where he was.