The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) (32 page)

‘There was a man here looking for you,’ said Hugh the doorman when I got back home.

‘He leave a name?’

‘No.’

‘A number?’

‘No.’

‘A message?’

‘No.’

Hugh was a man of few words.

Most of them unintelligible.

‘He leave any lasting impression on you whatsoever?’

Hugh considered the question.

‘He had a beard,’ came the answer.

‘We’re getting somewhere,’ I said encouragingly. ‘Stay close by me now, Hugh, and I think together we can pull through this one. Tell me. Was the beard kind of short and all salt-and-peppered with grey?’

Hugh looked impressed with my clairvoyancy skills.

‘It was.’

‘And did the bearded one have a waistline that made him look in some lights like he was one of our larger planets which had fallen tragically down from space and ended up wandering the streets of Dublin looking for a new orbit?’

That was probably too many words for Hugh to take in all at once, but he worked his way through them one by one, chewing them over carefully like a mouse that had picked up too large a portion of cheese but knew its teeth could get through it given time.

‘I didn’t think he was
that
fat,’ he said eventually.

‘I do.’

It had to be Fisher.

I called him from the lobby, and it turned out he was in Brown Thomas, a big old-fashioned department store in Grafton Street on the other side of St Stephen’s Green. So as it was, I didn’t get to go up to my apartment anyway.

‘I was looking for something to bring back for Laura and the children,’ he said when I caught up with him on the fourth floor.

‘You going back to London?’

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘I can’t hang around Dublin for ever.’

‘I’ll miss you,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘But you know, you’ll not find anything for Laura and the kids here,’ I pointed out. ‘This is the menswear department.’

‘I know that,’ said Fisher. ‘I’m also looking for some new shirts. I’m running low. I didn’t expect to be here as long as I have. I could really do with some clean underwear too.’

‘Spare me the details.’

I ended up walking round the racks with him, picking clothes. Taking them off the hangers, making him stand in front of mirrors so he could see what he looked like with them up against him. Fitzgerald would have been astonished. Shopping had never been my thing. As long as I could find something that fitted and kept me warm, I was happy.

One pair of jeans was much like another, after all.

Though the peculiar thing was that choosing for Fisher was making me more fussy. I found myself irritably replacing shirts he’d picked out with a terse: ‘Not your colour.’

What was happening to me? I was turning into a girl.

On the way to the counter, Fisher filled me in on what progress had been made in the last few hours. The murder squad, it seemed, had been able to identify over half the people in the snapshots and managed to speak to about half again of that number.

They all told the same story as Miranda Gray.

A man had called inviting them to be at a particular place at a particular time to have their photograph taken as part of a series of pictures to be entitled
Strangers
. All had made their way to the named location, only to find that the caller never showed. Each had been irritated, perplexed, but none had a clue who the mysterious caller had been.

And none had ever heard from him again.

Could it really have been George Dyer?

‘There’s certainly a similar type of thinking going on there,’ said Fisher. ‘Whoever took those photographs wanted to
shoot
the subjects as a trophy. Shoot them on film, in his case, but the methodology and language are uncomfortably close. He wanted to capture these people so that they became part of some collection. He was thinking like the Marxman. One shot per victim. It can’t be a coincidence.’

‘Shooting someone with a camera’s a bit different from shooting them with a Glock .36.’

‘Give me some credit,’ said Fisher. ‘All I mean is that you take something from someone when you take their photograph. They’re in your power in some indefinable way. They’re at your mercy. Even the American photographer Diane Arbus said once that it hurts a little to be photographed.’

I thought of the people in the snapshots in Felix’s locker.

How vulnerable they’d looked.

The photographer
had
taken something from them, even if it was only their peace of mind for an hour. And then he had the record of their discomfort in his possession eternally.

To gloat over.

To enjoy.

Just as he must’ve gloated over the pictures of the other victims after they died.

‘The only problem,’ I pointed out, ‘is that Dyer didn’t even have a camera. Didn’t have one that we could find, at any rate. So if he didn’t take the pictures, who did?’ I felt frustrated, annoyed with myself. ‘If only Dyer hadn’t killed himself,’ I said.

‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ Fisher said. ‘He wouldn’t have talked. Killing himself was a way of imposing silence on himself, but even if he had been arrested he would have embraced silence anyway. I’ve seen it often enough. Some perpetrators come in and can’t wait to spill the beans; it’s getting them to shut up that’s the problem. Others never say a word about what they’ve done. I think Dyer would undoubtedly have been in the second category. Cutting his own throat was the ultimate proof of that. Maybe that’s why he chose the name Dyer for himself. Dying was always going to be his final vocation.’

‘Isn’t it everyone’s?’ I said.

We paid up and I offered to make him dinner, because it was getting dark now and the stores were closing, and still he hadn’t managed to buy any gifts for his children or Laura.

‘I’ll look again tomorrow,’ he said as we walked round to my apartment. ‘You should come with me. I see now you have a talent for shopping that you’ve never properly tapped.’

‘Count me out. I’ve done enough shopping to last a lifetime.’

‘Saxon! Fisher!’

‘Fitzgerald?’

Her Rover had pulled up alongside the kerb suddenly and the window wound down.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Fisher.

‘Gina Fox is dead,’ she said. ‘Get in.’

She was pulling back into the line of cars before I’d even managed to put on a seatbelt. She was hunched forward on the wheel, willing the traffic to disappear.

‘She was found about twenty minutes ago,’ she explained in a rush. ‘It’s not clear how long she’s been dead. I got a call from Walsh. He’s down at the scene. He says whoever killed her must have fired about a dozen shots into her head from point-blank range. Blown most of her face away, according to him.’

‘Where is the scene?’

‘Strange’s gallery. She was lying behind his desk, and the killer had taken another snapshot of her body and pinned it to the inside of the glass in the door. Someone passing noticed the snapshot pinned up, went closer to take a look, realised what it showed and called the police.’

‘I’m not with you,’ said Fisher. ‘If this woman was killed in Temple Bar, aren’t we heading in the wrong direction?’

‘I’m not going to the crime scene. I’m going to Strange’s house. Gina must have trusted the killer enough to go into the gallery alone with him. It wasn’t even broken into. The killer locked up after he left. Where would he have got the key?’

‘Are you saying you think Strange killed her?’

‘I’m saying I don’t believe he knows as little about all this as he lets on,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘We only have his word that he didn’t look at the photographs in the locker. I want to talk to him now before he has the chance to weave himself a neat story.’

Strange lived in a huge house on a private road overlooking the sea in the shadow of Dalkey Hill, set well back behind huge gates and ivy-hung walls.

By the time we got out there it was fully dark, and yet, no, not fully because there was something peculiar about the sky as we turned off into his road.

Something still bright, like a comet.

It took me a moment to realise what it was.

A fire engine stood parked at the entrance, and figures in uniform and wearing oxygen masks were running in and out.

Through the gate, I could see flames.

The dark was vivid with colours.

Fitzgerald pulled to a halt and leapt out. The firefighters at the gate tried to stop her, but she waved her badge at them and they stepped back to let her through, directing her as she requested to the senior officer, who was up close to the fire.

Fisher and I trailed behind her, forgotten in the madness and noise.

It looked almost as if the trees that lined the driveway up to the house were on fire too, but it was only an optical illusion caused by the fierce glow from the flames behind and the powerful arc lights which had been set up and directed towards the house to allow the firefighters to work.

The air was rancid with black smoke that curled through the lights like drifting rags. It felt like it could peel skin from the eyes. The house itself was huge, Gothic, with a turret growing up one side like a petrified tree. The windows all along this side of the house had been punched out by the great pressure within as the flames sucked dry all the air and the fire had nowhere else to go. Inside was a vision of warfare almost, drapes hanging on to rails only by fingers of flame. There was the noise of small explosions deep and distant inside the shell that remained, and the flames roared out erratically at anyone who tried to approach, like the fire was reminding them who was boss. Water was arcing from hoses into the shattered building and glistening almost prettily with the light shining through it; but it was obvious now that it was too late.

I could taste the flames in my throat.

‘That’s where they found the body,’ said Fitzgerald, and she pointed at the hearth.

Morning again, and the sky was drizzle.

We were standing in what had once been Vincent Strange’s house and which was now a blackened, defeated, twisted husk. The stench of smoke was so powerful it was hard to believe the rain would ever wash it out of the air, that it would ever go away.

We were standing in what had once been the sitting room. There was a harsh crunch of glass and ash underfoot as firefighters came and went around us. The walls were thick with what looked like tar. The fire had exposed electric cables that now hung loose, bent into impossible shapes like snakes in the throes of agony. To one side a wall had vanished entirely, collapsing outwards so that, seen from the outside, it looked as though some great creature had bitten off the whole side of the house. The trees seemed to be crouching down to look inside at the destruction. The rain found a way in maliciously. Puddles of black water were pockmarked where the drizzle met the leftover water from last night’s hoses. The chairs were skeletons. I could still sense the flames around me, though it was hours since they’d been extinguished.

Fitzgerald handed me a picture.

More photographs to look at.

It showed a fireplace and a hearth of sandstone with a high arched mirror above it. I could see what remained of it in front of me, shattered and buckled and fused to the wall by the searing heat. In the picture, Strange stood beside the fireplace, smiling.

‘Where’d you get this?’

‘It was taken by a photographer for one of those magazines where the rich and famous parade their houses for the pornographic delight of the masses. Strange’s house was an eight-page spread last July. There’s a whole series of them.’

She handed them to me one by one.

Here was the hall, with a great oaken staircase curling upwards.

Gone.

The kitchen laid with tiles, so she told me, from a twelfth-century abbey in Italy.

Not anymore.

There was even one of Strange lying on his four-poster bed, wearing his fur coat.

And the walls everywhere were covered with paintings.

‘They were said to be worth thousands,’ she said.

Well, he did say he had a certain lifestyle to maintain.

‘Did any survive?’

‘Not that I know of. Saving them wasn’t exactly a priority.’

‘What will happen to the house now?’ I said.

‘There’s nothing to save. The whole structure is unsound, according to the fire investigators who came round this morning. It will probably be knocked down and apartments built in its place. This is prime real estate territory. In fact, last night’s fire is probably what property developers would call a result.’

‘Do you know yet what happened to Strange?’

‘By the time the fire was put out, there wasn’t much left of him. I saw him at the mortuary. He looked like a piece of burnt meat. His face was like one of those things conkers come out of, what do you call them? Horse chestnuts. The lips were peeled back where the skin had blistered and split. It almost looked as if he was grinning. He was unrecognisable really apart from a few pieces of jewellery. We’re sending samples to London for DNA testing. We don’t have the facilities here. The first firefighters on the scene thought he must’ve been overcome with fumes, slumped forward and died where he fell.’

Until the chief fire investigation team arrived. It had not taken them long to establish how the fire had started. The seat of the blaze was Strange’s body itself. It had been doused in petrol and set alight. More petrol had been splashed through the hall, up the stairs, in every room, and the alarms deliberately disabled.

It was little wonder the entire house had gone up as fast as it had.

Suffice to say this was no accident.

As was confirmed when the City Pathologist carried out the autopsy on the few fragments that remained of Strange’s body and found no evidence of any soot deposits in the airways, as would have been expected had he been alive during the blaze.

Suspicion was further pricked by the evidence of ante-mortem wounds to the skin around the skull. Butler surmised there was a strong possibility that the gallery owner had been struck by a sharp object, a poker perhaps, but as always he was hedging his bets.

The skin of fire victims could often split due to tissue contraction anyway, or sometimes because of the movement of the body during removal from the scene.

‘Was he dead already when he was set alight?’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Fitzgerald said grimly.

Thankfully, there’d been no one else in the house at the time of the fire. Strange had had a housekeeper, Amy, but she’d left hours before the blaze broke out.

‘She’s the one who owns the Citroën out front. Did you see it?’ Fitzgerald asked me. ‘She was here yesterday when Strange returned from town early in the afternoon. He must have shut the gallery shortly after talking to you. He went straight to his study, she says, and didn’t come down until teatime. She’d made him something to eat. She sat with him while he ate, they had a glass of wine together, then he told her to go. She took a taxi back to town.’

‘Why not take the car?’

‘There was some problem with the engine. Strange had promised to look at it.’

‘Strange was a mechanic?’

‘You wouldn’t know it to look at him,’ she admitted. ‘But he had a big interest in cars as well as guns. Vintage cars mainly. He’d a whole collection of them out back. About twenty in all. There’s a stable block converted into a garage. Two Rolls Royces. An Alfa Romeo. He spent a lot of time tinkering with them, apparently. Couple of motorcycles too.’

‘So he sent the servant away?’ I said. ‘Did he tell her why?’

‘According to her, he was expecting a visitor.’

‘Male? Female?’

‘She didn’t ask and he didn’t say. But I hear it was well known that Strange swung both ways, so it could’ve been either. She said it happened all the time, her being bundled away when he had visitors. Special visitors. She didn’t really want to talk about it.’

‘Touchy subject?’

‘You know what these old retainers are like. She’s been with Strange for twenty years. Probably didn’t like him having
special
visitors, if you know what I mean.’

‘She must be upset.’

‘Inconsolable would be nearer the mark.’

‘Does she have any idea who might have killed him?’

‘According to her, Strange didn’t have an enemy in the world, though I’m not sure she knew that much about his life outside the house.’

‘No one saw this special visitor arriving then?’

‘No.’

‘Which means you can’t even confirm there
was
a visitor,’ I said. ‘An expected visitor, anyway, because someone obviously turned up. Maybe Strange just told the housekeeper he was expecting a caller to get rid of her and free up his evening.’

‘Precisely.’ Fitzgerald stubbed her toe impatiently against a heap of ashes. ‘I can’t get my head around it at all. Strange is dead. Gina Fox is dead. The only one who knows anything about
her
is Boland, and he called through this morning to give in his notice and I haven’t been able to reach him since for love nor money. I think he may have gone away for a few days with that new woman of his.’

‘He’s quit already? He told me he was thinking about it.’

‘I haven’t even had time to get down to the mortuary to talk to Butler about the gun that killed Gina. I spoke to him briefly on the telephone and he says it was some old piece like the one Felix Berg got from Strange, so did it come from here? It must have done. And to make matters worse, I’m supposed to be down at the hospital right this minute dropping in on Dalton and meeting his mother and various siblings to reassure them that their beloved was not stabbed in vain.’

‘Dalton has a family? I didn’t realise there was a danger of his DNA spreading. Do they drag their knuckles along the ground when they walk too?’

‘Why don’t you head over there and find out for yourself?’

‘I think I’ll give it a miss,’ I said. ‘I doubt Dalton would want to see me. He’d probably just take it as an excuse to start giving me aggravation again. And I certainly don’t want to start getting it from his family too. They probably blame me for what happened.’

‘You don’t need to worry about them. I don’t think they have any illusions about him being some kind of saint. Besides which, I think he’s almost feeling humbled. He knows he’ll get a bit of a carpeting over what he did the other night. Turns out that when he was hiding behind the Dumpster waiting for our friend to turn up, he issued fresh orders to the back-up team to stay well back so that he could have the glory of capturing the Marxman all to himself, and that’s why they didn’t manage to get there in time to catch him before he ran.’

‘So it’s safe to say Draker isn’t in a great mood?’

‘What do you think?’ said Fitzgerald. ‘This hasn’t exactly helped,’ she added, sweeping her arm round to include the burnt-out building. ‘He’s been going round shrieking about the whole thing like some old woman. Wants to know exactly what happened. Wants reports on his desk in five minutes or there’ll be trouble. Every i dotted and t crossed, and the other way round as well. He’s just pissed off. He thought the Marxman case had been closed down, and then this happens. He’s wondering what next. He wants answers.’

‘This is a worrying development, him learning proper policing.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far. Strange was a friend of his, that’s all. He didn’t mind signing off on the Marxman case and ordering drinks all round at the golf club with the Commissioner. But now Strange is dead, it’s different. It’s the old cliché: This time it’s personal. Strange was one of the gang. He wants blood.’

‘Mine, probably.’

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ she said, and I almost laughed grimly in that dark, burnt-out place before seeing that she was serious.

‘Christ, what’s my motive for killing him meant to be?’

‘Draker hates you. That’s all the motive he needs. He also hasn’t forgotten that Strange threatened to take out a restraining order on you when you were harassing him.’

‘Not that one again. I already said I wasn’t hara—’

‘Also,’ she held up a finger to stop me before I got started, ‘he’s already told Healy – in the strictest confidence, which was why Healy came straight over to tell me – that you could easily have got from the Forty Foot to Strange’s house in time to set the fire.’

‘How does he know I was at the Forty Foot?’

She shrugged.

‘You must have been seen. It’s a public place.’

‘OK, but when the fire was lit, I was shopping for shirts with Fisher. You were the one who picked us up in town.’

‘You looking for an alibi?’

‘Might well be, if Draker has his way.’

‘Then we’ll negotiate when the time comes. But be warned, I strike a hard bargain.’

‘Very funny.’

We walked back into what remained of the hall of Strange’s house, and saw through the crippled doorway Sean Healy and Patrick Walsh standing talking to the chief fire investigator. They must have been asking where Fitzgerald was, because he raised a hand and pointed back towards the burned-out house.

Healy quickened his step when he saw us coming out.

‘What have you got?’ said Fitzgerald as he got near.

‘A number of possible IDs came in this morning for George Dyer,’ he said. ‘Seven reckon it’s their husband, despite the fact none of said husbands appear to be dead which makes it highly unlikely that any of them are our man. One reckons it’s the US President. One claims it’s the woman who comes to do her gardening. Figure that one out. But three say – are you ready? – that the man in the photo is definitely one Brendan George Toner, formerly of Howth.’

‘Lucy Toner’s brother,’ I said.

‘Is that the girl who was murdered all those years ago?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘When Felix and Alice lived in the house around the corner, the very same,’ I said. ‘Boland tried to track down the family, but he didn’t have any luck. The parents were both dead, the sister was in care, the brother had dropped off the map, was how he put it.’

‘Well, he seems to have reappeared on it now.’

An image came to mind of the faded photograph in the house of the man we’d thought of as George Dyer. The woman with the letters ONE above her head. That must have been the sign on the Toners’ store on the sea front at Howth.

It must have been his mother.

‘That’s all I need,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Another complication.’

‘Who did the IDs come in from?’ I asked.

Healy consulted his notebook.

‘One from a man who used to live in the same street as Toner and said he’d recognise him anywhere. An old woman who said she remembered going once a week into the shop the Toners ran down by the harbour, and what a pleasant, well-mannered boy Brendan was.’

‘He certainly changed.’