The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) (15 page)

But before I could decide whether to admit as much to Alice, and thereby risk opening up again that Pandora’s box which Fitzgerald had warned me about, the door of the church suddenly slammed open and a voice called out harshly: ‘Alice?’

Bear-like Strange in the fur coat appeared round a pillar.

And this time the bear had come with a sore head.

‘You’re here,’ he said testily, holding out his hands in a gesture of impatience at Alice. ‘Everyone’s asking what’s become of you. What are you doing in here?’

‘Saying hello to Saxon.’

His eye caught mine briefly, but he barely took me under his notice. It was like he wanted to pretend he didn’t remember me, make me feel too insignificant to warrant a place in the memory bank of so august a human being as Vincent Strange.

‘Hello doesn’t take three-quarters of an hour.’

‘It didn’t. Don’t exaggerate, Vincent,’ Alice said with a sigh. ‘And stop fussing. I’m coming.’ And she put her hand on the pew in front and pulled herself to her feet, refusing the hand he stretched out to help her. To me she said: ‘Another time.’

‘I’ll call.’

‘I’d like that.’

And then the bear bore her away, and I realised she’d said nothing about why, if she wanted to be friends and she was back in the house, she’d returned none of my calls. I waited a while longer before leaving, by which point the mourners had all drifted away; the press pack was following, even the crows had dispersed.

Only a single figure still waited by the gate.

He looked up when I stepped out and offered a smile.

‘It’s about time. What were you doing in there? Confessing all your sins? No, couldn’t have been or you’d still be in there.’

‘Fisher, you fat old fraud,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I knew you’d be pleased to see me.’

‘So you know Miranda Gray?’ said Fitzgerald.

It was late afternoon, and we were sitting at a table in the window of a restaurant in Coppinger Row. It was still cold, which was why the tables outside were all empty, and people walked by huddled inside overcoats, shuffling over intermittently to look at the menu.

‘Know her in every sense of the word, isn’t that right, Fisher?’ I said.

‘Please, you’re making me blush,’ Lawrence Fisher said, though of course the only colour in his increasingly fleshy cheeks was coming from the wine we’d ordered to go with the pasta. ‘Miranda and I went to university together, both studying psychiatry. She was a very brilliant student. We had a little thing going on for a while, though we both got over it. It’s long past now. Our paths diverged.’

Hers into a lucrative private practice treating rich artists who’d come to the conclusion that their misery was not just a symptom of the human condition shared by everyone, but something utterly unique to them and well worth spending thousands trying to cure – an optimistic view of the benefits of therapy which their therapists did nothing to dissuade them of – whilst Fisher had gone into criminal psychology, spending years in prisons interviewing killers, honing his research, before he’d leapt on the opportunity afforded him by a book I’d written on offender profiling, in which he figured prominently, to shuffle off the constraints of a normal job and embrace modern media stardom instead.

He now wrote two books a year, and appeared in numerous TV programmes and videos, many of them bearing his name (
Lawrence Fisher’s World of Criminal Masterminds
was a particularly risible example I’d caught a glimpse of whilst switching channels late one night, though I had to admit I’d enjoyed it thoroughly), whilst salving his conscience for having given up that less lucrative but unarguably more worthwhile former position by working, often unpaid, for Scotland Yard, and the Dublin Metropolitan Police too when he could, as a consultant on a string of obdurate cases

He was overworked, overfatigued, overweight, and I had never once seen him lose his temper, or heard of it happening. Whenever he felt his patience fraying, he often said, he just thought of his large house in Highgate, his second home on the beach in north Cornwall, a third in France, and the school fees he had to pay for his five children.

Zen calm descended instantly.

Not that the Zen calm had stopped his beard going greyer than I remembered since we’d last met.

What I liked about him was that he didn’t pretend he was doing anything other than blundering his way through, doing his best. His best was as good as it got, as it happened, but still he didn’t play the infallible card like some of them did, didn’t pretend that he was the Pope with a direct line to unquestionable truth. Nor did he cod himself that the creeps he worked with could ever be cured, which was another tick on his bonus card to me. Psychologists generally thought they had the answer to everything. They seemed to think that if they could just figure out what traumas or deprivations lay in a killer’s childhood then all their subsequent distorted development could be understood, and fixed, like a car mechanic taking an engine apart and fitting the pieces together again so that it ran smoothly.

It was a lie, and a dangerous one, but they stuck to it.

‘I’ve always kept in touch, though,’ he was saying now about Miranda Gray. ‘Christmas cards, postcards from holiday, phone calls, the occasional lunch when we were in the same town at the same conferences.’

‘Olive approves, does she?’

‘How many times do we have to go over this? My wife’s name is Laura, as you well know. And what’s there not to approve of?’

‘I’ve heard those conferences can be awfully full of temptation.’

‘You heard right. The late nights, the heavy drinking, the heady excitement that comes from listening all day to tenthousand-word papers from some crackpot out of Eastern Europe who wants to prove a link between the shape of a man’s toenail clippings and his criminal tendencies. It can all get too much and we just rip each other’s clothes off and leap into bed. It’s an orgy out there. But I’ve a bad back these days. Not to mention that I’m a very happily married man who couldn’t afford the child support payments if my wife caught me misbehaving. Hence I am a veritable paradigm of virtue.’

‘So how come you’re here in Dublin with her?’

‘It was chance,’ Fisher told Fitzgerald, ‘as I’ve been explaining patiently to Saxon all afternoon. I’d contacted Miranda to tell her that a TV producer I knew was looking for fresh talking heads for some new programme he was making and that I’d recommended her and she should look out for his call. I could tell she was concerned about something. We got talking. She told me that one of her patients had committed suicide.’

‘And you came hurrying over here to save her, her knight in shining armour?’ I said.

‘If you insist on seeing it like that.’

‘Hold her hand? Offer a shoulder to cry on?’

‘Saxon, you make it sound almost lascivious.’

‘I’m just trying to see it through Daphne’s eyes.’

‘Will you stop bringing my wife into this?
Laura
knows there’s nothing going on between Miranda and me. That spark died long ago, to be replaced by a small flame of mutual respect, admiration and friendship. She’s had a tough time, it’s hard when a patient dies. I thought a bit of mutual support would be in order, especially with the funeral.’

‘Is that what they call it now? Mutual support? Maybe we should be honoured you’re wasting your time here with us then,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t you be at her place consoling her?’

‘She’s working until late,’ he said with dignity. ‘We’ve arranged to meet after. Not that it’s any of your concern. And not that there’s much I
can
say besides offering my commiserations. It happens all the time. Dealing with suicides is an occupational hazard for a therapist. The prisoners were always hanging themselves when I worked in the jails.’

‘No loss there then,’ I said under my breath.

Fisher gave me a disapproving stare.

‘Did Miranda tell you who it was had died?’ asked Fitzgerald.

‘Not at first. There was no reason to. I hadn’t even known Felix Berg was Miranda’s patient, how would I? It was private, confidential patient-and-doctor stuff. But once he was dead . . . well, there wasn’t the same need to protect his privacy.’

‘Which is
how
she came to let slip something very interesting,’ I said to Fitzgerald, ‘which is
why
I suggested we meet here so you could hear it for yourself.’

‘Thanks for sparing me the trouble of telling her in my own time,’ said Fisher.

‘Stop griping and just tell her.’

‘Well?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘Miranda told me,’ said Fisher, ‘that Felix Berg confessed to being the Marxman.’

I don’t think Fitzgerald could’ve been more amazed had Fisher told her he was having an affair with Seamus Dalton. She looked between the two of us without saying a word, almost as if she was trying to decide if this was some tasteless joke.

‘I know it sounds incredible,’ Fisher said, ‘but that’s what he told her. I couldn’t believe it myself. Of course, I’d been following the case in the newspapers. Now Miranda was telling me one of her patients was confessing to being the killer. Shortly after the second shooting she had a session with Berg and he came right out and said
he’d
killed Terence Prior. That he’d been waiting in the shadows at his house and simply shot him.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘He said he felt like doing it. Straightforward as that. When he was in America – Saxon here tells me he’d had a breakdown and was out there recuperating or something – he told Miranda he’d started frequenting gun clubs and got a taste for it. He’d managed to smuggle a gun back into the country and had decided to start killing.’

‘Like you do,’ I said grimly.

‘But it’s absurd,’ said Fitzgerald.

‘Naturally it was absurd, that was the point. Miranda was in a turmoil, wondering what she should do. On the one hand she had to respect the professional relationship between them. On the other hand she couldn’t simply ignore what he’d said. Two people had died at this stage. What if Felix really was the Marxman and he went on adding more victims to the total? Besides which, she realised she herself was in danger. Either he
was
the Marxman and might soon decide that she needed to be killed before she could expose him, or else he
wasn’t
the Marxman, in which case what game was he playing? Was he delusional? Was he potentially violent? Either way, she felt uncomfortable.’

Fisher lifted his glass, noticed it was empty and flagged down a passing waiter with that immediate authority which men seem to have in public spaces. What is it that makes waiters ignore women? Do they take exams in it or does it just come with regular practice?

‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he continued whilst he waited for the bottle to come, ‘that Miranda is not the sort to flirt with danger. She comes from a very good home, middle class, father was a consultant surgeon, mother organised lunches for various charities. Don’t get me wrong, she became a therapist out of a genuine desire to help troubled people—’

‘Rich troubled people,’ I corrected him pettily.

‘But she never pretended she was getting down and dirty with the real crazies. She preferred dealing with neurotic and, yes, Saxon, well-off people telling her each week that they felt their mothers didn’t love them. Now suddenly, this.’

‘So she turned to you.’

‘Not at first. Mainly because she knew what my professional advice would have been. I’d have told her to take it directly to you, privately if she didn’t want to betray her confidences with Felix, and let you decide how to handle it; and she tells me now that she hadn’t reached the point at which she felt able to do that. You have to understand, she’s one of the old leftist hippie crowd, she thinks the authorities would’ve come down hard on Felix and she’d be responsible. So she waited. She only involved me after Felix was dead.’

‘What was she doing in the meantime?’

‘A spot of amateur sleuthing,’ said Fisher with a wry smile. ‘Very like Miranda, let me tell you. She found as many details as she could on the Marxman, became quite an expert, and then cross-referenced that information with what she knew about Felix.’

‘And what did she learn?’ pressed Fitzgerald.

‘That when the first victim was killed, Felix was in Stockholm.’

‘So it couldn’t have been him?’

‘Exactly. He may have spent all the time in the world hanging out in gun clubs in the States but even that couldn’t teach him how to fire a shot in Stockholm and have it hit a futures trader in the back of the head in Dublin. So she was reassured, she hadn’t wanted him to be the Marxman obviously; but she was also puzzled, because why had he told her that he was? And then, just as she was beginning to look back through his notes and see if there was anything there that might explain why he’d come up with this elaborate fantasy, he was found dead in Howth and she was presented with a new dilemma: was he killed because he had known who the Marxman really was? Had he been trying to tell her obliquely?’

‘It was a high-risk strategy,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘What if she’d come straight to us with the information about Felix? He might have been arrested, certainly he’d have been questioned. It wouldn’t have been great publicity for a successful artist.’

Fisher shrugged. ‘Maybe he thought he knew her well enough by then to know that she wouldn’t. Or maybe he couldn’t think of a less risky alternative. Or maybe he secretly wanted the police involved, but couldn’t think how to make it happen.’

‘What about simply handing over whatever information he had?’

‘Say a stranger walks in off the street tonight and says he knows who the Marxman is,’ Fisher said. ‘What would be the reaction of the desk sergeant to that?’

‘He’d probably have him hauled away in a white van.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Point taken. But it’s still a stupid risk. So what’s your theory? Same as Saxon, that Felix had found out something he shouldn’t have known and died as a result?’

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ said Fisher. ‘Saxon already told me about the autopsy report. I’ve spoken to Miranda about his depression. There’s nothing suggesting anything other than that Felix shot himself. But you must admit it’s intriguing.’

‘Intriguing is one thing,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘but I still can’t see anything for the pair of you to get so excited about. Felix Berg was clearly some sort of fantasist, wanting to turn everyone on with the idea that there was a big mystery about his life, so that when he did die you’d all not be able to believe things were as simple as they looked and you’d keep digging, digging, digging for some darker, less prosaic hidden secret. Which is exactly what you’ve all been doing, Saxon, Miranda Gray, now you too, Fisher.’

‘We’re just telling you,’ I said. ‘No need to get antsy.’

She was thoughtful for a moment, sipping on her wine.

‘What if he
hadn’t
had an alibi for the first death,’ she said after a moment. ‘In light of his confession, what would you make of Felix Berg as a suspect?’