The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) (29 page)

‘Just tell me one thing before you go,’ I said quickly, afraid now that he would be out of here even before I’d managed to ask him my question.

‘Did you kill Felix?’

There was no hesitation.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘It was the best thing I’ve ever done.’

And he pointed the gun at me.

‘I’m really sorry about this,’ he said.

At that moment, two things happened.

The first was that a shout came from the other side of the street and Dalton emerged from behind the Dumpster, yelling: ‘Police! Put down the gun!’

The second was that the scene was lit suddenly as if by a spotlight, and the stranger froze as the joyrider I’d heard in a nearby street took the corner at a squeal and came tearing down the centre of the road, swerving from side to side, the whoops of laughter bursting out from the open windows of the stolen car. Normally I’d have been wishing the nihilistic little punks just hit a wall and be done with it, but now I was glad of the light because it illuminated the place where I was standing, and in the instant before he threw up his hand to shield his eyes from the glare I had a chance to see the stranger’s face for the first time.

I knew him.

I
knew
him.

But from where?

Then it came to me. He was the guy in pinstripes who’d been watching me in Burke’s store the day after my apartment was trashed. And I’d seen him somewhere else, I realised. He was one of the three men in the photograph with Tim Enright, the one that Boland had snipped from a magazine and added to the victim’s file.

Why hadn’t I recognised his face in the picture? Because I hadn’t been looking that closely at his colleagues, only at Enright, and out of pinstripes he looked a different person.

Out of pinstripes, maybe he was.

The stranger’s face right now was a study in panic as he looked between Dalton and me, like he was trying to make up his mind which of us was more of a threat. And then, incredibly, he pointed the gun back at me even as Dalton was walking towards him.

I wasn’t scared. Why should I be? The gun wasn’t loaded.

But even though I knew that, my blood was still ice as the stranger took aim and fired.

My ears sang. My eyes burned with the flash from the blank shell. But there I still was, standing, looking at the stranger with his arm outstretched, the gun still clutched in his fingers.

‘Put your hands up and kneel down on the ground,’ said Dalton. ‘Don’t bother trying to escape. You’re surrounded.’

And he barked into his radio: ‘We got him.’

The stranger looked up the street, and down, as if confused by the emptiness, but he threw down the gun anyway, and didn’t resist as Dalton finally reached him and told him to turn round. But as he turned, I saw his hand slip into his pocket and he drew out something that flashed like silver, and before I had time to cry out a warning, he spun round and the silver disappeared inside Dalton’s jacket, and Dalton gave a gasp and fell to the ground on one knee.

The stranger turned and ran.

I hurried forward, and knelt down next to Dalton. He was clutching the jacket at the waist where he’d been stabbed, and his fingers were black with blood.

‘I’ll go and get help,’ I said.

‘Fuck help,’ he said. ‘They’re on their way.’

‘They should be here by now.’

‘They’ll be here. Just make sure he doesn’t get away. Go on.’

I still wavered.

‘You’re losing him, for fuck’s sake. Go! I’ll be fine. I’ll call through for help.’

So I ran in the wake of the fleeing stranger, feeling vulnerable without a weapon, without protection, hardly knowing what I was doing or what I’d do if I did catch up with him.

Hold him hostage with a lighted cigar until help arrived?

I could hear his footsteps in some side street, and turned the corner just in time to see him run into an alley on the other side. I followed blindly, and a cab sounded its horn as it narrowly missed hitting me, but didn’t slow down or stop to find out how I was, just blared a horn in protest and hurtled on, the neighbourliness of a city captured in one brief second of shock.

Behind me I heard the sound of sirens as the police backup finally arrived.

Where had it been?

But by this time I was over the road and moving away from the scene, and the stranger with the knife was even further ahead, dashing through one valley of dark brick after another, turning the city into a maze in the hope maybe that the pursuit would get lost; but I could see him more clearly now because he was among streetlights, and I ran as fast as I could, one of those times when I wished I had taken Fitzgerald’s advice and got more exercise, for my heart was creaking with the effort of keeping up as I negotiated more streets, more corners, my furious footfalls amplified by the echo bouncing off the encroaching walls, more—

I stopped.

I was in a small square of abandoned, broken buildings, where people had once lived, right in the middle of all these factories and warehouses, frightened trees hemmed in by railings in a communal garden dead centre, and I was surrounded by watching windows, shards and shadow, and doorways boarded up and transformed into canvases for obscene graffiti.

He couldn’t get out from here – unless he’d entered one of the houses.

Unless this was where he
lived
?

I rejected the idea as fanciful. He was hardly likely to lead the pursuit to the place where he lived. And no one lived here surely?

Certainly not a man in pinstripes.

Was he merely waiting then for a chance to double back and escape?

Or luring me into danger?

I thought of Dalton and went cold. Coming here alone didn’t seem such a smart idea now, but I couldn’t turn round. Trying to keep my breath steady, I made my way slowly round the edge of the square, peering through what gaps could be found in the boarded-up doors and downstairs windows at the heaps of rubble within, pockmarked with the glint of used syringes.

Looking for movement.

There was nothing there.

Nothing there.

Nothing—

I jumped back as a filthy bird, disturbed from its sleep, flapped out of the shattered window of a house I’d just passed; and as I watched it circle against the stars and vanish, silence settling once more like snow, I looked back at the house and knew:
He’s in there
.

Call it a sixth sense.

I retraced my steps, noticing this time that one of the planks that covered the doorway was loose. I moved it to one side, and a gap appeared, wide enough to squeeze through.

I wished I had a torch.

It was dingy inside.

There might be rats.

Might?

There was no might about it.

It was only when I was standing in the hallway, brushing the dust and dirt off my jacket, that I realised there was someone sitting hunched on the stairs.

I’d walked right into his trap.

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

But even now that I was here he didn’t move, and he must have heard me enter.

He was sitting bent forward, arms folded, his head resting on the place where they were crossed. The knife dangled limply from his fingers. Dalton’s blood stained the edge.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, without looking up, ‘I’m not going to kill you.’

‘Why not? I thought you liked killing people.’

‘I’ve killed enough of them,’ he said.

And he started to laugh strangely, like it was the funniest joke in the world.

He lifted his head and looked me directly in the eye.

He didn’t look like a killer.

Then again, which of them ever did?

I didn’t know what to do. If I could distract him . . . try to cover the ground before he realised what I was doing . . . but no, it was a calculation I couldn’t make.

One wrong move, and—

I could hear the noises of the city, dulled and distant, beyond the walls. I felt like I was in a belljar, like a trapped insect, with the air running out.

The sirens were far, far away.

I could hardly believe that I was here.

With the Marxman?

And as I watched him, I saw the same uncertainty in his eyes, like he was wondering what to do now – and then the next moment it was gone, it was a moon blotted out by a cloud, and he got to his feet and walked steadily down the steps towards me, and I had nowhere to run.

Besides, I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

When he was about three steps away, he halted.

Lifted up the knife between us.

‘It was nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘And I really am sorry about trying to shoot you.’

And he turned the knife round and pulled it hard across his throat. I heard the scrape of it loud against bone.

When the police entered the derelict building a short time later, their arrival putting an end to the hidden scurryings that had begun to converge on the hallway, I was still standing in the same position. I hadn’t moved. I couldn’t move. I was staring down at the slumped body of the man who’d tried to kill me not a half-hour ago, sprawled in a spreading pool of his own blood.

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

‘I can’t believe it. Sometimes,’ said Boland as he drove me back later from the northside to my apartment, ‘I think I don’t understand one thing that’s going on any more.’

All the lights were red against us.

It seemed like a portent.

‘I never liked Seamus Dalton,’ he said, ‘but it’s hard to accept that he could have been killed out there tonight. That I might have come in this morning and he wouldn’t be there giving grief to everyone like he always did. Wouldn’t be there ever again. You know what he said to me the last time I saw him yesterday? I was standing at the coffee machine and he walked up and said:
Why don’t you do some work for a change, you fat fuck, instead of standing around drinking coffee all day?
’ That sounded like Dalton. ‘Imagine if those were his last
words to me. The last thing I had to remember him by. Not
much of a memorial, is it?’

As it was, Dalton was going to be fine. He’d lost a lot of blood, and it was a long time before the paramedics could stabilise him enough to get him to hospital. But there’d be no permanent damage; the wound was messy, but the knife had missed the major organs. The doctors reckoned he’d be out within a few days if he took it easy and did what he was told.

They obviously didn’t know Dalton.

He was already complaining about the bed, most likely.

I could understand Boland’s reaction, though. I’d never known an agent who died in the line of duty, but I’d spoken to more than enough cops who’d lost colleagues to know how bad it could get, and tonight the murder squad had come pretty close. It was bound to come as a shock. The chances of a cop being killed in Dublin were still remote compared with other cities, but it was always a possibility, and tonight would make that possibility seem more real than ever.

‘Still,’ Boland continued, ‘Dalton had a point. That
is
all I ever seem to do these days. Some days I think I’ve got more coffee inside me than the coffee machine itself. I’ve had enough of it.’

I hadn’t really been listening to him up until then. My thoughts were back in that derelict house where George Dyer, as I’d now learned Enright’s former colleague was called, had died. And back further than that in the street when I’d asked if he’d killed Felix and he’d answered:
I did
.

Now he had my full attention.

‘You’ve had enough of what?’

‘Of all this,’ he answered. ‘Being a detective. Everything. I realise that now. I’m going nowhere.’

‘You can change. Healy changed. Look how he’s leapt up the ladder this last year.’

‘It’s not about climbing any ladders. Healy knows what he’s doing. Healy’s a good detective. I’m . . . I’m just a fat fuck who spends all day at the coffee machine trying not to get in the way and wondering how I ended up here, hoping every minute they don’t catch me out.’

I had no reassurance to offer. He wasn’t wrong. He stood out in the murder squad like a nun in a brothel.

‘So what you going to do? Shift departments again? Get a transfer to a desk job?’

Though in truth he virtually had one of those already.

‘I want out,’ he said. ‘Totally. Not half in and half out. One hundred per cent out. I’m through with feeling like a waster for not being a better detective. For a long time now I’ve felt I needed to be moving up, impressing the right people, or I was nothing, and I’ve been crushed when I couldn’t do it.

But I don’t care anymore. I never really did. Tonight’s made me see that. I just want a job where I can clock on in the morning, finish my shift and clock off in the evening, get paid and go home and watch TV. Live a normal life. Spend weekends in the country fishing.’

‘Policing’s a hard job to leave behind,’ I agreed.

‘Cassie’s been telling me that all along. If we’re to have a chance, I need to be there for her. I wasn’t for my ex-wife, Mary, and I screwed that up completely. Cassie already hates what I do. After what happened to Dalton . . .’

I didn’t know what to say to him. Police work was tough on partners, tough on relationships. Dalton being nearly killed would make everyone jumpy, force them to rethink what they really wanted. Cassie wouldn’t be the only partner begging their loved one to bail out once the news had spread.

Even so, the alternative Boland described – nine to five at some computer screen before going home and watching crap on TV – sounded like a living nightmare to me, and scarcely even a living one at that. But if it made him happy, and I suspected it would, it was his life.

And at least he still had one. Dalton so nearly had not. Dalton would agree with me. Maybe we were more alike than I cared to admit. Obsessive, cranky, short-tempered, thinking everyone around us was incompetent, inadequate.

And where had it got him?

Where had it got me?

‘I hope it works out,’ I told Boland, and meant it; but I was glad when my apartment building came into view through the windscreen and I could climb out and be alone again.