The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) (36 page)

‘What did you do?’

‘I used my nuclear option,’ said Gina. ‘I told him who I was. I told him I’d seen what he did to Lucy. I reminded him of details even he’d forgotten. There was no point him denying it. And I told him that if he exposed me, then I’d expose him.’

‘How did he react?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘He went very quiet. He told me he needed time to think it over. What I didn’t realise was that was just a front. He told me he felt dizzy. He asked for a glass of water. And while I was in the kitchen getting it for him, he grabbed hold of all the photographs I’d taken of the
Strangers
series and the victims, put them in a bag, and fled. He called me from his house and told me he’d say nothing about me being the Marxman, but that if anything was to happen to him or his sister in the meantime, then the photographs would go straight to the police.’

‘And to be sure,’ I said, ‘he asked Strange for a gun to protect himself and Alice.’

‘I didn’t care about that. All I cared about was getting those photographs back,’ said Gina. ‘They were mine, I needed them, I wanted them. So I persuaded Brendan to go to Felix’s house, break in, and find them for me. My brother knew I was the Marxman by then, of course, but he didn’t know what to do. He begged me to stop, but when I said no he had nothing to threaten me with. I was all he had left. He couldn’t turn me in to the police. He’d only lose me that way. So he agreed to try and get the photographs back.’

‘He was the one who broke into their house that time?’

‘He was, but he didn’t find the photographs. What he found instead,’ she said, ‘was Felix’s journal, filled, so he told me, with charming clippings and quotes about our dear sister’s departure, and he realised that Felix had killed Lucy. He’d always trusted it was Isaac Little and now, by utter chance, he discovered the truth. He was so shocked that he forgot to even bring it with him when he left. But it wasn’t as if he needed it any more. He had all the evidence he wanted. Everything that had gone wrong in our lives, so far as he was concerned, stemmed from the moment Lucy was murdered, and now he had the chance to put it right.’

‘It was after the break-in that Felix decided to give the photographs and the journal to Strange,’ I said. ‘He knew they weren’t safe at his house.’

‘Especially when Brendan started following him, and calling him up in the middle of the night and telling him he was going to kill him for what he’d done to Lucy. I tried to make him see that it was no use, that he might be wrong, but he just knew.’

‘I still don’t see how he managed to kill Felix.’

‘Well, I can only tell you how Brendan told me it happened. He said he took the Glock without my knowing and followed Felix to the harbour that night. But Felix did something unexpected. He pulled a gun on Brendan too. It was the old piece Strange had given him, a bit like this one, I suppose. So there they both were with guns pointed at one another, and that’s when Brendan told me he came up with the perfect plan to kill Felix. He told Felix they could shoot it out if he wanted, but he had a Glock and Felix had an old thing that hadn’t been fired in fifty years and who knows how it would turn out? He said they could do that if Felix wanted, but if Felix died and Brendan lived, then he would find Alice, rape her, strangle her and fill her mouth with soil until she choked, just as
he’d
done to Lucy. Or—’

‘Or,’ I said, suddenly understanding, ‘Felix could shoot himself.’

‘Exactly. He could put the gun to his own eye, pull the trigger and die there, just like our mother had done. And if he did, then Brendan promised to let Alice go unharmed.’

‘How could Felix know your brother would keep his side of the bargain?’

‘He couldn’t know it, but what else could he do?’ said Gina. ‘The Glock was pointed at his head. He knew he was going to die one way or another. His one way of keeping Alice safe was to do what Brendan told him. So he had to make a choice. And he did.’

‘Weren’t you furious that your brother had killed this man you claimed to love?’

‘Not really,’ said Gina. ‘Lucy meant nothing to me, but I understood Brendan’s need for revenge. When he told me later what pleasure he’d got from standing there and watching Felix put the gun to his eye – stand there, shaking – then pull the trigger and blow his face away . . . well, let’s say I recognised that pleasure. And at least Brendan did something. Felix only talked. The only thing Felix ever shot was pictures. I told you, he wasn’t the man I thought he was. He’d failed. The very fact that he’d do that for her, for that snivelling bitch, just showed how pathetic he was. How could he prefer her to me? How could he think that dried-up cow was worth sacrificing his life for?’

She glanced up at an unexpected noise, but it was only the dying driftwood shifting in the fire, sending out a brief bright burst of light. The light sparkled along the barrel of the gun.

‘As for that,’ she added, ‘what was done was done, I wasn’t going to spend my life brooding on it. I was the Marxman now, I’d outgrown him. I had work to be getting on with. I didn’t even need to make things fit Felix’s pictures any more. I was free. I was a little careless at the church, but that’s because I was so furious with the newspapers for saying Felix was killed by the Marxman. By me. How stupid could they be? I had to show them. I didn’t realise by that point that you already knew Felix had shot himself, otherwise I’d have waited till I was better prepared. I made a mess of it, I admit. That’s why I picked the magician next time and whispered that dumb message in his ear. So I could slip the card under your door, Saxon, and spin you that ridiculous line about the Tarot. I was just trying to buy more time while you went haring off up one blind alley after another before you clicked it was baloney.’

‘We never believed it for one moment,’ Fitzgerald said, and I saw Gina bristle with annoyance. ‘The only thing that really threw us was how the killer knew where Brook lived.’

‘That part was easy. I’d taken his picture too,’ Gina said. ‘He came from Germany as a kid, didn’t you know? His parents’ original name was Bruch. Like the composer. He was another of my
Strangers
. The only thing that messed it up was losing the damn gun.’

‘But big brother rode to the rescue.’

‘Like I say, he thought I was
ill
. He felt responsible for me. Especially when I insisted on getting another gun. I knew I could get one from Strange. Felix had told me about Vincent stealing money from his artists. But Brendan wouldn’t let me go and get the gun myself. He said it was too dangerous in that part of town, can you believe that? He said he’d go instead. I agreed – on one condition. That he killed the woman who handed over the gun. And that was going to be you. I know you were beavering away at Felix’s death, trying to figure out the truth. I didn’t want to take the risk that you might get to it. That’s why I broke into your apartment and left the photograph on your wall. To try and scare you off.’

‘You did
what
? Saxon, is this true?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ I said, avoiding her eye. ‘It was the night of Felix’s funeral. I came home and found the place trashed. I didn’t want to make an issue of it.’

‘An issue?’ echoed Fitzgerald in disbelief.

‘That hadn’t worked anyway,’ said Gina. ‘You still wouldn’t let it go. So I realised you had to die. Brendan didn’t want to do it, but he wanted to protect me more, and I made him see there was no other way. But you were one step ahead and he must’ve panicked.’

‘Did you care about
him
any more than you cared about your sister?’

‘I cared about his white cat. Gorgeous creature. Have you met? I’m surprised you didn’t recognise it, Saxon. I took rather a lot of pictures of it at one time. Don’t you remember looking at them on the table that first day you came round to ask me about Felix?’

The white cat.

I did remember now. Too late, but I remembered.

Mainly how I’d been glad the cat was only in the photographs and not curling round my feet and tripping me up like Hare.

Why hadn’t I remembered when it might’ve helped, like when I was standing in the garden of the man I thought of as George Dyer, watching it sit on a path?

I remembered other things too.

A wooden staircase.

A window cracked like a web.

Why hadn’t I recognised them?

‘Don’t you even feel ashamed that he sacrificed himself to save you?’

‘Why should I feel ashamed?’ Gina said. ‘It was his decision. It was his throat to cut. Don’t get me wrong. I can see what you’re saying. He obviously thought that if the police believed the Marxman was dead, they’d leave
me
alone. I guess it was a nice gesture when you put it like that, but I still think he was nuts.’

‘
He
was nuts?’ said Nye. ‘I think you’re
all
nuts.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Gina, ‘but I’m the only nut with a gun.’

‘So what do you intend to do with it?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘Do you really have to ask?’ she said. ‘I intend to protect myself.’

‘By coming here after Nye?’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Why? He has nothing on you.’

‘I didn’t come here after Paddy,’ she said dismissively. ‘I can deal with him later. I came here after you two.’

And she raised the gun and pointed it at Fitzgerald’s head.

‘No!’

The cry escaped without thought from my lips, and I took a step forward.

Gina just smiled to see how she’d got a reaction from me – but she didn’t smile for long. At that moment a shadow rose behind her, holding something ragged against the light, and the shadow brought the ragged shape down on to Gina’s head, and Gina slumped suddenly to the sand and dropped the pistol. Fitzgerald kicked it out of her reach before she could clutch hold of it again, and Gina just tutted and raised her hand to her head, and then looked at her fingers in the firelight where they were covered in blood.

‘Ouch,’ she said sarcastically. ‘That hurt.’

‘Fuck you,’ said Nye’s wife, and she dropped the driftwood to the ground.

I’d been wondering how long she was going to be gone fetching that wood.

It was late. The sky was scattered with stars and reddening at the edges, and I was on the balcony, catching a moment, when I saw Lawrence Fisher finally arrive.

The cab pulled up on the other side of the road and he clambered out, waiting till it had pulled away before crossing over. He didn’t look up. He didn’t see me.

I pulled open the glass door and went back inside.

Fitzgerald was talking to Miranda Gray on the couch whilst Healy listened. Thaddeus Burke was pouring drinks, enjoying the experience of making free with my whiskey for once instead of me making free with his. Walsh had skipped an invitation. He had some woman he wanted to take out. ‘Can I help it if I’m irresistible to women, babe?’ he’d said when I told him about the party.

If you could call what we had here a party.

‘He’s here,’ I told them, and instantly they fell silent and got to their feet, and I crossed the room to open the door for Fisher.

He came in a few moments later, looking tired, sombre.

‘She wouldn’t see you?’ I said.

‘I saw her all right,’ he said with a mock shudder. ‘That’s what’s wrong.’

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ said Burke as Fisher pulled off his coat and filled an armchair.

‘Sit down,’ he said to everyone. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

So we did.

Fisher had spent much of the day with Gina. He’d been sent for because, ever since being caught, she’d refused to speak a word to anyone, including her own defence lawyer.

Though what
was
there for her to say? Her fingerprints had been matched to the gun used in the Marxman killings and to the photographs which were found in Felix’s locker. Forensics were pretty sure they could connect her to the fire in Strange’s house. Under her clothes they’d even found a necklace threaded with the spent shells from the Glock, and there was gunpowder propellant residue ingrained into her clothes. The rest was joining the dots.

Fitzgerald still felt there was more that could be learned about Gina. She wasn’t idiot enough to think there was anything which could explain what Gina had done, which could provide a straightforward why. She just wanted to know what Fisher made of her.

Fisher looked up as Burke brought over the whiskey.

‘I shouldn’t really,’ he said. ‘I’ll not sleep.’

But he didn’t look like he’d get much sleep that night anyway, and he took the glass and sipped the whiskey, lost in thought.

‘If you’d like to leave this to another time . . .’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s get it over with. Not that Gina seemed to find the experience particularly stressful. She spent most of the time laughing at my new shirt.’

‘A mad bitch
and
no taste,’ I said.

‘In my experience,’ he agreed, ‘the two tend to go together.’

‘Did she talk?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘She talked.’

It turned out that Gina had talked plenty.

‘I think maybe she was impressed by who I was,’ Fisher said. ‘Intrigued that I was intrigued. She’d seen me on TV, she said. I guess she thought she was getting some second-hand celebrity status from being interviewed by me.’

‘Your biggest fan,’ growled Burke.

‘The worst kind,’ said Fisher. ‘Frankly, the problem wasn’t persuading her to talk. The problem was getting her to shut up.’

‘She talked a lot out on Ireland’s Eye too,’ I said.

‘The only time she really let me in on the conversation,’ Fisher said, ‘was when she asked what I thought of her, of what she’d done.’

‘What
did
you think of her?’

‘That was the problem,’ said Fisher. ‘I told her I thought she was quite a common case, psychologically speaking. I don’t think she took too kindly to the notion of being un-extraordinary. I guess it’s not very flattering to the ego.’

‘Every killer likes to think they’re unique,’ I said.

‘Common?’ said Healy. ‘Getting pleasure from watching your sister die is certainly what I call unique.’

‘Not even that is so unusual,’ said Fisher. ‘Everything goes back to childhood. Research shows that violent offenders have often had violent fantasies from as young as seven years of age, sometimes younger still. Children can take it further and kill too. If they can do that, why be so surprised by Gina? Sometimes people do bad things because they’re born that way, they’re primary psychopaths, but mostly it’s just because something happens to them in childhood, a confluence of events which makes them what they are.’

‘Innocence gone bad,’ said Healy.

‘Exactly. You take a paradigm of a normal, happy childhood and then you see how it can be bent, skewed. If something goes wrong along the way, then what we call normal starts to become distorted, and who knows what comes out at the end? Not a normal, happy adolescent anyway. And Gina’s childhood was screwed up long before she saw Felix kill her sister. She had the classic signs. A dysfunctional home. Psychologically damaging parenting.’

‘What was wrong with her parents?’

‘According to what Gina said to me tonight, both she and Lucy were forced to watch their father screwing their mother throughout their childhoods. His behaviour towards them was very sexual. He never actually raped them, but he touched them, made them touch him, touch each other. He used to beat them too and make them watch as he beat their mother. So it wasn’t as if seeing Felix rape her sister was an entirely new experience.’

‘Did no one know about this at the time?’ said Healy.

‘From what Fitzgerald tells me about the records,’ said Fisher, ‘it seems not.’

‘Is Gina telling the truth?’

‘We’ll never know that,’ said Fisher. ‘We can only guess at the past by looking at what happens in the future, and what she went on to do seems to me to be consistent with what she says happened in her childhood. The neglect, the emotional and physical abuse. Then, when her own sexuality began to blossom, there was little chance that she would be unaffected. She didn’t know what was normal behaviour. Didn’t understand about affection. So when she saw what was happening to her sister, she didn’t have an alarm in her head that told her it was wrong. The only question was, how would her sexuality develop under those circumstances? And I think we have our answer. She found it exciting. Sexually stimulating.’

It’s always the same. Killers turn natural, healthy qualities into diseased ones. Sexual desire becomes depraved lust. A need for money becomes corrosive greed. The need for self-assertion becomes a compulsion to destroy whatever undermines it. Discipline becomes obsession. They take normal appetites and heighten and distort them.

‘What made matters worse here,’ Fisher went on, ‘is that she looked up to Felix already. The Bergs were well known in Howth. Wealthy. Educated. Cultured. They were what many people wanted to be, certainly Gina with her life revolving round the store, the lower-middle-class life. She idolised them. It never occurred to her to question what Felix did, especially when it concurred with so much of what she’d already been taught at home. So she turned what had happened into a sacred thing they had in common and spent her whole life trying to get back to him, trying to re-create that moment, trying to share in that power.’

‘And maybe she would’ve managed it if it hadn’t been for Alice,’ I said. ‘Do you think Alice knew about Felix and Gina working together?’

‘Again, who can say? It seems likely that she knew there was something unhealthy about Felix’s relationship with Gina. Maybe she saw the pictures Felix had taken of her and realised Gina was stirring something in him that was best left unstirred.’

‘Little realising,’ I said, ‘that Gina wasn’t the sort to take being thwarted lightly.’

‘Killing all those folks is some over-reaction to being dumped,’ said Burke.

‘Not so uncommon,’ commented Fisher. ‘I talk to prisoners all the time in jail who’ve killed their partners and often other members of their partners’ families simply because they tried to break off a relationship. Men, mostly, but women too. You have to remember the sequence of things. Her father starts to mess with her mind as a child, she sees her sister murdered and finds that she enjoys it, she then sees the family broken further and is passed around from one unsuitable place to another, in some of which, she says, the same pattern of abuse and mistreatment and inappropriate sexualisation continued. It fuels in her a thrill for what is warped but also a sense of injustice that she has been treated badly by life. Put them together and – well, it’s a lethal combination. She told me that she used to dream of what she calls revenge. Of walking down the street and killing every single person she passed. Of blasting the smug idiot grins off their faces and making them realise what life was really like. She imagined destroying the whole city. That’s fairly common too, having a rich fantasy life wherein you take vengeance on the world. She drank heavily, I think she’s probably an alcoholic like her parents, so her inhibitions were lowered. You said, Saxon, that she drank plenty that afternoon you went round to her apartment. And she had suicidal tendencies. Depression, instability, violence all ran in the family. She suffered sleep disorders. Feelings of withdrawal and persecution. Killing became her way of reversing the pattern of childhood, of turning feelings of powerlessness into feelings of absolute power.’

‘What about her brother? Did he share those feelings too?’

‘Put two people through the same experiences and they’ll still react entirely differently. There’s always a mysterious X factor that makes the difference and I doubt we’ll ever know what it really is. But as it happened, Brendan Toner had a different experience. He was never initiated into his father’s sexual games. The traumatic event of his childhood was what happened to Lucy, and he seems to have reacted to that by shutting himself off from the world. Shutting down. The pain was easier to deal with that way. Of course, he reinvented himself too, like Gina did. He became George Dyer. But once he’d done that, his way of dealing with the trauma inside him was to keep a tight hold of his mind. You can see that in his house. How he needed to keep everything emotionless, impersonal, under wraps.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘is why Felix didn’t respond to Gina’s attempts to lure him into her way of thinking? I mean, after what he did to that child . . .’

‘You think because he’d killed once, he was programmed to do it over and over again? No. I think he knew what he was capable of, the darkness inside him, he saw it in himself every day, but he was also capable of control, of sublimating his urges. He wanted to get better. He lost control for a while when he was hit on the head and nearly killed, and he allowed himself to fall into Gina’s world again, the world of his own fantasies which he’d tried to keep a lid on all those years. But he was saved by Alice, and slowly, like she told  Saxon, he came round and began to get better.’

‘It must’ve come as a shock to that control when he found out who Gina really was.’

‘Yes,’ said Fisher, ‘and we’ll never know for sure how, inwardly, he reacted to finding out what she’d seen him do. He may have flirted artistically with the idea of revelation in the past, dropping a hint of T.S. Eliot here, a tale about his life in a house with a murderer there, playing with Isaac Little’s mind for the pleasure of watching him squirm, skirting the edges of the truth in his earliest pictures, but this was different. This wasn’t some self-referential game he was involved in with Gina. This was war. He must’ve known that whatever happened now, she would most likely kill him anyway. He was living on borrowed time. Stealing the evidence of Gina’s crimes bought him some time, but not much. Before he knew it, Toner was harassing him too, following him, calling him up in the night and telling him he was going to kill him. Which is when he contacted our friend Saxon.’

‘Why’d he do that?’ said Burke. ‘I don’t think I get that still.’

‘Once again I don’t think we’ll ever know what went through his mind,’ Fisher said. ‘My guess is that at some point Felix decided he’d had enough. He called Saxon, probably for the same reason Gina demanded to see me, because we’re some name they’d seen on late-night TV, and arranged to meet her. He was going to tell her everything, about Lucy, about Gina, the Marxman. He was going to confess and let whatever would happen happen.’

‘How can you possibly know all that?’ said Burke.

‘I can’t,’ said Fisher. ‘And if you like, you can dismiss it all as Grade A bullshit for which I haven’t got the first scrap of evidence. But I think it ties into what we know about the rest. I’m paid to investigate behaviour, I’m not a mind-reader or a psychic, and that’s what I think happened. He must have known he couldn’t run for ever, so he decided to stop the hunt himself, only Brendan Toner – George Dyer, call him what you will – intervened, and Felix realised he had to make a choice to save his sister. And maybe he knew about thebaby by that point too. He knew he was going to die. The question is, what happened after that? His one hope of ensuring that Alice was safe was to do exactly what Toner told him to do.’

‘It must’ve taken a lot of courage,’ I said, seeing another side of Felix than the one which had dominated my thoughts since I realised he’d killed Lucy Toner so brutally.

‘Even killers can find nobility in them when they need it,’ Fisher agreed. ‘And never underestimate how much courage it needs sometimes to take your own life.’