The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) (37 page)

I knew what he was telling me in his own Fisher-like way.

‘Do you think Toner
would
have done to Alice what he threatened?’ said Miranda as Burke came round with the whiskey again and poured everyone huge shots.

‘I doubt it,’ said Fisher. ‘He doesn’t seem to have been a bad man really. He was an unhappy man, and a man who couldn’t really cope with ordinary life, and he panicked and lashed out when Dalton tried to take him in. But that’s different from what he said he’d do to Alice. I don’t think he blamed her for what Felix had done. Even if she had covered up for him, he was covering up for Gina too. They were two sides of the one coin. Both understood the meaning of loyalty. The only thing he wanted was to see Felix suffer for what he’d done. And he did. What he didn’t know was that his loyalty to Gina would cost him his life.’

‘I’m just glad you finally caught her,’ said Miranda.

‘Well, it was Nye’s wife who caught her really,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Right on the back of the head with a large piece of driftwood.’

‘Though sadly not quite hard enough,’ I said.

Everyone was gone and I was alone once more with Fitzgerald.

‘I guess that means Isaac Little gets out now,’ I said.

‘You’re not responsible for that.’

‘Might even be paid a fat lot of compensation for his time behind bars. Enough to start again somewhere new. Buy a nice house. Near a playground maybe.’

‘Stop torturing yourself,’ she said. ‘What are you saying? That you wish you hadn’t found out the truth about what happened to Lucy Toner?’

‘Truth doesn’t seem that wonderful if all it does is benefit monsters like Little.’

‘Single acts have unforeseen consequences,’ Fitzgerald said matter of factly. ‘Some of them are bound to be bad. If you never did anything for fear of the bad consequences, you’d never do anything at all.’

‘And what about Alice?’ I said. ‘No one’s mentioned her in all this.’

‘Alice simply killed herself.’

‘Simply?’ I said, thinking about Sydney.

‘You know what I mean. There’s no mystery,’ she went on. ‘She was having a baby, the baby’s father was dead, the baby’s father was her brother. And anyway—’

‘What?’

‘We found a tape. In Alice’s house.’

‘What kind of tape?’

‘A video Alice made the night she died. I didn’t know whether to tell you,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘didn’t know if it was the sort of thing you’d want to see. Then I figured you were bound to hear about it eventually. You get to hear about everything eventually.’

‘When was it found?’

‘I heard about it yesterday morning after the fire in Strange’s house. A friend of Alice was round at her house clearing away the last few things. She found the tape inside the video player. Purely by accident. The video player was turned off at the wall. When the uniforms were searching the place for a note, they never thought to look for a video.’

‘What’s on it?’ I said.

She hesitated, then walked over to her bag that was sitting on the table and reached inside and took out a video. Walked back and held it out.

‘I had a copy made for you,’ she said.

I looked at it for a long time, almost afraid to touch it.

Then I reached out and took it.

It didn’t bite.

‘Have you watched it?’ I said.

She shook her head.

‘They told me what was on it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to see it.’

Did I?

I wondered what I would do if someone told me there was a tape of Sydney’s last moments. If I could watch her leaving the house and walking down to the railroad track.

Would I watch it?

Yes, I realised, I would. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.

I’d want to know.

That was my weakness.

I always needed to know.

Fitzgerald didn’t ask me what I was going to do. She had that perfect gift for knowing when to talk and when not to talk. When to leave things alone. Since the other day, she’d never even asked about Sydney. She knew if I wanted to talk about it I would, and if I didn’t think the time was right then there was no point trying to make me do it. I wish I had that gift, but I always push and badger and don’t know when to let things go.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and I laid the video on the desk.

We had another drink and talked about Gina. She was due in court tomorrow, where she’d be formally charged and a date set for her hearing. That was the worst thing about law enforcement. An investigation ended, but the paperwork never died.

Fitzgerald also made just the right sardonic comments about how well the apartment was looking since I’d cleaned up after Gina’s impromptu visit.

‘I’d better get off,’ she said finally when I offered another drink. ‘I’ve things to do.’

Tactful as always.

I was sad to see her go, but I knew I needed to be alone for this; but even then, it was some time before I could take the tape out of the case or slot it into the machine; and I don’t know how long it was after that before I pressed Play.

But there was Alice.

I’d watched tapes of people dying before. Men. Women. Even a child one time. The FBI made us view them during training and I’d learned to watch without flinching, pretending it was science, even as the victims begged and cried.

This was different.

Alice had no one to beg. No one to plead with. She was alone in the house and the camera was trained only on her, watching her raptly as she took the bottles and shook pills out on to the table, where they rattled and bounced, and then she sifted them with her fingers, separating them out according to some pattern in her head only she could fathom.

One by one she began to take them, white, blue, yellow, pink, lifting them to her lips, letting them dissolve on her tongue; washing them down with something that looked like water but might have been vodka, how could I tell? And every so often she got up and danced and skipped round the room, slowly separating from her real self until it was almost like there were two people there on the tape, Alice and another woman who looked like Alice but who wasn’t, and the two of them circled one another warily, quiet and secret and suspicious as cats meeting for the first time, until the pills really took hold, and then she was more like a cat which had met its reflection for the first time and was momentarily alarmed and determined to ignore this other presence. And then Alice was swallowing the pills two, three at a time, and more, until there wasn’t a single one left, and there was only the glass stuck to the table by its own spills.

And Alice sat and stared at the camera, through the camera, like she was looking straight at me, or not
me
, simply whoever it was on the other side of the lens. Staring with a kind of puzzlement as if we were the same mystery to her as she was to us. As if she was sorry for everyone who was watching her, not the other way round.

Then she reached forward and switched off the camera.

White noise replaced her.

A hiss like rain.

I stared at the white noise a long time, seeing patterns that weren’t there, before I too flicked a switch and sent Alice’s last wordless testament into oblivion.

Like her.

Like Sydney.

I turned off the video and walked to the window, opened the doors wide and stepped out on to the terrace. The stars would be summer stars soon. It was about time. The air would be warm with scents, and the names of plants tripped through my head, meaningless, but I never knew which plants were which, they were only the words reminding me that summer was finally here, that the scent I could so nearly smell was summer, whatever flavour it had, and though I preferred the cold I was still glad it would soon be over for another while, because it had been a dark season and I didn’t want to extend it. I looked down at the city and almost felt as if I understood Alice’s resignation, her surrender. To die, to sleep.

But death wasn’t sleep, that was just some foolish lie, it wasn’t slipping into the next room, as some fool once described it; there was no next room; death was nothingness.

I’d seen it too often to pretend that it was otherwise, that it could be prettified. But why choose that when instead there was this: the lights of the city I could see before me, a siren blazing as a squad car turned the corner of St Stephen’s Green and made its way west, out of sight. As I stood there and thought about Alice, I felt a fierce burning in me for all this chaos and noise. It never ended, never ended, and it shouldn’t otherwise there really was nothing.

Take away that and there was only the dark.

But still I was tired; it was late.

I shut the doors and went into the bathroom, opened the cabinet and found the sleeping pills, the ones Fitzgerald had told me to flush away all those days ago.

I took out two and placed them on the edge of the sink, and the rest I upended into the lavatory, watched them fizzle for a while and then flushed them away.

I didn’t need them anymore.

Tomorrow I wouldn’t need them, that is. But just for tonight I was going to enjoy the last two. I was going to set the alarm, but not too early, then I was going to let them dissolve on my tongue and lie down in bed and think and dream of nothing because sometimes that’s the best thing to think and dream about; sometimes the light is too much.

I was going to let the dark take me.

Just for a while.

Just one more night.

The dark was welcome to me.

Ingrid Black is the crime writing alias of Irish journalist Eilis O'Hanlon and children's author Ian Mark. Eilis O'Hanlon is a columnist and reviewer with
The Sunday Independent
, Ireland's largest selling newspaper, and has contributed to numerous other publications, including
The Irish Independent
,
The Daily Telegraph
,
The Spectator
,
The Guardian
,
The News Of The World
,
The Belfast Telegraph
and
The Irish Times
. Ian Mark's stories for children have appeared in a number of publications, including
The Sunday Independent
and
The Kingfisher Treasury Of Irish Stories
. Together, they have written four novels featuring Saxon, a former FBI agent turned true crime author, and Chief Superintendent Grace Fitzgerald of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. The first in the series.
The Dead
, was published in 2003 and won the Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel the following year after its release in the United States.
The Dark Eye
was published in 2004. Both books were translated into French, German, Italian and Dutch.