The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) (19 page)

I looked down at the grass and thought about that blood. Blood lasted, that was one of the things you first realised when you were an investigator. Indoors and out. Didn’t matter how often you tried to wash it away or how often it rained, it never really went away. It just went into hiding. It was still there, like a skeleton under the skin. The rain could come a thousand times and more and wash Tara’s blood into the soil, hammering it down deeper and deeper into the earth to mingle with the stones; but she was still here, scattered through the ground. Each fragment of her DNA, each perfect blueprint of herself, still lingering here to be trampled on. The final insult. Fagan would’ve liked that.

For the next ten minutes or so, we searched the area round the tree in silence, stopping now and then if we found something and calling the others over for a second and third opinion.

Sum total by the end of it: a few discarded condoms (were the grounds of the library still being used by prostitutes?), a couple of crumpled pages from a porn magazine, some coins and candy wrappers. It would be easy to read significance into a condom, a porn magazine and a few coins – but it was only litter, I couldn’t persuade myself otherwise; it had no meaning.

Well, what had I expected – the killer’s address on a scrap of paper with a huge arrow carved into the tree pointing towards it to make things easier? A cryptic crossword with one across spelling out the name of the killer? I needed to get a grip.

‘Come on,’ I said at last, ‘we’re wasting our time.’

And I could tell by the way they didn’t say a word to object that Fisher and Boland had come to the same resigned conclusion. It was time to call it a night.

Then I saw it.

‘Boland, give me the torch!’

Boland handed me his torch and I flashed the light on to the trunk of the tree.

Fisher whistled.

There, carved into the bole of the tree. Not an arrow pointing, but another letter. Another Hebrew letter? How the hell would I know? But it looked like it. Aleph it was the first time . . . now what?

‘You were right,’ I said to Fisher. ‘I don’t know how you knew, but you were right.’

‘I wish I’d been wrong,’ he said quietly.

‘Because of Tillman? It’s not your fault he missed an angle.’

‘He’s still my friend,’ said Fisher.

I nodded as if I understood, but in truth I had too much else to think about at that moment to spare any space in my head for Tillman’s potential hurt feelings. The letter on the tree: what did it mean this time? I stepped forward and raised my hand to touch the carving, like it was braille and I was blind and could read it.

‘No,’ said Boland firmly.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘We’re going to have to seal the scene.’

‘No hurry,’ I said. ‘The techs’ll find nothing here that we haven’t found already.’

‘Even so,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get the blame for contaminating evidence. Great start to my career in the murder squad that’d be. Draker would have a field day with me.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to call through to headquarters, tell them what we found,’ Boland said. ‘They’ll have search teams out to the last two Fagan scenes within the hour.’

‘You don’t mean—’ I stopped, annoyed. ‘Fisher?’

‘Leave me out of it,’ Fisher said.

‘But I thought we were going to search the scenes ourselves?’

‘Just where Tara Cox died, you said,’ Fisher reminded me. ‘Besides, Boland’s right. We should leave well alone now. You’ve proved your point, and I have a flight to catch.’

They wouldn’t even look at me. It was pointless arguing. I knew I should have come by myself.

Chapter Twenty-One

I didn’t relish the idea of hanging around waiting for the crime scene technical bureau to arrive and take over, not least because that might mean talking to Fitzgerald. I wasn’t ready for that yet. Instead I called a cab and ran out with Fisher to the airport. We hardly spoke at all during the journey, both distracted by our own thoughts, and when I offered to come inside with him, maybe grab a coffee, he politely put me off.

He stood at the entrance to the terminal, watching as I drove off.

What now?

Then it came to me. I’d call Ambrose Lynch. There was something that had been bothering me since I talked to Salvatore at the library, something he might be able to help clear up. But there was no answer from his cellphone when I tried to call. He’d probably switched it off. He hated carrying one, and only did so because the police insisted he always be in touch in case he was needed at a crime scene. ‘What’s the rush?’ he often complained. ‘The body isn’t going to get up and make a dash for it if I’m a few minutes late.’ Switching the phone off now and then was his quiet protest against bureaucracy and the modern world.

In no mood to wait till morning, I simply gave the pathologist’s address to the cab driver, leaned back into the seat, shut my eyes, and let the city flow by unnoticed, until we reached Lynch’s house.

He lived in the city’s embassy belt, an exclusive neighbourhood where security cameras flowered on virtually every tree and spiked iron gates warned off the curious. At this time of evening, it was an almost straight run across town to get there.

His was a huge detached Victorian villa with a gravel drive, a steep flight of granite steps to the front door, a coachhouse round the back, and enough bedrooms inside to house a football team, though he and his wife had never had any children to fill them. Why they hadn’t I didn’t know; it wasn’t the sort of thing I could imagine asking Lynch about.

I got the cab to pull up outside the front gate and climbed out. The rain had stopped a long time since. Lynch’s Mercedes wasn’t in the drive but he might have parked it round the back.

‘How much?’ I asked the driver, then waited till his tail-lights had disappeared into the darkness before stepping through the open gates and crunching up the gravel to the front door.

I rang the bell.

No answer.

Tried the bell once more. The same no answer.

Lifted the letterbox to peer inside, but there was nothing to see except another door. No light that I could detect. Was he in bed already? Quietly I made my way round the side. I’d been to this house for dinner with Lynch and his wife a couple of times; there’d even been a cocktail party once at which the Commissioner himself had been present, and some minister in the department of justice whose name now escaped me. I was the only woman there who wasn’t wearing a cocktail dress, and that included Grace. But I’d made a real effort and put on some expensive leather trousers that she’d bought me for my birthday.

Grace had looked fabulous in her little black number, but then she always did, whatever she wore; and I thought I looked fabulous too.

No one else seemed to agree.

I was like the token eccentric, having to keep everything polite with Grace so the minister wasn’t scandalised, endlessly explaining what an American former FBI agent without a cocktail dress was doing in Dublin. But Lynch had been charm itself. He didn’t give two hoots what I was wearing – that was how he put it to me, didn’t give two hoots, and I found the owlish expression so charming and odd that I took a note of it and meant to introduce it into conversation next time I had the chance, though the opportunity had never arisen.

My language was usually more forceful.

I remembered the house as it was that other night, light spilling on to the back lawn through the terrace windows, warm summer air scented with the fragrance of plants (Lynch’s wife Jean was a keen gardener), a bright moon in the sky. Lynch had rigged the trees with lights – which is to say, he’d got somebody else to do it; I couldn’t see Ambrose up a ladder hanging lights for a party – and the whole garden glittered like something out of a child’s picture book. The food had come from an award-winning restaurant down by the river; there was champagne; a string quartet played the Kreutzer Sonata. I know that’s what it was because the minister told me; well, chamber music’s not my thing. And maybe he was only bluffing to impress me.

In return, I offered him one of my best Cuban cigars – I was obviously feeling generous – and enlightened him as to why he should introduce the death penalty to Ireland, starting with the people who parked illegally outside my apartment.

Now the house looked dreary, forlorn, the garden filled with shadows as I trudged across the grass to the coachhouse and smeared a space on the dusty window to peer inside. No sign of Lynch’s car there either. He obviously wasn’t home yet, and it wasn’t hard to imagine where he was: some familiar pub, probably, to put off the moment when he had to come home to this blackness. Strange how the absence of one person could have such an effect on a house. Since Jean had gone, the life seemed to have seeped out of the place.

I was just debating whether to drop a note through the letterbox telling Ambrose to call me when a flash of light illuminated the trees and headlights appeared at the far end of the drive. For a moment I was dazzled, till my eyes cleared and I saw him clambering heavily as usual out of his car.

‘Lynch,’ I said.

He was so startled that he dropped the bags he was carrying on to the gravel.

‘It’s only me. Saxon.’

‘For mercy’s sake,’ said Ambrose, ‘you nearly killed me.’ He sounded breathless, edgy. ‘Where are you?’

‘Over here,’ I said and I stepped out where he could see me.

‘I thought . . .’ He trailed off, embarrassed. His hair was wet, as if with rain. He ran his hands through it nervously. I smiled. ‘You thought I was the legendary Night Hunter?’

‘I don’t know what I thought,’ said Lynch. ‘Thought my time was up, that’s for sure. Jumping at shadows at my age. I should be ashamed of myself.’

‘I shouldn’t have been lurking.’

He bent down to pick up his bags. A briefcase first, filled with papers he’d brought home to work on; the other one—

‘I’ll help you with that,’ I said.

‘I’m fine,’ he said hurriedly; and I realised there was a bottle inside the second bag, whiskey no doubt, picked up from an off-licence on the way home. ‘It’s you we’ve all been worried about. Grace was searching high and low for you to tell you what was happening.’

‘About Fagan? I know about that. Boland told me.’

‘Did he tell you about the
Evening News
as well?’

‘The
Evening News
?’

‘Obviously not. They got hold of a copy of the latest letter from the killer. They published it in their final edition late this afternoon.’

Why hadn’t Boland told me? Did he just assume I knew already? I should have known, that was true enough. And I would have known if I hadn’t gone AWOL.

‘There goes our head start on the killer,’ I said despondently.

‘It’s even worse than that, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘They published everything, and when I say everything I do mean everything. Their crime reporter got hold of the details of the quotes the killer has been leaving, and the writing on Mary Lynch’s body, and the missing parts of the woman in the churchyard. Need I go on?’

‘How?’

‘It seems that someone telephoned them this afternoon claiming to be an officer with the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He said he wanted to blow the whistle on the investigation in order to expose the corruption and inefficiency of the force.’

‘And they fell for it? They’re worse than the
Post
.’

‘It gets better. This self-proclaimed shining credit to the force gave his name as Gus Bishop.’

Gus. The same name as Mary Lynch’s creepy sugar daddy.

‘I don’t suppose you have a copy of it, do you?’ I said.

‘Of that rag? My dear, I am grievously insulted. Though you’d better come in all the same,’ he added. ‘No point standing about in the cold even if I have been insulted, is there?’

He took out his key and let me in the door at the side of the house, then led the way down a short passageway into the kitchen.

The house smelt like it hadn’t been lived in for years. Not dirty, just unused and abandoned, unloved. Ambrose went ahead into the kitchen and flicked a light.

I saw at once the unwashed cups and glasses piled in the sink and the empty liquor bottles standing on the draining board. There was a pile of unopened mail on the table, mostly with his wife’s name on, like he’d left it there in case she came back. Since his wife had left, Ambrose evidently hadn’t kept a grip on his domestic situation. That was typical of men of his age and upbringing. They expected life to be ordered about them so they could get on with their affairs, then, when one day it wasn’t, they didn’t know how to cope.

Ambrose put his bags down next to the sink, careful to conceal the bottle underneath his briefcase, before coming back to sit at the kitchen table, ushering me into a seat opposite him.

Then he caught my eye and smiled sadly.

‘Who am I fooling?’ he said, and he went back to the sink, rinsed a couple of glasses and reached into the bag for the bottle of whiskey.

He twisted open the cap, all pretence gone.

‘Can I pour you one?’

‘Might as well.’

What was another one after the day I’d had?

He seemed more at ease once he didn’t have to put on an act, though he didn’t have to put on any act for my benefit. Or perhaps it was simply the thought of whiskey which put him at ease.

‘How did you get on in the mountains while all this was going on?’ I asked as he poured.

‘Magnificently,’ said Ambrose dryly. ‘What better way to spend the weeks before Christmas than in the company of the dead? The conversation is so sparkling, so witty.’

‘Have you managed to identify the body yet?’

Ambrose shook his head.

‘Since when are our lives ever that simple?’ he said. ‘The body appears to be that of a man about the right age and height to be our Mr Fagan, and between you and me, of course it is him; but for now he remains officially unidentified. Just like his predecessor in the churchyard.’

‘Actually, that’s what I wanted to ask you about,’ I said. ‘Yesterday I spent some time with Professor Salvatore. Have you heard of him? No? He’s a theologian who used to work with Fagan; he pointed out a few interesting things to me. Thought I’d run them by you.’

‘I’m all ears,’ he said.

‘Do you know who Jehu is?’

‘Unlike most people in this modern world of ours,’ said Ambrose, ‘I happen to have had the benefit of a decent classical education, so yes, I know who Jehu is. Old Testament chappie, if I remember rightly. An avenger sent by God to kill the unholy.’

‘He killed Jezebel,’ I said. ‘That’s where the quote came from.
Go, see now this cursed woman and bury her
.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ he admitted. ‘I can certainly see why it would excite your interest.’

‘Right now I’m more interested in the way Jezebel died. You remember that?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Ambrose.

‘Your classical education did leave some gaps then?’ I teased. ‘She was thrown out of a window. I was wondering if that was a clue to how this woman died.’

‘You think, in choosing this particular quote, the killer was telling us that he threw this unfortunate woman out of a window?’ said Ambrose.

‘Not necessarily out of a window. Off a wall, down the stairs even. You said the injuries were consistent with a beating. Could they be consistent with a fall as well?’

‘Intriguing.’ He reached over to refill his glass. ‘I hadn’t considered that possibility, I must admit. I don’t think so, alas.’

‘Why not?’

‘For one thing, one wouldn’t get the same pattern of injuries in a fall; for another, the injuries would tend to be more severe. One would normally expect some kind of spinal injury to be present. Transection of the thoracic, perhaps.’

‘And there was nothing like that?’

‘Sorry. I’m not saying that it’s impossible,’ said Ambrose, ‘but the injuries simply did not conform to any that I’ve ever observed in the victim of a fall before, accidental or otherwise. But what about you? What have you been doing all day?’

Strangely enough, I didn’t mention sending the text message which had prompted his trip out to the mountains that afternoon. I told him instead about the symbol carved on the tree where Tara Cox died. I remembered that he’d identified the first one. He seemed impressed.

‘Have you a pen and paper?’ I asked. ‘I’ll try to draw it.’

‘Of course I do.’

On the fourth attempt, I got as near as I was likely to get.

‘Lamedh,’ he said at once. ‘And you know, that means ox as well. At least . . . wait there.’

He disappeared for a few moments and returned with a book. He pushed the glasses aside, and laid the book flat, pointing out the definition for me to read:
Lamedh, the twelfth letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Transliterated as L. Literal meaning: ox goad (from its shape)
.