The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) (32 page)

‘Hello,’ said a voice when it was picked up.

‘Professor Salvatore?’ I said. ‘Can we talk?’

Chapter Forty

The air was sterile and antiseptic in the autopsy room, but Ambrose Lynch wasn’t there. Nor was Tillman; and I wasn’t sorry about that. I hadn’t wanted to see him lying there. What I’d seen of him already that day was bad memory enough. A lab assistant was washing down the surfaces and told me he’d been taken back to the morgue, where he would remain, alone, cold, until his family made arrangements to fly his body back to the States. As for the city pathologist, she thought he’d gone back to his office on the first floor to write up the autopsy report.

I made my way up the stairs after him.

I found Lynch sitting at his desk, the only light coming from a lamp angled towards the page on which he was writing.

He looked up and smiled when I walked in.

‘They’re on the table over there,’ he said. I’d called earlier to tell him I’d be over to pick up Tillman’s fingerprints. If you hang on a few moments, you can bring this autopsy report too. It won’t take long.’

I sat down in the chair opposite and sighed.

‘I suppose I ought to call them,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Tillman’s family. Telling them what happened is the least I can do. Though it might help if I knew what had happened. I was hoping you could help me there.’

He looked up from the page and frowned.

‘What are you saying?’

‘You know what I’m saying,’ I said.

Lynch smiled again over the top of his spectacles, and his smile this time was contorted slightly by the way his face was lit by the desk lamp, like some shadow inside of him was breaking through. And maybe it was. He didn’t have to pretend any more.

‘It’s about time,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think you’d never work it out. This calls for a drink, wouldn’t you say?’

He reached down to his side to open the drawer in his desk.

‘Stop,’ I said, and before he could move I’d risen from the chair, pulled the gun from my pocket and levelled it at him.

It was the first time I’d seen Lynch genuinely speechless. I’d picked the gun up on my way to the mortuary from the safe deposit box where it had lain, untouched, since the day after I used it to kill Ed Fagan. Keeping it had been stupid, probably. The sensible thing would have been to fling it into the river at a point where the water was deep and the current would have dragged it out to sea and it could never resurface to incriminate me; but I couldn’t. It would have been like throwing a part of myself away. Besides, I hadn’t known when I might need it again.

Like now.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have much practice at this sort of thing,’ Lynch said after he’d recovered from his initial surprise. ‘Am I supposed to – how do you say? – stick them up?’

‘No,’ I told him. ‘You’re supposed to stay exactly where you are and shut the fuck up for once. That would do.’

I manoeuvred round the edge of the table without taking my eyes off him, then felt down and pulled open the drawer.

A quick glance. It was empty save for a bottle of whiskey, three quarters full, and two glasses.

‘Satisfied?’ said Lynch.

He lifted out the glasses and the bottle, twisted open the cap and poured two generous measures whilst I made my way back to the other chair and sat down again, the gun nestled comfortably in my hand.

He slid one of the glasses over to me, and drank deeply.

I ignored mine for now.

‘I must say, I expected us to be having this conversation sooner,’ he said. ‘I had great faith in you, as I told you on the telephone at the café this morning. Even Tillman was on to me quicker. Not that it did him much good. He was so confident of solving this little mystery all by himself that last night, when he found the house, he just walked in. I left the door open and he just walked in. Incredible. But that was our friend Tillman. Good on the academic theory part of the equation, not so hot on the not getting yourself killed part. And now you just walk in too.’

‘I’m not going to end up like Tillman,’ I said.

‘Tillman didn’t think he was going to end up like Tillman either. Right up until the moment when I looped the cord around his neck, and – well, I’ll spare you the details. You can’t imagine the trouble I had afterwards pulling him up into place in mid-air to make it look like suicide. I should have just slit his other wrist and been done with it, but there was something about the way he looked dangling there, something dramatic, that made it all worthwhile.’

‘He didn’t bring a gun,’ I pointed out.

‘True,’ said Lynch. ‘He had some rather quaint ideas about obeying the law of the land. Those things are still illegal in Dublin, am I right in saying? Not to worry. I won’t report you.’

He lifted his glass to his lips and drank again.

‘Come now, am I drinking alone?’ he said when he saw I wasn’t doing the same. ‘This is the last chance I’ll get. The least you could be is sociable.’

I reached for the glass and took a sip. I was glad I had. I was tired, I’d hardly eaten, everything had moved so fast that I was feeling weak, dizzy. The whiskey sharpened me. Kept me alert.

I drained the glass and let Lynch refill it.

‘Are you going to tell me how you finally figured it out?’ he said.

‘I’ve been drowning in details for days,’ I said quietly after taking another drink. ‘Not knowing what was significant and what was nothing. Everything came together when I opened the box. Tillman wasn’t sent bones. The box for Elliott wasn’t bones. So why was I sent a skull? Because I would have recognised a face. Because it was someone I knew. Then it came to me.
Go, see now this cursed woman and bury her, for she is a king’s daughter
. You told me right at the start, that night you came to the canal after Mary Lynch died, that your wife’s maiden name was King. It was Jean’s body that was left in the churchyard.’

‘My dear wife,’ said Lynch. ‘Twenty years I was married to her and I swear she got less observant with each passing year. All of a sudden, she started to notice things. She even followed me out to Ed Fagan’s old house. Well, you saw what was there. I had no choice but to kill her.’

‘You threw her down. Like Jezebel.’

‘
And some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trod her under foot
.’ Lynch laughed. ‘I wasn’t able to supply the horses, alas.’

I stared at him and realised for the first time how little I knew him.

How little I knew anyone?

Patiently, because he seemed to want to know, I explained how I’d put together the missing pieces. How a memory had flashed to mind of something half seen at the time but not taken in because I was distracted.

It was a scrap of paper torn from a religious calendar, marked with reminders of the saints’ feast days. How it said that today, the seventh of December, was St Ambrose’s Day.               When the first letter came, we’d wondered if the fact that the killer had promised that the seven days would start on St Agericus’s Day was important. We never thought to look when the seven-day sequence would end and whether that was where the real importance lay.

It had been the same with the names. We’d thought that Mary Lynch’s name might be a pointer because she was called Mary, not because she was called Lynch. And when the next victim was conveniently called Mary Dalton, there seemed no further reason to investigate the first Mary’s name as an angle.

From there, the other pieces fell swiftly into place.

Salvatore had explained that St Ambrose was one of the ancient Church Fathers and bishop to St Augustine. Gus Bishop. That in medieval art he was represented by an ox, a bee and a pen. Like the bee hanging from the keyring in the car that morning. Like the pen that was used to scratch the further riddle on to Liana Cassidy’s gravestone:

I know of no bishop worth the name
.

Those words had been kept out of the media, but as soon as I told Salvatore about them he immediately completed the quotation for me.

I know of no bishop worth the name . . . save Ambrose
.

‘Then there were the Hebrew letters,’ I said. ‘Aleph and lamedh. They both suggested an ox too, but Tillman had warned all along that the real meaning of them for the killer might be something so simple we’d never even consider it. And what was the most simple explanation of all? Not aleph or lamedh, just A and L. Ambrose Lynch.’

‘Occam’s Razor,’ Lynch agreed. ‘I told you about it myself. The principle that the fewest possible assumptions should be made when explaining a thing. Your mistake all along was to imagine things were more complicated than they really were. And now you know everything.’

‘Apart from why,’ I said.

‘Not that one again,’ said Lynch wearily. ‘As I explained to you on the telephone today, I hate that mechanistic way of explaining motive. Who really knows why anyone does anything?’

‘Surely if you don’t ask why, you’re just an animal, responding unthinkingly to external stimuli, like a rat scurrying through a maze?’

‘Don’t start using big words, Saxon, they don’t suit you. And you can stop the amateur reverse psychology too. What’s the plan? That I will be so affronted at being compared to an animal that I open my heart and reveal the inner Ambrose? Don’t insult me.’             

‘Overinflated sense of importance. Easily wounded sense of self-esteem. Classic serial killer traits,’ I said. ‘You’re not even original.’

‘I didn’t become a killer because my self-esteem was wounded,’ said Lynch. ‘If anything, it would be nearer the truth to say it was because I was bored. Bored with myself, with this city, my job, with everything. You have no idea how tedious life can be for a forensic pathologist in a city like Dublin. In New York the medical examiner’s office carries out seven thousand autopsies a year on suspicious corpses. Seven thousand! Here I get the odd treat, but mostly I’m fortunate if I have one unusual case a year to deal with. Two and I’d be throwing a street party. Night after night I am roused from sleep and called out, only to find that it’s yet another drunk stabbed to death outside a nightclub. I’ve lost count of the number of those.’

‘So you took to killing because Dublin failed to live up to your refined tastes in homicide?’ I said sarcastically.

‘Don’t be so glib. It wasn’t like that at all. Have some more.’

Another glass filled.

Was he trying to get me drunk so that he could outwit me? If so, he was out of luck. It would take more than a few glasses of whiskey to disorient me. The alcohol may have been working its vague spell on my senses, but I was still in control, he couldn’t change that.

‘It was Sally Tyrrell’s fault really,’ Lynch said. ‘I met her when she was a secretary for the police. We had an affair; nothing special. It was me who recommended that she find a new job. It would reflect badly on me, I told her, if I was found to be banging one of the staff.’

‘Is that how you put it to her?’

‘I may have expressed myself more romantically. The truth was, I was growing tired of her, and getting her into a new job on the other side of the city was the simplest way I could think of at the time to get shot of her. When she realised what I’d done, Sally got a bit silly about it. That’s women for you, I suppose. She even threatened to tell Jean. I couldn’t have that. I picked her up one afternoon on her way home from an office party. She was a little tipsy, which made things easier.’ He looked almost regretful as he gazed into the dark at the edge of the lamplight. ‘Afterwards, I was afraid she might have done something selfish, such as telling one of her friends about me, or writing a letter to my wife which she’d left unposted and would be found by the police when they searched her home. But it turned out she’d been touchingly discreet to the end.’

‘Where did you bury her?’

‘That, I think, shall remain my little secret. I have to keep something private now that the rest of my life seems set to be exposed to public scrutiny. And I was very fond of her. I wouldn’t want her disturbed now.’

‘You’re all heart.’

‘I like to think so,’ said Lynch, ‘though I do still get cross with her sometimes when I look back. I had to make do with prostitutes after Sally. I couldn’t run the risk of another woman getting silly about things again. It’s not that I would’ve minded having to dispose of them if they did, but how long would I get away with that if I could be connected to the victims? I couldn’t count on luck again after Sally. Prostitutes were safer. Prostitutes knew what they were for.’

‘Like Monica Lee.’

‘Like Monica Lee,’ he agreed brightly. ‘Monica was very fond of Gus Bishop, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think that he would run away with her to a little thatched cottage with roses round the door where they could grow old together.’

‘So why kill her?’

‘You’re back to asking why again. Because I wanted to, why else?’ said Lynch. ‘That’s the trouble with getting away with one murder. It only gives one an appetite for getting away with more. I blame the police. If they’d caught Sally’s killer, none of this would have happened.’

‘You should write an angry letter to the newspapers.’

Lynch chuckled.