The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) (14 page)

‘Any excuse to wear black,’ Fitzgerald said as she watched me getting dressed on the morning of Felix’s funeral.

‘And I have the mood to match,’ I replied.

I wasn’t looking forward to this. I didn’t like funerals at the best of times. No one likes funerals, of course; it’s not like people go to them for fun. But I dislike them to the extent that I’d normally go into hiding to avoid having to attend one. I’d actually left town on the day Sydney was buried and hadn’t come back for a week. I’d flown to St Paul because that was where the next flight was headed when I got to the airport.

It’s because you’re afraid of your own mortality that you avoid funerals, some smartass once said to me. Screw that. I’m not afraid of my own mortality. If there’s anything I’m afraid of, it’s having to watch other people’s grief. Strong emotions of any kind, I guess, including my own. I prefer people to keep their emotions to themselves. The only reason I was going to this funeral was because . . . well, I still wasn’t quite sure.

Because I couldn’t let it go, I guess, whatever I might’ve let Alice think.

‘How do I look?’

‘Like you always do.’

‘That bad?’

I went through into the kitchen to pour myself some coffee. It was bright out, but still as cold as it had been, if not colder. It was easy to forget when you saw the bright sunshine some days that the air didn’t feel the way the sun was pretending. I wished the weather would make up its mind. The last thing I need is a climate with an identity crisis.

I took a cookie from the barrel and ate it in silence. It was something to do more than anything. I didn’t feel like eating.

‘What time is it?’

‘Quit worrying,’ said Fitzgerald as she came out from the bedroom and started getting her own papers together for work. I must’ve asked her that question a hundred times already that morning. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘I won’t know anyone.’

‘You know Alice.’

‘Yeah, and she’s the one I want to avoid. I don’t even know if the invite still stands. She’s not been returning any of my calls. And what if she starts asking me again about Felix? What do I tell her?’

‘The truth,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘You tell her the truth.’

‘You make it sound so simple.’

To her, it was.

I envied her that certainty.

The funeral was at eleven at a church in a part of the city known as Harold’s Cross, though why I’d never bothered to find out. It was just about far enough to justify getting the Jeep out, but I’d already decided to walk that morning, to give myself a chance to prepare. Down Leeson Street and over the canal, turning right on to Grand Parade.

It was a quiet morning, one of those days which never seem to have mustered enough energy to get started but are just ticking off the hours until sunset.

Within half an hour of setting out, I was there.

Early, of course, which meant no one else had arrived. So I wandered through the graveyard, round the back of the church, smoking a cigar, reading the epitaphs on the overgrown graves, and thinking mournfully of all those other lives of which nothing now remained but a few words on slabs bought and paid for by loved ones who were now long forgotten themselves. Some had been dead centuries, and it was these graves, strangely, which made me most sad. At least those killed in recent weeks and months had someone to remember them by, someone to keep the graves tended. The ancient dead had nothing.

I looked up at the old church, at those elaborate arches carved into the stone, and at the stained-glass windows stained further by traffic fumes, and couldn’t figure why Alice had picked this one of all places for her brother’s funeral. Had he left instructions? And what was it here that had appealed to him if he had? However it had looked when the stones were first pulled into place, now it was dreary and shabby and hunched. Another couple of years and it would likely be another bingo hall, fixtures and fittings torn out to be sold off for scrap.

Oh, pull yourself together, girl. What business was it of mine what the hell they did with it? It wasn’t like the church meant anything to me, or I gave any thought to God and the angels – though I surely gave as much thought to them as they ever gave to me. I’d scarcely been inside a church since I was a kid back home in Boston, when I practically had to be dragged to the altar, enduring interminable masses in the hope of warding off sin. And a fat lot of good it had done me. A fat lot of good it had done Sydney too, who’d believed all that crap.

My only experience of religion since then had been of the kind killers used to inflame themselves into action. Theological pornography was how I saw it. If it gave comfort to them, had been my thinking, what could it have to offer me? I kept my distance from God and expected Him to have the same consideration for me. It wasn’t much to ask.

All the same, it was depressing to see these old places falling into dissolution. Another part of the fabric of the city being thoughtlessly unpicked, like a child pulling a thread in a shirt to see what happens and then watching as the shirt unravels.

By the time I got round to the front of the church again, I was relieved to find that others had started to arrive, sparing me in the process from my own unoriginal thoughts.

Reporters and photographers lingered too near the gates, most likely waiting for any well-known faces who might turn up to pay their respects to Felix, but there weren’t many of them. There would’ve been more had it still been thought that Felix had died at the hands of the Marxman, but that angle hadn’t lasted longer than it takes for a butterfly to reach old age.

And what was another suicide to interest them?

Especially the suicide of an artist. That was what tortured artists were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Maybe Felix was just obeying the script in that respect too.

I acknowledged with a nod the few faces in the press pack with whom I was on speaking terms, and then went inside, pausing for a moment in the aisle to look at the coffin up front, finding it hard to believe that the man I’d found sprawled on the rocks out at Howth only nights ago was now lying in there, cold, decaying already, the lid screwed tight over his head. Then I took my seat at the back of the dimmed church and tried to make myself inconspicuous. The scent of incense made my head light. I almost felt high.

A few people must have guessed who I was, or maybe they were friends of Alice, because I received the odd acknowledgement of my existence. Over there were some faces I recognised from local TV, others whose pictures looked vaguely familiar from the newspapers, a couple of policemen in uniform. But I didn’t know any well enough to speak more than a half-dozen words to. Most of the mourners I couldn’t even have told apart.

There was no sign of Gina Fox.

Only Strange stood out. He’d come wrapped in his fur coat, turned up at the collar, and entered the church with the sense of ownership I’d seen in him whilst we sat drinking coffee in Temple Bar. Maybe he treated everywhere in Dublin like it was his own.

Today he took a seat near the front and started to talk rather too loudly to people nearby, so that intermittent disconnected words drifted over the hum and whisper of the rest of the mourners right to the back where I sat, before in my imagination hitting the wall like a wave and returning to join the conversation up front again.

I felt I could’ve surfed down there on the crest of them.

After about ten minutes, Alice arrived. She didn’t look around as she came in, so she didn’t see me, just made her way to the front and took her seat. She was dressed simply, head bare. It didn’t look like she’d been crying, but she looked exhausted, pale, washed out.

I was relieved when the service started and I could measure out the ordeal in readings and dubious music. Then came the eulogies. A magazine editor who’d commissioned Felix for a series of photographs spoke about how well respected Berg was in his field; Strange discussed Felix’s place in the present art scene, his themes, his legacy. There was something mechanical about their words. Warmth didn’t exactly beam out of them.

Alice had clearly chosen not to speak about her brother at all.

She simply sat there, staring ahead.

When they carried the coffin out, I stayed seated and didn’t bother following as the church emptied. I could hardly remember why I’d come at all. There was no reason for me to be here. Outside I heard the cries of crows as they settled in the trees round the churchyard, and thought I heard bells, muffled, remote, somewhere above.

How many peals for a life?

Could I light up in here, or were there fire alarms? That would be all I needed, setting off an alarm in church during a funeral. Even I had to draw the line somewhere.

I closed my eyes and laid my head on the back of the pew, worn wood biting hard into the soft skin at the nape of my neck. Then I snapped them open again as I heard the sound of the church door opening and footsteps materialised, clicking quietly on stone.

A shadow, lengthened by the sun behind, tapered down the centre of the aisle.

‘Alice?’

‘Saxon, I thought it was you.’

‘Shouldn’t you be—’

‘Out there watching them lower the body into the ground?’

‘That’s the general idea.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said coolly. ‘Not much point coming to see the play if you leave before the final act. But to hell with that, and to hell with Felix. He didn’t give a fig for convention and neither do I. I’ve been feeling sick now for days. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I do know this is the last thing I need. This’ – unable to find the right word, she gestured around her at the church – ‘
show
was all his idea, not mine. I didn’t even know this was what he had planned until the solicitor showed me his will. He always told me he wanted to be cremated when he died. I don’t even like this church.’

‘Why’d he pick it?’

‘Beats me. Our aunt, when she died, left one third of her money to the restoration fund here, which, as you can see, didn’t do much good. She’d have been better off throwing it straight on to the fire; at least it would have kept us warm before it was all gone. She was married here, you see, years ago, years and years, centuries. The marriage didn’t last long. He ran off with a nightclub singer, leaving her with a few thousand pounds’ worth of debt – and this was the days when a few thousand pounds’ worth of debt meant something – not to mention a bad case of, well, family rumour never put a name to it, but some unfortunate disease, let’s put it that way. As a result she could never have children of her own. Instead she took us in when our parents died. She obviously never forgot about the husband, though, otherwise why leave a third of her fortune to this place?’

‘You didn’t approve of her charitable instincts?’

‘Forced to choose between Felix and me having the money, or this hole, then yes, I think I’d choose us. But a will is a will. It’s clearly a family tradition to leave surprises, though I wish someone had told
me
about it. I must remember to rewrite my own, telling the beneficiaries they have to personally scatter my ashes on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro if they want the money; it’ll serve all the bastards right. It must have been Felix’s idea of a joke to make me come here, but I don’t see why I should have to go along with it.’

‘The thought of his funeral probably seemed so far away at the time that he didn’t think about it.’

‘
Remember thou must die
: that’s what they always told the emperors. They used to employ people to whisper that in the king’s ear so that he never forgot he was mortal too, for all his apparent power. Felix had a habit of forgetting he was mortal.’

She stopped suddenly and looked round as if she’d heard something, but it was only the door of the church creaking shut again after her entrance. She’d been standing up to that point, but now she edged into the pew next to me and lowered her voice.

‘About the other day . . .’ she said.

‘Don’t say anything. That was my fault,’ I replied. ‘I was frustrated at everything going nowhere. Half-answers. Loose ends. I shouldn’t have been so tough on you.’

She shook her head.

‘You were right. I should have told you about Gina from the start. I let my feelings get in the way. I wasn’t thinking about Felix, I was thinking about me. And I haven’t been feeling so hot. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

‘You don’t have to explain.’

‘I do, so that you can see I have no hard feelings. I told you I wanted us to be friends, and I haven’t changed my mind. You must come round to the house. I’m back there now. And soon. I realise now I had no right to expect you to take the same interest in what happened to Felix that I had. That I
have
. It’s just . . . the whole thing . . . didn’t add up. Still doesn’t.’

There it was, the subject I’d feared.

The truth was, I’d been thinking about little else. Alternating between Fitzgerald’s clear logical conviction that Felix’s death had nothing to do with the Marxman, and my own continuing doubts, and always my thoughts returned to his voice on the phone that night.

Someone is trying to kill me . . .