The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

minutes later, I was on my way.
    There were still plenty of people in town, despite it being so late and despite the cold. Someone was singing on the other side of St Stephen’s Green, some old Irish ballad, and there was the sound of music behind glass and a smell of cheap food in the air. Somewhere else, a siren shrieked. It was headed in the opposite direction to me, but somehow it all seemed connected. Drinkers shambled out of pubs, laughing, shouting, and it seemed obscene that they should be so happy. It wasn’t their fault, but I hated them at that moment for their innocence.
    Soon I’d left them behind, crossing over Baggot Street for the back lanes, making my way down towards the canal through empty streets, past black windows. A few hookers lingered by the railings at the Peppercanister Church, watching me suspiciously; the odd car crawled by; but apart from that there was no one about.
    I wasn’t worried; I knew these streets well enough, just like I knew the place that Fitzgerald had directed me to over the phone. It was where Ed Fagan had left his first victim, Julie Feeney, almost down at the point where the canal reached the docks. I should’ve guessed the author of Nick Elliott’s letter would pull a stunt like that. Another mistake from me.
    By the time I was within a couple of hundred yards of the site, I could see the already stark winter trees lit with blue flashes from the patrol cars, as if lightning was trapped among the branches, struggling to get free. Turning the corner, I saw them all parked up ahead, Fitzgerald’s car among them, circled conspiratorially like wagons round a camp fire.
    She, whoever she was, had obviously not been found long.
    The uniformed officers were still securing the scene, and I could see familiar faces from the murder squad’s scene-of crime unit standing round waiting, drinking coffee, talking quietly: Dalton, Ray Lawlor, Sean Healy. Tom Kiernan, the unit photographer, who, incongruously enough, had done the author shot for my last book, had also only just begun taking his first overlapping pictures of the scene, stopping after each shot to scribble a note of what he’d just photographed.
    Everything by the book. The way it had to be.
    A young policeman tried to bar my way when I got there till Fitzgerald, who’d been talking on her cellphone a few yards apart from the rest of the murder squad, saw me and came over. She was wrapped up tight against the cold, grim-faced, her black hair yanked back severely from her brow, her breath a frost, skin so pale that her own breath made it fade temporarily from view. She looked like she hadn’t slept for a week, but it was still good to see her. It always was.
    ‘It’s all right, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘This woman’s here at my request.’ If he thought it unusual, he didn’t say anything. He was hardly going to contradict a chief superintendent. ‘Where’d you park the Jeep?’ she said as we stepped out of hearing.
    ‘I walked.’
    ‘You should be more careful.’ It was automatic by now, this show of concern. She never liked my habit of night walking.
    ‘Don’t worry about me. You look like you’re ready to drop,’ I said simply.
    ‘Maybe it’d be better for everyone if I did.’
    ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
    ‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss the letter as a hoax. It was unforgivable. Just because I had a lot on my plate.’
    ‘You weren’t to know,’ I said.
    ‘You knew,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘You get a feeling for this sort of thing, you said. Well, where’s my feeling for it?’ She was avoiding looking at me now, and I had no answer. ‘And the worst of it is, if this was true then the rest of it must be true as well. This is just the start.’
    ‘You’ll find him,’ I said.
    ‘You think so?’
    ‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.’
    She managed the trace of a smile at that.
    ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘To work.’
    She