The Killing Song, page 19
Now I was silent for a moment. There was a burst of laughter from the men playing darts.
“Are you in a bar?” Nora asked.
“A pub.”
“Are you drunk?”
She was really pissed off, so I let her have that shot at me. I took a calming breath.
“I think there were other murders here and in France that might be connected to Mandy’s,” I said.
“Matt,” she said. “I know how hard this has been, but—”
“Nora, please. You have to listen to me. Please.” As calmly as I could, I told her about the other lyrics and the other dead women. There was silence when I finished.
“I know how all this sounds, Nora,” I said finally. “But I’m here with a French inspector. We’re working on this together.”
“An inspector?”
I glanced over my shoulder. Eve had come up behind me, arms crossed, brow raised.
“Look,” I said. “Inspector Bellamont wants to speak with you about our DNA.”
“You have DNA evidence?” Nora asked.
“Yes.”
“Put him on.”
I handed the receiver to Eve. Unsure whether to stay or go, I leaned against the wall in case Eve had questions for me. I heard Eve’s end of the conversation as they talked about DNA, the black guy, Mandy’s autopsy and the murders in Paris.
As I listened, I felt an odd mixture of comfort and relief. It wasn’t just that I had taken some steps to square things with Nora. It was hearing a voice—her voice—and feeling a connection to home that I didn’t even realize I had been missing. The relief? I watched Eve’s face as it registered excitement over speaking with a fellow cop. Now I had two powerful allies.
Eve finally fell quiet, her eyes cutting to me. She laughed and turned away.
“Oui,” she said. “Reckless, yes. Crazy, yes.” A pause. “He is doing… he is coping. Yes. Yes. I shall. Thank you, Detective.”
She held out the phone to me and I took it.
“I am still furious with you,” Nora said.
But the anger was gone from her voice now. “I don’t blame you,” I said.
“Things have to be different from now on, you know.”
“I know.”
“You have to keep me informed on everything you do.”
“I know.”
“I want to be able to trust you, Matt.”
I was quiet for a moment. “And I want you to know you can.”
“Okay,” Nora said softly.
We said our good-byes and I hung up. When I went back to the bar, Eve was checking her messages. I used the moment to find the “Dire Wolf” lyrics on the Internet. When Eve set her phone down, I handed her the photograph of Allison Stephens’s right hand.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the sheet music.
“The Grateful Dead,” she said.
I turned my laptop so Eve could see the screen. The “Dire Wolf” lyrics were already displayed, and we took a few moments to read them.
The song began: In the timbers of Fennario, the wolves are running round.
I read and reread the verses. The song seemed to be about someone who lived in a frozen village and was being stalked by a wolf that played a game of cards with him.
“It makes no sense,” Eve said.
“Yeah, but look at these lines,” I said, pointing to the screen.
Don’t murder me, I beg of you, don’t murder me.
“The only location mentioned in the song seems to be this place called Fennario,” I said.
“Any idea where it is?” Eve asked.
I shook my head and switched back to Google to begin a search. “Fennario” appeared on various Grateful Dead fan sites, one of which included an analysis of “Dire Wolf” that concluded Fennario was purely fictional.
“Fennario” also popped up as the title of a song by Joan Baez. Those lyrics varied some from the other song but still offered nothing significant, just phrases like As we marched down to Fennario, our captain fell in love with a lady like a dove. They call her by the name pretty Peggy-o.
I glanced at Eve. Her eyes were red with exhaustion, and I realized we had been working at this since leaving Paris at six this morning.
In hopes we would hear something we weren’t seeing in the lyrics—and to wake us both up—I downloaded an MP3 of Baez’s song. When I hit PLAY, my speakers were on high and Baez’s voice broke through the din of male voices like a bullhorn. I fumbled to turn down the sound.
“Leave it on,” someone hollered.
I swiveled to see a big man who had been standing in back playing darts. He came toward us, head bobbing to the music.
“Do you know this song?” I asked him.
“To be sure,” he said. “That’s ‘The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie.’”
Then, to my amazement, he broke into a song that drowned out Baez. His version of the song was twice as fast and so heavily accented that it took all my concentration to understand the words.
But the flower o’ them aw lies in Fyvie-o!
O come doon the stairs, pretty Peggy-o,
I’ll give you a necklace of amber.
Come doon the stairs, pretty Peggy-o,
Comb back your yellow hair,
Take a last farewell to your daddy-o.
I looked at Eve and knew she had caught the references to blond hair and the necklace.
“What is the name of that song again?” Eve asked.
“‘The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie,’” the bartender said. “It’s a common old folk song.”
The man who had been singing nodded.
“Five-o is a place?” I asked.
“Not Five-o,” the man said. “Just Fyvie. Some say Fennario is just a made-up name for the real place.”
I thanked them, bought a beer for the singer and turned back to my laptop. Eve watched as I searched for the words to “The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie.” It was much longer and William the dead soldier had a new name, but there was no doubt it was an older version of the song Baez had recorded and no doubt in my mind that Baez’s fictional village of Fennario was, for our purposes, the real town of Fyvie.
“Can anyone tell us where Fyvie is?” Eve asked the group of men.
“It’s in Scotland.”
“Ya, north of Edinburgh.”
“North of Dundee, too.”
“And Aberdeen.”
I knew about where Edinburgh was on a map and I shivered at the idea of going two towns north of that. I had visions of a dirt-road village and could not imagine our killer at work in such a place.
I looked at Eve and knew she was thinking the same thing. Our whole investigation—with its arcane musical clues and intercontinental connections—was so far-fetched that even I had moments when I wasn’t sure we were following the right leads, let alone the right killer.
But I knew we had no choice but to get on the next train to Scotland.
27
We took the train as far north as Aberdeen. It was a trip through rolling yellow pastures that reminded me a little of the foothills of the Smokies in winter. When we disembarked, it was into a biting wind sweeping down from a steel-colored sky. The city of Aberdeen was larger than I thought it would be, with tall Gothic clock towers and streets congested with bumper-car-sized automobiles.
A kind man at the train station directed us toward a “car hire” company, and armed with a map and a GPS system, Eve and I set off for the village of Fyvie. We soon found ourselves in the tall grass of the Scottish countryside, not another car in sight.
Forty-five minutes later, I slowed the car to enter Fyvie. It was a collection of wind-battered fieldstone homes with rock chimneys, a crumbling church and a small school that looked surprisingly like a private academy I had once attended in Raleigh.
Before leaving London, I had run a Nexis search of newspaper articles for murders in this area but had come up empty. Eve’s call to her Interpol contact had yielded only a promise to check. We were left to whatever the locals could tell us. So we headed straight for what we knew would be the fount of all news in Fyvie—the town’s busiest pub, the Black Bull.
We settled in a wooden booth near the fireplace and within minutes of asking the bartender about a possible murder of a young woman three or four years ago, we got a name—Caitlyn McKenzie. The only other thing he would say is that someone would be over to talk to us.
It was a good hour before a barrel of a man with burnished brown hair came into the pub. He looked our way, took a moment to talk to the bartender, then came over to our table.
He brought with him his pint of beer and an odor of sweet pipe tobacco and soil, as if he spent his days in the fields.
“My name’s John Mulligan,” he said. “Peter called me and said you’re an inspector, ma’am, and you’re asking about Caitlyn McKenzie.”
Eve nodded and introduced me by name only. “We’d like to ask you some questions. Would you join us, please?”
Mulligan took a second long look at Eve, and I suspected—given her dark skin and gender—he was wondering about her place within the world of French law enforcement.
Eve scooted over, and Mulligan sat down in the booth next to her.
“Why do you want to know about Caitlyn McKenzie?” he asked.
“We’re pursuing a possible serial killer,” Eve said. Mulligan’s coppery brows shot up. “All the way from France?”
“From France to London to here,” Eve said.
“How’d you lock on our Caitlyn?” Mulligan asked. “That was four, five years ago and she barely made a splash in the papers.”
Eve launched into a condensed explanation of why we thought we had an international killer and how we interpreted the musical clues. When she was finished, I laid a printout of the lyrics to “The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie” on the table.
Mulligan didn’t look at the lyrics. He took a slow drink of his beer before he spoke.
“Caitlyn McKenzie was from Westhill, a village south of here,” he said. “She disappeared while attending the music festival in Aberdeen four summers ago.”
A music festival. But I stayed quiet, my hand encircling my beer glass.
“She was a musician?” Eve asked.
Mulligan nodded. “Fiddle player. She was last seen on the final day of the festival. There was a party that evening. We have witnesses who saw her leave the party and get in a car.”
“She wasn’t forced?” I asked.
“No, she went willingly, the witnesses said. But there were no leads. Two days later, her body was found up at Slains Castle by a couple of German tourists.”
I had seen signs for Fyvie Castle, apparently a big tourist attraction here. But there had been no signs for a Slains Castle.
“Where is this castle?” I asked.
“East of here, on the sea,” Mulligan said.
“How far is Slains from Aberdeen?” I asked.
“Forty-plus kilometers.”
If our killer had abducted Caitlyn McKenzie at the festival down in Aberdeen, why did he bother to drive nearly thirty miles north when he could have dumped her body in any of the desolate places we had seen on our drive?
“Is this Slains Castle a tourist attraction?” I asked.
“Only for the urban explorers and others who like a taste of the macabre,” Mulligan said. “Most ruins here are tended by Historic Scotland but you’d be hard-pressed to call anything about Slains attractive, even on sunny days. It’s a place that nature has just been left to get on with. Even haunted, some say.”
“How was Caitlyn killed?” Eve asked.
Mulligan’s eyes slipped to Eve, then he signaled for a beer refill. No one spoke until he had a foaming pint in front of him.
“I’d like both your words on something first,” he said. “Even if your investigation turns out to include Caitlyn McKenzie, I want your assurance that you’ll leave her mother and father alone. Not even a visit, mind you. Not one question.”
Eve stared at Mulligan, and I knew it nipped at her sense of duty to agree to something like this. In her business, witnesses were crucial, and as difficult as it was, they had to be interviewed.
“You trust me on this, I’ll trust you both with what I know,” Mulligan said.
“Agreed,” Eve said.
Mulligan took a long drink of his beer and wiped the foam with the back of his hand. “She was stabbed once in the chest,” he said. “Left naked in the grass, like it was some sacrifice or something.”
“Sacrifice?” I asked.
Mulligan nodded. “We thought she might have been kidnapped by some cultists who took her up there to play their sick games. Slains attracts that kind.”
“Did you find any evidence to support that theory?” Eve asked.
Mulligan looked uncomfortable. “No, ma’am, nothing to speak of.” He took a drink of his beer. “But the cult rumors took hold hard, so we did what we needed to do to calm things down.”
“Calm things down? What do you mean?” Eve asked.
“I mean we recorded it as an accidental fall from one of the castle’s crumbling stairwells,” Mulligan said. “It was done out of consideration for the McKenzies, ma’am. They are deeply religious folk, you see. After Caitlyn was found, they became shut-ins, not seeing anyone but their priest.”
“So that’s why it was never listed as a homicide in the databases,” Eve said.
Mulligan just nodded.
It was an insane way to handle a homicide, but part of me understood. I had worked on a story in my early years involving the rape of a Seminole girl. The tribe closed ranks around the victim’s family, rejecting all outside help from the county police. I didn’t know what Mulligan was exactly—police chief, mayor, constable—but he obviously had influence over this case. And he had done exactly as much, or as little, as needed to protect the family and this small community.
I was thinking, too, of how I had felt when Jeannie Laughlin asked me for a quote about Mandy, and how I had wanted to keep the world from my mother and father’s door.
Eve was trying hard to hide her frustration. “Do you know what kind of weapon was used?” she asked.
Mulligan gave Eve a long look, then shook his head slowly. Clearly, he was embarrassed at how the case had been handled. And from the pained look in his eyes, I was sure he had been at the murder scene.
“Could we take a look at your case file?” Eve asked.
Mulligan drew in a deep breath. “I doubt it would help you much, ma’am. Like I said, we did what we had to do to keep this to ourselves.”
Eve sat back in the booth and gave me a pained look. Although Caitlyn McKenzie seemed to fit our other cases, with no solid police investigative records and no access to the family, I knew it was going to be hard for us to connect her with any certainty. We needed something else.
“Mr. Mulligan,” I said. “What did Caitlyn look like?”
He blinked a couple times. “She was a pretty thing.”
“What color was her hair?”
“The color of brashlagh.”
He saw my blank look and gave me a small smile. “It’s a wild mustard flower that grows in these parts.”
“And her eyes?” I asked.
“As blue as the bluebells.”
He held my gaze for a moment, then picked up his pint and slowly drained it. The pub was so quiet I could hear the tick of a windblown twig against the glass. I could feel other eyes on us but didn’t look up. I was watching Mulligan, who was staring down at his glass.
When he looked up, first at Eve, then at me, his eyes were clouded with sadness.
“I don’t regret what I did,” he said. “Not for the McKenzies, anyways. But I do regret that I didn’t help to find the man who killed their daughter.”
He rose slowly. “Maybe there are things you can see about this that I was too blind to look for at the time. How about we take a drive out to the castle? I think we have enough daylight left.”
Mulligan had told us on the drive up that Bram Stoker once stayed at the castle. Other visitors included Samuel Johnson and James Boswell on their tours of the Highlands. As I stared at the ruins perched on the edge of the rugged cliffs, I could imagine it as an inspiration for Dracula’s home, but not as someplace any sane person would spend the night.
The arched windows were now only gaping holes in stone walls that stood in defiance of the relentless wind of the North Sea. The noises were haunting—just the crash of waves against rocks and the screech of gulls that were invisible against a dismal gray sky.
Mulligan led us through the ruins of stone corridors, curving staircases and crumbling turrets and into towers that resembled the rooks on a chessboard. Battlement towers, he explained as we walked huddled into the collars of our jackets. The crenellations were so castle defenders could drop rocks or burning oil onto attackers below.
It was in the center of one of these round towers where Mulligan stopped our tour. Above, the clouds swirled like smoke. Below, the ground was dried yellow grass and hard mud.
“The German tourists found Caitlyn here,” Mulligan said. “On her back, arms and legs splayed. She’d been stabbed with something thin and long, and she died quickly.”
“Was she raped?” Eve asked.
Mulligan nodded tightly.
“I have to ask this,” Eve said. “Was the act completed inside her?”
Mulligan seemed surprised at the question but then shook his head.
“Our examiner found no fluids inside her except her own blood,” Mulligan said. “That is why we are sure she was raped, because it indicated…” His voice trailed off. “The examiner said Caitlyn had been a virgin.”
“Did you find any fluids on the ground nearby?” Eve asked.
“Because of the rains, there was no semen or blood to be found on the grounds. We didn’t even recover her clothing, and we spent days searching the shore beneath the cliffs.”
“What about jewelry?” Eve asked.
“Jewelry? No, she was wearing nothing, not even a ring.”
“You said she was at the final day of the festival. Did she take her instrument, a purse or any personal items from her room that night?”
