Free The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) by Ingrid Black

gazed at it.
    ‘It looks like Felix,’ she said.
    ‘It is Felix. At least, I’d be ninety per cent sure it’s Felix. Enough to stake my left leg on it, but then I’ve always been the gambling type.’
    ‘I’d stake your left leg on it too,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘But what of it?’
    ‘Only that this shows he might’ve been being watched. Followed. And that he knew it.’
    ‘It proves nothing of the sort, as you well know. It’s only a photograph. The fact that someone other than Felix took it is irrelevant.’
    ‘Even if it was the Marxman?’ I said.
    ‘It wasn’t the Marxman.’
    ‘How can you be so sure?’
    I couldn’t understand why she was so resistant to exploring a possible link here after all the frustration she’d endured on the investigation to date.
    I thought she’d have been pleased with my help.
    ‘Because of this.’ She picked up a folder that had been sitting face down on her desk and tossed it across the table. ‘It came this afternoon. It’s the autopsy report on Felix Berg.’
    I picked it up, peeled back the cover.
    Scanned through it quickly.
    I didn’t need to wade through all the details of the toxicology readings and blood samples and analysis of the stomach contents. I read out the only part that mattered.
    ‘ Death by self-inflicted gunshot wound .’
    I could hardly believe what I was seeing. According to Alastair Butler, the City Pathologist, the only possible verdict was that Felix had placed the gun to his own eye and fired the trigger. The angles were all correct for a self-inflicted injury. He had gunshot propellant residue on his hands. There were no signs of defence injuries or marks consistent with any kind of a struggle. He had one small, clean, shallow recent cut on the back of his hand, and some post-mortem tearing to the skin caused by the body striking the jagged rocks, and that was it. He’d also, I noticed, glancing back through the blood samples – looking for flaws? – had three times the recommended alcohol limit in his body when he died.
    Getting himself smashed to gather the courage to put the gun against his eye?
    He’d been dead less than an hour by the time I found him.
    ‘But it doesn’t make any sense,’ I said, my voice struggling to come to terms with what the report was saying. ‘He told me someone was trying to kill him. Alice showed me his file filled with clippings about the Marxman. I have it with me here in my bag. I was going to give them to you. And now you’re saying he killed himself? There must be a mistake.’
    ‘There’s no mistake,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Butler knows what he’s doing.’
    ‘Did you find a note?’
    ‘Not everyone leaves a note.’
    ‘But the bullet went in through the eye,’ I said. ‘Suicides don’t shoot themselves in the eye. There are sites of election. The temples. The forehead. Not the eyes.’
    ‘That’s just statistics. There are always exceptions. Just because most suicides don’t shoot themselves in the eye doesn’t mean this one didn’t or couldn’t. Besides, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say there’s something fishy about the way he died because he shot himself through the eye and therefore it must have been the Marxman, and then ignore all the evidence which points away from the Marxman’s involvement. Like the same fact that he was shot through the eye. The Marxman’s never done that before. He always shoots from the rear. Besides, the gun was placed directly against the skin before being fired. If the Marxman was able to get that close to Felix, wouldn’t he have struggled, lashed out, resisted?’
    ‘But . . . you never said anything about finding a gun.’
    For the first time, she looked a little uncomfortable.
    ‘That’s because we didn’t,’ she admitted.
    ‘You didn’t find a gun?’
    ‘Dalton thinks it may have sprung out of his hand when he fired the bullet and ended up in the water. It happens. I’ve sent out divers to take a look through the