Free The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) by Ingrid Black

had a prearranged meeting that night with a regular client rather than being picked up at random on the street. Perhaps a client by the name of Gus who she’d mentioned to some of her friends. Other girls working that night certainly recalled her taking a call just before her disappearance, and laughing familiarly.
    Efforts to trace the mysterious Gus proved fruitless, however, and the investigation was, reluctantly, wound down. A note and extension number on the cover of the report indicated that the case was now being dealt with by a DS Donal O’Malley, and I made a note to contact him later and see if there was any information he could add.
    When it said that an unsolved case like this was being handled by a lone officer, that usually meant the officer in question was responsible for keeping the file updated with any new evidence which might, but rarely did, come in, and that he was expected to get the file out occasionally and blow off the cobwebs, see if anything had been missed previously; also to call the various witnesses and relatives to give the impression that something was being done. But to all intents it meant the investigation was closed and police didn’t expect to make further progress. Still, there was something about this one that made me want to know more.
    The deaths of five other prostitutes in the same time period took me less time to get through. They didn’t seem relevant to any investigation into Mary Lynch’s murder.
    One had fallen from the bridge, knocked her head and drowned in the canal. Autopsy showed excess alcohol and the presence of four different stimulant narcotics, including LSD and Ecstasy. Two had overdosed in the same crack house off the South Circular Road, not far from where Mary had lived, four months apart, but each was considered a clear case of accidental death. Another had suffocated on a plastic supermarket bag filled with glue. It would’ve been put down as accidental too had she not left a suicide note. The last to die had been knocked down and killed not far from the city centre at the corner of Fitzwilliam Street and Merrion Square. Eight women, eight dead women, just names now, eight women reduced to ghosts in the pages of a few meagre case reports. And only remembered now because Mary Lynch had gone into the darkness to join them.
    It was only when I laid Monica Lee’s photograph on the table, wanting on a sudden impulse to check if she looked anything like the picture I’d seen of Mary Lynch in the Post , whether that might be a connection, that I realised it was getting dark already.
    Out the window, lights were coming on over the city. The sky was streaked with black clouds. More rain. I checked the time. Four thirty. Fisher hadn’t called back, and Mort Tillman certainly hadn’t been in touch. I wondered if Fisher had managed to speak to Tillman yet, and if he had, why he hadn’t called to tell me. I rang Fisher’s number in London again but there was no answer.
    What time was Tillman’s seminar?
    Four o’clock, wasn’t it?
    I could be down there before it was over if I hurried. And once that thought was planted in my head, there was no uprooting it.
    What I had left of good sense told me I should wait till I heard from Fisher – but I told what I had left of good sense to go to hell.

 
    Chapter Seven
     
     
    Trinity College rose above the traffic that flowed round its base like an ancient sacred rock out of some fast-flowing dirty river, seemingly untouched by the surrounding noise and chaos. It had been here for over four hundred years and it wasn’t looking bad for its age.
    Certainly better than I did for mine most days.
    I walked through tall gates into the cobbled courtyard within.
    On the far side, a queue of tourists still waited, late as it was, to get into the library to see the Book of Kells, an eighth-century illuminated manuscript in Latin, stolen from Scotland, some said, by Irish monks and which the Irish showed few signs of handing