‘It’s always the hardest part,’ she was saying. ‘No one should ever have to look at anyone in here.’
I followed her into a small storeroom and helped carry out boxes of new syringes, masks and gloves.
‘Strung himself up from the rafters in the barn,’ she went on as we worked. ‘Was being treated for a drink problem and depression. More of the same. Unemployment, women, drugs. They hang themselves or jump off bridges.’ She glanced at me as we restocked a surgical cart. ‘Thank God we don’t have guns. Especially since I don’t have an X-ray machine.’
Foley was a slight woman with old-fashioned thick glasses and a penchant for tweed. We had met years ago at an international forensic science conference in Vienna, when female forensic pathologists were a rare breed, especially overseas. We quickly had become friends.
‘Margaret, I’m going to have to head back to the States sooner than I thought,’ I said, taking a deep breath, looking about, distracted. ‘I didn’t sleep worth a damn last night.’
She lit a cigarette, scrutinizing me. ‘I can get you copies of whatever you want. How fast do you need them? Photographs may take a few days, but they can be sent.’
‘I think there is always a sense of urgency when someone like this is on the loose,’ I said.
‘I’m not happy if he’s now your problem. And I’d hoped after all these years he had bloody quit.’ She irritably tapped an ash, exhaling the strong smoke of British tobacco. ‘Let’s take a load off for a minute. My shoes are already getting tight from the swelling. It’s hell getting old on these bloody hard floors.’
The lounge was two squat wooden chairs in a corner, where Foley kept an ashtray on a gurney. She put her feet up on a box and indulged her vice.
‘I can never forget those poor people.’ She started talking about her serial cases again. ‘When the first one came to me, I thought it was the IRA. Never seen people torn asunder like that except in bombings.’
I was reminded of Mark in a way I did not want to be, and my thoughts drifted to him when he was alive and we were in love. Suddenly he was in my mind, smiling with eyes full of a mischievous light that became electric when he laughed and teased. There had been a lot of that in law school at Georgetown, fun and fights and staying up all night, our hunger for each other impossible to appease. Over time we married other people, divorced and tried again. He was my leitmotif, here, gone, then back on the phone or at my door to break my heart and wreck my bed.
I could not banish him. It still did not seem possible that a bombing in a London train station would finally bring the tempest of our relationship to an end. I did not imagine him dead. I could not envision it, for there was no last image that might grant peace. I had never seen his body, had fled from any chance, just like the old Dubliner who could not view his son. I realized Foley was saying something to me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, her eyes sad, for she knew my history well. ‘I didn’t mean to bring up something painful. You seem blue enough this morning.’
‘You made an interesting point.’ I tried to be brave. ‘I suspect the killer we’re looking for is rather much like a bomber. He doesn’t care who he kills. His victims are people with no faces or names. They are nothing but symbols of his private, evil credo.’
‘Would it bother you terribly if I asked a question about Mark?’ she said.
‘Ask anything you want.’ I smiled. ‘You will anyway.’
‘Have you ever gone to where it happened, visited that place where he died?’
‘I don’t know where it happened,’ I quickly replied.
She looked at me as she smoked.
‘What I mean is, I don’t know where, exactly, in the train station.’ I was evasive, almost stuttering.
Still she said nothing, crushing the cigarette beneath her foot.
‘Actually,’ I went on, ‘I don’t know that I’ve been in Victoria at all, not that particular station, since he died. I don’t think I’ve had reason to take a train from there. Or arrive there. Waterloo was the last one I was in, I think.’