Read Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller Online
Authors: James Nally
Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller
JAMES NALLY
Published by Avon
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd
The News Building
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015
Copyright © James Nally 2015
Cover Design © Jem Butcher 2015
James Nally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008139506
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008139513
Version: 2015-09-07
For Bridget, James and Emma
Contents
Occasionally, we experience things that make no sense.
You hum an old song, only to hear it moments later on the radio. You think of someone out of the blue and they call. You get the feeling you’re being watched, turn and meet the stare you’d somehow felt.
Sometimes, it’s life changing. A driver swerves to avoid a pedestrian. He doesn’t remember reacting. A firefighter pulls his team out of a burning building. Seconds later, it collapses. Two strangers’ eyes meet over a crowded room. Somehow, right away, both know the other is THE ONE.
Some credit these experiences to extra-sensory perception – our so-called sixth sense. Others put it down to gut instinct, animal intuition. The point is, we know things but we don’t know
why
we know them.
I don’t know
why
the recent dead come to me, or if the things they show me are clues as to how they died. I don’t know
why
it happens, but it must be the reason I became a murder detective. That – and what happened to Eve.
It’s my unconscious mind, of course, piecing together fragments of information and presenting answers to me in a novel way. Isn’t it?
‘I See Dead People,’ says the creepy little boy in
The Sixth Sense
. Cole Sear he’s called. Cole Queer, my brother calls me. That and ‘Hormonal Donal’.
I don’t care. I’ve got more important things to worry about, now I’m the go-to guy for the recently murdered.
Clapham Junction, London
Monday, July 1, 1991; 21:14
‘It’s a bit like taking a shit, when you think about it,’ said Clive, his mouth grinding away on a Wimpy quarter pounder.
Flanked by over-lit pastel walls and screwed-down metal seats, we could have been in the canteen of a children’s correctional centre. Welcome to the Wimpy burger bar – the British McDonald’s but with a unique selling point: table service.
‘Thank you garçon,’ I said, as I watched my order slide from stained tray to half-wiped melamine.
‘Bon appetit,’ he grunted and I silently congratulated acne for turning his face to pizza.
A quick glance at my chicken burger revealed it to be simply that: no sauce, no salad – just cartoon-flattened white meat clamped between two constipating white buns.
‘Hard to imagine that pecking in the yard,’ I said, ‘landing on this table is probably the furthest it ever flew.’
‘Isn’t it though, Donal?’ said PC Clive Hunt, my forty-something beat partner who came from one of those Northern English towns that begins with either B or W and all sound alike.
Incredibly – at least to me – we’d walked past a McDonald’s to get here. Clive’s nostalgic bond to Wimpy once again had proved unshakeable. This was one of the countless things I failed to understand about the English – they get nostalgic about things that were crap in their time: TV shows with shaky sets like
Dr Who
and
Crossroads
; British-made cars that always broke down; the Second World War, for Christ’s sake.
McDonald’s might have been wiping Wimpy off the face of the earth, but it would never get Clive’s custom. You see, no one lamented London’s lack of chips-based meals more than Clive. How many times had I heard how, up North, you can get gravy with your chips, curry with your chips, mushy peas with your chips.
The moment a McDonald’s worker cheerfully informed Clive that they didn’t stock vinegar, his Golden Arches crumbled and fell. After several wordless seconds, he calmly placed his tray back on the counter, turned and marched out, never to return.
I relented. ‘What’s like taking a shit?’
‘Eating burger and chips,’ he said, chewing, his mouth a toothy cement mixer.
Clive swallowed hard, burped urgently into his hand, desperate to enlighten: ‘You eat some chips, then you eat
all
of the burger, then you finish off yer chips.’
He could see I wasn’t getting it.
‘It’s like you piss a bit, then you take your dump, then you piss again to finish.’ He beamed in satisfaction.
My radio scrambled, its frenzied fuzz cutting short Clive’s scatological musings.
It was a T call demanding immediate response to an incident on Sangora Road, just round the corner. I almost had to beat the burger out of Clive’s hand.
We were the first uniforms on the scene. A young woman with dark curly hair was going bonkers in the street. A crowd had gathered, some panicking, some nosy, some trying to comfort Ms Hysteria. When she saw us, she pointed at a house and gasped in a nasal South East London accent: ‘My friend Marion’s inside. I think she’s dead.’
A surge of adrenaline slowed the world down to a hi-definition dream. The front door to number 21 hung open, but there were no signs of a forced entry. I noticed two buzzers: the property had been divided into flats. Inside the communal hallway, a chiselled, red-haired man in his twenties looked ashen. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said in a remarkably high-pitched Irish accent, pointing to a door.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ he squeaked again.
‘Well you’ll know soon enough,’ mumbled Clive.
The door was on the latch. I pulled it open. The door fought back, forcing me to use both hands. I planted an elbow against its over-sprung resistance so Clive could follow me in.
‘Try not to touch anything,’ hissed Clive, and I thought about letting the door slam into his thick head.
I floated up the stairs towards the first floor flat, adrenaline numbing my feet to the carpet beneath.
She lay on the landing, on her side, an untamed red mane of hair sprawled almost ceremonially across the carpet. Her moon-white face lay awkwardly on her outstretched arm; her bloodshot blue eyes staring into nothingness. She looked no more than twenty-five, probably younger.
Her sad mouth had cried blood. One trail made it all the way down to her slender white throat. Her flowery summer dress was laddered with stab wounds – still fresh. My head swooned. I leaned back against the wall of the landing, exhaled hard.
Clive bent down and placed a reluctant finger to her porcelain neck.
‘She put up a hell of a fight,’ he said flatly, ‘but she’s dead.’
He backed away apologetically. My eyes fastened upon her limp hand, focusing upon the nail hanging from her little finger which had almost been completely ripped off. Sadness flooded me. My stinging eyes blinked and shifted to the floor next to her: a set of keys, a handbag, her jacket, some post.
‘She must have let her killer in,’ I squeaked, sounding every bit as shocked as I felt.
‘Looks like it,’ said Clive, reassuringly unmoved.
‘Right,’ he added brightly, ‘best get back downstairs. We don’t want to contaminate the crime scene.’
A cold breath chilled the right side of my face. I turned to see a small window on the landing, slightly open. ‘Fuck,’ I said. All this time, I’d been standing between her newly dead body and an open window. Where I came from, this spelt doom. I shivered, then snapped myself out of it. There was work to be done.
I’d never understood officers who said that, in really stressful situations, ‘your training kicks in’. I did now. Clive started questioning Chiselled Ginge and taking notes. His name was Peter Ryan. He was twenty-eight. The dead woman was his wife of thirteen months, Marion, aged twenty-three. She usually got home before six. He and Karen – a colleague from work – got back just after nine and found her like that on the landing. Police officers and forensics were wandering in, so I went outside to find Karen.
In the darkening, humming summer night, Sangora Road flashed blue and red, a grotesque carnival of morbid curiosity. Neighbours who’d never shared a word before chatted intently: lots of ‘apparently’ and ‘oh my God’. The petite, curly-haired brunette I assumed to be Karen was being comforted by a group of middle-aged men. One edgy-looking sleaze ball in a wife-beater vest and school-shooter combats rubbed her upper arm vigorously. He looked like a man who spent his life hunting down any kind of a leg-over whatsoever.
‘Karen?’ I asked. She looked up sharply, surprised by the sound of her own name. ‘PC Donal Lynch. Sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you a few questions.’ Her arm rubber – a Poster Boy for Families Need Fathers – glared at me, ready to back up his potential new squeeze against the filth.
Karen took a long deep breath and nodded. Instead of structured questions, I let her ramble. In a quivering, child-like, barely audible voice, she told me the following: her name was Karen Foster, twenty-five, from Lee in South East London, a colleague of Pete’s at the Pines old people’s home in Lambeth. She told me Pete was the gardener there. She’d given him a lift back to his flat tonight to pick up some heavy pots to take back to the home, where she lived in staff accommodation. They’d got here just after nine. He had unlocked the front door, then the door to their flat and went in first. Pete had stopped suddenly on the stairs and screamed, ‘Marion, Marion!’ He went to her. Karen had followed and saw Marion lying there. She checked for signs of life.
She shivered. Arm Rubber gave me a look that said: ‘C’mon mate, I think she’s had enough’, but I hadn’t. I may have been new to murder, but I understood the value of first-hand, untainted, lawyer-free testimony.
‘Go on,’ I demanded.
‘I got her blood on my hands, so I washed them. Then I had to get out of there.’
A shiver rattled her entire frame.
‘Did Pete definitely unlock both doors?’ I asked. She nodded and bowed her head. Her centre parting wobbled and so did I.
‘Look, Karen, I’m sorry, I have to ask … we need to find whoever did this.’
She sniffed hard at the pavement, and I lamented yet another failure to channel my inner bad cop. I fought the urge to place a comforting hand on her quivering shoulder and walked away.
I joined Clive inside the front door just as three hotshot detectives swaggered in. The senior of the trio wore the hangdog expression of a man put out by life. ‘Detective Superintendent Glenn,’ he barked. Clive unloaded the basic detail while DS Glenn nodded impatiently. As I took up the slack, he fixed me with a scowl. Clearly, I was way too excited for his deadpan taste.
They made what seemed to me a cursory inspection of the crime scene: skirting around it as you might a dead bird on the pavement, or a splatter of puke. Then DS Glenn stomped off outside.
‘Is that it?’ I asked Clive.
‘It’s not
Magnum P.I.
,’ he laughed, ‘they’ll wait for forensics and statements, then they’ll decide what lines of enquiry to take.’
One of Hangdog Glenn’s bitches stopped by on his way out to treat us to a condescending glare: ‘What time do you go off duty, lads?’
‘We finished almost an hour ago at nine,’ said Clive, all chipper, just so he’d know we didn’t mind the inconvenience one bit.
‘Okay, call Clapham. Get them to send an officer to guard the door overnight and an unmarked car to take the husband and woman in to make a statement.’
‘Right now?’ I asked.
‘Of course right now,’ he spat, ‘and we’ll need statements from you two before you start your shifts tomorrow.’ He scuttled off down the garden steps, his gumshoe mac flapping in the summer breeze. At the gate, he turned. ‘Make sure you get the front door keys off the husband,’ he shouted, not realising that said husband was stood right there.
As Peter fished around for his keys, Clive and I descended the steps towards him. A sickening dread tugged at my guts. What could I possibly say to him now? I thought back to all those funerals in Ireland, how we always spouted the same stock phrases to mourners. ‘Doesn’t he look peaceful?’ was a classic. I mean what did we expect? Signs of a struggle? Fingernail scratch marks down the side of the coffin?
Then I remembered the one cover-all stock phrase, used by everyone when coming face-to-face with the principal mourners: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’ That line always seemed so anodyne, so emotionally detached, so generic. My brother Fintan and I used to dream up equivalents. ‘Oh dear,’ was his favourite. I liked: ‘Sure, it could be worse.’
Clive took Peter’s keys and spoke first. ‘Who else has a set?’
‘Just me and … Marion,’ said Peter, his voice cracking at the mention of her name.
‘We’re fetching a car for you and your colleague. I’m afraid we need statements from both of you tonight.’
Peter just stared into space.
‘Where can you go after the police station?’ asked Clive. ‘Have you got family near here?’
Peter shook his pale face mournfully. ‘The only place I can go is to Marion’s mum and dad up in Enfield.’
Clive and I exchanged frowns.
‘Do you think that’s wise, son?’ asked Clive. Peter looked at him blankly.
‘Okay,’ said Clive, ‘first I’ve got to get officers round there to tell them the news.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ Peter gasped and we all baulked. Every parent’s worst nightmare: the death knock. Peter walked slowly away from us but I could hear every word. ‘Oh Jesus, Jesus,’ he muttered, over and over.
A sudden deafening bellow made us jump. Peter’s wails were primeval, from the very core of his being. My mind flashed back to the time the Dalys’ prize-winning cow died howling in their shed. I’m sure their mother said she’d developed gangrenous teats. I couldn’t drink milk for a month after.
I turned to Clive: ‘If he did it, he surely wouldn’t go and stay with her family.’
‘He’s either innocent or one hell of an actor,’ said Clive, ‘I mean look at him, he’s shivering like a shitting dog.’
‘Maybe he’s racked with guilt. She must have known her killer. She let him in.’
‘And it must have been a man,’ said Clive, ‘I mean, just from the point of view of strength. It’s always the man, isn’t it?’
‘They were only married thirteen months,’ I said, ‘I just don’t see it.’
‘Neither did she,’ deadpanned Clive, chuckling as he set off across the road. I wondered if that’s what happened to all cops, in the end.
I couldn’t just leave Peter like that, bent double, bawling at the pavement. I walked over and put a hand on his heaving shoulders. He calmed almost instantly. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, so I said: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’
He breathed in deeply.
‘Thank you, Officer,’ he blurted, and I could tell he meant it, before the spasms of grief swept him away once more.
As the car taking Peter and Karen to Clapham police station moved off, a flash of streetlight illuminated the interior. Freeze-framed in the back seat, Peter’s ghostly white face stared straight ahead, as if into an abyss. How I longed for a glimpse inside that mind. On the far side of him, two large teary eyes gazed into his. Then, for a nanosecond, the eyes of Karen Foster locked onto mine, glinting wounded confusion.
The murder scene buzz snapped off like a light. A sense of helplessness gnawed away at my red-raw nerves.
‘Go home, son, you look shattered,’ said Clive, and I lacked the will to argue.
It was less than a mile to the flat I shared with Aidan, an old friend from back home.
Aidan was a psychiatric nurse at the Maudsley hospital, and on ‘earlies’ that week. But I guessed he’d still be up, chain-smoking his Marlboro Reds, noodling on his guitar, crafting a ballad to the latest random woman he’d fallen in love with at the bus stop or in some supermarket queue, the soft eejit.
Like so many gifted musicians I’d known, Aidan existed in a perpetual emotional state of either unrequited love or rejection. It was as if he’d absorbed the lyrics of all the epic love songs he’d ever learned so that they became his doomed emotional landscape. Any girl he got off with instantly became ‘the one’ – cue a week of Van Morrison (early era), Stone Roses, The Sugarcubes. Then his intensity would scare her off, making her ‘the one who got away’ – cue a week of Van Morrison (late era), Nick Cave and Tom Waits in his locked smoky bedroom. If music be the food of love, Aidan ate only sweet ’n sour.